“That was the strange part of it. Not a soul stirred, and after the first burst the girl seemed to quiet down again and yield the floor to Melford, who kept bellowing steadily away. I was so furious that I reached out across the aisle to shake him, but the attempt was too much for me. I lost my balance and fell out of my berth onto the floor. You may imagine the state of mind I was in. I gathered myself up and pulled Melford’s curtains open and was just going to fall on him tooth and nail, when I was nearly taken off my feet again by an apparition: well, it looked like an apparition, but it was a tall fellow in his nighty — for it was twenty years before pajamas — and he had a small dark lantern in his hand, such as we used to carry in those days so as to read in our berths when we couldn’t sleep. He was gritting his teeth, and growling between them: ‘Out o’ this! Out o’ this! I’m going to shoot to kill, you blasted thieves!’ I could see by the strange look in his eyes that he was sleep-walking, and I didn’t wait to see if he had a pistol. I popped in behind the curtains, and found myself on top of another fellow, for I had popped into the wrong berth in my confusion. The man started up and yelled: ‘Oh, don’t kill me! There’s my watch on the stand, and all the money in the house is in my pantaloons pocket. The silver’s in the sideboard down-stairs, and it’s plated, anyway.’ Then I understood what his complaint was, and I rolled onto the floor again. By that time every man in the car was out of his berth, too, except Melford, who was devoting himself strictly to business; and every man was grabbing some other, and shouting, ‘Police!’ or ‘Burglars!’ or ‘Help!’ or ‘Murder!’ just as the fancy took him.”
“Most extraordinary!” Wanhope commented as the stranger paused for breath.
In the intensity of our interest, we had crowded close upon him, except Minver, who sat with his head thrown back, and that cynical cast in his eye which always exasperated Rulledge; and Halson, who stood smiling proudly, as if the stranger’s story did him as his sponsor credit personally.
“Yes,” the stranger owned, “but I don’t know that there wasn’t something more extraordinary still. From time to time the girl in the stateroom kept piping up, with a shriek for help. She had got past the burglar stage, but she wanted to be saved, anyhow, from some danger which she didn’t specify. It went through me that it was very strange nobody called the porter, and I set up a shout of ‘Porter!’ on my own account. I decided that if there were burglars the porter was the man to put them out, and that if there were no burglars the porter could relieve our groundless fears. Sure enough, he came rushing in, as soon as I called for him, from the little corner by the smoking-room where he was blacking boots between dozes. He was wide enough awake, if having his eyes open meant that, and he had a shoe on one hand and a shoe-brush in the other. But he merely joined in the general up-roar and shouted for the police.”
“Excuse me,” Wanhope interposed. “I wish to be clear as to the facts. You had reasoned it out that the porter could quiet the tumult?”
“Never reasoned anything out so clearly in my life.”
“But what was your theory of the situation? That your friend, Mr. Melford, had a nightmare in which he was dreaming of burglars?”
“I hadn’t a doubt of it.”
“And that by a species of dream-transference the nightmare was communicated to the young lady in the stateroom?”
“Well — yes.”
“And that her call for help and her cry of burglars acted as a sort of hypnotic suggestion with the other sleepers, and they began to be afflicted with the same nightmare?”
“I don’t know that I ever put it to myself so distinctly, but it appears to me now that I must have reached some such conclusion.”
“That is very interesting, very interesting indeed. I beg your pardon. Please go on,” Wanhope courteously entreated.
“I don’t remember just where I was,” the stranger faltered.
Rulledge returned with an accuracy which obliged us all: “‘The porter merely joined in the general uproar and shouted for the police.’”
“Oh yes,” the stranger assented. “Then I didn’t know what to do, for a minute. The porter was a pretty thick-headed darky, but he was lion-hearted; and his idea was to lay hold of a burglar wherever he could find him. There were plenty of burglars in the aisle there, or people that were afraid of burglars, and they seemed to think the porter had a good idea. They had hold of one another already, and now began to pull up and down the aisles in a way that reminded me of the old-fashioned mesmeric lecturers, when they told their subjects that they were this or that, and set them to acting the part. I remembered how once when the mesmerist gave out that they were at a horse — race, and his subjects all got astride of their chairs, and galloped up and down the hall like a lot of little boys on laths. I thought of that now, and although it was rather a serious business, for I didn’t know what minute they would come to blows, I couldn’t help laughing. The sight was weird enough. Every one looked like a somnambulist as he pulled and hauled. The young lady in the stateroom was doing her full share. She was screaming, ‘Won’t somebody let me out?’ and hammering on the door. I guess it was her screaming and hammering that brought the conductor at last, or maybe he just came round in the course of nature to take up the tickets. It was before the time when they took the tickets at the gate, and you used to stick them into a little slot at the side of your berth, and the conductor came along and took them in the night, somewhere between Worcester and Springfield, I should say.”
“I remember,” Rulledge assented, but very carefully, so as not to interrupt the flow of the narrative. “Used to wake up everybody in the car.”
“Exactly,” the stranger said. “But this time they were all wide awake to receive him, or fast asleep, and dreaming their roles. He came along with the wire of his lantern over his arm, the way the old-time conductors did, and calling out, ‘Tickets!’ just as if it was broad day, and he believed every man was trying to beat his way to New York. The oddest thing about it was that the sleep-walkers all stopped their pulling and hauling a moment, and each man reached down to the little slot alongside of his berth and handed over his ticket. Then they took hold and began pulling and hauling again. I suppose the conductor asked what the matter was; but I couldn’t hear him, and I couldn’t make out exactly what he did say. But the passengers understood, and they all shouted ‘Burglars!’ and that girl in the stateroom gave a shriek that you could have heard from one end of the train to the other, and hammered on the door, and wanted to be let out.
“It seemed to take the conductor by surprise, and he faced towards the stateroom and let the lantern slip off his arm, and it dropped onto the floor and went out; I remember thinking what a good thing it didn’t set the car on fire. But there in the dark — for the car lamps went out at the same time with the lantern — I could hear those fellows pulling and hauling up and down the aisle and scuffling over the floor, and through all Melford bellowing away, like an orchestral accompaniment to a combat in Wagner opera, but getting quieter and quieter till his bellow died away altogether. At the same time the row in the aisle of the car stopped, and there was perfect silence, and I could hear the snow rattling against my window. Then I went off into a sound sleep, and never woke till we got into New York.”
The stranger seemed to have reached the end of his story, or at least to have exhausted the interest it had for him, and he smoked on, holding his knee between his hands and looking thoughtfully into the fire.
He had left us rather breathless, or, better said, blank, and each looked at the other for some initiative; then we united in looking at Wanhope; that is, Rulledge and I did. Minver rose and stretched himself with what I must describe as a sardonic yawn; Halson had stolen away before the end, as one to whom the end was known. Wanhope seemed by no means averse to the inquiry delegated to him, but only to be formulating its terms. At last he said:
“I don’t remember hearing of any case of this kind before. Thought-transference is a sufficiently ascertained phenomeno
n — the insistence of a conscious mind upon a certain fact until it penetrates the unconscious mind of another and is adopted as its own. But in the dream state the mind seems passive, and becomes the prey of this or that self-suggestion, without the power of imparting it to another dreaming mind. Yet here we have positive proof of such an effect. It appears that the victim of a particularly terrific nightmare was able to share its horrors — or rather unable not to share them — with a whole sleeping-car full of people whose brains helplessly took up the same theme, and dreamed it, as we may say, to the same conclusions. I said proof, but of course we can’t accept a single instance as establishing a scientific certainty. I don’t question the veracity of Mr.—”
“Newton,” the stranger suggested.
“Newton’s experience,” Wanhope continued, “but we must wait for a good many cases of the kind before we can accept what I may call metaphantasmia as being equally established with thought-transference. If we could it would throw light upon a whole series of most curious phenomena, as, for instance, the privity of a person dreamed about to the incident created by the dreamer.”
“That would be rather dreadful, wouldn’t it?” I ventured. “We do dream such scandalous, such compromising things about people.”
“All that,” Wanhope gently insisted, “could have nothing to do with the fact. That alone is to be considered in an inquiry of the kind. One is never obliged to tell one’s dreams. I wonder” — he turned to the stranger, who sat absently staring into the fire— “if you happened to speak to your friend about his nightmare in the morning, and whether he was by any chance aware of the participation of the others in it?”
“I certainly spoke to him pretty plainly when we got into New York.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said he had never slept better in his life, and he couldn’t remember having a trace of nightmare. He said he heard me groaning at one time, but I stopped just as he woke, and so he didn’t rouse me as he thought of doing. It was at Hartford, and he went to sleep again, and slept through without a break.”
“And what was your conclusion from that?” Wanhope asked.
“That he was lying, I should say,” Rulledge replied for the stranger.
Wanhope still waited, and the stranger said, “I suppose one conclusion might be that I had dreamed the whole thing myself.”
“Then you wish me to infer,” the psychologist pursued, “that the entire incident was a figment of your sleeping brain? That there was no sort of sleeping thought-transference, no metaphantasmia, no — Excuse me. Do you remember verifying your impression of being between Worcester and Springfield when the affair occurred, by looking at your watch, for instance?”
The stranger suddenly pulled out his watch at the word. “Good Heavens!” he called out. “It’s twenty minutes of eleven, and I have to take the eleven-o’clock train to Boston. I must bid you good-evening, gentlemen. I’ve just time to get it if I can catch a cab. Good-night, good-night. I hope if you come to Boston — eh — Good-night! Sometimes,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve thought it might have been that girl in the stateroom that started the dreaming.”
He had wrung our hands one after another, and now he ran out of the room.
Rulledge said, in appeal to Wanhope: “I don’t see how his being the dreamer invalidates the case, if his dreams affected the others.”
“Well,” Wanhope answered, thoughtfully, “that depends.”
“And what do you think of its being the girl in the stateroom?”
“That would be very interesting.”
V
Editha
The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm which has not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she could not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still leafless avenue, making slowly up towards the house, with his head down and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the edge of the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her will before she called aloud to him: “George!”
He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence, before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, “Well?”
“Oh, how united we are!” she exulted, and then she swooped down the steps to him. “What is it?” she cried.
“It’s war,” he said, and he pulled her up to him and kissed her.
She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat. “How glorious!”
“It’s war,” he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship, which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him. In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her question of the origin and authenticity of his news.
All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity. Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her — be a hero, her hero — it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.
“But don’t you see, dearest,” she said, “that it wouldn’t have come to this if it hadn’t been in the order of Providence? And I call any war glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling for years against the cruelest oppression. Don’t you think so, too?”
“I suppose so,” he returned, languidly. “But war! Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?”
“That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates.” She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: “But now it doesn’t matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is gone. There are no two sides any more. There is nothing now but our country.”
He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda, and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, “Our country — right or wrong.”
“Yes, right or wrong!” she returned, fervidly. “I’ll go and get you some lemonade.” She rose rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with two tall glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice clucking in them, he still sat as she
had left him, and she said, as if there had been no interruption: “But there is no question of wrong in this case. I call it a sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there was one. And I know you will see it just as I do, yet.”
He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass down: “I know you always have the highest ideal. When I differ from you I ought to doubt myself.”
A generous sob rose in Editha’s throat for the humility of a man, so very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below her.
Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near slipping through her fingers as when he took that meek way.
“You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be right.” She seized his hand in her two hands, and poured her soul from her eyes into his. “Don’t you think so?” she entreated him.
He released his hand and drank the rest of his lemonade, and she added, “Have mine, too,” but he shook his head in answering, “I’ve no business to think so, unless I act so, too.”
Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with leaps that she felt in her neck. She had noticed that strange thing in men: they seemed to feel bound to do what they believed, and not think a thing was finished when they said it, as girls did. She knew what was in his mind, but she pretended not, and she said, “Oh, I am not sure,” and then faltered.
He went on as if to himself, without apparently heeding her: “There’s only one way of proving one’s faith in a thing like this.”
She could not say that she understood, but she did understand.
He went on again. “If I believed — if I felt as you do about this war — Do you wish me to feel as you do?”
Now she was really not sure; so she said: “George, I don’t know what you mean.”
He seemed to muse away from her as before.
“There is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the bottom of his heart every man would like at times to have his courage tested, to see how he would act.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 838