Bones and I

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

Athwart the sunny wall.”

The first step in supernatural learning, the first condition for the attainment of superhuman power, seems to have been the dismissal of so inconvenient and unmeaning an appurtenance as a shadow.

How many people have I known, and these not the least endearing and capable of their kind, over whose whole life the shadow of a memory, though growing fainter day by day, has yet been dark enough to throw a gloom that the warmest rays of friendship and affection were powerless to dispel! Sometimes, indeed, that darkness seems dearer to them than the glories of the outer world; sometimes, and this is the hardest fate of all, they cling to it the closer that they feel the illusion has been to them a more reliable possession than the reality. There is a world of tender longing, bitter experience, and sad, suggestive pathos in Owen Meredith’s lament—

“How many a night ’neath her window have I walked in the wind and the rain,

Only to look on her shadow fleet over the lighted pane!

Alas! ’twas the shadow that rested—’twas herself that fleeted, you see—

And now I am dying—I know it! Dying—and where is she?”

The shadow he had worshipped so fondly was not more fleeting than the dream on which he had anchored a man’s honest hopes, and wasted a man’s generous, unsuspecting heart.

Then we see our shadows at points of view so peculiar to ourselves, in lights that so distort and disguise their proportions, it is no wonder if for us they become phantoms of formidable magnitude and overpowering aspect. The demon of the Hartz Mountains is said to be nothing more than the reflection or shadow of the traveller’s own person, as seen under certain abnormal conditions of refraction against a morning or evening sky. Such demons most of us keep of our own, and we take care never to look at them but at the angle which magnifies them out of all reasonable proportions. When you see mine and I yours, each of us is surprised at the importance attached to his spectral illusion by the other. Yours seems to me a diminutive and contemptible little devil enough; and doubtless, although you never may have entertained a high opinion of my mental powers or moral force of character, both are fallen fifty per cent. in your estimation since you have been brought face to face with the bugbear by which they are overridden and kept down. If we could but change shadows we should both of us get back into the sun. Alas! that all the magic art of Michael Scott himself would fail to effect such a trick of legerdemain. Alas! that we must bear as best we can, each for himself, the gloomy presence that makes us so dull of cheer, so sad of countenance, and so cold about the heart.

Men adopt a great many different methods to get rid of their respective shadows, approximating more or less to the conclusive plan of Peter Schlemihl aforesaid, who sold his outright to the devil. Some try to lose it amongst a crowd of fellow-creatures, all with the same familiar attendants of their own; others struggle with it in solitude, and find themselves halting and maimed after the conflict, like him who wrestled of old with the angel at Penuel “until the breaking of the day.” One thinks to stifle his tormentor in business, another to lull him with pleasure, a third to drown him in wine. None of these remedies seem to answer the purpose desired. Blue-books, bankers’ books, betting-books are unable to break the spell; over the pages of each he throws the all-pervading gloom. Neither is he to be worsted by the gleam of many candles flashing only less brightly than the sparkle of Beauty’s jewels and the lustre of her soft eyes in “halls of dazzling light.” On the contrary, it is here that, maybe from the force of contrast, he asserts his power with the greatest determination, coming out, as is but natural, under the vivid glare thrown on him in a stronger and more uncompromising relief. To steep him in wine is often but to increase his dimensions out of all reasonable proportions, and at best only gets rid of him for a night that he may return in the morning refreshed and invigorated to vindicate his sovereignty over the enfeebled rebel he controls. There are means of dispelling the darkness, no doubt, but I fear they are not to be found in the resources of study, certainly not in the distractions of dissipation nor the feverish delirium of vice. It must be a warm, genial, and unusually generous disposition which is not warped and dwarfed by a shadow cast upon it in youth, or indeed at any period of life; but for animate as for inanimate nature there are black frosts as well as white. The latter evaporate with the morning sun in light wreaths of vapour and perhaps a few tears sparkling like diamonds, to be succeeded by brilliant sunshine, unclouded till the close of its short winter’s day; the former, grim, grey, and lowering, parch and wither up the life of every green thing, drawing her shroud, as it were, over the cold dead face of earth ere she is buried in the darkness of approaching night.