The Water Ghost and Others

by John Kendrick Bangs

I was much pained one morning last winter on picking up a copy of the Times to note therein the announcement of the death of my friend Tom Bragdon, from a sudden attack of la grippe. The news stunned me. It was like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky, for I had not even heard that Tom was ill; indeed, we had parted not more than four days previously after a luncheon together, at which it was I who was the object of his sympathy because a severe cold prevented my enjoyment of the whitebait, the fillet, the cigar, and indeed of everything, not even excepting Bragdon's conversation, which upon that occasion should have seemed more than usually enlivening, since he was in one of his most exuberant moods. His last words to me were, "Take care of yourself, Phil! I should hate to have you die, for force of habit is so strong with me that I shall forever continue to lunch with none but you, ordering two portions of everything, which I am sure I could not eat, and how wasteful that would be!" And now he had passed over the threshold into the valley, and I was left to mourn.

I had known Bragdon as a successful commission merchant for some ten or fifteen years, during which period of time we had been more or less intimate, particularly so in the last five years of his life, when we were drawn more closely together; I, attracted by the absolute genuineness of his character, his delightful fancy, and to my mind wonderful originality, for I never knew another like him; he, possibly by the fact that I was one of the very few who could entirely understand him, could sympathize with his peculiarities, which were many, and was always ready to enter into any one of his odd moods, and with quite as much spirit as he himself should display. It was an ideal friendship.

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It had been our custom every summer to take what Bragdon called spirit trips together—that is to say, generally in the early spring, Bragdon and I would choose some out-of-the-way corner of the world for exploration; we would each read all the literature that we could find concerning the chosen locality, saturate our minds with the spirit, atmosphere, and history of the place, and then in August, boarding a small schooner-rigged boat belonging to Bragdon, we would cruise about the Long Island Sound or sail up and down the Hudson River for a week, where, tabooing all other subjects, we would tell each other all that we had been able to discover concerning the place we had decided upon for our imaginary visit. In this way we became tolerably familiar with several places of interest which neither of us had ever visited, and which, in my case, financial limitations, and in Bragdon's, lack of time, were likely always to prevent our seeing. As I remember the matter, this plan was Bragdon's own, and its first suggestion by him was received by me with a smile of derision; but the quaintness of the idea in time won me over, and after the first trial, when we made a spirit trip to Beloochistan, I was so fascinated by my experience that I eagerly looked forward to a second in the series, and was always thereafter only too glad to bear my share of the trouble and expense of our annual journeyings. In this manner we had practically circumnavigated this world and one or two of the planets; for, content as we were to visit unseen countries in spirit only, we were never hampered by the ordinary limitations of travel, and where books failed to supply us with information the imagination was called into play. The universe was open to us at the expense of a captain for our sharpie, canned provisions for a week, and a moderate consumption of gray matter in the conjuring up of scenes with which neither ourselves nor others were familiar. The trips were refreshing always, and in the case of our spirit journey through Italy, which at that time neither of us had visited, but which I have since had the good-fortune to see in the fulness of her beauty, I found it to be far more delightful than the reality.

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"We'll go in," said Bragdon, when he proposed the Italian tour, "by the St. Gothard route, the description of which I will prepare in detail myself. You can take the lakes, rounding up with Como. I will follow with the trip from Como to Milan, and Milan shall be my care. You can do Verona and Padua; I Venice. Then we can both try our hands at Rome and Naples; in the latter place, to save time, I will take Pompeii, you Capri. Thence we can hark back to Rome, thence to Pisa, Genoa, and Turin, giving a day to Siena and some of the quaint Etruscan towns, passing out by the Mont Cenis route from Turin to Geneva. If you choose you can take a run along the Riviera and visit Monte Carlo. For my own part, though, I'd prefer not to do that, because it brings a sensational element into the trip which I don't particularly care for. You'd have to gamble, and if your imagination is to have full play you ought to lose all your money, contemplate suicide, and all that. I don't think the results would be worth the mental strain you'd have to go through, and I certainly should not enjoy hearing about it. The rest of the trip, though, we can do easily in five days, which will leave us two for fishing, if we feel so disposed. They say the blue-fish are biting like the devil this year."

I regret now that we did not include a stenographer among the necessaries of our spirit trips, for, as I look back upon that Italian tour, it was well worthy of preservation in book form, particularly Bragdon's contributions, which were so delightfully imaginative that I cannot but rejoice that he did not live to visit the scenes of which he so eloquently spoke to me upon that occasion. The reality, I fear, would have been a sore disappointment to him, particularly in relation to Venice, concerning which his notions were vaguely suggestive of an earthly floating paradise.

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"Ah, Philip," he said, as we cast anchor one night in a little inlet near Milford, Connecticut, "I shall never forget Venice. This," he added, waving his hand over the silvery surface of the moonlit water—"this reminds me of it. All is so still, so romantic, so beautiful. I arrived late at night, and my first sensations were those of a man who has entered a city of the dead. The bustle, the noise and clatter, of a great city were absent; nothing was there but the massive buildings rising up out of the still, peaceful waters like gigantic tombs, and as my gondolier guided the sombre black craft to which I had confided my safety and that of my valise, gliding in and out along those dark unlit streams, a great wave of melancholy swept over me, and then, passing from the minor streets into the Grand Canal, the melancholy was dispelled by the brilliant scene that met my eyes—great floods of light coming from everywhere, the brilliance of each ray re-enforced by its reflection in the silent river over which I was speeding. It was like a glimpse of paradise, and when I reached my palace I was loath to leave the gondola, for I really felt as though I could glide along in that way through all eternity."

"You lived in a palace in Venice?" I asked, somewhat amused at the magnificence of this imaginary tour.