Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, better put them in the tramps’ house,” said Brother Humphrey,—” there’s a fire there.”

  “Yee,” consented one of the sisters, “they will do very well there.”

  “They would slop everything up here,” said another, “and we’ve just been over our floors, Laban.”

  The third was silent, but she wrung her hands in nervous anxiety, like one who would not be selfish, and yet would like whatever advantage. may come of selfishness.

  “Nay,” said Laban, “they ‘re not tramps. They ‘re the folks that Joseph and Elihu told about meetin’ yesterday. I don’t know as you’d ought to put them with the tramps. I guess the young woman’s in a faint.”

  “Oh, why didn’t you say so, to begin with, Laban?” lamented that one of the sisters who had not yet spoken. “Of course she’s sick, and here we’ve been standin’ and troublin’ about our clean floors, and lettin’ her suffer. I don’t see how I can bear it.”

  “Oh, you’ll be over it by fall, Frances,” answered Laban, jocosely. Humphrey caught up a cotton umbrella, vast enough for community use, and weather-worn to a Shaker drab, and sallied out to the gate. The doctor and Laban got their benumbed burden from the wagon between them, and carried Egeria into the house, where they were met with remorseful welcome by the sisters. They dispatched Brother Humphrey to kindle a fire in the stove of the upper chamber, reserved for guests, and into its sweet, fresh cleanliness Frances presently helped Egeria, and then helped her into bed, while the others went to make her a cup of tea.

  Her father, meanwhile, had taken off his wet clothes, and arrayed himself in a suit belonging to one of the brethren, a much taller and a thinner man than Boynton, who made a Shaker of novel and striking pattern in his dress. But he beheld his appearance in the glass, which meagrely ministered to the vanity of the office guests, with uncommon content, as a token that he had already entered upon a new and final stage of investigation; and when his tongue had been loosed by the cup of tea brought to him in the office parlor, he regarded his surroundings with as great satisfaction. This room was carpeted, but it was like the rest of the house in its simple white walls and its plain finish of wood painted a warm brown; there were braided rugs scattered about before the stove and the large chairs, as there were at the foot of the stair-ways, and at the bedsides in the chambers above. Dr. Boynton, stirring his tea, walked out into the low, long hall, bare but not cheerless, and traversed it to look into the room on the other side; then he returned to the parlor, and glanced at the books and pamphlets on the table, — historical and doctrinal works relating to Shakerism, periodicals devoted to various social and hygienic reforms, and controversial tracts upon points in dispute between the community and the world; there were several weekly newspapers, and Boynton was turning over one of them with the hand that had momentarily relinquished his teaspoon when Brother Humphrey rejoined him.

  “If we could have at all helped ourselves,” he began promptly, “I should consider our intrusion upon you most unwarrantable; but we had no will in the matter.”

  “Nay,” replied the Shaker, “it’s no intrusion. This is not a family house. We call it the Office, for we do our business and receive friends from the world outside here.”

  “Do you mean that you keep a house of entertainment?”

  “Our rule forbids us to turn any one away. Of late years, the wayfaring poor have increased so much that we have appointed a small house especially for them; but we cannot put everybody there.”

  “I thank you,” said Boynton.

  “It is not a hotel,” continued Humphrey, “for we make out no bills. All are welcome to what we can do; those who can pay may pay.”

  “I shall wish to pay, as soon as we can recover our effects,” Boynton interposed.

  “Nay, I did not mean that,” quietly rejoined the Shaker. “You are welcome, whether you pay or not.”

  Boynton turned from these civilities. “I am glad to find myself here. I met two of your number yesterday, and had some conversation with them on a subject that vitally interests me.”

  “Yee, I heard,” said the Shaker. “You are spiritualists. Are you the medium?”

  “My daughter is a medium, — a medium of extraordinary powers, which I dare not say I have developed, but to which I have humbly ministered; powers that within the last hour have received testimony of the most impressive and final nature.” Brother Humphrey made no outward sign of any inward movement that Boynton’s words might have produced, and the latter suddenly demanded, “Are you a spiritualist?”

  “Yee,” answered the Shaker, “we are all spiritualists.”

  “Then you will be interested — you will all be interested intensely — in the communication which I shall have to make to your community. I wish you to call a meeting of your people, before whom I desire to lay some facts of the most astounding character, and to whom I wish to propose myself for admission to your community, in order to the pursuance of investigations profoundly interesting to the race.”

  He paused, full of repressed excitement; but Brother Humphrey was not moved. “There will be a family meeting to-morrow night,” he began.

  “To-morrow night!” cried Boynton. “Is it possible that you are so indifferent to phenomena that ought to be instantly telegraphed from Maine to California? That” —

  “We have heard a good deal of the doings with the spirits in the world outside,” interrupted the Shaker, in his turn, “and we know how often folks are deceived in them and in themselves. If something new and important has happened to you, I — guess it’ll keep for twenty-four hours.” Brother Humphrey smiled quaintly, and seemed to expect his guest to take this common-sense view of the matter.

  “Oh, it will keep!” exclaimed the doctor. “But so would the thunder from Sinai have kept!” He plunged into a vivid and rapid narration of the events of his captivity and release at the tavern.

  When he paused, the Shaker replied with unperturbed calm: “These are things to be judged of by the family. I cannot say anything about them.”

  “Is it possible?” demanded Boynton, in a tone of indescribable disappointment. He seemed hurt and puzzled. After a while he said, “I submit. Could you let me have writing materials to take to my room? I wish to make some notes.”

  “Yee,” said Humphrey.

  Boynton went to his room, which was across a passage-way from that where one of the sisters was still busy with Egeria, and he did not reappear till dinner, which was served him in the basement of the office, in a dining-room made snug with a stove-fire. As Boynton unfolded his napkin, “What are your tenets?” he abruptly demanded of the sister who came to wait upon him.

  “Tenets?” faltered Rebecca.

  “Your doctrine, your religious creed.”

  “We have no creed,” replied the sister.

  “Well, then, you have a life. What is your life?”

  “We try to live the angelic life,” said Rebecca, with some embarrassment: “to do as we would be done by; to return good for evil; to put down selfishness in our hearts.”

  “Good, very good! There could be no better basis. But as a society, a community, what is your central idea?”

  “I don’t know. We neither marry nor give in marriage.”

  “Yes, yes! That is what I thought. That was my impression. I fully approve of your system. It is the only foundation on which a community can rest. And to keep up your numbers you depend upon converts from the world?”

  “Yee.”

  “But you bring up children whom you adopt?”

  “Yee.”

  “Do they remain with you?”

  “We have better luck with those who are gathered in after middle life. The young folks — we are apt to lose them,” said the Shakeress, a little sadly.

  “I see, I see!” returned Boynton. “You cannot fight nature unassisted by experience. Life must teach them something first. They fall in love with each other?”

  “They are apt to get foolish,” the sister as
sented. “And then they run off together. That is what hurts us. They no need to. If they would come and tell us” —

  Boynton shook his head. “Impossible! But you have the true principle. Celibacy is the only hope of communism, — of advanced truth.” He ceased to question her as abruptly as he began; but after he had dispatched his dinner, he asked leave to borrow from the parlor a work on Shakerism which he had noticed there, and he again shut himself up in his room. That evening they heard him restlessly walking the floor.

  The sister who visited Egeria last had stood a moment, shading her lamp with her hand and looking down on the girl’s beauty. Her yellow hair strayed loosely out over the pillow; her lips were red and her cheeks flushed. The sister’s tresses had been shorn away as for the grave thirty years before, and her face had that unearthly pallor which the Shaker sisters share with nuns of all orders. She stooped and kissed Egeria’s hot cheek, and then went down to the office sitting-room to report her impressions to the other sisters before they slept.

  “It appears as if her father didn’t want to go to bed,” said Sister Diantha, after a moment’s quiet, in which the doctor’s regular tread on the floor overhead made itself audible.

  “If he’s got anything on his mind,” said Sister Rebecca, “it ain’t his daughter.”

  “Yee, Rebecca,” said Sister Frances, “you’re right, there. I told him I thought she was going to have a fit of sickness, but he said it wa’n’t anything but exhaustion, and ‘t he’d see after her; ‘t he was a doctor himself. To my knowledge he hain’t been near her since. I think she’s goin’ to have a fit of sickness.”

  Brother Humphrey came in from the next room and stood by the stove. “How did you leave her, Frances?” he asked.

  “Well, I think she’s goin’ to have a fit of sickness,” repeated Frances.

  “Well, I don’t know’s you’d have much to say agin that, would you?” returned the brother, after a general pause. “You hain’t had a good fit of sickness on hand for quite a spell.”

  The other sisters laughed. “Set down, Humphrey,” said Diantha, putting him a chair. The manner of these elderly women with Humphrey was of a truly affectionate and sisterly simplicity, to which he responded with brotherly frankness.

  “I guess she ain’t goin’ to be very sick,” resumed Humphrey, making himself easy in his chair. “Any way, we’ve got a doctor to prescribe for her.”

  “What do you think of him, Humphrey?” asked Rebecca.

  “Pretty glib,” said Humphrey.

  “I don’t know as I ever heard better language,” suggested Frances.

  “Oh, his language is good enough,” said Humphrey.

  “It’s quite a convert Laban’s brought us,” observed Diantha. “Talk of winter Shakers!” she continued, referring to that frequent sort of convert whose Shakerism begins and ends with cold weather.

  “I hain’t seen any one so ready to be gathered in for a long time.”

  “Yee, too ready,” said Humphrey, soberly. “That kind ain’t apt to stay gathered in; and I’m about tired havin’ the family fill mouths for a month or two, and afterwards revilin’s proceed out of ‘em.”

  “We must receive all, and try all,” interposed Frances, gently.

  “Yee,” sighed Humphrey.

  “What do you say to his story?” asked Diantha.

  “I don’t judge it,” said the brother. “We know that spirits do communicate with men, and miracles happen every day. As to the doin’s at the Elm Tahvern, Harris might tell a different story.”

  “I shouldn’t believe any story Harris told,” said Frances.

  Humphrey smiled. “Well, I don’t know as I should, come to look at it,” he admitted.

  “I wish that nest could be broken up,” said Rebecca. “It’s a cross.”

  “Yee, it’s a cross,” answered Humphrey. “I most drove over a man, dead drunk, in the road yesterday, comin’ down into the woods, after I passed the tahvern; and nearly all the tramps that come now smell of rum. The off’cers don’t seem to do anything.”

  “Oh, the off’cers!” cried Diantha.

  The walking had continued regularly overhead; but now, after some hesitation, the steps approached the door, which was heard to open, and they crossed the hall to Egeria’s room. From thence, after a brief interval, they descended the stairs, and Dr. Boynton, lamp in hand, entered the room. The sisters rose in expectation.

  “I find my daughter in a fever,” said Boynton, with an absent air. “What medicines have you in the house?”

  “We have our herbs,” answered Sister Frances. “They may be the best thing,” said Boynton, with the same abstraction, as if he were thinking of something else at the same time. He stood and waited amid a general silence, till Sister Frances, who had gone out, reappeared with some neat packages of the medicinal herbs which the Shakers put up. He chose one, and asked for some water in a tin dish in which to steep it on the stove.

  “Let me do it for you,” pleaded Sister Frances. The other sisters joined in an entreaty to be allowed to sit up with the sick girl.

  “No,” said Boynton. “I have always taken care of her, and to-night at least I will watch with her. I couldn’t sleep if I went to bed, but I shall make myself easy in an arm-chair, if you’ll give me one.” Humphrey went to fetch the chair, and as he passed the door, on his way up-stairs with it, Boynton called out to him, “Thanks! If her fever increases,” he continued to the sisters, “she will wake at eleven, and then I shall give her this. I shall need nothing more. Good-night.”

  He went out, and Sister Frances said, with perhaps some sense of penalty in this loss of opportunity for nursing the girl through the night, “I feel to say that I was hasty in judgin’ on him.”

  “Yee,” said the others. “We judged him hastily.”

  “We were too swift to blame,” said Humphrey, who now returned. “Let us remember it the next time.”

  “But,” added Sister Frances, “I knew she was goin’ to have a fit of sickness.”

  The sisters took each a kerosene hand-lamp, and passed up the bare, clean halls to their chambers. The brother went about trying the fastenings of the windows and the locks of the outer doors. The time had been, before the time of tramps, when he never turned a key at night.

  In the morning Sister Frances made an early visit to Egeria’s room, and found the girl and her father both awake. She was without fever now, but she lay white and still in her bed, and her father stood looking at her unhopefully.

  Sister Frances went down to the kitchen, where the other sisters were already busy getting Boynton’s breakfast. “It’s goin’ to be a fit of sickness,” she said.

  “Then she had best go to the sick-house,” said Diantha.

  “Yee,” added Rebecca, at a look of protest from Frances, “that’s what it’s for, and she can be better done for there. It’s noisy here.”

  She urged that it was noisy when they spoke, later, of Egeria’s removal to Boynton, who owned that he could not now say she would not be sick: it was the belief of the office sisters that they lived in the midst of excitement.

  The day had broken clear, and the New England spring was showing herself in one of her moods of conscientious adherence to duty: she would perform her part with sunshine and birds, but she breathed cold across the brilliant landscape, and she warned vegetation that it started at its own risk. The Shaker village had awakened to its round of labors and self-denials as quietly as if it had not awakened at all. Some of the elderly men, with the boys and the hired hands, were at work with the cattle in the great barns; some were raking together the last year’s decay in the garden into heaps for burning; some were busy in the workshops. The women went about their wonted cares in-doors, and there was no sign of interest in the arrival of guests at the office. Perhaps their presence had not been generally talked over in the family, but had been held in reserve for formal discussion at the meeting in the evening. The office sisters consulted with the eldress in the family house oppo
site in reference to Egeria’s removal, and the infirmary was made ready for her. It was aired, the damp was driven out by a hot fire in the stove, and Sister Frances strove to set its order still more in order; a little fluff under the bed or a spot upon the floor would have been a comfort to her; but everything was blamelessly, hopelessly neat. It was not quite regular for her to take an interest in things outside of the office, but she had been suffered to do so much in consideration of her affliction at haying a fit of sickness snatched from her care, as it were, and she was allowed a controlling voice in deciding upon the doctor’s request to have a bed put up for him in the infirmary. Such a thing was hitherto unknown; it was an invasion of family bounds by the world outside; but it stood to reason that the girl’s father had a double claim to be as near to her as possible, and after some conscientious difficulty his request was granted.

  While they were making ready for her, Brother Elihu came to see him at the office, and gave him a sort of conditional welcome. He seemed to be a person of weight in the community, and after his brief visit Boynton perceived that his standing was more strictly probationary than before. There was no want of kindness in Elihu’s manner; he made several thoughtful suggestions for the welfare and convenience of the Boyntons; but he had shown no eagerness for the statement which the doctor wished to make to the community, nor for his ideas upon the development of spiritistic science. The statement, he said, could be made that evening, or at the next family meeting; it did not matter; there was no haste. “Spiritualism arose among us; our faith is based upon the fact of an uninterrupted revelation; the very songs we sing in our meetings were communicated to us, words and music, from the other world. We have seen much perversion of spiritualism in the world outside, - - much error, much folly, much filth. If you have new light, it will not suddenly be quenched. Rest here a while. Our first care must be for the young woman.”