A Sleep and a Forgetting

by William Dean Howells

  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?”

  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—”

  “I will go with you,” her father said, “and if Dr. Lanfear doesn’t mind coming—”

  “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.

  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.

  “Yes; Mrs. Bell and her daughters,” Lanfear answered, simply.

  “Of course! Why do you suppose my daughter denied it?” Mr. Gerald asked.

  “I suppose she—had her reasons,” Lanfear answered, lamely enough.

  “No reason, 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.

  “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.”

  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—”

  “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.

  “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.”

  “Oh!” Mr. Gerald said, disappointedly, but after a blank moment he apparently took courage. “You’re in the same line, though?”

  “If you mean the psychopathic line, without being exactly an alienist, well, yes,” Lanfear admitted.

  “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—”

  “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.

  “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—”

  He stopped; Lanfear breathed a gentle “Oh!” and Gerald blurted out:

  “Accident—grade crossing—Don’t!” he winced at the kindness in Lanfear’s eyes, and panted on. “That’s over! What happened to her—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?”

  “I can imagine,” Lanfear assented.

  “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—”

  “Yes?” Lanfear prompted in the pause which Mr. Gerald made.

  “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?”

  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.

  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 must 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?”

  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—”

  “It doesn’t,” the father pleaded. “We don’t know when it will come on.”

  “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.”

  “Ah, its logic!”

&
nbsp; “Its logic, yes. My business, of course, would be to restore her to health at any risk. So far as her mind is affected—”

  “Her mind is not affected!” the father retorted.

  “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.” 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.”

  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.”

  “Thank you.”

  “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.”

  “Why, I haven’t any doubt you can. Shall we ask?”

  III

  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.

  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.

  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 their joint study of her dancing-card did not help them out.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.”

  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 pr
ocess, 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.”

  “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?”

  “Oh yes; that occurs to every one.”

  “But don’t you—don’t you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you had known them, in some previous existence—”

  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:

  “ ‘For something is, or something seems,

  Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.’

  These weird impressions are no more than that, probably.”

  “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 that, don’t you?”

  “In a life after this, or their happening in it?”

  “Well, both.”

  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.”

  “No.” She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if what they had been saying had already passed from her thought.

  “But, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear ventured, “have these impressions of yours grown more definite—fuller, as you say—of late?”

  “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.”