Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
though he did his best to find the well-known road, the point where
true sleep began. At last he saw the brushwood-pile, and hurried along
to the ridge, for behind him he felt was the wide-awake, sultry world.
He reached the lamp in safety, tingling with drowsiness, when a
policeman—a common country policeman—sprang up before him and touched
him on the shoulder ere he could dive into the dim valley below. He was
filled with terror,—the hopeless terror of dreams,—for the policeman
said, in the awful, distinct voice of dream-people, “I am Policeman Day
coming back from the City of Sleep. You come with me.” Georgie knew it
was true—that just beyond him in the valley lay the lights of the City
of Sleep, where he would have been sheltered, and that this
Policeman-Thing had full power and authority to head him back to
miserable wakefulness. He found himself looking at the moonlight on the
wall, dripping with fright; and he never overcame that horror, though
he met the Policeman several times that hot weather, and his coming was
the forerunner of a bad night.
But other dreams—perfectly absurd ones—filled him with an
incommunicable delight. All those that he remembered began by the
brushwood-pile. For instance, he found a small clockwork steamer (he
had noticed it many nights before) lying by the sea-road, and stepped
into it, whereupon it moved with surpassing swiftness over an
absolutely level sea. This was glorious, for he felt he was exploring
great matters; and it stopped by a lily carved in stone, which, most
naturally, floated on the water. Seeing the lily was labelled
“Hong-Kong,” Georgie said: “Of course. This is precisely what I
expected Hong-Kong would be like. How magnificent!” Thousands of miles
farther on it halted at yet another stone lily, labelled “Java”; and
this, again, delighted him hugely, because he knew that now he was at
the world’s end. But the little boat ran on and on till it lay in a
deep fresh-water lock, the sides of which were carven marble, green
with moss. Lilypads lay on the water, and reeds arched above. Some one
moved among the reeds—some one whom Georgie knew he had travelled to
this world’s end to reach. Therefore everything was entirely well with
him. He was unspeakably happy, and vaulted over the ship’s side to find
this person. When his feet touched that still water, it changed, with
the rustle of unrolling maps, to nothing less than a sixth quarter of
the globe, beyond the most remote imagining of man—a place where
islands were coloured yellow and blue, their lettering strung across
their faces. They gave on unknown seas, and Georgie’s urgent desire was
to return swiftly across this floating atlas to known bearings. He told
himself repeatedly that it was no good to hurry; but still he hurried
desperately, and the islands slipped and slid under his feet; the
straits yawned and widened, till he found himself utterly lost in the
world’s fourth dimension, with no hope of return. Yet only a little
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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