The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
"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 Gresham'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 did not 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 Gresham'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--Gresham'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 a-whirl 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
a-quiver 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."
"South-west," 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
dream stuff, 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 south-west. 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 south-eastern 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,