Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  He said, “Hello!” and at this Bushwick said:

  “Look here!”

  “Well?” Verrian asked, looking at him.

  “How does it happen you’re up so late, after everybody else is wrapped in slumber?”

  “I might ask the same of you.”

  “Well, I found I wasn’t making it a case of sleep, exactly, and so I got up.”

  “Well, I hadn’t gone to bed for much the same reason. Why couldn’t you sleep? A real-estate broker ought to have a clean conscience.”

  “So ought a publisher, for that matter. What do you think of this ghost-dance, anyway?”

  “It might be amusing — if it fails.” Verrian was tempted to add the condition by the opportunity for a cynicism which he did not feel. It is one of the privileges of youth to be cynical, whether or no.

  Bushwick sat down before the fire and rubbed his shins with his two hands unrestfully, drawing in a long breath between his teeth. “These things get on to my nerves sometimes. I shouldn’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”

  “On Mrs. Westangle’s account?”

  “I guess Mrs. Westangle could stand it. Look here!” It was rather a customary phrase of his, Verrian noted. As he now used it he looked alertly round at Verrian, with his hands still on his shins. “What’s the use of our beating round the bush?”

  Verrian delayed his answer long enough to decide against the aimless pun of asking, “What Bushwick?” and merely asked, “What bush?”

  “The bush where the milk in the cocoanut grows. You don’t pretend that you believe Mrs. Westangle has been getting up all these fairy stunts?”

  Verrian returned to his cigar, from which the ashen wraith dropped into his lap. “I guess you’ll have to be a little clearer.” But as Bushwick continued silently looking at him, the thing could not be left at this point, and he was obliged to ask of his own initiative, “How much do you know?”

  Bushwick leaned back in his chair, with his eyes still on Verrian’s profile. “As much as Miss Macroyd could tell me.”

  “Ah, I’m still in the dark,” Verrian politely regretted, but not with a tacit wish to wring Miss Macroyd’s neck, which he would not have known how to account for.

  “Well, she says that Mrs. Westangle has a professional assistant who’s doing the whole job for her, and that she came down on the same train with herself and you.”

  “Did she say that she grabbed the whole victoria for herself and maid at the station?” Verrian demanded, in a burst of rage, “and left us to get here the best way we could?”

  Bushwick grinned. “She supposed there were other carriages, and when she found there weren’t she hurried the victoria back for you.”

  “You think she believes all that? I’m glad she has the decency to be ashamed of her behavior.”

  “I’m not defending her. Miss Macroyd knows how to take care of herself.”

  The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which Bushwick filled a pipe he took from his pocket and lighted it. After the first few whiffs he took it from his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian, said, “Who was your fair friend?”

  If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not going to do it with the burden of any sort of reserve or contrivance on his soul. “This afternoon?” Bushwick nodded; and Verrian added, “That was she.” Then he went on, wrathfully: “She’s a girl who has to make her living, and she’s doing it in a new way that she’s invented for herself. She has supposed that the stupid rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people may be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to supply the ideas for a money consideration. She’s not a guest in the house, and she won’t take herself on a society basis at all. I don’t know what her history is, and I don’t care. She’s a lady by training, and, if she had the accent, I should say she was from the South, for she has the enterprise of the South that comes North and tries to make its living. It’s all inexpressibly none of my business, but I happen to be knowing to so much of the case, and if you’re knowing to anything else, Mr. Bushwick, I want you to get it straight. That’s why I’m talking of it, and not because I think you’ve any right to know anything about it.”

  “Thank you,” Bushwick returned, unruffled. “It’s about what Miss Macroyd told me. That’s the reason I don’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”

  Verrian did not notice him. He found it more important to say: “She’s so loyal to Mrs. Westangle that she wouldn’t have wished, in Mrs. Westangle’s interest, to have her presence, or her agency in what is going on, known; but, of course, if Mrs. Westangle chooses to, tell it, that’s her affair.”

  “She would have had to tell it, sooner or later, Mrs. Westangle would; and she only told it to Miss Macroyd this afternoon on compulsion, after Miss Macroyd and I had seen you in the wood-road, and Mrs. Westangle had to account for the young lady’s presence there in your company. Then Miss Macroyd had to tell me; but I assure you, my dear fellow, the matter hasn’t gone any further.”

  “Oh, it’s quite indifferent to me,” Verrian retorted. “I’m nothing but a dispassionate witness of the situation.”

  “Of course,” Bushwick assented, and then he added, with a bonhomie really so amiable that a man with even an unreasonable grudge could hardly resist it, “If you call it dispassionate.”

  Verrian could not help laughing. “Well, passionate, then. I don’t know why it should be so confoundedly vexatious. But somehow I would have chosen Miss Macroyd — Is she specially dear to you?”

  “Not the least!”

  “I would have chosen her as the last person to have the business, which is so inexpressibly none of my business—”

  “Or mine, as I think you remarked,” Bushwick interposed.

  “Come out through,” Verrian concluded, accepting his interposition with a bow.

  “I see what you mean,” Bushwick said, after a moment’s thought. “But, really, I don’t think it’s likely to go further. If you want to know, I believe Miss Macroyd feels the distinction of being in the secret so much that she’ll prefer to hint round till Mrs. Westangle gives the thing away. She had to tell me, because I was there with her when she saw you with the young lady, to keep me from going with my curiosity to you. Come, I do think she’s honest about it.”

  “Don’t you think they’re rather more dangerous when they’re honest?”

  “Well, only when they’re obliged to be. Cheer up! I don’t believe Miss Macroyd is one to spoil sport.”

  “Oh, I think I shall live through it,” Verrian said, rather stiffening again. But he relaxed, in rising from his chair, and said, “Well, good-night, old fellow. I believe I shall go to bed now.”

  “You won’t wait for me till my pipe’s out?”

  “No, I think not. I seem to be just making it, and if I waited I might lose my grip.” He offered Bushwick a friendly hand.

  “Do you suppose it’s been my soothing conversation? I’m like the actor that the doctor advised to go and see himself act. I can’t talk myself sleepy.”

  “You might try it,” Verrian said, going out.

  XVIII.

  The men who had talked of going away on Thursday seemed to have found it practicable to stay. At any rate, they were all there on the Saturday night for the ghost-seeing, and, of course, none of the women had gone. What was more remarkable, in a house rather full of girls, nobody was sick; or, at least, everybody was well enough to be at dinner, and, after dinner, at the dance, which impatiently, if a little ironically, preceded the supernatural part of the evening’s amusement. It was the decorum of a woman who might have been expected not to have it that Mrs. Westangle had arranged that the evening’s amusement should not pass the bound between Saturday night and Sunday morning. The supper was to be later, but that was like other eating and drinking on the Sabbath; and it was to be a cold supper.

  At half-past ten the dancing stopped in the foyer and the drawing-room, and by eleven the guests were all seated fronting the closed doors of the library.
There were not so many of them but that in the handsome space there was interval enough to lend a desired distance to the apparitions; and when the doors were slid aside it was applausively found that there was a veil of gauze falling from the roof to the floor, which promised its aid in heightening the coming mystery. This was again heightened by the universal ignorance as to how the apparitions were to make their advents and on what terms.

  It was with an access of a certain nervous anxiety that Verrian found himself next Miss Macroyd, whose frank good-fellowship first expressed itself in a pleasure at the chance which he did not share, and then extended to a confidential sympathy for the success of the enterprise which he did not believe she felt. She laughed, but ‘sotto voce’, in bending her head close to his and whispering, “I hope she’ll be equal to her ‘mise en scene’. It’s really very nice. So simple.” Besides the gauze veil, there was no preparation except in the stretch of black drapery which hid the book-shelves at the farther wall of the library.

  “Mrs. Westangle’s note is always simplicity,” Verrian returned.

  “Oh yes, indeed! And you wish to keep up the Westangle convention?”

  “I don’t see any reason for dropping it.”

  “Oh, none in the world,” she mocked.

  He determined to push her, since she had tried to push him, and he asked, “What reason could there be?”

  “Now, Mr. Verrian, asking a woman for a reason! I shall begin to think some one else wrote your book, too! Perhaps she’ll take up supplying ideas to authors as well as hostesses. Of course, I mean Mrs. Westangle.”

  Verrian wished he had not tried to push Miss Macroyd, and he was still grinding his teeth in a vain endeavor to get out some fit retort between them, when he saw Bushwick shuffling to his feet, in the front row of the spectators, and heard him beginning a sort of speech.

  “Ladies and gentlemen: Mrs. Westangle has chosen me, because a real-estate broker is sometimes an auctioneer, and may be supposed to have the gift of oratory, to make known the conditions on which you may interview the ghosts which you are going to see. Anybody may do it who will comply with the conditions. In the first place, you have got to be serious, and to think up something that you would really like to know about your past, present, or future. Remember, this is no joking matter, and the only difference between the ghost that you will see here and a real materialization under professional auspices is that the ghost won’t charge you anything. Of course, if any lady or gentleman — especially lady — wishes to contribute to any charitable object, after a satisfactory interview with the ghost, a hat will be found at the hall-door for the purpose, and Mrs. Westangle will choose the object: I have put in a special plea for my own firm, at a season when the real-estate business is not at its best.” By this time Bushwick had his audience laughing, perhaps the more easily because they were all more or less in a hysterical mood, which, whether we own it or not, is always induced by an approximation to the supernatural. He frowned and said, “NO laughing!” and then they laughed the more. When he had waited for them to be quiet he went on gravely, “The conditions are simply these: Each person who chooses may interview the ghost, keeping a respectful distance, but not so far off but that the ghost can distinctly hear a stage whisper. The question put must be seriously meant, and it must be the question which the questioner would prefer to have answered above everything else at the time being. Certain questions will be absolutely ruled out, such as, ‘Does Maria love me?’ or, ‘Has Reuben ever been engaged before?’ The laughter interrupted the speaker again, and Verrian hung his head in rage and shame; this stupid ass was spoiling the hope of anything beautiful in the spectacle and turning it into a gross burlesque. Somehow he felt that the girl who had invented it had meant, in the last analysis, something serious, and it was in her behalf that he would have liked to choke Bushwick. All the time he believed that Miss Macroyd, whose laugh sounded above the others, was somehow enjoying his indignation and divining its reason.

  “Other questions, touching intemperance or divorce, the questioner will feel must not be asked; though it isn’t necessary to more than suggest this, I hope; it will be left entirely to the good taste and good feeling of the — party. We all know what the temptations of South Dakota and the rum fiend are, and that to err is human, and forgive divine.” He paused, having failed to get a laugh, but got it by asking, confidentially, “Where was I? Oh!” — he caught himself up— “I remember. Those of you who are in the habit of seeing ghosts need not be told that a ghost never speaks first; and those who have never met an apparition before, but are in the habit of going to the theatre, will recall the fact that in W. Shakespeare’s beautiful play of ‘Hamlet’ the play could not have gone on after the first scene if Horatio had not spoken to the ghost of Hamlet’s father and taken the chances of being snubbed. Here there are no chances of that kind; the chances are that you’ll wish the ghost had not been entreated: I think that is the phrase.”

  In the laugh that followed a girl on Miss Macroyd’s other hand audibly asked her, “Oh, isn’t he too funny?”

  “Delicious!” Miss Macroyd agreed. Verrian felt she said it to vex him.

  “Now, there’s just one other point,” Bushwick resumed, “and then I have done. Only one question can be allowed to each person, but if the questioner is a lady she can ask a question and a half, provided she is not satisfied with the answer. In this case, however, she will only get half an answer. Now I have done, and if my arguments have convinced any one within the sound of my voice that our ghost really means business, I shall feel fully repaid for the pains and expense of getting up these few impromptu remarks, to which I have endeavored to give a humorous character, in order that you may all laugh your laugh out, and no unseemly mirth may interrupt the subsequent proceedings. We will now have a little music, and those who can recall my words will be allowed to sing them.”

  In the giggling and chatter which ensued the chords softly played passed into ears that might as well have been deaf; but at last there was a general quiescence of expectation, in which every one’s eyes were strained to pierce through the gauze curtain to the sombre drapery beyond. The wait was so long that the tension relaxed and a whispering began, and Verrian felt a sickness of pity for the girl who was probably going to make a failure of it. He asked himself what could have happened to her. Had she lost courage? Or had her physical strength, not yet fully renewed, given way under the stress? Or had she, in sheer disgust for the turn the affair had been given by that brute Bushwick, thrown up the whole business? He looked round for Mrs. Westangle; she was not there; he conjectured — he could only conjecture — that she was absent conferring with Miss Shirley and trying to save the day.

  A long, deeply sighed “Oh-h-h-h!” shuddering from many lips made him turn abruptly, and he saw, glimmering against the pall at the bottom of the darkened library, a figure vaguely white, in which he recognized a pose, a gesture familiar to him. For the others the figure was It, but for him it was preciously She. It was she, and she was going to carry it through; she was going to triumph, and not fail. A lump came into his 96 throat, and a mist blurred his eyes, which, when it cleared again, left him staring at nothing.

  A girl’s young voice uttered the common feeling, “Why, is that all?”

  “It is, till some one asks the ghost a question; then it will reappear,” Bushwick rose to say. “Will Miss Andrews kindly step forward and ask the question nearest her heart?”

  “Oh no!” the girl answered, with a sincerity that left no one quite free to laugh.

  “Some other lady, then?” Bushwick suggested. No one moved, and he added, “This is a difficulty which had been foreseen. Some gentleman will step forward and put the question next his heart.” Again no one offered to go forward, and there was some muted laughter, which Bushwick checked. “This difficulty had been foreseen, too. I see that I shall have to make the first move, and all that I shall require of the audience is that I shall not be supposed to be in collusion with the ill
usion. I hope that after my experience, whatever it is, some young woman of courage will follow.”

  He passed into the foyer, and from that came into the library, where he showed against the dark background in an attitude of entreaty slightly burlesqued. The ghost reappeared.

  “Shall I marry the woman I am thinking of?” he asked.

  The phantom seemed to hesitate; it wavered like a pale reflection cast against the pall. Then, in the tones which Verrian knew, the answer came:

  “Ask her. She will tell you.”

  The phantom had scored a hit, and the applause was silenced with difficulty; but Verrian felt that Miss Shirley had lost ground. It could not have been for the easy cleverness of such a retort that she had planned the affair. Yet, why not? He was taking it too seriously. It was merely business with her.

  “And I haven’t even the right to half a question more!” Bushwick lamented, in a dramatized dejection, and crossed slowly back from the library to his place.

  “Why, haven’t you got enough?” one of the men asked, amidst the gay clamor of the women.

  The ghost was gone again, and its evanescence was discussed with ready wonder. Another of the men went round to tempt his fate, and the phantom suddenly reappeared so near him that he got a laugh by his start of dismay. “I forgot what I was going to ask, he faltered.

  “I know what it was,” the apparition answered. “You had better sell.”

  “But they say it will go to a hundred!” the man protested.

  “No back — talk, Rogers!” Bushwick interposed. “That was the understanding.

  “But we didn’t understand,” one of the girls said, coming to the rescue, “that the ghost was going to answer questions that were not asked. That would give us all away.”

  “Then the only thing is for you to go and ask before it gets a chance to answer,” Bushwick said.

  “Well, I will,” the girl returned. And she swept round into the library, where she encountered the phantom with a little whoop as it started into sight before her. “I’m not going to be scared out of it!” she said, defiantly. “It’s simply this: Did the person I suspect really take the ring.”