“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 Rhinemouth were manoeuvring now in the
eastward sky. Evesham 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 will,
and 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 then even 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 I OUGHT to 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 Evesham'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 grey 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 grey and 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 halfway 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 spearheads 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 of the 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 Evesham'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 didn't 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 one SEES.
“'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 world must go. Whatever happens I will live this
life--I will live for YOU! 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 I COULD do 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 Evesham'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 at him, 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 in THIS accursed life; and
THERE--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 two nights after the whole place was shouting and
bawling, every woman almost and every other man wore a badge--Evesham'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 awhirl 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 aquiver 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.