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BOOK ONE

No abstract doctrine is more false and mischievous than that of the natural quality of men.

—Sir James Fraser,

The Scope of Social Anthropology

Chapter One

The May sun shone through the unblinded window of Muriel Temple’s bedroom, and a warm wind lifted the curtains. A moving shaft of light fell on her face, and she stirred and wakened to a sense of impending evil. For a moment she could not recall the nature of the trouble which had overshadowed her mind. “To be with Christ, which is far better”—the words which had brought sleep came back, and with them she remembered. Six months, the specialist had said, or it might be twelve, or eighteen, but it was not likely to be so long. He could not recommend an operation. He had been very kind, but quite definite. There would be more pain later, he admitted, but much could be done to deaden it. She hesitated about that. It might be better to endure the pain, if it were God’s will. She was not afraid. She would want to be conscious of death when it came. “To be with Christ, which is far better.” She did not doubt it.

She had been urged to rest this morning, and had reluctantly promised. She knew that her days of active service were over. She tired so easily. And now that her voice had gone…. But she would far rather have risen for the Sunday morning service as usual.

She had hoped that another operation might have been possible, and followed by some degree of recovered activity, though she knew that she would never see South Africa again. But that hope was over now. If God had decided that He did not need her further, she must not be faithless and defiant. He could build the new mission church at Nizetsi, on which her heart had been set, without her aid should He will it. She knew that; but she did not think that it was His will, or He would not have sent her this summons to lay aside the work she was doing. Perhaps, had she made better use of the time she had….

It was twenty years since she had sailed from Southampton for her first station in Basutoland. Life had seemed long then, and now…. “The night cometh, when no man can work.”

The night had come.

Her thought paused as the bells of Sterrington Church commenced their summons for the early Communion. She did not like the Anglican service. She knew it to be full of superstitions and laxities. Sinners should be converted, not confirmed. But she had a wide charity of mind, and today she would gladly have knelt in any place that was dedicated to her Master’s service, however blindly.

She thought of dawn moving over the earth, and of a world that waked to worship.

Fast as the light of morning broke

On island, continent, and deep,

Thy far-spread family awoke,

Sabbath all round the world to keep.

She remembered how she had used that great conception of James Montgomery to move a Zulu audience. She did not think of it as James Montgomery’s hymn. She did not know or care who had written it. She had no literary sense, but she had imagination, if only she were approached on the one side on which her mind was open, and she had a gift of clear and musical speech which could take an audience with her—till her throat had failed. Even in the harsh Zulu gutturals. “She who speaks as we speak,” so they had called her.

Thy poor have all been freely fed,

Thy chastened sons have kissed the rod,

Thy mourners have been comforted,

Thy pure in heart have seen their God.

The familiar words brought comfort. God was so very near to those who sought Him. She reached out for the Bible on her bedside table. She would read the usual morning chapter. As she did so Mrs. Wilkes knocked timidly, and, being answered, brought in her breakfast.

Mrs. Wilkes brought some gillies also. She knew that Muriel loved flowers. It was a world full of kindness, even for those for whom Death was waiting impatiently. Death might be near, but God was always nearer.

Chapter Two

Muriel’s mind wandered from selfish considerations, which it was unusual to indulge, to an incident of the previous afternoon, when she had gained the frightened confidence of Lena Atkins, a girl whose parents lived at the farther end of the village.

She was employed as a factory hand at the Larkshill Iron Works, four miles way, and had been lodging with a girl friend in Larkshill during the week, and coming home each Saturday.

She had contracted a foolish intimacy with the girl’s brother, the result of which could be concealed no longer, either at home or factory, and she had a terrified anticipation of the contempt and wrath of her parents, and of dismissal from her employment, as the first consequences of the folly which she had committed.

Muriel was not entirely free from the subconscious bitterness or jealousy which is commonly felt by the childless woman who has maintained her maidenhood toward those of less circumspect experiences, but she was controlled by the larger charity of her Master’s teaching, and she had sufficient knowledge of life, and of the human nature of two continents, to be aware that the girl’s condition was evidence of a comparative innocence rather than of exceptional vice.

She had already met the head forewoman, and the welfare worker, who were perfunctorily responsible for the conditions prevailing among the three hundred girls and women employed at the Larkshill Works. She knew that devilish contrivances to enable them to lose their chastity and their self-respect, without experiencing the condoning mystery of procreation, were openly sold at the factory gates, and that it was a thriving traffic. She knew that many of the girl’s companions, who would be contemptuous of an illegitimate child, would excuse abortion. She knew that immediately the girl’s condition should become known among her acquaintances she would be exposed to tempting whispers, advising her of the ease and safety with which she could destroy her child through the agency of noxious drugs, or with the aid of some repulsive hag who made a living by that unnatural wickedness. She knew that a large part even of the medical profession had surrendered to a vice so popular and so profitable, and that it was not only in the cottage or the slums that a doctor would look hard at a woman who suggested the probability of a third or fourth child, and ask if she felt she were strong enough; or did she really want it?

But this knowledge did not deflect the rigidity of her mind in its recognition of what is honourable and decent living, whether in a savage kraal or amidst the recondite vices of a dying civilization. Nor had she that perversion of mind, not uncommon among professional exponents of righteousness, which imagines a universal degradation among a population that does not give much attention to the teaching they offer.

She did not doubt that there were many happy and natural marriages among the eight hundred workpeople employed by the Larkshill Iron Works, in spite of the squalid lives to which their boasted civilization had brought them: many clean engagements of unsoiled romance: many integrities, both of men and women, which lived aloof and undegraded….

She had heard the tale with a ready sympathy, and with the occasional helping word or the well-judged silence that made it easy to tell. She had heard so many like it before!

Her thoughts wandered to a kindred trouble in a Zulu kraal, where a girl who had crouched stolidly in expectation of death had waked to a trembling terror at the knowledge that the white woman had interposed, and might, or might not, persuade her husband to pardon her infidelity.

In the end she had said what she had thought it right to say, and the girl had listened sullenly. She was not thinking of any trouble which she might cause to God, but of what the discovery might cause to her. Muriel had been resolved to help her practically as well as spiritually, but they differed as to the relative importance of the two parts of the programme.

Muriel had asked Mrs. Wilkes on returning if her husband would drive her over to Larkshill in his market-cart that evening. She had felt that she lacked the strength to walk such a distance, but she was not used to delay when dealing with anything that she had undertaken. She wished to see Tom Butler, the alleged cause of the trouble, and perhaps others.

Mrs. Wilkes had agreed, as she would have agreed to almost anything that her lodger had asked, but she felt that Mr. Wilkes might look at the matter somewhat differently. It is a natural consequence of such habits of thought as Muriel Temple cultivated that they are apt to be as exacting to others as to themselves. Mrs. Wilkes may never have had a lodger who caused her more trouble in proportion to the remuneration she offered. But Mrs. Wilkes served her gladly.

“Perhaps, Miss Temple, if you asked him…. He might do it for you,” she said doubtfully.

Muriel had asked him. He was busy earthing up his potatoes, and in no mood to leave them. Opportunities were few, and the growth of weeds unceasing. He meant to have the whole garden straight before the short Whitsun holidays should be over. He had compromised at last by saying that he’d see how he got on, and she could ask him again come Monday.

He felt that he was doomed as he said it. Miss Temple would have her way. Probably she felt a corresponding confidence. Unless something very unforeseen should happen…. As, in fact, it did.

* * * * * * *

Muriel lay till late, as she had reluctantly promised her doctor, and rested in the garden during the afternoon, half asleep in the sunlight.

Unused to leisure, her mind wandered backward in reminiscences that were sometimes sad, and sometimes pleasant to recall.

She had had much happiness, she decided, and also many mercies.

The sky was comparatively clear, its smoke-laden atmosphere having been unrecruited since the previous noon, and the June sun was warm and bright. Sterrington, though on the edge of one of England’s invented hells, was clear of mine or foundry for twenty miles on its north-western side, from which the winds of that time and place most commonly blew.

Muriel felt that it was a fair world, and a kind one. It was sad to think that it might be the last earthly summer that she would see She did not feel ill when she lay quietly, only weak if she tried to do too much.

In the evening she felt the need of joining in the acts of worship in which her life so largely consisted. There was a little Unitarian chapel in the village, but that was impossible. Unitarians, Muriel knew, are not Christians at all. There was nothing else but the Anglican church, and there she went (borrowing a prayer-book from Mrs. Wilkes) to hear a sermon from a text in the one hundred and seventh Psalm, “He turneth the wilderness into a standing water,” which wandered into abstract considerations of the methods of the Divine control of the cosmos, the antiquity of geologic records—the Rector was an enthusiast in geology—and introduced, rather awkwardly, the newest theories as to the rather numerous occasions on which Great Britain had been separated from or reunited to Western Europe, with allusions to the “Carboniferous Limestone Sea,” the “deltaic apron of the Hercynian Mountains,” and the “confluent deltas of the Millstone Grit,” which may have featured prominently in his reading of the previous week, but were unlikely to be received with any intelligent interest by his evening audience.

To Miss Temple’s thinking it was not a sermon at all.

Chapter Three

Muriel went to bed at once when she returned from the evening service. She had done a good deal during the day, and she was physically tired and mentally somewhat depressed. She tired so easily now. She remembered when…. But she supposed that, for good or evil, her work was done. It had never been anything to boast of. It was all as God willed it.

I would not have the restless will

That hurries to and fro,

Seeking for some great thing to do,

Or secret thing to know.

She had had ambitions once; dreams, as we all have. But they were faded now. Besides, she was not her own, and the regret was an infidelity. “Thine be the glory.” Tears came as she thought how little glory she had brought to God. And now His message had come that she was no longer needed. She must just rest and die.

Her thoughts wandered to the Rector to whom she had listened that evening. His personality had attracted her. A somewhat ascetic face, with a weary look in the eyes. She was not uncharitable. She supposed he served God in his own way, though it was not hers. “He who is not against us is of our part.” She wondered vaguely as to the nature of the work he did—so different from what hers had been among the Zulu kraals. Probably he was tired and dispirited also. The empty pews…. But what use was there in telling people about geological changes, which, if they were true at all, had no meaning today? The flood was past. That was part of the old dispensation. Now there were only the troubles of the last days for the world to endure before the glory of the millennium dawn. “There shall be wars, and rumours of wars, and earthquakes in divers places….” The last days might be very near….

She went to sleep at last; and while she slept the earth’s crust sank slightly and very gently in the northern hemisphere, and lifted slightly further toward the equator.

It was a trivial change. Not enough to make it falter in its settled course through the heavens, scarcely enough to change the axis on which it spun. There would be some space of bare land, steaming in tomorrow’s sun, which the tropic ocean had covered: some space of water where the land had been. That was all.

Muriel dreamed that she stood with the Rector on a bare plain. It was black night, and the wind was terrible. They were lost in the night. He said he knew the way, but she did not believe him. He was leading her into a pit where they would drown together. And there was a voice that cried through the night—a voice she knew—a voice that cried in an agony of terror, “Miss Temple, wake up! I think the roof’s a-falling!”

Muriel was awake now. By the light of a candle which she was holding she saw the comfortable face of her landlady, now white with fear. She heard the noise of a steady rush of air, which did not pause nor vary. She heard the rumble of a falling wall. She heard the woman’s frightened voice protesting. “I’m scairt to death, Miss Temple. It’s got such a queer sound. It’s not an ornary storm.”

No, it was not an ordinary storm. Muriel realized that, as she reassured her companion with a cheerful word, and began to dress quickly, for the cottage might really prove unsafe if this wind continued.

It was fortunate that her dressing was soon done, for she had scarcely finished when the window blew in, extinguishing the flickering light of the candle, and the next moment, through the darkness, there came a rattle of falling tiles at the farther end of the room, where the cottage roof was descending upon them.

Muriel stood uncertainly. There was a sound behind her in the darkness like the snapping of wood, and then a heavy gliding of something, and then a fall. But these noises, however loud and near, seemed confused and distanced by the sound of a wind which never ceased nor varied as it rushed southward to fill the void from which the land had fallen. But she knew nothing of that. She was concerned—though still with something of the serenity of those whose minds are trained to self-discipline—with the triviality of her own environment. She was aware that part at least of the roof was gone, that something struck her on the shoulder, causing her to lose her footing. She stumbled over the body of Mrs. Wilkes and came to her knees across her. She spoke to her, but there was no answer. She knew that their safety lay in flight down the narrow stairs if they could reach them, but she could not stir, and would not leave her. She tried to drag the inert body, but its bulk among the fallen rubble of the roof was too much for her strength. As she made this effort she was aware of something warm and wet that was flowing over her hand. She knew that it was blood. Perhaps she could staunch…. She had not lived for twenty years in savage Africa to be strange to the results of accident, or any form of violence. Feeling upward, she learnt the uselessness of her efforts. The woman’s head was half severed from her body

Knowing this, she lost no further time in attempting her own security. She crawled on hands and knees to the place where she supposed the door to be, raising her hands continually to feel for any fallen obstacle that might confront her, or for the guidance of the wall. Her eyes were adjusted to the darkness, and she began to see a little way ahead She found the door, and then the stairs.

Soon she was in the open air. Rain was falling heavily now—or scarcely falling—stinging rain that was carried almost level on the steady force of the wind. Rain that struck her face like hail. She turned sideways to the wind. She covered her face with her hands. She knew the way to the garden gate, and she feared at every moment that the cottage would collapse toward her.

But she could not make much headway. She tried to keep straight, and found that ridges of soft soil were beneath her feet. She must have been blown on to the potato-bed which she had observed Mr. Wilkes to be hoeing on Saturday. She wondered where he could be now. It seemed impossible that he could be asleep in the battered cottage. Yet perhaps she ought to try to go back to warn or find him?

As she tried to turn she was seized in sudden arms that caught and whirled her forward for ten or fifteen yards and then dropped her breathless. It was a great bough with many smaller branches from the cherry-tree in the hedge that the wind had severed. She knew that she had been scratched and torn, and her clothing shredded by the unconscious violence of this fellow-victim of the elemental fury around her. She was in the rhubarb-bed now. She could feel the broken stems beneath her hands as she lay.

The noise of the falling walls, as the cottage flattened to the wind, roused her to a momentary further effort. She rose with difficulty, made two stumbling steps, and fell to her knees. Then she lay flat again on the wet earth that seemed the only stable thing remaining in a world of ruin. She did not doubt the earth.

She lay there for an hour or more, while the wind blew over her. As, she did so her body recovered a measure of its strength from the violent ordeal it had endured. She had a natural desire to find some place of rest and shelter. She did not think that any of the cottages in the lane could offer such a haven, even if they had stood more solidly than the one from which she had fled.

Perhaps the Rectory, which she had scarcely seen, but which she knew lay in the hollow of the hill behind the church, not more than three or four hundred yards away, might give her rest and shelter.

As she lay face downward, half sunk in the rain-soaked soil, and among the stems and litter of the rhubarb-bed, torn and beaten and motionless, she might have seemed dead already to anyone who could have seen her in the darkness. But her mind, courageous, practical, tenacious, was already planning the way to the safety of which she had thought. She must find the back gate, and avoid the well; the lower lane would be a little longer, but it would be so much easier to follow its curving hollow and not to face the wind. She tried to remember, to construct the way which she must take before making any effort to commence the journey. Then she rose on her knees, and was surprised to find how well she could see among the surrounding shadows. But they were strange, confusing shadows. The contours of familiar things were changed and flailed and flattened. Yet she could see the gap of the back-lane gate in the low hawthorn hedge that still stood stoutly. But the walls and roof of the well must have fallen in.

An uprooted plum-tree, dragging at intervals farther across the garden, lengthened her progress, but she found the gate at last, or, rather, the gap where the gate had been, and scrambled down the three stone steps to the lower level of the lane.

After that progress was easier.

Chapter Four

The lane was very deep and narrow. Its width was just suffi­cient to allow two farm-carts to pass each other, with one wheel in the gutter, or tilted somewhat on the bank-side. These sides rose steeply for thirty feet to the level of the ploughed lands. Trees grew thickly from the steep slopes of the banks, and lined the edges, which were fenced with hedges of untrimmed hawthorn—un­trimmed because the countryside had been deserted of all but the most inevitable labour, and those who remained to do it were old men whose ancient habit still enabled them to overcome the reluc­tance of stiffened muscles and the vagueness of failing sight; and such of the younger generation as lacked the restless energy of a race more virile than were those who led it.

The lane was older than any record of the lives of men: older than those straight and narrow ways that the Romans cut blindly through the midland swamps and forests. The wild strawberries on its banks had an ancestry of possession that outdated the flood of Genesis.

There was an old oak on the northern bank. Its roots went deep in the sloping side. They projected also where the feet of climbing children had kicked away the soil that had once sustained them. Its branches spread, broad and low, over the narrow lane, and stretched across the field above, from which the wheat was springing.

The storm struck it, but it felt no fear. It had fought with storms for three centuries. There was no lightning, and it was only lightning it hated. A half-dead branch on its western side, and a weal down its wrinkled trunk, showed how nearly it had met disaster eighty years ago. But that was when the elms on the farther side had been too small to shade it.

If it thrilled to the first impact of the wind through all its sap-fed fibres, it was not with fear, but with the pleasure of a sport it knew, and to which it knew itself to be equal.

It did not meet the wind’s assault as do the palms of tropic lands with a slim bole that could bend over, at the worst, without snapping, and with a feathery crest of a similar flexibility—the elms had tried the idea of the straight bole, and a poor job they made of it. Nor did it grow to a full and equal amplitude, as did the ash, as in pretence of a perpetual calm, or in mere contempt of the wind’s power to harm it. The ash was a tree of good repute, not to be contemned by any neighbour. It would not snap and show a rotten heart, as the elm may, when it looks most confident. But yet the oak, its clutching claws deep in the rocky soil, its short, thick arms jutting awkwardly from its squat and stubborn trunk, knew that it might still be there when the ash’s children had perished.

It met the early fury of the storm with a joyous quickening of tenacious life in nerves that were alert and vivid with the youth of spring, and veins in which the sap pulsed strongly, despite the centuries which it carried.

But the storm did not strike with the sudden and interrupted violences of the tempests which it had known so often. It struck once, and the blow endured and continued, a relentless pressure. And the hours passed, and it did not slacken, and the stubborn strength endured it, and would not fear, though the joy of strife was gone, and every fibre ached and quivered; and the time came when the aching of the boughs was in the deep roots also, clutching, in terror now, to the hard rock which they had riven deeper for centuries The aching of the great east limb, which stretched horizontally across the path of the unceasing wind, became an increasing pain, and when it snapped at last, as a twig snaps, through its eight-foot girth, the stunned tree scarcely felt the pain of its parting. When the storm paused for a moment, and then struck with a fresh force, that bore the great tree bodily, with all its roots, and a hundred tons of the rock it gripped, into the hollow of the lane, it was scarcely conscious of the calamity that had overthrown it: it leaned, still half-erect, conscious, as in a dream, of the cessation of that intolerable strain, and falling into the heavy sleep from which it must wake at last to be aware of its ruin.

* * * * * * *

Muriel made her way up the deep lane with comparatively little difficulty, till she came to the place at which the oak had fallen. Here she found herself wading in loose soil, and sinking deeper at every step, till she fell over a projecting root of the fallen giant, that had held its position almost upright as it slid into the hollow.

To surmount this impediment would have been difficult in the daylight for one of her physical limitations. It was impossible in the darkness. But she was of the kind that does not easily turn from any purpose when once it has been undertaken. The bank rose steeply, its surface hidden by the overhanging shadows of bush and tree, and coated with a heavy undergrowth of weed and bramble. But she tried it, after an interval of rest—fortunately, in the blind chance of the darkness, selecting the opposite side from that on which the oak had grown, and in which it had left a gaping pit as far as its roots had spread beneath the surface level.

Actually, it was not as difficult as might be thought for one who had ceased to regard the scratching of face and arms or the tearing of sodden garments. Bush and tree gave support as well as hindrance to slipping feet, and aid as well as obstacle to hands that groped vaguely upward.

The time came when she felt the wind on the level field, and having struggled against it for a hundred difficult yards was glad to take to the bank again, and descend as best she might into the shelter of the narrow lane.

Having surmounted this obstacle, she might have had some difficulty in finding the hillside path that left the lane and straggled vaguely toward the Rectory and the church, with no evidence of where it forked in mid-field which she could have observed in the darkness, but that there was now a measure of light around her, of which she became conscious as soon as she had outflanked the obstacle of the fallen oak.

By this light she found her way round the hill as easily as the storm permitted, and learnt its cause as the Rectory came into sight. It was burning fiercely. Whether from the fire itself, or from the earlier action of the storm, its main structure, old and timber-built, had collapsed entirely. It showed now like a huge bonfire, from which a long trail of flame and smoke held down by the pressure of the wind, lay almost horizontally upon an ancient orchard, finding fresh fuel in its uprooted trees, and stretching on across a farther field, till it formed a hot and choking barrier to any who might attempt to struggle along the road that led to the shelter of the church from the eastern end of the village. For the church stood. It showed no lights, for its northern windows had fallen in, and its southern ones blown outward, and it would have been impossible to keep its candles or its ancient lamps alight in the tempest of wind and rain which blew through it.

But the walls remained, and the squat tower that was itself scarcely as high as the swell of land upon its northern side. And in the darkness, half lit by the flickering glow of the burning house, the Rector’s household, and about thirty others of the four hundred inhabitants of Sterrington village, crouched and sobbed and whimpered, or spoke confident words to others, as their natures led them.

The Rector stood in the shelter of the east porch, looking out in hesitation as Muriel reached it. He had just quietened an injured, frantic woman who had lost one of her children in the darkness as they had made their way to the church by promising that he would himself go to its rescue.

It was not a promise that he would lightly break. Yet what could he do till the wind should slacken and there be some light to guide him! The glare of the burning Rectory shone in his eyes, and made the howling darkness blacker. It would be difficult, he thought, on such a night, to find familiar paths, but now, when all landmarks were flattening, and the air was perilous with flying boughs and falling timber, and the ground was strewn with ruin…. And what cries could reach him through the screaming storm?

The firelight glowed up suddenly as Muriel approached, and shone directly upon her; yet at the first glance he did not recognize who she was.

Her sodden clothes were torn from her left shoulder and arm, and were otherwise filthed and shredded. Her face was smeared with soil and streaked with blood and rain and her hair was a wild disorder above it. He could see from her stumbling walk that she was in the last stage of exhaustion.

“Miss Temple! Are you hurt?” he said fatuously as he drew her on to the seat within the porch that gave some shelter from the wind.

She could not answer for some time, but leaned back, breathing with difficulty. There was the dreaded pain in her side. He was aware that she had fainted.

What could he do but wait beside, supporting her lest she should slip from the narrow bench.

After a time she revived.

“I think I’m all right now,” she said. “You mustn’t stay with me. There must be so much to do.”

The words reminded him of the errand on which he had been starting.

He said, “I am going to look for Mrs. Walkley’s Maud. She was struck by something as she came here, and some neighbours brought her along, and the other children; but Maud’s missing.”

“Then you mustn’t stay for me. I shall be all right now. I wish you hadn’t waited.”

The Rector still stood for a moment. He was not a hero. He hated to be out in the rain, even with an overcoat and some good boots. And now he was insufficiently clad and wearing bedroom slippers. And besides, his cough. He had been tired when he went to bed last night, and now, after barely escaping with his life from the collapse of the Rectory…. And what a loss for a poor man such as he! His library was known to book-collectors throughout the country. It was only last month that a self-invited dealer had offered him two thousand pounds for it. An absurd price! He believed that it was worth four. And it was insured for only three hundred pounds….

Certainly he did not want to go into the storm again in this half-clad condition to look for Maudie Walkley….

If the height of heroism is to be measured by the depth of disinclination or cowardice from which it springs, rather than from a ‘sea-level’ of normality, there was no braver deed in that night of a million of hidden heroisms that the advancing waters would cover than that of the Rev. Peter Smithers, stumbling down the slippery side of the hill into the rain-swept darkness, in his useless search for a child that was already dead.

Lost and bewildered, knowing only that he was somewhere in the lower meadows, he turned sharply more than once at the thought that he must be heading for the unfenced danger of the river-bank, till he knew that all sense of direction had left him.

He tried to read the stars, but the sky was dark with cloud already tinged with a faint red glow, that would be deeper before the morning came. He tried to locate his position from the light of the burning Rectory, but that fire was fading now, and others shone or flickered around him…. The faint light did not prevent him stumbling over a horse that lay flatly on the ground. It sprang up in panic, neighing with a voice that started half a dozen around it. The Rector tried to avoid their rush as they came upon him. He started a stumbling run, not looking where he went…. At the last moment a great horse that was almost upon him tried to turn, either to avoid collision or from a greater peril which it perceived better than he. But the wet flank struck him as it swerved. He lost his balance, and was aware that his feet were slipping beneath him as he fell. He called out, “Oh, my God!” once only as he fell into the weed-grown water, and died, as so many died that night, not knowing the full extent of the catastrophe that overwhelmed the world.

In the fire-lit church, beneath the shadow of the chancel wall, Muriel had joined the huddled group of refugees, some of whom were in little better plight than herself, and most of whom were in a terror which she did not share.

A weak and frightened voice came from one of Mrs. Walkley’s wounded but rescued children, “Oh, mummy, it does bleed,” and she felt her way to adjust the clumsy bandages with more skilful fingers than had been previously available.

What more, she thought, could she do? The mental habit of many years made her less concerned at the physical ruin around her than for the spiritual attitude of those who met it. She knew the power of song in the darkest places of the earth, among the lowest of her kind. It must not be one of her private favourites. It must be a hymn they knew.

“Abide with me. Fast falls the even-tide.

The darkness deepens. Lord with me abide.”

Her voice rose, weak and solitary against the elemental fury of the storm.

Then a man’s voice joined her. A rough, loud voice, as of an outdoor worker; it could be imagined as of a carter, who used it mostly as a horses’ call. Then others, tuneless enough some of them. Voices that halted and quavered beneath others that were of a stronger quality.

“Change and decay in all around I see,

Oh, Thou, Who changest not! Abide with me.”

What matter that the weak sound was beaten down and swept along to perish in the fury of the louder wind?

It was the voice of two thousand years. The Christian miracle. The assertion of immortality. The voice which was first heard in the serene confidence of the Founder of a faith transcending all its foolish creeds, “If it were not so, I would have told you.” In the triumphal boast of the greatest of His apostles, “O Grave, where is thy victory?” What matters, if all things change and fade, whether the process be slow or sudden, to those whose appeal is made to the unchanging God.

Chapter Five

Dawn came on a ruined world. A world that was strewn with wreckage. A world in which all the interdependent complexities by which its civilization was sustained had been rudely broken; on fence, and farmhouse, and forest, that the storm had flattened, on burning cities that rose up, a pillar of lurid smoke, as the wind fell, there came the light of the indifferent dawn. And as the north wind slackened the water came across the sinking land. Not violently, as it had poured, one huge and dreadful wave, into the sunken Mediterranean basin; a wave which millions must have seen—but who that saw it could have lived to tell? Gently, inexorably, as the dawn-light pierced the heavy pall of air, red as with volcanic dust, tainted with the smoke of a thousand fires, the water rose. It spread gently over the Essex marshes. It lapped against the Thames Embankment with something more than a tidal lifting. Lapped, and spilled over, and spread widely, and more widely, in among the burning streets; for in London, as in every city in Southern England, there had been more conflagrations in the falling buildings than there was any hope of quenching, and every hour the fires had got a surer hold, while beneath the feet of a populace that fled the flooded fire-fringed streets in an ever-greater congestion of panic there were a million rats that squealed and dodged as they made their way to the higher ground which, in its turn, would fail them.

Watchers in the early morning, on the hills above the Severn Valley, looking down the broadening stretch of the Bristol Channel, saw a succession of advancing ripples, long, gentle ripples, stretching from coast to coast, as though a giant stone had been thrown into the central waters; and as each ripple spread it lapped over a few miles farther of the level land. There was an upward rush of water in the river channel. Gloucester—Tewkesbury—Worcester one by one, as the morning passed, were underneath the floods. At midday the long waves heaved and broke against the barrier of the Malvern Hills. During the afternoon the inexorable advance spread out around this ten-mile barrier, and flooded the higher Hereford levels on the farther side. Then it seemed, in one appalling moment, that the whole land westward of the Severn cleft broke off, and Wales, with all its hills, slid downward, to be covered by a rush of water that had already drowned the lower Irish land. Eastward the water moved, drowning the Cotswold hills, meeting the flood that had risen in the Thames valley at an equal rate, lapping higher and higher around the northern Oxford wolds and against the ridge which is the watershed of England, leaving tide-swept shallows, and islands here and there, with casual salvage of beast or man that fled across it just as the circling waters closed, or that had not tried to fly. But farther north the land broke off, as it had done to westward—broke off, and sank away.

And all that day the northward roads were choked with crowds that fled the horror of the southern flood, to perish even more surely when the farther north should sink beneath the waters. Ceaseless lines of rapid, over-loaded motors, held up continually by the impedimenta of the storm-strewn roads, or by the accidents of their own impatience; offering wild rewards—anything but the priceless-seeming benefit of the lift in the overcrowded vehicle—to pedestrians who would help to drag aside the broken tree, to clear the rubble of the fallen wall; cursing the slowness of men who worked heroically to keep the roadways clear, or frightening the slower cars with threats or actual violence into the byways that soon became as congested as the wider roads.

So the day passed, and the next sun rose on an ocean that had spread from the Rocky Mountains to the northern coasts of Africa, and had obliterated the isolation of the Baltic Sea.

Chapter Six

With the first dawn the wind had somewhat lessened the relentless pressure of the night, lessened also in the steadiness of its direction, till, with the broader day, it became variable both in force and direction, a matter of short and violent gales, and sudden calms, and fierce whirlwinds of contending air.

With the first light a straggling company from the church porch came out to survey the havoc of the storm.

For the most part they were a white-faced group, cowed and bewildered by the magnitude of the calamity which the morning showed them. They were in no physical condition to regard it bravely. They were shaking with cold, or stiff with rheumatism, after their vigil in rain-soaked garments on the unfriendly stones. They were hungry, and uncertain how to look for food. They saw a world in which the familiar buildings, that held the endless things that they had come to regard as the inevitable necessities of life, were burnt or fallen. They gazed at horizons, livid or dusky red, which told of more than local ruin. Vaguely they realized that there was no help but in themselves, and they were untrained in self-reliance, as they were unpractised in self-discipline.

All their customs, all the tendency of their laws for a generation, had discouraged their initiatives and reduced their freedoms. They had been taught the ethics of slavery. They had not been encouraged to think, nor allowed to act. They were not permitted to build even their own houses to their own designs, or to teach their own children as they would. Everything was under the direction of appointed specialists. Even the money that they earned had been withdrawn from their control in ever-larger proportions, so that it might be spent for them more wisely than they would be likely to do themselves.

It would be unjust not to recognize that there was often much of wisdom in the ways in which they were controlled and herded. We may say, as we please, either that they had been reduced or raised to the level of domestic animals. On the average they were better housed, better clothed, and better fed than their grandparents had been. Perhaps the advantages of liberty may be overrated. If they had sold their freedom to the bureaucrats for a mess of pottage it was a savoury mess,, and their bowls were filled very punctually.

But now they were faced with a calamity which could not be reported to the proper authorities, and their instinct to stand about and wait for the appearance of uniformed men, and for the appropriate relief fund to be opened, was obstructed by a cold, bewildering doubt as to whether there were any shepherds left for the sheep to look for. Even the Rector had disappeared.

A babble of voices broke out, foolish, exclamatory, or lamenting.

Two of the Rectory maidservants made their way up to the still smoking ruins. There was nothing left unburned except an old red-brick barn on the western side of the house, and that had fallen in ruin. It had contained nothing which would repay the toil of delving among the brick-heap—or so they thought. Later there might be others who would think differently.

Beside the barns were the pigsties, which were still standing. The Rector’s sow rose on her hind legs as their voices reached her, and put her snout over the top of the gate. In the later morning she would do so again, grunting angrily that her expected meal had not been brought with the usual punctuality. That evening she would make repeated useless efforts to jump the gate, and fall back baffled.

A day later men would come searching with murderous purpose for such as she, but would find the gate burst through, and the sty left empty….

The little crowd spread out from the church porch, the more robust leading their different ways to the ruins of their cottage-homes, and perhaps to find such food as the gardens offered—which was not much on the first of June—or to search apathetically, with stunned, bewildered minds, for those that the night had ended.

There was one man, Ben Millett, the local grocer, who found his wife lying in the little yard behind his burnt-out shop. She lay half dressed: a large, ungainly woman, who had stayed after he fled in an effort to save some of the stock. She had not entirely failed, for some cases of provisions had been piled against the farther wall of the yard, but it seemed that the storm had overcome her, and she had fallen with her head against the pump-trough.

Ben Millett did not attempt to raise, or even to touch her. He stood fascinated, observing the tyrant of twenty years so fallen. He noticed that her feet were charred, and the shoes partly burned away. Surely that would have roused her had there been any life remaining! He stood silent before a hope that he scarcely dared to rely on. But surely, surely she must be dead!

He only moved when young Rogers and his aunt and mother came into the yard together. They took no notice of the dead, but began to search among the boxes that she had salvaged at that fatal cost.

He heard the voice of the elder woman. “Sugar’s no good to we. Here, Harry, smash this one. It’s tins o’ something.”

He roused himself as from a dream, stepping over the burnt legs of the dead to protect his property.

“Look here,” he said angrily, “you mustn’t do that. They’re not yours. That salmon’s two-and-three-pence a tin.”

Harry Rogers, engaged in smashing one of them with a coal-hammer, remarked that he’d have some breakfast if they were four-and-six.

His aunt interposed civilly that “Of course, we’ll pay you, Mr. Millett.”

Mr. Millett said, “When?”

The women’s dresses had no pockets, and they had no money. It was not evident how or when such a debt could be settled. But Harry had some paper money in a trouser-pocket. At his aunt’s urgency he passed a ten-shilling note to the protesting grocer.

Mr. Millett, a very honest man, wished to give change correctly. He remarked that he had no money “on him.” He looked at his ruined store. A search for the cash-till did not seem a very hopeful project. He must go to the bank, where he had enough of savings to stock half a dozen of such shops, should he wish to do so. But the bank itself.… He looked down the wreckage of the once familiar street—the street in which he had lived since he was a child of three, when his father had come from Foxhill to take the position of ostler at the Ring o’ Bells—and he realized that the bank itself…and, perhaps, all his savings…suppose that his real wealth were in that heap of boxes?”

“Never mind the change now, Mr. Millett,” the elder woman remarked. “We can take it in groceries. I hope you’ve saved something good besides the salmon.”

“Oh, Harry, what are you doing?” his mother broke in plaintively. She had always hated waste, and he was smashing a second tin, and a third, recklessly open.

He had discovered a coal-hammer to be a form of tin-opener that causes spilling, and introduces dirt very freely. Never mind that. He would open one for each.

“There’s plenty here,” he said, pointing to the case, which still contained thirty-three tins of the same size.

Feeling an impulse of generosity at the sight of this plethora of a food which he rarely tasted, or enjoying the smashing of the tins, or from a mixture of these incentives—human motives are seldom easy to analyse—he burst another tin for their owner, and Mr. Millett, observing it, became conscious that he could also do with some breakfast.

He joined his customers very sociably, and as their appetites failed they had glances and words of pity for the dead woman three yards away. They almost forgot how she had been disliked when living. They became cheerful about the future with the consciousness of the food within them. Harry Rogers was a plasterer. There would be no lack of work for him. He could stay here, and make shift for himself. The women would go to their cousin’s in Wolverhampton. It did not occur to any of them that the elements would have the audacity to interfere with important towns. What were Town Councils and Chief Constables for?

A motor-cyclist hailed them from the road, inquiring whether they knew where he could get some more juice, and was he right for Codsall?

He seemed glad to stop and talk for a moment. He told vague, wild tale of spreading floods in the south. He should go back to America. He thought the blooming country was done for. Meanwhile he was going north for the safety of the Yorkshire moors—if not farther. No risks for him. But he had a married sister at Codsall, and he meant to take her, if she would come. No, no kids. Only married at Easter. Yes, very bad getting along. Two spills in the last ten miles. A streak of blood on his cheek supported the narrative. Well, he must get on. Hoped it would last. Didn’t look like getting any about here.

He gazed hungrily at the salmon-tins. Mr. Millett gave him his, which was nearly empty, his own appetite being satisfied, and was thanked for a welcome charity; but he had manœuvred, as the conversation proceeded, to conceal the reserves of food, and the skirts of Harry’s aunt had been used as promptly and more effectually for the same purpose.

The cyclist went on, cheerfully enough, to his destined end. They did not know that he was the first of thousands….

At midday Mr. Millett was burying a remnant of his often-plundered stock in a little coppice, a field’s-width from the road.

Five hours later he had heard with a sudden realization of his peril that Worcester was beneath the water. (He knew Worcester, where his brother had a corn factor’s business, which made it seem suddenly real and near.) He joined the crowd that jostled and panted on the northern road.

Chapter Seven

Mrs Walkley, setting out in a vain search for her missing child, whose death had cost the Rector’s life, took the elder girl with her, but left the wounded Cora in Muriel’s care.

Cora, a thin, anæmic child of seven or eight years, who had been knocked down by a blown branch, and whose right arm and side had been lacerated, was evidently unfit to walk, and Muriel, who had been nursing her in the darkness, offered to continue her charge when the daylight enabled the distracted mother to set out on her useless search.

She made a bed, of a kind, from some hassocks that had escaped the rain that drove through the church during the night. She went out to find some means of washing the wounds. She found an old enamelled bowl in a ditch at the foot of the Rectory garden. It had a hole in the bottom, but it was at one side, and it would still hold a good deal of water if it were tilted. So she was able to relieve the child’s thirst, and then to do what was possible for wounds that were inflamed already.

By this time the church had emptied, except for one old man who had gone out with the rest and then returned. He was bent with rheumatism, and stood without speaking, leaning on a heavy stick, and looking down on Muriel’s tattered and muddied form, and on the injured child.

At last he said, “It’s milk ’er needs…. There’s a cow in Datchett’s paddock, as like as not.”

Muriel looked up into a broad and weather-beaten face, wrinkled with age, with a spreading fringe of yellowish-grey hair. She thought of a sheep, but the eyes were smaller and less intelligent. The face did not alter its expression as she looked up. The life in the bent figure seemed remote and dull; but the words were good.

“Will you show me?” she said.

He seemed reluctant to move, or as though he had not heard; but in the end he came, moving painfully.

The paddock was fortunately near—just over the hill—and after an hour or more of alternate coaxing and dodging a cornered, frightened cow yielded some reluctant milk to Muriel’s strange but not unskilful hands—not what it would have given in the garden shed to its own attendant, while it licked up the meal which was expected payment, but as much as Muriel herself cared to drink, and as much more as could be carried in the tilted bowl. For the old man would have none. He pulled out a chunk of bread and cheese from a capacious pocket. It was as though he silently implied that he was always adequately provided for such catastrophes.

At midday he disappeared. He did not return. Neither did Mrs. Walkley. Muriel never saw her again.

The child grew worse rather than better as the day advanced. She was weak and fretful, and at times somewhat delirious. Muriel would not leave her for long, but went out several times foraging for food, or to learn what she might of the conditions around her. She watched the crowds that struggled northward on the wreck-strewn roads. She heard the wild and fearful talk that urged the weaker forward.

The road beneath the hill was bad enough, but in the afternoon, when the child fell into a restless slumber, she made her way over the fields to the main road that crossed it at right angles, going north, and here she came to a hedge-gate, over which she saw a limousine on the farther side, with two wheels in the ditch, which half a dozen men were toiling to move forward, while an impatient block of vehicles fretted in the rear. It was a spot where a fallen tree had been dragged aside, but only just sufficiently for one car to pass at a time, and this one had been too broad, or too badly driven, to pass it safely.

There had been two ladies in the car, who had alighted, and stood on the uncrowded side of the tree, watching the workers. The men it carried had alighted also, but stood holding the doors, lest others should attempt to force a way in when the wheels were lifted.

Muriel crossed over to the ladies. She was not ashamed of begging—had done so many times—for others; not herself—in a hundred circumstances.

They stood, cool and clean and gaily clothed, looking with an aloof impatience at the slow lifting of the foundered wheels.

Muriel said, addressing both indifferently, “Have you any food you could give me? I have a wounded child in the church.”

The nearer of the ladies looked doubtfully at her companion who answered quickly, “No, indeed. We haven’t enough for ourselves.”

“Nonsense, Ella,” came a man’s voice from beside the car, “we can spare some easily.”

“Yes, of course,” said another.

“If you once start giving to every beggar—” she began furiously, but the man did not heed her. He had entered the car, and had brought out a basket from its ample recesses.

“You’d better take the lot,” he said, “you couldn’t carry much without something to put it in.”

Muriel took it doubtfully. She saw clearly enough that she was benefiting from some antagonism which did not concern her. She felt that the other members of the party looked disconcerted by the extent of the gift. She did not like to accept anything which was reluctantly offered.

“I don’t think I shall need all this,” she said, but the car began to move forward as she spoke. There was a rush to crowd in as it turned to the middle of the road, and the cars behind hooted their impatience to take the opening way. Muriel, basket in hand, was pushed aside and forgotten. She went back with a week’s provision for the sick child and her frugal needs.

She walked back giddily, thinking at times that she was faint from the toils and exposures and lack of sleep she had experienced, at others that the earth itself was unstable beneath her. As she regained the church she knew that the weakness was not in herself alone. The ground rocked under her feet. She was glad to sit, and then lie flat, to reduce its effects. As the shocks continued she considered that the open skies were safer than any roof, however solid, and carried the child out of the church and laid her in the adjoining field.

She lay down beside her, and as the earth quietened for a time, exhaustion triumphed, and she slept heavily.

She still slept when the shocks came again, not with violent oscillations, but with a steady sinking beneath her. She might have slept on through the night in the open field, but, as the evening came, the child waked her, asking for water.

She rose to get it, stiff, and heavy of limb, and slow of thought, but with the changed outlook that sleep will bring.

She looked round, and saw no one. She heard no sound of human life. She felt suddenly lonely. Had all the world fled to some farther safety, and left her here to die? She looked doubtfully at the child as she returned with the needed water. Could she carry it? Not far. She reminded herself that God was everywhere. The earth was quiet now. The church still stood. The child must not lie out all night.

She carried her back to the cushions where she had lain before…. The sky was clear of cloud, and a waning moon looked down on a hundred leagues of troubled, tossing water where there had been rich cities and fertile English fields but a night before. Only here and there an island showed above the covering waves, and on the largest of these an old grey church still stood among the surrounding ruins, and within it slept an exhausted woman and a dying child.

Chapter Eight

The short night ended. From the unshaken tableland of Asia, from the heights of the Himalayas, from the unchanged, enduring East, across the desolations of water that had been Europe, moved the regardless dawn.

It moved across a thousand leagues of new uncertain seas of no sure tides, where fierce and changing currents hurried the floating wreckage of a continent, now here, now there—hurried, and flung them back—the floating wreckage, and the floating dead.

It rose over some new-made islands in the western sea—islands with raw, unsanded, beachless coasts—islands on which some human life still endured among their storm-swept ruins—life that cowered terrified, or dazed, or maddened by the sudden calamity which it had experienced and perhaps survived.

It rose upon the old grey church where Muriel and the child still slept—where Muriel, exhausted by exertions far beyond her normal endurance, might have slept for many further hours, had she not been wakened by the weak reiteration of the cry for water from the dying child.

For she saw that the child must die unless some skill beyond her Own could be brought to aid her—would probably die in any case, as her experience told.

She hesitated as to what it might be best to do. She might find medical aid—if she sought it. She could not tell how far the settled order of civilization had left the world, or how few might be those who were still alive around her.

But when she tried to rise she found that the question was already answered. Exposure and exhaustion had left her too full of pain and weakness for any thought of walking farther than along the side of the field to the river below, from which she had been fetching the water that they required

Well, if it were God’s will…. She tried to talk to the restless child when she had done what little was in her power for its physical comfort, but she could not reach its mind. It gazed at her with dull, unheeding eyes, or turned away its head in a sharp impatience.

Later in the day it was in a delirium of fever, from which it had little respite till its life was closing.

In the afternoon Muriel heard voices with a sudden hope. They were the voices of approaching men. They passed the door of the church, but did not enter.

She supposed rightly that they had gone on to the Rectory ruins. They would return, she supposed, by the same path. Here she was right again, but her purpose to call them changed as they passed beneath the broken windows of the church and she heard their voices in an interjected narrative which it seemed that two or more were giving to the other members of the party:

“If the…hadn’t been standing underneath the crane.…”

“Fetched him a wipe over the jaw, and he fell….”

“She’d got two ducks hidden under the seat….”

“Told him to…the skulking hound….”

It was too fragmentary for any meaning to emerge, but neither tones nor words gave expectation of any useful succour.

The next minute she knew that the party had turned in at the church door.

She heard rough voices and the stamp of heavy boots on the stones. She lay quiet, and saw them as they straggled up the aisle, though, as yet, she was unobserved. She recognized them as a group of miners—doubtless from the Larkshill collieries, which she knew to be no more than three or four miles away.

She saw the foremost man very clearly. Not tall. A blunt-featured face, not uncomely. He was looking right and left in the empty pews as he advanced. She thought of the basket of food which lay near to her hand, and wondered how much, if any, would be left when these unwelcome visitors had departed. But she was not greatly perturbed, having an invariable formula for such emergencies. It was a case for prayer. After that the control of the situation was in very capable hands.

The man looked straightly at the place where she lay beneath the wall with the child beside her. He looked her straight in the face, and then turned a rather broad back between her and his advancing companions.

“Nothing here, Jim,” he said, to a tall, loose-jointed man, with a half-filled sack over his shoulders.

The man answered thickly, with an indication that he was something less than sober, but with a surprising fluency. The substance of his contention was that there was never any good to be got from a blasted church. He spat on the stones to emphasize his opinion concerning it.

A small man with a weak face and a goatish beard rebuked him with drunken solemnity. He appeared to suggest a possible connexion between the recent catastrophe and the infidelity of Jim Rattray. He also suggested that those who had escaped might reasonably be expected to show some gratitude for their Creator’s favour.

Rattray’s reply was again too picturesque for a literal reproduction. Its substance was that a Creator who preserved Monty Beeston, while disposing of so many millions of better men, must be weak in the head.

There was an uncertain murmur from the little crowd behind them. An uneasy murmur, from which emerged a desire that there should be less talk, and that they should ‘get a move on’ in some more profitable direction.

“Yes, we’re best out of here,” said the man whose back was offering a precarious shield to the woman and child who lay beneath the shadowed wall.

Jim Rattray turned with a sudden anger which may have been prompted rather by a personal antagonism than by the words of the speaker.

“I’m not taking orders from you, Tom Aldworth.”

He took a step forward, steadily enough, with a threat of ultra-sanguinary intentions in regard to his antagonist’s interior organs.

Tom Aldworth stood his ground, but declined the quarrel.

“I don’t fight a man when he’s in beer,” he remarked, as one who mentions something too obvious for discussion.

Jim Rattray looked dangerous for a moment, and then pulled himself together with an apparent effort. He said something indistinctly that sounded like “All pals here,” and turned to follow his retreating comrades.

Tom Aldworth went also, without looking round at those whom he had interposed to shelter.

Chapter Nine

Muriel Temple would certainly not have lain silent had she been possessed of her normal strength, nor was she restrained by any fear of the rough group that had approached so nearly.

She had walked unmoved through a kraal of hostile and rebellious Zulus to reason with a blood-drunken king, and been unconscious of heroism. If it were God’s will that she was to be murdered (which she thought unlikely), there was no more to be said. If it were not His will, the heathen might rage and imagine a vain thing, but as to doing her any injury they had just no power at all. A (Christian) child could see that. She played a game in which she held continual trumps, and the fault was hers if she lacked the necessary faith to play them victoriously.

But she thought of the child, and of the faintness which had come to her when last she had risen, and she lay still, and left the situation for her Master to deal with.

The miners did not return, and three days later she found strength to dig a little churchyard grave for the body of Cora Walkley, who thus found a quieter resting-place than had come to most of those that sea and storm had ended.

With reviving strength, and being freed of the encumbrance of the dying child, Muriel rose on the next morning with a determination to learn more of the condition to which her world had fallen.

The leaden pall of damp and dirty air, which for a century had lain unlifting upon the English midlands, as it lay upon the valleys of the Tyne and of the lower Thames, and upon the industrial districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, as though to hide their foulness from the indignant day, had disappeared, and the sky showed a blue depth such as the factory-worker had only seen when on excursions to the distant coast, and supposed with vague unreason to be a particular quality of the seaside air.

Muriel, whose life had been largely spent elsewhere, might have been less quick to notice its difference from the sickly struggle of frustrated light which had been locally known as a sunny day, but she was conscious of another quality, which she had no difficulty in defining. The air was salt. A fresh and pleasant wind came from the north, and it brought a strong scent of the sea.

“It can’t be a mile away,” she thought wonderingly. With all that she had heard and seen she had not realized until that moment how great might be the ruin that had overwhelmed the world.

Among the unconscious springs of conduct which she had not disciplined, because she had not understood their existence, or had not regarded them as antagonistic to the spiritual experiences or service which she supposed to be the only purpose of earthly existence, one of the strongest was the desire of exploration. She had little imagination. She was impatient of romance, or of the invented tale. But she liked new facts that came to her own experience. She liked to see and to know.

She determined now that her first enterprise should be to discover the meaning of the salt taste of the northern wind, and in doing this she must learn something of the conditions on which human life was continuing around her.

But first she made her way back to the ruins of the cottage where she had been living. She had seen, from the hillside, that it had escaped the destruction of fire, and she hoped to recover at least some of her personal possessions, and in particular the garments which she badly needed.

But her search was useless. Others had been there before her. The little well-tended garden had been trampled by many feet. There were the marks of wheels and of a horse’s hooves in the soft soil. Beams had been dragged aside, and tiles and bricks were scattered.

The body of John Wilkes, which had been exposed by these delvings (he had been smothered in the bed from which he had declined to rise), had been lifted, with that of his wife, into the ditch which bounded the garden on its lower side. There had been a rough attempt at burial, a few barrow-loads of earth and stones having been tipped over upon them. Muriel might not have observed the grave of her late landlord but for a liver-coloured, smooth-coated dog which was gnawing at an exposed foot, and lifted a snarling head as she made her way round the spreading débris of the fallen cottage.

Everything had not been taken. She stepped among broken bedsteads and furniture, some tattered books, a washtub, and a dented bucket. But there was nothing left of personal clothing or bedding, of food, or tools, or utensils. She saw some of her private papers and letters blowing about the garden, but the box which had held them had disappeared.

Here was at least sign of human life, and there was hope in the thought, though she would have preferred to find her possessions where she had left them.

She reflected that there might be other houses down the village which remained unplundered, but before investigating further she was still resolved to explore the limit of the land, and the meaning of the salt wind that she had breathed that morning.

She made her way back to the church. For the first time she entered the vestry.

It contained little of value, a recent theft at a neighbouring church having made the Rector cautious about his own property; but there was an ancient chest containing surplices and other vestments, a few devotional books, and a wall-mirror with some brushes on a ledge beneath it. There was also an old brown jacket hanging behind the door, which the Rector had used when he busied himself with the church brasses, or on other matters of cleaning or decoration which he did not always delegate to others.

Muriel hesitated to touch anything. The Rector might return, though it was strange that he had not done so earlier. Mrs. Walkley had not returned. No one returned. Of the little crowd that had gathered in the church a week ago there was no one left but herself and a dead child.

Yet he might do so.

She looked in the mirror, and it confirmed the earlier verdict of her own judgment. She had a comb which she had picked up from the rubbish-heap at the foot of the Rectory garden. A really excellent comb, with not more than a dozen teeth missing: a comb that had been well washed by months of rain. It was a rubbish-heap of further possibilities. Many things might have been thrown out by the careless servants of a rather absent-minded bachelor which would be useful now.

She did what she could with this looted treasure. The Rector’s hair-brush assisted. But she had found no means of mending her tattered garments, and now that she was going in search of civilization she became increasingly conscious of their condition.

She looked doubtfully at the old brown jacket. She felt that it would be a justifiable borrowing, but it did not attract her. She took it down, and was aware of a scent of stale tobacco which she disliked.

She tried it on, and found that it came almost to her knees. Her hands did not emerge from the sleeves.

There was a weight at one side. She discovered a pipe, a pouch of tobacco, a box of vestas about a third full, a stump of carpenter’s pencil.

She emptied these out, except the matches, which were treasure not lightly to be cast aside.

The size of the coat was awkward, but the capacious pockets pleased her. They might be useful for many things. She was not only hunting her fellow-men. Her food was almost exhausted. And some covering she must have.

She looked at the fastenings of the vestry doors. She did not know who might come in her absence. She already felt a sense of personal possession and responsibility. There was one door which opened into the churchyard: a strong door, locked and bolted on the inside. Clearly the Rector came in through the church. The door into the chancel was also strongly made—a thick oak door, heavily hinged. There was a key in the lock on the inside.

She carried in a quantity of the hassocks and pew-coverings, which had been the only bedding she had known for the past week, and the food-basket, nearly empty now, locked the door, hid the key, and started out to seek her kind.

She was aware that she must make a queer figure in the ungainly coat, but she was not greatly troubled. She realized sufficiently that others must be facing primitive necessities, and overcoming them as best they could.

In fact, she need not have troubled at all, for she was not destined to meet either man or woman till she returned in the evening, except one doubtful distant sight of a laden figure which made haste to disappear as she sighted it, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Had she made her way eastward to Larkshill, or to Cowley Thorn, she would have had a very different experience, and there was a scatter of human life to south and west; but she went up through the Rectory grounds, where she almost trod on a sitting hen as she tried a short cut through the shrubbery—a hen that dashed off her nest and flew squawking across the drive, leaving Muriel to the sight of a dozen eggs, and to consider their possibilities for her empty larder. But her hand convicted them of the warmth of incubation. She decided that the hen had been sitting, not laying, when she disturbed her. They were useless now, but she considered that a hen with tiny chickens may be caught very easily. She would remember the spot.

She went on by a field-path which went uphill in the direction she sought, and found an open gate into a larger field which had been ploughed but not planted. There was a cart-track by the hedge, and following this she came to another field in which oats were springing and a dozen sheep fed freely.

Beyond that she came to an open heath, which she supposed to be part of Cannock Chase, though she was not sure, knowing little of the geography of the district. Here the sheep were many, of all breeds and ages. They had broken through gapped hedges and fallen gates, and congregated according to their ancient practice on high and open ground.

Here Muriel turned and looked back. She could see for several miles, but there was no sign of ending land or of encroaching sea. South and east and west there must be a wide space of land which still endured above the water. She wondered whether there might yet be a further subsidence, but she was not greatly worried by the thought. After all that had happened the land yet seemed very solid, very firm. It is hard to distrust it.

But looking north again she saw nothing but level heath, and feeding sheep, and the sky-line beyond. In the air a black-headed gull circled slowly. She could not doubt that she was near the sea.

Yet it was farther than she had thought. She must have come two miles—perhaps more—and she was conscious of fatigue. She tired so easily now. Yet she realized, with a moment’s wonder, that she had had little of the old pains during the last week; had thought little of the doom under which she lived. Perhaps it was not wonderful that she should forget herself with such happenings round her.

She would rest before she went farther. She lay on short, warm grass, and slept long in the sunlight.

She waked refreshed, and with a feeling of healthful vigour such as she had seldom felt in recent years.

She went on, singing:

“Heaven above is fairer blue,

Earth around is lovelier green,

Something shines in every hue

Christless eye have never seen.”

It was a long time since she had thought of that hymn. She had heard it at a Convention for the Deepening of Spiritual Life which had been held in Birmingham over thirty years ago—before she had settled what her life would be—before Zululand had crossed her mind. But it was the clean, blue air and the pleasant sunlight which had brought it back.

She went on a little way, and stopped abruptly. The land broke off beneath her feet—broke off as straightly as though a knife had severed it. She looked down a cliff-wall of red marl; thirty feet below the ocean purred lazily in the sunlight, its full tide about to turn.

The sea was so quiet that a gull was sleeping on the gentle lift of the waves, its head beneath its wing.

There was no sign of northern land, no sign of boat or sail. Only when she looked north-eastward was she in doubt whether the land curved outward or a separate island followed.

Looking at the peaceful water, she might have forgotten the devastation that it had wrought, had she not seen a broken chair that floated almost beneath her feet. There was nothing else in sight to tell of all that the water covered.

She had loved the sea. But she saw it now as the implacable enemy of her kind. They might surmount its division; they might boast that they had subdued it; and then it would lift its waves and overwhelm a continent, and stretch itself in the sun to doze like a fed lion.

She saw the appalling cruelty of the waters. Her mind turned to the climax of the Apocalyptic vision—“and there shall be no more sea.” Words which had meant little in the ears of countless millions who had heard them since they were written—which must have wakened feelings of resentful protest in the minds of many. She had herself been conscious of regretting that condition of beatitude. Was its feline beauty to disappear forever?

A man can learn to love the sea, as he loves a woman. He can love the wind also, but not quite in the same way. Air is not feminine, like water. The wind can be quiet and loving. It can be fierce and merciless as a wolf in its hunger. But not as a cat. It will not purr against your feet in the same way; it will not bite without barking.

The sea does not seek its prey like a dog; it does not hunt as the wind hunts. It may crouch very still the while it waits for its victims. It can be quiet and swift in its treacheries. It can caress with smooth and deadly paws.

It loves to lie in the sun’s warmth, purring lazily, and half asleep, till it has lured its victims to its reach, as a fly will settle within range of a lizard’s tongue.

You may do well to love, but it is always folly to trust it. Even though it respond to your wooing with the surrenders which its lovers know, it will not be loyal. It will turn with cold and cruel teeth, even on those to whom it has bared its beauty. It has the heart of a harlot.

Chapter Ten

Muriel gazed at the ocean, which stretched northward to the horizon-limit, covering all the teeming life and wealth which had once been England to a depth which she could not estimate; and, though she pitied, it was without protest, as it was without fear.

She did not think of the elemental forces of nature as operating with impartial and implacable obedience to blind and universal law. She looked upon them as the servants of an omniscient and omnipotent God, of Whose household she was a servant also—a servant of higher rank and of more assured position. She would not have put it in that way. She did not readily think in metaphor, unless it were in the Hebrew imagery to which she had been used from childhood. But she was assured that the sea was powerless to touch her, unless it were permitted to do so.

She sat thinking for a long time, while the sun’s arc declined to the north-west, trying to understand the conditions under which life would continue, and to decide how best she could aid it. She was puzzled that her immediate surroundings should be so desolate, though the explanation was very simple. But she knew, by the men she had seen, that there were those who still lived in the Larkshill district. If they were of uncongenial types, the greater was the call upon her to join them. The greater, also, was the need for her to consider how she could serve them in practical ways, her missionary experiences having taught her the power of service and the methods by which she might stoop to conquer.

She was not too ill to be of some use to God under these changed conditions. If it were not so, would He have preserved her when so many millions had perished?

Surely not too ill; though she was aware of a lassitude which made her unwilling to face the return walk, in spite of the growing thirst from which she suffered…. Her thoughts were broken by a scrambling and scuffling sound in the gorse-bushes behind her, and by the stampede of a dozen sheep that had been feeding near them.

She looked round, and caught a glimpse of a small white dog—a smooth-haired terrier—that was making excited rushes right and left at something that dodged it, but which she could not see.

Then there came the agonized half-human cry of a captured rabbit, and a moment later the dog came out of the bushes, its prey hanging limp and dying in its mouth.

Muriel could not know whether it had been previously aware of her presence, but now it came straight toward her, wagging a stump of tail in the excitement of its successful hunting, and laying the rabbit at her feet.

Muriel loved dogs. The stranger was well satisfied with the praise she gave him. He sat down at her side, his stump still wagging on the ground, his head lifted sideways toward her caressing hand.

The dog had a brass collar, with his name, and his owner’s, inscribed upon it: “Gumbo. Please return to George Hinde, The Ridge, Lower Helford.”

Muriel was not very clear as to the position of Lower Helford, but she supposed (rightly) that it was covered by the placid ocean beneath her. She wondered whether the dog’s master would appear, or would she hear him whistle for the return of the wanderer. She resolved to introduce herself should the opportunity come. She felt that the owner of such a dog could not be an unwelcome acquaintance.

But no call came, and the dog showed no inclination to leave her.

Conscious of hunger, she began to think of the possibility of making a fire and roasting the unexpected meal. But there was little wood lying around, and she was unsure that the gorse-bushes would be dry enough to burn freely, even if she had had a knife to cut them.

She must not come out without a knife again—it must surely be possible to find one somewhere.

She decided to return at once; if the dog followed her she would conclude that he had lost his owner.

So she picked up the rabbit and returned, with Gumbo trotting very contentedly at her heel.

In spite of her physical weakness, it is probable that there were few survivors of flood and storm who were better fitted to face the altered conditions under which life must now be sustained. She had seen and shared so much of primitive living, had so often been reduced herself to crude expedient, that she was at once less perturbed by fear of privation, and better fitted to avoid its penalties.

Arriving home, she soon had a wood fire blazing on the open ground. A splinter of wood proved adequate to the skinning and preparation of the rabbit, and when she slept that night, in the added security of the locked vestry, with the dog at her feet, she thanked God in her prayers for the companionship He had sent her, and for the provision of the needed meal, with a gratitude which was not faltered by undue thought of the fate of George Hinde, or his family, that the waves had covered.

Chapter Eleven

AS Muriel had watched the ocean that afternoon, and tried to imagine the conditions under which human life could be continuing, she had resolved to lose no time, as her strength had returned sufficiently, in joining herself to those who remained alive, and that she would set out the next morning to Cowley Thorn or to Larkshill, where she felt it to be most probable that her search would be successful. It was characteristic that she did not give any thought to her own safety or to her own advantage. It was the duty of service which called her. However limited her strength might be, she did not doubt that she could do something, in their emergency, to aid her fellows.

But the next morning brought its own delays. She went farther among the ruins of Sterrington, and discovered, as she had expected, that there was much of probable or potential use which could still be salved from the ruins—much that weather and vermin were deteriorating, if not destroying.

There was, in particular, a detached bake house which had contained several sacks of flour, which had been only partially protected by the ruins under which they lay. The exposed portions had attracted the cow to which she had been previously introduced in Datchett’s paddock, the Rector’s wandering sow, and a young black pig with which we have not been previously acquainted; and when these marauders had made some tactical dispositions to rearward, in the face of Gumbo’s vociferous protests, he had dashed into the rubble of flour and tiles and mortar and scattered a score of busy rats, of which he had got a grip of the rearmost, and returned to his new mistress shaking the life out of it triumphantly.

Muriel recognized that the flour ought to be salved, but she found it a laborious task. She emptied a sack which had been largely exposed and damaged, carried it up to the vestry, and then filled it, in the course of many journeys, by means of the basket which had been given her from the foundered motor; the dog keeping guard over the sacks in her absence. In the process of filling the sack she had emptied another, which was carried up and filled in turn, and this continued till she had salved nearly four sackfuls. After this the weather turned wet, and the remaining flour was largely spoiled, at least for any lengthened storage.

Meanwhile there was other needed food for which to forage, cooking to be done, and many things that hindered, and made the days pass quickly.

She had felt that Datchett’s cow should be captured, and that its milk would be welcome, but she had difficulty in finding any enclosure that could be sufficiently secured without labour which she felt to be beyond her capacity.

In the end she got it into the Rector’s orchard, where she tethered it while she strengthened hawthorn-hedges which had suffered little, because they were already so old and short, and thickly stemmed, and deep-rooted. The June grass was abundant among the uprooted orchard trees, and the cow settled down contentedly; but she gave little milk—little even for Muriel’s modest needs. She was near her time for calving again, and the interval during which she had been left unmilked had nearly dried her.

Then there was no water in the orchard, and that meant a tub to be filled daily from a well in the rectory yard which still yielded freely.

Meanwhile Muriel had tried to secure the two pigs, and had succeeded, with Gumbo’s energetic assistance, in persuading the Rector’s sow into a sty adjoining that from which she had escaped previously, but the young black pig had evaded all her efforts, and had finally disappeared.

Having secured the sow, she became aware that she must release it again, or be content to remain sufficiently near the spot to feed it daily. And these things had not been done continuously, but between others, such as a determined search for sewing materials of any kind, on which she had been mainly occupied for three successive days before her efforts were substantially rewarded. And then there had been the work to do for which they were needed, the jacket sleeves, which impeded everything she did, to be shortened, and other tasks which it is needless to detail. And in that three days’ search she had come on so many things which she did not need at the moment, but which she knew might be of irreplaceable value, and which she must also try to secure from beast and bird and weather.

And then the gardens. Already the weeds were rejoicing that the hoe had ceased to trouble them. They were beyond any possible effort from her; but on an impulse, one day, she had decided that she would at least save the patch of potatoes that Mr. Wilkes had been earthing-up on his last Saturday, and had spent the best part of the day in searching for a suitable tool before she could complete her labour.

One afternoon, while she was engaged in retrieving the contents of one of her most desirable discoveries—a stout leather trunk, which had only burst on its under side, and containing a wealth of silk and linen garments, undamaged, except that a mouse had found them to be an ideal nesting-place—two men approached the church who did not walk openly down the road, as honest men should surely do, but came furtively through the ruined woods, among fallen trunks and half-uprooted trees that yet showed a valour of green leaves upon their skyward branches.

They walked straight to the church, as men that had an assured object. The one who entered first was slim and rather short, young, and dressed with a surprising neatness, as though unaware of any change in the conditions of life around him. He carried a light sporting-rifle under his arm.

He glanced round the empty church and whistled to attract the notice of any possible occupant.

“Probably dead, or gone,” he remarked to his rearward companion, a fresh-coloured youth, who was rarely talkative. “But we’d better look thoroughly now we’re here. Tom was sure he saw them. And there’s been a fire outside not many days since.”

Bill Horton said, “Ah,” and followed him up the church.

Muriel had grown careless about locking the vestry door during the day. She was becoming used to solitude.

Jack Tolley lifted the latch, and the two men gazed at a sight which left no doubt that they had found what they sought.

“Here’s your chance, Bill, if you can’t get Bella. There’s one here that understands housekeeping. Ever seen so much flour in a church before? And here’s half a hundredweight of Brazil nuts. It’s like a harvest service.”

Bill Horton said “Ah” again.

Jack Tolley closed the door, and retreated down the church. “We’ve got to find them,” he said. “It’s not likely they’re far. But they might scare if they saw us.”

He led the way to the Rector’s orchard. “Keeps a cow too,” he observed. “You’re in luck today, Bill.”

Bill Horton said no more than before, but his fresh complexion was a shade deeper than usual.

He knew well enough that he had no chance with Bella, and he had the desire for mating which is common to all healthy young animals.

He was here with Jack because he liked him better than Rattray, and he hated Bellamy, but he hadn’t forgotten what they said…

They lay for half an hour in the orchard grass, watching the churchyard path, and were then roused to alertness by a sound of furious barking in the road below.

“That’s dogs,” said Bill, with more animation of voice than he had shown previously. He jumped the low hedge and ran down the field, followed by Jack Tolley at a more moderate pace. Jack did not approach anything, even a dog-fight, without circumspection—especially in such days as these.

Chapter Twelve

Muriel came up the road in excellent spirits, even more heavily loaded then usual, and with such articles as no woman, even an ex-Zulu missionary, can regard with indifference, especially one whose wardrobe was in the condition from which Muriel’s suffered.

Even the dresses, of so little substance that they could have been concealed in a man’s hands, gave her more satisfaction than she would have cared to analyse, or why had she measured them against herself before she had chosen them for the parcel which she was making?

She was walking as rapidly as she could—she tired less easily now than she had done three weeks ago—for there were heavy clouds coming from the direction of Cowley Thorn, and she was anxious to get ‘home’ before the storm should drench her plunder. Gumbo was trotting before her, equally impatient for his own reasons, thinking of the evening meal with the appetite of a young and healthy dog whose life had become an almost ceaseless rat hunt. He carried a salt cellar in his mouth, not because Muriel would have been unable to accommodate it in one of her ample pockets, but because it had become the custom for him to carry something, and there was nothing else on this occasion with which Muriel could content his urgency.

They were clear of the village, and in sight of the church which they were approaching from the lower road, when a dog jumped up from the wayside ditch, where it had been occupied on some business best known to itself, and stood in the centre of the road, with a lifted tail and an air of dubious hesitation.

Muriel recognized the dog. It was the liver-coloured mongrel that had growled at her from his interrupted meal in the cottage garden.

Gumbo dropped the salt-cellar. The two dogs advanced slowly. Their noses touched. It is impossible to say how much was communicated between them. It is a thought which might bring some humility even to the colossal conceit of men that a dog may understand the methods of human intercourse far better than a man can understand those of a dog.

But whatever passed it was a cause of instant antagonism. The dog that has taken to unmastered living will never tolerate those who are still content with a human servitude, and the ill-feeling is returned with even greater intensity.

The two dogs backed from each other, growling deeply.

There was the pause which often ends in one dog turning aside with an abstracted expression, as though occupied with other thoughts, or troubled by some uncertain recollection of a prior engagement: a movement which is commenced very slowly, but at a pace which increases as the distance widens.

But the liver-coloured mongrel had no thought of retreating from an enemy less than half his size, and Gumbo, aware that he stood between his mistress and the forces of anarchy, was equally resolute.

The rush of the bigger dog carried the terrier off his feet, and the two rolled together for some yards, a snarling, dust-hidden heap, from which they broke apart, with their positions reversed, Gumbo now facing his mistress, and the bigger dog between them.

The terrier was shaken and breathless, but he had managed to avoid the grip of the white fangs which had sought his throat in the scuffle; he had also taken an instant advantage of opportunity when he had snapped at a hind paw as the heavier dog passed over him, and had assured that his opponent would continue the conflict with a limping leg.

He had won the first round on points, but he badly lacked a referee who would call time and give him the minute’s rest that he needed.

The big dog had no such intention. He came again with a rush that Gumbo dodged with difficulty, and the next moment the two were in a struggling heap again, with a flurry of snapping jaws, and a pandemonium of outcry, sinking to one rumbling growl as the big dog got the choking grip that it sought upon the throat of its enemy.

Muriel might be an exponent of the gospel of peace, but she was not of the kind to stand aside from a conflict of this character.

The stick she had picked up from the roadside was little help, as it broke the first time she applied it accurately; but it was unfortunate for the strange dog that, like Gumbo, he was still encumbered by his late owner’s collar.

In Gumbo’s case the broad metal band which prevented his opponent’s teeth getting a firm hold beneath the throat may have saved his life in the extremity of the next three minutes, but the other collar offered an inviting grip for Muriel’s hands, which became a choking one as her fingers worked in beneath it.

Bill Horton, watching the fight from the side of the road, with an expert’s appreciation, was roused to unusual articulation at the lady’s temerity.

“Don’t do that, miss. You’ll get bit for sure,” he protested, as he advanced to her assistance, with no clear purpose in his mind.

Bill had no brains worth mentioning, but he knew a dog-fight as something very good to watch and very bad to join.

The choking pull of Muriel’s hands in the mongrel’s collar, and Gumbo’s struggles beneath him, combined to free the latter animal from the grip that held him. The big dog, having his jaws free, became a greater menace to the woman whose hands were dragging at the tightened collar. For the moment he ignored the terrier, who had regained his feet, but was in poor condition to renew the conflict. He struggled savagely to twist free of Muriel’s hands and use his teeth upon her.

“Don’t loose now, miss,” implored the anxious Bill, moving up to help, but uncertain how to begin. He saw that her peril would be increased at once should she loose her grip on the collar. She saw it too, and held on desperately.

Bill, having arrived at the idea, by whatever laborious mental process, that an extra hand might be useful to choke the struggling animal, made a grab at the collar. The dog, seeing his purpose, dodged, and tried to bolt, dragging Muriel along several paces. She stumbled over some impediment in the road, and came to her knees, her grip failing as she did so.

The dog turned on her quickly, the wet jaws striking her throat as a rifle sounded, and he collapsed on the road. He rolled over, howling dismally, the sound sinking to a whimper, which was quickly silent. He twitched, and lay still.

Muriel got up breathlessly from the dust. The two men were on their knees in the road, collecting an assortment of feminine garments which had scattered from the parcel which she had dropped when she went to the rescue of Gumbo, and over which she had fallen as the dog dragged her along. She looked ruefully at their condition, as she interposed to retrieve with more sympathetic and discerning hands than those which were operating upon them.

“I must thank you both,” she said, as they rose and faced one another. Bill Horton grinned sheepishly.

Jack said, “That’s nothing. But I’m glad we came. It was a nasty brute for you to tackle.”

He looked with some respect at the woman before him. He thought vaguely that he had seen her somewhere. It was the voice of a cultured woman, quiet and musical. The figure was small and slight. He hesitated about her age. She was not young, but she had very clear grey eyes and a girl’s complexion, her natural paleness being overcome by the exertions of the last five minutes. She might be forty—probably less. (Actually, she was five years older.) No, he could not recollect where he had seen her previously.

He said, “We came to tell you that it’s not safe here, and to ask you to go back with us. We thought there were two of you. Are you alone?”

Muriel liked his directness. She answered frankly. “There were two. There was a child that died…. Why isn’t it safe here?”

“I can’t tell you in a word. Can we sit somewhere?”

Muriel hesitated. She did not care to introduce such strangers to her secret stores. Then the habit of a lifetime conquered.

“Yes; you’d better come with me to the church. That’s where I’ve been living.”

She turned her eyes to Gumbo, who sat licking his wounds, with as ecstatic a countenance as nature permits a smooth-haired terrier to exhibit. His tail thumped the ground in self-approbation as he saw that the attention of the party was directed upon him. He wasn’t quite clear how the dog had died, but he was quite sure that he had done well. He would always remember the instant chance of the passing paw, and how his teeth had snapped it….

Bill Horton looked him over critically. “He won’t hurt,” he said, meaning something quite different.

Gumbo supported the verdict by jumping up, briskly enough, as they commenced to move toward the church.

Chapter Thirteen

Muriel led her guests to the seats in the porch. She did not invite them farther.

She said, “It’s pleasanter here than inside on a warm evening like this. If you’ll sit down, I’ll get you something to eat.”

They sat down obediently, not saying that they had already explored her resources. She took the parcel from Jack, who had been carrying it since it had been reassembled from the dirt, and retreated into the church.

“It’s a queer meal,” she said, as she returned with a supply of pancakes, which she had cooked the night before, and had meant to last her for the next three days. She was sparing of fires, which meant matches. She brought some of the Brazil nuts also, of which they had already observed her store, and a tin of pineapple. “You’re welcome to this if you can open it,” she added. “I didn’t make a very good job of the last.”

Jack produced a large and complicated knife from a hip-pocket, which included a tin-opener among its numerous blades

They commenced with appetite, but Jack looked with some anxiety at the declining sun, which still shone fitfully through the clouds of a summer storm, though the rain was beating heavily on the stone path.

“We ought to start in half an hour,” he said, opening the subject which he knew had to be faced, and with as little delay as possible.

“Do you live far from here?” Muriel inquired, speaking as casually as she might have done a month ago.

“About four miles—perhaps more,” Jack answered. “But we came through the fields. It’s a bit risky by the road as things are just now.”

“How are they ‘just now’?” Muriel queried. “Hadn’t you better tell me from the beginning? You see, I know nothing.”

She recognized that Bill Horton was unlikely to contribute substantially to the conversation, and addressed herself to Jack Tolley accordingly. She was a good judge of men, and she felt some confidence in his probable character, but she had not the slightest intention of going anywhere with them that night without a better reason than he was at all likely to offer. She was unaccustomed to be led by anything other than her own conceptions of duty or obligation.

Jack considered that she must know something. The events of the last month could hardly have escaped the notice of the least observant. He said, “It’s hard to know where to begin. I’d better introduce myself first. My name’s Tolley—Jack Tolley I’m always called. I was a clerk at the collieries.”

“Yes, I remember you now. I thought I’d seen you before. I’m Muriel Temple. Don’t you—?”

Yes, he remembered now. She had come to the colliery office, perhaps two months ago, with an introduction from one of the directors and a request that she might be shown over the mine. He had only walked across the yard with her, to introduce her to the foreman, but he did not easily forget faces. It was the difference in dress and circumstances. The unexpectedness.

“Well, Miss Temple,” he went on, using a title which was already becoming obsolete in the chaos of the last few weeks, “it’s this way. When the trouble came there were a lot of men down the mine. Some of them got out at once, and went off with the crowd. I suppose they’re dead now. Some of them got caught down below. We got them out—at least, about eighty of them—by an old shaft which hadn’t been used for years. It was an old working that ran—but I needn’t go into that….

“And there were people still going north when the land sank…. I didn’t see that. I was helping to get the cage to work at the old shaft…. But they say that the land just broke off and slipped away. They looked over the edges, and it was hundreds of feet below them, and they could see the people running about, and trying to get back, and it seemed hours before the water flowed over them. There must have been a great part of England that just settled down lower than it had been, and the water couldn’t flow over all of it in a minute. But I didn’t see that. I don’t really know.” He spoke with some irritation of mind. His mental operations were as precise and neat as his person. He had heard a dozen more or less hysterical accounts of that stupendous tragedy, and no two were alike.

“Well, there were hundreds on the main road who had kept in front of the floods that followed them from the south, and only got here when the land had broken and they couldn’t go farther. They crowded the road beyond Cowley Thorn, and spread out along the cliff-side…. And there were those on the railway…. But I mustn’t go into detail. There were a lot that died…. Some of them fell ill, and some seemed to go mad…and there was quarrelling from the first…and there was no law.”

“There was God’s law.”

“Well, they didn’t worry much about that. Not all of them, anyway. They just saw that they could do anything if they were strong enough…and then they found ways to get food, if they didn’t trouble about tomorrow. We found a lot at Linkworth that wasn’t burnt. That’s why we haven’t come much this way. And some of them got arms.” Muriel glanced at the rifle, which lay across his knee as he talked, and he answered the unspoken comment. “Yes, we found some sporting-guns in a country house. I’m glad we did. It gave us a chance, or I mightn’t be here now…. But the quarrels got worse. You see, it” mostly men that are left, and the women made trouble.”

(Yes. It was an old tale. Women do make trouble. Muriel had observed that rather frequently.)

And then there was the drink. Butcher’s got enough up at Helford Grange to keep them all drunk for a month, and he doesn’t care who gets it if they pay what he wants. That’s made the trouble worse.”

(Yes. Drink does make trouble. Muriel knew that too. But she had not known how much trouble can be made either by women or drink when there are about four men to every woman, and there is no dread either of the annoying certainty of civilized law, or the deterrent severity of the administration of a savage chief.)

“So there’s been a fair row,” Jack concluded briefly. “And we’ve turned Jim Rattray out.” (Muriel recollected the name, and then the man. She did not doubt that there had been good reason for his expulsion.) “And a lot of men have gone with him. They’re somewhere down this way…. And Tom Aldworth said he’d seen two women here, and we’d better look you up.”

Muriel said, “You say Jim Rattray’s near here. Do you know where I could find him?”

Jack Tolley, who was not easy to startle, looked his surprise at the unexpected query, and an expression of vague bewilderment spread over the vacuity of Bill Horton’s countenance.

“You’d be sorry if you did. There’s some of the worst toughs you ever met in that lot. You wouldn’t be safe with them if there were a squad of police in the next street.”

Muriel looked unimpressed. Her experiences of the toughs of various races during the last twenty years, and of the best methods of dealing with them, had been rather numerous.

“It might do good, and it couldn’t do any harm,” she said thoughtfully. “But if you don’t know where he is…?”

“I wouldn’t say if I did.”

“I’m sure you’d tell me if I really wanted to know.” Muriel smiled “But I suppose there won’t be any more trouble, unless Rattray makes it, if you’ve turned him out.”

It occurred to her that she might carry out her intention without seeking the lawless one through the wilderness. She had an attractive vision of two hostile camps, and of herself as an envoy of peace between them.

Suddenly she decided that she would accept the invitation which she had received. It was what she would have been doing, in any case, in a few days. She had only put it off from day to day because there had always been something left over for the next morning’s occupation.

“But I’m not coming tonight,” she added. “I’ll come tomorrow. And I shall want a cart. I know you’ve got one. Oh, yes, I’ve seen the wheel-marks. Are your people in need?”

“Yes, the flour’ll be useful.”

Muriel looked at him, and he felt the error of the “the.” He realized that she knew at once that they had explored her stores in her absence. His respect for Miss Temple’s capacity was increasing rapidly.

“If we bring a cart we shall have to bring enough men to guard it. We don’t want them to collar everything you’ve collected here. But I wish you’d come with us tonight. It’s not safe here alone.”

“Oh, I shall be safe enough,” she answered easily. “I’ve got Gumbo, and some good bolts.”

Jack had the sense to see that it was waste of words to argue further. “Well,” he said, “you’ll see us again tomorrow.”

He got up to go.

When they were out of sight of the church he stopped.

“Bill,” he said, “I think I’ll stay here tonight. It’s the safest way. Tell Madge I shall be back tomorrow. And ask Tom Aldworth to bring Steve’s cart, and about a dozen men, with the rifles. Tell him to come early; there’s a fair lot to load up.”

Jack went back to the orchard. When it was dark, and he judged that Muriel would be sleeping, he returned to the church porch, where he made himself as comfortable as circumstances permitted. He did not trouble to keep awake. He calculated that the dog would give sufficient notice of any approaching stranger, as he had rightly calculated that he would not disturb his mistress to announce the movements of one who had been recognized as a friend a few hours earlier.