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.