Between the Dark and the Daylight. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 the 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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ