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 loss 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
_hôtel garni_ in the Rue de la Michodière. 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-keys, my purse, my penknife; my handkerchief in the
breastpocket 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 great 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 loi! in its place
was M. Saindou's _maison d'éducation_, 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 Père et la Mère François, 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 _première 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?"