THE GREAT COLLAPSE
And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving,
and dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the War.
The stages of the swift and universal collapse of the financial
and scientific civilisation with which the twentieth century
opened followed each other very swiftly, so swiftly that upon the
foreshortened page of history--they seem altogether to overlap.
To begin with, one sees the world nearly at a maximum wealth and
prosperity. To its inhabitants indeed it seemed also at a
maximum of security. When now in retrospect the thoughtful
observer surveys the intellectual history of this time, when one
reads its surviving fragments of literature, its scraps of
political oratory, the few small voices that chance has selected
out of a thousand million utterances to speak to later days, the
most striking thing of all this web of wisdom and error is surely
that hallucination of security. To men living in our present
world state, orderly, scientific and secured, nothing seems so
precarious, so giddily dangerous, as the fabric of the social
order with which the men of the opening of the twentieth century
were content. To us it seems that every institution and
relationship was the fruit of haphazard and tradition and the
manifest sport of chance, their laws each made for some separate
occasion and having no relation to any future needs, their
customs illogical, their education aimless and wasteful. Their
method of economic exploitation indeed impresses a trained and
informed mind as the most frantic and destructive scramble it is
possible to conceive; their credit and monetary system resting on
an unsubstantial tradition of the worthiness of gold, seems a
thing almost fantastically unstable. And they lived in planless
cities, for the most part dangerously congested; their rails and
roads and population were distributed over the earth in the
wanton confusion ten thousand irrevelant considerations had made.
Yet they thought confidently that this was a secure and permanent
progressive system, and on the strength of some three hundred
years of change and irregular improvement answered the doubter
with, "Things always have gone well. We'll worry through!"
But when we contrast the state of man in the opening of the
twentieth century with the condition of any previous period in
his history, then perhaps we may begin to understand something of
that blind confidence. It was not so much a reasoned confidence
as the inevitable consequence of sustained good fortune. By such
standards as they possessed, things HAD gone amazingly well for
them. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for the first
time in history whole populations found themselves regularly
supplied with more than enough to eat, and the vital statistics
of the time witness to an amelioration of hygienic conditions
rapid beyond all precedent, and to a vast development of
intelligence and ability in all the arts that make life
wholesome. The level and quality of the average education had
risen tremendously; and at the dawn of the twentieth century
comparatively few people in Western Europe or America were unable
to read or write. Never before had there been such reading
masses. There was wide social security. A common man might
travel safely over three-quarters of the habitable globe, could
go round the earth at a cost of less than the annual earnings of
a skilled artisan. Compared with the liberality and comfort of
the ordinary life of the time, the order of the Roman Empire
under the Antonines was local and limited. And every year, every
month, came some new increment to human achievement, a new
country opened up, new mines, new scientific discoveries, a new
machine!
For those three hundred years, indeed, the movement of the world
seemed wholly beneficial to mankind. men said, indeed, that
moral organisation was not keeping pace with physical progress,
but few attached any meaning to these phrases, the understanding
of which lies at the basis of our present safety. Sustaining and
constructive forces did indeed for a time more than balance the
malign drift of chance and the natural ignorance, prejudice,
blind passion, and,wasteful self-seeking of mankind.
The accidental balance on the side of Progress was far slighter
and infinitely more complex and delicate in its adjustments than
the people of that time suspected; but that did not alter the
fact that it was an effective balance. They did not realise that
this age of relative good fortune was an age of immense but
temporary opportunity for their kind. They complacently assumed
a necessary progress towards which they had no moral
responsibility. They did not realise that this security of
progress was a thing still to be won--or lost, and that the time
to win it was a time that passed. They went about their affairs
energetically enough and yet with a curious idleness towards
those threatening things. No one troubled over the real dangers
of mankind. They, saw their armies and navies grow larger and
more portentous; some of their ironclads at the last cost as much
as the whole annual expenditure upon advanced education; they
accumulated explosives and the machinery of destruction; they
allowed their national traditions and jealousies to accumulate;
they contemplated a steady enhancement of race hostility as the
races drew closer without. concern or understanding, and they
permitted the growth in their midst of an evil-spirited press,
mercenary, and unscrupulous, incapable of good, and powerful for
evil. The State had practically no control over the press at
all. Quite heedlessly they allowed thistouch-paper to lie at the
door of their War magazine for any spark to fire. The precedents
of history were all one tale of the collapse of civilisations,
the dangers of the time were manifest. One is incredulous now to
believe they could not see.
Could mankind have prevented this disaster of the War in the air?
An idle question that, as idle as to ask could mankind have
prevented the decay that turned Assyria and Babylon to empty
deserts or the slow decline and fall, the gradual social
disorganisation, phase by phase, that closed the chapter of the
Empire of the West! They could not, because they did not, they
had not the will to arrest it. What mankind could achieve with a
different will is a speculation as idle as it is magnificent.
And this was no slow decadence that came to the Europeanised
world; those other civilisations rotted and crumbled down, the
Europeanised civilisation was, as it were, blown up. Within the
space of five years it was altogether disintegrated and
destroyed. Up to the very eve of the War in the air one sees a
spacious spectacle of incessant advance, a world-wide security,
enormous areas with highly organised industry and settled
populations, gigantic cities spreading gigantically, the seas and
oceans dotted with shipping, the land netted with rails, and open
ways. Then suddenly the Geman air-fleets sweep across the
scene, and we are in the beginning of the end.
This story has already told of the swift rush upon New York of
the first Geman air-fleet and of the wild, inevitable orgy of
inconclusive destruction that ensued. Behind it a second
air-fleet was already swelling at its gasometers when England and
France and Spain and Italy showed their hands. None of these
countries had prepared for aeronautic warfare on the magnificent
scale of the Germans, but each guarded secrets, each in a measure
was making ready, and a common dread of Geman vigour and that
aggressive spirit Prince Karl Albert embodied, had long been
drawing these powers together in secret anticipation of some such
attack. This rendered their prompt co-operation possible, and
they certainly co-operated promptly. The second aerial power in
Europe at this time was France; the British, nervous for their
Asiatic Empire, and sensible of the immense moral effect of the
airship upon half-educated populations, had placed their
aeronautic parks in North India, and were able to play but a
subordinate part in the European conflict. Still, even in
England they had nine or ten big navigables, twenty or thirty
smaller ones, and a variety of experimental aeroplanes. Before
the fleet of Prince Karl Albert had crossed England, while Bert
was still surveying Manchester in bird's-eye view, the diplomatic
exchanges were going on that led to an attack upon Germany. A
heterogeneous collection of navigable balloons of all sizes and
types gathered over the Bernese Oberland, crushed and burnt the
twenty-five Swiss air-ships' that unexpectedly resisted this
concentration in the battle of the Alps, and then, leaving the
Alpine glaciers and valleys strewn with strange wreckage, divided
into two fleets and set itself to terrorise Berlin and destroy
the Franconian Park, seeking to do this before the second
air-fleet could be inflated.
Both over Berlin and Franconia the assailants with their modern
explosives effected great damage before they were driven off. In
Franconia twelve fully distended and five partially filled and
manned giants were able to make head against and at last, with
the help of a squadron of drachenflieger from Hamburg, defeat and
pursue the attack and to relieve Berlin, and the Germans were
straining every nerve to get an overwhelming fleet in the air,
and were already raiding London and Paris when the advance fleets
from the Asiatic air-parks, the first intimation of a new factor
in the conflict, were reported from Burmah and Armenia.
Already the whole financial fabric of the world was staggering
when that occurred. With the destruction of the American fleet
in the North Atlantic, and the smashing conflict that ended the
naval existence of Germany in the North Sea, with the burning and
wrecking of billions of pounds' worth of property in the four
cardinal cities of the world, the fact of the hopeless costliness
of War came home for the first time, came, like a blow in the
face, to the consciousness of mankind. Credit went down in a
wild whirl of selling. Everywhere appeared a phenomenon that had
already in a mild degree manifested itself in preceding periods
of panic; a desire to SECURE AND HOARD GOLD before prices reached
bottom. But now it spread like wild-fire, it became universal.
Above was visible conflict and destruction; below something was
happening far more deadly and incurable to the flimsy fabric of
finance and commercialism in which men had so blindly put their
trust. As the airships fought above, the visible gold supply of
the world vanished below. An epidemic of private cornering and
universal distrust swept the world. In a few weeks, money,
except for depreciated paper, vanished into vaults, into holes,
into the walls of houses, into ten million hiding-places. Money
vanished, and at its disappearance trade and industry came to an
end. The economic world staggered and fell dead. It was like
the stroke of some disease it was like the water vanishing out of
the blood of a living creature; it was a sudden, universal
coagulation of intercourse....
And as the credit system, that had been the living fortress of
the scientific civilisation, reeled and fell upon the millions it
had held together in economic relationship, as these people,
perplexed and helpless, faced this marvel of credit utterly
destroyed, the airships of Asia, countless and relentless, poured
across the heavens, swooped eastward to America and westward to
Europe. The page of history becomes a long crescendo of battle.
The main body of the British-Indian air-fleet perished upon a
pyre of blazing antagonists in Burmah; the Germans were scattered
in the great battle of the Carpathians; the vast peninsula of
India burst into insurrection and civil War from end to end, and
from Gobi to Morocco rose the standards of the "Jehad." For some
weeks of warfare and destruction it seemed as though the
Confederation of Eastern Asia must needs conquer the world, and
then the jerry-built "modern" civilisation of China too gave way
under the strain. The teeming and peaceful population of China
had been "westernised" during the opening years of the twentieth
century with the deepest resentment and reluctance; they had
been dragooned and disciplined under Japanese and
European--influence into an acquiescence with sanitary methods,
police controls, military service, and wholesale process of
exploitation against which their whole tradition rebelled. Under
the stresses of the War their endurance reached the breaking
point, the whole of China rose in incoherent revolt, and the
practical destruction of the central government at Pekin by a
handful of British and Geman airships that had escaped from the
main battles rendered that revolt invincible. In Yokohama
appeared barricades, the black flag and the social revolution.
With that the whole world became a welter of conflict.
So that a universal social collapse followed, as it were a
logical consequence, upon world-wide War. Wherever there were
great populations, great masses of people found themselves
without work, without money, and unable to get food. Famine was
in every working-class quarter in the world within three weeks of
the beginning of the War. Within a month there was not a city
anywhere in which the ordinary law and social procedure had not
been replaced by some form of emergency control, in which
firearms and military executions were not being used to keep
order and prevent violence. And still in the poorer quarters,
and in the populous districts, and even here and there already
among those who had been wealthy, famine spread.
So what historians have come to call the Phase of the Emergency
Committees sprang from the opening phase and from the phase of
social collapse. Then followed a period of vehement and
passionate conflict against disintegration; everywhere the
struggle to keep order and to keep fighting went on. And at the
same time the character of the War altered through the
replacement of the huge gas-filled airships by flying-machines as
the instruments of War. So soon as the big fleet engagements
were over, the Asiatics endeavoured to establish in close
proximity to the more vulnerable points of the countries against
which they were acting, fortified centres from which
flying-machine raids could be made. For a time they had
everything their own way in this, and then, as this story has
told, the lost secret of the Butteridge machine came to light,
and the conflict became equalized and less conclusive than ever.
For these small flying-machines, ineffectual for any large
expedition or conclusive attack, were horribly convenient for
guerilla warfare, rapidly and cheaply made, easily used, easily
hidden. The design of them was hastily copied and printed in
Pinkerville and scattered broadcast over the United States and
copies were sent to Europe, and there reproduced. Every man,
every town, every parish that could, was exhorted to make and use
them. In a little while they were being constructed not only by
governments and local authorities, but by robber bands, by
insurgent committees, by every type of private person. The
peculiar social destructiveness of the Butteridge machine lay in
its complete simplicity. It was nearly as simple as a
motor-bicycle. The broad outlines of the earlier stages of the
War disappeared under its influence, the spacious antagonism of
nations and empires and races vanished in a seething mass of
detailed conflict. The world passed at a stride from a unity and
simplicity broader than that of the Roman Empire at its best, to
as social fragmentation as complete as the robber-baron period of
the Middle Ages. But this time, for a long descent down gradual
slopes of disintegration, comes a fall like a fall over a cliff.
Everywhere were men and women perceiving this and struggling
desperately to keep as it were a hold upon the edge of the cliff.
A fourth phase follows. Through the struggle against Chaos, in
the wake of the Famine, came now another old enemy of humanity--
the Pestilence, the Purple Death. But the War does not pause.
The flags still fly. Fresh air-fleets rise, new forms of
airship, and beneath their swooping struggles the world
darkens--scarcely heeded by history.
It is not within the design of this book to tell what further
story, to tell how the War in the air kept on through the sheer
inability of any authorities to meet and agree and end it, until
every organised government in the world was as shattered and
broken as a heap of china beaten with a stick. With every week
of those terrible years history becomes more detailed and
confused, more crowded and uncertain. Not without great and
heroic resistance was civilisation borne down. Out of the bitter
social conflict below rose patriotic associations, brotherhoods
of order, city mayors, princes, provisional committees, trying to
establish an order below and to keep the sky above. The double
effort destroyed them. And as the exhaustion of the mechanical
resources of civilisation clears the heavens of airships at last
altogether, Anarchy, Famine and Pestilence are discovered
triumphant below. The great nations and empires have become but
names in the mouths of men. Everywhere there are ruins and
unburied dead, and shrunken, yellow-faced survivors in a mortal
apathy. Here there are robbers, here vigilance committees, and
here guerilla bands ruling patches of exhausted territory,
strange federations and brotherhoods form and dissolve, and
religious fanaticisms begotten of despair gleam in famine-bright
eyes. It is a universal dissolution. The fine order and welfare
of the earth have crumpled like an exploded bladder. In five
short years the world and the scope of human life have undergone
a retrogressive change as great as that between the age of the
Antonines and the Europe of the ninth century....
Across this sombre spectacle of disaster goes a minute and
insignificant person for whom perhaps the readers of this story
have now some slight solicitude. Of him there remains to be told
just one single and miraculous thing. Through a world darkened
and lost, through a civilisation in its death agony, our little
Cockney errant went and found his Edna! He found his Edna!
He got back across the Atlantic partly by means of an order from
the President and partly through his own good luck. He contrived
to get himself aboard a British brig in the timber trade that put
out from Boston without cargo, chiefly, it would seem, because
its captain had a vague idea of "getting home" to South Shields.
Bert was able to ship himself upon her mainly because of the
seamanlike appearance of his rubber boots. They had a long,
eventful voyage; they were chased, or imagined themselves to be
chased, for some hours by an Asiatic ironclad, which was
presently engaged by a British cruiser. The two ships fought for
three hours, circling and driving southward as they fought, until
the twilight and the cloud-drift of a rising gale swallowed them
up. A few days later Bert's ship lost her rudder and mainmast in
a gale. The crew ran out of food and subsisted on fish. They
saw strange air-ships going eastward near the Azores and landed
to get provisions and repair the rudder at Teneriffe. There they
found the town destroyed and two big liners, with dead still
aboard, sunken in the harbour. From there they got canned food
and material for repairs, but their operations were greatly
impeded by the hostility of a band of men amidst the ruins of the
town, who sniped them and tried to drive them away.
At Mogador, they stayed and sent a boat ashore for water, and
were nearly captured by an Arab ruse. Here too they got the
Purple Death aboard, and sailed with it incubating in their
blood. The cook sickened first, and then the mate, and presently
every one was down and three in the forecastle were dead. It
chanced to be calm weather, and they drifted helplessly and
indeed careless of their fate backwards towards the Equator. The
captain doctored them all with rum. Nine died all together, and
of the four survivors none understood navigation; when at last
they took heart again and could handle a sail, they made a course
by the stars roughly northward and were already short of food
once more when they fell in with a petrol-driven ship from Rio to
Cardiff, shorthanded by reason of the Purple Death and glad to
take them aboard. So at,last, after a year of wandering Bert
reached England. He landed in bright June weather, and found the
Purple Death was there just beginning its ravages.
The people were in a state of panic in Cardiff and many had fled
to the hills, and directly the steamer came to the harbour she
was boarded and her residue of food impounded by some
unauthenticated Provisional Committee. Bert tramped through a
country disorganised by pestilence, foodless, and shaken to the
very base of its immemorial order. He came near death and
starvation many times, and once he was drawn into scenes of
violence that might have ended his career. But the Bert
Smallways who tramped from Cardiff to London vaguely "going
home," vaguely seeking something of his own that had no tangible
form but Edna, was a very different person from the Desert
Dervish who was swept out of England in Mr. Butteridge's balloon
a year before. He was brown and lean and enduring, steady-eyed
and pestilence-salted, and his mouth, which had once hung open,
shut now like a steel trap. Across his brow ran a white scar
that he had got in a fight on the brig. In Cardiff he had felt
the need of new clothes and a weapon, and had, by means that
would have shocked him a year ago, secured a flannel shirt, a
corduroy suit, and a revolver and fifty cartridges from an
abandoned pawnbroker's. He also got some soap and had his first
real wash for thirteen months in a stream outside the town. The
Vigilance bands that had at first shot plunderers very freely
were now either entirely dispersed by the plague, or busy between
town and cemetery in a vain attempt to keep pace with it. He
prowled on the outskirts of the town for three or four days,
starving, and then went back to join the Hospital Corps for a
week, and so fortified himself with a few square meals before he
started eastward.
The Welsh and English countryside at that time presented the
strangest mingling of the assurance and wealth of the opening
twentieth century with a sort of Dureresque medievalism. All the
gear, the houses and mono-rails, the farm hedges and power
cables, the roads and pavements, the sign-posts and
advertisements of the former order were still for the most part
intact. Bankruptcy, social collapse, famine, and pestilence had
done nothing to damage these, and it was only to the great
capitals and ganglionic centres, as it were, of this State, that
positive destruction had come. Any one dropped suddenly into the
country would have noticed very little difference. He would have
remarked first, perhaps, that all the hedges needed clipping,
that the roadside grass grew rank, that the road-tracks were
unusually rainworn, and that the cottages by the wayside seemed
in many cases shut up, that a telephone wire had dropped here,
and that a cart stood abandoned by the wayside. But he would
still find his hunger whetted by the bright assurance that
Wilder's Canned Peaches were excellent, or that there was nothing
so good for the breakfast table as Gobble's Sausages. And then
suddenly would come the Dureresque element; the skeleton of a
horse, or some crumpled mass of rags in the ditch, with gaunt
extended feet and a yellow, purple-blotched skin and face, or
what had been a face, gaunt and glaring and devastated. Then
here would be a field that had been ploughed and not sown, and
here a field of corn carelessly trampled by beasts, and here a
hoarding torn down across the road to make a fire.
Then presently he would meet a man or a woman, yellow-faced and
probably negligently dressed and armed--prowling for food. These
people would have the complexions and eyes and expressions of
tramps or criminals, and often the clothing of prosperous
middle-class or upper-class people. Many of these would be eager
for news, and willing to give help and even scraps of queer
meat, or crusts of grey and doughy bread, in return for it. They
would listen to Bert's story with avidity, and attempt to keep
him with them for a day or so. The virtual cessation of postal
distribution and the collapse of all newspaper enterprise had
left an immense and aching gap in the mental life of this time.
men had suddenly lost sight of the ends of the earth and had
still to recover the rumour-spreading habits of the Middle Ages.
In their eyes, in their bearing, in their talk, was the quality
of lost and deoriented souls.
As Bert travelled from parish to parish, and from district to
district, avoiding as far as possible those festering centres of
violence and despair, the larger towns, he found the condition
of affairs varying widely. In one parish he would find the large
house burnt, the vicarage wrecked, evidently in violent conflict
for some suspected and perhaps imaginary store of food unburied
dead everywhere, and the whole mechanism of the community at a
standstill. In another he would find organising forces stoutly
at work, newly-painted notice boards warning off vagrants, the
roads and still cultivated fields policed by armed men, the
pestilence under control, even nursing going on, a store of food
husbanded, the cattle and sheep well guarded, and a group of two
or three justices, the village doctor or a farmer, dominating the
whole place; a reversion, in fact, to the autonomous community of
the fifteenth century. But at any time such a village would be
liable to a raid of Asiatics or Africans or such-like
air-pirates, demanding petrol and alcohol or provisions. The
price of its order was an almost intolerable watchfulness and
tension.
Then the approach to the confused problems of some larger centre
of population and the presence of a more intricate conflict would
be marked by roughly smeared notices of "Quarantine" or
"Strangers Shot," or by a string of decaying plunderers dangling
from the telephone poles at the roadside. About Oxford big
boards were put on the roofs warning all air wanderers off with
the single word, "Guns."
Taking their risks amidst these things, cyclists still kept
abroad, and once or twice during Bert's long tramp powerful motor
cars containing masked and goggled figures went tearing past him.
There were few police in evidence, but ever and again squads of
gaunt and tattered soldier-cyclists would come drifting along,
and such encounters became more frequent as he got out of Wales
into England. Amidst all this wreckage they were still
campaigning. He had had some idea of resorting to the workhouses
for the night if hunger pressed him too closely, but some of
these were closed and others converted into temporary hospitals,
and one he came up to at twilight near a village in
Gloucestershire stood with all its doors and windows open, silent
as the grave, and, as he found to his horror by stumbling along
evil-smelling corridors, full of unburied dead.
From Gloucestershire Bert went northward to the British
aeronautic park outside Birmingham, in the hope that he might be
taken on and given food, for there the Government, or at any rate
the War Office, still existed as an energetic fact, concentrated
amidst collapse and social disaster upon the effort to keep the
British flag still flying in the air, and trying to brisk up
mayor and mayor and magistrate and magistrate in a new effort of
organisation. They had brought together all the best of the
surviving artisans from that region, they had provisioned the
park for a siege, and they were urgently building a larger type
of Butteridge machine. Bert could get no footing at this work:
he was not sufficiently skilled, and he had drifted to Oxford
when the great fight occurred in which these works were finally
wrecked. He saw something, but not very much, of the battle from
a place called Boar Hill. He saw the Asiatic squadron coming up
across the hills to the south-west, and he saw one of their
airships circling southward again chased by two aeroplanes, the
one that was ultimately overtaken, wrecked and burnt at Edge
Hill. But he never learnt the issue of the combat as a whole.
He crossed the Thames from Eton to Windsor and made his way round
the south of London to Bun Hill, and there he found his brother
Tom, looking like some dark, defensive animal in the old shop,
just recovering from the Purple Death, and Jessica upstairs
delirious, and, as it seemed to him, dying grimly. She raved of
sending out orders to customers, and scolded Tom perpetually lest
he should be late with Mrs. Thompson's potatoes and Mrs. Hopkins'
cauliflower, though all business had long since ceased and Tom
had developed a quite uncanny skill in the snaring of rats and
sparrows and the concealment of certain stores of cereals and
biscuits from plundered grocers' shops. Tom received his brother
with a sort of guarded warmth.
"Lor!" he said, "it's Bert. I thought you'd be coming back some
day, and I'm glad to see you. But I carn't arst you to eat
anything, because I 'aven't got anything to eat.... Where you
been, Bert, all this time?"
Bert reassured his brother by a glimpse of a partly eaten swede,
and was still telling his story in fragments and parentheses,
when he discovered behind the counter a yellow and forgotten note
addressed to himself. "What's this?" he said, and found it was a
year-old note from Edna. "She came 'ere," said Tom, like one who
recalls a trivial thing, "arstin' for you and arstin' us to take
'er in. That was after the battle and settin' Clapham Rise
afire. I was for takin' 'er in, but Jessica wouldn't 'ave
it--and so she borrowed five shillings of me quiet like and went
on. I dessay she's tole you--"
She had, Bert found. She had gone on, she said in her note, to
an aunt and uncle who had a brickfield near Horsham. And there
at last, after another fortnight of adventurous journeying, Bert
found her.
When Bert and Edna set eyes on one another, they stared and
laughed foolishly, so changed they were, and so ragged and
surprised. And then they both fell weeping.
"Oh! Bertie, boy!" she cried. "You've come--you've come!" and
put out her arms and staggered. "I told 'im. He said he'd kill
me if I didn't marry him."
But Edna was not married, and when presently Bert could get talk
from her, she explained the task before him. That little patch
of lonely agricultural country had fallen under the power of a
band of bullies led by a Chief called Bill Gore who had begun
life as a butcher boy and developed into a prize-fighter and a
professional sport. They had been organised by a local nobleman
of former eminence upon the turf, but after a time he had
disappeared, no one quite knew how and Bill had succeeded to the
leadership of the countryside, and had developed his teacher's
methods with considerable vigour. There had been a strain of
advanced philosophy about the local nobleman, and his mind ran to
"improving the race" and producing the Over-man, which in
practice took the form of himself especially and his little band
in moderation marrying with some frequency. Bill followed up the
idea with an enthusiasm that even trenched upon his popularity
with his followers. One day he had happened upon Edna tending
her pigs, and had at once fallen a-wooing with great urgency
among the troughs of slush. Edna had made a gallant resistance,
but he was still vigorously about and extraordinarily impatient.
He might, she said, come at any time, and she looked Bert in the
eyes. They were back already in the barbaric stage when a man
must fight for his love.
And here one deplores the conflicts of truth with the chivalrous
tradition. One would like to tell of Bert sallying forth to
challenge his rival, of a ring formed and a spirited encounter,
and Bert by some miracle of pluck and love and good fortune
winning. But indeed nothing of the sort occurred. Instead, he
reloaded his revolver very carefully, and then sat in the best
room of the cottage by the derelict brickfield, looking anxious
and perplexed, and listening to talk about Bill and his ways, and
thinking, thinking. Then suddenly Edna's aunt, with a thrill in
her voice, announced the appearance of that individual. He was
coming with two others of his gang through the garden gate. Bert
got up, put the woman aside, and looked out. They presented
remarkable figures. They wore a sort of uniform of red golfing
jackets and white sweaters, football singlet, and stockings and
boots and each had let his fancy play about his head-dress. Bill
had a woman's hat full of cock's feathers, and all had wild,
slouching cowboy brims.
Bert sighed and stood up, deeply thoughtful, and Edna watched
him, marvelling. The women stood quite still. He left the
window, and went out into the passage rather slowly, and with the
careworn expression of a man who gives his mind to a complex and
uncertain business. "Edna!" he called, and when she came he
opened the front door.
He asked very simply, and pointing to the foremost of the three,
"That 'im? ... Sure?" ... and being told that it was, shot his
rival instantly and very accurately through the chest. He then
shot Bill's best man much less tidily in the head, and then shot
at and winged the third man as he fled. The third gentleman
yelped, and continued running with a comical end-on twist.
Then Bert stood still meditating, with the pistol in his hand,
and quite regardless of the women behind him.
So far things had gone well.
It became evident to him that if he did not go into politics at
once, he would be hanged as an assassin and accordingly, and
without a word to the women, he went down to the village
public-house he had passed an hour before on his way to Edna,
entered it from the rear, and confronted the little band of
ambiguous roughs, who were drinking in the tap-room and
discussing matrimony and Bill's affection in a facetious but
envious manner, with a casually held but carefully reloaded
revolver, and an invitation to join what he called, I regret to
say, a "Vigilance Committee" under his direction. "It's wanted
about 'ere, and some of us are gettin' it up." He presented
himself as one having friends outside, though indeed, he had no
friends at all in the world but Edna and her aunt and two female
cousins.
There was a quick but entirely respectful discussion of the
situation. They thought him a lunatic who had tramped into, this
neighbourhood ignorant of Bill. They desired to temporise until
their leader came. Bill would settle him. Some one spoke of
Bill.
"Bill's dead, I jest shot 'im," said Bert. "We don't need reckon
with 'IM. 'E's shot, and a red-'aired chap with a squint, 'E'S
shot. We've settled up all that. There ain't going to be no more
Bill, ever. 'E'd got wrong ideas about marriage and things. It's
'is sort of chap we're after."
That carried the meeting.
Bill was perfunctorily buried, and Bert's Vigilance Committee
(for so it continued to be called) reigned in his stead.
That is the end of this story so far as Bert Smallways is
concerned. We leave him with his Edna to become squatters among
the clay and oak thickets of the Weald, far away from the stream
of events. From that time forth life became a succession of
peasant encounters, an affair of pigs and hens and small needs
and little economies and children, until Clapham and Bun Hill and
all the life of the Scientific Age became to Bert no more than
the fading memory of a dream. He never knew how the War in the
air went on, nor whether it still went on. There were rumours of
airships going and coming, and of happenings Londonward. Once or
twice their shadows fell on him as he worked, but whence they
came or whither they went he could not tell. Even his desire to
tell died out for want of food. At times came robbers and
thieves, at times came diseases among the beasts and shortness of
food, once the country was worried by a pack of boar-hounds he
helped to kill; he went through many inconsecutive, irrelevant
adventures. He survived them all.
Accident and death came near them both ever and again and passed
them by, and they loved and suffered and were happy, and she bore
him many children--eleven children--one after the other, of whom
only four succumbed to the necessary hardships of their simple
life. They lived and did well, as well was understood in those
days. They went the way of all flesh, year by year.
War in the Air Chapter 10 ...
War in the Air Epilogue