时空传说-II—THE VACANT COUNTRYThe world, they say, changed more between
the year 1800 and the year 1900 than it had
done in the previous five hundred years. That
century, the nineteenth century, was the dawn
of a new epoch in the history of mankind—the
epoch of the great cities, the end of the old
order of country life.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century
the majority of mankind still lived upon the
countryside, as their way of life had been for
countless generations. All over the world they
dwelt in little towns and villages then, and engaged
either directly in agriculture, or in occupations
that were of service to the agriculturist.
They travelled rarely, and dwelt close
to their work, because swift means of transit
had not yet come. The few who travelled went
either on foot, or in slow sailing-ships, or by
means of jogging horses incapable of more than
sixty miles a day. Think of it!—sixty miles a
day. Here and there, in those sluggish times,
a town grew a little larger than its neighbours,
as a port or as a centre of government; but all
the towns in the world with more than a hundred
thousand inhabitants could be counted on
a man's fingers. So it was in the beginning of
the nineteenth century. By the end, the invention
of railways, telegraphs, steamships, and
complex agricultural machinery, had changed
all these things: changed them beyond all hope
of return. The vast shops, the varied pleasures,
the countless conveniences of the larger towns
were suddenly possible, and no sooner existed
than they were brought into competition with
the homely resources of the rural centres.
Mankind were drawn to the cities by an overwhelming
attraction. The demand for labour
fell with the increase of machinery, the local
markets were entirely superseded, and there
was a rapid growth of the larger centres at the
expense of the open country.
The flow of population townward was the
constant preoccupation of Victorian writers. In
Great Britain and New England, in India and
China, the same thing was remarked: everywhere
a few swollen towns were visibly replacing
the ancient order. That this was an inevitable
result of improved means of travel and
transport—that, given swift means of transit,
these things must be—was realised by few; and
the most puerile schemes were devised to overcome
the mysterious magnetism of the urban
centres, and keep the people on the land.
Yet the developments of the nineteenth century
were only the dawning of the new order.
The first great cities of the new time were horribly
inconvenient, darkened by smoky fogs, insanitary
and noisy; but the discovery of new
methods of building, new methods of heating,
changed all this. Between 1900 and 2000 the
march of change was still more rapid; and between
2000 and 2100 the continually accelerated
progress of human invention made the
reign of Victoria the Good seem at last an almost
incredible vision of idyllic tranquil days.
The introduction of railways was only the
first step in that development of those means
of locomotion which finally revolutionised human
life. By the year 2000 railways and roads
had vanished together. The railways, robbed
of their rails, had become weedy ridges and
ditches upon the face of the world; the old
roads, strange barbaric tracks of flint and soil,
hammered by hand or rolled by rough iron rollers,
strewn with miscellaneous filth, and cut by
iron hoofs and wheels into ruts and puddles
often many inches deep, had been replaced by
patent tracks made of a substance called Eadhamite.
This Eadhamite—it was named after its
patentee—ranks with the invention of printing
and steam as one of the epoch-making discoveries
of the world's history.
When Eadham discovered the substance, he
probably thought of it as a mere cheap substitute
for india rubber; it cost a few shillings a
ton. But you can never tell all an invention
will do. It was the genius of a man named
Warming that pointed to the possibility of
using it, not only for the tires of wheels, but
as a road substance, and who organised the
enormous network of public ways that speedily
covered the world.
These public ways were made with longitudinal
divisions. On the outer on either side
went foot cyclists and conveyances travelling at
a less speed than twenty-five miles an hour; in
the middle, motors capable of speed up to a
hundred; and the inner, Warming (in the face
of enormous ridicule) reserved for vehicles
travelling at speeds of a hundred miles an hour
and upward.
For ten years his inner ways were vacant.
Before he died they were the most crowded of
all, and vast light frameworks with wheels of
twenty and thirty feet in diameter, hurled along
them at paces that year after year rose steadily
towards two hundred miles an hour. And by
the time this revolution was accomplished, a
parallel revolution had transformed the ever-growing
cities. Before the development of
practical science the fogs and filth of Victorian
times vanished. Electric heating replaced fires
(in 2013 the lighting of a fire that did not absolutely
consume its own smoke was made an
indictable nuisance), and all the city ways, all
public squares and places, were covered in with
a recently invented glass-like substance. The
roofing of London became practically continuous.
Certain short-sighted and foolish legislation
against tall buildings was abolished, and
London, from a squat expanse of petty houses—feebly
archaic in design—rose steadily towards
the sky. To the municipal responsibility
for water, light, and drainage, was added another,
and that was ventilation.
But to tell of all the changes in human convenience
that these two hundred years brought
about, to tell of the long foreseen invention of
flying, to describe how life in households was
steadily supplanted by life in interminable
hotels, how at last even those who were still
concerned in agricultural work came to live in
the towns and to go to and fro to their work
every day, to describe how at last in all England
only four towns remained, each with many
millions of people, and how there were left no
inhabited houses in all the countryside: to tell
all this would take us far from our story of
Denton and his Elizabeth. They had been separated
and reunited, and still they could not
marry. For Denton—it was his only fault—had
no money. Neither had Elizabeth until she
was twenty-one, and as yet she was only eighteen.
At twenty-one all the property of her
mother would come to her, for that was the
custom of the time. She did not know that it
was possible to anticipate her fortune, and Denton
was far too delicate a lover to suggest such
a thing. So things stuck hopelessly between
them. Elizabeth said that she was very unhappy,
and that nobody understood her but
Denton, and that when she was away from him
she was wretched; and Denton said that his
heart longed for her day and night. And they
met as often as they could to enjoy the discussion
of their sorrows.
They met one day at their little seat upon the
flying stage. The precise site of this meeting
was where in Victorian times the road from
Wimbledon came out upon the common. They
were, however, five hundred feet above that
point. Their seat looked far over London. To
convey the appearance of it all to a nineteenth-century
reader would have been difficult. One
would have had to tell him to think of the Crystal
Palace, of the newly built "mammoth" hotels—as
those little affairs were called—of the
larger railway stations of his time, and to imagine
such buildings enlarged to vast proportions
and run together and continuous over the
whole metropolitan area. If then he was told
that this continuous roof-space bore a huge forest
of rotating wind-wheels, he would have begun
very dimly to appreciate what to these
young people was the commonest sight in their
lives.
To their eyes it had something of the quality
of a prison, and they were talking, as they had
talked a hundred times before, of how they
might escape from it and be at last happy together:
escape from it, that is, before the appointed
three years were at an end. It was,
they both agreed, not only impossible but almost
wicked, to wait three years. "Before
that," said Denton—and the notes of his voice
told of a splendid chest—"we might both be
dead!"
Their vigorous young hands had to grip at
this, and then Elizabeth had a still more poignant
thought that brought the tears from her
wholesome eyes and down her healthy cheeks.
"One of us," she said, "one of us might be—"
She choked; she could not say the word that
is so terrible to the young and happy.
Yet to marry and be very poor in the cities of
that time was—for any one who had lived
pleasantly—a very dreadful thing. In the old
agricultural days that had drawn to an end in
the eighteenth century there had been a pretty
proverb of love in a cottage; and indeed in
those days the poor of the countryside had
dwelt in flower-covered, diamond-windowed
cottages of thatch and plaster, with the sweet
air and earth about them, amidst tangled
hedges and the song of birds, and with the
ever-changing sky overhead. But all this had
changed (the change was already beginning in
the nineteenth century), and a new sort of life
was opening for the poor—in the lower quarters
of the city.
In the nineteenth century the lower quarters
were still beneath the sky; they were areas of
land on clay or other unsuitable soil, liable to
floods or exposed to the smoke of more fortunate
districts, insufficiently supplied with water,
and as insanitary as the great fear of infectious
diseases felt by the wealthier classes permitted.
In the twenty-second century, however, the
growth of the city storey above storey, and the
coalescence of buildings, had led to a different
arrangement. The prosperous people lived in
a vast series of sumptuous hotels in the upper
storeys and halls of the city fabric; the industrial
population dwelt beneath in the tremendous
ground-floor and basement, so to speak,
of the place.
In the refinement of life and manners these
lower classes differed little from their ancestors,
the East-enders of Queen Victoria's time; but
they had developed a distinct dialect of their
own. In these under ways they lived and died,
rarely ascending to the surface except when
work took them there. Since for most of them
this was the sort of life to which they had been
born, they found no great misery in such circumstances;
but for people like Denton and
Elizabeth, such a plunge would have seemed
more terrible than death.
"And yet what else is there?" asked Elizabeth.
Denton professed not to know. Apart from
his own feeling of delicacy, he was not sure
how Elizabeth would like the idea of borrowing
on the strength of her expectations.
The passage from London to Paris even,
said Elizabeth, was beyond their means; and in
Paris, as in any other city in the world, life
would be just as costly and impossible as in
London.
Well might Denton cry aloud: "If only we
had lived in those days, dearest! If only we
had lived in the past!" For to their eyes even
nineteenth-century Whitechapel was seen
through a mist of romance.
"Is there nothing?" cried Elizabeth, suddenly
weeping. "Must we really wait for those
three long years? Fancy three years—six-and-thirty
months!" The human capacity for
patience had not grown with the ages.
Then suddenly Denton was moved to speak
of something that had already flickered across
his mind. He had hit upon it at last. It seemed
to him so wild a suggestion that he made it only
half seriously. But to put a thing into words
has ever a way of making it seem more real and
possible than it seemed before. And so it was
with him.
"Suppose," he said, "we went into the country?"
She looked at him to see if he was serious in
proposing such an adventure.
"The country?"
"Yes—beyond there. Beyond the hills."
"How could we live?" she said. "Where
could we live?"
"It is not impossible," he said. "People used
to live in the country."
"But then there were houses."
"There are the ruins of villages and towns
now. On the clay lands they are gone, of
course. But they are still left on the grazing
land, because it does not pay the Food Company
to remove them. I know that—for certain.
Besides, one sees them from the flying
machines, you know. Well, we might shelter
in some one of these, and repair it with our
hands. Do you know, the thing is not so wild
as it seems. Some of the men who go out every
day to look after the crops and herds might be
paid to bring us food...."
She stood in front of him. "How strange it
would be if one really could...."
"Why not?"
"But no one dares."
"That is no reason."
"It would be—oh! it would be so romantic
and strange. If only it were possible."
"Why not possible?"
"There are so many things. Think of all the
things we have, things that we should miss."
"Should we miss them? After all, the life
we lead is very unreal—very artificial." He
began to expand his idea, and as he warmed to
his exposition the fantastic quality of his first
proposal faded away.
She thought. "But I have heard of prowlers—escaped
criminals."
He nodded. He hesitated over his answer
because he thought it sounded boyish. He
blushed. "I could get some one I know to
make me a sword."
She looked at him with enthusiasm growing
in her eyes. She had heard of swords, had seen
one in a museum; she thought of those ancient
days when men wore them as a common thing.
His suggestion seemed an impossible dream to
her, and perhaps for that reason she was eager
for more detail. And inventing for the most
part as he went along, he told her, how they
might live in the country as the old-world people
had done. With every detail her interest
grew, for she was one of those girls for whom
romance and adventure have a fascination.
His suggestion seemed, I say, an impossible
dream to her on that day, but the next day they
talked about it again, and it was strangely less
impossible.
"At first we should take food," said Denton.
"We could carry food for ten or twelve days."
It was an age of compact artificial nourishment,
and such a provision had none of the unwieldy
suggestion it would have had in the nineteenth
century.
"But—until our house," she asked—"until
it was ready, where should we sleep?"
"It is summer."
"But ... What do you mean?"
"There was a time when there were no
houses in the world; when all mankind slept always
in the open air."
"But for us! The emptiness! No walls—no
ceiling!"
"Dear," he said, "in London you have many
beautiful ceilings. Artists paint them and stud
them with lights. But I have seen a ceiling
more beautiful than any in London...."
"But where?"
"It is the ceiling under which we two would
be alone...."
"You mean...?"
"Dear," he said, "it is something the world
has forgotten. It is Heaven and all the host of
stars."
Each time they talked the thing seemed more
possible and more desirable to them. In a week
or so it was quite possible. Another week, and
it was the inevitable thing they had to do. A
great enthusiasm for the country seized hold of
them and possessed them. The sordid tumult
of the town, they said, overwhelmed them.
They marvelled that this simple way out of
their troubles had never come upon them before.
One morning near Midsummer-day, there
was a new minor official upon the flying stage,
and Denton's place was to know him no more.
Our two young people had secretly married,
and were going forth manfully out of the city
in which they and their ancestors before them
had lived all their days. She wore a new dress
of white cut in an old-fashioned pattern, and
he had a bundle of provisions strapped athwart
his back, and in his hand he carried—rather
shame-facedly it is true, and under his purple
cloak—an implement of archaic form, a cross-hilted
thing of tempered steel.
Imagine that going forth! In their days the
sprawling suburbs of Victorian times with their
vile roads, petty houses, foolish little gardens
of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious
privacies, had disappeared: the towering
buildings of the new age, the mechanical
ways, the electric and water mains, all came to
an end together, like a wall, like a cliff, near
four hundred feet in height, abrupt and sheer.
All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and
turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables
that were the basis of a thousand varied foods,
and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly
extirpated. The incessant expense of
weeding that went on year after year in the
petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the
ancient days, the Food Company had economised
for ever more by a campaign of extermination.
Here and there, however, neat rows of
bramble standards and apple trees with whitewashed
stems, intersected the fields, and at
places groups of gigantic teazles reared their
favoured spikes. Here and there huge agricultural
machines hunched under waterproof
covers. The mingled waters of the Wey and
Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular channels;
and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground
permitted a fountain of deodorised sewage distributed
its benefits athwart the land and made
a rainbow of the sunlight.
By a great archway in that enormous city
wall emerged the Eadhamite road to Portsmouth,
swarming in the morning sunshine with
an enormous traffic bearing the blue-clad servants
of the Food Company to their toil. A
rushing traffic, beside which they seemed two
scarce-moving dots. Along the outer tracks
hummed and rattled the tardy little old-fashioned
motors of such as had duties within
twenty miles or so of the city; the inner ways
were filled with vaster mechanisms—swift
monocycles bearing a score of men, lank multicycles,
quadricycles sagging with heavy loads,
empty gigantic produce carts that would come
back again filled before the sun was setting, all
with throbbing engines and noiseless wheels
and a perpetual wild melody of horns and
gongs.
Along the very verge of the outermost way
our young people went in silence, newly wed
and oddly shy of one another's company. Many
were the things shouted to them as they
tramped along, for in 2100 a foot-passenger on
an English road was almost as strange a sight
as a motor car would have been in 1800. But
they went on with steadfast eyes into the country,
paying no heed to such cries.
Before them in the south rose the Downs,
blue at first, and as they came nearer changing
to green, surmounted by the row of gigantic
wind-wheels that supplemented the wind-wheels
upon the roof-spaces of the city, and
broken and restless with the long morning
shadows of those whirling vanes. By midday
they had come so near that they could see here
and there little patches of pallid dots—the sheep
the Meat Department of the Food Company
owned. In another hour they had passed the
clay and the root crops and the single fence that
hedged them in, and the prohibition against
trespass no longer held: the levelled roadway
plunged into a cutting with all its traffic, and
they could leave it and walk over the greensward
and up the open hillside.
Never had these children of the latter days
been together in such a lonely place.
They were both very hungry and footsore—for
walking was a rare exercise—and presently
they sat down on the weedless, close-cropped
grass, and looked back for the first time at the
city from which they had come, shining wide
and splendid in the blue haze of the valley of
the Thames. Elizabeth was a little afraid of
the unenclosed sheep away up the slope—she
had never been near big unrestrained animals
before—but Denton reassured her. And overhead
a white-winged bird circled in the blue.
They talked but little until they had eaten,
and then their tongues were loosened. He
spoke of the happiness that was now certainly
theirs, of the folly of not breaking sooner out
of that magnificent prison of latter-day life, of
the old romantic days that had passed from the
world for ever. And then he became boastful.
He took up the sword that lay on the ground
beside him, and she took it from his hand and
ran a tremulous finger along the blade.
"And you could," she said, "you—could
raise this and strike a man?"
"Why not? If there were need."
"But," she said, "it seems so horrible. It
would slash.... There would be"—her
voice sank,—"blood."
"In the old romances you have read often
enough ..."
"Oh, I know: in those—yes. But that is
different. One knows it is not blood, but just
a sort of red ink.... And you—killing!"
She looked at him doubtfully, and then
handed him back the sword.
After they had rested and eaten, they rose up
and went on their way towards the hills. They
passed quite close to a huge flock of sheep, who
stared and bleated at their unaccustomed
figures. She had never seen sheep before, and
she shivered to think such gentle things must
needs be slain for food. A sheep-dog barked
from a distance, and then a shepherd appeared
amidst the supports of the wind-wheels, and
came down towards them.
When he drew near he called out asking
whither they were going.
Denton hesitated, and told him briefly that
they sought some ruined house among the
Downs, in which they might live together. He
tried to speak in an off-hand manner, as though
it was a usual thing to do. The man stared incredulously.
"Have you done anything?" he asked.
"Nothing," said Denton. "Only we don't
want to live in a city any longer. Why should
we live in cities?"
The shepherd stared more incredulously than
ever. "You can't live here," he said.
"We mean to try."
The shepherd stared from one to the other.
"You'll go back to-morrow," he said. "It looks
pleasant enough in the sunlight.... Are
you sure you've done nothing? We shepherds
are not such great friends of the police."
Denton looked at him steadfastly. "No," he
said. "But we are too poor to live in the city,
and we can't bear the thought of wearing
clothes of blue canvas and doing drudgery.
We are going to live a simple life here, like the
people of old."
The shepherd was a bearded man with a
thoughtful face. He glanced at Elizabeth's
fragile beauty.
"They had simple minds," he said.
"So have we," said Denton.
The shepherd smiled.
"If you go along here," he said, "along the
crest beneath the wind-wheels, you will see a
heap of mounds and ruins on your right-hand
side. That was once a town called Epsom.
There are no houses there, and the bricks have
been used for a sheep pen. Go on, and another
heap on the edge of the root-land is Leatherhead;
and then the hill turns away along the
border of a valley, and there are woods of
beech. Keep along the crest. You will come
to quite wild places. In some parts, in spite of
all the weeding that is done, ferns and bluebells
and other such useless plants are growing
still. And through it all underneath the wind-wheels
runs a straight lane paved with stones, a
roadway of the Romans two thousand years
old. Go to the right of that, down into the
valley and follow it along by the banks of the
river. You come presently to a street of houses,
many with the roofs still sound upon them.
There you may find shelter."
They thanked him.
"But it's a quiet place. There is no light
after dark there, and I have heard tell of robbers.
It is lonely. Nothing happens there.
The phonographs of the story-tellers, the kinematograph
entertainments, the news machines—none
of them are to be found there. If you
are hungry there is no food, if you are ill no
doctor ..." He stopped.
"We shall try it," said Denton, moving to go
on. Then a thought struck him, and he made
an agreement with the shepherd, and learnt
where they might find him, to buy and bring
them anything of which they stood in need, out
of the city.
And in the evening they came to the deserted
village, with its houses that seemed so small
and odd to them: they found it golden in the
glory of the sunset, and desolate and still.
They went from one deserted house to another,
marvelling at their quaint simplicity, and debating
which they should choose. And at last,
in a sunlit corner of a room that had lost its
outer wall, they came upon a wild flower, a little
flower of blue that the weeders of the Food
Company had overlooked.
That house they decided upon; but they did
not remain in it long that night, because they
were resolved to feast upon nature. And moreover
the houses became very gaunt and shadowy
after the sunlight had faded out of the sky. So
after they had rested a little time they went to
the crest of the hill again to see with their own
eyes the silence of heaven set with stars, about
which the old poets had had so many things to
tell. It was a wonderful sight, and Denton
talked like the stars, and when they went down
the hill at last the sky was pale with dawn.
They slept but little, and in the morning when
they woke a thrush was singing in a tree.
So these young people of the twenty-second
century began their exile. That morning they
were very busy exploring the resources of this
new home in which they were going to live the
simple life. They did not explore very fast
or very far, because they went everywhere
hand-in-hand; but they found the beginnings of
some furniture. Beyond the village was a store
of winter fodder for the sheep of the Food
Company, and Denton dragged great armfuls
to the house to make a bed; and in several of
the houses were old fungus-eaten chairs and
tables—rough, barbaric, clumsy furniture, it
seemed to them, and made of wood. They repeated
many of the things they had said on the
previous day, and towards evening they found
another flower, a harebell. In the late afternoon
some Company shepherds went down the
river valley riding on a big multicycle; but they
hid from them, because their presence, Elizabeth
said, seemed to spoil the romance of this
old-world place altogether.
In this fashion they lived a week. For all
that week the days were cloudless, and the
nights nights of starry glory, that were invaded
each a little more by a crescent moon.
Yet something of the first splendour of their
coming faded—faded imperceptibly day after
day; Denton's eloquence became fitful, and
lacked fresh topics of inspiration; the fatigue
of their long march from London told in a certain
stiffness of the limbs, and each suffered
from a slight unaccountable cold. Moreover,
Denton became aware of unoccupied time. In
one place among the carelessly heaped lumber
of the old times he found a rust-eaten spade,
and with this he made a fitful attack on the
razed and grass-grown garden—though he had
nothing to plant or sow. He returned to Elizabeth
with a sweat-streaming face, after half an
hour of such work.
"There were giants in those days," he said,
not understanding what wont and training will
do. And their walk that day led them along the
hills until they could see the city shimmering
far away in the valley. "I wonder how things
are going on there," he said.
And then came a change in the weather.
"Come out and see the clouds," she cried; and
behold! they were a sombre purple in the north
and east, streaming up to ragged edges at the
zenith. And as they went up the hill these
hurrying streamers blotted out the sunset. Suddenly
the wind set the beech-trees swaying and
whispering, and Elizabeth shivered. And then
far away the lightning flashed, flashed like a
sword that is drawn suddenly, and the distant
thunder marched about the sky, and even as
they stood astonished, pattering upon them
came the first headlong raindrops of the storm.
In an instant the last streak of sunset was hidden
by a falling curtain of hail, and the lightning
flashed again, and the voice of the thunder
roared louder, and all about them the world
scowled dark and strange.
Seizing hands, these children of the city ran
down the hill to their home, in infinite astonishment.
And ere they reached it, Elizabeth
was weeping with dismay, and the darkling
ground about them was white and brittle and
active with the pelting hail.
Then began a strange and terrible night for
them. For the first time in their civilised lives
they were in absolute darkness; they were wet
and cold and shivering, all about them hissed
the hail, and through the long neglected ceilings
of the derelict home came noisy spouts of
water and formed pools and rivulets on the
creaking floors. As the gusts of the storm
struck the worn-out building, it groaned and
shuddered, and now a mass of plaster from the
wall would slide and smash, and now some
loosened tile would rattle down the roof and
crash into the empty greenhouse below. Elizabeth
shuddered, and was still; Denton wrapped
his gay and flimsy city cloak about her, and so
they crouched in the darkness. And ever the
thunder broke louder and nearer, and ever more
lurid flashed the lightning, jerking into a momentary
gaunt clearness the steaming, dripping
room in which they sheltered.
Never before had they been in the open air
save when the sun was shining. All their time
had been spent in the warm and airy ways and
halls and rooms of the latter-day city. It was
to them that night as if they were in some other
world, some disordered chaos of stress and
tumult, and almost beyond hoping that they
should ever see the city ways again.
The storm seemed to last interminably, until
at last they dozed between the thunderclaps,
and then very swiftly it fell and ceased. And
as the last patter of the rain died away they
heard an unfamiliar sound.
"What is that?" cried Elizabeth.
It came again. It was the barking of dogs.
It drove down the desert lane and passed; and
through the window, whitening the wall before
them and throwing upon it the shadow of the
window-frame and of a tree in black silhouette,
shone the light of the waxing moon....
Just as the pale dawn was drawing the things
about them into sight, the fitful barking of dogs
came near again, and stopped. They listened.
After a pause they heard the quick pattering of
feet seeking round the house, and short, half-smothered
barks. Then again everything was
still.
"Ssh!" whispered Elizabeth, and pointed to
the door of their room.
Denton went half-way towards the door, and
stood listening. He came back with a face of
affected unconcern. "They must be the sheep-dogs
of the Food Company," he said. "They
will do us no harm."
He sat down again beside her. "What a
night it has been!" he said, to hide how keenly
he was listening.
"I don't like dogs," answered Elizabeth,
after a long silence.
"Dogs never hurt any one," said Denton. "In
the old days—in the nineteenth century—everybody
had a dog."
"There was a romance I heard once. A dog
killed a man."
"Not this sort of dog," said Denton confidently.
"Some of those romances—are exaggerated."
Suddenly a half bark and a pattering up the
staircase; the sound of panting. Denton sprang
to his feet and drew the sword out of the damp
straw upon which they had been lying. Then in
the doorway appeared a gaunt sheep-dog, and
halted there. Behind it stared another. For an
instant man and brute faced each other, hesitating.
Then Denton, being ignorant of dogs, made
a sharp step forward. "Go away," he said,
with a clumsy motion of his sword.
The dog started and growled. Denton
stopped sharply. "Good dog!" he said.
The growling jerked into a bark.
"Good dog!" said Denton. The second dog
growled and barked. A third out of sight down
the staircase took up the barking also. Outside
others gave tongue—a large number it seemed
to Denton.
"This is annoying," said Denton, without
taking his eye off the brutes before him. "Of
course the shepherds won't come out of the city
for hours yet. Naturally these dogs don't quite
make us out."
"I can't hear," shouted Elizabeth. She stood
up and came to him.
Denton tried again, but the barking still
drowned his voice. The sound had a curious
effect upon his blood. Odd disused emotions
began to stir; his face changed as he shouted.
He tried again; the barking seemed to mock
him, and one dog danced a pace forward, bristling.
Suddenly he turned, and uttering certain
words in the dialect of the underways, words
incomprehensible to Elizabeth, he made for the
dogs. There was a sudden cessation of the
barking, a growl and a snapping. Elizabeth
saw the snarling head of the foremost dog, its
white teeth and retracted ears, and the flash of
the thrust blade. The brute leapt into the air
and was flung back.
Then Denton, with a shout, was driving the
dogs before him. The sword flashed above his
head with a sudden new freedom of gesture,
and then he vanished down the staircase. She
made six steps to follow him, and on the landing
there was blood. She stopped, and hearing
the tumult of dogs and Denton's shouts pass
out of the house, ran to the window.
Nine wolfish sheep-dogs were scattering, one
writhed before the porch; and Denton, tasting
that strange delight of combat that slumbers
still in the blood of even the most civilised man,
was shouting and running across the garden
space. And then she saw something that for a
moment he did not see. The dogs circled round
this way and that, and came again. They had
him in the open.
In an instant she divined the situation. She
would have called to him. For a moment she
felt sick and helpless, and then, obeying a
strange impulse, she gathered up her white skirt
and ran downstairs. In the hall was the rusting
spade. That was it! She seized it and ran out.
She came none too soon. One dog rolled before
him, well-nigh slashed in half; but a second
had him by the thigh, a third gripped his collar
behind, and a fourth had the blade of the sword
between its teeth, tasting its own blood. He
parried the leap of a fifth with his left arm.
It might have been the first century instead
of the twenty-second, so far as she was concerned.
All the gentleness of her eighteen years
of city life vanished before this primordial
need. The spade smote hard and sure, and cleft
a dog's skull. Another, crouching for a spring,
yelped with dismay at this unexpected antagonist,
and rushed aside. Two wasted precious
moments on the binding of a feminine skirt.
The collar of Denton's cloak tore and parted
as he staggered back; and that dog too felt the
spade, and ceased to trouble him. He sheathed
his sword in the brute at his thigh.
"To the wall!" cried Elizabeth; and in three
seconds the fight was at an end, and our young
people stood side by side, while a remnant of
five dogs, with ears and tails of disaster, fled
shamefully from the stricken field.
For a moment they stood panting and victorious,
and then Elizabeth, dropping her spade,
covered her face, and sank to the ground in a
paroxysm of weeping. Denton looked about
him, thrust the point of his sword into the
ground so that it was at hand, and stooped to
comfort her.
At last their more tumultuous emotions subsided,
and they could talk again. She leant
upon the wall, and he sat upon it so that he
could keep an eye open for any returning dogs.
Two, at any rate, were up on the hillside and
keeping up a vexatious barking.
She was tear-stained, but not very wretched
now, because for half an hour he had been repeating
that she was brave and had saved his
life. But a new fear was growing in her mind.
"They are the dogs of the Food Company,"
she said. "There will be trouble."
"I am afraid so. Very likely they will prosecute
us for trespass."
A pause.
"In the old times," he said, "this sort of thing
happened day after day."
"Last night!" she said. "I could not live
through another such night."
He looked at her. Her face was pale for want
of sleep, and drawn and haggard. He came to a
sudden resolution. "We must go back," he said.
She looked at the dead dogs, and shivered.
"We cannot stay here," she said.
"We must go back," he repeated, glancing
over his shoulder to see if the enemy kept their
distance. "We have been happy for a time....
But the world is too civilised. Ours is
the age of cities. More of this will kill us."
"But what are we to do? How can we live
there?"
Denton hesitated. His heel kicked against
the wall on which he sat. "It's a thing I haven't
mentioned before," he said, and coughed; "but ..."
"Yes?"
"You could raise money on your expectations,"
he said.
"Could I?" she said eagerly.
"Of course you could. What a child you
are!"
She stood up, and her face was bright. "Why
did you not tell me before?" she asked. "And
all this time we have been here!"
He looked at her for a moment, and smiled.
Then the smile vanished. "I thought it ought
to come from you," he said. "I didn't like to
ask for your money. And besides—at first I
thought this would be rather fine."
There was a pause.
"It has been fine," he said; and glanced once
more over his shoulder. "Until all this began."
"Yes," she said, "those first days. The first
three days."
They looked for a space into one another's
faces, and then Denton slid down from the wall
and took her hand.
"To each generation," he said, "the life of its
time. I see it all plainly now. In the city—that
is the life to which we were born. To live in any
other fashion ... Coming here was a
dream, and this—is the awakening."
"It was a pleasant dream," she said,—"in the
beginning."
For a long space neither spoke.
"If we would reach the city before the shepherds
come here, we must start," said Denton.
"We must get our food out of the house and eat
as we go."
Denton glanced about him again, and, giving
the dead dogs a wide berth, they walked across
the garden space and into the house together.
They found the wallet with their food, and descended
the blood-stained stairs again. In the
hall Elizabeth stopped. "One minute," she said.
"There is something here."
She led the way into the room in which that
one little blue flower was blooming. She
stooped to it, she touched it with her hand.
"I want it," she said; and then, "I cannot
take it...."
Impulsively she stooped and kissed its petals.
Then silently, side by side, they went across
the empty garden-space into the old high road,
and set their faces resolutely towards the distant
city—towards the complex mechanical city
of those latter days, the city that had swallowed
up mankind.