All Men are Ghosts

by L. P. Jacks

"What is it?"

"You wait and see."

The great adventure was over. It had ended in disaster and tears. Never again did Billy and I ask any human being to tell us the time.

III

In those days I was a great metaphysician. Unassisted by any philosopher, ancient or modern, I had made a discovery in the metaphysical line. This discovery was my secret.

In the church-tower of the village where I was nurtured there was an ancient and curious clock, said to have been brought from Spain by a former owner of the parish. This clock was worked by an enormous pendulum which hung down, through a slit in the ceiling, into the body of the church, swinging to and fro at the west end of the nave. Its motion was even and beautiful; and the sight of it fascinated me continually through the hours of divine service. To those who were not attentive, the pendulum was inaudible; but if you listened you could detect a gentle tick, tock, between the pauses of the hymns or the parson's voice. "Let us pray," said the parson. "Tick," whispered the pendulum. "We beseech Thee—" cried the clerk, (tick!);—"to hear us, good Lord" (tock!). The clerk had unconsciously fallen into the habit of timing his cadence in the responses to correspond with these whispers of the pendulum. For my part, I used to think that this correspondence was the most beautiful arrangement in the universe. I loved the even motion of the pendulum; but I loved the faithful whispers more. To this day I have only to shut my eyes on entering a village church, and sit still for half a minute, and sure enough, stealing through the silence, comes the "tick, tock" of that ancient pendulum.

Of all the religious instruction I received during the eight or nine years we attended that church I confess I have not the faintest recollection. I cannot remember whether the sermons were good or bad, long or short, high, low, or broad. I know they never wearied me, for I never listened to a word that was said. The pendulum saw to that. There were two parsons in our time. The first, I have heard, was a very good man, but by no effort of memory can I recall what he was like. The second I do remember, and could draw his face on this sheet of paper, were I to try. I respected and admired him, not, I am sorry to say, for the purity of his life or his faithfulness in preaching the Gospel, but because he had fought and licked our gardener, whom I detested, outside the village Pub. With a little concentration of mind I can reconstruct the scene in church during this parson's tenure of office. I can see the rascal eminent in his pulpit, plodding through his task. I can hear the thud of the hymn-book which my father used to toss into the clerk's pew when he thought the sermon had lasted long enough: immediately the sermon stops and a great bull-voice roars out, "Now to God the Father," and so on. But all such incidents are as a fringe to the main theme of my memory—the restless curve of the swinging disc, and the whispered syllables of Time.

The question that haunted me was this: Did the pendulum stop on reaching the highest point of the ascending arc? Did it pause before beginning the descent? And if it stopped, did time stop with it? I answered both questions in the affirmative. Well, then, what was a second? Did the stoppage at the end of the swing make the second, or was the second made by the swing, the movement between the two points of rest? I concluded that it was the stoppage. For, mark you, it takes a second for the pendulum to reach the stopping point on either side; therefore there can be no second till that point is reached; the second must wait for the stoppage to do the business. I saw no other way of getting any seconds. And if no seconds, no minutes; and if no minutes, no hours, no days, and therefore no time at all—which is absurd.

I found great peace in this conclusion; but none the less I continued to support it by collateral reasonings, and by observation. In particular I determined, for reasons of my own, to make a careful survey of the hands of the clock. With this object I borrowed my father's field-glass, and, retiring to a convenient point of observation, focussed it on the clock-face. Instantly a startling phenomenon sprang into view. I saw that the big hand of the clock, instead of moving evenly as it seemed to do when viewed by the naked eye, was visibly jerking on its way, in time with the seconds that were being ticked off by the pendulum inside. By George, the hand was going jerk, jerk! The pendulum and the hand were moving together! Jerk went the hand: then a pause. What's happening now? thought I. Why the pendulum has just ticked and is going to tock. Tock it goes and—there you are!—jerk goes the hand again. "Why, of course," I said to myself, "that proves it. The hand stops, as well as the pendulum. The evidence of the hand corroborates the evidence of the pendulum. The seconds must be the stoppages. They can't be anything else. There's nothing else for them to be. I'll tell Billy Burst this very day! But no, I won't. I'll wait till the holidays and show it him."

Such was the secret which I resolved to impart to Billy in return for what he had disclosed to me.