“The boy thrived wonderously. His mother had told him that he was the one human being on the planet. He had lived in a cave and fed of the simple fruits of the earth, so that he grew to be a young god of the wild-wood. But he was curious. He wanted to see the wonderful, wicked world of which his mother had told him so much. So he set out on his travels.
“Like a superb young savage he tramped through Europe. He tamed a horse to bear him; he explored the ruins of great cities—Vienna, Paris, Berlin. In the ivy-grown palaces and the weed-stifled courts of kings he killed lions and tigers; for all the wild animals had escaped from the menageries and had reverted to a savage state. He ached to know something of the histories of these places; but he could not read, and all was meaningless to him.
“He discovered how to use a boat, and in his experiments he was blown across the channel to Britain. Then one day he lit a bonfire amid the ruins of London. Nothing in the world but ruin, ruin.
“He was as one at the birth of things for he understood nothing. He knew of fire and knives, but not of wheels. He was a primitive man in a world that has perished of super-civilisation. Yet as he cowered by his fire in the centre of Trafalgar Square the vast silence of it all weighed him down, and he felt oh! so lonely. He caressed the dogs he had trained to follow and love him. His mother had been the only human being he had ever seen and she had died when he was so young. His memory of her was vague, but he could imagine no one different. He knew nothing of sex, only that vast consuming loneliness, those haunting desires he could not understand.
“Then as he sat there brooding, into his life there came the woman—a girl. Where she came from he never knew. Probably like himself she was a deserted child, and like him she, too, was a child of nature, superb, virile, unspoiled. She had tamed two leopards to defend her, and she was clad in the skin of another. With her leopards she saved his life, just as he was about to fall in battle against a pack of wolves.
“Their meeting was a wondrous idyll; their love an idyll still more wonderful. There in the lovely Kentish woodland they roamed, a new Adam and a new Eve. Then to them in that fresh and glowing world, glad as at the birth of things, a child was born.
“And here we leave them standing on a peak that overlooks a beautiful plain, in the glory of the rising sun. The world rejoices; the sky is full of song; the air is a-thrill with fate. There they stand bathed in that yellow glow and hold aloft their child, the beginners of a new race, a primal pair in a primal world.
“For nature is stronger than man, and the Master of Destiny is invincible.”
I was pounding away at my typewriter one morning, and Anastasia was out on a marketing expedition, when there came a violent knocking at my door. As I opened it Lorrimer almost fell into my arms. He was ghastly and seemed about to faint. Staggering to the nearest chair he buried his head in his hands.