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.