The Ghost of Dr Harris - Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Ghost of Doctor Harris by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I'm afraid
this ghost story will bear a very faded aspect when
transferred to paper. Whatever effect it had on you, whatever
charm it retains in your memory, is perhaps to be
attributed to the favorable circumstances under which it was originally told.
We were sitting, i remember, late in the evening in

(00:23):
your drawing room, where the lights of the chandelier were
so muffled as to produce a delicious obscurity through which
the fire diffused a dim red glow in this rich twilight.
The feelings of the party had been properly attuned by
some tales of English superstitioned, and the lady of smith
Hills Hall had just been describing that bloody footstep which

(00:44):
marks the threshold of her old mansion. When your Yankee guest,
zealous for the honor of his country and desirous of
proving that his dead compatriots have the same ghostly privileges
as other dead people if they think it worthwhile to
use them, began a story of something wonderful that long
ago happened to himself. Possibly in the verbal narrative, he

(01:04):
may have assumed a little more license than would be
allowed in a written record, for the sake of the
artistic effect. He may then have thrown in here and
there a few slight circumstances which he will not think
it proper to retain in what he now puts forth
as the sober statement of a veritable fact. A good
many years ago, it must be as many as fifteen,

(01:25):
perhaps more, and while I was still a bachelor, I
resided at Boston and the United States. In that city
there is a large and long established library styled the Athenaeum,
connected with which is a reading room well supplied with
foreign and American periodicals and newspapers. A splendid edifice has
since been erected by the proprietors of the institution, but

(01:48):
at the period I speak of, it was contained within
a large old mansion, formerly the town residence of an
imminent citizen of Boston. The reading room, a spacious hall
with a group of the leaca on at one end,
in the Belvidere Apollo at the other, was frequented by
not a few elderly merchants retired from business, by clergymen
and lawyers, and by such literary men as we had

(02:11):
amongst us. These good people were mostly old, leisurely and somnolent,
and used to nod and doze for hours together with
the newspapers before them, ever and anon, recovering themselves so
far as to read a word or two of the
politics of the day, sitting, as it were, on the
boundary of the land of dreams, and having little to
do with this world except through the newspapers, which they

(02:34):
so tenaciously grasped. One of these worthies whom I occasionally
saw there was the Reverend doctor Harris, a Unitarian clergyman
of considerable repute and eminence. He was very far advanced
in life, no less than eighty years old, and probably more,
and he resided, I think, at Dorchester, a suburban village

(02:58):
in the immediate vicinity of Boston. I had never been
personally acquainted with the good old clergyman, but had heard
of him all my life as a noteworthy man, so
that when he was first pointed out to me, I
looked at him with a certain specialty of attention, and
always subsequently eyed him with a degree of interest. Whenever
I happened to see him at the Athenaeum or elsewhere.

(03:20):
He was a small, withered and firm, but brisk old
gentleman with snow white hair, a somewhat stooping figure, but
yet a remarkable alacrity of movement. I remember it was
in the street when I first noticed him. The doctor
was plodding along with the staff, but turned smartly about
on being addressed by the gentleman who was with me,

(03:43):
and responded with a good deal of vivacity. Who is he?
I inquired, as soon as he had passed. The Reverend
Doctor Harris of Dorchester, replied, my companion, And from that
time I often saw him and never forgot his aspect.
His especial haunt was the Athenaeum. There I used to

(04:05):
see him daily, and almost always with the newspaper the
Boston Post, which was the leading journal of the Democratic
Party in the Northern States. As old Doctor Harris had
been a noted Democrat during his more active life, it
was a very natural thing that he should still like
to read the Boston Post. There, his reverend figure was
accustomed to sit day after day in the self same

(04:28):
chair by the fireside, and by degrees, seeing him there
so constantly, I began to look towards him as I
entered the reading room and felt that a kind of acquaintance,
at least on my part, was established. Not that I
had any reason, as long as this venerable person remained
in the body, to suppose that he had ever noticed me.
But by some subtle connection, the small, white haired and

(04:51):
firm yet vivacious figure of an old clergyman became associated
with my idea and recollection of the place. One day,
especially about noon, as was generally his hour, I am
perfectly certain that I had seen this figure of old
doctor Harris and taken my customary note of him, although
I remember nothing in his appearance at all different from

(05:12):
what I had seen on many previous occasions. But that
very evening a friend said to me, did you hear
that old doctor Harris is dead? No, I said, very quietly,
and it cannot be true, for I saw him at
the atheneum today. You must be mistaken, rejoined my friend.

(05:33):
He is certainly dead, and confirmed the fact with such
special circumstance that I could no longer doubt it. My
friend has often since assured me that I seemed much
startled at the intelligence, But as well as I can recollect,
I believe that I was very little disturbed, if at all,
but set down the apparition as a mistake of my own,
or perhaps the interposition of a familiar idea into the

(05:55):
place and amid the circumstances with which I had been
accustomed to associate it. The next day, as I ascended
the steps of the Athenaeum, I remember thinking within myself, well,
I never shall see old doctor Harris again. With this
thought in my mind, as I opened the door of
the reading room, I glanced towards the spot and chair
where doctor Harris usually sat, and there, to my astonishment,

(06:20):
sat the gray and firm figure of the deceased doctor,
reading the newspaper as was his wont his own death
must have been recorded that very morning in that very newspaper.
I have no recollection of being greatly discomposed at the moment,
nor indeed that I felt any extraordinary emotion whatever, Probably,
if ghosts were in the habit of coming among us,

(06:43):
they would coincide with the ordinary train of affairs and
melt into them so familiarly that we should not be
shocked at their presence at all events. So it was
in this instance I looked through the newspapers as usual,
and turned over the periodically taking about as much interest
in their contents as at other times. Once or twice,

(07:06):
no doubt, I may have lifted my eyes from the
page to look again at the venerable doctor, who ought
them to have been lying in his coffin, dressed out
for the grave, but who felt such interest in the
Boston Post as to come back from the other world
to read it in the morning after his death. One
might have supposed that he would have cared more about
the novelties with a Sphere to which he had just

(07:27):
been introduced than about the politics he had left behind him.
The apparition took no notice of me, nor behaved otherwise
in any respect than on any previous day. Nobody but
myself seemed to notice him. And yet the old gentleman
round about the fire beside his chair were his lifelong acquaintances,

(07:48):
who were perhaps thinking of his death, and who in
a day or two would deem it a proper courtesy
to attend his funeral. I have forgotten how the ghost
of doctor Harris took its departure from the Athenae on
this occasion, or in fact, whether the ghost or I
went first. This equanimity and almost indifference on my part.

(08:09):
The careless way in which I glanced at so singular
a mystery and left it aside, is what now surprises
me as much as anything else in the affair. From
that time, for a long while thereafter, for weeks at least,
and I know not, but for months, I used to
see the figure of doctor Harris quite as frequently as
before his death. It grew to be so common that

(08:31):
at length I regarded the venerable defunct no more than
any other of the old fogies who bassed before the
fire and dosed over the newspapers. It was but a ghost,
nothing but thin air, not tangible nor appreciable, nor demanding
any attention from a man of flesh and blood. I
cannot recollect any cold shudderings, any awe, any repugnance, any

(08:54):
emotion whatsoever, such as would be suitable and decorous on
beholding a visit from the spiritual world. It is very strange,
but such is the truth. It appears excessively odd to
me now that I did not adopt such means as
I readily might to ascertain whether the appearance had solid

(09:15):
substance or was merely gaseous in vapory I might have
brushed against him, have jostled his chair, or have trodden
accidentally on his poor old toes. I might have snatched
the Boston Post, unless that were an apparition too out
of his shadowy hands. I might have tested him in
a hundred ways, But I did nothing of the kind.

(09:39):
Perhaps I was loth to destroy the illusion and to
rob myself so good of a ghost story which might
probably have been explained in some very commonplace way. Perhaps,
after all, I had a secret dread of the old phenomenon,
and therefore kept within my limits with an instinctive caution
which I mistook for indifference. As it may, here is

(10:01):
the fact I saw the figure day after day for
a considerable space of time, and took no pains to
ascertain whether it was a ghost or no. I never,
to my knowledge, saw him come into the reading room
or depart from it. There sat Doctor Harris in his
customary chair, and I can say little else about him.

(10:21):
After a certain period, I really know not how long
I began to notice or to fancy a peculiar regard
in the old gentleman's aspect towards myself. I sometimes found
him gazing at me and unless I deceived myself. There
was a sort of expectancy in his face. His spectacles,

(10:42):
I think, were shoved up so that his bleared eyes
might beat my own. Had he been a living man,
I should have flattered myself that good doctor Harris was,
for some reason or other interested in me and desirous
of a personal acquaintance. Being a ghost and amenable to
ghostly laws, it was natural to conclude that he was

(11:04):
waiting to be spoken to before delivering whatever message he
wished to impart. But if so, the ghost had shown
the bad judgment common among the spiritual brotherhood, both as
regarded the place of interview and the person whom he
had selected as the recipient of his communications. In the
reading room of the Athenaeum, conversation is strictly forbidden, and

(11:26):
I could not have addressed the apparition without drawing the
instant notice and indignant frowns of the slumbrous old gentleman
around me. I myself, too, at that time, was as
shy as any ghost, and followed the ghost's rule never
to speak first. And what an absurd figure should I
have made solemnly and awfully addressing what must have appeared
in the eyes of all the rest of the company

(11:48):
an empty chair. Besides, I had never been introduced to
doctor Harris, dead or alive, and I am not aware
that social regulations are to be abrogated by the accidental
fact of one of the part parties having crossed the
imperceptible line which separates the other party from the spiritual world.
If ghosts throw off all conventionalism among themselves, it does

(12:10):
not therefore follow that it can be safely dispensed with
by those who are still hampered with flesh and blood.
For such reasons as these, and reflecting moreover that the
deceased doctor might burden me with some disagreeable task with
which I had no business nor wish to be concerned,
I stubbornly resolved to have nothing to say to him.

(12:30):
To this determination I adhered, and not a syllable ever
pass between the ghost of doctor Harris and myself. To
the best of my recollection, I never observed the old
gentleman either enter the reading room or depart from it,
or move from his chair, or lay down the newspaper,
or exchange a look with any person in the company,
unless it were myself. He was not by any means

(12:53):
invariably in his place in the evening, for instance, though
often at the reading room myself I never saw him.
It was at the brightest noontide that I used to
behold him, sitting within the most comfortable focus of the
glowing fire, as real and lifelike as any object, except
that he was so very old and of an ashen

(13:14):
complexion as any other in the room. After a long
while of this strange intercourse, if such it can be called,
I remember once, at least, and I know not but oftener,
a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze which the ghost fixed upon
me from beneath his spectacles, a melancholy look of hopelessness, which,

(13:37):
if my heart had not been as hard as a
paving stone, I could hardly have withstood. But I did
withstand it, And I think I saw him no more
after this last appealing look, which still dwells in my memory,
as perfectly as while my own eyes were encountering the
dim and bleared eyes of the ghost. And whenever I
recall this strange passage of my life, I see the small, old,

(14:00):
withered figure of doctor Harris, sitting in his accustomed chair,
the Boston post in his hand, his spectacles shoved upwards
and gazing at me as I closed the door of
the reading room with that wistful, appealing, hopeless, helpless look.
I have only to add that it was not until
long after I had ceased to encounter the ghost that

(14:22):
I became aware how very odd and strange the whole
affair had been. And even now I am made sensible
of its strangeness, chiefly by the wonder and incredulity of
those to whom I tell the story. End of the
Ghost of Doctor Harris by Nathaniel Hawthorne