I drew back in a strange horror; but, at the same moment, we both stood
stock-still to listen: from some distance to the right came the
trickling sound of water. It was barely perceptible, and we listened
hard, indefinitely, while the silence congealed in our ears, and the
darkness condensed about our eyes, filling up space, and stopping
thought save just for the sound of the brook. It seemed a sort of
growing immobility, eternal, like after death.
At last Auber spoke, laying a hand on my shoulder: "It is over; let us
go ahead."
After a while we talked about it. There was little to "go" on. You see,
nothing happens, and, as Auber expressed it, "the psychological data are
ineffective for lack of an event." But though the whole thing remained
then a purely psychical experience, and did not "break through," yet it
had something of the fulness of fate. Auber, as usual, had a theory: in
the dream some manifestation was undoubtedly striving to break through,
but he had been unable to facilitate the process. The present
experience, he decided, was immature, a mere coincidence. The outcome
might yet, however, be foreseen through the dream, if the creative
perception of "white sleep" could be attained.
That is the affair which started the whole thing. Auber must have taken
the suggestion it contained much more seriously than any of us for
several years imagined; nor did we connect the long contemplativeness of
the man with any definite purpose. The thing was too vague and illusive
to become a purpose at all.
Before long there were half a dozen instances, some trivial, or
seemingly coincidental, but all forming our theory. There is one Ezekiel
recounted, as we sat here talking that night. It was just a matter of
old Horace MacNair's coming in on them once during a thunder-storm. The
family were sitting in the big hall; the ladies with their feet up on
chairs to insulate them from the lightning; young Vincent Ezekiel
teasing them by putting his on the mantelpiece. At one point in the
storm came a terrible crash, and Auber jumped up, starting toward the
door. Then he came back and sat down quietly. They laughed, and asked if
he had been struck.
"No," he said, quite seriously, "not by the lightning, but by a curious
idea that I saw Horace MacNair opening the door. I suppose I must have
dreamed it; I was nearly asleep."
The Ezekiels looked at one another in surprise, and Mrs. Ezekiel said:
"There is something curious in that, for the last time Horace was here,
just before he died, he came in the midst of a thunder-storm as we were
sitting here, much as we are now. And, why! I remember that he had come
over because he expected to see you, but you had not arrived."
"That's so," put in young Vincent, "because he said that if you had been
here, you wouldn't have been too afraid of the lightning to stand up and
shake hands. And by Jove! I had my feet on the mantelpiece! I remember
that, because when he saw me he laughed, and lined his up beside mine."
"He was wearing a gray rain-coat, and high overshoes that you made fun
of," added Auber, shortly, and then kept an embarrassed silence.
That was true, Ezekiel said; and Auber had not seen the man in five
years.
There were many cases which we strung that night on the threads of our
theory, all working toward its completion; and yet we neared the end
with misgiving and doubt, for we had the necessity of believing, if we
would keep ourselves still sane. All of us had noticed that so far as
there was an element of terror in the strange incidents, it lay in the
fact of a subtle undercurrent of connections, as if Fate were dimly
pointing all the while toward the invisible culmination. Suddenly there
would be a new manifestation of Auber's faculty, and a new instance
would be added, illusive, baffling, and yet forming each time new
threads in the vague warp and woof of something that we called our
theory. "There it is again," we would say to ourselves, as we sent the
ghostly shuttle flying in our psychological loom.
This undercurrent appeared to touch the incident of Horace MacNair, for
it seemed that the old artist had walked over to the Ezekiels that night
on purpose to talk with Auber about making a series of pictures of the
salt marshes along the Passaic River. Old Horace was dead of his heart
before Auber arrived, but the suggestion was repeated by Ezekiel; and
Auber, taking it as something like a dying request from his old master,
besides appreciating its value, set to work at once.
The long reaches of the Passaic tidal lagoon, with their mists and
blowing swamp-grass, are crossed by the trestles of all the railways
which enter New York from the south. It was old Horace MacNair's idea
that this place, more travelled, more unnoticed, and yet more
picturesque, perhaps, than any spot near the metropolis, might be the
making of Auber's reputation. The varied, moody tones of the marsh-land,
forever blending in a pervasive atmosphere of desolate beauty, suited
Auber's peculiar style. Here he would paint what passed in the popular
eye for the dullest commonplace, and would interpret, at the same time,
both this landscape and his little-understood art.
While he worked I frequently visited Auber on his yawl _Houri_, which
was canvassed over for an outdoor studio, and anchored at the point from
which he wished to paint. One day we were tied up to a pile by the
Central Railroad trestle. It was just the heat of the day, and Auber,
stretched out on a deck chair, was taking a sort of siesta. His eyes
were closed, and he had let his cigar go out. Whether it was due to the
light through the colored awning, I was not sure, but I was suddenly
attracted by a dull vacancy that seemed to be forming in his
countenance. It stole upon the features as if they were being slowly
sprinkled with fine dust, blotting their expression into a flat
lifelessness. Then the rush of a train passing over the bridge disturbed
him. With a fleeting look of pain he sat up, glanced first furtively at
me, and then stared hard around.
"Was there a train?" he asked, at length.
"Yes--an express."
"It did not stop here on the bridge for anything?"
"No, of course not."
"Of course not," he agreed, absently. "How long ago?"
"Perhaps two minutes," I said.
He examined his watch. After a while he got up, seeming to pull himself
together with an effort, and began scraping nervously on his picture. I
noticed that the palette-knife trembled in his hand.
"What is the matter?" I asked, finally.
"I feel very much upset," he replied, and sank weakly on the hatch. "I
was on that train and--"
I had to jump below to the ice-chest; Auber seemed to have fainted.
Jerry, the skipper, and I applied cold water for five minutes, and then
Auber revived and asked for whiskey.
"I was on the train," he began again, persistently. "Several people,
whom I knew, must have been in the chair-car with me, because I seemed
to be taking part in a conversation. Was there a Pullman on the train?"
he asked, abruptly.
"Yes," I said; "at the end."
The answer seemed to reassure him unhappily. "I was on the train," he
continued, "but I could not think where I had come from. There were
vague recollections of a walk, then of a long drive in the dark. Now I
was on the train, and yet I was somehow not there even now." I poured
out more whiskey, but he pushed it aside absently. "I was not there, nor
was I here; for when I moved, something seemed to be folded about me,
like bedclothes. It was all a kind of duplication, and I could be on the
train or in the other place at will. That is why it seemed confused and
unreal. We were talking about some matter of business. I held a list of
figures that I referred to now and then. Once I leaned forward to look
out of the window; it was just here. I was pointing, and saying to some
one, 'There is my last salt marsh!' when a great shock stopped the
words, and sent me against something in front. For a moment I was
conscious that you were leaning over me. Then I had a strange feeling of
becoming gradually detached, as if from my very self. A weight and a
feeling of bedclothes slipped from me; there was alternate glaring light
and enveloping darkness. Finally the light prevailed, and I found myself
looking up into this hideous awning."
"Well," I said, "that is a very queer dream!"
"Yes; it was white sleep," he replied, slowly; "but something was added
this time." He put his hand on my arm appealingly. "I knew it would
come; I have had the beginnings of that dream before." He spoke as if
from a tragic winding-sheet, a veil spun in the warp of his own fancy
and also in the very woof of Fate; and out of this veil, through which
none of us ever saw, he was stretching his hand to ask of me--what?
I did what I could. Auber consented to come at once to my farm till rest
should partly restore him. We reached here that night. It was just two
weeks ago; in thought, it is, for me, a lifetime. It was a time of
suspense and waiting when diversion seemed almost irreverent, but at
last it was forced upon us by that ever-moving providence which stood
back of the whole affair. My dam broke at the upper farm. Chance?
Nothing of the sort! I went up to see how it had happened, and found
some rotten joists and rust-eaten girders. They are in the course of
events. Auber went with me while I should see things set to rights.
It was a simple incident, but somehow I suspected it of finality even as
we started out of the yard on the long drive. I was suspicious of that
knobby hill region, which was connected with the incipient indications
of the whole affair. On arriving in the late afternoon, however, nothing
could be more natural than that Auber, having inspected the dam, should
stroll on to the pasture, where he once sketched the path that runs down
to his dream-meadow.
I went back to the farmhouse, and wrote to my engineers a detail of the
breach in the dam, then sat down on the porch to enjoy a smoke. The day
was warm and dreamy; the sun, filtering through the September haze,
rested on the eyelids like a caressing hand. I was soon half asleep,
peering lazily at the view which zigzags down between the knobby hills
to the more cultivated farm-lands that we had left hours behind us, when
the telephone rang. I got up and answered it:
"William?--at the farm? Oh yes--a message, a telegram--for Mr. Hurn, you
say? Is it important?--Well, go ahead--What! Must take 11.10
express--crisis on Wall Street?--meet on train--Who?--Ezekiel."
It had come, then! Chance? No. A railroad merger; stockholders
interested. At first I said: "I won't tell him." Then I thought: "After
this supposed Sentence is delayed and delayed till he no longer looks on
the world as his prison cell, and the whole matter evaporates in a
psychological mist, he will say: 'Our superstitions, my dear friend, and
your loving care, cost me just twenty thousand dollars that trip. My
picture of the twilight path, which you would have interrupted, won't
replace a hundredth part of that.'"
I wandered down to the broken dam; there beside the breach, with the
river sucking darkly through, Josiah Peacock stood, contemplating the
scene with his practical eye against to-morrow's labor. Suddenly I found
myself mentioning the telegram. He said, "Then you'll have to drive
back to-night." I felt alarmed; surely this was none of my doing.
Presently I was taking the short cut through the woods. The red glow of
sunset was fading behind me, and darkness already gathered among the
trees. Aware of a vague anxiety that impelled me forward, an odd notion
that I might be late for something, I began to hurry along, the gaunt
tree trunks watching like sentinels as I passed. Was I looking for Auber
Hurn? It was strangely reminiscent, not a real experience. "This is
absurd," I said to myself at length, and straightened my foot to stop.
Instead, I unexpectedly leaped over a fallen log, and continued with
nervous strides, while I flung back a sneaking glance of embarrassment.
On the turns of the path darkness closed in rapidly; the outlines of
objects loomed uncertainly distant through the forest. Gradually I
became aware that at the end of a dim vista down which I was hurrying,
something white had formed itself in the path. I stopped to look, but
could make out nothing clearly. It remained dimly ahead, and I
approached, a few steps at a time, peering through the obscure gray
shadows, striving to concentrate my vision. At last I recognized that
it was Auber Hurn in his shirt-sleeves, standing still in the middle of
the path. Apparently he, too, was trying to see who was coming.
"Auber!" I called. I was not sure that he replied.
When I was very close I began at once, as if involuntarily: "Auber, you
see, I came to meet you. There is a message from Ezekiel--a Wall Street
panic, or something. He wants you to meet him on the 11.10 to-mor--It
will be necess--Auber?" Had I been talking to the air? I looked about
me. "Auber!--Auber Hurn!" I called. There was no one there; but in the
hush of listening there came, as if wandering to me through the forest,
the little lost gurgle of a distant brook.
For a moment I stood fascinated by a reminiscence--and then, a sudden
fear swelling in my throat, I ran. Back on the path I fled, my legs
seeming to go of themselves, hurling my body violently along; my feet
pounding behind, as if in pursuit, whirling around the turns, then down
the last straight aisle, past the sentinel trees, out into the light.
When I reached the farmyard, a fresh team was being hitched to our
carriage.
"What! Has Mr. Hurn come back?" I asked, shakily.
"No," said Josiah, "but I thought maybe you'd want things ready. Didn't
you find him?"
"Why--no," I replied, and then repeated firmly, "No, I did not."
I sat down, exhausted, on the porch, and waited. At the end of ten
minutes Auber Hurn entered the gate, crossed to the buggy, and got in.
Josiah, from between the horses where he was buckling a knee-guard,
looked up in surprise. "You got that message, Mr. Hurn?"
"Yes," said Auber, speaking very distinctly. "Mr. Crenshaw just gave it
to me."
Josiah turned to me. "I thought you said--" he began.
"I was mistaken--I mean, I misunderstood you," I interposed.
Josiah stared, and then finished the harnessing. "Your coats are here
under the seat," he remarked. I took my place mechanically. Mrs. Josiah
came with some milk and sandwiches. I finished mine hurriedly, and took
the reins.
Auber sank back into his corner without a word, leaving me to feel only
a sense of desperate confused isolation, of lonely helplessness.
At length Auber said, in a voice that startled me, a low, contented
voice: "You were on the path? You went to find me yourself?"
"Yes," I answered; and then, after a long time, "And you were not
there--yourself?"
"No, I was not there." He leaned back against the cushions, and I
thought he smiled. "I was in that hill meadow. I went to sleep there for
a short time."
It was two o'clock when we drove into the yard. William was waiting to
take the horses.
As we went into the house, William asked if he should have the trap for
the 11.10 express. I could not answer, and Auber said, looking at me in
the light of the open door, "Yes, certainly."
I can see him now in the cheerless white hallway, his tall figure
exaggerated in a long driving-cloak, his high features sharpened in the
light of the lantern.
In taking off my coat I felt, in the pocket, the letter I had written to
my engineer in Trenton. I laid it on the hall table. "You might post
that to-morrow before you get to New York," I said, casually.