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?”
“Mrs. Yarrow,” he returned, as if that were the answer, “I think I owe you an explanation.”
“Pay it!” she bantered, putting out her hand.
“I’m so poverty-stricken that I don’t know whether I can. Did you ever notice anything odd about me?”
His directness seemed to have a right to directness from her. “I noticed that you stared a good deal—or used to. But peopledostare.”
“I stared because I saw things.”
“Saw things?”
“I saw whatever I thought of. Whatever came into my mind was externated in a vision.”
She smiled, he could not make out whether uneasily or not. “It sounds rather creepy, doesn’t it? But it’s very interesting.”
“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.”
“Yes, do,” she said. “I should like of all things to hear about them. Perhaps I’ve been one of them.”
“You have.”
“Oh! Isn’t that rather personal?”
“I hope not offensively.”
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.”
“No—no,” she hesitated.
“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?”
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.
“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.”
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.”
“What do you mean?” He stared at her hard.
“Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?”
“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.
But she took only the poetry. “I shouldn’t wish you to,” she said, and she laughed.
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 tellyouwhen these things were obsessing me—haunting me—they would cease—”
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?
“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.”
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.”
“To-morrow?”
“Not to-morrow, perhaps. When I send. Was ityoungDoctor Enderby?”
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.
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.
She had a difficulty in formulating her question, and when it came it was almost a speculation.
“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.”
Dr. Enderby reflected. “Well, yes. But I don’t know that I ever put it to myself in just those terms.”
Then she remarked, as if that were the next thing: “You’ve known Mr. Alford a long time.”
“We were at school together, and we shared the same rooms in Harvard.”
“He is very sincere,” she added, as if this were relevant.
“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.
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.”
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.
“If women could not fulfil the ideal in that way—if they did not constantly do it—there would be no marriages for love.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, with a shaking voice. “But men—men are ideal, too.”
“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.
At this point, Wanhope stopped as if that were the end.
“And did she let Alford come to see her again?” Rulledge, at once romantic and literal, demanded.
“Oh yes. At any rate, they were married that fall. They are—I believe he’s pursuing his archaeological studies there—living in Athens.”
“Together?” Minver smoothly inquired.
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!”
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 gothere,” he said, absently.
“Well,” Minver returned, “you don’t expectmeto 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 didyoucome by it?”
“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.”
“Probably to make trouble for you, somehow,” Minver suggested.
“No, I don’t think it’sthat, 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.”
“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. Icouldn’tstand that.”
“I certainly haven’t heard the story,” I said, “and if I had I would be too polite to own it.”
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.”
“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. Itwasthe first place I met her, but not the last.”
“Don’t be obvious,” Minver ordered.
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 whereshefirst metyou, too. I’m not ashamed of it as a bit of color. Anyway, I sha’n’t live to do anything better.’
“‘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 villanow.”
“No?” I said. “How charming!”
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.Youremember them?” he asked Minver.
“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.”
“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.”
“Sure?” Minver asked.
“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.”
“Goodcoup de théâtre,” Minver jeered. “Curtain?”
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.
“As I pushed into the railroad office, I bet myself that the picture would not be there, and, sure enough, I won.”
“You were always a lucky dog,” Minver said.
“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.
“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.
“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?
“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.
“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.
“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.
“‘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.’
“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.
“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 tellsallto 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 anybodyIknow. 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.”
“You were wise as far as you went,” Minver said. “Go on.”
“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.’
“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.
“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,letit 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 killmeif 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.
“‘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.
“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.”
Here Minver’s brother stopped and lost himself in contemplation of the sketch, as he held it at arm’s-length.
“Well, did you get your picture?” I prompted, after a moment.
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
“Very strange,” I was beginning, but just then the door opened and Mrs. Minver came in, and I was presented.
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!”
She was a mighty pretty woman, but full of vim and fun and sense.
“It’s one of the most curious freaks of memory I ever heard of, Mrs. Minver,” I said.
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?”
“I have again eaten that particular piece of humble-pie,” Minver’s brother replied.
“Well,” she said to me, “Ithink he was simply so possessed with the awfulness of having lost the picture that all the rest took place prophetically, but unconsciously.”
“By a species of inverted presentiment?” I suggested.
“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.”
Minver had got his pipe alight, and was enjoying it. “Ithink Joe was simply off his nut, for the time being.”
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.
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.”
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:
“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.
[Illustration: “NO BURGLAR COULD HAVE MISSED ME IF HE HAD WANTED AN EASY MARK”]
“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.”
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.
“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.”
Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter. He took his cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an “Ah!”
Rulledge went further and interrogatively repeated the word “Nightmare?”
“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.”
“Jove!” Rulledge said, “I don’t see how you could stand it.”
“There’s everything in habit, Rulledge,” Minver put in. “Perhaps our friend only dreamt that he heard a dream.”
“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.”
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.
“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.”
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.”
“Yes, I dare say,” Minver put in. “But if they all amount to the same thing in the end, what difference would it make?”
“It would perhaps establish the identity of good and evil,” Wanhope suggested.
“Oh, the sinners are convinced of that already,” Minver said, while Rulledge glanced quickly from one to the other.
The stranger looked rather dazed, and Rulledge said: “Well, I don’t suppose that was the conclusion of the whole matter?”
“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.
“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.”
The stranger made a little break, and Wanhope asked, “Could you make out what she screamed, or was it quite inarticulate?”
“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.”
“And did she wake anybody?” Rulledge inquired.
“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.”
“Most extraordinary!” Wanhope commented as the stranger paused for breath.
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.
“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.”
“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?”
“Never reasoned anything out so clearly in my life.”
“But what was your theory of the situation? That your friend, Mr. Melford, had a nightmare in which he was dreaming of burglars?”
“I hadn’t a doubt of it.”
“And that by a species of dream-transference the nightmare was communicated to the young lady in the stateroom?”
“Well—yes.”
“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?”
“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.”
“That is very interesting, very interesting indeed. I beg your pardon. Please go on,” Wanhope courteously entreated.
“I don’t remember just where I was,” the stranger faltered.
Rulledge returned with an accuracy which obliged us all: “‘The porter merely joined in the general uproar and shouted for the police.’”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
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.
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:
“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 unablenotto 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.—”
“Newton,” the stranger suggested.
“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.”
“That would be rather dreadful, wouldn’t it?” I ventured. “We do dream such scandalous, such compromising things about people.”
“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?”
“I certainly spoke to him pretty plainly when we got into New York.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said he had never slept better in his life, and he couldn’t remember having a trace of nightmare. He said he heardmegroaning 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.”
“And what was your conclusion from that?” Wanhope asked.
“That he was lying, I should say,” Rulledge replied for the stranger.
Wanhope still waited, and the stranger said, “I suppose one conclusion might be that I had dreamed the whole thing myself.”
“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?”
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.”
He had wrung our hands one after another, and now he ran out of the room.
Rulledge said, in appeal to Wanhope: “I don’t see how his being the dreamer invalidates the case, if his dreams affected the others.”
“Well,” Wanhope answered, thoughtfully, “that depends.”
“And what do you think of its being the girl in the stateroom?”
“That would be very interesting.”
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!”
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?”
“Oh, how united we are!” she exulted, and then she swooped down the steps to him. “What is it?” she cried.
“It’s war,” he said, and he pulled her up to him and kissed her.
She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat. “How glorious!”
“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.
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 tohavewon her—be a hero,herhero—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.
“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?”
“I suppose so,” he returned, languidly. “But war! Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?”
“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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.”
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.
Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near slipping through her fingers as when he took that meek way.
“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.