Armadale (30 page)

Allan looked at Midwinter. ‘I don't remember talking about pools, or lakes,' he said. ‘Do you?'

Instead of answering the question, Midwinter suddenly appealed to the doctor.

‘Have you got the last number of the Manx newspaper?' he asked.

The doctor produced it from the sideboard. Midwinter turned to the page containing those extracts from the recently published Travels in Australia, which had roused Allan's interest on the previous evening, and the reading of which had ended by sending his friend to sleep. There – in the passage describing the sufferings of the travellers from thirst, and the subsequent discovery which saved their lives – there,
appearing at the climax of the narrative, was the broad pool of water which had figured in Allan's dream!

‘Don't put away the paper,' said the doctor, when Midwinter had shown it to him, with the necessary explanation. ‘Before we are at the end of the inquiry, it is quite possible we may want that extract again. We have got at the pool. How about the sunset? Nothing of that sort is referred to in the newspaper extract. Search your memory again, Mr Armadale; we want your waking impression of a sunset, if you please.'

Once more, Allan was at a loss for an answer; and, once more, Midwinter's ready memory helped him through the difficulty.

‘I think I can trace our way back to this impression, as I traced our way back to the other,' he said, addressing the doctor. ‘After we got here yesterday afternoon, my friend and I took a long walk over the hills—'

‘That's it!' interposed Allan. ‘I remember. The sun was setting as we came back to the hotel for supper – and it was such a splendid red sky, we both stopped to look at it. And then we talked about Mr Brock, and wondered how far he had got on his journey home. My memory may be a slow one at starting, doctor; but when it's once set going, stop it if you can! I haven't half done yet.'

‘Wait one minute, in mercy to Mr Midwinter's memory and mine,' said the doctor. ‘We have traced back to your waking impressions, the vision of the open country, the pool, and the sunset. But the Shadow of the Woman has not been accounted for yet. Can you find us the original of this mysterious figure in the dream-landscape?'

Allan relapsed into his former perplexity, and Midwinter waited for what was to come, with his eyes fixed in breathless interest on the doctor's face. For the first time there was unbroken silence in the room. Mr Hawbury looked interrogatively from Allan to Allan's friend. Neither of them answered him. Between the shadow and the shadow's substance there was a great gulph of mystery, impenetrable alike to all three of them.

‘Patience,' said the doctor, composedly. ‘Let us leave the figure by the pool for the present, and try if we can't pick her up again as we go on. Allow me to observe, Mr Midwinter, that it is not very easy to identify a shadow; but we won't despair. This impalpable lady of the lake may take some consistency when we next meet with her.'

Midwinter made no reply. From that moment his interest in the inquiry began to flag.

‘What is the next scene in the dream?' pursued Mr Hawbury, referring to the manuscript. ‘Mr Armadale finds himself in a room. He
is standing before a long window opening on a lawn and flower-garden, and the rain is pattering against the glass. The only thing he sees in the room is a little statue; and the only company he has is the Shadow of a Man standing opposite to him. The Shadow stretches out its arm, and the statue falls in fragments on the floor; and the dreamer, in anger and distress at the catastrophe (observe, gentlemen, that here the sleeper's reasoning faculty wakes up a little, and the dream passes rationally, for a moment, from cause to effect), stoops to look at the broken pieces. When he looks up again the scene has vanished. That is to say, in the ebb and flow of sleep, it is the turn of the flow now, and the brain rests a little. What's the matter, Mr Armadale? Has that restive memory of yours run away with you again?'

‘Yes,' said Allan. ‘I'm off at full gallop. I've run the broken statue to earth; it's nothing more nor less than a china shepherdess I knocked off the mantelpiece in the hotel coffee-room, when I rang the bell for supper last night. I say, how well we get on; don't we? It's like guessing a riddle. Now then, Midwinter! your turn next.'

‘No!' said the doctor. ‘My turn, if you please. I claim the long window, the garden, and the lawn, as my property. You will find the long window, Mr Armadale, in the next room. If you look out, you'll see the garden and lawn in front of it – and, if you'll exert that wonderful memory of yours, you will recollect that you were good enough to take special and complimentary notice of my smart French window and my neat garden, when I drove you and your friend to Port St Mary yesterday.'

‘Quite right,' rejoined Allan, ‘so I did. But what about the rain that fell in the dream? I haven't seen a drop of rain for the last week.'

Mr Hawbury hesitated. The Manx newspaper which had been left on the table caught his eye. ‘If we can think of nothing else,' he said, ‘let us try if we can't find the idea of the rain where we found the idea of the pool.' He looked through the extract carefully. ‘I have got it!' he exclaimed. ‘Here is rain described as having fallen on these thirsty Australian travellers, before they discovered the pool. Behold the shower, Mr Armadale, which got into your mind when you read the extract to your friend last night! And behold the dream, Mr Midwinter, mixing up separate waking impressions just as usual!'

‘Can you find the waking impression which accounts for the human figure at the window?' asked Midwinter; ‘or, are we to pass over the Shadow of the Man as we have passed over the Shadow of the Woman already?'

He put the question with scrupulous courtesy of manner, but with a
tone of sarcasm in his voice which caught the doctor's ear, and set up the doctor's controversial bristles on the instant.

‘When you are picking up shells on the beach, Mr Midwinter, you usually begin with the shells that lie nearest at hand,' he rejoined. ‘We are picking up facts now; and those that are easiest to get at are the facts we will take first. Let the Shadow of the Man and the Shadow of the Woman pair off together for the present – we won't lose sight of them, I promise you. All in good time, my dear sir; all in good time!'

He too was polite, and he too was sarcastic. The short truce between the opponents was at an end already. Midwinter returned significantly to his former place by the window. The doctor instantly turned his back on the window more significantly still. Allan, who never quarrelled with anybody's opinion, and never looked below the surface of anybody's conduct, drummed, cheerfully on the table with the handle of his knife. ‘Go on, doctor!' he called out; ‘my wonderful memory is as fresh as ever.'

‘Is it?' said Mr Hawbury, referring again to the narrative of the dream. ‘Do you remember what happened, when you and I were gossiping with the landlady at the bar of the hotel last night?'

‘Of course I do! You were kind enough to hand me a glass of brandy-and-water, which the landlady had just mixed for your own drinking. And I was obliged to refuse it because, as I told you, the taste of brandy always turns me sick and faint, mix it how you please.'

‘Exactly so,' returned the doctor. ‘And here is the incident reproduced in the dream. You see the man's shadow and the woman's shadow together this time. You hear the pouring out of liquid (brandy from the hotel bottle, and water from the hotel jug); the glass is handed by the woman-shadow (the landlady) to the man-shadow (myself); the man-shadow hands it to you (exactly what I did); and the faintness (which you had previously described to me) follows in due course. I am shocked to identify these mysterious Appearances, Mr Midwinter, with such miserably unromantic originals as a woman who keeps an hotel, and a man who physics a country district. But your friend himself will tell you that the glass of brandy-and-water was prepared by the landlady, and it reached him by passing from her hand to mine. We have picked up the shadows, exactly as I anticipated; and we have only to account now – which may be done in two words – for the manner of their appearance in the dream. After having tried to introduce the waking impression of the doctor and the landlady separately, in connection with the wrong set of circumstances, the dreaming mind comes right at the third trial, and introduces the doctor and the landlady
together, in connection with the right set of circumstances. There it is in a nutshell! – Permit me to hand you back the manuscript, with my best thanks for your very complete and striking confirmation of the rational theory of dreams.' Saying those words, Mr Hawbury returned the written paper to Midwinter, with the pitiless politeness of a conquering man.

‘Wonderful! not a point missed anywhere from beginning to end! By Jupiter!' cried Allan, with the ready reverence of intense ignorance. ‘What a thing science is!'

‘Not a point missed, as you say,' remarked the doctor, complacently. ‘And yet I doubt if we have succeeded in convincing your friend.'

‘You have
not
convinced me,' said Midwinter. ‘But I don't presume on that account to say that you are wrong.'

He spoke quietly, almost sadly. The terrible conviction of the supernatural origin of the dream, from which he had tried to escape, had possessed itself of him again. All his interest in the argument was at an end; all his sensitiveness to its irritating influences was gone. In the case of any other man, Mr Hawbury would have been mollified by such a concession as his adversary had now made to him; but he disliked Midwinter too cordially to leave him in the peaceable enjoyment of an opinion of his own.

‘Do you admit,' asked the doctor, more pugnaciously than ever, ‘that I have traced back every event of the dream to a waking impression which preceded it in Mr Armadale's mind?'

‘I have no wish to deny that you have done so,' said Midwinter, resignedly.

‘Have I identified the Shadows with their living originals?'

‘You have identified them to your own satisfaction, and to my friend's satisfaction. Not to mine.'

‘Not to yours? Can
you
identify them?'

‘No. I can only wait till the living originals stand revealed in the future.'

‘Spoken like an oracle, Mr Midwinter! Have you any idea at present of who those living originals may be?'

‘I have. I believe that coming events will identify the Shadow of the Woman with a person whom my friend has not met with yet; and the Shadow of the Man with myself.'

Allan attempted to speak. The doctor stopped him.

‘Let us clearly understand this,' he said to Midwinter. ‘Leaving your own case out of the question for the moment, may I ask how a shadow,
which has no distinguishing mark about it, is to be identified with a living woman whom your friend doesn't know?'

Midwinter's colour rose a little. He began to feel the lash of the doctor's logic.

‘The landscape-picture of the dream has its distinguishing marks,' he replied. ‘And, in that landscape, the living woman will appear when the living woman is first seen.'

‘The same thing will happen, I suppose,' pursued the doctor, ‘with the man-shadow which you persist in identifying with yourself. You will be associated in the future with a statue broken in your friend's presence, with a long window looking out on a garden, and with a shower of rain pattering against the glass? Do you say that?'

‘I say that.'

‘And so again, I presume, with the next vision? You and the mysterious woman will be brought together in some place now unknown, and will present to Mr Armadale some liquid yet unnamed, which will turn him faint? – Do you seriously tell me you believe this?'

‘I seriously tell you I believe it.'

‘And, according to your view, these fulfilments of the dream will mark the progress of certain coming events, in which Mr Armadale's happiness, or Mr Armadale's safety, will be dangerously involved?'

‘That is my firm conviction.'

The doctor rose – laid aside his moral dissecting-knife – considered for a moment – and took it up again.

‘One last question,' he said. ‘Have you any reason to give
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for going out of your way to adopt such a mystical view as this, when an unanswerably rational explanation of the dream lies straight before you?'

‘No reason,' replied Midwinter, ‘that I can give, either to you or to my friend.'

The doctor looked at his watch with the air of a man who is suddenly reminded that he has been wasting his time.

‘We have no common ground to start from,' he said; ‘and if we talked till doomsday, we should not agree. Excuse my leaving you rather abruptly. It is later than I thought; and my morning's batch of sick people are waiting for me in the surgery. I have convinced
your
mind, Mr Armadale, at any rate; so the time we have given to this discussion has not been altogether lost. Pray stop here, and smoke your cigar. I shall be at your service again in less than an hour.' He nodded cordially to Allan, bowed formally to Midwinter, and quitted the room.

As soon as the doctor's back was turned, Allan left his place at the
table, and appealed to his friend, with that irresistible heartiness of manner which had always found its way to Midwinter's sympathies, from the first day when they met at the Somersetshire inn.

‘Now the sparring-match between you and the doctor is over,' said Allan, ‘I have got two words to say on my side. Will you do something for my sake which you won't do for your own?'

Midwinter's face brightened instantly. ‘I will do anything you ask me,' he said.

‘Very well. Will you let the subject of the dream drop out of our talk altogether, from this time forth?'

‘Yes, if you wish it.'

‘Will you go a step further? Will you leave off thinking about the dream?'