by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER XI. THE GREAT COLLAPSE
1
And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving, anddropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the war.
The stages of the swift and universal collapse of the financial andscientific civilisation with which the twentieth century opened followedeach other very swiftly, so swiftly that upon the foreshortened page ofhistory--they seem altogether to overlap. To begin with, one sees theworld nearly at a maximum wealth and prosperity. To its inhabitantsindeed it seemed also at a maximum of security. When now in retrospectthe thoughtful observer surveys the intellectual history of this time,when one reads its surviving fragments of literature, its scraps ofpolitical oratory, the few small voices that chance has selected out ofa thousand million utterances to speak to later days, the most strikingthing of all this web of wisdom and error is surely that hallucinationof security. To men living in our present world state, orderly,scientific and secured, nothing seems so precarious, so giddilydangerous, as the fabric of the social order with which the men of theopening of the twentieth century were content. To us it seems that everyinstitution and relationship was the fruit of haphazard and traditionand the manifest sport of chance, their laws each made for some separateoccasion and having no relation to any future needs, their customsillogical, their education aimless and wasteful. Their method ofeconomic exploitation indeed impresses a trained and informed mind asthe most frantic and destructive scramble it is possible to conceive;their credit and monetary system resting on an unsubstantial traditionof the worthiness of gold, seems a thing almost fantastically unstable.And they lived in planless cities, for the most part dangerouslycongested; their rails and roads and population were distributed overthe earth in the wanton confusion ten thousand irrevelant considerationshad made.
Yet they thought confidently that this was a secure and permanentprogressive system, and on the strength of some three hundred yearsof change and irregular improvement answered the doubter with, "Thingsalways have gone well. We'll worry through!"
But when we contrast the state of man in the opening of the twentiethcentury with the condition of any previous period in his history, thenperhaps we may begin to understand something of that blind confidence.It was not so much a reasoned confidence as the inevitable consequenceof sustained good fortune. By such standards as they possessed, thingsHAD gone amazingly well for them. It is scarcely an exaggeration to saythat for the first time in history whole populations found themselvesregularly supplied with more than enough to eat, and the vitalstatistics of the time witness to an amelioration of hygienic conditionsrapid beyond all precedent, and to a vast development of intelligenceand ability in all the arts that make life wholesome. The level andquality of the average education had risen tremendously; and at the dawnof the twentieth century comparatively few people in Western Europe orAmerica were unable to read or write. Never before had there been suchreading masses. There was wide social security. A common man mighttravel safely over three-quarters of the habitable globe, could goround the earth at a cost of less than the annual earnings of a skilledartisan. Compared with the liberality and comfort of the ordinary lifeof the time, the order of the Roman Empire under the Antonines was localand limited. And every year, every month, came some new increment tohuman achievement, a new country opened up, new mines, new scientificdiscoveries, a new machine!
For those three hundred years, indeed, the movement of the world seemedwholly beneficial to mankind. Men said, indeed, that moral organisationwas not keeping pace with physical progress, but few attached anymeaning to these phrases, the understanding of which lies at the basisof our present safety. Sustaining and constructive forces did indeedfor a time more than balance the malign drift of chance and the naturalignorance, prejudice, blind passion, and wasteful self-seeking ofmankind.
The accidental balance on the side of Progress was far slighter andinfinitely more complex and delicate in its adjustments than the peopleof that time suspected; but that did not alter the fact that it was aneffective balance. They did not realise that this age of relative goodfortune was an age of immense but temporary opportunity for their kind.They complacently assumed a necessary progress towards which they hadno moral responsibility. They did not realise that this security ofprogress was a thing still to be won--or lost, and that the time to winit was a time that passed. They went about their affairs energeticallyenough and yet with a curious idleness towards those threatening things.No one troubled over the real dangers of mankind. They, saw their armiesand navies grow larger and more portentous; some of their ironcladsat the last cost as much as the whole annual expenditure upon advancededucation; they accumulated explosives and the machinery of destruction;they allowed their national traditions and jealousies to accumulate;they contemplated a steady enhancement of race hostility as the racesdrew closer without concern or understanding, and they permittedthe growth in their midst of an evil-spirited press, mercenary andunscrupulous, incapable of good, and powerful for evil. The State hadpractically no control over the press at all. Quite heedlessly theyallowed this torch-paper to lie at the door of their war magazine forany spark to fire. The precedents of history were all one tale of thecollapse of civilisations, the dangers of the time were manifest. One isincredulous now to believe they could not see.
Could mankind have prevented this disaster of the War in the Air?
An idle question that, as idle as to ask could mankind have preventedthe decay that turned Assyria and Babylon to empty deserts or the slowdecline and fall, the gradual social disorganisation, phase by phase,that closed the chapter of the Empire of the West! They could not,because they did not, they had not the will to arrest it. What mankindcould achieve with a different will is a speculation as idle as itis magnificent. And this was no slow decadence that came to theEuropeanised world; those other civilisations rotted and crumbled down,the Europeanised civilisation was, as it were, blown up. Within thespace of five years it was altogether disintegrated and destroyed. Upto the very eve of the War in the Air one sees a spacious spectacle ofincessant advance, a world-wide security, enormous areas with highlyorganised industry and settled populations, gigantic cities spreadinggigantically, the seas and oceans dotted with shipping, the land nettedwith rails, and open ways. Then suddenly the German air-fleets sweepacross the scene, and we are in the beginning of the end.
2
This story has already told of the swift rush upon New York of thefirst German air-fleet and of the wild, inevitable orgy of inconclusivedestruction that ensued. Behind it a second air-fleet was alreadyswelling at its gasometers when England and France and Spain and Italyshowed their hands. None of these countries had prepared for aeronauticwarfare on the magnificent scale of the Germans, but each guardedsecrets, each in a measure was making ready, and a common dread ofGerman vigour and that aggressive spirit Prince Karl Albert embodied,had long been drawing these powers together in secret anticipation ofsome such attack. This rendered their prompt co-operation possible, andthey certainly co-operated promptly. The second aerial power in Europeat this time was France; the British, nervous for their Asiaticempire, and sensible of the immense moral effect of the airship uponhalf-educated populations, had placed their aeronautic parks in NorthIndia, and were able to play but a subordinate part in the Europeanconflict. Still, even in England they had nine or ten big navigables,twenty or thirty smaller ones, and a variety of experimental aeroplanes.Before the fleet of Prince Karl Albert had crossed England, whileBert was still surveying Manchester in bird's-eye view, the diplomaticexchanges were going on that led to an attack upon Germany. Aheterogeneous collection of navigable balloons of all sizes and typesgathered over the Bernese Oberland, crushed and burnt the twenty-fiveSwiss air-ships that unexpectedly resisted this concentration in thebattle of the Alps, and then, leaving the Alpine glaciers and valleysstrewn with strange wreckage, divided into two fleets and set itselfto terrorise Berlin and destroy the Franconian Park, seeking to do thisbefore the second air-fleet could
be inflated.
Both over Berlin and Franconia the assailants with their modernexplosives effected great damage before they were driven off. InFranconia twelve fully distended and five partially filled and mannedgiants were able to make head against and at last, with the help of asquadron of drachenflieger from Hamburg, defeat and pursue the attackand to relieve Berlin, and the Germans were straining every nerve to getan overwhelming fleet in the air, and were already raiding London andParis when the advance fleets from the Asiatic air-parks, the firstintimation of a new factor in the conflict, were reported from Burmahand Armenia.
Already the whole financial fabric of the world was staggering whenthat occurred. With the destruction of the American fleet in the NorthAtlantic, and the smashing conflict that ended the naval existence ofGermany in the North Sea, with the burning and wrecking of billions ofpounds' worth of property in the four cardinal cities of the world, thefact of the hopeless costliness of war came home for the first time,came, like a blow in the face, to the consciousness of mankind. Creditwent down in a wild whirl of selling. Everywhere appeared a phenomenonthat had already in a mild degree manifested itself in preceding periodsof panic; a desire to SECURE AND HOARD GOLD before prices reachedbottom. But now it spread like wild-fire, it became universal. Above wasvisible conflict and destruction; below something was happening far moredeadly and incurable to the flimsy fabric of finance and commercialismin which men had so blindly put their trust. As the airships foughtabove, the visible gold supply of the world vanished below. An epidemicof private cornering and universal distrust swept the world. In a fewweeks, money, except for depreciated paper, vanished into vaults, intoholes, into the walls of houses, into ten million hiding-places. Moneyvanished, and at its disappearance trade and industry came to an end.The economic world staggered and fell dead. It was like the strokeof some disease it was like the water vanishing out of the blood ofa living creature; it was a sudden, universal coagulation ofintercourse....
And as the credit system, that had been the living fortress of thescientific civilisation, reeled and fell upon the millions it hadheld together in economic relationship, as these people, perplexed andhelpless, faced this marvel of credit utterly destroyed, the airshipsof Asia, countless and relentless, poured across the heavens, swoopedeastward to America and westward to Europe. The page of historybecomes a long crescendo of battle. The main body of the British-Indianair-fleet perished upon a pyre of blazing antagonists in Burmah; theGermans were scattered in the great battle of the Carpathians; the vastpeninsula of India burst into insurrection and civil war from end toend, and from Gobi to Morocco rose the standards of the "Jehad."For some weeks of warfare and destruction it seemed as though theConfederation of Eastern Asia must needs conquer the world, and thenthe jerry-built "modern" civilisation of China too gave way underthe strain. The teeming and peaceful population of China had been"westernised" during the opening years of the twentieth century withthe deepest resentment and reluctance; they had been dragooned anddisciplined under Japanese and European--influence into an acquiescencewith sanitary methods, police controls, military service, and wholesaleprocess of exploitation against which their whole tradition rebelled.Under the stresses of the war their endurance reached the breakingpoint, the whole of China rose in incoherent revolt, and the practicaldestruction of the central government at Pekin by a handful of Britishand German airships that had escaped from the main battles rendered thatrevolt invincible. In Yokohama appeared barricades, the black flag andthe social revolution. With that the whole world became a welter ofconflict.
So that a universal social collapse followed, as it were a logicalconsequence, upon world-wide war. Wherever there were great populations,great masses of people found themselves without work, without money,and unable to get food. Famine was in every working-class quarter inthe world within three weeks of the beginning of the war. Within amonth there was not a city anywhere in which the ordinary law and socialprocedure had not been replaced by some form of emergency control, inwhich firearms and military executions were not being used to keeporder and prevent violence. And still in the poorer quarters, and in thepopulous districts, and even here and there already among those who hadbeen wealthy, famine spread.
3
So what historians have come to call the Phase of the EmergencyCommittees sprang from the opening phase and from the phase of socialcollapse. Then followed a period of vehement and passionate conflictagainst disintegration; everywhere the struggle to keep order and tokeep fighting went on. And at the same time the character of the waraltered through the replacement of the huge gas-filled airships byflying-machines as the instruments of war. So soon as the big fleetengagements were over, the Asiatics endeavoured to establish in closeproximity to the more vulnerable points of the countries against whichthey were acting, fortified centres from which flying-machine raidscould be made. For a time they had everything their own way in this, andthen, as this story has told, the lost secret of the Butteridge machinecame to light, and the conflict became equalized and less conclusivethan ever. For these small flying-machines, ineffectual for any largeexpedition or conclusive attack, were horribly convenient for guerillawarfare, rapidly and cheaply made, easily used, easily hidden. Thedesign of them was hastily copied and printed in Pinkerville andscattered broadcast over the United States and copies were sent toEurope, and there reproduced. Every man, every town, every parish thatcould, was exhorted to make and use them. In a little while they werebeing constructed not only by governments and local authorities, but byrobber bands, by insurgent committees, by every type of private person.The peculiar social destructiveness of the Butteridge machine lay inits complete simplicity. It was nearly as simple as a motor-bicycle. Thebroad outlines of the earlier stages of the war disappeared under itsinfluence, the spacious antagonism of nations and empires and racesvanished in a seething mass of detailed conflict. The world passed at astride from a unity and simplicity broader than that of the Roman Empireat its best, to as social fragmentation as complete as the robber-baronperiod of the Middle Ages. But this time, for a long descent downgradual slopes of disintegration, comes a fall like a fall over a cliff.Everywhere were men and women perceiving this and struggling desperatelyto keep as it were a hold upon the edge of the cliff.
A fourth phase follows. Through the struggle against Chaos, in the wakeof the Famine, came now another old enemy of humanity--the Pestilence,the Purple Death. But the war does not pause. The flags still fly.Fresh air-fleets rise, new forms of airship, and beneath their swoopingstruggles the world darkens--scarcely heeded by history.
It is not within the design of this book to tell what further story, totell how the War in the Air kept on through the sheer inability ofany authorities to meet and agree and end it, until every organisedgovernment in the world was as shattered and broken as a heap of chinabeaten with a stick. With every week of those terrible years historybecomes more detailed and confused, more crowded and uncertain. Notwithout great and heroic resistance was civilisation borne down. Outof the bitter social conflict below rose patriotic associations,brotherhoods of order, city mayors, princes, provisional committees,trying to establish an order below and to keep the sky above. The doubleeffort destroyed them. And as the exhaustion of the mechanical resourcesof civilisation clears the heavens of airships at last altogether,Anarchy, Famine and Pestilence are discovered triumphant below. Thegreat nations and empires have become but names in the mouths of men.Everywhere there are ruins and unburied dead, and shrunken, yellow-facedsurvivors in a mortal apathy. Here there are robbers, here vigilancecommittees, and here guerilla bands ruling patches of exhaustedterritory, strange federations and brotherhoods form and dissolve, andreligious fanaticisms begotten of despair gleam in famine-bright eyes.It is a universal dissolution. The fine order and welfare of the earthhave crumpled like an exploded bladder. In five short years the worldand the scope of human life have undergone a retrogressive change asgreat as that between the age of the Antonines and the Europe of theninth century....
4
Across this sombre spectacle of disaster goes a minute and insignificantperson for whom perhaps the readers of this story have now someslight solicitude. Of him there remains to be told just one singleand miraculous thing. Through a world darkened and lost, through acivilisation in its death agony, our little Cockney errant went andfound his Edna! He found his Edna!
He got back across the Atlantic partly by means of an order from thePresident and partly through his own good luck. He contrived to gethimself aboard a British brig in the timber trade that put out fromBoston without cargo, chiefly, it would seem, because its captain hada vague idea of "getting home" to South Shields. Bert was able to shiphimself upon her mainly because of the seamanlike appearance of hisrubber boots. They had a long, eventful voyage; they were chased, orimagined themselves to be chased, for some hours by an Asiatic ironclad,which was presently engaged by a British cruiser. The two ships foughtfor three hours, circling and driving southward as they fought, untilthe twilight and the cloud-drift of a rising gale swallowed them up. Afew days later Bert's ship lost her rudder and mainmast in a gale. Thecrew ran out of food and subsisted on fish. They saw strange air-shipsgoing eastward near the Azores and landed to get provisions and repairthe rudder at Teneriffe. There they found the town destroyed and two bigliners, with dead still aboard, sunken in the harbour. From there theygot canned food and material for repairs, but their operations weregreatly impeded by the hostility of a band of men amidst the ruins ofthe town, who sniped them and tried to drive them away.
At Mogador, they stayed and sent a boat ashore for water, and werenearly captured by an Arab ruse. Here too they got the Purple Deathaboard, and sailed with it incubating in their blood. The cook sickenedfirst, and then the mate, and presently every one was down and threein the forecastle were dead. It chanced to be calm weather, and theydrifted helplessly and indeed careless of their fate backwards towardsthe Equator. The captain doctored them all with rum. Nine died alltogether, and of the four survivors none understood navigation; when atlast they took heart again and could handle a sail, they made a courseby the stars roughly northward and were already short of food oncemore when they fell in with a petrol-driven ship from Rio to Cardiff,shorthanded by reason of the Purple Death and glad to take them aboard.So at last, after a year of wandering Bert reached England. He landed inbright June weather, and found the Purple Death was there just beginningits ravages.
The people were in a state of panic in Cardiff and many had fled to thehills, and directly the steamer came to the harbour she was boardedand her residue of food impounded by some unauthenticated ProvisionalCommittee. Bert tramped through a country disorganised by pestilence,foodless, and shaken to the very base of its immemorial order. He camenear death and starvation many times, and once he was drawn into scenesof violence that might have ended his career. But the Bert Smallwayswho tramped from Cardiff to London vaguely "going home," vaguely seekingsomething of his own that had no tangible form but Edna, was a verydifferent person from the Desert Dervish who was swept out of Englandin Mr. Butteridge's balloon a year before. He was brown and lean andenduring, steady-eyed and pestilence-salted, and his mouth, which hadonce hung open, shut now like a steel trap. Across his brow ran a whitescar that he had got in a fight on the brig. In Cardiff he had feltthe need of new clothes and a weapon, and had, by means that would haveshocked him a year ago, secured a flannel shirt, a corduroy suit, anda revolver and fifty cartridges from an abandoned pawnbroker's. Healso got some soap and had his first real wash for thirteen months ina stream outside the town. The Vigilance bands that had at first shotplunderers very freely were now either entirely dispersed by the plague,or busy between town and cemetery in a vain attempt to keep pace withit. He prowled on the outskirts of the town for three or four days,starving, and then went back to join the Hospital Corps for a week, andso fortified himself with a few square meals before he started eastward.
The Welsh and English countryside at that time presented the strangestmingling of the assurance and wealth of the opening twentieth centurywith a sort of Dureresque medievalism. All the gear, the houses andmono-rails, the farm hedges and power cables, the roads and pavements,the sign-posts and advertisements of the former order were still for themost part intact. Bankruptcy, social collapse, famine, and pestilencehad done nothing to damage these, and it was only to the great capitalsand ganglionic centres, as it were, of this State, that positivedestruction had come. Any one dropped suddenly into the country wouldhave noticed very little difference. He would have remarked first,perhaps, that all the hedges needed clipping, that the roadside grassgrew rank, that the road-tracks were unusually rainworn, and that thecottages by the wayside seemed in many cases shut up, that a telephonewire had dropped here, and that a cart stood abandoned by the wayside.But he would still find his hunger whetted by the bright assurance thatWilder's Canned Peaches were excellent, or that there was nothing sogood for the breakfast table as Gobble's Sausages. And then suddenlywould come the Dureresque element; the skeleton of a horse, or somecrumpled mass of rags in the ditch, with gaunt extended feet and ayellow, purple-blotched skin and face, or what had been a face, gauntand glaring and devastated. Then here would be a field that had beenploughed and not sown, and here a field of corn carelessly trampled bybeasts, and here a hoarding torn down across the road to make a fire.
Then presently he would meet a man or a woman, yellow-faced and probablynegligently dressed and armed--prowling for food. These people wouldhave the complexions and eyes and expressions of tramps or criminals,and often the clothing of prosperous middle-class or upper-class people.Many of these would be eager for news, and willing to give help and evenscraps of queer meat, or crusts of grey and doughy bread, in return forit. They would listen to Bert's story with avidity, and attempt tokeep him with them for a day or so. The virtual cessation of postaldistribution and the collapse of all newspaper enterprise had left animmense and aching gap in the mental life of this time. Men had suddenlylost sight of the ends of the earth and had still to recover therumour-spreading habits of the Middle Ages. In their eyes, in theirbearing, in their talk, was the quality of lost and deoriented souls.
As Bert travelled from parish to parish, and from district to district,avoiding as far as possible those festering centres of violence anddespair, the larger towns, he found the condition of affairs varyingwidely. In one parish he would find the large house burnt, the vicaragewrecked, evidently in violent conflict for some suspected and perhapsimaginary store of food unburied dead everywhere, and the wholemechanism of the community at a standstill. In another he would findorganising forces stoutly at work, newly-painted notice boards warningoff vagrants, the roads and still cultivated fields policed by armedmen, the pestilence under control, even nursing going on, a store offood husbanded, the cattle and sheep well guarded, and a group of twoor three justices, the village doctor or a farmer, dominating thewhole place; a reversion, in fact, to the autonomous community of thefifteenth century. But at any time such a village would be liable to araid of Asiatics or Africans or such-like air-pirates, demandingpetrol and alcohol or provisions. The price of its order was an almostintolerable watchfulness and tension.
Then the approach to the confused problems of some larger centre ofpopulation and the presence of a more intricate conflict would be markedby roughly smeared notices of "Quarantine" or "Strangers Shot," or by astring of decaying plunderers dangling from the telephone poles at theroadside. About Oxford big boards were put on the roofs warning all airwanderers off with the single word, "Guns."
Taking their risks amidst these things, cyclists still kept abroad, andonce or twice during Bert's long tramp powerful motor cars containingmasked and goggled figures went tearing past him. There were fewpolice in evidence, but ever and again squads of gaunt and tatteredsoldier-cyclists would come drifting along, and such encounters becamemore frequent as he got out of Wales into England. Amidst all thiswreckage they were still campaigning. He had had some idea of resortingto the workho
uses for the night if hunger pressed him too closely, butsome of these were closed and others converted into temporary hospitals,and one he came up to at twilight near a village in Gloucestershirestood with all its doors and windows open, silent as the grave, and, ashe found to his horror by stumbling along evil-smelling corridors, fullof unburied dead.
From Gloucestershire Bert went northward to the British aeronautic parkoutside Birmingham, in the hope that he might be taken on and givenfood, for there the Government, or at any rate the War Office, stillexisted as an energetic fact, concentrated amidst collapse and socialdisaster upon the effort to keep the British flag still flying inthe air, and trying to brisk up mayor and mayor and magistrate andmagistrate in a new effort of organisation. They had brought togetherall the best of the surviving artisans from that region, they hadprovisioned the park for a siege, and they were urgently building alarger type of Butteridge machine. Bert could get no footing at thiswork: he was not sufficiently skilled, and he had drifted to Oxford whenthe great fight occurred in which these works were finally wrecked. Hesaw something, but not very much, of the battle from a place calledBoar Hill. He saw the Asiatic squadron coming up across the hills to thesouth-west, and he saw one of their airships circling southward againchased by two aeroplanes, the one that was ultimately overtaken, wreckedand burnt at Edge Hill. But he never learnt the issue of the combat as awhole.
He crossed the Thames from Eton to Windsor and made his way round thesouth of London to Bun Hill, and there he found his brother Tom, lookinglike some dark, defensive animal in the old shop, just recovering fromthe Purple Death, and Jessica upstairs delirious, and, as it seemed tohim, dying grimly. She raved of sending out orders to customers, andscolded Tom perpetually lest he should be late with Mrs. Thompson'spotatoes and Mrs. Hopkins' cauliflower, though all business had longsince ceased and Tom had developed a quite uncanny skill in the snaringof rats and sparrows and the concealment of certain stores of cerealsand biscuits from plundered grocers' shops. Tom received his brotherwith a sort of guarded warmth.
"Lor!" he said, "it's Bert. I thought you'd be coming back some day, andI'm glad to see you. But I carn't arst you to eat anything, because I'aven't got anything to eat.... Where you been, Bert, all this time?"
Bert reassured his brother by a glimpse of a partly eaten swede, and wasstill telling his story in fragments and parentheses, when he discoveredbehind the counter a yellow and forgotten note addressed to himself."What's this?" he said, and found it was a year-old note from Edna. "Shecame 'ere," said Tom, like one who recalls a trivial thing, "arstin' foryou and arstin' us to take 'er in. That was after the battle and settin'Clapham Rise afire. I was for takin' 'er in, but Jessica wouldn't 'aveit--and so she borrowed five shillings of me quiet like and went on. Idessay she's tole you--"
She had, Bert found. She had gone on, she said in her note, to an auntand uncle who had a brickfield near Horsham. And there at last, afteranother fortnight of adventurous journeying, Bert found her.
5
When Bert and Edna set eyes on one another, they stared and laughedfoolishly, so changed they were, and so ragged and surprised. And thenthey both fell weeping.
"Oh! Bertie, boy!" she cried. "You've come--you've come!" and put outher arms and staggered. "I told 'im. He said he'd kill me if I didn'tmarry him."
But Edna was not married, and when presently Bert could get talk fromher, she explained the task before him. That little patch of lonelyagricultural country had fallen under the power of a band of bulliesled by a chief called Bill Gore who had begun life as a butcher boy anddeveloped into a prize-fighter and a professional sport. They had beenorganised by a local nobleman of former eminence upon the turf, butafter a time he had disappeared, no one quite knew how and Bill hadsucceeded to the leadership of the countryside, and had developed histeacher's methods with considerable vigour. There had been a strainof advanced philosophy about the local nobleman, and his mind ran to"improving the race" and producing the Over-Man, which in practicetook the form of himself especially and his little band in moderationmarrying with some frequency. Bill followed up the idea with anenthusiasm that even trenched upon his popularity with his followers.One day he had happened upon Edna tending her pigs, and had at oncefallen a-wooing with great urgency among the troughs of slush. Ednahad made a gallant resistance, but he was still vigorously about andextraordinarily impatient. He might, she said, come at any time, and shelooked Bert in the eyes. They were back already in the barbaric stagewhen a man must fight for his love.
And here one deplores the conflicts of truth with the chivalroustradition. One would like to tell of Bert sallying forth to challengehis rival, of a ring formed and a spirited encounter, and Bert by somemiracle of pluck and love and good fortune winning. But indeed nothingof the sort occurred. Instead, he reloaded his revolver very carefully,and then sat in the best room of the cottage by the derelict brickfield,looking anxious and perplexed, and listening to talk about Bill and hisways, and thinking, thinking. Then suddenly Edna's aunt, with a thrillin her voice, announced the appearance of that individual. He was comingwith two others of his gang through the garden gate. Bert got up, putthe woman aside, and looked out. They presented remarkable figures.They wore a sort of uniform of red golfing jackets and white sweaters,football singlet, and stockings and boots and each had let his fancyplay about his head-dress. Bill had a woman's hat full of cock'sfeathers, and all had wild, slouching cowboy brims.
Bert sighed and stood up, deeply thoughtful, and Edna watched him,marvelling. The women stood quite still. He left the window, and wentout into the passage rather slowly, and with the careworn expression ofa man who gives his mind to a complex and uncertain business. "Edna!" hecalled, and when she came he opened the front door.
He asked very simply, and pointing to the foremost of the three, "That'im?... Sure?"... and being told that it was, shot his rival instantlyand very accurately through the chest. He then shot Bill's best man muchless tidily in the head, and then shot at and winged the third man as hefled. The third gentleman yelped, and continued running with a comicalend-on twist.
Then Bert stood still meditating, with the pistol in his hand, and quiteregardless of the women behind him.
So far things had gone well.
It became evident to him that if he did not go into politics at once,he would be hanged as an assassin and accordingly, and without a wordto the women, he went down to the village public-house he had passed anhour before on his way to Edna, entered it from the rear, and confrontedthe little band of ambiguous roughs, who were drinking in the tap-roomand discussing matrimony and Bill's affection in a facetious but enviousmanner, with a casually held but carefully reloaded revolver, andan invitation to join what he called, I regret to say, a "VigilanceCommittee" under his direction. "It's wanted about 'ere, and some of usare gettin' it up." He presented himself as one having friends outside,though indeed, he had no friends at all in the world but Edna and heraunt and two female cousins.
There was a quick but entirely respectful discussion of the situation.They thought him a lunatic who had tramped into, this neighbourhoodignorant of Bill. They desired to temporise until their leader came.Bill would settle him. Some one spoke of Bill.
"Bill's dead, I jest shot 'im," said Bert. "We don't need reckon with'IM. 'E's shot, and a red-'aired chap with a squint, 'E'S shot. We'vesettled up all that. There ain't going to be no more Bill, ever. 'E'dgot wrong ideas about marriage and things. It's 'is sort of chap we'reafter."
That carried the meeting.
Bill was perfunctorily buried, and Bert's Vigilance Committee (for so itcontinued to be called) reigned in his stead.
That is the end of this story so far as Bert Smallways is concerned.We leave him with his Edna to become squatters among the clay and oakthickets of the Weald, far away from the stream of events. From thattime forth life became a succession of peasant encounters, an affair ofpigs and hens and small needs and little economies and children, untilClapham and Bun Hill and all the life of th
e Scientific Age became toBert no more than the fading memory of a dream. He never knew how theWar in the Air went on, nor whether it still went on. There were rumoursof airships going and coming, and of happenings Londonward. Once ortwice their shadows fell on him as he worked, but whence they came orwhither they went he could not tell. Even his desire to tell died outfor want of food. At times came robbers and thieves, at times camediseases among the beasts and shortness of food, once the country wasworried by a pack of boar-hounds he helped to kill; he went through manyinconsecutive, irrelevant adventures. He survived them all.
Accident and death came near them both ever and again and passed themby, and they loved and suffered and were happy, and she bore him manychildren--eleven children--one after the other, of whom only foursuccumbed to the necessary hardships of their simple life. They livedand did well, as well was understood in those days. They went the way ofall flesh, year by year.
