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diff --git a/12100-h/12100-h.htm b/12100-h/12100-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ae34f1e --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/12100-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,5900 @@ +<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> +<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> +<head> +<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Between the Dark and the Daylight: Romances, by W.D. Howells</title> +<style type="text/css"> +body { margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; } +p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0em; margin-bottom: 0em; text-align: justify } +div.illustration { text-align: center; margin-top: 0.75em; margin-bottom: 0.75em } +p.poetry { text-indent: 0em; padding-left: 4em; margin-top: 0.75em; margin-bottom: 0.75em; text-align: left } +div.illustration { text-align: center } +div.letter { padding-left: 4em; margin-top: 0.75em; margin-bottom: 0.75em } +img { border: 0px } +h1, h2, h3 { text-align: center } +h1.title { font-size: 2em; text-transform: uppercase } +h1.subtitle { font-size: 1.5em; font-style: italic } +h1.authorship, h1.date { font-size: 1.5em; text-transform: uppercase; font-weight: normal } +h2 { font-size: 1.5em; margin-top: 4em; text-transform: uppercase } +h2.chaptertitle { margin-top: 1em; } +h3 { font-size: 1em; margin-top: 2em } +hr { width: 33%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em } +ul, ol { list-style-position: outside } +ul.illustrations { list-style-type: none; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em; text-transform: lowercase; font-variant: small-caps } +ol.contents { list-style-type: upper-roman; font-variant: small-caps } +li { margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em } +a:hover { color: #770000 } +@media print +{ +.nonprinting { display: none } +a { color: #000000; text-decoration: none } +} +</style> +</head> +<body> +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12100 ***</div> + +<div class="illustration"><a href="images/illust1l.jpg" name="illust1"><img src="images/illust1m.jpg" title="THEIR JOINT STUDY OF HER DANCING-CARD DID NOT HELP THEM OUT" alt="[Illustration: THEIR JOINT STUDY OF HER DANCING-CARD DID NOT HELP THEM OUT]" style="width: 450px; height: 760px" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.75em; font-variant: small-caps" class="nonprinting">(“<a href="#illust1ref">their joint study...</a>")</span></div> + + + + +<h1 class="title">Between the Dark and the Daylight</h1> + +<h1 class="subtitle">Romances</h1> + +<h1 class="authorship">by<br /> +W.D. Howells</h1> +<h1 class="date">1907</h1> + + + + +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> + + +<div> +<span style="font-size: 0.625em">CHAP.</span> +<ol class="contents"> +<li><a href="#chapter1">A Sleep and a Forgetting</a></li> +<li><a href="#chapter2">The Eidolons of Brooks Alford</a></li> +<li><a href="#chapter3">A Memory that Worked Overtime</a></li> +<li><a href="#chapter4">A Case of Metaphantasmia</a></li> +<li><a href="#chapter5">Editha</a></li> +<li><a href="#chapter6">Braybridge’s Offer</a></li> +<li><a href="#chapter7">The Chick of the Easter Egg</a></li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + +<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2> + + +<ul class="illustrations"> +<li><a href="#illust1">Their joint study of her dancing-card did not +help them out</a></li> + +<li><a href="#illust2">A lively matron, of as youthful a temperament as +the lively girls she brought in her train, burst upon them</a></li> + +<li><a href="#illust3">“She shook her head, and said,... +‘Nobody has been here, except—’”</a></li> + +<li><a href="#illust4">“No burglar could have missed me if he had +wanted an easy mark”</a></li> + +<li><a href="#illust5">“‘You shall not say +that!’”</a></li> + +<li><a href="#illust6">“She glared at editha. ‘What you got +that black on for?’”</a></li> </ul> + + + + +<h2><a name="chapter1" id="chapter1">I</a></h2> + +<h2 class="chaptertitle">A Sleep and a Forgetting</h2> + + +<h3>I</h3> + +<p>Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San Remo +in the interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer with him, +and who wished him to test the air before settling there for the winter +with an invalid wife. She was one of those neurasthenics who really +carry their climate—always a bad one—with them, but she had +set her mind on San Remo; and Lanfear was willing to pass a few days in +the place making the observations which he felt pretty sure would be +adverse.</p> + +<p>His train was rather late, and the sunset was fading from the French +sky beyond the Italian shore when he got out of his car and looked round +for a porter to take his valise. His roving eye lighted on the anxious +figure, which as fully as the anxious face, of a short, stout, elderly +man expressed a sort of distraction, as he stood loaded down with +umbrellas, bags, bundles, and wraps, and seemed unable to arrest the +movements of a tall young girl, with a travelling-shawl trailing from +her arm, who had the effect of escaping from him towards a bench beside +the door of the waiting-room. When she reached it, in spite of his +appeals, she sat down with an absent air, and looked as far withdrawn +from the bustle of the platform and from the snuffling train as if on +some quiet garden seat along with her own thoughts.</p> + +<p>In his fat frenzy, which Lanfear felt to be pathetic, the old +gentleman glanced at him, and then abruptly demanded: “Are you an +American?”</p> + +<p>We knew each other abroad in some mystical way, and Lanfear did not +try to deny the fact.</p> + +<p>“Oh, well, then,” the stranger said, as if the fact made +everything right, “will you kindly tell my daughter, on that bench +by the door yonder”—he pointed with a bag, and dropped a +roll of rugs from under his arm—“that I’ll be with her +as soon as I’ve looked after the trunks? Tell her not to move till +I come. Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, will you?” He caught the +sleeve of a <em>facchino</em> who came wandering by, and heaped him with +his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in the direction of the +baggage-room with a sort of mastery of the situation which struck +Lanfear as springing from desperation rather than experience.</p> + +<p>Lanfear stood a moment hesitating. Then a glance at the girl on the +bench, drooping a little forward in freeing her face from the veil that +hung from her pretty hat, together with a sense of something quaintly +charming in the confidence shown him on such purely compatriotic +grounds, decided him to do just what he had been asked. The girl had got +her veil up by this time, and as he came near, she turned from looking +at the sunset over the stretch of wall beyond the halting train, and met +his dubious face with a smile.</p> + +<p>“It <em>is</em> beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. +“I know I shall get well, here, if they have such sunsets every +day.”</p> + +<p>There was something so convincingly normal in her expression that +Lanfear dismissed a painful conjecture. “I beg your pardon,” +he said. “I am afraid there’s some mistake. I haven’t +the pleasure—You must excuse me, but your father wished me to ask +you to wait here for him till he had got his baggage—”</p> + +<p>“My father?” the girl stopped him with a sort of a +frowning perplexity in the stare she gave him. “My father +isn’t here!”</p> + +<p>“I beg your pardon,” Lanfear said. “I must have +misunderstood. A gentleman who got out of the train with you—a +short, stout gentleman with gray hair—I understood him to say you +were his daughter—requested me to bring this +message—”</p> + +<p>The girl shook her head. “I don’t know him. It must be a +mistake.”</p> + +<p>“The mistake is mine, no doubt. It may have been some one else +whom he pointed out, and I have blundered. I’m very sorry if I +seem to have intruded—”</p> + +<p>“What place is this?” the girl asked, without noticing +his excuses.</p> + +<p>“San Remo,” Lanfear answered. “If you didn’t +intend to stop here, your train will be leaving in a moment.”</p> + +<p>“I meant to get off, I suppose,” she said. “I +don’t believe I’m going any farther.” She leaned back +against the bars of the bench, and put up one of her slim arms along the +top.</p> + +<p>There was something wrong. Lanfear now felt that, in spite of her +perfect tranquillity and self-possession; perhaps because of it. He had +no business to stay there talking with her, but he had not quite the +right to leave her, though practically he had got his dismissal, and +apparently she was quite capable of taking care of herself, or could +have been so in a country where any woman’s defencelessness was +not any man’s advantage. He could not go away without some effort +to be of use.</p> + +<p>“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Can I help you in +calling a carriage; or looking after your hand-baggage—it will be +getting dark—perhaps your maid—”</p> + +<p>“My <em>maid!</em>” The girl frowned again, with a +measure of the amazement which she showed when he mentioned her father. +“<em>I</em> have no maid!”</p> + +<p>Lanfear blurted desperately out: “You are alone? You +came—you are going to stay here—alone?”</p> + +<p>“Quite alone,” she said, with a passivity in which there +was no resentment, and no feeling unless it were a certain color of +dignity. Almost at the same time, with a glance beside and beyond him, +she called out joyfully: “Ah, there you are!” and Lanfear +turned, and saw scuffling and heard puffing towards them the short, +stout elderly gentleman who had sent him to her. “I knew you would +come before long!”</p> + +<p>“Well, I thought it was pretty long, myself,” the +gentleman said, and then he courteously referred himself to Lanfear. +“I’m afraid this gentleman has found it rather long, too; +but I couldn’t manage it a moment sooner.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear said: “Not at all. I wish I could have been of any use +to—”</p> + +<p>“My daughter—Miss Gerald, Mr.—”</p> + +<p>“Lanfear—Dr. Lanfear,” he said, accepting the +introduction; and the girl bowed.</p> + +<p>“Oh, doctor, eh?” the father said, with a certain +impression. “Going to stop here?”</p> + +<p>“A few days,” Lanfear answered, making way for the +forward movement which the others began.</p> + +<p>“Well, well! I’m very much obliged to you, very much, +indeed; and I’m sure my daughter is.”</p> + +<p>The girl said, “Oh yes, indeed,” rather indifferently, +and then as they passed him, while he stood lifting his hat, she turned +radiantly on him. “Thank you, ever so much!” she said, with +the gentle voice which he had already thought charming.</p> + +<p>The father called back: “I hope we shall meet again. We are +going to the Sardegna.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear had been going to the Sardegna himself, but while he bowed he +now decided upon another hotel.</p> + +<p>The mystery, whatever it was, that the brave, little, fat father was +carrying off so bluffly, had clearly the morbid quality of unhealth in +it, and Lanfear could not give himself freely to a young pleasure in the +girl’s dark beauty of eyes and hair, her pale, irregular, piquant +face, her slender figure and flowing walk. He was in the presence of +something else, something that appealed to his scientific side, to that +which was humane more than that which was human in him, and abashed him +in the other feeling. Unless she was out of her mind there was no way of +accounting for her behavior, except by some caprice which was itself +scarcely short of insanity. She must have thought she knew him when he +approached, and when she addressed him those first words; but when he +had tried to set her right she had not changed; and why had she denied +her father, and then hailed him with joy when he came back to her? She +had known that she intended to stop at San Remo, but she had not known +where she had stopped when she asked what place it was. She was +consciously an invalid of some sort, for she spoke of getting well under +sunsets like that which had now waned, but what sort of invalid was +she?</p> + + +<h3>II</h3> + +<p>Lanfear’s question persisted through the night, and it helped, +with the coughing in the next room, to make a bad night for him. None of +the hotels in San Remo receive consumptive patients, but none are +without somewhere a bronchial cough. If it is in the room next yours it +keeps you awake, but it is not pulmonary; you may comfort yourself in +your vigils with that fact. Lanfear, however, fancied he had got a poor +dinner, and in the morning he did not like his coffee. He thought he had +let a foolish scruple keep him from the Grand Hotel Sardegna, and he +walked down towards it along the palm-flanked promenade, in the gay +morning light, with the tideless sea on the other hand lapping the rough +beach beyond the lines of the railroad which borders it. On his way he +met files of the beautiful Ligurian women, moving straight under the +burdens balanced on their heads, or bestriding the donkeys laden with +wine-casks in the roadway, or following beside the carts which the +donkeys drew. Ladies of all nations, in the summer fashions of London, +Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York thronged the path. The sky +was of a blue so deep, so liquid that it seemed to him he could scoop it +in his hand and pour it out again like water. Seaward, he glanced at the +fishing-boats lying motionless in the offing, and the coastwise steamer +that runs between Nice and Genoa trailing a thin plume of smoke between +him and their white sails. With the more definite purpose of making sure +of the Grand Hotel Sardegna, he scanned the different villa slopes that +showed their level lines of white and yellow and dull pink through the +gray tropical greenery on the different levels of the hills. He was duly +rewarded by the sight of the bold legend topping its cornice, and when +he let his eye descend the garden to a little pavilion on the wall +overlooking the road, he saw his acquaintances of the evening before +making a belated breakfast. The father recognized Lanfear first and +spoke to his daughter, who looked up from her coffee and down towards +him where he wavered, lifting his hat, and bowed smiling to him. He had +no reason to cross the roadway towards the white stairway which climbed +from it to the hotel grounds, but he did so. The father leaned out over +the wall, and called down to him: “Won’t you come up and +join us, doctor?”</p> + +<p>“Why, yes!” Lanfear consented, and in another moment he +was shaking hands with the girl, to whom, he noticed, her father named +him again. He had in his glad sense of her white morning dress and her +hat of green-leafed lace, a feeling that she was somehow meeting him as +a friend of indefinite date in an intimacy unconditioned by any past or +future time. Her pleasure in his being there was as frank as her +father’s, and there was a pretty trust of him in every word and +tone which forbade misinterpretation.</p> + +<p>“I was just talking about you, doctor,” the father began, +“and saying what a pity you hadn’t come to our hotel. +It’s a capital place.”</p> + +<p>“<em>I’ve</em> been thinking it was a pity I went to +mine,” Lanfear returned, “though I’m in San Remo for +such a short time it’s scarcely worth while to change.”</p> + +<p>“Well, perhaps if you came here, you might stay longer. I guess +we’re booked for the winter, Nannie?” He referred the +question to his daughter, who asked Lanfear if he would not have some +coffee.</p> + +<p>“I was going to say I had had my coffee, but I’m not sure +it <em>was</em> coffee,” Lanfear began, and he consented, with +some demur, banal enough, about the trouble.</p> + +<p>“Well, that’s right, then, and no trouble at all,” +Mr. Gerald broke in upon him. “Here comes a fellow looking for a +chance to bring you some,” and he called to a waiter wandering +distractedly about with a “Heigh!” that might have been +offensive from a less obviously inoffensive man. “Can you get our +friend here a cup and saucer, and some of this good coffee?” he +asked, as the waiter approached.</p> + +<p>“Yes, certainly, sir,” the man answered in careful +English. “Is it not, perhaps, Mr. and Misses Gerald?” he +smilingly insinuated, offering some cards.</p> + +<p>“Miss Gerald,” the father corrected him as he took the +cards. “Why, hello, Nannie! Here are the Bells! Where are +they?” he demanded of the waiter. “Bring them here, and a +lot more cups and saucers. Or, hold on! I’d better go myself, +Nannie, hadn’t I? Of course! You get the crockery, waiter. Where +did you say they were?” He bustled up from his chair, without +waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear in hurrying +away. “You’ll excuse me, doctor! I’ll be back in half +a minute. Friends of ours that came over on the same boat. I must see +them, of course, but I don’t believe they’ll stay. Nannie, +don’t let Dr. Lanfear get away. I want to have some talk with him. +You tell him he’d better come to the Sardegna, here.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear and Miss Gerald sat a moment in the silence which is apt to +follow with young people when they are unexpectedly left to themselves. +She kept absently pushing the cards her father had given her up and down +on the table between her thumb and forefinger, and Lanfear noted the +translucence of her long, thin hand in the sunshine striking across the +painted iron surface of the garden movable. The translucence had a +pathos for his intelligence which the pensive tilt of her head enhanced. +She stopped toying with the cards, and looked at the addresses on +them.</p> + +<p>“What strange things names are!” she said, as if musing +on the fact, with a sigh which he thought disproportioned to the depth +of her remark.</p> + +<p>“They seem rather irrelevant at times,” he admitted, with +a smile. “They’re mere tags, labels, which can be attached +to one as well as another; they seem to belong equally to +anybody.”</p> + +<p>“That is what I always say to myself,” she agreed, with +more interest than he found explicable.</p> + +<p>“But finally,” he returned, “they’re all +that’s left us, if they’re left themselves. They are the +only signs to the few who knew us that we ever existed. They stand for +our characters, our personality, our mind, our soul.”</p> + +<p>She said, “That is very true,” and then she suddenly gave +him the cards. “Do you know these people?”</p> + +<p>“I? I thought they were friends of yours,” he replied, +astonished.</p> + +<div class="illustration"><a href="images/illust2l.jpg" name="illust2"><img src="images/illust2m.jpg" title="A LIVELY MATRON, OF AS YOUTHFUL A TEMPERAMENT AS THE LIVELY GIRLS SHE BROUGHT IN HER TRAIN, BURST UPON THEM" alt="[Illustration: A LIVELY MATRON, OF AS YOUTHFUL A TEMPERAMENT AS THE LIVELY GIRLS SHE BROUGHT IN HER TRAIN, BURST UPON THEM]" style="width: 450px; height: 723px" /></a></div> + +<p>“That is what papa thinks,” Miss Gerald said, and while +she sat dreamily absent, a rustle of skirts and a flutter of voices +pierced from the surrounding shrubbery, and then a lively matron, of as +youthful a temperament as the lively girls she brought in her train, +burst upon them, and Miss Gerald was passed from one embrace to another +until all four had kissed her. She returned their greeting, and shared, +in her quieter way, their raptures at their encounter.</p> + +<p>“Such a hunt as we’ve had for you!” the matron +shouted. “We’ve been up-stairs and down-stairs and in my +lady’s chamber, all over the hotel. Where’s your father? Ah, +they did get our cards to you!” and by that token Lanfear knew +that these ladies were the Bells. He had stood up in a sort of +expectancy, but Miss Gerald did not introduce him, and a shadow of +embarrassment passed over the party which she seemed to feel least, +though he fancied a sort of entreaty in the glance that she let pass +over him.</p> + +<p>“I suppose he’s gone to look for <em>us!</em>” Mrs. +Bell saved the situation with a protecting laugh. Miss Gerald colored +intelligently, and Lanfear could not let Mrs. Bell’s implication +pass.</p> + +<p>“If it is Mrs. Bell,” he said, “I can answer that +he has. I met you at Magnolia some years ago, Mrs. Bell. Dr. +Lanfear.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanfear,” Miss Gerald said. +“I couldn’t think—”</p> + +<p>“Of my tag, my label?” he laughed back. “It +isn’t very distinctly lettered.”</p> + +<p>Mrs. Bell was not much minding them jointly. She was singling Lanfear +out for the expression of her pleasure in seeing him again, and +recalling the incidents of her summer at Magnolia before, it seemed, any +of her girls were out. She presented them collectively, and the eldest +of them charmingly reminded Lanfear that he had once had the magnanimity +to dance with her when she sat, in a little girl’s forlorn despair +of being danced with, at one of those desolate hops of the good old +Osprey House.</p> + +<p>“Yes; and now,” her mother followed, “we +can’t wait a moment longer, if we’re to get our train for +Monte Carlo, girls. We’re not going to play, doctor,” she +made time to explain, “but we are going to look on. Will you tell +your father, dear,” she said, taking the girl’s hands +caressingly in hers, and drawing her to her motherly bosom, “that +we found you, and did our best to find him? We can’t wait +now—our carriage is champing the bit at the foot of the +stairs—but we’re coming back in a week, and then we’ll +do our best to look you up again.” She included Lanfear in her +good-bye, and all her girls said good-bye in the same way, and with a +whisking of skirts and twitter of voices they vanished through the +shrubbery, and faded into the general silence and general sound like a +bevy of birds which had swept near and passed by.</p> + +<p>Miss Gerald sank quietly into her place, and sat as if nothing had +happened, except that she looked a little paler to Lanfear, who remained +on foot trying to piece together their interrupted tête-à-tête, but not +succeeding, when her father reappeared, red and breathless, and wiping +his forehead. “Have they been here, Nannie?” he asked. +“I’ve been following them all over the place, and the +<i>portier</i> told me just now that he had seen a party of ladies coming +down this way.”</p> + +<p>He got it all out, not so clearly as those women had got everything +in, Lanfear reflected, but unmistakably enough as to the fact, and he +looked at his daughter as he repeated: “Haven’t the Bells +been here?”</p> + +<div class="illustration"><a href="images/illust3l.jpg" name="illust3"><img src="images/illust3m.jpg" title="“SHE SHOOK HER HEAD, AND SAID,... ‘NOBODY HAS BEEN HERE, EXCEPT—’”" alt="[Illustration: “SHE SHOOK HER HEAD, AND SAID,... ‘NOBODY HAS BEEN HERE, EXCEPT—’”]" style="width: 599px; height: 450px" /></a></div> + +<p>She shook her head, and said, with her delicate quiet: “Nobody +has been here, except—” She glanced at Lanfear, who smiled, +but saw no opening for himself in the strange situation. Then she said: +“I think I will go and lie down a while, now, papa. I’m +rather tired. Good-bye,” she said, giving Lanfear her hand; it +felt limp and cold; and then she turned to her father again. +“Don’t you come, papa! I can get back perfectly well by +myself. Stay with—”</p> + +<p>“I will go with you,” her father said, “and if Dr. +Lanfear doesn’t mind coming—”</p> + +<p>“Certainly I will come,” Lanfear said, and he passed to +the girl’s right; she had taken her father’s arm; but he +wished to offer more support if it were needed. When they had climbed to +the open flowery space before the hotel, she seemed aware of the groups +of people about. She took her hand from her father’s arm, as if +unwilling to attract their notice by seeming to need its help, and swept +up the gravelled path between him and Lanfear, with her flowing +walk.</p> + +<p>Her father fell back, as they entered the hotel door, and murmured to +Lanfear: “Will you wait till I come down?” ... “I +wanted to tell you about my daughter,” he explained, when he came +back after the quarter of an hour which Lanfear had found rather +intense. “It’s useless to pretend you wouldn’t have +noticed—Had nobody been with you after I left you, down +there?” He twisted his head in the direction of the pavilion, +where they had been breakfasting.</p> + +<p>“Yes; Mrs. Bell and her daughters,” Lanfear answered, +simply.</p> + +<p>“Of course! Why do you suppose my daughter denied it?” +Mr. Gerald asked.</p> + +<p>“I suppose she—had her reasons,” Lanfear answered, +lamely enough.</p> + +<p>“No <em>reason</em>, I’m afraid,” Mr. Gerald said, +and he broke out hopelessly: “She has her mind sound enough, but +not—not her memory. She had forgotten that they were there! Are +you going to stay in San Remo?” he asked, with an effect of +interrupting himself, as if in the wish to put off something, or to make +the ground sure before he went on.</p> + +<p>“Why,” Lanfear said, “I hadn’t thought of it. +I stopped—I was going to Nice—to test the air for a friend +who wishes to bring his invalid wife here, if I approve—but I have +just been asking myself why I should go to Nice when I could stay at San +Remo. The place takes my fancy. I’m something of an invalid +myself—at least I’m on my vacation—and I find a charm +in it, if nothing better. Perhaps a charm is enough. It used to be, in +primitive medicine.”</p> + +<p>He was talking to what he felt was not an undivided attention in Mr. +Gerald, who said, “I’m glad of it,” and then added: +“I should like to consult you professionally. I know your +reputation in New York—though I’m not a New-Yorker +myself—and I don’t know any of the doctors here. I suppose +I’ve done rather a wild thing in coming off the way I have, with +my daughter; but I felt that I must do something, and I hoped—I +felt as if it were getting away from our trouble. It’s most +fortunate my meeting you, if you can look into the case, and help me out +with a nurse, if she’s needed, and all that!” To a certain +hesitation in Lanfear’s face, he added: “Of course, +I’m asking your professional help. My name is Abner +Gerald—Abner L. Gerald—perhaps you know my standing, and +that I’m able to—”</p> + +<p>“Oh, it isn’t a question of that! I shall be glad to do +anything I can,” Lanfear said, with a little pang which he tried +to keep silent in orienting himself anew towards the girl, whose +loveliness he had felt before he had felt her piteousness.</p> + +<p>“But before you go further I ought to say that you must have +been thinking of my uncle, the first Matthew Lanfear, when you spoke of +my reputation; I haven’t got any yet; I’ve only got my +uncle’s name.”</p> + +<p>“Oh!” Mr. Gerald said, disappointedly, but after a blank +moment he apparently took courage. “You’re in the same line, +though?”</p> + +<p>“If you mean the psychopathic line, without being exactly an +alienist, well, yes,” Lanfear admitted.</p> + +<p>“That’s exactly what I mean,” the elder said, with +renewed hopefulness. “I’m quite willing to risk myself with +a man of the same name as Dr. Lanfear. I should like,” he said, +hurrying on, as if to override any further reluctance of +Lanfear’s, “to tell you her story, and +then—”</p> + +<p>“By all means,” Lanfear consented, and he put on an air +of professional deference, while the older man began with a face set for +the task.</p> + +<p>“It’s a long story, or it’s a short story, as you +choose to make it. We’ll make it long, if necessary, later, but +now I’ll make it short. Five months ago my wife was killed before +my daughter’s eyes—”</p> + +<p>He stopped; Lanfear breathed a gentle “Oh!” and Gerald +blurted out:</p> + +<p>“Accident—grade crossing—Don’t!” he +winced at the kindness in Lanfear’s eyes, and panted on. +“That’s over! What happened to <em>her</em>—to my +daughter—was that she fainted from the shock. When she +woke—it was more like a sleep than a swoon—she didn’t +remember what had happened.” Lanfear nodded, with a gravely +interested face. “She didn’t remember anything that had ever +happened before. She knew me, because I was there with her; but she +didn’t know that she ever had a mother, because she was not there +with her. You see?”</p> + +<p>“I can imagine,” Lanfear assented.</p> + +<p>“The whole of her life before the—accident was wiped out +as to the facts, as completely as if it had never been; and now every +day, every hour, every minute, as it passes, goes with that past. But +her faculties—”</p> + +<p>“Yes?” Lanfear prompted in the pause which Mr. Gerald +made.</p> + +<p>“Her intellect—the working powers of her mind, apart from +anything like remembering, are as perfect as if she were in full +possession of her memory. I believe,” the father said, with a +pride that had its pathos, “no one can talk with her and not feel +that she has a beautiful mind, that she can think better than most girls +of her age. She reads, or she lets me read to her, and until it has time +to fade, she appreciates it all more fully than I do. At Genoa, where I +took her to the palaces for the pictures, I saw that she had kept her +feeling for art. When she plays—you will hear her play—it is +like composing the music for herself; she does not seem to remember the +pieces, she seems to improvise them. You understand?”</p> + +<p>Lanfear said that he understood, for he could not disappoint the +expectation of the father’s boastful love: all that was left him +of the ambitions he must once have had for his child.</p> + +<p>The poor, little, stout, unpicturesque elderly man got up and began +to walk to and fro in the room which he had turned into with Lanfear, +and to say, more to himself than to Lanfear, as if balancing one thing +against another: “The merciful thing is that she has been saved +from the horror and the sorrow. She knows no more of either than she +knows of her mother’s love for her. They were very much alike in +looks and mind, and they were always together more like persons of the +same age—sisters, or girl friends; but she has lost all knowledge +of that, as of other things. And then there is the question whether she +won’t some time, sooner or later, come into both the horror and +the sorrow.” He stopped and looked at Lanfear. “She has +these sudden fits of drowsiness, when she <em>must</em> sleep; and I +never see her wake from them without being afraid that she has wakened +to everything—that she has got back into her full self, and taken +up the terrible burden that my old shoulders are used to. What do you +think?”</p> + +<p>Lanfear felt the appeal so keenly that in the effort to answer +faithfully he was aware of being harsher than he meant. “That is a +chance we can’t forecast. But it is a chance. The fact that the +drowsiness recurs periodically—”</p> + +<p>“It doesn’t,” the father pleaded. “We +don’t know when it will come on.”</p> + +<p>“It scarcely matters. The periodicity wouldn’t affect the +possible result which you dread. I don’t say that it is probable. +But it’s one of the possibilities. It has,” Lanfear added, +“its logic.”</p> + +<p>“Ah, its logic!”</p> + +<p>“Its logic, yes. My business, of course, would be to restore +her to health at any risk. So far as her mind is +affected—”</p> + +<p>“Her mind is not affected!” the father retorted.</p> + +<p>“I beg your pardon—her memory—it might be restored +with her physical health. You understand that? It is a chance; it might +or it might not happen.”</p> + +<p>The father was apparently facing a risk which he had not squarely +faced before. “I suppose so,” he faltered. After a moment he +added, with more courage: “You must do the best you can, at any +risk.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear rose, too. He said, with returning kindness in his tones, if +not his words: “I should like to study the case, Mr. Gerald. +It’s very interesting, and—and—if you’ll forgive +me—very touching.”</p> + +<p>“Thank you.”</p> + +<p>“If you decide to stay in San Remo, I will—Do you +suppose I could get a room in this hotel? I don’t like +mine.”</p> + +<p>“Why, I haven’t any doubt you can. Shall we +ask?”</p> + + +<h3>III</h3> + +<p>It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience +by pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend’s +neurasthenic wife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and +more sheltered seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than +San Remo. He wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no +preoccupation to hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. +He put the case first in the order of interest rather purposely, and +even with a sense of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a +like case related to a different personality might have been less +absorbing. But he tried to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that +certain painful pleasure which, as a young man not much over thirty, he +must feel in the strange affliction of a young and beautiful girl.</p> + +<p>Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be +installed near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making +him, without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her +hardly differed from that of her father, except that it involved a +closer and more premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from +the sort of association which, in a large hotel of the type of the +Sardegna, entails no sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together +at the long table, midway of the dining-room, which maintained the +tradition of the old table-d’hôte against the small tables ranged +along the walls. Gerald had an amiable old man’s liking for talk, +and Lanfear saw that he willingly escaped, among their changing +companions, from the pressure of his anxieties. He left his daughter +very much to Lanfear, during these excursions, but Lanfear was far from +meaning to keep her to himself. He thought it better that she should +follow her father in his forays among their neighbors, and he encouraged +her to continue such talk with them as she might be brought into. He +tried to guard her future encounters with them, so that she should not +show more than a young girl’s usual diffidence at a second +meeting; and in the frequent substitution of one presence for another +across the table, she was fairly safe.</p> + +<p>A natural light-heartedness, of which he had glimpses from the first, +returned to her. One night, at the dance given by some of the guests to +some others, she went through the gayety in joyous triumph. She danced +mostly with Lanfear, but she had other partners, and she won a pleasing +popularity by the American quality of her waltzing. Lanfear had already +noted that her forgetfulness was not always so constant or so inclusive +as her father had taught him to expect; Mr. Gerald’s statement had +been the large, general fact from which there was sometimes a shrinking +in the particulars. While the warmth of an agreeable experience lasted, +her mind kept record of it, slight or full; if the experience were +unpleasant the memory was more apt to fade at once. After that dance she +repeated to her father the little compliments paid her, and told him, +laughing, they were to reward him for sitting up so late as her +chaperon. Emotions persisted in her consciousness as the tremor lasts in +a smitten cord, but events left little trace. She retained a sense of +personalities; she was lastingly sensible of temperaments; but names +were nothing to her. She could not tell her father who had said the nice +things to her, and <a name="illust1ref" id="illust1ref">their joint study of her +dancing-card did not help them out</a>.</p> + +<p>Her relation to Lanfear, though it might be a subject of +international scrutiny, was hardly a subject of censure. He was known as +Dr. Lanfear, but he was not at first known as her physician; he was +conjectured her cousin or something like that; he might even be her +betrothed in the peculiar American arrangement of such affairs. +Personally people saw in him a serious-looking young man, better dressed +and better mannered than they thought most Americans, and unquestionably +handsomer, with his Spanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the +Vandyke cut which was then already beginning to be rather belated.</p> + +<p>Other Americans in the hotel were few and transitory; and if the +English had any mind about Miss Gerald different from their mind about +other girls, it would be perhaps to the effect that she was quite mad; +by this they would mean that she was a little odd; but for the rest they +had apparently no mind about her. With the help of one of the English +ladies her father had replaced the homesick Irish maid whom he had sent +back to New York from Genoa, with an Italian, and in the shelter of her +gay affection and ignorant sympathy Miss Gerald had a security +supplemented by the easy social environment. If she did not look very +well, she did not differ from most other American women in that; and if +she seemed to confide herself more severely to the safe-keeping of her +physician, that was the way of all women patients.</p> + +<p>Whether the Bells found the spectacle of depravity at Monte Carlo +more attractive than the smiling face of nature at San Remo or not, they +did not return, but sent for their baggage from their hotel, and were +not seen again by the Geralds. Lanfear’s friend with the invalid +wife wrote from Ospedaletti, with apologies which inculpated him for the +disappointment, that she had found the air impossible in a single day, +and they were off for Cannes. Lanfear and the Geralds, therefore, +continued together in the hotel without fear or obligation to others, +and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in that +pavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded. No one, +after a few mornings of tacit possession, would have disputed their +claim, and there, day after day, in the mild monotony of the December +sunshine, they sat and drank their coffee, and talked of the sights +which the peasants in the street, and the tourists in the promenade +beyond it, afforded. The rows of stumpy palms which separated the road +from the walk were not so high but that they had the whole lift of the +sea to the horizon where it lost itself in a sky that curved blue as +turquoise to the zenith overhead. The sun rose from its morning bath on +the left, and sank to its evening bath on the right, and in making its +climb of the spacious arc between, shed a heat as great as that of +summer, but not the heat of summer, on the pretty world of villas and +hotels, towered over by the olive-gray slopes of the pine-clad heights +behind and above them. From these tops a fine, keen cold fell with the +waning afternoon, which sharpened through the sunset till the dusk; but +in the morning the change was from the chill to the glow, and they could +sit in their pavilion, under the willowy droop of the eucalyptus-trees +which have brought the Southern Pacific to the Riviera, with increasing +comfort.</p> + +<p>In the restlessness of an elderly man, Gerald sometimes left the +young people to their intolerable delays over their coffee, and walked +off into the little stone and stucco city below, or went and sat with +his cigar on one of the benches under the palm-lined promenade, which +the pale northern consumptives shared with the swarthy peasant girls +resting from their burdens, and the wrinkled grandmothers of their race +passively or actively begging from the strangers.</p> + +<p>While she kept her father in sight it seemed that Miss Gerald could +maintain her hold of his identity, and one morning she said, with the +tender fondness for him which touched Lanfear: “When he sits there +among those sick people and poor people, then he knows they are in the +world.”</p> + +<p>She turned with a question graver in her look than usual, and he +said: “Yes, we might help them oftener if we could remember that +their misery was going on all the time, like some great natural process, +day or dark, heat or cold, which seems to stop when we stop thinking of +it. Nothing, for us, at least, exists unless it is recalled to +us.”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” she said, in her turn, “I have noticed that. +But don’t you sometimes—sometimes”—she knit her +forehead, as if to keep her thought from escaping—“have a +feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, or seeing, had all +happened before, just as it is now?”</p> + +<p>“Oh yes; that occurs to every one.”</p> + +<p>“But don’t you—don’t you have hints of +things, of ideas, as if you had known them, in some previous +existence—”</p> + +<p>She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, the +experience which young people make much of when they have it, and +sometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it. But there could +be no pose or pretence in her. He smilingly suggested:</p> + +<p class="poetry">“‘For something is, or something seems, +<br />Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.’</p> + +<p style="text-indent: 0em">These weird impressions are no more than +that, probably.”</p> + +<p>“Ah, I don’t believe it,” the girl said. +“They are too real for that. They come too often, and they make me +feel as if they would come more fully, some time. If there was a life +before this—do you believe there was?—they may be things +that happened there. Or they may be things that will happen in a life +after this. You believe in <em>that</em>, don’t you?”</p> + +<p>“In a life after this, or their happening in it?”</p> + +<p>“Well, both.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear evaded her, partly. “They could be premonitions, +prophecies, of a future life, as easily as fragmentary records of a past +life. I suppose we do not begin to be immortal merely after +death.”</p> + +<p>“No.” She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if +what they had been saying had already passed from her thought.</p> + +<p>“But, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear ventured, “have these +impressions of yours grown more definite—fuller, as you +say—of late?”</p> + +<p>“My impressions?” She frowned at him, as if the look of +interest, more intense than usual in his eyes, annoyed her. “I +don’t know what you mean.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear felt bound to follow up her lead, whether she wished it or +not. “A good third of our lives here is passed in sleep. I’m +not always sure that we are right in treating the mental—for +certainly they are mental—experiences of that time as altogether +trivial, or insignificant.”</p> + +<p>She seemed to understand now, and she protested: “But I +don’t mean dreams. I mean things that really happened, or that +really will happen.”</p> + +<p>“Like something you can give me an instance of? Are they +painful things, or pleasant, mostly?”</p> + +<p>She hesitated. “They are things that you know happen to other +people, but you can’t believe would ever happen to you.”</p> + +<p>“Do they come when you are just drowsing, or just waking from a +drowse?”</p> + +<p>“They are not dreams,” she said, almost with +vexation.</p> + +<p>“Yes, yes, I understand,” he hesitated to retrieve +himself. “But <em>I</em> have had floating illusions, just before +I fell asleep, or when I was sensible of not being quite awake, which +seemed to differ from dreams. They were not so dramatic, but they were +more pictorial; they were more visual than the things in +dreams.”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” she assented. “They are something like that. +But I should not call them illusions.”</p> + +<p>“No. And they represent scenes, events?”</p> + +<p>“You said yourself they were not dramatic.”</p> + +<p>“I meant, represent pictorially.”</p> + +<p>“No; they are like the landscape that flies back from your +train or towards it. I can’t explain it,” she ended, rising +with what he felt a displeasure in his pursuit.</p> + + +<h3>IV</h3> + +<p>He reported what had passed to her father when Mr. Gerald came back +from his stroll into the town, with his hands full of English papers; +Gerald had even found a New York paper at the news-stand; and he +listened with an apparent postponement of interest.</p> + +<p>“I think,” Lanfear said, “that she has some shadowy +recollection, or rather that the facts come to her in a jarred, confused +way—the elements of pictures, not pictures. But I am afraid that +my inquiry has offended her.”</p> + +<p>“I guess not,” Gerald said, dryly, as if annoyed. +“What makes you think so?”</p> + +<p>“Merely her manner. And I don’t know that anything is to +be gained by such an inquiry.”</p> + +<p>“Perhaps not,” Gerald allowed, with an inattention which +vexed Lanfear in his turn.</p> + +<p>The elderly man looked up, from where he sat provisionally in the +hotel veranda, into Lanfear’s face; Lanfear had remained standing. +“<em>I</em> don’t believe she’s offended. Or she +won’t be long. One thing, she’ll forget it.”</p> + +<p>He was right enough, apparently. Miss Gerald came out of the hotel +door towards them, smiling equally for both, with the indefinable +difference between cognition and recognition habitual in her look. She +was dressed for a walk, and she seemed to expect them to go with her. +She beamed gently upon Lanfear; there was no trace of umbrage in her +sunny gayety. Her face had, as always, its lurking pathos, but in its +appeal to Lanfear now there were only trust and the wish of pleasing +him.</p> + +<p>They started side by side for their walk, while her father drove +beside them in one of the little public carriages, mounting to the +Berigo Road, through a street of the older San Remo, and issuing on a +bare little piazza looking towards the walls and roofs of the mediaeval +city, clustered together like cliff-dwellings, and down on the gardens +that fell from the villas and the hotels. A parapet kept the path on the +roadside nearest the declivities, and from point to point benches were +put for the convenient enjoyment of the prospect. Mr. Gerald preferred +to take his pleasure from the greater elevation of the seat in his +victoria; his daughter and Lanfear leaned on the wall, and looked up to +the sky and out to the sea, both of the same blue.</p> + +<p>The palms and eucalyptus-trees darkened about the villas; the bits of +vineyard, in their lingering crimson or lingering gold, and the orchards +of peaches and persimmons enriched with the varying reds of their +ripening leaves and fruits the enchanting color scheme. The rose and +geranium hedges were in bloom; the feathery green of the pepper-trees +was warmed by the red-purple of their grape-like clusters of blossoms; +the perfume of lemon flowers wandered vaguely upwards from some point +which they could not fix.</p> + +<p>Nothing of all the beauty seemed lost upon the girl, so bereft that +she could enjoy no part of it from association. Lanfear observed that +she was not fatigued by any such effort as he was always helplessly +making to match what he saw with something he had seen before. Now, when +this effort betrayed itself, she said, smiling: “How strange it is +that you see things for what they are like, and not for what they +are!”</p> + +<p>“Yes, it’s a defect, I’m afraid, sometimes. +Perhaps—”</p> + +<p>“Perhaps what?” she prompted him in the pause he +made.</p> + +<p>“Nothing. I was wondering whether in some other possible life +our consciousness would not be more independent of what we have been +than it seems to be here.” She looked askingly at him. “I +mean whether there shall not be something absolute in our existence, +whether it shall not realize itself more in each experience of the +moment, and not be always seeking to verify itself from the +past.”</p> + +<p>“Isn’t that what you think is the way with me +already?” She turned upon him smiling, and he perceived that in +her New York version of a Parisian costume, with her lace hat of summer +make and texture and the vivid parasol she twirled upon her shoulder, +she was not only a very pretty girl, but a fashionable one. There was +something touching in the fact, and a little bewildering. To the pretty +girl, the fashionable girl, he could have answered with a joke, but the +stricken intelligence had a claim to his seriousness. Now, especially, +he noted what had from time to time urged itself upon his perception. If +the broken ties which once bound her to the past were beginning to knit +again, her recovery otherwise was not apparent. As she stood there her +beauty had signally the distinction of fragility, the delicacy of +shattered nerves in which there was yet no visible return to strength. A +feeling, which had intimated itself before, a sense as of being in the +presence of a disembodied spirit, possessed him, and brought, in its +contradiction of an accepted theory, a suggestion that was destined to +become conviction. He had always said to himself that there could be no +persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, +except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperament, +they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through +time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own +personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity +without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?</p> + +<p>Her waiting eyes recalled him from his inquiry, and with an effort he +answered, “Yes, I think you do have your being here and now, Miss +Gerald, to an unusual degree.”</p> + +<p>“And you don’t think that is wrong?”</p> + +<p>“Wrong? Why? How?”</p> + +<p>“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked round, and her eye +fell upon her father waiting for them in his carriage beside the walk. +The sight supplied her with the notion which Lanfear perceived would not +have occurred otherwise. “Then why doesn’t papa want me to +remember things?”</p> + +<p>“I don’t know,” Lanfear temporized. +“Doesn’t he?”</p> + +<p>“I can’t always tell. Should—should <em>you</em> +wish me to remember more than I do?”</p> + +<p>“I?”</p> + +<p>She looked at him with entreaty. “Do you think it would make my +father happier if I did?”</p> + +<p>“That I can’t say,” Lanfear answered. “People +are often the sadder for what they remember. If I were your +father—Excuse me! I don’t mean anything so absurd. But in +his place—”</p> + +<p>He stopped, and she said, as if she were satisfied with his broken +reply: “It is very curious. When I look at him—when I am +with him—I know him; but when he is away, I don’t remember +him.” She seemed rather interested in the fact than distressed by +it; she even smiled.</p> + +<p>“And me,” he ventured, “is it the same with regard +to me?”</p> + +<p>She did not say; she asked, smiling: “Do you remember me when I +am away?”</p> + +<p>“Yes!” he answered. “As perfectly as if you were +with me. I can see you, hear you, feel the touch of your hand, your +dress—Good heavens!” he added to himself under his breath. +“What am I saying to this poor child!”</p> + +<p>In the instinct of escaping from himself he started forward, and she +moved with him. Mr. Gerald’s watchful driver followed them with +the carriage.</p> + +<p>“That is very strange,” she said, lightly. “Is it +so with you about everyone?”</p> + +<p>“No,” he replied, briefly, almost harshly. He asked, +abruptly: “Miss Gerald, are there any times when you know people +in their absence?”</p> + +<p>“Just after I wake from a nap—yes. But it doesn’t +last. That is, it seems to me it doesn’t. I’m not +sure.”</p> + +<p>As they followed the winding of the pleasant way, with the villas on +the slopes above and on the slopes below, she began to talk of them, and +to come into that knowledge of each which formed her remembrance of them +from former knowledge of them, but which he knew would fade when she +passed them.</p> + +<p>The next morning, when she came down unwontedly late to breakfast in +their pavilion, she called gayly:</p> + +<p>“Dr. Lanfear! It <em>is</em> Dr. Lanfear?”</p> + +<p>“I should be sorry if it were not, since you seem to expect it, +Miss Gerald.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, I just wanted to be sure. Hasn’t my father been +here, yet?” It was the first time she had shown herself aware of +her father except in his presence, as it was the first time she had +named Lanfear to his face.</p> + +<p>He suppressed a remote stir of anxiety, and answered: “He went +to get his newspapers; he wished you not to wait. I hope you slept +well?”</p> + +<p>“Splendidly. But I was very tired last night; I don’t +know why, exactly.”</p> + +<p>“We had rather a long walk.”</p> + +<p>“Did we have a walk yesterday?”</p> + +<p>“Yes.”</p> + +<p>“Then it was <em>so!</em> I thought I had dreamed it. I was +beginning to remember something, and my father asked me what it was, and +then I couldn’t remember. Do you believe I shall keep on +remembering?”</p> + +<p>“I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”</p> + +<p>“Should you wish me to?” she asked, in evident, however +unconscious, recurrence to their talk of the day before.</p> + +<p>“Why not?”</p> + +<p>She sighed. “I don’t know. If it’s like some of +those dreams or gleams. Is remembering pleasant?”</p> + +<p>Lanfear thought for a moment. Then he said, in the honesty he thought +best to use with her: “For the most part I should say it was +painful. Life is tolerable enough while it passes, but when it is past, +what remains seems mostly to hurt and humiliate. I don’t know why +we should remember so insistently the foolish things and wrong things we +do, and not recall the times when we acted, without an effort, wisely +and rightly.” He thought he had gone too far, and he hedged a +little. “I don’t mean that we <em>can’t</em> recall +those times. We can and do, to console and encourage ourselves; but they +don’t recur, without our willing, as the others do.”</p> + +<p>She had poured herself a cup of coffee, and she played with the spoon +in her saucer while she seemed to listen. But she could not have been +listening, for when she put down her spoon and leaned back in her chair, +she said: “In those dreams the things come from such a very far +way back, and they don’t belong to a life that is like this. They +belong to a life like what you hear the life after this is. We are the +same as we are here; but the things are different. We haven’t the +same rules, the same wishes—I can’t explain.”</p> + +<p>“You mean that we are differently conditioned?”</p> + +<p>“Yes. And if you can understand, I feel as if I remembered long +back of this, and long forward of this. But one can’t remember +forward!”</p> + +<p>“That wouldn’t be remembrance; no, it would be +prescience; and your consciousness here, as you were saying yesterday, +is through knowing, not remembering.”</p> + +<p>She stared at him. “Was that yesterday? I thought it +was—to-morrow.” She rubbed her hand across her forehead as +people do when they wish to clear their minds. Then she sighed deeply. +“It tires me so. And yet I can’t help trying.” A light +broke over her face at the sound of a step on the gravel walk near by, +and she said, laughing, without looking round: “That is papa! I +knew it was his step.”</p> + + +<h3>V</h3> + +<p>Such return of memory as she now had was like memory in what we call +the lower lives. It increased, fluctuantly, with an ebb in which it +almost disappeared, but with a flow that in its advance carried it +beyond its last flood-tide mark. After the first triumph in which she +could address Lanfear by his name, and could greet her father as her +father, there were lapses in which she knew them as before, without +naming them. Except mechanically to repeat the names of other people +when reminded of them, she did not pass beyond cognition to recognition. +Events still left no trace upon her; or if they did she was not sure +whether they were things she had dreamed or experienced. But her memory +grew stronger in the region where the bird knows its way home to the +nest, or the bee to the hive. She had an unerring instinct for places +where she had once been, and she found her way to them again without the +help from the association which sometimes failed Lanfear. Their walks +were always taken with her father’s company in his carriage, but +they sometimes left him at a point of the Berigo Road, and after a long +détour among the vineyards and olive orchards of the heights above, +rejoined him at another point they had agreed upon with him. One +afternoon, when Lanfear had climbed the rough pave of the footways with +her to one of the summits, they stopped to rest on the wall of a +terrace, where they sat watching the changing light on the sea, through +a break in the trees. The shadows surprised them on their height, and +they had to make their way among them over the farm paths and by the dry +beds of the torrents to the carriage road far below. They had been that +walk only once before, and Lanfear failed of his reckoning, except the +downward course which must bring them out on the high-road at last. But +Miss Gerald’s instinct saved them where his reason failed. She did +not remember, but she knew the way, and she led him on as if she were +inventing it, or as if it had been indelibly traced upon her mind and +she had only to follow the mystical lines within to be sure of her +course. She confessed to being very tired, and each step must have +increased her fatigue, but each step seemed to clear her perception of +the next to be taken.</p> + +<p>Suddenly, when Lanfear was blaming himself for bringing all this upon +her, and then for trusting to her guidance, he recognized a certain +peasant’s house, and in a few moments they had descended the +olive-orchard terraces to a broken cistern in the clear twilight beyond +the dusk. She suddenly halted him. “There, there! It happened +then—now—this instant!”</p> + +<p>“What?”</p> + +<p>“That feeling of being here before! There is the curb of the +old cistern; and the place where the terrace wall is broken; and the +path up to the vineyard—Don’t you feel it, too?” she +demanded, with a joyousness which had no pleasure for him.</p> + +<p>“Yes, certainly. We were here last week. We went up the path to +the farm-house to get some water.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, now I am remembering—remembering!” She stood +with eagerly parted lips, and glancing quickly round with glowing eyes, +whose light faded in the same instant. “No!” she said, +mournfully, “it’s gone.”</p> + +<p>A sound of wheels in the road ceased, and her father’s voice +called: “Don’t you want to take my place, and let me walk +awhile, Nannie?”</p> + +<p>“No. You come to me, papa. Something very strange has happened; +something you will be surprised at. Hurry!” She seemed to be +joking, as he was, while she beckoned him impatiently towards her.</p> + +<p>He had left his carriage, and he came up with a heavy man’s +quickened pace. “Well, what is the wonderful thing?” he +panted out.</p> + +<p>She stared blankly at him, without replying, and they silently made +their way to Mr. Gerald’s carriage.</p> + +<p>“I lost the way, and Miss Gerald found it,” Lanfear +explained, as he helped her to the place beside her father.</p> + +<p>She said nothing, and almost with sinking into the seat, she sank +into that deep slumber which from time to time overtook her.</p> + +<p>“I didn’t know we had gone so far—or rather that we +had waited so long before we started down the hills,” Lanfear +apologized in an involuntary whisper.</p> + +<p>“Oh, it’s all right,” her father said, trying to +adjust the girl’s fallen head to his shoulder. “Get in and +help me—”</p> + +<p>Lanfear obeyed, and lent a physician’s skilled aid, which left +the cumbrous efforts of her father to the blame he freely bestowed on +them. “You’ll have to come here on the other side,” he +said. “There’s room enough for all three. Or, hold on! Let +me take your place.” He took the place in front, and left her to +Lanfear’s care, with the trust which was the physician’s +right, and with a sense of the girl’s dependence in which she was +still a child to him.</p> + +<p>They did not speak till well on the way home. Then the father leaned +forward and whispered huskily: “Do you think she’s as strong +as she was?”</p> + +<p>Lanfear waited, as if thinking the facts over. He murmured back: +“No. She’s better. She’s not so strong.”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” the father murmured. “I +understand.”</p> + +<p>What Gerald understood by Lanfear’s words might not have been +their meaning, but what Lanfear meant was that there was now an +interfusion of the past and present in her daily experience. She still +did not remember, but she had moments in which she hovered upon such +knowledge of what had happened as she had of actual events. When she was +stronger she seemed farther from this knowledge; when she was weaker she +was nearer it. So it seemed to him in that region where he could be sure +of his own duty when he looked upon it singly as concern for her health. +No inquiry for the psychological possibilities must be suffered to +divide his effort for her physical recovery, though there might come +with this a cessation of the timeless dream-state in which she had her +being, and she might sharply realize the past, as the anaesthete +realizes his return to agony from insensibility. The quality of her mind +was as different from the thing called culture as her manner from +convention. A simplicity beyond the simplicity of childhood was one with +a poetic color in her absolute ideas. But this must cease with her +restoration to the strength in which she could alone come into full and +clear self-consciousness. So far as Lanfear could give reality to his +occupation with her disability, he was ministering to a mind diseased; +not to “rase out its written trouble,” but if possible to +restore the obliterated record, and enable her to spell its tragic +characters. If he could, he would have shrunk from this office; but all +the more because he specially had to do with the mystical side of +medicine, he always tried to keep his relation to her free from personal +feeling, and his aim single and matter-of-fact.</p> + +<p>It was hard to do this; and there was a glamour in the very +topographical and meteorological environment. The autumn was a long +delight in which the constant sea, the constant sky, knew almost as +little variance as the unchanging Alps. The days passed in a procession +of sunny splendor, neither hot nor cold, nor of the temper of any +determinate season, unless it were an abiding spring-time. The flowers +bloomed, and the grass kept green in a reverie of May. But one afternoon +of January, while Lanfear was going about in a thin coat and panama hat, +a soft, fresh wind began to blow from the east. It increased till +sunset, and then fell. In the morning he looked out on a world in which +the spring had stiffened overnight into winter. A thick frost painted +the leaves and flowers; icicles hung from pipes and vents; the frozen +streams flashed back from their arrested flow the sun as it shone from +the cold heaven, and blighted and blackened the hedges of geranium and +rose, the borders of heliotrope, the fields of pinks. The leaves of the +bananas hung limp about their stems; the palms rattled like skeletons in +the wind when it began to blow again over the shrunken landscape.</p> + + +<h3>VI</h3> + +<p>The caprice of a climate which vaunted itself perpetual summer was a +godsend to all the strangers strong enough to bear it without suffering. +For the sick an indoor life of huddling about the ineffectual fires of +the south began, and lasted for the fortnight that elapsed before the +Riviera got back its advertised temperature. Miss Gerald had drooped in +the milder weather; but the cold braced and lifted her, and with its +help she now pushed her walks farther, and was eager every day for some +excursion to the little towns that whitened along the shores, or the +villages that glimmered from the olive-orchards of the hills. Once she +said to Lanfear, when they were climbing through the brisk, clear air: +“It seems to me as if I had been here before. Have I?”</p> + +<p>“No. This is the first time.”</p> + +<p>She said no more, but seemed disappointed in his answer, and he +suggested: “Perhaps it is the cold that reminds you of our winters +at home, and makes you feel that the scene is familiar.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, that is it!” she returned, joyously. “Was +there snow, there, like that on the mountains yonder?”</p> + +<p>“A good deal more, I fancy. That will be gone in a few days, +and at home, you know, our snow lasts for weeks.”</p> + +<p>“Then that is what I was thinking of,” she said, and she +ran strongly and lightly forward. “Come!”</p> + +<p>When the harsh weather passed and the mild climate returned there was +no lapse of her strength. A bloom, palely pink as the flowers that began +to flush the almond-trees, came upon her delicate beauty, a light like +that of the lengthening days dawned in her eyes. She had an instinct for +the earliest violets among the grass under the olives; she was first to +hear the blackcaps singing in the garden-tops; and nothing that was +novel in her experience seemed alien to it. This was the sum of what +Lanfear got by the questioning which he needlessly tried to keep +indirect. She knew that she was his patient, and in what manner, and she +had let him divine that her loss of memory was suffering as well as +deprivation. She had not merely the fatigue which we all undergo from +the effort to recall things, and which sometimes reaches exhaustion; but +there was apparently in the void of her oblivion a perpetual rumor of +events, names, sensations, like—Lanfear felt that he inadequately +conjectured—the subjective noises which are always in the ears of +the deaf. Sometimes, in the distress of it, she turned to him for help, +and when he was able to guess what she was striving for, a radiant +relief and gratitude transfigured her face. But this could not last, and +he learned to note how soon the stress and tension of her effort +returned. His compassion for her at such times involved a temptation, or +rather a question, which he had to silence by a direct effort of his +will. Would it be worse, would it be greater anguish for her to know at +once the past that now tormented her consciousness with its broken and +meaningless reverberations? Then he realized that it was impossible to +help her even through the hazard of telling her what had befallen; that +no such effect as was to be desired could be anticipated from the +outside.</p> + +<p>If he turned to her father for counsel or instruction, or even a +participation in his responsibility, he was met by an optimistic +patience which exasperated him, if it did not complicate the case. Once, +when Lanfear forbearingly tried to share with him his anxiety for the +effect of a successful event, he was formed to be outright, and remind +him, in so many words, that the girl’s restoration might be +through anguish which he could not measure.</p> + +<p>Gerald faltered aghast; then he said: “It mustn’t come to +that; you mustn’t let it.”</p> + +<p>“How do you expect me to prevent it?” Lanfear demanded, +in his vexation.</p> + +<p>Gerald caught his breath. “If she gets well, she will +remember?”</p> + +<p>“I don’t say that. It seems probable. Do you wish her +being to remain bereft of one-half its powers?”</p> + +<p>“Oh, how do I know what I want?” the poor man groaned. +“I only know that I trust you entirely, Doctor Lanfear. Whatever +you think best will be best and wisest, no matter what the outcome +is.”</p> + +<p>He got away from Lanfear with these hopeless words, and again Lanfear +perceived that the case was left wholly to him. His consolation was the +charm of the girl’s companionship, the delight of a nature knowing +itself from moment to moment as if newly created. For her, as nearly as +he could put the fact into words, the actual moment contained the past +and the future as well as the present. When he saw in her the +persistence of an exquisite personality independent of the means by +which he realized his own continuous identity, he sometimes felt as if +in the presence of some angel so long freed from earthly allegiance that +it had left all record behind, as we leave here the records of our first +years. If an echo of the past reached her, it was apt to be trivial and +insignificant, like those unimportant experiences of our remotest +childhood, which remain to us from a world outlived.</p> + +<p>It was not an insipid perfection of character which reported itself +in these celestial terms, and Lanfear conjectured that angelic +immortality, if such a thing were, could not imply perfection except at +the cost of one-half of human character. When the girl wore a dress that +she saw pleased him more than another, there was a responsive pleasure +in her eyes, which he could have called vanity if he would; and she had +at times a wilfulness which he could have accused of being obstinacy. +She showed a certain jealousy of any experiences of his apart from her +own, not because they included others, but because they excluded her. He +was aware of an involuntary vigilance in her, which could not leave his +motives any more than his actions unsearched. But in her conditioning +she could not repent; she could only offer him at some other time the +unconscious reparation of her obedience. The self-criticism which the +child has not learned she had forgotten, but in her oblivion the wish to +please existed as perfectly as in the ignorance of childhood.</p> + +<p>This, so far as he could ever put into words, was the interior of the +world where he dwelt apart with her. Its exterior continued very like +that of other worlds where two young people have their being. Now and +then a more transitory guest at the Grand Hotel Sardegna perhaps fancied +it the iridescent orb which takes the color of the morning sky, and is +destined, in the course of nature, to the danger of collapse in which +planetary space abounds. Some rumor of this could not fail to reach +Lanfear, but he ignored it as best he could in always speaking gravely +of Miss Gerald as his patient, and authoritatively treating her as such. +He convinced some of these witnesses against their senses; for the +others, he felt that it mattered little what they thought, since, if it +reached her, it could not pierce her isolation for more than the instant +in which the impression from absent things remained to her.</p> + +<p>A more positive embarrassment, of a kind Lanfear was not prepared +for, beset him in an incident which would have been more touching if he +had been less singly concerned for the girl. A pretty English boy, with +the dawn of a peachy bloom on his young cheeks, and an impulsiveness +commoner with English youth than our own, talked with Miss Gerald one +evening and the next day sent her an armful of flowers with his card. He +followed this attention with a call at her father’s apartment, and +after Miss Gerald seemed to know him, and they had, as he told Lanfear, +a delightful time together, she took up his card from the table where it +was lying, and asked him if he could tell her who that gentleman was. +The poor fellow’s inference was that she was making fun of him, +and he came to Lanfear, as an obvious friend of the family, for an +explanation. He reported the incident, with indignant tears standing in +his eyes: “What did she mean by it? If she took my flowers, she +must have known that—that—they—And to pretend to +forget my name! Oh, I say, it’s too bad! She could have got rid of +me without that. Girls have ways enough, you know.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, yes,” Lanfear assented, slowly, to gain time. +“I can assure you that Miss Gerald didn’t mean anything that +could wound you. She isn’t very well—she’s rather +odd—”</p> + +<p>“Do you mean that she’s out of her mind? She can talk as +well as any one—better!”</p> + +<p>“No, not that. But she’s often in pain—greatly in +pain when she can’t recall a name, and I’ve no doubt she was +trying to recall yours with the help of your card. She would be the last +in the world to be indifferent to your feelings. I imagine she scarcely +knew what she was doing at the moment.”</p> + +<p>“Then, do you think—do you suppose—it would be any +good my trying to see her again? If she wouldn’t be indifferent to +my feelings, do you think there would be any hope—Really, you +know, I would give anything to believe that my feelings wouldn’t +offend her. You understand me?”</p> + +<p>“Perhaps I do.”</p> + +<p>“I’ve never met a more charming girl and—she +isn’t engaged, is she? She isn’t engaged to you? I +don’t mean to press the question, but it’s a question of +life and death with me, you know.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear thought he saw his way out of the coil. “I can tell +you, quite as frankly as you ask, that Miss Gerald isn’t engaged +to <em>me</em>.”</p> + +<p>“Then it’s somebody else—somebody in America! Well, +I hope she’ll be happy; <em>I</em> never shall.” He offered +his hand to Lanfear. “I’m off.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, here’s the doctor, now,” a voice said behind +them where they stood by the garden wall, and they turned to confront +Gerald with his daughter.</p> + +<p>“Why! Are you going?” she said to the Englishman, and she +put out her hand to him.</p> + +<p>“Yes, Mr. Evers is going.” Lanfear came to the +rescue.</p> + +<p>“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl said, and the youth +responded.</p> + +<p>“That’s very good of you. I—good-by! I hope +you’ll be very happy—I—” He turned abruptly +away, and ran into the hotel.</p> + +<p>“What has he been crying for?” Miss Gerald asked, turning +from a long look after him.</p> + +<p>Lanfear did not know quite what to say; but he hazarded saying: +“He was hurt that you had forgotten him when he came to see you +this afternoon.”</p> + +<p>“Did he come to see me?” she asked; and Lanfear exchanged +looks of anxiety, pain, and reassurance with her father. “I am so +sorry. Shall I go after him and tell him?”</p> + +<p>“No; I explained; he’s all right,” Lanfear +said.</p> + +<p>“You want to be careful, Nannie,” her father added, +“about people’s feelings when you meet them, and afterwards +seem not to know them.”</p> + +<p>“But I <em>do</em> know them, papa,” she +remonstrated.</p> + +<p>“You want to be careful,” her father repeated.</p> + +<p>“I will—I will, indeed.” Her lips quivered, and the +tears came, which Lanfear had to keep from flowing by what quick turn he +could give to something else.</p> + +<p>An obscure sense of the painful incident must have lingered with her +after its memory had perished. One afternoon when Lanfear and her father +went with her to the military concert in the sycamore-planted piazza +near the Vacherie Suisse, where they often came for a cup of tea, she +startled them by bowing gayly to a young lieutenant of engineers +standing there with some other officers, and making the most of the +prospect of pretty foreigners which the place afforded. The lieutenant +returned the bow with interest, and his eyes did not leave their party +as long as they remained. Within the bounds of deference for her, it was +evident that his comrades were joking about the honor done him by this +charming girl. When the Geralds started homeward Lanfear was aware of a +trio of officers following them, not conspicuously, but unmistakably; +and after that, he could not start on his walks with Miss Gerald and her +father without the sense that the young lieutenant was hovering +somewhere in their path, waiting in the hopes of another bow from her. +The officer was apparently not discouraged by his failure to win +recognition from her, and what was amounting to annoyance for Lanfear +reached the point where he felt he must share it with her father. He had +nearly as much trouble in imparting it to him as he might have had with +Miss Gerald herself. He managed, but when he required her father to put +a stop to it he perceived that Gerald was as helpless as she would have +been. He first wished to verify the fact from its beginning with her, +but this was not easy.</p> + +<p>“Nannie,” he said, “why did you bow to that officer +the other day?”</p> + +<p>“What officer, papa? When?”</p> + +<p>“You know; there by the band-stand, at the Swiss +Dairy.”</p> + +<p>She stared blankly at him, and it was clear that it was all as if it +had not been with her. He insisted, and then she said: “Perhaps I +thought I knew him, and was afraid I should hurt his feelings if I +didn’t recognize him. But I don’t remember it at all.” +The curves of her mouth drooped, and her eyes grieved, so that her +father had not the heart to say more. She left them, and when he was +alone with Lanfear he said:</p> + +<p>“You see how it is!”</p> + +<p>“Yes, I saw how it was before. But what do you wish to +do?”</p> + +<p>“Do you mean that he will keep it up?”</p> + +<p>“Decidedly, he’ll keep it up. He has every right to from +his point of view.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, well, then, my dear fellow, you must stop it, somehow. +You’ll know how to do it.”</p> + +<p>“I?” said Lanfear, indignantly; but his vexation was not +so great that he did not feel a certain pleasure in fulfilling this +strangest part of his professional duty, when at the beginning of their +next excursion he put Miss Gerald into the victoria with her father and +fell back to the point at which he had seen the lieutenant waiting to +haunt their farther progress. He put himself plumply in front of the +officer and demanded in very blunt Italian: “What do you +want?”</p> + +<p>The lieutenant stared him over with potential offence, in which his +delicately pencilled mustache took the shape of a light sneer, and +demanded in his turn, in English much better than Lanfear’s +Italian: “What right have you to ask?”</p> + +<p>“The right of Miss Gerald’s physician. She is an invalid +in my charge.”</p> + +<p>A change quite indefinable except as the visible transition from +coxcomb to gentleman passed over the young lieutenant’s comely +face. “An invalid?” he faltered.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” Lanfear began; and then, with a rush of confidence +which the change in the officer’s face justified, “one very +strangely, very tragically afflicted. Since she saw her mother killed in +an accident a year ago she remembers nothing. She bowed to you because +she saw you looking at her, and supposed you must be an acquaintance. +May I assure you that you are altogether mistaken?”</p> + +<p>The lieutenant brought his heels together, and bent low. “I beg +her pardon with all my heart. I am very, very sorry. I will do anything +I can. I would like to stop that. May I bring my mother to call on Miss +Gerald?”</p> + +<p>He offered his hand, and Lanfear wrung it hard, a lump of gratitude +in his throat choking any particular utterance, while a fine shame for +his late hostile intention covered him.</p> + +<p>When the lieutenant came, with all possible circumstance, bringing +the countess, his mother, Mr. Gerald overwhelmed them with hospitality +of every form. The Italian lady responded effusively, and more sincerely +cooed and murmured her compassionate interest in his daughter. Then all +parted the best of friends; but when it was over, Miss Gerald did not +know what it had been about. She had not remembered the lieutenant or +her father’s vexation, or any phase of the incident which was now +closed. Nothing remained of it but the lieutenant’s right, which +he gravely exercised, of saluting them respectfully whenever he met +them.</p> + + +<h3>VII</h3> + +<p>Earlier, Lanfear had never allowed himself to be far out of call from +Miss Gerald’s father, especially during the daytime slumbers into +which she fell, and from which they both always dreaded her awakening. +But as the days went on and the event continued the same he allowed +himself greater range. Formerly the three went their walks or drives +together, but now he sometimes went alone. In these absences he found +relief from the stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast +off the bond which enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he +must ignore at times for mere self-preservation’s sake; but there +was always a lurking anxiety, which, though he refused to let it define +itself to him, shortened the time and space he tried to put between +them.</p> + +<p>One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware of +somewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursion +to a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandoned +himself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to a +luxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allow +himself. At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of a +sharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days. But Mr. Gerald +was tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met him +with an easy smile. “She woke once, and said she had had such a +pleasant dream. Now she’s off again. Do you think we’d +better wake her for dinner? I suppose she’s getting up her +strength in this way. Her sleeping so much is a good symptom, +isn’t it?”</p> + +<p>Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible +eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to +favor. But he said: “Decidedly I wouldn’t wake her”; +and he spent a night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous +expectation which the morning, when it came, rather mockingly +defeated.</p> + +<p>Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a +fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father’s +“Well, Nannie, you <em>have</em> had a nap, this time,” she +answered, smiling:</p> + +<p>“Have I? It isn’t afternoon, is it?”</p> + +<p>“No, it’s morning. You’ve napped it all +night.”</p> + +<p>She said: “I can’t tell whether I’ve been asleep or +not, sometimes; but now I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where +are we going to-day?”</p> + +<p>She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: “I guess the +doctor won’t want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition +yesterday afternoon.”</p> + +<p>“Ah,” she said, “I <em>knew</em> you had been +somewhere! Was it very far? Are you too tired?”</p> + +<p>“It was rather far, but I’m not tired. I shouldn’t +advise Possana, though.”</p> + +<p>“Possana?” she repeated. “What is +Possana?”</p> + +<p>He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an +account of his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, +in making light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end she +said, gently: “Shall we go this morning?”</p> + +<p>“Let the doctor rest this morning, Nannie,” her father +interrupted, whimsically, but with what Lanfear knew to be an inner +yielding to her will. “Or if you won’t let <em>him</em>, let +<em>me</em>. I don’t want to go anywhere this morning.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that +by the afternoon she would have forgotten Possana. She sighed, but in +her sigh there was no concession. Then, with the chance of a returning +drowse to save him from openly thwarting her will, he merely suggested: +“There’s plenty of time in the afternoon; the days are so +long now; and we can get the sunset from the hills.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, that will be nice,” she said, but he perceived that +she did not assent willingly; and there was an effect of resolution in +the readiness with which she appeared dressed for the expedition after +luncheon. She clearly did not know where they were going, but when she +turned to Lanfear with her look of entreaty, he had not the heart to +join her father in any conspiracy against her. He beckoned the carriage +which had become conscious in its eager driver from the moment she +showed herself at the hotel door, and they set out.</p> + +<p>When they had left the higher level of the hotel and began their +clatter through the long street of the town, Lanfear noted that she +seemed to feel as much as himself the quaintness of the little city, +rising on one hand, with its narrow alleys under successive arches +between the high, dark houses, to the hills, and dropping on the other +to sea from the commonplace of the principal thoroughfare, with its pink +and white and saffron hotels and shops. Beyond the town their course lay +under villa walls, covered with vines and topped by pavilions, and +opening finally along a stretch of the old Cornice road.</p> + +<p>“But this,” she said, at a certain point, “is where +we were yesterday!”</p> + +<p>“This is where the doctor was yesterday,” her father +said, behind his cigar.</p> + +<p>“And wasn’t I with you?” she asked Lanfear.</p> + +<p>He said, playfully: “To-day you are. I mustn’t be selfish +and have you every day.”</p> + +<p>“Ah, you are laughing at me; but I know I was here +yesterday.”</p> + +<p>Her father set his lips in patience, and Lanfear did not insist.</p> + +<p>They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on the +shoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed, +and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people had +built when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old +home.</p> + +<p>World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but the +spring-time was immortally young in the landscape. Over the expanses of +green and brown fields, and hovering about the gray and white cottages, +was a mist of peach and cherry blossoms. Above these the hoar olives +thickened, and the vines climbed from terrace to terrace. The valley +narrowed inland, and ceased in the embrace of the hills drawing +mysteriously together in the distances.</p> + +<p>“I think we’ve got the best part of it here, Miss +Gerald,” Lanfear broke the common silence by saying. “You +couldn’t see much more of Possana after you got there.”</p> + +<p>“Besides,” her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred +on the younger man, “if you were there with the doctor yesterday, +you won’t want to make the climb again to-day. Give it up, +Nannie!”</p> + +<p>“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give it +up.”</p> + +<p>“Well, then, we must go on, I suppose. Where do we begin our +climb?”</p> + +<p>Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at +the foot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of +the peasants. He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but he +suggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the new +town.</p> + +<p>“Well, I hope so,” Mr. Gerald grumbled. But at Possana +Nuova no saddle-donkeys were to be had, and he announced, at the café +where they stopped for the negotiation, that he would wait for the young +people to go on to Possana Vecchia, and tell him about it when they got +back. In the meantime he would watch the game of ball, which, in the +piazza before the café, appeared to have engaged the energies of the +male population. Lanfear was still inwardly demurring, when a stalwart +peasant girl came in and announced that she had one donkey which they +could have with her own services driving it. She had no saddle, but +there was a pad on which the young lady could ride.</p> + +<p>“Oh, well, take it for Nannie,” Mr. Gerald directed; +“only don’t be gone too long.”</p> + +<p>They set out with Miss Gerald reclining in the kind of litter which +the donkey proved to be equipped with. Lanfear went beside her, the +peasant girl came behind, and at times ran forward to instruct them in +the points they seemed to be looking at. For the most part the landscape +opened beneath them, but in the azure distances it climbed into Alpine +heights which the recent snows had now left to the gloom of their pines. +On the slopes of the nearer hills little towns clung, here and there; +closer yet farm-houses showed themselves among the vines and olives.</p> + +<p>It was very simple, as the life in it must always have been; and +Lanfear wondered if the elemental charm of the scene made itself felt by +his companion as they climbed the angles of the inclines, in a silence +broken only by the picking of the donkey’s hoofs on the rude +mosaic of the pavement, and the panting of the peasant girl at its +heels. On the top of the last upward stretch they stopped for the view, +and Miss Gerald asked abruptly: “Why were you so sad?”</p> + +<p>“When was I sad?” he asked, in turn.</p> + +<p>“I don’t know. Weren’t you sad?”</p> + +<p>“When I was here yesterday, you mean?” She smiled on his +fortunate guess, and he said: “Oh, I don’t know. It might +have begun with thinking—</p> + +<p class="poetry">‘Of old, unhappy, far-off things, <br />And +battles long ago.’</p> + +<p style="text-indent: 0em">You know the pirates used to come sailing +over the peaceful sea yonder from Africa, to harry these coasts, and +carry off as many as they could capture into slavery in Tunis and +Algiers. It was a long, dumb kind of misery that scarcely made an echo +in history, but it haunted my fancy yesterday, and I saw these valleys +full of the flight and the pursuit which used to fill them, up to the +walls of the villages, perched on the heights where men could have built +only for safety. Then, I got to thinking of other +things—”</p> + +<p>“And thinking of things in the past always makes you +sad,” she said, in pensive reflection. “If it were not for +the wearying of always trying to remember, I don’t believe I +should want my memory back. And of course to be like other +people,” she ended with a sigh.</p> + +<p>It was on his tongue to say that he would not have her so; but he +checked himself, and said, lamely enough: “Perhaps you will be +like them, sometime.”</p> + +<p>She startled him by answering irrelevantly: “You know my mother +is dead. She died a long while ago; I suppose I must have been very +little.”</p> + +<p>She spoke as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew a +breath of relief in his surprise. He asked, at another tangent: +“What made you think I was sad yesterday?”</p> + +<p>“Oh, I knew, somehow. I think that I always know when you are +sad; I can’t tell you how, but I feel it.”</p> + +<p>“Then I must cheer up,” Lanfear said. “If I could +only see you strong and well, Miss Gerald, like this +girl—”</p> + +<p>They both looked at the peasant, and she laughed in sympathy with +their smiling, and beat the donkey a little for pleasure; it did not +mind.</p> + +<p>“But you will be—you will be! We must hurry on, now, or +your father will be getting anxious.”</p> + +<p>They pushed forward on the road, which was now level and wider than +it had been. As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more +to reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they +saw a man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively +put himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning +darkly, and muttering and gesticulating.</p> + +<p>Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze. +The peasant girl said gayly in Italian: “He is mad; the earthquake +made him mad,” and urged the donkey forward.</p> + +<p>Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the +luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the +madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. He no longer +experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and +made him glad of any delay that kept them from it.</p> + +<p>They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the +open country without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin, +which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life. There, till +within the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, as +they had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing to +intimate a domestic or civic advance. This street must have been the +main thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from it +here and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the little +piazza on a height in the midst of the town. Two churches and a simple +town house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered façades. +The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and some +were tumbled in heaps. But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of the +churches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it was +roofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people had +flocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake. The high altar +stood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubs +perched, under the open sky, in celestial security.</p> + +<p>He had learned to look for the unexpected in Miss Gerald, and he +could not have said that it was with surprise he now found her as +capable of the emotions which the place inspired, as himself. He made +sure of saying: “The earthquake, you know,” and she +responded with compassion:</p> + +<p>“Oh yes; and perhaps that poor man was here, praying with the +rest, when it happened. How strange it must all have seemed to them, +here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful +thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the +way!”</p> + +<p>It seemed to Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of the +knowledge so long kept from her. But she went confidently on like a +sleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him in +waking. She spoke of the earthquake as if she had been reading or +hearing of it; but he doubted if, with her broken memory, this could be +so. It was rather as if she was exploring his own mind in the way of +which he had more than once been sensible, and making use of his memory. +From time to time she spoke of remembering, but he knew that this was as +the blind speak of seeing.</p> + +<p>He was anxious to get away, and at last they came out to where they +had left the peasant girl waiting beside her donkey. She was not there, +and after trying this way and that in the tangle of alleys, Lanfear +decided to take the thoroughfare which they had come up by and trust to +the chance of finding her at its foot. But he failed even of his search +for the street: he came out again and again at the point he had started +from.</p> + +<p>“What is the matter?” she asked at the annoyance he could +not keep out of his face.</p> + +<p>He laughed. “Oh, merely that we’re lost. But we will wait +here till that girl chooses to come back for us. Only it’s getting +late, and Mr. Gerald—”</p> + +<p>“Why, I know the way down,” she said, and started quickly +in a direction which, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by +which he had emerged from the town the day before. He had once more the +sense of his memory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken +his hand for guidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she +had directed a pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put +down. In some mystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was +his.</p> + +<p>They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond +the last house. She explained that, not being able to follow them into +the church with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her +and wait for them there.</p> + +<p>“Does no one at all live here?” Lanfear asked, +carelessly.</p> + +<p>“Among the owls and the spectres? I would not pass a night here +for a lemonade! My mother,” she went on, with a natural pride in +the event, “was lost in the earthquake. They found her with me +before her breast, and her arms stretched out keeping the stones +away.” She vividly dramatized the fact. “I was alive, but +she was dead.”</p> + +<p>“Tell her,” Miss Gerald said, “that my mother is +dead, too.”</p> + +<p>“Ah, poor little thing!” the girl said, when the message +was delivered, and she put her beast in motion, chattering gayly to Miss +Gerald in the bond of their common orphanhood.</p> + +<p>The return was down-hill, and they went back in half the time it had +taken them to come. But even with this speed they were late, and the +twilight was deepening when the last turn of their road brought them in +sight of the new village. There a wild noise of cries for help burst +upon the air, mixed with the shrill sound of maniac gibbering. They saw +a boy running towards the town, and nearer them a man struggling with +another, whom he had caught about the middle, and was dragging towards +the side of the road where it dropped, hundreds of feet, into the gorge +below.</p> + +<p>The donkey-girl called out: “Oh, the madman! He is killing the +signor!”</p> + +<p>Lanfear shouted. The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fled +shrieking. Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear as +he ran forward to the prostrate form. She did not look at it, but within +a few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out: +“Oh, my mother is killed!” and sank, as if sinking down into +the earth, in a swoon.</p> + +<p>“No, no; it’s all right, Nannie! Look after her, Lanfear! +I’m not hurt. I let myself go in that fellow’s hands, and I +fell softly. It was a good thing he didn’t drop me over the +edge.” Gerald gathered himself up nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear +his help with the girl. The situation explained itself, almost without +his incoherent additions, to the effect that he had become anxious, and +had started out with the boy for a guide, to meet them, and had met the +lunatic, who suddenly attacked him. While he talked, Lanfear was feeling +the girl’s pulse, and now and then putting his ear to her heart. +With a glance at her father: “You’re bleeding, Mr. +Gerald,” he said.</p> + +<p>“So I am,” the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a +red stream from his face with his handkerchief. “But I am not +hurt—”</p> + +<p>“Better let me tie it up,” Lanfear said, taking the +handkerchief from him. He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he +had not always thought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead +with a reverence mingling with his professional gentleness. The +donkey-girl had not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, +as her care was needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she +became a part of the silence in which the procession made its way slowly +into Possana Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the +other to support his daughter in her place. There was a sort of muted +outcry of the whole population awaiting them at the door of the locanda +where they had halted before, and which now had the distinction of +offering them shelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young +lady, who still remained in her swoon.</p> + +<p>When the landlord could prevail with his fellow-townsmen and +townswomen to disperse in her interest, and had imposed silence upon his +customers indoors, Lanfear began his vigil beside his patient in as +great quiet as he could anywhere have had. Once during the evening the +public physician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear +that nothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater +experience of the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending +for some San Remo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always +approved, and then Gerald had not persisted. He was strongly excited, +and anxious not so much for his daughter’s recovery from her +swoon, which he did not doubt, as for the effect upon her when she +should have come to herself.</p> + +<p>It was this which he wished to discuss, sitting fallen back into his +chair, or walking up and down the room, with his head bound with a +bloody handkerchief, and looking, with a sort of alien picturesqueness, +like a kindly brigand.</p> + +<p>Lanfear did not leave his place beside the bed where the girl lay, +white and still as if dead. An inexpressible compassion for the poor man +filled his heart. Whatever the event should be, it would be tragical for +him. “Go to sleep, Mr. Gerald,” he said. “Your waking +can do no good. I will keep watch, and if need be, I’ll call you. +Try to make yourself easy on that couch.”</p> + +<p>“I shall not sleep,” the old man answered. “How +could I?” Nevertheless, he adjusted himself to the hard pillows of +the lounge where he had been sitting and drowsed among them. He woke +just before dawn with a start. “I thought she had come to, and +knew everything! What a nightmare! Did I groan? Is there any +change?”</p> + +<p>Lanfear, sitting by the bed, in the light of the wasting candle, +which threw a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After +a moment he asked: “How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted +after the accident to her mother?”</p> + +<p>“I don’t think she recovered consciousness for two days, +and then she remembered nothing. What do you think are the chances of +her remembering now?”</p> + +<p>“I don’t know. But there’s a kind of psychopathic +logic—If she lost her memory through one great shock, she might +find it through another.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, yes!” the father said, rising and walking to and +fro, in his anguish. “That was what I thought—what I was +afraid of. If I could die myself, and save her from living through +it—I don’t know what I’m saying! But if—but +if—if she could somehow be kept from it a little longer! But she +can’t, she can’t! She must know it now when she +wakes.”</p> + +<p>Lanfear had put up his hand, and taken the girl’s slim wrist +quietly between his thumb and finger, holding it so while her father +talked on.</p> + +<p>“I suppose it’s been a sort of weakness—a sort of +wickedness—in me to wish to keep it from her; but I <em>have</em> +wished that, doctor; you must have seen it, and I can’t deny it. +We ought to bear what is sent us in this world, and if we escape we must +pay for our escape. It has cost her half her being, I know it; but it +hasn’t cost her her reason, and I’m afraid for that, if she +comes into her memory now. Still, you must do—But no one can do +anything either to hinder or to help!”</p> + +<p>He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently. He +made an appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained +immovable with his hand on the girl’s pulse.</p> + +<p>“Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, +though without it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life? Do +you think my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping +her—But this faint <em>may</em> pass and she may wake from it just +as she has been. It is logical that she should remember; but is it +certain that she will?”</p> + +<p>A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like a +response from the girl’s lips, and she all but imperceptibly +stirred. Her father neither heard nor saw, but Lanfear started forward. +He made a sudden clutch at the girl’s wrist with the hand that had +not left it and then remained motionless. “She will never remember +now—here.”</p> + +<p>He fell on his knees beside the bed and began to sob. “Oh, my +dearest! My poor girl! My love!” still keeping her wrist in his +hand, and laying his head tenderly on her arm. Suddenly he started, with +a shout: “The pulse!” and fell forward, crushing his ear +against her heart, and listened with bursts of: “It’s +beating! She isn’t dead! She’s alive!” Then he lifted +her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that she opened her eyes, and +while she clung to him, entreated:</p> + +<p>“My father! Where is he?”</p> + +<p>A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they +welcomed her back to life. She took her father’s head between her +hands, and kissed his bruised face. “I thought you were dead; and +I thought that mamma—” She stopped, and they waited +breathless. “But that was long ago, wasn’t it?”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” her father eagerly assented. “Very long +ago.”</p> + +<p>“I remember,” she sighed. “I thought that I was +killed, too. Was it <em>all</em> a dream?” Her father and Lanfear +looked at each other. Which should speak? “This is Doctor Lanfear, +isn’t it?” she asked, with a dim smile. “And I’m +not dreaming now, am I?” He had released her from his arms, but +she held his hand fast. “I know it is you, and papa; and yes, I +remember everything. That terrible pain of forgetting is gone! +It’s beautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I +wanted to call to you. But mamma—”</p> + +<p>However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, +it had been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in the +rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to +establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the +things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so +back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no sudden +burst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which her +spirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to him +that the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural agencies such +as, he remembered once somewhere reading, attend the souls of those +lately dead, and explore their minds till every thought and deed of +their earthly lives, from the last to the first, is revealed to them out +of an inner memory which can never, any jot or tittle, perish. It was as +if this had remained in her intact from the blow that shattered her +outer remembrance. When the final, long-dreaded horror was reached, it +was already a sorrow of the past, suffered and accepted with the +resignation which is the close of grief, as of every other passion.</p> + +<p>Love had come to her help in the time of her need, but not love alone +helped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyond +it. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, more +than the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if not +neglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not help +ignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in the +self-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing, +he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he did +not do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt his +duty to the gentle old man, even while he did it. Gerald lived to +witness his daughter’s perfect recovery of the self so long lost +to her; he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her +the wife of the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have +made her. He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in +the fond memories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by +her affliction to recall. Then, after the spring of the Riviera had +whitened into summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny +glare behind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon +through the heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed. He +had been full of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little +place in New England where his daughter knew that her mother lay. In the +morning he did not wake.</p> + +<p>“He gave his life that I might have mine!” she lamented +in the first wild grief.</p> + +<p>“No, don’t say that, Nannie,” her husband +protested, calling her by the pet name which her father always used. +“He is dead; but if we owe each other to his loss, it is because +he was given, not because he gave himself.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, I know, I know!” she wailed. “But he would +gladly have given himself for me.”</p> + +<p>That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to +do so. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not +belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes +within which she means to rest her soul.</p> + + + + +<h2><a name="chapter2" id="chapter2">II</a></h2> + +<h2 class="chaptertitle">The Eidolons of Brooks Alford</h2> + + +<p>I should like to give the story of Alford’s experiences just as +Wanhope told it, sitting with us before the glowing hearth in the +Turkish room, one night after the other diners at our club had gone away +to digest their dinners at the theatre, or in their bachelor apartments +up-town, or on the late trains which they were taking north, south, and +west; or had hurried back to their offices to spend the time stolen from +rest in overwork for which their famished nerves would duly revenge +themselves. It was undoubtedly overwork which preceded Alford’s +experiences if it did not cause them, for he was pretty well broken from +it when he took himself off in the early summer, to put the pieces +together as best he could by the seaside. But this was a fact which +Wanhope was not obliged to note to us, and there were certain other +commonplaces of our knowledge of Alford which he could omit without +omitting anything essential to our understanding of the facts which he +dealt with so delicately, so electly, almost affectionately, coaxing +each point into the fittest light, and then lifting his phrase from it, +and letting it stand alone in our consciousness. I remember particularly +how he touched upon the love-affair which was supposed to have so much +to do with Alford’s break-up, and how he dismissed it to its +proper place in the story. As he talked on, with scarcely an +interruption either from the eager credulity of Rulledge or the doubt of +Minver, I heard with a sensuous comfort—I can use no other +word—the far-off click of the dishes in the club kitchen, putting +away till next day, with the musical murmur of a smitten glass or the +jingle of a dropped spoon. But if I should try to render his words, I +should spoil their impression in the vain attempt, and I feel that it is +best to give the story as best I can in words of my own, so far from +responsive to the requisitions of the occult incident.</p> + +<p>The first intimation Alford had of the strange effect, which from +first to last was rather an obsession than a possession of his, was +after a morning of idle satisfaction spent in watching the target +practice from the fort in the neighborhood of the little fishing-village +where he was spending the summer. The target was two or three miles out +in the open water beyond the harbor, and he found his pleasure in +watching the smoke of the gun for that discrete interval before the +report reached him, and then for that somewhat longer interval before he +saw the magnificent splash of the shot which, as it plunged into the +sea, sent a fan-shaped fountain thirty or forty feet into the air. He +did not know and he did not care whether the target was ever hit or not. +That fact was no part of his concern. His affair was to watch the burst +of smoke from the fort and then to watch the upward gush of water, +almost as light and vaporous to the eye, where the ball struck. He did +not miss one of the shots fired during the forenoon, and when he met the +other people who sat down with him at the midday dinner in the hotel, +his talk with them was naturally of the morning’s practice. They +one and all declared it a great nuisance, and said that it had shattered +their nerves terribly, which was not perhaps so strange, since they were +all women. But when they asked him in his quality of nervous wreck +whether he had not suffered from the prolonged and repeated explosions, +too, he found himself able to say no, that he had enjoyed every moment +of the firing. He added that he did not believe he had even noticed the +noise after the first shot, he was so wholly taken with the beauty of +the fountain-burst from the sea which followed; and as he spoke the +fan-like spray rose and expanded itself before his eyes, quite blotting +out the visage of a young widow across the table. In his swift +recognition of the fact and his reflection upon it, he realized that the +effect was quite as if he had been looking at some intense light, almost +as if he had been looking at the sun, and that the illusion which had +blotted out the agreeable reality opposite was of the quality of those +flying shapes which repeat themselves here, there, and everywhere that +one looks, after lifting the gaze from a dazzling object. When his +consciousness had duly registered this perception, there instantly +followed a recognition of the fact that the eidolon now filling his +vision was not the effect of the dazzled eyes, but of a mental process, +of thinking how the thing which it reported had looked.</p> + +<p>By the time Alford had co-ordinated this reflection with the other, +the eidolon had faded from the lady’s face, which again presented +itself in uninterrupted loveliness with the added attraction of a +distinct pout.</p> + +<p>“Well, Mr. Alford!” she bantered him.</p> + +<p>“Oh, I beg your pardon! I was thinking—”</p> + +<p>“Not of what I was saying,” she broke in, laughingly, +forgivingly.</p> + +<p>“No, I certainly wasn’t,” he assented, with such a +sense of approaching creepiness in his experience that when she +challenged him to say what he <em>was</em> thinking of, he could not, or +would not; she professed to believe that he would not.</p> + +<p>In the joking that followed he soon lost the sense of approaching +creepiness, and began to be proud of what had happened to him as out of +the ordinary, as a species of psychological ecstasy almost of spiritual +value. From time to time he tried, by thinking of the splash and upward +gush from the cannon-shot’s plunge in the sea, to recall the +vision, but it would not come again, and at the end of an afternoon +somewhat distraughtly spent he decided to put the matter away, as one of +the odd things of no significance which happen in life and must be dealt +with as mysteries none the less trifling because they are +inexplicable.</p> + +<p>“Well, you’ve got over it?” the widow joked him as +he drew up towards her, smiling from her rocker on the veranda after +supper. At first, all the women in the hotel had petted him; but with +their own cares and ailments to reclaim them they let the invalid fall +to the peculiar charge of the childless widow who had nothing else to +do, and was so well and strong that she could look after the invalid +Professor of Archaeology (at the Champlain University) without the +fatigues they must feel.</p> + +<p>“Yes, I’ve got over it,” he said.</p> + +<p>“And what was it?” she boldly pursued.</p> + +<p>He was about to say, and then he could not.</p> + +<p>“You won’t tell?”</p> + +<p>“Not yet,” he answered. He added, after a moment, +“I don’t believe I can.”</p> + +<p>“Because it’s confidential?”</p> + +<p>“No; not exactly that. Because it’s +impossible.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, that’s simple enough. I understand exactly what you +mean. Well, if ever it becomes less difficult, remember that I should +always like to know. It seemed a little—personal.”</p> + +<p>“How in the world?”</p> + +<p>“Well, when one is stared at in that way—”</p> + +<p>“Did I stare?”</p> + +<p>“Don’t you <em>always</em> stare? But in this case you +stared as if there was something wrong with my hair.”</p> + +<p>“There wasn’t,” Alford protested, simple-heartedly. +Then he recollected his sophistication to say: “Unless its being +of that particular shade between brown and red was wrong.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford! After that I <em>must</em> believe +you.”</p> + +<p>They talked on the veranda till the night fell, and then they came in +among the lamps, in the parlor, and she sat down with a certain +provisionality, putting herself sideways on a light chair by a window, +and as she chatted and laughed with one cheek towards him she now and +then beat the back of her chair with her open hand. The other people +were reading or severely playing cards, and they, too, kept their tones +down to a respectful level, while she lingered, and when she rose and +said good-night he went out and took some turns on the veranda before +going up to bed. She was certainly, he realized, a very pretty woman, +and very graceful and very amusing, and though she probably knew all +about it, she was the franker and honester for her knowledge.</p> + +<p>He had arrived at this conclusion just as he turned the switch of the +electric light inside his door, and in the first flash of the carbon +film he saw her sitting beside the window in such a chair as she had +taken and in the very pose which she had kept in the parlor. Her +half-averted face was lit as from laughing, and she had her hand lifted +as if to beat the back of her chair.</p> + +<p>“Good Heavens, Mrs. Yarrow!” he said, in a sort of +whispered shout, while he mechanically closed the door behind him as if +to keep the fact to himself. “What in the world are you doing +here?”</p> + +<p>Then she was not there. Nothing was there; not even a chair beside +the window.</p> + +<p>Alford dropped weakly into the only chair in the room, which stood +next the door by the head of his bed, and abandoned himself a helpless +prey to the logic of the events.</p> + +<p>It was at this point, which I have been able to give in +Wanhope’s exact words, that, in the ensuing pause, Rulledge asked, +as if he thought some detail might be denied him: “And what was +the logic of the events?”</p> + +<p>Minver gave a fleering laugh. “Don’t be premature, +Rulledge. If you have the logic now, you will spoil everything. You +can’t have the moral until you’ve had the whole story. Go +on, Wanhope. You’re so much more interesting than usual that I +won’t ask how you got hold of all these compromising +minutiae.”</p> + +<p>“Of course,” Wanhope returned, “they’re not +for the general ear. I go rather further, for the sake of the curious +fact, than I should be warranted in doing if I did not know my audience +so well.”</p> + +<p>We joined in a murmur of gratification, and he went on to say that +Alford’s first coherent thought was that he was dreaming one of +those unwarranted dreams in which we make our acquaintance privy to all +sorts of strange incidents. Then he knew that he was not dreaming, and +that his eye had merely externated a mental vision, as in the case of +the cannon-shot splash of which he had seen the phantom as soon as it +was mentioned. He remembered afterwards asking himself in a sort of +terror how far it was going to go with him; how far his thought was +going to report itself objectively hereafter, and what were the +reasonable implications of his abnormal experiences. He did not know +just how long he sat by his bedside trying to think, only to have his +conclusions whir away like a flock of startled birds when he approached +them. He went to bed because he was exhausted rather than because he was +sleepy, but he could not recall a moment of wakefulness after his head +touched the pillow.</p> + +<p>He woke surprisingly refreshed, but at the belated breakfast where he +found Mrs. Yarrow still lingering he thought her looking not well. She +confessed, listlessly, that she had not rested well. She was not sure, +she said, whether the sea air agreed with her; she might try the +mountains a little later. She was not inclined to talk, and that day he +scarcely spoke with her except in commonplaces at the table. They had no +return to the little mystery they had mocked together the day +before.</p> + +<p>More days passed, and Alford had no recurrence of his visions. His +acquaintance with Mrs. Yarrow made no further advance; there was no one +else in the hotel who interested him, and he bored himself. At the same +time his recovery seemed retarded; he lost tone, and after a fortnight +he ran up to talk himself over with his doctor in Boston. He rather +thought he would mention his eidolons, and ask if they were at all +related to the condition of his nerves. It was a keen disappointment, +but it ought not to have been a surprise, for him to find that his +doctor was off on his summer vacation. The caretaker who opened the door +to Alford named a young physician in the same block of Marlborough +Street who had his doctor’s practice for the summer, but Alford +had not the heart to go to this alternate.</p> + +<p>He started down to his hotel on a late afternoon train that would +bring him to the station after dusk, and before he reached it the lamps +had been lighted in his car. Alford sat in a sparsely peopled smoker, +where he had found a place away from the crowd in the other coaches, and +looked out of the window into the reflected interior of his car, which +now and then thinned away and let him see the weeds and gravel of the +railroad banks, with the bushes that topped them and the woods that +backed them. The train at one point stopped rather suddenly and then +went on, for no reason that he ever cared to inquire; but as it slowly +moved forward again he was reminded of something he had seen one night +in going to New York just before the train drew into Springfield. It had +then made such another apparently reasonless stop; but before it resumed +its course Alford saw from his window a group of trainmen, and his own +Pullman conductor with his lantern on his arm, bending over the figure +of a man defined in his dark clothing against the snow of the bank where +he lay propped. His face was waxen white, and Alford noted how +particularly black the mustache looked traversing the pallid visage. He +never knew whether the man was killed or merely stunned; you learn +nothing with certainty of such things on trains; but now, as he thought +of the incident, its eidolon showed itself outside of his mind, and +followed him in every detail, even to a snowy stretch of the embankment, +until the increasing speed of the train seemed to sweep it back out of +sight.</p> + +<p>Alford turned his eyes to the interior of the smoker, which, except +for two or three dozing commuters and a noisy euchre-party, had been +empty of everything but the fumes and stale odors of tobacco, and found +it swarming with visions, the eidolons of everything he remembered from +his past life. Whatever had once strongly impressed itself upon his +nerves was reported there again as instantly as he thought of it. It was +largely a whirling chaos, a kaleidoscopic jumble of facts; but from time +to time some more memorable and important experience visualized itself +alone. Such was the death-bed of the little sister whom he had been +wakened, a child, to see going to heaven, as they told him. Such was the +pathetic, foolish face of the girl whom long ago he had made believe he +cared for, and then had abruptly broken with: he saw again, with +heartache, her silly, tender amaze when he said he was going away. Such +was the look of mute astonishment, of gentle reproach, in the eyes of +the friend, now long dead, whom in a moment of insensate fury he had +struck on the mouth, and who put his hand to his bleeding lips as he +bent that gaze of wonder and bewilderment upon him. But it was not alone +the dreadful impressions that reported themselves. There were others, as +vivid, which came back in the original joyousness: the face of his +mother looking up at him from the crowd on a day of college triumph when +he was delivering the valedictory of his class; the collective gayety of +the whole table on a particularly delightful evening at his dining-club; +his own image in the glass as he caught sight of it on coming home +accepted by the woman who afterwards jilted him; the transport which +lighted up his father’s visage when he stepped ashore from the +vessel which had been rumored lost, and he could be verified by the +senses as still alive; the comical, bashful ecstasy of the good fellow, +his ancient chum, in telling him he had had a son born the night before, +and the mother was doing well, and how he laughed and danced, and +skipped into the air.</p> + +<p>The smoker was full of these eidolons and of others which came and +went with constant vicissitude. But what was of a greater weirdness than +seeing them within it was seeing them without in that reflection of the +interior which travelled with it through the summer night, and repeated +it, now dimly, now brilliantly, in every detail. Alford sat in a daze, +with a smile which he was aware of, fixed and stiff as if in plaster, on +his face, and with his gaze bent on this or that eidolon, and then on +all of them together. He was not so much afraid of them as of being +noticed by the other passengers in the smoker, to whom he knew he might +look very queer. He said to himself that he was making the whole thing, +but the very subjectivity was what filled him with a deep and hopeless +dread. At last the train ceased its long leaping through the dark, and +with its coming to a stand the whole illusion vanished. He heard a gay +voice which he knew bidding some one good-bye who was getting into the +car just back of the smoker, and as he descended to the platform he +almost walked into the arms of Mrs. Yarrow.</p> + +<p>“Why, Mr. Alford! We had given you up. We thought you +wouldn’t come back till to-morrow—or perhaps ever. What in +the world will you do for supper? The kitchen fires were out ages +ago!”</p> + +<p>In the light of the station electrics she beamed upon him, and he +felt glad at heart, as if he had been saved from something, a mortal +danger or a threatened shame. But he could not speak at once; his teeth +closed with tetanic force upon each other. Later, as they walked to the +hotel, through the warm, soft night in which the south wind was roaming +the starless heavens for rain, he found his voice, and although he felt +that he was speaking unnaturally, he made out to answer the lively +questions with which she pelted him too thickly to expect them to be +answered severally. She told him all the news of the day, and when she +began on yesterday’s news she checked herself with a laugh and +said she had forgotten that he had only been gone since morning. +“But now,” she said, “you see how you’ve been +missed—how <em>any</em> man must be missed in a hotel full of +women.”</p> + +<p>She took charge of him when they got to the house, and said if he +would go boldly into the dining-room, where they detected, as they +approached, one lamp scantly shining from the else darkened windows, she +would beard the lioness in her den, by which she meant the cook in the +kitchen, and see what she could get him for supper. Apparently she could +get nothing warm, for when a reluctant waitress appeared it was with +such a chilly refection on her tray that Alford, though he was not very +hungry, returned from interrogating the obscurity for eidolons, and +shivered at it. At the same time the swing-door of the long, dim room +opened to admit a gush of the outer radiance on which Mrs. Yarrow +drifted in with a chafing-dish in one hand and a tea-basket in the +other. She floated tiltingly towards him like, he thought, a pretty +little ship, and sent a cheery hail before.</p> + +<p>“I’ve been trying to get somebody to join you at a +premature Welsh-rarebit and a belated cup of tea, but I can’t tear +one of the tabbies from their cards or the kittens from their gambols in +the amusement-hall in the basement. Do you mind so very much having it +alone? Because you’ll have to, whether you do or not. Unless you +call me company, when I’m merely cook.”</p> + +<p>She put her utensils on the table beside the forbidding tray the +waitress had left, and helped lift herself by pressing one hand on the +top of a chair towards the electric, which she flashed up to keep the +dismal lamp in countenance. Alford let her do it. He durst not, he felt, +stir from his place, lest any movement should summon back the eidolons; +and now in the sudden glare of light he shyly, slyly searched the room +for them. Not one, fair or foul, showed itself, and slowly he felt a +great weight lifting from his heart. In its place there sprang up a +joyous gratitude towards Mrs. Yarrow, who had saved him from them, from +himself. An inexpressible tenderness filled his breast; the tears rose +to his eyes; a soft glow enveloped his whole being, a warmth of hope, a +freshness of life renewed, encompassed him. He wished to take her in his +arms, to tell her how he loved her; and as she bustled about, lighting +the lamp of her chafing-dish, and kindling the little spirit-stove she +had brought with her to make tea, he let his gaze dwell upon every pose, +every motion of her with a glad hunger in which no smallest detail was +lost. He now believed that without her he must die, without her he could +not wish to live.</p> + +<p>“Jove,” Rulledge broke in at this point of +Wanhope’s story, which I am telling again so badly, “I think +Alford was in luck.”</p> + +<p>Minver gave a harsh cackle. “The only thing Rulledge finds +fault with in this club is ‘the lack of woman’s nursing and +the lack of woman’s tears.’ Nothing is wanting to his +enjoyment of his victuals but the fact that they are not served by a +neat-handed Phyllis, like Alford’s.”</p> + +<p>Rulledge glanced towards Wanhope, and innocently inquired, “Was +that her first name?”</p> + +<p>Minver burst into a scream, and Rulledge looked red and silly for +having given himself away; but he made an excursion to the buffet +outside, and returned with a sandwich with which he supported himself +stolidly under Minver’s derision, until Wanhope came to his relief +by resuming his story, or rather his study, of Alford’s strange +experience.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Yarrow first gave Alford his tea, as being of a prompter brew +than the rarebit, but she was very quick and apt with that, too; and +pretty soon she leaned forward, and in the glow from the lamp under the +chafing-dish, which spiritualized her charming face with its thin +radiance, puffed the flame out with her pouted lips, and drew back with +a long-sighed “There! That will make you see your grandmother, if +anything will.”</p> + +<p>“My grandmother?” Alford repeated.</p> + +<p>“Yes. Wouldn’t you like to?” Mrs.. Yarrow asked, +pouring the thick composition over the toast (rescued stone-cold from +the frigid tray) on Alford’s plate. “I’m sure I should +like to see mine—dear old gran! Not that I ever saw +her—either of her—or should know how she looked. Did you +ever see yours—either of her?” she pursued, impulsively.</p> + +<p>“Oh yes,” Alford answered, looking intently at her, but +with so little speculation in the eyes he glared so with that he knew +her to be uneasy under them.</p> + +<p>She laughed a little, and stayed her hand on the bail of the teapot. +“Which of her?”</p> + +<p>“Oh, both!”</p> + +<p>“And—and—did she look so much like +<em>me?</em>” she said, with an added laugh, that he perceived had +an hysterical note in it. “You’re letting your rarebit get +cold!”</p> + +<p>He laughed himself, now, a great laugh of relaxation, of relief. +“Not the least in the world! She was not exactly a phantom of +delight.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford. Now, it’s your tea’s +getting cold.”</p> + +<p>They laughed together, and he gave himself to his victual with a +relish that she visibly enjoyed. When that question of his grandmother +had been pushed he thought of an awful experience of his childhood, +which left on his infant mind an indelible impression, a scar, to remain +from the original wound forever. He had been caught in a lie, the first +he could remember, but by no means the last, by many immemorable +thousands. His poor little wickedness had impugned the veracity of both +these terrible old ladies, who, habitually at odds with each other, now +united, for once, against him. He could always see himself, a mean +little blubbering-faced rascal, stealing guilty looks of imploring at +their faces, set unmercifully against him, one in sorrow and one in +anger, requiring his mother to whip him, and insisting till he was led, +loudly roaring, into the parlor, and there made a liar of for all time, +so far as fear could do it.</p> + +<p>When Mrs. Yarrow asked if he had ever seen his grandmother he +expected instantly to see her, in duplicate, and as a sole refuge, but +with little hope that it would save him, he kept his eyes fast on hers, +and to his unspeakable joy it did avail. No other face, of sorrow or of +anger, rose between them. For the time his thought was quit of its +consequence; no eidolon outwardly repeated his inward vision. A warm +gush of gratitude seemed to burst from his heart, and to bathe his whole +being, and then to flow in a tide of ineffable tenderness towards Mrs. +Yarrow, and involve her and bear them together heavenward. It was not +passion, it was not love, he perceived well enough; it was the utterance +of a vital conviction that she had saved him from an overwhelming +subjective horror, and that in her sweet objectivity there was a +security and peace to be found nowhere else.</p> + +<p>He greedily ate every atom of his rarebit, he absorbed every drop of +the moisture in the teapot, so that when she shook it and shook it, and +then tried to pour something from it, there was no slightest dribble at +the spout. But they lingered, talking and laughing, and perhaps they +might never have left the place if the hard handmaiden who had brought +the tea-tray had not first tried putting her head in at the swing-door +from the kitchen, and then, later, come boldly in and taken the tray +away.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Yarrow waited self-respectfully for her disappearance, and then +she said, “I’m afraid that was a hint, Mr. +Alford.”</p> + +<p>“It seemed like one,” he owned.</p> + +<p>They went out together, gayly chatting, but she would not encourage +the movement he made towards the veranda. She remained firmly attached +to the newel-post of the stairs, and at the first chance he gave her she +said good-night and bounded lightly upward. At the turn of the stairs +she stopped and looked laughing down at him over the rail. “I hope +you won’t see your grandmother.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, not a bit of it,” he called back. He felt that he +failed to give his reply the quality of epigram, but he was not unhappy +in his failure.</p> + +<p>Many light-hearted days followed this joyous evening. No eidolons +haunted Alford’s horizon, perhaps because Mrs. Yarrow filled his +whole heaven. She was very constantly with him, guiding his wavering +steps up the hill of recovery, which he climbed with more and more +activity, and keeping him company in those valleys of relapse into which +he now and then fell back from the difficult steeps. It came to be +tacitly, or at least passively, conceded by the other ladies that she +had somehow earned the exclusive right to what had once been the common +charge; or that if one of their number had a claim to keep Mr. Alford +from killing himself by all sorts of imprudences, which in his case +amounted to impieties, it was certainly Mrs. Yarrow. They did not put +this in terms, but they felt it and acted it.</p> + +<p>She was all the safer guardian for a delicate invalid because she +loathed manly sports so entirely that she did not even pretend to like +them, as most women, poor things, think themselves obliged to do. In her +hands there was no danger that he would be tempted to excesses in golf. +She was really afraid of all boats, but she was willing to go out with +him in the sail-boat of a superannuated skipper, because to sit talking +in the stern and stoop for the vagaries of the boom in tacking was such +good exercise. She would join him in fishing from the rotting pier, but +with no certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she +caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things. +When they went a walk together, her notion of a healthful tramp was to +find a nice place among the sweet-fern or the pine-needles, and sit down +in it and talk, or make a lap, to which he could bring the berries he +gathered for her to arrange in the shallow leaf-trays she pinned +together with twigs. She really preferred a rocking-chair on the veranda +to anything else; but if he wished to go to those other excesses, she +would go with him, to keep him out of mischief.</p> + +<p>There could be only one credible reading of the situation, but Alford +let the summer pass in this pleasant dreaming without waking up till too +late to the pleasanter reality. It will seem strange enough, but it is +true, that it was no part of his dream to fancy that Mrs. Yarrow was in +love with him. He knew very well, long before the end, that he was in +love with her; but, remaining in the dark otherwise, he considered only +himself in forbearing verbally to make love to her.</p> + +<p>“Well!” Rulledge snarled at this point, “he +<em>was</em> a chump.”</p> + +<p>Wanhope at the moment opposed nothing directly to the censure, but +said that something pathetically reproachful in Mrs. Yarrow’s +smiling looks penetrated to Alford as she nodded gayly from the car +window to him in the little group which had assembled to see her off at +the station when she left, by no means the first of their happy hotel +circle to go.</p> + +<p>“Somebody,” Rulledge burst out again, “ought to +have kicked him.”</p> + +<p>“What’s become,” Minver asked, “of all the +dear maids and widows that you’ve failed to marry at the end of +each summer, Rulledge?”</p> + +<p>The satire involved flattery so sweet that Rulledge could not perhaps +wish to make any retort. He frowned sternly, and said, with a face +averted from Minver: “Go on, Wanhope!”</p> + +<p>Wanhope here permitted himself a philosophical excursion in which I +will not accompany him. It was apparently to prepare us for the dramatic +fact which followed, and which I suppose he was trying rather to work +away from than work up to. It included some facts which he had failed to +touch on before, and which led to a discussion very interesting in +itself, but of a range too great for the limits I am trying to keep +here. It seems that Alford had been stayed from declaring his love not +only because he doubted of its nature, but also because he questioned +whether a man in his broken health had any right to offer himself to a +woman, and because from a yet finer scruple he hesitated in his poverty +to ask the hand of a rich woman. On the first point, we were pretty well +agreed, but on the second we divided again, especially Rulledge and +Minver, who held, the one, that his hesitation did Alford honor, and +quite relieved him from the imputation of being a chump; and the other +that he was an ass to keep quiet for any such silly reason. Minver +contended that every woman had a right, whether rich or poor, to the man +who loved her; and, moreover, there were now so many rich women that, if +they were not allowed to marry poor men, their chances of marriage were +indefinitely reduced. What better could a widow do with the money she +had inherited from a husband she probably did not love than give it to a +man like Alford—or to an ass like Alford, Minver corrected +himself.</p> + +<p>His <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> allowed Wanhope to resume with a laugh, +and say that Alford waited at the station in the singleness to which the +tactful dispersion of the others had left him, and watched the train +rapidly dwindle in the perspective, till an abrupt turn of the road +carried it out of sight. Then he lifted his eyes with a long sigh, and +looked round. Everywhere he saw Mrs. Yarrow’s smiling face with +that inner pathos. It swarmed upon him from all points; and wherever he +turned it repeated itself in the distances like that succession of faces +you see when you stand between two mirrors.</p> + +<p>It was not merely a lapse from his lately hopeful state with Alford, +it was a collapse. The man withered and dwindled away, till he felt that +he must audibly rattle in his clothes as he walked by people. He did not +walk much. Mostly he remained shrunken in the arm-chair where he used to +sit beside Mrs. Yarrow’s rocker, and the ladies, the older and the +older-fashioned, who were “sticking it out” at the hotel +till it should close on the 15th of September, observed him, some +compassionately, some censoriously, but all in the same conviction.</p> + +<p>“It’s plain to be seen what ails Mr. Alford, +<em>now</em>.”</p> + +<p>“Well, I guess it <em>is</em>.”</p> + +<p>“<em>I</em> guess so.”</p> + +<p>“I <em>guess</em> it is.”</p> + +<p>“Seems kind of heartless, her going and leaving him +so.”</p> + +<p>“Like a sick kitten!”</p> + +<p>“Well, I should say as <em>much</em>.”</p> + +<p>“Your eyes bother you, Mr. Alford?” one of them chanted, +breaking from their discussion of him to appeal directly to him. He was +rubbing his eyes, to relieve himself for the moment from the intolerable +affliction of those swarming eidolons, which, whenever he thought of +this thing or that, thickened about him. They now no longer displaced +one another, but those which came first remained fadedly beside or +behind the fresher appearances, like the earlier rainbow which loses +depth and color when a later arch defines itself.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” he said, glad of the subterfuge. “They annoy +me a good deal of late.”</p> + +<p>“You want to get fitted for a good pair of glasses. I kept +letting it go, when I first began to get old-sighted.”</p> + +<p>Another lady came to Alford’s rescue. “I guess Mr. Alford +has no need to get fitted for old sight yet a while. You got little +spidery things—specks and dots—in your eyes?”</p> + +<p>“Yes—multitudes,” he said, hopelessly.</p> + +<p>“Well, I’ll tell you what: you want to build up. That was +the way with me, and the oculist said it was from getting all run down. +I built up, and the first thing I knew my sight was as clear as a bell. +You want to build up.”</p> + +<p>“You want to go to the mountains,” a third interposed. +“That’s where Mrs. Yarrow’s gone, and I guess +it’ll do her more good than sticking it out here would ever have +done.”</p> + +<p>Alford would have been glad enough to go to the mountains, but with +those illusions hovering closer and closer about him, he had no longer +the courage, the strength. He had barely enough of either to get away to +Boston. He found his doctor this time, after winning and losing the +wager he made himself that he would not have returned to town yet, and +the good-fortune was almost too much for his shaken nerves. The cordial +of his friend’s greeting—they had been chums at +Harvard—completed his overthrow. As he sank upon the professional +sofa, where so many other cases had been diagnosticated, he broke into +tears. “Hello, old fellow!” the doctor said, encouragingly, +and more tenderly than he would have dealt with some women. +“What’s up?”</p> + +<p>“Jim,” Alford found voice to say, “I’m afraid +I’m losing my mind.”</p> + +<p>The doctor smiled provisionally. “Well, that’s +<em>one</em> of the signs you’re not. Can you say how?”</p> + +<p>“Oh yes. In a minute,” Alford sobbed, and when he had got +the better of himself he told his friend the whole story. In the direct +examination he suppressed Mrs. Yarrow’s part, but when the doctor, +who had listened with smiling seriousness, began to cross-examine him +with the question, “And you don’t remember that any outside +influence affected the recurrence of the illusions, or did anything to +prevent it?” Alford answered promptly: “Oh yes. There was a +woman who did.”</p> + +<p>“A woman? What sort of a woman?”</p> + +<p>Alford told.</p> + +<p>“That is very curious,” the doctor said. “I know a +man who used to have a distressing dream. He broke it up by telling his +wife about it every morning after he had dreamt it.”</p> + +<p>“Unluckily, she isn’t my wife,” Alford said, +gloomily.</p> + +<p>“But when she was with you, you got rid of the +illusions?”</p> + +<p>“At first, I used to see hers; then I stopped seeing +any.”</p> + +<p>“Did you ever tell her of them?”</p> + +<p>“No; I didn’t.”</p> + +<p>“Never tell anybody?”</p> + +<p>“No one but you.”</p> + +<p>“And do you see them now?”</p> + +<p>“No.”</p> + +<p>“Do you think, because you’ve told me of them?”</p> + +<p>“It seems so.”</p> + +<p>The doctor was silent for a marked space. Then he asked, smiling: +“Well, why not?”</p> + +<p>“Why not what?”</p> + +<p>“Tell your wife.”</p> + +<p>“How, my wife?”</p> + +<p>“By marriage.”</p> + +<p>Alford looked dazed. “Do you mean Mrs. Yarrow?”</p> + +<p>“If that’s her name, and she’s a widow.”</p> + +<p>“And do you think it would be the fair thing for a man on the +verge of insanity—a physical and mental wreck—to ask a woman +to marry him?”</p> + +<p>“In your case, yes. In the first place, you’re not so bad +as all that. You need nothing but rest for your body and change for your +mind. I believe you’ll get rid of your illusions as soon as you +form the habit of speaking of them promptly when they begin to trouble +you. You ought to speak of them to some one. You can’t always have +me around, and Mrs. Yarrow would be the next best thing.”</p> + +<p>“She’s rich, and you know what I am. I’ll have to +borrow the money to rest on, I’m so poor.”</p> + +<p>“Not if you marry it.”</p> + +<p>Alford rose, somewhat more vigorously than he had sat down. But that +day he did not go beyond ascertaining that Mrs. Yarrow was in town. He +found out the fact from the maid at her door, who said that she was +nearly always at home after dinner, and, without waiting for the evening +of another day, Alford went to call upon her.</p> + +<p>She said, coming down to him in a rather old-fashioned, impersonal +drawing-room which looked distinctly as if it had been left to her: +“I was so glad to get your card. When did you leave +Woodbeach?”</p> + +<p>“Mrs. Yarrow,” he returned, as if that were the answer, +“I think I owe you an explanation.”</p> + +<p>“Pay it!” she bantered, putting out her hand.</p> + +<p>“I’m so poverty-stricken that I don’t know whether +I can. Did you ever notice anything odd about me?”</p> + +<p>His directness seemed to have a right to directness from her. +“I noticed that you stared a good deal—or used to. But +people <em>do</em> stare.”</p> + +<p>“I stared because I saw things.”</p> + +<p>“Saw things?”</p> + +<p>“I saw whatever I thought of. Whatever came into my mind was +externated in a vision.”</p> + +<p>She smiled, he could not make out whether uneasily or not. “It +sounds rather creepy, doesn’t it? But it’s very +interesting.”</p> + +<p>“That’s what the doctor said; I’ve been to see him +this morning. May I tell you about my visions? They’re not so +creepy as they sound, I believe, and I don’t think they’ll +keep you awake.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, do,” she said. “I should like of all things +to hear about them. Perhaps I’ve been one of them.”</p> + +<p>“You have.”</p> + +<p>“Oh! Isn’t that rather personal?”</p> + +<p>“I hope not offensively.”</p> + +<p>He went on to tell her, with even greater fulness than he had told +the doctor. She listened with the interest women take in anything weird, +and with a compassion for him which she did not conceal so perfectly but +that he saw it. At the end he said: “You may wonder that I come to +you with all this, which must sound like the ravings of a +madman.”</p> + +<p>“No—no,” she hesitated.</p> + +<p>“I came because I wished you to know everything about me +before—before—I wouldn’t have come, you’ll +believe me, if I hadn’t had the doctor’s assurance that my +trouble was merely a part of my being physically out of kilter, and had +nothing to do with my sanity—Good Heavens! What am I saying? But +the thought has tormented me so! And in the midst of it I’ve +allowed myself to—Mrs. Yarrow, I love you. Don’t you know +that?”</p> + +<p>Alford may have had a divided mind in this declaration, but after +that one word Mrs. Yarrow had no mind for anything else. He went on.</p> + +<p>“I’m not only sick—so sick that I +sha’n’t be able to do any work for a year at least—but +I’m poor, so poor that I can’t afford to be sick.”</p> + +<p>She lifted her eyes and looked at him, where she sat oddly aloof from +those possessions of hers, to which she seemed so little related, and +said, with a smile quivering at the corners of her pretty mouth, +“I don’t see what that has to do with it.”</p> + +<p>“What do you mean?” He stared at her hard.</p> + +<p>“Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?”</p> + +<p>“No, you’re only one, and there’s none like you! I +could never see any one else while I looked at you!” he cried, +only half aware of his poetry, and meaning what he said very +literally.</p> + +<p>But she took only the poetry. “I shouldn’t wish you +to,” she said, and she laughed.</p> + +<p>He could not believe yet in his good-fortune. His countenance fell. +“I’m afraid I don’t understand, or that you +don’t. It doesn’t seem as if I could get to the end of my +unworthiness, which isn’t voluntary. It seems altogether too base. +I can’t let you say what you do, if you mean it, till you know +that I come to you in despair as well as in love. You saved me from the +fear I was in, again and again, and I believe that without you I +shall—Ah, it seems very base! But the doctor—If I could +always tell some one—if I could tell <em>you</em> when these +things were obsessing me—haunting me—they would +cease—”</p> + +<p>Mrs. Yarrow rose, with rather a piteous smile. “Then, I am a +prescription!” She hoped, woman-like, that she was solely a +passion; but is any woman worth having, ever solely a passion?</p> + +<p>“Don’t!” Alford implored, rising too. +“Don’t, in mercy, take it that way! It’s only that I +wish you to know everything that’s in me; to know how utterly +helpless and worthless I am. You needn’t have a pang in throwing +such a thing away.”</p> + +<p>She put out her hand to him, but at arm’s-length. “I +sha’n’t throw you away—at least, not to-night. I want +to think.” It was a way of saying she wished him to go, and he had +no desire to stay. He asked if he might come again, and she said, +“Oh yes.”</p> + +<p>“To-morrow?”</p> + +<p>“Not to-morrow, perhaps. When I send. Was it <em>young</em> +Doctor Enderby?”</p> + +<p>They had rather a sad, dry parting; and when her door closed upon him +he felt that it had shut him out forever. His shame and his defeat were +so great that he did not think of his eidolons, and they did not come to +trouble him. He woke in the morning, asking himself, bitterly, if he +were cured already. His humiliation was such that he closed his eyes to +the light, and wished he might never again open them to it.</p> + +<p>The question that Mrs. Yarrow had to ask Dr. Enderby was not the +question he had instantly forecast for her when she put aside her veil +in his office and told him who she was. She did not seem anxious to be +assured of Alford’s mental condition, or as to any risks in +marrying him. Her inquiry was much more psychological; it was almost +impersonal, and yet Dr. Enderby thought she looked as if she had been +crying.</p> + +<p>She had a difficulty in formulating her question, and when it came it +was almost a speculation.</p> + +<p>“Women,” she said, a little hoarsely, “have no +right, I suppose, to expect the ideal in life. The best they can do +seems to be to make the real look like it.”</p> + +<p>Dr. Enderby reflected. “Well, yes. But I don’t know that +I ever put it to myself in just those terms.”</p> + +<p>Then she remarked, as if that were the next thing: +“You’ve known Mr. Alford a long time.”</p> + +<p>“We were at school together, and we shared the same rooms in +Harvard.”</p> + +<p>“He is very sincere,” she added, as if this were +relevant.</p> + +<p>“He’s a man who likes to have a little worse than the +worst known about him. One might say he was excessively sincere.” +Enderby divined that Alford had been bungling the matter, and he was +willing to help him out if he could.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Yarrow fixed dimly beautiful eyes upon him. “I don’t +know,” she said, “why it wouldn’t be ideal—as +much ideal as anything—to give one’s self absolutely +to—to—a duty—or not duty, exactly; I don’t mean +that. Especially,” she added, showing a light through the mist, +“if one wanted to do it.”</p> + +<p>Then he knew she had made up her mind, and though on some accounts he +would have liked to laugh with her, on other accounts he felt that he +owed it to her to be serious.</p> + +<p>“If women could not fulfil the ideal in that way—if they +did not constantly do it—there would be no marriages for +love.”</p> + +<p>“Do you think so?” she asked, with a shaking voice. +“But men—men are ideal, too.”</p> + +<p>“Not as women are—except now and then some fool like +Alford.” Now, indeed, he laughed, and he began to praise Alford +from his heart, so delicately, so tenderly, so reverently, that Mrs. +Yarrow laughed too before he was done, and cried a little, and when she +rose to leave she could not speak; but clung to his hand, on turning +away, and so flung it from behind her with a gesture that Enderby +thought pretty.</p> + +<p>At this point, Wanhope stopped as if that were the end.</p> + +<p>“And did she let Alford come to see her again?” Rulledge, +at once romantic and literal, demanded.</p> + +<p>“Oh yes. At any rate, they were married that fall. They +are—I believe he’s pursuing his archaeological studies +there—living in Athens.”</p> + +<p>“Together?” Minver smoothly inquired.</p> + +<p>At this expression of cynicism Rulledge gave him a look that would +have incinerated another. Wanhope went out with Minver, and then, after +a moment’s daze, Rulledge exclaimed: “Jove! I forgot to ask +him whether it’s stopped Alford’s illusions!”</p> + + + + +<h2><a name="chapter3" id="chapter3">III</a></h2> + +<h2 class="chaptertitle">A Memory that Worked Overtime</h2> + + +<p>Minver’s brother took down from the top of the low bookshelf a +small painting on panel, which he first studied in the obverse, and then +turned and contemplated on the back with the same dreamy smile. “I +don’t see how that got <em>here</em>,” he said, +absently.</p> + +<p>“Well,” Minver returned, “you don’t expect +<em>me</em> to tell you, except on the principle that any one would +naturally know more about anything of yours than you would.” He +took it from his brother and looked at the front of it. “It +isn’t bad. It’s pretty good!” He turned it round. +“Why, it’s one of old Blakey’s! How did <em>you</em> +come by it?”</p> + +<p>“Stole it, probably,” Minver’s brother said, still +thoughtfully. Then with an effect of recollecting: “No, come to +think of it,” he added, “Blakey gave it to me.” The +Minvers played these little comedies together, quite as much to satisfy +their tenderness for each other as to give their friends pleasure. +“Think you’re the only painter that gets me to take his +truck as a gift? He gave it to me, let’s see, about ten years ago, +when he was trying to make a die of it, and failed; I thought he would +succeed. But it’s been in my wife’s room nearly ever since, +and what I can’t understand is what she’s doing with it down +here.”</p> + +<p>“Probably to make trouble for you, somehow,” Minver +suggested.</p> + +<p>“No, I don’t think it’s <em>that</em>, +quite,” his brother returned, with a false air of scrupulosity, +which was part of their game with each other. He looked some more at the +picture, and then he glanced from it at me. “There’s a very +curious story connected with that sketch.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, well, tell it,” Minver said. “Tell it! I +suppose I can stand it again. Acton’s never heard it, I believe. +But you needn’t make a show of sparing him. I +<em>couldn’t</em> stand that.”</p> + +<p>“I certainly haven’t heard the story,” I said, +“and if I had I would be too polite to own it.”</p> + +<p>Minver’s brother looked towards the open door over his +shoulder, and Minver interpreted for him: “She’s not coming. +I’ll give you due warning.”</p> + +<p>“It was before we were married, but not much before, and the +picture was a sort of wedding present for my wife, though Blakey made a +show of giving it to me. Said he had painted it for me, because he had a +prophetic soul, and felt in his bones that I was going to want a picture +of the place where I first met her. You see, it’s the little villa +her mother had taken that winter on the Viale Petrarca, just outside of +Florence. It <em>was</em> the first place I met her, but not the +last.”</p> + +<p>“Don’t be obvious,” Minver ordered.</p> + +<p>His brother did not mind him. “I thought it was mighty nice of +Blakey. He was barking away, all the time he was talking, and when he +wasn’t coughing he was so hoarse he could hardly speak above a +whisper; but he kept talking on, and wishing me happy, and fending off +my gratitude, while he was finding a piece of manila paper to wrap the +sketch in, and then hunting for a piece of string to tie it. When he +handed it to me at last, he gasped out: ‘I don’t mind her +knowing that I partly meant it as the place where <em>she</em> first met +<em>you</em>, too. I’m not ashamed of it as a bit of color. +Anyway, I sha’n’t live to do anything better.’</p> + +<p>“‘Oh, yes, you will,’ I came back in that lying way +we think is kind with dying people. I suppose it is; anyway, it turned +out all right with Blakey, as he’ll testify if you look him up +when you go to Florence. By the way, he lives in that villa +<em>now</em>.”</p> + +<p>“No?” I said. “How charming!”</p> + +<p>Minver’s brother went on: “I made up my mind to be +awfully careful of that picture, and not let it out of my hand till I +left it with ‘her’ mother, to be put among the other wedding +presents that were accumulating at their house in Exeter Street. So I +held it on my lap going in by train from Lexington, where Blakey lived, +and when I got out at the old Lowell Depot—North Station, +now—and got into the little tinkle-tankle horse-car that took me +up to where I was to get the Back Bay car—Those were the +prehistoric times before trolleys, and there were odds in horse-cars. We +considered the blue-painted Back Bay cars very swell. <em>You</em> +remember them?” he asked Minver.</p> + +<p>“Not when I can help it,” Minver answered. “When I +broke with Boston, and went to New York, I burnt my horse-cars behind +me, and never wanted to know what they looked like, one from +another.”</p> + +<p>“Well, as I was saying,” Minver’s brother went on, +without regarding his impatriotism, “when I got into the horse-car +at the depot, I rushed for a corner seat, and I put the picture, with +its face next the car-end, between me and the wall, and kept my hand on +it; and when I changed to the Back Bay car, I did the same thing. There +was a florist’s just there, and I couldn’t resist some +Mayflowers in the window; I was in that condition, you know, when +flowers seemed to be made for her, and I had to take her own to her +wherever I found them. I put the bunch between my knees, and kept one +hand on it, while I kept my other hand on the picture at my side. I was +feeling first-rate, and when General Filbert got in after we started, +and stood before me hanging by a strap and talking down to me, I had the +decency to propose giving him my seat, as he was about ten years +older.”</p> + +<p>“Sure?” Minver asked.</p> + +<p>“Well, say fifteen. I don’t pretend to be a chicken, and +never did. But he wouldn’t hear of it. Said I had a bundle, and +winked at the bunch of Mayflowers. We had such a jolly talk that I let +the car carry me a block by and had to get out at Gloucester and run +back to Exeter. I rang, and, when the maid came to the door, there I +stood with nothing but the Mayflowers in my hand.”</p> + +<p>“Good <i>coup de théâtre</i>,” Minver jeered. +“Curtain?”</p> + +<p>His brother disdained reply, or was too much absorbed in his tale to +think of any. “When the girl opened the door and I discovered my +fix I burst out, ‘Good Lord!’ and I stuck the bunch of +flowers at her, and turned and ran. I suppose I must have had some +notion of overtaking the car with my picture in it. But the best I could +do was to let the next one overtake me several blocks down Marlborough +Street, and carry me to the little jumping-off station on Westchester +Park, as we used to call it in those days, at the end of the Back Bay +line.</p> + +<p>“As I pushed into the railroad office, I bet myself that the +picture would not be there, and, sure enough, I won.”</p> + +<p>“You were always a lucky dog,” Minver said.</p> + +<p>“But the man in charge was very encouraging, and said it was +sure to be turned in; and he asked me what time the car had passed the +corner of Gloucester Street. I happened to know, and then he said, Oh +yes, that conductor was a substitute, and he wouldn’t be on again +till morning; then he would be certain to bring the picture with him. I +was not to worry, for it would be all right. Nothing left in the Back +Bay cars was ever lost; the character of the abutters was guarantee for +that, and they were practically the only passengers. The conductors and +the drivers were as honest as the passengers, and I could consider +myself in the hands of friends.</p> + +<p>“He was so reassuring that I went away smiling at my fears, and +promising to be round bright and early, as soon, the official +suggested—the morrow being Sunday—as soon as the men and +horses had had their baked beans.</p> + +<p>“Still, after dinner, I had a lurking anxiety, which I turned +into a friendly impulse to go and call on Mrs. Filbert, whom I really +owed a bread-and-butter visit, and who, I knew, would not mind my coming +in the evening. The general, she said, had been telling her of our +pleasant chat in the car, and would be glad to smoke his after-dinner +cigar with me, and why wouldn’t I come into the library?</p> + +<p>“We were so very jolly together, all three, that I made light +of my misadventure about the picture. The general inquired about the +flowers first. He remembered the flowers perfectly, and hoped they were +acceptable; he thought he remembered the picture, too, now I mentioned +it; but he would not have noticed it so much, there by my side, with my +hand on it. I would be sure to get it. He gave several instances, +personal to him and his friends, of recoveries of lost articles; it was +really astonishing how careful the horse-car people were, especially on +the Back Bay line. I would find my picture all right at the Westchester +Park station in the morning; never fear.</p> + +<p>“I feared so little that I slept well, and even overslept; and +I went to get my picture quite confidently, and I could hardly believe +it had not been turned in yet, though the station-master told me so. The +substitute conductor had not seen it, but more than likely it was at the +stables, where the cleaners would have found it in the car and turned it +in. He was as robustly cheerful about it as ever, and offered to send an +inquiry by the next car; but I said, Why shouldn’t I go myself; +and he said that was a good idea. So I went, and it was well I did, for +my picture was not there, and I had saved time by going. It was not +there, but the head man said I need not worry a mite about it; I was +certain to get it sooner or later; it would be turned in, to a dead +certainty. We became rather confidential, and I went so far as to +explain about wanting to make my inquiries very quietly on +Blakey’s account: he would be annoyed if he heard of its loss, and +it might react unfavorably on his health.</p> + +<p>“The head man said that was so; and he would tell me what I +wanted to do: I wanted to go to the Company’s General Offices in +Milk Street, and tell them about it. That was where everything went as a +last resort, and he would bet any money that I would see my picture +there the first thing I got inside the door. I thanked him with the +fervor I thought he merited, and said I would go at once.</p> + +<p>“‘Well,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to go +to-day, you know. The offices are not open Sunday. And to-morrow’s +a holiday. But you’re all right. You’ll find your picture +there, don’t you have any doubts about it.’</p> + +<p>“That was my next to last Sunday supper with my wife, before +she became my wife, at her mother’s house, and I went to the feast +with as little gayety as I suppose any young man ever carried to a +supper of the kind. I was told, afterwards, that my behavior up to a +certain point was so suggestive either of secret crime or of secret +regret, that the only question was whether they should have in the +police or I should be given back my engagement ring and advised to go. +Luckily I ceased to bear my anguish just in time.</p> + +<p>“The fact is, I could not stand it any longer, and as soon as I +was alone with her I made a clean breast of it; partially clean, that +is: I suppose a fellow never tells <em>all</em> to a girl, if he truly +loves her.” Minver’s brother glanced round at us and +gathered the harvest of our approving smiles. “I said to her, +‘I’ve been having a wedding present.’ +‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’ve come as near having no +use for a wedding present as anybody <em>I</em> know. Was having a +wedding present what made you so gloomy at supper? Who gave it to you, +anyway?’ ‘Old Blakey.’ ‘A painting?’ +‘Yes—a sketch.’ ‘What of?’ This was where +I qualified. I said: ‘Oh, just one of those Sorrento things of +his.’ You see, if I told her that it was the villa where we first +met, and then said I had left it in the horse-car, she would take it as +proof positive that I did not really care anything about her or I never +could have forgotten it.”</p> + +<p>“You were wise as far as you went,” Minver said. +“Go on.”</p> + +<p>“Well, I told her the whole story circumstantially: how I had +kept the sketch religiously in my lap in the train, and then held it +down with my hand all the while beside me in the first horse-car, and +did the same thing in the Back Bay car I changed to; and felt of it the +whole time I was talking with General Filbert, and then left it there +when I got out to leave the flowers at her door, when the awful fact +came over me like a flash. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Norah +said you poked the flowers at her without a word, and she had to guess +they were for me.’</p> + +<p>“I had got my story pretty glib by this time; I had reeled it +off with increasing particulars to the Westchester Park station-master, +and the head man at the stables, and General Filbert, and I was so +letter-perfect that I had a vision of the whole thing, especially of my +talking with the general while I kept my hand on the picture—and +then all was dark.</p> + +<p>“At the end she said we must advertise for the picture. I said +it would kill Blakey if he saw it; and she said: No matter, <em>let</em> +it kill him; it would show him that we valued his gift, and were moving +heaven and earth to find it; and, at any rate, it would kill <em>me</em> +if I kept myself in suspense. I said I should not care for that; but +with her sympathy I guessed I could live through the night, and I was +sure I should find the thing at the Milk Street office in the +morning.</p> + +<p>“‘Why,’ said she, ‘to-morrow it’ll be +shut!’ and then I didn’t really know what to say, and I +agreed to drawing up an advertisement then and there, so as not to lose +an instant’s time after I had been at the Milk Street office on +Tuesday and found the picture had not been turned in. She said I could +dictate the advertisement and she would write it down, and she asked: +‘Which one of his Sorrento things was it? You must describe it +exactly, you know.’ That made me feel awfully, and I said I was +not going to have my next-to-last Sunday evening with her spoiled by +writing advertisements; and I got away, somehow, with all sorts of +comforting reassurances from her. I could see that she was feigning them +to encourage me.</p> + +<p>“The next morning, I simply could not keep away from the Milk +Street office, and my unreasonable impatience was rewarded by finding it +at least ajar, if not open. There was the nicest kind of a young fellow +there, and he said he was not officially present; but what could he do +for me? Then I told him the whole story, with details I had not thought +of before; and he was just as enthusiastic about my getting my picture +as the Westchester Park station-master or the head man of the stables. +It was morally certain to be turned in, the first thing in the morning; +but he would take a description of it, and send out inquiries to all the +conductors and drivers and car-cleaners, and make a special thing of it. +He entered into the spirit of the affair, and I felt that I had such a +friend in him that I confided a little more and hinted at the double +interest I had in the picture. I didn’t pretend that it was one of +Blakey’s Sorrento things, but I gave him a full and true +description of it, with its length, breadth, and thickness, in exact +measure.”</p> + +<p>Here Minver’s brother stopped and lost himself in contemplation +of the sketch, as he held it at arm’s-length.</p> + +<p>“Well, did you get your picture?” I prompted, after a +moment.</p> + +<p>“Oh yes,” he said, with a quick turn towards me. +“This is it. A District Messenger brought it round the first thing +Tuesday morning. He brought it,” Minver’s brother added, +with a certain effectiveness, “from the florist’s, where I +had stopped to get those Mayflowers. I had left it there.”</p> + +<p>“You’ve told it very well, this time, Joe,” Minver +said. “But Acton here is waiting for the psychology. Poor old +Wanhope ought to be here,” he added to me. He looked about for a +match to light his pipe, and his brother jerked his head in the +direction of the chimney.</p> + +<p>“Box on the mantel. Yes,” he sighed, “that was +really something very curious. You see, I had invented the whole history +of the case from the time I got into the Back Bay car with my flowers. +Absolutely nothing had happened of all I had remembered till I got out +of the car. I did not put the picture beside me at the end of the car; I +did not keep my hand on it while I talked with General Filbert; I did +not leave it behind me when I left the car. Nothing of the kind +happened. I had already left it at the florist’s, and that whole +passage of experience which was so vividly and circumstantially stamped +in my memory that I related it four or five times over, and would have +made oath to every detail of it, was pure invention, or, rather, it was +something less positive: the reflex of the first half of my horse-car +experience, when I really did put the picture in the corner next me, and +did keep my hand on it.”</p> + +<p>“Very strange,” I was beginning, but just then the door +opened and Mrs. Minver came in, and I was presented.</p> + +<p>She gave me a distracted hand, as she said to her husband: +“Have you been telling the story about that picture again?” +He was still holding it. “Silly!”</p> + +<p>She was a mighty pretty woman, but full of vim and fun and sense.</p> + +<p>“It’s one of the most curious freaks of memory I ever +heard of, Mrs. Minver,” I said.</p> + +<p>Then she showed that she was proud of it, though she had called him +silly. “Have you told,” she demanded of her husband, +“how oddly your memory behaved about the subject of the picture, +too?”</p> + +<p>“I have again eaten that particular piece of humble-pie,” +Minver’s brother replied.</p> + +<p>“Well,” she said to me, “<em>I</em> think he was +simply so possessed with the awfulness of having lost the picture that +all the rest took place prophetically, but unconsciously.”</p> + +<p>“By a species of inverted presentiment?” I suggested.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” she assented, slowly, as if the formulation were +new to her, but not unacceptable. “Something of that kind. I never +heard of anybody else having it.”</p> + +<p>Minver had got his pipe alight, and was enjoying it. +“<em>I</em> think Joe was simply off his nut, for the time +being.”</p> + + + + +<h2><a name="chapter4" id="chapter4">IV</a></h2> + +<h2 class="chaptertitle">A Case of Metaphantasmia</h2> + + +<p>The stranger was a guest of Halson’s, and Halson himself was a +comparative stranger, for he was of recent election to our dining-club, +and was better known to Minver than to the rest of our little group, +though one could not be sure that he was very well known to Minver. The +stranger had been dining with Halson, and we had found the two smoking +together, with their cups of black coffee at their elbows, before the +smouldering fire in the Turkish room when we came in from +dinner—my friend Wanhope the psychologist, Rulledge the +sentimentalist, Minver the painter, and myself. It struck me for the +first time that a fire on the hearth was out of keeping with a Turkish +room, but I felt that the cups of black coffee restored the lost balance +in some measure.</p> + +<p>Before we had settled into our wonted places—in fact, almost as +we entered—Halson looked over his shoulder and said: “Mr. +Wanhope, I want you to hear this story of my friend’s. Go on, +Newton—or, rather, go back and begin again—and I’ll +introduce you afterwards.”</p> + +<p>The stranger made a becoming show of deprecation. He said he did not +think the story would bear immediate repetition, or was even worth +telling once, but, if we had nothing better to do, perhaps we might do +worse than hear it; the most he could say for it was that the thing +really happened. He wore a large, drooping, gray mustache, which, with +the imperial below it, quite hid his mouth, and gave him, somehow, a +martial effect, besides accurately dating him of the period between the +latest sixties and earliest seventies, when his beard would have been +black; I liked his mustache not being stubbed in the modern manner, but +allowed to fall heavily over his lips, and then branch away from the +corners of his mouth as far as it would. He lighted the cigar which +Halson gave him, and, blowing the bitten-off tip towards the fire, +began:</p> + +<p>“It was about that time when we first had a ten-o’clock +night train from Boston to New York. Train used to start at nine, and +lag along round by Springfield, and get into the old Twenty-sixth Street +Station here at six in the morning, where they let you sleep as long as +you liked. They call you up now at half-past five, and, if you +don’t turn out, they haul you back to Mott Haven, or New Haven, +I’m not sure which. I used to go into Boston and turn in at the +old Worcester Depot, as we called it then, just about the time the train +began to move, and I usually got a fine night’s rest in the course +of the nine or ten hours we were on the way to New York; it didn’t +seem quite the same after we began saying Albany Depot: shortened up the +run, somehow.</p> + +<div class="illustration"><a href="images/illust4l.jpg" name="illust4"><img src="images/illust4m.jpg" title="“NO BURGLAR COULD HAVE MISSED ME IF HE HAD WANTED AN EASY MARK”" alt="[Illustration: “NO BURGLAR COULD HAVE MISSED ME IF HE HAD WANTED AN EASY MARK”]" style="width: 300px; height: 709px" /></a></div> + +<p>“But that night I wasn’t very sleepy, and the porter had +got the place so piping hot with the big stoves, one at each end of the +car, to keep the good, old-fashioned Christmas cold out, that I thought +I should be more comfortable with a smoke before I went to bed; and, +anyhow, I could get away from the heat better in the smoking-room. I +hated to be leaving home on Christmas Eve, for I never had done that +before, and I hated to be leaving my wife alone with the children and +the two girls in our little house in Cambridge. Before I started in on +the old horse-car for Boston, I had helped her to tuck the young ones in +and to fill the stockings hung along the wall over the +register—the nearest we could come to a fireplace—and I +thought those stockings looked very weird, five of them, dangling +lumpily down, and I kept seeing them, and her sitting up sewing in front +of them, and afraid to go to bed on account of burglars. I suppose she +was shyer of burglars than any woman ever was that had never seen a sign +of them. She was always calling me up, to go down-stairs and put them +out, and I used to wander all over the house, from attic to cellar, in +my nighty, with a lamp in one hand and a poker in the other, so that no +burglar could have missed me if he had wanted an easy mark. I always +kept a lamp and a poker handy.”</p> + +<p>The stranger heaved a sigh as of fond reminiscence, and looked round +for the sympathy which in our company of bachelors he failed of; even +the sympathetic Rulledge failed of the necessary experience to move him +in compassionate response.</p> + +<p>“Well,” the stranger went on, a little damped perhaps by +his failure, but supported apparently by the interest of the fact in +hand, “I had the smoking-room to myself for a while, and then a +fellow put his head in that I thought I knew after I had thought I +didn’t know him. He dawned on me more and more, and I had to +acknowledge to myself, by and by, that it was a man named Melford, whom +I used to room with in Holworthy at Harvard; that is, we had an +apartment of two bedrooms and a study; and I suppose there were never +two fellows knew less of each other than we did at the end of our four +years together. I can’t say what Melford knew of me, but the most +I knew of Melford was his particular brand of nightmare.”</p> + +<p>Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter. He took +his cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an “Ah!”</p> + +<p>Rulledge went further and interrogatively repeated the word +“Nightmare?”</p> + +<p>“Nightmare,” the stranger continued, firmly. “The +curious thing about it was that I never exactly knew the subject of his +nightmare, and a more curious thing yet was Melford himself never knew +it, when I woke him up. He said he couldn’t make out anything but +a kind of scraping in a door-lock. His theory was that in his childhood +it had been a much completer thing, but that the circumstances had +broken down in a sort of decadence, and now there was nothing left of it +but that scraping in the door-lock, like somebody trying to turn a +misfit key. I used to throw things at his door, and once I tried a +cold-water douche from the pitcher, when he was very hard to waken; but +that was rather brutal, and after a while I used to let him roar himself +awake; he would always do it, if I trusted to nature; and before our +junior year was out I got so that I could sleep through, pretty calmly; +I would just say to myself when he fetched me to the surface with a +yell, ‘That’s Melford dreaming,’ and doze off +sweetly.”</p> + +<p>“Jove!” Rulledge said, “I don’t see how you +could stand it.”</p> + +<p>“There’s everything in habit, Rulledge,” Minver put +in. “Perhaps our friend only dreamt that he heard a +dream.”</p> + +<p>“That’s quite possible,” the stranger owned, +politely. “But the case is superficially as I state it. However, +it was all past, long ago, when I recognized Melford in the smoking-room +that night: it must have been ten or a dozen years. I was wearing a full +beard then, and so was he; we wore as much beard as we could in those +days. I had been through the war since college, and he had been in +California, most of the time, and, as he told me, he had been up north, +in Alaska, just after we bought it, and hurt his eyes—had +snow-blindness—and he wore spectacles. In fact, I had to do most +of the recognizing, but after we found out who we were we were rather +comfortable; and I liked him better than I remembered to have liked him +in our college days. I don’t suppose there was ever much harm in +him; it was only my grudge about his nightmare. We talked along and +smoked along for about an hour, and I could hear the porter outside, +making up the berths, and the train rumbled away towards Framingham, and +then towards Worcester, and I began to be sleepy, and to think I would +go to bed myself; and just then the door of the smoking-room opened, and +a young girl put in her face a moment, and said: ‘Oh, I beg your +pardon. I thought it was the stateroom,’ and then she shut the +door, and I realized that she looked like a girl I used to +know.”</p> + +<p>The stranger stopped, and I fancied from a note in his voice that +this girl was perhaps like an early love. We silently waited for him to +resume how and when he would. He sighed, and after an appreciable +interval he began again. “It is curious how things are related to +one another. My wife had never seen her, and yet, somehow, this girl +that looked like the one I mean brought my mind back to my wife with a +quick turn, after I had forgotten her in my talk with Melford for the +time being. I thought how lonely she was in that little house of ours in +Cambridge, on rather an outlying street, and I knew she was thinking of +me, and hating to have me away on Christmas Eve, which isn’t such +a lively time after you’re grown up and begin to look back on a +good many other Christmas Eves, when you were a child yourself; in fact, +I don’t know a dismaler night in the whole year. I stepped out on +the platform before I began to turn in, for a mouthful of the night air, +and I found it was spitting snow—a regular Christmas Eve of the +true pattern; and I didn’t believe, from the business feel of +those hard little pellets, that it was going to stop in a hurry, and I +thought if we got into New York on time we should be lucky. The snow +made me think of a night when my wife was sure there were burglars in +the house; and in fact I heard their tramping on the stairs +myself—thump, thump, thump, and then a stop, and then down again. +Of course it was the slide and thud of the snow from the roof of the +main part of the house to the roof of the kitchen, which was in an L, a +story lower, but it was as good an imitation of burglars as I want to +hear at one o’clock in the morning; and the recollection of it +made me more anxious about my wife, not because I believed she was in +danger, but because I knew how frightened she must be.</p> + +<p>“When I went back into the car, that girl passed me on the way +to her stateroom, and I concluded that she was the only woman on board, +and her friends had taken the stateroom for her, so that she +needn’t feel strange. I usually go to bed in a sleeper as I do in +my own house, but that night I somehow couldn’t. I got to thinking +of accidents, and I thought how disagreeable it would be to turn out +into the snow in my nighty. I ended by turning in with my clothes on, +all except my coat; and, in spite of the red-hot stoves, I wasn’t +any too warm. I had a berth in the middle of the car, and just as I was +parting my curtains to lie down, old Melford came to take the lower +berth opposite. It made me laugh a little, and I was glad of the relief. +‘Why, hello, Melford,’ said I. ‘This is like the old +Holworthy times.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said he, and +then I asked something that I had kept myself from asking all through +our talk in the smoking-room, because I knew he was rather sensitive +about it, or used to be. ‘Do you ever have that regulation +nightmare of yours nowadays, Melford? He gave a laugh, and said: +’I haven’t had it, I suppose, once in ten years. What made +you think of it?’ I said: ‘Oh, I don’t know. It just +came into my mind. Well, good-night, old fellow. I hope you’ll +rest well,’ and suddenly I began to feel light-hearted again, and +I went to sleep as gayly as ever I did in my life.”</p> + +<p>The stranger paused again, and Wanhope said: “Those swift +transitions of mood are very interesting. Of course they occur in that +remote region of the mind where all incidents and sensations are of one +quality, and things of the most opposite character unite in a common +origin. No one that I remember has attempted to trace such effects to +their causes, and then back again from their causes, which would be much +more important.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, I dare say,” Minver put in. “But if they all +amount to the same thing in the end, what difference would it +make?”</p> + +<p>“It would perhaps establish the identity of good and +evil,” Wanhope suggested.</p> + +<p>“Oh, the sinners are convinced of that already,” Minver +said, while Rulledge glanced quickly from one to the other.</p> + +<p>The stranger looked rather dazed, and Rulledge said: “Well, I +don’t suppose that was the conclusion of the whole +matter?”</p> + +<p>“Oh no,” the stranger answered, “that was only the +beginning of the conclusion. I didn’t go to sleep at once, though +I felt so much at peace. In fact, Melford beat me, and I could hear him +far in advance, steaming and whistling away, in a style that I recalled +as characteristic, over a space of intervening years that I hadn’t +definitely summed up yet. It made me think of a night near Narragansett +Bay, where two friends of mine and I had had a mighty good dinner at a +sort of wild club-house, and had hurried into our bunks, each one so as +to get the start of the others, for the fellows that were left behind +knew they had no chance of sleep after the first began to get in his +work. I laughed, and I suppose I must have gone to sleep almost +simultaneously, for I don’t recollect anything afterwards till I +was wakened by a kind of muffled bellow, that I remembered only too +well. It was the unfailing sign of Melford’s nightmare.</p> + +<p>“I was ready to swear, and I was ashamed for the fellow who had +no more self-control than that: when a fellow snores, or has a +nightmare, you always think first off that he needn’t have had it +if he had tried. As usual, I knew Melford didn’t know what his +nightmare was about, and that made me madder still, to have him +bellowing into the air like that, with no particular aim. All at once +there came a piercing scream from the stateroom, and then I knew that +the girl there had heard Melford and been scared out of a year’s +growth.”</p> + +<p>The stranger made a little break, and Wanhope asked, “Could you +make out what she screamed, or was it quite inarticulate?”</p> + +<p>“It was plain enough, and it gave me a clew, somehow, to what +Melford’s nightmare was about. She was calling out, ‘Help! +help! help! Burglars!’ till I thought she would raise the roof of +the car.”</p> + +<p>“And did she wake anybody?” Rulledge inquired.</p> + +<p>“That was the strange part of it. Not a soul stirred, and after +the first burst the girl seemed to quiet down again and yield the floor +to Melford, who kept bellowing steadily away. I was so furious that I +reached out across the aisle to shake him, but the attempt was too much +for me. I lost my balance and fell out of my berth onto the floor. You +may imagine the state of mind I was in. I gathered myself up and pulled +Melford’s curtains open and was just going to fall on him tooth +and nail, when I was nearly taken off my feet again by an apparition: +well, it looked like an apparition, but it was a tall fellow in his +nighty—for it was twenty years before pajamas—and he had a +small dark lantern in his hand, such as we used to carry in those days +so as to read in our berths when we couldn’t sleep. He was +gritting his teeth, and growling between them: ‘Out o’ this! +Out o’ this! I’m going to shoot to kill, you blasted +thieves!’ I could see by the strange look in his eyes that he was +sleep-walking, and I didn’t wait to see if he had a pistol. I +popped in behind the curtains, and found myself on top of another +fellow, for I had popped into the wrong berth in my confusion. The man +started up and yelled: ‘Oh, don’t kill me! There’s my +watch on the stand, and all the money in the house is in my pantaloons +pocket. The silver’s in the sideboard down-stairs, and it’s +plated, anyway.’ Then I understood what his complaint was, and I +rolled onto the floor again. By that time every man in the car was out +of his berth, too, except Melford, who was devoting himself strictly to +business; and every man was grabbing some other, and shouting, +‘Police!’ or ‘Burglars!’ or ‘Help!’ +or ‘Murder!’ just as the fancy took him.”</p> + +<p>“Most extraordinary!” Wanhope commented as the stranger +paused for breath.</p> + +<p>In the intensity of our interest, we had crowded close upon him, +except Minver, who sat with his head thrown back, and that cynical cast +in his eye which always exasperated Rulledge; and Halson, who stood +smiling proudly, as if the stranger’s story did him as his sponsor +credit personally.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” the stranger owned, “but I don’t know +that there wasn’t something more extraordinary still. From time to +time the girl in the stateroom kept piping up, with a shriek for help. +She had got past the burglar stage, but she wanted to be saved, anyhow, +from some danger which she didn’t specify. It went through me that +it was very strange nobody called the porter, and I set up a shout of +‘Porter!’ on my own account. I decided that if there were +burglars the porter was the man to put them out, and that if there were +no burglars the porter could relieve our groundless fears. Sure enough, +he came rushing in, as soon as I called for him, from the little corner +by the smoking-room where he was blacking boots between dozes. He was +wide enough awake, if having his eyes open meant that, and he had a shoe +on one hand and a shoe-brush in the other. But he merely joined in the +general up-roar and shouted for the police.”</p> + +<p>“Excuse me,” Wanhope interposed. “I wish to be +clear as to the facts. You had reasoned it out that the porter could +quiet the tumult?”</p> + +<p>“Never reasoned anything out so clearly in my life.”</p> + +<p>“But what was your theory of the situation? That your friend, +Mr. Melford, had a nightmare in which he was dreaming of +burglars?”</p> + +<p>“I hadn’t a doubt of it.”</p> + +<p>“And that by a species of dream-transference the +nightmare was communicated to the young lady in the +stateroom?”</p> + +<p>“Well—yes.”</p> + +<p>“And that her call for help and her cry of burglars acted as a +sort of hypnotic suggestion with the other sleepers, and they began to +be afflicted with the same nightmare?”</p> + +<p>“I don’t know that I ever put it to myself so distinctly, +but it appears to me now that I must have reached some such +conclusion.”</p> + +<p>“That is very interesting, very interesting indeed. I beg your +pardon. Please go on,” Wanhope courteously entreated.</p> + +<p>“I don’t remember just where I was,” the stranger +faltered.</p> + +<p>Rulledge returned with an accuracy which obliged us all: +“‘The porter merely joined in the general uproar and shouted +for the police.’”</p> + +<p>“Oh yes,” the stranger assented. “Then I +didn’t know what to do, for a minute. The porter was a pretty +thick-headed darky, but he was lion-hearted; and his idea was to lay +hold of a burglar wherever he could find him. There were plenty of +burglars in the aisle there, or people that were afraid of burglars, and +they seemed to think the porter had a good idea. They had hold of one +another already, and now began to pull up and down the aisles in a way +that reminded me of the old-fashioned mesmeric lecturers, when they told +their subjects that they were this or that, and set them to acting the +part. I remembered how once when the mesmerist gave out that they were +at a horse—race, and his subjects all got astride of their chairs, +and galloped up and down the hall like a lot of little boys on laths. I +thought of that now, and although it was rather a serious business, for +I didn’t know what minute they would come to blows, I +couldn’t help laughing. The sight was weird enough. Every one +looked like a somnambulist as he pulled and hauled. The young lady in +the stateroom was doing her full share. She was screaming, +‘Won’t somebody let me out?’ and hammering on the +door. I guess it was her screaming and hammering that brought the +conductor at last, or maybe he just came round in the course of nature +to take up the tickets. It was before the time when they took the +tickets at the gate, and you used to stick them into a little slot at +the side of your berth, and the conductor came along and took them in +the night, somewhere between Worcester and Springfield, I should +say.”</p> + +<p>“I remember,” Rulledge assented, but very carefully, so +as not to interrupt the flow of the narrative. “Used to wake up +everybody in the car.”</p> + +<p>“Exactly,” the stranger said. “But this time they +were all wide awake to receive him, or fast asleep, and dreaming their +roles. He came along with the wire of his lantern over his arm, the way +the old-time conductors did, and calling out, ‘Tickets!’ +just as if it was broad day, and he believed every man was trying to +beat his way to New York. The oddest thing about it was that the +sleep-walkers all stopped their pulling and hauling a moment, and each +man reached down to the little slot alongside of his berth and handed +over his ticket. Then they took hold and began pulling and hauling +again. I suppose the conductor asked what the matter was; but I +couldn’t hear him, and I couldn’t make out exactly what he +did say. But the passengers understood, and they all shouted +‘Burglars!’ and that girl in the stateroom gave a shriek +that you could have heard from one end of the train to the other, and +hammered on the door, and wanted to be let out.</p> + +<p>“It seemed to take the conductor by surprise, and he faced +towards the stateroom and let the lantern slip off his arm, and it +dropped onto the floor and went out; I remember thinking what a good +thing it didn’t set the car on fire. But there in the +dark—for the car lamps went out at the same time with the +lantern—I could hear those fellows pulling and hauling up and down +the aisle and scuffling over the floor, and through all Melford +bellowing away, like an orchestral accompaniment to a combat in Wagner +opera, but getting quieter and quieter till his bellow died away +altogether. At the same time the row in the aisle of the car stopped, +and there was perfect silence, and I could hear the snow rattling +against my window. Then I went off into a sound sleep, and never woke +till we got into New York.”</p> + +<p>The stranger seemed to have reached the end of his story, or at least +to have exhausted the interest it had for him, and he smoked on, holding +his knee between his hands and looking thoughtfully into the fire.</p> + +<p>He had left us rather breathless, or, better said, blank, and each +looked at the other for some initiative; then we united in looking at +Wanhope; that is, Rulledge and I did. Minver rose and stretched himself +with what I must describe as a sardonic yawn; Halson had stolen away +before the end, as one to whom the end was known. Wanhope seemed by no +means averse to the inquiry delegated to him, but only to be formulating +its terms. At last he said:</p> + +<p>“I don’t remember hearing of any case of this kind +before. Thought-transference is a sufficiently ascertained +phenomenon—the insistence of a conscious mind upon a certain fact +until it penetrates the unconscious mind of another and is adopted as +its own. But in the dream state the mind seems passive, and becomes the +prey of this or that self-suggestion, without the power of imparting it +to another dreaming mind. Yet here we have positive proof of such an +effect. It appears that the victim of a particularly terrific nightmare +was able to share its horrors—or rather unable <em>not</em> to +share them—with a whole sleeping-car full of people whose brains +helplessly took up the same theme, and dreamed it, as we may say, to the +same conclusions. I said proof, but of course we can’t accept a +single instance as establishing a scientific certainty. I don’t +question the veracity of Mr.—”</p> + +<p>“Newton,” the stranger suggested.</p> + +<p>“Newton’s experience,” Wanhope continued, +“but we must wait for a good many cases of the kind before we can +accept what I may call metaphantasmia as being equally established with +thought-transference. If we could it would throw light upon a whole +series of most curious phenomena, as, for instance, the privity of a +person dreamed about to the incident created by the dreamer.”</p> + +<p>“That would be rather dreadful, wouldn’t it?” I +ventured. “We do dream such scandalous, such compromising things +about people.”</p> + +<p>“All that,” Wanhope gently insisted, “could have +nothing to do with the fact. That alone is to be considered in an +inquiry of the kind. One is never obliged to tell one’s dreams. I +wonder”—he turned to the stranger, who sat absently staring +into the fire—“if you happened to speak to your friend about +his nightmare in the morning, and whether he was by any chance aware of +the participation of the others in it?”</p> + +<p>“I certainly spoke to him pretty plainly when we got into New +York.”</p> + +<p>“And what did he say?”</p> + +<p>“He said he had never slept better in his life, and he +couldn’t remember having a trace of nightmare. He said he heard +<em>me</em> groaning at one time, but I stopped just as he woke, and so +he didn’t rouse me as he thought of doing. It was at Hartford, and +he went to sleep again, and slept through without a break.”</p> + +<p>“And what was your conclusion from that?” Wanhope +asked.</p> + +<p>“That he was lying, I should say,” Rulledge replied for +the stranger.</p> + +<p>Wanhope still waited, and the stranger said, “I suppose one +conclusion might be that I had dreamed the whole thing +myself.”</p> + +<p>“Then you wish me to infer,” the psychologist pursued, +“that the entire incident was a figment of your sleeping brain? +That there was no sort of sleeping thought-transference, no +metaphantasmia, no—Excuse me. Do you remember verifying your +impression of being between Worcester and Springfield when the affair +occurred, by looking at your watch, for instance?”</p> + +<p>The stranger suddenly pulled out his watch at the word. “Good +Heavens!” he called out. “It’s twenty minutes of +eleven, and I have to take the eleven-o’clock train to Boston. I +must bid you good-evening, gentlemen. I’ve just time to get it if +I can catch a cab. Good-night, good-night. I hope if you come to +Boston—eh—Good-night! Sometimes,” he called over his +shoulder, “I’ve thought it might have been that girl in the +stateroom that started the dreaming.”</p> + +<p>He had wrung our hands one after another, and now he ran out of the +room.</p> + +<p>Rulledge said, in appeal to Wanhope: “I don’t see how his +being the dreamer invalidates the case, if his dreams affected the +others.”</p> + +<p>“Well,” Wanhope answered, thoughtfully, “that +depends.”</p> + +<p>“And what do you think of its being the girl in the +stateroom?”</p> + +<p>“That would be very interesting.”</p> + + + + +<h2><a name="chapter5" id="chapter5">V</a></h2> + +<h2 class="chaptertitle">Editha</h2> + + +<p>The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a +storm which has not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot +spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity +of the question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she +could not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still +leafless avenue, making slowly up towards the house, with his head down +and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the +edge of the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with +her will before she called aloud to him: “George!”</p> + +<p>He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical +urgence, before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, +“Well?”</p> + +<p>“Oh, how united we are!” she exulted, and then she +swooped down the steps to him. “What is it?” she cried.</p> + +<p>“It’s war,” he said, and he pulled her up to him +and kissed her.</p> + +<p>She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion, +and uttered from deep in her throat. “How glorious!”</p> + +<p>“It’s war,” he repeated, without consenting to her +sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at first. She never +knew what to think of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through +their courtship, which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war +feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He +seemed to despise it even more than he abhorred it. She could have +understood his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a +survival of his old life when he thought he would be a minister, and +before he changed and took up the law. But making light of a cause so +high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his +being. Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital +defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. +Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him. In the presence of +the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have +gone out of him; she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, +and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon +him her question of the origin and authenticity of his news.</p> + +<p>All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at +the very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, +by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to +take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect +as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was +peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity. +Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his +nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means +she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that +the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not +know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her +love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, +without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could +do something worthy to <em>have</em> won her—be a hero, +<em>her</em> hero—it would be even better than if he had done it +before asking her; it would be grander. Besides, she had believed in the +war from the beginning.</p> + +<p>“But don’t you see, dearest,” she said, “that +it wouldn’t have come to this if it hadn’t been in the order +of Providence? And I call any war glorious that is for the liberation of +people who have been struggling for years against the cruelest +oppression. Don’t you think so, too?”</p> + +<p>“I suppose so,” he returned, languidly. “But war! +Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?”</p> + +<p>“That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime +and shame at our very gates.” She was conscious of parroting the +current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose +her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for +him, and after a good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: +“But now it doesn’t matter about the how or why. Since the +war has come, all that is gone. There are no two sides any more. There +is nothing now but our country.”</p> + +<p>He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the +veranda, and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, +“Our country—right or wrong.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, right or wrong!” she returned, fervidly. +“I’ll go and get you some lemonade.” She rose +rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with two tall glasses of +clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice clucking in them, he still sat as +she had left him, and she said, as if there had been no interruption: +“But there is no question of wrong in this case. I call it a +sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there was one. And I +know you will see it just as I do, yet.”</p> + +<p>He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the +glass down: “I know you always have the highest ideal. When I +differ from you I ought to doubt myself.”</p> + +<p>A generous sob rose in Editha’s throat for the humility of a +man, so very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below +her.</p> + +<p>Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near +slipping through her fingers as when he took that meek way.</p> + +<p>“You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be +right.” She seized his hand in her two hands, and poured her soul +from her eyes into his. “Don’t you think so?” she +entreated him.</p> + +<div class="illustration"><a href="images/illust5l.jpg" name="illust5"><img src="images/illust5m.jpg" title="“‘YOU SHALL NOT SAY THAT!’”" alt="[Illustration: “‘YOU SHALL NOT SAY THAT!’”]" style="width: 450px; height: 759px" /></a></div> + +<p>He released his hand and drank the rest of his lemonade, and she +added, “Have mine, too,” but he shook his head in answering, +“I’ve no business to think so, unless I act so, +too.”</p> + +<p>Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with leaps that she felt +in her neck. She had noticed that strange thing in men: they seemed to +feel bound to do what they believed, and not think a thing was finished +when they said it, as girls did. She knew what was in his mind, but she +pretended not, and she said, “Oh, I am not sure,” and then +faltered.</p> + +<p>He went on as if to himself, without apparently heeding her: +“There’s only one way of proving one’s faith in a +thing like this.”</p> + +<p>She could not say that she understood, but she did understand.</p> + +<p>He went on again. “If I believed—if I felt as you do +about this war—Do you wish me to feel as you do?”</p> + +<p>Now she was really not sure; so she said: “George, I +don’t know what you mean.”</p> + +<p>He seemed to muse away from her as before.</p> + +<p>“There is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the +bottom of his heart every man would like at times to have his courage +tested, to see how he would act.”</p> + +<p>“How can you talk in that ghastly way?”</p> + +<p>“It <em>is</em> rather morbid. Still, that’s what it +comes to, unless you’re swept away by ambition or driven by +conviction. I haven’t the conviction or the ambition, and the +other thing is what it comes to with me. I ought to have been a +preacher, after all; then I couldn’t have asked it of myself, as I +must, now I’m a lawyer. And you believe it’s a holy war, +Editha?” he suddenly addressed her. “Oh, I know you do! But +you wish me to believe so, too?”</p> + +<p>She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in the ironical way he +always had with her plainer mind. But the only thing was to be outspoken +with him.</p> + +<p>“George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at +any and every cost. If I’ve tried to talk you into anything, I +take it all back.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, I know that, Editha. I know how sincere you are, and +how—I wish I had your undoubting spirit! I’ll think it over; +I’d like to believe as you do. But I don’t, now; I +don’t, indeed. It isn’t this war alone; though this seems +peculiarly wanton and needless; but it’s every war—so +stupid; it makes me sick. Why shouldn’t this thing have been +settled reasonably?”</p> + +<p>“Because,” she said, very throatily again, “God +meant it to be war.”</p> + +<p>“You think it was God? Yes, I suppose that is what people will +say.”</p> + +<p>“Do you suppose it would have been war if God hadn’t +meant it?”</p> + +<p>“I don’t know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put this +world into men’s keeping to work it as they pleased.”</p> + +<p>“Now, George, that is blasphemy.”</p> + +<p>“Well, I won’t blaspheme. I’ll try to believe in +your pocket Providence,” he said, and then he rose to go.</p> + +<p>“Why don’t you stay to dinner?” Dinner at +Balcom’s Works was at one o’clock.</p> + +<p>“I’ll come back to supper, if you’ll let me. +Perhaps I shall bring you a convert.”</p> + +<p>“Well, you may come back, on that condition.”</p> + +<p>“All right. If I don’t come, you’ll +understand.”</p> + +<p>He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of +their engagement. It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a +tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood +looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows +onto the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness.</p> + +<p>“Why didn’t he stay to dinner?”</p> + +<p>“Because—because—war has been declared,” +Editha pronounced, without turning.</p> + +<p>Her mother said, “Oh, my!” and then said nothing more +until she had sat down in one of the large Shaker chairs and rocked +herself for some time. Then she closed whatever tacit passage of thought +there had been in her mind with the spoken words: “Well, I hope +<em>he</em> won’t go.”</p> + +<p>“And <em>I</em> hope he <em>will</em>,” the girl said, +and confronted her mother with a stormy exaltation that would have +frightened any creature less unimpressionable than a cat.</p> + +<p>Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of cogitation. What +she arrived at in speech was: “Well, I guess you’ve done a +wicked thing, Editha Balcom.”</p> + +<p>The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her +mother had come out by: “I haven’t done +anything—yet.”</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts from Gearson, +down to the withered petals of the first flower he had offered, with +that timidity of his veiled in that irony of his. In the heart of the +packet she enshrined her engagement ring which she had restored to the +pretty box he had brought it her in. Then she sat down, if not calmly +yet strongly, and wrote:</p> + +<div class="letter"> +<p> “GEORGE:—I understood when you left me. But I think we + had better emphasize your meaning that if we cannot be one in + everything we had better be one in nothing. So I am sending these + things for your keeping till you have made up your mind.</p> + +<p> “I shall always love you, and therefore I shall never marry + any one else. But the man I marry must love his country first of + all, and be able to say to me,</p> + +<p class="poetry">“‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, + <br />Loved I not honor more.’</p> + +<p> “There is no honor above America with me. In this great hour + there is no other honor.</p> + +<p> “Your heart will make my words clear to you. I had never + expected to say so much, but it has come upon me that I must say the + utmost.</p> + +<p> EDITHA.”</p> +</div> + +<p>She thought she had worded her letter well, worded it in a way that +could not be bettered; all had been implied and nothing expressed.</p> + +<p>She had it ready to send with the packet she had tied with red, +white, and blue ribbon, when it occurred to her that she was not just to +him, that she was not giving him a fair chance. He had said he would go +and think it over, and she was not waiting. She was pushing, +threatening, compelling. That was not a woman’s part. She must +leave him free, free, free. She could not accept for her country or +herself a forced sacrifice.</p> + +<p>In writing her letter she had satisfied the impulse from which it +sprang; she could well afford to wait till he had thought it over. She +put the packet and the letter by, and rested serene in the consciousness +of having done what was laid upon her by her love itself to do, and yet +used patience, mercy, justice.</p> + +<p>She had her reward. Gearson did not come to tea, but she had given +him till morning, when, late at night there came up from the village the +sound of a fife and drum, with a tumult of voices, in shouting, singing, +and laughing. The noise drew nearer and nearer; it reached the street +end of the avenue; there it silenced itself, and one voice, the voice +she knew best, rose over the silence. It fell; the air was filled with +cheers; the fife and drum struck up, with the shouting, singing, and +laughing again, but now retreating; and a single figure came hurrying up +the avenue.</p> + +<p>She ran down to meet her lover and clung to him. He was very gay, and +he put his arm round her with a boisterous laugh. “Well, you must +call me Captain now; or Cap, if you prefer; that’s what the boys +call me. Yes, we’ve had a meeting at the town-hall, and everybody +has volunteered; and they selected me for captain, and I’m going +to the war, the big war, the glorious war, the holy war ordained by the +pocket Providence that blesses butchery. Come along; let’s tell +the whole family about it. Call them from their downy beds, father, +mother, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks!”</p> + +<p>But when they mounted the veranda steps he did not wait for a larger +audience; he poured the story out upon Editha alone.</p> + +<p>“There was a lot of speaking, and then some of the fools set up +a shout for me. It was all going one way, and I thought it would be a +good joke to sprinkle a little cold water on them. But you can’t +do that with a crowd that adores you. The first thing I knew I was +sprinkling hell-fire on them. ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of +war.’ That was the style. Now that it had come to the fight, there +were no two parties; there was one country, and the thing was to fight +to a finish as quick as possible. I suggested volunteering then and +there, and I wrote my name first of all on the roster. Then they elected +me—that’s all. I wish I had some ice-water.”</p> + +<p>She left him walking up and down the veranda, while she ran for the +ice-pitcher and a goblet, and when she came back he was still walking up +and down, shouting the story he had told her to her father and mother, +who had come out more sketchily dressed than they commonly were by day. +He drank goblet after goblet of the ice-water without noticing who was +giving it, and kept on talking, and laughing through his talk wildly. +“It’s astonishing,” he said, “how well the worse +reason looks when you try to make it appear the better. Why, I believe I +was the first convert to the war in that crowd to-night! I never thought +I should like to kill a man; but now I shouldn’t care; and the +smokeless powder lets you see the man drop that you kill. It’s all +for the country! What a thing it is to have a country that +<em>can’t</em> be wrong, but if it is, is right, +anyway!”</p> + +<p>Editha had a great, vital thought, an inspiration. She set down the +ice-pitcher on the veranda floor, and ran up-stairs and got the letter +she had written him. When at last he noisily bade her father and mother, +“Well, good-night. I forgot I woke you up; I sha’n’t +want any sleep myself,” she followed him down the avenue to the +gate. There, after the whirling words that seemed to fly away from her +thoughts and refuse to serve them, she made a last effort to solemnize +the moment that seemed so crazy, and pressed the letter she had written +upon him.</p> + +<p>“What’s this?” he said. “Want me to mail +it?”</p> + +<p>“No, no. It’s for you. I wrote it after you went this +morning. Keep it—keep it—and read it sometime—” +She thought, and then her inspiration came: “Read it if ever you +doubt what you’ve done, or fear that I regret your having done it. +Read it after you’ve started.”</p> + +<p>They strained each other in embraces that seemed as ineffective as +their words, and he kissed her face with quick, hot breaths that were so +unlike him, that made her feel as if she had lost her old lover and +found a stranger in his place. The stranger said: “What a gorgeous +flower you are, with your red hair, and your blue eyes that look black +now, and your face with the color painted out by the white moonshine! +Let me hold you under the chin, to see whether I love blood, you +tiger-lily!” Then he laughed Gearson’s laugh, and released +her, scared and giddy. Within her wilfulness she had been frightened by +a sense of subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had +never been before.</p> + +<p>She ran all the way back to the house, and mounted the steps panting. +Her mother and father were talking of the great affair. Her mother said: +“Wa’n’t Mr. Gearson in rather of an excited state of +mind? Didn’t you think he acted curious?”</p> + +<p>“Well, not for a man who’d just been elected captain and +had set ’em up for the whole of Company A,” her father +chuckled back.</p> + +<p>“What in the world do you mean, Mr. Balcom? Oh! There’s +Editha!” She offered to follow the girl indoors.</p> + +<p>“Don’t come, mother!” Editha called, vanishing.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Balcom remained to reproach her husband. “I don’t +see much of anything to laugh at.”</p> + +<p>“Well, it’s catching. Caught it from Gearson. I guess it +won’t be much of a war, and I guess Gearson don’t think so, +either. The other fellows will back down as soon as they see we mean it. +I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. I’m going back to bed, +myself.”</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>Gearson came again next afternoon, looking pale and rather sick, but +quite himself, even to his languid irony. “I guess I’d +better tell you, Editha, that I consecrated myself to your god of +battles last night by pouring too many libations to him down my own +throat. But I’m all right now. One has to carry off the +excitement, somehow.”</p> + +<p>“Promise me,” she commanded, “that you’ll +never touch it again!”</p> + +<p>“What! Not let the cannikin clink? Not let the soldier drink? +Well, I promise.”</p> + +<p>“You don’t belong to yourself now; you don’t even +belong to <em>me</em>. You belong to your country, and you have a sacred +charge to keep yourself strong and well for your country’s sake. I +have been thinking, thinking all night and all day long.”</p> + +<p>“You look as if you had been crying a little, too,” he +said, with his queer smile.</p> + +<p>“That’s all past. I’ve been thinking, and +worshipping <em>you</em>. Don’t you suppose I know all that +you’ve been through, to come to this? I’ve followed you +every step from your old theories and opinions.”</p> + +<p>“Well, you’ve had a long row to hoe.”</p> + +<p>“And I know you’ve done this from the highest +motives—”</p> + +<p>“Oh, there won’t be much pettifogging to do till this +cruel war is—”</p> + +<p>“And you haven’t simply done it for my sake. I +couldn’t respect you if you had.”</p> + +<p>“Well, then we’ll say I haven’t. A man that +hasn’t got his own respect intact wants the respect of all the +other people he can corner. But we won’t go into that. I’m +in for the thing now, and we’ve got to face our future. My idea is +that this isn’t going to be a very protracted struggle; we shall +just scare the enemy to death before it comes to a fight at all. But we +must provide for contingencies, Editha. If anything happens to +me—”</p> + +<p>“Oh, George!” She clung to him, sobbing.</p> + +<p>“I don’t want you to feel foolishly bound to my memory. I +should hate that, wherever I happened to be.”</p> + +<p>“I am yours, for time and eternity—time and +eternity.” She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for +phrases.</p> + +<p>“Well, say eternity; that’s all right; but time’s +another thing; and I’m talking about time. But there is something! +My mother! If anything happens—”</p> + +<p>She winced, and he laughed. “You’re not the bold +soldier-girl of yesterday!” Then he sobered. “If anything +happens, I want you to help my mother out. She won’t like my doing +this thing. She brought me up to think war a fool thing as well as a bad +thing. My father was in the Civil War; all through it; lost his arm in +it.” She thrilled with the sense of the arm round her; what if +that should be lost? He laughed as if divining her: “Oh, it +doesn’t run in the family, as far as I know!” Then he added, +gravely: “He came home with misgivings about war, and they grew on +him. I guess he and mother agreed between them that I was to be brought +up in his final mind about it; but that was before my time. I only knew +him from my mother’s report of him and his opinions; I don’t +know whether they were hers first; but they were hers last. This will be +a blow to her. I shall have to write and tell her—”</p> + +<p>He stopped, and she asked: “Would you like me to write, too, +George?”</p> + +<p>“I don’t believe that would do. No, I’ll do the +writing. She’ll understand a little if I say that I thought the +way to minimize it was to make war on the largest possible scale at +once—that I felt I must have been helping on the war somehow if I +hadn’t helped keep it from coming, and I knew I hadn’t; when +it came, I had no right to stay out of it.”</p> + +<p>Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they satisfied her. She +clung to his breast, and whispered, with closed eyes and quivering lips: +“Yes, yes, yes!”</p> + +<p>“But if anything should happen, you might go to her and see +what you could do for her. You know? It’s rather far off; she +can’t leave her chair—”</p> + +<p>“Oh, I’ll go, if it’s the ends of the earth! But +nothing will happen! Nothing <em>can!</em> I—”</p> + +<p>She felt herself lifted with his rising, and Gearson was saying, with +his arm still round her, to her father: “Well, we’re off at +once, Mr. Balcom. We’re to be formally accepted at the capital, +and then bunched up with the rest somehow, and sent into camp somewhere, +and got to the front as soon as possible. We all want to be in the van, +of course; we’re the first company to report to the Governor. I +came to tell Editha, but I hadn’t got round to it.”</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>She saw him again for a moment at the capital, in the station, just +before the train started southward with his regiment. He looked well, in +his uniform, and very soldierly, but somehow girlish, too, with his +clean-shaven face and slim figure. The manly eyes and the strong voice +satisfied her, and his preoccupation with some unexpected details of +duty flattered her. Other girls were weeping and bemoaning themselves, +but she felt a sort of noble distinction in the abstraction, the almost +unconsciousness, with which they parted. Only at the last moment he +said: “Don’t forget my mother. It mayn’t be such a +walk-over as I supposed,” and he laughed at the notion.</p> + +<p>He waved his hand to her as the train moved off—she knew it +among a score of hands that were waved to other girls from the platform +of the car, for it held a letter which she knew was hers. Then he went +inside the car to read it, doubtless, and she did not see him again. But +she felt safe for him through the strength of what she called her love. +What she called her God, always speaking the name in a deep voice and +with the implication of a mutual understanding, would watch over him and +keep him and bring him back to her. If with an empty sleeve, then he +should have three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be his +for life. She did not see, though, why she should always be thinking of +the arm his father had lost.</p> + +<p>There were not many letters from him, but they were such as she could +have wished, and she put her whole strength into making hers such as she +imagined he could have wished, glorifying and supporting him. She wrote +to his mother glorifying him as their hero, but the brief answer she got +was merely to the effect that Mrs. Gearson was not well enough to write +herself, and thanking her for her letter by the hand of some one who +called herself “Yrs truly, Mrs. W.J. Andrews.”</p> + +<p>Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again quite as if the +answer had been all she expected. Before it seemed as if she could have +written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of the +killed, which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was +Gearson’s name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out +that it might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name and the +company and the regiment and the State were too definitely given.</p> + +<p>Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it seemed as if she +never could rise again; then a lift into clouds far above all grief, +black clouds, that blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him, +with George—George! She had the fever that she expected of +herself, but she did not die in it; she was not even delirious, and it +did not last long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one +thought was of George’s mother, of his strangely worded wish that +she should go to her and see what she could do for her. In the +exaltation of the duty laid upon her—it buoyed her up instead of +burdening her—she rapidly recovered.</p> + +<p>Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern +New York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said +he could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to +the little country town where George’s mother lived in a little +house on the edge of the illimitable cornfields, under trees pushed to a +top of the rolling prairie. George’s father had settled there +after the Civil War, as so many other old soldiers had done; but they +were Eastern people, and Editha fancied touches of the East in the June +rose overhanging the front door, and the garden with early summer +flowers stretching from the gate of the paling fence.</p> + +<p>It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds, +that they could scarcely see one another: Editha tall and black in her +crapes which filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father +standing decorously apart with his hat on his forearm, as at funerals; a +woman rested in a deep arm-chair, and the woman who had let the +strangers in stood behind the chair.</p> + +<p>The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman +behind her chair: “<em>Who</em> did you say?”</p> + +<p>Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone +down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, “I am +George’s Editha,” for answer.</p> + +<p>But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman’s +voice, saying: “Well, I don’t know as I <em>did</em> get the +name just right. I guess I’ll have to make a little more light in +here,” and she went and pushed two of the shutters ajar.</p> + +<p>Then Editha’s father said, in his public +will-now-address-a-few-remarks tone: “My name is Balcom, +ma’am—Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom’s Works, New York; +my daughter—”</p> + +<p>“Oh!” the seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, +the voice that always surprised Editha from Gearson’s slender +frame. “Let me see you. Stand round where the light can strike on +your face,” and Editha dumbly obeyed. “So, you’re +Editha Balcom,” she sighed.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” Editha said, more like a culprit than a +comforter.</p> + +<p>“What did you come for?” Mrs. Gearson asked.</p> + +<p>Editha’s face quivered and her knees shook. “I +came—because—because George—” She could go no +further.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” the mother said, “he told me he had asked +you to come if he got killed. You didn’t expect that, I suppose, +when you sent him.”</p> + +<p>“I would rather have died myself than done it!” Editha +said, with more truth in her deep voice than she ordinarily found in it. +“I tried to leave him free—”</p> + +<p>“Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his other +things, left him free.”</p> + +<p>Editha saw now where George’s irony came from.</p> + +<p>“It was not to be read before—unless—until—I +told him so,” she faltered.</p> + +<p>“Of course, he wouldn’t read a letter of yours, under the +circumstances, till he thought you wanted him to. Been sick?” the +woman abruptly demanded.</p> + +<p>“Very sick,” Editha said, with self-pity.</p> + +<p>“Daughter’s life,” her father interposed, +“was almost despaired of, at one time.”</p> + +<p>Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed. “I suppose you would have been +glad to die, such a brave person as you! I don’t believe +<em>he</em> was glad to die. He was always a timid boy, that way; he was +afraid of a good many things; but if he was afraid he did what he made +up his mind to. I suppose he made up his mind to go, but I knew what it +cost him by what it cost me when I heard of it. I had been through +<em>one</em> war before. When you sent him you didn’t expect he +would get killed.”</p> + +<p>The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it was time. +“No,” she huskily murmured.</p> + +<p>“No, girls don’t; women don’t, when they give their +men up to their country. They think they’ll come marching back, +somehow, just as gay as they went, or if it’s an empty sleeve, or +even an empty pantaloon, it’s all the more glory, and +they’re so much the prouder of them, poor things!”</p> + +<p>The tears began to run down Editha’s face; she had not wept +till then; but it was now such a relief to be understood that the tears +came.</p> + +<p>“No, you didn’t expect him to get killed,” Mrs. +Gearson repeated, in a voice which was startlingly like George’s +again. “You just expected him to kill some one else, some of those +foreigners, that weren’t there because they had any say about it, +but because they had to be there, poor wretches—conscripts, or +whatever they call ’em. You thought it would be all right for my +George, <em>your</em> George, to kill the sons of those miserable +mothers and the husbands of those girls that you would never see the +faces of.” The woman lifted her powerful voice in a psalmlike +note. “I thank my God he didn’t live to do it! I thank my +God they killed him first, and that he ain’t livin’ with +their blood on his hands!” She dropped her eyes, which she had +raised with her voice, and glared at Editha. “What you got that +black on for?” She lifted herself by her powerful arms so high +that her helpless body seemed to hang limp its full length. “Take +it off, take it off, before I tear it from your back!”</p> + +<div class="illustration"><a href="images/illust6l.jpg" name="illust6"><img src="images/illust6m.jpg" title="“SHE GLARED AT EDITHA. ‘WHAT YOU GOT THAT BLACK ON FOR?’”" alt="[Illustration: “SHE GLARED AT EDITHA. ‘WHAT YOU GOT THAT BLACK ON FOR?’”]" style="width: 450px; height: 773px" /></a></div> + +<hr /> + +<p>The lady who was passing the summer near Balcom’s Works was +sketching Editha’s beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the +effects of a colorist. It had come to that confidence which is rather +apt to grow between artist and sitter, and Editha had told her +everything.</p> + +<p>“To think of your having such a tragedy in your life!” +the lady said. She added: “I suppose there are people who feel +that way about war. But when you consider the good this war has +done—how much it has done for the country! I can’t +understand such people, for my part. And when you had come all the way +out there to console her—got up out of a sick-bed! +Well!”</p> + +<p>“I think,” Editha said, magnanimously, “she +wasn’t quite in her right mind; and so did papa.”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” the lady said, looking at Editha’s lips in +nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to +them in the picture. “But how dreadful of her! How +perfectly—excuse me—how <em>vulgar!</em>”</p> + +<p>A light broke upon Editha in the darkness which she felt had been +without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had +bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose +from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the +ideal.</p> + + + + +<h2><a name="chapter6" id="chapter6">VI</a></h2> + +<h2 class="chaptertitle">Braybridge’s Offer</h2> + + +<p>We had ordered our dinners and were sitting in the Turkish room at +the club, waiting to be called, each in his turn, to the dining-room. It +was always a cosey place, whether you found yourself in it with cigars +and coffee after dinner, or with whatever liquid or solid appetizer you +preferred in the half-hour or more that must pass before dinner after +you had made out your menu. It intimated an exclusive possession in the +three or four who happened first to find themselves together in it, and +it invited the philosophic mind to contemplation more than any other +spot in the club.</p> + +<p>Our rather limited little down-town dining-club was almost a celibate +community at most times. A few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch; +but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in +an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare +what we liked. Some dozed away in the intervening time; some read the +evening papers or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the +Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these +sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be +Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to +interrupt and dispute. I myself liked to look in and linger for either +the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now, seeing the +three there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who +made no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar +sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and +he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the +psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I +was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then +intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were +privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher +range of thinking.</p> + +<p>“I shouldn’t have supposed, somehow,” he said, with +a knot of deprecation between his fine eyes, “that he would have +had the pluck.”</p> + +<p>“Perhaps he hadn’t,” Minver suggested.</p> + +<p>Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in +toleration. “You mean that she—”</p> + +<p>“I don’t see why you say that, Minver,” Rulledge +interposed, chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.</p> + +<p>“I didn’t say it,” Minver contradicted.</p> + +<p>“You implied it; and I don’t think it’s fair. +It’s easy enough to build up a report of that kind on the +half-knowledge of rumor which is all that any outsider can have in the +case.”</p> + +<p>“So far,” Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, +“as any such edifice has been erected, you are the architect, +Rulledge. I shouldn’t think you would like to go round insinuating +that sort of thing. Here is Acton,” and he now acknowledged my +presence with a backward twist of his head, “on the alert for +material already. You ought to be more careful where Acton is, +Rulledge.”</p> + +<p>“It would be great copy if it were true,” I owned.</p> + +<p>Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with +the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a +culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote +as might be from the personal appeal. “It is curious how little we +know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and +all the inquiry of the poets and novelists.” He addressed himself +in this turn of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I +united with the functions of both a responsibility for their +shortcomings.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” Minver said, facing about towards me. “How +do you excuse yourself for your ignorance in matters where you’re +always professionally making such a bluff of knowledge? After all the +marriages you have brought about in literature, can you say positively +and specifically how they are brought about in life?”</p> + +<p>“No, I can’t,” I admitted. “I might say that +a writer of fiction is a good deal like a minister who continually +marries people without knowing why.”</p> + +<p>“No, you couldn’t, my dear fellow,” the painter +retorted. “It’s part of your swindle to assume that you +<em>do</em> know why. You ought to find out.”</p> + +<p>Wanhope interposed concretely, or as concretely as he could: +“The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers +the confession, tacit or explicit, began with.”</p> + +<p>“Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on +the question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from +nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and +asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent +out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don’t you do +it, Acton?”</p> + +<p>I returned, as seriously as could have been expected:</p> + +<p>“Perhaps it would be thought rather intimate. People +don’t like to talk of such things.”</p> + +<p>“They’re ashamed,” Minver declared. “The +lovers don’t either of them, in a given case, like to let others +know how much the woman had to do with making the offer, and how little +the man.”</p> + +<p>Minver’s point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a +remark at the same time. We begged each other’s pardon, and +Wanhope insisted that I should go on.</p> + +<p>“Oh, merely this,” I said. “I don’t think +they’re so much ashamed as that they have forgotten the different +stages. You were going to say—?”</p> + +<p>“Very much what you said. It’s astonishing how people +forget the vital things and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance +from stage to stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. +Nothing can be more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how +they became husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the +main fact, would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next +generations knows nothing of it.”</p> + +<p>“That appears to let Acton out,” Minver said. “But +how do <em>you</em> know what you were saying, Wanhope?”</p> + +<p>“I’ve ventured to make some inquiries in that region at +one time. Not directly, of course. At second and third hand. It +isn’t inconceivable, if we conceive of a life after this, that a +man should forget, in its more important interests and occupations, just +how he quitted this world, or at least the particulars of the article of +death. Of course, we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have +elapsed.” Wanhope continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost +equivalent to something so unscientific as a sigh: “Women are +charming, and in nothing more than the perpetual challenge they form for +us. They are born defying us to match ourselves with them.”</p> + +<p>“Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood—” Rulledge began, +but Minver’s laugh arrested him.</p> + +<p>“Nothing so concrete, I’m afraid,” Wanhope gently +returned. “I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, +in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. It’s +pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other +game, which they are so good at.”</p> + +<p>“They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean +the game of love,” Minver said. “Especially when +they’re not in earnest about it.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women,” Wanhope +admitted. “But I don’t mean flirting. I suppose that the +average unspoiled woman is rather frightened than otherwise when she +knows that a man is in love with her.”</p> + +<p>“Do you suppose she always knows it first?” Rulledge +asked.</p> + +<p>“You may be sure,” Minver answered for Wanhope, +“that if she didn’t know it, <em>he</em> never would.” +Then Wanhope answered for himself:</p> + +<p>“I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of +wireless telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through space +towards each other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the +appeal of his before he is conscious of having made any +appeal.”</p> + +<p>“And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?” I +suggested.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” Wanhope admitted, after a thoughtful +reluctance.</p> + +<p>“Even when she is half aware of having invited it?”</p> + +<p>“If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. +Take the case in point; we won’t mention any names. She is sailing +through time, through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the +natural equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, +somewhere from the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the +gulfs of air where there had been no life before. But she can’t be +said to have knowingly searched the void for any presence.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, I’m not sure about that, Professor,” Minver +put in. “Go a little slower, if you expect me to follow +you.”</p> + +<p>“It’s all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of +life,” Wanhope resumed. “I don’t believe I could make +out the case as I feel it to be.”</p> + +<p>“Braybridge’s part of the case is rather plain, +isn’t it?” I invited him.</p> + +<p>“I’m not sure of that. No man’s part of any case is +plain, if you look at it carefully. The most that you can say of +Braybridge is that he is rather a simple nature. But nothing,” the +psychologist added, with one of his deep breaths, “is so complex +as a simple nature.”</p> + +<p>“Well,” Minver contended, “Braybridge is plain, if +his case isn’t.”</p> + +<p>“Plain? Is he plain?” Wanhope asked, as if asking +himself.</p> + +<p>“My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!”</p> + +<p>“I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of +unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek +proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel +the attraction of such a man—the fascination of his being grizzled +and slovenly and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to +do that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would +divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under +rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks, +where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop. +He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the +hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and +I don’t vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found +himself at odds with the gay young people who made up the +hostess’s end of the party, and was watching for a chance +to—”</p> + +<p>Wanhope cast about for the word, and Minver supplied +it—“Pull out.”</p> + +<p>“Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from +him.”</p> + +<p>“I don’t understand,” Rulledge said.</p> + +<p>“When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with +an excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he +saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence +of having arrived late the night before; and when Braybridge found +himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said +good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them +talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and +introduced them. But it’s rather difficult reporting a lady +verbatim at second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had +them from his wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and +Miss Hazelwood were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror +because one was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel +experience for both. Ever seen her?”</p> + +<p>We looked at one another. Minver said: “I never wanted to paint +any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists. +There was a jam of people; but this girl—I’ve understood it +was she—looked as much alone as if there were nobody else there. +She might have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming +out on a twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of +twenty-million-dollar people on the veranda.”</p> + +<p>“And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe,” I said. +“Good selling name.”</p> + +<p>“Don’t reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it +would be a selling name.”</p> + +<p>“Go on, Wanhope,” Rulledge puffed impatiently. +“Though I don’t see how there could be another soul in the +universe as constitutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of +women.”</p> + +<p>“In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has +its complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a +bashful woman,” Wanhope returned.</p> + +<p>“Or a bold one,” Minver suggested.</p> + +<p>“No; the response must be in kind to be truly complemental. +Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they +needn’t be afraid.”</p> + +<p>“Oh! <em>That’s</em> the way you get out of +it!”</p> + +<p>“Well?” Rulledge urged.</p> + +<p>“I’m afraid,” Wanhope modestly confessed, +“that from this point I shall have to be largely conjectural. +Welkin wasn’t able to be very definite, except as to moments, and +he had his data almost altogether from his wife. Braybridge had told him +overnight that he thought of going, and he had said he mustn’t +think of it; but he supposed Braybridge had spoken of it to Mrs. Welkin, +and he began by saying to his wife that he hoped she had refused to hear +of Braybridge’s going. She said she hadn’t heard of it, but +now she would refuse without hearing, and she didn’t give +Braybridge any chance to protest. If people went in the middle of their +week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the +equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin +thought it was odd that Braybridge didn’t insist; and he made a +long story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that +Miss Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. +When Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, +the business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each +other’s charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as +Mrs. Welkin knew from the letters that passed through her hands, +and—Well, their engagement has come out, and—” Wanhope +paused, with an air that was at first indefinite, and then +definitive.</p> + +<p>“You don’t mean,” Rulledge burst out in a note of +deep wrong, “that that’s all you know about it?”</p> + +<p>“Yes, that’s all I know,” Wanhope confessed, as if +somewhat surprised himself at the fact.</p> + +<p>“Well!”</p> + +<p>Wanhope tried to offer the only reparation in his power. “I can +conjecture—we can all conjecture—”</p> + +<p>He hesitated; then: “Well, go on with your conjecture,” +Rulledge said, forgivingly.</p> + +<p>“Why—” Wanhope began again; but at that moment a +man who had been elected the year before, and then gone off on a long +absence, put his head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. +It was Halson, whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I +knew. His eyes were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety +of his temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile +carried his little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. +“Private?”</p> + +<p>“Come in! come in!” Minver called to him. “Thought +you were in Japan?”</p> + +<p>“My dear fellow,” Halson answered, “you must brush +up your contemporary history. It’s more than a fortnight since I +was in Japan.” He shook hands with me, and I introduced him to +Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at once: “Well, what is it? Question +of Braybridge’s engagement? It’s humiliating to a man to +come back from the antipodes and find the nation absorbed in a parochial +problem like that. Everybody I’ve met here to-night has asked me, +the first thing, if I’d heard of it, and if I knew how it could +have happened.”</p> + +<p>“And do you?” Rulledge asked.</p> + +<p>“I can give a pretty good guess,” Halson said, running +his merry eyes over our faces.</p> + +<p>“Anybody can give a good guess,” Rulledge said. +“Wanhope is doing it now.”</p> + +<p>“Don’t let me interrupt.” Halson turned to him +politely.</p> + +<p>“Not at all. I’d rather hear your guess, if you know +Braybridge better than I,” Wanhope said.</p> + +<p>“Well,” Halson compromised, “perhaps I’ve +known him longer.” He asked, with an effect of coming to business: +“Where were you?”</p> + +<p>“Tell him, Rulledge,” Minver ordered, and Rulledge +apparently asked nothing better. He told him, in detail, all we knew +from any source, down to the moment of Wanhope’s arrested +conjecture.</p> + +<p>“He did leave you at an anxious point, didn’t he?” +Halson smiled to the rest of us at Rulledge’s expense, and then +said: “Well, I think I can help you out a little. Any of you know +the lady?”</p> + +<p>“By sight, Minver does,” Rulledge answered for us. +“Wants to paint her.”</p> + +<p>“Of course,” Halson said, with intelligence. “But I +doubt if he’d find her as paintable as she looks, at first. +She’s beautiful, but her charm is spiritual.”</p> + +<p>“Sometimes we try for that,” the painter interposed.</p> + +<p>“And sometimes you get it. But you’ll allow it’s +difficult. That’s all I meant. I’ve known her—let me +see—for twelve years, at least; ever since I first went West. She +was about eleven then, and her father was bringing her up on the ranch. +Her aunt came along by and by and took her to Europe—mother dead +before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl was always homesick for +the ranch; she pined for it; and after they had kept her in Germany +three or four years they let her come back and run wild again—wild +as a flower does, or a vine, not a domesticated animal.”</p> + +<p>“Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic +Rulledge.”</p> + +<p>“Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, +Minver,” Halson said, almost austerely. “Her father died two +years ago, and then she <em>had</em> to come East, for her aunt simply +<em>wouldn’t</em> live on the ranch. She brought her on here, and +brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea; but the girl didn’t +take to the New York thing at all; I could see it from the start; she +wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about the ranch.”</p> + +<p>“She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those +conventional people.”</p> + +<p>Halson laughed at Minver’s thrust, and went on amiably: +“I don’t suppose that till she met Braybridge she was ever +quite at her ease with any man—or woman, for that matter. I +imagine, as you’ve done, that it was his fear of her that gave her +courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn’t that it?”</p> + +<p>Wanhope assented to the question referred to him with a nod.</p> + +<p>“And when they got lost from the rest of the party at that +picnic—”</p> + +<p>“Lost?” Rulledge demanded.</p> + +<p>“Why, yes. Didn’t you know? But I ought to go back. They +said there never was anything prettier than the way she unconsciously +went for Braybridge the whole day. She wanted him, and she was a child +who wanted things frankly when she did want them. Then his being ten or +fifteen years older than she was, and so large and simple, made it +natural for a shy girl like her to assort herself with him when all the +rest were assorting themselves, as people do at such things. The +consensus of testimony is that she did it with the most transparent +unconsciousness, and—”</p> + +<p>“Who are your authorities?” Minver asked; Rulledge threw +himself back on the divan and beat the cushions with impatience.</p> + +<p>“Is it essential to give them?”</p> + +<p>“Oh no. I merely wondered. Go on.”</p> + +<p>“The authorities are all right. She had disappeared with him +before the others noticed. It was a thing that happened; there was no +design in it; that would have been out of character. They had got to the +end of the wood-road, and into the thick of the trees where there +wasn’t even a trail, and they walked round looking for a way out +till they were turned completely. They decided that the only way was to +keep walking, and by and by they heard the sound of chopping. It was +some Canucks clearing a piece of the woods, and when she spoke to them +in French they gave them full directions, and Braybridge soon found the +path again.”</p> + +<p>Halson paused, and I said: “But that isn’t +all?”</p> + +<p>“Oh no.” He continued thoughtfully silent for a little +while before he resumed. “The amazing thing is that they got lost +again, and that when they tried going back to the Canucks they +couldn’t find the way.”</p> + +<p>“Why didn’t they follow the sound of the chopping?” +I asked.</p> + +<p>“The Canucks had stopped, for the time being. Besides, +Braybridge was rather ashamed, and he thought if they went straight on +they would be sure to come out somewhere. But that was where he made a +mistake. They couldn’t go on straight; they went round and round, +and came on their own footsteps—or hers, which he recognized from +the narrow tread and the dint of the little heels in the damp +places.”</p> + +<p>Wanhope roused himself with a kindling eye. “That is very +interesting, the movement in a circle of people who have lost their way. +It has often been observed, but I don’t know that it has ever been +explained. Sometimes the circle is smaller, sometimes it is larger, but +I believe it is always a circle.”</p> + +<p>“Isn’t it,” I queried, “like any other error +in life? We go round and round, and commit the old sins over +again.”</p> + +<p>“That is very interesting,” Wanhope allowed.</p> + +<p>“But do lost people really always walk in a vicious +circle?” Minver asked.</p> + +<p>Rulledge would not let Wanhope answer. “Go on, Halson,” +he said.</p> + +<p>Halson roused himself from the revery in which he was sitting with +glazed eyes. “Well, what made it a little more anxious was that he +had heard of bears on that mountain, and the green afternoon light among +the trees was perceptibly paling. He suggested shouting, but she +wouldn’t let him; she said it would be ridiculous if the others +heard them, and useless if they didn’t. So they tramped on +till—till the accident happened.”</p> + +<p>“The accident!” Rulledge exclaimed, in the voice of our +joint emotion.</p> + +<p>“He stepped on a loose stone and turned his foot,” Halson +explained. “It wasn’t a sprain, luckily, but it hurt enough. +He turned so white that she noticed it, and asked him what was the +matter. Of course that shut his mouth the closer, but it morally doubled +his motive, and he kept himself from crying out till the sudden pain of +the wrench was over. He said merely that he thought he had heard +something, and he had an awful ringing in his ears; but he didn’t +mean that, and he started on again. The worst was trying to walk without +limping, and to talk cheerfully and encouragingly with that agony +tearing at him. But he managed somehow, and he was congratulating +himself on his success when he tumbled down in a dead faint.”</p> + +<p>“Oh, come now!” Minver protested.</p> + +<p>“It <em>is</em> like an old-fashioned story, where things are +operated by accident instead of motive, isn’t it?” Halson +smiled with radiant recognition.</p> + +<p>“Fact will always imitate fiction, if you give her time +enough,” I said.</p> + +<p>“Had they got back to the other picnickers?” Rulledge +asked, with a tense voice.</p> + +<p>“In sound, but not in sight of them. She wasn’t going to +bring him into camp in that state; besides, she couldn’t. She got +some water out of the trout-brook they’d been fishing—more +water than trout in it—and sprinkled his face, and he came to, and +got on his legs just in time to pull on to the others, who were +organizing a search-party to go after them. From that point on she +dropped Braybridge like a hot coal; and as there was nothing of the +flirt in her, she simply kept with the women, the older girls, and the +tabbies, and left Braybridge to worry along with the secret of his +turned ankle. He doesn’t know how he ever got home alive; but he +did, somehow, manage to reach the wagons that had brought them to the +edge of the woods, and then he was all right till they got to the house. +But still she said nothing about his accident, and he couldn’t; +and he pleaded an early start for town the next morning, and got off to +bed as soon as he could.”</p> + +<p>“I shouldn’t have thought he could have stirred in the +morning,” Rulledge employed Halson’s pause to say.</p> + +<p>“Well, this beaver <em>had</em> to,” Halson said. +“He was not the only early riser. He found Miss Hazelwood at the +station before him.”</p> + +<p>“What!” Rulledge shouted. I confess the fact rather +roused me, too; and Wanhope’s eyes kindled with a scientific +pleasure.</p> + +<p>“She came right towards him. ‘Mr. Braybridge,’ says +she, ‘I couldn’t let you go without explaining my very +strange behavior. I didn’t choose to have these people laughing at +the notion of <em>my</em> having played the part of your preserver. It +was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn’t bring you into +ridicule with them by the disproportion they’d have felt in my +efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to ignore +the incident. Don’t you see?’ Braybridge glanced at her, and +he had never felt so big and bulky before, or seen her so slender and +little. He said, ‘It <em>would</em> have seemed rather +absurd,’ and he broke out and laughed, while she broke down and +cried, and asked him to forgive her, and whether it had hurt him very +much; and said she knew he could bear to keep it from the others by the +way he had kept it from her till he fainted. She implied that he was +morally as well as physically gigantic, and it was as much as he could +do to keep from taking her in his arms on the spot.”</p> + +<p>“It would have been edifying to the groom that had driven her +to the station,” Minver cynically suggested.</p> + +<p>“Groom nothing!” Halson returned with spirit. “She +paddled herself across the lake, and walked from the boat-landing to the +station.”</p> + +<p>“Jove!” Rulledge exploded in uncontrollable +enthusiasm.</p> + +<p>“She turned round as soon as she had got through with her hymn +of praise—it made Braybridge feel awfully flat—and ran back +through the bushes to the boat-landing, and—that was the last he +saw of her till he met her in town this fall.”</p> + +<p>“And when—and when—did he offer himself?” +Rulledge entreated, breathlessly. “How—”</p> + +<p>“Yes, that’s the point, Halson,” Minver interposed. +“Your story is all very well, as far as it goes; but Rulledge here +has been insinuating that it was Miss Hazelwood who made the offer, and +he wants you to bear him out.”</p> + +<p>Rulledge winced at the outrage, but he would not stay Halson’s +answer even for the sake of righting himself.</p> + +<p>“I <em>have</em> heard,” Minver went on, “that +Braybridge insisted on paddling the canoe back to the other shore for +her, and that it was on the way that he offered himself.” We +others stared at Minver in astonishment. Halson glanced covertly towards +him with his gay eyes. “Then that wasn’t true?”</p> + +<p>“How did you hear it?” Halson asked.</p> + +<p>“Oh, never mind. Is it true?”</p> + +<p>“Well, I know there’s that version,” Halson said, +evasively. “The engagement is only just out, as you know. As to +the offer—the when and the how—I don’t know that +I’m exactly at liberty to say.”</p> + +<p>“I don’t see why,” Minver urged. “You might +stretch a point for Rulledge’s sake.”</p> + +<p>Halson looked down, and then he glanced at Minver after a furtive +passage of his eye over Rulledge’s intense face. “There was +something rather nice happened after—But, really, now!”</p> + +<p>“Oh, go on!” Minver called out in contempt of his +scruple.</p> + +<p>“I haven’t the right—Well, I suppose I’m on +safe ground here? It won’t go any further, of course; and it +<em>was</em> so pretty! After she had pushed off in her canoe, you know, +Braybridge—he’d followed her down to the shore of the +lake—found her handkerchief in a bush where it had caught, and he +held it up, and called out to her. She looked round and saw it, and +called back: ‘Never mind. I can’t return for it now.’ +Then Braybridge plucked up his courage, and asked if he might keep it, +and she said ‘Yes,’ over her shoulder, and then she stopped +paddling, and said: ‘No, no, you mustn’t, you mustn’t! +You can send it to me.’ He asked where, and she said: ‘In +New York—in the fall—at the Walholland.’ Braybridge +never knew how he dared, but he shouted after her—she was paddling +on again—‘May I <em>bring</em> it?’ and she called +over her shoulder again, without fully facing him, but her profile was +enough: ‘If you can’t get any one to bring it for +you.’ The words barely reached him, but he’d have caught +them if they’d been whispered; and he watched her across the lake +and into the bushes, and then broke for his train. He was just in +time.”</p> + +<p>Halson beamed for pleasure upon us, and even Minver said: “Yes, +that’s rather nice.” After a moment he added: +“Rulledge thinks she put it there.”</p> + +<p>“You’re too bad, Minver,” Halson protested. +“The charm of the whole thing was her perfect innocence. She +isn’t capable of the slightest finesse. I’ve known her from +a child, and I know what I say.”</p> + +<p>“That innocence of girlhood,” Wanhope said, “is +very interesting. It’s astonishing how much experience it +survives. Some women carry it into old age with them. It’s never +been scientifically studied—”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” Minver allowed. “There would be a fortune +for the novelist who could work a type of innocence for all it was +worth. Here’s Acton always dealing with the most rancid +flirtatiousness, and missing the sweetness and beauty of a girlhood +which does the cheekiest things without knowing what it’s about, +and fetches down its game whenever it shuts its eyes and fires at +nothing. But I don’t see how all this touches the point that +Rulledge makes, or decides which finally made the offer.”</p> + +<p>“Well, hadn’t the offer already been made?”</p> + +<p>“But how?”</p> + +<p>“Oh, in the usual way.”</p> + +<p>“What is the usual way?”</p> + +<p>“I thought everybody knew <em>that</em>. Of course, it was +<em>from</em> Braybridge finally, but I suppose it’s always six of +one and half a dozen of the other in these cases, isn’t it? I dare +say he couldn’t get any one to take her the handkerchief. My +dinner?” Halson looked up at the silent waiter, who had stolen +upon us and was bowing towards him.</p> + +<p>“Look here, Halson,” Minver detained him, “how is +it none of the rest of us have heard all those details?”</p> + +<p>“<em>I</em> don’t know where you’ve been, Minver. +Everybody knows the main facts,” Halson said, escaping.</p> + +<p>Wanhope observed, musingly: “I suppose he’s quite right +about the reciprocality of the offer, as we call it. There’s +probably, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a perfect understanding +before there’s an explanation. In many cases the offer and the +acceptance must really be tacit.”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” I ventured, “and I don’t know why +we’re so severe with women when they seem to take the initiative. +It’s merely, after all, the call of the maiden bird, and +there’s nothing lovelier or more endearing in nature than +that.”</p> + +<p>“Maiden bird is good, Acton,” Minver approved. “Why +don’t you institute a class of fiction where the love-making is +all done by the maiden birds, as you call them—or the widow birds? +It would be tremendously popular with both sexes. It would lift an +immense responsibility off the birds who’ve been expected to +shoulder it heretofore if it could be introduced into real +life.”</p> + +<p>Rulledge fetched a long, simple-hearted sigh. “Well, it’s +a charming story. How well he told it!”</p> + +<p>The waiter came again, and this time signalled to Minver.</p> + +<p>“Yes,” he said, as he rose. “What a pity you +can’t believe a word Halson says.”</p> + +<p>“Do you mean—” we began simultaneously.</p> + +<p>“That he built the whole thing from the ground up, with the +start that we had given him. Why, you poor things! Who could have told +him how it all happened? Braybridge? Or the girl? As Wanhope began by +saying, people don’t speak of their love-making, even when they +distinctly remember it.”</p> + +<p>“Yes, but see here, Minver!” Rulledge said, with a dazed +look. “If it’s all a fake of his, how came <em>you</em> to +have heard of Braybridge paddling the canoe back for her?”</p> + +<p>“That was the fake that tested the fake. When he adopted it, I +<em>knew</em> he was lying, because I was lying myself. And then the +cheapness of the whole thing! I wonder that didn’t strike you. +It’s the stuff that a thousand summer-girl stories have been spun +out of. Acton might have thought he was writing it!”</p> + +<p>He went away, leaving us to a blank silence, till Wanhope managed to +say: “That inventive habit of mind is very curious. It would be +interesting to know just how far it imposes on the inventor +himself—how much he believes of his own fiction.”</p> + +<p>“I don’t see,” Rulledge said, gloomily, “why +they’re so long with my dinner.” Then he burst out: “I +believe every word Halson said! If there’s any fake in the thing, +it’s the fake that Minver owned to.”</p> + + + + +<h2><a name="chapter7" id="chapter7">VII</a></h2> + +<h2 class="chaptertitle">The Chick of the Easter Egg</h2> + + +<p>The old fellow who told that story of dream-transference on a +sleeping-car at Christmas-time was again at the club on Easter Eve. +Halson had put him up for the winter, under the easy rule we had, and he +had taken very naturally to the Turkish room for his after-dinner coffee +and cigar. We all rather liked him, though it was Minver’s pose to +be critical of the simple friendliness with which he made himself at +home among us, and to feign a wish that there were fewer trains between +Boston and New York, so that old Newton (that was his name) could have a +better chance of staying away. But we noticed that Minver was always a +willing listener to Newton’s talk, and that he sometimes +hospitably offered to share his tobacco with the Bostonian. When brought +to book for his inconsistency by Rulledge, he said he was merely +welcoming the new blood, if not young blood, that Newton was infusing +into our body, which had grown anaemic on Wanhope’s psychology and +Rulledge’s romance; or, anyway, it was a change.</p> + +<p>Newton now began by saying abruptly, in a fashion he had, “We +used to hear a good deal in Boston about your Easter Parade here in New +York. Do you still keep it up?”</p> + +<p>No one else answering, Minver replied, presently, “I believe it +is still going on. I understand that it’s composed mostly of +milliners out to see one another’s new hats, and generous Jewesses +who are willing to contribute the ‘dark and bright’ of the +beauty in which they walk to the observance of an alien faith. +It’s rather astonishing how the synagogue takes to the feasts of +the church. If it were not for that, I don’t know what would +become of Christmas.”</p> + +<p>“What do you mean by their walking in beauty?” Rulledge +asked over his shoulder.</p> + +<p>“I shall never have the measure of your ignorance, Rulledge. +You don’t even know Byron’s lines on Hebrew loveliness?</p> + +<p class="poetry">“‘She walks in beauty like the night +<br /><span style="padding-left: 2em">Of cloudless climes and starry + skies,</span> +<br />And all that’s best of dark and bright +<br /><span style="padding-left: 2em">Meets in her aspect and her + eyes.’”</span></p> + +<p>“Pretty good,” Rulledge assented. “And they +<em>are</em> splendid, sometimes. But what has the Easter Parade got to +do with it?” he asked Newton.</p> + +<p>“Oh, only what everything has with everything else. I was +thinking of Easter-time long ago and far away, and naturally I thought +of Easter now and here. I saw your Parade once, and it seemed to me one +of the great social spectacles. But you can’t keep anything in New +York, if it’s good; if it’s bad, you can.”</p> + +<p>“You come from Boston, I think you said, Mr. Newton,” +Minver breathed blandly through his smoke.</p> + +<p>“Oh, I’m not a <em>real</em> Bostonian,” our guest +replied. “I’m not abusing you on behalf of a city that +I’m a native proprietor of. If I were, I shouldn’t perhaps +make your decadent Easter Parade my point of attack, though I think +it’s a pity to let it spoil. I came from a part of the country +where we used to make a great deal of Easter, when we were boys, at +least so far as eggs went. I don’t know whether the grown people +observed the day then, and I don’t know whether the boys keep it +now; I haven’t been back at Easter-time for several generations. +But when I was a boy it was a serious thing. In that soft Southwestern +latitude the grass had pretty well greened up by Easter, even when it +came in March, and grass colors eggs a very nice yellow; it used to +worry me that it didn’t color them green. When the grass +hadn’t got along far enough, winter wheat would do as well. I +don’t remember what color onion husks would give; but we used +onion husks, too. Some mothers would let the boys get logwood from the +drug-store, and that made the eggs a fine, bold purplish black. But the +greatest egg of all was a calico egg, that you got by coaxing your +grandmother (your mother’s mother) or your aunt (your +mother’s sister) to sew up in a tight cover of brilliant calico. +When that was boiled long enough the colors came off in a perfect +pattern on the egg. Very few boys could get such eggs; when they did, +they put them away in bureau drawers till they ripened and the mothers +smelt them, and threw them out of the window as quickly as possible. +Always, after breakfast, Easter Morning, we came out on the street and +fought eggs. We pitted the little ends of the eggs against one another, +and the fellow whose egg cracked the other fellow’s egg won it, +and he carried it off. I remember grass and wheat colored eggs in such +trials of strength, and onion and logwood colored eggs; but never calico +eggs; <em>they</em> were too precious to be risked; it would have seemed +wicked.</p> + +<p>“I don’t know,” the Boston man went musingly on, +“why I should remember these things so relentlessly; I’ve +forgotten all the important things that happened to me then; but perhaps +these were the important things. Who knows? I only know I’ve +always had a soft spot in my heart for Easter, not so much because of +the calico eggs, perhaps, as because of the grandmothers and the aunts. +I suppose the simple life is full of such aunts and grandmothers still; +but you don’t find them in hotel apartments, or even in flats +consisting of seven large, light rooms and bath.” We all +recognized the language of the advertisements, and laughed in sympathy +with our guest, who perhaps laughed out of proportion with a pleasantry +of that size.</p> + +<p>When he had subdued his mirth, he resumed at a point apparently very +remote from that where he had started.</p> + +<p>“There was one of those winters in Cambridge, where I lived +then, that seemed tougher than any other we could remember, and they +were all pretty tough winters there in those times. There were forty +snowfalls between Thanksgiving and Fast Day—you don’t know +what Fast Day is in New York, and we didn’t, either, as far as the +fasting went—and the cold kept on and on till we couldn’t, +or said we couldn’t, stand it any longer. So, along about the +middle of March somewhere, we picked up the children and started south. +In those days New York seemed pretty far south to us; and when we got +here we found everything on wheels that we had left on runners in +Boston. But the next day it began to snow, and we said we must go a +little farther to meet the spring. I don’t know exactly what it +was made us pitch on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; but we had a notion we +should find it interesting, and, at any rate, a total change from our +old environment. We had been reading something about the Moravians, and +we knew that it was the capital of Moravianism, with the largest +Moravian congregation in the world; I think it was Longfellow’s +‘Hymn of the Moravian Nuns’ that set us to reading about the +sect; and we had somehow heard that the Sun Inn, at Bethlehem, was the +finest old-fashioned public house anywhere. At any rate, we had the +faith of our youthful years, and we put out for Bethlehem.</p> + +<p>“We arrived just at dusk, but not so late that we +couldn’t see the hospitable figure of a man coming out of the Sun +to meet us at the omnibus door and to shake hands with each of us. It +was the very pleasantest and sweetest welcome we ever had at a public +house; and though we found the Sun a large, modern hotel, we easily +accepted the landlord’s assurance that the old Inn was built up +inside of the hotel, just as it was when Washington stayed in it; and +after a mighty good supper we went to our rooms, which were piping warm +from two good base-burner stoves. It was not exactly the vernal air we +had expected of Bethlehem when we left New York; but you can’t +have everything in this world, and, with the snowbanks along the streets +outside, we were very glad to have the base-burners.</p> + +<p>“We went to bed pretty early, and I fell into one of those +exemplary sleeps that begin with no margin of waking after your head +touches the pillow, or before that, even, and I woke from a dream of +heavenly music that translated itself into the earthly notes of bugles. +It made me sit up with the instant realization that we had arrived in +Bethlehem on Easter Eve, and that this was Easter Morning. We had read +of the beautiful observance of the feast by the Moravians, and, while I +was hurrying on my clothes beside my faithful base-burner, I kept quite +superfluously wondering at myself for not having thought of it, and so +made sure of being called. I had waked just in time, though I +hadn’t deserved to do so, and ought, by right, to have missed it +all. I tried to make my wife come with me; but after the family is of a +certain size a woman, if she is a real woman, thinks her husband can see +things for her, and generally sends him out to reconnoitre and report. +Besides, my wife couldn’t have left the children without waking +them, to tell them she was going, and then all five of them would have +wanted to come with us, including the baby; and we should have had no +end of a time convincing them of the impossibility. We were a good deal +bound up in the children, and we hated to lie to them when we could +possibly avoid it. So I went alone.</p> + +<p>“I asked the night porter, who was still on duty, the way I +wanted to take, but there were so many people in the streets going the +same direction that I couldn’t have missed it, anyhow; and pretty +soon we came to the old Moravian cemetery, which was in the heart of the +town; and there we found most of the Moravian congregation drawn up on +three sides of the square, waiting and facing the east, which was +beginning to redden. Of all the cemeteries I have seen, that was the +most beautiful, because it was the simplest and humblest. Generally a +cemetery is a dreadful place, with headstones and footstones and shafts +and tombs scattered about, and looking like a field full of granite and +marble stumps from the clearing of a petrified forest. But here all the +memorial tablets lay flat with the earth. None of the dead were assumed +to be worthier of remembrance than another; they all rested at regular +intervals, with their tablets on their breasts, like shields, in their +sleep after the battle of life. I was thinking how right and wise this +was, and feeling the purity of the conception like a quality of the +keen, clear air of the morning, which seemed to be breathing straight +from the sky, when suddenly the sun blazed up from the horizon like a +fire, and the instant it appeared the horns of the band began to blow +and the people burst into a hymn—a thousand voices, for all I +know. It was the sublimest thing I ever heard, and I don’t know +that there’s anything to match it for dignity and solemnity in any +religious rite. It made the tears come, for I thought how those people +were of a church of missionaries and martyrs from the beginning, and I +felt as if I were standing in sight and hearing of the first Christians +after Christ. It was as if He were risen there ‘in the midst of +them.’”</p> + +<p>Rulledge looked round on the rest of us, with an air of acquiring +merit from the Bostonian’s poetry, but Minver’s gravity was +proof against the chance of mocking Rulledge, and I think we all felt +alike. Wanhope seemed especially interested, though he said nothing.</p> + +<p>“When I went home I told my wife about it as well as I could, +but, though she entered into the spirit of it, she was rather +preoccupied. The children had all wakened, as they did sometimes, in a +body, and were storming joyfully around the rooms, as if it were +Christmas; and she was trying to get them dressed. ‘Do tell them +what Easter is like; they’ve never seen it kept before,’ she +said; and I tried to do so, while I took a hand, as a young father will, +and tried to get them into their clothes. I don’t think I dwelt +much on the religious observance of the day, but I dug up some of my +profane associations with it in early life, and told them about coloring +eggs, and fighting them, and all that; there in New England, in those +days, they had never seen or heard of such a thing as an Easter egg.</p> + +<p>“I don’t think my reminiscences quieted them much. They +were all on fire—the oldest hoy and girl, and the twins, and even +the two-year-old that we called the baby—to go out and buy some +eggs and get the landlord to let them color them in the hotel kitchen. I +had a deal of ado to make them wait till after breakfast, but I managed, +somehow; and when we had finished—it was a mighty good +Pennsylvania breakfast, such as we could eat with impunity in those +halcyon days: rich coffee, steak, sausage, eggs, applebutter, buckwheat +cakes and maple syrup—we got their out-door togs on them, while +they were all stamping and shouting round and had to be caught and +overcoated, and fur-capped and hooded simultaneously, and managed to get +them into the street together. Ever been in Bethlehem?”</p> + +<p>We all had to own our neglect of this piece of travel; and Newton, +after a moment of silent forgiveness, said:</p> + +<p>“Well, I don’t know how it is now, but twenty-five or +thirty years ago it was the most interesting town in America. It +wasn’t the old Moravian community that it had been twenty-five +years before that, when none but Moravians could buy property there; but +it was like the Sun Hotel, and just as that had grown round and over the +old Sun Inn, the prosperous manufacturing town, with its iron-foundries +and zinc-foundries, and all the rest of it, had grown round and over the +original Moravian village. If you wanted a breath of perfect +strangeness, with an American quality in it at the same time, you +couldn’t have gone to any place where you could have had it on +such terms as you could in Bethlehem. I can’t begin to go into +details, but one thing was hearing German spoken everywhere in the +street: not the German of Germany, but the Pennsylvania German, with its +broad vowels and broken-down grammatical forms, and its English vocables +and interjections, which you caught in the sentences which came to you, +like <i>av coorse</i>, and <i>yes</i> and <i>no</i> for <i>ja</i> and <i>nein</i>. There were +stores where they spoke no English, and others where they made a +specialty of it; and I suppose when we sallied out that bright Sunday +morning, with the baby holding onto a hand of each of us between us, and +the twins going in front with their brother and sister, we were almost +as foreign as we should have been in a village on the Rhine or the +Elbe.</p> + +<p>“We got a little acquainted with the people, after awhile, and +I heard some stories of the country folks that I thought were pretty +good. One was about an old German farmer on whose land a prospecting +metallurgist found zinc ore; the scientific man brought him the bright +yellow button by which the zinc proved its existence in its union with +copper, and the old fellow asked in an awestricken whisper: ‘Is it +a gold-mine?’ ‘No, no. Guess again.’ ‘Then +it’s a <em>brass-mine</em>!’ But before they began to find +zinc there in the lovely Lehigh Valley—you can stand by an open +zinc-mine and look down into it where the rock and earth are left +standing, and you seem to be looking down into a range of sharp mountain +peaks and pinnacles—it was the richest farming region in the whole +fat State of Pennsylvania; and there was a young farmer who owned a vast +tract of it, and who went to fetch home a young wife from Philadelphia +way, somewhere. He drove there and back in his own buggy, and when he +reached the top overlooking the valley, with his bride, he stopped his +horse, and pointed with his whip. ‘There,’ he said, +‘as far as the sky is blue, it’s all ours!’ I thought +that was fine.”</p> + +<p>“Fine?” I couldn’t help bursting out; +“it’s a stroke of poetry.”</p> + +<p>Minver cut in: “The thrifty Acton making a note of it for +future use in literature.”</p> + +<p>“Eh!” Newton queried. “Oh! I don’t mind. +You’re welcome to it, Mr. Acton. It’s a pity somebody +shouldn’t use it, and of course <em>I</em> can’t.”</p> + +<p>“Acton will send you a copy with the usual forty-per-cent. +discount and ten off for cash,” the painter said.</p> + +<p>They had their little laugh at my expense, and then Newton took up +his tale again. “Well, as I was saying—By the way, what +<em>was</em> I saying?”</p> + +<p>The story-loving Rulledge remembered. “You went out with your +wife and children for Easter eggs.”</p> + +<p>“Oh yes. Thank you. Well, of course, in a town geographically +American, the shops were all shut on Sunday, and we couldn’t buy +even an Easter egg on Easter Sunday. But one of the stores had the shade +of its show-window up, and the children simply glued themselves to it in +such a fascination that we could hardly unstick them. That window was +full of all kinds of Easter things—I don’t remember what +all; but there were Easter eggs in every imaginable color and pattern, +and besides these there were whole troops of toy rabbits. I had +forgotten that the natural offspring of Easter eggs is rabbits; but I +took a brace, and remembered the fact and announced it to the children. +They immediately demanded an explanation, with all sorts of scientific +particulars, which I gave them, as reckless of the truth as I thought my +wife would suffer without contradicting me. I had to say that while +Easter eggs mostly hatched rabbits, there were instances in which they +hatched other things, as, for instance, handfuls of eagles and +half-eagles and double-eagles, especially in the case of the golden eggs +that the goose laid. They knew all about that goose; but I had to tell +them what those unfamiliar pieces of American coinage were, and promise +to give them one each when they grew up, if they were good. That only +partially satisfied them, and they wanted to know specifically what +other kinds of things Easter eggs would hatch if properly treated. Each +one had a preference; the baby always preferred what the last one said; +and <em>she</em> wanted an ostrich, the same as her big brother; he was +seven then.</p> + +<p>“I don’t really know how we lived through the day; I mean +the children, for my wife and I went to the Moravian church, and had a +good long Sunday nap in the afternoon, while the children were pining +for Monday morning, when they could buy eggs and begin to color them, so +that they could hatch just the right kind of Easter things. When I woke +up I had to fall in with a theory they had agreed to between them that +any kind of two-legged or four-legged chick that hatched from an Easter +egg would wear the same color, or the same kind of spots or stripes, +that the egg had.</p> + +<p>“I found that they had arranged to have calico eggs, and they +were going to have their mother cover them with the same sort of cotton +prints that I had said my grandmother and aunts used, and they meant to +buy the calico in the morning at the same time that they bought the +eggs. We had some tin vessels of water on our stoves to take the dryness +out of the hot air, and they had decided that they would boil their eggs +in these, and not trouble the landlord for the use of his kitchen.</p> + +<p>“There was nothing in this scheme wanting but their +mother’s consent—I agreed to it on the spot—but when +she understood that they each expected to have two eggs apiece, with one +apiece for us, she said she never could cover a dozen eggs in the world, +and that the only way would be for them to go in the morning with us, +and choose each the handsomest egg they could out of the eggs in that +shop-window. They met this proposition rather blankly at first; but on +reflection the big brother said it would be a shame to spoil +mamma’s Easter by making her work all day, and besides it would +keep till that night, anyway, before they could begin to have any fun +with their eggs; and then the rest all said the same thing, ending with +the baby: and accepted the inevitable with joy, and set about living +through the day as well as they could.</p> + +<p>“They had us up pretty early the next morning—that is, +they had me up; their mother said that I had brought it on myself, and +richly deserved it for exciting their imaginations, and I had to go out +with the two oldest and the twins to choose the eggs; we got off from +the baby by promising to let her have two, and she didn’t +understand very well, anyway, and was awfully sleepy. We were a pretty +long time choosing the six eggs, and I don’t remember now just +what they were; but they were certainly joyous eggs; and—By the +way, I don’t know why I’m boring a brand of hardened +bachelors like you with all these domestic details?”</p> + +<p>“Oh, don’t mind <em>us</em>,” Minver responded to +his general appeal. “We may not understand the feelings of a +father, but we are all mothers at heart, especially Rulledge. Go on. +It’s very exciting,” he urged, not very ironically, and +Newton went on.</p> + +<p>“Well, I don’t believe I could say just how the havoc +began. They put away their eggs very carefully after they had made their +mother admire them, and shown the baby how hers were the prettiest, and +they each said in succession that they must be very precious of them, +for if you shook an egg, or anything, it wouldn’t hatch; and it +was their plan to take these home and set an unemployed pullet, +belonging to the big brother, to hatching them in the coop that he had +built of laths for her in the back yard with his own hands. But long +before the afternoon was over, the evil one had entered Eden, and +tempted the boy to try fighting eggs with these treasured specimens, as +I had told we boys used to fight eggs in my town in the southwest. He +held a conquering course through the encounter with three eggs, but met +his Waterloo with a regular Blücher belonging to the baby. Then he +instantly changed sides; and smashed his Blücher against the last egg +left. By that time all the other children were in tears, the baby +roaring powerfully in ignorant sympathy, and the victor steeped in +silent gloom. His mother made him gather up the ruins from the floor, +and put them in the stove, and she took possession of the victorious +egg, and said she would keep it till we got back to Cambridge herself, +and not let one of them touch it. I can tell you it was a tragical time. +I wanted to go out and buy them another set of eggs, and spring them for +a surprise on them in the morning, after they had suffered enough that +night. But she said that if I dared to dream of such a thing—which +would be the ruin of the children’s character, by taking away the +consequences of their folly—she should do, she did not know what, +to me. Of course she was right, and I gave in, and helped the children +forget all about it, so that by the time we got back to Cambridge I had +forgotten about it myself.</p> + +<p>“I don’t know what it was reminded the boy of that +remaining Easter egg unless it was the sight of the unemployed pullet in +her coop, which he visited the first thing; and I don’t know how +he managed to wheedle his mother out of it; but the first night after I +came home from business—it was rather late and the children had +gone to bed—she told me that ridiculous boy, as she called him in +self-exculpation, had actually put the egg under his pullet, and all the +children were wild to see what it would hatch. ‘And now,’ +she said, severely, ‘what are you going to do? You have filled +their heads with those ideas, and I suppose you will have to invent some +nonsense or other to fool them, and make them believe that it has +hatched a giraffe, or an elephant, or something; they won’t be +satisfied with anything less.’ I said we should have to try +something smaller, for I didn’t think we could manage a chick of +that size on our lot; and that I should trust in Providence. Then she +said it was all very well to laugh; and that I couldn’t get out of +it that way, and I needn’t think it.</p> + +<p>“I didn’t, much. But the children understood that it took +three weeks for an egg to hatch, and anyway the pullet was so +intermittent in her attentions to the Easter egg, only sitting on it at +night, or when held down by hand in the day, that there was plenty of +time. One evening when I came out from Boston, I was met by a doleful +deputation at the front gate, with the news that when the coop was +visited that morning after breakfast—they visited the coop every +morning before they went to school—the pullet was found perched on +a cross-bar in a high state of nerves, and the shell of the Easter egg +broken and entirely eaten out. Probably a rat had got in and done it, +or, more hopefully, a mink, such as used to attack eggs in the town +where I was a boy. We went out and viewed the wreck, as a first step +towards a better situation; and suddenly a thought struck me. +‘Children,’ I said, ‘what did you really expect that +egg to hatch, anyway?’ They looked askance at one another, and at +last the boy said: ‘Well, you know, papa, an egg that’s been +cooked—’ And then we all laughed together, and I knew they +had been making believe as much as I had, and no more expected the +impossible of a boiled egg than I did.”</p> + +<p>“That was charming!” Wanhope broke out. “There is +nothing more interesting than the way children join in hypnotizing +themselves with the illusions which their parents think <em>they</em> +have created without their help. In fact, it is very doubtful whether at +any age we have any illusions except those of our own creation; +we—”</p> + +<p>“Let him go on, Wanhope,” Minver dictated; and Newton +continued.</p> + +<p>“It was rather nice. I asked them if their mother knew about +the egg; and they said that of course they couldn’t help telling +her; and I said: ‘Well, then, I’ll tell you what: we must +make her believe that the chick hatched out and got away—’ +The boy stopped me: ‘Do you think that would be exactly true, +papa?’ ‘Well, not <em>exactly</em> true; but it’s only +for the time being. We can tell her the exact truth afterwards,’ +and then I laid my plan before them. They said it was perfectly +splendid, and would be the greatest kind of joke on mamma, and one that +she would like as much as anybody. The thing was to keep it from her +till it was done, and they all promised that they wouldn’t tell; +but I could see that they were bursting with the secret the whole +evening.</p> + +<p>“The next day was Saturday, when I always went home early, and +I had the two oldest children come in with the second-girl, who left +them to take lunch with me. They had chocolate and ice-cream, and after +lunch we went around to a milliner’s shop in West Street, where my +wife and I had stopped a long five minutes the week before we went to +Bethlehem, adoring an Easter bonnet that we saw in the window. I wanted +her to buy it; but she said, No, if we were going that expensive +journey, we couldn’t afford it, and she must do without, that +spring. I showed it to them, and ‘Now, children,’ I said, +‘what do you think of that for the chick that your Easter egg +hatched?’ And they said it was the most beautiful bonnet they had +ever seen, and it would just exactly suit mamma. But I saw they were +holding something back, and I said, sharply, ‘Well?’ and +they both guiltily faltered out: ‘The <em>bird</em>, you know, +papa,’ and I remembered that they belonged to the society of Bird +Defenders, who in that day were pledged against the decorative use of +dead birds or killing them for anything but food. ‘Why, confound +it,’ I said, ‘the bird is the very thing that makes it an +Easter-egg chick!’ but I saw that their honest little hearts were +troubled, and I said again: ‘Confound it! Let’s go in and +hear what the milliner has to say.’ Well, the long and short of it +was that the milliner tried a bunch of forget-me-nots over the bluebird +that we all agreed was a thousand times better, and that if it were +substituted would only cost three dollars more, and we took our +Easter-egg chick home in a blaze of glory, the children carrying the +bandbox by the string between them.</p> + +<p>“Of course we had a great time opening it, and their mother +acted her part so well that I knew she was acting, and after the little +ones were in bed I taxed her with it. ‘Know? Of course I +knew!’ she said. ‘Did you think they would let you +<em>deceive</em> me? They’re true New-Englanders, and they told me +all about it last night, when I was saying their prayers with +them.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘they let you deceive +<em>me;</em> they must be true Westerners, too, for they didn’t +tell me a word of your knowing.’ I rather had her there, but she +said: ‘Oh, you goose—’ We were young people in those +days, and goose meant everything. But, really, I’m ashamed of +getting off all this to you hardened bachelors, as I said +before—”</p> + +<p>“If you tell many more such stories in this club,” Minver +said, severely, “you won’t leave a bachelor in it. And +Rulledge will be the first to get married.”</p> + + + + +<h2>The End</h2> + +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12100 ***</div> +</body> +</html> + + + + + + + diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust1l.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust1l.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..9fb5a63 --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust1l.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust1m.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust1m.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..7b28ad3 --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust1m.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust2l.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust2l.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..5cbeef0 --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust2l.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust2m.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust2m.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..656e85e --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust2m.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust3l.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust3l.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..5cd5e67 --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust3l.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust3m.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust3m.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..c6087b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust3m.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust4l.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust4l.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..cc93e46 --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust4l.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust4m.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust4m.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..55eca5a --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust4m.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust5l.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust5l.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..9d9fe6d --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust5l.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust5m.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust5m.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..1d2a71e --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust5m.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust6l.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust6l.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..1919e63 --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust6l.jpg diff --git a/12100-h/images/illust6m.jpg b/12100-h/images/illust6m.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..87a781c --- /dev/null +++ b/12100-h/images/illust6m.jpg |
