PROLOGUE

“I maintain,” said Monsignor with a brisk air of aggressiveness, and holding his pipe a moment from his mouth, “I maintain that agnosticism is the only reasonable position in these matters. Your common agnostic is no agnostic at all; he is the most dogmatic of sectarians. He declares that such things do not happen, or that they can be explained always on a materialistic basis. Now, your Catholic——”

Father Bianchi bristled and rolled his black eyes fiercely. If he had had a moustache he would have twirled it.

We were sitting in the upstairs sala of the presbytery attached to the Canadian Church of S. Filippo in Rome. It had been a large, comfortless room, stone floored, stone walled, and plaster ceilinged, but it had been made possible by numerous rugs, a number of armchairs, and an English fireplace. Above, in the cold plaster, dingy, flesh-colored gods and nymphs attempted to lounge on cotton clouds with studied ease, looking down dispiritedly upon seven priests and myself, a layman, who sat in a shallow semicircle round the red logs. In 1871 the house had fallen into secular hands, whence issued the gods and nymphs, but in 1897 the Church had come by her own again, and had not yet banished Olympus. There was no need to annihilate the conquered.

In the centre sat the Father Rector, a placid old man, and round about him were the rest of us—Monsignor Maxwell, a French priest, an English, an Italian, a Canadian, a German, and myself. This was five years ago. I do not know where these people are now—one I think is in heaven, two I should suppose in purgatory, four on earth. In spite of my feelings toward Padre Bianchi, I should assign him to purgatory. He made a good death two years later in the Naples epidemic.

We had begun at supper by discussing modern miracles. The second nocturn had furnished the text to the mouth of Monsignor, and we had passed on by natural channels to levitation, table-turning, family curses, ghosts, and banshees. The Italian was sceptical and scornful. Such things, in his opinion, did not take place; he excepted only the incidents recorded in the lives of the saints. I did not mind his scepticism (that, after all, injures no one but the sceptic), but scorn and contumely is another matter, and I was glad that Canon Maxwell had taken him in hand, for that priest has a shrewd and acrid tongue, and wears purple, besides, round his person and on his buttons, so he speaks with authority.

“You have some tale, then, no doubt, Monsignor?” sneered the Italian.

The Englishman smiled with tight lips.

“Every one has,” he said briefly. “Even you, Padre Bianchi, if you will but tell it.”

The other shook his head indulgently.

“I will swear,” he said, “that none here has such a tale at first hand.”

It was Father Meuron’s turn to bristle.

“But yes!” he exclaimed.

Canon Maxwell drew on his pipe a moment or two and regarded the fire.

“I have a proposition to make,” he said. “Father Bianchi is right. I have one tale, and Father Meuron has another. With the Father Rector’s permission we will tell our tales, one each night. On Sunday two or three of us are supping at the French College, so that shall be a holiday, and by Monday night these other gentlemen will no doubt have remembered experiences—even Father Bianchi, I believe. And Mr. Benson shall write them all down, if he wishes to, and make an honest penny or two, if he can get any publisher to take the book.”

I hastened to express my approval of the scheme.

The Father Rector moved in his chair.

“That will be very amusing, Monsignor. I am entirely in favor of it, though I doubt my own capacity. I propose that Canon Maxwell takes the chair.”

“Then I understand that all will contribute one story,” said Monsignor briskly, “on those terms——?”

There was a chorus of assent.

“One moment, Monsignor,” interrupted Father Brent; “would it not be worth while to have a short discussion first as to the whole affair? I must confess that my own ideas are not clear.”

“Well,” said Monsignor shortly, “on what point?”

The younger priest mused a moment.

“It is like this,” he said; “half at least of the stories one hears have no point—no reason. Take the ordinary haunted-house tale or the appearances at the time of death. Now, what is the good of all that? They tell us nothing; they don’t generally ask for prayers. It is just a white woman wringing her hands, or a groaning or something. At the best one only finds a skeleton behind the panelling. Now, my story, if I tell it, has absolutely no point at all.”

“No point?” said Monsignor; “you mean that you don’t understand the point, or that no one does; is that it?”

“Well, yes; but there is more, too. How do you square these things with purgatory? How can spirits go wandering about, and be so futile at the end of it, too? Then why is everything so vague? Why don’t they give us a hint? I’m not wanting precise information, but a kind of hint of the way things go. Then the whole thing is mixed up with such childish nonsense. Look at the spiritualists, and the tambourine business, and table-rapping. Either those things are true, even if they’re diabolical—and in that case people in the spiritual world seem considerably sillier even than people in this—or they’re not true; and in that case the whole thing is so fraudulent that it seems useless to inquire. Do you see my point?”

“I see about twenty,” said Monsignor; “and it would take all night to answer them. But let me take two. Firstly, I am entirely willing to allow that half the stories one hears are fraudulent or hysterical—I’m quite ready to allow that. But it seems to me that there remain a good many others; and if one doesn’t accept those to some extent, I don’t know what becomes of the value of human evidence. Now, one of your points, I take it, is that even these seem generally quite pointless and useless; is that it?”

“More or less,” said Father Brent.

“Well, first I would say this: It seems perfectly clear that these other stories aren’t sent to help our faith, or anything like that. I don’t believe that for one instant. We have got all we need in the Catholic Church, and the moral witness, and the rest. But what I don’t understand in your position is this: What earthly right have you got to think that they’re sent just for your benefit?”

The other demurred.

“I don’t,” he said; “but I suppose they’re sent for somebody’s benefit.”

“Somebody still on earth, you mean?”

“Well—yes.”

Monsignor leaned forward.

“My dear Father, how very provincial you are—if I may say so! Here is this exceedingly small earth, certainly with a very fair number of people living on it, but absolutely a mere fraction of the number of intelligences that are in existence. And all about us—since we must use that phrase—is a spiritual world compared with which the present generation is as a family of ants in the middle of London. Things happen; this spiritual world is crammed full of energy and movement and affairs.... We know practically nothing of it all, except those few main principles which are called the Catholic Faith—nothing else. What conceivable right have we to demand that the little glimpses that we seem to get sometimes of the spiritual world are given to us for our benefit or information?”

“Then why are they given?”

Monsignor made a disdainful sound with closed lips.

“My dear Father, a boy drops a piece of orange peel into the middle of the ants’ nest one day. The ants summon a council at once and sit on it. They discuss the lesson that is to be learned from the orange peel; they come to the conclusion that Buckingham Palace must be built entirely of orange peel, and that the reason why it was sent to them was that they were to learn that great and important lesson.”

Father Brent sat up suddenly.

“My dear Monsignor, you seem to me to strike at the root of Revelation. If we aren’t to deduce things from supernatural incidents, why should we believe in our religion?”

Monsignor lifted a hand.

“Next day there is slid into the ants’ nest a box divided into compartments, containing exactly that which the ants need for the winter—food and so forth. The ants hold another Parliament. Two-thirds of them who have determined in the last hour or two to reject the Buckingham-Palace-orange-peel theory reject this, too. All is fortuitous, they say. The orange peel was, therefore the box is.”

Father Brent relapsed, smiling.

“That is all right,” he said; “I was a fool.”

“One-third,” continued the Canon severely, “come to the not unreasonable conclusion that a box which shows such evident signs of intelligence, and of knowledge and care for their circumstances, proceeds from an Intelligence which wishes them well. But there is a further schism. Half of those who accept Revelation remain agnostic about most other things, and say frankly that they don’t know—especially as regards the orange peel. The other half rages on about the orange peel; some are inclined to think that there was no orange peel—it was no more than an hallucination; others think that there is some remarkable lesson to be learned from it, and these differ evidently as to what the lesson is. Others, again, regard it unintelligently and say to one another, ‘Look, a piece of orange peel! How very beautiful and important!’”

I laughed softly to myself. Monsignor spoke with such earnestness. I would like him to be my advocate if I ever get into trouble.

“Now, my dear Father,” he went on, “I take up the first position of those who accept Revelation, and I acknowledge the fact of the orange peel; but really nothing more. My religion teaches me that there is a spiritual world of indefinite size; and that things not only may, but must, go on there which have nothing particular to do with me. Every now and then I get a glimpse of some of these things—an orange pip at the very least. But I don’t immediately demand an explanation. It probably isn’t deliberately meant for me at all. It has something to do with affairs of which I know nothing, and which manage to get on quite well without me.”

Father Brent, still smiling, protested once more.

“Very ingenious, Monsignor; but then why does it happen to happen to you?”

“I have not the slightest idea, any more than I have the slightest idea why Providence made me break a tooth this morning. I accept the fact; I believe that somehow it works into the scheme. But I do not for that reason desire to understand it.... And as for purgatory—well, I ask you, what in the world do we know about purgatory except that there is such a thing, and that the souls of the faithful detained there are assisted by our suffrages? What conceivable possibility is there that we should understand the details of its management? My dear Father, no one in this world has a greater respect for, or confidence in, dogmatic theology than myself; in fact, I may say that it is the only thing which I do have confidence in. But I respect the limits which it itself has laid down.”

“Then you are an agnostic as regards everything but the Faith?”

“Certainly I am. Well, possibly, except mathematics, too. And so is every wise man. I have my ideas, of course, and I make guesses sometimes; but I really do not think that they have any value.”

There was silence a moment.

“Then there is this, too,” he continued; “it really is important to remember that the spiritual world exists in another mode from that in which the material world exists. That is where the ant simile breaks down. It is more as if an ant went to the Royal Academy.... Of course, in the Faith we have an adequate and guaranteed translation of the supernatural into the natural and vice versa; and in these ghost stories, or whatever we call them, we have a certain sort of translation, too. The real thing, whatever it is, expresses itself in material terms, more or less. But in these we have no sort of guarantee that the translation is adequate, or that we are adequate to understand it. We can try, of course; but we really don’t know. Therefore it seems to me that in all ghost stories the best thing is to hear it, to satisfy ourselves that the evidence is good or bad—and then to hold our tongues. We don’t want elaborate commentaries on what may be, after all, an utterly corrupt text.”

“But some of them do support the Faith,” put in Father Brent.

“So much the better, then. But it is much safer not to lean your weight on them. You never can tell. Now, with the Faith you can.”

There was another silence.

Then the Rector stood up, smiling.

“Night prayers, reverend Fathers,” he said.