Yes, that life had left her, with all its obligations, all its occupations, its loves and friendships—perhaps she would have regretted them more keenly had not the new urgencies—but anyway, they were gone, and here she stood—free.
Free!—a fierce anger lit the sombre gaze of wild grey eyes, and strong teeth bit a bleeding lip as the thought stirred her. She was the Eve—perhaps the only Eve—of the new world, and her sole thought was of risking life itself to reach that doubtful streak of land, and so escape her heritage—or perhaps to gain it?
If she could only be sure that land were there! For she knew quite clearly that whatever life might hold she did not mean to die. Then did she mean to yield? Like a trapped mouse her mind went backward and forward to find escape from a problem which gave her no solution.
She recalled how she had climbed the hill from the bay where she had landed, and found a cleft in the hilltop where three cows crouched and shivered, and how they had come to her, as though for protection from the terror of a failing world, and she had drawn milk from one of them, and slept on the short turf in the warmth of the rising sun, and wakened to know that the noon was past, and to find the cows in a recovered serenity grazing quietly around her (and the cows were hers, let Jephson say what he would!), and so, with another meal of new milk to ease the thirst with which she woke, and clothed only in the bathing dress in which she had landed, she had set out to explore the land that the floods had spared, and seek for further food, and garments, and shelter for the night to be.
CHAPTER VI
Climbing clear of the grassy hollow in which the cows had found their safety, she had reached an undulating space of land about half a mile broad, and beyond that a depression, in the centre of which was the ruin of a farmhouse. The hollow of this depression in which the house stood was actually below the new sea-level but the ground rose again on the further side. What had been a lofty upland had become an island of an area of a square mile or two only, but, on the southern side, there was a further space of land of about equal extent, divided by an arm of water which receded at low tide, so that it was possible to cross it with little difficulty. This further island had been swept over by the floods, and was bare of any life, though it now stood some feet above the water.
Of this she learnt later. What she first saw was that two men were standing by the ruined house, and so, thinking little of her spare attire in her eagerness to meet with living creatures of her own kind, she had hurried down the slope, while they crossed the more level space beneath her. And with those men she had lived for the past days in the ruined house—and how she loathed them!
They had been days of urgent toil, but without privation or any real discomfort. She thought of the tales she had read of people marooned on desert islands, and of their quarrels, and of the love that always followed. But the men in those tales were types rather than individuals, and these were—Jephson and Norwood. She noticed that she always thought of Jephson first.
Neither of them was a native of the district. Jephson was a joiner by trade. He had been the foreman employed on the job of repairing the dilapidated farmhouse in which they were now living. He was a native of Birmingham. He had preferred to live on the premises, while his men lodged in the village. That had saved his life, though the room in which he had slept on the first night had fallen in, and he had been cut and bruised. The lobe of his left ear had been almost severed, and for lack of the aid of anyone with skill to stitch it, it would always hang loose.
He was a man of medium height, very broadly made, and with a heavy, resolute step. His arms were long and very hairy, the hands coarse and spatulate. He had a tuft of straw-coloured beard, and a stiff moustache projecting like that of a walrus. His front teeth were decayed and broken. His head showed a skimpy fringe of yellow hair, around a natural tonsure. His eyes were small, deep-set, and intelligent, sometimes lit with a humour which was rarely kindly. His voice was deep, and his speech came with deliberation.
He was of an intense acquisitiveness. He had lost a wife and some children, but he was more concerned as to the fate of a sum of three hundred pounds that he had deposited in the Municipal Bank of his native town. He was not of a type of mind that could easily realise that money had no intrinsic value.
It was probably a penurious habit arising from this feature of his character which had led him to live on the job rather than lodge in the village near.
It was clear to him that the house was his, as he had been on the spot when the floods came, and that Norwood and Claire could live there by permission only. His money was gone, but ‘findin’s is keepin’s now’ was the first law he announced for the regulation of his new dominion.
Certainly he knew best how to deal with it, and under his expert and energetic hands it soon began to lose the ruined aspect that age and storm had bestowed upon it.
He claimed also a dozen sheep that were running loose on the hill, because ‘the land goes with the house,’ and with the same argument he disputed Claire’s contention that the cows were hers; a contention first made in jest—for what difference did it make when there was milk for all?—but afterwards in earnest, when she found that even here the privileges of property might be employed to coerce her.
Norwood was a man cast from a very different mould. His name had been known to her before as a professional cricketer of international reputation. He had been playing at Cheltenham in a three days’ match, which began on the Saturday before the storm. A too-convivial evening had been followed by a Sunday of heavy sleep, after which he had started out in the evening for a long walk, which experience had taught him was the best way to recover his condition after such an episode. He had been on the hilltop, and about to turn back, calculating that he would reach his hotel in time for three or four hours’ sleep before play would be recommenced when the storm had struck him, and he had lain there for many hours with no more protection than a pile of stones where a wall had fallen. When the force of the wind slackened, he had made his way to the farmhouse, and had remained there during the flood and earthquake of the following night, after helping the bruised and bleeding Jephson to disentangle himself from the collapse of the upper room in which he had been sleeping.
He was a man of about thirty-five, tall, handsome in a rather weak and swaggering way, better educated than Jephson, but with far less knowledge or capacity for overcoming the practical issues of life. He was fair-haired, clean-shaven, with the healthy brick-red complexion of the athlete, and showing his vice only in a rather watery appearance of eyes that had still been clear enough to watch a fast ball from the bowler’s hand until the perfect timing of the stroke should drive it hard and low to the distant boundary.
The sudden oblivion of the world he knew had left him with a sense of stupefaction, from which he had only gradually recovered, to inquire what his companions thought had happened to ‘poor Lil’—a sister, as they understood—with rather maudlin pathos.
The condition of the lives of these three derelicts was controlled at first by the configuration of the little bay in which Claire had landed. Narrow at its entrance, it curved to the right hand and widened into a pool, which shallowed as the tide fell, so that the green of the flooded grass could be seen clearly through the water. Other things could be seen there also; and other things were left uncovered by the tide on the gently-shelving beach of the bay.
For the sea-floor, which had been England, carried an empire’s wealth, and the great tides washed it out of the buildings that held it, or broke them down and released it, to add to all that had floated since the flood had risen, and the little bay was like a trap to catch them.
And all these things they toiled to save without ceasing, under Jephson’s restless urgency. Nothing would he admit to be too cumbersome or too worthless to be dragged up from the tide level. When that had been done, there was the harder task of carrying all that was of sufficient value over the higher ground and down to the house. Norwood was the more disposed to grumble at this incessa
nt toil, but though Jephson’s eager greed was unattractive in its intensity, Claire could see the reason which underlay it, and did her part, and more than that, in the common labour. Even timber might be worth more than they could easily estimate, for the trees on this island, which had been a hill-top, were little more than shrubs, and fuel for the winter, which must surely come, might not be easy to find.
For the most part, Jephson worked with a tireless vigour at the repairing of the house, so that there might be weather-proof space for the storing of the salvage when they had dried it. He only asked for his companions’ help when something had to be done which required extra hands or strength; and he would come once to the beach with them each day to see what the tide had brought, remaining only if his help were needed, but urging them by ceaseless question and sarcasm, and by his own example, to yet greater efforts.
During this time there was little of any real intimacy between these uncongenial companions that disaster had thrown together. At first the restraint of the civilisation of yesterday, the shock of the overwhelming calamity, and the urgency of their labours had combined to defer the inevitable difficulties of adjustment that were before them.
Once or twice a conflict of wills had flared into sudden anger, that might die down as quickly, but left a subtle difference of mutual relations behind it.
In the first days Claire had inclined to feel that Norwood was the more tolerable companion, and the arrangement of labour caused them to be much together, while Jephson worked at the house, but neither was in any way congenial to her.
Then there was the day when the first of the dead sheep was washed into the bay. There had been many sheep on the uplands, but it was several days before the first of them came ashore; after that some trick of the tide brought several others, but it was over the first one that the quarrel had arisen.
Claire was a woman unused to shirk an unpleasant task, if its need were clear, but her experiences had not been those of a butcher. Swollen and sodden, the carcass was repulsive to look at.
“That there sheep will need skinnin’, Mrs. Arlington,” Jephson had remarked. He had addressed her up to that time with that degree of polite formality.
“Not by me, Mr. Jephson,” she had replied pleasantly enough, but with an intention of finality.
“Nor I,” said Norwood, with a glance of disgust at the still floating carcass, “and what the hell do we want with the skin of a rotten sheep?”
Norwood spoke with irritation, born of an earlier difference. Neither of the two men had yet accepted the leadership of the other, nor found the terms of a smooth-working partnership. They were like two armies which are manoeuvring for position before the battle joins, and perhaps it was from that reason, or because Jephson was not as clear in his own mind as to the degree of rottenness or inutility of the object of his cupidity as he would have liked to be, that Norwood’s question was left unanswered.
He looked at Claire with a dangerous humour in his deep-set eyes, and spoke with a deliberate slowness.
“Mrs. Arlington, you’ll skin that sheep, an’ no ‘umbug! Yes, my wench, you will. We all does our part here.”
He walked away for a few yards, and looked back. She had not moved, and was regarding him with an amused contempt which hid some inward uncertainty. “Or I’ll larn you what you don’t want, nor I, neither.” With which cryptic remark he had gone off and left them.
She had remained silent and thoughtful for some time, while she realised several things more clearly than she had done previously. One was that there is no more ‘romance’ in a community of three people than of thirty, or of thirty millions—probably much less, because the choice of intimacy or of companionship is so much more limited.
Norwood said nothing. Bare-legged, he was hauling some broken timber clear of the receding water, and did not ask her assistance.
The dead sheep had grounded and lay half out of the water.
She walked over to it and surveyed it with distaste.
“Is it really worth doing, Mr. Norwood?” She asked in a judicial tone, intended to convey that she would decide the question on its merits without reference to Jephson’s rudeness.
Norwood, who probably knew no more than herself as to the value of such a hide, or of the method of salving it, had looked across with disgust and hesitation. “Beastly job,” he had replied vaguely, and then, after a moment’s pause, he had added impulsively: “Call me George, and I’ll help you,” and it was just that which had decided her to undertake the loathsome task, and to do it unaided.
It reminded her that familiarity from her companions might be worse than rudeness.
She had made a hard and filthy labour harder than it need have been through her ignorance, and she had worked with a growing conviction that if the product of her occupation were really of any value, neither she nor either of the men had the necessary knowledge to utilise it, but it was done at last in a ragged way.
The next day had brought a worse horror, for it was a human body that the tide gave them after a week of wandering at the waves’ mercy. Of her own instinct she would have closed her eyes and waded out and pushed the dreadful thing at a pole’s end back through the channel by which it had entered, but here another aspect of Jephson’s character was revealed. He had, as she had already recognised, no religion whatever beyond a few of the crudest superstitions only half believed, but he held to the ritual of burial with the foolishness of the class from which he came. It is bare justice to say that he did his part on this occasion, not resting till a grave had been opened in the chalky soil and the ghastly remnant of what had once been human deposited, with some reading of prayers above it.
It had seemed to Claire that he derived satisfaction, if not actual enjoyment, from this procedure, but, however that might be, the incident renewed the consciousness, through that single evidence, of the appalling catastrophe from which they had emerged with lives uninjured. For a few hours it had subdued the ego in each of them.
It was some days after that—but they went uncounted—that Norwood dragged ashore a wooden chest containing little of value, but in which he found a bottle which he slipped stealthily into his pocket, thinking that it was unobserved by Claire, who was working beside him. She was slightly startled, because there had been an understanding that nothing salved should be retained by any one of them, except by consent, but she said nothing.
Shortly afterwards they returned to the house together, and the occurrence left her mind. Jephson’s news might have banished a more important incident. The fresh water had failed them. The house had been supplied from a well, and surprisingly enough, had they considered it, the supply had continued after the subsidence of the land which gave it, but that afternoon Jephson had drawn some to fill a cask which they kept for the cows to drink when they came for milking, and noticed that the well was much higher than usual, and then that the cows, which usually drank it eagerly, breathed over it and turned away. He had tasted it and found it salt.
At the first hearing she had scarcely realised the magnitude of the disaster. They did not drink water. Milk was too abundant. One of the cows had calved, and they left her alone, but the other two were in full milk. She had milked them thoroughly morning and evening, knowing that they would go dry if she failed to do so. They drank what they could, and they threw the rest away. What else could they do? Had she been expert in the making of cheese or butter there was no time. Everything was subordinated, and rightly so, to the saving of that which the sea brought them. They did no cooking. They had no fires in the house. Once or twice when Jephson had wanted one for some process of the building on which he laboured, he had lit a fire of rubbish outside, and then they had boiled some vegetables from the garden. Mostly they lived on foods which the sea had given. Among them were some tinned fish and a crate of bananas. There were other things put aside, including a side of bacon, and there were potatoes in the garden waiting the time to dig them. They had no fear of starvation. There were sheep, too, when t
hey were needed. But they had no flour.
They slept in separate rooms, which they had made more or less their own, and which they kept as they would, though each of them now had its share of salvage, and would have had much more but that the labour of carrying to the house was much greater than that of saving from the sea.
Night and morning they met to eat in the common kitchen, and talked of the day’s doings. Beyond that they ate when and what they would, but there was no time for life’s amenities.
Jephson had a sense of order, though little of personal cleanliness, and he kept the kitchen roughly clear and tidy.
So they lived.
The sea had brought them quantities of clothing, mostly damaged, and much of it otherwise useless.
There was a large case of ladies’ gloves—many gross. Claire could not have worn them had she wished to do so; they were all a size too small.
A suit of men’s overalls, of which the sea had also delivered a consignment, was the most useful dress she had for the work she was doing; and when they were not working they slept.
Boots were the greatest need. Those which the men had were wearing out, and there was no means of replacement. Claire had landed without any. She had tried going barefooted. It had not been any real hardship on soft turf, or on the mud which the tide left, till she had trodden on some broken glass and must go bandaged and lamely. The next day she found an old discarded pair of women’s boots in the house. They were too large, and one was burst at the toe, but they were stoutly made, and she stuffed them till they would fit sufficiently. When the foot healed she went bare again. What life was left in the boots should be kept for the winter days....
That night they talked of nothing but the failure of the well and what it might mean.
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