by Forrest Reid
The head and shoulders of this figure were distinct: the rest was barely a suggestion. Yet, while Tom looked, the faint diffused light trembled and drew in, giving a more realistic appearance to the whole shape, and brightening as it contracted. It had less substance than a vapour, but it was very slowly assuming the nebulous outlines of a human form, through the upper portions of which the flat paper portrait he had cut out that afternoon was still visible. And the materialization took place so gradually, and the process was so strange, that Tom, watching it, was more curious than alarmed. Besides, it was only paper after all, and one quick tear across, he felt, would be sufficient to destroy it. There was at any rate nothing to fear: that phantom had no sensible reality. It was too feeble to produce a sound or a touch: it was no more formidable than a breath on frosty air, or a reflection of moonlight in water. And already, as if exhausted, it was dimming again, and far more rapidly than it had brightened. Then Tom suddenly felt himself grasped down from behind, and next instant he was lifted down and set upon the ground, while the hands that had seized him still held him, and Daddy’s voice kept repeating firmly but gently: “It’s all right: don’t be frightened: I’m here with you and we’re out in the yard; but now, I think, we’ll go back to the house.”
Tom said nothing at all, and he did not move. He was not frightened, he merely felt confused and somehow half asleep, conscious of very little more than that Daddy was speaking to him.
“It’s quite simple,” Daddy was saying. “You were dreaming, you see, and in the middle of your dream you got up and came out here. We heard you—or at least Mother heard you—unchaining the hall-door. So she woke me up and I came down to look for you.”
Tom still listened without seeming to hear; but he was perfectly docile, and allowed Daddy to lead him back across the yard. Then suddenly he asked a quite pertinent question—“Did she think it was burglars?”—and Daddy answered: “No, she thought it was you; and I thought it was her imagination until I found the hall-door open. The rest didn’t take very long.”
After this neither of them spoke again until they came round to the front of the house, which was at present all lit up. Then Daddy called out: “I’ve got him—safe and sound,” and Mother was there in the porch, in her dressing-gown, and with a warning “S-sh!” upon her lips.
“Don’t make a noise,” she whispered, drawing Tom into the hall. “We don’t want to wake Phemie and Mary. . . . Where did you find him?”
“In the yard,” replied Daddy cheerfully. “Half-way up a ladder. The ladder was one he had put there himself this afternoon. I had to lift him down and that’s what wakened him. But it’s all right, and he’s wide awake now—or very nearly.”
Tom said nothing, and Mother stooped and kissed him. She kissed him twice, and smiled, but rather anxiously. “He’s only half awake,” she murmured. . . . “I thought he had outgrown it. It must be more than a year since it happened last.”
“Since what happened last?” Tom questioned dreamily; for everything now seemed to him strange and unreal, and this conversation as strange as all the rest.
“Since you came marching down into the study with your eyes wide open,” Mother said, “and—— However, this isn’t the time to discuss it,” she went on. “You must get back to bed as quickly as possible. It’s a blessing it’s such a warm night. Perhaps you won’t catch cold after all.”
“It’s far more likely that I will,” Daddy observed, but Mother took no notice. She hurried Tom upstairs, packed him into bed after drying his feet with a rough towel, and put an eiderdown quilt on top of him.
All this Tom submitted to in silence: only the quilt drew a protest from him. “I can’t, he remonstrated plaintively. “I’m burning!”
Mother put her hand on his forehead and then reluctantly removed the quilt. She sat down beside the bed. “Now go to sleep,” she told him. “It’s all my fault; I should never have allowed you to sit out in the garden with the dew falling.”
“But I’ve sat out hundreds of times,” Tom expostulated. “Not when you weren’t feeling well,” Mother said. “I should have had more sense.” Nevertheless she seemed a good deal less anxious now that she had got him safely into bed, and it was Tom himself who began to feel a little worried by what had happened. He still wasn’t at all clear about it, and the few words Mother had spoken in the hall, before she had suddenly checked herself, seemed particularly mysterious, referring, as they evidently did, to something that had occurred in the past—something which both she and Daddy knew about but had never before mentioned. “Why shouldn’t my eyes have been open?” he began. “I mean that time when you say I came down into the study.”
Mother, he thought at first, wasn’t going to answer: however, in the end she changed her mind. “Because you were sound asleep,” she said. “Just the way you were to-night. Only then we hadn’t gone to bed.”
Tom was less satisfied than ever. It was the first time he had heard of this sleep-walking, and that in itself was peculiar. He hated half-explanations. Besides, if he had been asleep to-night when he came downstairs, then he must have been asleep before that; which meant that the voices, the thread of light, the figure in the loft, even Henry on the window-sill, had all been nothing but a dream. Yet in that case how was he ever really to be sure when he was dreaming and when he wasn’t? “How often did I come down to the study?” he asked dubiously. “More than once?”
“Now, Tom, I’m not going to talk any more,” Mother answered. “I want you to go to sleep—and you’ve all to-morrow to ask questions.”
But he knew that to-morrow she would find some fresh pretext for putting him off. “I can’t go to sleep like this,” he complained. “I’m far more likely to go to sleep if you tell me about it first.”
Mother looked at him and hesitated. “I have told you,” she said, “all that there is to tell.”
“Oh, Mother dear!” Tom protested.
“But what do you want to know?” she asked, half laughing. “There’s no secret! I never saw such a boy for weaving mysteries and romances out of nothing!”
“I want to know about walking in my sleep,” Tom replied. “Did I do it more than once?”
“Once!” Mother exclaimed. “Once a night would be more like it.” Then, as he lay gazing at her with a frown puckering his forehead, she resigned herself to the inevitable. “It was like living in the house with a small ghost,” she said, “and I got so accustomed to it that I used to look at the clock if you were a few minutes late. Luckily it didn’t have to be midnight; between half-past ten and eleven was when we expected you, and it never occurred twice in the same night. As soon as you had had your little perambulation, that ended it, and you were all right till morning. Now, are you satisfied?”
Tom lay pondering. “How long ago was it?” he asked.
“Three—no, it must be more than three years ago. At least, that was when it started and when it was really bad. Later it became less frequent, and in the end we believed you had outgrown it. Doctor Macrory always said you would. And so you have, really; to-night’s performance was an exception and only happened because you weren’t very well.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Tom questioned suspiciously.
“I don’t know—except that Doctor Macrory thought it might be better not to.”
“You weren’t even going to tell me now,” Tom reproached her, but he was too much interested and too curious to dwell on that aspect of the matter. “It was queer,” he went on, “that I didn’t wake when I came down to the study. I woke up to-night the minute Daddy grabbed hold of me—that is, if I was really asleep.”
“We didn’t grab hold of you,” Mother said. “We were always very careful. And now——”
But Tom interrupted her. “What did I do?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Mother answered. “You were as good as gold. You used to open the door and come into the room—that was all. As I say, exactly like a little ghost. You took no notice of us, and when we
’d turned you round, back you’d march to bed again without the least trouble.”
“But didn’t you speak to me?” Tom still pressed her. “Why didn’t you? Are you sure I was asleep?”
Mother sighed. “That’s the worst of .telling you anything! There’s never an end to it. You know yourself that you must have been asleep, or you’d remember about it. You sometimes spoke, but we didn’t.”
“And can’t you remember anything I said?”
“No, I can’t,” Mother answered. “You didn’t talk to us at all, you didn’t even know we were there. . . . There’s nothing wonderful about it,” she added, “lots of people talk in their sleep now and then; I dare say most people do.”
Tom turned on the pillow so that he faced her. “Weren’t you cross?” he asked.
“Cross!” Mother repeated uncomprehendingly.
“Well, it must have been a nuisance if it happened so often.”
“Oh, I see! No, I wasn’t cross.”
After that he lay quiet for so long a time that she began to think he must have dropped asleep, when suddenly he said: “I’d like you to sing to me.”
She was accustomed to abrupt changes of mood, but this one was more surprising than usual. “Sing!” she exclaimed. “That would be a nice thing to do at this hour of the night—and wake up the whole house!”
“You need only hum,” Tom coaxed her. “That won’t wake anybody.”
His face was flushed now—even his forehead—and when she put her hand against his cheek it felt hot and dry. She didn’t know precisely what lay behind his odd request, but she could guess perhaps, so she began to sing in hardly more than a whisper, and instantly he smiled. This made her want to kiss him, but she was afraid it might disturb his drowsiness if she did, so she sang on, in the lowest voice she could produce—lower even than her speaking voice. And outside in the garden other voices presently were raised, though it was barely dawn. But by this time she could hear him breathing and knew that he must really be asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
TOM WASN’T ill at all—at least nothing to signify—though Mother insisted on getting Doctor Macrory to see him, and Doctor Macrory, just because he had been called in, wrote a prescription and kept him in bed. He was sitting up, with several pillows behind him, on the afternoon of the third day, when Mary opened the door and announced Master Pascoe. Master Pascoe thereupon entered, and from the foot of the bed gazed at the invalid commiseratingly.
Tom put down his book and said: “Hello!”
He had not expected this call, and for some silly reason its first effect upon him was to make him feel embarrassed. This was partly due to Pascoe’s attitude, which was exactly that of a visitor at the Zoo. He kept on staring as if the bars of the bed were the bars of a cage, till Tom at last advised him to go down to the study and get the field-glasses; then he stopped.
“I only wanted to see how you were,” he apologized. “You don’t look too bad. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. . . . Just I wasn’t well.”
Pascoe seemed satisfied with this diagnosis, and came round to the side of the bed. He had a parcel in his hand, and in silence he proceeded to remove the string and paper, revealing within the outer wrapper yet another paper—a paper bag—while Tom watched the performance with curiosity.
“I got you these,” Pascoe explained, because I thought they’d be strengthening, being filled with wine.”
Tom, still more surprised, expressed his thanks.
“They’re wine gums,” Pascoe continued. “I don’t expect you’ve ever tasted them before.”
“Why?” Tom asked. “I mean, why shouldn’t I have tasted them? Are they expensive?”
Pascoe, being a truthful boy, hesitated. “As a rule I expect they are,” he compromised. “But these weren’t—so very. . . . I mean I got them more or less a bargain.”
“Oh,” said Tom, noncommittally.
“It was for the very queer reason, too, that they had been in the shop for some time.”
To Tom, however, the reason appeared quite comprehensible, though he did not say so, Pascoe’s eyes being fixed upon him.
“Of course, that only makes them better,” Pascoe pointed out, “because wine improves with age. In fact it isn’t really good till it is old. Everybody knows that.”
“The man in the shop can’t have known it,” Tom mentioned guardedly.
“No. People like that don’t drink wine; they only drink beer or stout. Anyway it wasn’t a man, it was a woman, and Daddy says women are never judges of wine.”
Tom did not dispute the opinion. Pascoe’s father, he knew, was a wine merchant; in fact generations of Pascoes had been in the wine trade—Pascoe, Wine Merchant, established 1802—he had seen the place often, down town—dark but attractive-looking—old-fashioned—with a low doorway, low windows, and a brown dusky interior within which, amid casks and flagons and cob-webby bottles, somewhere lurked Pascoe senior, rubicund and genial, though Tom had never actually been introduced to him.
Still, wine gums weren’t just the same as wine, he thought; they must consist of a variety of materials, not all of which would be improved by keeping. Meanwhile Pascoe junior placed the open bag on the counterpane between them, and since he could hardly refuse, Tom rather gingerly selected a specimen and began to chew it. It tasted better than he had expected, for viewed in the mass the wine gums looked distinctly unappetizing, with a tendency to coalesce, even to liquefy; but taken singly they proved not so bad—sticky and soft and sweet—eatable at any rate. “Thanks awfully,” he repeated. “It was jolly decent of you.”
Pascoe did not deny the decency. He too helped himself, and then sat down beside the bed, after which, amid fragmentary talk, they munched the wine gums for some time. The bag indeed was more than half empty when Pascoe pronounced these astonishing words: “We’ll stop the minute we begin to feel the effects. It doesn’t matter with you of course, but I have to ride home.”
Tom’s jaws slowly ceased to work as he turned an uneasy gaze upon his friend. “What effects?” he asked, with a dawning consciousness that he had begun to feel them already.
“We may get tight,” Pascoe replied, “with any luck.”
Tom was startled. That Pascoe, of all people, should express such a desire, was bewildering. It must be inherited. It detracted too, he couldn’t help feeling, from the generosity of the gift, reducing it at once from an act of sympathy to a mere experiment of dubious disinterestedness. Anyhow, he didn’t see why Pascoe need smack his lips in such a fashion, and told him so.
“I’m tasting,” Pascoe said. “You always make a noise like that when you’re tasting.”
“I don’t,” Tom contradicted, “and it’s pretty awful! You don’t eat your meals in that way, I hope.”
“No. You don’t understand. I don’t mean ordinary tasting. You only taste like this with samples—when you’re trying a new wine. I’ve seen Daddy doing it heaps of times. Sometimes you spit the wine out again.”
“Well, you needn’t do that here,” Tom exclaimed quickly. “It’s disgusting enough as it is.”
Pascoe was not offended. “All right,” he said; “I wasn’t going to.” And with that he stopped tasting,. or at least stopped making a noise. “The exams began to-day,” he presently observed. “I did rather well in the maths papers. Have another wine gum.”
“No, thanks,” Tom muttered, turning his head round towards the window and lying very still. His voice, too, had acquired an unusual, muffled sound, and something in his aspect—a slight haggardness, a peculiar hue perhaps—appeared to strike Pascoe, who leaned forward, looking at him hopefully. “Do you feel——” he was beginning, when Tom with a sudden upheaval of the clothes half scrambled, half tumbled out of bed. On his knees he groped frantically beneath it, and then, before the solemn eyes of his visitor, was painfully and emphatically ill.
Pascoe, quickly retreating, watched the catastrophe from a distance. “Hard luck!” he murmured.
&
nbsp; But Tom, with the sweat trickling down his forehead, and his hands clutching the counterpane, could not answer for some time. “It’s your beastly wine gums,” he at last managed to gasp, hurt and annoyed by the calmness of Pascoe’s tone. “You’d better ring the bell,” he added, getting back shakily between the sheets.
Pascoe crossed the room, but at the chimney-piece he paused in thought. “What are you going to say?” he inquired.
“I’m going to say I’ve been sick,” Tom answered impatiently. “Unless you want to take it away yourself.”
Pascoe didn’t, so he rang the bell, and immediately afterwards announced: “I think I ought to be going.”
“All right,” Tom answered coldly, for he knew well enough why Pascoe wanted to go, and indeed Pascoe himself made no secret of it. “Your mother will think it was my fault,” he explained.
“So it was,” Tom replied.
“I couldn’t tell that this would happen,” Pascoe murmured deprecatingly. “I really thought they might buck you up a bit. Honestly I did. That was why I got them.”
“You got them to see if they’d make us drunk,” Tom told him. “And you jolly well waited till I’d made myself ill before you mentioned a word about it.”
Pascoe’s gaze was still fixed upon him. “You’re surely not going to tell her that!” he expostulated.
“I’m not going to tell her anything,” Tom answered. “Because for one thing she’s out.” And with this he shut his eyes and kept them shut till Mary appeared in the doorway. Then he opened them and looked at her. “Mary, I’ve been sick,” he said.
Mary, who had actually brought them up tea, hastily set down the tray. With unerring instinct—though possibly helped by the sight of the paper bag—she at once grasped the situation. “My goodness, Master Tom, what rubbish have you been eating at all? I’d have thought you’d have had more sense!”