The 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

THE MAN WHO CAME BACK William Gerhardi

I had been asked to tea by a very beautiful woman, but her old father was so intent and intellectually active that his daughter, I regret to say, all but fades out of the picture. They lived in a white villa in the pine woods by the sea at the far end of an isthmus which was reached in half an hour by boat from Toulon. He came in a moment or so after my arrival, I remember, a very old, sick man, with a drooping moustache, and shuffling along in bedroom slippers and a sort of padded jacket buttoned up to the neck. Learning that I was a novelist, he conceived it a necessary courtesy to discourse on literature, which took the form of airing his knowledge in one continuous flow which nothing could stop or interrupt. His wife, who claimed to be a poetess, made pathetic little attempts to show me the favourable Press notices she had received. It was useless. He had so much to say, and he wasn’t going to have his opportunity of airing his knowledge before a literary visitor spoilt by his wife’s vanity about her poems, which, he made me understand, were poor stuff. He was terribly ill. One could see it was a strain for him to talk at all. But he couldn’t help himself. His false teeth chattered perilously as he spoke, and every now and then he would clutch at his heart and say, “Excuse me if I lie down for a moment. I will be myself again presently.” Then it was that his wife jumped in with her poems. But not for long. The old man had dragged down his legs to a sitting position on the sofa and was saying: “Another Elizabethan I am very fond of . . .” And his wife’s brief spell was over.

His knowledge was amazing. It covered the literature of every country, and it began very early and ended with our own days. In English literature his knowledge ranged from Chaucer to Mr. David Garnett. And the extraordinary thing about it was that he could not speak a word of English and, while understanding everything he read, he could not pronounce the words, or if he did, pronounced them wrongly, accentuating the ed’s in words like “asked,” “called,” for example. His knowledge struck me as very accurate and his critical estimations as just, but, owing to the vast range of material, they took the form of tracing influences, rather than valuing an author for himself.

Touching mystical poetry, I asked him whether he believed in some form of immortality. He paused. It was his first pause in a sitting position, and his wife immediately said, “I have tried in my poems . . .” But he submerged her by his intensity.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t.” He reflected deeply. “No. I can’t say I do. I regret it, but I don’t. I regret that all this laboriously accumulated knowledge should be wasted with my death. For I have neither written, nor lectured, nor during my long career in the French Consular Service have I had many opportunities to impart my knowledge to anyone intelligent enough to retain it. Not a word of it will be left. I regret it. But there it is, I bow to the inevitable. Yet I can’t stop. I still read, because I have a thirst for knowledge. It is the only luxury that I can afford myself in old age. I read, though I know my days are coming to an end. Because I know my time is short, I read more; I am in a desperate hurry to keep up with the vast volume of knowledge still sealed to me. I read myself to sleep. I read on waking in the morning, and all through the day. And sometimes I ask myself, seeing that I cannot have more than a year or two to live, can it be that all this reading of mine is in vain?”

When I saw him again a year later he was so ill that he would beg to be allowed to continue his discourse in a lying position. Suddenly he would stop, clutching at his heart, and lie still for a long time. “It has passed,” he would say and go on: “The Comedy of Humours, though crude, undoubtedly, was treading the right path in divining that individuality of character asserts itself through repetition, and subtle writers such as Tchekov knew how to re-create subtle characters by means of subtle repetitions . . .”

“Rest,” his wife would say, “and let me read that Hindu lyric I’ve translated. I am sure Mr.——”

But he would go on: “. . . While Shelley’s poetry is metaphysical I place Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven in the category of the mystical; while Spenser’s Faery Queen . . .” He clutched at his heart and lay silent for ten minutes.

When he recovered he said, pointing with his chin to the bookshelves, “My library is complete. How it pains me to think that I must leave it behind. The books in it that I haven’t read yet! Night and day I am reading my books, reading against time. It is a sort of greediness, if you like. But I cannot bear the thought of leaving any book of mine behind unread. They are like human beings to me.” He sucked back vehemently his false teeth which threatened at every moment to fly out, like some rebellious bird that he was trying to shut in, and said: “If there is any personal immortality in store for us I hope that heaven for each one of us is shaped after his heart’s desire, and that mine contains large, well-aired rooms with innumerable books, an infinity of libraries, so that I may read, read, read into eternity and never be hard-pressed for time.”

“But what sort of books?” I asked. “These books?”

“Ah! I hope so. For there are books here I won’t have read before I go. Time,” he said, “time is getting short.”

As I was going, “Persian poetry,” he pointed at a parcel on the table.

“Good?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t opened the parcel yet,” he said eagerly. “Let you know next time.”

But the next time I called, on a rainy night (for I had been invited to a party of some friends who lived on the isthmus, and had mistaken the date and missed the last boat back to Toulon), the maid told me that both ladies were away in town and would not be back till after midnight. I resolved to wait for them in the library. I took a book and began to read. I was startled an hour or so afterwards by the sound of approaching steps. But it was only the old man shuffling in his bedroom slippers and the padded jacket, bleak like a ghost in the moonlight which streamed in through the glass veranda, come down from his bedroom to look for a book in the library. I stood up. He paused, looked at me; his mouth moved convulsively, but no sound came. He went over to the shelf, took down two large volumes and went out through the door.

He couldn’t have seen me, I thought; or he was dreaming, or walking in his sleep, or his ill-health had impaired his eyesight.

“Your husband came down for books, but evidently did not recognise me,” I told his wife on her returning in the morning with her daughter from Toulon.

She stared at me with amazement.

“He died three weeks ago on Friday.”

I stared at her. “But I saw him. He came down for some books and took away two volumes.”

We went into the library and she at once noticed the gap. She looked up in the catalogue and ascertained the names of the books. They were: Letters of Lord Byron, Volumes I and II.

It is not for me to explain, but to report the facts and circumstances. If you think I am mad, let a doctor examine me; and should the doctor, on finding me sane, be himself suspected of hallucination, let him be scrutinised by a professor.