From “Between the Dark and the Daylight,” copyright, 1907,
by Harper and Brothers. By special permission from the author.
The stranger was a guest of Halson’s, and Halson himself was a
comparative stranger, for he was of recent election to our
dining-club, and was better known to Minver than to the rest of our
little group, though one could not be sure that he was very well
known to Minver. The stranger had been dining with Halson, and we
had found the two smoking together, with their cups of black coffee
at their elbows, before the smoldering fire in the Turkish room when
we came in from dinner--my friend Wanhope the psychologist, Rulledge
the sentimentalist, Minver the painter, and myself. It struck me for
the first time that a fire on the hearth was out of keeping with a
Turkish room, but I felt that the cups of black coffee restored the
lost balance in some measure.
Before we had settled into our wonted places--in fact, almost as we
entered--Halson looked over his shoulder and said: “Mr. Wanhope, I
want you to hear this story of my friend’s. Go on, Newton--or,
rather, go back and begin again--and I’ll introduce you afterwards.”
The stranger made a becoming show of deprecation. He said he did not
think the story would bear immediate repetition, or was even worth
telling once, but, if we had nothing better to do, perhaps we might
do worse than hear it; the most he could say for it was that the
thing really happened. He wore a large drooping, gray mustache,
which, with the imperial below it, quite hid his mouth, and gave
him, somehow, a martial effect, besides accurately dating him of the
period between the latest sixties and earliest seventies, when his
beard would have been black; I liked his mustache not being stubbed
in the modern manner, but allowed to fall heavily over his lips, and
then branch away from the corners of his mouth as far as it would.
He lighted the cigar which Halson gave him, and, blowing the
bitten-off tip towards the fire, began:
“It was about that time when we first had a ten-o’clock night train
from Boston to New York. Train used to start at nine, and lag along
around by Springfield, and get into the old Twenty-sixth Street
Station here at six in the morning, where they let you sleep as long
as you liked. They call you up now at half-past five, and, if you
don’t turn out, they haul you back to Mott Haven or New Haven, I’m
not sure which. I used to go into Boston and turn in at the old
Worcester Depot, as we called it then, just about the time the train
began to move, and I usually got a fine night’s rest in the course
of the nine or ten hours we were on the way to New York; it didn’t
seem quite the same after we began saying Albany Depot: shortened up
the run, somehow.
“But that night I wasn’t very sleepy, and the porter had got the
place so piping hot with the big stoves, one at each end of the car,
to keep the good, old-fashioned Christmas cold out, that I thought I
should be more comfortable with a smoke before I went to bed; and,
anyhow, I could get away from the heat better in the smoking-room. I
hated to be leaving home on Christmas Eve, for I never had done that
before, and I hated to be leaving my wife alone with the children
and the two girls in our little house in Cambridge. Before I started
in on the old horse-car for Boston, I had helped her to tuck the
young ones in and to fill the stockings hung along the wall over the
register--the nearest we could come to a fireplace--and I thought
those stockings looked very weird, five of them, dangling lumpily
down, and I kept seeing them, and her sitting up sewing in front of
them, and afraid to go to bed on account of burglars. I suppose she
was shyer of burglars than any woman ever was that had never seen a
sign of them. She was always calling me up, to go down-stairs and put
them out, and I used to wander all over the house, from attic to
cellar, in my nighty, with a lamp in one hand and a poker in the
other, so that no burglar could have missed me if he had wanted an
easy mark. I always kept a lamp and a poker handy.”
The stranger heaved a sigh as of fond reminiscence, and looked round
for the sympathy which in our company of bachelors he failed of;
even the sympathetic Rulledge failed of the necessary experience to
move him in compassionate response.
“Well,” the stranger went on, a little damped perhaps by his
failure, but supported apparently by the interest of the fact in
hand, “I had the smoking-room to myself for a while, and then a
fellow put his head in that I thought I knew after I had thought I
didn’t know him. It dawned on me more and more, and I had to
acknowledge to myself, by and by, that it was a man named Melford,
whom I used to room with in Holworthy at Harvard: that is, we had an
apartment of two bedrooms and a study; and I suppose there were
never two fellows knew less of each other than we did at the end of
our four years together. I can’t say what Melford knew of me, but
the most I knew of Melford was his particular brand of nightmare.”
Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter. He took
his cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an “Ah!”
Rulledge went further and interrogatively repeated the word
“Nightmare?”
“Nightmare,” the stranger continued, firmly. “The curious thing
about it was that I never exactly knew the subject of his nightmare,
and a more curious thing yet was Melford himself never knew it, when
I woke him up. He said he couldn’t make out anything but a kind of
scraping in a door-lock. His theory was that in his childhood it had
been a much completer thing, but that the circumstances had broken
down in a sort of decadence, and now there was nothing left of it
but that scraping in the door-lock, like somebody trying to turn a
misfit key. I used to throw things at his door, and once I tried a
cold-water douche from the pitcher, when he was very hard to waken;
but that was rather brutal, and after a while I used to let him roar
himself awake; he would always do it, if I trusted to nature; and
before our junior year was out I got so that I could sleep through,
pretty calmly; I would just say to myself when he fetched me to the
surface with a yell, ‘That’s Melford dreaming,’ and doze off
sweetly.”
“Jove! I don’t see how you could stand it.”
“There’s everything in habit, Rulledge,” Minver put in. “Perhaps our
friend only dreamt that he heard a dream.”
“That’s quite possible,” the stranger owned, politely. “But the case
is superficially as I state it. However, it was all past, long ago,
when I recognized Melford in the smoking-room that night; it must
have been ten or a dozen years. I was wearing a full beard then, and
so was he; we wore as much beard as we could in those days. I had
been through the war since college, and he had been in California,
most of the time, and, as he told me, he had been up north, in
Alaska, just after we bought it, and hurt his eyes--had
snowblindness--and he wore spectacles. In fact, I had to do most of
the recognizing, but after we found out who we were we were rather
comfortable; and I liked him better than I remembered to have liked
him in our college days. I don’t suppose there was ever much harm in
him; it was only my grudge about his nightmare. We talked along and
smoked along for about an hour, and I could hear the porter outside,
making up the berths, and the train rumbled away towards Framingham,
and then towards Worcester, and I began to be sleepy, and to think I
would go to bed myself; and just then the door of the smoking-room
opened, and a young girl put in her face a moment, and said: ‘Oh, I
beg your pardon. I thought it was the stateroom,’ and then she shut
the door, and I realized that she looked like a girl I used to
know.”
The stranger stopped, and I fancied from a note in his voice that
this girl was perhaps like an early love. We silently waited for him
to resume how and when he would. He sighed, and after an appreciable
interval he began again. “It is curious how things are related to
one another. My wife had never seen her, and yet, somehow, this girl
that looked like the one I mean brought my mind back to my wife with
a quick turn, after I had forgotten her in my talk with Melford for
the time being. I thought how lonely she was in that little house of
ours in Cambridge, on rather an outlying street, and I knew she was
thinking of me, and hating to have me away on Christmas Eve, which
isn’t such a lively time after you’re grown up and begin to look
back on a good many other Christmas Eves, when you were a child
yourself; in fact, I don’t know a dismaler night in the whole year.
I stepped out on the platform before I began to turn in, for a
mouthful of the night air, and I found it was spitting snow--a
regular Christmas Eve of the true pattern; and I didn’t believe,
from the business feel of those hard little pellets, that it was
going to stop in a hurry, and I thought if we got into New York on
time we should be lucky. The snow made me think of a night when my
wife was sure there were burglars in the house; and in fact I heard
their tramping on the stairs myself--thump, thump, thump, and then a
stop, and then down again. Of course it was the slide and thud of
the snow from the roof of the main part of the house to the roof of
the kitchen, which was in an L, a story lower, but it was as good an
imitation of burglars as I want to hear at one o’clock in the
morning; and the recollection of it made me more anxious about my
wife, not because I believed she was in danger, but because I knew
how frightened she must be.
“When I went into the car, that girl passed me on the way to her
stateroom, and I concluded that she was the only woman on board, and
her friends had taken the stateroom for her, so that she needn’t
feel strange. I usually go to bed in a sleeper as I do in my own
house, but that night I somehow couldn’t. I got to thinking of
accidents, and I thought how disagreeable it would be to turn out
into the snow in my nighty. I ended by turning in with my clothes
on, all except my coat; and, in spite of the red-hot stoves, I
wasn’t any too warm. I had a berth in the middle of the car, and
just as I was parting my curtains to lie down, old Melford came to
take the lower berth opposite. It made me laugh a little, and I was
glad of the relief. ‘Why, hello, Melford,’ said I. ‘This is like the
old Holworthy times.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said he, and then I asked
something that I had kept myself from asking all through our talk in
the smoking-room, because I knew he was rather sensitive about it,
or used to be. ‘Do you ever have that regulation nightmare of yours
nowadays, Melford?’ He gave a laugh, and said: ‘I haven’t had it, I
suppose, once in ten years. What made you think of it?’ I said: ‘Oh,
I don’t know. It just came into my mind. Well, good-night, old
fellow. I hope you’ll rest well,’ and suddenly I began to feel
light-hearted again, and I went to sleep as gayly as ever I did in
my life.
“... I didn’t go to sleep at once, though I felt so much at peace.
In fact, Melford beat me, and I could hear him far in advance,
steaming and whistling away, in a style that I recalled as
characteristic, over a space of intervening years that I hadn’t
definitely summed up yet. It made me think of a night near
Narragansett Bay, where two friends of mine and I had had a mighty
good dinner at a sort of wild club-house, and had hurried into our
bunks, each one so as to get the start of the others, for the
fellows that were left behind knew they had no chance of sleep after
the first began to get in his work. I laughed, and I suppose I must
have gone to sleep almost simultaneously, for I don’t recollect
anything afterwards till I was wakened by a kind of muffled bellow,
that I remembered only too well. It was the unfailing sign of
Melford’s nightmare.
“I was ready to swear, and I was ashamed for the fellow who had no
more self-control than that: when a fellow snores, or has a
nightmare, you always think first off that he needn’t have had it if
he had tried. As usual, I knew Melford didn’t know what his
nightmare was about, and that made me madder still, to have him
bellowing into the air like that, with no particular aim. All at
once there came a piercing scream from the stateroom, and then I
knew that the girl there had heard Melford, and been scared out of a
year’s growth.”
The stranger made a little break, and Wanhope asked, “Could you make
out what she screamed, or was it quite inarticulate?”
“It was plain enough, and it gave me a clew, somehow, to what
Melford’s nightmare was about. She was calling out ‘Help! help!
help! Burglars!’ till I thought she would raise the roof of the
car.”
“And did she wake anybody?” Rulledge inquired.
“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.
“... 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 uproar and shouted for the police.
“... 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
lectures, 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 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 rôles. 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 round
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 was 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.
“... 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 plain 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. 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.