I should like to give the story of Alford's experiences just as Wanhope
told it, sitting with us before the glowing hearth in the Turkish room,
one night after the other diners at our club had gone away to digest
their dinners at the theatre, or in their bachelor apartments up-town,
or on the late trains which they were taking north, south, and west; or
had hurried back to their offices to spend the time stolen from rest in
overwork for which their famished nerves would duly revenge themselves.
It was undoubtedly overwork which preceded Alford's experiences if it
did not cause them, for he was pretty well broken from it when he took
himself off in the early summer, to put the pieces together as best he
could by the seaside. But this was a fact which Wanhope was not obliged
to note to us, and there were certain other commonplaces of our
knowledge of Alford which he could omit without omitting anything
essential to our understanding of the facts which he dealt with so
delicately, so electly, almost affectionately, coaxing each point into
the fittest light, and then lifting his phrase from it, and letting it
stand alone in our consciousness. I remember particularly how he touched
upon the love-affair which was supposed to have so much to do with
Alford's break-up, and how he dismissed it to its proper place in the
story. As he talked on, with scarcely an interruption either from the
eager credulity of Rulledge or the doubt of Minver, I heard with a
sensuous comfort--I can use no other word--the far-off click of the
dishes in the club kitchen, putting away till next day, with the musical
murmur of a smitten glass or the jingle of a dropped spoon. But if I
should try to render his words, I should spoil their impression in the
vain attempt, and I feel that it is best to give the story as best I can
in words of my own, so far from responsive to the requisitions of the
occult incident.
The first intimation Alford had of the strange effect, which from first
to last was rather an obsession than a possession of his, was after a
morning of idle satisfaction spent in watching the target practice from
the fort in the neighborhood of the little fishing-village where he was
spending the summer. The target was two or three miles out in the open
water beyond the harbor, and he found his pleasure in watching the smoke
of the gun for that discrete interval before the report reached him, and
then for that somewhat longer interval before he saw the magnificent
splash of the shot which, as it plunged into the sea, sent a fan-shaped
fountain thirty or forty feet into the air. He did not know and he did
not care whether the target was ever hit or not. That fact was no part
of his concern. His affair was to watch the burst of smoke from the fort
and then to watch the upward gush of water, almost as light and vaporous
to the eye, where the ball struck. He did not miss one of the shots
fired during the forenoon, and when he met the other people who sat down
with him at the midday dinner in the hotel, his talk with them was
naturally of the morning's practice. They one and all declared it a
great nuisance, and said that it had shattered their nerves terribly,
which was not perhaps so strange, since they were all women. But when
they asked him in his quality of nervous wreck whether he had not
suffered from the prolonged and repeated explosions, too, he found
himself able to say no, that he had enjoyed every moment of the firing.
He added that he did not believe he had even noticed the noise after the
first shot, he was so wholly taken with the beauty of the fountain-burst
from the sea which followed; and as he spoke the fan-like spray rose and
expanded itself before his eyes, quite blotting out the visage of a
young widow across the table. In his swift recognition of the fact and
his reflection upon it, he realized that the effect was quite as if he
had been looking at some intense light, almost as if he had been looking
at the sun, and that the illusion which had blotted out the agreeable
reality opposite was of the quality of those flying shapes which repeat
themselves here, there, and everywhere that one looks, after 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 no reason that he ever cared to inquire; but as it slowly
moved forward again he was reminded of something he had seen one night
in going to New York just before the train drew into Springfield. It had
then made such another apparently reasonless stop; but before it resumed
its course Alford saw from his window a group of trainmen, and his own
Pullman conductor with his lantern on his arm, bending over the figure
of a man defined in his dark clothing against the snow of the bank where
he lay propped. His face was waxen white, and Alford noted how
particularly black the mustache looked traversing the pallid visage. He
never knew whether the man was killed or merely stunned; you learn
nothing with certainty of such things on trains; but now, as he thought
of the incident, its eidolon showed itself outside of his mind, and
followed him in every detail, even to a snowy stretch of the embankment,
until the increasing speed of the train seemed to sweep it back out of
sight.
Alford turned his eyes to the interior of the smoker, which, except for
two or three dozing commuters and a noisy euchre-party, had been empty
of everything but the fumes and stale odors of tobacco, and found it
swarming with visions, the eidolons of everything he remembered from his
past life. Whatever had once strongly impressed itself upon his nerves
was reported there again as instantly as he thought of it. It was
largely a whirling chaos, a kaleidoscopic jumble of facts; but from time
to time some more memorable and important experience visualized itself
alone. Such was the death-bed of the little sister whom he had been
wakened, a child, to see going to heaven, as they told him. Such was the
pathetic, foolish face of the girl whom long ago he had made believe he
cared for, and then had abruptly broken with: he saw again, with
heartache, her silly, tender amaze when he said he was going away. Such
was the look of mute astonishment, of gentle reproach, in the eyes of
the friend, now long dead, whom in a moment of insensate fury he had
struck on the mouth, and who put his hand to his bleeding lips as he
bent that gaze of wonder and bewilderment upon him. But it was not alone
the dreadful impressions that reported themselves. There were others, as
vivid, which came back in the original joyousness: the face of his
mother looking up at him from the crowd on a day of college triumph when
he was delivering the valedictory of his class; the collective gayety of
the whole table on a particularly delightful evening at his dining-club;
his own image in the glass as he caught sight of it on coming home
accepted by the woman who afterwards jilted him; the transport which
lighted up his father's visage when he stepped ashore from the vessel
which had been rumored lost, and he could be verified by the senses as
still alive; the comical, bashful ecstasy of the good fellow, his
ancient chum, in telling him he had had a son born the night before, and
the mother was doing well, and how he laughed and danced, and skipped
into the air.
The smoker was full of these eidolons and of others which came and went
with constant vicissitude. But what was of a greater weirdness than
seeing them within it was seeing them without in that reflection of the
interior which travelled with it through the summer night, and repeated
it, now dimly, now brilliantly, in every detail. Alford sat in a daze,
with a smile which he was aware of, fixed and stiff as if in plaster, on
his face, and with his gaze bent on this or that eidolon, and then on
all of them together. He was not so much afraid of them as of being
noticed by the other passengers in the smoker, to whom he knew he might
look very queer. He said to himself that he was making the whole thing,
but the very subjectivity was what filled him with a deep and hopeless
dread. At last the train ceased its long leaping through the dark, and
with its coming to a stand the whole illusion vanished. He heard a gay
voice which he knew bidding some one good-bye who was getting into the
car just back of the smoker, and as he descended to the platform he
almost walked into the arms of Mrs. Yarrow.
"Why, Mr. Alford! We had given you up. We thought you wouldn't come back
till to-morrow--or perhaps ever. What in the world will you do for
supper? The kitchen fires were out ages ago!"
In the light of the station electrics she beamed upon him, and he felt
glad at heart, as if he had been saved from something, a mortal danger
or a threatened shame. But he could not speak at once; his teeth closed
with tetanic force upon each other. Later, as they walked to the hotel,
through the warm, soft night in which the south wind was roaming the
starless heavens for rain, he found his voice, and although he felt that
he was speaking unnaturally, he made out to answer the lively questions
with which she pelted him too thickly to expect them to be answered
severally. She told him all the news of the day, and when she began on
yesterday's news she checked herself with a laugh and said she had
forgotten that he had only been gone since morning. "But now," she said,
"you see how you've been missed--how _any_ man must be missed in a hotel
full of women."
She took charge of him when they got to the house, and said if he would
go boldly into the dining-room, where they detected, as they approached,
one lamp scantly shining from the else darkened windows, she would beard
the lioness in her den, by which she meant the cook in the kitchen, and
see what she could get him for supper. Apparently she could get nothing
warm, for when a reluctant waitress appeared it was with such a chilly
refection on her tray that Alford, though he was not very hungry,
returned from interrogating the obscurity for eidolons, and shivered at
it. At the same time the swing-door of the long, dim room opened to
admit a gush of the outer radiance on which Mrs. Yarrow drifted in with
a chafing-dish in one hand and a tea-basket in the other. She floated
tiltingly towards him like, he thought, a pretty little ship, and sent a
cheery hail before.
"I've been trying to get somebody to join you at a premature
Welsh-rarebit and a belated cup of tea, but I can't tear one of the
tabbies from their cards or the kittens from their gambols in the
amusement-hall in the basement. Do you mind so very much having it
alone? Because you'll have to, whether you do or not. Unless you call me
company, when I'm merely cook."
She put her utensils on the table beside the forbidding tray the
waitress had left, and helped lift herself by pressing one hand on the
top of a chair towards the electric, which she flashed up to keep the
dismal lamp in countenance. Alford let her do it. He durst not, he
felt, stir from his place, lest any movement should summon back the
eidolons; and now in the sudden glare of light he shyly, slyly searched
the room for them. Not one, fair or foul, showed itself, and slowly he
felt a great weight lifting from his heart. In its place there sprang up
a joyous gratitude towards Mrs. Yarrow, who had saved him from them,
from himself. An inexpressible tenderness filled his breast; the tears
rose to his eyes; a soft glow enveloped his whole being, a warmth of
hope, a freshness of life renewed, encompassed him. He wished to take
her in his arms, to tell her how he loved her; and as she bustled about,
lighting the lamp of her chafing-dish, and kindling the little
spirit-stove she had brought with her to make tea, he let his gaze dwell
upon every pose, every motion of her with a glad hunger in which no
smallest detail was lost. He now believed that without her he must die,
without her he could not wish to live.
"Jove," Rulledge broke in at this point of Wanhope's story, which I am
telling again so badly, "I think Alford was in luck."
Minver gave a harsh cackle. "The only thing Rulledge finds fault with in
this club is 'the lack of woman's nursing and the lack of woman's
tears.' Nothing is wanting to his enjoyment of his victuals but the fact
that they are not served by a neat-handed Phyllis, like Alford's."
Rulledge glanced towards Wanhope, and innocently inquired, "Was that her
first name?"
Minver burst into a scream, and Rulledge looked red and silly for having
given himself away; but he made an excursion to the buffet outside, and
returned with a sandwich with which he supported himself stolidly under
Minver's derision, until Wanhope came to his relief by resuming his
story, or rather his study, of Alford's strange experience.
Mrs. Yarrow first gave Alford his tea, as being of a prompter brew than
the rarebit, but she was very quick and apt with that, too; and pretty
soon she leaned forward, and in the glow from the lamp under the
chafing-dish, which spiritualized her charming face with its thin
radiance, puffed the flame out with her pouted lips, and drew back with
a long-sighed "There! That will make you see your grandmother, if
anything will."
"My grandmother?" Alford repeated.
"Yes. Wouldn't you like to?" Mrs.. Yarrow asked, pouring the thick
composition over the toast (rescued stone-cold from the frigid tray) on
Alford's plate. "I'm sure I should like to see mine--dear old gran! Not
that I ever saw her--either of her--or should know how she looked. Did
you ever see yours--either of her?" she pursued, impulsively.
"Oh yes," Alford answered, looking intently at her, but with so little
speculation in the eyes he glared so with that he knew her to be uneasy
under them.
She laughed a little, and stayed her hand on the bail of the teapot.
"Which of her?"
"Oh, both!"
"And--and--did she look so much like _me_?" she said, with an added
laugh, that he perceived had an hysterical note in it. "You're letting
your rarebit get cold!"
He laughed himself, now, a great laugh of relaxation, of relief. "Not
the least in the world! She was not exactly a phantom of delight."
"Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford. Now, it's your tea's getting cold."
They laughed together, and he gave himself to his victual with a relish
that she visibly enjoyed. When that question of his grandmother had been
pushed he thought of an awful experience of his childhood, which left on
his infant mind an indelible impression, a scar, to remain from the
original wound forever. He had been caught in a lie, the first he could
remember, but by no means the last, by many immemorable thousands. His
poor little wickedness had impugned the veracity of both these terrible
old ladies, who, habitually at odds with each other, now united, for
once, against him. He could always see himself, a mean little
blubbering-faced rascal, stealing guilty looks of imploring at their
faces, set unmercifully against him, one in sorrow and one in anger,
requiring his mother to whip him, and insisting till he was led, loudly
roaring, into the parlor, and there made a liar of for all time, so far
as fear could do it.
When Mrs. Yarrow asked if he had ever seen his grandmother he expected
instantly to see her, in duplicate, and as a sole refuge, but with
little hope that it would save him, he kept his eyes fast on hers, and
to his unspeakable joy it did avail. No other face, of sorrow or of
anger, rose between them. For the time his thought was quit of its
consequence; no eidolon outwardly repeated his inward vision. A warm
gush of gratitude seemed to burst from his heart, and to bathe his whole
being, and then to flow in a tide of ineffable tenderness towards Mrs.
Yarrow, and involve her and bear them together heavenward. It was not
passion, it was not love, he perceived well enough; it was the utterance
of a vital conviction that she had saved him from an overwhelming
subjective horror, and that in her sweet objectivity there was a
security and peace to be found nowhere else.
He greedily ate every atom of his rarebit, he absorbed every drop of
the moisture in the teapot, so that when she shook it and shook it, and
then tried to pour something from it, there was no slightest dribble at
the spout. But they lingered, talking and laughing, and perhaps they
might never have left the place if the hard handmaiden who had brought
the tea-tray had not first tried putting her head in at the swing-door
from the kitchen, and then, later, come boldly in and taken the tray
away.
Mrs. Yarrow waited self-respectfully for her disappearance, and then she
said, "I'm afraid that was a hint, Mr. Alford."
"It seemed like one," he owned.
They went out together, gayly chatting, but she would not encourage the
movement he made towards the veranda. She remained firmly attached to
the newel-post of the stairs, and at the first chance he gave her she
said good-night and bounded lightly upward. At the turn of the stairs
she stopped and looked laughing down at him over the rail. "I hope you
won't see your grandmother."
"Oh, not a bit of it," he called back. He felt that he failed to give
his reply the quality of epigram, but he was not unhappy in his failure.
Many light-hearted days followed this joyous evening. No eidolons
haunted Alford's horizon, perhaps because Mrs. Yarrow filled his whole
heaven. She was very constantly with him, guiding his wavering steps up
the hill of recovery, which he climbed with more and more activity, and
keeping him company in those valleys of relapse into which he now and
then fell back from the difficult steeps. It came to be tacitly, or at
least passively, conceded by the other ladies that she had somehow
earned the exclusive right to what had once been the common charge; or
that if one of their number had a claim to keep Mr. Alford from killing
himself by all sorts of imprudences, which in his case amounted to
impieties, it was certainly Mrs. Yarrow. They did not put this in terms,
but they felt it and acted it.
She was all the safer guardian for a delicate invalid because she
loathed manly sports so entirely that she did not even pretend to like
them, as most women, poor things, think themselves obliged to do. In her
hands there was no danger that he would be tempted to excesses in golf.
She was really afraid of all boats, but she was willing to go out with
him in the sail-boat of a superannuated skipper, because to sit talking
in the stern and stoop for the vagaries of the boom in tacking was such
good exercise. She would join him in fishing from the rotting pier, but
with no certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she
caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things.
When they went a walk together, her notion of a healthful tramp was to
find a nice place among the sweet-fern or the pine-needles, and sit down
in it and talk, or make a lap, to which he could bring the berries he
gathered for her to arrange in the shallow leaf-trays she pinned
together with twigs. She really preferred a rocking-chair on the veranda
to anything else; but if he wished to go to those other excesses, she
would go with him, to keep him out of mischief.
There could be only one credible reading of the situation, but Alford
let the summer pass in this pleasant dreaming without waking up till too
late to the pleasanter reality. It will seem strange enough, but it is
true, that it was no part of his dream to fancy that Mrs. Yarrow was in
love with him. He knew very well, long before the end, that he was in
love with her; but, remaining in the dark otherwise, he considered only
himself in forbearing verbally to make love to her.
"Well!" Rulledge snarled at this point, "he _was_ a chump."
Wanhope at the moment opposed nothing directly to the censure, but said
that something pathetically reproachful in Mrs. Yarrow's smiling looks
penetrated to Alford as she nodded gayly from the car window to him in
the little group which had assembled to see her off at the station when
she left, by no means the first of their happy hotel circle to go.
"Somebody," Rulledge burst out again, "ought to have kicked him."
"What's become," Minver asked, "of all the dear maids and widows that
you've failed to marry at the end of each summer, Rulledge?"
The satire involved flattery so sweet that Rulledge could not perhaps
wish to make any retort. He frowned sternly, and said, with a face
averted from Minver: "Go on, Wanhope!"
Wanhope here permitted himself a philosophical excursion in which I will
not accompany him. It was apparently to prepare us for the dramatic fact
which followed, and which I suppose he was trying rather to work away
from than work up to. It included some facts which he had failed to
touch on before, and which led to a discussion very interesting in
itself, but of a range too great for the limits I am trying to keep
here. It seems that Alford had been stayed from declaring his love not
only because he doubted of its nature, but also because he questioned
whether a man in his broken health had any right to offer himself to a
woman, and because from a yet finer scruple he hesitated in his poverty
to ask the hand of a rich woman. On the first point, we were pretty well
agreed, but on the second we divided again, especially Rulledge and
Minver, who held, the one, that his hesitation did Alford honor, and
quite relieved him from the imputation of being a chump; and the other
that he was an ass to keep quiet for any such silly reason. Minver
contended that every woman had a right, whether rich or poor, to the man
who loved her; and, moreover, there were now so many rich women that, if
they were not allowed to marry poor men, their chances of marriage were
indefinitely reduced. What better could a widow do with the money she
had inherited from a husband she probably did not love than give it to a
man like Alford--or to an ass like Alford, Minver corrected himself.
His _reductio ad absurdum_ allowed Wanhope to resume with a laugh, and
say that Alford waited at the station in the singleness to which the
tactful dispersion of the others had left him, and watched the train
rapidly dwindle in the perspective, till an abrupt turn of the road
carried it out of sight. Then he lifted his eyes with a long sigh, and
looked round. Everywhere he saw Mrs. Yarrow's smiling face with that
inner pathos. It swarmed upon him from all points; and wherever he
turned it repeated itself in the distances like that succession of faces
you see when you stand between two mirrors.
It was not merely a lapse from his lately hopeful state with Alford, it
was a collapse. The man withered and dwindled away, till he felt that he
must audibly rattle in his clothes as he walked by people. He did not
walk much. Mostly he remained shrunken in the arm-chair where he used to
sit beside Mrs. Yarrow's rocker, and the ladies, the older and the
older-fashioned, who were "sticking it out" at the hotel till it should
close on the 15th of September, observed him, some compassionately,
some censoriously, but all in the same conviction.
"It's plain to be seen what ails Mr. Alford, _now_."
"Well, I guess it _is_."
"_I_ guess so."
"I _guess_ it is."
"Seems kind of heartless, her going and leaving him so."
"Like a sick kitten!"
"Well, I should say as _much_."
"Your eyes bother you, Mr. Alford?" one of them chanted, breaking from
their discussion of him to appeal directly to him. He was rubbing his
eyes, to relieve himself for the moment from the intolerable affliction
of those swarming eidolons, which, whenever he thought of this thing or
that, thickened about him. They now no longer displaced one another, but
those which came first remained fadedly beside or behind the fresher
appearances, like the earlier rainbow which loses depth and color when a
later arch defines itself.
"Yes," he said, glad of the subterfuge. "They annoy me a good deal of
late."
"You want to get fitted for a good pair of glasses. I kept letting it
go, when I first began to get old-sighted."
Another lady came to Alford's rescue. "I guess Mr. Alford has no need to
get fitted for old sight yet a while. You got little spidery
things--specks and dots--in your eyes?"
"Yes--multitudes," he said, hopelessly.
"Well, I'll tell you what: you want to build up. That was the way with
me, and the oculist said it was from getting all run down. I built up,
and the first thing I knew my sight was as clear as a bell. You want to
build up."
"You want to go to the mountains," a third interposed. "That's where
Mrs. Yarrow's gone, and I guess it'll do her more good than sticking it
out here would ever have done."
Alford would have been glad enough to go to the mountains, but with
those illusions hovering closer and closer about him, he had no longer
the courage, the strength. He had barely enough of either to get away to
Boston. He found his doctor this time, after winning and losing the
wager he made himself that he would not have returned to town yet, and
the good-fortune was almost too much for his shaken nerves. The cordial
of his friend's greeting--they had been chums at Harvard--completed his
overthrow. As he sank upon the professional sofa, where so many other
cases had been diagnosticated, he broke into tears. "Hello, old fellow!"
the doctor said, encouragingly, and more tenderly than he would have
dealt with some women. "What's up?"
"Jim," Alford found voice to say, "I'm afraid I'm losing my mind."
The doctor smiled provisionally. "Well, that's _one_ of the signs you're
not. Can you say how?"
"Oh yes. In a minute," Alford sobbed, and when he had got the better of
himself he told his friend the whole story. In the direct examination he
suppressed Mrs. Yarrow's part, but when the doctor, who had listened
with smiling seriousness, began to cross-examine him with the question,
"And you don't remember that any outside influence affected the
recurrence of the illusions, or did anything to prevent it?" Alford
answered promptly: "Oh yes. There was a woman who did."
"A woman? What sort of a woman?"
Alford told.
"That is very curious," the doctor said. "I know a man who used to have
a distressing dream. He broke it up by telling his wife about it every
morning after he had dreamt it."
"Unluckily, she isn't my wife," Alford said, gloomily.
"But when she was with you, you got rid of the illusions?"
"At first, I used to see hers; then I stopped seeing any."
"Did you ever tell her of them?"
"No; I didn't."
"Never tell anybody?"
"No one but you."
"And do you see them now?"
"No."
"Do you think, because you've told me of them?"
"It seems so."
The doctor was silent for a marked space. Then he asked, smiling: "Well,
why not?"
"Why not what?"
"Tell your wife."
"How, my wife?"
"By marriage."