The body, they assure us, changes its atoms every seven years or so, being therefore totally different at twenty-eight from what it was at twenty-one, but science does not commit itself with regard to mental changes, such changes being doubtless incommensurable. At any rate, Mr Martin Secker’s request for an introduction faces me with a question: Am I the man who wrote these tales so many years ago, or am I someone else? This considerable period of time is involved, but as I cannot step back to the platform from which I viewed the world in 1906, the question finds no answer. Neither Dunne’s Serial Universe, nor Ouspensky’s other-dimensional time, nor even a book like Forrest Reid's Uncle Steven, can help, while the recent exposé of the Versailles Adventure suggests brutally that thirty or one hundred years are precisely what they say they are, no more, no less. Moreover, a polite request from an intelligent publisher being in the nature of force majeure, if not an Act of God, this introduction, whoever writes it, must be written.
It is, none the less, a dour job, for I have not read these stories since I first wrote them; physically, mentally, spiritually I must have changed more times than I care to remember; they introduce me to someone I now know but slightly, so that it is almost like reading the work of another man. Any desire to cut, to alter, entirely to re-compose is, of course, inadmissible; tinkering is worse than useless, it is dangerous; the tales stand, therefore, as they were first set down. Far from apologizing for them, however, I must admit that most of them thrilled me. ‘I wish I had known the fellow who saw things in this way and thus expressed himself’ is the kind of comment my twentieth-century mind suggests, since behind the actual tale I discern hints of an adventurous philosophy. ‘I wonder whether his queer, observant, questioning mind travelled further!’ But what I myself honestly think of the stories today not event Torquemada could extract from me.
It is, of course, extremely interesting to look back across the years questioningly, wonderingly, objectively, without detachment, though seeing ‘objectively’ does not necessarily imply seeing truthfully. It ought to imply seeing with self eliminated, yet self obstinately intrudes, whether it be the self of today or the self of 1906. I recall, anyhow, that these tales poured from me spontaneously, as though a tap were turned on, and I have often since leaned to the suggestion that many of them derived from buried, unresolved shocks - shocks to the emotions; and by ‘unresolved,’ I mean, of course, unexpressed. These ‘shocks’ had come to an exceptionally ignorant youth of twenty who had drifted into the life of a newspaper reporter in New York after a disastrous cattle-farm and a hotel in Canada, and the drifting had included the stress of extreme poverty and starvation. Having told some of this in Adventures Before Thirty, I must not repeat, but it holds this psychological interest for me today: that the New York experiences in a world of crime and vice had bruised and bludgeoned a sensitive nature that swallowed the horrors without being able to digest them, and that the seeds thus sown, dormant and unresolved in the subconscious, possible emerged later - and, since the subconscious, possible emerged later - and, since the subconscious always dramatizes, emerged in story form.
Others are, of course, ghost-stories, so called, for the classification of ghost-stories has stuck to me closer than a brother, and even when the BBC ask for a story it must be, preferably, of the ‘creepy’ kind. Yet this alleged interest in ghosts I should more accurately define as an interest in the Extension of Human Faculty. To be known as the ‘ghost man’ is almost a derogatory classification, and here at last I may perhaps refute it. My interest in psychic matters has always been the interest in questions of extended or expanded consciousness. If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than what sees it? Do we possess faculties which, under exceptional stimulus, register beyond the normal gamut of seeing, hearing, feeling? That such faculties may exist in the human being and occasionally manifest is where my interest has always lain. Such exceptional stimulus may be pathogenic (as duplicated in the Salpetrière and other mental hospitals), or due to some dynamic flash of terror or beauty which strikes a Man in the Street, but that they occur is beyond the denials today of the petty sceptic. If this is more certain to me now than it was when I wrote these tales a generation ago it means merely that I have since studied more of the increasingly voluminous evidence. Thus in most of these stories there is usually an average man who, either through a flash of terror or of beauty, becomes stimulated into extra-sensory experience. A wide gap may lie between a commonplace mind that became clairvoyant and clairaudient from a flash of terror in The Empty House, to the Man in the Street in The Centaur whose sense of beauty blazed into a realization of the planetary bodies as superhuman entities, but the principle is the same: both experienced an expansion of normal consciousness. And this, I submit, travels a little further than the manufacture of the homespun ‘ghost-story.’
These early stories, though I did not know it at the time, seem to me now to have been practice-flights for more adventurous explorations or, as Eveleigh Nash, my first publisher, phrased it, ‘trying your hand on a larger canvas.’ That idea of a ‘larger canvas’ scarified me at the age of thirty-six, but seeing my first book in print, I remember, scarified me even more. It is an experience that must surely intensify any hint of inferiority complex that lies hidden. I well recall my intense relief that The Empty House, my first book, enjoyed, if that be the word, a gentle, negligible press until the Spectator of that day, half to my distress, half to my delight, chose it as a verse for a special sermon and, later, a scholarly article in the Morning Post, analysing the ‘ghost story’ as a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form, based its remarks on this particular book and became traceable to Hilaire Belloc, to whose subsequent encouragement I owe much.
What I may call left-handed compliments, at any rate, flew wildly across a barrage of ‘faithful criticism,’ and I remember that, while accepting the blame as deserved, I cuddled the compliments, deciding therefore to try again - so that The Listener in due course appeared. And, such are the tricks of memory, I can still see the grave expression on the face of Eveleigh Nash and his gifted ‘reader’, Maude ffoulkes, while we discussed together whether a large ear might be printed on the cover (picture-jackets had not yet come in), and whether the title-story was not perhaps of too pathogenic a character, to be included, my own vote being in the decided negative despite the personal origin of that horrible tale.
It is, at any rate, true that to this persuasive suggestion of "trying a larger canvas" I owed a later Centaur, Julius Le Vallon, The Human Chord, The Education of Uncle Paul, and many others. Thus, I both blame and bless Eveleigh Nash for a stimulating hint which, if its results have afflicted others, provided relief to an author who found himself more overcharged with material than probably his talent was competent to express adequately.
The origin of some of these stories may be of interest to a reader here or there: this not only sound egotistical, but is: it interests me, as I look back to revive old memories . . . of a journey down the Danube in a Canadian canoe, and how my friend and I camped on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg (Bratislava) and the willows seemed to suffocate us in spite of the gale blowing, and how a year or two later, making the same trip in a barge, we found a dead body caught by a root, its decayed mass dangling against the sandy shore of the very same island my story describes. A coincidence, of course! Of that unfurnished haunted house in a Brighton square where I sat up to see a ghost with a woman beside me whose rather wrinkled face suddenly blanched smooth as the face of a child, frightening me far more than the ghost I never actually saw; of the Moravian School in the Black Forest (Königsfeld), where as a boy I spent two haunted years and revisited later to find a compensating Devil Worship in full swing and called "Secret Worship"; of the island in the Baltic where the Were-wolf Legend materialized as "The Camp of the Dog", yet whereof our happy party of six campers remained ignorant until they read my tale; above all, of that old French town of "Ancient Sorceries", where the slinking inhabitants behaved as cats behave, sidling along the pavements with slanting gestures, twitching their sleeky ears and snaky tails, their sharp eyes glinting, all alert and concentrated upon some hidden, secret life of their own while they feigned attention to tourists like ourselves - ourselves just back from climbing in the Dolomites and finding the train so boring on its way from Basle to Boulogne that we hopped out at Laon and spent two days in this witch-ridden atmosphere. The ‘Auberge de la Hure’ was the name of the Inn, and it was not Angoulême, as some fancied, nor Coutances as John Gibbons thought (I Wanted to Travel), nor elsewhere as variously attributed, but Laon, a lovely old haunted town where the Cathedral towers stand up against the sunset like cats’ ears, the paws running down the dusky streets, the feline body crouched just below the hill. Yet who should guess that so much magic lay within a kilometre of its dull, desolate railway station or that from my little bedroom window I should presently stand enthralled as I looked across the moonlit tiles and towers, jotting down on the backs of envelopes an experience that kept sleep away till dawn? Then the awful "Wendigo" comes shouldering up over a hill of memory, a name I remembered vividly in Hiawatha (‘Wendigos and giant’ runs the line), yet hardly thought of again till a friend, just back from Labrador, told me honest tales about mysterious evacuations of a whole family from a lonely valley because the ‘Wendigo had come blundering in’ and ‘scared them stiff’; of the "Haunted Island," an island I lived on for an autumn month alone in the Muskoka Lakes north of Toronto, where Red Indians flit to and from when the summer visitors have left; and of a dreadful house I once lived in (New York City) where unaccountable noises, voices, slitherings at night and so forth seemed a commonplace setting for the "Eavesdropping" re-enactment of a gruesome murder of twenty years before. . . .
Memories, indeed, of where each story was written are clearer to me today than the conduct and details of the plots themselves, but clearer still is the vivid recollection that in each case an emotion of a very possessive kind produced each tale. To write a ghost-story I must first feel ghostly, a condition not to be artificially induced; and there was a touch of goose-flesh down my back as I watched my "Wendigo" in a mountain inn above Champéry and heard the November night-wind crashing among the pine-forests beyond the window; shivers down the spine, too, as the horror of that "Willows" island crept over the imagination. I think, indeed, the majority of these tales were accompanied at birth by what may be called a delicious shudder. The true ‘other-worldly’ story should issue from that core of superstition which lies in every mother’s son of us, and we are still close enough to primitive days with their terror of the dark for Reason to abdicate without too violent resistance.
There has, however, been on striking change in knowledge since the generation when these tales were written - matter has been wiped out of existence. Atoms are no longer minute billiard-balls but charges of negative electricity, and these charges, according to Eddington, Jeans and Whitehead, are themselves but symbols. What these ‘symbols’ stand for ultimately Science admittedly does not know. Physics remains silent. Jeans speaks of a ‘world of shadows’. ‘Phenomena’, Professor Joad reminds us, ‘may be merely symbols of a Reality which underlies them. The Reality, for all we know to the contrary, may be of an entirely different order from the events which symbolize it. It may be even mental or spiritual.’ The Universe, thus, seems to be an appearance merely, our old friend Maya, or Illusion, of the Hindus. Possible, therefore, Reason might today encounter less need for abdication than thirty years ago, and the rapprochement between Modern Physics and so-called psychical and mystical phenomena must seem suggestive to any reflecting mind. All alike conduct their researches in a ‘world of shadows’ among mere symbols of a Reality that may conceivably be ‘mental or spiritual’, but is unknown, if not unknowable.
Let me leave the stories to speak for themselves. They are printed here in the chronological sequence in which they were written between 1906 and 1910.
