Free online reading Ebook -A Dream of Armageddon by H. G. Wells
The man with the white face entered the carriage at Rugby. He moved slowly despite his porter's urgency, and even while he was still on the platform I
noted how ill he seemed. He dropped into the corner across from me with a sigh,
made an incomplete attempt to arrange his traveling shawl, and became motionless, his eyes staring vacantly. I returned to my reading.
"That book," he said, pointing a lean finger, "is about dreams."
"Obviously," I answered, for it was Fortnum Roscoe's the Dream States, and the title
was on the cover.
He hung silent for space as if seeking words. "Yes," he said at last, "but
they know nothing."
I looked attentively at him.
"There are dreams," he said, "and dreams... Tell me, do you ever dream vividly?"
"Rarely," I answered. "I doubt I have three vivid dreams in a year."
"Ah!" he said, "Then your dreams don't mix with your memories? You don't find
yourself in doubt; did this happen or did it not?"
"Hardly ever. Except for a momentary hesitation now and then. I suppose few people do. Roscoe says it happens at times and gives the usual explanation about
the intensity of impression and the like to account for its not happening as a rule.
I suppose you know of these theories--"
"They are wrong."
His emaciated hand played with the strap of the window for a time. I prepared to resume reading, and that seemed to precipitate his next remark. He leaned
forward almost as though to touch me.
"Isn't there something called consecutive dreaming--that goes on night after
night?"
"I believe there is. There are cases given in most books on mental trouble."
"Right place for them. But what I mean--" He looked at his bony knuckles. "Is
that sort of thing really dreaming? Or something else?"
I should have snubbed his persistent conversation but for the drawn anxiety of his face. I remember now the look of his faded eyes and the lids red stained.
"I'm not just arguing about a matter of opinion," he said. "It's killing me."
"Dreams?"
"If you call them dreams. Night after night. Vivid!--so vivid...this--" he
indicated the landscape that went streaming by the window "seems unreal in
comparison! I can scarcely remember who I am, what business I am on..."
"You mean the dream is always the same?" I asked.
"No. It's over. I died."
"Died?"
"Smashed and killed, and now, so much of me as that dream was, is dead. Forever.
I dreamt I was another man, living in a different part of the world at a
different time. Night after night I woke into that other life. Fresh scenes and
fresh happenings--until I came upon the last--when I died."
It was clear I was in for this dream. And after all, I had an hour before me,
the light was fading fast, and Fortnum Roscoe is rather dreary. "Living in a
different time," I said: "do you mean in some different age?"
"Yes, to come."
"The year 3,000, for example?"
"I don't know. I did when I was asleep and dreaming, but not now that I am
awake. I have forgotten many things since I woke out of these dreams, though I
knew them at the time when I was--I suppose it was dreaming. They called the
year differently from our way... What did they call it?" He put his hand to his
forehead. "No, I forget."
He sat smiling weakly. I feared he would not tell me his dream. As a rule, I hate
people who tell their dreams, but this struck me differently. I proffered
assistance even. "It began--" I suggested.
"It was vivid from the first. I seemed to wake up in it suddenly. The first
time, I found myself sitting in a sort of loggia looking out over the sea. I had
been dozing, and suddenly I woke up--fresh and vivid--not a bit
dreamlike--because the girl had stopped fanning me."
"What girl?"
"Please don't interrupt. I woke up, I say because the girl had stopped fanning
me. I was not surprised to find myself there or anything of that sort, you
understand. I did not feel I had fallen into it suddenly. I simply took it up at
that point. Whatever memory I had of this life, this 19th-century life faded as
I woke, vanished like a dream. I knew all about myself, knew that my name was no
longer Cooper but Hedon, and all about my position in the world. I've forgotten
a lot since I woke--there's a want of connection--but it was all quite clear and
matter-of-fact then."
He hesitated, gripping the window strap, putting his face forward, and looking up
to me appealingly.
"This seems bosh to you?"
"No, no!" I cried. "Go on. Tell me what this loggia was like!"
"It was not really a loggia--I don't know what to call it. It faced south. It
was small. It was all in shadow except the semicircle above the balcony that
showed the sky and sea and the corner where the girl stood. I was on a metal
couch with light striped cushions--and the girl was leaning over the balcony
with her back to me. The light of the sunrise fell on her ear and cheek. Her
pretty white neck and the little curls that nestled there, and her white
shoulder were in the sun, and all the grace of her body was in the cool shadow.
She was dressed--how can I describe it? It was easy and flowing. And there she
stood so that it came to me how beautiful and desirable she was, as though I
had never seen her before. And when at last I spoke and raised myself upon my
arm she turned to face me--"
He stopped.
"I have lived 53 years in this world. I have had mother, sisters, friends, wife
, and daughters--all their faces, the play of their faces, I know. But the face of
this girl--it is much more real to me. I can bring it back into memory so that I
see it again--I could draw it or paint it. And after all--"
He stopped--but I said nothing.
"The face of a dream--the face of a dream. She was beautiful. Not that beauty
which is terrible, cold, and worshipful, like the beauty of a saint; nor that
beauty that stirs fierce passions; but a sort of glow, sweet lips that softened
into smiles, and grave gray eyes. And she moved so gracefully--"
He stopped, his face downcast and hidden. Then he looked up at me and went on,
making no further attempt to disguise his absolute belief in the reality of his
story.
"You see, I had given up my plans and ambitions, given up all I had ever worked
for or desired, for her sake. I had been a master man away there in the north,
with influence and property and a great reputation, but it was all nothing
compared to her. I had come to the place, this city of sunny pleasures with her,
and left all those things to wreck and ruin just to save a remnant at least of
my life. While I had been in love with her before I knew that she too loved me,
all my life had seemed vain and hollow, dust and ashes. It was dust and ashes.
Night after night and through endless days I had longed and desired--my soul had
beaten against the thing forbidden!
"But it is impossible for one man to tell another just these things. It's
emotion, it's a tint, a light that comes and goes. Only while it's there,
everything changes, everything. The thing is I came away and left them in their
Crisis to do what they could."
"Left whom?" I asked, puzzled.
"The people up in the north. You see, in this dream, I had been a big man, a
leader who other men trusted and grouped themselves about. Millions who had
never seen me were ready to do things and take risks because of their confidence
in me. I had played that big laborious game--politics--for years, amid intrigues
and betrayals, speech and agitation. At last, I had power against the Gang--an
organization whose scoundrelly projects, base ambitions, and vast public
emotional stupidities and catchwords kept the world noisy and blind year by
year and drifting toward infinite disaster. I can't expect you to understand
the shades and complications of that time. I had it all--down to the last
detail--in my dream.
"I rubbed my eyes and thanked God for the sunlight. I sat up on the couch,
looking at the woman and rejoicing that I had come away out of all that tumult,
folly, and violence before it was too late. After all, I thought, this is
life--love and beauty, desire and delight, are they not worth all those dismal
struggles for vague, gigantic ends? I blamed myself for having ever sought to be
a leader when I might have given my days to love. All my being went out in love
and tenderness to my dear mistress, my dear lady, who had come at last and
compelled me by her invincible charm to lay that life aside.
"'You are worth it, my dearest one' I said, without intending her to hear;
'worth pride and praise and all things. Love! to have you is worth them all
together." And at the murmur of my voice, she turned about.
"'Come and see,' she cried--I can hear her now--'come and see the sunrise upon
Monte Solaro.'
"I remember how I sprang to my feet and joined her at the balcony. She put a
white hand upon my shoulder and pointed toward great masses of limestone,
flushing, as it were, into life. I looked. But first I noted the sunlight on her
face caressing the lines of her cheeks and neck. How can I describe to you the
scene before us? We were at Capri--"
"I have been there," I said. "I have clambered up Monte Solaro and drunk Vero
Capri--muddy stuff like cider--at the summit."
"Ah!" said the man with the white face; "then perhaps you can tell me--you will
know if this is indeed Capri. For in this life I have never been there. Let me
describe it. We were in a little room, one of a multitude of little rooms, cool
and sunny, hollowed out of the limestone of a sort of cape, high above the sea.
The whole island was one enormous hotel, complex beyond explaining, and on the
other side were miles of floating hotels, and huge floating stages to which
flying machines came. They called it a pleasure city. Of course, there was none
of that in your time--rather, I should say, is none of that now.
"Well, this room of ours was at the extremity of the cape, so we could see east
and west. Eastward was a great cliff--a thousand feet high perhaps--coldly gray
except for one bright edge of gold and beyond it the Isle of the Sirens, and a
falling coast that faded and passed into the hot sunrise. When one turned to the
west, distinct and near was a little bay, a little beach still in shadow. Out of
that shadow rose Solaro straight and tall, flushed and golden crested, like a
beauty throned, and the white moon was floating behind her in the sky. And
before us from east to west stretched the many-tinted sea all dotted with little
sailing boats.
"Eastward, of course, these little boats were gray and very minute and clear,
but westward they were little boats of gold--shining gold--almost like little
flames. And just below us was a rock with an arch worn through it. The blue
sea-water broke to green and foam all around the rock, and a galley came gliding
out of the arch."
"I know that rock," I said. "I was nearly drowned there. It is called the
Faraglioni."
"I Faraglioni? Yes, she called it that," answered the man with the white face.
"Well, that is the first thing I remember, the first dream I had, that little
shaded room and the beautiful air and sky and that dear lady of mine, with her
shining arms and her graceful robe, and how we sat and talked in half whispers
to one another. We talked in whispers not because there was anyone to hear, but
because there was still such a freshness of mind between us that our thoughts
were a little frightened, I think, to find themselves at last in words. And so
they went softly.
"Presently we were hungry and we went from our apartment, going by a strange
passage with a moving floor until we came to the great breakfast room--there
was a fountain and music. A pleasant and joyful place it was, with its sunlight
and splashing, and the murmur of plucked strings. And we sat and ate and smiled
at one another, and I would not heed a man who was watching me from a table
nearby.
"And afterwards we went on to the dancing hall. But I cannot describe that hall.
The place was enormous--larger than any building you have ever seen--and in one
place there was the old gate of Capri, caught into the wall of a gallery high
overhead. Light girders, stems, and threads of gold, burst from the pillars like
fountains, streamed like an Aurora across the roof and interlaced, like--like
conjuring tricks. All about the great circle for the dancers, there were
beautiful figures, strange dragons, and intricate and wonderful grotesques
bearing lights. The place was inundated with artificial light that shamed the
newborn day. And as we went through the throng the people turned about and
looked at us, for all through the world my name and face were known, and how I
had suddenly thrown up pride and struggle to come to this place. And they looked
also at the lady beside me, though half the story of how at last she had come to
me was unknown or mistold. And few of the men who were there, I know, but judged
me a happy man, in spite of all the shame and dishonor that had come upon my
name.
"The air was full of music, full of harmonious scents, full of the rhythm of
beautiful motions. Thousands of beautiful people swarmed about the hall, crowded
the galleries, sat in a myriad recess; they were dressed in splendid colors
and crowned with flowers; thousands danced about the great circle beneath the
white images of the ancient gods, and glorious processions of youths and maidens
came and went. We two danced, not the dreary monotonies of your days--of this
time, I mean--but dances that were beautiful, intoxicating. And even now I can
see my lady dancing--dancing joyously. She danced, you know, with a serious
face; she danced with a serious dignity, and yet she was smiling at me and
caressing me--smiling and caressing with her eyes.
"The music was different," he murmured. "It went--I cannot describe it, but it
was infinitely richer and more varied than any music that has ever come to me
awake.
"And then--it was when we had done dancing--a man came to speak to me. He was a
lean, resolute man, very soberly clad for that place, and already I had marked
his face watching me in the breakfasting hall, and afterward as we went along
the passage I had avoided his eye. But now, as we sat in a little alcove,
smiling at the pleasure of all the people who went to and fro across the shining
floor, he came and touched me, and spoke to me so that I was forced to listen.
And he asked that he might speak to me for a little time apart.
"'No,' I said. 'I have no secrets from this lady. What do you want to tell me?'
"He said it was a trivial matter, or at least a dry matter, for a lady to hear.
"'Perhaps for me to hear,' said I.
"He glanced at her, as though almost he would appeal to her. Then he asked me
suddenly if I had heard of a great and avenging declaration that Evesham had
made? Now, Evesham had always before been the man next to myself in the
leadership of that great party in the north. He was a forcible, hard, and
tactless man, and only I had been able to control and soften him. It was on his
account even more than my own, I think, that the others had been so dismayed at
my retreat. So this question about what he had done reawakened my old interest
in the life I had put aside just for a moment.
"'I have taken no heed of any news for many days,' I said. 'What has Evesham
been saying?'
"And with that, the man began, nothing loth, and I must confess even I was struck
by Evesham's reckless folly in the wild and threatening words he had used. And
this messenger they had sent to me not only told me of Evesham's speech but
went on to ask counsel and to point out what need they had of me. While he
talked, my lady sat a little forward and watched his face and mine.
"My old habits of scheming and organizing reasserted themselves. I could 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 you 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 a 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 Evesham 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 forever.
"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 today.
"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 Evesham 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 the
book-cover 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
businesspeople 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
99-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 do no
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 airplanes. Airplanes
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 airplanes that had long slumbered useless in the distant
arsenals of the Rhinemouth were maneuvering now in the eastward sky. Evesham 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
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 Evesham's airplanes 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 nighttime 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 had jarred with her gravity, but I was resolved to end that gravity, and
make 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 behavior--they must have
recognized my face. And halfway 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 spearheads without a shaft, with a propeller in the place of the
shaft."
"Steel?"
"Not steel."
"Aluminum?"
"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
Evesham'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 didn't go into the city until the sky was full of stars, so we walked out
upon the high terrace, to and fro, and--she counseled 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 glamor 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
Evesham's bluffing forever, 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, faraway 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 leaned 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--Evesham'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 awhirl with rumors; 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 the 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 aquiver 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."
"Southwest," he said, and glanced at me for a second. "We went in a boat."
"But I should have thought an airplane?"
"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 color 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 center 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 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 the puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amid
the gray; 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 gray,
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 toward 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 airplanes 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 suchlike birds, moving with a
marvelous uniformity, and ever as they drew nearer they spread over a greater
width of sky. The southward wind flung itself in an arrowheaded 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. 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 toward 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 amid 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 airplanes.
"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 airplanes 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
around 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 flashed something 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 toward 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, "toward 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 airplanes came up out of the south, and that the
battle went away to the west. One airplane 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--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 toward the temple. He
scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing toward 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 gray 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!" clamored 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 cobblestones,
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."
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