The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. UNIVERSITY OF ‘ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN MAY 2 3 | CO MAY 11 13% L161— O-1096 THE DREAM § Mr. Wells has also written the following novels: THE WHEELS OF CHANCE LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM KIPPS TONO-BUNGAY ANN VERONICA MR. POLLY THE NEW MACHIAVELLI MARRIAGE THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN BEALBY THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH THE SOUL OF A BISHOP JOAN AND PETER THE UNDYING FIRE THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART © The following fantastic and imaginative romances: THE TIME MACHINE THE WONDERFUL VISIT THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU THE INVISIBLE MAN THE WAR OF THE WORLDS THE SLEEPER AWAKES THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON THE SEA LADY THE FOOD OF THE GODS IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET THE WAR IN THE AIR THE WORLD SET FREE MEN LIKE GODS 4 Numerous short stories collected under the following titles: THE STOLEN BACILLUS THE PLATTNER STORY TALES OF SPACE AND TIME TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM 4] The same short stories will also be found in three volumes: TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED TALES OF LIFE AND ADVENTURE TALES OF WONDER 4 A Series of books on social, religious and political questions: ANTICIPATIONS (1900) A MODERN UTOPIA THE FUTURE IN AMERICA NEW WORLDS FOR OLD FIRST AND LAST THINGS GOD THE INVISIBLE KING THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS THE SALVAGING OF CIVILISATION WASHINGTON AND THE HOPE OF PEACE A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER q And two little books about children’s play, called: FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS THE DREAM A NOVEL BY H. G. WELLS RNew Bork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1924 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1923 and 1924, By H. G. WELLS. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1924. Printed in the United States of America by THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. CONTENTS CHAPTER THE FIRST PAGE PEG RUURSION ile i Cer ee ean eeg es ete Oh Nah 3 CHAPTER THE SECOND THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAM. ....... 15 CHAPTER THE THIRD MISFORTUNES COME UPON THE SMITH FAMILY . 60 CHAPTER THE FOURTH THE WIDOW SMITH MovES TO LONDON .... 97% CHAPTER THE FIFTH HANNY DISCOVERS HERSELF 00°) 2 . 159 CHAPTER THE SIXTH DVERUEEAGE GIN | WAR s RIM coo) 2) ay 229 CHAPTER THE SEVENTH ANU GLIA TH 6 Mr rey ae einer sar hoe rede. pata CHAPTER THE EIGHTH Bm DIO UE eects eictes ote tina ore) a ie ot ae 312 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign https://archive.org/details/dreamnovelOOwell PART I How Harry Mortimer Smith Was Made a al — ti ee 7 ‘ke es Py THE DREAM CHAPTER THE FIRST THE EXCURSION Seal Sarnac had worked almost continuously for the better part of a year upon some very subtle chemical reactions of the nervous cells of the sympathetic system. His first enquiries had led to the opening out of fresh and surprising possibilities, and these again had lured him on to still broader and more fascinating prospects. He worked perhaps. too closely; he found his hope and curiosity unimpaired, but there was less delicacy of touch in his manipula- tion, and he was thinking less quickly and accu- rately. He needed a holiday. He had come to the end of a chapter in his work and wished to brace himself for a new beginning. Sunray had long hoped to be away with him; she, too, was at a phase in her work when interruption was possible, and so the two went off together to wander among the lakes and mountains. Their companionship was at a very delightful stage. Their close relationship and their friendship was of old standing, so that they were quite at their ease with one another, yet they were not too familiar 3 4 THE DREAM to have lost the keen edge of their interest in each other’s proceedings. Sunray was very much in love with Sarnac and glad, and Sarnac was always happy and pleasantly exalted when Sunray was near him. Sunray was the richer-hearted and cleverer lover. They talked of everything in the world but Sarnac’s work because that had to rest and grow fresh again. Of her own work Sunray talked abundantly. She had been making stories and pictures of happiness and sorrow in the past ages of the world, and she was full of curious speculations about the ways in which the ancestral mind has thought and felt. They played with boats upon the great lake for some days, they sailed and paddled and drew up their canoe among the sweet-scented rushes of the islands and bathed and swam. They went from one guest-house to another upon the water and met many interesting and refreshing people. In one house an old man of ninety-eight was staying: he was amusing his declining years by making statuettes of the greatest beauty and humour; it was wonderful to see the clay take shape in his hands. Moreover, he had a method of cooking the lake fish that was very appetising, and he made a great dish of them so that everyone who was dining in the place could have some. And there was a musician who made Sunray talk about the days gone by, and afterwards he played music with his own hands on a clavier to express the ancient feelings of men. He played one piece that was, he explained, two thousand years old; it was by a man named Chopin, and it was called the Revolutionary Etude. Sunray could not have believed a piano capable of such passionate THE DREAM 5 resentment. After that he played grotesque and angry battle music and crude marching tunes from those half-forgotten times, and then he invented wrathful and passionate music of his own. Sunray sat under a golden lantern and listened to the musician and watched his nimble hands, but Sarnac was more deeply moved. He had not heard very much music in his life, and this player seemed to open shutters upon deep and dark and violent things that had long been closed to mankind. Sar- nac sat, cheek on hand, his elbow on the parapet of the garden wall, looking across the steely blue of the lake at the darkling night sky at the lower end. The sky had been starry, but a monstrous crescent of clouds like a hand that closes was now gathering all the stars into its fist of darkness. Perhaps there would be rain to-morrow. The lanterns hung still, except that ever and again a little shiver of the air set them swaying. Now and then a great white moth would come fluttering out of the night and beat about among the lanterns for a time and pass away. Presently it would return again or another moth like it would come. Sometimes there would be three or four of these transitory phantoms; they seemed to be the only insects abroad that night. A faint ripple below drew his attention to the light of a boat, a round yellow light like a glowing orange, which came gliding close up to the terrace wall out of the blue of the night. There was the sound of a paddle being shipped and a diminishing drip of water, but the people in the boat sat still and listened until the musician had done altogether. 6 THE DREAM Then they came up the steps to the terrace and asked the master of the guest-house for rooms for the night. They had dined at a place farther up the lake. Four people came by this boat. Two were brother and sister, dark handsome people of southern origin, and the others were fair women, one blue-eyed and one with hazel eyes, who were clearly very much attached to the brother and sister. They came and talked about the music and then of a climbing ex- pedition they had promised themselves in the great mountains above the lakes. The brother and sis- ter were named Radiant and Starlight, and their work in life, they explained, was to educate ani- mals; it was a business for which they had an almost instinctive skill. The two fair girls, Willow and Firefly, were electricians. During the last few days Sunray had been looking ever and again at the glittering snowfields and desiring them; there was always a magic call for her in snowy mountains. She joined very eagerly in the mountain talk, and it was presently suggested that she and Sarnac should accompany these new acquaintances up to the peaks they had in mind. But before they went on to the mountains, she and Sarnac wanted to visit some ancient remains that had recently been excavated in a valley that came down to the lake from the east. The four new-comers were interested in what she told them about these ruins, and altered their own plans to go with her and Sarnac to see them. Then afterwards all six would go into the mountains. THE DREAM 7 g 2 These ruins were rather more than two thousand years old. There were the remains of a small old town, a railway station of some importance, and a rail- way tunnel which came right through the moun- tains. The tunnel had collapsed, but the excavators had worked along it and found several wrecked trains in it which had evidently been packed with soldiers and refugees. The remains of these people, much disturbed by rats and other vermin, lay about in the trains and upon the railway tracks. The tun- nel had apparently been blocked by explosives and these trainloads of people entombed. After- wards the town itself and all its inhabitants had been destroyed by poison-gas, but what sort of poison-gas it was the investigators had still to decide. It had had an unusual pickling effect, so that many of the bodies were not so much skeletons as mum- mies; and there were books, papers, papier mAaché objects or the like in a fair state of preservation in many of the houses. Even cheap cotton goods were preserved, though they had lost all their colour. For some time after the great catastrophe this part of the world must have remained practically uninhabited. A landslide had presently blocked the lower valley and banked back the valley waters so as to submerge the town and cover it with a fine silt and seal up the tunnel very completely. Now the barrier had been cut through and the valley drained again, and all these evidences of one of the characteristic disasters of the last war period in 8 THE DREAM man’s history had been brought back to the light once more. The six holiday-makers found the visit to this place a very vivid experience, almost too vivid for their contentment. On Sarnac’s tired mind it made a particularly deep impression. The material col- lected from the town had been arranged in a long museum gallery of steel and glass. There were many almost complete bodies; one invalid old woman, embalmed by the gas, had been replaced in the bed from which the waters had floated her, and there was a shrivelled little baby put back again in its cradle. The sheets and quilts were bleached and browned, but it was quite easy to see what they had once been like. The people had been taken by sur- prise, it seemed, while the midday meal was in preparation; the tables must have been set in many of the houses; and now, after a score of centuries beneath mud and weeds and fishes, the antiquaries had disinterred and reassembled these old machine- made cloths and plated implements upon the tables. There were great stores of such pitiful discoloured litter from the vanished life of the past. The holiday-makers did not go far into the tunnel; the suggestion of things there were too horrible for their mood, and Sarnac stumbled over a rail and cut his hand upon the jagged edge of a broken railway- carriage window. The wound pained him later, and did not heal so quickly as it should have done. It was as if some poison had got into it. It kept him awake in the night. For the rest of the day the talk was all of the ter- rible days of the last wars in the world and the THE DREAM 9 dreadfulness of life in that age. It seemed to Firefly and Starlight that existence must have been almost unendurable, a tissue of hate, terror, want and dis- comfort, from the cradle to the grave. But Radiant argued that people then were perhaps no less happy and no happier than himself; that for everyone in every age there was a normal state, and that any exaltation of hope or sensation above that was hap- piness and any depression below it misery. It did not matter where the normal came. ‘They went to great intensities in both directions,” he said. There was more darkness in their lives and more pain, but not more unhappiness. Sunray was in- clined to agree with him. But Willow objected to Radiant’s psychology. She said that there could be permanently depressed states in an unhealthy body or in a life lived under restraint. There could be generally miserable crea- tures just as there could be generally happy crea- tures. “Of course,’ interjected Sarnac, “given a stand- ard outside themselves.” “But why did they make such wars?” cried Fire- fly. “Why did they do such horrible things to one another? They were people like ourselves.” “No better,” said Radiant, “and no worse. So far as their natural quality went. It is not a hun- dred generations ago.” “Their skulls were as big and well shaped.” “Those poor creatures in the tunnel!” said Sar- nac. “Those poor wretches caught in the tunnel! But everyone in that age must have felt caught in a tunnel.” b] 10 THE DREAM After a time a storm overtook them and inter- rupted their conversation. They were going up over a low pass to a guest-house at the head of the lake, and it was near the crest of the pass that the storm burst. The lightning was tremendous and a pine-tree was struck not a hundred yards away. They cheered the sight. They were all exhilarated by the elemental clatter and uproar; the rain was like a whip on their bare, strong bodies and the wind came in gusts that held them staggering and laughing, breathlessly unable to move forward. They had doubts and difficulties with the path; for a time they lost touch with the blazes upon the trees and rocks. Followed a steady torrent of rain, through which they splashed and stumbled down the foaming rocky pathway to their resting-place. They arrived wet as from a swim and glowing; but Sarnac, who had come behind the others with Sun- ray, was tired and cold. The master of this guest- house drew his shutters and made a great fire for them with pine-knots and pine-cones while he pre- pared a hot meal. After a while they began to talk of the excavated town again and of the shrivelled bodies lying away there under the electric light of the still glass-walled museum, indifferent for evermore to the sunshine and thunderstorms of life without. “Did they ever laugh as we do?” asked Willow. “For sheer happiness of living?” Sarnac said very little. He sat close up to the fire, pitching pine-cones into it and watching them flare and crackle. Presently he got up, confessed himself tired, and went away to his bed. THE DREAM 1] Oe: It rained hard all through the night and until nearly midday, and then the weather cleared. In the afternoon the little party pushed on up the val- ley towards the mountains they designed to climb, but they went at a leisurely pace, giving a day and a half to what was properly only one day’s easy walking. The rain had refreshed everything in the upper valley and called out a great multitude of flowers. The next day was golden and serene. In the early afternoon they came to a plateau and meadows of asphodel, and there they sat down to eat the provisions they had brought with them. They were only two hours’ climb from the moun- tain-house in which they were to pass the night, and there was no need to press on. Sarnac was lazy; he confessed to a desire for sleep; in the night he had been feverish and disturbed by dreams of men entombed in tunnels and killed by poison-gas. The others were amused that anyone should want to sleep in the daylight, but Sunray said she would watch over him. She found a place for him on the sward, and Sarnac laid down beside her and went to sleep with his cheek against her side as suddenly and trustfully as a child goes to sleep. She sat up —as a child’s nurse might do—enjoining silence on the others by gestures. “After this he will be well again,” laughed Radi- ant, and he and Firefly stole off in one direction, while Willow and Starlight went off in another to climb a rocky headland near at hand, from which 12 THE DREAM they thought they might get a very wide and per- haps a very beautiful view of the lakes below. For some time Sarnac lay quite still in his sleep and then he began to twitch and stir. Sunray bent down attentively with her warm face close to his. He was quiet again for a time and then he moved and muttered, but she could not distinguish any words. Then he rolled away from her and threw his arms about and said, “I can’t stand it. I can’t endure it. Nothing can alter it now. You’re un- clean and spoilt.” She took him gently and drew him into a comfortable attitude again, just as a nurse might do. “Dear,” he whispered, and in his sleep reached out for her hand... . When the others came back he had just awak- ened. He was sitting up with a sleepy expression and Sunray was kneeling beside him with her hand on his shoulder. “Wake up!” she said. He looked at her as if he did not know her and then with puzzled eyes at Radiant. “Then there is another life!” he said at last. “Sarnac!” cried Sunray, shaking him. “Don’t you know me?” He passed a hand over his face. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Your name is Sunray. I seem to remem- ber.. Sunray. ... Not Hetty No. Though you are very like Hetty. Queer! And mine— mine is Sarnac. “Of course! I am Sarnac.” He laughed at Wil- low. “But I thought I was Harry Mortimer Smith,” he said. “I did indeed. A moment ago I THE DREAM 13 was Henry Mortimer Smith. . . . Henry Mortimer Smith.” He looked about him. ‘Mountains,’ he said, “sunshine, white narcissus. Of course, we walked up here this very morning. Sunray splashed me at a waterfall.... I remember it perfectly. ... And yet I was in bed—shot. I was in bed.... A dream? ... Then I have had a dream, a whole lifetime, two thousand years ago!” “What do you mean?” said Sunray. “A lifetime—childhood, boyhood, manhood. And death. He killed me. Poor rat!—he killed me!”’ “A dream?” “A dream—but a very vivid dream. The reallest of dreams. If it was a dream. ... I can answer all your questions now, Sunray. I have lived through a whole life in that old world. I know.... “Tt is as though that life was still the real one and this only a dream. ... I wasinabed. Five minutes ago I was in bed. I was dying.... The doctor said, ‘He is going.’ And I heard the rustle of my wife coming across the room. .. .” “Your wife!” cried Sunray. “Yes—my wife—Milly.” Sunray looked at Willow with raised eyebrows and a helpless expression. Sarnac stared at her, dreamily puzzled. ‘Milly,’ he repeated very faintly. “She was by the window.” For some moments no one spoke. Radiant stood with his arm on Firefly’s shoul- der. “Tell us about it, Sarnac. Was it hard to die?” 14 THE DREAM “T seemed to sink down and down into quiet— and then I woke up here.” “Tell us now, while it is still so real to you.” “Have we not planned to reach the mountain- house before nightfall?” said Willow, glancing at the sun. “There is a little guest-house here, within five minutes’ walk of us,” said Firefly. Radiant sat down beside Sarnac. ‘Tell us your dream now. If it fades out presently or if it is uninteresting, we can go on; but if it is entertain- ing, we can hear it out and sleep down here to- night. It is a very pleasant place here, and there is a loveliness about those mauve-coloured crags across the gorge, a faint mistiness in their folds, that I could go on looking at for a week without impatience. Tell us your dream, Sarnac.” He shook his friend. “Wake up, Sarnac!” Sarnac rubbed his eyes. “It is so queer a story. And there will be so much to explain.” He took thought for a while. “Tt will be a long story.” “Naturally, if it is a whole life.” “First let me get some cream and fruit from the guest-house for us all,” said Firefly, “and then let Sarnac tell us his dream. Five minutes, Sarnac, and I will be back here.” “T will come with you,” said Radiant, hurrying after her. This that follows is the story Sarnac told. CHAPTER THE SECOND THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAM § 1 “This dream of mine began,” he said, “as all our lives begin, in fragments, in a number of discon- nected impressions. I remember myself lying on a sofa, a sofa covered with a curious sort of hard, shiny material with a red and black pattern on it, and I was screaming, but I do not know why I screamed. I discovered my father standing in the doorway of the room looking at me. He looked very dreadful; he was partially undressed in trousers and a flannel shirt and his fair hair was an unbrushed shock; he was shaving and his chin was covered with lather. He was angry because I was screaming. I suppose I stopped screaming, but I am not sure. And I remember kneeling upon the same hard red and black sofa beside my mother and looking out of the window—the sofa used to stand with its back to the window-sill—at the rain falling on the road- way outside. The window-sill smelt faintly of paint; soft bad paint that had blistered in the sun. It was a violent storm of rain and the road was an ill-made road of a yellowish sandy clay. It was covered with muddy water and the storming rainfall made a multitude of flashing bubbles, that drove along before the wind and burst and gave place to others. 15 16 THE DREAM ““Look at ’em, dearie,’ said my mother. ‘Like sojers.’ “T think I was still very young when that hap- pened, but I was not so young that I had not often seen soldiers with their helmets and bayonets march- ing by.” “That,” said Radiant, “was some time before the Great War, then, and the Social Collapse.” “Some time before,” said Sarnac. He considered. “Twenty-one years before. This house in which I was born was less than two miles from the great military camp of the British at Loweliff in England, and Lowcliff railway station was only a few hundred yards away. ‘Sojers’ were the most conspicuous objects in my world outside my home. They were more brightly coloured than other people. My mother used to wheel me out for air every day in a thing called a perambulator, and whenever there were soldiers to be seen she used to say, ‘Oh! Prirry sojers!’ “ Sojers’ must have been one of my earliest words. I used to point my little wool-encased finger—for they wrapped up children tremendously in those days and I wore even gloves—and I would say: ‘Sosher.’ “Let me try and describe to you what sort of home this was of mine and what manner of people my father and mother were. Such homes and houses and places have long since vanished from the world, not many relics of them have been kept, and though you have probably learnt most of the facts concern- ing them, I doubt if you can fully realise the feel and the reality of the things I found about me. The THE DREAM 17 name of the place was Cherry Gardens; it was about two miles from the sea at Sandbourne, one way lay the town of Cliffstone from which steamboats crossed the sea to France, and the other way lay Lowcliff and its rows and rows of ugly red brick barracks and its great drilling-plain, and behind us inland was a sort of plateau covered with raw new roads of loose pebbles—you cannot imagine such roads!—and vegetable gardens and houses new-built or building, and then a line of hills, not very high but steep and green and bare, the Downs. The Downs made a graceful sky-line that bounded my world to the north as the sapphire line of the sea bounded it to the south, and they were almost the only purely beautiful things in that world. All the rest was touched and made painful by human con- fusion. When I was a very little boy I used to won- der what lay behind those Downs, but I never went up them to see until I was seven or eight years old.” “This was before the days of aeroplanes?” asked Radiant. “They came into the world when I was eleven or twelve. I saw the first that ever crossed the Channel between the mainland of Europe and Eng- land. That was considered a very wonderful thing indeed. (“It was a wonderful thing,” said Sunray.) I went with a lot of other boys, and we edged through a crowd that stood and stared at the quaint old machine; it was like a big canvas grasshopper with outspread wings; in a field—somewhere beyond Cliffstone. It was being guarded, and the people were kept away from it by stakes and a string. “T find it hard to describe to you what sort of 18 THE DREAM places Cherry Gardens and Cliffstone were like— even though we have just visited the ruins of Do- modossola. Domodossola was a sprawling, aimless town enough, but these sprawled far more and looked with a far emptier aimlessness into the face of God. You see in the thirty or forty years before my birth there had been a period of comparative prosperity and productivity in human affairs. It was not of course in those days the result of any statesmanship or forethought; it just happened,— as now and then in the course of a rain-torrent there comes a pool of level water between the rapids. But the money and credit system was working fairly well; there was much trade and intercourse, no extensive pestilences, exceptionally helpful seasons, and few very widespread wars. As a result of this conspiracy of favourable conditions there was a per- ceptible rise in the standards of life of the common people, but for the most part it was discounted by a huge increase of population. As our school books say, ‘In those days Man was his own Locust.’ Later in my life I was to hear furtive whispers of a for- bidden topic called Birth Control, but in the days of my childhood the whole population of the world, with very few exceptions, was in a state of complete and carefully protected ignorance about the ele- mentary facts of human life and happiness. The surroundings of my childhood were dominated by an unforeseen and uncontrollable proliferation. Cheap proliferation was my scenery, my drama, my atmos- phere.” “But they had teachers and priests and doctors and rulers to tell them better,” said Willow. THE DREAM 19 “Not to tell them better,’ said Sarnac. ‘These guides and pilots of life were wonderful people. They abounded, and guided no one. So far from teaching men and women to control births or avoid diseases or work generously together, they rather prevented such teaching. This place called Cherry Gardens had mostly come into existence in the fifty years before my birth. It had grown from a minute hamlet into what we used to call an ‘urban district.’ In that old world in which there was neither freedom nor direction, the land was divided up into patches of all sorts and sizes and owned by people who did what they liked with it, subject to a few vexatious and unhelpful restrictions. And in Cherry Gardens, a sort of men called speculative builders bought pieces of land, often quite unsuitable land, and built houses for the swarming increase of population that had otherwise nowhere to go. There was no plan about this building. One speculative builder built here and another there, and each built as cheaply as possible and sold or let what he had built for as much as possible. Some of the houses they built in rows and some stood detached each with a little patch of private garden—garden they called it, though it was either a muddle or a waste—fenced in to keep people out.” “Why did they keep people out?” “They liked to keep people out. It was a satis- faction for them. ‘They were not secret gardens. People might look over the fence if they chose. And each house had its own kitchen where food was cooked—there was no public eating-place in Cherry Gardens—and each, its separate store of household 20 THE DREAM gear. In most houses there was a man who went out to work and earn a living—they didn’t so much live in those days as earn a living—and came home to eat and sleep, and there was a woman, his wife, who did all the services, food and cleaning and everything, and also she bore children, a lot of un- premeditated children—because she didn’t know any better. She was too busy to look after them well, and many of them died. Most days she cooked a dinner. She cooked it. ... It was cooking!” Sarnac paused—his brows knit. “Cooking! Well, well. That’s over, anyhow,” he said. Radiant laughed cheerfully. “Almost everyone suffered from indigestion. The newspapers were fuil of advertisements of cures,” said Sarnac, still darkly retrospective. “T’ve never thought of that aspect of life in the old world,’ said Sunray. “It was—fundamental,” said Sarnac. “It was a world, in every way, out of health. “Every morning, except on the Sunday, after the man had gone off to his day’s toil and the children had been got up and dressed and those who were old enough sent off to school, the woman of the house tidied up a bit and then came the question of getting in food. For this private cooking of hers. Every day except Sunday a number of men with little pony carts or with barrows they pushed in front of them, bearing meat and fish and vegetables and fruit, all of it exposed to the weather and any dirt that might be blowing about, came bawling along the roads of Cherry Gardens, shouting the sort of food they were selling. My memory goes re THE DREAM 21 back to that red and black sofa by the front window and I am a child once again. There was a particu- larly splendid fish hawker. What a voice he had! I used to try to reproduce his splendid noises in my piping childish cries: ‘Mackroo-E-y’are Macroo! Fine Macroo! Thee a Sheen. Macroo!’ “The housewives would come out from their do- mestic mysteries to buy or haggle and, as the saying went, ‘pass the time of day’ with their neighbours. But everything they wanted was not to be got from the hawkers, and that was where my father came in. He kept a little shop. He was what was called a greengrocer; he sold fruits and vegetables, such poor fruits and vegetables as men had then learnt to grow—and also he sold coals and paraffin (which people burnt in their lamps) and chocolate and ginger-beer and other things that were necessary to the barbaric housekeeping of the time. He also sold cut-flowers and flowers in pots, and seeds and sticks and string and weed-killer for the little gar- dens. His shop stood in a row with a lot of other shops; the row was like a row of the ordinary houses with the lower rooms taken out and replaced by the shop, and he ‘made his living’ and ours by buying his goods as cheaply as he could and getting as much as he could for them. It was a very poor living because there were several other able-bodied men in Cherry Gardens who were also greengrocers, and if he took too much profit then his customers would go away and buy from these competitors and he would get no profit at all. “T and my brother and sisters—for my mother had been unable to avoid having six babies and four 22 THE DREAM of us were alive—lived by and in and round about this shop. In the summer we were chiefly out of doors or in the room above the shop; but in the cold weather it cost too much trouble and money to have a fire in that room—all Cherry Gardens was heated by open coal fires—and we went down into a dark underground kitchen where my mother, poor dear! cooked according to her lights.” “You were troglodytes!” said Willow. “Practically. We always ate in that downstairs room. In the summer we were sunburnt and ruddy, but in the winter, because of this—inhumation, we became white and rather thin. I had an elder brother who was monstrous in my childish memory; he was twelve years older than I; and I had two sisters, Fanny and Prudence. My elder brother Ernest went out to work, and then he went away to London and I saw very little of him until I too went to London. I was the youngest -of the lot; and when I was nine years old, my father, taking courage, turned my mother’s perambulator into a little push-cart for delivering sacks of coals and suchlike goods. “Fanny, my elder sister, was a very pretty girl, with a white face from which her brown hair went back in graceful, natural waves and curls, and she had very dark blue eyes. Prudence was also white but of a duller whiteness, and her eyes were grey, She would tease me and interfere with me, but Fanny was either negligent or gracefully kind to me and I adored her. I do not, strangely enough, re- member my mother’s appearance at all distinctly, though she was, of course, the dominant fact of my THE DREAM 23 childish life. She was too familiar, I suppose, for the sort of attention that leaves a picture on the mind. “T learnt to speak from my family and chiefly from my mother. None of us spoke well; our com- mon idioms were poor and bad, we mispronounced many words, and long words we avoided as some- thing dangerous and pretentious. I had very few toys: a tin railway-engine I remember, some metal soldiers, and an insufficient supply of wooden build- ing-bricks. There was no special place for me to play, and if I laid out my toys on the living-room table, a meal was sure to descend and sweep them away. I remember a great longing to play with the things in the shop, and especially with the bundles of firewood and some fire-kindlers that were most seductively shaped like wheels, but my father dis- couraged such ambitions. He did not like to have me about the shop until I was old enough to help, and the indoor part of most of my days was spent in the room above it or in the underground room below it. After the shop was closed it became a very cold, cavernous, dark place to a little boy’s imagination; there were dreadful shadows in which terrible things might lurk, and even holding fast to my mother’s hand on my way to bed, I was filled with fear to traverse it. It had always a faint, un- pleasant smell, a smell of decaying vegetation vary- ing with the particular fruit or vegetable that was most affected, and a constant element of parafiin. But on Sundays when it was closed all day the shop was different, no longer darkly threatening but very, very still. I would be taken through it on my way 24 THE DREAM to church or Sunday school. (Yes—I will tell you about church and Sunday school in a minute.) When I saw my mother lying dead—she died when I was close upon sixteen—I was instantly reminded of the Sunday shop.... “Such, my dear Sunray, was the home in which I found myself. I seemed to have been there since my beginning. It was the deepest dream I have ever had. I had forgotten even you.” § 2 “And how was this casually begotten infant pre- pared for the business of life?” asked Radiant. “Was he sent away to a Garden?” . “There were no Children’s Gardens such as we know them, in that world,” said Sarnac. “There was a place of assembly called an elementary school. Thither I was taken, twice daily, by my sister Pru- dence, after I was six years old. “And here again I find it hard to convey to you what the reality was like. Our histories tell you of the beginning of general education in that distant time and of the bitter jealousy felt by the old priest- hoods and privileged people for the new sort of teachers, but they give you no real picture of the ill-equipped and understaffed schoolhouses and of the gallant work of the underpaid and ill-trained men and women who did the first rough popular teaching. There was in particular a gaunt dark man with a cough who took the older boys, and a little freckled woman of thirty or so who fought with the lower children, and, I see now, they were holy saints. His name I forget, but the little woman THE DREAM 20 was called Miss Merrick. They had to handle enor- mous classes, and they did most of their teaching by voice and gesture and chalk upon a blackboard. Their equipment was miserable. The only materials of which there was enough to go round were a stock of dirty reading-books, Bibles, hymn-books, and a lot of slabs of slate in frames on which we wrote with slate pencils to economise paper. Drawing materials we had practically none; most of us never learnt to draw. Yes. Lots of sane adults in that old world never learnt to draw even a box. There was nothing to count with in that school and no geometrical models. There were hardly any pictures except a shiny one of Queen Victoria and a sheet of animals, and there were very yellow wall-maps of Europe and Asia twenty years out of date. We learnt the elements of mathematics by recitation. We used to stand in rows, chanting a wonderful chant called our Tables:— “<*Twi-swun two. Twi-stewer four. T'wi-sfree’r six. Twi-sfour’ rate.’ “We used to sing—in unison—religious hymns for the most part. The school had a second-hand piano to guide our howlings. There had been a great fuss in Cliffstone and Cherry Gardens when this piano was bought. They called it a luxury, and pampering the working classes.”’ “Pampering the working classes!” Firefly re- peated. “I suppose it’s all right. But I’m rather at sea.” 26 THE DREAM ) “T can’t explain everything,” said Sarnac. “The fact remains that England grudged its own children the shabbiest education, and so for the matter of fact did every other country. They saw things differently in those days. They were still in the competitive cave. America, which was a much richer country than England, as wealth went then, had if possible meaner and shabbier schools for her common people.... My dear! it was so. I’m telling you a story, not explaining the universe. .. . And naturally, in spite of the strenuous efforts of such valiant souls as Miss Merrick, we children learnt little and we learnt it very badly. Most of my memories of school are memories of boredom. We sat on wooden forms at long, worn, wooden desks, rows and rows of us—I can see again all the little heads in front of me—and far away was Miss Merrick with a pointer trying to interest us in the Rivers of England:— “Ty. Wear. Teasumber.” “Ts that what they used to call swearing?” asked Willow. “No. Only Jogriphy. And History was:— “Wi-yum the Conqueror. ‘Tessisstysiss. Wi-yum Ruefiss. Ten eighty-seven.” “What did it mean?” “To us children? Very much what it means to you—gibberish. The hours, those interminable hours of childhood in school! How they dragged! Did I say I lived a life in my dream? In school I lived eternities. Naturally we sought such amuse- THE DREAM 27 ment as was possible. One thing was to give your next-door neighbour a pinch or a punch and say, ‘Pass it on.’ And we played furtive games with marbles. It is rather amusing to recall that I learnt to count, to add and subtract and so forth, by play- ing marbles in despite of discipline.” “But was that the best your Miss Merrick and your saint with the cough could do?” asked Radiant. “Oh! they couldn’t help themselves. They were in a machine, and there were periodic Inspectors and examinations to see that they kept in it.” “But,” said Sunray, “that Incantation about ‘Wi-yum the Conqueror’ and the rest of it. It meant something? At the back of it, lost to sight perhaps, there was some rational or semi-rational idea?” “Perhaps,” reflected Sarnac. “But I never de- tected it.” “They called it history,” said Firefly helpfully. “They did,” Sarnac admitted. ‘Yes, I think they were trying to interest the children of the land in the doings of the Kings and Queens of England, probably as dull a string of monarchs as the world has ever seen. If they rose to interest at times it was through a certain violence; there was one de- lightful Henry VIII with such a craving for love and such a tender conscience about the sanctity of marriage that he always murdered one wife before he took another. And there was one Alfred who burnt some cakes—I never knew why. In some way it embarrassed the Danes, his enemies.” “But was that all the history they taught you?” cried Sunray. 28 THE DREAM “Queen Elizabeth of England wore a ruff and James the First of England and Scotland kissed his men favourites.” “But history!” Sarnac laughed. “It zs odd. I see that—now that I am awake again. But indeed that was all they taught us.” “Did they tell you nothing of the beginnings of life and the ends of life, of its endless delights and possibilities?” Sarnac shook his head. “Not at school,” said Starlight, who evidently knew her books; “they did that at church. Sarnac forgets the churches. It was, you must remember, an age of intense religious activity. There were places of worship everywhere. One whole day in every seven was given up to the Destinies of Man and the study of God’s Purpose. The worker ceased from his toil. From end to end of the land the air was full of the sound of church bells and of con- gregations singing. Wasn’t there a certain beauty in that, Sarnae?” Sarnac reflected and smiled. “It wasn’t quite like that,” he said. “Our histories, in that matter, need a little revision.” “But one sees the churches and chapels in the old photographs and cinema pictures. And we still have many of their cathedrals. And some of those are quite beautiful.” “And they have all had to be shored up and under- pinned and tied together with steel,’”’ said Sunray, “because they were either so carelessly or so faith- THE DREAM 29 lessly built. And anyhow, these were not built in Sarnac’s time.” “Mortimer Smith’s time,” Sarnac corrected. “They were built hundreds of years earlier than that.” § 3 “You must not judge the religion of an age by its temples and churches,’ said Sarnac. “An un- healthy body may have many things in it that it cannot clear away, and the weaker it is the less it can prevent abnormal and unserviceable growths. Which sometimes may be in themselves quite bright and beautiful growths. “But let me describe to you the religious life of my home and upbringing. There was a sort of State Church in England, but it had lost most of its offi- cial standing in regard to the community as a whole; it had two buildings in Cherry Gardens—one an old one dating from the hamlet days with a square tower and rather small as churches went, and the other new and spacious with a spire. In addition there were the chapels of two other Christian com- munities, the Congregationalists and the Primitive Methodists, and also one belonging to the old Roman Catholic communion. Each professed to present the only true form of Christianity and each maintained a minister, except the larger Church of England place, which had two, the vicar and the curate. You might suppose that, like the museums of history and the Temples of Vision we set before our young people, these places would display in the most moving and beautiful forms possible the his- 30 THE DREAM tory of our race and the great adventure of life in which we are all engaged, they would remind us of our brotherhood and lift us out of selfish thoughts. . But let me tell you how I saw it:— “T don’t remember my first religious instruction. Very early I must have learnt to say a rhymed prayer to— “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look on me, a little child.’ And also another prayer about ‘Trespassing’ which I thought referred to going into fields or woods where there was no public footpath, and which began with the entirely incomprehensible words, “Our Father Charting Heaven, Haloed B thy Name.’ Also one asked for one’s ‘daily bread’ and that God’s Kingdom should come. I learnt these two prayers from my mother at an incredibly early age, and said them every night and sometimes in the morning. She held these words in far too great reverence to explain them, and when I wanted to ask for my ‘daily bread and butter,’ she scolded me bitterly. I also wanted to ask what would happen to good Queen Victoria when God’s Kingdom came, but IJ never mustered courage to ask my mother that. I had a curious idea that there could be a marriage but that nobody had thought of that solution. This must have been very early in my life, because Vic- toria the Good died when I was five, during the course of a long, far-away, and now almost-forgotten struggle called the Boer War. “These infantile perplexities deepened and then gave way to a kind of self-protective apathy when THE DREAM ol I was old enough to go to church and Sunday school. “Sunday morning was by far the most strenuous part of all the week for my mother. We had all had a sort of bath overnight in the underground kitchen, except my father and mother, who I don’t think ever washed all over—I don’t know for certain —and on Sunday morning we rose rather later than usual and put on our ‘clean things’ and our best clothes. (Everybody in those days wore a frightful lot of clothes. You see, they were all so unhealthy they could not stand the least exposure to wet or eold.) Breakfast was a hurried and undistinguished meal on the way to greater things. Then we had to sit about, keeping out of harm’s way, avoiding all crumpling or dirt, and pretending to be interested in one of the ten or twelve books our home possessed, until church time. Mother prepared the Sunday meal, almost always a joint of meat in a baking-dish which my elder sister took in to the baker’s next door but one to be cooked while we worshipped. Father rose later than anyone and appeared strangely transformed in a collar, dickey and cuffs and a black coat and his hair smoothed down and parted. Usu- ally some unforeseen delay arose; one of my sisters had a hole in her stocking, or my boots wouldn’t button and nobody could find the buttonhook, or a prayer-book was mislaid. This engendered an at- mosphere of flurry. There were anxious moments when the church bell ceased to ring and began a monotonous ‘tolling-in.’ ““Oh! we shall be late again!’ said my mother. ‘We shall be late again.’ 32 THE DREAM “ said my uncle, but did not say 66 THE DREAM what wanted my place. If she and Petterton framed it up “He struck the table, but half-heartedly. “My father poured him out some beer. “ ‘Ugh!’ said my uncle and emptied the glass. ““Got to face it,’ said my uncle, feeling better. ‘Got to go through with it. I suppose with all these tuppenny-apenny villa gardens ’ere there’s jobbing work to be got. Ill get something all right.... Think of it! Jobbing gardener! Me —a Jobber! By the Day! It’ll set up some of these ’ere season-ticket clerks no end to ’ave Lord Bramble’s gardener dragging a lawn-mower for them. I can see ’em showing me to their friends out of the window. Bin ’ead-gardener to a Lord, they'll say. Well, well ! ““Tt’s a come-down, said my father when my uncle had departed. ‘Say what you like, it’s a come- down.’ “My mother was preoccupied with the question of their accommodation. ‘She’ll ’ave to ’ave the sofa in the sitting-room I expect, and ’e’ll ’ave a bit of a shake-up on the floor. Don’t suppose she’ll like it. They’ll ’ave their own bedding of course. But Adelaide isn’t the sort to be comfortable on a sofa.’ “Poor woman! she was not. Although my uncle and my father and mother all pointed out to her the untimeliness and inconsiderateness of her con- duct she insisted upon suffering so much that a doctor had to be called in. He ordered a prompt removal to a hospital for an immediate operation. “Those were days,” said Sarnac, “of the profound- THE DREAM 67 est ignorance about the body. The ancient Greeks and the Arabs had done a little anatomy during their brief phases of intellectual activity, but the rest of the world had only been studying physiology in a scientific way for about three hundred years. People in general still knew practically nothing of vital processes. As I have told you they even bore children by accident. And living the queer lives they did, with abnormal and ill-prepared food in a world of unchecked infections, they found the very tissues of the bodies going wrong and breaking out into the queerest growths. Parts of these bodies would cease to do anything but change into a sort of fungoid proliferation 3 “Their bodies were like their communities!” said Radiant. | “The same sort of thing. They had tumours and cancers and such-like things in their bodies and Cherry-Garden urban-districts on their country- sides. But these growths!—they are dreadful even to recall.” “But surely,’ said Willow, “in the face of such a horrible possibility which might afflict anyone, all the world must have wanted to push on with physio- logical research.” “Didn’t they see,” said Sunray, “that all these things were controllable and curable?” “Not a bit of it,’ said Sarnac. “They didn’t positively like these tumours and cancers, but the community was too under-vitalised to put up a real fight against these miseries. And everyone thought that he or she would escape—until it had them. There was a general apathy. And the priests and 68 THE DREAM journalists and so forth, the common opinion makers, were jealous of scientific men. They did their best to persuade people that there was nothing hopeful in scientific research, they did all they could to discredit its discoveries, to ridicule its patient workers and set people against them.” “That’s what puzzles me most,” said Sunray. “Their mental habits were different. Their minds hadn’t been trained to comprehensive thinking. Their thinking was all in compartments and patches. The morbid growths in their bodies were nothing to the morbid growths in their minds.” § 2 “My aunt in the hospital, with that lack of con- sideration for my uncle that had always distin- guished her, would neither recover nor die. She was a considerable expense to him and no help; she added greatly to his distresses. After some days and at the urgent suggestion of my mother he removed himself from our sitting-room to a two- roomed lodging in the house of a bricklayer in an adjacent street; into this he crowded his furniture from Chessing Hanger, but he frequented my father’s shop and showed a deepening attachment to my father’s company. “He was not so successful a jobbing gardener as he had anticipated. Huis short contemptuous way with his new clients in the villas of Cliffstone failed to produce the respect he designed it to do; he would speak of their flower-beds as ‘two penn’orths of all-sorts’ and compare their gardens to a table-cloth or a window box; and instead of welcoming these THE DREAM 69 home-truths, they resented them. But they had not the manliness to clear up this matter by a good straightforward argument in which they would have had their social position very exactly defined; they preferred to keep their illusions and just ceased toemploy him. Moreover, his disappointment with my aunt produced a certain misogyny, which took the form of a refusal to take orders from the wives of his patrons when they were left in sole charge of the house. As many of these wives had a con- siderable influence over their husbands, this too injured my uncle’s prospects. Consequently there were many days when he had nothing to do but stand about our shop to discuss with my father as hearer the defects of Cliffstone villa-residents, the baseness of Mr. Petterton and that cat (‘cat’ he called her) and the probable unworthiness of any casual customer who strayed into range of comment. “Nevertheless my uncle was resolved not to be defeated without a struggle. There was a process which he called ‘keeping his pecker up,’ which neces- sitated, I could not but perceive, periodic visits to the Wellington public-house at the station corner. From these visits he returned markedly more garru- lous, more like Sir John ffrench-Cuthbertson, and exhaling a distinctively courageous smell when he coughed or breathed heavily. After a time, as his business difficulties became more oppressive, my father participated in these heartening excursions. They broadened his philosophical outlook but made it, I fancied, rather less distinct. “My uncle had some indefinite sum of money in the Post Office Savings Bank, and in his determina- 70 THE DREAM tion not to be beaten without a struggle he did some courageous betting on what he called ‘certs’ at the race-meetings on Byford Downs.” ““Cert’ beats me altogether,” said Radiant. “A ‘cert? was a horse that was certain to win and never did. A ‘dead cert’ was an extreme form of the ‘cert. You cannot imagine how the prospects and quality of the chief race-horses were discussed throughout the land. The English were not a no- madic people, only a minority could ride horses, but everybody could bet on them. The King was, so to speak, head of the racing just as he was head of the army. He went in person to the great race- meetings as if to bless and encourage the betting of his subjects. So that my Uncle John Julip was upheld by the most loyal and patriotic sentiments when he wasted his days and his savings on Byford Downs. On several of these occasions my father went with him and wrestled with fortune also. They lost generally, finally they lost most of what they had, but on one or two occasions, as my uncle put it, they ‘struck it rich.’ One day they pitched upon a horse called Rococo, although it was regarded as the very reverse of a ‘cert’ and the odds were heavy against it, but an inner light seems to have guided my uncle; it came in first and they won as much as thirty-five pounds, a very large sum for them. They returned home in a state of solemn exaltation, which was only marred by some mechanical dif- ficulty in pronouncing the name of the winning horse. They began well but after the first syllable they went on more like a hen that had laid an egg THE DREAM 71 than like rational souls who had spotted a winner. ‘Rocococo’ they would say or ‘Rococococo.’ Or they would end in a hiccup. And though each tried to help the other out, they were not really helpful to each other. They diffused an unusually powerful odour of cigars and courage. Never had they smelt so courageous. My mother made them tea. ““Teal’ said my uncle meaningly. He did not actually refuse the cup she put before him, but he pushed it a little aside. “For some moments it seemed doubtful whether he was going to say something very profound or whether he was going to be seriously ill. Mind triumphed over matter. ‘Knew it would come, Marth,’ he said. ‘Knew allong it would come. Directly I heard name. Roc He paused. ““*Cococo,’ clucked my father. ““Cocococo—hiceup, said my uncle. ‘I knew ourour ad come. Some men, Smith, some men ’ave that instink. I would ’ave put my shirt on that ’orse, Marth—only.... They wouldn’t ’ave took my shirt.’ “He looked suddenly very hard at me. “They wouldn’t ’ave took it, ’Arry,’ he said. ‘They done take shirts!’ “ ‘No,’ he said and became profoundly thoughtful. “Then he looked up. ‘Thirty-six to one against,’ he said. ‘We'd ’ave ’ad shirts for a lifetime.’ “My father saw it from a wider, more philosophi- cal point of view. ‘Might never ’ave been spared to wear ’em out, he said. ‘Better as it is, John.’ “And mind you,’ said my uncle; ‘this is only 72 THE DREAM a beginning. Once I start spotting ’em I go on spotting *em—mind that. This Roc—— “ “Cococo.’ ““Cocococo—whatever it is, s’only a beginning. S’only the firs’-ray-sunlight ’v’ a glorious day.’ ““TIn that case, said my mother, ’t’seems to me some of us might have a share.’ “ “Certainly, said my uncle, ‘certainly, Marth.’ And amazingly he handed me a ten-shilling piece— in those days we had gold coins and this was a little disk of gold. Then he handed Prue the same. He gave a whole sovereign, a golden pound, to Fanny and a five-pound Bank of England note to my mother. “Hold on!’ said my father warningly. “*Tha’s a’ right, Smith,’ said my uncle with a gesture of princely generosity. ‘You share, seven- teen pounce ten. Six pounce ten leaves ’leven. Lessee. One ’n’ five six—seven—eight—nine—ten —leven. Here!’ “My father took the balance of the money with a puzzled expression. Something eluded him. ‘Yers,’ he said; ‘but : “His mild eye regarded the ten-shilling piece I still held exposed in my hand. I put it away im- mediately but his gaze followed my hand towards my pocket until it met the table edge and got into difficulties. ““Thout the turf, Smith, there wouldn’t be such a country as England,’ said my Uncle John, and rounded his remarks off with, ‘Mark my words.’ “My father did his best to do so.” THE DREAM 73 § 3 “But this hour of success was almost the only bright interlude in a steady drift to catastrophe. In a little while I gathered from a conversation between my mother and my father that we were ‘behind with the rent.’ That was a quarterly payment we paid to the enterprising individual who owned our house. I know all that sounds odd to you, but that is the way things were done. If we got behind with our rent the owner could turn us out.” “But where?” asked Firefly. “Out of the house. And we weren’t allowed to stay in the street. But it is impossible for me to explain everything of that sort in detail. We were behind with the rent and catastrophe impended. And then my sister Fanny ran away from us. “In no other respect,” said Sarnac, “is it so dif- ficult to get realities over to you and make you understand how I thought and felt in that other life than in matters of sex. Nowadays sex is so simple. Here we are free and frank men and women; we are trained so subtly that we scarcely know we are trained, not to be stupidly competitive, to control jealous impulses, to live generously, to honour the young. Love is the link and flower of our choicest friendships. We take love by the way as we take our food and our holidays, the main thing in our lives is our creative work. But in that dark tormented world in which I passed my dream life, all the business of love was covered over and netted in by restraints and put in fetters that fretted and tortured. I will tell you at last how I was 74 THE DREAM killed. Now I want to convey to you something of the reality of this affair of Fanny. “Even in this world,’ said Sarnac, “my sister Fanny would have been a conspicuously lovely girl. Her eyes could be as blue as heaven, or darken with anger or excitement so that they seemed black. Her hair had a brave sweep in it always. Her smile made you ready to do anything for her; her laughter made the world clean and brightly clear about her even when it was touched with scorn. And she was ignorant I can hardly describe her ignorance. “Tt was Fanny first made me feel that ignorance was shameful. I have told you the sort of school we had and of our religious teachers. When I was nine or ten and Fanny was fifteen, she was already scolding me for fumbling with the pronunciation of words and particularly with the dropping of the aspirate. “ “Harry, she said, ‘if you call me Fenny again it's war and pinching. My name’s Fanny and yours is Harry and don’t you forget it. It’s not English we talk in this place; it’s mud.’ “Something had stung her. She had been talking with someone with a better accent and she had been humiliated. I think that someone may have mocked her. Some chance acquaintance it must have been, some ill-bred superior boy upon the Cliff- stone promenade. But Fanny was setting out now to talk good English and make me do the same, with a fury all her own. “ “Tf only I could talk French,’ she said. ‘“There’s France in sight over there; all its lighthouses wink- ing at us, and all we’ve got to say is, “Parley vous THE DREAM 75 Francy,”’ and grin as if it was a joke.’ She brought home a sixpenny book which professed but failed to teach her French. She was reading voraciously, greedily, to know. She read endless novels but also she was reading all sorts of books, about the stars, about physiology (in spite of my mother’s wild scoldings at the impropriety of reading a book ‘with pictures of yer insides’ in it), about foreign countries. Her passion that I should learn was even greater than her own passion for knowledge. “At fourteen she left school and began to help earn her living. My mother had wanted her to go into ‘service, but she had resisted and resented this passionately. While that proposal was still hanging over her, she went off by herself to Cliff- stone and got a job as assistant book-keeper in a pork butcher’s shop. Before a year was out she was book-keeper, for her mind was as neat as it was nimble. She earned enough money to buy books and drawing material for me and to get herself clothes that scandalised all my mother’s ideas of what was becoming. Don’t imagine she ‘dressed well,’ as we used to say; she experimented boldly, and some of her experiments were cheap and tawdry. “T could lecture to you for an hour,” said Sarnac, “of what dress and the money to buy dresses meant for a woman in the old world. “A large part of my sister’s life was hidden from me; it would have been hidden altogether but for the shameless tirades of my mother, who seemed to prefer to have an audience while she scolded Fanny. I can see now that my mother was bitterly jealous of Fanny because of her unexhausted youth, 76 THE DREAM but at the time I was distressed and puzzled at the gross hints and suggestions that flew over my head. Fanny had a maddening way of not answering back or answering only by some minor correction. ‘It’s horrible, mother,’ she would say. ‘Not ’orrible.’ “Behind her defensive rudenesses, unlit, unguided, poor Fanny was struggling with the whole riddle of life, presented to her with an urgency no man can fully understand. Nothing in her upbringing had ever roused her to the passion for real work in the world; religion for her had been a grimace and a threat; the one great reality that had come through to her thoughts was love. The novels she read all told of love, elusively, partially, and an impatience in her imagination and in her body leapt to these hints. Love whispered to her in the light and beauty of things about her; in the moonlight, in the spring breezes. Fanny could not but know that she was beautiful. But such morality as our world had then was a morality of abject suppression. Love was a disgrace, a leering fraud, a smutty joke. She was not to speak about it, not to look towards it until some good man—the pork butcher was a widower and seemed likely to be the good man in her case—came and spoke not of love indeed but marriage. He would marry her and hurry home with his prize and tear the wrappings from her loveliness, clumsily, stupidly, in a mood of morbidly inflamed desire.” “Sarnac,” said Firefly, ‘you are horrible.” “No,” said Sarnac. “But that world of the past was horrible. Most of the women, your ancestors, suffered such things. And that was only the begin- THE DREAM 77 ning of the horror. Then came the birth and desecration of the children. Think what a delicate, precious and holy thing a child is! They were be- gotten abundantly and abnormally, born reluctantly, and dropped into the squalour and infection of an overcrowded disordered world. Bearing a child was not the jolly wholesome process we know to-day; in that diseased society it was an illness, it counted as an illness, for nearly every woman. Which the man her husband resented—grossly. Five or six children in five or six years and a pretty girl was a cross, worried wreck of a woman, bereft of any shred of spirit or beauty. My poor scolding, worried mother was not fifty when she died. And one saw one’s exquisite infants grow up into ill-dressed, un- der-nourished, ill-educated children. Think of the agony of shamed love that lay beneath my poor mother’s slaps and scoldings! The world has for- gotten now the hate and bitterness of disappointed parentage. That was the prospect of the moral life that opened before my sister Fanny; that was the antistrophe to the siren song of her imagination. “She could not believe this of life and love. She experimented with love and herself. She was, my mother said, ‘a bold, bad girl.’ She began I know with furtive kissings and huggings in the twilight, with boy schoolfellows, with clerks and errand-boys. Some gleam of nastiness came into these adventures of the dusk and made her recoil. At any rate she became prim and aloof to Cherry Gardens, but only because she was drawn to the bands and lights and prosperity of Cliffstone. That was when she began to read and correct her accent. You have heard of 78 THE DREAM our old social stratifications. She wanted to be like a lady; she wanted to meet a gentleman. She imagined there were gentlemen who were really gentle, generous, wise and delightful, and she imagined that some of the men she saw on the cliff promenade at Cliffstone were gentlemen. She began to dress herself as I have told. “There were scores of such girls in every town in Europe,” said Sarnac, “turning their backs on their dreadful homes. In a sort of desperate hope. “When you hear about the moral code of the old world,’ Sarnac went on, “you are apt to think of it as a rule that everyone respected in exactly the same way that you think everyone believed the professed religions. We have not so much a moral code now as a moral training, and our religion in- volves no strain on reason or instincts, and so it is difficult for us to understand the tortuosity and evasions and defiances and general furtiveness and meanness of a world in which nobody really under- stood and believed the religious creeds, not even the priests, and nobody was really convinced to the bone of the sweetness and justice of the moral code. In that distant age almost everybody was sexually angry or uncomfortable or dishonest; the restraints we had did not so much restrain as provoke people. It is difficult to imagine it now.” “Not if you read the old literature,” said Sunray. “The novels and plays are pathological.” “So you have my pretty sister Fanny, drawn by impulses she did not understand, flitting like a moth out of our dingy home in Cherry Gardens to the lights, bright lights of hope they seemed to her, THE DREAM ig about the bandstand and promenade of Cliffstone. And there staying in the lodging-houses and board- ing-houses and hotels were limited and thwarted people, keeping holiday, craving for bright excite- ments, seeking casual pleasures. There were wives who had tired of their husbands and husbands long weary of their wives, there were separated people who could not divorce and young men who could not marry because they could not afford to maintain a family. With their poor hearts full of naughti- ness, rebellious suppressions, jealousies, resentments. And through this crowd, eager, provocative, and defenceless, flitted my pretty sister Fanny.” § 4 “On the evening before Fanny ran away my father and my uncle sat in the kitchen by the fire discoursing of politics and the evils of life. They had both been keeping up their peckers very reso- lutely during the day and this gave a certain ram- bling and recurrent quality to their review. Their voices were hoarse, and they drawled and were loud and emphatic and impressive. It was as if they spoke for the benefit of unseen listeners. Often they would both be talking together. My mother was in the scullery washing up the tea-things and I was sitting at the table near the lamp trying to do some ~ homework my teacher had given me, so far as the distraction of this conversation so close to me and occasional appeals to me to ‘mark’ this or that, would permit. Prue was reading a book called Min- astering Children to which she was much addicted. Fanny had been helping my mother until she was 80 THE DREAM told she was more a hindrance than a help. Then she came and stood at my side looking over my shoulder at what I was doing. ““What’s spoiling trade and ruining the country,’ said my uncle, ‘is these ’ere strikes. These ’ere strikes reg’ler destrushion—destruction for the country.’ “Stop everything,’ said my father. ‘It stands to reason.’ ““They didn’t ought to be allowed. These ’ere miners’ paid and paid ’andsomely. Paid ’andsomely they are. ’Andsomely. Why! I’d be glad of the pay they get, glad of it. They ’as bulldogs, they ’as pianos. Champagne. Me and you, Smith, me and you and the middle classes generally; we don’t get pianos. We don’t get champagne. Not-tit... “Ought to be a Middle Classes Union,’ said my father, ‘keep these ’ere workers in their places. They ’old up the country and stop trade. Trade! Trade’s orful. Why! people come in now and look at what you got and arst the price of this and that. Think twice they do before they spend a sixpence. .. . And the coal you’re expected to sell nowadays! I tell ’em, if this ’ere strike comes off this ’s bout the last coal you’re likely to see, good or bad. Straight out, Lite ems “*Youw’re not working, Harry,’ said Fanny with- out troubling to lower her voice. ‘Don’t see how you can work, with all this jawing going on. Come out for a walk,’ “T glanced up at her and rose at once. It wasn’t often Fanny asked me to go for a walk with her. I put my books away. THE DREAM 81 “‘Going out for a bit of fresh air, mother,’ said Fanny, taking her hat down from its peg. ““No, you don’t—not at this time,’ cried my mother from the scullery. ‘Ain’t I said, once and for all fe “ *Tt’s all right, mother, Harry’s going with me. He’ll see no one runs away with me and ruins me. You’ve said it once and for all—times enough.’ “My mother made no further objection, but she flashed a look of infinite hate at my sister. “We went upstairs and out into the street. “For a time we said nothing, but I had a sense that I was going to be ‘told things.’ ““T’ve had about enough of all this,’ Fanny began presently. ‘What’s going to become of us? Father and uncle ’ve been drinking all day; you can see they’re both more than half-screwed. Both of ’em. It’s every day now. It’s worse and worse and worse. Uncle hasn’t had a job these ten days. Father’s always with him. The shop’s getting filthy. He doesn’t sweep it out now for days together.’ ““Uncle seems to have lost ’eart,’ I said, ‘since he heard that Aunt Adelaide would have to have that second operation.’ ““Lost heart! He never had any heart to lose.’ My sister Fanny said no more of my uncle—by an effort. ‘What a home!’ she cried. “She paused for a moment. ‘Harry,’ she said, ‘T’m going to get out of this. Soon.’ “T asked what she meant by that. “Never mind what I mean. I’ve got a situation. A different sort of situation. ... Harry, you— you care for me, Harry?’ 82 THE DREAM “Professions of affection are difficult for boys of thirteen. ‘I’d do anything for you, Fanny,’ I said after a pause. ‘You know I would.’ “ “And you wouldn’t tell on me?’ ““Whad you take me for?’ “ “Nohow?’ és ‘No’ow.’ ““T knew you wouldn’t, said Fanny. ‘You're the only one of the whole crew I’ll be sorry to leave. I do care for you, Harry. Straight, I do. I used to care for mother. Once. But that’s different. She’s scolded me and screamed at me till it’s gone. Every bit of it. I can’t help it,—it’s gone. Tl think of you, Harry—often.’ “T realised that Fanny was crying. Then when I glanced at her again her tears were over. “ ‘Look here, Harry,’ she said, ‘would you do— something—for me? Something—not so very much —and not tell? Not tell afterwards, I mean.’ ““T’d do anything, Fanny.’ “ *Tt’s not so very much really. There’s that little old portmanteau upstairs. I’ve put some things in it. And there’s a little bundle. Ive put ’em both under the bed at the back where even Prying Prue won’t think of looking. And to-morrow—when father’s out with uncle like he is now every day, and mother’s getting dinner downstairs and Prue’s pretending to help her and sneaking bits of bread —if you'd bring those down to Cliffstone to Crosby’s side-door. ... They aren’t so very heavy.’ ““*T ain’t afraid of your portmanteau, Fanny. I’d carry it more miles than that for you. But where’s THE DREAM 83 this new situation of yours, Fanny? and why ain’t you saying a word about it at home?’ “Suppose I asked you something harder than carrying a portmanteau, Harry?’ “ FRyou think I’m going to be treated as a nonen- tity, said my uncle, ‘you’re making the biggest mistake you ever made in your life. See? Now you listen to me, Marth : “ “You shut up!’ said my brother. ‘Mother’s my business first and foremost.’ “Shut up!’ echoed my uncle. ‘Wot manners! At a funeral. From a chap not a third my age, a mere ’azardous empty boy. Shut up! You shut up yourself, my boy, and listen to those who know a bit more about life than you do. I’ve smacked your ’ed before to-day. Not once or twice either. And I warmed your ’ide when you stole them peaches —and much good it did you! I oughter’ve took yer skin off! You and me ’ave never got on much, and unless you keep a civil tongue in your head we ain’t going to get on now.’ “Seeing which,’ said brother Ernest with a dan- gerous calmness, ‘the sooner you make yourself scarce the better for all concerned.’ “ “Not to leave my on’y sister’s affairs in the ’ands of a cub like you.’ “Again my mother essayed to speak, but the angry voices disregarded her. ““T tell you you’re going to get out, and if you can’t get out of your own discretion I warn you I'll ’ave to ’elp you.’ “ “Not when you’re in mourning,’ said my mother. ‘Not wearing your mourning. And besides f THE DREAM 103 “But they were both too heated now to attend to her. “ “Youre pretty big with your talk,’ said my uncle, ‘but don’t you preshume too far on my forbearance. I’ve ’ad about enough of this.’ “““So’ve I,’ said my brother Ernest and stood up. “My uncle stood up too and they glared at one another. “*That’s the door,’ said my brother darkly. “My uncle walked back to his wonted place on the hearthrug. ‘Now don’t let’s ’ave any quarrelling on a day like this, he said. ‘If you ’aven’t any con- sideration for your mother you might at least think of ’im who has passed beyond. My objec’ ’ere is simply to try n’range things so’s be best for all. And what I say is this, the ideer of your mother going into a lodging-’ouse alone, without a man’s ’elp, is ridiculous, perfectly ridiculous, and only a first-class inconsiderate young fool ; “My brother Ernest went and stood close to my uncle. ‘You’ve said enough,’ he remarked. ‘This affair’s between me and my mother and your motto is Get Out. See?’ “Again my mother had something to say and again she was silenced. ‘“ ‘This is man’s work, mother,’ said Ernest. ‘Are you going to shift it, uncle?’ “My uncle faced up to this threat of Ernest. ‘I’ve a juty to my sister ; “And then I regret to say my brother laid hands on him. He took him by the collar and by the wrist and for a moment the two black-clad figures swayed. ““Lea’ go my coat,’ said my uncle. ‘Lea’ go my coat collar.’ | 104 THE DREAM “But a thirst for violence had taken possession of Ernest. My mother and Prue and I stood aghast. “ “Ernie!” cried my mother, ‘You forget yourself!’ “Sall right, mother,’ said Ernie, and whirled my uncle violently from the hearthrug to the bottom of the staircase. Then he shifted his grip from my uncle’s wrist to the seat of his tight black trousers and partly lifted and partly impelled him up the staircase. My uncle’s arms waved wildly as if he clutched at his lost dignity. “ John!’ cried my mother. ‘’Ere’s your ’at!’ “T had a glimpse of my uncle’s eye as he vanished up the staircase. He seemed to be looking for his hat. But he was now offering no serious opposition to my brother Ernest’s handling of him. ““Give it ’im, ’Arry, said my mother. ‘And there’s *is gloves too.’ “T took the black hat and the black gloves and followed the struggle upstairs. Astonished and un- resisting, my uncle was propelled through the front door into the street and stood there panting and regarding my brother. His collar was torn from its stud and his black tie disarranged. Ernest was breathing heavily. ‘Now you be orf and mind your own business,’ said Ernie. “Ernie turned with a start as I pushed past him. ‘’Ere’s your ’at and gloves, uncle,’ I said, handing them to him. He took them mechanically, his eyes still fixed on Ernest. “And you're the boy I trained to be ’onest,’ said my uncle to my brother Ernest, very bitterly. ‘Leastways I tried to. You're the young worm I THE DREAM 105 fattened up at my gardens and showed such kind- ness to! Gratitood!’ “He regarded the hat in his hand for a moment as though it was some strange object, and then by a happy inspiration put it on his head. “ “God ’elp your poor mother,’ said my Uncle John Julip. ‘God ’elp ’er.’ “He had nothing more to say. He looked up the street and down and then turned as by a sort of necessity in the direction of the Wellington public- house. And in this manner was my Uncle John Julip on the day of my father’s funeral cast forth into the streets of Cherry Gardens, a prospective widower and a most pathetic and unhappy little man. That dingy little black figure in retreat still haunts my memory. Even from the back he looked amazed. Never did a man who has not been kicked look so like a man who has been. I never saw him again. I have no doubt that he carried his sorrows down to the Wellington and got himself thoroughly drunk, and I have as little doubt that he missed my father dreadfully all the time he was doing so. “My brother Ernest returned thoughtfully to the kitchen. He was already a little abashed at his own violence. I followed him respectfully. ““*You didn’t ought t’ave done that,’ said my mother. “What right ’as ’e to plant ’imself on you to be kept and waited on?’ “EK wouldn’t ’ave planted ’imself on me,’ my mother replied. ‘You get ’eated, Ernie, same as you used to do, and you won’t listen to anything.’ ““T never did fancy uncle,’ said Ernie. 106 THE DREAM “When you get ’eated, Ernie, you seem to forget everything, said my mother. ‘You might’ve remem- bered ’e was my brother.’ “ “Hine brother!’ said Ernie. ‘Why!—who started all that stealing? Who led poor father to drink and bet?’ “All the same,’ said my mother, ‘you ’adn’t no right to ’andle ’im as you did. And your poor father ’ardly cold in ’is grave!’ She wept. She produced a black-bordered handkerchief and mopped her eyes. ‘I did ’ope your poor father would ’ave a nice funeral —all the trouble and expense—and now you’ve spoilt it. Dll never be able to look back on this day with pleasure, not if I live to be a ’undred years. [’ll always remember ’ow you spoilt your own father’s funeral—turning on your uncle like this.’ “Ernest had no answer for her reproaches. ‘He shouldn’t ’ve argued and said what he did,’ he objected. “And all so unnecessary! All along I’ve been trying to tell you you needn’t worry about me. I don’t want no lodging-’ouse in Cliffstone—with your uncle or without your uncle. I wrote to Matilda Good a week come Tuesday and settled everything with ’er—everything. It’s settled.’ “ “What d’you mean?’ asked Ernest. “Why, that ’ouse of hers in Pimlico. She’s been wanting trusty ’elp for a long time, what with her varicose veins up and downstairs and one thing ‘nother, and directly she got my letter about your poor dear father she wrote orf to me. “You need never want a ’ome,” she says, “so long as I got a lodger. You and Prue are welcome,” she says, ‘“‘wel- THE DREAM 107 come ’elp, and the boy can easy find work up ’ere— much easier than ’e can in Cliffstone.” All the time you was planning lodging-’ouses and things for me I was trying to tell you ; “ “You mean it’s settled?’ “ *Tt’s settled.’ ““And what you going to do with your bits of furniture ’ere?’ “Sell some and take some... . “ *Tt’s feasible,’ said Ernest after reflection. ) “And so we needn’t reely ’ave ’ad that—bit of a’ argument?’ said Ernest after a pause. ‘Not me and uncle?’ ““Not on my account you needn't,’ said my mother. “ “Well—we ’ad it,’ said Ernest after another pause and without any visible signs of regret.” Nes “If my dream was a dream,” said Sarnac, “it was a most circumstantial dream. I could tell you a hundred details of our journey to London and how we disposed of the poor belongings that had fur- nished our home in Cherry Gardens. Every detail would expose some odd and illuminating difference between the ideas of those ancient days and our own ideas. Brother Ernest was helpfui, masterful and irascible. He got a week’s holiday from his employer to help mother to settle up things, and among other things that were settled up I believe my mother persuaded him and my uncle to ‘shake hands,’ but I do not know the particulars of that great scene, I did 108 THE DREAM not see it, it was merely mentioned in my hearing during the train journey to London. I would like to tell you also of the man who came round to buy most of our furniture, including that red and black sofa I described to you, and how he and my brother had a loud and heated argument about some damage to one of its legs, and how Mr. Crosby produced a bill, that my mother understood he had forgiven us on account of Fanny long ago. There was also some point about something called ‘tenant’s fixtures’ that led my brother and the landlord, Mr. Bulstrode, to the verge of violence. And Mr. Bulstrode, the land- lord, brought accusations of damage done to the fabric of his house that were false, and he made extravagant claims for compensation based thereon and had to be rebutted with warmth. There was also trouble over carting a parcel of our goods to the railway station, and when we got to the terminus of Victoria in London it was necessary, I gathered, that Ernest should offer to fight a railway porter —you have read of railway porters?—before we received proper attention. “But I cannot tell you all these curious and typical incidents now because at that rate I should never finish my story before our holidays are over. I must go on now to tell you of this London, this great city, the greatest city it was in the world in those days, to which we had transferred our fates. All the rest of my story, except for nearly two years and a half I spent in the training camp and in France and Germany during the First World War, is set in the scenery of London. You know already what a vast congestion of human beings London was; you know THE DREAM 109 that within a radius of fifteen miles a population of seven and a half million people were gathered together, people born out of due time into a world unready for them and born mostly through the sheer ignorance of their procreators, gathered together into an area of not very attractive clay country by an urgent need to earn a living, and you know the terrible fate that at last overwhelmed this sinfully crowded accumulation; you have read of west-end and slums, and you have seen the cinema pictures of those days showing crowded streets, crowds gap- ing at this queer ceremony or that, a vast traffic of clumsy automobiles and distressed horses in narrow unsuitable streets, and I suppose your general 1m- pression is a nightmare of multitudes, a suffocating realisation of jostling discomfort and uncleanness and of an unendurable strain on eye and ear and attention. The history we learn in our childhood enforces that lesson. “But though the facts are just as we are taught they were, I do not recall anything like the distress at London you would suppose me to have felt, and I do remember vividly the sense of adventure, the intellectual excitement and the discovery of beauty I experienced in going there. You must remember that in this strange dream of mine I had forgotten all our present standards; I accepted squalor and confusion as being in the nature of things, and the aspects of this city’s greatness, the wonder of this limitless place and a certain changing and evanes- cent beauty, rise out of a sea of struggle and limita- tion as forgetfully as a silver birch rises out of the swamp that bears it. 110 THE DREAM “The part of London in which we took up our abode was called Pimlico. It bordered upon the river, and once there had been a wharf there to which ships came across the Atlantic from America. This word Pimlico had come with other trade in these ships; in my time it was the last word left alive of the language of the Algonquin Red Indians, who had otherwise altogether vanished from the earth. The Pimlico wharf had gone, the American trade was forgotten, and Pimlico was now a great wilderness of streets of dingy grey houses in which people lived and let lodgings. These houses had never been designed for the occupation of lodgers; they were faced with a lime-plaster called stucco which made a sort of pretence of being stone; each one had a sunken underground floor originally in- tended for servants, a door with a portico and several floors above which were reached by a staircase. Beside each portico was a railed pit that admitted light to the front underground room. As you walked along these Pimlico streets these porticos receded in long perspectives and each portico of that endless series represented ten or a dozen misdirected, incom- plete and rather unclean inhabitants, infected men- tally and morally. Over the grey and dingy archi- tecture rested a mist or a fog, rarely was there a precious outbreak of sunlight; here and there down the vista a grocer’s boy or a greengrocer’s boy or a fish hawker would be handing in food over the rail- ings to the subterranean members of a household, or a cat (there was a multitude of cats) would be peeping out of the railings alert for the danger of a passing dog. There would be a few pedestrians, THE DREAM 111 a passing cab or so, and perhaps in the morning a dust-cart collecting refuse filth—set out for the winds to play with in boxes and tin receptacles at the pavement edge—or a man in a uniform cleaning the streets with a hose. It seems to you that it must have been the most depressing of spectacles. It wasn’t, though I doubt if I can make clear to you that it wasn’t. I know I went about Pimlico think- ing it rather a fine place and endlessly interesting. I assure you that in the early morning and by my poor standards it had a sort of grey spaciousness and dignity. But afterwards I found the thing far better done, that London architectural aquatint, in Belgravia and round about Regent’s Park. “T must admit that I tended to drift out of those roads and squares of lodging-houses either into the streets where there were shops and street-cars or southward to the Embankment along the Thames. It was the shops.and glares that drew me first as the lights began to fail and, strange as it may seem to you, my memories of such times are rich with beauty. We feeble children of that swarming age had, I think, an almost morbid gregariousness; we found a subtle pleasure and reassurance in crowds and a real disagreeableness in being alone; and my impressions of London’s strange interest and charm are, I confess, very often crowded impressions of a kind this world no longer produces, or impressions to which a crowded foreground or background was essential. But they were beautiful. “For example there was a great railway station, a terminus, within perhaps half a mile of us. There was a great disorderly yard in front of the station 112 THE DREAM in which hackney automobiles and omnibuses assem- bled and departed and arrived. In the late twilight of an autumn day this yard was a mass of shifting black shadows and gleams and lamps, across which streamed an incessant succession of bobbing black heads, people on foot hurrying to catch the trains: as they flitted by the lights one saw their faces gleam and vanish again. Above this foreground rose the huge brown-grey shapes of the station buildings and the facade of a big hotel, reflecting the flares below and pierced here and there by a lit window; then very sharply came the sky-line and a sky still blue and luminous, tranquil and aloof. And the innumerable sounds of people and vehicles wove into a deep, wonderful and continually varying drone. Even to my boyish mind there was an irrational conviction of unity and purpose in this spectacle. “The streets where there were shops were also very wonderful and lovely to me directly the too- lucid and expository daylight began to fade. The variously coloured lights in the shop-windows which displayed a great diversity of goods for sale splashed the most extraordinary reflections upon the pave- ments and roadway, and these were particularly gem-like if there had been rain or a mist to wet the reflecting surfaces. One of these streets—it was called Lupus Street, though why it had the name of an abominable skin disease that has long since vanished from the earth I cannot imagine—was close to our new home and I still remember it as full of romantic effectiveness. By daylight it was an ex- ceedingly sordid street, and late at night empty and echoing, but in the magic hours of London it was a THE DREAM 113 bed of black and luminous flowers, the abounding people became black imps and through it wallowed the great shining omnibuses, the ships of the street, filled with light and reflecting lights. “There were endless beauties along the river bank. The river was a tidal one held in control by a stone embankment, and the roadway along the embank- ment was planted at the footway edge with plane trees and lit by large electric lights on tall standards. These planes were among the few trees that could flourish in the murky London air, but they were un- suitable trees to have in a crowded city because they gave off minute specules that irritated people’s throats. That, however, I did not know; what I did know was that the shadows of the leaves on the pavements thrown by the electric glares made the most beautiful patterings I had ever seen. I would walk along on a warm night rejoicing in them, more particularly if now and then a light breeze set them dancing and quivering. “One could walk from Pimlico along this Thames Embankment for some miles towards the east. One passed little black jetties with dangling oil lamps; there was a traffic of barges and steamers on the river altogether mysterious and romantic to me; the frontages of the houses varied incessantly, and ever and again were cleft by crowded roadways that brought a shining and twinkling traffic up to the bridges. Across the river was a coming and going of trains along a railway viaduct; it contrib- uted a restless motif of clanks and concussion to the general drone of London, and the engines sent puffs of firelit steam and sudden furnace-glows into 114 THE DREAM the night. One came along this Embankment to the great buildings at Westminster, by daylight a pile of imitation Gothic dominated by a tall clock- tower with an illuminated dial, a pile which assumed a blue dignity with the twilight and became a noble portent standing at attention, a forest of spears, in the night. This was the Parliament House, and in its chambers a formal King, an ignoble nobility and a fraudulently elected gathering of lawyers, financiers and adventurers took upon themselves, amidst the general mental obscurity of those days, a semblance of wisdom and empire. As one went on beyond Westminster along the Embankment came great grey-brown palaces and houses set behind green gardens, a railway bridge and then two huge hotels, standing high and far back, bulging with lit windows; there was some sort of pit or waste beneath them, I forget what, very black, so that at once they loomed over one and seemed magically - remote. There was an Egyptian obelisk here, for all the European capitals of my time, being as honest as magpies and as original as monkeys, had adorned themselves with obelisks stolen from Egypt. And farther along was the best and noblest building in London, St. Paul’s Cathedral; it was invisible by night, but it was exceedingly serene and beautiful on a clear, blue, windy day. And some of the bridges were very lovely with gracious arches of smutty grey stone, though some were so clumsy that only night could redeem them. “As I talk I remember,” said Sarnac. ‘Before employment robbed me of my days I pushed my boyish explorations far and wide, wandering all THE DREAM 115 day and often going without any meal, or, if I was in pocket, getting a bun and a glass of milk in some small shop for a couple of pennies. The shop- windows of London were an unending marvel to me; and they would be to you too if you could remember them as I do; there must have been hundreds of miles of them, possibly thousands of miles. In the poorer parts they were chiefly food- shops and cheap clothing shops and the like, and one could exhaust their interest, but there were thor- oughfares like Regent Street and Piccadilly and narrow Bond Street and Oxford Street crammed with all the furnishings of the life of the lucky minority, the people who could spend freely. You will find it difficult to imagine how important a matter the mere buying of things was in the lives of those people. In their houses there was a vast congestion of objects neither ornamental nor useful; purchases in fact; and the women spent large por- tions of every week-day in buying things, clothes, table-litter, floor-litter, wall-litter. They had no work; they were too ignorant to be interested in any real thing; they had nothing else to do. That was the world’s reward, the substance of success—pur- chases. Through them you realised your well-being. As a shabby half-grown boy I pushed my way among these spenders, crowds of women dressed, wrapped up rather, in layer after layer of purchases, scented, painted. Most of them were painted to suggest a health-flushed face, the nose powdered a leprous white. “There is one thing to be said for the old fashion of abundant clothing; in that crowded jostling 116 THE DREAM world it saved people from actually touching each other. “T would push through these streets eastward to less prosperous crowds in Oxford Street and to a different multitude in Holborn. As you went east- ward the influence of women diminished and that of young men increased. Cheapside gave you all the material for building up a twentieth-century young man from the nude. In the shop-windows he was disarticulated and priced: hat five and six- pence, trousers eighteen shillings, tie one and six; cigarettes tenpence an ounce; newspaper a half- penny, cheap novel sevenpence; on the pavement outside there he was put together and complete and the cigarette burning, under the impression that he was a unique immortal creature and that the ideas in his head were altogether his own. And beyond Cheapside there was Clerkenwell with curious little shops that sold scarcely anything but old keys or the parts of broken-up watches or the like detached objects. Then there were great food markets at Leadenhall Street and Smithfield and Covent Garden, incredible accumulations of raw stuff. At Covent Garden they sold fruits and flowers that we should think poor and undeveloped, but which everyone in those days regarded as beautiful and delicious. And in Caledonian Market were innu- merable barrows where people actually bought and took away every sort of broken and second-hand rubbish, broken ornaments, decaying books with torn pages, second-hand clothing—a wonderland of litter for any boy with curiosity in his blood... . “But I could go on talking endlessly about this THE DREAM 117 old London of mine and you want me to get on with my story. I have tried to give you something of its endless, incessant, multitudinous glittering quality and the way in which it yielded a thousand strange and lovely effects to its changing lights and atmosphere. I found even its fogs, those dreaded fogs of which the books tell, romantic. But then I was a boy at the adventurous age. The fog was often very thick in Pimlico. It was normally a soft creamy obscurity that turned even lights close at hand into luminous blurs. People came out of nothingness within six yards of you, were riddles and silhouettes before they became real. One could go out and lose oneself within ten minutes of home and perhaps pick up with a distressed automobile driver and walk by his headlights, signalling to him where the pavement ended. That was one sort of fog, the dry fog. But there were many sorts. There was a sort of yellow darkness, like blackened bronze, that hovered about you and did not embrace you and left a clear nearer world of deep browns and blacks. And there was an unclean wet mist that presently turned to drizzle and made every surface a mirror.” “And there was daylight,” said Willow, “‘some- times surely there was daylight.” “Yes,” Sarnac reflected; “there was daylight. At times. And sometimes there was quite a kindly and redeeming sunshine in London. In the spring, in early summer or in October. It did not blaze, but it filled the air with a mild warmth, and turned the surfaces it lit not indeed to gold but to amber and topaz. And there were even hot days in Lon- don with skies of deep blue above, but they were 118 THE DREAM rare. And sometimes there was daylight without the ssue ee “Yes,” said Sarnac and paused. “At times there was a daylight that stripped London bare, showed its grime, showed its real ineffectiveness, showed the pitiful poverty of intention in its buildings, showed the many coloured billstickers’ hoardings for the crude and leprous things they were, brought out the shabbiness of unhealthy bodies and misfitting garments. . “Those were terrible, veracious, unhappy days. When London no longer fascinated but wearied and offended, when even to an uninstructed boy there came some intimation of the long distressful journey that our race had still to travel before it attained even to such peace and health and wisdom as it has to-day.” § 4 Sarnac stopped short in his talk and rose with something between a laugh and a sigh. He stood facing westward and Sunray stood beside him. _ “This story will go on for ever if I digress like this. See! the sun will be behind that ridge in another ten minutes. I cannot finish this evening, because most of the story part still remains to be told.” “There are roast fowls with sweet corn and chest- nuts,” said Firefly. “Trout and various fruits.” “And some of that golden wine?” said Radiant. “Some of that golden wine.” Sunray, who had been very still and intent, awoke. THE DREAM 119 “Sarnac dear,” she said, slipping her arm through his. ‘What became of Uncle John Julip?” Sarnac reflected. “I forget,” he said. “Aunt Adelaide Julip died?” asked Willow. “She died quite soon after we left Cherry Gardens.: My uncle wrote, I remember, and I remember my mother reading the letter at breakfast like a proc- lamation and saying, ‘Seems if she was reely ill after all.” If she had not been ill then surely she had carried malingering to the last extremity. But I forget any particulars about my uncle’s departure from this world. He probably outlived my mother, and after her death the news of his end might easily have escaped me.” “You have had the most wonderful dream in the world, Sarnac,” said Starlight, ‘and I want to hear the whole story and not interrupt, but I am sorry not to hear more of your Uncle John Julip.” “He was such a perfect little horror,’ said Pyeiyy 2. Until the knife-edge of the hills cut into the mol- ten globe of the sun, the holiday-makers lingered watching the shadows in their last rush up to the mountain crests, and then, still talking of this par- ticular and that in Sarnac’s story, the six made their way down to the guest-house and supper. “Sarnac was shot,” said Radiant. “He hasn’t even begun to get shot yet. There is no end of story still to come.” “Sarnac,’ asked Firefly, “you weren’t killed in the Great War, were you? Suddenly? In some inconsequent sort of way?” “Not a bit of it,’ said Sarnac. “I am really 120 THE DREAM beginning to be shot in this story though Radiant does not perceive it. But I must tell my story in my own fashion.” At supper what was going on was explained to the master of the guest-house. Like so many of these guest-house-keepers he was a jolly, convivial, simple soul, and he was amused and curious at Sar- nac’s alleged experience. He laughed at the im- patience of the others; he said they were like chil- dren in a Children’s Garden, agog for their go-to-bed fairy-tale. After they had had coffee they went out for a time to see the moolight mingle with the ruddy afterglow above the peaks; and then the guest- master led the way in, made up a blazing pinewood fire and threw cushions before it, set out an after- dinner wine, put out the lights and prepared for a good night’s story-telling. Sarnac remained thoughtful, looking into the flames until Sunray set him off again by whispering: “Pimlico?” § 5 “T will tell you as briefly as I can of the household in Pimlico where we joined forces with my mother’s old friend, Matilda Good,” said Sarnac; “but I con- fess it is hard to be reasonably brief when one’s mind is fuller of curious details than this fire is of sparks.” “That’s excellent!” said the master of the guest- house. ‘“That’s a perfect story-teller’s touch!” and looked brightly for Sarnac to continue. “But we are all beginning to believe that he has been there,” whispered Radiant, laying a restraining THE DREAM 121 hand on the guest-master’s knee. “And he’— Radiant spoke behind his hand—“he believes it altogether.” “Not really?” whispered the guest-master. He seemed desirous of asking difficult questions and then subsided into an attention that was at first a little constrained and presently quite involuntary. “These houses in Pimlico were part of an enor- mous proliferation of houses that occurred between a hundred years and seventy years before the Great War. There was a great amount of unintelligent building enterprise in those decades in London, and at the building, as I have already told you, I think, was done on the supposition that there was an end- less supply of fairly rich families capable of occupy- ing a big house and employing three or four domestic servants. There were underground kitchens and servants’ rooms, there was a dining-room and mas- ter’s study at the ground level, there was a ‘drawing- room floor’ above, two rooms convertible into one by a device known as folding doors, and above this were bedrooms on a scale of diminishing importance until one came to attics without fire-places in which the servants were to sleep. In large areas and par- ticularly in Pimlico, these fairly rich families of the builder’s imagination, with servile domestics all complete, never appeared to claim the homes pre- pared for them, and from the first, poorer people, for whom of course no one had troubled to plan houses, adapted these porticoed plaster mansions to their own narrower needs. My mother’s friend, Matilda Good, was a quite typical Pimlico house- holder. She had been the trusted servant of a rich 122 THE DREAM old lady in Cliffstone who had died and left her two or three hundred pounds of money 4 The master of the guest-house was endlessly per- plexed and made an interrogative noise. “Private property,” said Radiant very rapidly. “Power of bequest. Two thousand years ago. Made a Will, you know. Go on, Sarnac.” “With that and her savings,” said Sarnac, “she was able to become tenant of one of these Pimlico houses and to furnish it with a sort of shabby gen- tility. She lived herself in the basement below and in the attic above, and all the rest of the house she had hoped to let in pieces, floor by floor or room by room, to rich or at least prosperous old ladies, and to busy herself in tending them and supplying their needs and extracting a profit and living out of them, running up and down her staircase as an ant runs up and down a rose stem tending its aphides. But old ladies of any prosperity did not come into Pimlico. It was low and foggy, the children of its poorer streets were rough and disrespectful, and it was close to the river embankment over which rich, useless old ladies naturally expected to be thrown. So Matilda Good had to console herself with less succulent and manageable lodgers. “T remember Matilda Good giving us an account — of those she had as we sat in her front downstairs room having a kind of tea supper on the evening of our arrival. Ernest had declined refreshment and departed, his task as travel conductor done, but there were my mother and Prue and myself, all in dingy black and all a little stiff and strange, thawing slowly to tea and hot buttered toast with a poached THE DREAM 123 ege each, our mouths very full and our eyes and ears very attentive to Matilda Good. “She appeared quite a grand lady to me that night. She was much larger than any lady I had hitherto been accustomed to; she had a breadth and variety of contour like scenery rather than a human being; the thought of her veins being vari- cose, indeed of all her anatomy being varicose and fantastic, seemed a right and proper one. She was dressed in black with outbreaks of soiled lace, a large gold-rimmed brooch fastened her dress at the neck and she had a gold chain about her, and on her head was what was called a ‘cap,’ an affair like the lower shell of an oyster inverted, made of layers of dingy lace and adorned with a black velvet bow and a gold buckle. Her face had the same land- scape unanatomical quality as her body; she had a considerable moustache, an overhung slightly mis- chievous mouth and two different large dark-grey eyes with a slightly vertical cast in them and very marked eyelashes. She sat sideways. One eye looked at you rather sidelong, the other seemed to watch something over your head. She spoke in a whisper which passed very easily into wheezy, not unkindly laughter. “*You’ll get no end of exercise on these stairs, my dear,’ she said to sister Prue, ‘no end of exercise. There’s times when I’m going up to bed when I start counting ’em, just to make sure that they aren’t taking in lodgers like the rest of us. There’s no doubt this ’ouse will strengthen your legs, my dear. Mustn’t get ’em too big and strong for the rest of you. But you can easy manage that by carrying 124 THE DREAM something, carrying something every time you go up or down. Ugh—ugh. That’ll equalise you. There’s always something to carry, boots it is, hot water it is, a scuttle of coals or a parcel.’ ““T expect it’s a busy ’ouse,’ said my mother, eating her buttered toast like a lady. “F ve learnt 'alotof French:and:Itahan and. some German: ‘and:.about: music, Eve’ gota pianola and I’d\love to play. it to you or Morty. He was always the one for music: Often: and often T think of you. ‘Tell mother; show her this letter} and let'mevknow soon about ‘you all and ‘don’t think unkind things. of me. ,~ Member, the.good times:we had, Ernie, when, We ; “dressed, up at, ‘Christmas cand father. didn’t -know ;us.in. the shop, and: how; -you made.me a; doll’s house, for my birthday. Oh! and cheese pies, JErnie!. Cheese pies!?.1:| visr 1a” THE: DREAM 175 © What were cheese’pies ?’2asked Matilda.! ! ““Tt was a sort of silly game—we: fad apéasihé people. I forget exactly... But it used to make’ us laugh=regular roll about! we did’) o0iss¢s ‘““*Then she gets back to you, Morty,’ aa Matilda, “ “ ‘Well; ‘there’s ’Arry. ’7E goes to *is elites aiid what if someone gets ’old of it there?’ ’Is\ sister; a Kep Woman. *:They’d ‘ardly let’ im go on work: oe after’such''a disgrace.’ 19 “€fOh Pdi soon——~ -T beaan? éllosine in “my hiothen’s (wake. But) Matilda stopped ‘me ‘with’ ‘a 178 THE ‘DREAM gesture.': Her! gesture swept) round and held my mother, who was indeed Sag atch near be end of what? she had ‘to say.. | Sa ‘“ “Toean see; ‘Matha,’ al Matilds, ast: OW you feel about Fanny: ‘Th “suppose it’s all naturals sores course, this letter- “She picked up the letter. Shi eres her saan mouth and: waggled her. clumsy: head: slowly ‘from side to side. ‘ ‘For thelife of:me I can’t believe the girl who wrote this is a: bad-hearted girl,’ she said. “‘You’re Lele pwrnt hss Slee penta a “You re bitter? is1212 +! ; ‘ fS‘Afters all——: A] began, but Matilda’ hand stopped me again: (“ “Bitter !? aa my sdaerat T; Knoles? er. > She can put.on-that in’cent air just as though othing ‘ad ‘appened! ate acon ande Led hg ae in be: wrong: - “Matilda ‘caaséd AY els aiid Rigi rs fio J ‘see,’ she said; (5‘Is see.s/ But why, should) Fanny take the: trouble to! writé this: letter, :if she hadn’t a real sort of affection for you all? ‘As though:she need have bothered herself about the. lot of ‘you! You're no. sort of ‘Help to her.;: There’s kindness inthis: letter,’ Martha, and»something more than kindness; Ate you going to throw it back at her? Her and her offers of help?s; Even: ‘if she: doesn’t crawl and’ repent as she’ ought /to -do!.-Won’t’ you even answer herletter?? bfo' zien | fe od won't be drawn into, ‘a: aarvesnandsrieg with er,’ said my mother. ‘No!:-So long: as: she’s:a Kep. Woman, she’s :no- daughter of, mine! J wash myijands-of /er;, And. as for’’en “Elp!:; ’Elp indeed! THE DREAM 179 It’s ’Umbug!0: Ifshe’d wanted ’elp us she could have married Mr: Crosby; as! le and ‘honest. a man as any; woman could wish fori6)/ oO: - So that’s that; said Matilda Good: conclusively) _“Abruptly ‘she-swivelled: her’ great head roundto Ernest: ‘And what sare’ you’ going : to’ ‘do, - Ernie? Are yow for turning down Fanny?) And: letting the cheese»:pies' just drop into: the’ mud°of Oblivium, as the saying .goes,. aa ihe aera aot ever “and ever:and ever?’ tacv - “Ernest sat back, put Ahilg hand dn ae Hookers pocket:and retained thoughtful for some moments. Tt s orkward,’ he said. Matilda’ offered him ‘no assistance.” “ ‘There's my | Yoting “Lady to consider,” ’ said nett and flushed an extreme scarlet. ee th We “My' mother turned’ her head. ‘sharply and looked at “him: Ernest with’ a, Stony, ‘expression did” not look at my ip tiene a) les oh!” said ‘Matilda: | “Here's comiebhate" new. And who. may your Young Lady be, Brnien. pole ies Well, ap ’adn't proposed to discuss ” er. "ere just yet. So neyer mind. what. ’ er. name, is. “She's. got a. little millinery. business. Vl .say ; that, for, ’er, And a. cleverer, nicer girl neyer. lived. We met at a. little dance... oN othing.i isn’t fixed.up.yet. beyond a sort of engagement. There’s been presents. ‘ Given ‘er.airing and so;forth. But naturally: I’ve mever told,’er:anything: about; Fanny.» ’aven’t discussed family ‘affairs with: ’er! much, not: so far. | Knows we were: in-business of some-sort’ andi’ad losses’and father died! of am accident; that’s about all: But ‘ een / ¢ 38 180; THE! DREAM Fanny—i: Fanny’s certainly goimg! to! be! orkward to-explaim.::>Notithat; I-want to be ’ard:.on: Fanny!” ““T see,’ said Matilda.: She glanced: a:mute in- terrogation at; Prue and: found:heér answer. in Prue’s facé. ;: Thén:she picked up the letter again and fread very distinetly: ‘One: hundred:and:two, Brantismoreé Gardens, Earl's Court.’:; She read:this address slowly. as:theugh she ‘wanted :to ‘print it on. her: nea ‘Top flat, you said it: was; Hrmie? 22.’ 2 “She turned to me. ‘And what are. you going tasio, Harry, abott:all thik?’ id sox: DT owant »to- see Fanny for | syself? is said. ‘I don’t believe ‘| ““Arry, said ,-my- mother, ‘now—once’. “for! all ++I. forbid. you to go near. ’er./I-. monet ave you corrupted.’ Don’t forbid him, Martine ‘said Matilda. | Tts no use forbidding him. Because he will! Any boy with any heart and spunk in him. would, g0 and see her after that letter. One, hundred and two, Brantismore Gardens, Earl’s Court, "she was very clear with the ‘address— it’s not very, far from here.’ “““T forbid you to go near ’er, *Arry,’ my mother reiterated. And’ then realising too late the full importance of Fanny’s létter, she picked it up. ‘I Won't “ave this answered. ‘PH burn it as it deserves: And’ forget about” it. Banish it ‘from beh mind: Phere? 2 “And ‘then my’ mothe toot’ up ind sraiinig’ a curious noise in her throat like the’ strangulation ef:a sob, she put°Fanny’s: letter mto: the fire ‘and took the ‘pokerito: ‘thrustit mto the: glow and«make it: burnii;; Weal stared in silence: asthe letter curled THE “DREHAM 181 up.and darkened»: burstzintosa swift flame and ‘be- came:in ‘an anétant: a: writhing, ‘agonised, ‘erackling, black cinder. : Then:she' sat down .again;-remained stull for a moment, and ‘then after a fierce struggle with her skirt-pocket dragged out: a: poor, old; dirty pocket-handkerchief :and> began to weepat ‘first quietly and then: witha gathering eran The rest of us sat aghast-at this explosion:*i) o10 14 - “*You omustn’t :go:near Fanny,» nee motif mother forbids,’ Said ea at ee idl but firmly. “Matilda looked at mein grim enquiry. ‘ “Tr shall; I said, and. was ina. terror. HR the ee ily tears béhind. my eyes should overflow: : “ @Arry!’. eried my mother: amidst. her» sobe ‘You'll oaepeagah iam ie bee ayy ve ea ‘First EF rp Themyour! 20 isae1d ow) bas boibayd “ «You see!’ said Brnésti pita istied buod -“The: storm -of.: her- weeping: rome as: onbibtish she: waited to hear my answer.: My-to let’ him‘ see ‘her after that. > He'll: do albhe can to: save her, he says: Who knows? He:might bring her: to repentance,' “ “More likely the other: way :about,” said my mother, oe eet eyes; wee brief. storm a be now over... “oT can’t ’elp feeling ay S a mistake, said Ernest ‘for ’Arry to: go and:see ’er? J Well: anyhow:don’t, otve: Gd up Teddlinabe you’ ve forgotten: the address; Harry,’ said) Matilda, ‘or else you: are. done, Let: si be: your own fréee-will and hot: forgetfulnéss,:.1f - yous: throw her over. One hundred and two Brantismore Gardens, Teun Court. You’d better write it down.’ g io ‘Onez hundred:and: ie “Radttaernce GartiBns’ MT wert over to my books onthe corner: table tocdo as she advised sternly:and: resolutely: in a fair round: hand on fie oust leah of oinEnIs Pmncipia Latinal? [ | jedy 21 tud .astov | “g 6 Cty | “My first Viel to» Poon it flat was puitir sirilike any of the moving scenes I acted in my‘mind before- hand.’ I went ‘roundabout half-past’ eight when shop was done on! the evening ‘next but one after Ernest’s revelation. The house seemed to mea very dignified one and'I went up a carpeted’ stair- case to her flat. © as naty the bell’ a i Baia the door herself. © IV2Oq (iy isvoost 1” THE : DREAM 133 ‘“Ttowas quite evident at: once: that:the smiling young womaii -im the doorway had! expected::to, see someonecelse instead: of the gawky youth: who ‘stood before her, and-that:for: some moments:she had: not the! slightest \idea who, Iwas.’ ‘Her: expression. of radiant -welcome changed to:a:defensive) coldness. What: ct you! want, sta a shi sald: to Aege silent stare. “She: ac phcerials very. ake She: poate grown, though: now Iwas taller than shé:was;and her wavy brown:hair was tied bya band of black velvet -with a brooch on one side of:it, adorned:'with clearcut stones of some: sort’ that: shone: and: twinkled:/' Her face ‘and dips had) a »warmer: ¢olour :than2I’ remem> bered: “And she:was wearing a:light soft:greenish- bluevrobe with ‘T:cleared my aks ‘taal I ‘said TOE ek ta cia know me? yitlidsss [deren “She knitted ret ire phows! andl: hrbal eame ‘her ola delightful’ smilecs ‘Why! | It’s Harry!’ sheeried and drew°me into the little ‘hall and “hugged: and kissec)mes 11° “My” little brother Hoes eh rida as big as Tiam!s “How:awonderful!?2 107! » YM’ oc! Ther she went ‘by meiand: etiuts ne deur and docked ‘at'me doubtfully.: ‘But why. didn’t you write tosme first’ to saycyou' were coming?~ Here’ am I dying fora talk: with you: and here’s @ visitor who's 184 THE ‘DREAM eoming to! beé® tes ) May: come:m at: any: sae Now whataml! to'do? bet me seeVariow a: ho Phe httle hall “ins which owes stouc>wasi iste swith white*paintiand pretty: Japanese pictures. : It had‘eupboards itd ‘hides away ccoats: and ‘hats:and an old ‘oak chests Several doors: opened into sit: and twoiwere ajar s-Throughsone Ishad:ia glimpse of a sofa and things set out for coffee, and through the other saw along mirror and’a chintz-coverediarm- chair. ioShe' seemed to ‘hesitate: between’ these: two rooms°and thet’ pushed! me” into’ the’ fouther) one and shut the-doorbehind'us:;) 9:7 900 10 doourd of ‘You! should have: written ‘to: telb:me jouw: were eoming,’ ishe: said0! ‘I’m dying to talk-t6 you and here’s someone ‘coming ‘who’s dying to: talk tome: But never: mind! let's talk-all we ¢an: «How are you? -Well+4t can ‘see that.!; But are: yow getting educated?:::And mother; :-how’s«mother?'~ What’s happened to:Prue?:s amen 18: -Ennest as mip asjever?’s+ t6 tho ca ‘oT attempted: tell ae a tried Va sive pete an impression ‘of Matilda; Good:arid ‘to: hint not too harshly at my mother’s white implacability. I be- gan to tell: her of my chemist’s shop and how much Latin and ‘Chemistry I knew, and in the: midst of it she darted away from me‘and stood listening. |. 2 ‘Tt: was the sound of.a latch-key at the door... ~ “ “My other visitor,’ shé said, hesitated a monient and was out of the ‘room, leaving me to. study her furniture and the! -eoffeé machine ‘that. bubbled on the tablet; She had left; the door-a little ajar.and I heard all. too plainly the sound of a.kiss and, then THE ‘DREAM 485 ! a:aian's: voice: 21 ahae bth was, Sta Bi. jolly VOICE 10 Bricqe tf if Tm tired, little ae on Din oe fs eta ‘Phis snew -paper iss the. devil. >We’ve «started ’ all wrong. °But I shall :pull itsoffsGods!0if: I: hadn’t this sweet pool of restito: plunge mto, I’d. go off my head! Pd have:nothing left: to:me but: head- lines. Take my coat; there’sadear. I smell coffee’ JT -heard: a omovement as: thdugh’ Fanny had ehecked her -visitor: almost :at the door of the-room I was in. I heard her Bay nie iG eeey about a-brother.:: 0. “Oh, Damn!’ a ine man very Heart ANot Hindther: of:*em! How many::brothers’ have! you got, Fanny? Send him« MEY ‘Tv neni aaa! an hour altogether, my dear fe is“Then -the door’ closed: ae a aa a iene discovered. it-was vata the. rest of the at ‘was inaudible; 227 31 . - (Fanny. Gy a. dittle: eis pits “bright Bead and. withal:demure; She !had: fer eet ay kissed again. Br ag, “ ‘Harry,’ ‘shé:said;: {I hate‘ to-ask you vi re rind come: again): but that other visitors+-I'd promised him first.;Do-you ‘mind, Harry?! -Pmolonging for e. good, time with’ you,’ a good:long talks ‘You: :get your Sundays, Harry? “Well; why not :eome’ here at’ three -on: Sunday when) J’ll-be: quite: alone and we'll, have. a, regular ‘pail old, nate ae rye mind, Harry?’ od: 4 iftde afta oe cata tm ainGe flat: Sede yelltias ante quite different :to.what ' they were: sutsidd. 186 THE ;‘DREAM if After alk: yourdid ought to have written: first,’ said Fanny, ‘instead of yey Tape ou omome out-of thedatky: I [ilo :v6 itor 3“ Therei was’ no/one in the: hall ieee We showed me out!and' not: even a shatior coat visible. Give me a: kiss, Harry,’ she; said:and:!I kissed *her: very readily:: ‘Quite’ ‘sure ao don't bite. she:! suid atsher door: |. eff ‘Not: albit2: I nike 7. ii to aoe kitten? 46{Sunday at three; she said as) I went downs ua carpeted: ‘staircase.’ | “« Sunday at Fresnel I I replied at. the bend of the stairs. 96.7150: ee ! EDane ia ieee was a shit “of Shia hall to all the flats with a fire burning ina fire-place and a man ready to call a-eab or) taxi for anyone who wanted: one; :'The-prosperity and comfort ‘of it ‘all impressed me greatly, and :I-was: quite proud tobe walking out of such a fine place. It was only ‘when I had gone: some way along the’street: that TI: began to-realise how) widely my plans‘for ‘the: piles had miscarried. EPL ‘“Tohad: not asked ther: whether shda -was' siting a bad: life or not and I had ‘reasoned with: her not‘ at all. .'The scenes I had:réhearsed in my mind before+ hand; of a strong:and simple-and resolute younger brother saving “his frail’ but: lovable’ ‘sister: from terrible degradations, had: indeed vanished altogether from: my mind when her door had-opened’ and: she had appeared. And here I was with the evening all ‘before:me and ‘nothing ito report to my family butz) theo profound | difference’ that’ lies» between THE DREAM 187 romance and reality. I decided not to report to my family at all yet, but to go for a very long walk and think this Fanny business over thoroughly, returning home when it would be too late for my mother to cross-examine me and ‘draw me out’ at any length. “T made for the Thames Embankment, for that afforded uncrowded pavements and the solemnity and incidental beauty appropriate to a meditative promenade. “Tt is curious to recall now the phases of my mind that night. At first the bright realities I came from dominated me: Fanny pretty and prosperous, kindly and self-assured, in her well-lit, well-fur- nished flat, and the friendly and confident voice I had heard speaking in the hall, asserted themselves as facts to be accepted and respected. It was de- lightful after more than two years of ugly imagina- tions to have the glimpse of my dear sister again so undefeated and loved and cared for and to look forward to a long time with her on Sunday and a long confabulation upon all I had done in the mean- time and all I meant to do. Very probably these two people were married after all, but unable for some obscure reason to reveal the fact to the world. Perhaps Fanny would tell me as much in the strictest confidence on Sunday and I could go home and astonish and quell my mother with the whis- pered secret. And even as I developed and cuddled this idea it grew clear and cold and important in my mind that they were not married at all, and the shades of a long-accumulated disapproval dimmed that first bright impression of Fanny’s little nest. I felt a growing dissatisfaction with the part 188 THE DREAM I had played in our encounter. I had let myself be handled and thrust out as though I had been a mere boy instead of a brother full of help and moral superiority. Surely I ought to have said something, however brief, to indicate our relative moral positions! I ought to have faced that man too, the Bad Man, lurking no doubt in the room with the mirror and the chintz-covered chair. He had avoided seeing me—because he could not face me! And from these new aspects of the case I began to develop a whole new dream of reproach and rescue. What should I have said to the Bad Man? ‘And 0, Sir, at last we meet , “Something like that. “My imagination began to leap and bound and soar with me. I pictured the Bad Man, dressed in that ‘immaculate evening dress’ which my novels told me marked the deeper and colder depths of male depravity, cowering under my stream of simple eloquence. ‘You took her,’ I would say, ‘from our homely but pure and simple home. You broke her father’s heart’—yes, I imagined myself saying that! —‘And what have you made of her?’ I asked. ‘Your doll, your plaything! to be pampered while the whim lasts and then to be cast aside!’ Or— ‘tossed aside’? “T decided ‘tossed aside’ was better. “T found myself walking along the Embankment, gesticulating and uttering such things as that.” “But you knew better?” said Firefly. “Even then.” “T knew better. But that was the way our minds worked in the ancient days.” THE DREAM 189 S07. “But,” said Sarnac, “my second visit to Fanny, like my first, was full of unexpected experiences and unrehearsed effects. The carpet on the pleasant staircase seemed to deaden down my moral tramp- lings, and when the door opened and I saw my dear Fanny again, friendly and glad, I forgot altogether the stern interrogations with which that second interview was to have opened. She pulled my hair and kissed me, took my hat and coat, said I had grown tremendously and measured herself against me, pushed me into her bright little sitting-room, where she had prepared such a tea as I had never seen before, little ham sandwiches, sandwiches of a delightful stuff called Gentleman’s Relish, straw- berry jam, two sorts of cake, and little biscuits to fill in any odd corners. ‘You are a dear to come and see me, Harry. But I had a sort of feeling that whatever happened you would come along.’ ““We two always sort of hung together,’ I said. “ “Always, she agreed. ‘I think mother and Ernie might have written me a line. Perhaps they will later. Ever seen an electric kettle, Harry? This is one. And you put that plug in there.’ ““T know,’ I said, and did as I was told. “There’s resistances embedded in the coating. I’ve been doing some electricity and chemistry. Council classes. Six’r seven subjects altogether. And there’s a shop-window in Tothill Street full of such things.’ “*T expect you know all about them,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve learnt all sorts of sciences,’ and 190 THE DREAM so we came to the great topic of what I was learning and what I was going to do. “Tt was delightful to talk to someone who really understood the thirst for knowledge that possessed me. I talked of myself and my dreams and ambi- tions, and meanwhile, being a growing youth, my arm swept like a swarm of locusts over Fanny’s wonderful tea. Fanny watched me with a smile on her face and steered me with questions towards the things she most wanted to know. And when we had talked enough for a time she showed me how to play her pianola and I got a roll of Schumann that Mr. Plaice had long ago made familiar to me and had the exquisite delight of playing it over for myself. These pianolas were quite easy things to manage, I found; in a little while I was already playing with conscious expression. “Fanny praised me for my quickness, cleared her tea-things away while I played, and then came and sat beside me and listened and talked and we found we had learnt quite a lot about music since our parting. We both thought great things of Bach, —whom I found I was calling quite incorrectly Batch—and Mozart, who also had to be pronounced a little differently. And then Fanny began to ques- tion me about the work I wanted to do in the world. ‘You mustn’t stay with that old chemist much longer,’ she declared. How would I like to do some sort of work that had to do with books, bookselling or helping in a library or printing and publishing books and magazines? ‘You’ve never thought of writing things?’ asked Fanny. ‘People do.’ ““T made some verses once or twice,’ I confessed, THE DREAM 191 ‘and wrote a letter to the Daily News about temper- ance. But they didn’t put it in.’ ‘““Have you ever wanted to write?’ “What, books? Like Arnold Bennett? Rather!’ “But you didn’t quite know how to set about it.’ “‘*Tt’s difficult to begin,’ I said, as though that was the only barrier. ““You ought to leave that old chemist’s shop,’ she repeated. ‘If I were to ask people I know and found out some better sort of job for you, Harry, would you take it?’ “ “Rather! said I.” “Why not altogether?” interrupted Firefly. “Oh! we used to say Rather,’ said Sarnac. “It was artistic understatement. But you realise how dreadfully I lapsed from all my preconceived notions about Fanny and myself. We talked the whole evening away. We had a delightful cold picnic sup- per in a pretty little dining-room with a dresser, and Fanny showed me how to make a wonderful salad with onions very finely chopped and white wine and sugar in the dressing. And afterwards came some more of that marvel, the pianola, and then very reluctantly I took my leave. And when I found myself in the streets again I had once more my former sense of having dropped abruptly from one world into another, colder, bleaker, harder, and with entirely different moral values. Again I felt the same reluctance to go straight home and have my evening dimmed and destroyed by a score of pitiless ques- tions. And when at last I did go home I told a lie. ‘Fanny’s got a pretty place and she’s as happy as can be,’ I said. ‘I’m not quite sure, but from what 192 THE DREAM she said, I believe that man’s going to marry her before very long.’ “My cheeks and ears grew hot under my mother’s hostile stare. “Did she tell you that?’ “ ‘Practically,’ I lied. ‘I kind of got it out of her.’ ““But ’e’s married already!’ said my mother. “*T believe there is something,’ I said. “ “Something! said my mother scornfully. ‘She’s stolen another woman’s man. ’E belongs to ’er —for ever. No matter what there is against ’er. “Whomsoever God Hath Joined, Let No Man Put Asunder!”—that’s what I was taught and what I believe. ’E may be older; ’e may have led her astray, but while she and ’e harbour together the sin is ’ers smutch as ’is. Did you see ’im?’ ““He wasn’t there.’ ““°?Adn’t the face. That’s so much to their credit. And are you going there again?’ ““Pve kind of promised : ‘It’s against my wishes, ’Arry. Every time you go near Fanny, ’Arry, you disobey me. Mark that. Let’s be plain about that, once and for all.’ “T felt mulish. ‘She’s my sister,’ I said. ““And Vm your mother. Though nowadays mothers are no more than dirt under their children’s feet. Marry ’er indeed! Why should ’e? Likely. *E’ ll marry the next one. Come, Prue, take that bit of coal off the fire and we'll go up to bed.’ ” § 8 “And now,” said Sarnac, “I must tell you of the queer business organisation of Thunderstone House THE DREAM 193 and the great firm of Crane & Newberry, for whom, at Fanny’s instance, I abandoned Mr. Humberg and his gold-labelled bottles of nothingness. Crane «& Newberry were publishers of newspapers, magazines and books, and Thunderstone House was a sort of fountain of printed paper, spouting an unending wash of reading matter into the lives of the English ‘people. “T am talking of the world two thousand years ago,” said Sarnac. “No doubt you have all been good children and have read your histories duly, but at this distance in time things appear very much foreshortened, and changes that occupied lifetimes and went on amidst dense clouds of doubt, mis- understanding and opposition seem to be the easiest and most natural of transitions. We were all taught that the scientific method came into human affairs first of all in the world of material things, and later on in the matters of psychology and human relation- ship, so that the large-scale handling of steel, and railways, automobiles, telegraphs, flying machines and all the broad material foundations of the new age were in existence two or three generations before social, political and educational ideas and methods were modified in correspondence with the new neces- sities these things had created. There was a great unanticipated increase in the trade and population of the world and much confusion and conflict, vio- lent social stresses and revolutions and great wars, before even the need of a scientific adjustment of human relationships was recognised. It is easy enough to learn of such things in general terms but hard to explain just what these processes of blind 194. THE DREAM readjustment meant in anxiety, suffering and distress to the countless millions who found themselves born into the swirl of this phase of change. As I look back to that time in which I lived my other life I am reminded of a crowd of people in one of my old Pimlico fogs. No one had any vision of things as a whole; everybody was feeling his way slowly and clumsily from one just perceptible thing to another. And nearly everybody was uneasy and disposed to be angry. “Tt is clear beyond question to us now, that the days of illiterate drudges were already past in the distant nineteenth century, for power-machinery had superseded them. The new world, so much more complicated and dangerous, so much richer and ampler, was a world insisting upon an educated population, educated intellectually and morally. But in those days these things were not at all clear, and it was grudgingly and insufficiently that access to knowledge and enlightenment was given by the learned and prosperous classes to the rapidly accu- mulating masses of the population. They insisted that it should be done by special channels and in a new and different class of school. I have told you of what passed for my education, reading and writing, rudimentary computations, ‘jogfry’ and so forth. That sort of process, truncated by employment at thirteen or fourteen, when curiosity and interest were just beginning to awaken, was as far as educa- tion had gone for the bulk of the common men and women in the opening years of the twentieth cen- tury. It had produced a vast multitude of people, just able to read, credulous and uncritical and piti- THE DREAM 195 fully curious to learn about life and things, pitifully wanting to see and know. As a whole the com- munity did nothing to satisfy the vague aspirations of those half-awakened swarms; it was left to ‘pri- vate enterprise’ to find what profits it could in their dim desires. A number of great publishing busi- nesses arose to trade upon the new reading public that this ‘elementary’ education, as we called it, had accumulated. “Tn all ages people have wanted stories about life. The young have always wanted to be told about the stage on which they are beginning to play their parts, to be shown the chances and possibilities of existence, vividly and dramatically, so that they may imagine and anticipate their own reactions. And even those who are no longer youthful have always been eager to supplement their experiences and widen their judgment by tales and histories and discussions. ‘There has been literature since there has been writing, since indeed there was enough language for story-telling and reciting. And always literature has told people what their minds were prepared to receive, searching for what it should tell rather in the mind and expectation of the hearer or reader—who was the person who paid—than in the unendowed wildernesses of reality. So that the greater part of the literature of every age has been a vulgar and ephemeral thing interesting only to the historian and psychologist of later times because of the light it threw upon the desires and imagina- tive limitations of its generation. But the popular literature of the age in which Harry Mortimer Smith was living was more abundant, more cynically insin- 196 THE DREAM cere, lazy, cheap and empty than anything that the world had ever seen before. “You would accuse me of burlesque if I were to tell you the stories of the various people who built up immense fortunes by catering for the vague needs of the new reading crowds that filled the hypertro- phied cities of the Atlantic world. There was a certain Newnes of whom legend related that one day after reading aloud some item of interest to his family he remarked, ‘I call that a regular tit-bit.’ From that feat of nomenclature he went on to the idea of a weekly periodical full of scraps of interest, cuttings from books and newspapers and the like. A hungry multitude, eager and curious, was ready to feed greedily on such hors d’ceuvre. So Tit-Bits came into existence, whittled from a thousand sources by an industrious and not too expensive staff, and Newnes became a man of wealth and a baronet. His first experiment upon the new public encouraged him to make a number of others. He gave it a monthly magazine full of short stories drawn from foreign sources. At first its success was uncertain, and then a certain Dr. Conan Doyle rose to fame in it and carried it to success with stories about crime and the detection of crime. Every intelligent person in those days, everyone indeed intelligent or not, was curious about the murders and such-like crimes which still abounded. Indeed, there could have been no more fascinating and de- sirable subject for us; properly treated such cases illuminated the problems of law, training and control in our social welter as nothing else could have done. The poorest people bought at least a weekly paper THE DREAM 197 in order to quicken their wits over murder mysteries and divorces, driven by an almost instinctive need to probe motives and judge restraints. But Conan Doyle’s stories had little of psychology in them; he tangled a skein of clues in order to disentangle it again, and his readers forgot the interest of the problem in the interest of the puzzle. “Hard upon the heels of Newnes came a host of other competitors, among others a certain Arthur Pearson and a group of brothers Harmsworth who rose to great power and wealth from the beginning of a small weekly paper called Answers, inspired originally by the notion that people liked fo read other people’s letters. You will find in the histories how two of these Harmsworths, men of great thrust and energy, became Lords of England and promi- nent figures in politics, but I have to tell of them now simply to tell you of the multitude of papers and magazines they created to win the errand-boy’s ceuffaw, the heart of the factory girl, the respect of the aristocracy and the confidence of the nouveau riche. It was a roaring factory of hasty printing. . Our own firm at Thunderstone House was of an older standing than these Newnes, Pearson, Harmsworth concerns. As early as the eighteenth century the hunger for knowledge had been apparent, and a certain footman turned publisher, named Dodsley, had produced a book of wisdom called the Young Man’s Companion. Our founder, Crane, had done the same sort of thing in Early Victorian times. He had won his way to considerable success with a Home Teacher in monthly parts and with Crane’s Circle of the Sciences and a weekly magazine and so 198 THE DREAM forth. His chief rivals had been two firms called Cassell’s and Routledge’s, and for years, though he worked upon a smaller capital, he kept well abreast of them. For a time the onrush of the newer popu- lar publishers had thrust Crane and his contempo- raries into the background and then, reconstructed and reinvigorated by a certain Sir Peter Newberry, the old business had won its way back to prosperity, publishing a shoal of novelette magazines and cheap domestic newspapers for women, young girls and children, reviving the Home Teacher on modern lines with a memory training system and a Guide to Success by Sir Peter Newberry thrown in, and even launching out into scientific handbooks of a not too onerous sort. “Tt is difficult for you to realise,’ said Sarnac, “what a frightful lot of printed stuff there was in that old world. It was choked with printed rubbish just as it was choked with human rubbish and a rubbish of furniture and clothing and every sort of rubbish; there was too much of the inferior grades of everything. And good things incredibly rare! You cannot imagine how delightful it is for me to sit here again, naked and simple, talking plainly and nakedly in a clear and beautiful room. The sense of escape, of being cleansed of unnecessary adhesions of any sort, is exquisite. We read a book now and then and talk and make love naturally and honestly and do our work and thought and research with well-aired, well-fed brains, and we live with all our senses and abilities taking a firm and easy grip upon life. But stress was in the air of the twentieth century. Those who had enough courage fought THE DREAM 199 hard for knowledge and existence, and to them we sold our not very lucid or helpful Home Teacher and our entirely base Guide to Success; but great multi- tudes relaxed their hold upon life in a way that is known now only to our morbid psychologists. They averted their attention from reality and gave them- selves up to reverie. They went about the world distraught in a day-dream, a day-dream that they were not really themselves, but beings far nobler and more romantic, or that presently things would change about them into a dramatic scene centring about themselves. These novelette magazines and popular novels that supplied the chief part of the income of Crane & Newberry, were really helps to reverie—mental drugs. Sunray, have you ever read any twentieth-century novelettes?” | “One or two,” said Sunray. “It’s as you say. I suppose I have a dozen or so. Some day you shall see my little collection.” “Very likely ours—half of them,—Crane & New- berry’s I mean. It will be amusing to see them again. The great bulk of this reverie material was written for Crane & Newberry by girls and women and by a type of slack imaginative men. These ‘authors,’ as we called them, lived scattered about London or in houses on the country-side, and they sent their writings by post to Thunderstone House, where we edited them in various ways and put the stuff into our magazines and books. Thunderstone House was a great rambling warren of a place open- ing out of Tottenham Court Road, with a yard into which huge lorries brought rolls of paper and from which vans departed with our finished products. It 200 THE DREAM was all a-quiver with the roar and thudding of the printing machinery. I remember very vividly to this day how I went there first, down a narrow road- way out of the main thoroughfare, past a dingy public-house and the stage door of a theatre.” “What were you going to do—pack up books? Or run errands?” asked Radiant. “T was to do what I could. Very soon I was on the general editorial staff.” “Editing popular knowledge?” Yeo’ “But why did they want an illiterate youngster like yourself at Thunderstone House?” asked Radi- ant. “I can understand that this work of instruct- ing and answering the first crude questions of the new reading classes was necessarily a wholesale improvised affair, but surely there were enough learned men at the ancient universities to do all the editing and instructing that was needed!” Sarnac shook his head. “The amazing thing is that there weren’t,” he said. “They produced men enough of a sort but they weren’t the right sort.” His auditors looked puzzled. “The rank-and-file of the men they sent out labelled M.A. and so forth from Oxford and Cam- bridge were exactly like those gilt-lettered jars in Mr. Humberg’s shop, that had nothing in them but stale water. The pseudo-educated man of the older order couldn’t teach, couldn’t write, couldn’t explain. He was pompous and patronising and prosy; timid and indistinct in statement, with no sense of the common need or the common quality. The pro- moted office-boy, these new magazine and newspaper THE DREAM 201 people discovered, was brighter and better at the job, comparatively modest and industrious, eager to know things and impart things. The editors of our periodicals, the managers of our part publica- tions and so forth were nearly all of the office-boy class, hardly any of them, in the academic sense, educated. But many of them had a sort of educa- tional enthusiasm and all of them a boldness that the men of the old learning lacked. . . .” Sarnac reflected. “In Britain at the time I am speaking about—and in America also—there were practically two educational worlds and two tradi- tions of intellectual culture side by side. There was all this vast fermenting hullabaloo of the new pub- lishing, the new press, the cinema theatres and so forth, a crude mental uproar arising out of the new elementary schools of the nineteenth century, and there was the old aristocratic education of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, which had picked up its tradition from the Augustan age of Rome. They didn’t mix. On the one hand were these office- boy fellows with the intellectual courage and vigour —oh! of Aristotle and Plato, whatever the quality of their intellectual equipment might be; on the other the academic man, affectedly Grecian, like the bought and sold learned man of the days of Roman slavery. He had the gentility of the house- hold slave; he had the same abject respect for patron, prince and patrician; he had the same metic- ulous care in minor matters, and the same fear of uncharted reality. He criticised like a slave, sneer- ing and hinting, he quarrelled like a slave, despised all he dared despise with the eagerness of a slave. 202 THE DREAM He was incapable of serving the multitude. The new reading-crowd, the working masses, the ‘democ- racy’ as we used to call it, had to get its knowledge and its wisdom without him. “Crane, our founder, had had in his day some inkling of the educational function such businesses as his were bound to serve in the world, but Sir Peter Newberry had been a hard tradesman, intent only on recovering the prosperity that the newer popular publishers had fileched away from our firm. He was a hard-driving man; he drove hard, he paid in niggardly fashion and he succeeded. He had been dead now for some years and the chief shareholder and director of the firm was his son Richard. He was nicknamed the Sun; I think because someone had quoted Shakespeare about the winter of our discontent being made summer by this Sun of York. He was by contrast a very genial and warming per- son. He was acutely alive to the moral responsibility that lay behind the practical irresponsibility of a popular publisher. If anything, he drove harder than his father, but he paid generously; he tried to keep a little ahead of the new public instead of a little behind; the times moved in his favour and he succeeded even more than his father had done. I had been employed by Crane & Newberry for many weeks before I saw him, but in the first office I entered in Thunderstone House I saw the evidences of his personality in certain notices upon the wall. They were printed in clear black letters on cards and hung up. It was his device for giving the house a tone of its own. “T remember ‘We lead; the others imitate,’ and THE DREAM 203 ‘If you are in any doubt about its being too good put it in” A third was: ‘If a man doesn’t know what you know that’s no reason for writing as if he was an all-round fool. Rest assured there is something he knows better than you do.’ ” § 9 “Tt took me some time to get from the yard of Thunderstone House to the office in which these inscriptions were displayed. Fanny had told me to ask for Mr. Cheeseman, and when I had discovered and entered the doorway up a flight of steps, which had at first been masked by two large vans, I made this demand of an extremely small young lady en- closed in a kind of glass cage. She had a round face and a bright red button of a nose. She was engaged, I realised slowly, in removing a foreign stamp from a fragment of envelope by licking the back of the paper. She did not desist from this occupation but mutely asked my business with her eyes. ““‘Oran-amoiment?’ she asked, still licking. “Pardon?” “‘Oran-amoiment?’ ““T’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t get it quite.’ “““Mus’ be deaf,’ she said, putting down the stamp and taking a sufficient breath for slow loud speech. ‘Ave you gottonappointment ?’ ““Oh!’ I said. ‘Yes. I was told to come here to-day and see Mr. Cheeseman between ten and twelve.’ She resumed her struggle with the stamp for a time. ‘S’pose you don’t c’lect stamps?’ she asked. ‘*Sintresting ’obby. Mr. Cheeseman’s written a 204 THE DREAM little ’andbook about it. Looking for a job, I sup- pose? May ’ave to wait a bit. Will you fill up that bit of paper there? Formality we ’ave to insist on. Pencil “The paper demanded my name and my business and I wrote that the latter was ‘literary employ- ment.’ ““Lordy,’ said the young lady when she read it. ‘I thought you was in for the ware’ouse. I say, Florence,’ she said to another considerably larger girl who had appeared on the staircase, ‘look at ’im. *E’s after litry emplyment.’ “““Cheek!’ said the second young lady after one glance at me, and sat down inside the glass box with a piece of chewing gum and a novelette just pub- lished by the firm. The young lady with the button nose resumed her stamp damping. They kept me ten minutes before the smaller one remarked: ‘Spose I better take this up to Mr. Cheeseman, Flo,’ and departed with my form. “She returned after five minutes or so. ‘Mr. Cheeseman says ’E can see you now for one minute,’ she said, and led the way up a staircase and along a passage that looked with glass windows into a print- er’s shop and down a staircase and along a dark passage to a small apartment with an office table, one or two chairs, and bookshelves covered with paper-covered publications. Out of this opened another room, and the door was open. ‘You better sit down here,’ said the young lady with the button nose. “That Smith?’ asked a voice. ‘Come right in.’ THE DREAM 205 “T went in, and the young lady with the button nose vanished from my world. “T discovered a gentleman sunken deeply in an arm-chair before a writing-table, and lost in con- templation of a row of vivid drawings which were standing up on a shelf against the wall of the room. He had an intensely earnest, frowning, red face, a large broad mouth intensely compressed, and stiff black hair that stood out from his head in many directions. His head was slightly on one side and he was chewing the end of a lead-pencil. ‘Don’t see it, he whispered. ‘Don’t see it.’ I stood awaiting his attention. ‘Smith, he murmured, still not look- ing at me, ‘Harry Mortimer Smith. Smith, were you by any chance educated at a Board School?’ “ “Yessir,” I said. “““*T hear you have literary tastes.’ “ “Yessir.” “*Then come here and stand by me and look at these damned pictures there. Did you ever see such stuff?’ “TI stood by his side but remained judiciously silent. The drawings I now perceived were designs for a magazine cover. Upon all of them appeared the words ‘The New World’ in very conspicuous lettering. One design was all flying machines and steamships and automobiles; two others insisted upon a flying machine; one showed a kneeling loin- clothed man saluting the rising sun—which however rose behind him. Another showed a planet earth half illuminated, and another was simply a workman going to his work in the dawn. “ Smith,’ said Mr. Cheeseman, ‘it’s you’ve got to 206 THE DREAM buy this magazine, not me. Which of these covers do you prefer? It’s your decision. Fiat experimen- tum in corpore vilt.’ “ “Meaning me, Sir?’ I said brightly. “His bristle eyebrows displayed a momentary surprise. ‘I suppose we're all fitted with the same tags nowadays, he remarked. ‘Which do you find most attractive?’ “ “Those aeroplane things, Sir, seem to me to be shoving it a bit too hard,’ I said. “ “Fm, said Mr. Cheeseman. ‘“That’s what the Sun says. You wouldn’t buy on that?’ “*T don’t think so, Sir. It’s been done too much.’ “ “How about that globe?’ “*Too like an Atlas, Sir.’ ““Aren’t geography and travel interesting?’ “They are, Sir, but somehow they aren’t attrac- tive.’ “ “Interesting but not attractive. H’m. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.... So it’s going to be that labour chap there in the dawn. You’d buy that, eh?’ “ “Ts this going to be a magazine about inventions and discoveries and progress, Sir?’ “ *Exactly.’ ““Well, the Dawn’s good, Sir, but I don’t think that sort of Labour Day Cartoon man is going to be very attractive. Looks rheumatic and heavy, Sir. Why not cut him out and keep the dawn?’ ““Bit too like a slice of ham, Smith—thin pink streaks.’ “T was struck by an idea. ‘Suppose, Sir, you kept that dawn scene and made it a bit earlier in the THE DREAM 207 year. Buds on the trees, Sir. And perhaps snowy mountains, rather cold and far off. And then you put a hand right across it—just a big hand—point- ing, Sir.’ “Pointing up?’ said Mr. Cheeseman. ““No, Sir, pointing forward and just a little up. It would sort of make one curious.’ ““Tt would. A woman’s hand.’ “Just a hand I think, Sir’ So evou d- buy that?’ ““P'd jump at it, Sir, if I had the money.’ “Mr. Cheeseman reflected for some moments, chewing his pencil serenely. Then he spat out small bits of pencil over his desk and spoke. ‘What you say, Smith, is exactly what I’ve been thinking. Exactly. It’s very curious.’ He pressed a bell-push on his desk and a messenger girl appeared. ‘Ask Mr. Prelude to come here. .. . So you think you’d like to come into Thunderstone House, Smith. [’m told you know a little about science already. Learn more. Our public’s moving up to science. [ve got some books over there I want you to read and pick out anything you find interesting.’ “ “Youll be able to find me a job, Sir?’ I said. “