Ellis Parker Butler - The Chromatic Ghosts of Thomas

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit
LibriVox dot org. The Chromatic Ghosts of Thomas by Ellis
Parker Butler. Our cat, Thomas was very sensitive. I never

(00:25):
knew such a sensitive cat as Thomas was. The slightest
harsh word seemed to hurt his feelings and put him
into a fit of the dumps, and if anybody scolded him,
he would sob once or twice, then burst into tears.
My wife and I tried to be gentle and kind

(00:46):
to Thomas. But when a cat has such abnormally sensitive
feelings as that, one is almost every minute doing something
inadvertently to wound them. Mus seemed to be everlastingly looking
for something to take to heart. It got so that

(01:07):
he wandered about the house from one week's end to
another with a downcast, mournful expression, and it began to
get on our nerves. Time and again. I made up
my mind to speak to my wife about it, and
then I would remember how kind and loving and faithful

(01:28):
Thomas had been when he was a kitten, and I
would try to soothe my nerves by playing on my violin,
but whether it was the material of which the violin
strings were made or something else, this would hurt Thomas's
feelings too, and he would sit and look at me
oh so sadly, until I would have to weep also,

(01:53):
And then my wife would come in and seeing both
her darlings, and tears would fall to crying. We were very,
very unhappy, and all because Thomas was so ridiculously sensitive.
I stood it until one day when he had been
more than unusually moody. He had taken offense at some

(02:16):
fancied slight early in the morning, and all day he
had sat with a frown on his brow, not saying
a word to me nor answering me when I spoke
to him. I said nothing until evening, and then, being
sure that Thomas had fallen asleep on our best silk
damask chair, I spoke to my wife about it. I

(02:42):
told her plainly that I was becoming a nervous wreck
on account of that cat's feelings. I said that either
I would move out and lead the house to Thomas,
or that Thomas must move out and lead the house
to me. That his moods were too moody and that
his permanent melancholy was beginning to tinge my writing, and

(03:05):
that if I lost any more of the blithe joyousness
that was my principal hold on the public, I would
lose my popularity. No one would want my writings, and
we should all starve. I can see now that I
was a little too vehement. My mind was very much

(03:27):
wrought up over the manner, and I may have spoken
louder than I had intended. At any rate, Thomas suddenly
jumped from the chair and walked dejectedly from the room.
At the door, he stopped and gave me one reproachful glance,
and then we heard him push open the screen door

(03:48):
and go out on to the kitchen porch. My wife
and I sat for a minute in silence. The awful
significance of what I had done came upon me. Never
before had I outspokenly told my feelings regarding Thomas. In
his hearing, Edward said, my wife, I fear you have

(04:13):
mortally offended Thomas. I pretended I was indifferent about what
Thomas thought of what I had said, but at heart
I was worried and ashamed. I knew I had said
more than I had intended in the heat of my words,
I had gone further than I should otherwise have gone. However,

(04:35):
I doggedly set my mouth into firm lines and scowled edward,
said my wife anxiously a few minutes later, Thomas is
very quiet out there, don't you don't you think you
had better go out and coax him in. Hadn't you
had'n you better go to the door and say a

(04:57):
kind word to him, You know, oh how sensitive he is.
And she did not say the awful words, but we
both understood what she meant. Thomas was in the exact
condition of melancholy, in which suicide suggests itself to the
hypochondriac mind. I moved uneasily in my chair. I hated

(05:22):
to beg the cat's pardon, for I felt that I
was right in the quality of what I had said,
even if I had made the quantity too large. I hesitated,
and then I rose. At that moment, my wife screamed,

(05:42):
and I strong man, though I be jumped nervously, for
our straining ears caught the sound of a heavy body
splashing into our rain barrel. For one terror stricken moment,
Mary and I stood looking at each other aghast. The
next moment, I was dashing from the room wildly, impetuously.

(06:06):
I ran to the rain barrel. Our worst fears had
been realized. Thomas had committed suicide. My garden rake was
standing near, and with it I hastily raked all that
remained of poor misguided Thomas out of the rain barrel

(06:28):
and laid his dank body on the back porch. Poor Thomas.
Mary came and stood beside me, and I threw my
arms around her, and together we looked down at that dripping,
lifeless form. When her first strong paroxysms of grief were over,

(06:49):
I took her hand, And then as we looked, Thomas quivered,
staggered to his feet, and tottered into the kitchen. You
may be sure that Mary and I were joyful. We
got a huckaback towel and rubbed him dry. We dosed
him with hot catnip. We stroked him gently and tickled

(07:13):
him under the chin, where a cat loves best to
be tickled. He revived quickly, and strange to say, he
seemed to bear me no resentment. In fact, he seemed
to be a new cat. He had no recollection of
what had passed between us, nor of his awful act.

(07:34):
He was happy and blithe as he had been when
we first made his acquaintance, and he purred and smiled
at us good naturedly. We left him asleep by the
kitchen fire, and Mary and I went into the parlor
to talk the matter over. We decided we would be

(07:54):
very good to Thomas in the future, for his suicide
had been a lesson to us, and we knew that
Thomas had only eight lives more no cat has more
than nine lives at the best, and we agreed that
we must do all we could to cherish these eight
remaining lives. We sat in the parlor planning pleasant little

(08:17):
surprises and gifts for Thomas, and evolving new ways of
making him contented and happy. For we felt that our
little home must be dull for a cat of Thomas's parts,
with no children to amuse him. And we saw that
we had been wrong to blame him for his melancholy.

(08:38):
We should have made his life pleasanter and brighter, and
should have tried to draw him out of himself. More
so interested did we become that we were surprised to
hear the clock strike midnight, for time goes so quickly
when one is conspiring good deeds. As the last stroke

(08:59):
of sounded, Thomas bounded into the parlor. His eyes were
glaring wildly, his limbs were trembling. Every hair on his
body was standing erect. He backed between my feet and
stared with horror at what seemed to us to be
but the vacant air. He alternated between pitiful mewing and

(09:25):
frantic spitting, and cling at the air before him. I
supposed that he had awakened suddenly out of a bad dream.
But when I bade him go to his usual bed
in the kitchen, he pleaded so piteously to be allowed
to sleep an hour bedroom that Mary begged me to
remember how near we had come to losing him, and

(09:46):
I agreed to let him come with us. The permission
seemed to give him pleasure. But all the way up
the stairs he kept close to my feet, now and then,
looking back with evident tear, And while I was disrobing,
he did not move an inch away from me. When
I turned off the gas and moved toward my bed,

(10:10):
I stopped short, in amazement. In the black darkness of
the room, I could distinguish Thomas by his two huge,
terror stricken eyes. But that was not what made me
pause and trimble. Perched on the foot of my bed
was a thin, phosphorescent form. It was a pale blue,

(10:34):
transparent cat, and its face was contorted into a diabolical grin.
Through it, I could see the frightened face of my wife.
In every feature, the ghost cat was identical with Thomas.
It was, indeed, the ghost of Thomas's first life returned

(10:55):
to haunt him. I do not, or not then, believe
very much in ghosts. I have always been willing to
admit that there were ghosts, but that a man of
any stamina should be afraid of them seemed to me
the utmost folly, and I took a hair brush and
tried to brush the blue cat ghost off the footboard

(11:18):
of my bed, But the ghost cat would not vanish.
The brush passed through it as it would have passed
through a moonbeam. I blew at the ghost, and it
flickered as a flame flickers in a draft, but it
remained where it had been. If anything, it glowed with
a brighter blue. Thomas had jumped upon the bed and

(11:42):
was cowering in my wife's arms. My own hair and
my mustache were standing erect, and the hairs of my
mustache tickled my nose and made me sneeze repeatedly. I
sneezed right through the cat ghost each time, and this
bent him into odd curves, twisting his infernal grin into

(12:04):
horrible caricatures of Thomas's sweet face. I tried every antidote
for ghosts of which I had ever read, but without
the least success, And finally I lighted the gas again,
which dissipated the cat ghost so far as Mary and
I were concerned. I thought I could see a thin

(12:26):
blue haze above the foot board, just where the cat
ghost had been to Thomas. However, the blue ghost remained
perfectly visible, as we knew by the manner in which
he trembled all night. As he lay between Mary and me.
I was very thankful that he was a cat instead
of a pig, for his hair remained permanently erect, and

(12:51):
if he had been a pig, his bristles would have
stuck out like those on a hair brush and would
have made sleep impossible for us. I hoped that the
ghost cat would depart with the rising of the sun,
but although to marry in me it was quite invisible.
The actions of Thomas told us plainly as possible that

(13:13):
the ghost of himself was still haunting him. All that morning,
Thomas walked sideways, spitting and scratching at the thin air,
where we knew the ghost cat must be walking beside him,
and occasionally he would make wild dashes around the room,
or seek to climb the smooth side of the hall,

(13:35):
or hide his head under a hassock. As the day
wore on, he became exhausted, and he finally fell into
a troubled sleep. He slept several hours until about nine
o'clock in the evening, and then he awoke with a
blood curtling scream and dashed madly up the stairs. My

(13:58):
wife and I darted after him, but we were too
late to save the rash creature from the consequences of
his folly. As we panted into the attic, we saw
him dash madly through a pane of glass in the
window under the eaves, and a moment later we heard
him strike on the brick walk below. Poor poor Thomas.

(14:22):
Once more he had been driven to that last resort
of unfortunates and had killed himself. I threw my arms
around Mary and when her first strong paroxysms of grief
were over, I took her hand, and together we winded
our way downstairs and opened the door. There was a

(14:46):
dogged look as Thomas entered the hall, a look of hopeless,
spiritless woe that was only broken when he sprang, striking
out viciously at the ghost, now to one side, and
now to the other. I thought it best then to
speak to Thomas as one man should speak to another.

(15:09):
I told him that he was not playing the part
of a man, that he should bear up and be brave,
that men had been haunted by ghosts before and had
lived to be happy, and that he should try to
conquer his hatred and fear of the blue ghost and
bear with it. But Thomas only crept closer to Mary's

(15:31):
skirts and refused to be comforted or to have his
fears allayed. That night, a second ghost of Thomas took
its place on my foot board beside the first. There
was no question then that Thomas had lost the second
of his nine lives, and that he had but seven left.

(15:53):
And before I got into bed, I gave him a
good lecture on the necessity of taking good care of
the few precious lives he had left, but his attention
was not on what I was saying, and that can
hardly be wondered at. For the second ghost on my
bed was as like the first one as one pin

(16:13):
is like another, and both were as like Thomas as
could be. But the second ghost was, instead of being blue,
a rich, vivid red. The two ghosts prowled back and forth,
walking through each other, and if I had not been
possessed by a shuddering chill, I should have been highly amused.

(16:37):
For when the two ghosts walked through each other, the
red and blue combined they formed a rich purple. I might,
with honesty say that I have never seen a blue
cat ghost before, nor even a red cat ghost. But
I can take my oath that neither I, nor my wife,

(16:58):
nor Thomas I had ever seen a purple cat ghost.
It was trying for me and for Mary, but think
what it must have been for Thomas, considering that these
were ghosts of himself. I will not extend this story needlessly.
Anyone who wishes to read the complete details will find

(17:19):
them in the report I wrote for the Society for
Psychical Research. I cannot, I fear make the story as
amusing as it would be if it were the work
of fiction. It would be amusing no doubt. Were I
to go on to say that each night a new
ghost of Thomas was added to the line of ghost

(17:41):
cats that prowled on the footboard of my bed, until
nine ghosts of various hues were gathered there, Mister John
Kendrick Bangs would doubtless have sacrificed the truth in order
to create just such a comical situation. For he is
a humorist, and if a few very colored cat cooast

(18:02):
had happened to roost on his bed, he would have
seen something funny in them, and would have exaggerated the
facts in order to make a little fun with the subject.
But I have a reputation as a family man and
as secretary of the Bone Park Improvement Association to maintain,

(18:24):
and I cannot bring myself to pander to your love
of amusement by any such mendacity. I must stick to
the facts. Of course, I cannot deny that poor dear
Thomas committed suicide every day for nine consecutive days, for
that is the truth. In spite of all our efforts

(18:45):
to prevent him, he managed each day to accomplish his
fell purpose. I cannot deny that on the third day
he ate an abnormally large portion of rat poison, driven
to desperation by the care that kills cats, nor that,
when after Mary's for strong paroxysms of grief were over,

(19:10):
Thomas staggered up our steps with only six lives remaining
in him, there was a new ghost on footboard to
greet him. Neither can I deny that when on the
fourth day melancholy seized him and he jumped into the
oven of our gas stove when the heat there was
as great as is obtainable from our suburban gas, and

(19:33):
perished miserably. My Mary was seized with a paroxysm of grief,
for we loved Thomas, and it pained us to see
him get into the dying habit. Nor shall I deny
that he died by his own act on the fifth day,
when he allowed our heavy front door to slam shut

(19:54):
on his neck, extinguishing himself in causing my wife strong
paroxies of grief. And it would not be the truth
if I did not say that on the sixth day,
Thomas to the paroxysmal grief of my wife chewed up
and swallowed a lamp chimney, and died a wicked death.

(20:16):
I trust, too that my wife is as tender hearted
as any other woman, but I cannot deny that when
on the seventh day we found Thomas hanged by the neck,
and our lovely three dollar ninety eight marked down from
five dollar rope portiennes and dead, Mary's paroxysms of grief

(20:40):
were less strong than Thomas had perhaps come to expect
on such occasions. I claim that no woman can be expected,
by any reasonable cat, to keep up a high standard
of paroxysms of grief day after day without falling off
a little in energy from time to time. But Thomas

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was not a reasonable cat, and what he thought was
Mary's indifference so affected him that on the eighth day
he gnawed the rubber coating off an electric light wire
and perished miserably. My wife hardly paroxysmed at all. But

(21:22):
it was another matter when on the ninth day, poor
dear Thomas snuffed out his last life by crawling under
the sofa pillows of our almost oriental cozy corner, and
there suffocated. Then we knew that poor Thomas was indeed

(21:44):
lost to us. While six or four lives are left,
there is still, as the proverb says, hope. But when
the ninth life of a cat is gone, it is
a dead cat. Our sweet, suffering Thomas had left us.
And I cannot deny that, when Mary had recovered somewhat

(22:06):
from her paroxysms of grief, we hoped we had seen
the last of Thomas. These things I cannot deny. But
at no time was our bedroom full of multi colored
cat walking through each other and perching all around the room.
We had no such vision of a woe begone Thomas

(22:30):
mournfully moving about the house, followed by his eight ghosts
of himself in a long, prismatic row. What really happened
was this. On the third night, a third cat ghost
of Thomas appeared of a rich yellow color and perched
on my footboard. But the red and blue ghosts of

(22:53):
the night before had permanently merged into one ghost of
a rich purple. I do not try to account for this.
I merely state it as a fact and say that
any one who knows anything about color knows that red
and blue combined make purple. On the fourth night, the

(23:16):
purple ghost and the yellow ghost were joined by a
new blue ghost of a rather stronger shade than the
first blue ghost had been. But when a red ghost
appeared on the fifth night, we found that the yellow
and blue ghost had combined to form one green one,

(23:38):
and then this red ghost and the green ghost amalgamated
into one brown one. Thus it continued, a new yellow
cat ghost materializing on the sixth night, only to mingle
with a new red one on the seventh night, making
a lovely orange colored one, while on the eighth night

(23:59):
a peculiar cat ghost appeared that was what might be
called a tortoish shell cat ghost of all hues. We
went to our room on the ninth night with considerable anxiety,
not knowing what the last ghost of Thomas would be like.
But we found that all the ghosts had combined to

(24:22):
make one single ghost of spotless purity, a white irridescent
ghost with a white iridescent grin that faded away into
the air and disappeared entirely. Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction.

(24:42):
Perhaps you may consider this blending of the ghosts stranger
than the congregating of nine prismatic cat ghosts would have been.
I can only say it is more logical. For several
days after Thomas, for the last time left left us
so abruptly cut down for the ninth time in its prime,

(25:04):
my wife and I discussed the matter, but we could
make nothing of it, and it was at her suggestion
that I wrote out the whole story and laid it
before the Society for Psychical Research. The conclusion that the
Society reached was that in this the Laws of Ghosts
was happily illustrated, for if every cat was allowed to

(25:27):
send nine distinct ghosts into the ghost realm, the population
there would soon be to caddy. It was also pointed
out that if each ghost of poor dear Thomas had
been white, each would have been complete in itself, but
that by being colored, they could only reach perfection and

(25:49):
harmony by combining to form one white ghost. The Society
also asked us to let it know if we were
haunted by Thomas in his new and white form, but
we have had nothing to report. Occasionally we awake at
night to hear a soft patter of feet, or a

(26:11):
weird rattle of plaster in the walls, or unearthly squeakings.
But while I am persuaded that these are due to
the death of Thomas. I do not believe they are
ghostly manifestations. I know they are rats. Read by Dennis

(26:35):
Sayers in Modesto, California, for LibriVox Fall twenty o six