Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/13

Rh camels with misshapen humps, elephants with long trunks, the head of a lion. It was very startling to wake up, lying on one's back and gazing out where this faint light appeared in the crevices between these weird figures. The pleasant green plants with which they had gone to bed had given place to queer apparitions. Yet they must be plants. But how could plants look so terrifyingly like heads. Everywhere he looked there appeared a bristling, clear shape. The window was a vast tracery of strangeness. Gilbert was never quite sure how real they were, and he was always grateful when the advancing light gradually brought out the greenness of the leaves, and finally threw them into relief, so that the menacing head would finally dissolve into the utterly meaningless juncture of two geranium blossoms, and the elephant trunk became a familiar begonia front. Then he was cheered, and he wondered how he had ever seen anything else. No wildest forcing of his imagination could make him see the things he had seen.

It was in this room that Gilbert's mother put the children to bed every night, and then took out the lamp to her room, leaving the door just slightly ajar, so they would not be afraid. Everything was so cosy and comfortable during the undressing. Then would come the frightening thought, "Perhaps this comforting presence is going to be withdrawn!" For sometimes you would wake up suddenly with a little clutch at the heart. The dim light would be burning through the crack of the door, but there would be a vast stillness. You knew that the house was empty, that somehow it was the middle of a night that would never end, and everybody, Garna, Mother, and Annie, had gone off to some distant muffled cavern and would never come again. Olga, sleeping in a little round ball at your side, her eyes seraphically closed, was of no avail. The light burned steadily on, only deepening the terror of eternity, of being lost. Should you call? What would be the use? They were infinitely far away, in a sort of Buddha-like trance. So you cried a little, and fell off asleep.

Or if you did not go to sleep, you waited dumbly, and, after æons of time, you heard an unmistakable door close softly downstairs, and in a minute Mother was looking in at you, to see if you were safe. And you said, "Mother!" in a half-choking voice, while great waves of relief and happiness surged through you, and you went sound asleep. So Gilbert got in the habit of asking his mother