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Title: Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future

Author: Cicely Hamilton

Release date: July 16, 2021 [eBook #65848]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Leonard Parsons

Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE SAVAGE: A STORY OF THE PAST OR THE FUTURE ***

                            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

                         ⁘    ⁘    ⁘    ⁘    ⁘


                _DEVONSHIRE STREET, BLOOMSBURY, LONDON_

              _Telephone No.:_      _Telegraphic Address_:
            _Museum 964._      “_Erudite, Westcent, London_”




                                CONTENTS


                                 PART I

                                                PAGE
                    NEW AND FORTHCOMING WORKS   1003


                                PART II

                    SUBJECT INDEX               1008


                                PART III

                    INDEX TO TITLES AND AUTHORS 1014


      _NOTE—All prices of books quoted in this Catalogue are net._




                        NEW & FORTHCOMING WORKS


                                FICTION

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE, by _Hamilton Fyfe_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

Mr. Hamilton Fyfe is an attentive social observer. He sees that the
growing distaste of the more intellectual kind of women for motherhood
is bound to have disturbing consequences. Just as in the past men sought
in “gay” society distraction from aggravated domesticity, so now they
are liable to crave for domestic joys as a relief from childless homes.

Without taking sides Mr. Fyfe describes such a case with an ever-present
humour. He does not plead or preach: he is content to set forth problems
of personality which have a vivid application in the everyday lives of
us all.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN, by _Hugh de Sélincourt_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

MR. HAVELOCK ELLIS writes: “This novel seems to be, in some ways, his
most notable achievement.”

_Observer._—“This is the best novel that Mr. de Sélincourt has yet
published.”

SARAH AND HER DAUGHTER, by _Bertha Pearl_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

This is a story of New York’s Ghetto, showing the Ghetto family as it
lives from day to day.

The thing has never been done before. It is the first novel setting
forth the whole world of the Ghetto and the emergence of the younger
generation into the larger world of American life.

It has the Potash and Perlmutter laugh, and the tears of the sufferers
of all ages.

A work of genuine humour and understanding realism.

THE QUEST OF MICHAEL HARLAND, by _Nora Kent_. Crown 8vo, 8/6.

In reviewing Miss Kent’s previous novel, “The Greater Dawn,” _Land and
Water_ said: “Mrs. Florence Barclay and Miss Ethel M. Dell have cause to
tremble.” Her new story has the same fragrance and delicacy of sentiment
that attracted readers in “The Greater Dawn,” and will, we feel
confident, increase their number.

GARTH, by _Mrs. J. O. Arnold_. Crown 8vo, 8/6.

_Times._—“A thoroughly well-told ghost story.... It is admittedly
exceptional and inexplicable, and in that lies its thrill.”

_Sheffield Telegraph._—“A very clever and exciting piece of work. Good
ghost stories are none too common, and this one is very good.”


                           GENERAL LITERATURE

THE MAKING OF AN OPTIMIST, by _Hamilton Fyfe_. Demy 8vo, 12/6.

CLAUDIUS CLEAR in the _British Weekly_: “Mr. Hamilton Fyfe has written a
remarkable volume.... It is needless to say that the book is frank and
able and interesting.”

H. M. T. in the _Nation and Athenæum_: “I hope Mr. Fyfe’s book will be
widely read, because I think it must be unique.”

H. W. NEVINSON in the _Daily Herald_: “A very remarkable and
exhilarating book.”

DIVORCE (TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW), by _C. Gasquoine Hartley_. Author of
“The Truth about Woman,” “Sex Education and National Health.” Crown 8vo,
6/-.

This book deals with many aspects on the subject. It shows historically
how the present divorce laws developed and how closely they are still
allied to the ancient ecclesiastical Canon Law. It proves that most
Protestant countries have far more liberal laws, and that, but for
accidents in the lives of our kings, our own laws would have been
reformed in the 16th century. The harmful way in which the laws work
against morality and the family is shown by an analysis of a number of
present-day divorce suits. The present position in regard to proposals
for an extension of the grounds of divorce is examined, and a contrast
is drawn between our petrified laws and the liberal reforms introduced
by those of English stock in the dominions over the seas. The author
finally brings forward her own proposals and explains her own moral
standards. She declares that ecclesiastical defenders of the present law
do not understand the spirit of the Founder of Christianity.

STRAY THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES, by the Late _James A. Rentoul, K.C., LL.D._
Edited by _L. Rentoul_. Demy 8vo, 18/-.

_Times._—“Many racy anecdotes.”

_Daily Telegraph._—“Good stories abound.”

_Daily News._—“Racy and warm-hearted memories of a varied life ...
should be widely read.”

MY YEARS OF EXILE, by _Eduard Bernstein_. Translated by _Bernard Miall_.
Demy 8vo, 15/-.

_Times._—“Herr Bernstein is a calm and dispassionate observer ... full
of simple narrative and naïve reflection.”

_Morning Post._—“Of this country and its people he gives a very shrewd
and sympathetic analysis ... worth recording.”

A LADY DOCTOR IN BAKHTIARILAND, by _Dr. Elizabeth MacBean Ross_. Crown
8vo, 7/6.

_Daily Mail._—“A really admirable and entertaining study.”

_Medical Times._—“An attractive volume which should make a wide appeal.”

_Geographical Journal._—“This book possesses a permanent value.”

THE KEREN HA-YESOD BOOK. Colonisation Problems of the Eretz-Israel
(Palestine) Foundation Fund. Edited by The Publicity Department of the
“Keren Ha-Yesod.” Crown 8vo, 2/-.


=THE NEW ERA SERIES=

BREAKING POINT, by _Jeffery E. Jeffery_, with Foreword by _G. D. H.
Cole_. Crown 8vo, 4/6.

This book is an attempt to consider the future of civilisation in the
light of the present world crisis. It speaks much for Mr. Jeffery’s
optimism that while he manfully faces his facts and never in any way
evades the issues, his book ends on a hopeful note. He believes that
_now_ is the time for mankind to turn the next corner on the road of
progress and that ours is the opportunity to seize or to throw away.

ECONOMIC MOTIVES IN THE NEW SOCIETY, by _J. A. Hobson_. Crown 8vo, 4/6.

Perhaps the most telling argument used against drastic schemes of
economic reconstruction is that which holds that any system of public
ownership and representative government of essential industries would
break down because it would fail to create the necessary incentives to
production and distribution. In this book Mr. Hobson examines this
important question in detail. He analyses these “incentives” both from
the producing and the consuming side and proposes many ways by which
they might be not only retained but stimulated. He provides satisfactory
answers to such questions as: Will the present standards of management,
skill, workmanship and factory discipline be improved? Will the
consumers benefit? Will people save? _i. e._ Will sufficient fresh
capital be forthcoming for the further developments of industry?

It is a valuable book because it successfully counters the argument
which has, on appearance at least, some show of reason behind it.

LAND NATIONALISATION, by _A. Emil Davies, L.C.C._, and _Dorothy Evans_
(formerly Organiser, Land Nationalisation Society). Crown 8vo, 4/6.

In the past the importance of the land problem has been neglected, but
now the changed conditions brought about by the war call for increased
production at home. This book shows that the present system of land
ownership impedes production on every hand and stands in the way of
almost every vital reform.

The authors contend that no solution of the serious problems that
confront the community can be found until the nation itself becomes the
ground landlord of the country in which it lives. They put forward a
scheme for nationalisation complete in financial and administrative
details, providing for the participation of various sections of the
community in the management of the land.

PROLETCULT, by _Eden_ and _Cedar Paul_ (authors of “Creative
Revolution”). Crown 8vo, 4/6.

Education to-day, availing itself of the widest means, employing the
press and the cinemas no less effectively than the schools, imposes upon
the community the ideology, the cultured outlook, of the ruling class.

The authors contend that among the working classes there are many who
strive for the realisation of a new culture.

Proletcult (proletarian culture) organises and consolidates the
thought-forces which will complete the overthrow of Capitalism. It will
then inaugurate and build up the economic and social, the artistic and
intellectual life of the “new era.” This great and far-reaching
contemporary movement is the theme of “Proletcult.”

OPEN DIPLOMACY, by _E. D. Morel_. Crown 8vo, 4/6.

“Foreign Policy” and “Secret Diplomacy” continue to be terms invested
with some kind of mysterious attributes. In this volume Mr. Morel
endeavours to simplify a problem which still remains complicated and
obscure to the general public. He shows us “foreign policy” as an
influence working in our everyday lives. He brings “diplomacy” into our
homes, and serves it up as a dish upon the breakfast table. He depicts
us as helpless automata moving blindfolded in a world of make-believe
until we secure an effective democratic control over the management of
our foreign relations.

THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK, by _Robert Williams_. Crown 8vo, 4/6.

_Morning Post._—“An exceedingly shrewd and lively commentator on the
significance of events ... decidedly valuable.”

_Daily Herald._—“We hope this book will have a wide circulation, as it
will enable all who read it to realise the difficulties before us.”

SOCIALISM AND PERSONAL LIBERTY, by _Robert Dell_ (author of “My Second
Country”). Crown 8vo, 4/6.

“Personal Liberty in the Socialist State” is an old controversy, and the
publishers feel that Mr. Dell’s new volume will evoke widespread
interest and discussion.

The author shows that Socialism is not necessarily incompatible with
personal freedom, or with individualism properly understood, but is
rather an essential condition of both. He contends that economic freedom
is unattainable under Capitalist conditions by any but the owners of
capital and that individual liberty is being threatened by political
democracy, which is becoming a tyranny of the majority.

A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY, by _F. E. Green_. Crown 8vo, 4/6.

_Times._—“His advocacy is clear and detailed, and his criticisms
pointed ... worth noting.”

_Glasgow Herald._—“Brightly and vigorously written by a shrewd
observer.”




                             SUBJECT INDEX


                   CRITICISM, POETRY & BELLES-LETTRES


=CRITICISM=

SOME CONTEMPORARY POETS, by _Harold Monro_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

SOME CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS (WOMEN), by _R. Brimley Johnson_. Crown 8vo,
7/6.

SOME CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS (MEN), by _R. Brimley Johnson_. Crown 8vo,
7/6.


=POETRY=

WHEELS, 1920 (FIFTH CYCLE), edited by _Edith Sitwell_. With cover design
by _Gino Severini_. Crown 8vo, 6/-.


=BELLES-LETTRES=

CHILDREN’S TALES (from the Russian Ballet), by _Edith Sitwell_. With 8
four-colour reproductions of scenes from the Ballet, by _I. de B.
Lockyer_. Crown 4to, 12/6.


                                FICTION

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE, by _Hamilton Fyfe_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

THE WIDOW’S CRUSE, by _Hamilton Fyfe_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

SARAH AND HER DAUGHTER, by _Bertha Pearl_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN, by _Hugh de Sélincourt_. Crown 8vo, 8/6.

THE QUEST OF MICHAEL HARLAND, by _Nora Kent_. Crown 8vo, 8/6.

THE GREATER DAWN, by _Nora Kent_. Crown 8vo, 7/-.

GARTH, by _Mrs. J. O. Arnold_. Crown 8vo, 8/6.

THE BURIED TORCH, by _Coralie Stanton_ and _Heath Hosken_. Crown 8vo,
7/-.

THE BISHOP’S MASQUERADE, by _W. Harold Thomson_. Crown 8vo, 7/-.

SIDE ISSUES, by _Jeffery E. Jeffery_ (author of “Servants of the Guns”).
Crown 8vo, 6/-.

THE INVISIBLE SUN, by _Bertram Munn_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

MIRIAM AND THE PHILISTINES, by _Alice Clayton Greene_. Crown 8vo, 7/-.


                           GENERAL LITERATURE

THE MAKING OF AN OPTIMIST, by _Hamilton Fyfe_. Demy 8vo, 12/6.

STRAY THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES, by _James A. Rentoul, K.C., LL.D._ Demy
8vo, 18/-.

MY YEARS OF EXILE, by _Eduard Bernstein_. Translated by _Bernard Miall_.
Demy 8vo, 15/-.

THE KEREN HA-YESOD BOOK. Colonisation Problems of the Palestine
Foundation Fund. Crown 8vo, 2/-.


                      SOCIAL, POLITICAL & ECONOMIC


=THE NEW ERA SERIES=

                            Crown 8vo, 4/6.

NATIONALISATION OF THE MINES, by _Frank Hodges_. Second Impression.

A NEW ARISTOCRACY OF COMRADESHIP, by _William Paine_.

WHAT I SAW IN RUSSIA, by _George Lansbury_.

AFTER THE PEACE, by _H. N. Brailsford_.

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF THE LIQUOR TRADE, by _Arthur Greenwood_.

LABOUR AND NATIONAL FINANCE by _Philip Snowden_.

A POLICY FOR THE LABOUR PARTY, by _J. Ramsay MacDonald_.

DIRECT ACTION, by _William Mellor_.

A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY, by _F. E. Green_.

THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK, by _Robert Williams_.

BREAKING POINT, by _Jeffery E. Jeffery_, with Foreword by _G. D. H.
Cole_.

PROLETCULT, by _Eden_ and _Cedar Paul_.

LAND NATIONALISATION, by _A. Emil Davies_ and _Dorothy Evans_.

SOCIALISM AND PERSONAL LIBERTY, by _Robert Dell_.

ECONOMIC MOTIVES IN THE NEW SOCIETY, by _J. A. Hobson_.

OPEN DIPLOMACY, by _E. D. Morel_.


=SOCIAL STUDIES SERIES=

PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY, by _J. Ramsay MacDonald_. Crown 8vo, 3/6.

RELIGION IN POLITICS, by _Arthur Ponsonby_. Crown 8vo, 6/-.

LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX, by _M. Beer_. Crown 8vo, 5/-.

SOCIALISM AND CO-OPERATION, by _L. S. Woolf_. Crown 8vo, 5/-.


=MISCELLANEOUS=

GUILD SOCIALISM—RE-STATED, by _G. D. H. Cole, M.A._ Crown 8vo, 6/-.

DIVORCE (TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW), by _C. Gasquoine Hartley_. Crown 8vo,
6/-.

SEX EDUCATION AND NATIONAL HEALTH, by _C. Gasquoine Hartley_. Crown 8vo,
6/-.

THE NEW LIBERALISM, by _C. F. G. Masterman_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

THE CORPORATION PROFITS TAX, by _Raymond W. Needham_. Crown 8vo, 7/6.

THE GREAT RE-BUILDING, by _H. Denston Funnell, F.S.I._ Demy 8vo, 15/-.

THE MARCH TOWARDS SOCIALISM, by _Edgard Milhaud_. Translated by _H. J.
Stenning_. Crown 8vo, 8/6.

RED RUBBER, by _E. D. Morel_. Crown 8vo, 6/-.

THE BLACK MAN’S BURDEN, by _E. D. Morel_. Crown 8vo, 6/-.


                                 TRAVEL

A WEST COUNTRY PILGRIMAGE, by _Eden Phillpotts_. With 16 three-colour
illustrations by _A. T. Benthall_, tipped on mounts. Buckram, crown 4to,
21/-.

A LADY DOCTOR IN BAKHTIARILAND, by _Dr. Elizabeth MacBean Ross_. Crown
8vo, 7/6.




                      INDEX TO TITLES AND AUTHORS


                             INDEX TO TITLES


                                                                    PAGE

 After the Peace,                                                   1011

     Brailsford, H. N.


 Bishop’s Masquerade, The,                                          1010

     Thomson, W. Harold

 Black Man’s Burden,                                                1013

     Morel, E. D.

 Breaking Point,                                              1006, 1011

     Jeffery, Jeffery E.

 Buried Torch, The,                                                 1010

     Stanton, Coralie and Hosken, Heath


 Children’s Tales (from the Russian Ballet),                        1009

     Sitwell, Edith

 Corporation Profits Tax, The,                                      1013

     Needham, Raymond W.


 Direct Action,                                                     1011

     Mellor, William

 Divorce—To-day and To-morrow,                                1004, 1012

     Hartley, C. Gasquoine


 Economic Motives in the New Society,                         1006, 1012

     Hobson, J. A.


 Fruit of the Tree, The,                                      1003, 1009

     Fyfe, Hamilton


 Garth,                                                       1004, 1010

     Arnold, Mrs. J. O.

 Great Rebuilding, The,                                             1013

     Funnell, H. Denston

 Greater Dawn, The,                                                 1010

     Kent, Nora

 Guild Socialism—Restated,                                          1012

     Cole, G. D. H.


 Invisible Sun, The,                                                1010

     Munn, Bertram


 Keren Ha-Yesod Book, The,                                    1005, 1010

     Edited by the Keren Ha-Yesod Publicity
       Department


 Labour and National Finance,                                       1011

     Snowden, Philip

 Lady Doctor in Bakhtiariland, A,                             1005, 1013

     Ross, Elizabeth MacBean

 Land Nationalisation—A Practical Scheme,                     1006, 1012

     Davies, Emil and Evans, Dorothy

 Life and Teaching of Karl Marx,                                    1012

     Beer, M.


 Making of an Optimist, The,                                  1004, 1010

     Fyfe, Hamilton

 March Towards Socialism, The,                                      1013

     Milhaud, Edgard

 Miriam and the Philistines,                                        1010

     Greene, Alice Clayton

 My Years of Exile,                                           1005, 1010

     Bernstein, Eduard


 Nationalisation of the Mines,                                      1011

     Hodges, Frank

 New Agricultural Policy, A,                                  1008, 1011

     Green, F. E.

 New Aristocracy of Comradeship, A,                                 1011

     Paine, William

 New Labour Outlook, The,                                           1008

     Williams, Robert

 New Liberalism, The,                                               1013

     Masterman, C. F. G.


 Open Diplomacy,                                              1007, 1012

     Morel, E. D.


 Parliament and Democracy,                                          1012

     MacDonald, J. R.

 Policy for the Labour Party, A,                                    1011

     MacDonald, J. R.

 Proletcult,                                                  1007, 1011

     Paul, Eden and Cedar

 Public Ownership of the Liquor Trade,                              1011

     Greenwood, Arthur


 Quest of Michael Harland, The,                               1003, 1009

     Kent, Nora


 Red Rubber,                                                        1013

     Morel, E. D.

 Religion in Politics,                                              1012

     Ponsonby, Arthur


 Sarah and Her Daughter,                                      1003, 1009

     Pearl, Bertha

 Sex Education and National Health,                                 1013

     Hartley, C. Gasquoine

 Side Issues,                                                       1010

     Jeffery, Jeffery E.

 Socialism and Co-operation,                                        1012

     Woolf, L. S.

 Socialism and Personal Liberty,                              1008, 1012

     Dell, Robert

 Some Contemporary Novelists (Men),                                 1009

     Johnson, R. Brimley

 Some Contemporary Novelists (Women),                               1009

     Johnson, R. Brimley

 Some Contemporary Poets,                                           1008

     Monro, Harold

 Stray Thoughts and Memories,                                 1005, 1010

     Rentoul, James A.


 West Country Pilgrimage, A,                                        1013

     Phillpotts, Eden

 What I saw in Russia,                                              1011

     Lansbury, George

 Wheels, 1920 (Fifth Cycle),                                        1009

     Edited by Sitwell, Edith

 Widow’s Cruse, The,                                                1009

     Fyfe, Hamilton

 Women and Children,                                          1003, 1009

     Sélincourt, Hugh de


                            INDEX TO AUTHORS


 Arnold, Mrs. J. O.,                                          1004, 1010

     Garth. 8/6


 Beer, M.,                                                          1012

     Life and Teaching of Karl Marx. 6/-

 Bernstein, Eduard,                                           1005, 1010

     My Years of Exile. 15/-

 Brailsford, H. N.,                                                 1011

     After the Peace. 4/6


 Cole, G. D. H.,                                                    1012

     Guild Socialism—Restated. 6/-


 Davies, Emil,                                                1006, 1012

     Land Nationalisation. 4/6

 Dell, Robert,                                                1008, 1012

     Socialism and Personal Liberty. 4/6


 Evans, Dorothy,                                              1006, 1012

     Land Nationalisation. 4/6


 Funnell, H. Denston,                                               1013

     The Great Rebuilding. 15/-

 Fyfe, Hamilton,                                  1003, 1004, 1009, 1010

     The Fruit of the Tree. 7/6

     The Making of an Optimist. 12/6

     The Widow’s Cruse. 7/6


 Green, F. E.,                                                1008, 1011

     A New Agricultural Policy. 4/6

 Greene, Alice Clayton,                                             1010

     Miriam and the Philistines. 7/-

 Greenwood, Arthur,                                                 1011

     Public Ownership of the Liquor Trade. 4/6


 Hartley, C. Gasquoine,                                 1004, 1012, 1013

     Divorce—To-day and To-morrow. 6/-

     Sex Education and National Health. 6/-

 Hobson, J. A.,                                               1006, 1012

     Economic Motives in the New Society. 4/6

 Hodges, Frank,                                                     1011

     Nationalisation of the Mines. 4/6

 Hosken, Heath,                                                     1010

     The Buried Torch. 7/-


 Jeffery, Jeffery E.,                                   1006, 1010, 1011

     Breaking Point. 4/6

     Side Issues. 6/-

 Johnson, R. Brimley,                                               1009

     Some Contemporary Novelists (Men). 7/6

     Some Contemporary Novelists (Women). 7/6


 Kent, Nora,                                            1003, 1009, 1010

     The Greater Dawn. 7/-

     The Quest of Michael Harland. 8/6

 Keren Ha-Yesod, Publicity Department,                        1005, 1010

     The Keren Ha-Yesod Book. 2/-


 Lansbury, George,                                                  1011

     What I saw in Russia. 4/6


 MacDonald, J. Ramsay,                                        1011, 1012

     Parliament and Democracy. 3/6

     A Policy for the Labour Party. 4/6

 Masterman, C. F. G.,                                               1013

     The New Liberalism. 7/6

 Mellor, William,                                                   1011

     Direct Action. 4/6

 Milhaud, Edgard,                                                   1013

     The March towards Socialism. 8/6

 Monro, Harold,                                                     1008

     Some Contemporary Poets. 7/6
 Morel, E. D.,                                          1007, 1011, 1013

     Black Man’s Burden. 6/-

     Open Diplomacy. 4/6

     Red Rubber. 6/-

 Munn, Bertram,                                                     1010

     The Invisible Sun. 7/6


 Needham, Raymond W.,                                               1013

     The Corporation Profits Tax. 7/6


 Paine, William,                                                    1011

     A New Aristocracy of Comradeship. 4/6

 Paul, Eden and Cedar,                                        1007, 1011

     Proletcult. 4/6

 Pearl, Bertha,                                               1003, 1009

     Sarah and Her Daughter. 7/6

 Phillpotts, Eden,                                                  1013

     A West Country Pilgrimage. 21/-

 Ponsonby, Arthur,                                                  1012

     Religion in Politics. 5/-


 Rentoul, James A.,                                           1005, 1010

     Stray Thoughts and Memories. 18/-

 Ross, Elizabeth MacBean,                                     1005, 1013

     A Lady Doctor in Bakhtiariland. 7/6


 Sélincourt, Hugh de,                                         1003, 1009

     Women and Children. 8/6

 Sitwell, Edith,                                                    1009

     Children’s Tales (from the Russian Ballet).
       12/6

     Wheels—1920. 6/-

 Snowden, Philip,                                                   1011

     Labour and National Finance. 4/6

 Stanton, Coralie,                                                  1010

     The Buried Torch. 7/-


 Thomson, W. Harold,                                                1010

     The Bishop’s Masquerade. 7/-


 Williams, Robert,                                            1008, 1011

     The New Labour Outlook. 4/6

 Woolf, L. S.,                                                      1012

     Socialism and Co-operation. 5/-


                       _LEONARD PARSONS LIMITED_

 [_Printed in Great Britain by R. Clay & Sons, Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk._]

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. P. 70, changed “moral” to “morale”.
 2. P. 215, changed “tailing” to “trailing”.
 3. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 4. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
 5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
 6. Enclosed bold font in =equals=.



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