Page:Tales of the Unexpected (1924).djvu/162

 him, and his face was intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway station, a string of loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of a cottage shot by the carriage window, and a bridge passed with a clap of noise, echoing the tumult of the train.

'After that,' he said, 'I dreamt often. For three weeks of nights that dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in this accursed life; and there—somewhere lost to me—things were happening—momentous, terrible things. . . . I lived at nights—my days, my waking days, this life I am living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover of the book.'

He thought.

'I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the dream, but as to what I did in the daytime—no. I could not tell—I do not remember. My memory—my memory has gone. The business of life slips from me'

He leant forward, and pressed his hands upon his eyes. For a long time he said nothing.

'And then?' said I.

'The war burst like a hurricane.'

He stared before him at unspeakable than things.

'And then?' I urged again.

'One touch of unreality,' he said, in the low tone of a man who speaks to himself, 'and they would have been nightmares. But they were not nightmares—they were not nightmares. No!'

He was silent for so long that it dawned upon me that there was a danger of losing the rest of the story. But he went on talking again in the same tone of questioning self-communion.

'What was there to do but flight? I had not thought the war would touch Capri—I had seemed to see Capri as being out of it all, as the contrast to it all; but two