Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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 perfectly as if you were with me. I can see you, hear you, feel the touch of your hand, your dress — Good heavens!” he added to himself under his breath. “What am I saying to this poor child!”

  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 — to-morrow.” She rubbed her hand across her forehead as people do when they wish to clear their minds. Then she sighed deeply. “It tires me so. And yet I can’t help trying.” A light broke over her face at the sound of a step on the gravel walk near by, and she said, laughing, without looking round: “That is papa! I knew it was his step.”

  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 — no
w — 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 that 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.

  It was hard to do this; and there was a glamour in the very topographical and meteorological environment. The autumn was a long delight in which the constant sea, the constant sky, knew almost as little variance as the unchanging Alps. The days passed in a procession of sunny splendor, neither hot nor cold, nor of the temper of any determinate season, unless it were an abiding spring-time. The flowers bloomed, and the grass kept green in a reverie of May. But one afternoon of January, while Lanfear was going about in a thin coat and panama hat, a soft, fresh wind began to blow from the east. It increased till sunset, and then fell. In the morning he looked out on a world in which the spring had stiffened overnight into winter. A thick frost painted the leaves and flowers; icicles hung from pipes and vents; the frozen streams flashed back from their arrested flow the sun as it shone from the cold heaven, and blighted and blackened the hedges of geranium and rose, the borders of heliotrope, the fields of pinks. The leaves of the bananas hung limp about their stems; the palms rattled like skeletons in the wind when it began to blow again over the shrunken landscape.

  VI

  The caprice of a climate which vaunted itself perpetual summer was a godsend to all the strangers strong enough to bear it without suffering. For the sick an indoor life of huddling about the ineffectual fires of the south began, and lasted for the fortnight that elapsed before the Riviera got back its advertised temperature. Miss Gerald had drooped in the milder weather; but the cold braced and lifted her, and with its help she now pushed her walks farther, and was eager every day for some excursion to the little towns that whitened along the shores, or the villages that glimmered from the olive-orchards of the hills. Once she said to Lanfear, when they were climbing through the brisk, clear air: “It seems to me as if I had been here before. Have I?”

  “No. This is the first time.”

  She said no more, but seemed disappointed in his answer, and he suggested: “Perhaps it is the cold that reminds you of our winters at home, and makes you feel that the scene is familiar.”

  “Yes, that is it!” she returned, joyously. “Was there snow, there, like that on the mountains yonder?”

  “A good deal more, I fancy. That will be gone in a few days, and at home, you know, our snow lasts for weeks.”

  “Then that is what I was thinking of,” she said, and she ran strongly and lightly forward. “Come!”

  When the harsh weather passed and the mild climate returned there was no lapse of her strength. A bloom, palely pink as the flowers that began to flush the almond-trees, came upon her delicate beauty, a light like that of the lengthening days dawned in her eyes. She had an instinct for the earliest violets among the grass under the olives; she was first to hear the blackcaps singing in the garden-tops; and nothing that was novel in her experience seemed alien to it. This was the sum of what Lanfear got by the questioning which he needlessly tried to keep indirect. She knew that she was his patient, and in what manner, and she had let him divine that her loss of memory was suffering as well as deprivation. She had not merely the fatigue which we all undergo from the effort to recall things, and which sometimes reaches exhaustion; but there was apparently in the void of her oblivion a perpetual rumor of events, names, sensations, like — Lanfear felt that he inadequately conjectured — the subjective noises which are always in the ears of the deaf. Sometimes, in the distress of it, she turned to him for help, and when he was able to guess what she was striving for, a radiant relief and gratitude transfigured her face. But this could not last, and he learned to note how soon the stress and tension of her effort returned. His compassion for her at such times involved a temptation, or rather a question, which he had to silence by a direct effort of his will. Would it be worse, would it be greater anguish for her to know at once the past that now tormented her consciousness with its broken and meaningless reverberations? Then he realized that it was impossible to help her even through the hazard of telling her what had befallen; that no s
uch effect as was to be desired could be anticipated from the outside.

  If he turned to her father for counsel or instruction, or even a participation in his responsibility, he was met by an optimistic patience which exasperated him, if it did not complicate the case. Once, when Lanfear forbearingly tried to share with him his anxiety for the effect of a successful event, he was formed to be outright, and remind him, in so many words, that the girl’s restoration might be through anguish which he could not measure.

  Gerald faltered aghast; then he said: “It mustn’t come to that; you mustn’t let it.”

  “How do you expect me to prevent it?” Lanfear demanded, in his vexation.

  Gerald caught his breath. “If she gets well, she will remember?”

  “I don’t say that. It seems probable. Do you wish her being to remain bereft of one-half its powers?”

  “Oh, how do I know what I want?” the poor man groaned. “I only know that I trust you entirely, Doctor Lanfear. Whatever you think best will be best and wisest, no matter what the outcome is.”

  He got away from Lanfear with these hopeless words, and again Lanfear perceived that the case was left wholly to him. His consolation was the charm of the girl’s companionship, the delight of a nature knowing itself from moment to moment as if newly created. For her, as nearly as he could put the fact into words, the actual moment contained the past and the future as well as the present. When he saw in her the persistence of an exquisite personality independent of the means by which he realized his own continuous identity, he sometimes felt as if in the presence of some angel so long freed from earthly allegiance that it had left all record behind, as we leave here the records of our first years. If an echo of the past reached her, it was apt to be trivial and insignificant, like those unimportant experiences of our remotest childhood, which remain to us from a world outlived.

  It was not an insipid perfection of character which reported itself in these celestial terms, and Lanfear conjectured that angelic immortality, if such a thing were, could not imply perfection except at the cost of one-half of human character. When the girl wore a dress that she saw pleased him more than another, there was a responsive pleasure in her eyes, which he could have called vanity if he would; and she had at times a wilfulness which he could have accused of being obstinacy. She showed a certain jealousy of any experiences of his apart from her own, not because they included others, but because they excluded her. He was aware of an involuntary vigilance in her, which could not leave his motives any more than his actions unsearched. But in her conditioning she could not repent; she could only offer him at some other time the unconscious reparation of her obedience. The self-criticism which the child has not learned she had forgotten, but in her oblivion the wish to please existed as perfectly as in the ignorance of childhood.