Deluge: A Novel of Global Warming

by S. Fowler Wright

  Martin was cooler. He had won the fight, and he had won the woman. His adversary had won nothing but a broken head. He had no occasion for bitterness. But Claire’s tense whisper, “Don’t fire too soon; make sure,” told him how she felt.

  Anyway, he saw quite clearly that he must shoot to kill, and had no doubt that he should do it. He wondered at the folly of their opponents who came in small numbers to be shot down when a rush of many might overwhelm them.

  He was behind the shelter of the trolley, Claire being on his right. He rested the rifle on the impedimenta with which it had been loaded. Bellamy walked between the metals directly toward them. Martin did not think he could miss, though he was unused to the weapon. He wondered how hard it would kick. If he missed, he could fire again. So he waited. In fact, under the hypnotism of Claire’s admonition, he waited too long.

  The giant form was not twelve paces distant when he fired. It did not seem possible to miss; but miss he did. The furnaceman’s neck was grazed by the bullet, that was all. Up to that moment he had shown no sign that he observed the trolley though he was so close upon it. But as the shot was fired he ducked and ran round the right-hand side before Martin could get another shot at him.

  Claire saw him coming upon her and met him bravely. She fired twice. Both shots hit their object, and the second caused the giant to falter in his stride, but they did not stay him. And then he had struck the pistol from her, and one huge hand was on her throat choking the cry which she would have uttered. She struck fiercely with her right hand at the loathsome face that was so close to her own in the half-darkness, hitting the fractured cheekbone, and caused the great head to flinch and groan, but it would have availed her nothing against the strength which was choking her had not her rescue come at the instant.

  Martin let the rifle go as he realised what was happening, caught up the spear which was leaning beside him, paused only for an unavoidable second because Claire was between him and her attacker, and then thrust as she swayed aside in the struggle. It was no mortal wound, but the blade cut through the tendons of the leg, which gave way so that the huge form collapsed to the ground, dragging Claire with him. But he loosed his grasp as he fell, and the next instant she had struggled free.

  The sledgehammer was dropped as he fell, but lay close at his hand. Knowing how he could throw it, Martin snatched at it, catching it near the head in his left hand just as Bellamy got it at the other end. His strength would have been no match for his opponent, but he jabbed at the clutching hand, and it loosened, and he was able to pull the hammer clear. He stood a few paces back, with Claire beside him. There was something bestially repulsive in the sprawling form that was incapacitated, without any mortal wound, and that was making grotesque efforts in the half-light to rise and reach them. Claire, her throat painful and her breath still coming with difficulty, was conscious only of fear and a hysterical desire to end the horror. “Oh, kill him, kill him,” she urged, and did not know that her voice was no more than a hoarse whisper.

  Martin hesitated, with less than his usual logic. Their opponent seemed helpless, and there were deep instincts which objected to the killing of a fallen foe under such circumstances. While he paused a large stone came under Bellamy’s groping fingers. Rising on his other arm, he threw it with all his force. It hit Martin over the left temple, and he fell where he stood.

  After that Claire killed him. If she might otherwise have hesitated she had no choice when she saw him crawling toward Martin. She ran forward and got the spear a second before his hand would have reached it.

  Then began a scene of which she would never afterwards think willingly, though she was to see much of bloodshed and much of horror in the days to be. She circled round the sprawling bulk, giving it quick stabs whenever she could, while keeping clear of the great hands that made desperate efforts to reach her, well-knowing that if she should once fall into that fatal hold her life would end very quickly. Nor could she safely stab, except where his hands could not reach the spear, or so quickly that he had no time to grasp it.

  It was only when he was weakened by a dozen thrusts that she got him fairly in the throat, and as she pulled the spear free that time she knew that it was over, and with the thought knew that her own consciousness was leaving her.

  Had Joe ventured to a fuller investigation he would have found Bellamy still twitching slightly in a pool of his own blood, while Martin lay stunned a few paces distant, with Claire faint and unconscious beside him.

  But Joe went back, wondering whether Bellamy might not be chasing them through the tunnel to where the fire would block, or his companions seize them.

  If that were so, he wished to be in at the death. If Bellamy had failed, it would be a chance for better brains, and he thought he knew where to find them.

  BOOK IV: HELEN AND CLAIRE

  CHAPTER XXIV

  There are women who are incapable of tragedy. An invincible triviality protects them.

  Mary Wittels was of this order. Fortune, which had endowed her with a mysterious malady, variously reported as neuritis, rheumatism, or sciatica, but which she honestly believed to be peculiar to herself, had, with an almost equal kindliness, appointed her lodge-keeper to the Staffordshire mansion of the Earl of Ellerton. No one who knew the Earl would be likely to suppose that she received any remuneration from that source, and it was therefore a natural development in the social disorder of which she was a by-product, that she should support herself by the retailing of gossip in return for the offerings which her neighbours gave her. She did this without malice, and became, in the course of years, somewhat expert in distinguishing between that which was authentic and that which would bring discredit upon her should she extend its publicity. With a generosity which is seldom duplicated, fortune befriended her again when it was spreading ruin over a continent. Unable to join the wild flight to northward (even had her common sense been insufficient to prevent such a folly), she owed her life to two further circumstances.

  First, the Earl of Ellerton was a gambler. Not being a bookmaker, and being too stupid even for successful dishonesty, he lost continually, as honest gamblers are apt to do. There is nothing here to regret. His money passed into other hands. They may have been better able to control it for the common good: that they were less so is not easily to be imagined. Being short of money, he fell among lawyers, who gave him good advice, and robbed him further with an air of detachment which gave their procedure an appearance as of the inevitability of natural law rather than of human ingenuity.

  He desired to cut down an avenue of trees which his ancestors had planted, and inquired of them whether the conditions on which he held the estate (which was entailed) would permit him to do so. They informed him that it was a doubtful point which the Courts must settle. The question depended upon the construction of a single unpunctuated sentence in a document which had been drawn in their own office. In the course of two years the Courts had decided it as he desired, incidentally saving the life of Mary Wittels, for the avenue extended to the lodge gate and would surely have overwhelmed her. The timber was sold, a large part of the proceeds remaining in the hands of the legal gentlemen he had trusted. They signed a strip of coloured paper, and their bankers transferred a substantial sum from “Clients” to “Office” account when they received it. It was all most orderly. They robbed him strictly according to scale, and their intelligence was such that they would have considered it dishonest to charge him more than the rate agreed by the trade union to which they belonged. The bureaucracy took its share of the plunder with a like urbanity.

  The Earl of Ellerton did not doubt that the propriety of felling trees could be affected by the appearance of red stamps on blue paper, and that those who had brought these colours into juxtaposition were entitled to a third of the proceeds of the avenue to which they related. In the end it made no real difference except to Mary Wittels.

  The second point on which fortune had befriended her was that the lodge was very squat in shape, and wa
s built of heavy stone blocks. Unlike most buildings of its kind, and possibly because it was built against a bank which rose steeply at the northern side of the lodge gates, its roof had a single slope to southward.

  It would be wrong to say that Mary was not affected by the storm. She was destined to remember it for many years as the night when her larder window was blown in with disastrous consequences to a pot of strawberry jam which Mrs. Swadkins had given her. The next day her leg was troublesome, and, supposing that callers would be few in such weather, she lay in bed.

  When the storm fell, and the road became congested with a flying crowd, she remarked to herself (quite truly) that it was “wurs nor a bank ’oliday.” She got up to close her window from the noise, and asked the passers what was “up” to explain their haste. But they took no notice, or replied with nonsense such as should not be spoken to an elderly person who asks a question politely. She was too sensible to believe them, and the latch clicked sharply as she closed it with less than her usual calmness.

  During the evening she had been wakened sharply from a pleasant doze by a sensation of sinking, which had left her faint and dizzy. At the same time the clock had slid perilously along the mantel-shelf and the china dogs had fallen. There had been a noise of earth and stones that rattled upon the roof from the ivied bank above it. No doubt, in that lay the whole explanation, and she knew how that must have happened. Drat them boys!

  As the day passed, the hurrying crowd passed with it, and the moon looked on an empty road and a small grey building in which Mary was sleeping peacefully. No doubt Mrs. Swadkins would call in the morning and tell her the news. There must be a fair somewhere.

  The morning came, bright, and warm, and peaceful, and though Mrs. Swadkins did not call she had other visitors. They were some men from the mine. They carried the body of a woman, and asked leave to lay it on her bed. They had two children with them wrapped in their coats, children that were alert with hunger, but shy of strangeness, aware that they were kindly held, but looking ever with a pleading wonder at the still form on the bed which they had tried so hard to waken.

  Tom Aldworth was one of these men. He was wet through as though he had been in the pond. She guessed an accident, but she could get no reasonable details. As to that, she never did. It was two days before anyone had the sense to tell her the real news; that the Hall had been burnt down while she slept, and no one had got the engines from Netherfield. There had been floods, too, worse than those of 1910 if they told the truth—but “folk will exaggerate.” It seemed that most of her old neighbours moved away after the Hall was burnt. Anyway, they no longer came to see her. And those who did come, after a time, brought her more fish, and less of other things, than she needed.

  Also, a few days after the storm, there was trouble among the miners and some strange men that had come into the district. Other changes came as changes will; but they did not greatly affect her. Ten years after, she died.

  I should be sorry to give the impression that Mary Wittels was an exceptionally foolish woman. She had, among other things, the practical helpfulness that is common to those who live lonely lives and minister to their own necessities.

  She quickly discovered that Helen was not dead, and fortunately for Helen she knew nothing of medicine. There were very few doctors or nurses of that time who would not have worried the faint spark of life into extinction, after the fashion of those who poke too zealously at the faint effort of a flickering fire till it gives up the unequal contest. It would have been unfair to have blamed them. They had been taught to do so many things, some of them of a quite useful or comforting nature, few of which would have done any harm to a healthy body. They had also developed an expert technique for rendering death as arduous and prolonged as possible. It would not have occurred to them that a life which had survived the exertions which had prostrated its body, and the exposures of the night, would be very unlikely to retire when that body was quiet, and warm, and unworried. Besides, had she died under such circumstances, they would almost certainly have been accused of having done nothing to save her.

  If many people at the extremity of weakness were wakened, and washed, and harried to death, others were healed very skilfully. But only very few of the poorest and lowliest of that time were allowed to die in peace.

  Mary did no more than to cut off the sodden garments—partly dry where the morning wind had reached them, but still soaked where they had been beneath her—and to cover her warmly, giving her the hot-water bottles which she kept for her own comfort.

  She had told Tom Aldworth that he must bring milk and other things for the children, and he returned with these later in the morning. She did not ask how he got them.

  She asked for money, which he gave her freely, but told her that the printed slips had lost their value, as he did it. Tom Aldworth would have his joke.

  Later Helen woke to an uncertain consciousness. She drank the milk that was offered. She knew that the two children were lifted in to her, one on each side—there was no other bed—and she returned to a contented oblivion.

  But she did not quickly recover. There was no one to name her malady. Were it pneumonia, or rheumatic fever, or both, or neither, there was no one to tell her. Pain and thirst she knew; fever and delirium. Through it all the children slept beside her. In conscious intervals her weak hands held them. When she was at her worst, she would change to contented sleep when the old woman lifted them in to her. And they were very quiet and very gentle as they lay beside her, with the age-old wisdom of children, their minds aware of the present, without the preoccupations of the years which civilisation would have destined for them, making their later lives to pass with the deadened consciousness of an unhealthy dream.

  In the end, as the days dawned and the sunlight fell on her through the open window, the fever left and health returned very slowly.

  Through it all the old woman ministered to her, sleeping in a cushioned chair by the hearth with her legs on another. She thought of the five one-pound notes in the tea-caddy, and felt that she could not grumble, though her bones ached somewhat in consequence.

  Every day Tom Alderworth brought the milk and food which they needed—except for two days, when he was absent, and food was scarce.

  Then he came again, with a bruised chin and a reddened bandage round his arm. Trouble there must have been, but it did not come near them.

  Then he was as regular as before, and the children learned to look for him, and would run to meet him along the road, where vehicles no longer passed to their danger.

  But after a time Tom stopped that. He spoke to Mary vaguely of cattle that might be wandering, and then, seeing that he had not impressed her, more definitely of a “mad dog” that was running loose. She was alarmed at that. Mad dogs were in her own tradition. Jim Poulton’s great-uncle had died of a mad dog’s bite, and Jim had inherited the cottage at Crossover, and married Jane Welch in consequence. Everyone knew that.

  So she approved when Tom put a new chain on the park gate, and a padlock of which he kept the key, even though she could not have got out herself had she wished to do so. He was so careful that he went at times through the park itself to see that the mad dog was not there, and strengthened the weaker spots in the fencing.

  But nothing vexed them, neither dog nor cattle, and the day came when Helen could sit out in the little porch, and Tom would stay to talk with her.

  Naturally, with returning strength, her thoughts turned to Martin. She felt that he lived. She did not blame herself. She knew that Martin would feel as she did that the first thought must be to save the children. She could not have done this had she waited for his return. But she realised that he must suppose that they had perished. It was her first duty to seek him. She questioned Tom eagerly as to where he might still be living, and the way by which she could search.

  Tom did not refuse to help, but was not entirely encouraging. He saw difficulties in such a search at which she did not guess, and of which he was not quick
to tell her.

  He knew that there was a considerable expanse of country—probably half of Staffordshire, and stretching further west than that county, above water. On its northern portion there were a considerable number of people living who had been arrested in their flight by the surrounding floods. He believed the southern portion, where it was possible that Martin might still live, to be inhabited very thinly, if at all, except by some roving bands of licentious character, who had been expelled from the general community, or had voluntarily left them. He had himself been engaged in a conflict which had resulted in the expulsion of some of these. He said vaguely that it was a question of the treatment of women. Some had been killed on either side in this fighting.

  Among those who remained she learned that there was great confusion. There was no government. There was neither freedom nor discipline. Appeal was made to old laws, or their authority was denied, as advantage turned the scale.

  There was no settled law of property. Each man took what he could find, and kept what he could hold. Crimes of violence were frequent. There had been communal acts of lawless justice. Spasmodic attempts at order and government were springing up, and jealousies and disputes were destroying them.