Our vagrants know, too, the power of these neutrarians, they know they can adopt any shape, and tempt and goad man on to the committal of any crime, however heinous. They have, moreover, acquired a further knowledge—a knowledge denied and scoffed at by the ministry of all Christian denominations—namely that all forms of animal and vegetable life, all forms of flora and fauna, pass into the superphysical, and live again.
I myself first learned of a tree ghost from an old tramp, who came and sat by my side on a seat on Clapham Common.
“Do I ever see anything strange here at night?” he repeated in answer to my question. “Yes, I do, at times, but what gives me the worst fright is a tree that I sometimes see close to the spot where that man was murdered some ten or twelve years ago. I never saw it before the murder, but a few nights afterwards, as I was passing the spot, I saw a peculiar glimmer of white, and, on getting a bit closer, I found, to my astonishment, that it was a tall, slender white thing with branches just like a tree, only it was not behaving like a tree. Although there was not a breath of wind, it kept lurching with a strange, creaking noise, and I felt it was watching me, watching me furtively, just as if it had eyes, and was bent on doing me all the harm it possibly could. I was so scared, I turned tail, and never ceased running till I had reached home.”
“Home!” I said.
“Yes, a clump of bushes near the ditch, where I always turn in of nights. It ain’t much of a home, to be sure, but it’s the only one I’ve got, and I can generally count on lying there undisturbed till the morning.”
I gave him a few coppers, and he blessed me as if I had given him a fortune.
On Tooting Common I met a Northumberland miner, who had come to London for the first time on a holiday, and, having had his pocket picked, was obliged to spend the night out-of-doors. “Ghosts,” he said, when I asked him if he had any experiences with the supernatural whilst engaged in his underground work. “Ghosts! Yes, but of a nature you don’t read about in books. Me and my mates, when working in a drift at night, have heard the blowing of the wind and a mighty rustling of leaves, and have found ourselves surrounded on all sides by numerous trees and ferns that have suddenly risen from the ground and formed a regular forest. They have not resembled any trees you see now-a-days, but what you might fancy existed many thousands of years ago. There has been no colour in them, only a uniform whiteness, and they have shone like phosphorous. We have heard, too, all the noises, such as go on daily in forests above-ground—the humming and buzzing of insects, and the chirping of birds; and shafts and galleries have echoed and re-echoed with the sounds, till you would have thought that those away above us must have heard them, too.”
I do not think the miner romanced, for what he said was only a corroboration of what other miners have often told me.
Of course, it is not every mine that is haunted in this way, or every miner that sees such sights, for the Unknown confines its manifestations to the few, but I firmly believe such phenomena do happen, because as I state in my “Byways of Ghostland” (W. Rider & Sons), I have seen several tree ghosts myself. If one form of life possesses a spirit, why should we not assume that other forms of life possess a spirit, too? Why should man have the monopoly of an immaterial self, and alone of all creation continue his identity after physical dissolution? On moral grounds? No! For man, generally speaking, is in no sense superior morally to the so-called beasts around him. He is often the reverse. Oddly enough, we have so long accustomed ourselves to using the term immorality exclusively in reference to our illegal relations with the other sex, that we have come to regard these illegal relations as the only immorality existing. It is a curious error. Immorality comprises theft, and theft not only comprehends depriving people of their material goods, it comprehends slander and gossip—i.e., depriving people of their character; sweating—i.e., depriving people of the just rewards of their mental and manual labour; and bread-snatching,—i.e., depriving people of their only means of existence; beside many other acts of an equally odious nature. The average drawing-room is invariably the rendezvous of immoral people; nine out of every ten of the ladies one meets there are robbers—they steal, almost at very breath, someone’s good name and reputation, a far worse crime than the purloining of a loaf, for which act of desperation a poor man would be sent to prison, and a hungry dog beaten. In the drawing-room, too, one meets the girl with a few hundred a year, who announces her intention of taking some post—maybe on the stage, or on the staff of some paper, or in a business house, “just to make a little money.” A little money at the expense of someone else’s life! For that is what the want of occupation to the person with no private income literally means. We see none of this mean immorality in the animal world. Dogs steal bones from one another, it is true, but they do not lie, and cheat, and intrigue; nor do they, when they have a sufficiency themselves, snatch away the little that constitutes another person’s all.
Animals are accused of being cruel—of barbarously murdering one another, as in the cases of the cat and mouse, the lion and deer, etc. But they rarely kill, saving when they are hungry, and for food man kills, too, in a fashion and with a method which is truly disgusting. By studiously looking after the daily wants of certain animals, such as cows and sheep, and by caring for them when they are ill, man leads them to suppose he is their friend, and they learn to trust him. Vain faith. He is kind to them only to suit his own ends. He out-Judas’s Judas, and after nonchalantly accepting their most lavish tributes of affection, he takes them unawares and kills them, either with a poleaxe, or some other weapon entailing an equally painful and lingering death. Do any animals behave quite so basely? Besides, there is no cruelty in the animal world—not even the most excruciating suction of the octopus, nor the sharp, agonising bite of the flesh-eating parrot of New Zealand—that can for one moment compare with the coolly planned and leisurely executed horrors of the Spanish Inquisition; and the tiger, at its worst, is but a tyro in savagery compared with the creature God is said to have made in His own image.