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

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

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      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