The time came, before the following winter, when Hewson was tempted
beyond his strength, and told the story of his apparition. He told it
more than once, and kept himself with increasing difficulty from lying
about it. He always wished to add something, to amplify the fact, to
heighten the mystery of the circumstances, to divine the occult
significance of the incident. In itself the incident, when stated, was
rather bare and insufficient; but he held himself rigidly to the actual
details, and he felt that in this at least he was offering the powers
which had vouchsafed him the experience a species of atonement for
breaking faith with them. It seemed like breaking faith with Miss
Hernshaw, too, though this impression would have been harder to reason
than the other. Both impressions began to wear off after the first
tellings of the story; the wound that Hewson gave his sensibility in the
very first cicatrized before the second, and at the fourth or fifth it
had quite calloused over; so that he did not mind anything so much as
what always seemed to him the inadequate effect of his experience with
his hearers. Some listened carelessly; some nervously; some
incredulously, as if he were trying to put up a job on them; some
compassionately, as if he were not quite right, and ought to be looked
after. There was a consensus of opinion, among those who offered any sort
of comment, that he ought to give it to the Psychical Research, and at
the bottom of Hewson’s heart, there was a dread that the spiritualists
would somehow get hold of him. This remained to stay him, when the shame
of breaking faith with Miss Hernshaw and with Mystery no longer
restrained him from exploiting the fact. He was aware of lying in wait
for opportunities of telling it, and he swore himself to tell it only
upon direct provocation, or when the occasion seemed imperatively to
demand it. He commonly brought it out to match some experience of
another; but he could never deny a friendly appeal when he sat with some
good fellows over their five-o’clock cocktails at the club, and one of
them would say in behalf of a newcomer, “Hewson, tell Wilkins that odd
thing that happened to you up country, in the summer.” In complying he
tried to save his self-respect by affecting a contemptuous indifference
in the matter, and beginning reluctantly and pooh-poohingly. He had pangs
afterwards as he walked home to dress for dinner, but his self-reproach
was less afflicting as time passed. His suffering from it was never so
great as from the slight passed upon his apparition, when Wilkins or what
other it might be, would meet the suggestion that he should tell him
about it, with the hurried interposition, “Yes, I have heard that; good
story.” This would make Hewson think that he was beginning to tell his
story too often, and that perhaps the friend who suggested his doing so,
was playing upon his forgetfulness. He wondered if he were really
something of a bore with it, and whether men were shying off from him at
the club on account of it. He fancied that might be the reason why the
circle at the five-o’clock cocktails gradually diminished as the winter
passed. He continued to join it till the chance offered of squarely
refusing to tell Wilkins, or whoever, about the odd thing that had
happened to him up country in the summer. Then he felt that he had in a
manner retrieved himself, and could retire from the five-o’clock
cocktails with honor.
That it was a veridical phantom which had appeared to him he did not in
his inmost at all doubt, though in his superficial consciousness he
questioned it, not indeed so disrespectfully as he pooh-poohed it to
others, but still questioned it. This he thought somehow his due as a man
of intelligence who ought not to suffer himself to fall into superstition
even upon evidence granted to few. Superficially, however, as well as
interiorly, he was aware of always expecting its repetition; and now, six
months after the occurrence this expectation was as vivid with him as it
was the first moment after the vision had vanished, while his tongue was
yet in act to stay it with speech. He would not have been surprised at
any time in walking into his room to find It there; or waking at night to
confront It in the electric flash which he kindled by a touch of the
button at his bedside. 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; though at the times when he had
prefaced his story of it with terms of slighting scepticism, he had
professed neither to know nor to care why the thing had happened. He
always said that he had never been particularly interested in the
supernatural, and then was ashamed of a lie that was false to universal
human experience; but he could truthfully add that he had never in his
life felt less like seeing a ghost than that morning. It was not full
day, but it was perfectly light, and there the thing was, as palpable to
vision as any of the men that moment confronting him with cocktails in
their hands. Asked if he did not think he had dreamed it, he answered
scornfully that he did not think, he _knew_, he had not dreamed it; he
did not value the experience, it was and had always been perfectly
meaningless, but he would stake his life upon its reality. Asked if it
had not perhaps been the final office of a nightcap, he disdained to
answer at all, though he did not openly object to the laugh which the
suggestion raised.
Secretly, within his inmost, Hewson felt justly punished by the laughter.
He had been unworthy of his apparition in lightly exposing it to such a
chance; he had fallen below the dignity of his experience. He might never
hope to fathom its meaning while he lived; but he grieved for the wrong
he had done it, as if at the instant of the apparition he had offered
that majestic, silent figure some grotesque indignity: thrown a pillow at
it, or hailed it in tones of mocking offence. He was profoundly and
exquisitely ashamed even before he ceased to tell the story for his
listeners’ idle amusement. When he stopped doing so, and snubbed
solicitation with the curt answer that everybody had heard that story, he
was retrospectively ashamed; and mixed with the expectation of seeing the
vision again was the formless wish to offer it some sort of reparation,
of apology.
He longed to prove himself not wholly unworthy of the advance that had
been made him from the other world upon grounds which he had done his
worst to prove untenable. He could not imagine what the grounds were,
though he had to admit their probable existence; such an event might have
no obvious or present significance, but it had not happened for nothing;
it could not have happened for nothing. Hewson might not have been in
what he thought any stressful need of ghostly comfort or reassurance in
matters of faith. He was not inordinately agnostic, or in the way of
becoming so. He was simply an average skeptical American, who denied no
more than he affirmed, and who really concerned himself so little about
his soul, though he tried to keep his conscience decently clean, that he
had not lately asked whether other people had such a thing or not. He had
not lost friends, and he was so much alone in this world that it seemed
improbable the fate of any uncle or cousin, in the absence of more
immediate kindred, should be mystically forecast to him. He was perfectly
well at the time of the apparition, and it could not have been the
figment of a disordered digestion, as the lusty hunger which willingly
appeased itself with the coffee of the St. Johnswort Inn sufficiently
testified. Yet, in spite of all this, an occurrence so out of the course
of events must have had some message for him, and it must have been his
fault that he could not divine it. A sense of culpability grew upon him
with the sense of his ignominy in cheapening it by making it subservient
to what he knew was, in the last analysis, a wretched vanity. At least he
could refuse himself that miserable gratification hereafter, and he got
back some measure of self-respect in forbidding himself the pleasure he
might have taken in being noted for a strange experience he could never
be got to speak of.