The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
had used. And this messenger they had sent to me not only told me of
Gresham'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 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 Gresham 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 Gresham 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 bookcover that lay on my wife's sewing-machine in the
breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line that ran
about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the messenger from my
deserted party. Have you ever heard of a dream that had a quality like
that?"
"Like--?"
"So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten."
I thought. I had never noticed the point before, but he was right.
"Never," I said. "That is what you never seem to do with dreams."
"No," he answered. "But that is just what I did. I am a solicitor, you
must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help wondering what the
clients and business people I found myself talking to in my office would
think if I told them suddenly I was in love with a girl who would be born
a couple of hundred years or so hence, and worried about the politics of
my great-great-great-grandchildren. I was chiefly busy that day
negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease. It was a private builder in
a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way. I had an
interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that sent me to
bed still irritated. That night I had no dream. Nor did I dream the next
night, at least, to remember.
"Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished. I began to feel
sure it _was_ a dream. And then it came again.
"When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very different.
I think it certain that four days had also elapsed _in_ the dream.
Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them was back
again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled. I began, I
know, with moody musings. Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back
for all the rest of my days, to toil and stress, insults, and perpetual
dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people,
whom I did not love, whom too often I could not do other than despise,
from the stress and anguish of war and infinite misrule? And, after all, I
might fail. _They_ all sought their own narrow ends, and why should
not I--why should not I also live as a man? And out of such thoughts her
voice summoned me, and I lifted my eyes.
"I found myself awake and walking. We had come out above the Pleasure
City, we were near the summit of Monte Solaro and looking towards the bay.
It was the late afternoon and very clear. Far away to the left Ischia hung
in a golden haze between sea and sky, and Naples was coldly white against
the hills, and before us was Vesuvius with a tall and slender streamer
feathering at last towards the south, and the ruins of Torre dell'
Annunziata and Castellammare glittering and near."
I interrupted suddenly: "You have been to Capri, of course?"
"Only in this dream," he said, "only in this dream. All across the bay
beyond Sorrento were the floating palaces of the Pleasure City moored and
chained. And northward were the broad floating stages that received the
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 Rhine-mouth were manoeuvring now in the
eastward sky. Gresham 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 Gresham'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 half-way 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 spear-heads 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?"