Lanfear felt the appeal so keenly that in the effort to answer faithfully he was aware of being harsher than he meant. “That is a chance we can’t forecast. But it is a chance. The fact that the drowsiness recurs periodically—”
“It doesn’t,” the father pleaded. “We don’t know when it will come on.”
“It scarcely matters. The periodicity wouldn’t affect the possible result which you dread. I don’t say that it is probable. But it’s one of the possibilities. It has,” Lanfear added, “its logic.”
“Ah, its logic!”
“Its logic, yes. My business, of course, would be to restore her to health at any risk. So far as her mind is affected—”
“Her mind is not affected!” the father retorted.
“I beg your pardon — her memory — it might be restored with her physical health. You understand that? It is a chance; it might or it might not happen.”
The father was apparently facing a risk which he had not squarely faced before. “I suppose so,” he faltered. After a moment he added, with more courage: “You must do the best you can, at any risk.”
Lanfear rose, too. He said, with returning kindness in his tones, if not his words: “I should like to study the case, Mr. Gerald. It’s very interesting, and — and — if you’ll forgive me — very touching.”
“Thank you.”
“If you decide to stay in San Remo, I will — Do you suppose I could get a room in this hotel? I don’t like mine.”
“Why, I haven’t any doubt you can. Shall we ask?”
III
It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience by pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend’s neurasthenic wife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more sheltered seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo. He wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation to hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. He put the case first in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a sense of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case related to a different personality might have been less absorbing. But he tried to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasure which, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strange affliction of a young and beautiful girl.
Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installed near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him, without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her hardly differed from that of her father, except that it involved a closer and more premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from the sort of association which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entails no sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together at the long table, midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the old table-d’hôte against the small tables ranged along the walls. Gerald had an amiable old man’s liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he willingly escaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of his anxieties. He left his daughter very much to Lanfear, during these excursions, but Lanfear was far from meaning to keep her to himself. He thought it better that she should follow her father in his forays among their neighbors, and he encouraged her to continue such talk with them as she might be brought into. He tried to guard her future encounters with them, so that she should not show more than a young girl’s usual diffidence at a second meeting; and in the frequent substitution of one presence for another across the table, she was fairly safe.
A natural light-heartedness, of which he had glimpses from the first, returned to her. One night, at the dance given by some of the guests to some others, she went through the gayety in joyous triumph. She danced mostly with Lanfear, but she had other partners, and she won a pleasing popularity by the American quality of her waltzing. Lanfear had already noted that her forgetfulness was not always so constant or so inclusive as her father had taught him to expect; Mr. Gerald’s statement had been the large, general fact from which there was sometimes a shrinking in the particulars. While the warmth of an agreeable experience lasted, her mind kept record of it, slight or full; if the experience were unpleasant the memory was more apt to fade at once. After that dance she repeated to her father the little compliments paid her, and told him, laughing, they were to reward him for sitting up so late as her chaperon. Emotions persisted in her consciousness as the tremor lasts in a smitten cord, but events left little trace. She retained a sense of personalities; she was lastingly sensible of temperaments; but names were nothing to her. She could not tell her father who had said the nice things to her, and their joint study of her dancing-card did not help them out.
Her relation to Lanfear, though it might be a subject of international scrutiny, was hardly a subject of censure. He was known as Dr. Lanfear, but he was not at first known as her physician; he was conjectured her cousin or something like that; he might even be her betrothed in the peculiar American arrangement of such affairs. Personally people saw in him a serious-looking young man, better dressed and better mannered than they thought most Americans, and unquestionably handsomer, with his Spanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the Vandyke cut which was then already beginning to be rather belated.
Other Americans in the hotel were few and transitory; and if the English had any mind about Miss Gerald different from their mind about other girls, it would be perhaps to the effect that she was quite mad; by this they would mean that she was a little odd; but for the rest they had apparently no mind about her. With the help of one of the English ladies her father had replaced the homesick Irish maid whom he had sent back to New York from Genoa, with an Italian, and in the shelter of her gay affection and ignorant sympathy Miss Gerald had a security supplemented by the easy social environment. If she did not look very well, she did not differ from most other American women in that; and if she seemed to confide herself more severely to the safe-keeping of her physician, that was the way of all women patients.
Whether the Bells found the spectacle of depravity at Monte Carlo more attractive than the smiling face of nature at San Remo or not, they did not return, but sent for their baggage from their hotel, and were not seen again by the Geralds. Lanfear’s friend with the invalid wife wrote from Ospedaletti, with apologies which inculpated him for the disappointment, that she had found the air impossible in a single day, and they were off for Cannes. Lanfear and the Geralds, therefore, continued together in the hotel without fear or obligation to others, and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in that pavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded. No one, after a few mornings of tacit possession, would have disputed their claim, and there, day after day, in the mild monotony of the December sunshine, they sat and drank their coffee, and talked of the sights which the peasants in the street, and the tourists in the promenade beyond it, afforded. The rows of stumpy palms which separated the road from the walk were not so high but that they had the whole lift of the sea to the horizon where it lost itself in a sky that curved blue as turquoise to the zenith overhead. The sun rose from its morning bath on the left, and sank to its evening bath on the right, and in making its climb of the spacious arc between, shed a heat as great as that of summer, but not the heat of summer, on the pretty world of villas and hotels, towered over by the olive-gray slopes of the pine-clad heights behind and above them. From these tops a fine, keen cold fell with the waning afternoon, which sharpened through the sunset till the dusk; but in the morning the change was from the chill to the glow, and they could sit in their pavilion, under the willowy droop of the eucalyptus-trees which have brought the Southern Pacific to the Riviera, with increasing comfort.
In the restlessness of an elderly man, Gerald sometimes left the young people to their intolerable delays over their coffee, and walked off into the little stone and stucco city below, or went and sat with his cigar on one of the benches under the palm-lined promenade, which the pale northern consumptives shared with t
he swarthy peasant girls resting from their burdens, and the wrinkled grandmothers of their race passively or actively begging from the strangers.
While she kept her father in sight it seemed that Miss Gerald could maintain her hold of his identity, and one morning she said, with the tender fondness for him which touched Lanfear: “When he sits there among those sick people and poor people, then he knows they are in the world.”
She turned with a question graver in her look than usual, and he said: “Yes, we might help them oftener if we could remember that their misery was going on all the time, like some great natural process, day or dark, heat or cold, which seems to stop when we stop thinking of it. Nothing, for us, at least, exists unless it is recalled to us.”
“Yes,” she said, in her turn, “I have noticed that. But don’t you sometimes — sometimes” — she knit her forehead, as if to keep her thought from escaping— “have a feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, or seeing, had all happened before, just as it is now?”
“Oh yes; that occurs to every one.”
“But don’t you — don’t you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you had known them, in some previous existence—”
She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, the experience which young people make much of when they have it, and sometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it. But there could be no pose or pretence in her. He smilingly suggested:
“‘For something is, or something seems,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.’
These weird impressions are no more than that, probably.”
“Ah, I don’t believe it,” the girl said. “They are too real for that. They come too often, and they make me feel as if they would come more fully, some time. If there was a life before this — do you believe there was? — they may be things that happened there. Or they may be things that will happen in a life after this. You believe in that, don’t you?”
“In a life after this, or their happening in it?”
“Well, both.”
Lanfear evaded her, partly. “They could be premonitions, prophecies, of a future life, as easily as fragmentary records of a past life. I suppose we do not begin to be immortal merely after death.”
“No.” She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if what they had been saying had already passed from her thought.
“But, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear ventured, “have these impressions of yours grown more definite — fuller, as you say — of late?”
“My impressions?” She frowned at him, as if the look of interest, more intense than usual in his eyes, annoyed her. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Lanfear felt bound to follow up her lead, whether she wished it or not. “A good third of our lives here is passed in sleep. I’m not always sure that we are right in treating the mental — for certainly they are mental — experiences of that time as altogether trivial, or insignificant.”
She seemed to understand now, and she protested: “But I don’t mean dreams. I mean things that really happened, or that really will happen.”
“Like something you can give me an instance of? Are they painful things, or pleasant, mostly?”
She hesitated. “They are things that you know happen to other people, but you can’t believe would ever happen to you.”
“Do they come when you are just drowsing, or just waking from a drowse?”
“They are not 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
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 onl
y 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?
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 830