Of what now befell, or seemed to befall, I shall give an account written some two years later by Elias himself, in a letter to Christine:
“Gradually—as is apt to happen, if you fix your eyes for any length of time upon a single spot in some small object—gradually the picture blurred, becoming simply a formless smudge upon the white surface of the paper; a lapse on the part of my eyesight, which I, absorbed in the effort I was making to remember, did not attempt to correct, but which in due time, as was natural, corrected itself; and again the picture stood out as distinct as before. Now, however, at once, every other thought and every other feeling were swept away, clean out of my head, by a sensation—I shall not be able to define it; you will easily conceive it; a sensation half of amazement, half of terror; for, without having changed in size, the face seemed to have changed totally in quality; it seemed to have ceased to be a face drawn with black lead upon paper, and to have become a face in veritable flesh and blood. The hair had apparently become hair. There was color in the cheeks. And the eyes were liquid, living eyes. They—the eyes—were what most affected me. Large, black, mournful, as her eyes had been in life, they looked into my eyes with an expression—I can't describe it. It was what you would call an expression of intense agony, and of appeal; as though it were an agony of my causing, and one that she appealed to me to relieve. The lips—bluish white, as her lips were, toward the end of her life—the lips seemed to move, and kept moving, as if trying to speak, but unable to; until at last they succeeded; and I could have vowed that I heard, in her own recognizable voice, just a little above a whisper, these words: 'There is no more chance of its taking place than there is of the sun's failing to rise. Beware!'—the words that my uncle had spoken down stairs. I was so much startled, so much terrified, that I jumped up from my chair. Thereat, instantly, the illusion ended. Again it was only a crude pencil drawing upon the page of my sketch-book. I can't tell how long it had lasted. Very likely not longer than two or three seconds, though it seemed at least as many minutes. I don't think I had breathed once. I don't think my heart had given a single beat. It had literally paralyzed me with fear.
“But now that it was over, I fell back upon my chair, and my heart began to pound like a hammer against my side; and I sat there, panting and perspiring, like a man exhausted by some tremendous physical exertion. I felt sick and dizzy, and had a racking headache.—Of course, it was a mere optical delusion; a mere hallucination; not an actual, objective phenomenon, not a ghost; a mere projection from my own imagination. A long time afterward I talked with a physician about it. The substance of what he said was this: Consider the steadily increasing excitement under which my mind had been laboring for many days, in view of our approaching marriage; consider the interview that I had had with my uncle, only an hour or two earlier, and the high pitch of agitation to which it had wrought me up; consider that it was long past my customary bedtime, and that my brain was irritated by lack of sleep, for I had not slept much of any the night before; consider that my mother was just then the one person uppermost in my thoughts, having been vividly recalled to me first by the pencil I had found, and then by the drawing that I was looking at; consider finally that my bodily posture—bending over till my chest nearly touched my knees—was such as to keep the blood pent up in my head; and the occurrence becomes very easily explicable, especially so, as such hallucinations, when people are excited, are not uncommon experiences. This is what the medical man said. It is undoubtedly true; and something like it I had wit enough to tell myself immediately, at the time. But telling did no good. It is one thing to satisfy your judgment; another to tranquilize your feelings and hush your imagination. They choose to accept the direct testimony of your eyes and ears, rather than the deductions of your common sense.
“I knew, as I have said, that my nerves had simply played me a trick; but that knowledge did not prevent me from passing a most wretched, uncomfortable night—the rest of that night, till day-break. The memory of the thing persisted in haunting me, in spite of the efforts I made to forget it. Strive as I might, I could not shake off the fear, the uneasiness, that it had inspired. Thinking of it, even at this distance, I still wince a little. It produced a very deep impression, and must have been, I believe, in large part accountable for, as it was of a piece with, what happened next day—or, rather, the evening of the same day, for it was now early morning.”
XI.
ELIAS speaks of “day-break”; but it can not accurately be said that the day broke at all that morning. The blackness of the night slowly faded into a dismal, lifeless drab. It rained. The wind blew from the north-east. Under it, the branches of the trees, across in the park, swayed strenuously to and fro. The sparrows, with sadly bedraggled plumage, huddled together upon the window-sills, and raised their voices in noisy disputation, as if thereby seeking to screw their courage up, and not mind the%sorry weather. The milkman's wagon came rattling down the street. The milkman wore a rubber overcoat. His war-whoop sounded less spirited, less defiant, than its wont.
By and by Elias looked at his watch. It was getting along toward seven o'clock. Just then somebody rapped upon his studio door. Elias's nerves must indeed have been in a bad way. He started, paled, trembled, recovered himself, and called out, “Come in.”
It was the rabbi.