MY INCREDULOUS FRIEND'S TROUBLES
I feel greatly embarrassed in narrating my friend's adventure, but I have begged his pardon beforehand, and he knows how unselfish my aims are. Besides, as he has related his troubles to everyone who would listen to them, without having deposed to the facts under a seal of secrecy, I have only to play the rôle of an impartial chronicler, and if I am looked at askance on account of that it is I who pay the penalty.
My friend is an atheist and materialist, but enjoys the life which he despises, and fears death, which he does not know. At the beginning of our acquaintanceship, when he offered me a refuge in his house, he treated me with friendly brotherliness, and tended me like a sick person, that is to say, with the considerate sympathy of an intelligent free-thinker who understands mental disorders, and the indulgent treatment which they require.
But even a freethinker may have his dark hours of depression, the cause of which he knows not. Late one evening, when the room was in twilight, and the lamps, though kindled, did not illuminate the corners where the shadows fell, my friend confided to me, in answer to my expressions of gratitude, that the obligation lay on his side. For he had, he said, a short while ago lost his best friend by death. Since then he was troubled by uneasy dreams, in which there always mixed the image of his departed friend.
"You also?" I exclaimed.
"I also! But you understand that I am only speaking of dreams such as one has at night."
"Yes, certainly."
"Sleeplessness, nightmares, and so forth. You know what it is to be ridden by a nightmare, which is a disorder of the chest caused by disturbed digestion following on excesses. Have you never had it?"
"Yes, indeed. One eats crabs for supper, and then one has it! Have you tried sulphonal for it?"
"Yes. But as to trusting doctors—you know yourself already, perhaps?"
"I should think so! I know them thoroughly. But let us speak of your dead friend. Does he appear to you in a disturbing way,—I mean in dreams?"
"I need hardly tell you it isn't he who appears before me. It is his corpse, and I am sorry to say he died under strange circumstances. Only think! A young talented man who had made a very promising début in literature must die of an obscure disease, tuberculosis miliaris, which caused his body to so decompose that it looked like a heap of millet."
"And now his body appears to you?"
"You don't understand what I mean. Let us drop the subject."
With his health shaken and his moods as varying as April weather, my friend seems to suffer from an acute degree of nervousness. When I part from him in February, he will never go alone to his house after sunset.
Then he has an important pecuniary loss. There is some talk of instituting legal proceedings, and we fear that he may commit suicide, judging by expressions which he has let fall from time to time. Although recently engaged to be married, he regards the future in the most gloomy light. But instead of resisting his troubles, he takes a journey in order to distract his mind, and on his return invites his friends to a dinner to celebrate the occasion. But in the middle of the festival he has an attack of indisposition and is ordered to bed.
As soon as I hear of it, on the second day of his illness, I go to him. A corpse-like odour pervades the house. The patient has grown black in the face, so that he can be scarcely recognised. He lies stretched out on the bed, and is watched by a friend and a nurse, whose hands he does not let go of for a moment. My coming startles him, weakened as he is by his continuous sufferings.
Later on, when he is somewhat better, he tells me that he has had a vision of five devils in the shape of red apes with black eyes, which crept up, sat on the edge of his bed, and moved their tails up and down.
When he has recovered his strength and put his pecuniary affairs in order, he tells his dream to every one who will listen, and they are much amused at it.
From time to time he expresses his astonishment that destiny, which has hitherto favoured him, now begins to persecute him so that nothing will succeed and everything goes wrong. Amid these gloomy reflections, with intervals of cheerfulness, the unhappy man, who seems to have fallen into disfavour with the Powers, receives a fresh and crushing blow. A tradesman, who belonged to his set, has drowned himself, leaving debts, so that my friend who had gone surety for him for a considerable sum is still further embarrassed.
His troubles now recommence in earnest. The body of the dead man appears in his kitchen, and he persuades a young doctor to pass the nights with him in order to drive away the phantoms. But the invisible powers are regardless of everything, and one night my friend wakes up to see the whole room full of mice. Fully convinced of their reality, he takes a stick and strikes at them till they disappear. That was an attack of delirium, but an attack shared by two, for in the morning his friend, who occupied the adjoining room, says that he heard the squeaking of mice from my friend's room. How are we to explain a hallucination which is seen by one and heard by another?
When this adventure is related in sunshine and broad daylight, it is laughed at. Thereupon my friend begins to give a detailed description of the body of the suicide which had appeared to him, and he accompanies it with deliberately cynical remarks, "Cannot you imagine that it was quite black, and that the white maggots——"
As an eye-witness, I can testify that in the same moment that he uttered these words he turned pale, stood up from the table, and with a gesture of disgust pointed to something on his plate. It was a white maggot crawling along a sardine.
The next day my friend is obliged to break off his evening meal because he finds a piece of chicken surrounded by white maggots. He cannot eat although he is ravenously hungry, and becomes alarmed, but only for a moment.
"What does it mean? What does it mean?" he says.
"One should not speak ill of the dead. They revenge themselves."
"The dead? But they are dead!"
"Exactly. And therefore they are more alive than the living."
My friend had, as a matter of fact, accustomed himself to speak openly of the weaknesses of the deceased, who, in spite of all, had been a good friend to him.
Some days later, as we sat at table in the verandah of a garden-restaurant, one of the guests exclaimed, "Look at that rat! What a big fellow!"
No one had seen it, and they laughed at the visionary.
"Wait a minute!" he said, "you will soon see. It is there under the planks!"
A minute passed, and a cat came from under the planks. "I think we have had enough of rats," my friend exclaimed, apparently much disturbed.
After some time has elapsed, one evening I hear a knock at my door after I have gone to bed. I open it, and find myself face to face with my friend, who looks disturbed and excited. He asks to be allowed to stay and rest on a sofa, because there is a woman who screams the whole night in the house where he lives.
"Is it a real woman, or a spectre?"
"Oh, it is a woman with cancer, who only wants to be able to die. It is enough to drive one mad. If I don't end my days in an asylum, it will be strange."
There is only a short sofa, and to see the tall man stretched out on such a thing, and two chairs placed by it, is as though one saw a slave on the rack. Hunted out of his pleasant house, and his comfortable bed, deprived of the simple pleasure of being able to undress himself, he rouses my sympathy and I offer him my bed as a sign of my gratitude. But he refuses. He asks to have the lamp lit, and the light falls straight on the unfortunate man's face. He fears the dark and I promise to sit up and watch. He lies and murmurs to himself till sleep has pity on him. "There is no doubt it is a sick woman, but still it is strange."
For two whole weeks he is obliged to seek rest on other people's sofas. "This is really hell!" he exclaims.
"Just what I think" is my answer.
Another time when the "white woman" has appeared to him in the night he himself suggests the possibility that it may be a punishment. True to my rôle, I confine myself to a sceptical silence. I pass over others of his adventures and come to the story of the Madonna and the telepathic vision he had of some one at the moment he died. It is quite short. On the occasion of an excursion into the country my friend found himself in a little company gathered on the shore of a lake. In an access of cheerfulness and forgetfulness of his painful experiences he made the following suggestion,—
"This, on my faith, is the proper scene for a revelation of the Blessed Virgin! It would be a good speculation to set up a shrine for pilgrimages."
At the same moment he turned pale, and to the great astonishment of his companions he exclaimed almost in an ecstasy,—
"Just now he has died."
"Who?"
"Lieutenant X. I saw him lying in the death struggle, the chamber, the attendants, and everything!"
His friends laughed at him, but on their return to the town they were met by the news of Lieutenant X.'s death. It had happened suddenly, exactly at half-past seven o'clock, at the same moment in which the visionary received intimation of it. Those who had ridiculed him were greatly impressed, so that they involuntarily shed tears, not of grief, for the death of the lieutenant was a matter of indifference to them, but of emotion at the strange occurrence.
The newspapers made a fuss over the affair. The honest ones did not deny the fact, while the dishonest ones suggested that the witnesses were liars. The result was a protest on the part of my friend the heretic, who acknowledged the real facts of the case, but explained them as an accidental coincidence.
I grant that a certain apparent modesty would rule out as impossible all interference of invisible powers in our petty affairs, but this modesty itself may be an "obstacle cast up by the unrepentant." This seems to be suggested by the following words of Claude de Saint Martin:—
"It is perhaps this wrong connection of ideas (that the earth is only a mere point in the universe) which has led men to the still falser notion that they are not worthy of the Creator's regard. They have believed themselves to be obeying the dictates of humility when they have denied that the earth and all that the universe contains only exist on man's account, on the ground that the admission of such an idea would be only conceit. But they have not been afraid of the laziness and cowardice which are the inevitable results of this affected modesty. The present-day avoidance of the belief that we are the highest in the universe is the reason that we have not the courage to work in order to justify that title, that the duties springing from it seem too laborious, and that we would rather abdicate our position and our rights than realise them in all their consequences. Where is the pilot that will guide us between these hidden reefs of conceit and false humility?"
Meanwhile I have gained a thorough knowledge of all my friend's weaknesses, and can predict the troubles he will suffer by day or night by observing his behaviour. My observations lead me to the conclusion that all his ailments spring from "moral" grounds. But "moral" is a word which is nowadays despised and suspected, and I am not the man to reassert it. Only on one occasion, when the unfortunate man was in a state of deep depression, I said to him out of sympathy, and by way of putting up a sign-post for him, "If you had read Swedenborg before your last attack at night you would have gone into the Salvation Army or become a hospital attendant!"
"How so?" he asked. "What does this Swedenborg say?"
"He says a great deal, and he it is who has saved me from going mad. Consider now, he has given me back the power of sleep by a single sentence of four words."
"Say it, I beg you."
My courage sank, and has failed me every time that the possessed man has asked for this formula of exorcism.
But here I write down the four words which are worth all the doctors' regulations, "Do this no more."
Everyone's conscience must interpret the word "this" for himself. I, the undersigned, declare that I have obtained health and quiet sleep by obeying the above receipt.
THE AUTHOR.
This is a confession, not an exhortation.