THE experience I am about to set down was perhaps the result, and at any rate it was the sequel, of a conversation engaged between three men in London in the year 1903. Of these three men one was returned but recently from South Africa, where he had seen all too much of the war; another was a kindly, wealthy, sober sort of man, young, virtuous, and full of inquiry; the third was a hack.
It was about the season of Easter and of spring, when actually and physically one can feel and handle the force of life about one, all ready to break bounds; but these young men (for no one of them was yet of middle age) preferred to talk of things more shadowy and less certain than the air and the life and the English spring all around. Things more shadowy and less certain, but to the mind of youth, being a vigorous mind things fixed and absorbing; destiny, for instance, and the nature of man.
Not one of these three, however, affirmed in this conversation (which I so well remember!) any definite scheme. They spoke in terms of violent opinion, of argument, and of analogy, but none of the three came forward with a faith or even with[271] a philosophy from which one felt he could not be shaken. The more remarkable was it, therefore, that one of them on his return in the early morning to his rooms, after this young and long conversation of a mixed sort, such as men entering upon life will often indulge, should have suffered and should have remembered an exact and even terrible vision. It would indeed be inexplicable that he should have suffered such a thing as a consequence of his waking thoughts, though, if there be influences upon minds other than the influences they themselves can bring—if there be influences from without, and other wills determining our dreams—then what next followed is less difficult to comprehend. For, when he had fallen asleep, it seemed to him at once that he was in the midst of a very gay and pleasant company in a sort of palace whereof the vast room in which he stood was one out of very many that opened one into the other in sequence. The crowd, and he with it, went forward slowly towards a banquet which he heard was prepared. He did not see among those he spoke to, and who spoke to him, any face with which he was familiar or to which he could attach a name; and yet he seemed to know them all, in that curious inconsequence of dreams, and one in especial, at some distance from him, which seemed to have been lost once, and now to be seen again through the crowd, was a face the sight of which moved in him a very passionate memory: yet it was no early memory.
[272]So they went forward, and soon they were all seated at a table of enormous length, so long that its length seemed to have some purpose about it; and at the farther end of this table was a door leading out of that hall. It was a door not very large for so magnificent a space; such a door as a man or woman could easily open with a common gesture, and pass through and shut behind them quickly.
Now, for the first time, when they were eating and drinking, it seemed to him that the conversation took on meaning, and a more consecutive meaning than is usual in dreams; when, just as that new phase of his dream had begun, one of the guests, a little to the left of the place opposite to him, a woman of middle age who had been somewhat silent, rose without apology, and without warning left her place he hardly knew how, and passed out of the room through the door that he had noticed. It shut behind her. No one mentioned or noticed her going, but in a little while another and another had risen and had gone. And still as each guest departed, some in the midst of a sentence, some during a silence in the talk, there increased upon him an appalling sense of unusual things; it was appalling to him that no one said good-bye, that none of the fellows of those who so departed turned to them or noticed their going, and that none of those who so departed returned or made any promise to return. Next he noticed ............