The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (6 page)

“I said I’d stay here till my house was a home for seamen, and I’m a man of my word and you’re not so much as a ship’s boy,” retorted Captain Gregg. “God bless my soul, I’ve a perfect right to stay in my own house, which I built with my own hands and have now bought with my own money, which incidentally has gone to my blasted next-of-kin in any case, so what you’re worrying about, me dear, I can’t imagine.”

In spite of his reassurances Lucy did worry. No one that she had ever met had been on intimate terms with a ghost. Indeed the subject had always been scoffed at by her friends and relations—spectres and phantoms, voices and visions, belonging exclusively in their minds to mediaeval saints or modern lunatics.

And supposing, thought Lucy in alarm, supposing Captain Gregg were but a figment of her imagination. Women approaching middle age and living alone did sometimes go odd, she had read, and imagined the wildest situations; but after all she was scarcely stepping onto the threshold of middle age, and positively dancing into loneliness, and surely Captain Gregg was wilder than her mind, at the most odd, could invent.

But this new aspect of the case weighed on her so much that at last it drove her up to London for the day, to visit a psychoanalyst of whom she had once heard her sisters-in-law speak in connection with an unfortunate lady who had suffered from delusions about a very junior curate’s intentions to elope with her.

After a surprising conversation with this earnest specialist in human peculiarities, which did not so much lay bare as strip to the skeleton her most intimate life, he assured her that she was as normal as any woman could expect to be, though there did seem to be this curious obsession in her subconscious, a craving perhaps for the ideal lover, which made her imagine this Voice, and if she were to continue her visits to him, at three guineas a time, a dozen times or more, they could no doubt sublimate this Voice and rationalize it.

“I don’t think any one could make my Voice more rational,” said Lucy, “and there’s nothing lover-like about it, I do assure you.”

“That, of course, is your conscious still attempting to repress your natural instincts,” said the specialist.

“Then you don’t believe in ghosts at all?” said Lucy.

“Well, dear lady,” the specialist said guardedly, “there are queerer things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Come back next week and we will see what we can do.”

Which, thought Lucy, is not really worth paying five guineas for.

“As I could have told you,” said Captain Gregg that evening, “but I knew you wouldn’t be satisfied till you’d been.”

“Do you believe in psychoanalysts?” asked Lucy.

“It’s a new science, and they are only experimenting,” said Captain Gregg, “and unfortunately they can only experiment with people in this case, neurotic guinea pigs and rabbits being unable to unburden their subconscious in language intelligible to man. It’s rather out of my province in any case.”

“I thought you would know everything about everything in your state,” said Lucy. “Tell me about it, what is the next world really like?”

There was a long silence. “No,” said Captain Gregg at last, “it’s too difficult. It’s as if I were asked to explain navigation to a child sailing a celluloid duck in its bath. The words I should have to use would have no meaning for you—there aren’t earthly words to fit this other dimension, just as there weren’t earthly words to fit telegraphy and electricity till the scientists worked their way up to these things. Besides, even if you could understand, I doubt if it would be fair to tell you—I mean it would be like handing you a crib in a difficult grading exam in languages. You might pass out of the first grade all right, but unless you’d sweated the words out for yourself and made them your own, you’d soon fail in the higher grade. No, me dear, fair’s fair, and you’ll have to work out life for yourself, and death.”

“But I’m not asking you to tell my fortune or give me advice about the future,” protested Lucy. “I just want to know as a matter of curiosity what the next world is really like. Do you have wings and float about on clouds all day, playing golden harps, and where do you sleep at night?”

“Did I say you were in the first grade?” asked Captain Gregg in disgust. “Dammit, you’re no higher than the kindergarten. There is no day here and no night, it’s eternity, not time.”

“Oh, dear me!” said Lucy. “Eternity, everything going on for ever and ever—it makes my head reel!”

“Exactly,” said Captain Gregg, “and yet you expect me to explain it to you in words of one syllable. Reality on earth is all you need worry about at the moment, and without me I doubt if you’d be capable of tackling that!”

It was astonishing how swiftly the days slipped by on their string of routine. The children were happy at their schools, where they remained for lunch until Lucy should become
more proficient in the art of cooking. She herself was more than happy in her solitude, knowing that it would be broken each evening by the lively chatter of her daughter Anna, to whom each day brought some scene of stirring adventure, and by the more restrained account of her son Cyril’s doings, and not least by Captain Gregg’s appraisal of the day’s happenings, of which he often did not approve.

Indeed he was quite fierce in his disapproval of the alterations that Lucy made in the downstairs rooms, though finally he had to admit that the pale gold walls and brocade curtains in the drawing-room set off his Persian carpet and kakemonos and lacquer cabinet to advantage.

“But what you wanted to get rid of that good suite of furniture for, I can’t think,” he grumbled. “I paid good money for it.”

“I’m sure you did,” said Lucy, “but my father paid better for the chairs I have in its place, and I got two-pound-ten for yours at the second-hand dealers, which paid for the new mantelpiece.”

“Robbery—nothing but robbery!” Captain Gregg snorted. “And who wanted a new mantelpiece anyway? I brought that bit of marble from Italy, and now what have you done with it? Made it into a rockery in the back garden! My God! I believe you’d root up your own father’s tombstone and use it for that rockery!”

“I certainly should if it were made of black marble carved into gargoyles,” Lucy retorted.

“Notre Dame is covered with gargoyles,” snapped Captain Gregg.

“Perhaps,” said Lucy, “but I don’t have to sit and warm my feet under Notre Dame.”

“And I don’t see why you had to move my portrait up here, either,” continued Captain Gregg.

“You ought to be pleased that I didn’t move it to the attic,” said Lucy, glancing with disfavour at the oil painting of the captain that now hung over the bedroom fireplace.

“It’s a very good portrait,” said Captain Gregg stiffly.

“That,” said Lucy, “is a matter of opinion. I think it’s frightful.”

“Why? What’s wrong with it?” asked Captain Gregg hotly.

“The hands are terrible,” said Lucy.

“They weren’t my hands,” replied Captain Gregg. “I took the fellow that painted the picture out to South America and he made that portrait instead of paying me passage money. Of course I couldn’t always be sitting for him and wasting my time, so he’d paint bits of anyone that came along.”

“He can’t have been a very good artist,” said Lucy.

“He wasn’t.” Captain Gregg chuckled. “Bigamy was his trouble, though I never did think he was really bad, just weak. Any woman could marry him, and it was surprising how many wanted to turn him into a good husband—a little chap he was, with no chin and canary-coloured hair.”

“I was referring to his artistic ability,” said Lucy.

“Oh, well, chuck the thing away, or use it as a cucumber frame,” said Captain Gregg. “I don’t really think so much of it myself.”

But he was not so easily placated when Lucy hired a gardener to come and set the garden in order and cut down the araucaria. He burst on her consciousness like a whirlwind that evening.

“My tree—my monkey-puzzle tree—I planted it with my own hands!” he stormed.

“Why did you?” asked Lucy.

“Why! Dammit, because I wanted a monkey-puzzle tree in my front garden,” replied Captain Gregg.

“But why?” persisted Lucy. “It’s not useful and it’s certainly not ornamental. Think how much prettier a bed of roses will look there.”

“Bed of roses be damned!” said Captain Gregg, fuming. “May the whole blasted bed die of blight!”

“I wish you wouldn’t swear, it’s so ugly.” Lucy sighed.

“That’s not swearing,” retorted Captain Gregg, “that’s Sunday school language to what I’m thinking.”

“Well, I shouldn’t admit it then,” said Lucy. “I would have thought you ought to have known better by now. You still seem to be very—very earthly for a spirit.”

“You, madam, are enough to turn a saint from his canonizing,” snapped Captain Gregg, “but all women are alike—I might have known, I might have known.”

And he vanished in a sudden stillness that clapped down on her senses louder than any thunder. Nor did he come back for several evenings, not indeed till Lucy had bought two small bay trees at the local market garden and planted them in green tubs on either side of the front door.

“Bay trees doing well, I see,” he said, his voice strolling in casually as she turned on the light in her bedroom a few nights later, for he kept his word and never visited her downstairs or when the children were at hand.

“Oh!” she said, more pleased at his return than she cared to admit. “Yes, I hope so.”

“Appropriate, too,” said Captain Gregg.

“Appropriate?” said Lucy.

“The wicked shall flourish like the green bay tree,” said Captain Gregg. “It was a pretty way of admitting your villainy, my dear, but never mind, we’ll forget it. I was never one to bear a grudge. Even when that swine in Valparaiso borrowed my best pants, I only threw him in the ditch and said no more about it!”

The days slipped by, and the laburnum trees shed their yellow glory in pools of gold about their roots. The buttercups spread a vivid carpet across the field that lay beyond the garden wall at the back of the house; and the raspberries drew the starlings, and sparrows, and thrushes, and blackbirds, in quarrelsome brotherhood to maraud the kitchen garden. Most of the residents had let their houses at summer rates to summer visitors, and the pierrots had set up their stands on the beach, where bathing tents had sprung up like a colourful garden of flowers.

More colourful, thought Lucy ruefully one evening, than her own garden, where her herbaceous border wilted under the hot August sun, showing a healthier display of weeds than blossoms.

Bindweed, she muttered, “blasted” bindweed, and looked round hastily to see if either of the children, free for the holidays, were at hand. It was hot work tugging the obstinate weed up by the roots; more often than not it snapped above them to grow again in luxurious mockery about her columbines and snapdragons and hollyhocks. It was very hot work, and she sat back on her heels, sweeping a curl of tickling hair off her damp forehead with the back of an earthy hand, as the garden gate clicked and the postman clumped his way up the path and back again.

Not so many people wrote to Lucy that her curiosity could allow the letter he had brought to lie hidden in the letter-box, and she still retained the childlike feeling that, one day, treasure from an unknown source might come dropping through that narrow slit. She dusted her earthy hands on the grass, rose to her feet, and went toward the house. She felt in the wooden box for the envelope. A first glance
at the firm writing on it showed her it was from her sister-in-law, Eva. With a ridiculous feeling that she was showing her independence by keeping that strong-minded lady waiting, she thrust the letter into the pocket of her gardening apron and sauntered back into the garden. She climbed the steps up to the round lookout in the wall and seated herself on the parapet, gazing down on the shore where her children were playing. She could see them there in the distance. Cyril, industriously building a lake on the wet sands exposed below the pebble ridge by the falling tide, was working hard, guiding little streams into the pool he had dug, reinforcing the dam he had built to hold it there. He leaned over his iron spade, his back bowed with his labour. Anna danced along by the edge of the waves on her bare feet, trailing a long tail of brown seaweed behind her, her curly dark hair blown back by the breeze, joy and vitality in every line of her graceful body.

Lucy looked fondly down at them. The rough grey stone was warm under her hand from the heat of the sun. In the cracks a scarlet snapdragon flourished, and farther on a yellow-brown wallflower, and nearer at hand a cushion of grey-green upheld the roundness of sea pinks on their stiff stems, like old-fashioned hatpins.

A sea-gull planed its way down to the water on curving, outstretched wings. The salt air blew coolly on her flushed cheeks, and she smiled to herself in her happiness.

I wonder if there is something wrong with me, she thought, that I can get so much from so little, because all my joy really comes from not doing—not spending summer afternoons in stuffy drawing-rooms listening to women setting their neighbours’ morals to rights over the bridge table, not spending summer evenings listening to men and women setting the world’s affairs to rights over five-course dinners, not sewing in circles, nor reading in groups. I must be very selfish,
she thought, for I want to set nothing and no one right; all I want is to be left in peace to make what I can of this problem called life for myself and my children. What would the world be like, she wondered, if everyone minded his own business? And yet there must be leaders; states and nations could never be allowed to drift without some guiding hand on the helm.

“Anna, Anna!” Cyril’s shrill voice came up to her on the breeze, as clearly as if he were speaking at her elbow. “It’s time for supper.” He straightened himself as he called, and, picking up his bucket, began to make his way up the beach toward the cliff path.

Anna continued on her way, dancing along the wet sand.

“I told her, mother,” said Cyril, panting a little from his climb up the steep cliff path, “I told Anna it was time for supper.”

“I know, darling, I heard you,” said Lucy.