Between the Dark and the Daylight

by William Dean Howells

“Well,” the stranger went on, a little damped perhaps by his failure, but supported apparently by the interest of the fact in hand, “I had the smoking-room to myself for a while, and then a fellow put his head in that I thought I knew after I had thought I didn’t know him. He dawned on me more and more, and I had to acknowledge to myself, by and by, that it was a man named Melford, whom I used to room with in Holworthy at Harvard; that is, we had an apartment of two bedrooms and a study; and I suppose there were never two fellows knew less of each other than we did at the end of our four years together. I can’t say what Melford knew of me, but the most I knew of Melford was his particular brand of nightmare.”

Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter. He took his cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an “Ah!”

Rulledge went further and interrogatively repeated the word “Nightmare?”

“Nightmare,” the stranger continued, firmly. “The curious thing about it was that I never exactly knew the subject of his nightmare, and a more curious thing yet was Melford himself never knew it, when I woke him up. He said he couldn’t make out anything but a kind of scraping in a door-lock. His theory was that in his childhood it had been a much completer thing, but that the circumstances had broken down in a sort of decadence, and now there was nothing left of it but that scraping in the door-lock, like somebody trying to turn a misfit key. I used to throw things at his door, and once I tried a cold-water douche from the pitcher, when he was very hard to waken; but that was rather brutal, and after a while I used to let him roar himself awake; he would always do it, if I trusted to nature; and before our junior year was out I got so that I could sleep through, pretty calmly; I would just say to myself when he fetched me to the surface with a yell, ‘That’s Melford dreaming,’ and doze off sweetly.”

“Jove!” Rulledge said, “I don’t see how you could stand it.”

“There’s everything in habit, Rulledge,” Minver put in. “Perhaps our friend only dreamt that he heard a dream.”

“That’s quite possible,” the stranger owned, politely. “But the case is superficially as I state it. However, it was all past, long ago, when I recognized Melford in the smoking-room that night: it must have been ten or a dozen years. I was wearing a full beard then, and so was he; we wore as much beard as we could in those days. I had been through the war since college, and he had been in California, most of the time, and, as he told me, he had been up north, in Alaska, just after we bought it, and hurt his eyes—had snow-blindness—and he wore spectacles. In fact, I had to do most of the recognizing, but after we found out who we were we were rather comfortable; and I liked him better than I remembered to have liked him in our college days. I don’t suppose there was ever much harm in him; it was only my grudge about his nightmare. We talked along and smoked along for about an hour, and I could hear the porter outside, making up the berths, and the train rumbled away towards Framingham, and then towards Worcester, and I began to be sleepy, and to think I would go to bed myself; and just then the door of the smoking-room opened, and a young girl put in her face a moment, and said: ‘Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought it was the stateroom,’ and then she shut the door, and I realized that she looked like a girl I used to know.”

The stranger stopped, and I fancied from a note in his voice that this girl was perhaps like an early love. We silently waited for him to resume how and when he would. He sighed, and after an appreciable interval he began again. “It is curious how things are related to one another. My wife had never seen her, and yet, somehow, this girl that looked like the one I mean brought my mind back to my wife with a quick turn, after I had forgotten her in my talk with Melford for the time being. I thought how lonely she was in that little house of ours in Cambridge, on rather an outlying street, and I knew she was thinking of me, and hating to have me away on Christmas Eve, which isn’t such a lively time after you’re grown up and begin to look back on a good many other Christmas Eves, when you were a child yourself; in fact, I don’t know a dismaler night in the whole year. I stepped out on the platform before I began to turn in, for a mouthful of the night air, and I found it was spitting snow—a regular Christmas Eve of the true pattern; and I didn’t believe, from the business feel of those hard little pellets, that it was going to stop in a hurry, and I thought if we got into New York on time we should be lucky. The snow made me think of a night when my wife was sure there were burglars in the house; and in fact I heard their tramping on the stairs myself—thump, thump, thump, and then a stop, and then down again. Of course it was the slide and thud of the snow from the roof of the main part of the house to the roof of the kitchen, which was in an L, a story lower, but it was as good an imitation of burglars as I want to hear at one o’clock in the morning; and the recollection of it made me more anxious about my wife, not because I believed she was in danger, but because I knew how frightened she must be.

“When I went back into the car, that girl passed me on the way to her stateroom, and I concluded that she was the only woman on board, and her friends had taken the stateroom for her, so that she needn’t feel strange. I usually go to bed in a sleeper as I do in my own house, but that night I somehow couldn’t. I got to thinking of accidents, and I thought how disagreeable it would be to turn out into the snow in my nighty. I ended by turning in with my clothes on, all except my coat; and, in spite of the red-hot stoves, I wasn’t any too warm. I had a berth in the middle of the car, and just as I was parting my curtains to lie down, old Melford came to take the lower berth opposite. It made me laugh a little, and I was glad of the relief. ‘Why, hello, Melford,’ said I. ‘This is like the old Holworthy times.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said he, and then I asked something that I had kept myself from asking all through our talk in the smoking-room, because I knew he was rather sensitive about it, or used to be. ‘Do you ever have that regulation nightmare of yours nowadays, Melford? He gave a laugh, and said: ’I haven’t had it, I suppose, once in ten years. What made you think of it?’ I said: ‘Oh, I don’t know. It just came into my mind. Well, good-night, old fellow. I hope you’ll rest well,’ and suddenly I began to feel light-hearted again, and I went to sleep as gayly as ever I did in my life.”

The stranger paused again, and Wanhope said: “Those swift transitions of mood are very interesting. Of course they occur in that remote region of the mind where all incidents and sensations are of one quality, and things of the most opposite character unite in a common origin. No one that I remember has attempted to trace such effects to their causes, and then back again from their causes, which would be much more important.”