The night was intensely hot and airless. No breath of wind came from the sea. Drops of perspiration stood on the boy’s forehead as he slept, with nothing over him but a sheet. He lay on his side, with his face towards the open window and one arm outside the sheet.
People easily fall into habits of sleeping. Jimmy was accustomed to sleep for about eight hours “on end,” as he put it. When he had had his eight hours he generally woke up. If he was not obliged to get up he often went to sleep again after an interval of wakefulness, but he seldom slept for as much as nine hours without waking.
On this night between two o’clock and three it seemed as if a layer of sleep were gently lifted from him. He sighed, stirred, turned over and began to dream.
He dreamed confusedly about Dion, and there were pain and apprehension in his dream. In it Dion seemed to be himself and yet not himself, to be near and at the same time remote, to be Jimmy’s friend and yet, in some strange and horrible way, hostile to Jimmy. No doubt the boy was haunted in his sleep by an obscure phantom bred of that painful impression of the morning, when his friend had suddenly been changed in the pavilion, changed into a tragic figure from which seemed to emanate impalpable things very black and very cold.
In the dream Jimmy’s mother did not appear as an active figure; yet the dreamer seemed somehow to be aware of her, to know faintly that she was involved in unhappy circumstances, that she was the victim of distresses he could not fathom. And these distresses weighed upon him like a burden, as things weigh upon us in dreams, softly and heavily, and with a sort of cloudy awfulness. He wanted to strive against them for his mother, but he was held back from action, and Dion seemed to have something to do with this. It was as if his friend and enemy, Dion Leith, did not wish his mother to be released from unhappiness.
Jimmy moved, lay on his back and groaned. His eyelids fluttered. Something from without, something from a distance, was pulling at him, and the hands of sleep, too inert, perhaps, for any conflict, relaxed their hold upon him. Thoughts from two minds in a dark pavilion were stealing upon him, were touching him here and there, were whispering to him.
Another layer of sleep was softly removed from him.
He clenched his large hands—he had already the hands and feet almost of the man he would some day grow into—and his eyes opened wide for a moment. But they closed again. He was not awake yet.
At three o’clock he woke. He had slept for six hours in the villa and for two hours in the forest. He lay still in the dark for a few minutes. A faint memory of his dream hung about him like a tattered mist. He felt anxious, almost apprehensive, and strained his ears expectant of some sound. But the silence of the airless night was deep and large all about him. He began to think of his mother. What had been the matter with her? Who, or what, had persecuted her? He realized now that he had been dreaming, said to himself, with a boy’s exaggeration, that he had had “a beastly nightmare!” Nevertheless his mother still appeared to him as the victim of distresses. He could not absolutely detach himself from the impressions communicated to him in his dream. He was obliged to think of his mother as unhappy and of Dion Leith as not wholly friendly either to her or to himself. And it was all quite beastly.
Presently, more fully awake, he began to wonder about the time and to feel tremendously thirsty, as if he could “drink the jug.”