William Dean Howells

“ It was rather a large dinner, but not so large that a striking phrase, launched in a momentary lull, could not fuse all the wandering attentions in a sole regard. The man who spoke was the psychologist Wanhope, and he was saying with a melancholy that mocked itself a little in his smile: “I shouldn’t be particular about seeing a ghost myself. I have seen plenty of men who had seen men who had seen ghosts; but I never yet saw a man who had seen a ghost. If I had it would go a long way to persuade me of ghosts.”
Hewson felt his heart thump in his throat. ”

“ In those day’s he learned to know himself, as he never had before, and to put off a certain shell of worldliness that had grown upon him. In his remoteness from it, New York became very distasteful to him; he thought with reluctance of going back to it; his club, which had been his home, now appeared a joyless exile; the life of a leisure class, which he had made his ideal, looked pitifully mean and little in the retrospect; he wondered how he could have valued the things that he had once thought worthy. ”

“ If Miss Hernshaw had wished to meet him again, he could not doubt that she would have asked him, or at the least had him asked to come and see her, and not have left it to the social fortutities to bring them together. Towards the end of the term which rumor had fixed to her stay abroad Hewson’s folly was embittered to him in a way that he had never expected in his deepest shame and darkest forboding. But evil, like good, does not cease till it has fulfilled itself in every possible consequence. It seeing even more active and persistent. ”

“ I did say that, and yet I suppose that though such a notion of death, say, no longer survives in the consciousness, it does survive in the unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illusory suggestion would have force to bring it to the surface.”
“I wish I knew what you were driving at,” said Rulledge.
“You remember Ormond, don’t you?” asked Wanhope, turning suddenly to me.
“Perfectly,” I said. “I--he isn’t living, is he?”
“No; he died two years ago.”
“I thought so,” I said, with the relief that one feels in not having put a fellow-creature out of life, even conditionally. ”

“ She said at last, in her slow, deep-throated voice, “I guess I will let you tell him.”
“Oh, I’ll tell him fast enough,” said Alderling, nursing his knee, and bringing it well up toward his chin, between his clasped hands. “Marion has always had the notion that I should live again if I believed I should, and that as I don’t believe I shall, I am not going to. The joke of it is,” and he began to splutter laughter round the stem of his pipe, “she’s as much of an agnostic as I am. She doesn’t believe she is going to live again, either.” ”

“ There was something very pathetic in her absolute conviction that Ormond’s happiness was an emanation from the source of all happiness, such as sometimes, where the consciousness persists, comes to a death-bed. That the dying are not afraid of dying is a fact of such common, such almost invariable observation--”
“You mean,” I interposed, “when the vital forces are beaten so low that the natural dread of ceasing to be, has no play? It has less play, I’ve noticed, in age than in youth, but for the same reason that it has when people are weakened by sickness.” ”

“ He looked up at Hewson, standing nerveless before him, from where he lay mournfully wallowing in an easy-chair, as if now for the first time, there might be a gleam of hope for them both in some such notion.
Hewson slowly shook his head. “It wouldn’t work. The person--isn’t that kind of person.”
“Why, but see here,” St. John urged. “There must be something in the fellow that you can appeal to. If you went and told him how it was playing the very deuce with me pecuniarily, he would see the necessity of letting you deny it, and taking the consequences, if he was anything of a man at all.” ”

“ Wanhope smiled. “I think it can--measurably. Most murderers make a good end, as the saying used to be, when they end on the scaffold, though they are not supported by religious fervor of any kind, or the exaltation of a high ideal. They go meekly and even cheerfully to their death, without rebellion or even objection. It is most exceptional that they make a fight for their lives, as that woman did a few years ago at Dannemora, and disgusted all refined people with capital punishment.”
“I wish they would make a fight always,” said Rulledge, with unexpected feeling. ”

“ He was to have driven me to the station, some miles away, before noon, and I supposed we should sit down together, and try to have some sort of talk before I went. But Alderling appeared to have forgotten about my going, and after a while, took himself off to his studio, and left me alone to watch the inroads of the fog. It came on over the harbor rapidly, as on that morning when Mrs. Alderling had been so nearly lost in it, and presently the masts and shrouds of the shipping at anchor were sticking up out of it as if they were sunk into a body as dense as the sea under them. ”

“ Such a woman’s being is a cycle of self-sacrifice, so perfect, so essential, from birth to death, as to exclude the notion of volition. She is what she does. Of course she has to put her sacrifice into words from time to time, but its true language is acts, and the acts themselves only clumsily express it. There is a kind of tyranny in it for the man, of course. It requires self-sacrifice to be sacrificed to, and I don’t suppose a woman has any particular merit in what is so purely natural. ”

“ It was as if some poor pagan had brought me his fetish to test its effect upon me. “Yes,” I said, “those are things that we hardly know what to do with in our philosophy. They seem to be said as with authority, and yet, somehow, we cannot admit their validity in a philosophical inquiry as to a future life. Aren’t they generally taken to mean that we shall be unhappy or happy hereafter, rather than that we shall be or not be at all? And what is believing? Is it the mere act of acknowledgement, or is it something more vital, which expresses itself in conduct?” ”

“ Good seems to satisfy itself sometimes in the direct effect, but evil winds sinuously in and out, and reaches round and over and under its wretched author, and strikes him in every tender and fatal place, with an ingenuity in finding the places out that seems truly of hell. Hewson thought he had paid the principal of his debt in full through the hurt to his vanity in failing to gain any sort of consequence from his apparition, but the interest of his debt had accumulated, and the sorest pinch was in paying the interest. ”

“ In the solitude of the hour there was an intimation of privity to the event which had taken place, an implication of the unity of the natural and the supernatural, strangely different from that robust gayety of the plain day which later seemed to disown the affair, and leave the burden of proof altogether to the human witness. By this time Hewson had already set about to putting it in such phrases as should carry conviction to the hearer, and yet should convey to him no suspicion of the pride which Hewson felt in the incident as a sort of tribute to himself. ”

“ John lamented.
“But if she were here in New York, I couldn’t allow it,” he continued. “It was in confidence between us.”
“She doesn’t seem to have thought so,” said St. John, with sarcasm which Hewson could not resent.
“There’s only one thing for me to do,” said Hewson, who had been thinking the point over, and saw no other way out for him as a gentleman, or even merely as a just man. He was not rich, and in the face of the mounting accumulations of other men he had grown comparatively poor, without actually losing money, since he had begun to lead the life which had long been his ideal. ”

“ He smoked with great energy, and cast his eyes alertly about as if to make sure that there was no chance of Wanhope’s physically escaping him, from the corner of the divan, where he sat pretty well hemmed in by the rest of us, spreading in an irregular circle before him.
“You unscientific people are always wanting an instance, as if an instance were convincing. An instance is only suggestive; a thousand instances, if you please, are convincing,” said the psychologist. ”

“ Being of no employ whatever, and spending his whole life at the club in an extraordinary idleness, Rulledge was always using the most strenuous expressions, and requiring everybody to be practical. He leaned directly forward with the difficulty that a man of his girth has in such a movement, and vigorously broke off the ash of his cigar against the edge of his saucer. We had been dining together, and had been served with coffee in the Turkish room, as it was called from its cushions and hangings of Indian and Egyptian stuffs. “What is the instance you’ve got up your sleeve?” ”

“ The poor little dying pauper, lying in her dream at the almshouse, sees the figure of Death. It is not the skeleton with the dart, or the phantom with the shrouded face, but a tall, beautiful young man,--as beautiful as they could get into the cast, at any rate,--clothed in simple black, and standing with his back against the mantlepiece, with his hands resting on the hilt of a long, two-handed sword. ”

“ He said irrelevantly to their talk at that point, “I suppose you know Rosalie believes in that ghost of yours?”
“Was it a ghost?--I’ve never been sure, myself,” said Hewson.
“How do you explain it?” asked his prospective father-in-law.
“I don’t explain it. I have always left it just as it was. I know that it was a real experience.”
“I think I should have left it so, too,” said Hernshaw. “That always gives it a chance to explain itself. If such a thing had happened to me I should give it all the time it wanted.”
“Well, I haven’t hurried it,” Hewson suggested. ”

“ They had no more voluntarily cultivated the natural than the supernatural; he kindled the fire for her, and she made the coffee for him, not because they preferred, but because they must; and they had arrived at their common ground in the occult by virtue of being alone together, and not by seeking the solitude for the experiment which the solitude promoted. Mrs. Alderling did not talk less, nor he more, when either was alone with me, than when we were all together ”

“ If Marion and I tried to give you an illustration, as you call it, the occult would snub us. But, is there anything so very strange about it? The wonder _is_ that a man and wife ever fail of knowing each what the other is thinking. They pervade each other’s minds, if they are really married, and they are so present with each other that the tacit wish should be the same as a call. Marion and I are only an intensified instance of what may be done by living together. There is something, though, that is rather queer, but it belongs to psychomancy rather than psychology, as I understand it. ”

“ I chose cigarettes, and he brought the box off the table, stopping on his way to the veranda, and taking his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the hall mantel.
Mrs. Alderling had got to the veranda before us, and done things to the chairs and cushions, and was leaning against one of the slender fluted pine columns like some rich, blond caryatid just off duty, with the blue of her dress and the red of her hair showing deliciously against the background of white house-wall. He and she were an astonishing and satisfying contrast ”

“ He looked frightfully altered, but perhaps it was the shaggy beard that he had let grow over his poor, lean muzzle, that mainly made the difference. His clothes hung gauntly upon him, and he had a weak-kneed stoop. His coat sleeves were tattered at the wrists, and one of them showed the white lining at the elbow. I simply shuddered at his shirt.
“Will you smoke?” he asked huskily, almost at the first word, and with an effect of bewilderment in his hospitality that almost made me shed tears.
“Well, not just yet, Alderling,” I said. “Shall I go to my old room?” ”

“ Ormond,” said Wanhope. “The change that began to set her mind at rest about Ormond was his taking the personifications more seriously. Why, he began to ask, but always with a certain measure of joke in it, why shouldn’t there be something _in_ the personifications? Why shouldn’t Morn and Eve come corporeally walking up their lawn, with little or no clothes on, or Despair be sitting in their woods with her hair over her face, or Famine coming gauntly up to their back door for a hand-out? ”

“ His talk, as far as she was able to report it, didn’t amount to much more than this: that in a world where death was, people never could be cheerful with reason unless death was something altogether different from what people imagined. After people came to their intellectual consciousness, death was never wholly out of it, and if they could be joyful with that black drop at the bottom of every cup, it was proof positive that death was not what it seemed. ”

“ He gave a soft groan of comfort as he settled in his chair and began pulling at his short black pipe, and she let her eyes dwell on him in a rapture that curiously interested me. People in love are rarely interesting--that is, flesh-and-blood people. Of course I know that lovers are the life of fiction, and that a story of any kind can scarcely hold the reader without them. ”

“ He broke into a sobbing that seemed to wrench and tear his poor little body, and if I had thought of anything to say, I could not have said it to his headlong grief with any hope of assuaging it. “I am satisfied now,” he said, at last, wiping his wet face, and striving for some composure of its trembling features, “that it was all a delusion, the effect of my exaltation, of my momentary aberration, perhaps. Don’t be afraid of saying what you really think,” he added scornfully, “with the notion of sparing me. ”

“ Now, so late in his youthful life, he realized that there was no beauty but that of truth, and he pledged himself a thousand times that if she should say she could not live without him he would henceforward live for truth alone, and not for the truth merely as it was in her, but as it was in everything. ”

“ Rulledge asked. “She would have been responsible for what happened, according to her notion, if she had had her way with the horse; she would have felt that she had driven Ormond to his doom.”
“Of course!” said Minver. “She always found a hole to creep out of. Why couldn’t she go back a little further, and hold herself responsible through having made him turn round?”
“Poor woman!” said Rulledge, with a tenderness that made Minver smile. “What was it that did happen?”
Wanhope examined his cup for some dregs of coffee, and then put it down with an air of resignation. ”

“ Rather, he was surprised that nothing of the sort happened, to confirm him in his belief that he had been all but in touch with the other life, or to give him some hint, the slightest, the dimmest, why this vision had been shown him, and then instantly broken and withdrawn. In that inmost of his where he recognized its validity, he could not deny that it had a meaning, and that it had been sent him for some good reason special to himself ”