The Undiscovered Country. William Dean Howells
Читать онлайн книгу.
from directly opposing him. She subdued the tremor that ran through her, and answered, "You know that I think whatever you do, father. How — how " — She apparently wished to temporize, to catch at this thought and that; without uttering any, she stopped short.
"How should I go about it?" radiantly demanded her father. "In the openest, the simplest manner possible, by submitting your—your gift to the test of opposing wills; by inviting this man to a public contest, in which, laying prejudice aside, he and I should enter the lists against each other in a fair struggle for supremacy. I am not afraid of the issue. In this view he is no longer an enemy. He is a blind opposing force of nature, which is simply to be overcome; he can no more have insulted or wronged me than the rock against which I strike in the dark, than the tempest that dashes its drops in my face. Poor, helpless, blameless obstacle! I am ashamed, Egeria, that I used harsh language to him; I am ashamed that I retorted from my vantage ground the merely mechanical outrage which I suffered from him. My first business must be to—to—apologize; to seek him in a spirit of passive good feeling, and to invite him in a sentiment of the widest liberality to enter upon this rivalry; to—to "— He bustled about the room, seeking his hat. "It is my duty, it is my right, it is my sacred privilege, to go to him without a moment's delay, and withdraw every offensive expression that I may have used in the heat of—of—controversy; to solicit, upon whatever terms of personal humiliation he makes, his co-operation in this experiment; to conjure him by our common hopes of immortality "— Boynton had found that his hat was not in the room; he made a swift dash towards the door. Egeria flung herself against it, and, holding it fast, stretched out both her hands towards him.
"Wait!"
Her father suddenly arrested himself.
"Egeria!"
" What—what"—the girl panted tumultuously—"what—if I can't submit to the test?"
Boynton looked at her in stupefaction, as if this were a point that had not occurred to him; but she confronted him steadily.
"You cannot refuse," he began.
"You have not considered this matter yet, father," said the girl. "You have not taken time"—
"Time, time!" retorted her father, with wild impatience. "There is no time! Eternity hems us in on all sides! It presses and invades at every point! The man may die; a wretched casualty—a falling timber on the street, a frightened horse, an open cellarway—may snatch him from me before I can use him for the purpose to which Providence has appointed his being. And you talk of time! Come, my daughter, let me pass! You are not you, nor I, in such a crisis as this."
The girl moved from the door, and cast her arms about his neck, as he quickly advanced. "Oh, father, father!" she cried, "what is it you mean to do?"
"Why, I have told you, child," he answered, putting up his hands to unclasp her arms.
"Yes; but if I failed?" she implored, clinging the closer. "Remember that I have been sick, that I am still very weak, and wait—wait a little."
Boynton's mood changed instantly. "Ha!" he breathed, and continued in his tone of scientific investigation: "Are you sensible, Egeria, of any distinct loss of psychic force through the diminution of your physical strength?"
"How can I tell, father? It is you who do it. I see, or seem to see, whatever you tell me. I have always done that. It began so long ago, when I was so little, that I can't remember anything different. I want to please you; I want to help you; but I don't know if I can, father. It has always come from my thinking that what you wished was perfectly wise and right."
"Yes, yes," said Boynton, "that is of course a condition of the highest clairvoyant force, though I don't remember to have heard it formulated before."
"And don't you see, father," said the girl, looking tenderly into his face, as if she would fain interpose her love between him and what she must say, "that if I lose this perfect confidence I lose my power to do what you want me to do?"
Dr. Boynton was hurt through the shield of her affection. "Have I done anything to forfeit your trust in my purposes, Egeria? If I have, it is certainly time for me to despair."
"Oh, no, no, father! I trust you; I love you this moment more dearly than ever I did. But are you sure—are you sure that it will all come out as you think? Are you sure that we are taking the right way? We have been trying now a long while, and I can't see that we've accomplished anything. Perhaps I'm not a medium, but only a dreamer, and dream what you tell me. I'm afraid sometimes it isn't right. I was thinking about it just before you came in. What if there should be nothing in it all?"
"How nothing in it?"
"What if you were deceiving yourself? I can't tell how much my wanting to please you makes me— Oh, I'm afraid—I'm afraid it's all wrong."
"Egeria," said Dr. Boynton, severely, "I have often explained to you my principle in regard to these matters. These are the first steps. It is necessary that we should take them. Other steps will advance from the world of spirits to meet them. I am convinced—I know—that in your last seance we had direct proof of this; and I will yet compel, I will extort from that lying villain the confession that he had no agency in the things he claims to have done." Boynton had lost his compassionate sense of Ford as an irresponsible moral force, and as he walked up and down the floor he broke from time to time into expressions of vivid injuriousness.
"Listen, Egeria: I respect your conscientious scruples, though they belong to a petty personal conscience that I hoped before this you had exchanged for the race-conscience that gives me perfect freedom to think and to act. I will set the matter before you, and you will see the logical sequence of my course. In the development of the phenomena which now agitate the world, mesmerism came first, and spiritism came second. I follow this providential order, and I begin with mesmerism. In this, the results are unquestioned in your case. You have been accustomed all your life to my controlling influence, my magnetic force, by which you have seen, heard, touched, tasted, spoken, whatever I willed. I knew this and you knew it. A thousand successful experiments attest its truth. Well, when we come to deal with disembodied life, we have to deal with it as I deal with you. We have to show this life how to approach us; to suggest, to intimate, to demonstrate, the ways and means of communication with us. The only perfectly ascertained fact of spiritistic science is the rap. This, with the innumerable exposures and explanations which expose and explain all the other phenomena, remains a mystery, insoluble, whatever we attribute it to. But as a method of commerce with the other life, it is nearly worthless,—slow, vague, uncertain. We must advance beyond it, or retire forever from the border of the invisible world. Now, then, you see the unbroken chain of my reasoning, and as an investigator I take my stand boldly upon the necessity of first doing ourselves what we wish the spirits to do. A feeble sense of right and wrong may call it deceit; a vulgar nihilism may call it trickery; but the results will justify us—they have justified us. What I wish to do now, Egeria, is to determine whether an opposing force of doubt, embodied in a powerful intellectual organism, such as this man's undoubtedly is, can annul, can annihilate, the progress we have made. We cannot meet this force too soon; for if it is able to do this, we may have to retrace all our steps and begin de novo."
Egeria listened drearily to her father's harangue, and at the pause he now made she looked hopelessly at his eager face, and did not reply, though he evidently expected some answer from her.
"After all, Egeria," he resumed impatiently, " you have no manner of responsibility, moral or otherwise, in the affair. You have simply to yield yourself, as heretofore, to my will, and leave me to take the consequences. I will meet them all. But I wish, my daughter, to satisfy your minutest scruple. If you were acting in that stance upon the theories which you have often heard me advance; if you were supplying to the invisible agencies we had called about us the model, the prototype, the example, needed for communication with us; and if when that man seized your hand—granting that it was he who did so—you were yourself consciously doing any of the things supposed to be done by the spirits "—
"I tried to bring myself to it; but I couldn't, father, I couldn't!"
"Then—then," panted