The thing happened in America; that is one reason for believing it.
Another land would absorb it, or at least give a background to shadow
over its likelihood, the scenery and atmosphere to lend an evanescent
credibility, changing it in time to a mere legend, a tale told out of
the hazy distance. But in America it obtrudes; it stares eternally on in
all its stark unforgetfulness, absorbing its background, constantly
rescuing itself from legend by turning guesswork and theory into facts,
till it appears bare, irremediable, and complete,--witnessed at high
noon, and in New Jersey of all places, flat, unillusive, and American.
The thing was as clear a fact in its unsubtle, shadowless mystery as was
he--that is, as was the shell and husk of him lying there in the next
room after I had watched the life and the person drawn out, leaving only
mere barren lees to show what had gone. Hours it lay there to prove the
thing, to settle it in my mind, to let me believe eternally in it. Then
we buried it deep under the big pile of scree on my hill. As I write I
can see the white stones from the window.
It is not all guesswork to begin with; indeed it is not guesswork at any
moment if the end is always in view, and we had to begin with the end. I
tell you it was as plain as daylight. People saw him, heard him talk;
saw him get off the train at Newark to mail my letter--this
one--addressed to my engineers in Trenton; heard him say, "Promised
Crenshaw to post this before reaching the city; guess this is my last
chance to keep it." It is a little thing that counts; you can't get by
that; it alone is final; but there were a dozen more. Ezekiel saw him on
the platform hunting for the right box for west-bound mail, and saw him
post the letter after considerable trouble. When I heard that, I yielded
to the incredulous so far as to telephone to Trenton, asking if the firm
had received it. I did that, though I held the letter in my hand at the
time, and knew it had never left this house. Ezekiel was sure that he
mailed the letter, that it went from his hand into the box. He was
watching carefully because just then the train began to move; but
Auber, leisurely ignoring this, appeared to be comparing his watch with
the station clock, and finally looked up at the moving train as if in
disapproval. Ezekiel lost sight of him in the crowd, and then, at the
same moment, he was taking his seat opposite again.
Ezekiel said, "I thought you were going to miss the train,
characteristically, for the sake of setting your watch." And Auber
replied, rather queerly: "Great God! It's impossible now; I can see
that." Ezekiel did not know what he meant, but remembered it afterward
when we were talking the whole thing over in this room.
Besides Ezekiel, there were four men who saw him after the train left
Newark; and the porter remembered holding the vestibule door and
trap-platform open for some one as the train pulled out.
Then there is my coachman who drove him to the train, here in Barrelton,
who had his tip of a silver dollar from him. Put it in his pocket--and
then--lost it, of course. You see, there's the most conclusive link in
the chain. If William had produced his dollar, or my engineer had
received that letter, the whole thing would fall through--jugglery and
imposition, mere ordinary faking. The hypnotic theory might still hold,
but it must stretch fifty miles to an improbable source in a man who is,
at the time, dying strangely on my bed.
Of course, there is no use asking if any one on the train touched
him,--not only saw and heard him, but shook hands with him, let us say.
It is the same story as William's, or not so good. Ezekiel is sure that
he shook hands when Auber first boarded the train; Judson is sure that
he did so when he stepped across the aisle to ask about me. Yet, I tell
you that would have made no difference; let him have been as impalpable
as the very air of the car, those men would have felt the flesh, just as
William felt his silver dollar. "Fulfilment of sure expectation on the
ground of countless identical experiences," your psychologist would
explain. Illusion and fact were indistinguishable; and though I happened
to watch the facts, and the others the illusion, their testimony is as
good as mine.
There is the testimony of four men that, when the smash came, they saw
him thrown from his seat, head first, into the window-jamb, and lie for
a moment half through the shattered pane. Just before this, he had taken
out his watch. Its familiar picture-face, and also its enamelled hands
exactly together at twelve o'clock, had caught Ezekiel's eye. He said
that Auber looked at the watch, and then leaned forward as if to call
attention to the view from the window. It was then that the smash came.
When Ezekiel and some others, who were only thrown to the floor, looked
up again, Auber was gone.
You see, the time is identical; we calculated it exactly, for the train
left Newark on time and takes just six minutes to reach the bridge; that
is, at exactly noon. When I noticed the hour here, it was, perhaps, a
few minutes later, and that is not a difference in timepieces, for it
was by his own watch on the bedside table. No one saw him on the train
or on the bridge after that. It seems conclusive, just that alone. They
finally decided that he must have fallen from the window and somehow
rolled from the sleepers into the river.
Actually no one else in the Pullman was badly hurt. The men picked
themselves up and rushed to the doors of the car, or climbed out of the
windows. Ezekiel put his head through the shattered pane which Auber had
struck. Men were running toward the car ahead, from which screams came.
In the excitement of rescuing those from the telescoped coach, Auber was
forgotten; but when it was all over, Ezekiel and Judson looked
everywhere for him, till they assured themselves that he was not on the
bridge.
At all events, that is how he came to be reported among "The
Missing,--known by friends to have been on the train,--Auber Hurn, the
artist."
During that night, when Ezekiel and Judson had come down in response to
my telegrams, we sat here, talking endlessly, guessing, relating, slowly
developing the theory of the thing, delving into our minds for memories
of him, gradually getting below the facts, gradually working back to
them, examining the connections, completing the chain. The main fact,
the culmination, had to be the soulless shell of him, lying there in the
next room. Our theory began far away from that, in what he used to call
"white sleep," and more especially in a curious occasional association
between the dreams of this sleep and the landscape pictures that he
painted. What impressed you most as he recounted one of those
half-conscious dream concoctions, that he named "white-sleep fancies,"
was the remarkable scenery, the setting of the dream. This was in
character with his pictures, for about them both you felt that
peculiarly pervasive "sense of place," for which his landscape is of
course famous, and which in these dreams was emphasized through a subtle
ominousness of atmosphere. You perceived what the place stood for, its
sensational elements, and you began vaguely to imagine the kind of event
for which it would form a suitable background. In his pictures the
element was a sort of dream-infusion, as though in each scene the secret
goddess, the Naiad of the spot, must have stood close to him as he
painted, and thrilled him to understanding at her impalpable touch.
Whatever the exact nature of these creative intuitions, there was
between his art and his dreams a lurking connection, out of which, as we
believed, finally grew his strange faculty for seeing beyond the scene,
an intuition for certain events associated with what we called "an
ominous locality."
This faculty began to distinguish itself from mere psychical fancy
through a curious contact of one of Auber's dreams with his actual
experience.
The dream, which came at irregular intervals during a number of years,
began with a sense of color, a glare to dazzle the eyes, till, as Auber
insisted, he awaked and saw the sunset glow over a stretch of forest. He
was on a hillside field, spotted with daisies and clumps of tall grass.
On one side a stone wall, half hidden by the grass and by a sumac hedge
in full bloom, curved over the sky-line. All this was exactly
expressible by a gesture, and when he reached the bottom of the field he
looked back for a long time, and made the gesture appreciatively. It was
at this point that he always recognized the recurring dream; but he
could never remember how it was going to end. Then he entered the wood
on a grassy path, and for a long time the tall tasselled grasses brushed
through his fingers as he walked. Suddenly it grew dark, and feeling
that "it would be folly to continue," he tried hard to remember the
point of the dream. Just as he seemed to recollect it, the sound of
running water came to him, as from a ravine, and he knew that "he could
not escape." The low sound of running water,--the little lonely gurgle
of a deep-wood brook, all but lost in the loam and brush of the silent
forest,--why should he feel an incomprehensible distaste for the place?
He tried feverishly to recollect the outcome of the dream, but all
memory of it had fled. Nor could he bring himself to continue on the
path; when he tried to take another step his leg dangled uselessly in
front, his foot beating flimsily on the ground till he brought it back
beside the other. The longer he listened to the sound of the running
water, the stronger grew his aversion for the place. This continued
indefinitely, till he awoke.
You perceived the vague sense of "ominous locality" developed out of the
simplest details. There is a recognizable introduction, the field, the
stone wall, the grass striking his fingers; but there is no ending,
nothing happens; the dream-spell at last dissolves, and the sleeper
wakes. His aversion to the sound of the brook can, therefore, come from
no conscious knowledge of a portending catastrophe in the dream. It was
always Auber's fancy that the dream would really end in a catastrophe,
which, though the mind proper continue in ignorance, casts its ominous
shadow through the subconsciousness upon the surroundings of the event.
It was also a fanciful idea of his that dreams in general imply a
subconscious state coexisting constantly with the actual realm of
thought, but penetrated by our consciousness only when the will is
least active, or during sleep. With ordinary mortals sleep and
consciousness are so nearly incompatible that the notion of actual
mental achievement during sleep is unthought of. Dreams are allowed to
run an absurd riot through the brain, disturbing physical rest. The
remedy for this universal ailment and waste of time was to be found in
"white sleep," a bit of Indian mysticism, purporting to accomplish a
partial detachment of mind and body, so that the will, which is always
the expression of the link between these two, is, for the time,
dissolved. The body rests, but the unfettered mind enters upon a
"will-less state of pure seeing," where dreams no longer remain the
meaningless fantasies of blind sleep, but become luminous with idea and
sequence. With the body thus left behind, the intellect rises to the
zenith of perception, where the blue veil of earthly knowledge is
pierced and transcended.
How often had we heard Auber talk in his fantastically learned fashion,
with an amused seriousness lighting up his face. At what point he began
to see something more than amusement in his dreams and theories, I never
knew; but the serious beginning of the thing took shape in an incident
which not even the most fervent theorist could have created for the
sake of a theory.
It was up among the little knobby hills to the north of my farm. We were
as usual sketching, and Auber had been going on all the afternoon about
the mournful scenery, talking of nothing but browns, and grays, and
"mountain melancholy." He had a way of stringing out a ceaseless jargon
while he worked,--an irritating trick caught in the Paris studios. At
the end of the afternoon, he held up a remarkable sketch, suggesting the
color scheme for a picture in the atmosphere of oncoming dusk--a bit of
path over the hill toward the sun.
"You have struck it most certainly," I said. "Be wary of finishing that;
it is strangely suggestive as it is."
He nodded; and then, as we packed up, he said, "Do you know, I have felt
vaguely intimate with this spot, as if I had been here before, as if I
were painting a reminiscence." I remarked tritely on the commonness of
this feeling.
At the bottom of a hillside meadow I was hunting for the entrance of a
path into a patch of woods. Auber, instead of helping me, kept gazing
back at the fading light while he made random observations on the nature
of the sky-line,--one of his cant hobbies. "See how crudely the
character of everything is defined up there against the sky," I heard
him say, while I continued to search for the path. "Now even a sheep or
a cow, or an inanimate thing, like that stone wall, for instance,--see
how its character as a wall comes out as it sweeps over the top." At
this moment, a little drop of surprise in his voice made me look around.
He was walking backwards, one arm extended toward the hill in a
descriptive gesture. "Why, it is the dream!" he murmured in hushed
excitement. "Ah, of course! I might have known it. Now, I'll turn to
find the path."
"I wish you would," I said.
He started abruptly. Then he came slowly, and touched me in a queer
evasive way on my shoulder. Finally he drew a long breath, and gripped
me by the arm. "Don't you recognize it?" "It's the dream! See! The stone
wall--the field--the sumac! Now that's the first sumac--"
"Oh, come along!" I said; "there are twenty such fields. That is
curious, though: you made the gesture. Do you recognize it all exactly?"
"It's it! the whole thing--and now, you see, I'm turning to find the
path."
I admitted that it was curious, and said that it would be interesting to
see how it all turned out.
For a long time Auber followed in silence, which I tried to relieve by
bantering comments. I was some distance ahead, when I heard him say,
"The grass is brushing through my hands."
"Why not?" I laughed, but it rang false, for I recollected the detail.
It was childishly simple; perhaps that was why the thing bothered me. I
noticed that in the growing darkness the forest took on a peculiar look.
It had been partly burnt over, leaving the ground black, and some of the
trees gaunt, upbristling, and sentinel-like. The place, even in broad
daylight, would have had a night-struck appearance. At this hour, when
the sudden forest darkness had just fallen, there was a sense of unusual
gloom, easily connecting itself with strange forebodings.
Perhaps it had been five minutes, when Auber said, "I am conscious that
I cannot take my hands out of the grass."
As I said, it was a simple thing. With an odd impulse, I groped back
toward him till I found his wrists, and then shook them violently above
his head. We stood there for several moments performing this absurd
pantomime in the darkness. His arms, with the sleeves rolled up, felt
heavy with flesh in my grip. I seemed to be handling things of dead,
cold flesh.