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Title: The Last Man
Author: Noyes, Alfred (1880-1958)
Date of first publication: 1940
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: The Catholic Book Club, 1941
Date first posted: 10 January 2012
Date last updated: 10 January 2012
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #903

This ebook was produced by
Barbara Watson, Mary Meehan, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






                   THE LAST MAN

                   ALFRED NOYES


    THE CATHOLIC BOOK CLUB
    121 CHARING CROSS ROAD, LONDON, W.C.2

    _This Edition ... 1941_

    PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
    LOWE AND BRYDONE PRINTERS LIMITED, LONDON, N.W.1O




CHAPTER I


The catastrophe that overwhelmed the inhabitants of this planet in the
year ----, might have been foretold a hundred years earlier, from the
increasing subtlety and skill with which the nations had devoted all the
resources of science to multiplying the means of destruction. At the
same time, for many generations, they had all been declaring that, in
certain contingencies, they would "fight to the last man". The sincerity
and seriousness of these declarations could not be doubted; nor could
one suppose that all the nations of the earth would speak so
emphatically of what they would do in a purely imaginary case. It was
not bluff. They meant what they said; and, at last, they were confronted
by the very case about which they had been talking: they must either
prove their words and save their faces, or eat their words and save
everyone else.

When Mark Adams swam ashore at Steephill Cove in the Isle of Wight,
twenty-four hours after the general catastrophe, it was only gradually
that he realized his unique position, and the grim irony of it all. His
own survival, and the way in which he had escaped destruction, were
indeed almost more remarkable than the catastrophe itself. Poems and
works of fiction had several times been written about the annihilation
of the human race by an invasion of monsters from another planet, or the
generation of some noxious gas from the earth itself, or through the
natural cooling of the sun. The last man had been pictured as
pathetically dying in a snow-hut accompanied, oddly enough, by the last
butterfly. In recent times, it had not occurred to the proposers of
perfect schemes and agreements for a "new and better world" that evil
was a reality, strongly enthroned in human nature, and that men, by
their own deliberate act, might themselves precipitate a horror that no
earthly contract could forestall.

For over a hundred years, the leading nations had been discovering more
and more deadly poison-gases, more and more subtle ways of disseminating
disease-germs among their rivals, with a view to the survival of the
fittest. The nave question--"fittest for what?"--was no longer asked by
intelligent men and women. In the meantime, the mind and spirit of the
whole race had been profoundly affected by the great discovery that the
old distinction between right and wrong had no absolute foundations, as
the more unsophisticated followers of outworn creeds had supposed; and
that, in the eyes of the intelligentsia, right and wrong had long been
regarded as entirely "relative". Indeed, for a large section of modern
art and literature, in which the souls of nations are supposed to
express themselves, the absolute imperatives of the moral law had become
merely "public conveniences".

This liberating discovery, daily emphasized by most of the critical
organs in the civilized world, had so intimidated large numbers of
ordinary men and women that they were afraid to use their own more
reliable faculties, and meekly accepted the current unmorality, lest
they should be branded as "behind the times".

Very few, indeed, had the courage of the "laughing philosopher" who
somewhat bitingly remarked that he was content to be behind the times
when he saw the ghastly people who were abreast of the times, and the
still more ghastly people who were in advance of the times.

It was when the general bewilderment had reached its chaotic climax, in
every department of social life, that a further discovery was made which
enabled the political gangs to bring the human race to the brink of the
abyss. Ordinary men and women had no more say in the matter than the cat
on the hearth, or the sheep in the fold. The bombs and poison-gases by
which a great metropolis could be turned into a wilderness of charnel
houses in a single night had suddenly become as out-of-date as the
weapons of the flint man. The disease-germs and bacteria by which large
sections of an unsuspecting populace could be scientifically eliminated
in times of peace, without the fuss and formality of an open declaration
of war, had become mere child's play. Considerable doubt had long been
expressed by statisticians as to whether really satisfactory results had
been achieved by the quiet introduction of bacteria into milk supplies
and the mouth-pieces of public telephones. The dissemination of
disease-germs in picture houses, where all the conditions of
germ-culture--darkness, moisture, artificial heat and the breath of a
closely packed crowd--were to be found at their best, had added to the
death-rate of rival nations considerably, but it was doubtful whether it
had diminished their man-power more effectively than the propaganda of
birth-control. This was not even suspected of emanating from enemy
sources, and was indeed regarded by many as highly advantageous to their
own people and a remedy for unemployment. The only satisfactory result
of the disease-germ attacks was a moral one. The very nations who were
formerly disgusted and appalled at such methods, gradually came to
accept the phrases of those who employed them; and whereas, in former
generations, any clean-handed soldier would have called it plain
cowardly "murder" to poison the food of unsuspecting populations, the
new fashion, all the world over, in leading articles and platform
speeches, blandly consented to call it "bacteriological warfare". And
now this, too, was elementary. Professor Hammerstein of Bonn had
discovered a method of transmitting an all-pervasive ethereal wave which
would instantaneously stop--not the engines of motor-cars and
aeroplanes--but the beating of the human heart.

The only drawback to this discovery, immensely serviceable and curiously
symbolical as it seemed, for it affected only the human heart, was that
in the opinion of the supreme Kriegsacademie it was "too terrible for
use except as a last resort". Its range was practically unlimited; and
everyone, friend or foe, except those who stood behind the transmitter,
would be killed. There was also the more serious danger that, when once
it had been used, the secret might be revealed to another power; for, as
Professor Hammerstein remarked innocently, "there are Powers to whom all
hearts are open and from whom no secrets are hid".

It was after a series of international crises that the catastrophe
occurred. The statesmen of no less than fifteen nations had declared
that each was ready to fight "to the last man", for something about
which the ordinary folk in all those nations knew absolutely nothing
till the crash came. For several years before this final war broke out,
there had been a system of alliances to guarantee peace. Under this
admirable system, every nation in the world was pledged to defend every
other nation against any act of aggression; so that, whenever such an
act took place in any quarter of the globe, the entire world was at
once involved in war. For, unfortunately, history shows that no nation
has ever regarded itself as the aggressor in war; and the present case
was no exception. All the nations, most nobly, fulfilled their pledges.
They all took up arms, instantly, as agreed; but unhappily they took
them up, in almost equal numbers, on opposite sides.

For several months, during the preliminary "war of nerves", both sides
had been boasting that they possessed an "unknown weapon" which would
bring all enemies to their knees, and annihilate all resistance on a
scale hitherto unimagined. And it was not idle boasting. Professor Muck,
who had been Professor Hammerstein's chief laboratory assistant, had
surreptitiously copied the records of his invention, and sold them
separately to agents of the British, French, Italian, American, Soviet,
Turkish, Japanese and Chinese Governments, at a thousand marks a time.
It was a small sum for a secret so important; but Professor Muck was a
modest little man, and a great admirer of the English poet, Wordsworth,
whom he often quoted in praise of "plain living and high thinking". His
only other pleasure was angling, which is not an expensive sport.

The result was that all the combatants, in all parts of the world,
possessed a secret weapon so formidable that, to do them justice, most
of them would have shrunk with horror from using it, except--and this
was the fatal reservation--_except in the last resort_.

The reservation was fatal; because there was one man, one fanatical
leader in Europe, who really did believe himself justified in using any
and every means to ensure victory. As historians of the twentieth
century pointed out, on occasion after occasion, the world had been
brought to the brink of a war involving a score of nations and scores
of millions of lives, by the sole caprice of one individual, of
third-rate intellect, and with the morals of a gangster. To the
protagonist on this occasion the "last resort" was merely the correct
and perfect application of science. It was the highest kind of
"Realpolitik" to wipe out your enemies as completely as you would wipe
out a wasp's nest. As soon as hostilities began, therefore, Herr Grumkow
decided to use the formidable means at his disposal and, not in the
least realizing that the enemy governments also possessed the "secret",
he could not resist announcing his intention beforehand. Owing to the
glorious success with which Science has "annihilated space", there was
an immediate pandemonium of telephone messages between the allied
nations on the other side, to the effect that a moment's delay might be
disastrous. Within an hour, on that fine morning, in the first week of
May, the fatal buttons had been pressed, almost simultaneously, in all
the countries concerned. The "last resort", which knew no frontiers and
would eliminate neutrals as impartially as it would eliminate friends
and enemies if they stood in its way, had been brought into operation on
all sides; and the war, which, as all sides so truly declared, was to
end war, had itself come to an abrupt end.

The league-long sealike roar of the guns had shut off, suddenly, as a
door shuts in a clap of wind, and left a silence far more terrible. The
most certain of all the lessons taught by war had been taught for the
last time on this planet--the lesson that in war there are no winners.




CHAPTER II


Mark Adams escaped the general annihilation because, during the crucial
moments, he happened to be in a unique position. Neither the inventor of
the new weapon, nor anyone else, knew that the one secure refuge from
the "last resort" was a steel chamber, submerged under the sea, at a
considerably greater depth than that at which submarines usually
operate. Shortly before the wave of death swept over the upper world,
the enemy submarine in which Mark was a prisoner had struck a sunken
wreck, and for three days and nights thereafter it had been lying
helpless at the bottom of the sea in deep water.

It was those three days and nights of living hell that saved him. The
officers and crew of the submarine had gone out, on the first day, by
the escape-chambers, which were of a far more efficient type than those
of the generation before the war. On their way to the surface they had
met the all-pervasive wave of death, and it was only their lifeless
bodies that emerged, for a moment, like shining porpoises into the
sunlight. Mark had been left to the last. The others had all gone in
couples; and, when he approached the escape-chamber to take his place
with the last remaining member of the ship's company, he had been
greeted with an oath and a heavy blow in the face from that gallant
officer, who required all the room he could get for his bulky frame, and
certainly desired no enemy companion in the narrow cell.

Mark went down like an ox under the unexpected blow, and striking his
head against an iron bolt, lay unconscious for a considerable time. When
he recovered consciousness he was too weak and dazed to move for several
hours. But the absence of the crew, and the automatic action of the air
regenerators, had at least made it easier to breathe.

Gradually he recovered strength; and, at twelve o'clock by his watch,
after washing the encrusted blood from his face, he was able to make his
own preparations for escape. He was not sure, however, whether it was
twelve midnight or twelve noon; and he decided that his chances of being
rescued would be far greater if he came to the surface in daylight. To
ensure this, therefore, he thought it would be better to wait till the
hour hand pointed to six; for at that hour, whether in the morning or
evening, there would be ample light.

He was a strong swimmer; and, when he came to the surface, he found
himself only a few hundred yards away from the coast that he knew best
in the world, the Undercliff of the Isle of Wight. The submarine had, in
fact, been lying at the bottom of "St. Catherine's Deep". A strong tide
from the south-west was carrying him towards Steephill Cove, so that he
had no need to exert himself. By the time he had got rid of his "escape
apparatus" he was already within wading distance of the land.

While he was still waist-deep in the water, Mark instinctively felt a
certain strangeness, the faintest suggestion of something abnormal in
the quiet familiar scene before him. Outwardly everything looked as he
had known it and loved it for years; the fisherman's cottage under the
cliff; the boats drawn up above the high-water line; the herring gulls
clustering over their reflection in the wet sand; the dark heap of
rusty-red fishing nets. It was all as lazily peaceful as a picture by
Morland; and, oddly enough, it was the laziest and most peaceful detail
of all that gave him the first startling hint of something sinister
about the whole scene.

Nothing could be more usual on the English coast in an exceptionally
early summer than the spectacle of two or three young women lazily
sun-bathing on a slope of warm shingle; nothing more true to form, in
every sense of the phrase, than those slender motionless figures, lying
face downwards on the beach. They had probably not been swimming so
early in the year, but there was one girl in a light blue bathing-suit,
a delicate note of water-colour; and, a little further on, a dark-haired
girl, in a bright red bathing-suit. Both of these were drowsily
outstretched on a bank of tawny shingle, with their heads buried in
their brown arms; and both, apparently, were absorbed in the same
cat-like reverie.

The vaguely apprehended, but distinctly unusual thing was this. It was a
pleasant summer evening; but the sunlight, which still sparkled on the
bay, had already deserted the beach; and sun-bathers did not usually lie
so contentedly in the grey lengthening shadow of the cliff, where the
shingle must now be striking damp and cold.

Twenty yards farther on, he could see a third young woman now, in a pale
gold bathing-suit. The water of the incoming tide seemed to be rippling
over her feet. A moment later he saw something quite unusual and
startling. A large seagull with brown-flecked wings swooped within easy
reach of the girl's head, peered cautiously, and then fluttered to and
fro, less than an arm's length above her sunburnt back, as though
hesitatingly tempted to alight upon the bare flesh of a body so
motionless. For a second or two Mark failed to grasp anything more than
that he was witnessing one of those uncommon incidents with which
writers of popular "Natural History" amuse their readers. Then, with a
gasp, he realized that the seagull was not departing, in the least, from
the rules of seagull nature; and that any strangeness in the incident
came from the human side.

Dashing out of the water, he ran towards the body, shouting as he ran.
The seagull with a witch-like scream wheeled off into the sunset, and
Mark Adams, kneeling by the girl in the pale gold bathing-suit,
discovered that she was as cold and dead as the shingle on which she
lay.




CHAPTER III


During the wars Mark had grown used to death; but a sense of something
terrible beyond all use and wont crept over him now, as stealthily as
the evening shadow crept over the waters of the bay. He ran,
stumblingly, towards the other sun-bathers; touched them and found them
dead. The face of one of them, vacuously pretty, was turned sideways.
Her child-like mouth, still streaked with lipstick, was full of sand.

They had all been dead for hours. But why had nobody removed them? Why
was everything so uncannily still? Why was no one stirring in the little
fisherman's cottage under the cliff? He ran quickly up to it, and peered
through the window. The light was fast fading now; but he could see a
woman lying near the kitchen range, in one of the unmistakable attitudes
of death.

Perhaps there had been a raid on Portsmouth. Perhaps a stray bomb had
been dropped on this out-of-the-way village, a few minutes too soon for
its real objective, seventeen miles away. But he felt that this was not
the real explanation. There was no sign of an explosion, the windows
were intact. There was no indication of gas. He hurried up the
cliff-path to Ventnor, and, as he approached the town, he became
increasingly aware of its uncanny stillness. There was no sound of
traffic, no moving figure on the road or at the doors of the outlying
houses.

As he drew near the first hotel on the outskirts of the town, he
encountered something for which even the last five weeks had not
prepared him. A large bus of the Vectis Company stood at the side of the
road, as though waiting for passengers. Stealing up to it through the
dusk, Mark found the driver lolling forward over his wheel, with the
fixed stare of the dead. Inside, it was filled with a grotesque crowd of
frozen gargoyles--men, women and children, with stony faces and gaping
mouths. They were held--petrified--in their places by some abnormal
rigor. The rising moon silvered their greyness and made them spectral.
Averting his eyes, Mark again broke into a stumbling run in his search
for something alive, until the sound of his own footsteps, echoing back
from the walls of the hotel in that appalling stillness, pulled him up
by its weird abnormality. He pushed back the swing-doors of the hotel
entrance, almost stealthily, as a man tiptoes into a church; yet he felt
instinctively what he was going to see. It was dark; but he knew where
the switches were in that big lounge-hall. He remembered a jolly
Christmas party there, ten years ago, when they put out the lights and
told ghost stories round the fire, till they were all afraid to go home.
Lights, lights, lights, one after another, he switched them on, as
though he hoped that each new light would dispel the dreadful picture
that the others had revealed only more and more clearly: the frozen
little groups of the dead, in the big arm-chairs and couches; the old
man with the newspaper still clutched in his stiff yellow fingers; his
old wife with her head drooping on her breast. On the floor beside her
there was a note which she had been scribbling to her daughter in
London. Mark picked it up and read--

     _Such a lovely view from the window here, across masses of flowers
     to the sea. It seems too tragic that men should be killing one
     another in a world which might be made so full of happiness for
     everyone with only a tithe of the effort and energy used in war. I
     wish that you and Jack could be with us here and out of danger._

He could see the bold headlines of the newspaper in the old man's hand.
OUR CONSCIENCES ARE CLEAR.

Behind the desk in the office, two girl clerks were stretched on the
floor, dead. The porter was huddled in his box, as motionless and cold
as the rows of keys on their hooks behind him. He, too, had a newspaper
spread out on his desk, and his dead face seemed to be heavily pondering
the same headline. OUR CONSCIENCES ARE CLEAR.

And then Mark caught sight of a telephone-box at the back of the lobby.
He dashed into it, and raised the receiver--the swiftest means of
communication with the outside world, or so he thought and expected it
to be.

He could not tell whether the drumming in his ears came from the
telephone or from the blood in his own veins. But he dialled first
"enquiry", and then "trunk". There was no reply. He dialled for the
operator. Again there was no reply, only that steady drumming--the blood
in his own veins.

He could not tell whether the silence indicated that everyone at the
exchange was dead, or merely that there was a local breakdown.

In the parking ground, outside the hotel, there were two or three
motor-cars. He chose the car whose gears he understood best, and started
the engine. The human associations of that purring sound--memories of
old happy journeys in the country, laughing faces at the doors of old
houses, hands cheerily waving good-bye--almost overwhelmed him as he
drove off from that silent building, populated only by the dead.

His first halt was at Niton on the Undercliff, where his only near
relations--the family of his Uncle Andrew--had lived for many years. He
left the car at the outer gates, and as he went down the steep little
road to the beautiful old house of island stone, he caught faintly
luminous glimpses of innumerable primroses on the rocky banks to left
and right. To the left of the house, he saw the orchard, ghostly with
blossom. It was all breathlessly still as he entered the familiar porch.
The door was wide open. He knocked and rang, but went straight in,
without waiting for an answer. There was no sound anywhere except the
trickling of a little stream outside and the humming of a bee who had
lost his way home and was butting his head against a glass door in the
hall.

Mark stood at the foot of the stairs and called his Aunt Christie and
Uncle Andrew by name. There was no reply. He went into the sun-room, as
they called it, a large verandah enclosed with glass, where the old
people used to read their papers and have tea. His Uncle Andrew seemed
to be taking an afternoon nap in his arm-chair. An illustrated paper lay
on the floor beside him. His Aunt Christie was there, lying on a couch.
They were both dead. She had that strangely blissful look which often
seems to transfigure the faces of the old when they catch their first
glimpse of another world. At her side, one of her grand-children, David,
a boy often, was kneeling with a huge bunch of primroses which he had
picked for her. One of her transparent old hands was half-outstretched
to take it, while the other was resting on the boy's head. On a table
near the head of the couch were some of the books she had been reading.
He noticed a well-worn copy of the _Fioretti of St. Francis_. He knew
that book so well. She used to read it to him when he was a small boy.
Mark picked it up. It opened at a passage of which he remembered every
word, the passage which describes how St. Francis, when he was dying,
was taken from Assisi to the plains below; how he asked that his litter
should be placed so that his face was turned towards his beloved city;
and how he blessed it as he died.

     _Blessed be thou of God, O holy City; for through thee shall many
     be saved, and in thee shall dwell many servants of the Lord; and
     out of thee shall many be chosen for the kingdom of eternal life._

He kissed the cold brow of the old lady and the little boy and stole
quietly out of the sun-room.

He wondered what had become of his married cousin, Althaea, who had been
staying with her mother, as he knew, for the birth of her first baby. He
went quietly up the stairs. In the first room he entered he saw at once
what had happened. Death, like a sculptor of surpassing genius, had
caught one fleeting moment of divine beauty and forbidden it to go by.
The new-born child was being laid in its mother's arms for the first
time. Her face wore an expression of ecstatic peace. The young
father--in the uniform of the air-force--was seated at her bedside,
kissing her hand. His wife's face was turned towards him. The nurse, on
the other side of the bed, had been leaning across to lay the child
between them. She was a curiously hard-featured woman, as austerely
above all sentiment, one might have supposed, as any veteran soldier.
Mark happened to have heard that she was of a morose and quarrelsome
disposition, though extremely efficient in her work. Neither of the
parents seemed to be aware, and neither of them could ever have
guessed, that as this hard-featured woman leaned over to lay the baby
between them, she took the opportunity of secretly kissing the dark head
of the young mother on the pillow. Nurse Hopkins would have been angry
if that touch of tenderness had been noticed, but death had caught her
in the act.

As Mark went up the steep little road to his car it was darker, but the
primroses seemed to have grown more luminous.

He decided to make for Cowes, where he thought he was more likely to
find the kind of boat he would need to take him to the mainland. He did
not dare to formulate the growing suspicion that, over there, sixteen
miles away, the same deadly silence would reign; but he instinctively
felt that he would probably have to make his own way across the Solent.

This instinctive feeling became almost a certainty during his drive
across the island; for, on the way, he saw no living form, no sign of
life or movement; but, once, in a moonlit cottage garden he saw a
prostrate figure and, twice, he had to swerve suddenly to avoid a dead
body on the road. On both occasions he stopped, and looked at the
bodies. He hammered at a cottage door and, receiving no reply, entered.
He found a whole family, the mother with her knitting, the father with
his newspaper, the children with their picture-books and toys, all stiff
as marionettes in the silent puppet-show of death, yet without any sign
of physical injury. Their fixed attitudes all had that strange petrified
look. After three more investigations of this kind he decided to push on
to Cowes without stopping again. Whatever the unknown weapon might have
been, that "last resort" which had been hinted at in the newspaper
headlines, there was clearly no room for any human life within its
range; and whatever that range might have been, it certainly seemed to
include the whole island.

At Cowes, as he now expected, he found another little town of the dead.
Their bodies were so thickly strewn along the narrow main street that it
was impassable. The moonlight here was dimmer, but it shone only too
vividly on those frozen up-turned faces. He saw, in one sickening
glance, townsmen, sailors, van-drivers, newspaper hawkers, policemen and
smartly dressed women all jumbled and huddled together along the road
and pavement. Several of the women were in yachting dress, though they
had certainly not been sailing, and their blood-red finger-nails
contrasted oddly with their thin yellow oil-skins. He saw two
golden-haired children, lying under a newspaper placard which bore in
large black letters the headline of the hour:

     OUR CONSCIENCES ARE CLEAR

Mark backed his car, and drove up a deserted side-street, making his way
round to the water-front by way of Egypt House. At the entrance to the
Club House of the Royal Yacht Squadron he halted. He remembered that
this conservative but highly efficient institution had recently made a
concession to modernity by installing the best wireless receiving
apparatus in the world. From one or another station, surely, he would be
able to learn what had happened.

The man in the sentry-box, at the sacrosanct gate, did not lift his head
as Mark Adams hurried through. Two elderly admirals were reposing in
basket-chairs on the moonlit lawn. A newspaper, trailing from one of the
claw-like hands, showed the last four words, now so obviously true: OUR
CONSCIENCES ARE CLEAR.

Mark groped his way into the dark club lounge, turned on all the
electric lights he could find and, watched by the stony faces of three
dead members who were assembled there in arm-chairs as though to listen
in, switched on the wireless. The Royal Yacht Squadron was not a place
where defect of the apparatus would be tolerated, but there was not a
murmur from National, Regional or Scottish Regional. He tried Paris,
Berlin, Rome, Moscow, all the cities of Europe from which usually there
would have flowed endless currents of contradictory propaganda, news
bulletins, raucous jungle-music, or (since the air must be all things to
all men) an occasional violin crying like a desolate angel over a lost
world. But to-night, there was nothing. All those stations, all those
cities, were utterly silent. He tried America. The Squadron and the New
York Yacht Club made a practice at that date of listening to one
another's news, and their apparatus was adequate to all transatlantic
purposes. But New York and Chicago were both silent.

He left the receiving apparatus, and went to the notice-board in the
entrance hall, where the last tape message had been pinned up, and there
he obtained his first clue.

It was now Thursday, the 7th of May. The latest announcements pinned up
on the green baize were these:

     _Tuesday, May 5th, 2.30 p.m. INTERNATIONAL RADIO:_

     _Grumkow threatens use of secret weapon of incalculable power, as
     last resort. In some quarters this is regarded as bluff but it is
     now regarded more seriously by the French Government who are in
     telephonic communication with the British War Office._

     _2.45 p.m. An emergency meeting of the British Inner Cabinet is now
     considering Herr Grumkow's threat. The President of the United
     States is in consultation with his military advisers. A Tokyo
     message states that the Japanese War Office is seriously disturbed
     by the message. Moscow reports an immediate summons of the Supreme
     Council. It is believed that all the chief powers are acquainted
     with the nature of the secret weapon, and will take immediate steps
     to forestall its use. The President of France states that the
     Allies also have a secret weapon, which hitherto they have regarded
     as too formidable for use except in the "last resort". If they are
     compelled to use it, he says, the result will be conclusive: and
     this moment seems to be approaching. Further delay might be fatal._

Apparently there had been no further delay; but the consequences had
been more fatal than anyone had expected. Immediately above these latest
notices Mark saw telegraphic messages from the heads of four great
nations, all of whom declared that they were prepared to "fight to the
last man".

It suddenly burst upon him that this might be what had actually
happened.

The human mind is an uncanny instrument, and does unexpected things. If
there had been any living witnesses, they would probably have been
surprised by Mark's behaviour at this moment. Flinging himself back upon
a great leather couch he talked to himself aloud, for the first time in
his life.

"My God," he said, "I do believe they've really done it. I believe I'm
the last man!"

Then, although his blood ran cold at the prospect, he burst into peal
after echoing peal of ironic laughter.




CHAPTER IV


There was a swift reaction, and, for an hour, Mark went to the other
extreme. Rushing from house to house, he entered one after another,
sometimes battering open a locked door and discovering, on more than one
occasion, a scandal that would have electrified Cowes, if Cowes had been
able to hear it.

Wherever he found a wireless apparatus, he switched it on, desperately
trying all the stations, hoping against hope that his former failures
were due merely to exhausted batteries. But in all cases, and from all
stations, there was utter silence.

He gave it up at last and returned to the sea-front. There, at least,
the seagulls were wheeling and mewing, and the ripple of the tide kept
up its quiet conversation with the shore.

He was shivering now with cold. His mental excitement hitherto had
almost prevented him from feeling any physical sensation; but the wet
clothes in which he had landed at Steephill Cove had not yet dried upon
his body; and, in the night air, he was chilled to the bone. If he was
to cross the Solent and continue his search without collapsing, he
needed dry clothes and a hot drink. Within a stone's throw there were
several shops which displayed the kind of outfit he wanted, and they
were all at his disposal. In a few minutes he was warmly clad in grey
flannel trousers, a flannel shirt, and a woollen jersey. Then he went
into a hotel near the Squadron and, resolutely disregarding the blonde
ghastliness of the barmaid among her bottles, and the facetious
countenance of the petrified sportsman in the loud checks who still
leaned towards her with an ogling eye, Mark put a kettle on an electric
ring behind the bar and mixed himself a stiff glass of hot rum and
water. This, with a glass-covered dish of ham-sandwiches, saved by their
grease-paper wrappings from over-staleness, he carried into the lounge,
which had no occupants, dead or alive. It was his first food for nearly
forty-eight hours, and he wolfed the sandwiches down, feeling ashamed of
his own hunger, but feeding it as he might have fed a ravenous animal to
be rid of its importunity. Afterwards, at the tobacco-stall near the
hotel entrance, he chose a pipe to replace the one he had lost, and
filled a pouch with his favourite tobacco. Then he went down to the
landing-stage, at which a small motor-launch was rocking. It was a
beautiful little boat, which had belonged, two days ago, to one of the
yachts at anchor in the Solent; but it was entirely at his own disposal
now. As quickly as his present haste allowed, he was off and away,
chugging across the Solent for the great sea-port which he could dimly
see on the opposite coast. He had only one immediate aim, however--to
get away from this fearful island of the dead, away into the clear,
crisp lapping water. As the shore died away behind him, a hideous
nightmare seemed to die away also, for a time. Beauty began to clothe
the coast behind him as, for the present, it clothed the coast he was
approaching. Which, he wondered, was the reality? In half an hour, the
coast he had left looked as inviting under the summer moon as the island
valley of Avilion, and the coast he was approaching filled him with a
new and terrible apprehension.

There was no movement on any of the great sea-going liners. The wharves
were deserted. But he caught glimpses of dark bundles on them which
might or might not be what he feared they were. Once--a very unusual
thing in the Solent, he had to swerve out of his course to prevent a
derelict boat drifting across his bows.

He landed at the Southampton pier of the Isle of Wight Steam Packet
Company, and almost the first thing he saw was the dead face of a
steel-helmeted watchman, staring at him over an ironic rampart of
sandbags by which the dead man's body was protected and propped on all
sides.

The broad road at the end of the pier showed him that the "unknown
weapon" had been as effective in Southampton as on the Island. There was
just one place where, if any defence at all had been effective, he would
be more likely to find survivors than anywhere else. At a naval dock
near by, the moon had shown him the massive grey hull and turret and
sky-pointing guns of H.M.S. _Implacable_, the most formidable fighting
ship of the British Navy. He had that inborn faith of the British that,
when it came to a final test, their Navy was invincible, prepared for
every possible emergency, and that no surprise from sky or sea could
ever put it out of action.

In a sense, this was still true, so far as the ship was concerned.
H.M.S. _Implacable_ was in perfect condition. But the sentries recumbent
on the dock asked him no questions, and offered no opposition as he
passed the forbidden gates. He walked up the gangway, which had
obviously been placed in position for the little group of officers
huddled in a grotesque heap on the gleaming moonlit deck. The Titanic
guns lifted their dumb grey muzzles to the sky as though they were
still expecting enemy wings from the north; but only the small grey
clouds came flying over; and there was no sound anywhere except the
lapping of the water against the bows and the eldritch mewing of the
seagulls.

This, so far as Southampton was concerned, seemed to Mark conclusive. It
would be useless to waste any more time there; and he determined to push
on to London at once. Outside the dock gates there were several cars
waiting. He chose an unoccupied one, tore the hoods off the headlights;
and, in a few minutes, was driving along the London road as fast as the
dreadful circumstances allowed.

In the open country there were fewer of those dark obstructions; but, as
he approached Winchester, he had to slow down again. His lights, blazing
through this new and more fearful black-out, seemed bright enough to
wake the dead, and he had grown so used in recent months to the
precautions that, even now, he felt himself to be recklessly breaking
the law. But, nothing--in these hours--would have given him greater
relief than to be challenged and arrested.




CHAPTER V


Fortunately, or unfortunately, Mark Adams was a highly civilized man. He
would have suffered less, in many ways, if he had been nearer to the
soil; but he was curiously fitted to carry on the memories of the race
that had vanished. He came of an English father and a French mother. He
had his father's fair skin and strong frame, and his mother's dark eyes
and quick nerves. His father had been a biologist of distinction. He had
encouraged Mark to become a medical student; for he thought that, in the
world which was coming, the medical profession would be one of the very
few to survive. Whatever the new tyrannies and revolutions might bring
forth, dictators and revolutionaries alike, he said, will always want
medical advisers for their own sakes. They will always have to recognize
the value of that profession, and allow its members reasonable
opportunities for study and the life of an educated man. Mark agreed;
and, for more idealistic reasons, threw himself into hospital work with
the ardour of a young Lister. War had swept him into the Red Cross
service. (It was after the torpedoing of his hospital ship that he had
been taken prisoner on the enemy submarine.) For some years before this,
he had been fortunate enough to have ample time for reading. He had
inherited from his mother a passion for literature, English, French and
Italian, chiefly; and he had one of those minds which were constantly
trying to arrive at real conclusions about the nature of the world in
which they live, and the purpose and meaning of the individual human
life, as well as the life of the race. He had a great fund of general
knowledge--all the wider perhaps because he was not a specialist in
anything. It was, of course, just such a man, at the age of twenty-nine,
who would most fully and imaginatively realize the extraordinary
position in which he now found himself, as he drove through the night
towards London.

Near Bagshot he stopped abruptly at the gates of a house he
knew--Chingford Wood--the abode of Sir Herbert Boskin, the well-known
publicist, whose articles on literature and the drama, as well as on all
kinds of public affairs, had secured him an immense following among
readers of the more popular newspapers.

Mark did not know him well; but he had stayed in the neighbourhood, and
had been taken by his hostess to several tennis parties given by Lady
Boskin.

It occurred to Mark that in the house of a man so closely in touch with
current events, there might be further clues to what had actually
happened. He turned into the drive, along which the dark trees, in the
moonlight, seemed towering to an unnatural height. At the front door he
made a great clangor with the bell, though he knew it was the idlest
formality. There was no reply, of course, and--after a very brief
pause--he pushed the door open, and entered the dark hall. With the help
of his electric torch he found the switches and began to flash the
lights on.

Sir Herbert Boskin and his wife Annette had been regarded locally, and
even nationally, as pillars--minor pillars, perhaps, but still
pillars--of things as they ought to be. They supported all the good
causes which might enhance this reputation. No breath of scandal had
ever touched their private lives. Sir Herbert, naturally, had to be
abreast of the times. He recognized that we had to move with them, in
our conception of ethics as in everything else; for everything under the
sun is subject to fashion; and a writer for the popular newspapers
cannot afford to be "dated". But everyone admired the tact with which he
made the "advanced" readers feel that he was being subtly ironical at
the expense of the traditionalists, while at the same time he made the
traditionalists feel that he was merely showing the "advanced" people
the breadth of his mind and his underlying recognition of the more
permanent values behind the traditional point of view. Indeed, he
modelled himself upon the cat; and, while he was impartially ready to
purr and rub himself against the boots of any party with a really
popular or fashionable following, his velvet paw was equally ready, at
any moment, and on either side, to expand into claws, if the expansion,
and the resultant scratch, seemed likely to increase his reputation for
wit or wisdom with a sufficiently large body of readers.

Mark went first into the drawing-room where he found Lady Boskin, dead,
on a large Chesterfield sofa. She was in the arms of a dead man with a
long, pale nose, and a red moustache, which gave a touch of macabre
comedy to their attitude; for the dead man was certainly not Sir Herbert
Boskin; and, no less certainly, he was what the more romantic Sunday
newspapers, to which Sir Herbert contributed, would call an "episode in
her love-life".

Feeling a little sick at the stomach, Mark walked out of the
drawing-room. At the farther end of a long passage he pushed open a door
and found himself in what Sir Herbert called his "den". Sir Herbert was
reposing in a huge leather arm-chair, with his head on his breast, in a
Napoleonic attitude, and as dead as Napoleon. On a table beside him
there was a magnificently bound copy of a pornographic work which was
then being smuggled into the country from Belgium at five guineas a
copy. On the pretext that it was an "advance" in literary method, this
monstrosity had secured a public which would never have looked at it,
and would certainly not have paid the requisite five guineas, if it had
not been for the "beautiful" and "highly curious" obscenity of many of
its pages.

However, Sir Herbert had clothed it in purple morocco. Some corrected
proofs on his desk showed that Sir Herbert himself had acquired merit
among the "advanced" by discreetly puffing this "highly curious" work.
Discreetly, for though he made great play with "inhibitions", the
"sub-conscious mind", the "Oedipus complex" and all the rest of the
patter, he gave no examples of the really operative ingredients of the
book, and he assured his audience that he read it for the style.

"When a fat major makes that remark in an Indian club, everybody hoots
and laughs." So it was written, many years ago, in that buried
masterpiece of youthful satire, _The Three Young Men_. In less grim
circumstances, Sir Herbert's article might have elicited no more than a
ribald chuckle of the same kind from some invisible Imp of Irony. But,
unfortunately, on his desk there lay another article in proof. This was
an eloquent indictment of the moral iniquity--private as well as
public--of certain foreign leaders and officials. It made impressive use
of the words "honour" and "truth"; it appealed to the Christian
religion; and it ended with the inevitable quotation from Wordsworth,
suggesting that Sir Herbert must be free or he would die. The reason
suggested for this heroic attitude was that he--Sir Herbert Boskin--was
one of those who "the faith and morals hold that Milton held".

Mark dropped both the proofs and the book into the waste-paper basket.
He did it mechanically, hardly realizing what he was doing. It was so
obviously natural a function of the hands. Then he walked out, without
glancing at the dead man, but feeling even more sick at the stomach than
he felt in Lady Boskin's drawing-room. It is not easy at twenty-nine to
be completely cynical.




CHAPTER VI


He crept into London with difficulty in the early hours of the morning;
for, in the great city, the jumble of motionless vehicles, many of which
had crashed into one another or into shop-windows before stopping, and
the dark huddled forms on road and pavement became so obstructive that
he almost thought of abandoning the car and walking. Once indeed he
stopped and alighted with that intention, but the attempt had a curious
psychological effect upon him. He felt that in abandoning the car with
its throbbing engine, he was somehow losing a friendly link with the
living. Its animation was only mechanical, but the mechanism was the
work of man. To leave it in the cold grey gloom of that early morning,
with the motionless relics of that fearful cataclysm on all sides of
him, was like going out of a lighted ship's cabin to explore the bleak
darkness of a Polar desert. He re-entered the car more quickly than he
had gone out. The lighted dash-board had a new friendliness as he shut
himself in again. The illuminated face of the little ticking clock,
where the hands now pointed to three-thirty, conveyed by sheer contrast
a comforting sense, not of "cosiness" (for that word must imply
contentment), but the hint of unconscious comradeship that a friendly
hearth can give to a man in distress. In the car, at any rate, he felt
that he was aboard his own small ship, commanding his own bit of the old
civilized world. It would have taken a great deal to persuade him to
abandon it at this juncture, though he knew he might find another, or a
better, at any of the thousand parking places and garages on the road
before him. He drove on slowly therefore, finding some offset to the
difficulties in the fact that he need pay no attention to the traffic
laws. He could take either side of the road, or use the pavements, if
necessary. With these aids, and occasional circuits by a side street, he
passed Waterloo Station and arrived at last within sight of the Houses
of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

The day was breaking as he drove slowly over Westminster Bridge. He
wondered if he were going mad as he heard his own voice intoning in his
own ears, "Earth has not anything to show more fair."

With a sudden swerve he avoided a dead hawker of matches who sprawled
with all his stock-in-trade, in the shadow of a lamp-post, across the
road. The broadening light showed him the brown dumps of wet sandbags
round the entrances to the House of Commons and St. James's Park
Station.

    This city now doth like a garment wear
        The beauty of the morning.

He repeated it to himself desperately, keeping time with the rhythm of
the engine, and hardly knowing whether he was trying to drug his memory
of a lost world or to revive it.

    The river glideth at his own sweet will.
    Dear God, the very houses seem asleep,
    And all that mighty heart is lying still.

He was not paying any attention to the meaning of his words--only
repeating them with the kind of numbed restraint that might at any
moment break down.

    And all that mighty heart is lying still.

He turned to the right up Whitehall. There were masses of flowers at the
foot of the war memorial of 1914-18. The present war had revived the
pity of the older tragedy, and the still fresh petals seemed to be
glistening with the dew of the new-born day. A woman in black was lying
prostrate among them, her dead face buried in them and her arms full of
lilies.

A sudden impulse made Mark turn into Downing Street and pull up at the
door of Number 10. There, at least, he might find some further
clue--possibly some light on conditions elsewhere--in the form of a
written message taken down from the transatlantic telephone (he had
already begun to look beyond the continent of Europe for a ray of hope)
or a late cable received before the catastrophe.

The two steel-helmeted policemen who had been on duty were stretched
across the pavement, one staring upwards at the strip of sky and flying
summer cloud that streamed like a blue and white pennant above the
narrow street, the other with his face in the gutter. The front door was
open. The dead butler lay cheek by jowl with a newly arrived visitor,
who had apparently been handing him his hat, coat, scarf, gloves and
umbrella, at the very moment when the wave of death had arrived. The
butler had his hands full of them; but, even so, in their present
position, the butler's corpse looked the more dignified of the two; for
the visitor's mouth was wide open, while the butler's lips were firmly
closed in his clean-shaven and somewhat episcopal face.

Mark made a long stride over their bodies; went quickly up the narrow
stair, opened a door at random, and found himself in the Cabinet room.

They were all there, those important ones, seated around a long polished
table, in a frozen silence, as though this unprecedented intrusion of
an obscure stranger had struck them dumb. They were all there--except
one--the most important of all. The Prime Minister's chair was vacant.
The light from the large window, overlooking the pleasant little garden,
streamed cheerfully over them, and over the books on the shelves behind
them, and on the portraits of former statesmen looking gravely down upon
them from the walls.

To Mark it was the most uncanny sensation of his life, to steal like
this into the most private, and perhaps the most important conclave of
the modern political world, and find all those figures, so familiar to
the press of five continents, at his absolute disposal, helpless and
impotent as graven images or tailors' dummies.

It was almost like passing through the darkness of a more terrible and
mysterious looking-glass, and discovering a more tragic Wonderland.
There was something almost childishly pathetic about their neat little
blotters; their neat little sheets of white paper laid beside them; and
all the other neat little preparations for their task of setting the
world to rights and rearranging the fate of the obscure millions
outside. And here was he--one of those obscure millions--the only living
survivor--stumbling into the private conclave of those Olympians, and
finding them all at his mercy. He was able, if he chose, to read all
their private notes; to search their pockets and examine their
pocket-books, like a divinely appointed detective, acting on behalf of
the Recording Angel. He could have no scruple about that now; for in
twenty-four hours the world to which he belonged had grown as strange
and remote as that of Tutankhamen, and Mark Adams had already all the
justifications of the historical explorer.

In all of them he noticed again that strange appearance of petrifaction,
or rather calcification, for the dead tissues had a curiously chalky
texture. It was probably owing to this effect of the death-wave that the
attitudes in which they had been caught were so little changed. With the
exception of the Prime Minister, whose vacant chair had an expectant
look, like the throne in melodrama, they were almost as vividly present
as in life, those Olympians. The most dominating figure was the
Secretary of State for War, whose statistics of the casualties up to the
date of the cataclysm had been set forth so brilliantly and
persuasively, and with so skilful an emphasis on the larger casualties
of the enemy, that in high quarters his mathematical generalship was
held to be of immense "propaganda" value, and indeed almost to have
dulled the pain of the bereaved and fatherless. His huge cigar had
slipped from his fingers, and had burned a large black blister on the
shining mahogany table. Next to him was the First Lord of the Admiralty,
who had settled a little in his chair, and was looking even more
Napoleonic than the late Sir Herbert Boskin. His big head had sunk on
his breast, and one white hand was thrust stiffly into his waist-coat,
over the tightly buttoned but rebellious paunch. The Air Minister seemed
to be looking at him with suppressed dislike. The Home Secretary and the
Minister for Agriculture were bowed forward on the table with their
heads on their arms; while the Chancellor of the Exchequer had almost
slipped beneath it. The keen-faced Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs was the most efficient looking of all these dead men. He had
drawn his chair closer to the table than the others, and it now held him
more erect. His arms were resting on his blotter, and his body was
almost as upright as in life, but his head lolled on his right shoulder
with half-shut eyes which seemed to be looking sleepily at the Minister
of Propaganda, while his slightly gaping mouth suggested that he was
restraining a bored yawn. In life he had undoubtedly held more clues to
the situation than any of the others; and it was to his notes that Mark
turned first in his feverish desire for more information.

He took a bundle of these notes to a chair near the window, flung the
window wide open, lit his pipe and, turning his back on the dead
conclave, began to examine the evidence, while a thrush in the garden
whistled as carelessly as it had whistled a week ago, or as other
thrushes had whistled through all the calamities of twenty thousand
years. Mark was conscious of this indifference of Nature in a strange
new way now; for the enormity, the monstrosity of the calamity had this
curious psychological effect upon him--that he seemed to be seeing and
hearing the most ordinary sights and sounds for the first time.

He had become vividly aware of the mysteries that idle habit had cloaked
and conventional names had hidden from the former civilized world,
though they had been revealed to children and savages. As he looked into
the sunlit garden he felt a new wonder at the fact that thrushes had not
forgotten their pretty ways, and that birds were hopping in absolute
carelessness, and probably with an increased sense of happiness on the
lawn below.

He turned over the notes of the Foreign Secretary. Some of them he was
unable to understand for lack of technical knowledge. Others amazed and
startled him, by their revelation of utterly unsuspected secret moves in
the international game. At the bottom of the file he found two decoded
telegrams. One was from the President of the United States, informing
him of a secret service report from Tokyo that Japan was planning to use
the "last resort", and advising him that the United States had decided,
in the interests of Western civilization, to forestall the Japanese at
three o'clock that afternoon.

The other telegram was from the British Embassy at Tokyo, reporting that
the Japanese were certainly going to use the "last resort" at three
o'clock that afternoon. Both nations had selected the same hour. There
was nothing strange about that. Both were working against time and, like
two competitors in a race, they found that there were only a few seconds
between them at the goal.

Mark Adams found no clue, however, in any of the papers to the nature of
this "last resort" until he turned to the notes of the First Lord of the
Admiralty. There, scrawled in a big child-like fist, he found a question
that--in less appalling circumstances--would have made him roar with
laughter. It was this:

     _In the event of our bringing the "last resort" into operation, is
     there any known limit to the range of the wave, or anything to
     prevent it making the circuit of the entire globe, and taking us
     all in the back?_

To this, various Sea Lords and Admiralty experts had appended comments
serious and facetious.

     _Nothing. So far as I know._

     _What of it? This is a war to end war._

Strange as it all seemed, the world had been asking itself questions and
giving itself answers of the same kind for more than a century now. Even
in the preceding century, statesmen and journalists had asked solemnly
whether any limits could be set to the bloody conflicts in which the
nations were to be engaged; whether any nation could possibly stand out
eventually; whether the killing could be limited to the armed forces of
those nations; and finally, whether any civilian, old or young, man,
woman or child, could escape the new and scientific methods of insuring
the "survival of the fittest" by indiscriminate slaughter.

The nature of the new weapon was more or less clear from the First
Lord's notes; and the peoples of the world were just as powerless in
this matter as they had been in the attempt to prevent war itself.
Having gone so far, they must go farther; from flint to steel; from
steel to gunpowder; from gunpowder to poison-gases; from poison-gases to
disease-germs; from disease-germs to the "last resort".

    The first step is with us; then all the road,
      The long road is with Fate.

Mark did not believe in that fatalism, but it represented what had
actually happened; and now, at the last moment, in this mad predicament,
the only hope of survival for any nation was to strike first, and
apparently they had all struck together.

Fearful as the scope of the catastrophe had been, it was not until this
moment that Mark really came to grips with the appalling possibility
that it might be world-wide; and that his unique position at three of
the clock on that doom-fraught afternoon had made him the "heir of all
the ages" in a new and more terrible sense.

He had no scruple at all now in carrying his investigations further. He
thrust his hand into the pockets of the dead men, dragging out
notebooks, letters, telegrams. He opened their despatch-cases and read
feverishly. Some of the things he read would have given a shock to the
constituents of the Minister concerned; but there was a greater
simplicity than he had expected about most of these men, and, on the
whole, what he read made him feel proud of his country. In one
pocket-book there was evidence that its owner had consistently used his
official information to his own exceeding advantage on the Stock
Exchange. But his method was very simple. Certain announcements were
held to have a depressing influence on prices, and others a stimulating
influence. Before the former kind of announcement his brokers had
consistently sold for him, and before the latter, they had consistently
bought. That was all. But he was the only offender of the twelve, and as
Mark reminded himself, even the disciples could not escape that
proportion of evil. Moreover, there was no suggestion that this
particular Iscariot would have sold his country for all the wealth of
the world. Indeed, there was ample evidence in other ways, that he was
unremitting in his efforts to serve her. But Mark could find no more
light on the question which was making his brain reel--a question that
would have seemed remote two days ago--though all the facts were now
forcing him to ask it.

Was there any other survivor of the human race, or was he the solitary
Crusoe of the entire planet, a Crusoe for whom there could be no hope of
any sail from any other part of the universe?

The Prime Minister's empty chair caught his eye again. He wondered where
Mr. Harrington could be, or whether his despatch-case or pockets would
reveal any later messages. Leaving the Cabinet room Mark climbed another
flight of stairs, and passed the open doors of two empty bedrooms. The
next door was shut and he opened it himself. There he saw, and
immediately recognized, the dead Prime Minister, in a kneeling attitude,
at his bedside. The _rigor mortis_ held him there, cold and stiff. But
there was no doubt about it. In that almost entirely agnostic and highly
sophisticated political world which, for all its conventionally sound
principles, was essentially pagan at heart, the chief figure had been
praying in private as simply as Abraham Lincoln, before discussing with
his colleagues the decisions which had to be made. But it would never
have been known to his biographer, or indeed to anyone, if Death had not
struck him in the act.

For a moment, Mark felt like a new Hamlet who had expected to find a
crafty, if not a secretly Machiavellian figure in any leading statesman,
and had discovered instead a good and true-hearted man trying his best
to serve his country and seeking for guidance from the Supreme Being.

As Mark descended to the front door again his mind was a whirl of
conflicting ideas. He did not like politicians, as a rule; and, from
what he had seen, he thought that this Prime Minister must have been one
of those great exceptions who upset all preconceived ideas. He looked at
the portraits of former Prime Ministers, steel-engravings most of them,
on the wall of the lower flight of stairs. The earlier men were a
fine-looking lot, and if they were as fine as their engraved portraits
it would have been difficult to discover their equals in character and
intellect anywhere. But he noticed that some of the later portraits, as
he went down, had a different effect. He could not analyse it. They
seemed to be trying to take up more room. The men of the last three
decades occupied almost as much space as those of the two preceding
centuries. In fact, they had filled up all the remaining space, as
though they knew instinctively that they were bringing things to an end.

There were several first-rate men among them, but the most self-seeking
and most oily-tongued demagogue of all the moderns had annexed thrice
the space allotted to Pitt and Wellington.

Mark had a horrible feeling that some of the modern politicians had
become "history-conscious", and that, in their ambition to inscribe
their names in "history", which they confused with the lime-lit placards
of "publicity" they might almost welcome earthquake and eclipse; for, in
all such times of disaster, those who happen to be in office acquire a
fortuitous importance. He had felt certain of this with some of the
lesser men. He had watched them, in moments of crisis, when unity was
essential, attacking the government simply because they themselves had
not been included among the holders of office. He had seen them purring
with approval over the same government, and over the same policy, as
soon as they were included; and the spectacle had almost made him
despair of politics. But the glimpse that he had caught of the dead
Prime Minister had strangely restored the balance. There were many
different Englands, he thought, but that glimpse was of an England for
whose sake, a hundred times in history, God had refrained his anger.




CHAPTER VII


Every hour it became clearer to Mark that there was no hope of finding
another survivor in Great Britain. He felt now, in his bones, that it
would be the same on the continent of Europe, and perhaps even farther
afield. Otherwise, surely by this time there would have been the roar of
investigating aeroplanes overhead, or an inquisitive ship steaming up
the Thames.

There had certainly been time for the first adventurous troop of
awe-stricken explorers to reach London by one way or another. Even if no
European had been curious enough to come and see why the whole of Great
Britain had been plunged into complete silence, the European
correspondents of the American press in all the capitals of the
continent, would have been moving Acheron for information. They would
have chartered a fleet of aeroplanes by this time, to secure a news-item
which would change the face of history and make the destruction of
Pompeii and Herculaneum look like a children's Christmas party, with
Pangloss playing Santa Claus. But nothing happened; nobody arrived. Once
or twice, for five minutes at a time, he heard a wild yelping of dogs in
the distance; but it soon relapsed into silence. There was no footstep
in the street; no telephone bell ringing, far or near, in house or
office; no sound of engines overhead, nothing but the silence of the
wilderness and the mountains, which seemed to turn the grey inanimate
buildings into crags and cliffs; a silence all the deeper by contrast
with the remembered pandemonium of former days. Even at the dead of
night, in London, when it had been populated by the living, the
stillness was different from that of the mountains or mid-ocean. There
had been footsteps echoing on stone pavements; there had been the rush
and rattle of distant vehicles; the sullen rumble of an underground
train; the blaring of a motor-horn; the clangour of a fire-engine; the
steady droning of aeroplanes; the tolling hammer-strokes of Big Ben;
dance-music in the distance, or the voices of strayed revellers raised
in discordant caterwaulings on their way home. But now, for the first
time in London, he was aware of the kind of silence which the poets have
found in Nature at her loneliest:

    The silence that is in the starry sky,
    The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

For the first time he heard, from the Embankment, the flowing of the
Thames. The cries of birds came to him, not as a thin treble struggling
to make itself heard over the massive boomings of an orchestra, but
crystal-clear as the call of a blackbird, alone on the topmost bough of
a silver birch, among the hills of heather. A little way off in the
Green Park, he heard the wide, uninterrupted rustling of leaves, the
lapping of water, and the cry of water-fowl, just as he might have heard
them on the untrodden shores of a lake in the woods of Maine or at
Ponkapog, the beautiful pool of the Red Indian, before the coming of the
white man.

He noticed, as the hours went by, while he explored churches and parks
and private houses, and the Houses of Parliament, and doctors' houses in
Harley Street, that the slight changes which were taking place in the
appearance of these innumerable dead were curiously different from the
normal. The petrifying effect of the death-wave, which he had noticed
on the island, seemed to be progressive, and the flesh was acquiring a
dry, chalky whiteness. At the end of four days, the fifth from the
catastrophe, there were none of the usual traces of corruption. The
bodies looked as though they were gradually turning to chalk. In the
streets they had fallen hither and thither, where they had been touched
by the wave; and he felt sometimes, as though he were driving through
endless vistas of jumbled Chinese images in some Oriental bazaar.

He saw many strange sights in London. Some were of things that, in
ordinary circumstances, would have been known only to the recording
angel. Some--like that ineffaceable picture at Niton--were of an
exquisite beauty, moments of the divine charity, caught and fixed by the
arresting finger of death.

Others were as grotesque as Hogarth. He blundered once into the close of
a wedding feast which had been caught and petrified, with all its
chalk-white faces, at the very moment when the bride and groom were
leaving the front-door for their honeymoon. They had sunk to their
knees, and squatted there, on their heels, with their heads lolling
against one another, as though the champagne had been too much for them,
while the grinning guests, toppling over, or propping one another up in
all directions, around and behind them, still seemed to menace them with
the pink and blue confetti in their frozen hands.

Once he strayed into a famous hotel. Lunch had come to an end, of
course, at the time of the death-wave; but coffee and liqueurs were
still being taken in the palm-room. He stood in the middle of the room
and stared around him. He seemed to be surrounded by an exotic jungle of
horribly insistent silk stockings. They thrust themselves at him like
serpents with pointed heads of the daintiest enamelled shoe-skin from
every corner of that luxurious lounge. Blood-red finger-nails gleamed at
him on every side, as though they were trying to illustrate the line
about "Nature, red in tooth and claw". He remembered the groan of a
soldier who, after a long exile from civilization, had once lunched with
him here. "My God, most of these women look as if they had been
murdering babies." Mark knew some of them by sight. There was La-La
Vivian, the film star, with her French poodle and her fifth husband,
surrounded by a group of those "prominent leaders of Society" who had
acquired national fame by way of flash-light photographs of themselves
at night clubs with bottles in ice-buckets, equally "prominent", at
their side. The poodle, Frou-Frou, snoring in her lap, looked the most
intelligent of them. It was not its own fault that its nails had been
dyed as barbarous a red as those of the other ladies in the group. La-La
was surveying herself in a pocket mirror with an air of great
satisfaction. Death, apparently, had been satisfied, too; and had fixed
her in the act. Her fifth husband was evidently telling a story about
her to the rest of the party, who were contorted with laughter. On the
table before him, a private letter which he had obviously been making
public, explained the laughter. It was an indignant protest from an
eminent physician at the Children's Hospital in Chelsea. La-La,
apparently, had summoned him by telephone, on the ground that her baby
was at the point of death. Sir Rowland had postponed his visit to
another case, a most serious one, and dashed to her hotel, only to find
that her "baby" was no other than Frou-Frou, the French poodle.

For all Sir Rowland's indignation, the letter was dignified and brief.
It threatened an action. Affixed to it, however, was a cable from
La-La's publicity-agent to this effect--

     _Entire Press tickled to death. Advertisement worth twenty thousand
     dollars. Suggest you have Frou-Frou baptized._

Mark escaped into a room off the lobby, where the "ticker" had been
working up till the last moment. The announcement of the "last resort"
had brought a group of cosmopolitan faces to watch the fluctuations of
the market.

One man seemed to be staring at the news that a passenger ship, the
_Oriana_, had been sunk with all hands, while the face of another seemed
to be horribly appreciative of the effect of this disaster on the
market-prices, which were recorded immediately below.

At one of the centres of his own profession--a great metropolitan
hospital, scene after scene of a nobler drama had been caught and fixed,
as in a series of vivid tableaux, by that strange artistry of death.
Their fixity seemed to emphasize their significance, as when some
fleeting gesture or expression is arrested by the hand of a sculptor.
The petrifying effect of the wave had been so quietly instantaneous in
some of these indoor scenes that--in many cases--there was hardly any
sign of disturbance. Of the doctors and nurses who had been standing a
few had fallen prostrate; but most of them had sunk to their knees and
remained there, almost as if in prayer. Those who had been seated at
bedsides were leaning forward only a little more than usual; and, where
there was any departure from the normal attitudes of the body, it
suggested rather that they had been overcome by a heavy sleep than that
a disaster had happened. All in the day's work as it may have been, and
overlooked as it undoubtedly had been by the fomenters of class-hatred,
the compassionate cause which these men and women had been quietly
serving to the utmost of their ability, touched their suspended and
broken tasks with a beauty that the brush of Rembrandt would not have
despised. Here at least were the images of men who knew their work; men
who had a true and definite purpose; men who had been devoting infinite
patience and incomparable skill to high and merciful ends. He went into
one room, where they were grouped around the operating-table, on their
knees, or bowing their heads on the ground, as though before some
strange altar of suffering humanity. In another room, under eyes that
still seemed to be watching for every chance to heal and save, a young
man seemed still to be fighting for breath. In another the wondering
faces of children looked up with a peaked and curiously old wisdom and
trustfulness into the compassionate face of the physician. Wherever he
looked, Mark saw here, or thought he saw, an integrity of mind and will
that might have gone far towards the redemption of the race. In the very
nature of things, a good doctor had no use for lying reports (physical,
intellectual or political.) He could not play modernistic monkey-tricks
with his cases. There was no room for Dadaism in diagnosis, or Gagaism
in treatment. Nor would the most "advanced" of his patients have been
anxious for surrealistic methods in surgery to be practised by a
"sub-conscious" mind on his own body. Law, the lamp of knowledge and
absolute precision, were the creed here, if nowhere else. It was
apparent in the fine intellectual values, the look of self-control and
keen efficiency, the firm lines of character, in face after face among
the healers.

In amazing contrast was a scene into which he walked by accident. He had
been looking for the offices of a man he knew, near the Temple; and,
mistaking the number, he pushed back a door and discovered the Executive
Committee of the "Unity Movement" in conference. Eight dead men and four
dead women were seated at a long table with their agenda before them.
Round the walls there were rows of framed photographs representing the
leaders of the diverse parties which were to be unified. They were of
every nation, and every form of belief and unbelief. The founder of the
Christian religion hung between Lenin and Stalin. St. Francis and Karl
Marx were sandwiched in between Grumkow and Abraham Lincoln. Zoroaster,
Luther, Cardinal Newman, Adolf Hitler, and an intimidating person named
Mardok, led the eye cheerfully on to Moses, Brigham Young and Charles
Darwin. Over them, on three of the walls, were inscribed the watch-words
of the movement:

    _Truth is Undivided._
    _Let Us Be One._
    _Organize for Unity._

The minutes lay before the secretary, and made what they had been doing
and saying quite clear.

James Harkness, the chairman, seemed to be looking at his own agenda
with considerable perplexity in his chalk-white face. The meeting,
apparently, had decided on only one clause in its programme. It was to
be a society with which everyone could agree and co-operate. They were
to have a basis of religion, but they must lay down no beliefs which
would be unacceptable to an atheist. They were to support the British
Commonwealth of Nations, but only in the most cordial co-operation with
its most implacable enemies.

This broad-minded attitude made it essential that the Society should
bear an extremely comprehensive name; and it appeared plainly enough,
from the documents on the table, that the trouble had begun at this very
early point. The Chairman wanted to call it the "Patriotic Unity
Movement." He thought that this would engage the sympathies of an
immense body of retired soldiers and sailors, who didn't think very
much, but would subscribe; or at least the word "patriotic" could offend
no one, since it specified no particular country, and would therefore be
accepted by people of all nations, whether they were friends or enemies
of our own.

Some of the members, however, contended that the word "patriotic" would
be understood in the old-fashioned sense, and that this would certainly
prevent all the left-wing undergraduates at the universities from taking
the movement seriously. It would certainly be misunderstood by other
bodies, like the I.R.A. and the anarchists whom it was specially
desirable to influence in the right direction. A sharp-nosed lady, in
immense tortoise-shell spectacles, had made a note on her programme, in
question-form. "But what _is_ the right direction?" Others, apparently,
including two clergymen, wished to substitute the word "spiritual" for
"patriotic". This would commit them to nothing and comprehend
everything.

According to the minutes one opponent had replied that he could see
nothing very spiritual about the bombs of the I.R.A. and that, in any
case, he was a materialist and did not believe in the existence of
spirits at all. The sharp-nosed spinster, whose tortoise-shell glasses,
with their Crookes' lenses, looked strikingly effective on her
chalk-white skin--had apparently supported this. She had pointed out
that "Wells, long ago, had shown the astronomical inadequacy of a
'Friend for little children, above the bright blue sky'. Surely," she
had appealed, "we can't go back to that!"

A thoughtful little man had replied that these considerations were
hardly relevant to the scientific conclusions of Christian thinkers like
Harnack, and that Origen, nearly two thousand years ago, had----

At this point, for some reason, the atheist had ejaculated _Pshaw!_ in a
tone that had led to a general squabble about manners, and the writer of
the minutes had lost himself in the battle. When calm had been restored,
Mrs. Beadle, a large phlegmatic woman, whose strong family likeness to
Buddha had been curiously emphasized by the "last resort", suggested
that they should call themselves the "_Higher_ Unity Movement". As
instances of the use of the word "higher" to overcome objections, she
had mentioned the "Higher Pantheism"; the "Higher Mathematics"; the
"Higher Criticism"; and--rather startlingly--the "Higher Continence".

The last phrase had apparently brought a profound silence upon the
assembly; for, according to the minutes, the whole subject had been
abruptly changed, so that the phlegmatic Mrs. Beadle had no opportunity
to explain what she meant.

The source of the Chairman's perplexity, indeed, was more fundamental.
He had been ambitious enough to hope for the co-operation of the Godless
League on the one hand, and the Catholic Church on the other; for, after
all, that was precisely the aim of the Higher Unity. But, on the table
before him, there lay a letter from an English Cardinal.

     _Dear Mr. Harkness,_

     _While I have every sympathy with your desire to help this
     bewildered generation, I feel that I must point out three
     inescapable facts._

     _1. Organization, for the sake of organization, can lead nowhere._

     _2. A definite belief (as I call it) or dogma (as you call it) is
     essential to any serious movement, secular or religious, for the
     betterment of the world._

     _3. A definite belief, no matter how small, necessarily rules out
     everything (no matter how big) which is in direct contradiction to
     it._

     _Wishing you every blessing, my dear Mr. Harkness,_

     _I am,_
     _Yours sincerely,_
     _G. Cardinal Brodrick._

The Chairman's notes indicated that he profoundly regretted this
obstinacy.

In another house which he entered quite casually, Mark was almost sure
that he found evidence of a contemplated murder. It was a weird
scene--the man whom he suspected, caught by the wave of death, just as
he was about to administer the wrong medicine to the haggard woman in
the bed....

But these were all daylight scenes. It was far worse after dark. On his
first night in London Mark tried to sleep in a bedroom at the top of the
Athenum Club, which had been closed at the time of the catastrophe for
some alterations, and had no occupants except one mute attendant on the
ground floor. But it was too grim an experience to repeat. Every creak
that he heard after midnight made him turn the lights on, and eventually
he had to read, sleeplessly, till the morning broke. After that, he
found a big car, outside the house of Sir James Brodie, the famous
gynaecologist in Harley Street, who had brought so many royal babies
into the world. It was fitted with a long couch on which Sir James used
to rest while he was being driven to and from his cases in the small
hours. In this car Mark drove far and wide into the country during the
next week, making it a kind of travelling home. He explored Salisbury,
Oxford, Birmingham, York and Edinburgh; and everywhere it was the
same--silence and the rigid, innumerable hosts of silence.

From a shop in Birmingham he borrowed a large knapsack, specially
designed for campers; and he stocked it with the various small things
which civilized man has come to regard as "necessaries". In books of
adventure the requirements of civilized man in these small matters are
often overlooked. In this case, all the material goods of the world were
at Mark's disposal; but he wanted to be as independent of the towns as
possible, and to escape the hateful task of entering the doors of the
dead whenever he wanted a tube of toothpaste. At first, of course, he
was unable to think of such things at all; but, at the end of his first
week, absurdly out of proportion as it may seem, he spent nearly half an
hour in a chemist's shop, looking for a reel of dental floss and a pair
of nail-scissors. He provided himself also with a lantern in which he
could burn candles for reading purposes; a spirit lamp and its
appurtenances; a flask of brandy; and a few unspoilable things to eat.

It was easier to eat and drink out in the country, and he could usually
find some quite unspoiled meadow, or the bank of a brook where the
running water talked to him with a bright unconcern. He found a strange
comfort too, in the unperturbed grazing of the cattle in the fields,
and the peaceful sounds of the innocent and unharmed animal life in
country places: the rustling of a flock of sheep beyond a hedge; the
child-like calling of the lambs; the clucking of hens in a farm-yard or
the squattering of ducks in a pool. But he must not approach the
farm-buildings too closely, or he would be sure to find some human
scarecrow, pitchfork in hand, sprawling across a dung-heap.

At night, he would drive into some unfrequented country lane; roll his
rugs about him, and try to sleep on Sir James Brodie's couch. But he
made London his headquarters; for, if there were any survivors in the
world, it was surely in London that the first enquiries would be made.

What had happened to Europe that it had become so incurious? If it were
a case of victors and vanquished, where were the victors? By now, surely
their triumphal marches into the great metropolis should have begun to
flatter their own people into forgetfulness of the price they too must
have paid. Perhaps they thought there was no triumph when there were no
longer any defeated alive to see it. Or was there a more fearful
explanation? Like Oedipus in his questioning, he felt sure of the answer
he dreaded. But he determined to go and see for himself.

There were plenty of sturdy motor-launches to be found at a hundred
wharves on the Thames. He decided that his best way of crossing the
Channel would be to choose one of these and work it round the coast to
Dover. From there, on the first good day, it would take him only an hour
or so to run over to Calais. He found exactly the boat he required, near
Chelsea Embankment, pitched his knapsack into it, and set out at once.
As it happened, on his arrival at Dover, the sea was so calm that it
seemed to be filmed over with oil. In exactly an hour and a half he
sighted Calais.

For a full minute, while he was nearing the coast, his heart had raced
and thumped at the sight of a few figures clustering on the sand-dunes,
as though to watch him. They were certainly alive; but a moment later
they had taken wing and turned to sea-birds.

    Gannet or gull, whose wandering plaint is heard
      On Ailsa, or Iona, desolate.

When he reached the quay his first glance at the scene around him
explained why no exploring party had come from France to England. Almost
at his feet there were two French sailors, lying as motionless as those
other unawakening sleepers on the other side of the Channel; and again
and again he had the queer sensation of having passed through a dark,
and more mysterious, looking-glass; and of finding himself among
reflections that had become realities.

There was the same indescribable loneliness. It was not exactly silence,
for there was the lapping of the tide, the swish of the seaweed in the
wave along the wharf, the patter of falling water-drops as the wave sank
to sleep again, and the witch-like calling of the gulls. But these
sounds had the effect of deepening the solitude, as they do in wild
Nature. They helped only to "make a lone place lonelier".

He put his knapsack into the best of the empty cars, a small
cream-coloured two-seater, which stood outside the station and, as he
drove through the town, he saw at once that conditions were exactly as
they had been in England. Everywhere he saw the same motionless forms,
apparently uninjured, but dead; and, everywhere, he saw the same
chalk-like petrifaction, with no trace of corruption. Everywhere he
found the same strange peace, in which there was not the slightest
trace of any preceding havoc. The windows were unshattered by bombs or
gun-fire. The French houses were smiling as bravely in the sun as a
picture by Matisse, with their washes of pink and chrome-yellow and
faded cornflower blue. He passed under an open window where a woman with
a painted face leaned over the window-sill and leered down at him; but
it was the fixed leer of the _rigor mortis_, and there was something
almost Chinese about the dreadful lolling pose of the head.
Incongruously enough, as he halted and looked up at her, he found
himself mentally repeating the beautiful lines of a twentieth-century
poet--

    Her face was like a window
    Where a man's first love looked out.

But all ideas of congruity had gone. Sometimes there seemed to be no
difference between the merely irrelevant and the bitterly ironical; and
the next moment, still looking up at the face of the dead harlot, he was
haunted by another and more terrible echo of the vanished world:

     _And she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a
     window...._

     _And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, who is on my
     side? Who?_

     _And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the
     field in the portion of Jezreel, so that they shall not say, this
     is Jezebel._

All the way to Paris it haunted him, as he drove along the straight
poplar-bordered road:

"_And she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a
window._"




CHAPTER VIII


In Paris it was as it had been in London. There were almost as many
gargoyles on the floor of Notre Dame as there were grotesques of stone
outside it. The Rue de la Paix looked like a gigantic toy street in
which a Brobdingnagian child had left its black-dressed dolls lying
untidily about the doorsteps and pavements in a hundred ungainly
attitudes.

At Napoleon's Tomb, the Emperor's cocked hat looked more natural and
human than the dead visitors around it; and the contrast in the
Champs-lyses between the prostrate relics of humanity and the
rejoicing nymphs and naiads of marble, over whose polished shoulders and
firm shapely bodies the fountains were flashing as brightly as ever,
gave Mark a sudden sense of escape into the unchanging world. He was
quick to seize that hint of a respite, brief perhaps, but still a
respite, from the inhuman horror of what had once been the living world
of men. He drove to the Louvre. There, at least, he would find great
sunlit galleries peopled only by the bright immortals, among whom he
would rest for an hour or two, collect his thoughts and re-discover his
own soul.

At the turnstile he had to step over the dead body of the uniformed
attendant; but, after that, he had the great palace of art almost
entirely to himself. He had brought his knapsack with him, intending to
lunch somewhere in those unoccupied rooms; but, for a long time, he
wandered about, feeding his eyes and mind. On every side he was
surrounded by those forms of loveliness which, because they had never
lived in the earthly sense, can never really die. He passed up a long
corridor towards that wonder of the world, the Venus of Milo, and for a
moment as he advanced towards it, he felt through his whole frame that
strange tingling which overcomes us in great music. Never before had he
so keenly realized the sheer spiritual splendour of the great art which
thus expressed itself in physical and sensuous form. Now, more than
ever, in a world so full of grotesque horror, that serene and radiant
goddess--Beauty--the daughter of heaven and the sea, conveyed a sense of
eternal things. She seemed to be looking through endless ages, across
the entire universe of change and decay, towards the land of the
undying, which was in the beginning, before this mortal world was made;
and shall be--in the end--when this mortal world has passed away. It was
not merely the maimed body of Aphrodite, physically emerging from the
physical raiment. It was an analogy in stone. As the body was to the
raiment, so was the eternal loveliness--the soul that is form--to the
veils of the material world. It was a parable, in stone, of Beauty, the
eternal reality, emerging from the mists of time:

    The firm clear body, like a slope of snow
      Out of the slipping dream-stuff half with-drawn.

He climbed a flight of stairs and walked slowly through some of the
great picture galleries. This journey had tired him, and he intended to
find a seat in front of one of the pictures, where he could rest and
think at the same time. He paused at the Gioconda; but, though it had
fascinated him on former occasions, he was curiously repelled by it now.
The faint mocking smile seemed to have a strangely sinister bearing on
recent events, and he turned away from it with a creeping of the flesh.
At last he composed himself on a comfortable seat, where he could rest
and think at the same time, in front of that delicious picture by
Murillo of the Monk's kitchen, in which the old lay-brother who should
have been preparing the food for the monastery is caught up in an
ecstasy while, to save him from the consequences of his neglect, the
angels prepare the food and mix the salad, and the astonished prior
peeps at the radiant scene from the cautiously opened door.

It was a picture that justified the opening of the knapsack, even among
the immortals, and as good a lunch as Mark could make upon its contents.
Afterwards, he felt that he might safely do what no one had ever done
before in those august precincts, and he lit his pipe.

He had been sitting there for nearly a quarter of an hour, when he saw,
at the end of the seat, a small silver handbag. It was so tucked into
the back of the seat, that it had escaped his notice hitherto. In a
world of the dead there was no longer any question of "property" lost or
otherwise. He could take any of the Leonardos away in his car, if he
liked, to any place that he cared to live in. But just because this
particular and quite commonplace bit of property had obviously been
"lost" by its former owner, it roused his curiosity. He picked it up and
opened it. The next moment he was staring at something he found in it,
staring and listening with all the amazement of a new Crusoe confronted
by the solitary footprint in the sand. It was no more than a charming
little wrist-watch, which its former owner had probably put in her bag
for security because the fastening had been broken. It was a pretty
trifle, set in brilliants; and, in one sense, it was a very trifling
matter that startled Mark like a voice from the grave. Fourteen days had
elapsed since the catastrophe. It was an ordinary twenty-four hour
wrist-watch; but, as it lay there in the palm of his hand, the
_tick--tick--tick_ of its tiny mechanism raced the beating of his own
heart. He stared at it as though some small Egyptian jewel, a golden
scarabaeus from the tomb of a dead queen, had miraculously come alive
and was talking to him.

He laid it carefully down and examined the other contents of the bag.
There was no card or clue to the owner's identity, except a small
lace-bordered handkerchief with the initial E, some Italian paper money,
a student's ticket to the Vatican galleries, and the address of an
Italian Professor of the Fine Arts at Rome, who was also Vice-President
of the Royal Academy of Italy. There was a letter, however, written
before the date of the catastrophe. It was from a woman living in Paris
and it began, "Dearest E."

Reading between the lines Mark gathered that the recipient was a young
American woman who had been studying art in Rome. He thought she had
probably motored to Paris in search of her friend. If the watch was any
guide, she could hardly be very far away now. For a moment he wondered
whether the watch had really stopped. Perhaps it had been set going
again by his action in picking it up. But it gave the correct time--and
it was almost fully wound. This, however, was not conclusive, and he
knew no way of resolving the doubt. It seemed hardly possible that she
was still in the Louvre. The world was so silent that he must have heard
the faintest footfall in those echoing galleries and corridors. For a
moment he listened; then, despite the deep stillness that reigned
everywhere, he leapt to his feet and called again and again, "Is anyone
there? Hallo! Is anyone there?" But only the mocking echo, flapping back
at him from distant walls, replied, again and again, "Is anyone there?
Hallo! Is anyone there?"

He hurried, almost running, through gallery after gallery, room after
room, glancing rapidly round each in turn, under the quietly watchful
eyes of the painted men and women on the walls. They seemed to look down
upon the agitated intruder with the disdain of an alien and untroubled
world. The sound of his footsteps filled the whole building with
re-doubled echoes, and made him all the more certain that any other
footsteps, no matter how light and ghostly, must have been audible to
him, during the considerable time he had been sitting motionless before
the Murillo, or even earlier in the lower gallery.

Three times he stopped, and called aloud, and stood listening. But there
was no answer. He began to think that his first sceptical explanation
must be true. Perhaps in picking up the watch, he had shaken it enough
to dislodge some bit of dust in the works and so set it going again. But
his recaptured peace among the immortals of the Louvre was gone; and,
still holding the little silver bag, he began to retrace his steps in
search of the exit. When he came to the seat in front of the Murillo it
occurred to him for the first time that, if the owner of the bag was
still alive, and remembered where she had mislaid it, she might very
well come back for it. He scribbled a few words on half a sheet of
notepaper:

     _I have gone to look for you outside, and shall probably be
     unsuccessful, but I hope you will come back for your bag. If so,
     will you please meet me here at four o'clock when I shall return._

     _A Fellow-Survivor._

To make sure that it would not be overlooked, he inserted his note in
the clasp, together with his card which (as it gave his club) he thought
might be reassuring. The woman at any rate would know she was not alone
in the world with an Apache. Then he laid the bag down where he had
found it, and hurried to the exit.

For a moment he stood at the top of the steps, looking down the
Champs-lyses, where those dark, motionless blots lay on the sunlit
grass or the grey stones around the leaping fountains. He felt like a
man awakening from a wild dream to sharp realities again. A piece of
lost property, a ticking watch, might raise a momentary hope in that
great Palace of the Imagination; but, outside, in the warm light of day,
he realized only how great his need for the sound of a human voice must
have become, before so slight a straw of evidence could send him tearing
along the galleries of the Louvre like a madman.

He realized it well enough now; but, as he went down the steps towards
the place where he had left his car, another and a more staggering
surprise than that of the ticking watch awaited him. In the place where
he had left his car, there was nothing. The car was no longer there. It
seemed as incredible as anything in the Arabian nights; but, this time,
there could be no doubt about it. The car had gone.




CHAPTER IX


There was another car on the opposite side of the road. He remembered
that it had been standing there when he arrived. It was a large saloon
car, one of the new Leicesters, and not in the least like the small
cream-coloured car which he had left below the broad stairs, at the
entrance to the Louvre. He was quite certain that he had left his own
car at that particular place--the emptiness of which was now equally
certain. The owner of the ticking watch might easily have taken for
granted that the smaller car had been there all the time; and that, as
it was more manageable for feminine hands, it was equally at her
disposal. That would account for the exchange.

At his first glance through the window of the saloon car he discovered
something else. There was a tiny red light showing on the dash-board,
indicating that the former driver, with feminine carelessness, he
supposed, had not switched off the ignition. If this had been left for
more than a few hours the battery would have run down. He examined the
engine and found it still hot. It had obviously been driven for some
hours that morning.

Mark entered the car, settled himself down in the driver's seat and, in
half a minute, was racing down the Champs-lyses at sixty miles an
hour, glancing to right and left in search of his fellow-survivor. But
he saw nothing. There was nothing in the long, wide stretches between
the posturing statues, nothing but those occasional dark blots, or the
confused pile of motionless wreckage where two cars had crashed.
Nothing but this, all the way up to the ironical Arc de Triomphe.

For the next hour he drove feverishly along the boulevards and avenues
and across most of the great open spaces where he thought it most likely
that he might meet his former car, or see it moving in the distance. But
there was nothing and, suddenly, he realized with a shock that it was a
quarter to four, and he would soon be due at the Louvre again.

At five minutes to four he rushed up the broad stairs and made his way
along the echoing galleries to the Murillo. The little silver bag was
where he had laid it. The unknown fellow-survivor had not returned. He
began to ask himself the old question of the sceptics, whether it was
not more likely that in his agitated state of mind he had made some
mistake, rather than that a miracle could have happened. Perhaps he had
left his own car somewhere else in the morning and walked to the Louvre,
and forgotten it. After the strain through which he had passed it was
only too likely that he had imagined the ticking of a watch in that
appalling silence. Perhaps he had heard a death-watch beetle. He opened
the bag and took out the watch. The steady ticking told him he had made
no mistake here. But, as for the motor-car, the red light and the hot
engine--he was still in a kind of trance about it. Perhaps he had
switched a battery on unconsciously, or caught a gleam of the sun on the
red disk, and hypnotized himself into believing the engine was hot. It
was amazing what association of ideas would do. He remembered the tales
about Indian conjurers. At the same time he determined to wait now till
it grew dark, for he knew also what tricks doubt could play with the
human mind. He was tired and he might as well rest there as anywhere
else. The seat was broad and comfortable, and he thought he might even
spend the night there. The great roomy palace, in that afternoon light,
seemed like an untroubled harbour of refuge, serenely aloof from the
world of the dead outside. He lay down on the seat and almost at once
fell asleep.

It was eight o'clock when he awoke. The air struck cold, and the great
gallery was darkening. He could hardly see the pictured faces on the
walls, but they peopled the gigantic obscurity with phantoms. To remain
there in the dark would be unbearable. It would be like trying to sleep
in the enchanted woods of Westermain, where

    Thousand eyeballs under hoods
    Have you by the hair.

He hastily added a line to the half-sheet of notepaper--"_will return
to-morrow morning at eleven-thirty_," and re-inserted it in the clasp of
the bag. He groped his way out of the gallery and down the stairs to the
exit, looking over his shoulder as he went,

    Like one that on a lonely road
    Doth walk in fear and dread.

It seemed an immense distance to the outer doors; and it was with a
strange sense of relief that he found himself in the car again. For a
reason that he was quite unable to analyse he drove into the middle of
the most open space he could find in the Champs-lyses. Then, he locked
the doors, established himself in the roomy back seat, drew down the
blinds, turned on the interior lights, and opened a bottle of wine. He
drank half of it before he could eat. But he was hungry, and in a very
short time he had demolished most of the food that he had brought with
him. He ended his meal with a draught of brandy from his flask, and lit
his pipe. He then wrapped a great rug around him and prepared to read
himself into drowsiness. He would turn off the lights when he felt that
he could sleep again. In the meantime, however, a further thought
occurred to him, and--leaning over the front seats, with his eyes fixed
on the dash-board--he switched on the powerful headlights. If any
survivor did happen to enter the Champs-lyses, there was a good chance
that they might be seen. But he had no sooner opened his book than he
seemed to be filled with a terrifying sense of the vast darkness outside
his little lighted cabin. All his attempts to shut it off seemed only to
make the weight of darkness more appallingly palpable and crushing. It
was like trying to live in a bravely illuminated egg-shell at the bottom
of a midnight sea. With a snap of the springs, he raised the blinds, and
that made it a little better, but not much, for the internal lights made
it impossible to see through the black windows. He switched them off;
and that was far better, for now he was himself sitting in darkness, and
he could see dark trees and a few glittering stars beyond them. But,
even so, the headlights of his lonely car, challenging the gigantic
obscurity, had an indescribably frightening effect. It is only in the
stupefying contact of their fellow-men that men can carelessly throw
searchlights into the darkness around them. He felt that he would be
safer (from what peril he could not tell) and certainly more ready to
sleep if he were himself lost in the darkness. He climbed into the front
seat to switch the headlights off, and as he did so he saw for the first
time the dreadful picture which they had been flooding with an unnatural
day. Fifteen yards in front of the car there was a fountain tossing
myriads of liquid jewels into the air. At the foot of it, with their
bodies propped against a stone basin, half sitting, half reclining, a
dead man and woman were staring directly towards him, with eyes of
hollow shadow, and faces that were turned by those intense rays to a
leprous white.

Mark started the engine and drove madly away, he hardly knew where, till
his lights showed nothing but grass and trees. There he stopped and shut
his lights off completely. He found a certain respite, both from seeing
too much and seeing too little, in the dim light of the crescent moon as
it struggled through a grey fleece of cloud. He wrapped his rug round
him again, and settled himself down as well as he could in the back seat
of the car, wondering, wondering, wondering at the mystery of things,
till, from utter weariness, his head sunk on his breast and he fell
asleep.




CHAPTER X


He woke in the very early morning, so intensely relieved at the
vanishing of the dark that he was actually able to think of breakfast.
Perhaps at a caf--preferably an open air one--he might even be able to
brew a pot of tea or coffee. But he lost heart as he approached those
horrible figures among the green chairs and tables. Macbeth might have
supped on horrors; but it was not easy to breakfast on them. All that he
was able to do was to seize some good, clean-skinned pears, a sealed
packet of oatmeal biscuits, and a bottle of wine which, being still
better sealed, seemed to be more secure from the dreadful world around
him.

He breakfasted in the car, that little travelling home of his; and, when
he had lighted his pipe, he tried to think out a more definite plan of
action than he had hitherto formed. He made a further discovery. Feeling
in a side-pocket of the car for a duster to wipe the wind-screen, he
found a diary with an elastic-band around it, under which a road-map had
been slipped. The diary--which he examined first--gave him the second
initial of his fellow-survivor, but little more direct information, for
it was of an unusual kind in those days. It was headed, on the first
page, "Reading Diary of E. H.", and under the various dates, it recorded
the books she had been reading, with occasional comments, and quotations
of passages which had struck her as memorable.

It interested Mark immensely; for although the direct information was
so little, he thought that he could almost picture her character from
her choice of books and the passages she had transcribed.

One of the first that caught his eye was from _La Maison du Chat qui
Pelote_ by Balzac. She had been reading it, at the outbreak of war, and
had transcribed one sentence of it. _Dans ces grandes crises le coeur se
brise ou se bronze._

Two others, which indicated a vein of humour, were from _Middlemarch_:

     _The world is full of handsome dubious eggs called possibilities._

     _When she was a child she believed in the gratitude of wasps and
     the honourable susceptibilities of sparrows, and was
     proportionately indignant when their baseness was made manifest._

A third, from the same book, was this:

     _The best piety is to enjoy--when you can. You are doing the most
     then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet._

Several more were on the tendencies of the time, in art and literature.
One or two were biting; for instance:

     _There was not one of his fellow-men whom he did not feel himself
     in a position to ridicule and torment, confident of the
     entertainment he thus gave to all the rest of the company._

This was George Eliot's comment on another character in _Middlemarch_;
but E. H. had applied it thus. "Compare with the malice of the modern
pseudo-intellectual, in conversation, and in print."

She was apparently--with the enthusiasm of her country--all for trying
to appreciate rather than to condemn; and her criticisms were all
directed against those who took the initiative in destruction or
depreciation of what was good. Yet another instance of her dislike of
what--alas--she called "the spirit of the debunker" came from George
Eliot--

     _I am not sure that the greatest man of his age could escape these
     unfavourable reflections of himself in various small mirrors. Even
     Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have
     the facial angle of a bumpkin._

Most of her own comments took a similar line. This, for instance, was
from E. H. herself:

     _Modern artistic circles_ [she wrote] _have lost the old
     catholicity of appreciation, in which all real values could
     co-exist. They cannot accept apples as apples, but criticize them
     for not being pomegranates. They would "liquidate" roses for
     lacking the poison-fangs of the snake; and they lecture the lily on
     its smooth inability to imitate the strength and character of the
     octopus._

He thought he recognized the note of New England in that, as also in the
following:

     _We must move with the times. We can never go back, as the Gadarene
     swine said, when they were half-way down the hill._

That was E. H., too, and it amused him. The next was more serious:

     _Strange that, at the very moment when advanced thinkers were
     repudiating "super-nature" with contempt, they were about to
     worship the inventors of the super-man and the super-state.
     Unconsciously, they must have their God in one place or another,
     but they chose a most unlikely stamping-ground._

That last phrase puzzled him.

He gathered that she was repelled by the streak of falsity in Rousseau;
but there were notes of romantic feeling here and there. One, from
Renan, came to him like a strain of music. It was on the mysticism of
love: _cette voix lointaine d'un monde qui veut tre_.

Another passage was translated from Voltaire:

     _We must forgive the deaf who talk against music, and the blind who
     hate beauty. They are not so much enemies of society, conspiring to
     destroy what consoles and charms us. They are really unfortunate
     creatures to whom Nature has denied certain faculties._

Mark was fascinated by this little diary. It crystallized so much of
what he had often thought and felt but had never been able to express so
simply and lucidly. He felt that, even in this indirect way, E. H. had
become a very real person to him.

He unfolded the road-map.

The road from Rome to Paris was under-scored in pencil, and, on the
margin, in the writing of the diary, there was a list of places through
which the road passed. Their more or less equal distances from one
another suggested that they had been chosen as stopping places. This
would hardly help him to find the traveller, for the journey was now
over. But it confirmed the impression he had got from the letter in the
little silver bag--that the driver of the car had come from Rome, in
search of the friend who lived in Paris. If there was one survivor in
Rome, perhaps there were others. Perhaps Italy, or some parts of it, had
escaped. He determined that, if his visit to the Louvre this morning
proved fruitless, he would push on to Rome at once. There were many
things, however, which prevented him from being too hopeful about the
result. Italy was an enterprising country, and if there had been any
survivors there, it seemed almost certain that they would be exploring
the devastated cities of Europe by this time. His whole existence for
the last fortnight had been so much a nightmare that, again and again,
he wondered whether he was not deluding himself with the idea of a
fellow-survivor; whether he was not twisting the evidence to his own
wishes.

At a quarter to twelve he was at the seat in front of the Murillo. The
silver bag was still there, with the note in the clasp. It had not been
touched. He examined the contents of the bag again. The watch was not
ticking now. It had no more to tell him. He saw, however, that on the
blank page, on the back of the letter from her Parisian friend, the
recipient had noted another list of places between Rome and Paris, and
that these places were different, and indicated a different route from
those on the margin of the road-map in the car. Moreover, they were in
the reverse order; and, amazed at his own obtuseness, he recalled that
all roads lead in two directions. It was clear that the list of names on
the back of the letter had been written in Rome, for they led off with
Orvieto, Florence and Genoa. It seemed equally clear now that the list
on the margin of the map had been written in Paris; for it began with
the French names, as though the writer were planning her return journey
to Rome and by a slightly different route. Moreover, it was a French
map, and it bore the stamp of a French book-shop. This seemed to be
conclusive. The whole picture became clear to him now. This
fellow-survivor, with the intrepidity of young America, had come to look
for her friend in Paris, realized the hopelessness of her search, and
decided to return to Rome. He wondered whether this pointed to better
conditions farther east, or whether it was due to the sheer bewilderment
of a panic-stricken creature, bent only on returning to the surroundings
which she knew best, and where she was most likely to be found.

In any case, his own course was now clear. He would push on to Rome, at
once, by the route indicated on the map. To make sure that no possible
chance was missed, he left the silver bag where he had found it, with
yet another addition to the note, which he inserted in the clasp:

     _As you have not come back to the Louvre, I am going to look for
     you in Rome, where I think you have gone already. If I am mistaken,
     and you find my message, this is to say that for the next month,
     every day, at twelve o'clock noon, I shall look for you at the top
     of the steps outside the main entrance to St. Peter's. If this
     fails I shall return to the Louvre on the 1st of July at noon, and
     I shall be there every day after that, at the same time, till the
     end of the month._

     _A Fellow-Survivor._

Half an hour later, after filling up with free petrol at the nearest
garage, and making a few other preparations, he was putting mile after
mile behind him on the long road to Rome.




CHAPTER XI


Three days later, at sunset, he entered Rome by the Flaminian Gate. All
the way through Italy the wave of death had done its work, and he knew
that Rome, like London and Paris, could now be only a city of the dead.
But, a few minutes after he had crossed the Piazza del Popolo, with its
great obelisk of so many memories, he was conscious of a strange
difference. Here, for the first time, the catastrophe which had made no
more of the entire human race than if it had been an ephemeral colony of
ants, was itself dwarfed by the majesty of an historical record that,
even in its ruin, seemed to transcend time.

It was through the Flaminian Gate that the first pilgrims from a
barbarous little island off the western coast of Europe had entered the
Imperial City; and now, after all those movements to the west, the final
catastrophe seemed to have restored the historic mistress of the
civilized world to her old eminence. In life, for a few fleeting
centuries, she had lost it. In death, she re-assumed her reign.

He drove slowly, for the old dreadful reason, down the Corso, and turned
to the left towards the Piazza di Spagna, where he halted for a moment
outside the little house where Keats died. At its foot, on the pavement
at the lowest of the broad steps of the Trinit de' Monti a group of
dead flower-sellers were bowed together among great masses of withered
blossom, like a piece of mournful sculpture. Even now the flowers had
not lost all their original brightness, for some of them were in
baskets of earth, and there had been some rain of late, while many of
the leaves and faded petals had taken on a rich autumnal colour. On an
earlier visit which he had made to Rome with his parents long before the
disaster, the way in which those glistening clusters of blossom, violet
and narcissus, daffodil and lily, hyacinth and mimosa, had been heaped
before the dead poet's house, had possessed an unconscious symbolism for
his hero-worshipping boyhood. Day after day, year after year, the
flower-girls of Italy, not knowing what they did, had laid their
tributes there. The young poet, who had died in the little room above
them, had not known how his poems would be treasured after his death. He
was convinced that his name was indeed "writ in water"; and now, as
before, but with a deepening of its ironic indications, a line of the
dead poet haunted the mind and heart of the one man left alive:

    I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.

The body of a young woman, probably the caretaker, for she had a key in
her hand, was lying just outside the open door. It occurred to him that
there would be no dead in the Keats House, and he might make up a couch
and sleep there, for his first night in Rome. But, first, before the
light went, he wanted to drive about the city, in the faint hope of
meeting that other car, or seeing that other survivor.

The sun had gone down and the full moon was rising as he came suddenly,
with a catch of the breath, under the shadow of the Colosseum. He halted
and, drawn by an irresistible spell, got out of the car to look at it.
When he last saw it, there had been chattering hawkers of cheap
trinkets, and touting guides, and the whining voice of a beggar at his
elbow. He remembered thinking that a little race of mean parasites
seemed to be living on the prodigious relics of the past, like rats in a
ruined palace of the Caesars. This evening there was utter silence,
utter stillness. The remote past had resumed its power. The parasites
were no more than dead flies in the dusk of those portentous arches; and
the Colosseum, in its battered grandeur, looked as quiet and lonely as a
crater on that other dead world, the slowly rising meteor-battered moon.

As he entered the monstrous arena that had once reeked with a still more
monstrous furnace of brutal passions, the moon with its own dead craters
rose above its ragged crest, touching the massive blocks of travertine
with silver. He stared at the great empty circles of stone, rock above
rock, from which the lords of the world had once heard the cry, _Ave,
Csar, morituri te salutant!_ and, in that awful silence and stillness,
where the only movement was that of the moving sister-planet, he was
appalled by the memory of the things which had happened there--monstrous
cruelties, bestialities to which no beast but man had ever sunk,
deliberately designed to satiate the blood-lust of a jaded and
over-sophisticated world. There had been something very like it, all
over Europe, in the intellectual atmosphere of the world before the war.
There was only one explanation. It had been given, in poetical form, by
the book of Genesis. Men had become as gods to themselves; but in the
very act they had cut themselves off from their origin and had become
acquainted with that evil which is unknown to the beasts of the field.
In modern times, among the seekers for the new, there had been an all
too easy and literal interpretation of the verses,

    Where shall we turn then for pastime,
    If the worst that can be has been done.

They had made an intolerable hell out of a world in full possession of
all the means of happiness; and, as he stood there, wondering at the
Satanic perversity that had wrecked a world so full of hope, he became
aware of something moving on the earth beside him and before him. It was
only a long shadow, shortening at the same slow pace as the ascending
moon, but as it stole back towards his feet and spread its two dark
contracting arms around him it held him spellbound as though he were
listening to a great piece of music; for it told him he was standing in
the shadow of the one symbol that might have saved the world. He turned
and saw it--the crude black wooden cross, erected there so long ago, in
memory of the martyrs whose blood had soaked the sands of the arena. Its
plainness, its crudity, its humility, in the midst of that imperial
circus, were like a challenge from a world elsewhere. And, here, at
least, it had been a conquering challenge. He remembered the story of
the monk, Telemachus, who had travelled from the east to sacrifice his
own life in protest against the gladiatorial butcheries. It was on this
very ground that he had rushed into the arena, between the ranks of the
approaching swords, and tried, in the name of God, to keep them apart
with his own body, and his outstretched naked hands. From those great
stone circles above, the Emperor in his purple and the senators on their
ivory thrones had watched, with all the sophisticated curiosity of a
modern cynic, while the infuriated rabble in the upper galleries had
yelled like wild beasts for the mad intruder's death. "Kill! Kill!
Kill!" they clamoured, like a horrible orchestra, in which the shriek of
the women was no less ferocious than the roar of the men. The swords of
the gladiators whom he had tried to save cut him down and ripped him
open and tossed him aside like a dead dog. But something--perhaps in the
lonely courage of his act; perhaps in his appeal to a higher Power;
perhaps in the light on his face as he fell--so moved the mind of the
Emperor, that henceforth the butchery of man by man was forbidden in the
Colosseum.

There are moments when the utmost that an immortal soul can do is to
hold out the hands or stretch out the arms of its all too mortal
body--our "rood of every day". But, in so stretching them out, it may
span the world and touch the Eternal. Love knows that gesture, and knows
also the profound passion of those words, "I, when I am lifted up, will
draw all men unto me."

Such things as these, and more, were among the costly remembrances of
that crude black symbol. It belonged to an order of reality higher than
"brute nature", an order to which at one time the spirit of man was able
to aspire. Its full meaning then was too deep and universal to be
expressed physically in anything but a very simple and abrupt
hieroglyph. It symbolized all the real values of Christendom--chivalry
towards the weak, the dignity of womanhood, the broad stone of honour,
the beauty of holiness, and the splendour of that justice whose eyes are
unbandaged, and whose sword is laid before the mercy-seat of God. It
symbolized not worldly success, or the petty triumphs of materialistic
science, but a supernatural victory accomplished, even in defeat, by
"the broken heart and the unbroken word".

In the neo-paganism of recent generations, all these things had gone as
utterly out of fashion as any of the other conventions about political
"scraps of paper", the disregard of which were commonly held to have
been the sole cause of the world's disasters. But the disease went far
deeper than the breaking of the pledged word in politics. It was not
generally recognized that, when the Dictators began to break their word,
and to sneer at those who kept it, they were, in one fearful particular,
more sincere than their enemies. For nearly half a century, the
literature and art of western civilization had succumbed (partly out of
intellectual snobbery) to the subtle propaganda of the new atheism. They
had been glorifying the breaking of the pledged word in the most sacred
relationships of the individual human life; they had been revelling in
the analytical destruction of all the foundations of morality; and
sneering at those who defended them as "out-of-date"; while the most
leprous stigmata of degeneracy had again and again been upheld as a
vital proof of new and advanced thought and original aims. As one critic
said, in a leading journal, "their very obscenity is somehow beautiful,
and if this is not high art, what is?"

As the one man left alive stared at the one symbol that might have saved
the world, he heard in the far distance, beyond the Tiber, the howl of a
wild beast. It may have been the howl of Manfred's watch-dog returning
to the wild, but it sounded like the howl of the wolf returning to
Rome.




CHAPTER XII


For the next hour he drove about at random by moonlit arch and stately
column, and dark little winding street, hoping against hope for a
glimpse of the fellow-survivor, whom he believed to be now in Rome. But
in all that great echoing city of temples and tombs, he saw no sign of
life among them, no movement in the intense listening stillness, except
the flash of the glorious moonlit fountains over their marble naiads and
sea-gods. He drove up the steep winding road to the Capitol, but found
only the great equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius towering dark and
motionless against a silver flock of flying clouds. Twice he passed the
Pantheon, and the Forum of Trajan and the Forum Romanum. He passed the
grim prison-like palaces of the Renaissance princes, and returned, by
the dark and narrow Corso, to the wide moonlit stillness of the Piazza
del Popolo again. There, he turned to the right by the steep winding
ascent, between the old Hotel Russie, and the noble church of Santa
Maria del Popolo, which had been built over Nero's tomb, but had failed
to lay his ghost. He was on a beautiful road now, overhung on one side
by orange-trees and vines, and overlooking the dusky moonlit city on the
other. There were aromatic scents of eucalyptus in the air, and a breath
of roses met him. It was the kind of road, he thought, where he might
see that little cream-coloured car at a garden gate, or find the
occupant asleep in it under a magnolia tree. The road had been named
apparently after a famous poet of the twentieth century. He saw the
inscription on one of its walls--_Via Gabriele d'Annunzio_. He drove
along it slowly. His headlights made the leaves and boughs look as
strangely artificial as the lime-lit scenery of a theatre, and in the
rhythmic pulse of his engine, he seemed to hear a mocking echo of the
superb verses in which d'Annunzio had called upon the stones of Rome,
not to rise and mutiny, but to remember her past and wait for her
re-birth:

    Il sole declina fra i cieli e le tombe.
    Ovunque l'inane caligine incombe.
    Udremo su l'alba squillare le trombe?
      Ricrdati e aspetta.

But for all his artistic mastery, d'Annunzio had in himself the seeds of
decay. Morality, however good it may be, is not art; but, in bad
morality, there is always something inhuman, and as one of the greatest
of critics observed, "in art, nothing inhuman can reach the heights". It
was only from afar that d'Annunzio could see that resurrection: but with
what passion he invoked it!

     figlia al silenzio la pi bella sorte.
    Verr dal silenzio, vincendo la morte,
    L'Eroe necessario. Tu veglia alle porte,
      Ricrdati e aspetta.

With that music throbbing through him Mark paused, for a moment, on the
Via Pinciana to look at the dim expanse of the city beneath. Clearly as
the moon shone in the sky he could not distinguish St. Peter's in the
vast obscurity of the distance; nor was there any speck of moving light
in all that mighty web of dusky streets.

A hundred yards further on he came to the Trinit de' Monti. There he
left his car under the wall of the church and took what he thought he
would require for the night, a couple of rugs, his electric torch, and
his big knapsack. He flung the latter over his shoulder, and looking
rather like a pack-laden soldier going into the trenches, he went down
the steep flight of steps. At the foot of them he could see the dead
flower-sellers and their gleaming baskets of withered flowers which he
had seen earlier. He tried not to look at them as he entered the little
doorway of the Keats House where, by the light of his electric torch, he
shut and bolted the door behind him. He climbed the narrow little stair
to the first floor. There, as he expected, and partly remembered, a
friendly room, like a small English library, awaited him. It had a
pleasant smell of good leather bindings.

He opened his knapsack and lighted the candle in his lantern. He had
always been a book-lover, and it was good to see the friendly English
volumes that so warmly lined the walls. There was Ernest De Selincourt's
edition of Keats, for instance. Old as it now was, it had never been
superseded; and there were hosts of books about the poet's
contemporaries, as well as their own works. He took Leigh Hunt from the
shelf and read, while he demolished what was left of the fruit and
cheese in his knapsack, followed by half a flask of Brolio. Then, with
two large chairs placed front to front, and the rugs from the car, he
made himself a bed, lit a well-packed pipe, and prepared to read himself
to sleep. But it was the music of the poet's own words that he chose for
this:

    I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.

It had been dulled--how often--by dull repetition; but the wonder of it
was increased a thousand-fold now that it was about to be lost for ever.
He could have wept as he read, for the fearful irony of it all. But,
although he had not the courage to blow out his candle, his head grew
heavy and his eyes closed. A minute later--perhaps because he was among
the never-failing friends of the mind--he had fallen into the soundest
sleep he had known since he waded ashore at Steephill Cove.

When he awoke the candle in the lantern had burned out, and it was broad
daylight. He unpacked the remaining contents of his capacious knapsack;
lighted his spirit-lamp; and in a few minutes the Keats House was
suffused with the homely fragrance of an excellent pot of coffee. Fresh
milk, of course, was lacking, but he had a good packet of it in powdered
form and, for the first time since the disaster, he had what the normal
Englishman might call a "reasonable breakfast". He might well have said
a grace for it to John Keats who, in some mysterious way, had made him
feel at home in the world again. He decided that, as long as he stayed
in Rome, this should be his headquarters.

When he had lighted his pipe, he began to examine more closely the
contents of the friendly room in which he had passed the night. Near the
door there was a table on which a visitor's book reposed. He looked at
it idly at first, thinking merely of the abrupt end which had come to
that long series of names, recorded there for so many years. But, as he
turned the latest page, his attention was suddenly riveted by the
formation of the letters in the last recorded name, EVELYN HAMILTON. It
was the same writing, he felt sure, as that of the little diary in his
pocket. He compared it, letter by letter. There could hardly be any
doubt, and the initial made it doubly certain. It would have seemed an
impossible coincidence, but for one even more surprising fact. The date
beside it showed that it had been written exactly a fortnight ago, when
there was no one else in Rome or Italy who could have added a later
signature. He could picture her in the appalling loneliness, coming into
this little house, as many another of her fellow-countrymen would have
done, and for exactly the same reason; and then, before leaving, with a
hint of wistful irony, writing her forlorn little name as the last entry
on that long and grateful record.

He looked through the earlier pages to see if she had made an earlier
visit. He found her name twice in that year; and once in the previous
year, when apparently there had been a special celebration of the poet's
birthday, and there was a long list of distinguished names, including
those of the British Ambassador, Sir Howard Mortimer, and his wife.

In two years, therefore, she had visited the Keats House four times. She
evidently liked the place and its associations. This might be a clue to
the character of the young American art student, but it did not help
Mark very much in his task of finding her. There was no indication of
where she had been living in Rome, and it might be a very long time
before she came to the Keats House again. In fact, she had drawn a line
under her last signature as though, with the curious feeling for such
things that is so characteristic of the American mind, she realized that
she was writing "Finis" to the whole volume of memories. Having done
that, she might never return. But Mark knew that if he neglected the
smallest possible link in the too thin chain of circumstances by which
their destinies were at present connected, the chain might be broken
altogether. Two survivors, one of whom was unconscious of the existence
of the other, might wander through Europe and the world for a thousand
years without meeting. Two raindrops, one of which fell in Paris and the
other in Rome, might have a very long way to travel before they met,
even after the sea had received them. The fact that, in this case, one
of the raindrops was conscious and endowed with will and reason made a
difference. But he did not intend to miss any chances.

Under her name, therefore, in the visitor's book, he wrote his own,
dated it, and appended the message that he had left in the little silver
bag at the Louvre.

     _Every day, at noon, for the next month, I shall look for you at
     the main entrance of St. Peter's. If this fails, I shall return to
     Paris where I have left the same message on the seat before the
     Murillo, where you left your silver bag. I shall look for you there
     every day at noon, for the following month. If this fails, I shall
     return to Rome, and continue my search. I shall stay in this house
     while I am in Rome, and a message left in this book will find me._

It would be simple now to suggest the Keats House as a meeting-place;
but he could not alter the Louvre message, which it was just possible
that his fellow-survivor might have found if her departure from Paris
had been delayed. He tore a fresh page from the end of the visitor's
book, and wrote, in large letters, a further message.

     _To EVELYN HAMILTON._

     _There is a message for you in the visitor's book upstairs._

     _A FELLOW-SURVIVOR._

This, with some drawing-pins from the notice-board, he fastened to the
outside of the front door, which he carefully closed behind him as he
went out. It seemed to him that if she happened only to pass the house
again, and throw the most casual glance towards it, she could not fail
to see that staring new notice. Then, in the vast sunlit stillness of
the city, he mounted the great stairs--the _Scala di Spagna_--to the
Trinit de' Monti, where he got into his car and set out for that
strange tryst with one who might never receive his message or know of
his existence.




CHAPTER XIII


It was only a little after nine when he crossed the Tiber; but he was
making at once for the Vatican City, partly because he was in the state
of tension which brings a man to the railway-station before his train is
due, and partly because he had no other definite aim. But, being a good
reasoner, he had also tried to put himself in the place of the person he
was trying to find. One of her problems, undoubtedly, would be to
escape, at night, from that fearful and silent company of the dead,
which would await her in every private house, and every hotel. It was a
mere accident that the Keats House had solved his own problem. Before
that happened, he had actually thought of the private gardens of the
Vatican which, in every sense, were lifted so high above the walls and
roofs of Rome. In one of those quiet shelters from the summer heat,
designed for the peace of their lonely ruler, the obscure but infinitely
more lonely inheritor of all the palaces and gardens in the world might
find at least a lodging for the night. No other place in Rome was so
open and near to the stars, and so free, at night, from the shadowy
terrors of the dark city below.

Everything was bathed in sunshine this morning, as he drove up to the
great glistening square of St. Peter's. The fountains were flashing, and
the pigeons preening their iridescent throats around them in the centre
of the piazza; but this only intensified the silence and stillness of
the vast colonnades that swept, on either side, up to the central
church of Christendom. The sheer immensity of that world's wonder, for
whose dome the titanic imagination of Michelangelo had "heaved the
Pantheon into the sky", obliterated all traces of the wave of death on
the earth beneath.

On the broad steps, and scattered about the piazza, there were a few
dark specks and that was all. But the terrible cleavage in human nature,
the war in the members, which at last had destroyed the race, was
recorded here in a more portentous way. Over against the Christian
basilica which had been so triumphantly raised on the very site of
Nero's circus, there seemed to be a new and sardonic mockery in the
towering of that gigantic healthy obelisk which had been old when Rome
was born. After the sack of Heliopolis, where it had once been the
central emblem in the worship of the sun, Caligula had brought it to
Rome and stationed it here, to be splashed with the blood of the circus.
During all those centuries it had been a dark and menacing reminder of
the pagan abominations of which human nature was still capable. It was
not an uncultured or primitive set of men who, on this very spot, had
stimulated and glutted their jaded senses with the spectacle of women
thrown naked to the beasts and children torn limb from limb,

    When with flame all around him aspirant
    Stood flushed as a harp-player stands,
    The implacable beautiful tyrant,
    Rose-crowned, having death in his hands.

The aesthetic "modernity" of those far-off days when Nero had a
degenerate poet for "arbiter elegantiarum" had its counterpart in our
own. Mark had as quick a sense of the presence of evil in human
character and in art, as some men were said to have of the invisible
presence of an adder. He remembered the cold touch of it in some words
written at the outbreak of war by an over-sophisticated man of letters,
who talked of his feeling of "release" and "refreshment" when at last
the blood began to flow. The "modernity" of ancient Rome had "refreshed"
itself in imagination, with "brutalities" which it mistook for strength,
and with sexual perversities which it mistook for subtlety of mind. It
had regarded these things as the stigmata of genius, and the mark of the
supreme master in art and literature rather than as the mark of the
beast; for truth itself, when these things held the intellectual stage,
appeared nave, banal and conventional. It was all here, for those who
had eyes to see it. The central basilica of Christendom; and, over
against it, the gigantic, sinister, obelisk which had once risen from
the _spina_ of the circus, and now figured with a pious inscription as a
Christian monument.

The Swiss guards, with their pikes, and the orange and black stripes of
that Renaissance costume which Michelangelo had designed as though for
some strange harlequinade, were lying face downwards at the entrance
gate on the left and under the _Arco delle Campane_, through which Mark
drove into the grounds of the Vatican.

For half an hour he explored those great sun-flooded gardens which, in
spite of their privacy, always conveyed an unusual sense of openness.
This was partly because of their height. At one or two points, they not
only overlooked St. Peter's and Rome, but really did convey the feeling
that, in doing so, they possessed a strange centrality of their own, a
privacy of glorious light from which the lonely watcher overlooked the
world.

He drove along winding semi-tropical roads, over-shadowed by palm and
magnolia. He passed a great sun-baked rockery, where the lizards ran
like swift tricklings of green fire, under flowering stone-crop and
cactus. He passed fountains bubbling out of deep rock-crevices, through
a mist of _Capelli di Venere_, or maidenhair fern; and others from which
the naiads of Virgil and Horace had not been exiled. He had not hitherto
found any place so aloof from the catastrophe, or with so secure an air
of being "above the battle". He supposed that even the gardeners must
have been away or indoors at the fatal hour, for there was no sign of
them anywhere. But neither was there any sign of that human survivor for
whom he was searching. He came suddenly on the beautiful little loggia,
where the Pope sometimes dined in summer. With its pillared arches
opening on four sides, and those tall daughters of the gods in the
niches between them, and the quiet, rushing sound of the water from the
cascade below, it was the kind of place in which Pliny and Cicero would
have delighted to entertain their friends. The loneliness of the place
was curiously emphasized by a small refectory table of the barest and
plainest wood, one side of which bore the inscription in black letters:

     Tavola da pranzo del Papa.

It was the kind of table that might have been found in the poorest
peasant's cottage, but it was in perfect harmony with its classic
surroundings, and somehow suggested the classic beauty of asceticism,
the loaf of bread and the cup of wine.

But there was no human voice to break the loneliness or interrupt that
sound of flowing water which, in lonely places, can so mysteriously
convey the sense of immeasurable time, and the untroubled process of
things that had no beginning and will have no end.

    Nothing ever changes till the gods come again.
      Water still will flow....

He left his car and walked on into what indeed might be called the
Secret Garden, where only that lonely and august occupant of the oldest
throne in European history had been used to walk and meditate. It was a
place of exquisite silence, fragrant with flowers and memories, where
Mark felt like the first explorer of a strange planet. The Pope used to
be called "the prisoner of the Vatican"; but even in this secret garden
there was a height which seemed to command and overlook the world. Fifty
yards further on, he found the seclusion of a hermitage in the Forest of
Broceliande; and he stumbled, like a man in a dream, into a dusky
clearing among trees, where he saw something which held him spellbound.
It was the quiet shrine dedicated to St. Thrse, the Little Flower. The
group of figures, the child-saint, and the old man kneeling and gazing
up at her face, was so unexpectedly beautiful in design and colour; it
was so vivid an expression of a deep and simple human heart calling upon
other hearts to share its own devotion that Mark--for the first time
since the catastrophe--felt that he was near to tears.

And then he saw something which almost suspended the beating of his
heart. At the base of the figures, there was a bunch of flowers, and the
flowers were as fresh and unwithered as though they had been picked that
morning.




CHAPTER XIV


During the next hour and a half Mark hastily explored every corner of
the Vatican Gardens in quest of his fellow-survivor. He walked along the
Stradone dei Giardini, and under that most private sun-flooded wall,
where huge grape-fruit were ripening, like the golden melons of the
desert island in the Voyage of Maeldune. He called aloud, as he went, in
his feverish excitement, "Is anyone there? Is anyone there?" And he
heard only the echoes replying from the high walls of the Vatican
galleries. He ran back to his car and driving along the Viale del
Giardino Quadrato, turned to the left up the Viale del Bosco. At every
point of vantage he stopped and examined the whole prospect. He entered
every building in which it seemed possible that his fellow-survivor
might have made a temporary home. The compact little observatory was one
of the likeliest places. It contained a pallet-bed for the use of the
astronomer in the intervals of his watching, but there was a great
iridescent spider's web across the open doorway, and the long glistening
threads of green and gold were all unbroken. He went into the tiny
railway station, and the Casina Pio IV and the Accademia Nuovi Lincei
where those odd "mediaevalists" of the Vatican--despite the common view
of them--had studied the latest developments of modern science. But he
found no clue, and only the mocking echoes answered his reiterated
calls. He went into the Radio building and saw what had been the most
efficient wireless station for its size in the world. He saw all that

marvellous apparatus of communication lying utterly uncommunicative. The
words of a great philosopher came mockingly into his mind: "Mechanism is
everywhere; but it is everywhere subordinate." He wondered how long it
would take him to master its intricacies, and send a message across the
Atlantic, in a forlorn hope of a reply from the other side. But this was
not his immediate concern. He called aloud, as he had called in all the
other buildings he had entered--"Is anyone there?" and, as he did so, he
caught sight, for the first time, in this lonely place--of a dead face
staring at him across the machinery. It was the smudged and greasy face
of one of the mechanics; but the fixed stare, and the posture of the
body in its blue dungarees, half propped, half lying, among wheels and
levers which were now as impotent as the valves, and pulleys and levers
of its own heart and sinews, answered his question clearly enough.

He stumbled out, repeating stupidly, and hardly knowing what he was
saying: "Mechanism is present everywhere; but it is everywhere
subordinate." Subordinate to what? Not to man--in the long run, Man had
been only its temporary master.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was at the main entrance of St. Peter's ten minutes before the time
appointed. For three-quarters of an hour he moved restlessly about the
broad atrium at the head of the steps, gazing across the piazza. But
there was no moving speck of human life on the long approach from the
Tiber or the broad expanse before him. Before leaving, he took three
cardboard notices that hung within the porch. On their blank white backs
he wrote, in heavy blue pencil, the message to his fellow-survivor
which he had left at the Keats House. He fastened them at the entrance
doors so conspicuously that she could hardly miss them if ever she
passed that way.

Then, in spite of all his preoccupation, Mark discovered that he was
hungry. At the far side of the piazza he had noticed a small restaurant
where he might be able to replenish his stock of food. He drove over to
it and, undeterred by the two dead waiters who lay near the entrance,
with napkins in their hands, and the afternoon light shining on their
soiled shirt-fronts, he proceeded to fill his big knapsack. He chose
only such edibles as were in glass bottles or hermetically sealed boxes.
But there were plenty of those to choose from; and, with a tin of
biscuits, boxes of dates and dry figs, and a flask or two of good wine,
he revictualled his car for some days to come.

As soon as he had satisfied his hunger, he drove through the Porta
Angelica to the great entrance on the right of the Vatican, and mounted
the steep stairs. He was convinced that his fellow-survivor, when she
went to the spacious and unfrequented room in the Louvre, was moved by
the same desire as his own--to escape the crowded horror of the outside
world. She was an art student and had been accustomed to work in the
Vatican galleries; or so he supposed, from the student's pass which he
had found in the silver bag, in conjunction with Professor Antonelli's
card, and one or two references in her reading-diary. What would be more
likely, therefore, than that she should have made a temporary sanctuary
for herself in one of its many quiet rooms, overlooking gardens flooded
with sun at daybreak, and glorified by her beloved painters?

But, again, as he went with echoing footsteps along those vast
corridors, he felt the touch of an appalling loneliness. He passed
through the Cabinet of Masks and the Gallery of Statues and the
exquisite octagonal Court of the Belvedere, where Apollo and Perseus and
Hermes, and the Laocon with its Virgilian associations, gleamed in the
quiet sunlight like thoughts in the Eternal Mind.

They almost frightened him now with their silent and unaltering
perfection. Their effect was infinitely more overwhelming than when he
stood before them with a little group of his fellow mortals on his
former visit to Rome. With the confidence which the small mind always
finds in numbers, some of his companions had looked appraisingly at
these serenely aloof immortals. They had even criticized them as if they
had been merely the work of men's hands. But now, as the one man left
alive on the planet, he found it almost impossible to think that hands
like his own had created such beauty. He almost quailed before their
splendour and all that it represented in the realm of ideal thought.

Having no communication with human minds and souls present in the flesh,
he felt more keenly than ever before that these ideal forms were, in
fact, the physical expression of an invisible spirit, and he was haunted
by the deep inner truth of those great Platonic lines of Edmund Spenser:

    For of the soul the body form doth take;
    For soul is form, and doth the body make.

Perhaps for the same reason, and because he was searching for something
more immediately human, it was a relief to return to the Pinacoteca and
the warm colours of that glorious palace of painting. But he was very
deliberate and systematic in his search. Without looking at the
prostrate body of the uniformed attendant, he took two large coloured
prints from the table where the reproductions had been laid out for
sale, and wrote his message to his fellow-survivor on their blank backs.
He fastened one on the door leading to the "Hall of Statues"; and the
other on the entrance door to the Pinacoteca. Then he pushed back the
latter door and walked on through room after glowing room. The
chronological order of the pictures gave him a strange sense of passing
through all the centuries of European civilization. He passed through
the Byzantine Hall into the hall of Giotto; and, though in the new
eagerness of his search he hardly glanced at the pictures themselves, he
had a curious sense that he was drawing nearer to his own age, and to
the hearts and minds of men like himself. It made him feel also that he
was actually drawing nearer with every step to the object of his search.

He paused a moment in the room of Fra Angelico. The exquisite beauty of
those small panel-pictures enthralled him, as though he had entered a
room where slender little arched windows opened on the valleys of
Paradise. When he was a small boy there had been a copy of one of them
in his nursery at home, and he had been fascinated by its delicate
colours. He remembered being vaguely annoyed by a pagan nurse who had
described them as "pastel shades of rose and blue". He did not know what
"pastel shades" were at the time; but the very sound of it was like
having your hair brushed the wrong way with a hard brush. For a gentle
voice had told him an old legend about that picture, which had made him
feel the ethereal subtlety of a light and colour that might have
suffused the wings of angels or glorified the walls of the celestial
city.

It touched him with the old simplicity, and the tears rushed to his
eyes. The pity of it, the tragedy of it, oppressed him like a physical

burden, aching in the brain and wringing the heart; that men who had
all this power of creation, all this capacity not only for happiness but
for blessedness, men with all the intellectual and spiritual riches of
the treasure-house of God at their disposal, should have done so fearful
a thing with their inheritance. It seemed that even the infinite mercy
and compassion of the Supreme Being had, perhaps, grown weary of them at
last, and allowed them to obliterate one another from the face of the
earth.

Room after glowing room, through the coloured pageant of the vanished
centuries, he hurried on, seeing no indication of life in all that long
vista of beauty, and hearing no sound but his own echoing footsteps. In
the vast eighth hall, at the foot of those masterpieces of Raphael, the
Transfiguration, the Madonna of Foligno, and the Crowning of the Virgin
in Heaven, there were three bodies lying prostrate, as though in
grotesque adoration. But it was not adoration. From the podgy hand of
the central body (a large, fat man with the jowl of a pig) an "advanced"
Art journal entitled _The Bomb_ had slithered across the polished floor.

Mark picked it up because he noticed some writing on the broad margin of
an exposed page. The whole journal, apparently, was devoted to a painter
who had recently caused an immense sensation with a work entitled "The
Abortion". Reproductions of this work of genius were given from every
possible angle; and, on the marked page, it was compared, to its own
great advantage, with the insipidly beautiful conceptions of such
idealistic, yet representational painters, as Raphael. One podgy fist of
the dead man still held the fountain pen with which he had scrawled some
further notes and comments on the passage which contrasted "The
Abortion" with the effete work of the dead masters. At the head of the
article there was a photograph of the author with two young women. They
were described as "The famous Art Critic, Hamilcar Pratt, with his
talented disciples." Mark glanced at the faces of the young women, and
at the face of the dead man. There was no doubt about it. This was the
famous Art Critic, Hamilcar Pratt. Even in death his up-turned face wore
that smile of which Phene spoke in _Pippa Passes_--

    That hateful smile of boundless self-conceit.

The poor little rabbit faces of the two young women were so painted and
plastered with cosmetics that any expression of their own was
obliterated, but they wore a very close imitation of their master's
smile; and their narrow foreheads made it only too comprehensible. In
support of its reversal of all values, _The Bomb_ was be-starred with
quotations from Dr. Arendzen's excellent translation of a famous
twentieth-century Bolshevik hymn. The hymn was entitled "WE"; and the
smile of the young women meant exactly what the hymn said:

    _We'll burn Raphael's paintings, in name of the dawn that is rising,_
    _We have forgotten the fragrance of fields and the flowers of the
         spring-tide._
    _We at last have unlearnt to be sighing and home-sick for heaven._
    _Here, in this world, must a man have his fill, without dreams of
         hereafter._
    _We are the Judge and the Judgement. Our will is the law._

Unfortunately, even in this world, they did not seem to be satisfied
with their "fill". Nor had their association with Hamilcar Pratt crowned
them with the dark and sinister haloes to which they aspired; for the
illustrated papers, alas! irreverent even in the presence of sin,
usually robbed their twin scandal of all its glamour by referring to
them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

It was only in the last generation that the hymn of "WE" had come into
its own. In any saner age its appeal to brute numbers and force would
have seemed not only irrelevant to artistic values, but grotesquely
false to the spirit of the world's real workers:

    _We, the overwhelming innumerable legions of labour..._
    _Shook from our shoulders the burden received from our fathers,_
    _Cast for ever away mad dreams of a world unknown to the senses._
    _We'll burn Raphael's paintings in name of the dawn that is rising._
    _We'll destroy the museums and crush with our heel the treasures of
         artists._
    _Never again shall the tears flow from our eyes. We have killed pity
         within us._
    _We love only the power of steam and the blasting might of explosives._
    _We want the scream of the sirens, the rolling wheels of thundering
         metal._

So far from being a hymn of labour (for labour might have been thought,
in any age capable of real thought, to have had more than enough of the
"scream of the sirens"), it was the kind of raving that might have
frothed the mouth of an unusually brutal steel-king in a fit of
_delirium tremens_. But it had impressed millions of the half-baked as
"great and new". The word "new" was the fatal _Open Sesame_ to immature
minds. It had opened the door of the popular Press. It had held
criticism spellbound, lest it should be labelled "reactionary". It had
opened the capricious gates of fashion. It had opened even more widely
those already wide open spaces--the minds of the "revolting and
frustrated young" in the houses of the rich, and at the wealthier
schools and universities. It had opened a door to the bitter and
revengeful, and all who had grudges against their neighbours, and
therefore preferred pulling down to building up. It had opened a way of
escape to those who were too tired and disillusioned to trouble about
thinking any longer. Moreover, any attempt to answer the new gospel of
numbers, force and materialism, was at once checkmated by the desire of
press and pulpit to be all things to all men. Nothing could surpass the
large-minded tolerance with which they flattered and fawned upon the
disloyal as "intellectual leaders", while they smote and suppressed the
loyal from whom they had nothing to fear, and tossed their own
supporters as an appeasement to the wolves. Nothing could be more
generous than their belief--so ingratiatingly flattering to the common
enemy--that out of the spirit of destruction and murder some newer
thing, better and more valuable than the loyalties that had been
destroyed, would eventually be born; or that in sheer wickedness we saw
the beginnings of an infinitely better world to come. They persuaded
themselves that the opening of the gates of hell was a foretaste of
heaven; and the most horrible feature of the whole bewildered chaos was
its absolute irrationality. It was not merely an insurrection of lower
values against the higher. It was an insurrection of those swarming
imbecilities which were generated only in the most loathsome circle of
the whole political and intellectual Inferno. The fashionable folk whose
tongues had never conferred lasting fame, but had always been the organs
of its ephemeral substitute, "publicity", had apparently decided that
everyone who was anyone must see, admire, and talk about "The Abortion".
Seeing it was not quite as necessary as admiring it and talking about
it, but admiring and talking about it were essential for all who wanted
to swim with the contemporary swim, or walk with that endless
contemporary procession whose romantically rebellious originality was so
clearly demonstrated by the complete standardization of all its members
as exactly interchangeable parts.

An odd claim to "distinction" and "significant form" had been made for
"The Abortion", on the ground that it was an "abstraction". But in
actual and precise fact, this "abstraction" was a fairly accurate
representation of the embryo of an ape. It was laid, like the head of
Baptist John, on a large platter of "Art" pottery. It had a surgical
instrument on each side of it, like a knife and fork; and round it there
was a garnishing of sufficiently representative "phallic symbols".

It had been denounced by one bishop and praised by another. It had
received columns in the Press, and was regarded as "important" and
highly "intellectual" by the religious journals, even though they felt
it to be a mistake. Its importance--apart from its "publicity
value"--was not explained. The cheaper daily papers had pretended to
condemn. Some of them had called for censorship, while obviously
revelling in the common mud-bath, and profiting by their sensational
headlines. The more serious daily papers and reviews, especially those
of a conservative political tendency, had pointed out that "we must move
with the times". They had severely snubbed more honest critics by
telling them that they "must not expect to confine Art and Genius to the
conventions of the past", an observation which was perfectly true, but
absolutely irrelevant. They did not add that we must not expect to
confine artists like Wainwright, the poisoner, to the antiquated science
of Galen. As the conventional unconventionalists all said, with one
voice, "We must accept the fact that the artists and writers of our day
are in complete revolt". It was quite true, and they had become
revolting.

It was not explained why these privileged rebels had to be accepted by
those who disagreed with them; nor was it made clear what those far too
comfortable sons of luxury and sophistication were really in revolt
about. But their supporters in the conservative Press would tolerate no
real criticism. "This revolt", they said, "went deeper in literature,
than in art." It went deeper even than "the revolt against authority of
the Renaissance", for it "repudiated all literary associations". It was
not explained how the Renaissance had escaped the responsibility for its
deliberate revival, not only of literary associations, but of the
particularly old and formidable classic tradition. Neither was it
explained whether a complete abandonment of language was advocated for
the writers of the future; though what, alas! could be more "literary"
than letters? But the patter of that chaotic hour had no relation at all
to realities. It was the patter of the utterly incompetent, and of those
rudimentary creatures of modern publicity among whom thinking had become
almost a lost art. The conservative journals, whose editors-in-chief
were too hurried and worried to consider such things, did not think
there could be any real connection between the contemporary art and
literature of a country and its political stability. With all the
histories of all the revolutions to warn them they would allow their
artistic and literary columns to prepare the minds of thousands for
chaos, by dissolving in the acid of their cynicism or deriding as
utterly out-of-date the very principles upon which their own political
articles based the existence of the nation. They allowed them to set so
sweeping a fashion of thought or thoughtlessness, that those who did not
accept it were felt to have lost intellectual caste. They allowed them
to impose it on helpless millions who at heart were utterly opposed to
it, but had no means of protesting. In the journal which Mark now held
in his hands all the poor old commandments, except those which were so
out-of-date as not to be worth mentioning, were derided as the taboos of
an ancient and ridiculous bourgeoisie. But, in a leading article, on the
political situation, the writer's country was still described as
"Christian"; and the breaking of political pledges by foreigners was
denounced with hypocritical smugness, as a violation of precisely those
"bourgeois" principles which--according to almost every other page and
certainly in almost every book praised by their literary columns--could
have no possible justification in reality. And all this while,
Christendom--if they had only known it--was waiting with her replies to
all their bewilderment; replies infinitely deeper and more complete than
they had ever dreamed of; replies that embraced the depths and heights
of the _philosophia perennis_, and carried with them a thousand subtle
and true possibilities of really new discovery in art, thought and life.

Over them, the deep eyes of Raphael's "Mother and Child" looked through
the ages, with that spiritual glory of which the human race had caught
one fleeting glimpse, and then lost it for ever. But it had been no
remote glory. It was a discovery of the essential worth and dignity of
the individual human soul, where man--after his long evolution--had
emerged into a higher order of reality, and recognized his own
relationship to the spiritual world and to God. Every earthly mother, in
that recognition, shared the hallowing secret of the _Magnificat_.
Raphael had seen it shining in the quiet eyes of the Italian peasant
girl--his Madonna--whose child was her king, and would lead the nations
into the ways of peace.

Eyes of that quiet spiritual depth had not been uncommon once,
especially in childhood and old age. But, recently, in the greater part
of the human race, even the eyes had been modernized. Those deep
altar-lights of the spirit had been replaced or hidden by glittering
little electric lights, intensely quick and clever at seizing the
immediate and superficial, especially if it were hurtful. In this new
and dreadful silence, it seemed that the wonder of those eyes, though
they could now be seen only as Raphael remembered them, might have
convinced the modern world of its madness. Their sacred innocence,
hallowed and hallowing, was a terrible answer to the wickedness of the
mighty ones. But the sophisticated had grown tired of such things. At
heart, they hated them as they hated the "vulgar beauty" of sunsets and
flowers. They hated those loyalties of art, as they hated those other
loyalties of the individual and the family, which were the foundation of
all other earthly loyalties, but were themselves based on eternal
values. They hated those things as the evil eye must hate the beatific
vision, and therefore condemns itself, by its own desire and its own
preference, to outer darkness and eternal exile. "We'll burn Raphael's
paintings", in name of the night that is coming.

With an eye watching the minute-hand of the clock in the market-place,
lest a faith should be held a moment longer than the fashion of the hour
approved, such minds could understand neither the art nor the religion
of any former age. "The true classic", said the greatest of French
critics, "is a contemporary of all the ages." Perhaps that is why
Christendom, in its transcendence of time, gave so catholic a home to
the classics. But the volatility of the neo-pagans could never grasp the
spirit of Christian Art. "That grand conception of supreme events and
mysteries at which"--as a great agnostic said--"the successive ages
were spectators, and in relation to which the great souls of all
periods became contemporaries."

All those things rushed through the mind of the lonely survivor in a few
moments while he stood in the hall of Raphael. He saw clearly how the
new intellectual and spiritual incompetence had contributed to the
modern chaos, and eventually to the catastrophic end of civilization.

But he could not see clearly where any remedy could have been found at
any time in the last quarter of a century. The madness had gone too far.
Fifty years ago the world might have been saved, by a profound change of
heart, and the realization that unless men re-discovered their own roots
in the eternal grounds of the moral law, their civilization and all that
they had so laboriously built up through the centuries would come
crashing down as inevitably as a tree falls when the axe bites through
the last inch of the trunk. "Christianity has failed," said the cynics;
but one of the most just replies ever made was that of the laughing
philosopher who retorted in the true Voltairian spirit, "Christianity
cannot have failed. It has never been tried."

It was obviously not in any reactionary return to an outward and
insincere conformity with any religious creed that the remedy could have
been found. Something far more radical had been necessary. It was in the
heart, the inner man, that the change should have been wrought, before
the mocking and bewildered modern world could ever be brought to believe
again in real values, established on an eternal ground, or dare to act
on that belief. In fact, no man who really did believe in those eternal
values, would have dared to act in defiance of them, as the greater part
of the world had been acting for nearly half a century. It was not
merely that the world had grown more "wicked". In many ways it had grown
less wicked. There had been no wickedness like that of the "ages of
faith" in Italy. But, at least, it was recognized as wickedness. They
were "purple of raiment and golden". They sinned like beasts and fiends,
but they knew they were sinning like beasts and fiends. They even had a
suspicion, as Faustus had, that the spirit of evil might be in alliance
with them, and they gloried in the fact with a Satanic pride. They had
nothing in common with the modern university professors who explained
that fair is foul and foul is fair, or demonstrated to bewildered herds
of the young that the perversities described in the first letter of St.
Paul to the Romans were to be regarded with admiring sympathy as
innocent complexes or inhibitions of the subtler forms of genius.

It was as Mark made his way through the darker Borgia apartments that
the most startling experience of his life befell him. It was startling
for a two-fold reason. The curious deepening presentiment that
something, he knew not what, was about to happen, had risen to intense
expectation. In the sub-conscious depths of his mind those dark rooms
and winding corridors were associated with the most sinister legend in
history of evil incarnate. The darkness, and the narrow doors, and the
sudden twisting exits and entrances, almost physically symbolized the
evil. The ghostly presences of that corrupt house hung upon the air like
the heavy odour of stale incense from some old Satanic mass.

He passed on tiptoe through the doors to escape the echo of his own
footsteps; and, in the very act, he felt that he might have come upon
Alexander Borgia, God's Vicegerent in palpable form, mixing a cup of
poison; or Cesare Borgia, wiping his brother's blood from his dagger; or
Lucrezia Borgia, coiling her serpentine hair before a mirror. Once he
thought he heard footsteps in the distance, and stopped to listen. His
nerves were abnormally over-strained; and, in that listening hush, the
creak of a joint in the floor, or the tiny thud of a moth against one of
the small dark windows, was intensified as though it came through a
microphone. He could have sworn that he heard footsteps. He paused, and
they seemed to have paused with his own. Then, above or below, as though
from the far end of a long subterranean passage, there came a cry, the
most terrible he had ever heard, the scream of a woman in mortal fear.
It shivered and tingled through his frame and shook his heart to his
heart's root. The next moment he distinctly heard footsteps. They seemed
to be running and there was panic in the sound. But they gave him the
direction. He felt sure that they were beyond and below the Borgia
rooms. He ran, stumbling through the dark little labyrinth towards the
further exit; rushed down a narrow passage which gradually descended
like a very long winding stair; and suddenly he found himself at the
entrance to the Sistine Chapel. To his amazement, as he pushed back the
entrance door, there was a brilliant illumination within, as though all
the power in the Vatican batteries had been reserved for the
blood-freezing spectacle before him.

The Sistine Chapel was thronged from end to end by a great motionless
conclave of the Princes of the Church. The whole college of Cardinals
was assembled there in one blood-red furnace of colour. Many of them
were kneeling, supported in their positions by their own crowded ranks.
Others, rosary in hand, were lolling forward over the backs of chairs.
Others had slipped to the ground as though overcome in some drunken
orgy, with their red hats beside them. High overhead on his regal
throne, with the great ostrich-feather fans--the _flabella_ of
Heliogabalus--on either side of him, sat a small wizened old man in
white, with a white skull-cap. It was the Pope, the ruler of the Vatican
City, and of those five hundred million souls beyond its walls who
recognized him as the head of Christendom. One waxen hand was lifted up
and frozen in the very act of giving benediction; while the finely cut
cameo-like face, so exquisitely spiritual in life, had been so maligned
by the anatomy of death that it was fixed in a grin of ghastly
mockery--the _rictus_ of the skull beneath the waxen skin.

Coming out of the darkness into that diabolical glare, in which all the
pomp and glory of the world seemed at once to be summed up and
annihilated, the mind and senses of the one man left alive reeled under
the shock. He did a thing which he could never have done if he had been
in full possession of his faculties, or, indeed, if the dead faces of
that silent conclave had been turned towards him. He strode up the
narrow aisle between all those ranks of violet and gold and fine linen
and scarlet, until he reached the throne of the Pope. Then he leaned
forward and looked up into the small waxen face. It seemed to leer into
his own, and as though he expected some profoundly secret reply, he
whispered to it softly, "_Is anyone there?_"

He could have sworn that there was a momentary gleam of mockery in that
small, almost transparent mask.

He turned and faced the dead conclave, intending to go back along the
central aisle, and then--he discovered a dreadful thing. He discovered
that he could not move. The gleam of all those dead faces, rank behind
rank, lolling towards him with their gaping mouths and glazed eyes,
fastened him in a paralysed impotence of fear. Shaking from head to foot
he whispered, more loudly than before, and in a hoarse voice that he
hardly recognized as his own, "Is anyone there?"

Then he completely lost control and, like an animal baying at something
which it dares not encounter, he hurled his question in a raucous shout
at the dead faces and over their heads at the darkness beyond the
entrance door.

He was not mad; for the last forces of his reason were still trying to
rally and beat back the chaos that would obliterate them. He looked up
to the painted ceiling where the brush of Michelangelo had depicted the
First Man awakening at the touch of the Creator. He turned and saw that
other titanic imagination opening, depth beyond depth, behind him--the
flaming heavens of the Last Judgement. The struggling, gasping,
imploring figures there were at least alive. Knowing it was madness, he
lifted his hands and tried to shout his mad question to the painted
Figure throned in its own eternal life above those surging splendours
and terrors, but he choked on the words as though his throat were filled
with dust. The lights and dead faces wavered and grew distant; and he
fell fainting at the feet of the dead Pope, as though he were himself
dead.




CHAPTER XV


He did not know whether he was waking in the Keats House, or in a
submarine, or in some quiet bedroom on the Undercliff; but, as the light
of consciousness began to glimmer again in his own mind, he became
curiously aware that the external lights were growing dim. Suddenly they
went out altogether; and the slight shock of their extinction roused
him. He stood up, swaying a little at first. The darkness of the Sistine
Chapel, in which the paintings on the walls seem to have thrust the
windows up out of sight, was not complete. But it was a dense obscurity
only faintly suffused with creepings and glimmerings of the late
afternoon. He saw its motionless and terrible occupants as he might have
seen them through a fog; and what he saw most vividly was a stretch of
blessed daylight at the entrance beyond them, where there had been only
a black contrasting darkness when the interior had been blazing with
electricity.

The dusky veil drawn over that dreadful conclave enabled him to face
them without looking at them. He steadied himself, took a deep breath
and, like a man walking rapidly along a narrow path, with a precipitous
abyss on either side, he kept his eyes fixed on the floor of the aisle
between them and picked his way out.

As soon as he reached the outer door and what remained of the common
light of day, he broke into a run, in what he supposed to be the
direction taken by the fugitive, though it was only the most obvious of
several possibilities. He dashed upstairs and pounded along galleries
that seemed almost endless. He found himself, at one moment, in a
section of the Vatican Library, and at another in the immense Gallery of
the Maps. Some of the windows here overlooked the Vatican Gardens; and,
as he paused for breath at one of them, he saw in the distance the small
cream-coloured car moving rapidly along the Viale del Giardino Quadrato
towards the exit in the Piazza of St. Peter's.

In five minutes he was driving his own car towards the Piazza of St.
Peter's in the hope of intercepting and overtaking the fugitive. But she
had too long a start, and when he drove through the Porta Angelica there
was nothing to be seen in all the expanse of the square, or on any of
the approaches to it. After ten more wasted minutes he turned towards
the Tiber, intending to make his way back to the Keats House for the
night, and feeling strangely saddened and a little ashamed of his
breakdown. But his forehead was still cold and wet, and the sickness at
his heart gave him an only too complete understanding of the fearful cry
he had heard, and the panic in the sound of those flying footsteps. He
cursed himself for the weakness which had prevented him from following
the fugitive more promptly. But it was doubtful whether he could have
overtaken her in any case; for of the many exits that she might have
chosen from the labyrinth in that part of the Vatican (or what had
seemed to him a labyrinth) he knew of none that led to the Gardens; and,
by the time he had reached the door of the Sistine Chapel, she must
already have been a great way off.

During those most critical moments, he had been curiously inhibited
from calling aloud. But, since he knew the cause of her panic, he felt
sure it would have been re-doubled, by a ghastly sense that the dead
were pursuing her, if she had heard a voice echoing along the corridors.
He seemed to be acquiring the strangest power of entering into the
thoughts and emotions of this utterly unknown fellow-survivor. It was as
though all the intuitive sympathies that, in a populous world, had been
more widely diffused, had been intensified by their concentration on one
object.

He pored long over her reading-diary before going to sleep that night.

     _Those extinct volcanoes of one's spiritual life--those eruptions
     of the intellect and the passions which have scattered the lava of
     doubt and negation over our early faith--are only a glorious
     Himalayan chain, beneath which new valleys of undreamed richness
     and beauty will spread themselves._

That was one of her quotations in which he seemed to hear a whisper of
new life. Several of them dwelt on the fact that human beings are not
likely to have "sublimer thoughts than the universe can furnish into
reality".

     _There is a sort of blasphemy in that proverbial phrase, "too good
     to be true". The highest inspiration of the purest, noblest, human
     soul, is the nearest expression of the truth._

Here at last, he felt, was the true rebel against the world in which
they had all been living.

In the early hours of the next morning, while Mark lay on his
extemporized couch in the Keats House, there occurred to him one of
those absurdly simple ideas which are so easily passed over. He was
angry with himself for not thinking of it before.

Evelyn Hamilton had been living in Rome as an art student for a
considerable time. There was a good chance that she had been staying,
not in a hotel, but in a flat of her own and, if so, she would almost
certainly, as an American, be in the telephone book. The telephone was
useless, of course, but the book would give him the address. Quite
possibly, the wave of death would have made this address untenable for
her, but he would be likely to discover something which would help him
in his search.

Before these extremely simple ideas had been formulated, he had his
candle alight and was groping through the pages of the telephone book on
the table near the door. He found the name so quickly that he could
hardly believe his eyes. But there it undoubtedly was

     _HAMILTON, E._, Signorina. _Via Margutta, 49. Int. 4._

It was only a few hundred yards from the Keats House. "Int." he supposed
meant "interno", the number of the flat in block 49. In a quarter of an
hour he had dressed and was knocking at number 4. But it was as he half
expected. There was no answer. At last, putting his shoulder to the
door, and leaning his weight against it, he burst it open.

It was a pretty little flat of three rooms. In the centre of a table in
the hall, where no searcher could fail to see it, there was a large
envelope addressed,

    _TO ANYONE WHOM IT MAY CONCERN._
    _From EVELYN HAMILTON._

It contained this message:

     _If anyone comes to look for me, this is to say that I waited in
     Rome as long as I could bear it. But it has become too much for
     me. I have gone to the Palazzo Rufolo at Ravello, in the hills
     above Amalfi. It is a house belonging to the Brookes of Princeton,
     with whom I stayed last year. They have not used it this year; but
     I can easily open it up, and there will be none of the terrible
     things which make any occupied place unbearable. If any Americans
     reach Rome and read this, I hope someone will look for me there._

     _Evelyn Hamilton._

He looked for a moment into the little sitting-room, and felt as though
he were surrounded by the living presence of its vanished owner. The
pictures on the walls, some of them her own; the books on the shelves;
gave him a clear indication of her mind. He noticed some of the books
which she had quoted in her reading-diary.

But he could not delay. Something might interfere with her plans at
Ravello, and then he might never find her. His best chance was to follow
with all speed. In his higher-powered car he might even overtake her on
the way.




CHAPTER XVI


He drove into Amalfi about three o'clock that afternoon, and, turning
away from the sunlit beach, took the steep winding road, past the old
convent to Ravello. Up into the hills he went, with the dark gorge of
the Dragone on his right, and terraces of trellised vines on his left.
Sometimes the vines gave place to gnarled and twisted woods of
grey-green olive trees, or glossy-leaved and golden-fruited
orange-orchards. But he hardly saw them; for on the dusty road before
him there was the track of a small car. The tread of the tyres was so
clearly imprinted that it could not have been more than a day old. A
single shower would have obliterated it.

Endlessly up into the hills he went, catching occasional glimpses over
lemon-trees or pomegranates of the deep violet Bay of Salerno. But he
drank them in almost as unconsciously as he heard the sound of
goat-bells among the rocks. His eyes hardly moved from the wheel-tracks
in the dust. Only once, after the first mile of the ascent, did he see
any trace of the disaster, when he had to avoid the body of a
bare-footed charcoal burner, who was crumpled up in the middle of the
road with his bag of charcoal beside him. But Mark hardly looked at the
body; for the small car ahead of him had obviously been obliged to
swerve also, and his assurance became doubly sure.

It was still broad afternoon when he drove into the small central square
of the ancient hill-crowning city, which was now little more than a
country village. He stopped abruptly in front of the bronze doors of the
Cathedral of St. Pantaleone; but he did not even glance at their
exquisitely sculptured panels, for there, under an acacia tree, was the
small cream-coloured car. It had no occupant. Perhaps she had gone into
the Cathedral. He pushed back the entrance door and looked. There was
nobody to be seen. But there was one unexpected thing which touched him
to the quick, and filled him with a strange sense of peace. There was a
quietly flickering ruby-coloured flame in the little lamp before the
sanctuary. She must have gone up to the altar and re-lighted it.

He returned to the piazza, and saw, on the side nearest to the sea, the
tall wrought-iron gates of the Palazzo Rufolo. But he was so afraid of
missing the object of his search that, before exploring further, he
wrote a brief note and laid it on the front seat of the small car, lest
she should drive away before he had found her.

     _I have followed you from Paris; and am now looking for you in the
     Palazzo Rufolo. If you come back to the car before I have found
     you, please wait for me here. I shall return in a quarter of an
     hour._

     _A Fellow-Survivor._

Then, as quietly as a shadow, for his heart was full of the dreadful cry
at the Vatican, and he was afraid of frightening her--he stole through
the beautiful wrought-iron gates of the Palazzo Rufolo. At the end of a
short avenue between tall black cypresses, he passed, on his right, an
exquisite little sunken courtyard, built by the Saracens, with slender
columns and arches, through which he looked down, as from a tiny
clerestory, into a chapel below. On his left, over pomegranates and
lemon-trees, he saw the dark red ruins of an old watch-tower; and then,
suddenly, he found himself in a wild garden of inexpressible beauty. The
memories of the place alone would have suffused it with magic, as a
sunset-cloud is suffused with colour. Nicholas Breakspeare, the only
Englishman to occupy the central throne of Christendom, had walked here
in the flesh; and Boccaccio had made it the scene of one of his most
fascinating legends. Wagner had visited it and, at his first glimpse of
its loveliness, exclaimed, "I have found Klingsor's Magic Garden!" It
had inspired the scene and provided the setting of Parsifal's temptation
by the flower-maidens.

Mark knew his Italy and had heard of all these memories; but he was not
prepared for the sheer loveliness that now opened out before him in the
garden itself, or for the glorious prospect of the foam-fringed coast so
far below its glowing little sun-flooded terraces. The dark stone-pines
to left and right stood up against the Gulf of Salerno, which looked
like a sea of ruffled violets in the light southerly wind. Tall
flame-shaped cypress and cloudy-headed cluster pine seem to draw height
and majesty from that steep and magnificent distance as of an eagle's
vision; and, where the garden ended, he saw vineyard below vineyard,
descending with its grapes to the little villages of Majori and Minori,
and the curve of the beach below and beyond them, where he caught the
sparkle of the foam.

He went quickly down to the second terrace, by the winding stone steps,
with a steep wall of rock on one side and a rock-garden on the other,
where the green lizards rustled and streaked into hiding under the
saffron-flowering cistus and rosy-petalled stock. And then, unseen, he
saw her, standing on the parapet before him. She was gazing out to sea,
with her light print dress fluttering round her like a flower in the
wind from the south, and her shining head of flaxen hair like a little
sunset cloud against the stainless blue of the sky.




CHAPTER XVII


The winding stair had concealed him during his quiet descent; and, now,
in his anxiety not to frighten her, he waited for a moment. Her position
on the parapet might be dangerous if he startled her. She was so near
that he could see the small white straps of her sandals, and the dark
scratch of a thorn above one sunburnt ankle. But she stood like Echo on
her mountain crag, or as Praxiteles might have imagined Ariadne on her
lonely cliff in Naxos, watching the horizon for a sail.

He was about to call to her when she turned and saw him. Her dark grey
eyes widened, and her lips parted without a word.

"I found your message," he said. "Don't be afraid."

She leapt down from the parapet and stood facing him.

He could see now the terrible strain which she had been enduring. Her
lips quivered without speaking. Then she pulled herself together and
said, with a desperate restraint that wrung his heart, "You went to my
address in Rome? Have you any message from my people?"

He saw the light die out of her face as his own returned no answer to
her hope; but he tried to bring the light back again. "It was only by an
accident that I discovered your message. This does not mean that your
people may not find it too."

"I had no one very near to me," she said, in a hard little voice,
refusing the compassion in his eyes. Then, putting herself aside, she
added more gently, "But you, probably, had many."

He shook his head. "The unknown enemy saw to that, in the glorious
bacteriological war, ten years ago. They were in the bubonic plague
zone."

"They escaped more than they knew," she said. "Science has advanced
since then. But mine were luckier still. When the last war but one broke
out, my father and mother, and an elder sister, were on a neutral ship.
You know what that meant. I can just remember them. I'm glad they didn't
live to see the war that actually accomplished it."

Every word of that bitterness knocked at the door of his heart with the
bare knuckles of truth itself, and awoke a deep response there. She
looked at him with hard eyes, while she spoke them, then turned her head
away as if to look at the deepening west, which was already suffusing
the hills and the sea with its mellow light. But her averted face was
wet with tears. If a visitant from another world had seen these two, in
that high hill-garden, between the sunset and the slowly brightening
crescent moon, with the Bay of Salerno at their feet, and the dark pines
and the pomegranates and the old red watch-tower looking down upon them,
he would have said that they were in an unimaginably beautiful Earthly
Paradise, a place exquisitely foreshadowing that other, of which it was
written:

     _Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the
     heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love
     him._

If the visitant had been a stranger to mankind, that terrible race,
crawling between earth and heaven, he must have wondered to see the
grey shadow of desolation on the face of the young woman; and that
speechless agony in the eyes of the young man. He must have wondered
still more if he had grasped the meaning of their broken and stumbling
words.

"You have been very brave. But you were right to come here. It was
terrible in the cities."

"Terrible; so terrible, that I almost feel it must be wrong to go on
living."

"It was an entry in your own diary that helped me--hardened me,
perhaps--to go on. You remember it? About those dark times when 'the
heart must either break or turn to bronze'."




CHAPTER XVIII


Fortunately for the human heart it is almost the last thing to be
broken, as many a defeated man has discovered to his amazement; and it
is beyond the power of any alchemy, old or new, to turn that rebellious
muscle into bronze. Certain nerves can be so punished that they are
anaesthetized. But, in youth especially, others gradually take over
their functions.

Mark's discovery that Evelyn Hamilton had been living on biscuits and
water hastened this return to the normal. They were both of them
ravenously hungry; and, on his male urgency, further discussion was
postponed while they collected the food from the car. The only thing he
allowed her to carry was the large grape-fruit which had been reposing
on the back seat ever since he picked it up in the private garden of the
Vatican. While Evelyn was setting these things out on the table in the
verandah, he discovered half-a-dozen new-laid eggs in the nest-boxes of
a chicken-run, and returned in triumph to boil them over the
spirit-lamp. A further useful discovery was that the American owners of
the Palazzo had ordered in a large supply of "things that would keep",
in readiness for their summer visit.

By half-past seven, accordingly, the two survivors had made a
surprisingly good attempt at a civilized dinner. They were sitting on
the terrace outside the french windows of the dining-room. On the
glass-topped table between them there was a bunch of black grapes, a
bottle of wine, a box of cigarettes and a fragrant pot of coffee.

Happily for the future of this planet, the last feminine survivor of the
great catastrophe was not only young and beautiful, but extremely
capable, and--in many respects--an improvement on the original
experiment in the Garden of Eden. This could hardly be otherwise; for
modern science has confirmed Voltaire in his belief that our first
parents were by no means the snow-limbed creatures that reposed under
the cedars of Milton's Paradise. They probably had long black nails,
hairy bodies and uncouth habits. Evelyn, on the other hand, had been
born in Cambridge, New England, and educated at Wellesley College, near
Boston. There, in addition to rowing on the lake, and winning most of
the prizes for swimming and diving, she had acquired a special interest
in the Italian Renaissance, and an ardent desire to see Rome, study art,
and live intensely. But she could compose a salad almost as well as she
could copy an old Master.

It was while they were helping one another to spread their first
dinner-table that, with the brave irreverence of Transatlantic humour,
and in her slight Bostonian drawl, she quoted that large simple phrase
from "Paradise Lost",--"No fear lest dinner cool."

"It takes a strong man, like Milton or Beethoven, to say a thing like
that in the middle of a sublime work of art," she added. The way in
which she said it made Mark laugh; and he rejoined,

"It's very odd, isn't it, that your name should be Evelyn."

"The second syllable saves it; but do you realize I don't know yours at
all?" she said.

"Mark Adams," he muttered, suddenly conscious, rather sheepishly, that
this was odder still.

It was now her turn to laugh; but they made a duet of it. From that
moment, in fiction, Mark Adams and Evelyn Hamilton must inevitably have
begun to call each other Adam and Eve. In this more veracious history,
they merely called each other Mark and Evelyn.

It was over the coffee and cigarettes that Evelyn told him of her own
amazing escape from the wave of death. She, too, had occupied a unique
position at the critical moment. Signor Antonelli, President of the
Royal Academy of Italy, and a worthy successor to d'Annunzio and
Marconi, had a remarkable friend in the political world, named Mardok,
who had recently shown an extraordinary interest in a new kind of
diving-bell, expressly designed for photographically exploring the floor
of the sea. Mardok, in fact, had financed the experiment, stipulating
only that the diving-bell should be at his disposal, whenever he wished
to take a friend or two down to see these beautiful under-sea pictures.
He had been urgent that the diving-bell should be at his disposal on May
6th, which (though Antonelli, of course, did not know it), was to be the
fatal day. The diving-bell had transparent windows on all sides; and
searchlights which enabled one to see every detail of the fantastically
beautiful under-sea life. Antonelli had spoken rapturously to Evelyn of
the rainbow-finned goblins that came and goggled at him through the
windows, and the curved sea-horses, like the knights in chess, that
flicked themselves over the shell-encrusted rocks; or glided through the
lucid woods and gardens of his emerald water-world. They had a peculiar
interest for her because she was then engaged upon her most ambitious
work, a picture of the sea-king's palace. For Mark's benefit Evelyn
quoted the lines in Keats which had suggested it to her:

    A light as of four sunsets, blazing forth
    A gold green zenith 'bove the sea-god's head.

Signor Antonelli had so roused her desire to see the poet's magical
water-world for herself that she begged him to ask Mardok to take her
down with him, on the final test of his elaborate apparatus. The test
was to take place in deep water near Capri. At first, Signor Antonelli
demurred.

"Mardok", he said, "is a strange and difficult man. He is a titanic
genius; but--unlike most geniuses--he has a hatred of being known. This
is partly because some of the most formidable scientific secrets of
modern times, inventions that would be worth untold millions to certain
great military powers, are entirely in his hands. He controls immense
wealth, and he has the indifference which accompanies it. Mardok has the
most powerful intellect of the century. He is the Leonardo of the modern
world, and greater, perhaps, than Leonardo." (Signor Antonelli had all
the southern enthusiasm.) "We have wonderful monographs from him in the
archives of the Accademia, wonderful! But he is a man who never lets his
right hand know what his left is doing. He seems to be above
nationality. Nobody knows his origin; though he once said--in jest,
perhaps--that he was descended from the ancient Babylonians. But he is
guilty of--how shall I say?--a great blasphemy. He dislikes women, even
young and beautiful women. Those, perhaps, more than any. It is absurd.
No man has ever done great work without them; not even Leonardo. But
some people have thought--for this very reason--that Mardok one day
will meet a woman who will revenge the whole of her sex; and he will
capitulate completely. However, I will introduce you to him; and you
shall try to persuade him yourself. Who knows? Perhaps you may be the
one who will tame him. But I warn you--it will be like trying to tame a
king-cobra."

This was not encouraging; but Mardok apparently had reasons of his own
for meeting her more than half-way. After half an hour's talk, he not
only promised to take her down in the diving-bell, but made definite
arrangements there and then, which almost bound her to come, whether she
changed her mind or not. And she did almost change her mind; for there
was something at once contemptible and frightening, she thought, about
this dark man with the coarse features whom Antonelli appeared to admire
so much. She felt instinctively that the admiration had been dictated by
fear, and the urgent desire that anything which happened to be reported
to Mardok should be satisfactory to him. The world had been full of that
kind of thing in recent years. The brutal mouth and fanatical eyes of
Mardok belonged to a type that, fifty years ago, would never have
commanded admiration, except perhaps in the underworld. But the amazing
conditions of world politics, as an eminent historian had pointed out,
after the war of 1914, had more than once placed the destinies of
Europe, and the lives of millions, at the mercy of one individual,
contemptible in character, fifth-rate in intellect, and with the
political philosophy of a gangster. Types that hitherto would have found
their proper setting in the villainous underworlds depicted by
Hollywood, suddenly began to strut and rant on the European stage. Their
first desire was personal power. Sometimes they achieved it by the
methods of the very "democracy" which they professed to despise. They
studied the weaknesses of their fellow-men; and learned how to sway
large numbers by appealing to those weaknesses. It never seemed to occur
to the idealists of the Left-wing that the doctrine of ten to one might
be just as base in the political world as it is in a stand-up physical
fight. A faint suspicion may have crept into their minds when they saw
the Russian hordes crawling over Finland like a vast army of bugs. But
it never really occurred to them that numerical majorities were
continually swamping the best that was known and thought in the world.
No sooner had "leaders" like Mardok achieved their "power" however, than
it went to their heads. Having obtained control of the governmental
machine they would have driven it over the bodies of their intimidated
multitudes as remorselessly as any imaginable Juggernaut could have
crushed its own worshippers.

Mardok might be frightening as a gangster might be frightening to a
helpless victim. He was incalculable, not because of the genius which
Antonelli attributed to him, but because he had no standards. Power was
in his hands, and he was unfit to use it. He had the explosive energy of
an epileptic, and it was mistaken for strength, just as the fixity of
his ideas was mistaken for strength of will and purpose. Their force was
derived from the narrowness of the mental channels in which they ran,
and this narrowness was, in some ways, the most frightening thing of
all. It stared at Evelyn from the fanatical eyes which seemed to speak
no recognizable human language. When they met her own there seemed to be
no intercourse possible between her mind and his.

At a certain stage of their conversation she seemed to be instinctively
aware that Mardok had suddenly made a decision; that it was a decision
which vitally concerned her, and that he had made it to further his own
plans, not hers. It alarmed her a little. She felt as if she had
suddenly become part of a rather sinister scientific experiment, the
nature of which she was unable to grasp. But, after all the persuasion
she had used on Signor Antonelli, and the arrangements which had now
been so firmly settled by Mardok for her special benefit, she would look
foolish if she withdrew.

The first hour of their morning under the sea had been intensely
interesting. Mardok seemed to have taken an almost morbid pleasure in
fitting out his elaborate diving-bell with a fantastic luxury, so that
his guest--and temporary prisoner--felt that she was enclosed in a
gigantic illuminated jewel, a crystal room in a magician's palace. He
made various experiments with coloured lights which he thought had a
special attraction for certain kinds of rainbow-scaled fish, and he
manipulated his illumination so skilfully that Evelyn obtained some
enchantingly beautiful photographs of the under-sea woods and gardens
and their glistening inhabitants.

After this they sat in comfortable chairs, and drank something very
exquisite--she did not know its name, but it was the colour of Tokay,
while they watched the lucid flocks--radiant as tropical birds--that
floated and flashed through the long illuminated vistas of the strange
world around them. Then Mardok made a statement so startling, that her
flesh crept in sudden suspicion that there was a dreadful streak of
insanity in him.

"All this is very pretty," he said, in his curiously low grating voice,
"but now I want to talk seriously to you. I did not bring you here
merely for artistic purposes. I brought you here to save your life."

He told her that at three o'clock that afternoon--it was then
half-past--the unknown weapon had been brought into operation. He told
her all he knew about it, and apparently there was very little that he
did not know, for he had been largely responsible for its development,
and he was the only person living who had really prepared any defence
against it. His experiments with the diving-bell had simply developed
out of his plans for his own safety, and the safety of anyone whom he
chose to accompany him. It was still in the experimental stage, but he
had been fairly sure of it.

"The world, when you return to it," he said, "will be a very different
place."

Then, to her horror--for she was convinced now that he was a maniac--he
explained why he had chosen her as his companion. At that moment, he did
not know that the wave of death would be world-wide in its range; but he
seemed to be quite certain that he would be in the position, afterwards,
of an absolute dictator. He reminded her, with the vanity of a Hitler,
that he had already, in secret, swayed the destinies of nations. The
secret of several unknown weapons was in his possession. In the age to
come, knowledge and experience of the kind that he possessed would not
be merely power. The over-crowded planet would be almost de-populated;
and, when the few survivors from the outlying parts of the planet had
been brought together, his power would be absolute. "It was of the
utmost importance," he said, "that I should have the right woman to
share my destiny, and possibly--to bring a new dynasty into being." He
knew as soon as he saw her that he need look no further. "You have
youth, beauty, intelligence, and"--here he added a remark which made
Evelyn's western eyes flash--"you have another gift which will be
invaluable in the comparative isolation which is to be ours--you amuse
me."

Signor Antonelli had warned her that this remarkable personage disliked
and did not understand women. In other circumstances, if Mardok had
merely praised her sense of humour she might have been flattered; but to
tell her that he wanted her for his mistress because she amused him
would have been altogether too Oriental in taste for a young American.
In the horrible circumstances it was an atrocity. Moreover, he went on
to explain that her health and excellent physique would be invaluable
factors in the founding of his dynasty. Their descendants would be
super-men and super-women; and, though their development would be
fostered by scientific means, it was essential that they should spring
from a sound mother. Cold-blooded as he seemed in his ophidian
rationalism, his eyes riveted her attention as a snake is said to hold
its prey spellbound; and then, with a strange passion, he began to paint
the age to come as he saw it. It was to be a world from which the soul
had vanished. Science and mechanism, in the hands of an autocrat, would
solve all problems and control everything and everyone except the
controller himself. But there were to be no more morals, or "taboos", as
he called them; for science would replace the primitive inhibitions of
conscience, and make it possible to enjoy many things which formerly
were regarded as forbidden fruit. They would be as gods, above good and
evil. Religion would be abolished. "Love" would be regarded for what it
was--the magnetism of the life-force, drawing the sexes together for its
own purposes. This magnetism, however, once recognized, would be
controlled by the race to come, and turned on at their pleasure, exactly
as they turned on the electric light. There would be no more broken
hearts, for all those sentimental entanglements which used to be
described as "affections" would be destroyed like so much poison-ivy by
the higher intellect of the future. He thought that, eventually, they
would master the secret of life and conquer death. After this, their
main problem would be to discover some way of migrating to another
planet, when our own became uninhabitable, and the dying sun could no
longer warm it.

Then he began to practise an art on which he evidently prided himself.
He asked her if she had ever heard of Menzel--the latest disciple of
Freud--and he tried to explore her mind with detestable little questions
and loathsome little insinuations which--to his disappointment--she did
not seem to understand. Through both the questions and the insinuations,
however, there crept his own curious conception of love-making--the
"magnetism" of his own "life-force". He found--with repressed
fury--that, in this case, the effect was not attraction, but repulsion,
to the point of horror. Evelyn was frightened, but she told him boldly
enough that she now wanted to see the daylight again.

For over an hour Mardok refused. His science had not enabled him
entirely to master his own passions, for his repressed anger smouldered
fiercely enough in his eyes; and, when he found that he was making no
headway with his pseudo-scientific love-talk, there was a moment when
the beast looked out of them. He announced, however, that the new
condition of the world awaiting them would soon change her outlook
completely. "You do not believe in those new conditions--yet," he said.
"Very well. Try for yourself. Press that button. It is supposed to
communicate with our friends on the surface, and give the signal that we
wish to return. Normally there would be a reply, and an answering bell
would ring down here. Try it and see."

She pressed the button again and again. There was no reply. And now--for
the first time--the dreadful fear seized her that what she had taken to
be the extravagant talk of an unbalanced intellect might have more in it
than she had imagined, though she did not for a moment think that his
account of the disaster was true.

"Try to telephone," he said. She seized the receiver and listened. There
was no reply. She turned and faced him. "What has happened to them?" she
said.

"I have already told you," he answered, "but you did not believe me. The
wave of death has come--and gone."

"Even if I could have believed that," she said, "you did not expect me
to believe you would leave your own crew to be wiped out."

He shrugged his shoulders. "What is one small diving-bell among so many?
And who am I to discriminate? Do you realize," he said, "what tragic
scenes there might have been? Some of those poor men had families."

Evelyn scrutinized him carefully. It was not irony. He had not the
faintest idea of his own atrocity. The venture would have been
incredible if his type had not been exhibited to Europe again and again
in the last fifty years, and on the high stage of world-politics.

The diving-bell was fitted with an elaborate system of doors which, if
its occupants so desired, would enable them to go out for a short time
in a diving-kit designed for the purpose of exploring the ocean bed.
Mardok now produced two diving-dresses devised for the more important
purpose of regaining the surface. He explained to her that this was now
their only means of escape. They reached the surface with the greatest
ease and divested themselves of their helmets, only to discover that one
of those little things which have so often marred the schemes of the
unscrupulously mighty had now seriously upset Mardok's plan. The yacht
in attendance loomed high over their heads, with one member of the dead
crew gaping at them over the side; but the small boat which had swung at
the stern was no longer there. Mardok had been counting on this boat for
their escape; for it was quite impossible to board the yacht without
help. It was the kind of predicament which so often happens when a small
detail is only of great importance to the unscrupulous. Honesty neglects
it, and the unscrupulous pay the price. Possibly the captain of the
yacht had sent someone ashore in the boat (a perfectly reasonable
proceeding in view of the only facts in his possession) and the wave of
death had prevented its return.

They were more than a mile from the coast, and Mardok was a poor
swimmer. Indeed he was kept afloat only by his cork-jacket. His tone
changed now, and he pretended to be shocked that his own predictions had
come so terribly true. Evelyn did not suspect, at the time, that he was
tortured by his own distrust, and that he was now playing a part because
he seriously feared she might leave him to his fate, as he would
certainly have left others. There seemed to be no hope of his reaching
the shore, unless they could get a boat. Evelyn therefore volunteered
to swim ashore and bring one back to him, while Mardok prevented himself
from drifting away by holding on to the yacht's cable. When Evelyn
landed, she discovered, of course, that Mardok's predictions were
certainly true of the immediate neighbourhood and that no human aid was
obtainable. She at once pushed out in a small rowing boat, but, to her
horror, when she reached the yacht, she found that Mardok had
disappeared. His cork-jacket would have kept him afloat, but there was
no speck to be seen in the whole shining circle of the sea. She noticed,
however, that there was now a very strong current, running like a river
round the bows of the yacht. She thought that Mardok must have released
the cable for a moment and been unable to reach it again. She let her
boat drift with the current, thinking it would take her in his
direction. It was carried at a great pace towards a distant wooded
promontory. In half an hour she herself landed on this, but she had to
use the oars to do so, and she could see no footprints on the sandy
beach, and no sign that anyone else had landed there. It seemed likely
that Mardok had been carried past the promontory into the open sea--in
which case--unless some other survivors of the death-wave picked him up,
he was almost certain to perish.

It was growing dark now and she had to abandon her search. Her
experiences during the next few hours were terrible enough, though with
Mardok's predictions in her mind she realized more quickly than Mark the
full extent of the catastrophe. Very soon, she found an empty car in
front of a wayside _osteria_, and drove through the night back to Rome.
She thought it best to return there. A little later, she had made the
hasty journey to Paris, of which Mark already knew, in search of the
friend whom she believed to be staying at the Hotel Matignon. She had
found her, dead, in her bedroom.

Her own car had broken down on the way, and she had taken another from a
garage, but exchanged it for the two-seater, outside the Louvre. She had
failed in her quest, as he knew, and returned to Rome, where--at
first--she had felt exactly as Mark had felt, a sense of relief and
escape among those incorruptible forms of beauty; a sense of silent
companionship with the ideas and imaginations of the most lovable branch
of the human race.

And then--one afternoon--she had suddenly come upon the scene in the
Sistine Chapel and it had frightened her. As she told him of her
panic-stricken flight he longed to lay his hand on hers, but he checked
the impulse.

Then Mark took up the tale, and told her of the ticking watch in the
little silver bag at the Louvre, and of his long search for her. Three
separate times, before nine o'clock that evening, he called her Eve, but
it was only a cheerful abbreviation, with no more reference to their
predicament than her own use of his name "Mark".

American efficiency, coupled with the fact that water-power had been
available, enabled them to explore the house together, after dinner, by
electric light. Mark, seeing the house for the first time, and Evelyn
who had been reviving her memories of it for twenty-four hours now, soon
became aware that nothing could be more perfectly adapted to their
circumstances. If the disaster had to take place, they could have found
nothing better on earth though they had been led by angels. From
Evelyn's point of view the fact that it had belonged to an American who
was not only an artist but had fitted it with every conceivable
labour-saving device, was conclusive.

From Mark's point of view, the delicious library, with its bronzes, its
rows of carefully selected books, and its windows opening on the most
exquisite seascape in the world, was--as he said--the best thing he had
seen for a very long time.

Evelyn herself had taken possession of the late owner's best spare
bedroom, while Mark settled down in a room which belonged, apparently,
to the Brookes' eldest son; for his college photographs were on the
walls, and there were books containing his name on shelves near the bed.

Mark tried to read himself to sleep that night, with one of these; but
sleep delayed long; for his heart and mind were haunted by his first
glimpse of that lonely little figure on the parapet, gazing out to sea.
They were haunted by the quiet voice that had been making music for him
all the evening, in that silent house among the hills, and by the quiet,
dark grey eyes that had already made the world less lonely to him, and
more beautiful, than he ever expected to find it again.

He was awakened next morning by a knock on the door, and a cheerful
voice calling "breakfast". It was all ready on the verandah when he got
down, a little ashamed that he had not been in time to help.

It was a new Evelyn that appeared this morning--very charming, but very
efficient, in a blue shirt and "slacks". She was one of the fortunate
young women who could wear those sailor-like garments with grace. Her
slender, young figure, with its belt of plaited cord, and the rope-soled
raffia sandals, looked as trim as if she had been piped on deck for
boat-drill and had somehow, quite carelessly, slipped into the most
suitable garments in a few seconds, with one of those artistically
right results which can only come by nature. She must have been up and
about for some time. To Mark's amazement, breakfast included not only
coffee, fruit, shredded wheat and eggs, but fresh milk.

"I found two cows, with calves, at the home farm," Evelyn explained,
"and I thought we needed the milk more than the calves did. Look at the
cream on it."

"And honey, too," he exclaimed.

"From our own hives. They had a huge harvest last year, and there are
rows of pots in the store-room."

She appeared to be talking quite cheerfully, and he also, tried to play
his part. Then the curious waxen pallor of the bereaved seemed to creep
over her young face, and she murmured those bitter words:

                  We'll sit contentedly,
    And eat our pot of honey on the grave.

Suddenly, she covered her face with her hands and, with a sharp,
shuddering cry, as though she were protesting against some fearful
memory, she put her head down on the table and wept.

Mark rose and stood beside her. "Don't do that," he said abruptly,
almost harshly, for he was afraid of tenderness; and indeed it was the
harshness of his tone that pulled her together.

"I'm sorry," she said, but the streaming eyes with which she looked at
him were estranged and seemed to be wondering at the new hardness of his
tone.

"Don't you realize what has happened," he said, and the hardness of his
voice was re-doubled. "Don't you realize that, even before the disaster,
things had gone utterly beyond the use of tears?"

She saw the torment of all the past weeks, and the memory of five years
of war in his eyes; and she knew instinctively that, while he was
trying to save her from breaking down completely, he was also trying to
master his own tenderness towards her.

"Forgive me," she said, in a low voice. "Forgive me, Mark."

"Forgive you," he said. "It won't be easy to forgive you for making the
world look like the happy place it was intended to be. How can I ever
forgive you, unless--unless so far as the past is concerned--we adopt
your own brave motto: _le coeur se brise ou se bronze_? It is one thing
or the other now. If we mourn till doomsday, we could never mourn enough
for all that has happened. And how are we to mourn for the universe? Let
the angels of God do that. I could weep for one or two, or a hundred, or
a thousand; but how is it possible to weep for all mankind? Thank God,
there was no one very near to either of us. They have gone, by their own
act, to their own place; and, if there is anything in what we believe,
they've gone to a better world. When I was a child I used to think it
would be difficult to find it, and God knows what they'll make of it, if
they can't do better there than here. But they can hardly be looked upon
as lonely. They've joined all their predecessors at one stride. They've
all gone together, to the endless generations that persecuted and burned
and slaughtered one another before them; and, if what you believe is
true--they've got another chance of purging themselves or being purged."

He stabbed his own heart with the brutality of his own words; but it
saved both of them, and in a moment she had regained her composure.

"You were right to pull me up," she said. "When an end comes as this has
come, it is impossible to think of it in the old terms of human loss.
It's too big for that. I saw that all along, in the first few days. My
first lesson was about the fourth day. I was groping about in Rome,
hoping to find some other survivor. It was about dusk, and just to
escape for a moment from the awful spectacle of the streets, I went into
the Therm of Caracalla. You know those gigantic walls--how they seem to
shut out everything that belongs to time. Their height made it darker
inside; and, to my amazement, where I expected to find myself absolutely
alone, there seemed to be an immense crowd, some of them propped up on
seats, others sprawling on the ground. They all seemed to be looking in
my direction except those who were immediately around me; and then I
realized that I had walked on to a sort of open-air stage, and I was
standing in the midst of the dead players. You know they used to perform
operas in the Therm during the summer. Just as I realized what they
were doing, a ray of light struck through one of the arches, and lit up
the faces of the players. One of them was made up as a clown. It was
Pagliacci, and he was lying on his back, grinning up at me, with a face
like a great white moon. I wasn't frightened that time, though it was
the uncanniest thing I ever saw; but it gave me my first lesson. During
those awful scenes, afterwards, I used to remind myself that it was only
a matter of a few years before all those millions would have died, in
any case."

"And however peaceful the politicians might have been," he broke in,
"the lifetime of one human being was all that those millions upon
millions could expect individually. Most of them had already had the
greater part of it. Out of the whole population alive in the world at
any given moment of the past, one or two must have been the last to die.
So I suppose they might be called the only survivors of their own
world."

"It was a way they had down south," she replied. "Almost all the old
people used to call themselves the only survivors, especially after the
gulf between the young and old began to widen. They could hardly see
each other across it latterly. The difference is that this time the two
survivors are not old, and that the rest have all gone simultaneously,
and a year or two earlier than the average."

"There's another mysterious thing about it," he said, in an almost
awe-struck tone, as he looked out over the sunlit hillside to the
immeasureable expanse of the sea, "when the war broke out, and those
endless casualty lists began to be published, I remember being appalled
by an article in a newspaper which said, '_At last we are seeing human
life at its true value_.' I know now that it was said in bitterness;
but, at the time, I thought I had never seen a more wicked lie or a
worse blasphemy. It seemed like a cynical abandonment of the very values
that made the sacrifice possible. It sounds like a paradox; but it was
because the individual life was so eternally valuable that it was worth
while laying it down, in this world of time, for its own freedom, and
its own eternal distinctions between right and wrong. But, as the war
went on, our enemies imposed their own totalitarian views on us in other
forms. We began to talk almost with contempt of the value of the
individual life and to squander it almost as recklessly as we squandered
material treasure, despite all the efforts that were made to counteract
it. The gospel of 'eat and drink for to-morrow we die' sprang up amongst
us, and, inevitably, led to other kinds of squandering too. All the
values of life were lowered. But now, in some mysterious way, when one
might have expected the values to be obliterated altogether, the very
bigness of the catastrophe, the end that stares us in the face, seems to
have restored them."

"I know," she said. "Many things that I could only half believe in, when
there were all those crowds around, seem quite clear to me now. Have you
ever seen the Grand Canyon? It is like coming to the edge of the
universe, and seeing depth beyond depth of beauty and terror in the
abyss. And the Abyss, as you know, is one of the old names of God."

"I see one thing very clearly that I've only dimly seen before," he
said. "When the visible world is so completely deserted by mankind, it
almost forces one to believe that they've only struck their tents and
gone elsewhere. It almost forces one to believe in the reality of the
invisible world. When all those magnificent cities were putting out the
stars with their electric lights, we took it for granted that we were
the roof and crown of things. But it's impossible for two little human
beings to stand alone on a deserted planet and think that the whole
universe of human thought, all that world of beauty and goodness and
truth, which depended upon the existence of conscious minds and spirits,
now depends upon themselves alone, and has no existence apart from them.
I've been an agnostic most of my life; but, lately, just when the old
women were beginning to say they couldn't believe in a God who allowed
people to kill one another in war, I found that I could not believe in
anything without Him. Right and wrong had no meaning unless His
creatures had a free choice between them. Freedom is a terrible thing;
but it's the only foundation on which God and man can meet."

"And that," she said, "is the key to the whole disaster. I've been
thinking, too, and pretty hard during the last few years. The race came
to destruction, my friend, because a great part of it had ceased to
believe in just that unchanging ground, the only ground, for the
distinction between right and wrong. It used the words in all its
international disputes; but it didn't believe in the only reality that
gave them any meaning: It had lost the religion of Christendom. You
could see the tragedy of it in my own country, by picking up almost any
book that gave a realistic picture of young America in its cups. It was
more or less the same all over the world; degradation; brutality; and
cheap insidious propaganda against every code of honour in private life.
How could such people stand up and preach, self-righteously, about
'international morality', when they were convinced that 'morality'
itself was as out-of-date as the novels of Charlotte M. Yonge."

"Exactly. The Western democracies, as they were called, happened to be
in the right; but they didn't realize that right and wrong had no
meaning at all if they were merely a bi-product of a fortuitous
concourse of atoms or were destined to end as they began, in a cloud of
hydrogen gas. Absurd little ephemeral bubbles of that kind can't claim
to make those imperative distinctions, or draw up declarations of their
'rights' either. On those premises, the totalitarian powers were
absolutely logical. They realized clearly enough that, if Christendom
was founded on a delusion, they could make their own morality. We didn't
know it at the time, but the war was between Christendom and the
heathen; and we confused our banners and went down to hell together. The
whole thing turned on the rejection of religion, and it was a stupid
rejection. It began with perfectly justifiable reasons for rejecting the
literal truth of primitive poems like Genesis, which, incidentally,
have their own deep poetic truth; and it ended in a shallow world-wide
assumption that the reality of God, as it has been demonstrated again
and again by the profoundest philosophy the world has ever known, had
somehow been exploded or superseded."

"It was one of those fatuous journalistic waves of fashion, with about
as much thought behind it as the latest nigger-dance," said Evelyn. "The
politicians, of course, talked of our 'common Christianity', and made
their propaganda points out of it, knowing perfectly well in their
hearts that the great majority had gone absolutely pagan."

"I don't think they all realized the falsity of the position," he said.
"In my country, and I think in yours, there were millions of really
good, sound people who lived, as far as they could, by the codes they
had inherited from Christendom. Nobody realized that it was only the
inherent goodness of these people, and the codes they had inherited,
that kept things going, by a kind of impetus from the past; and that,
intellectually, if they thought at all, they had surrendered to the
neo-pagans. There was no fundamental belief behind the mere natural
goodness; and when the real test came, and they were challenged on the
ultimate foundation of things, the conventions, unsupported by any vital
religious creed, were bound to crash. The whole thing turned on the
reality of religion. I'm not sure of very much; but I'm absolutely sure
of that, agnostic though I've been. You are more fortunate. You're a
Catholic, aren't you?"

She shook her head gravely. "I've sometimes wished I were," she said.
"One of my cousins was. He married a French-Canadian girl from Quebec.
They came to Rome last fall and we went about together a great deal. We
motored to Subiaco, and Assisi, and other places. You remember Abt
Vogler: '_Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled_.'
Well, it had been like that with me. I had been having my little
adventures among the masterpieces of art while I was in Italy; but they
were external, the adventures of a spectator from outside. Oh, I was
moved and stirred, to the quick sometimes. But hers was something
different. She was not a spectator. She was part of it--the thing
itself. It was all alive to her, yesterday and to-day and for ever. She
was a part of its life, and its life was outside Time. Giotto's frescoes
were only masterpieces to me. But they were more than pictures to her.
They were glorious windows in the dark walls of San Francesco, letting
her look through the ages at her personal friends. She recognized them,
not from books, but because she knew them personally. She talked to St.
Francis like a friend in the field where he made his hymn to the sun.
For me, the churches and cathedrals were like glorious picture-books,
great illuminated missals where I could read myself blind with lovely
songs and stories. But she, with her little rosary, was a part of the
spirit that made them and made Christendom."




CHAPTER XIX


During the next week, they found that the house and garden, and the
little farm, which was only a few hundred yards away, kept them fully
occupied. They attended to the scattered livestock, which had suffered
severely from the absence of its human masters, and had also done
considerable damage by breaking through hedges and palings into
vegetable plots and vineyards. The straying cows and calves were
enclosed in a good hill-pasture, with a stream of clear water running
through it. Hens were lured back to their runs with handfuls of grain. A
lean dog which had vacillated at first between frightened hostility, and
ecstatic tail-waggings, was brought into the house and soon made it
quite clear that he had adopted them as his gods, and did not intend to
let more than one of them out of his sight in future. He was a
sorely-bedraggled pariah when they found him, and seemed to have been
living on garbage behind some of the peasants' cottages. But, in a few
days, he was the glossiest of collies, and his brown eyes were not only
companionable, but curiously comforting in their acceptance of the world
as it was. They christened him Rab. Then there were half a dozen goats
that had been working havoc among the growing vines, and feasting
royally on the tender shoots and leaves. Their bells made it easy to
round them up, and another good and well-enclosed pasture was found for
them.

At six o'clock, for two mornings in succession, without saying anything
to Evelyn about it, Mark went out, and with the aid of a small handcart,
removed the few bodies which lay in the open. The famous little city of
rebellion could hardly have ranked as a populous village in recent
years; and the piazza, streets and churches, those memorials of its
greater days, had been almost entirely free from the physical horrors of
the catastrophe. Apparently, too, there had been a meeting in the town
hall, where almost all the inhabitants were assembled, except those who
had been caught drinking at the various inns. Mark brought his pitiful
loads of petrified scarecrows to join one or other of these companies,
according to where he found them; and then he locked the doors and
fastened the shutters on them all. It was a dreadful task, but it had
its own palliatives. The curious chalk-like petrification and the
extraordinary lightness of the figures that he lifted into his cart,
robbed them of their humanity. They might have been so many Egyptian
mummies; and their lightness almost suggested that they had been
consumed to a grey ash. It seemed to him that they were still undergoing
some strange change which had replaced the ordinary process of
dissolution. It was not corruption but a sort of spontaneous cremation,
as clean as the process which consumes a beech log in a slow fire. In
some mysterious way it seemed to be affecting even their clothes, which
were strangely crisp to the touch. He couldn't be sure that this was
progressive; for he had not handled them before; but, subconsciously, he
made odd comparisons as he lifted them; an Egyptian mummy; lean, brown,
leaf-like wrappings; a Havana cigar; and now--oh, careful, careful, or
the fine ash may break.

At the end of a week, Evelyn might have walked anywhere in the streets
of Ravello. She could have explored its three or four little shops and
visited any of its churches without being physically reminded of the
catastrophe.

In the evenings, after Evelyn had gone to bed, Mark explored the books
in the library. He rejoiced to find that, by careful selection, almost
everything that a book-lover could desire had been packed into its
shelves. There was no rubbish. All the best of the modern work was
there--much of it scientific and philosophic, the whole of Darwin and
Huxley, as well as later men like Rutherford, Eddington, and the younger
Thomson. Best of all, there was the whole company of the older and
assured masters of literature. There was a good stock of Greek and Roman
classics with special attention to the Stoics. Cervantes, Balzac,
Voltaire, Dickens and Scott were there in full array; and, so far as he
could see, most of the great poets. France and Italy were both
represented. There was the glorious national edition of d'Annunzio, the
Sussex edition of Kipling, and the continental editions of Mark Twain,
Emerson and Hawthorne.

Sometimes, in the evening, after dinner, Mark and Evelyn would shut out
the loneliness of the earth, and fill their little lighted room with old
friendships, by taking it in turn to read their chosen poets aloud,
matching passage for passage.

The very nature of their circumstances often led them, in their reading
and their talk, to look beyond the moment, and try very seriously to
arrive at some conclusion about the meaning of human life and the world
in which they seemed to be so isolated. They found a strongly poignant
happiness, a happiness that was half pain, in some of those poets for
whom the beauty of earth hinted at an unearthly loveliness elsewhere.

"I suppose all this is very escapist," she said one night.

"Is there any reason why we shouldn't escape," he answered. "After all,
we are probably only escaping to our native land."

"Strange, isn't it," she said, "what a part that old home-sickness plays
in all the great poetry and music and painting of the world? I wonder if
there really is anything in that idea of pre-existence in a better
world, the sort of thing that Wordsworth talks about in his
_Intimations_:

     Not in entire forgetfulness."

"I've often wondered," he said, "whether the old tale of the Fall wasn't
a parable of something that had really happened on a much bigger scale
in a world elsewhere. Perhaps we all faintly remember a better world
from which we are exiled. We may have been exiled by our own failings,
or in some cases even self-exiled as auxiliary volunteers in the cause
of world redemption. Origen was a heretic, I suppose, but he had the
biggest mind of any of the Greek fathers, and he thought that the Fall
might have taken place in another world. He thought or, at least, he
hinted that the Paradise we had lost was elsewhere, and that our task
here was to find our way back to it, and help as many as we could along
the way."

"I don't know enough to reason about it; but my instinct tells me that
something very like that must be true. It fits in so perfectly with so
many inspired passages and gleams of vision in the poets and mystics.
But what must we do now to find the way?"

"Some of the great old thinkers had an answer to that," he said. "One of
those who struck deepest for me was Plotinus, at the close of his
glorious treatise on Beauty, where he sees Beauty as one of the
attributes of the Supreme Being, just as Keats did, unconsciously, and
in his own simpler way, when he said, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'
But Plotinus says that the goal of life is to attain to that vision; and
this, of course, fits in perfectly, too, with all the great conclusions
of the poets and mystics about the search for truth."

"And also with what Christians described as the goal and reward of all
their struggles--the Beatific Vision which was in itself Paradise
regained."

"Perhaps. I don't see how all that agreement of so many different minds
can be accidental." He took down a translation of Plotinus from the
philosophy section. "Listen to this," he said, and began to read:

     "In the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to
     its likeness, what Beauty can the soul lack? For This, the Beauty
     supreme, the absolute and the primal, fashions its lovers to Beauty
     and makes them also worthy of love.

     "And for this the sternest and the uttermost combat is set before
     the souls; all our labour is for this, lest we be left without part
     in this noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in the
     blissful sight; which to fail of is to fail utterly.

     "For not he that has failed of the joy that is in colour or in
     visible forms, not he that has failed of power or of honours or of
     kingdom has failed; but only he that has failed of only This; for
     whose winning he should renounce kingdoms....

     "But what must we do? Where lies the path? How shall we come to the
     vision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated
     precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the
     profane?...

     "Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland.... The Fatherland
     to us is there whence we have come, and there is the Father.

     "What then is our course? What the manner of our flight? This is
     not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to
     land.... All this order of things you must set aside: you must
     close the eyes and call instead upon another vision, the
     birth-right of all, which few turn to use....

     "Withdraw into yourself and look ... act as does the creator of a
     statue that is to be made beautiful. He cuts away here, he smoothes
     there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely
     face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is
     excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that
     is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty, and never cease
     chiselling your statue until you shall see the perfect goodness
     established in the stainless shrine.

     "This is the only eye that sees the mighty beauty. If the eye that
     adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure or weak, then it
     sees nothing. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what
     is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see
     that sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul
     have vision of the first Beauty unless itself be beautiful."

"I don't know anything about philosophy," she said, "and Plotinus is
only a name to me; but the amazing thing again is just that deep inner
agreement with what the simplest Christian believer has it in his power
to understand in a more perfect form. Every one of the phrases you have
read to me was brought to its final perfection in the deepest and most
beautiful book ever written, the fourth Gospel. I don't understand it
as philosophers understand things, but it's more than a book. It's
music, absolute music, from the first phrase to the last; and music
strikes deeper than the understanding.

"Your philosopher says that 'the Fatherland is there whence we have
come, and there is the Father', but the music says, '_Let not your heart
be troubled, neither let it be afraid: ye believe in God, believe also
in me_.'

"_In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would
have told you. I go to prepare a place for you._

"_And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know._"

She said it so simply, and so impersonally, that he--too--felt it in the
depth of his being as only music can be felt.

That night, after she had gone upstairs, he closed his Plotinus, and
opened the most beautiful book ever written.




CHAPTER XX


But all human beings live in two worlds: and the practical affairs of
every day filled up the greater part of their lives. Their happy
division of labour disclosed the fact that Mark who, in two campaigns,
had often had to forage for food and had learned to cook it for himself
over a brushwood fire, was particularly good at roasting a chicken. This
was useful, because Evelyn had that delightful gift in a pretty woman, a
healthy appetite; and roast chicken, preferably roast guinea fowl (which
she sinfully preferred to pheasant) was her favourite non-vegetarian
dish. Moreover, chickens rambled and scratched over all the
cottage-gardens at Ravello, and there was downy promise of generations
to come.

It has often been noticed that roast chicken and a bottle of good wine
have had a remarkable influence upon the spirit and thought of a
philosopher. It has been observed that, after he has absorbed these
pleasing substances through a hole in his head, a process which
familiarity has robbed of its strangeness (though Dante himself never
imagined anything more weird) the philosopher will confront the world
with renewed courage. This is not a concession to materialism. It is
merely a realistic warning to those who would ignore the subtler
relationships between the two worlds.

It was after an unusually good lunch, in which roast chicken, asparagus
and a bottle of _Episcopio_, deliciously redolent of the native grape,
had played their part, that Evelyn began to talk with a new and almost
contemptuous courage of her flight from Rome. In her haste she had left
certain personal treasures at her flat. She asked Mark if he would go
back with her to secure them and bring them to Ravello. There were
letters, photographs, books that had been given to her by friends,
pictures that she had painted herself, and many other things that she
was loath to abandon.

He was glad, for another reason, that she had made the suggestion. Faint
as the chance now seemed of there being any other survivors in the
world, there was even less chance of establishing contact with them
through the very inadequate clue which had been left at Evelyn's flat in
Rome. The notices he had fastened at the entrances of St. Peter's and in
the Vatican gave no hint of their subsequent movements; and unless some
personal friend or relation, knowing her address, were to make direct
investigations, her little flat might remain unexplored till Rome itself
was drawn into the earth's breast and buried. He thought it was
certainly desirable to leave more messages in Rome, where they could not
be overlooked by any possible explorers.

He gave this to Evelyn as an additional reason for their journey; and
she agreed. Personally he would have been content if, for the rest of
their lives, they could remain undisturbed in this Paradise among the
hills; but there was another side to the matter now, which troubled him
greatly. It was not because, in the most literal sense, she was "the
only woman in the world" that Evelyn had come to fill his heart and
mind. But she did fill them.

Moreover, he was a civilized man and Evelyn was a civilized woman. The
problem could not be solved as easily as it might have been in the
revolutionary romances of Rousseau, by a return to animal simplicity
and running about in the woods on all fours, with a Foundling Hospital
in the background.

Also, he happened to love this gallant young comrade of his. He loved
her in the real sense of the word, which had nothing in common with what
Sir Herbert Boskin would have called his "love-life". It was the true
Eros which had mastered him, a power enthroned beside the eternal laws,
the winged and naked god of the _Antigone_, "Love, unconquered in the
fight". But it had happened, as quietly and gradually, as the light
comes at daybreak; and it had found a simpler language in his own heart
than the Greek poet had found. The thought that she stood alone on the
planet with no other help than his own, made him afraid of dying lest
she should find no helping hand or human face beside her when her own
time came. He had lain awake, once, for half the night, staring at that
nightmare.

All this made him eager to fall in with her suggestion of re-visiting
Rome; for, if there were any considerable number of survivors across the
Atlantic (where he felt that the best chance lay) they would certainly
explore that central city of the world's history as soon as any other in
Europe. He thought it best to concentrate on this, and then keep to the
one definite place at Ravello where they might be found, rather than go
wandering on a ghastly pilgrimage through a devastated world. But there
were one or two other places on the way--Naples, for instance, which
were not likely to be overlooked by any exploring survivors; and he
could leave messages also at these, on the doors of Government
buildings, or on the high altar of the chief church.

They made Rab free of the farm-yard and, after seeing that he was well
provided with food and water, they stocked the large car that afternoon
with everything they thought they might need on their journey. They set
out very early the next morning. Before leaving Ravello, Evelyn made an
excuse for visiting the church. She said that she wanted to make sure
that the lamp was alight in front of the altar. But she knew very well
that the lamp was alight; for she had attended to it the day before.
Mark was watching her from the door, without her knowing it, and he saw
that all she did was to kneel at one of the dark benches. A beam of
dusky light from one of the painted windows touched her bent head and
crowned it, all woman as she was, with a glory not altogether of this
earth, though no eye could see it but his own--unless, as he could
almost have believed at that moment--the blind eyes of the stone angels
above her could see it. He remembered what she had said of her cousin:
"_I looked at it from the outside; but she was a part of it, and a part
of the life that had made Christendom_."

He, too, had thought of religion, from the outside, as a philosopher,
but there was something here which annihilated all pride of intellect.
It gripped him by the throat and tugged at his heart which, like the
hearts of most modern men, was full of an unrealized hunger and thirst
for something that the world had long lost, something that materialism
could never satisfy. Humility had never been his virtue; but he felt it
now to the roots of his being. He moved quietly forward, like a shadow
through the shadows of that many-memoried place, and knelt at the dark
bench beside her.

She had told him that she did not belong any more than he did to the
Church in which she was kneeling; and, as for himself, he was sure of
very little more than that he believed in God. He believed that the
nature of God had been most perfectly revealed to man by the Founder of
the Christian religion. He believed in the _philosophia perennis_ as a
guide through the chaotic bewilderment of modern thought, and the
central depository of the deepest wisdom of the ages, the wisdom that is
unaffected by the service of weight and measure. But here there was
something more. There was no question now of the rites and ceremonies
which had sometimes repelled him; there was no audible word to be
misinterpreted or questioned or doubted. But, in this utter silence of a
forsaken world, with only the lamp burning before the altar, and that
lonely little kneeling figure beside him, there was a sense of something
unutterably sacred, something that still spoke of God's tabernacle among
men.

They rose together and went out to the car without speaking. It was not
until they were winding down the road to Amalfi that she said, "I'm glad
you did that."

"I'm glad I followed you," he replied. After a long pause he went on,
"That lighted lamp gave me a sense of home."

"When I arrived in Ravello," she said, "I did what my cousin would have
done, and went into the church. She called it 'making a visit', exactly
as if she were going to have a few minutes' conversation with a friend.
You can understand how that appealed to me at such a time. But when I
got inside, it was all so dark and cheerless I missed that friendly
little light. So I attended to it. I had a notion that it was never
supposed to go out."

"I suppose no other light has ever seemed so friendly or filled so many
troubled souls with peace," he said, "and I suppose it has been burning
somewhere for over a thousand years. I'm glad you looked after it."

"I have another feeling about it," she said, "now that all the human
disputations are gone, one sees the reality behind it all; and I somehow
feel certain that the reality behind that little light is continuing
somewhere else in the world at this moment. I can't explain it; and I've
never felt it before in the same way; but the thing it represents was
bound to go on. Protestants believed that as well as Catholics. Somehow,
this new isolation brings us face to face with the fact that we do
belong to two worlds, the ordinary world around us where things kill one
another, and the world of light to which the best part of us belongs."

She broke off, hesitating for a word, and he gave it under his
breath--the "_Civitas Dei_."

"Yes," she said, "and we're members of it, and it can't come to an end,
even on the earth, while any human life lasts. Somewhere on the
planet--at this moment, it's going on." Again she broke off, and after
another long pause, he asked, "You really believe that?"

"It's one of the promises which can't be broken," she said, "and it
reminds me of it to keep our own lamp alight."

"It would be a strange turn of events," he said, "if--one day--a ship
arrived from the New World, bringing the Faith back to the Old."

They were turning out of Amalfi now, into the coast road for Sorrento,
with the old monastery looking down upon them, on the right, and on
their left the "immeasurable tremor of all the sea."

The moment seemed to have its own symbolism, conveying through their
physical surroundings a strange new hope.




CHAPTER XXI


They reached Rome late in the afternoon and drove at once to Evelyn's
flat. The unchanged state of the streets, where they both recognized
certain huddled bodies that they had seen before in exactly the same
positions, and certain cars that had crashed into shop windows, gave
them a curious sense of entering a petrified city of arrested motion. It
was the sinister opposite of the little town of the Grecian Urn:

    And, little town, thy streets for evermore
      Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
    Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

When they arrived at the hall door of Via Margutta 49, Mark noticed that
there was now no grim mask of death staring out of the porter's box. He
peered into it, and saw only a crumpled copy of the _Osservatore
Romano_, a bottle and glass, and a mound of fluffy grey ash, as though
the slow process of that spontaneous cremation which he thought he had
only imagined had here actually finished its work.

He inwardly thanked God for what seemed a real possibility that the
death-wave was going to finish its work cleanly; and it seemed to be a
good omen that the first completed instance of it should have happened
at this particular door.

Upstairs, in her flat, Evelyn made tea; and, afterwards, while he smoked
and looked at her pictures, she filled a trunk with what she called her
"treasures". She introduced him, by photographs, to her father and
mother, who had gone down with the neutral ship; and in both of their
faces he discovered fore-shadowings of her own. She had the father's
broad brow, and upright carriage; and the mother's spiritual eyes. She
told him little anecdotes about them, as she remembered them in her New
England childhood. While she talked and packed, he picked up a book that
lay near him. It was an old edition of Whittier that had belonged to her
father. It was inscribed, "To my darling little Evelyn, from her loving
Dad, who hopes she will some day find as good a friend in this book as
he did."

Turning the pages Mark could almost see her father and read his
character, through the passages he had marked and annotated in the
margin. At the head of one of the poems Evelyn herself had written in
pencil, "This was my darling Dad's favourite," and she had doubly marked
one of the stanzas in it, with a day of a month and year. One of these
dates was far back in her teens when the neutral ship had been sunk. The
second was a week after the wave of death. The stanza was a very simple
one--to some modern minds it would have seemed almost childishly simple.
To Mark's, and he had read more widely and deeply than the majority of
his generation, it went as deep as the universe. It covered his own
agnosticism as completely as it expressed her father's faith, a faith
bequeathed to the child who now so sorely needed it.

    I know not where His islands lift
      Their fronded palms in air,
    I only know I cannot drift
      Beyond His love and care.

She was talking, almost gaily now, of a visit she had made, long ago, to
Uncle John in Kentucky, and a corn-shucking dance she had seen there;
and Mark bent over the book pretending to read on, lest she should see
the mist in his eyes. She told him of the coloured people who lived on
Uncle John's plantation, just as in the old slave days, but were as
devoted to Uncle John as any Highland clan to its chief.

"There was a bell outside the house, and when you rang it, they all came
together, exactly as in the old days. Uncle John called them one
evening, and asked them to sing for us. We all sat in the porch and
rocked in time--America invented the rocking-chair, you know--while they
sang 'Swing low, sweet chariot', and the moon was coming up over the
cotton fields like a big, red water-melon."

It was a photograph of Uncle John's "old colonial" house that recalled
all these things, and she put it on the arm of his chair, so that he
could look at it if he wished. He had never heard her talking with such
apparent happiness of spirit. In the recovery of her "treasures", she
had recovered at least a semblance of what must have been her natural
light-heartedness. She was so utterly free from self-consciousness, and
so confident in his own understanding, that he felt more poignantly than
ever his own responsibility for her. The marked passage at which he was
still looking became a living whisper from the dead father--

    I know not where His islands lift
    Their fronded palms in air!

He longed to tell her of his human love, but he felt--only too
poignantly--that, in their fearful circumstances, this might be to annul
all the care that had been invoked by one to whom she had been
everything. They must be friends, but they could be no more. Crushing
the impulse to take her in his arms, he bent his head over the book as
if he were absorbed in it, though he could hardly see the page. He
answered her only in subdued monosyllables, and in a way that belied the
aching intensity with which he was listening to what she said. Once or
twice she had glanced at him, as though she were puzzled--or troubled.
Suddenly she stopped her pretty flow of anecdote, in the middle of a
sentence, and startled him by saying, "I won't interrupt your reading
any more."

He looked up at her, and discovered that she was hurt and angry.

"What do you mean?"

"Only that I should not have inflicted all those reminiscences on you,"
she said. "There was no reason why you should be interested. But I
thought, as we were so completely alone in the world, you might have
liked to hear about one or two people who were once everything to me."

He stood up and held out the book to her. "This is what I was reading,"
he said. "I was looking at this marked passage by which you have twice
written a day of the month and a year. The first was when the neutral
ship went down. The second was a week after death had come to this world
of ours."

"And the third?" she said.

"There is no third," he replied.

"You think I am afraid," she said. "Just as you thought I didn't know
you loved me."

In all his thoughts, through all the silence and restraint of the last
week, and the continual checking of words and phrases that might have
revealed too much--his repressed love for her had been aching like a
pulse of physical pain. It was only now, as she stood facing him, that
he realized what had happened. He stood amazed at the glory of the
knowledge in her eyes. He felt infinitely humbled at the discovery
that, while he had been pretending to read a printed page, she had been
reading his very heart.

She took the printed book from his hands. With a little silver pencil
she wrote, for the third time, the day of the month and the year, on the
margin of the marked passage. Then she gave it back to him.

"The first," she said, "was when that neutral ship went down. The
second, as you pointed out, was a week after death had come to this
world of ours. But the third? Is that death, too?"

"Oh, my dear, dear love," he cried, and he knew not how, but she was in
his arms.

"He is not a blind god," she said.




CHAPTER XXII


The next morning, immediately after breakfast, they made a dozen large
copies of the message they were to leave in Rome, giving their names,
and the place at which they were to be found--the Palazzo Rufolo,
Ravello.

As soon as they were completed they took them down to the car and set
out on their task. Perhaps it was because they were happier this
morning, but there seemed to be fewer of those dreadful obstructions in
the streets. Several times, Evelyn touched Mark's arm and pointed to
what appeared to be little mounds of grey ash, hardly larger than
mole-hills.

They went first to the entrance to St. Peter's, where Evelyn stood
silent for a moment before the messages which Mark had placed there on
his former visit.

"Those can be torn up now," he said, as he fastened the new messages to
left and right of the inner doors, where weather could not affect them.

"Torn up," she said. "They are going with my other treasures to
Ravello."

They drove next to the Quirinal, where everything, at first, seemed to
be deserted; for the sentries, if they had been there, were now
represented only by a few of those small grey mounds of soft ash.
Apparently the process was quicker in the open air than indoors, for
they passed one or two uniformed bodies which showed no signs of change
in the stately rooms of the palace. They fastened the largest of their
notices to the frame of a Velasquez, from which the features of a
former king of Italy looked down on another king who was crumpled up at
his writing desk, and seemed to be on the point of crumpling up as
completely as the poor porter at number forty-nine.

They intended to leave another notice at the headquarters of the Duce;
but, on their way there, they happened to pass the best jewellers' shop
in Rome. The sun was streaming into the windows, and making so pretty a
play of colour over the Aladdin's garden within that Mark stopped the
car and made Evelyn alight.

"This is the place for the ring," he said.

"Idiot!" said Evelyn, laughing, but she did not refuse the invitation.

It was a very handsome establishment that they entered. The only
attendant was a shrivelled mummy whose ashen body seemed to be held
together only by its once fashionable and well-fitting morning-coat, and
this was already crumbling as though it had been scorched in a fire.
Mark drew a Chinese screen before it, so that it should not distract
Evelyn's attention. Then he began to open the glass cases and spread the
stones of Aladdin's garden before her--'_all-coloured clustering gems
instead of fruit_'--engagement rings, ear-rings, bracelets, necklaces,
and all kinds of dainty brooches under her pretty little nose.

    Le superflu, chose trs ncessaire
    A runi l'un et l'autre hmisphre.

"It is very important," he said, "that you should choose something you
really like."

Eve toyed for a moment with a five-hundred-guinea diamond ring, and a
pearl necklace that would have laid the Queen of Sheba in a brown lump
at Solomon's feet. Then remembering that there would be no other woman
to outshine, and only Mark to dazzle, she laid them down and asked him a
somewhat impertinent question. "Were you a frightfully rich man, Mark?"

He replied with an absurd gesture, a sweep of the hand, indicating that
all the jewels in the place, as well as Rome, were hers if she desired
them. But fooling was checked by a light hand on his arm; and looking
into her face, he saw to his surprise that her eyes had grown moist and
dark and that she was looking up at him with a child-like gravity.

"I want to know what you could have afforded."

"In the old days, you mean. Oh, very little, I suppose. This, perhaps,
at a pinch." He pointed to a ring valued at about sixty pounds. "I was
making only about three hundred a year when the last war broke out. Of
course, I hoped to make more later on."

Evelyn picked up a modest little ring, with a single sapphire set in
tiny diamonds. "It's terribly extravagant of me, Mark," she said. "It
would cost nearly twenty pounds; but, as I'm to wear it all my life, I
think I should like to have this."

And then, oddly enough, Mark became aware of a lump in his throat which
he could only disguise by saying, rather croakily: "Very well, Eve, if
you like it; and now, what about a pearl necklace."

She gave him the prettiest smile in the world, and deliberately chose a
string of coloured beads, valued at about three English pounds.

"Will you please give me this," she said. Mark linked it round her neck.
"Now I feel I have a real present," said Evelyn. "So I can say 'Thank
you, darling'."

Mark kissed her.

Before they went to the car Mark picked out another ring, a small band
of gold which he asked her to try on. It fitted perfectly, and he put it
away in his breast-pocket; for Evelyn decided that the ceremony was to
take place at Ravello, with the little lamp as witness.

As they drove away, to the headquarters of the Duce, there seemed to be
no obstructions at all on the streets, and he heard her humming quietly,
under her breath, to the rhythm of the engine:

    "I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
      Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.
    I will make a palace fit for you and me
      Of green days in forests, and blue days at sea."

The next of their messages in Rome they laid on the sacrosanct table of
the Duce himself, at the end of that long shining room, where the bronze
head of his formidable predecessor--Mussolini--glowered down on them,
with outthrust jaw.

Evelyn stood unconcernedly staring at that grim visage of hammered
bronze.

"You don't really mind, do you?" she said, and patted it, as though it
had been a pet mastiff.

"Look, Mark," she said, "he's rather a dear. He's not really scowling.
It was only the sculptor's idea of making him look brutally strong. If
you take him sideways, like this"--she drew Mark by the arm to look at
the bronze from another angle--"you see, he was really an idealist, and
a bit of a poet."

The last of their messages they left at that radiant palace of the
Renaissance, the Palazzo Farnesina, which had been the home of the Royal
Academy of Italy for over a hundred years. One of their messages they
fastened at the entrance; and one in the private room of Evelyn's
friend, Professor Antonelli. As President of the Academy Signor
Antonelli was the successor of a long and illustrious line. This room
was one of the places to which scientific explorers would certainly go,
if any of them had survived; for the Royal Academy of Italy had always
been in the tradition of Leonardo. Art, literature and science there
went hand in hand; though the marble face of Galileo, with his blunt
Socratic nose, seemed to be looking somewhat enviously at the more
handsome marble features of Marconi, while, behind him, the "Polyphemus"
of Sebastiano del Piombo pleaded for the love of Galatea on the painted
wall.

As Mark and Evelyn entered the big sun-flooded room on the ground floor,
with its tall windows opening on to the garden, he stood silent for a
moment, looking up at the exquisite rendering of the story of Psyche,
designed by Raphael, which seemed to dissolve the ceiling into another
world with a radiant Greek sky. For a moment, in their strange
isolation, he felt that Evelyn and himself had wandered into the lovely
old legend, and that their own story was a kind of play within the play
of that radiant palace. There, through sunlit clouds, he caught glimpses
of her wanderings on earth, and her ascent to the dwelling-place of the
gods. There, he saw her arrival on the mountain height of the gods; and
there, on Olympus, she drank the cup of immortality. There, in the last
scene of all, Psyche--the human soul--became the bride of love, the
undying; and at her wedding, too, the gods were the only guests, and all
the Muses sang.

Every one of those things passed through his mind; but, being very much
a mortal himself, he could only feel his own unworthiness of the goddess
beside him; and, like the bluntest of Englishmen, despite his Parisian
mother, he could only grunt, "I didn't know Raphael had painted you."
The next moment he was hastily calling her attention to the head of
Marconi, for he suddenly realized that the Psyche on the ceiling was not
only entirely beautiful but entirely Greek.

In Professor Antonelli's room, when they had fastened their placard to
the only picture, they casually examined a glass-fronted book-case in
which a number of documents, some of them rather beautifully bound, had
been preserved. One entire shelf in more workmanlike bindings related to
inventions for use in war. They were mostly monographs by Mardok.

"Had we but life enough and time," said Mark, "I should like to go all
over Europe, destroying every record of that kind."

"We can make a beginning, anyway," said Evelyn, and set the example by
tearing to pieces a masterly treatise on the strategic posting of
waiters in foreign restaurants where, of course, they would be of almost
decisive effect in any future bacteriological war. As the writer said,
it was remarkable that nobody had thought of so simple a device
hitherto.

This masterpiece of military science they patiently tore to very small
pieces, and then frightened a black cat in the garden by scattering the
fragments to the breeze through an open window. It was only a symbolic
gesture, but their youthful exuberance found some satisfaction in it.

On another shelf they found a bound volume of letters from d'Annunzio, a
former President; and this, with a collector's eagerness, Evelyn decided
that she must add to her treasures for Ravello. There was also a volume
of documents relating to the Keats House, mostly reports of speeches
that had been made there on various occasions by Italian and English
men of letters. Not far from this, they found a book beautifully
printed, in a limited edition, for private circulation by the Academy
itself. It had been issued with Mussolini's portrait as a frontispiece,
eight months before the war of 1939. It was an Italian translation of a
poem by an English writer of that generation, whose name was unknown to
Mark and Evelyn, and it had one or two very odd historical points about
it. Some extremely private letters from Mussolini were bound up with the
volume. In one of these he made a caustic remark about the famous
Italian poet who had almost anticipated his leadership: "_d'Annunzio is
a rotten tooth. He must be filled with gold or extracted._"

Another expressed his personal dislike of Hitler, a dislike almost
amounting to repulsion. He said, regretfully enough, "_It is a tragedy
that France has thrown Italy into the arms of Prussia. France is our
natural ally, and England our natural friend._"

Another was to the translator of the poem, telling him he wished it
might also appear in the _Giornale D'Italia_, so that it might be "read
by the poorest Italian peasant over his evening meal of polenta", as
well as by the recipients of the finer edition.

The poem was entitled "_L'Inghilterra all' Italia_", and one of its most
puzzling features to Mark and Evelyn was this. Italy, in the early part
of 1939, was generally assumed to be supporting the Nazi programme of
aggression and broken pledges. But this privately printed book had been
prepared in 1938. It had been issued by the Royal Academy of Italy at
Mussolini's personal wish in January 1939; and it had been circulated
privately by the Academy, during the most critical months before the war
of that year. It dwelt, primarily, on the value of England's pledged
word, in a world where pledges were daily broken. The reference to Nazi
methods were quite clear; and the conclusion was that the friendship of
England and Italy, with their common regard for law, "The Roman law that
lives in England's mighty spirit still", might even yet save the world
from chaos.

"Odd, isn't it," said Mark. "Almost everyone in England at that time
thought that Mussolini was on the other side. They all coupled him with
the Nazis. But look at the foreword to this book, written when the Axis
was supposed to be at its strongest, by one of Mussolini's most ardent
henchmen, the Vice-President of the Academy of that day. He finds the
verses about England's pledged word 'prophetic'. 'E non moranno' (And
they will not die) he says."

"'E non moranno,'" said Evelyn. "Poor poet; and we didn't even know his
name. Probably he was like all the others.

    "And ever was the heart within him hot
    To gain the land of matters unforgot."

"Well, it seems to have come true, for the present," said Mark. "He
little thought that, a few generations later, the entire population of
the world would be reading his book."

"And in the limited edition, too," said Evelyn.

They had a picnic lunch in the garden of the Academy, under the dark
floating rafts of the great cedar. Afterwards, when Mark had lit his
pipe, Evelyn read extracts from the poem in Italian, and Mark echoed
them in English. They made a duet of it, quite unconscious of the fact
that with perfect naturalness they were doing exactly what Theocritus
and Virgil made their lovers do, two thousand years ago. Evelyn began it
with,

    "_Quando la primavera tomo_
    _All' Italia quest' anno_,"

and Mark, interjecting "Not too quickly", replied,

    "When spring turned home
    To Italy this year."

Then they kept it up alternately, Evelyn (as befitted her sex) supplying
the southern music, and Mark the plain northern words.

    "_E fra le sue rocce_
    _E gli anfrattuosi colli_
    _I colti di frumento_
    _Rinverdirono tutta la bruna terra._"

    "And in among her rocks
    And craggy hills,
    The plots of wheat
    Made all the brown earth green."

    "_Quando sui pergolati delle corti_
    _E sulle bianche mura_
    _Ciocche di glicine_
    _Stesero in lungo i delicati germogli._"

    "When over the trellised court-yards
    And white walls,
    Wistaria clusters
    Trailed their delicate blooms."

    "_E fiorenti ciliegi_
    _Coruscarono come rosee nubi_
    _Di tra gli argentei ulivi._"

    "And flowering cherry-trees
    Gleamed like rosy clouds
    Among the silvery olives."

"Oh, but 'gleamed' isn't nearly so good a word as 'coruscarono'," she
protested.

"What English word _could_ equal the Italian just there," he said.

"None. I agree."

    "_Quando la vigne_
    _Le vecchie e nodose vigne_
    _Ringiovanirono._"

    "When the vines,
    The old and knotted vines,
    Grew young again."

    "_E quelle giovani,_
    _Lungo migliaia di valli_
    _Distesero, esultanti,_
    _Le braccia, e si presero per mano;_
    _Grandi memorie si destarono----_"

    "And the young vines
    Along a thousand valleys,
    Stretched out their arms exulting
    And caught hands
    Great memories woke."

    "_E di su i mari suoi foschi_
    _L'Inghilterra ricordo e rimiro_
    _L'Italia, ancora----_"

    "And over her dim seas
    England remembered also, and beheld
    Italy, once again."

    "_Ma ora,_
    _Il nostro ricordare, O Italia,_
    _Non  di cose transitorie._"

    "But now
    This deep remembrance, Italy, is not
    Of things that pass away."

    "_Perch da te, da te_
    _Agostino porto la croce,_
    _Ed espiro il verbo_
    _E tu fosti per noi, in arte e in poetare,_
    _Italia, una seconda Terra Santa._"

    "Because from thee, from thee
    Augustine bore the cross, and breathed the word
    And thou hast been for us, in art and song,
        A second Holy Land."

    "_Noi sappiamo di chi i piedi_
    _I trafitti piedi, fra i cipressi,_
    _Comminarono presso Assisi sui colli umbri_
    _E lasciarono quello splendore di bellezza_
    _Sulle tue mura_
    _Simile all' ultima luce del nostro Paradiso perduto,_
    _Al morente tramonto dell' anima dell' uomo._"

    "We know whose feet,
    Whose pierced feet, between the cypresses,
    Walked by Assisi, on the Umbrian hills.
    We know whose passing shadow cast that glow
    Of beauty on thy walls,
    Like the last light of our lost Paradise,
    The dying sunset of the soul of man."

    "_Sia luce, O Italia, una volta ancora!_
    _Non una gloria che muore,_
    _Ma un giorno nato di fresco._"

    "Let there be light, O Italy, once again.
    No dying glory,
    But a day new-born."

Then came a passage which described how a large part of the world had
ground its altars into dust. It had proclaimed that there were no
religious or ethical foundations in the universe; and had thus destroyed
the basis of every real and imperative distinction between right and
wrong, by declaring such distinctions to be merely "anthropomorphic". In
such a world, the poet asked, when it was really put to the test, what
word, what bond, what oath could hold or bind?

Historians in distant ages, he hoped, might be able to look back and
say, "la parola dell' Inghilterra"; that England, at least, had kept her
word; and that Italy re-arisen, was at her side.

    "_Che, in questa fede_
    _La fiaccola della legge fu piantata_
    _Nel centro del mondo, pari alli fiamma di un ara_
    _Ardente per sempre nella Citta di Dio._"

    "That, in this faith,
    The light of law was set
    At the world's centre, like an altar-flame,
    Burning for ever in that City of God."

"You see," said Evelyn, "he had his altar-flame, too. I think we ought
to take him back to Ravello with us. Besides, I must have the Duce on
d'Annunzio for my collection."

"It throws a curious light on the mind of Mussolini, and on the English
bewilderment about it," said Mark. "I'm beginning to think that nobody,
in these international matters, could ever have known what his opposite
number was really thinking about."

"The classical instance," said Evelyn, "was Colonel House, the
right-hand man of Wilson, in the war of 1914. He was greatly troubled,
as I believe you English were, about the phrase 'too proud to fight';
but he was not troubled enough to look up the speech and discover what
the rest of the sentence was. Neither he, nor the English, nor any of
Wilson's friends, ever asked if there happened even to be a verb in that
sentence. My father had a volume of Wilson's speeches; and it was one of
his dear old marked passages. Can you guess what that phrase led up to?
I've asked hundreds of people, and they never can. It leads directly up
to this: _America must not be looked upon as a country that will not
fight_. Think of all the tauntings, and maliciousness, and international
bad feeling caused by the omission of that context, in the cabled
report."

"It could not have been a deliberate omission," said Mark, "unless the
cable was sent by enemy propagandists. We had everything to lose by it."

"Of course, it was not deliberate," said Evelyn. "It was just that
horrible thing, the journalistic mind, so quick on the trigger that it
usually shot the cat instead of the cat-burglar. It was all done by
brains that had no time to think. It had nothing to do with journalism
as a profession. My father was a journalist, and he edited a great
newspaper--the _Boston Evening Transcript_--for more than a quarter of a
century. After that, for ten years, he edited the _New York Times_. He
used to say that the journalistic mind was the disease of true
journalism, and death to the greatness of any newspaper. It was
certainly one of the things which brought civilization down. It was
deadly to truth. It formed its opinions on books by cutting the pages
and smelling the paper-knife. It labelled its contemporaries in
politics, art and literature with ready-made labels and stuck them on in
a hurry, like a railway porter in a rush hour, and then judged them and
all their sayings, doings or writings by the label and the label alone.

"It jumped to all its conclusions like that, and it didn't care a hoot
if they were wrong, for nobody read yesterday's newspaper; and, if the
readers themselves went off the rails in the general fog, well, a
railway accident makes good copy for the next morning. It had to produce
scores of headlines every twenty-four hours whether there was any real
news or not; and every foreign office in the world was continually being
rattled by its habit of ringing all the bells and running away. It
provided the entire mental food of the greater part of the population,
and the casualties were appalling. My father used to say that poison
used scientifically and in small quantities might be medicinal, but you
can't use it as a breakfast food."




CHAPTER XXIII


With all the treasures of Rome at their disposal, there was very little
that they wanted to take back to Ravello, except the personal
"treasures" at Evelyn's flat.

"And I used to think there were all kinds of things I wanted," she said,
as they drove about the fashionable shopping district, while shining
mile after mile of plate-glass windows, with all their contents so
cunningly disposed to entrap the heart of woman, went streaming by
unheeded.

"There is just one picture, not very large, in the Pinacoteca at the
Vatican, I should like to take back with us. You can give it me for a
wedding present, if you like, Mark. It's that lovely 'Repose during the
Flight into Egypt' by Barocci. Oh, and there is that exquisite head of a
sleeping child in the Museo Nazionale. No other bit of marble has ever
breathed so sweetly and drowsily. I watched it once until I thought I
saw the lashes moving on the cheek. It's quite small. We _must_ take
that with us. I should love to have it in the room which is to be my
studio, on the north side. It shall sleep on a purple cushion near the
window. But, isn't there anything _you_ want to take?"

"Nothing, I can think of," he said, "except you, and of course your
treasures."

"Mark," she said, "I believe you're rather a darling. I was afraid you
might vote for the Laocon. Do you mean to say there isn't even a book
you'd like?"

"There seemed to be everything at Ravello."

"Well, there's just one rather shabby little book in the Keats House
I've always thought I should like--Leigh Hunt's _Jar of Honey from Mount
Hybla_. It's worth about thirty lire, and it could easily be replaced,
anyway. I think we might take that, don't you?"

There was not much more, and they were all "quite small things"; but,
before the afternoon was over, it was clear that they would require a
larger car. For ordinary purposes there was always the small
cream-coloured car which they had left at Ravello; but a bigger and
really good car might be useful in many ways.

So they went to a glittering showroom, near the Piazza Colonna, where
the latest motor-cars were looking at their own reflections in half an
acre of polished floor. Three smart scarecrows in morning-coats and
patent-leather shoes were taking a dusty siesta among the latest models;
and theirs was probably the first dust that had ever drifted on to that
immaculate floor. One of the scarecrows must have been irresistible as a
showman before his flesh and bones had begun to flake into ash. The
ingratiating grin was not wholly obliterated, and he had a way with him
even now. He seemed to be pointing with a sketchy forefinger of delicate
emphasis to a Rolls-Royce coup, as the very thing for a honeymoon.

"For the occasion, Signora, what could be more appropriate." But Mark
shepherded Evelyn to another part of the showroom, and as there was no
need to consider ways and means, they speedily decided on the best car
in the place.

That night there was a wild thunderstorm. About one o'clock Mark started
up from the couch in the sitting-room at the flat, thinking--for one
awful moment--that the former world had returned, and that hell was
being rained from the skies on sleeping children, as in the old days.
There was something very terrible about this rending of the midnight
skies over the deserted planet; but it was not so terrible as the memory
of what man had done to man, and to the soul of man. Indeed, its terror
was only in its vivid illumination, its endlessly echoing resurrection
of those appalling memories. There were moments when the whole block of
buildings, and Rome itself, seemed to reel under a crackling and
bursting barrage of high-explosive; and the intervals of silence made so
strange and profound a contrast that--to a less-imaginative man than
Mark--they might have seemed to be waiting for the annihilation of the
planet. It was as though the earth were being bombarded by the whole
implacable circle of the fixed stars.

In the midst of one of the fiercest detonations, the door of the
sitting-room opened and Evelyn appeared in her nightgown, carrying a
lighted candle. Her eyes were wide open, but she was walking in her
sleep.

"They've begun again," she whispered, "they've begun again----"

Her voice was drowned by another thunderclap, but Mark knew only too
well the fearful thought that was in her mind. He was afraid of
startling her by a reply, and he watched, without speaking, while she
carried the candle across the room to a niche containing a small statue
of the Madonna and Child. She placed the lighted candle before this; and
Mark felt, in an amazing way, that the room was transfigured and filled
with a strange peace, in which the quiet symbolism of her unconscious
act, as in a little illuminated picture by some world-comprehending
master, counted for more than all the physical vastness and material
forces of the midnight universe that surrounded them. He was amazed at
the beauty that seemed to flow from that simple act of hers, as peace
and light flowed from the very stillness and smallness of the
candle-flame amid so huge a conflict of the elements. The real and
deeper values of the cosmos, by contrast with the outer chaos, had
somehow been focused into clear visibility, in the little circle of
untroubled light which enclosed the blue-robed Madonna and the Holy
Child, and the lit face of Evelyn gazing up at them, under its luminous
crown of misty gold.

Gradually the thunder died away in the distance, leaving only the steady
rush of the rain behind it, as though--at last--the overburdened heart
of the universe had found relief in a flood of tears.

Evelyn listened to it gravely; then, quietly as she had entered, she
stole back to her room, leaving the candle alight before the Mother and
Child. He could see, by her face as she went, that peace had returned to
her.

It was a "blest candle" that had been given to her at the Sacred Heart
Convent of the Trinit de' Monti, on Candlemas day. Curiously enough,
there was a custom, in Catholic countries, of lighting a "blest candle"
during a thunderstorm. Mark knew nothing of this at the time; and, if he
had known it, he would have felt certain, of course, that it made no
difference to the thunder, or to the danger--if there had been any
danger--from the lightning. Nevertheless, he was conscious of another
and deeper difference that really had been made. Perhaps it was like the
effect of drawing curtains across a window, to exclude the night and
the nothingness outside, and to enhance the human values within. Perhaps
it was like the friendly firelight on the floor or wall of a room--he
remembered it so vividly--at home in England, when he was a boy
convalescing from some illness.

He thought of it in medical terms. "It was a psychological alternative",
which was only another way of saying that it really had made a
difference, after all--not to the storm and the desolate night outside,
but to his own inward peace, and the current of his thoughts, and the
way in which he looked at things. The blind chaotic storm outside was as
nothing to the values represented and illuminated here, values that were
strangely reassuring about the nature of the universe. In that small
circle of light there was not only a representation of the Mother and
Child. There was a quiet reminder, a quiet assertion of the supreme
values of humanity against the menacing and immense darkness without. He
remembered some boyish verses of his own.

    The moon that sways the rhythmic seas
      The wheeling earth, the marching sky,
        I ask not whence the order came
          That moves them all as one.
    These are your chariots. Nor shall these
      Appal me with immensity.
        I know they carry one heart of flame
          More precious than the sun.

It was useful, sometimes, to be reminded of such things. There, of
course, was one of the secrets of the difference that it had made to
himself. It was because of his amazing discovery of love in a shattered
world that his thoughts were streaming so endlessly on. But they were
streaming through light now, in a broad peaceful river, instead of
through darkness in a turbulent and broken torrent.

For a long time he lay awake, watching those softly illuminated figures,
which so simply conveyed their suggestion of the vital communion between
the Supreme Being and His creatures. It had been the central idea of
Christian Art for nearly two thousand years. Sometimes he had thought
that, if the modern mind, so bewildered with its new accumulations of
physical knowledge, had been big enough to survey and grasp the whole of
its own gains, it would have recovered its lost centre in the divine.
There had been fleeting signs of this in many isolated thinkers. He
remembered a sentence from Marett, one of the anthropologists at whose
feet his father had sat:

     "_It is no sacrifice of the mother to suckle her child. Nay, it is
     the nearest thing to communion on God's earth, and may therefore
     stand as the perfect symbol of peaceful and bountiful love, as it
     might be, not only in the Communion of Saints, but likewise among
     us poor human beings. Charity is no late message sent down to
     civilized folk. It is something that whispers in the very
     life-blood of the race...._"

Perhaps this was why women had so intuitive an understanding of the
sacramental side of religion, an understanding so much more vital and
realistic, so much richer and deeper, than any intellectual analysis.
Their own bodies were the gates through which the mystery of new life
was brought into the world. It was their own direct experience of
Motherhood, its pangs and its joy, at once so mysterious and so
realistic, that gave them their immediate grasp of the incarnational and
sacramental elements of religion, and left so many of them on their
knees before the incarnate Word, when the rest of the world had gone
its pagan and materialistic way.

The softly illuminated figures on which Mark's eyes were fixed seemed to
bring all that mystery into clear focus. They gave form and definition
to the secret of the whole creation; a secret utterly lost in the dim
unending vistas of Space and Time. It was only a representation in
painted wood, just as--in one sense--Milton's Paradise Regained was only
printer's ink and paper; but, at least, it conveyed and symbolized the
way in which human love might enfold the divine.

Then, as his eyes closed at last for sleep, the face of Evelyn came back
to him again ... her face, asleep to earth, but awake to heaven,
gazing up at the Mother and Child. He had almost ceased to believe that
there was anything good in human nature; but his eyelids pricked with
tears at the recollection of her look, in that little circle of heavenly
light.

       *       *       *       *       *

Very early the next morning, for they wished to reach Ravello the same
day, they loaded up the car, and drove southward, along the Appian Way,
between those broken memorials and tombs of ancient Rome, which, after
so many centuries, could still touch the human heart so intimately.

Southward, through the broad Campagna, they went, with the blue
mountains in the distance, and the giant arches of the ruined aqueducts
striding across the plain. Here and there in the foreground a couple of
great white oxen were still dragging their useless yoke; or a group of
black buffaloes pawed at the ground and stared with wild eyes across the
masterless world that had once more become their pasture.

The sun was growing hot, and the heat-mist shimmered everywhere from
the moist hollows and marshy patches between the dry sunburnt bents and
tufts of feathery grass. The lovely lines of a poet who had depicted the
Campagna from the Alban hills came into Evelyn's mind, and she quoted:

    O'er the Campagna it is dim warm weather.

"A careless reader might think that the word 'dim' was used only because
it sounded poetical," she said. "But how exactly true it is."

"How does it go on?" said Mark, to whom it came like music.

    "With wild spring-meanings hill and plain together
    Grow pale, or just flush with a dust of flowers.
    Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers,
    Floats in the midst, a little cloud at tether."

They reached Naples about noon, and drove slowly through the dead city,
stopping only for ten minutes to leave one of their notices at the
National Museum, from which Evelyn wished also to collect two more
treasures. In the library at Ravello there was a bronze replica of the
head of Dante, and another of the Narcissus which had been found at
Pompeii.

"I love them both," she said, "but why should we have copies when the
originals are so easily taken with us."

In that part of Naples the process of spontaneous cremation had done its
work, and even the mounds of ash had been obliterated by a thunderstorm
on the previous night. But, curiously enough, the rate of the process
seemed to vary by districts, and the streets through which they drove
southward were not a pleasant sight. Whatever may be the lure of the
underground catacombs to inquisitive minds, a great modern city, blazing
with sunshine, and populated only by a prostrate crowd of scarecrows
that once were men and women, is no spectacle for lovers on the eve of
their honeymoon.

Strangely enough, their new cheerfulness was hardly diminished by it.
They had already done all their thinking and sorrowing, over that aspect
of the matter; and not only the grief but the horror of the disaster had
somehow been almost eliminated by its completeness. The word "finis",
when it was as final as all that, made sensitiveness about it absurd.
One might shudder at seeing a chicken killed slowly: but, if the planet
suddenly exploded and all its inhabitants dissolved instantaneously into
gas, there would be more than a touch of titanic comedy about it, which
could only be enhanced if it happened at a peculiarly solemn moment,
during a broadcast by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or on some great
occasion like the reading of the King's Speech at the opening of
Parliament. When Mark and Evelyn had faced the world alone, they had
lived in a waking nightmare; but, now that they were together, this was
replaced by a haunting sense of wonder at the sheer mystery of the
universe.

All those bleached scarecrows and mummies with their brown wrappings and
ashen faces, collapsing in chairs, or propped up in the corners of
benches, or grinning wanly from upper windows like Chinese dolls; or
laughing at the sky where they lay on their backs among the little green
tables outside a caf; or leaning forward over a bottle and glass, as
though silently contorted by some paralysing jest; all those dumb relics
had become so harmless, and were so obviously free themselves from any
painful emotion, that Mark and Evelyn might have driven through endless
vistas of them now as carelessly as they might have explored some
gigantic street of Chinese temples, decorated with grotesque puppets of
ivory.

Oddly enough, though some learned psychologist might have shown reason
for it, they felt only one real shiver of horror, and that was caused,
not by the lifeless relics, but by a sudden insurrection of horrible
life, when a brown river of enormous rats came rippling up the street
towards them, and divided into two whirling torrents round the advancing
car. Mark accelerated fiercely, and the shrill squeal of the rats under
the wheels made Evelyn put her fingers in her ears.

"If that is what the world is going to be like, I'm afraid we can't
escape war," said Mark.

"Ugh," said Evelyn, shuddering. "If _they've_ had orders to increase and
multiply, what are we to do about it?"

"Leave it to the cats," said Mark. "Naples is full of hungry cats, thank
God."

In a quarter of an hour they had left Naples behind them; and, after
that, they saw no more relics of the catastrophe. Between Naples and
Herculaneum, the thunderstorm of the previous night had almost
obliterated the mounds of white ash, and the only traces were the
occasional old shoes, of the coarser kind, which had resisted
destruction. But there were few of these in what had been a bare-footed
countryside. Buttons had apparently survived; but these were hardly
noticeable in the dusty roads of summer.

When they reached Pompeii, the world had become very beautiful again,
and Mark did a good deal of driving with his right hand, for his left
was entwined with Evelyn's. But the miles went on very swiftly as they
talked and made plans for beginning the world again on that high and
lovely hill to which they were going. They proposed that the wedding
should take place next morning. They would read the essential parts of
the service together, in their church where the lamp was burning, as a
visible sign of their unseen witness; and then, as God meant them to be
happy, they would drive to Paestum, which Mark had never seen, and they
would have their wedding picnic there, in that divine solitude, under
the columns of the old Greek temple of Poseidon.

It was to happen, but it was not to happen as they planned; for their
grimmest trial was still to come.

After they had passed Pompeii, Evelyn asked Mark to change places with
her.

"I'll drive now," she said, "I know the way from here, and there are
some misleading cross-roads near Sorrento." But she had another reason.

It was in Sorrento itself, not far beyond the statue of Tasso, which
stands in the market-place of that magical old town of the sea-witches,
that she unexpectedly turned into a private road on their right.

"Do you believe in dreams, Mark?" she asked, as they glided between
lemon-trees and magnolias, up to a low white house with green-shuttered
windows. She stopped at the door and they alighted.

Mark gave a gasp of pleasure at the beauty of the garden-orchard in
which they were standing.

"I believe in this dream," he said.

"So do I," she said. "That's why I wanted to drive. I had a dream about
this place last night. It came back to me only a little while ago. There
was trouble in it; and this place was to help us, in some way. I was
afraid we might miss the turning; but the car seemed to know the way, as
if we were being piloted. I suppose we are, don't you?"

"I'm sure of it. But what was the dream?"

"Wait till you see the other side," said Evelyn, taking his hand and
drawing him quickly round the corner of the house. There, dipping their
heads to pass under a glorious myrtle, they groped through bushes that
smelt like lemon-verbena and flowering shrubs that dizzied them with
their fragrance.

They came out on a terrace which, between two cloudy-headed stone-pines,
looked across the dark purple of the Bay to where, as Goethe said, the
shadowy cone of Vesuvius rose "like a peak of hell out of the garden of
Paradise". It was faintly smouldering; but the distance concealed its
grimness. The black coils of congealed lava which--at close
quarters--had suggested the writhings of the damned in Dor's
illustrations to the Inferno, were veiled in amethystine beauty; and, as
for the dark wreath of smoke (although it might be stained red when
night fell), Evelyn found an unexpected friendliness in it. She said it
was what Pittsburg would look like, if it ever went to heaven. The smoke
coming out of the chimney made her feel that "things were still going on
in the old foundry" under the earth.

"I like to have it there," she said, "at that distance."

She seemed to feel very strongly that this place was some kind of refuge
from the nameless forebodings of her dream; and, indeed, the stillness
of the garden, with its shuttered house, had a curiously protective
effect, as though it were enfolding them both with a friendly though
invisible arm.

"You say you dreamed about this house," he said. "Had you ever seen it
before?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "Often. It belonged to a retired English admiral,
Sir John Roscoe. He was a great friend of the Brookes. He used to come
here in the autumn and winter, and write books about the British Navy.
He was a dear old man, and a bit of a mystic. He was the only man,
except my father, that I ever heard talk of those lines of Whittier. It
was one of those curious coincidences. When that neutral ship went down,
I was at Ravello, and he came over to see us. He didn't know anything
about my father, except that he had gone down in the ship. And he just
sat with us there saying nothing, and smoking his pipe on the verandah.
Every now and then he cleared his throat, as if he were going to speak,
and then he'd fill his pipe again and go on smoking. After a while, Mr.
and Mrs. Brooke went into the house, and I was left alone with him, and
then he looked over his shoulder as if he were afraid of being
overheard, and he said, 'There are some lines, of which I'm very fond,
by Whittier. Do you know them?'

    'I know not where his islands lift
      Their fronded palms in air,
    I only know I cannot drift
      Beyond his love and care.'"

"Things have happened to me, like that," said Mark. "Probably there are
many more happening all the time, but we don't notice them. Has it ever
occurred to you how very remarkable it was that you should have taken
that little car of mine, out of all the cars in Paris?"

"What does it mean, do you think?" said Evelyn.

"I can only think it means exactly what the verses say," he replied.

"Perhaps we shall notice such things more, now that we are alone in the
world."

"Anyway, I believe it. But what was it you dreamed?"

"I can only remember part of it. Something very terrible had been
happening to you and me; and, somehow, I had escaped and was being
hunted; and suddenly I saw dear old Admiral Roscoe standing bare-headed
at the entrance of the road to this house. He was staring down the road
with a troubled look on his good old bull-dog face, as if he were
expecting me and anxious about me; and as soon as he saw me he made a
signal with his hand to drive in quickly. And I did, and when I looked
round for him he wasn't there, and I was standing alone here on the
terrace in the night. I seemed to be horribly frightened because you
weren't here, and something terrible was happening to you; but, all the
time, something was saying, '_Don't be afraid. It's all right. Don't be
afraid. It's all right._' And sometimes I thought it was my father; and
sometimes I thought it was Admiral Roscoe, or his ghost; and sometimes I
thought it was the wind in the trees; and then it seemed to be growing
light quite quickly, and you were standing quite near me after all; but
it wasn't here. It was in some high place among the hills, and St.
Francis was holding out his hands to us and saying '_Buona Ventura_'. I
wonder if it means that we are to make Assisi our final home. I did
think of it as the best alternative to Ravello."

"Assisi must be the one place in the world where no harm could happen to
anyone," said Mark. "But this is the place to sight a ship from, if ever
those unlikely explorers come from the new world."

The flag-staff, at the end of the garden, stood on a high cliff
promontory, of which one rocky facet looked towards Naples and the other
towards Capri.

"A flag there could hardly be missed by any ship coming into the Bay,"
said Mark. "Perhaps the dream drove us here just to make us hoist it;
and the terrible things were only whips to make us go faster. I wonder
where the Admiral keeps his colours. We must certainly run our flag up."

A look of fear came into her eyes, and she begged him not to do it. "Not
now," she said.

Women had always been rather puzzling to Mark; but he had considerable
respect for their intuitions; and Evelyn, who could not have explained
her uneasiness in the very least, was so clearly affected by something
in their environment that he could no more doubt its reality than he
could doubt the pointings of the magnetic compass.

At that moment, as they stood silent, they heard on the main road
through Sorrento, a hundred yards away, the soft rushing sound of a
powerful motor-car. It was once a sound so familiar that it would have
passed unnoticed; but it froze them to stillness now as though the wings
of an archangel had gone by.

"Good God!" said Mark. "Did you hear that?" He was about to run to their
own car and follow, when Evelyn seized him by the arm and clung to him.

"No," she said. "Don't move. There's something wrong out there. I don't
know what it is; but there's something wrong. There's evil in it."

She looked at his face beseechingly, and he saw with amazement that she
was horribly frightened, so frightened that her eyes had rings of white.

"Eve, my darling," he said, holding her closely in his arms, "you
mustn't let a dream trouble you like this. That sound could only mean
that your belief has come true. There must be some other survivor."

"I didn't tell you," she said, "I didn't tell you, because I was afraid
you would think I was crazy; but, just before I drove in here, I thought
I saw the dear old Admiral standing bare-headed in the road and
signalling to me to come in quickly, exactly as he did in my dream."

"It was just your dream repeating itself, Eve. It often happens."

"Oh, no. I know now he was trying to save us from whatever it was that
passed. He was trying to save us from meeting it."

She was so convinced, and so stricken by her shadowy apprehensions that
Mark himself began to feel a phantom fear of something unknown.

"If anything should happen to separate us, Mark, or if you can't find
me," she said, "I want you to come here. I may be--hiding."

Then--for the first time--something in the way she used that last
word--"hiding"--touched him with the cold hand of fear. But he must not
let her know it.

"Eve," he said, "the last two days have been too much for you. You are
tired out. It probably wasn't a car at all that passed; and, if it was,
it's half-way to Naples by this time. It will soon be dark. I'm going to
drive you home."

He led the way to the car and, with the sunset behind them, and his hand
from time to time touching her own or giving it a reassuring clasp, they
drove in silence along the beautiful cliff-road to Amalfi, and up
through the hills to Ravello. A single star was shining brightly over
the little town as they approached it.

At Evelyn's wish, they stopped at the doors of their cathedral and went
in. Curiously enough, it was not so dark at this hour as in the daytime,
for the late evening light struck in a level shaft through a western
window. They thought, at first, it might be this dusky beam that
prevented them from seeing their light before the altar. Light in light
is not so clear as light in darkness. But, as they approached the
chancel, Evelyn gave an abrupt, inarticulate cry.

Their lamp, which was never to go out, had been wrenched from its chains
and hurled--as though in some evil anger--at the crucifix on the high
altar. Patches of oil stained the altar-cloth below the crucifix, and
all around it there were fragments of ruby-coloured glass. There was no
new mark upon the ivory figure of the Christ; but ruby-coloured sparkles
and grains had lodged in the dark crown of thorns. They looked like
beads of fresh blood.




CHAPTER XXIV


Before leaving the church they removed all traces of the outrage, and
replaced the broken lamp with another which they found in the sacristy.
Then they went down to the Palazzo Rufolo.

The French windows leading into the house from the verandah were wide
open. Mark had shut them himself before they went to Rome. They went all
over the house; but nothing seemed to have been touched
except--curiously enough--a New Testament which Mark had left on a
writing-table in the library, after their reading of Plotinus a week or
two ago. He did not tell Evelyn where he found it, or of the pages that
had been torn out of it.

Nor did he tell her that, when he explored the grounds, half an hour
later, he found the dog Rab had been shot, and thrown into the bushes
under the Saracen watch-tower. Reticence itself, however, can be
communicative when the nerves are tensely strung.

Evelyn glided quietly about, with a pale set face and frightened eyes,
making hardly any comment. It seemed to Mark that she had caught the
very look of some of the refugee women that he had seen during the war,
streaming out of countries occupied by the totalitarian powers.

"Don't take it too seriously, Eve," he said. "All that has happened is
that some other survivor has found his way here. He was probably
half-mad, poor devil. I don't suppose he realized our existence, and now
he has cleared off; and I'll admit, from the little we know about him,
it's an exceedingly good riddance."

"Mark," she said, "there's something more than that. We are being
rounded up. There's something evil trying to close in on us. I've
dreamed and dreamed about it, as I told you at Sorrento, and sometimes I
almost remember it, and then it goes. I ..."

She covered her face with her hands, and shivered from head to foot.
Mark took her in his arms, and held her against his heart.

"I only know it was terrible for you, and for me," she went on. "It
can't just be coincidence, all these things fitting together like this,
and my dreaming about them beforehand. I'm not superstitious. I hate
superstition. There may be all sorts of explanations of the way dreams
work; but, just once or twice in a lifetime, they seem to make a sort of
window for us into the future. There's a mist on the window, and you
can't see things very clearly, but you can get glimpses. My mother had
them, too, but hers were happy glimpses. She used to call it 'opening
the gates of distance'. I'd forgotten all about it until we were quite
near that turn in the road. But all this can't be just accident. Out of
all the millions of places on this earth, with no other survivor as far
as we know, why should this one lonely little place among the hills have
been picked by that evil thing out there. When we left those messages in
Rome, we never asked ourselves what sort of survivors might read them.
The thing that has happened to the world is so fearful we took it for
granted that any survivors would have--friendly human eyes. I feel we
are being rounded up by the very thing that wrecked the world."

"It's the kind of thing that Mardok might have done," he said. "It's
possible that he might have escaped after all. If he did, he's almost
certain to have gone mad. But you mustn't let it worry you. If that was
his car we heard, he is half-way to Rome by now. But why should he have
gone back in such a hurry?"

"He may have seen my diary. I left it in my room. The entry in it said
that we were going to Rome. If that's it--he'll find the message at the
Via Margutta, and----"

"The Brookes very considerately left a revolver and some cartridges
here."

"There'd be no help in that," she said. "He has no scruples, and he has
weapons of his own. You might think him perfectly friendly; but, without
warning, he could paralyse you where you stood, before you could fire a
shot, just as he could bring your car to a halt, if his Alata were
within five miles of it. It's not Mardok. It's the power behind him that
frightens me. There's something evil trying to close in on us."

The deep underlying strain to which Evelyn had been subjected during the
last month was already making itself felt. It had not been lessened by
the exertions and fatigue of their journey to Rome and back.

"What you really need is something to eat and drink," he said. It was
the usual male prescription, and most doctors would have endorsed it in
the circumstances. They had, in fact, travelled all day with no food,
except the light lunch which they had nibbled in the car as they went.
Mark made her eat while he ransacked the larder for cold chicken.

Afterwards, in the library, where they had their coffee, he tried to
persuade himself that all was well, for the pallor had gone and she made
no allusion to the unknown visitor. Thinking it would keep her mind off
the subject, he explored the Brookes' collection of gramophone records,
and discovered among them a well-documented group, produced in Rome for
historical purposes. They recorded the speeches of most of the political
leaders of the chief countries during the critical weeks before and
after the outbreak of war.

"It might be rather interesting to hear what they sound like now," he
said, and he put one of them on.

The windows of the library were wide open to the stars and the tranquil
darkness of the Gulf of Salerno; and, commonplace as the mechanical
instrument had become, the night and the loneliness made it an uncanny
sensation to hear those voices from a lost world, the voices of the men
who had brought it to destruction, recalled to life at the touch of a
steel needle.

"Justice," cried an emotional voice in German, "Justice is all that we
ask; and justice has been denied to us. A grave injustice, an
intolerable injustice, has been riveted like an iron chain upon the
necks of a hundred million Germans. Our enemies for years have admitted
the injustice. It began at Versailles. It continued after the war of
1939; and to-day, after all these years, though their own publicists
have constantly declared it to be intolerable, they have made no
practical proposals for its removal. Whenever practical proposals have
been suggested, they have looked the other way. We decided, therefore,
that we would win with our own strong hands that rightful place in the
world which has been denied to us. And then what happened? The very men
who had evaded every proposal, for a century, had the audacity to tell
the rest of the world that--at the very last moment of the
century--Germany was about to receive justice and had wilfully thrown
away the chance of peacefully obtaining it. They forgot the long years
of patience, the endless rebuffs; and when--at last--the patience broke
down, they announced that the blood-guilt was ours and ours alone. We
are fighting to bring about a new European order of peace and justice.
Our consciences are clear."

It was uncanny indeed in that quiet night to hear the tumultuous
clapping of thousands of vanished hands, and the well-drilled rhythmic
cries of "_Heil! Heil! Heil!_"

The voice on the next record delivered a speech from the other side. It
was more restrained and comprehensive than the first voice.

"History," it said, "did not begin with the Treaty of Versailles. The
Treaty of Versailles was a consequence as well as a cause. The plea of
our opponents sounds impressive only if we forget what they did to
Poland in 1939, to Belgium in 1914, and to France in 1870. They speak as
if the many million square miles of the British Commonwealth of Nations
were inhabited entirely by the comparatively small population of the
British Isles, while the larger population of the Reich was forced to
exterminate its neighbours in order to obtain living-room in Europe.
They ignore the fact that the British Commonwealth of Nations has over
seven hundred million inhabitants; and that by far the greater part of
it is now entirely self-governing. For economic co-operation we are
prepared; but, even though Germany may have been born late, there is no
room here for her racial theories, or for the extermination of those who
have anticipated her. We are at war," the voice went on--and here the
vicious circle in which both sides were involved seemed to become more
evident than in the old days of stress--"we are at war because we are
opposed to the use of force. We do not believe that anything can be
settled by physical force. That is why we mean to meet this threat with
the whole of our incomparable physical resources on land, at sea and in
the air, until the reign of right has been restored."

The speaker was certainly on the right side. He was defending his
country against an evil thing; but like many another well-meaning
opponent of scoundrelism, he was cutting the Gordian knot rather than
solving it. What else could he do, seeing that he was ensnared in that
political riddle to which no statesman and no merely temporal philosophy
has ever offered a real solution? He assumed, however, that the right
cause, in the last resort, would always have the big battalions at its
disposal, and would always have the physical power to win. This was the
very proposition which he wished to discredit and disprove. He might
have stated an infinitely better case--a case that would have held good
in the most overwhelming physical defeat, since it was possible--and
only too probable--that very small minorities indeed might sometimes be
in the right, with nothing to support them but "the broken heart and the
unbroken word". The fortunate position of his own country hitherto had
made it possible for him to remark that "with the whole might of our
armed forces we intended to establish the solemn fact that force could
settle nothing". It was indeed possible to argue that the right cause
must in any case rally the forces of the world around it in the long
run; but it seemed increasingly improbable in the modern world, which
had so supped on horrors that it had lost its sensitiveness, and had
become almost cynically incapable of righteous anger. Moreover, honest
strength, no matter how great, can never be proof against cunning and
treachery, the poisoned cup, the assassin's dagger, and their more
deadly intellectual and spiritual equivalents. Lacking the one thing
needful in the world, the eternal ground of right and wrong which had
been so contemptuously smashed to pieces by the pseudo-intellectuals of
western civilization in recent years, there was now no other appeal that
he could make. But he had at least the practical justification that the
appeal to force had been the "last resort" of his own country; and that,
if we could still have believed in the eternal validity of anything, his
country was still--somehow--fighting for that.

The enemies' ambassadors in London had reported again and again on her
unpreparedness. Foreign statesmen had pointed to her unwillingness to
fight, as a sign of her decadence, and a signal of encouragement to the
Bandar-log. Even friendly neutrals had somewhat vicariously reproached
her for not taking up the challenge to international morality, by force
of arms, at an earlier date. In America there had been many
head-shakings over the decadence of the old lion. The American press had
been full of it. More than one leading American paper indeed had to
remind the others that, if the eagle was to be no more than a highly
moral spectator, there was a touch of grim comedy about the way in which
the eagle had been deploring the lion's obvious reluctance to fight for
general principles in two hemispheres simultaneously.

The lion blinked at some of the remarks, but continued to sprawl at full
length. He accepted the compassion accorded to his senility by his
friends; and he patiently endured, from his enemies, all kinds of
whisker-tweakings, face-slappings, and peltings with many varieties of
dirt. These attentions were accompanied by a running commentary to the
effect that the lion was worn out and that he had lost his teeth--an
effete condition which was, of course, highly tempting to the
Bandar-log. And then--quite quietly and undramatically, the lion stood
up and stretched himself. He gave his mane a shake and yawned, in that
insufferably lazy way of his; and, at the first sight of that red
interior, there was so rat-like a scurrying among his enemies, so loud a
squealing of complaints about this brutal and bellicose monster; so
instant and complete a reversal of everything his enemies had been
saying for weeks and months and years past, that the eagle--whose
spectatorial habits had not impaired its sense of humour--began to
laugh. The laughter of America had always had a salutary effect hitherto
on all forms of humbug.

All these things were evident in the recorded speeches. One of the most
amazing things about them was the evidence they unconsciously offered of
the innumerable cross-purposes of those who were at war. It was apparent
even within the individual nations. One party in the nation X believed
that it was fighting for a new "scientific" world from which religion
would be banished. Another party in the same nation, believed that it
was engaged in a Holy War for the restoration of Christianity to Europe.
But the contradictions were even more apparent between the nations that
had initiated the appeal to force. More than once it had happened that
nations who were allies on one front, were deadly enemies on another.
The rich confusion of 1940, when Germany limited her support of Russia
in the air, because her ally--Italy--was supplying airmen to the other
side, was even more richly confounded in this later and more murderous
chaos. If--for political reasons--it seemed better that an ally whose
help on land was useful should not be allowed to become too prosperous
at sea, her totalitarian friends had no hesitation in surreptitiously
torpedoing her merchant-ships, especially if they could secure a "total
loss" of ship and crew, and so attribute the disappearance more
plausibly to the devilish cunning of the other side. War, in the old
straight sense, had in fact come to an end as far back as 1918. After
that, it often meant a wholesale massacre of civilians, without any
formal declaration; or the cowardly sinking of light-ships (a perfect
symbol of the whole bestial process) and the turning of machine-guns on
their helpless crews. Up to then, there had been a code of comradeship
and generous courage among the fellow seamen of most of the civilized
nations. It was reserved for a totalitarian power to smash this and to
distinguish herself by shooting the helpless occupants of small
life-saving ships and lifeboats. "War" was no longer "war" among the
totalitarian nations. It was state-organized crime. Neither friend nor
foe, within or without their borders, was safe from "liquidation" (their
gangster slang for murder) if it suited the book of any seeker after
"power". It had begun early in the century; and the mistake of 1918 was
not in any injustice of the Treaty of Versailles (unwise as that treaty
may have been in some respects). The mistake was in the failure to
recognize that an appalling series of crimes had been committed by
various persons to whom the destinies of helpless millions had been
entrusted. These helpless millions had been deceived again and again;
but every one of the criminals was able to retire and live in luxury and
honour for the rest of his life, while blinded men, in their innocent
thousands, who had sacrificed everything for the ideal country in their
own hearts, were forced to beg their bread in the streets. This
terrible mistake, this glossing over of the most fearful crimes in
history, led directly to a world-wide cynicism, which made it infinitely
easier later on for the political gangsters to abolish all distinctions
between right and wrong. It would have been infinitely better for the
world if there had been no whisper of those material "reparations" which
could repair nothing; and a stern demand for a solemn court of enquiry,
the most solemn and impressive that the whole world could assemble.
Before this the individual criminals should have been tried; and, if
guilty, they should have been sentenced and executed as an example to
the whole world, exactly as criminals are punished within the nation. As
long as the double standard of political and private life was tolerated,
those crimes against humanity would continue. It should have been no
matter of small or petty revenge, or "making a martyr" of a
misunderstood man who had dipped his hands in the blood of millions by
an error which "charity" would overlook. We did not discuss martyrdom
before punishing a drunken motorist on a high road who blindly kills a
single individual. We did not talk hypocritically about "charity" then.
To shrink from the methods of justice in the greater and infinitely more
terrible crime is not charity, but a deadly--and perhaps a
cowardly--suppression of truth. If innocent, the accused should have
been set free, and those who were really responsible should have been
indicted. But it was utter madness to compare the most just of wars with
an international "police-operation"; and then, when the criminals, the
responsible leaders, had been cornered, to dismiss them with a bunch of
flowers, and as many thousands a year as they wanted, while the
unfortunate members of the "police-force" who had been conscripted to
hunt them down, were in thousands of cases condemned to a maimed and
poverty-stricken remnant of existence, or to beat their heads against
the charitably padded walls of lunatic asylums. But the world had chosen
not to mark, firmly, the distinction between good and evil in 1918; and
the inevitable result followed. Gangsterdom grew, and the world watched
it growing, with the general loss of all religious belief. It had come
to its inevitable conclusion in a chaos of abominations.

    Coldly they went about to raise
      To life and make more dread
    Abominations of old days
      That men believed were dead.

On their own premises, the new power-politicians were logical enough in
their demand for a godless world. There was no possible answer to the
philosophy of gangsterdom if the individual life were an ephemeral
bubble, or if it were deprived of the eternal significance which
Christendom had once given to it. There was no possible answer to their
unmorality if there were no absolute ground for the distinction between
right and wrong. Christendom had its answer; and it was a complete
answer. The moral relationship of the Supreme Being to His creatures was
asserted and demonstrated only in the Christian religion. There was no
other and there could be no other. The hypothesis on which Christendom
had been set aside was the hypothesis of universal relativity in morals
as in everything else; and the theory that, ultimately, there was only
the night and nothingness. There was only one thing that the gangsters
overlooked in their cynical rush to embrace the "godless" opportunity of
doing anything they pleased in a world which owned "no power above the
state." They fully realized that evil was destructive. They used it as
a weapon. But they forgot that evil was also self-destructive.

The last of the records that Mark put on had apparently been made on one
of the red-letter days of the lost world. The Federation of European
Powers, to which the idealists of 1939 had looked forward as one of
their "war aims", had been perfectly worked out on paper. It had been
universally accepted in principle; and it had broken down in practice
simply because the men who had worked it out had ignored the reality of
evil, or what old-fashioned people used to call "original sin". The
record dealing with this disaster had been made apparently from a
broadcast of the news; for the announcer's voice broke in at the end,
with that ineffable calm of a refined soul at ease in Zion; and the
announcement he made, in circumstances less horrible, might have been
regarded as a masterpiece of unconscious humour. As it was, it merely
summed up the almost Bedlamite confusion of the world.

     "_M. Solnikoff, the Russian President of the Federation of European
     nations, has ignored the protest of the Germans, which was
     supported in this case by Great Britain, against the distribution
     by Russian airmen of bubonic plague germs in Bavaria. That is the
     end of the news. The studio-orchestra will now give a
     rumbling_"--Here he cleared his throat and said, "beg
     pardon"--"_will now give a rendering of the old favourite 'Hitchy
     Koo.'_"

"What a ghastly resurrection of those awful nights," said Evelyn. "It
seems incredible now that the whole world used to sit listening to that
kind of thing on the air. You had to listen if you wanted the news, and
sometimes you desperately wanted it. They developed a cunning trick to
make people listen, by giving them the first lists of casualties and
survivors in the middle of the propaganda talks. It was all too
devilish. You turned a knob and heard loud raucous voices, in all the
languages of Europe, bawling their contradictory lies into the air and
abusing one another, like a lot of competitive cheap-jacks on tubs, or
bookies offering odds at an international slaughter-match. It was one of
the most degrading and degraded things that ever happened to civilized
men and women. Let's forget it. I think I'll unpack."

It was an attempt to distract her own mind, and Mark knew it. She knelt
by the trunk which he had brought into the library, and began to unpack
some of the personal "treasures" she had brought back from Rome. Mark
lit his pipe and began to read, but his thoughts came between him and
the printed page, and he found himself re-reading the same paragraph
over and over without understanding. The "ghastly resurrection" of the
old hateful conflict at the touch of a steel needle had been too vivid.
It seemed almost incredible in its tragic triviality and unworthiness,
now that the planet had gone back to the majestic silence and loneliness
of its beginnings. In a flash, he saw the essential meanness of all that
mechanized life which the superficial had confused with "progress".
Loneliness and silence are great philosophers. He remembered how, in
boyhood, certain words of a lonely thinker in the desert, thousands of
years ago, had overcome him like a midnight heaven.

     "_When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon
     and the stars which Thou hast ordained--Lord, what is man that Thou
     art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him?_"

He wondered whether it would all happen again if there were another
chance--all the fatuous and self-contradictory chatter about "rights" in
that mechanized state where every fundamental distinction between right
and wrong had been obliterated; "rights" without reference to duties, or
even to the nature and worth of the claimant, and the character of the
universe in which the claimant happened to be living. The political
"thinkers" at the beginning of the nineteenth century had almost been
prepared to assert the "rights" of every man to good weather. Minds of
that calibre were quite able to ignore the fact that no Government could
insure those rights, and that no Englishman--however free--could ever
obtain them between January and March in his own country. They did not
explain what became of your title-deeds if you happened to be a
shipwrecked sailor on a raft, or what became of your "rights" to a
congenial life if a somewhat harsh universe grew only a little more
stubborn, or afflicted you with cancer. An older, deeper and more
comprehensive philosophy had its answer; but the new theorists did not
ask whence the title-deeds came or where they were deposited. They
ignored their complete dependence--for every breath they drew--on the
Supreme Power in which all things live and work and move. They reduced
the human individual to complete insignificance by chatter about the
physical vastness of the universe, denying the one thing in man which
towers above all physical vastness. They were sure that he had no soul,
and died as the beasts die; and then they ascribed "sacred rights" to
him, and attached an almost mystical and quite unexplained importance
both to himself and those "rights", as though he were still set apart
from the bleak and callous physical universe, and were a kind of god.
But this last assumption was the very stone which the new builders
thought they had rejected. It dangled in the air from the end of their
mechanical crane. They didn't recognize it when they saw it; and they
didn't know where to place it. This, indeed, was the tragedy of the
modern intellectual world, that, when the late nineteenth-century
evolutionists might have seized the most triumphant illustration of
their own theory, and the most glorious instance of emergence into a
higher order of things, at the very point where the human race had
attained to its first great glimpse of the real nature of the divine,
these evolutionists--of all people in the world--became as blind as bats
to the significance of that moral and spiritual ascent in their own
scheme of thought. They turned their backs on the ascending way, though
it gave a meaning and an aim to the whole of the strange progress
whereby man seemed to have stepped out of the blind process of nature
into a new and higher ethical order. They had already ignored the one
essential Factor working through the whole process, the Supreme Being,
ever present to it, as the permanent ground, the origin and end of all
its changes. By ignoring it, they had led the popular mind to suppose
that "evolution" meant getting something out of nothing, or plus out of
minus; and they had involved their own theory in all kinds of
unnecessary contradictions and difficulties which confused the whole
matter. They did this, though the omitted Factor, even if admitted only
as the Unknowable X of the agnostic Spencer, with the "supernatural" and
"perfect" attributes that he so insistently gave to it, would have
discovered a meaning and an aim in the whole process, and opened out an
immeasurable future. They passed it over, though everything that was
best in our civilization was derived from the aspirations and
remembrances which had been born of it. They seemed to think that, if
they traced the orchestral symphony back to the wood and cat-gut of the
physical instruments, and announced in correct detail the pedigree of
the cat, they had explained away not only the music, but the Composer.
The prophets of this philosophy explained everything away, by deriving
it from something less than itself. Love on these terms was merely lust.
Morality was a relic of primitive taboos. They would have been very
angry if they had been told that they were breaking down the walls of
civilization as well as of the _Civitas Dei_; but almost everyone had
been cowed by the cry "We must move with the times", regardless of the
direction in which they were moving. If anyone had the courage to speak
these truths they would have been far in advance of their time; but they
would have been regarded by the pseudo-intelligentsia and the immense
army of their half-educated followers as "out-of-date". Many centuries
ago the Greek poet--Pindar--had summed it all up.

     "_Even for the feeble it is an easy task to shake a city to its
     foundations, but it is a sore struggle to set it in its place anew,
     unless God becometh promptly a guide unto its rulers._"

The most tragic thing of all was that the complete answer to all those
disputations and conflicts was there, all the time, in the _philosophia
perennis_ of Christendom. It was ignored, partly out of ignorance, and
partly out of prejudice--the survival, sometimes, in Protestant
countries, of a just prejudice against its human instruments and
exponents. But in recent times, the wisest and truest things ever said
about the relations of capital and labour, the most just allotment of
the proper dues to each, and the most fair analysis of their faults,
were to be found in some of the modern encyclicals. This was most
certainly true also of the encyclicals about international relations,
and of those about the place of the family in the State, and of those
about Christian marriage. Those great Christian solutions had been
ignored, largely because of the neo-paganism of the modern world and the
schismatic dissensions of Christendom. No matter how great the proffered
truth might be, or how great the world's need of it, there were large
numbers of people all over the world so prejudiced that, if it came to
them from the head of the Catholic Church, they would avert their faces
and stop their ears, and refuse either to read or to consider it. This,
quite apart from any religious grounds, was a tragic mistake on
political and moral grounds; for, whatever its human faults and blunders
in the past may have been, the Church was the one institution in the
world which concerned itself with the administration of the moral law,
and regarded all sociological questions, first and foremost, from the
ethical standpoint.

And now, all that the survivors could do was to keep one small light
burning, one small light to act as a "remembrance", where the spoken
word was so inadequate.

The only spoken words, in fact, while Evelyn was unpacking, expressed
very little of what was passing through their minds.

"Odd, isn't it?" said Mark, "how all those vanished moderns omitted the
real richness and depth of life from their reports, and how the ancients
managed to include it all. The modern world missed the real lesson of
the Renaissance. Compare Leonardo, for instance, with Darwin; and
compare Leonardo's command of both the scientific and the aesthetic
imagination with Darwin's frank confession that the details of his work
had gradually robbed him of all power to appreciate the things that
count for most in humanism. One doesn't have to be a Christian to see
the change for the worse there. It's quite clear on purely humanistic
grounds."

"I suppose specialization had something to do with it, the kind of
specialization that 'knows more and more about less and less'. It was a
lad at Princeton who uttered that great truth, though statesmen and
bishops passed it off as their own afterwards."

"It was specialism that led to the divorce of science from natural
philosophy, at the end of the nineteenth century. Like bad artists, its
exponents assumed that the photographic correctness of their minutiae
gave them a kind of superiority in far more important things, which had
been magnificently stated in the older 'parables'. And then, after all,
it turned out that their minutiae--their atoms and electrons and all the
rest of the new scholastic formulas were themselves only 'parables', or
as they preferred to call them, 'mathematical abstractions', convenient
representations of a truth which could never be seen as it really was,
by any finite mind. And, all the time, they went on explaining all the
best things away by deriving them from something less than themselves;
biology, ethics, psychology--in all of them they forgot the splendid
saying of the old Greek that if you want real explanations you must
reverse the order of nature and look at the last term of the series, not
at the first. In other words you must look at man, and where he is
going, not at the ape or the primal slime or the cloud of hydrogen gas
in which the solar system originated."

"I remember," she said, "how the 'psychology' we used to be taught
maddened me with its assumptions. It reduced everything that ever
seemed worth while to nothing; and it took it for granted, with the most
appalling conceit, that its anaemic little textbooks and outlines had
somehow registered an advance on the psychology of _Oedipus Rex_ or
_Macbeth_. The very latest, of course, was always the best. We had one
lecturer with a Slavonic beard and a prognathous jaw. All the faculty
used to sit at his feet with eyes of frog-like adoration, and we used to
troop into the room like lambs to hear him wipe out the spiritual
experience of two thousand years, and give us the nightmares of a
sanitary inspector in exchange."

Among the personal "treasures" which Evelyn had been unpacking, there
was one small object which at this moment caught Mark's eye. It was a
slim book, bound in vellum, which Evelyn's cousin had sent from Quebec,
as a memorial of her wedding there--a pretty little "marriage-service"
bearing the initials of the bride and bridegroom in silver on the white
cover. Mark rose and picked it up. The beauty of the noble old
words--the promises that were meant to be kept--stole into his mind like
a healing music as he read them.

"If they had only known," he said, "if they had only known the beauty
and truth of it. There was nothing in the greatest poetry of the world
to touch it; and it was all the greater because it sometimes involved
hardships and sacrifice. If they had only known. 'The broken heart and
the unbroken word' might have been the most priceless gifts that any
redeeming spirit could have made to our bewildered and pledge-breaking
generation."

Evelyn stood up at his side to look at the passage he was reading. He
put his arm round her and pointed to the responses which, according to
the rites of the church, the bride and bridegroom were to speak. They
were moved to it by no plan of their own; but they began, in low voices,
to read them aloud, as though they were making their own responses,
there and then. It was Mark himself who began to read the first
question--inserting his own and Evelyn's name. Then he suddenly found
that the quiet words were coming from what was deepest in him, subduing
his voice, and misting his eyes, so that he could hardly speak or see.

     "_Mark, wilt thou take Evelyn here present, for thy lawful wife,
     according to the rite of our holy mother, the Church?_"

     "_I will._"

     "_Evelyn, wilt thou take Mark here present, for thy lawful husband,
     according to the rite of our holy mother, the Church?_"

     "_I will._"

     "_I, Mark, take thee, Evelyn, to my wedded wife, to have and to
     hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for
     poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part; and
     thereto I plight thee my troth._"

And, as they said the words, they knew that there was nothing more that
they could say on the morrow. They had been moved to it by no plan of
their own, but this was their real wedding, and the end for which there
and now those twain were met.

     _With this ring I thee wed. With my body I thee worship...._




CHAPTER XXV


Immediately after breakfast next morning, they prepared their picnic
basket for Paestum. They stopped the car at the entrance to the church,
and went in to confirm, before the altar, what they had already promised
on the previous night. Among the passages they had marked for reading
together, were some of those beautiful old Latin responses which are the
best answer to the charge that the world grew grey and the roses lost
their colour and fragrance when Paganism made way for Christendom.
Substitute Calvinism for Christendom, and the roses might well die; but
they are fresh with morning dew in this cry from Joyous Gard, which is
the central citadel of the Civitas Dei.

     _Introibo ad altare Dei._ I will go unto the altar of God.

     _Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam._ To God who giveth joy to
     my youth.

     _Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea._ For thou, God, art my strength.

     _Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam, ipsa me deduxerunt._ Send
     forth thy light and thy truth. They have led me.

     _Et introibo ad altare Dei._ And I will go unto the altar of God.

     _Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam._ To God who giveth joy to
     my youth.

The day they spent at Paestum was as perfect as a lyric from the Greek
Anthology. They travelled through a country which had been so long a
wilderness that it had nothing to remind them of disaster. Wherever they
looked they saw beauty, in that wide and level land of whispering reeds
between the mountains and the sea, where the Greek colonists from
Sybaris had once built them a city. The city had long vanished. Herds of
black buffaloes stood gazing across the marshy hollows as the lovers
drove southward, and then, suddenly, there were roses; and, on a stretch
of dry sunburnt wilderness, the tawny Doric columns of the temple of the
sea-god and its two radiant companion temples, in all the loneliness of
their own massive survival from a vanished world, stood up against the
dark amethyst of the distant hills. Snow still covered the distant
crags, while dark red snapdragons blossomed in the crevices of cornice
and architrave; and when Mark saw Evelyn standing between those massive
double rows of fluted columns, with her shining head and slender body
poised like a vision of youth immortal, he could have believed that the
gates of distance had indeed been opened, and that the modern girl, in
her sailor-like attire, was an avatar of the Greek. It was as though
Nausicaa herself had returned, in all her breathing human sweetness,
from the land of the undying.

Now, for the first time, he understood that glory of the Greek world,
and why men had loved it better than all the frowning majesty of Rome.
The smile of the immortals is not less majestic than their power, but
its radiance makes men happier; and, for all the austerity of those
massive columns, there was a radiance in their beauty which touched the
heart with love as well as with awe, and stirred the spirit as well as
the senses.

They had their wedding feast in the Temple of Ceres, among those
tapering columns of travertine, mellowed by age to a russet gold.
Beautiful little green lizards eyed them and rustled away among the dry
grasses and hot fragments of stone. Jackdaws wheeled and chattered
overhead, and wondered if they dared swoop on the remains of their
feast. They drank Falernian, but they were trying it for the first time,
and they thought it had been overpraised by the poets. So they made a
libation of what was left, to the daughter of Ceres; and, afterwards, as
Eve stood on the higher level, Mark lifted up his hands to help her down
to his own, then changed his mind and held her by her brown ankles, and
took off her canvas shoes to kiss her bare feet.

They explored Paestum for another hour. Then they went down to the sea,
half a mile away, and swam out through the shallower sunlit green into
the colder and deeper blue. They dried themselves in the sun and the
sand, and returned to Paestum and, caring not a straw for the
anachronism, poured their tea from a thermos flask into green enamelled
cups. After tea, they lay on a grassy knoll where acanthus grew wild
instead of being carved on stone; and, as they lay, hand in hand,
looking up at the blue heavens, a sky-lark made lyrics for them. There
was a scent of roses in the salt air, for there were roses all about
them. Paestum of late had recovered the lost pride of which the poets
had sung for nearly two thousand years; and to-day, as two thousand
years ago, the rose of roses crowned their feast; for they found, as
they had already found a score of times, that their friends, the poets,
who so hauntingly lived on in memory, had the strangest power of
counteracting the havoc that had been wrought by the materialists. They
could repeople a wilderness; and they were the happiest of guests. They
could appear when they were called upon, and make the prettiest of
speeches and propose the prettiest toasts, and crowd the feast with
friends; and then, when they were not wanted, they would retire, finger
on lip.

It was Mark who called on Landor, to whom Evelyn had not hitherto been
introduced, and it was Landor who made the prettiest speech of all:--

    "Paestum, thy roses long ago
      Were prized, the rest above:
    Twice in the year 'twas theirs to blow
      And braid the locks of Love."

They lay side by side and hand in hand, looking up at the blue sky as he
repeated it. Then they turned to one another; Mark folded her in his
arms, and her lips met his own.

At this moment all the poets discreetly vanished, with the exception of
Theocritus, who merely retired behind a fallen column and murmured
something in Greek to a small green lizard.

It sounded like this [Greek]:

      Hs hoi men chloeroisin iainomenoi meleessin
        alllois psithyrizon;
    anistato phrios eun.




CHAPTER XXVI


Not until their long and happy day was nearly over did either of them
allow the thought of that ugly episode at Ravello to spoil their
pleasure.

Mark hoped that it would fade into the past now, as one of those
mysterious episodes which, being inexplicable, are better forgotten.
But, on the way home, it was clear, from Evelyn's face, that the shadow
had returned, and that she was dreading what they might encounter.

"We needn't stay at Ravello," said Mark. "We have all the world before
us where to choose, as Mr. Milton said, on a former occasion. We might
go to your alternative--Assisi; but I must confess I hate the idea of
being driven out of our southern Paradise."

"I love the place," she said, "and ever since I lighted our lamp in the
church, I felt that Ravello was my home. And now, it's yours, too. It's
no use, it's never any use, running away from fear. It would only follow
us, unless we can defeat it. But it doesn't make it any the less
frightening. There's something quite abnormal about it."

He laid his hand on hers and said, "Eve, you are taking this thing in
the wrong way. You are quite right about defeating fear. But you talk of
the ugly episode as though it were something far more than it really is,
something out of the natural order of things. We must pull ourselves
together, or we shall be imagining all sorts of ghostly terrors. I see,
exactly, what has been happening to your thoughts, and mine during the
last few weeks. The whole world, now that we are alone in it, has become
immeasurably more mysterious than it was before. All sorts of quite
simple things have begun to look cryptic and inexplicable. In the old
days we could leave the inexplicable to be explained by other people;
but, when we have to cope with it ourselves, we can't evade the touch of
mystery on every side. There's nothing new about it. Everything in the
universe is and always has been mysterious. What could be more
mysterious than you are yourself? I've often found an abyss opening
under my own feet when I've lain awake and simply asked myself what I
mean when I call myself 'I'. We don't know what anything is, or where it
comes from or where it is going to. Birds are mysterious; flowers are
mysterious, and the way grass grows is absolutely creepy when you have
time to think about it. There were moments before I found you, when I
looked at trees, those mysterious monsters waving a hundred arms in the
air, with something like panic. Only a flash, of course. It came and
went."

He was talking to distract her thoughts. He could see that the episode
at Ravello had made her afraid of some new discovery on their return;
but he really did also feel that their isolation in the world had made
everything about them more mysterious, and had thus abnormally
heightened the effect of that mysterious episode on Evelyn. She--on the
other hand--had a more definite dread, which she could not explain to
him.

"In the old days," Mark went on, "there were plenty of scientific people
to explain all these things away in a mist of words. But the plain truth
is, that their explanations explained nothing. The scientific folk were
much more in the dark than most of us realized. They didn't know what
matter is, or what thought is; and still less could they explain why
anything should be in existence at all. The only natural thing, the only
really reasonable state of affairs (if I may be Irish for the moment)
would have been complete nothingness--that there should be nothing at
all, absolutely nothing. But we are here in existence, surrounded by an
immense universe, which, from the point of view of reason--ought not to
be here at all. Its existence is against reason. It defies reason. It's
the fundamental paradox of things. Nature--ultimately--isn't natural."

"Exactly," said Evelyn. "And that is what frightens me. Ultimately, it's
all supernatural."

"But it has always been so," he said, "only in the crowds we didn't feel
it so keenly. Now that we are alone in the world, we're intensely
conscious of it. Nothing has changed; and we mustn't let our isolation
change our way of looking at things too much. We're not meant to focus
our minds on ultimate explanations. The way in which the human will can
lift the human hand is as uncanny as seeing a dead man rise and walk,
only we are used to the one and we've never seen the other. And this
ugly episode at Ravello, mysterious and senseless as it seems, has
nothing more uncanny about it than that. We'd got used to the idea of
being alone and at peace, and it was abruptly and horribly broken. It's
some brutal fellow-survivor, a man brutalized by the war, and driven mad
by his own isolation, who just happened to be passing our way. That's
all."

Evelyn shook her head. "It's part of something bigger than that. It
frightens me. Our little bit of Paradise has been invaded by exactly the
same thing that has wrecked every other Paradise. Why is it that men
could never be kind to one another? Why did every attempt to bring peace
on earth fail? What was it that broke down all the Leagues and
Federations that men could contrive, although they knew their failure
would make a hell of earth? Why have all the wise for generations said
that only a profound change of heart could enable us to build a better
world; and why, in spite of all those rivers of tears and blood, have
there always been so many obstacles, malicious obstacles, wickedly
selfish obstacles, to the goodwill that might have made everyone on
earth so infinitely more happy?"

"That's the darkest mystery of all," he said, "and the oldest of all.
Men made their schemes, and up to the last, they thought that, if they
could produce the perfect scheme, it was bound to work perfectly. They
ignored the most terrible reality in the universe, the reality of
wickedness in the heart and mind of man. Christendom fought it; and
sometimes succumbed to it. But--when she convinced men of sin--she held
the key to the mystery. When Europe lost its religion, it lost the only
key, and the only means of coping with a reality which threatened the
existence of the civilized world."

"I used to believe in Abt Vogler," said Evelyn. "'_The evil is null, is
nought, is silence implying sound._' I know better now. It's a reality,
and like the other realities, ultimately, it's----"

She hesitated and shivered.

"It's the work of man," he said.

"Its agents here are flesh and blood," she returned, "but it's beyond
nature, all the same. Men have been possessed by it, as no brute beast
was ever possessed. Books and pictures have been possessed by it.
Statesmen have been possessed by it. What else can explain the
blasphemies against humanity, and the tortures and cruelties and
persecutions, which make the innocence of the wild beast almost
Paradisal in comparison with the wickedness of man. It is exactly as St.
Paul described it--a warfare against the spirit of evil in high places.
But he didn't mean kings and queens, or even dictators. He meant the
powers of darkness."

It was rapidly growing dark when they reached Ravello. While Mark was
putting the car away, Evelyn told him that she was going into the church
for a moment, and asked him to join her there. She thought that, as
their little lamp was so near, she would like to say, "Thank you, for a
happy day" with her evening prayers, in what she now regarded as their
own chapel.




CHAPTER XXVII


That night it was Mark who, alternatively, lay awake and dreamed.

At about three in the morning he stretched out his hand to make sure
that Evelyn was still sleeping beside him; and he found--or
dreamed--that she was no longer there.

He seemed to remember that she had whispered to him--an hour ago--that
she had been dreaming about the light in the Cathedral. Perhaps she was
walking in her sleep again. Apparently, she had dressed, and gone down.
Immediately he, too, dressed and went down to the stone-paved hall. It
was very dark; he could only vaguely distinguish an uncurtained window;
but he became aware--perhaps by some faint sound or cat-like step behind
him--that he was not alone. He turned sharply, and as he did so there
was a faint click. A tingling sensation crept through his brain and
seemed to concentrate in his eyes. He could see nothing--not even the
faint glimmer from the uncurtained window. He was not sure whether a
sudden blindness had overcome him, or whether the night had grown
blacker. He groped his way across the hall and found the electric
switch. It had no effect. He felt for the door and found it open, but he
could see no glimmer of light outside--not a star in the sky, not even
one thing darker than another. He brought his hand within an inch of his
face, and he could not see it. He remembered the hideous threat of the
enemy--_we have weapons that will leave them neither eyes to see nor
ears to hear_.

"They've blinded me," he gasped, hardly knowing that the thought had
escaped into words. But it was heard and answered.

"Not yet," said a low grating voice. "You may recover your sight, on
conditions. Tell me where she is."

"Why do you ask? What right have you to ask that question?" Then, in the
same low grating tone, as of one stone grinding against another, the
voice packed into three brief sentences the essential iniquity that had
wrecked civilization.

"_You possess something which I do not possess. I have the power to take
it. Therefore I intend to take it._"

It was as simple as that; as simple as a fable; as simple as the
doctrine of _Mein Kampf_.

"You will not find her here," said Mark.

"I am going to look for her," said the voice, and Mark cried out to it
in desperation.

"Give me back my sight."

"On the contrary," said the voice. There was another faint click, and
again a tingling sensation crept through Mark's brain. It seemed to numb
the sides and the lower part of his face. His lower jaw dropped as in
paralysis, and he could not articulate. Then everything became blank.

It may have been half an hour before he began to struggle back to life.
It was certainly more than an hour before he could grasp, even faintly,
what had happened. Everything still appeared to be pitch-dark and, as he
painfully tried to raise himself, it flashed upon him, like a bullet
through the brain, that something must have happened to Evelyn. He found
it was almost impossible to move, and his arms and legs were so numbed
that he felt as if he were still paralysed. He tried to pray for help;
and found that he could at least articulate. It was a strange prayer
that he made. He seemed to realize that no miracle was to be expected,
but--only some kind of wide resolution of discords. "God help us," it
went up from some great depth within him. "If it is possible along the
roads of law, smoothe away these difficulties." And, as he prayed it, he
somehow felt that it could and would be done. Then he relapsed into
semi-consciousness for half an hour. After this, gradually, the power of
movement seemed to return. He caught a faint glimmer of light from a
window. The numbness gradually left his brain and facial muscles. He
rose to his feet, tottering a little. He groped his way out through the
door and past the courtyard, feeling the Saracenic stonework with his
hands, and then--more stumblingly up the avenue of cypresses, blundering
into tree-trunks, and continually losing his sense of direction; so
that, once, when he thought he was touching the pillars of the entrance
gates, he discovered that he was feeling round the ruined wall of the
old Saracenic watch-tower.

And then--still half-dazed--he had found the electric torch in his
pocket and groped his way out and was moving more quickly, across the
piazza. Everything there was utterly silent, and there was a new
emptiness about it that struck him cold. He went through the bronze
doors into the church. It was quite dark within. He could see only the
little ruby flame before the invisible altar. He called, in a hushed
whisper that seemed to carry further and hold more than any
cry--"_Eve!_" and the whisper came back to him from the walls like a
cold breath. "Eve! Eve! Eve!" he called, not expecting her to answer
now, but out of his own bursting heart. The wavering light of his
electric torch glanced from side to side, momentarily illuminating now
some fragment of old mosaic, or picking out on the walls one of the
coloured Stations of the Cross.

He caught the flash of marble--the six spiral columns of the ancient
rostrum, and the crouching marble lions from whose backs they rose.

He examined more closely with his electric torch everything in the
neighbourhood of the dark bench where she used to kneel. Hitherto he had
been looking for Evelyn herself; now he was looking only for some clue,
however faint, which might help him to trace her. The only unusual thing
which he noticed was that a missal which had been left on the bench by
some former owner, and had lain there on their various visits, was now
lying open and face downwards on the ground. He felt instinctively that
she had brushed it from its place in some startled movement, possibly
when the unknown assailant appeared. The little religious pictures which
had been tucked into its pages were scattered around it on the floor,
like the feathers which show where a hawk has fallen on a white dove. He
felt sure that, in any normal circumstances, Evelyn would have picked
them up and replaced them.

As he went out through the bronze doors, the light of his torch fell on
one of those tiny picture cards which had evidently been dropped there,
separately. He tried to picture how it had happened; and the blood
rushed through his veins at the thought suggested by some old story of
his childhood--that it had been dropped there designedly. He picked it
up and recognized that it was one of the pictures that had been in
Evelyn's own missal, when he had glanced at it, a week or two ago. It
was a picture of the crucifix at Assisi, from which, according to the
ancient legend, the lips of the Crucified had whispered to St. Francis
the words which were printed in Italian above the picture "_Va,
Francesco, e ripara la mia casa che, come vedi, va in rovina_." (Go,
Francis, and rebuild my house, which, as thou seest, is falling into
ruin.) Mark had been moved by this sentence when he first saw it; for,
in this new ruin of the whole world of men, they had a new poignancy.

Under the picture there were some more words printed in
Italian--_Crocifisso che parl a S. Francesco, Assisi_, and, under the
word _Assisi_, pointing to it, there was a small arrow indented in the
card as by a finger-nail. He felt sure that this mark had not been there
when he saw it last.

Mark tried to re-construct in his mind what had happened. She had been
kneeling at her bench, when something startled her. After that, he
supposed that she must have been confronted by her unknown assailant,
and something must have been said to her that made her certain of two
things. First, that she would not be able to communicate directly with
Mark; and secondly, that--if she escaped--the house in Sorrento was no
longer a possible meeting-place. The tiny picture of the crucifix was
slightly crumpled, as though it had been twisted in her hand. He
imagined her standing in the dark church (it had not been so dark then
as it was now) confronting the unknown assailant. She had slipped the

picture card out of her missal. It had an indented line around it, so
that even in the dark, she would be able to distinguish between the top
and the lower part. She knew exactly where the word _Assisi_ came, at
the lower corner, on the right; and she had taken advantage of the very
fear with which her fingers were twisting to make that arrowhead by
digging a finger into the card. She had a plan, therefore, of escape;
and knowing that Sorrento was now--for some reason--a closed door, she
was pointing to Assisi, the very place they had discussed as an
alternative to Ravello.

He was not sure how much of this was reasoning and how much was merely
the desperate hope which insists on picturing possibilities when the
reason has no ground to work on. But there was enough reason in it to
make him determine that, if he could find no other clue, to Assisi he
would go.

But he must make quite sure that he was overlooking nothing here. He had
a ghastly fear that he might find her lying dead. He searched through
the silent village, and the farm; and again, as the day was breaking,
through all the garden, and the old red watch-tower. He examined the
dusty road leading down to Amalfi, and he discovered the tracks of a
large car which must have gone that way since their return from Paestum;
for the tracks of the small car had been obliterated at the first
corner, where the large car had passed over them and left the clear
imprint of its own tread. He felt certain that Evelyn must have been
taken away in the car, and that she was counting on being able to escape
later. He began to catch glimpses of her purpose. The motive for getting
him away from Ravello was obviously that they might throw the pursuer
completely off their track. But the clue on the card was so slight that
he did not dare to stake everything on it. He went into the house,
therefore, and left a note on her writing-table, worded carefully, so
that only Evelyn would understand:

     _I am looking for you at our only other alternative, where I think
     you have gone. If I fail to find you there I shall return a
     fortnight from to-day._

He added the second sentence and dated it, to prevent their crossing one
another on the journey. Then, without further delay, he set out in the
small cream-coloured car. At first he had some wild thought of following
the tracks of the larger car to its destination; but there were long
hard stretches on the winding road to Sorrento where the tracks faded
out, and he felt sure that, further on, it would be impossible to follow
them. Nevertheless, it was his only direct clue, and--as far as he
could--he meant to follow it. At Sorrento, in spite of what he took to
be her cancellation of her former injunction that, if ever they were
separated, he should look for her at the Admiral's house, he intended,
as a precaution, to carry it out before going on to Assisi. To his
amazement, when he reached the entrance, the tracks of the large car
turned quite clearly into the private road to Sir John Roscoe's house;
he could see no sign that it had come out again. Mark left his own car
at the gate, drew his revolver, and went quietly up the drive, under the
shadow of the lemon-trees. The green shutters were all closed on this
side of the low white house; but the big car--a forty horse-power
Alata--was standing in front of the door. Mark went up to the door,
tried it, and found it locked. Before exploring further he carefully
punctured the two front tyres of the Alata with one of those sharp
adjuncts of the pocket-knife for which he had hitherto discovered no
use. He discovered a most valuable one now. The quiet, escaping hiss of
the air assured him that there would be considerable delay before the
Alata could be used again; for there was only one spare tyre.

Then, he went round quietly to the front of the house, through the
thicket of shrubs that smelt like lemon-verbena. His mind ached with the
memory of his former visit there with Evelyn. The door from the terrace
into the house, which had been shut then, was wide open now. He stole
in, cautiously, and found in the first room he entered no sign of any
recent visitor. There was a thin coating of dust on polished tables, and
a ghostly glimmer of light on the dust-covers of chairs; but no sign
that anything had been disturbed since the Admiral had left it. In the
dining-room, however, he discovered, on a side-board, a coffee-pot and
two cups, which had evidently been used that morning; for what was left
in the pot was still tepid. There were used plates, too, on the
dining-room table which indicated that two persons had made a light
breakfast there. His blood ran cold at the thought of Evelyn in the
clutches of--he knew not what or whom.




CHAPTER XXVIII


Several times in her childhood, Evelyn had walked in her sleep; but it
was only the stress of the last few weeks that had induced the two later
occasions, at Rome and Ravello. She had some confused dream about the
smashing of the lamp in the Cathedral, and its replacement, which made
her think she must go out and see that all was well. She had only half
prepared for this. The sailor-suit, as Mark called it, had been easily
slipped on; but her feet were bare; and, as she went up the cold aisle,
she was on the verge of waking. For some time, however, she knelt in a
half-trance at her usual place, near the chancel, looking at the tiny
flame which was never to go out.

The sound that startled her was not a footstep or the opening of a door.
Both of these sounds she had heard with complete tranquillity, in her
half-dream, taking them to mean that Mark had discovered her absence and
was following her. In fact, she had actually been moving a little
further along the bench, making room for him to kneel at her side, when
she heard her name pronounced in a low grating voice that made her start
to her feet and awoke her. (It was this sudden movement that brushed the
missal from the bench beside her, and scattered its pictures on the
floor, where Mark found them, later, when he was frantically hunting for
a clue.)

She could not see the features of her interlocutor, though he stood
facing her; but, even in the darkness, she seemed to be aware of the
penetrating fanaticism of his eyes. The low grating voice she knew only
too well. It was the voice of Mardok.

"At last I have found you," he said. "You will come away with me now."

She tried to interrupt him, by telling him--quite conventionally--how
matters stood between herself and Mark; but, as the words left her lips,
she felt, with a paralysing fear, that they had become strangely
irrelevant. She knew, instinctively, that something had happened to
Mark; and, for a moment, her heart failed her. She remained silent and
motionless as a bird hypnotized by a snake.

"I gather," the low grating voice renewed, "from what I read in your
diary while I was waiting for you, that you regard yourself as married."

"What have you done to him?" she whispered. Then, suddenly, she called
aloud, again and again. "Mark! Mark! Mark!"

Her cry, in the silence of that lonely place, must have echoed far and
wide. The agony of it must have wrenched an answer from anyone capable
of hearing or replying. But Mardok made no effort to restrain her; and
the silence, as the echoes died away, closed in again, so implacably,
that it seemed to clothe him with a more formidable power.

"You have killed him," she cried.

"Certainly not," said Mardok, with all the blandness of a dictator
discussing his kindly feelings towards the helpless. "He is too useful
for that. His future depends entirely on your own choice, your own free
will. I should explain that, since we last parted, I have been on a long
journey. It was necessary for me to discover the extent of the
destruction. I visited Berlin and Moscow, as well as Paris; and it was
the same everywhere. You have therefore become more necessary to me
than ever, and I began to search for you as soon as I returned to Rome.
You probably thought I was dead. Possibly you hoped I was dead."

"I went back to look for you," she said, "as soon as I could find a
boat. But you had gone. I thought you had been drowned."

She was sure in her heart that the only hope, for herself or Mark, was
to propitiate Mardok. Her desire to do this was conveyed, with feminine
subtlety, in the softening tone of her voice.

"Would it have made any difference," he said, "if you had known that I
was alive? Would you still--after I had offered you so much--would you
still have chosen as you have? You think perhaps you would. But I tell
you it is not so. I should have claimed you, because I had the power to
claim you; and all women, in the end, prefer power to weakness."

She appeared to assent to this last statement, and she was not lying.
There were higher forms of power than the physical or even the
intellectual. But the propitiatory effect on Mardok revealed to her, as
by a lightning-flash, the blind spot in his brain.

"Marriage, in the world as it used to be," he said, "was always a very
elastic institution. In the world as it is now, there can be neither
marriage nor giving in marriage. No contract that you have made can be
valid, for it was made in ignorance. Pledges are necessarily subject to
varying circumstances, especially when they deprive others of their
opportunity. You do not pretend, or wish to pretend, that there is any
binding quality in this marriage of yours."

"It was ratified here," she said, hardly realizing--till the words were
out--how they would infuriate him.

"Now that the world has been swept clean of its idiotic superstitions,"
he replied, "we can estimate the real virtue of that. There is nothing
here but wood and stone. There is no power in the world now above mine.
I have the right, therefore, that has always belonged to supreme power,
in any state, to annul any contract you have made."

He was mad, of course; but that was not quite all. He focused in his own
person the madness that had walked in the high places of civilization
and had destroyed the world. The words he used were their words.

Then, with a hint of passion that seemed to be absolutely sincere, he
once more packed everything that had been wrong with the modern world
into three sentences, spoken very slowly, and in that low grating tone
which was like the grinding of granite on granite.

"I will be plain with you," he said. "This man acquired something before
my own opportunity came. I have the power to take it; and therefore I am
going to take it."

"Must it all depend on power?" she murmured again. She saw, more clearly
now, that she must take every advantage of this blind spot; and her
remark was instantly effective. She shivered to feel him drawing nearer
through the dark.

"I was enchanted with much that I found in your diary," he said. "The
account of your dream, for instance, about the house at Sorrento. I will
take you there. It is a far more Paradisal place than Ravello. That is
where you and I will begin the world again."

It was while he was talking in this vein that she slipped the picture of
the crucifix at Assisi out of her prayer-book and, with her finger-nail,
made that tiny arrow on it, pointing to the word _Assisi_. She was
already forming her plans, preparing to go away with Mardok, in the hope
that she might escape later and rejoin Mark at their "only alternative",
to which their enemy would have no clue. She hoped that in this way he
would be thrown completely off the track. She hoped that, if she could
gain time, Mark would escape; but, at all costs, she wanted to prevent
him from following her to Sorrento now, for she knew that Mardok's boast
was not an idle one, and that Mark would be powerless against his
weapons.

Mardok desired, apparently, to convince her of the truth of his
theories. He did not want a rebellious slave. He wished her to share his
"kingdom" as he called it, and though her will was to be absorbed in his
own, it was to be willingly absorbed. At the same time, exactly as in
the old political tyrannies, he seemed to feel that his strongest hold
upon her would be to keep her lover alive and hint at the ghastly things
that might be done to him, if she did not rejoicingly accept the
conditions. He told her that Mark was his prisoner, and that he was
lying unconscious in the house. He would recover consciousness in an
hour or two. He had suffered no real injury. It was one of Mardok's less
lethal weapons that had put him to sleep. "I will take you to a window,"
he said, "through which you can hear him breathing."

As they went out of the church, she dropped the little Assisi picture in
the porch, and believed that Mardok had not noticed it. He gave no
obvious sign; but a moment or two later he warned her--in veiled, but
unmistakable terms, that if she disobeyed him, the result might be fatal
to Mark. Then he took her to a window, opening into the stone-paved hall
of the Palazzo Rufolo, and bade her listen. It was quite dark within,
but she could hear the steady somnolent breathing of her unconscious
lover. She thought that, if only she could gain time for him, he might
escape. In fact, her chief anxiety was to get Mardok away, lest he
should change his mind and decide to kill.

She told Mardok that she would go with him willingly to Sorrento, and he
took her to his car, which was standing in a dark side-street. When she
had obediently taken her place, next to the driver's seat, he shut the
door and, to her surprise, strode off into the piazza. She tried all the
doors of the car and found that they were locked; but, in any case, she
would not have attempted to escape at the moment; for she believed
that--if she did--he would certainly have killed Mark. She wanted to get
Mardok well away from Ravello, before she attempted anything further.

In a few minutes he returned with a rug over his arm.

"I borrowed this from your own car," he said. "My big rug at the back is
too clumsy for the front seat; and I've had no occasion hitherto for any
other."

He gave her no hint that he had really gone back to look at the card she
had dropped in the church porch. He had examined it, observed the arrow
pointing to Assisi, wondered with a chuckle if it were intentional
and--not dreaming for a moment that Mark would ever be able to pick it
up--had let it fall again where he found it. The faintest suggestion of
a sardonic smile, as he arranged the rug around her, made her heart sink
with the feeling that something was hidden behind this unusual
politeness. It was only a blind instinct; but it filled her with a new
fear.

On the way down to Amalfi, she tried to think of further ways of gaining
time. She wondered if she could obtain a weapon and kill him. A woman
had opportunities, especially in the relationship which he desired of
her. The death of Mardok floated before her in a mist of whirling
thoughts, while she sat shivering at his side, on the front seat of the
car, and he murmured his love-talk like a great panther.

Theirs was to be no common love, on the old conventional pattern. They
were to share the secrets of the life-force and shape the world to come.
He tried to tempt her with promises that she took to be indications of
his madness, though some of the strange statements he made were
undoubtedly true. He told her he had mastered some of the most recondite
secrets of life, and that he could promise her at least a hundred years
of youth and beauty. Before that time had expired, he said, there would
be more knowledge at his disposal, and they two would be the first of a
race of immortals, who would rule the planet like the gods of Olympus.

It sounded like madness to Evelyn; but it was the kind of madness that
had possessed several of the world's leaders in recent generations; and
the awful thing about it was that, on its own premises, it was
absolutely logical. She listened, playing up to him in her desperate
anxiety to gain time; and repeating, mechanically, that he must give her
time to think. Once, by hardly more than a slip of the tongue she raised
the question of right and wrong. She realized it was a mistake as soon
as the words were out, and it seemed to goad him into a frenzy.

"Hypocrisy!" he cried. "If I have the power, I have the right. Were not
all your political measures grounded on the powers of ten, fifty, a
hundred to one. Did not all your noble democracies act on that axiom,
even towards their own citizens? Oh, I studied them closely, closely,
for years. Did not your politicians bribe your electors at the expense
of the few? Did not your large towns absorb outlying parishes against
their will? Naboth's vineyard! Did not your railway companies drive
their lines across the poor man's field without the slightest
compensation? They paid for it? Well, if payment is everything, I too
will pay for it. Did not your own people exterminate the original owner
of your country--the Red Indian? Is there a single department of modern
life which considers right and wrong in such matters when _force
majeure_ can settle them? I must read Schopenhauer to you. The
life-force, the will to live, is like this," he said; and he gave her a
horrible imitation of some primeval monster advancing through the
universe by swallowing and absorbing everything it encountered. It was
indescribable. His mouth opened and shut; and he used both his arms as
though they were gigantic crab's claws, sweeping the whole world into
his maw. He looked absolutely insane while he did it, and again the
awful thing was that it was all absolutely logical, and that he was
merely focusing in himself a madness that had controlled the most
formidable armies and armaments of the modern world.

When they arrived at the Admiral's house, Mardok took her to a room on
the second floor where, he said, she might finish her thinking. The next
day, he said, he would expect her decision. He managed to hint, in the
subtlest way, that the future of Mark would depend on it; yet he
attached great importance, apparently, to the voluntary nature of her
choice. It was another characteristic instance of the blind spot in his
brain.

The "future of Mark", she gathered, was not necessarily a matter of life
and death; but something more appalling--his usefulness in a more or
less helplessly enslaved condition, a physical subjection from which he
could never escape. It was the old story of Europe, focused this time
into the sharpness of a fable by its embodiment in two or three persons.

By the next morning, Evelyn had her plan, though it was almost entirely
opportunist, and there seemed to be little hope of success with all the
material odds so overwhelmingly against her. But she had grasped the
first principle of strategy, and she would at least exact the fullest
possible advantage from any discoverable weakness in the enemy.

Moreover, she understood now that the blind spot in Mardok's brain--his
absolute unawareness of any moral law--was a real weakness, and she
concentrated upon it. Mardok himself would have felt no insecurity, no
danger, in the fact that he was unaware of any moral imperatives.
Indeed--if it had been pointed out to him--he would have mistaken this
unawareness for strength, as had so often happened in the world that had
gone. But now, when the issues were less complicated, it was clear
enough to Evelyn that it was the one factor by which he might be
defeated. At the very outset, it completely prevented him from seeing
that this newly attractive woman was not being her real self.

Very soon after it was light she heard Mardok moving about on the floor
below and--shortly afterwards--there was a faint fragrance of coffee. It
gave her the kind of excuse that would appeal to Mardok, the excuse she
needed, in her desperate anxiety to waste no time; and, in a few
minutes, she had joined him in the dining-room, where he had prepared a
light breakfast.

At the sound of her light step he turned abruptly, ready for her
antagonism, and confident of mastery. At the same time he was not in the
least surprised to see her smiling at him, from the doorway, a little
enigmatically. Nor, although her lover might even then be at the point
of death, was he in the least surprised at the casualness of her
attitude, or the apparent callousness of her opening remark. "I thought
I smelt coffee."

The remark pleased him, and she knew it pleased him. It gave him a warm
inner sense of satisfaction--almost physical--as though she had poured
him out a cup with her own hands. He responded at once by filling a cup
for her, almost as though he were rewarding a refractory pupil for her
return to normal common sense. She watched him as he did it. She fully
realized now that this moral blindness of his made her real self almost
invisible to him. The only question was whether there would be time for
her to play her part. At this point an idea flashed into her mind. Her
plan began to shape itself more and more clearly--suggested perhaps by
her vivid remembrance of that former occasion, off Capri, when she had
the advantage over him.

Her apparent submissiveness and anxiety to please had confirmed all
Mardok's theories of the essential nature of woman; and, though even he
was hardly prepared for the still more decisive confirmation which her
next move gave to these theories, it was so completely in accord with
them that he could have no possible ground for suspicion. Moreover, it
threw him completely off the scent. He might have expected some agitated
reference to the prisoner at Ravello. He was taken on his blind side,
however, and incidentally delighted when, after finishing her light
breakfast in apparently contented silence, she calmly turned to him and
said, "I studied myself in the looking-glass this morning. You said last
night that you had a wonderful scientific receipt. The woman you loved
would never grow wrinkled and old. She would have almost endless youth.
Is that really true?"

"It is really true," he said. "The last researches were completed--by a
strange irony--only a few days before the human race decided to
annihilate itself. I cannot say that it will be endless. But--a hundred
years hence your eyes----"

They shone at him as he spoke.

"Your eyes will still be clear, your teeth will still be as white as
almonds, your skin will still be like honey and milk, and your mouth as
like a flower as it is to-day. Afterwards? Well--in a hundred years from
now--who knows? We may have discovered the secret of immortality!"

"Immortality," she whispered; and for a moment there was a look in her
eyes which might have enlightened him. But it was not for Mardok to
suspect anything deeper. Mardok saw all that he could understand in that
look; but he took it merely as an indication of her desire for the
temporal results of his "scientific receipt". Her next remark seemed
completely to justify him.

"Before I accept your offer, will you do something to please me?" she
said.

"Make yourself willingly mine," he replied, "and we will go up to
Ravello together, and set the prisoner free."

"No," she said, "forget him. It will be kinder to let him know nothing.
If I'm to break with the past, we'll make it a clean break. After all,
I'd known him only for a few weeks."

They were in the verandah now, looking over the sea, towards the Island
of Capri. The dark amethystine coast looked astonishingly clear this
morning. It seemed hardly a mile away. She remembered something that
Admiral Roscoe had told her about this, and its meaning, when the wind
was from the north. It was a very light wind at present, but it seemed
to be breathing from that quarter.

"That's where I should like you to take me," she said, pointing to
Capri. "I should like to see the place where Tiberius amused himself. I
believe you are his re-incarnation. It will be amusing to hear what you
have to say to me among the ruins of your wicked old palace. Do you
remember the Goat's Leap--the precipice over which your slaves used to
be thrown for your diversion, a sheer drop of a thousand feet into the
green water? Do you remember how you laughed at their contortions and
the crazy faces they pulled before they went over the edge? Do you
remember--Tiberius?"

She spoke the last word softly, and in a semi-mocking tone which to the
ears of Mardok only enhanced its caressing appeal. She continued, in the
same vein of artificial rhapsody. She found, instinctively, the very
note that appealed to him and "amused" him, as other young women had
found it--again and again--for very different purposes, with those other
paranoiac masters of Europe. But Evelyn was able to do it only because
she was intensely overwrought, and Mardok mistook one kind of emotional
vibration for another. He was stirred by the almost hypnotic rhythm of
her voice, the curious automatic rhythm in which so many different
states of nervous tension may express themselves. For him, it was only
pleasing evidence of what he called "temperament". New England has
always had a touch of Deborah the prophetess in its Puritanical blood,
and he did not in the least suspect that there might be a touch of Jael
in it also, or that a voice so delicately Bostonian could be offering
him "butter in a lordly dish". What was gall and wormwood to herself was
honey of Hybla to Mardok. His eyes smouldered at her. There was
something very remote from his usual associations about that slim,
bare-footed, almost boyish figure in the sailor-like "slacks". There was
something indeed quite alien to his understanding in those troubled grey
eyes, under the cloud of bright hair; the pleasure-loving, yet almost
childishly innocent red mouth; and the straight little Greek nose, so
faintly and charmingly freckled, in just one small place about the size
of a fritillary's wing. It was all very remote indeed from any
suggestion of the hammer and the nail.

"It would be wonderful," she went on, "to have you making love to me out
there. We might find some marvellous unspoiled corner of one of your
palaces, Tiberius; perhaps the undiscovered one from which the secret
stair went down to the bathing-pool of the sirens, in the Blue Grotto.
No one has ever found that winding stair again; but, somewhere on the
cliffs above, we might find a corner of the old palace, with the little
green lizards asleep on it in the sun. I think I must have been one of
your dancing girls in the old days, Tiberius. Perhaps we could find a
smooth piece of the old marble floor--a few shining yards of _giallo
antico_; and I would dance on it again for you. Afterwards--I suppose--I
ought to lie at your feet on a leopard-skin. You should have a broken
pillar of blood-red serpentine for your throne, and you should tell me
of your old cruelties, Tiberius. Do you remember how the messenger came
one day from your pro-consul, in Judea, a certain Pontius Pilate--wasn't
that his name?--and how you laughed at his tale of that crazy King of
the Jews? And then--perhaps--we should grow tired of remembering
and--who knows?--we might find the secret stairs and go down to the
bathing-pool of the sirens, in the Blue Grotto."

She had thrown herself so completely into the crazy exaltation of the
part she was playing that she seemed to have become a flattering
feminine echo of his own megalomania. He replied in almost the same key.

"And then," he said, "in the Blue Grotto, where the _ragazzi_--the
little fisher lads used to dive for copper coins, so that--far down--you
could see their bodies turn to glistening silver, you who are so
beautiful a swimmer should dive for me, and I should see you floating up
to me like a slender crescent moon in a bath of liquid sapphire."

"Let us go," she said. "I will give you my answer there." Unquestioning,
unsuspecting and more than a little elated he followed her, as she led
the way through the garden to a steep rock-stair in the cliff. In a tiny
cove at the foot of this there was a small boat which had belonged to
Admiral Roscoe. Evelyn remembered something he had told her about it,
and the entrance to the Blue Grotto. She looked at the sky. The wind was
still light, but it was now clearly blowing from the north. The boat was
fitted with an auxiliary motor, and Mardok pronounced it to be in
working order. In five minutes, with Evelyn at the tiller and Mardok
acting as engineer, they had set off at a great pace across the strait
of dark blue sea, and in a very short time they were rocking under the
tall cliffs of Capri.

Mardok did not know the island well, and Evelyn had deliberately steered
for a point not far from the small and difficult sea-entrance to the
Blue Grotto. She noticed with satisfaction that one or two other small
boats were obtainable at no great distance. Their own boat was rather
large for the cramped and low-arched passage into that amazing
sea-cavern; but, by crouching level with the gunwale and ducking their
heads, they were just able to ferry it through with their hands. Even
so, the slight swell of the water, when they were half-way through,
jarred and splintered a row-lock against the top of the rocky vault. The
next moment, they were floating in the jewelled twilight of that
marvellous cavern or sea-temple, the _Grotto Azzura_. The greater part
of the arch through which they had entered lay under the water. It was
only through this gate of sea-water that the light could enter and, with
all the magic of the sea behind it, diffuse itself in that amazing
opalescent blue through the clear depths within, dyeing the rocks where
the ripples washed them, as though they had been washed with blue and
silver, and tingeing even the upper air of the great cavern with the
luminosity of a dark sapphire. It was this light from beneath the water
that gave the unearthly beauty to the scene, and transposed the natural
order of things so that you saw the dark fish moving over the blue and
silver sand in the depths more clearly than you could see your
neighbour's face in the upper air.

"It was this enchanting light from beneath the water," said Mardok,
"that in the old days made so wonderful a setting and earned so many
lire for the young Italian divers. But to-day the Blue Grotto will be
transfigured. Something more beautiful than it has ever seen before will
dive into those enchanted depths."

Evelyn's eyes were fixed on the low-arched entrance into the cave, as
though she were watching for something. A close observer might have
thought that her face lightened a little when the slight swell of the
sea momentarily filled the opening.

"You will keep your promise," Mardok was saying, "you, who are such a
beautiful swimmer, will dive for me?"

"And if I do," said Evelyn, "you will promise me that a hundred years
hence I shall still be a beautiful swimmer."

Mardok laughed. He was feeling very well pleased with himself, and the
way in which he had obviously supplanted his rival. Moreover, this young
woman was certainly going to amuse him.

"You shall be more than that," he said. "I have told you that you and I
will shape a new world, over which we shall reign together as no king
and queen have ever reigned."

"But there will be no subjects," said Evelyn.

"You need have no fear of that," said Mardok. "I have not found them
yet; but, somewhere in the world, I am convinced there are other
survivors. We shall find them, and they will serve us. We shall be as
gods." He said it. He used the very words.

She was still watching the entrance. The swell of the sea was clearly
increasing, and the opening was more often filled by it.

Mardok, however, was set upon her promise, and he thought her delay was
merely provocative. This was a point of view that he understood, and it
did not displease him.

"Tell me first," she said, "why you delayed to look for me, after you
had escaped from the diving-bell."

"I went to Berlin and Moscow," he said. "I wanted to discover whether
there were any other survivors. They were both cities of the dead; and
so were all the other cities I visited on the way."

She led him on with hero-worshipping questions to tell her of his
adventures on that journey. He might almost have thought that she was
in the mood of Desdemona, loving him for the dangers he had passed. He
liked to see her gazing at him, while he told that tale. She hung upon
his words as though she were enthralled. At last, after another glance
at the entrance, she remarked,

"And you began to look for me again only when you had discovered that
there was nobody else."

He laughed that low grating laugh of his; but he denied the charge. "I
am quite sure there are others," he said, "but they will be few and
isolated, as you were isolated, and therefore not easy to find. But
about you I had made up my mind from the beginning; and I could not run
the risk of losing you."

Her eyes were fixed on the entrance. During the last minute it had been
filled three times in quick succession.

"But you promised to give me your answer here," he said. "You must not
put me off any longer."

"I wonder how deep it is," she said. "This clear water is very
deceptive."

He chuckled to himself.

At the bottom of the boat there were half-a-dozen plump sandbags,
ballast for the rare occasions when a sail had been used. Quietly, while
they had been talking, Evelyn had succeeded in emptying most of them
over the side, as though she had been interested in watching the sand
turn to amethyst and silver as it sifted down. The last two bags she now
dropped overboard intact. "Look at your divers," she said. "The last of
the _ragazzi_."

She had lightened the boat with all this. It would ride still higher
when she had left it. She looked at the entrance again. It was filled
almost continuously now. The swell of the sea had evidently increased
outside as she had been hoping. The wind from the north had arrived, and
the Admiral had told her that, at such times, no boat could get through
the low-arched passage to the Blue Grotto.

"Well. You know the depth now," he said. "What is the answer?"

"I'm quite ready," she replied, and suddenly stood up.

Before he could speak, she had dived neatly towards the entrance and,
swimming deeply under the water, disappeared through the luminous arch.

It was several seconds before he grasped the fact that he had not only
been fooled but trapped. Even if the boat had not been riding several
inches higher, it would have been quite impossible to get through the
sea-choked passage. In his anger, he tried to do it, during a momentary
subsidence of the swell, but the next moment the bow of his boat was
heaved and crashed against the rocky vault with so many crunchings and
splinterings that he was afraid of foundering altogether. For a poor
swimmer like himself there was no way out until the sea subsided and the
wind changed. He was a prisoner in the Blue Grotto. It was only a
"temporary" imprisonment, but it might last for hours. The savagery
which it roused in him boded ill for his antagonists; but all he could
do at present was to let it accumulate.




CHAPTER XXIX


At the Admiral's house Mark had failed to find any further clue. He had
taken possession of the Admiral's binocular glasses and gone up to the
cliff promontory, under the flag-staff, from which he could see long
stretches of the coast in either direction, as well as long strips of
the road along the coast. He scanned these closely, and then--by
accident more than design--looked across the sea towards Capri. Half-way
across, to his amazement, he saw a small boat, with a lateen sail,
moving towards him. To the naked eye it was almost invisible, the merest
speck, no larger than a seagull. But through the glasses, he could see
the foam crisping round the bow. The curve of the sail concealed the
occupant or occupants. The fact that the boat was heading straight for
the point on which he stood made him hesitate for a moment as to whether
he should conceal himself and await its arrival, or try to find another
boat on the beach and meet it. He did not want to run the risk of seeing
it turn round and escape.

Suddenly the sail flapped in the wind, and he caught sight of the
occupant. There was only one; and he recognized her at once. He could
see the tensity of her attitude, and he leapt at once to the truth. She
had somehow escaped, and was in danger of pursuit. Instantly he dashed
down the steep rocky stair to the beach and pushed off in a small
fishing boat. Its large spread of sail rejoiced him as he hoisted it,
and in a quarter of an hour the combined speeds of the two boats had
brought them racing up within hail. Evelyn turned up into the wind, and
Mark came alongside. They hung there just long enough for Evelyn to
scramble into Mark's boat, which was the larger and faster; and then,
with hardly a word spoken--they were off and away for Sorrento.

Evelyn was shivering in the fold of his arm, as though she were chilled
to the bone by her wet clothes; but the sun was already hot, and he knew
by the pallor of her face that it was more the reaction from the strain
than anything else. He was afraid, every moment, that she was about to
faint; but she pulled herself together; and, when they reached the
beach, the colour had returned to her face.

He helped her up the rock-stair to the cliff-top, and told her that
their car was outside the gate, on the main road.

Her only reply was to seize him by the arm and draw him on more quickly.

"Quick," she gasped, as she scrambled into the car beside him. "Quick,
or he will be on our track again." Then, as the car moved off, she fell
against his shoulder, and buried her face there, crying, "Oh, thank God,
thank God."

It was not until they had passed Pompeii that she was able to talk
consecutively of what had happened; and she was still in mortal fear of
pursuit. Mark told her he was armed, but she swept this aside as futile.
"You know his weapons. And he has no scruples of any kind. He believes
that his power to do these things gives him the right to do them. When
he came upon me suddenly in the church at Ravello, he tried to make a
hideous bargain with me. He knew that we were married; and that was one
of the things that had roused his fiendish hate. It was just then, while
he was talking----"

"That you slipped a picture of a crucifix at Assisi out of your missal,"
said Mark, "and indented a tiny arrow on it with your finger-nail,
pointing to Assisi. This is the road. I'm still following the
instructions of your dream, you see."

"You found it then," cried Evelyn, "I thought it was hopeless." He
lifted her hand and kissed it.

"It was the dear old Admiral's house, after all, that brought us
together again," said Evelyn. "Perhaps dreams come true like prayers, by
roundabout ways. Have you ever noticed that about prayers?"

"Perhaps it's like music," said Mark. "The composer can't always solve a
problem directly; but he gets there at last by a series of modulations."

"We've been piloted, so far," said Evelyn, "and I hope we shall be
piloted to Assisi. I can't believe that we shall be followed there. It's
the last place that Mardok would think of. Everything came all right in
that nightmare, when St. Francis held out his hands. Faster, Mark."


They were quite certainly being piloted; but they did not yet know their
harbour.




CHAPTER XXX


They were well on their way to Orvieto when the thing from which they
thought they were now secure happened. For no apparent cause the engine
stopped; and nothing that Mark could do had the least effect upon it.
There was nothing visibly wrong. Evelyn was convinced that Mardok's
wireless apparatus was responsible, and that, as its range was limited,
he must be hard upon their track.

Their only course was to abandon not only the car, but also the main
road; for, on this, if Mardok was following them, they certainly would
be overtaken in a few minutes. A little way ahead, on the right, there
was a small road leading up into the hills, and they ran together up
this, hand in hand, until it began to wind through the wilder woods and
rocks of tufa among which they could take cover at a moment's notice, if
necessary. In two minutes or less, they heard that unmistakable sound of
the Alata--like the rushing of wings--along the main road below them. It
stopped somewhere near the place where they had left their own car.
Mardok was evidently investigating; but he did not delay long. In half a
minute they heard that formidable rushing sound again. It swept along
the main road towards Orvieto.

Mark drew a deep breath of relief; but Evelyn had no illusions about
this enemy.

"Quickly," she cried, leading the way up the hillside. "He will soon
know that he's on the wrong track, and then he'll come back and look for
us."

Their respite was longer than she expected. At the next turn of the road
they came upon some farm buildings, in which a mixed company of goats,
mules, and two hill-ponies, were busily pulling a rick of hay to pieces.
The ponies turned their heads and stared at Mark and Evelyn, then with a
whinny of pleasure trotted up to them. Mark had an apple in his pocket
which Evelyn divided between them, while he searched the buildings for
saddles and bridles.

They were soon mounted and clattering up into the hills, between crags
and oak-woods, at a pace which gave them a new hope of out-distancing
their pursuer along that rough road; for the ponies were obviously
enjoying the change from their masterless freedom, and Mark and Evelyn
were young enough to be infected by their high spirits.

In something over an hour, the winding road straightened itself out for
twenty yards and then came to an abrupt end, at the brink of a dark
abyss which might well have been one of the gulfs of the Inferno. It was
the prodigious crater of Balneum Regis, as awe-inspiring in its dark
blue depths as the Grand Canyon. From the centre of this profound
circular gulf there rose a towering hill, a monstrous column of volcanic
rock, crowned by a walled city, which clasped its topmost crags and
riveted itself into their savage clefts like a fortress. The only road
to this amazing city seemed to run along a narrow strait of rock
which--from where they stood--seemed hardly more than a knife-edge, with
a dizzy precipice on either side.

Mark caught at Evelyn's rein to draw her back from the overhanging and
crumbling promontory on which their ponies stood; and, at that very
moment, behind them, sweeping the road, they heard the rushing sound of
their pursuer's Alata. They turned swiftly to the right, and urged
their ponies down a rough declivity, intending to cross the narrow
rock-bridge to Balneum Regis, which was the only road now left to them.
It seemed like entering a trap, for there was no other way out; but it
was a trap which might be defended.

The last of the sun dropped behind the raw amethystine rampart of the
hills, and the air darkened, as though a thunder-cloud were
over-shadowing them. The rushing sound came up the mountain path like an
eagle's wings, and then, in an instant, ceased completely, not as when a
car pulls up, but as though it had suddenly vanished. There was an
interval of perhaps a quarter of a minute, though it seemed
interminable, and then, from below in the gulf, a muffled concussion, so
dull and distant that, if they had not been listening intently, they
would hardly have heard it. And then--there was one of those intense
silences in which the listeners might have thought they heard the grass
growing, or the clouds crisping.

For one minute, two minutes, three minutes, they stood, looking at one
another and listening intently, but there was no sound. They then
dismounted, tethered their ponies to a sapling oak, and stole quietly
back to the point where the road ended and the abyss began.

The dark cloud moved away from the west as they reached the level
ground, and the sky was suffused with glowing colour. They saw clearly
what had happened to Mardok. The changes of light over that dark
precipice would have made it almost impossible for him to see what lay
before him and below him until it was too late. The tracks of the Alata
went almost straight to the edge of the abyss. At the very last moment
it looked as if Mardok had tried to turn sharply to the right, but that
something slippery on the road had caused the Alata to slither, for it
had gone over at an angle. A great piece of the overhanging promontory
had broken away and gone down with it, into the gulf. Glistening green
across one of the wheel-tracks there was the slippery body of a dead
snake.

       *       *       *       *       *

Neither Mark nor Evelyn had known where their mountain road was leading
them; but the words _Balneum Regis_ and Bagnorea had come to their lips
as soon as its unimaginable beauty and terror had opened out before
them. The abyss might be dark as any circle of the Inferno; and that
strange hill-crowning city in the centre, which still caught the last of
the light, had indeed been incorporated by Dante in his epic. It was not
in the Inferno, however, that he referred to it, but in the _Paradiso_;
and he glorified it as the birthplace of St. Bonaventure, that great
friend and follower of St. Francis; St. Bonaventure, of whom Alexander
of Hales said he "seemed to have escaped the curse of Adam's sin".

Hand in hand, Mark and Eve stood looking at that famous walled city,
across the abyss.

"This is the place to which we were meant to come," said Eve, "and it
wasn't only in my dream that St. Francis said _Buona Ventura_!"

Then she went through a curious little ritual of her own. She took off
her wedding-ring and gave it to Mark.

"When Mardok pulled me out of the car at Sorrento," she said, "he was
blind with fury at his failure to make me anything more than his
prisoner. He tore the ring off my finger, and threw it away. I didn't
see where it went; but I found it again. I saw it shining at my feet,
as we turned the corner of the house. It was lying at my feet where it
had fallen--among the bushes that smelt like lemon-verbena. You remember
them? I want you to put it on again, with a wish; and, perhaps, the
friend of St. Francis will make it happen."

As she held out her hand, Mark noticed that the fourth finger was still
bleeding. He slipped on the ring and kissed it.

"_Buona Ventura_," she said.




CHAPTER XXXI


There was nothing now to prevent them from going back to their home at
Ravello, but they were well on their way to Assisi. It would seem a
little ungrateful to turn back now, and the original impulse that had
set their faces towards the light of Umbria was still strong within
them. It was more than an impulse. It was almost a longing--the desire
of the pilgrim for the distant city on a hill. During the flight from
their enemy, they had seen it shining before them as a sure place of
refuge, and, though this might have originated only in Evelyn's confused
dream, and the strange importance which she attached to it might seem
now to have vanished, the desire persisted, with the urgency of an
instinct. Both of them felt it, and felt that more than they knew might
be involved in their obeying that impulse. For the first time, they
became conscious of a process which the whole modern world had forgotten
in the chaotic and crowded life of the cities, though it was
illustrated, daily, under their eyes, by the migration of birds across
the sea or by a thousand natural phenomena, by the orderly swinging into
position of the inconceivable hosts of "electrons" involved in the
development and opening of a flower. It was a process that led myriads
of unthinking creatures, animate or inanimate, to arrive at ends,
purposed ends--which they themselves could never have purposed or
discovered or reached by their own will or reason.

As they rode down the returning way towards the main road, they agreed
that they would push on to Assisi the next day. It was a beautiful
evening, warm and clear, and full of stars; and, when they reached the
farm from which they had borrowed the ponies, they decided to sleep
there for the night. They were so tired that they did not trouble about
food. After a draught of clear water from a rocky spring in the
hillside, they climbed on to the haystack, which the ponies and goats
had been pulling to pieces, and fell asleep in each other's arms, with
the stars looking down at them.

Early the next morning, after robbing the hen-roost of half a dozen
fresh eggs, they went down to their car. They had no difficulty in
starting it now, and they drove on at once to Orvieto, where they raided
one or two of the little shops, and, with the aid of a new spirit-lamp,
boiled their eggs and made themselves a delicious breakfast on the old
ramparts overlooking the steep-down valley.

"I still feel that we are being piloted to Assisi," said Evelyn. "But
yesterday was another instance of dreams and prayers coming true by a
roundabout way. Do you think Freud would have explained how _Buona
Ventura_ came into my dream?"

"He would have explained it all right; but neither of us would have been
able to eat any breakfast."

"The old artists were the best kind of dream interpreters," she said.
"They had a knack of discovering the secret pattern in things. They
understood that idea about the modulations in music. They used the
unexpected and roundabout ways of the composer as lovely notes of
surprise."

"Like an unexpectedly perfect rhyme in poetry, which brings everything
into an order of a more beautiful kind," said Mark, "so many of their
best works have the effect of a parable."

"That was their secret in dealing with some of the old legends, which
were really dreams of a sort, and had exquisite meanings for the right
interpreters, like Simone Martini, or the Maestro delle Vele d'Assisi."

Her voice lingered on the last words as though the influence of her
dream was still with her, and all her thoughts were flowing to that one
small city.

As they drove on through the great hills, and the sunlit woods of
grey-green olive-trees, Evelyn returned more than once to their
discussion of the unexpected ways in which dreams may come true and
prayers be answered.

"Do you remember the legend of Joachim of Fiore," she said. "We're not
far from his country now. It's a dear little fable which I think must
have meant something like that. Joachim of Fiore used to go and pray
alone in the woods, and it was said that a strangely beautiful flower
grew out of the naked rock where he had been kneeling. The fame of it
spread through all the countryside. One evening a woman picked the
flower and took it away with her, thinking that it might heal a sick
friend--which, indeed, it did. But the peasants of the neighbourhood
were disturbed at losing the mysterious flower, and begged Joachim to
pray at the rock once more, so that the flower might be restored to
them. Joachim did not wish to be regarded as a worker of miracles, and
at first refused; but the peasants were so urgent with him that, at
last, he went into the woods alone and knelt to pray, on the rock, as
they wished. The next day, to their delight, the peasants found the
prayer had been answered. But it was not a flower that broke out of the
rock, it was a little fountain of clear water, more beautiful in form
than even a flower; and this, of course, would flow on for ever, and
could not be taken away from them."

"It's a beautiful little fable," said Mark, "and as true inwardly as it
is fabulous outwardly. The only thing I know about Joachim of Fiore is
that enigmatic saying of his: '_The Kingdom of the Father has passed;
the Kingdom of the Son is passing; and we are now about to enter the
Kingdom of the Spirit_.'"

"His Eternal Gospel was supposed to be heretical; but they forgave him
after a time," said Evelyn.

She had always been interested in Joachim of Fiore, because he seemed to
understand what many sensitive spirits in modern times had felt about
the inner and outer aspects of Christianity. Those who looked at the
outer aspects alone might find themselves, as so many of the moderns
did, in a world of materialistic ceremonies and empty superstitions. But
there were inner values, quite unfathomable, in what Joachim called the
Eternal Gospel, values that transfigured everything, from the stones of
the churches to the text of the Bible. They filled everything with
endless meanings, exactly as--on a smaller scale--a picture or poem from
the hand of a master might have almost infinite meanings.

As they drove down to the great Valley of Spoleto, birds began to fly
across the road more frequently. They heard them singing in the
olive-trees, and they seemed steadily to increase in number as they
neared the birthplace of St. Francis.

It was late in the afternoon when they came through the wide Umbrian
plain to the foot of the hill on which Assisi stands.

They halted for a moment by St. Mary of the Angels, the Church of the
Porziuncola, which watches over the little room where St. Francis died.

"I've always felt that there was some deep meaning in that last strange
wish of his," said Mark. "It was like a supreme act of renunciation
which somehow more than regains all it renounces. One might have
expected that he would have wished to die at Assisi. Yet he asked them
to carry him down on a litter to the plain, so that he might see the
place he loved best, far off, above him. It must have been like
renouncing heaven."

"There was all his Master in it," whispered Evelyn, under her breath.
Tears filled her eyes, as they had filled Mark's, in the place that he
called home, two months ago, remembering how St. Francis asked that his
litter should be placed where his eyes might see his little city on the
hill. In her own longing for the place her heart was full of the
unearthly beauty of the words which had broken from the lips of St.
Francis in the supreme moment, when Sister Death drew near him; and,
without speaking a word, both of their hearts pulsed with the same
remembered cry: _Blessed be thou of God, O holy City; for through thee
shall many be saved, and in thee shall dwell many servants of the Lord;
and out of thee shall many be chosen for the kingdom of eternal life_.

As they drove up the steep winding road to the walled town and the great
monastery on its dominating crag, there were flocks of birds on all
sides of them. It was impossible not to think that the small feathered
friends of that kindly saint must have been protected by his beneficent
shadow. It was not a miracle, except in the sense that everything is a
miracle; but, after all those ages, it was certainly true that the
memory of one man's kindliness had so influenced his neighbourhood that
the wild birds, which had been mercilessly exterminated in some parts of
the country, had found a sanctuary here. Their increasing numbers had a
curiously cumulative effect, leading up through the tangled vineyards to
Assisi in ever-increasing bursts of song, which induced a strange sense
of expectation as though the hill-crowning citadel they were approaching
were a fountain of life and compassion.

They left their car at the first stone arch of that strong fortress, and
entered it on foot. As they went up the twisted climbing streets, their
strange feeling of expectation was enhanced by something else. The sun
was sinking; but, as the great plain below grew dimmer and dimmer,
Assisi on its hill seemed to be growing into the light. In the distance
its walls had looked grey; but, seen from within at sunset, it was
transfigured. A translucent colour glowed in the stone--the beautiful
native stone of its own hill--an exquisite and ethereal rose-colour,
luminous as a sunset-cloud.

Suddenly Evelyn caught at Mark's arm and pointed to an arched shrine in
the wall of one of the houses. Before a figure of the Madonna and child,
a lamp was burning.

The door of the house was open and Mark went in, followed by Evelyn. In
the one small room, on the ground floor, there was a table laid for an
evening meal, with wine and bread. Evelyn laid her hand upon a crust of
the bread, and found it warm. But there was no one in the house.

They went out into the street again and, although it was completely
deserted and there was no sign of any living inhabitant, they felt that
there was some strange difference about the place, some quality in the
very colour and texture of the stone, an indescribable loveliness in the
very light that seemed to fill it like a living presence and separate it
from any other place that they had ever seen.

By narrow street and winding stair of rose-tinted stone they went right
up to the ancient arched gateway, beyond which they saw tall cypresses,
black in the evening light, towering like sentinels over the deep valley
below, and, above these, only the bare hill, rising steeply to its bleak
summit.

They were standing still for a moment, near the old gateway,
scrutinizing the houses below them--from this high point of vantage--for
any sign of a living inhabitant. The immense plain of Umbria had almost
vanished in the violet twilight beyond and beneath the hill; but Assisi
itself, still catching the evening light, and still brightening as the
darkness below it deepened, seemed almost to be detached from the earth.
It hung there in a rose-coloured nimbus of its own, like a celestial
citadel of shining rocks and winding ethereal streets. While they were
looking at it, the most amazing thing happened. There resounded, from
the square-towered monastery below, the deep note of a great bronze
bell. The two listeners stared at one another as though a phantom had
passed on the wings of the wind. But it was no phantom. The great slow
hammer struck again and again, and the deep vibrating waves of sound
went throbbing out like a challenge to the gathering night. But it was
more than a challenge--it was a masterful and dominant proclamation--or
so it seemed to those two, through whom every note of it shivered with
an unearthly power--a proclamation that here was something above the
night, and stronger than death. Leonardo said, once, to his disciples,
that in the sound of a bell they would find every name and word (_ogni
nome e vocabolo_) that the mind could imagine. To-night for these two,
in the universal stillness, which seemed as though it were being broken
for the first time, it spoke--not of the hour, but of things eternal.

Only two or three hundred yards below them, to the west, the monastery
and church of San Francesco looked like a fortress commanding the
universe--an effect which was again intensified by the light on the
square-cut tower, and the vast dimness of the almost invisible Umbrian
plain in the shadowy gulf beneath. It was intensified also by the way in
which the triple strength of San Francesco was clamped into the rock on
three levels; the upper church, as it was called; the lower church; and
the crypt, which was the heart of the whole fabric, being itself a great
vaulted church over-arching the rock-tomb in which St. Francis was
originally laid so long ago. Its fortress-like aspect was intensified
again by the low bright ramparts, which ran along the western side of
the level and open spaces before both the upper and lower
entrance-doors. Over the ramparts, half an hour ago, the old enemy of
Assisi, the warrior-city of Perugia, might have been seen, miles away,
on its own challenging hill; but it was lost now in the violet dusk, and
all the light of the world seemed now to be concentrated on this one
high citadel.

Without a word, Mark gripped Evelyn's hand, and they made their way,
almost running, down the steep descent to the first of the two levels,
the open space before the tall doors of the upper church. They entered,
and found no one--only those great scenes from the life of St. Francis,
on the painted walls, and the echo of their own footsteps. Evelyn's eyes
were drawn to the sanctuary lamp, at the far end of the church.

"It is lighted," she said, "I believe it is lighted."

They went towards it, doubting and uncertain whether the ruby-coloured
gleam came from within or without, until they stood almost beneath it,
when they saw that the little flame was burning as steadfastly as the
star that steers the ships, or their own small lamp at Ravello.

Then, as they were about to go and search elsewhere, a sound reached
them, so overwhelmingly beautiful that it robbed them of all power to
move, and held them breathless. It was the Magnificat chanted (as it
seemed, in their strangely broken solitude) by a great choir of male
voices. The whole Order of St. Francis seemed to be quietly singing
together, in some glorious gathering outside space and time, while other
voices, less firm and clear, but not less beautiful--voices of men,
women and children--gradually broke in, as though all Assisi were
accompanying them.

The two listeners looked at one another with quivering lips for a
minute; then the tears came, and they fell on their knees, and let the
voices of Assisi carry them where they would. In the world that had
vanished, the words to which they were listening had been so familiar
that their heart-rending beauty had been forgotten. The glorious old
Latin had at least saved those who adhered to it from that loss. But as
it pulsed around those two listeners the words that beat with the
beating of their own hearts were the words of the equally glorious old
English version. Their childhood was in it; their schooldays were in it;
the lost religion of Christendom was in it, with all its deep meanings
and half-forgotten hopes. And now, in their new and strange world, the
deadening familiarity had dropped away, and they could do no more than
bow the head before a revelation of infinite beauty.

As the music died away, Mark whispered to Evelyn, "We must go down and
find them."

They went out into the sunset-coloured air again; and, making their way
down to the second level, entered the lower church. Near the door
everything was in darkness; but at the far end there was a blaze of
light. As they moved nearer to it, they felt that one of the great
pictures of the old masters had somehow come to life, and that they were
being quietly drawn into it from the formless night outside. It seemed
to hold everything that was now of value in the world. At the altar
which was built immediately over the tomb of St. Francis in the crypt
below, two Franciscans were going through the rite of "benediction".
Immediately below and around them were rows of illuminated faces of
their Order--old and young, many of them grave and austere, like those
of men engaged in a stern and tremendous enterprise, yet all strangely
illuminated from within, as well as by the soft radiance of the candles.
Behind these, there seemed to be gathered all the dwellers in
Assisi--men, women and children, who in that hour and place looked as
though they had been assembled from the peasants of Cimabue or Giotto.

There was no longer a gulf between the high imaginations of art and the
common life of every day. The celebrants at the altar, their utterly
impersonal symbolic actions, their symbolic vestures, the symbolic
lights, the symbolic incense; and, beyond these, the faces of the
peasants, with their dark imaginative eyes, drinking in all that this
vital art and music and drama so exquisitely directed to its true end
could give the soul of man--all this made one picture. It was what
Giotto and the Maestro delle Vele had spent their lives and every
faculty of their minds in trying to paint, and it was alive. To eyes no
longer blinded by use and wont, this life of every day, though it was
only revealing its own wonder and beauty, was transfigured.

Two or three bare-footed children had stolen up to the steps of the
altar. Their brown up-turned faces and dark shining eyes were filled
with a childish wonder. Nobody paid any more attention to them than if
they had been sparrows who had made their home there at the invitation
of St. Francis himself. But their innocent little faces, and indeed the
whole picture, seemed to be the living foreground of the masterpieces on
the painted wall. It was this, perhaps, that gave the scene its
timelessness--a timelessness in which the present was reconciled to a
past more remote even than the beginnings of Christianity. The rite that
they were watching had elements in it far older than history. They went
back to the earliest days of that Eastern people whose religious genius
was at least as unique as the aesthetic genius of the Greeks, and whose
monotheism and sense of universal law formed the rock-foundations not
only of Christendom, but of knowledge itself. The mind would have to
traverse endless deserts and many thousands of years before it found at
some rude altar on a high mountain, or beyond the black tents at the
edge of some Arabian wilderness, the beginnings of that symbolic prayer
of the mass, in which the voice of supplication is said to ascend like
incense, and the hands are raised as for "the evening sacrifice".

As Benediction was drawing to its close, a Franciscan came quietly up to
Mark and Evelyn and drew them away to the Cappella di San Martino, a
side-chapel, nearer the doors.

"So you have found us," he said in English. "It must have been terrible
out there. You have nowhere to go to-night, of course. There is a small
house waiting for you, if you wish. My sister will get everything ready
for you."

Mark thanked him, feeling that this man too, for all the vitality in his
dark eyes, had stepped out of those faintly discernible pictures on the
wall--where St. Martin is giving his cloak to a beggar, and then--in a
dream--sees Christ Himself wearing it.

Their new friend contributed to the timelessness of it all, not only by
his Franciscan garb, but by giving them his name as "Brother Juniper".
He led them up the narrow street that they had climbed earlier. The
rose-coloured light was fading now, but the scent of roses drifted to
them over the walls of narrow gardens, where the cypresses towered like
black flames to the stars. To their amazement Brother Juniper stopped
under the shrine where the light burned before the Madonna, and took
them into the very house they had already entered. He pointed to the
table, with its loaf of bread and flask of wine.

"It is already half prepared for you," he said, with a smile. "My
sister--Jacoba--will be here soon."

Then seeing the look of astonishment on their faces, he added: "Don't be
afraid. You are not dreaming. We have several houses ready for--those
who have been chosen. My sister broke off her work here to go to
Benediction. There was no miracle. These things belonged to her; but, of
course, she will leave them now and provide whatever else is necessary.
Tomorrow, if you wish, we can discuss plans for the future."

They murmured an incoherent gratitude. He seemed to take it for
granted--or to have some private knowledge--that Assisi was, in fact,
the only place that had escaped the disaster. Mark asked him how this
had happened. He remained silent, for a moment. Then, very gravely and
simply, putting the question by, he said, "Not all who lived in Assisi
have been saved. San Francesco, you must have seen, was by no means
full. Many of those who were working in the valley below have not
returned. Among them was Jacoba's husband. But if the world is to begin
again we could hardly do better than with the help and inspiration of
St. Francis."

At this moment his sister, Jacoba, returned--with a basket on her arm,
and her children, a little boy of five and a little girl of three;
holding on to her skirt. They were all bare-footed, and in good clean
peasant dress. Jacoba held herself and spoke like that Princess Poverty
in the celestial marriage-scene.

While she busied herself, with Evelyn's help, in making everything
ready, Brother Juniper asked Mark many questions, and replied to many
others. Their community at Assisi, he said, included all that was
necessary for a good beginning. They had excellent vineyards, and fields
of wheat, and plenty of experienced men and women to cultivate them.
They had good craftsmen, wood-carvers, workers in wrought-iron, a
printing-press, two young sculptors, one of great promise, four or five
excellent painters. Please God they would never again be caught in the
mechanical wheels of the industrial system. When Mark told him that he
had a medical degree, Brother Juniper gripped his hand and shook it. "I
knew," he said, "that you must have been sent to us for a purpose. We
had women who were good nurses, but we had no doctor."

Brother Juniper spoke very simply of his own hopes for the future and
the new beginning that was to be made at Assisi. There, at any rate, no
conflicting questions of sovereignty would arise, for there was only one
Ruler of the Universe. Christendom had returned, though on the smallest
of scales. Its continuity was unbroken. That strange conclave in the
Sistine Chapel, anticipating the disaster, had sent them a provisional
message. The light would not go out.

It was not until Mark and Evelyn had been left to themselves for the
night that they realized how Brother Juniper and Jacoba had drawn them
out upon their own adventures, but had evaded every question about the
way in which Assisi had escaped the disaster.

"Once," said Mark, "I suspected him of irony. He began to talk about the
peculiar texture of the native stone, as though he were suggesting a
scientific explanation. I'd half expected Brother Juniper to suggest
that it was a miracle."

"That's why, of course, he cut the ground from under your feet. Perhaps
he's more certain of his own ground than we know."

"You were right about the lamp at Ravello."

"You hadn't much faith in that superstition of mine, had you, Mark? Poor
darling, you loved me, and you were afraid to marry me. But I knew we
should find our home at last. One of these days I suppose we shall have
to go over to Ravello for some of our treasures; but that can wait,
until we're thoroughly settled in here."

       *       *       *       *       *

They woke early the next morning to the sound of the great bell of San
Francesco. They leaned out of their open bedroom window and looked at
the sunlit slope of tangled vines dropping steeply down behind the house
to St. Mary of the Angels, the lily of Umbria.

Evelyn drew deep breaths of the sunlit air, with its faint redolence of
wood-smoke and roses. Already they could hear the pleasant sounds of
reawakening human life. A cart drawn by great white oxen was coming
slowly up the winding road from the valley. A hammer clinked at the
iron-worker's forge. Then----

"Listen," said Evelyn, "oh, listen," and Mark's hand took her own.

In one of the vineyards below them a melodious Italian voice had begun
to sing one of the lovely old songs of Tuscany:

    "_L' rivenuto il fior di primavera._
    _L' ritornata la verdura al prato_
    _L' ritornato chi prima non c'era_
    _ ritornato lo mio innamorato----_"

    "_It has come back--the flower of youth and spring._
    _It has come back--the green leaf to the plain._
    _It has come back--the heart that once took wing,_
    _My true love's heart has found its home again._"




[End of The Last Man, by Alfred Noyes]
