The Complete Short Stories of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells

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

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      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 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