This file is scanned from the Gilbert Dalton edition with the preface to the second edition added.
Preface to the Second Edition
The issue of a second edition of this book, before its sequel is published, provides an earlier opportunity of answering some of the criticisms which it has provoked, most of which were based upon the supposition that it was written in a spirit of propaganda, which is a mistake.
It was, in fact, written somewhat randomly, allowing circumstances and character to develop to what ends they would, which is the way of life, and should, I think, be that of fiction also. Its conclusion - if such it can be called, being the event of a critical moment, which must work out its further and most uncertain issues - was neither foreseen nor intended.
Imagining a quite probable physical incidence, and certain people to be involved therein, I was only concerned to observe the interaction of character and circumstance, under conditions which would never be exactly duplicated. If such people, under such circumstances, would not act in such manner, the book is open to legitimate criticism, but not otherwise. As to that, readers must judge for themselves. But the actions must be regarded as individual, not typical.
One American reviewer challenges me definitely on this ground, stating that no woman would act as Helen does in the last chapter, and that I show ignorance of feminine psychology. Women may be as inevitable as the moon, but, like her, they act with a delusive appearance of inconstancy, and the error may not be mine.
A woman has just brought an action against her husband in the Turkish courts on the ground that he failed to take a second wife within a reasonable interval after his marriage to herself, which she had a right to expect from one in his social position. Does he suppose, she asks, that she will be content to consort with servants indefinitely?
I notice that this line of criticism reaches me only from American sources. "A frequent change of wife," in Sir Owen Seaman's delightful phrase, is one of the basic privileges of American citizenship, which we of the old world, bound to our monotonous loyalties, can only admire from a distance; but they are extremely particular that neither they nor their neighbours shall have more than one at a time.
I am puzzled by both these characteristics. I have a strong preference for keeping the wife I have, and if my neighbour were to tell me that he has half a dozen I should hear him with sympathy, but my mind would not be disturbed by any violent reaction. It might be supposed that an American citizen, having emerged once or twice from the disaster of marriage, would prefer to take his remaining wives in bulk rather than seriatim, and get through them as quickly as possible. Perhaps he would; and the objection may be on the side of the women only. A woman commonly has a retail mind.
In England, one (otherwise too-kindly) reviewer considers that the book contains evidences of "ferocious prejudices."
Now I am not without prejudices (who is?), but if I were told that I have fewer than any other inhabitant of these islands, I should be less surprised than if almost any other singularity were alleged against me.
I believe that human life has some value; and I am prejudiced in favour of populating the British Empire.
I am equally prejudiced against walking across Oxford Circus with my eyes closed at midday, and reducing our fleet while our land goes out of cultivation, although I realise that either folly may be perpetrated without inevitable penalty following.
I am prejudiced in the belief that the death of one careless chauffeur daily in the hangman's shed, however regrettable, would be less so than is the death of seven careless pedestrians daily on the open road. (The actual road fatalities in England now number fourteen a day, not seven, but half of these are motorists who kill themselves or each other.)
I am also prejudiced against the opinion of the Home Secretary that the perils and abuses of road traffic will increase indefinitely, because I have not observed that it is in the nature of pendulums to continue to swing in the same direction.
But my prejudices are very few, and are easily challenged. I am prejudiced in the beliefs that the earth is spherical, and that Marie Stopes is intellectually subnormal, yet if I were told that she is capable of a logical argument, or that the earth is flat, I should approach either proposition with an alert curiosity and a very open mind.
A correspondent reproaches me for alluding to "the mercy of another war" as though it implied either callousness or stupidity. War is, in many aspects, the supreme evil; and to initiate it is the supreme crime. It may be strongly, though not conclusively argued, that it is incompatible with Christianity under every circumstance. But there are evils of peace, also, which are no less deadly because they are slower and less dramatic in operation; and if war be permanently avoidable without national degeneration, we must carry the high spirit of conflict into the years of peace, which we have failed to do.
The end of the war left us with a Government assuring us that we were too tired for further effort, and ordering the retreat to be sounded. We were to reap the blessings of peace, but we were to make no effort to cultivate them. We were to talk about homes for heroes rather than to exert ourselves to build them. We were to recover prosperity, not by hard work, but by increasing each other's wages indefinitely.
Naturally, privations followed.
Pitiless taxation and currency manoeuvres may have kept some parts of the nation in continued comfort, but for the community as a whole they proved an obstructive curse. Such are the common sequels of prolonged war, and the politicians who are responsible for them will tell us complacently that they are inevitable. But is there any historical record of the difficulties of post-martial years being attacked with the national spirit which is provoked by the impact of a dangerous enmity?
Consider the question of housing. The end of the war found us deficient both in quantity and condition. There was no proper accommodation for the millions of men who were returning to civil life from tent and trench and shipboard. There were no roofs beneath which they could form the homes which the nation needed, with the women who were waiting for them, or whom they had married already. Can it be said that we were lacking in the labour or skill to build the houses they needed, or that it was beyond possibility to procure the necessary materials?
Suppose that at the crisis of war, in the spring of 1918, these houses had suddenly been realised as a condition of victory. Suppose that we had known certainly that if half a million houses could be solidly erected in six months we should win the war, and if there were one short we should lose it. Would Mr Lloyd George have been content to make a "homes for heroes" speech, and then such a bargain with those who were expert to build them as would enable them, from brickmaker to bricklayer, to live comfortably while working slackly, and to debar anyone else from assisting their operations?
Would it have been tolerated, Had the result of the war depended upon their occupation, that thousands of houses, whether large or small, should have been held empty to satisfy the private greed of their owners?
There are many instances of nations that have maintained themselves through centuries of successful war. In all history, there is no record of any nation that has retained its character or vitality through centuries of successful peace. If we would venture that higher and harder enterprise with reasonable hope of achievement, we must first recognise its conditions and dangers, which we show no disposition to do, and we shall need some better guidance than will come from the muddled wobblings of Dean Inge, or the vicious cowardice of the gospel of Marie Stopes.
We need not observe these facts in any spirit of pessimism, for they are only formidable the while we fail to observe them. But it would be foolish to ignore their significance. It is not a trivial circumstance that the English post-office, which once prided itself on the certainty with which it would deliver any communication entrusted to it, however badly addressed, now takes an equal pride in the ingenuity with which it can find reasons for failing to do so. But it will not be the first time that England has seen evil days and survived them.
Quiet, uncomplaining, oppressed with a weight of taxation which is without excuse, as it is without precedent, shamefully told that the payment of these exactions is more important than their children's lives, there are still in England, unless my faith is mistaken, a million of uncorrupted homes, where children are received with love, and privations are met with courage.
The pressure of unjust taxation may yet find a Hampden to resist it. A materialistic "science" may yet rouse a prophet to deride its superstitions, and to denounce its counsels of degradation.
However cunningly entrenched may be the bureaucracy which controls us, it is a fundamental law that it cannot endure unless its spirit be one of service rather than of acquisition.
Feudalism was impregnable until its ideal of service faltered. The monasteries would have endured until today, had they been content to express the ideality which conceived them.
Our "captains of industry" may become the rulers of their race, or they may end beneath the feet of a howling mob. The decision does not rest with the mob, nor with chance, nor with a settled destiny. It rests with them. If they be more concerned for their own wealth than for the welfare of those they lead, even the stupidity of the Labour party (which is almost absolute) will be sufficient for their undoing.
We may contemplate the probability that our civilisation may be swept away by physical catastrophe, and be succeeded by a period of simpler and more primitive life, from which new complexities will develop, without pessimism, and, if we understand the nature and purpose of human life intelligently, without regret.
Even if this civilisation were realised as the highest that the earth has borne, and could it be freed from various sinister practices, (such as that of usury), which are so woven into its fabric that it may be doubted whether it could survive their removal, we might still contemplate its conclusion with equanimity, or even with satisfaction.
Having won a game, we do not desire to remain static in victory. We clear the field for the contest which is sure to follow. But whether our civilisation be of such quality that it could be accounted pessimistic, from any standpoint, to anticipate its destruction, is not beyond argument. It might be considered evidence of an exceptionally sanguine temperament.
First published 1928 -Reprinted 1928 Reissued 1930 by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.
PRELUDE
To an observer from a distant planet the whole movement would have appeared trivial. There was probably no point at which land either sank or rose to one five-thousandth of the earth's diameter. But water and land were so nearly at one level that the slightest tremor was sufficient either to drain or flood them.
The surface trembled, and was still, and the Himalayas were untroubled, and the great tableland of Central Asia was still behind them, but the tides lapped the foothills to the south, and India was no more, and China a forgotten dream.
Once before the earth had trembled along the volcanic fissure which was then the fertile Eden of the human race, and a hundred legends and the Mediterranean were its mementoes.
Now it sank again, slightly and gently, along the same path. It was as though it breathed in its sleep, but scarcely turned, and Southern Europe was gone, and Germany a desolation that the seas had swept over.
Ocean covered the plain of the Mississippi, and broke against the barrier of the Rockies. The next day it receded, leaving the naked wrecks of a civilisation that a night had ended.
There were different changes southward, where the Saharan desert wrinkled into the greatest mountain range that the world had seen, and the sea creatures of the West Atlantic learnt in bewildered death that the ocean had failed them.
In the Indian tropics a hundred leagues of sea-slime that had known the weight of mile-deep waters streamed naked to a torrid sun.
The subsistence of the first night must have been comparatively local. It was nothing more than an extension of the Mediterranean basin, which had flooded the lower lands of Spain and Italy and part of France.
In England, as in Europe generally, the intervening day had been used in such attempts at escape as may be made by a cockroach in the middle floor when the lantern finds it.
The sea offered nothing, for the western coast was piled with the wreckage of the North Atlantic and the Irish Sea. There were no ships coming to the southern ports that day. There had been none in sight when its dawn had risen. The night-wind had swept the Channel clear, and if any had outlived the gale, which is not to be reasonably supposed, they must have been hurried far to south, where wind and water poured into the vortex.
The air offered a slight hope for the few who could avail themselves of its possibility. When the wind lessened, during the day, there were those who tried it, and may have lived, if they were able to find a place of safety before the storm resumed, but at best they could not have been many, and their hope was slender.
To most there came the blind instinct of northward flight, and as the pressure of the gale slackened, it had crowded many of the main roads with burdened stumbling crowds, or jammed them with motor vehicles which could make little progress against uprooted trees, and fallen poles, and blown wreckage, which confronted every mile of the smooth surfaces on which they had been accustomed to the high speed for which they paid so frequently in the deaths of their drivers, and in the slaughter of their fellowmen.
Now, when they felt that speed would have been their salvation, they could not gain it; but it would have availed them nothing. When the horror of the next night was over, Scotland, Wales, and all the heights of Northern England had disappeared for ever. Only, by some freak of fate, the cause of which is beyond knowing, some portions of the midland plain were still above the ocean level, with unimpaired fertility, and some life upon them. Larger portions had been drowned by the wild floods that receded when all life had ended, and the salt-soaked fields could only return in the course of gradual years to a reduced fertility. There was little of human life that remained, even in the higher ground, for those whom fire and storm had spared fled northward, to their own undoing, and few from the pasture-country to southward (one of the least populated portions of the England of that time) had had the good fortune to come so far, and no farther; but life there was, both of beast and man - life equally released from its accustomed slavery, lawless, confused, and incompetent.
The wild creatures of the woods adapted themselves the more readily to the new conditions. The change was only one of reduced caution, or of an added boldness. Man had ceased to count for the moment, and the fox walked where he would. To the rabbit it meant only that, if he had one foe the less, the others slaughtered with an assured impunity. To his undrowsing watchfulness it made no change at all.
Rats increased in the deserted ruins, and the owls fed freely.
The domesticated animals adjusted themselves more easily than their tyrants. The cat hunted now for food, as she had done for sport before. Sheep broke out from ruined fences, or where a tree fell in the hedgerow, and gathered into larger flocks, and rams fought for their leadership. The lambs were grown, and the roaming dogs had not yet combined to molest the flocks. Within a week, the sheep had collected on the high and open fields; and a herd of horses had gathered in the meadows of a river which still flowed on its shortened course-horses that wheeled with a flash of sudden hooves if a strange sound startled, or a strange object stirred in the grass as the wind found it, and came round in a galloped arc with tossing necks and lifted tails, to face the cause of their flurry. They were a strangely assorted troop of mare and gelding, of every size and colour, from shire horse to pony, absurdly led by a bright-eyed, half-grown yearling, who took the unchallenged right of the only male among them.
Herds of cattle lurked in the woods, and splashed in shady pools; and in the woods, too, were the pigs, to which the sows that roamed loosely round the farm buildings, finding that the morning meal was no more forthcoming, had led their hungry litters. They lay also in the potato fields, and would find their way later into the corn and to the acorn harvest, so that they ran no risk of scarcity, and before the winter came they would have worn the rings from their noses, and be able to burrow for a score of succulent roots that the woods could offer, as their free-roaming ancestors had done in the England of an earlier millennium.
Men fared more hardly. It was upon their artificial environment that the storm spent its force. There were many thousands whom this environment destroyed, quite literally, beneath its falling debris. Those who escaped from such catastrophe were less capable than the beasts they despised, either to find a temporary security or to provide for their bodily necessities when the storm subsided. They had used their boasted intelligence to evade the natural laws of their beings, and they were to reap the fruits of their folly. They had degraded their purblind and toothless bodies, until even those which were still reasonably sound in heart and lungs, in liver and kidneys, were incapable of sustained exertion without continual food, or of retaining warmth without the clumsy encumbrance of the skins of superior animals, or by the weaving of various vegetable substances.
Every natural law that their lives had denied and their lips derided was now released to scourge them. They had despised the teaching of the earth that bore them, and her first care was given to her more obedient offspring.
It was not only that they were physically ill-adapted for life on the earth's surface, but the minds of most of them were empty of the most elementary knowledge of their physical environment.
Released in a day from the most elaborate system of mutual slavery that the world has known, they were unused to the exercise of mental initiative, or to independent action. They were accustomed to settle every issue of life, not by the application of any basic rules, or instinctive preferences, or by the exercise of reason, but under the blind guidance of their specialised fellowmen, or by assiduous imitation of the procedure of those around them. The great majority of them were engaged in repetition work which had not originated in their own minds, and made no call upon them for analysis, decision, or judgement.
Their perceptions were blinded by physical deficiency. They were incapable of clear thought, or of decisive action.
They were under a further disadvantage, which was not less serious because it was of a less obvious kind.
They had been restrained from many evil (and some admirable) courses, not by experience of their probable consequences, nor by observation, nor tradition, but by laws which exacted utterly illogical penalties. When the fear of these penalties was removed, they reacted variously to instincts undisciplined except by a restraint which no longer operated.
It had been a natural correlative of such conditions that where there had been no law to coerce them they (or at least many among them) had lacked the self-control needed for the dignity or even the decencies of physical existence, and had developed communally-concealed habits which would have appalled the instincts of any cleanly beast. The bodies of many of them were rotten from the contagious horrors of the degradation in which they had lived, and the deluge did not more than hasten them to a swifter and more seemly end than they would otherwise have experienced.
The bodies of many others had been mutilated by expert practitioners, who had removed portions of decayed or diseased organs, or glands, or other parts, of the uses of which they were ignorant. Their enfeebled vitality had been subjected to the attacks of various kinds of external and internal parasites, from the effects of which many thousands died every year. But the warnings of these endemic diseases had been unheeded, or misread, and they had either striven to defeat them by operation or inoculation, or resigned themselves to them, as to the effect of a natural law, rather than attempt to recapture the conditions of life and health which would render them superior to the attacks of such vermin.
Even the evidence supplied by their domesticated animals, which developed a corresponding series of diseases and infirmities as their conditions of life were approximated to those of their masters, was disregarded. The pain and danger without which the degenerate bodies of their women were incapable of procreation was accepted as an unavoidable evil, although a study of the experiences of the various breeds of their domestic sheep would have supplied them with knowledge of the conditions under which these dangers or discomforts would have been largely avoided, even under the conditions of existence to which they had descended.
There was scarcely a man of all their millions who was not warned of these evils in a parable which had reached them from an earlier world, but they had united to deride it, some as a literal episode of primeval history, and others as an idle tale.
It remained to discover what would be brought to birth from the wrecks of such a civilisation, when the fallen girders of its erections had rusted, and the coal-smoke cleared, and the fresh sea-air blew over the recovered greenness of the fields that they had once polluted.
MARTIN AND HELEN
CHAPTER I
May 31 was Whit-Sunday. It was one of those rare days that the English climate would sometimes give to those who had grown weary of its more sinister vagaries, green and cool and sunny after a week of showers. It was on that day that Mrs. Templeton lunched at the Websters. She was the wife of a newspaper proprietor; a lean, short-haired, painted woman, such as were common at that period. She had no children, and made a boast of her barrenness, which she implied was deliberate. "Besides," she said, "how could we afford it, with income tax as it is, and a new car to be bought in the autumn? And then the cost of education! - I always think it is so wicked to bring a child into the world to be handicapped afterwards. Charles? Oh, men are so sentimental, and so inconsiderate - they never think what it means to us women - as Bishop Storr said at the last Congress. . . . Oh yes, I think your babies are beautiful - I dote on children - but I do hope you won't be silly again - "
And two days later - well, perhaps it was time.
The woman spoke with the assurance of one whose vices were popular, and who felt it was her hosts, rather than herself, who were on the defensive, for the crime of having two children in the nursery; and Helen was always polite to a guest, and had special reasons of importance (as they appeared then) for conciliating Mrs. Templeton. As for Martin, several years of law court practice had taught him to conceal opinions till they were needed, and he contented himself with eliciting casually that she was a seventh child, and agreeing that there was something to be said for small families.
It was that night that the wind rose. It blew against the house with a steady pressure, free from gusts, and there was a continuous whining sound from the trees, very different from the rustle and creak of swaying boughs that is usual in time of tempest.
Martin, wakeful in an unusual restlessness, found it hard to turn his mind from this sound. It seemed to him that the trees whined in a conscious terror, and as though to an implacable power which they had no hope to propitiate.
The wind increased. He heard the loud crack of a tree-trunk that had snapped at the strain. There were many noises in the night. There was a crash as though a chimney fell at the further end of the house. But Helen slept quietly through it, and while she did so he would not rise to disturb her.
The wind came from the north. The room in which they slept had a northern wall, but the windows were on the western side. The door was on the south. It opened to a passage leading to the room where the children slept. There was no sound to alarm him from that direction.
The side of the house from which the sound of falling had come was vacant that night. The servants - a married couple - had been given leave over the weekend. The sudden illness of a brother had occasioned the absence of the nurse since the previous afternoon. They were alone in the house.
It was toward morning, in an interval of broken sleep, that he heard the telephone ringing in the room below with an unmistakable urgency. He rose and went down.
He found that it was a call from the local police station to tell him that a tree had fallen across the road adjoining his premises, and broken the fence of his field. Had he any animals loose in the field, and, if so, would he take steps to secure them? The inspector added that he had had so many accidents reported during the last hour that he was short of staff to deal with them. Could Mr. Webster's man put some warning light upon the obstruction, such as would last till sunrise?
Mr. Webster's man was away, but Mr. Webster would do it. The inspector was hurriedly grateful. He rang off. Martin went upstairs to dress hastily.
Helen was still sleeping peacefully, and when he woke her sufficiently to explain why he was going, she only said, "Don't be long; it's too cold to stay out at this time of night," and was asleep again as she said it.
The house lay at some distance south of the road, and the wind blew from the north, so that it faced him almost directly as he entered the drive, to which the house stood sideways, facing west, and though the trees must have done something to break its force, he found that he could only stand against it with difficulty. He switched on the drive lamps (for the night was still dark) so that he found his way easily, though every yard was an effort, as though the air into which he stepped were solid substance into which a foot must be forced with difficulty.
Turning to the right when he left the drive, and passing a row of adjoining cottages, he came to the place of the accident. An elm had fallen across the road, scattering the bricks of a wall which had bounded the field in which it grew, so that he stumbled against one of them while the dark barrier of the fallen trunk was still at some distance. On his own side, it had crashed through a high fence of saplings, which had fallen for several yards on either side. A flash-light torch which he carried showed the giant bole stretching far into the field, and beyond a shadowy mass of broken or uplifted branches. Having fixed the torch with some labour, and the help of a pocket-knife (rather neatly, as he thought), on the fallen trunk, so that the wind should not displace it, and it would be a warning, however feeble, to any approaching traffic, he made his way back to the house.
The steady violence of the wind was still increasing. Turning in at the gate he found it difficult to move forward without falling. Had it come in gusts of such a force it must have been impossible to do so, but the pressure was so regular that the muscular effort needed for its resistance could be gauged with accuracy, and the greatest difficulty was to avoid an acceleration of pace, when moving before it, which would have become uncontrollable.
As he made his way to the house, he heard a heavy rumbling sound behind him, which he at first supposed to be thunder, but when it came a second time he recognised the fall of some large building that the wind had demolished.
But no fear for his own house, which was very solidly built, entered his mind, and he regained it with a sense of relief and of recovered security.
He was of the temperament that a high wind exhilarates, and the lives of most people of that time were so bare of unexpected incident, that any unusual physical occurrence, even of a threatening character, had an effect of pleasurable stimulus, and dim atavistic instincts moved slightly in their sleep, though they might not waken.
It is a thing almost incredible to tell, but it is simply true, and illustrates the intolerable monotony of their days, that a great industry had arisen which was occupied in collecting daily information respecting the actions or accidents of their fellowmen, and informing others concerning them, so that every day millions of people dissipated their time in learning (and at once forgetting) that a woman of whom they had never heard before, nor would hear again, had left her husband; or that a husband had broken his wife's head; or a servant had taken his master's property; that a building had been accidentally burned in a distant town; or a child drowned in a river fifty miles away; and even events of much greater triviality were repeated in a series of unending monotony.
Yet the collection of such details over a vast area gave to their readers, whose intelligences were dulled by the conditions of their existence, an illusion of surrounding incidents; and so they would spend their daily time in the absorbing of such vicarious excitement, while the actual conditions in which they existed were such that they might sometimes lack food or clothing for their children, and the land around them was neglected, or roughly cultivated by the machines which they produced in their crowded settlements, and which had replaced the living men and women by whom the work had been more efficiently performed in earlier days.
Of the joy of present living, of the captured meal and the barred door, of brief safety after hazard, of ecstatic rest after exhaustion, they knew nothing, either by imagination or experience.
So hateful were their own existences, and so hopeless were they of any change or improvement from their own exertions, that many thousands of them found relief in periods of temporary forgetfulness, during which they were enabled, by a supply of imaginary narrations, to occupy themselves with the supposed emotions or actions of invented lives.
As we have seen, the house-front faced sideways to the wind's course, and it was owing to this circumstance that Martin was able, after a moment's breathless struggle, to close the door again when he entered it.
As he did this he became conscious that the telephone was again ringing steadily, and he went to it in anticipation that he would hear an inquiry as to the work which he had just completed but a voice was speaking already as he raised the receiver.
". . . should be held in readiness until more is known. Message ends. Home Office message begins. Broadcast by all means available. Post public notice this effect in all offices. Terrible calamity in Southern Europe. Land subsidence, and Mediterranean overflowing. Spain and Italy believed submerging. Telegraphic communications ceased except through Denmark. Believed no occasion alarm here, although gale increasing Movements of population will greatly embarrass Government's efforts to meet emergency. Public notice ends. Instruct all local authorities take immediate steps control provisions, Arrange population evacuate all unstable buildings. Close all banks. Suspend all transit services, awaiting further instructions. Government taking necessary steps maintain essential services. Precautions in cities against fire urgently necessary. Panic movements of population to be. . . ."
The voice ceased, and the instrument no longer responded to any effort to rouse it. It was clear that he had received the end, and then the beginning of a message which was being repeated incessantly for the benefit of all who could hear it.
Martin went upstairs slowly. He was excited rather than shocked or alarmed by the stupendous nature of the catastrophe. His mind was too active for his feet to move very rapidly. Was it really true? And would his own country sink also into the abyss, and they with it? Was it safe to stay in the house, and if not, what should be the alternative? What food was there in the house, and could any tradesman reach them if this storm should continue? Would the court be closed, or ought he to attempt to reach it? Thank Heaven, that brief - ! The fowl-house would never stand this wind - the hens would be loose among those young savoys in the morning, just planted out, if they weren't dead - he must wake Helen; could anyone sleep through this wind? He would see that the children were safe before he did so; if they were awake he would bring them to her.
So he went first to their room, and found them sleeping as he had hoped, and the sight, illogically enough, gave him a feeling of the stability of established things, so that he went to look out of their window in a quieter and more sceptical mood. He would do nothing rashly. Those who lost their heads at such a time were the ones who suffered now, and were ridiculed afterwards.
The window was over the front door, and he could see the trees on the further side of the drive. They were not swaying at all, but bent before the wind so low that he could see over some of them (for the dawn was faintly widening) to a field beyond that was usually hidden entirely. And then the wind ceased. It ceased absolutely, and as suddenly as a clock ticks. The bent trees leapt upward.
There was a moment's pause of stillness, and then the wind came again with a sudden and augmented blast, a triumphant downward rush that swept the tortured trees before it. Some that had resisted the gradually increasing pressure half the night now screamed and snapped, or fell full length, with a rending of deep roots, and tons of green-turfed soil flung loose around them. It caught up gate and fence, and carried them like paper till they were flung against a wall that held them back for a moment, and then fell itself in an equal ruin. A crash and rumble of falling bricks came from the farther end of the house at the same moment. Martin supposed it to be another chimney falling. The noise roused him to the need for action. He went quickly toward the bedroom where he had left his wife an hour earlier, but she met him on her way to the nursery. There was no time for explanations then.
"Are they safe?" she asked.
"Yes," he said, with an affected carelessness, "but they'll be safer outside till the storm quietens. We must go out by the back door. Get yourself some clothes while I fetch them." He went back, and made a hurried bundle of each, wrapping up their clothes with them in a shawl or blanket, and before he had done it there came a louder, nearer crash than before, with an after-falling of masonry, and the plaster fell heavily from the ceiling. A rush of wind came with it, and the door of the room, which he had left half open, banged loudly. He tried to open it, but it resisted his efforts. He had the living bundles, one under each arm at first, as he did this, but found that he must lay them down if he were to hope to gain his freedom. He pushed them under the bed, as the place which would be safe at least from the falling ceiling. The younger one, a child of two, was crying, loudly no doubt, though the storm drowned it. The elder, nearly twice her age, watched him in a wide-eyed excitement, and said something that he could not hear. She did not appear conscious that her cheek was bleeding freely where the falling plaster had caught it.
He tried the door now with both hands, but it was jammed too tightly to yield to any force that he could apply. He called loudly to Helen, but could hear no answer. He looked round for a weapon which he could use to break it down. He felt sure now that there would be no escape alive unless it were done very quickly. But at the next instant there came an augmented blast of storm, that rocked the house to its foundations. He heard a straining and cracking of woodwork, and a rush of wind in the passage without, and then the door was flung open with a force which might have killed anyone standing near, as it swung backward to the wall behind it.
With a bundle under either arm, Martin fought his way from the room, step by step, against the howling force of the tempest. As he gained the main landing he realised that the structure of the house was still standing, and the stairs were clear, but the bedroom to which Helen had returned was wrecked and piled with debris. A chestnut tree, which grew close against the house on that side, and of the danger of which he had sometimes doubted in times of milder storm, had fallen upon it. The great tree had broken through the roof and outer wall, and the inner wall and door were scattered across the landing.
Burdened as he was, he stumbled on past the stair head, struggling against the wind and calling Helen's name as he did so, but receiving no answer. He gained the edge of the room, and saw that a part of the floor was broken, and the next step would have precipitated him to the space below. He paused there for a moment, keeping difficult footing, in distraction of mind between the fear that she might be somewhere there, in desperate need of aid, and the desire to place the precious lives he carried in some comparative safety. In the end, the logic of fact compelled him. He could not search so burdened, nor did he know that she might not be already in safety. Where the room had been was now a rubble of fallen bricks and slates and beams, with the great bole of the tree leaning across them, and its shattered boughs intruding.
That anyone could have lived beneath that avalanche was beyond probability.
Slowly, in a reluctant misery, he turned away, and had soon made a successful issue from the rear of the house, and across the stable yard, where he received a cut from a flying slate, which would have had more notice in quieter times, and so, by a struggling, falling course, to a stack of last year's hay, which was still standing in the field, and which he had made his objective. It was over the ridge, and so protected slightly from the wind's full pressure, but when he reached it he found that its thatching, and much of its upper portion, had been torn off and scattered.
He rested beneath it for a few moments, gaining strength and breath for further effort, but dared not leave the children there, as he had first intended, lest they should be smothered by a further subsidence. He realised that safety was not easily to be found, and yet to get back was urgent, and to do that, against the torment of wind which was now raging, it was imperative that he should be relieved of his burdens.
There was a marl-pit close at hand, which gave a moment's hope, till he recalled the steepness of its more sheltered side, and the deep pool it held; there was a larger one, with a dry bottom, farther away, and on this he decided.
It was of unusual width and depth, even for a district where these old pits were frequent, and often of considerable size. It was on the edge of a clump of oak trees, but these were to the south, so that there would be no danger from them while the wind held from its present quarter.
There were some old hawthorns growing within it, on the slope of its northern bank, so that the tops of the trees were about level with the field's edge.
Here he made his way, and slid and stumbled down its easier slope, and found a sandy spot that was nearly level beneath the hawthorns, and laid his bundles down, and could at last think with some clearness, which had been impossible while the burdened struggle with the storm continued.
The younger child, warmly wrapped and covered from the wind, was surprisingly sleeping, but the elder was very widely awake, with excited wondering eyes. She looked doubtful as he rose to go, and her lip trembled, but when he laughed and told her that she must be good and he would soon be back and her mother also, and that they would have breakfast under the trees, she took it as a new game, and only said: "Muvver come soon?" as she turned away. "Yes, very soon," he said with a light assurance he was far from feeling, wondering whether she could still be living, or if they or he would be alive when the day ended.
He paused a moment as he gained the pit's edge before he climbed out to meet the force of the screaming hurricane which raged round him. There was still no rain, but the sky was darkened with low, black clouds that hurried southward at a rate that looked fantastic, and the air had become strangely cold, so that he shivered as the wind met him.
Beneath the clouds, the whole of the south-western horizon was of the colour of heated copper.
This he saw first, because he had climbed to the west of the pit, where the ascent was easier, but when he looked to the further side he was startled by the evidence of nearer calamity. Heavy smoke was driving across the field from the fallen ruins of the house which he had left but a few moments earlier, and from the eastern wing a pillar of flame bent as the wind's gusts gripped it.
He was never clear in his mind as to how he got back to the burning building. But he had the sense to keep on up the field, so that he should approach it to windward.
When he had done this, in short time or long, he had a moment's relief in the consciousness that he was not too late, if any rescue were possible.
He stood at last holding to a root of the upturned tree, and partly sheltered from the wind by the mass of earth which it had torn up, but which still held it; and perhaps it was then that he was first subconsciously aware that the heat and suffocation of the air he breathed were not entirely due to the burning of his own house which the wind blew from him, but to the greater conflagration of the city on the outskirts of which he lived, and which must have involved it entirely within a few hours, if it had not then done so. With it, the wind brought a faint, continuous, wailing cry, as of the gathered lamentation of thousands, and beneath his feet a half-fledged thrush fluttered feebly with a broken wing.
Before him, the wall of the house was still standing, to the height of the first floor. The great tree which had broken the roof and the upper story was supported now by the whole structure on which it leaned, its breadth of branch distributing its weight very widely, but it looked as though at any moment the ruin must collapse entirely.
Though the lower wall stood, the window, which opened to the ground, had been blown or broken inward, and by this gap he was able to climb over a debris of fallen bricks, and beams, and shattered furniture, and broken boughs, searching fearfully in a shadowed gloom, to which the smoke of the burning wing was already penetrating, till a voice from the further side said with eager urgency: "Are they safe?"
"Yes," he said, "but are you?"
"I felt sure you'd saved them. I don't know. But move carefully."
He was struggling, in natural haste, toward the site from which the voice came, but now paused as she continued, while his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, and helped him to understand what she told him. "Wait a moment, and listen. I am pinned under a beam. I don't feel hurt at all, but I can't move, and I don't know whether I am really injured. I didn't care to struggle hard till you came, because, as you can see, its full weight is not on me now, but if I moved I might bring it. I felt sure when you did not come, and I did not hear them cry, that you had got them safe. You wouldn't all have been killed at once. So when I heard nothing I just waited. Where have you left them?"
He answered briefly, his mind occupied in overcoming, without any resulting disturbance, the obstacles that still divided them The thoughts that the whole edifice might collapse at any moment; that a hasty movement might bring disaster, that the fire was advancing its own argument of urgency, and that the children would almost surely die unless he should return to them safely, left no mental leisure for the needless words which they had spent so much of their lives in exchanging.
He was one who had lived by words, and he was to find their use again under very different conditions, but there was an earlier lesson to be learned of their more frequent futility.
He saw that when the tree fell the first substantial impact had been given by a great lateral branch which grew toward the house, and which must have struck the roof and penetrated inward and downward as the tree leaned over.
From this cause, as also from the fact that it was built less strongly, the partition wall had been broken down lower, as well as more widely, than the outer one, so that its ruins had given little support to the cataract of brick and slate, of board and rafter, which had descended through the broken floor of the bedroom.
When the crash came, as she afterwards told him, Helen had been standing at an open wardrobe which was placed between the windows. A moment earlier these windows had been blown in on either side of her, with a rush of air which had nearly thrown her off her feet, but she had held her ground, and urged by this catastrophe, she had given up the attempt to clothe herself further, and had just gathered the contents of the wardrobe into her arms when the roof descended upon her. Blinded by dust and plaster, she continued to clutch the door of the wardrobe with one hand, the other arm being filled with the loose clothes she had gathered, while the floor gave way at the further end, causing the wardrobe to slide rapidly forward, carrying her before it; but, probably owing to the pull of her weight on the door, it swung round as it did so, so that it was beneath her as it was precipitated into the room below. It fell on its back which smashed very easily, as, like most of the furniture of those days, the parts which were usually hidden were made of thin and worthless wood.
She found herself lying across it, with the loose clothes beneath her, feeling no pain, and thinking herself free to move when she would, but choked and blinded by the dust. A fresh fall of bricks and rubble came a moment later, at the further side of the room, and she lay awhile uncertain whether it would be more or less risky to remain still or to attempt escape.
As the dust began to clear, and no further fall came, she attempted to rise, and was surprised to find her legs immovable. A heavy rafter lay across them, itself bearing a mass of debris, but so placed that its further end was supported upon the ruin of the inner wall, and holding her only, she thought, as in a gentle vice, with pressure rather than weight. Indeed, she found that with a little twisting she got one leg entirely loose, and would have drawn it from beneath the beam but for the discomfort of the position which would have resulted. But when she attempted to release the other, at the first pull there was a slight movement among the broken bricks on which the beam was resting, and it settled down more heavily, so that the leg which she had loosed before was held again, and the other felt the pain of an increasing weight and pressure. There was an ominous slipping also in the debris which the beam supported, and being confident that Martin would find her, she had decided to remain quiet for a time in the hope that he could co-operate in a safer method of release. After that she had felt faint, though she knew no cause, and had since been sleeping or half-conscious, so that the time had seemed but a few minutes till she was aroused by his coming.
Martin could not tell what risk he took in the work of the next few moments. He tried to reach her with as little disturbance as possible, but as he did so an eddy of denser smoke rolled in from the hall, and he could see nothing clearly. The next moment it came more thickly in a pause of wind, with a blast of heat, and a flame glowed in the hallway.
He felt along the beam to where her legs were beneath it. He said: "When I can I will lift with all my strength and you must pull them out instantly. I can't say whether I shall be able to do it, or for how long, or what will follow, but it seems the best chance we have. Are you ready? Now."
Then the beam lifted, tilting somewhat from one end, with some noise and confusion of falling bricks.
Helen said: "I think they are clear now," and cautiously, not knowing how far its supports might have shifted, he lowered the beam. It rested much as before, and then her voice came again, with an undertone of fear for the first time: "I can't get up. I am too weak. My legs are cramped, but I think there's something else wrong. Could you lift me?"
"Rather," he said lightly, and indeed he was relieved so greatly that they could escape the fire, that he hardly felt the fear of what this incapacity might imply, as he would have done in other circumstances.
The wind was blowing again with recovered force, and they were less choked and blinded than they had been, but the fire in the hall was closer, and a sudden spurt of flame from the stairs lit them, so that he saw her plainly for the first time, lying almost face-downward, on the heap of clothes she had been collecting.
She tried to raise herself when she saw him: "Bring the clothes," she began, and then her smile changed to an expression of sudden agony, and she sank forward in a faint from which she did not recover until he had carried her out of the burning building into a heavy rain which was now falling. The wind seemed more moderate, and though the ram was strangely cold for the season, it felt even pleasant as he left the stifling heat, the discomfort of which he had scarcely realised in the excitement of the rescue. He breathed deeply of the cooler air as he crossed the lawn, his relief that she was alive and recovered contending with fear as to the extent of her injury, anxiety to return to the children, and the consciousness that their food and all other necessities of life were lost within the burning building.
CHAPTER II
To the habits of those days, a marl-pit in a time of soaking rain was no fit place in which to lay an unconscious and injured woman, but he could think of no better resort, nor could he do other than unite her with the children if he were to go in search of food, as he surely must if their lives were to be long continued. He had realised already that they were faced by more than ordinary catastrophe, and that they must rely upon themselves if they were to find means to survive it.
During this time, and for many hours afterwards, he was too occupied with their own immediate needs to concern himself with larger issues, except as they were thrust upon him, but he could not be unaware that the north-west sky was now a lurid height of flame, where the city burnt, in which a hundred of those whom he had known most intimately had been sleeping but a few hours before. The wind was no longer steady, but veered in sudden gusts, as though it were drawn at times by the rising of the heated air. When it blew in that direction it was cold enough, and the rain was mixed with sleet, but when it came straight from the north it felt as though it were too hot and dry for the rain to cool it, though it could but have passed at a mile's distance the furnace of that appalling tragedy.
But with the wind and the rain behind him, he made quick progress down the sloping field, and, reaching the pit, he went round to the easier side, and there sat and slid down it as best he could till they had reached the place where he had left the children.
Hawthorn and undergrowth made an insufficient screen from the rain that was falling, and as they grew only on the steeper side of the pit it was not easy to find a place beneath them both dry and level. He could see nothing better than the elder bushes beneath which the children had retreated, and there at last he laid her as best he could, treading down a space of grass and nettles, and breaking away the lower branches that gave insufficient space to stoop beneath them.
The fear that Helen had not escaped without some serious injury had been growing upon him as he carried her, and noticed her exhaustion and wavering consciousness, but doubt was certainty as soon as he raised the loose wraps and dresses on which she had lain, and which he had lifted with her. Below her waist they had been soaked in blood which had dried, and in a fresh stream which must have broken out when she moved, and which still continued to drip from them.
Another moment disclosed the injury. On the left side, across the lower ribs, a piece of broken glass had made a wound about six inches long, though not, he thought, very deeply.
"It hasn't killed me?" she asked lightly, though with anxious eyes.
"No," he answered, in the way of the world that they had known, where there was always leisure for words, whatever else might be lacking, so that a man might be expected to handle them skilfully, though he would be of little use with spade or chisel; "you'll die of old age before that kills you. But you've lost a lot of blood, and you'll have to lie quite still, and the question is how I can make you comfortable, and get all that is needed for you and the children."
As he spoke, he saw that her eyes had wandered ruefully to the ruined dresses, and then forgot them in the realisation of the children's safety, and with a sudden consciousness of all that was lost or left, he bent and kissed her. "You will soon be well," he said, "and nothing matters, if you are safe and the children."
They talked quietly for a few minutes, trying to comprehend the catastrophe which had fallen upon the world, and to adjust their minds to its necessities, and then she called to the children, who were crying quietly in a frightened way, to come to her, and comforted them, telling them that she was hurt in falling, but would soon be well, and making a game of everything.
Meanwhile Martin had improved their shelter to some extent, breaking down some of the lower growth, so that they could be brought more inward and gain some shelter from the bank itself, as well as from the trees above them, and had placed the various garments and the children's bedclothes - the only things they had saved - in the driest spot he could find.
Helen lay in the dressing-gown which she had put on when she first rose, and would have no other covering, nor was she willing that he should examine her wound again when he suggested that they ought to be sure that no broken glass had been left in it.
"Perhaps you think I ought to lose some more blood," she said, "but I would rather have breakfast."
Martin could sympathise with that feeling, as could the children, who were becoming fretful with hunger. They were all used to a ready meal when they rose in the morning. A marlpit might have blackberries in September, but at the end of May it offered no evident nourishment.
The world's fate became a less urgent matter than the meal they were needing.
It would be tedious to tell the work of the next few hours in detail.
Three times Martin went out and returned loaded with such necessities as he could discover, while the wind fell and the rain ceased, and the sky became covered with a reddish, smoky haze, beneath which the wet ground steamed visibly, and, as it dried, which it did very quickly, the atmosphere was one of oppressive and increasing heat, as of an oven.
During this time they saw no living person. If any but themselves had survived the ravages of fire and storm - and they supposed that many must have done so - they were cowering in such cover as they could find, or had fled in other directions. Such wind as continued blew towards the city, fortunately, no doubt, for them, as it was fortunate also that they were on higher ground, and that a ridge divided it from them, but it was clear that it still burnt, and indeed the whole sky, with its smoky haze, and horizons of molten copper, gave an impression of a world in flame.
Up to this time, through the physical exhaustion of his body, Martin's mind had worked in a dazed and almost mechanical manner, only dimly realising the shadow of catastrophe beneath which their lives had fallen, and it may have been the effect of food, and a brief interval of rest, which made him so much more alertly conscious as he left the pit for the fourth time, but the dullest mind - and his was very far from that - would have been waked to some excitement when the red haze of the southern sky was transformed to a sudden sheet of flame, and a low rumble followed, as of a great noise at a great distance, and continued for some time, but with a gradually decreasing volume, till he could not tell certainly whether or when it had entirely ceased, while his strained hearing became aware that a low inarticulate murmur, as of the wailing of millions, was in the air continually.
But he turned away from the southern sky, which had resumed its previous aspect, and went on up the field in a mood of lively speculation as to the nature of the catastrophe which had overwhelmed the world he knew; and in doubt as to whether the worst had yet come upon them, and in what way, if at all, he could best protect his own from its dangers.
His objective was now the row of cottages beyond his own grounds. He thought that if they had fallen, but had not burnt, he might find there many things of value, and also that there would surely be some people still living who might be helpful, or who might need help which he could give them.
In his first hope he was disappointed. The row of cottages, from end to end, was a smoking ruin. For though many buildings were separately strong or sheltered enough to withstand the force of the gale, yet in the cities, where the older or frailer fell, and any fire was started, the wind would spread it very quickly, and such fires were too numerous for any organised resistance to be offered.
In the country districts, many buildings that fell would have escaped unburnt but for a prevalent custom of leaving enough hot ashes in their grates at night to make the restarting of the fire an easy process in the following morning.
In the towns, the fusing of electric wires may have been a frequent cause of conflagration.
Anyway, the cottages were burned, and the only sign of life was a small dog that ran round them.
On a paved yard which had divided one of the cottage-fronts from the road, a boy was lying. It seemed that he had jumped from one of the upper windows. It was no great height, but he may have climbed or been thrown clumsily from a small window.
An arm lay awkwardly, as though the shoulder were dislocated. His clothing was charred in places, but the wind must have blown the fire from him, so that he was scorched rather than burned.
He was plainly dead.
As Martin stooped over him to assure himself that no help were possible, a rat ran from his clothing. It darted aside, evidently expecting a hole beneath the wall which was no longer there. Then it turned in an instant's indecision, and Martin's foot, in a revulsion of antipathy, came down upon it. It ran on a few paces unsteadily, as though partially stunned, and he stamped on it again - and again - till all movement ceased.
He felt an illogical satisfaction, as though he had successfully defied the blind and terrible forces by which the boy had perished, and had avenged his death.
He went on along the road. It was a quiet byway, running east and west, and the flight of the surrounding inhabitants had been by other ways. But the wall along its northern side was in ruins, and the bricks were scattered across it at several places. Where the elm had fallen he came to a new horror. Near that point there was a slight bend in the road. A motor, driven at a high pace round the curve, had been unable to slacken speed quickly enough to avoid the impact. It was evident that it had taken a somersault over it, flinging forward a woman who had been driving, and who now lay in a heap in the middle road.
The instinct of service led Martin to approach her. She lay in a pool of her own blood. She was not dead, for her eyes moved, following him as he bent over her. He spoke, but she did not answer. He thought to move her by the roadside, but when he touched her, she shrank, and moaned pitifully. What could he do? He saw that she was hopelessly injured. It might have been kind to kill her, but of this he was incapable.
He was sick of horrors, and his inclination was to return to Helen without seeking further for the things they needed. Seeing that the cottages had shared the fate of his own house, it became doubtful how far he might have to go to obtain them.
But he became aware that his hands were red from the blood of the woman that he had tried to succour. He would wash them before returning. He remembered that there was a stream at a short distance, and crossed the ruined wall and a park-like enclosure beyond to reach it.
While he did this he regained the nervous control that he had almost lost, and decided that it would be cowardly to return without making a further search. He had no doubt that he had left his family in safety. It was not his presence which they would need, but the things which he could find for their food and comfort.
He crossed another field, and came in sight of a farmhouse that was still burning. Avoiding this, he crossed a hollow, beyond which he thought he saw the thatched roof of a cottage. It proved to be no more than a deserted cattleshed which the storm had spared, as though in derision. As he entered it, a hen ran cackling between his feet. He found a nest and several eggs.
Pleased with this booty, he resolved to continue along the higher ground, making a circuit of the hollow which he had crossed, and so return by a somewhat different route, foraging as he went.
It was then that he became aware that he was walking unsteadily. He sat down on the ground, feeling uncertain whether he had done so by compulsion or of his own volition.
A piece of wall, very solidly built, that had withstood the tempest of the previous night, leaned over and fell with a crash of brick and masonry, and a cloud of dust, that spread chokingly around him.
He felt a sensation as when a lift starts suddenly downward. After a time he got up and continued his way. If the ground were still sinking (as it must have been, and as it must have continued to do with a very steady and gradual motion, till it had descended some hundreds of feet below its previous level) he had become so accustomed to the movement that it had ceased to affect him consciously.
It did not give him any premonition of fresh disaster, as would have been the case had the earth quaked violently, or been torn apart. Its storm-beaten surface seemed quiet and peaceful enough, under a smoky pall of sky that was liver-coloured in places and a glowing copper in others. It was solid earth to the view, and unshaken.
Martin made slow progress.
It was a larger circuit than he had supposed, and the way through the fields was impeded by hedges which had few gates in the direction he was attempting.
He was conscious of an increasing weariness, natural to the length and nature of the exertions which he had made since the previous night, and of an intermittent giddiness, and a feeling of sickness, which may have had a different cause.
At last he felt compelled to rest, where a fallen fence gave a drier seat than the ground could offer, and some support behind it, and here he remained, only dimly aware of the passing hour, till he noticed that the sun was near its setting, and rose in a belated haste, with the fear that he might not have completed his homeward journey before the light should fail him.
Even then, his concern was not that he should have any difficulty in returning, but only lest the length of his absence should have caused anxiety to Helen. He did not think that he had far to go. Though the familiar landmarks were obliterated or broken, he felt sure that he was not far from the road which he must have crossed a mile or two further west when he set out. Once there, he could find his way in the dark. It was downhill, too, and easy going. After his rest he made a good pace. He was soon descending toward the hollow along which ran the lane to Goring Dene. He could follow that lane. . . .
But the lane to Goring Dene was under thirty feet of water that was rising, foot by foot, on the sloping field that he had crested to gain it.
Martin stopped. There was no way here. He could not easily understand what had happened. A chill of fear was at his heart which he would not heed. What stream, what river, could have risen thus? What flood could have filled it?
He went on along the crest of the field, climbing to a wider view. A sea of turbulent water stretched beneath him, dull red beneath the copper sky. He realised with a shock of horror that the whole city must be under water. He thought - he hoped - that it would not have reached to where he had left those who were dearest to him. But how could he reach them?
On his left, the water stretched to the horizon. It heaved as it advanced in long, rolling curves that did not break, except here and there, where the higher ground was not yet deeply covered.
It may seem strange that it rose so gently. It is not difficult to imagine that there were places where a swirling torrent of ocean poured into the abyss of a sinking continent with a rush that carried it far on across the face of land from which it must ultimately be withdrawn by the law that rules its level - indeed, it was such a torrent that swept the central plain of Europe, and left it sown with salt, empty, and desolate. There may have been places also where the lifting land threw off the weight of waters that it had carried since the dawn of history, with a force that hurried it, a mile-high wave, against an equal wall of advancing water, to break in tumult that men may have beheld, but could not live to tell.
But here the water rose with an amazing quietness, as the land sank, foot by foot, without evidence of either tilt or fracture.
The main rush of the Atlantic was to the mighty hollow that had formed in the Mediterranean basin. But here it brimmed gently to the falling land. . . .
To Martin it bore no aspect of gentleness. He had no assurance - he had no reasonable hope - that it would not continue to rise till the last foot of land had disappeared beneath it, yet with a tenacity of purpose and loyalty of affection which were fundamental he continued to make his difficult way along the edge of the advancing flood in the failing light, seeking for some point at which it would be possible for him to return to the rescue of those whom he had left in this unsuspected peril.
It was in vain. The night fell, and the water was around and beneath him on every side. He could not doubt that they were dead, nor could he hope that there were many hours of life before him.
Till the dawn came, he sat unmoving on a fallen rail and watched the moonlight on the ruffled face of the waters.
He could not doubt that they were dead. Yesterday, such an incident, the deaths of his wife and both his children, would have brought a sense of desolation, of irretrievable loss; he would have felt as though the world had ended.
Now that it appeared that there was indeed an end to all the world he knew, their deaths did not affect him in the same way. They did not afflict him with a sense of separation. Only, he regretted bitterly, that he had not been with them: that he should have seemed to have deserted them at such a moment.
But he had no wish to live, as he had no expectation. His world was gone in the night. He was left there for the moment, by the caprice of fortune, till the next tremor of land or rise of tide should sweep him to the common fate of his race.
So he sat, neither desirous of sleep, nor aware either of cold or hunger. Awed, rather than miserable: even elated by the greatness of the events around him.
He saw and watched the moon on the water.
So the dawn found him. It came, a faint widening of gold, in a sky that the night-wind, which had blown steadily from the north-west, had cleared of the polluting dust of yesterday. The pale gold flushed rose-pink over half the sky, and was reflected upon the waters.
He watched the dawn advance, august and passionless, indifferent to the triviality of human destiny; indifferent and serene, though there should be no man living to observe its beauty, and, as he looked, he knew that life would continue.
Realising this, he felt sorrow, as the night had been powerless to bring it. He knew that it must even be possible that his own life would continue, and realising this, he felt fear.
He became conscious of pain and hunger. He rose stiffly, and was aware that he was very cold.
He felt the warm rays of the level sun, and an impulse of satisfaction, if not of pleasure, moved beneath the desolation of his mind.
He looked round, and resignation left him; he was a human atom once again; a private in the losing battle with death which is the common destiny of his race.
The water was around him on every side. It swept in a strong current but twenty feet beneath the place on which he was standing.
It ran north-eastward, troubled by a crossing wind, but with no great roughness of surface. It broke against the steep slope beneath him with a continued murmur. It sparkled in the sunlight.
It was scattered over with many drowned and broken things. A dead ox drifted past. Other things. But he saw neither man nor woman.
Only, at the last, washed to his feet (for he had descended, as he gazed, to the water's level), there came a human arm, torn from its trunk by some mechanical violence, with a bundle of drenched parchments still clutched in the dead hand, which was plainly that of a woman.
He went to the top of the little knoll on which fortune had marooned him. The water was round him on every side.
He looked in the direction of his own home. There was nothing there now but the level waste of the flood. He remembered that Helen had been too injured to walk. She could not swim. She would not have left the children. There was no hope, no faintest hope, that the seas could have spared them.
He wondered whether he might find them floating in the water, but he saw that even that hope must be fruitless. The current was sweeping everything to the northeast, far out and beyond him.
He considered the possibility that he could himself escape from his present confinement. He saw that the water was not rising - had even sunk somewhat from its highest level - and though it surrounded his place of refuge, it did not appear to be more than two or three feet deep on the northern side, and of a width of about twenty yards, beyond which the ground rose again, and gave prospect of a wider range and a greater security.
He watched it for a few minutes, wondering whether it were still declining, so that an hour's patience might give an easier passage. He supposed that there would be tidal changes, apart from the vital question of whether the land had settled to a final stability. Certainly the water had been higher than it now was. But that might only be because it had swirled further up the slope at the first rush. He observed no change during the few moments that his patience lasted. Then he stepped in.
It was not an easy crossing. He waded more than waist-deep in places, and though there was no such current as hurried past on the other side, yet the water that was diverted to this side of the knoll was flowing steadily in the same direction, and made it difficult to keep his feet and a straight course to the nearest point of the dry ground before him.
He stumbled once over an obstacle the water hid, and recovered himself with difficulty, drenched to the shoulders.
Having dry ground beneath him once again, he wrung out his soaked garments as best he could, but he was in no mood to linger. Even beyond the calls of thirst and hunger, or of any physical discomfort, was the desire to gain the highest point he could, and learn how much of solid land was still remaining around him.
When he gained this view, he was relieved of any immediate apprehension, for though he saw little either to south or east but wastes of wrack-strewn water, it was equally evident that the land remained unflooded for at least a space of some miles in the opposite directions.
Relieved of the fear that he had been marooned on a spot of land too small for human sustenance, he turned his thoughts to the primitive necessities of the wild-food, and water, and shelter from the certainties of rain and cold.
CHAPTER III
The first day he saw no man. His search for food was so far fortunate that he came upon the little heap of articles which he had thrown aside on the previous night, when he had first tried to outrun the water, that he might go to the rescue of his family. Among these were the broken remains of the eggs that he had been carrying, from which he was able to recover a sufficient part of their contents to provide the meal he was needing.
Beyond that he got little. He searched in deserted gardens. He ate lettuce and radishes. He made a slow and meagre meal of green peas that had scarcely begun to form in the pods. He ate half-grown gooseberries, green and hard. He searched in charred ruins for food which was not there.
In the evening he came upon an isolated tool-shed in a large garden. Built in a very sheltered corner, it was still standing. There he lay down and slept.
That day he remembered clearly, but he had little recollection of those that followed.
He must have been ill for days. The shock to mind and body the unusual exertions, the effects of wet and exposure, and of unsuitable food, had their natural consequences.
Had he been unsound in any vital organ he would have had little chance of recovery. As it was, he probably owed his life to the fact that the shed had been used by a gardener who had left a pot half full of cold tea.
This, being desperate with thirst, and after an interval of illness, of which he could not guess the duration, he found, and drank. In a cupboard he found a lump of mouldy bread, which he chewed as he lay.
After this he had a time of healthful sleep, and then staggered uncertainly into a sunlit world.
He had little strength, but the instinct for life was strong and his constitution uninjured.
Of the succeeding days his memory was blurred and dream-like.
Though he had little strength, he had much patience. He lay for many hours over a burrow, till he had caught a rabbit in his bare hands. He cooked it, somehow, for there had been matches in the shed, and he made a fire of wood without difficulty.
He followed a strayed hen, it seemed for days, till he had found the place where she was laying.
He dug up potatoes, still unripe and small, but which he could cook till his matches ended. He learned to eat raw beans.
Strength came again, and with it the desire to adventure further.
He searched among ruined houses, but was several days before he had any means of making another fire.
His greatest find at this time was a sack of sharps in a farm outbuilding, and a smaller quantity of bran. When he had secured a further supply of matches he made this meal into a kind of thick soup, and it was delicious to his altered palate.
He came on a woman who had sustained life, with an amazing vitality, crawling upon the ground, and dragging after her a broken leg.
He stayed beside her, doubtless prolonging her life, and almost certainly increasing her misery, after the tradition in which he had been educated. He could not save her life, for which an amputation would have been the only hope, and that was beyond his skill or resources.
She died unconquered, as she had lived, being too great for circumstances. She died with a faith serene and untroubled. Having fought hard for life, she accepted death confidently. "Though He slay me yet will I trust Him," she quoted, when the fever slackened.
She lay unconscious for two days before he was sufficiently sure that she was dead to bury her from the flies.
After that, he came on an open drain in a deserted highway, at which a navvy was blindly excavating. The man begged his assistance for the useless labour. He was plainly mad, and when Martin declined to help him he made a murderous attack, from which he escaped with difficulty.
He wondered how the man lived.
He avoided that stretch of road for the following days, until he came on the man again, then in a condition of raving insanity. He mistook Martin for his Creator, and cursed him in words unfit for reproduction.
In the end Martin was compelled to kill him with his own pick.
At this time Martin did not go far from the shore which overlooked the place of the ruins of his own home. When his physical needs were satisfied, he would sit for many hours gazing over the water. His body recovered strength. His health became more vigorous than it had ever been, but his mind lacked incentive to do more than provide for his immediate necessities.
His reason told him that the whole earth could not be under water. He expected continually to see the smoke of some approaching steamer.
But the seas remained empty.
CHAPTER IV
The hours passed very quickly to Helen after Martin left her. He had provided as far as was possible for her comfort during his absence. Food and water were near to her hand. Fire was beneath her and within her reach, but it was not cold. He had left a stock of broken wood, sufficient to keep it alight till his return, if it were used with discretion. She could easily throw it on, piece by piece, from where she lay. She let the children scramble on the side of the pit, guiding them with her voice to avoid the brambles and the steeper places, but they soon came back to her. Tired by the excitement of their strange experience, they were glad to nestle against her, and slept, one on either side, in the warm safety of her arms.
Among the attempts which have been made by mankind to solve the enigma of conscious life, its end and its beginning, the most rational (as it may foolishly seem to an imperfect knowledge) is that of the transmigration of souls. With this theory there is commonly linked one of progression or penalty, by which each incarnation is controlled by the conduct of the individual in the one which preceded. Whether true or false, the two theories are without necessary sequence. It would be as probable to postulate that the ego is unalterable, and that the incarnations it may undergo are not rewards, nor penalties, nor of any educational purpose, but are rather a series of tests of its quality, by which its value is proved under different conditions and with conflicting environments.
However this may be (if it be at all), it appears evident that there is little difference in the nature of mankind when tested by circumstances the most refined or the most barbarous, or when compared over the longest periods of recorded history. Of this there is no clearer proof than in the actions of individuals whose conditions are sharply changed by natural convulsions, by war, or famine, or by the sudden acquisition of unusual wealth.
To each of those who had survived the first assaults of flood, and fire, and tempest, the test came, which was as though they approached a new incarnation without losing the memory of that which had preceded it.
Helen, her mind stunned by a catastrophe too sudden and too vast for immediate comprehension, and knowing only doubtfully the extent to which civilisation had fallen before it, felt, rather than thought, as she lay unsleeping between her children. She had no consciousness of immediate danger. She supposed that, for the time at least, to be over. She had no fear that Martin would not return as he had promised. She was not of a nature that worries over imagined evil, and her confidence in him was habitual. But her thoughts moved uncertainly, as does an insect whose nest is broken or removed in its absence. The furniture of her mind had become worthless. Thoughts of her home, neighbours, recreations, pleasures, garments, engagements, would obtrude or betray her into a moment's forgetfulness, only to be thrown aside with the realisation that they had no further meaning. Her brain brought her the accustomed memories, to find itself always repelled and its tributes rejected. Beyond this, it had nothing to offer, except the enigma of the future, to which it could supply no answer.
So she lay, and felt only, while it commenced its patient task of covering rejected thoughts, and arranging new facts in readiness for when she should require them.
But there were some things which it was not asked to change, but rather to call to an added consciousness and first of these was that instinct that held dominion separate from herself, however willingly she might foster it in every cell of her body. The instinct which her generation had been persuaded to betray, to their own undoing. Her arms tightened round the two that slept so confidently in their protection - arms so pitifully weak to shield them against the blind forces that wrecked the earth around her. Out of a sudden agony of prayer, her soul rose to that height of God-in-man which is the tragic greatness of humanity, and before which death itself is ashamed and impotent. She knew the weakness of her arms, and was not daunted. She knew the strength of her opponents, and was resolute to resist them. They should not suffer, though the whole world fall.
The hours passed, and Martin did not return. The sun, which no longer shone down into the pit, but touched the bushes on its eastern side with the golden light of evening, told her that she was not deceived as to the time which had passed. She determined to test her ability to stand. Drawing herself carefully from between the sleeping children she rose painfully. She was stiff and bruised, but the numbness had gone from her side, though it hurt her sharply. It hurt her, too, if she breathed deeply. It hurt her more if she touched it. But she was glad she could stand.
She had never been credited with any physical courage. She would be startled by a dog's bark. She would walk wide of a quiet cow. She could certainly have run in terror from a rat had it advanced boldly upon her, though it were as absurd as though a cat should offer battle to an elephant. But she had that high quality of passive courage which can face pain and wounds, after their infliction, with a more resolute spirit than is possible to many who may more lightly take the risks which incur them.
She soon found that she could move more easily, and that she could more exactly gauge her capacity to do so without hurting herself too sharply. She busied herself in many little activities of which she had thought as she lay. She woke the children and fed them. She had a meal herself. She was hungry, and there was no good purpose in waiting to share it with Martin - surely he would not be long now? The sun must be near setting.
Casually she looked at the further side of the pit, was puzzled by what she saw, and looked more closely. While she did so, a wave swirled over the edge, spilling through the bushes, and splashing into the hollow.
Her mind poised blank for a moment, and then woke to full consciousness of its meaning. She knew that the field below the pit sloped downward, though only gently. Beyond it, stretched miles of lower land to the river valley. Water flowing over the edge could only mean an inundation beyond conception. Before the next swirl of the rising water fell over the edge with a louder noise, and in a fuller volume, her purpose had taken shape, and she had commenced its accomplishment. With no thought of saving anything but their bare lives, and with even Martin forgotten, she was climbing up the bank, with the two children under her right arm, while she used her left as best she could to support her in the burdened climb. There was one chance - so small a chance - if she were not too late already. Her memory searched for details of every drop and rise in the ground before her. She decided that she was not yet too late - but how fast might not the water be rising around her? She must not be too late.
She was on the edge of the pit now, and cast a glance around, though she did not delay for an instant. Mile on mile the water stretched interminably to southward. In the shallowness of the foreground, trees rose and hedges showed. There was no regular succession of waves, but the surface heaved irregularly as it advanced. It was covered by debris of a thousand kinds. The low sun glorified it.
As she looked, a fox ran past, carrying a cub in her mouth. The creature did not mind her.
She became conscious that the children, roughly held and dragged through weed and briar, were crying in a frightened way. She was running now, though weakly enough up the field, and changed the younger one to her injured arm. It is the highest evidence of her courage that her voice could soothe them. Sensitive to her mood they became quiet with a consciousness of drama, but not of tragedy, as she bore them.
Her progress was not rapid, for she was weak and burdened. There were obstacles also to be surmounted, or avoided as best she might. But she knew her purpose, and her spirit used the little strength she had to its last atom of energy. Nature held the scale that trembled to the verdict of death, watched it - and let her go.
It was half a mile beyond that there had been a public park, where some skiffs were kept on a small lake for hiring. The park lay in a hollow, lower than the level which the water had gained already. But the land around was higher. It might be under water now, but she thought not. When it filled, it would do it quickly. How quickly, she could not tell.
Her way was shortened by the fact that the park wall was fallen, and it was that which made the final difference. She gained the pond when water was already pouring into the hollow. She found the boats had broken from their moorings, and had been driven against a bushy bank on the further side. Leaving the children, she had to wade in waist deep to reach them. Two of them were damaged. She found one that seemed sound. Fortunately, it was more stoutly built than the others, which were river skiffs of the lightest kind. She pulled it through the water to where she had left the children. Water was draining into the pool at a hundred points by now. The water was up to her armpits at one point as she waded back. The place where she had laid the children down was covered, but they had retreated before it. Grounding the boat, she lifted them in, and sat down on a thwart - and waited. There was nothing more to be done. She had no sculls. The water was now rising so rapidly that the boat lifted from the bank almost before she was seated. Fortunately, it rose gently and evenly. As there was no outlet at first, there was no strength of current until the smaller trees were flooded, and the expanse of water was wide and fairly clear around her. Then the boat began to drift rapidly. It seemed that water was pouring out as well as in now, and they were swept to where the stumps of a row of elms that the storm had snapped showed raggedly above the flood. There was nothing to be done. She could only watch and wait for death - if death were coming. She put the children in the well of the boat, and sat there with them, thinking that the lower they were the better the boat would balance. The boat struck something which held it. It leaned somewhat as the current pressed it. Some water splashed over. They swept at perilous speed between the broken elm boles.
Almost immediately after, another current struck them. They were whirled round for a time in a vortex which finally hurried them along the side of the row of stumps through which they had come, and out into a wide sea of troubled water over which darkness was falling.
She baled out the water which the boat had taken. She and the children were wet and cold, and the night was coming. If they survived it, what hope was there in a world that the floods had covered? For the first time she thought of Martin. Doubtless he was dead. She supposed that few could be living. She did not know. She looked over the edge of the boat, and a dead dog floated past.
She thought of Martin, and she had no wish for life to continue. She felt the pain of her injured side, and the exhaustion which had overcome her, and she thought that death could not be distant. She looked at the children that crouched together with wide frightened eyes that questioned the darkness, and she knew that she must not die if the floods spared them.
Leaning against a thwart she drew them to her and made herself their pillow. She was soaked and cold, and it was a poor bed to offer, but there was no better to be done. It was best for them to sleep while they could.
In the later night the moon looked down upon a little boat that turned and tossed in a troubled water. A woman lay where she had slipped on to the floor of the boat. It had shipped some water which washed over her face at times, but she did not heed it. Pillowed on her breasts, the children that she had saved slept peacefully. Born of a race of women that had learned to esteem their children as less than their pleasures, who would even pay to have them murdered in their own bodies, she had redeemed her own soul at the bar of God, and whether she were dead or living was a little thing.
It was the next morning that a group of men stood on a stretch of moorland that had been purple with heather before the curse of coal had blackened it, and was now the shore of a new sea.
They saw a boat that had grounded gently a hundred yards out, but with deeper water before them. They could not see whether it held anything living, but it would be a desirable possession under their new conditions of life. But who could swim? No one, unless it were Tom. But Tom Aldworth shook his head. He could swim, but very little. The inducement was not sufficient. Besides, he was not friendly with the men, nor they with him. He was an acquitted murderer, and as such he was entitled to and received much less goodwill than would have been accorded to one who had confessed and would be hanged tomorrow. But then - was there not a movement in the boat, and, perhaps, a cry, though a weak one?
Tom Aldworth took off his coat.
As he did so the cry came again. It was the cry of a child that pressed against a mother who was very cold and did not answer.
BOOK II
CLAIRE
CHAPTER I
Claire Arlington stood on the edge of what had once been a steep hillside in the Upper Cotswolds. Now it was lapped by a tide that rose within eighty feet of the summit.
Steep though the slope might be, it was still green with the sparse Cotswold herbage, which grew so thinly that the white chalk showed between it, and yet the sleek, long-barrelled cow that grazed on the cliff-top was evidence that it was not lacking in nourishment.
Claire was not thinking of cliff or cow, but gazing with troubled eyes upon the desolation of a quiet sea.
Looking north, there was no sign of land, though a whitening of broken water here and there beneath her told of shallows which a lower tide would leave uncovered.
There was no sign of the Malverns. If any of the higher lands of Wales had escaped the deluge, they were too low or too distant for her sight to reach them.
Only to the north-east was there at times a doubtful hint of land. If she were only sure - She was a strong swimmer. Once she had tried to cross the Dover Straits, and had been baulked by the tide when within but a short distance of the French coast. If she could only be sure that land were there - or of how far it might be.
It was but a few weeks ago - she had not counted the days, for count of days had ceased to matter - since she had spent long hours of darkness floating as best she might amidst the buffeting of continual waves, to find, when the dawn came that she was drifting fast towards a vision of green land, and then to realise that the current which bore her near would sweep her past it, and then to battle backward, yard by yard, until the sun had risen high above the horizon, and she was aware at last that she was clear of the current's force and each tired stroke decreased the distance to the waiting land.
Then the land on which she climbed had seemed the most blessed thing for which a living creature could pray; and now she loathed it, so that death itself might seem less bitter.
Death? No; her heart told her that she had no will that way, whatever life might mean.
She stood there for a long time silent, gazing at the sea, the while her mind went back to recollection of all that had happened since she had survived that night in which so many millions must have perished.
Her husband among them - there was no possible hope that he could have lived. An invalid, awaiting an operation in the nursing home in Cheltenham, she would have been with him on the previous day, if the great storm had not made it impossible. She felt no keen regret. The horror had been too great. It had numbed her mind. And she knew that though she had loved him in a way, and there had been no differences between them, the bond had not been as strong as she had been taught such bonds should be. Pity rather than love - pity for a man maimed and disfigured in the prime of life - and then he had been querulous, and exacting, and jealous - so she knew, though she did not let the thought take form. But she was glad that the baby had not lived - for she could not have saved it - and how she had grieved when she had been told - but who could have foreseen?
Yes, there was no chance that he lived; not Cheltenham only, but all the land beyond - Ireland, perhaps - had gone. It was only a few days ago that a south-west wind had risen, and she had watched the great Atlantic rollers sweeping past, and felt the high surf drench her, even at that height, as she had seen and felt upon the Cornish headlands in the days gone by.
Yes, that life had left her, with all its obligations, all its occupations, its loves and friendships - perhaps she would have regretted them more keenly had not the new urgencies - but anyway, they were gone, and here she stood - free.
Free! - a fierce anger lit the sombre gaze of wild grey eyes, and strong teeth bit a bleeding lip as the thought stirred her. She was the Eve - perhaps the only Eve - of the new world, and her sole thought was of risking life itself to reach that doubtful streak of land, and so escape her heritage - or perhaps to gain it?
If she could only be sure that land were there! For she knew quite clearly that whatever life might hold she did not mean to die. Then did she mean to yield? Like a trapped mouse her mind went backward and forward to find escape from a problem which gave her no solution.
She recalled how she had climbed the hill from the bay where she had landed, and found a cleft in the hilltop where three cows crouched and shivered, and how they had come to her, as though for protection from the terror of a failing world, and she had drawn milk from one of them, and slept on the short turf in the warmth of the rising sun, and wakened to know that the noon was past, and to find the cows in a recovered serenity grazing quietly around her (and the cows were hers, let Jephson say what he would!), and so, with another meal of new milk to ease the thirst with which she woke, and clothed only in the bathingdress in which she had landed, she had set out to explore the land that the floods had spared, and seek for further food, and garments, and shelter for the night to be.
CHAPTER II
Climbing clear of the grassy hollow in which the cows had found their safety, she had reached an undulating space of land about half a mile broad, and beyond that a depression, in the centre of which was the ruin of a farmhouse. The hollow of this depression in which the house stood was actually below the new sea-level but the ground rose again on the further side. What had been a lofty upland had become an island of an area of a square mile or two only, but, on the southern side, there was a further space of land of about equal extent, divided by an arm of water which receded at low tide, so that it was possible to cross it with little difficulty. This further island had been swept over by the floods, and was bare of any life, though it now stood some feet above the water.
Of this she learnt later. What she first saw was that two men were standing by the ruined house, and so, thinking little of her spare attire in her eagerness to meet with living creatures of her own kind, she had hurried down the slope, while they crossed the more level space beneath her. And with those men she had lived for the past days in the ruined house - and how she loathed them!
They had been days of urgent toil, but without privation or any real discomfort. She thought of the tales she had read of people marooned on desert islands, and of their quarrels, and of the love that always followed. But the men in those tales were types rather than individuals, and these were - Jephson and Norwood. She noticed that she always thought of Jephson first.
Neither of them was a native of the district. Jephson was a joiner by trade. He had been the foreman employed on the job of repairing the dilapidated farmhouse in which they were now living. He was a native of Birmingham. He had preferred to live on the premises, while his men lodged in the village. That had saved his life, though the room in which he had slept on the first night had fallen in, and he had been cut and bruised. The lobe of his left ear had been almost severed, and for lack of the aid of anyone with skill to stitch it, it would always hang loose.
He was a man of medium height, very broadly made, and with a heavy, resolute step. His arms were long and very hairy, the hands coarse and spatulate. He had a tuft of straw-coloured beard, and a stiff moustache projecting like that of a walrus. His front teeth were decayed and broken. His head showed a skimpy fringe of yellow hair, around a natural tonsure. His eyes were small, deep-set, and intelligent, sometimes lit with a humour which was rarely kindly. His voice was deep, and his speech came with deliberation.
He was of an intense acquisitiveness. He had lost a wife and some children, but he was more concerned as to the fate of a sum of three hundred pounds that he had deposited in the Municipal Bank of his native town. He was not of a type of mind that could easily realise that money had no intrinsic value.
It was probably a penurious habit arising from this feature of his character which had led him to live on the job rather than lodge in the village near.
It was clear to him that the house was his, as he had been on the spot when the floods came, and that Norwood and Claire could live there by permission only. His money was gone, but 'findin's is keepin's now' was the first law he announced for the regulation of his new dominion.
Certainly he knew best how to deal with it, and under his expert and energetic hands it soon began to lose the ruined aspect that age and storm had bestowed upon it.
He claimed also a dozen sheep that were running loose on the hill, because 'the land goes with the house,' and with the same argument he disputed Claire's contention that the cows were hers; a contention first made in jest - for what difference did it make when there was milk for all? - but afterwards in earnest, when she found that even here the privileges of property might be employed to coerce her.
Norwood was a man cast from a very different mould. His name had been known to her before as a professional cricketer of international reputation. He had been playing at Cheltenham in a three days' match, which began on the Saturday before the storm. A too-convivial evening had been followed by a Sunday of heavy sleep, after which he had started out in the evening for a long walk, which experience had taught him was the best way to recover his condition after such an episode. He had been on the hilltop, and about to turn back, calculating that he would reach his hotel in time for three or four hours' sleep before play would be recommenced when the storm had struck him, and he had lain there for many hours with no more protection than a pile of stones where a wall had fallen. When the force of the wind slackened, he had made his way to the farmhouse, and had remained there during the flood and earthquake of the following night, after helping the bruised and bleeding Jephson to disentangle himself from the collapse of the upper room in which he had been sleeping.
He was a man of about thirty-five, tall, handsome in a rather weak and swaggering way, better educated than Jephson, but with far less knowledge or capacity for overcoming the practical issues of life. He was fair-haired, clean-shaven, with the healthy brick-red complexion of the athlete, and showing his vice only in a rather watery appearance of eyes that had still been clear enough to watch a fast ball from the bowler's hand until the perfect timing of the stroke should drive it hard and low to the distant boundary.
The sudden oblivion of the world he knew had left him with a sense of stupefaction, from which he had only gradually recovered, to inquire what his companions thought had happened to 'poor Lil' - a sister, as they understood - with rather maudlin pathos.
The condition of the lives of these three derelicts was controlled at first by the configuration of the little bay in which Claire had landed. Narrow at its entrance, it curved to the right hand and widened into a pool, which shallowed as the tide fell, so that the green of the flooded grass could be seen clearly through the water. Other things could be seen there also; and other things were left uncovered by the tide on the gently-shelving beach of the bay.
For the sea-floor, which had been England, carried an empire's wealth, and the great tides washed it out of the buildings that held it, or broke them down and released it, to add to all that had floated since the flood had risen, and the little bay was like a trap to catch them.
And all these things they toiled to save without ceasing, under Jephson's restless urgency. Nothing would he admit to be too cumbersome or too worthless to be dragged up from the tide level. When that had been done, there was the harder task of carrying all that was of sufficient value over the higher ground and down to the house. Norwood was the more disposed to grumble at this incessant toil, but though Jephson's eager greed was unattractive in its intensity, Claire could see the reason which underlay it, and did her part, and more than that, in the common labour. Even timber might be worth more than they could easily estimate, for the trees on this island, which had been a hill-top, were little more than shrubs, and fuel for the winter, which must surely come, might not be easy to find.
For the most part, Jephson worked with a tireless vigour at the repairing of the house, so that there might be weather-proof space for the storing of the salvage when they had dried it. He only asked for his companions' help when something had to be done which required extra hands or strength; and he would come once to the beach with them each day to see what the tide had brought, remaining only if his help were needed, but urging them by ceaseless question and sarcasm, and by his own example, to yet greater efforts.
During this time there was little of any real intimacy between these uncongenial companions that disaster had thrown together. At first the restraint of the civilisation of yesterday, the shock of the overwhelming calamity, and the urgency of their labours had combined to defer the inevitable difficulties of adjustment that were before them.
Once or twice a conflict of wills had flared into sudden anger, that might die down as quickly, but left a subtle difference of mutual relations behind it.
In the first days Claire had inclined to feel that Norwood was the more tolerable companion, and the arrangement of labour caused them to be much together, while Jephson worked at the house, but neither was in any way congenial to her.
Then there was the day when the first of the dead sheep was washed into the bay. There had been many sheep on the uplands, but it was several days before the first of them came ashore; after that some trick of the tide brought several others, but it was over the first one that the quarrel had arisen.
Claire was a woman unused to shirk an unpleasant task, if its need were clear, but her experiences had not been those of a butcher. Swollen and sodden, the carcass was repulsive to look at.
"That there sheep will need skinnin', Mrs. Arlington," Jephson had remarked. He had addressed her up to that time with that degree of polite formality.
"Not by me, Mr. Jephson," she had replied pleasantly enough, but with an intention of finality.
"Nor I," said Norwood, with a glance of disgust at the still floating carcass, "and what the hell do we want with the skin of a rotten sheep?"
Norwood spoke with irritation, born of an earlier difference. Neither of the two men had yet accepted the leadership of the other, nor found the terms of a smooth-working partnership. They were like two armies which are manoeuvring for position before the battle joins, and perhaps it was from that reason, or because Jephson was not as clear in his own mind as to the degree of rottenness or inutility of the object of his cupidity as he would have liked to be, that Norwood's question was left unanswered.
He looked at Claire with a dangerous humour in his deep-set eyes, and spoke with a deliberate slowness.
"Mrs. Arlington, you'll skin that sheep, an' no 'umbug! Yes, my wench, you will. We all does our part here."
He walked away for a few yards, and looked back. She had not moved, and was regarding him with an amused contempt which hid some inward uncertainty. "Or I'll larn you what you don't want, nor I, neither." With which cryptic remark he had gone off and left them.
She had remained silent and thoughtful for some time, while she realised several things more clearly than she had done previously. One was that there is no more 'romance' in a community of three people than of thirty, or of thirty millions - probably much less, because the choice of intimacy or of companionship is so much more limited.
Norwood said nothing. Bare-legged, he was hauling some broken timber clear of the receding water, and did not ask her assistance.
The dead sheep had grounded and lay half out of the water.
She walked over to it and surveyed it with distaste.
"Is it really worth doing, Mr. Norwood?" She asked in a judicial tone, intended to convey that she would decide the question on its merits without reference to Jephson's rudeness.
Norwood, who probably knew no more than herself as to the value of such a hide, or of the method of salving it, had looked across with disgust and hesitation. "Beastly job," he had replied vaguely, and then, after a moment's pause, he had added impulsively: "Call me George, and I'll help you," and it was just that which had decided her to undertake the loathsome task, and to do it unaided.
It reminded her that familiarity from her companions might be worse than rudeness.
She had made a hard and filthy labour harder than it need have been through her ignorance, and she had worked with a growing conviction that if the product of her occupation were really of any value, neither she nor either of the men had the necessary knowledge to utilise it, but it was done at last in a ragged way.
The next day had brought a worse horror, for it was a human body that the tide gave them after a week of wandering at the waves' mercy. Of her own instinct she would have closed her eyes and waded out and pushed the dreadful thing at a pole's end back through the channel by which it had entered, but here another aspect of Jephson's character was revealed. He had, as she had already recognised, no religion whatever beyond a few of the crudest superstitions only half believed, but he held to the ritual of burial with the foolishness of the class from which he came. It is bare justice to say that he did his part on this occasion, not resting till a grave had been opened in the chalky soil and the ghastly remnant of what had once been human deposited, with some reading of prayers above it.
It had seemed to Claire that he derived satisfaction, if not actual enjoyment, from this procedure, but, however that might be, the incident renewed the consciousness, through that single evidence, of the appalling catastrophe from which they had emerged with lives uninjured. For a few hours it had subdued the ego in each of them.
It was some days after that - but they went uncounted - that Norwood dragged ashore a wooden chest containing little of value, but in which he found a bottle which he slipped stealthily into his pocket, thinking that it was unobserved by Claire, who was working beside him. She was slightly startled, because there had been an understanding that nothing salved should be retained by any one of them, except by consent, but she said nothing.
Shortly afterwards they returned to the house together, and the occurrence left her mind. Jephson's news might have banished a more important incident. The fresh water had failed them. The house had been supplied from a well, and surprisingly enough, had they considered it, the supply had continued after the subsidence of the land which gave it, but that afternoon Jephson had drawn some to fill a cask which they kept for the cows to drink when they came for milking, and noticed that the well was much higher than usual, and then that the cows, which usually drank it eagerly, breathed over it and turned away. He had tasted it and found it salt.
At the first hearing she had scarcely realised the magnitude of the disaster. They did not drink water. Milk was too abundant. One of the cows had calved, and they left her alone, but the other two were in full milk. She had milked them thoroughly morning and evening, knowing that they would go dry if she failed to do so. They drank what they could, and they threw the rest away. What else could they do? Had she been expert in the making of cheese or butter there was no time. Everything was subordinated, and rightly so, to the saving of that which the sea brought them. They did no cooking. They had no fires in the house. Once or twice when Jephson had wanted one for some process of the building on which he laboured, he had lit a fire of rubbish outside, and then they had boiled some vegetables from the garden. Mostly they lived on foods which the sea had given. Among them were some tinned fish and a crate of bananas. There were other things put aside, including a side of bacon, and there were potatoes in the garden waiting the time to dig them. They had no fear of starvation. There were sheep, too, when they were needed. But they had no flour.
They slept in separate rooms, which they had made more or less their own, and which they kept as they would, though each of them now had its share of salvage, and would have had much more but that the labour of carrying to the house was much greater than that of saving from the sea.
Night and morning they met to eat in the common kitchen, and talked of the day's doings. Beyond that they ate when and what they would, but there was no time for life's amenities.
Jephson had a sense of order, though little of personal cleanliness, and he kept the kitchen roughly clear and tidy.
So they lived.
The sea had brought them quantities of clothing, mostly damaged, and much of it otherwise useless.
There was a large case of ladies' gloves - many gross. Claire could not have worn them had she wished to do so; they were all a size too small.
A suit of men's overalls, of which the sea had also delivered a consignment, was the most useful dress she had for the work she was doing; and when they were not working they slept.
Boots were the greatest need. Those which the men had were wearing out, and there was no means of replacement. Claire had landed without any. She had tried going barefooted. It had not been any real hardship on soft turf, or on the mud which the tide left, till she had trodden on some broken glass and must go bandaged and lamely. The next day she found an old discarded pair of women's boots in the house. They were too large, and one was burst at the toe, but they were stoutly made, and she stuffed them till they would fit sufficiently. When the foot healed she went bare again. What life was left in the boots should be kept for the winter days. . . .
That night they talked of nothing but the failure of the well and what it might mean.
Milk was plenty, and salt water must do for washing. But milk must fail unless the cows were watered.
They knew that there was a small and muddy pool about half a mile away, where they supposed that the sheep drank, and where the cows had drunk till they commenced to fill the cask as an inducement to them to come for the milking. But they knew that this pool had been shrinking, and it might now be dry entirely.
It had been infested with gulls, of which there had been many thousands round the island after the storm. There were fewer now; many must have found a more congenial home, which proved that there was land within the distance that their flight covered. But many remained. They settled in great flocks on the lower island during the day, returning at night to roost on the hill-sides of the higher land.
Norwood said that there was one place on the lower island around which they always flew most thickly. Perhaps there was fresh water there. It was a poor chance, but it was worth trying. He proposed that Claire and he should go in the morning to inspect it. Claire had answered that one was enough. She would go to look at the state of the pool where the cows used to drink.
Jephson said that he would go there himself. If it were full there was no need for immediate worry. If not, he might want them all to work at opening the well. He had an idea that it might be possible to locate the place where the salt water entered, or to tap the fresh separately. It did not sound hopeful.
Norwood had pressed Claire to go with him in the morning. She had answered shortly, and gone to her room. It had been the only one on the upper floor which had withstood the storm. A solid room. And there was a good lock on the door.
The securing of that room had been the one success she had scored on the day she arrived. It had been unfurnished, except for a heavy wooden bedstead, which might almost have been regarded as a part of the house itself. Now the appearance of the room was something between that of a marine store and a broker's shop.
She walked over to one of the windows, and as she leaned out she heard the voices of the men disputing through the open window of the room beneath her. She knew, as it seemed instinctively, that the water was forgotten, and that she was the cause of their anger.
Norwood's voice was the louder, but it was not one that carried well, and she could not hear the words. It rose once or twice in defiant tones, but more often it sounded sulkily, or as though he were giving way with reluctant expostulation. Once she heard Jephson clearly: "You'll keep off the wench till. . . ." The remainder of the sentence was lost. Till what? Of the word 'till' she was sure.
Tired though she was, she had lain awake for a long time that night, restlessly questioning the future and seeing no tolerable issue. She had courage, and the quality of mind that is frank with itself, as with others. She was woman, with a full experience of life behind her. Isolated as they were, she knew that it was natural that the thoughts of the men should turn to her, and hers to them for that matter. But she knew that she loathed them both, so far as any physical contact was concerned. Yet how could it end? The ocean showed no land. It showed no sail. She was the only woman of her world as far as she could know it. Was it natural that she should hold them off for ever? Was it right?
There were two of them, and perhaps in that lay her immediate safety. It gave some choice also. But she had no wish to exercise it. She doubted whether the greedy coarseness and physical deficiencies of Jephson repelled her more utterly than the invertebrate dullness of her more frequent companion. Perhaps it did; and yet she knew that there was more manhood in the house-builder, however ugly and brutal it might be. Probably if it came to open violence between them Jephson would win, though he was the older and smaller man. So she had thought that night. Now she knew.
But she had no wish that they should quarrel concerning her. Only a vague thought that, at the worst, she might play one off against the other.
Then she had been startled at a sudden aspect of baseness in this atavistic instinct, that she should think of appealing to either against the other when she had no thought to reward him for his championship.
It might be hard to avoid. At best it was a mean and perilous way. Yet what else was there to hold to? She had fallen asleep with this enigma unanswered.
CHAPTER III
The following morning she had risen early, and because the sun shone and the air was buoyant, she was able to face the future more hopefully. Whatever of sinister meaning might be in the words she had overheard, at the worst they implied a respite.
"Brave men die once, but cowards die many times," she had thought gaily enough. And how many dead there were! Surely she should be able to laugh in the sunlight.
She found the cows were smelling round the cask, but the supply of milk was undiminished. Either they had found water, or its failure had not yet affected them.
She carried in the milk carefully, with an added sense of its value. The men were waiting, and while they ate and drank they agreed on the plan that had been proposed the night before.
Jephson would go to inspect the pool on their own island. She and Norwood would explore the lower one, only they would separate and each take half the work of surveying it thoroughly. Jephson had plans already, if all else should fail, of the building of cisterns for rainwater. He was calculating on a change of weather, and wished to be