Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  Calpurnius: These are dreams.

  Gleva (passionately): Why? Why? Are these women in Rome more beautiful than I? Look! (She rises.) I can dress, too, as the Roman women do. I wear the combs you gave me. I don’t think they are pretty, but I wear them. See, I wear, too, the sandals, the bracelets.

  Calpurnius: No. There are no women in Rome more beautiful than you — but — but ——

  Gleva (all her passion dying away): You would be ashamed of me.

  [Calpurnius is uncomfortable.]

  Calpurnius: You would be — unusual. People would turn and stare. Other women would laugh. Some scribbler would write a lampoon. Oh, you are beautiful, but this is your place, not Rome. Each to his own in the end, Gleva. I to Rome — you to your people.

  Gleva: My people! Oh, you did right to laugh at the thought of reigning here. What are my people? Slaves for your pleasure. It can’t be! You to Rome, the lights, the women — oh, how I hate them! You would not reproach me because my knife hangs idle, had I your Roman women here! Calpurnius, be kind. From the first morning when I saw you in the forest, shining in brass, a god, there has been no kingdom, no people for me but you. I have watched you, learnt from you. Oh! I am of the Romans — I’ll ——

  Calpurnius: Each to his own in the end. That’s the law.

  Gleva: A bitter, cruel one.

  Calpurnius: Very likely. But it can’t be changed. So long as the world lasts, centuries hence, wherever soldiers are, still it will be the law.

  Gleva: Soldiers! Say soldiers, and all must be forgiven!

  Calpurnius: Much, at all events, by those with understanding. Hear what a soldier is. You see him strong, browned by the sun, flashing in armour, tramping the earth, a conqueror — a god, yes, a god! Ask his centurion who drills him in the barrack square.

  Gleva: But the centurion ——

  Calpurnius: The centurion’s the god, then? Ask me, his Captain, who tells him off. Am I the god, then? Ask my Colonel, who tells me off. Is it my Colonel, my General? Ask the Emperor in Rome who, for a fault, strips them of their command and brings them home. Soldiers are men trained to endurance by a hard discipline, cursed, ridiculed, punished like children but with a man’s punishments, so that when the great ordeal comes they may move, fight, die, like a machine. The soldier! He suffers discomfort, burns in the desert, freezes in the snow at another’s orders. He has no liberty, he must not argue, he must not answer; and he gets an obol a day, and in the end — in the end, a man, he gives his life without complaint, without faltering, gladly as a mere trifle in the business of the day, so that his country may endure. And what’s his reward? What does he get? A woman’s smile in his hour of furlough. That’s his reward. He takes it. Blame him who will. The woman thinks him a god, and he does not tell her of the barrack square. Good luck to him and her, I say. But at the last, there’s the long parting, just as you and I part in the forest of Anderida to-night. Other soldiers will say good-bye here on this spot to other women in centuries from now. Their trouble will be heavy, my dear, but they’ll obey the soldier’s law.

  Gleva: Very well, then! Each to his own! I, too, will obey that law. (She confronts him, erect and, strong.)

  Calpurnius: You will? (Doubtfully.)

  Gleva: To the letter. To the very last letter. I’ll gather my men. There shall be no more Romans in Anderida. There shall be only stubble in the fields where the scythes of my chariots have run.

  Calpurnius: Silence! (Sternly.)

  Gleva: I learn my lesson from my Lord Calpurnius. Why should my teacher blame me if I learn it thoroughly?

  Calpurnius: Gleva, you cannot conquer Rome. (He speaks gently. She stands stubbornly.) How shall I prove it to you — you who know only one wild corner of Britain! (Thinks.) There is that road where the soldiers march. You know — how much of it? — a few miles where it passes through the forest. That’s all. But it runs to the Wall in the north.

  Gleva (scornfully): Is there a Wall?

  Calpurnius: Is there a Wall? Ye gods! I kept my watch upon it through a winter under the coldest stars that ever made a night unfriendly. I freeze now when I think of it. Yes, there’s a Wall in the north, and that road runs to it; and in the south, it does not end at Regnum.

  Gleva: Doesn’t it? Wonderful road!

  Calpurnius: Yes, wonderful road. For on the other side at the very edge of the sea in Gaul it lives again — yes, that’s the word — the great road lives and runs straight as a ruled line to Rome. For forty days you drive, inns by the road-side, post horses ready and a cloud of traffic, merchants on business, governors on leave, pedlars, musicians and actors for the fairs, students for the universities, Jews, explorers, soldiers, pack-horses and waggons, gigs and litters. Oh, if I could make you see it — always on each side the shade of trees, until on its seven hills springs Rome. Nor does the road end there.

  Gleva: This same road? (Her scorn has gone. She speaks doubtfully.)

  Calpurnius: This same road which runs by the brook down here in the forest. (Pointing L.) It crosses Rome and goes straight to the sea again — again beyond the sea it turns and strikes to Jerusalem four thousand miles from where we stand to-night, Rome made it. Rome guards it, and where it runs Rome rules. You cannot conquer Rome — until the road’s destroyed.

  Gleva: I will destroy it.

  Calpurnius: Only Rome can destroy it. (A pause.) Gleva, let what I say sink deep into your heart. A minute ago I sneered at the road. I blasphemed. The roads are my people’s work. While it builds roads, it’s Rome, it’s the Unconquerable. But when there are no new roads in the making and the weeds sprout between the pavements of the old ones, then your moment’s coming. When the slabs are broken and no company marches down from the hill to mend them, it has come. Launch your chariots then, Gleva! Rome’s day is over, her hand tired. She has grown easy and forgotten. But while Rome does Rome’s appointed work, beware of her! Not while the road runs straight from Regnum to the Wall, shall you or any of you prevail.

  Gleva (looking inscrutably.) No, I cannot conquer Rome.

  [A moment’s pause.]

  Calpurnius: Listen!

  Gleva: The sound upon the road has ceased.

  Calpurnius: There are no longer men marching.

  Gleva: All have gone over the hill to the sea.

  Calpurnius: Yes. There’s a freshness in the air, a breath of wind. The morning comes ——

  Gleva: I cannot conquer Rome.

  [A trumpet rings out clear from the top of the hill. The morning is beginning to break. There is the strange light which comes when moonlight and the dawn meet.]

  Calpurnius: The reveillé! (He turns to her.)

  Gleva: And ——

  Calpurnius (nods): My summons. Gleva!

  Gleva: My Lord will bid farewell to his slaves. (She calls aloud): Bran, Caransius.

  Calpurnius: Oh, before they come! (He holds out his arms to her.) Gleva! (She comes slowly into his embrace.) I shall remember this night. Some of our poets say that we are born again in another age. So may it be with us! We shall grow old and die, you here, I where my Emperor shall send me. May we be born again, love again, under a happier star.

  [He kisses her, she clings to him. Behind enter Bran, Caransius. They approach carefully.]

  But now there’s Rome in front of me.

  [He tries to draw away from her. She clings about his neck.]

  And I must go.

  Gleva: Not yet, my Lord — Calpurnius.

  Calpurnius: Farewell! and the Gods prosper you. (He is seized from behind on a gesture from Gleva. She utters a cry.)

  Gleva: Do him no hurt! Yet hold him safe. (They bind him. Calpurnius struggles.)

  Calpurnius: Help! Romans, help!

  [The two men gag him.]

  Gleva: Do him no hurt!

  [They lay him on the bank. Gleva goes to him.]

  No, I cannot conquer Rome, but one Roman — yes. You taught me, Calpurnius, the lesson of the road. I thank you. I learn another lesson. (She is speaking very
gently.) On that long, crowded way from the edge of Gaul to Rome many a soldier of your legion will be lost — lost and remain unheard of. Calpurnius, you shall stay with me, reign with me, over me. You shall forget Rome.

  [Once more the trumpet sounds only more faintly. Calpurnius utters a stifled groan. The morning broadens. A cracking of bushes is heard. From the right enters third attendant excitedly.]

  Attendant: Mistress! Mistress!

  Gleva: Well?

  [She turns, stands between Calpurnius and attendants, e. g.:

  Bran.

  Third Attendant. Gleva. Calpurnius. Caransius.]

  [Footlights.]

  Attendant: They have gone! The hill is empty; the camp is scattered.

  Gleva: They march to the coast. The Valeria Victrix.

  [A movement from Calpurnius, who is working his hands free.]

  Third Attendant: They are putting out to sea. The harbour’s black with ships. Some have reached the open water.

  Gleva: All have gone.

  Third Attendant: All. Already there’s a wolf in the camp on the hill.

  Calpurnius (freeing his hands and mouth, plucks out his sword. He buries it in his heart.) Rome! Rome! (In a whisper.)

  [Gleva turns and sees Calpurnius dead. She stands motionless. Then she waves her attendants away. They go silently. Gleva seats herself by Calpurnius’s side. She runs her hand over his hair.]

  Gleva (with a sob): My Lord Calpurnius!

  [The Curtain Falls Slowly.]

  Dilemmas (1934)

  CONTENTS

  THE STRANGE CASE OF JOAN WINTERBOURNE

  THE WOUNDED GOD

  THE CHRONOMETER

  SIXTEEN BELLS

  THE REVEREND BERNARD SIMMONS, B.D.

  A FLAW IN THE ORGANIZATION

  THE LAW OF FLIGHT

  THE KEY

  TASMANIAN JIM’S SPECIALITIES

  THE ITALIAN

  MAGIC

  THE DUCHESS AND LADY TORRENT

  WAR NOTES

  MATA HARI

  THE CRUISE OF THE “VIRGEN DEL SOCORRO”

  The first edition

  THE STRANGE CASE OF JOAN WINTERBOURNE

  CLOSE TO THE foot of the staircase, the manager of the hotel was giving instructions to a liveried attendant. A little way off five young people, three men and two women, were standing together in an impatient group. It was the height of the holiday season at this watering-place, and the roar of voices from the dining-room behind the glass doors drowned altogether the thunder of the surf upon the beach.

  “Joan was certain to be late,” said the hostess of the party as she looked with vexation about the lounge, now alcove after alcove, a wilderness of plush upholstery and oriental tables. “It’s part of her present make-up.”

  At that moment the girl herself came running down the wide staircase, a gleaming slender creature of twenty-two years, with large brown eyes and a fresh face which she had carefully painted a shade of orange. Her lips showed the bright scarlet which women’s lips share with the tunics of the Guards. She carried, of course, neither fan nor gloves, but about her slim white throat she wore a string of iridescent beads which might have been pearls had not their enormous size boasted their artificiality. She gave to Bramley, the young surgeon who formed one of the group of five, the amusing impression that she was playing very hard at being the young lady of the dance clubs. She was certainly abrim with eagerness to make a quite complete affair of this evening’s enjoyment.

  “I am so sorry, Marjorie, that I am late,” she cried to her hostess, and so stopped suddenly upon the last shallow tread of the stairs. All her joy was extinguished in an instant. Her hands clenched and then flew upwards to cover her face. But in the moment which intervened Bramley read so stark a terror in the gleam of her eyes and the quiver of her lips that it shocked him. A fluttering wail broke from her lips, and she crumpled as if her bones were suddenly turned to water. She slid down in a heap against the balustrade. Before Bramley could reach her she had fainted.

  “What is the number of her room?” he asked.

  “Twenty-three, on the first floor,” said Marjorie Hastings. “Oh, I hope it’s not serious.”

  “I don’t think there’s any reason for alarm,” the surgeon reassured her. He turned to the manager of the hotel. “You might send a maid;” and lifting the girl up in his arms with an ease which surprised everyone, he carried her up the stairs.

  At the landing he called down:

  “You’d better all go in to dinner. We’ll follow.”

  But the greater part of an hour had passed before Bramley joined the party at the table; and then he returned alone.

  “Joan wants nothing,” he explained. “She is asleep now.”

  “What was the matter?” asked Marjorie Hastings.

  “I haven’t one idea,” replied Bramley. “There’s nothing wrong with her really.”

  “I can explain,” said a stout hearty young man who sat on the other side of Marjorie Hastings. “You met Joan for the first time yesterday. But I can tell you she has been overdoin’ it for a good few years now. First she was going to be an artist and she splashed on paint all day for months. When that fell down, she splashed ink on paper all night for another set of months. When that fell down, she plumped for the open air and set out to show Miss Leitch how to play golf. When that fell down, she hit the cabarets. Now she has fallen down herself. Joan is a perfect darling, but she wants someone to smack her from time to time.”

  He sketched her history. No father and no mother, an aunt somewhere — utterly useless — a bachelor flat in Pall Mall, and a sufficient income. “And a little nervous always,” he concluded. “She’s not a case for you, Bramley, at all. She’s meant for the psycho-wanglers.”

  Bramley shook his head vigorously. To him, already eminent as an operator and a firm believer that man’s best friend was the knife, psycho-analysis was the heresy of heresies.

  “Just jargon. Quacks doctoring the half-baked,” he declared confidently. For like many brilliant men he was a little arrogant in his attitude towards the things which he did not know. He was none the less troubled by Joan Winterbourne’s collapse, and the next morning when the rest of the party went off to the golf course, he stayed behind.

  Joan came down at eleven. Her step was firm. There was not even a shadow under her eyes. Her swoon had left no other trace than this: she was dressed for a journey.

  “You are going away?” Bramley asked. He saw the door of the luggage lift open and trunks painted with her initials.

  “Yes. I have left a note for Marjorie. I am very sorry. I was enjoying myself here very much. But I have got to go.”

  “It’s a pity,” Bramley said regretfully. “For I should have liked to have looked after you for a little.”

  Joan smiled gratefully.

  “That’s very kind,” she answered warmly. “But what happened to me last night has happened three times before; and I never can bear the place where it happened, or anything associated with it afterwards. I couldn’t stay here another day. I can’t give you any reason, but I couldn’t.”

  Joan was quite without affectation now. She was not playing at being anything but herself — a girl driven hard by an unaccountable experience and seeking the one only way of relief which her instincts had taught to her. Bramley made no attempt to dissuade her.

  “If you’ll send your maid with your luggage on to the station by the omnibus, I’ll walk along with you,” he said.

  They went out on to the sea-front together, and in the course of that walk, Joan was persuaded by his mere reticence to reveal more of herself than she ever had done before.

  “The first time I behaved in that silly fashion,” she said, “was on the sailing-yacht of Monsieur de Ferraud off Bordeaux two summers ago. In May of the next year came the second time. I was on a motor-trip to the South of France by the Route des Alpes and the car broke down in the Dauphine between La Grave and the Col de Lauteret. I was standing at the side of the
road, and crumpled up as I did last night. The third time I was fortunately sitting down. It was in a circus at St. Etienne. I haven’t one idea why it happens. So you see that since I can’t endure a yacht, or a motor-car, or a circus, and now shall shrink from any seaside hotel, my life is becoming a little circumscribed.”

  She ended with a smile of humour which did not hide from him that her distress was very real. Bramley put her into a carriage.

  “Will you give me a chance?” he asked, as he shook her hand. “It’s all wrong that any girl as young and healthy as you are should go on being attacked in this way. There must be an explanation, and therefore there must be a cure.”

  The blood mounted into Joan’s cheeks. Gratitude shone in her eyes. It did Bramley besides no harm in her thoughts that he was a good-looking young man of a tall and sinewy build.

  “Of course I shall be ever so thankful if you’ll look after me,” she said; and the train moved out of the station.

  Bramley walked back to the hotel and made some inquiries that evening of the ruddy-faced optimist who gave the Winterbourne family a clean bill of health.

  “Never heard of any epilepsy. A nervous, kind of artistic lot — that, yes. The father, for instance, would always rather paint a bird than shoot one. Queer taste, isn’t it? But all of them clean-blooded and clear-eyed just like Joan herself. No, no, it’s not your affair, Bramley, so you can keep your penknife in your pocket. Joan ought to go to the psycho-boys.”

  This time Bramley did not shake his head in contempt. Certainly if there was anything in the theories of the “psycho-boys,” here was the very patient for them. It was all heresy, to be sure, but none the less he found himself in his perplexity formulating the case from their angle. Thus:

  “A girl, by heredity and of her own disposition nervous, passes through an experience which Nature, in its determination to survive, proceeds to bury deep down in the girl’s subconsciousness below the levels of memory. The experience therefore was one terrible enough to shake her reason; and from time to time something, a word perhaps, or an article, associated with that experience reproduces suddenly in a milder form the original terror and shock. The only cure is to be found in restoring this experience to the patient’s memory. For she will then understand; and the trouble will be at an end.”