Twice it has happened.

I was surprised each time. Delighted.

By the light touch. Just a touch, but definite. Enough for me to open my eyes. The felt sensation too delicate to place or give reference. Especially through clothing. But I felt the tiny weight move fabric. Pushing weave against my skin.

The first time was high above the big burn. I’d spent thirty minutes yowling and mewing. Crouched and naked in the shower. Tears coalescing with the water from the shower head. Streaming. Forming fat drops. Weighty with the pressure. My head hurt. Frowns giving me early lines for thirty three.

I crawled out the shower basin and sat on my haunches. On a wet towel. Like the dog. Dripping. Drained of effort.

I’d moved to this little white cottage. Deep in the Highlands. A little over a year ago. It was springtime. I’d endured the winter. Alone. No car. Donning a head torch and wellies to walk the couple of miles to work every day. Returning via a seaside path. Giant beech trees either side of me created a starlit runway up from Dunrobin Castle to the A9. Then through the inky black woods. On edge for the bogey man. Or my drunken neighbour making his way back from the pub.

I’d gotten Ted at some point. A big black bear of a dog. Made his way up from Hampshire on the train. His owner had become disabled and he needed a new owner. I needed a new owner. I went and met him at Inverness train station. He got straight in the back of the car with me and proceeded to lean in to me as if he’d been waiting his whole life for this. My face was planted against the glass of the rear window but I already felt safer.

He was waiting for me as I crawled out the bathroom. Clearly wondering what all the ungodly racket was about and why I was still wet. “I don’t know about this Ted. I don’t know”

But the sun was shining. Bulbs were rearing their cheeky heads and making a stand against the coolness of the air. I peered out the window and pulled on some jeans and a hoodie. I’m not sure why this anniversary had had the effect it had. But it did. Usually I did something nice, went to a garden, a monastery. Paid my respects in some romantic and poetic way. Something that made me feel closer to heaven. But not this time. Something about the five year ribbon caused unholy wailing and my knees to collapse.

The dog needed walking though.

This is the thing about grief. We live it in time. Time carries on. With its duties and orderliness. And yet. Concurrent to this is some other plane. That stretches between wonder, focus and an indescribable chasm of love that has been blown over the top of time and space. You are holding on to the tips of it’s tails. But you don’t know where the other end is. So you get lost in the distance for a while. Wondering if there is something on the horizon that might hold an answer.

Then you realise that the dog still needs walking. So you find some boots instead. And the lead that hangs on the back of the door. And the poo bags in the kitchen drawer.

By now Ted is launching his huge self around the hallway bringing me back from the horizon with his apparent love for life. He has forgotten the banshee in the shower. We head out into the spring.

I climb over the gate. He squeezes underneath, a shimmy as he does.

I can feel the air on my skin and the grass beneath my feet. We walk down the field, picking up one of the sheep trails. Easier that way. Don’t have to watch my step. Can follow in theirs.

Another gate, cross the road. Into the woods. Past the curling pond. This ices up in the winter and you can skid about on it. T junction. Turn right and follow the path along for a bit. I’ve picked up pace and things being in bud and seeing flashes of green are working some magic. I think I might have washed away a bit of grief in the shower and perhaps that outburst of sound I made was needed. I’ve been pretty quiet since he died. My voice lost in his tail feathers.

I reach my portal. Two ash trees. Young and in love, they reach and form an arch. And I enter. Ted pounding through the bracken. Taking his seat beside the huge oak, which has fallen forward into the canopy above the Big Burn. I climb aboard and sit with my back to the root system which is now upright and roots are sunbound. I look out over the treetops. All the colours of a native treeline. Lichen fluttering on the breeze.. The horizon is closer. And I like it.

I slide down until I am horizontal. Just the crown of my head pressed against the upturned roots. Keeping my mind encased. Sometimes I think that it might all disperse. Like seeds on the wind. Interesting and far reaching. They would all form something new and beautiful.

But not together.

My body relaxes. I let the trunk take my weight. Pull my hood up, helps the seeds. I let the shower episode go. Washing the seeds. Like thoughts. Away on the wind.

Ted is parked beside me and we become still.

And for a moment I pull it all together.

I feel something land on my chest.

I’m not sure what it is so carefully open my eyes. And the small bird cocks it’s head at me and stares straight into my day. Neither of us move. Seconds pass. I am acutely aware of her tiny frame upon my chest. My heart comes a little closer. Returns to me.

And I think of him as I watch her depart, tail feathers searing into blue.

Fleeting, but heavy with presence.

.The second time deserves another story. Heartbreak calls birds.

Rounding our sadness up into the azure. Shooting it through sunlit skies.

Stillness brings the weight of lighter days to come.

Leave a comment

They called him disrespectful, but they were wrong.

You could feel Derek before he ever spoke.

His presence was always known, because the air had a shift in pressure. His energy was heavy, the kind that made you glance up without knowing why. When he moved, the students’ conversations would soften. Their chairs would still, heads turned toward the doorway watching out of curiosity.

Derek’s shoulders were always squared, movements steady. The room always seemed to make space for him, no matter how crowded. He sat on a chair in the back row, slightly angled, claiming it like it was his own.

He would drop into his chair with a thud, leaning it back just enough for the metal legs to creak. His arms were always folded, one foot stretched forward. And his eyes constantly scanned the room.

He was only twelve, but there was nothing little about his presence.

He carried himself like someone who hadn’t been a child for a long long time. His jaw set with tension, his eyes moved quickly…alert. When he was addressed, he never looked down. He met your gaze directly, steady…unflinching.

And when he talked back, which he did, often…it was never messy or emotional. His words were quick, sharp, hitting exactly where he knew it would hurt. Most teachers called it disrespect. But they were wrong more often than they realized. His words were never careless, they were…gaurded.

The calls to the office came often…it seemed like every day.

“Ms. T, we need you up front.”

The hallway felt colder on those walks. The fluorescent lights flickered, casting a stark glow in the hallway that made everything feel intense. It may have been a different classroom where he would get in trouble, but it was always the same story. A moment where a teacher’s tone carried a little too much edge. An adult looking at him with judgement. A word that didn’t just correct, but felt cutting. And then…you could see it hit him. His shoulders would lock, his head tilted slightly, his eyes would go still. In his mind, a line had been crossed.

Derek’s voice would rise, fast and immediate. A sound that would cut straight through the room. Then chairs would scrape, and pencils would drop, as everyone in class would hold their breath.

The moment would fracture.

These moments would happen so quickly that most people only paid attention to the explosion. No one ever saw the moment he decided he needed one.

But in my classroom, the air was different. Not because Derek had changed, but because I had. Instead of reacting to the moments that drew everyone else’s attention, I watched the ones that were overlooked. And what I began to notice was surprising.

At first, I saw how quickly he worked. He never rushed, but somehow he was always finished before everyone else. His pencil rarely paused, it moved across the paper with certainty. He didn’t second-guess himself and when he finished his work he would lean back in his chair, fold his arms, and watch. Not because of boredom, but because he was always on guard.

So one day, I gave him something small to do.

“Derek, can you take this to the office?”

He didn’t move right away. His eyes met mine, studying me with a long, measured look. As if he was deciding what motive I had in store for him.

Then he stood, took the paper, and quietly left the room.

The next day I handed him a stack of folders and asked if he could organize them for me. He held them for a moment before beginning, then he carefully pressed the corners together. He straightened every page with perfection, tapping the edges against the desk. Making sure all were aligned. Nothing about the way he worked felt rushed or careless. He was always intentional, in everything he did.

After that, I found more reasons to keep him busy. A drawer overflowing with dull pencils. Papers that needed sorting. A supply closet thick with the dry scent of dust. He moved through each job with the same focus. He opened cabinets gently, returned supplies to their proper places, bringing order to things most people would never notice.

As the weeks passed, I noticed small changes. His chair rested on all four legs more often, and the sharp edge in his voice softened. His eyes were still always watching the room, but there were moments when he seemed to forget he was doing it. For a little while he looked like an ordinary sixth grader sitting in class.

Outside my room, the storm followed him wherever he went. The calls from the office continued, sometimes before lunch, or before the school bell rang.

“Ms. T, he walked out.”

“He yelled at another teacher.”

“He refused to follow directions.”

By the time someone came to get me, to talk some “sense” into him, the incident had already been reduced to an outburst. No one remembered the clipped tone that came before it. The look of judgement or the correction that may have come across a little too sharp.

Even on his best days, there were moments when his eyes drifted back to the classroom door. Vigilant and aware, as if part of him was always listening. A voice in the hallway could pull his attention away instantly. His hyper-vigilance began to haunt me and I realized whatever taught him to live this way, began long before he had ever stepped inside my classroom.

Leave a comment

“When thy kingdoms come,

there will be a holy day.”

Cept 76: The Stôurfwin Codex.

Amaranth, the Stôurfwin Codices - Stôurfwin meaning The Living Book, is a collection of ancient manuscripts predating the human written word. Its contents are a stunning array of chronicled mythologies, histories and prophecies. The Eldritch, an ancient bloodline and sect of the fae; jealously guard it.

“A darkness will cover the world. In that moment the Shönishûne will be born, heralding a new age for both human and fae alike, ruling two kingdoms with teknologie and majik.” Cept 117.

Now Shönishûne in the old tongue, Amaranth means ‘The Paradox Child’. Cept 89 describes the being as ‘an enigma of innocence’ and goes on to say ‘born from a crystal tree that is the heart and soul of a crystal grove’. A hallowed place where the fae convene twice-yearly on the winter and summer solstices called Na’nuah-ni Fjel’ayre’amon – which translates as The Great Convergence – that’s actualised in the Great Forest in Wales.

Typically, representatives of the fae clans from overseas also attend the festival as each year it is hoped that theirs is the generation who witnesses the birth of a new God. Presiding over the land and its folk are the beloved Illia and Allia, king and queen of the fae, who ritually tell the tale at each solstice of the ‘First Ones’ who ‘shed a tear from which the silver grove and sacred tree were formed’ Cept 24.

Along the winding pathway surrounding The Great Forest are signposts, talismans, anointed stones or tree stumps. Warnings are written on plaques painted cherry red. Embossed in white are the words ‘Private Land. Stay Out’. A simple message that could entice the curious minded. Should that happen then wards automatically activate playing on deep seated fearscapes.

Prevention, after all, is better than the cure.

On the 30th July 5041 Amaranth, a single crystal bud dropped unnoticed to the ground, a chrysalis, doubling in size until it was big as a boulder. Attaching itself to the tree and earth, tendrils and filaments, drew nutrients from both sources nurturing the life inside. If one touched the womb, its throb akin to a heartbeat could be felt. The entity inside it grew at an astonishing rate becoming a fully formed humanoid ‘neither fae nor human but other-worldly’ Cept 978.

The splitting of the chrysalis was witnessed primarily by The Eldritch, the royalty and eventually the whole forest. Word spread majikly like wildfire across the globe with every fae aware of the momentous occasion this heralded. With bated breath they waited for the Nahpto-shi, meaning The Inevitable One, to emerge from its cocoon. A beautifully fragile silvery-winged creature was birthed as “seven planetary bodies aligned” Cept 1062, a rare event witnessed by the universe. The Shönishûne, prophesy made flesh, was fulfilled as ‘darkness coloured the world’ and a ‘light was borne from it’ Cept 666.

Source: The Stôurfwin Codices courtesy of the Eldritch T’as’a’beah-ni Library.

To its end and its beginning

Amaranth, this is a teaser to the Tzi Universe Vol 3. It is also the prologue to a larger story called The Paradox Papers. You might be wondering why Rumour is showcasing this story. As usual he finds his way into The Tzi Universe and has cameo roles, in this particular saga he is cast in the main roster. Originally this story was written for the Ystradgynlais Creative Writing Group. A visual prompt of a tree in a forest with a sign post as described in the story was used. Amaranth I have cheekily used sleight of hand to make this story more immersive. I am going to pivot in slow motion, so watch closely. The song I chose to pair with this document is A Mystical Eclipse, it showcases the music projekt Silhouette and Shadow and provides a sweet ambient relaxing medium as you read the document.

A Mystical Eclipse

Crucified souls on rusted crosses saints and martyrs their abundant losses They’ll tell you lies and drink your fear they’ll whisper secrets no one will hear I’ll touch your soul then kiss your heart as all around you crumbles and tears you apart. Black heart supernovas black mind that craves rest hidden secrets shallow depths face your fears and dance with death.

The Paradox Child can be found lurking in The Tzi Universe Vol 3. Its sequel The Paradox Papers can be found here.

Leave a comment

Rina, the pretty lass in Standard-XI, did not want to be the sunlight like Amalkanti*. She wanted to capture the sunlight instead to share it with the people close to her to help reduce their suffering, sadness and pain.

Rina, giggling, dashed out with the empty Mazza bottle to collect the sparkling sunlight, as she believed that sunlight was synonimous with optimism, hope and laughter. She’d caught her Ma, breaking into a smile after ages!

“Raj and Mira are coming today! Rinu ( that’s what she called Rina endearingly), make sure that our house is spec and span. Where is Rupa gone? I’ve to send her to the market.....RUPA...” She cried out loudly as the younger of the two sisters, Rina, came running back in.

“Ma looks happy today! Thank you, God, for bringing the smile back on her face......” She exclaimed having already removed the lid and captured the sunlight in the bottle.

Rina lived at Bidhan Park with her mother and elder sister, Rupa, five years her older. Their father passed long back, leaving the task of running the family to their mother, who worked in a milk depot at that time. The pay was insufficient yet they all lived happily till Raj, their only brother, married his childhood crush, Mira.

Mira had a tough time adjusting to the life at the in-laws. Relations between her mother and Mira came to such a pass that Raj finally shifted to Mira’s house. He’s assigned the responsibility of looking after his father-in-law’s business. As his visits to their house became few and far between, the smile from their mother’s face vanishhed.

That afternoon, they chatted excitedly in Ma’s room and the atmosphere was filled with the long-lost love, memories and laughter again.

“He’s such a cry-baby! Every time he lost at Chess, he’d make life hell for others.” Rupa, reminisced when Raj tried to pull her legs.

Rina, looking at her mother, could fancy her thanking Lord Govinda Deva silently. Things were beginning to look up for her family as Rupa had joined the local private school as a Receptionist recently.

The day Soumya, the Economics teacher of Rupa’s school, came to their house at Ma’s invitation,

“Baba, we aren’t rich but my children are well-behaved to fit in anywhere. Rupa’s a good girl. And I so want her to be happy!”

“You know, Aunt, my parents can’t wait to meet her.” Soumya replied as he exchanged a knowing look with Rupa. Rina opened the door with another plastic bottle of Sprite then and sprinted out to store the cool sunlight again. She had seen them leaving their home holding hands from the window and felt happy for her sister.

***

It was pouring as Rina dropped by Mimi Aunty’s house a couple of days later.

“Arey, Rina! What a surprise! It’s almost three months since Sudip (her elder son) got married! Get in fast.” Mimi Aunty stated teasingly while moving aside for Rina to step in. She loved Rina like her own daughter. Secretly, she nurtured the notion of setting her up with her younger son. But she’d have time to think about it later. Right then, she had other pressing matters to address on the home front.

“Aunty, I heard something and that’s why I brought you a gift. Promise me you’ll open this bottle the moment the air in here feels heavy.” Rina uttered, pointing to the room before handing her the bottle.

“An empty bottle?” She asked Rina quizzically.

“Treasure it, it will come handy. Just unscrew the lid and let the sunlight from outside mingle with the light inside the bottle. Bring you loads of luck.” She concluded before getting up as the middle-aged lady rose and hugged her affectionately.

She was delighted to know some days later that Aunty’s daughter-in-law had decided to stay back and wasn’t moving to another house as rumoured.

Raj started frequenting their house again. Things were not as rosy between him and Mira as they were during their courting days.

“I don’t know, Ma. Mira’s become bossy these days.” Whenever Raj got annoyed with Mira, he would start addressing her by her proper name. “She calls me names! I’m running out of options.” Rina overheard him grumbling to their mother. She went on hemming her salwar with her ears glued to their conversation though, getting apprehensive.

“All I can say is you’ve to be patient with her. She’s intelligent. You two will patch up in due course...” Ma assured him while Raj kept on shaking his head.

Next day, Rina left home with the other bottle in which she had captured the sunlight, having seen Rupa and Soumya leaving their house holding hands. That simple gesture hinted at their togetherness, love for one another and happiness.

This magic sunlight would bring back the lost love in their lives, on her way to Rupa’s house, she thought to herself. For a moment the picture of all three of them relishing their egg-chicken rolls in a restaurant right after watching “Kashmir Ki Kali” flashed through her mind. She’d always been very fond of Mira who treated her like a sister.

As she knocked on the door, Mira opened it. Her unkempt looks frightened Rina no end as she led Rina up the stairs to her room. known to be a heckler for cleanliness, her room looked bleak indeed.

“Bhabhi, I’ve brought the magic bottle for you. Before Rajda comes, please open the lid to let the sunlight in it mingle with the light from outside. Believe me, all your worries will be gone within no time....”

Mira didn’t say anything but the far-away look in her eyes said it all.

Rina knew not if Mira did as she bid but three months after her visit to their house, Raj snailed back home with bag and baggage to file for divorce in a court!

Rina doesn’t collect sunlight anymore. She has known by now that captured emotions cannot be replicated.

The end

Author’s Note :

• Amalkanti, the famous, dreamy protagonist in a Bengali poem by Niren Chakraborty. He wanted to be the sunlight.

Leave a comment

The #FindDadsVoice campaign tells the story of this very struggle against forgetting—a deeply human movement born out of real trauma, initiated by Cathie Clarence.

Searching Through the Accumulation of Time The story began with a loss: the passing of Robert Edward Lynn Clarence (known as Bob), a renowned environmental and safety instructor in Ontario, Canada. Bob was a man of nature, a hunter, a master of teaching responsibility, and an unwavering pillar for his daughter, Cathie. Their bond was filled with warmth, family humor, and unbreakable connection. However, after Bob’s passing and as time slipped by, the only cassette tape holding his last voice message and the sound of his laughter was lost.

Describing this moment, Cathie says:

“I can picture his face, I can still feel his hug... but I can’t hear his voice anymore. Not a word, not a whisper. Losing his voice felt like losing him all over again—as if a deep hole opened up in the universe right where he used to stand.”

This agonizing pain sparked the #FindDadsVoice movement. Cathie launched a global search, hunting through old training session videos, forgotten family tapes in storage, and answering machine recordings from the 1980s and 1990s, hoping to find even just a few seconds of her father’s voice.

From a Personal Search to a Universal Haven What began as a daughter’s quest to find her father’s voice quickly transformed. Cathie realized that this deep longing was not hers alone. Millions of people around the world close their eyes at night, desperately trying to recall the tone of a lost loved one’s voice.

The #FindDadsVoice project became a sanctuary for preserving human audio legacies—a call to action to record the voices of those we love before it is too late, and to protect the audio memories of our past. This movement serves as a poignant yet beautiful reminder that human beings should not be lost across generations, and that voice is the most vivid bridge connecting us to memory and love.

Joining the Movement and Giving Support Alongside her effort to find the lost tape, Cathie Clarence navigates personal

• Support & Information: Explore stories and support her campaign via her Linktree page.

• Direct Contact: Send potential audio files of Bob Clarence or reach Cathie directly at iamcatclarence@gmail.com.

Voices may turn into echoes amidst the noise of the world, but with love and collective action, no voice ever has to remain silent forever.

My dear sir,

Your letter reached me just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the deep and loving trust it revealed. I can do no more. I cannot comment on the style of your verses; critical intent is too far removed from my nature. There is nothing that manages to influence a work of art less than critical words. They always result in more or less unfortunate misunderstandings. Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. Even more inexpressible are works of art; mysterious entities they are, whose lives, compared to our fleeting ones, endure.

Having said these things at the outset, I now dare tell you only this: that your verses do not as yet have an individual style. Yet they possess a quiet and hidden inclination to reveal something personal. I felt that very thing most notably in the last poem, “My Soul.” There, something of your inner self wants to rise to expression. And in the beautiful poem “To Leopardi” something akin to greatness and bordering on uniqueness is sprouting out toward fulfillment. However, the poems cannot yet stand on their own merit, are not yet independent, not even the last one to Leopardi, not yet. In your kind letter accompanying them, you do not fail to admit to and to analyze some shortcomings, which I could sense while reading your verses, but could not directly put into words.

You ask whether your poems are good. You send them to publishers; you compare them with other poems; you are disturbed when certain publishers reject your attempts. Well now, since you have given me permission to advise you, I suggest that you give all that up. You are looking outward and, above all else, that you must not do now. No one can advise and help you, no one.

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

Then draw near to nature. Pretend you are the very first man and then write what you see and experience, what you love and lose. Do not write love poems, at least at first; they present the greatest challenge. It requires great, fully ripened power to produce something personal, something unique, when there are so many good and sometimes even brilliant renditions in great numbers. Beware of general themes. Cling to those that your every- day life offers you. Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts, your belief in anything beautiful. Describe all that with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity. In order to express yourself, use things in your surroundings, the scenes of your dreams, and the subjects of your memory.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty—nothing is insignificant or unimportant. Even if you were in a prison whose walls would shut out from your senses the sounds of the outer world, would you not then still have your childhood, this precious wealth, this treasure house of memories? Direct your attention to that. Attempt to resurrect these sunken sensations of a distant past. You will gain assuredness. Your aloneness will expand and will become your home, greeting you like the quiet dawn. Outer tumult will pass it by from afar.

If, as a result of this turning inward, of this sinking into your own world, poetry should emerge, you will not think to ask someone whether it is good poetry. And you will not try to interest publishers of magazines in these works. For you will hear in them your own voice; you will see in them a piece of your life, a natural possession of yours. A piece of art is good if it is born of necessity. This, its source, is its criterion; there is no other.

Therefore, my dear friend, I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth. At its source you will find the answer to the question, whether you must write. Accept it, however it sounds to you, without analyzing. Perhaps it will become apparent to you that you are indeed called to be a writer. Then accept that fate; bear its burden, and its grandeur, without asking for the reward, which might possibly come from without. For the creative artist must be a world of his own and must find everything within himself and in nature, to which he has betrothed himself.

It is possible that, even after your descent into your inner self and into your secret place of solitude, you might find that you must give up becoming a poet. As I have said, to feel that one could live without writing is enough indication that, in fact, one should not. Even then this process of turning inward, upon which I beg you to embark, will not have been in vain. Your life will no doubt from then on find its own paths. That they will be good ones and rich and expansive—that I wish for you more than I can say.

What else shall I tell you? It seems to me everything has been said, with just the right emphasis. I wanted only to advise you to progress quietly and seriously in your evolvement. You could greatly interfere with that process if you look outward and expect to obtain answers from the outside—answers which only your innermost feeling in your quietest hour can perhaps give you.

I was very happy to find in your writing the name of Professor Horaˇcek. I harbor the highest regard for this kindest of scholars and owe him lasting gratitude. Would you please pass my sentiments on to him. It is very kind of him to think of me still, and I appreciate it.

I am returning the verses with which you entrusted me. I thank you again for your unconditional and sincere trust. I am overwhelmed with it, and therefore have tried, to the best of my ability, to make myself a little more worthy than I, as a stranger to you, really am.

With my sincerest interest and devotion,

Yours,

Leave a comment

From behind the bars overlooking the desert, he imagined the ocean and let a handful of sand dance beneath his fingers as if it were beach sand. A gust of wind blew dust from the desert onto his face. He coughed, turned his face away, and wished that this window had glass or a curtain to draw when the wind blew so fiercely, so that at least the dust wouldn’t choke him. He reached for the bars to try once more to pull them out of the ground, but it seemed as though they had rooted deep into the earth, their feet clasping underground fissures so tightly that no human could uproot them.

They knew well that in this absolute desert, if anyone tried to steal them, there would be no one to save them. On the other hand, these ten steel bars had stood together since they had opened their eyes, warmed by each other’s presence. He gripped one of the bars tighter and used his bare foot as a lever on the ground to pull one of the bars out with more force. Just then, the sun, in a frantic effort to stop this relentless attempt to break the unity among old friends, intensified its rays and blinded him. The man, overwhelmed by the intense sunlight, released his grip and covered his eyes with his forearm. He felt defeated and crawled back from the bars onto the ground. He left the room; the village had been abandoned for years. Most of the houses were buried under the sand, but occasionally, some houses could be found with their roofs still ten inches above ground. The man turned and thought about losing the people around him. Perhaps from the beginning, he shouldn’t have clung to the vertical steel bars behind the window.

Share

It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected. The tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens. When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. They do not see what is not obvious, are unable to do the unexpected, are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives to other and strange grooves. In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die.

On the other hand, there are those that make toward survival, the fit individuals who escape from the rule of the obvious and the expected and adjust their lives to no matter what strange grooves they may stray into, or into which they may be forced. Such an individual was Edith Whittlesey. She was born in a rural district of England, where life proceeds by rule of thumb and the unexpected is so very unexpected that when it happens it is looked upon as an immorality. She went into service early, and while yet a young woman, by rule-of-thumb progression, she became a lady’s maid.

Subscribe now

The effect of civilization is to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about grewsome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away.

Such was the environment of Edith Whittlesey. Nothing happened. It could scarcely be called a happening, when, at the age of twenty-five, she accompanied her mistress on a bit of travel to the United States. The groove merely changed its direction. It was still the same groove and well oiled. It was a groove that bridged the Atlantic with uneventfulness, so that the ship was not a ship in the midst of the sea, but a capacious, many-corridored hotel that moved swiftly and placidly, crushing the waves into submission with its colossal bulk until the sea was a mill-pond, monotonous with quietude. And at the other side the groove continued on over the land—a well-disposed, respectable groove that supplied hotels at every stopping-place, and hotels on wheels between the stopping-places.

In Chicago, while her mistress saw one side of social life, Edith Whittlesey saw another side; and when she left her lady’s service and became Edith Nelson, she betrayed, perhaps faintly, her ability to grapple with the unexpected and to master it. Hans Nelson, immigrant, Swede by birth and carpenter by occupation, had in him that Teutonic unrest that drives the race ever westward on its great adventure. He was a large-muscled, stolid sort of a man, in whom little imagination was coupled with immense initiative, and who possessed, withal, loyalty and affection as sturdy as his own strength.

Subscribe now

“When I have worked hard and saved me some money, I will go to Colorado,” he had told Edith on the day after their wedding. A year later they were in Colorado, where Hans Nelson saw his first mining and caught the mining-fever himself. His prospecting led him through the Dakotas, Idaho, and eastern Oregon, and on into the mountains of British Columbia. In camp and on trail, Edith Nelson was always with him, sharing his luck, his hardship, and his toil. The short step of the house-reared woman she exchanged for the long stride of the mountaineer. She learned to look upon danger clear-eyed and with understanding, losing forever that panic fear which is bred of ignorance and which afflicts the city-reared, making them as silly as silly horses, so that they await fate in frozen horror instead of grappling with it, or stampede in blind self-destroying terror which clutters the way with their crushed carcasses.

Would you like to have your work published in Amaranth Magazine? Contact us at magazine@amaranthmagazine.ca

Edith Nelson met the unexpected at every turn of the trail, and she trained her vision so that she saw in the landscape, not the obvious, but the concealed. She, who had never cooked in her life, learned to make bread without the mediation of hops, yeast, or baking-powder, and to bake bread, top and bottom, in a frying-pan before an open fire. And when the last cup of flour was gone and the last rind of bacon, she was able to rise to the occasion, and of moccasins and the softer-tanned bits of leather in the outfit to make a grub-stake substitute that somehow held a man’s soul in his body and enabled him to stagger on. She learned to pack a horse as well as a man,—a task to break the heart and the pride of any city-dweller, and she knew how to throw the hitch best suited for any particular kind of pack. Also, she could build a fire of wet wood in a downpour of rain and not lose her temper. In short, in all its guises she mastered the unexpected. But the Great Unexpected was yet to come into her life and put its test upon her.

The gold-seeking tide was flooding northward into Alaska, and it was inevitable that Hans Nelson and his wife should he caught up by the stream and swept toward the Klondike. The fall of 1897 found them at Dyea, but without the money to carry an outfit across Chilcoot Pass and float it down to Dawson. So Hans Nelson worked at his trade that winter and helped rear the mushroom outfitting-town of Skaguay.

He was on the edge of things, and throughout the winter he heard all Alaska calling to him. Latuya Bay called loudest, so that the summer of 1898 found him and his wife threading the mazes of the broken coast-line in seventy-foot Siwash canoes. With them were Indians, also three other men. The Indians landed them and their supplies in a lonely bight of land a hundred miles or so beyond Latuya Bay, and returned to Skaguay; but the three other men remained, for they were members of the organized party. Each had put an equal share of capital into the outfitting, and the profits were to be divided equally. In that Edith Nelson undertook to cook for the outfit, a man’s share was to be her portion.

First, spruce trees were cut down and a three-room cabin constructed. To keep this cabin was Edith Nelson’s task. The task of the men was to search for gold, which they did; and to find gold, which they likewise did. It was not a startling find, merely a low-pay placer where long hours of severe toil earned each man between fifteen and twenty dollars a day. The brief Alaskan summer protracted itself beyond its usual length, and they took advantage of the opportunity, delaying their return to Skaguay to the last moment. And then it was too late. Arrangements had been made to accompany the several dozen local Indians on their fall trading trip down the coast. The Siwashes had waited on the white people until the eleventh hour, and then departed. There was no course left the party but to wait for chance transportation. In the meantime the claim was cleaned up and firewood stocked in.

The Indian summer had dreamed on and on, and then, suddenly, with the sharpness of bugles, winter came. It came in a single night, and the miners awoke to howling wind, driving snow, and freezing water. Storm followed storm, and between the storms there was the silence, broken only by the boom of the surf on the desolate shore, where the salt spray rimmed the beach with frozen white.

All went well in the cabin. Their gold-dust had weighed up something like eight thousand dollars, and they could not but be contented. The men made snowshoes, hunted fresh meat for the larder, and in the long evenings played endless games of whist and pedro. Now that the mining had ceased, Edith Nelson turned over the fire-building and the dish-washing to the men, while she darned their socks and mended their clothes.

There was no grumbling, no bickering, nor petty quarrelling in the little cabin, and they often congratulated one another on the general happiness of the party. Hans Nelson was stolid and easy-going, while Edith had long before won his unbounded admiration by her capacity for getting on with people. Harkey, a long, lank Texan, was unusually friendly for one with a saturnine disposition, and, as long as his theory that gold grew was not challenged, was quite companionable. The fourth member of the party, Michael Dennin, contributed his Irish wit to the gayety of the cabin. He was a large, powerful man, prone to sudden rushes of anger over little things, and of unfailing good-humor under the stress and strain of big things. The fifth and last member, Dutchy, was the willing butt of the party. He even went out of his way to raise a laugh at his own expense in order to keep things cheerful. His deliberate aim in life seemed to be that of a maker of laughter. No serious quarrel had ever vexed the serenity of the party; and, now that each had sixteen hundred dollars to show for a short summer’s work, there reigned the well-fed, contented spirit of prosperity.

And then the unexpected happened. They had just sat down to the breakfast table. Though it was already eight o’clock (late breakfasts had followed naturally upon cessation of the steady work at mining) a candle in the neck of a bottle lighted the meal. Edith and Hans sat at each end of the table. On one side, with their backs to the door, sat Harkey and Dutchy. The place on the other side was vacant. Dennin had not yet come in.

Hans Nelson looked at the empty chair, shook his head slowly, and, with a ponderous attempt at humor, said: “Always is he first at the grub. It is very strange. Maybe he is sick.”

“Where is Michael?” Edith asked.

“Got up a little ahead of us and went outside,” Harkey answered.

Dutchy’s face beamed mischievously. He pretended knowledge of Dennin’s absence, and affected a mysterious air, while they clamored for information. Edith, after a peep into the men’s bunk-room, returned to the table. Hans looked at her, and she shook her head.

“He was never late at meal-time before,” she remarked.

“I cannot understand,” said Hans. “Always has he the great appetite like the horse.”

“It is too bad,” Dutchy said, with a sad shake of his head.

They were beginning to make merry over their comrade’s absence.

“It is a great pity!” Dutchy volunteered.

“What?” they demanded in chorus.

“Poor Michael,” was the mournful reply.

“Well, what’s wrong with Michael?” Harkey asked.

“He is not hungry no more,” wailed Dutchy. “He has lost der appetite. He do not like der grub.”

“Not from the way he pitches into it up to his ears,” remarked Harkey.

“He does dot shust to be politeful to Mrs. Nelson,” was Dutchy’s quick retort. “I know, I know, and it is too pad. Why is he not here? Pecause he haf gone out. Why haf he gone out? For der defelopment of der appetite. How does he defelop der appetite? He walks barefoots in der snow. Ach! don’t I know? It is der way der rich peoples chases after der appetite when it is no more and is running away. Michael haf sixteen hundred dollars. He is rich peoples. He haf no appetite. Derefore, pecause, he is chasing der appetite. Shust you open der door und you will see his barefoots in der snow. No, you will not see der appetite. Dot is shust his trouble. When he sees der appetite he will catch it und come to preak-fast.”

They burst into loud laughter at Dutchy’s nonsense. The sound had scarcely died away when the door opened and Dennin came in. All turned to look at him. He was carrying a shot-gun. Even as they looked, he lifted it to his shoulder and fired twice. At the first shot Dutchy sank upon the table, overturning his mug of coffee, his yellow mop of hair dabbling in his plate of mush. His forehead, which pressed upon the near edge of the plate, tilted the plate up against his hair at an angle of forty-five degrees. Harkey was in the air, in his spring to his feet, at the second shot, and he pitched face down upon the floor, his “My God!” gurgling and dying in his throat.

It was the unexpected. Hans and Edith were stunned. They sat at the table with bodies tense, their eyes fixed in a fascinated gaze upon the murderer. Dimly they saw him through the smoke of the powder, and in the silence nothing was to be heard save the drip-drip of Dutchy’s spilled coffee on the floor. Dennin threw open the breech of the shot-gun, ejecting the empty shells. Holding the gun with one hand, he reached with the other into his pocket for fresh shells.

He was thrusting the shells into the gun when Edith Nelson was aroused to action. It was patent that he intended to kill Hans and her. For a space of possibly three seconds of time she had been dazed and paralysed by the horrible and inconceivable form in which the unexpected had made its appearance. Then she rose to it and grappled with it. She grappled with it concretely, making a cat-like leap for the murderer and gripping his neck-cloth with both her hands. The impact of her body sent him stumbling backward several steps. He tried to shake her loose and still retain his hold on the gun. This was awkward, for her firm-fleshed body had become a cat’s. She threw herself to one side, and with her grip at his throat nearly jerked him to the floor. He straightened himself and whirled swiftly. Still faithful to her hold, her body followed the circle of his whirl so that her feet left the floor, and she swung through the air fastened to his throat by her hands. The whirl culminated in a collision with a chair, and the man and woman crashed to the floor in a wild struggling fall that extended itself across half the length of the room.

Hans Nelson was half a second behind his wife in rising to the unexpected. His nerve processes and mental processes were slower than hers. His was the grosser organism, and it had taken him half a second longer to perceive, and determine, and proceed to do. She had already flown at Dennin and gripped his throat, when Hans sprang to his feet. But her coolness was not his. He was in a blind fury, a Berserker rage. At the instant he sprang from his chair his mouth opened and there issued forth a sound that was half roar, half bellow. The whirl of the two bodies had already started, and still roaring, or bellowing, he pursued this whirl down the room, overtaking it when it fell to the floor.

Hans hurled himself upon the prostrate man, striking madly with his fists. They were sledge-like blows, and when Edith felt Dennin’s body relax she loosed her grip and rolled clear. She lay on the floor, panting and watching. The fury of blows continued to rain down. Dennin did not seem to mind the blows. He did not even move. Then it dawned upon her that he was unconscious. She cried out to Hans to stop. She cried out again. But he paid no heed to her voice. She caught him by the arm, but her clinging to it merely impeded his effort.

It was no reasoned impulse that stirred her to do what she then did. Nor was it a sense of pity, nor obedience to the “Thou shalt not” of religion. Rather was it some sense of law, an ethic of her race and early environment, that compelled her to interpose her body between her husband and the helpless murderer. It was not until Hans knew he was striking his wife that he ceased. He allowed himself to be shoved away by her in much the same way that a ferocious but obedient dog allows itself to be shoved away by its master. The analogy went even farther. Deep in his throat, in an animal-like way, Hans’s rage still rumbled, and several times he made as though to spring back upon his prey and was only prevented by the woman’s swiftly interposed body.

Back and farther back Edith shoved her husband. She had never seen him in such a condition, and she was more frightened of him than she had been of Dennin in the thick of the struggle. She could not believe that this raging beast was her Hans, and with a shock she became suddenly aware of a shrinking, instinctive fear that he might snap her hand in his teeth like any wild animal. For some seconds, unwilling to hurt her, yet dogged in his desire to return to the attack, Hans dodged back and forth. But she resolutely dodged with him, until the first glimmerings of reason returned and he gave over.

Both crawled to their feet. Hans staggered back against the wall, where he leaned, his face working, in his throat the deep and continuous rumble that died away with the seconds and at last ceased. The time for the reaction had come. Edith stood in the middle of the floor, wringing her hands, panting and gasping, her whole body trembling violently.

Hans looked at nothing, but Edith’s eyes wandered wildly from detail to detail of what had taken place. Dennin lay without movement. The overturned chair, hurled onward in the mad whirl, lay near him. Partly under him lay the shot-gun, still broken open at the breech. Spilling out of his right hand were the two cartridges which he had failed to put into the gun and which he had clutched until consciousness left him. Harkey lay on the floor, face downward, where he had fallen; while Dutchy rested forward on the table, his yellow mop of hair buried in his mush-plate, the plate itself still tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees. This tilted plate fascinated her. Why did it not fall down? It was ridiculous. It was not in the nature of things for a mush-plate to up-end itself on the table, even if a man or so had been killed.

She glanced back at Dennin, but her eyes returned to the tilted plate. It was so ridiculous! She felt a hysterical impulse to laugh. Then she noticed the silence, and forgot the plate in a desire for something to happen. The monotonous drip of the coffee from the table to the floor merely emphasized the silence. Why did not Hans do something? say something? She looked at him and was about to speak, when she discovered that her tongue refused its wonted duty. There was a peculiar ache in her throat, and her mouth was dry and furry. She could only look at Hans, who, in turn, looked at her.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a sharp, metallic clang. She screamed, jerking her eyes back to the table. The plate had fallen down. Hans sighed as though awakening from sleep. The clang of the plate had aroused them to life in a new world. The cabin epitomized the new world in which they must thenceforth live and move. The old cabin was gone forever. The horizon of life was totally new and unfamiliar. The unexpected had swept its wizardry over the face of things, changing the perspective, juggling values, and shuffling the real and the unreal into perplexing confusion.

“My God, Hans!” was Edith’s first speech.

He did not answer, but stared at her with horror. Slowly his eyes wandered over the room, for the first time taking in its details. Then he put on his cap and started for the door.

“Where are you going?” Edith demanded, in an agony of apprehension.

His hand was on the door-knob, and he half turned as he answered, “To dig some graves.”

“Don’t leave me, Hans, with—” her eyes swept the room—“with this.”

“The graves must be dug sometime,” he said.

“But you do not know how many,” she objected desperately. She noted his indecision, and added, “Besides, I’ll go with you and help.”

Hans stepped back to the table and mechanically snuffed the candle. Then between them they made the examination. Both Harkey and Dutchy were dead—frightfully dead, because of the close range of the shot-gun. Hans refused to go near Dennin, and Edith was forced to conduct this portion of the investigation by herself.

“He isn’t dead,” she called to Hans.

He walked over and looked down at the murderer.

“What did you say?” Edith demanded, having caught the rumble of inarticulate speech in her husband’s throat.

“I said it was a damn shame that he isn’t dead,” came the reply.

Edith was bending over the body.

“Leave him alone,” Hans commanded harshly, in a strange voice.

She looked at him in sudden alarm. He had picked up the shot-gun dropped by Dennin and was thrusting in the shells.

“What are you going to do?” she cried, rising swiftly from her bending position.

Hans did not answer, but she saw the shot-gun going to his shoulder. She grasped the muzzle with her hand and threw it up.

“Leave me alone!” he cried hoarsely.

He tried to jerk the weapon away from her, but she came in closer and clung to him.

“Hans! Hans! Wake up!” she cried. “Don’t be crazy!”

“He killed Dutchy and Harkey!” was her husband’s reply; “and I am going to kill him.”

“But that is wrong,” she objected. “There is the law.”

He sneered his incredulity of the law’s potency in such a region, but he merely iterated, dispassionately, doggedly, “He killed Dutchy and Harkey.”

Long she argued it with him, but the argument was one-sided, for he contented himself with repeating again and again, “He killed Dutchy and Harkey.” But she could not escape from her childhood training nor from the blood that was in her. The heritage of law was hers, and right conduct, to her, was the fulfilment of the law. She could see no other righteous course to pursue. Hans’s taking the law in his own hands was no more justifiable than Dennin’s deed. Two wrongs did not make a right, she contended, and there was only one way to punish Dennin, and that was the legal way arranged by society. At last Hans gave in to her.

“All right,” he said. “Have it your own way. And to-morrow or next day look to see him kill you and me.”

She shook her head and held out her hand for the shot-gun. He started to hand it to her, then hesitated.

“Better let me shoot him,” he pleaded.

Again she shook her head, and again he started to pass her the gun, when the door opened, and an Indian, without knocking, came in. A blast of wind and flurry of snow came in with him. They turned and faced him, Hans still holding the shot-gun. The intruder took in the scene without a quiver. His eyes embraced the dead and wounded in a sweeping glance. No surprise showed in his face, not even curiosity. Harkey lay at his feet, but he took no notice of him. So far as he was concerned, Harkey’s body did not exist.

“Much wind,” the Indian remarked by way of salutation. “All well? Very well?”

Hans, still grasping the gun, felt sure that the Indian attributed to him the mangled corpses. He glanced appealingly at his wife.

“Good morning, Negook,” she said, her voice betraying her effort. “No, not very well. Much trouble.”

“Good-by, I go now, much hurry,” the Indian said, and without semblance of haste, with great deliberation stepping clear of a red pool on the floor, he opened the door and went out.

The man and woman looked at each other.

“He thinks we did it,” Hans gasped, “that I did it.”

Edith was silent for a space. Then she said, briefly, in a businesslike way:

“Never mind what he thinks. That will come after. At present we have two graves to dig. But first of all, we’ve got to tie up Dennin so he can’t escape.”

Hans refused to touch Dennin, but Edith lashed him securely, hand and foot. Then she and Hans went out into the snow. The ground was frozen. It was impervious to a blow of the pick. They first gathered wood, then scraped the snow away and on the frozen surface built a fire. When the fire had burned for an hour, several inches of dirt had thawed. This they shovelled out, and then built a fresh fire. Their descent into the earth progressed at the rate of two or three inches an hour.

It was hard and bitter work. The flurrying snow did not permit the fire to burn any too well, while the wind cut through their clothes and chilled their bodies. They held but little conversation. The wind interfered with speech. Beyond wondering at what could have been Dennin’s motive, they remained silent, oppressed by the horror of the tragedy. At one o’clock, looking toward the cabin, Hans announced that he was hungry.

“No, not now, Hans,” Edith answered. “I couldn’t go back alone into that cabin the way it is, and cook a meal.”

Subscribe now

At two o’clock Hans volunteered to go with her; but she held him to his work, and four o’clock found the two graves completed. They were shallow, not more than two feet deep, but they would serve the purpose. Night had fallen. Hans got the sled, and the two dead men were dragged through the darkness and storm to their frozen sepulchre. The funeral procession was anything but a pageant. The sled sank deep into the drifted snow and pulled hard. The man and the woman had eaten nothing since the previous day, and were weak from hunger and exhaustion. They had not the strength to resist the wind, and at times its buffets hurled them off their feet. On several occasions the sled was overturned, and they were compelled to reload it with its sombre freight. The last hundred feet to the graves was up a steep slope, and this they took on all fours, like sled-dogs, making legs of their arms and thrusting their hands into the snow. Even so, they were twice dragged backward by the weight of the sled, and slid and fell down the hill, the living and the dead, the haul-ropes and the sled, in ghastly entanglement.

“To-morrow I will put up head-boards with their names,” Hans said, when the graves were filled in.

Edith was sobbing. A few broken sentences had been all she was capable of in the way of a funeral service, and now her husband was compelled to half-carry her back to the cabin.

Dennin was conscious. He had rolled over and over on the floor in vain efforts to free himself. He watched Hans and Edith with glittering eyes, but made no attempt to speak. Hans still refused to touch the murderer, and sullenly watched Edith drag him across the floor to the men’s bunk-room. But try as she would, she could not lift him from the floor into his bunk.

“Better let me shoot him, and we’ll have no more trouble,” Hans said in final appeal.

Edith shook her head and bent again to her task. To her surprise the body rose easily, and she knew Hans had relented and was helping her. Then came the cleansing of the kitchen. But the floor still shrieked the tragedy, until Hans planed the surface of the stained wood away and with the shavings made a fire in the stove.

The days came and went. There was much of darkness and silence, broken only by the storms and the thunder on the beach of the freezing surf. Hans was obedient to Edith’s slightest order. All his splendid initiative had vanished. She had elected to deal with Dennin in her way, and so he left the whole matter in her hands.

The murderer was a constant menace. At all times there was the chance that he might free himself from his bonds, and they were compelled to guard him day and night. The man or the woman sat always beside him, holding the loaded shot-gun. At first, Edith tried eight-hour watches, but the continuous strain was too great, and afterwards she and Hans relieved each other every four hours. As they had to sleep, and as the watches extended through the night, their whole waking time was expended in guarding Dennin. They had barely time left over for the preparation of meals and the getting of firewood.

Since Negook’s inopportune visit, the Indians had avoided the cabin. Edith sent Hans to their cabins to get them to take Dennin down the coast in a canoe to the nearest white settlement or trading post, but the errand was fruitless. Then Edith went herself and interviewed Negook. He was head man of the little village, keenly aware of his responsibility, and he elucidated his policy thoroughly in few words.

“It is white man’s trouble,” he said, “not Siwash trouble. My people help you, then will it be Siwash trouble too. When white man’s trouble and Siwash trouble come together and make a trouble, it is a great trouble, beyond understanding and without end. Trouble no good. My people do no wrong. What for they help you and have trouble?”

So Edith Nelson went back to the terrible cabin with its endless alternating four-hour watches. Sometimes, when it was her turn and she sat by the prisoner, the loaded shot-gun in her lap, her eyes would close and she would doze. Always she aroused with a start, snatching up the gun and swiftly looking at him. These were distinct nervous shocks, and their effect was not good on her. Such was her fear of the man, that even though she were wide awake, if he moved under the bedclothes she could not repress the start and the quick reach for the gun.

She was preparing herself for a nervous break-down, and she knew it. First came a fluttering of the eyeballs, so that she was compelled to close her eyes for relief. A little later the eyelids were afflicted by a nervous twitching that she could not control. To add to the strain, she could not forget the tragedy. She remained as close to the horror as on the first morning when the unexpected stalked into the cabin and took possession. In her daily ministrations upon the prisoner she was forced to grit her teeth and steel herself, body and spirit.

Hans was affected differently. He became obsessed by the idea that it was his duty to kill Dennin; and whenever he waited upon the bound man or watched by him, Edith was troubled by the fear that Hans would add another red entry to the cabin’s record. Always he cursed Dennin savagely and handled him roughly. Hans tried to conceal his homicidal mania, and he would say to his wife: “By and by you will want me to kill him, and then I will not kill him. It would make me sick.” But more than once, stealing into the room, when it was her watch off, she would catch the two men glaring ferociously at each other, wild animals the pair of them, in Hans’s face the lust to kill, in Dennin’s the fierceness and savagery of the cornered rat. “Hans!” she would cry, “wake up!” and he would come to a recollection of himself, startled and shamefaced and unrepentant.

So Hans became another factor in the problem the unexpected had given Edith Nelson to solve. At first it had been merely a question of right conduct in dealing with Dennin, and right conduct, as she conceived it, lay in keeping him a prisoner until he could be turned over for trial before a proper tribunal. But now entered Hans, and she saw that his sanity and his salvation were involved. Nor was she long in discovering that her own strength and endurance had become part of the problem. She was breaking down under the strain. Her left arm had developed involuntary jerkings and twitchings. She spilled her food from her spoon, and could place no reliance in her afflicted arm. She judged it to be a form of St. Vitus’s dance, and she feared the extent to which its ravages might go. What if she broke down? And the vision she had of the possible future, when the cabin might contain only Dennin and Hans, was an added horror.

After the third day, Dennin had begun to talk. His first question had been, “What are you going to do with me?” And this question he repeated daily and many times a day. And always Edith replied that he would assuredly be dealt with according to law. In turn, she put a daily question to him,—“Why did you do it?” To this he never replied. Also, he received the question with out-bursts of anger, raging and straining at the rawhide that bound him and threatening her with what he would do when he got loose, which he said he was sure to do sooner or later. At such times she cocked both triggers of the gun, prepared to meet him with leaden death if he should burst loose, herself trembling and palpitating and dizzy from the tension and shock.

But in time Dennin grew more tractable. It seemed to her that he was growing weary of his unchanging recumbent position. He began to beg and plead to be released. He made wild promises. He would do them no harm. He would himself go down the coast and give himself up to the officers of the law. He would give them his share of the gold. He would go away into the heart of the wilderness, and never again appear in civilization. He would take his own life if she would only free him. His pleadings usually culminated in involuntary raving, until it seemed to her that he was passing into a fit; but always she shook her head and denied him the freedom for which he worked himself into a passion.

But the weeks went by, and he continued to grow more tractable. And through it all the weariness was asserting itself more and more. “I am so tired, so tired,” he would murmur, rolling his head back and forth on the pillow like a peevish child. At a little later period he began to make impassioned pleas for death, to beg her to kill him, to beg Hans to put him our of his misery so that he might at least rest comfortably.

The situation was fast becoming impossible. Edith’s nervousness was increasing, and she knew her break-down might come any time. She could not even get her proper rest, for she was haunted by the fear that Hans would yield to his mania and kill Dennin while she slept. Though January had already come, months would have to elapse before any trading schooner was even likely to put into the bay. Also, they had not expected to winter in the cabin, and the food was running low; nor could Hans add to the supply by hunting. They were chained to the cabin by the necessity of guarding their prisoner.

Something must be done, and she knew it. She forced herself to go back into a reconsideration of the problem. She could not shake off the legacy of her race, the law that was of her blood and that had been trained into her. She knew that whatever she did she must do according to the law, and in the long hours of watching, the shot-gun on her knees, the murderer restless beside her and the storms thundering without, she made original sociological researches and worked out for herself the evolution of the law. It came to her that the law was nothing more than the judgment and the will of any group of people. It mattered not how large was the group of people. There were little groups, she reasoned, like Switzerland, and there were big groups like the United States. Also, she reasoned, it did not matter how small was the group of people. There might be only ten thousand people in a country, yet their collective judgment and will would be the law of that country. Why, then, could not one thousand people constitute such a group? she asked herself. And if one thousand, why not one hundred? Why not fifty? Why not five? Why not—two?

She was frightened at her own conclusion, and she talked it over with Hans. At first he could not comprehend, and then, when he did, he added convincing evidence. He spoke of miners’ meetings, where all the men of a locality came together and made the law and executed the law. There might be only ten or fifteen men altogether, he said, but the will of the majority became the law for the whole ten or fifteen, and whoever violated that will was punished.

Edith saw her way clear at last. Dennin must hang. Hans agreed with her. Between them they constituted the majority of this particular group. It was the group-will that Dennin should be hanged. In the execution of this will Edith strove earnestly to observe the customary forms, but the group was so small that Hans and she had to serve as witnesses, as jury, and as judges—also as executioners. She formally charged Michael Dennin with the murder of Dutchy and Harkey, and the prisoner lay in his bunk and listened to the testimony, first of Hans, and then of Edith. He refused to plead guilty or not guilty, and remained silent when she asked him if he had anything to say in his own defence. She and Hans, without leaving their seats, brought in the jury’s verdict of guilty. Then, as judge, she imposed the sentence. Her voice shook, her eyelids twitched, her left arm jerked, but she carried it out.

“Michael Dennin, in three days’ time you are to be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”

Such was the sentence. The man breathed an unconscious sigh of relief, then laughed defiantly, and said, “Thin I’m thinkin’ the damn bunk won’t be achin’ me back anny more, an’ that’s a consolation.”

With the passing of the sentence a feeling of relief seemed to communicate itself to all of them. Especially was it noticeable in Dennin. All sullenness and defiance disappeared, and he talked sociably with his captors, and even with flashes of his old-time wit. Also, he found great satisfaction in Edith’s reading to him from the Bible. She read from the New Testament, and he took keen interest in the prodigal son and the thief on the cross.

On the day preceding that set for the execution, when Edith asked her usual question, “Why did you do it?” Dennin answered, “’Tis very simple. I was thinkin’—”

But she hushed him abruptly, asked him to wait, and hurried to Hans’s bedside. It was his watch off, and he came out of his sleep, rubbing his eyes and grumbling.

“Go,” she told him, “and bring up Negook and one other Indian. Michael’s going to confess. Make them come. Take the rifle along and bring them up at the point of it if you have to.”

Half an hour later Negook and his uncle, Hadikwan, were ushered into the death chamber. They came unwillingly, Hans with his rifle herding them along.

“Negook,” Edith said, “there is to be no trouble for you and your people. Only is it for you to sit and do nothing but listen and understand.”

Thus did Michael Dennin, under sentence of death, make public confession of his crime. As he talked, Edith wrote his story down, while the Indians listened, and Hans guarded the door for fear the witnesses might bolt.

He had not been home to the old country for fifteen years, Dennin explained, and it had always been his intention to return with plenty of money and make his old mother comfortable for the rest of her days.

“An’ how was I to be doin’ it on sixteen hundred?” he demanded. “What I was after wantin’ was all the goold, the whole eight thousan’. Thin I cud go back in style. What ud be aisier, thinks I to myself, than to kill all iv yez, report it at Skaguay for an Indian-killin’, an’ thin pull out for Ireland? An’ so I started in to kill all iv yez, but, as Harkey was fond of sayin’, I cut out too large a chunk an’ fell down on the swallowin’ iv it. An’ that’s me confession. I did me duty to the devil, an’ now, God willin’, I’ll do me duty to God.”

“Negook and Hadikwan, you have heard the white man’s words,” Edith said to the Indians. “His words are here on this paper, and it is for you to make a sign, thus, on the paper, so that white men to come after will know that you have heard.”

The two Siwashes put crosses opposite their signatures, received a summons to appear on the morrow with all their tribe for a further witnessing of things, and were allowed to go.

Dennin’s hands were released long enough for him to sign the document. Then a silence fell in the room. Hans was restless, and Edith felt uncomfortable. Dennin lay on his back, staring straight up at the moss-chinked roof.

“An’ now I’ll do me duty to God,” he murmured. He turned his head toward Edith. “Read to me,” he said, “from the book;” then added, with a glint of playfulness, “Mayhap ’twill help me to forget the bunk.”

The day of the execution broke clear and cold. The thermometer was down to twenty-five below zero, and a chill wind was blowing which drove the frost through clothes and flesh to the bones. For the first time in many weeks Dennin stood upon his feet. His muscles had remained inactive so long, and he was so out of practice in maintaining an erect position, that he could scarcely stand.

He reeled back and forth, staggered, and clutched hold of Edith with his bound hands for support.

“Sure, an’ it’s dizzy I am,” he laughed weakly.

A moment later he said, “An’ it’s glad I am that it’s over with. That damn bunk would iv been the death iv me, I know.”

When Edith put his fur cap on his head and proceeded to pull the flaps down over his ears, he laughed and said:

“What are you doin’ that for?”

“It’s freezing cold outside,” she answered.

“An’ in tin minutes’ time what’ll matter a frozen ear or so to poor Michael Dennin?” he asked.

She had nerved herself for the last culminating ordeal, and his remark was like a blow to her self-possession. So far, everything had seemed phantom-like, as in a dream, but the brutal truth of what he had said shocked her eyes wide open to the reality of what was taking place. Nor was her distress unnoticed by the Irishman.

“I’m sorry to be troublin’ you with me foolish spache,” he said regretfully. “I mint nothin’ by it. ’Tis a great day for Michael Dennin, an’ he’s as gay as a lark.”

He broke out in a merry whistle, which quickly became lugubrious and ceased.

“I’m wishin’ there was a priest,” he said wistfully; then added swiftly, “But Michael Dennin’s too old a campaigner to miss the luxuries when he hits the trail.”

He was so very weak and unused to walking that when the door opened and he passed outside, the wind nearly carried him off his feet. Edith and Hans walked on either side of him and supported him, the while he cracked jokes and tried to keep them cheerful, breaking off, once, long enough to arrange the forwarding of his share of the gold to his mother in Ireland.

Leave a comment

They climbed a slight hill and came out into an open space among the trees. Here, circled solemnly about a barrel that stood on end in the snow, were Negook and Hadikwan, and all the Siwashes down to the babies and the dogs, come to see the way of the white man’s law. Near by was an open grave which Hans had burned into the frozen earth.

Dennin cast a practical eye over the preparations, noting the grave, the barrel, the thickness of the rope, and the diameter of the limb over which the rope was passed.

“Sure, an’ I couldn’t iv done better meself, Hans, if it’d been for you.”

He laughed loudly at his own sally, but Hans’s face was frozen into a sullen ghastliness that nothing less than the trump of doom could have broken. Also, Hans was feeling very sick. He had not realized the enormousness of the task of putting a fellow-man out of the world. Edith, on the other hand, had realized; but the realization did not make the task any easier. She was filled with doubt as to whether she could hold herself together long enough to finish it. She felt incessant impulses to scream, to shriek, to collapse into the snow, to put her hands over her eyes and turn and run blindly away, into the forest, anywhere, away. It was only by a supreme effort of soul that she was able to keep upright and go on and do what she had to do. And in the midst of it all she was grateful to Dennin for the way he helped her.

“Lind me a hand,” he said to Hans, with whose assistance he managed to mount the barrel.

He bent over so that Edith could adjust the rope about his neck. Then he stood upright while Hans drew the rope taut across the overhead branch.

“Michael Dennin, have you anything to say?” Edith asked in a clear voice that shook in spite of her.

Dennin shuffled his feet on the barrel, looked down bashfully like a man making his maiden speech, and cleared his throat.

“I’m glad it’s over with,” he said. “You’ve treated me like a Christian, an’ I’m thankin’ you hearty for your kindness.”

“Then may God receive you, a repentant sinner,” she said.

“Ay,” he answered, his deep voice as a response to her thin one, “may God receive me, a repentant sinner.”

“Good-by, Michael,” she cried, and her voice sounded desperate.

She threw her weight against the barrel, but it did not overturn.

“Hans! Quick! Help me!” she cried faintly.

She could feel her last strength going, and the barrel resisted her. Hans hurried to her, and the barrel went out from under Michael Dennin.

She turned her back, thrusting her fingers into her ears. Then she began to laugh, harshly, sharply, metallically; and Hans was shocked as he had not been shocked through the whole tragedy. Edith Nelson’s break-down had come. Even in her hysteria she knew it, and she was glad that she had been able to hold up under the strain until everything had been accomplished. She reeled toward Hans.

“Take me to the cabin, Hans,” she managed to articulate.

“And let me rest,” she added. “Just let me rest, and rest, and rest.”

With Hans’s arm around her, supporting her weight and directing her helpless steps, she went off across the snow. But the Indians remained solemnly to watch the working of the white man’s law that compelled a man to dance upon the air.

Share

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 dreamlike—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.”

Leave a comment

“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 catch-words—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.”

“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 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 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 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 Vesuvius 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. 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 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?”

“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 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 Marina Piccola 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 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 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 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 clamorous. I saw through the steamy window huge electric lights glaring down from tall masts upon a fog, saw rows of stationary empty carriages passing by; and then a signal-box, hoisting its constellation of green and red into the murky London twilight marched after them. I looked again at his drawn features.

“He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment—no fear, no pain—but just amazement, that I felt it pierce me, felt the sword drive home into my body. It didn’t hurt, you know. It didn’t hurt at all.”

The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of men passed to and fro without.

“Euston!” cried a voice.

“Do you mean—?”

“There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face of the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of existence—”

“Euston!” clamoured the voices outside; “Euston!”

The carriage door opened, admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truckload of lighted lamps blazed along the platform.

“A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out all things.”

“Any luggage, sir?” said the porter.

“And that was the end?” I asked.

He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered “No.”

“You mean?”

“I couldn’t get to her. She was there on the other side of the Temple— And then—”

“Yes,” I insisted. “Yes?”

“Nightmares,” he cried; “nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that fought and tore.”

About “ A Dream of Armageddon”

“A Dream of Armageddon” endures as a profound work of early 20th-century science fiction, showcasing H.G. Wells’ genius for weaving personal tragedy into sweeping speculative visions. More than a simple tale of apocalyptic forewarning, A Dream of Armageddon is a piercing study of consecutive dreaming and the terrifying power of vivid dreams to command a soul.

In the conflict between a world’s fate and a single, consuming apocalyptic romance, H.G. Wells masterfully asks: what is the true price of abandoning destiny for love? This haunting story lingers long after the final line, a timeless question etched in the shadow of approaching war.

About H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells (1866–1946) stands as one of the founding architects of modern science fiction and a towering figure in early 20th-century literature. With seminal novels like The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells didn’t just predict technological marvels—he used them to explore urgent social, political, and ethical dilemmas of his time and our future.

A visionary thinker, historian, and social commentator, H.G. Wells infused his narratives, including haunting short stories like “A Dream of Armageddon,” with a potent blend of scientific curiosity and profound human concern. His legacy is defined by this unique ability to frame timeless questions about progress, responsibility, and the human condition within the gripping contours of speculative adventure.

I set my imagination free
behind the mud-plastered hedges,

toward gardens
scented with bergamot,
where the song of the breeze,
like a plectrum,
is hung upon the strings of your hair.

Toward a branch
seated in contemplation of your eyelashes’ shadow,
and the air of longing
that from the chest of your gaze
strikes my heart with a clenched fist.

You speak of feelings,
But you can’t feel what I feel,
I can’t feel the way you do,
You want me to empathize and sympathize,
That I expect the same from you, yet you never realize,
Our connection we strive to synchronize,
But we are never in-sync,
The more you doubt the less you think,
I wish you would focus and dismiss the ‘hocus pocus’,
Just focus on us

Zack Steel

MANIFESTO

And suddenly… I write.

There, time catches me in its embrace,

stories taste like refuge, and I dance, sing,

and weep without fear of being seen,

without fear of being heard.

I write so that the passage of time finds me, at last, thinking;

to evict the voices that have nested in my head and transmute the din into ink.

So that the ghosts may abandon me

while I, among verses, reclaim myself.

I write not to yield before the blind abyss

nor to inhabit the muteness of shipwrecks.

To not lose my way,

to ignite upon paper those fires

that the world insists on extinguishing.

I write to know that I am alive

—sometimes halfway, but always ALIVE—.

I write because it became a habit,

because words, frantic and wild,

strike the walls of my skull to be seen.

I write to be. I write, simply, to feel that I can fly.

And suddenly… I write and the wound becomes a bridge,

the noise becomes music,

and everything becomes soul.

Everything becomes calm.

I write.

I write.

I write.

(So that the spell may take effect).

That sound,
that hypnosis, that liberty,
simultaneous, stabilized, sacred.
Somewhere in my head,
fingernails spur into hooves,
from a sprint to a canter,
running like the beast
that bestows their borrowed breath.

These sounds,
of Death’s encroaching promise,
of Life’s entangled loom,
of Love’s predestined losing,
and Losing’s fated song.
It’s all those things
that smother sensibility,
under stamping sorrow’s stroll.

This sound.
Each click a brick.
Each clack a plaque.
This builder,
breaker,
bonder,
blunder.
This world-warping wrangler.

Those sounds,
early morning echoes,
draped in late night garb.
Stars spark sounds overheard,
or perhaps those are rodents
who race around the hollows;
those mangy ancestors scuttering
above the antique plaster ceiling.

It’s surely the lonelinesses.
Those willowing lonlinesses.
Those lonely,
wallowing
lonelinesses.

The Breeze of Waves Reduce Sorrow

Hear the waves
Feel the waves
See the waves
Touch the waves
Imagine the waves
Forget all sorrows
And just breeze aside.

Almiraz Abedin

Bounce Back to Rebuild From Failure For All Losses

A betrayal of failure
The setback to manage
Heartfelt rebuild
Is a bounce back
Of road to recovery
Here on after
For all trouble losses.

Almiraz Abedin

You…
With golden hair, like fields of wheat,
Bathed in the glow of a radiant summer sun.

You…
With golden hair, like fields of wheat,
Bathed in the glow of a radiant summer sun.

With golden hair, like fields of wheat,
Bathed in the glow of a radiant summer sun.
With deep blue eyes, like the vast ocean,
Contrasting with mine, dark as the serene night.

To you,
I love you with strength and intensity,
Like the rain that fervently kisses
The southern earth, in my beloved Chile,
Where the soul merges with the sea
And every heart embraces vibrant stories.

To you,
I love you under the cloudy sky,
While the playful wind surrounds us,
And in the whisper of the waves along the coast,
I find you, the spell that guards the ocean and its odyssey.

To you,
I see you in the still dreamy dawn,
Beneath the full moon and burning stars,
In the northern desert, where dreams
Bloom like vibrant flowers in the still hot earth.

I…
I love the melancholy in the song of the birds
And the joyful echoes of mischievous children,
Hidden, seeking forgotten dreams
Under the golden veil of the afternoon’s embrace and its kisses.

I,
Am amazed by your essence, bright and pure,
With your fears and sweet longings.
I imagine you in the cottages of Chiloé,
Where the wind sways you, and your soul takes flight.

I,
See you sailing a thousand seas, challenging storms,
At the world’s ends,
Yet you dwell here, among gentle hills,
In the embrace of nights that feel eternal
And the turquoise reflection of divine waters.
In enchanted forests with hidden magic,
Where the trees whisper ancient secrets,
You are here, in every distant corner,
An eternal heartbeat that lives in my chest.

I want…
You and me
To become one heart,
A laughter that envelops us,
You and me, in the dawn and the dusk
Of the same square.

You and me
Will become an intertwined story,
Woven with the thread of existence,
Where every heartbeat holds its own essence.
You and me
Will become more than languages or countries,
We will be more than Chile or Canada,
You and me will become stories,
Dreams of love in their delight

She was born at the beginning of seconds,
in the white hills, where borderless minds dance,
born of time, from dreams that whisper,
like murmurs of stars in the silent night.

She was born with the flight of birds,
so free, like a sigh that escapes,
without fears, distant as the echo in the mountain,
where the breeze caresses her face,
and the horizon opens like an infinite canvas.

She was born in the heights,
in the treetops that murmur secrets,
where sunlight filters in golden glimmers,
and the wind plays among the leaves like a mischievous child,
there, where dreams awaken in sweet melodies,
and majestic mountains greet her with reverence.

She was born in the mountains,
where that farmer converses with his dogs,
and butterflies, with wings of crystal,
dance in a waltz of vivid colors,
where a red petal gave life to a rose,
each thorn a memory, each scent a sigh.

She was born there, embraced by flames,
among thousands of dancing crows that whirl,
weaving shadows and light in an eternal ballet,
as if the universe conspired in her honor,
and the whole earth celebrated her arrival.

She is the echo of an ancestral song,
the essence of a fire that never goes out,
a whisper in the wind,
a heartbeat in the soul of the world,
a story that blooms in every corner,
where life and love are but a verse,
and time, a river that never stops flowing

Do you have influence?
Can you achieve confluence?
Can you identify absence? Are you able to fill in the space?
Perhaps you will leave no trace of having been in this place,
No lasting mark upon the Earth, to demonstrate your worth,
What will testify to your existence?
Will it be more than your efforts of persistence?
You were willing to go the distance, Regardless of the resistance,
Stood strong in every instance,
Do people get your drift, or through your words do people have to sift?
Always make your meaning clear, To ensure that others won’t veer,
Lead on a clear path, Ensure to avoid wrath,
Strict focus, no ‘hocus pocus’,
Exactness, No lax-ness,
Firm and direct, Certain to never neglect,
To have sway and get your way,
Use more than words to be heard,
Your moves and grooves,
Your disposition, Not as an imposition,
Your every expression makes a certain impression!

I’m in control of my own journey
A strength so clear to be underrated
Truth lies deep inside of my well being
The kind of obstacles at a place
I never thought I’d reach
To the top of the mountain peak
Still standing tall never broken
After being rejected
Amount of punches I’ve taken
The knockouts given down to the ground
In a state that would teach me
The ultimate lesson
By unfortunate tragedy
That things happened
Pieces by pieces thrown away
As I look at myself still growing
Enjoying what I’ve accomplished
Before my defeat to be hopeful
Always learning new on everyday basis
Realizing to open my eyes
So I can see the value of my life
Fulfilling my beauty worth of love & hope
That will forever be inside my heart
By sharing the inspiration with many
Along for those that need
The help of whose weary burdens are heavy
To overcome the painful troubles they face
Its the power I fought
With the everlasting face of resiliency

March 2nd, 2023

I’m almost always late, I always arrive late. Mentally or physically, I barely make it on time, and I guess that is what I did and I’m still doing wrong in my life, I believe that it is the only thing I should be blamed for.

If holding onto the moments of utmost joy is okay, then it is okay to remember the most embarrassing days too. Often, I get lost in regrets, often I sit in the present to analyse and criticise what I have done in the past. I found myself lost in my yesterday. That is why I arrived very late for my today.

I have known for years that writing soothes me, but I never write constantly. For years I could sense my path, but I was too tired to walk on it and ended up sitting in the passenger seat in the car of my life. Not that I do not love my life, but I wish to change a lot. Almost everything in my life now is telling me that my twenties are for trial and error like for everyone else and life starts at thirty but stupid me is still not believing that, I keep on saying that this thought is only good if I want to console my messy self, Today I’m so embarrassed by the things in which I’m failing at and I’m so obsessed with the things i did well that I’m slowly building my personality and life around it, it is pathetic that I’m failing to see that in this race of perfect and sorted life, I’m kind of not living any. I’m just citising my past to create a perfect future without putting any emphasis on today’s learning.

It is so sad that I too am in the race, and you know what’s sadder - that there is no competition, there is no finishing line and no blinging trophy but only the memories of my twenties where I was young but not too much, I was surely far from old but almost an adult-adult! My face had no wrinkles, and I could digest an enormous amount of mixed alcohol. In my teenage years I thought I’d be different when in my twenties and now I think the same about my thirties, but the question is why is it so important to change in a “right” way that we forget we are where we once wanted to be and that is the biggest accomplishment?! I wonder when I will learn to accept that change is only constant and sometimes that certain constant is the other name of that thing, we want the most- peace of mind which we have been looking for everywhere!

It’s right here alongside all the worries of this age and I have been neglecting what’s important, focusing on what’s not. How foolish of me and you!

Never in my life have I met someone like him- so different from everyone and a whole new person with me. I have heard that someone only becomes a child in front of someone they feel safe with, only at their sacred place where no one will ever ask them to grow up and kill the happiest, most smiling parts of themselves. I have met this man and in front of me he sometimes becomes a boy.

Oh how much I love to see him become a child who laughs easy, who still likes Legos and turns around to see the fire truck passing by, how much I love him when he chooses going to the water park instead of anything else, how much I love to see him eat his chocolate cornflakes for Sunday breakfast after a long hard week of work!

Today, I read somewhere that only the woman living with her man, whom she loves can know him fully, everyone else are just misled by the decoy, He is just not what he shows everyone and I feel so grateful and overwhelmed to know that I’m someone who brings the child out in him, not so long ago he thanked me for sponsoring his adult childhood! That moment when he uttered those words left, that moment left but the feeling stayed, it is as stuck in my heart as the urge to see his eyes sparkle again and again!

I cherish every playful glance and every spontaneous laugh we share. His joy is my joy, and seeing him embrace life with such innocence fills my heart with boundless love. Every day with him is an adventure, a beautiful journey of rediscovering the simple, pure pleasures of life. I thank him for being the man who reminds me how wonderful it is to be a child at heart. I think all men deserve to be the boy they are at heart, I think all my dear men deserve a safe space !