COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1929 by S. Fowler Wright
Copyright © 2009, 2013 by the Estate of S. Fowler Wright
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is complete in itself, but is a sequel to Deluge in the sense that some of the characters are the same, and the latter part of the book continues the narrative of Deluge beyond the point at which that book closes.
BOOK ONE
No abstract doctrine is more false and mischievous than that of the natural quality of men.
—Sir James Fraser,
The Scope of Social Anthropology
Chapter One
The May sun shone through the unblinded window of Muriel Temple’s bedroom, and a warm wind lifted the curtains. A moving shaft of light fell on her face, and she stirred and wakened to a sense of impending evil. For a moment she could not recall the nature of the trouble which had overshadowed her mind. “To be with Christ, which is far better”—the words which had brought sleep came back, and with them she remembered. Six months, the specialist had said, or it might be twelve, or eighteen, but it was not likely to be so long. He could not recommend an operation. He had been very kind, but quite definite. There would be more pain later, he admitted, but much could be done to deaden it. She hesitated about that. It might be better to endure the pain, if it were God’s will. She was not afraid. She would want to be conscious of death when it came. “To be with Christ, which is far better.” She did not doubt it.
She had been urged to rest this morning, and had reluctantly promised. She knew that her days of active service were over. She tired so easily. And now that her voice had gone…. But she would far rather have risen for the Sunday morning service as usual.
She had hoped that another operation might have been possible, and followed by some degree of recovered activity, though she knew that she would never see South Africa again. But that hope was over now. If God had decided that He did not need her further, she must not be faithless and defiant. He could build the new mission church at Nizetsi, on which her heart had been set, without her aid should He will it. She knew that; but she did not think that it was His will, or He would not have sent her this summons to lay aside the work she was doing. Perhaps, had she made better use of the time she had….
It was twenty years since she had sailed from Southampton for her first station in Basutoland. Life had seemed long then, and now…. “The night cometh, when no man can work.”
The night had come.
Her thought paused as the bells of Sterrington Church commenced their summons for the early Communion. She did not like the Anglican service. She knew it to be full of superstitions and laxities. Sinners should be converted, not confirmed. But she had a wide charity of mind, and today she would gladly have knelt in any place that was dedicated to her Master’s service, however blindly.
She thought of dawn moving over the earth, and of a world that waked to worship.
Fast as the light of morning broke
On island, continent, and deep,
Thy far-spread family awoke,
Sabbath all round the world to keep.
She remembered how she had used that great conception of James Montgomery to move a Zulu audience. She did not think of it as James Montgomery’s hymn. She did not know or care who had written it. She had no literary sense, but she had imagination, if only she were approached on the one side on which her mind was open, and she had a gift of clear and musical speech which could take an audience with her—till her throat had failed. Even in the harsh Zulu gutturals. “She who speaks as we speak,” so they had called her.
Thy poor have all been freely fed,
Thy chastened sons have kissed the rod,
Thy mourners have been comforted,
Thy pure in heart have seen their God.
The familiar words brought comfort. God was so very near to those who sought Him. She reached out for the Bible on her bedside table. She would read the usual morning chapter. As she did so Mrs. Wilkes knocked timidly, and, being answered, brought in her breakfast.
Mrs. Wilkes brought some gillies also. She knew that Muriel loved flowers. It was a world full of kindness, even for those for whom Death was waiting impatiently. Death might be near, but God was always nearer.
Chapter Two
Muriel’s mind wandered from selfish considerations, which it was unusual to indulge, to an incident of the previous afternoon, when she had gained the frightened confidence of Lena Atkins, a girl whose parents lived at the farther end of the village.
She was employed as a factory hand at the Larkshill Iron Works, four miles way, and had been lodging with a girl friend in Larkshill during the week, and coming home each Saturday.
She had contracted a foolish intimacy with the girl’s brother, the result of which could be concealed no longer, either at home or factory, and she had a terrified anticipation of the contempt and wrath of her parents, and of dismissal from her employment, as the first consequences of the folly which she had committed.
Muriel was not entirely free from the subconscious bitterness or jealousy which is commonly felt by the childless woman who has maintained her maidenhood toward those of less circumspect experiences, but she was controlled by the larger charity of her Master’s teaching, and she had sufficient knowledge of life, and of the human nature of two continents, to be aware that the girl’s condition was evidence of a comparative innocence rather than of exceptional vice.
She had already met the head forewoman, and the welfare worker, who were perfunctorily responsible for the conditions prevailing among the three hundred girls and women employed at the Larkshill Works. She knew that devilish contrivances to enable them to lose their chastity and their self-respect, without experiencing the condoning mystery of procreation, were openly sold at the factory gates, and that it was a thriving traffic. She knew that many of the girl’s companions, who would be contemptuous of an illegitimate child, would excuse abortion. She knew that immediately the girl’s condition should become known among her acquaintances she would be exposed to tempting whispers, advising her of the ease and safety with which she could destroy her child through the agency of noxious drugs, or with the aid of some repulsive hag who made a living by that unnatural wickedness. She knew that a large part even of the medical profession had surrendered to a vice so popular and so profitable, and that it was not only in the cottage or the slums that a doctor would look hard at a woman who suggested the probability of a third or fourth child, and ask if she felt she were strong enough; or did she really want it?
But this knowledge did not deflect the rigidity of her mind in its recognition of what is honourable and decent living, whether in a savage kraal or amidst the recondite vices of a dying civilization. Nor had she that perversion of mind, not uncommon among professional exponents of righteousness, which imagines a universal degradation among a population that does not give much attention to the teaching they offer.
She did not doubt that there were many happy and natural marriages among the eight hundred workpeople employed by the Larkshill Iron Works, in spite of the squalid lives to which their boasted civilization had brought them: many clean engagements of unsoiled romance: many integrities, both of men and women, which lived aloof and undegraded….
She had heard the tale with a ready sympathy, and with the occasional helping word or the well-judged silence that made it easy to tell. She had heard so many like it before!
Her thoughts wandered to a kindred trouble in a Zulu kraal, where a girl who had crouched stolidly in expectation of death had waked to a trembling terror at the knowledge that the white woman had interposed, and might, or might not, persuade her husband to pardon her infi
delity.
In the end she had said what she had thought it right to say, and the girl had listened sullenly. She was not thinking of any trouble which she might cause to God, but of what the discovery might cause to her. Muriel had been resolved to help her practically as well as spiritually, but they differed as to the relative importance of the two parts of the programme.
Muriel had asked Mrs. Wilkes on returning if her husband would drive her over to Larkshill in his market-cart that evening. She had felt that she lacked the strength to walk such a distance, but she was not used to delay when dealing with anything that she had undertaken. She wished to see Tom Butler, the alleged cause of the trouble, and perhaps others.
Mrs. Wilkes had agreed, as she would have agreed to almost anything that her lodger had asked, but she felt that Mr. Wilkes might look at the matter somewhat differently. It is a natural consequence of such habits of thought as Muriel Temple cultivated that they are apt to be as exacting to others as to themselves. Mrs. Wilkes may never have had a lodger who caused her more trouble in proportion to the remuneration she offered. But Mrs. Wilkes served her gladly.
“Perhaps, Miss Temple, if you asked him…. He might do it for you,” she said doubtfully.
Muriel had asked him. He was busy earthing up his potatoes, and in no mood to leave them. Opportunities were few, and the growth of weeds unceasing. He meant to have the whole garden straight before the short Whitsun holidays should be over. He had compromised at last by saying that he’d see how he got on, and she could ask him again come Monday.
He felt that he was doomed as he said it. Miss Temple would have her way. Probably she felt a corresponding confidence. Unless something very unforeseen should happen…. As, in fact, it did.
* * * * * * *
Muriel lay till late, as she had reluctantly promised her doctor, and rested in the garden during the afternoon, half asleep in the sunlight.
Unused to leisure, her mind wandered backward in reminiscences that were sometimes sad, and sometimes pleasant to recall.
She had had much happiness, she decided, and also many mercies.
The sky was comparatively clear, its smoke-laden atmosphere having been unrecruited since the previous noon, and the June sun was warm and bright. Sterrington, though on the edge of one of England’s invented hells, was clear of mine or foundry for twenty miles on its north-western side, from which the winds of that time and place most commonly blew.
Muriel felt that it was a fair world, and a kind one. It was sad to think that it might be the last earthly summer that she would see She did not feel ill when she lay quietly, only weak if she tried to do too much.
In the evening she felt the need of joining in the acts of worship in which her life so largely consisted. There was a little Unitarian chapel in the village, but that was impossible. Unitarians, Muriel knew, are not Christians at all. There was nothing else but the Anglican church, and there she went (borrowing a prayer-book from Mrs. Wilkes) to hear a sermon from a text in the one hundred and seventh Psalm, “He turneth the wilderness into a standing water,” which wandered into abstract considerations of the methods of the Divine control of the cosmos, the antiquity of geologic records—the Rector was an enthusiast in geology—and introduced, rather awkwardly, the newest theories as to the rather numerous occasions on which Great Britain had been separated from or reunited to Western Europe, with allusions to the “Carboniferous Limestone Sea,” the “deltaic apron of the Hercynian Mountains,” and the “confluent deltas of the Millstone Grit,” which may have featured prominently in his reading of the previous week, but were unlikely to be received with any intelligent interest by his evening audience.
To Miss Temple’s thinking it was not a sermon at all.
Chapter Three
Muriel went to bed at once when she returned from the evening service. She had done a good deal during the day, and she was physically tired and mentally somewhat depressed. She tired so easily now. She remembered when…. But she supposed that, for good or evil, her work was done. It had never been anything to boast of. It was all as God willed it.
I would not have the restless will
That hurries to and fro,
Seeking for some great thing to do,
Or secret thing to know.
She had had ambitions once; dreams, as we all have. But they were faded now. Besides, she was not her own, and the regret was an infidelity. “Thine be the glory.” Tears came as she thought how little glory she had brought to God. And now His message had come that she was no longer needed. She must just rest and die.
Her thoughts wandered to the Rector to whom she had listened that evening. His personality had attracted her. A somewhat ascetic face, with a weary look in the eyes. She was not uncharitable. She supposed he served God in his own way, though it was not hers. “He who is not against us is of our part.” She wondered vaguely as to the nature of the work he did—so different from what hers had been among the Zulu kraals. Probably he was tired and dispirited also. The empty pews…. But what use was there in telling people about geological changes, which, if they were true at all, had no meaning today? The flood was past. That was part of the old dispensation. Now there were only the troubles of the last days for the world to endure before the glory of the millennium dawn. “There shall be wars, and rumours of wars, and earthquakes in divers places….” The last days might be very near….
She went to sleep at last; and while she slept the earth’s crust sank slightly and very gently in the northern hemisphere, and lifted slightly further toward the equator.
It was a trivial change. Not enough to make it falter in its settled course through the heavens, scarcely enough to change the axis on which it spun. There would be some space of bare land, steaming in tomorrow’s sun, which the tropic ocean had covered: some space of water where the land had been. That was all.
Muriel dreamed that she stood with the Rector on a bare plain. It was black night, and the wind was terrible. They were lost in the night. He said he knew the way, but she did not believe him. He was leading her into a pit where they would drown together. And there was a voice that cried through the night—a voice she knew—a voice that cried in an agony of terror, “Miss Temple, wake up! I think the roof’s a-falling!”
Muriel was awake now. By the light of a candle which she was holding she saw the comfortable face of her landlady, now white with fear. She heard the noise of a steady rush of air, which did not pause nor vary. She heard the rumble of a falling wall. She heard the woman’s frightened voice protesting. “I’m scairt to death, Miss Temple. It’s got such a queer sound. It’s not an ornary storm.”
No, it was not an ordinary storm. Muriel realized that, as she reassured her companion with a cheerful word, and began to dress quickly, for the cottage might really prove unsafe if this wind continued.
It was fortunate that her dressing was soon done, for she had scarcely finished when the window blew in, extinguishing the flickering light of the candle, and the next moment, through the darkness, there came a rattle of falling tiles at the farther end of the room, where the cottage roof was descending upon them.
Muriel stood uncertainly. There was a sound behind her in the darkness like the snapping of wood, and then a heavy gliding of something, and then a fall. But these noises, however loud and near, seemed confused and distanced by the sound of a wind which never ceased nor varied as it rushed southward to fill the void from which the land had fallen. But she knew nothing of that. She was concerned—though still with something of the serenity of those whose minds are trained to self-discipline—with the triviality of her own environment. She was aware that part at least of the roof was gone, that something struck her on the shoulder, causing her to lose her footing. She stumbled over the body of Mrs. Wilkes and came to her knees across her. She spoke to her, but there was no answer. She knew that their safety lay in flight down the narrow stairs if they could reach them, but she could not stir, and would not leave her. She tried to drag the ine
rt body, but its bulk among the fallen rubble of the roof was too much for her strength. As she made this effort she was aware of something warm and wet that was flowing over her hand. She knew that it was blood. Perhaps she could staunch…. She had not lived for twenty years in savage Africa to be strange to the results of accident, or any form of violence. Feeling upward, she learnt the uselessness of her efforts. The woman’s head was half severed from her body
Knowing this, she lost no further time in attempting her own security. She crawled on hands and knees to the place where she supposed the door to be, raising her hands continually to feel for any fallen obstacle that might confront her, or for the guidance of the wall. Her eyes were adjusted to the darkness, and she began to see a little way ahead She found the door, and then the stairs.
Soon she was in the open air. Rain was falling heavily now—or scarcely falling—stinging rain that was carried almost level on the steady force of the wind. Rain that struck her face like hail. She turned sideways to the wind. She covered her face with her hands. She knew the way to the garden gate, and she feared at every moment that the cottage would collapse toward her.
But she could not make much headway. She tried to keep straight, and found that ridges of soft soil were beneath her feet. She must have been blown on to the potato-bed which she had observed Mr. Wilkes to be hoeing on Saturday. She wondered where he could be now. It seemed impossible that he could be asleep in the battered cottage. Yet perhaps she ought to try to go back to warn or find him?
As she tried to turn she was seized in sudden arms that caught and whirled her forward for ten or fifteen yards and then dropped her breathless. It was a great bough with many smaller branches from the cherry-tree in the hedge that the wind had severed. She knew that she had been scratched and torn, and her clothing shredded by the unconscious violence of this fellow-victim of the elemental fury around her. She was in the rhubarb-bed now. She could feel the broken stems beneath her hands as she lay.
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