In The Red Room

( Originally Published 1922 )

SURELY there was nothing supernatural about the manner of it. The thing happened in a brilliantly lighted room where I was one of a hundred persons, all occupied with the very material business of dining, and dining well. No environment could be more unsuited to a visitor or a message from the Beyond. The lights, the music, the noise of incoming or departing guests, the bustling waiters, the hum of joyous conversation punctuated with the popping of wine corks, the deep tones of men, the staccato laughter of women, —these were the accompaniment of the strangest experience of my life, to which I hesitate to give a name.

And then, oh my God! can a Ghost eat? can a Ghost drink? can a Ghost talk, and yet attract no notice in a crowded company of feasting men and women?

Let me reword the matter—a thing which Hamlet tells us "madness would gambol from"; let me by the strictest effort of memory and reason strip the supernatural from it, if I may....

I was dining alone in a corner of his favorite French café; in the Red Room, too, of whose cheerful warmth and brightness of color he had been outspokenly fond in his hearty way. He had introduced me to this place and here we had often dined together. Here or elsewhere, alas, we should dine together no more . . . he died suddenly in his youth and strength some four years ago.

Always I think of him when I am in the Red Room of this café, whether alone or in company; but this night the thought, the image, the vital recollection of him, faultless in every detail, possessed me absolutely. I had made very little progress with my dinner, and had taken but one glass of Château Palmer, when I resigned myself to the sad pleasure of keeping tryst with his memory.

First of all, my mind dwelt on our friendship : how sweet it was, how firm, how true ; with never a doubt to mar it, never a cold wind of jealousy or envy to blow upon it. We were lovers,—for such friendship between men is a purer sentiment than the love of man and woman, only the nobler emotions of the heart being engaged.

We were neither too old nor too young for a real friendship; both were still well under that chilly meridian where men usually part with the generosities and enthusiasms of life in order to take on the prudences and self-calculations. Of the two he was the junior, but he assumed a kind of specious seniority by virtue of his physical bigness and his greater success in battling with the world. O friend, how true in your case that the battle is not always to the strong !

I recalled how the anticipation of dining with him, in this very Red Room, was quite the most exquisite pleasure I have known, no woman ever having given me the like—though I am anything but a hater of women. And I said to myself with a sigh that there were not left in all the world three men, the thought of dining with whom could yield me an equal joy.

That is, I maintain, the crucial test of friendship. Do you like to dine with him? Not without a deep meaning was of old the life of a man held sacred with whom one had shared bread and salt. The sacramental rite of ancient hospitality persists under our less simple and less beautiful forms. Nor may we violate it with impunity, barbarians as we are :—Nature cries out against our performing this act with one whom we dislike or mistrust, or even toward whom we are indifferent. In a word, I had rather make love to a woman who affects me with a physical repulsion than dine with a man I don't like. The fact proves the perfect sympathy existing between our physical and psychic selves, and from this dual voice there is no appeal—it is the highest court of human nature.

This was the very thought in my mind when, raising the second glass of Bordeaux to my lips, I saw him . . and set it down untasted.

He came into the room at the farthest en-trance leading direct to the street, and shouldered his way through the crowd of guests and waiters in his old big careless manner, which never failed to move the admiration of women and the resentment of men. He was dressed as I had so often seen him, not in regulation evening clothes, but in a suit of some rich gray material which he wore as if it were a part of him, with a light overcoat tossed over his arm :—it was in the early days of April.

The shouldering gray-suited giant, picked out in strong relief from all the black-clad guests, came straight toward me ,across the crowded room, his fine head, crowned with auburn curls, held solidly erect on a columnar neck; the smiling, eager challenge of his eye bent upon me.

What I thought God alone knows, if indeed I was not deprived of all conscious power of thinking in that terrible moment. And yet, obedient to old habit, I tried to rise from my chair to greet him, but found myself utterly paralyzed. Neither hand nor foot could I move.

But though my body was stricken lifeless by the presence of the Supernatural, my soul, strange to say, remained calm and without terror. And great as was the physical shock of the fear which held me now as in a vise, I yet wondered that our neighbors, almost elbowing us, seemed to pay no attention either to him or tome.

"Don't get up, old fellow; you're a bit shaken. I'll just sit here, if you don't mind, and have a taste of your dinner and a sip of your Château Palmer-you always did like the red."

His voice !—the same genial tones in it that had ever such power to thrill me. Oh! I could believe it all a dream, an hallucination arising from some disorder of the senses, were it not for that voice whose tones are registered in my heart. In obedience to a nod from me,—for I could not have spoken had my life depended on it,—the waiter, without the least apparent show of concern, laid an-other plate. From his manner I could not divine if he were conscious of the presence of my Guest.

Ah ! then I knew it was indeed my friend over whose untimely grave the grass had withered and the winds had blown during four long years. For in the old loving big-brotherly way, he began to play the host as of yore, to heap my plate with good things, and to fill my glass with cheerful assiduity. "I'm afraid you must often go hungry without me to help you, old boy", he said, with the old kind smile.

Still, I could not speak, but at his bidding I ate my share of the dinner. He too partook, though lightly, and soon we had made an end of it. Then the waiter having cleared the table and served the coffee, he offered me a cigarette from a full box—his old favorite brand, I noticed—and lit one himself.

I watched him mutely, with emotions which I may not describe—perhaps rather with a tense suspension of all emotion, save that of a fearful expectancy.

He spoke : "You thought of me so lovingly and insistently tonight, in this place where we have often been happy together, that I had to come to you. Love is the one thing, you see, that has power to recall us from the Shadow."

He paused, and the flute-like laughter of women rose high above the surrounding hum of talk and the surded strains of the orchestra. There came into his eye a light I well knew.

Nodding his head whence the laughter had proceeded, he went on:

"The keenest part of your regret for me, my friend, is that I who loved that so much should have had to die in the flower of my youth." .. .

Even as he spoke my mind like lightning overran his brief career. I saw him as he was when he came from the rugged North to the Big Town, a young giant in his health and strength, and in his eager appetite for pleasure. I marked in him that terrible passion for women to which so many splendid and gener ous natures are sacrificed; that craving for action and excitement which eats the sword in the scabbard; that tiger thirst for the enchanted Goblet of Life which would drain all to the dregs at a single draught; that devouring energy which knows no rest but with daring hand would tear aside the curtain betwixt day and day.

He went on as if I had spoken my thoughts aloud: "Yes, there is nothing of all this about us but I have had, my boy, and good measure—as you were thinking. Life owes me nothing, even though I did close my account at thirty; I lived every minute of my time—got all there was coming to me or to any man. No regrets ! If I could come back for keeps I would not live otherwise, do otherwise, than I have lived and done. Excepting, perhaps, that I would not make such a hurried job of it. Yes, that was my mistake, but you are not to pity me on this account. For what matter a few years more or less, a few dinners more or less—aye, a few passions, more or less, the best and only permanently alluring pleasure that life can offer? The end is the same, and the end comes as surely to him who has outlived his digestion and his capacity for enjoyment as to him who, like me, dies with every power and every appetite at the full."

For a moment I took my eyes from my Guest and looked anxiously about to assure myself that nobody was listening to this confession of the Dead. As before, we seemed not to attract any special attention. Our nearest neighbors, a man and a young woman a little the worse for wine, hardly deigned us a glance, and were certainly occupied with anything but spiritual affairs. This bit of the universal human comedy was repeated here and there about the room. Many diners had gone, and with each departure the scattered lovers seemed to take on fresh courage and confidence. The orchestra continued to play intermittently and was applauded ever the more wildly by the still lingering guests.

All this I saw in the space of less than a second or two during which my eyes had left his face.

He continued: "You have grieved too much, dear old boy, over the thought that I was cheated, or cheated myself of my due share of life. The cowards who dared not live, the weaklings whose fill of life was starvation and death to me, found a text and a moral in my fate. Let not this be your thought, my friend, when you sit here alone in the Red Room and pledge me in old Bordeaux. Think rather that I fulfilled my life, won every prize of my desire, tasted every joy, scorned every fear, and died in the flush of victory!"

As he said these last words his voice sounded like the distant note of a silver clarion. Could it be possible that he was unheard by the neigh-boring diners? Again I stole a fearful glance about the room.

Evidently nobody was concerned with us in the now thinned-out company. The hour was late. Leaning against the wall, at a little distance, was our waiter, quietly observant of us, as I thought, but not importunate with his attentions.

With a feeling of relief I turned again to my Visitor. He was gone!—but for some moments my bewilderment and stupefaction were such that I could not remove my eyes from the vacant chair where he had been seated an instant before.

I must have cried out, recovering my speech, for I awoke as from a trance to see that some near-by people were looking toward me in a surprised fashion. In the same moment the waiter came hastily forward.

"Did Monsieur call? Is anything the matter with Monsieur?"

"No, no," I managed to articulate, my presence of mind returning at sight of those staring faces; "what should be the matter? Just bring me a pony of brandy—and the bill."

He was back in a moment with the liquor, and having figured out the bill, laid it face down on the table before me.

I tossed off the brandy, thinking that I had just had the strangest hallucination that ever sprang from a few glasses of old Bordeaux, and unable to account for it upon any theory of my previous experience, or temperament, or constitution.

Then I took up the dinner check and, surprised at the amount, called the waiter.

"Haven't you made a mistake?" I asked, indicating the charge.

"But . . . pardon!—the other gentleman. Monsieur is paying for two," said the waiter.