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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
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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
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 the puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst the
gray; 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 gray, 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,¹ I said, fleeing from all this madness of war.¹
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
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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
wind 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 south east 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. Oh, 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
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or something, and take once more to sea. And there it was the battle
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