“Where did you go?” I said.
“When?”
“When you left Capri.”
“Southwest,” 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:
“But why should it be? If, indeed, this battle, this slaughter and
stress IS life, why have we this craving for pleasure and beauty? If
there IS no refuge, if there is no place of peace, and if all our dreams
of quiet places are a folly and a snare, why have we such dreams? Surely
it was no ignoble cravings, no base intentions, had brought us to this;
it was Love had isolated us. Love had come to me with her eyes and robed
in her beauty, more glorious than all else in life, in the very shape
and colour of life, and summoned me away. I had silenced all the voices,
I had answered all the questions--I had come to her. And suddenly there
was nothing but War and Death!”
I had an inspiration. “After all,” I said, “it could have been only a
dream.”
“A dream!” he cried, flaming upon me, “a dream--when even now--”
For the first time he became animated. A faint flush crept into his
cheek. He raised his open hand and clenched it, and dropped it to his
knee. He spoke, looking away from me, and for all the rest of the time
he looked away. “We are but phantoms,” he said, “and the phantoms of
phantoms, desires like cloud shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the
wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries
the shadow of its lights, so be it! But one thing is real and certain,
one thing is no dreamstuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre
of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether
vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead
together!
“A dream! How can it be a dream, when it drenched a living life with
unappeasable sorrow, when it makes all that I have lived for and cared
for, worthless and unmeaning?
“Until that very moment when she was killed I believed we had still a
chance of getting away,” he said. “All through the night and morning
that we sailed across the sea from Capri to Salerno, we talked of
escape. We were full of hope, and it clung about us to the end, hope for
the life together we should lead, out of it all, out of the battle and
struggle, the wild and empty passions, the empty arbitrary 'thou shalt'
and 'thou shalt not' of the world. We were uplifted, as though our quest
was a holy thing, as though love for one another was a mission....
“Even when from our boat we saw the fair face of that great rock
Capri--already scarred and gashed by the gun emplacements and
hiding-places that were to make it a fastness--we reckoned nothing of
the imminent slaughter, though the fury of preparation hung about in
puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst the grey; but,
indeed, I made a text of that and talked. There, you know, was the
rock, still beautiful, for all its scars, with its countless windows and
arches and ways, tier upon tier, for a thousand feet, a vast carving
of grey, broken by vine-clad terraces, and lemon and orange groves, and
masses of agave and prickly pear, and puffs of almond blossom. And out
under the archway that is built over the Piccola Marina other boats were
coming; and as we came round the cape and within sight of the mainland,
another little string of boats came into view, driving before the wind
towards the southwest. In a little while a multitude had come out, the
remoter just little specks of ultramarine in the shadow of the eastward
cliff.
“'It is love and reason,' I said, 'fleeing from all this madness, of
war.'
“And though we presently saw a squadron of aeroplanes flying across the
southern sky we did not heed it. There it was--a line of little dots in
the sky--and then more, dotting the southeastern horizon, and then still
more, until all that quarter of the sky was stippled with blue specks.
Now they were all thin little strokes of blue, and now one and now
a multitude would heel and catch the sun and become short flashes of
light. They came rising and falling and growing larger, like some huge
flight of gulls or rooks, or such-like birds moving with a marvellous
uniformity, and ever as they drew nearer they spread over a greater
width of sky. The southward wing flung itself in an arrow-headed cloud
athwart the sun. And then suddenly they swept round to the eastward and
streamed eastward, growing smaller and smaller and clearer and clearer
again until they vanished from the sky. And after that we noted to the
northward and very high Evesham's fighting machines hanging high over
Naples like an evening swarm of gnats.
“It seemed to have no more to do with us than a flight of birds.
“Even the mutter of guns far away in the southeast seemed to us to
signify nothing....
“Each day, each dream after that, we were still exalted, still seeking
that refuge where we might live and love. Fatigue had come upon us,
pain and many distresses. For though we were dusty and stained by our
toilsome tramping, and half starved and with the horror of the dead
men we had seen and the flight of the peasants--for very soon a gust of
fighting swept up the peninsula--with these things haunting our minds it
still resulted only in a deepening resolution to escape. O, but she was
brave and patient! She who had never faced hardship and exposure had
courage for herself--and me. We went to and fro seeking an outlet, over
a country all commandeered and ransacked by the gathering hosts of war.
Always we went on foot. At first there were other fugitives, but we did
not mingle with them. Some escaped northward, some were caught in
the torrent of peasantry that swept along the main roads; many gave
themselves into the hands of the soldiery and were sent northward. Many
of the men were impressed. But we kept away from these things; we had
brought no money to bribe a passage north, and I feared for my lady at
the hands of these conscript crowds. We had landed at Salerno, and
we had been turned back from Cava, and we had tried to cross towards
Taranto by a pass over Mount Alburno, but we had been driven back for
want of food, and so we had come down among the marshes by Paestum,
where those great temples stand alone. I had some vague idea that by
Paestum it might be possible to find a boat or something, and take once
more to sea. And there it was the battle overtook us.
“A sort of soul-blindness had me. Plainly I could see that we were being
hemmed in; that the great net of that giant Warfare had us in its toils.
Many times we had seen the levies that had come down from the north
going to and fro, and had come upon them in the distance amidst the
mountains making ways for the ammunition and preparing the mounting of
the guns. Once we fancied they had fired at us, taking us for spies--at
any rate a shot had gone shuddering over us. Several times we had hidden
in woods from hovering aeroplanes.
“But all these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and
pain.... We were in an open place near those great temples at Paestum,
at last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes, empty and
desolate and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away showed to the
feet of its stems. How I can see it! My lady was sitting down under
a bush, resting a little, for she was very weak and weary, and I was
standing up watching to see if I could tell the distance of the firing
that came and went. They were still, you know, fighting far from each
other, with those terrible new weapons that had never before been used:
guns that would carry beyond sight, and aeroplanes that would do--What
THEY would do no man could foretell.
“I knew that we were between the two armies, and that they drew
together. I knew we were in danger, and that we could not stop there and
rest!
“Though all these things were in my mind, they were in the background.
They seemed to be affairs beyond our concern. Chiefly, I was thinking of
my lady. An aching distress filled me. For the first time she had owned
herself beaten and had fallen a-weeping. Behind me I could hear her
sobbing, but I would not turn round to her because I knew she had need
of weeping, and had held herself so far and so long for me. It was well,
I thought, that she would weep and rest and then we would toil on again,
for I had no inkling of the thing that hung so near. Even now I can see
her as she sat there, her lovely hair upon her shoulder, can mark again
the deepening hollow of her cheek.
“'If we had parted,' she said, 'if I had let you go.'
“'No,' said I. 'Even now, I do not repent. I will not repent; I made my
choice, and I will hold on to the end.”
“And then--
“Overhead in the sky something flashed and burst, and all about us I
heard the bullets making a noise like a handful of peas suddenly thrown.
They chipped the stones about us, and whirled fragments from the bricks
and passed....”
He put his hand to his mouth, and then moistened his lips.
“At the flash I had turned about....
“You know--she stood up--
“She stood up; you know, and moved a step towards me--
“As though she wanted to reach me--
“And she had been shot through the heart.”
He stopped and stared at me. I felt all that foolish incapacity an
Englishman feels on such occasions. I met his eyes for a moment, and
then stared out of the window. For a long space we kept silence. When at
last I looked at him he was sitting back in his corner, his arms folded,
and his teeth gnawing at his knuckles.
He bit his nail suddenly, and stared at it.
“I carried her,” he said, “towards the temples, in my arms--as though it
mattered. I don't know why. They seemed a sort of sanctuary, you know,
they had lasted so long, I suppose.
“She must have died almost instantly. Only--I talked to her--all the
way.”
Silence again.
“I have seen those temples,” I said abruptly, and indeed he had brought
those still, sunlit arcades of worn sandstone very vividly before me.
“It was the brown one, the big brown one. I sat down on a fallen pillar
and held her in my arms.... Silent after the first babble was over. And
after a little while the lizards came out and ran about again, as though
nothing unusual was going on, as though nothing had changed.... It was
tremendously still there, the sun high, and the shadows still; even the
shadows of the weeds upon the entablature were still--in spite of the
thudding and banging that went all about the sky.
“I seem to remember that the aeroplanes came up out of the south, and
that the battle went away to the west. One aeroplane was struck, and
overset and fell. I remember that--though it didn't interest me in
the least. It didn't seem to signify. It was like a wounded gull, you
know--flapping for a time in the water. I could see it down the aisle of
the temple--a black thing in the bright blue water.
“Three or four times shells burst about the beach, and then that ceased.
Each time that happened all the lizards scuttled in and hid for a space.
That was all the mischief done, except that once a stray bullet gashed
the stone hard by--made just a fresh bright surface.
“As the shadows grew longer, the stillness seemed greater.
“The curious thing,” he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a
trivial conversation, “is that I didn't THINK--I didn't think at all.
I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones--in a sort of
lethargy--stagnant.
“And I don't remember waking up. I don't remember dressing that day. I
know I found myself in my office, with my letters all slit open in front
of me, and how I was struck by the absurdity of being there, seeing that
in reality I was sitting, stunned, in that Paestum temple with a dead
woman in my arms. I read my letters like a machine. I have forgotten
what they were about.”
He stopped, and there was a long silence.
Suddenly I perceived that we were running down the incline from Chalk
Farm to Euston. I started at this passing of time. I turned on him with
a brutal question, with the tone of Now or never.
“And did you dream again?”
“Yes.”
He seemed to force himself to finish. His voice was very low.
“Once more, and as it were only for a few instants. I seemed to have
suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting
position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me. A gaunt body.
Not her, you know. So soon--it was not her....
“I may have heard voices. I do not know. Only I knew clearly that men
were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.
“I stood up and walked through the temple, and then there came into
sight--first one man with a yellow face, dressed in a uniform of dirty
white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing to the crest of
the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there. They were little
bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung, weapon in hand,
peering cautiously before them.
“And further away I saw others and then more at another point in the
wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.
“Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command, and
his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards the
temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing towards
me, and when he saw me he stopped.
“At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when I
had seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid them. I
shouted to the officer.
“'You must not come here,' I cried, '_I_ am here. I am here with my
dead.'
“He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown
tongue.
“I repeated what I had said.
“He shouted again, and I folded my arms and stood still. Presently he
spoke to his men and came forward. He carried a drawn sword.
“I signed to him to keep away, but he continued to advance. I told him
again very patiently and clearly: 'You must not come here. These are old
temples and I am here with my dead.'
“Presently he was so close I could see his face clearly. It was a narrow
face, with dull grey eyes, and a black moustache. He had a scar on
his upper lip, and he was dirty and unshaven. He kept shouting
unintelligible things, questions perhaps, at me.
“I know now that he was afraid of me, but at the time that did not
occur to me. As I tried to explain to him he interrupted me in imperious
tones, bidding me, I suppose, stand aside.
“He made to go past me, And I caught hold of him.
“I saw his face change at my grip.
“'You fool,' I cried. 'Don't you know? She is dead!'
“He started back. He looked at me with cruel eyes. I saw a sort of
exultant resolve leap into them--delight. Then, suddenly, with a scowl,
he swept his sword back--SO--and thrust.”
He stopped abruptly. I became aware of a change in the rhythm of the
train. The brakes lifted their voices and the carriage jarred and
jerked. This present world insisted upon itself, became clamorous. I saw
through the steamy window huge electric lights glaring down from tall
masts upon a fog, saw rows of stationary empty carriages passing by, and
then a signal-box, hoisting its constellation of green and red into the
murky London twilight marched after them. I looked again at his drawn
features.
“He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment--no
fear, no pain--but just amazement, that I felt it pierce me, felt the
sword drive home into my body. It didn't hurt, you know. It didn't hurt
at all.”
The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first
rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of
men passed to and fro without.
“Euston!” cried a voice.
“Do you mean--?”
“There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness
sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face
of the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of
existence--”
“Euston!” clamoured the voices outside; “Euston!”
The carriage door opened, admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood
regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of
cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the
London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truckload of lighted lamps
blazed along the platform.
“A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out
all things.”
“Any luggage, sir?” said the porter.
“And that was the end?” I asked.
He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, “No.”
“You mean?”
“I couldn't get to her. She was there on the other side of the
Temple--And then--”
“Yes,” I insisted. “Yes?”
“Nightmares,” he cried; “nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that
fought and tore.”