A Sleep and a Forgetting

by William Dean Howells

  Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to favor. But he said: “Decidedly I wouldn’t wake her”; and he spent a night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which the morning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.

  Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father’s “Well, Nannie, you have had a nap, this time,” she answered, smiling:

  “Have I? It isn’t afternoon, is it?”

  “No, it’s morning. You’ve napped it all night.”

  She said: “I can’t tell whether I’ve been asleep or not, sometimes; but now I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where are we going to-day?”

  She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: “I guess the doctor won’t want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday afternoon.”

  “Ah,” she said, “I knew you had been somewhere! Was it very far? Are you too tired?”

  “It was rather far, but I’m not tired. I shouldn’t advise Possana, though.”

  “Possana?” she repeated. “What is Possana?”

  He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an account of his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, in making light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end she said, gently: “Shall we go this morning?”

  “Let the doctor rest this morning, Nannie,” her father interrupted, whimsically, but with what Lanfear knew to be an inner yielding to her will. “Or if you won’t let him, let me. I don’t want to go anywhere this morning.”

  Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that by the afternoon she would have forgotten Possana. She sighed, but in her sigh there was no concession. Then, with the chance of a returning drowse to save him from openly thwarting her will, he merely suggested: “There’s plenty of time in the afternoon; the days are so long now; and we can get the sunset from the hills.”

  “Yes, that will be nice,” she said, but he perceived that she did not assent willingly; and there was an effect of resolution in the readiness with which she appeared dressed for the expedition after luncheon. She clearly did not know where they were going, but when she turned to Lanfear with her look of entreaty, he had not the heart to join her father in any conspiracy against her. He beckoned the carriage which had become conscious in its eager driver from the moment she showed herself at the hotel door, and they set out.

  When they had left the higher level of the hotel and began their clatter through the long street of the town, Lanfear noted that she seemed to feel as much as himself the quaintness of the little city, rising on one hand, with its narrow alleys under successive arches between the high, dark houses, to the hills, and dropping on the other to sea from the commonplace of the principal thoroughfare, with its pink and white and saffron hotels and shops. Beyond the town their course lay under villa walls, covered with vines and topped by pavilions, and opening finally along a stretch of the old Cornice road.

  “But this,” she said, at a certain point, “is where we were yesterday!”

  “This is where the doctor was yesterday,” her father said, behind his cigar.

  “And wasn’t I with you?” she asked Lanfear.

  He said, playfully: “To-day you are. I mustn’t be selfish and have you every day.”

  “Ah, you are laughing at me; but I know I was here yesterday.”

  Her father set his lips in patience, and Lanfear did not insist.

  They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on the shoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed, and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people had built when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old home.

  World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but the spring-time was immortally young in the landscape. Over the expanses of green and brown fields, and hovering about the gray and white cottages, was a mist of peach and cherry blossoms. Above these the hoar olives thickened, and the vines climbed from terrace to terrace. The valley narrowed inland, and ceased in the embrace of the hills drawing mysteriously together in the distances.

  “I think we’ve got the best part of it here, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear broke the common silence by saying. “You couldn’t see much more of Possana after you got there.” “Besides,” her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred on the younger man, “if you were there with the doctor yesterday, you won’t want to make the climb again to-day. Give it up, Nannie!”

  “Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give it up.”

  “Well, then, we must go on, I suppose. Where do we begin our climb?”

  Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at the foot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of the peasants. He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but he suggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the new town.

  “Well, I hope so,” Mr. Gerald grumbled. But at Possana Nuova no saddle-donkeys were to be had, and he announced, at the café where they stopped for the negotiation, that he would wait for the young people to go on to Possana Vecchia, and tell him about it when they got back. In the meantime he would watch the game of ball, which, in the piazza before the café, appeared to have engaged the energies of the male population. Lanfear was still inwardly demurring, when a stalwart peasant girl came in and announced that she had one donkey which they could have with her own services driving it. She had no saddle, but there was a pad on which the young lady could ride.

  “Oh, well, take it for Nannie,” Mr. Gerald directed; “only don’t be gone too long.”

  They set out with Miss Gerald reclining in the kind of litter which the donkey proved to be equipped with. Lanfear went beside her, the peasant girl came behind, and at times ran forward to instruct them in the points they seemed to be looking at. For the most part the landscape opened beneath them, but in the azure distances it climbed into Alpine heights which the recent snows had now left to the gloom of their pines. On the slopes of the nearer hills little towns clung, here and there; closer yet farm-houses showed themselves among the vines and olives.

  It was very simple, as the life in it must always have been; and Lanfear wondered if the elemental charm of the scene made itself felt by his companion as they climbed the angles of the inclines, in a silence broken only by the picking of the donkey’s hoofs on the rude mosaic of the pavement, and the panting of the peasant girl at its heels. On the top of the last upward stretch they stopped for the view, and Miss Gerald asked abruptly: “Why were you so sad?”

  “When was I sad?” he asked, in turn.

  “I don’t know. Weren’t you sad?”

  “When I was here yesterday, you mean?” She smiled on his fortunate guess, and he said: “Oh, I don’t know. It might have begun with thinking—

  ‘Of old, unhappy, far-off things,

  And battles long ago.’

  “You know the pirates used to come sailing over the peaceful sea yonder from Africa, to harry these coasts, and carry off as many as they could capture into slavery in Tunis and Algiers. It was a long, dumb kind of misery that scarcely made an echo in history, but it haunted my fancy yesterday, and I saw these valleys full of the flight and the pursuit which used to fill them, up to the walls of the villages, perched on the heights where men could have built only for safety. Then, I got to thinking of other things—”

  “And thinking of things in the past always makes you sad,” she said, in pensive reflection. “If it were not for the wearying of always trying to remember, I don’t believe I should want my memory back. And of course to be like other people,” she ended with a sigh.

  It was on his tongue to say that he would not have her so; but he checked himself, and said, lamely enough: “Perhaps you will be like them, sometime.”

  She startled him by answering irrelevantly: “You
know my mother is dead. She died a long while ago; I suppose I must have been very little.”

  She spoke as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew a breath of relief in his surprise. He asked, at another tangent: “What made you think I was sad yesterday?”

  “Oh, I knew, somehow. I think that I always know when you are sad; I can’t tell you how, but I feel it.”

  “Then I must cheer up,” Lanfear said. “If I could only see you strong and well, Miss Gerald, like this girl—”

  They both looked at the peasant, and she laughed in sympathy with their smiling, and beat the donkey a little for pleasure; it did not mind.

  “But you will be—you will be! We must hurry on, now, or your father will be getting anxious.”

  They pushed forward on the road, which was now level and wider than it had been. As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more to reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw a man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning darkly, and muttering and gesticulating.

  Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze. The peasant girl said gayly in Italian: “He is mad; the earthquake made him mad,” and urged the donkey forward.

  Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. He no longer experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and made him glad of any delay that kept them from it.

  They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the open country without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin, which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life. There, till within the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, as they had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing to intimate a domestic or civic advance. This street must have been the main thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from it here and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the little piazza on a height in the midst of the town. Two churches and a simple town house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered façades. The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and some were tumbled in heaps. But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of the churches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it was roofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people had flocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake. The high altar stood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubs perched, under the open sky, in celestial security.

  He had learned to look for the unexpected in Miss Gerald, and he could not have said that it was with surprise he now found her as capable of the emotions which the place inspired, as himself. He made sure of saying: “The earthquake, you know,” and she responded with compassion:

  “Oh yes; and perhaps that poor man was here, praying with the rest, when it happened. How strange it must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!”

  It seemed to Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of the knowledge so long kept from her. But she went confidently on like a sleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him in waking. She spoke of the earthquake as if she had been reading or hearing of it; but he doubted if, with her broken memory, this could be so. It was rather as if she was exploring his own mind in the way of which he had more than once been sensible, and making use of his memory. From time to time she spoke of remembering, but he knew that this was as the blind speak of seeing.

  He was anxious to get away, and at last they came out to where they had left the peasant girl waiting beside her donkey. She was not there, and after trying this way and that in the tangle of alleys, Lanfear decided to take the thoroughfare which they had come up by and trust to the chance of finding her at its foot. But he failed even of his search for the street: he came out again and again at the point he had started from.

  “What is the matter?” she asked at the annoyance he could not keep out of his face.

  He laughed. “Oh, merely that we’re lost. But we will wait here till that girl chooses to come back for us. Only it’s getting late, and Mr. Gerald—”

  “Why, I know the way down,” she said, and started quickly in a direction which, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by which he had emerged from the town the day before. He had once more the sense of his memory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken his hand for guidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she had directed a pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put down. In some mystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was his.

  They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond the last house. She explained that, not being able to follow them into the church with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her and wait for them there.

  “Does no one at all live here?” Lanfear asked, carelessly.

  “Among the owls and the spectres? I would not pass a night here for a lemonade! My mother,” she went on, with a natural pride in the event, “was lost in the earthquake. They found her with me before her breast, and her arms stretched out keeping the stones away.” She vividly dramatized the fact. “I was alive, but she was dead.”

  “Tell her,” Miss Gerald said, “that my mother is dead, too.”

  “Ah, poor little thing!” the girl said, when the message was delivered, and she put her beast in motion, chattering gayly to Miss Gerald in the bond of their common orphanhood.

  The return was down-hill, and they went back in half the time it had taken them to come. But even with this speed they were late, and the twilight was deepening when the last turn of their road brought them in sight of the new village. There a wild noise of cries for help burst upon the air, mixed with the shrill sound of maniac gibbering. They saw a boy running towards the town, and nearer them a man struggling with another, whom he had caught about the middle, and was dragging towards the side of the road where it dropped, hundreds of feet, into the gorge below.

  The donkey-girl called out: “Oh, the madman! He is killing the signor!”

  Lanfear shouted. The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fled shrieking. Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear as he ran forward to the prostrate form. She did not look at it, but within a few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out: “Oh, my mother is killed!” and sank, as if sinking down into the earth, in a swoon.

  “No, no; it’s all right, Nannie! Look after her, Lanfear! I’m not hurt. I let myself go in that fellow’s hands, and I fell softly. It was a good thing he didn’t drop me over the edge.” Gerald gathered himself up nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl. The situation explained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effect that he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for a guide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him. While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the girl’s pulse, and now and then putting his ear to her heart. With a glance at her father: “You’re bleeding, Mr. Gerald,” he said.

  “So I am,” the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a red stream from his face with his handkerchief. “But I am not hurt—”

  “Better let me tie it up,” Lanfear said, taking the handkerchief from him. He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he had not always thought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead with a reverence mingling with his professional gentleness. The donkey-girl had not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care was needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part of the silence in which the procession made its way slowly into Possana Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to support his daughter in her place. There was a sort of muted outcry of the whole populati
on awaiting them at the door of the locanda where they had halted before, and which now had the distinction of offering them shelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young lady, who still remained in her swoon.

  When the landlord could prevail with his fellow-townsmen and townswomen to disperse in her interest, and had imposed silence upon his customers indoors, Lanfear began his vigil beside his patient in as great quiet as he could anywhere have had. Once during the evening the public physician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear that nothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater experience of the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending for some San Remo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always approved, and then Gerald had not persisted. He was strongly excited, and anxious not so much for his daughter’s recovery from her swoon, which he did not doubt, as for the effect upon her when she should have come to herself.

  It was this which he wished to discuss, sitting fallen back into his chair, or walking up and down the room, with his head bound with a bloody handkerchief, and looking, with a sort of alien picturesqueness, like a kindly brigand.

  Lanfear did not leave his place beside the bed where the girl lay, white and still as if dead. An inexpressible compassion for the poor man filled his heart. Whatever the event should be, it would be tragical for him. “Go to sleep, Mr. Gerald,” he said. “Your waking can do no good. I will keep watch, and if need be, I’ll call you. Try to make yourself easy on that couch.”

  “I shall not sleep,” the old man answered. “How could I?” Nevertheless, he adjusted himself to the hard pillows of the lounge where he had been sitting and drowsed among them. He woke just before dawn with a start. “I thought she had come to, and knew everything! What a nightmare! Did I groan? Is there any change?”