He nodded. He hesitated over his answer because he thought it sounded
boyish. He blushed. "I could get some one I know to make me a sword."
She looked at him with enthusiasm growing in her eyes. She had heard of
swords, had seen one in a museum; she thought of those ancient days when
men wore them as a common thing. His suggestion seemed an impossible
dream to her, and perhaps for that reason she was eager for more detail.
And inventing for the most part as he went along, he told her, how they
might live in the country as the old-world people had done. With every
detail her interest grew, for she was one of those girls for whom
romance and adventure have a fascination.
His suggestion seemed, I say, an impossible dream to her on that day,
but the next day they talked about it again, and it was strangely less
impossible.
"At first we should take food," said Denton. "We could carry food for
ten or twelve days." It was an age of compact artificial nourishment,
and such a provision had none of the unwieldy suggestion it would have
had in the nineteenth century.
"But--until our house," she asked--"until it was ready, where should we
sleep?"
"It is summer."
"But ... What do you mean?"
"There was a time when there were no houses in the world; when all
mankind slept always in the open air."
"But for us! The emptiness! No walls--no ceiling!"
"Dear," he said, "in London you have many beautiful ceilings. Artists
paint them and stud them with lights. But I have seen a ceiling more
beautiful than any in London...."
"But where?"
"It is the ceiling under which we two would be alone...."
"You mean...?"
"Dear," he said, "it is something the world has forgotten. It is Heaven
and all the host of stars."
Each time they talked the thing seemed more possible and more desirable
to them. In a week or so it was quite possible. Another week, and it was
the inevitable thing they had to do. A great enthusiasm for the country
seized hold of them and possessed them. The sordid tumult of the town,
they said, overwhelmed them. They marvelled that this simple way out of
their troubles had never come upon them before.
One morning near Midsummer-day, there was a new minor official upon the
flying stage, and Denton's place was to know him no more.
Our two young people had secretly married, and were going forth manfully
out of the city in which they and their ancestors before them had lived
all their days. She wore a new dress of white cut in an old-fashioned
pattern, and he had a bundle of provisions strapped athwart his back,
and in his hand he carried--rather shame-facedly it is true, and under
his purple cloak--an implement of archaic form, a cross-hilted thing of
tempered steel.
Imagine that going forth! In their days the sprawling suburbs of
Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little
gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious
privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the
mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end
together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height,
abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and
turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables that were the basis of a
thousand varied foods, and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly
extirpated. The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after
year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days,
the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of
extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows of bramble standards
and apple trees with whitewashed stems, intersected the fields, and at
places groups of gigantic teazles reared their favoured spikes. Here and
there huge agricultural machines hunched under waterproof covers. The
mingled waters of the Wey and Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular
channels; and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground permitted a
fountain of deodorised sewage distributed its benefits athwart the land
and made a rainbow of the sunlight.
By a great archway in that enormous city wall emerged the Eadhamite road
to Portsmouth, swarming in the morning sunshine with an enormous traffic
bearing the blue-clad servants of the Food Company to their toil. A
rushing traffic, beside which they seemed two scarce-moving dots. Along
the outer tracks hummed and rattled the tardy little old-fashioned
motors of such as had duties within twenty miles or so of the city; the
inner ways were filled with vaster mechanisms--swift monocycles bearing
a score of men, lank multicycles, quadricycles sagging with heavy loads,
empty gigantic produce carts that would come back again filled before
the sun was setting, all with throbbing engines and noiseless wheels and
a perpetual wild melody of horns and gongs.
Along the very verge of the outermost way our young people went in
silence, newly wed and oddly shy of one another's company. Many were the
things shouted to them as they tramped along, for in 2100 a
foot-passenger on an English road was almost as strange a sight as a
motor car would have been in 1800. But they went on with steadfast eyes
into the country, paying no heed to such cries.
Before them in the south rose the Downs, blue at first, and as they came
nearer changing to green, surmounted by the row of gigantic wind-wheels
that supplemented the wind-wheels upon the roof-spaces of the city, and
broken and restless with the long morning shadows of those whirling
vanes. By midday they had come so near that they could see here and
there little patches of pallid dots--the sheep the Meat Department of
the Food Company owned. In another hour they had passed the clay and the
root crops and the single fence that hedged them in, and the prohibition
against trespass no longer held: the levelled roadway plunged into a
cutting with all its traffic, and they could leave it and walk over the
greensward and up the open hillside.
Never had these children of the latter days been together in such a
lonely place.
They were both very hungry and footsore--for walking was a rare
exercise--and presently they sat down on the weedless, close-cropped
grass, and looked back for the first time at the city from which they
had come, shining wide and splendid in the blue haze of the valley of
the Thames. Elizabeth was a little afraid of the unenclosed sheep away
up the slope--she had never been near big unrestrained animals
before--but Denton reassured her. And overhead a white-winged bird
circled in the blue.
They talked but little until they had eaten, and then their tongues were
loosened. He spoke of the happiness that was now certainly theirs, of
the folly of not breaking sooner out of that magnificent prison of
latter-day life, of the old romantic days that had passed from the
world for ever. And then he became boastful. He took up the sword that
lay on the ground beside him, and she took it from his hand and ran a
tremulous finger along the blade.
"And you could," she said, "_you_--could raise this and strike a man?"
"Why not? If there were need."
"But," she said, "it seems so horrible. It would slash.... There would
be"--her voice sank,--"_blood_."
"In the old romances you have read often enough ..."
"Oh, I know: in those--yes. But that is different. One knows it is not
blood, but just a sort of red ink.... And _you_--killing!"
She looked at him doubtfully, and then handed him back the sword.
After they had rested and eaten, they rose up and went on their way
towards the hills. They passed quite close to a huge flock of sheep, who
stared and bleated at their unaccustomed figures. She had never seen
sheep before, and she shivered to think such gentle things must needs be
slain for food. A sheep-dog barked from a distance, and then a shepherd
appeared amidst the supports of the wind-wheels, and came down towards
them.
When he drew near he called out asking whither they were going.
Denton hesitated, and told him briefly that they sought some ruined
house among the Downs, in which they might live together. He tried to
speak in an off-hand manner, as though it was a usual thing to do. The
man stared incredulously.
"Have you _done_ anything?" he asked.
"Nothing," said Denton. "Only we don't want to live in a city any
longer. Why should we live in cities?"
The shepherd stared more incredulously than ever. "You can't live here,"
he said.
"We mean to try."
The shepherd stared from one to the other. "You'll go back to-morrow,"
he said. "It looks pleasant enough in the sunlight.... Are you sure
you've done nothing? We shepherds are not such _great_ friends of the
police."
Denton looked at him steadfastly. "No," he said. "But we are too poor to
live in the city, and we can't bear the thought of wearing clothes of
blue canvas and doing drudgery. We are going to live a simple life here,
like the people of old."
The shepherd was a bearded man with a thoughtful face. He glanced at
Elizabeth's fragile beauty.
"_They_ had simple minds," he said.
"So have we," said Denton.
The shepherd smiled.
"If you go along here," he said, "along the crest beneath the
wind-wheels, you will see a heap of mounds and ruins on your right-hand
side. That was once a town called Epsom. There are no houses there, and
the bricks have been used for a sheep pen. Go on, and another heap on
the edge of the root-land is Leatherhead; and then the hill turns away
along the border of a valley, and there are woods of beech. Keep along
the crest. You will come to quite wild places. In some parts, in spite
of all the weeding that is done, ferns and bluebells and other such
useless plants are growing still. And through it all underneath the
wind-wheels runs a straight lane paved with stones, a roadway of the
Romans two thousand years old. Go to the right of that, down into the
valley and follow it along by the banks of the river. You come presently
to a street of houses, many with the roofs still sound upon them. There
you may find shelter."
They thanked him.
"But it's a quiet place. There is no light after dark there, and I have
heard tell of robbers. It is lonely. Nothing happens there. The
phonographs of the story-tellers, the kinematograph entertainments, the
news machines--none of them are to be found there. If you are hungry
there is no food, if you are ill no doctor ..." He stopped.
"We shall try it," said Denton, moving to go on. Then a thought struck
him, and he made an agreement with the shepherd, and learnt where they
might find him, to buy and bring them anything of which they stood in
need, out of the city.
And in the evening they came to the deserted village, with its houses
that seemed so small and odd to them: they found it golden in the glory
of the sunset, and desolate and still. They went from one deserted house
to another, marvelling at their quaint simplicity, and debating which
they should choose. And at last, in a sunlit corner of a room that had
lost its outer wall, they came upon a wild flower, a little flower of
blue that the weeders of the Food Company had overlooked.
That house they decided upon; but they did not remain in it long that
night, because they were resolved to feast upon nature. And moreover the
houses became very gaunt and shadowy after the sunlight had faded out
of the sky. So after they had rested a little time they went to the
crest of the hill again to see with their own eyes the silence of heaven
set with stars, about which the old poets had had so many things to
tell. It was a wonderful sight, and Denton talked like the stars, and
when they went down the hill at last the sky was pale with dawn. They
slept but little, and in the morning when they woke a thrush was singing
in a tree.
So these young people of the twenty-second century began their exile.
That morning they were very busy exploring the resources of this new
home in which they were going to live the simple life. They did not
explore very fast or very far, because they went everywhere
hand-in-hand; but they found the beginnings of some furniture. Beyond
the village was a store of winter fodder for the sheep of the Food
Company, and Denton dragged great armfuls to the house to make a bed;
and in several of the houses were old fungus-eaten chairs and
tables--rough, barbaric, clumsy furniture, it seemed to them, and made
of wood. They repeated many of the things they had said on the previous
day, and towards evening they found another flower, a harebell. In the
late afternoon some Company shepherds went down the river valley riding
on a big multicycle; but they hid from them, because their presence,
Elizabeth said, seemed to spoil the romance of this old-world place
altogether.
In this fashion they lived a week. For all that week the days were
cloudless, and the nights nights of starry glory, that were invaded each
a little more by a crescent moon.
Yet something of the first splendour of their coming faded--faded
imperceptibly day after day; Denton's eloquence became fitful, and
lacked fresh topics of inspiration; the fatigue of their long march from
London told in a certain stiffness of the limbs, and each suffered from
a slight unaccountable cold. Moreover, Denton became aware of unoccupied
time. In one place among the carelessly heaped lumber of the old times
he found a rust-eaten spade, and with this he made a fitful attack on
the razed and grass-grown garden--though he had nothing to plant or sow.
He returned to Elizabeth with a sweat-streaming face, after half an hour
of such work.
"There were giants in those days," he said, not understanding what wont
and training will do. And their walk that day led them along the hills
until they could see the city shimmering far away in the valley. "I
wonder how things are going on there," he said.
And then came a change in the weather. "Come out and see the clouds,"
she cried; and behold! they were a sombre purple in the north and east,
streaming up to ragged edges at the zenith. And as they went up the hill
these hurrying streamers blotted out the sunset. Suddenly the wind set
the beech-trees swaying and whispering, and Elizabeth shivered. And then
far away the lightning flashed, flashed like a sword that is drawn
suddenly, and the distant thunder marched about the sky, and even as
they stood astonished, pattering upon them came the first headlong
raindrops of the storm. In an instant the last streak of sunset was
hidden by a falling curtain of hail, and the lightning flashed again,
and the voice of the thunder roared louder, and all about them the world
scowled dark and strange.
Seizing hands, these children of the city ran down the hill to their
home, in infinite astonishment. And ere they reached it, Elizabeth was
weeping with dismay, and the darkling ground about them was white and
brittle and active with the pelting hail.
Then began a strange and terrible night for them. For the first time in
their civilised lives they were in absolute darkness; they were wet and
cold and shivering, all about them hissed the hail, and through the long
neglected ceilings of the derelict home came noisy spouts of water and
formed pools and rivulets on the creaking floors. As the gusts of the
storm struck the worn-out building, it groaned and shuddered, and now a
mass of plaster from the wall would slide and smash, and now some
loosened tile would rattle down the roof and crash into the empty
greenhouse below. Elizabeth shuddered, and was still; Denton wrapped his
gay and flimsy city cloak about her, and so they crouched in the
darkness. And ever the thunder broke louder and nearer, and ever more
lurid flashed the lightning, jerking into a momentary gaunt clearness
the steaming, dripping room in which they sheltered.
Never before had they been in the open air save when the sun was
shining. All their time had been spent in the warm and airy ways and
halls and rooms of the latter-day city. It was to them that night as if
they were in some other world, some disordered chaos of stress and
tumult, and almost beyond hoping that they should ever see the city ways
again.
The storm seemed to last interminably, until at last they dozed between
the thunderclaps, and then very swiftly it fell and ceased. And as the
last patter of the rain died away they heard an unfamiliar sound.
"What is that?" cried Elizabeth.
It came again. It was the barking of dogs. It drove down the desert lane
and passed; and through the window, whitening the wall before them and
throwing upon it the shadow of the window-frame and of a tree in black
silhouette, shone the light of the waxing moon....
Just as the pale dawn was drawing the things about them into sight, the
fitful barking of dogs came near again, and stopped. They listened.
After a pause they heard the quick pattering of feet seeking round the
house, and short, half-smothered barks. Then again everything was still.
"Ssh!" whispered Elizabeth, and pointed to the door of their room.
Denton went half-way towards the door, and stood listening. He came back
with a face of affected unconcern. "They must be the sheep-dogs of the
Food Company," he said. "They will do us no harm."
He sat down again beside her. "What a night it has been!" he said, to
hide how keenly he was listening.
"I don't like dogs," answered Elizabeth, after a long silence.
"Dogs never hurt any one," said Denton. "In the old days--in the
nineteenth century--everybody had a dog."
"There was a romance I heard once. A dog killed a man."
"Not this sort of dog," said Denton confidently. "Some of those
romances--are exaggerated."
Suddenly a half bark and a pattering up the staircase; the sound of
panting. Denton sprang to his feet and drew the sword out of the damp
straw upon which they had been lying. Then in the doorway appeared a
gaunt sheep-dog, and halted there. Behind it stared another. For an
instant man and brute faced each other, hesitating.
Then Denton, being ignorant of dogs, made a sharp step forward. "Go
away," he said, with a clumsy motion of his sword.
The dog started and growled. Denton stopped sharply. "Good dog!" he
said.
The growling jerked into a bark.
"Good dog!" said Denton. The second dog growled and barked. A third out
of sight down the staircase took up the barking also. Outside others
gave tongue--a large number it seemed to Denton.
"This is annoying," said Denton, without taking his eye off the brutes
before him. "Of course the shepherds won't come out of the city for
hours yet. Naturally these dogs don't quite make us out."
"I can't hear," shouted Elizabeth. She stood up and came to him.
Denton tried again, but the barking still drowned his voice. The sound
had a curious effect upon his blood. Odd disused emotions began to stir;
his face changed as he shouted. He tried again; the barking seemed to
mock him, and one dog danced a pace forward, bristling. Suddenly he
turned, and uttering certain words in the dialect of the underways,
words incomprehensible to Elizabeth, he made for the dogs. There was a
sudden cessation of the barking, a growl and a snapping. Elizabeth saw
the snarling head of the foremost dog, its white teeth and retracted
ears, and the flash of the thrust blade. The brute leapt into the air
and was flung back.
Then Denton, with a shout, was driving the dogs before him. The sword
flashed above his head with a sudden new freedom of gesture, and then he
vanished down the staircase. She made six steps to follow him, and on
the landing there was blood. She stopped, and hearing the tumult of dogs
and Denton's shouts pass out of the house, ran to the window.
Nine wolfish sheep-dogs were scattering, one writhed before the porch;
and Denton, tasting that strange delight of combat that slumbers still
in the blood of even the most civilised man, was shouting and running
across the garden space. And then she saw something that for a moment he
did not see. The dogs circled round this way and that, and came again.
They had him in the open.
In an instant she divined the situation. She would have called to him.
For a moment she felt sick and helpless, and then, obeying a strange
impulse, she gathered up her white skirt and ran downstairs. In the hall
was the rusting spade. That was it! She seized it and ran out.
She came none too soon. One dog rolled before him, well-nigh slashed in
half; but a second had him by the thigh, a third gripped his collar
behind, and a fourth had the blade of the sword between its teeth,
tasting its own blood. He parried the leap of a fifth with his left arm.
It might have been the first century instead of the twenty-second, so
far as she was concerned. All the gentleness of her eighteen years of
city life vanished before this primordial need. The spade smote hard and
sure, and cleft a dog's skull. Another, crouching for a spring, yelped
with dismay at this unexpected antagonist, and rushed aside. Two wasted
precious moments on the binding of a feminine skirt.
The collar of Denton's cloak tore and parted as he staggered back; and
that dog too felt the spade, and ceased to trouble him. He sheathed his
sword in the brute at his thigh.
"To the wall!" cried Elizabeth; and in three seconds the fight was at an
end, and our young people stood side by side, while a remnant of five
dogs, with ears and tails of disaster, fled shamefully from the stricken
field.
For a moment they stood panting and victorious, and then Elizabeth,
dropping her spade, covered her face, and sank to the ground in a
paroxysm of weeping. Denton looked about him, thrust the point of his
sword into the ground so that it was at hand, and stooped to comfort
her.
* * * * *
At last their more tumultuous emotions subsided, and they could talk
again. She leant upon the wall, and he sat upon it so that he could keep
an eye open for any returning dogs. Two, at any rate, were up on the
hillside and keeping up a vexatious barking.
She was tear-stained, but not very wretched now, because for half an
hour he had been repeating that she was brave and had saved his life.
But a new fear was growing in her mind.
"They are the dogs of the Food Company," she said. "There will be
trouble."
"I am afraid so. Very likely they will prosecute us for trespass."
A pause.
"In the old times," he said, "this sort of thing happened day after
day."
"Last night!" she said. "I could not live through another such night."
He looked at her. Her face was pale for want of sleep, and drawn and
haggard. He came to a sudden resolution. "We must go back," he said.
She looked at the dead dogs, and shivered. "We cannot stay here," she
said.
"We must go back," he repeated, glancing over his shoulder to see if the
enemy kept their distance. "We have been happy for a time.... But the
world is too civilised. Ours is the age of cities. More of this will
kill us."
"But what are we to do? How can we live there?"
Denton hesitated. His heel kicked against the wall on which he sat.
"It's a thing I haven't mentioned before," he said, and coughed;
"but ..."
"Yes?"
"You could raise money on your expectations," he said.
"Could I?" she said eagerly.
"Of course you could. What a child you are!"
She stood up, and her face was bright. "Why did you not tell me before?"
she asked. "And all this time we have been here!"
He looked at her for a moment, and smiled. Then the smile vanished. "I
thought it ought to come from you," he said. "I didn't like to ask for
your money. And besides--at first I thought this would be rather fine."
There was a pause.
"It _has_ been fine," he said; and glanced once more over his shoulder.
"Until all this began."
"Yes," she said, "those first days. The first three days."
They looked for a space into one another's faces, and then Denton slid
down from the wall and took her hand.
"To each generation," he said, "the life of its time. I see it all
plainly now. In the city--that is the life to which we were born. To
live in any other fashion ... Coming here was a dream, and this--is the
awakening."
"It was a pleasant dream," she said,--"in the beginning."
For a long space neither spoke.
"If we would reach the city before the shepherds come here, we must
start," said Denton. "We must get our food out of the house and eat as
we go."
Denton glanced about him again, and, giving the dead dogs a wide berth,
they walked across the garden space and into the house together. They
found the wallet with their food, and descended the blood-stained stairs
again. In the hall Elizabeth stopped. "One minute," she said. "There is
something here."
She led the way into the room in which that one little blue flower was
blooming. She stooped to it, she touched it with her hand.
"I want it," she said; and then, "I cannot take it...."
Impulsively she stooped and kissed its petals.
Then silently, side by side, they went across the empty garden-space
into the old high road, and set their faces resolutely towards the
distant city--towards the complex mechanical city of those latter days,
the city that had swallowed up mankind.