Driftwood Spars / The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life

by Percival Christopher Wren

At present I cannot understand and I do not know—though I am informed and infused with a burning and reverent desire to understand and to know—why Evil should be allowed to triumph, as in my own case, as well as in those of millions of others, it does. And thirdly, why does the man who would never deny beauty in a poem or picture because he failed to see it while others did, deny that immaterial forms of the dead exist, because he has never seen one, though others have?

I know of so many many men who would blush to be called "I-believe-what-I-see men," who yet laugh to scorn the bare idea of the materialization and visualization of visitants from the spirit world, because they have never seen one. I have so often met the argument, "The ghost of a man I might conceive—but I can not conceive the appearance of the ghost of a pair of trousers or of a top-hat," offered as though it were unanswerable. Surely the spirit, aura, shade, ghost, soul, ego—what you will—can permeate and penetrate and pervade clothing and other matter as well as flesh?

Well, once again, I do not know,—and yet I have seen, not once but repeatedly, not by moonlight in a churchyard, but under the Indian sun on a parade-ground, the ghost of a man and of all his accoutrements,—of a rifle, of a horse and all a horse's trappings.

I have been a teetotaller for years, I have never had sunstroke and I am as absolutely sane as ever a man was.

And further I am in no sense remorseful, repentant, or "dogged by the spectre of an evil deed".

I killed Burker intentionally. Were he alive again I would kill him again. I punished him myself because the law could not punish him as he deserved, and I in no way regret or deplore my just and judicial action. There are deeds a gentleman must resent and punish—with the extreme penalty. No, it is in no sense a case of the self-tormented wretch driven mad by the awful hallucinations of his guilty, unhinged mind. I am no haunted murderer pursued by phantoms and illusions, believing himself always in the presence of his victim's ghost.

All people who have read anything, have read of the irresistible fascination that the scene of the murder has for the murderer, of the way in which the victim "haunts" the slayer, and of how the truth that "murder will out" is really based on the fact that the murderer is his own most dangerous accuser by reason of his life of terror, remorse, and terrible hallucination.

My case is in no wise parallel.

I am absolutely without fear, regret, remorse, repentance, dread or terror in the matter of my killing Sergeant Burker. Exactly how and why I killed him, and how and why I am about to kill myself, I will now set forth, without the slightest exaggeration, special pleading or any other deviation from the truth….

I am to my certain knowledge the eighth consecutive member of my family, in the direct line, to follow the profession of arms, but am the first to do so without bearing a commission. My father died young in the rank of Captain, my grandfather led his own regiment in the Crimea, my great-grandfather was a Lieutenant-General, and, if I told you my real name, you could probably state something that he did at Waterloo.