Search for plunder was the principal occupation of the community, and even this was carried on without organization or forethought.
Some of the rougher elements, including a proportion of the miners, formed themselves into nomadic bands which wandered without any settled headquarters, destroying wantonly such findings as they did not value, or would overload their transit facilities.
As the weeks passed it was inevitable that some men should gain ascendancy over their fellows, either by character or mental energy, but it was unfortunate that there was no one man who became recognized as a natural leader.
There were doubtless those who were self-satisfied of their ability to take control to the general benefit, but they lacked the force of individuality to impress such a belief upon their fellows—at least, until the slow processes of the common experiences should have assessed them rightly.
There was, perhaps, only one man, Jerry Cooper, at Cowley Thorn, who had a clear purpose of taking control of the new community. He was confident of his ability, and was entirely selfish and unscrupulous in his intentions and methods. He was not generally liked, but had already established some local domination.
Jim Rattray, of whom we have heard and seen something already, was of a different kind. He was too lazy, and too rarely sober, to have any plans for the governing of his fellow-men. But he was popular among a certain order; he was quarrelsome and reckless, he had intelligence, and a considerable vanity.
In discussing the social order of the England which the floods had covered it had been customary to divide the population into “classes,” as though they were of different castes and of permanent division. But the fact was that they were in a condition of continual flux.
The slum-bred child, the hardy survivor of a large family, of which half might have died in the hard school of elimination into which they were born, would find that money could be made by frugal thrift and energy, aided, it might be, by some caprice of circumstance. His children, born to softer conditions, would despise their father’s origin, but would have sufficient shrewdness and enterprise to hold and perhaps increase the wealth that his industry had accumulated. Their children, probably fewer and weaker, and bred to the disadvantage of luxurious living, would most often succumb to the “misfortunes” by which their enterprises would be frustrated, and would gravitate toward the gutter from which their parents came—and from where a child or grandchild might emerge again to fight an upward battle, and to be scorned in turn by the children for whom he would recapture the ground that his parents had lost.
Jim Rattray’s father, a prosperous Bristol brewer, had taken a common course when he had paid his son’s dishonoured cheques for the third time, settled with the moneylenders who were feeding upon him, and seen him on to an Australian liner, with the promise of an annuity of four hundred pounds, payable monthly, which would cease as soon as he should set returning foot upon the soil of his native land.
Jim Rattray had outwitted his parent before he landed at Melbourne, by arranging with a boat acquaintance to impersonate him with his father’s agents in that city, at the cost of a commission of twenty-five percent upon the monthly allowance, which was to be deducted before remitting it back to England, to which country Jim returned by the next boat, using the name of his new acquaintance for the purpose.
For three subsequent years he had experienced the difficulty of living his accustomed life without his presence becoming known to his family or to his previous associates. It imposed a new penalty upon such appearances in the magistrates’ courts as had been part of the routine of his old life, and other disabilities which he found so irksome that he was considering the advantages of returning to the exile he had avoided, when the elements interposed to solve his problem, as they solved so many which had seemed to be of an impossible difficulty to those who faced them.
Among others of this fortuitous community who were destined to some prominence in the events of the coming months, it is sufficient now to mention two only, an ex-furnaceman named Bellamy and Tom Aldworth.
Bellamy was a man of enormous strength, and of a corresponding brutality.
He was of a black and scowling humour, dreaded by his companions, who had yet a greater fear of his geniality. For it was in the exercise of his ferocious strength that he found relief from his broodings. Having lived in civilized conditions under the shadow of the jail, and more than once in fear of the gallows, he had suddenly found a delightful freedom, beyond any possibility of his dreams, of which he had, so far, taken advantage (if we except some minor violences) on two occasions only.
Once was in the first week of panic, when he had been a scowling member of a little crowd at the cliff-side which listened in a wondering terror to a man who preached the Judgment of God, and an approaching hell, in a frenzy of religious emotion, which might have borne its natural fruits, under conditions so favourable, had he not pushed his way to the front of the crowd and addressed the self-appointed evangelist.
“Eh, mister, what’s this about sending us all to hell?”
The man was inclined to be frightened by the huge form and sinister reputation of his interrogator, till he noticed the good-humoured grin that was obliterating his usual aspect of ferocity.
“‘Except ye repent—’” he began.
“It isn’t fire,” interrupted the furnaceman, with a widening grin, “it isn’t fire we’re worried about just now. What’s the best thing to put hell out? We’ve got too much round these parts.”
The man, who was not unused to being heckled, and could usually retort to good purpose against a far more adroit opponent than Bellamy was likely to prove, began, rather neatly, to allude to the waters of baptism, but the furnaceman did not want to hear him. He lifted him easily with one hand on his coat collar, and dropped his suddenly squealing and squirming victim over the cliff-side before any of the spectators could have intervened, even had they had the courage to do so.
He turned to face them with a broad grin of satisfaction at the joke he had played.
“You won’t hear of a better hell-quencher than that,” he remarked genially, as he made his way through a crowd that opened very widely before him.
The other incident occurred about a fortnight later.
Among the flying population that had been stayed at the cliff-edge there was a young woman who had been a teacher at a girl’s training college in London. It had been a condition of her employment that she should maintain an at least nominal celibacy. Amidst much chatter of so-called eugenic theories of race-production (mostly of a negative character, and as cowardly in conception as they were false in fact), there was an utter indifference of public opinion either as to the nature or number of the English children which were to form the succeeding generation They cared nothing that many thousands of the best of their younger women should be condemned to barrenness, or tempted to abortion, because it was considered an inconvenience that those who were engaged in the teaching of the children of others should be interrupted by the bearing of their own.
Contemning their religion and their race for a false expediency, where they might more reasonably have required that those should themselves have had a full experience of life who were guiding others across the threshold of maturity, they deprived the next generation of many thousands of those who would have been, both in mind and body, among the front rank of its most hopeful children.
It followed that her experiences of life had been as limited as was her fitness for the post she held. Like most of her fellow-teachers, she had lived cleanly, though they would talk among themselves with an ignorant viciousness. It had only been required of her that she should be an efficient transmitter of facts (most of which were not worth remembering) and an example of the negative virtues. Her disposition had been quiet, gentle, and inoffensive, and she had been popular both with her fellow’s and with the girls she taught.
When the deluge came she had owed her life to the efforts of a chance acquaintance of the London stre
ets, a grocer’s assistant, who had persuaded her against the folly of crowding into one of the lifts of the underground railways a few minutes before they had ceased to work, and within half an hour of the time when the whole system had been flooded, with the loss of not less than half a million lives.
They had taken the northward road together, getting a lift from a kindly motorist for a sufficient part of the way to enable them to escape the pursuing flood, while not advancing to die beneath the devastation which was before them.
To the boy the flight had brought a romantic idyll, beside which a world’s collapse had been an unimportant incident.
For ten days they had lived in a green arbour, where great trees had fallen across a natural hollow, making a dim green twilight above the sandy soil of the bank-side, and feeding on the stores of a gipsy caravan which had been wrecked and overturned and deserted.
At the end of that time they had ventured out together, and almost at once they had encountered Bellamy, with two congenial companions, roaming in search of any plunder that might be worth the taking.
Bellamy had looked at the girl, and at the puny size of her escort. He had told her with a good-humoured growl to leave that monkey and come along. The girl had hesitated. Actually she cared little for her companion. She had always liked big men.
What she would have done had the decision been hers cannot be certainly known, for Bellamy, seeing her hesitation, laid a compelling grip on her shoulder, at which the boy struck an absurdly futile blow, and was afterward conscious only of the huge hand that choked him.
The giant threw him aside contemptuously, with a broken neck.
“Come on, now,” he commanded, with the affability which resulted from his successful violences, and the woman followed him, rather stunned in mind, but not altogether unwillingly.
A week later she came, a flying, dishevelled figure, to claim the shelter of the camp in the railway cutting, showing a hand of which three fingers were broken.
Half an hour later Bellamy had followed, a leisurely, good-humoured giant, come to recover and chastise his property.
He had been met by Tom Aldworth, the last of those whom it is necessary to consider before approaching the main stream of the succeeding incidents.
Tom was a young man whose love of adventure had led him into trouble in the earlier days, when he had been tried (and acquitted) on a charge of murder. He was, quite consistently with that incident (this is not the place for its explanation), of a solid reliability of character, which, as it became recognized, was giving him an increasing influence among his associates—an influence which was more quickly felt because he was already known to those who had escaped from the flooded mine, and who formed so considerable a part of the male population.
He was not brilliant of intellect, nor of more than ordinary education. He was without personal ambition. But he was free from private vices, and was doggedly anxious for the welfare of the new community, though he had neither the wish nor belief in his own capacity to guide it wisely.
But for Tom it is probable that Bellamy would have fetched the woman out of her hiding-place and carried her off to such punishment as his humour prompted; but Tom had promised her that she should not be taken, and knowing that there was none among them who would stand up to the giant at close quarters, he had used the half-hour interval in enlisting the support of those who had been most active in the expulsion of Rattray, so that he was prepared for the ordeal.
He met Bellamy on the bridge which spanned the dry bed which had once held the Rugeley Canal, and that he must cross to enter the camp from the western side, unless he should have preferred to clamber down the ditch, which was not reasonably probable, as he was not of the kind to avoid the direct approach, nor to have much respect for his adversaries.
Tom had a rifle under his arm, and he did not offer to move from the centre of the roadway as the giant approached him.
“What do you want here?” he asked curtly.
The attitude and words were sufficiently hostile, but Bellamy showed no sign of observing it.
“I wants a bitch o’ mine that’s run loose. A dark-eyed bitch with a red skirt. I know she’s hiding near here. Reddy saw her crossin’ the flat.”
“There’s a woman here with a broken hand,” Tom answered frankly, “but you won’t get her. You won’t get anything here. You’re warned off. The boys have told me to warn you. You’ll be shot at sight if you come a step nearer than Larkshill Road after tonight.”
Bellamy stood facing the now lifted rifle, as though he restrained himself with difficulty from rushing upon it. His face flushed with blood, and the veins swelled out on his forehead.
He tried to swear, and it seemed that his articulation was obstructed by his own rage. He turned away, muttering something about “choking him with his own guts.” He may have known what he meant.
Tom watched him till he was out of sight, and went back to talk matters over with his companions. It was agreed that an armed watch should be kept in the future, both day and night, more especially at night, and that either Tom himself, or Jack Tolley, or a Welsh miner named Ellis Roberts, should always be one of the party.
Chapter Fifteen
The next day Tom walked over to Cowley Thorn to see Jerry Cooper, and to learn whether they could gain any support from him in the stand they were taking. He went up Bycroft Lane, which now led nowhere but to the steep shore-cliffs, and crossed Hallowby Park, which was equally deserted. No one came there, for the mansion had been burned to the ground, the park was four square miles of bracken and storm-strewn oaks, and there was no hope of plunder in that direction.
Those who wandered abroad went inland, or eastward to where the new coast was shallow, with little bays, and depressions that trapped the largesse of the tides.
But the lodge was standing on the farther side of the park, and had its share of life, for the old woman who had kept it was still there, having been too lame for flight (and too incredulous also), and there were a woman and two children that the seas had thrown up a month ago in a foundered boat—a woman that Tom and his companions had rescued, and carried there, as the nearest shelter, and that had lain too weak and ill to be anything but a burden to anyone. Considering the isolation of the position, and the fact that their existence was known only to himself, he had considered that they might b’ safer there than in any other shelter that he could offer, and in any case, the woman had been too ill to move.
So far, he had brought them food, and watched over their safety as far as he was able, and if he hoped for any ultimate reward from a woman who was regaining health and bad no other protector the time had not come to claim it.
So, after delivering the food he had brought, and lingering to give vague warnings to keep the children off the road, and to lock up at night (he kept the key of the lodge-gates in his own pocket, and he had made the park-palings secure, at least against any wandering animal), he crossed the road, and took his way over the neglected fields to Cowley Thorn. He saw no use in alarming those who could do nothing further for their own protection.
He found Jerry Cooper busily occupied in repairing the fencing of a paddock in which he had secured three horses.
He was in his shirt-sleeves, a heavily built man of about fifty years, hard of eye and jaw, who laid down his tools, and received him with a superficial geniality, which still seemed to require him to state his business, and begone when he had done so.
Jerry Cooper, a builder’s merchant by trade, had made himself the richest man and the most powerful in the city of his birth. He had no doubt that a few years would see him in the same position again.
He was of no mind to be guided by Tom Aldworth’s suggestions. He would play second fiddle to no man.
He listened to the tale to its conclusion without comment, and then asked bluntly, “What’s it to do with me?”
Tom knew his defeat from the tone and manner of the question, and had no subtlety of mind to overcome the hostility which
he recognized.
He answered with directness. “It seems to me we shall have trouble till we join together to stop that sort of thing happening.”
“Well, shoot Bellamy if you want to. You needn’t ask me. I shan’t shoot you. Probably one of his pals will. But that’s your look-out.”
“I thought we might have joined together to get some order—and security,” said Tom weakly.
“Look here, Aldworth,” Cooper answered, in the tone which his employees had learned to dread in the old days, a tone domineering and merciless, “if you come here to me to talk, talk sense. What’s this girl of Bellamy’s to me? She hasn’t come here. If she had I might have kept her, and put a bullet through the swine, instead of talking about it, and asking other men to help me to save my skin. You’ve got two women in Hallowby Lodge. How many more do you want?
“You come here with Rattray, and Butcher, and any other men who’ll join in a fair deal, and I’ll talk business tomorrow. Then you can make dogs’ meat of Bellamy, for all I care.
“But you listen to this. There’s not one woman to five men in this cursed place, and about half of those women are with your lot already, and now you ask me to help you when another bolts to the same hole.
“If you’ll share level, we’ll talk. If you won’t, we may act in a way you won’t like.”
“It seems to me,” said Tom, “if we go on those lines, the men may soon get fewer.”
Cooper gave him an interrogatory stare before he answered:
“Perhaps you’re right. But it needn’t be if we talk reasonably.”
“So I will,” said Tom. “We don’t make them come to us, and we shan’t keep them if they want to go. That’s reasonable enough.”
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