Men, Women, and Ghosts Part 17

I was, I confess, a little startled by the vehemence with which my friend brought his clerical fist down upon the table, and exclaimed:--

"The Devil?"

"Dear me, Garth, don't swear; you in search of a pulpit just at this time, too!"

"I tell you I never spoke more solemnly. I cannot, in the face of facts, ascribe all these phenomena to human agency. Something that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither, is at work there in the dark. I am driven to grant to it an extra-human power. Yet when that flabby Miss Fellows, in the trance state, undertakes to bring me messages from my dead wife, and when she attempts to recall the most tender memories of our life together, I cannot,"--he paused and turned his face a little away,--"it would be pleasant to think I had a word from Mary, but I cannot think she is there. I don't believe good spirits concern themselves with this thing. It has in its fair developments too much nonsense and too much positive sin; read a few numbers of the 'Banner,' or attend a convention or two, if you want to be convinced of that. If they 're not good spirits they're bad ones, that's all. I've dipped into the subject in various ways since I have been here; consulted the mediums, talked with the prophets; I'm convinced that there is no dependence to be placed on the thing. You never learn anything from it that it is worth while to learn; above all, you never can trust its _prophecies_. It is evil,--_evil_ at the root; and except by physicians and scientific men it had better be let alone. They may yet throw light on it; you and I cannot. I propose for myself to drop it henceforth. In fact, it looks too much toward putting one's self on terms of intimacy with the Prince of the Powers of the Air to please me."

"You're rather positive, considering the difficulty of the subject," I said.

The truth is, and it may be about time to own to it, that the three months' siege against the mystery, which I had held so pertinaciously that winter, had driven me to broad terms of capitulation. I a.s.sented to most of my friend's conclusions, but where he stopped I began a race for further light. I understood then, for the first time, the peculiar charm which I had often seen work so fatally with dabblers in Spiritualism.

The fascination of the thing was upon me. I ransacked the papers for advertis.e.m.e.nts of mediums. I went from city to city at their mysterious calls. I held _seances_ in my parlor, and frightened my wife with messages--some of them ghastly enough--from her dead relatives, I ran the usual gauntlet of strange seers in strange places, who told me my name, the names of all my friends, dead or alive, my secret aspirations and peculiar characteristics, my past history and future prospects.

For a long time they never made a failure. Absolute strangers told me facts about myself which not even my own wife knew: whether they spoke with the tongues of devils, or whether, by some unknown laws of magnetism, they simply _read my thoughts_, I am not even now prepared to say. I think if they had made a miss I should have been spared some suffering. Their communications had sometimes a ridiculous aimlessness, and occasionally a subtle deviltry coated about with religion, like a pill with sugar, but often a significant and fearful accuracy.

Once, I remember, they foretold an indefinite calamity to be brought upon me before sunset on the following Sat.u.r.day. Before sunset on that Sat.u.r.day I lost a thousand dollars in mining stock which had stood in all Eastern eyes as solid as its own gold. At another time I was warned by a medium in Philadelphia that my wife, then visiting in Boston, was taken suddenly ill. I had left her in perfect health; but feeling nevertheless uneasy, I took the night train and went directly to her. I found her in the agonies of a severe attack of pleurisy, just preparing to send a telegram to me.

"Their prophecies are unreliable, notwithstanding coincidences," wrote George Garth. "Let them alone, Fred, I beg of you. You will regret it if you don't."

"Once let me be fairly taken in and cheated to my face," I made reply, "and I may compress my views to your platform. Until then I must gang my own gait."

I now come to the remarkable portion of my story,--at least it seems to me the remarkable portion under my present conditions of vision.

In August of the summer following Miss Fellows's visit, and the manifestations in my house at Atkinsville, I was startled one pleasant morning, while sitting in the office of a medium in Washington Street in Boston, by a singularly unpleasant communication.

"The second day of next May," wrote the medium,--she wrote with the forefinger of one hand upon the palm of the other,--"the second of May, at one o'clock in the afternoon, you will be summoned into a spiritual state of existence."

"I suppose, in good English, that means I'm going to die," I replied, carelessly. "Would you be so good as to write it with a pen and ink, that there may be no mistake?"

She wrote it distinctly: "The second of May, at one o'clock in the afternoon."

I pocketed the slip of paper for further use, and sat reflecting.

"How do you know it?"

"_I_ don't know it. I am told."

"Who tells you?"

"Jerusha Babc.o.c.k and George Washington."

Jerusha Babc.o.c.k was the name of my maternal grandmother. What could the woman know of my maternal grandmother? It did not occur to me, I believe, to wonder what occasion George Washington could find to concern himself about my dying or my living. There stood the uncanny Jerusha as pledge that my informant knew what she was talking about. I left the office with an uneasy sinking at the heart. There was a coffin-store near by, and I remember the peculiar interest with which I studied the quilting of the satin lining, and the peculiar crawling sensation which crept to my fingers' ends.

Determined not to be unnecessarily alarmed, I spent the next three weeks in testing the communication. I visited one more medium in Boston, two in New York, one in New Haven, one in Philadelphia, and one in a little out-of-the-way Connecticut village, where I spent a night, and did not know a soul. None of these people, I am confident, had ever seen my face or heard, my name before.

It was a circ.u.mstance calculated at least to arrest attention, that these seven people, each unknown to the others, and without concert with the others, repeated the ugly message which had sought me out through the happy summer morning in Washington Street. There was no hesitation, no doubt, no contradiction. I could not trip them or cross-question them out of it. Unerring, a.s.sured, and consistent, the fiat went forth:--

"On the second of May, at one o'clock in the afternoon, you will pa.s.s out of the body."

I would not have believed them if I could have helped myself, I sighed for the calm days when I had laughed at medium and prophet, and sneered at ghost and rapping. I took lodgings in Philadelphia, locked my doors, and paced my rooms all day and half the night, tortured by my thoughts, and consulting books of medicine to discover what evidence I could by any possibility give of unsuspected disease. I was at that time absolutely well and strong; absolutely well and strong I was forced to confess myself, after having waded through Latin adjectives and anatomical ill.u.s.trations enough to make a ghost of Hercules. I devoted two days to researches in genealogical pathology, and was rewarded for my pains by discovering myself to be the possessor of one great-aunt who had died of heart disease at the advanced age of two months.

Heart disease, then, I settled upon. The alternative was accident.

"Which will it be?" I asked in vain. Upon this point my friends the mediums held a delicate reserve. "The Influences were confusing, and they were not prepared to state with exactness."

"Why _don't_ you come home?" my wife wrote in distress and perplexity.

"You promised to come ten days ago, and they need you at the office, and I need you more than anybody."

"I need you more than anybody!" When the little clinging needs of three weeks grew into the great want of a lifetime,--O, how could I tell _her_ what was coming?

I did not tell her. When I had hurried home, when she came bounding through the hall to meet me, when she held up her face, half laughing, half crying, and flushing and paling, to mine,--the poor little face that by and by would never watch and glow at my coming,--I could not tell her.

When the children were in bed and we were alone after tea, she climbed gravely up into my lap from the little cricket on which she had been sitting, and put her hands upon my shoulders.

"You're sober, Fred, and pale. Something ails you, you know, and you are going to tell me all about it."

Her pretty, mischievous face swam suddenly before my eyes. I kissed it, put her gently down as I would a child, and went away alone till I felt more like myself.

The winter set in gloomily enough. It may have been the snow-storms, of which we had an average of one every other day, or it may have been the storm in my own heart which I was weathering alone.

Whether to believe those people, or whether to laugh at their predictions; whether to tell my wife, or whether to continue silent,--these questions tormented me through many wakeful nights and dreary days. My fears were in nowise allayed by a letter which' I received one day in January from Gertrude Fellows.

"Why don't you read it aloud? What's the news?" asked Alison. But at one glance over the opening page I folded the sheet, and did not read it till I could lock myself into the library alone. The letter ran:--

"I have been much disturbed lately on your behalf. My mother and your brother Joseph appear to me nearly every day, and charge me with some message to you which I cannot distinctly grasp. It seems to be clear, however, as far as this: that some calamity is to befall you in the spring,--in May, I should say. It seems to me to be of the nature of death. I do not learn that you can avoid it, but that they desire you to be prepared for it."

After receiving this last warning, certain uncomfortable words filed through my brain for days together:--

"Set thine house in order, for thou shalt surely die."

"Never knew you read your Bible so much in all your life," said Alison, with a pretty pout. "You'll grow so good that I can't begin to keep up with you. When I try to read my polyglot, the baby comes and bites the corners, and squeals till I put it away and take him up."

As the winter wore away I arrived at this conclusion: If I were in fact destined to death in the spring, my wife could not help herself or me by the knowledge of it. If events proved that I was deluded in the dread, and I had shared it with her, she would have had all her pain and anxiety to no purpose. In either case I would insure her happiness for these few months; they might be her last happy months. At any rate happiness was a good thing, and she could not have too much of it. To say that I myself felt no uneasiness as to the event would be affectation. The old sword of Damocles hung over me. The hair might hold, but it was a hair.

As the winter pa.s.sed,--it seemed to me as if winter had never pa.s.sed so rapidly before,--I found it natural to watch my health with the most careful scrutiny; to avoid improper food and undue excitement; to refrain from long and perilous journeys; to consider whether each new cook who entered the family might have occasion to poison me. It was an anomaly which I did not observe at the time, that while in my heart of hearts I expected to breathe my last upon the second of May, I yet cherished a distinct plan of fighting, cheating, persuading, or overmatching death.

I closed a large speculation on which I had been inclined, in the summer, to "fly"; Alison could never manage petroleum ventures. I wound up my business in a safe and systematic manner. "Hotchkiss must mean to retire," people said. I revised my will, and held one long and necessary conversation with my wife about her future, should "anything happen" to me. She listened and planned without tears or exclamations; but after we had finished the talk, she crept up to me with a quiet, puzzled sadness that I could not bear.

"You are growing so blue lately, Fred! Why, what can 'happen' to you? I don't believe G.o.d can mean to leave me here after you are gone; I don't believe he _can_ mean to!"

All through the sweet spring days we were much together. I went late to the office. I came home early. I spent the beautiful twilights at home.

I followed her about the house. I made her read to me, sing to me, sit by me, touch me with her little, soft hand. I watched her face till the sight choked me. How soon before she would know? How soon?

"I feel as if we'd just been married over again," she said one day, pinching my cheek with a low laugh. "You are so good! I'd no idea you cared so much about me. By and by, when you get over this lazy fit and go about as you used to, I shall feel so deserted,--you've no idea! I believe I will order a little widow's cap, and put it on, and wear it about,--now, what do you mean by getting up and stalking off to look out of the window? Fine prospect you must have, with the curtain down!"

It is, to say the least, an uncomfortable state of affairs when you find yourself drawing within a fortnight of the day on which seven people have a.s.sured you that, you are going to shuffle off this mortal coil. It is not agreeable to have no more idea than the dead (probably not as much) of the manner in which your demise is to be effected. It is not in all respects a cheerful mode of existence to dress yourself in the morning with the reflection that you are never to half wear out your new mottled coat, and that this striped neck-tie will be laid away by and by in a little box, and cried over by your wife; to hear your immediate acquaintances all wondering why you _don't_ get yourself some new boots; to know that your partner has been heard to say that you are growing dull at trade; to find the children complaining that you have engaged no rooms yet at the beach; to look into their upturned eyes and wonder how long it is going to take for them to forget you; to go out after breakfast and wonder how many more times you will shut that front door; to come home in the perfumed dusk and see the faces pressed against the window to watch for you, and feel warm arms about your neck, and wonder how soon they will shrink from the chill of you; to feel the glow of the budding world, and think how blossom and fruit will crimson and drop without you, and wonder how the blossom and fruit of life can slip from you in the time of violet smells and orioles.

April, spattered with showers and dripped upon a little with ineffectual suns, slid restlessly away from me, and I locked my office door one night, reflecting that it was the night of the first of May, and that to-morrow was the second.

I spent the evening alone with my wife. I have spent more agreeable evenings. She came and nestled at my feet, and the firelight painted her cheeks and hair, and her eyes followed me, and her hand was in mine; but I have spent more agreeable evenings.