Eleven Possible Cases

THE END OF ALL

The difficulty that I experience in complying with your request, dear spirit, springs from the terrestrial limitations of thought and expression, from which, as you may well know, I have not been long enough with you to free myself.

I shall, however, give you a plain narrative of the events attending the extinction of life on our planet, asking you only to remember that I am doing it just as I would have done it, were it possible, for a fellow human being while on earth, using the phraseology and the terrestrial time divisions with which I am most familiar.

The circumstance which at our last intercourse I was trying to explain to you was simply this: In the early summer of the year 1892 a sudden interruption of navigation occurred on the Pacific coast, which, curiously enough, attracted very little attention outside of scientific circles. I was living at the house of my wealthy friend, Judge Brisbane, in Gramercy Park. To tell you the truth, I was in love with his beautiful daughter, of whom I shall have to speak more fully to you, for she was intimately associated with me in the appalling scenes which you desire me to describe.

I was sitting in the Judge's library on the night of June 25. His daughter was present, and I had been conversing with her in an undertone while the Judge read the evening papers. He suddenly laid down the paper, took off his spectacles, and, turning round in his chair, said to me: "Did you see the brief dispatch in the morning papers two days ago from San Francisco, saying that all the eastern-bound vessels were overdue on that coast?"

I replied at once that I had not noticed it.

"It is astonishing," he said, "that in our present system of journalism the most important events connected with the welfare of mankind receive the slightest attention from the newspapers, and the trivialities of life are most voluminously treated. A movement in the iron trade that affects millions of homes gets a brief paragraph in small type, and the quarrel of a ballet girl with her paramour receives illuminated attention down whole columns. Here is something taking place in the Pacific Ocean of surpassing interest to the race, and nobody pays the slightest attention to it except, perhaps, the consignees and shipping clerks."

"What is it?" we both asked, with the languid interest that young people, having an overmastering personal affair on hand, would be apt to take in matters of national or universal importance.

The Judge got up, and going to a side table, where he kept his papers piled in chronological order, pulled out a recent issue of a morning journal, and after looking it over searchingly a moment, said:

"Here. I should think you would notice such a paragraph as this." Then he read, as I recollect, a telegraphic dispatch to this effect:

"San Francisco, June 23. – Considerable anxiety is felt here in commercial circles by the non-arrival of any eastward-bound vessels for a week. The steamship Cathay of the Occidental Line is overdue four days. An unusual easterly wind has been blowing for twenty-four hours. Weather mild.

"That dispatch, you will perceive," said the Judge, "was sent two days ago. Now here, on the 25th, I read in the evening paper another dispatch from San Francisco, hidden away at the bottom of a column of commercial news. Listen to this:

"San Francisco, June 25. – The entire suspension of travel from the West continues to excite the gravest apprehensions. Nothing but coastwise vessels have come in during the past eight days. The U. S. cruiser Mobile left Honolulu three weeks ago for this coast. There is no official intimation of a storm in the Chinese seas."

The Judge laid the paper down, and regarded us both a moment in silence, as if expecting to hear some remark that indicated our suddenly awakened curiosity.

I don't think we responded with any adequate interest to the occasion. Miss Brisbane did, indeed, stare at her father in her dreamy, abstracted way a moment, and then got up, and, going to the open window, began to arrange the curtains, as if relinquishing whatever problem there was to the superior acumen of the masculine mind.

I think I said that it looked as if there had been a cyclone somewhere, and if there had we should in all probability get the accounts of it soon enough.

"But, young man," replied the Judge, with his majesterial emphasis, "cyclones do not extend from the fiftieth degree of north latitude to the fortieth degree of south latitude, and vessels are due at San Francisco from Melbourne and Japan."

"What, then, other than a storm at sea could have caused a detention of all these vessels?" I asked, and I must have unwittingly betrayed in the tone of my voice, or the expression of my face, that considerate superciliousness with which youth regards the serious notions of mature philosophers, for the Judge, putting his gold spectacles upon his nose, and regarding me over the top of them a moment, said rather severely:

"Other than the known and regular phenomena of this planet do not interest young men. If I could answer your question there would be no special interest in the matter."

I mention these trivial incidents because, insignificant as they may seem, they were the first ripples of that disaster which was soon enough to overwhelm us all, and to show you what were the only premonitions the world had of the events which were to follow.

On June 26, the subject did not occur to me. A hundred other things of far more immediate consequence to me occupied my attention. A young man who is preparing to get married is not apt to take somber views of anything. Nor is he very apt to allow the contumacy of age in his prospective father-in-law to aggravate him. It was a pardonable freak, I thought, in a man who had retired in most respects from the active world, to dogmatize a little about that world now that he judged it through his favorite evening paper. When, therefore, on the night of the 26th, while at the tea-table, the Judge broke out again about the meteorological wave on the Pacific coast, his daughter Kate and I exchanged a rapid but furtive glance which said, in the perfect understanding of lovers, "There comes the old gentleman's new hobby again, and we can well afford to treat it leniently."

The Judge had the damp evening paper in his hand, and he disregarded the steaming cup of tea which his daughter had poured for him.

"Well," he said, with a toss of self-satisfied import. "Now the newspapers are waking up to the significance of the California news." He then read from the paper, as nearly as I can recollect, something like the following:

San Francisco, June 26. – There is an intense and growing anxiety on this coast with respect to the non-appearance of any eastward-bound vessels. The breeze from the east continues, and is unprecedented.

"Now, I should like to know," said the Judge, as he laid down the paper and took up his tea-cup, "why a breeze from the east in California should be unprecedented."

"Because," I ventured to remark, "it usually blows from the sea at this season."

"Nonsense," exclaimed the Judge with vigor. "A variation for a few days in wind or weather is a common occurrence everywhere. Fancy a message sent all over the world from the West Indies that the trade winds were six days late, or a telegram from Minnesota that the winter frosts had been interfered with for a week by pleasant sunshine. No, sir. The event of importance to the Californian at this moment is the mysterious something that has happened out at sea, and there is no excuse for his associating a summer breeze from the east with it, except that there is something peculiar about that breeze that associates it in the mind with the predominant mystery."

I smiled. "You will pardon me, Judge, but it seems to me," I said, "that you are trying to invest the whole affair with an occult significance that is subjective. I suppose that in a few hours the matter will be explained and forgotten."

In a moment we were in one of those foolish little wrangles in which, so far as argument is concerned, the younger man is at a great disadvantage, when the elder, however unreasonable his claims, enforces them with the advantage of age and position. I remember that the desire to convince Kate on the one hand that I was free from what I conceived to be her father's unreasonableness, and sustain my independence of views on the other hand, led me to say much more than was polite, for I exasperated the old gentleman, and with a curt and not altogether complimentary remark he got up and left the room.

The moment he was gone I turned to the daughter and laughingly said: "Well, my dear, I am afraid I have offended your father without intending it, but you at least understand me, and are free from his superstition."

To my surprise she regarded me with a serious air, and replied: "I do not know what you mean by superstition. My father believes that something has happened, and I feel that he is right."

"You do not mean to tell me," I said, "that you believe anything has happened that can concern us?"

She made no reply. I looked at her with some astonishment, and wondered if I had offended her by opposing her father's childish views.

"Perhaps," I persisted, "you, too, think I am stupidly unreasonable because I will not consent to be dishonestly chimerical."

I well remember the look of sad reproach with which she silently regarded me, and I well remember, too, the thought that came into my mind. I said to myself: "This is the same obduracy that her father has shown. Odd it is that I never noticed the trait in her before." Then I added, with an equal obduracy that I was not conscious of:

"Perhaps you, too, have discovered some peculiarity of good sense in me that is offensive, and you are afraid that something will happen if we – "

Here she interrupted me in her quiet, resolute, and reproachful way.

"Something has happened," she said.

I was amazed. If I had suddenly discovered that the woman I loved was unfaithful to me it could not have produced, in my frame of mind at that moment, a greater shock. It seemed to me then that the wooing of months, the confidence and affection of a year, were to be sacrificed in a moment of infatuated stubbornness. The very thought was so unnatural that it produced a revulsion in my own feelings.

"My darling," I said, as I went toward her impulsively, "we are playing the unworthy part of fools. Nothing can ever happen that will make us love each other less, or prevent you from being my wife."

I put my arm around her in the old familiar way. She was passive and irresponsive. She stood there, limply holding the curtain, with one white arm upraised, her beautiful head bent over and her eyes cast down so that I could not look into her face. This stony obduracy was so new and unlike her that I withdrew my arm and stepped back a little to regard her with astonishment, not unmingled with pique. At that moment she lifted her head slowly, and as she looked at me with a dreamy and far-away pathos I saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

"It seems to me," she said, with a voice that sounded as if it was addressed to an invisible phantom way beyond me. "It seems to me that I shall never be your wife!"

I must have stared at her several seconds in silence. Then I said:

"You are ill. You are not yourself. When you have recovered your normal condition I will come back."

I snatched a kiss from her lips, that were strangely cold, and rushed from the house.

It was not till the next morning, when I woke up after a short and disturbed sleep, that my mind reverted to the cause of all this purely sentimental disagreement, and I felt a strong desire to have events prove that the Judge was slightly monomaniacal, and that I was right. I went to Riccadonnas' for my breakfast and got all the morning papers, as usual, but this time with a distinct confidence that the news would be the best vindication of my good sense, and that I should yet have a good laugh at the Judge.

I opened the paper as I sipped my coffee, and the first thing my eyes fell on were the headlines of a dispatch from St. Louis. I read them with an inexplicable sense of something sinking in me. As I recall them they ran as follows:

"Strange news from the West. All communication west of Salt Lake City ceases. Meteorological puzzle. What is the matter with the wires?"

Then followed the dispatch, which I have not forgotten:

St. Louis, June 26, 8 P. M. – A dispatch received here from Yuma on the Texas Pacific announces that no eastern-bound train has come in since morning, and all attempts to open communication by telegraph with points west of that place have failed. It is the opinion of railroad men that a great storm is raging in California. Weather here pleasant, with a steady, dry wind from the east blowing.

Immediately following this was another news item which I can quote from memory:

Denver, June 26, 9 P. M. – Intelligence from Cheyenne is to the effect that railway travel and telegraphic communication west of Pocatello on the Union Pacific and Ogden and on the Central Pacific have been interrupted by a storm. The telegraph wires are believed to be in good condition, but up to nine o'clock there has been no return current.

I read these paragraphs over three or four times. Ordinarily I should have passed them by and given my attention to other and more congenial news. But now a dull fear that events were conspiring to widen the breach between myself and the Brisbanes focussed my interest on them. There was that easterly wind blowing again; was I, too, growing superstitious? I turned over all the papers. The news was the same in all, but there was not an editorial paragraph of comment in any of the sheets, which, indeed, teamed with all the details of active commercial, political, and social life.

I went down town after eating my breakfast and found that the intelligence had not awakened any public attention that was observable. The two or three persons to whom I spoke with regard to it treated it as one of the passing sensations of the hour that would be explained sooner or later. It was not till the evening papers of the 27th came out that the matter began to be discussed. The dispatches in these papers were of a nature to arouse widespread anxiety. It was very obvious from their construction and import that the feeling west of the Mississippi was more intense than had up to this time been suspected. The columns of the papers were filled with brief but rather startling telegrams from various points. Denver, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, St. Paul, St. Louis, and Chicago sent anxious sentences which had a thrill of trepidation in their broken phrases. And it was easy to see that this feeling of deep concern increased with each dispatch from a point further west.

Telegrams sent to St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul represented the condition of anxiety in Ogden and Pocatello to be bordering on excitement. Fears were entertained, the dispatches said, of a "meteorological cataclysm," and thousands who had friends either on the coast or in transit were besieging the telegraph offices in vain.

The hurried comments of the evening papers on the news were singularly unsatisfactory and non-committal. "The unprecedented storm that is now raging on the Pacific slope," I read, "and which has temporarily cut off communications with the far West, will by its magnitude fill the country with the most serious apprehensions." "The earliest news from California, which shall give us the details of the storm," said another paper, "will be looked for with eagerness, and will be promptly and fully furnished to our readers."

As curious as anybody could be to know what kind of a storm it was that had stopped railroad travel from Idaho to Mexico, and remarking with surprise that the Signal Office utterly refused to recognize a great storm anywhere, I dismissed the subject from my mind with the reflection that there would in all probability be explanatory news in the morning, and resolved to make my usual visit to the Brisbane family.

To my surprise, Kate received me cordially, and with no other allusion to the unpleasantness of the night before than a demure remark that she was afraid she had offended me.

"Let us not refer to it at all," I said, "and thus avoid making idiots of ourselves."

"I am glad you came to-night," she remarked, after a moment's silence, "for I wanted to tell you of the change we are going to make."

A little pang darted through me. It was said so seriously.

"What is it, my dear," I asked, trying to be as affectionate as if the conditions had not changed.

"My father and I have determined to go to Europe."

"To Europe!" I repeated, aghast. "You surely do not mean it?"

"Yes," resolutely. "He wanted to consult you about it, but was afraid you would disagree with his plans."

"And when did he make up his mind to take this sudden move?"

"This morning."

"And you intend to go with him?"

"Yes, and I was going to ask you to go, too."

"When do you propose to go?"

"Immediately."

It was evident to my mind now that this old man was a panic-stricken monomaniac, and had infected his daughter with his fears.

"Kate," I said, as I took her by her hands and pulled her to the sofa beside me, "you are running away from something; it is not from me, is it?"

"I want you to go with us," she answered.

"But you knew when you asked me that I could not go so suddenly. You expected me to refuse."

"No," she said, "I expect you to consent."

"Be careful. In a moment of bravado I may take you at your word, at any cost!"

She caught hold of me. "Do," she said, tremulously, and I felt a little shiver in her hand. "Do, do."

"I would rather go with you than lose you," I said at a hazard, "and if you are determined to go, I believe I will accompany you if your father will consent."

"We are determined," she calmly replied.

"But I must put my affairs in order," I suggested.

"How many hours will it take you?"

"Hours?" I repeated. "You would not like to start to-night, surely?"

"Yes," she answered, "I would gladly start to-night."

My patience was giving way very fast at this imperturbable obduracy. "Perhaps," I said, "you will give me some adequate reason for a haste that I cannot comprehend."

She did not answer. She was listening, with her head averted, and she held up her hand for me to listen also, as if that were her answer. Then there came through the open window the hoarse cry of a distant newsboy who was bellowing an "extra."

There was something weird in her attitude and action, connecting, as they did, her motives with that discordant, ominous cry.

"It's an extra," I said, as unconcernedly as possible. "I'll get a copy. There may be some good news for you," and I made a move toward the window.

"Don't," she said, quietly. "We were talking about going to Europe. Pa is not familiar with the business of securing passages, and you are. You could relieve him of a great deal of worry, and if you would go with us – "

"Kate," I said, "do you want me to go?"

"Yes, I do," she replied. "I do not want to leave you here."

"Then," I said, "I will go. I will see your father in the morning and tell him that I will attend to the whole business of securing passages. I will set about arranging my affairs at once."

She then let me plague her a little about her timidity, and after a half hour of playful badinage on my part I came away, with a parting promise on my lips to lose no delay in making the arrangements for our departure.

Such, however, was not my intention. I felt sure that the Judge and his daughter would change their minds if I could only manage to delay matters a few days. To go running off to Europe at a moment's notice would be utter folly for me.

As I left the house I heard the voices of the newsboys in various keys still calling the extras. I bought a paper and read it under the gaslight of the church on Twentieth Street. "Display" headlines announced, "As Silent as the Grave; Nothing Heard from the Pacific. Great Excitement in Chicago and St. Louis." I must have stood there ten minutes poring over the strange news. An expedition in a special train had been sent west from Yuma that day, with railroad men and doctors. It had left at 3 P. M. The train reached Mesquite in less than an hour, and word was sent back from that station, "All right here; track clear; will reach the springs at 9 P. M." A dispatch from Yuma sent at 10 o'clock and received at St. Louis said, "Nothing further heard from the special." News from Chicago, where the excitement appeared to be momentarily growing, reflected intelligence from Denver, St. Paul, and Kansas City, and it was vain to ignore the fact that the entire West was in an alarming condition of anxiety. A special train was fitting out at Cheyenne under Government orders to start in the morning with a corps of Signal Service men, army officers, and electricians. It was to go provided with every scientific appliance, and to carry an insulated cable to be paid out from the car. The accounts said that the people were all on the streets in Cheyenne, and an enormous mob surrounded the station where the preparations were making.

For the first time I felt, as I threw the paper away, what I can only call a sense of misgiving. As I walked up the deserted avenue this feeling grew upon me, and when I reached Twenty-third Street, on my way to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a sudden and entirely new reflection made me stop unconsciously as I turned it over in my mind. "If this strange news has affected Judge Brisbane and his daughter so seriously, why may it not be affecting millions of other people similarly? If there is at this moment a panic in the West, how long will it take the reflex wave to reach New York?"

The next morning events, or at least the publication of them, had reached that condition which arrests public attention everywhere. The news from the West swamped all else in the morning journals. The editors, by their work, now acknowledged that the mysterious silence on the Pacific Slope was by far the most important subject for consideration before the world. The moment I glanced at the sheets I saw that there was but one theme in the journalistic mind.

Two days had passed, and the silence was unbroken. Never before in the history of the world had the absence of news become such important news. Public attention was now mainly centered on the attempt to get a train of observation through from Cheyenne.

There was a hopeful spirit to most of the accounts, as if it was believed that science would unravel the mystery. But there was nothing from any quarter of the globe that as yet afforded the feeblest gleam of comfort. The Government train was to start early on this, the morning of the 28th, and the papers were only able to furnish details of the preparation and reports of the public excitement in Cheyenne and Denver. The officers on the train were to send dispatches from every station west of Pocatello. They were sagacious, experienced men, and the expedition was under the direction of the well-known engineer, General Albert Carrall.

I felt as I read the accounts that these men would probably clear up the mystery, and I resolved to delay engaging the passages on the ocean steamer until the next day. So I wrote a carefully worded note to Judge Brisbane, informing him that I would attend to the matter immediately. Had I then had the slightest knowledge of the cumulative rapidity with which a panic moves I would not have taken this risk. But my whole object was to gain time, with the hope that something would occur to change the minds of my two timid friends.