Chapter VI (2)

And with the female inmates it is just the same. There is a lady who has spent twenty years of her life here. Her father was a small country doctor, called Snogget; her husband an obscure, hard-working curate; and she is absolutely normal, common-place, and even vulgar. For her hobby is to discourse of well-born and titled people and county families, with whom (and with no others) it has always been her hope and desire to mix; and is still, though her hair is nearly white, and she is still here. She thinks and talks and cares about nothing else but "smart people," and has conceived a very warm regard for me, on account of Lieutenant-colonel Ibbetson, of Ibbetson Hall, Hopshire; not because I killed him and was sentenced to be hanged for it, or because he was a greater criminal than I (all of which is interesting enough); but because he was my relative, and that through him I must be distantly connected, she thinks, with the Ibbetsons of Lechmere--whoever they may be, and whom neither she nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial feminine cackle?

And yet this woman, in a fit of conjugal jealousy, murdered her own children; and her father went mad in consequence, and her husband cut his throat.

In fact, during their lucid intervals it would never enter one's mind that they were mad at all, they are so absolutely like the people one meets every day in the world--such narrow-minded idiots, such deadly bores! One might as well be back in Pentonville or Hopshire again, or live in Passionate Brompton (as I am told it is called); or even in Belgravia, for that matter!

For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet--a shocking pair, who should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be doing their twenty years' penal servitude in jail, instead of living comfortably sequestered here. Like Ouida's high-born heroes, they "stick to their order," and do not mingle with the rest of us. They ignore us so completely that we cannot help looking up to them in spite of their vices--just as we should do outside.

And we, of the middle class, we stick to our order, too, and do not mingle with the small shop-keepers--who do not mingle with the laborers, artisans, and mechanics--who (alas, for them!) have nobody to look down upon but each other--but they do not; and are the best-bred people in the place.

Such are we! It is only when our madness is upon us that we cease to be commonplace, and wax tragical and great, or else original and grotesque and humorous, with that true deep humor that compels both our laughter and our tears, and leaves us older, sadder, and wiser than it found us.

"_Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_."

(So much, if little more, can I recall of the benign Virgil.)

And now to my small beer again, which will have more of a head to it henceforward.

* * * * *

Thus did I pursue my solitary way, like Bryant's Water-fowl, only with a less definite purpose before me--till at last there dawned for me an ever-memorable Saturday in June.

I had again saved up enough money to carry my long longed-for journey to Paris into execution. The _Seine's_ boiler got up its steam, the _Seine's_ white awning was put up for me as well as others; and on a beautiful cloudless English morning I stood by the man at the wheel, and saw St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower fade out of sight; with what hope and joy I cannot describe. I almost forgot that I was me!

And next morning (a beautiful French morning) how I exulted as I went up the Champs Elysees and passed under the familiar Arc de Triomphe on my way to the Rue de la Pompe, Passy, and heard all around the familiar tongue that I still knew so well, and rebreathed the long-lost and half-forgotten, but now keenly remembered, fragrance of the _genius loci_; that vague, light, indescribable, almost imperceptible scent of a place, that is so heavenly laden with the past for those who have lived there long ago--the most subtly intoxicating ether that can be!

When I came to the meeting of the Rue de la Tour and the Rue de la Pompe, and, looking in at the grocer's shop at the corner, I recognized the handsome mustachioed groceress, Madame Liard (whose mustache twelve prosperous years had turned gray), I was almost faint with emotion. Had any youth been ever so moved by that face before?

There, behind the window (which was now of plate-glass), and among splendid Napoleonic wares of a later day, were the same old India-rubber balls in colored net-work; the same quivering lumps of fresh paste in brown paper, that looked so cool and tempting; the same three-sou boxes of water-colors (now marked seventy-five centimes), of which I had consumed so many in the service of Mimsey Seraskier! I went in and bought one, and resmelt with delight the smell of all my by-gone dealings there, and received her familiar sounding--

"Merci, monsieur! faudrait-il autre chose?" as if it had been a blessing; but I was too shy to throw myself into her arms and tell her that I was the "lone, wandering, but not lost" Gogo Pasquier. She might have said--

"Eh bien, et apres?"

The day had begun well.

Like an epicure, I deliberated whether I should walk to the old gate in the Rue de la Pompe, and up the avenue and back to our old garden, or make my way round to the gap in the park hedge that we had worn of old by our frequent passage in and out, to and from the Bois de Boulogne.

I chose the latter as, on the whole, the more promising in exquisite gradations of delight.

The gap in the park hedge, indeed! The park hedge had disappeared, the very park itself was gone, cut up, demolished, all parcelled out into small gardens, with trim white villas, except where a railway ran through a deep cutting in the chalk. A train actually roared and panted by, and choked me with its filthy steam as I looked round in stupefaction on the ruins of my long-cherished hope.

If that train had run over me and I had survived it, it could not have given me a greater shock; it all seemed too cruel and brutal an outrage.

A winding carriage-road had been pierced through the very heart of the wilderness; and on this, neatly-paled little brand-new gardens abutted, and in these I would recognize, here and there, an old friend in the shape of some well-remembered tree that I had often climbed as a boy, and which had been left standing out of so many, but so changed by the loss of its old surroundings that it had a tame, caged, transplanted look--almost apologetic, and as if ashamed of being found out at last!

Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of blankness and bereavement.

But how about the avenue and my old home? I hastened back to the Rue de la Pompe with the quick step of aroused anxiety. The avenue was gone--blocked within a dozen yards of the gate by a huge brick building covered with newly-painted trellis-work! My old house was no more, but in its place a much larger and smarter edifice of sculptured stone. The old gate at least had not disappeared, nor the porter's lodge; and I feasted my sorrowful eyes on these poor remains, that looked snubbed and shabby and out of place in the midst of all this new splendor.

Presently a smart concierge, with a beautiful pink ribboned cap, came out and stared at me for a while, and inquired if monsieur desired anything.

I could not speak.

"Est-ce que monsieur est indispose? Cette chaleur! Monsieur ne parle pas le Francais, peut-etre?"

When I found my tongue I explained to her that I had once lived there in a modest house overlooking the street, but which had been replaced by this much more palatial abode.

"O, oui, monsieur--on a balaye tout ca!" she replied.

"Balaye!" What an expression for _me_ to hear!

And she explained how the changes had taken place, and how valuable the property had become. She showed me a small plot of garden, a fragment of my old garden, that still remained, and where the old apple-tree might still have been, but that it had been sawed away. I saw the stump; that did duty for a rustic table.

Presently, looking over a new wall, I saw another small garden, and in it the ruins of the old shed where I had found the toy wheelbarrow--soon to disappear, as they were building there too.

I asked after all the people I could think of, beginning with those of least interest--the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.

Some were dead; some had retired and had left their "commerce" to their children and children-in-law. Three different school-masters had kept the school since I had left. Thank Heaven, there was still the school--much altered, it is true. I had forgotten to look for it.

She had no remembrance of my name, or the Seraskiers'--I asked, with a beating heart. We had left no trace. Twelve short years had effaced all memory of us! But she told me that a gentleman, _decore, mais tombe en enfance_, lived at a _maison de sante_ in the Chaussee de la Muette, close by, and that his name was le Major Duquesnois; and thither I went, after rewarding and warmly thanking her.

I inquired for le Major Duquesnois, and I was told he was out for a walk, and I soon found him, much aged and bent, and leaning on the arm of a Sister of Charity. I was so touched that I had to pass him two or three times before I could speak. He was so small--so pathetically small!

It was a long time before I could give him an idea of who I was--Gogo Pasquier!

Then after a while he seemed to recall the past a little.

"Ha, ha! Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!--oui--oui--l'exercice? Portez ... arrrmes! arrmes ... bras? Et Mimse? bonne petite Mimse! toujours mal a la tete?"

He could just remember Madame Seraskier; and repeated her name several times and said, "Ah! elle etait bien belle, Madame Seraskier!"

In the old days of fairy-tale telling, when he used to get tired and I still wanted him to go on, he had arranged that if, in the course of the story, he suddenly brought in the word "Cric," and I failed to immediately answer "Crac," the story would be put off till our next walk (to be continued in our next!) and he was so ingenious in the way he brought in the terrible word that I often fell into the trap, and had to forego my delight for that afternoon.

I suddenly thought of saying "Cric!" and he immediately said "Crac!" and laughed in a touching, senile way--"Cric!--Crac! c'est bien ca!" and then he became quite serious and said--

"Et la suite au prochain numero!"

After this he began to cough, and the good Sister said--

"Je crains que monsieur ne le fatigue un peu!"

So I had to bid him good-bye; and after I had squeezed and kissed his hand, he made me a most courtly bow, as though I had been a complete stranger.

I rushed away, tossing up my arms like a madman in my pity and sorrow for my dear old friend, and my general regret and disenchantment. I made for the Bois de Boulogne, there to find, instead of the old rabbit-and-roebuck-haunted thickets and ferneries and impenetrable growth, a huge artificial lake, with row-boats and skiffs, and a rockery that would have held its own in Rosherville gardens. And on the way thither, near the iron gates in the fortifications, whom should I meet but one of my friends the couriers, on his way from St. Cloud to the Tuileries! There he rode with his arms jogging up and down, and his low glazed hat, and his immense jack-boots, just the same as ever, never rising in his stirrups, as his horse trotted to the jingle of the sweet little chime round its neck.

Alas! his coat was no longer the innocent, unsophisticated blue and silver livery of the bourgeois king, but the hateful green and gold of another regime.

Farther on the Mare d'Auteuil itself had suffered change and become respectable--imperially respectable. No more frogs or newts or water-beetles, I felt sure; but gold and silver fish in vulgar Napoleonic profusion.

No words that I can find would give any idea of the sadness and longing that filled me as I trod once more that sunlit grassy brink--the goal of my fond ambition for twelve long years.

It was Sunday, and many people were about--many children, in their best Sunday clothes and on their best behavior, discreetly throwing crumbs to the fish. A new generation, much quieter and better dressed than my cousins and I, who had once so filled the solitude with the splashing of our nets, and the excited din of our English voices.

As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and forms, and conjure away these modern intruders. The power to do this seemed almost within my reach; I willed and willed and willed with all my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy, well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold and silver fish; and there, with an aching heart, I left them.

Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not worth living for many of us if a want so desperate and yet so natural can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake. The touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at out beck and call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the senses.

Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones again in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in _this_, just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see them with the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad to become such a self-conjurer as that.

Thus musing sadly, I reached St. Cloud, and _that_, at least, and the Boulogne that led me to it, had not been very perceptibly altered, and looked as though I had only left them a week ago. The sweet aspect from the bridge, on either side and beyond, filled me with the old enchantment. There, at least, the glory had not departed.

I hastened through the gilded gates and up the broad walk to the grand cascade. There, among the lovely wreathed urns and jars of geranium, still sat or reclined or gesticulated, the old, unalterable gods; there squatted the grimly genial monsters in granite and marble and bronze, still spouting their endless gallons for the delectation of hot Parisian eyes. Unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable (save that they were not nearly so big as I had imagined), their cold, smooth, ironical patience shamed and braced me into better cheer. Beautiful, hideous, whatever you please, they seemed to revel in the very sense of their insensibility of their eternal stability--their stony scorn of time and wind and weather, and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of man. It was good to fondly pat them on the back once more--when one could reach them--and cling to them for a little while, after all the dust and drift and ruin I had been tramping through all day.

Indeed, they woke in me a healthy craving for all but forgotten earthly joys--even for wretched meat and drink--so I went and ordered a sumptuous repast at the Tete Noire--a brand-new Tete Noire, alas! quite white, all in stone and stucco, and without a history!

It was a beautiful sunset. Waiting for my dinner, I gazed out of the first-floor window, and found balm for my disappointed and regretful spirit in all that democratic joyousness of French Sunday life. I had seen it over and over again just like that in the old days; _this_, at least, was like coming back home to something I had known and loved.

The cafes on the little "Place" between the bridge and the park were full to overflowing. People chatting over their _consommations_ sat right out, almost into the middle of the square, so thickly packed that there was scarcely room for the busy, lively, white-aproned waiters to move between them. The air was full of the scent of trodden grass and macaroons and French tobacco, blown from the park; of gay French laughter and the music of _mirlitons_; of a light dusty haze, shot with purple and gold by the setting sun. The river, alive with boats and canoes, repeated the glory of the sky, and the well-remembered, thickly-wooded hills rose before me, culminating in the Lanterne de Diogene.

I could have threaded all that maze of trees blindfolded.

Two Roman pifferari came on to the Place and began to play an extraordinary and most exciting melody that almost drew me out of the window; it seemed to have no particular form, no beginning or middle or end; it went soaring higher and higher, like the song of a lark, with never a pause for breath, to the time of a maddening jig--a tarantella, perhaps--always on the strain and stress, always getting nearer and nearer to some shrill climax of ecstasy quite high up and away, beyond the scope of earthly music; while the persistent drone kept buzzing of the earth and the impossibility to escape. All so gay, so sad, there is no name for it!

Two little deformed and discarded-looking dwarfs, beggars, brother and sister, with large toothless gaps for mouths and no upper lip, began to dance; and the crowd laughed and applauded. Higher and higher, nearer and nearer to the impossible, rose the quick, piercing notes of the piffero. Heaven seemed almost within reach--the nirvana of music after its quick madness--the region of the ultra-treble that lies beyond the ken of ordinary human ears!

A carriage and four, with postilions and "guides," came clattering royally down the road from the palace, and dispersed the crowd as it bowled on its way to the bridge. In it were two ladies and two gentlemen. One of the ladies was the young Empress of the French; the other looked up at my window--for a moment, as in a soft flash of summer lightning, her face seemed ablaze with friendly recognition--with a sweet glance of kindness and interest and surprise--a glance that pierced me like a sudden shaft of light from heaven.

It was the Duchess of Towers!

I felt as though the bagpipes had been leading up to this! In a moment more the carriage was out of sight, the sun had quite gone down, the pifferari had ceased to play and were walking round with the hat, and all was over.

I dined, and made my way back to Paris on foot through the Bois de Boulogne, and by the Mare d'Auteuil, and saw my old friend the water-rat swim across it, trailing the gleam of his wake after him like a silver comet's tail.

"Allons-nous-en, gens de la nous! Allons-nous-en chacun chez nous!"

So sang a festive wedding-party as it went merrily arm in arm through the long high street of Passy, with a gleeful trust that would have filled the heart with envy but for sad experience of the vanity of human wishes.

_Chacun chez nous!_ How charming it sounds!

Was each so sure that when he reached his home he would find his heart's desire? Was the bridegroom himself so very sure?

The heart's desire--the heart's regret! I flattered myself that I had pretty well sounded the uttermost depths of both on that eventful Sunday!

Part Four

I got back to my hotel in the Rue de la Michodiere.

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 _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-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'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?"

I assented, and she let go my hand.

The street was full of people--familiar forms and faces and voices, chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus; old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French ways of speech--all as it was long ago. Nobody noticed us, and we walked up the now deserted avenue.

The happiness, the enchantment of it all! Could it be that I was dead, that I had died suddenly in my sleep, at the hotel in the Rue de la Michodiere! Could it be that the Duchess of Towers was dead too--had been killed by some accident on her way from St. Cloud to Paris? and that, both having died so near each other, we had begun our eternal afterlife in this heavenly fashion?

That was too good to be true, I reflected; some instinct told me that this was not death, but transcendent earthly life--and also, alas! that it would not endure forever!

I was deeply conscious of every feature in her face, every movement of her body, every detail of her dress--more so then I could have been in actual life--and said to myself, "Whatever this is, it is no dream." But I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which can come to us only in our waking moments when we are at our very best; and then only feebly, in comparison with this, and to many of us never, ft never had to me, since that morning when I had found the little wheelbarrow.

I was also conscious, however, that the avenue itself had a slight touch of the dream in it. It was no longer quite right, and was getting out of drawing and perspective, so to speak. I had lost my stay--the touch of her hand.

"Are you still dreaming true, Mr. Ibbetson?"

"I am afraid not quite," I replied.

"You must try by yourself a little--try hard. Look at this house; what is written on the portico?"

I saw written in gold letters the words, "Tete Noire," and said so.

She rippled with laughter, and said, "No; try again"; and just touched me with the tip of her finger for a moment.

I tried again and said, "Parvis Notre Dame."

"That's rather better," she said, and touched me again; and I read, "Parva sed Apta," as I had so often read there before in old days.

"And now look at that old house over there," pointing to my old home; "how many windows are there in the top story?"

I said seven.

"No; there are five. Look again!" and there were five; and the whole house was exactly, down to its minutest detail, as it had been once upon a time. I could see Therese through one of the windows, making my bed.

"That's better," said the duchess; "you will soon do it--it's very easy--_ce n'est que le premier pas!_ My father taught me; you must always sleep on your back with your arms above your head, your hands clasped under it and your feet crossed, the right one over the left, unless you are left-handed; and you must never for a moment cease thinking of where you want to be in your dream till you are asleep and get there; and you must never forget in your dream where and what you were when awake. You must join the dream on to reality. Don't forget. And now I will say good-bye; but before I go give me both hands and look round everywhere as far as your eyes can see."

It was hard to look away from her; her face drew my eyes, and through them all my heart; but I did as she told me, and took in the whole familiar scene, even to the distant woods of Ville d'Avray, a glimpse of which was visible through an opening in the trees; even to the smoke of a train making its way to Versailles, miles off; and the old telegraph, working its black arms on the top of Mont Valerien.

"Is it all right?" she asked. "That's well. Henceforward, whenever you come here, you will be safe as far as your sight can reach--from this spot--all through my introduction. See what it is to have a friend at court! No more little dancing jailers! And then you can gradually get farther by yourself.

"Out there, through that park, leads to the Bois de Boulogne--there's a gap in the hedge you can get through; but mind and make everything plain in front of you--_true_, before you go a step farther, or else you'll have to wake and begin it all over again. You have only to will it, and think of yourself as awake, and it will come--on condition, of course, that you have been there before. And mind, also, you must take care how you touch things or people--you may hear, and see, and smell; but you mustn't touch, nor pick flowers or leaves, nor move things about. It blurs the dream, like breathing on a window-pane. I don't know why, but it does. You must remember that everything here is dead and gone by. With you and me it is different; we're alive and real--that is, _I_ am; and there would seem to be no mistake about your being real too, Mr. Ibbetson, by the grasp of your hands. But you're _not_; and why you are here, and what business you have in this, my particular dream, I cannot understand; no living person has ever come into it before. I can't make it out. I suppose it's because I saw your reality this afternoon, looking out of the window at the 'Tete Noire,' and you are just a stray figment of my overtired brain--a very agreeable figment, I admit; but you don't exist here just now--you can't possibly; you are somewhere else, Mr. Ibbetson; dancing at Mabille, perhaps, or fast asleep somewhere, and dreaming of French churches and palaces, and public fountains, like a good young British architect--otherwise I shouldn't talk to you like this, you may be sure!

"Never mind. I am very glad to dream that I have been of use to you, and you are very welcome here, if it amuses you to come--especially as you are only a false dream of mine, for what else _can_ you be? And now I must leave you, so good-bye."

She disengaged her hands, and laughed her angelic laugh, and then turned towards the park. I watched her tall, straight figure and blowing skirts, and saw her follow some ladies and children into a thicket that I remembered well, and she was soon out of sight.

I felt as if all warmth had gone out of my life; as if a joy had taken flight; as if a precious something had withdrawn itself from my possession, and the gap in my periphery had closed again.

Long I stood in thought, with my eyes fixed on the spot where she had disappeared; and I felt inclined to follow, but then considered this would not have been discreet. For although she was only a false dream of mine, a mere recollection of the exciting and eventful day, a stray figment of my overtired and excited brain--a _more_ than agreeable figment (what else _could_ she be!)--she was also a great lady, and had treated me, a perfect stranger and a perfect nobody, with singular courtesy and kindness; which I repaid, it is true, with a love so deep and strong that my very life was hers, to do what she liked with, and always had been since I first saw her, and always would be as long as there was breath in my body! But this did not constitute an acquaintance without a proper introduction, even in France--even in a dream. Even in dreams one must be polite, even to stray figments of one's tired, sleeping brain.

And then what business had _she_, in _this_, _my_ particular dream--as she herself had asked of me?

But _was_ it a dream? I remembered my lodgings at Pentonville, that I had left yesterday morning. I remembered what I was--why I came to Paris; I remembered the very bedroom at the Paris hotel where I was now fast asleep, its loudly-ticking clock, and all the meagre furniture. And here was I, broad awake and conscious, in the middle of an old avenue that had long ceased to exist--that had been built over by a huge brick edifice covered with newly-painted trellis-work. I saw it, this edifice, myself, only twelve hours ago. And yet here was everything as it had been when I was a child; and all through the agency of this solid phantom of a lovely young English duchess, whose warm gloved hands I had only this minute been holding in mine! The scent of her gloves was still in my palm. I looked at my watch; it marked twenty-three minutes to twelve. All this had happened in less than three-quarters of an hour!

Pondering over all this in hopeless bewilderment, I turned my steps towards my old home, and, to my surprise, was just able to look over the garden wall, which I had once thought about ten feet high.

Under the old apple-tree in full bloom sat my mother, darning small socks; with her flaxen side-curls (as it was her fashion to wear them) half-concealing her face. My emotion and astonishment were immense. My heart beat fast. I felt its pulse in my temples, and my breath was short.

At a little green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a gilt-edged volume bound in red morocco. I knew it at a glance; it was _Elegant Extracts_. The dog Medor lay asleep in the shade. The bees were droning among the nasturtiums and convolvulus.

A little girl ran up the avenue from the porter's lodge and pushed the garden gate, which rang the bell as it opened, and she went into the garden, and I followed her; but she took no notice of me, nor did the others. It was Mimsey Seraskier.

I went out and sat at my mother's feet, and looked long in her face.

I must not speak to her, nor touch her--not even touch her busy hand with my lips, or I should "blur the dream."

I got up and looked over the boy Gogo's shoulder. He was translating Gray's _Elegy_ into French; he had not got very far, and seemed to be stumped by the line--

_"And leaves the world to darkness and to me."_

Mimsey was silently looking over his other shoulder, her thumb in her mouth, one arm on the back of his chair. She seemed to be stumped also: it was an awkward line to translate.

I stooped and put my hand to Medor's nose, and felt his warm breath. He wagged his rudiment of a tail, and whimpered in his sleep. Mimsey said--

"Regarde Medor, comme il remue la queue! _C'est le Prince Charmant qui lui chatouille le bout du nez._"

Said my mother, who had not spoken hitherto: "Do speak English, Mimsey, please."

Oh, my God! My mother's voice, so forgotten, yet so familiar, so unutterably dear! I rushed to her, and threw myself on my knees at her feet, and seized her hand and kissed it, crying, "Mother, mother!"

A strange blur came over everything; the sense of reality was lost. All became as a dream--a beautiful dream--but only a dream; and I woke.

* * * * *

I woke in my small hotel bedroom, and saw all the furniture, and my hat and clothes, by the light of a lamp outside, and heard the ticking of the clock on the mantel-piece, and the rumbling of a cart and cracking of a whip in the street, and yet felt I was not a bit more awake than I had been a minute ago in my strange vision--not so much!

I heard my watch ticking its little tick on the mantel-piece by the side of the clock, like a pony trotting by a big horse. The clock struck twelve, I got up and looked at my watch by the light of the gas-lit streets; it marked the same. My dream had lasted an hour--I had gone to bed at half-past ten.

I tried to recall it all, and did so to the smallest particular--all except the tune the organ had played, and the words belonging to it; they were on the tip of my tongue, and refused to come further, I got up again and walked about the room, and felt that it had not been like a dream at all; it was more "recollectable" than all my real adventures of the previous day. It had ceased to be like a dream, and had become an actuality from the moment I first touched the duchess's hand to the moment I kissed my mother's, and the blur came. It was an entirely new and utterly bewildering experience that I had gone through.

In a dream there are always breaks, inconsistencies, lapses, incoherence, breaches of continuity, many links missing in the chain; only at points is the impression vivid enough to stamp itself afterwards on the waking mind, and even then it is never so really vivid as the impression of real life, although it ought to have seemed so in the dream: One remembers it well on awaking, but soon it fades, and then it is only one's remembrance of it that one remembers.

There was nothing of this in my dream.

It was something like the "camera-obscura" on Ramsgate pier: one goes in and finds one's self in total darkness; the eye is prepared; one is thoroughly expectant and wide-awake.

Suddenly there flashes on the sight the moving picture of the port and all the life therein, and the houses and cliffs beyond; and farther still the green hills, the white clouds, and blue sky.

Little green waves chase each other in the harbor, breaking into crisp white foam. Sea-gulls wheel and dash and dip behind masts and ropes and pulleys; shiny brass fittings on gangway and compass flash in the sun without dazzling the eye; gay Liliputians walk and talk, their white teeth, no bigger than a pin's point, gleam in laughter, with never a sound; a steamboat laden with excursionists comes in, its paddles churning the water, and you cannot hear them. Not a detail is missed--not a button on a sailor's jacket, not a hair on his face. All the light and color of sea and earth and sky, that serve for many a mile, are here concentrated within a few square feet. And what color it is! A painter's despair! It is light itself, more beautiful than that which streams through old church windows of stained glass. And all is framed in utter darkness, so that the fully dilated pupils can see their very utmost. It seems as though all had been painted life-size and then shrunk, like a Japanese picture on crape, to a millionth of its natural size, so as to intensify and mellow the effect.

It is all over: you come out into the open sunshine, and all seems garish and bare and bald and commonplace. All magic has faded out of the scene; everything is too far away from everything else; everybody one meets seems coarse and Brobdingnagian and too near. And one has been looking at the like of it all one's life!

Thus with my dream, compared to common, waking, every-day experience; only instead of being mere flat, silent little images moving on a dozen square feet of Bristol-board, and appealing to the eye alone, the things and people in my dream had the same roundness and relief as in life, and were life-size; one could move among them and behind them, and feel as if one could touch and clasp and embrace them if one dared. And the ear, as well as the eye, was made free of this dark chamber of the brain: one heard their speech and laughter as in life. And that was not all, for soft breezes fanned the cheek, the sparrows twittered, the sun gave out its warmth, and the scent of many flowers made the illusion complete.

And then the Duchess of Towers! She had been not only visible and audible like the rest, but tangible as well, to the fullest extent of the sensibility that lay in my nerves of touch; when my hands held hers I felt as though I were drawing all her life into mine.

With the exception of that one figure, all had evidently been as it _had_ been in _reality_ a few years ago, to the very droning of an insect, to the very fall of a blossom!

Had I gone mad by any chance? I had possessed the past, as I had longed to do a few hours before.

What are sight and hearing and touch and the rest?

Five senses in all.

The stars, worlds upon worlds, so many billions of miles away, what are they for us but mere shiny specks on a net-work of nerves behind the eye? How does one _feel_ them there?

The sound of my friend's voice, what is it? The clasp of his hand, the pleasant sight of his face, the scent of his pipe and mine, the taste of the bread and cheese and beer we eat and drink together, what are they but figments (stray figments, perhaps) of the brain--little thrills through nerves made on purpose, and without which there would be no stars, no pipe, no bread and cheese and beer, no voice, no friend, no me?

And is there, perchance, some sixth sense embedded somewhere in the thickness of the flesh--some survival of the past, of the race, of our own childhood even, etiolated by disuse? or some rudiment, some effort to begin, some priceless hidden faculty to be developed into a future source of bliss and consolation for our descendants? some nerve that now can only be made to thrill and vibrate in a dream, too delicate as yet to ply its function in the light of common day?

And was I, of all people in the world--I, Peter Ibbetson, architect and surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville--most futile, desultory, and uneducated dreamer of dreams--destined to make some great psychical discovery?

Pondering deeply over these solemn things, I sent myself to sleep again, as was natural enough--but no more to dream. I slept soundly until late in the morning, and breakfasted at the Bains Deligny, a delightful swimming-bath near the Pont de la Concorde (on the other side), and spent most of the day there, alternately swimming, and dozing, and smoking cigarettes, and thinking of the wonders of the night before, and hoping for their repetition on the night to follow.

I remained a week in Paris, loafing about by day among old haunts of my childhood--a melancholy pleasure--and at night trying to "dream true" as my dream duchess had called it. Only once did I succeed.

I had gone to bed thinking most persistently of the "Mare d'Auteuil," and it seemed to me that as soon as I was fairly asleep I woke up there, and knew directly that I had come into a "true dream" again, by the reality and the bliss. It was transcendent _life_ once more--a very ecstasy of remembrance made actual, and _such_ an exquisite surprise!

There was M. le Major, in his green frock-coat, on his knees near a little hawthorn-tree by the brink, among the water-logged roots of which there dwelt a cunning old dytiscus as big as the bowl of a table-spoon--a prize we had often tried to catch in vain.

M. le Major had a net in his hand, and was watching the water intently; the perspiration was trickling down his nose; and around him, in silent expectation and suspense, were grouped Gogo and Mimsey and my three cousins, and a good-humored freckled Irish boy I had quite forgotten, and I suddenly remembered that his name was Johnstone, that he was very combative, and that he lived in the Rue Basse (now Rue Raynouard).

On the other side of the pond my mother was keeping Medor from the water, for fear of his spoiling the sport, and on the bench by the willow sat Madame Seraskier--lovely Madame Seraskier--deeply interested. I sat down by her side and gazed at her with a joy there is no telling.

An old woman came by, selling conical wafer-cakes, and singing--"_V'la l'plaisir, mesdames--V'la l'plaisir!_" Madame Seraskier bought ten sous' worth--a mountain!

M. le Major made a dash with his net--unsuccessfully, as usual. Medor was let loose, and plunged with a plunge that made big waves all round the mare, and dived after an imaginary stone, amid general shouts and shrieks of excitement. Oh, the familiar voices! I almost wept.

Medor came out of the water without his stone and shook himself, twisting and barking and grinning and gyrating, as was his way, quite close to me. In my delight and sympathy I was ill-advised enough to try and stroke him, and straight the dream was "blurred"--changed to an ordinary dream, where all things were jumbled up and incomprehensible; a dream pleasant enough, but different in kind and degree--an ordinary dream; and in my distress thereat I woke, and failed to dream again (as I wished to dream) that night.

Next morning (after an early swim) I went to the Louvre, and stood spellbound before Leonardo da Vinci's "Lisa Gioconda," trying hard to find where the wondrous beauty lay that I had heard so extravagantly extolled; and not trying very successfully, for I had seen Madame Seraskier once more, and felt that "Gioconda" was a fraud.

Presently I was conscious of a group just behind me, and heard a pleasant male English voice exclaim--

"And now, duchess, let me present to you my first and last and only love, Mona Lisa." I turned round, and there stood a soldier-like old gentleman and two ladies (one of whom was the Duchess of Towers), staring at the picture.

As I made way for them I caught her eye, and in it again, as I felt sure, a kindly look of recognition--just for half a second. She evidently recollected having seen me at Lady Cray's, where I had stood all the evening alone in a rather conspicuous corner. I was so exceptionally tall (in those days of not such tall people as now) that it was easy to notice and remember me, especially as I wore my beard, which it was unusual to do then among Englishmen.

She little guessed how _I_ remembered _her_; she little knew all she was and had been to me--in life and in a dream!

My emotion was so great that I felt it in my very knees; I could scarcely walk; I was as weak as water. My worship for the beautiful stranger was becoming almost a madness. She was even more lovely than Madame Seraskier. It was cruel to be like that.

It seems that I was fated to fall down and prostrate myself before very tall, slender women, with dark hair and lily skins and light angelic eyes. The fair damsel who sold tripe and pigs' feet in Clerkenwell was also of that type, I remembered; and so was Mrs. Deane. Fortunately for me it is not a common one!

All that day I spent on quays and bridges, leaning over parapets, and looking at the Seine, and nursing my sweet despair, and calling myself the biggest fool in Paris, and recalling over and over again that gray-blue kindly glance--my only light, the Light of the World for ME!

* * * * *

My brief holiday over, I went back to London--to Pentonville--and resumed my old occupations; but the whole tenor of my existence was changed.

The day, the working-day (and I worked harder than ever, to Lintot's great satisfaction), passed as in an unimportant dream of mild content and cheerful acquiescence in everything, work or play.

There was no more quarrelling with my destiny, nor wish to escape from myself for a moment. My whole being, as I went about on business or recreation bent, was suffused with the memory of the Duchess of Towers as with a warm inner glow that kept me at peace with all mankind and myself, and thrilled by the hope, the enchanting hope, of once more meeting her image at night in a dream, in or about my old home at Passy, and perhaps even feeling once more that ineffable bliss of touching her hand. Though why should she be there?

When the blessed hour came round for sleep, the real business of my life began. I practised "dreaming true" as one practises a fine art, and after many failures I became a professed expert--a master.