A Dream of Armageddon: The Breakdown of Hedon’s Realm
One day, as Hedon and his lover are enjoying themselves in a luxurious dancehall, a man (“very soberly clad for that place”) approaches and asks to talk to Hedon in private. Hedon refuses – here in paradise everything should be open. The man tells Hedon that his former party rival, a man named Evesham, has been issuing “wild and threatening words” in various political proclamations, clearly an attempt to stir up sentiments for war in the state of the North. The man presses Hedon to return to the North and to challenge and defeat Evesham in the political arena before the situation escalates. Hedon contemplates this option and for a moment seems on the verge of making the selfless act required by circumstances, but then draws back. He refuses to participate, telling that messenger that he has broken free of public life and now wants to enjoy a private existence in a sphere where true love can exist. He knows instinctively that any reentry into the world of public affairs will mean a loss of the woman, a loss of their love. If the people of the North want to rid themselves of Evesham, Hedon tells the messenger, “they must settle with him themselves.”
From this point on, Hedon’s realm of paradise starts to deteriorate as news and events from the North infiltrate more and more. As the situation with Evesham and the political environment in the North worsens, Hedon increasingly struggles with his inaction. Each struggle only serves to reinforce his original choice of private love over public service and sacrifice. The sight of military aircraft in the “eastern sky” is insufficient to move Hedon into action. The “long peace” that had lasted for generations and that Hedon had worked to guarantee now seemed threatened, foremost by all the weapons of war that had been developed in the meantime but never brought into battle:
And these flying war machines, you know, were only one sort of the endless war contrivances that had been invented and had fallen into abeyance during the long peace. There were all sorts of these things that people were routing out and furbishing up; infernal things, silly things; things that had never been tried; big engines, terrible explosives, great guns. You know the silly way of these ingenious sort of men who make these things; they turn ’em out as beavers build dams, and with no more sense of the rivers they’re going to divert and the lands they’re going to flood! ....
No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine, with all these new inventions, what horror war might bring. I believe most people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms and shouting charges and triumphs and flags and bands — in a time when half the world drew its food supply from regions ten thousand miles away —.
As the action of this dream-world intensifies, the reality of the waking life of the traveler (Cooper) withers.
For three weeks of nights that dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in THIS accursed life; and THERE— somewhere lost to me — things were happening — momentous, terrible things. . . . I lived at nights — my days, my waking days, this life I am living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover of the book.
When the dream returns, war has come to the island of paradise, destroying Hedon’s notion once and for all that this private world was somehow disconnected from the world of affairs. “The war,” Cooper tells the narrator, “burst like a hurricane.” This realization that public and private life are one and the same affects both Hedon and Cooper. Cooper is drawing lessons from the dream-world for the waking world:
If, indeed, this battle, this slaughter and stress IS life, why have we this craving for pleasure and beauty? If there IS no refuge, if there is no place of peace, and if all our dreams of quiet places are a folly and a snare, why have we such dreams? Surely it was no ignoble cravings, no base intentions, had brought us to this; it was Love had isolated us. Love had come to me with her eyes and robed in her beauty, more glorious than all else in life, in the very shape and colour of life, and summoned me away. I had silenced all the voices, I had answered all the questions — I had come to her. And suddenly there was nothing but War and Death!”
Hedon and his lover flee from Capri by boat. They cross to Salerno and continue south, ending up at the temples of Paestrum. There, near the temples, the lover is killed by a bullet through the heart. Hedon, still mourning her, is overtaken by a patrol of soldiers. The commander of the group approaches him, speaking a language Hedon cannot understand. Hedon shouts at the soldiers to leave the temple area. They refuse. The commander runs his sword through Hedon’s chest, killing him. Hedon’s death and the subsequent destruction of the dream-world seem to have inflicted deep spiritual wounds on Cooper – resulting in the enervated, pale, disturbed man we now find in the carriage.
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