The Country of the Blind and other Selected Stories Read online

  ‘ “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.3 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 scimitar of 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 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 seawater 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 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 anyone 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 floors 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 an 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 while 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 Evesham4 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 loth, 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 organizing 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 Bove 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 today.

  ‘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 trivial 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 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-grand-children. I was chiefly busy that day negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease. It was a private builder in a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way. I had an interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that sent me to bed still irritated. That night I had no dream. Nor did I dream the next night, at least, to remember.

  ‘Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished. I began to feel sure it was a dream. And then it came again.

  ‘When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very different. I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in the dream. Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them was back again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled. I began I know with moody musings. Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days to toil and stress, insults and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could do no other than despise, from the stress and anguish of war and infinite misrule? And after all I might fail. They all sought their own narrow ends, and why should not I – why should not I also live as a man? And out of such thoughts her voice summoned me, and I lifted my eyes.

  ‘I found myself awake and walking. We had come out above the Pleasure City, we were near the summit of Monte Solaro and looking towards the bay. It was the late afternoon and very clear. Far away to the left Ischia hung in a golden haze between sea and sky, and Naples was coldly white against the hills, and before us was Vesuvius5 with a tall and slender streamer feathering at last towards the south, and the ruins of Torre 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.6 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-mouth7 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.