IX

Some nights, even in Davos, are spent, even by an invalid, in bed.  A leaflet, therefore, of ‘Sleep-chasings’ may not inappropriately be flung, as envoy to so many wanderings on foot and sledge upon the winter snows.

The first is a confused medley of things familiar and things strange.  I have been dreaming of far-away old German towns, with gabled houses deep in snow; dreaming of chalets in forgotten Alpine glens, where wood-cutters come plunging into sleepy light from gloom, and sinking down beside the stove to shake the drift from their rough shoulders; dreaming of vast veils of icicles upon the gaunt black rocks in places where no foot of man will pass, and where the snow is weaving eyebrows over the ledges of grey whirlwind-beaten precipices; dreaming of Venice, forlorn beneath the windy drip of rain, the gas lamps flickering on the swimming piazzetta, the barche idle, the gondolier wrapped in his thread-bare cloak, alone; dreaming of Apennines, with world-old cities, brown, above the brown sea of dead chestnut boughs; dreaming of stormy tides, and watchers aloft in lighthouses when day is finished; dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in the earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep.  And then I lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on the valley, and the room is filled with spectral light.

I sleep, and change my dreaming.  This is a hospice in an unfrequented pass, between sad peaks, beside a little black lake, overdrifted with soft snow.  I pass into the house-room, gliding silently.  An old man and an old woman are nodding, bowed in deepest slumber, by the stove.  A young man plays the zither on a table.  He lifts his head, still modulating with his fingers on the strings.  He looks right through me with wide anxious eyes.  He does not see me, but sees Italy, I know, and some one wandering on a sandy shore.

I sleep, and change my dreaming.  This is S. Stephen’s Church in Wien.  Inside, the lamps are burning dimly in the choir.  There is fog in the aisles; but through the sleepy air and over the red candles flies a wild soprano’s voice, a boy’s soul in its singing sent to heaven.

I sleep, and change my dreaming.  From the mufflers in which his father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights.  He is half asleep.  His father scrapes the fiddle.  The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the glasses on the table.