Dawn

by S. Fowler Wright

  At least, he resolved, there should be no lawyers in his new state, if he were really destined to found it. A man should bring direct complaint; and a law should be so published and so worded that all should know and should be able to understand it.

  Every one conversant with litigation, as Martin had been, knows that the rights of any dispute are rarely all on one side, and that it is often of minor importance on which side the verdict falls. It is only important that the dispute shall be settled promptly, and without oppression of the losing side.

  English justice had been fair enough (with some important qualifications), but it had been dilatory, operated with a routine publicity which was often regardless either of the feelings or the interests of those concerned, and always ruinously oppressive to the side against which the verdict fell.

  But these were defects of procedure or administration rather than of the law itself. They were defects of age rather than youth. They were such as, having seen their evils, he could avoid very easily.

  The question of the new laws which he must formulate was larger and more difficult.

  There was the question of the social and political position of women, which had agitated the newspapers and tea-tables of the past civilization. Some of the political aspects of that controversy would not recur, for he had no intention of passing over the decision of any question of moment to the chance majority of a general vote.… He had not supposed when he supported their claims to increase of freedom and opportunity, from generous instinct rather than a considered judgment, that he would one day be in a position to legislate upon them.

  Might there not be evidence of difference, if not of inferiority, in the fact that he was in a position to do it?

  The men had chosen a leader. The women had made no effort to do so.… Possibly the whole question would resolve itself without difficulty. Yet he was unsure. He had been taught to suppose that women live subordinate or even servile lives under primitive conditions, and that this is at once a result of barbarism, and a cause from which it continues.

  Yet even this did not stand out as a clear fact when he examined it closely.

  The advance of civilization (if advance had been) did not show a progressive advance in the position of women which ran parallel with it.

  He remembered that basic allegory of human fate in the opening chapters of Genesis, in which women were warned that the pursuit of wisdom, the advance of ‘civilization,’ would rob them of the physical equality of a savage mating, and of the intellectual precedence which is usual among all the mammalia who have the care of the young to stimulate their mental processes.

  Probably the radical cause of all resulting difference was in the loss of physical equality. The women made the men work, and the men gained by losing, which is the constant equity of creation. There was no fundamental reason why the female should be physically inferior. It was not generally true of monogamous animals or birds—usually the reverse.

  Then should he tell the women to dig their way to equality? He smiled at the whimsical fancy, and sighed for the futility of all efforts of government. He could think much, but he knew that he would be able to do little

  Even thinking was of doubtful value.

  The ideas which seemed so simple, the faiths which seemed so sure—they would recede as the mind approached to examine them—recede faster than it advanced, until they were in an atmosphere of doubt and shadow.

  He knew that if he had asked a hundred people of the drowned world behind him they would have assured him that the women of their time, whether for good or evil, had advanced into a wider freedom, a greater responsibility, than had been known before to the civilization of Western Europe.

  Yet when he examined this assumption it became less obvious than he had supposed.

  It might be just possible to imagine a Joan of Arc in the twentieth century. It would be more difficult to imagine an Ethelfleda of Mercia. It was not a question of capacity, but of opportunity. As warrior or as administrator, the woman of a thousand years ago seemed to have had opportunities which had not been kept or recovered.

  So he vexed his mind with these and a score of similar questions, and a score of times he reminded himself that they could not be of an immediate urgency, and that there were things that were. And then, when he had doubted whether the fact that he could consume the vital hours in such speculations did not demonstrate his unfitness for the position he had assumed, he became doubtful of his own doubt, reflecting that though the first steps may not go far in any direction, yet it may be everything, in the end, that they should have started in the right one.

  As his thoughts wandered thus, he went on with his examination of the books around him….

  He opened a book on physical jerks, which was eloquent upon the advantage of lying on the bedroom floor and waggling the legs in the air before dressing every morning. Probably it had done good in its time. But it could go to Betty now. He hoped to provide his new subjects with some more useful activities.

  He came to a shelf of poetry, which included most of the acknowledged masters of English song. He had never taken poetry very seriously. He was surprised, as he opened volume after volume, to realize how little difference the floods had made to the value of these, and that there could be no thought of destruction here. His glance fell on one of Robert Browning’s lyrics, “Is she not pure gold, my mistress?” There was nothing obsolete here. “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” Yes, the poetry must remain, because it dealt with the unchangeable things.

  Here was a business directory of the Midland Counties. Surely that was a book which had ended its utility. He paused in the act of consigning it to the condemned heap. Might not its tabulated list of civilized activities prove a guide by which he might avoid the oversight of any occupation which would conduce to the welfare of the new community?

  He took the book to his desk, and settled to the task of analysing its contents.… It was startling to observe how few men had been engaged, even in the business circles with which it dealt, in actual production either of the necessities or comforts of life.

  For this analysis, he divided them under general descriptive headings, such as Growers, Makers, Mongers, Feeders, Body-patchers, Housers, Furnishers, Heaters, Clothers, Movers, Teachers, Restrainers, Coercionists, Newsvendors, Assessors, Insurers, Stockbrokers, Bankers, Gamblers, Amusers, Lawyers, Credulity-profiteers. These main heading required much subdivision, as, for instance, the Body-patchers included Surgeons, Physicians, Chemists, Herbalists, Dentists, Chiropodists, Manicurists, Nurses, Oculists, Hairdressers, Makers of Pills and Rouges and Powders, and many others.

  He had finished this, and was compiling a second and much shorter list of the occupations which were of a really useful character, when Phillips announced that Mr. and Mrs. James Hatterley had called, and that the gentleman appeared very anxious to see him.

  “Show them in, Phillips,” he said, and the next moment found himself shaking hands with a small, wild-haired man, scantily and picturesquely attired, and wearing sandals of flexible leather, which he had made for his own use, with some demonstration of dexterity.

  He introduced himself as a “Christian Socialist,” and by other names which indicated the birth-dates rather than the nature of his enthusiasms, and discovered a mind of somewhat confusingly contradictory beliefs and theories, and of a very angular surface.

  He indicated that he had come to accept Martin’s authority, if he were satisfied of his spiritual soundness on various points of importance, but not otherwise.

  Martin judged that he would himself have been quite willing to guide his neighbours to an earthly paradise, but had found them indisposed to take him seriously.

  His wife was a vague-eyed woman, with untidy hair. They were one of the rare cases of a man and woman having survived the first catastrophe together, and both outliving the succeeding days of privation and violence. In this they must have shown some adaptability to circumstance, even th
ough fortune may have done its share.

  Martin let the man talk while he studied him, giving a sympathetic hearing, and, at times, acquiescence. Hatterley had a mind containing many ideas, with which it was littered untidily. He had intelligence without judgment.

  Martin saw that he might be a very useful tool, if he could handle him successfully, but the handling might not be easy.

  The man was of a perversely combative nature.

  He had been a pacifist in the old days, ready to fight furiously for the right to deny the moral justification of fighting under any circumstances. He had abandoned this theory, under sufficient provocation; and one of Cooper’s inefficients, whose neck was permanently awry, and who trailed a damaged leg, had been a source of discouragement to any whose complexes might otherwise have prompted them to attempt the acquisition of Hatterley’s wife. That is how he would himself have stated the position. He had been the apostle of many crazes, and had believed that a study of complexes, and the interpretation of dreams with a fantastic grossness, could do something better than add a new jargon to European languages.

  Martin found himself catechized as though he had been an election candidate—as, in fact, he was, though it was a candidature without a declared opponent, and one which it had been declared in advance would be asserted by force, if it should be necessary.

  But force is clumsy and dangerous. To be obliged to appeal to it would be in itself a confession of failure. Martin preferred the mental weapons in which he had a trained efficiency. If he could make captures in single combats, such as this (for the lady was silent), he might hope to establish the new authority without serious opposition.

  He learnt that his visitors slept in a hollow tree, and that they found it healthful. Mr. Hatterley was sure that a ‘return to nature’ would be equally beneficial for the rest of the community, who were showing a contrary tendency to re-erect their fallen dwellings, retarded only by indolence and incapacity.

  Listening to the Hatterley gospel, Martin thought several things which he did not say. His mental processes were not eased by the happy faculty possessed by his visitor of confining his attention to one side of any subject with which he was occupied.

  He knew that nature, having ruthlessly destroyed the more diseased or unadaptable of those that the floods had spared, was already giving a higher measure of health than they had previously known to those who had survived the ordeal. He could not tell that the same path might not be followed farther with advantage to the race, and perhaps to the individual also. But he was also aware that a king’s palace is no more ‘unnatural’ than is a bird’s nest or a fox’s earth. They are all departures from ‘nature.’ They are all artificial adaptations of environment. And an ant-hill may represent a more complex, as it certainly represents a more lasting, civilization than any which has resulted from human congregations.

  It also occurred to him, though he did not say it, that the supply of hollow trees suitable for family life might be insufficient to accommodate the population for which he was assuming responsibility.

  But he pleased his visitor by agreeing that wood is a better and cleaner fuel than coal, that hand-craft is better than machine-craft, both in the quality of its products and its reactions on the producers, and that many things had been wrong in the past which men of exceptional intelligence should now combine to alter.

  He learnt that James had been an ardent believer in the advantages of a diet of bananas and nut-butter, of which the supplies had failed, but he was still an aggressive vegetarian. He suggested that the possibility of producing butter from hazel-nuts should be promptly investigated. He admitted that in the urgency of the interval he had become a drinker of milk, and had eaten eggs. Even fish at times…. But he appeared to look to Martin to save him from the necessity for any future depravities.

  Martin replied that it was a subject to which Mr. Hatterley had probably given more thought than he had himself (James looked pleased), and he would always be glad to take it over with him as opportunity might allow. But he thought it would be inexpedient—indeed, impossible at the moment—to attach any penal consequence either to the consumption of milk, or the catching of rabbits. He pointed out that, while cows should remain, calves would continue to be a very natural consequence. About half of them would always have a radical incapacity for the production of milk, and they would almost certainly be destroyed at birth, were there no prospect that they would be eaten at a later stage of their existence, and—from their point of view—the advantage would be less than obvious.

  As to the separate question of the suitability of flesh as an article of human diet, he pointed out that he was again confronted by the fact that it existed, for the moment, abundantly, whereas many alternative articles of diet were restricted or entirely lacking.

  He concluded, “But I shall want your help in matters which are more urgent, and may be very difficult.”

  If Mr. Hatterley were not entirely satisfied, he had the sense to see that he had got as much as he could expect, and a more open-minded reception than he could hope to meet from any other possible authority. Also, he did not like some aspects of the life of the last few months. He had felt rather hunted. He was about to say that Martin could enroll his support; when the lady spoke for the first time.

  “We’re a lot better for the milk,” she said definitely.

  Hearing the tone, and observing that the man accepted the dictum without protest, Martin modified his first impression. There might be more character here than was suggested by the surface indications of her colourless and rather loose-boned structure. He reflected also that few women are vegetarian at heart, whether because they are more sensible than men, less sensitive, more selfish, or more naturally carnivorous.

  Perhaps it may only be that they are dominated more absolutely by the herd instinct. They are never quick to believe that a majority can be wrong. They are rarely willing to face singularity for a theory. Beyond that, they are less moved by generalities. To excite their sympathies you must not talk to them of cattle, but of a particular cow, and, if possible, it should be one which they have seen quite recently.

  This difference may show that women have less imagination than men, or, at least, that some women, of one race, at one time, may have had less.

  Whether this difference had been fundamental, or the result of lives of more limited opportunity, was a question on which civilization had been experimenting when the flood had offered its own solution to all its problems. Perhaps now.… Martin became aware that his thoughts had wandered.

  His visitor was talking about cows.

  “Not so much as you might suppose,” he was saying. “Some people have got cows that are milking well, but more of them are going dry because they haven’t been properly milked or fed. If they’re shut up in a byre they’re a lot of trouble to feed, and if they’re left in the fields they break out sooner or later and join the wild ones.… Most of the wild ones have got calves now, but it’s not safe to go near them…. Gerda can.” He looked at his wife with approval.

  “They don’t mind me,” she said, with the same definiteness as before.

  Martin felt that the subject of milk was exhausted.

  He had a thought that he might find a use for these people, which would remove one from the list of the immediate things that he had resolved to put in hand.

  He left his desk, and went over to the table, inviting his visitors to come forward also. He spread out a large-scale map of the county, with which the library had supplied him. He pointed to Helford and Cowley Thorn, indicating the coast as they knew it.

  He went on, “We suppose, from many evidences, that we are on an island of very limited area, but even that we hardly know as a fact. Of this supposed island we are familiar with the north-east corner. Some of us have been down the east coast, the length of which is about sixteen miles in a straight line. From the south-eastern corner I know myself that the land is flooded as far as sight extends. There are some who have pen
etrated inland for ten miles or more, and have found little but deserted country, and the ashes that once were towns, but they have not reached a farther coast.

  “The man we captured from Cooper’s gang says that they have gone farther in search of horses with the same experience.

  “Now what I want is someone who will follow the coast completely round, and who will have sufficient intelligence to make a reliable report upon it.

  “Would you do this?

  “It may be difficult, or even dangerous.

  “It seems unlikely that we are the only people living, particularly along the northern coast, of the extent of which we know nothing. But you will notice this. Beyond Helford there was the high common of Cranleigh Chase, extending for about seven miles, and for that distance there was no north-ward road. Beyond that, the principal main road runs east, north-east, and would not be generally chosen for a northward flight. But if the northern coast extends to, or beyond, that point, there may be as many people there, or more, than we have here.

  “Anyway, it is best to know.”

  James Hatterley looked at his wife. Evidently, he had no thought of going alone. But he looked eager. A new project excited him.

  His wife said, “Yes, we’d do that.” She looked pleased also.

  Martin was well content. They would do it more intelligently than most, and they might be a nuisance at close quarters during the next few weeks.

  James Hatterley had a somewhat similar thought. He considered that Martin’s supporters might have some strenuous experiences before them, which he had no passion to share. But he understood wilderness living, and keeping to cover when safety required it

  Let him have a tracing of the map, and he would mark the coast-line upon it. If it were no more extensive than they supposed, he should be back in a fortnight—perhaps sooner.