The prophet (so Theodore learned) had continued his wanderings, preaching the gospel as he went—through village after village and settlement after settlement, till he passed beyond the confines of report. He had bidden his followers expect his return; but whether he came again or not, his doctrine was firmly established. He had left behind him the germs of a priesthood, a tradition and a Law for his converts—a Law which included the penalty of death for those who should fail to keep the vow. …
Lest it should fade from their minds, there were days set apart for renewal of the vow, for public, ceremonial repetition of the creed and doctrine of ignorance; and, with the Ruin an ever-present memory to the remnant of humanity, the tendency was to interpret the Law with all strictness—there were devotees and fanatics who watched with a mingling of animal fear and religious hate for signs of relapse and backsliding. Denunciation was of all things dreaded; and outspoken regret for a world that had passed had more than once been pretext for denunciation. To dwell in speech on the doings of that world might be interpreted—had been interpreted—as a hankering after the Thing Forbidden, a desire to revive the Accursed. … Hence the parrying of questions, the barrier of protective silence which the newcomer broke through with difficulty.
It took more than a day for Theodore to understand his new world and its meaning, to grasp its social system and civil and religious polity; but at the end of one day he knew roughly the conditions in which he was destined to live out the rest of his life.
Not that, in the beginning, he admitted that so he must live; it was long—many years—before he resigned himself to the knowledge that his limits, till death released him, were the narrow limits of his tribe. For years he held secretly—but none the less fast—to the hope of a civilization that must one day reveal itself, advance and overwhelm his barbarians. For years he strained his eyes for the coming of its pioneers, its saviours; it was long—very long—before he gave up his hopes and faced the certainty that, if the world he had known continued to exist, it existed too feebly and too far away to stretch out to himself and his surroundings.
There were times when the longing for it flared and burned in him, and he sought desperately for traces of the world he had known—running hither and thither in search of it. Under pretext of a hunting expedition he would absent himself from the tribe, and trespass—often at the imminent risk of death—on the territory of alien communities; returning, after days, no nearer to his goal and no wiser for his stealthy prowlings. The life of alien communities, the prospect revealed from strange hills, was, to all intents and purposes, the life and outlook of his tribe. … He would question the occasional stranger from a distant village, in the hope of at least a word, a rumour—a rumour that might give guidance for further and more hopeful search. But those who came from distant villages spoke only of villages more distant; of other hunting-grounds, of other tribal feuds, of other long stretches of ruin. … The world, so far as it came within his ken, was cut to one pattern, the pattern of a cowed and brutalized man, who bent his face to the stubborn ground and forgot the cunning of his fathers.
XIX
The actual and formal ceremony of his acceptance into the little community took place after night had fallen; deferred to that hour in part because, with nightfall, the day’s labour ceased and the fishermen and snarers of birds had returned to their dwelling-place—and in part because darkness, lit only by the glow of torches and wood fires, lent an added solemnity to the rite.
Earlier in the day the new tribesman had been summoned to a second interview with the headman. The old man questioned him shrewdly enough as to his road, the nature of his winter food store and the feasibility of transporting it; and it was settled finally that Theodore should depart with the morning accompanied by another from the tribe. The pair could row and tow up the river a flat-bottomed boat which was one of the community’s possessions; and as his own camp was only a few hours’ tramp from navigable water, he and his companion should be able, with a day or two, to make three or four journeys from camp to riverside and load the boat with as much as it would carry of his hoard. If the weather favoured—if snow held off and storm—they might return within five or six days.
His instructions received, he was dismissed; and bidden, since he would need a hut for himself and his wife, to set about its building at once. A site was allotted him on the edge of the copse that was the centre of the tribal life and he was granted the use of some of the tools that were common property—an axe, a mallet, and a spade. By the time the sun set his dwelling had made some progress; stakes had been driven in to serve as corner-posts, and logs laid from one to the other.
With dusk, by twos and threes, the men had drifted back to the village and the
