II
When the dream began, Barnard seemed in it to be a boy. Yet as an actor in the dream, he felt himself neither boy nor man, simply James Barnard. He was—identity. He was himself.
It was in one of the earliest scenes of his dream that he first discovered the threatening Cloud which was to shadow all the rest.
He seemed to be running desperately after an omnibus, with a door in its rear end. He pursued it at the height of his speed; and yet it drew continually further away, and at length disappeared, in a hazy fashion, at a great distance from him. When at last he abandoned the pursuit, his chest seemed like to burst with his labored breathing.
Two faces looked back at him from the rear windows of this omnibus; and a hand waved through the open door. And above the omnibus, smoothly, and without effort, moved a faint shadow of misty Cloud. It seemed to Barnard to grow darker as the omnibus drew further and further away; and when the vehicle disappeared, the Cloud remained for a moment in his sight before it, too, vanished. There was something menacing about this drifting mist. Barnard thought of it, in his dream, as The Threat.
When the omnibus was gone, he remembered the faces which had looked back at him, and recognized them. His mother, and his brother. His brother was a baby.
Barnard, in his dream, felt an overpowering terror at this recognition, and he shuddered.
Then that misty, shadowy picture was gone, and another took its place.
He saw himself at home, sitting in a low chair before a coal fire, with his chin in his hand. His Aunt Joan stood beside him. She was crying, and she kept patting his head.
“You’re a brave boy, not to cry,” she said to him, over and over. “You’re a brave boy not to cry.”
At the same time, she wept bitterly.
Barnard, in his dream, had no desire to cry. He was puzzled and uneasy; he groped for understanding.
Understanding came with a last glimpse of the baby’s face in the omnibus, and The Threat gliding above, and then he saw in his dream a bit of yellow paper, and on it, written in a long, flowing, telegrapher’s hand, the words:
“Rob died today at noon.”
He understood that Rob was his baby brother; and he understood, from that time forward, the nature of The Threat....