He went on breathing hard by the binnacle and trying to reach round his shoulder-blades; then, with a thick, drowsy severity, declared:
“Incredulity, sir, is the evil of the age!”
It rejected the evidence of Professor Cranks and of the journalist chap. It resisted the production of photographs.
For Captain Johns believed firmly that certain spirits had been photographed. He had read something of it in the papers. And the idea of it having been done had got a tremendous hold on him, because his mind was not critical. Bunter said afterwards that nothing could be more weird than this little man, swathed in a sleeping suit three sizes too large for him, shuffling with excitement in the moonlight near the wheel, and shaking his fist at the serene sea.
“Photographs! photographs!” he would repeat, in a voice as creaky as a rusty hinge.
The very helmsman just behind him got uneasy at that performance, not being capable of understanding exactly what the “old man was kicking up a row with the mate about.”
Then Johns, after calming down a bit, would begin again.
“The sensitised plate can't lie. No, sir.”
Nothing could be more funny than this ridiculous little man's conviction—his dogmatic tone. Bunter would go on swinging up and down the poop like a deliberate, dignified pendulum. He said not a word. But the poor fellow had not a trifle on his conscience, as you know; and to have imbecile ghosts rammed down his throat like this on top of his own worry nearly drove him crazy. He knew that on many occasions he was on the verge of lunacy, because he could not help indulging in half-delirious visions of Captain Johns being picked up by the scruff of the neck and dropped over the taffrail into the ship's wake—the sort of thing no sane sailorman would think of doing to a cat or any other animal, anyhow. He imagined him bobbing up—a tiny black speck left far astern on the moonlit ocean.
I don't think that even at the worst moments Bunter really desired to drown Captain Johns. I fancy that all his disordered imagination longed for was merely to stop the ghostly inanity of the skipper's talk.
But, all the same, it was a dangerous form of self-indulgence. Just picture to yourself that ship in the Indian Ocean, on a clear, tropical night, with her sails full and still, the watch on deck stowed away out of sight; and on her poop, flooded with moonlight, the stately black mate walking up and down with measured, dignified steps, preserving an awful silence, and that grotesquely mean little figure in striped flannelette alternately creaking and droning of “personal intercourse beyond the grave.”
It makes me creepy all over to think of. And sometimes the folly of Captain Johns would appear clothed in a sort of weird utilitarianism. How useful it would be if the spirits of the departed could be induced to take a practical interest in the affairs of the living! What a help, say, to the police, for instance, in the detection of crime! The number of murders, at any rate, would be considerably reduced, he guessed with an air of great sagacity. Then he would give way to grotesque discouragement.
Where was the use of trying to communicate with people that had no faith, and more likely than not would scorn the offered information? Spirits had their feelings. They wereallfeelings in a way. But he was surprised at the forbearance shown towards murderers by their victims. That was the sort of apparition that no guilty man would dare to pooh-pooh. And perhaps the undiscovered murderers—whether believing or not—were haunted. They wouldn't be likely to boast about it, would they?
“For myself,” he pursued, in a sort of vindictive, malevolent whine, “if anybody murdered me I would not let him forget it. I would wither him up—I would terrify him to death.”
The idea of his skipper's ghost terrifying anyone was so ludicrous that the black mate, little disposed to mirth as he was, could not help giving vent to a weary laugh.
And this laugh, the only acknowledgment of a long and earnest discourse, offended Captain Johns.
“What's there to laugh at in this conceited manner, Mr. Bunter?” he snarled. “Supernatural visitations have terrified better men than you. Don't you allow me enough soul to make a ghost of?”
I think it was the nasty tone that caused Bunter to stop short and turn about.
“I shouldn't wonder,” went on the angry fanatic of spiritism, “if you weren't one of them people that take no more account of a man than if he were a beast. You would be capable, I don't doubt, to deny the possession of an immortal soul to your own father.”
And then Bunter, being bored beyond endurance, and also exasperated by the private worry, lost his self-possession.
He walked up suddenly to Captain Johns, and, stooping a little to look close into his face, said, in a low, even tone:
“You don't know what a man like me is capable of.”
Captain Johns threw his head back, but was too astonished to budge. Bunter resumed his walk; and for a long time his measured footsteps and the low wash of the water alongside were the only sounds which troubled the silence brooding over the great waters. Then Captain Johns cleared his throat uneasily, and, after sidling away towards the companion for greater safety, plucked up enough courage to retreat under an act of authority:
“Raise the starboard clew of the mainsail, and lay the yards dead square, Mr. Bunter. Don't you see the wind is nearly right aft?”
Bunter at once answered “Ay, ay, sir,” though there was not the slightest necessity to touch the yards, and the wind was well out on the quarter. While he was executing the order Captain Johns hung on the companion-steps, growling to himself: “Walk this poop like an admiral and don't even notice when the yards want trimming!”—loud enough for the helmsman to overhear. Then he sank slowly backwards out of the man's sight; and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he stood still and thought.
“He's an awful ruffian, with all his gentlemanly airs. No more gentleman mates for me.”
Two nights afterwards he was slumbering peacefully in his berth, when a heavy thumping just above his head (a well-understood signal that he was wanted on deck) made him leap out of bed, broad awake in a moment.
“What's up?” he muttered, running out barefooted. On passing through the cabin he glanced at the clock. It was the middle watch. “What on earth can the mate want me for?” he thought.
Bolting out of the companion, he found a clear, dewy moonlit night and a strong, steady breeze. He looked around wildly. There was no one on the poop except the helmsman, who addressed him at once.
“It was me, sir. I let go the wheel for a second to stamp over your head. I am afraid there's something wrong with the mate.”
“Where's he got to?” asked the captain sharply.
The man, who was obviously nervous, said:
“The last I saw of him was as he-fell down the port poop-ladder.”
“Fell down the poop-ladder! What did he do that for? What made him?”
“I don't know, sir. He was walking the port side. Then just as he turned towards me to come aft...”
“You saw him?” interrupted the captain.
“I did. I was looking at him. And I heard the crash, too—something awful. Like the mainmast going overboard. It was as if something had struck him.”
Captain Johns became very uneasy and alarmed. “Come,” he said sharply. “Did anybody strike him? What did you see?”
“Nothing, sir, so help me! There was nothing to see. He just gave a little sort of hallo! threw his hands before him, and over he went—crash. I couldn't hear anything more, so I just let go the wheel for a second to call you up.”
“You're scared!” said Captain Johns. “I am, sir, straight!”
Captain Johns stared at him. The silence of his ship driving on her way seemed to contain a danger—a mystery. He was reluctant to go and look for his mate himself, in the shadows of the main-deck, so quiet, so still.
All he did was to advance to the break of the poop, and call for the watch. As the sleepy men came trooping aft, he shouted to them fiercely:
“Look at the foot of the port poop-ladder, some of you! See the mate lying there?”
Their startled exclamations told him immediately that they did see him. Somebody even screeched out emotionally: “He's dead!”
Mr. Bunter was laid in his bunk and when the lamp in his room was lit he looked indeed as if he were dead, but it was obvious also that he was breathing yet. The steward had been roused out, the second mate called and sent on deck to look after the ship, and for an hour or so Captain Johns devoted himself silently to the restoring of consciousness. Mr. Bunter at last opened his eyes, but he could not speak. He was dazed and inert. The steward bandaged a nasty scalp-wound while Captain Johns held an additional light. They had to cut away a lot of Mr. Bunter's jet-black hair to make a good dressing. This done, and after gazing for a while at their patient, the two left the cabin.
“A rum go, this, steward,” said Captain Johns in the passage.
“Yessir.”
“A sober man that's right in his head does not fall down a poop-ladder like a sack of potatoes. The ship's as steady as a church.”
“Yessir. Fit of some kind, I shouldn't wonder.”
“Well, I should. He doesn't look as if he were subject to fits and giddiness. Why, the man's in the prime of life. I wouldn't have another kind of mate—not if I knew it. You don't think he has a private store of liquor, do you, eh? He seemed to me a bit strange in his manner several times lately. Off his feed, too, a bit, I noticed.”
“Well, sir, if he ever had a bottle or two of grog in his cabin, that must have gone a long time ago. I saw him throw some broken glass overboard after the last gale we had; but that didn't amount to anything. Anyway, sir, you couldn't call Mr. Bunter a drinking man.”
“No,” conceded the captain, reflectively. And the steward, locking the pantry door, tried to escape out of the passage, thinking he could manage to snatch another hour of sleep before it was time for him to turn out for the day.
Captain Johns shook his head.
“There's some mystery there.”
“There's special Providence that he didn't crack his head like an eggshell on the quarter-deck mooring-bits, sir. The men tell me he couldn't have missed them by more than an inch.”
And the steward vanished skilfully.
Captain Johns spent the rest of the night and the whole of the ensuing day between his own room and that of the mate.
In his own room he sat with his open hands reposing on his knees, his lips pursed up, and the horizontal furrows on his forehead marked very heavily. Now and then raising his arm by a slow, as if cautious movement, he scratched lightly the top of his bald head. In the mate's room he stood for long periods of time with his hand to his lips, gazing at the half-conscious man.
For three days Mr. Bunter did not say a single word. He looked at people sensibly enough but did not seem to be able to hear any questions put to him. They cut off some more of his hair and swathed his head in wet cloths. He took some nourishment, and was made as comfortable as possible. At dinner on the third day the second mate remarked to the captain, in connection with the affair:
“These half-round brass plates on the steps of the poop-ladders are beastly dangerous things!”
“Are they?” retorted Captain Johns, sourly. “It takes more than a brass plate to account for an able-bodied man crashing down in this fashion like a felled ox.”
The second mate was impressed by that view. There was something in that, he thought.
“And the weather fine, everything dry, and the ship going along as steady as a church!” pursued Captain Johns, gruffly.
As Captain Johns continued to look extremely sour, the second mate did not open his lips any more during the dinner. Captain Johns was annoyed and hurt by an innocent remark, because the fitting of the aforesaid brass plates had been done at his suggestion only the voyage before, in order to smarten up the appearance of the poop-ladders.
On the fourth day Mr. Bunter looked decidedly better; very languid yet, of course, but he heard and understood what was said to him, and even could say a few words in a feeble voice.
Captain Johns, coming in, contemplated him attentively, without much visible sympathy.
“Well, can you give us your account of this accident, Mr. Bunter?”
Bunter moved slightly his bandaged head, and fixed his cold blue stare on Captain Johns' face, as if taking stock and appraising the value of every feature; the perplexed forehead, the credulous eyes, the inane droop of the mouth. And he gazed so long that Captain Johns grew restive, and looked over his shoulder at the door.
“No accident,” breathed out Bunter, in a peculiar tone.
“You don't mean to say you've got the falling sickness,” said Captain Johns. “How would you call it signing as chief mate of a clipper ship with a thing like that on you?”
Bunter answered him only by a sinister look. The skipper shuffled his feet a little.
“Well, what made you have that tumble, then?”
Bunter raised himself a little, and, looking straight into Captain Johns' eyes said, in a very distinct whisper:
“You—were—right!”
He fell back and closed his eyes. Not a word more could Captain Johns get out of him; and, the steward coming into the cabin, the skipper withdrew.
But that very night, unobserved, Captain Johns, opening the door cautiously, entered again the mate's cabin. He could wait no longer. The suppressed eagerness, the excitement expressed in all his mean, creeping little person, did not escape the chief mate, who was lying awake, looking frightfully pulled down and perfectly impassive.
“You are coming to gloat over me, I suppose,” said Bunter without moving, and yet making a palpable hit.
“Bless my soul!” exclaimed Captain Johns with a start, and assuming a sobered demeanour. “There's a thing to say!”
“Well, gloat, then! You and your ghosts, you've managed to get over a live man.”
This was said by Bunter without stirring, in a low voice, and with not much expression.
“Do you mean to say,” inquired Captain Johns, in awe-struck whisper, “that you had a supernatural experience that night? You saw an apparition, then, on board my ship?”
Reluctance, shame, disgust, would have been visible on poor Bunter's countenance if the great part of it had not been swathed up in cotton-wool and bandages. His ebony eyebrows, more sinister than ever amongst all that lot of white linen, came together in a frown as he made a mighty effort to say:
“Yes, I have seen.”
The wretchedness in his eyes would have awakened the compassion of any other man than Captain Johns. But Captain Johns was all agog with triumphant excitement. He was just a little bit frightened, too. He looked at that unbelieving scoffer laid low, and did not even dimly guess at his profound, humiliating distress. He was not generally capable of taking much part in the anguish of his fellow-creatures. This time, moreover, he was excessively anxious to know what had happened. Fixing his credulous eyes on the bandaged head, he asked, trembling slightly:
“And did it—did it knock you down?”
“Come! am I the sort of man to be knocked down by a ghost?” protested Bunter in a little stronger tone. “Don't you remember what you said yourself the other night? Better men than me———Ha! you'll have to look a long time before you find a better man for a mate of your ship.”
Captain Johns pointed a solemn finger at Bunter's bedplace.
“You've been terrified,” he said. “That's what's the matter. You've been terrified. Why, even the man at the wheel was scared, though he couldn't see anything. Hefeltthe supernatural. You are punished for your incredulity, Mr. Bunter. You were terrified.”
“And suppose I was,” said Bunter. “Do you know what I had seen? Can you conceive the sort of ghost that would haunt a man like me? Do you think it was a ladyish, afternoon call, another-cup-of-tea-please apparition that visits your Professor Cranks and that journalist chap you are always talking about? No; I can't tell you what it was like. Every man has his own ghosts. You couldn't conceive...”
Bunter stopped, out of breath; and Captain Johns remarked, with the glow of inward satisfaction reflected in his tone:
“I've always thought you were the sort of man that was ready for anything; from pitch-and-toss to wilful murder, as the saying goes. Well, well! So you were terrified.”
“I stepped back,” said Bunter, curtly. “I don't remember anything else.”
“The man at the wheel told me you went backwards as if something had hit you.”
“It was a sort of inward blow,” explained Bunter. “Something too deep for you, Captain Johns, to understand. Your life and mine haven't been the same. Aren't you satisfied to see me converted?”
“And you can't tell me any more?” asked Captain Johns, anxiously.
“No, I can't. I wouldn't. It would be no use if I did. That sort of experience must be gone through. Say I am being punished. Well, I take my punishment, but talk of it I won't.”
“Very well,” said Captain Johns; “you won't. But, mind, I can draw my own conclusions from that.”
“Draw what you like; but be careful what you say, sir. You don't terrify me.Youaren't a ghost.”
“One word. Has it any connection with what you said to me on that last night, when we had a talk together on spiritualism?”
Bunter looked weary and puzzled.
“What did I say?”
“You told me that I couldn't know what a man like you was capable of.”
“Yes, yes. Enough!”
“Very good. I am fixed, then,” remarked Captain Johns. “All I say is that I am jolly glad not to be you, though I would have given almost anything for the privilege of personal communication with the world of spirits. Yes, sir, but not in that way.”
Poor Bunter moaned pitifully.
“It has made me feel twenty years older.”
Captain Johns retired quietly. He was delighted to observe this overbearing ruffian humbled to the dust by the moralizing agency of the spirits. The whole occurrence was a source of pride and gratification; and he began to feel a sort of regard for his chief mate.
It is true that in further interviews Bunter showed himself very mild and deferential. He seemed to cling to his captain for spiritual protection. He used to send for him, and say, “I feel so nervous,” and Captain Johns would stay patiently for hours in the hot little cabin, and feel proud of the call.
For Mr. Bunter was ill, and could not leave his berth for a good many days. He became a convinced spiritualist, not enthusiastically—that could hardly have been expected from him—but in a grim, unshakable way. He could not be called exactly friendly to the disembodied inhabitants of our globe, as Captain Johns was. But he was now a firm, if gloomy, recruit of spiritualism.
One afternoon, as the ship was already well to the north in the Gulf of Bengal, the steward knocked at the door of the captain's cabin, and said, without opening it:
“The mate asks if you could spare him a moment, sir. He seems to be in a state in there.”
Captain Johns jumped up from the couch at once.
“Yes. Tell him I am coming.”
He thought: Could it be possible there had been another spiritual manifestation—in the daytime, too!
He revelled in the hope. It was not exactly that, however. Still, Bunter, whom he saw sitting collapsed in a chair—he had been up for several days, but not on deck as yet—poor Bunter had something startling enough to communicate. His hands covered his face. His legs were stretched straight out, dismally.
“What's the news now?” croaked Captain Johns, not unkindly, because in truth it always pleased him to see Bunter—as he expressed it—tamed.
“News!” exclaimed the crushed sceptic through his hands. “Ay, news enough, Captain Johns. Who will be able to deny the awfulness, the genuineness? Another man would have dropped dead. You want to know what I had seen. All I can tell you is that since I've seen it my hair is turning white.”
Bunter detached his hands from his face, and they hung on each side of his chair as if dead. He looked broken in the dusky cabin.
“You don't say!” stammered out Captain Johns. “Turned white! Hold on a bit! I'll light the lamp!”
When the lamp was lit, the startling phenomenon could be seen plainly enough. As if the dread, the horror, the anguish of the supernatural were being exhaled through the pores of his skin, a sort of silvery mist seemed to cling to the cheeks and the head of the mate. His short beard, his cropped hair, were growing, not black, but gray—almost white.
When Mr. Bunter, thin-faced and shaky, came on deck for duty, he was clean-shaven, and his head was white. The hands were awe-struck. “Another man,” they whispered to each other. It was generally and mysteriously agreed that the mate had “seen something,” with the exception of the man at the wheel at the time, who maintained that the mate was “struck by something.”
This distinction hardly amounted to a difference. On the other hand, everybody admitted that, after he picked up his strength a bit, he seemed even smarter in his movements than before.
One day in Calcutta, Captain Johns, pointing out to a visitor his white-headed chief mate standing by the main-hatch, was heard to say oracularly:
“That man's in the prime of life.”
Of course, while Bunter was away, I called regularly on Mrs. Bunter every Saturday, just to see whether she had any use for my services. It was understood I would do that. She had just his half-pay to live on—it amounted to about a pound a week. She had taken one room in a quiet little square in the East End.
And this was affluence to what I had heard that the couple were reduced to for a time after Bunter had to give up the Western Ocean trade—he used to go as mate of all sorts of hard packets after he lost his ship and his luck together—it was affluence to that time when Bunter would start at seven o'clock in the morning with but a glass of hot water and a crust of dry bread. It won't stand thinking about, especially for those who know Mrs. Bunter. I had seen something of them, too, at that time; and it just makes me shudder to remember what that born lady had to put up with. Enough!
Dear Mrs. Bunter used to worry a good deal after theSapphireleft for Calcutta. She would say to me: “It must be so awful for poor Winston”—Winston is Bunter's name—and I tried to comfort her the best I could. Afterwards, she got some small children to teach in a family, and was half the day with them, and the occupation was good for her.
In the very first letter she had from Calcutta, Bunter told her he had had a fall down the poop-ladder, and cut his head, but no bones broken, thank God. That was all. Of course, she had other letters from him, but that vagabond Bunter never gave me a scratch of the pen the solid eleven months. I supposed, naturally, that everything was going on all right. Who could imagine what was happening?
Then one day dear Mrs. Bunter got a letter from a legal firm in the City, advising her that her uncle was dead—her old curmudgeon of an uncle—a retired stockbroker, a heartless, petrified antiquity that had lasted on and on. He was nearly ninety, I believe; and if I were to meet his venerable ghost this minute, I would try to take him by the throat and strangle him.
The old beast would never forgive his niece for marrying Bunter; and years afterwards, when people made a point of letting him know that she was in London, pretty nearly starving at forty years of age, he only said: “Serve the little fool right!” I believe he meant her to starve. And, lo and behold, the old cannibal died intestate, with no other relatives but that very identical little fool. The Bunters were wealthy people now.
Of course, Mrs. Bunter wept as if her heart would break. In any other woman it would have been mere hypocrisy. Naturally, too, she wanted to cable the news to her Winston in Calcutta, but I showed her,Gazettein hand, that the ship was on the homeward-bound list for more than a week already. So we sat down to wait, and talked meantime of dear old Winston every day. There were just one hundred such days before theSapphiregot reported “All well” in the chops of the Channel by an incoming mailboat.
“I am going to Dunkirk to meet him,” says she. TheSapphirehad a cargo of jute for Dunkirk. Of course, I had to escort the dear lady in the quality of her “ingenious friend.” She calls me “our ingenious friend” to this day; and I've observed some people—strangers—looking hard at me, for the signs of the ingenuity, I suppose.
After settling Mrs. Bunter in a good hotel in Dunkirk, I walked down to the docks—late afternoon it was—and what was my surprise to see the ship actually fast alongside. Either Johns or Bunter, or both, must have been driving her hard up Channel. Anyway, she had been in since the day before last, and her crew was already paid off. I met two of her apprenticed boys going off home on leave with their dunnage on a Frenchman's barrow, as happy as larks, and I asked them if the mate was on board.
“There he is, on the quay, looking at the moorings,” says one of the youngsters as he skipped past me.
You may imagine the shock to my feelings when I beheld his white head. I could only manage to tell him that his wife was at an hotel in town. He left me at once, to go and get his hat on board. I was mightily surprised by the smartness of his movements as he hurried up the gangway.
Whereas the black mate struck people as deliberate, and strangely stately in his gait for a man in the prime of life, this white-headed chap seemed the most wonderfully alert of old men. I don't suppose Bunter was any quicker on his pins than before. It was the colour of the hair that made all the difference in one's judgment.
The same with his eyes. Those eyes, that looked at you so steely, so fierce, and so fascinating out of a bush of a buccaneer's black hair, now had an innocent almost boyish expression in their good-humoured brightness under those white eyebrows.
I led him without any delay into Mrs. Bunter's private sitting-room. After she had dropped a tear over the late cannibal, given a hug to her Winston, and told him that he must grow his moustache again, the dear lady tucked her feet upon the sofa, and I got out of Bunter's way.
He started at once to pace the room, waving his long arms. He worked himself into a regular frenzy, and tore Johns limb from limb many times over that evening.
“Fell down? Of course I fell down, by slipping backwards on that fool's patent brass plates. 'Pon my word, I had been walking that poop in charge of the ship, and I didn't know whether I was in the Indian Ocean or in the moon. I was crazy. My head spun round and round with sheer worry. I had made my last application of your chemist's wonderful stuff.” (This to me.) “All the store of bottles you gave me got smashed when those drawers fell out in the last gale. I had been getting some dry things to change, when I heard the cry: 'All hands on deck!' and made one jump of it, without even pushing them in properly. Ass! When I came back and saw the broken glass and the mess, I felt ready to faint.
“No; look here—deception is bad; but not to be able to keep it up after one has been forced into it. You know that since I've been squeezed out of the Western Ocean packets by younger men, just on account of my grizzled muzzle—you know how much chance I had to ever get a ship. And not a soul to turn to. We have been a lonely couple, we two—she threw away everything for me—and to see her want a piece of dry bread———”
He banged with his fist fit to split the Frenchman's table in two.
“I would have turned a sanguinary pirate for her, let alone cheating my way into a berth by dyeing my hair. So when you came to me with your chemist's wonderful stuff———”
He checked himself.
“By the way, that fellow's got a fortune when he likes to pick it up. It is a wonderful stuff—you tell him salt water can do nothing to it. It stays on as long as your hair will.”
“All right,” I said. “Go on.”
Thereupon he went for Johns again with a fury that frightened his wife, and made me laugh till I cried.
“Just you try to think what it would have meant to be at the mercy of the meanest creature that ever commanded a ship! Just fancy what a life that crawling Johns would have led me! And I knew that in a week or so the white hair would begin to show. And the crew. Did you ever think of that? To be shown up as a low fraud before all hands. What a life for me till we got to Calcutta! And once there—kicked out, of course. Half-pay stopped. Annie here alone without a penny—starving; and I on the other side of the earth, ditto. You see?
“I thought of shaving twice a day. But could I shave my head, too? No way—no way at all. Unless I dropped Johns overboard; and even then———
“Do you wonder now that with all these things boiling in my head I didn't know where I was putting down my foot that night? I just felt myself falling—then crash, and all dark.
“When I came to myself that bang on the head seemed to have steadied my wits somehow. I was so sick of everything that for two days I wouldn't speak to anyone. They thought it was a slight concussion of the brain. Then the idea dawned upon me as I was looking at that ghost-ridden, wretched fool. 'Ah, you love ghosts,' I thought. 'Well, you shall have something from beyond the grave.'
“I didn't even trouble to invent a story. I couldn't imagine a ghost if I wanted to. I wasn't fit to lie connectedly if I had tried. I just bulled him on to it. Do you know, he got, quite by himself, a notion that at some time or other I had done somebody to death in some way, and that———”
“Oh, the horrible man!” cried Mrs. Bunter from the sofa. There was a silence.
“And didn't he bore my head off on the home passage!” began Bunter again in a weary voice. “He loved me. He was proud of me. I was converted. I had had a manifestation. Do you know what he was after? He wanted me and him 'to make aseance,' in his own words, and to try to call up that ghost (the one that had turned my hair white—the ghost of my supposed victim), and, as he said, talk it over with him—the ghost—in a friendly way.
“'Or else, Bunter,' he says, 'you may get another manifestation when you least expect it, and tumble overboard perhaps, or something. You ain't really safe till we pacify the spirit-world in some way.'
“Can you conceive a lunatic like that? No—say?”
I said nothing. But Mrs. Bunter did, in a very decided tone.
“Winston, I don't want you to go on board that ship again any more.”
“My dear,” says he, “I have all my things on board yet.”
“You don't want the things. Don't go near that ship at all.”
He stood still; then, dropping his eyes with a faint smile, said slowly, in a dreamy voice:
“The haunted ship.”
“And your last,” I added.
We carried him off, as he stood, by the night train. He was very quiet; but crossing the Channel, as we two had a smoke on deck, he turned to me suddenly, and, grinding his teeth, whispered:
“He'll never know how near he was being dropped overboard!”
He meant Captain Johns. I said nothing.
But Captain Johns, I understand, made a great to-do about the disappearance of his chief mate. He set the French police scouring the country for the body. In the end, I fancy he got word from his owners' office to drop all this fuss—that it was all right. I don't suppose he ever understood anything of that mysterious occurrence.
To this day he tries at times (he's retired now, and his conversation is not very coherent)—he tries to tell the story of a black mate he once had, “a murderous, gentlemanly ruffian, with raven-black hair which turned white all at once in consequence of a manifestation from beyond the grave.” An avenging apparition. What with reference to black and white hair, to poop-ladders, and to his own feelings and views, it is difficult to make head or tail of it. If his sister (she's very vigorous still) should be present she cuts all this short—peremptorily:
“Don't you mind what he says. He's got devils on the brain.”
THE END