Boon's pessimistic outlook on the war had a profoundly depressing
effect upon me. I do all in my power to believe that Wilkins is right,
and that the hopelessness that darkened Boon's last days was due to
the overshadowing of his mind by his illness. It was not simply that
he despaired of the world at large; so far as I am concerned, he
pointed and barbed his opinion by showing how inevitable it was that
the existing publishing and book trade would be shattered to
fragments. Adapted as I am now to the necessities of that trade,
incapable as I am of the fresh exertions needed to bring me into a
successful relationship to the unknown exigencies of the future, the
sense of complete personal ruin mingled with and intensified the
vision he imposed upon me of a world laid waste. I lay awake through
long stretches of the night contemplating now my own life, no longer
in its first vigour, pinched by harsh necessities and the fiercer
competition of a young and needy generation, and now all life with its
habits and traditions strained and broken. My daily fatigues at drill
and the universal heavy cold in the head that has oppressed all
Britain this winter almost more than the war, have added their quota
to my nightly discomfort. And when at last I have slept I have been
oppressed with peculiar and melancholy dreams.
One is so vividly in my mind that I am obliged to tell it here,
although I am doubtful whether, except by a very extreme stretching of
the meaning of words, we can really consider it among the Remains of
George Boon.
It was one of those dreams of which the scenery is not so much a
desolate place as desolation itself, and I was there toiling up great
steepnesses with a little box of something in my hand. And I knew, in
that queer confused way that is peculiar to dreams, that I was not
myself but that I was the Author who is the hero of the Wild Asses of
the Devil, and also that I was neither he nor I, but all sorts of
authors, the spirit of authorship, no Author in particular but the
Author at large, and that, since the melancholy devil had deserted
me--he had sneaked off Heaven knows whither--it rested with me and
with me alone to discover and catch and send out of this tormented
world those same Wild Asses of the Devil of which you have read. And
so I had salt in my box, Attic Salt, a precious trust, the one thing
in all the universe with which I could subdue them.
And then suddenly there I was amidst all those very asses of which I
have told you. There they were all about me, and they were more wild
and horrible than I can describe to you. It was not that they were
horrible in any particular way, they were just horrible, and they
kicked up far over head, and leapt and did not even seem to trouble to
elude my poor ineffectual efforts to get within salting distance of
them. I toiled and I pursued amidst mad mountains that were suddenly
marble flights of stairs that sloped and slid me down to precipices
over which I floated; and then we were in soft places knee-deep in
blood-red mud; and then they were close to my face, eye to eye,
enormous revolving eyes, like the lanterns of lighthouses; and then
they swept away, and always I grew smaller and feebler and more
breathless, and always they grew larger, until only their vast legs
danced about me on the sward, and all the rest was hidden. And all the
while I was tugging at my box of Attic Salt, to get it open, to get a
pinch. Suddenly I saw they were all coming down upon me, and all the
magic salt I had was in the box that would not open....
I saw the sward they trampled, and it was not sward, it was living
beings, men hurt by dreadful wounds, and poor people who ran in
streaming multitudes under the beating hoofs, and a lichenous growth
of tender things and beautiful and sweet and right things on which
they beat, splashing it all to blood and dirt. I could not open my
box. I could not open my box. And a voice said: "Your box! Your box!
Laugh at them for the fools they are, and at the salt sting of
laughter back they will fly to hell!"
But I could not open my box, for I thought of my friend's sons and
dear friends of my own, and there was no more spirit in me. "We cannot
laugh!" I cried. "We cannot laugh! Another generation! Another
generation may have the heart to do what we cannot do."