Twelve Stories and a Dream (27 page)

"'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 loath, 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 organising 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 the 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 for ever.

"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 to-day.

"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 a 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 business people 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 ninety-nine-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 Castellamare 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 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 Rhinemouth were manoeuvring 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 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 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 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 grey 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 grey 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 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."

"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 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."