Chapter III: Part 3

Theodore was asleep when the alarm was given—by a shout at the door of his hut. One of ten or a dozen, aroused like himself, he grabbed at his rifle as he stumbled to his feet; believing in the first hurried moment of waking that he was called to drive back yet another night onslaught of the starving enemy without. He ran out of the hut into a strong, pallid glare that wavered.... A stretch of gorse and bramble-patch two hundred yards away was alight, burning lividly, and further off the same bluish flame was running like a wave across a field. Enemy aeroplanes were dropping their fire-bombs—here and there, flash on flash, of pale, inextinguishable flame.

It was scarcely five minutes from the time he had been roused before the camp and its garrison had ceased to exist as a community, and Theodore Savage and his living comrades were vagabonds on the face of the earth. The gorse and bramble-patch lay to the eastward and the wind was blowing from the east; the flames rushed triumphantly at a black clump of fir trees—great torches that lit up the neighbourhood. The guiding hand in the terror overhead had a mark laid ready for his aim; the camp, with its camouflaged huts and sheds, seen plainly as in broadest daylight. His next bomb burst in the middle of the camp blowing half-a-score of soldiers into bloody fragments and firing the nearest wooden building. While it burned, the terror overhead struck again and again—then stooped to its helpless quarry and turned a machine-gun on men in trenches and men running hither and thither in search of a darkness that might cover them.... That, for Theodore Savage, was the ending of civilization.

With the crash of the first explosion he cowered instinctively and pressed himself against the wall of the nearest shed; the flames, rushing upward, showed him others cowering like himself, all striving to obliterate themselves, to shrink, to deny their humanity. Even in his extremity of bodily fear he was conscious of merciless humiliation; the machine-gun crackled at scurrying little creatures that once were men and that now were but impotent flesh at the mercy of mechanical perfection.... Mechanical perfection, the work of men’s hands, soared over its creators, spat down at their helplessness and defaced them; they cringed in corners till it found them out and ran from it screaming, without power to strike back at the invisible beast that pursued them. Without power even to surrender and yield to its mercy; they could only hate impotently—and run....

As they ran they broke instinctively—avoiding each other, since a group made a mark for a gunner. Theodore, when he dared cower no longer, rushed with a dozen through the gate of the camp but, once outside it, they scattered right and left and there was no one near him when his flight ended with a stumble. He stayed where he had fallen, a good mile from the camp, in the blessed shadow of a hedgerow; he crept close to it and lay in the blackness of the shadow, breathing great sobs and trembling—crouching in dank grass and peering through the leafage at the distant furnace he had fled from. The crackling of machine-guns had ceased, but here and there, for miles around were stretches of flame running rapidly before a dry wind. Half a mile away an orchard was blazing with hayricks; and he drew a long sigh of relief when another flare leaped up—further off. That was miles away, that last one; they were going, thank God they were going!... He waited to make sure—half an hour or more—then stumbled back in search of his companions; through fields on to the road that led past what once had been the camp.

On his way he met others, dark figures creeping back like himself; by degrees a score or so gathered in the roadway and stood in little groups, some muttering, some silent, as they watched the flames burn themselves out. There were bodies lying in the road and beside it—men shot from above as they ran; and the living turned them over to look at their distorted faces.... No one was in authority; their commanding officer had been killed outright by the bursting of the first bomb, one of the subalterns lay huddled in the roadway, just breathing. So much they knew.... In the beginning there was relief that they had come through alive; but, with the passing of the first instinct of relief, came understanding of the meaning of being alive.... The breath in their bodies, the knowledge that they still walked the earth: and for the rest, vagrancy and beast-right—the right of the strongest to live!

They took counsel together as the night crept over them and—because there was nothing else to do—planned to search the charred ruin as the fire died out, in the hope of salvage from the camp. They counted such few, odd possessions as remained to them: cartridge belts, rifles thrown away in flight and then picked up in the road, the contents of their pockets—no more.... In the end, for the most part, they slept the dead sleep of exhaustion till morning—to wake with cold rain on their faces.

The rain, for all its wretchedness to men without shelter, was so far their friend that it beat down the flames on the smouldering timbers which were all that remained of their fortress and rock of defence. They burrowed feverishly among the black wreckage of their store-sheds, blistering and burning their fingers by too eager handling of logs that still flickered, unearthing, now and then, some scrap of charred meat but, for the most part, nothing but lumps of molten metal that had once been the tins containing food. In their pressing anxiety to avert the peril of hunger they were heedless of a peril yet greater; their search had attracted the attention of others—scarecrow vagrants, the rabble of the roads, who saw them from a distance and came hurrying in the hope of treasure-trove. The first single spies retreated at the order of superior and disciplined numbers; but with time their own numbers were swollen by those who halted at the rumour of food, and there hovered round the searchers a shifting, snarling, envious crowd that drew gradually nearer till faced with the threat of pointed rifles. Even that only stayed it for a little—and, spurred on by hunger, imagining riches where none existed, it rushed suddenly forward in a mob that might not be held.

Those who had rifles fired at it and men in the foremost ranks went down, unheeded in the rush of their fellows; those who might have hesitated were thrust forward by the frantic need behind, and the torrent of misery broke against the little group of soldiers in a tumult of grappling and screeching. Women, like men, asserted their beast-right to food—when sticks and knives failed them, asserted it with claws and teeth; unhuman creatures, with eyes distended and wide, yelling mouths, went down with their fingers at each other’s throats, their nails in each other’s flesh.... Theodore clubbed a length of burnt wood and struck out ... saw a man drop with a broken, bloody face and a woman back from him shrieking ... then was gripped from behind, with an arm round his neck, and went down.... The famished creatures fought above his body and beat out his senses with their feet.

* * * * *

When life came back to him the sun was very low in the west. In his head little hammers beat intolerably and all his strained body ached with bruises as he raised himself, slowly and groaning, and leaned on an arm to look round. He lay much where he had fallen, but the soldiers, the crowd of human beasts, had vanished; the bare stretch of camp, still smoking in places, was silent and almost deserted. Two or three bending and intent figures were hovering round the charred masses of wreckage—moving slowly, stopping often, peering as they walked and thrusting their hands into the ashes, in the hope of some fragment that those who searched before them had missed. A woman lay face downwards with her dead arm flung across his feet; further off were other bodies—which the searchers passed without notice. Three or four were in uniform, the bodies of men who had once been his comrades; others, for the benefit of the living, had been stripped, or half-stripped, of their clothing.

He lifted himself painfully and crawled on hands and knees, with many groans and halts, to the stream that had formed one border of the camp—where he drank, bathed his head and washed the dried blood from his scratches. With a measure of physical relief—the blessing of cool water to a burning head and throat—came a clearer understanding and, with clearer understanding, fear.... He knew himself alone in chaos.

As soon as he might he limped back to the smouldering wood-heaps and accosted a woman who was grubbing in a mess of black refuse. Did she know what had become of the soldiers? Which way they had gone when they left? The woman eyed him sullenly, mistrustful and resenting his neighbourhood—knew nothing, had not seen any soldiers—and turned again to grub in her refuse. A skeleton of a man was no wiser; had only just turned off the road to search, did not know what had happened except that there must have been a fight—but it was all over when he came up. He also had seen no soldiers—only the dead ones over there.... Theodore saw in their eyes that they feared him, were dreading lest he should compete with them for their possible treasure of refuse.

For the time being a sickly faintness deprived him of all wish for food; he left the sullen creatures to their clawing and grubbing, went back to the water, drank and soused once more, then crept farther off in search of a softer ground to lie on. After a few score yards of painful dragging and halting, he stretched himself exhausted on a strip of dank grass at the roadside—and dozed where he fell until the morning.

With sunrise and awakening came the pangs of sharp hunger, and he dragged himself limping through mile after mile in search of the wherewithal to stay them. He was giddy with weakness and near to falling when he found his first meal in a stretch of newly-burned field—the body of a rabbit that the fire had blackened as it passed. He fell upon it, hacked it with his clasp-knife and ate half of it savagely, looking over his shoulder to see that no one watched him; the other half he thrust into his pocket to serve him for another meal. He had learned already to live furtively and hide what he possessed from the neighbours who were also his enemies. Next day he fished furtively—with a hook improvised out of twisted wire and worm-bait dug up by his clasp-knife; lurking in bushes on the river-bank, lest others, passing by, should note him and take toll by force of his catch.

* * * * *

He lived thenceforth as men have always lived when terror drives them this way and that, and the earth, untended, has ceased to yield her bounties; warring with his fellows and striving to outwit them for the remnant of bounty that was left. He hunted and scraped for his food like a homeless dog; when found, he carried it apart in stealth and bolted it secretly, after the fashion of a dog with his offal. In time all his mental values changed and were distorted: he saw enemies in all men, existed only to exist—that he might fill his stomach—and death affected him only when he feared it for himself. He had grown to be self-centred, confined to his body and its daily wants and that side of his nature which concerned itself with the future and the needs of others was atrophied. He had lost the power of interest in all that was not personal, material and immediate; and, as the uncounted days dragged out into weeks, even the thought of Phillida, once an ever-present agony, ceased to enter much into his daily struggle to survive. He starved and was afraid: that was all. His life was summed up in the two words, starvation and fear.

At night, as a rule, he sheltered in a house or deserted farm-building that stood free for anyone to enter—sometimes alone, but as often as not in company. Starved rabble, as long as it hunted for food, avoided its rivals in the chase; but when night, perforce, brought cessation of the hunt, the herding instinct reasserted itself and lasted through the hours of darkness. As autumn sharpened, guarded fires were lit in cellars where they could not be seen from above and fed with broken furniture, with fragments of doors and palings; and one by one, human beasts would slink in and huddle down to the warmth—some uncertainly, seeking a new and untried refuge, and others returning to their shelter of the night before. The little gangs who shared fire and roof for the space of a night never ate in each other’s company; food was invariably devoured apart, and those who had possessed themselves of more than an immediate supply would hide and even bury it in a secret place before they came in contact with their fellows. Hence no gang, no little herd, was permanent or contained within itself the beginnings of a social system; its members shared nothing but the hours of a night and performed no common social duties. A face became familiar because seen for a night or two in the glow of a common fire; when it vanished none knew—and none troubled to ask—whether a man had died between sunrise and sunset or whether he had drifted further off in his daily search for the means to keep life in his body. When a man died in the night, with others round him, the manner of his ending was known; otherwise he passed out of life without notice from those who yet crawled on the earth.... With morning the herd of starvelings that had sheltered together broke up and foraged, each man for himself and his own cravings; rooted in fields and trampled gardens, crouched on river-banks fishing, laid traps for vermin, ransacked shops and houses where scores had preceded them.... And some, it was muttered—as time went on and the need grew yet starker—fed horribly ... and therefore plentifully....

There were nights—many nights—when a herd broke in panic from its shelter and scattered to the winds of heaven at an alarm of the terror overhead; and always, as starvation pressed, it dwindled—by death and the tendency to dissolve into single nomads, who (such as survived) regrouped themselves elsewhere, to scatter and re-group again.... With repeated wandering—now this way, now that, as hope and hunger prompted—went all sense of direction and environment; the nomads, hunting always, drifted into broken streets or dead villages and through them to the waste of open country—not knowing where they were, in the end not caring, and turned back by a river or the sea.

The sight or suspicion of food and plunder would always draw vagrancy together in crowds; district after district untouched by an enemy had been swept out of civilized existence by the hordes which fell on the remnants of prosperity and tore them; which ransacked shops and dwellings, slaughtered sheep, horses, cattle and devoured them and, often enough, in a fury of destruction and vehement envy, set light to houses and barns lest others might fare better than themselves. But when flocks, herds and storehouses had vanished, when agriculture, like the industry of cities, had ceased to exist and nothing remained to devour and plunder, the motive for common action passed. With equality of wretchedness union was impossible, and every man’s hand against his neighbour; if groups formed, here and there, of the stronger and more brutal, who joined forces for common action, they held together only for so long as their neighbours had possessions that could be wrested from them—stores of food or desirable women; once the neighbours were stripped of their all and there was nothing more to prey on, the group fell apart or its members turned on each other. In the life predatory man had ceased to be creative; in a world where no one could count on a morrow, construction and forethought had no meaning.

VIII

In a world where all were vagabond and brutal, where each met each with suspicion and all men were immersed in the intensity of their bodily needs, very few had thoughts to exchange. Mentally, as well as actually, they lived to themselves and where they did not distrust they were indifferent; the starvelings who slunk into shelter that they might huddle for the night round a common fire found little to say to one another. As human desire concentrated itself on the satisfaction of animal cravings, so human speech degenerated into mere expression of those cravings and the emotions aroused by them. Only once or twice while he starved and drifted did Theodore talk with men who sought to give expression to more than their present terrors and the immediate needs of their bodies, who used speech that was the vehicle of thought.

One such he remembered—met haphazard, as all men met each other—when he sheltered for an autumn night on the outskirts of a town left derelict. With falling dusk came a sudden sharp patter of rain and he took refuge hurriedly in the nearest house—a red-brick villa, standing silent with gaping windows. What was left of the door swung loosely on its hinges—half the lower panels had been hacked away to serve as firewood; the hall was befouled with the feet of many searchers and of the furniture remained but a litter of rags and fragments that could not be burned.

He thought the place empty till he scented smoke from the basement; whereupon he crept down the stairs, soft-footed and alert, to discover that precaution was needless. There was only one occupant of the house, a man plainly dying; a livid hollow-eyed skeleton who coughed and trembled as he knelt by the grate and tried to blow damp sticks into a flame. Theodore, in his own interests, took charge of the fire, ransacked the house for inflammable material and tore up strips of broken boarding that the other was too feeble to wrestle with. When the blaze flared up, the sick man cowered to it, stretched out his hands—filthy skin-covered bones—and thanked him; whereat Theodore turned suddenly and stared. It was long—how long?—since any man had troubled to thank him; and this man, for all his verminous misery, had a voice that was educated, cultured.... Something in the tone of it—the manner—took Theodore back to the world where men ate courteously together, were companions, considered each other; and instinctively, almost without effort, he offered a share of his foraging. The offer was refused, whereat Theodore wondered still more; but the man, near death, was past desire for food and shook his head almost with repulsion. Perhaps it was the fever that had turned him against food that loosened his tongue and set him talking—or perhaps he, also, by another’s voice and manner, was reminded of his past humanity.

“‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” he quoted suddenly. “Who wrote that—do you remember?”

“No,” Theodore said, “I’ve forgotten.” He stared at the cowering, hunched figure with its shaking hands stretched to the blaze. The man, it might be, was mad as well as dying—he had met many such in his wanderings; babbling of verse as someone—who was it?—had babbled in dying of green fields.

“‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” the sick man repeated. “Well, even if we’ve forgotten who wrote it, there’s one thing about him that’s certain; he didn’t know what we know—hadn’t lived in our kind of hell. The place where you haven’t a mind—only fear and a stomach.... The flesh and the devil—hunger and fear; they haven’t left us a world!... But if there’s ever a world again, I believe I shall have learned how to write. Now I know what we are—the fundamentals and the nakedness....”

“Were you a writer?” Theodore asked him—and at the question his old humanity stirred curiously within him.

“Yes,” said the other, “I was a writer.... When I think of what I wrote—the little, little things that seemed important!... I spent a year once—a whole good year—on a book about a woman who was finding out she didn’t love her husband. She was well fed and housed, lived comfortably—and I wrote of her as if she were a tragedy. The work I put into it—the work and the thought! I tried to get what I called atmosphere.... And all the time there was this in us—this raw, red thing—and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without our habits.... Do you know where we made the mistake?”—he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger—“We were not civilized—it was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was always there—lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh—clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.”

He broke off to cough horribly and lay breathless and exhausted for a time; then, when breath came back to him, talked on while Theodore listened—not so much to his words as to a voice from the world that had passed.

“The religions were right,” he said. “They were right through and through; the only sane thing and the only safe thing is humility—to realize your sin, to confess it and repent.... We—we were bestial and we did not know it; and when you don’t even suspect you sin how can you repent and save your soul alive?... We dressed ourselves and taught ourselves the little politenesses and ceremonies which made it easy to forget that we were brutes in our hearts; we never faced our own possibilities of evil and beastliness, never confessed and repented them, took no precautions against them. Our limitless possibilities.... We thought our habits—we called them virtues—were as real and natural and ingrained as our instincts; and now what is left of our habits? When we should have been crying, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ we believed in ourselves, our enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment that ended as science applied to destruction and progress that has led us—to this.... And to-day it has gone, every shred of it, and we’re back at what we started with—hunger and lust! Brute instincts ... and the primitive passion, hatred—against those who thwart hunger and lust. Nothing else—how can there be anything else? When we lost all we loved, we lost the habit and power of loving.... ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’—of hatred and hunger and lust.”

“Yes,” said Theodore—and he, too, stared at the fire.... What the other had said was truth and truth only. Even Phillida had left him; the power of loving her was gone. “I hadn’t thought of it like that—but it’s right.... We can only hate.”

“It’s that,” said the dying man, “that’s beyond all torment.... God pity us!”

He covered his eyes and sat silent until Theodore asked him, “Does that mean you still believe in God?”

“There’s Law,” said the other. “Is that God?... We have got to see into our own souls and to pay for everything we take. That’s all I know, so far—except that what we think we own—owns us. That’s what the wise men meant by renunciation.... It’s what we made and thought we owned that has turned on us—the creatures that were born for our pleasure and power, to increase our comfort and our riches. As we made them they fastened on us—set their claws in us—and they have taken our minds from us as well as our bodies. As we made them, they followed the law of their life. We created life without a soul; but it was life and it went its own way.”

Crouched to the fire, and between his bouts of coughing, he played with the idea and insisted on it. Everything that we made, that we thought dead and dumb, had a life that we could not control. In the case of books and art we admitted the fact, had a name for the life, called it influence: influence a form of independent existence.... In the same way we took metals and welded them, made machines; which were beasts, potent beasts, whose destiny was the same as our own. To live and develop and, developing, to turn on the power that enslaved them.... That was what had happened; they had made themselves necessary, fastened on us and, grown strong enough, had turned on their masters and killed—even though they died in the killing. The revolt against servitude had always been accounted a virtue in men and the law of all life was the same. The beasts we had made could not live without us, but they would have their revenge before they died.

“Think of us,” he said, “how we run and squeal and hide from them!... The patient servants, our goods and chattels, who were brought into life for our pleasure—they chase us while we run and squeal and hide!”

“Yes,” Theodore answered, “I’ve felt that, too—the humiliation.”

“The humiliation,” the sick man nodded. “Always in the end the slave rules his master—it’s the price paid for servitude, possession. I tell you, they were wise men who preached renunciation—before what we own takes hold of us and possession turns to servitude. For there’s a law of average in all things—have you ever felt it as I have? A law of balance which we never strike aright.... When the mighty tread hard enough on the humble and meek, the humble and meek are exalted and begin to tread hard in their turn. That’s obvious and we’ve generally known it; but it’s the same in what we call material things. We rise into the air—make machines that can fly—and grovel underground to protect ourselves from the flying-man. As we struck the balance to the one side, so it has to swing back on the other; a few men rise high into the air and many creep down into trenches and cellars, crouch flat.... If we could work out the numbers and heights mathematically, be sure that we should strike the perfect balance—represented by the surface of the earth. Balance—in all things balance.”

He rambled on, perhaps half-delirious, coughing out his thoughts and theories concerning a world he was leaving.... In all things balance, inevitably; the purpose of life which, so far, we sought blindly—by passion and recoil from it, by excess and consequent exhaustion.... It was in the cities where men herded, where life swarmed, that death had come most thickly, that desolation was swiftest and most complete. The ground underneath them needed rest from men; there was an average of life it could support and bear with. Now, the average exceeded, the cities lay ruined, were silent, knew the peace they had craved for—while those who once swarmed in them avoided them in fear or scattered themselves in the open country, finding no sustenance in brickwork, stone or paved street.... With the machine and its consequence, the industrial system, population had increased beyond the average allotted to the race; now the balance was righting itself by a very massacre of famine—induced by the self-same process of invention which had fostered reproduction unhindered. Because millions too many had crawled upon earth, long stretches of earth must lie waste and desolate till the average had worked itself out.... The art of life was adjustment of the balance in all things—was action and reaction rightly applied, was provision of counterweight, discovery of the destined mean. Was control of Truth, lest it turn into a lie; was check upon the power and velocity of Good ere it swung to immeasurable Evil....

The fire, for want of more wood to pile on it, had died low, to a flicker in the ashes, and the two men sat almost in darkness; the one, between the bouts that shook him, whispering out the tenets of his Law; the other, now listening, now staring back into the world that once was—and ever should be.... He was with Markham, listening to the Westminster chimes—(on the crest of the centuries, Markham had said)—when there were sudden yelping screams outside and a patter of feet on the road. The human rats who had crept into the town for shelter from the night were bolting in panic from their holes.

“They’re running,” said the dying man and felt towards the stairs. “It’s gas—it must be gas! Oh God, where’s the door—where’s the door?”

As they groped and stumbled through the door and up the stairway, he was clutching at Theodore’s arm and gasping in an ecstasy of terror; as fearful of losing his few poor hours of life as if they had been years of health and usefulness. In the open air was darkness with figures flying dimly by; a thin stream of panic that raced against death by suffocation.

The man with death on him held to Theodore’s arm and besought him, for Christ’s sake, not to leave him—he could run if he were only helped! Theodore let him cling for a dragging pace or two; then, looking behind him, saw a woman reel, clawing the air.

He wrenched himself free and ran on till he could run no further.

IX

It was somewhere towards the end of autumn that Theodore Savage realized that the war had come to an end—so far, at least, as his immediate England was concerned. What was happening elsewhere he and his immediate England had no means of knowing and were long past caring to know. There was no definite ending but a leaving-off, a slackening; the attacks—the burnings and panics—by degrees were fewer and not only fewer but less devastating, because carried out with smaller forces; there were days and nights without alarm, without smoke cloud or glow on the horizon. Then yet longer intervals—and so on to complete cessation.... By the time the nights had grown long and frosty the war that was organized and alien had ended; there remained only the daily, personal and barbaric form of war wherein every man’s hand was raised against his neighbour and enemy. That warfare ceased not and could not cease—until the human herd had reduced itself to the point at which the bare earth could support it.

It seemed to him later a wonder—almost a miracle—that he had come alive through the months of war and after; at times he stood amazed that any had lived in the waste of hunger and violence, of pestilence and rotting bodies which for months was the world as he knew it. He was near death not once nor a score of times, but daily; death from exhaustion or the envy of men who were starved and reckless as himself. The mockery of peace brought no plenty or hope of it, no sign of reconstruction or dawn of new order; reconstruction and order were rank impossibilities so long as human creatures preyed on each other in a land swept bare, and prowled after the manner of wolves. No revival of common life, no system was possible until earth once more brought forth her fruits.

He judged, by the length of the nights, that it was somewhere about the middle of November when the first snow came suddenly and thickly; the harbinger and onslaught of a fiercely hard winter that killed in their thousands the gaunt human beasts who tore at each other for the refuse and vermin that was food. In the all-pervading dearth and starvation there was only one form of animal life that increased and flourished mightily; the rat overran empty buildings, found dreadful sustenance in street and field and, in turn, was hunted, trapped and fed on.

With the coming of winter the human remnant was perforce less vagrant and migratory, and Theodore, driven by weather to shelter, lived for weeks in what once had been a country town, a cluster of dead houses with, here and there, a silent factory. Only the buildings, the semblance of a township, remained; the befouled and neglected body whence the life of a community had fled; and he never knew what its living name had been or what was the manner of industry or commerce whereby it had supported its inhabitants. It lay in a flattish agricultural country and a railway had run through its outskirts; the rusted metals stretched north and south and the remnants of a station still existed—platforms, charred buildings and trucks and locomotives in sidings. Perhaps the charred buildings had been burned in a fury of drunken and insane destruction, perhaps shivering destitution had set light to them for the sake of a few hours’ warmth.

The shell of the town—its brickwork and stone—was still practically intact; it was anarchy, pillage and starvation, not the violence of an enemy, that had reduced it to a city of the dead. The means of supporting life were absent, but certain forms of what had once been luxury remained and were counted as nothing. At a corner of the main street stood a jeweller’s premises which, time and again, had been entered and ransacked; the dwelling-house behind it contained not so much as a fragment of dried crust but in the shop itself rings, brooches and pendants were still lying for any man to take—disordered, scattered and trampled underfoot, because worthless to those who craved for bread. The only item of jeweller’s stock that still had value to starving men was a watch—if it furnished a burning-glass, a means of lighting a fire when other means were unavailable.

Theodore lived through the winter—as all his fellows lived—destructively, on the legacy and remnant of other men’s savings and makings; scraping and grubbing in other men’s ground, burning furniture and woodwork, the product of other men’s labours, and taking no thought for the morrow. At the beginning of winter some four or five score of human shadows, men and women, crept about the dead streets and the fields beyond them in their daily quest for the means to keep life in their bodies; but, as the weeks drew on and the winter hardened, starvation and the sickness born of starvation reduced their numbers by a half. Those lived best who were most skilful at the trapping of vermin; and they had long been existing on little but rat-flesh, when some hunters of rats, on the track of their prey, discovered a treasure beyond price—a godsend—in the shape of sacks of grain in the cellar of an empty brewery.

The discovery meant more than a supply of food and the staving-off of death by starvation; with the possession of resources that, with care, might last for weeks there came into being a common interest, the fellowship that makes a social system. After the first wild struggle—the rush to fill their hands and cram their gnawing stomachs—the shadows and skeletons of men controlled their instincts and took counsel; the fact that their stomachs were full and their craving satisfied gave back to them the power of construction, of forethought and restraint; they ceased to be instinctively inimical and wholly animal and took common measures for the preservation and rationing of their heaven-sent windfall. They advised, consulted, heard opinion and gave it, were reasonable; counted their numbers in relation to the size of their hoard; and in the end decided, by common consent, on the amount of the daily portion which was to be allotted to each in return for his share in the duty of guarding it—against the cravings of their own hunger as well as against the inroads of rats and mice.... With food—with property—they were human again; capable of plans for the morrow, of concerted and intelligent action. The enmity they had hitherto felt against each other was suddenly transferred to the stranger—the foreigner—who might force his way in and acquire a share in their treasure. Hence they took precautions against the arrival of the stranger, kept watch and ward on the outskirts of the town and drove away the chance newcomer, so that the knowledge of their good fortune should not spread. With duties shared, the dead sense of comradeship revived; they began to recognize and greet each other as they came for their daily portion. And if some were restrained only by the common watchfulness from appropriating more than their share of the common stock, there were others in whom stirred the sense of honour.

For a week or more they lived under the beginnings of a social system which was rendered possible by their certainty of a daily mess; and then came what, perhaps, was inevitable—discovery of pilfering from the store that gave life to them all. The pilferers, detected by the night guard, fled on the instant, well knowing that their sin against the very existence of the little community was a sin beyond hope of forgiveness; they eluded pursuit in the darkness and by morning had vanished from the neighbourhood. For the time only; since they took with them the knowledge of the hoarded grain they had forfeited—a knowledge which was power and a weapon to themselves, a danger to those they had fled from. Two days later, after nightfall, a skeleton rabble, armed with knives, clubs and stones, was led into the town by the renegades; and there was fought out a fierce, elementary battle, a struggle of starved men for the prize of life itself.... From the first the case of the defenders was hopeless; outnumbered and taken by surprise, they were beaten in detail, overwhelmed—and in less than five minutes the survivors were flying for their lives, the darkness their only hope of safety.

* * * * *

Theodore Savage was of the remnant who owed their lives to darkness and the speed with which they fled. As he neared the outskirts of the town and slackened, exhausted, to draw breath, he heard the patter of running steps behind him and for a moment believed himself pursued—till a passing burst of moonlight showed the runner as a woman, like himself seeking safety in flight. A young woman, with a sobbing open mouth, who clutched at his arm and besought him not to leave her to be killed—to save her, to get her away!... He knew her by sight as he knew all the members of the destitute little community—a girl with a face once plump, now hollowed, whom he had seen daily when she came, in stupid wretchedness, to hold out her bowl for her share of the common ration; one of a squalid company of three or four women who herded together—and whose habit of instinctive fellowship was broken by the sudden onslaught which had driven them apart in flight.

“I don’t know where they’ve all gone,” she wailed. “Don’t leave me—for Gawd’s saike don’t leave me.... Ow, whatever shall I do?... I dunno where to go—for Gawd’s sake....”

He would gladly have been rid of her lamenting helplessness but she clung to him in a panic that would not be gainsaid, as fearful almost of the lonely dark ahead as of the bloody brawl she had fled from.

“Hold your tongue,” he ordered as he pulled her along. “Don’t make that noise or they’ll hear us. And keep close to me—keep in the shadow.”

She obeyed and stilled her sobbing to gasps and whimpers—holding tightly to his arm while he hurried her through by-streets to the open country. He knew no more than she where they were going when they left the silent outskirts of the town behind them, and, pressing against each other for warmth, bent their heads to a January wind.

X

That night for Theodore Savage was the beginning of an odd partnership, a new phase of his life uncivilized. The girl who had clutched at him as the drowning clutch at straws was destined to bear him company for more than a winter’s night and a journey to comparative safety; being by nature and training of the type that clings, as a matter of right, to whomsoever will fend for it, she drifted after him instinctively. When she woke in the morning in the shelter he had found for her she looked round for him to guide and, if possible, feed her—and awaited his instructions passively.

One human being—so it did not threaten him with violence—was no more to him than another, and perhaps he hardly noticed that when he rose and moved on she followed. From that hour forth she was always at his heels—complaining or too wretched to complain. He would let her hang on his arm as they trudged and shared his findings of food with her—because she had followed, was there; and it was some time before he realized that he had shouldered a responsibility which had no intention of shifting itself from his back.... When he realized the fact he had already tacitly accepted it; and for the first few weeks of their existence in common he was too fiercely occupied in the task of keeping them both alive to consider or define his relationship to the creature who whimpered and stumbled at his heels and took scraps of food from his hands. When, at last, he considered it, the relationship was established on both sides. She was his dependent, after the fashion of a child or an accustomed dog; and having learned to look to him for food, for guidance and protection, she could be cast off only by direct cruelty and the breaking of a daily habit.

In the beginning that was all; she followed because she did not know what else to do; he led and they hungered together. For the most part they were silent with the speechlessness of misery, and it was days before he even asked her name, weeks before he knew more of her life in the past than was betrayed by a Cockney accent. So long as existence was a craving and a fear, where nothing mattered save hunger and the fending-off of present death, the fact that she was a woman meant no more to him than her dependence and his own responsibility; thus her companionship was no more than the bodily presence of a human being whose needs were his own, whose terrors and whose enemies were his.

They prowled and starved together through the long bitterness of winter in a world stripped bare of its last year’s harvest where all hungry mouths strove to keep other mouths at a distance; and time and again, when they grubbed for food or sought to take shelter, they were driven away with threats and with violence by those who already held possession of some tract of street or country. No claim to ownership could stand against the claim of a stronger, and one man, meeting them, would avoid them, slink out of their way—because, being two, they could strip him if the mood should take them. And when they, in their turn, sighted three or four figures in the distance, they made haste to take another road.

Once, when a solitary wayfarer shrank from them and scuttled to the cover of a ragged patch of firwood, there came back to Theodore, like a rushing mighty wind, the memory of his last days in London, the thought of his journey down to York. The strange, glad fellowship of the outbreak of war, the eagerness to serve and be sacrificed; the friendliness of strangers, the dear love of England, the brotherhood!... The creature who scuttled at his very sight would have been his brother in those first days of splendid sacrifice!

“Lord God!” he said and laughed long and uncontrollably; while the girl, Ada, stared in open-mouthed bewilderment—then pulled at his arm and began to cry, believing he was going off his head.

* * * * *

In their hunted and fugitive life their wanderings, of necessity, were planless; they drifted east or west, by this road or that, as fear, the weather or the cravings of their hunger prompted. They sought food, thought food only and, as far as possible, avoided the neighbourhood of those, their fellow-men, who might try to share their meagre findings. House-room, bare house-room, stood ready for their taking in the country as well as in the town; but wherever there was more than house-room—food or the mere possibility of food—the human wolf was at hand to dispute it with his rivals. There was a time when a road, followed blindly, led them down to the sea and the corpse of a pretentious little watering-place—where stiff, blank terraces of ornate brick and plaster stared out at the unbroken sea-line; they found themselves shelter in a bow-windowed villa that still bore the legend “Ocean View: Apartments,” trudged along the tide-mark in search of sand-crabs and fished from an iron-legged pier. When a long winter gale swept the pier with breakers and put a stop to their fishing, they turned and tramped inland again.... And there was another time when they were the sole inhabitants of a stretch of Welsh mining-village—they knew it for Welsh by the street-names—where they hunted their rats and grubbed for roots in allotments already trampled over. For very starvation they moved on again; and later—how much later they could not remember—took shelter, because they could go no further, in a cottage on the outskirts of a moorland hamlet, where they were almost at extremity when a bitter spell of cold, at the end of winter, sent them food in the shape of frozen rooks and starlings. And, a day or two later, they were driven out again; Theodore, searching for dead birds in the snow, met others engaged in the same hungry quest—other and earlier settlers in the neighbourhood who saw in him a poacher on their scanty hunting-grounds and, gathering together in a common hate and need, fell on the intruders and chased them out with stones and threats. Theodore and the girl were hunted from their homestead and out on to the bleakness of the moor; whence, looking back breathless and aching from their bruises, they saw half a dozen yelling starvelings who still threatened them with shouts and upraised fists.... They went on blindly because they dared not stay; and that, for many days, was the last they saw of mankind.

* * * * *

It must have been towards the end of February or the beginning of March that they ended their long goings to and fro and found the refuge that, for many months, was to give them hiding and sustenance. Since they had been driven from their last shelter they had sighted no enemy in the shape of a living man, but the days that followed their flight had been almost foodless; and in the end they had come near to death from exposure on a stretch of hill and heath-covered country where they lost all sense of direction or even of desire. There, without doubt, they would have left their bones if there had not already been a promise of spring in the air; as it was, they could hardly drag themselves along when the moor dropped suddenly into a valley, a wide strip of land once pasture, now bleak and blackened from the passing of the poison-fire which had seared it from end to end. Here and there were charred mummies of men and of animals, lying thickest round a farmhouse, partly burned out; but beyond the burned farmhouse was a stream that might yield them fish; and with the warmth that was melting the snow on the hilltops little shafts of green life were piercing through the blackened soil. Before dark, in what once had been a garden, they scraped with their nails and their knives and found food—worm-eaten roots that would once have seemed unfit for cattle, that they thrust into their mouths unwashed. They sheltered for the night within the skeleton walls of the farm; and when, with morning, they crawled into the sun, the last patch of snow had vanished from the hills and the tiny shafts of green were more radiant against the blackened soil.... The long curse and barrenness of winter was over and Nature was beginning anew her task of supporting her children.

From that day forward they lived isolated, without sight or sound of men. Chance had led them to a loneliness which was safety, coupled with a bare possibility of supporting life—by rooting in fields left derelict, by fishing and the snaring of birds; but for all their isolation it was long before they ceased to peer for men on the horizon, to take careful precautions against the coming of their own kind. With the memory of savagery and violence behind them, they looked round sharply at an unaccustomed sound, kept preferably to woods and shadow and moved furtively in open country; and Theodore’s ultimate choice of a dwelling-place was dictated chiefly by fear of discovery and desire to remain unseen. What he sought was not only a shelter, a roof-tree, but a hiding-place which other men might pass without notice; hence he settled at last in a fold of the hills—in a copse of tall wood, some four or five miles from their first halt, where oaks and larches, bursting into bud, denied the ruin that had come upon last year’s world.... Theodore, setting foot in the wood for the first time—seeking refuge, a hiding-place to cower in—was suddenly in presence of the green life unchanging, that blessed and uplifted by its very indifference to the downfall and agony of man. The windflowers, thrusting through brown leaves, were as last year’s windflowers—a delicate endurance that persisted.... He had entered a world that had not altered since the days when he lived as a man.

He explored his little wood with precaution, creeping through it from end to end; and, finding no more recent sign of human occupation than a stack of sawn logs, their bark grey with mould, he decided on the site of his camp and refuge—a clearing near the stream that babbled down the valley, but well hidden by its thick belt of trees. The girl had followed him—she dreaded being left alone of all things—and assented with her customary listlessness when he explained to her that the bird-life and the stream would mean a food-supply and that the logs, ready cut, could be built into shelters from the weather; she was a town-dweller, mentally as well as by habit of body, whom the spring of the woods had no power to rouse from her apathy.

There were empty cottages for the taking lower down the valley and it was the fear of the marauder alone that sent them to camp in the wilderness, that kept them lurking in their fold of the hills, not daring to seek for greater comfort. Within a day or two after they had discovered it, they were hidden away in the solitary copse, their camp, to begin with, no more than a couple of small lean-to’s—logs propped against the face of a projecting rock and their interstices stuffed with green moss. In the first few weeks of their lonely life they were often near starvation; but with the passing of time food was more abundant, not only because Theodore grew more skilled in his fishing and snaring—learned the haunts of birds and the likely pools for fish—but because, as spring ripened, they inherited in the waste land around them a legacy of past cultivation, fruits of the earth that had sown themselves and were growing untended amidst weeds.

With time, with experiment and returning strength, Theodore made their refuge more habitable; tools, left lying in other men’s houses, fields and gardens, were to be had for the searching, and, when he had brought home a spade discovered in a weed-patch and an axe found rusting on a cottage floor, he built a clay oven that their fire might not quench in the rain and hewed wood for the bettering of their shelters. Ada—when he told her where to look for it—gathered moss and heather for their bed-places and spread it to dry in the sun; and from one of his more distant expeditions he returned with pots which served for cooking and the carrying of water from the stream.... Spring lengthened into summer and no man came near them; they lived only to themselves in a primitive existence which concerned itself solely with food and bodily security.