These details were rather incoherently reported, as the spring advanced, and an occasional survivor from the north made his way out of the beleaguered capital. When the spring had fairly ripened into summer, an energetic effort was made to reach Edinburgh, and it succeeded. Scotland at that time became inundated, and though the enormous accumulations of snow refused at once to surrender their blockade, they were so deeply broached and undermined that the North British line pushed a train forward to the edge of the city, though unable to reach its depot in the heart of the city, by reason of the hammered wedge of snow which it encountered under the Castle’s cliffs.
After cutting their way out, to the Lothian Road, the explorers began investigations and were horror stricken to find that immense conflagration had broken out, destroying great sections of the city, which owed its partial survival to the masses of invading snow. These fires had started in the houses occupied by the domestic bandits, who had seized the finest residences, provisioned them from the stores, and surrendered themselves to an orgy of rapine and indulgence, by which their own fears were stifled, through the excesses of their drunken dissipation. Hundreds of these unfortunates had perished in the flames, their recklessness had invoked. The picture of the noble and beautiful city was shocking. The fires had made inroads upon the attractive Princes street, and in the portions west of the Caledonian station, towards the Donaldson hospital, gaping openings and swept acres revealed the unchecked fury of the flames. While it was probable that the city might, with a return of auspicious conditions resume some of its old beauty it was also too plain that the veto of Nature had been indelibly written across all such plans. Glaciers had already begun their formation in the Highlands, and the incipient development of an Ice Age was forcibly proclaimed on every hand. The logic of events was unanswerable. The United Kingdom throughout all its parts must participate again in the benighted life of Labrador and Siberia.
And Europe throughout its borders felt the poignant exasperation of the Arctic goad. It trembled with a new apprehension. The touch of those icy fingers, stretched out in myriad lines of approach, swarming like wavering steel points in thick onslaught from the crowded skies, made it suddenly anxious. It corrected its habits, it took council of piety and played with beseeching care its pretty role of devotee. Its ridiculous and wicked society, with futile haste filled the churches, and tried to forget its inherited cruelty, and even turned with an unexpected solicitude to the consideration of improving, in some sure way, the state of the untitled majority. Its scientific men rushed into congresses and explored their text books, and read and reread hopeless papers on the why and how of it, but being unable to invent another Gulf Stream, retired into dismal prognostications of a returning Ice Age. In fact deluded, as scientific men often are, by language, they embraced the thought of a “returning Ice Cap,” which would successfully force its way from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They nervously began measurements of the Alpine glaciers, took temperatures, wandered up in the higher regions of the atmosphere in balloons, sounded the floor of the ocean, established meteorological stations everywhere, and became so excited and convinced that they were happily on hand at a critical geological juncture, that they succeeded in supplying a technical ground for panic.
The statesmen and economists were more useful. They estimated the results of any continued lowering of the temperatures, the effects of climatic alterations on life and production, especially in grain, and found that the southern countries of Europe were in some danger, and the northern countries very really threatened with a commercial overthrow, as England had been. They too turned to the colonies of their respective countries for refuge. It looked as if the bursting receptacles of European Culture were about to explode and scatter over the ends of the world the germinal seeds of its civilization.
CHAPTER X.
ADDENDUM.
“Histories leave oppressive legacies behind them. They may furnish subjects for art and literature and poetry, but, as in family inheritance, they burden posterity with considerable rubbish. Society does not quickly free itself from superstition, nor from its habits of thinking or of doing things. Even when they become anachronisms we are loathe to part from them, because, to our own detriment, we are fond of them. America has started fresh, and runs on the road of opportunity, while other nations must hobble and limp as best they can, with the clogs of old usage and prejudice hanging on their feet.”
It was the voice of our friend Leacraft, and he was standing on a broad piazza built at the rear of a spacious villa on the topmost slopes of Staten Island, in the harbor of New York city, looking at the motionless ocean far beyond the fringe of land immediately before him, flushed by the setting sun. That luminary with glorious opulence had painted the sky a seething carmine in the west, and imparted its most delicate reminders of the morn to the eastern arches of the heavens, that hung above the sea. The picture was superbly satisfying. There was enough detail in the landscape, enough isolation of house and wood and field, of moor and strand, and not too much. The oncoming twilight softly blended these nearer things, yet left them palpable. But the day still flung its garlands of illumination over the broad skies; and the sensitive surfaces of the water with lavish sympathy repeated on its face the smiles of the blending zenith. And on either side of Leacraft stood Miss Tobit and Mr. Thomsen, and the month was June, and the year, narrated.
Before we satisfy our curiosity more closely as to their relation, or note those changes which five years, however kindly inclined, must leave behind them, let us follow this conversation which of itself 1915, five years after all the happenings previously may unroll some curtains of the past.
“Well,” it was Thomsen who was now speaking, “then I suppose you are not willing to quarrel with the material revolution we have been through, because all that has come between the present and the past, like the sundering of Damocles’ sword, has saved us from the necessity of denuding ourselves of the old things, turning us loose in a fresh field, where we may play high jinks with all we once venerated, and where we may end by despising ourselves, for the very liberties you seem anxious for us to indulge in.”