There was no immediate answer, but suddenly he knew that the silence around him had ceased to be threatening and tense. The old man’s eyes had left his own; they were moving round the room and searching, as it seemed, for assent.... In the end they came back to Theodore—and judgment was given.
“If you are what you say you are, we will take you; but if you have lied to us and you know what is forbidden, we shall find you out sooner or later and, as sure as you stand there, we will kill you. If you are what you say you are—a plain man like us and without devil’s knowledge—you may come to us and bring your woman, if she also is without devil’s knowledge. That is, if you can feed her; we have only enough for ourselves. And from this day forward you will be our man; and to-morrow you will take the oath to be what we are and live as we do, and be our man against all our enemies and perils. Are you agreed to that?”
He was saved and Ada with him—so much he knew; but as yet it was not clear what had saved him. He was to be their man—take an oath and be one with them—and there was the phrase “devil’s knowledge,” twice repeated.... He stared stupidly at the man who had granted his life—realizing that his ordeal was over only when the packed room emptied itself and the old man turned back to his fire.
XVIII
It was the phrase “devil’s knowledge” that, when his first bewilderment was over, gave Theodore the clue to the meaning of the scene he had lived through and the outlook of those whose man he would become on the morrow. That and the sudden memory of Markham ... on the crest of the centuries, on the night when the crest curled over...
He was so far taken into tribal fellowship that he had ceased to be openly a prisoner; but the two men who, for the rest of the night, shared with him the shelter of a lean-to hut, took care to bestow themselves between their guest and the entrance. He got little out of them in the way of enlightenment, for they were asleep almost as they flung themselves down on their moss; but for hours, while they snored, Theodore lay open-eyed, piecing together his fragmentary information of the world into which he had strayed.
“Without devil’s knowledge”—that, if he understood aright, was the qualification for admission to the life that had survived disaster. “Devil’s knowledge” being—if he was not mad—the scientific, mechanical, engineering lore which was the everyday acquirement of thousands on thousands of ordinary civilized men. The everyday acquirements of ordinary men were anathema; if he was not mad, his own life had been granted him for the reason only that he was unskilled and devoid of them. Ignorant, even as the men who spared him, of practical science and mechanics—a plain man, like unto them.... Ignorance was prized here, esteemed as a virtue—the old man’s query, “You’re a college man?” had been accusation disguised.
In a flash it was clear to him, and he saw through the farce whereby he had been tested and tempted; understood the motive that had prompted its cruel low cunning and all that the cunning implied of acceptance of barbarism, insistence on it.... What these outcasts, these remnants of humanity feared above all things was a revival of the science, the mechanical powers, that had wrecked their cities, their houses and their lives and made them—what they were.... In knowledge was death and in ignorance alone was a measure of peace and security; hence, fearing lest he was of those who knew too much, they had tempted him to confess to forbidden knowledge, to boast of it—that, having boasted, they might kill him without mercy, make an end of his wits with his life. In the torments inflicted by science destructive they had turned upon science and renounced it; and, that their terrors might not be renewed in the future, they were setting up against it an impassable barrier of ignorance. They had put devil’s knowledge behind them—with intention for ever.... If when they questioned him and led him on, he had yielded to the natural impulse to lie, they would have knocked him on the head—like vermin—without scruple; and the sweat broke out on him as he remembered how nearly he had lied....
He sat up, sweating and staring at darkness, and thrust back the hair from his forehead.... He was back among men—who, of set purpose and deliberately, had turned their faces from the knowledge their fathers had acquired by the patience and toil of generations! Who, of set purpose and deliberately, sought to filch from their children the heritage of the ages, the treasure of the mind of man!... That was what it meant—the treasure of the mind of man! Renunciation of all that long generations had striven for with patience and learning and devotion.... The impossibility and the treason of it—to know nothing, to forget all their fathers had won for them.... He remembered old talk of education as a birthright and the agitations of reformers and political parties. To this end.
Who were they, he asked himself, these people who had made a decision so terrible—what manner of men in the old life? Now they were seeking to live as the beasts live, and not only the world material had died to them, but the world of human aspiration.... To this they had come, these people who once were human—the beast in them had conquered the brain ... and like fire there blazed into his brain the commandment: “Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge! Thou shalt not eat ... lest ye die.”