‘What d’yer mean by it?’ asked the constable. ‘Hallo! it’s you, is it? The gent that broke the lamp at the Long Dragon!’
‘I don’t mean anything by it,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘What d’yer do it for then?’
‘Oh, bother!’ said Mr Fotheringay.
‘Bother indeed! D’yer know that stick hurt? What d’yer do it for, eh?’
For the moment Mr Fotheringay could not think what he had done it for. His silence seemed to irritate Mr Winch. ‘You’ve been assaulting the police, young man, this time. That’s whatyoudone.’
‘Look here, Mr Winch,’ said Mr Fotheringay, annoyed and confused. ‘I’m sorry, very. The fact is——’
‘Well?’
He could think of no way but the truth. ‘I was working a miracle.’ He tried to speak in an offhand way, but try as he would he couldn’t.
‘Working a——! ’Ere, don’t you talk rot. Working a miracle, indeed! Miracle! Well, that’s downright funny! Why, you’s the chap that don’t believe in miracles.... Fact is, this is another of your silly conjuring tricks—that’s what this is. Now, I tell you——’
But Mr Fotheringay never heard what Mr Winch was going to tell him. He realised he had given himself away, flung his valuable secret to all the winds of heaven. A violent gust of irritation swept him to action. He turned on the constable swiftly and fiercely. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I’ve had enough of this, I have! I’ll show you a silly conjuring trick, I will! Go to Hades! Go, now!’
He was alone!
Mr Fotheringay performed no more miracles that night, nor did he trouble to see what had become of his flowering stick. He returned to the town, scared and very quiet, and went to his bedroom. ‘Lord!’ he said, ‘it’s a powerful gift—an extremely powerful gift. I didn’t hardly mean as muchas that. Not really.... I wonder what Hades is like!’
He sat on the bed taking off his boots. Struck by a happy thought he transferred the constable to San Francisco, and without any more interference with normal causation went soberly to bed. In the night he dreamt of the anger of Winch.
The next day Mr Fotheringay heard two interesting items of news. Some one had planted a most beautiful climbing rose against the elder Mr Gomshott’s private house in the Lullaborough Road, and the river as far as Rawling’s Mill was to be dragged for Constable Winch.
Mr Fotheringay was abstracted and thoughtful all that day, and performed no miracles except certain provisions for Winch, and the miracle of completing his day’s work with punctual perfection in spite of all the bee-swarm of thoughts that hummed through his mind. And the extraordinary abstraction and meekness of his manner was remarked by several people, and made a matter for jesting. For the most part he was thinking of Winch.
On Sunday evening he went to chapel, and, oddly enough, Mr Maydig, who took a certain interest in occult matters, preached about ‘things that are not lawful.’ Mr Fotheringay was not a regular chapel-goer, but the system of assertive scepticism, to which I have already alluded, was now very much shaken. The tenor of the sermon threw an entirely new light on these novel gifts, and he suddenly decided to consult Mr Maydig immediately after the service. So soon as that was determined he found himself wondering why he had not done so before.
Mr Maydig, a lean, excitable man with quite remarkably long wrists and neck, was gratified at a request for a private conversation from a young manwhose carelessness in religious matters was a subject for general remark in the town. After a few necessary delays, he conducted him to the study of the manse, which was contiguous to the chapel, seated him comfortably, and, standing in front of a cheerful fire—his legs threw a Rhodian arch of shadow on the opposite wall—requested Mr Fotheringay to state his business.
At first Mr Fotheringay was a little abashed, and found some difficulty in opening the matter. ‘You will scarcely believe me, Mr Maydig, I am afraid’—and so forth for some time. He tried a question at last, and asked Mr Maydig his opinion of miracles.
Mr Maydig was still saying ‘Well’ in an extremely judicial tone, when Mr Fotheringay interrupted again: ‘You don’t believe, I suppose, that some common sort of person—like myself, for instance—as it might be sitting here now, might have some sort of twist inside him that made him able to do things by his will.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Mr Maydig. ‘Something of the sort, perhaps, is possible.’
‘If I might make free with something here, I think I might show you by a sort of experiment,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Now, take that tobacco-jar on the table, for instance. What I want to know is whether what I am going to do with it is a miracle or not. Just half a minute, Mr Maydig, please.’
He knitted his brows, pointed to the tobacco-jar and said: ‘Be a bowl of vi’lets.’
The tobacco-jar did as it was ordered.
Mr Maydig started violently at the change, and stood looking from the thaumaturgist to the bowl of flowers. He said nothing. Presently he ventured to lean over the table and smell the violets; they were fresh-picked and very fine ones. Then he stared at Mr Fotheringay again.
‘How did you do that?’ he asked.
Mr Fotheringay pulled his moustache. ‘Just told it—and there you are. Is that a miracle, or is it black art, or what is it? And what do you think’s the matter with me? That’s what I want to ask.’
‘It’s a most extraordinary occurrence.’
‘And this day last week I knew no more that I could do things like that than you did. It came quite sudden. It’s something odd about my will, I suppose, and that’s as far as I can see.’
‘Is that—the only thing. Could you do other things besides that?’
‘Lord, yes!’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Just anything.’ He thought, and suddenly recalled a conjuring entertainment he had seen. ‘Here!’ he pointed, ‘change into a bowl of fish—no, not that—change into a glass bowl full of water with goldfish swimming in it. That’s better! You see that, Mr Maydig?’
‘It’s astonishing. It’s incredible. You are either a most extraordinary.... But no——’
‘I could change it into anything,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Just anything. Here! be a pigeon, will you?’
In another moment a blue pigeon was fluttering round the room and making Mr Maydig duck every time it came near him. ‘Stop there, will you?’ said Mr Fotheringay; and the pigeon hung motionless in the air. ‘I could change it back to a bowl of flowers,’ he said, and after replacing the pigeon on the table worked that miracle. ‘I expect you will want your pipe in a bit,’ he said, and restored the tobacco-jar.
Mr Maydig had followed all these later changes in a sort of ejaculatory silence. He stared at Mr Fotheringay and in a very gingerly manner picked up the tobacco-jar, examined it, replaced it on the table. ‘Well!’ was the only expression of his feelings.
‘Now, after that it’s easier to explain what I came about,’ said Mr Fotheringay; and proceeded to a lengthy and involved narrative of his strange experiences, beginning with the affair of the lamp in the Long Dragon and complicated by persistent allusions to Winch. As he went on, the transient pride Mr Maydig’s consternation had caused passed away; he became the very ordinary Mr Fotheringay of everyday intercourse again. Mr Maydig listened intently, the tobacco-jar in his hand, and his bearing changed also with the course of the narrative. Presently, while Mr Fotheringay was dealing with the miracle of the third egg, the minister interrupted with a fluttering, extended hand.
‘It is possible,’ he said. ‘It is credible. It is amazing, of course, but it reconciles a number of amazing difficulties. The power to work miracles is a gift—a peculiar quality like genius or second sight; hitherto it has come very rarely and to exceptional people. But in this case.... I have always wondered at the miracles of Mahomet, and at Yogi’s miracles, and the miracles of Madame Blavatsky. But, of course—— Yes, it is simply a gift! It carries out so beautifully the arguments of that great thinker’—Mr Maydig’s voice sank—‘his Grace the Duke of Argyll. Here we plumb some profounder law—deeper than the ordinary laws of nature. Yes—yes. Go on. Go on!’
Mr Fotheringay proceeded to tell of his misadventure with Winch, and Mr Maydig, no longer overawed or scared, began to jerk his limbs about and interject astonishment. ‘It’s this what troubled me most,’ proceeded Mr Fotheringay; ‘it’s this I’m most mijitly in want of advice for; of course he’s at San Francisco—wherever San Francisco may be—but of course it’s awkward for both of us, as you’ll see, Mr Maydig. I don’t see how he can understand what has happened,and I dare say he’s scared and exasperated something tremendous, and trying to get at me. I dare say he keeps on starting off to come here. I send him back, by a miracle, every few hours, when I think of it. And of course, that’s a thing he won’t be able to understand, and it’s bound to annoy him; and, of course, if he takes a ticket every time it will cost him a lot of money. I done the best I could for him, but, of course, it’s difficult for him to put himself in my place. I thought afterwards that his clothes might have got scorched, you know—if Hades is all it’s supposed to be—before I shifted him. In that case I suppose they’d have locked him up in San Francisco. Of course I willed him a new suit of clothes on him directly I thought of it. But, you see, I’m already in a deuce of a tangle——’
Mr Maydig looked serious. ‘I see you are in a tangle. Yes, it’s a difficult position. How you are to end it....’ He became diffuse and inconclusive.
‘However, we’ll leave Winch for a little and discuss the larger question. I don’t think this is a case of the black art or anything of the sort. I don’t think there is any taint of criminality about it at all, Mr Fotheringay—none whatever, unless you are suppressing material facts. No, it’s miracles—pure miracles—miracles, if I may say so, of the very highest class.’
He began to pace the hearthrug and gesticulate, while Mr Fotheringay sat with his arm on the table and his head on his arm, looking worried. ‘I don’t see how I’m to manage about Winch,’ he said.
‘A gift of working miracles—apparently a very powerful gift,’ said Mr Maydig, ‘will find a way about Winch—never fear. My dear sir, you are a most important man—a man of the most astonishing possibilities. As evidence, for example! And in other ways, the things you may do....’
‘Yes,I’vethought of a thing or two,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘But—some of the things came a bit twisty. You saw that fish at first? Wrong sort of bowl and wrong sort of fish. And I thought I’d ask some one.’
‘A proper course,’ said Mr Maydig, ‘a very proper course—altogether the proper course.’ He stopped and looked at Mr Fotheringay. ‘It’s practically an unlimited gift. Let us test your powers, for instance. If they reallyare.... If they really are all they seem to be.’
And so, incredible as it may seem, in the study of the little house behind the Congregational Chapel, on the evening of Sunday, Nov. 10, 1896, Mr Fotheringay, egged on and inspired by Mr Maydig, began to work miracles. The reader’s attention is specially and definitely called to the date. He will object, probably has already objected, that certain points in this story are improbable, that if any things of the sort already described had indeed occurred, they would have been in all the papers at that time. The details immediately following he will find particularly hard to accept, because among other things they involve the conclusion that he or she, the reader in question, must have been killed in a violent and unprecedented manner more than a year ago. Now a miracle is nothing if not improbable, and as a matter of fact the readerwaskilled in a violent and unprecedented manner in 1896. In the subsequent course of this story that will become perfectly clear and credible, as every right-minded and reasonable reader will admit. But this is not the place for the end of the story, being but little beyond the hither side of the middle. And at first the miracles worked by Mr Fotheringay were timid little miracles—little things with the cups and parlour fitments, as feeble as the miracles of Theosophists, and, feeble asthey were, they were received with awe by his collaborator. He would have preferred to settle the Winch business out of hand, but Mr Maydig would not let him. But after they had worked a dozen of these domestic trivialities, their sense of power grew, their imagination began to show signs of stimulation, and their ambition enlarged. Their first larger enterprise was due to hunger and the negligence of Mrs Minchin, Mr Maydig’s housekeeper. The meal to which the minister conducted Mr Fotheringay was certainly ill-laid and uninviting as refreshment for two industrious miracle-workers; but they were seated, and Mr Maydig was descanting in sorrow rather than in anger upon his housekeeper’s shortcomings, before it occurred to Mr Fotheringay that an opportunity lay before him. ‘Don’t you think, Mr Maydig,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t a liberty,I——’
‘My dear Mr Fotheringay! Of course! No—I didn’t think.’
Mr Fotheringay waved his hand. ‘What shall we have?’ he said, in a large, inclusive spirit, and, at Mr Maydig’s order, revised the supper very thoroughly. ‘As for me,’ he said, eyeing Mr Maydig’s selection, ‘I am always particularly fond of a tankard of stout and a nice Welsh rarebit, and I’ll order that. I ain’t much given to Burgundy,’ and forthwith stout and Welsh rarebit promptly appeared at his command. They sat long at their supper, talking like equals, as Mr Fotheringay presently perceived, with a glow of surprise and gratification, of all the miracles they would presently do. ‘And, by-the-by, Mr Maydig,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘I might perhaps be able to help you—in a domestic way.’
‘Don’t quite follow,’ said Mr Maydig, pouring out a glass of miraculous old Burgundy.
Mr Fotheringay helped himself to a second Welshrarebit out of vacancy, and took a mouthful. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘I might be able (chum, chum) to work (chum, chum) a miracle with Mrs Minchin (chum, chum)—make her a better woman.’
Mr Maydig put down the glass and looked doubtful. ‘She’s—— She strongly objects to interference, you know, Mr Fotheringay. And—as a matter of fact—it’s well past eleven and she’s probably in bed and asleep. Do you think, on the whole——’
Mr Fotheringay considered these objections. ‘I don’t see that it shouldn’t be done in her sleep.’
For a time Mr Maydig opposed the idea, and then he yielded. Mr Fotheringay issued his orders, and a little less at their ease, perhaps, the two gentlemen proceeded with their repast. Mr Maydig was enlarging on the changes he might expect in his housekeeper next day, with an optimism that seemed even to Mr Fotheringay’s supper senses a little forced and hectic, when a series of confused noises from upstairs began. Their eyes exchanged interrogations, and Mr Maydig left the room hastily. Mr Fotheringay heard him calling up to his housekeeper and then his footsteps going softly up to her.
In a minute or so the minister returned, his step light, his face radiant. ‘Wonderful!’ he said, ‘and touching! Most touching!’
He began pacing the hearthrug. ‘A repentance—a most touching repentance—through the crack of the door. Poor woman! A most wonderful change! She had got up. She must have got up at once. She had got up out of her sleep to smash a private bottle of brandy in her box. And to confess it too!... But this gives us—it opens—a most amazing vista of possibilities. If we can work this miraculous change inher....’
‘The thing’s unlimited seemingly,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘And about Mr Winch——’
‘Altogether unlimited.’ And from the hearthrug Mr Maydig, waving the Winch difficulty aside, unfolded a series of wonderful proposals—proposals he invented as he went along.
Now what those proposals were does not concern the essentials of this story. Suffice it that they were designed in a spirit of infinite benevolence, the sort of benevolence that used to be called post-prandial. Suffice it, too, that the problem of Winch remained unsolved. Nor is it necessary to describe how far that series got to its fulfilment. There were astonishing changes. The small hours found Mr Maydig and Mr Fotheringay careering across the chilly market square under the still moon, in a sort of ecstasy of thaumaturgy, Mr Maydig all flap and gesture, Mr Fotheringay short and bristling, and no longer abashed at his greatness. They had reformed every drunkard in the Parliamentary division, changed all the beer and alcohol to water (Mr Maydig had overruled Mr Fotheringay on this point); they had, further, greatly improved the railway communication of the place, drained Flinder’s swamp, improved the soil of One Tree Hill, and cured the vicar’s wart. And they were going to see what could be done with the injured pier at South Bridge. ‘The place,’ gasped Mr Maydig, ‘won’t be the same place to-morrow. How surprised and thankful every one will be!’ And just at that moment the church clock struck three.
‘I say,’ said Mr Fotheringay, ‘that’s three o’clock! I must be getting back. I’ve got to be at business by eight. And besides, Mrs Wimms——’
‘We’re only beginning,’ said Mr Maydig, full of the sweetness of unlimited power. ‘We’re only beginning. Think of all the good we’re doing. When people wake——’
‘But——’ said Mr Fotheringay.
Mr Maydig gripped his arm suddenly. His eyes were bright and wild. ‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘there’s no hurry. Look’—he pointed to the moon at the zenith—‘Joshua!’
‘Joshua?’ said Mr Fotheringay.
‘Joshua,’ said Mr Maydig. ‘Why not? Stop it.’
Mr Fotheringay looked at the moon.
‘That’s a bit tall,’ he said, after a pause.
‘Why not?’ said Mr Maydig. ‘Of course it doesn’t stop. You stop the rotation of the earth, you know. Time stops. It isn’t as if we were doing harm.’
‘H’m!’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘I’ll try. Here!’
He buttoned up his jacket and addressed himself to the habitable globe, with as good an assumption of confidence as lay in his power. ‘Jest stop rotating, will you?’ said Mr Fotheringay.
Incontinently he was flying head over heels through the air at the rate of dozens of miles a minute. In spite of the innumerable circles he was describing per second he thought; for thought is wonderful—sometimes as sluggish as flowing pitch, sometimes as instantaneous as light. He thought in a second, and willed. ‘Let me come down safe and sound. Whatever else happens let me down safe and sound.’
He willed it only just in time, for his clothes, heated by his rapid flight through the air, were already beginning to singe. He came down with a forcible, but by no means injurious, bump in what appeared to be a mound of fresh-turned earth. A large mass of metal and masonry, extraordinarily like the clock-tower in the middle of the market square, hit the earth near him, ricochetted over him, and flew into stonework, bricks, and cement, like a bursting bomb. A hurtling cow hit one of the larger blocks and smashed like an egg. Therewas a crash that made all the most violent crashes of his past life seem like the sound of falling dust, and this was followed by a descending series of lesser crashes. A vast wind roared throughout earth and heaven, so that he could scarcely lift his head to look. For a while he was too breathless and astonished even to see where he was or what had happened. And his first movement was to feel his head and reassure himself that his streaming hair was still his own.
‘Lord!’ gasped Mr Fotheringay, scarce able to speak for the gale, ‘I’ve had a squeak! What’s gone wrong? Storms and thunder. And only a minute ago a fine night. It’s Maydig set me on to this sort of thing.Whata wind! If I go on fooling in this way I’m bound to have a thundering accident!...’
‘Where’s Maydig?’
‘What a confounded mess everything’s in!’
He looked about him so far as his flapping jacket would permit. The appearance of things was really extremely strange. ‘The sky’s all right anyhow,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘And that’s about all that is all right. And even there it looks like a terrific gale coming up. And even there’s the moon overhead. Just as it was just now. Bright as midday. But as for the rest—— Where’s the village? Where’s—where’s any thing? And what on earth set this wind a-blowing?Ididn’t order no wind.’
Mr Fotheringay struggled to get to his feet in vain, and after one failure, remained on all fours, holding on. He surveyed the moonlit world to leeward, with the tails of his jacket streaming over his head. ‘There’s something seriously wrong,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘And what it is—goodness knows.’
Far and wide nothing was visible in the white glare through the haze of dust that drove before a screaming gale but tumbled masses of earth and heaps of inchoateruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only a wilderness of disorder, vanishing at last into the darkness beneath the whirling columns and streamers, the lightnings and thunderings of a swiftly rising storm. Near him in the livid glare was something that might once have been an elm-tree, a smashed mass of splinters, shivered from boughs to base, and further a twisted mass of iron girders—only too evidently the viaduct—rose out of the piled confusion.
You see, when Mr Fotheringay had arrested the rotation of the solid globe, he had made no stipulation concerning the trifling movables upon its surface. And the earth spins so fast that the surface at its equator is travelling at rather more than a thousand miles an hour, and in these latitudes at more than half that pace.
So that the village, and Mr Maydig, and Mr Fotheringay, and everybody and everything had been jerked violently forward at about nine miles per second—that is to say, much more violently than if they had been fired out of a cannon. And every human being, every living creature, every house, and every tree—all the world as we know it—had been so jerked and smashed and utterly destroyed. That was all.
These things Mr Fotheringay did not, of course, fully appreciate. But he perceived that his miracle had miscarried, and with that a great disgust of miracles came upon him. He was in darkness now, for the clouds had swept together and blotted out his momentary glimpse of the moon, and the air was full of fitful struggling tortured wraiths of hail. A great roaring of wind and waters filled earth and sky, and peering under his hand through the dust and sleet to windward, he saw by the play of the lightnings a vast wall of water pouring towards him.
‘Maydig!’ screamed Mr Fotheringay’s feeble voice amid the elemental uproar. ‘Here!—Maydig!’
‘Stop!’ cried Mr Fotheringay to the advancing water. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, stop!
‘Just a moment,’ said Mr Fotheringay to the lightnings and thunder. ‘Stop jest a moment while I collect my thoughts.... And now what shall I do?’ he said. ‘WhatshallI do? Lord! I wish Maydig was about.’
‘I know,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘And for goodness’ sake let’s have it rightthistime.’
He remained on all fours, leaning against the wind, very intent to have everything right.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Let nothing what I’m going to order happen until I say “Off!” ... Lord! I wish I’d thought of that before!’
He lifted his little voice against the whirlwind, shouting louder and louder in the vain desire to hear himself speak. ‘Now then!—here goes! Mind about that what I said just now. In the first place, when all I’ve got to say is done, let me lose my miraculous power, let my will become just like anybody else’s will, and all these dangerous miracles be stopped. I don’t like them. I’d rather I didn’t work ’em. Ever so much. That’s the first thing. And the second is—let me be back just before the miracles begin; let everything be just as it was before that blessed lamp turned up. It’s a big job, but it’s the last. Have you got it? No more miracles, everything as it was—me back in the Long Dragon just before I drank my half-pint. That’s it! Yes.’
He dug his fingers into the mould, closed his eyes, and said ‘Off!’
Everything became perfectly still. He perceived that he was standing erect.
‘Soyousay,’ said a voice.
He opened his eyes. He was in the bar of the Long Dragon, arguing about miracles with Toddy Beamish. He had a vague sense of some great thing forgottenthat instantaneously passed. You see that, except for the loss of his miraculous powers, everything was back as it had been, his mind and memory therefore were now just as they had been at the time when this story began. So that he knew absolutely nothing of all that is told here—knows nothing of all that is told here to this day. And among other things, of course, he still did not believe in miracles.
‘I tell you that miracles, properly speaking, can’t possibly happen,’ he said, ‘whatever you like to hold. And I’m prepared to prove it up to the hilt.’
‘That’s whatyouthink,’ said Toddy Beamish, and ‘Prove it if you can.’
‘Looky here, Mr Beamish,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It’s something contrariwise to the course of nature done by power of Will....’
The man with the white face entered the carriage at Rugby. He moved slowly in spite of the urgency of his porter, and even while he was still on the platform I noted how ill he seemed. He dropped into the corner over against me with a sigh, made an incomplete attempt to arrange his travelling shawl, and became motionless, with his eyes staring vacantly. Presently he was moved by a sense of my observation, looked up at me, and put out a spiritless hand for his newspaper. Then he glanced again in my direction.
I feigned to read. I feared I had unwittingly embarrassed him, and in a moment I was surprised to find him speaking.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said I.
‘That book,’ he repeated, pointing a lean finger, ‘is about dreams.’
‘Obviously,’ I answered, for it was Fortnum-Roscoe’sDream States, and the title was on the cover.
He hung silent for a space as if he sought words. ‘Yes,’ he said, at last, ‘but they tell you nothing.’
I did not catch his meaning for a second.
‘They don’t know,’ he added.
I looked a little more attentively at his face.
‘There are dreams,’ he said, ‘and dreams.’
That sort of proposition I never dispute.
‘I suppose——’ he hesitated. ‘Do you ever dream? I mean vividly.’
‘I dream very little,’ I answered. ‘I doubt if I have three vivid dreams in a year.’
‘Ah!’ he said, and seemed for a moment to collect his thoughts.
‘Your dreams don’t mix with your memories?’ he asked abruptly. ‘You don’t find yourself in doubt: did this happen or did it not?’
‘Hardly ever. Except just for a momentary hesitation now and then. I suppose few people do.’
‘Doeshesay——’ he indicated the book.
‘Says it happens at times and gives the usual explanation about intensity of impression and the like to account for its not happening as a rule. I suppose you know something of these theories——’
‘Very little——except that they are wrong.’
His emaciated hand played with the strap of the window for a time. I prepared to resume reading, and that seemed to precipitate his next remark. He leant forward almost as though he would touch me.
‘Isn’t there something called consecutive dreaming—that goes on night after night?’
‘I believe there is. There are cases given in most books on mental trouble.’
‘Mental trouble! Yes. I dare say there are. It’s the right place for them. But what I mean——’ He looked at his bony knuckles. ‘Is that sort of thing always dreaming?Isit dreaming? Or is it something else? Mightn’t it be something else?’
I should have snubbed his persistent conversation but for the drawn anxiety of his face. I remember now the look of his faded eyes and the lids red stained—perhaps you know that look.
‘I’m not just arguing about a matter of opinion,’ he said. ‘The thing’s killing me.’
‘Dreams?’
‘If you call them dreams. Night after night. Vivid!—so vivid ... this——’ (he indicated the landscape that went streaming by the window) ‘seems unreal in comparison! I can scarcely remember who I am, what business I am on....’
He paused. ‘Even now——’
‘The dream is always the same—do you mean?’ I asked.
‘It’s over.’
‘You mean?’
‘I died.’
‘Died?’
‘Smashed and killed, and now so much of me as that dream was is dead. Dead for ever. I dreamt I was another man, you know, living in a different part of the world and in a different time. I dreamt that night after night. Night after night I woke into that other life. Fresh scenes and fresh happenings—until I came upon the last——’
‘When you died?’
‘When I died.’
‘And since then——’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank God! that was the end of the dream....’
It was clear I was in for this dream. And, after all, I had an hour before me, the light was fading fast, and Fortnum-Roscoe has a dreary way with him. ‘Living in a different time,’ I said: ‘do you mean in some different age?’
‘Yes?
‘Past?’
‘No, to come—to come.’
‘The year three thousand, for example?’
‘I don’t know what year it was. I did when I was asleep, when I was dreaming, that is, but not now—not now that I am awake. There’s a lot of things Ihave forgotten since I woke out of these dreams, though I knew them at the time when I was—I suppose it was dreaming. They called the year differently from our way of calling the year.... Whatdidthey call it?’ He put his hand to his forehead. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I forget.’
He sat smiling weakly. For a moment I feared he did not mean to tell me his dream. As a rule, I hate people who tell their dreams, but this struck me differently. I proffered assistance even. ‘It began——’ I suggested.
‘It was vivid from the first. I seemed to wake up in it suddenly. And it’s curious that in these dreams I am speaking of I never remembered this life I am living now. It seemed as if the dream life was enough while it lasted. Perhaps—— But I will tell you how I find myself when I do my best to recall it all. I don’t remember anything clearly until I found myself sitting in a sort of loggia looking out over the sea. I had been dozing, and suddenly I woke up—fresh and vivid—not a bit dreamlike—because the girl had stopped fanning me.’
‘The girl?’
‘Yes, the girl. You must not interrupt or you will put me out.’
He stopped abruptly. ‘You won’t think I’m mad?’ he said.
‘No,’ I answered; ‘you’ve been dreaming. Tell me your dream.’
‘I woke up, I say, because the girl had stopped fanning me. I was not surprised to find myself there or anything of that sort, you understand. I did not feel I had fallen into it suddenly. I simply took it up at that point. Whatever memory I had ofthislife, this nineteenth-century life, faded as I woke, vanished like a dream. I knew all about myself, knew that myname was no longer Cooper but Hedon, and all about my position in the world. I’ve forgotten a lot since I woke—there’s a want of connection—but it was all quite clear and matter-of-fact then.’
He hesitated again, gripping the window strap, putting his face forward, and looking up to me appealingly.
‘This seems bosh to you?’
‘No, no!’ I cried. ‘Go on. Tell me what this loggia was like.’
‘It was not really a loggia—I don’t know what to call it. It faced south. It was small. It was all in shadow except the semicircle above the balcony that showed the sky and sea and the corner where the girl stood. I was on a couch—it was a metal couch with light striped cushions—and the girl was leaning over the balcony with her back to me. The light of the sunrise fell on her ear and cheek. Her pretty white neck and the little curls that nestled there, and her white shoulder were in the sun, and all the grace of her body was in the cool blue shadow. She was dressed—how can I describe it? It was easy and flowing. And altogether there she stood, so that it came to me how beautiful and desirable she was, as though I had never seen her before. And when at last I sighed and raised myself upon my arm she turned her face to me——’
He stopped.
‘I have lived three-and-fifty years in this world. I have had mother, sisters, friends, wife and daughters—all their faces, the play of their faces, I know. But the face of this girl—it is much more real to me. I can bring it back into memory so that I see it again—I could draw it or paint it. And after all——’
He stopped—but I said nothing.
‘The face of a dream—the face of a dream. She was beautiful. Not that beauty which is terrible, cold, and worshipful, like the beauty of a saint; nor that beautythat stirs fierce passions; but a sort of radiation, sweet lips that softened into smiles, and grave gray eyes. And she moved gracefully, she seemed to have part with all pleasant and gracious things——’
He stopped, and his face was downcast and hidden. Then he looked up at me and went on, making no further attempt to disguise his absolute belief in the reality of his story.
‘You see, I had thrown up my plans and ambitions, thrown up all I had ever worked for or desired, for her sake. I had been a master man away there in the north, with influence and property and a great reputation, but none of it had seemed worth having beside her. I had come to the place, this city of sunny pleasures, with her, and left all those things to wreck and ruin just to save a remnant at least of my life. While I had been in love with her before I knew that she had any care for me, before I had imagined that she would dare—that we should dare—all my life had seemed vain and hollow, dust and ashes. Itwasdust and ashes. Night after night, and through the long days I had longed and desired—my soul had beaten against the thing forbidden!
‘But it is impossible for one man to tell another just these things. It’s emotion, it’s a tint, a light that comes and goes. Only while it’s there, everything changes, everything. The thing is I came away and left them in their crisis to do what they could.’
‘Left whom?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘The people up in the north there. You see—in this dream, anyhow—I had been a big man, the sort of man men come to trust in, to group themselves about. Millions of men who had never seen me were ready to do things and risk things because of their confidence in me. I had been playing that game for years, that big laborious game, that vague, monstrous political game amidst intrigues and betrayals, speech and agitation.It was a vast weltering world, and at last I had a sort of leadership against the Gang—you know it was called the Gang—a sort of compromise of scoundrelly projects and base ambitions and vast public emotional stupidities and catch-words—the Gang that kept the world noisy and blind year by year, and all the while that it was drifting, drifting towards infinite disaster. But I can’t expect you to understand the shades and complications of the year—the year something or other ahead. I had it all—down to the smallest details—in my dream. I suppose I had been dreaming of it before I awoke, and the fading outline of some queer new development I had imagined still hung about me as I rubbed my eyes. It was some grubby affair that made me thank God for the sunlight. I sat up on the couch and remained looking at the woman, and rejoicing—rejoicing that I had come away out of all that tumult and folly and violence before it was too late. After all, I thought, this is life—love and beauty, desire and delight, are they not worth all those dismal struggles for vague, gigantic ends? And I blamed myself for having ever sought to be a leader when I might have given my days to love. But then, thought I, if I had not spent my early days sternly and austerely, I might have wasted myself upon vain and worthless women, and at the thought all my being went out in love and tenderness to my dear mistress, my dear lady, who had come at last and compelled me—compelled me by her invincible charm for me—to lay that life aside.
‘“You are worth it,” I said, speaking without intending her to hear; “you are worth it, my dearest one; worth pride and praise and all things. Love! to haveyouis worth them all together.” And at the murmur of my voice she turned about.
‘“Come and see,” she cried—I can hear her now—“come and see the sunrise upon Monte Solaro.”
‘I remember how I sprang to my feet and joined her at the balcony. She put a white hand upon my shoulder and pointed towards great masses of limestone flushing, as it were, into life. I looked. But first I noted the sunlight on her face caressing the lines of her cheeks and neck. How can I describe to you the scene we had before us? We were at Capri——’
‘I have been there,’ I said. ‘I have clambered up Monte Solaro and drunkvero Capri—muddy stuff like cider—at the summit.’
‘Ah!’ said the man with the white face; ‘then perhaps you can tell me—you will know if this was indeed Capri. For in this life I have never been there. Let me describe it. We were in a little room, one of a vast multitude of little rooms, very cool and sunny, hollowed out of the limestone of a sort of cape, very high above the sea. The whole island, you know, was one enormous hotel, complex beyond explaining, and on the other side there were miles of floating hotels, and huge floating stages to which the flying machines came. They called it a Pleasure City. Of course, there was none of that in your time—rather, I should say,isnone of thatnow. Of course. Now!—yes.
‘Well, this room of ours was at the extremity of the cape, so that one could see east and west. Eastward was a great cliff—a thousand feet high perhaps, coldly gray except for one bright edge of gold, and beyond it the Isle of the Sirens, and a falling coast that faded and passed into the hot sunrise. And when one turned to the west, distinct and near was a little bay, a little beach still in shadow. And out of that shadow rose Solaro, straight and tall, flushed and golden-crested, like a beauty throned, and the white moon was floating behind her in the sky. And before us from east to west stretched the many-tinted sea all dotted with little sailing-boats.
‘To the eastward, of course, these little boats weregray and very minute and clear, but to the westward they were little boats of gold—shining gold—almost like little flames. And just below us was a rock with an arch worn through it. The blue sea-water broke to green and foam all round the rock, and a galley came gliding out of the arch.’
‘I know that rock,’ I said. ‘I was nearly drowned there. It is called the Faraglioni.’
‘Faraglioni?Yes,shecalled it that,’ answered the man with the white face. ‘There was some story—but that——’
He put his hand to his forehead again. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I forget that story.
‘Well, that is the first thing I remember, the first dream I had, that little shaded room and the beautiful air and sky and that dear lady of mine, with her shining arms and her graceful robe, and how we sat and talked in half whispers to one another. We talked in whispers, not because there was any one to hear, but because there was still such a freshness of mind between us that our thoughts were a little frightened, I think, to find themselves at last in words. And so they went softly.
‘Presently we were hungry, and we went from our apartment, going by a strange passage with a moving floor, until we came to the great breakfast-room—there was a fountain and music. A pleasant and joyful place it was, with its sunlight and splashing, and the murmur of plucked strings. And we sat and ate and smiled at one another, and I would not heed a man who was watching me from a table near by.
‘And afterwards we went on to the dancing-hall. But I cannot describe that hall. The place was enormous, larger than any building you have ever seen—and in one place there was the old gate of Capri, caught into the wall of a gallery high overhead. Light girders,stems and threads of gold, burst from the pillars like fountains, streamed like an Aurora across the roof and interlaced, like—like conjuring tricks. All about the great circle for the dancers there were beautiful figures, strange dragons, and intricate and wonderful grotesques bearing lights. The place was inundated with artificial light that shamed the newborn day. And as we went through the throng the people turned about and looked at us, for all through the world my name and face were known, and how I had suddenly thrown up pride and struggle to come to this place. And they looked also at the lady beside me, though half the story of how at last she had come to me was unknown or mistold. And few of the men who were there, I know, but judged me a happy man, in spite of all the shame and dishonour that had come upon my name.
‘The air was full of music, full of harmonious scents, full of the rhythm of beautiful motions. Thousands of beautiful people swarmed about the hall, crowded the galleries, sat in a myriad recesses; they were dressed in splendid colours and crowned with flowers; thousands danced about the great circle beneath the white images of the ancient gods, and glorious processions of youths and maidens came and went. We two danced, not the dreary monotonies of your days—of this time, I mean—but dances that were beautiful, intoxicating. And even now I can see my lady dancing—dancing—joyously. She danced, you know, with a serious face; she danced with a serious dignity, and yet she was smiling at me and caressing me—smiling and caressing with her eyes.
‘The music was different,’ he murmured. ‘It went—I cannot describe it; but it was infinitely richer and more varied than any music that has ever come to me awake.
‘And then—it was when we had done dancing—a man came to speak to me. He was a lean, resolute man, very soberly clad for that place, and already I had marked his face watching me in the breakfasting hall, and afterwards as we went along the passage I had avoided his eye. But now, as we sat in a little alcove smiling at the pleasure of all the people who went to and fro across the shining floor, he came and touched me, and spoke to me so that I was forced to listen. And he asked that he might speak to me for a little time apart.
‘“No,” I said. “I have no secrets from this lady. What do you want to tell me?”
‘He said it was a trivial matter, or at least a dry matter, for a lady to hear.
‘“Perhaps for me to hear,” said I.
‘He glanced at her, as though almost he would appeal to her. Then he asked me suddenly if I had heard of a great and avenging declaration that Gresham had made. Now, Gresham had always before been the man next to myself in the leadership of that great party in the north. He was a forcible, hard, and tactless man, and only I had been able to control and soften him. It was on his account even more than my own, I think, that the others had been so dismayed at my retreat. So this question about what he had done re-awakened my old interest in the life I had put aside just for a moment.
‘“I have taken no heed of any news for many days,” I said. “What has Gresham been saying?”
‘And with that the man began, nothing loath, and I must confess even I was struck by Gresham’s reckless folly in the wild and threatening words he had used. And this messenger they had sent to me not only told me of Gresham’s speech, but went on to ask counsel and to point out what need they had of me. While he talked, my lady sat a little forward and watched his face and mine.
‘My old habits of scheming and organising reasserted themselves. I could even see myself suddenly returning to the north, and all the dramatic effect of it. All that this man said witnessed to the disorder of the party indeed, but not to its damage. I should go back stronger than I had come. And then I thought of my lady. You see—how can I tell you? There were certain peculiarities of our relationship—as things are I need not tell about that—which would render her presence with me impossible. I should have had to leave her; indeed, I should have had to renounce her clearly and openly, if I was to do all that I could do in the north. And the man knewthat, even as he talked to her and me, knew it as well as she did, that my steps to duty were—first, separation, then abandonment. At the touch of that thought my dream of a return was shattered. I turned on the man suddenly, as he was imagining his eloquence was gaining ground with me.
‘“What have I to do with these things now?” I said. “I have done with them. Do you think I am coquetting with your people in coming here?”
‘“No,” he said; “but——”
‘“Why cannot you leave me alone? I have done with these things. I have ceased to be anything but a private man.”
‘“Yes,” he answered. “But have you thought?—this talk of war, these reckless challenges, these wild aggressions——”
‘I stood up.
‘“No,” I cried. “I won’t hear you. I took count of all those things, I weighed them—and I have come away.”
‘He seemed to consider the possibility of persistence. He looked from me to where the lady sat regarding us.
‘“War,” he said, as if he were speaking to himself, and then turned slowly from me and walked away.
‘I stood, caught in the whirl of thoughts his appeal had set going.
‘I heard my lady’s voice.
‘“Dear,” she said; “but if they have need of you——”
‘She did not finish her sentence, she let it rest there. I turned to her sweet face, and the balance of my mood swayed and reeled.
‘“They want me only to do the thing they dare not do themselves,” I said. “If they distrust Gresham they must settle with him themselves.”
‘She looked at me doubtfully.
‘“But war——” she said.
‘I saw a doubt on her face that I had seen before, a doubt of herself and me, the first shadow of the discovery that, seen strongly and completely, must drive us apart for ever.
‘Now, I was an older mind than hers, and I could sway her to this belief or that.
‘“My dear one,” I said, “you must not trouble over these things. There will be no war. Certainly there will be no war. The age of wars is past. Trust me to know the justice of this case. They have no right upon me, dearest, and no one has a right upon me. I have been free to choose my life, and I have chosen this.”
‘“Butwar——” she said.
‘I sat down beside her. I put an arm behind her and took her hand in mine. I set myself to drive that doubt away—I set myself to fill her mind with pleasant things again. I lied to her, and in lying to her I lied also to myself. And she was only too ready to believe me, only too ready to forget.
‘Very soon the shadow had gone again, and we were hastening to our bathing-place in the Grotta del Bovo Marino, where it was our custom to bathe every day. We swam and splashed one another, and in that buoyantwater I seemed to become something lighter and stronger than a man. And at last we came out dripping and rejoicing and raced among the rocks. And then I put on a dry bathing-dress, and we sat to bask in the sun, and presently I nodded, resting my head against her knee, and she put her hand upon my hair and stroked it softly and I dozed. And behold! as it were with the snapping of the string of a violin, I was awakening, and I was in my own bed in Liverpool, in the life of to-day.
‘Only for a time I could not believe that all these vivid moments had been no more than the substance of a dream.
‘In truth, I could not believe it a dream, for all the sobering reality of things about me. I bathed and dressed as it were by habit, and as I shaved I argued why I of all men should leave the woman I loved to go back to fantastic politics in the hard and strenuous north. Even if Gresham did force the world back to war, what was that to me? I was a man, with the heart of a man, and why should I feel the responsibility of a deity for the way the world might go?
‘You know that is not quite the way I think about affairs, about my real affairs. I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of view.
‘The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike a dream, that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details; even the ornament of a book-cover that lay on my wife’s sewing-machine in the breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line that ran about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the messenger from my deserted party. Have you ever heard of a dream that had a quality like that?’
‘Like——?’
‘So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten.’
I thought. I had never noticed the point before, but he was right.
‘Never,’ I said. ‘That is what you never seem to do with dreams.’
‘No,’ he answered. ‘But that is just what I did. I am a solicitor, you must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help wondering what the clients and business people I found myself talking to in my office would think if I told them suddenly I was in love with a girl who would be born a couple of hundred years or so hence, and worried about the politics of my great-great-great-grandchildren. I was chiefly busy that day negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease. It was a private builder in a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way. I had an interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that sent me to bed still irritated. That night I had no dream. Nor did I dream the next night, at least, to remember.
‘Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished. I began to feel sure itwasa dream. And then it came again.
‘When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very different. I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in the dream. Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them was back again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled. I began, I know, with moody musings. Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days, to toil and stress, insults, and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could not do other than despise, from the stress and anguish of war and infinite misrule? And, after all, I might fail.Theyall sought their own narrow ends, and why should not I—why should not I also live as aman? And out of such thoughts her voice summoned me, and I lifted my eyes.
‘I found myself awake and walking. We had come out above the Pleasure City, we were near the summit of Monte Solaro and looking towards the bay. It was the late afternoon and very clear. Far away to the left Ischia hung in a golden haze between sea and sky, and Naples was coldly white against the hills, and before us was Vesuvius with a tall and slender streamer feathering at last towards the south, and the ruins of Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellammare glittering and near.’
I interrupted suddenly: ‘You have been to Capri, of course?’
‘Only in this dream,’ he said, ‘only in this dream. All across the bay beyond Sorrento were the floating palaces of the Pleasure City moored and chained. And northward were the broad floating stages that received the aeroplanes. Aeroplanes fell out of the sky every afternoon, each bringing its thousands of pleasure-seekers from the uttermost parts of the earth to Capri and its delights. All these things, I say, stretched below.
‘But we noticed them only incidentally because of an unusual sight that evening had to show. Five war aeroplanes that had long slumbered useless in the distant arsenals of the Rhine-mouth were manœuvring now in the eastward sky. Gresham had astonished the world by producing them and others, and sending them to circle here and there. It was the threat material in the great game of bluff he was playing, and it had taken even me by surprise. He was one of those incredibly stupid, energetic people who seem sent by heaven to create disasters. His energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity! But he had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast, driving force of willand a mad faith in his stupid idiot “luck” to pull him through. I remember how we stood out upon the headland watching the squadron circling far away, and how I weighed the full meaning of the sight, seeing clearly the way things must go. And even then it was not too late. I might have gone back, I think, and saved the world. The people of the north would follow me, I knew, granted only that in one thing I respected their moral standards. The east and south would trust me as they would trust no other northern man. And I knew I had only to put it to her and she would have let me go.... Not because she did not love me!
‘Only I did not want to go; my will was all the other way about. I had so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I was still so fresh a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what Ioughtto do had no power at all to touch my will. My will was to live, to gather pleasures, and make my dear lady happy. But though this sense of vast neglected duties had no power to draw me, it could make me silent and preoccupied, it robbed the days I had spent of half their brightness and roused me into dark meditations in the silence of the night. And as I stood and watched Gresham’s aeroplanes sweep to and fro—those birds of infinite ill omen—she stood beside me, watching me, perceiving the trouble indeed, but not perceiving it clearly—her eyes questioning my face, her expression shaded with perplexity. Her face was gray because the sunset was fading out of the sky. It was no fault of hers that she held me. She had asked me to go from her, and again in the night-time and with tears she had asked me to go.
‘At last it was the sense of her that roused me from my mood. I turned upon her suddenly and challenged her to race down the mountain slopes. “No,” she said, as if I jarred with her gravity, but I was resolved to end that gravity and made her run—no one can be very grayand sad who is out of breath—and when she stumbled I ran with my hand beneath her arm. We ran down past a couple of men, who turned back staring in astonishment at my behaviour—they must have recognised my face. And half-way down the slope came a tumult in the air—clang-clank, clang-clank—and we stopped, and presently over the hill-crest those war things came flying one behind the other.’
The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.
‘What were they like?’ I asked.
‘They had never fought,’ he said. ‘They were just like our ironclads are nowadays; they had never fought. No one knew what they might do, with excited men inside them; few even cared to speculate. They were great driving things shaped like spear-heads without a shaft, with a propeller in the place of the shaft.’
‘Steel?’
‘Not steel.’
‘Aluminium?’
‘No, no, nothing of that sort. An alloy that was very common—as common as brass, for example. It was called—let me see——’ He squeezed his forehead with the fingers of one hand. ‘I am forgetting everything,’ he said.
‘And they carried guns?’
‘Little guns, firing high explosive shells. They fired the guns backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with the beak. That was the theory, you know, but they had never been fought. No one could tell exactly what was going to happen. And meanwhile I suppose it was very fine to go whirling through the air like a flight of young swallows, swift and easy. I guess the captains tried not to think too clearly what the real thing would be like. And these flying war machines, you know, were only one sort ofthe endless war contrivances that had been invented and had fallen into abeyance during the long peace. There were all sorts of these things that people were routing out and furbishing up; infernal things, silly things; things that had never been tried; big engines, terrible explosives, great guns. You know the silly way of these ingenious sort of men who make these things; they turn ’em out as beavers build dams, and with no more sense of the rivers they’re going to divert and the lands they’re going to flood!
‘As we went down the winding stepway to our hotel again in the twilight I foresaw it all: I saw how clearly and inevitably things were driving for war in Gresham’s silly, violent hands, and I had some inkling of what war was bound to be under these new conditions. And even then, though I knew it was drawing near the limit of my opportunity, I could find no will to go back.’
He sighed.
‘That was my last chance.
‘We did not go into the city until the sky was full of stars, so we walked out upon the high terrace, to and fro, and—she counselled me to go back.
‘“My dearest,” she said, and her sweet face looked up to me, “this is Death. This life you lead is Death. Go back to them, go back to your duty——”
‘She began to weep, saying between her sobs, and clinging to my arm as she said it, “Go back—go back.”
‘Then suddenly she fell mute, and glancing down at her face, I read in an instant the thing she had thought to do. It was one of those moments when onesees.
‘“No!” I said.
‘“No?” she asked, in surprise, and I think a little fearful at the answer to her thought.
‘“Nothing,” I said, “shall send me back. Nothing! I have chosen. Love, I have chosen, and the worldmust go. Whatever happens, I will live this life—I will live foryou! It—nothing shall turn me aside; nothing, my dear one. Even if you died—even if you died——”
‘“Yes?” she murmured, softly.
‘“Then—I also would die.”
‘And before she could speak again I began to talk, talking eloquently—as Icoulddo in that life—talking to exalt love, to make the life we were living seem heroic and glorious; and the thing I was deserting something hard and enormously ignoble that it was a fine thing to set aside. I bent all my mind to throw that glamour upon it, seeking not only to convert her but myself to that. We talked, and she clung to me, torn too between all that she deemed noble and all that she knew was sweet. And at last I did make it heroic, made all the thickening disaster of the world only a sort of glorious setting to our unparalleled love, and we two poor foolish souls strutted there at last, clad in that splendid delusion, drunken rather with that glorious delusion, under the still stars.
‘And so my moment passed.
‘It was my last chance. Even as we went to and fro there, the leaders of the south and east were gathering their resolve, and the hot answer that shattered Gresham’s bluffing for ever took shape and waited. And all over Asia, and the ocean, and the south, the air and the wires were throbbing with their warnings to prepare—prepare.
‘No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine, with all these new inventions, what horror war might bring. I believe most people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms and shouting charges and triumphs and flags and bands—in a time when half the world drew its food-supply from regions ten thousand miles away——’
The man with the white face paused. I glanced athim, and his face was intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway station, a string of loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of a cottage shot by the carriage window, and a bridge passed with a clap of noise, echoing the tumult of the train.
‘After that,’ he said, ‘I dreamt often. For three weeks of nights that dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed inthisaccursed life; andthere—somewhere lost to me—things were happening—momentous, terrible things.... I lived at nights—my days, my waking days, this life I am living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover of the book.’
He thought.
‘I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the dream, but as to what I did in the daytime—no. I could not tell—I do not remember. My memory—my memory has gone. The business of life slips from me——’
He leant forward, and pressed his hands upon his eyes. For a long time he said nothing.
‘And then?’ said I.
‘The war burst like a hurricane.’
He stared before him at unspeakable things.
‘And then?’ I urged again.
‘One touch of unreality,’ he said, in the low tone of a man who speaks to himself, ‘and they would have been nightmares. But they were not nightmares—they were not nightmares.No!’
He was silent for so long that it dawned upon me that there was a danger of losing the rest of the story. But he went on talking again in the same tone of questioning self-communion.
‘What was there to do but flight? I had not thought the war would touch Capri—I had seemed to see Capri as being out of it all, as the contrast to it all; but twonights after the whole place was shouting and bawling, every woman almost and every other man wore a badge—Gresham’s badge—and there was no music but a jangling war-song over and over again, and everywhere men enlisting, and in the dancing halls they were drilling. The whole island was a-whirl with rumours; it was said, again and again, that fighting had begun. I had not expected this. I had seen so little of the life of pleasure that I had failed to reckon with this violence of the amateurs. And as for me, I was out of it. I was like a man who might have prevented the firing of a magazine. The time had gone. I was no one; the vainest stripling with a badge counted for more than I. The crowd jostled us and bawled in our ears; that accursed song deafened us; a woman shrieked at my lady because no badge was on her, and we two went back to our own place again, ruffled and insulted—my lady white and silent, and I a-quiver with rage. So furious was I, I could have quarrelled with her if I could have found one shade of accusation in her eyes.
‘All my magnificence had gone from me. I walked up and down our rock cell, and outside was the darkling sea and a light to the southward that flared and passed and came again.
‘“We must get out of this place,” I said over and over. “I have made my choice, and I will have no hand in these troubles. I will have nothing of this war. We have taken our lives out of all these things. This is no refuge for us. Let us go.”
‘And the next day we were already in flight from the war that covered the world.
‘And all the rest was Flight—all the rest was Flight.’
He mused darkly.
‘How much was there of it?’
He made no answer.
‘How many days?’
His face was white and drawn and his hands were clenched. He took no heed of my curiosity.
I tried to draw him back to his story with questions.
‘Where did you go?’ I said.
‘When?’
‘When you left Capri.’
‘South-west,’ he said, and glanced at me for a second. ‘We went in a boat.’
‘But I should have thought an aeroplane?’
‘They had been seized.’
I questioned him no more. Presently I thought he was beginning again. He broke out in an argumentative monotone:—