gin palace that towered twice his height and ended In a sky sign,
staring down at the pigmies and wondering--trying, I doubt not, to
collate it all with the other things of his life, with the valley among
the downlands, the nocturnal lovers, the singing in the church, the
chalk he hammered daily, and with instinct and death and the sky, trying
to see it all together coherent and significant. His brows were knit. He
put up his huge paw to scratch his coarse hair, and groaned aloud.
"I don't see It," he said.
His accent was unfamiliar. A great babblement went across the open
space--a babblement amidst which the gongs of the trams, ploughing their
obstinate way through the mass, rose like red poppies amidst corn. "What
did he say?" "Said he didn't see." "Said, where is the sea?" "Said,
where is a seat?" "He wants a seat." "Can't the brasted fool sit on a
'ouse or somethin'?"
"What are ye for, ye swarming little people? What are ye all doing, what
are ye all for?
"What are ye doing up here, ye swarming little people, while I'm
a-cuttin' chalk for ye, down in the chalk pits there?"
His queer voice, the voice that had been so bad for school discipline at
Cheasing Eyebright, smote the multitude to silence while it sounded and
splashed them all to tumult at the end. Some wit was audible screaming
"Speech, speech!" "What's he saying?" was the burthen of the public
mind, and an opinion was abroad that he was drunk. "Hi, hi, hi," bawled
the omnibus-drivers, threading a dangerous way. A drunken American
sailor wandered about tearfully inquiring, "What's he want anyhow?" A
leathery-faced rag-dealer upon a little pony-drawn cart soared up over
the tumult by virtue of his voice. "Garn 'ome, you Brasted Giant!" he
brawled, "Garn 'Ome! You Brasted Great Dangerous Thing! Can't you see
you're a-frightening the 'orses? Go _'ome_ with you! 'Asn't any one 'ad
the sense to tell you the law?" And over all this uproar young Caddles
stared, perplexed, expectant, saying no more.
Down a side road came a little string of solemn policemen, and threaded
itself ingeniously into the traffic. "Stand back," said the little
voices; "keep moving, please."
Young Caddles became aware of a little dark blue figure thumping at his
shin. He looked down, and perceived two white hands gesticulating.
"_What_?" he said, bending forward.
"Can't stand about here," shouted the inspector.
"No! You can't stand about here," he repeated.
"But where am I to go?"
"Back to your village. Place of location. Anyhow, now--you've got to
move on. You're obstructing the traffic."
"What traffic?"
"Along the road."
"But where is it going? Where does it come from? What does it mean?
They're all round me. What do they want? What are they doin'? I want to
understand. I'm tired of cuttin' chalk and bein' all alone. What are
they doin' for me while I'm a-cuttin' chalk? I may just as well
understand here and now as anywhere."
"Sorry. But we aren't here to explain things of that sort. I must arst
you to move on."
"Don't you know?"
"I must arst you to move on--_if_ you please ... I'd strongly advise you
to get off 'ome. We've 'ad no special instructions yet--but it's against
the law ... Clear away there. Clear away."
The pavement to his left became invitingly bare, and young Caddles went
slowly on his way. But now his tongue was loosened.
"I don't understand," he muttered. "I don't understand." He would appeal
brokenly to the changing crowd that ever trailed beside him and behind.
"I didn't know there were such places as this. What are all you people
doing with yourselves? What's it all for? What is it all for, and where
do I come in?"
He had already begotten a new catchword. Young men of wit and spirit
addressed each other in this manner, "Ullo 'Arry O'Cock. Wot's it all
_for_? Eh? Wot's it all bloomin' well _for_?"
To which there sprang up a competing variety of repartees, for the most
part impolite. The most popular and best adapted for general use appears
to have been "_Shut_ it," or, in a voice of scornful
detachment--"_Garn!_"
There were others almost equally popular.
III.
What was he seeking? He wanted something the pigmy world did not give,
some end which the pigmy world prevented his attaining, prevented even
his seeing clearly, which he was never to see clearly. It was the whole
gigantic social side of this lonely dumb monster crying out for his
race, for the things akin to him, for something he might love and
something he might serve, for a purpose he might comprehend and a
command he could obey. And, you know, all this was _dumb_, raged dumbly
within him, could not even, had he met a fellow giant, have found outlet
and expression in speech. All the life he knew was the dull round of the
village, all the speech he knew was the talk of the cottage, that failed
and collapsed at the bare outline of his least gigantic need. He knew
nothing of money, this monstrous simpleton, nothing of trade, nothing of
the complex pretences upon which the social fabric of the little folks
was built. He needed, he needed--Whatever he needed, he never found his
need.
All through the day and the summer night he wandered, growing hungry but
as yet untired, marking the varied traffic of the different streets, the
inexplicable businesses of all these infinitesimal beings. In the
aggregate it had no other colour than confusion for him....
He is said to have plucked a lady from her carriage in Kensington, a
lady in evening dress of the smartest sort, to have scrutinised her
closely, train and shoulder blades, and to have replaced her--a little
carelessly--with the profoundest sigh. For that I cannot vouch. For an
hour or so he watched people fighting for places in the omnibuses at the
end of Piccadilly. He was seen looming over Kennington Oval for some
moments in the afternoon, but when he saw these dense thousands were
engaged with the mystery of cricket and quite regardless of him he went
his way with a groan.
He came back to Piccadilly Circus between eleven and twelve at night
and found a new sort of multitude. Clearly they were very intent: full
of things they, for inconceivable reasons, might do, and of others they
might not do. They stared at him and jeered at him and went their way.
The cabmen, vulture-eyed, followed one another continually along the
edge of the swarming pavement. People emerged from the restaurants or
entered them, grave, intent, dignified, or gently and agreeably excited
or keen and vigilant--beyond the cheating of the sharpest waiter born.
The great giant, standing at his corner, peered at them all. "What is it
all for?" he murmured in a mournful vast undertone, "What is it all
for? They are all so earnest. What is it I do not understand?"
And none of them seemed to see, as he could do, the drink-sodden
wretchedness of the painted women at the corner, the ragged misery that
sneaked along the gutters, the infinite futility of all this employment.
The infinite futility! None of them seemed to feel the shadow of that
giant's need, that shadow of the future, that lay athwart their paths...
Across the road high up mysterious letters flamed and went, that might,
could he have read them, have measured for him the dimensions of human
interest, have told him of the fundamental needs and features of life as
the little folks conceived it. First would come a flaming
T;
Then U would follow,
TU;
Then P,
TUP;
Until at last there stood complete, across the sky, this cheerful
message to all who felt the burthen of life's earnestness:
TUPPER'S TONIC WINE FOR VIGOUR.
Snap! and it had vanished into night, to be followed in the same slow
development by a second universal solicitude:
BEAUTY SOAP.
Not, you remark, mere cleansing chemicals, but something, as they say,
"ideal;" and then, completing the tripod of the little life:
TANKER'S YELLOW PILLS.
After that there was nothing for it but Tupper again, in naming crimson
letters, snap, snap, across the void.
T U P P....
Early in the small hours it would seem that young Caddles came to the
shadowy quiet of Regent's Park, stepped over the railings and lay down
on a grassy slope near where the people skate in winter time, and there
he slept an hour or so. And about six o'clock in the morning, he was
talking to a draggled woman he had found sleeping in a ditch near
Hampstead Heath, asking her very earnestly what she thought she was
for....
IV.
The wandering of Caddles about London came to a head on the second day
in the morning. For then his hunger overcame him. He hesitated where the
hot-smelling loaves were being tossed into a cart, and then very
quietly knelt down and commenced robbery. He emptied the cart while the
baker's man fled for the police, and then his great hand came into the
shop and cleared counter and cases. Then with an armful, still eating,
he went his way looking for another shop to go on with his meal. It
happened to be one of those seasons when work is scarce and food dear,
and the crowd in that quarter was sympathetic even with a giant who took
the food they all desired. They applauded the second phase of his meal,
and laughed at his stupid grimace at the policeman.
"I woff hungry," he said, with his mouth full.
"Brayvo!" cried the crowd. "Brayvo!"
Then when he was beginning his third baker's shop, he was stopped by
half a dozen policemen hammering with truncheons at his shins. "Look
here, my fine giant, you come along o' me," said the officer in charge.
"You ain't allowed away from home like this. You come off home with me."
They did their best to arrest him. There was a trolley, I am told,
chasing up and down streets at that time, bearing rolls of chain and
ship's cable to play the part of handcuffs in that great arrest. There
was no intention then of killing him. "He is no party to the plot,"
Caterham had said. "I will not have innocent blood upon my hands." And
added: "--until everything else has been tried."
At first Caddles did not understand the import of these attentions. When
he did, he told the policemen not to be fools, and set off in great
strides that left them all behind. The bakers' shops had been in the
Harrow Road, and he went through canal London to St. John's Wood, and
sat down in a private garden there to pick his teeth and be speedily
assailed by another posse of constables.
"You lea' me alone," he growled, and slouched through the
gardens--spoiling several lawns and kicking down a fence or so, while
the energetic little policemen followed him up, some through the
gardens, some along the road in front of the houses. Here there were one
or two with guns, but they made no use of them. When he came out into
the Edgware Road there was a new note and a new movement in the crowd,
and a mounted policeman rode over his foot and got upset for his pains.
"You lea' me alone," said Caddles, facing the breathless crowd. "I ain't
done anything to you." At that time he was unarmed, for he had left his
chalk chopper in Regent's Park. But now, poor wretch, he seems to have
felt the need of some weapon. He turned back towards the goods yard of
the Great Western Railway, wrenched up the standard of a tall arc light,
a formidable mace for him, and flung it over his shoulder. And finding
the police still turning up to pester him, he went back along the
Edgware Road, towards Cricklewood, and struck off sullenly to the north.
He wandered as far as Waltham, and then turned back westward and then
again towards London, and came by the cemeteries and over the crest of
Highgate about midday into view of the greatness of the city again. He
turned aside and sat down in a garden, with his back to a house that
overlooked all London. He was breathless, and his face was lowering, and
now the people no longer crowded upon him as they had done when first he
came to London, but lurked in the adjacent garden, and peeped from
cautious securities. They knew by now the thing was grimmer than they
had thought. "Why can't they lea' me alone?" growled young Caddles. "I
_mus'_ eat. Why can't they lea' me alone?"
He sat with a darkling face, gnawing at his knuckles and looking down
over London. All the fatigue, worry, perplexity, and impotent wrath of
his wanderings was coming to a head in him. "They mean nothing," he
whispered. "They mean nothing. And they _won't_ let me alone, and they
_will_ get in my way." And again, over and over to himself, "Meanin'
nothing.
"Ugh! the little people!"
He bit harder at his knuckles and his scowl deepened. "Cuttin' chalk
for 'em," he whispered. "And all the world is theirs! _I_ don't come
in--nowhere."
Presently with a spasm of sick anger he saw the now familiar form of a
policeman astride the garden wall.
"Lea' me alone," grunted the giant. "Lea' me alone."
"I got to do my duty," said the little policeman, with a face that was
white and resolute.
"You lea' me alone. I got to live as well as you. I got to think. I got
to eat. You lea' me alone."
"It's the Law," said the little policeman, coming no further. "We never
made the Law."
"Nor me," said young Caddles. "You little people made all that before I
was born. You and your Law! What I must and what I mustn't! No food for
me to eat unless I work a slave, no rest, no shelter, nothin', and you
tell me--"
"I ain't got no business with that," said the policeman. "I'm not one to
argue. All I got to do is to carry out the Law." And he brought his
second leg over the wall and seemed disposed to get down. Other
policemen appeared behind him.
"I got no quarrel with _you_--mind," said young Caddles, with his grip
tight upon his huge mace of iron, his face pale, and a lank explanatory
great finger to the policeman. "I got no quarrel with you. But--_You
lea' me alone."_
The policeman tried to be calm and commonplace, with a monstrous tragedy
clear before his eyes. "Give me the proclamation," he said to some
unseen follower, and a little white paper was handed to him.
"Lea' me alone," said Caddles, scowling, tense, and drawn together.
"This means," said the policeman before he read, "go 'ome. Go 'ome to
your chalk pit. If not, you'll be hurt."
Caddles gave an inarticulate growl.
Then when the proclamation had been read, the officer made a sign. Four
men with rifles came into view and took up positions of affected ease
along the wall. They wore the uniform of the rat police. At the sight of
the guns, young Caddles blazed into anger. He remembered the sting of
the Wreckstone farmers' shot guns. "You going to shoot off those at me?"
he said, pointing, and it seemed to the officer he must be afraid.
"If you don't march back to your pit--"
Then in an instant the officer had slung himself back over the wall, and
sixty feet above him the great electric standard whirled down to his
death. Bang, bang, bang, went the heavy guns, and smash! the shattered
wall, the soil and subsoil of the garden flew. Something flew with it,
that left red drops on one of the shooter's hands. The riflemen dodged
this way and that and turned valiantly to fire again. But young Caddles,
already shot twice through the body, had spun about to find who it was
had hit him so heavily in the back. Bang! Bang! He had a vision of
houses and greenhouses and gardens, of people dodging at windows, the
whole swaying fearfully and mysteriously. He seems to have made three
stumbling strides, to have raised and dropped his huge mace, and to have
clutched his chest. He was stung and wrenched by pain.
What was this, warm and wet, on his hand?
One man peering from a bedroom window saw his face, saw him staring,
with a grimace of weeping dismay, at the blood upon his hand, and then
his knees bent under him, and he came crashing to the earth, the first
of the giant nettles to fall to Caterham's resolute clutch, the very
last that he had reckoned would come into his hand.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH.
REDWOOD'S TWO DAYS.
I.
So soon as Caterham knew the moment for grasping his nettle had come, he
took the law into his own hands and sent to arrest Cossar and Redwood.
Redwood was there for the taking. He had been undergoing an operation in
the side, and the doctors had kept all disturbing things from him until
his convalescence was assured. Now they had released him. He was just
out of bed, sitting in a fire-warmed room, with a heap of newspapers
about him, reading for the first time of the agitation that had swept
the country into the hands of Caterham, and of the trouble that was
darkening over the Princess and his son. It was in the morning of the
day when young Caddles died, and when the policeman tried to stop young
Redwood on his way to the Princess. The latest newspapers Redwood had
did but vaguely prefigure these imminent things. He was re-reading these
first adumbrations of disaster with a sinking heart, reading the shadow
of death more and more perceptibly into them, reading to occupy his mind
until further news should come. When the officers followed the servant
into his room, he looked up eagerly.
"I thought it was an early evening paper," he said. Then standing up,
and with a swift change of manner: "What's this?"
After that Redwood had no news of anything for two days.
They had come with a vehicle to take him away, but when it became
evident that he was ill, it was decided to leave him for a day or so
until he could be safely removed, and his house was taken over by the
police and converted into a temporary prison. It was the same house in
which Giant Redwood had been born and in which Herakleophorbia had for
the first time been given to a human being, and Redwood had now been a
widower and had lived alone in it eight years.
He had become an iron-grey man, with a little pointed grey beard and
still active brown eyes. He was slender and soft-voiced, as he had ever
been, but his features had now that indefinable quality that comes of
brooding over mighty things. To the arresting officer his appearance was
in impressive contrast to the enormity of his offences. "Here's this
feller," said the officer in command, to his next subordinate, "has done
his level best to bust up everything, and 'e's got a face like a quiet
country gentleman; and here's Judge Hangbrow keepin' everything nice and
in order for every one, and 'e's got a 'ead like a 'og. Then their
manners! One all consideration and the other snort and grunt. Which just
shows you, doesn't it, that appearances aren't to be gone upon, whatever
else you do."
But his praise of Redwood's consideration was presently dashed. The
officers found him troublesome at first until they had made it clear
that it was useless for him to ask questions or beg for papers. They
made a sort of inspection of his study indeed, and cleared away even
the papers he had. Redwood's voice was high and expostulatory. "But
don't you see," he said over and over again, "it's my Son, my only Son,
that is in this trouble. It isn't the Food I care for, but my Son."
"I wish indeed I could tell you, Sir," said the officer. "But our orders
are strict."
"Who gave the orders?" cried Redwood.
"Ah! _that_, Sir---" said the officer, and moved towards the door....
"'E's going up and down 'is room," said the second officer, when his
superior came down. "That's all right. He'll walk it off a bit."
"I hope 'e will," said the chief officer. "The fact is I didn't see it
in that light before, but this here Giant what's been going on with the
Princess, you know, is this man's son."
The two regarded one another and the third policeman for a space.
"Then it is a bit rough on him," the third policeman said.
It became evident that Redwood had still imperfectly apprehended the
fact that an iron curtain had dropped between him and the outer world.
They heard him go to the door, try the handle and rattle the lock, and
then the voice of the officer who was stationed on the landing telling
him it was no good to do that. Then afterwards they heard him at the
windows and saw the men outside looking up. "It's no good that way,"
said the second officer. Then Redwood began upon the bell. The senior
officer went up and explained very patiently that it could do no good to
ring the bell like that, and if it was rung for nothing now it might
have to be disregarded presently when he had need of something. "Any
reasonable attendance, Sir," the officer said. "But if you ring it just
by way of protest we shall be obliged, Sir, to disconnect."
The last word the officer heard was Redwood's high-pitched, "But at
least you might tell me if my Son--"
II.
After that Redwood spent most of his time at the windows.
But the windows offered him little of the march of events outside. It
was a quiet street at all times, and that day it was unusually quiet:
scarcely a cab, scarcely a tradesman's cart passed all that morning. Now
and then men went by--without any distinctive air of events--now and
then a little group of children, a nursemaid and a woman going shopping,
and so forth. They came on to the stage right or left, up or down the
street, with an exasperating suggestion of indifference to any concerns
more spacious than their own; they would discover the police-guarded
house with amazement and exit in the opposite direction, where the great
trusses of a giant hydrangea hung across the pavement, staring back or
pointing. Now and then a man would come and ask one of the policemen a
question and get a curt reply ...
Opposite the houses seemed dead. A housemaid appeared once at a bedroom
window and stared for a space, and it occurred to Redwood to signal to
her. For a time she watched his gestures as if with interest and made a
vague response to them, then looked over her shoulder suddenly and
turned and went away. An old man hobbled out of Number 37 and came down
the steps and went off to the right, altogether without looking up. For
ten minutes the only occupant of the road was a cat....
With such events that interminable momentous morning lengthened out.
About twelve there came a bawling of newsvendors from the adjacent road;
but it passed. Contrary to their wont they left Redwood's street alone,
and a suspicion dawned upon him that the police were guarding the end of
the street. He tried to open the window, but this brought a policeman
into the room forthwith....
The clock of the parish church struck twelve, and after an abyss of
time--one.
They mocked him with lunch.
He ate a mouthful and tumbled the food about a little in order to get it
taken away, drank freely of whisky, and then took a chair and went back
to the window. The minutes expanded into grey immensities, and for a
time perhaps he slept....
He woke with a vague impression of remote concussions. He perceived a
rattling of the windows like the quiver of an earthquake, that lasted
for a minute or so and died away. Then after a silence it returned....
Then it died away again. He fancied it might be merely the passage of
some heavy vehicle along the main road. What else could it be?
After a time he began to doubt whether he had heard this sound.
He began to reason interminably with himself. Why, after all, was he
seized? Caterham had been in office two days--just long enough--to grasp
his Nettle! Grasp his Nettle! Grasp his Giant Nettle! The refrain once
started, sang through his mind, and would not be dismissed.
What, after all, could Caterham do? He was a religious man. He was
bound in a sort of way by that not to do violence without a cause.
Grasp his Nettle! Perhaps, for example, the Princess was to be seized
and sent abroad. There might be trouble with his son. In which case--!
But why had he been arrested? Why was it necessary to keep him in
ignorance of a thing like that? The thing suggested--something more
extensive.
Perhaps, for example--they meant to lay all the giants by the heels!
They were all to be arrested together. There had been hints of that in
the election speeches. And then?
No doubt they had got Cossar also?
Caterham was a religious man. Redwood clung to that. The back of his
mind was a black curtain, and on that curtain there came and went a
word--a word written in letters of fire. He struggled perpetually
against that word. It was always as it were beginning to get written on
the curtain and never getting completed.
He faced it at last. "Massacre!" There was the word in its full
brutality.
No! No! No! It was impossible! Caterham was a religious man, a civilised
man. And besides after all these years, after all these hopes!
Redwood sprang up; he paced the room. He spoke to himself; he shouted.
"_No!_"
Mankind was surely not so mad as that--surely not! It was impossible, it
was incredible, it could not be. What good would it do to kill the giant
human when the gigantic in all the lower things had now inevitably come?
They could not be so mad as that! "I must dismiss such an idea," he
said aloud; "dismiss such an idea! Absolutely!"
He pulled up short. What was that?
Certainly the windows had rattled. He went to look out into the street.
Opposite he saw the instant confirmation of his ears. At a bedroom at
Number 35 was a woman, towel in hand, and at the dining-room of Number
37 a man was visible behind a great vase of hypertrophied maidenhair
fern, both staring out and up, both disquieted and curious. He could see
now too, quite clearly, that the policeman on the pavement had heard it
also. The thing was not his imagination.
He turned to the darkling room.
"Guns," he said.
He brooded.
"Guns?"
They brought him in strong tea, such as he was accustomed to have. It
was evident his housekeeper had been taken into consultation. After
drinking it, he was too restless to sit any longer at the window, and he
paced the room. His mind became more capable of consecutive thought.
The room had been his study for four-and-twenty years. It had been
furnished at his marriage, and all the essential equipment dated from
then, the large complex writing-desk, the rotating chair, the easy chair
at the fire, the rotating bookcase, the fixture of indexed pigeon-holes
that filled the further recess. The vivid Turkey carpet, the later
Victorian rugs and curtains had mellowed now to a rich dignity of
effect, and copper and brass shone warm about the open fire. Electric
lights had replaced the lamp of former days; that was the chief
alteration in the original equipment. But among these things his
connection with the Food had left abundant traces. Along one wall, above
the dado, ran a crowded array of black-framed photographs and
photogravures, showing his son and Cossar's sons and others of the
Boom-children at various ages and amidst various surroundings. Even
young Caddles' vacant visage had its place in that collection. In the
corner stood a sheaf of the tassels of gigantic meadow grass from
Cheasing Eyebright, and on the desk there lay three empty poppy heads as
big as hats. The curtain rods were grass stems. And the tremendous skull
of the great hog of Oakham hung, a portentous ivory overmantel, with a
Chinese jar in either eye socket, snout down above the fire....
It was to the photographs that Redwood went, and in particular to the
photographs of his son.
They brought back countless memories of things that had passed out of
his mind, of the early days of the Food, of Bensington's timid presence,
of his cousin Jane, of Cossar and the night work at the Experimental
Farm. These things came to him now very little and bright and distinct,
like things seen through a telescope on a sunny day. And then there was
the giant nursery, the giant childhood, the young giant's first efforts
to speak, his first clear signs of affection.
Guns?
It flowed in on him, irresistibly, overwhelmingly, that outside there,
outside this accursed silence and mystery, his son and Cossar's sons,
and all these glorious first-fruits of a greater age were even
now--fighting. Fighting for life! Even now his son might be in some
dismal quandary, cornered, wounded, overcome....
He swung away from the pictures and went up and down the room
gesticulating. "It cannot be," he cried, "it cannot be. It cannot end
like that!"
"What was that?"
He stopped, stricken rigid.
The trembling of the windows had begun again, and then had come a
thud--a vast concussion that shook the house. The concussion seemed to
last for an age. It must have been very near. For a moment it seemed
that something had struck the house above him--an enormous impact that
broke into a tinkle of falling glass, and then a stillness that ended at
last with a minute clear sound of running feet in the street below.
Those feet released him from his rigor. He turned towards the window,
and saw it starred and broken.
His heart beat high with a sense of crisis, of conclusive occurrence, of
release. And then again, his realisation of impotent confinement fell
about him like a curtain!
He could see nothing outside except that the small electric lamp
opposite was not lighted; he could hear nothing after the first
suggestion of a wide alarm. He could add nothing to interpret or enlarge
that mystery except that presently there came a reddish fluctuating
brightness in the sky towards the south-east.
This light waxed and waned. When it waned he doubted if it had ever
waxed. It had crept upon him very gradually with the darkling. It became
the predominant fact in his long night of suspense. Sometimes it seemed
to him it had the quiver one associates with dancing flames, at others
he fancied it was no more than the normal reflection of the evening
lights. It waxed and waned through the long hours, and only vanished at
last when it was submerged altogether under the rising tide of dawn. Did
it mean--? What could it mean? Almost certainly it was some sort of
fire, near or remote, but he could not even tell whether it was smoke or
cloud drift that streamed across the sky. But about one o'clock there
began a flickering of searchlights athwart that ruddy tumult, a
flickering that continued for the rest of the night. That too might mean
many things? What could it mean? What did it mean? Just this stained
unrestful sky he had and the suggestion of a huge explosion to occupy
his mind. There came no further sounds, no further running, nothing but
a shouting that might have been only the distant efforts of drunken
men...
He did not turn up his lights; he stood at his draughty broken window, a
distressful, slight black outline to the officer who looked ever and
again into the room and exhorted him to rest.
All night Redwood remained at his window peering up at the ambiguous
drift of the sky, and only with the coming of the dawn did he obey his
fatigue and lie down upon the little bed they had prepared for him
between his writing-desk and the sinking fire in the fireplace under the
great hog's skull.
III.
For thirty-six long hours did Redwood remain imprisoned, closed in and
shut off from the great drama of the Two Days, while the little people
in the dawn of greatness fought against the Children of the Food. Then
abruptly the iron curtain rose again, and he found himself near the very
centre of the struggle. That curtain rose as unexpectedly as it fell. In
the late afternoon he was called to the window by the clatter of a cab,
that stopped without. A young man descended, and in another minute stood
before him in the room, a slightly built young man of thirty perhaps,
clean shaven, well dressed, well mannered.
"Mr. Redwood, Sir," he began, "would you be willing to come to Mr.
Caterham? He needs your presence very urgently."
"Needs my presence!" There leapt a question into Redwood's mind, that
for a moment he could not put. He hesitated. Then in a voice that broke
he asked: "What has he done to my Son?" and stood breathless for the
reply.
"Your Son, Sir? Your Son is doing well. So at least we gather."
"Doing well?"
"He was wounded, Sir, yesterday. Have you not heard?"
Redwood smote these pretences aside. His voice was no longer coloured by
fear, but by anger. "You know I have not heard. You know I have heard
nothing."
"Mr. Caterham feared, Sir--It was a time of upheaval. Every one--taken
by surprise. He arrested you to save you, Sir, from any misadventure--"
"He arrested me to prevent my giving any warning or advice to my son. Go
on. Tell me what has happened. Have you succeeded? Have you killed them
all?"
The young man made a pace or so towards the window, and turned.
"No, Sir," he said concisely.
"What have you to tell me?"
"It's our proof, Sir, that this fighting was not planned by us. They
found us ... totally unprepared."
"You mean?"
"I mean, Sir, the Giants have--to a certain extent--held their own."
The world changed, for Redwood. For a moment something like hysteria had
the muscles of his face and throat. Then he gave vent to a profound
"Ah!" His heart bounded towards exultation. "The Giants have held their
own!"
"There has been terrible fighting--terrible destruction. It is all a
most hideous misunderstanding ... In the north and midlands Giants have
been killed ... Everywhere."
"They are fighting now?"
"No, Sir. There was a flag of truce."
"From them?"
"No, Sir. Mr. Caterham sent a flag of truce. The whole thing is a
hideous misunderstanding. That is why he wants to talk to you, and put
his case before you. They insist, Sir, that you should intervene--"
Redwood interrupted. "Do you know what happened to my Son?" he asked.
"He was wounded."
"Tell me! Tell me!"
"He and the Princess came--before the--the movement to surround the
Cossar camp was complete--the Cossar pit at Chislehurst. They came
suddenly, Sir, crashing through a dense thicket of giant oats, near
River, upon a column of infantry ... Soldiers had been very nervous all
day, and this produced a panic."
"They shot him?"
"No, Sir. They ran away. Some shot at him--wildly--against orders."
Redwood gave a note of denial. "It's true, Sir. Not on account of your
son, I won't pretend, but on account of the Princess."
"Yes. That's true."
"The two Giants ran shouting towards the encampment. The soldiers ran
this way and that, and then some began firing. They say they saw him
stagger--"
"Ugh!"
"Yes, Sir. But we know he is not badly hurt."
"How?"
"He sent the message, Sir, that he was doing well!"
"To me?"
"Who else, Sir?"
Redwood stood for nearly a minute with his arms tightly folded, taking
this in. Then his indignation found a voice.
"Because you were fools in doing the thing, because you miscalculated
and blundered, you would like me to think you are not murderers in
intention. And besides--The rest?"
The young man looked interrogation.
"The other Giants?"
The young man made no further pretence of misunderstanding. His tone
fell. "Thirteen, Sir, are dead."
"And others wounded?"
"Yes, Sir."
"And Caterham," he gasped, "wants to meet me! Where are the others?"
"Some got to the encampment during the fighting, Sir ... They seem to
have known--"
"Well, of course they did. If it hadn't been for Cossar--Cossar is
there?"
"Yes, Sir. And all the surviving Giants are there--the ones who didn't
get to the camp in the fighting have gone, or are going now under the
flag of trace."
"That means," said Redwood, "that you are beaten."
"We are not beaten. No, Sir. You cannot say we are beaten. But your sons
have broken the rules of war. Once last night, and now again. After our
attack had been withdrawn. This afternoon they began to bombard
London--"
"That's legitimate!"
"They have been firing shells filled with--poison."
"Poison?"
"Yes. Poison. The Food--"
"Herakleophorbia?"
"Yes, Sir. Mr. Caterham, Sir--"
"You are beaten! Of course that beats you. It's Cossar! What can you
hope to do now? What good is it to do anything now? You will breathe it
in the dust of every street. What is there to fight for more? Rules of
war, indeed! And now Caterham wants to humbug me to help him bargain.
Good heavens, man! Why should I come to your exploded windbag? He has
played his game ... murdered and muddled. Why should I?"
The young man stood with an air of vigilant respect.
"It is a fact, Sir," he interrupted, "that the Giants insist that they
shall see you. They will have no ambassador but you. Unless you come to
them, I am afraid, Sir, there will be more bloodshed."
"On _your_ side, perhaps."
"No, Sir--on both sides. The world is resolved the thing must end."
Redwood looked about the study. His eyes rested for a moment on the
photograph of his boy. He turned and met the expectation of the young
man. "Yes," he said at last, "I will come."
IV.
His encounter with Caterham was entirely different from his
anticipation. He had seen the man only twice in his life, once at dinner
and once in the lobby of the House, and his imagination had been active
not with the man but with the creation of the newspapers and
caricaturists, the legendary Caterham, Jack the Giant-killer, Perseus,
and all the rest of it. The element of a human personality came in to
disorder all that.
Here was not the face of the caricatures and portraits, but the face of
a worn and sleepless man, lined and drawn, yellow in the whites of the
eyes, a little weakened about the mouth. Here, indeed, were the
red-brown eyes, the black hair, the distinctive aquiline profile of the
great demagogue, but here was also something else that smote any
premeditated scorn and rhetoric aside. This man was suffering; he was
suffering acutely; he was under enormous stress. From the beginning he
had an air of impersonating himself. Presently, with a single gesture,
the slightest movement, he revealed to Redwood that he was keeping
himself up with drugs. He moved a thumb to his waistcoat pocket, and
then, after a few sentences more, threw concealment aside, and slipped
the little tabloid to his lips.
Moreover, in spite of the stresses upon him, in spite of the fact that
he was in the wrong, and Redwood's junior by a dozen years, that strange
quality in him, the something--personal magnetism one may call it for
want of a better name--that had won his way for him to this eminence of
disaster was with him still. On that also Redwood had failed to reckon.
From the first, so far as the course and conduct of their speech went,
Caterham prevailed over Redwood. All the quality of the first phase of
their meeting was determined by him, all the tone and procedure were
his. That happened as if it was a matter of course. All Redwood's
expectations vanished at his presence. He shook hands before Redwood
remembered that he meant to parry that familiarity; he pitched the note
of their conference from the outset, sure and clear, as a search for
expedients under a common catastrophe.
If he made any mistake it was when ever and again his fatigue got the
better of his immediate attention, and the habit of the public meeting
carried him away. Then he drew himself up--through all their interview
both men stood--and looked away from Redwood, and began to fence and
justify. Once even he said "Gentlemen!"
Quietly, expandingly, he began to talk....
There were moments when Redwood ceased even to feel himself an
interlocutor, when he became the mere auditor of a monologue. He became
the privileged spectator of an extraordinary phenomenon. He perceived
something almost like a specific difference between himself and this
being whose beautiful voice enveloped him, who was talking, talking.
This mind before him was so powerful and so limited. From its driving
energy, its personal weight, its invincible oblivion to certain things,
there sprang up in Redwood's mind the most grotesque and strange of
images. Instead of an antagonist who was a fellow-creature, a man one
could hold morally responsible, and to whom one could address
reasonable appeals, he saw Caterham as something, something like a
monstrous rhinoceros, as it were, a civilised rhinoceros begotten of the
jungle of democratic affairs, a monster of irresistible onset and
invincible resistance. In all the crashing conflicts of that tangle he
was supreme. And beyond? This man was a being supremely adapted to make
his way through multitudes of men. For him there was no fault so
important as self-contradiction, no science so significant as the
reconciliation of "interests." Economic realities, topographical
necessities, the barely touched mines of scientific expedients, existed
for him no more than railways or rifled guns or geographical literature
exist for his animal prototype. What did exist were gatherings, and
caucuses, and votes--above all, votes. He was votes incarnate--millions
of votes.
And now in the great crisis, with the Giants broken but not beaten, this
vote-monster talked.
It was so evident that even now he had everything to learn. He did not
know there were physical laws and economic laws, quantities and
reactions that all humanity voting _nemine contradicente_ cannot vote
away, and that are disobeyed only at the price of destruction. He did
not know there are moral laws that cannot be bent by any force of
glamour, or are bent only to fly back with vindictive violence. In the
face of shrapnel or the Judgment Day, it was evident to Redwood that
this man would have sheltered behind some curiously dodged vote of the
House of Commons.
What most concerned his mind now was not the powers that held the
fastness away there to the south, not defeat and death, but the effect
of these things upon his Majority, the cardinal reality in his life. He
had to defeat the Giants or go under. He was by no means absolutely
despairful. In this hour of his utmost failure, with blood and disaster
upon his hands, and the rich promise of still more horrible disaster,
with the gigantic destinies of the world towering and toppling over him,
he was capable of a belief that by sheer exertion of his voice, by
explaining and qualifying and restating, he might yet reconstitute his
power. He was puzzled and distressed no doubt, fatigued and suffering,
but if only he could keep up, if only he could keep talking--
As he talked he seemed to Redwood to advance and recede, to dilate and
contract. Redwood's share of the talk was of the most subsidiary sort,
wedges as it were suddenly thrust in. "That's all nonsense." "No." "It's
no use suggesting that." "Then why did you begin?"
It is doubtful if Caterham really heard him at all. Round such
interpolations Caterham's speech flowed indeed like some swift stream
about a rock. There this incredible man stood, on his official
hearthrug, talking, talking with enormous power and skill, talking as
though a pause in his talk, his explanations, his presentation of
standpoints and lights, of considerations and expedients, would permit
some antagonistic influence to leap into being--into vocal being, the
only being he could comprehend. There he stood amidst the slightly faded
splendours of that official room in which one man after another had
succumbed to the belief that a certain power of intervention was the
creative control of an empire....
The more he talked the more certain Redwood's sense of stupendous
futility grew. Did this man realise that while he stood and talked
there, the whole great world was moving, that the invincible tide of
growth flowed and flowed, that there were any hours but parliamentary
hours, or any weapons in the hands of the Avengers of Blood? Outside,
darkling the whole room, a single leaf of giant Virginia creeper tapped
unheeded on the pane.
Redwood became anxious to end this amazing monologue, to escape to
sanity and judgment, to that beleaguered camp, the fastness of the
future, where, at the very nucleus of greatness, the Sons were gathered
together. For that this talking was endured. He had a curious impression
that unless this monologue ended he would presently find himself carried
away by it, that he must fight against Caterham's voice as one fights
against a drug. Facts had altered and were altering beneath that spell.
What was the man saying?
Since Redwood had to report it to the Children of the Food, in a sort of
way he perceived it did matter. He would have to listen and guard his
sense of realities as well as he could.
Much about bloodguiltiness. That was eloquence. That didn't matter.
Next?
He was suggesting a convention!
He was suggesting that the surviving Children of the Food should
capitulate and go apart and form a community of their own. There were
precedents, he said, for this. "We would assign them territory--"
"Where?" interjected Redwood, stooping to argue.
Caterham snatched at that concession. He turned his face to Redwood's,
and his voice fell to a persuasive reasonableness. That could be
determined. That, he contended, was a quite subsidiary question. Then he
went on to stipulate: "And except for them and where they are we must
have absolute control, the Food and all the Fruits of the Food must be
stamped out--"
Redwood found himself bargaining: "The Princess?"
"She stands apart."
"No," said Redwood, struggling to get back to the old footing. "That's
absurd."
"That afterwards. At any rate we are agreed that the making of the Food
must stop--"
"I have agreed to nothing. I have said nothing--"
"But on one planet, to have two races of men, one great, one small!
Consider what has happened! Consider that is but a little foretaste of
what might presently happen if this Food has its way! Consider all you
have already brought upon this world! If there is to be a race of
Giants, increasing and multiplying--"
"It is not for me to argue," said Redwood. "I must go to our sons. I
want to go to my son. That is why I have come to you. Tell me exactly
what you offer."
Caterham made a speech upon his terms.
The Children of the Food were to be given a great reservation--in North
America perhaps or Africa--in which they might live out their lives in
their own fashion.
"But it's nonsense," said Redwood. "There are other Giants now abroad.
All over Europe--here and there!"
"There could be an international convention. It's _not_ impossible.
Something of the sort indeed has already been spoken of ... But in this
reservation they can live out their own lives in their own way. They may
do what they like; they may make what they like. We shall be glad if
they will make us things. They may be happy. Think!"
"Provided there are no more Children."
"Precisely. The Children are for us. And so, Sir, we shall save the
world, we shall save it absolutely from the fruits of your terrible
discovery. It is not too late for us. Only we are eager to temper
expediency with mercy. Even now we are burning and searing the places
their shells hit yesterday. We can get it under. Trust me we shall get
it under. But in that way, without cruelty, without injustice--"
"And suppose the Children do not agree?"
For the first time Caterham looked Redwood fully in the face.
"They must!"
"I don't think they will."
"Why should they not agree?" he asked, in richly toned amazement.
"Suppose they don't?"
"What can it be but war? We cannot have the thing go on. We cannot. Sir.
Have you scientific men _no_ imagination? Have you no mercy? We cannot
have our world trampled under a growing herd of such monsters and
monstrous growths as your Food has made. We cannot and we cannot! I ask
you, Sir, what can it be but war? And remember--this that has happened
is only a beginning! _This_ was a skirmish. A mere affair of police.
Believe me, a mere affair of police. Do not be cheated by perspective,
by the immediate bigness of these newer things. Behind us is the
nation--is humanity. Behind the thousands who have died there are
millions. Were it not for the fear of bloodshed, Sir, behind our first
attacks there would be forming other attacks, even now. Whether we can
kill this Food or not, most assuredly we can kill your sons! You reckon
too much on the things of yesterday, on the happenings of a mere score
of years, on one battle. You have no sense of the slow course of
history. I offer this convention for the sake of lives, not because it
can change the inevitable end. If you think that your poor two dozen of
Giants can resist all the forces of our people and of all the alien
peoples who will come to our aid; if you think you can change Humanity
at a blow, in a single generation, and alter the nature and stature of
Man--"
He flung out an arm. "Go to them now, Sir. I see them, for all the evil
they have done, crouching among their wounded--"
He stopped, as though he had glanced at Redwood's son by chance.
There came a pause.
"Go to them," he said.
"That is what I want to do."
"Then go now...."
He turned and pressed the button of a bell; without, in immediate
response, came a sound of opening doors and hastening feet.
The talk was at an end. The display was over. Abruptly Caterham seemed
to contract, to shrivel up into a yellow-faced, fagged-out,
middle-sized, middle-aged man. He stepped forward, as if he were
stepping out of a picture, and with a complete assumption of that
friendliness that lies behind all the public conflicts of our race, he
held out his hand to Redwood.
As if it were a matter of course, Redwood shook hands with him for the
second time.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH.
THE GIANT LEAGUER.
I.
Presently Redwood found himself in a train going south over the Thames.
He had a brief vision of the river shining under its lights, and of the
smoke still going up from the place where the shell had fallen on the
north bank, and where a vast multitude of men had been organised to burn
the Herakleophorbia out of the ground. The southern bank was dark, for
some reason even the streets were not lit, all that was clearly visible
was the outlines of the tall alarm-towers and the dark bulks of flats
and schools, and after a minute of peering scrutiny he turned his back
on the window and sank into thought. There was nothing more to see or do
until he saw the Sons....
He was fatigued by the stresses of the last two days; it seemed to him
that his emotions must needs be exhausted, but he had fortified himself
with strong coffee before starting, and his thoughts ran thin and clear.
His mind touched many things. He reviewed again, but now in the
enlightenment of accomplished events, the manner in which the Food had
entered and unfolded itself in the world.
"Bensington thought it might be an excellent food for infants," he
whispered to himself, with a faint smile. Then there came into his mind
as vivid as if they were still unsettled his own horrible doubts after
he had committed himself by giving it to his own son. From that, with a
steady unfaltering expansion, in spite of every effort of men to help
and hinder, the Food had spread through the whole world of man. And now?
"Even if they kill them all," Redwood whispered, "the thing is done."
The secret of its making was known far and wide. That had been his own
work. Plants, animals, a multitude of distressful growing children would
conspire irresistibly to force the world to revert again to the Food,
whatever happened in the present struggle. "The thing is done," he said,
with his mind swinging round beyond all his controlling to rest upon the
present fate of the Children and his son. Would he find them exhausted
by the efforts of the battle, wounded, starving, on the verge of defeat,
or would he find them still stout and hopeful, ready for the still
grimmer conflict of the morrow? His son was wounded! But he had sent a
message!
His mind came back to his interview with Caterham.
He was roused from his thoughts by the stopping of his train in
Chislehurst station. He recognised the place by the huge rat alarm-tower
that crested Camden Hill, and the row of blossoming giant hemlocks that
lined the road....
Caterham's private secretary came to him from the other carriage and
told him that half a mile farther the line had been wrecked, and that
the rest of the journey was to be made in a motor car. Redwood descended
upon a platform lit only by a hand lantern and swept by the cool night
breeze. The quiet of that derelict, wood-set, weed-embedded suburb--for
all the inhabitants had taken refuge in London at the outbreak of
yesterday's conflict--became instantly impressive. His conductor took
him down the steps to where a motor car was waiting with blazing
lights--the only lights to be seen--handed him over to the care of the
driver and bade him farewell.
"You will do your best for us," he said, with an imitation of his
master's manner, as he held Redwood's hand.
So soon as Redwood could be wrapped about they started out into the
night. At one moment they stood still, and then the motor car was
rushing softly and swiftly down the station incline. They turned one
corner and another, followed the windings of a lane of villas, and then
before them stretched the road. The motor droned up to its topmost
speed, and the black night swept past them. Everything was very dark
under the starlight, and the whole world crouched mysteriously and was
gone without a sound. Not a breath stirred the flying things by the
wayside; the deserted, pallid white villas on either hand, with their
black unlit windows, reminded him of a noiseless procession of skulls.
The driver beside him was a silent man, or stricken into silence by the
conditions of his journey. He answered Redwood's brief questions in
monosyllables, and gruffly. Athwart the southern sky the beams of
searchlights waved noiseless passes; the sole strange evidences of life
they seemed in all that derelict world about the hurrying machine.
The road was presently bordered on either side by gigantic blackthorn
shoots that made it very dark, and by tail grass and big campions, huge
giant dead-nettles as high as trees, flickering past darkly in
silhouette overhead. Beyond Keston they came to a rising hill, and the
driver went slow. At the crest he stopped. The engine throbbed and
became still. "There," he said, and his big gloved finger pointed, a
black misshapen thing before Redwood's eyes.
Far away as it seemed, the great embankment, crested by the blaze from
which the searchlights sprang, rose up against the sky. Those beams went
and came among the clouds and the hilly land about them as if they
traced mysterious incantations.
"I don't know," said the driver at last, and it was clear he was afraid
to go on.
Presently a searchlight swept down the sky to them, stopped as it were
with a start, scrutinised them, a blinding stare confused rather than
mitigated by an intervening monstrous weed stem or so. They sat with
their gloves held over their eyes, trying to look under them and meet
that light.
"Go on," said Redwood after a while.
The driver still had his doubts; he tried to express them, and died down
to "I don't know" again.
At last he ventured on. "Here goes," he said, and roused his machinery
to motion again, followed intently by that great white eye.
To Redwood it seemed for a long time they were no longer on earth, but
in a state of palpitating hurry through a luminous cloud. Teuf, teuf,
teuf, teuf, went the machine, and ever and again--obeying I know not
what nervous impulse--the driver sounded his horn.
They passed into the welcome darkness of a high-fenced lane, and down
into a hollow and past some houses into that blinding stare again. Then
for a space the road ran naked across a down, and they seemed to hang
throbbing in immensity. Once more giant weeds rose about them and
whirled past. Then quite abruptly close upon them loomed the figure of a
giant, shining brightly where the searchlight caught him below, and
black against the sky above. "Hullo there!" he cried, and "stop! There's
no more road beyond ... Is that Father Redwood?"
Redwood stood up and gave a vague shout by way of answer, and then
Cossar was in the road beside him, gripping both hands with both of his
and pulling him out of the car.
"What of my son?" asked Redwood.
"He's all right," said Cossar. "They've hurt nothing serious in _him_."
"And your lads?"
"Well. All of them, well. But we've had to make a fight for it."
The Giant was saying something to the motor driver. Redwood stood aside
as the machine wheeled round, and then suddenly Cossar vanished,
everything vanished, and he was in absolute darkness for a space. The
glare was following the motor back to the crest of the Keston hill. He
watched the little conveyance receding in that white halo. It had a
curious effect, as though it was not moving at all and the halo was. A
group of war-blasted Giant elders flashed into gaunt scarred
gesticulations and were swallowed again by the night ... Redwood turned
to Cossar's dim outline again and clasped his hand. "I have been shut up
and kept in ignorance," he said, "for two whole days."
"We fired the Food at them," said Cossar. "Obviously! Thirty shots. Eh!"
"I come from Caterham."
"I know you do." He laughed with a note of bitterness. "I suppose he's
wiping it up."
II.
"Where is my son?" said Redwood.
"He is all right. The Giants are waiting for your message."
"Yes, but my son--..."
He passed with Cossar down a long slanting tunnel that was lit red for a
moment and then became dark again, and came out presently into the great
pit of shelter the Giants had made.
Redwood's first impression was of an enormous arena bounded by very high
cliffs and with its floor greatly encumbered. It was in darkness save
for the passing reflections of the watchman's searchlights that whirled
perpetually high overhead, and for a red glow that came and went from a
distant corner where two Giants worked together amidst a metallic
clangour. Against the sky, as the glare came about, his eye caught the
familiar outlines of the old worksheds and playsheds that were made for
the Cossar boys. They were hanging now, as it were, at a cliff brow, and
strangely twisted and distorted with the guns of Caterham's bombardment.
There were suggestions of huge gun emplacements above there, and nearer
were piles of mighty cylinders that were perhaps ammunition. All about
the wide space below, the forms of great engines and incomprehensible
bulks were scattered in vague disorder. The Giants appeared and vanished
among these masses and in the uncertain light; great shapes they were,
not disproportionate to the things amidst which they moved. Some were
actively employed, some sitting and lying as if they courted sleep, and
one near at hand, whose body was bandaged, lay on a rough litter of pine
boughs and was certainly asleep. Redwood peered at these dim forms; his
eyes went from one stirring outline to another.
"Where is my son, Cossar?"
Then he saw him.
His son was sitting under the shadow of a great wall of steel. He
presented himself as a black shape recognisable only by his pose,--his
features were invisible. He sat chin upon hand, as though weary or lost
in thought. Beside him Redwood discovered the figure of the Princess,
the dark suggestion of her merely, and then, as the glow from the
distant iron returned, he saw for an instant, red lit and tender, the
infinite kindliness of her shadowed face. She stood looking down upon
her lover with her hand resting against the steel. It seemed that she
whispered to him.
Redwood would have gone towards them.
"Presently," said Cossar. "First there is your message."
"Yes," said Redwood, "but--"
He stopped. His son was now looking up and speaking to the Princess, but
in too low a tone for them to hear. Young Redwood raised his face, and
she bent down towards him, and glanced aside before she spoke.
"But if we are beaten," they heard the whispered voice of young Redwood.
She paused, and the red blaze showed her eyes bright with unshed tears.
She bent nearer him and spoke still lower. There was something so
intimate and private in their bearing, in their soft tones, that
Redwood--Redwood who had thought for two whole days of nothing but his
son--felt himself intrusive there. Abruptly he was checked. For the
first time in his life perhaps he realised how much more a son may be to
his father than a father can ever be to a son; he realised the full
predominance of the future over the past. Here between these two he had
no part. His part was played. He turned to Cossar, in the instant
realisation. Their eyes met. His voice was changed to the tone of a grey
resolve.
"I will deliver my message now," he said. "Afterwards--... It will be
soon enough then."
The pit was so enormous and so encumbered that it was a long and
tortuous route to the place from which Redwood could speak to them all.
He and Cossar followed a steeply descending way that passed beneath an
arch of interlocking machinery, and so came into a vast deep gangway
that ran athwart the bottom of the pit. This gangway, wide and vacant,
and yet relatively narrow, conspired with everything about it to enhance
Redwood's sense of his own littleness. It became, as it were, an
excavated gorge. High overhead, separated from him by cliffs of
darkness, the searchlights wheeled and blazed, and the shining shapes
went to and fro. Giant voices called to one another above there, calling
the Giants together to the Council of War, to hear the terms that
Caterham had sent. The gangway still inclined downward towards black
vastnesses, towards shadows and mysteries and inconceivable things, into
which Redwood went slowly with reluctant footsteps and Cossar with a
confident stride....
Redwood's thoughts were busy. The two men passed into the completest
darkness, and Cossar took his companion's wrist. They went now slowly
perforce.
Redwood was moved to speak. "All this," he said, "is strange."
"Big," said Cossar.
"Strange. And strange that it should be strange to me--I, who am, in a
sense, the beginning of it all. It's--"
He stopped, wrestling with his elusive meaning, and threw an unseen
gesture at the cliff.
"I have not thought of it before. I have been busy, and the years have
passed. But here I see--It is a new generation, Cossar, and new emotions
and new needs. All this, Cossar--"
Cossar saw now his dim gesture to the things about them.
"All this is Youth."
Cossar made no answers and his irregular footfalls went striding on.
"It isn't _our_ youth, Cossar. They are taking things over. They are
beginning upon their own emotions, their own experiences, their own way.
We have made a new world, and it isn't ours. It isn't even--sympathetic.
This great place--"
"I planned it," said Cossar, his face close.
"But now?"
"Ah! I have given it to my sons."
Redwood could feel the loose wave of the arm that he could not see.
"That is it. We are over--or almost over."
"Your message!"
"Yes. And then--"
"We're over."
"Well--?"
"Of course we are out of it, we two old men," said Cossar, with his
familiar note of sudden anger. "Of course we are. Obviously. Each man
for his own time. And now--it's _their_ time beginning. That's all
right. Excavator's gang. We do our job and go. See? That is what death
is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions,
and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple.
What's the trouble?"
He paused to guide Redwood to some steps.
"Yes," said Redwood, "but one feels--"
He left his sentence incomplete.
"That is what Death is for." He heard Cossar below him insisting, "How
else could the thing be done? That is what Death is for."
III.
After devious windings and ascents they came out upon a projecting ledge
from which it was possible to see over the greater extent of the Giants'
pit, and from which Redwood might make himself heard by the whole of
their assembly. The Giants were already gathered below and about him at
different levels, to hear the message he had to deliver. The eldest son
of Cossar stood on the bank overhead watching the revelations of the
searchlights, for they feared a breach of the truce. The workers at the
great apparatus in the corner stood out clear in their own light; they
were near stripped; they turned their faces towards Redwood, but with a
watchful reference ever and again to the castings that they could not
leave. He saw these nearer figures with a fluctuating indistinctness, by
lights that came and went, and the remoter ones still less distinctly.
They came from and vanished again into the depths of great obscurities.
For these Giants had no more light than they could help in the pit, that
their eyes might be ready to see effectually any attacking force that
might spring upon them out of the darknesses around.
Ever and again some chance glare would pick out and display this group
or that of tall and powerful forms, the Giants from Sunderland clothed
in overlapping metal plates, and the others clad in leather, in woven
rope or in woven metal, as their conditions had determined. They sat
amidst or rested their hands upon, or stood erect among machines and
weapons as mighty as themselves, and all their faces, as they came and
went from visible to invisible, had steadfast eyes.
He made an effort to begin and did not do so. Then for a moment his
son's face glowed out in a hot insurgence of the fire, his son's face
looking up to him, tender as well as strong; and at that he found a
voice to reach them all, speaking across a gulf, as it were, to his son.
"I come from Caterham," he said. "He sent me to you, to tell you the
terms he offers."
He paused. "They are impossible terms, I know, now that I see you here
all together; they are impossible terms, but I brought them to you,
because I wanted to see you all--and my son. Once more ... I wanted to
see my son...."
"Tell them the terms," said Cossar.
"This is what Caterham offers. He wants you to go apart and leave his
world!"
"Where?"
"He does not know. Vaguely somewhere in the world a great region is to
be set apart.... And you are to make no more of the Food, to have no
children of your own, to live in your own way for your own time, and
then to end for ever."
He stopped.
"And that is all?"
"That is all."
There followed a great stillness. The darkness that veiled the Giants
seemed to look thoughtfully at him.
He felt a touch at his elbow, and Cossar was holding a chair for him--a
queer fragment of doll's furniture amidst these piled immensities. He
sat down and crossed his legs, and then put one across the knee of the
other, and clutched his boot nervously, and felt small and
self-conscious and acutely visible and absurdly placed.
Then at the sound of a voice he forgot himself again.
"You have heard, Brothers," said this voice out of the shadows.
And another answered, "We have heard."
"And the answer, Brothers?"
"To Caterham?"
"Is No!"
"And then?"
There was a silence for the space of some seconds.
Then a voice said: "These people are right. After their lights, that is.
They have been right in killing all that grew larger than its
kind--beast and plant and all manner of great things that arose. They
were right in trying to massacre us. They are right now in saying we
must not marry our kind. According to their lights they are right. They
know--it is time that we also knew--that you cannot have pigmies and
giants in one world together. Caterham has said that again and
again--clearly--their world or ours."
"We are not half a hundred now," said another, "and they are endless
millions."
"So it may be. But the thing is as I have said."
Then another long silence.
"And are we to die then?"
"God forbid!"
"Are they?"
"No."
"But that is what Caterham says! He would have us live out our lives,
die one by one, till only one remains, and that one at last would die
also, and they would cut down all the giant plants and weeds, kill all
the giant under-life, burn out the traces of the Food--make an end to us
and to the Food for ever. Then the little pigmy world would be safe.
They would go on--safe for ever, living their little pigmy lives, doing
pigmy kindnesses and pigmy cruelties each to the other; they might even
perhaps attain a sort of pigmy millennium, make an end to war, make an
end to over-population, sit down in a world-wide city to practise pigmy
arts, worshipping one another till the world begins to freeze...."
In the corner a sheet of iron fell in thunder to the ground.
"Brothers, we know what we mean to do."
In a spluttering of light from the searchlights Redwood saw earnest
youthful faces turning to his son.
"It is easy now to make the Food. It would be easy for us to make Food
for all the world."
"You mean, Brother Redwood," said a voice out of the darkness, "that it
is for the little people to eat the Food."
"What else is there to do?"
"We are not half a hundred and they are many millions."
"But we held our own."
"So far."
"If it is God's will, we may still hold our own."
"Yes. But think of the dead!"
Another voice took up the strain. "The dead," it said. "Think of the
unborn...."
"Brothers," came the voice of young Redwood, "what can we do but fight
them, and if we beat them, make them take the Food? They cannot help but
take the Food now. Suppose we were to resign our heritage and do this
folly that Caterham suggests! Suppose we could! Suppose we give up this
great thing that stirs within us, repudiate this thing our fathers did
for us--that _you_, Father, did for us--and pass, when our time has
come, into decay and nothingness! What then? Will this little world of
theirs be as it was before? They may fight against greatness in us who
are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should
destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness
is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of
all things! It is in the nature of all things; it is part of space and
time. To grow and still to grow: from first to last that is Being--that
is the law of life. What other law can there be?"
"To help others?"
"To grow. It is still, to grow. Unless we help them to fail...."
"They will fight hard to overcome us," said a voice.
And another, "What of that?"
"They will fight," said young Redwood. "If we refuse these terms, I
doubt not they will fight. Indeed I hope they will be open and fight. If
after all they offer peace, it will be only the better to catch us
unawares. Make no mistake, Brothers; in some way or other they will
fight. The war has begun, and we must fight, to the end. Unless we are
wise, we may find presently we have lived only to make them better
weapons against our children and our kind. This, so far, has been only
the dawn of battle. All our lives will be a battle. Some of us will be
killed in battle, some of us will be waylaid. There is no easy
victory--no victory whatever that is not more than half defeat for us.
Be sure of that. What of that? If only we keep a foothold, if only we
leave behind us a growing host to fight when we are gone!"
"And to-morrow?"
"We will scatter the Food; we will saturate the world with the Food."
"Suppose they come to terms?"
"Our terms are the Food. It is not as though little and great could live
together in any perfection of compromise. It is one thing or the other.
What right have parents to say, My child shall have no light but the
light I have had, shall grow no greater than the greatness to which I
have grown? Do I speak for you, Brothers?"
Assenting murmurs answered him.
"And to the children who will be women as well as to the children who
will be men," said a voice from the darkness.
"Even more so--to be mothers of a new race ..."
"But for the next generation there must be great and little," said
Redwood, with his eyes on his son's face.
"For many generations. And the little will hamper the great and the
great press upon the little. So it must needs be, father."
"There will be conflict."
"Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and
little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man,
Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness--waiting for the Food."
"Then I am to go to Caterham again and tell him--"
"You will stay with us, Father Redwood. Our answer goes to Caterham at
dawn."
"He says that he will fight...."
"So be it," said young Redwood, and his brethren murmured assent.
"_The iron waits_," cried a voice, and the two giants who were working
in the corner began a rhythmic hammering that made a mighty music to the
scene. The metal glowed out far more brightly than it had done before,
and gave Redwood a clearer view of the encampment than had yet come to
him. He saw the oblong space to its full extent, with the great engines
of warfare ranged ready to hand. Beyond, and at a higher level, the
house of the Cossars stood. About him were the young giants, huge and
beautiful, glittering in their mail, amidst the preparations for the
morrow. The sight of them lifted his heart. They were so easily
powerful! They were so tall and gracious! They were so steadfast in
their movements! There was his son amongst them, and the first of all
giant women, the Princess....
There leapt into his mind the oddest contrast, a memory of Bensington,
very bright and little--Bensington with his hand amidst the soft breast
feathers of that first great chick, standing in that conventionally
furnished room of his, peering over his spectacles dubiously as cousin
Jane banged the door....
It had all happened in a yesterday of one-and-twenty years.
Then suddenly a strange doubt took hold of him: that this place and
present greatness were but the texture of a dream; that he was dreaming,
and would in an instant wake to find himself in his study again, the
Giants slaughtered, the Food suppressed, and himself a prisoner locked
in. What else indeed was life but that--always to be a prisoner locked
in! This was the culmination and end of his dream. He would wake through
bloodshed and battle, to find his Food the most foolish of fancies, and
his hopes and faith of a greater world to come no more than the coloured
film upon a pool of bottomless decay. Littleness invincible!
So strong and deep was this wave of despondency, this suggestion of
impending disillusionment, that he started to his feet. He stood and
pressed his clenched fists into his eyes, and so for a moment remained,
fearing to open them again and see, lest the dream should already have
passed away....
The voice of the giant children spoke to one another, an undertone to
that clangorous melody of the smiths. His tide of doubt ebbed. He heard
the giant voices; he heard their movements about him still. It was real,
surely it was real--as real as spiteful acts! More real, for these great
things, it may be, are the coming things, and the littleness,
bestiality, and infirmity of men are the things that go. He opened his
eyes. "Done," cried one of the two ironworkers, and they flung their
hammers down.
A voice sounded above. The son of Cossar, standing on the great
embankment, had turned and was now speaking to them all.
"It is not that we would oust the little people from the world," he
said, "in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards from
their littleness, may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight
for and not ourselves.... We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve
the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We
fight not for ourselves--for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of
the Life of the World. So you, Father Redwood, taught us. Through us and
through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word and
birth and act it must pass--to still greater lives. This earth is no
resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put
our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to
live than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants and
vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth--growth that goes on
for ever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through
us. That is the law of the spirit for ever more. To grow according to
the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these
shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater," he said,
speaking with slow deliberation, "greater, my Brothers! And then--still
greater. To grow, and again--to grow. To grow at last into the
fellowship and understanding of God. Growing.... Till the earth is no
more than a footstool.... Till the spirit shall have driven fear into
nothingness, and spread...." He swung his arm heavenward:--"_There!"_
His voice ceased. The white glare of one of the searchlights wheeled
about, and for a moment fell upon him, standing out gigantic with hand
upraised against the sky.
For one instant he shone, looking up fearlessly into the starry deeps,
mail-clad, young and strong, resolute and still. Then the light had
passed, and he was no more than a great black outline against the starry
sky--a great black outline that threatened with one mighty gesture the
firmament of heaven and all its multitude of stars.
THE END.