Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  Perforce to Dream by John Wyndham

  “But, my dear Miss Kursey,” said the man behind the desk, speaking with patient clarity. “It is not that we have changed our minds about the quality of your book. Our readers were enthusiastic. We stand by our opinion that it is a charming light romance. But you must see that we are now in an impossible position. We simply cannot publish two books that are almost identical—and now that we know that two exist, we can’t even publish one of them. Very understandably, either you or the other author would feel like making trouble. Equally understandably, we don’t want trouble of that kind.”

  Jane looked at him steadily, with hurt reproach. “But mine was first,” she objected.

  “By three days,” he pointed out.

  She dropped her eyes, and sat playing with the silver bracelet on her wrist. He watched her uncomfortably. He was not a man who enjoyed saying no to personable young women at any time; also, he was afraid she was going to cry.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, earnestly.

  Jane sighed. “I suppose it was just too good to be true—I might have known.” She looked up. “Who wrote the other one?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know that we can—”

  Jane broke in: “Oh, but you must! It wouldn’t be fair not to tell me. You simply must give me—us—a chance to clear this up.”

  His instinct was to steer safely out of the whole thing. If he had had the least doubt about her sincerity, he would have done so. As it was, his sense of justice won. She did have a right to know, and the chance to sort the whole thing out, if she could.

  “Her name is Leila Mortridge,” he admitted.

  “That’s her real name?”

  “I believe so.”

  Jane shook her head. “I’ve never heard it. It’s so queer… Nobody can have seen my manuscript. No one knew I was writing it. I—I just can’t understand it at all.”

  The publisher had no comment to make on that. Coincidences, he knew, do occur. It seems sometimes as though an idea were afloat in the ether, and settles in two independent minds simultaneously. But this was something beyond that. Save for the last two chapters. Miss Kursey’s Amaryllis in Arcady had not only the same story as Miss Mortridge’s Strephon Take My Heart, but the same settings, as well as long passages of identical and near identical conversation. There could be absolutely no question of chance about it.

  Curiously, he asked, “Where did it come from? How did you get the idea of it in the first place, I mean?”

  Jane saw that he was looking at her with a peculiar intensity. She looked back at him uncertainly, miserably aware of tears not far behind her eyes.

  “I—I dreamed it—at least, I think I dreamed it,” she told him.

  She was not able to see the puzzled astonishment that came over his face, for suddenly, and to her intense exasperation, tears from a source deeper than mere disappointment about the book overwhelmed her.

  He groaned inwardly, and sat regarding her with helpless embarrassment.

  Out in the street again, conscious of looking far from her best although considerably recovered, Jane made her way to a café in a mood of deep self-disgust. The exhibition she had put on was the kind of thing she heartily despised: a thing, in fact, that she would have thought herself quite incapable of a year ago.

  But the truth of the matter, which she scarcely admitted to herself, was that she was no longer the same person as she had been a year ago. A careful observer would have said that her manner was a little altered, her assurance more individual, though superficially she was the same Jane Kursey doing the same job in the same way. Only she knew how much more tedious the job had gradually become.

  It is galling for a young woman of literary leanings to keep on day after day, for what seems several lifetimes, writing with a kind of standardized verve and coded excitement about such subjects as diagonal tucks, slashed necklines, swing backs and double peplums. It is frustrating for her to have to season her work with the adjectives heavenly, tiny, captivating, enchanting, divine, delicious, marching around and around like an operatic army, when her deepest instinct is to put her soul on paper—when, in fact, something so extraordinary has happened to her that she feels her spirit should be mounting skylark-like to the empyrean; that her heart is no less tender than that of Elaine the Lovable; that, should the occasion arise, she would be found not incompetent among the hetaerae.

  The publisher’s letter, therefore, had, despite her attempts to retain a level sensibleness, given her a choky, heart-thumping excitement. It did more than disclose the first rungs of a new and greatly preferable career for which many of her associates also struggled: it petted and pleased her secret self. The publisher had spoken of literary merit as if drawing a line between her and those others who worked with three-quarters of their attention on the film rights.

  Her novel, he told her frankly, he found charming—an idyllic romance which could not fail to delight a large number of readers. There were, perhaps, a few passages where the feeling was a little Elizabethan for these prudish times, but they could be toned down with imperceptible loss.

  The only qualification of her delight was a faint suspicion of her own undeserving—but, after all, was a dream any more of a gift than a talent? It was just a matter of the way your mind worked, and if hers happened to work better when she slept than when she was awake, what of it? Nobody had ever been heard to think the worse of Coleridge for dreaming Kubla Khan rather than thinking it up. Besides, she would not be taken literally even though she admitted frankly to dreaming it…

  And now came this blow. Something so like her own story that the publisher would not touch either of them. She did not see how that could possibly have happened. She had not told anyone anything about it—not even that she was working on a book.

  She gazed moodily into her coffee. Then, as she raised the cup, she became aware of the other person who had come to her table almost unnoticed. The woman was looking her over with careful speculation. Jane paused with her cup a few inches from her mouth, returning the scrutiny. The woman was about her own age, quietly dressed, wearing a fur coat that was beyond Jane’s means, and a becoming small fur cap on her fair hair. But for the difference in dress she was not unlike Jane herself; the same build and size, much the same coloring; hair, too, that was a similar shade, though differently worn.

  Jane lowered her cup. As she put it down, she noticed a wedding ring on the other’s hand.

  The woman spoke first: “You are Jane Kursey,” she said, in a tone that was more statement than question.

  Jane had a curious sense of tenseness. “Yes,” she admitted.

  “My name,” said the woman, “is Leila Mortridge.”

  “Oh,” said Jane. She could not find anything to add to that at the moment.

  The other woman sat and sipped her coffee, with Jane’s eyes following every movement. She set her cup very precisely in the saucer, and looked up again.

  “It seemed likely that they would be wanting to see you too,” she said. “So I waited outside the publisher’s to see.” She paused. “There is something here that requires an explanation. Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes,” Jane agreed again.

  For some seconds they regarded one another levelly without speaking.

  “Nobody knew I was writing it,” the woman observed.

  “Nobody knew I was writing it,” said Jane.

  She looked at the woman unhappily, resentfully, bitterly. Even if it had been only a dream—and it was hard to believe that it had, for she’d never heard of a dream that went on in installments night by night, so vividly that one seemed to be living two alternating lives—but even if it were, it was her dream, her private dream, save for such parts of it as she had chosen to write down—and even those parts should remain private until they were published.

  “I don’t see—” she began, and then broke off, feeling none too certain of herself.

  The other woman’s self-control was
not good, either; the corners of her mouth were unsteady.

  Jane said, “We can’t talk in this place. My flat’s quite near.”

  They walked the few hundred yards there, each immersed in thought. Not until they were in Jane’s small sitting room did the woman speak again. When she did, she looked at Jane as though she were hating her.

  “How did you find out?” she demanded.

  “Find out what?” Jane countered.

  “What I was writing.”

  Jane regarded her coldly. “Attack is sometimes the best form of defense, but not in this case. The first I knew of your existence was in the publisher’s office about one hour ago. I gather that you found out about me in the same way, just a little earlier. That makes us practically even. I know you can’t have read my manuscript. I know I’ve not read yours. It’s a waste of time starting with accusations. What we have to find out is what has really happened. I—I—” She floundered to a stop, without any idea how she had intended to continue.

  “Perhaps you have a copy of your manuscript here?” suggested Mrs. Mortridge.

  Jane hesitated; then, without a word, she went to her desk, unlocked a lower drawer, and took out a pile of carbon copy. Still without speaking, she handed it over. The other took it without hesitation. She read a page, and stared at it for a little; then she turned on and started to read another page.

  Jane went into her bedroom and stood there awhile, staring listlessly out of the window.

  When she went back, the pile of pages was lying on the floor, and Leila was hunched forward, crying uncontrollably into a scrap of handkerchief.

  Jane sat down, looking moodily at the script and the weeping girl. For the moment she was feeling cold and dead inside, as if with a numbness which would turn to pain as it passed. Her dream was being killed, and now she was terribly afraid of life without it…

  The dream had begun about a year ago. When and where it was placed, she neither knew nor cared to know—a never-never land, perhaps, for it seemed always to be spring or early summer there in a sweet, unwithering Arcady. She was lying on a bank where the grass grew close like green velvet. It ran down to a small stream of clear water chuckling over smooth white stones. Her bare feet were dabbling in the fresh coolness. The sunshine was warm on her bare arms. Her dress was a simple white cotton frock, patterned with small flowers and little amorets.

  There were small flowers set among the grass, too: she could not name them, but she could describe them minutely. A bird no larger than a blue-tit came down close to her, and drank. It turned a sparkling eye on her, drank again, and then flew away, unafraid. A light breeze rustled the taller grasses beside her and shimmered the trees beyond. Her whole body drank in the warmth of the sunshine as though it were an elixir.

  Dimly, she could remember another kind of life—a life full of work and bustle—but it did not interest her: it was the dream, and this the reality. She could feel the ripples against her feet, the grass under her finger tips, the glow of the sun. She was intensely aware of the colors, the sounds, the scents in the air; aware as she had never been before, not merely of being alive, but of being part of the whole flow of life.

  She had a glimpse of a figure approaching in the distance. A quickening excitement ran through every vein, and her heart sang. But she did not move. She lay with her head turned to one side on her arm. A tress of hair rested on her other cheek, heavy and soft as a silk tassel. She let her eyes close, but more than ever she was aware of the world about her.

  She heard the soft approaching footsteps and felt the faint tremor of them in the ground. Something light and cool rested on her breast and the scent of flowers filled her nostrils. Still she did not move. She opened her eyes. A head with short dark curls was just above her own. Brown eyes were watching her from a suntanned face. Lips were smiling slightly. She reached up with both arms, and clasped them round his neck…

  That was how it had begun. The sentimental dream of a schoolgirl, but preciously sweet for all that, and with a bright might-have-been quality which dulled still further the following dull day. She could remember waking with a radiance which was gradually drained away by the dimness of ordinary things and people.

  She was left, too, with a sense of loss—of having been robbed of what she should have been, and should have felt. It was as though in the dream she had been her rightful, essential self, while by day she was forced to carry out a drab mechanical part as though she were an animated clay figure—something that was not properly alive, and in a world that was not properly alive.

  The following night, the dream came again. It did not repeat; it continued. She had never heard of a dream that did that, but there it was—the same countryside, the same people, the same particular person, and herself. A world in which she felt quite familiar, and with people whom she seemed always to have known.

  There was a cottage which she could describe to the smallest detail, where she seemed to have spent all her life, in a village where she knew everyone. There was her work, at which her fingers flickered surely among innumerable bobbins and produced exquisite lace upon a black pillow. The neighbors she talked to, the girls she had grown up with, the young men who smiled at her, were all of them quite real. They became even more real than the world of offices, dress shows, and editors demanding copy.

  In her waking world, she came gradually to feel a drab among drabs; in her village world, she was alive, perceptive—and in love…

  For the first week or two, she had opened her eyes on the workaday world with painful reluctance, afraid that, should the dream slip from her, it would not return. But it was not finished. It went on, becoming all the time less elusive and more solid until, tentatively, she allowed herself the hope that it had come to stay. And as the weeks went on, the dream continued, building episode on episode, and it began curiously to illuminate her daily “real” life and pierce the dullness with unexpected glimpses. She found pleasure in noticing details which she had never observed before. Things and people changed in value and importance. She had more sense of detachment, and less of struggle. It came to her one day with a shock to find how her interests had altered and her impatiences had declined.

  The dream had caused that. Now that she had begun to feel there was little likelihood of it fading away any moment, she could risk feeling happy in it—and the more tolerant of things outside it. The world looked altogether a different place when you knew that you had only to close your eyes at night to come alive as your true self in Arcady.

  And, why, she wondered, could real life not be like that? Or perhaps for some people it was—sometimes, and in glimpses…

  There had been that wonderful night when they had gone along the green path which led up the little hill to the pavilion. She had been excited, happy, a little tremulous. They had lain on cushions, looking out between the square oak pillars while the sun sank smoky red, and the thin banks of cloud lost their tinge to become dark lines across a sky that had turned almost green. All the sounds had been soft. A faint susurring of insects, the constant whisper of leaves, and, faraway, a nightingale singing… His muscles were firm and brave; she was soft as a sun-warmed peach. Does a rose, she wondered, feel like this when it is about to open…?

  And then she had rested content, looking up at the stars, listening to the nightingale still singing, and to all nature gently breathing.

  In the morning, when her eyes were open to her familiar small room and her ears to the sound of traffic in the street below, she lay for a while in happy lassitude. It was then that she had decided to write the book—not, at first, for others to read, but for herself, so that she would never forget.

  Unashamedly it was a sentimental book—one such as she had never thought herself capable of writing. But she enjoyed writing it, and reliving in it. And then it had occurred to her that perhaps she was not the only person who was tired of carrying a tough, unsentimental carapace. So she produced a second version of the book, somewhat pruned—though not quite enou
gh, apparently, for the publisher’s taste—and added an ending of her own invention.

  And here, now, was the inexplicable result.

  The first pressure of Leila Mortridge’s flood of tears had subsided. She was dabbing now, and giving little sniffs.

  With the air of one accepting the necessity of somebody being practical, Jane said: “It seems to me it’s quite clear that one of two things has happened: either there’s some kind of telepathy between us—and I don’t see that that fits very well—or we are both having the same dream.”

  Mrs. Mortridge sniffed again. “That’s impossible,” she said, decidedly.

  “The whole situation’s impossible,” Jane told her shortly. “But it’s happened—and we have to find the least impossible explanation. Anyway, is two people having the same dream so much more unlikely than anybody having a dream which goes on like a serial?”

  Mrs. Mortridge dabbed, and regarded her thoughtfully. “I don’t see,” she said, a trifle primly, “how an unmarried girl like you could be having a dream like that at all.”

  Jane stared. “Come off it,” she advised, briefly. “Besides… it seems to me every bit as unsuitable for a respectably married woman.”

  Mrs. Mortridge looked forlorn. “It’s ruined my marriage.”

  Jane nodded understandingly. “I was engaged—and it wrecked that. How could one? I mean, after—” She let the sentence trail away.

  “Quite,” said Mrs. Mortridge.

  They fell into abstract contemplation for some long moments.

  Mrs. Mortridge broke the silence to say, “And now you’re spoiling it, too.”

  “Spoiling your marriage?” said Jane, amazedly.

  “No, spoiling the dream.”

  Jane said, firmly, “Now, don’t let’s be silly about this! We’re both in the same boat. Do you think I want you muscling in on my dream?”

  “My dream.”

  Jane disregarded that, and thought for a while.