Читать книгу Deluge - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 14

CHAPTER VII

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 ready to take full advantage of it.

Norwood seemed more cheerful than usual. He made trivial jokes and laughed at his own wit. The difference of the previous night appeared to be forgotten.

Claire and he had started out together intending to do their work of salvage before crossing the channel, which they could only do when the tide was at its lowest, some hours ahead.

They found little to occupy them. The sea was smooth, and the wind off the shore. There were two more of the dead sheep floating in, and they were of one mind to start them out again on their interrupted voyage. They had found that if any unsavoury items that the ocean brought were dismissed again through the narrow entrance of the bay, the next tide would often return them unless they were started round the southern side, when the current caught them and they were seen no more. They had no use for dead sheep, however recent their decease might be. There was a difference on that point. Jephson said that they might have come from some land left just above the sea-level, to which they clung till the sea washed them off one by one. It was impossible to disprove it. He had even suggested that they might be fit for eating. If they were, their looks belied them.

Anyway, Claire and Norwood had been of one mind in poling them out of sight and reach before a fresh debate could rise. What remained of the tide’s largess had been only the broken remnant of a wicker chair, a wooden hay-fork, also damaged, and a battered chicken-coop that had a long dead hen entangled in the bars, against which it must have struggled frantically when the flood swept over it.

It was the poorest haul they had had, and took little time to deal with. So they crossed the island at leisure, Norwood still in unusual spirits and talking of the game in which he excelled. He seemed to forget that the very grounds of his triumphs were beneath the ocean, and that few things were more certain than that he would never handle a bat again, as he expounded his theory of the best method of playing back to a swerving ball or of the result of bowling “round the wicket” to a left-hander. As he became absorbed in his subject she almost liked him, and she was well content to lead him on, and able to do so, for she had captained a cricket team in her college days, though she would have given all the cricket grounds that were ever rolled for a tennis racquet and net, with a good opponent beyond it.

So they had come to the channel, and being anxious to commence their exploration, they had waded over while the water was still knee-deep and with a pull that nearly took their footing more than once as they struggled against it.

She had expected that he would object to separation, though it would obviously halve the time that the survey would require, and had been determined to insist upon it, but he did not do so, agreeing readily that she should follow the right-hand coast and he the left, and that they should meet at the further end. By that means they would discover whether there were any stream such as must require an outlet, and should that fail, they could return across the inner land in search of any possible pool in the hollows.

A moment after she left him she disturbed a small bird of the finch kind, which fluttered past her, and because she had seen no sign of such life since the flood came, but only the stronger sea-birds, she turned to look after it. Norwood was still standing where she had left him. He had a flask at his mouth, which he quickly withdrew and slipped into a side pocket when he saw her looking back.

Following the curves of the land, her walk may have been a matter of two miles. The tide, being low, had exposed a portion of the hillside sloping gently down for most of the distance. At one point there was a considerable stretch of more level land that the lower tides discovered. It was a melancholy view of drowned herbage and of the debris of land and sea.

She had worked thoroughly, though with little expectation, making short detours inland where any hollow invited it. The place where Norwood had said that the gulls settled was on her side. She found it to be a flat field which the high tides covered, leaving large shallow pools when they retreated, in which the birds waded and fed. There was no hope of fresh water there.

She had become used to horrors, but had never realised the full tragedy of the flood so vividly as she did that morning, walking on land over which it had swept and receded, leaving a hundred piteous relics of a world’s destruction. Her mind was clear and vacant to think of what was lost and of what might be. Why of all the millions of English men and women had they three been saved? She knew that the men were worthless beside so many that the seas had taken. Were they indeed to be the parents of a new race? Was she—? Her mind revolted fiercely. Was the whole world overwhelmed, or was that the nightmare horror of a few weeks only, from which some passing ship would soon release them? She looked with longing seaward, but the bare horizon gave no answer.

She had nearly reached the farther point at which Norwood should join her when she came to a more dreadful sight than any which she had encountered previously.

In the fold of the hillside, just below the flatter top on which she walked, there had been a clump of fir trees which the tide had uncovered, and entangled in these trees were the remains of a group of people who had climbed to this refuge, and there had perished. It does not bear words to tell it.

She had gone on to the meeting place and sat down on the cliff-edge to await her companion. The sun shone warmly, the wind was pleasantly cool, the sea sparkled beneath her, but her own mood gave no response. She had been taught that the earth had seen many such upheavals. Even the Bible, which her teachers had derided, contained the record of one such catastrophe. She had learnt and believed, but it had meant nothing to her, and now....

“Because things seen are mightier than things heard” her mind was in fierce rebellion against the cruelty of a blind Nature or a regardless God.

At the best, it was all so futile. And yet, was it? If she did not understand, how could she judge it?

As so many millions of her kind had done before when faced with the blind forces that betray them to tragedy, she had striven desperately to break the intolerable veil of the enigma in which we live. She remembered the mood of Rua: “.... and death is the better part.” It was always true, it always had been. It was the way of refusal which even God could not take from the creatures for whose miseries He was ultimately responsible, and which He made His jest. A man could destroy himself if he would. So could the whole race, if God did not—as it seemed He was doing now.

To that extent they were free. But they did not want to die. Then life must be a boon worth having, with all its pains and losses.

But they were not allowed to live. “Death is the better part.” The man who wrote that line was dead now. Had he found it to be so? He had died in Samoa. Was there any Samoa today? Might there not be much nearer lands from which ships were now steering to search the wrecks of Europe and to bring aid and rescue? It was hard to guess. But surely the whole land surface of the globe need not have suffered because a part of Western Europe had sunk—and very gently as she realised—a few furlongs below sea-level.

Again she had looked seaward. Shallows there were, breaking the long, slow swell of the water into whitening waves that lessened as the tide rose over them, but of land no sign, nor could her gaze,

“lifted in hope to spy

Trailed smoke along the sky”

find any hope for its searching. Her mind still thought in the phrases of a dead literature, but the world to which it had belonged was ended, and would be utterly forgotten.

While she had watched and thought, a wind had freshened from the north-west and the sky had clouded. It was still bright overhead, but on her right hand a flying storm came from behind and moved over the water to southward. The sea had become restless and broken, and she could see that a heavy rain was falling. And then: “I do set my bow in the cloud.” The words came back to her as she had heard them read, and they had caught her attention once in childhood when she had been half asleep in the corner of a church pew on a drowsy summer evening.

The bow showed first in the south, stretched upward, and curved over till it descended above the land behind her. For a short minute it stood out complete, and then it shortened at its southern end and faded upward as it had risen. It was indistinct for a moment, and then she lost it entirely.

Her reason reminded her that if a covenant had been given it had been broken. She knew the physical incidence of the phenomenon she had witnessed, and she had been trained in the habit of thought that assumed that to understand the process of an event is to destroy its marvel or its significance. Yet she knew that she felt differently. She realised that men had always been dying.

Death being inevitable, surely it mattered little that many had died the same night. If there were life beyond it could not be when men died, nor how they died, but how they lived that mattered.

While life lasted it had always its problems; even now to her.

And then, just as her mind had reverted to its own immediate difficulties, Norwood’s arm had come round her neck, and his drunken kisses were on her mouth. No doubt the spirit-flask which he had secreted and emptied was partly responsible. Possibly, had she been in a different mood, and had he approached her differently, the result might have been different also, though, he being that which he was, it seems unlikely. Roused in such a manner from the mood in which he found her, she reacted with a fierce revulsion. She was sickened by the stench of his drunken breath. She was not afraid at all. Naturally self-reliant and robust, she did not doubt that she could protect herself quite effectually. It was with a fresh anger that she realised that he was stronger than she. He said little or nothing. The method of his love-making revealed the weak brutality of the man. To her indignant protest he muttered something about having got his chance “where that old fool can’t interfere.” He had got her arms pinned to her sides so that she could not use them, nor could she resist his strength sufficiently to gain her feet, but her mind was cool and determined. She recognised that she must try to do him some serious injury or disablement. Even if she got free for a moment she knew that he could overtake her. There was no help whatever but in herself. She could not use her feet from the position in which he had caught her. She could not prevent him kissing her face and neck, and her efforts to do so seemed to amuse him only. She would use her teeth if the chance came, but she must not warn him by an abortive effort.

Suddenly she became limp in his arms as though exhausted or consenting. He thought his purpose won, and his hold relaxed in consequence. But she had seen a piece of wood that lay on the turf near, as the flood had left it. It was a mere strip, about a foot long, but it might make a sufficient weapon.

She wrenched herself loose, snatched it up, twisted round as he caught her again, and brought it down on his face with the force of desperation. The next moment he had loosed her with a curse, and they had both risen and stood confronting one another.

The wood, little more than lath, had broken in her hand. It had inflicted an ugly bruise on his forehead, but the worse damage had been caused by a bent nail projecting from the wood, which had made a long, deep tear beneath the cheekbone, which was bleeding freely.

It was a disconcerting wound, but by no means sufficient to disable him, or to have deterred a more resolute man. Probably the game was still his, had he played it better. Women have been taken by force often enough from the time of the Sabines, or of the children of Benjamin, and have learnt to kiss their captors.

But Norwood had had enough.