A Sleep and a Forgetting

by William Dean Howells

  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.”

  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.”

  “Like something you can give me an instance of? Are they painful things, or pleasant, mostly?”

  She hesitated. “They are things that you know happen to other people, but you can’t believe would ever happen to you.”

  “Do they come when you are just drowsing, or just waking from a drowse?”

  “They are not dreams,” she said, almost with vexation.

  “Yes, yes, I understand,” he hesitated to retrieve himself. “But I 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.”

  “Yes,” she assented. “They are something like that. But I should not call them illusions.”

  “No. And they represent scenes, events?”

  “You said yourself they were not dramatic.”

  “I meant, represent pictorially.”

  “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.

  IV

  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.

  “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.”

  “I guess not,” Gerald said, dryly, as if annoyed. “What makes you think so?”

  “Merely her manner. And I don’t know that anything is to be gained by such an inquiry.”

  “Perhaps not,” Gerald allowed, with an inattention which vexed Lanfear in his turn.

  The elderly man looked up, from where he sat provisionally in the hotel veranda, into Lanfear’s face; Lanfear had remained standing. “I don’t believe she’s offended. Or she won’t be long. One thing, she’ll forget it.”

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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!”

  “Yes, it’s a defect, I’m afraid, sometimes. Perhaps—”

  “Perhaps what?” she prompted him in the pause he made.

  “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.”

  “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?

  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.”

  “And you don’t think that is wrong?”

  “Wrong? Why? How?”

  “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?”

  “I don’t know,” Lanfear temporized. “Doesn’t he?”

  “I can’t always tell. Should—should you wish me to remember more than I do?”

  “I?”

  She looked at him with entreaty. “Do you think it would make my father happier if I did?”

  “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—”

  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.

  “And me,” he ventured, “is it the same with regard to me?”

  She did not say; she asked, smiling: “Do you remember me when I am away?”

  “Yes!” he answered. “As perfe
ctly 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!”

  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.

  “That is very strange,” she said, lightly. “Is it so with you about everyone?”

  “No,” he replied, briefly, almost harshly. He asked, abruptly: “Miss Gerald, are there any times when you know people in their absence?”

  “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.”

  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.

  The next morning, when she came down unwontedly late to breakfast in their pavilion, she called gayly:

  “Dr. Lanfear! It is Dr. Lanfear?”

  “I should be sorry if it were not, since you seem to expect it, Miss Gerald.”

  “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.

  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?”

  “Splendidly. But I was very tired last night; I don’t know why, exactly.”

  “We had rather a long walk.”

  “Did we have a walk yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it was so! 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?”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

  “Should you wish me to?” she asked, in evident, however unconscious, recurrence to their talk of the day before.

  “Why not?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. If it’s like some of those dreams or gleams. Is remembering pleasant?”

  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 can’t recall those times. We can and do, to console and encourage ourselves; but they don’t recur, without our willing, as the others do.”

  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.”

  “You mean that we are differently conditioned?”

  “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!”

  “That wouldn’t be remembrance; no, it would be prescience; and your consciousness here, as you were saying yesterday, is through knowing, not remembering.”

  She stared at him. “Was that yesterday? I thought it was—tomorrow.” 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.”

  V

  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.

  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!”

  “What?”

  “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.

  “Yes, certainly. We were here last week. We went up the path to the farm-house to get some water.”

  “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.”

  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?”

  “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.

  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.

  She stared blankly at him, without replying, and they silently made their way to Mr. Gerald’s carriage.

  “I lost the way, and Miss Gerald found it,” Lanfear explained, as he helped her to the place beside her father.

  She said nothing, and almost with sinking into the seat, she sank into that deep slumber which from time to time overtook her.

  “I didn’t know we had gone so far—or rather th
at we had waited so long before we started down the hills,” Lanfear apologized in an involuntary whisper.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” her father said, trying to adjust the girl’s fallen head to his shoulder. “Get in and help me—”

  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.

  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?”

  Lanfear waited, as if thinking the facts over. He murmured back: “No. She’s better. She’s not so strong.”

  “Yes,” the father murmured. “I understand.”

  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.