As soon as I could quiet my wife's agitation and induce her to look again for the appearance which she believed she had beheld, but which she told me had now vanished, I made a search upon the sidewalk for the objects whose fall I had both felt and seen. They were plainly evident, even in the dim light, and I gathered up a number of them and carried them under the lamp for examination. They were pansies, freshly gathered, and with their leaves and stems damp, as if just taken from water. Hastening to the house, we went directly to our room, and lighting the gas looked eagerly toward the shelf where we had left the vase filled with pansies some three hours before. The vase was there, half-filled with water, but not a single flower was standing in it.
The next day was Sunday and all the family went to morning service at the church. As my wife and I, with our daughter between us and following my father and mother at some distance, reached the scene of our adventure on the previous night, we saw lying on the sidewalk a half-dozen pansies which we had evidently overlooked, owing to the dim light in which we had gathered up the others. At sight of them the little girl dropped my hand, to which she was clinging, and with a cry of surprise ran to pick them up.
"Why," she exclaimed, "how did these come here? They are the pansies I picked for mamma yesterday from my pansy bed!"
"Oh, no, dear," I said; "these are probably some other pansies; how can you tell they came from your bed?"
"Why," she replied, "I know every one of my pansies, and this one"—holding up a blossom that was of so deep and uniform a purple as to appear almost black—"I could tell anywhere, for there was no other in the bed like it."
So she collected all the scattered flowers and insisted on carrying them to church, and on returning home they were replaced, with their fellows, in the vase from which they had been so mysteriously transferred the night before.
It has been my purpose, in preparing these stories for publication, not to permit myself to be led into any attempt to explain them, or even to embellish them with comment, and thus perhaps weaken what I desire to present as a plain statement of fact—yet this incident of the pansies seems to me (although for quite personal reasons) so touching, and so tender in its suggestions, that I cannot forbear a word or two concerning it. In thus indulging myself I am aware that the reader may think he finds a contradiction of the statement I have made in the preface of this book as to my non-committal attitude regarding Spiritualism. On this point I can only say that while I am not convinced as to the origin of the phenomenon, I should find much comfort if I could with assurance attribute it to a spiritualistic source. There are doubtless many who will thus refer it, and I write these lines in sympathy, even if somewhat doubtingly, with their point of view.
In every way this event stands unique in my experience—in place of its occurrence, and in all its circumstances. The town was the scene of my youthful wooing—the street one in which my fiancée and I had walked and talked a thousand times on the way between my home and hers. To this town, and to this familiar path, the new wife had come with me, and with us both the child of her love and sacrifice. Is there no significance, is there no consolation, not only to myself but to others who have been bereaved, in this episode? The loving gift of flowers to her new guardian by the innocent and unconscious child; the approval of the offering through its repetition, by the apparent spirit of the mother that bore her!—these things may mean nothing, yet in me whom they approached so nearly they have strengthened the hope that lives in every human heart, that the flame of our best and purest affections shall survive the seeming extinguishment of the grave.
Science, to be sure, has its explanation, and in fairness that explanation should be heard. To quote an eminent authority who has favored me with his views on the subject:—"The power that moved the pansies was a psychic force inherent in the human personality [of your wife] and exercised without the knowledge or cooperation of the objective self." (Dr. John D. Quackenbos.)
In other words, it was not the spirit of the dead wife that lifted the pansies and showered them upon us, but what we must call, for want of a better term, the living wife's "subliminal self." The vision that appeared and seemed to be casting the flowers was a freak of the psychical consciousness—there was no apparition save in my wife's overwrought imagination.