The old man on this had looked appealingly at Jeremy, who sought without success to convince Roger that the difference was really great. But his attention was chiefly concentrated on discovering how this and other differences had come about. It seemed incredible that the race could have forgotten so much and yet live. The “Troubles” were so often in the mouths of both uncle and nephew that Jeremy’s mind came at last to give them their due in the shape of a capital letter. The “Troubles.”... He supposed that his trance had begun with this beginning and indeed much of what the priest had told him was more vivid to him than to the teller when he remembered the soldier and the alien woman who had called him a dirty bourgeois, or Scott leaning down, pale and anxious from the lorry, or the man whom he had never seen, but who had thrown a bomb at him down Trehanoc’s cellar steps.
Jeremy gathered that it had been a question not of one outburst of fighting, one upheaval and turning-point of time, but of numbers spread over many years.
“It is hard to say how it all came about,” mused the old man, at one of the few moments when he was cajoled into telling instead of asking. “Some have said that the old life grew too difficult, and just ground itself to pieces. It began with the rich and the poor. When some accident brought them to blows it was too late to put the world right. After that they never trusted one another, and there was no more peace.”
“When did the fighting stop at last?” asked Jeremy.
“It kept on stopping—it kept on stopping. And it kept on breaking out again, first in one country and then in another. For fifty years there was always war in some part of the world. And when they stopped fighting they couldn’t settle down again. The workers idled, or smashed the machines. And at last a time came when the fighting didn’t stop. It went on and on in England and all over the Continent. All the schools were closed, all the teachers were idle for more than twenty years. I have often thought that that was how we came to lose so much. A generation grew up that had never learnt anything. Only a few men knew how to do the things their fathers had done every day, and the rest were too stupid or too lazy to learn from them properly. Then everybody was tired out and more than half the people were dead; they had to begin again, and they were too weary to recover as much as they might have done.”
Jeremy pondered over again the vision raised by these words. He could see the earth ravaged by exhausted enemies, too evenly matched to bring the struggle to an end until exhaustion had reached its lowest pitch. He could see all the mechanical wonders of his own age smashed by men who were too weak to prevail, but who were strong enough not to endure the soulless contrivances which had brought them into servitude. And he could see the gradual triumph of the Speaker over a weary and starving population. The first Speaker, who had really been Speaker of the House of Commons in the year when Jeremy had fallen into his trance, had been a man of unsuspected strength of character and a member of a great and wealthy Jewish house. Assisted by his kinsmen in all parts of the world, he had been a rallying-point for the rich in the early disorders; and he had established a party which had lasted, with varying fortunes, through all the changes of succeeding years. He it was who had arranged that compromise with the Church of Rome by which all southern England became again more or less Catholic without too violently alienating those parts of the country in which other sorts of religion were dominant. Not the least of his claims for greatness had been his perception of the real power still concentrated in the fugitive and changing person of that Bishop of Rome who was chased from his own ruined palace and his own city, up and down Europe from one refuge to another, as the forces of disorder veered and changed ... subsided here and rose again there. One by one the countries of the earth had sunk, bloodless and impoverished, into quiescence, and when the turn of England came, the house of the Speaker, the house of Burney, in the person of his grandson, had been at hand to take the opportunity.
“And did all the people die off in the fighting?” Jeremy had wondered.
“In battle and disease and famine,” the priest answered. “Towards the end of the Troubles came the Great Famine. And that was the cause of the worst of the wars. The people of the towns were starving, because they were fighting in America and sent us no food-ships, and the country people were nearly starving too, because their crops had failed. They struggled for what food there was ... they died by millions ... by millions and millions....”
“I must say I find it hard to believe all that,” Roger interposed with an air of detachment. “My uncle is so enthusiastic about the old times that he believes whatever any one tells him or what he reads in a lot of old books—books you couldn’t imagine if you hadn’t seen them, filthy, simply dropping to pieces.... The more improbable the story the better he likes it. Well, in the first place, why should those people have wanted food from other countries? What did they do if they didn’t grow it for themselves? And why should so many of them be living in towns?”
“You are very ignorant, my boy,” said the old man calmly. “Look at London now; look at the miles of houses that no one has lived in for a hundred years. Who did live in them but the people who died of famine?”