Questionable Shapes | Page 6

about it. He always wished to add something, to amplify the fact,
to heighten the mystery of the circumstances, to divine the occult
significance of the incident. In itself the incident, when stated, was
rather bare and insufficient; but he held himself rigidly to the actual
details, and he felt that in this at least he was offering the powers which
had vouchsafed him the experience a species of atonement for breaking
faith with them. It seemed like breaking faith with Miss Hernshaw, too,
though this impression would have been harder to reason than the other.
Both impressions began to wear off after the first tellings of the story;
the wound that Hewson gave his sensibility in the very first cicatrized
before the second, and at the fourth or fifth it had quite calloused over;
so that he did not mind anything so much as what always seemed to
him the inadequate effect of his experience with his hearers. Some
listened carelessly; some nervously; some incredulously, as if he were
trying to put up a job on them; some compassionately, as if he were not
quite right, and ought to be looked after. There was a consensus of
opinion, among those who offered any sort of comment, that he ought
to give it to the Psychical Research, and at the bottom of Hewson's
heart, there was a dread that the spiritualists would somehow get hold
of him. This remained to stay him, when the shame of breaking faith
with Miss Hernshaw and with Mystery no longer restrained him from
exploiting the fact. He was aware of lying in wait for opportunities of
telling it, and he swore himself to tell it only upon direct provocation,
or when the occasion seemed imperatively to demand it. He commonly
brought it out to match some experience of another; but he could never
deny a friendly appeal when he sat with some good fellows over their

five-o'clock cocktails at the club, and one of them would say in behalf
of a newcomer, "Hewson, tell Wilkins that odd thing that happened to
you up country, in the summer." In complying he tried to save his
self-respect by affecting a contemptuous indifference in the matter, and
beginning reluctantly and pooh-poohingly. He had pangs afterwards as
he walked home to dress for dinner, but his self-reproach was less
afflicting as time passed. His suffering from it was never so great as
from the slight passed upon his apparition, when Wilkins or what other
it might be, would meet the suggestion that he should tell him about it,
with the hurried interposition, "Yes, I have heard that; good story."
This would make Hewson think that he was beginning to tell his story
too often, and that perhaps the friend who suggested his doing so, was
playing upon his forgetfulness. He wondered if he were really
something of a bore with it, and whether men were shying off from him
at the club on account of it. He fancied that might be the reason why
the circle at the five-o'clock cocktails gradually diminished as the
winter passed. He continued to join it till the chance offered of squarely
refusing to tell Wilkins, or whoever, about the odd thing that had
happened to him up country in the summer. Then he felt that he had in
a manner retrieved himself, and could retire from the five-o'clock
cocktails with honor.
That it was a veridical phantom which had appeared to him he did not
in his inmost at all doubt, though in his superficial consciousness he
questioned it, not indeed so disrespectfully as he pooh-poohed it to
others, but still questioned it. This he thought somehow his due as a
man of intelligence who ought not to suffer himself to fall into
superstition even upon evidence granted to few. Superficially, however,
as well as interiorly, he was aware of always expecting its repetition;
and now, six months after the occurrence this expectation was as vivid
with him as it was the first moment after the vision had vanished, while
his tongue was yet in act to stay it with speech. He would not have been
surprised at any time in walking into his room to find It there; or
waking at night to confront It in the electric flash which he kindled by a
touch of the button at his bedside. Rather, he was surprised that nothing
of the sort happened, to confirm him in his belief that he had been all
but in touch with the other life, or to give him some hint, the slightest,
the dimmest, why this vision had been shown him, and then instantly

broken and withdrawn. In that inmost of his where he recognized its
validity, he could not deny that it had a meaning, and that