Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Egeria first went out on the 20th of May, that signal date when the spring, whatever her previous reluctances, brings up all arrears with the apple-blossoms. The season is then no longer late or early, but is the consummate spring; and all weather-wise hopes and fears are lost in the richness with which she keeps the promise of her name. It might well have seemed to the girl’s impatience as she watched the orchard trees, sometimes from her closed window and sometimes from her open door, as the day was chill or soft, that the blossoms would never come; and even when every tip of the mossed and twisted boughs was lit with the pink glimmer of a bud, and the trees’ whole round was suffused with a tender flush of color, that the delicate petals of rose and snow would never unfold. The orioles and the bobolinks sang from the airy tops, and from the clover in the grassy alleys between the trees; in a neighboring field the oats were already high enough to brighten and darken in the wind. The canes of the blackberries and raspberries in the garden were tufted with dark green, and beyond the broad leaves of the pie-plant and the neat lines of sprouting peas, the grapevines on Elder Joseph’s trellis were set thick with short, velvety leaves of pinkish-olive, when suddenly, in a warm night, the delaying buds unfolded, and in the morning the apple-blossoms had come.

  “I am going out under them,” the girl said, when she saw them, and she set a resolute face against the fond anxieties of Sister Frances. Her father came and approved her wish.

  “It won’t hurt her; it will do her good,” he said, with that somewhat propitiatory acquiescence with which he now indulged his daughter’s whims. So, when the morning was well warmed through, as Sister Frances said, they spread some sad-colored wraps on the grass in the orchard, where the mingled wind and sun could reach her through the screen of blossoms. She walked a little tremulously, clinging to her father’s arm, but a light of perfect happiness played over her faintly flushing face as she sank upon the couch. From where she lounged she could look across the gardened intervale, declining from the street on which the hamlet was built, to the elms and sycamores that fringed the river-course, and beyond to other uplands, where the gray farmsteads dimly showed among the fields, and the white houses of villages clustered and sparkled in the sun. An unspeakable serenity filled the scene; and round her the little Shaker town was a part of the wide peace. There was seldom a passer on the sandy thoroughfare, now printed with the delicate shadows of the new maple leaves, and the stillness was unbroken by any sound of human life. The Shakers and their hired men were at work in the gardens and the fields, but they worked quietly; and the shops in which there was once the clinking of hammers on lap-stone and anvil had been hushed long ago by the cheaper industries of the world outside.

  At the doors of the great family houses of brick a Shaker sister in strict drab and deep bonnet from time to time issued or entered silently. Nothing but the cat-bird twanging in the elder-bushes, and the bobolinks climbing in the sunlit air, to reel and slide down, gurgling and laughing, to the clover tufts from which they rose, broke upon the mellow diapason of the bees in the apple-blossoms overhead. Where she lay, propped on her arm, with her father seated beside her, some of the brothers and sisters came out of their way from time to time, to welcome her out-doors, and to warn her not to stay too long. Some rumor of her longing to be in the weather, and of her passion for the blossoms and the birds amongst which she was blessed at last, had penetrated the whole community, and many who did not come to speak to her looked out unseen from their windows upon her happiness, which they might have found somewhat too earthly, in spite of the ideas lately promulgated by the visiting brother. With her blue eyes dreamily untroubled, she looked like some sylvan creature, a part of the young terrestrial life that shone and sang and bloomed around her; while flashes of light and color momently repaired the waste that sickness had made in her beauty. A sense of her exquisite harmony with the great natural frame of things may have penetrated the well-defended consciousness of Elder Joseph, as he paused near her, on his way home to dinner; but if it did, it failed to grieve him. He looked indulgently down at her; by an obscure impulse he gathered some of the richest sprays from the branches at hand, and dropped them into her lap.

  “It seems right,” he said, “to be getting well in the spring, when everything is taking a fresh start. I like to see the young woman looking so happy.”

  He addressed the doctor as well as Egeria, but it was she who answered.

  “Yes; it wouldn’t seem the same thing if it were fall. If it had been fall, I should not have got well; I should not have cared to get well.”

  “Nay,” replied the Shaker; “if it is for us to choose, we are to choose to get well at all times.”

  “I mean,” said the girl, “that I could not have chosen.”

  “You can’t tell,” observed her father. “Most fevers are autumnal, and convalescents are braced up by the approach of cold weather.”

  “Yes,” she rejoined, “but now I seem to be stronger because my getting well is part of the spring.”

  “Our sympathetic relations with nature are subtle and strong,” consented Boynton. “No one can tell just how much influence they have over our physical condition.”

  Egeria silently gazed upon the prospect. “It’s sightly, isn’t it?” asked the Shaker. “I have looked at it, now, for fifty spring-times, and it is as pretty as when it was first revealed to me.” Boynton started, and repeated, “Revealed?”

  “Oh, yee,” returned the elder, “I first saw this place in a vision. It was when I was a young man, and several years before I was gathered in from the world outside. When I came here, I remembered the place and the persons I had seen in my vision, and I knew them all. Then I knew that it was meant, and I stayed.”

  “Is it possible!” cried Boynton. “That was very extraordinary. Have you had other psychological experiences?”

  “Nay,” said Brother Joseph, briefly.

  “But they are common among you?” pursued Boynton.

  “Oh, yee, we have all had some such intimations.

  Have you never read Elder Evans’s account of his dealings with the supernatural?”

  “No, never!” cried Boynton, with intensifying interest.

  “I will lend you the book. He tells some strange things. But we do not follow up such experiences. They serve their purpose, and that is enough. We try to live the angelic life. That will bring what is good in the supernatural to us, and we need not go to it.”

  “I think you make a mistake!” said Boynton, promptly. “These intimations are given expressly to invite pursuit. That is what miracles are for.”

  “Nay,” returned the Shaker. “They are no miracles, if you follow them up to see them a second time. We must beware how we make the supernatural a commonplace. None of the disciples knew exactly who Christ was till he was taken from them; and he has only appeared since to one Doubter out of all the millions that have longed to believe on him. There is something in that. The other world cannot come twice to prove itself. Once is enough in miracles.”

  “Then you disapprove of spiritistic research?” demanded Boynton. “You condemn the desire to develop the dim hints of immortality which we all think we have received into certain and absolute demonstration?”

  “Nay, I do not condemn any earnest striving for the truth, under proper conditions.”

  “I hope to find those conditions among you,” Boynton hastened to say.

  “We shall be happy to afford them,” said the Shaker, smoothly, “if we can agree upon what they are. But it is right to say that we consider Shakerism the end and not the means of spiritualism.” He passed on down the orchard aisle, the sunlight falling upon his quaint figure through the apple-blossoms.

  Boynton’s eyes followed him, but it was some time before he spoke. “After all,” he said, as if musing aloud, “he is not one of the controlling forces of the community.” He spoke with a certain effect of arming himself against opposition. “You had better come in, now, Egeria. It won’t do for you to take cold.�
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  “Yes, pretty soon. I don’t wonder that they think they ‘re living the angelic life.”

  “Why?” asked her father, sharply.

  “It’s like a heaven upon earth, here.”

  This vexed her father. “Yes, like heaven now, with the apples in bloom and the birds singing. But how much like heaven would it be with three feet of snow where you are lying?”

  “Yes, let us go in. I had better not stay too long.” She rose as if saddened by his words, and suffered herself to be helped back to the infirmary.

  “The Swedenborgians,” said her father, in reparation, “believe that in the other world winter is absorbed into the other seasons, and that the whole year is a sort of spring-time.”

  “All!” breathed the girl. “But I didn’t mean spring. I should want the whole year to be summer, and I should want it to be in this world. I should like a heaven upon earth.”

  Her father looked closely at her. “This materialistic tendency is a trait of your convalescence. People are never so earthly as when they are recovering from a dangerous sickness. There is a kind of revolt from the world whose borders they have touched, — a rebound. The senses are riotous to try their strength again.” He said these things as if accounting to himself for a fact, rather than explaining her condition to Egeria.

  “Well, we have a right to our life here!” she cried, passionately. “Let the other world keep to itself!”

  He did not answer her directly, and at other times he avoided encounter with anything like opposition in her. She would not stay in-doors after she once liberated herself. The spring came on rapidly and brought the hot weather before its time; but she throve in the heat. Before she was strong enough to walk much the Shakers appointed for her use an open buggy, garrulous and plaintive with age, and an old horse past his usefulness at the plow, but very fit for lounging along by-roads, and skilled in cropping wayside foliage as he went. With her father beside her in his Shaker dress, while she wore a worldlier garb, which she had beguiled her convalescence in fashioning from materials supplied by the family dress-maker, she took the passers on the quiet roads with question and wonder. But they met few people, for they drove mostly over the grass-grown lanes that entered the forest, and the track oftener died away in the thickening vegetation than led any whither. Sometimes it arrived at a clearing deep in the woods, and accounted for itself as the way over which the teams had hauled wood in the winter, or got out logs. In other places it was a fading reminiscence of former population and led through the trees and thick undergrowth to the site of a vanished dwelling; a few apple-trees emerged from the ranks of their sylvan brethren; a rose or currant bush stood revealed among the blueberries or the sweet-fern; then the raw red and white of ruined masonry showed in the grass, and suddenly a cellar yawned before their feet, or they stepped over a well-curb choked with stones. Now and then they met lurking and evasive people on the lonesome roads, who were sometimes black, and who seldom seemed part of the ordinary New England life. If they followed up the track on which these men had shambled towards them, they might come upon a poverty-stricken dwelling of unpainted wood, which seemed never to have had heart to be a home. If they spoke to the slattern woman in the doorway, she was nasal enough, but otherwise the effect was as if some family of poor whites from the South had been dropped down in those Northern woods, with all its native environment of lounging dogs, half-starved colts, and frightened poultry.

  Boynton philosophized the strange conditions as well as he could in the absence of any but obvious facts concerning them. When he stopped for a dipper of water at the well, from which he drew it with the old-fashioned sweep, and fell into talk with the women, they were voluble, but not very intelligible. They commonly took him for a Shaker, but Egeria gave them pause in their conjectures; and when he explained that he and his daughter were merely staying with the Shakers they said, Well, the Shakers were good folks, any way. There was sickness in some of these forlorn places, and once it happened to the doctor to be able to afford relief in the case of a suffering child. He was very tender with it, and gentle with the parents, who looked as if they would still be young if they had any encouragement, and on a second visit they asked him what he charged. When he said, “Nothing,” they followed him and Egeria out to their buggy in a sort of helpless gratitude.

  “Well, you’ve done our little girl good, doctor,” the woman said on the doorstep, “and we sha’n’t forget it. The trouble is we don’t seem to get no ways forehanded.”

  Boynton looked about him, as he took the reins in his hand, upon two or three other weather-beaten houses. “What place is this?” he asked.

  “Well,” said the woman, with sober apology, while her man grinned, “I d’ know’s you may say it has any name. Skunk’s Misery, they call it.” She showed her sense of degradation in the brutal grotesquery. “Well, call again,” she said, as the doctor lifted his reins and chirruped to the old horse. “And you, too, lady,” she added, nodding to Egeria.

  “She kept her house in good order, for such a poor place,” said the girl, when they had been watched out of sight by the man and his wife, “and the little girl’s bed was sweet and clean. I should think they might be happy, there.”

  “In Skunk’s Misery?” asked her father.

  “If the house is their own,” answered Egeria, simply. “They seemed good to each other.”

  “Oh, you will change your mind when you ‘re quite well again. You will want to see more of the world.”

  “I wish we had a house of our own, somewhere,” said Egeria. “I shouldn’t care where. I was thinking of that. I should like to keep house. I am going to get Frances to teach me everything.”

  “That will all come in good time,” answered her father, soothingly. “And it will come with higher things. Only now get well.”

  “What higher things?” demanded the girl. Boynton looked at her, and answered, evasively, “Things we couldn’t very well find in Skunk’s Misery. Perhaps we shall go abroad. Would you like to go to Europe?”

  “I would rather go home.”

  Boynton frowned, but did not answer; and they had escaped encounter for that time, at least.

  As Egeria grew stronger they gave up their drives somewhat, and took walks in the nearer woods. Oftenest their errand was to gather laurel, which was now coming richly into bloom. It filled the open spaces of the small clearings and wherever the woods were thin; it hid the stumps and consoled the poor, sterile soil with the starry profusion of its flower. One afternoon, when they had climbed to the hill-top where the Shakers of earlier times lay in their nameless graves, they looked out over the masses of the laurel, and it was like a second blossoming of the orchards. Egeria sat down on one of the fallen stones, without knowing that it covered a grave, and began putting her boughs of laurel into shape, choosing this and rejecting that, while her father went about among the forgetful tombs.

  “I am glad we came here,” he said, returning to her, “for I should not have liked to miss seeing their grave-yard.”

  “Their grave-yard?” she repeated.

  “Yes; this is the old Shaker burial-ground.”

  She looked round. “I didn’t know it,” she sighed like one following out some tacit thought. “Well, what difference would it make if they had put their names on? They rest as well without it. And if they had put their names, who could remember who they were in fifty years from now?”

  “They know one another in the other world just as well, without the record here,” consented her father. “And it isn’t here that we are to be remembered, at any rate.”

  “I wish it were!” said the girl, with passion, dropping her flowers into her lap. “I like this world, and I like to be in it. I wish we didn’t have to die.”

  “Death is the condition of our advancement,” said her father.

  “But I would rather not advance,” said Egeria. “I almost wish I had been born an animal. I should have had to die, but I should not have known it, and there wou
ld have been nothing of me to come back!” She went on putting together her boughs of laurel, and she wore that look of being remote within her defenses which a woman knows how to assume no less with her father than with her lover. She then adventurously throws out thoughts and opinions, as if they had just casually occurred to her, which she has perhaps reached after long, secret cogitation or sensation, or which are perhaps really what they seem.

  “Why shouldn’t you wish to come back, ages hence, and see what advance the world has made?” rejoined her father, after a pause.

  “I should be afraid that I hadn’t kept up with it,” answered Egeria. “The spirits that come back say such silly things.”

  “That is a childish way of looking at it,” said her father with severity. “We have no more right to accuse them of silliness than we have to laugh at the foreigner who can express only the simplest things in English. The medium of thought must be so different in the two conditions of being that the wonder is that returning spirits can understand and use our dialects at all.”

  “I don’t see why they should forget their own language, if they ‘re the same persons there that they were here,” Egeria returned, stubbornly. “Yes,” she cried, “I would rather be here under the ground forever than be like some of the spirits! Oh, I should like to live always, too; but I don’t call that living. I should like to live here in this world, — on the earth.”

  “Would you like to live always among the Shakers?” asked her father, willing to turn the current of her thoughts.

  “They try all the time to make the other world of this world!”

  “Perhaps that’s the only condition on which they find happiness in this world.”