‘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
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 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 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 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 gray 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.