Читать книгу The Undiscovered Country - William Dean Howells - Страница 6

FORD went back to his room, and turned over some new books which he had on his table for review. He could not make his choice among these volumes, or else he found them all unworthy; for after an absent glance at the deep chair in which he usually sat to read, he looked up his hat and went out, taking his way toward the shabbily adventurous street where the Boyntons had their lodgings.

Dr. Boynton met him at the door of his apartment with a smile of cheerful cordiality; but when Ford mentioned his encounter with Mr. Eccles, and expressed his hope that Miss Boynton was better, "Well, no," answered the doctor, "I cannot say that she is. She has had a shock,—a shock from which she may be days and even weeks in recovering." He rubbed his small, soft hands together, and beamed upon Ford's cold front almost rapturously.

"I am very sorry to hear it," said the latter, with a glance of misgiving.

"Yes, yes," admitted the other. "In some respects it is regrettable. But there are in this case, as in all others, countervailing advantages." He settled himself comfortably in the corner of the sofa as he proceeded. "Yes. The whole episode, on its scientific side, has been eminently satisfactory. The character of the manifestations at the seance, the violence with which neglect of the conditions was resented, the subsequent effects, primary and secondary, on the nervous organism of the medium, and indeed of almost all persons present, have been singularly impressive, and indicative of novel and momentous developments. I don't know, Mr. Ford, whether you have had an opportunity of conversing with any of our friends, since the evening in question, but I have seen many of them, and they have all testified to an experience which, however difficult of formulation, was most distinct.

It appears to have been something analogous to the electrisation of persons in the vicinity of a point struck by lightning. In the case of Mrs. Le Roy there has scarcely been a cessation of the effects. The raps in her room have been almost continuous, and the furniture of the whole house has been affected. Miss Boynton has suffered the greatest distress from the continuance of the manifestations, and her mind is oppressed by influences which she is apparently powerless to throw off. In a word, everything has worked most harmoniously to the best advantage, and the progress made has been all that we could wish. Mr. Eccles perhaps told you of a marked increase of the discomfort he habitually suffers from indigestion?"

Ford hardly knew whether to laugh or rage at all this, but he merely said that Mr. Eccles had mentioned his dyspepsia, and remained in a bitter indecision, while Dr. Boynton went on. "Ah, yes! yes, yes! I think we may safely refer the aggravation of his complaint to the influences, still active, of our memorable seance. But I am not sure that Mr. Eccles's peculiar theory is the correct one. I distrust his speculations in some degree. A ferment of the kind he speaks of in the world of spirits would be more apt to ultimate itself here in the mind than in the stomach."

"Do you generally distrust speculations in regard to these matters?" asked Ford.

"I distrust all special speculation," said the doctor. "We physicians know what specialism leads to in medicine. I prefer to base my convictions solely upon facts."

"Are you able to satisfy yourself as to the facts of the seance here the other night?"

"Not absolutely,—no. Not entirely. As yet we are only able to approximate facts."

"Then as yet you have only approximated convictions?" asked Ford.

"As yet I am only inquiring," said the doctor, with sweet acquiescence. "Startling and significant as those manifestations were, I feel that I am still only an inquirer. But I feel also that I have gained certain points which will almost infallibly lead me to a final conclusion in the matter."

"Then you mean to say," pursued Ford, "that as a man of science you rose from Mrs. Le Roy's experiments in sleight of hand, the other night, with a degree of satisfaction. Have you the slightest confidence in her powers?"

"Why, there," replied Boynton, "you touch upon a strange problem. I am always aware, in these matters, of an obscurity of motive and of opinion which will not allow me to make any explicit answer to such a question as yours."

"You obfuscate yourself before sitting down, as you darken the room, that you may be in a perfectly receptive condition?"

"Something of that nature,—yes. But I should distinguish: I should say that the obfuscation, though voluntary, was very largely unconscious."

Ford laughed. "I am afraid that I was in no state to judge of the exhibition then. You are a man of such candor yourself that I am sure you will not blame my frankness in telling you that I thought the whole apparitional performance a piece of gross trickery."

"Not at all, not at all!" cried Boynton, with friendly animation. "From one point your position is perfectly tenable,—perfectly. You will remember that I myself warned you of the possibility of deceit in the effects produced, and said that I always took part in such a stance with the full knowledge of this possibility. At the same time, I always try, for my own sake, and for the sake of the higher truth to be attained, to keep this knowledge in abeyance,—in the dark, as we were saying."

"I see," said Ford drily. He waited blankly a moment, while Boynton watched him with cheery interest. "I suppose it was my misfortune to have been able to expose the whole performance at any moment. I didn't think it worthwhile."

"It was not worthwhile," Boynton interposed. "Those people would not have accepted your expose",—I can't say that I should have accepted it myself; and in your effort to fulfil a mission, a mere mechanical duty, to society, you might have placed obstacles in the way of the most extraordinary developments. Nothing is clearer to my mind," he proceeded impressively," than that it is our business, after the first intimations of a desire for converse on the part of spirits, to afford them every possible facility, to suggest, to arrange, to prepare agencies for their use. Suppose you had detected Madame Le Roy in the employment of stuffed gloves; at the very moment when you seized upon the artificial apparition, a genuine spirit hand might have been about to manifest itself, in obedience to the example given. My dear sir," cried Dr. Boynton, leaning from his perch on the sofa toward the place where Ford sat, "I have gone to the very bottom of this matter, and I find that in almost all cases there is a degree of solicitation on the part of mediums; that where this is most daring the results are most valuable; and what I wish now to establish as the central principle of spiritistic science is the principle of solicitationism. If the disembodied spirits do not voluntarily approach, invite them; if they cannot manifest their presence, show them by example the ways and means of so doing. Depend upon it, the whole science must die out without some such direct and vigorous effort on our part."

He paused, leaving Ford in a strange perplexity. The smoothness and finish with which Boynton had formulated the preposterous ideas just expressed rendered it impossible for Ford to approach without irony a confession which he had meant to make in a different spirit. "Then you would not blame me if I had lost patience at any point of the game, and actively interfered in the process of solicitation?"

"As a mere exterior inquirer," returned Boynton blandly, "I could not have blamed you."

"In the dark seance," said Ford, "I did interfere. It was my belief that Mrs. Le Roy was affording the agencies, as you express it, in that too. It makes me sick to think that I should have hurt Miss Boynton, and if I could have suspected her of what I suspected Mrs. Le Roy, I should never"—"You were quite right," interrupted Dr. Boynton courteously as before, but with a touch of pride. "My daughter was entirely irresponsible, for she was purely the passive instrument of my will; she was carrying out my plan—a plan which the sequel proved triumphantly successful."

"I have said what I wished to say," remarked Ford, rising. "I can well believe that she did only as she was bidden. There were other things that showed that. I leave you to settle with yourself the little questions of honesty and decency in thrusting a helpless girl on the performance of a cheat like that. You seem to be well grounded in your great principle, and I dare say you won't be troubled by my opinions. But my opinion of you, Dr. Boynton, is that you are either the most unconscionable knave and quack I have ever seen, or"—

Boynton sprang to his feet. " Not another word, sir! I regret for the sake of human nature to find you a ruffian. But there my concern in you ceases. I defy you to do your worst! Leave the house!"

"You defy me!" said Ford, setting his teeth, and struggling with the rage into which he found himself hurried. " What do you defy me to? Do you suppose I am going to mix myself up in any public way with your affairs? You are perfectly safe to go on and gull imbeciles to the end of time, for all I care."

"I am an honest man!" retorted Dr. Boynton. "I have an unsullied life behind me, spent in the practice of an honorable profession and in earnest research into questions, into mysteries, on the solution of which the dearest hopes of the race repose. Who are you, to attaint me of unworthy motives, to cry pretender and impostor at me? I have met, in the course of my investigations, rude incredulity from the thoughtless crowds who witnessed them, and insolent disdain from those qualified to question, but too proud or too indolent to do so. Till now this indifference has only accused my judgment. It remained for you to asperse my motives."

Dr. Boynton looked the resentment of an outraged man: he gained, in spite of his flowing rhetoric, a dignity which he did not have before. Ford stared at him in momentary helplessness. He was at the disadvantage that every man must be whose habits of life and whose temperament remove him from personal encounter, and who meets others in that sort of intellectual struggle in which his antagonist is for the time necessarily passive.

"You arraign me as a cheat," resumed Boynton, " and you dare to judge my principle by the imperfect first steps of those who attempt to put it in practice, by the crudest preliminary processes. But even here you have no ground to stand upon. Even here the ultimate fact utterly defeats and annihilates your insolent assumptions."

" I don't know what you mean," began Ford, "and"—

"I will tell you what I mean," interrupted Boynton, "and you shall judge your own case. If all our endeavors at spirit intercourse were for the ends of selfish deception, as you claim, how do you account for the final response to them? I am willing to believe that it was your hand that inflicted a hurt upon a woman,—oh, whether my daughter or Mrs. Le Roy, it was still a woman,—and that invoked any possible consequence from the violation of conditions that you were bound in honor to respect; but whose hand was it that evolved itself from the darkness, and then dispersed that darkness? Whose hand was that which crowned my wildest hopes with success?"

"If you mean," said Ford, and he felt that after all it was shocking to own it, " the hand which turned on the gas, it was my hand."

"Your hand!" gasped Dr. Boynton.

"My hand—prepared by a trick so common and simple that it could have deceived no one but children, or men and women so eager for lies "—

"Oh, it was the truth, the sacred, vital, saving truth, they longed for! And it was this, it was this desire, you deluded!" Dr. Boynton hid his face in his handkerchief, and sank back upon the sofa. "Go now," he said. " I will not, I cannot, I must not hear one word of excuse from you. Your action is indefensible."

"Excuse!" cried Ford. "Do you really think I want to excuse myself? Do you think "—

"Why should you not wish to excuse yourself?" solemnly demanded Boynton, uncovering his face, which was pale, but calm. "You have dire need of excuse, if sacrilege is a crime."

"Sacrilege!" Ford was aware of forcing his laugh.

"Yes, sacrilege. You intruded upon religious aspirations to turn them into ridicule. You derided the hope of immortality itself,-—the evidences through which thousands cling to the belief in God."

"You are such a very preposterous creature that I don't quite know how to take you," said Ford; "but I will ask you what you were doing yourself in making those simpletons think there were spirits present among them?"

"I was leading them on to the evolution of a great truth, to the comfort of an assured immortality. But you,—were you aiming at anything higher than the gratification of the wretched vanity that delights in finding all endeavor as low and hopeless as its own? Oh, I know your position, young man! I know the attitude of those shallow sciences which trace man backward to the brute, and forward to the clod. Which of them do you profess? They all join in a cowardly contempt of phenomena which they will not examine; and if one of their followers, more just, more candid, than the rest, like Crookes, of London, ventures into the field of investigation, and dares to own the truth, they unite like a pack of wolves to destroy him. His methods are non-scientific! Bah! Did you think you were doing a fine thing that day, when you lay in wait to dash our hopes,— to prove to us by the success of your trick that we were as the beasts that perish?"

"I can't say that I intended to trouble myself to expose you to them," said Ford.

"Then how much better were you," retorted Boynton, "than the worst you think of me? You call me an impostor. What were you but an impostor who wished to fool them to the top of their bent, for the sake of laughing them over in secret, or among others like yourself?"

"Here!" cried Ford. "I am sick of this foolery, and I warn you now that I will laugh you over with this whole city, if I know you to give another seance or public exhibition of any sort here. I believe there are no laws that can reach you, but justice shall. I am going to put an end to your researches, in Boston at least."

"You threaten me, do you?" cried Dr. Boynton, following him in his retreat from the room. "You propose, in your small way, to play the tyrant, to fetter my action, to forbid me the exercise of my faculties in the pursuit of truth! And you think I shall regard your threats? Poh, I fling them in your face! I value them no more than I care for the miserable trick by which you have burlesqued without retarding my inquiries for an instant."

"Very well," retorted Ford, "we shall see!" He crushed on his hat, and left the house, Boynton pursuing him to the door with noisy defiance, and remaining on the outer threshold to look after him.