Chapter IV: Part 4

As the days grew longer and the means of subsistence were easier to come by, Theodore would go further afield—still moving cautiously over open country, but no longer expectant of onslaught. In the immediate neighbourhood of his daily haunts and hunting-grounds was no sign of human life and work save a green cart-track that ended on the outskirts of his copse; but lower down the valley were ploughed fields lapsing into weed-beds, here and there an orchard or a garden-patch and hedges that straggled as they would. Lower down again was another wide belt of burned land which, so far, he had not entered—trees on either side the stream, stood gaunt and withered to the farthest limit of his sight. The district, even when alive and flourishing, had seemingly been sparsely populated; its lonely dwellings were few and far apart—a farmhouse here, a clump of small cottages there, all bearing traces of the customary invasion by the hungry. Sheep-farming had been one of the local industries, and hillsides and fields were dotted with the skeletons of sheep—left lying where vagabond hunger had slaughtered them and ripped the flesh from their bones.

As the year rolled over him, Theodore came to know the earth as primitive man and the savage know it—as the source of life, the storehouse of uncertain food, the teacher of cunning and an infinite and dogged patience. When the weather made wandering or fishing impossible he would sit under shelter, with his hands on his knees, passive, unimpatient, hardly moving through long hours, while he waited for the rain to cease. It was months before there stirred in him a desire for more than safety and his daily bread, before he thought of the humanity he had fled from except with fear and a shrinking curiosity as to what might be happening in the world beyond his silent hills. In his body, exhausted by starvation, was a mind exhausted and benumbed; to which only very gradually—as the quiet and healing of Nature worked on him—the power of speculation and outside interest returned. In the beginnings of his solitary life he still spoke little and thought little save of what was personal and physical; cut off mentally from the future as well as from the past, he was content to be relieved of the pressure of hunger and hidden from the enemy, man.

XI

Of the woman whom chance and her own helplessness had thrown upon his hands he knew, in those first months, curiously little. She remained to him what she had been from the moment she clutched at his arm and fled with him—an encumbrance for which he was responsible—and as the numbness passed from his brain and he began once more to live mentally, she entered less and less into his thoughts. She was Ada Cartwright—as pronounced by its owner he took the name at first for Ida—ex-factory hand and dweller in the north-east of London; once vulgarly harmless in the company of like-minded gigglers, now stupefied by months of fear and hunger, bewildered and incapable in a life uncivilized that demanded of all things resource. As she ate more plentifully and lost her starved hollows, she was not without comeliness of the vacant, bouncing type; a comeliness hidden from Theodore by her tousled hair, her tattered garments and the heavy wretchedness that sulked in her eyes and turned down the corners of her mouth. She was helpless in her new surroundings, with the dazed helplessness of those who have never lived alone or bereft of the minor appliances of civilization; to Theodore, at times, she seemed half-witted, and he treated her perforce as a backward child, to be supervised constantly lest it fail in the simplest of tasks.

It was his well-meant efforts to renew her scanty and disreputable wardrobe that first revealed to him something of the mind that worked behind her outward sullen apathy. In the beginning of disaster clothing had been less of a difficulty than the other necessities of life; long after food was a treasure beyond price it could often be had for the taking and, when other means of obtaining it failed, those who needed a garment would strip it from the dead, who had no more need of it. In their hidden solitude it was another matter, and they were soon hard put to it to replace the rags that hung about them; thus Theodore accounted himself greatly fortunate when, ransacking the rooms of an empty cottage, he came on a cupboard with three or four blankets which he proceeded to convert into clothing by the simple process of cutting a hole in the middle. He returned to the camp elated by his acquisition; but when he presented Ada with her improvised cloak, the girl astonished him by turning her head and bursting into noisy tears.

“What’s the matter?” he asked her, bewildered. “Don’t you like it?”

She made no answer but noisier tears, and when he insisted that it would keep her nice and warm her sobs rose to positive howls; he stared at her uncertainly as she sat and rocked, then knelt down beside her and began to pat and soothe, as he might have tried to soothe a child. In the end the howls diminished in volume and he obtained an explanation of the outburst—an explanation given jerkily, through sniffs, and accompanied by much rubbing of eyes.

No, it wasn’t that she didn’t want it—she did want it—but it reminded her.... It was so ’ard never to ’ave anything nice to wear. Wasn’t she ever going to ’ave anything nice to wear again—not ever, as long as she lived?... She supposed she’d always got to be like this! No ’airpins—and straw tied round her feet instead of shoes!... Made you look as if you’d got feet like elephants—and she’d always been reckoned to ’ave a small foot.... Made you wish you was dead and buried!...

He tried two differing lines of consolation, neither particularly successful; suggesting, in the first place, that there was no one but himself to see what she looked like, and, in the second, that a blanket could be made quite becoming as a garment.

“That’s a lie,” Ada told him sulkily. “You know it ain’t becoming—’ow could it be? A blanket with an ’ole for the ’ead!... Might just as well ’ave no figure. Might just as well be a sack of pertaters.... I wonder what anyone would ’ave said at ’ome if I’d told ’em I should ever be dressed in a blanket with an ’ole for the ’ead!... And I always ’ad taiste in my clothes—everyone said I ’ad taiste.”

And—stirred to the soul by the memory of departed chiffon, by the hideous contrast between present squalor and former Sunday best—her howls once more increased in volume and she blubbered with her head on her knee.

Theodore gave up the attempt at consolation as useless, leaving her to weep herself out over vanished finery while he busied himself with the cooking of their evening meal; and in due time she came to the end of her stock of emotion, ceased to snuffle, ate her supper and took possession of the blanket with the ’ole for the ’ead—which she wore without further complaint. The incident was over and closed; but it was not without its significance in their common life. To Theodore the tragicomic outburst was a reminder that his dependent, for all her childish helplessness, was a woman, not only a creature to be fed; while the stirrings of Ada’s personal vanity were a sign and token that she, also, was emerging from the cowed stupor of body and mind produced by long terror and starvation, that her thoughts, like her companion’s, were turning again to the human surroundings they had fled from.... Man had ceased to be only an enemy, and the first sheer relief at security attained was mingling, in both of them, with the desire to know what had come to a world that still gave no sign of its existence. Order, the beginnings of a social system (so Theodore insisted to himself) must by now have risen from the dust; but meanwhile—because order restored gave no sign and the memory of humanity debased was still vivid—he showed himself with caution against the skyline and went stealthily when he broke new ground. There were days when he lay on a hill-top and scanned the clear horizon, for an hour at a time, in the hope that a man would come in sight; just as there were nights, many, when he lived his past agonies over again and started from his sleep, alert and trembling, lest the footstep he had dreamed might be real. Meanwhile he made no move towards the world he had fled from—waiting till it gave him a sign.

If he had been alone in his wilderness, unburdened by the responsibility of Ada and her livelihood, it is probable that, before the days shortened, he would have embarked upon a journey of cautious exploration; but there was hazard in taking her, hazard in leaving her, and their safety was still too new and precious to be lightly risked for the sake of a curious adventure—which might lead, with ill-luck, to discovery of their secret place and the enforced sharing of their hidden treasure of food. Further, as summer drew on towards autumn, though his haunting fear of mankind grew less, his work in his own small corner of the earth was incessant and, in preparation for the coming of winter, he put thought of distant expedition behind him and busied himself in making their huts more weatherproof, as well as roomier, in the storing of firewood under shelter from the damp, and in the gathering together of a stock of food that would not rot. He made frequent journeys—sometimes alone, sometimes with Ada trudging behind him—to a derelict orchard in the lower valley which supplied them plentifully with apples; he had provided himself with a wet-weather occupation in the twisting of osiers into clumsy baskets—which were filled in the orchard and carried to their camping-place where they spread out the apples on dried moss.... With summer and autumn they fared well enough on the harvest of other men’s planting; and if Theodore’s crude and ignorant experiments in the storage of fruit and vegetables were failures more often than not, there remained sufficient of the bounty of harvest to help them through the scarcity of winter.

* * * * *

It was with the breaking of the next spring that there came a change into the life that he lived with Ada.

They had dragged through the winter in a squalid hardship that, but for the memory of a hardship more dreadful, would have seemed at times beyond bearing; often short of food, with no means of light but their fire, with damp and snow dripping through their ill-built shelters—where they learned, like animals, to sleep through the long dark hours. Through all the winter months their solitude was still unbroken, and if any marauders prowled in the neighbourhood, they passed without knowledge of the hidden camp in the hills.

It was—so far as he could guess—on one of the first sunny days of March that Theodore, the spring lust of movement stirring in his blood, went further from the camp than he had as yet explored; following the stream down its valley into the wide belt of burned land, now rank with coarse grass and yellow dandelions. For an hour or so there was nothing save coarse grass, yellow dandelion and gaunt, dead trees; then a bend of the stream showed him roofs—a cluster of them—and instinctively he halted and crouched behind a tree before making his stealthy approach.

His stealth and precaution were needless. The village from a distance might have passed for uninjured—the flames that had blackened its fields had swept by it, and the houses, for the most part, stood whole; but there was no living man in the long, straggling street, no movement, save of birds and the pattering little scuffle of rats. The indifferent life of beast and bird had taken possession of the dwellings of those who once tyrannized over them; and not only of their dwellings but their bodies. At the entrance of the village half-a-dozen skeletons lay sprawled on the grass-grown road, and a robin sang jauntily from his perch on the breast-bone of a man.... From one end of the street to the other the bones of men lay scattered; in the road, in gardens, on the thresholds of houses—some with tattered rags still fluttering to the wind, some bare bones only, whence the flesh had festered and been gnawed. By a cottage doorstep lay two skeletons touching each other—whereof one was the framework of a child; the little bones that had once been arms reached out to the death’s-head that once had borne the likeness of a woman....

There was a time when Theodore would have turned from the sight and fled hastily; even now, familiar though he was with the ugliness of death, his flesh stirred and crept in the presence of the grotesque litter of bones.... These people had died suddenly, in strange contorted attitudes—here crouching, there outstretched with clawing fingers. Gas, he supposed—a cloud of gas rolling down the street before the wind—and perhaps not a soul left alive!... From an upper window hung a long, fleshless arm: someone had thrust up the casement for air and fallen half across the sill.

It was the indifferent, busy chirping of the nesting birds that helped him to the courage to explore the silent street to its end. It wound, through the village and out of it, to a bridge across a river—into which flowed the smaller stream he had followed since he left his refuge in the hills. From the bridge the road turned with the river and ran down the valley in a south to south-easterly direction; a road grass-grown and empty and bearing no recent trace of the life of man—nothing more recent than the remains of a cart, blackened wood and rusted metal, with the bones of a horse between its shafts.

Below the dead village the valley opened out, the hills receded and were lower; but between them, so far as his eye could discern, the trees were still blackened and lifeless. Down either side the stream the fire-blast had swept without mercy; and, from the completeness with which the country had been seared, Theodore judged that it had been largely cornland, waving with ripe stalks at the moment of disaster and fired after days of dry weather.... All life, save the life of man, teemed in the hot March sun; the herbage thrust bravely to obliterate his handiwork, larks shrilled invisibly and lithe, dark fish were darting through the arches of the bridge.

He went only a yard or two beyond the end of the bridge—having, as the sun warned him, reached the limit of distance he could well accomplish if he was to return to the camp by nightfall. On his way back through the village he fought with his repugnance to the grinning company of the dead and turned into one of the silent houses that stood open for any man to enter. Though the dead still dwelt there—stricken down, on the day of disaster before they could reach the open air—there were the usual abundant traces that living men had been there before him; the door had been forced and rooms littered and fouled in the frequent search for clothing and food. All the same, in the hugger-mugger on a kitchen floor he found treasure of string and stuffed the blanket-bag slung over his back with odds and ends of rusting hardware; finally mounting to the floor above the kitchen where, at the head of the staircase, an open door faced him and beyond it a chest of drawers. The drawers had been pulled out and emptied on the floor; what remained of their contents was a dirty litter, sodden by rain when it drove through the window and browned with the dust of many months, and it was not until Theodore had picked up a handful of the litter that he saw it was composed of women’s trifles of underwear. What he held was a flimsy bodice made of soiled and faded lawn with a narrow little edging of lace.

He dropped it, only to pick it up again — remembering suddenly the blanket episode and Ada’s lamentable howls for the garments a wilderness denied her. Perhaps an assortment of dingy finery would do something to allay her craving—and, amused at the thought, he went down on a knee and proceeded to collect an armful. Appropriately the shifting of a heap of yellowed rags revealed a broken hand-glass, lying face downwards on the floor; as he raised it, wondering what Ada would say to a mirror as a gift, its cracked surface showed him a bedstead behind him—not empty!... What was left of the owner of the scraps of lawn and lace was reflected from the oval of the glass.

He snatched up his bag and clattered down the stairs into the open.

XII

It was well past dusk when he trudged up the path that led to the camp and found Ada on the watch at the outskirts of the copse, uneasy at the thought of dark alone.

“You ’ave been a time,” she reproached him sulkily. “The ’ole blessed day—since breakfus. I was beginnin’ to think you’d gone and got lost and I’ve ’ad the fair ’ump sittin’ ’ere by myself and listenin’ to them owls. I ’ate their beastly screechin’; it gives me the creeps.”

“Never mind,” he consoled her, “come along to the fire. I’ve brought you something—a present.”

“Pertaters?” Ada conjectured, still sulky.

“Not potatoes this time,” he told her. “Better than vegetables—something to wear.”

“Something to wear,” she repeated, with no show of enthusiasm. “I suppose that’s another old blanket!”

“Wrong again,” he rejoined, amused by the contempt in her voice. She was still contemptuous when he opened his bag and tossed her a dingy bundle; but as she disentangled it, saw lace and embroidery, she brightened suddenly and knelt down to examine in the firelight; while the sight of the cracked hand-glass brought an instant “Oh!” followed by intent contemplation and much patting and twisting of hair.

Theodore dished supper while she sat and pondered her reflection; and even while she ate hungrily she had eyes and thoughts for nothing but her new possessions. Some were what he had taken them to be—underclothes, for the most part of an ordinary pattern; but mingled with the plainer linen articles were one or two more decorative, lace collars and the like, and it was on these, dingy as they were, that she fell with delight that was open and audible. He watched her curiously when, for the first time since he had known her, he saw her mouth widen in a smile. She was no longer inert, the sullen, lumpish Ada, she was critical, interested, alive; she fingered her treasures, she smoothed them and made guesses at their price when new; she held them up, now this way, now that, for his admiration and her own. Finally, while Theodore stretched his tired length by the camp fire, she ran off to her shelter for a broken scrap of comb; and when he looked up, a few minutes later, she was posing self-consciously before the hand-glass, with hair newly twisted and a dirty scrap of lace round her neck.... She was another woman as she sat with her rags arranged to show her new frippery; tilting the hand-mirror this way and that and twitching now at the collar and now at her straying ends of hair.

Lying stretched on an arm by the fire, he watched her little feminine antics, amused and taken out of himself; realizing how seldom, till that moment, he had thought of her as a woman, how nearly she had seemed to him an animal only, a creature to be guided and fed; and parrying her eager and insistent demand to be taken to the house where the treasure had been found, that she might see if it contained any more. He had no desire to spoil her pleasure in her finery by the gruesome tale of the manner of its finding; hence, in spite of a curiosity made manifest in coaxing, he held to his refusal stubbornly.... The house was a long way off, he told her—much further than she would care to tramp; then, as she still persisted, maintaining her readiness even for a lengthy expedition, he went on to fiction and explained that the house was in a dangerous condition—knocked about, ruinous, might fall at any moment—and he was not going to say where it was, for her own sake, lest she should be tempted to the peril of an entry.

She pouted “You might tell me,” glancing at him from under her lashes; then, as he still persisted in refusal, slapped him on the shoulder for an obstinate boy, turned her back and pretended to sulk. He returned the slap—she expected it and giggled; the next move in the game was his catching of her wrist as she raised her hand for a rejoinder—and for a moment they wrestled inanely, after the fashion of Hampstead Heath.... As he let her go, it dawned on him that this was flirtation as she knew it.

* * * * *

It did not take long for him to realize that they stood to each other, from that night on, in a new and more difficult relation; from foundling and guardian, the leader and led, they had developed into woman and man. For a time fear and hunger had suppressed in Ada the consciousness of sex—which a yard or two of lace and the possession of a hand-glass had revived. Once revived, it coloured her every action, gave meaning to her every word and glance; so that, day by day and hour by hour, the man who dwelt beside her was reminded of bodily desire.

One night when she had left him he lay staring at the fire, faced the situation and wondered if she saw where she was drifting? Possibly—possibly not; she was acting instinctively, from habit. To her (he was sure) a man was a creature to flirt with; an unsubtle attempt to arouse his desire was the only way she knew of carrying on a conversation.... Now that she was woman again—not merely bewildered misery and empty stomach—she had slipped back inevitably to the little giggling allurements of her factory days, to the habits bred in her bone.... With the result?... He put the thought from him, turned over, dog-weary, and slept.

So soon as the next night he saw the result as inevitable; the outcome of life reduced to mere animal living, of nearness, isolation and the daily consciousness of sex. If they stayed together—and how should they not stay together?—it was only a question of time, of weeks at the furthest, of days or it might be hours.... He raised himself to peer through the night at the log-hut that hid and sheltered Ada, wondering if she also were awake. If so, of a certainty, her thoughts were of him; and perhaps she knew likewise that it was only a question of time. Perhaps—and perhaps she just drifted, following her instincts.... He found himself wondering what she would say if she opened her eyes to find him standing at the entrance to her hut, to see him bending over her ... now?

He put the thought from him and once more turned over and slept.

With the morning it seemed further off, less inevitable; the sun was hidden behind raw grey mist, and when Ada, shivering and stupid, turned out into the chilly discomfort of the weather she was too much depressed for the exercise of feminine coquetry. The day’s work—hard necessary wood-chopping and equally necessary fishing for the larder—sent his thoughts into other channels, and it was not till he sat at their evening fire—warmed, fed and rested, with no duties to distract him—that he became conscious again, and even more strongly, of the change in their attitude and intercourse. Something new, of expectation, had crept into it; something of excitement and constraint. When their hands touched by chance they noticed it, were instantly awkward; when a silence fell Ada was embarrassed, uncomfortable and made palpable efforts to break it with her pointless giggle. When their eyes met, hers dropped and looked away.... When she rose at last and said good-night he was sure that she also knew. And since they both knew and the end was inevitable, certain....

“You’re not going yet,” he said—and caught at her wrist, laughing oddly.

“It’s late—and I’m sleepy,” she objected with a foolish little giggle; but made no effort to withdraw her wrist from his hold.

“Nonsense,” he told her, “it’s early yet—and you’re better by the fire. Sit down and keep me company for a bit longer.”

She giggled again—more faintly, more nervously—as she yielded to the pull of his fingers and sat down; offering no protest when, instead of releasing her arm, he drew it through his own and held it pressed to his side.... It was a windless night, very silent; no sound but the rush of the little stream below them, now and then a bird-cry and the snap and crackle of their fire. Once or twice Ada tried talking—of a hooting owl, of a buzzing insect—for the sake, obviously, of talking, of hearing a voice through the silence; but as he answered not at all, or by monosyllables, her forced little chatter died away. Even if the thought was not conscious, he knew she was his for the taking.

With her arm in his—with her body pressed close enough to feel her quickened breathing—he sat and stared into the fire; and at the last, when the inevitable was about to accomplish itself, there floated into his mental vision the delicate memory of the woman whom once he had desired. Phillida, a shadow impossible, leaned out of a vanished existence as the Damosel leaned out of Heaven; and he looked with his civilized, his artist’s eyes on the woman who was his for the taking.... Ada felt that he slackened his hold on her arm, felt him shrink a little from the pressure of her leaning shoulder.

“What is it?” she asked—uneasy; and perhaps it was the sound of her familiar voice that brought him back to primitive realities. The glow of the fire and the over-arching vault of darkness; and beneath it two creatures, male and female, alone with nature, subject only to the laws of her instinct.... The vision of a dead world, a dead woman, faded and he looked no more through the fastidious eyes of the civilized.

Man civilized is various, divided from his kind by many barriers—of taste, of speech, of habit of mind and breeding; man living as the brute is cut to one pattern, the pattern of his simple needs and lusts.... The warm shoulder pressed him and he drew it the closer; he was man in a world of much labour and instinct—who sweated through the seasons and wearied. Whose pains were of the body, whose pleasures of the body ... and alone in the night with a mate.

“’Ere, what’s that for?” she asked, making semblance of protest, as his hand went round her head and he pressed her cheek against his lips.

He said “You!” ... and laughed oddly again.

XIII

They settled down swiftly and prosaically into a married state which entailed no immediate alteration—save one—in life as they had hitherto shared it. Matrimony shorn of rings and a previous engagement, shorn of ceremony, honeymoon, change of residence and comments of friends, revealed itself as a curiously simple undertaking and, by its very simplicity, disappointing—so far at least as Ada was concerned.

Her conscience, in the matter of legal and religious observance, was not unduly tender, and her embryo scruples concerning the absence of legal or religious sanction to their union were easily allayed by her husband’s assurance that they were as truly married as it was possible to be in a world without churches or registrars. What she missed far more than certificate or blessing was the paraphernalia and accompanying circumstance of the wedding, to which she had always looked forward as the culminating point of her existence; her veil, her bouquet, her bevy of bridesmaids, her importance!... When she sat with her back against a tree-trunk, listlessly unobservant of the play of dappled sunlight or the tracery of leafage, she would crave in the shallows of her disappointed heart for the gaudy little sitting-room that should have been her newly-married dwelling; contrasting its impossible and non-existent splendours with the ramshackle roof-tree under which she took shelter from the weather. The gaudy, tasteless, stuffy little room wherein she should have set out her wedding presents, displayed her photos and done honours of possession to her friends.... That was matrimony as she understood it; enhanced importance, display of her matronly dignity. And instead, a marriage that aroused no envy, called forth no jests, affected none but the partners to the bond; in the unchanged discomfort of unchanged surroundings—wherein, being crowd-bred, she could see little beauty and no meaning; in the frequent loneliness and silence abhorrent to her noise-loving soul; with the evening companionship of a wearied man to whom her wifehood meant no more than a physical relation.

Theodore, being male, was not troubled by her abstract longings for the minor dignities of matrimony—and, expecting little from his married life, it could not bring him disillusion. Ada might have fancied that what stirred in her was love; he had always known himself moved by a physical instinct only. Thus of the pair he was the less to be pitied when the increased familiarity of their life in common brought its necessary trouble in the shape of friction—revealing the extent of their unlikeness and even, with time, their antagonism. One of the results of her vague but ever-present sense of grievance, her lasting homesickness for a world that had crumbled, was a lack of interest in the world as it was and a reluctance to adapt herself to an environment altogether hateful; hence, on Theodore’s side, a justified annoyance at her continued want of resource and the burdensome stupidity which threw extra labour on himself.

She was a thoroughly helpless woman; helpless after the fashion of the town-bred specialist, the product of division of labour. The country, to her, was a district to drive through in a char-à-banc with convenient halts at public-houses. Having lived all her days as the member of a crowd, she was a creature incomplete and undeveloped; she had schooled with a crowd and worked with it, shared its noise and its ready-made pleasures; it is possible that, till red ruin came, she had conceived of no other existence.... Leaving school, she had entered a string factory where she pocketed a fairly comfortable wage in return for the daily and yearly manipulation of a machine devoted to the production of a finer variety of twine. Having learned to handle the machine with ease, life had no more to offer her in the way of education, and development came to a standstill. Her meals, for the most part, she obtained without trouble from factory canteens, cheap restaurants or municipal kitchens; thus her domestic duties were few—the daily smearing of a bedroom (frequently omitted) and the occasional cobbling of a garment, bought ready-made. Her reading, since her schooldays, had consisted of novelettes only, and even to these she was not greatly addicted, preferring, as a rule, a more companionable form of amusement—a party to the pictures, gossip with her girlfriends and flirtations more or less open. At twenty-three (when disaster came) she was a buxom, useless and noisy young woman—good-natured, with the brain of a hen; incapable alike of boiling a potato or feeling an interest in any subject that did not concern her directly.

There were moments when she irritated Theodore intensely by her infantile helplessness and the blunders that resulted therefrom, by her owlish stupidity in the face of the new and unfamiliar. And there were moments when, for that very owlishness, he pitied her with equal intensity, realizing that his own loss, his daily wretchedness, was a small thing indeed beside hers. The ruin of a world could not rob him utterly of his heritage of all the ages; part of that heritage no ruin could touch, since he had treasure stored in his heart and brain for so long as his memory should last. But for Ada, whose world had been a world of cheap finery, of giggling gossip and evenings at the cinema, there remained from the ages—nothing. Gossip and cinemas, flowered hats and ribbon-trimmed camisoles—they had left not a wrack, save regret, for her mind to feed on.... As the workings of her vacant little soul were laid bare to him, he understood how dreadful was its plight; how pitiably complete must be the blankness of a life such as hers, bereft of the daily little personal interests wherein had been summed up a world. She—unhandy, unresourceful, superficial—was one of the natural and inevitable products of a mechanical civilization; which, in saving her trouble, had stunted her, interposing itself between primary cause and effect. Bread, to her, was food bought at a counter—not grown with labour in a field; the result not of rain, sun and furrow, but of sixpence handed to a tradesman. And cunning men of science had wrestled with the forces of nature that she might drop a penny in the slot for warmth or suck sweets with her “boy” at the pictures.

He guessed her a creature who had always lived noisily, a babbler whom even his fits of taciturnity would not have daunted had she found much to babble of in the lonely world she shared with him; but, bewildered and awed by it, oppressed by its silence, she found meagre subject-matter for the very small talk which was her only method of expression. Under the peace and vastness of the open sky she was homesick for a life that excluded all vastness and peace; her sorrow’s crown of sorrow was a helpless, incessant craving for little meaningless noises and little personal excitements.... Sometimes, at night, as they sat by the fire, he would see her face pathetic in its blank dreariness; her eyes wandering from the glow of the fire to the darkness beyond it and back from the darkness to the glow. Endeavouring—(or so he imagined)—to piece together some form of inner life from fragmentary memories of past inanity and aimless, ephemeral happenings!

The sight often moved him to pity; but he cast about in vain for a means of allaying her sodden and persistent discontent. Once or twice he attempted to awaken her interest by explaining, as he would have explained to a child, the movements of nightly familiar stars, the habits of birds or the process of growth in vegetation. These things, as he took care to point out, now concerned her directly, were part of the round of her existence; but the fact had no power to stimulate a mind which had been accustomed to accept, without interest or inquiry, the marvels of mechanical science. She carried over into her new life the same lack of curiosity which had characterized her dealings with the old; she was no more alive to the present phenomena of the open field than to the past phenomena of the electric switch, the petrol-engine or the gas-meter.... And the workings of the gas-meter at least had been pleasant—while the workings of raw nature repelled her. Thus Theodore’s only reward for his attempt at education was a bored, inattentive remark, to the effect that she had heard her teacher say something like that at school.

She had all the crowd-liver’s horror of her own company; strengthened, in her case, by dislike of her surroundings, amounting to abhorrence, and the abiding nervousness that was a natural after-effect of the days when she had fled from her fellows and cowered to the earth in an abject and animal terror. Her unwillingness to let Theodore out of her sight was comprehensible enough, if irritating; but there were times when it was more than irritating—a difficulty added to life. It was impossible to apportion satisfactorily a daily toil that, if Ada had her way, must always be performed in company; while her customary fellowship on his hunting and snaring expeditions meant not only the presence of a clumsy idler but the dying down of a neglected log-fire and the postponement of all preparations for a meal until after their return to camp. Further, it was a bar to that wider exploration of the neighbourhood which, as time went on, he desired increasingly; confining him, except on comparatively rare occasions, to such range from his hearthstone as could be attained in the company of Ada. So long as he attributed it to the workings of fear only, he was hopeful that, with time, her abhorrence of loneliness might pass; but as the months went by he realized that it was not only fear that kept her close to his heels—her town-bred incapacity to interest or occupy herself.

Once—when the call of the outside world grew louder—he proposed to Ada that he should see her well provided with a store of food and fuel and leave her for two or three days; hoping to tempt her to agreement by pointing out the probability, amounting to certainty, that other survivors of disaster must be dwelling somewhere within reach. Peaceable survivors with whom they could join forces with advantage.... Her face lit up for a moment at the idea of other men’s company; but when she understood that he proposed to go alone, her terror at the idea of being left was abject and manifest. She was afraid of everything and anything; of ghosts, of darkness, of prowling men, of spiders and possible snakes; and, having reasoned in vain, in the end he gave her the assurance she clamoured for—that she should not be called on to suffer the agony of a night by herself.

He gave her the promise in sheer pity, but regretted it as soon as made. He had set his heart on a journey in search of the world that gave no sign, planning to undertake it before the days grew shorter; but he did not disguise from himself that there might still be danger in the expedition—which Ada’s hampering presence would increase. The project was abandoned for the time being, in the hope that she would see reason later; but he regretted his promise and weakness the more when he found that Ada did not trust to his word and, fearing lest he gave her the slip, now clung to him as closely as his shadow. Her suspicion and stupidity annoyed him; and there were times when he was ashamed of his own irritation when he saw her trotting, like a dog, at his heels or squatting within eyeshot of his movements. He was conscious of a longing to slap her silly face, and more than once he spoke sharply to her, urged her to go home; whereupon she sulked or cried, but continued her trotting and squatting.

The irritation came to a head one afternoon in the early days of autumn when, with persistent ill-luck, he had been fishing a mile or so from home. Various causes combined to bring about the actual outbreak; a growing anxiety with regard to the winter supply of provisions, sharpened by the discovery, the night before, that a considerable proportion of his store of vegetables was a failure and already malodorous; the ill-success of several hours’ fishing, and gusty, unpleasant weather that chilled him as he huddled by the water. The weather worsened after midday, the gusts bringing rain in their wake; a cold slanting shower that sent him, in all haste, to the clump of trees where Ada had sheltered since the morning. The sight of her sitting there to keep an eye on him—uselessly watchful and shivering to no purpose—annoyed him suddenly and violently; he turned on her sharply, as the shower passed, and bade her go home on the instant. She was to keep a good fire, a blazing fire—he would be drenched and chilled by the evening. She was to have water boiling that the meal might be cooked the moment he returned with the wherewithal.... While he spoke she eyed him with questioning, distrustful sullenness; then, convinced that he meant what he said, half rose—only, after a moment of further hesitation, to slide down to her former position with her back against the trunk of a beech-tree.

“I don’t want to,” she said doggedly. “I want to stay ’ere. I don’t see why I shouldn’t. What d’yer want to get rid of me for?”

The suspicion that lay at the back of the refusal infuriated him: it was suddenly intolerable to be followed and spied on, and he lost his temper badly. The rough-tongued vehemence of his anger surprised himself as much as it frightened his wife; he swore at her, threatened to duck her in the stream, and poured out his grievances abusively. What good was she?—a clog on him, who could not even tend a fire, a helpless idiot who had to be waited on, a butter-fingered idler without brains! Let her do what he told her and make herself of use, unless she wanted to be turned out to fend for herself.... Much of what he said was justified, but it was put savagely and coarsely; and when—cowed, perhaps, by the suggestion of a ducking—Ada had taken to her heels in tears, he was remorseful as well as surprised at his own vehemence. He had not known himself as a man who could rail brutally and use threats to a woman; the revelation of his new possibilities troubled him; and when, towards sundown, he gathered up his meagre prey and stepped out homeward, it was with the full intention of making amends to Ada for the roughness of his recent outburst.

His path took him through a copse of brushwood into what had been a cart-track; now grass-grown and crumbling between hedges that straggled and encroached. The wind, rising steadily, was sweeping ragged clouds before it and as he emerged from the shelter of the copse he was met by a stinging rain. He bent his head to it, in shivering discomfort, thrusting chilled hands under his cloak for warmth and longing for the blaze and the good warm meal that should thaw them; he had left the copse a good minute behind him when, from the further side of the overgrown hedge, he heard sudden rending of brambles, a thud, and a human cry. A yard or two on was a gap in the hedge where a gate still swung on its hinges; he rushed to it, quivering at the thought of possibilities—and found Ada struggling to her knees!

She began to cry loudly when she saw him, like a child caught in flagrant transgression; protesting, with bawling and angry tears, that “she wasn’t going to be ordered about” and “she should staiy just where she liked!” It did not take him long to gather that her previous flight had been a semblance only and that, shivering and haunted by ridiculous suspicion, she had watched him all the afternoon from behind the screen of the copse wood—for company partly, but chiefly to make sure he was there. Seeing him gather up his tackle and depart homeward, she had tried to outpace him unseen; keeping the hedge between them as she ran and hoping to avert a second explosion of his wrath by blowing up the ashes of the fire before his arrival at the camp. An unsuspected rabbit-burrow had tripped her hurrying feet and brought about disaster and discovery; and she made unskilful efforts to turn the misfortune to account by rubbing her leg and complaining of damage sustained.

In contact with her stubborn folly his repentance and kindly resolutions were forgotten; he cut short her bid for sympathy with a curt “Get along with you,” caught her by the arm and started her with a push along the road—too angry to notice that, for the first time, he had handled her with actual violence. Then, bending his head to the sweep of the rain, he strode on, leaving her to follow as she would.

Perhaps her leg really pained her, perhaps she judged it best to keep her distance from his wrath; at any rate she was a hundred yards or more behind him when he reached the camp and, stirring the ashes that should have been a fire, found only a flicker alive. He cursed Ada’s idiocy between his chattering teeth as he set to work to re-kindle the fire; his hands shaking, half from anger, half from cold, as he gathered the fuel together. When, after a long interval of coaxing and cursing, the flame quivered up into the twilight, it showed him Ada sitting humped at the entrance to their shelter; and at sight of her, inert and watching him—watching him!—his wrath flared sudden and furious.

“Have you filled the cookpot?” he asked, standing over her. “No?... Then what were you doing—sitting there staring while I worked?”

She began to whimper, “You’re crool to me!”—and repeated her parrot-like burden of futile suspicion and grievance; that she knew he wanted to get her out of the way so as he could leave her, and she couldn’t be left alone for the night! He had a sense of being smothered by her foolish, invertebrate persistence, and as he caught her by the shoulders he trembled and sputtered with rage.

“God in Heaven, what’s the good of talking to you? If you take me for a liar, you take me—that’s all. Do you think I care a curse for your opinion?... But one thing’s certain—you’ll do what I tell you, and you’ll work. Work, do you hear?—not sit in a lump and idle and stare while I wait on you! Learn to use your silly hands, not expect me to light the fire and feed you. And you’ll obey, I tell you—you’ll do what you’re told. If not—I’ll teach you....”

He was wearied, thwarted, wet through and unfed since the morning; baulked of fire and a meal by the folly that had irked him for days; a man living primitively, in contact with nature and brought face to face with the workings of the law of the strongest. It chanced that she had lumped herself down by the bundle of osier-rods he had laid together for his basket-making; so that when he gripped her by the nape of the neck a weapon lay ready to his hand. He used it effectively, while she wriggled, plunged and howled; there was nothing of the Spartan in her temperament, and each swooping stroke produced a yell. He counted a dozen and then dropped her, leaving her to rub and bemoan her smarts while he filled the cookpot at the stream.

When he came back with the cookpot filled, her noisy blubbering had died into gulps and snuffles. The heat of his anger was likewise over, having worked itself off by the mere act of chastisement, and with its cooling he was conscious of a certain embarrassment. If he did not repent he was at least uneasy—not sure how to treat her and speak to her—and he covered his uneasiness, as best he might, by a busy scraping and cleaning of fish and a noisy snapping of firewood.... A wiser woman might have guessed his embarrassment from his bearing and movements and known how to wrest an advantage by transforming it into remorse; Ada, sitting huddled and smarting on her moss-bed, found no more effective protest against ill-treatment than a series of unbecoming sniffs. With every silent moment his position grew stronger, hers weaker; unconsciously he sensed her acquiescence in the new and brutal relation, and when—over his shoulder—he bade her “Come along, if you want any supper,” he knew, without looking, that she would come at his word, take the food that he gave her and eat.

* * * * *

They discussed the subject once and very briefly—at the latter end of a meal consumed in silence. A full stomach gives courage and confidence; and Ada, having supped and been heartened, tried a sulky “You’ve been very crool to me.”

In answer, she was told, “You deserved it.”

After this unpromising beginning it took her two or three minutes to decide on her next observation.

“I believe,” she quavered tearfully, “you’ve taken the skin off my back.”

“Nonsense!” he said curtly. Which was true.

* * * * *

The episode marked his acceptance of a new standard, his definite abandonment of the code of civilization in dealings between woman and man. With another wife than Ada the lapse into primitive relations would have been less swift and certainly far less complete; she was so plainly his mental inferior, so plainly amenable to the argument of force and no other, that she facilitated his conversion to the barbaric doctrine of marriage. And his conversion was the more thorough and lasting from the success of his uncivilized methods of ruling a household; where reasoning and kindliness had failed of their purpose, the sting of the rod had worked wonders.... Ada sulked through the evening and sniffed herself to sleep; but in the morning, when he woke, she had filled the cookpot and was busied at the breakfast fire.

They had adapted themselves to their environment, the environment of primitive humanity. That morning when he started for his snaring he started alone; Ada stayed, without remonstrance, to dry moss, collect firewood and perform the small duties of the camp.

XIV

It was a solid fact that from the day of her subjection to the rod and rule of her overlord, Ada found life more bearable; and watching her, at first in puzzlement, Theodore came by degrees to understand the reason for the change in her which was induced—so it seemed—by the threat and magic of an osier-wand. In the end he realized that the fundamental cause of her sodden, stupid wretchedness had been lack of effective interest—and that in finding an interest, however humble, she had found herself a place in the world. Her interest, in the beginning, was nothing more exalted than the will to avoid a second switching; but, undignified as it was in its origin, it implied a stimulus to action which had hitherto been wanting, and a process of adaptation to the new relationship between herself and her man. By accepting him as master, with the right unquestioned of reward and punishment, she had provided herself with that object in life to which she had been unable to attain by the light of her own mentality.

With an eye on the osier-heap she worked that she might please and, finding occupation, brooded less; learning imperceptibly to look on the new world primitive as a reality whose hardships could be mitigated by effort, instead of an impossible nightmare. As she wrestled with present difficulties—the daily tasks she dared no longer neglect—the trams, shop-windows and chiffons of the past receded on her mental horizon. Not, fundamentally, that they were any less dear to her; but the need of placating an overlord at hand took up part of her thoughts and time. Too slothful, both in mind and in body, to acquire of her own intelligence and initiative the changed habits demanded by her changed surroundings, she was unconsciously relieved—because instantly more comfortable—when the necessary habits were forced on her.

With the allotment of her duties and the tacit definition of her status that followed on the night of her chastisement, their life on the whole became easier, better regulated; and the mere fact of their frequent separation during part of the day made their coming together more pleasant. Companionship in any but the material sense it was out of her power to offer; but she could give her man a welcome at the end of the day and take lighter work off his hands. Her cooking was always a matter of guesswork and to the last she was stupid, unresourceful and clumsy with her fingers; but she fetched and carried, washed pots and garments in the stream, was hewer of wood and drawer of water and kept their camp clean and in order. In time she even learned to take a certain amount of pleasure in the due fulfilment of her task-work; when Theodore, having discovered a Spanish chestnut-tree not far from their dwelling, set her the job of storing nuts against the winter, she pointed with pride in the evening to the size of the heap she had collected.