Over our coffee in the Turkish room Minver was usually a censor of our
several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations
and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one
professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with
the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little
in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual
gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that
Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind
action that did not seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too
heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indulgence, which was quite
blameless, unless surfeit is a fault, was the basis of an interest in
occult themes, which was the means of even higher diversion to Minver.
He liked to have Rulledge approach Wanhope from this side, in the
invincible persuasion that the psychologist would be interested in
these themes by the law of his science, though he had been assured
again and again that in spite of its misleading name psychology did
not deal with the soul as Rulledge supposed the soul; and Minver's
eyes lighted up with a prescience of uncommon pleasure when, late one
night, after we had vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now of this,
now of that, Rulledge asked Wanhope, abruptly as if it followed from
something before:
"Wasn't there a great deal more said about presentiments forty or
fifty years ago than there is now?"
Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper into the hollow of his
chair; but he now pulled himself up, and turned quickly toward
Rulledge. "What made you think of that?" he asked.
"I don't know. Why?"
"Because I was thinking of it myself." He glanced at me, and I shook
my head.
"Well," Minver said, "if it will leave Acton out in the cold, I'll own
that I was thinking of it, too. I was going back in my mind, for no
reason that I know of, to my childhood, when I first heard of such a
thing as a presentiment, and when I was afraid of having one. I had
the notion that presentiments ran in the family."
"Why had you that notion?" Rulledge demanded.
"I don't know that I proposed telling," the painter said, giving
himself to his pipe.
"Perhaps you didn't have it," Rulledge retaliated.
"Perhaps," Minver assented.
Wanhope turned from the personal aspect of the matter. "It's rather
curious that we should all three have had the same thing in mind just
now; or, rather, it is not very curious. Such coincidences are really
very common. Something must have been said at dinner which suggested
it to all of us."
"All but Acton," Minver demurred.
"I mightn't have heard what was said," I explained. "I suppose the
passing of all that sort of sub-beliefs must date from the general
lapse of faith in personal immortality."
"Yes, no doubt," Wanhope assented. "It is very striking how sudden the
lapse was. Everyone who experienced it in himself could date it to a
year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of scientific men was of course
all the time undermining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in
abruptly, reaching one believer after another as fast as the ground
was taken wholly or partly from under his feet. I can remember how
people once disputed whether there were such beings as guardian
spirits or not. That minor question was disposed of when it was
decided that there were no spirits at all."
"Naturally," Minver said. "And the decay of the presentiment must have
been hastened by the failure of so many presentiments to make good."
"The great majority of them have failed to make good, from the
beginning of time," Wanhope replied.
"There are two kinds of presentiments," Rulledge suggested, with a
philosophic air. "The true and the untrue."
"Like mushrooms," Minver said. "Only, the true presentiment kills, and
the true mushroom nourishes. Talking of mushrooms, they have a way in
Switzerland of preserving them in walnut oil, and they fill you with
the darkest forebodings, after you've filled yourself with the
mushrooms. There's some occult relation between the two. Think it out,
Rulledge!"
Rulledge ignored him in turning to Wanhope. "The trouble is how to
distinguish the true from the untrue presentiment."
"It would be interesting," Wanhope began, but Minver broke in upon him
maliciously.
"To know how much the dyspepsia of our predecessors had to with the
prevalence of presentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better diet
has a good deal to do with the decline of the dark foreboding among
us. What I can't understand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like
Rulledge here, doesn't go about like ancestral voices prophesying all
sorts of dreadful things."
"That's rather cheap talk, even for you, Minver," Rulledge said. "Why
did you think presentiments ran in _your_ family?"
"Well, there you have me, Rulledge. That's where my theory fails. I
can remember," Minver continued soberly, "the talk there used to be
about them among my people. They were serious people in an unreligious
way, or rather an unecclesiastical way. They were never spiritualists,
but I don't think there was one of them who doubted that he should
live hereafter; he might doubt that he was living here, but there was
no question of the other thing. I must say it gave a dignity to their
conversation which, when they met, as they were apt to do at one
another's houses on Sunday nights, was not of common things. One of my
uncles was a merchant, another a doctor; my father was a
portrait-painter by profession, and a sign-painter by practice. I
suppose that's where I got my knack, such as it is. The merchant was
an invalid, rather, though he kept about his business, and our people
merely recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could
call, for that day and region--the Middle West of the early fifties--a
man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him
largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a
peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the
melancholy accomplishment of playing the flute."
"I wonder why nobody plays the flute nowadays," I mused aloud.
"Yes, it's quite obsolete," Minver said. "They only play the flute in
the orchestras now. I always look at the man who plays it and think of
my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a child; and he was very
fond of my father, in a sort of filial way; my father was so much
older. I can remember my young aunt; and how pretty she was as she sat
at the piano, and sang and played to his fluting. When she looked
forward at the music, her curls fell into her neck; they wore curls
then, grown-up women; and though I don't think curls are beautiful, my
aunt's beauty would have been less without them; in fact, I can't
think of her without them.
"She was delicate, too; they were really a pair of invalids; but she
had none of his melancholy. They had had several children, who died,
one after another, and there was only one left at the time I am
speaking of. I rather wonder, now, that the thought of those poor
little ghost-cousins didn't make me uncomfortable. I was a very
superstitious boy, but I seem not to have thought of them. I played
with the little girl who was left, and I liked going to my uncle's
better than anywhere else. I preferred going in the daytime and in the
summer-time. Then my cousin and I sat in a nook of the garden and
fought violets, as we called it; hooked the wry necks of the flowers
together and twitched to see which blossom would come off first. She
was a sunny little thing, like her mother, and she had curls, like
her. I can't express the feeling I had for my aunt; she seemed the
embodiment of a world that was at once very proud and very good. I
suppose she dressed fashionably, as things went then and there; and
her style as well as her beauty fascinated me. I would have done
anything to please her, far more than to please my cousin. With her I
used to squabble, and sometimes sent her crying to her mother. Then I
always ran off home, but when I sneaked back, or was sent for to come
and play with my cousin, I was not scolded for my wickedness.
"My uncle was more prosperous than his brothers; he lived in a much
better house than ours, and I used to be quite awe-struck by its
magnificence. He went East, as we said, twice a year to buy goods,
and he had things sent back for his house such as we never saw
elsewhere; those cask-shaped seats of blue china for the verandas, and
bamboo chairs. There were cane-bottom chairs in the sitting-room, such
as we had in our best room; in the parlor the large pieces were of
mahogany veneer, upholstered in black hair-cloth; they held me in awe.
The piano filled half the place; the windows came down to the ground,
and had Venetian blinds and lace curtains.
"We all went in there after the Sunday night supper, and then the
fathers and mothers were apt to begin talking of those occult things
that gave me the creeps. It was after the Rochester Knockings, as they
were called, had been exposed, and so had spread like an infection
everywhere. It was as if people were waiting to have the fraud shown
up in order to believe in it."
"That sort of thing happens," Wanhope agreed. "It's as if the seeds of
the ventilated imposture were carried atmospherically into the human
mind broadcast and a universal crop of self-delusion sprang up."
"At any rate," Minver resumed, "instead of the gift being confined to
a few persons--a small sisterhood with detonating knee-joints--there
were rappings in every well-regulated household; all the tables
tipped; people went to sleep to the soft patter of raps on the
headboards of their beds; and girls who could not spell were occupied
in delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare.
Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical
intimations from the world which we've now abolished."
"Not permanently, perhaps," I suggested.
"Well, that remains to be seen," Minver said. "It was this sort of
thing which my people valued above the other. Perhaps they were
exclusive in their tastes, and did not care for an occultism which the
crowd could share with them; though this is a conjecture too long
after the fact to have much value. As far as I can now remember, they
used to talk of the double presence of living persons, like their
being where they greatly wished to be as well as where they really
were; of clairvoyance; of what we call mind-transference, now; of
weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange experiences of their own
and of others; of the participation of animals in these experiences,
like the testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of invisible
spirits; of dreams that came true, or came near coming true; and,
above everything, of forebodings and presentiments.
"I dare say they didn't always talk of such things, and I'm giving
possibly a general impression from a single instance; everything
remembered of childhood is as if from large and repeated occurrence.
But it must have happened more than once, for I recall that when it
came to presentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once only. My
cousin used to get very sleepy on the rug before the fire, and her
mother would carry her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being
kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of the occult alone.
I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my
mother's skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of
drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams
would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double
nightmare, waking and sleeping."
"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's astonishing how people
will go on before children, and never think of the misery they're
making for them."
"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver returned, "but when that
sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for
her. 'It held her like a two years' child'; I was eight that winter. I
don't know how long my suffering had gone on, when my aunt came back
and seemed to break up the talk. It had got to presentiments, and,
whether they knew that this was forbidden ground with her, or whether
she now actually said something about it, they turned to talk of other
things. I'm not telling you all this from my own memory, which deals
with only a point or two. My father and mother used to recur to it
when I was older, and I am piecing out my story from their memories.
"My uncle, with all his temperamental pensiveness, was my aunt's stay
and cheer in the fits of depression which she paid with for her usual
gaiety. But these fits always began with some uncommon depression of
his--some effect of the forebodings he was subject to. Her opposition
to that kind of thing was purely unselfish, but certainly she dreaded
it for him as well as herself. I suppose there was a sort of conscious
silence in the others which betrayed them to her. 'Well,' she said,
laughing, 'have you been at it again? That poor child looks frightened
out of his wits.'
"They all laughed then, and my father said, hypocritically, 'I was
just going to ask Felix whether he expected to start East this week or
next.'
"My uncle tried to make light of what was always a heavy matter with
him. 'Well, yesterday,' he answered, 'I should have said next week;
but it's this week, now. I'm going on Wednesday.'
"'By stage or packet?' my father asked.
"'Oh, I shall take the canal to the lake, and get the boat for Buffalo
there,' my uncle said.
"They went on to speak of the trip to New York, and how much easier it
was then than it used to be when you had to go by stage over the
mountains to Philadelphia and on by stage again. Now, it seemed, you
got the Erie Canal packet at Buffalo and the Hudson River steamboat at
Albany, and reached New York in four or five days, in great comfort
without the least fatigue. They had all risen and my aunt had gone out
with her sisters-in-law to help them get their wraps. When they
returned, it seemed that they had been talking of the journey, too,
for she said to my mother, laughing again, 'Well, Richard may think
it's easy; but somehow Felix never expects to get home alive.'
"I don't think I ever heard my uncle laugh, but I can remember how he
smiled at my aunt's laughing, as he put his hand on her shoulder; I
thought it was somehow a very sad smile. On Wednesday I was allowed to
go with my aunt and cousin to see him off on the packet, which came up
from Cincinnati early in the morning; I had lain awake most of the
night, and then nearly overslept myself, and then was at the canal in
time. We made a gay parting for him, but when the boat started, and I
was gloating on the three horses making up the tow-path at a spanking
trot, under the snaky spirals of the driver's smacking whip-lash, I
caught sight of my uncle standing on the deck and smiling that sad
smile of his. My aunt was waving her handkerchief, but when she turned
away she put it to her eyes.
"The rest of the story, such as it is, I know, almost to the very end,
from what I heard my father and mother say from my uncle's report
afterward. He told them that, when the boat started, the stress to
stay was so strong upon him that if he had not been ashamed he would
have jumped ashore and followed us home. He said that he could not
analyze his feelings; it was not yet any definite foreboding, but
simply a depression that seemed to crush him so that all his movements
were leaden, when he turned at last, and went down to breakfast in the
cabin below. The stress did not lighten with the little changes and
chances of the voyage to the lake. He was never much given to making
acquaintance with people, but now he found himself so absent-minded
that he was aware of being sometimes spoken to by friendly strangers
without replying until it was too late even to apologize. He was not
only steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant distress of the
effort he involuntarily made to trace it back to some cause or follow
it forward to some consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind so
tensely bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain
away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other
things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him
was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to
abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a
while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain
to escape from it.
"He thought he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite
delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had
none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something
dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no
part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the
two nights that passed before he reached Toledo, where he was to take
the lake steamer for Buffalo. He wished to turn back again, but the
relentless pressure which had kept him from turning back at the start
was as strong as ever with him. He tried to give his presentiment
direction by talking with the other passengers about a recent accident
to a lake steamer, in which several hundred lives were lost; there
had been a collision in rough weather, and one of the boats had gone
down in a few minutes. There was a sort of relief in that, but the
double action of the mind brought the same intolerable anguish again,
and he settled back for refuge under the shadow of his impenetrable
doom. This did not lift till he was well on his way from Albany to New
York by the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from Buffalo to Albany
had been as eventless as that to Toledo, and his lake steamer had
reached Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as if those lost in
the recent disaster had paid.
"He tried to pierce his heavy cloud by argument from the security in
which he had traveled so far, but the very security had its
hopelessness. If something had happened--some slight accident--to
interrupt it, his reason, or his unreason, might have taken it for a
sign that the obscure doom, whatever it was, had been averted.
"Up to this time he had not been able to connect his foreboding with
anything definite, and he was not afraid for himself. He was simply
without the formless hope that helps us on at every step, through good
and bad, and it was a mortal peril, which he came through safely while
scores of others were lost, that gave his presentiment direction. He
had taken the day boat from Albany, and about the middle of the
afternoon the boat, making way under a head-wind, took fire. The pilot
immediately ran her ashore, and her passengers, those that had the
courage for it, ran aft, and began jumping from the stern, but a great
many women and children were burned. My uncle was one of the first of
those who jumped, and he stood in the water, trying to save those who
came after from drowning; it was not very deep. Some of the women lost
courage for the leap, and some turned back into the flames,
remembering children they had left behind. One poor creature stood
hesitating wildly, and he called up to her to jump. At last she did
so, almost into his arms, and then she clung about him as he helped
her ashore. 'Oh,' she cried out between her sobs, 'if you have a wife
and children at home, God will take you safe back to them; you have
saved my life for my husband and little ones.' 'No,' he was conscious
of saying, 'I shall never see my wife again,' and now his foreboding
had the direction that it had wanted before.
"From that on he simply knew that he should not get home alive, and he
waited resignedly for the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort
of peace in that. He went about his business intelligently, and from
habit carefully, but it was with a mechanical action of the mind,
something, he imagined, like the mechanical action of his body in
those organs which do their part without bidding from the will. He was
only a few days in New York, but in the course of them he got several
letters from his wife telling him that all was going well with her and
their daughter. It was before the times when you can ask and answer
questions by telegraph, and he started back, necessarily without
having heard the latest news from home.
"He made the return trip in a sort of daze, talking, reading, eating,
and sleeping in the calm certainty of doom, and only wondering how it
would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night or day. But it is no
use my eking this out; I heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I
am afraid that if I should try to give it with the full detail I
should take to inventing particulars." Minver paused a moment, and
then he said: "But there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly
on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly safe and well."
"Oh!" Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.
"What was it impressed itself on your memory?" Wanhope asked, with
scientific detachment from the story as a story.
Minver continued to address Wanhope, without regarding Rulledge. "My
uncle told my father that some sort of psychical change, which he
could not describe, but which he was as conscious of as if it were
physical, took place within him as he came in sight of his house--"
"Yes," Wanhope prompted.
"He had driven down from the canal-packet in the old omnibus which
used to meet passengers and distribute them at their destinations in
town. All the way to his house he was still under the doom as regarded
himself, but bewildered that he should be getting home safe and well,
and he was refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly, at the
sight of the familiar house, the change within him happened. He looked
out of the omnibus window and saw a group of neighbors at his gate. As
he got out of the omnibus, my father took him by the hand, as if to
hold him back a moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly, 'You
needn't tell me: my wife is dead.'"
There was an appreciable pause, in which we were all silent, and then
Rulledge demanded, greedily, "And was she?"
"Really, Rulledge!" I could not help protesting.
Minver asked him, almost compassionately and with unwonted gentleness,
as from the mood in which his reminiscence had left him: "You
suspected a hoax? She had died suddenly the night before while she and
my cousin were getting things ready to welcome my uncle home in the
morning. I'm sorry you're disappointed," he added, getting back to his
irony.
"Whatever," Rulledge pursued, "became of the little girl?"
"She died rather young; a great many years ago; and my uncle soon
after her."
Rulledge went away without saying anything, but presently returned
with the sandwich which he had apparently gone for, while Wanhope was
remarking: "That want of definition in the presentiment at first, and
then its determination in the new direction by, as it were,
propinquity--it is all very curious. Possibly we shall some day
discover a law in such matters."
Rulledge said: "How was it your boyhood was passed in the Middle West,
Minver? I always thought you were a Bostonian."
"I was an adoptive Bostonian for a good while, until I decided to
become a native New-Yorker, so that I could always be near to you,
Rulledge. You can never know what a delicate satisfaction you are."
Minver laughed, and we were severally restored to the wonted relations
which his story had interrupted.