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Then: "Never mind how the money came, dear, invalids mustn't be curious. It strains their nerves. Wait till you're well and perhaps you'll hear a tale about that land out west." Day after day slipped past in the lotus-eating land whose unreality makes it almost a change of planets from every-day America. Each day brought health with great rapidity, and soon each day brought new friends. Mrs.
It is evidently only a sort of idealized form of loafing: a passive life in Rome, thanks to the number and the quality of one's impressions, takes on a very respectable likeness to activity. It is still lotus-eating, only you sit down at table, and the lotuses are served up on rococo china.
It is not a land of lotus-eating delights, but it is a land where there is little sound but what the sea makes, and where every face tells of strong sun and salt waves. No doubt, much of its charm lies in its contrast to the life of towns or country places.
From the Devon border I drifted like a leaf detached from a tree, across to a deep coombe in the Quantock Hills. The vast hollow is made for repose and lotus-eating; its very shape, like a hammock, indicates idleness. There the days go over noiselessly and without effort, like white summer clouds.
At Las Uvas they keep up all the good customs brought out of Old Mexico or bred in a lotus-eating land; drink, and are merry and look out for something to eat afterward; have children, nine or ten to a family, have cock-fights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes and wait for the sun to go down.
Once again all the things past floated out of the dream-world and before him,—the wreck, the lotus-eating at Sardis, Thermopylæ, Salamis, the agony on the Bozra. Now came the end, the end promised in the moment of vision whilst he pulled the boat at Salamis. What was it? He tried not to ask. Enough it was to be the end.
"Tell me what you have been doing since I saw you." "Lotus-eating," she answered. "How lovely the summer is! Since I saw you I have wanted to do nothing but rest and dream." "You have been happy, then?" "Yes." "Is he kind to you?" "Oh he! He is just the same. There is no change in my life. The change is in me." "Then you mean to be happy in spite of him? I call that the beginning of wisdom.
"Faith, but that looks like lotus-eating, all right," said the major, notching up his cartridge-belt another hole. "That looks like 'A book of verses underneath the bough, with Fatima or Lalla Rookh, or the like, eh?" He drew at a cigarette, and smiled with sweet visionings of Celtic exuberance. "A golden city! Lord!"
The soft and enervating climate was, of course, largely responsible for this; indeed, it was inevitable that a beautiful and lotus-eating land of the kind should have produced inhabitants to match.
Johnny leaned from his hammock, and fingered the four or five letters dejectedly. Keogh was sitting on the edge of the table chopping lazily with a paper knife at the legs of a centipede that was crawling among the stationery. Johnny was in that phase of lotus-eating when all the world tastes bitter in one's mouth. "Same old thing!" he complained.
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