All Men are Ghosts. L. P. Jacks

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ their own are in communion, deaf to the voices which mingle with theirs in the eternal dialogue of thought, they have uttered their message as a weary monologue, and the vivid interplay of mind with mind, the quick debate of reacting spirits, which is the very life of thought, has fallen dead. In the course of your education, which has properly begun to-day, you will become acquainted with a multitude of interlocutors whose existence you have never suspected, though they have been addressing you from the first moment you began to think and contributing much of what you consider most original in your thought. These are the ghosts by whom you will henceforth be haunted, until, finally, they make you one of themselves and carry you to heaven in a whirlwind of fire. Farewell."

      Having said this, he instantly vanished, leaving behind him a faint odour of Havana cigars.

      At the same moment a marvellous change, the stages of which have left no record on my memory, passed over me. I found myself in the place where I am at this moment, this identical sheet of paper was under my hand, this pen was writing, and the ink of the last paragraph was still wet.

THE MAGIC FORMULA

       Table of Contents

I

       Table of Contents

      Many years ago I had a schoolfellow and bosom friend whom I knew as Billy, but whose name as it stood in the Register was William Xavier Plosive. Where his family came from, or where they got their outlandish name, I know not. From its rarity I infer that the Plosive stock has not multiplied lavishly on the earth. Only twice, since the days of my friendship with Billy, have I encountered that name. There is, or was, a wayside public-house in Devonshire, the landlord of which was a Plosive; it bore the sign of the "Dog and Ladle," which the signboard interpreted by a picture of a large retriever in precipitate flight with a tin ladle tied to his tail. The other Plosive of my acquaintance kept a shop in a Canadian city; he was a French half-breed, and, as I have heard, a great rascal.

      Billy's father was said to have been a Roman Catholic; and I infer from the name he bestowed on his son that he had a turn for waggishness of a sort. Plosive senior must have foreseen what would happen. No sooner, of course, was the name William X. Plosive seen on the outside of the poor boy's copy-books than a whisper passed through the whole school—"Billy Burst." And that name remained with him to the end. It was more appropriate than its bestowers knew.

      "When did Billy burst?" "Why did Billy burst?" "Will Billy burst again?" and a hundred questions of the like order were asked all day long apropos of nothing. They were shouted in the playground. They were whispered in the class. They broke the silence of the dormitory in the dead of night. With them we relieved our pent-up feelings in hours of tedium or of gloom. Introduced pianissimo, they profaned the daily half-hour devoted to the study of Divinity. Innumerable impositions followed in their train. One morning the Rev. Cyril Puttock, M.A., who "took" us in Divinity, saw written large on the blackboard in front of him these words: "What burst Billy?" I spent my next half-holiday in writing out the Beatitudes a hundred times.

      Billy and I slept in the same dormitory and our beds were side by side. Both of us were bad sleepers, and many a deep affinity did our souls discover in the silent watches of the night. As a place to observe the workings of telepathy I know of no spot on earth to compare with the dormitory of a boarding-school. The atmosphere of our dormitory was, if I may say so, in a state of chronic telepathic saturation, and the area where the currents ran strongest was in the space between Billy's bed and mine. This is the sort of thing that would go on:

      "Billy, are you awake?"

      "Yes; I knew you were."

      "Shall we talk?"

      "I want to, ever so."

      "I say, we are going to have that beastly pudding for dinner to-morrow."

      "That's just what I want to talk about."

      "I've got an idea. Billy, I found out yesterday where they cook those puddings. They boil them in the copper of the outhouse, and the cook leaves them there while she looks after the rest of the dinner."

      "Ripping!" answered Billy. "I'll tell you what we'll do.—Hush! Is old Ginger awake?—All right. Well, we'll sneak into the outhouse to-morrow when the cook isn't looking, pinch the puddings out of the copper and chuck 'em in the pond."

      "Why, Billy, that's just what I was going to say to you. But won't we scald ourselves?"

      "I've thought of that. We'll get the garden fork and jab it into the puddings. They boil 'em in bags, you know."

      "There's a better way than that. We'll get in before the copper has begun to boil."

      "I hadn't thought of that, but I was just going to," said Billy. "Yes, that's the way."

      Enterprises such as these, however, were episodic, and merely serve to show how great souls, born under the same star, and united in the grand trend of their life-directions, share also the minor details of their activity. The seat of our affinities lay deeper. Both Billy and I were persons with an "end" in life, and breathed in common the atmosphere of great designs. We were like two young trees planted side by side on a breezy hill-top. Our roots were in the same soil; our branches swayed to the same rhythm; we heard the same secrets from the whispering winds. We were always on the heights. Few were the days of our companionship when we were not infatuated about something or other; and I sometimes doubt whether even yet I have outgrown the habit, so deep was its spring in my own nature and so strong the reinforcement it received from the influence of Billy. Sometimes we were infatuated about the same thing; and sometimes each of us struck out an independent line of his own; but always we were the victims of one mania or another.

      At the time this history begins the particular mania that afflicted me was the collecting of tramcar tickets. My friends used to save them for me; I begged them from passengers as they alighted from the cars; I picked them up in the street; and I had over seven thousand collected in a box. I thought that when the sum had risen to ten thousand the goal of my existence would be reached; and it may be said that I lived for little else.

      Billy's mania was astronomy. He would spend the hours of his playtime lying on his stomach with a map of the stars spread out before him on the floor. Billy was a great astronomer—in secret. On the very day when he and I were being initiated into the mysteries of Decimals, he whispered to me in class, "I say, I wonder how people found out the weight of the planets." He was an absent-minded boy, and many a clout on the head did he receive at this time for paying no attention to what was going on in class. Little did the master know what Billy was thinking of as he stared at the wall before him with his great, dreamy eyes—and not for ten thousand worlds would Billy have told him. He was thinking about the weight of the planets, and the problem lay heavy on his soul; and Billy grew ever more absent-minded, and spent more time on his stomach every day. At last he suddenly waked up and began to get top-marks not only in Arithmetic but in every other subject as well. And later on, when we came to the Quadratic Equations and the Higher Geometry, the master was amazed to find that Billy required no teaching at all.

      "What has happened to Billy?" asked somebody; and the answer came, "Why, of course, Billy has burst."

      So he had. Billy had found out "how they weighed the planets," and the mass of darkness that oppressed him had been blown away in the explosion. About the same time I burst СКАЧАТЬ