Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Why, what makes you think there is a feeling against you, father, in any of them?”

  “Do you remember that day in the orchard when you first went out? Joseph and I had some words, in which he showed plainly what had been fermenting in his mind, when he intimated the subordination of spiritualism to Shakerism. I understood his drift, though at the time I said nothing. Afterward the matter dropped; but within a few days I have been made to feel very distinctly a sphere of opposition. They think, the leading men, that my utilization of their conditions will undermine their whole system. And so it will. Their system is unnaturally and ridiculously mistaken; next after their spiritualism, their communism is the only thing about them that is fit to survive. Their angelic life, as they call it, is an absurd delusion, the dream of a sick woman.” —

  “Oh, I hope you won’t do anything to break up their life!” cried the girl, in simple trust of his power. “They have been so good to us.”

  “Their system may remain, for all me,” returned her father. “Even in riding down the opposition to me I shall be careful of their rights. Egeria,” he said, “you must have observed that during your long convalescence I have spared you all discussion of this matter?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, apprehensively.

  “I noticed that it seemed to irritate you, — to cost you an effort of mind and of will, which I was unwilling to tax you with till you had regained your full strength. The delay has been very irksome to me. I felt that we were losing precious time — that we were being placed in a false position; the waiting has worn upon me, as you see.” He looked even haggard in the coming twilight. He had lost flesh, and two loose cords hung where his double chin had been. “The question now is whether you will be ready when I call upon you for the test which I am impatient to make.”

  Egeria sank down upon the bank not far from him, and pulled weakly at a tuft of grass. “I was in hopes,” she said sadly, “that you had given it up, father.”

  “Given it up!” he cried in amaze.

  “Why couldn’t we wait?” she asked.

  “Wait? Till when?”

  “Till we are dead. Then we shall know whether there is any truth in it all. It will be only a little while at the longest.”

  “A little while!” exclaimed the doctor indignantly. “We may live to be a hundred! There are people in those houses yonder,” — he indicated the dormitories with a wave of his hand,—” who have had everything to kill them in their prime; who came here with the women who were to be their wives, or who left husband and children and home to embrace this asceticism; who for scores of years have had the memories of these to brood upon in their withered hearts. We can’t wait for death. We have a right to know the truth from life.”

  They had so often talked of this deep concern as knowledge to be acquired that probably neither of them found anything grotesque or terrible in this phase of the discussion. Egeria now only urged vaguely, “We have the Bible.”

  “Yes,” rejoined her father, bitterly, “the Bible! the book with which they try to crush our hopes! the record, permeated and saturated with spiritualism from Genesis to Revelation, by which they pretend to disprove and forbid spiritualism! Shall one revelation suffice for all time? Shall we know nothing of the grand and hopeful changes which must have taken place in the world of spirits, as in this world, during the last eighteen hundred years? Are we less worthy of communion with supernal essences than those semi-barbarous Jews? Let us beware how we refuse the light of our day, because the light of the past still shines. Shines? Flickers! In many it is extinct. How shall faith and hope be rekindled? Egeria, you must not try to argue with me on this point. You must submit yourself and your power implicitly to me. Will you do so?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by my power. I have no power.”

  “You have power, if you think you have. What I ask is that you will not oppose your will to mine.”

  “I will not oppose you,” she answered in a low voice. A gush of tears blinded her, and dimmed the beautiful world. “You know how I have always hated this, father, — ever since I was old enough to think about it. A thing that seemed to be and seemed not to be, — it scared me! And when it all stopped I thought you wouldn’t want to begin it again. But I will try to do whatever you ask me.”

  “I can’t understand your repugnance,” said her father. “If this power of yours should bring you face to face with your mother” —

  “I never saw her, — I should not know her; and she would not know me for the little baby she left!” cried the girl desperately. “Besides, I can wait to go to her. And she can wait, too. I don’t believe she would ever come. What good does it all do? Oh, it’s dreadful to me!”

  “The time has been, Egeria,” rejoined her father, “when your attitude would have discouraged me. Now, it only gives me pain. I am convinced that your own opinions and ideas of the matter are of no consequence to the agencies operating through you. All that I ask of you is that you yield yourself passively to my influence. Will you do this?”

  “Oh, yes, I will do all that I can. Oh, I wish I had died in the fever!”

  “You talk childishly,” said her father. “How do you know that death would have released you from your obligation to this cause? It may be your office in the next world, as it is in this, to be the medium of communication between embodied and disembodied spirits.”

  “Then I hope there won’t be any other world.” Her father looked angrily at her as she rose and stood beside the rustic fountain. One of the Shaker boys, uncouth in his wide straw hat and misshapen trowsers, came by with some cows from pasture, and they stopped to drink from the great stone bowl. The voices of bathers in the river half a mile away floated sad across the intervening space of meadow land. The air was so heavy with dew that the rumble of a distant railroad train was as clear as if near at hand in the valley which the sound even of the steam whistle seldom visited. As Egeria and her father walked back to the office the crickets trilled along the path. The smell of the prosperous gardens beyond the wall came to them, and mingled with the thick, sweet scent of the milkweed by the wayside.

  There was a little group before the office door. At the foot of the steps stood Humphrey, and with him Joseph and Elihu; Diantha and Rachel were seen within the door-way, and Frances sat on the threshold. They were talking earnestly; at sight of the doctor and Egeria they lowered their voices, and as they drew near they ceased speaking altogether, with the consciousness of sincere people interrupted by those of whom they have been speaking. At the same time Sister Frances made room upon the step, and beckoned to Egeria with more than her usual fondness, — with a sort of tender reparation and defiance. The girl took the place, and her father remained standing with the other men.

  It plainly cost Elihu an effort to break the silence, but he said, after a moment, “Have you seen the account of the exposure of that materialization medium out in St. Louis?”

  “No,” said the doctor; “but nothing of that sort surprises me. It is too soon yet for successful materializations, and all attempts at it are mixed with imposture.”

  “There’s quite a long account,” rejoined Elihu, “in yesterday’s Tribune.”

  He made a movement to take the paper out of his breast pocket. “I don’t care to see it,” said the doctor abruptly; “I can very well imagine it. Those things are sickening. Some wretched creature — a woman, I suppose — trying to eke out her gift by cheating, to get her bread. It rests with you Shakers to rescue this precious opportunity from infamy. But you must take hold of it in no halfhearted way.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Elihu.

  “You have the conditions here of perfect success, as I heard you boast when I first saw you in the Fitchburg depot at Boston. You are released from all thought of the morrow; the spectre of want that pursues other men does not dog your steps; you have neither wife nor husband nor child to cling about your hearts and weaken your will to serve the truth with absolute fidelity. Your discipli
ne has rescued you from the vanity of making men wonder. There is nothing to prevent you from developing a perfect mediumship amongst you.”

  “You imply,” rejoined Elihu, with warmth, “that we have failed of our duty in this respect. You don’t seem to realize that our very existence is a witness to the truth of an open relation between the spiritual and the material worlds. As a people we had birth in the inspired visions of Ann; the very hymn we sang yesterday was breathed through our lips by angelic authority; the tradition of prophecy has never been broken with us We gave spiritualism to the world.”

  “Yes, you gave spiritualism to the world,” retorted Boynton, “to mock its hopes and baffle its aspirations and corrupt its life. You flung it out a flaming brand, to be blown upon by cupidity and lust and ambition, till its heavenly light turned to an infernal fire, while you remained lapped in your secure prosperity, counting your gains; adding acre to acre, beef to beef, sheep to sheep; living the lives of clowns and peasants on week days, and on the Sabbath dancing before the Lord, for the amusement of the idlers who come to your church as they go to a circus.”

  “Friend,” interrupted Elihu warningly, “you are abusing our patience!” The other Shakers looked shocked and alarmed, and Egeria rose to her feet.

  “I mean to abuse your patience. I mean to sting you into life. I mean to make you think of your heavenly origin, and realize how unworthy you have grown. You have subordinated your spiritualism to your Shakerism” —

  “Spiritualism was never anything but a means to Shakerism,” angrily retorted Elihu.

  “I would make it the end of Shakerism. How has it profited you as a means?” demanded Boynton.

  “It has made us what we are. It gave us a discipline and a rule of life, because it descended, unasked, from heaven. But your secular spiritualism which you want to have us take up, and which has continued through solicitation and entreaty, has given you no code of morality. It has been a vain show, making men worse and not better, and tempting them to all manner of lies. And you wish us to take it up at the point to which the world has brought it? Nay! You wish us to subordinate the angelic life, and the good that has crowned it, to the mere dead means? Nay! To value the staff by which we have climbed, and not the height we have reached? Nay! Prove first that in your hands it has not become a stock to conjure with, — to be cast on the ground and turned into a serpent for a wonder before Pharaoh and a confusion of true prophecy, — and then we will take it up again.”

  The men’s faces had grown red, and they approached each other angrily.

  “You have deceived me!” cried Boynton. “You led me to believe that among you I should find the sympathy and support which are essential to success.”

  “We led you to believe nothing,” retorted Elihu. “An accident threw you among us, after we had fully and fairly warned you that we should not receive you or anyone without deliberation. We welcomed you kindly, and you have had our best.”

  “Elihu, Elihu!” softly pleaded Sister Frances, “it isn’t for us to boast of our good deeds.” The others silently looked from him to her.

  “There is no vainglory in the truth, Frances,” answered Elihu, severely. “We have been assailed with unjust tauntings.”

  “And I,” said Boynton, “have been provoked to a harsher frankness than I meant to use, by your indifference to an interest infinitely more vital than any rule of life; by a gradually increasing enmity here which I have new felt for some time, and have struggled against in vain. There has been a withdrawal of confidence from me.”

  “You have no right to say that,” Elihu promptly retorted. “The conditions remain precisely the same as when you first unfolded your plans to us in family meeting. We dealt plainly with you then, and we know nothing more of you now than we knew within two days after your arrival here. You made certain pretensions then, and you have fulfilled none of them. Instead of that, you come after nearly three months’ time, and require us to lay aside our industries, and join you in a pursuit which has proved the vainest and idlest that has ever wasted the human mind.”

  “You have twice upbraided me, now,” said Dr. Boynton, “with my failure to make good my claim to your confidence. You shall not upbraid me a third time. You knew why I was waiting. You knew that it was at a cost almost like life itself that I waited, and that I counted every hour of delay as a drop of blood wrung from my heart. But I will delay no longer. You shall have the proof now —— at once — this very night. Call your family together. We won’t lose another moment. Egeria!” Egeria started: the quarrel — for it had assumed this character — had begun so suddenly, and probably without intention or expectation on either side, though this is by no means certain; but she must have known whither it tended.

  “You are right!” cried Elihu, with equal heat. “There is no time like the present. Matters have come to such a pass that something must be done.”

  “Call your family together!” repeated Boynton, defiantly.

  “There is no need; this is the evening for family meeting,” the Shaker rejoined.

  In fact, while they had been disputing, a group of the younger Shakers and Shakeresses had formed about the door of the family house in which the meeting was to be held, and their voices, unheeded by the angry disputants and their listeners, had risen on the cool twilight air. At that distance the white dresses of the young girls, freshly put on for the evening worship, showed pale through the gathering dusk, and their singing, robbed of its shrillness, was the voice of that disembodied devotion which haunts dim cathedral arches, and in our bright New World sometimes drifts out of open church windows to the ear of the passer, taking his heart with an indefinite religious passion and yearning.

  XV.

  The office sisters went in-doors to make some change in their dress for the meeting; Elihu and Joseph walked away together; Egeria had shrunk from the tearful embrace of Sister Frances, and she now slowly followed with her father, who continued in strenuous appeal to her, till they reached the door of the family house, and entered with the group awaiting them there. A dull look was in her eyes when they came into the hall, and she sank absent-mindedly into her usual place in one of the back rows of sisters, away from the light of the kerosene lamps burning in brackets against the wall. Her father, for reasons of his own, chose to sit apart from the men, and he now retired to one of the corners, where he remained with his head dropped on his hand during the greater part of the service.

  Brother Humphrey did not join the rest till the meeting was nearly over. He had stayed to close up the office for the night, and to wait for the return of Brother Laban, who was away on business, and he was about to lock one of the front doors, when he found himself confronted at the threshold by two men, one of whom asked if he could oblige them with a night’s lodging.

  “We do not keep a house of entertainment,” said Humphrey, willing to evade, but unwilling to deny.

  “Oh, I’m perfectly aware of that,” said the stranger, “but I suppose you don’t turn people away. I was given to understand at the village, back here, that you sometimes took pity on wayfarers.”

  “Yee, we do,” said Humphrey, still holding the door ajar.

  “Then take pity on us, my dear friend, and on our horse,” said the stranger, not otherwise indicating the vehicle he had left at the gate, “and we will pay you what you like for your compassion.” He pushed in, and Humphrey mechanically setting the door wider his companion followed. “We can sleep in a double-bedded room, if you can’t give us two single ones.”

  “Nay,” said Humphrey, “you can have two single rooms. Sit down,” he added, showing them into the office parlor.

  “Ah, you double nothing, I suppose,” said the stranger. “Thanks!” He dropped into a rocking-chair, but when Humphrey went out, to see that the rooms were quite ready, he sprang actively to his feet again and went peering about the room with the lamp which Humphrey had left on the table. He stooped down and examined the legs of this piece of furniture. “No! Evidently th
e Shaker conscience is against the claw-foot. Probably they regard it as but one remove from the cloven-foot. And I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as a brass-mounting of any sort in the building. But really, this bare wall with the flat finish isn’t so bad; it’s expressive of the bare walls and flat finish of Shakerism; an instance of what the Swedenborgians call correspondence. Look here, my dear fellow! Here is something very original —— aboriginal — in rugs. That’s a good bit of color.” He seized upon one of the braided rugs on the floor and partly lifted it. “Look at this!”

  “Oh, let it alone,” said the other, with a yawn. He looked not very well, and he glanced at his feet with the weariness that despairs of ever getting to bed with such an obstacle as boots in the way.

  “But you don’t understand,” persisted the first, clinging to the rug. “This must be home-dyed. These yellows and reds — I was admiring your rug,” he explained to Humphrey, who now reappeared. “It’s something uncommon in color.”

  “Yee,” said the Shaker; “we don’t generally like our things so gay. Your rooms are ready.”

  “Ah, then we won’t detain you,” said the stranger; but he caught sight of the long clock at the lower end of the hall, into which they issued, and turned from going up-stairs to look closer at it, with his hand lamp. “This is good! Very good! A genuine Marm Storrs. A family heir-loom, I fancy?”

  “Nay, I don’t know,” said the Shaker, stopping half-way up the stairs; “it came here before I did. I don’t know who brought it.”

  “You don’t care for colonial bric-a-brac? But you should. It’s the only thing we can justly aspire to, this side of the water. You could pick up some nice things in the country. Have you a spinning-wheel?”

  “Yee. But we don’t use it. It’s cheaper to buy our linen.”

  “Of course. But you’ve no idea how much character it would give that pleasant parlor of yours.” Humphrey answered neither yea nor nay. The other stranger, who had stalked up-stairs past him, asked from the upper hall, “Which room is mine?” And when Humphrey pointed it out he entered and shut the door behind him.