The Daffodil Affair (10 page)

The death of Colonel Morell, although sudden, aroused in the first instance no suspicion, nor had it occurred to you in any way to connect with it his occasionally expressed anxieties about the Italian manservant who, with his wife, has since quitted your service. And it was only after your chance communication of that anxiety to the late Colonel Morell’s fellow-officer Captain Bertram that this gentleman was first visited by the apparition. Let me remind you, dear Madam, with such gentleness as this painful subject requires, that the ideas of
sudden death
and
poison
lie sufficiently near together in the
arcana
of the mind to be readily brought together when there is offered so striking a link as
absconding Italian
. Were Captain Bertram a man of fanciful mind – and of this his return to India prevents my forming an opinion of my own – the raw materials of romantic fiction lay ready to his hand.

But we are told that the apparition of your dead husband appeared not only to his old friend Captain Bertram but also to a number of other persons of respectable character who have testified to the fact; but with this difference – that whereas to the Captain the vision unfailingly called out for vengeance against his poisoner, in the presence of others it was mute or heard only to groan. The Captain saw and heard things, to him, equally familiar. Is it perhaps easier to conjure up an unfamiliar figure than an unfamiliar voice?

A total disbelief of apparitions is adverse to the opinion of the existence of the soul between death and the last day; the question simply is, whether departed spirits ever have the power of making themselves perceptible to us, and whether we are here confronted with an instance in which this has occurred. It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; in its favour we must set many voluntary solemn asseverations. And even so it is in the present case.

I advise you to persevere in your resolution of selling the house; and to take no further action than this. You speak of a duty of
laying
the ghost, or doing that which will afford it relief from having to walk the earth. But this is the shadow of superstition and such as is encouraged by writings carelessly profane: as the happiness or misery of unembodied spirits does not depend upon place, but is intellectual, we cannot say that they are less happy or less miserable by appearing upon earth. Nor can I approve the argument that the apparition, being supernatural, is tantamount to a divine injunction to pursue the supposed murderer of Colonel Morell. For the spirit, if spirit there be, is at best a
questionable shape
, bringing we know not whether
airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
and with
intents wicked or charitable
to an unknown degree. If you will but consider the painful issues which a doubtful criminal prosecution would bring you may well feel Hamlet’s doubt:
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d
? I suppose, in short, that in the pursuit of merely human justice we should regard evidence only mundane and rational. But here I touch on matters so awful that I would not venture to give an opinion did I not find myself supported by my friend Dr Douglas, who, in addition to his own distinguished abilities, enjoys the superior qualification of being Bishop of Carlisle. I am, Madam, your most humble servant,

SAM JOHNSON.

JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET,

March 20, 1772.

So much for the Morel haunting. It is not remarkable in itself, or is remarkable only for the wise advice which it produced. We must credit Dr Johnson with suspecting that if Colonel Morell was indeed poisoned by his Italian servant, the wife of the Italian servant was not without her place in the affair, and from the canvassing of such a ‘painful issue’ he sagaciously dissuades the widow. Had he given more information on the ‘persons of respectable character’ we should have been grateful, but this was not to be expected in a letter of the kind he had set himself to write. For the rest we must please ourselves with the picture of the Sage and his faithful negro servant keeping their three nights’ vigil in the empty house.

And now we come to the Spettigue affair…

Again Appleby paused in his reading. The engines had taken on the deeper throb which seems to come in the late afternoon; it was as if they were preparing for their long, tireless haul through the night. Again a bell rang and overhead there was the pad of a quartermaster’s feet going forward; from the little saloon below came a chink of cutlery and rattle of plates. Dinner would be at seven-thirty; there would be the usual jokes about the metamorphoses of Roast Hazel Hen. Appleby frowned. There was over a week’s steaming before them, and three times a day he and Hudspith would gather round the board with Wine and Beaglehole and Mrs Nurse and Miss Mood – with these and with the wraiths of Hannah Metcalfe and Lucy Rideout. And Daffodil. Roast Hazel Horse… Appleby pulled himself awake and returned to 37 Hawke Square.

And now we come to the Spettigue affair, which is more striking in itself and gives retroactive significance to the sketchy case of Colonel Morell. At this time, more than a hundred and twenty years after the events we have been considering, the Hawke Square house was in the occupancy of Mr Smart, a merchant, who had married the sister of his close friend Dr Spettigue. There were several young children – a circumstance from which arose one of the most curious aspects of the affair. For the house, like others of its kind, had a central staircase winding round a narrow well. And Mrs Smart, like other careful parents similarly situated, had provided against accident by causing a net or lattice to be placed across the well at the level of the first and again at the third (or nursery) landing. During the summer of 1888 the whole family had repaired for a holiday visit to a hotel in Yarmouth, the servants (other than a nurse) being placed on board wages the while. During this period nothing remarkable seems to have occurred, and Mr Smart was said to be in particularly good spirits, even playing cricket with his children on the beach. When the holiday was over – and following the usual custom of the Smarts on such occasions – Mr Smart returned to town a day earlier than his family for the purpose of ‘opening up’ the house – an operation of some intricacy, it will be remembered, during Victorian times. He was to await the arrival of the servants in the afternoon, sleep at his club, and his family was to return home on the morrow. This, we repeat, was the established procedure. But when the servants arrived on this occasion they found their master dead on the marble floor of the hall. The nets or lattices spoken of had been removed and there were indications that Mr Smart had fallen from the top storey.

Suicide and murder seemed equally possible as agencies in this sad affair, and at the inquest an open verdict was returned. Those taking the view that Mr Smart had been done to death saw significance in the time of the fatality: on this day of the year – and perhaps on this day only – was Mr Smart likely to be found alone in his own house. But on the other side it was maintained that this was far from weakening the case for suicide. For by taking his own life under those precise circumstances Mr Smart would so far have contrived to mitigate the shock to his family as to ensure that the discovery was made by servants and not by any of those more intimately concerned. Moreover the removal of the lattices and subsequent luring of the victim to the top of the house appeared an unnecessarily intricate method of committing murder, while the removal of the lattices by Mr Smart himself was consistent with a rational plan for taking his own life with a greater measure of decent privacy than would be compatible with, say, casting himself out of a window.

It were idle at this distance of time to speculate on the facts of Mr Smart’s death as given above. Suicide appears to have been the solution at first accepted by his friends, and this chiefly on two counts: Mr Smart seemed to be without personal enemies or any irregularity of private life; and his private affairs did upon examination prove to be embarrassed. It seemed likely that, had he survived, a considerable change in his style of living would have been necessary; and this, it was felt, might have weighed unduly on his mind. As it was, this financial stringency was to have remarkable consequences after his decease.

We have mentioned Mr Smart’s friend and brother-in-law, a Dr Spettigue. This gentleman was in medical practice in the vicinity and he possessed at the time a growing family which made increasing demands upon the available space at his residence in an adjoining square. It was therefore arranged that he should rent consulting-rooms from his widowed sister in the Hawke Square house at a figure which should materially assist her annual budget. This estimable family arrangement was completed some three months after the death of Mr Smart, and the two houses were connected by a private telephone line, then something of a novelty in London. It was hard upon Dr Spettigue’s entering in occupation of his new professional quarters that the phenomena began.

The apparition which was to appear so purposely to this competent and level-headed medical practitioner must be reckoned one of the most remarkable of which we have record – and this chiefly because of its combining the characteristics of the literary and the veridical ghost. Like most phantasms of the more respectably authenticated sort it was shy, fluid and indefinite in appearance, being commonly no more than a gliding luminous column viewed from the corner of the eye. Often, indeed, the phenomena were not visual but auditory merely, and consisted in those raps and suggestions of the movement of heavy bodies with which the reader is now so well acquainted in the better class of phantoms. On the other hand this ghost spoke, and spoke to a purpose – in this imitating those of its fellows incubated solely in the imaginations of novelists and literary men. To be brief, it was the sustained endeavour of Mr Smart’s ghost to secure vengeance upon his murderer.

For some time the manifestations were perceptible to Dr Spettigue alone. Occasionally the apparition would present itself plainly in the form of Mr Smart, and then it appeared unable to speak. But at other times and more commonly – and as if conserving its psychic force for aural impression – it was a vague appearance only, an appearance from which proceeded the very voice of Dr Spettigue’s dead friend – only having (Dr Spettigue thinks) ‘a somewhat more settled gravity’ than during life. The words were always the same. ‘I was murdered, Archibald, murdered,’ the voice would say. There would then be a pause and it would add: ‘I was murdered by–’ But at this point the voice would invariably falter and break off – in such a way that it was difficult to determine whether it was through compunction or some failure of memory that the vital information was withheld.

It will not escape the recollection of some readers that the late Mr Andrew Lang, an acute if light-hearted commentator on supernormal phenomena, at one time published a facetious essay in which it was suggested that the futile and unaccountable conduct of many supposed ghosts might be attributable to a species of
aphasia
, or inability to express certain thoughts in words by reason of some specific mental disease. Significance therefore may be attached to these facts taken in conjunction : (1) Lang’s essay may have been in the conscious or unconscious recollection of Dr Spettigue; (2) Dr Spettigue was a physician, familiar with the conception of
aphasia
, a fact which might help to fix Lang’s whimsical notion somewhere in his mind; (3) although numerous other observers
saw
the supposed ghost of Mr Smart, only Dr Spettigue
heard it talk
.

The subsequent history of the second Hawke Square haunting may be recounted in few words. The manifestations extended over a number of years but with diminishing definition and intensity, finally dying away into merely wraith-like appearances and feeble rappings and scratchings. But this was not before the phenomena had come within the perception of a surprisingly large number of persons, including at least two casual patients of Dr Spettigue’s in whom any state of specific expectation is most unlikely. One of these, indeed, who was brought into the Doctor’s surgery after having been knocked down by a hansom cab, had that morning stepped off a boat which had brought him home from a ten years’ sojourn in China. This is extremely interesting, but so too is the circumstance that neither Mrs Smart nor any of her children was ever perceptive of any supernormal phenomena whatever. The fact of the haunting, as was inevitable, became widely known, and was naturally associated with Mr Smart’s mysterious death. But the words heard by Dr Spettigue were wisely suppressed during the lifetime of those concerned, the interests of scientific enquiry being at the same time safeguarded by a confidential deposition made to the Logical Society’s committee for psychical investigation. The
Proceedings
of this body contain a very full report.

A museum, Appleby said to himself as he closed the book. A sort of ghost museum neatly housed in a rebuilt 37 Hawke Square. Lucy Rideout in the basement illustrating possession by demons; Mrs Nurse holding a seance in the drawing-room; Miss Mood crystal-gazing in the pantry; Hannah Metcalfe floating from room to room on a broomstick; Daffodil tap-tapping in the back yard; the spectres of Colonel Morell and Mr Smart toasting Yarmouth bloaters before the kitchen fire. And no doubt there would be more exotic exhibits as well: Maori
Tohungas
and Eskimo
Angakuts
, Peay-men from British Guiana, Dene Hareskins from North America and
Birraarks
from Australia. All with their attendant spirits:
kenaimas
and
mrarts
,
jossakeeds
and –

And Uncle Tom Cobley and all, thought Appleby, abruptly standing up. The thing was fantastic; it was as fantastic if one believed in ghosts as if one did not. And no one would believe such a story for a moment… He put the book back in its drawer. Writing with a nice, dry, scientific tone. Interesting, without a doubt. And perhaps rather alarming as well.