CHAOS
1
The awaking was sudden and disconcerting. Without any interval, it
seemed, Jeremy found himself staring up at the blinding sky, which
looked almost white with the dry heat, and suffering miserably from an
intolerable weight on his throat. This, he soon perceived, was caused
by the legs of a dead man, and after a moment he threw them off and sat
up, licking dry lips with a dry tongue. His ears still sang a little
and he felt sick; but his head was clear, if his mind was still feeble.
A minute’s reflection restored to him all that had happened, and he
looked around him with slightly greater interest.
He alone in the gun-pit seemed to be alive, though bodies sprawled
everywhere in twisted and horrible attitudes. A few yards away lay
Jabez, stabbed and dead, clinging round the trail of a gun, his
nutcracker face grinning fixedly in a hideous counterfeit of life.
Jeremy was unmoved and let his eyes travel vaguely further. He was
very thirsty and wanted water badly. But apart from this desire he
was little stirred to take up the task of living again. What he most
wanted, on the whole, was to lie down where he was and doze, to let
things happen as they would. The muscles of his back involuntarily
relaxed and he subsided on to one elbow, yawning with a faint shudder.
Then he realized that he would not be comfortable until he had drunk;
and he rose stiffly to his feet. Close by the wheel of one of the guns,
just inside it, stood an open earthenware jar half full of water,
miraculously untouched by the tumult that had raged in the battery.
Jeremy did not know for what purpose the gunners had used it, and found
it blackened with powder and tainted with oil; but it served to quench
his thirst. He drank deeply and then again examined the scene of quiet
desolation.
One by one he identified the bodies of all the members of the
gun-crews: none had escaped. Some had been bayonetted, some clubbed,
some strangled or suffocated under the weight of their assailants.
The feeble lives of a few, perhaps, had merely flickered out before
the terror of the onset. Jeremy mused idly on the fact that all these
ancients, who, if ever man did, deserved a quiet death, should have
perished thus violently together, contending with a younger generation.
He wondered if they would be the last gunners the world was to see. He
found it odd that he, the oldest of all, should be the last to survive.
He felt again the loneliness that had overtaken him--how long ago?--in
the empty Whitechapel Meadows, when once before he had emerged from
darkness. But now he suffered neither bewilderment nor despair. It
was thus that fate was accustomed to deal with him, and something had
destroyed or deadened the human nerve that rebels against an evil fate.
He sank on to the ground in a squatting position, propped his back
against a wheel of the nearer gun and rested his chin on his hands,
speculating, as though on something infinitely remote, on the causes
and circumstances of his ruin. Thomas Wells, he supposed, had, in
fact, sold them to the President of Wales, had very likely been
corrupting the army for days before the battle. By that treachery the
campaign was irrevocably lost and, Jeremy told himself calmly, the
whole kingdom as well. There was no army between this and London, nor
could any now be raised in the south. England was at the mercy of the
invaders, and the reign of the Speakers was forever finished. It was
over, Jeremy murmured, with the death of their last descendant--for he
took it for granted that the old man had been killed.
And then a sudden inexplicable wave of anger and foreboding came over
him, as though the deadened nerve had begun to stir again and had waked
him from this unnatural indifference. He scrambled to his feet and
stared wildly in the direction of London. He must go there and find the
Lady Eva. He found that he still desired to live.
With the new desire came activity of body and mind. He must travel as
fast as he could, making his way through the ranks of the invaders
and more quickly than they, and to do this with any chance of success
he needed weapons. He would trust to luck to provide him with a horse
later on. His own pistols had disappeared, but he began a determined
and callous search among the dead. As he hunted here and there his
glance was attracted by something white and trailing in the heap of
bodies which lay between the wheels of the other gun. He realized
with a shock that it was the Speaker’s long beard, somehow caught up
between two corpses which hid the rest of him. He looked at it and
hesitated. Then, muttering, “Poor old chap!” he interrupted his search
to show his late master what respect he could by composing his dead
limbs. But as he pulled the old man’s body free, the heavy, pouched
eyelids flickered, the black lips parted and emitted a faint sigh. In
an instant Jeremy had fetched the jar of water, and after sucking at it
languidly like a sick child, the Speaker murmured something that Jeremy
could not catch.
“Don’t try to talk,” he warned. “Be quiet for a moment.”
“Is it all over?” the Speaker repeated in a distinct but toneless voice.
“All over,” Jeremy told him; and in his own ears the words rang like
two strokes of a resonant and mournful bell.
“Then why are we here?”
Jeremy explained what had happened, and while he told the story the
Speaker appeared, without moving, slowly to recover full consciousness.
When it was done he tried to stand up. Jeremy helped him and steadied
him when he was erect.
“It is all over,” he pronounced in the same unwavering voice. Then he
added with childish simplicity, “What shall we do now?”
“Get away from here,” Jeremy cried with a sudden access of terror.
“Thomas Wells will want to make sure we are dead, and this is just
where he will look for us--he may come back any minute! And we mustn’t
be caught; we must get to London, to help the Lady Eva!”
“Get away from here. Very well, I am ready.” And with a slow unsteady
movement the Speaker began to pick his way across the battery, lurching
a little when he turned aside to avoid a body lying at his feet.
Jeremy ran after him and offered his arm, which the old man docilely
accepted. When they had climbed out of the pit they saw that not only
the village of Slough was burning, but also that every building for
miles around seemed to have been fired. On the main road, away to
their left, Jeremy distinguished a long column of wagons and mounted
men on the march, accompanied by irregular and straggling crowds--the
transport and the camp-followers, he surmised. But already most of the
invaders were far ahead, making for London and, eager for that rich
prize, not staying to loot the poor farmhouses, the smoke of which
indicated their advance.
Jeremy turned and looked at his companion. The old Jew had paused
without a word when Jeremy paused and stood waiting patiently for the
order to move again. A sort of enduring tranquillity had descended like
a thin mask on the savage power of his face, softening all its features
without concealing them. His eyes shone softly with a peaceful and
unnatural light. He stared fixedly straight before him, and what he
saw moved him neither to speech nor to a change of expression. Jeremy
regarded him with doubt, which deepened into fear. This passivity in
one who had been so vehement had about it something alarming. The old
man must have gone mad.
Jeremy shuddered at the suggestion. His thoughts suddenly became
unrestrained, ridiculous, inconsequent. It was wicked to have led them
into this misery and then to avoid reproach by losing his reason! How
was he to get a madman over the difficult road to London? He felt as
if he had been deserted in a hostile country with no companion but
a hideous, an irritating monstrosity.... That fixed, gentle smile
began to work on his nerves and to enrage him. It was a symbol of an
unreasonable and pitiless world, where the sun shone and the birds
sang, and which yet turned wantonly to blast his most beautiful hopes.
He cursed at the old man, cried, “It was all your fault, this!” madly
raised his hand to strike---- But the Speaker turned on him with a
regard so quiet and so melancholy that he drew back in horror from his
own intention.
“Come on, sir,” he said with hoarse tenderness. “Give me your arm. We
must keep to the right, well away from the road. We’ll get through
somehow.”
2
Darkness was fast thickening in the air when Jeremy and the Speaker
at last reached the western edge of London. During that tortuous
and incredible journey the old man had not more than once or twice
been shaken out of his smiling calm. He had walked or ridden, stood
motionless as a stone by the roadside or crouched in hiding in
the ditch, as Jeremy bade him, obedient in all things, impassive,
apparently without will or desire of his own. Jeremy bore for them
both the burden of their dangers and their escape, planned and acted
and dragged his companion after him, astonishing himself by his
inexhaustible reserve of vitality and resolution. Or, rather, he did
none of these things, but some intelligence not his own reigned in his
mind, looked ahead, judged coolly, decided, and drove his flagging body
to the last limits of fatigue. An ancient instinct woke in the depths
of his nature and took the reins. He was not at all a man, a lover,
Jeremy Tuft, scientist, gunner, revenant, struggling, by means of such
knowledge and gifts as his years of conscious life had bestowed on him,
across difficult obstacles to reach a desired goal. He was a blind
activity, a force governed by some obscure tropism; the end called, and
like an insect or a migrating bird he must go to it, whether he would
or not, whatever might stand in the way.
Once, when they almost stumbled on a ranging party of the President’s
horsemen, Jeremy pulled the Speaker roughly after him into a pond
and found a hiding-place for them both among the thick boughs of an
overhanging tree. When the old man felt the water rising coldly to
his armpits he uttered a single faint cry of distress or despair, and
Jeremy scanned him keenly, wondering whether perhaps it would not
be better to desert that outworn body and altered brain as too much
encumbrance on his flight. Afterwards, when the danger had gone by
and it was time to emerge, they found that they had sunk deep in the
mud. Jeremy’s expression did not change or his heart beat a stroke
the faster during the three or four minutes in which he struggled to
draw himself up into the tree. Then he gazed down pitilessly on his
companion, considering; but, seeing no signs of agitation or indocility
on that dumb immobile mask, at last after much effort he drew him out.
Once they came sharply around a corner and saw ahead of them one of the
Welsh troopers leading a riderless horse. It was too late to look for
cover or to escape, and Jeremy, halting the Speaker by a rude jerk of
his arm, went forward with an air of calm. As he came closer he cried
out to the soldier in a raspingly authoritative voice: “I am looking
for Thomas Wells. You must lead me to Thomas Wells at once.”
The man, dark, squat, low-browed and brutish, paused and hesitated.
He was puzzled by the unfamiliar speech of the eastern counties and
was ignorant whether this might not be one of the deserters from the
Speaker’s army whom he ought to receive as a comrade. His uncertainty
lasted long enough for Jeremy to come close to him, to produce a
bayonet taken from one of the dead, and to drive it with a single
unfaltering movement into his heart. He toppled off the horse without a
sound, leaving one foot caught in the stirrup. Jeremy disentangled it,
took the man’s pistol and cloak, and rolled the body into the ditch,
where he put a couple of dry branches over it. Then he beckoned to the
Speaker to come up and mount. Thereafter they traveled more rapidly.
They had gone by such by-ways as to avoid for the most part the main
track of the invading army, but they saw bands of marauders here
and there and more often the evidences of their passage. As they
came closer to London, in the neighborhood of Fulham, they slipped
miraculously unchallenged through the advanced guard. Here Jeremy saw
with a clear eye horrors which affected him no more than the faces of
other people affect a hurrying man who jostles impatiently against them
in a crowded street. The flare of burning cottages lit up the gathering
twilight, and there were passing scenes of brutality.... The invaders
were pressing on to reach the city by nightfall and had no time to be
exhaustively atrocious. But Jeremy heard (and was not detracted by it)
the screams of tortured men, women, and children, and sometimes of
cattle. Beyond the furthest patrols of the army they found the roads
full of fugitives, hastening pitifully onward, though the country held
for them no refuge from this ravening host, unless it might be in mere
chance. These, like their pursuers, were but so many obstacles in the
way which Jeremy and the Speaker had to pass by as best they could.
When they came to the first cluster of houses it was dark and the full
moon had not yet risen; but in front of them great welling fountains of
fire softly yet fiercely illuminated the night sky.
“The people have gone mad,” Jeremy muttered with cold understanding.
“They are plundering the city before the enemy can plunder it. Come on,
we must hurry.” He urged forward the Speaker’s horse and they plunged
together into that doubtful flame-lit chaos.
No man raised a hand to stay them as they passed. The streets were
crowded with hurrying people, both men and women, among whom it was
impossible to distinguish which were escaping and which were looting.
All carried bundles of incongruous goods and all looked fiercely yet
shrinkingly at any who approached them. Many were armed, some with
swords, some with clubs, some with the rudest weapons, odd pieces of
iron or the legs of chairs, which they brandished menacingly, prepared
to strike on the smallest suspicion rather than be unexpectedly struck
down. Here and there in the boiling mob Jeremy distinguished the
sinister, degraded faces, the rude, bundled clothes, of the squatters
from the outskirts. Without slackening his pace he glanced around at
the Speaker, who was moving through the turmoil with gentle smile and
fixed, unseeing eyes. The time was already gone when he might have been
affected by the agony of his city.
Out of the raging inferno of Piccadilly, where already a dozen houses
were on fire, they turned down a dark and narrow lane behind two high
walls, and as they did so the noise of the tumult became strangely
remote, as though it belonged to another world. Here there was no
sound save the terrifying reverberations caused by their horses’ hoofs.
At the bottom of it was a gate set in the boundary wall of the gardens
of the Treasury. It stood wide open, and inside there was a mysterious
and quiet blackness. They rode through and immediately drew rein.
Then the sense of these invisible but familiar walks and lawns
quickened Jeremy’s cold resolution to an intolerable agony of
pain--pain like that which follows the thawing of a frozen limb.
During the wild and hasty journey the only conscious thought that
had possessed him had been that somehow or other he must get to the
Treasury. It had excluded all consideration of what he might find, or
what he should do when he got there. Now suddenly he understood that
this place and all the people in it had been existing and changing,
as places and people change, in reality as well as in his mind, that
things had been happening here in his absence, all that week, all
that day, during the time he lay unconscious in the gun-pit, during
the last hour.... It was as though he had carried somewhere in his
brain, unalterable till now by any certainty, a picture of the Treasury
as it had always been; this black and silent wilderness substituted
itself with a shock like a cataclysm. For the first time Jeremy made
a sound, a low choked groan of extreme anguish. Then, cold as he had
been before, he dismounted and bade the Speaker stay by the horses,
because the gardens here were too much broken up for riding at night.
He hastened forward alone, staring through the darkness at the empty
place where the lights of the Treasury ought to have been.
But there was no light in any of the windows, and Jeremy stumbled on,
sinking to the ankles in the soft earth of flower-beds, catching
his feet in trailing plants, running headlong into bushes, growing
desperate and breathless. Suddenly he became aware of the building, a
great vague mass looming over him like a thicker piece of night; and
as he stared up at it, it seemed to grow more distinct and the windows
glimmered a little paler than the darkness around them. He crawled
cautiously along the wall, found a door, which, like the garden-gate,
was wide open, and slipped into the chilling obscurity of a passage.
Then he paused, hesitating, frightened by the uncanny silence and
emptiness of the house.
It was plain that the Treasury had been deserted, though how and why he
could not conjecture. He stayed by the door and rested his body against
the wall, racking his wits to think what the Lady Eva and her mother
might have been expected to do when the news of the disaster reached
them--as it must have reached them. He now perceived his own weariness
and that he was aching in every member. His head was whirling, perhaps
from the delayed effects of the blow that had stunned him, and he felt
as though he were flying, swooping up and down in great dizzy circles.
His back was an aching misery that in no attitude could find rest.
This last check, at what had been for hours and through incredible
adventures his only imagined goal, sapped at a blow his unnatural
endurance, and for a moment he was ready to fall where he stood and
weep in despair.
It was to choke back the tears he felt rising in his throat that he
called out, foolishly, in a weak and hoarse voice: “Eva! Where are you?
Eva!”
Then most incredibly from the bushes in the garden a few yards behind
him came a wavering low cry, “Jeremy, is it you?” and then, in an
accent of terror, “Oh, who is it?” At the same time he saw a shadow
moving, and the next moment that shadow was in his arms, crying softly,
while he held her in a firm embrace.
Some minutes passed thus before the Lady Eva recovered her power of
speech. Jeremy lost all sense of time and of events. He wanted first to
comfort her and next to know what she had suffered. He had forgotten
that he had come to take her away from impending danger.
At last her sobbing stopped and she murmured, her face still close
against his breast: “Jeremy, mother is dead!”
“Dead!” They both spoke in whispers, as though the silent gardens were
full of enemies seeking for them.
“Yes, dead.” She straightened herself and withdrew from his arms, as
though she must be free before she could tell her story. Then she went
on in a low, hurried, unemphasized voice: “Roger--you know, Roger
Vaile--brought the news that ... that you had been defeated. He was
with Thomas Wells and saw him give the signal to surrender, but he
managed to get away, and when he realized it was all over he came
straight here. He was badly wounded, I think--he stumbled and fell
against me, and my dress is all covered with blood....” She stopped
and caught her breath, then went on more firmly: “He was telling us
and begging us to go away and hide, and we didn’t want to go. Then a
crowd of people came into our room--servants, most of them, grooms and
stable-men--and told us that everything was over, that there was no
more government, and we had to get out at once, because the Treasury
belonged to them now. And I said we’d go, but mother said out loud:
‘Then I must get my jewels first.’
“They got very excited at that, and when she went to her chest to get
them, they went after her and pulled her away, not roughly really, and
began rummaging in the chest themselves. Roger was standing, holding on
to a chair, looking horribly white, and he told mother to come away and
leave them. But she wouldn’t; she went back to the chest and ordered
them out of the room. They pushed her away again more roughly and
laughed at her, and she lost her temper--you know how she used to?--and
hit one of them in the face. Then he--then he killed her ... with a
sword....”
Her voice trailed away into silence. Jeremy took her cold hands and
muttered brokenly. “Dearest--dearest----”
“When that happened,” she went on in the same even whisper, “Roger
called out to me to run away. He’d got a great bandage around his
wound, and he looked so ill I thought he was going to faint. But he
stood in the door and drew his knife to keep them from coming after me:
I was just outside in the passage. I couldn’t run away. Then one of
them came at him, and Roger struck at him with the knife. The man just
caught Roger’s wrist and held it for a minute--Roger was so weak--and
then pushed him, and he fell down in the passage, and blood came
pouring out of his side. Then I--I think he died. And I ran away. I
don’t think they came after me ... I don’t think they did....”
She was silent again, and Jeremy took her into his arms in an
inarticulate agony. She lay there limp and unresponsive. At last she
whispered: “I ought to have stayed and looked after him ... but I
think he was dead. Such a lot of blood came out of his wound ... it
poured and poured over the floor ... it came almost to my feet....”
“Eva!” said Jeremy, and could say nothing more. Several minutes passed
before he exclaimed: “It doesn’t matter. We must get away. You must try
and forget it all, beloved. I’ll look after you now.”
“I will, oh, I will!” she cried, clinging to him. “But I can’t now--I
can see it all the time. I’m trying. And, Jeremy,” she went on, holding
him as he tried to draw her away, “afterwards, when I thought they’d
gone, I went back ... I went back to my room----”
“Yes, dear.” Jeremy was still trying to draw her away.
“And I got this--look!” Jeremy peered at something she held up to
him, but could not make out what it was. She thrust it into his hand,
and he felt a small round metal box, the size and shape of half an
egg. “I took it once, months ago, from that silly girl, Mary. She was
pretending to be in love, and she said that if ever her lover deserted
her she’d kill herself. Then she boasted that she’d got poison so as
to be ready--Rose told me. So I made her give it to me, and I never
thought about it again till to-day.”
“Yes, dear,” Jeremy murmured soothingly, “but it’s all right now. You
don’t need it. Shall we throw it away?”
“No, no!” she cried agitatedly, snatching the box back; then calmly
again: “Don’t be angry with me, Jeremy. It’s stupid, but you don’t know
how I wanted that box this afternoon while I was hiding in the garden,
so as to be sure.... And I couldn’t get up the courage to go back and
look for it. I must keep it for a little while now. I’ll throw it away
myself in a little while.” She tucked the box into her dress and gave
him her hand. Without another word they set off towards the Speaker and
the horses.