The Daughter of the Storage

"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.

III

CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP

It was against the law, in such case made and provided,Of the United States, but by the good will of the pilotsThat we would some of us climb to the pilot-house after our breakfastFor a morning smoke, and find ourselves seats on the benchingUnder the windows, or in the worn-smooth arm-chairs. The pilot,Which one it was did not matter, would tilt his head round and say, "All right!"When he had seen who we were, and begin, or go on as from stoppingIn the midst of talk that was leading up to a story,Just before we came in, and the story, begun or beginning,Always began or ended with some one, or something or other,Having to do with the river. If one left the wheel to the other,Going off watch, he would say to his partner standing behind himWith his hands stretched out for the spokes that were not given up yet,"Captain, you can tell them the thing I was going to tell themBetter than I could, I reckon," and then the other would answer,"Well, I don't know as I feel so sure of that, captain," and havingRecognized each other so by that courtesy title of captainNever officially failed of without offense among pilots,One would subside into Jim and into Jerry the other.It was on these terms, at least, Captain Dunn relieved Captain DavisWhen we had settled ourselves one day to listen in comfort,After some psychological subtleties we had indulged in at breakfastTouching that weird experience every one knows when the sensesJuggle the points of the compass out of true orientation,Changing the North to the South, and the East to the West. "Why, Jerry, what was itYou was going to tell them?" "Oh, never you mind what it was, Jim.You tell them something else," and so Captain Davis submitted,While Captain Dunn, with a laugh, got away beyond reach of his protest.Then Captain Davis, with fitting, deprecatory preamble,Launched himself on a story that promised to be all a storyCould be expected to be, when one of those women – you know them —Who interrupt on any occasion or none, interrupted,Pointed her hand, and asked, "Oh, what is that island there, captain?""That one, ma'am?" He gave her the name, and then the woman persisted,"Don't say you know them all by sight!" "Yes, by sight or by feeling.""What do you mean by feeling?" "Why, just that by daylight we see them,And in the dark it's like as if somehow we felt them, I reckon.Every foot of the channel and change in it, wash-out and cave-in,Every bend and turn of it, every sand-bar and landmark,Every island, of course, we have got to see them, or feel them.""But if you don't?" "But we've got to." "But aren't you ever mistaken?""Never the second time." "Now, what do you mean, Captain Davis?Never the second time." "Well, let me tell you a story.It's not the one I begun, but that island you asked about yonderPuts me in mind of it, happens to be the place where it happened,Three years ago. I suppose no man ever knew the OhioBetter than Captain Dunlevy, if any one else knew it like him.Man and boy he had been pretty much his whole life on the river:Cabin-boy first on a keelboat before the day of the steamboats,Back in the pioneer times; and watchman then on a steamboat;Then second mate, and then mate, and then pilot and captain and owner —But he was proudest, I reckon, of being about the best pilotOn the Ohio. He knew it as well as he knew his own Bible,And I don't hardly believe that ever Captain DunlevyLet a single day go by without reading a chapter."While the pilot went on with his talk, and in regular, rhythmical motionSwayed from one side to the other before his wheel, and we listened,Certain typical facts of the picturesque life of the riverWon their way to our consciousness as without help of our senses.It was along about the beginning of March, but alreadyIn the sleepy sunshine the budding maples and willows,Where they waded out in the shallow wash of the freshet,Showed the dull red and the yellow green of their blossoms and catkins,And in their tops the foremost flocks of blackbirds debatedAs to which they should colonize first. The indolent house-boatsLoafing along the shore, sent up in silvery spiralsOut of their kitchen pipes the smoke of their casual breakfasts.Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear down to the gunwales,Gave us the slack of the current, with proper formalities shoutedBy the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges before her,And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles.Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden,River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilotDropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in time to escape it."Always give those fellows," he joked, "all the leeway they ask for;Worst kind of thing on the river you want your boat to run into.Where had I got about Captain Dunlevy? Oh yes, I remember.Well, when the railroads began to run away from the steamboats,Taking the carrying trade in the very edge of the water,It was all up with the old flush times, and Captain DunlevyHad to climb down with the rest of us pilots till he was onlyCaptain the same as any and every pilot is captain,Glad enough, too, to be getting his hundred and twenty-five dollarsThrough the months of the spring and fall while navigation was open.Never lowered himself, though, a bit from captain and owner,Knew his rights and yours, and never would thought of allowingAny such thing as a liberty from you or taking one with you.I had been his cub, and all that I knew of the riverCaptain Dunlevy had learnt me; and if you know what the feelingIs of a cub for the pilot that learns him the river, you'll trust meWhen I tell you I felt it the highest kind of an honorHaving him for my partner; and when I came up to relieve him,One day, here at the wheel, and actu'lly thought that I found himTaking that island there on the left, I thought I was crazy.No, I couldn't believe my senses, and yet I couldn't endure it.Seeing him climb the spokes of the wheel to warp the Kanawha,With the biggest trip of passengers ever she carried,Round on the bar at the left that fairly stuck out of the water.Well, as I said, he learnt me all that I knew of the river,And was I to learn him now which side to take of an islandWhen I knew he knew it like his right hand from his left hand?My, but I hated to speak! It certainly seemed like my tongue clove,Like the Bible says, to the roof of my mouth! But I had to.'Captain,' I says, and it seemed like another person was talking,'Do you usu'lly take that island there on the eastward?''Yes,' he says, and he laughed, 'and I thought I had learnt you to do it,When you was going up.' 'But not going down, did you, captain?''Down?' And he whirled at me, and, without ever stopping his laughing,Turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes fairly bulged from their sockets.Then he whirled back again, and looked up and down on the river,Like he was hunting out the shape of the shore and the landmarks.Well, I suppose the thing has happened to every one sometime,When you find the points of the compass have swapped with each other,And at the instant you're looking, the North and the South have changed places.I knew what was in his mind as well as Dunlevy himself did.Neither one of us spoke a word for nearly a minute.Then in a kind of whisper he says, 'Take the wheel, Captain Davis!'Let the spokes fly, and while I made a jump forwards to catch them,Staggered into that chair – well, the very one you are in, ma'am.Set there breathing quick, and, when he could speak, all he said was,'This is the end of it for me on the river, Jim Davis,'Reached up over his head for his coat where it hung by that window,Trembled onto his feet, and stopped in the door there a second,Stared in hard like as if for good-by to the things he was used to,Shut the door behind him, and never come back again through it."While we were silent, not liking to prompt the pilot with questions,"Well," he said, at last, "it was no use to argue. We tried it,In the half-hearted way that people do that don't mean it.Every one was his friend here on the Kanawha, and we knewIt was the first time he ever had lost his bearings, but he knew,In such a thing as that, that the first and the last are the same time.When we had got through trying our worst to persuade him, he onlyShook his head and says, 'I am done for, boys, and you know it,'Left the boat at Wheeling, and left his life on the river —Left his life on the earth, you may say, for I don't call it living,Setting there homesick at home for the wheel he can never go back to.Reads the river-news regular; knows just the stage of the waterUp and down the whole way from Cincinnati to Pittsburg;Follows every boat from the time she starts out in the spring-timeTill she lays up in the summer, and then again in the winter;Wants to talk all about her and who is her captain and pilot;Then wants to slide away to that everlastingly puzzlingThing that happened to him that morning on the KanawhaWhen he lost his bearings and North and South had changed places —No, I don't call that living, whatever the rest of you call it."We were silent again till that woman spoke up, "And what was it,Captain, that kept him from going back and being a pilot?""Well, ma'am," after a moment the pilot patiently answered,"I don't hardly believe that I could explain it exactly."