CHAPTER X

MY VIEWS ON A FUTURE LIFE FOR THE ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE WORLDS

I mentioned in one of my former works that I believe many of the figures we pass by in the streets are not men and women like ourselves, but phantasms—phantasms of the living, that is to say, spirit projections of people consciously or unconsciously thinking of being where we see them—phantasms of the dead, and impersonating neutrarians.

Mingling with the crowds in the parks and gliding in and out the trees, I have often seen people with the pallor of corpses; I have followed them, and they have unaccountably vanished. I believe Hyde Park, particularly the northern side, to be as full of ghosts as any spot in London, and I have heard many strange tales from the outcasts, the tattered and torn brigade, who have slept all night under its trees and bushes. The police are, I believe, expected to clear the Park before locking-up time, and I’ve no doubt they try to do so, but they cannot possibly look into every nook and cranny in that vast expanse, and there are many in which one could easily hide and defy detection. I have tried the experiment once, and I am not anxious to try it again; there is no place so terribly depressing, so strangely suggestive of suicide, and hauntings by the most grotesque type of neutrarians, as London’s premier park by night.

Some twelve or fifteen years ago, in my nightly rambles there, I noticed that the seat beneath a certain tree, mid-way between the Marble Arch and Lancaster Gate, was rarely occupied, whereas all the other seats in that vicinity were invaded by couples. One evening, the weather being warm and sultry, I went and sat there. I dozed off, and eventually fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed that an old man and a young girl stood under the tree, whispering, and that as I watched them they raised their eyes, and looked in a horribly guilty manner, not at me, but at the space next me, which I perceived, for the first time, was occupied by a tiny child. Moving stealthily forward and holding in their hands an outspread cloth, they crept up behind the child, the cloth descended, and all three vanished. Then something made me gaze up into the branches of the tree, and I saw a large, light, colourless, heavily-lidded eye peering down at me with an expression of the utmost malevolence. It was altogether so baneful, so symbolic of cruelty, malice, and hate that I could only stare back at it in mute astonishment. The whole shape of the tree then seemed to alter, and to become like an enormous dark hand, which, swaying violently to and fro, suddenly dived down and closed over me. I awoke at once, but was so afraid of seeing the eye, that for some minutes I kept my own eyes tightly shut. When I opened them, I saw, bending over me, a very white face, and to my intense relief a voice, unmistakably human, croaked, “No wonder you’re scared, sitting here at this time of night by yourself.”

The speaker was merely one of the many hundreds of tramps for whom the Park was reception and bedroom combined. His hat was little more than a rim, and his trousers cried shame on the ladies I saw every day with their skirts plastered all over with buttons. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes preternaturally bright, and his breath full of hunger. Still, he was alive, and anything alive just then was very welcome.

“I never sleep here,” he said; “none of us do.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s haunted,” he said. “You may laugh—so did I years ago, afore I took to this sort of thing. But sleeping out-of-doors all night has taught me more than any politicians, bishops, or schoolmasters know; or any of those fine ladies that swell about in their carriages know; I’ve seen sights that would make an hangel afraid; I’ve seen ghosts of all sorts. They’re not all like us, neither. Some of them ain’t human at all, they’re devils. You may laugh when you read about them in them library books, but it’s no laughing matter when you see them, as I’ve seen them, all alone and cold, in some wayside ditch. This tree, I tell yer, is ’aunted—and it’s a devil that ’aunts it. Ask my mates, any of them that you’ll find sleeping in the parks. There’s many of them that ’ave experienced it. They’ve seen something hiding in the branches, and when they’ve seen it, they’ve felt they must either kill themselves or someone else. There’s a devil in the tree that tempts one to do all kind of wicked things, and if you take my advice, young man, you’ll sit somewhere else.”

“I think I will,” I said; “and here’s something for your warning.” I gave him threepence, the only coins I had on me just then, and, overwhelming me with thanks, he shuffled away.

Since that night I have often thought that the poor—the very poor—know far more of the other world or worlds than do the rich, and that they know more—far more—on other points than the rich. The statesman talks of the people and the people’s needs, but what does he know of the people and their needs? He rarely, if ever, goes amongst them. Except in electioneering times, I doubt if any Member of Parliament ever goes into the more squalid of our London districts. I have seen one Member of the House of Lords eating whelks in a tavern in the Limehouse Causeway, but he is an exception. Journalists go there—but the leisured folk—never.

It bores them; and yet how much they might learn, how much not only of urgent human needs, but of coming storms. They might learn that the East End brews whilst the West End sleeps, and that as surely as the long-talked-of German war cloud—that war cloud they affected to ridicule—has at last burst, so undoubtedly will the war cloud of revolution; revolution hatched by malcontents of all nationalities in East End doss houses and crowded coffee taverns.

This is no empty prophecy. The cinders of the volcano have been hot for some time—they are now burning hot—and the hour is fast approaching when they will arise mightily in a red conflagration. Are we prepared for it? It takes a very sound constitution to face a revolution with perfect confidence. Are we sound? Can any constitution be sound when the rich daily grow richer, and the poor, poorer. Where Art—all that cries out for beauty, real beauty, beauty as it is seen and worshipped by souls uninspired by lucre—is starved to death and crushed, limp and lifeless, by the thumbscrews of a vain, shallow, mercenary mushroom aristocracy on the one hand, and an equally selfish, crude, ignorant, money-grabbing working class on the other. But let me say again it is the East End, the ever watchful, never slumbering East End, that is the thermometer of future events. And why? Because it is here that the lean, hungry men of letters, who seldom, if ever, get their thoughts transferred to print, are even now threshing out the nation’s destiny. Threshing it out, consolidating it, whilst the monied men and women, the present all-powerful nouveau riche—the beer, whiskey and tobacco, peers and peeresses—the lords of the Stock Exchange, Banks and Divorce Courts—those who have made their money out of the sins and follies of the world, or by sweating and usury, are lolling in their soft, upholstered chairs, smoking luxurious cigars and quaffing liqueurs.

The war has done much: it has aroused patriotism, it has given rise to self-sacrifice, but it has not touched the root of the gangrene, it has not lessened our worship of the dollar. Individualism, as we know it to-day, must collapse, and some better and purer system—a system that does not encourage selfishness—must prevail. The people are dying for change—for some great change that will give them fair play. This is the people’s need—the need that you may hear voiced throughout the length and breadth of the squalid East End. “We want a Government that remembers its primary duties,” they cry. “A Government that is father to its children, that loves, fosters and protects them. We have never had one yet, but the hour may not be far distant when we shall demand one.” This is what the people of leisure might learn, if they visited the haunts I visit; and they might learn more beside. They might learn of another world, a spirit world, such as is never alluded to in the pulpits, with which people in the poorest parts—people who are too poor to pay for beds—are forced to live in contact. Nights in the parks and commons have taught these vagrants more, a thousand times more, than they ever learned in Sunday or County Council Schools. They have seen sights—spirits in the form of man and of beast, of both and of neither—that have revealed to them how closely the other world borders on this, and to what close supervision the inhabitants of the other world subject some of us. They have learned, I say, what no priest or preacher would, or could, teach them, namely, that the hell of spirit-land lies on this earth, and that the worst of all punishments is that of the poor phantasms of the dead, that glides in and out the trees nocturnally, never meeting those it knew and loved, but ever encountering the most terrifying of the spirits that are hostile to man.

Our vagrants know, too, the power of these neutrarians, they know they can adopt any shape, and tempt and goad man on to the committal of any crime, however heinous. They have, moreover, acquired a further knowledge—a knowledge denied and scoffed at by the ministry of all Christian denominations—namely that all forms of animal and vegetable life, all forms of flora and fauna, pass into the superphysical, and live again.

I myself first learned of a tree ghost from an old tramp, who came and sat by my side on a seat on Clapham Common.

“Do I ever see anything strange here at night?” he repeated in answer to my question. “Yes, I do, at times, but what gives me the worst fright is a tree that I sometimes see close to the spot where that man was murdered some ten or twelve years ago. I never saw it before the murder, but a few nights afterwards, as I was passing the spot, I saw a peculiar glimmer of white, and, on getting a bit closer, I found, to my astonishment, that it was a tall, slender white thing with branches just like a tree, only it was not behaving like a tree. Although there was not a breath of wind, it kept lurching with a strange, creaking noise, and I felt it was watching me, watching me furtively, just as if it had eyes, and was bent on doing me all the harm it possibly could. I was so scared, I turned tail, and never ceased running till I had reached home.”

“Home!” I said.

“Yes, a clump of bushes near the ditch, where I always turn in of nights. It ain’t much of a home, to be sure, but it’s the only one I’ve got, and I can generally count on lying there undisturbed till the morning.”

I gave him a few coppers, and he blessed me as if I had given him a fortune.

On Tooting Common I met a Northumberland miner, who had come to London for the first time on a holiday, and, having had his pocket picked, was obliged to spend the night out-of-doors. “Ghosts,” he said, when I asked him if he had any experiences with the supernatural whilst engaged in his underground work. “Ghosts! Yes, but of a nature you don’t read about in books. Me and my mates, when working in a drift at night, have heard the blowing of the wind and a mighty rustling of leaves, and have found ourselves surrounded on all sides by numerous trees and ferns that have suddenly risen from the ground and formed a regular forest. They have not resembled any trees you see now-a-days, but what you might fancy existed many thousands of years ago. There has been no colour in them, only a uniform whiteness, and they have shone like phosphorous. We have heard, too, all the noises, such as go on daily in forests above-ground—the humming and buzzing of insects, and the chirping of birds; and shafts and galleries have echoed and re-echoed with the sounds, till you would have thought that those away above us must have heard them, too.”

I do not think the miner romanced, for what he said was only a corroboration of what other miners have often told me.

Of course, it is not every mine that is haunted in this way, or every miner that sees such sights, for the Unknown confines its manifestations to the few, but I firmly believe such phenomena do happen, because as I state in my “Byways of Ghostland” (W. Rider & Sons), I have seen several tree ghosts myself. If one form of life possesses a spirit, why should we not assume that other forms of life possess a spirit, too? Why should man have the monopoly of an immaterial self, and alone of all creation continue his identity after physical dissolution? On moral grounds? No! For man, generally speaking, is in no sense superior morally to the so-called beasts around him. He is often the reverse. Oddly enough, we have so long accustomed ourselves to using the term immorality exclusively in reference to our illegal relations with the other sex, that we have come to regard these illegal relations as the only immorality existing. It is a curious error. Immorality comprises theft, and theft not only comprehends depriving people of their material goods, it comprehends slander and gossip—_i.e._, depriving people of their character; sweating—_i.e._, depriving people of the just rewards of their mental and manual labour; and bread-snatching,—_i.e._, depriving people of their only means of existence; beside many other acts of an equally odious nature. The average drawing-room is invariably the rendezvous of immoral people; nine out of every ten of the ladies one meets there are robbers—they steal, almost at very breath, someone’s good name and reputation, a far worse crime than the purloining of a loaf, for which act of desperation a poor man would be sent to prison, and a hungry dog beaten. In the drawing-room, too, one meets the girl with a few hundred a year, who announces her intention of taking some post—maybe on the stage, or on the staff of some paper, or in a business house, “just to make a little money.” A little money at the expense of someone else’s life! For that is what the want of occupation to the person with no private income literally means. We see none of this mean immorality in the animal world. Dogs steal bones from one another, it is true, but they do not lie, and cheat, and intrigue; nor do they, when they have a sufficiency themselves, snatch away the little that constitutes another person’s all.

Animals are accused of being cruel—of barbarously murdering one another, as in the cases of the cat and mouse, the lion and deer, etc. But they rarely kill, saving when they are hungry, and for food man kills, too, in a fashion and with a method which is truly disgusting. By studiously looking after the daily wants of certain animals, such as cows and sheep, and by caring for them when they are ill, man leads them to suppose he is their friend, and they learn to trust him. Vain faith. He is kind to them only to suit his own ends. He out-Judas’s Judas, and after nonchalantly accepting their most lavish tributes of affection, he takes them unawares and kills them, either with a poleaxe, or some other weapon entailing an equally painful and lingering death. Do any animals behave quite so basely? Besides, there is no cruelty in the animal world—not even the most excruciating suction of the octopus, nor the sharp, agonising bite of the flesh-eating parrot of New Zealand—that can for one moment compare with the coolly planned and leisurely executed horrors of the Spanish Inquisition; and the tiger, at its worst, is but a tyro in savagery compared with the creature God is said to have made in His own image.

From vices turn to virtues, and pause for a moment in reflection on the many lovable qualities of the dog. Where in man do we find such affection, forgiveness, general amiability, constancy and patience; and in the case of the horse, such a willingness to labour without any thought of recompense. It makes me positively ill, when I hear hopelessly immoral men and women—gossips, slanderers, breadsnatchers, usurers, sweaters—speak condescendingly of animals—of dogs and horses that are on an infinitely higher moral plane than ever they have been, or ever will be. But moral superiority is not the only superiority that man fallaciously assumes. He lays claim to an intellectual superiority, which is equally fallacious, equally a myth. No one who has ever studied animal and insect life can but have been impressed with the marvels of ingenuity and skill displayed therein. The web of the common garden spider and the nest of the wren, for example, are every whit as wonderful in their way as the architectural works of Inigo Jones or Christopher Wren. On the grounds of a moral and mental inferiority, therefore, the argument of a future life for the human species only, fails. Another argument, an argument advanced by the most bigotted of the religious denominationalists, is “that man only has a conscience, and that conscience which he alone possesses is the only passport to another world. Without conscience there can be no soul, and without soul there can be no hope of a continuation of life after death.” This, of course, is merely assumption, as is nearly all the teaching of the Churches. Conscience, like religion, depends to a very large extent on climate. A man born in the centre of Africa might not think it wrong to do things that would appear appalling to a Plymouth Brother, and vice versa. There is at present no fixed and universal standard of right and wrong, any more than there is a fixed and universal standard of beauty—for as each eye forms its own idea of feminine loveliness, so each heart forms its own conception of honour and dishonour, virtue and vice. We know that this is the case as far as mankind is concerned, and we have nothing beyond assumption to assure us that it is not so throughout the animal and insect world. If the animals have no conception of a moral standard, how is it that they do not destroy one another? That the instinct to injure people is innate in us is readily proved by the joy nearly all of us take in saying disparaging things of our neighbours. We go so far, and we would undoubtedly go the whole hog and kill those we hate, if something more, perhaps, than the mere fear of hanging did not hold us back. That restraining something is unquestionably the fear of the Future, and it is that fear which I am inclined to think is the origin of what we term our consciences. Were we sure there was no future existence, there would be no moral restraint (it would only be the prospect of legal punishment that would deter us from injuring other people to our heart’s content), we should have no consciences; and if this is applicable to mankind, why is it not applicable to other forms of animal life?

Is it not feasible to suppose that it is this same fear of the future that acts as a preventive to animals killing one another indiscriminately? That they do at times rob and kill for other motives than to satisfy their hunger is indisputable, but these exceptional cases prove what I am trying to maintain—that there is some restraining influence that keeps the vast majority highly moral; and I see no feasible arguments for not supposing this influence to be a conscience begat by a deep-rooted fear of what may await them on physical dissolution.

And if this applies to the mammals, why not to the whole animal, insect, and vegetable worlds—to everything that has life, for Science has yet to prove that where there is life, there is not also intelligence.

The superior morality of animals to man, then, may be considered as due to their more powerful consciences, and to their stronger fear of the possibility of the superphysical. And why should they have a much stronger fear? Because, unquestionably, they have a more intimate knowledge of the Unknown than has man. No one who has had much to do with dogs and horses can doubt this. Who that has ridden through woods and jungles, or lonely country roads at night, has not seen their horse suddenly stop and evince every evidence of fear. Though the human eye has seen nothing to account for it, the horse obviously has seen something, and it has only been by dint of the utmost coaxing and petting that the sagacious animal has been persuaded to continue its course. It is the same with dogs. Over and over again I have had dogs with me in houses alleged to be haunted, and they have suddenly manifested symptoms of the greatest, the most uncontrollable fear. I have endeavoured to pacify them, to urge them to follow me, but it has been in vain; though obedient and fearless as a rule, they have suddenly become the most disobedient and incorrigible of cowards. Why? Because I am certain they have seen and heard things which, for some unaccountable reason, have been held back from me.

If knowledge, then, of another life is any plea for the bestowal of an unperishable spirit, animals should live again even more surely than man. And so also should the vegetable world, for I have myself seen trees violently agitated, as if with paroxysms of the most sublime terror, before the advent of superphysical phenomena.

And stronger than any of these arguments is that of the ghosts themselves. There are innumerable and well-authenticated cases of hauntings by the phantasms of dogs, horses, birds, insects, and trees, and it is, perhaps, chiefly through these hauntings that we can disprove the theory that man possesses a monopoly of the immaterial planes; a theory which, were it not for his insufferable egotism and conceit, he would never have advanced.