BOOK III

WOMANKIND IN THE MAKING

XVII--LONDON TO MARLOW

1

The history of mankind is the history of human law. The larger ordinances of the universe are commonly referred to some superior lawgiver, under such names as God and physico-chemical action; names which appear mutually subversive only to the bigot, whether theologian or biologist. These larger ordinances sometimes appear inflexible, as in the domain of physics and chemistry, sometimes empirical as in the development of species, but we may believe that if they change at all, the period of change is so great as to be outside any possibility of observation by a few thousand generations of mankind.

Human law, on the other hand, is tentative, without sound precedent and in its very nature mutable. In our miserably limited record of history, that paltry ten thousand years which is but a single tick of the cosmic watch, we have been unable to formulate any overruling law to which other laws are subject. Climate, race and condition impose certain limitations, and within that enceinte civilizations have developed a system of rules, increasing always in complexity, and have then failed to maintain their place in the competitive struggle. It has been rashly suggested that the overriding law of laws is that rigidity is fatal to the nation. An analogy has been found in the growth of the child. Here and there some bold spirit has ventured the daring hypothesis that if a young child be confined within a perfectly fitting iron shell he will not grow. Such speculations, however, do not appeal to mankind as a whole. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that nothing appals us so much as the idea that man is capable of growth. Is it not inconceivable that any race of men could be wiser, more perfect than ourselves?

Nevertheless, out of all vague speculation one deliciously certain axiom presents itself, namely that mankind cannot live without law of some kind. The most primitive savage has his ordinances. The least primary concussion of individuals develops a rule of practice, whether it takes such diverse forms as "hit first," or "present the other cheek"; although the latter rule has not yet been developed beyond the stage of theory.

In the unprecedented year of the new plague, the old rules were thrown into the melting pot, but within three months humanity was evolving precedents for a new statute book. The concussions of these three months were fierce and destructive. Women, in the face of death, killed and stole in the old primitive ways, unhampered now by the necessity to kill and steal according to the tedious rules of twentieth-century civilization, rules that women had never been foolish enough to reverence in the letter. All those complex and incomprehensible laws had been made by men for men, and after the plague there was none to administer them, for no women and few men had ever had the least idea what the law was. Even the lawgivers themselves had had to wait for the pronouncement of some prejudiced or unprejudiced judge. Women had long known what our Bumbles can only learn by bitter experience, inspired to vision in some moment of fury or desolation.

But within three months of the first great exodus of women from the town, one dominant law was being brought to birth. It was not written on tables of stone, nor incorporated in any swollen, dyspeptic book of statutes; it was not formulated by logic, nor was it the outcome of serious thought by any individual or by a solemn committee. The law rose into recognition because it was a necessity for the life of the majority, and although that majority was not compact, had no common deliberate purpose, and had never formulated their demand in precise language, the new law came into being before harvest and was accepted by all but a small resentful minority of aristocrats and landowners, as a supreme ordinance, indisputably just.

This law was that every woman had a right to her share in the bounty of Nature, and the corollary was that she earned her right by labour.

In those days the justice of the principle was perfectly obvious; so obvious, indeed, that the law came to birth without the obstetric skill of any parliament whatever.

2

It is now impossible to say why such different types of male humanity as Jasper Thrale, George Gosling or the Bacchus of Wycombe Abbey escaped the plague. The bacillus (surely a strangely individual type, it must have been) was never isolated, nor the pathology of the disease investigated. The germ was some new unprecedented growth which ran through a fierce cycle of development within a few months, changed its nature as it swarmed into every corner of the earth, and finally expired more quickly than it had come into being.

If the male survivors in Europe and the East had been of one type, some theory might be formulated to account for their immunity; but so far as science can pronounce an opinion, the living male residue can only be explained by the doctrine of chances. A few escaped, by accident. In the British Isles there may have been 1,500 men who thus survived. In the whole of Europe, besides, there were less than a thousand. It seems probable that even before Scotland was attacked the climax had been reached; by the time the plague reached England the first faint evidences of a decline in virulence may be marked....

From the first, Jasper Thrale ventured his life without an afterthought. He was fearless by nature. He did not lack those powers of imagination which are commonly supposed to add so greatly to the terror of death, he simply lacked the feeling of fear. In all his life he had never experienced that sickness of apprehension which dissolves our fibre into a quivering jelly--as though the spirit had already withdrawn from the trembling inertia of the flesh. Perhaps Thrale's spirit was too dominant for such retreat, was more completely master of its material than is the spirit of the common man. For the spirit cannot know bodily fear, it is the apprehensive flesh that wilts and curdles at the approach of danger. And it is worthy of notice that in the old days, up to the early twentieth century, these rare cases of fearlessness in individuals were more often found among women than among men.

Thrale, with his perfectly careless courage, found plenty of work for himself in London during May and early June. He acted as a scavenger, and still went far afield with his burial cart long after every trace of living male humanity had disappeared from the streets of London.

Then one day, at the end of June, he realized that his task was futile, and it came to him that there was work awaiting him of more importance than this purification of streets which might never again echo to the traffic of humanity.

So he chose the best bicycle he could find in Holborn Viaduct, stripped a relay of four tyres from other machines, and with these and a reserve of food made into a somewhat cumbrous parcel, he set out to explore the new world.

He took the Bath Road, intending to make exploration of the fertile West Country. He had Cornish blood in his veins, and his ultimate goal was the county which had almost escaped urbanization. As he then visualized the problem, it appeared that life would offer greater possibilities in such places.

But before he reached Colnbrook, he had recognized that work was required of him nearer home. The exodus was then in progress. He came through armies of helpless women and children flying from starvation; women who had no object in view save that of escape to the country; "Silly Londoners" with no knowledge of how food was to be obtained when their goal was reached.

He did not stay there, however. He was beginning to see the outline of his plan, and at the same time the limitation of his own powers. He saw that enough food could not be raised near London to support the multitude, that the death of the many was demanded by the needs of the few if any were to survive, and that communities must be formed with the common purpose of tilling the land and excluding those who could not earn their right to support. In such a catastrophe as this, charity became a crime.

He intended even then to push on beyond Reading, but in Maidenhead he met a woman who influenced him to a nearer goal.

3

She stepped into the road and held up her hand.

Thrale stopped; he thought she was about to make the familiar demand either for food or a direction.

"Well?" he said curtly.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "To find room," he said.

"There is room for you near here," said the woman, "if you'll work."

"At what?" he asked.

"Machinery, harvesting machinery, agricultural machinery of all sorts."

"Where?" asked Thrale.

She dropped her voice and looked about her. "Marlow," she said. "It--it's an eddy. Off the main roads and by the river. There are less than a thousand women there at present, and we are keeping the others out; at least until after harvest. There is plenty of land about, and we're keeping ourselves at present. Only we do want a man for the machines. Will you come and help us?"

"I'll come and see what I can do," said Thrale "I won't promise to stay."

"Aren't there any other men, there?" he added after a moment's hesitation.

"One at Wycombe," said the women. "He's a butcher, but----"

"I understand," said Thrale.

"And meanwhile you might help me," said the woman. "I come over here with a horse and cart to raid the seedsmen's shops. If we leave them the women would eat all the beans and peas and things, you know; enough to feed us for the winter gone in a week, and no one any the better. Isn't it awful how careless we are?"

4

She was a fair, clear-eyed girl, with the figure and complexion of one who had devoted considerable attention to outdoor sports. She was wearing a man's Norfolk jacket (men's clothing was so plentiful), and a skirt that barely reached her knees, and did not entirely hide cloth knickerbockers which might also have been adapted from a man's garment. Below the knickerbockers she displayed thick stockings and sandals. Her splendid fair hair furnished sufficient protection for her head, and she had dressed a pillow of it into the nape of her neck as a shield for the sun.

Thrale looked at her with a frank curiosity as they made their way up the town to a seedsman's shop. She had left the horse and cart there, she explained, while she explored other streets of the town.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Eileen, of Marlow," she said. "There doesn't seem to be another Eileen there, so one name's enough."

"Is that how your community feel about it?" he asked.

She smiled. "We're beginning," she said.

He pondered that for a time, and then asked, "Who were you?"

"Does it matter?" was the answer.

"Not in the least," said Thrale. "Never did much so far as I was concerned, but I have a memory of having seen your photographs in the illustrated papers. I was wondering whether you had been actress, peeress, scandal; or perhaps all three."

She laughed. "I'm the eldest daughter of the late Duke of Hertford," she said, "the ci-devant Lady Eileen Ferrar, citizen."

"Oh, was that it?" replied Thrale carelessly. "Where's this shop of yours?"

The loot was heavier than Eileen had anticipated. The shop had been ransacked, but they found an untouched store, containing such valuables as beans, potatoes and a few small sacks of turnip seed at the bottom of a yard. When these had been placed in the cart, they decided that the load was sufficient for one horse.

They took the longer road to Marlow, through Bourne End, to avoid the hill. Eileen walked at the horse's head, with Thrale beside her wheeling his bicycle, and during those two hours he learnt much of the little community which he proposed to serve for a time.

It seemed that in Marlow--and the same thing must have happened in a hundred other small towns throughout the country--a few women had taken control of the community. These women were of all classes and the committee included an Earl's widow, a national schoolmistress, a small green-grocer, and an unmarried woman of property living half a mile out of the town. These women had worked together in an eminently practical way; at first to relieve distress, and then to plan the future. They had wasted little time in discussions among themselves--none of them had the parliamentary sense of the uses of debate. When they had disagreed, they had had plenty of scope to carry out varying methods within their own spheres of influence.

Their first and most difficult task had been to teach the members of their community to work for the common good, and that task was by no means perfected as yet. Co-operation was agreeable enough to those who had nothing to lose, but the women in temporary possession of the sources of food supply were not so easily convinced. In many instances the committee's arguments had been suddenly clenched by an exposition of force majeure, and property owners had discovered to their amazement that they had no remedy.

But the head and leader of Marlow was a farmer's daughter of nineteen, a certain Carrie Oliver. Her father had had a small farm in the Chilterns not far from Fingest. He had been a lazy, drunken creature, and from the time Carrie had left the national school she had practically carried on the work of the farm single handed. She liked the work; the interest of it absorbed her.

The Marlow schoolmistress had remembered her when the committee had first faced the daunting task of providing for the future. They had been more or less capable of organizing a majority of the women, but no member of the committee knew the secrets of agriculture and stock-breeding, and in all Marlow and the neighbourhood no woman had been found who was capable of instructing them in all that was necessary.

A deputation of three had been sent to Fingest, and had discovered Miss Oliver in the midst of plenty, cultivating her farm in comfort now that she had been relieved of her father's unwelcome presence.

She had been covered with confusion when requested to leave her retreat and take command of a town and the surrounding twenty thousand acres or so within reach of the new community.

"Oh! I can't," she had said, blushing and ducking her head. "It's easy enough; I'll tell you if there's anything you want to know."

The deputation had then put the case very clearly before her, pointing out that in Miss Oliver's hands lay the future of a thousand lives.

"Oh, dear. I dunno. What can I do?" Carrie had said, and when the deputation had urged that she should return with them and take charge forthwith, she had replied that that was quite impossible, that there were the cows to milk, the calves, pigs and chickens to feed, and goodness knew how many other necessary things to be done before sunset.

The deputation had said that cows, calves, horses, sheep, pigs and chickens might and should be transferred forthwith to the neighbourhood of Marlow.

It had taken three days to convince her, Eileen said, and added, "But she's splendid, now. It's wonderful what a lot she knows; and she rides about on a horse everywhere and sees to everything. The difficulty is to stop her getting down and doing the work herself."

Thrale understood that, exceptional male as he was, his position in Marlow would be subordinate to that of Miss Oliver.

"Does she understand agricultural machinery?" he asked.

"Oh, yes," returned Eileen. "But she hasn't time, you see, to attend to all that, and it's so jolly difficult to learn. I've been doing a bit. I'm better at it than most of 'em. But when I saw you it struck me how ripping it would be if you'd come and take over that side. Men are so jolly good at machinery. We shouldn't miss them much if it weren't for that."

5

After a marked preliminary hesitation the committee appointed Jasper Thrale chief mechanic of Marlow. The hesitation was understandable. Their only experience of the ways of men in this altered civilization had been drawn from observations of Mr Evans at Wycombe. His manner of life appeared representative of what they might expect. Nevertheless they did not openly condemn him, although he proved an immediate source of trouble, even to these organizers in Marlow. The youth of the place was apt to wander over the hill in the evenings; "just for fun," they said. They went in twos and threes, and occasionally one of them stayed behind. These evening walks interfered with work. "Later on I shouldn't mind so much," Lady Durham had said, commenting on the loss of a young and active worker, "but there is so much to do just now." Her comment showed that even then the situation was being accepted, and that many women were prepared to adapt their old opinions to new conditions. It also showed why the committee hesitated to accept Thrale's services.

Thrale understood their difficulty, and went straight to the point.

"You are afraid that the young women will be wasting time, running after me," he said. "Set your minds at rest. That won't last. And if you give me pupils for my machinery I should prefer women over forty in any case. I believe I shall find them more capable."

He was right in one way. When the excitement of his coming had subsided, he was not the cause of much wasted time. He adopted a manner with the younger women which did not encourage advances. He was, in fact, quite brutally frank. When the young women devised all kinds of impossible excuses to linger in his vicinity he sent them away with hot indignant faces. Among those who sought their sterile amusements in Wycombe it became the fashion openly to express hatred and contempt for "that engine fellow." It was agreed that he "wasn't a proper man." Another section, however, talked scandal, and hinted that assistant-engineer Eileen was the cause of Thrale's pretended misogyny.

The committee found their work more complicated in some respects after Thrale's coming.

Thrale, himself, was supremely indifferent to any scandal or expression of hatred. He had his hands full, his hours of work were only limited by daylight, and six hours sleep was all he asked for or desired. After a very brief introduction to the intricacies of reaper and rake at the hands of Miss Oliver--her father had never been able to afford a binder, but the days of corn-harvest were still far ahead--he set himself to learn the mysteries of all the agricultural machinery in the neighbourhood; traction engines, steam ploughs and thrashing machines, and to pass on the knowledge he gained to his pupils. He found them stupid at first, but they were patient and willing for the most part.

Then, handicapped by the lack of coal, he rode over to Bourne End and discovered two locomotives. One of them was standing on the line a mile out of the station with a full complement of coaches attached, the other was an unencumbered goods engine in a siding. He chose the latter for his first experiment, and succeeded in driving it back to Marlow. It groaned and screamed in a way that indicated serious organic trouble, but after he had overhauled it, it proved capable of taking him to Maidenhead, where he found a sound engine in a shed.

After that he devoted three days to getting a clear line to Paddington, a tedious process which involved endless descents from the cab, and mountings into signal boxes, experiments with levers and the occasional necessity for pushing whole trains out of his path into some siding. But at last he returned with magnificent loot of coal from the almost untouched London yards beyond Ealing.

London was still the storehouse of certain valuable commodities.

His passage through the surrounding country was hailed with cries of amazement and jubilant acclamation. The first railway surely excited less astonishment than did Thrale on his solitary engine. Doubtless the unfortunate women who saw him pass believed that the gods of machinery had returned once more to bring relief from all the burden of misery and unfamiliar work.

And once the points were set and the way open to London by rail he could go and return with tools and many other necessaries that had offered no temptation to the starving multitude who had fled from the town.

Marlow was greatly blessed among the communities in those days.

6

The harvest was early that year, and Miss Oliver decided to cut certain fields of barley at the end of July.

Thrale's energies were then diverted to the superintendence of the reapers and binders, and he rode from field to field, overlooking the work of his pupils or spending furious hours in struggle with some refractory mechanism.

One Saturday, an hour or two after midday, he was returning from some such struggle, when he saw a strange procession coming down that long hill from Handy Cross, which some pious women regarded as the road to hell.

Casual immigration had almost ceased by that time, but the sight indicated the necessity for immediate action. The immigration laws of Marlow, though not coded as yet, were strict; and only bona fide workers were admitted, and even those were critically examined.

Thrale shouted to attract attention and the procession stopped.

When he came through the gate on to the road, he was accosted by name.

"Oh, Mr Thrale, fancy finding you," said the young woman at the pole of the truck.

The meeting of Livingstone and Stanley was far less amazing.

An old woman perched on the truck and partly sheltered by the remains of an umbrella, regarded his appearance with some show of displeasure.

"By rights 'e should 'ave written to me in the first place," she muttered.

"Mother's got a touch of the sun," explained Blanche hurriedly.

Thrale had not yet spoken. He was considering the problem of whether he owed any duty to these wanderers, which could override his duty to Marlow.

"Where have you come from?" he asked.

Blanche and Millie explained volubly, by turns and together.

"You see, we don't let anyone stay here," said Thrale.

Blanche's eyebrows went up and she waved her too exuberant sister aside. "We're willing to work," she said.

"And your mother?" queried Thrale. "And this other woman?"

"Ach! I work too," put in Mrs Isaacson. "I have learnt all that is necessary for the farm. I milk and feed chickens and everything."

"You'll have to come before the committee," said Thrale.

"Anywhere out of the sun," replied Blanche, "and somewhere where we can put mother. She's very bad, I'm afraid."

"You can stay to-night, anyway," returned Thrale.

Millie made a face at him behind his back, and whispered to Mrs Isaacson, who pursed her mouth.

"Well, you do seem more civilized here," remarked Blanche as the procession restarted towards Marlow. Thrale, with something of the air of a policeman, was walking by the side of the pole.

"You've come at a good time," was his only comment.

Millie had another shock before they reached the town. She saw what she thought was a second man, on horseback this time, coming towards them. Marlow, she thought, was evidently a place to live in. But the figure was only that of Miss Oliver in corduroy trousers, riding astride.

7

Fate had dropped the Goslings into Buckinghamshire to fulfil their destiny. They had been led to Marlow by a casual direction, here and there, after the first propulsion of Blanche's instinct had sent them into the country beyond Harrow. And fate, doubtless with some incomprehensible purpose of its own in view, had quietly decided that in Marlow they were to stay. They had been dropped at a season when, for the first time in the long three months' history of the community, there was a shortage of labour; and Blanche and Millie, browned by exposure and generally improved by their first six days of healthy life, were quite acceptable additions to the population at that moment. As for Mrs Isaacson, a lady of sufficient initiative and force of character to require no kindly interposition of Providence on her behalf, she arranged her own future as an expert of farm management, and incidentally as the Goslings' housemate. Mrs Isaacson was a burr that would stick anywhere for a time. She displayed an unexpected and highly specialized knowledge of the management of farms, when confronted with the expert Miss Oliver who was far too embarrassed to press her questions home. The casual remarks of Aunt May and her helpers had been retained in Mrs Isaacson's brilliant memory and she displayed her knowledge to the best possible advantage, filling the gaps with irrelevant volubility, gesture and histrionic struggles with the English language, which proved suddenly inadequate to the expression of these recondities that the German would have so aptly expressed. It was inferred that in her native Bavaria, Mrs Isaacson had farmed in the grand style.

Only Mrs Gosling, useless and ineligible, remained for consideration, and she for once took a firm line of her own, and defied the committee, Marlow generally, and the negligible remainder of the cosmos, to alter her determination.

The home at which they had finally arrived did not suit her. The tiny cottage of three rooms in the little street that runs down to the town landing stage had no lace curtains in the front window, no suites of furniture, no hall to save the discreet caller from stepping through the front door straight into the single living-room, no accumulation of dustable ornaments, not even a strip of carpet or linoleum to cover the nakedness of a bricked floor. It was not civilized; it was not decent according to the refined standards of Wisteria Grove; it was an impossible place for any respectable woman to live in, and Mrs Gosling, with unexpected force of character, chose the obvious alternative. She did not, however, make any announcement of her determination; she was wrapped in a speculative depression that found no relief in words. She had been so ordered, hoisted, dragged and bumped through the detested country during the past six days that all show of authority had been taken from her. It may be that deep in her own mind she cherished a sullen and enduring resentment against her daughters, and had vowed to take the last and unanswerable revenge of which humanity is capable. But outwardly she preserved that air of incomprehension which had marked her during the last stages of their journey, and committed herself to no statement of the enormous plan which must have been forming in her mind.

When they took her into the small, brick-paved room and deposited her temporarily on a wooden-seated chair, while they unpacked what remained to them in the accursed trolly, Mrs Gosling took one brief but comprehensive survey of her naked surroundings.

"She's a bit touched, isn't she?" whispered Millie to her sister. "Do you think she understands where we are or what we're doing?"

Blanche shook her head. "I expect she'll be all right in a day or two," she ventured, "It's the sun."

The two girls, stirred to a new outlook on life by the extraordinary experiences of the past months, were on the threshold of diverse adventures. After the toil and anxiety of their tramp through inhospitable country, and the hazard of the open air, this reception into a community and settlement into a permanent shelter afforded a relief which was too unexpected to be qualified as yet by criticism, or any comparison with past glories. They were young and plastic, and to each of them the future seemed to hold some promise; to them the silence and immobility of their mother could only be evidence of impaired faculties.

"We must get her to bed," said Blanche.

Even when Mrs Gosling asked with perfect relevance, "Are we going to stop 'ere, Blanche?" they humoured her with evasive replies. "Well, for a day or two, perhaps," and "Look here, don't you worry about that. We're going to put you to bed."

Her head dropped again and she fell back into her moody silence. Doubtless she meditated on the many wrongs her daughters had done her, and wondered why she should have been brought out to die in this wilderness?

During the nine days that elapsed before her plan matured, she made no further comment on her surroundings. She lay in the upstairs room, sleeping little, with no desire ever again to face the terror of a world which demanded a new mode of thought. Unconsciously she had adopted Blanche's phrase, "Everything's different," but to her the message was one of doom, she could not live in a different world.

And Blanche on her side was puzzled at her mother's apathy and said, "I can't understand it." Yet both the changed conditions and Mrs Gosling's unchangeable habit were fundamental things.

XVIII--MODES OF EXPRESSION

1

In Marlow that year harvesting and thrashing were carried on simultaneously. August was very dry, and the greater part of the corn was never stacked at all. Thrale took his engines into the fields, and the shocks were loaded on to carts and fed directly into the thrasher. This method entailed some disadvantages, chief among them the retarding of the actual harvest-work, but on the whole it probably economized labour. The scheme would doubtless have been impracticable in the days of small private ownership, but it worked well in this instance, favoured as it was by the drought.

The saving of labour during those six weeks of furious toil was a matter of the first importance. The work, indeed, was too heavy for many of the women who were unable to stand the physical strain of hoisting sheaves from the waggons into the thrasher; and the sacks of grain proved so unmanageable that Thrale had to devise a makeshift hoist for loading them into the carts. In Marlow, at least, machinery was still triumphant, and the committee sighed their relief in the sentence: "I don't know what we should have done without Jasper Thrale." Nevertheless it is quite certain that they would have done without him if it had not been for that fortuitous meeting in Maidenhead.

For Thrale there was no rest possible, even when the last field had been cleared and the last clumsily-built stack of straw or unthrashed corn erected. Besides the necessity for some form of thatching--or, failing efficiency in that direction, for completing the thrashing operations--he had to turn his attention to the immensely difficult problem of turning the grain into flour. He knew vaguely that the grain ought to be cleaned and conditioned before grinding, and that the actual separation of the constituents of the berry was a matter of importance; but he had no practical knowledge of the various operations, and in this matter Miss Oliver was quite unable to help him.

The mill beside the lock presented itself as an intricate and enormously detailed problem which must be solved by a concentrated effort of induction. The only person who appeared to be of real assistance to him was Eileen, and she was apt to tire and fall into despair when the detail of involved and often concealed machinery baffled them for hour after hour. Nevertheless Thrale solved this problem also. His first concern was for a head of water. The weirs had not been touched since the beginning of May, and the river was very low, but by mid-September there was enough water to work for a few hours every day, and, despite endless mistakes and setbacks, the mill was turning out a sufficient supply of fairly respectable looking flour.

Thrale had that wonderful masculine faculty for thus applying himself to a mechanical problem, and, like his predecessors in mechanical invention, it was the problem and not any promise of future reward which interested him. He became absorbed for the time in that problem of grinding corn, grudging the hours he was obliged to devote to other activities; and when he felt the throb of life running through the mill, saw the women he had taught attending each to their own appointed task in the economy, and felt the touch of the fine, smooth flour between his fingers, he needed no thanks from the committee nor promise of independence to reward him for his labour. The sight of this thing he had created was sufficient recompense. He loved this beautiful efficient toy that changed wheat into flour, and oats into meal, it was his to father and to fight for; the perfect child of his ingenuity and toil.

But if Thrale's time was tremendously occupied the women found that they had more opportunities for leisure after harvest. They were still employed in field and garden, and there was still much to be done, but their hours were shorter and the work seemed light in contrast with the heroic labour that had been necessary at the harvest.

And with this first coming of comparative ease, this first opportunity for reflection since the terrible plague had thrust upon them the necessity for fierce and unremitting effort to produce the essentials of life, women began to express themselves in their various ways. Aspirations and emotions that had been crushed by the fatigues of physical labour began to revive; personal inclinations, jealousies and resentments became manifest in the detail of intercourse; old prejudices, religious and social, once more assumed an aspect of importance in the interactions of individuals. There was a faint stir in the community, the first sign of a trouble which was steadily to increase as winter laid its bond upon the storehouses of earth.

2

The two Goslings, working only six or seven hours a day in the mill during the latter part of September, found plenty of time for chatter and speculation. They, and more especially Blanche, had shown themselves capable workers in the harvest field, but when hands had been required in his mill Thrale had chosen the Goslings and those whom he considered less adapted to field work; and among them Mrs Isaacson and a member of the committee, Miss Jenkyn, the schoolmistress. (The education problem was in abeyance for the time being. The children had run wild for three months, and been subject only to the discipline of their mothers, but it was understood that the children were to receive attention when the winter brought opportunity.)

Blanche soon distinguished herself as a picked worker in this sphere. Her intelligence was of a somewhat more masculine quality in some respects than that of the average woman; she was slower, more detailed, more logical in her methods. And now that those male characteristics--so often deplored by women in the days before the plague--had been withdrawn from the flux of life, it had become evident that they had been an essential part of the whole, if only a part. Masculine characteristics were at a premium in Marlow that autumn, and as a natural consequence were being rated at an ever higher value. There was a tendency among some women to become more male....

Millie, however, was not among the progressives. She was not gifted intellectually; she had no swift intuitions--such as Eileen had--which enabled her to comprehend her work; she was naturally indolent, and all her emotions came to her through sensation.

When she was put to work in the mill she was secretly elated. She did not believe the stories told of Jasper Thrale's insensibility to feminine attractions, and if she believed those other stories which coupled his name with that of Lady Eileen, Millie was of opinion that such an entanglement was not necessarily final.

The first week of her association with Thrale in the work of the mill brought disillusionment.

When she looked up from her work and caught his eye as he passed her, he either stared coldly or stopped and asked in a businesslike, austere voice whether she wanted assistance. Such intimations should have been sufficient, but in this thing, at least, Millie was persistent. She thought that he did not understand--men were proverbially stupid in these matters. So she waited for an opportunity and within ten days one was presented.

A hesitation in some of the machinery she overlooked provided sufficient excuse for calling the head engineer. She looked down the step-ladder which communicated with the floor below and called hesitatingly, "Oh! Please. Mr Thrale."

He heard her and looked up, "What is it?" he asked.

"Something gone wrong," she said blushing, "I've stopped the rollers, but I don't know----"

"All right, I'm coming," he returned, and presently joined her.

"By the way," he remarked as he began to examine the machine, "we don't say 'Mister,' now. I thought you'd learnt that."

Millie simpered. "It sounds so familiar not to," she said.

"Rubbish," grunted Thrale. "You can call me 'engineer,' I suppose?"

"Now, look here," he continued, "do you see this hopper in here?"

She came close to him and peered into the machine.

"It gets clogged, do you see?" said Thrale, "and when the meal stutters you've just got to put your hand in and clear it. Understand?"

"I think so," hesitated Millie. She was leaning against him and her body was trembling with delicious excitement. Almost unconsciously she pressed a little closer.

Thrale suddenly drew back. "Do you understand?" he said harshly.

"Ye-yes, I think so," returned Millie; and she straightened herself, looked up at him for a moment and then dropped her eyes, blushing.

"Very well," said Thrale, "and here's another piece of advice for you. If you want to stay in the mill keep your attention on your work. You're a man now, for all intents and purposes; you've got a man's work to do, and you must keep your mind on it. If there's any foolishness you go out into the turnip fields. You won't have another warning," he concluded as he turned and left her.

"Beast," muttered Millie when she was alone. She was shaken with furious anger. "I hate you, you silly stuck up thing," she whispered fiercely shaking with passion. "Oh, I wish you only knew how I hate you. I won't touch your beastly machines again. I'd sooner a million times be out in the turnip field than in the same mill with you, you stuck up beast. I won't work, I won't do a thing, I'll--I'll----"

For a time she was hysterical.

Blanche coming down from the floor above found her sister tearing at her hair.

"Good heavens, Mill, what's up?" she asked.

Millie had passed through the worst stages of her seizure by then, and she dropped her hands. "I dunno," she said. "It's this beastly mill, I suppose."

"I like it," returned Blanche.

"Oh, you," said Millie, full of scorn for Blanche's frigidity. "You ought to have been a man, you ought."

"I dunno what's come to you," was Blanche's comment.

3

It was maturity that had come to Millie. Her new life of air and physical exercise had set the blood running in her veins. In the Wisteria Grove days she had had an anæmic tendency; the limited routine of her existence and all the suppressions of her narrow life had retarded her development. Now she was suddenly ripe. Two months of sun and air had brought superabundant vitality, and the surplus had become the most important factor in her existence. She found no outlet for her new vigour in the work of the mill. Something within her was crying out for joy. She wanted to find expression.

There were many other young women in Marlow that autumn in similar case, and a rumour was current among them that this was a favourable time for crossing the hill. It was said that the lord of Wycombe was seeking new favourites.

Millie heard the rumour and tossed her head superciliously.

"Let him come here. I'd give him a piece of my mind," she said.

"He doesn't come 'ere," returned the gossip. "'E's afeard of our Mr Thrale."

"Oh! Jasper Thrale!" said Millie. "That fellow from Wycombe could knock his head off in no time."

The gossip was doubtful.

Millie was incapable of formulating a plan in this connexion, but she was seized with a desire for spending the still September evenings in the open air, and always something drew her towards the hill at Handy Cross. That way lay interest and excitement. There was a wonderful fascination in going as far as the top of the descent into Wycombe.

Usually she joined one or two other young women in these excursions. It was understood between them that they went "for fun," and they would laugh and scream when they reached the dip past the farm, pretend to push each other down the slope, and cry out suddenly: "He's coming! Run!"

But one afternoon, some ten days after Jasper Thrale had threatened her with the turnip field, Millie went alone.

She had left work early. The rain had not come yet, and Thrale was becoming anxious with regard to the shortage of water. He had the sluices of Marlow and Hedsor weirs closed, and had opened the sluices of the weirs above as far as Hambledon, but so little water was coming down that he decided to work shorter hours for the present.

Blanche had stayed on at the mill to help with repairs. She was rapidly developing into a capable engineer. So Millie, whose only service was that of machine minder, found herself alone and unoccupied.

Every one else seemed to be working. Her friends of the evening excursions were mostly in the fields on the Henley side of the town.

Millie decided she would lie down on the bed and go to sleep for a bit; but even before she came to the cottage she changed her mind. It was a deliciously warm, still afternoon.

Almost automatically she took the road towards Little Marlow; a desire for adventure had overtaken her. Why, she argued, shouldn't she go into Wycombe? There were plenty of other women there. She would be quite safe. She only wanted to see what the place was like.

Her consciousness of perfect rectitude lasted until she reached the dip beyond Handy Cross. Farther than this she had not ventured before. Some mystery lay beyond the turn of the road.

She sat down in the grass by the wayside and called herself a fool, but she was afraid to go further. She and those friends of hers had made this place the entrance to a terrible and fascinating beyond. She remembered how they had feared to stay there in the failing light, daring each other to remain there alone after sunset. There was nothing to be afraid of, she said to herself; and yet she was afraid.

She was hot with her long climb, and the place was quite deserted. She decided to take down her hair to cool herself.

Curiously, she looked upon this simple act as deliciously daring and in some way wicked. She cast half-fearful glances at the green girt shadows of the descending road, as she shook out the masses of her hair. "If anyone should come!" she thought. "If he should come...!"

She giggled nervously, and shivered.

But as time passed, and no one came, she began to lose her fear, and presently she lay full length on the grass, and stared up into the pale blue dome of the sky until her eyes ached and she had to close them. The deep hush of the still afternoon enveloped her in a great calm.

For a time she slept peacefully, and then she dreamed that she was rushing through the air, and that some one chased her. She wanted desperately to be captured, but it was ordained that she must fly, and she flew incredibly fast. She flew through the sunlight into darkness, and awoke to find that some one was standing between her and the sun.

She lay still, paralysed with terror. She bitterly regretted her coming. She would have given ten years of life to be safe home in Marlow.

"Now, where've I seen you before?" asked Sam Evans....

It was nearly dark when Blanche accosted a knot of women in the High Street with a question as to whether they had seen anything of her sister.

One of the women laughed sneeringly. "Ah! She went over the hill this afternoon," she said. "We were in the fields that side, and saw her go."

Blanche's face burned. "She hasn't! I know she hasn't!" she blurted out. "She isn't one of that sort."

The woman laughed again.

"She's one of the lucky ones," another woman remarked. "You can expect her back in a week or two's time."

4

On the same evening that Millie crossed the hill, Lady Eileen Ferrar encountered the spirit of passion in another shape.

The thought of a lonely bathe tempted her, and she crossed the river, made her way through deserted Bisham, and back to the stream along a narrow, overhung lane beyond Bisham Abbey.

The sun had set, but when she came out from the trees there was light in the sky and on the water. Overhead a few wisps of cirrus, sailing in the far heights of air, still caught the direct rays of the sun. Eileen paused on the bank, rejoicing in the glow of colour about her; but as she gazed, the little fleet of salmon-tinted clouds were engulfed in the great earth-shadow, and the delicate crisp rose-leaves were transfigured into flat stipples of steel grey.

A slight chill had come into the air, but the water was deliciously soft and warm. Eileen swam a couple of hundred yards up-stream, towards the gloom of shadows that obscured the course of the river. The after-glow was fading now, and though the surface of the water seemed to catch some reflection of light from an unknown source, the near distance loomed dark and mysterious. She trod water for a few moments, but could not decide whether the river turned to right or left. To all appearances, it terminated abruptly fifty yards ahead....

A new sound was forcing itself upon her attention--a low, steady booming. She stopped swimming, and, keeping herself afloat by slow, silent movements of hands and feet under water, she listened attentively. The dull boom seemed changed into a low, ceaseless moan.

She remembered then the recently opened sluices of Temple Weir, but quite suddenly she was aware of fear. She thought she saw a movement among the reeds by the bank. She thought she heard laughter and the thin pipe of a flute.

Were the old gods coming back to witness the death of man, as they had witnessed his birth? Now that machinery and civilization were being re-absorbed into the nature-spirit from which they had been wrung by the force of man's devilish and alien intelligence, were the old things returning for one mad revel before the creatures of their sport disappeared for ever, these representatives of a species which had failed to hold its own in the struggle for existence?

Night was coming up like a shadow, and in the east a red, enormous moon was rising, coming not to dissipate, but to enhance the mysteries of the dark, coming to countenance the wild and blind the eyes of man.

Eileen, almost motionless, was floating down with the drift of the sluggish stream. She was afraid to intrude upon the natural sounds of the night, the stealthy trickle of the river, and the furtive rustle of secret movement whose origin she could not guess. And again she thought that she heard the trembling reed of a distant flute.

She touched bottom near her landing-place, and waded out of the river, crouching, afraid even in the black shadow of the trees to exhibit the white column of her slim body. She dried and dressed hastily, and when she felt again the touch of her familiar clothes about her, she knew that she was safe from the wiles of nymph or satyr. She had come out of the half-world that interposes between man and Nature; her clothes made her invisible to the earth-gods, and hid them from her knowledge.

But she was still trembling and afraid. The flesh had terrors great as those of the spirit.

A little uncertain wind was coming out of the south-west, and the trees were stirred now and again into hushed whisperings. A dead leaf brushed her face in falling, and she started back, thrusting at an imaginary enemy with nervously agitated hands.

The thought of her remoteness from life terrified her. She was alone, face to face with implacable, brutal Nature. Man, the boastful, full of foolish pride, was vanishing from the earth. He had been an alien, ever out of place, defiling and corrupting the order of growth. Now he was beaten and a fugitive. All around her, the representative of this vile destructive species, was the slow, persistent hatred of the earth, which longed to be at peace again. There was no god favourable to man, now that he was dying; the gods of man's creation would perish with him. Only a few women were left to realize that they were strangers in the world of Nature which hated them. The world was not theirs, had never been theirs; they were only some horrible, unnatural fungus that had disfigured the Earth for a time....

She moved cautiously and slowly under the darkness of the trees, and even when she came back to the road she could not shake off her fear. On her right she could see the black cliff of the woods transfigured by the light of the moon. In the day she knew them for woods; now they were strange and threatening; they menaced her with invasion. She knew that they would march down from the hills and swarm across the valley. In a hundred, two hundred years, Marlow would be a few heaps of brick and stone lost in the heart of the forest.

Ashamed of her race, she hurried on stealthily towards the bridge.

But before she reached it, she heard the sound of a firm, defiant step coming towards her. She paused and listened, and her fear fell from her. In the old days she would have feared man more than Nature, feared robbery or assault, but now, man was united in a common cause; the sound of humanity was the sound of a friend.

"Hullo!" she called, and the voice of Jasper Thrale answered. "Hullo! Who's that?" he said.

"Me--Eileen," she replied. "I've been for a bathe."

He paused opposite her, and they looked at one another.

"Jolly night," he remarked.

"I've seen the great god Pan," said Eileen. "Those sailors in the Ionian Sea were misinformed. He's not dead."

"Why should Pan die and Dionysus live?" returned Thrale. "I hear that Dionysus has claimed one of our hands, by the way."

"Millie?"

"Yes."

"Are you angry?"

"Yes. Not with Millie. If you saw Pan, why shouldn't she see Dionysus? No, I'm angry with the Jenkyn woman. She's saying that we ought not to have Millie back if she wants to come."

"How silly!" commented Eileen.

"Oh! if that were all!" replied Thrale. "The real trouble is that the Jenkyn woman is proselytizing. She wants to revive Church services and Sunday observances. We're going to have a split before the winter's over, and all the old misunderstandings and antagonisms back again."

"Why, of course we are," returned Eileen, after a pause. "We are going to divide into those that are afraid and those that aren't. It's fear that's got hold of us, now we've time to think. It's all about us to-night; I've seen it, and Millie has seen it; and Clara Jenkyn and all those who are going with her have seen it; and we've all got to find our own way out." She hesitated for a moment, and then said: "And what about you? Have you seen it?"

"Yes, for the first time. Within the last ten minutes," said Thrale.

The moon was above the trees now, and she could see his face clearly. "Have you?" she asked. "I can't picture it. It can't be Pan or Dionysus, or fear of the Earth or of humanity. No; and it can't be the most terrible of all, the fear of an idea. What are you afraid of?"

"I'm afraid of you," said Thrale, and he turned away quickly and hurried on in the direction of the river.

"I did see Pan," affirmed Eileen, as she returned, happy and unafraid, towards Marlow.

5

That mood of the night had suggested to Eileen the idea of a single cause which seemed sufficient to account for the revivalist tendencies of Miss Jenkyn and certain other women in Marlow. Fear was presented as a simple explanation, and Eileen, like many other philosophers who had preceded her, was too eager for the simple and inclusive explanation.

At first the revivalist tendency was feeble and circumscribed. Twenty or thirty women met in the schoolroom and talked and prayed by the light of a single, tenderly nursed oil-lamp. The absence of any minister kept them back at first; the less earnest needed some concrete embodiment of religion in the form of a black coat and white tie.

But when the rain came in early October, came and persisted; when the beeches, instead of flaring into scarlet, grew sodden and dead; when the threat of flood grew even more imminent, and the distraction of physical toil almost ceased, this little nucleus of women was joined by many new recruits, and their comparatively harmless prostrations, lamentations and worshippings of the abstract, developed into an attempt to enforce a moral law upon the community.

Millie Gosling, returning to Marlow in mid-October, gave the religionists splendid opportunity for a first demonstration.

Millie returned with a bold face and a shrinking heart. She had fled from Wycombe because she could not meet the taunts of the women who had so lately envied her as she rode, prime favourite for a time, in the Dionysian landau. A great loneliness had come over her after she was dethroned; she needed sympathy, and she hoped that Blanche might be made to understand. Millie came back from over the hill prepared with a long tale of excuses.

She found her sister perfectly complacent.

Blanche was a fervent disciple of Jasper Thrale and machinery, and Thrale had anticipated Millie's return and in some ways prepared for it. At odd moments he had preached the new gospel, the tenets of which Blanche had begun to formulate for herself.

"It's no good going back to the old morality for a precedent," had been the essential argument used by Thrale; "we have to face new conditions. If a man is only to have one wife now, the race will decline, probably perish. It is a woman's duty to bear children."

Eileen, Blanche and a few other young women had wondered that he made no application of the argument to his own case, but his opinion carried more weight by reason of his continence. Even Miss Jenkyn could not urge that his opinion was framed to defend his own mode of life, and, failing that casuistical support, she had to fall back on the second alternative of her kind, namely, to assert that this preacher of antagonistic opinions was either the devil in person or possessed by him--a line of defence which took longer to establish than the simple accusation of expediency.

So Millie, returning one wet October afternoon, found that no excuses were required of her. Blanche welcomed her and asked no questions, and Jasper Thrale and Eileen came to the little cottage in St Peter's Street at sunset and treated the prodigal Millie with a new and altogether delightful friendliness. It was understood that she would return at once to her work in the Mill. But in the school-house opposite another reception was being prepared for her.

The more advanced of the Jenkynites were for taking immediate action. Prayer, worship, and the acknowledgment of personal sin fell into the background that evening, Millie appeared not as a brand to be saved from the burning, but as an abandoned and evil creature who must be thrust out of the community if any member of it was to save her soul alive. Every one of these furious religionists could stand up and declare that she was innocent of the commission of this particular sin of Millie's, and every one was willing and anxious to cast the first stone.

The meeting simmered, and at last boiled over into St Peter's Street. A band of more than a dozen rigidly virtuous and ecstatically Christian women beat at the door of the Goslings' cottage. They had come to denounce sin and thrust the sinner out of the community with physical violence. Each of them in her own heart thought of herself as the bride of Christ.

The door was opened to them by Jasper Thrale.

"We have come to cast out the evil one!" cried Miss Jenkyn in a high emotional voice.

"What are you talking about?" asked Thrale.

"She shall be cast forth from our midst!" shrilled Miss Jenkyn; and her supporters raised a horrible screaming cry of agreement.

"Cast her forth!" they cried, finding full justification for their high pitch of emotion in the use of Biblical phrase.

"Cast forth your grandmother!" replied Thrale calmly. "Get back to your homes, and don't be foolish."

"He is possessed of the devil!" chanted Miss Jenkyn. "The Lord has called upon us to vindicate his honour and glory. This man, too, must not be suffered to dwell in the congregation."

"Down with him! down with him!" assented the little crowd, now so exalted with the glory of their common purpose that they were ready for martyrdom.

Miss Jenkyn was an undersized, withered little spinster of forty-five, and physically impotent; but, drunk with the fervour of her emotion, and encouraged by the sympathy of her followers and the fury of her own voice, she flung herself fiercely upon the calm figure of Jasper Thrale. Her thwarted self-expression had found an outlet. She desired the blood of Millie Gosling and Jasper Thrale with the same intensity that women had once desired a useless vote.

Jasper Thrale put out a careless hand and pushed her back into the arms of the women behind her; but she was up again instantly, and, backed by the crowd, who, encouraging themselves by shrill screams of "Cast them forth!" were now thrusting forward into the narrow doorway, she renewed the assault with all the fierce energy of a struggling kitten.

"I shall lose my temper in a minute," said Thrale, as he took a step forward and, bracing himself against the door frame, drove the women back with vigorous thrusts of his powerful arms.

To lose his temper, indeed, seemed the only way of escape; to give way to berserk rage, and so to injure these muscularly feeble creatures that they would be unable to continue the struggle. But the babble of screaming voices was bringing other helpers to his aid, chief among them Lady Durham, and her cold, clear voice fell on the hysterical Jenkynites like a douche of cold water.

"Clara Jenkyn, what are you doing?" asked Elsie Durham.

"Millie Gosling must be cast forth," wavered the little dishevelled woman; but this time there was no reponse from her disciples.

"That is a question for the committee," replied Elsie Durham. "Now, please go to your homes, all of you."

Miss Jenkyn tried to explain.

Elsie Durham walked into the cottage and shut the door.

Inside, Eileen and Blanche were trying to reassure the trembling Millie. Outside, the Jenkynites were suffering a more brutal martyrdom than that they had sought. The tongues of the new arrivals, the fuller-blooded, more physically vigorous members of the community, were making sport of these brides of Christ.

6

But the women of Marlow were to learn afresh the old lesson that religious enthusiasm is not to be killed by ridicule or oppression. Jasper Thrale understood and appreciated that fact, but the policy he suggested could not be approved by the committee.

"This emotion is a fundamental thing," he said to Lady Durham, "and history will show you that persecution will intensify it to the point of martyrdom. There is only one way to combat it. Give it room. Let them do as they will. The heat of the fire is too fierce for you to damp it down; you only supply more fuel. Fan it, throw it open to the air, and it will burn itself harmlessly out."

Elsie Durham shrugged her shoulders. "That's all very well," she said. "I believe it's perfectly true. But they make you the bone of contention. If it were only Millie Gosling--well--she might go. We could find a place for her--at Fingest, perhaps. But we can't spare you."

"I don't know why not," returned Thrale. "I never intended to stay indefinitely. You can carry on now without me, and I can fulfil my original intention and push on into the West."

"My dear man! we can't, and we won't!" said Elsie Durham. "You are indispensable."

"No one is indispensable," replied Thrale.

"Bother your metaphysics, Jasper!" was the answer. "We are not going to let you go. 'We' is the majority of Marlow, not only the committee. We'll fight the fanatics somehow."

The majority referred to by Elsie Durham was fairly compact in relation to this issue of retaining Jasper Thrale, and included the two greater of the three recognizable parties in the community. Of these three, the greatest was the moderate party, made up of Episcopalians, Nonconformists and a few Roman Catholics, who found relief for their emotion one day in seven either in the Town Hall or Marlow Church, in which places services and meetings were held--the former by certain approved individuals, notably Elsie Durham and the widow of the late Rector of Marlow. The second party in order of size included all those who either denied the Divine revelation or were careless of all religious matters. The third party--the Jenkynites, as they were dubbed by their opponents--had drawn their numbers from every old denomination. The Jenkynites were differentiated from the other two parties by certain physical differences. For instance, the Jenkynites numbered few members under the age of thirty-five; very few of them were fat, and very few of them were capable field workers; they were hungry-eyed, and had a certain air of disappointed eagerness about them; they looked as though they had for ever sought something, and, finding it, had remained unsatisfied. In all, there were some seventeen women who might have been regarded as quite true to type, and about this vivid nucleus were clustered nearly a hundred other women, many of whom exhibited some characteristic mark of the same type, while the remainder, perhaps 40 per cent of the whole body, had joined the party out of bravado, to seek excitement, or for some purpose of expediency.

Among the last was Mrs Isaacson, who was the ultimate cause of the Jenkynite defeat.

Ever since she had passed her examination in farm supervision, Mrs Isaacson had exhibited an increasing tendency to rest on her laurels. She had grown very stout again during her stay in Marlow, and complained of severe heart trouble. The least exertion brought on violent palpitation accompanied by the most alarming symptoms. The poor lady would gasp for breath, press her hands convulsively to a spot just below her left breast, and roll up her eyes till they presented only a terrifying repulsive rim of blood-streaked white, if the least exertion were demanded from her, and yet she would persist in the effort until absolutely on the verge of collapse. "No, no! I must work!" she would insist. "It iss not fair to the others that I do no work. I will try once more. It iss only fair."

At times they had to insist that she should return home and rest.

And as the winter closed in, Mrs Isaacson's rests became more and more protracted. Jasper Thrale grinned and said: "I suppose we've got to keep her"; but there was a feeling among the other members of the committee that they were creating an undesirable precedent. Mrs Isaacson's example was being followed by other women who preferred rest to work.

Heart weakness was becoming endemic in Marlow.

Then came the news that Mrs Isaacson had joined the Jenkynites. The seventeen received her somewhat doubtfully at first, but the body of the sect were in favour of her reception. Possibly they were rather proud of counting one more fat woman among them; the average member was so noticeably thin.

Even the seventeen were satisfied within a fortnight of Mrs Isaacson's conversion. She had a wonderful fluency, and she said the right and proper things in her own peculiar English--a form of speech which had a certain piquancy and interest and afforded relief and variety after the somewhat stereotyped formulas of the seventeen.

But early in December, before the floods came, Mrs Isaacson was convicted of a serious offence against the community. One of the committee's first works had been to store certain priceless valuables. Tea, coffee, sugar, soap, candles, salt, baking powder, wine and other irreplaceable commodities had been locked up in one of the bank premises. In all, they had a fairly large store, upon which they had hardly drawn as yet. It was not intended to hoard these luxuries indefinitely. After harvest a dole had been made to all the workers as acknowledgment of their services, and it had been decided to hold another festival on Christmas Day.

Mrs Isaacson, with unsuspected energy, had burglariously entered this storehouse of wealth. She had found an accessible window at the rear, which she had succeeded in forcing, and, despite her bulk and the delicate state of her heart, she had effected an entrance and stolen tea, sugar, candles and whisky.

She was, indeed, finally caught in the act; but her thefts would probably have escaped notice--she worked after dark, and with a cunning and caution that would have placed her high in the profession before the plague--had it not been for Blanche.

7

It seems that Mrs Isaacson had formed the habit of staying up in the evening. She pleaded that she could not sleep during the early hours of the night, which was not surprising in view of the fact that she slept much during the day; and as she was diligent in picking up or begging sufficient wood to maintain the fire, there was no reason why Blanche and Millie should offer any objection. Thrale had rigged up a dynamo at the mill now to provide artificial light, and the girls' hours of work were so prolonged that they were glad to get to bed at half-past seven. By eight o'clock Mrs Isaacson evidently counted herself safe from all interruption.

She might have continued her enjoyment of luxury undiscovered throughout the winter if Blanche had not suffered from toothache.

She had been in bed and asleep nearly two hours when her dreams of discomfort merged into a consciousness of actual pain. She sighed and pressed her cheek into the pillows, made agonizing exploration with her tongue, and tried to go to sleep again. Possibly she might have succeeded had not that unaccountable smell of whisky obtruded itself upon her senses.

At first she thought the house was on fire. That had always been her one fear in leaving Mrs Isaacson alone; and she sat up in bed and sniffed vigorously. "Funny," she murmured; "it smells like--like plum pudding." The analogy was probably suggested to her by the odour of burning brandy.

She got up and opened the door of the bedroom.

Mrs Isaacson slept on a sort of glorified landing, and when Blanche stepped outside her own door she could see at once by the light of a watery full moon that her lodger had not yet come to bed.

The smell of the spirit was stronger on the landing, and Blanche, forgetting her toothache in the excitement of the moment, stole quietly down the short flight of crooked stairs. The door giving on to the living-room was latched, but there were two convenient knot-holes, and through one of them she saw Mrs Isaacson seated by the fire drinking hot tea. On the table stood an open whisky bottle and two lighted wax candles.

Blanche was thunderstruck. Tea, whisky and candles were inexplicable things. The thought of witchcraft obtruded itself, and so fascinated her that she stood on the stairs gazing through the knothole until a sudden rigour reminded her that she was deadly cold.

She did not interrupt the orgy. She crept back to bed, and after much difficulty awakened Millie.

The sound of their voices must have alarmed Mrs Isaacson, for the girls presently heard her stumbling upstairs. They stopped their discussion then, and Blanche's toothache being mysteriously cured by her excitement, they were soon asleep again.

Neither of the girls spoke of their discovery to anyone the next day, but Blanche returned to the cottage at half-past four, when Mrs Isaacson was at a meeting over the way, and explored her bedroom. She found a small store of tea, sugar and candles under the mattress--the whisky bottle had disappeared--and so came to an understanding of Mrs Isaacson's self-sacrificing insistence that she should perform all work connected with her own sleeping-place--it could hardly be called a room.

After consultation with Millie, Blanche decided that she must inform Jasper Thrale of the contraband.

"She's been stealing, of course," he said. "I suppose we shall have to bring it home to her." But he laughed at Blanche's indignation.

"She's stealing from us!" said Blanche, who had developed a fine sense of her duty towards and interest in the community.

"Oh, yes! you're quite right," said Thrale. "I'll inform the committee--at least, the non-Jenkynites."

The five non-Jenkynites were furious.

"We must make an example," Elsie Durham said. "It isn't that we shall miss what the Isaacson woman has taken--or will take. It's the question of precedent. This is where we are facing the beginning of law--isn't it? Somebody has to protect the members of the community against themselves. If one steals and goes unpunished, another will steal. We shall have the women divided into stealers and workers."

"What are you going to do with her?" asked Thrale.

"Turn her out," replied Elsie Durham.

"The Jenkynites won't let her go," said Thrale raising the larger question.

"We shall see," said Elsie Durham, "But that reminds me that we must catch the woman flagrante delicto; we must have no quibbles about the facts."

Thrale agreed with the wisdom of this policy, but refused to take any part in either the detection or the prosecution of Mrs Isaacson. "They'll say its a put-up job if I have anything to do with it," he argued.

8

The Jenkynites blazed when Rebecca Isaacson was finally caught and denounced. The culprit, when caught in the act of entering the bank premises had made a slight error of judgment, and pleaded the excuse that she was a sleepwalker and quite unconscious of what she was doing; but she afterwards adopted a sounder line of defence. She made full confession to the seventeen, pleaded extravagant penitence with all the necessary references to the blood of the Lamb, and displayed all the well-known signs that she would become fervent in well-doing after the ensanguined ablutions had been metaphorically performed.

The Jenkynites were enraptured with so real a case of sin. They had been compelled to content themselves with so many minor failures from grace that the performances were becoming slightly monotonous.

The "Sister Rebecca" case was refreshingly real and genuine, and they meant to make the most of it. Also, this case gave them occasion to assert themselves once more against the opinions of the community.

It must not be supposed that the seventeen deliberately adopted a practical and apparently promising policy. They were not consciously seeking to obtain civil power as were the priests of the old days before the plague. The seventeen had no sense of the State as represented by the community; they were without question perfectly sincere in their beliefs and actions. Their fault, if it can be so described, was their inability to adapt themselves to their conditions. They were as unchangeable as the old lady who had died sooner than be permanently separated from the glories of a house in Wisteria Grove. She and the seventeen and many other women in Marlow were demonstrating that rigidity of opinion is detrimental to the interests of the growing State. The same proposition had been clearly demonstrated by a few exceptional individuals in the old days, but progress was so slow, the property owners so content, and the average of mankind so intensely conservative, that their arguments received no attention. For every man who believed in the broad principle of maintaining an open mind, there were ten thousand who were quite incapable of putting the principle into practice. With these women in Marlow the conditions were completely changed. Moreover, women are by nature more broad-minded than men in practical affairs. Where intuition rather than the hard-and-fast methods of an intellectual logic is being brought into play, new and wonderful possibilities of adaptation may enter the domain of politics.

The Jenkynites and such individuals as the late Mrs Gosling became suddenly conspicuous in the new conditions. The type that they represent cannot persist. They are the bonds on a vigorous and increasing growth; the tree will grow and burst away all inflexible restraints.

In Marlow the new and vigorous growth was the sense of the community. The majority of the women were realizing, consciously or unconsciously, that they must work with and for each other. The Jenkynite affair served the committee as a valuable object-lesson.

Mrs Isaacson was free to do as she would while the discussion raged. Imprisonment would have been utterly futile. The committee did not wish to punish her for her offence against common property, they merely wished to rid themselves of an undesirable member and to make public announcement that they would in like manner exclude any other member who proved herself a burden to the community.

The Jenkynites were characteristically unable to comprehend this argument. They had their own definitions of heinous and venial sins, definitions based on ancient precedent, and they counted the fault of Millie Gosling in the former and that of Rebecca Isaacson in the latter category. They were not susceptible to argument. As they saw the problem, no argument was admissible. They had the old law and the old prophets on their side, and maintained that what was true once was true for all time. In their opinion, changed conditions did not affect morality.

If the need for labour had been great, the affair might have been shelved for a time as of less importance than the dominant economic demand which takes precedence of all other problems. But although the floods had not yet come, there was not enough work for all the members of the community, and this comparative idleness reacted upon the importance of the Isaacson case in another and probably more influential direction than the abstract consideration of justice and humanity.

The women had time to talk, and a new and fascinating subject was given them to discuss. And they talked; and their talk ripened into action. The affair Isaacson, which included also the affair Jenkyns, was brought to a climax at a mass meeting in the Town Hall.

It was decided, noisily, but with considerable emphasis, that for the good of the community the Jenkynites must go. The seventeen were specifically indicated, but it was understood that certain of their more advanced adherents would go with them.

The Jenkynites accepted the decision in the spirit of their belief. They were martyrs in a great cause. They would leave this accursed city (their terminology was always Biblical) and cast off its dust from their feet--although the roads were deep in mud at the time. They would go forth to regenerate the world, upheld by their love of truth and their zeal for the Word.

Only Mrs Isaacson dissented, but she was compelled to go with them.

They went forth in the rain, thirty-nine of them in all, exalted with conscious righteousness and faint with enthusiasm. The women of Marlow were kind to them. They turned out and jeered the little procession as it marched out of the town by the Henley Road.

"'Oo stole the tea?" was the most popular taunt, and no doubt the exiles would have preferred that the taunts should have been cast at their faith rather than at the social misdemeanour of an obscure convert. But any form of martyrdom was better than none, and they held their heads high and sang "Glory! glory!" with magnificent fervour.

"I'm sure we've done right," commented Elsie Durham. "But we should never have had all the women with us if there had been no offence against property. That touched them--communal property. I'm not sure that it isn't become almost dearer than personal property."

XIX--ON THE FLOOD

1

From the middle of November onwards, the river had been running nearly bank-high, and so much power was available that Thrale had been considering the possibility of lighting some of the nearer houses by electricity. He had made three journeys to London, and with half a dozen assistants he had rifled two dynamos from the power station just outside Paddington, and had brought back twenty truck-loads of coal.

The dynamos, however, were still in the truck, covered by tarpaulin. Thrale had decided that the luxury of artificial lighting could not be provided until all the grain had been thrashed and milled. The end of that work was now in sight, and the accumulated wealth of flour in Marlow was calculated to be sufficient to last the community for at least twelve months. But before the lighting scheme could be put in hand, a new trouble had threatened.

During the first week of December there was almost continuous rain, and the river began to top its banks, spreading itself over the meadowland below the lock and creeping up the end of St Peter's Street. No serious matter as yet, and a short spell of frost and clear skies followed; but before Christmas heavy rains came again, and Thrale began to grow anxious.

"The weirs down-stream ought to be opened," he explained to Eileen. "They are probably all up; we need never be afraid of shortage here; if we close our own weir we can always hold up all the water we want."

"Is it serious?" she asked.

"Not yet, but it may be," he said, looking up at the sky. "All Marlow might be flooded."

And still the rain fell, and soon the girls had to wade through a foot of water to reach the mill.

"I must go down-stream and open all the weirs," Thrale announced on Christmas Eve. "I've been looking at a steam launch over at the boat-house; it's in quite good condition. I shall bring it up to the town landing-stage to-morrow and get enough coal and food aboard to last a week."

"You're not going alone?" said Eileen.

"No! I must take some one to work the engine and the locks," returned Thrale.

"I'll come!" announced Eileen, with glee.

Thrale shook his head. "You'll have to run this place," he said.

Since that night in September no reference had been made by either of them to his strange revelation of fear. They had worked together as two men might have worked. Neither of them had exhibited the least consciousness of sex. Thrale believed that he had put the fear away from him, and Eileen was content to wait. She was barely twenty.

"Blanche could run the mill," she suggested. "There isn't much to do now."

Thrale turned away from her with a touch of impatience. "Blanche had better come with me," he said.

"I want to come," pleaded Eileen.

"Why?" he asked.

"It'll be sport."

"I don't care to trust Blanche with the mill," he persisted.

"She's every bit as good as I am," was her reply.

He shook his head.

"Oh, look here," said Eileen, "you might let me come, or are you--are you afraid of--of what the women will say?" She was standing by one of the flour-encrusted mill windows and she began to scratch a clean place on it with her nail.

Thrale did not answer for a moment and then he came and stood near her. "What is it?" he asked. "Are you sick of your work here?"

"I shouldn't mind a change," she said, intent on enlarging her peep-hole.

"One forgets that you are women," said Thrale. "I suppose women are never content with work for work's sake."

"If you like," returned Eileen inconsequently. "I can see out now. Why don't we have these windows cleaned sometimes?"

"You can have them done while I'm away," he suggested.

"I'm coming with you," said Eileen.

"Oh! you can come if you like," he said. He thought he was perfectly safe, despite this unusual display of femininity.

"You'll have to run the engine," he concluded.

"Oh! I'll run the engine," she agreed and looked down at her capable, frankly dirty little hands.

2

The weirs at Marlow and Hedsor had been roaring open-mouthed for ten days before Thrale and Eileen began their journey; but the water had been piling up from below and the floods were working back up river. The fact that none of the weirs above Henley was closed had served to protect Marlow in some degree. There were great floods above Sonning, and from Goring to Culham the country was a vast sheet of water. This water, however, only came down comparatively slowly owing to the dammed condition of the main channel, and a greater proportion of it was absorbed. If the upper weirs had been open, Marlow would have been under water by the middle of December.

Not until the launch had been manoeuvred with some difficulty through Boulter's Lock did Thrale begin to realize the full significance of the situation.

He had had very great difficulty first in reaching and second in raising the paddles of the Taplow weir. In one place the force of the flood had broken away the structure, but even with the relief this passage had afforded the pressure of water on the paddles was so great that he had been working for more than two hours before the last valve was opened.

Eileen had been waiting for him with the launch warped up just below the lock where the force of the stream was not so great.

"I don't know whether we shall be able to carry out this job," remarked Thrale when he rejoined her.

"Oh, but we must," she expostulated.

"Do you see what has happened?" he explained. "All the water is piled up below us. We shall probably find the next locks flood-high, which means that we sha'n't be able to open them."

"We must navigate," said Eileen. "Steam round them; shoot the weirs."

"Oh, well," said Thrale, "I'm wondering how far our responsibility goes. If we don't open the river right down to Richmond, we shall only be increasing the flood in the lower reaches, and there may be women living there. After all, Marlow isn't the only place on the river. And there is another thing; we may never get back. It's a risky thing we are proposing to do. No one could swim against this current. If we were upset and carried into a weir, we should be smashed to pieces in no time. Do you think the community can spare us?"

"Bother the community!" replied Eileen.

The community and its activities were already in the background of her mind. Marlow had receded into a little distant place with which she was no longer connected. The world of adventure and romance lay open before her. She wanted only to explore this turbulent river, widened now into a miniature Amazon, from which arose the islands of half-submerged houses and trees that composed the strange archipelago of Maidenhead.

"Oh, well," said Thrale again. "We'll try. It's no use waiting for the stream to go down. We'd better go on now."

"Shall I cast off?" asked Eileen.

"Steady, steady," Thrale warned her. "The next quarter of a mile is simply a rapid. You must be ready to get the engines going full ahead the moment we start, or I sha'n't be able to steer her. And, now, we must both cast off together or we shall be across the stream in two ticks. Just loosen the rope round the cleats and let go, and then start the engine. Let the loose end of the rope drag till we've time to pick it up. Are you ready? All right--cast off!"

The little launch swept out into the current with a bound the instant she was released from her moorings, and almost before the engines began to revolve she was caught in the rapids that surged down from the newly-opened weir. She was only a light draught pleasure-boat, designed to navigate the placid surface of the summer Thames, and when she entered the curling broken water below the island she threw up her nose and plunged like a nervous mare.

"Full steam ahead," shouted Thrale at the toy wheel. Eileen nodded, crouching over her little engine; the roar of the stream had drowned Thrale's voice, but she guessed his order.

Her eyes were bright with excitement. She had no sense of fear. She was exhilarated by the sense of rapid movement. The launch, indeed, was travelling at a remarkable pace. In the narrow channel between the islands and the town, the river must have been running at nearly ten miles an hour, and the engines were probably adding another eight. In the wide spaces of the ocean eighteen miles an hour may appear a safe and controllable speed, but this little launch was running down hill, she could not be stopped at command, and the restricted course was beset with many and dangerous obstacles.

Thrale, handling the little brass wheel forward, was conscious of uneasiness. The launch steered after a fashion, but he had little control of her. The trees on the banks appeared to be flying upstream at the pace of an express train, and ahead of him was the town bridge.

He decided instantly that they could not pass under it, and put the wheel over, intending to shoot out of the stream into the calm of the flood water over the new open bank. But as the launch turned and came across, the current took her stern and turned her half round. For a moment her lee rail was under water, and she trembled and rocked on the verge of capsize. Then her engines drove her out of the stream and she righted herself again and began to cut through the almost still, shallow flood water.

"Stop her!" roared Thrale.

"I say, what's up?" replied Eileen, coolly, as she obeyed the order.

"No room to pass under the bridge," said Thrale. "I suppose we'll have to navigate, as you call it. Go dead slow, and be prepared to stop her at a moment's notice."

They spent over an hour in finding a passage round the approach to the bridge. They had laboriously to pole the launch through the tops of hedges, and in one place they were aground for ten minutes. But after they had returned to the stream once more they had a rapid and easy passage down to Bray. They shot the great arch of the Maidenhead railway bridge triumphantly. Eileen said it was "glorious."

The weir at Bray proved even more difficult to negotiate than the one above, and by the time it was fully opened the dull December afternoon was closing in.

They spent that night moored to two of the elms that ring the isolated little church in the meadows by Boveney.

"At this rate," remarked Thrale as they settled themselves for the night, "it'll take us a week to get to Richmond. We've done two weirs out of thirteen, so far."

3

Thrale's estimate proved excessive. They reached Richmond on the fourth day out from Marlow, having opened another nine weirs--the one at Old Windsor had been swept away, and the one below Richmond Bridge Thrale opened that afternoon.

During those four days they had seen few signs of life. They had moved, keeping to the main stream for the most part, in the midst of a wide expanse of water; exploring a desolate and wasted country.

Once they had been hailed by three women, who looked out at them from a house in Windsor, and shouted something they did not catch; and a woman had been standing on Staines Bridge as they careered intrepidly through the centre arch--they had no time even to distinguish her dress. But with these exceptions they might have come through the land of an extinct civilization, devoid of life; a land in which deserted houses and church towers stood up from the silver sheet of a vast lake, that was threaded by this one impetuous torrent of swelling river.

Richmond, also, was deserted. The emigrants had passed on over the river or southwards to Petersham and so into Surrey.

"Well!" said Eileen, wiping her oil-blackened hands on a bunch of cotton waste, "that job's done. We've fairly drawn the plug of the cistern now. And how are we going to get back?"

"We'll find a couple of bicycles somewhere here," said Thrale.

It had been a clear day, and there was a suggestion of frost in the air. The sun was setting very red and full behind the bare trees across the river. Save for the gurgle and hiss of the eddying flood, everything was very still. The little launch which had served them so well, and bore the marks of its great adventure in broken rails and bruised sides, was run aground by the side of the bridge. Thrale was standing in the road, but Eileen still sat by her engine.

"I hate to leave the launch," she said, after a long pause.

"We can come back and fetch her up when the flood goes down," returned Thrale.

"We've done pretty well, the three of us."

"Yes, the three of us," he echoed.

"It has been great fun," sighed Eileen.

Thrale did not reply. He was thinking himself back into the past. He saw a street in Melbourne on a burning December evening, and the figure of a gaily-clad little brunette who spoke purest cockney and asked him why he looked so glum. "We ain't goin' to a funeral," she had said. Yet afterwards he had believed that something had been buried that night. He had faced his own passion and the sight of it had disgusted him. He had seen the shadow of a demon who might master him, and he had grappled with it; he believed that he had slain and buried lust in Melbourne ten years ago. It had not risen up to confront him when the plague had put a world of women at his command. He had not been forced to fight, he was not tempted--surely the thing was dead and buried. Only once, on that warm September night, had he felt a sudden furious desire to take this girl into his arms and fly with her into the woods. The desire had come and gone, he was master of it, and in any case it bore no resemblance to the brutal thing he had faced in Melbourne.

Nor, as he stood now by Richmond Bridge watching the vault of the sky deepen to an intenser blue, did the feeling that possessed him in any way resemble that old cruel passion which had flared up and died--surely it had died. He could not analyse his feeling for this brave, clear-eyed companion, who had faced with him all the dangers of the past four days without a sign of fear. She had made no advances to him, they were friends, she might have been some delightfully clean, wholesome boy. And then his thought was pierced and broken by a horrible suggestion.

A picture of the hill to Handy Cross flashed before him, and he saw a little lonely figure creeping furtively away from Marlow. He drove his nails into his palms and suddenly cried out.

"What's up?" said Eileen, turning round and looking up at him. "Have you forgotten anything?"

He stepped into the boat and sat down beside her. "I want to know--I must know," he said.

She looked at him and smiled. "All right, old man," she said. "Fire away."

"I told you once that I was frightened of you," said Thrale. "I want to know if you have ever been frightened of yourself--or of me?"

"I could never be frightened of you," she replied, and looked away towards the rising darkness of the shadows across the hurrying river, "and I haven't been afraid of myself--yet. I don't think----"

"Wouldn't you be frightened of me if I picked you up and ran shouting into the woods?" he asked, fiercely.

Her eyes met his without reserve. "Dear old man," she said. "I should love it. I'm so glad you understand. That was the one thing that prevented our being real friends. I've wanted so much to be frank and open with you. It's all these silly reserves that make love abominable. Now we can be two jolly, clean human beings who understand each other, can't we? And we shall be such ripping good friends always; quite open and honest with each other."

He drew a deep, sighing breath and put his arms round her, drew her close to him and laid his face against hers. "I've been such an awful ass," he said. "I've always thought that love was unclean. I've been like that Jenkyn woman. I've been prurient and suspicious and evil-minded. I've been like the people who cover up statues. But there was an excuse for me--and for them, too. I didn't know, because there was no woman like you to teach me. All the women I've known have been secretive and sly. They've fouled love for me by making it seem a hidden, disreputable thing. Oh! we shall be ripping good friends, little Eileen--magnificent friends."

"This is a jolly old boat, isn't it?" replied Eileen, inconsequently. "Don't smother me, old man. And, I say, do you think we'll be able to raid some soap from somewhere? Do look at my hands! You couldn't be friends with a chap who had hands like that!" ...

"There's one thing I'd like to remark," said Eileen the next morning. There had been a frost in the night, and there was every promise of an easy ride back to Marlow.

"Yes?" said Thrale, examining the deflated tyres of two bicycles they had chosen from a shop in the High Street.

"We'd never have understood each other so well if we hadn't worked together on the same job," said Eileen.

"Well, of course not," returned Thrale. His tone seemed to imply that she had stated a truth that must always have been obvious to sensible people.

"That and there being no footle about marriage," concluded Eileen.

4

A third factor that had contributed to the perfection of that complete understanding was not realized by either until they were descending the hill into Bisham.

"I rather wish we weren't going back," said Eileen. "Let's stop a moment. I want to talk. We've never thought of what we're going to do."

"Do?" said Jasper, as he dismounted. "Well, we've just got to make an announcement and that's the end of it. The Jenkyns lot have all gone."

"It isn't the end, it's the beginning," replied Eileen. "Don't you see that we can't even explain?"

"We sha'n't try."

"We shall. We shall have to--in a way. It'll take years and years to do it. But the point is that they won't understand, now, none of them, not even Elsie Durham. We aren't free any longer."

"We aren't alone," she added, bringing the hitherto unacknowledged factor into prominence.

Thrale frowned and looked up into the thin brightness of the frosty sky. "Yes, I understand," he said. "It's public opinion that compels one to regard love as shameful and secret. Alone together, free from every suspicion, we hadn't a doubt. But now, we have to explain and we can't explain, and we are forced against our wills to wonder whether we can be right and all the rest of the world wrong."

"We are right," put in Eileen.

"Only we can't prove it to anyone but ourselves."

"And we shouldn't want to, if we hadn't got to live with them."

For a moment they looked at one another thoughtfully.

"No, we mustn't run away," Jasper said, with determination, after a pause. "Look, the flood has begun to go down already. That's our work. There's other work for us to do yet."

For a time they were silent, looking down on to Marlow and out over the valley.

"We didn't go over that hill," said Eileen, at last, pointing to the distant rise of Handy Cross.

"No," replied Jasper, and then, "we won't hide behind hills. Damn public opinion."

"Oh, yes, damn public opinion," agreed Eileen. "But we won't stay in Marlow always."

XX--THE TERRORS OF SPRING

1

The frost gave way on the third night, and for ten days there was a spell of mild weather with some rain. Carrie Oliver began to contemplate the possibility of getting forward with such ploughing as still remained to be done. She proposed to have an increased acreage of arable that year, and less pasture, less hay and less turnips; the arable was to include potatoes, beans and peas. For the community was rapidly tending towards vegetarianism. They had no butcher in Marlow, and the women revolted against the slaughter of cattle and sheep. They were hesitating and clumsy in the attack, and so inflicted wounds which were not fatal, they turned sick at the sight of the brute's agonies and at the appalling spurts of blood, and finally when the animal was at last mercifully dead, they bungled the dissection of the carcase.

"I'd sooner starve than do it again," was the invariable decision pronounced by any new volunteer who had heroically offered to provide Marlow with meat, and even Carrie Oliver admitted that it was a "beastly dirty job."

"Only," she added "we'll 'ave to go on breeding calves or we won't get no milk, an' what are we goin' to do with the bullocks?"

The committee wondered if some form of barter might not be introduced. Wycombe and Henley might have something to offer in exchange, or, failing that, might be urged to accept these superfluous beasts as a present, returning the skins and horns, for which there might be a use in the near future. Sheep must be reared for their wool--the clothes of the community would not last for ever. The subjects of tanning and weaving were being studied by certain members of the now enlarged committee. Neither operation presented insuperable difficulties.

Now that a certain supply of food was provided for, the community was already turning its energy towards the industries. Many schemes were being planned and debated. Marlow was well situated, with such abundance of water and wood at its gates; and the question of attracting desirable immigrants had been raised.

Time was afforded for the consideration of all these schemes by the great frost which began on New Year's Day and lasted until the end of February.

The frost came first from the south-west, and for three days the country was changed into a fairy world built of sharp white crystals, a world that was seen dimly through a magic veil of mist. Then followed a black and bitter wind from the north-east, that bought a thin and driving snow, and when the wind fell the country was locked in an iron shell that was not relaxed for six weeks.

The flood had nearly subsided before the first frost came, but the river was still high, and presently the water came down laden with ice-floes, that jammed against the weir and the mill, and formed a sheet of ice that gradually crept back towards the bridge.

All field and mill work was stopped, and Thrale and Eileen spent two or three days a week making excursions to London, bringing back coal and other forms of riches.

2

Their fear of being misunderstood had proved to have been an exaggeration. In that exalted mood of theirs, which had risen to such heights, after four days of adventurous solitude, they had come a little too near the stars. In finding themselves they had lost touch with the world.

Elsie Durham had smiled at their defensive announcement.

"My dear children," she had said, "don't be touchy about it. I am so glad; and, of course, I've known for months that you would come to an understanding. And there's no need to tell me that your--agreement, did you say?--was entirely different to any other. I know. But be human about it. Don't apologize for it by being superior to all of us."

"Oh, you're a dear," Eileen had said enthusiastically.

Nevertheless there were many women still left in Marlow who were less spiritually-minded than Elsie Durham. Comparative idleness induced gossip, and there was more than one party in the community which regarded Thrale and Eileen with disfavour.

The old ruts had been worn too deep to be smoothed out in a few months, however heavy had been the great roller of necessity. And, strangely enough, the life of Sam Evans at High Wycombe was regarded by many of the more bigoted with less displeasure than this perfectly wholesome and desirable union of Thrale and Eileen. The prostitution of Sam Evans was a new thing outside the experience of these women, and it was accepted as an outcome of the new conditions. The other affair was familiar in its associations, and was condemned on both the old and the new precedents.

The mass of the women were quite unable to think out a new morality for themselves....

3

Relief from all these foolish criticisms, gossipings and false emotions came when the frost broke. A warm rain in the first week of March released the soil from its bonds, and as the retarded spring began to move impatiently into life there was a great call for labour.

But as the year ripened the temperament of the community exhibited a new and alarming symptom.

There was a terrible spirit of depression abroad.

All Nature was warm with the movement of reproduction. Nature was growing and propagating, thrusting out and taking a larger hold upon life. Nature was coming to the fight with new reserves and allies, a fruitful and increasing army, eager for the struggle against this little decreasing band of sterile humanity. Nature was prolific and these women were barren.

And in some inexplicable way the consciousness of futility had spread through the Marlow community. Some posthumous children had been born since the plague, a few young girls--Millie among them--were pregnant, but death had been busier than life during the winter, and from outside came stray reports that in other communities death had been busier still.

What hope was there for that generation? They were too few to cope with their task. Grass was growing in their streets, their houses were in need of repair, and after their day's labour in the fields to provide themselves with food, they had neither strength nor inclination to take up the battle anew.

Moreover, the spice was gone from life. Some inherent need for emulation was gone. They were ceasing to take any pride in their persons, and in their clothes. They wore knickerbockers or trousers for convenience in working, and suffered a strange loss of self-esteem in consequence. Many of the younger women still returned in the evenings to what skirts and ribbons they still possessed, but the habit was declining. The uselessness of it was growing even more apparent. There were no sex distinctions or class distinctions among them. Of what account was it that one girl was prettier or better dressed than her neighbour? What mattered was whether she was a stronger or more intelligent worker.

Above all, the woman's need for love and admiration could find no outlet. They realized that they were becoming hardened and unsexed, and revolted against the coming change. Something within them rose up and cried for expression, and when it was thwarted it turned to a thing of evil....

The mind of the community was becoming distorted. Hysteria, sexual perversions, and various forms of religious mania were rife. Young women broke into futile and unsatisfying orgies of foolish dancing, and middle-aged women became absorbed in the contemplation of a male and human god.

Even the committee did not escape the influence of the growing despair. They looked forward to a future when such machines and tools as they possessed would be worn out, and they had no means of replacing them.

Thrale had reported that the line to London was becoming unsafe for the passage of his trucks. Rust was at work upon the rails; rain and floods had weakened embankments; young growths were springing up on the permanent way, and it was hopeless to contemplate any work of repair. In the old days an army of men had been needed for that work alone. The country roads needed re-metalling, and the houses restoration; they had not the means or the labour to undertake half the necessary work. There were breaches in the river bank and a large and apparently permanent lake was forming in the low meadows towards Bourne End. All about them Nature was so intensely busy in her own regardless way, and they were helpless, now, to oppose her.

The age of iron and machinery was falling into a swift decline. All that the community could look for in the future was a return to primitive conditions and the fight for bare life. Every year their tools and machines would grow less efficient, every year Nature would return more powerful to the attack. In ten years they would be fighting her with rude and tedious weapons of wood, grinding their scanty corn between two stones, and living from hand to mouth. In the bountiful South such a life might have its rewards, but how could they endure it in this uncertain and cruel North?

So while the sun rose higher in the sky and the earth was wonderfully reclothed, the women of Marlow fell deeper and deeper into the horrors of mental depression. What had they to work for, and to hope for, save this miserable possession of unsatisfied life?

XXI--SMOKE

1

One bright morning, at the end of April, Jasper and Eileen sat on the cliffs at the Land's End and talked of the future.

Ten days before, they had left Marlow on bicycles to make exploration. They intended to return; they had explained they would be away for a month at the outside, but in view of the growing depression and the loss of spirit shown by the community, they considered it necessary to go out and discover what conditions obtained in other parts of England. It might be, they urged, that the plague had been less deadly in other districts.

"We should not know, here," Jasper had argued. "There may be many men left elsewhere; but they might not have been able to communicate with us yet. Their attention, like ours, would have been concentrated upon local conditions for a time. Eileen and I will find out. Perhaps we may be able to open up communication again. In any case we'll come back within a month and report."

His natural instinct had taken him into the West Country.

They had left Elsie Durham slightly more cheerful. They had given her a gleam of hope, given her something, at last, to which she might look forward.

Their own hopes had quickly faded and died as they rode on into the West. By the time they reached Plymouth they were thinking of Marlow as a place peculiarly favoured by Providence.

At first they had passed through communities conducted on lines resembling their own, greater or smaller groups of women working more or less in co-operation. In many of these communities a single man was living--in some cases two men--who viewed their duty towards society in the same light as the Adonis of Wycombe.

But the unit grew steadily smaller as they progressed. It was no longer the town or village community but the farm which was the centre of activity, and the occupied farms grew more scattered. For it appeared that here in the West the plague had attacked women as well as men. Another curious fact they learned was that the men had taken longer to die. One woman spoke of having nursed her husband for two months before the paralysis proved fatal....

And if the depression in Marlow had been great, the travellers soon learned that elsewhere it was greater still. The women worked mechanically, drudgingly. They spoke in low, melancholy voices when they were questioned, and save for a faint accession of interest in Thrale's presence there, and the signs of some feeble flicker of hope as they asked of conditions further north and east, they appeared to have no thought beyond the instant necessity of sustaining the life to which they clung so feebly. Thrale and Eileen rode on into Cornwall, not because they still hoped, but because they both felt a vivid desire to reach the Land's End and gaze out over the Atlantic. They wanted to leave this desolate land behind them for a few hours, and rest their minds in the presence of the unchangeable sea.

"Let us go on and forget for a few days," Eileen had said, and so they had at last reached the furthest limit of land.

Cornwall had proved to be a land of the dead. Save for a few women in the neighbourhood of St Austell, they had not seen a living human being in the whole county.

And so, on this clear April morning, they sat upon this ultimate cliff and talked of the future.

2

The water below them was delicately flecked with white. No long rollers were riding in from the Atlantic, but the fresh April breeze was flicking the crests of little waves into foam; and, above, an ever-renewed drift of scattered white clouds threw coursing shadows upon the blues and purples of the curdling sea.

Eileen and Thrale had walked southwards as far as Carn Voel to avoid the obstruction to vision of the Longships, and on three sides they looked out to an unbroken horizon of water, which on that bright morning was clearly differentiated from the impending sky.

"One might forget--here," remarked Eileen, after a long silence.

"If it were better to forget," said Jasper.

Eileen drew up her knees until she could rest her chin upon them, embracing them with her arms. "What can one do?" she asked. "What good is it all, if there is no future?"

"Just to live out one's own life in the best way," was the answer.

She frowned over that for a time. "Do you really believe, dear," she said, when she had considered Jasper's suggestion, "do you really believe that this is the end of humanity?"

"I don't know," he said. "I have changed my mind half a dozen times in the last few days. There may be a race untouched somewhere--in the archipelagos of the South Seas, perhaps--which will gradually develop and repeople the world again."

"Or in Australia, or New Zealand," she prompted.

"We should have heard from them before this," he said. "We must have heard before this."

"And is there no hope for us, here in England, in Marlow? There are a few boys--infants born since the plague, you know--and there will be more children in the future--Evans's children and those others. There were two men in some places, you remember."

"Can they ever grow up? It seems to me that the women are dying. They've nothing to live for. It's only a year since the plague first came, and look at them now. What will they be like in five years' time? They'll die of hopelessness, or commit suicide, or simply starve from the lack of any purpose in living, because work isn't worth while. And the others, the mothers, that have some object in living, will fall back into savagery. They'll be so occupied in the necessity for work, for forcing a living out of the ground somehow, that they'll have neither time nor wish to teach their children. I don't know, but it seems to me that we are faced with decrease, gradually leading on to extinction.

"And I doubt," he continued, after a little hesitation, "I doubt whether these sons of the new conditions will have much vitality. They are the children of lust on the father's side, worse still, of tired lust. It does make a difference. Perhaps if we were a young and vigorous people like the old Jews the seed would be strong enough to override any inherent weakness. But we are not, we are an old civilization. Before the plague, we had come to a consideration of eugenics. It had been forced upon us. A vital and growing people does not spend its time on such a question as that. Eugenics was a proposition that grew out of the necessity of the time. It was easy enough to deny decadence, and to prove our fitness by apparently sound argument, but, to me, it always seemed that this growing demand for some form of artificial selection of parents, by restriction of the palpably unfit, afforded the surest evidence. Things like that are only produced if there is a need for them. Eugenics was a symptom."

Eileen sighed. "And what about us?" she asked.

"We're happy," replied Jasper. "Probably the happiest people in the world at the present time. And we must try to give some of our happiness to others. We must go back to Marlow and work for the community. And I think we'll try in our limited way to do something for the younger generation. Perhaps, it might be possible for us to go north and try our hands at making steel, there are probably women there who would help us. But I don't think it's worth while, unless to preserve our knowledge and hand it on. We can only lessen the difficulty in one little district for a time. As the pressure of necessity grows, as it must grow, we shall be forced to abandon manufacture. The need for food will outrun us. We are too few, and it will be simpler and perhaps quicker to plough with a wooden plough than to wait for our faulty and slowly-produced steel. The adult population, small as it is, must decrease, and I'm afraid it will decrease more rapidly than we anticipate, owing to these causes of depression and lack of stimulus...."

"Oh, well," said Eileen at last, getting to her feet, "we're happy, as you say, and our job seems pretty plain before us. To-morrow, I suppose, we ought to be getting back, though I hate taking the news to Elsie."

Jasper came and stood beside her, and put his arm across her shoulders. "We, at any rate, must keep our spirits up," he said. "That, before everything."

"I'm all right," said Eileen, brightly. "I've got you and, for the moment, the sea. We'll come back here sometimes, if the roads don't get too bad."

"Yes, if the roads don't get too bad."

"And, already, the briars are creeping across the road from hedge to hedge. The forest is coming back."

"The forest and the wild."

He drew her a little closer and they stood looking out towards the horizon.

3

In the south-west the clear line had been wiped out and what looked like mist was sweeping towards them.

"There's a shower coming," said Thrale.

They stood quietly and let the sharp spatter of rain beat in their faces, and then the shadow of the storm moved on and the horizon line was clear again.

"That's a queer cloud out there," said Eileen. "Is it another shower?"

She pointed to a tiny blur on the far rim of the sea.

"It is queer," said Thrale. "It's so precisely like the smoke of a steamer."

For a few seconds they gazed in intent silence.

"It's getting bigger," broke out Eileen, suddenly excited. "What is it, Jasper?"

"I don't know. I can't make it out," he said. He moved away from her and shaded his eyes from the glare of the momentarily cloudless sky.

"I can't make it out," he repeated mechanically.

The blur was widening into a grey-black smudge, into a vaguely diffused smear with a darker centre.

"With the wind blowing towards us----" said Jasper, and broke off.

"Yes, yes--what?" asked Eileen, and then as he did not answer, she gripped his arm and repeated importunately. "What? Jasper, what? With the wind blowing towards us?"

"By God it is," he said in a low voice, disregarding her question. "By God it is," he repeated, and then a third time, "It is."

"Oh! what, what? Do answer me! I can't see!" pleaded Eileen.

But still he did not answer. He stood like a rock and stared without wavering at the growing cloud on the horizon.

And then the cloud began to grow more diffused, to die away, and Eileen could see tiny indentations on the sky line, indentations which pushed up and presently revealed themselves as attached to a little black speck in the remotest distance.

"Oh, Jasper!" she cried, and her eyes filled with inexplicable tears, so that she could see only a misty field of troubled blue.

"It's a liner," said Jasper at last, turning to her. He looked puzzled and his eyes stared through her. "And its coming from America. Do you suppose the American women----"

The boat was revealed now. They could see the shape of her, the high deck, the two tall funnels and the three masts. She was passing across, fifteen miles or so to the south of them, making up Channel.

For a moment they felt like shipwrecked sailors on a lonely island, who see a vessel pass beyond hail.

"Oh, Jasper, what can it be?" Eileen besought him.

"It's a White Star boat," he said, and he still spoke as if his mind was far away. "Is it possible, is it anyway possible that America has survived? Is it possible that there is traffic between America and Europe, and that they pass us by for fear of infection? How do we know that vessels haven't been passing up the Channel for months past? Why should we think that this is the first?"

"It is the first," proclaimed Eileen. "I feel it. Oh, let us hurry. Let us ride and ride as fast as we can to Plymouth or Southampton. I know they'll be coming to Plymouth or Southampton. Men, Jasper, men! No women would dare to run a boat at that pace. See how fast she is going. Oh hurry, hurry!"

He caught fire then. They ran back to find their bicycles. They ran, and presently they rode in silence, with fierce intensity. They rode at first as if they had but ten miles to go, and the lives of all the women in England depended upon their speed.

And though they slackened after the first few miles they still rode on with such eager determination that they reached Plymouth at sunset.

But they could see no sign of the liner in the waters about Plymouth. They saw only the deserted hulks of a hundred vessels that had ridden there untouched for twelve months, futile battleships and destroyers among them; great, venomous, useless things that had become void of all meaning in the struggle of humanity.

"It's not here. Let's go on!" said Eileen.

Jasper shrugged his shoulders. "It's well over a hundred miles to Southampton," he said. "Nearer a hundred and fifty, I should say."

"But we must go on, we must," urged Eileen.

It was evident that Jasper, too, felt a compelling desire to go on. He stood still with a look of intense concentration on his face. Eileen had seen him look thus, when he had been momentarily frustrated by some problem of mill machinery. She waited expectant for the solution she was sure would presently emerge.

"A motor," he said, speaking in short disconnected sentences. "If we can find paraffin and petrol and candles--light of some sort. The engines wouldn't rust, but they'd clog. It must be paraffin. We daren't clean with petrol by artificial light. It's possible. Let's try...."

That night Jasper did not sleep, but Eileen, as she sat beside him in the softly moving motor, soon lost consciousness of the dim streak of road and black river of hedge. The moon, in her third quarter, had risen before midnight, and when they started was riding deep in the sky, half veiled by a vast wing of dappled cirrus. And that, too, merged into her dream. She thought she was driving out into the open sea in a ship which became miraculously winged and soared up towards an ever-approaching but unincreasing moon. She woke with a start to find that it was broad daylight and that a thin misty rain was coming up from the sea.

"The Solent," said Jasper, pointing to a distant gleam below them.

On the common they stopped and stood up in the car, watching a distant smear of smoke that stained the thin mist.

"She'll be coming up Southampton Water with the lead going," said Jasper, trying desperately to be calm.

EPILOGUE

THE GREAT PLAN

On the evening of that day Jasper and Eileen dined on board the "Bombastic," that latest development of the old trans-Atlantic competition in shipbuilding, the boat that had made her first journey to New York carrying fugitives from England in the days when the threat of the plague grew hourly more imminent. The "Bombastic" had not justified her name, she had fled from Southampton without ceremony, and she had not returned for over a year. The "Apologetic" would have been more apt.

And on this evening of her return, the demeanour of that crowd of quiet serious men in the huge over-decorated saloon, gave no hint of bombast. As they listened intently to the rapid story of their two travel-stained and somewhat ragged guests, there was no hint of brag or boast among them all. They came not as conquerors but as friends.

"But oh, it's your story we want to hear," broke in Eileen at last.

She had been strangely quiet so far, she had become suddenly conscious of the defects of her dress. The old associations were swarming about her. Eighteen months ago she had sat in just such another saloon as this, courted and flattered, the daughter of a great aristocrat, a creature on a remote and gorgeous pedestal. Now it seemed that she was neither greater nor less than any man present. She was one of them, not set apart. She looked down at her hands, still oil-stained by her struggles with the motor on the previous night.

Jasper had been more patient. He was not less eager than Eileen to hear the explanation of this wonderful visit, of the resurrection of these twelve hundred men from a dead and silent world. But he had restrained his impatience and told his story first. He knew that so he would be more quickly satisfied. He would be able to listen to men who were not tense with an anxiety to ask questions.

They were sitting now at one end of a long table in the saloon, after eating a meal that had provided once more the longed-for satisfaction of salt.

"Well," said an American at the head of the table, turning to Eileen in answer to her protest, "we've maybe been selfish in putting all these questions but we're looking ahead. We aren't forgetting that we've a big work to do."

"But how did you get here?" asked Eileen impetuously. "How is it that you're all alive?"

"Well, as to that, you'd better ask the doctor, there," replied the American. "He's a countryman of yours, and he's been in the thick of it and knows the life story of that plague microbe like the history of England."

The doctor, a bearded, grave-eyed man, looked up and smiled.

"Hardly that," he said. "We shall never know now, I hope, the history of the plague organism. It was never studied under the microscope--we were too busy--and now we trust that the bacillus--if it were a bacillus--has encompassed its own destruction. What interests you, however, is that this sudden, miraculously sudden, development of its deadly power as regards humanity ran through a determinable cycle of evolution. From what you've told us, already, it seems clear, I think, that even in England the bacillus was losing what I may call its effectiveness. The men in the West Country you've described, probably died from starvation and neglect."

He paused for a moment and then continued: "Now in America both men and women were attacked. There was certainly a greater percentage of male cases, but I suppose something like half the female population was infected as well. As far as one can judge the bacillus was simply losing power. But for all we know it may have developed, it may be entering on a new stage of evolution, and in some apparently haphazard way now be beneficial to man instead of deadly. Such things may be happening every day below the reach of our knowledge. The little world is hidden from us, even as the great world is hidden....

"However," he went on more briskly, "the thing we do know is that the symptoms of the new plague in America differed materially from our expectation of them, gathered from the accounts that had reached us from the Old World. In England the paralysis lasted, I believe, some forty-eight hours and ended in death. In America the paralysis rarely ended fatally, but it lasted in some cases for six months. 'Paresis,' we called it. The patient was perfectly conscious but practically unable to move hand or foot."

"That paresis gave us time to do some very clear and consecutive thinking, I may remark," put in an American. "I had four months to study my ideas of life."

The doctor nodded thoughtfully. "America is no less changed than England," he said, "but it is another change. Well, you understand that we did not all get the plague over there; the thing was less deadly in attack and about ten per cent of us were left to look after the patients."

"And find food," interpolated one of the listeners.

"That was a time we won't ever forget," agreed another.

"Sure thing," said some one, and a general murmur of assent ran round the table.

"And all the machines were idle, of course," continued the doctor, "and even when the tide of recovery began to flow we had to turn our attention first to the getting of food."

"If it hadn't been for that we'd have been here before this," said a young man. "I feel we owe England and Europe some kind of an apology, but we just had to get busy on food growing right away. We couldn't spare a ship's crew till three weeks ago."

"And the others are hard at it over there still," put in another. "This is just a pioneer party."

"It's all so comprehensible now," said Thrale after a silence, "but we had no idea, we never thought there could be any one living in America. We thought that somehow we must have heard. One forgets...."

"We tried to get on to you," said one of the party, "by cable and wireless. We kept on tapping away for months, but we got no reply. We thought you must be all dead too."

"Well, we guessed you were having a real bad time anyway," amended another. "You see we knew the way that plague had taken Europe but we kept hoping and trying to get on to you all the same."

"We've got a message for Elsie, after all," Eileen said to Jasper the next day. "There's hope for us yet."

"Yes, there's hope," said Jasper.

They had been up at the town railway station assisting a party of Americans to investigate the condition of the rolling stock and the permanent way. Neither could be pronounced satisfactory. A few women had come in from the neighbouring country that morning attracted by the sight of an inexplicable pillar of smoke, and their report of local conditions had been equally uninspiring. They had spoken of famine and failure, but their faces had been lit by a new brightness at the sight of this miraculous little army of men. There had been hope in the faces and bearing of these toil-worn women, faith in the promise of support and succour.

Now Jasper and Eileen stood looking down towards the harbour. The tide was creeping in to efface the repulsive ugliness of the mud flats, and the sluggish water rippled faintly against the foul sloping sides of small boats that had lain anchored there for more than twelve months. Behind them, across the line, was a row of unsightly houses, hung with weather-slating.

"Oh, there's hope," repeated Jasper.

He was thinking of all the work that lay before them, and yet he had faith that a new and better civilization would arise. "We must get things going again," had been the Americans' phrase, and they apparently faced the future without a qualm.

But Jasper's mind was perplexed with the detail of the mechanical work that must be faced, detail so intricate and confused that he was bewildered by its complexity. It appeared to him that the crux of the whole problem lay in the North, in the counties of coal and iron. Coal and steel were the first essentials, he thought. They must begin there in however small a way, and America must send out more men, continually more men. To-morrow he was going back in the motor, with two experts, to the cable hut in Sennen Cove. They were going to test the cable and hoped to re-establish communication with America, and then more ships would come and more men, ever more men.

And, even so, they could do little at first, and beyond lay the whole of Europe and still further the whole of Asia. Were women there, also, maintaining the terrible fight against Nature in the awful struggle to find food? Steel and coal we must have, was the burden of his thought, and in his imagination he pictured the waking of factories and mines, he had a vision of little engines running....

Eileen's thought had flown ahead. With one magnificent leap she had passed from the contemplation of present necessity to a realization of the dim future. And her thought found words.

"Hope, lots of hope," she said. "Hope of a new clean world. We've got such a chance to begin all over again, and do it better. No more sweated labour, Jasper, and no more living on the work of others. We've just got to pull together and work for each other. If we can get enough food, and we can now with all these dear men come to help us, we can do such wonderful things afterwards. There'll be lots of children growing up in a few years' time, and we shall teach them the things we've had to learn by the force of necessity. They'll begin so differently because, although we have had the experience of all history, we sha'n't be bound by all the foolish conventions that grew out of it. Such a silly incongruous growth, wasn't it? But I suppose it couldn't be helped in one way. We were so penned in. We all had our rotten little places to keep and that took all our time. We never had a chance to consider the broad issues, the real fundamental things. But you've got to consider the fundamental things when you start clean away from a new beginning.

"And, oh! Jasper, surely we have all learnt certain things to avoid, haven't we? I mean class distinctions and sex distinctions, and things like that. Women won't trouble any more about titles and all that rot now, and anyway there aren't any left to trouble about. And social conditions will be so different now that there won't be any more marriage. Marriage was a man's prerogative; he wanted to keep his woman to himself, and keep his property for his children. It never really protected women, and anyway they were capable of protecting themselves if they'd been given a chance. I know the children were a difficulty in the old days, but they won't be now. It'll be everybody's business to see that the children get looked after, and a woman won't starve just because she hasn't got a husband to keep her. She'll get better wages than that. The women who have children will be the most precious things we shall have. They'll live healthier lives, too, and they won't be incapacitated as they used to be. They'll work and be strong instead of spending all their time either in doing nothing or pottering about the house in an eternal round of cleaning the stupid, ugly things we used. We shall have to have all new houses, Jasper, when we get things going again.

"Oh, it will be splendid," she broke out in a great burst of enthusiasm, "and we begin to-day. We have begun."

Jasper nodded. "It's a wonderful opportunity," he said.

"Wonderful, wonderful," repeated Eileen. "We all, men and women, start level again. Equality, Jasper, It's a beautiful word--Equality. Of course I know how unequal we all are from one point of view, and there must come a sort of aristocracy of intellect and efficiency. But underneath there will be a true equality for all that, and we shall see to it that no man or woman can abuse their powers by making slaves again. What a world of slaves it used to be, and we weren't even slaves to intellect and efficiency, only to wealth and to money, and to some foolish idea of position and power."

"Well, we've got our work to do, here and now," said Jasper after a long pause.

"Work? Of course, and I love it," returned Eileen, "and while we work we've got to think and teach."

The tide was coming in steadily, and near them an old boat that had been lying on the mud was now afloat once more and had taken on some of its old dignity.

Eileen pointed to it. "We're afloat again," she remarked.

"Embarked on the greatest plan the world has ever known," added Jasper.

"Oh, it's all part of the great plan," concluded Eileen.

THE END