“That’s a good job,” he said, with a deep breath of relief. “It might have been awkward.”
“Yes,” she said, “thanks to you. I was horribly frightened.”
“So was I,” he answered. “But you see that the spear can be useful.”
They went along the road for some distance—already turning green on the footpath, though there was little sign of life, as yet, in the poisoned dust of a narrow roadway—and then took to the fields again, till they came to the house they sought.
It had been somewhat old, but very solidly built beneath a rise of ground which had sheltered it from the direct force of the tempest. With fallen chimneys, and lifted roofs, and blown-in windows, it yet held some semblance of its original shape, and gave some shelter to the furnishing which remained within it.
They crossed a garden which had once been well-kept, and was already choked with weeds and ravaged by beast and bird; a rabbit starting from beneath their feet, and a covey of partridges making off along the hedge-side. They passed a wide, paved yard, scattered with broken slates and timbers and the bricks of a fallen chimney. At the door he paused.
He said: “The things we seek are most likely to be on the upper floor. To search there will mean some climbing, which is not very easy or safe. Suppose I collect everything which is likely to be of interest to you and bring it down, and meanwhile you could fill the basket with vegetables from the garden, which we shall be glad to have.”
“Thanks,” she said, “but I would rather see for myself. I expect I can climb where you can.”
But he would not give way, and, seeing that, she became equally obstinate. She would not have been averse from his plan, for she was unexpectedly tired, the exertions of the previous day having had their effect upon her, but the same cause rendered her less equable than usual, and the search was one which she would rather undertake herself than leave to him.
Seeing that she would not otherwise give way, he told her his real reason: “When the roof fell there were two people in the upper rooms. They were dead when I searched there. They were not a pleasant sight then; they will not be so now. But please yourself.”
She laughed at that, thinking of the dead sheep she had skinned and of far worse things that she had seen on the island where first she landed.
“I am not a child,” she said, but as she said it her will weakened, and she added: “But it shall be as you wish.”
CHAPTER XVII
It was very hot in the garden. She filled the basket with such peas and beans as mice and birds had spared, and then with larger vegetables, and after that she came to some wall fruit-trees, now striking upward shoots from amidst a rabble of fallen brick-work, and picked a dozen large, ripe plums that the crowding wasps had not yet ruined. Half of these she ate, and half she saved for Martin with a scrupulous honour.
He was to call her when he was ready, and she sat down and waited. Her mind was on the possibilities of her new life. It seemed to hold the beginnings of wonderful, and perhaps of dreadful things. She thought of Stevenson’s pregnant line, written of a woman whose circumstance was little different from hers: “To bear the weight of the desert, and the babes of a kinless man.”
With a clear perception of all it meant, she resolved that if she should accept such a union she would give something better than the parasitic affection of Victorian women, or the barren selfishness of their descendants. In the exaltation of this mood she felt a renewed resentment that Martin should have thought her unfit to accompany his search. When the next occasion came....
It was just then, as she was drowsing into quietude, that she was aroused to alert attention by the sound of a heavy body that broke through the snapping beansticks. The next moment the head and shoulders of a large sow pushed its way through, and came grunting and rooting toward a bed of weed-choked beetroot, which grew up to the edge of a narrow path, on the further side of which she was seated.
She rose hastily.
The sow lifted her head, stood a moment, and came forward, the objective appearing to be the basket that was on the ground beside her.
She became aware that a number of half-grown pigs were following the sow at no great distance, ploughing through the tangled growths of the neglected garden with much scuffling and squealing.
Claire took a step forward, shouting at the sow to scare her, but she continued to advance. Her impulse to leave the basket to its fate became almost irresistible. Bare feet and legs are a poor equipment for such contest. But the resolution which she had just made had sufficient force to hold her. She realised the courage that was needed if men were to dominate in the changed conditions of life, and stepped boldly before the basket.
The animal hesitated again, but years of wandering round the farmstead had left her without fear of man, which is instinctive in those that have been born to the wilderness, and her recent months of savage freedom, in which there had been no creature to thwart her will, had given a confidence which she had not previously known.
She jerked her head angrily, and advanced with a deep grunt and the menace of open jaws.
Had Claire been her real objective, or had she known how to use her strength, there could have been only one possible issue to such an argument in spite of the knife which opposed her.
Had Claire shown a second’s lack of confidence the result might have been the same. As it was, her glance met the small, cunning eyes boldly, and the knife slashed at the advancing head.
The sow dodged the stroke with surprising agility, and an angry snap of jaws that could have cracked a thigh-bone, without effort. But in an instant Claire had repeated the stroke, and the knife-point caught in the nostril of the flinching snout.
With a squeal of pain the great pig turned and dashed away through the garden, with her half-grown litter, startled by the sound of their mother’s terror, following her in a wild confusion.
Claire stood for a moment to watch them, flushed and exultant, her head lifted, a drop of blood falling from the knife she held, showing, in the close-fitting bathing-dress, that neither concealed nor distorted, like a statue of triumphant womanhood, combining all that are best in savagery and civilisation. Then her mood broke into laughter at her trivial victory.
The confused outcries of the flying litter died into distance, but left a sound of regular and persistent squealing, which became more dominant as the other noises died. It came from the further end of the ruined garden, penetrating and monotonous. It needed little wisdom to guess that one of the flying troop was intrigued in some arresting catastrophe, and less than the curiosity of her maternal ancestor to incline Claire to its investigation.
She found a young boar pig caught in a gap in the garden palings. It seemed that a blind rush at a hole which was scarcely large enough for its passage had carried it halfway through, bending back a piece of broken pale, which its strength might have been sufficient to break entirely, but it happened, unfortunately, that there was a projecting nail which had caught into its back. If it pushed forward it drove the nail deeper. Either it could not wriggle back or it lacked the sense to attempt it. What could it do but wriggle at intervals till the pain of the nail in its protesting ribs caused it to desist and squeal for the help of a mother who was already becoming indifferent to the claims of her half-grown offspring, and who was now fully occupied with a pain which she could not rub out of her snout, however deeply she buried it in the cool dampness of the soil of the ditch to which she had resorted?
Claire knew little of pigs, except under the post-mortem circumstances in which they had unwillingly contributed to the nourishment of her own body. She vaguely supposed them to be greedy and obstinate, which they are, and dirty and stupid, which they are not. The squeal of a pig does not awaken human sympathy as readily as the cry of a calf or lamb. There are reasons for this, as for everything, and the subject is not without interest, but a consideration of pigs is outside the scope of this record.
But Claire’s instinct for nearly thirty year
s had been to go to the help of any calling need. She tore away a tangle of kidney beans which had grown over the fence, that she might see what was wrong more clearly. She decided that if she pulled the animal backward she could get it clear without any great damage or difficulty. She grasped its hind legs with that purpose, but as she touched them it wrenched them free vigorously. It renewed its efforts to struggle forward, and pain and fright gave fresh volume to its vociferations. I think that, had it taken its attempted rescue more quietly, Claire would have pulled it free, and it might have galloped off to be the father of hundreds. But the attitude it showed stirred in her a more primitive instinct than sympathy—that of capture and acquisition. Why should she not secure it? She realised that the uses of a boar pig are limited. But a pig is pork. In fact, the pork before her was as fine as free range and abundant feeding could make it. Had it been less plumply rounded it might then have been rooting with its companions in the ditch where its mother lamented.
Claire had a practical mind, and could act with promptness and vigour, or she would not have been enjoying life in the sunlight when so many millions of her kind had perished.
She looked at the pig and she looked at the knife which she had still carried in her hand as she had come to the scene of action, and had laid on the ground as she knelt to investigate.
They seemed made for one another.
But though she was unpractised in procuring the decease of pigs, she felt sure that it would be wrong to commence operations by assaulting it in the hindquarters. It seemed more natural to approach it at the other end. But that end was beyond her reach, and she did not know how difficult it might be to get round to it. “Never the time and the place,” she thought whimsically, as she pondered the problem. It occurred to her also that if she should approach from the other side the pig might make a successful effort to wriggle backward and be lost entirely.
The hunting instinct had not wakened in her mind for twenty second before she was searching the debris of the garden for the thing she needed. She found it quickly enough in a length of rope which had been pegged down to mark the edge of a path which someone had been trimming backward and had left unfinished.
Two minutes later half a cwt. of protesting pork, its hind legs tightly bound together, was being hauled backward from the palings.
CHAPTER XVIII
Claire looked at her capture, which was floundering awkwardly among the trampled weeds, her foot upon the end of the rope that tied it, in some doubt as to her immediate purpose. Then she put the knife back into its sheath and decided to carry the pig to the house and consult with Martin as to its destiny.
It was less easy than she had supposed. Had it been dead it would have been a very light or easy burden. Alive and wriggling, and with its front legs kicking vigorously, it was an awkward and very slippery load.
Martin, roused by the continued disturbance, and coming through the garden to discover its origin, met her as she approached the house, an animal half as large as herself struggling furiously under her right arm and emitting squeals which were only limited by the capacity of very healthy lungs.
Martin laughed: “I thought the sties were empty. But may I ask where you are carrying the author of this delightful concert?” he asked.
Claire was hot and breathless. Furious with herself for the folly that had taken a living burden when a dead one could have been carried so much more easily. She bit her lower lip in a way she had when her temper failed. She was carrying the animal with her right arm round its middle and her left hand holding an ear to stave off the wriggling head, the sharp teeth and growing tusks of which she did not view with entire complacence. And why hadn’t she tied its front legs? She thought angrily.
As Martin spoke, the pig, perhaps stirred to fresh effort by his approach, succeeded in a backward struggle that brought its tied hind legs to the ground, from which she recovered it with difficulty.
“It wasn’t in a sty. It won’t much longer. Don’t you know what pigs are for?” she replied somewhat confusedly, but Martin understood well enough, and also that he had failed to strike the right note, as he had failed before, with this new companion. There was a grim meaning in that emphatic phrase, “It won’t much longer,” that made him realise that he had still much to learn of the character of the woman before him.
With a changed tone, he said quickly: “You’ve done well to catch it, anyway. Let me help.” But she refused curtly. She did not know why she was so angry. She said: “There is enough here to repay you for what I shall eat till I go tomorrow. I like paying my debts.”
They entered the house together by the back door into a large kitchen which was uninjured, except that some plaster had fallen from the ceiling, and that rust had spread on range and stove.
She dropped her burden on to a stone sink that was under the window, bringing the rope forward as she did so, and after a brief struggle succeeded in tying the front legs, after which it lay helpless enough though by no means reduced to quietude, either of lungs or body.
“Are you proposing to kill it here,” he asked feeling himself reduced to the part of a spectator at this unexpected episode.
“Yes, where else?’ she replied reasonably enough. “Do you want it to make this row forever? And won’t there be less to carry?”
“You seem to know,” he said. “Have you often killed them?”
“No,” she answered shortly, “but if I don’t know how I soon shall. I know you strike their necks, and then they ‘stare like a stuck pig.’ I’ve often wondered why. Have you?”
This was a little incoherent again, but he answered with an exactitude which was a result of professional training rather than mental pedantry.
“If you mean have I wondered, no, I can’t say I have. If you mean have I killed pigs, no again. But I have seen it done. If I may humbly suggest, I shouldn’t hold the knife as though you intended decapitation, nor should I lean over it in that affectionate manner, for reasons which you will learn if you do. There is a traditional preference for driving the blade straight in, and you might turn it this way if you wish to qualify in the art.”
Claire drove the long, keen blade down with a vicious thrust, and it was really Martin’s fault that it was done with such force that the point came out at the back and was blunted on the stone below.
She stood back the next moment, the dripping knife in her hand, not having wholly escaped the deluge of blood, for which Martin’s enigmatic warning had not fully prepared her, looking with a sudden revulsion of feeling at the body that still squealed and struggled before her.
“Oh,” she said, “I haven’t killed it now! Why didn’t you do it?”
“I don’t think it will quarrel with you on that score,” he answered dryly, and as he spoke she knew that its movements were becoming feebler and the squeals were fainter.
He saw the reaction from which she suffered. “There’s no need to stay here,” he said. “Come into the next room and see what I have found for you.”
The adjoining room to which they passed was full of dull and heavy furniture, which must have given an effect of musty age even when it was occupied. Now it had an atmosphere of stale depression, and yet suggested an unimaginative stolidity before which even the tempest which had wrecked the world had retired defeated.
On a round mahogany table in the centre Martin had collected a pile of dresses and other clothing, which he turned over for Claire’s inspection, for her own hands were obviously unfit to touch them. They had belonged to at least two women, and half of them were much too small for her use. They were serviceable rather than attractive, and those which attempted finery were the least tolerable of all. Some had been damaged by the weather; others, retrieved from the interiors of solid chests or other receptacles, were in better condition. A miscellaneous collection of shoes and boots completed the exhibition.
They went back to the kitchen, where the body of the pig now lay inert and flabby on the sink, over which Claire found a tap from which
water still ran, and here she cleansed her hands, and then returned to the inner room, where she sorted out as much of the gathered spoils as could be packed into a swollen sack; Martin assuring her that he had already sufficient store of such requirements as would enable her to repair or alter them to her use.
Then she retrieved the abandoned basket from the garden, and finally they joined forces in a recovered amity to assault the body of the pig.
They started an hour later, beneath a midday sky of cloudless heat, and made a burdened but uneventful way back to the entrance of the tunnel, where they paused to light the lantern before entering it. Here, half hidden in the long grass of the embankment, beneath the shadow of the wall, there was a small, solid padlocked structure with “Danger: Explosives” painted in red across its door, and beneath it, beside the line, there lay a rail-trolley such as was commonly used by repairing gangs on lines where the traffic was not too frequent for their safe employment.
Martin had previously tried to get this trolley on to the line, but had found it beyond his single strength to raise it. He had brought a crowbar on a previous day in the hope that it would solve the problem, and now looked at it with increased hope. It was one of many things in which two could do more than twice the work of either.
But he looked at his companion with hesitation. It was not his nature to be inconsiderate, nor unobservant. He saw that she was approaching exhaustion. He said: “If you can help me I think we can get this trolley on the rails, and then I can punt you home. Will the effort be worth the relief which will follow? It is not really far through the tunnel.”
She answered with unconscious gratification at the attitude he showed, both in tone and manner, but with some unwillingness to admit the fatigue which was overcoming her, “Yes, I am tired; but I can help. What do you want me to do?”
He showed her how best she could assist him, and as the work proceeded she became aware how carefully he avoided any abortive effort, and used the strength of both to the best advantage till he had achieved his purpose, and the trolley stood on the rails for which it was built.
Deluge: A Novel of Global Warming Page 12
