The Complete Short Stories of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells
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lifting the gaze from a dazzling object. When his consciousness had duly registered this perception, there instantly followed a recognition of the fact that the eidolon now filling his vision was not the effect of the dazzled eyes, but of a mental process, of thinking how the thing which it reported had looked.
By the time Alford had co-ordinated this reflection with the other, the eidolon had faded from the lady’s face, which again presented itself in uninterrupted loveliness with the added attraction of a distinct pout.
“Well, Mr. Alford!” she bantered him.
“Oh, I beg your pardon! I was thinking—”
“Not of what I was saying,” she broke in, laughingly, forgivingly.
“No, I certainly wasn’t,” he assented, with such a sense of approaching creepiness in his experience that when she challenged him to say what he was thinking of, he could not, or would not; she professed to believe that he would not.
In the joking that followed he soon lost the sense of approaching creepiness, and began to be proud of what had happened to him as out of the ordinary, as a species of psychological ecstasy almost of spiritual value. From time to time he tried, by thinking of the splash and upward gush from the cannon-shot’s plunge in the sea, to recall the vision, but it would not come again, and at the end of an afternoon somewhat distraughtly spent he decided to put the matter away, as one of the odd things of no significance which happen in life and must be dealt with as mysteries none the less trifling because they are inexplicable.
“Well, you’ve got over it?” the widow joked him as he drew up towards her, smiling from her rocker on the veranda after supper. At first, all the women in the hotel had petted him; but with their own cares and ailments to reclaim them they let the invalid fall to the peculiar charge of the childless widow who had nothing else to do, and was so well and strong that she could look after the invalid Professor of Archaeology (at the Champlain University) without the fatigues they must feel.
“Yes, I’ve got over it,” he said.
“And what was it?” she boldly pursued.
He was about to say, and then he could not.
“You won’t tell?”
“Not yet,” he answered. He added, after a moment, “I don’t believe I can.”
“Because it’s confidential?”
“No; not exactly that. Because it’s impossible.”
“Oh, that’s simple enough. I understand exactly what you mean. Well, if ever it becomes less difficult, remember that I should always like to know. It seemed a little—personal.”
“How in the world?”
“Well, when one is stared at in that way—”
“Did I stare?”
“Don’t you always stare? But in this case you stared as if there was something wrong with my hair.”
“There wasn’t,” Alford protested, simple-heartedly. Then he recollected his sophistication to say: “Unless its being of that particular shade between brown and red was wrong.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford! After that I must believe you.”
They talked on the veranda till the night fell, and then they came in among the lamps, in the parlor, and she sat down with a certain provisionality, putting herself sideways on a light chair by a window, and as she chatted and laughed with one cheek towards him she now and then beat the back of her chair with her open hand. The other people were reading or severely playing cards, and they, too, kept their tones down to a respectful level, while she lingered, and when she rose and said good-night he went out and took some turns on the veranda before going up to bed. She was certainly, he realized, a very pretty woman, and very graceful and very amusing, and though she probably knew all about it, she was the franker and honester for her knowledge.
He had arrived at this conclusion just as he turned the switch of the electric light inside his door, and in the first flash of the carbon film he saw her sitting beside the window in such a chair as she had taken and in the very pose which she had kept in the parlor. Her half-averted face was lit as from laughing, and she had her hand lifted as if to beat the back of her chair.
“Good Heavens, Mrs. Yarrow!” he said, in a sort of whispered shout, while he mechanically closed the door behind him as if to keep the fact to himself. “What in the world are you doing here?”
Then she was not there. Nothing was there; not even a chair beside the window.
Alford dropped weakly into the only chair in the room, which stood next the door by the head of his bed, and abandoned himself a helpless prey to the logic of the events.
It was at this point, which I have been able to give in Wanhope’s exact words, that, in the ensuing pause, Rulledge asked, as if he thought some detail might be denied him: “And what was the logic of the events?”
Minver gave a fleering laugh. “Don’t be premature, Rulledge. If you have the logic now, you will spoil everything. You can’t have the moral until you’ve had the whole story. Go on, Wanhope. You’re so much more interesting than usual that I won’t ask how you got hold of all these compromising minutiae.”
“Of course,” Wanhope returned, “they’re not for the general ear. I go rather further, for the sake of the curious fact, than I should be warranted in doing if I did not know my audience so well.”
We joined in a murmur of gratification, and he went on to say that Alford’s first coherent thought was that he was dreaming one of those unwarranted dreams in which we make our acquaintance privy to all sorts of strange incidents. Then he knew that he was not dreaming, and that his eye had merely externated a mental vision, as in the case of the cannon-shot splash of which he had seen the phantom as soon as it was mentioned. He remembered afterwards asking himself in a sort of terror how far it was going to go with him; how far his thought was going to report itself objectively hereafter, and what were the reasonable implications of his abnormal experiences. He did not know just how long he sat by his bedside trying to think, only to have his conclusions whir away like a flock of startled birds when he approached them. He went to bed because he was exhausted rather than because he was sleepy, but he could not recall a moment of wakefulness after his head touched the pillow.
He woke surprisingly refreshed, but at the belated breakfast where he found Mrs. Yarrow still lingering he thought her looking not well. She confessed, listlessly, that she had not rested well. She was not sure, she said, whether the sea air agreed with her; she might try the mountains a little later. She was not inclined to talk, and that day he scarcely spoke with her except in commonplaces at the table. They had no return to the little mystery they had mocked together the day before.
More days passed, and Alford had no recurrence of his visions. His acquaintance with Mrs. Yarrow made no further advance; there was no one else in the hotel who interested him, and he bored himself. At the same time his recovery seemed retarded; he lost tone, and after a fortnight he ran up to talk himself over with his doctor in Boston. He rather thought he would mention his eidolons, and ask if they were at all related to the condition of his nerves. It was a keen disappointment, but it ought not to have been a surprise, for him to find that his doctor was off on his summer vacation. The caretaker who opened the door to Alford named a young physician in the same block of Marlborough Street who had his doctor’s practice for the summer, but Alford had not the heart to go to this alternate.
He started down to his hotel on a late afternoon train that would bring him to the station after dusk, and before he reached it the lamps had been lighted in his car. Alford sat in a sparsely peopled smoker, where he had found a place away from the crowd in the other coaches, and looked out of the window into the reflected interior of his car, which now and then thinned away and let him see the weeds and gravel of the railroad banks, with the bushes that topped them and the woods that backed them. The train at one point stopped rather suddenly and then went on, for