“Yes,” she said, “it is sometimes cruel to wake us from our dreams, and yet it is best, I think.”
“—You think it is best to modify our poetry with prose? Was it better to have awakened Shelley, and given us his ‘Prometheus’ with wooden limbs of a day’s social dogmatism, than to have let him make delicate music in the italian woods and by the italian shores, for ever sweet and fair?”
“So he told me,” said Alcock, “and I was very glad to hear it. The interests of all wealth, whether in land or in money, is identic. But we have no organization.—And Labour,” he added with a look to Maddock, “as Mr. Hawkesbury just told us, is organizing, if it is not already organized.”
If it had been possible for Mrs. Medwin to be amazed at anything, she would have been amazed at this. Hawkesbury had a few years ago been an employé on one of Medwin’s stations, the very station to which she was now on her road. This was a reflection which was positively annoying to her. “It would,” she had once simply remarked, “have been as well perhaps, if he had eaten some poisoned meat when he was there, as they used to say the troublesome blacks did. He is a danger to society.” Sydney Medwin, who liked to do his best to ruffle his mother’s serenity now and then, used not unfrequently to speak in praise of Hawkesbury (his friend Hawkesbury, a clever fellow too, and who would make his mark out here yet!) and had once even, as Gildea told Maddock, offered to introduce him to her. “You know, Sydney,” said Mrs. Medwin simply, “I am not interested in Mr. Hawkesbury. If you like to make up a shooting-party at Lathong,” (a station of Medwin’s in Victoria), “with all the men on the station, I daresay he would be pleased to join you.”—What, then, was the meaning of Mr. Alcock’s remark that this firebrand socialist, this impertinent journalist and pamphleteer, had been just telling something to Mr. Alcock, Dr. Maddock, and presumably Sir Horace?
“I’m sure,” said Alcock with his politest manner again, “that we all of us cannot be too—too pleased to have found a lady who realized this, and could help us to what we so much want—a ... a sort of general rallying-point.—Nothing,” he proceeded, “struck me so much in England as the use that the political parties made of their social gatherings, and they tell me that this was much more the case once than it is at present.” Alcock found a certain amount of difficulty in saying that he thought women might, after all, be made of some use in political life, in a manner that should be pleasing to this woman.
The talk progressed more or less easily, Maddock, with a humorous perception of the effect Alcock’s innocent allusion to Hawkesbury had produced on Mrs. Medwin, playing the part of conversational mediator between the two.
“You are not, then,” said Gildea, in answer to a remark of Miss Medwin’s, “in sympathy with dreams and dreamers?”
“No,” she answered shaking her head, “not if they take their dreams for realities. It is just, I think, because we have been dreaming so long and dreaming so much, that our waking is so miserable.—You speak of prose and poetry,” she continued, turning her head a little and looking at him, “as if the prose had something disagreeable in it. Well, so it may have—to the dreamers. I too am a dreamer, of course, in my way; but I dream about the earth and the things of the earth, and so my dreams are real as the wind is real, or the sunlight, or the moonlight, or the light of the stars, none of which fear the contact of the earth or the water. But these people seem to me to dream of the things of heaven, filling all space with them. But space is empty—at any rate of things like theirs.”
“You do not believe,” he said, “as Taine does, that ‘at bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in our life but our dreams?’”
“Yes,” she said, “yes and no! But what does it matter what I believe? I have no opinion of my own in this way. You would make me dogmatic. Now I shall always try not to be dogmatic. I rebel against defining things, especially things that I like; they are never the same afterwards. But I am often doing this, and I have to suffer for it. This comes of being born in an age which can describe everything and do nothing.—You see, you make me petulant!”