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 knew _that_, 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.'
"'But _war_--' 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 buoyant
water 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 bookcover 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 it _was_ a 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. _They_ all sought their own narrow ends, and why should
not I--why should not I also live as a man? 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 manoeuvring 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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--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:
"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
dream stuff, 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 south-west. 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 south-eastern 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,
Gresham'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 south-east 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. Oh, 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.