do not remember.
My memory--my memory has gone. The business of life slips from me--"

He leant forward, and pressed his hands upon his eyes. For a long time
he said nothing.

"And then?" said I.

"The war burst like a hurricane."

He stared before him at unspeakable things.

"And then?" I urged again.

"One touch of unreality," he said, in the low tone of a man who speaks
to himself, "and they would have been nightmares. But they were not
nightmares--they were not nightmares. NO!"

He was silent for so long that it dawned upon me that there was a danger
of losing the rest of the story. But he went on talking again in the
same tone of questioning self-communion.

"What was there to do but flight? I had not thought the war would touch
Capri--I had seemed to see Capri as being out of it all, as the contrast
to it all; but two nights after the whole place was shouting and
bawling, every woman almost and every other man wore a badge--Evesham's
badge--and there was no music but a jangling war-song over and over
again, and everywhere men enlisting, and in the dancing halls they were
drilling. The whole island was awhirl with rumours; it was said, again
and again, that fighting had begun. I had not expected this. I had seen
so little of the life of pleasure that I had failed to reckon with this
violence of the amateurs. And as for me, I was out of it. I was like
a man who might have prevented the firing of a magazine. The time had
gone. I was no one; the vainest stripling with a badge counted for more
than I. The crowd jostled us and bawled in our ears; that accursed song
deafened us; a woman shrieked at my lady because no badge was on her,
and we two went back to our own place again, ruffled and insulted--my
lady white and silent, and I aquiver with rage. So furious was I,
I could have quarrelled with her if I could have found one shade of
accusation in her eyes.

"All my magnificence had gone from me. I walked up and down our rock
cell, and outside was the darkling sea and a light to the southward that
flared and passed and came again.

"'We must get out of this place,' I said over and over. 'I have made my
choice, and I will have no hand in these troubles. I will have nothing
of this war. We have taken our lives out of all these things. This is no
refuge for us. Let us go.'

"And the next day we were already in flight from the war that covered
the world.

"And all the rest was Flight--all the rest was Flight