Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Brother Humphrey, who could scarcely have meant to intimate any mental reservation, hastened to answer in alarm, “I ha’n’t got any doubts of ye, Friend Boynton. I think just as the rest do. We’d believe you.”

  “Believe me about what? I insist that you speak out.”

  Humphrey looked at the faces near him for help, but there was only pity and surprise in them. “It ain’t no time or place,” he began.

  “It is the very time and the very place,” retorted Boynton. “There can be no other like it. I wish you to say what you mean before the whole family. There is nothing in my life which I wish secretly examined into. I absolve you from all your scruples, and I wish, I demand, I require, that you speak out.”

  Humphrey rose with a sort of groan. “I think,” he said, “as much as any on ye that there ought to be forgivin’ and forgettin’, and I ain’t one to bear resentment for revilin’s that’s been passed on Shakerism here to-night. But what I thought, if Friend Boynton was goin’ to stay amongst us, he’d ought to have a chance to clear himself. We all know what’s been flyin’ about the neighborhood here, and it ain’t fair to us, and it ain’t fair to him, to let it go without a word. I don’t want he should feel that we ‘re tryin’ on him, but I want him to know what’s said, for all I don’t believe in breakin’ a bruised reed.”

  “As I said before, if you have heard anything to my disadvantage, I wish you to speak out, — I demand that you shall speak out,” said Boynton.

  “I’m goin’ to speak out, now,” returned Humphrey more steadily, “and it ain’t for anything that Friend Harris said, although I think ye’d ought to know what he did say.”

  “Who is Harris?” asked Boynton.

  “He’s the landlord of the Elm Tahvern.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Well,” said Humphrey, with reluctance, “I think ye’d ought to know. He says you wa’n’t sober that mornin’ at his house, and he couldn’t hardly git ye out.” Humphrey turned very red, as if ashamed, and wiped his forehead with his napkin; Elihu and the brothers near him looked down, and a painful hush prevailed.

  Boynton did not deign to notice this accusation.

  “And what does your friend Harris say of the occurrences attending our departure?” he demanded, contemptuously.

  “He ain’t no friend of our’n, except in the scriptural sense,” replied Humphrey, doggedly. “But he says the’ wa’n’t no occurrences. Just a flash of tol’ble sharp lightnin’ and that’s all. The’ wa’n’t no raps, nor no liftin’ o’ table-tops, accordin’ to his say.”

  “I am glad to have you so explicit,” said the doctor, “and I think now I begin to understand the value of your family’s generosity towards myself. Did your friend Harris say anything in aspersion of my daughter?”

  “Nay,” replied Humphrey.

  “Then she probably remains as before in your estimation, and you would take her word against Harris’s, highly as you value his testimony?”

  “Nay, we don’t value his testimony,” interposed Elihu. “Your word is better than his. We believe you against him.”

  Boynton waved scornful rejection with his hand. “Oh, spare your flatteries, sir. I know what you think of me. But you would believe my daughter?”

  “Yee, we would,” answered the whole audience. The doctor regarded them with a curling lip. “Egeria,” he said quietly, “state to these people what occurred. Tell the truth.” The girl was silent. “Speak!”

  “Father!” she gasped, “I don’t know. I have heard you say. But I was asleep and dreaming till that clap of thunder came.”

  “Then you remember nothing?”

  “Oh, I can just remember our going into that house, and our coming out of it. I forgot everything, — I was beginning to be crazy with the fever. But don’t mind, — oh, don’t mind, father! They believe you, — they said they did. Oh, you do believe him, don’t you?” she implored of all those faces that swam on her tears.

  Boynton reeled, and again the compassionate brother started up to save him from a fall. “Don’t touch me!” he cried harshly. “Is there anything else?” he demanded, turning to Humphrey.

  Elihu rose with an air of authority. “This must stop now. It has been a painful season; but no one here thinks that these friends have done anything wrong, or said anything false. We believe them, and we welcome them, if they choose, to stay with us.”

  “Yee, we do!” The assenting voices included Humphrey’s.

  “You welcome us to stay amongst you!” cried the doctor, with intense disdain. “Do you think that after what has just passed here any earthly consideration could induce me to remain another day, another hour, under your roof?” He had his daughter’s hand in his arm, and he proudly pressed it as he spoke, drawing himself to his full height. “So much for ourselves! As for the experiments in which we have so ignominiously failed, I have no personal regrets. It would have been a pitiful triumph at best, if we had succeeded before you, and I cannot believe that the principle, the truth, involved can suffer by our defeat. We are simply proved unfit means for its development, — nothing more. Were it otherwise, were I persuaded that our humiliation was destined to arrest, or more than slightly retard, the progress of this science in men’s minds, then I should indeed regard this night as the blackest of my life, and should be ready to lay down that life in despair. But, no! It is not given to any one weak instrument, mysteriously breaking in the presence of a few obscure and sordid intelligences, to obstruct the divine intention. In this ineradicable conviction, I bid you a final farewell.” He strode toward the door with his daughter on his arm. One of the elders said, meekly and sadly, “The meeting is dismissed,” and the brethren and sisters dispersed to their different houses. Those of the office found themselves following Dr. Boynton thither. They apprehensively entered after him, dreading some fresh explosion, or some show of preparation for instant departure. But the rhetoric of his spectacular adieu had sufficed him for the present. He merely said, “Egeria, go to bed. You must be quite worn out. As for me, I can’t sleep, yet. I will go out for a walk. Would you oblige me with a glass of water?” he asked politely, turning to Sister Frances. When she brought it, “Thanks,” he said, and handed back the empty goblet with a bow.

  “Do you think you’d better walk far?” tremulously asked Egeria.

  The touch of opposition restored him to his sense of wrong and resentment.

  “Go to bed, Egeria,” he said severely, “and don’t any one sit up for me. I can let myself in at the side door when I wish to return.”

  He started away, but the girl put herself in his path to the door. “Oh, father! You won’t go to see that man at the tavern, will you? Tell me you won’t, or I can’t let you go.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” cried her father. “I have no idea of going to meet that ruffian. In due time I shall call him to account.”

  “Don’t ye think, Friend Boynton,” said Humphrey, with awkward kindliness, “that you’d better try to get some rest?”

  In the swift evanescence and recurrence of his moods under the strong excitement, Boynton was like a drunken man. After publishing his resolution not to accept the hospitality of the Shakers for an hour more, he had walked passively to the office with them, and had bidden Egeria go to bed there, as if nothing had happened. At Humphrey’s words, all his indignation was rekindled.

  “Rest! No, sir! I will not try to get some rest. After what has passed, every offer of kindness from you is a fresh offense. You, Egeria, if you can close your eyes here, you are welcome. Doubtless you can. Your apathy, your total want of sympathetic response to my feelings and my will, may enable you to do so. But till some other roof shall cover us, I want no shelter.”

  No one sought to detain him, now, and going quickly from the door he left them huddled in a blank and purposeless group together.

  “Poor thing!” said Sister Frances, first breaking the silence, as she turned to Egeria. “Oh, poor child!” She tried to take the girl in he
r arms; but with a pathetic “Don’t!” Egeria prevented her, and averted her quivering face. She went out of the room and up-stairs without a word or sound; but Frances creeping softly after, to listen at her door, heard her sobbing within the room.

  XVI.

  The hot weather, with here and there a blazing day in June, flamed into whole weeks of unbroken heat before the middle of July. The business streets were observably quieter, and the fashionable quarters were solitudes. At the club windows a few elderly men sat in arm-chairs, with glasses of iced Apollinaris water at their elbows, and stared out on the Common; some young men, with their hats on (if they perished for it), stalked spectrally from room to room behind them. The imported bonnes with their charges no longer frequented the Public Garden; it was thronged with the children and the superannuated of the poor, and with groups of tourists from the South and West, who were finding Boston what so many natives boast it in winter, the most comfortable summer resort on the coast.

  It was not Ford’s habit to go out of town at all; for in his hatred of the narrow and importunate conditions of the village life which he had left behind him with his earlier youth, he had become an impassioned cockney.

  “If you are so bitter against the country,” said Phillips, who was urging an invitation to the seaside upon him, “why don’t you try really to be of the town as well as in it? Why don’t you try to be one of us? Why don’t you make an effort to fit in?”

  “I don’t like fitting in; I like elbow-room,” answered Ford. “Do you suppose I should be fond of the town if I were of it? I should have to be one of a set, and a set is a village. If I am in the town, but not of it, I have freedom and seclusion. Besides, no man of simple social traditions like mine fits into a complex society without a loss of self-respect. He must hold aloof, or commit insincerities, — be a snob. I prefer to hold aloof. It isn’t hard.”

  “And you don’t think you do it to make yourself interesting?” inquired Phillips.

  “I think not,” said Ford.

  “People would as lief be pleasant to you as not. But it ends there. They ‘re not anxious about you,” suggested the other.

  “I believe I understand that.” Ford was sitting at his window in his deep easy-chair; and he had his coat off. “That’s what galls my peasant-pride. Suppose I went with you to this lady’s house” — he touched with the stem of his pipe a letter which lay open on the table pulled near him—” and visited among your friends, the nobility and gentry; I should be reminded by a thousand things every day that I was a sham and a pretender. That kind of people always take it for granted that you feel and think with them; and I don’t. You can’t keep telling them so, however. And suppose I tried to conform: I should be an amateur among professionals. They have the habit of breeding and of elegance, as they understand it; I may have a loftier ideal, but I haven’t discipline; I can’t realize my ideal; and they do realize theirs, — poor souls! That makes me their inferior; that makes me hate them.”.

  “Oh,” said Phillips, “you can put an ironical face on it, but I suspect what you say is really your mind.”

  “Of course it is. At heart I am a prince in disguise; but your friends won’t know it if I sit with my coat off. That would vex me.” He took up the letter from the table, and holding it at arm’s length admired it. “Such a hand alone is enough; the smallest letters half an inch high, and all of them shrugging their shoulders. I can’t come up to that. If I went to this lady’s house, to be like her other friends and acquaintance I should have to be just arrived from Europe, or just going; my talk should be of London and Paris and Rome, of the Saturday Review and the Revue des Deux Mondes, of English politics and society; my own country should exist for me on sufferance through a compassionate curiosity, half repulsion; I ought to have recently dined at Newport with poor Lord and Lady Scamperton, who are finding the climate so terrible; and I should be expected to speak of persons of the highest social distinction by their first names, or the first syllables of their first names. You see, that’s quite beyond me. ‘And do bring your friend, Mr. Ford,’” he read from the letter mincingly, and laughed. “I leave it to your fertile invention to excuse me, Phillips.”

  He kindled his pipe, and Phillips presently went away. It was part of his routine not to fix himself in any summer resort, but to keep accessible to the invitations which did not fail him. He found his account in this socially, and it did not remain unsaid that he also gratified a passion for economy in it; but the people who said this continued among his hosts. Late in the summer, or almost when the leaves began to turn, he went away to the hills for a fortnight or three weeks, providing himself with quarters in some small hotel, and making a point of returning to the simplicity of nature. In the performance of this rite he wore a straw hat and a flannel shirt, and he took walks in the woods with the youngest young ladies among the boarders.

  The intervals between his visits he spent in town, where he was very comfortable. When he went to the places that desired him, he explained that he had been in Boston trying to get Ford away. “Oh, yes! Your odd friend,” said the ladies driving him home from the station in their phaetons. Phillips must have known that they did not care either for his odd friend or for his own oddity in having him, and yet he rather prized this eccentricity in himself.

  The people in Ford’s boarding-house went their different ways. Mrs. Perham remained latest, for Mr. Perham’s health had not yet allowed his removal. He had had two great passions in life: making money and driving horses. By the time he had made his money he had a touch of paralysis, and could no longer drive horses. This separated him much from his wife, who liked almost as well as he to ride after a good horse (as it is expressed by people who like it), and whom, since she had been forced so much to books for amusement, he could not join. She read the newspapers to him, and she went with him to the theatres; but there they ceased to sympathize in their tastes, for she was not fond of swearing, and it was this resource which remained to Mr. Perham after the papers and the play.

  The house filled up for the summer with those people from the West and South who found the summer in Boston so pleasant, and with other transients; but many of the rooms and many of the places at the table remained vacant, and Mrs. Perham and Ford looked at each other across long distances, empty, or populated only by strange faces. At last Mr. Perham was able to bear removal; his wife seized the occasion and hurried him away to the country. That left Ford alone with the strangers, and he rather missed the woman’s hungry curiosity, her cheerfulness, and her indomitable patience under what a more sympathetic witness might have felt to be the hard conditions of her life. He clung to the town throughout July and far into August, with a growing restlessness. He did not care for the heat, and he amused himself well enough when he found time to be amused. He made a point of studying the different excursions in the harbor and beyond it; he studied also the entertainments offered at the theatres, where the variety combinations inculcated in small audiences a morality as relaxed as their systems.

  One Sunday he went to the spiritualist meeting in the grove by Walden Pond. Most of the spiritualists were at a camp-meeting of their sect further up the road, and the people whom he met seemed, like himself, vaguely curious. They were nearly all country-folk: the young men had come with their sweethearts for pleasure; there were middle-aged husbands and wives who had brought their children for a day in the woods beside the pretty lake. Their horses were tied to the young pines and oaks; they sat in their buggies and carryalls, which were pushed into cool and breezy spots. The scene brought back to Ford the Sunday-school picnics of his childhood, but here was a profaner flavor: scraps of newspaper that had wrapped lunches blew about the grounds; at one place a man had swung a hammock, and lay in it reading, in his shirt-sleeves; on the pond was a fleet of gay rowboats, which, however, the railroad company would not allow to be hired on Sunday. Ford found the keeper of the floating bath-houses and got a bath. When he came out the man, with American splendor, refused to take an
y money; he said that they did not let the baths on Sunday, but when he saw a gentleman he liked to treat him as one. “ I hope you ‘re not mistaken in my case,” said Ford sadly; and the bath-man laughed, and said he would chance it. Another of the people in charge complained of the dullness of the place. “What you want is a band. You want a dance-hall in the middle of the pond, here; and you want a band.” They pointed out the auditorium in a hollow of the hills beyond the railroad track, where at the hour fixed for service he found the sparse company assembled. A score of listeners were scattered over the seats in the middle of the pavilion; outside, two young fellows who had come by the train leaned against the columns and smoked, with their hats on; a young girl in blue, with her lover, conspicuously occupied one of the seats under the trees that scaled the amphitheatre, worn grassless and brown by drought and the feet of many picnics; there were certain ladies in artificial teeth and long linen dusters whom Ford fixed upon as spiritualists, though he had no reason to do so. A trance-speaker was announced for the Invocation; he came forward, where the fiddlers sat when there was dancing, and, supporting himself by one hand on the music-stand, closed his eyes and passed into a trance of wandering rhetoric, returning to himself in a dribble of verse which bade the hearer, at the close of each stanza, “Come, then, come to Spirit-Land.”

  The address was given by another speaker, who declaimed against the injustice of the world towards spiritualism and boasted of the importance of its Unfoldments. He sketched its rise and progress, and found an analogy between the “first lisping of the tinny rap at Rochester” and the advent of Christ, whom he described as the “infant Reformer in the manger,” and again as our “humble elder brother.” The people listened decently, and but for the young fellows with their cigars were as respectful as most country congregations to what was much duller than most country preaching. Ford came away before the end, and climbing the side of the amphitheatre encountered Mr. Eccles, who was also about to go. He shook hands with Ford, and on his present inquiry said that nothing had been heard of the Boyntons since the spring. He expressed a faded interest in them. He asked Ford if he had seen the experiments in self-expansion and compression of the new medium, Mrs. Sims. He viewed these experiments as the ultimation of certain moral fluctuations in the spiritual world, for if there was a steady movement either outward or inward in that world, Mrs. Sims might expand or might condense herself, but it stood to reason that she could not do both.