He had no lack of care in his extreme old age—in part perhaps because the tribe grew to hold him in awe that increased with the years; the sole survivor of the legendary age that preceded the Ruin and Downfall of Man, he was feared in spite of his helplessness. He alone of his little community could remember the Ruin with any comprehension of its causes; he alone possessed in silence a share of that hidden and forbidden knowledge which had brought flaming judgment on the world. Here and there in the countryside were grey-headed men, his juniors by years, who could remember vaguely the horrors of a distant childhood—the sky afire, the crash of falling masonry, the panic, the lurking and the starving. These things they could remember like a nightmare past ... but only remember, not explain. Behind Theodore’s bald forehead and dimmed, oozing eyes lay the understanding of why and wherefore denied to those who dwelt beside him.
For this reason Theodore Savage was treated with deference in the days of his senile helplessness. As he sat, half-blind, in the sun by the door of his hut, no one ever failed to greet him with respect in passing; while in most the greeting was more than a token of respect or kindliness—the sign and result of a nervous desire to propitiate. In the end he was credited with a knowledge of unholy arts, and the children of the tribe avoided and shrank from him, frightened by the gossip of their elders; so that village mothers found him useful as a bogy, arresting the tantrums of unruly brats by threats of calling in Old Bald-Head.
Even in his lifetime legends clustered thick about him, and sickness or accident to man or beast was ascribed to the glance of his purblind eye or the malice of his vacant brain; while there was once—though he never knew or suspected it—an agitated and furtive discussion as to whether, for the good of the community, he should not be knocked on the head. The furtive discussion ended in discussion only—not because the advocates of mercy were numerous, but because no man was willing to lay violent hands on a wizard, for fear of what might befall him; and, the interlude over, the tribe relapsed into its customary timid respect for its patriarch, its customary practice of ensuring his goodwill by politeness and small offerings of victuals. These added to the old man’s comfort in his latter years—nor had he any suspicion of the motive that secured him both deference and dainties.
With his death the local legends increased and multiplied; the distorted, varied myths of the Ruin of Man and its causes showing an inevitable tendency to group themselves around one striking and mysterious figure, to make of that figure a cause and a personification of the Great Disaster. Theodore Savage, to those who came after, was Merlin, Frankenstein and Adam; the fool who tasted of forbidden fruit, the magician whose arts had brought ruin on a world, the devil-artisan whose unholy skill had created monsters that destroyed him. His grave was an awesome spot, apart from other graves, which the timorous avoided after dark; and, long after all trace of it had vanished, there clung to the neighbourhood a tradition of haunting and mystery.... To his children’s children his name was the symbol of a dead civilization; a civilization that had passed so completely from the ken of living man that its lost achievements, the manner of its ending, could only be expressed in symbol.
PRINTED BY GARDEN CITY PRESS, LETCHWORTH, ENGLAND.
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