So clamorous and so persistent was the ringing that Cosmo Waynflete was
roused at last. He found himself suddenly standing on his feet, with
his hand clutching the back of the chair in which he had been sitting
before the fire when the rays of the setting sun had set long ago. The
room was dark, for it was lighted now only by the embers of the
burnt-out fire; and the electric bell was ringing steadily, as though
the man outside the door had resolved to waken the seven sleepers.
Then Cosmo Waynflete was wide-awake again; and he knew where he was
once more--not in Japan, not in Persia, not in Lisbon, not in Sleepy
Hollow, but here in New York, in his own room, before his own fire. He
opened the door at once and admitted his friend, Paul Stuyvesant.
"It isn't dinner-time, is it?" he asked. "I'm not late, am I? The fact
is, I've been asleep."
"It is so good of you to confess that," his friend answered, laughing;
"although the length of time you kept me waiting and ringing might have
led me to suspect it. No, you are not late and it is not dinner-time.
I've come around to have another little chat with you before dinner,
that's all."
"Take this chair, old man," said Cosmo, as he threw another
hickory-stick on the fire. Then he lighted the gas and sat down by the
side of his friend.
"This chair is comfortable, for a fact," Stuyvesant declared,
stretching himself out luxuriously. "No wonder you went to sleep. What
did you dream of?--strange places you had seen in your travels or the
homely scenes of your native land."
Waynflete looked at his friend for a moment without answering the
question. He was startled as he recalled the extraordinary series of
adventures which had fallen to his lot since he had fixed his gaze on
the crystal ball. It seemed to him as though he had been whirled
through space and through time.
"I suppose every man is always the hero of his own dreams," he began,
doubtfully.
"Of course," his friend returned; "in sleep our natural and healthy
egotism is absolutely unrestrained. It doesn't make any matter where
the scene is laid or whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy, the
dreamer has always the centre of the stage, with the calcium light
turned full on him."
"That's just it," Waynflete went on; "this dream of mine makes me feel
as if I were an actor, and as if I had been playing many parts, one
after the other, in the swiftest succession. They are not familiar to
me, and yet I confess to a vague feeling of unoriginality. It is as
though I were a plagiarist of adventure--if that be a possible
supposition. I have just gone through these startling situations
myself, and yet I'm sure that they have all of them happened
before--although, perhaps, not to any one man. Indeed, no one man could
have had all these adventures of mine, because I see now that I have
been whisked through the centuries and across the hemispheres with a
suddenness possible only in dreams. Yet all my experiences seem somehow
second-hand, and not really my own."
"Picked up here and there--like your bric-a-brac?" suggested
Stuyvesant. "But what are these alluring adventures of yours that
stretched through the ages and across the continents?"
Then, knowing how fond his friend was of solving mysteries and how
proud he was of his skill in this art, Cosmo Waynflete narrated his
dream as it has been set down in these pages.
When he had made an end, Paul Stuyvesant's first remark was: "I'm sorry
I happened along just then and waked you up before you had time to get
married."
His second remark followed half a minute later.
"I see how it was," he said; "you were sitting in this chair and
looking at that crystal ball, which focussed the level rays of the
setting sun, I suppose? Then it is plain enough--you hypnotized
yourself!"
"I have heard that such a thing is possible," responded Cosmo."
"Possible?" Stuyvesant returned, "it is certain! But what is more
curious is the new way in which you combined your self-hypnotism with
crystal-gazing. You have heard of scrying, I suppose?"
"You mean the practice of looking into a drop of water or a crystal
ball or anything of that sort," said Cosmo, "and of seeing things in
it--of seeing people moving about?"
"That's just what I do mean," his friend returned. "And that's just
what you have been doing. You fixed your gaze on the ball, and so
hypnotized yourself; and then, in the intensity of your vision, you
were able to see figures in the crystal--with one of which visualized
emanations you immediately identified yourself. That's easy enough, I
think. But I don't see what suggested to you your separate experiences.
I recognize them, of course----"
"You recognize them?" cried Waynflete, in wonder.
"I can tell you where you borrowed every one of your adventures,"
Stuyvesant replied, "But what I'd like to know now is what suggested to
you just those particular characters and situations, and not any of the
many others also stored away in your subconsciousness."
So saying, he began to look about the room.
"My subconsciousness?" repeated Waynflete. "Have I ever been a samurai
in my subconsciousness?"
Paul Stuyvesant looked at Cosmo Waynflete for nearly a minute without
reply. Then all the answer he made was to say: "That's a queer
dressing-gown you have on."
"It is time I took it off," said the other, as he twisted himself out
of its clinging folds. "It is a beautiful specimen of weaving, isn't
it? I call it the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador, for although I
bought it in a curiosity-shop in Nuremberg, it was once, I really
believe, the slumber-robe of an Oriental envoy."
Stuyvesant took the silken garment from his friend's hand.
"Why did the Japanese ambassador sell you his dream-gown in a Nuremberg
curiosity-shop?" he asked.
"He didn't," Waynflete explained. "I never saw the ambassador, and
neither did the old German lady who kept the shop. She told me she
bought it from a Japanese acrobat who was out of an engagement and
desperately hard up. But she told me also that the acrobat had told her
that the garment had belonged to an ambassador who had given it to him
as a reward of his skill, and that he never would have parted with it
if he had not been dead-broke."
Stuyvesant held the robe up to the light and inspected the embroidery
on the skirt of it.
"Yes," he said, at last, "this would account for it, I suppose. This
bit here was probably meant to suggest 'the well where the head was
washed,'--see?"
"I see that those lines may be meant to represent the outline of a
spring of water, but I don't see what that has to do with my dream,"
Waynflete answered.
"Don't you?" Stuyvesant returned. "Then I'll show you. You had on this
silk garment embroidered here with an outline of the well in which was
washed the head of Kotsuke no Suke, the man whom the Forty-Seven Ronins
killed. You know the story?"
"I read it in Japan, but----" began Cosmo.
"You had that story stored away in your subconsciousness," interrupted
his friend. "And when you hypnotized yourself by peering into the
crystal ball, this embroidery it was which suggested to you to see
yourself as the hero of the tale--Oishi Kuranosuke, the chief of the
Forty-Seven Ronins, the faithful follower who avenged his master by
pretending to be vicious and dissipated--just like Brutus and
Lorenzaccio--until the enemy was off his guard and open to attack."
"I think I do recall the tale of the Forty-Seven Ronins, but only very
vaguely," said the hero of the dream. "For all I know I may have had
the adventure of Oishi Kuranosuke laid on the shelf somewhere in my
subconsciousness, as you want me to believe. But how about my Persian
dragon and my Iberian noblewoman?"
Paul Stuyvesant was examining the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador
with minute care. Suddenly he said, "Oh!" and then he looked up at
Cosmo Waynflete and asked: "What are those buttons? They seem to be old
coins."
"They are old coins," the other answered; "it was a fancy of mine to
utilize them on that Japanese dressing-gown. They are all different,
you see. The first is----"
"Persian, isn't it?" interrupted Stuyvesant.
"Yes," Waynflete explained, "it is a Persian daric. And the second is a
Spanish peso made at Potosi under Philip II. for use in America. And
the third is a York shilling, one of the coins in circulation here in
New York at the time of the Revolution--I got that one, in fact, from
the farmer who ploughed it up in a field at Tarrytown, near Sunnyside."
"Then there are three of your adventures accounted for, Cosmo, and
easily enough," Paul commented, with obvious satisfaction at his own
explanation. "Just as the embroidery on the silk here suggested to
you--after you had hypnotized yourself--that you were the chief of the
Forty-Seven Ronins, so this first coin here in turn suggested to you
that you were Rustem, the hero of the 'Epic of Kings.' You have read
the 'Shah-Nameh?'"
"I remember Firdausi's poem after a fashion only," Cosmo answered. "Was
not Rustem a Persian Hercules, so to speak?"
"That's it precisely," the other responded, "and he had seven labors to
perform; and you dreamed the third of them, the slaying of the grisly
dragon. For my own part, I think I should have preferred the fourth of
them, the meeting with the lovely enchantress; but that's neither here
nor there."
"It seems to me I do recollect something about that fight of Rustem and
the strange beast. The faithful horse's name was Rakush, wasn't it?"
asked Waynflete.
"If you can recollect the 'Shah-Nameh,'" Stuyvesant pursued, "no doubt
you can recall also Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Custom of the Country?'
That's where you got the midnight duel in Lisbon and the magnanimous
mother, you know."
"No, I didn't know," the other declared.
"Well, you did, for all that," Paul went on. "The situation is taken
from one in a drama of Calderon's, and it was much strengthened in the
taking. You may not now remember having read the play, but the incident
must have been familiar to you, or else your subconsciousness couldn't
have yielded it up to you so readily at the suggestion of the Spanish
coin, could it?"
"I did read a lot of Elizabethan drama in my senior year at college,"
admitted Cosmo, "and this piece of Beaumont and Fletcher's may have
been one of those I read; but I totally fail to recall now what it was
all about."
"You won't have the cheek to declare that you don't remember the
'Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' will you?" asked Stuyvesant. "Very obviously
it was the adventure of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman that
the York shilling suggested to you."
"I'll admit that I do recollect Irving's story now," the other
confessed.
"So the embroidery on the dream-gown gives the first of your strange
situations; and the three others were suggested by the coins you have
been using as buttons," said Paul Stuyvesant. "There is only one thing
now that puzzles me: that is the country church and the noon wedding
and the beautiful bride."
And with that he turned over the folds of the silken garment that hung
over his arm.
Cosmo Waynflete hesitated a moment and a blush mantled his cheek. Then
he looked his friend in the face and said: "I think I can account for
my dreaming about her--I can account for that easily enough."
"So can I," said Paul Stuyvesant, as he held up the photograph of a
lovely American girl that he had just found in the pocket of the
dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador.
(1896.)