Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “You obfuscate yourself before sitting down, as you darken the room, that you may be in a perfectly receptive condition?”

  “Something of that nature, yes. But I should distinguish: I should say that the obfuscation, though voluntary, was very largely unconscious.” Ford laughed. “I am afraid that I was in no state to judge of the exhibition, then. You are a man of such candor yourself that I am sure you will not blame my frankness in telling you that I thought the whole apparitional performance a piece of gross trickery.”

  “Not at all, not at all!” cried Boynton, with friendly animation. “From one point your position is perfectly tenable, — perfectly. You will remember that I myself warned you of the possibility of deceit in the effects produced, and said that I always took part in such a séance with the full knowledge of this possibility. At the same time, I always try, for my own sake, and for the sake of the higher truth to be attained, to keep this knowledge in abeyance, — in the dark, as we were saying.”

  “I see,” said Ford, dryly. He waited blankly a moment, while Boynton watched him with cheery interest. “I suppose it was my misfortune to have been able to expose the whole performance at any moment. I didn’t think it worth while.”

  “It was not worth while,” Boynton interposed. “Those people would not have accepted your exposé, — I can’t say that I should have accepted it myself; and in your effort to fulfill a mission, a mere mechanical duty, to society, you might have placed obstacles in the way of the most extraordinary developments. Nothing is clearer to my mind,” he proceeded impressively, “than that it is our business, after the first intimations of a desire for converse on the part of spirits, to afford them every possible facility, to suggest, to arrange, to prepare, agencies for their use. Suppose you had detected Madam Le Roy in the employment of stuffed gloves; at the very moment when you seized upon the artificial apparition, a genuine spirit hand might have been about to manifest itself, in obedience to the example given. My dear sir,” cried Dr. Boynton, leaning from his perch on the sofa toward the place where Ford sat, “I have gone to’ the very bottom of this matter, and I find that in almost all cases there is a degree of solicitation on the part of mediums; that where this is most daring the results are most valuable; and what I wish now to establish as the central principle of spiritistic science is the principle of solicitationism. If the disembodied spirits do not voluntarily approach, invite them; if they cannot manifest their presence, show them by example the ways and means of so doing. Depend upon it, the whole science must die out without some such direct and vigorous effort on our part.” He paused, leaving Ford in a strange perplexity. The smoothness and finish with which Boynton had formulated the preposterous ideas just expressed rendered it impossible for Ford to approach without irony a confession which he had meant to make in a different spirit. “Then you would not blame me if I had lost patience at any point of the game, and actively interfered in the process of solicitation?”

  “As a mere exterior inquirer,” returned Boynton, blandly, “I could not have blamed you.”

  “In the dark séance,” said Ford, “I did interfere. It was my belief that Mrs. Le Roy was affording the agencies, as you express it, in that, too. It makes me sick to think that I should have hurt Miss Boynton, and if I could have suspected her of what I suspected Mrs. Le Roy I should never” —

  “You were quite right,” interrupted Dr. Boynton, courteously as before, but with a touch of pride. “My daughter was entirely irresponsible, for she was purely the passive instrument of my will; she was carrying out my plan — a plan which the sequel proved triumphantly successful.”

  “I have said what I wished to say,” remarked Ford, rising. “I can well believe that she did only as she was bidden. There were other things that showed that. I leave you to settle with yourself the little questions of honesty and decency in thrusting a helpless girl on the performance of a cheat like that. You seem to be well grounded in your great principle, and I dare say you won’t be troubled by my opinions. But my opinion of you, Dr. Boynton, is that you are either the most unconscionable knave and quack I have ever seen, or” —

  Boynton sprang to his feet. “Not another word, sir! I regret for the sake of human nature to find you a ruffian. But there my concern in you ceases. I defy you to do your worst! Leave the house I”

  “You defy me!” said Ford, setting his teeth, and struggling with the rage into which he found himself hurried. “What do you defy me to? Do you suppose I am going to mix myself up in any public way with your affairs? You are perfectly safe to go on and gull imbeciles to the end of time, for all I care.”

  “I am an honest man I” retorted Dr. Boynton. “I have an unsullied life behind me, spent in the practice of an honorable profession and in earnest research into questions, into mysteries, on the solution of which the dearest hopes of the race repose. Who are you, to attaint me of unworthy motives, to cry pretender and impostor at me? I have met, in the course of my investigations, rude incredulity from the thoughtless crowds who witnessed them, and insolent disdain from those qualified to question, but too proud or too indolent to do so. Till now this indifference has only accused my judgment. It remained for you to asperse my motives.”

  Dr. Boynton looked the resentment of an outraged man; he gained, in spite of his flowing rhetoric, a dignity which he did not have before. Ford stared at him in momentary helplessness. He was at the disadvantage that every man must be whose habits of life and whose temperament remove him from personal encounter, and who meets others in that sort of intellectual struggle in which his antagonist is for the time necessarily passive.

  “You arraign me as a cheat,” resumed Boynton, “and you dare to judge my principle by the imperfect first steps of those who attempt to put it in practice, by the crudest preliminary processes. But even here you have no ground to stand upon. Even here the ultimate fact utterly defeats and annihilates your insolent assumptions.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” began Ford, “and” —

  “I will tell you what I mean,” interrupted Boynton, “and you shall judge your own case. If all our endeavors at spirit intercourse were for the ends of selfish deception, as you claim, how do you account for the final response to them? I am willing to believe that it was your hand that inflicted a hurt upon a woman, — oh, whether my daughter or Mrs. Le Roy, it was still a woman, — and that invoked any possible consequence from the violation of conditions that you were bound in honor to respect; but whose hand was it that evolved itself from the darkness, and then dispersed that darkness? Whose hand was that which crowned my wildest hopes with success?”

  “If you mean,” said Ford, and he felt that after all it was shocking to own it, “the hand which turned on the gas, it was my hand.”

  “Your hand?” gasped Dr. Boynton.

  “My hand — prepared by a trick so common and simple that it could have deceived no one but children, or men and women so eager for lies” —

  “Oh, it was the truth, the sacred, vital, saving truth, they longed for! And it was this, it was this desire, you deluded!” Dr. Boynton hid his face in his handkerchief, and sank back upon the sofa. “Go, now,” he said. “I will not, I cannot, I must not, hear one word of excuse from you. Your action is indefensible.”

  “Excuse?” cried Ford. “Do you really think I want to excuse myself? Do you think” —

  “Why should you not wish to excuse yourself?” solemnly demanded Boynton, uncovering his face, which was pale, but calm. “You have dire need of excuse, if sacrilege is a crime.”

  “Sacrilege?” Ford was aware of forcing his laugh.

  “Yes, sacrilege. You intruded upon religious aspirations to turn them into ridicule. You derided the hope of immortality itself, — the evidences through which thousands cling to the belief in God.”

  “You are such a very preposterous creature that I don’t quite know how to take you,” said Ford, “but I will ask you what you were doing yourself in making those simpletons think the
re were spirits present among them.”

  “I was leading them on to the evolution of a great truth, to the comfort of an assured immortality. But you, — were you aiming at anything higher than the gratification of the wretched vanity that delights in finding all endeavor as low and hopeless as its own? Oh, I know your position, young man! I know the attitude of those shallow sciences which trace man backward to the brute, and forward to the clod. Which of them do you profess? They all join in a cowardly contempt of phenomena which they will not examine; and if one of their followers, more just, more candid, than the rest, like Crookes, of London, ventures into the field of investigation, and dares to own the truth, they unite like a pack of wolves to destroy him. His methods are non-scientific! Bah! Did you think you were doing a fine thing, that day, when you lay in wait to dash our hopes, — to prove to us by the success of your trick that we were as the beasts that perish?”

  “I can’t say that I intended to trouble myself to expose you to them,” said Ford.

  “Then how much better were you,” retorted Boynton, “than the worst you think of me? You call me an impostor. What were you but an impostor who wished to fool them to the top of their bent, for the sake of laughing them over in secret, or among others like yourself?”

  “Here!” cried Ford. “I am sick of this foolery, and I warn you now that I will laugh you over with this whole city, if I know you to give another séance or public exhibition of any sort here. I believe there are no laws that can reach you, but justice shall. I am going to put an end to your researches, in Boston at least.”

  “You threaten me, do you?” cried Dr. Boynton, following him in his retreat from the room. “You propose, in your small way, to play the tyrant, to fetter my action, to forbid me the exercise of my faculties in the pursuit of truth! And you think I shall regard your threats? Poh, I fling them in your face! I value them no more than I care for the miserable trick by which you have burlesqued without retarding my inquiries for an instant.”

  “Very well,” retorted Ford, “we shall see!” He crushed on his hat, and left the house, Boynton pursuing him to the door, with noisy defiance, and remaining on the outer threshold to look after him.

  IV.

  DR. Boynton watched Ford out of sight, and then, hot and flushed, turned back into the house. He did not return to the parlor, where the stormy scene had taken place between them, but went to his daughter’s room. Egeria lay there in the twilight that befriended the shabbiness of the chamber, upon a lounge wheeled away from the wall, and at his entrance she asked, without lifting her eyes to his face (for women need not look at those dear to them, to know their moods), “What is it, father?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” panted her father, with a poor show of evasion.

  “Yes, there is something,” sadly persisted the girl. “Something has happened to worry you.”

  “Yes, you are right!” cried Dr. Boynton, with vehemence. “I have just met the grossest outrage and contumely from a man whom — whom — But, Egeria,” he broke off, “tell me how you knew I was troubled. Did you hear angry talking?”

  “No, I didn’t hear anything. Who was the man, father?”

  “Did you notice anything in my manner?”

  “No, I saw nothing unusual.”

  “Then how did you know? Try to think, Egeria,” said her father, eagerly. “Try to trace the processes of your intuition. This may be a very important clue, leading to the most significant results. How could you suspect, having heard nothing, and in this darkened room, having seen nothing, strange in my manner, — how could you divine that something had occurred to trouble me? How did you know it?”

  “Oh, I suppose I knew it because I love you so, father. There was nothing strange in that. Oh, father, you promised me that you wouldn’t speak of those things again, just yet. They wear my life out.” He had drawn his chair, in his excitement, close to her couch, and sat leaning intently over her. She put her arm round his neck, and gently pulled his face down on her pillow for a moment. “Poor father! What was it vexed you?”

  Boynton freed himself, instantly reverting with his first vehemence to the outrage he had suffered. “It was that young man, — that Ford, who was here the other night. He has gone, after heaping every insult upon me, — after telling me to my face that it was he who seized your hand in the dark séance, and produced by a trick the effect of the luminous spirit hand which turned on the gas. He dared to call me an impostor, to taunt me with forcing you to take part in my deceptions, — and this after the fullest and freest and frankest statement from me of the principle upon which I proceed in these experiments. And he ended by threatening me — yes, by threatening me with public exposure if I gave another séance in this city. The insolent scoundrel! If I had been a younger man, I should have replied in the only fitting manner. As it was, I treated his threats with contempt. I answered him taunt for taunt, and I defied him to do his worst. I a quack, — the shameless swindler! To take part in a mystery whose conditions bound him to good faith, and to defeat all its results by his miserable trickery!” Boynton started up and crossed the room. Suddenly he broke out, “Egeria, I don’t believe him! I don’t believe it was he who hurt you! I don’t believe that he produced that effect of a luminous hand! I believe that in both cases supernatural agencies were at work; they must have been; and a man capable of wishing to defeat our experiments would be quite capable of claiming to have done so. He is a heartless liar, and so I will tell him in any public place. He forbid me to give another séance in Boston! He force me to quit this city in defeat and ignominy! I would perish first!”

  “Oh, I wish we could go away! Oh, I wish we could go home!” moaned the girl, when the doctor’s furious tirade had ended.

  “Egeria!”

  “Yes, father,” said the girl, desperately; “I hate this wandering life; I’m afraid of these strange people, with their talk and their tricks and their dupes, and your part with them.”

  “Egeria! This to your father? Do you join that scoundrel in his insult to me? Do you wish to add a crueler sting to the pain I have suffered, —— you who know how unselfish my motives are? Do you deny the power — the strange power — which you have yourself repeatedly exercised, and which you have not been able to analyze?”

  “No, no, father,” said the girl fondly, rising from where she lay, and going quickly to the chair into which her father had sunk, “I don’t deny it, and I don’t doubt you. How could I doubt you?” She sat down upon his knee, and drew his head against her breast. “But let’s go away! Let us go back to the country, and think it all over again, and try to see more clearly what it is, and — and — pray about it!” She had dropped to her knees upon the floor, and held his hands beseechingly between her own. “Why shouldn’t we go home?”

  “Home! home!” repeated her father. “We have no home, Egeria! We might go back to that hole where I have stifled all my life; but we should starve there. My practice had dwindled to nothing, before we left; you know that. Their miserable bigotry could not tolerate my opinions. No, Egeria, we must make the world our home hereafter. We must be content to associate our names with the establishment of — of a supreme principle, and find our consolation where all the benefactors of mankind have found it, — in the grave.” Boynton paused, as if he had too deeply wrought upon his own sensibilities; but he resumed with fresh animation: “But why look upon the dark side of things, Egeria? Surely, you are better with me here than in that old house, where they would have taught you to distrust and despise me? You cannot regret having decided in my favor between your grandfather and me? If you do” —

  “Oh, no, father! Never! You are all the world to me; I know how good you are, and I shall never doubt your truth, whatever happens. But go — let us go away from here — from this town, where we’ve had nothing but trouble, where I’m sure there’s some great trouble coming to us yet.”

  “Do you think so, Egeria?” asked her father with interest. “What makes you think so? What is the charac
ter, the purport, of your prescience?”

  “It’s no prescience! It’s nothing. It’s only fear. Everything goes from me.”

  “That is very curious!” mused Boynton. “Could it be something in the local electric conditions?”

  “Oh, father, father!” moaned the girl in despair.

  “Well, well, my child! What is it, then?”

  “You have quarreled with this — this Mr. Ford?”

  “Yes, Egeria; I told you.”

  “And he has threatened you, if you stayed — threatened to do something — I don’t know — against us?”

  “I suppose he means to vilify me in the public prints.”

  “Oh, then don’t provoke him, father, — don’t provoke him. Let us go away.”

  “Why, Egeria, are you afraid for your father?”

  “I’m afraid for myself,” answered the girl, cowering nearer to her father. “He will come to see us, and I shall fail, and he will ruin you!”

  “Egeria,” said Dr. Boynton, “this is very interesting. I remember that on the day he came here — the day of the séance — you seemed to be similarly affected by his sphere, his presence. Can you analyze your feeling sufficiently, my child, to tell me why he should affect you in this way?”

  “No,” said Egeria.

  “Do you remember any one else who has affected you as he has?”

  “No, no one else.”

  “Very curious!” mused Dr. Boynton, with a pleased air of scientific inquiry. “Very curious, indeed! It opens up a wholly new field of investigation. All these things seem to proceed by a sort of indirection. We may be further from the result we were seeking than I supposed; but we may be upon the point of determining the nature of the chief obstacle in our way, and therefore — therefore — Um! Very strange, very strange! Egeria, I have felt myself, ever since we came to Boston, something singularly antagonistic in the conditions.”

  “Oh, then you’ll go away, won’t you, father, — you’ll go away at once?” pleaded the girl.