Hauntings | Page 2

imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from
the strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our
fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid
impressions, litter of multi-colored tatters, and faded herbs and flowers,
whence arises that odor (we all know it), musty and damp, but
penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air
when the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the
flickering flames of candle and fire start up once more after waning.
The genuine ghost? And is not this he, or she, this one born of
ourselves, of the weird places we have seen, the strange stories we have
heard--this one, and not the aunt of Miss Jemima Jackson? For what
use, I entreat you to tell me, is that respectable spinster's vision? Was
she worth seeing, that aunt of hers, or would she, if followed, have led
the way to any interesting brimstone or any endurable beatitude?
The supernatural can open the caves of Jamschid and scale the ladder
of Jacob: what use has it got if it land us in Islington or Shepherd's
Bush? It is well known that Dr. Faustus, having been offered any ghost
he chose, boldly selected, for Mephistopheles to convey, no less a
person than Helena of Troy. Imagine if the familiar fiend had
summoned up some Miss Jemima Jackson's Aunt of Antiquity!
That is the thing--the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which the

prose is clean obliterated by distance--that is the place to get our ghosts
from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of modern times, on
the borderland of the Past, in houses looking down on its troubadours'
orchards and Greek folks' pillared courtyards; and a legion of ghosts,
very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro, fetching and
carrying for us between it and the Present.
Hence, my four little tales are of no genuine ghosts in the scientific
sense; they tell of no hauntings such as could be contributed by the
Society for Psychical Research, of no specters that can be caught in
definite places and made to dictate judicial evidence. My ghosts are
what you call spurious ghosts (according to me the only genuine ones),
of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains,
and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends'--yours, dear
Arthur Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, among the high growing
bracken and the spectral pines, of the south country; and yours, amidst
the mist of moonbeams and olive-branches, dear Flora Priestley, while
the moonlit sea moaned and rattled against the moldering walls of the
house whence Shelley set sail for eternity.
VERNON LEE
MAIANO, near FLORENCE, June 1889.

Amour Dure:
PASSAGES FROM THE DIARY OF SPIRIDION TREPKA.


Part I
Urbania, August 20th, 1885.--
I had longed, these years and years, to be in Italy, to come face to face

with the Past; and was this Italy, was this the Past? I could have cried,
yes cried, for disappointment when I first wandered about Rome, with
an invitation to dine at the German Embassy in my pocket, and three or
four Berlin and Munich Vandals at my heels, telling me where the best
beer and sauerkraut could be had, and what the last article by Grimm or
Mommsen was about.
Is this folly? Is it falsehood? Am I not myself a product of modern,
northern civilization; is not my coming to Italy due to this very modern
scientific vandalism, which has given me a traveling scholarship
because I have written a book like all those other atrocious books of
erudition and art-criticism? Nay, am I not here at Urbania on the
express understanding that, in a certain number of months, I shall
produce just another such book? Dost thou imagine, thou miserable
Spiridion, thou Pole grown into the semblance of a German pedant,
doctor of philosophy, professor even, author of a prize essay on the
despots of the fifteenth century, dost thou imagine that thou, with thy
ministerial letters and proof-sheets in thy black professorial coat-pocket,
canst ever come in spirit into the presence of the Past?
Too true, alas! But let me forget it, at least, every now and then; as I
forgot it this afternoon, while the white bullocks dragged my gig slowly
winding along interminable valleys, crawling along interminable
hill-sides, with the invisible droning torrent far below, and only the
bare grey and reddish peaks all around, up to this town of Urbania,
forgotten of mankind, towered and battlemented on the high Apennine
ridge. Sigillo, Penna, Fossombrone, Mercatello, Montemurlo--each
single village name, as the driver pointed it out, brought to my mind the
recollection of some battle or some great act of treachery of former
days. And as the huge mountains shut out