“I thought,” said Mr. Brisher, “AND I thought. Once I got regular doubtful whether I’d seen it or not, and went down to it and ‘ad it uncovered again, just as her ma came out to ‘ang up a bit of washin’ she’d done. Jumps again! Afterwards I was just thinking I’d ‘ave another go at it, when Jane comes to tell me dinner was ready. ‘You’ll want it,’ she said, ‘seeing all the ‘ole you’ve dug.’
“I was in a regular daze all dinner, wondering whether that chap next door wasn’t over the fence and filling ‘is pockets. But in the afternoon I got easier in my mind–it seemed to me it must ‘ave been there so long it was pretty sure to stop a bit longer–and I tried to get up a bit of a discussion to dror out the old man and see what ‘E thought of treasure trove.”
Mr. Brisher paused, and affected amusement at the memory.
“The old man was a scorcher,” he said; “a regular scorcher.”
“What!” said I; “did he–?”
“It was like this,” explained Mr. Brisher, laying a friendly hand on my arm and breathing into my face to calm me. “Just to dror ‘im out, I told a story of a chap I said I knew–pretendin’, you know–who’d found a sovring in a novercoat ‘e’d borrowed. I said ‘e stuck to it, but I said I wasn’t sure whether that was right or not. And then the old man began. Lor’! ‘e DID let me ‘ave it!” Mr. Brisher affected an insincere amusement. “‘E was, well–what you might call a rare ‘and at Snacks. Said that was the sort of friend ‘e’d naturally expect me to ‘ave. Said ‘e’d naturally expect that from the friend of a out-of-work loafer who took up with daughters who didn’t belong to ‘im. There! I couldn’t tell you ‘ARF ‘e said. ‘E went on most outrageous. I stood up to ‘im about it, just to dror ‘im out. ‘Wouldn’t you stick to a ‘arf-sov’, not if you found it in the street?’ I says. ‘Certainly not,’ ‘e says; ‘certainly I wouldn’t.’ ‘What! not if you found it as a sort of treasure?’ ‘Young man,’ ‘e says, ‘there’s ‘i’er ‘thority than mine–Render unto Caesar’– what is it? Yes. Well, he fetched up that. A rare ‘and at ‘itting you over the ‘ed with the Bible, was the old man. And so he went on. ‘E got to such Snacks about me at last I couldn’t stand it. I’d promised Jane not to answer ‘im back, but it got a bit TOO thick. I–I give it ‘im . . .”
Mr. Brisher, by means of enigmatical facework, tried to make me think he had had the best of that argument, but I knew better.
“I went out in a ‘uff at last. But not before I was pretty sure I ‘ad to lift that treasure by myself. The only thing that kep’ me up was thinking ‘ow I’d take it out of ‘im when I ‘ad the cash.”
There was a lengthy pause.
“Now, you’d ‘ardly believe it, but all them three days I never ‘ad a chance at the blessed treasure, never got out not even a ‘arf-crown. There was always a Somethink–always.
“‘Stonishing thing it isn’t thought of more,” said Mr. Brisher. “Finding treasure’s no great shakes. It’s gettin’ it. I don’t suppose I slep’ a wink any of those nights, thinking where I was to take it, what I was to do with it, ‘ow I was to explain it. It made me regular ill. And days I was that dull, it made Jane regular ‘uffy. ‘You ain’t the same chap you was in London,’ she says, several times. I tried to lay it on ‘er father and ‘is Snacks, but bless you, she knew better. What must she ‘ave but that I’d got another girl on my mind! Said I wasn’t True. Well, we had a bit of a row. But I was that set on the Treasure, I didn’t seem to mind a bit Anything she said.
“Well, at last I got a sort of plan. I was always a bit good at planning, though carrying out isn’t so much in my line. I thought it all out and settled on a plan. First, I was going to take all my pockets full of these ‘ere ‘arf-crowns–see?–and afterwards as I shall tell.
“Well, I got to that state I couldn’t think of getting at the Treasure again in the daytime, so I waited until the night before I had to go, and then, when everything was still, up I gets and slips down to the back door, meaning to get my pockets full. What must I do in the scullery but fall over a pail! Up gets ‘er father with a gun–‘e was a light sleeper was ‘er father, and very suspicious and there was me: ‘ad to explain I’d come down to the pump for a drink because my water-bottle was bad. ‘E didn’t let me off a Snack or two over that bit, you lay a bob.”
“And you mean to say–” I began.
“Wait a bit,” said Mr. Brisher. “I say, I’d made my plan. That put the kybosh on one bit, but it didn’t ‘urt the general scheme not a bit. I went and I finished that rockery next day, as though there wasn’t a Snack in the world; cemented over the stones, I did, dabbed it green and everythink. I put a dab of green just to show where the box was. They all came and looked at it, and sai ‘ow nice it was–even ‘e was a bit softer like to see it, and all he said was, “It’s a pity you can’t always work like that, then you might get something definite to do,” he says.
“‘Yes,’ I says–I couldn’t ‘elp it–‘I put a lot in that rockery,’ I says, like that. See? ‘I put a lot in that rockery’–meaning–“
“I see,” said I–for Mr. Brisher is apt to overelaborate his jokes.
“_’E_ didn’t,” said Mr. Brisher. “Not then, anyhow.
“Ar’ever–after all that was over, off I set for London. . . . Orf I set for London.”
Pause.
“On’y I wasn’t going to no London,” said Mr. Brisher, with sudden animation, and thrusting his face into mine. “No fear! What do YOU think?
“I didn’t go no further than Colchester–not a yard.
“I’d left the spade just where I could find it. I’d got everything planned and right. I ‘ired a little trap in Colchester, and pretended I wanted to go to Ipswich and stop the night, and come back next day, and the chap I ‘ired it from made me leave two sovrings on it right away, and off I set.
“I didn’t go to no Ipswich neither.
“Midnight the ‘orse and trap was ‘itched by the little road that ran by the cottage where ‘e lived–not sixty yards off, it wasn’t–and I was at it like a good ‘un. It was jest the night for such games–overcast–but a trifle too ‘ot, and all round the sky there was summer lightning and presently a thunderstorm. Down it came. First big drops in a sort of fizzle, then ‘ail. I kep’on. I whacked at it–I didn’t dream the old man would ‘ear. I didn’t even trouble to go quiet with the spade, and the thunder and lightning and ‘ail seemed to excite me like. I shouldn’t wonder if I was singing. I got so ‘ard at it I clean forgot the thunder and the ‘orse and trap. I precious soon got the box showing, and started to lift it . . . .”
“Heavy?” I said.
“I couldn’t no more lift it than fly. I WAS sick. I’d never thought of that I got regular wild–I tell you, I cursed. I got sort of outrageous. I didn’t think of dividing it like for the minute, and even then I couldn’t ‘ave took money about loose in a trap. I hoisted one end sort of wild like, and over the whole show went with a tremenjous noise. Perfeck smash of silver. And then right on the heels of that, Flash! Lightning like the day! and there was the back door open and the old man coming down the garden with ‘is blooming old gun. He wasn’t not a ‘undred yards away!
“I tell you I was that upset–I didn’t think what I was doing. I never stopped-not even to fill my pockets. I went over the fence like a shot, and ran like one o’clock for the trap, cussing and swearing as I went. I WAS in a state. . . .
“And will you believe me, when I got to the place where I’d left the ‘orse and trap, they’d gone. Orf! When I saw that I ‘adn’t a cuss left for it. I jest danced on the grass, and when I’d danced enough I started off to London. . . . I was done.”
Mr. Brisher was pensive for an interval. “I was done,” he repeated, very bitterly.
“Well?” I said.
“That’s all,” said Mr. Brisher.
“You didn’t go back?”
“No fear. I’d ‘ad enough of THAT blooming treasure, any’ow for a bit. Besides, I didn’t know what was done to chaps who tried to collar a treasure trove. I started off for London there and then. . . .”
“And you never went back?”
“Never.”
“But about Jane? Did you write?”
“Three times, fishing like. And no answer. We’d parted in a bit of a ‘uff on account of ‘er being jealous. So that I couldn’t make out for certain what it meant.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know whether the old man knew it was me. I sort of kep’ an eye open on papers to see when he’d give up that treasure to the Crown, as I hadn’t a doubt ‘e would, considering ‘ow respectable he’d always been.”
“And did he?”
Mr. Brisher pursed his mouth and moved his head slowly from side to side. “Not ‘IM,” he said.
“Jane was a nice girl,” he said, “a thorough nice girl mind you, if jealous, and there’s no knowing I mightn’t ‘ave gone back to ‘er after a bit. I thought if he didn’t give up the treasure I might ‘ave a sort of ‘old on ‘im. . . . Well, one day I looks as usual under Colchester–and there I saw ‘is name. What for, d’yer think?”
I could not guess.
Mr. Brisher’s voice sank to a whisper, and once more he spoke behind his hand. His manner was suddenly suffused with a positive joy. “Issuing counterfeit coins,” he said. “Counterfeit coins!”
“You don’t mean to say–?”
“Yes-It. Bad. Quite a long case they made of it. But they got ‘im, though he dodged tremenjous. Traced ‘is ‘aving passed, oh!–nearly a dozen bad ‘arf-crowns.”
“And you didn’t–?”
“No fear. And it didn’t do ‘IM much good to say it was treasure trove.”
12. MISS WINCHELSEA’S HEART
Miss Winchelsea was going to Rome. The matter had filled her mind for a month or more, and had overflowed so abundantly into her conversation that quite a number of people who were not going to Rome, and who were not likely to go to Rome, had made it a personal grievance against her. Some indeed had attempted quite unavailingly to convince her that Rome was not nearly such a desirable place as it was reported to be, and others had gone so far as to suggest behind her back that she was dreadfully “stuck up” about “that Rome of hers.” And little Lily Hardhurst had told her friend Mr. Binns that so far as she was concerned Miss Winchelsea might “go to her old Rome and stop there; SHE (Miss Lily Hardhurst) wouldn’t grieve.” And the way in which Miss Winchelsea put herself upon terms of personal tenderness with Horace and Benvenuto Cellini and Raphael and Shelley and Keats–if she had been Shelley’s widow she could not have professed a keener interest in his grave–was a matter of universal astonishment. Her dress was a triumph of tactful discretion, sensible, but not too “touristy”–Miss Winchelsea, had a great dread of being “touristy”– and her Baedeker was carried in a cover of grey to hide its glaring red. She made a prim and pleasant little figure on the Charing Cross platform, in spite of her swelling pride, when at last the great day dawned, and she could start for Rome. The day was bright, the Channel passage would be pleasant, and all the omens promised well. There was the gayest sense of adventure in this unprecedented departure.
She was going with two friends who had been fellow-students with her at the training college, nice honest girls both, though not so good at history and literature as Miss Winchelsea. They both looked up to her immensely, though physically they had to look down, and she anticipated some pleasant times to be spent in “stirring them up” to her own pitch of aesthetic and historical enthusiasm. They had secured seats already, and welcomed her effusively at the carriage door. In the instant criticism of the encounter she noted that Fanny had a slightly “touristy” leather strap, and that Helen had succumbed to a serge jacket with side pockets, into which her hands were thrust. But they were much too happy with themselves and the expedition for their friend to attempt any hint at the moment about these things. As soon as the first ecstasies were over–Fanny’s enthusiasm was a little noisy and crude, and consisted mainly in emphatic repetitions of “Just FANCY! we’re going to Rome, my dear!–Rome!”–they gave their attention to their fellow-travellers. Helen was anxious to secure a compartment to themselves, and, in order to discourage intruders, got out and planted herself firmly on the step. Miss Winchelsea peeped out over her shoulder, and made sly little remarks about the accumulating people on the platform, at which Fanny laughed gleefully.
They were travelling with one of Mr. Thomas Gunn’s parties–fourteen days in Rome for fourteen pounds. They did not belong to the personally conducted party of course–Miss Winchelsea had seen to that–but they travelled with it because of the convenience of that arrangement. The people were the oddest mixture, and wonderfully amusing. There was a vociferous red-faced polyglot personal conductor in a pepper-and-salt suit, very long in the arms and legs and very active. He shouted proclamations. When he wanted to speak to people he stretched out an arm and held them until his purpose was accomplished. One hand was full of papers, tickets, counterfoils of tourists. The people of the personally conducted party were, it seemed, of two sorts; people the conductor wanted and could not find, and people he did not want and who followed him in a steadily growing tail up and down the platform. These people seemed, indeed, to think that their one chance of reaching Rome lay in keeping close to him. Three little old ladies were particularly energetic in his pursuit, and at last maddened him to the pitch of clapping them into a carriage and daring them to emerge again. For the rest of the time, one, two, or three of their heads protruded from the window wailing enquiries about “a little wickerwork box” whenever he drew near. There was a very stout man with a very stout wife in shiny black; there was a little old man like an aged hostler.
“What CAN such people want in Rome?” asked Miss Winchelsea. “What can it mean to them?” There was a very tall curate in a very small straw hat, and a very short curate encumbered by a long camera stand. The contrast amused Fanny very much. Once they heard some one calling for “Snooks.” “I always thought that name was invented by novelists,” said Miss Winchelsea. “Fancy! Snooks. I wonder which IS Mr. Snooks.” Finally they picked out a very stout and resolute little man in a large check suit. “If he isn’t Snooks, he ought to be,” said Miss Winchelsea.
Presently the conductor discovered Helen’s attempt at a corner in carriages. “Room for five,” he bawled with a parallel translation on his fingers. A party of four together–mother, father, and two daughters–blundered in, all greatly excited. “It’s all right, Ma, you let me,” said one of the daughters, hitting her mother’s bonnet with a handbag she struggled to put in the rack. Miss Winchelsea detested people who banged about and called their mother “Ma.” A young man travelling alone followed. He was not at all “touristy” in his costume, Miss Winchelsea observed; his Gladstone bag was of good pleasant leather with labels reminiscent of Luxembourg and Ostend, and his boots, though brown, were not vulgar. He carried an overcoat on his arm. Before these people had properly settled in their places, came an inspection of tickets and a slamming of doors, and behold! they were gliding out of Charing Cross station on their way to Rome.
“Fancy!” cried Fanny, “we are going to Rome, my dear! Rome! I don’t seem to believe it, even now.”
Miss Winchelsea suppressed Fanny’s emotions with a little smile, and the lady who was called “Ma” explained to people in general why they had “cut it so close” at the station. The two daughters called her “Ma” several times, toned her down in a tactless effective way, and drove her at last to the muttered inventory of a basket of travelling requisites. Presently she looked up. “Lor’!” she said, “I didn’t bring THEM!” Both the daughters said “Oh, Ma!” but what “them” was did not appear. Presently Fanny produced Hare’s Walks in Rome, a sort of mitigated guide-book very popular among Roman visitors; and the father of the two daughters began to examine his books of tickets minutely, apparently in a search after English words. When he had looked at the tickets for a long time right way up, he turned them upside down. Then he produced a fountain pen and dated them with considerable care. The young man, having completed an unostentatious survey of his fellow travellers, produced a book and fell to reading. When Helen and Fanny were looking out of the window at Chiselhurst–the place interested Fanny because the poor dear Empress of the French used to live there–Miss Winchelsea took the opportunity to observe the book the young man held. It was not a guide-book, but a little thin volume of poetry–BOUND. She glanced at his face–it seemed a refined pleasant face to her hasty glance. He wore a little gilt pince-nez. “Do you think she lives there now?” said Fanny, and Miss Winchelsea’s inspection came to an end.
For the rest of the journey Miss Winchelsea talked little, and what she said was as pleasant and as stamped with refinement as she could make it. Her voice was always low and clear and pleasant, and she took care that on this occasion it was particularly low and clear and pleasant. As they came under the white cliffs the young man put his book of poetry away, and when at last the train stopped beside the boat, he displayed a graceful alacrity with the impedimenta of Miss Winchelsea and her friends. Miss Winchelsea hated nonsense, but she was pleased to see the young man perceived at once that they were ladies, and helped them without any violent geniality; and how nicely he showed that his civilities were to be no excuse for further intrusions. None of her little party had been out of England before, and they were all excited and a little nervous at the Channel passage. They stood in a little group in a good place near the middle of the boat–the young man had taken Miss Winchelsea’s carry-all there and had told her it was a good place–and they watched the white shores of Albion recede and quoted Shakespeare and made quiet fun of their fellow travellers in the English way.
They were particularly amused at the precautions the bigger-sized people had taken against the little waves–cut lemons and flasks prevailed, one lady lay full-length in a deck chair with a handkerchief over her face, and a very broad resolute man in a bright brown “touristy” suit walked all the way from England to France along the deck, with his legs as widely apart as Providence permitted. These were all excellent precautions, and, nobody was ill. The personally conducted party pursued the conductor about the deck with enquiries in a manner that suggested to Helen’s mind the rather vulgar image of hens with a piece of bacon peel, until at last he went into hiding below. And the young man with the thin volume of poetry stood at the stern watching England receding, looking rather lonely and sad to Miss Winchelsea’s eye.
And then came Calais and tumultuous novelties, and the young man had not forgotten Miss Winchelsea’s hold-all and the other little things. All three girls, though they had passed government examinations in French to any extent, were stricken with a dumb shame of their accents, and the young man was very useful. And he did not intrude. He put them in a comfortable carriage and raised his hat and went away. Miss Winchelsea thanked him in her best manner–a pleasing, cultivated manner–and Fanny said he was “nice” almost before he was out of earshot. “I wonder what he can be,” said Helen. “He’s going to Italy, because I noticed green tickets in his book.” Miss Winchelsea almost told them of the poetry, and decided not to do so. And presently the carriage windows seized hold upon them and the young man was forgotten. It made them feel that they were doing an educated sort of thing to travel through a country whose commonest advertisements were in idiomatic French, and Miss Winchelsea made unpatriotic comparisons because there were weedy little sign-board advertisements by the rail side instead of the broad hoardings that deface the landscape in our land. But the north of France is really uninteresting country, and after a time Fanny reverted to Hare’s Walks and Helen initiated lunch. Miss Winchelsea awoke out of a happy reverie; she had been trying to realise, she said, that she was actually going to Rome, but she perceived at Helen’s suggestion that she was hungry, and they lunched out of their baskets very cheerfully. In the afternoon they were tired and silent until Helen made tea. Miss Winchelsea might have dozed, only she knew Fanny slept with her mouth open; and as their fellow passengers were two rather nice critical-looking ladies of uncertain age–who knew French well enough to talk it–she employed herself in keeping Fanny awake. The rhythm of the train became insistent, and the streaming landscape outside became at last quite painful to the eye. They were already dreadfully tired of travelling before their night’s stoppage came.
The stoppage for the night was brightened by the appearance of the young man, and his manners were all that could be desired and his French quite serviceable. His coupons availed for the same hotel as theirs, and by chance as it seemed he sat next Miss Winchelsea at the table d’hote. In spite of her enthusiasm for Rome, she had thought out some such possibility very thoroughly, and when he ventured to make a remark upon the tediousness of travelling–he let the soup and fish go by before he did this–she did not simply assent to his proposition, but responded with another. They were soon comparing their journeys, and Helen and Fanny were cruelly overlooked in the conversation. It was to be the same journey, they found; one day for the galleries at Florence–“from what I hear,” said the young man, “it is barely enough,”–and the rest at Rome. He talked of Rome very pleasantly; he was evidently quite well read, and he quoted Horace about Soracte. Miss Winchelsea had “done” that book of Horace for her matriculation, and was delighted to cap his quotation. It gave a sort of tone to things, this incident–a touch of refinement to mere chatting. Fanny expressed a few emotions, and Helen interpolated a few sensible remarks, but the bulk of the talk on the girls’ side naturally fell to Miss Winchelsea.
Before they reached Rome this young man was tacitly of their party. They did not know his name nor what he was, but it seemed he taught, and Miss Winchelsea had a shrewd idea he was an extension lecturer. At any rate he was something of that sort, something gentlemanly and refined without being opulent and impossible. She tried once or twice to ascertain whether he came from Oxford or Cambridge, but he missed her timid importunities. She tried to get him to make remarks about those places to see if he would say “come up” to them instead of “go down”–she knew that was how you told a ‘Varsity man. He used the word “‘Varsity”–not university–in quite the proper way.
They saw as much of Mr. Ruskin’s Florence as the brief time permitted; he met them in the Pitti Gallery and went round with them, chatting brightly, and evidently very grateful for their recognition. He knew a great deal about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties, especially while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to seize the moral lessons of the pictures. Fanny went softly among these masterpieces; she admitted “she knew so little about them,” and she confessed that to her they were “all beautiful.” Fanny’s “beautiful” inclined to be a little monotonous, Miss Winchelsea thought. She had been quite glad when the last sunny Alp had vanished, because of the staccato of Fanny’s admiration. Helen said little, but Miss Winchelsea had found her a little wanting on the aesthetic side in the old days and was not surprised; sometimes she laughed at the young man’s hesitating delicate little jests and sometimes she didn’t, and sometimes she seemed quite lost to the art about them in the contemplation of the dresses of the other visitors.
At Rome the young man was with them intermittently. A rather “touristy” friend of his took him away at times. He complained comically to Miss Winchelsea. “I have only two short weeks in Rome,” he said, “and my friend Leonard wants to spend a whole day at Tivoli, looking at a waterfall.”
“What is your friend Leonard?” asked Miss Winchelsea abruptly.
“He’s the most enthusiastic pedestrian I ever met,” the young man replied, amusingly, but a little unsatisfactorily, Miss Winchelsea thought. They had some glorious times, and Fanny could not think what they would have done without him. Miss Winchelsea’s interest and Fanny’s enormous capacity for admiration were insatiable. They never flagged–through pictures and sculpture galleries, immense crowded churches, ruins and museums, Judas trees and prickly pears, wine carts and palaces, they admired their way unflinchingly. They never saw a stone pine or a eucalyptus but they named and admired it; they never glimpsed Soracte but they exclaimed. Their common ways were made wonderful by imaginative play. “Here Caesar may have walked,” they would say. “Raphael may have seen Soracte from this very point.” They happened on the tomb of Bibulus. “Old Bibulus,” said the young man. “The oldest monument of Republican Rome!” said Miss Winchelsea.
“I’m dreadfully stupid,” said Fanny, “but who WAS Bibulus?”
There was a curious little pause.
“Wasn’t he the person who built the wall?” said Helen.
The young man glanced quickly at her and laughed. “That was Balbus,” he said. Helen reddened, but neither he nor Miss Winchelsea threw any light upon Fanny’s ignorance about Bibulus.
Helen was more taciturn than the other three, but then she was always taciturn, and usually she took care of the tram tickets and things like that, or kept her eye on them if the young man took them, and told him where they were when he wanted them. Glorious times they had, these young people, in that pale brown cleanly city of memories that was once the world. Their only sorrow was the shortness of the time. They said indeed that the electric trams and the ’70 buildings, and that criminal advertisement that glares upon the Forum, outraged their aesthetic feelings unspeakably; but that was only part of the fun. And indeed Rome is such a wonderful place that it made Miss Winchelsea forget some of her most carefully prepared enthusiasms at times, and Helen, taken unawares, would suddenly admit the beauty of unexpected things. Yet Fanny and Helen would have liked a shop window or so in the English quarter if Miss Winchelsea’s uncompromising hostility to all other English visitors had not rendered that district impossible.
The intellectual and aesthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and the scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling. The exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite admiration by playing her “beautiful,” with vigour, and saying “Oh! LET’S go,” with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest was mentioned. But Helen developed a certain want of sympathy towards the end, that disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She refused to “see anything” in the face of Beatrice Cenci–Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci!–in the Barberini gallery; and one day, when they were deploring the electric trams, she said rather snappishly that “people must get about somehow, and it’s better than torturing horses up these horrid little hills.” She spoke of the Seven Hills of Rome as “horrid little hills!”
And the day they went on the Palatine–though Miss Winchelsea did not know of this–she remarked suddenly to Fanny, “Don’t hurry like that, my dear; THEY don’t want us to overtake them. And we don’t say the right things for them when we DO get near.”
“I wasn’t trying to overtake them,” said Fanny, slackening her excessive pace; “I wasn’t indeed.” And for a minute she was short of breath.
But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she came to look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite realised how happy she had been, pacing among the cypress-shadowed ruins, and exchanging the very highest class of information the human mind can possess, the most refined impressions it is possible to convey. Insensibly emotion crept into their intercourse, sunning itself openly and pleasantly at last when Helen’s modernity was not too near. Insensibly their interest drifted from the wonderful associations about them to their more intimate and personal feelings. In a tentative way information was supplied; she spoke allusively of her school, of her examination successes, of her gladness that the days of “Cram” were over. He made it quite clear that he also was a teacher. They spoke of the greatness of their calling, of the necessity of sympathy to face its irksome details, of a certain loneliness they sometimes felt.
That was in the Colosseum, and it was as far as they got that day, because Helen returned with Fanny–she had taken her into the upper galleries. Yet the private dreams of Miss Winchelsea, already vivid and concrete enough, became now realistic in the highest degree. She figured that pleasant young man, lecturing in the most edifying way to his students, herself modestly prominent as his intellectual mate and helper; she figured a refined little home, with two bureaus, with white shelves of high-class books, and autotypes of the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, with Morris’s wall papers and flowers in pots of beaten copper. Indeed she figured many things. On the Pincio the two had a few precious moments together, while Helen marched Fanny off to see the muro Torto, and he spoke at once plainly. He said he hoped their friendship was only beginning, that he already found her company very precious to him, that indeed it was more than that.
He became nervous, thrusting at his glasses with trembling fingers as though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. “I should of course,” he said, “tell you things about myself. I know it is rather unusual my speaking to you like this. Only our meeting has been so accidental–or providential–and I am snatching at things. I came to Rome expecting a lonely tour . . . and I have been so very happy, so very happy. Quite recently I found myself in a position– I have dared to think–. And–“
He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. He said “Damn!” quite distinctly–and she did not condemn him for that manly lapse into profanity. She looked and saw his friend Leonard advancing. He drew nearer; he raised his hat to Miss Winchelsea, and his smile was almost a grin. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Snooks,” he said. “You promised to be on the Piazza steps half an hour ago.”
Snooks! The name struck Miss Winchelsea like a blow in the face. She did not hear his reply. She thought afterwards that Leonard must have considered her the vaguest-minded person. To this day she is not sure whether she was introduced to Leonard or not, nor what she said to him. A sort of mental paralysis was upon her. Of all offensive surnames–Snooks!
Helen and Fanny were returning, there were civilities, and the young men were receding. By a great effort she controlled herself to face the enquiring eyes of her friends. All that afternoon she lived the life of a heroine under the indescribable outrage of that name, chatting, observing, with “Snooks” gnawing at her heart. From the moment that it first rang upon her ears, the dream of her happiness was prostrate in the dust. All the refinement she had figured was ruined and defaced by that cognomen’s unavoidable vulgarity.
What was that refined little home to her now, spite of autotypes, Morris papers, and bureaus? Athwart it in letters of fire ran an incredible inscription: “Mrs. Snooks.” That may seem a little thing to the reader, but consider the delicate refinement of Miss Winchelsea’s mind. Be as refined as you can and then think of writing yourself down:–“Snooks.” She conceived herself being addressed as Mrs. Snooks by all the people she liked least, conceived the patronymic touched with a vague quality of insult. She figured a card of grey and silver bearing “Winchelsea,” triumphantly effaced by an arrow, Cupid’s arrow, in favour of “Snooks.” Degrading confession of feminine weakness! She imagined the terrible rejoicings of certain girl friends, of certain grocer cousins from whom her growing refinement had long since estranged her. How they would make it sprawl across the envelope that would bring their sarcastic congratulations. Would even his pleasant company compensate her for that? “It is impossible,” she muttered; “impossible! SNOOKS!”
She was sorry for him, but not so sorry as she was for herself. For him she had a touch of indignation. To be so nice, so refined, while all the time he was “Snooks,” to hide under a pretentious gentility of demeanour the badge sinister of his surname seemed a sort of treachery. To put it in the language of sentimental science she felt he had “led her on.”
There were of course moments of terrible vacillation, a period even when something almost like passion bid her throw refinement to the winds. And there was something in her, an unexpurgated vestige of vulgarity, that made a strenuous attempt at proving that Snooks was not so very bad a name after all. Any hovering hesitation flew before Fanny’s manner, when Fanny came with an air of catastrophe to tell that she also knew the horror. Fanny’s voice fell to a whisper when she said SNOOKS. Miss Winchelsea would not give him any answer when at last, in the Borghese, she could have a minute with him; but she promised him a note.
She handed him that note in the little book of poetry he had lent her, the little book that had first drawn them together. Her refusal was ambiguous, allusive. She could no more tell him why she rejected him than she could have told a cripple of his hump. He too must feel something of the unspeakable quality of his name. Indeed he had avoided a dozen chances of telling it, she now perceived. So she spoke of “obstacles she could not reveal”–“reasons why the thing he spoke of was impossible.” She addressed the note with a shiver, “E. K. Snooks.”
Things were worse than she had dreaded; he asked her to explain. How COULD she explain? Those last two days in Rome were dreadful. She was haunted by his air of astonished perplexity. She knew she had given him intimate hopes, she had not the courage to examine her mind thoroughly for the extent of her encouragement. She knew he must think her the most changeable of beings. Now that she was in full retreat, she would not even perceive his hints of a possible correspondence. But in that matter he did a thing that seemed to her at once delicate and romantic. He made a go-between of Fanny. Fanny could not keep the secret, and came and told her that night under a transparent pretext of needed advice. “Mr. Snooks,” said Fanny, “wants to write to me. Fancy! I had no idea. But should I let him?” They talked it over long and earnestly, and Miss Winchelsea was careful to keep the veil over her heart. She was already repenting his disregarded hints. Why should she not hear of him sometimes–painful though his name must be to her? Miss Winchelsea decided it might be permitted, and Fanny kissed her good-night with unusual emotion. After she had gone Miss Winchelsea sat for a long time at the window of her little room. It was moonlight, and down the street a man sang “Santa Lucia” with almost heart-dissolving tenderness. . . . She sat very still.
She breathed a word very softly to herself. The word was “SNOOKS.” Then she got up with a profound sigh, and went to bed. The next morning he said to her meaningly, “I shall hear of you through your friend.”
Mr. Snooks saw them off from Rome with that pathetic interrogative perplexity still on his face, and if it had not been for Helen he would have retained Miss Winchelsea’s hold-all in his hand as a sort of encyclopaedic keepsake. On their way back to England Miss Winchelsea on six separate occasions made Fanny promise to write to her the longest of long letters. Fanny, it seemed, would be quite near Mr. Snooks. Her new school–she was always going to new schools–would be only five miles from Steely Bank, and it was in the Steely Bank Polytechnic, and one or two first-class schools, that Mr. Snooks did his teaching. He might even see her at times. They could not talk much of him–she and Fanny always spoke of “him,” never of Mr. Snooks,–because Helen was apt to say unsympathetic things about him. Her nature had coarsened very much, Miss Winchelsea perceived, since the old Training College days; she had become hard and cynical. She thought he had a weak face, mistaking refinement for weakness as people of her stamp are apt to do, and when she heard his name was Snooks, she said she had expected something of the sort. Miss Winchelsea was careful to spare her own feelings after that, but Fanny was less circumspect.
The girls parted in London, and Miss Winchelsea returned, with a new interest in life, to the Girls’ High School in which she had been an increasingly valuable assistant for the last three years. Her new interest in life was Fanny as a correspondent, and to give her a lead she wrote her a lengthy descriptive letter within a fortnight of her return. Fanny answered, very disappointingly. Fanny indeed had no literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea’s study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was “Twaddle!” It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea’s letter had been full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this much: “I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me on two Saturday afternoons running. He talked about Rome and you; we both talked about you. Your ears must have burnt, my dear. . . .”
Miss Winchelsea repressed a desire to demand more explicit information, and wrote the sweetest long letter again. “Tell me all about yourself, dear. That journey has quite refreshed our ancient friendship, and I do so want to keep in touch with you.” About Mr. Snooks she simply wrote on the fifth page that she was glad Fanny had seen him, and that if he SHOULD ask after her, she was to be remembered to him VERY KINDLY (underlined). And Fanny replied most obtusely in the key of that “ancient friendship,” reminding Miss Winchelsea of a dozen foolish things of those old schoolgirl days at the training college, and saying not a word about Mr. Snooks!
For nearly a week Miss Winchelsea was so angry at the failure of Fanny as a go-between that she could not write to her. And then she wrote less effusively, and in her letter she asked point-blank, “Have you seen Mr. Snooks?” Fanny’s letter was unexpectedly satisfactory. “I HAVE seen Mr. Snooks,” she wrote, and having once named him she kept on about him; it was all Snooks–Snooks this and Snooks that. He was to give a public lecture, said Fanny, among other things. Yet Miss Winchelsea, after the first glow of gratification, still found this letter a little unsatisfactory. Fanny did not report Mr. Snooks as saying anything about Miss Winchelsea, nor as looking a little white and worn, as he ought to have been doing. And behold! before she had replied, came a second letter from Fanny on the same theme, quite a gushing letter, and covering six sheets with her loose feminine hand.
And about this second letter was a rather odd little thing that Miss Winchelsea only noticed as she re-read it the third time. Fanny’s natural femininity had prevailed even against the round and clear traditions of the training college; she was one of those she-creatures born to make all her m’s and n’s and u’s and r’s and e’s alike, and to leave her o’s and a’s open and her i’s undotted. So that it was only after an elaborate comparison of word with word that Miss Winchelsea felt assured Mr. Snooks was not really “Mr. Snooks” at all! In Fanny’s first letter of gush he was Mr. “Snooks,” in her second the spelling was changed to Mr. “Senoks.” Miss Winchelsea’s hand positively trembled as she turned the sheet over–it meant so much to her. For it had already begun to seem to her that even the name of Mrs. Snooks might be avoided at too great a price, and suddenly–this possibility! She turned over the six sheets, all dappled with that critical name, and everywhere the first letter had the form of an E! For a time she walked the room with a hand pressed upon her heart.
She spent a whole day pondering this change, weighing a letter of inquiry that should be at once discreet and effectual, weighing too what action she should take after the answer came. She was resolved that if this altered spelling was anything more than a quaint fancy of Fanny’s, she would write forthwith to Mr. Snooks. She had now reached a stage when the minor refinements of behaviour disappear. Her excuse remained uninvented, but she had the subject of her letter clear in her mind, even to the hint that “circumstances in my life have changed very greatly since we talked together.” But she never gave that hint. There came a third letter from that fitful correspondent Fanny. The first line proclaimed her “the happiest girl alive.”
Miss Winchelsea crushed the letter in her hand–the rest unread–and sat with her face suddenly very still. She had received it just before morning school, and had opened it when the junior mathematicians were well under way. Presently she resumed reading with an appearance of great calm. But after the first sheet she went on reading the third without discovering the error:–“told him frankly I did not like his name,” the third sheet began. “He told me he did not like it himself –you know that sort of sudden frank way he has”–Miss Winchelsea did know. “So I said ‘Couldn’t you change it?’ He didn’t see it at first. Well, you know, dear, he had told me what it really meant; it means Sevenoaks, only it has got down to Snooks–both Snooks and Noaks, dreadfully vulgar surnames though they be, are really worn forms of Sevenoaks. So I said–even I have my bright ideas at times–‘if it got down from Sevenoaks to Snooks, why not get it back from Snooks to Sevenoaks?’ And the long and the short of it is, dear, he couldn’t refuse me, and he changed his spelling there and then to Senoks for the bills of the new lecture. And afterwards, when we are married, we shall put in the apostrophe and make it Se’noks. Wasn’t it kind of him to mind that fancy of mine, when many men would have taken offence? But it is just like him all over; he is as kind as he is clever. Because he knew as well as I did that I would have had him in spite of it, had he been ten times Snooks. But he did it all the same.”
The class was startled by the sound of paper being viciously torn, and looked up to see Miss Winchelsea white in the face, and with some very small pieces of paper clenched in one hand. For a few seconds they stared at her stare, and then her expression changed back to a more familiar one. “Has any one finished number three?” she asked in an even tone. She remained calm after that. But impositions ruled high that day. And she spent two laborious evenings writing letters of various sorts to Fanny, before she found a decent congratulatory vein. Her reason struggled hopelessly against the persuasion that Fanny had behaved in an exceedingly treacherous manner.
One may be extremely refined and still capable of a very sore heart. Certainly Miss Winchelsea’s heart was very sore. She had moods of sexual hostility, in which she generalised uncharitably about mankind. “He forgot himself with me,” she said. “But Fanny is pink and pretty and soft and a fool–a very excellent match for a Man.” And by way of a wedding present she sent Fanny a gracefully bound volume of poetry by George Meredith, and Fanny wrote back a grossly happy letter to say that it was “ALL beautiful.” Miss Winchelsea hoped that some day Mr. Senoks might take up that slim book and think for a moment of the donor. Fanny wrote several times before and about her marriage, pursuing that fond legend of their “ancient friendship,” and giving her happiness in the fullest detail. And Miss Winchelsea wrote to Helen for the first time after the Roman journey, saying nothing about the marriage, but expressing very cordial feelings.
They had been in Rome at Easter, and Fanny was married in the August vacation. She wrote a garrulous letter to Miss Winchelsea, describing her home-coming, and the astonishing arrangements of their “teeny weeny” little house. Mr. Se’noks was now beginning to assume a refinement in Miss Winchelsea’s memory out of all proportion to the facts of the case, and she tried in vain to imagine his cultured greatness in a “teeny weeny” little house. “Am busy enamelling a cosey corner,” said Fanny, sprawling to the end of her third sheet, “so excuse more.” Miss Winchelsea answered in her best style, gently poking fun at Fanny’s arrangements and hoping intensely that Mr. Sen’oks might see the letter. Only this hope enabled her to write at all, answering not only that letter but one in November and one at Christmas.
The two latter communications contained urgent invitations for her to come to Steely Bank on a Visit during the Christmas holidays. She tried to think that HE had told her to ask that, but it was too much like Fanny’s opulent good-nature. She could not but believe that he must be sick of his blunder by this time; and she had more than a hope that he would presently write her a letter beginning “Dear Friend.” Something subtly tragic in the separation was a great support to her, a sad misunderstanding. To have been jilted would have been intolerable. But he never wrote that letter beginning “Dear Friend.”
For two years Miss Winchelsea could not go to see her friends, in spite of the reiterated invitations of Mrs. Sevenoaks–it became full Sevenoaks in the second year. Then one day near the Easter rest she felt lonely and without a soul to understand her in the world, and her mind ran once more on what is called Platonic friendship. Fanny was clearly happy and busy in her new sphere of domesticity, but no doubt HE had his lonely hours. Did he ever think of those days in Rome–gone now beyond recalling? No one had understood her as he had done; no one in all the world. It would be a sort of melancholy pleasure to talk to him again, and what harm could it do? Why should she deny herself? That night she wrote a sonnet, all but the last two lines of the octave–which would not come, and the next day she composed a graceful little note to tell Fanny she was coming down.
And so she saw him again.
Even at the first encounter it was evident he had changed; he seemed stouter and less nervous, and it speedily appeared that his conversation had already lost much of its old delicacy. There even seemed a justification for Helen’s description of weakness in his face–in certain lights it WAS weak. He seemed busy and preoccupied about his affairs, and almost under the impression that Miss Winchelsea had come for the sake of Fanny. He discussed his dinner with Fanny in an intelligent way. They only had one good long talk together, and that came to nothing. He did not refer to Rome, and spent some time abusing a man who had stolen an idea he had had for a text-book. It did not seem a very wonderful idea to Miss Winchelsea. She discovered he had forgotten the names of more than half the painters whose work they had rejoiced over in Florence.
It was a sadly disappointing week, and Miss Winchelsea was glad when it came to an end. Under various excuses she avoided visiting them again. After a time the visitor’s room was occupied by their two little boys, and Fanny’s invitations ceased. The intimacy of her letters had long since faded away.
13. A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON
The man with the white face entered the carriage at Rugby. He moved slowly in spite of the urgency of his porter, and even while he was still on the platform I noted how ill he seemed. He dropped into the corner over against me with a sigh, made an incomplete attempt to arrange his travelling shawl, and became motionless, with his eyes staring vacantly. Presently he was moved by a sense of my observation, looked up at me, and put out a spiritless hand for his newspaper. Then he glanced again in my direction.
I feigned to read. I feared I had unwittingly embarrassed him, and in a moment I was surprised to find him speaking.
“I beg your pardon?” said I.
“That book,” he repeated, pointing a lean finger, “is about dreams.”
“Obviously,” I answered, for it was Fortnum-Roscoe’s Dream States, and the title was on the cover. He hung silent for a space as if he sought words. “Yes,” he said at last, “but they tell you nothing.” I did not catch his meaning for a second.
“They don’t know,” he added.
I looked a little more attentively at his face.
“There are dreams,” he said, “and dreams.”
That sort of proposition I never dispute.
“I suppose–” he hesitated. “Do you ever dream? I mean vividly.”
“I dream very little,” I answered. “I doubt if I have three vivid dreams in a year.”
“Ah!” he said, and seemed for a moment to collect his thoughts.
“Your dreams don’t mix with your memories?” he asked abruptly. “You don’t find yourself in doubt; did this happen or did it not?”
“Hardly ever. Except just for a momentary hesitation now and then. I suppose few people do.”
“Does HE say–” he indicated the book.
“Says it happens at times and gives the usual explanation about intensity of impression and the like to account for its not happening as a rule. I suppose you know something of these theories–“
“Very little–except that 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 leant forward almost as though he would 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.”
“Mental trouble! Yes. I dare say there are. It’s the right place for them. But what I mean–” He looked at his bony knuckles. “Is that sort of thing always dreaming? IS it dreaming? Or is it something else? Mightn’t it be 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–perhaps you know that look.
“I’m not just arguing about a matter of opinion,” he said. “The thing’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. . . .”
He paused. “Even now–“
“The dream is always the same–do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s over.”
“You mean?”
“I died.”
“Died?”
“Smashed and killed, and now, so much of me as that dream was, is dead. Dead for ever. I dreamt I was another man, you know, living in a different part of the world and in a different time. I dreamt that night after night. Night after night I woke into that other life. Fresh scenes and fresh happenings–until I came upon the last–“
“When you died?”
“When I died.”
“And since then–“
“No,” he said. “Thank God! That was the end of the dream. . . .”
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 has a dreary way with him. “Living in a different time,” I said: “do you mean in some different age?”
“Yes.”
“Past?”
“No, to come–to come.”
“The year three thousand, for example?”
“I don’t know what year it was. I did when I was asleep, when I was dreaming, that is, but not now–not now that I am awake. There’s a lot of things I have forgotten 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 of calling the year. . . . What DID they call it?” He put his hand to his forehead. “No,” said he, “I forget.”
He sat smiling weakly. For a moment I feared he did not mean to 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. And it’s curious that in these dreams I am speaking of I never remembered this life I am living now. It seemed as if the dream life was enough while it lasted. Perhaps–But I will tell you how I find myself when I do my best to recall it all. I don’t remember anything dearly until 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 dream-like–because the girl had stopped fanning me.”
“The girl?”
“Yes, the girl. You must not interrupt or you will put me out.”
He stopped abruptly. “You won’t think I’m mad?” he said.
“No,” I answered; “you’ve been dreaming. Tell me your dream.”
“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 nineteenth-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 again, gripping the window strap, putting his face forward and looking up at 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 couch–it was 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 blue shadow. She was dressed–how can I describe it? It was easy and flowing. And altogether 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 sighed and raised myself upon my arm she turned her face to me–“
He stopped.
“I have lived three-and-fifty 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 radiation, sweet lips that softened into smiles, and grave grey eyes. And she moved gracefully, she seemed to have part with all pleasant and gracious things–“
He stopped, and his face was 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 thrown up my plans and ambitions, thrown 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 none of it had seemed worth having beside 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 had any care for me, before I had imagined that she would dare–that we should dare, all my life had seemed vain and hollow, dust and ashes. It WAS dust and ashes. Night after night and through the long 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 there. You see–in this dream, anyhow– I had been a big man, the sort of man men come to trust in, to group themselves about. Millions of men who had never seen me were ready to do things and risk things because of their confidence in me. I had been playing that game for years, that big laborious game, that vague, monstrous political game amidst intrigues and betrayals, speech and agitation. It was a vast weltering world, and at last I had a sort of leadership against the Gang–you know it was called the Gang–a sort of compromise of scoundrelly projects and base ambitions and vast public emotional stupidities and catchwords– the Gang that kept the world noisy and blind year by year, and all the while that it was drifting, drifting towards infinite disaster. But I can’t expect you to understand the shades and complications of the year–the year something or other ahead. I had it all down to the smallest details–in my dream. I suppose I had been dreaming of it before I awoke, and the fading outline of some queer new development I had imagined still hung about me as I rubbed my eyes. It was some grubby affair that made me thank God for the sunlight. I sat up on the couch and remained looking at the woman and rejoicing– rejoicing that I had come away out of all that tumult and 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? And I blamed myself for having ever sought to be a leader when I might have given my days to love. But then, thought I, if I had not spent my early days sternly and austerely, I might have wasted myself upon vain and worthless women, and at the thought all my being went out in love and tenderness to my dear mistress, my dear lady, who had come at last and compelled me–compelled me by her invincible charm for me–to lay that life aside.
“‘You are worth it,’ I said, speaking without intending her to hear; ‘you are worth it, my dearest one; 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 towards 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 we had 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 was indeed Capri. For in this life I have never been there. Let me describe it. We were in a little room, one of a vast multitude of little rooms, very cool and sunny, hollowed out of the limestone of a sort of cape, very high above the sea. The whole island, you know, was one enormous hotel, complex beyond explaining, and on the other side there were miles of floating hotels, and huge floating stages to which the 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. Of course. Now!–yes.
“Well, this room of ours was at the extremity of the cape, so that one could see east and west. Eastward was a great cliff–a thousand feet high perhaps–coldly grey 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. And when one turned to the west, distinct and near was a little bay, a little beach still in shadow. And 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.
“To the eastward, of course, these little boats were grey and very minute and clear, but to the 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 round 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. “There was some story–but that–“
He put his hand to his forehead again. “No,” he said, “I forget that story.”
“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 any one 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 near by.
“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 dishonour 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 recesses; they were dressed in splendid colours 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 afterwards 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 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, inspite 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.”
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.
“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 round 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 something flashed 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 towards 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, “towards 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 aeroplanes came up out of the south, and that the battle went away to the west. One aeroplane 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–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 towards the temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing towards 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 grey 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