“What is it?” he asked and she clung to him miserably and wept her forebodings on his shoulder. Not only forebodings of her coming ordeal in the absence of hospitals and doctors, but—was this, in truth, to be the world? These people—so they told her—knew of no other existing; but what had become of all the towns? The trams, the shops, the life of the towns—her life—where was it? It must be somewhere—a little way off—where was it? … He soothed her with difficulty, repeating his warnings on the danger of open regrets for the past and reminding her that tomorrow she also would be called on for the oath.
“I know,” she whimpered. “Of course I’ll taike an oath if I must. But you can’t ’elp thinking—if you swear yourself black in the faice, you can’t ’elp thinking.”
“Whatever you think,” he insisted, “you mustn’t say it—to anyone.”
“I know,” she snuffled obediently, “I shan’t say nothing … but, oh Gawd, oh Gawd—aren’t we ever going to be ’appy again?”
He knew what she was weeping for—shaking with miserable sobs; the evenings at the pictures, the little bits of machine-made finery, the petty products of “devil’s knowledge” that had made up her daily life. The cry to her “Gawd” was a prayer for the return of these things and the hope of them had so far sustained her in peril, hardship and loneliness. Pictures and finery had always been there, just a mile or two beyond the horizon—awaiting her enjoyment so soon as it was safe to reach them. Now, in her overpowering misery and darkness of soul, she was facing the dread possibility that they no longer awaited her, that the horizon was immeasurable, infinite. … Guns and bombs and poisons—nobody wanted them and she understood people making up their minds to do without ’em. But the other things—you couldn’t go on living without the other things—shops and proper houses and railways. …
“It can’t be for always,” she persisted, “it can’t be”—and was cheered by the sudden heat of his agreement, the sudden note of protest in his voice. The knowledge that he sympathized encouraged her and, with her head on his shoulder, sniffing, but comforted, she began to plan out their deliverance.
“They must be somewhere—the people that live like they used to. Keepin’ quiet, I dessay, till things gets more settled. When things is settled they’ll get a move on and come along and find us. It stands to reason they can’t be so very far off, because I remember the teacher tellin’ us when we ’ad our jography lesson that England’s quite a small country. So they ’aven’t got so very far to come. … I expect an aeroplane’ll come first.”
He felt her thrill in expectation of the moment when she sighted the swiftly moving speck aloft, the bearer of deliverance drawing nigh. Wouldn’t it be heavenly when they saw one at last—after all these awful months and years! … In the war they were beastly, but, now that the war was over, what had become of all the passenger ’planes and the airships? She was always looking out for one—always; every morning when she came out of the hut the first thing she did was to look up at the sky. … And some day one was bound to come. When things had settled down and got straight, it was bound to. …
But it never did; and in the end she ceased to look for it.
His attempts—they were many in the first few years—to break away from his world and his bondage of ignorance were made always with cunning precaution and subterfuge; not even the pitiable need of his wife would have served as excuse for the backsliding which was search after the forbidden. To a fanaticism dominated by the masculine element the pains of childbirth were once more an ordinance of God; and when, a few weeks before Ada’s time of trial, Theodore absented himself from the camp for a night or two, he gave no one (save Ada) warning of his journey, and later accounted for his absence by a plausible story of straying and a hunter’s misfortunes. He had ceased, since he took up his dwelling with the tribe, to believe in the neighbourhood of a civilization in being; all he hoped for was the neighbourhood, not too distant, of men who had not acquiesced in ruin and put hope of recovery behind them. What he sought primarily was that aid and comfort in childbirth for which his wife appealed to him with insistence that grew daily more terrified; what he sought fundamentally was escape from a people vowed to ignorance.
The goal of his first journey was the town lying lower down the river, the forbidden city which had once bred pestilence and flies. He approached it deviously, keeping to the hills and avoiding districts he knew to be inhabited; hoping against hope, that, in spite of report, he might find some rebuilding of a civic existence and human life as he had known it. … What he found when he came down from the foothills and trudged through its outskirts was the customary silent desolation; a desolation flooded and smelling of foul water—untenanted streets that were channels and backwaters, and others where the slime of years lay thick and scum bred rank vegetation.
Silent streets and empty houses had long been familiar to him, but until that day he had not known how swiftly nature, left to herself, could take hold of them. The river and the life that sprang from it was overwhelming what man had deserted. Three winters of neglect in a low-lying, well-watered country had wrought havoc with the work of the farmer and the engineer; streams which had been channelled and guided for centuries had already burst their way back
