Dawn

by S. Fowler Wright

  It was sunny between the oaks, some of which still stood up stubbornly, though their shattered forms, and great limbs flung loose and dying, showed how much they had suffered.

  She kept as straight as she could, choosing the broader paths, and came out to what had once been a wide expanse of lawn before the front of the Hall. But the Hall was now a charred ruin, with nothing more than some roofless stone walls partly standing, and on the lawns the grass had grown thick and long, and lay over as wind and rain had beaten it. There were tall weeds also, growing on what had been a gravel drive, though these were not as dense or heavy as was the lawn, so that Muriel could trace her way without difficulty. She noticed that the drive showed signs of a pathway vaguely trodden through its weedy growth, and that this turned off across the lawn as though to approach the ruins, and wondered whether any human life could have found shelter in that desolation.

  But she went on with no inclination to investigate this possibility, and soon saw the broad, locked gates that closed the drive from the public road, and on her left, as she approached, a small, stone-built lodge, built against a sloping bank that rose at that point above the height of the gates, and which, with its squat shape and solid stone construction, had enabled it to endure the elemental fury which had cast down so many more imposing structures.

  Muriel knocked at the closed door, and it was opened by a rather stout and elderly woman, who walked with an habitual lameness.

  She did not look at surprised to see Muriel as might reasonably have been expected after some months of isolation, but answered with a respectful civility. No, Mrs. Webster was not in. She had gone out with the children.

  “Could I find her?” said Muriel.

  Mary Wittals looked at her visitor, and scarcely hesitated in her reply.

  “Well, miss, she’s likely gone up to the Hall gardens. We gets no vegetables now, since the fire, and the gardeners leaving, unless they’re fetched. She’s most likely there, with the children…. No, she never goes out of the park, and there’s not many that pass these days. Things be quiet to what they was…! We’re all getting on, as you might say.”

  Muriel wondered whether the old woman attributed the recent changes to the advancing age of the planet or of its inhabitants, but she did not follow the subject.

  She said she would try to find Mrs. Webster, and the door was closed politely, after giving her a glimpse of a small but very comfortable interior, with a grandfather clock ticking sedately against the farther wall….

  The Hall grounds lay behind the house, and the kitchen-garden was on the western side, so that Muriel, following the dim track in the grass which she had previously noticed, came to it first, when she had passed the stables—burnt out, like the main structure—and made her way along deeply weeded paths, between a luxuriance of neglected vegetables and competing weeds, seeing no one, but guided, as she paused in some uncertainty at the lower end, by a sound of children’s laughter in the orchard that lay beyond.

  Climbing over what appeared to be the tree-crushed ruin of a rustic summer-house, she descended into a tangled wilderness of green boughs, through which any progress must be indirect and difficult. The orchard was not large, but it had contained some old pear-trees of great size, which the storm had broken short, or uprooted, and these fallen giants had either crushed or, in some cases, actually held upright in their places the smaller standard trees between their outstretched branches.

  She came on the children and their mother together, and if Helen Webster was surprised to see such a visitor, she did not show it.

  She was seated on a fallen log, watching the two children—brown-limbed babies of four and two—who had been gorging themselves with raspberries (overripe, and falling at a touch of reaching fingers), and had now stopped to observe the spasmodic jumps of a frog in the undergrowth, stimulated by a cautious approach of Mary’s deliberate juice-stained finger, while her elder sister, more excited than she, alternately rebuked her for teasing, and encouraged her to incite it to a fresh activity.

  “I am Muriel Temple. Tom Aldworth may have mentioned me,” said Muriel, as she reached the group.

  “No,” Helen answered. “I don’t think so. But I always had a bad memory for names.”

  In fact, Tom had mentioned none, and had always been vague and reticent about the affairs of the outer world.

  “But,” she went on, smiling, “no one’s asked for a card. Visitors aren’t so frequent that they’re unwelcome. And I suppose we’re both trespassing, really—if anyone trespasses anywhere now. There’s room here.”

  She moved along the log as she spoke, making space for Muriel beside her. She looked at Muriel’s dress, at her general appearance. Her boots, she admitted, were bad enough, but she did not look quite what she would have expected to emerge from Tom’s lurid hintings. Had he misled her to get that hateful promise? And how and why had Muriel found her here? She felt sure that it was not an unexpected meeting.

  Muriel took the unspoken point with her next words. “Tom told me about you being alone here. He cannot come himself now, because they’re gone after Bellamy’s gang—but I expect you’ve heard about that. Will Carless is to bring the milk and other things till Tom comes back…. But why don’t you have a cow here of your own? There are plenty about. You might just as well have had mine. It wasn’t welcomed very warmly where it is. Tom ought to have thought of it…. You’ll like Will Carless…. So I said to Tom I’d come and see whether there was anything that you might need that Will wouldn’t think of.”

  Muriel stopped with a feeling that she was explaining too much. It was as though she were being required to excuse her presence. It was too impalpable for resentment.

  Helen did not answer directly, for her first purpose was to probe the conditions of life from which Muriel had emerged so suddenly.

  She asked, “Is he married?”

  “Married? Oh, you mean Will Carless. Ye-e-s.” The doubtful drawl of the word was involuntary, and she went on to explain it. He’s living with Doll Withlin. The women aren’t changing their names now. At least, Doll hasn’t.” She added, “Of course, things are so different.” She didn’t wish to give a bad impression of Doll. “People can’t marry just as they did. There’s no one to marry them.”

  Helen said, “Yes, I’ve understood that…. It was good of you to come. I’ve got so much to ask you, I don’t know where to begin.… Joan, you mustn’t tease Mary. She won’t hurt it.”

  The two children looked up as their mother spoke. They saw Muriel for the first time. Joan stood irresolute, but her younger sister advanced with a slow solemnity. She stood before Muriel, gazing at her in silence with wide-open eyes.

  “Nu,” she said, indicating an overall of a somewhat startling blue that she was wearing.

  “And mine,” came a quick word from Joan, and her sister ran to her side.

  Mary still gazed at Muriel with an unwinking intentness. “Kiss,” she directed solemnly, and was in Muriel’s arms in a moment.

  The frog hopped away forgotten.

  Joan looked jealously at the captured lap for a moment. She would never like to be left out, or to come second.

  “I’ll have muvver’s,” she announced. “Muvver’s best.”

  Helen took up the child’s first word in a tone of apology. “They do look rather startling. But Tom brought the material, and I had nothing else…. I expect anything’s difficult to get now. It was very good of him to trouble.” She did not wish to show a critical ingratitude, but what better could you expect of Tom?

  “I expect they’ll fade in the sun,” Muriel answered, with professional hopefulness. “But how beautifully you’ve made them.”

  “You don’t really think so,” Helen smiled. “I never tried before. But they had to have something. While I was ill they ran about in the clothes they had, till they were both half naked.”

  “Then I think you’ve done wonderfully.”

  A child’s overall is not a very difficult article to cut
out or make, but no garment can be easy to unpractised hands. Muriel thought that Helen need be, economically at least, dependent on no one. She had learnt enough herself of the unpopularity of the needle in the railway camp, and of the demands which would be quickly made upon anyone who had skill and willingness to use it.

  She looked down at the child that lay so quietly with eyes that never left her face, and then at the restless Joan, already showing signs of a wish to leave the lap she had chosen.

  “How like you she is,” she said, alluding to the elder.

  She would have said, “How beautiful they are,” but that she was not of those who will speak of a present child as though it were incapable of comprehension, or as though it learnt to speak a language first and to understand it afterward.

  “Do you think so?” said Helen. “I suppose Mary is more like her father. So people say—used to say….” She stopped as the words brought back a past of which she feared to think, and a future which she feared to face.

  Her hesitation brought to Muriel the same realization of the gulf between past and present, though her reactions were different.

  All the difficult adjustments, all the lawless violences of the past months, all the tests of body and character which had fallen upon the remnant of her race that the seas had spared, had passed Helen Webster by, in her illness and isolation, and now she looked and spoke as though she were still of the forgotten days, which were already receding into a mist of unreality.

  Muriel had the faculty of judging the qualities of her associates which is acquired most often by those who live widely and variously, and have mental contacts with numerous and divergent types.

  She saw a woman who had beauty, and more than beauty—charm, distinction, and a self-possession that would not easily be shaken.

  She saw one in the dawn of youth, looking, indeed, after the months of convalescence, too virginal for motherhood.

  But she saw more than that. She saw the character of one who was reticent of emotion, and reserved from action, to whom life had been something to be discussed, observed, criticized, rather than to be felt and lived. One who would give trust, and show sympathy, even friendship, freely enough, but would not give her own confidence lightly.

  And what a wife—how absurd a wife!—for Tom Aldworth.

  But, as she had seen already, there must be incongruities in the matings of so small a society. And who was there better than Tom? There was Stacey Dobson, at Cowley Thorn, who, in education, manners, and outlook, might be more of her kind, but he had not shown any desire to marry anyone. He only appeared to wish to be left alone with his books, and with servants who gave him a loyalty difficult to understand under the new conditions….

  Her mind wandered into speculations on what kind of man Helen’s husband had been—a successful barrister, doubtless much older than she. It was not a profession for which Muriel had any respect. Men who spoke to their briefs. Without honest conviction. It was unlikely that such a man would be of much use under present conditions. He would find his level, and it might not be a very high one.

  But his wife was loyal—more than merely loyal, anxious that he should be sought when search seemed foolish, and, Helen being what she was, that said something for him. And the children…. Muriel knew enough of life to understand that such as these were do not derive from one parent only. They were beautiful children. What would the new conditions bring to them as they grew older? How much could be retained of the lost civilization, even by such as they? How much was worth retaining?

  Clearly enough, she saw them as the one supreme importance to which all else should yield. If the children of this new community could be reared graciously in body and mind and character, what else mattered? Otherwise, what remained?

  As she thought thus she was already answering Helen’s questions as to the conditions of life in the railway camp, and in the country beyond it. They were quietly searching questions that, in all their variety, led to one line of inquiry—how far had Tom Aldworth been accurate in the description of existing conditions by which he had gained that hateful promise, and what hope was there that her husband might be found, and the nightmare ended? The fact was that the appearance of Muriel had made the position to which she was committed at once more real and more obnoxious. Having no love for Tom, and regarding him as of another social order, of a different range of sympathies from her own, she felt such a union to be a degradation. But if she had really been left alive in a world of savages even this must be endured for the sake of the children that she could protect in no other way. But suppose it were not a world of savages at all? Suppose it were one in which there were many others such as herself? Then it would be twice intolerable that there should be such to behold her shame…. And Muriel, not by what she said; but by what she was, had made her doubt.

  Muriel, remembering what Tom had told her already, easily understood the drift of the questions, and her answers showed it.

  Helen, who had no intention of exposing her feelings, or of confiding the position in which she stood to this acquaintance of an hour, realized what she was doing, and took the fence as it came.

  “I see you know that Tom has promised to look for my husband, Miss Temple? Do you think there is much chance that they may find him?”

  Muriel understood that she was not supposed to know more than that, and that anything which implied that Tom had confided further, or would suggest any intimacy of understanding between Helen and him, would be unwelcome, if not resented.

  As it was, Helen looked at her in a speculation that she had only partly hidden. Was it possible that the woman whom Tom had sent, who knew so much, might be an alternative—perhaps a way of release? But Helen, not being given to let her inclinations deflect her judgment, put the thought aside. Muriel was not the sort to be attracted by Tom, and Tom seemed a boy to her; Muriel was ten—fifteen—possibly twenty years older, and she had no children to reduce her freedom.

  Muriel was saying, “I don’t know, Mrs. Webster. I don’t know how you were parted. But I was alone a good while, and no one came my way. Every one seems to think that most of the people who are left alive are at this end. They came on till the water stopped them. You can take that either way. It does mean that, if he did stay in those parts, he might not have been heard of here.”

  Helen said, “It was when he had gone to get some things we needed that the water came. It seemed to be everywhere all at once. I found a boat on a park pool. There were no sculls, so we just drifted. I was hurt before that, and I suppose I got soaked during the night. That was how I was ill for so long. But I’ve learnt since then that the water couldn’t have covered much farther than where we were. But I couldn’t do anything while I was so ill—and having the children, too.”

  She had a secret feeling that Muriel might have done more, that Muriel would have found somewhere to leave the children, some way to search….

  It may have caused her to add, “I pray all night that he will be found. I feel sure somehow that he isn’t dead. I suppose you believe in prayer?”

  Yes, Muriel believed in prayer, but she could not say that Martin Webster must be living because his wife prayed for that to be. How many prayers had the floods silenced forever?

  She said gently, “I think there is a good chance that he is alive, and we will pray that they find him for you…. I suppose that I ought to be getting back….” She looked at the sun, which she had learned for many years to use as the most natural reference, and which others were beginning to use in the same way. Watches might get damaged in rough work, or would break down, one by one, and there was none to mend them. And the sun was an enduring alternative. Also, they saw more of it than in the old days.

  Helen became awake at once to the fact that it was afternoon, and to the duties of hospitality.

  “Won’t you come back with me?” she asked, with an evident sincerity. “It’s not more than ten minutes’ walk, and there will be a meal ready. Not that the children will need much af
ter the fruit they’ve eaten. I was afraid to let them have so much when we first found our way here, but they run about all day, and it doesn’t seem to hurt them.”

  Muriel said she must return, but would be glad to come again, if she might; and they walked back through the weed-choked garden together. When the flood came at the end of May it must have been fully planted and in good order. Now, with four months’ growth of unchecked weeds in fertile soil, the crops were not always easy to find, but they were there, and most of them had held their own, more or less successfully, against the unusual competition.

  Vegetables were plentiful, for many more than the little family at the lodge, and some were already wasting in consequence. They discussed what could be saved by storage, and the labour it would require. Should Helen mention it to Will Carless? Muriel thought not, even to him. She did not wish to start wandering parties coming here from the camp, or elsewhere, especially while the best of the men were absent. But she would be glad to come again herself, and to bring any news there might be of the expedition.

  So they planned, and parted; their prudence reasonable enough, but to be rendered futile by the events of the coming day, as so much careful human planning must always be.