THE DREAM
1
Barry and Gerda were married in January in a registry office, and, as all
concerned disliked wedding parties, there was no wedding party.
After they had gone, Neville, recovered now from the lilies and languors
of illness, plunged into the roses and raptures of social life. One
mightn't, she said to herself, be able to accomplish much in this world,
or imprint one's personality on one's environment by deeds and
achievements, but one could at least enjoy life, be a pleased
participator in its spoils and pleasures, an enchanted spectator of its
never-ending flux and pageant, its richly glowing moving pictures. One
could watch the play out, even if one hadn't much of a part oneself.
Music, art, drama, the company of eminent, pleasant and entertaining
persons, all the various forms of beauty, the carefully cultivated
richness, graces and elegances which go to build up the world of the
fortunate, the cultivated, the prosperous and the well-bred--Neville
walked among these like the soul in the lordly pleasure house built for
her by the poet Tennyson, or like Robert Browning glutting his sense upon
the world--"Miser, there waits the gold for thee!"--or Francis Thompson
swinging the earth a trinket at his wrist. In truth, she was at times
self-consciously afraid that she resembled all these three, whom (in the
moods they thus expressed) she disliked beyond reason, finding them
morbid and hard to please.
She too knew herself morbid and hard to please. If she had not been
so, to be Rodney's wife would surely have been enough; it would have
satisfied all her nature. Why didn't it? Was it perhaps really because,
though she loved him, it was not with the uncritical devotion of the
early days? She had for so many years now seen clearly, through and
behind his charm, his weakness, his vanities, his scorching ambitions
and jealousies, his petulant angers, his dependence on praise and
admiration. She had no jealousy now of his frequent confidential
intimacies with other attractive women; they were harmless enough, and
he never lost the need of and dependence on her; but they may have helped
to clarify her vision of him.
Rodney had no failings beyond what are the common need of human nature;
he was certainly good enough for her. Their marriage was all right. It
was only the foolish devil of egotism in her which goaded to unwholesome
activity the other side of her nature, that need for self-expression
which marriage didn't satisfy.
2
In February she suddenly tired of London and the British climate, and was
moved by a desire to travel. So she went to Italy, and stayed in Capri
with Nan and Stephen Lumley, who were leading on that island lives by
turns gaily indolent and fiercely industrious, finding the company
stimulating and the climate agreeable and soothing to Stephen's defective
lungs.
From Italy Neville went to Greece. Corinth, Athens, the islands, Tempe,
Delphi, Crete--how good to have money and be able to see all these! Italy
and Greece are Europe's pleasure grounds; there the cultivated and the
prosperous traveller may satisfy his soul and forget carking cares and
stabbing ambitions, and drug himself with loveliness.
If Neville abruptly tired of it, and set her face homewards in early
April, it was partly because she felt the need of Rodney, and partly
because she saw, fleetingly but day by day more lucidly, that one could
not take one's stand, for satisfaction of desire, on the money which one
happened to have but which the majority bitterly and emptily lacked. Some
common way there had to be, some freedom all might grasp, a liberty not
for the bourgeois only, but for the proletariat--the poor, the sad, the
gay proletariat, who also grew old and lost their dreams, and had not the
wherewithal to drug their souls, unless indeed they drank much liquor,
and that is but a poor artificial way to peace.
Voyaging homewards through the spring seas, Neville saw life as an
entangling thicket, the Woods of Westermain she had loved in her
childhood, in which the scaly dragon squatted, the craving monster self
that had to be subjugated before one could walk free in the enchanted
woods.
"Him shall change, transforming late,
Wonderously renovate...."
Dimly discerning through the thicket the steep path that climbed to
such liberty as she sought, seeing far off the place towards which her
stumbling feet were set, where life should be lived with alert readiness
and response, oblivious of its personal achievements, its personal claims
and spoils, Neville the spoilt, vain, ambitious, disappointed egoist,
strained her eyes into the distance and half smiled. It might be a dream,
that liberty, but it was a dream worth a fight....