Questionable Shapes | Page 7

it had been
sent him for some good reason special to himself; though at the times
when he had prefaced his story of it with terms of slighting scepticism,
he had professed neither to know nor to care why the thing had
happened. He always said that he had never been particularly interested
in the supernatural, and then was ashamed of a lie that was false to
universal human experience; but he could truthfully add that he had
never in his life felt less like seeing a ghost than that morning. It was
not full day, but it was perfectly light, and there the thing was, as
palpable to vision as any of the men that moment confronting him with
cocktails in their hands. Asked if he did not think he had dreamed it, he
answered scornfully that he did not think, he knew, he had not dreamed
it; he did not value the experience, it was and had always been perfectly
meaningless, but he would stake his life upon its reality. Asked if it had
not perhaps been the final office of a nightcap, he disdained to answer
at all, though he did not openly object to the laugh which the
suggestion raised.
Secretly, within his inmost, Hewson felt justly punished by the laughter.
He had been unworthy of his apparition in lightly exposing it to such a
chance; he had fallen below the dignity of his experience. He might
never hope to fathom its meaning while he lived; but he grieved for the
wrong he had done it, as if at the instant of the apparition he had
offered that majestic, silent figure some grotesque indignity: thrown a
pillow at it, or hailed it in tones of mocking offence. He was
profoundly and exquisitely ashamed even before he ceased to tell the
story for his listeners' idle amusement. When he stopped doing so, and
snubbed solicitation with the curt answer that everybody had heard that
story, he was retrospectively ashamed; and mixed with the expectation
of seeing the vision again was the formless wish to offer it some sort of
reparation, of apology.
He longed to prove himself not wholly unworthy of the advance that
had been made him from the other world upon grounds which he had
done his worst to prove untenable. He could not imagine what the
grounds were, though he had to admit their probable existence; such an
event might have no obvious or present significance, but it had not
happened for nothing; it could not have happened for nothing. Hewson

might not have been in what he thought any stressful need of ghostly
comfort or reassurance in matters of faith. He was not inordinately
agnostic, or in the way of becoming so. He was simply an average
skeptical American, who denied no more than he affirmed, and who
really concerned himself so little about his soul, though he tried to keep
his conscience decently clean, that he had not lately asked whether
other people had such a thing or not. He had not lost friends, and he
was so much alone in this world that it seemed improbable the fate of
any uncle or cousin, in the absence of more immediate kindred, should
be mystically forecast to him. He was perfectly well at the time of the
apparition, and it could not have been the figment of a disordered
digestion, as the lusty hunger which willingly appeased itself with the
coffee of the St. Johnswort Inn sufficiently testified. Yet, in spite of all
this, an occurrence so out of the course of events must have had some
message for him, and it must have been his fault that he could not
divine it. A sense of culpability grew upon him with the sense of his
ignominy in cheapening it by making it subservient to what he knew
was, in the last analysis, a wretched vanity. At least he could refuse
himself that miserable gratification hereafter, and he got back some
measure of self-respect in forbidding himself the pleasure he might
have taken in being noted for a strange experience he could never be
got to speak of.

V.
The implication of any such study as this is that the subject of it is
continuously if not exclusively occupied with the matter which is
supposed to make him interesting. But of course it was not so with
Hewson, who perhaps did not think of his apparition once in a fortnight,
or oftener, say, than he thought of the odd girl with whom for no reason,
except contemporaneity in his acquaintance, he associated with it. If he
never thought of the apparition without subconsciously expecting its
return, he equally expected when he thought of Miss Hernshaw that the
chances of society would bring them together