The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (24 page)

Uncle Cornelius His Story

GEORGE MACDONALD

It was a dull evening in November. A drizzling mist had been falling all day about the old farm. Harry Heywood and his two sisters sat in the house-place, expecting a visit from their uncle, Cornelius Heywood. This uncle lived alone, occupying the first floor above a chemist's shop in the town, and had just enough of money over to buy books that nobody seemed ever to have heard of but himself; for he was a student in all those regions of speculation in which anything to be called knowledge is impossible.

'What a dreary night!' said Kate. 'I wish uncle would come and tell us a story.'

'A cheerful wish,' said Harry. 'Uncle Cornie is a lively companion— isn't he? He can't even blunder through a Joe Miller without tacking a moral to it, and then trying to persuade you that the joke of it depends on the moral.'

'Here he comes!' said Kate, as three distinct blows with the knob of his walking-stick announced the arrival of Uncle Cornelius. She ran to the door to open it.

The air had been very still all day, but as he entered he seemed to have brought the wind with him, for the first moan of it pressed against rather than shook the casement of the low-ceiled room.

Uncle Cornelius was very tall, and very thin, and very pale, with large grey eyes that looked greatly larger because he wore spectacles of the most delicate hair-steel, with the largest pebble-eyes that ever were seen. He gave them a kindly greeting, but too much in earnest even in shaking hands to smile over it. He sat down in the arm-chair by the chimney corner.

I have been particular in my description of him, in order that my reader may give due weight to his words. I am such a believer in words, that I believe everything depends on who says them. Uncle Cornelius. Heywood's story told word for word by Uncle Timothy Warren, would not have been the same story at all. Not one of the listeners would have believed a syllable of it from the lips of round-bodied, red-faced, small-eyed, little Uncle Tim; whereas from Uncle Cornie—disbelieve one of his stories if you could!

One word more concerning him. His interest in everything conjectured or believed relative to the awful borderland of this world and the next, was only equalled by his disgust at the vulgar, unimaginative forms which curiosity about such subjects has assumed in the present day. With a yearning after the unseen like that of a child for the lifting of the curtain of a theatre, he declared that, rather than accept such a spirit-world as the would-be seers of the nineteenth century thought or pretended to reveal—the prophets of a pauperized, workhouse immortality, invented by a poverty-stricken soul, and a sense so greedy that it would gorge on carrion—he would rejoice to believe that a man had just as much of a soul as the cabbage of Iamblichus, namely, an aerial double of his body.

'I'm so glad you're come, uncle!' said Kate. 'Why wouldn't you come to dinner? We have been so gloomy!'

'Well, Katey, you know I don't admire eating. I never could bear to see a cow tearing up the grass with her long tongue.' As he spoke he looked very much like a cow. He had a way of opening his jaws while he kept his lips closely pressed together, that made his cheeks fall in, and his face look awfully long and dismal. 'I consider eating', he went on, 'such an animal exercise that it ought always to be performed in private. You never saw me dine, Kate.'

'Never, uncle; but I have seen you drink—nothing but water, I must confess.'

'Yes, that is another affair. According to one eye-witness, that is no more than the disembodied can do. I must confess, however, that, although well attested, the story is to me scarcely credible. Fancy a glass of Bavarian beer lifted into the air without a visible hand, turned upside down, and set empty on the table!—and no splash on the floor or anywhere else!'

A solitary gleam of humour shone through the great eyes of the spectacles as he spoke.

'Oh, uncle! how can you believe such nonsense!' said Janet.

'I did not say I believed it—did I? But why not? The story has at least a touch of imagination in it.'

'That is a strange reason for believing a thing, uncle,' said Harry.

'You might have a worse, Harry. I grant it is not sufficient; but it is better than that commonplace aspect which is the ground of most faith. I believe I did say that the story puzzled me.'

'But how can you give it any quarter at all, uncle?'

'It does me no harm. There it is—between the boards of an old German book. There let it remain.'

'Well, you will never persuade me to believe such things,' said Janet'

'Wait till I ask you, Janet,' returned her uncle, gravely. 'I have not the slightest desire to convince you. How did we get into this unprofitable current of talk? We will change it at once. How are consols, Harry?'

'Oh, uncle!' said Kate, 'we were longing for a story, and just as I thought you were coming to one, off you go to consols!'

'I thought a ghost story at least was coming,' said Janet.

'You did your best to stop it, Janet,' said Harry.

Janet began an angry retort, but Cornelius interrupted her. 'You never heard me tell a ghost story, Janet.'

'You have just told one about a drinking ghost, uncle,' said Janet— in such a tone that Cornelius replied—

'Well, take that for your story, and let us talk of something else.'

Janet apparently saw that she had been rude, and said as sweetly as she might—'Ah! but you didn't make that one, uncle. You got it out of a German book.'

'Make it!—Make a ghost story!' repeated Cornelius. 'No; that I never did.'

'Such things are not to be trifled with, are they?' said Janet. 'I at least have no inclination to trifle with them.' 'But, really and truly, uncle,' persisted Janet, 'you don't believe in such things?'

'Why should I either believe or disbelieve in them? They are not essential to salvation, I presume.'

'You must do the one or the other, I suppose.'

'I beg your pardon. You suppose wrong. It would take twice the proof I have ever had to make me believe in them; and exactly your prejudice, and allow me to say ignorance, to make me disbelieve in them. Neither is within my reach. I postpone judgement. But you, young people, of course, are wiser, and know all about the question.'

'Oh, uncle! I'm so sorry!' said Kate. 'I'm sure I did not mean to vex you.'

'Not at all, not at all, my dear. It wasn't you.'

'Do you know', Kate went on, anxious to prevent anything unpleasant, for there was something very black perched on Janet's forehead, 'I have taken to reading about that kind of thing.'

'I beg you will give it up at once. You will bewilder your brains till you are ready to believe anything, if only it be absurd enough. Nay, you may come to find the element of vulgarity essential to belief. I should be sorry to the heart to believe concerning a horse or dog what they tell you nowadays about Shakespeare and Burns. What have you been reading, my girl?'

'Don't be alarmed, uncle. Only some Highland legends, which are too absurd either for my belief or for your theories.'

'I don't know that, Kate.'

'Why, what could you do with such shapeless creatures as haunt their fords and pools for instance? They are as featureless as the faces of the mountains.'

'And so much the more terrible.'

'But that does not make it easier to believe in them,' said Harry. 'I only said,' returned his uncle, 'that their shapelessness adds to their horror.'

'But you allowed—almost, at least, uncle,' said Kate, 'that you could find a place in your theories even for those shapeless creatures.'

Cornelius sat silent for a moment; then, having first doubled the length of his face, and restored it to its natural condition, said thoughtfully, 'I suspect, Katey, if you were to come upon an ichthyosaurus or a pterodactyl asleep in the shrubbery, you would hardly expect your report of it to be believed all at once either by Harry or Janet.'

'I suppose not, uncle. But I can't see what-'

'Of course such a thing could not happen here and now. But there was a time when and a place where such a thing may have happened. Indeed, in my time, a traveller or two have got pretty soundly disbelieved for reporting what they saw—the last of an expiring race, which had strayed over the natural verge of its history, coming to life in some neglected swamp, itself a remnant of the slime of Chaos.'

'I never heard you talk like that before, uncle,' said Harry. 'If you go on like that, you'll land me in a swamp, I'm afraid.'

'I wasn't talking to you at all, Harry. Kate challenged me to find a place for kelpies, and such like, in the theories she does me the honour of supposing I cultivate.'

'Then you think, uncle, that all these stories are only legends which, if you could follow them up, would lead you back to some one of the awful monsters that have since quite disappeared from the earth.'

'It is possible those stories may be such legends; but that was not what I intended to lead you to. I gave you that only as something like what I am going to say now. What if, mind, I only suggest it, what if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the earth's history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the world, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet so far finished as to part from the invisible world that was its mother, and which, on its part, had not then become quite invisible—was only almost such; and when, as a credible consequence, strange shapes of those now invisible regions, Gorgons and Chimaeras dire, might be expected to gloom out occasionally from the awful Fauna of an ever-generating world upon that one which was being born of it. Hence, the life-periods of a world being long and slow, some of these huge, unformed bulks of half-created matter might, somehow, like the megatherium of later times, a baby creation to them, roll at age-long intervals, clothed in a mighty terror of shapelessness into the half-recognition of human beings, whose consternation at the uncertain vision were barrier enough to prevent all further knowledge of its substance.'

'I begin to have some notion of your meaning, uncle,' said Kate.

'But then,' said Janet, 'all that must be over by this time. That world has been invisible now for many years.'

'Ever since you were born, I suppose, Janet. The changes of a world are not to be measured by the changes of its generations.'

'Oh, but, uncle, there can't be any such things. You know that as well as I do.'

'Yes, just as well, and no better.'

'There can't be any ghosts now. Nobody believes such things.'

'Oh, as to ghosts, that is quite another thing. I did not know you were talking with reference to them. It is no wonder if one can get nothing sensible out of you, Janet, when your discrimination is no greater than to lump everything marvellous, kelpies, ghosts, vampires, doubles, witches, fairies, nightmares, and I don't know what all, under the one head of ghosts; and we haven't been saying a word about them. If one were to disprove to you the existence of the afreets of Eastern tales, you would consider the whole argument concerning the reappearance of the departed upset. I congratulate you on your powers of analysis and induction, Miss Janet. But it matters very little whether we believe in ghosts, as you say, or not, provided we believe that we are ghosts—that within this body, which so many people are ready to consider their own very selves, their lies a ghostly embryo, at least, which has an inner side to it God only can see, which says I concerning itself, and which will soon have to know whether or not it can appear to those whom it has left behind, and thus solve the question of ghosts for itself, at least.'

'Then you do believe in ghosts, uncle?' said Janet, in a tone that certainly was not respectful.

'Surely I said nothing of the sort, Janet. The man most convinced that he had himself had such an interview as you hint at, would find—ought to find it impossible to convince any one else of it.'

'You are quite out of my depth, uncle,' said Harry. 'Surely any honest man ought to be believed?'

'Honesty is not all, by any means, that is necessary to being believed. It is impossible to convey a conviction of anything. All you can do is to convey a conviction that you are convinced. Of course, what satisfied you might satisfy another; but, till you can present him with the sources of your conviction, you cannot present him with the conviction—and perhaps not even then.'

'You can tell him all about it, can't you?'

'Is telling a man about a ghost, affording him the source of your conviction? Is it the same as a ghost appearing to him? Really, Harry!—You cannot even convey the impression a dream has made upon you.'

'But isn't that just because it is only a dream?'

'Not at all. The impression may be deeper and clearer on your mind than any fact of the next morning will make. You will forget the next day altogether, but the impression of the dream will remain through all the following whirl and storm of what you call facts. Now a conviction may be likened to a deep impression on the judgement or the reason, or both. No one can feel it but the person who is convinced. It cannot be conveyed.'