Twelve Stories and a Dream (28 page)

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 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 Evesham'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—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 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 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 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 dreamstuff, 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 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 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 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 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 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. O, 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.

"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 amidst 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 aeroplanes.

"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 aeroplanes that would do—What
THEY would do no man could foretell.