Prostrate with emotion and fatigue, the tarantella still jingling in
my ears, and that haunting, beloved face, with its ineffable smile,
still printed on the retina of my closed eyes, I fell asleep.
And then I dreamed a dream, and the first phase of my real, inner life
began!
All the events of the day, distorted and exaggerated and jumbled
together after the usual manner of dreams, wove themselves into a kind
of nightmare and oppression. I was on my way to my old abode;
everything that I met or saw was grotesque and impossible, yet had now
the strange, vague charm of association and reminiscence, now the
distressing sense of change and desolation.
As I got near to the avenue gate, instead of the school on my left
there was a prison; and at the door a little thick-set jailer, three
feet high and much deformed, and a little deformed jaileress no bigger
than himself, were cunningly watching me out of the corners of their
eyes, and toothlessly smiling. Presently they began to waltz together
to an old familiar tune, with their enormous keys dangling at their
sides; and they looked so funny that I laughed and applauded. But soon
I perceived that their crooked faces were not really funny; indeed,
they were fatal and terrible in the extreme, and I was soon conscious
that these deadly dwarfs were trying to waltz between me and the
avenue gate for which I was bound--to cut me off, that they might run
me into the prison, where it was their custom to hang people of a
Monday morning.
In an agony of terror I made a rush for the avenue gate, and there
stood the Duchess of Towers, with mild surprise in her eyes and a kind
smile--a heavenly vision of strength and reality.
"You are not dreaming true!" she said. "Don't be afraid--those little
people don't exist! Give me your hand and come in here."
And as I did so she waved the troglodytes away, and they vanished; and
I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else--some
strange thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woke
up to.
For at the touch of her hand my consciousness, my sense of being I,
myself, which hitherto in my dream (as in all previous dreams up to
then) had been only partial, intermittent, and vague, suddenly blazed
into full, consistent, practical activity--just as it is in life, when
one is well awake and much interested in what is going on; only with
perceptions far keener and more alert.
I knew perfectly who I was and what I was, and remembered all the
events of the previous day. I was conscious that my real body,
undressed and in bed, now lay fast asleep in a small room on the
fourth floor of an _hotel garni_ in the Rue de la Michodiere. I knew
this perfectly; and yet here was my body too, just as substantial,
with all my clothes on; my boots rather dusty, my shirt collar damp
with the heat, for it was hot. With my disengaged hand I felt in my
trousers pocket; there were my London latch-key, my purse, my
penknife; my handkerchief in the breast pocket of my coat, and in its
tail pockets my gloves and pipe-case, and the little water-color box I
had bought that morning. I looked at my watch; it was going, and
marked eleven. I pinched myself, I coughed, I did all one usually does
under the pressure of some immense surprise, to assure myself that I
was awake; and I _was_, and yet here I stood, actually hand in hand
with a lady to whom I had never been introduced (and who seemed much
tickled at my confusion); and staring now at her, now at my old
school.
The prison had tumbled down like a house of cards, and lo! in its
place was M. Saindou's _maison d'education_, just as it had been of
old. I even recognized on the yellow wall the stamp of a hand in dry
mud, made fifteen years ago by a day boy called Parisot, who had
fallen down in the gutter close by, and thus left his mark on getting
up again; and it had remained there for months, till it had been
whitewashed away in the holidays. Here it was anew, after fifteen
years.
The swallows were flying and twittering. A yellow omnibus was drawn up
to the gates of the school; the horses stamped and neighed, and bit
each other, as French horses always did in those days. The driver
swore at them perfunctorily.
A crowd was looking on--le Pere et la Mere Francois, Madame Liard the
grocer's wife, and other people, whom I remembered at once with
delight. Just in front of us a small boy and girl were looking on,
like the rest, and I recognized the back and the cropped head and thin
legs of Mimsey Seraskier.
A barrel organ was playing a pretty tune I knew quite well, and had
forgotten.
The school gates opened, and M. Saindou, proud and full of
self-importance (as he always was), and half a dozen boys whose faces
and names were quite familiar to me, in smart white trousers and
shining boots, and silken white bands round their left arms, got into
the omnibus, and were driven away in a glorified manner--as it
seemed--to heaven in a golden chariot. It was beautiful to see and
hear.
I was still holding the duchess's hand, and felt the warmth of it
through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was
in Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my
periphery had been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine--a
most powerful and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my
impenetrable armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and
charity and loving-kindness had found it out.
"Now you're dreaming true," she said. "Where are those boys going?"
"To church, to make their _premiere communion_," I replied.
"That's right. You're dreaming true because I've got you by the hand.
Do you know that tune?"
I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past, and I
said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up
deliciously.
"Quite right--quite!" she exclaimed. "How odd that you should know
them! How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr.
Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect?"