A Sleep and a Forgetting

by William Dean Howells

  A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING FIRST APPEARED IN THE COLLECTION

  BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT: ROMANCES IN 1907.

  MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING

  145 PLYMOUTH STREET

  BROOKLYN, NY 11201

  WWW.MHPBOOKS.COM

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PAPERBACK EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN, 1837–1920.

  A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING / WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.

  P. CM.–(THE ART OF THE NOVELLA)

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-243-7

  1. PHYSICIANS–FICTION. 2. YOUNG WOMEN–FICTION.

  3. AMNESIACS–FICTION. 4. PSYCHOLOGICAL FICTION.

  I. TITLE. II. SERIES.

  PS2029.S64 2006

  813.4–DC22

  2006012774

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Other Books by This Author

  I

  Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San Remo in the interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer with him, and who wished him to test the air before settling there for the winter with an invalid wife. She was one of those neurasthenics who really carry their climate—always a bad one—with them, but she had set her mind on San Remo; and Lanfear was willing to pass a few days in the place making the observations which he felt pretty sure would be adverse.

  His train was rather late, and the sunset was fading from the French sky beyond the Italian shore when he got out of his car and looked round for a porter to take his valise. His roving eye lighted on the anxious figure, which as fully as the anxious face, of a short, stout, elderly man expressed a sort of distraction, as he stood loaded down with umbrellas, bags, bundles, and wraps, and seemed unable to arrest the movements of a tall young girl, with a travelling-shawl trailing from her arm, who had the effect of escaping from him towards a bench beside the door of the waiting-room. When she reached it, in spite of his appeals, she sat down with an absent air, and looked as far withdrawn from the bustle of the platform and from the snuffling train as if on some quiet garden seat along with her own thoughts.

  In his fat frenzy, which Lanfear felt to be pathetic, the old gentleman glanced at him, and then abruptly demanded: “Are you an American?”

  They knew each other abroad in some mystical way, and Lanfear did not try to deny the fact.

  “Oh, well, then,” the stranger said, as if the fact made everything right, “will you kindly tell my daughter, on that bench by the door yonder”—he pointed with a bag, and dropped a roll of rugs from under his arm—“that I’ll be with her as soon as I’ve looked after the trunks? Tell her not to move till I come. Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, will you?” He caught the sleeve of a facchino who came wandering by, and heaped him with his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in the direction of the baggage-room with a sort of mastery of the situation which struck Lanfear as springing from desperation rather than experience.

  Lanfear stood a moment hesitating. Then a glance at the girl on the bench, drooping a little forward in freeing her face from the veil that hung from her pretty hat, together with a sense of something quaintly charming in the confidence shown him on such purely compatriotic grounds, decided him to do just what he had been asked. The girl had got her veil up by this time, and as he came near, she turned from looking at the sunset over the stretch of wall beyond the halting train, and met his dubious face with a smile.

  “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “I know I shall get well, here, if they have such sunsets every day.”

  There was something so convincingly normal in her expression that Lanfear dismissed a painful conjecture. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I am afraid there’s some mistake. I haven’t the pleasure—You must excuse me, but your father wished me to ask you to wait here for him till he had got his baggage—”

  “My father?” the girl stopped him with a sort of a frowning perplexity in the stare she gave him. “My father isn’t here!”

  “I beg your pardon,” Lanfear said. “I must have misunderstood. A gentleman who got out of the train with you—a short, stout gentleman with gray hair—I understood him to say you were his daughter—requested me to bring this message—”

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t know him. It must be a mistake.”

  “The mistake is mine, no doubt. It may have been some one else whom he pointed out, and I have blundered. I’m very sorry if I seem to have intruded—”

  “What place is this?” the girl asked, without noticing his excuses.

  “San Remo,” Lanfear answered. “If you didn’t intend to stop here, your train will be leaving in a moment.”

  “I meant to get off, I suppose,” she said. “I don’t believe I’m going any farther.” She leaned back against the bars of the bench, and put up one of her slim arms along the top.

  There was something wrong. Lanfear now felt that, in spite of her perfect tranquillity and self-possession; perhaps because of it. He had no business to stay there talking with her, but he had not quite the right to leave her, though practically he had got his dismissal, and apparently she was quite capable of taking care of herself, or could have been so in a country where any woman’s defencelessness was not any man’s advantage. He could not go away without some effort to be of use.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “Can I help you in calling a carriage; or looking after your hand-baggage—it will be getting dark—perhaps your maid—”

  “My maid!” The girl frowned again, with a measure of the amazement which she showed when he mentioned her father. “I have no maid!”

  Lanfear blurted desperately out: “You are alone? You came—you are going to stay here—alone?”

  “Quite alone,” she said, with a passivity in which there was no resentment, and no feeling unless it were a certain color of dignity. Almost at the same time, with a glance beside and beyond him, she called out joyfully: “Ah, there you are!” and Lanfear turned, and saw scuffling and heard puffing towards them the short, stout elderly gentleman who had sent him to her. “I knew you would come before long!”

  “Well, I thought it was pretty long, myself,” the gentleman said, and then he courteously referred himself to Lanfear. “I’m afraid this gentleman has found it rather long, too; but I couldn’t manage it a moment sooner.”

  Lanfear said: “Not at all. I wish I could have been of any use to—”

  “My daughter—Miss Gerald, Mr.—”

  “Lanfear—Dr. Lanfear,” he said, accepting the introduction; and the girl bowed.

  “Oh, doctor, eh?” the father said, with a certain impression. “Going to stop here?”

  “A few days,” Lanfear answered, making way for the forward movement which the others began.

  “Well, well! I’m very much obliged to you, very much, indeed; and I’m sure my daughter is.”

  The girl said, “Oh yes, indeed,” rather indifferently, and then as they passed him, while he stood lifting his hat, she turned radiantly on him. “Thank you, ever so much!” she said, with the gentle voice which he had already thought charming.

  The father called back: “I hope we shall meet again. We are going to the Sardegna.”

  Lanfear had been going to the Sardegna himself, but while he bowed he now decided upon another hotel.

  The mystery, whatever it was, that the brave, little, fat father was carrying off so bluffly, had clearly the morbid quality of unhealth in it, and Lanfear could
not give himself freely to a young pleasure in the girl’s dark beauty of eyes and hair, her pale, irregular, piquant face, her slender figure and flowing walk. He was in the presence of something else, something that appealed to his scientific side, to that which was humane more than that which was human in him, and abashed him in the other feeling. Unless she was out of her mind there was no way of accounting for her behavior, except by some caprice which was itself scarcely short of insanity. She must have thought she knew him when he approached, and when she addressed him those first words; but when he had tried to set her right she had not changed; and why had she denied her father, and then hailed him with joy when he came back to her? She had known that she intended to stop at San Remo, but she had not known where she had stopped when she asked what place it was. She was consciously an invalid of some sort, for she spoke of getting well under sunsets like that which had now waned, but what sort of invalid was she?

  II

  Lanfear’s question persisted through the night, and it helped, with the coughing in the next room, to make a bad night for him. None of the hotels in San Remo receive consumptive patients, but none are without somewhere a bronchial cough. If it is in the room next yours it keeps you awake, but it is not pulmonary; you may comfort yourself in your vigils with that fact. Lanfear, however, fancied he had got a poor dinner, and in the morning he did not like his coffee. He thought he had let a foolish scruple keep him from the Grand Hotel Sardegna, and he walked down towards it along the palm-flanked promenade, in the gay morning light, with the tideless sea on the other hand lapping the rough beach beyond the lines of the railroad which borders it. On his way he met files of the beautiful Ligurian women, moving straight under the burdens balanced on their heads, or bestriding the donkeys laden with wine-casks in the roadway, or following beside the carts which the donkeys drew. Ladies of all nations, in the summer fashions of London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York thronged the path. The sky was of a blue so deep, so liquid that it seemed to him he could scoop it in his hand and pour it out again like water. Seaward, he glanced at the fishing-boats lying motionless in the offing, and the coastwise steamer that runs between Nice and Genoa trailing a thin plume of smoke between him and their white sails. With the more definite purpose of making sure of the Grand Hotel Sardegna, he scanned the different villa slopes that showed their level lines of white and yellow and dull pink through the gray tropical greenery on the different levels of the hills. He was duly rewarded by the sight of the bold legend topping its cornice, and when he let his eye descend the garden to a little pavilion on the wall overlooking the road, he saw his acquaintances of the evening before making a belated breakfast. The father recognized Lanfear first and spoke to his daughter, who looked up from her coffee and down towards him where he wavered, lifting his hat, and bowed smiling to him. He had no reason to cross the roadway towards the white stairway which climbed from it to the hotel grounds, but he did so. The father leaned out over the wall, and called down to him: “Won’t you come up and join us, doctor?”

  “Why, yes!” Lanfear consented, and in another moment he was shaking hands with the girl, to whom, he noticed, her father named him again. He had in his glad sense of her white morning dress and her hat of green-leafed lace, a feeling that she was somehow meeting him as a friend of indefinite date in an intimacy unconditioned by any past or future time. Her pleasure in his being there was as frank as her father’s, and there was a pretty trust of him in every word and tone which forbade misinterpretation.

  “I was just talking about you, doctor,” the father began, “and saying what a pity you hadn’t come to our hotel. It’s a capital place.”

  “I’ve been thinking it was a pity I went to mine,” Lanfear returned, “though I’m in San Remo for such a short time it’s scarcely worth while to change.”

  “Well, perhaps if you came here, you might stay longer. I guess we’re booked for the winter, Nannie?” He referred the question to his daughter, who asked Lanfear if he would not have some coffee.

  “I was going to say I had had my coffee, but I’m not sure it was coffee,” Lanfear began, and he consented, with some demur, banal enough, about the trouble.

  “Well, that’s right, then, and no trouble at all,” Mr. Gerald broke in upon him. “Here comes a fellow looking for a chance to bring you some,” and he called to a waiter wandering distractedly about with a “Heigh!” that might have been offensive from a less obviously inoffensive man. “Can you get our friend here a cup and saucer, and some of this good coffee?” he asked, as the waiter approached.

  “Yes, certainly, sir,” the man answered in careful English. “Is it not, perhaps, Mr. and Misses Gerald?” he smilingly insinuated, offering some cards.

  “Miss Gerald,” the father corrected him as he took the cards. “Why, hello, Nannie! Here are the Bells! Where are they?” he demanded of the waiter. “Bring them here, and a lot more cups and saucers. Or, hold on! I’d better go myself, Nannie, hadn’t I? Of course! You get the crockery, waiter. Where did you say they were?” He bustled up from his chair, without waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear in hurrying away. “You’ll excuse me, doctor! I’ll be back in half a minute. Friends of ours that came over on the same boat. I must see them, of course, but I don’t believe they’ll stay. Nannie, don’t let Dr. Lanfear get away. I want to have some talk with him. You tell him he’d better come to the Sardegna, here.”

  Lanfear and Miss Gerald sat a moment in the silence which is apt to follow with young people when they are unexpectedly left to themselves. She kept absently pushing the cards her father had given her up and down on the table between her thumb and forefinger, and Lanfear noted the translucence of her long, thin hand in the sunshine striking across the painted iron surface of the garden movable. The translucence had a pathos for his intelligence which the pensive tilt of her head enhanced. She stopped toying with the cards, and looked at the addresses on them.

  “What strange things names are!” she said, as if musing on the fact, with a sigh which he thought disproportioned to the depth of her remark.

  “They seem rather irrelevant at times,” he admitted, with a smile. “They’re mere tags, labels, which can be attached to one as well as another; they seem to belong equally to anybody.”

  “That is what I always say to myself,” she agreed, with more interest than he found explicable.

  “But finally,” he returned, “they’re all that’s left us, if they’re left themselves. They are the only signs to the few who knew us that we ever existed. They stand for our characters, our personality, our mind, our soul.”

  She said, “That is very true,” and then she suddenly gave him the cards. “Do you know these people?”

  “I? I thought they were friends of yours,” he replied, astonished.

  “That is what papa thinks,” Miss Gerald said, and while she sat dreamily absent, a rustle of skirts and a flutter of voices pierced from the surrounding shrubbery, and then a lively matron, of as youthful a temperament as the lively girls she brought in her train, burst upon them, and Miss Gerald was passed from one embrace to another until all four had kissed her. She returned their greeting, and shared, in her quieter way, their raptures at their encounter.

  “Such a hunt as we’ve had for you!” the matron shouted. “We’ve been up-stairs and down-stairs and in my lady’s chamber, all over the hotel. Where’s your father? Ah, they did get our cards to you!” and by that token Lanfear knew that these ladies were the Bells. He had stood up in a sort of expectancy, but Miss Gerald did not introduce him, and a shadow of embarrassment passed over the party which she seemed to feel least, though he fancied a sort of entreaty in the glance that she let pass over him.

  “I suppose he’s gone to look for us!” Mrs. Bell saved the situation with a protecting laugh. Miss Gerald colored intelligently, and Lanfear could not let Mrs. Bell’s implication pass.

  “If it is Mrs. Bell,” he said, “I can answer that he has. I met you at Mag
nolia some years ago, Mrs. Bell. Dr. Lanfear.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanfear,” Miss Gerald said. “I couldn’t think—”

  “Of my tag, my label?” he laughed back. “It isn’t very distinctly lettered.”

  Mrs. Bell was not much minding them jointly. She was singling Lanfear out for the expression of her pleasure in seeing him again, and recalling the incidents of her summer at Magnolia before, it seemed, any of her girls were out. She presented them collectively, and the eldest of them charmingly reminded Lanfear that he had once had the magnanimity to dance with her when she sat, in a little girl’s forlorn despair of being danced with, at one of those desolate hops of the good old Osprey House.

  “Yes; and now,” her mother followed, “we can’t wait a moment longer, if we’re to get our train for Monte Carlo, girls. We’re not going to play, doctor,” she made time to explain, “but we are going to look on. Will you tell your father, dear,” she said, taking the girl’s hands caressingly in hers, and drawing her to her motherly bosom, “that we found you, and did our best to find him? We can’t wait now—our carriage is champing the bit at the foot of the stairs—but we’re coming back in a week, and then we’ll do our best to look you up again.” She included Lanfear in her good-bye, and all her girls said good-bye in the same way, and with a whisking of skirts and twitter of voices they vanished through the shrubbery, and faded into the general silence and general sound like a bevy of birds which had swept near and passed by.

  Miss Gerald sank quietly into her place, and sat as if nothing had happened, except that she looked a little paler to Lanfear, who remained on foot trying to piece together their interrupted tête-à-tête, but not succeeding, when her father reappeared, red and breathless, and wiping his forehead. “Have they been here, Nannie?” he asked. “I’ve been following them all over the place, and the portier told me just now that he had seen a party of ladies coming down this way.”