The process, unhindered, was certain as sunrise; the important little streets that humanity had built for its vanished needs and its vanished business would be absorbed into an indifferent wilderness, in all things sufficient to itself. The rigid important little streets had been no more than an episode in the ceaseless life of the wilderness; an episode ending in failure, to be decently buried and forgotten.
He plodded aimlessly through street after street that was fordable till the shell of a “County Infirmary” mocked at Ada’s hopes and recalled the first purpose of his journey; a gaunt sodden building, the name yet visible on walls that sweated fungi and mould. Then, that he might leave nothing undone in the way of help and search, he trudged and waded to the lower outskirts of the town; where the roads lost themselves in grass and flooded water, and there stretched to the limit of his eyesight a dull winter landscape without sign of living care or habitation. In the end—having strained his eyes after that which was not—he turned to slink back to his own place; skirting alien territory where the sight of a stranger might mean an alarm and a manhunt, and sheltering at night where his fire might be hidden from the watcher.
“You ’aven’t found nothin’?” Ada whimpered, when he had told his necessary lies to the curious and they were out of earshot in their hut. Her eyes had grown piteous when he stumbled in alone; she had dreamt in his absence of sudden and miraculous deliverance—following him in fancy through streets with tramlines, where dwelt women who wore corsets—also doctors. Who, perhaps, when they knew the greatness of her need, would send a motor-ambulance—to fetch her to a bed with sheets on it.
“Nothing,” he told her almost roughly, afraid to show pity. “No doctors, no houses fit to live in. Wherever I’ve been and as far as I could see—it’s like this.”
XXI
It was in the third spring after the Ruin of Man that Ada’s time was accomplished and she bore a son to her husband; on a day in late April or early May there was going and coming round the shelter that was Theodore’s home. The elder women of the tribe, by right of their experience, took possession, and from early morning till long after nightfall they busied themselves with the torment and mystery of birth; and with the aid of nothing but their rough and unskilled kindliness Ada suffered and brought forth a squalling red mannikin—the heir of the ages and their outcast. The child lived and, despite its mother’s fecklessness, was lusty; as a boy, ran shoeless, and, in summer, naked as Adam; and grew to his primitive manhood without letters, knowing of the world that was past and gone only legends derived from his elders.
His coming, to Theodore, meant more than paternity; the birth of his son made him one with the life of the tribe. By the child’s wants and helplessness—still more when other children followed—his father was tied to an existence which offered the necessary measure of security; to the stretch of land where he had the right to hunt unmolested, the patch he had the right to sow and reap, and the company of those who would aid him in protecting his children. He had given his hostages to fortune and the limits set to his secret expeditions in search of a lost world were the limits set by the needs of those dependent on him, by his fear of leaving them too long unprotected, unprovided for.
He learned much from his firstborn and the brothers and sisters who followed him; not only the intimate lore of his fatherhood, but the lore and outlook of man bred uncivilized, and the traditions, in making, of a world to come—which in all things would resemble the old traditions handed down by a world that had died. His children lived naturally the life that had been forced upon their father and inherited ignorance as a birthright; growing up—such as lived through the perils of childhood—without knowledge of the past and untempted by the sin of the intellect. The oath which Theodore, like every new-made father, was called on to swear in the name of the child he had given to the tribe, had a meaning to those who had lived through Disaster and witnessed the Ruin of Man; to the next generation the vow was a formula only, a renunciation of that they had never possessed. They could not, if they would, instruct their children in the secrets of God, the forbidden lore of the intellect.
By the time his first son was of an age to think and question, Theodore understood more than the growth and workings of a child-mind—much that had hitherto seemed dark and fantastic in the origins of a world that had ended with the Ruin of Man. It was the workings of a child-mind that made oddly clear to him the significance of primitive religious doctrine and beliefs handed down through the ages—the once meaningless doctrine of the Fall of Man and the belief in a vanished Golden Age. These the boy, unprompted, evolved from his own knowledge and the talk of his elders, accepting them spontaneously and naturally.
In Theodore’s childhood the Golden Age had been a myth and pleasant fancy of the ancients, and the Fall of Man as distant as the Book of Genesis and unreal as the tale of Puss-in-Boots; to his children, one and all, the legends of his infancy were close and undoubted realities. The Golden Age was a wondrous condition of yesterday; the Fall—the Ruin—its catastrophic overthrow, an experience their father had survived. The fields and hillsides where they worked, played and wandered were still littered with strange relics of the Golden Age—the vanished, fruitful, incomprehensible world whence their parents had been cast into the outer darkness of everyday hardship as a penalty for the sin of mankind. The sin unforgivable of grasping at the knowledge which had made them like unto gods; a mad ambition which not only they but their children’s children must atone for in the sweat of their brow.... More than once Theodore suspected in the secret recesses of his youngsters’ minds a natural and wondering contempt for the men of the last generation; the fools and blind who had overreached themselves and forfeited the splendour of the Golden Age by their blundering greed and unwisdom. So history was writing itself in their minds; making of a race that had acquiesced in science and drifted to destruction a legendary people whose sin was deliberate—a people whose encroachments had angered a self-important Deity and brought down his wrath upon their heads. It was a history inseparable from religious belief; its opening chapters identical in all essentials with the legendary history of an epoch that had ceased to exist.