THE
SUBSTANCE OF A DREAM

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT

by

F. W. BAIN

Nidrádarpana

METHUEN & CO. LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

Second Edition

First Published . October 16th 1919

Second Edition ... 1919

DEDICATED

to

THE INEXPRESSIBLY GENTLE GENIUS

of

MY OWN MOTHER

INTRODUCTION

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

And since so many people have asked me questions as to the origin of these stories, I will say a word on the point here. Where do they come from? I do not know. I discovered only the other day that some believe them to have been written by a woman. That appears to me to be improbable. But who writes them? I cannot tell. They come to me, one by one, suddenly, like a flash of lightning, all together: I see them in the air before me, like a little Bayeux tapestry, complete, from end to end, and write them down, hardly lifting the pen from the paper, straight off "from the MS." I never know, the day before, when one 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 fairy tale: as indeed every love-story is a fairy tale. Because, although that unaccountable mystery, the mutual attraction of the sexes, is the very essence of life, and everything else merely accidental or accessory, yet only too often in the jostle of the world, in the trough and tossing of the waves of time, the accidental smothers the essential, and life turns into a commonplace instead of a romance. And so, like every other story, this little story will perhaps be very differently judged, according to the reader's sex. The bearded critic will see it with eyes very different from those with which it may be viewed by the fair voter with no beard upon her chin; for women, as the great god says at the end, have scant mercy on their own sex, and the heroine of the story is a strange heroine, an enigmatical Mona Lisa, so to say, who will not appeal to everybody so strongly as she does to the Moony-crested Deity, when he sums her up at the close. I venture, with humility, to concur in the opinion of the Deity, for she holds me under the same spell as her innumerable other lovers. The reader, 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 in reading, as I did, in transcribing, the evidence in the case. Only, moreover, when he closes the book will he appreciate the mingled exactitude and beauty of its name: for no story ever had a name which fitted it with such curious precision as this one. For the essence of a dream is always that along with its weird beauty, it counters expectation, often in such queer, ludicrous, kaleidoscopic ways. So it is, here.

Many bitter things, since the beginning, have men said of women, though neither so many nor so bitter, as the witty Frenchman cynically remarks, as the things women have said of one another. Poor Eve has paid very dear for that apple: the only wonder is, that she was not made responsible also for the Flood: but we have not got the whole of that story: Noah's wife may have dropped some incriminating documents into the water, for the Higher Criticism to unearth by and by: the Eternal Feminine may have had a hand in it after all, as she is generally to be found somewhere behind the scenes, wherever mischief brews for mortal man. She comes down the ages, loaded with accusations; and yet, somehow or other, they do not seem to have done her much harm. And the reason is, that she possesses, in supreme perfection, the art of disarming her antagonist, having been very cunningly constructed by the Creator for that very purpose: she is like a cork; she will not drown, under any flood of charges: she floats, quand même: (two words that she might very well take, like the inimitable Sarah, for her motto:) so that, be as angry as you please with her, you generally find yourself not only unable to condemn her, but even ready to beg her pardon, and rather glad, on the whole, to get it. It is a hopeless case. And all the more, because no woman ever lived, bad or good, who could be got to understand what is meant by "playing cricket": you cannot make her keep the rules in any game: she plays to win, like a German, and invariably cheats, if she can: international law counts, only as long as it is for and not against her: if you find her out, and scold her, she pouts, and will not play. And then, if, as is commonly the situation, you want her to play, 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 which its public importance demands, we may perceive, that though there is, it must be candidly owned, an element of truth in the charges brought against her, they are founded, for all that, largely on misunderstanding. It is man himself, her accuser, who is very nearly always to blame. His intelligence as compared with her own, is clumsy: (it is the difference between the dog and the cat:) he does not realise the unfathomable gulf that divides her nature from his own, and for lack of imaginative tact, judging her by himself, he enormously 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, that what she did, she did, deliberately. But that is his mistake. Women never 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, to fascinate the other sex: that is her essence and her raison d'être: the woman who does not do it is a failure, and she is Nature's triumph and entelechy, who does it best. And this every woman knows, by instinct, and feels, long before she knows it, almost as soon as she can stand upon her feet: consequently, no artificially elaborated compliment, no calculated flattery, ever touches her so near, as it does, when she perceives that her personality tells, acts like a charm, on any given man: a point about which no woman ever blunders, as a man often so ridiculously does about himself: