PART I

THEODORE SAVAGE

[Illustration]

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

DIANA OF DOBSON’S

WILLIAM, AN ENGLISHMAN

MARRIAGE AS A TRADE

THEODORE SAVAGE

A STORY OF THE PAST OR THE FUTURE

BY

CICELY HAMILTON

LONDON

LEONARD PARSONS

DEVONSHIRE STREET

_First Published 1922._

_Leonard Parsons Ltd._

Theodore Savage

I

If it had been possible for Theodore Savage to place on record for those

who came after him the story of his life and experiences, he would have

been the first to admit that the interest of the record lay in

circumstance and not in himself. From beginning to end he was much what

surroundings made of him; in his youth the product of a public school,

Wadham and the Civil Service; in maturity and age a toiler with his

hands in the company of men who lived brutishly. In his twenties, no

doubt, he was frequently bored by his clerking duties and the routine of

the Distribution Office; later on there were seasons when all that was

best in him cried out against confinement in a life that had no

aspiration; but neither boredom nor resentment ever drove him to revolt

or set him to the moulding of circumstance. If he was destined to live

as a local tradition and superman of legend, the honour was not gained

by his talents or personal achievements; he had to thank for it an

excellent constitution, bequeathed him by his parents, certain traces of

refinement in manner and speech and the fears of very ignorant men.

When the Distribution Office—like his Hepplewhite furniture, his

colour-prints and his English glass—was with yesterday’s seven thousand

years, it is more than possible that Theodore Savage, looking back on

his youth, saw existence, till he neared the age of thirty, as a stream

of scarcely ruffled content. Sitting crouched to the fire in the

sweat-laden air of his cabin or humped idly on a hillside in the dusk of

summer evening, it may well have seemed, when his thoughts strayed

backwards, that the young man who once was impossibly himself was a

being whom care did not touch. What he saw with the eye of his mind and

memory was a neat young Mr. Savage who was valeted in comfortable

chambers and who worked, without urgence, for limited hours, in a room

that looked on Whitehall. Who in his plentiful leisure gained a minor

reputation on the golf-links! Who frequented studios, bought—now and

then—a picture and collected English glass and bits of furniture. Who

was passably good-looking, in an ordinary way, had a thoughtful taste in

socks and ties and was careful of his hands as a woman.... So—through

the vista of years and the veil of contrast—Theodore may have seen his

young manhood; and in time, perhaps, it was difficult for a

coarse-fingered labourer, dependent for his bread on the moods of

nature, to sympathize greatly with the troubles of neat Mr. Savage or

think of him as subject to the major afflictions of humanity.

All the same, he would spend long hours in communion with his vanished

self; striving at times to trace resemblances between the bearded,

roughened features that a fishing-pool reflected and the smooth-chinned

civil servant with brushed hair and white collar whom he followed in

thought through his work, his amusements, his love-making and the

trivial details of existence.... And imagining, sometimes, the years and

the happenings that might have been if his age, like his youth, had been

soaped and collared, routined by his breeding and his office; if gods

and men had not run amuck in frenzy and his sons had been born of a

woman who lived delicately—playing Chopin of an evening to young Mr.

Savage and giving him cream in his tea?...

* * * * *

Even if life in his Civil Service days was not all that it shone through

the years of contrast, Theodore Savage could have had very little of

hardship to complain of in the days when he added to a certain amount of

private income a salary earned by the duties of the unexacting billet

which a family interest had secured for him. If he had no particular

vocation for the bureaucratic life—if good painting delighted, and

official documents bored him—he had sufficient common sense to

understand that it is given to most of us, with sufficient application,

to master the intricacies of official documents, while only to few is it

given to master an art. After a phase of abortive experiment in his

college days he had realized—fortunately—that his swift and instinctive

pleasure in beauty had in it no creative element; whereupon he settled

down, early and easily, into the life and habits of the amateur....

There remained with him to the end of his days an impression of a young

man living pleasurably, somewhat fastidiously; pursuing his hobbies,

indulging his tastes, on the whole without much damage to himself or to

others affected; acting decently according to his code and, when he fell

in love and out of it, falling not too grossly or disastrously. If he

had a grievance against his work at the Distribution Office, it was no

more serious than this: it took much time, certain hours every day, from

the interests that counted in his life. And against that grievance, no

doubt, he set the ameliorating fact that his private means unaided would

hardly have supported his way of existence, his many pleasant interests

and himself; it was his civil servant’s salary that had furnished his

rooms in accordance with his taste and made possible the purchase of his

treasured Fragonard and his bell-toned Georgian wine-glasses.... The

bearded toiler, through a mist of years, watched a young man dawdling,

without fear of the future, through a world of daily comforts that to

his sons would seem fantastic, the creation of legend or of dream.

It was that blind and happy lack of all fear of the future that lent

interest to the toiler’s watching; knowing what he knew of the years

that lay ahead, there was something of grim and dramatic humour in the

sight of himself—yea, Theodore Savage, the broken-nailed,

unshorn—arrayed of a morning in a flowered silk dressing-gown or

shirt-fronted for an evening at the opera.... As it was in the

beginning, is now and ever shall be—that, so it seemed to him in later

years, had been the real, if unspoken, motto of the world wherein he had

his being in the days of his unruffled content....

* * * * *

Of the last few weeks in the world that was and ever should be he

recalled, on the whole, very little of great hurrying and public events;

it was the personal, intimate scenes that stood out and remained to a

line and a detail. His first meeting with Phillida Rathbone, for

instance, and the chance interview with her father that led to it: he

could see himself standing by Rathbone’s desk in the Distribution

Office, see the bowl between his fingers, held to the light—see its very

shape and conventional pattern of raised flowers.

Rathbone—John Rathbone—was his chief in his Distribution days; a

square-jawed, formidable, permanent official who was held in awe by

underlings and Ministers, and himself was subject, most contentedly

subject, to a daughter, the ruler of his household. Her taste in art and

decoration was not her father’s, but, for all the bewilderment it caused

him, he strove to gratify it loyally; and for Phillida’s twenty-third

birthday he had chosen expensively, on his way to the office, at the

shop of a dealer in antiquities. Swept on the spate of the dealer’s

eloquence he had been pleased for the moment with his find—a flowered

bowl, reputed Chelsea; it was not until half an hour later that he

remembered uneasily his daughter’s firm warnings against unaided traffic

with the miscreants who deal in curios. With the memory uncomfortable

doubts assailed him, while previous experiments came thronging

unpleasantly to mind—the fiasco of the so-called Bartolozzi print and

the equally lamentable business of the so-called Chippendale settee....

He drew his purchase from its paper wrapping, set it down on the table

and stared at it. The process brought no enlightenment and he was still

wrestling with uncomfortable doubts when Theodore Savage knocked and

came in with a draft report for approval.

The worry born of ignorance faded out of Rathbone’s face as he conned

the document and amended its clauses with swift pencilled notes in the

margin; he was back with the solidities he knew and could make sense of,

and superfluous gimcracks for the moment had ceased to exist. It was

Savage who unwittingly recalled their existence and importance; when his

chief, at the end of his corrections, looked up, the younger man was

eyeing the troublesome gimcrack with a meditative interest that reminded

Rathbone of his daughter’s manner when she contemplated similar rubbish.

“Know anything about old china?” he inquired—an outward and somewhat

excessive indifference concealing an inward anxiety.

“Not much,” said Theodore modestly; but, taking the query as request for

an opinion, his hand went out to the bowl.

“What do you make of it?” asked Rathbone, still blatantly indifferent.

“I picked it up this morning—for my daughter. Supposed to be

Chelsea—should you say it was?”

If the answer had been in the negative the private acquaintance between

chief and subordinate would probably have made no further progress; no

man, even when he makes use of it, is grateful for the superior

knowledge in a junior that convicts him to his face of gullibility. As

it was, the verdict was favourable and Rathbone, in the relief of

finding that he had not blundered, grew suddenly friendly—to the point

of a dinner invitation; which was given, in part, as instinctive thanks

for restored self-esteem, in part because it might interest Phillida to

meet a young man who took gimcracks as gravely as herself. The

invitation, as a matter of course, was accepted; and three days later

Savage met Phillida Rathbone.

“I’ve asked a young fellow you’re sure to get on with”—so Rathbone had

informed his daughter; who, thereupon, as later she confessed to

Theodore, had made up her mind to be bored. She threw away her prejudice

swiftly when she found the new acquaintance talked music with

intelligence—she herself had music in her brain as well as in her

finger-tips—while he from the beginning was attracted by a daintiness of

manner and movement that puzzled him in Rathbone’s daughter.... From

that first night he must have been drawn to her, since the evening

remained to him clear in every detail; always in the hollow of a glowing

fire he could summon up Phillida, himself and Rathbone, sitting, the

three of them, round the table with its silver and tall roses.... In the

centre a branching cluster of roses—all yellow, like Phillida’s

dress.... Rathbone, for the most part, good-naturedly silent, Phillida

and himself talking swiftly.... In shaded light and a solid, pleasant

comfort; ordinary comfort, which he took for granted as an element of

daily life, but which yet was the heritage of many generations, the

product of long centuries of striving and cunning invention.... Later,

in the drawing-room, the girl made music—and he saw himself listening

from his corner of the sofa with a cigarette, unlit, between his

fingers. Above all it was her quality of daintiness that pleased him;

she was a porcelain girl, with something of the grace that he associated

with the eighteenth century....

After half an hour that was sheer content to Theodore she broke off from

her playing to sit on the arm of her father’s chair and ruffle his grey

hair caressingly.

“Old man, does my noise on the piano prevent you from reading your

paper?”

Whereat Rathbone laughed and returned the caress; and Phillida

explained, for the visitor’s benefit, that the poor dear didn’t know one

tune from another and must have been bored beyond measure—by piano

noises since they came upstairs and nothing but music-talk at dinner.

“I believe we’ve driven him to the Montagu divorce case,” she announced,

looking over his shoulder. “‘Housemaid cross-examined—the Colonel’s

visits.’ Daddy, have you fallen to that?”

“No, minx,” he rebuked her, “I haven’t. I’m not troubling to wade

through the housemaid’s evidence for the very good reason that it’s

quite unnecessary. I shall hear all about it from you.”

“That’s a nasty one,” Phillida commented, rubbing her cheek against her

father’s. She turned the paper idly, reading out the headlines.

“‘American elections—Surprises at Newmarket—Bank Rate’—There doesn’t

seem much news except the housemaid and the colonel, does there?”

Rathbone laughed as he pinched her cheek and pointed—to a headline here

and a headline there, to a cloud that was not yet the size of a man’s

hand.

“It depends on what you call news. It seems to have escaped you that

we’ve just had a Budget. That matters to those of us who keep expensive

daughters. And, little as the subject may interest you, I gather from

the size of his type, that the editor attaches some importance to the

fact that the Court of Arbitration has decided against the Karthanian

claim. That, of course, compared to a housemaid in the witness-box is——”

“Ponderous,” she finished and laughed across at Theodore. “Important, no

doubt, but ponderous—the Court of Arbitration always is. That’s why I

skipped it.” ... Then, carelessly interested, and running her eye down

the columns of the newspaper, she supposed the decision was final and

those noisy little Karthanians would have to be quiet at last. Rathbone

shrugged his shoulders and hoped so.

“But they’ll have to, won’t they?” said Phillida. “Give me a match,

Daddy—There’s no higher authority than the Court of Arbitration, is

there?”

“If,” Rathbone suggested as he held a light to her cigarette, “if your

newspaper reading were not limited to scandals and chiffons, you might

have noticed that your noisy little friends in the East have declared

with their customary vehemence that in no circumstances whatever will

they accept an adverse verdict—not even from the Court of Arbitration.”

“But they’ll have to, won’t they?” Phillida repeated placidly. “I

mean—they can’t go against everybody else. Against the League.”

She tried to blow a smoke-ring with conspicuous ill-success, and

Theodore, watching her from his corner of the sofa—intent on her profile

against the light—heard Rathbone explaining that “against everybody

else” was hardly the way to put it, since the Federal Council was not a

happy family at present. There was very little doubt that Karthania was

being encouraged to make trouble—and none at all that there would be

difference of opinion on the subject of punitive action.... Phillida,

with an arm round her father’s neck, was divided between international

politics and an endeavour to make the perfect ring—now throwing in a

question anent the constitution and dissensions of the League, now

rounding her mouth for a failure—while Theodore, on the sofa, leaned his

head upon his hand that he might shade his eyes and watch her without

seeming to watch.... He listened to Rathbone—and did not listen; and

that, as he realized later, had been so far his attitude to interests in

the mass. The realities of his life were immediate and personal—with, in

the background, dim interests in the mass that were vaguely distasteful

as politics. A collective game played with noisy idealism and flaring

abuse, which served as copy to the makers of newspapers and gave rise at

intervals to excited conversation and argument....

What was real, and only real while Rathbone talked, was the delicate

poise of Phillida’s head, the decorative line of Phillida’s body, his

pleasure in the sight of her, his comfort in a well-ordered room; these

things were realities, tangible or æsthetic, in whose company a man, if

he were so inclined, might discuss academically an Eastern imbroglio and

the growing tendency to revolt against the centralized authority of the

League. Between life, as he grasped it, and public affairs there was no

visible, essential connection. The Karthanian imbroglio, as he strolled

to his chambers, was an item in the make-up of a newspaper, the subject

of a recent conversation; it was the rhythm of Phillida’s music that

danced in his brain as a living and insistent reality. That, and not the

stirrings of uneasy nations, kept him wakeful till long after midnight.

II

While Theodore Savage paid his court to Phillida Rathbone, the

Karthanian decision was the subject of more than conversation;

diplomatists and statesmen were busy while he drifted into love and

dreamed through the sudden rumours that excited his fellows at the

office. In London, for the most part, journalism was guarded and

reticent, the threat of secession at first hardly mentioned; but in

nations and languages that favoured secession the press was voicing the

popular cry with enthusiasm that grew daily more heated. Through

conflicting rumour this at least was clear: at the next meeting of the

Council of the League its authority would be tested to the uttermost,

since the measure of independent action demanded by the malcontent

members would amount to a denial of the federal principle, to secession

in fact if not in name.... Reaction against central and unified

authority was not a phenomenon of yesterday; it had been gathering its

strength through years of racial friction, finding an adherent in every

community that considered itself aggrieved by a decision of the Council

or award of the Court of Arbitration, and for years it had taxed the

ingenuity of the majority of the Council to avoid open breach and

defiance.

Before open breach and its consequences, both sides had so far

manœuvred, hesitated, compromised; it had been left to a minor, a very

minor, state, to rush in where others feared to tread. The flat refusal

of a heady, half-civilized little democracy to accept the unfavourable

verdict of the Court of Arbitration was the spark that might fire a

powder-barrel; its frothy demonstrations, ridiculous in themselves,

appealed to the combative instinct in others, to race-hatreds, old

herding feuds and jealousies. These found vent in answering

demonstrations, outbursts of popular sympathy in states not immediately

affected; the noisy rebel was hailed as a martyr and pioneer of freedom,

and became the pretext for resistance to the Council’s oppression. There

was no doubt of the extent of the re-grouping movement of the nations,

of the stirrings of a widespread combativeness which denounced

Federation as a system whereby dominant interests and races exploited

their weaker rivals. With the meeting of the Council would come the

inevitable clash of interests; the summons to the offending member of

the League to retreat from its impossible position, and—in case of

continued defiance—the proposal to take punitive action. That proposal,

to all seeming, must bring about a crisis; those members of the League

who had encouraged the rebel in defiance would hardly consent to

co-operate in punitive measures; and refusal—withdrawal of their

military contingents—would mean virtual secession and denial of majority

rule. If collective excitement and anger ran high, it might mean even

more than secession; there were possibilities—first hinted at, later

discussed without subterfuge—of actual and armed opposition should the

Council attempt to enforce its decree and authority.... Humanity, once

more, was gathering into herds and growing sharply conscious alike of

division and comradeship.

It was some time before Theodore was even touched by the herding

instinct and spirit; apart, in a delicate world of his own, he concerned

himself even less than usual with the wider interests of politics. By

his fellows in the Distribution Office he was known as an incurable

optimist; even when the cloud had spread rapidly and darkened he saw

“strained relations” through the eyes of a lover, and his mind, busied

elsewhere, refused to dwell anxiously on “incidents” and “disquieting

possibilities.” They intruded clumsily on his delicate world and, so

soon as might be, he thrust them behind him and slipped back to the

seclusion that belonged to himself and a woman. All his life, thought

and impulse, for the time being, was a negation, a refusal of the idea

of strife and destruction; in his happy egoism he planned to make and

build—a home and a lifetime of content.

Now and again, and in spite of his reluctance, his veil of happy egoism

was brushed aside—some chance word or incident forcing him to look upon

the menace. There was the evening in Vallance’s rooms, for

instance—where the talk settled down to the political crisis, and Holt,

the long journalist, turned sharply on Vallance, who supposed we were

drifting into war.

“That’s nonsense, Vallance! Nonsense! It’s impossible—unthinkable!”

“Unpleasant, if you like,” said Vallance; “but not impossible. At

least—it never has been.”

“That’s no reason,” Holt retorted; “we’re not living yesterday. There’ll

be no war, and I’ll tell you why: because the men who will have to start

it—daren’t!” He had a penetrating voice which he raised when excited, so

that other talk died down and the room was filled with his argument.

Politicians, he insisted, might bluff and use threats—menace with a

bogy, shake a weapon they dared not use—but they would stop short at

threats, manœuvre for position and retreat. Let loose modern science,

mechanics and chemistry, they could not—there was a limit to human

insanity, if only because there was a limit to the endurance of the

soldier. Unless you supposed that all politicians were congenital idiots

or criminal lunatics out to make holocausts. What was happening at

present was manœuvring pure and simple; neither side caring to prejudice

its case by open admission that appeal to force was unthinkable, each

side hoping that the other would be the first to make the admission,

each side trotting out the dummy soldiers that were only for show, and

would soon be put back in their boxes.... War, he repeated, was

unthinkable....

“Man,” said a voice behind Theodore, “does much that is unthinkable!”

Theodore turned that he might look at the speaker—Markham, something in

the scientific line, who had sat in silence, with a pipe between his

lips, till he dropped out his slow remark.

“Your mistake,” he went on, “lies in taking these people—statesmen,

politicians—for free agents, and in thinking they have only one fear.

Look at Meyer’s speech this morning—that’s significant. He has been

moderate so far, a restraining influence; now he breathes fire and

throws in his lot with the extremists. What do you make of that?”

“Merely,” said Holt, “that Meyer has lost his head.”

“In which happy state,” suggested Vallance, “the impossible and

unthinkable mayn’t frighten him.”

“That’s one explanation,” said Markham. “The other is that he is divided

between his two fears—the fear of war and the fear of his democracy,

which, being in a quarrelsome and restless mood, would break him if he

flinched and applauds him to the echo when he blusters. And, maybe, at

the moment, his fear of being broken is greater than his fear of the

impossible—at any rate the threat is closer.... The man himself may be

reasonable—even now—but he is the instrument of instinctive emotion.

Almost any man, taken by himself, is reasonable—and, being reasonable,

cautious. Meyer can think, just as well as you and I, so long as he

stands outside a crowd; but neither you nor I, nor Meyer, can think when

we are one with thousands and our minds are absorbed into a jelly of

impulse and emotion.”

“I like your phrase about jelly,” said Vallance. “It has an odd

picturesqueness. Your argument itself—or, rather, your assertion—strikes

me as a bit sweeping.”

“All the same,” Markham nodded, “it’s worth thinking over.... Man in the

mass, as a crowd, can only feel; there is no such thing as a mass-mind

or intellect—only mass desires and emotions. That is what I mean by

saying that Meyer—whatever his intelligence or sanity—is the instrument

of instinctive emotion.... And instinctive emotion, Holt—until it has

been hurt—is damnably and owlishly courageous. It isn’t clever enough to

be afraid; not even of red murder—or starvation by the million—or the

latest thing in gas or high explosive. Stir it up enough and it’ll run

on ’em—as the lemmings run to the sea.”

Holt snorted something that sounded like “Rot!” and Vallance, sprawling

an arm along the mantelpiece, asked, “Another of your numerous

theories?”

“If you like,” Markham assented, “but it’s a theory deduced from hard

facts.... It’s a fact, isn’t it, that no politician takes a crowd into

his confidence until he wants to make a fight of it? It’s a fact, isn’t

it, that no movements in mass are creative or constructive—that

simultaneous action, simultaneous thought, always is and must be

destructive? Set what we call the People in motion and something has got

to be broken. The crowd-life is still at the elementary, the animal

stage; it has not yet acquired the human power of construction ... and

the crowd, the people, democracy—whatever you like to call it—has been

stirring in the last few years; getting conscious again, getting active,

looking round for something to break ... which means that the politician

is faced once more with the necessity of giving it something to break.

Naturally he prefers that the breakage should take place in the

distance—and, League or no League, the eternal and obvious resource is

War ... which was not too risky when fought with swords and muskets, but

now—as Holt says—is impossible. Being a bit of a chemist, I’m sure Holt

is right; but I’m also sure that man, as a herd, does not think.

Further, I am doubtful if man, as a herd, ever finds out what is

impossible except through the painful process of breaking his head

against it.”

“I’m a child in politics,” said Vallance, “and I may be dense—but I’m

afraid it isn’t entirely clear to me whether your views are advanced or

grossly and shamelessly reactionary?”

“Neither,” said Markham, “or both—you can take your choice. I have every

sympathy with the people, the multitude; it’s hard lines that it can

only achieve destruction—just because there is so much of it, because it

isn’t smaller. But I also sympathize with the politician in his efforts

to control the destructive impulse of the multitude. And, finally—in

view of that progress of science of which Holt has reminded us, and of

which I know a little myself—I’m exceedingly sorry for us all.”

Someone from across the room asked: “You make it war, then?”

“I make it war. We have had peace for more than a generation, so our

periodic blood-letting is already a long time overdue. The League has

staved it off for a bit, but it hasn’t changed the human constitution;

and the real factor in the Karthanian quarrel—or any other—is the

periodic need of the human herd for something to break and for something

to break itself against.... Resistance and self-sacrifice—the need of

them—the call of the lemming to the sea.... And, perhaps, it’s all the

stronger in this generation because this generation has never known war,

and does not fear it.”

“Education,” said Holt, addressing the air, “is general and

compulsory—has been so for a good many years. The inference being that

the records of previous wars—and incidentally of the devastation

involved—are not inaccessible to that large proportion of our population

which is known as the average man.”

“As printed pages, yes,” Markham agreed. “But what proportion even of a

literate population is able to accept the statement of a printed page as

if it were a personal experience?”

“As we’re not all fools,” Holt retorted, “I don’t make it war.”

“I hope you’re right, for my own sake,” said Markham good-temperedly. He

knocked out his pipe as he spoke and made ready to go—while Theodore

looked after him, interested, for the moment, disturbingly.... Markham’s

unemotional and matter-of-fact acceptance of “periodic blood-letting”

made rumour suddenly real, and for the first time Theodore saw the

Karthanian imbroglio as more than the substance of telegrams and

articles, something human, actual, and alive.... Saw himself, even

Phillida, concerned in it—through a medley of confused and threatening

shadows.... For the moment he was roused from his self-absorption and

thrust into the world that he shared with the common herd of men. He and

Phillida were no longer as the gods apart, with their lives to make in

Eden; they were little human beings, the sport of a common human

destiny.... He remembered how eagerly he caught at Holt’s condemnation

of Markham as a crank and Vallance’s next comment on the crisis.

“We had exactly the same scare three—or was it four?—years ago. This is

the trouble about Transylvania all over again—just the same alarums and

excursions. That fizzled out quietly in a month or six weeks and the

chances are that Karthania will fizzle out, too.”

“Of course it will,” Holt declared with emphasis—and proceeded to

demolish Markham’s theories. Theodore left before he had finished his

argument; as explained dogmatically in Holt’s penetrating voice, the

intrigues and dissensions of the Federal Council were once more unreal

and frankly boring. The argument satisfied, but no longer interested—and

ten minutes after Markham’s departure his thoughts had drifted away from

politics to the private world he shared with Phillida Rathbone.

* * * * *

For very delight of it he lingered over his courtship, finding charm in

the pretence of uncertainty long after it had ceased to exist. To

Phillida also there was pleasure not only in the winning, but in the

exquisite game itself; once or twice when Theodore was hovering near

avowal, she deferred the inevitable, eluded him with laughter, asked

tacitly to play a little longer.... In the end the avowal came suddenly,

on the flash and impulse of a moment—when Phillida hesitated over one of

his gifts, a print she had admired on the wall of his sitting-room, duly

brought the next day for her acceptance.

“No, I oughtn’t to take it—it’s one of your treasures,” she

remonstrated.

“If you’d take all I have—and me with it,” he stammered.... That was the

crisis of the exquisite game—and pretence of uncertainty was over.

III

One impression of those first golden hours that stayed with him always

was the certainty with which they had dwelt on the details of their

common future; he could see Phillida with her hands on his shoulders

explaining earnestly that they must live very near to the Dad—the dear

old boy had no one but herself and they mustn’t let him miss her too

much. And when Theodore asked, “You don’t think he’ll object to me?”

Rathbone’s disapproval was the only possible cloud—which lifted at

Phillida’s amused assurance that the old dear wasn’t as blind as all

that and, having objections, would have voiced them before it was too

late.

“You don’t suppose he hasn’t noticed—just because he hasn’t said

anything!”... Whereupon Theodore caught at her hands and demanded how

long she had noticed?—and they fell to a happy retracing of this step

and that in their courtship.

When they heard Rathbone enter she ran down alone, telling Theodore to

stay where he was till she called him; returning in five minutes or so,

half-tearful and half-smiling, to say the dear old thing was waiting in

the library. Then Theodore, in his turn, went down to the library where,

red to the ears and stammering platitudes, he shook hands with his

future father-in-law—proceeding eventually to details of his financial

position and the hope that Rathbone would not insist upon too lengthy an

engagement?... The answer was so slow in coming that he repeated his

question nervously.

“No,” said Rathbone at last, “I don’t know that I”—(he laid stress on

the pronoun)—“I don’t know that I should insist upon a very lengthy

engagement. Only....”

Again he paused so long that Theodore repeated “Only?”

“Only—there may be obstacles—not of my making or Phillida’s. Connected

with the office—your work ... I dare say you’ve been too busy with your

own affairs to give very much attention to the affairs of the world in

general; still I conclude the papers haven’t allowed you to forget that

the Federal Council was to vote to-day on the resolution to take

punitive action? Result is just through—half an hour ago. Resolution

carried, by a majority of one only.”

“Was it?” said Theodore—and remembered a vague impulse of resentment, a

difficulty in bringing down his thoughts from Phillida to the earthiness

of politics. It took him an effort and a moment to add: “Close thing—but

they’ve pulled it off.”

“They have,” said Rathbone. “Just pulled it off—but it remains to be

seen if that’s matter for congratulation.... The vote commits us to

action—definitely—and the minority have entered a protest against

punitive action.... It seems unlikely that the protest is only formal.”

He was dry and curiously deliberate—leaning back in his chair, speaking

quietly, with fingers pressed together.... To the end Theodore

remembered him like that; a square-jawed man, leaning back in his chair,

speaking slowly, unemotionally—the harbinger of infinite misfortune....

And himself, the listener, a young man engrossed by his own new

happiness; irritated, at first, by the intrusion of that which did not

concern it; then (as once before in Vallance’s rooms) uneasy and

conscious of a threat.

He heard himself asking, “You think it’s—serious?” and saw Rathbone’s

mouth twist into the odd semblance of a smile.

“I think so. One way or other we shall know within a week.”

“You can’t mean—war?” Theodore asked again—remembering Holt and his

“Impossible!”

“It doesn’t seem unlikely,” said Rathbone.

He had risen, with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, and begun to

pace backwards and forwards. “Something may happen at the last

minute—but it’s difficult to see how they can draw back. They have gone

too far. They’re committed, just as we are—committed to a principle....

If we yield the Council abdicates its authority once for all; it’s an

end of the League—a plain break, and the Lord knows what next. And the

other side daren’t stop at verbal protest. They will have to push their

challenge; there’s too much clamour behind them....”

“There was Transylvania,” Theodore reminded him.

“I know—and nothing came of it. But that wasn’t pushed quite so far....

They threatened, but never definitely—they left themselves a possibility

of retreat. Now ... as I said, something may happen ... and, meanwhile,

to go back to what I meant about you, personally, how this might affect

you....”

He dropped into swift explanation. “Considerable rearrangement in the

work of the Department—if it should be necessary to place it on a

war-footing.” Theodore’s duties—if the worst should happen—would

certainly take him out of London and therefore part him from Phillida.

“I can tell you that definitely—now.”

Perhaps he realized that the announcement, on a day of betrothal, was

brutal; for he checked himself suddenly in his walk to and fro, clapped

the young man good-naturedly on the shoulder, repeated that “Something

might happen” and supposed he would not be sorry to hear that a member

of the Government required his presence—“So you and Phillida can dine

without superfluous parents.”... And he said no word of war or parting

to Phillida—who came down with Theodore to watch her father off,

standing arm-in-arm upon the doorstep in the pride of her new

relationship.

The threat lightened as they dined alone deliciously, as a foretaste of

housekeeping in common; Phillida left him no thoughts to stray and only

once, while the evening lasted, did they look from their private

Paradise upon the world of common humanity. Phillida, as the clock

neared ten, wondered vaguely what Henderson had wanted with her father?

Was there anything particular, did Theodore know, any news about the

Federal Council?... He hesitated for a moment, then told her the bare

facts only—the vote and the minority protest.

“A protest,” she repeated. “That’s what they’ve all been afraid of....

It looks bad, doesn’t it?”

He agreed it looked bad; thinking less, it may be, of the threat of red

ruin and disaster than of Rathbone’s warning that his duties would part

him from Phillida.

“I hope it doesn’t mean war,” she said.

At the time her voice struck him as serious, even anxious; later it

amazed him that she had spoken so quietly, that there was no trembling

of the slim white fingers that played with her chain of heavy beads.

“Do you think it does?” she asked him.

Because he remembered the threat of parting and had need of her daily

presence, he was stubborn in declaring that it did not, and could not,

mean war; quoting Holt that modern war was impossible, that statesmen

and soldiers knew it, and insisting that this was the Transylvanian

business over again and would be settled as that was settled. She shook

her head thoughtfully, having heard other views from her father; but her

voice (he knew later) was thoughtful only—not a quiver, not a hint of

real fear in it.

“It’ll have to come sometime—now or in a year or two. At least, that’s

what everybody says. I wonder if it’s true.”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t—unless we make it true. This sort of thing—it’s

a kind of common nightmare we have now and then. Every few years—and

when it’s over we turn round and wake up and wonder what the devil we

were frightened about.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “when you come to think of it, it is rather like

that. I don’t remember in the least what the fuss was all about last

time—but I know the papers were full of Transylvania and the poor old

Dad was worked off his head for a week or two.... And then it was over

and we forgot all about it.”

And at that they turned and went back to their golden solitude, shutting

out, for the rest of the evening, a world that made protests and sent

ominous telegrams. Before Theodore left her, to walk home restless with

delight, they had decided on the fashion of Phillida’s ring and planned

the acquisition of a Georgian house—with powder-closet.

It was his restless delight that made sleep impossible—and he sat at his

window and smoked till the east was red.... While Henderson and

Rathbone, a mile or two away, planned Distribution on a war-footing.

* * * * *

Events in the next few days moved rapidly in an atmosphere of tense and

rising life; races and peoples were suddenly and acutely conscious of

their life collective, and the neighbourly quarrel and bitterness of

yesterday was forgotten in the new comradeship born of common hatred and

common passion for self-sacrifice. There was talk at first, with

diplomatists and leader-writers, of a possibility of localizing the

conflict; but within forty-eight hours of the issue of the minority

protest it was clear that the League would be rent. On one side, as on

the other, statesmen were popular only when known to be unyielding in

the face of impossible demands; crowds gathered when ministers met to

take counsel and greeted them with cries to stand fast. Behind vulgar

effervescence and music-hall thunder was faith in a righteous cause;

and, as ever, man believed in himself and his cause with a hand on the

hilt of his sword. Freedom and justice were suddenly real and attainable

swiftly—through violence wrought on their enemies.... Humanity, once

more, was inspired by ideals that justified the shedding of blood and

looked death in the face without fear.

As always, there were currents and crosscurrents, and those who were not

seized by the common, splendid passion denounced it. Some meanly, by

distortion of motive—crying down faith as cupidity and the impulse to

self-sacrifice as arrogance; and others, more worthy of hearing, who

realized that the impulse to self-sacrifice is passing and the idealism

of to-day the bestial cunning of to-morrow.... On one side and the other

there was an attempt on the part of those who foresaw something, at

least, of the inevitable, to pit fear against the impulse to

self-sacrifice and make clear to a people to whom war was a legend only

the extent of disaster ahead. The attempt was defeated, almost as begun,

by the sudden launching of an ultimatum with twenty-four hours for

reply.

At the news young men surged to the recruiting-stations, awaiting their

turn for admission in long shouting, jesting lines; the best blood and

honour of a generation that had not yet sated its inborn lust of combat.

Women stood to watch them as their ranks moved slowly to the goal—some

proud to tears, others giggling a foolish approval. Great shifting

crowds—men and women who could not rest—gathered in public places and

awaited the inevitable news. In the last few hours—all protest being

useless—even the loudest of the voices that clamoured against war had

died down; and in the life collective was the strange, sudden peace

which comes with the cessation of internal feud and the focusing of

hatred on those who dwell beyond a nation’s borders.

* * * * *

Theodore Savage, in the days that followed his betrothal, was kept with

his nose to the Distributive grindstone, working long hours of overtime

in an atmosphere transformed out of knowledge. The languid and formal

routine of departments was succeeded by a fever of hurried innovation;

gone were the lazy, semi-occupied hours when he had been wont to play

with his thoughts of Phillida and the long free evenings that were hers

as a matter of course. In the beginning he felt himself curiously

removed from the strong, heady atmosphere that affected others like

wine. Absorption in Phillida counted for something in his aloofness, but

even without it his temperament was essentially averse from the

crowd-life; he was stirred by the common desire to be of service, but

was conscious of no mounting of energy restless and unsatisfied....

Having little conviction or bias in politics, he accepted without

question the general version of the origins of conflict and resented, in

orthodox fashion, the gross breach of faith and agreement which betrayed

long established design. “It had got to be” and “They’ve been getting

ready for years” were phrases on the general lip which he saw no reason

to discredit; and, with acceptance of the inevitability of conflict, he

ceased to find conflict “unthinkable.” In daily intercourse with those

to whom it was thinkable, practical, a certainty—to some, in the end, a

desirable certainty—Holt’s phrase lost its meaning and became a symbolic

extravagance.... So far he was caught in the swirl of the crowd-life;

but he was never one with it and remained conscious of it always as

something that flowed by him, something apart from himself.

Above all he knew it as something apart when he saw how it had seized

and mastered Phillida. She was curiously alive to its sweep and emotion,

and beneath her outward daintiness lay the power of fervid partisanship.

“If it weren’t for you,” she told him once, “I should break my heart

because I’m only a woman”; and he saw that she pitied him, that she was

even resentful for his sake, when she learned from her father that there

was no question of allowing the clerks of the Distribution Office to

volunteer for military service.

“He says the Department will need all its trained men and that modern

war is won by organization even more than by fighting. I’m glad you

won’t have to go, my dear—I’m glad—” and, saying it, she clung to him as

to one who stood in need of consolation.

He felt the implied consolation and sympathy—with a twinge of

conscience, not entirely sure of deserving it. But for the rigid

departmental order, he knew he should have thought it his duty to

volunteer and take his share of the danger that others were clamouring

to face; but he had not cursed vehemently, like his junior, Cassidy,

when Holles, equally blasphemous, burst into the room with the news that

enlistment was barred. He thought of Cassidy’s angry blue eyes as he

swore that, by hook or by crook, he would find his way into the

air-service.... Phillida would have sympathized with Cassidy and the

flash of her eyes answered his; she too, for the moment, was one with

the crowd-life, and there were moments when he felt it was sweeping her

away from his hold.

He felt it most on their last evening, on the night the ultimatum

expired; when he came from the office, after hours of overtime,

uncertain whether he should find her, wondering whether her excited

restlessness had driven her out into the crowds that surged round

Whitehall. As he ran up the stairs the sound of a piano drifted from the

room above; no definite melody but a vague, irregular striking of chords

that came to an end as he entered the room and Phillida looked up,

expectant.

“At last,” she said as she ran to him. “You don’t know how I have wanted

you. I can’t be alone—if you hadn’t turned up I should have had to find

someone to talk to.”

“Anyone—didn’t matter who?” he suggested.

She laughed, caught his hand and rubbed her cheek against it. “Yes,

anyone—you know what I mean. It’s just—when you think of what’s

happening, how can you keep still?... As for father, I never see him

nowadays. I suppose there isn’t any news?”

“There can’t be,” he answered. “Not till twelve.”

“No—and even at twelve it won’t really be news. Just no answer—and the

time will be up.... We’re at peace now—till midnight.... What’s the

time?”

He longed to be alone with her—alone with her in thought as well as in

outward seeming—but her talk slipped restlessly away from his leading

and she moved uncertainly about the room, returning at last to her vague

striking of the piano—sharp, isolated notes, and then suddenly a

masterful chord.

“Play to me,” he asked, “play properly.”

She shook her head and declared it was impossible.

“Anything connected is beyond me; I can only strum and make noises.” She

crashed in the bass, rushed a swift arpeggio to the treble, then turned

to him, her eyes wide and glowing. “If you hold your breath, can’t you

feel them all waiting?—thousands on thousands—all through the world?...

Waiting till midnight ... can’t you feel it?”

“You make me feel it,” he answered. “Tell me—you want war?”

The last words came out involuntarily, and it was only the startled,

sudden change in her face that brought home to him what he had said.

“I want war,” she echoed.... “I want men to be killed.... Theodore, what

makes you say that?”

He fumbled for words, not sure of his own meaning—sure only that her

eyes would change and lose their fervour if, at the last moment and by

God-sent miracle, the sword were returned to its sheath.

“Not that, of course—not the actual fighting. I didn’t mean that.... But

isn’t there something in you—in you and in everyone—that’s too strong to

be arrested? Too swift?... If nothing happened—if we drew back—you

couldn’t be still now; you couldn’t endure it....”

She looked at him thoughtfully, puzzled, half-assenting; then protested

again: “I don’t want it—but we can’t be still and endure evil.”

“No,” he said, “we can’t—but isn’t there a gladness in the thought that

we can’t?”

“Because we’re right,” she flashed. “It’s not selfish—you know it isn’t

selfish. We see what is right and, whatever it costs us, we stand for

it. The greatest gladness of all is the gladness of giving—everything,

even life.... That’s what makes me wish I were a man!”

“The passion for self-sacrifice,” he said, quoting Markham. “I was told

the other day it was one of the causes of war.... Don’t look at me so

reproachfully—I’m not a pacifist. Give me a kiss and believe me.”

She laughed and gave him the kiss he asked for, and for a minute or two

he drew her out of the crowd-life and they were alone together as they

had been on the night of their betrothal. Then the spirit of

restlessness took hold of her again and she rose suddenly, declaring

they must find out what was happening—they must go out and see for

themselves.

“It’s only just past ten,” he argued. “What can be happening for another

two hours? There’ll only be a crowd—walking up and down and waiting.”

It was just the crowd and its going to and fro that she needed, and she

set to work to coax him out of his reluctance. There would never be

another night like this one—they must see it together and remember it as

long as they lived.... Perhaps, her point gained, she was remorseful,

for she rewarded his assent with a caress and a coaxing apology.

“We shall have so many evenings to ourselves,” she told him—“and

to-night—to-night we don’t only belong to ourselves.”

He could feel her arm tremble and thrill on his own as they came in

sight of the Clock Tower and the swarm of expectant humanity that moved

and murmured round Westminster. On him the first impression was of

seething insignificance that the Clock Tower dwarfed and the dignity of

night reproved; on her, as he knew by the trembling of her fingers, a

quickening of life and sensation....

They were still at the shifting edges of the crowd when a man’s voice

called “Phillida!” and one of her undergraduate cousins linked himself

on to their company. For nearly an hour the three moved backwards and

forwards—through the hum and mutter of voices, the ceaseless turning of

eyes to Big Ben and the shuffling of innumerable feet.... When the

quarters chimed, there was always a hush; when eleven throbbed solemnly,

no man stirred till the last beat died.... With silence and arrested

movement the massed humanity at the base of the Clock Tower was no

longer a seething insignificance; without speech, without motion, it was

suddenly dignified—life faced with its destiny and intent upon a Moving

Finger....

“Only one more hour,” whispered Phillida as the silence broke; and the

Rathbone boy, to show he was not moved, wondered if it was worth their

while to stay pottering about for an hour?... No one answered his

question, since it needed no answer; and, the dignity of silence over,

they drifted again with the crowd.

IV

The Moving Finger had written off another five minutes or so when police

were suddenly active and sections of the crowd lunged uncomfortably; way

was being made for the passing of an official car—and in the backward

swirl of packed humanity Theodore was thrust one way, Phillida and the

Rathbone boy another. For a moment he saw them as they looked round and

beckoned him; the next, the swirl had carried him yet further—and when

it receded they were lost amongst the drifting, shifting thousands.

After ten minutes more of pushing to and fro in search of them, Theodore

gave up the chase as fruitless and made his way disconsolately to the

Westminster edge of the crowd.... Phillida, if he knew her, would stay

till the stroke of midnight, later if the spirit moved her; and she had

an escort in the Rathbone boy, who, in due time, would see her home....

There was no need to worry—but he cursed the luck of what might be their

last evening.

For a time he lingered uncertainly on the edge of the pushing, shuffling

mass; perhaps would have lingered till the hour struck, if there had not

drifted to his memory the evening at Vallance’s when Holt had declared

this night to be impossible—and when Markham had “made it war.” And,

with that, he remembered also that Markham had rooms near by—in one of

the turnings off Great Smith Street.

There was a light in the room that he knew for Markham’s and it was only

after he had rung that he wondered what had urged him to come. He was

still wondering when the door opened and could think of no better

explanation than “I saw you were up—by your light.”

“If you’d passed five minutes ago,” said Markham, as he led the way

upstairs, “you wouldn’t have seen any light. I’m only just back from the

lab—and dining off biscuits and whisky.”

“Is this making any difference to you, then?” Theodore asked. “I mean,

in the way of work?”

Markham nodded as he poured out his visitor’s whisky. “Yes, I’m serving

the country—the military people have taken me over, lock and stock: with

everyone else, apparently, who has ever done chemical research. I’ve

been pretty hard at it the last few days, ever since the scare was

serious.... And you—are you soldiering?”

“No,” said Theodore and told him of the departmental prohibition.

“It mayn’t make much difference in the end,” said Markham.... “You see,

I was right—the other evening.”

“Yes,” Theodore answered, “I believe that was why I came in. The crowd

to-night reminded me of what you said at Vallance’s—though I don’t think

I believed you then.... How long is it going to last?”

“God knows,” said Markham, with his mouth full of biscuit. “We shall

have had enough of it—both sides—before very long; but it’s one thing to

march into hell with your head up and another to find a way out....

There’s only one thing I’m fairly certain about—I ought to have been

strangled at birth.”

Theodore stared at him, not sure he had caught the last words.

“You ought to——?”

“Yes—you heard me right. If the human animal must fight—and nothing

seems to stop it—it should kill off its scientific men. Stamp out the

race of ’em, forbid it to exist.... Holt was also right that evening,

fundamentally. You can’t combine the practice of science and the art of

war; in the end, it’s one or the other. We, I think, are going to prove

that—very definitely.”

“And when you’ve proved it—we stop fighting?”

Markham shrugged his shoulders, thrust aside his plate and filled his

pipe.

“Curious, the failure to understand the influence on ourselves of what

we make and use. We just make and use and damn the consequence.... When

Lavoisier invented the chemical balance, did he stop to consider the

possibilities of chemical action in combination with outbursts of human

emotion? If he had...!”

In the silence that followed they heard the chiming of

three-quarters—and there flashed inconsequently into Theodore’s memory,

a vision of himself, a small boy with his hand in his mother’s, staring

up, round-eyed, at Big Ben of London—while his mother taught him the

words that were fitted to the chime.

Lord—through—this—hour

Be—Thou—our—guide,

So—by—Thy—power

No—foot—shall—slide.

... That, or something like that.... Odd, that he should remember them

now—when for years he had not remembered.... “Lord—through—this—hour——”

He realized suddenly that Markham was speaking—in jerks, between pulls

at his pipe. “... And the same with mechanics—not the engine but the

engine plus humanity. Take young James Watt and his interest in the lid

of a tea-kettle! In France, by the way, they tell the same story of

Papin; but, so far as the rest of us are concerned it doesn’t much

matter who first watched the lid of a kettle with intelligence—the point

is that somebody watched it and saw certain of its latent possibilities.

Only its more immediate possibilities—and we may take it for granted

that amongst those which he did not foresee were the most important. The

industrial system—the drawing of men into crowds where they might feed

the machine and be fed by it—the shrinkage of the world through the use

of mechanical transport. That—the shrinkage—when we first saw it coming,

we took to mean union of peoples and the clasping of distant

hands—forgetting that it also meant the cutting of distant throats....

Yet it might have struck us that we are all potential combatants—and the

only known method of preventing a fight is to keep the combatants apart!

These odd, simple facts that we all of us know—and lose sight of ... the

drawing together of peoples has always meant the clashing of their

interests ... and so new hatreds. Inevitably new hatreds.”

Theodore quoted: “‘All men hate each other naturally’.... You believe

that?”

“Of individuals, no—but of all communities, yes. Is there any form of

the life collective that is capable of love for its fellow—for another

community? Is there any church that will stand aside that another church

may be advantaged? ... You and I are civilized, as man and man; but

collectively we are part of a life whose only standard and motive is

self-interest, its own advantage ... a beast-life, morally. If you

understand that, you understand to-night ... Which demands from us

sacrifices, makes none itself.... That’s as far as we have got in the

mass.”

Through the half-open window came the hum and murmur of the crowd that

waited for the hour.... Theodore stirred restlessly, conscious of the

unseen turning of countless faces to the clock—and aware, through the

murmur, of the frenzied little beating of his watch.... He hesitated to

look at it—and when he drew it out and said “Five minutes more,” his

voice sounded oddly in his ears.

“Five minutes,” said Markham.... He laughed suddenly and pushed the

bottle across the table. “Do you know where we are now—you and I and all

of us? On the crest of the centuries. They’ve carried us a long roll

upwards and now here we are—on top! In five more minutes—three hundred

little seconds—we shall hear the crest curl over.... Meanwhile, have a

drink!”

He checked himself and held up a finger. “Your watch is slow!”

The hum and murmur of the crowd had ceased and through silence unbroken

came the prayer of the Westminster chime.

Lord—through—this—hour

Be—Thou—our—guide,

So—by—Thy—power

No—foot—shall—slide.

There was no other sound for the twelve booming strokes of the hour: it

was only as the last beat quivered into silence that there broke the

moving thunder of a multitude.

“Over!” said Markham. “Hear it crash?... Well, here’s to the

centuries—after all, they did the best they knew for us!”

V

The war-footing arrangements of the Distribution Office included a

system of food control involving local supervision; hence provincial

centres came suddenly into being, and to one of these—at York—Theodore

Savage was dispatched at little more than an hour’s notice on the

morning after war was declared. He telephoned Phillida and they met at

King’s Cross and had ten hurried minutes on the platform; she was still

eager and excited, bubbling over with the impulse to action—was hoping

to start training for hospital work—had been promised an opening—she

would tell him all about it when she wrote. Her excitement took the

bitterness out of the parting—perhaps, in her need to give and serve,

she was even proud that the sacrifice of parting was demanded of her....

The last he saw of her was a smiling face and a cheery little wave of

the hand.

He made the journey to York with a carriageful of friendly and talkative

folk who, in normal days, would have been strangers to him and to each

other; as it was, they exchanged newspapers and optimistic views and

grew suddenly near to each other in their common interest and

resentment.... That was what war meant in those first stirring

days—friendliness, good comradeship, the desire to give and serve, the

thrill of unwonted excitement.... Looking back from after years it

seemed to him that mankind, in those days, was finer and more gracious

than he had ever known it—than he would ever know it again.

* * * * *

The first excitement over, he lived somewhat tediously at York between

his office and dingily respectable lodgings; discovering very swiftly

that, so far as he, Theodore Savage, was concerned, a state of

hostilities meant the reverse of alarums and excursions. For him it was

the strictest of official routine and the multiplication of formalities.

His hours of liberty were fewer than in London, his duties more

tiresome, his chief less easy to get on with; there was frequent

overtime, and leave—which meant Phillida—was not even a distant

possibility. For all his honest desire of service he was soon frankly

bored by his work; its atmosphere of minute regularity and insistent

detail was out of keeping with the tremor and uncertainty of war, and

there was something æsthetically wrong about a fussy process of

docketing and checking while nations were at death grips and the fate of

a world in the balance.... His one personal satisfaction was the town,

York itself—the walls, the Bars, and above all the Minster; he lodged

near the Minster, could see it from his window, and its enduring dignity

was a daily relief alike from the feverish perusal of war news, his

landlady’s colour-scheme and taste in furniture and the fidgety trifling

of the office.

In the evening he read many newspapers and wrote long letters to

Phillida; who also, he gathered, had discovered that war might be

tedious. “We haven’t any patients yet,” she scribbled him in one of her

later letters, “but, of course, I’m learning all sorts of things that

will be useful later on, when we do get them. Bandaging and making

beds—and then we attend lectures. It’s rather dull waiting and bandaging

each other for practice—but naturally I’m thankful that there aren’t

enough casualties to go round. Up to now the regular hospitals have

taken all that there are—‘temporaries’ like us don’t get even a look

in.... The news is really splendid, isn’t it?”

There were few casualties in the beginning because curiously little

happened; Western Europe was removed from the actual storm-centre, and

in England, after the first few days of alarmist rumours concerning

invasion by air and sea, the war, for a time, settled down into a

certain amount of precautionary rationing and a daily excitement in

newspaper form—so much so that the timorous well-to-do, who had retired

from London on the outbreak of hostilities, trickled back in increasing

numbers. Hostilities, in the beginning, were local and comparatively

ineffective; one of the results of the limitation of troops and

armaments enforced by the constitution of the League was to give to the

opening moves of the contest a character unprepared and amateurish. The

aim, on either side, was to obtain time for effective preparation, to

organize forces and resources; to train fighters and mobilize chemists,

to convert factories, manufacture explosive and gas, and institute a

system of co-operation between the strategy of far-flung allies. Hence,

in the beginning, the conflict was partial and, as regards its strategy,

hesitating; there were spasms of bloody incident which were deadly

enough in themselves, but neither side cared to engage itself seriously

before it had attained its full strength.... First blood was shed in a

fashion that was frankly mediæval; the heady little democracy whose

failure to establish a claim in the Court of Arbitration had been the

immediate cause of the conflict, flung itself with all its

half-civilized resources upon its neighbour and enemy, the victorious

party to the suit. Between the two little communities was a treasured

feud which had burst out periodically in defiance of courts and

councils; and, control once removed, the border tribesmen gathered for

the fray with all the enthusiasm of their rude forefathers, and raided

each other’s territory in bands armed with knives and revolvers. Their

doings made spirited reading in the press in the early days of the

war—before the generality of newspaper readers had even begun to realize

that battles were no longer won by the shock of troops and that the

root-principle of modern warfare was the use of the enemy civilian

population as an auxiliary destructive force.

Certain states and races grasped the principle sooner than others, being

marked out for early enlightenment by the accident of geographical

position. In those not immediately affected, such as Britain, censorship

on either side ruled out, as impossible for publication, the extent of

the damage inflicted on allies, and the fact that it was not only in

enemy countries that large masses of population, hunted out of cities by

chemical warfare and the terror from above, had become nomadic and

predatory. That, as the struggle grew fiercer, became, inevitably, the

declared aim of the strategist; the exhaustion of the enemy by burdening

him with a starving and nomadic population. War, once a matter of armies

in the field, had resolved itself into an open and thorough-going effort

to ruin enemy industry by setting his people on the run; to destroy

enemy agriculture not only by incendiary devices—the so-called

poison-fire—but by the secondary and even more potent agency of starving

millions driven out to forage as they could.... The process, in the

stilted phrase of the communiqué, was described as “displacement of

population”; and displacement of population, not victory in the field,

became the real military objective.

To the soldier, at least, it was evident very early in the struggle that

the perfection of scientific destruction had entailed, of necessity, the

indirect system of strategy associated with industrial warfare;

displacement of population being no more than a natural development of

the striker’s method of attacking a government by starving the

non-combatant community. The aim of the scientific soldier, like that of

the soldier of the past, was to cut his enemy’s communications, to

intercept and hamper his supplies; and the obvious way to attain that

end was by ruthless disorganization of industrial centres, by letting

loose a famished industrial population to trample and devour his crops.

Manufacturing districts, on either side, were rendered impossible to

work in by making them impossible to live in; and from one crowded

centre after another there streamed out squalid and panic-stricken

herds, devouring the country as they fled. Seeking food, seeking refuge,

turning this way or that; pursued by the terror overhead or imagining

themselves pursued; and breaking, striving to separate, to make

themselves small and invisible.... And, as air-fleets increased in

strength and tactics were perfected—as one centre of industry after

another went down and out—the process of disintegration was rapid. To

the tentative and hesitating opening of the war had succeeded a fury of

widespread destruction; and statesmen, rendered desperate by the sudden

crumbling of their own people—the sudden lapse into primitive

conditions—could hope for salvation only through a quicker process of

“displacement” on the enemy side.

There were reasons, political and military, why the average British

civilian, during the opening phases of the struggle, knew little of

warfare beyond certain food restrictions, the news vouchsafed in the

communiqués and the regulation comments thereon; the enemy forces which

might have brought home to him the meaning of the term “displacement”

were occupied at first with other and nearer antagonists. Hence

continental Europe—and not Europe alone—was spotted with ulcers of

spreading devastation before displacement was practised in England.

There had been stirrings of uneasiness from time to time—of uneasiness

and almost of wonder that the weapon she was using with deadly effect

had not been turned against herself; but at the actual moment of

invasion there was something like public confidence in a speedy end to

the struggle—and the principal public grievance was the shortage and

high price of groceries.

* * * * *

Whatever he forgot and confused in after days—and there were stretches

of time that remained with him only as a blur—Theodore remembered very

clearly every detail and event of the night when disaster began. Young

Hewlett’s voice as he announced disaster—and what he, Theodore, was

doing when the boy rapped on the window. Not only what happened, but his

mood when the interruption came and the causes of it; he had suffered an

irritating day at the office, crossed swords with a self-important chief

and been openly snubbed for his pains. As a result, his landlady’s

evening grumble on the difficulties of war-time housekeeping seemed

longer and less bearable than usual, and he was still out of tune with

the world in general when he sat down to write to Phillida. He

remembered phrases of the letter—never posted—wherein he worked off his

irritation. “I got into trouble to-day through thinking of you when I

was supposed to be occupied with indents. You are responsible, Blessed

Girl, for several most horrible muckers, affecting the service of the

country.... Your empty hospital don’t want you and my empty-headed boss

don’t want me—oh, lady mine, if I could only make him happy by sacking

myself and catching the next train to London!” ... And so on and so

on....

It was late, nearing midnight, when he finished his letter and, for want

of other occupation, turned back to a half-read evening paper; the

communiqués were meagre, but there was a leading article pointing out

the inevitable effect of displacement on the enemy’s resources and

morale, and he waded through its comfortable optimism. As he laid aside

the paper he realized how sleepy he was and rose yawning; he was on his

way to the door, with intent to turn in, when the rapping on the window

halted him. He pulled aside the blind and saw a face against the

glass—pressed close, with a flattened white nose.

“Who’s that?” he asked, pushing up the window. It was Hewlett, one of

his juniors at the office, out of breath with running and excitement.

“I say, Savage, come along out. There’s no end going on—fires, the whole

sky’s red. They’ve come over at last and no mistake. Crashaw and I have

been watching ’em and I thought you’d like to have a look. It’s worth

seeing—we’re just along there, on the wall. Hurry up!”

The boy was dancing with eagerness to get back and Theodore had to run

to keep up with him. He and Crashaw, Hewlett explained in gasps, had

spent the evening in a billiard-room; it was on their way back to their

diggings that they had noticed sudden lights in the sky—sort of

flashes—and gone up on the wall to see better.... No, it wasn’t only

searchlights—you could see them too—sudden flashes and the sky all red.

Fires—to the south. It was the real thing, no doubt about that—and the

only wonder was why they hadn’t come before.... At the head of the steps

leading up to the wall were three or four figures with their heads all

turned one way; and as Hewlett, mounting first, called “Still going on?”

another voice called back, “Rather!”

They stood on the broad, flat wall and watched—in a chill little wind.

The skyline to the south and south-west was reddened with a glow that

flickered and wavered spasmodically and, as Hewlett had said, there were

flashes—the bursting of explosive or star-shells. Also there were

moments when the reddened skyline throbbed suddenly in places, grew

vividly golden and sent out long fiery streamers.... They guessed at

direction and wondered how far off; the wind was blowing sharply from

the north, towards the glow; hence it carried sound away from them and

it was only now and then that they caught more than a mutter and rumble.

As the minutes drew out the news spread through the town and the

watchers on the wall increased in numbers; not only men but women,

roused from bed, who greeted the flares with shrill, excited “Oh’s” and

put ceaseless questions to their men folk. Young Hewlett, at Theodore’s

elbow, gave himself up to frank interest in his first sight of war;

justifying a cheerfulness that amounted to enthusiasm by explaining at

intervals that he guessed our fellows were giving ’em what for and by

this time they were sorry they’d come.... Once a shawled woman demanded

tartly why they didn’t leave off, then, if they’d had enough? Whereat

Hewlett, unable to think of an answer, pretended not to hear and moved

away.

Of his own sensations while he watched from the wall Theodore remembered

little save the bodily sensation of chill; he saw himself standing with

his back to the wind, his shoulders hunched and the collar of his coat

turned up. The murmur of hushed voices remained with him and odd

snatches of fragmentary talk; there was the woman who persisted

uneasily, “But you can’t ’ear ’em coming with these ’ere silent

engines—why, they might be right over us naow!” And the man who answered

her gruffly with “You’d jolly well know if they were!” ... And perpetual

conjecture as to distance and direction of the glow; disputes between

those who asserted that over there was Leeds, and those who scoffed

contemptuously at the idea—arguing that, if Leeds were the centre of

disturbance, the guns would have sounded much nearer.... Petty talk, he

remembered, and plainly enough—but not how much he feared or foresaw. He

must have been anxious, uneasy, or he would not have stood for long

hours in the chill of the wind; but his definite impressions were only

of scattered, for the most part uneducated, talk, of silhouetted figures

that shifted and grouped, of turning his eyes from the lurid skyline to

the shadowy rock that in daylight was the mass of the cathedral.... In

the end sheer craving for warmth drove him in; leaving Hewlett and

Crashaw deaf to his reminder that the office expected them at nine.

* * * * *

With the morning came news and—more plentifully—rumour; also, the wind

having dropped, a persistent thunder from the south. Industrial

Yorkshire, it was clear, was being subjected to that process of human

displacement which, so far, it had looked on as an item in the daily

communiqué; the attack, moreover, was an attack in force, since the

invaders did not find it needful to desist with the passing of darkness.

Rumour, in the absence of official intelligence, invented an enveloping

air-fleet which should cut them off from their base; and meanwhile the

thunder continued....

This much, at least, was shortly official and certain: nearly all rail,

road and postal communication to the south was cut off—trains had ceased

to run Londonwards and ordinary traffic on the highways was held up at

barriers and turned back. Only military cars used the roads—and returned

to add their reports to those brought in by air-scouts; but as a rule

the information they furnished was for official enlightenment only, and

it was not till the refugees arrived in numbers that the full meaning of

displacement was made clear to the ordinary man.

It was after the second red night that the refugees appeared in their

thousands—a horde of human rats driven out of their holes by terror, by

fire and by gas. Whatever their status and possessions in the life of

peace, they came with few exceptions on foot; as roads, like railways,

were a target for the airman, the highway was avoided for the by-path or

the open field, and the flight from every panic-stricken centre could be

traced by long wastes of trampled crops. There were those who, terrified

beyond bearing by the crash of masonry and long trembling underground,

saw safety only in the roofless open, refused to enter houses and

persisted in huddling in fields—unafraid, as yet, of the so-called

poison-fire which had licked up the crops in Holderness and the

corn-growing district round Pontefract.... Leeds, for a day or two, was

hardly touched; but with the outpouring of fugitives from Dewsbury,

Wakefield, Halifax and Bradford, Leeds also began to vomit her terrified

multitudes. A wave of vagrant destitution rushed suddenly and blindly

northward—anywhere away from the ruin of explosive, the flames and death

by suffocation; while authority strove vainly to control and direct the

torrent of overpowering misery.

It was in the early morning that the torrent reached York and rolled

through it; overwhelming the charity, private and public, that at first

made efforts to cope with the rush of misery. Theodore’s room for a time

was given up to a man with bandaged eyes and puffed face whom his wife

had led blindfold from Castleford. The man himself sat dumb and

suffering, breathing heavily through blistered lips; the woman raged

vulgarly against the Government which had neglected to supply them with

gas-masks, to have the place properly defended, to warn people! “The

bloody fools ought to have known what was coming and if her man was

blinded for the rest of his life it was all the fault of this ’ere

Government that never troubled its blasted ’ead as long as it drew its

money.” ... That was in the beginning, before the flood of misery had

swollen so high that even the kindliest shrank from its squalid menace;

and Theodore, because it was the first he heard, remembered her story

when he had forgotten others more piteous.

Before midday there was only one problem for local authority, civil and

military—the disposal of displaced population; that is to say, the

herding of vagrants that could not all be sheltered, that could not all

be fed, that blackened fields, choked streets, drove onward and sank

from exhaustion. The railway line to the north was still clear and, in

obedience to wireless instructions from London, trains packed with

refugees were sent off to the north, with the aim of relieving the

pressure on local resources. Disorganization of transport increased the

difficulty of food supply and even on the first day of panic and

migration the agricultural community were raising a cry of alarm. Blind

terror and hunger between them wrought havoc; fields were trampled and

fugitives were plundering already—would plunder more recklessly

to-morrow.

All day, all night, displaced humanity came stumbling in panic from the

south and south-west; spreading news of the torment it had fled from,

the dead it had left and the worse than dead who still crouched in an

inferno whence they could not summon courage to fly. The railways could

not deal with a tithe of the number who clamoured to be carried to the

north, into safety; by the first evening the town was well-nigh eaten

out, and householders, hardening their hearts against misery, were

bolting themselves in, for fear of misery grown desperate. While out in

the country farmers stabled their live-stock and kept ceaseless watch

against the hungry.

All day the approaches to the station were besieged by those who hoped

for a train; and, on the second night of the invasion, Theodore, sent by

his chief with a message to the military transport officer, fought his

way through a solid crowd on the platform—a crowd excluded from a train

that was packed and struggling with humanity. A crowd that was squalid,

unreasoning and blindly selfish; intent only on flight and safety—and

some of it brutally intent. There were scuffles with porters and

soldiers who refused to open locked doors, angry hootings and wild

swayings backward and forward as the train moved out of the station;

Theodore’s efforts to make his way to the station-master’s office were

held to be indicative of a desire to travel by the next train and he was

buffeted aside without mercy. There was something in the brute mass of

terror that sickened him—a suggestion already of the bestial, the

instinctive, the unhuman.

The transport officer looked up at him with tired, angry eyes and

demanded what the hell he wanted?... Whereat Theodore handed him a

typewritten note from a punctilious chief and explained that they had

tried to get through on the telephone, either to him or the

station-master, but——

“I should rather think not,” said the transport officer rudely. “We’ve

both of us got more important things to worry about than little

Distribution people. The telephone clerk did bring me some idiotic

message or other, but I told him I didn’t want to hear it.”

He glanced at the typewritten note—then glared at it—and went off into a

cackle of laughter; which finally tailed into blasphemy coupled with

obscene abuse.

“Seen this?” he asked when he had sworn himself out. “Well, at any rate

you know what it’s about. The —— has sent for particulars of to-morrow’s

refugee train service—wants to know the number and capacity of trains to

be dispatched to Newcastle-on-Tyne. Wants to enter it in duplicate, I

suppose—and make lots and lots and lots of carbon copies. God in

Heaven!”—and again he sputtered into blasphemy.... “Well, I needn’t

bother to write down the answer; even if you’ve no more sense than he

has, you’ll be able to remember it all right. It’s nil to both

questions; nil trains to Newcastle, nil capacity. So that’s that!...

What’s more—if it’s any satisfaction to your darned-fool boss to know

it—we haven’t been sending any trains to Newcastle all day.”

“But I thought,” began Theodore—wondering if the man were drunk? He was,

more than slightly—having fought for two days with panic-stricken devils

and helped himself through with much whisky; but, drunk or not, he was

sure of his facts and rapped them out with authority.

“Not to Newcastle. The first two or three got as far as Darlington—this

morning. There they were pulled up. Then it was Northallerton—now we

send ’em off to Thirsk and leave the people there to deal with ’em. You

bet they’ll send ’em further if they can—you don’t suppose they want to

be eaten out, any more than we do. But, for all I know, they’re getting

’em in from the other side.”

“The other side?” Theodore repeated. “What do you mean?” Whereat the

transport officer, grown suddenly uncommunicative, leaned back in his

chair and whistled.

“That’s all I can tell you,” he vouchsafed at length. “Trains haven’t

run beyond Darlington since yesterday. I conclude H.Q. knows the reason,

but they haven’t imparted it to me—I’ve only had my orders. It isn’t our

business if the trains get stopped so long as we send ’em off—and we’re

sending ’em and asking no questions.”

“Do you mean,” Theodore stammered, “that—this—is going on up north?”

“What do you think?” said the transport officer. “It’s the usual trick,

isn’t it?... Start ’em running from two sides at once—don’t let ’em

settle, send ’em backwards and forwards, keep ’em going!... We’ve played

it often enough on them—now we’re getting a bit of our own back....

However, I’ve no official information. You know just as much as I do.”

“But,” Theodore persisted, “the people coming through from the north.

What do they say—they must know?”

“There aren’t any people coming through,” said the other grimly.

“Military order since this morning—no passenger traffic from the north

runs this side of Thirsk. We’ve got enough of our own, haven’t we?...

All I say is—God help Thirsk and especially God help the

station-master!”

He straightened himself suddenly and grabbed at the papers on his table.

“Now, you’ve got what the damn fool sent you for—and I’m trying to make

out my report.”

* * * * *

As Theodore fought his way out of the station and the crowd that seethed

round it, he had an intolerable sense of being imprisoned between two

fires. If he could see far enough to the north—to Durham and the

Tyneside—there would be another hot, throbbing horizon and another

stream of human destitution pouring lamentably into the night.... And,

between the two fires, the two streams were meeting—turning back upon

themselves, intermingling ... in blind and agonized obedience to the

order to “keep ’em going!”... What happened when a train was halted by

signal and the thronged misery inside it learned that here, without

forethought or provision made, its flight must come to an end? At

Thirsk, Northallerton, by the wayside, anywhere, in darkness?... A thin

sweep of rain was driving down the street, and he fancied wretched

voices calling through darkness, through rain. Asking what, in God’s

name, was to become of them and where, in God’s name, they were to

go?... And the overworked officials who could give no answer, seeking

only to be rid of the massed and dreadful helplessness that cumbered the

ground on which it trod!... Displacement of population—the daily,

stilted phrase—had become to him a raw and livid fact and he stood

amazed at the limits of his own imagination. Day after day he had read

the phrase, been familiar with it; yet, so far, the horror had been

words to him. Now the daily, stilted phrase was translated,

comprehensible: “Don’t let ’em settle—keep ’em going.”

* * * * *

Back at the office, he discovered that his errand to the station had

been superfluous; his chief, the man of precedent, order and many carbon

copies, was staring, haggard and bewildered, at a typewritten document

signed by the military commandant.... And obtaining, incidentally, his

first glimpse into a world till now unthinkable—where precedent was not,

where reference was useless and order had ceased to exist.

VI

That night ended Theodore’s life as a clerk in the Civil Service. The

confusion consequent on the breakdown of transport had left of the

Distribution system but a paralysed mockery, a name without functions

attached to it; and with morning Theodore and his able-bodied fellows

were impressed into a special constabulary, hastily organized as a

weapon against vagrancy grown desperate and riotous. They were armleted,

put through a hurried course of instruction, furnished with revolvers or

rifles and told to shoot plunderers at sight.

No system of improvised rationing could satisfy even the elementary

needs of the hundreds of thousands who swept hither and thither, as

panic seized or the invader drove them; hence military authority, in

self-preservation, turned perforce on the growing menace of fugitive and

destitute humanity. Order, so long as the semblance of it lasted, strove

to protect and maintain the supplies of the fighting forces; which

entailed, inevitably, the leaving to the fate of their own devices of

the famished useless, the horde of devouring mouths. Interruption of

transport meant entire dependence on local food stuffs; and, as stocks

grew lower and plundering increased, provisions were seized by the

military.... Theodore, in the first hours of his new duty, helped to

load an armed lorry with the contents of a grocer’s shop and fight it

through the streets of York. There was an ugly rush as the driver

started his engine; men who had been foodless for days had watched, in

sullen craving, while the shop was emptied of its treasure of sacks and

tins; and when the engine buzzed a child wailed miserably, a woman

shrieked “Don’t let them, don’t let them!” and the whole pack snarled

and surged forward. Wolfish white faces showed at the tailboard and

before the car drew clear her escort had used their revolvers. Theodore,

not yet hardened to shooting, seized the nearest missile, a tin of meat,

and hurled it into one of the faces; when they drew away three or four

of the pack were tearing at each other for the treasure contained in the

tin.

He noticed, as the days went by, how quickly he slipped from the outlook

and habits of civilized man and adopted those of the primitive, even of

the animal. It was not only that he was suspicious of every man, careful

in approach, on the alert and ready for violence; he learned, like the

animal, to be indifferent to the suffering that did not concern him.

Violence, when it did not affect him directly, was a noise in the

distance—no more; and as swiftly as he became inured to bloodshed he

grew hardened to the sight of misery. At first he had sickened when he

ate his rations at the thought of a million-fold suffering that starved

while he filled his stomach; later, as order’s representative, he herded

and hustled a massed starvation without scruple, driving it away when it

grouped itself threateningly, shooting when it promised to give trouble

to authority, and looking upon death, itself, indifferently.

It amazed him, looking back, to realize the swiftness with which ordered

society had crumbled; laws, systems, habits of body and mind—they had

gone, leaving nothing but animal fear and the animal need to be fed.

Within little more than a week of the night when young Hewlett had

called him to watch the red flashes and the glare in the sky, there

remained of the fabric of order built up through the centuries very

little but a military force that was fighting on two sides—against

inward disorder and alien attack—and struggling to maintain itself

alive. Automatically, inevitably—under pressure of starvation, blind

vagrancy and terror—that which had once been a people, an administrative

whole, was relapsing into a tribal separatism, the last barrier against

nomadic anarchy.... As famished destitution overran the country,

localities not yet destitute tried systematically and desperately to

shut out the vagrant and defended what was left to them by force.

Countrymen beat off the human plague that devoured their substance and

trampled their crops underfoot; barriers were erected that no stranger

might pass and bloody little skirmishes were frequent at the outskirts

of villages. As bread grew scarcer and more precious, the penalties on

those who stole it were increasingly savage; tribal justice—lynch

law—took the place of petty sessions and assize, and plunderers, even

suspected plunderers, were strung up to trees and their bodies left

dangling as a warning.... And a day or two later, it might be, the

poison-fire swept through the fields and devoured the homes of those who

had executed tribal justice; or a horde of destitution, too strong to be

denied, drove them out; and, homeless in their turn, they swelled the

tide of plunderers and vagrants.... Man, with bewildering rapidity, was

slipping through the stages whereby, through the striving of long

generations, he had raised himself from primitive barbarism and the law

that he shares with the brute.

Very steadily the process of displacement continued. On most nights, in

one direction or another, there were sudden outbursts of light—the glare

of explosion or burning buildings or the greenish-blue reflection of the

poison-fire. The silent engine gave no warning of its coming, and the

first announcement of danger was the bursting of gas-shell and high

explosive, or the sudden vivid pallor of the poison-fire as it ran

before the wind and swept along dry fields and hedgerows. Where it swept

it left not only long tracts of burned crop and black skeleton trees,

but, often enough, the charred bodies of the homeless whom its rush had

outpaced and overtaken.... Sudden and unreasoning panic was

frequent—wild rushes from imaginary threats—and there were many towns

which, when their turn came, were shells and empty buildings only; dead

towns, whence the inhabitants had already fled in a body. York had been

standing all but silent for days when an enemy swooped down to destroy

it and Theodore, guarding military stores in a camp on the Ripon road,

looked his last on the towers of the Minster, magnificent against a sea

of flame. Death, in humanity, had ceased to move him greatly; but he

turned away his head from the death of high human achievement.

For the first few days of disaster there was a certain amount of news,

or what passed for news, from the outside world; in districts yet

untouched and not wholly panic-stricken, local journals struggled out

and communiqués—true or false—were published by the military

authorities. But with the rapid growth of the life nomadic, the herding

and driving to and fro, with the consequent absence of centres for the

dissemination of news or information, the outside world withdrew to a

distance and veiled itself in silence unbroken. With the disappearance

of the newspaper there was left only rumour, and rumour was always

current—sometimes hopeful, sometimes dreadful, always wild; to-day,

Peace was coming, a treaty all but signed—and to-morrow London was in

ruins.... No one knew for certain what was happening out of eyeshot, or

could more than guess how far devastation extended. This alone was a

certainty; that in every direction that a man might turn, he met those

who were flying from destruction, threatened or actual; and that night

after night and day after day, humanity crouched before the science

itself had perfected.... Sometimes there were visible encounters in the

air, contending squadrons that chased, manœuvred and gave battle; but

the invaders, driven off, returned again and the process of displacement

continued. And, with every hour of its continuance, the death-roll grew

longer, uncounted; and men, who had struggled to retain a hold on their

humanity and the life civilized, gave up the struggle, became predatory

beasts and fought with each other for the means to keep life in their

bodies.

* * * * *

In after years Theodore tried vainly to remember how long he was

quartered in the camp on the Ripon road—whether it was weeks or a matter

of days only. Then or later he lost all sense of time, retaining only a

memory of happenings, of events that followed each other and connecting

them roughly with the seasons—frosty mornings, wet and wind or summer

heat. There were the nights when York flamed and the days when thick

smoke hung over it; and the morning when aeroplanes fought overhead and

two crashed within a mile of the camp. There was the night of pitched

battle with a rabble of the starving, grown desperate, which rushed the

guard suddenly out of the darkness and beat and hacked at the doors of

the sheds which contained the hoarded treasure of food. Theodore, with

every other man in the camp, was turned out hastily to do battle with

the horde of invaders—to shoot into the mass of them and drive them back

to their starvation. In the end the rush was stemmed and the camp

cleared of the mob; but there was a hideous five minutes of shots and

knife-thrusts and hand-to-hand struggling before the final stampede.

Even after the stampede the menace was not at an end; when the sun rose

it showed to the watchers in the camp a sullen rabble that lingered not

a field’s breadth distant—a couple of hundred wolfish men and women who

could not tear themselves away from the neighbourhood of food, who

glared covetously and took hopeless counsel together till the order to

charge them was given and they broke and fled, spitting back hatred.

After that, the night guard was doubled and the commanding officer

applied in haste for reinforcements; barbed wire entanglements were

stretched round the camp and orders were given to disperse any crowd

that assembled and lingered in the neighbourhood. Behind their

entanglements and line of sentries the little garrison lived as on an

island in the flood of anarchy and ruin—a remnant of order, defending

itself against chaos. And, for all the discipline with which they faced

anarchy and the ruthlessness with which they beat back chaos, they knew

(so often as they dared to think) that the time might be at hand—must be

at hand, if no deliverance came—when they, every man of them, would be

swept from their island to the common fate and become as the creatures,

scarce human, who crawled to them for food and were refused. When

darkness fell and flames showed red on the horizon, they would wonder

how long before their own turn came—and be thankful for the lightening

in the east; and as each convoy of lorries drove up to remove supplies

from their fast dwindling stores, they would scan the faces of men who

were ignorant and helpless as themselves to see if they were bearers of

good news.... And the news was always their own news repeated; of ruin

and burning, of famine and the threat of the famished. No message—save

stereotyped military orders—from that outside world whence alone they

could hope for salvation.

There remained with Theodore to the end of his days the dreadful memory

of the women. At the beginning—just at the beginning—of disaster,

authority had connived at a certain amount of charitable diversion of

military stores for the benefit of women and children; but as supplies

dwindled and destroying hordes of vagrants multiplied, the tacit

permission was withdrawn. The soldier, the instrument of order, unfed

was an instrument of order no longer; discipline was discipline for so

long only as it obtained the necessities of life, and troops whose

rations failed them in the end ceased to be troops and swelled the flood

of vagrant and destitute anarchy. The useless mouth was the weapon of

the enemy; and authority hardened its heart perforce against the crying

of the useless mouth.

Once a score or so of women, with a tall, frantic girl as their leader,

stood for hours at the edge of the wire entanglement and called on the

soldiers to shoot—if they would not feed them, to shoot. Then, receiving

only silence as answer, the tall girl cried out that, by God, the

soldiers should be forced to shoot! and led her companions—some cumbered

with children—to tear and hurl themselves across the stretch of barbed

and twisted wire. As they scrambled over, bleeding, crying and their

clothes in rags, they were seized by the wrists and hustled to the gate

of the camp—some limp and effortless, others kicking and writhing to get

free. When the gate was closed and barred on them they beat on it—then

lay about wretchedly ... and at last shambled wretchedly away....

More dreadful even than the women who dragged with them children they

could not feed, were those who sought to bribe the possessors of food

with the remnant of their feminine attractions; who eyed themselves

anxiously in streams, pulled their sodden clothes into a semblance of

jauntiness and made piteous attempts at flirtation. Money being

worthless, since it could buy neither safety nor food, the price for

those who traded their bodies was paid in a hunk of bread or meat....

Those women suffered most who had no man of their own to forage and fend

for them, and were no longer young enough for other men to look on with

pleasure. They—as humanity fell to sheer wolfishness and the right of

the strongest—were beaten back and thrust aside when it came to the

sharing-out of spoil.

* * * * *

He remembered very clearly a day when news that was authentic reached

them from the outside world; an aeroplane came down with engine-trouble

in a field on the edge of the camp, and the haggard-faced pilot, beset

with breathless questions, laughed roughly when they asked him of

London—how lately he had been there, what was happening? “Oh yes, I was

over it a day or two ago. You’re no worse off than they are down

south—London’s been on the run for days.” He turned back to his engine

and whistled tunelessly through the silence that had fallen on his

hearers.... Theodore said it over slowly to himself, “London’s been on

the run for days.” If so—if so—then what, in God’s name, of Phillida?

Hitherto he had fought back his dread for Phillida, denying to himself,

as he denied to others, the rumour that disaster was widespread and

general, and insisting that she, at least, was safe. If there was one

thing intolerable, one thing that could not be, it was Phillida vagrant,

Phillida starving—his dainty lady bedraggled and grovelling for her

bread.... like the haggard women who had beaten with their hands on the

gate....

“It must stop,” he choked suddenly, “it must stop—it can’t go on!”

The pilot broke off from his whistling to stare at the distorted face.

“No,” he said grimly, “it can’t go on. What’s more, it’s stopping, by

degrees—stopping itself; you mayn’t have noticed it yet, but we do.

Taking ’em all round they’re leaving off, not coming as thick as they

did. And”—his mouth twisted ironically—“we’re leaving off and for the

same reason.”

“The same reason?” someone echoed him.

“Because we can’t go on.... You don’t expect us to carry on long in

this, do you?” He shrugged and jerked his head towards a smoke cloud on

the western skyline. “That’s what ran us—gone up in smoke. Food and

factories and transport and Lord knows what beside. The things that ran

us and kept us going ... We’re living on our own fat now—what there is

of it—and so are the people on the other side. We can just keep going as

long as it lasts; but it’s getting precious short now, and when we’ve

finished it—when there’s no fat left!...” He laughed unpleasantly and

stared at the rolling smoke cloud.

Someone else asked him about the rumour ever-current of

negotiation—whether there was truth in it, whether he had heard

anything?

“Much what you’ve heard,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. “There’s

talk—there always is—plenty of it; but I don’t suppose I know any more

than you do.... It stands to reason that someone must be trying to put

an end to it—but who’s trying to patch it up with who?... And what is

there left to patch? Lord knows! They say the real trouble is that when

governments have gone there’s no one to negotiate with. No responsible

authority—sometimes no authority at all. Nothing to get hold of. You

can’t make terms with rabble; you can’t even find out what it wants—and

it’s rabble now, here, there, and everywhere. When there’s nothing else

left, how do you get hold of it, treat with it? Who makes terms, who

signs, who orders?... Meanwhile, we go on till we’re told to stop—those

of us that are left.... And I suppose they’re doing much the

same—keeping on because they don’t know how to stop.”

Theodore asked what he meant when he spoke of “no government.” “You

can’t mean it literally? You can’t mean...?”

“Why not?” said the pilot. “Is there any here?”—and jerked his head,

this time towards the road. Its long white ribbon was spotted with

groups and single figures of vagrants—scarecrow vagrants—crawling onward

they knew not whither.

“See that,” he said, “see that—does anyone govern it? Make rules for it,

defend it, keep it alive?... And that’s everywhere.”

Someone whispered back “Everywhere” under his breath; the rest stared in

silence at the spotted white ribbon of road.

“You can’t mean...?” said Theodore again.

The airman shrugged his shoulders and laughed roughly.

“I believe,” he said, “there are still some wretched people who call

themselves a government, try to be a government—at least, there were the

other day.... Sometimes I wonder _how_ they try, what they say to each

other—poor devils! How they look when the heads of what used to be

departments bring them in the day’s report? Can’t you imagine their

silly, ghastly faces?... Even if they’re still in existence, what in

God’s name can they do—except let us go on killing each other in the

hope that something may turn up. If they give orders, sign papers, make

laws, does anyone listen, pay any attention? Does it make any difference

to _that_?” Again he jerked his head towards the road, and in the word

as in the gesture was loathing, fear and contempt. “And in other parts

of what used to be the civilized world—where this sort of hell has been

going on longer—what do you suppose is happening?”

No one answered; he laughed again roughly, as if he were contemptuous of

their hopes, and a man beside Theodore—a corporal—swung round on him,

white-faced and snarling.

“Damn you!... I’ve got a girl.... I’ve got a girl!...”

He choked, moved away and stood rigid, staring at the road.

Theodore heard himself asking, “If there isn’t any government—what is

there?”

“What’s left of the army,” said the other, “that’s all that hangs

together. Bits of it, here and there—getting smaller, losing touch with

the other bits; hanging on to its rations—what’s left of ’em.... And we

hold together just as long as we can fight back the rabble; not an hour,

not a minute longer! When we’ve gnawed our way through the last of our

rations—what then?... You may do what you like, but I’m keeping a shot

for myself. Whether we’re through with it or whether we’re not. Just

stopping fighting won’t clear up this mess.... And I’ll die—what I am.

Not rabble!”

* * * * *

Whether after days or whether after weeks, there came a time when they

ceased to have dealings with the world beyond their wire defences; when

the store-sheds in the camp were all but emptied of their hoard of

foodstuffs and such military authority as might still exist took no

further interest in the doings of a useless garrison. Orders and

communications, once frequent, grew fewer, and finally, as military

authority crumbled, they were left to isolation, to their own defence

and devices. Since no man any longer had need of them, they were cut off

from intercourse with those other remnants of the life disciplined

whence lorries had once arrived in search of rations; separated from

such other bands of their fellows as still held together, they were no

longer part of an army, were nothing but a band of armed men. Though

their own daily rations were cut down to the barest necessities of life,

there was little grumbling, since even the dullest knew the reason; as

the airman had told them, they were living on their own fat, for so long

as their own fat lasted. For all their isolation, their fears and daily

perils kept them disciplined; they held together, obeyed orders and kept

watch, not because they still felt themselves part of a nation or a

military force, but because there remained in their common keeping the

means to support bare life. It was not loyalty or patriotism, but the

sense of their common danger, their common need of defence against the

famished world outside their camp, that kept them comrades, obedient to

a measure of discipline, and made them still a community.

There had been altercation of the fiercest before they were left to

themselves—when lorries drove up for food which was refused them, on the

ground that the camp had not sufficient for its own needs. Disputes at

the refusal were furious and violent; men, driven out forcibly, went off

shouting threats that they would come back and take what was denied

them—would bring their machine-guns and take it. Those who yet had the

wherewithal to keep life in their bodies knew the necessity that

prompted the threat and lived thenceforth in a state of siege against

men who had once been their comrades. With the giving out of military

supplies and the consequent breaking of the bonds of discipline, bands

of soldiers, scouring the countryside, were an added terror to their

fellow-vagrants and, so long as their ammunition lasted, fared better

than starvation unarmed.... If central authority existed it gave no

sign; while military force that had once been united—an army—dissolved

into its primitive elements: tribes of armed men, held together by their

fear of a common enemy. In the wreck of civilization, of its systems,

institutions and polity, there endured longest that form of order which

had first evolved from the chaos of barbarism—the disciplined strength

of the soldier.... A people retracing its progress from chaos retraced

it step by step.

VII

The end of civilization came to Theodore Savage and his fellows as it

had come to uncounted thousands.

There had been a still warm day with a haze on it—he judged it early

autumn or perhaps late summer; for the rest, like any other day in the

camp routine—of watchfulness, of scanning the sky and the distance, of

the passing of vagabond starvation, of an evil smell drifting with the

lazy air from the dead who lay unburied where they fell. Before

nightfall the haze was lifted by a cold little wind from the east; and

soon after darkness a moon at the full cast white, merciless light and

black shadow.

Theodore was asleep when the alarm was given—by a shout at the door of

his hut. One of ten or a dozen, aroused like himself, he grabbed at his

rifle as he stumbled to his feet; believing in the first hurried moment

of waking that he was called to drive back yet another night onslaught

of the starving enemy without. He ran out of the hut into a strong,

pallid glare that wavered.... A stretch of gorse and bramble-patch two

hundred yards away was alight, burning lividly, and further off the same

bluish flame was running like a wave across a field. Enemy aeroplanes

were dropping their fire-bombs—here and there, flash on flash, of pale,

inextinguishable flame.

It was scarcely five minutes from the time he had been roused before the

camp and its garrison had ceased to exist as a community, and Theodore

Savage and his living comrades were vagabonds on the face of the earth.

The gorse and bramble-patch lay to the eastward and the wind was blowing

from the east; the flames rushed triumphantly at a black clump of fir

trees—great torches that lit up the neighbourhood. The guiding hand in

the terror overhead had a mark laid ready for his aim; the camp, with

its camouflaged huts and sheds, seen plainly as in broadest daylight.

His next bomb burst in the middle of the camp blowing half-a-score of

soldiers into bloody fragments and firing the nearest wooden building.

While it burned, the terror overhead struck again and again—then stooped

to its helpless quarry and turned a machine-gun on men in trenches and

men running hither and thither in search of a darkness that might cover

them.... That, for Theodore Savage, was the ending of civilization.

With the crash of the first explosion he cowered instinctively and

pressed himself against the wall of the nearest shed; the flames,

rushing upward, showed him others cowering like himself, all striving to

obliterate themselves, to shrink, to deny their humanity. Even in his

extremity of bodily fear he was conscious of merciless humiliation; the

machine-gun crackled at scurrying little creatures that once were men

and that now were but impotent flesh at the mercy of mechanical

perfection.... Mechanical perfection, the work of men’s hands, soared

over its creators, spat down at their helplessness and defaced them;

they cringed in corners till it found them out and ran from it

screaming, without power to strike back at the invisible beast that

pursued them. Without power even to surrender and yield to its mercy;

they could only hate impotently—and run....

As they ran they broke instinctively—avoiding each other, since a group

made a mark for a gunner. Theodore, when he dared cower no longer,

rushed with a dozen through the gate of the camp but, once outside it,

they scattered right and left and there was no one near him when his

flight ended with a stumble. He stayed where he had fallen, a good mile

from the camp, in the blessed shadow of a hedgerow; he crept close to it

and lay in the blackness of the shadow, breathing great sobs and

trembling—crouching in dank grass and peering through the leafage at the

distant furnace he had fled from. The crackling of machine-guns had

ceased, but here and there, for miles around were stretches of flame

running rapidly before a dry wind. Half a mile away an orchard was

blazing with hayricks; and he drew a long sigh of relief when another

flare leaped up—further off. That was miles away, that last one; they

were going, thank God they were going!... He waited to make sure—half an

hour or more—then stumbled back in search of his companions; through

fields on to the road that led past what once had been the camp.

On his way he met others, dark figures creeping back like himself; by

degrees a score or so gathered in the roadway and stood in little

groups, some muttering, some silent, as they watched the flames burn

themselves out. There were bodies lying in the road and beside it—men

shot from above as they ran; and the living turned them over to look at

their distorted faces.... No one was in authority; their commanding

officer had been killed outright by the bursting of the first bomb, one

of the subalterns lay huddled in the roadway, just breathing. So much

they knew.... In the beginning there was relief that they had come

through alive; but, with the passing of the first instinct of relief,

came understanding of the meaning of being alive.... The breath in their

bodies, the knowledge that they still walked the earth: and for the

rest, vagrancy and beast-right—the right of the strongest to live!

They took counsel together as the night crept over them and—because

there was nothing else to do—planned to search the charred ruin as the

fire died out, in the hope of salvage from the camp. They counted such

few, odd possessions as remained to them: cartridge belts, rifles thrown

away in flight and then picked up in the road, the contents of their

pockets—no more.... In the end, for the most part, they slept the dead

sleep of exhaustion till morning—to wake with cold rain on their faces.

The rain, for all its wretchedness to men without shelter, was so far

their friend that it beat down the flames on the smouldering timbers

which were all that remained of their fortress and rock of defence. They

burrowed feverishly among the black wreckage of their store-sheds,

blistering and burning their fingers by too eager handling of logs that

still flickered, unearthing, now and then, some scrap of charred meat

but, for the most part, nothing but lumps of molten metal that had once

been the tins containing food. In their pressing anxiety to avert the

peril of hunger they were heedless of a peril yet greater; their search

had attracted the attention of others—scarecrow vagrants, the rabble of

the roads, who saw them from a distance and came hurrying in the hope of

treasure-trove. The first single spies retreated at the order of

superior and disciplined numbers; but with time their own numbers were

swollen by those who halted at the rumour of food, and there hovered

round the searchers a shifting, snarling, envious crowd that drew

gradually nearer till faced with the threat of pointed rifles. Even that

only stayed it for a little—and, spurred on by hunger, imagining riches

where none existed, it rushed suddenly forward in a mob that might not

be held.

Those who had rifles fired at it and men in the foremost ranks went

down, unheeded in the rush of their fellows; those who might have

hesitated were thrust forward by the frantic need behind, and the

torrent of misery broke against the little group of soldiers in a tumult

of grappling and screeching. Women, like men, asserted their beast-right

to food—when sticks and knives failed them, asserted it with claws and

teeth; unhuman creatures, with eyes distended and wide, yelling mouths,

went down with their fingers at each other’s throats, their nails in

each other’s flesh.... Theodore clubbed a length of burnt wood and

struck out ... saw a man drop with a broken, bloody face and a woman

back from him shrieking ... then was gripped from behind, with an arm

round his neck, and went down.... The famished creatures fought above

his body and beat out his senses with their feet.

* * * * *

When life came back to him the sun was very low in the west. In his head

little hammers beat intolerably and all his strained body ached with

bruises as he raised himself, slowly and groaning, and leaned on an arm

to look round. He lay much where he had fallen, but the soldiers, the

crowd of human beasts, had vanished; the bare stretch of camp, still

smoking in places, was silent and almost deserted. Two or three bending

and intent figures were hovering round the charred masses of

wreckage—moving slowly, stopping often, peering as they walked and

thrusting their hands into the ashes, in the hope of some fragment that

those who searched before them had missed. A woman lay face downwards

with her dead arm flung across his feet; further off were other

bodies—which the searchers passed without notice. Three or four were in

uniform, the bodies of men who had once been his comrades; others, for

the benefit of the living, had been stripped, or half-stripped, of their

clothing.

He lifted himself painfully and crawled on hands and knees, with many

groans and halts, to the stream that had formed one border of the

camp—where he drank, bathed his head and washed the dried blood from his

scratches. With a measure of physical relief—the blessing of cool water

to a burning head and throat—came a clearer understanding and, with

clearer understanding, fear.... He knew himself alone in chaos.

As soon as he might he limped back to the smouldering wood-heaps and

accosted a woman who was grubbing in a mess of black refuse. Did she

know what had become of the soldiers? Which way they had gone when they

left? The woman eyed him sullenly, mistrustful and resenting his

neighbourhood—knew nothing, had not seen any soldiers—and turned again

to grub in her refuse. A skeleton of a man was no wiser; had only just

turned off the road to search, did not know what had happened except

that there must have been a fight—but it was all over when he came up.

He also had seen no soldiers—only the dead ones over there.... Theodore

saw in their eyes that they feared him, were dreading lest he should

compete with them for their possible treasure of refuse.

For the time being a sickly faintness deprived him of all wish for food;

he left the sullen creatures to their clawing and grubbing, went back to

the water, drank and soused once more, then crept farther off in search

of a softer ground to lie on. After a few score yards of painful

dragging and halting, he stretched himself exhausted on a strip of dank

grass at the roadside—and dozed where he fell until the morning.

With sunrise and awakening came the pangs of sharp hunger, and he

dragged himself limping through mile after mile in search of the

wherewithal to stay them. He was giddy with weakness and near to falling

when he found his first meal in a stretch of newly-burned field—the body

of a rabbit that the fire had blackened as it passed. He fell upon it,

hacked it with his clasp-knife and ate half of it savagely, looking over

his shoulder to see that no one watched him; the other half he thrust

into his pocket to serve him for another meal. He had learned already to

live furtively and hide what he possessed from the neighbours who were

also his enemies. Next day he fished furtively—with a hook improvised

out of twisted wire and worm-bait dug up by his clasp-knife; lurking in

bushes on the river-bank, lest others, passing by, should note him and

take toll by force of his catch.

* * * * *

He lived thenceforth as men have always lived when terror drives them

this way and that, and the earth, untended, has ceased to yield her

bounties; warring with his fellows and striving to outwit them for the

remnant of bounty that was left. He hunted and scraped for his food like

a homeless dog; when found, he carried it apart in stealth and bolted it

secretly, after the fashion of a dog with his offal. In time all his

mental values changed and were distorted: he saw enemies in all men,

existed only to exist—that he might fill his stomach—and death affected

him only when he feared it for himself. He had grown to be self-centred,

confined to his body and its daily wants and that side of his nature

which concerned itself with the future and the needs of others was

atrophied. He had lost the power of interest in all that was not

personal, material and immediate; and, as the uncounted days dragged out

into weeks, even the thought of Phillida, once an ever-present agony,

ceased to enter much into his daily struggle to survive. He starved and

was afraid: that was all. His life was summed up in the two words,

starvation and fear.

At night, as a rule, he sheltered in a house or deserted farm-building

that stood free for anyone to enter—sometimes alone, but as often as not

in company. Starved rabble, as long as it hunted for food, avoided its

rivals in the chase; but when night, perforce, brought cessation of the

hunt, the herding instinct reasserted itself and lasted through the

hours of darkness. As autumn sharpened, guarded fires were lit in

cellars where they could not be seen from above and fed with broken

furniture, with fragments of doors and palings; and one by one, human

beasts would slink in and huddle down to the warmth—some uncertainly,

seeking a new and untried refuge, and others returning to their shelter

of the night before. The little gangs who shared fire and roof for the

space of a night never ate in each other’s company; food was invariably

devoured apart, and those who had possessed themselves of more than an

immediate supply would hide and even bury it in a secret place before

they came in contact with their fellows. Hence no gang, no little herd,

was permanent or contained within itself the beginnings of a social

system; its members shared nothing but the hours of a night and

performed no common social duties. A face became familiar because seen

for a night or two in the glow of a common fire; when it vanished none

knew—and none troubled to ask—whether a man had died between sunrise and

sunset or whether he had drifted further off in his daily search for the

means to keep life in his body. When a man died in the night, with

others round him, the manner of his ending was known; otherwise he

passed out of life without notice from those who yet crawled on the

earth.... With morning the herd of starvelings that had sheltered

together broke up and foraged, each man for himself and his own

cravings; rooted in fields and trampled gardens, crouched on river-banks

fishing, laid traps for vermin, ransacked shops and houses where scores

had preceded them.... And some, it was muttered—as time went on and the

need grew yet starker—fed horribly ... and therefore plentifully....

There were nights—many nights—when a herd broke in panic from its

shelter and scattered to the winds of heaven at an alarm of the terror

overhead; and always, as starvation pressed, it dwindled—by death and

the tendency to dissolve into single nomads, who (such as survived)

regrouped themselves elsewhere, to scatter and re-group again.... With

repeated wandering—now this way, now that, as hope and hunger

prompted—went all sense of direction and environment; the nomads,

hunting always, drifted into broken streets or dead villages and through

them to the waste of open country—not knowing where they were, in the

end not caring, and turned back by a river or the sea.

The sight or suspicion of food and plunder would always draw vagrancy

together in crowds; district after district untouched by an enemy had

been swept out of civilized existence by the hordes which fell on the

remnants of prosperity and tore them; which ransacked shops and

dwellings, slaughtered sheep, horses, cattle and devoured them and,

often enough, in a fury of destruction and vehement envy, set light to

houses and barns lest others might fare better than themselves. But when

flocks, herds and storehouses had vanished, when agriculture, like the

industry of cities, had ceased to exist and nothing remained to devour

and plunder, the motive for common action passed. With equality of

wretchedness union was impossible, and every man’s hand against his

neighbour; if groups formed, here and there, of the stronger and more

brutal, who joined forces for common action, they held together only for

so long as their neighbours had possessions that could be wrested from

them—stores of food or desirable women; once the neighbours were

stripped of their all and there was nothing more to prey on, the group

fell apart or its members turned on each other. In the life predatory

man had ceased to be creative; in a world where no one could count on a

morrow, construction and forethought had no meaning.

VIII

In a world where all were vagabond and brutal, where each met each with

suspicion and all men were immersed in the intensity of their bodily

needs, very few had thoughts to exchange. Mentally, as well as actually,

they lived to themselves and where they did not distrust they were

indifferent; the starvelings who slunk into shelter that they might

huddle for the night round a common fire found little to say to one

another. As human desire concentrated itself on the satisfaction of

animal cravings, so human speech degenerated into mere expression of

those cravings and the emotions aroused by them. Only once or twice

while he starved and drifted did Theodore talk with men who sought to

give expression to more than their present terrors and the immediate

needs of their bodies, who used speech that was the vehicle of thought.

One such he remembered—met haphazard, as all men met each other—when he

sheltered for an autumn night on the outskirts of a town left derelict.

With falling dusk came a sudden sharp patter of rain and he took refuge

hurriedly in the nearest house—a red-brick villa, standing silent with

gaping windows. What was left of the door swung loosely on its

hinges—half the lower panels had been hacked away to serve as firewood;

the hall was befouled with the feet of many searchers and of the

furniture remained but a litter of rags and fragments that could not be

burned.

He thought the place empty till he scented smoke from the basement;

whereupon he crept down the stairs, soft-footed and alert, to discover

that precaution was needless. There was only one occupant of the house,

a man plainly dying; a livid hollow-eyed skeleton who coughed and

trembled as he knelt by the grate and tried to blow damp sticks into a

flame. Theodore, in his own interests, took charge of the fire,

ransacked the house for inflammable material and tore up strips of

broken boarding that the other was too feeble to wrestle with. When the

blaze flared up, the sick man cowered to it, stretched out his

hands—filthy skin-covered bones—and thanked him; whereat Theodore turned

suddenly and stared. It was long—how long?—since any man had troubled to

thank him; and this man, for all his verminous misery, had a voice that

was educated, cultured.... Something in the tone of it—the manner—took

Theodore back to the world where men ate courteously together, were

companions, considered each other; and instinctively, almost without

effort, he offered a share of his foraging. The offer was refused,

whereat Theodore wondered still more; but the man, near death, was past

desire for food and shook his head almost with repulsion. Perhaps it was

the fever that had turned him against food that loosened his tongue and

set him talking—or perhaps he, also, by another’s voice and manner, was

reminded of his past humanity.

“‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” he quoted suddenly. “Who wrote that—do

you remember?”

“No,” Theodore said, “I’ve forgotten.” He stared at the cowering,

hunched figure with its shaking hands stretched to the blaze. The man,

it might be, was mad as well as dying—he had met many such in his

wanderings; babbling of verse as someone—who was it?—had babbled in

dying of green fields.

“‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” the sick man repeated. “Well, even if

we’ve forgotten who wrote it, there’s one thing about him that’s

certain; he didn’t know what we know—hadn’t lived in our kind of hell.

The place where you haven’t a mind—only fear and a stomach.... The flesh

and the devil—hunger and fear; they haven’t left us a world!... But if

there’s ever a world again, I believe I shall have learned how to write.

Now I know what we are—the fundamentals and the nakedness....”

“Were you a writer?” Theodore asked him—and at the question his old

humanity stirred curiously within him.

“Yes,” said the other, “I was a writer.... When I think of what I

wrote—the little, little things that seemed important!... I spent a year

once—a whole good year—on a book about a woman who was finding out she

didn’t love her husband. She was well fed and housed, lived

comfortably—and I wrote of her as if she were a tragedy. The work I put

into it—the work and the thought! I tried to get what I called

atmosphere.... And all the time there was this in us—this raw, red

thing—and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without

our habits.... Do you know where we made the mistake?”—he turned

suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger—“We were not civilized—it

was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh

of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was

always there—lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is

ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh—clothed in habits, in rags that

have been torn from us.”

He broke off to cough horribly and lay breathless and exhausted for a

time; then, when breath came back to him, talked on while Theodore

listened—not so much to his words as to a voice from the world that had

passed.

“The religions were right,” he said. “They were right through and

through; the only sane thing and the only safe thing is humility—to

realize your sin, to confess it and repent.... We—we were bestial and we

did not know it; and when you don’t even suspect you sin how can you

repent and save your soul alive?... We dressed ourselves and taught

ourselves the little politenesses and ceremonies which made it easy to

forget that we were brutes in our hearts; we never faced our own

possibilities of evil and beastliness, never confessed and repented

them, took no precautions against them. Our limitless possibilities....

We thought our habits—we called them virtues—were as real and natural

and ingrained as our instincts; and now what is left of our habits? When

we should have been crying, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ we believed in

ourselves, our enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment that ended as

science applied to destruction and progress that has led us—to this....

And to-day it has gone, every shred of it, and we’re back at what we

started with—hunger and lust! Brute instincts ... and the primitive

passion, hatred—against those who thwart hunger and lust. Nothing

else—how can there be anything else? When we lost all we loved, we lost

the habit and power of loving.... ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’—of hatred

and hunger and lust.”

“Yes,” said Theodore—and he, too, stared at the fire.... What the other

had said was truth and truth only. Even Phillida had left him; the power

of loving her was gone. “I hadn’t thought of it like that—but it’s

right.... We can only hate.”

“It’s that,” said the dying man, “that’s beyond all torment.... God pity

us!”

He covered his eyes and sat silent until Theodore asked him, “Does that

mean you still believe in God?”

“There’s Law,” said the other. “Is that God?... We have got to see into

our own souls and to pay for everything we take. That’s all I know, so

far—except that what we think we own—owns us. That’s what the wise men

meant by renunciation.... It’s what we made and thought we owned that

has turned on us—the creatures that were born for our pleasure and

power, to increase our comfort and our riches. As we made them they

fastened on us—set their claws in us—and they have taken our minds from

us as well as our bodies. As we made them, they followed the law of

their life. We created life without a soul; but it was life and it went

its own way.”

Crouched to the fire, and between his bouts of coughing, he played with

the idea and insisted on it. Everything that we made, that we thought

dead and dumb, had a life that we could not control. In the case of

books and art we admitted the fact, had a name for the life, called it

influence: influence a form of independent existence.... In the same way

we took metals and welded them, made machines; which were beasts, potent

beasts, whose destiny was the same as our own. To live and develop and,

developing, to turn on the power that enslaved them.... That was what

had happened; they had made themselves necessary, fastened on us and,

grown strong enough, had turned on their masters and killed—even though

they died in the killing. The revolt against servitude had always been

accounted a virtue in men and the law of all life was the same. The

beasts we had made could not live without us, but they would have their

revenge before they died.

“Think of us,” he said, “how we run and squeal and hide from them!...

The patient servants, our goods and chattels, who were brought into life

for our pleasure—they chase us while we run and squeal and hide!”

“Yes,” Theodore answered, “I’ve felt that, too—the humiliation.”

“The humiliation,” the sick man nodded. “Always in the end the slave

rules his master—it’s the price paid for servitude, possession. I tell

you, they were wise men who preached renunciation—before what we own

takes hold of us and possession turns to servitude. For there’s a law of

average in all things—have you ever felt it as I have? A law of balance

which we never strike aright.... When the mighty tread hard enough on

the humble and meek, the humble and meek are exalted and begin to tread

hard in their turn. That’s obvious and we’ve generally known it; but

it’s the same in what we call material things. We rise into the air—make

machines that can fly—and grovel underground to protect ourselves from

the flying-man. As we struck the balance to the one side, so it has to

swing back on the other; a few men rise high into the air and many creep

down into trenches and cellars, crouch flat.... If we could work out the

numbers and heights mathematically, be sure that we should strike the

perfect balance—represented by the surface of the earth. Balance—in all

things balance.”

He rambled on, perhaps half-delirious, coughing out his thoughts and

theories concerning a world he was leaving.... In all things balance,

inevitably; the purpose of life which, so far, we sought blindly—by

passion and recoil from it, by excess and consequent exhaustion.... It

was in the cities where men herded, where life swarmed, that death had

come most thickly, that desolation was swiftest and most complete. The

ground underneath them needed rest from men; there was an average of

life it could support and bear with. Now, the average exceeded, the

cities lay ruined, were silent, knew the peace they had craved for—while

those who once swarmed in them avoided them in fear or scattered

themselves in the open country, finding no sustenance in brickwork,

stone or paved street.... With the machine and its consequence, the

industrial system, population had increased beyond the average allotted

to the race; now the balance was righting itself by a very massacre of

famine—induced by the self-same process of invention which had fostered

reproduction unhindered. Because millions too many had crawled upon

earth, long stretches of earth must lie waste and desolate till the

average had worked itself out.... The art of life was adjustment of the

balance in all things—was action and reaction rightly applied, was

provision of counterweight, discovery of the destined mean. Was control

of Truth, lest it turn into a lie; was check upon the power and velocity

of Good ere it swung to immeasurable Evil....

The fire, for want of more wood to pile on it, had died low, to a

flicker in the ashes, and the two men sat almost in darkness; the one,

between the bouts that shook him, whispering out the tenets of his Law;

the other, now listening, now staring back into the world that once

was—and ever should be.... He was with Markham, listening to the

Westminster chimes—(on the crest of the centuries, Markham had

said)—when there were sudden yelping screams outside and a patter of

feet on the road. The human rats who had crept into the town for shelter

from the night were bolting in panic from their holes.

“They’re running,” said the dying man and felt towards the stairs. “It’s

gas—it must be gas! Oh God, where’s the door—where’s the door?”

As they groped and stumbled through the door and up the stairway, he was

clutching at Theodore’s arm and gasping in an ecstasy of terror; as

fearful of losing his few poor hours of life as if they had been years

of health and usefulness. In the open air was darkness with figures

flying dimly by; a thin stream of panic that raced against death by

suffocation.

The man with death on him held to Theodore’s arm and besought him, for

Christ’s sake, not to leave him—he could run if he were only helped!

Theodore let him cling for a dragging pace or two; then, looking behind

him, saw a woman reel, clawing the air.

He wrenched himself free and ran on till he could run no further.

IX

It was somewhere towards the end of autumn that Theodore Savage realized

that the war had come to an end—so far, at least, as his immediate

England was concerned. What was happening elsewhere he and his immediate

England had no means of knowing and were long past caring to know. There

was no definite ending but a leaving-off, a slackening; the attacks—the

burnings and panics—by degrees were fewer and not only fewer but less

devastating, because carried out with smaller forces; there were days

and nights without alarm, without smoke cloud or glow on the horizon.

Then yet longer intervals—and so on to complete cessation.... By the

time the nights had grown long and frosty the war that was organized and

alien had ended; there remained only the daily, personal and barbaric

form of war wherein every man’s hand was raised against his neighbour

and enemy. That warfare ceased not and could not cease—until the human

herd had reduced itself to the point at which the bare earth could

support it.

It seemed to him later a wonder—almost a miracle—that he had come alive

through the months of war and after; at times he stood amazed that any

had lived in the waste of hunger and violence, of pestilence and rotting

bodies which for months was the world as he knew it. He was near death

not once nor a score of times, but daily; death from exhaustion or the

envy of men who were starved and reckless as himself. The mockery of

peace brought no plenty or hope of it, no sign of reconstruction or dawn

of new order; reconstruction and order were rank impossibilities so long

as human creatures preyed on each other in a land swept bare, and

prowled after the manner of wolves. No revival of common life, no system

was possible until earth once more brought forth her fruits.

He judged, by the length of the nights, that it was somewhere about the

middle of November when the first snow came suddenly and thickly; the

harbinger and onslaught of a fiercely hard winter that killed in their

thousands the gaunt human beasts who tore at each other for the refuse

and vermin that was food. In the all-pervading dearth and starvation

there was only one form of animal life that increased and flourished

mightily; the rat overran empty buildings, found dreadful sustenance in

street and field and, in turn, was hunted, trapped and fed on.

With the coming of winter the human remnant was perforce less vagrant

and migratory, and Theodore, driven by weather to shelter, lived for

weeks in what once had been a country town, a cluster of dead houses

with, here and there, a silent factory. Only the buildings, the

semblance of a township, remained; the befouled and neglected body

whence the life of a community had fled; and he never knew what its

living name had been or what was the manner of industry or commerce

whereby it had supported its inhabitants. It lay in a flattish

agricultural country and a railway had run through its outskirts; the

rusted metals stretched north and south and the remnants of a station

still existed—platforms, charred buildings and trucks and locomotives in

sidings. Perhaps the charred buildings had been burned in a fury of

drunken and insane destruction, perhaps shivering destitution had set

light to them for the sake of a few hours’ warmth.

The shell of the town—its brickwork and stone—was still practically

intact; it was anarchy, pillage and starvation, not the violence of an

enemy, that had reduced it to a city of the dead. The means of

supporting life were absent, but certain forms of what had once been

luxury remained and were counted as nothing. At a corner of the main

street stood a jeweller’s premises which, time and again, had been

entered and ransacked; the dwelling-house behind it contained not so

much as a fragment of dried crust but in the shop itself rings, brooches

and pendants were still lying for any man to take—disordered, scattered

and trampled underfoot, because worthless to those who craved for bread.

The only item of jeweller’s stock that still had value to starving men

was a watch—if it furnished a burning-glass, a means of lighting a fire

when other means were unavailable.

Theodore lived through the winter—as all his fellows

lived—destructively, on the legacy and remnant of other men’s savings

and makings; scraping and grubbing in other men’s ground, burning

furniture and woodwork, the product of other men’s labours, and taking

no thought for the morrow. At the beginning of winter some four or five

score of human shadows, men and women, crept about the dead streets and

the fields beyond them in their daily quest for the means to keep life

in their bodies; but, as the weeks drew on and the winter hardened,

starvation and the sickness born of starvation reduced their numbers by

a half. Those lived best who were most skilful at the trapping of

vermin; and they had long been existing on little but rat-flesh, when

some hunters of rats, on the track of their prey, discovered a treasure

beyond price—a godsend—in the shape of sacks of grain in the cellar of

an empty brewery.

The discovery meant more than a supply of food and the staving-off of

death by starvation; with the possession of resources that, with care,

might last for weeks there came into being a common interest, the

fellowship that makes a social system. After the first wild struggle—the

rush to fill their hands and cram their gnawing stomachs—the shadows and

skeletons of men controlled their instincts and took counsel; the fact

that their stomachs were full and their craving satisfied gave back to

them the power of construction, of forethought and restraint; they

ceased to be instinctively inimical and wholly animal and took common

measures for the preservation and rationing of their heaven-sent

windfall. They advised, consulted, heard opinion and gave it, were

reasonable; counted their numbers in relation to the size of their

hoard; and in the end decided, by common consent, on the amount of the

daily portion which was to be allotted to each in return for his share

in the duty of guarding it—against the cravings of their own hunger as

well as against the inroads of rats and mice.... With food—with

property—they were human again; capable of plans for the morrow, of

concerted and intelligent action. The enmity they had hitherto felt

against each other was suddenly transferred to the stranger—the

foreigner—who might force his way in and acquire a share in their

treasure. Hence they took precautions against the arrival of the

stranger, kept watch and ward on the outskirts of the town and drove

away the chance newcomer, so that the knowledge of their good fortune

should not spread. With duties shared, the dead sense of comradeship

revived; they began to recognize and greet each other as they came for

their daily portion. And if some were restrained only by the common

watchfulness from appropriating more than their share of the common

stock, there were others in whom stirred the sense of honour.

For a week or more they lived under the beginnings of a social system

which was rendered possible by their certainty of a daily mess; and then

came what, perhaps, was inevitable—discovery of pilfering from the store

that gave life to them all. The pilferers, detected by the night guard,

fled on the instant, well knowing that their sin against the very

existence of the little community was a sin beyond hope of forgiveness;

they eluded pursuit in the darkness and by morning had vanished from the

neighbourhood. For the time only; since they took with them the

knowledge of the hoarded grain they had forfeited—a knowledge which was

power and a weapon to themselves, a danger to those they had fled from.

Two days later, after nightfall, a skeleton rabble, armed with knives,

clubs and stones, was led into the town by the renegades; and there was

fought out a fierce, elementary battle, a struggle of starved men for

the prize of life itself.... From the first the case of the defenders

was hopeless; outnumbered and taken by surprise, they were beaten in

detail, overwhelmed—and in less than five minutes the survivors were

flying for their lives, the darkness their only hope of safety.

* * * * *

Theodore Savage was of the remnant who owed their lives to darkness and

the speed with which they fled. As he neared the outskirts of the town

and slackened, exhausted, to draw breath, he heard the patter of running

steps behind him and for a moment believed himself pursued—till a

passing burst of moonlight showed the runner as a woman, like himself

seeking safety in flight. A young woman, with a sobbing open mouth, who

clutched at his arm and besought him not to leave her to be killed—to

save her, to get her away!... He knew her by sight as he knew all the

members of the destitute little community—a girl with a face once plump,

now hollowed, whom he had seen daily when she came, in stupid

wretchedness, to hold out her bowl for her share of the common ration;

one of a squalid company of three or four women who herded together—and

whose habit of instinctive fellowship was broken by the sudden onslaught

which had driven them apart in flight.

“I don’t know where they’ve all gone,” she wailed. “Don’t leave me—for

Gawd’s saike don’t leave me.... Ow, whatever shall I do?... I dunno

where to go—for Gawd’s sake....”

He would gladly have been rid of her lamenting helplessness but she

clung to him in a panic that would not be gainsaid, as fearful almost of

the lonely dark ahead as of the bloody brawl she had fled from.

“Hold your tongue,” he ordered as he pulled her along. “Don’t make that

noise or they’ll hear us. And keep close to me—keep in the shadow.”

She obeyed and stilled her sobbing to gasps and whimpers—holding tightly

to his arm while he hurried her through by-streets to the open country.

He knew no more than she where they were going when they left the silent

outskirts of the town behind them, and, pressing against each other for

warmth, bent their heads to a January wind.

X

That night for Theodore Savage was the beginning of an odd partnership,

a new phase of his life uncivilized. The girl who had clutched at him as

the drowning clutch at straws was destined to bear him company for more

than a winter’s night and a journey to comparative safety; being by

nature and training of the type that clings, as a matter of right, to

whomsoever will fend for it, she drifted after him instinctively. When

she woke in the morning in the shelter he had found for her she looked

round for him to guide and, if possible, feed her—and awaited his

instructions passively.

One human being—so it did not threaten him with violence—was no more to

him than another, and perhaps he hardly noticed that when he rose and

moved on she followed. From that hour forth she was always at his

heels—complaining or too wretched to complain. He would let her hang on

his arm as they trudged and shared his findings of food with her—because

she had followed, was there; and it was some time before he realized

that he had shouldered a responsibility which had no intention of

shifting itself from his back.... When he realized the fact he had

already tacitly accepted it; and for the first few weeks of their

existence in common he was too fiercely occupied in the task of keeping

them both alive to consider or define his relationship to the creature

who whimpered and stumbled at his heels and took scraps of food from his

hands. When, at last, he considered it, the relationship was established

on both sides. She was his dependent, after the fashion of a child or an

accustomed dog; and having learned to look to him for food, for guidance

and protection, she could be cast off only by direct cruelty and the

breaking of a daily habit.

In the beginning that was all; she followed because she did not know

what else to do; he led and they hungered together. For the most part

they were silent with the speechlessness of misery, and it was days

before he even asked her name, weeks before he knew more of her life in

the past than was betrayed by a Cockney accent. So long as existence was

a craving and a fear, where nothing mattered save hunger and the

fending-off of present death, the fact that she was a woman meant no

more to him than her dependence and his own responsibility; thus her

companionship was no more than the bodily presence of a human being

whose needs were his own, whose terrors and whose enemies were his.

They prowled and starved together through the long bitterness of winter

in a world stripped bare of its last year’s harvest where all hungry

mouths strove to keep other mouths at a distance; and time and again,

when they grubbed for food or sought to take shelter, they were driven

away with threats and with violence by those who already held possession

of some tract of street or country. No claim to ownership could stand

against the claim of a stronger, and one man, meeting them, would avoid

them, slink out of their way—because, being two, they could strip him if

the mood should take them. And when they, in their turn, sighted three

or four figures in the distance, they made haste to take another road.

Once, when a solitary wayfarer shrank from them and scuttled to the

cover of a ragged patch of firwood, there came back to Theodore, like a

rushing mighty wind, the memory of his last days in London, the thought

of his journey down to York. The strange, glad fellowship of the

outbreak of war, the eagerness to serve and be sacrificed; the

friendliness of strangers, the dear love of England, the brotherhood!...

The creature who scuttled at his very sight would have been his brother

in those first days of splendid sacrifice!

“Lord God!” he said and laughed long and uncontrollably; while the girl,

Ada, stared in open-mouthed bewilderment—then pulled at his arm and

began to cry, believing he was going off his head.

* * * * *

In their hunted and fugitive life their wanderings, of necessity, were

planless; they drifted east or west, by this road or that, as fear, the

weather or the cravings of their hunger prompted. They sought food,

thought food only and, as far as possible, avoided the neighbourhood of

those, their fellow-men, who might try to share their meagre findings.

House-room, bare house-room, stood ready for their taking in the country

as well as in the town; but wherever there was more than house-room—food

or the mere possibility of food—the human wolf was at hand to dispute it

with his rivals. There was a time when a road, followed blindly, led

them down to the sea and the corpse of a pretentious little

watering-place—where stiff, blank terraces of ornate brick and plaster

stared out at the unbroken sea-line; they found themselves shelter in a

bow-windowed villa that still bore the legend “Ocean View: Apartments,”

trudged along the tide-mark in search of sand-crabs and fished from an

iron-legged pier. When a long winter gale swept the pier with breakers

and put a stop to their fishing, they turned and tramped inland

again.... And there was another time when they were the sole inhabitants

of a stretch of Welsh mining-village—they knew it for Welsh by the

street-names—where they hunted their rats and grubbed for roots in

allotments already trampled over. For very starvation they moved on

again; and later—how much later they could not remember—took shelter,

because they could go no further, in a cottage on the outskirts of a

moorland hamlet, where they were almost at extremity when a bitter spell

of cold, at the end of winter, sent them food in the shape of frozen

rooks and starlings. And, a day or two later, they were driven out

again; Theodore, searching for dead birds in the snow, met others

engaged in the same hungry quest—other and earlier settlers in the

neighbourhood who saw in him a poacher on their scanty hunting-grounds

and, gathering together in a common hate and need, fell on the intruders

and chased them out with stones and threats. Theodore and the girl were

hunted from their homestead and out on to the bleakness of the moor;

whence, looking back breathless and aching from their bruises, they saw

half a dozen yelling starvelings who still threatened them with shouts

and upraised fists.... They went on blindly because they dared not stay;

and that, for many days, was the last they saw of mankind.

* * * * *

It must have been towards the end of February or the beginning of March

that they ended their long goings to and fro and found the refuge that,

for many months, was to give them hiding and sustenance. Since they had

been driven from their last shelter they had sighted no enemy in the

shape of a living man, but the days that followed their flight had been

almost foodless; and in the end they had come near to death from

exposure on a stretch of hill and heath-covered country where they lost

all sense of direction or even of desire. There, without doubt, they

would have left their bones if there had not already been a promise of

spring in the air; as it was, they could hardly drag themselves along

when the moor dropped suddenly into a valley, a wide strip of land once

pasture, now bleak and blackened from the passing of the poison-fire

which had seared it from end to end. Here and there were charred mummies

of men and of animals, lying thickest round a farmhouse, partly burned

out; but beyond the burned farmhouse was a stream that might yield them

fish; and with the warmth that was melting the snow on the hilltops

little shafts of green life were piercing through the blackened soil.

Before dark, in what once had been a garden, they scraped with their

nails and their knives and found food—worm-eaten roots that would once

have seemed unfit for cattle, that they thrust into their mouths

unwashed. They sheltered for the night within the skeleton walls of the

farm; and when, with morning, they crawled into the sun, the last patch

of snow had vanished from the hills and the tiny shafts of green were

more radiant against the blackened soil.... The long curse and

barrenness of winter was over and Nature was beginning anew her task of

supporting her children.

From that day forward they lived isolated, without sight or sound of

men. Chance had led them to a loneliness which was safety, coupled with

a bare possibility of supporting life—by rooting in fields left

derelict, by fishing and the snaring of birds; but for all their

isolation it was long before they ceased to peer for men on the horizon,

to take careful precautions against the coming of their own kind. With

the memory of savagery and violence behind them, they looked round

sharply at an unaccustomed sound, kept preferably to woods and shadow

and moved furtively in open country; and Theodore’s ultimate choice of a

dwelling-place was dictated chiefly by fear of discovery and desire to

remain unseen. What he sought was not only a shelter, a roof-tree, but a

hiding-place which other men might pass without notice; hence he settled

at last in a fold of the hills—in a copse of tall wood, some four or

five miles from their first halt, where oaks and larches, bursting into

bud, denied the ruin that had come upon last year’s world.... Theodore,

setting foot in the wood for the first time—seeking refuge, a

hiding-place to cower in—was suddenly in presence of the green life

unchanging, that blessed and uplifted by its very indifference to the

downfall and agony of man. The windflowers, thrusting through brown

leaves, were as last year’s windflowers—a delicate endurance that

persisted.... He had entered a world that had not altered since the days

when he lived as a man.

He explored his little wood with precaution, creeping through it from

end to end; and, finding no more recent sign of human occupation than a

stack of sawn logs, their bark grey with mould, he decided on the site

of his camp and refuge—a clearing near the stream that babbled down the

valley, but well hidden by its thick belt of trees. The girl had

followed him—she dreaded being left alone of all things—and assented

with her customary listlessness when he explained to her that the

bird-life and the stream would mean a food-supply and that the logs,

ready cut, could be built into shelters from the weather; she was a

town-dweller, mentally as well as by habit of body, whom the spring of

the woods had no power to rouse from her apathy.

There were empty cottages for the taking lower down the valley and it

was the fear of the marauder alone that sent them to camp in the

wilderness, that kept them lurking in their fold of the hills, not

daring to seek for greater comfort. Within a day or two after they had

discovered it, they were hidden away in the solitary copse, their camp,

to begin with, no more than a couple of small lean-to’s—logs propped

against the face of a projecting rock and their interstices stuffed with

green moss. In the first few weeks of their lonely life they were often

near starvation; but with the passing of time food was more abundant,

not only because Theodore grew more skilled in his fishing and

snaring—learned the haunts of birds and the likely pools for fish—but

because, as spring ripened, they inherited in the waste land around them

a legacy of past cultivation, fruits of the earth that had sown

themselves and were growing untended amidst weeds.

With time, with experiment and returning strength, Theodore made their

refuge more habitable; tools, left lying in other men’s houses, fields

and gardens, were to be had for the searching, and, when he had brought

home a spade discovered in a weed-patch and an axe found rusting on a

cottage floor, he built a clay oven that their fire might not quench in

the rain and hewed wood for the bettering of their shelters. Ada—when he

told her where to look for it—gathered moss and heather for their

bed-places and spread it to dry in the sun; and from one of his more

distant expeditions he returned with pots which served for cooking and

the carrying of water from the stream.... Spring lengthened into summer

and no man came near them; they lived only to themselves in a primitive

existence which concerned itself solely with food and bodily security.

As the days grew longer and the means of subsistence were easier to come

by, Theodore would go further afield—still moving cautiously over open

country, but no longer expectant of onslaught. In the immediate

neighbourhood of his daily haunts and hunting-grounds was no sign of

human life and work save a green cart-track that ended on the outskirts

of his copse; but lower down the valley were ploughed fields lapsing

into weed-beds, here and there an orchard or a garden-patch and hedges

that straggled as they would. Lower down again was another wide belt of

burned land which, so far, he had not entered—trees on either side the

stream, stood gaunt and withered to the farthest limit of his sight. The

district, even when alive and flourishing, had seemingly been sparsely

populated; its lonely dwellings were few and far apart—a farmhouse here,

a clump of small cottages there, all bearing traces of the customary

invasion by the hungry. Sheep-farming had been one of the local

industries, and hillsides and fields were dotted with the skeletons of

sheep—left lying where vagabond hunger had slaughtered them and ripped

the flesh from their bones.

As the year rolled over him, Theodore came to know the earth as

primitive man and the savage know it—as the source of life, the

storehouse of uncertain food, the teacher of cunning and an infinite and

dogged patience. When the weather made wandering or fishing impossible

he would sit under shelter, with his hands on his knees, passive,

unimpatient, hardly moving through long hours, while he waited for the

rain to cease. It was months before there stirred in him a desire for

more than safety and his daily bread, before he thought of the humanity

he had fled from except with fear and a shrinking curiosity as to what

might be happening in the world beyond his silent hills. In his body,

exhausted by starvation, was a mind exhausted and benumbed; to which

only very gradually—as the quiet and healing of Nature worked on him—the

power of speculation and outside interest returned. In the beginnings of

his solitary life he still spoke little and thought little save of what

was personal and physical; cut off mentally from the future as well as

from the past, he was content to be relieved of the pressure of hunger

and hidden from the enemy, man.

XI

Of the woman whom chance and her own helplessness had thrown upon his

hands he knew, in those first months, curiously little. She remained to

him what she had been from the moment she clutched at his arm and fled

with him—an encumbrance for which he was responsible—and as the numbness

passed from his brain and he began once more to live mentally, she

entered less and less into his thoughts. She was Ada Cartwright—as

pronounced by its owner he took the name at first for Ida—ex-factory

hand and dweller in the north-east of London; once vulgarly harmless in

the company of like-minded gigglers, now stupefied by months of fear and

hunger, bewildered and incapable in a life uncivilized that demanded of

all things resource. As she ate more plentifully and lost her starved

hollows, she was not without comeliness of the vacant, bouncing type; a

comeliness hidden from Theodore by her tousled hair, her tattered

garments and the heavy wretchedness that sulked in her eyes and turned

down the corners of her mouth. She was helpless in her new surroundings,

with the dazed helplessness of those who have never lived alone or

bereft of the minor appliances of civilization; to Theodore, at times,

she seemed half-witted, and he treated her perforce as a backward child,

to be supervised constantly lest it fail in the simplest of tasks.

It was his well-meant efforts to renew her scanty and disreputable

wardrobe that first revealed to him something of the mind that worked

behind her outward sullen apathy. In the beginning of disaster clothing

had been less of a difficulty than the other necessities of life; long

after food was a treasure beyond price it could often be had for the

taking and, when other means of obtaining it failed, those who needed a

garment would strip it from the dead, who had no more need of it. In

their hidden solitude it was another matter, and they were soon hard put

to it to replace the rags that hung about them; thus Theodore accounted

himself greatly fortunate when, ransacking the rooms of an empty

cottage, he came on a cupboard with three or four blankets which he

proceeded to convert into clothing by the simple process of cutting a

hole in the middle. He returned to the camp elated by his acquisition;

but when he presented Ada with her improvised cloak, the girl astonished

him by turning her head and bursting into noisy tears.

“What’s the matter?” he asked her, bewildered. “Don’t you like it?”

She made no answer but noisier tears, and when he insisted that it would

keep her nice and warm her sobs rose to positive howls; he stared at her

uncertainly as she sat and rocked, then knelt down beside her and began

to pat and soothe, as he might have tried to soothe a child. In the end

the howls diminished in volume and he obtained an explanation of the

outburst—an explanation given jerkily, through sniffs, and accompanied

by much rubbing of eyes.

No, it wasn’t that she didn’t want it—she did want it—but it reminded

her.... It was so ’ard never to ’ave anything nice to wear. Wasn’t she

ever going to ’ave anything nice to wear again—not ever, as long as she

lived?... She supposed she’d always got to be like this! No ’airpins—and

straw tied round her feet instead of shoes!... Made you look as if you’d

got feet like elephants—and she’d always been reckoned to ’ave a small

foot.... Made you wish you was dead and buried!...

He tried two differing lines of consolation, neither particularly

successful; suggesting, in the first place, that there was no one but

himself to see what she looked like, and, in the second, that a blanket

could be made quite becoming as a garment.

“That’s a lie,” Ada told him sulkily. “You know it ain’t becoming—’ow

could it be? A blanket with an ’ole for the ’ead!... Might just as well

’ave no figure. Might just as well be a sack of pertaters.... I wonder

what anyone would ’ave said at ’ome if I’d told ’em I should ever be

dressed in a blanket with an ’ole for the ’ead!... And I always ’ad

taiste in my clothes—everyone said I ’ad taiste.”

And—stirred to the soul by the memory of departed chiffon, by the

hideous contrast between present squalor and former Sunday best—her

howls once more increased in volume and she blubbered with her head on

her knee.

Theodore gave up the attempt at consolation as useless, leaving her to

weep herself out over vanished finery while he busied himself with the

cooking of their evening meal; and in due time she came to the end of

her stock of emotion, ceased to snuffle, ate her supper and took

possession of the blanket with the ’ole for the ’ead—which she wore

without further complaint. The incident was over and closed; but it was

not without its significance in their common life. To Theodore the

tragicomic outburst was a reminder that his dependent, for all her

childish helplessness, was a woman, not only a creature to be fed; while

the stirrings of Ada’s personal vanity were a sign and token that she,

also, was emerging from the cowed stupor of body and mind produced by

long terror and starvation, that her thoughts, like her companion’s,

were turning again to the human surroundings they had fled from.... Man

had ceased to be only an enemy, and the first sheer relief at security

attained was mingling, in both of them, with the desire to know what had

come to a world that still gave no sign of its existence. Order, the

beginnings of a social system (so Theodore insisted to himself) must by

now have risen from the dust; but meanwhile—because order restored gave

no sign and the memory of humanity debased was still vivid—he showed

himself with caution against the skyline and went stealthily when he

broke new ground. There were days when he lay on a hill-top and scanned

the clear horizon, for an hour at a time, in the hope that a man would

come in sight; just as there were nights, many, when he lived his past

agonies over again and started from his sleep, alert and trembling, lest

the footstep he had dreamed might be real. Meanwhile he made no move

towards the world he had fled from—waiting till it gave him a sign.

If he had been alone in his wilderness, unburdened by the responsibility

of Ada and her livelihood, it is probable that, before the days

shortened, he would have embarked upon a journey of cautious

exploration; but there was hazard in taking her, hazard in leaving her,

and their safety was still too new and precious to be lightly risked for

the sake of a curious adventure—which might lead, with ill-luck, to

discovery of their secret place and the enforced sharing of their hidden

treasure of food. Further, as summer drew on towards autumn, though his

haunting fear of mankind grew less, his work in his own small corner of

the earth was incessant and, in preparation for the coming of winter, he

put thought of distant expedition behind him and busied himself in

making their huts more weatherproof, as well as roomier, in the storing

of firewood under shelter from the damp, and in the gathering together

of a stock of food that would not rot. He made frequent

journeys—sometimes alone, sometimes with Ada trudging behind him—to a

derelict orchard in the lower valley which supplied them plentifully

with apples; he had provided himself with a wet-weather occupation in

the twisting of osiers into clumsy baskets—which were filled in the

orchard and carried to their camping-place where they spread out the

apples on dried moss.... With summer and autumn they fared well enough

on the harvest of other men’s planting; and if Theodore’s crude and

ignorant experiments in the storage of fruit and vegetables were

failures more often than not, there remained sufficient of the bounty of

harvest to help them through the scarcity of winter.

* * * * *

It was with the breaking of the next spring that there came a change

into the life that he lived with Ada.

They had dragged through the winter in a squalid hardship that, but for

the memory of a hardship more dreadful, would have seemed at times

beyond bearing; often short of food, with no means of light but their

fire, with damp and snow dripping through their ill-built shelters—where

they learned, like animals, to sleep through the long dark hours.

Through all the winter months their solitude was still unbroken, and if

any marauders prowled in the neighbourhood, they passed without

knowledge of the hidden camp in the hills.

It was—so far as he could guess—on one of the first sunny days of March

that Theodore, the spring lust of movement stirring in his blood, went

further from the camp than he had as yet explored; following the stream

down its valley into the wide belt of burned land, now rank with coarse

grass and yellow dandelions. For an hour or so there was nothing save

coarse grass, yellow dandelion and gaunt, dead trees; then a bend of the

stream showed him roofs—a cluster of them—and instinctively he halted

and crouched behind a tree before making his stealthy approach.

His stealth and precaution were needless. The village from a distance

might have passed for uninjured—the flames that had blackened its fields

had swept by it, and the houses, for the most part, stood whole; but

there was no living man in the long, straggling street, no movement,

save of birds and the pattering little scuffle of rats. The indifferent

life of beast and bird had taken possession of the dwellings of those

who once tyrannized over them; and not only of their dwellings but their

bodies. At the entrance of the village half-a-dozen skeletons lay

sprawled on the grass-grown road, and a robin sang jauntily from his

perch on the breast-bone of a man.... From one end of the street to the

other the bones of men lay scattered; in the road, in gardens, on the

thresholds of houses—some with tattered rags still fluttering to the

wind, some bare bones only, whence the flesh had festered and been

gnawed. By a cottage doorstep lay two skeletons touching each

other—whereof one was the framework of a child; the little bones that

had once been arms reached out to the death’s-head that once had borne

the likeness of a woman....

There was a time when Theodore would have turned from the sight and fled

hastily; even now, familiar though he was with the ugliness of death,

his flesh stirred and crept in the presence of the grotesque litter of

bones.... These people had died suddenly, in strange contorted

attitudes—here crouching, there outstretched with clawing fingers. Gas,

he supposed—a cloud of gas rolling down the street before the wind—and

perhaps not a soul left alive!... From an upper window hung a long,

fleshless arm: someone had thrust up the casement for air and fallen

half across the sill.

It was the indifferent, busy chirping of the nesting birds that helped

him to the courage to explore the silent street to its end. It wound,

through the village and out of it, to a bridge across a river—into which

flowed the smaller stream he had followed since he left his refuge in

the hills. From the bridge the road turned with the river and ran down

the valley in a south to south-easterly direction; a road grass-grown

and empty and bearing no recent trace of the life of man—nothing more

recent than the remains of a cart, blackened wood and rusted metal, with

the bones of a horse between its shafts.

Below the dead village the valley opened out, the hills receded and were

lower; but between them, so far as his eye could discern, the trees were

still blackened and lifeless. Down either side the stream the fire-blast

had swept without mercy; and, from the completeness with which the

country had been seared, Theodore judged that it had been largely

cornland, waving with ripe stalks at the moment of disaster and fired

after days of dry weather.... All life, save the life of man, teemed in

the hot March sun; the herbage thrust bravely to obliterate his

handiwork, larks shrilled invisibly and lithe, dark fish were darting

through the arches of the bridge.

He went only a yard or two beyond the end of the bridge—having, as the

sun warned him, reached the limit of distance he could well accomplish

if he was to return to the camp by nightfall. On his way back through

the village he fought with his repugnance to the grinning company of the

dead and turned into one of the silent houses that stood open for any

man to enter. Though the dead still dwelt there—stricken down, on the

day of disaster before they could reach the open air—there were the

usual abundant traces that living men had been there before him; the

door had been forced and rooms littered and fouled in the frequent

search for clothing and food. All the same, in the hugger-mugger on a

kitchen floor he found treasure of string and stuffed the blanket-bag

slung over his back with odds and ends of rusting hardware; finally

mounting to the floor above the kitchen where, at the head of the

staircase, an open door faced him and beyond it a chest of drawers. The

drawers had been pulled out and emptied on the floor; what remained of

their contents was a dirty litter, sodden by rain when it drove through

the window and browned with the dust of many months, and it was not

until Theodore had picked up a handful of the litter that he saw it was

composed of women’s trifles of underwear. What he held was a flimsy

bodice made of soiled and faded lawn with a narrow little edging of

lace.

He dropped it, only to pick it up again — remembering suddenly the

blanket episode and Ada’s lamentable howls for the garments a wilderness

denied her. Perhaps an assortment of dingy finery would do something to

allay her craving—and, amused at the thought, he went down on a knee and

proceeded to collect an armful. Appropriately the shifting of a heap of

yellowed rags revealed a broken hand-glass, lying face downwards on the

floor; as he raised it, wondering what Ada would say to a mirror as a

gift, its cracked surface showed him a bedstead behind him—not empty!...

What was left of the owner of the scraps of lawn and lace was reflected

from the oval of the glass.

He snatched up his bag and clattered down the stairs into the open.

XII

It was well past dusk when he trudged up the path that led to the camp

and found Ada on the watch at the outskirts of the copse, uneasy at the

thought of dark alone.

“You ’ave been a time,” she reproached him sulkily. “The ’ole blessed

day—since breakfus. I was beginnin’ to think you’d gone and got lost and

I’ve ’ad the fair ’ump sittin’ ’ere by myself and listenin’ to them

owls. I ’ate their beastly screechin’; it gives me the creeps.”

“Never mind,” he consoled her, “come along to the fire. I’ve brought you

something—a present.”

“Pertaters?” Ada conjectured, still sulky.

“Not potatoes this time,” he told her. “Better than vegetables—something

to wear.”

“Something to wear,” she repeated, with no show of enthusiasm. “I

suppose that’s another old blanket!”

“Wrong again,” he rejoined, amused by the contempt in her voice. She was

still contemptuous when he opened his bag and tossed her a dingy bundle;

but as she disentangled it, saw lace and embroidery, she brightened

suddenly and knelt down to examine in the firelight; while the sight of

the cracked hand-glass brought an instant “Oh!” followed by intent

contemplation and much patting and twisting of hair.

Theodore dished supper while she sat and pondered her reflection; and

even while she ate hungrily she had eyes and thoughts for nothing but

her new possessions. Some were what he had taken them to

be—underclothes, for the most part of an ordinary pattern; but mingled

with the plainer linen articles were one or two more decorative, lace

collars and the like, and it was on these, dingy as they were, that she

fell with delight that was open and audible. He watched her curiously

when, for the first time since he had known her, he saw her mouth widen

in a smile. She was no longer inert, the sullen, lumpish Ada, she was

critical, interested, alive; she fingered her treasures, she smoothed

them and made guesses at their price when new; she held them up, now

this way, now that, for his admiration and her own. Finally, while

Theodore stretched his tired length by the camp fire, she ran off to her

shelter for a broken scrap of comb; and when he looked up, a few minutes

later, she was posing self-consciously before the hand-glass, with hair

newly twisted and a dirty scrap of lace round her neck.... She was

another woman as she sat with her rags arranged to show her new

frippery; tilting the hand-mirror this way and that and twitching now at

the collar and now at her straying ends of hair.

Lying stretched on an arm by the fire, he watched her little feminine

antics, amused and taken out of himself; realizing how seldom, till that

moment, he had thought of her as a woman, how nearly she had seemed to

him an animal only, a creature to be guided and fed; and parrying her

eager and insistent demand to be taken to the house where the treasure

had been found, that she might see if it contained any more. He had no

desire to spoil her pleasure in her finery by the gruesome tale of the

manner of its finding; hence, in spite of a curiosity made manifest in

coaxing, he held to his refusal stubbornly.... The house was a long way

off, he told her—much further than she would care to tramp; then, as she

still persisted, maintaining her readiness even for a lengthy

expedition, he went on to fiction and explained that the house was in a

dangerous condition—knocked about, ruinous, might fall at any moment—and

he was not going to say where it was, for her own sake, lest she should

be tempted to the peril of an entry.

She pouted “You might tell me,” glancing at him from under her lashes;

then, as he still persisted in refusal, slapped him on the shoulder for

an obstinate boy, turned her back and pretended to sulk. He returned the

slap—she expected it and giggled; the next move in the game was his

catching of her wrist as she raised her hand for a rejoinder—and for a

moment they wrestled inanely, after the fashion of Hampstead Heath....

As he let her go, it dawned on him that this was flirtation as she knew

it.

* * * * *

It did not take long for him to realize that they stood to each other,

from that night on, in a new and more difficult relation; from foundling

and guardian, the leader and led, they had developed into woman and man.

For a time fear and hunger had suppressed in Ada the consciousness of

sex—which a yard or two of lace and the possession of a hand-glass had

revived. Once revived, it coloured her every action, gave meaning to her

every word and glance; so that, day by day and hour by hour, the man who

dwelt beside her was reminded of bodily desire.

One night when she had left him he lay staring at the fire, faced the

situation and wondered if she saw where she was drifting?

Possibly—possibly not; she was acting instinctively, from habit. To her

(he was sure) a man was a creature to flirt with; an unsubtle attempt to

arouse his desire was the only way she knew of carrying on a

conversation.... Now that she was woman again—not merely bewildered

misery and empty stomach—she had slipped back inevitably to the little

giggling allurements of her factory days, to the habits bred in her

bone.... With the result?... He put the thought from him, turned over,

dog-weary, and slept.

So soon as the next night he saw the result as inevitable; the outcome

of life reduced to mere animal living, of nearness, isolation and the

daily consciousness of sex. If they stayed together—and how should they

not stay together?—it was only a question of time, of weeks at the

furthest, of days or it might be hours.... He raised himself to peer

through the night at the log-hut that hid and sheltered Ada, wondering

if she also were awake. If so, of a certainty, her thoughts were of him;

and perhaps she knew likewise that it was only a question of time.

Perhaps—and perhaps she just drifted, following her instincts.... He

found himself wondering what she would say if she opened her eyes to

find him standing at the entrance to her hut, to see him bending over

her ... now?

He put the thought from him and once more turned over and slept.

With the morning it seemed further off, less inevitable; the sun was

hidden behind raw grey mist, and when Ada, shivering and stupid, turned

out into the chilly discomfort of the weather she was too much depressed

for the exercise of feminine coquetry. The day’s work—hard necessary

wood-chopping and equally necessary fishing for the larder—sent his

thoughts into other channels, and it was not till he sat at their

evening fire—warmed, fed and rested, with no duties to distract him—that

he became conscious again, and even more strongly, of the change in

their attitude and intercourse. Something new, of expectation, had crept

into it; something of excitement and constraint. When their hands

touched by chance they noticed it, were instantly awkward; when a

silence fell Ada was embarrassed, uncomfortable and made palpable

efforts to break it with her pointless giggle. When their eyes met, hers

dropped and looked away.... When she rose at last and said good-night he

was sure that she also knew. And since they both knew and the end was

inevitable, certain....

“You’re not going yet,” he said—and caught at her wrist, laughing oddly.

“It’s late—and I’m sleepy,” she objected with a foolish little giggle;

but made no effort to withdraw her wrist from his hold.

“Nonsense,” he told her, “it’s early yet—and you’re better by the fire.

Sit down and keep me company for a bit longer.”

She giggled again—more faintly, more nervously—as she yielded to the

pull of his fingers and sat down; offering no protest when, instead of

releasing her arm, he drew it through his own and held it pressed to his

side.... It was a windless night, very silent; no sound but the rush of

the little stream below them, now and then a bird-cry and the snap and

crackle of their fire. Once or twice Ada tried talking—of a hooting owl,

of a buzzing insect—for the sake, obviously, of talking, of hearing a

voice through the silence; but as he answered not at all, or by

monosyllables, her forced little chatter died away. Even if the thought

was not conscious, he knew she was his for the taking.

With her arm in his—with her body pressed close enough to feel her

quickened breathing—he sat and stared into the fire; and at the last,

when the inevitable was about to accomplish itself, there floated into

his mental vision the delicate memory of the woman whom once he had

desired. Phillida, a shadow impossible, leaned out of a vanished

existence as the Damosel leaned out of Heaven; and he looked with his

civilized, his artist’s eyes on the woman who was his for the taking....

Ada felt that he slackened his hold on her arm, felt him shrink a little

from the pressure of her leaning shoulder.

“What is it?” she asked—uneasy; and perhaps it was the sound of her

familiar voice that brought him back to primitive realities. The glow of

the fire and the over-arching vault of darkness; and beneath it two

creatures, male and female, alone with nature, subject only to the laws

of her instinct.... The vision of a dead world, a dead woman, faded and

he looked no more through the fastidious eyes of the civilized.

Man civilized is various, divided from his kind by many barriers—of

taste, of speech, of habit of mind and breeding; man living as the brute

is cut to one pattern, the pattern of his simple needs and lusts.... The

warm shoulder pressed him and he drew it the closer; he was man in a

world of much labour and instinct—who sweated through the seasons and

wearied. Whose pains were of the body, whose pleasures of the body ...

and alone in the night with a mate.

“’Ere, what’s that for?” she asked, making semblance of protest, as his

hand went round her head and he pressed her cheek against his lips.

He said “You!” ... and laughed oddly again.

XIII

They settled down swiftly and prosaically into a married state which

entailed no immediate alteration—save one—in life as they had hitherto

shared it. Matrimony shorn of rings and a previous engagement, shorn of

ceremony, honeymoon, change of residence and comments of friends,

revealed itself as a curiously simple undertaking and, by its very

simplicity, disappointing—so far at least as Ada was concerned.

Her conscience, in the matter of legal and religious observance, was not

unduly tender, and her embryo scruples concerning the absence of legal

or religious sanction to their union were easily allayed by her

husband’s assurance that they were as truly married as it was possible

to be in a world without churches or registrars. What she missed far

more than certificate or blessing was the paraphernalia and accompanying

circumstance of the wedding, to which she had always looked forward as

the culminating point of her existence; her veil, her bouquet, her bevy

of bridesmaids, her importance!... When she sat with her back against a

tree-trunk, listlessly unobservant of the play of dappled sunlight or

the tracery of leafage, she would crave in the shallows of her

disappointed heart for the gaudy little sitting-room that should have

been her newly-married dwelling; contrasting its impossible and

non-existent splendours with the ramshackle roof-tree under which she

took shelter from the weather. The gaudy, tasteless, stuffy little room

wherein she should have set out her wedding presents, displayed her

photos and done honours of possession to her friends.... That was

matrimony as she understood it; enhanced importance, display of her

matronly dignity. And instead, a marriage that aroused no envy, called

forth no jests, affected none but the partners to the bond; in the

unchanged discomfort of unchanged surroundings—wherein, being

crowd-bred, she could see little beauty and no meaning; in the frequent

loneliness and silence abhorrent to her noise-loving soul; with the

evening companionship of a wearied man to whom her wifehood meant no

more than a physical relation.

Theodore, being male, was not troubled by her abstract longings for the

minor dignities of matrimony—and, expecting little from his married

life, it could not bring him disillusion. Ada might have fancied that

what stirred in her was love; he had always known himself moved by a

physical instinct only. Thus of the pair he was the less to be pitied

when the increased familiarity of their life in common brought its

necessary trouble in the shape of friction—revealing the extent of their

unlikeness and even, with time, their antagonism. One of the results of

her vague but ever-present sense of grievance, her lasting homesickness

for a world that had crumbled, was a lack of interest in the world as it

was and a reluctance to adapt herself to an environment altogether

hateful; hence, on Theodore’s side, a justified annoyance at her

continued want of resource and the burdensome stupidity which threw

extra labour on himself.

She was a thoroughly helpless woman; helpless after the fashion of the

town-bred specialist, the product of division of labour. The country, to

her, was a district to drive through in a char-à-banc with convenient

halts at public-houses. Having lived all her days as the member of a

crowd, she was a creature incomplete and undeveloped; she had schooled

with a crowd and worked with it, shared its noise and its ready-made

pleasures; it is possible that, till red ruin came, she had conceived of

no other existence.... Leaving school, she had entered a string factory

where she pocketed a fairly comfortable wage in return for the daily and

yearly manipulation of a machine devoted to the production of a finer

variety of twine. Having learned to handle the machine with ease, life

had no more to offer her in the way of education, and development came

to a standstill. Her meals, for the most part, she obtained without

trouble from factory canteens, cheap restaurants or municipal kitchens;

thus her domestic duties were few—the daily smearing of a bedroom

(frequently omitted) and the occasional cobbling of a garment, bought

ready-made. Her reading, since her schooldays, had consisted of

novelettes only, and even to these she was not greatly addicted,

preferring, as a rule, a more companionable form of amusement—a party to

the pictures, gossip with her girlfriends and flirtations more or less

open. At twenty-three (when disaster came) she was a buxom, useless and

noisy young woman—good-natured, with the brain of a hen; incapable alike

of boiling a potato or feeling an interest in any subject that did not

concern her directly.

There were moments when she irritated Theodore intensely by her

infantile helplessness and the blunders that resulted therefrom, by her

owlish stupidity in the face of the new and unfamiliar. And there were

moments when, for that very owlishness, he pitied her with equal

intensity, realizing that his own loss, his daily wretchedness, was a

small thing indeed beside hers. The ruin of a world could not rob him

utterly of his heritage of all the ages; part of that heritage no ruin

could touch, since he had treasure stored in his heart and brain for so

long as his memory should last. But for Ada, whose world had been a

world of cheap finery, of giggling gossip and evenings at the cinema,

there remained from the ages—nothing. Gossip and cinemas, flowered hats

and ribbon-trimmed camisoles—they had left not a wrack, save regret, for

her mind to feed on.... As the workings of her vacant little soul were

laid bare to him, he understood how dreadful was its plight; how

pitiably complete must be the blankness of a life such as hers, bereft

of the daily little personal interests wherein had been summed up a

world. She—unhandy, unresourceful, superficial—was one of the natural

and inevitable products of a mechanical civilization; which, in saving

her trouble, had stunted her, interposing itself between primary cause

and effect. Bread, to her, was food bought at a counter—not grown with

labour in a field; the result not of rain, sun and furrow, but of

sixpence handed to a tradesman. And cunning men of science had wrestled

with the forces of nature that she might drop a penny in the slot for

warmth or suck sweets with her “boy” at the pictures.

He guessed her a creature who had always lived noisily, a babbler whom

even his fits of taciturnity would not have daunted had she found much

to babble of in the lonely world she shared with him; but, bewildered

and awed by it, oppressed by its silence, she found meagre

subject-matter for the very small talk which was her only method of

expression. Under the peace and vastness of the open sky she was

homesick for a life that excluded all vastness and peace; her sorrow’s

crown of sorrow was a helpless, incessant craving for little meaningless

noises and little personal excitements.... Sometimes, at night, as they

sat by the fire, he would see her face pathetic in its blank dreariness;

her eyes wandering from the glow of the fire to the darkness beyond it

and back from the darkness to the glow. Endeavouring—(or so he

imagined)—to piece together some form of inner life from fragmentary

memories of past inanity and aimless, ephemeral happenings!

The sight often moved him to pity; but he cast about in vain for a means

of allaying her sodden and persistent discontent. Once or twice he

attempted to awaken her interest by explaining, as he would have

explained to a child, the movements of nightly familiar stars, the

habits of birds or the process of growth in vegetation. These things, as

he took care to point out, now concerned her directly, were part of the

round of her existence; but the fact had no power to stimulate a mind

which had been accustomed to accept, without interest or inquiry, the

marvels of mechanical science. She carried over into her new life the

same lack of curiosity which had characterized her dealings with the

old; she was no more alive to the present phenomena of the open field

than to the past phenomena of the electric switch, the petrol-engine or

the gas-meter.... And the workings of the gas-meter at least had been

pleasant—while the workings of raw nature repelled her. Thus Theodore’s

only reward for his attempt at education was a bored, inattentive

remark, to the effect that she had heard her teacher say something like

that at school.

She had all the crowd-liver’s horror of her own company; strengthened,

in her case, by dislike of her surroundings, amounting to abhorrence,

and the abiding nervousness that was a natural after-effect of the days

when she had fled from her fellows and cowered to the earth in an abject

and animal terror. Her unwillingness to let Theodore out of her sight

was comprehensible enough, if irritating; but there were times when it

was more than irritating—a difficulty added to life. It was impossible

to apportion satisfactorily a daily toil that, if Ada had her way, must

always be performed in company; while her customary fellowship on his

hunting and snaring expeditions meant not only the presence of a clumsy

idler but the dying down of a neglected log-fire and the postponement of

all preparations for a meal until after their return to camp. Further,

it was a bar to that wider exploration of the neighbourhood which, as

time went on, he desired increasingly; confining him, except on

comparatively rare occasions, to such range from his hearthstone as

could be attained in the company of Ada. So long as he attributed it to

the workings of fear only, he was hopeful that, with time, her

abhorrence of loneliness might pass; but as the months went by he

realized that it was not only fear that kept her close to his heels—her

town-bred incapacity to interest or occupy herself.

Once—when the call of the outside world grew louder—he proposed to Ada

that he should see her well provided with a store of food and fuel and

leave her for two or three days; hoping to tempt her to agreement by

pointing out the probability, amounting to certainty, that other

survivors of disaster must be dwelling somewhere within reach. Peaceable

survivors with whom they could join forces with advantage.... Her face

lit up for a moment at the idea of other men’s company; but when she

understood that he proposed to go alone, her terror at the idea of being

left was abject and manifest. She was afraid of everything and anything;

of ghosts, of darkness, of prowling men, of spiders and possible snakes;

and, having reasoned in vain, in the end he gave her the assurance she

clamoured for—that she should not be called on to suffer the agony of a

night by herself.

He gave her the promise in sheer pity, but regretted it as soon as made.

He had set his heart on a journey in search of the world that gave no

sign, planning to undertake it before the days grew shorter; but he did

not disguise from himself that there might still be danger in the

expedition—which Ada’s hampering presence would increase. The project

was abandoned for the time being, in the hope that she would see reason

later; but he regretted his promise and weakness the more when he found

that Ada did not trust to his word and, fearing lest he gave her the

slip, now clung to him as closely as his shadow. Her suspicion and

stupidity annoyed him; and there were times when he was ashamed of his

own irritation when he saw her trotting, like a dog, at his heels or

squatting within eyeshot of his movements. He was conscious of a longing

to slap her silly face, and more than once he spoke sharply to her,

urged her to go home; whereupon she sulked or cried, but continued her

trotting and squatting.

The irritation came to a head one afternoon in the early days of autumn

when, with persistent ill-luck, he had been fishing a mile or so from

home. Various causes combined to bring about the actual outbreak; a

growing anxiety with regard to the winter supply of provisions,

sharpened by the discovery, the night before, that a considerable

proportion of his store of vegetables was a failure and already

malodorous; the ill-success of several hours’ fishing, and gusty,

unpleasant weather that chilled him as he huddled by the water. The

weather worsened after midday, the gusts bringing rain in their wake; a

cold slanting shower that sent him, in all haste, to the clump of trees

where Ada had sheltered since the morning. The sight of her sitting

there to keep an eye on him—uselessly watchful and shivering to no

purpose—annoyed him suddenly and violently; he turned on her sharply, as

the shower passed, and bade her go home on the instant. She was to keep

a good fire, a blazing fire—he would be drenched and chilled by the

evening. She was to have water boiling that the meal might be cooked the

moment he returned with the wherewithal.... While he spoke she eyed him

with questioning, distrustful sullenness; then, convinced that he meant

what he said, half rose—only, after a moment of further hesitation, to

slide down to her former position with her back against the trunk of a

beech-tree.

“I don’t want to,” she said doggedly. “I want to stay ’ere. I don’t see

why I shouldn’t. What d’yer want to get rid of me for?”

The suspicion that lay at the back of the refusal infuriated him: it was

suddenly intolerable to be followed and spied on, and he lost his temper

badly. The rough-tongued vehemence of his anger surprised himself as

much as it frightened his wife; he swore at her, threatened to duck her

in the stream, and poured out his grievances abusively. What good was

she?—a clog on him, who could not even tend a fire, a helpless idiot who

had to be waited on, a butter-fingered idler without brains! Let her do

what he told her and make herself of use, unless she wanted to be turned

out to fend for herself.... Much of what he said was justified, but it

was put savagely and coarsely; and when—cowed, perhaps, by the

suggestion of a ducking—Ada had taken to her heels in tears, he was

remorseful as well as surprised at his own vehemence. He had not known

himself as a man who could rail brutally and use threats to a woman; the

revelation of his new possibilities troubled him; and when, towards

sundown, he gathered up his meagre prey and stepped out homeward, it was

with the full intention of making amends to Ada for the roughness of his

recent outburst.

His path took him through a copse of brushwood into what had been a

cart-track; now grass-grown and crumbling between hedges that straggled

and encroached. The wind, rising steadily, was sweeping ragged clouds

before it and as he emerged from the shelter of the copse he was met by

a stinging rain. He bent his head to it, in shivering discomfort,

thrusting chilled hands under his cloak for warmth and longing for the

blaze and the good warm meal that should thaw them; he had left the

copse a good minute behind him when, from the further side of the

overgrown hedge, he heard sudden rending of brambles, a thud, and a

human cry. A yard or two on was a gap in the hedge where a gate still

swung on its hinges; he rushed to it, quivering at the thought of

possibilities—and found Ada struggling to her knees!

She began to cry loudly when she saw him, like a child caught in

flagrant transgression; protesting, with bawling and angry tears, that

“she wasn’t going to be ordered about” and “she should staiy just where

she liked!” It did not take him long to gather that her previous flight

had been a semblance only and that, shivering and haunted by ridiculous

suspicion, she had watched him all the afternoon from behind the screen

of the copse wood—for company partly, but chiefly to make sure he was

there. Seeing him gather up his tackle and depart homeward, she had

tried to outpace him unseen; keeping the hedge between them as she ran

and hoping to avert a second explosion of his wrath by blowing up the

ashes of the fire before his arrival at the camp. An unsuspected

rabbit-burrow had tripped her hurrying feet and brought about disaster

and discovery; and she made unskilful efforts to turn the misfortune to

account by rubbing her leg and complaining of damage sustained.

In contact with her stubborn folly his repentance and kindly resolutions

were forgotten; he cut short her bid for sympathy with a curt “Get along

with you,” caught her by the arm and started her with a push along the

road—too angry to notice that, for the first time, he had handled her

with actual violence. Then, bending his head to the sweep of the rain,

he strode on, leaving her to follow as she would.

Perhaps her leg really pained her, perhaps she judged it best to keep

her distance from his wrath; at any rate she was a hundred yards or more

behind him when he reached the camp and, stirring the ashes that should

have been a fire, found only a flicker alive. He cursed Ada’s idiocy

between his chattering teeth as he set to work to re-kindle the fire;

his hands shaking, half from anger, half from cold, as he gathered the

fuel together. When, after a long interval of coaxing and cursing, the

flame quivered up into the twilight, it showed him Ada sitting humped at

the entrance to their shelter; and at sight of her, inert and watching

him—watching him!—his wrath flared sudden and furious.

“Have you filled the cookpot?” he asked, standing over her. “No?... Then

what were you doing—sitting there staring while I worked?”

She began to whimper, “You’re crool to me!”—and repeated her parrot-like

burden of futile suspicion and grievance; that she knew he wanted to get

her out of the way so as he could leave her, and she couldn’t be left

alone for the night! He had a sense of being smothered by her foolish,

invertebrate persistence, and as he caught her by the shoulders he

trembled and sputtered with rage.

“God in Heaven, what’s the good of talking to you? If you take me for a

liar, you take me—that’s all. Do you think I care a curse for your

opinion?... But one thing’s certain—you’ll do what I tell you, and

you’ll work. Work, do you hear?—not sit in a lump and idle and stare

while I wait on you! Learn to use your silly hands, not expect me to

light the fire and feed you. And you’ll obey, I tell you—you’ll do what

you’re told. If not—I’ll teach you....”

He was wearied, thwarted, wet through and unfed since the morning;

baulked of fire and a meal by the folly that had irked him for days; a

man living primitively, in contact with nature and brought face to face

with the workings of the law of the strongest. It chanced that she had

lumped herself down by the bundle of osier-rods he had laid together for

his basket-making; so that when he gripped her by the nape of the neck a

weapon lay ready to his hand. He used it effectively, while she

wriggled, plunged and howled; there was nothing of the Spartan in her

temperament, and each swooping stroke produced a yell. He counted a

dozen and then dropped her, leaving her to rub and bemoan her smarts

while he filled the cookpot at the stream.

When he came back with the cookpot filled, her noisy blubbering had died

into gulps and snuffles. The heat of his anger was likewise over, having

worked itself off by the mere act of chastisement, and with its cooling

he was conscious of a certain embarrassment. If he did not repent he was

at least uneasy—not sure how to treat her and speak to her—and he

covered his uneasiness, as best he might, by a busy scraping and

cleaning of fish and a noisy snapping of firewood.... A wiser woman

might have guessed his embarrassment from his bearing and movements and

known how to wrest an advantage by transforming it into remorse; Ada,

sitting huddled and smarting on her moss-bed, found no more effective

protest against ill-treatment than a series of unbecoming sniffs. With

every silent moment his position grew stronger, hers weaker;

unconsciously he sensed her acquiescence in the new and brutal relation,

and when—over his shoulder—he bade her “Come along, if you want any

supper,” he knew, without looking, that she would come at his word, take

the food that he gave her and eat.

* * * * *

They discussed the subject once and very briefly—at the latter end of a

meal consumed in silence. A full stomach gives courage and confidence;

and Ada, having supped and been heartened, tried a sulky “You’ve been

very crool to me.”

In answer, she was told, “You deserved it.”

After this unpromising beginning it took her two or three minutes to

decide on her next observation.

“I believe,” she quavered tearfully, “you’ve taken the skin off my

back.”

“Nonsense!” he said curtly. Which was true.

* * * * *

The episode marked his acceptance of a new standard, his definite

abandonment of the code of civilization in dealings between woman and

man. With another wife than Ada the lapse into primitive relations would

have been less swift and certainly far less complete; she was so plainly

his mental inferior, so plainly amenable to the argument of force and no

other, that she facilitated his conversion to the barbaric doctrine of

marriage. And his conversion was the more thorough and lasting from the

success of his uncivilized methods of ruling a household; where

reasoning and kindliness had failed of their purpose, the sting of the

rod had worked wonders.... Ada sulked through the evening and sniffed

herself to sleep; but in the morning, when he woke, she had filled the

cookpot and was busied at the breakfast fire.

They had adapted themselves to their environment, the environment of

primitive humanity. That morning when he started for his snaring he

started alone; Ada stayed, without remonstrance, to dry moss, collect

firewood and perform the small duties of the camp.

XIV

It was a solid fact that from the day of her subjection to the rod and

rule of her overlord, Ada found life more bearable; and watching her, at

first in puzzlement, Theodore came by degrees to understand the reason

for the change in her which was induced—so it seemed—by the threat and

magic of an osier-wand. In the end he realized that the fundamental

cause of her sodden, stupid wretchedness had been lack of effective

interest—and that in finding an interest, however humble, she had found

herself a place in the world. Her interest, in the beginning, was

nothing more exalted than the will to avoid a second switching; but,

undignified as it was in its origin, it implied a stimulus to action

which had hitherto been wanting, and a process of adaptation to the new

relationship between herself and her man. By accepting him as master,

with the right unquestioned of reward and punishment, she had provided

herself with that object in life to which she had been unable to attain

by the light of her own mentality.

With an eye on the osier-heap she worked that she might please and,

finding occupation, brooded less; learning imperceptibly to look on the

new world primitive as a reality whose hardships could be mitigated by

effort, instead of an impossible nightmare. As she wrestled with present

difficulties—the daily tasks she dared no longer neglect—the trams,

shop-windows and chiffons of the past receded on her mental horizon.

Not, fundamentally, that they were any less dear to her; but the need of

placating an overlord at hand took up part of her thoughts and time. Too

slothful, both in mind and in body, to acquire of her own intelligence

and initiative the changed habits demanded by her changed surroundings,

she was unconsciously relieved—because instantly more comfortable—when

the necessary habits were forced on her.

With the allotment of her duties and the tacit definition of her status

that followed on the night of her chastisement, their life on the whole

became easier, better regulated; and the mere fact of their frequent

separation during part of the day made their coming together more

pleasant. Companionship in any but the material sense it was out of her

power to offer; but she could give her man a welcome at the end of the

day and take lighter work off his hands. Her cooking was always a matter

of guesswork and to the last she was stupid, unresourceful and clumsy

with her fingers; but she fetched and carried, washed pots and garments

in the stream, was hewer of wood and drawer of water and kept their camp

clean and in order. In time she even learned to take a certain amount of

pleasure in the due fulfilment of her task-work; when Theodore, having

discovered a Spanish chestnut-tree not far from their dwelling, set her

the job of storing nuts against the winter, she pointed with pride in

the evening to the size of the heap she had collected.

Now that she was admittedly his underling, subdued to his authority, he

found it infinitely easier to be patient with her many blunders; and

though there were still moments when her brainlessness and limitations

galled him to anger, on the whole he grew fonder of her—with a

patronizing, kindly affection. He still cherished his plans of

exploration unhampered by her company but, from pity for the fears she

no longer dared to talk of, refrained from present mention thereof;

while the nights were long and dark it would be cruel to leave her, and

by the time spring came round again she might have grown less fearful of

solitude.... Or, before spring came, the world might make a sign and

plans of exploration be needless.

Meanwhile, resigning himself to his daily and solitary round, he worked

hard and anxiously to provision his household for a second winter of

loneliness.

* * * * *

It was when the days were nearly at their shortest that the round and

tenor of his life was broken by the shock of a disturbing knowledge.

Trudging homewards toward sunset on a mild December evening, he came

upon his wife sitting groaning in the path; she had been on her way to

the stream for water when a paroxysm of sickness overtook her. Since the

days of starvation he had never seen her ill and the violence of the

paroxysm frightened him; when it was over and she leaned on him

exhausted as he led her back to their camping-place, he questioned her

anxiously as to what had upset her—had she pain, had she eaten anything

unwholesome or unusual? She shook her head silently in answer to his

queries till he sat her down by the fire; then, as he knelt beside her,

stirring the logs into a blaze, she caught his arm suddenly and pressed

her face tightly against it.

“Ow, Theodore, I’m going to ’ave a baiby!”

“What?” he said. “What?”—and stared at her, his mouth wide open....

Perhaps she was hurt or disappointed at his manner of taking the news;

at any rate she burst into floods of noisy weeping, rocking herself

backwards and forwards and hiding her face in her hands. He did his best

to soothe her, stroking her hair and encircling her shoulders with an

arm; seeking vainly for the words that would stay her tears, for

something that would hearten and uplift her. He supposed she was

frightened—more frightened even than he was; his first bewildered

thought, when he heard the news, had been “What, in God’s name, shall we

do?”

He drew her head to his shoulder, muttering “There, there,” as one would

to a child, till her noisy demonstrative sobbing died down to an

intermittent whimper; and when she was quieted she volunteered an answer

to the question his mind had been forming. She thought it would be

somewhere about five months—but it mightn’t be so long, she couldn’t be

sure. She didn’t know enough about it to be sure—how could she, seeing

as it was her first?... She had been afraid for ever so long now—weeks

and weeks—but she’d gone on hoping and that was why she hadn’t said

anything about it before. Now there wasn’t any doubt—she wondered he

hadn’t seen for himself ... and she clung to him again with another

burst of noisy weeping.

“But,” he ventured uncertainly, reaching out after comfort, “when it’s

over—and there’s the baby—you’ll be glad, won’t you?”

His appeal to the maternal instinct had no immediate success. Ada

protested with yet noisier crying that she was bound to die when the

baby came, so how could she possibly be glad? It was all very well for

him to talk like that—he didn’t have to go through it! Lots of women

died, even when they had proper ’orspitals and doctors and nurses....

He listened helplessly, not knowing how to take her; until, common sense

coming to his aid, he fell back on the certainty that exhausting,

hysterical weeping could by no possibility be good for her, rebuked her

with authority for upsetting herself and insisted on immediate

self-control. It was well for them both that wifely obedience was

already a habit with Ada; by the change in his tone she recognized an

order, pulled herself together, rubbed her swollen eyes and even made an

effort to help with the preparing of supper—whining a little, now and

again, but checking the whine before it had risen to a wail.

She was manifestly cheered by a bowlful of hot stew—whereof, though she

pushed it away at first, she finished by eating sufficiently; and, once

convinced that the outburst of emotion was over, he petted her, though

not too sympathetically, lest he stirred her again to self-pity. She was

not particularly responsive to his hesitating suggestions anent the

coming joys of maternity; more successful in raising her spirits were

his actual encouraging pats and caresses, his assumption of confidence

greater than he felt in the neighbourhood of men and women whose hands

were not turned against their fellows.... He realized that, as the

suspicion of her motherhood grew to a certainty, she had spent long,

lonely hours oppressed by sheer physical terror; and he reproached

himself for having been carelessly unobservant of a suffering that

should long ere this have been plain to him.

He was longing to be alone and to think undistracted; it was a relief to

him therefore when, warmed, fed, and exhausted by her crying, she began

to nod against his shoulder. He insisted jestingly on immediate bed,

patted and pulled at her moss-couch before she lay down, kissed

her—whereupon she again cried a little—and sat beside her, listening,

till her breathing was even and regular. Once sure that she slept, he

crept back to the fire to sit with his chin on his hands; outside was

the silence of a still December night, where the only sound was the rush

of water and the hiss and snap of burning logs.

* * * * *

With his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, he stared into

the fire and the future ... wondering why it had come as a shock to

him—this natural, this almost inevitable consequence of the life he

shared with a woman? He found no immediate answer to the question;

understanding only that the animal and unreflecting need which had

driven them into each other’s arms had coloured their whole

sex-relation. They had lived like the animal, without any thought of the

future.... Now the civilized man in him demanded that his child should

be born of something more than unreasoning lust of the flesh and there

stirred in him a craving to reverence the mother of his son.... Ada,

flaccid, lazy, infantile of mind, was more, for the moment, than her

prosaic, incapable self. A rush of tenderness swept over him—for her and

for the little insistent life which might, when its time came, have to

struggle into being unaided....

With the thought returned the dread which had flashed into his mind when

Ada revealed to him his fatherhood. If their life in hiding were

destined to continue—if all men within reach were as those they had fled

from, there would come the moment when—he should not know what to do!...

He remembered, years ago, in the rooms of a friend, a medical student,

how, with prurient youthful curiosity, he had picked up a textbook on

midwifery—and sought feverishly to recall what he had read as he

fluttered its pages and eyed its startling illustrations.

As had happened sometimes in the first days of loneliness, the immensity

of the world overwhelmed him; he sat crouched by his fire, an insect of

a man, surrounded by unending distances. An insect of a man, a pigmy,

whom nature in her vastness ignored; yet, for all his insignificance,

the guardian of life, the keeper of a woman and her child.... They would

look to him for sustenance, for guidance and protection; and he, the

little man, would fend for them—his mate and his young....

Of a sudden he knew himself close kin to the bird and beast; to the

buck-rabbit diving to the burrow where his doe lay cuddled with her soft

blind babies; to the round-eyed blackbird with a beakful gathered for

the nest.... The loving, anxious, protective life of the winged and

furry little fathers—its unconscious sacrifice brought a lump to his

throat and the world was less alien and dreadful because peopled with

his brethren—the guardians of their mates and their young.

XV

It was clear to him, so soon as he knew of his coming fatherhood, that,

in spite of the drawbacks of winter travelling, his long-deferred

journey of exploration must be undertaken at once; the companionship of

men, and above all of women, was a necessity to be sought at the risk of

any peril or hardship. Hence—with misgiving—he broached the subject to

Ada next morning; and in the end, with smaller opposition than he had

looked for, her lesser fears were mastered by her greater. That the

certain future danger of unaided childbirth might be spared her, she

consented to the present misery of days and nights of solitude; and

together they made preparations for his voyage of discovery in the

outside world and her lonely sojourn in the camp.

As he had expected, her first suggestion had been that they should break

camp and journey forth together; but he had argued her firmly out of the

idea, insisting less on the possible dangers of his journey—which he

strove, rather, to disguise from her—than on her own manifest unfitness

for exertion and exposure to December weather. Once more the habit of

wifely obedience came to his assistance and her own, and she bowed to

her overlord’s decision—if tearfully, without temper or sullenness;

while, the decision once taken, it was he, and not Ada, who lay wakeful

through the night and conjured up visions of possible disaster in his

absence. His imagination was quickened by the new, strange knowledge of

his responsibility, the protective sense it had awakened; and, lying

wide awake in the still of the night, it was not only possible danger to

Ada that he dreaded—he was suddenly afraid for himself. If misfortune

befell him on his journey into the unknown, it would be more than his

own misfortune; on his strength, his luck and well-being depended the

life of his woman and her unborn child. If evil befell him and he never

came back to them—if he left his bones in the beyond.... At the thought

the sweat broke out on his face and he started up shivering on his

moss-bed.

He worked through the day at preparations for the morning’s departure

which, if simple, demanded thought and time; saw that plentiful

provision of food and dry fuel lay ready to his wife’s hand, so that

small exertion would be needed for the making of fire and meal. For his

own provisioning he filled a bag with cooked fish, chestnuts and the

like—store enough to keep him with care for five or six days. All was

made ready by nightfall for an early start on the morrow; and he was

awake and afoot with the first reddening of a dull December morning.

Fearing a breakdown from Ada at the last moment, he had planned to leave

her still asleep; but the crackling of a log he had thrown on the embers

roused her and she sat up, pushing the tumbled brown hair from her eyes.

“You’re gowing?” she asked with a catch in her voice; and he avoided her

eye as he nodded back “Yes,” and slung his bag over his shoulder.

“Just off,” he told her with blatant cheeriness. “Take care of yourself

and have a good breakfast. There’s water in the cookpot—and mind you

look after the fire. I’ve put you plenty of logs handy—more than you’ll

want till I come back. Good-bye!”

“You might say good-bye properly,” she whimpered after him.

He affected not to hear and strode away whistling; he had purposely

tried to make the parting as careless and unemotional as his daily going

forth to work. Purposely, therefore, he did not look back until he was

too far away to see her face; it was only when the trees were about to

hide him that he turned, waved and shouted and saw her lift an arm in

reply. She did not shout back—he guessed that she could not—and when the

trees hid him he ran for a space, lest the temptation to follow and call

him back should master her.

He had planned out his journey often enough during the last few months;

considering the drift of the river and lie of the country and attempting

to reduce them to map-form on the soil by the aid of a pointed stick.

His idea was to make, in the first place, for the silent village which

had hitherto been the limit of his voyaging; and thence to follow the

road beside the river which in time, very surely, must bring him to the

haunts of men. Somewhere on the banks of the river—beyond the tract of

devastated ground—must dwell those who drank from its waters and fished

in them; who perhaps—now the night of destruction was over and humanity

had ceased to tear at and prey upon itself—were rebuilding their

civilization and salving their treasures from ruin!... The air, crisp

and frosty, set him walking eagerly, and as his body glowed from the

swiftness of his pace a pleasurable excitement took hold of him; his

sweating fears of the night were forgotten and his brain worked keenly,

adventurously. Somewhere, and not far, were men like unto himself,

beginning their life and their world anew in communities reviving and

hopeful. Even, it might be—(he began to dream dreams)—communities

comparatively unscathed; with homes and lands unpoisoned, unshattered,

living ordered and orderly lives!... Some such communities the devils of

destruction must have spared ... if a turn in the valley should reveal

to him suddenly a town like the old towns, with men going out and in!

He quickened his pace at the thought and the miles went under him

happily. He was no longer alone; even when he entered the long waste of

coarse grass and blackened tree that lay around the dead village its

dreariness was peopled with his vivid and hopeful imaginings ... of a

crowd that hustled to hear his story, that questioned and welcomed and

was friendly—and led him to a house that was furnished and whole ...

where were books and good comfort and talk....

So, in pleasant company, he trudged until well after midday; when,

perhaps discouraged by the beginnings of bodily weariness, perhaps

affected by the sight of the stark village street—his unreasonable

hopefulness passed and anxiety returned. He grew conscious, suddenly and

acutely, of his actual surroundings; of silence, of the waste he had

trodden, of the desolation about him, of the unknown loneliness ahead.

That above all—the indefinite, on-stretching loneliness.... He hurried

through the dumb street nervously, listening to his own footsteps—the

beat and the crunch of them on a frozen road, their echo against

deserted walls; and at the end of the village he turned with relief into

the road he had marked on his previous visit, the road that turned to

run by the stream a few yards beyond the bridge. It wound dismally into

a scorched little wood—not one live shoot in it, a cemetery of poisoned

trees; then on, still keeping fairly close to the stream, through the

same long waste patched with grass and spreading weed. The road, though

it narrowed and was overgrown and crumbling in places, was easy enough

to follow for the first few hours, but he sought in vain for traces of

its recent use. There was no sign of man or the works of man in use; the

only token of his presence were, now and again, a fire-blackened

cottage, a jumble of rusted, twisted ironwork or a skeleton with rank

grass thrusting through the whitened ribs. When the river rounded a turn

in the hills, the prospect before him was even as the prospect behind; a

waste and silence where corn had once grown and cattle pastured.

As the day wore on the heavy silence was irksome and more than irksome.

It was broken only by the sound of his footsteps, the whisper of grass

in a faint little wind and now and again—more rarely—by the chirp and

flutter of a bird. Long before dusk he began to fear the night, to

think, with something like craving, of the shelter and the fire and the

woman beside it—that was home; the thought of hours of darkness spent

alone amongst the whitened bones of men and the blackened carcases of

trees loomed before him as a growing threat. He pushed on doggedly,

refusing himself the spell of rest he needed, in the hope that when

night came down on him he might have left the drear wilderness behind.

It was a hope doomed to disappointment; the fall of the early December

evening found him still in the unending waste, and when the dusk

thickened into darkness he camped, perforce, near the edge of the river

in the lee of a broken wall. The branches of a dead tree near by

afforded him fuel for the fire that he kindled with difficulty with the

aid of a rough contrivance of flint and steel; and as he crouched by the

blaze and ate his evening ration he scanned the night sky with anxious

and observant eyes. So far the weather had been clear and dry, but he

realized the peril of a break in it, of a snowstorm in shelterless

country.... If to-morrow were only as to-day—if the waste stretched on

without trace of man or sign of ending—what then? Would it be wise or

safe to push on for yet another day—leaving home yet further behind him?

For the journey back the waste must be recrossed, in whatever weather

the winter pleased to send him; traversed by day and camped on by night,

in hail, in rain, in snow.... The thought gave him pause since exposure

might well mean death—and to more than himself.

He slept little and brokenly, rousing at intervals with a shiver as the

fire died down for want of tendance; and was on his feet with the first

grey of morning, trudging forward with fear at his heels. It was a fear

that pressed close on them with the passing of long lonely hours; still

wintry hours wherethrough he strained his eyes for a curl of smoke or a

movement on the outspread landscape.... The day was yesterday over

again; the same pale sky, the dull swollen river that led him on, and

the endless waste of shallow valley; and when night came down again he

knew only this—a clump of hills that had been distant was nearer, and he

was a day’s tramp further on his way. He settled at sundown in a copse

of withered trees which afforded him plentiful firing if little else in

the way of shelter from the night; and having kindled a blaze he warmed

his food, ate and slept—too weary to lie awake and brood.

* * * * *

He had not slept long—for the logs still glowed redly and flickered—when

he started into wakefulness that was instant, complete and alert.

Something—he knew it—had stirred in the silence and roused him; he sat

up, peered round and listened with the watchful terror instinctive in

the hunted, be the hunted beast or man. For a moment he peered round,

seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the whisper of the fire and the

beating of his own heart ... then, in the blackness, two points caught

the firelight—eyes!... Eyes unmistakable, that glowed and were fixed on

him....

He stiffened and stared at them, open-mouthed; then, as a sudden flicker

of the dying flame showed the outline of a bearded human face, he choked

out something inarticulate and made to scramble to his feet. Swift as

was the movement he was still on a knee when someone from behind leaped

on him and pinned both arms to his sides.... As he wrestled

instinctively other hands grasped him; he was the held and helpless

captive of three or four who clutched him by throat, wrist and

shoulder....

By that token he was back among men.

XVI

When they had him down and helpless at their feet, a dry branch was

thrust into the embers and, as it flamed, held aloft that the light

might fall upon his face. To him it revealed the half-dozen faces that

looked down at him—weatherworn, hairy and browned with dirt, the eyes,

for the moment, aglow with the pleasure of the hunter who has tracked

and snared his prey. They held their prey and gazed at it, as they would

have gazed at and measured a beast they had roped into helplessness.

Satisfaction at the capture shone in their faces; the natural and grim

satisfaction of him who has met and mastered his natural enemy.... That,

for the moment, was all; they had met with a man and overcome him.

Curiosity, even, would come later.

Theodore, after his first instinctive lunge and struggle, lay

motionless—flaccid and beaten; understanding in a flash that was agony

that men were still what they had been when he fled from them into the

wilderness—beast-men who stalked and tore each other. In the torchlight

the dirty, coarse faces were savage and animal; the eyes that glowered

down at him had the staring intentness of the animal.... He expected

death from a blow or a knife-thrust, and closed his eyes that he might

not see it coming; and instead saw, as plainly as with bodily eyes, a

vision of Ada by the camp fire, sitting hunched and listening for his

footstep. Listening for it, staring at the dreadful darkness—through

night after dreadful night.... In a torment of pity for his mate and her

child he stammered an appeal for his life.

“For God’s sake—I wasn’t doing any harm. If you’ll only listen—my

wife.... All that I want....”

If they were moved they did not show it, and it may be they were not

moved—having lived, themselves, through so much of misery and bodily

terror that they had ceased to respond to its familiar workings in

others. Fear and the expression of fear to them were usual and normal,

and they listened undisturbed while he tried to stammer out his

pleading. Not only undisturbed but apparently uninterested; while he

spoke one was twisting the knife from his belt and another taking stock

of the contents of his food-bag; and he had only gasped out a broken

sentence or two when the holder of the torch—as it seemed the leader—cut

him short with “Are you alone?”... Once satisfied on that head he

listened no more, but dropped the torch back on to the fire and kicked

apart the dying embers. The action was apparently a sign to move on; the

hands that gripped Theodore dragged him to his feet and urged him

forward; and, with a captor holding to either arm, he stumbled out of

the clump of stark trees into the open desert—now whitened by a moon at

the full.

There was little enough talk amongst his captors as, for more than two

hours, they thrust and guided him along; such muttered talk as there

was, was not addressed to their prisoner and he judged it best to be

silent. It was—so he guessed—the red shine of his fire that had drawn

attention to his presence; and, the fear of instant death removed, he

drew courage from the thought that the men who held and hurried him must

be dwellers in some near-by village. Once he had reached it and been

given opportunity to tell his story and explain his presence, they would

cease to hold him in suspicion—so he comforted himself as they strode

through the wilderness in silence.

After an hour of steady tramping they turned inland sharply from the

river till a mile or so brought them to broken, rising ground and a

smaller stream babbling from the hills. They followed its course, for

the most part steadily uphill, and, at the end of another mile, the

scorched black stumps gave place to trees uninjured—spruce firs in their

solemn foliage and oaks with their tracery of twigs. A copse, then a

stretch of short turf and the spring of heather underfoot; then down, to

more trees growing thickly in a hollow—and through them a glow that was

fire. Then figures that moved, silhouetted, in and out of the glow and

across it; an open space in the midst of the trees and hut-shapes,

half-seen and half-guessed at, in the mingling of flicker and deep

shadow.... Out of the darkness a dog yapped his warning—then another—and

at the sound Theodore thrilled and quivered as at a voice from another

world. Now and again, while he lived in his wilderness, he had heard the

sharp and familiar yelp of some masterless dog, run wild and hunting for

his food; but the dog that lived with man and guarded him was an adjunct

of civilization!

The warning had roused the little community before the newcomers emerged

from the shadow of the trees; and as they entered the clearing and were

visible, men hurried towards them, shouting questions. Theodore found

himself the centre of a staring, hustling group—which urged him to the

fire that it might see him the better, which questioned his guards while

it stared at him.... Here, too, was the strange aloofness that refrained

from direct address; he was gazed at, stolidly or eagerly, taken stock

of as if he were a beast, and his guards explained how and where they

had found him, as if he himself were incapable of speech, as they might

have spoken of the finding of a dog that had strayed from its owner.

Perhaps it was uneasiness that held him silent, or perhaps he adapted

himself unconsciously to the general attitude; at any rate—as he

remembered afterwards—he made no effort to speak.

The men and women who crowded round him, staring and murmuring, were in

number, perhaps, between thirty and forty; women with matted hair

straggling and men unshorn, their garments, like his own, a patchwork of

oddments and all of them uncouth and unclean. One woman, he noted, had a

child at her half-naked breast; a dirty little nursling but a few months

old, its downy pate crusted with scabs. He stared at it, wondering as to

the manner of its birth—the mother returning his scrutiny with

open-mouthed interest until shouldered aside without ceremony by a man

whom Theodore recognized for the leader of his band of captors. When

they reached the shadow of the clump of trees he had stridden ahead and

vanished, presumably to report and seek orders from some higher

authority; and now, at a word from him, Theodore was again jerked

forward by his guards and, with the crowd breaking and trailing behind

him, was led some fifty or sixty yards further to where, on the edge of

the clump of trees, stood a building, a tumbledown cottage. The moon

without and a fire within showed broken panes stuffed with moss and a

thatched roof falling to decay; inside the atmosphere was foul and

stale, and heavy with the heat of a blazing wood fire which alone gave

light to the room.

By the fire, seated on a backless kitchen chair, sat a man, grey of head

and bent of shoulder; but even in the firelight his eyes were keen and

steely—large bright-blue eyes that shone under thick grey eyebrows. His

face, with its bright, stubborn eyes and tight mouth, was—for all its

dirt—the face of a man who gave orders; and it did not escape the

prisoner that the others—the crowd that was thrusting and packing itself

into the room—were one and all silent till he spoke.

“Come nearer,” he said—and on the word, Theodore was pushed close to

him. “Let him go”—and Theodore was loosed. Someone, at a sign, lit a

stick from the heap beside the fire and held it aloft; and for a moment,

till it flared itself out, there was silence, while the old man peered

at the stranger. With the sudden light the hustling and jostling ceased,

and the crowd, like Theodore, waited on the old man’s words.

“Tell me,” at last came the order, “what you were doing here. Tell me

everything”—and he lifted a dirty lean finger like a threat—“what you

were doing on our land, where you came from, what you want?... and speak

the truth or it will be the worse for you.”

Theodore told him; while the steel-blue eyes searched his face as well

as they might in the semi-darkness and the half-seen crowd stood mute.

He told of his life as it had been lived with Ada; of their complete

separation from their fellows for the space of nearly two years; of the

coming of the child and the consequent need of help for his

wife—conscious, all the time, not only of the questioning, unshrinking

eyes of his judge but of the other eyes that watched him suspiciously

from the corners and shadows of the room. Two or three times he faltered

in his telling, oppressed by the long, steady silence; for throughout

there was no comment, no word of interest or encouragement—only once,

when he paused in the hope of encouragement, the old man ordered “Go

on!”... He went on, striving to steady his voice and pleading against he

knew not what of hostility, suspicion and fear.

“... And so,” he ended uncertainly, “they found me. I wasn’t doing any

harm.... I suppose they saw my fire?...”

From someone in the darkness behind him came a grunt that might indicate

assent—then, again, there was silence that lasted.... The dumb, heavy

threat of it was suddenly intolerable and Theodore broke it with

vehemence.

“For God’s sake tell me what you’re going to do! It’s not much I ask and

it’s not for myself I ask it. If you can’t help me yourselves there must

be other people who can—tell me where I am and where I ought to go. My

wife—she must have help.”

There was no actual response to his outburst, but some of the half-seen

figures stirred and he heard a muttering in the shadow that he took for

the voices of women.

“Tell me where I am,” he repeated, “and where I can go for help.”

It was the first question only that was answered.

“You are on our land.”

“Your land—but where is it? In what part of England?”

“I don’t know,” said the old man and shrugged his lean shoulders. “But

you haven’t any right on it. It’s ours.”

He pushed back his chair and stood up to his full, tall height; then,

raising his hand, addressed the assembly of his followers.

“You have all of you heard what he said and know what he wants. Now let

me hear what you think. Say it out loud and not in each other’s ears.”

He dropped his arm and stood waiting a reply—and after a moment one came

from the back of the room.

“It’s winter,” said a man’s voice, half-sulky, half-defiant, “and we’ve

hardly enough left for ourselves. We don’t want any more mouths

here—we’ve more than we can fill as it is.” A murmur of agreement

encouraged him and he went on—louder and pushing through the crowd as he

spoke. “We fend for our own and he must fend for his. He ought to think

himself lucky if we let him go after we’ve taken him on our land. What

business had he there?”

This time the murmur of agreement was stronger and a second voice called

over it:

“If we catch him here again he won’t get off so easily!”

The assent that followed was more than assent; applause that swelled and

grew almost clamorous. The old man stilled it with a lifting of his

knotted hand.

“Then you won’t have him here? You don’t want him?”

The “No” in answer was vigorous; refusal, it seemed, was unanimous.

Theodore tried to speak, to explain that all he asked ... but again the

knotted hand was lifted.

“And are you—for letting him go?”

The words dropped out slowly and were followed by a hush—significant as

the question itself.... This much was clear to the listener: that behind

them lay a fear and a threat. The nature of the threat could be guessed

at—since they would not keep him and dared not let him go; but where and

what was the motive for the fear that had prompted the slow, sly

question and the uneasy silence that followed it?... He heard his own

heart-beats in the long uneasy silence—while he sought in vain for the

reason of their dread of one man and tried in vain to find words. It

seemed minutes—long minutes—and not seconds till a voice made answer

from the shadows:

“Not if it isn’t safe.”

And at the words, as a signal, came voices from this side and

that—speech hurried, excited and tumultuous. It wasn’t safe—what did

they know of him and how could they prove his story true? He might be a

spy—now he knew where to find them, knew they had food, he might come

back and bring others with him! When he tried to speak the voices grew

louder, over-shouted him—and one man at his side, gesticulating wildly,

cried out that they would be mad to let him go, since they could not

tell how much he knew. The phrase was taken up, as it seemed in panic—by

man after man and woman after woman—they could not tell how much he

knew! They pressed nearer as they shouted, their faces closing in on

him—spitting, working mouths and angry eyes. They were handling him

almost; and when once they handled him—he knew it—the end would be sure

and swift. He dared not move, lest fingers went up to his throat. He

dared not even cry out.

It was the old man who saved him with another call for silence. Not out

of mercy—there was small mercy in the lined, dirty face—but because, it

seemed, there was yet another point to be considered.

“If they came again”—he jerked his head towards the open—“we should be a

man the stronger. Now they are stronger than we are—by nearly a

dozen....”

Apparently the argument had weight, for its hearers stood uncertain and

arrested—and instinct bade Theodore seize on the moment they had given

him.... What he said in the beginning he could not remember—how he

caught their attention and held it—but when cooler consciousness

returned to him they were listening while he bargained for his life....

He bargained and haggled for the right to live—offering goods and sweat

and muscle in exchange for a place on the earth. He was strong and would

work for them; he could hunt and fish and dig; he would earn by his

labour every mouthful that fell to him, every mouthful that fell to his

wife.... More, he had food of his own laid away for the winter

months—dried fish and nuts and the store of fruit he had salved and

hoarded from the autumn. These all could be fetched and shared if need

be.... He bribed them while they haggled with their eyes. Let them come

with him—any of them—and prove what he said; he had more than enough—let

them come with him.... When he stopped, exhausted and sobbing for

breath, the extreme of the danger had passed.

“If he has food,” someone grunted—and Theodore, turning to the unseen

speaker, cried out—“I swear I have! I swear it!”

He hoped he had won; and then knew himself in peril again when the man

who had raised the cry before repeated doggedly that they could not tell

how much he knew....

“Take him away,” said the old man suddenly. “You take him—you two”—and

he pointed twice. “Keep him while we talk—till I send for you.”

At least it was reprieve and Theodore knew himself in safety, if only

for a passing moment. For their own comfort, if not for his, his guards

escorted him to the fire in the open, where they crouched down, stolid

and watchful, Theodore between them—exhausted by emotion and flaccid

both in body and mind.... There was a curious relief in the knowledge

that he had shot his last bolt and could do nothing more to save

himself; that whatever befell him—release or swift death—was a happening

beyond his control. No effort more was required of him and all that he

could do was to wait.

He waited dumbly, in the end almost drowsily, with his head bent forward

on his knees.

XVII

After minutes, or hours, a hand was laid on his shoulder and shook it;

he raised his eyes stupidly, saw his guards already on their feet and

with them a third man—sent, doubtless, with orders to summon them. He

rose, knowing that a decision had been made, one way or another, but

still oddly numb and unmoved.... The two men with him thrust a way into

the crowded little room, elbowing their fellows aside till they had

pushed and dragged their charge to the neighbourhood of the fireplace

and set him face to face with his judge. As they fell back a pace or

two—as far as the crowding of the room allowed—someone again lit a

branch at the fire and held it up that the light might fall upon the

prisoner.

To Theodore the action brought with it a conviction that his sentence

was death and his manner of receiving it a diversion for the eyes of the

beholders.... The old man was waiting, intent, with his chin on his

hand, that he might lengthen the diversion by lengthening the suspense

of the prisoner....

When he spoke at last his words were a surprise—instead of a judgment,

came a query.

“What were you?” he asked suddenly; and, at the unexpected, irrelevant

question, Theodore, still numb, hesitated—then repeated mechanically,

“What was I?”

“In the days before the Ruin—what were you? What sort of work did you

do? How did you earn your living?”

He knew that, pointless as the question seemed, there was something that

mattered behind it; his face was being searched for the truth and the

ring of listeners had ceased to jostle and were waiting in silence for

the answer.

“I—I was a clerk,” he stammered, bewildered.

“A clerk,” the other repeated—as it seemed to Theodore suspiciously.

“There were a great many different kinds of clerks—they did all sorts of

things. What did you do?”

“I was a civil servant,” Theodore explained. “A clerk in the

Distribution Office—in Whitehall.”

“That means you wrote letters—did accounts?”

“Yes. Wrote letters, principally ... and filed them. And drew up

reports....”

The question sent him back through the ages. In the eye of his mind he

saw his daily office—the shelves, the rows of files, interminable

files—and himself, neat-suited, clean-fingered, at his desk.

Neat-suited, clean-fingered and idling through a short day’s work; with

Cassidy’s head at the desk by the window—and Birnbaum, the Jew boy, who

always wore a buttonhole.... He brought himself back with an effort,

from then to now—from the seemly remembrance of the life bureaucratic to

a crowd of evil-smelling savages....

“You were always that—just a clerk? You have never had any other way of

earning a living?”... And again he knew that the answer mattered, that

his “No!” was listened for intently.

“You weren’t ever an engineer?” the old man persisted. “Or a scientific

man of any kind?”

“No,” Theodore repeated, “I have never had anything to do with either

engineering or science. When I left the University I went straight into

the Distribution Office and I stayed there till the war.”

“University!” The word (so it seemed to him) was snatched at. “You’re a

college man?”

“I was at Oxford,” Theodore told him.

“A college man—then they must have taught you science. They always

taught it at colleges. Chemistry and that sort of thing—you know

chemistry?”

In the crowd was a sudden thrill that was almost murmur; and Theodore

hesitated before he answered, his tongue grown dry in his mouth.... Were

these people, these outcasts from civilization, hoping to find in him a

guide and saviour who should lighten the burden of their barbarism by

leading them back to the science which had once been a part of their

daily life, but of which they had no practical knowledge?... If so, how

far was it safe to lie to them? and how far, having lied, could he

disguise his dire ignorance of processes mechanical and chemical? What

would they hope from him, expect in the way of achievement and proof?...

Miracles, perhaps—sheer blank impossibilities....

“Science—they taught it you,” the old man was reiterating, insisting.

“Yes, they taught it me,” he stammered, delaying his answer. “That is to

say, I used to attend lectures....”

“Then you know chemistry? Gases and how to make them?... And machines—do

you know about machines? You could help us with machines—tell us how to

make one?”

The dirty old face peered up at him, waiting for his “Yes”; and he knew

the other faces that he could not see were peering from the shadow with

the same odd, sinister eagerness. All waiting, expectant.... The

temptation to lie was overwhelming and what held him back was no scruple

of conscience but the brute impossibility of making good his claim to a

knowledge he did not possess. The utter ignorance betrayed by the form

of the old man’s speech—“You know chemistry—do you know about

machines?”—would make no allowance for the difficulty of applying

knowledge and see no difference between theory and instant practice....

In his hopelessness he gave them the truth and the truth only.

“I have told you already I am not an engineer—I have never had any

training in mechanics. As for chemistry—I had to attend lectures at

school and college. But that was all—I never really studied it and I’m

afraid I remember very little—almost nothing that would be of any

practical use to you.... I don’t know what you want but, whatever it is,

it would need some sort of apparatus—a chemist has to have his tools

like other men. Even if I were a trained chemist I should need

those—even if I were a trained chemist I couldn’t separate gases with my

bare hands. For that sort of thing you need a laboratory—a workshop—the

proper appliances.... I’ll work for you in any way that’s possible—any

way—but you mustn’t expect impossibilities, chemistry and mechanics from

a man who hasn’t been trained in them.... And why should you expect me

to do what you can’t do yourselves—why should you? Is it fair?...”

There was no immediate answer, but suddenly he knew that the silence

around him had ceased to be threatening and tense. The old man’s eyes

had left his own; they were moving round the room and searching, as it

seemed, for assent.... In the end they came back to Theodore—and

judgment was given.

“If you are what you say you are, we will take you; but if you have lied

to us and you know what is forbidden, we shall find you out sooner or

later and, as sure as you stand there, we will kill you. If you are what

you say you are—a plain man like us and without devil’s knowledge—you

may come to us and bring your woman, if she also is without devil’s

knowledge. That is, if you can feed her; we have only enough for

ourselves. And from this day forward you will be our man; and to-morrow

you will take the oath to be what we are and live as we do, and be our

man against all our enemies and perils. Are you agreed to that?”

He was saved and Ada with him—so much he knew; but as yet it was not

clear what had saved him. He was to be their man—take an oath and be one

with them—and there was the phrase “devil’s knowledge,” twice

repeated.... He stared stupidly at the man who had granted his

life—realizing that his ordeal was over only when the packed room

emptied itself and the old man turned back to his fire.

XVIII

It was the phrase “devil’s knowledge” that, when his first bewilderment

was over, gave Theodore the clue to the meaning of the scene he had

lived through and the outlook of those whose man he would become on the

morrow. That and the sudden memory of Markham ... on the crest of the

centuries, on the night when the crest curled over...

He was so far taken into tribal fellowship that he had ceased to be

openly a prisoner; but the two men who, for the rest of the night,

shared with him the shelter of a lean-to hut, took care to bestow

themselves between their guest and the entrance. He got little out of

them in the way of enlightenment, for they were asleep almost as they

flung themselves down on their moss; but for hours, while they snored,

Theodore lay open-eyed, piecing together his fragmentary information of

the world into which he had strayed.

“Without devil’s knowledge”—that, if he understood aright, was the

qualification for admission to the life that had survived disaster.

“Devil’s knowledge” being—if he was not mad—the scientific, mechanical,

engineering lore which was the everyday acquirement of thousands on

thousands of ordinary civilized men. The everyday acquirements of

ordinary men were anathema; if he was not mad, his own life had been

granted him for the reason only that he was unskilled and devoid of

them. Ignorant, even as the men who spared him, of practical science and

mechanics—a plain man, like unto them.... Ignorance was prized here,

esteemed as a virtue—the old man’s query, “You’re a college man?” had

been accusation disguised.

In a flash it was clear to him, and he saw through the farce whereby he

had been tested and tempted; understood the motive that had prompted its

cruel low cunning and all that the cunning implied of acceptance of

barbarism, insistence on it.... What these outcasts, these remnants of

humanity feared above all things was a revival of the science, the

mechanical powers, that had wrecked their cities, their houses and their

lives and made them—what they were.... In knowledge was death and in

ignorance alone was a measure of peace and security; hence, fearing lest

he was of those who knew too much, they had tempted him to confess to

forbidden knowledge, to boast of it—that, having boasted, they might

kill him without mercy, make an end of his wits with his life. In the

torments inflicted by science destructive they had turned upon science

and renounced it; and, that their terrors might not be renewed in the

future, they were setting up against it an impassable barrier of

ignorance. They had put devil’s knowledge behind them—with intention for

ever.... If when they questioned him and led him on, he had yielded to

the natural impulse to lie, they would have knocked him on the head—like

vermin—without scruple; and the sweat broke out on him as he remembered

how nearly he had lied....

He sat up, sweating and staring at darkness, and thrust back the hair

from his forehead.... He was back among men—who, of set purpose and

deliberately, had turned their faces from the knowledge their fathers

had acquired by the patience and toil of generations! Who, of set

purpose and deliberately, sought to filch from their children the

heritage of the ages, the treasure of the mind of man!... That was what

it meant—the treasure of the mind of man! Renunciation of all that long

generations had striven for with patience and learning and devotion....

The impossibility and the treason of it—to know nothing, to forget all

their fathers had won for them.... He remembered old talk of education

as a birthright and the agitations of reformers and political parties.

To this end.

Who were they, he asked himself, these people who had made a decision so

terrible—what manner of men in the old life? Now they were seeking to

live as the beasts live, and not only the world material had died to

them, but the world of human aspiration.... To this they had come, these

people who once were human—the beast in them had conquered the brain ...

and like fire there blazed into his brain the commandment: “Thou shalt

not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge! Thou shalt not eat ...

lest ye die.”

The command, the prohibition, had suddenly a new significance. Was this,

then, the purport of a legend hitherto meaningless? Was this the truth

behind the childish symbol? The deadly truth that knowledge is power of

destruction—power of destruction too great for the human, the fallible,

to wield?... Odd that he had never thought of it before—that, familiar

all his life with a deadly truth, he had read it as primitive

childishness!

“Of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat ...

lest ye die....”

He sat numbly repeating the words half aloud till there flashed into his

brain a memory, a vision of Markham. In his room off Great Smith Street

on the night when war was declared—talking rapidly with his mouth full

of biscuit. “Only one thing I’m fairly certain about—I ought to have

been strangled at birth.... If the human animal must fight, it should

kill off its scientific men. Stamp out the race of ’em!”... What was

that but a paraphrase, a modern application of the command laid upon

Adam. “Of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not

eat ... lest ye die.”

To his first impulse—of amazement and shrinking, as from

treason—succeeded understanding of the outlook of these men and their

decision. More, he wondered why, even in the worst of his despair, he

had always believed in the persistence, the re-birth, of the

civilization that had bred him.... These people—he saw it—were logical,

as Markham had been logical—were wise after the event as Markham had

been wise before it; and it amazed him that in his porings and guessings

at a world reviving he had never hit upon their simple solution of the

eternal problem of war. Markham’s solution; which, till this moment, he

had not taken literally.... “You can’t combine the practice of science

and the art of war; in the end it’s one or the other. We, I think, are

going to prove that—very definitely.” One or the other. The fighting

instinct or knowledge!

Man, because he fights, must deny himself knowledge—which is power over

the forces of nature; the secrets of nature must be veiled from him by

his own ignorance—lest, when the impulse to strife wells up in him, they

serve him for infinite destruction. These renegades, in agony, had made

confession of their sin, of the corporate sin of a world; had faced the

brutality of their own nature; had denied themselves the fruit of the

Tree of Knowledge, and led themselves out of temptation. Since fight

they must, being men with men’s passions, they would limit their powers

of destruction.... So he read their strange self-denying ordinance.

The thought led him on to wonder whether they were alone in their

self-denying ordinance.... Surely not—unless they lived hidden, in

complete isolation, out of contact with others of their kind. And

obviously they did not live isolated; they had spoken of others who were

stronger, and of land that was theirs—implying a system of boundary and

penalty for trespass and theft. Further, the phrase “against all

enemies” indicated at least a possibility of the contact that was

bloodshed—yet enemies who had not renounced the advantage of mechanical

and scientific knowledge would be enemies who could overwhelm at the

first encounter a community fighting as barbarians.... What, then, was

their relation to a world more civilized and communities that had not

renounced?...

In the end, from sheer exhaustion, he ceased to surmise and argue with

himself—and slept suddenly and heavily, huddling for warmth on his

moss-bed against the body of his nearest gaoler.

* * * * *

It was a thrust from a foot that awakened him, and he crawled out

shivering into the half-light of dawn and the chill of a frostbitten

morning; the camp was alive and emerging from its shelters, the women

already occupied in cooking the morning meal. Theodore and his guardians

shared a bowl of steaming mess; a mingling of potatoes, dried greenstuff

and gobbets of meat which he guessed to be rat-flesh. They shared it

wolfishly, each man eating fast lest his fellows had more than their

portion; the meal over, the bowl was flung back to the women for

washing, and his gaolers—his mates now—relaxed; there was no further

reason for unfriendliness and they were willing enough to be

communicative, with the slow uncommunicativeness of men who have little

but their daily round to talk about.

They had neighbours, yes—at least what you might call neighbours; there

was a settlement, much the same size as their own, some three or four

hours’ journey away, on the other side of the river—that was the

nearest, and the tribesmen met sometimes but not often. Being

questioned, they explained that there was frequent trouble about fishing

rights—where our stretch of river ended and theirs began; trouble and,

now and then, fighting. Yes, of course, they lived as we do—how else

should they live?... They were better off for shelter, having taken

possession of a village—but we, in the hills, were much safer, not so

easy to attack or surprise.... No, they were not the only ones; on this

side the river, but farther away, was another settlement, a larger one;

there had been trouble with them, too, as they were very short of food

and sent out raiding parties. They had fallen on the village across the

water, carried off some of its winter stock and set light to three or

four houses; later—a month ago—they had fallen on us, less successfully

because we were warned and on the look-out for them.... That was why we

always have watchers at night—the watchers who saw your fire....

Even from a first halting conversation with men who found anything but

sheer statement of fact a difficulty, Theodore was able to construct in

outline the common life of this new humanity, its politics, internal and

external. The constitution of the tribe—the origin and keystone of the

social system—had been, in the beginning, as much a matter of reckless

chance as the mating of himself and Ada; small wandering groups of men,

who had come alive through the agony of war and famine, had been knit

together by a common need or a terror of loneliness, and insensibly

welded into a whole, an embryo community. It was a matter of chance,

too, in the beginning whether the meeting with another little wandering

group would result in bloodshed for the possession of food—sometimes for

the possession of women—or a welcome and the joining up of forces; but

to the joining-up process there was always a limit—the limit of

resources available. A tribe which desired to augment its strength as

against its rivals was faced with the difficulty of filling many hungry

mouths.... Their own community had once been faced with such a

difficulty and had solved it by driving out three or four of its weaker

members.

“What became of them?” asked Theodore, and was told no one knew. It was

winter when food ran short and they were driven out—and some of them had

come back after nightfall to the edge of the camp and cried to be

allowed in again. Till the men ran out and drove them off with sticks

and stone-throwing. After that they went and were no more seen....

Later, in the summer, there had broken out a sickness which again

reduced their numbers. When the wind blew for long up the valley it

brought a bad smell with it—and flies. That was what caused the

sickness. There had been a great deal of it; it was said that in a

village lower down the river more than half the inhabitants had died.

He surmised as he listened—and realized later—that it was the need of

avoiding constant strife that had broken the nomadic habit and

solidified the wandering and fluid groups into tribes with a settled

dwelling-place. Until a limit was set to their wanderings, groups and

single nomads drifted hither and thither in the search for food,

snarling at each other when they met; the end of sheer anarchy came with

appropriation, by a particular group, of a stretch of country which gave

some promise of supporting it. That entailed the institution of communal

property, the setting up of a barrier against the incursions of others—a

barrier which was also a limit beyond which the group must not trespass

on the land and possessions of others.... Swiftly, insensibly and

naturally, there was growing up a system of boundaries; boundaries

established, in the first place, by chance, by force or rough custom and

defined later by meetings between headmen of villages. Within its

boundaries each tribe or group existed as best it might, overstepping

its limits at its peril; but disputing at intervals—as men have disputed

since the world began—the precise terms of the agreement that defined

its limits. And, agreements being verbal only, there were many occasions

for dispute.

As he questioned his new-made comrades and heard their answers, there

died in Theodore’s heart the hope that these people into whose midst he

had stumbled—these people living like the beasts of the field—were but

dwellers on the outskirts of a world reviving and civilized. Of men

existing in any other fashion than their own he heard no mention, no

rumour; there was talk only of a camp here and a village there—where men

fished and hunted and scratched the ground that they might find the

remains of other’s sowing. The formal intercourse between the various

groups was suspicious and slyly diplomatic, an affair of the meetings of

headmen; though now and again, as life grew more certain, there was

trading in the form of barter. One community had settled in a stretch of

potato-fields, left derelict, which, even under rough and unskilled

cultivation, yielded more than sufficient for its needs; another, by

some miracle, had possessed itself of goats—three or four in the first

instance, found wild among the hills, escaped from the hungry,

indiscriminate slaughter which had bared the countryside of cattle.

These they bred, were envied for, guarded with arms in their hands and

occasionally bartered; not without bitter resentment and dispute at the

price their advantage exacted.... But of those who possessed more than

goats or the leavings of other men’s fields, who lived as men had been

wont to live in the days when the world was civilized—not a trace, not

so much as a word!

Direct questioning brought only a shake of the head. Towns—yes, of

course there were towns—further on; but no one lived in them—you could

not get a living out of pavements, bricks and hard roads.... Up the

river—the way he had come—was a stretch of dead land where nothing grew

and no one lived; he had seen it for himself and knew best what lay

beyond it. Lower down the river were the other camps like their own; so

many they knew of, and others they had heard of further off. In the

distance—on the other side of those hills—there had been a large town in

the old days; ruins of it—miles of streets and ruins—were lying on both

banks of the river. They themselves had never entered it—only seen it

from a distance—but those who lived nearer had said it was mostly in

ruins and that bodies were thick in the streets. In the summer, they had

heard, it was forbidden to enter it; because it was those who had gone

there in search of plunder who first were smitten with the sickness

which spread from their camp along the valley. It was the wind blowing

over the town—so they said—which brought the bad smell and the flies....

No, they did not know its name; had never heard it.

* * * * *

It was when he turned from the present to the past that Theodore found

himself against a barrier, the barrier unexpected of a plain

unwillingness to talk of the world that had vanished. When spoken of at

all it was spoken of carefully, with precaution and choosing of phrase,

and no man gave easily many details of his life before the Ruin.

At first the strange attitude puzzled him—he could make nothing of the

odd, suspicious glances whereby questioning was met, the attempt to

parry it, the cautious, non-committal replies; it was only by degrees

that he grasped their significance and understood how complete was that

renunciation of the past which these people had imposed upon themselves.

Forgetfulness—so Theodore learned in time—was more than a precaution; it

had been preached in the new-born world as a religion, accepted as an

article of faith. The prophet who had expressed the common need and

instinct in terms of religion had in due time made his appearance; a

wild-eyed, eloquent scarecrow of a man, aflame with belief in his sacred

mission and with loathing for the sins of the world. Coming from no one

knew where, he carried his gospel through a land left desolate,

proclaiming his creed of salvation through ignorance and crying woe on

the yet unrepentant sinners who should seek to preserve the deadly

knowledge that had brought God’s judgment on the world!

The seed of his doctrine fell on fruitful soil—on brutalized minds in

starved bodies; the shaggy, half-naked enthusiast was hailed as a

law-giver, saint and saviour, and the harvest of souls was abundant. On

every side the faith was embraced with fervour; the bitter experience of

the convert confirming the prophet’s inspiration. Tribe after tribe

reconciled itself to a God who had turned in wrath from His creatures,

offended by their upstart pretensions and encroachments on the power of

Deity. Tribe after tribe made confession of its sin, grovelling at the

feet of a jealous Omnipotence and renouncing the works of the devil and

the deadly pride of the intellect; and in tribe after tribe there were

hideous little massacres—blood-offerings, sweet and acceptable

sacrifice, that should purify mankind from its guilt. Those who were

known to have pried into the hidden secrets of Omnipotence were cut off

in their wickedness, lest they should corrupt others—were dragged to the

feet of the prophet and slaughtered, lest they should defile humanity

anew through the pride of the intellect and the power of their

devil-sent knowledge. Men known to be learned or suspected of learning;

men possessed of no more than mechanical training and skill.... There

was a story of one whom certain in the tribe would have spared—a doctor

of medicine who had comforted many in the past. But the prophet cried

out that this uttermost sacrifice, too, was demanded of them till,

frenzied with piety, they turned on their healer and beat out the brains

that had served them.... And over the bodies had followed an orgy of

repentance, of groaning and revivalistic prayer; the priest blessing the

sacrifice with uplifted arms and calling down the vengeance of God Most

High upon those who should be false to the vow they had sworn in the

blood of sinners. He chanted the vow, they repeating it after him;

taking oath to renounce the evil thing, to stamp it out wherever met

with, in man, in woman, in child.

The prophet (so Theodore learned) had continued his wanderings,

preaching the gospel as he went—through village after village and

settlement after settlement, till he passed beyond the confines of

report. He had bidden his followers expect his return; but whether he

came again or not, his doctrine was firmly established. He had left

behind him the germs of a priesthood, a tradition and a Law for his

converts—a Law which included the penalty of death for those who should

fail to keep the vow....

Lest it should fade from their minds, there were days set apart for

renewal of the vow, for public, ceremonial repetition of the creed and

doctrine of ignorance; and, with the Ruin an ever-present memory to the

remnant of humanity, the tendency was to interpret the Law with all

strictness—there were devotees and fanatics who watched with a mingling

of animal fear and religious hate for signs of relapse and backsliding.

Denunciation was of all things dreaded; and outspoken regret for a world

that had passed had more than once been pretext for denunciation. To

dwell in speech on the doings of that world might be interpreted—had

been interpreted—as a hankering after the Thing Forbidden, a desire to

revive the Accursed.... Hence the parrying of questions, the barrier of

protective silence which the newcomer broke through with difficulty.

* * * * *

It took more than a day for Theodore to understand his new world and its

meaning, to grasp its social system and civil and religious polity; but

at the end of one day he knew roughly the conditions in which he was

destined to live out the rest of his life.

Not that, in the beginning, he admitted that so he must live; it was

long—many years—before he resigned himself to the knowledge that his

limits, till death released him, were the narrow limits of his tribe.

For years he held secretly—but none the less fast—to the hope of a

civilization that must one day reveal itself, advance and overwhelm his

barbarians. For years he strained his eyes for the coming of its

pioneers, its saviours; it was long—very long—before he gave up his

hopes and faced the certainty that, if the world he had known continued

to exist, it existed too feebly and too far away to stretch out to

himself and his surroundings.

There were times when the longing for it flared and burned in him, and

he sought desperately for traces of the world he had known—running

hither and thither in search of it. Under pretext of a hunting

expedition he would absent himself from the tribe, and trespass—often at

the imminent risk of death—on the territory of alien communities;

returning, after days, no nearer to his goal and no wiser for his

stealthy prowlings. The life of alien communities, the prospect revealed

from strange hills, was, to all intents and purposes, the life and

outlook of his tribe.... He would question the occasional stranger from

a distant village, in the hope of at least a word, a rumour—a rumour

that might give guidance for further and more hopeful search. But those

who came from distant villages spoke only of villages more distant; of

other hunting-grounds, of other tribal feuds, of other long stretches of

ruin.... The world, so far as it came within his ken, was cut to one

pattern, the pattern of a cowed and brutalized man, who bent his face to

the stubborn ground and forgot the cunning of his fathers.

XIX

The actual and formal ceremony of his acceptance into the little

community took place after night had fallen; deferred to that hour in

part because, with nightfall, the day’s labour ceased and the fishermen

and snarers of birds had returned to their dwelling-place—and in part

because darkness, lit only by the glow of torches and wood fires, lent

an added solemnity to the rite.

Earlier in the day the new tribesman had been summoned to a second

interview with the headman. The old man questioned him shrewdly enough

as to his road, the nature of his winter food store and the feasibility

of transporting it; and it was settled finally that Theodore should

depart with the morning accompanied by another from the tribe. The pair

could row and tow up the river a flat-bottomed boat which was one of the

community’s possessions; and as his own camp was only a few hours’ tramp

from navigable water, he and his companion should be able, with a day or

two, to make three or four journeys from camp to riverside and load the

boat with as much as it would carry of his hoard. If the weather

favoured—if snow held off and storm—they might return within five or six

days.

His instructions received, he was dismissed; and bidden, since he would

need a hut for himself and his wife, to set about its building at once.

A site was allotted him on the edge of the copse that was the centre of

the tribal life and he was granted the use of some of the tools that

were common property—an axe, a mallet, and a spade. By the time the sun

set his dwelling had made some progress; stakes had been driven in to

serve as corner-posts, and logs laid from one to the other.

With dusk, by twos and threes, the men had drifted back to the village

and the women were busied with the cooking of supper at fires that

blazed in the open, so long as the weather was dry, as well as at the

mud-built ovens that sheltered a flame from the wind. When they kept

their men waiting for the plates and bowls of food there was impatient

shouting and now and then a blow.... Theodore, as he ate his supper,

noted suddenly that though one or two of the women carried babies, the

camp contained no child that was older than the crawling stage—no child

that survived the Disaster.

The night was rainless, and when the meal was over the men, for the most

part, lay or crouched near their fires—some torpid, some talking with

their women; but they roused and stood upright when the ceremony began,

and the headman, calling for silence, beckoned with a dirty claw to

Theodore.

“Here!” said Theodore and went to him. The old man was seated on the

trunk of a fallen tree; he waited till the tribesmen, one and all, had

ranged themselves on either hand and then signed to Theodore to kneel.

“Give me both your hands,” he ordered—and held them between his own. As

in days long past—(so Theodore remembered)—the overlord, the suzerain,

had taken the hands of his vassal.... Did he remember—this latter-day

barbarian—the ritual of chivalry, the feudal customs of Capet,

Hohenstaufen and Plantagenet? Or was his imitation of their lordly rite

unconscious?

“So that you may live and be one of us,” the old man began, “you will

swear two things—to be true to your fellows and humble and meek towards

God. Before God and before all of us you will take your oath; and, if

you break it, may you die the death of the wicked and may fire consume

you to eternity!”

The words were intoned and not spoken for the first time: the ritual of

the ceremony was established, and at definite points and intervals the

bystanders broke in with a mutter of approval or warning—already

traditional.

“First: you will swear, till death takes you, to be our man against all

perils and enemies.”

“I will be your man till death takes me,” swore Theodore, “against all

perils and enemies.”

“You are witness,” said the headman, looking round, and was answered by

a murmur from the listeners. The women did not join in it—they had, it

seemed, no right of vote or assent; but they had drawn near, every one

of them, and were peering at the ceremony from beyond the shoulders of

their men.

“And now,” came the order, “you will take the oath to God, to purify

your heart and renounce devil’s knowledge—for yourself and for those who

come after you. Swear it after me, word by holy word—and swear it with

your heart as with your lips.”

And word by word, and line by line, Theodore repeated the formula that

cut him off from the world of his youth and the heritage of all the

ages. It was a rhythmical formula, its phrasing often Biblical;

instinctively the prophet, when he framed his new ritual, had followed

the music of the old.... Written pages and the stonework of churches

might perish, but the word that was spoken endured....

“I do swear and take oath, before God and before man, that I will walk

humbly all my days and put from me the pride of the intellect.

Remembering that the meek shall inherit the earth and that the poor in

spirit are acceptable in the sight of the Most High. Therefore, I do

swear and take oath that I will purify my heart of that which is

forbidden, that I will renounce and drive out all memory of the learning

which it is not meant for me, who am sinful man, to know. What I know

and remember of that which is forbidden shall be dead to me and as if it

had never been born.... May my hands be struck off before I set them to

the making of that which is forbidden; and may blindness smite me if I

seek to pry into the hidden mysteries of God. Into the secrets of the

earth, into the secrets of the air, the secrets of water or fire. For

the Lord our God is a jealous God and the secrets of earth, air, water

and fire are sacred to Him Who made them and must not be revealed to

sinners.... Therefore, I pray that my tongue may rot in my mouth before

I speak one word that shall kindle the desire of others for that which

must not be revealed.

“I call upon the Lord Most High, Who made heaven and earth and all that

in them is, to hear this oath that I have sworn; and, in the day that I

am false to it, I call on Him to blast me with His utmost wrath.... And

I call upon my fellow-men to hear this oath that I have sworn; may they

shed my blood without mercy, in the day that I am false to it, by

thought, word or deed. In the day that I am false to it may they visit

my sin on my head; as I will visit their sin on man, woman or child who,

in my sight or in my hearing, shall hanker after that which is

forbidden.

“For so only shall we cleanse and purify our hearts; so only shall we

live without devil’s knowledge and bring up our children without it.

That the land may have peace in our days and that the wrath of the Most

High may be averted from us.

“So help me God. Amen.”

“Amen!” came back in a chorus from the shadowy group on either hand; and

when the echo of their voices had died in the night the headman loosed

Theodore’s hands.

He rose and looked round him on the faces that were near enough to

see—searched them in the firelight for regret or a memory of the

past ... and, beyond and behind the ring of stolid expressionless faces

and the desert silence, saw Markham toasting the centuries, heard the

moving thunder of a multitude and the prayer of the Westminster

bells....

Lord—through—this—hour ...

The old man stretched out a hand in token of comradeship admitted—and

Theodore took it mechanically.

XX

With dawn Theodore and a stolid companion, appointed by the headman, set

out on their journey to the camp where Ada awaited them. They reached it

only after weatherbound delays; as they towed their boat against a

current that was almost too strong for their paddling they were

overtaken by a blinding snowstorm and escaped from it barely with their

lives. They made fast their boat to the stump of a tree and groped

through the smother to a shed near the river’s edge; and there, for the

better part of a day, they sheltered while the storm lasted. When it

moderated and they pushed on through the dead village, a thick sheet of

snow had obliterated the minor landmarks whereby Theodore had been wont

to guide his way. It was close upon sunset on the third day of their

journey when they trudged into the hidden valley and the familiar

tree-clump came in sight—and dusk was thickening into moonless dark when

Ada, hearing voices, ran forward with a scream of welcome. She sobbed

and laughed incoherently as she clung round her husband’s neck;

hysterical, perhaps near insanity, through loneliness and the terror of

loneliness.

In the intensity of her relief at the ending of her ordeal she forgot,

at first, to be greatly disappointed because the world of Theodore’s

discovery was a world without a cinema or char-à-banc; with her craving

for company, it was sheer delight to know that in a few days more she

would be in the midst of some two score human beings, whatever their

manner of living. It took time and explanation to make her understand

that the desire for char-à-banc and cinema must no longer be openly

expressed; she stared uncomprehendingly when Theodore strove to make

clear to her the religious, as well as the practical, idea that lay

behind the prohibition.

The need for caution was the more urgent since he had learned in the

course of the return journey that his appointed companion was a fanatic

in the new faith, a penitent who groaned to his offended Deity; savagely

pure-hearted in the cult of ignorance and savagely suspicious of the

backslider.

The religious temperament was something so far removed from Ada’s

experience that he found it impossible at a first hearing to convince

her of the unknown danger of intolerant and distorted faith. His mention

of a religious aspect to their new difficulties brought the vague

rejoinder that her mother was a Baptist but her aunt had been married in

a Catholic church to an Irishman; and in the end he gave up his attempt

at explanation and snapped out an order instead.

“You’re to be careful how you talk to them. Until you get to know them,

you’d better say nothing about what you used to do in the old times.

Nothing at all—do you hear?...”

She stared, uncomprehending, but realized the order was an order. What

she did understand and tremble at was the lack of provision for her

coming ordeal of childbirth, and there was a burst of loud weeping and

terrified protest when Theodore admitted, in answer to her questions,

that he had found no trace of either hospitals, nurses or doctors. For

the time being he soothed her with a hurried promise of seeking them

further afield—pushing on to find them (they were sure to be found) when

she was settled in comfort and safety with other women to look after

her.... For the time being, he told himself, the soothing deceit was a

necessity; she would understand later—see for herself what was

possible—settle down and accept the inevitable.

She was all eagerness to start, but it took two full days before the

requisite number of journeys had been made to the river—their stores

packed on an improvised sled, dragged heavily across the miles of frozen

snow and stowed in the flat-bottomed boat. Then, on the third day, Ada

herself made the journey; helped along by the men who, when the ground

was smooth enough, set her on the sled and dragged her. In spite of

their help she needed many halts for rest, and the distance between camp

and river took most of the hours of daylight to accomplish; hence they

sheltered for the night in a cottage not far from the river’s bank, and

with morning dropped downstream in the boat—paddling cautiously as they

rounded each bend and always on their guard against the possibility of

unfriendly meetings. The long desolation they passed through was a

no-man’s land; any stray hunter, therefore, might deem himself at

liberty to attack whom he saw and seize what he found in their

possession. But throughout the short day was neither sight nor sound of

man and by sunset the current, running swollen and rapidly, had brought

them to their destined landing.... After that came the mooring of the

boat in the reeds and the hiding, on the bank of the river, of the

stores they could not carry; then the long uphill tramp over snow, in

the gathering darkness—with Ada shivering, crying from weariness and

clinging to her husband’s arm. And—at last—the glow of fires, through

tree-trunks; with figures moving round them, shaggy men and unkempt

women.... Their home!

The unkempt women met their fellow not unkindly. They drew her to the

fire and rubbed her frozen hands; then, while one brought a bowl of

steaming mess, another laid dry moss and heather in the bed-place of her

unfinished dwelling. A protesting baby was wakened from its sleep and

dandled for her comfort and inspection—its mother giving frank and

loud-voiced details concerning the manner of its birth. There was a

rough and good-natured attempt to raise her drooping spirits, and Ada,

fed and warmed, brightened visibly and responded to the clack of

tongues. This, at least, the new world had restored to her—the blessing

of loud voices raised in chatter.... All the same, on the second night

of their new life Theodore, awake in the darkness, heard her sniffing

and swallowing her tears.

“What is it?” he asked and she clung to him miserably and wept her

forebodings on his shoulder. Not only forebodings of her coming ordeal

in the absence of hospitals and doctors, but—was this, in truth, to be

the world? These people—so they told her—knew of no other existing; but

what had become of all the towns? The trams, the shops, the life of the

towns—her life—where was it? It must be somewhere—a little way off—where

was it?... He soothed her with difficulty, repeating his warnings on the

danger of open regrets for the past and reminding her that to-morrow she

also would be called on for the oath.

“I know,” she whimpered. “Of course I’ll taike an oath if I must. But

you can’t ’elp thinking—if you swear yourself black in the faice, you

can’t ’elp thinking.”

“Whatever you think,” he insisted, “you mustn’t say it—to anyone.”

“I know,” she snuffled obediently, “I shan’t say nothing ... but, oh

Gawd, oh Gawd—aren’t we ever going to be ’appy again?”

He knew what she was weeping for—shaking with miserable sobs; the

evenings at the pictures, the little bits of machine-made finery, the

petty products of “devil’s knowledge” that had made up her daily life.

The cry to her “Gawd” was a prayer for the return of these things and

the hope of them had so far sustained her in peril, hardship and

loneliness. Pictures and finery had always been there, just a mile or

two beyond the horizon—awaiting her enjoyment so soon as it was safe to

reach them. Now, in her overpowering misery and darkness of soul, she

was facing the dread possibility that they no longer awaited her, that

the horizon was immeasurable, infinite.... Guns and bombs and

poisons—nobody wanted them and she understood people making up their

minds to do without ’em. But the other things—you couldn’t go on living

without the other things—shops and proper houses and railways....

“It can’t be for always,” she persisted, “it can’t be”—and was cheered

by the sudden heat of his agreement, the sudden note of protest in his

voice. The knowledge that he sympathized encouraged her and, with her

head on his shoulder, sniffing, but comforted, she began to plan out

their deliverance.

“They must be somewhere—the people that live like they used to. Keepin’

quiet, I dessay, till things gets more settled. When things is settled

they’ll get a move on and come along and find us. It stands to reason

they can’t be so very far off, because I remember the teacher tellin’ us

when we ’ad our jography lesson that England’s quite a small country. So

they ’aven’t got so very far to come.... I expect an aeroplane’ll come

first.”

He felt her thrill in expectation of the moment when she sighted the

swiftly moving speck aloft, the bearer of deliverance drawing nigh.

Wouldn’t it be heavenly when they saw one at last—after all these awful

months and years!... In the war they were beastly, but, now that the war

was over, what had become of all the passenger ’planes and the airships?

She was always looking out for one—always; every morning when she came

out of the hut the first thing she did was to look up at the sky.... And

some day one was bound to come. When things had settled down and got

straight, it was bound to....

But it never did; and in the end she ceased to look for it.

* * * * *

His attempts—they were many in the first few years—to break away from

his world and his bondage of ignorance were made always with cunning

precaution and subterfuge; not even the pitiable need of his wife would

have served as excuse for the backsliding which was search after the

forbidden. To a fanaticism dominated by the masculine element the pains

of childbirth were once more an ordinance of God; and when, a few weeks

before Ada’s time of trial, Theodore absented himself from the camp for

a night or two, he gave no one (save Ada) warning of his journey, and

later accounted for his absence by a plausible story of straying and a

hunter’s misfortunes. He had ceased, since he took up his dwelling with

the tribe, to believe in the neighbourhood of a civilization in being;

all he hoped for was the neighbourhood, not too distant, of men who had

not acquiesced in ruin and put hope of recovery behind them. What he

sought primarily was that aid and comfort in childbirth for which his

wife appealed to him with insistence that grew daily more terrified;

what he sought fundamentally was escape from a people vowed to

ignorance.

The goal of his first journey was the town lying lower down the river,

the forbidden city which had once bred pestilence and flies. He

approached it deviously, keeping to the hills and avoiding districts he

knew to be inhabited; hoping against hope, that, in spite of report, he

might find some rebuilding of a civic existence and human life as he had

known it.... What he found when he came down from the foothills and

trudged through its outskirts was the customary silent desolation; a

desolation flooded and smelling of foul water—untenanted streets that

were channels and backwaters, and others where the slime of years lay

thick and scum bred rank vegetation.

Silent streets and empty houses had long been familiar to him, but until

that day he had not known how swiftly nature, left to herself, could

take hold of them. The river and the life that sprang from it was

overwhelming what man had deserted. Three winters of neglect in a

low-lying, well-watered country had wrought havoc with the work of the

farmer and the engineer; streams which had been channelled and guided

for centuries had already burst their way back to freedom. With every

flooded winter more banks were undermined, more channels silted up and

shifted; and that which had been ploughland, copse or water-meadow was

relapsing into bog undrained. The valley above and below the town was a

green swamp studded with reedy little pools; a refuge for the waterbird

where a man would set foot at his peril. Buildings here and there stood

rotting, forlorn and inaccessible—barns, sheds and farmhouses, their

walls leaning drunkenly as foundations shifted in the mud; and in the

town itself, as surely, if more slowly, the waters were taking

possession.... Towns had vanished, he knew—vanished so completely that

their very sites had been matter of dispute to antiquarians—but never

till to-day had he visualized the process; the rising of layer on layer

of mud, the sapping of foundations by water. The forces that made ruin

and the forces that buried it; flood and frost and the persistent thrust

of vegetation. As the waterlogged ground slid beneath them, rows of

jerry-built houses were sagging and cracking to their fall; here and

there one had crumbled and lay in a rubble heap, the water curdling at

its base.... How many life-times, he wondered, till the river had the

best of it and the houses where men had gone out and in were one and all

of them a rubble heap—under water and mud and rank greenery? He saw

them, decades or centuries ahead, as a waste, a stretch of bogland where

the river idled; bogland, now flooded, now drying and cracked in the

sun; and with broken green islets still thrusting through the

swamp—broken green islets of moss-covered rock that underneath was brick

and mortar. In time it might be—with more decades or centuries—the

islets also would sink lower in the swamp, disappear....

The process, unhindered, was certain as sunrise; the important little

streets that humanity had built for its vanished needs and its vanished

business would be absorbed into an indifferent wilderness, in all things

sufficient to itself. The rigid important little streets had been no

more than an episode in the ceaseless life of the wilderness; an episode

ending in failure, to be decently buried and forgotten.

He plodded aimlessly through street after street that was fordable till

the shell of a “County Infirmary” mocked at Ada’s hopes and recalled the

first purpose of his journey; a gaunt sodden building, the name yet

visible on walls that sweated fungi and mould. Then, that he might leave

nothing undone in the way of help and search, he trudged and waded to

the lower outskirts of the town; where the roads lost themselves in

grass and flooded water, and there stretched to the limit of his

eyesight a dull winter landscape without sign of living care or

habitation. In the end—having strained his eyes after that which was

not—he turned to slink back to his own place; skirting alien territory

where the sight of a stranger might mean an alarm and a manhunt, and

sheltering at night where his fire might be hidden from the watcher.

“You ’aven’t found nothin’?” Ada whimpered, when he had told his

necessary lies to the curious and they were out of earshot in their hut.

Her eyes had grown piteous when he stumbled in alone; she had dreamt in

his absence of sudden and miraculous deliverance—following him in fancy

through streets with tramlines, where dwelt women who wore corsets—also

doctors. Who, perhaps, when they knew the greatness of her need, would

send a motor-ambulance—to fetch her to a bed with sheets on it.

“Nothing,” he told her almost roughly, afraid to show pity. “No doctors,

no houses fit to live in. Wherever I’ve been and as far as I could

see—it’s like this.”

XXI

It was in the third spring after the Ruin of Man that Ada’s time was

accomplished and she bore a son to her husband; on a day in late April

or early May there was going and coming round the shelter that was

Theodore’s home. The elder women of the tribe, by right of their

experience, took possession, and from early morning till long after

nightfall they busied themselves with the torment and mystery of birth;

and with the aid of nothing but their rough and unskilled kindliness Ada

suffered and brought forth a squalling red mannikin—the heir of the ages

and their outcast. The child lived and, despite its mother’s

fecklessness, was lusty; as a boy, ran shoeless, and, in summer, naked

as Adam; and grew to his primitive manhood without letters, knowing of

the world that was past and gone only legends derived from his elders.

His coming, to Theodore, meant more than paternity; the birth of his son

made him one with the life of the tribe. By the child’s wants and

helplessness—still more when other children followed—his father was tied

to an existence which offered the necessary measure of security; to the

stretch of land where he had the right to hunt unmolested, the patch he

had the right to sow and reap, and the company of those who would aid

him in protecting his children. He had given his hostages to fortune and

the limits set to his secret expeditions in search of a lost world were

the limits set by the needs of those dependent on him, by his fear of

leaving them too long unprotected, unprovided for.

He learned much from his firstborn and the brothers and sisters who

followed him; not only the intimate lore of his fatherhood, but the lore

and outlook of man bred uncivilized, and the traditions, in making, of a

world to come—which in all things would resemble the old traditions

handed down by a world that had died. His children lived naturally the

life that had been forced upon their father and inherited ignorance as a

birthright; growing up—such as lived through the perils of

childhood—without knowledge of the past and untempted by the sin of the

intellect. The oath which Theodore, like every new-made father, was

called on to swear in the name of the child he had given to the tribe,

had a meaning to those who had lived through Disaster and witnessed the

Ruin of Man; to the next generation the vow was a formula only, a

renunciation of that they had never possessed. They could not, if they

would, instruct their children in the secrets of God, the forbidden lore

of the intellect.

By the time his first son was of an age to think and question, Theodore

understood more than the growth and workings of a child-mind—much that

had hitherto seemed dark and fantastic in the origins of a world that

had ended with the Ruin of Man. It was the workings of a child-mind that

made oddly clear to him the significance of primitive religious doctrine

and beliefs handed down through the ages—the once meaningless doctrine

of the Fall of Man and the belief in a vanished Golden Age. These the

boy, unprompted, evolved from his own knowledge and the talk of his

elders, accepting them spontaneously and naturally.

In Theodore’s childhood the Golden Age had been a myth and pleasant

fancy of the ancients, and the Fall of Man as distant as the Book of

Genesis and unreal as the tale of Puss-in-Boots; to his children, one

and all, the legends of his infancy were close and undoubted realities.

The Golden Age was a wondrous condition of yesterday; the Fall—the

Ruin—its catastrophic overthrow, an experience their father had

survived. The fields and hillsides where they worked, played and

wandered were still littered with strange relics of the Golden Age—the

vanished, fruitful, incomprehensible world whence their parents had been

cast into the outer darkness of everyday hardship as a penalty for the

sin of mankind. The sin unforgivable of grasping at the knowledge which

had made them like unto gods; a mad ambition which not only they but

their children’s children must atone for in the sweat of their brow....

More than once Theodore suspected in the secret recesses of his

youngsters’ minds a natural and wondering contempt for the men of the

last generation; the fools and blind who had overreached themselves and

forfeited the splendour of the Golden Age by their blundering greed and

unwisdom. So history was writing itself in their minds; making of a race

that had acquiesced in science and drifted to destruction a legendary

people whose sin was deliberate—a people whose encroachments had angered

a self-important Deity and brought down his wrath upon their heads. It

was a history inseparable from religious belief; its opening chapters

identical in all essentials with the legendary history of an epoch that

had ceased to exist.

Once his eight-year boy, planted sturdily before him, demanded a plain

explanation of the folly of his father’s contemporaries.

“Why,” he asked frowning, “did the people want to find out God’s

secrets?”

Theodore thought of Ada and the countless millions like her, leaned his

chin on his hand and smiled grimly.

“Some of us didn’t,” he answered. “Some of us—many of us—had no interest

in the secrets of God. We made use of them when others found them out,

but we, ourselves, were quite content to be ignorant. Ignorant in all

things.”

“I know,” the child assented, puzzled by his father’s smile. “The good

ones didn’t want to—the good ones like you and Mummy. But the others—all

the wicked ones—why did they? It was stupid of them.”

“They wanted to find out,” said Theodore, “and there have always been

people like that. From the beginning, the very beginning of things—ever

since there were men on the earth. The desire to know burned them like a

fire. There is an old story of a woman who brought great trouble into

the world because she wanted to know. She was given a box and told never

to open it; but she disobeyed because she was filled with a great

curiosity to know what had been put inside it. Her longing tormented her

night and day and she could think of nothing else; till at last she

opened the box and horrible creatures flew out.”

The boy, interested, demanded more of Pandora and the horrible

creatures. “Is it a true story?” he asked when his father had given such

further details as he managed to remember and invent.

“Yes,” Theodore told him, “I believe it is a true story. It was so long

ago that we cannot tell exactly how it happened: I may not have told it

you quite rightly, but on the whole it is a true story.... And the

wicked people—our wicked people who brought ruin on the world—were much

like Pandora and her box. It was the same thing over again; they wanted

to know so strongly that they forgot everything else; they had only the

longing to find out and it seemed as if nothing else mattered.”

“Weren’t they afraid?” the boy asked doubtfully, still puzzled by his

father’s odd smile. “Afraid of what would happen to them?”

“No,” Theodore answered. “Until it was too late and they saw what they

had done, I don’t think many were afraid. Here and there, before the

end, some began to be frightened, but most of them didn’t see where they

were going.”

“But they must have known,” his son insisted, frowning. “God told them

He would punish them if they tried to learn His secrets.”

“Yes,” Theodore assented—with the orthodox truth, more deceptive than a

lie, that meant one thing to him and another to the world barbarian.

“Yes, God told them so; but though He said it very plainly not many of

them understood....” They were talking, he knew, across more than the

gulf between the mind of a child and a man; between them lay the

centuries, the barrier of many generations. To his son, now and always,

dead and gone chemists and mathematicians must appear in the likeness of

present evildoers—raiders of the territory and robbers of the property

of God; to his son, now and always, inventors and spectacled professors

in mortar-boards would be greedy, foolish chieftains who planned war

against Heaven as a tribe plans assault upon its rivals. These were and

must always be his “wicked,” his destroyers of the Golden Age; his life

and outlook being what it was, how should he picture the war against

Heaven as pure-hearted, instinctive and unconscious?

“Why not?” the child persisted, repeating the question when his father

stroked his head absently.

“Because ... they did not know themselves. If they had known themselves

and their own passions they would have seen why knowledge was

forbidden.”

“Yes,” said the child vaguely—and passed to the matter that interested

him.

“Why didn’t the others make them understand? You and the other good

ones?”

“Because,” said Theodore, “we ourselves didn’t understand. That was the

blunder—the sin—of the rest of us. We didn’t seek after knowledge, but

we took the fruits of other men’s knowledge and ate.”

(Unconsciously he made use of the familiar hereditary simile.)

“I’d have killed them,” his son declared firmly. “Every one. I’d have

told them to stop, and then, if they wouldn’t, I’d have killed them.

Thrown them in the river—or hammered them with stones till they died.

That’s what I’d have done.”

“No,” Theodore told him, “you wouldn’t have killed them.... One of them

said the same thing to me—one of the wicked ones. He said we should have

stamped out the race of them. Afterwards I knew he was right, but at the

time I didn’t understand. I couldn’t. I heard what he said, but the

words had no real meaning for me.”

He saw something that was almost contempt in his son’s eyes and took the

grubby face between his hands.

“That same wicked man—who was also very wise—told me something else that

is as true for you as it was for me; he said that we never know anything

except through our own experience. I might tell you that the sun is warm

or the water is cold, but if you had never felt the heat of the sun or

the cold of the water you would not know what I meant. And it was like

that with us; there were always some few who understood that knowledge

was a flame that, in the end, would burn us—but the rest of us couldn’t

even try to save ourselves until after we were burned.”

He stroked the grubby face as he released it.

“That’s the Law, son; and all that matters you’ll learn that way. That

way and no other—just as we did.”

* * * * *

In time he found himself recalling, with strange interest, the

fairy-tales of his childhood; he spent long hours re-weaving and piecing

them together, searching his memory for half-remembered fragments of

what had once seemed fantasy or nonsense invented for the nursery. The

hobgoblins and heroes of his nursery days were transformed and made

suddenly possible; looking through the mind of a new generation, he saw

that they might have been as human and prosaic as himself. More—he came

to know that he and his commonplace, civilized contemporaries would be

the heroes and hobgoblins of the future.

The process, the odd transformation, would be simple as it was

inevitable. It was forbidden, by the spirit and letter of the Vow, to

awaken youthful curiosity concerning the past—youthful curiosity whose

end might be youthful experiment; but women, in spite of all vows and

prohibitions, would gossip to each other of their memories. While they

talked their children would listen, open-eyed and puzzled; and when a

youngster demanded the meaning of an unfamiliar term or impossible

happening, the explanation, as a matter of course, took the form of

analogy, of comparison with the known and familiar. The aeroplane was a

bird extinct and monstrous—larger, many times larger, than the flapping

heron or the owl; the bomb was more dreadful than a lightning stroke;

the tram, train or motor a gigantic wheelbarrow that ran without man or

beast to drag it.... The ignorance of science of those who told, the yet

greater ignorance of those who heard, resulted, inevitably, before many

years had passed, in myth and religious legend—an outwardly fantastic

statement of actual fact and truth. The children, piecing together their

fragments of incomprehensible information, made their own image of the

past—to be handed on later to their sons; an image of a world fantastic,

enchanted and amazing, destroyed, as a judgment for sin against God, by

strange, fire-breathing beasts and bolts from heaven. A world of

gigantic fauna and bewitched chariots; likewise of sorcerers, their

masters—whom God and the righteous had exterminated.... So Theodore

realized—as his children grew and he heard them talk—must a race that

knew nothing of science explain the dead wonders of science; from the

message that flashes round the world in seconds to the petrol-engine and

the magic slumber of chloroform. That which is outside the power and

beyond the understanding of man has always been denounced as magic; and

steam, electricity, chemical action, were outside the power and beyond

the understanding of men born after the Ruin. In default of

understanding they must needs fall back on a wizardry known to their

fathers; thus he and his contemporaries to their children’s children

would be semi-supernatural beings, fit comrades of Sindbad, of Perseus,

or the Quatre Fils Aymon: giants with great voices that called to each

other across continents and vasty deeps; possessors of seven-league

boots, magic steeds and flying carpets—of all the stock-in-trade of the

fairy-tale.... Belief in the demi-god was a natural growth and product

of the world wherein his son grew to manhood.

Given time and black ignorance of mechanics and science, and the

engineer would be promoted to a giant or demi-god; who, by virtue of a

strength that was more than human, dammed rivers, drained bogs and

pierced mountains. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall

be”—and always in the past there had been giants. Titans—and Hercules,

removing mighty obstacles and cleansing the stables of Augeas. He came

to understand that all wonders were facts misinterpreted and that (given

time and ignorance) a post-office underling, tapping out his Morse code,

might be seen as a geni or an Oberon—the absolute master of obedient

sprites who could lay their girdles round the earth; and he pictured a

college-bred, sober-suited Hercules planning his Labours in the office

of a limited company—jotting down figures, estimating costs and scanning

the reports of geologists. Figures and reports, like his tunnels and

dams, would pass into the limbo of science forgotten and forbidden, but

the memory of his labours, his defiance of brute nature, would live on

as the story of a demi-god; and the childhood that was barbarism would

explain his achievements by a giant strength that could tear down trees

and move mountains.

The idea took fast root and grew in him—the idea of a world that, time

and again, had returned to the helplessness of childhood. He saw science

as the burden that, time and again, the race found intolerable; as

Dead-Sea fruit that turned to ashes in the mouth, as riches that

humanity strove for, attained and renounced—renounced because it dared

not keep them. In his hours of dreaming he made fairies and demi-gods

out of dapper little sedentary persons, the senders of forgotten

telegrams, with forgotten engines—motor-cars and aeroplanes—at their

insignificant command; and once, in the night, when Ada snored beside

him, he asked himself if Lucifer, Son of the Morning—Lucifer who strove

with his God and was worsted—were more, in his beginnings, than a

scientist intent on his work? A chemist, a spectacled professor,

resplendent only in degrees and learning? An Archfiend of Knowledge who

had sinned against God in the secret places of a laboratory and not upon

the shining plains of Heaven? And whom ignorance and time had glorified

into the Tempter, the Evil One—setting him magnificently in the flaming

Hell which he and his like, by their skill and patience, had created and

let loose upon man?... This, at least, was certain; that in years to

come and under other names, his children’s children would retell the

story of Lucifer, Son of the Morning; the Enemy of Man who was flung out

of Heaven because, in his overweening vanity, he encroached on the power

of a God.

It was the new world that taught him that man invents nothing, is

incapable of pure invention; that what seem his wildest, most fantastic

imaginings are no more than ineffective, distorted attempts to set down

a half-forgotten experience. What had once appeared prophecies he saw to

be memories; the Day of Judgment, when the heavens should flame and men

call upon the rocks to cover them, belonged to the past before it

belonged to the future. The forecast of its terrors was possible only to

a people that had known them as realities; a people troubled by a dim

race-memory of the conquest of the air and catastrophe hurled from the

skies....

So, at least, his children taught him to believe.

XXII

With years and rough husbandry the resources of the tribe were augmented

and it emerged from its first starved misery; more land was brought

under cultivation and, as tillage improved and better crops were raised,

the little community was less dependent on the haphazard luck of its

fishing and snaring and lived further from the line of utter want.

While, save in bad seasons, the inter-tribal raiding that was caused by

sheer starvation was less frequent. Even so, strife was frequent

enough—small intermittent feud that flared now and again into savagery;

the desire of a growing community to extend its hunting-grounds at the

expense of a neighbour meant, almost inevitably, appeal to the right of

the strongest. Other quarrels had their origin in the border inroads and

reprisals of poachers or a barbaric setting of the eternal story that

was old when Helen launched a thousand ships.

With husbandry, even rough husbandry, came the small beginnings of

commerce, the barter and exchange of one man’s superfluities for the

produce of another man’s fields. Cold and nakedness stimulated ingenuity

in the matter of clothing, even in a society whose original members had

in large part been bred to depend in all things on the aid of the

machine and to earn a livelihood by the performance of one action

only—the tending of one lathe, the accomplishment of one stereotyped

mechanical process. Outcasts of civilization flung into the world of

savagery, they had in the beginning none of the adaptability and none of

the resources of the savage—knew nothing of the properties of unfamiliar

plants, knew neither what to weave nor how to weave it, and often from

sheer lack of understanding, starved and shivered in the midst of

plenty. It was not till they had suffered long and intolerably that they

learned to clothe themselves from such material as their new world

afforded, to cure skins of animals and stitch them together into

garments. In the first years of ruin only ratskins were plentiful; but,

as time went on, rabbits, cats and wild dogs multiplied and, spreading

through the countryside, were trapped and hunted for their flesh and the

warmth of their skins. The dogs, as they bred, reverted to a mongrel and

wolf-like type which, in summer, preyed largely on vermin; in winter,

when scarcity of food made them bold, they prowled in packs, were a

danger to the solitary and a legendary terror to children.

In the beginning the village was a straggle of rude huts, the tribesmen

building how and where they would; later it took shape within its first

wall and was roughly circular, enclosed by a fence of stake and

thornbush. The raising of the fence was a sign and result of the

beginning of primitive competition in armament; it was the knowledge

that one village had fortified itself that set others to the driving in

of stakes. One November evening Theodore, trudging in with his catch,

saw a group round the headman’s fire; the centre of interest, a youth

who had returned from poaching on other men’s land and brought back news

of their doings. His trespassing had taken him within sight of the

neighbouring village—which lately was a cluster of huts, like their own,

and now was surrounded by a wall. A stockade, fully the height of a man,

with only one gap for a gate.... The poacher’s news was discussed with

uneasy interest. The fortified tribe, in point of numbers, was already

stronger than its rival; if it added this new advantage to its numbers,

what was there to prevent it from raiding and robbing as it would?

Having raided and robbed, it could shelter behind its defences—beat off

attack, make sorties and master the countryside! Its security meant the

insecurity of others, the dependence of others on its goodwill and

neighbourly honesty; the issue was as plain to the handful of tribesmen

as to old-time nations competing in battleships, aeroplanes and guns,

and the suspicions muttered round the headman’s fire were the raw

material of arguments once familiar in the councils of emperors.

In the end, as the result of uneasy discussion, Theodore and another

were dispatched to spy out the new menace, to get as near as they might

to the wall, ascertain its strength and the method of its building; and

with their return from a night expedition there was more consultation

and a hurried planning of defences. Before winter was over the haphazard

settlement was a compound, a walled town in embryo; within the narrow

limits of a circle small enough for a handful of men to defend all huts

were crowded, all provisions stored, all animals driven at sunset—so

that, in case of night attack, no man could be cut off and the strength

of the tribe be at hand to resist the assailants. With waste, healthy

miles stretching out on either side, the village itself was an

evil-smelling huddle of cabins; since a short stretch of wall was easier

to defend than a long, men and beasts were crowded together in a

foulness that made for security. In times of feud—and times of feud were

seldom distant—stones were heaped beside the barrier, in readiness to

serve as missiles, watch and ward was kept turn and turn by the

able-bodied and—naturally, inevitably and almost unconsciously—there was

evolved a system of military discipline, of penalty for mutiny and

cowardice.

As in every social system from the beginning of time, the community was

welded to a conscious whole not by the love its members bore to each

other, but by hatred and fear of the outsider; it was the enemy, the

urgent common need to be saved from him, that made of man a comrade and

a citizen; the peril from outside was the natural antidote to everyday

hatreds and the ceaseless bickerings of close neighbours. The

instinctive politics of a squalid village were in miniature the policy

of vanished nations, and untraditioned little headmen, like dead and

gone kings, quelled internal feuds by diverting attention to the danger

that threatened from abroad. The foundations of community life in the

new world, like the foundations of community life in the old, were laid

in the selfishness of fear; but for all its base origin the life of the

community imposed upon its members the essential virtues of the soldier

and citizen, a measure of discipline and sacrifice. From these, in time,

would grow loyalty and pride in sacrifice; the enclosure of ramshackle

huts and pens was breaking its savages to achievements undreamed of and

virtues as yet beyond their ken; the blind, stubborn instincts that

created Babylon—created London and Rome and destroyed them—were laying

well and truly in a mud-walled compound the foundations of cities which

should rise, flourish, perish in the stead of London and of Rome.

Outside the little fortress with its noisome huddle of sheds and

shelters lay a belt of ploughed land, of patches scraped and sown, where

the women worked by the side of their men and worked alone when their

men were gone hunting or fishing. One or two members of the tribe who

were countrymen born were its saviours in its first years of leanness,

imparting their knowledge of soil and seed to their unskilled comrades

bred in towns; and, by slow degrees, as the lesson was learned, the belt

of tilled ground grew wider and more fertile, the little community more

prosperous.

As families grew and the tribe settled down the makeshift shelters of

wood and moss were succeeded by stronger and better built cabins; by the

time that her second child was born Ada was established in a

weatherproof hut—a mud-walled building, roofed with dried grass and with

a floor of earth beaten hard. In its early years it possessed a glazed

window, a pane which Theodore had found whole in a crumbling house and

set immovably in an aperture cut in his wall. But, as years went on,

unbroken glass was hard to come by; and there came a day when the

window-aperture, no longer glazed, was plastered up to keep out the

weather.

Long before he set about the building of his cabin Theodore had brought

a strip of ground under cultivation, sown a patch of potatoes and

straggling beans which, in time, expanded to a field. His life,

henceforth, was largely the anxious life of the seasons; the sowing and

tending and reaping of his crop, the struggle with the soil and the

barrenness thereof, the ceaseless war against vermin.... He ended rich,

as the men of his time counted riches; the possessor of goats, the owner

of land which other men envied him, the father of sons who could till

it. The new world gave him what it had to give; and gradually, with the

passing of years, the hope of life civilized died in him and he ceased

to strain his eyes at the distance.

* * * * *

It was slowly, very slowly, that hope died in him; but there came a day

when, searching the skyline, as his habit was, it dawned on his mind

that he sought automatically; it was habit only that made him lift his

eyes to the horizon. He expected nothing when he shaded his eyes and

looked this way and that; his belief in a world that was lettered and

civilized had vanished. If that world yet existed, remote and apart, of

a surety it was not for him—who perhaps was no longer capable of

existence lettered and civilized. And if he himself could be broken to

its decencies, what place had his children, his young barbarians, in an

ordered atmosphere like that of his impossible youth? They belonged to

their world, to its squalor, its dirt, its rude ignorance ... as, it

might be, he also belonged.

At the thought, he knelt and stared into the water, taking stock of the

image it reflected and coming face to face with himself. His body and

habits had adapted themselves to their surroundings, his mind to the

outlook of his world—to his daily, yearly struggle with the soil and

vermin and his fellows. His relations with his fellows—with women—with

himself—were not those of humanity civilized; it was nothing to him to

go foul and unwashed or to clench his fist against his wife. Could he

live the life he had been born and bred to, of cleanliness, self-control

and courtesy? Or had he been stripped of the decencies which go to make

civilized man?... He covered his face with his broken-nailed fingers and

strove with God and his own soul that he might not fall utterly to ruin

with his world, that some remnant might remain of his heritage.

From the day when he saw himself for what he was and resigned all hope

of the world of his youth, it seemed to him that he lived two divergent

lives. One absorbed, perforce, in his digging and snaring, in the daily

struggle, for the daily wants of his household; the other—in his hours

of summer rest, in the long dark winter evenings—an inward life of

brooding that concerned itself only with the past. His memories became

to him a species of cult, a secret ceremonial and a rite; that which had

been (so he fancied) was not altogether waste, not altogether dead, so

long as one man thought of it with reverence. When the mood took him he

would sit for long hours with his chin on his hand, staring at the fire

while the children wondered at his silence—and Ada, wearied of talking

to deaf ears, flung off to gossip with the neighbours.

* * * * *

She, before she was thirty, was a haggard slattern of a woman; pitiable

by reason of her discontent, and looking far older than her years.

Childbearing aged her and the field-work she hated—the bent-backed

drudgery she tried in vain to shirk and to which she brought no shred of

understanding; even more she was aged by the weary desire that sulked in

the corners of her mouth. Before she lost her comeliness she had more

than once sought distraction from her dullness in clumsy flirtation;

which perhaps was no more than silly ogling and nudging and perhaps led

to actual unfaithfulness. Theodore—not greatly interested in his wife’s

doings—ignored the danger to his household peace until it was forcibly

thrust upon his notice by a jealous spitfire who cursed Ada for running

after other women’s husbands, and proceeded to tear out her hair. Ada’s

snuffling protestations when the spitfire was pulled off did not savour

of injured innocence; he judged her guilty, at least in thought, cuffed

her soundly and from that time kept his eye on her. He was not (as she

liked to think) jealous—salving her bruises with the comforting balm

that two males were disputing the possession of her body; what stirred

him to wrath fundamentally was his outraged sense of property in Ada,

his woman, and the possibility that her lightness might entail on him

the labour of supporting another man’s child. The intrigue—if intrigue

it were—ended on the day of the cuffing and hairpulling; her Lothario,

awed by his spitfire or unwilling to tackle an outraged husband, avoided

her company from that day forth and Ada sank back to domesticity.

She, too, in the end accepted the loss of the world that had made her

what she was, ceased to search the horizon and strain her eyes for the

deliverer; whereupon—having nothing to aim at or hope for—she lapsed

into slovenly neglect of her home, alternating hours of clack and gossip

with fits of sullen complaining at the daily misery of existence.

Had destiny realized the dreams of her youth and set her to live out her

married life in a shoddy little villa with bamboo furniture, she might

have made a tolerable mother; she would at least have taken pride in the

looks of her children, have dressed them with interest, as she dressed

herself, and tied up their hair with satin bows. Being what she was, she

could take no pride in ragamuffins who ran half the year naked; she

could see no beauty, even, in straight agile limbs which were meant to

be encased in reach-me-down suits or cheap costumes of cotton velveteen.

Thus her naked little ragamuffins—those of them that lived—were apt to

be dirtier, less cared-for, than the run of the dirty village

youngsters. Theodore, in whom the instinct of fatherhood was strong, was

sometimes roused to wrath by her stupid mishandling of her children;

but, on the whole he was patient with her—knowing it useless to be

otherwise. He beat her as seldom as possible and she was looked on by

her neighbours as a woman kindly handled and unduly blessed in her

husband. To the end she remained what she had always been; essentially a

parasite, a minor product of civilization, machine-bred and

crowd-developed—bewildered by a life not lived in crowds and not subject

to the laws of the Machine. To the end all nature was alien and hateful

to her—raw life that she turned from with disgust.... In her last

illness her mind, when it wandered, strayed back into the world where

she belonged; Theodore, an hour before she died, heard her muttering of

“last Bank ’Oliday.”

She died at the end of a long hard winter during which she had failed

and complained unceasingly, sat huddled to the fire and grown weaker;

creeping, at last, to her straw in the corner and forgetting, in

delirium, the meaningless life she had shared with her husband and

children. Death smoothed out the lines in her sullen face; it was

peaceful, almost comely, when Theodore looked his last on it—and

wondered, oddly, if among the “many mansions,” were some Cockney

paradise of noise and jostle where his wife had found her heart’s

desire?

Of the four or five children she had brought into the world but two were

living on the day of her death, her eldest-born and a youngster at the

crawling stage; but the care of even two children was a burdensome

matter for a man unaided, and it was esteemed natural and no insult to

the dead, that Theodore should take another wife as speedily as might

be—in the course not of months but of weeks. He found a woman to suit

his needs without going further than his own tribe; a woman left widowed

a year or two before, who was glad enough to accept the offer of a

better living than she could hope to make by her own scratching of a rod

or two of earth and the uncertain charity of neighbours. The proposal of

marriage, made in stolid fashion, was accepted as a matter of course ...

and, that night, Theodore stared through the fire into a room in

Westminster where a girl in a yellow dress made music ... and a young

man listened from the corner of a sofa with a cigarette, unlit, between

his fingers. He was dreaming at a table—with silver and branching yellow

roses—when his son nudged him that supper was ready, and he dipped his

hand into a greasy bowl for the meat.

The wedding followed swiftly on the heels of betrothal, and was

celebrated in the manner already compulsory and established; by a public

promise made solemnly before the headman, by a clasping of hands and a

ceremony of religious blessing. This last was moulded, like all tribal

ceremonies, on remembered formulæ and ritual; and the tradition that a

wedding should be accompanied by much eating and general merrymaking was

also faithfully observed.

The new wife, if not over comely or intelligent, was a sturdy young

woman who had been broken to the duties required of her, and Theodore’s

home, under its second mistress, was better tended and more comfortable

than in the days of her sluttish predecessor. He had married her simply

as a matter of business, that she might help in his field-work, cook his

food, look after his children and satisfy his animal desire; and on the

whole he had no reason to complain of the bargain he had made. She was a

younger woman than Ada by some years—had been only a slip of a girl at

the time of the Ruin—and, because of her youth, had adapted herself more

readily than most of her elders to a world in the making and

untraditioned methods of living. Her husband found life easier for the

help of a pair of sturdy arms and pleasanter for lack of Ada’s

grumbling.... She brought more than herself to Theodore’s household—a

child by her first husband; and, as time went on, she bore him other

children of his own.

XXIII

As the years went by and his children grew to manhood in the world

primitive which was the only world they knew, the life of Theodore

Savage became definitely twofold; a life of the body in the present and

a life of the mind in the past. There was his outward, rustic and daily

self, the labourer, hunter and fisherman, who begat sons and daughters,

who trudged home at nightfall to eat and sleep heavily, who occasionally

cudgelled his wife: a sweating, muscular animal man whose existence was

bounded by his bodily needs and the bodily needs of his children; who

fondled his children and cuffed them by turns, as the beast cuffs and

fondles its offspring. Whose world was the world of a food-patch

enclosed in a valley, of a river where he fished, a wood where he snared

and a hut that received him at evening.... In time it was of these

things, and these things only, that he spoke to his kin and his

neighbours; the weather, the luck of his hunting or fishing, the loves,

births and deaths of his fellows. With the rise and growth of a

generation that knew only the world primitive, the little community

lived more in the present and less in the past; mention of the world

that had vanished was even less frequent and even more furtive than

before.

And even if that had not been the case, there was no man in the tribe,

save Theodore, whose mind was the mind of a student; thus his other

life, his life of the past, was lived to himself alone. It was a vivid

memory-life in which he delved, turning over its vanished treasures—the

intangible treasures of dead beauty, dead literature, learning and art;

a life that at times receded to a dream of the impossible and at others

was so real and overwhelming in its nearness that the everyday sweating

and toiling and lusting grew vague and misty—was a veil drawn over

reality.

Sometimes the two lives clashed suddenly and oddly—to the wonder of

those who saw him. As on the day when his wife had burned the evening

mess and, raising his hand to chastise her carelessness, there flashed

before his eyes, without warning, a vision of Phillida bent delicately

over her piano.... Not only Phillida, but the room, her surroundings;

every detail clear to him and the loveliness of Chopin in his ears....

Furniture, hangings, a Louis Seize clock and a Hogarth print—and

swiftly-seen objects whose very names he had forgotten, so long was it

since he had made use of the household words that once described them.

The dead world caught him back to itself and claimed him; in the face of

its reality the present faded, the burned stew mattered not and his hand

dropped slack to his side; while his wife’s mouth, open for a wailing

protest, hung open in gratified astonishment. He stared through the open

door of the hut, not seeing the tufted trees beyond it or the curving

skyline of the hills; then, taking mechanically his stout wooden spoon,

he shovelled down his portion without tasting it. In his ears, like a

song, was the varied speech of other days; of art, of daily mechanics,

of books, of daily politics, of learning.... Phillida, her curved hands

touching the keys, gave place to the eager, bespectacled face of a

scholar who had tried to make clear to him the rhythm and beauty of

French verse. He had forgotten the man’s name—long forgotten it—but from

some odd crevice in his brain a voice came echoing down the years,

caressing the lines as it quoted them:—

O Corse à cheveux plats, que la France était belle

Au soleil de Messidor!

His own lips framed the words involuntarily, attempting the accent long

unheard. “Au soleil de Messidor, au soleil de Messidor” ... and his wife

and children stared after him as, thrusting the half-eaten bowl aside,

he rose and went out, muttering gibberish. They were not unused to these

fits in the house-father, to the change in his eyes, the sudden

forgetting of their presence; but never lost their fear of them as

something uncanny and inexplicable.

With these masterful rushes of the past came often an infinite

melancholy; which was not so much a regret for what had been as a sense

of the pity of oblivion. So that he would lie outstretched with his face

to the earth, rebellious at the thought that with him and a few of his

own generation must pass all knowledge of human achievement, the very

memory of that which had once been glorious.... Not only the memory of

actual men whose fame had once been blown about the world; but the

memory of sound, of music, and of marvels in stone, uplifted by the

skill of generations; the memory of systems, customs, laws, wrought

wisely by the hand of experience; and of fanciful people, more real than

living men and women. With him and his like would pass not only

Leonardo, Cæsar and the sun of Messidor, but Rosalind, d’Artagnan and

Faust; the heroes, the merrymen, the women loved and loving who, created

of dreams, had shared the dead world with their fellows created of

dust.... Once deemed immortal, they had been slain by science as surely

as their fellows of dust.

At times he pondered vaguely whether he might not save the memory of

some of them alive by teaching his children to love them; but in the end

he realized that, as we grasp nothing save through ourselves and our own

relation to it, the embodied desires and beauty of an inconceivable age

would be meaningless to his young barbarians.

* * * * *

If he ceased to believe in the survival of life as he had known it and a

civilization that would reach out and claim him, there were times when

he believed, or almost believed, that somewhere in the vastness of the

great round world a remnant must hold fast to its inheritance; when it

was inconceivable that all men living could be sunk in brutishness or

vowed to the creed of utter ignorance. Hunger and blind terror—(he knew,

for he had seen it)—could reduce the highest to the level of the beast;

but with the passing of terror and the satisfaction of the actual needs

of the body, there awakens the hunger of the mind. Somewhere in the

vastness of the great, round world must be those who, because they

craved for more than full stomachs and daily security, still clung to

the power which is knowledge. Little groups and companies that chance

had brought together or good fortune saved from destruction; resourceful

men who had striven with surrounding anarchy and worsted it, and, having

worsted it, were building their civilization.... And in the very

completeness of surrounding anarchy, the very depth of surrounding

brutishness, would lie their opportunity and chance of supremacy, their

power of enforcing their will.

If such groups, such future nations, existed, he asked himself how they

would build? What manner of world they would strive for—knowing what

they knew?... This, at least, was certain: it would not be the world of

their fathers, of their own youth. They had seen their civilization laid

waste by the agency of science combined with human passion; hence, if

they rejected the alternative of ignorance and held to their perilous

treasure of science, their problem was the mastery of passion.

He came to believe that the problem—like all others—had been faced in

forgotten generations; that old centuries had learned the forgotten

lesson that the Ruin was teaching anew. To a race that had realized the

peril of knowledge there would be two alternatives only;

renunciation—the creed of blind ignorance and savagery—or the guarding

of science as a secret treasure, removed from all contact with the flame

that is human emotion. There had been elder and long-past civilizations

in which knowledge was a mystery, the possession and the privilege of a

caste; tradition had come down to us of ancient wisdom which might only

be revealed to the initiate.... A blind fear massacred its scientific

men, a wiser fear exalted them and set them apart as initiates. When

science and human emotion between them had wrought the extreme of

destruction and agony, there passed the reckless and idealistic dream of

a world where all might be enlightened; the aim and tradition of a

social system arising out of ruin would be the setting of an iron

barrier between science and human emotion. That, and not enlightenment

of all and sundry—the admission of the foolish, the impulsive and the

selfish to a share in the power of destruction. The same need and

instinct of self-preservation which had inspired the taking of the Vow

of Ignorance would work, in higher and saner minds, for the training of

a caste—an Egyptian priesthood—exempt from blind passion and the common

impulse of the herd; a caste trained in silence and rigid self-control,

its way of attainment made hard to the student, the initiate. The deadly

formulæ of mechanics, electricity and chemistry would be entrusted only

to those who had been purged of the daily common passions of the

multitude; to those who, by trial after trial, had fettered their

natural impulses and stripped themselves of instinct and desire.

So, in times past, had arisen—and might again arise—a scientific

priesthood whose initiates, to the vulgar, were magicians; a caste that

guarded science as a mystery and confined the knowledge which is power

of destruction to those who had been trained not to use it. The old lost

learning of dead and gone kingdoms was a science shielded by its

devotees from defilement by human emotion; a pure, cold knowledge, set

apart and worshipped for itself.... And somewhere in the vastness of the

great round world the beginnings of a priesthood, a scientific caste,

might be building unconsciously on the lines of ancient wisdom, and

laying the foundations of yet another Egypt or Chaldæa. A State whose

growth would be rooted in the mystery of knowledge and fear of human

passion; whose culture and civilization would be moulded by a living and

terrible tradition of catastrophe through science uncontrolled.... And,

so long as the tradition was living and terrible, the initiate would

stand guard before his mysteries, that the world might be saved from

itself; only when humanity had forgotten its downfall and ruin had

ceased to be even a legend, would the barrier between science and

emotion be withdrawn and knowledge be claimed as the right of the

uncontrolled, the multitude.

* * * * *

Till his brain began to fail him he watched, in dumb interest, the life

and development of the tribe; learning from it more than he had ever

known in the world of his youth of the eternal foundations on which life

in community is built. The unending struggle between the desire for

freedom, which makes of man a rebel, and the need for security, which

makes of him a citizen, was played before his understanding eyes; he

watched parties, castes and priesthoods in the making and, before he

died, could forecast the beginning of an aristocracy, a slave class and

a tribal hereditary monarchy. In all things man untraditioned held

blindly to the ways he had forgotten; instinctively, not knowing whither

they led, he trod the paths that his fathers had trodden before him.

Most of all he was stirred in his interest and pity by the life

religious of the world around him; watching it adapt itself, steadily

and naturally, to the needs of a race in its childhood. As a new

generation grew up to its heritage of ignorance, the foundations of

faith were shifted; as tribal life crystallized, gods multiplied

inevitably and the Heaven ruled by a Supreme Being gave place to a crude

Valhalla of minor deities. Man, who makes God in his own image, can only

make that image in the likeness of his own highest type; which, in a

world divided, insecure and predatory, is the type of the successful

warrior; the Saviour, in a world divided and predatory, takes the form

of a tribal deity who secures to his people the enjoyment of their

fields by strengthening their hands against the assaults and the malice

of their enemies. As always with those who live in constant fear and in

hate of one another, the Lord was a Man of War; and when Theodore’s

first grandson was received into the tribe, the deity to whom vows were

made in the name of the child was already a local Jehovah. Faith saw him

as a tribal Lord of Hosts, the celestial captain of his worshippers; if

his worshippers walked humbly and paid due honour to his name he would

stand before them in the day of battle and protect them with his shield

invisible—would draw the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, show himself

mightier than the priests of Baal and overthrow the altars of the

Philistines.

A god whose attributes are those of a warrior, of necessity is not

omnipotent; since he fights, his authority is partial—assailed and

disputed by those against whom he draws the sword. A race in its

childhood evolved the deity it needed, a champion and upholder of his

own people; to the tribal warrior the god to whom an enemy prayed for

success was a rival of his own protector.... So the mind primitive

argued, more or less directly and consciously, making God in its image,

for its own needs and purposes; and even in Theodore’s lifetime the

deities worshipped by men from a distance were not those of his own

country. The jurisdiction of the gods was limited and the stranger, of

necessity, paid homage to an alien spirit who took pleasure in an

unfamiliar ritual.

In his lifetime the darkness of Heaven was unbroken and there emerged no

god whose attribute was mercy and long-suffering; the Day of Judgment

was still too recent, its memory too clear and overwhelming, to admit of

the idea of a Divine Love or a Father who had pity on his children.

Fear, and fear only, led his people to the feet of the Lord. The God of

Vengeance of the first generation and the tribal superman who gradually

ousted him from his pride of place were alike wrathful, jealous of their

despotism and greedily expectant of mouth-honour. Hence, propitiation

and ignorance were the whole religious duty of man, and the rites

wherewith deity was duly worshipped were rites of crawling flattery and

sacrifice.... The blood of sinners was acceptable in the sight of

Heaven; the Lord Almighty had destroyed a world that he might slake his

vengeance, and his lineal descendants, the celestial warriors, rejoiced

in the slaughter of those who had borne arms against their

worshippers—in the end, rejoiced in blood for itself and the savour of

the burnt sacrifice. And a race cowed spiritually (lest worse befall it)

evolved its rites of sacrificial cruelty, paying tribute to a god who

took ceaseless pleasure in the humbling of his people and could only be

appeased by their suffering.

There were seasons and regions where abasement produced its own

reaction; when, for all the savour of sacrificial cruelty, the gods

remained deaf to the prayers of their worshippers, delivered them into

the hands of their enemies or chastened them with famine and pestilence.

Hope of salvation beaten out of them, the worshippers, like rats driven

into a corner, ceased to grovel and turned on the tyrants who had failed

them; and the Lord Almighty Who made the heavens, shrunk to the

dimensions of a local fetish, was upbraided and beaten in effigy.

Since it seemed that the new world must in all things follow in the ways

of the old, the gentler deities who delighted not in blood would in due

time reveal themselves to man grown capable of mercy. As the memory of

judgment faded with the centuries—as the earth waxed fruitful and life

was kindlier—humanity would dare to lift its head from the dust and the

life religious would be more than blind cringing to a despot. The Heaven

of the future would find room for gods who were gracious and friendly;

for white Baldurs and Olympians who walk with men and instruct them; and

there would arise prophets whose message was not vengeance, but a call

to “rejoice in the Lord.” ... And in further time, it might be, the God

who is a Spirit ... and a Christ.... The rise, the long, slow upward

struggle of the soul of man was as destined and inevitable as its fall;

all human achievement, material or spiritual, was founded in the

baseness of mire and clay—and rose towering above its foundations. As

the State, which had its origin in no more than common fear and hatred,

in the end would be honoured without thought of gain and its flag held

sacred by its sons; so Deity, beginning as vengeance personified, would

advance to a spiritual Law and a spiritual Love. When the power of

loving returned to the race, it would cease to abase itself and lift up

its eyes to a Father—endowing its Deity with that which was best in

itself; when it achieved and took pleasure in its own thoughts and the

works of its hands, it would see in the Highest not the Vengeance that

destroys but the Spirit that heals and creates.

Meanwhile the foundation of the life religious was, and must be, the

timorous virtue of ignorance, of humble avoidance of inquiry into the

dreadful secrets of God. In Theodore’s youth he had turned from the

orthodox religions, which repelled by what seemed to him a fear of

knowledge and inquiry; now he understood that man, being by nature

destructive, can survive only when his powers of destruction are

limited; and that the ignorance enjoined by priest and bigot had

been—and would be again—an essential need of the race, an expression of

the will to live.... The jealous God who guards his secrets is the god

of the race that survives.

How many times—(he would wonder)—how many times since the world began to

spin has man, in his eager search for truth, rushed blindly through

knowledge to the ruin that means chaos and savagery? How many times, in

his devout, instinctive longing to know his own nature and the workings

of the Infinite Mind that created him has he wrought himself weapons

that turned to his own destruction?... Ignorance of the powers and

forces of nature is a condition of human existence; as necessary to the

continued life of the race as the breathing of air or the taking of food

into the body. Behind the bench of zealots who judged Galileo lay the

dumb race-memory of ruin—ruin, perhaps, many times repeated. They stood,

the zealots, for that ignorance which, being interpreted, is life; and

Galileo for that knowledge which, being interpreted, is death....

Many times, it might be, since the world began to spin, had men called

upon the rocks to cover them from the devils their own hands had

fashioned; many times, it might be, a remnant had put from it the

knowledge it dared not trust itself to wield—that it might not fall upon

its own weapons, but live, just live, like the beasts! Behind the

injunction to devout ignorance, behind the ecclesiastical hatred of

science and distrust of brain, lay more than prejudice and bigotry; the

prejudice and bigotry were but superficial and outward workings of

instinct and the first law of all, the Law of Self-Preservation.

With his eyes open to the workings of that law, folk-tale and myth had

long become real to him—since he saw them daily in the making.... The

dragon that wasted a country with its breath—how else should a race that

knew naught of chemistry account for the devilry of gas? And he

understood now, why the legend of Icarus was a legend of disaster, and

Prometheus, who stole fire from Heaven, was chained to eternity for his

daring; he knew, also, why the angel with a flaming sword barred the

gate of Eden to those who had tasted of knowledge.... The story of the

Garden, of the Fall of Man, was no more the legend of his youth; he read

it now, with his opened eyes, as a livid and absolute fact. A fact told

plainly as symbol could tell it by a race that had put from it all

memory of the science whereby it was driven from its ancient paradise,

its garden of civilization.... How many times since the world began to

spin had man mastered the knowledge that should make him like unto God,

and turned, in agony of mind and body, from a power synonymous with

death?

And how many times more, he wondered—how many times more?

* * * * *

Theodore Savage lived to be a very old man; how old in years he could

not have said, since, long before his memory failed him, he had lost his

count of time. But for fully a decade before he died he went humped and

rheumatic, leaning on a stick, was blear-eyed, toothless and wizened; he

had outlived all those who had begun the new world with him, and a son

of his grandson was of those who—when the time came—dug a trench for his

bones and shovelled loose earth on his head.

He had no lack of care in his extreme old age—in part perhaps because

the tribe grew to hold him in awe that increased with the years; the

sole survivor of the legendary age that preceded the Ruin and Downfall

of Man, he was feared in spite of his helplessness. He alone of his

little community could remember the Ruin with any comprehension of its

causes; he alone possessed in silence a share of that hidden and

forbidden knowledge which had brought flaming judgment on the world.

Here and there in the countryside were grey-headed men, his juniors by

years, who could remember vaguely the horrors of a distant childhood—the

sky afire, the crash of falling masonry, the panic, the lurking and the

starving. These things they could remember like a nightmare past ... but

only remember, not explain. Behind Theodore’s bald forehead and dimmed,

oozing eyes lay the understanding of why and wherefore denied to those

who dwelt beside him.

For this reason Theodore Savage was treated with deference in the days

of his senile helplessness. As he sat, half-blind, in the sun by the

door of his hut, no one ever failed to greet him with respect in

passing; while in most the greeting was more than a token of respect or

kindliness—the sign and result of a nervous desire to propitiate. In the

end he was credited with a knowledge of unholy arts, and the children of

the tribe avoided and shrank from him, frightened by the gossip of their

elders; so that village mothers found him useful as a bogy, arresting

the tantrums of unruly brats by threats of calling in Old Bald-Head.

Even in his lifetime legends clustered thick about him, and sickness or

accident to man or beast was ascribed to the glance of his purblind eye

or the malice of his vacant brain; while there was once—though he never

knew or suspected it—an agitated and furtive discussion as to whether,

for the good of the community, he should not be knocked on the head. The

furtive discussion ended in discussion only—not because the advocates of

mercy were numerous, but because no man was willing to lay violent hands

on a wizard, for fear of what might befall him; and, the interlude over,

the tribe relapsed into its customary timid respect for its patriarch,

its customary practice of ensuring his goodwill by politeness and small

offerings of victuals. These added to the old man’s comfort in his

latter years—nor had he any suspicion of the motive that secured him

both deference and dainties.

With his death the local legends increased and multiplied; the

distorted, varied myths of the Ruin of Man and its causes showing an

inevitable tendency to group themselves around one striking and

mysterious figure, to make of that figure a cause and a personification

of the Great Disaster. Theodore Savage, to those who came after, was

Merlin, Frankenstein and Adam; the fool who tasted of forbidden fruit,

the magician whose arts had brought ruin on a world, the devil-artisan

whose unholy skill had created monsters that destroyed him. His grave

was an awesome spot, apart from other graves, which the timorous avoided

after dark; and, long after all trace of it had vanished, there clung to

the neighbourhood a tradition of haunting and mystery.... To his

children’s children his name was the symbol of a dead civilization; a

civilization that had passed so completely from the ken of living man

that its lost achievements, the manner of its ending, could only be

expressed in symbol.

PRINTED BY GARDEN CITY PRESS, LETCHWORTH, ENGLAND.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration]

_A Complete

Catalogue of Books

Published by

Leonard Parsons, Ltd.

Autumn_

1921

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_DEVONSHIRE STREET, BLOOMSBURY, LONDON_

_Telephone No.:_ _Telegraphic Address_:

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CONTENTS

PART I

PAGE

NEW AND FORTHCOMING WORKS 1003