The Substance of a Dream

by F. W. Bain

  THE SUBSTANCE OF A DREAM

  Translated from the Original Manuscript

  by

  F. W. BAIN

  _Mix, with sunset's fleeting glow, Kiss of friend, and stab of foe, Ooze of moon, and foam of brine, Noose of Thug, and creeper's twine, Hottest flame, and coldest ash, Priceless gems, and poorest trash; Throw away the solid part, And behold--a woman's heart._

  NIDRADARPANA

  Methuen & Co. Ltd.36 Essex Street W.C.LondonSecond EditionFirst Published . October 16th 1919Second Edition ... 1919

  DEDICATED

  to

  THE INEXPRESSIBLY GENTLE GENIUS

  of

  MY OWN MOTHER

  INTRODUCTION

  I could almost persuade myself, that others will like this littlefable as much as I do: so curiously simple, and yet so strangelyprofound is its delicate epitome of the old old story, the course oftrue love, which never did run smooth.

  And since so many people have asked me questions as to the origin ofthese stories, I will say a word on the point here. Where do they comefrom? I do not know. I discovered only the other day that some believethem to have been written by a woman. That appears to me to beimprobable. But who writes them? I cannot tell. They come to me, oneby one, suddenly, like a flash of lightning, all together: I see themin the air before me, like a little Bayeux tapestry, complete, fromend to end, and write them down, hardly lifting the pen from thepaper, straight off "from the MS." I never know, the day before, whenone is coming: it arrives, as if shot out of a pistol. Who can tell?They may be all but so many reminiscences of a former birth.

  The _Substance of a Dream_ is half a love-story, and half a fairytale: as indeed every love-story is a fairy tale. Because, althoughthat unaccountable mystery, the mutual attraction of the sexes, is thevery essence of life, and everything else merely accidental oraccessory, yet only too often in the jostle of the world, in thetrough and tossing of the waves of time, the accidental smothers theessential, and life turns into a commonplace instead of a romance. Andso, like every other story, this little story will perhaps be verydifferently judged, according to the reader's sex. The bearded criticwill see it with eyes very different from those with which it may beviewed by the fair voter with no beard upon her chin; for women, asthe great god says at the end, have scant mercy on their own sex, andthe heroine of the story is a strange heroine, an enigmatical MonaLisa, so to say, who will not appeal to everybody so strongly as shedoes to the Moony-crested Deity, when he sums her up at the close. Iventure, with humility, to concur in the opinion of the Deity, for sheholds me under the same spell as her innumerable other lovers. Thereader, a more formidable authority even than the god, must decide:only I must warn him that to understand, he must go to the very end.He will not think his time wasted, if he take half the delight inreading, as I did, in transcribing, the evidence in the case. Only,moreover, when he closes the book will he appreciate the mingledexactitude and beauty of its name: for no story ever had a name whichfitted it with such curious precision as this one. For the essence ofa dream is always that along with its weird beauty, it countersexpectation, often in such queer, ludicrous, kaleidoscopic ways. So itis, here.

  * * * * *

  Many bitter things, since the beginning, have men said of women,though neither so many nor so bitter, as the witty Frenchman cynicallyremarks, as the things women have said of one another. Poor Eve haspaid very dear for that apple: the only wonder is, that she was notmade responsible also for the Flood: but we have not got the whole ofthat story: Noah's wife may have dropped some incriminating documentsinto the water, for the Higher Criticism to unearth by and by: theEternal Feminine may have had a hand in it after all, as she isgenerally to be found somewhere behind the scenes, wherever mischiefbrews for mortal man. She comes down the ages, loaded withaccusations; and yet, somehow or other, they do not seem to have doneher much harm. And the reason is, that she possesses, in supremeperfection, the art of disarming her antagonist, having been verycunningly constructed by the Creator for that very purpose: she islike a cork; she will not drown, under any flood of charges: shefloats, _quand meme_: (two words that she might very well take, likethe inimitable Sarah, for her motto:) so that, be as angry as youplease with her, you generally find yourself not only unable tocondemn her, but even ready to beg her pardon, and rather glad, on thewhole, to get it. It is a hopeless case. And all the more, because nowoman ever lived, bad or good, who could be got to understand what ismeant by "playing cricket": you cannot make her keep the rules in anygame: she plays to win, like a German, and invariably cheats, if shecan: international law counts, only as long as it is for and notagainst her: if you find her out, and scold her, she pouts, and willnot play. And then, if, as is commonly the situation, you want her toplay, very badly, what are you to do? Yes, it is a hopeless case.

  * * * * *

  And yet, if we look into the matter with that stern impartiality whichits public importance demands, we may perceive, that though there is,it must be candidly owned, an element of truth in the charges broughtagainst her, they are founded, for all that, largely onmisunderstanding. It is man himself, her accuser, who is very nearlyalways to blame. His intelligence as compared with her own, is clumsy:(it is the difference between the dog and the cat:) he does notrealise the unfathomable gulf that divides her nature from his own,and for lack of imaginative tact, judging her by himself, heenormously overestimates the part played by reason in her behaviour.Hence when, as she is always doing, she lets him down, he breaks out,(obtusely) into denunciation and reproach, taking it for granted, thatwhat she did, she did, deliberately. But that is his mistake. Womennever act by deliberation, least of all in their relations with men.Reason has hardly anything to do with it. A woman is a weapon,designed by the Creator, who generally knows what he is doing, tofascinate the other sex: that is her essence and her _raison d'etre_:the woman who does not do it is a failure, and she is Nature's triumphand entelechy, who does it best. And this every woman knows, byinstinct, and feels, long before she knows it, almost as soon as shecan stand upon her feet: consequently, no artificially elaboratedcompliment, no calculated flattery, ever touches her so near, as itdoes, when she perceives that her personality _tells_, acts like acharm, on any given man: a point about which no woman ever blunders,as a man often so ridiculously does about himself: she invariablydetects, by unerring instinct, when her arrow hits its mark. And thisinvoluntary homage she finds so irresistibly delectable, going as itdoes down to the very depths of her being, and endorsing it, that sheliterally _cannot_ deny herself the pleasure of basking in it, makinghay, so to say, while her sun shines, revelling in the consciousnessof her power all the more delicious because she knows only too wellthat she must lose it later on, as youth flies: old age, _i.e._ theloss of her charm, being every woman's ogre, the skeleton in hercupboard, which she dreads far more than death, just as the onlydisease which she shudders to face is the smallpox, for a similarreason. And so, when she finds her spell working, she lets herself go:never dreaming what interpretation her victim puts on her behaviour:and then, all at once, she awakes to discover with what fire she wasignorantly playing. And then it is, that she recoils, on the verge:and then it is, that thwarted in the very moment that he deemedtriumph secured, the baffled lover falls into fury and abuse, becausehe imagines her to have been all along clearly aware of what she wasabout, which is exactly what hardly one woman in a million does. Notbeing a man, she does not understand: her end is only his beginning:his object is possession, still to come: hers is already gained
in theform of the tribute to her charm: she was only playing (every woman isa child), he was in deadly earnest, and took her purely instinctiveself-congratulation for a promise deliberately made. Suddenlyilluminated, she lets him down abruptly with a bump, all the harderthat she never meant to do it (the _coquette_ does: but she is ahorrible professional, methodising feminine instinct, for prey: apsychological ghoul, feeding on souls instead of bodies, and deservingextermination without benefit of clergy). The real crime of woman isnot so much a crime as a defect: she is weak, as all the sages know,and all languages prove, though "democracy" ignores it; it is herstrength, and half her charm, that she cannot stand alone, like acreeper. But that is why you cannot depend on her, good or bad.Irresolution is her essence: she will "determine" one way, and act inanother, according to the pressure. Instinct, inclination or aversion,vanity, emotion, pity or fear, or even mere chance: these are hermotives, the forces that move her: reason counts with her forabsolutely nothing, a thing like arithmetic, useful, evenindispensable, but only for adding up a grocer's bill, or catching atrain. It has literally nothing to do with her heart. There is nofolly like the folly of supposing that it has: yet on this folly restmost of the accusations against her. Reduce her to a rational being,and you degrade her to the level of an inferior man. But she is nothis inferior: she is his dream, his magnet, his force, hisinspiration, and his fate. Take her away, and you annihilate him:Othello's occupation's gone. Nine-tenths of the great things done inthe world have been done for a woman. Why? Exactly because she wouldburn down a street to boil her baby's milk. No rational being would dothat: but we all owe our lives to it.

  And hence, misogyny is only a pique. To fall foul of the sea, likeXerxes, when it wrecks your ambitions, is to behave as he did, like aspoiled child, without the child's excuse. "If you burn your fingers,is the flame to blame?" You should have known better. When Aristotlewas reproved, by some early political economist, for giving alms to abeggar, he replied: I gave not to the man, but humanity. Admirableretort! which is exactly in point here. When she requited your homagewith such encouraging smiles, it was not _you_ but the man in you,that appealed to her. And because you are _a_ man, are you necessarily_the_ man? Not at all. And argument is mere waste of time: reason isnot the court of appeal. _If of herself she will not love, nothingcan make her._ Yet why draw the poet's ungallant conclusion? Whyshould _the devil take her_? Because she was weak (were _you_ notweak?) is she therefore to be damned beyond redemption? Becauseflattery was sweet, must she give herself away to every male animalthat confesses the spell? Surely that is not only harsh, butpreposterous, even outrageous. Are you sure that your merit is worthyof such generosity?

  And yet, here is the human catastrophe. Why did the Creator scatterhis sexual attraction so anomalously that it is so rarelyreciprocated, each lover pursuing so often another who flies him for athird, as in _Midsummer Night's Dream_, an imbroglio oddly enoughfound in a little poem identical in the Greek Moschus and the HindooBhartrihari? Was it blunder or design? Why could he not have madeaction and reaction equal and opposite, as they are in mechanics? Forif affection could not operate at all, unless it was mutual, therewould be no unhappy, because ill-assorted, marriages. What adifference it would have made! Had mutual gravitation been the law ofthe sexes, as it is of the spheres, this Earth would never have stoodin need of a Heaven, since it would have existed already: for the onlyearthly heaven is a happy marriage. As it is, even when it is not aHell, a marriage is only too often but an everlasting sigh.

  * * * * *

  And not marriage only, but life. For here lies the solution of amystery that has baffled the sages, who have failed to discover itchiefly because they have blinded themselves by their own theologicaland philosophical delusions, idealism and monotheism. Why is it, thatgazing at Nature's inexhaustible beauty, thrown at us with such lavishprofusion in her dawns and her sunsets, her shadows and her moods, inthe roar of her breakers and the silence of her snows, the gloom ofher thunder and the spirit of her hills, the blue of her distance andthe tints of her autumns, the glory of her blossom and the dignity ofher decay, her heights and her abysses, her fury and her peace--why isit, that as we gaze insatiably at these never ending miracles, we arehaunted by so unaccountable a sadness, which is not in the thingsthemselves, for Nature never mourns, but in some element that weourselves import? For if the Soul be only Nature's mirror, herlooking-glass, whence the melancholy? It is because beneath oursurface consciousness, far away down below, in the dark organic depthsthat underlie it, we feel without clearly understanding that, as theHindoos put it, we have missed the fruit of our existence, owing toour never having found our other half. For every one of us, so farfrom being a self-sufficient whole, an independent unity, isincomplete, requiring for its metaphysical satisfaction, itscomplement, apart from which it never can attain that peace whichpasseth all understanding, for which it longs obscurely, and must everbe uneasy, till it finds it. For just as no misfortunes whatever canavail to mar the bliss of the man who has beside him the absolutesympathy of his feminine ideal, so on the other hand no worldlysuccess of any kind can compensate for its absence. All particularcauses of happiness or misery are swallowed up and sink intoinsignificance and nullity compared with this: this present, theydisappear: this absent, each alone is sufficient to wreck the soul,fluttering about without rudder or ballast on the waves of the world.Duality is the root, out of which alone, for mortals, happiness canspring. And the old Hindoo mythology, which is far deeper in itssimplicity than the later idealistic pessimism, expresses thisbeautifully by giving to every god his other half; the supremeinstance of which dualism is the divine Pair, the Moony-crested godand his inseparable other half, the Daughter of the Snow: soorganically symbolised that they coalesce indistinguishably into one:the _Arddanari_, the Being half Male half Female, He whose left halfis his wife. That is the true ideal: cut in two, and destroyed, by thedismal inhuman monotheism of later sophistical speculation.

  * * * * *

  It was long before I understood this: the solution came to mesuddenly, of its own accord, as all profound solutions always come,apparently by accident: like a "fluke" in a game of skill, where oftenunskilfulness unintentionally does something that could not beachieved by any degree of skill whatever, short of the divine.[1] Andthe two things that combined to produce my spark of illumination were,as it so fell out, the two things that mean most to me, a sunset and achild. The child was looking at the sunset, and I was looking at thechild. Some readers of these stories have been introduced to herbefore, and will be obliged to me for renewing the acquaintance, asthey would be to the postman who brought them news of an old friend.

  The sunset was like every other sunset, the garment of a dying deity,and a gift of god: but it had a special peculiarity of its own, and itwas this strange peculiarity that arrested the attention of the child.For children are little animals, _terram spectantia_, taking sunsetsand other commonplaces such as mother, father, home, furniture andcarpets, generally for granted, being as a rule absorbed in the greatthings of life, that is, play. This child was very diligently blowingbubbles, occasionally turning aside up a by-path to make abubble-pudding in the soap-dish: the ruckling noise of this operationpossessing some magical fascination for all childhood. And in themeanwhile, yellow dusk was gradually deepening in the quiet air.Presently the tired sun sank like a weight, red-hot, burning his waydown through filmy layers of Indian ink. The day had been rainy, butthe clouds had all dissolved imperceptibly away into a broken chain ofveils of mist, which looked with the sun behind them like droppingshowers of liquid gold, or copper-coloured waterfalls: whileunderneath or through them the lines of low blue hills showed now halfobscured, now clear and sharp in outline as if cut with scissors outof paper and stuck upon the amber background of the sky. And then camethe miracle. Right across the horizon, a little higher than the sun, along thin bar of cloud suddenly changed colour, becoming rich darkpurple, and all along its jagge
d upper edge the light shot out in onecontinuous sheet of bright glory to the zenith, while below therepoured from the bar a long cascade, a very Niagara of golden mist andrain, as if the flood-gates of some celestial dam had suddenly givenway, and all the precious stuff were escaping in a cataract throughthe rift, in one gigantic plunge, to be lost for ever in somebottomless abyss.

  Suddenly, the dead silence struck me: my ear missed the "ruckle," andthe occasional exclamations of delight. I turned abruptly, and glancedat the child. She was standing still as a stone, with one hand just infront of her holding the forgotten pipe, arrested on the way to hermouth, as the heavenly vision struck her: rapt, lost in her eyes,which were filled with wonder to the brim, open-mouthed, entranced,with a smile on her lips of which she was totally unconscious, faint,involuntary, seraphic, indescribable. The ecstasy of union hadswallowed her: she was gone. I called her by her name: she neverheard: her soul was away at the golden gates.

  And I said to myself, as I gazed at her with intense curiosity, mixedwith regret that I was not Raffael, so marvellous was the picture:This, this is the wisdom of the sages, the secret of Plotinus and theBuddhists: this is Nirwana, Moksha, Yoga, the unattainable ecstasy ofbliss, the absolute fruition, which men call by many names: the endtowards which the adult strives, in vain, to recover what he lost byceasing to be a child: a child, which is sexless, knowing as yetnothing of the esoteric dissatisfaction of the soul that wants andhas not found. Aye! to reach the mystic union, the absolute extinctionof the Knower in the All; to lose one's Self in Infinity, without aremnant of regret; to attain to the unattainable, the point ofself-annihilation where all distinction between subject and object,something and nothing, disappears, it is necessary to be a child: tobe born again. _Rebirth_! the key to the enigma of unhappiness liesthere!

  * * * * *

  And after a while, as I watched her, she came back to herself. Oureyes met: and she looked at me long, with a far-off expression that Icould not define. And at last, she gave a little sigh. Daddy, shesaid, why does the golden rain never fall here? Our rain is alwaysonly common rain.

  And I said solemnly: Little girls are the reason why. But she didn'tunderstand. She looked at me reproachfully with puzzled eyes--suchgreat, grey, beautiful, sea-green eyes!--and then drew a long breath.And she went back to her bubbles, and together we watched them go asthey floated away into the valley, wild with excitement as to whethermy bubble or her bubble would go farthest before it burst--till theRhadamanthine summons came, and the Bubble-Blower went to bed.

  _Poona_, 1919.

  FOOTNOTES:

  [Footnote 1: _O quantum est subitis casibus ingenium!_ an exquisiteline of Martial which ought to be posted on a board on everyputting-green.]