Tales of Space and Time
"There are the ruins of villages and towns now. On the clay lands they
are gone, of course. But they are still left on the grazing land,
because it does not pay the Food Company to remove them. I know
that--for certain. Besides, one sees them from the flying machines, you
know. Well, we might shelter in some one of these, and repair it with
our hands. Do you know, the thing is not so wild as it seems. Some of
the men who go out every day to look after the crops and herds might be
paid to bring us food...."
She stood in front of him. "How strange it would be if one really
could...."
"Why not?"
"But no one dares."
"That is no reason."
"It would be--oh! it would be so romantic and strange. If only it were
possible."
"Why not possible?"
"There are so many things. Think of all the things we have, things that
we should miss."
"Should we miss them? After all, the life we lead is very unreal--very
artificial." He began to expand his idea, and as he warmed to his
exposition the fantastic quality of his first proposal faded away.
She thought. "But I have heard of prowlers--escaped criminals."
He nodded. He hesitated over his answer because he thought it sounded
boyish. He blushed. "I could get some one I know to make me a sword."
She looked at him with enthusiasm growing in her eyes. She had heard of
swords, had seen one in a museum; she thought of those ancient days when
men wore them as a common thing. His suggestion seemed an impossible
dream to her, and perhaps for that reason she was eager for more detail.
And inventing for the most part as he went along, he told her, how they
might live in the country as the old-world people had done. With every
detail her interest grew, for she was one of those girls for whom
romance and adventure have a fascination.
His suggestion seemed, I say, an impossible dream to her on that day,
but the next day they talked about it again, and it was strangely less
impossible.
"At first we should take food," said Denton. "We could carry food for
ten or twelve days." It was an age of compact artificial nourishment,
and such a provision had none of the unwieldy suggestion it would have
had in the nineteenth century.
"But--until our house," she asked--"until it was ready, where should we
sleep?"
"It is summer."
"But ... What do you mean?"
"There was a time when there were no houses in the world; when all
mankind slept always in the open air."
"But for us! The emptiness! No walls--no ceiling!"
"Dear," he said, "in London you have many beautiful ceilings. Artists
paint them and stud them with lights. But I have seen a ceiling more
beautiful than any in London...."
"But where?"
"It is the ceiling under which we two would be alone...."
"You mean...?"
"Dear," he said, "it is something the world has forgotten. It is Heaven
and all the host of stars."
Each time they talked the thing seemed more possible and more desirable
to them. In a week or so it was quite possible. Another week, and it was
the inevitable thing they had to do. A great enthusiasm for the country
seized hold of them and possessed them. The sordid tumult of the town,
they said, overwhelmed them. They marvelled that this simple way out of
their troubles had never come upon them before.
One morning near Midsummer-day, there was a new minor official upon the
flying stage, and Denton's place was to know him no more.
Our two young people had secretly married, and were going forth manfully
out of the city in which they and their ancestors before them had lived
all their days. She wore a new dress of white cut in an old-fashioned
pattern, and he had a bundle of provisions strapped athwart his back,
and in his hand he carried--rather shame-facedly it is true, and under
his purple cloak--an implement of archaic form, a cross-hilted thing of
tempered steel.
Imagine that going forth! In their days the sprawling suburbs of
Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little
gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious
privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the
mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end
together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height,
abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and
turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables that were the basis of a
thousand varied foods, and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly
extirpated. The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after
year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days,
the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of
extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows of bramble standards
and apple trees with whitewashed stems, intersected the fields, and at
places groups of gigantic teazles reared their favoured spikes. Here and
there huge agricultural machines hunched under waterproof covers. The
mingled waters of the Wey and Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular
channels; and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground permitted a
fountain of deodorised sewage distributed its benefits athwart the land
and made a rainbow of the sunlight.
By a great archway in that enormous city wall emerged the Eadhamite road
to Portsmouth, swarming in the morning sunshine with an enormous traffic
bearing the blue-clad servants of the Food Company to their toil. A
rushing traffic, beside which they seemed two scarce-moving dots. Along
the outer tracks hummed and rattled the tardy little old-fashioned
motors of such as had duties within twenty miles or so of the city; the
inner ways were filled with vaster mechanisms--swift monocycles bearing
a score of men, lank multicycles, quadricycles sagging with heavy loads,
empty gigantic produce carts that would come back again filled before
the sun was setting, all with throbbing engines and noiseless wheels and
a perpetual wild melody of horns and gongs.
Along the very verge of the outermost way our young people went in
silence, newly wed and oddly shy of one another's company. Many were the
things shouted to them as they tramped along, for in 2100 a
foot-passenger on an English road was almost as strange a sight as a
motor car would have been in 1800. But they went on with steadfast eyes
into the country, paying no heed to such cries.
Before them in the south rose the Downs, blue at first, and as they came
nearer changing to green, surmounted by the row of gigantic wind-wheels
that supplemented the wind-wheels upon the roof-spaces of the city, and
broken and restless with the long morning shadows of those whirling
vanes. By midday they had come so near that they could see here and
there little patches of pallid dots--the sheep the Meat Department of
the Food Company owned. In another hour they had passed the clay and the
root crops and the single fence that hedged them in, and the prohibition
against trespass no longer held: the levelled roadway plunged into a
cutting with all its traffic, and they could leave it and walk over the
greensward and up the open hillside.
Never had these children of the latter days been together in such a
lonely place.
They were both very hungry and footsore--for walking was a rare
exercise--and presently they sat down on the weedless, close-cropped
grass, and looked back for the first time at the city from which they
had come, shining wide and splendid in the blue haze of the valley of
the Thames. Elizabeth was a little afraid of the unenclosed sheep away
up the slope--she had never been near big unrestrained animals
before--but Denton reassured her. And overhead a white-winged bird
circled in the blue.
They talked but little until they had eaten, and then their tongues were
loosened. He spoke of the happiness that was now certainly theirs, of
the folly of not breaking sooner out of that magnificent prison of
latter-day life, of the old romantic days that had passed from the
world for ever. And then he became boastful. He took up the sword that
lay on the ground beside him, and she took it from his hand and ran a
tremulous finger along the blade.
"And you could," she said, "_you_--could raise this and strike a man?"
"Why not? If there were need."
"But," she said, "it seems so horrible. It would slash.... There would
be"--her voice sank,--"_blood_."
"In the old romances you have read often enough ..."
"Oh, I know: in those--yes. But that is different. One knows it is not
blood, but just a sort of red ink.... And _you_--killing!"
She looked at him doubtfully, and then handed him back the sword.
After they had rested and eaten, they rose up and went on their way
towards the hills. They passed quite close to a huge flock of sheep, who
stared and bleated at their unaccustomed figures. She had never seen
sheep before, and she shivered to think such gentle things must needs be
slain for food. A sheep-dog barked from a distance, and then a shepherd
appeared amidst the supports of the wind-wheels, and came down towards
them.
When he drew near he called out asking whither they were going.
Denton hesitated, and told him briefly that they sought some ruined
house among the Downs, in which they might live together. He tried to
speak in an off-hand manner, as though it was a usual thing to do. The
man stared incredulously.
"Have you _done_ anything?" he asked.
"Nothing," said Denton. "Only we don't want to live in a city any
longer. Why should we live in cities?"
The shepherd stared more incredulously than ever. "You can't live here,"
he said.
"We mean to try."
The shepherd stared from one to the other. "You'll go back to-morrow,"
he said. "It looks pleasant enough in the sunlight.... Are you sure
you've done nothing? We shepherds are not such _great_ friends of the
police."
Denton looked at him steadfastly. "No," he said. "But we are too poor to
live in the city, and we can't bear the thought of wearing clothes of
blue canvas and doing drudgery. We are going to live a simple life here,
like the people of old."
The shepherd was a bearded man with a thoughtful face. He glanced at
Elizabeth's fragile beauty.
"_They_ had simple minds," he said.
"So have we," said Denton.
The shepherd smiled.
"If you go along here," he said, "along the crest beneath the
wind-wheels, you will see a heap of mounds and ruins on your right-hand
side. That was once a town called Epsom. There are no houses there, and
the bricks have been used for a sheep pen. Go on, and another heap on
the edge of the root-land is Leatherhead; and then the hill turns away
along the border of a valley, and there are woods of beech. Keep along
the crest. You will come to quite wild places. In some parts, in spite
of all the weeding that is done, ferns and bluebells and other such
useless plants are growing still. And through it all underneath the
wind-wheels runs a straight lane paved with stones, a roadway of the
Romans two thousand years old. Go to the right of that, down into the
valley and follow it along by the banks of the river. You come presently
to a street of houses, many with the roofs still sound upon them. There
you may find shelter."
They thanked him.
"But it's a quiet place. There is no light after dark there, and I have
heard tell of robbers. It is lonely. Nothing happens there. The
phonographs of the story-tellers, the kinematograph entertainments, the
news machines--none of them are to be found there. If you are hungry
there is no food, if you are ill no doctor ..." He stopped.
"We shall try it," said Denton, moving to go on. Then a thought struck
him, and he made an agreement with the shepherd, and learnt where they
might find him, to buy and bring them anything of which they stood in
need, out of the city.