Eva's apples

XLIV.

FINNEGAN! BEGIN AGAIN!

Lord de Jones, having, he deemed, ended his work, took a hot bath, sitting in which he reflected that while it had taken God six days to make the world, it took him only one day to unmake it. Yet he felt he also needed a rest. It was 6 a.m. when he dragged himself up to his room, dropped on his bed and fell asleep. He dreamt that he had been given a lot of work which he resented because he was tired, having gone to bed as late as 6 a.m. All night he dreamt that he had gone to bed at 6 a.m., and when he woke at noon he felt more tired than when he had gone to bed at 6 a.m.

Rising, he put on his trousers and fastened on his braces and, not troubling to put on a coat, went out on to the balcony to look at the world: and he saw that it was good. The earth was certainly small, but there was a cosiness, an intimacy about it now which it lacked when it boasted five continents. It was dear to him because it was the work of his own hands—in his private opinion, a masterpiece. It had been for him to make it as small as he deemed fit, and he had deemed its present size—which was ten miles in diameter—entirely appropriate.

he carolled hoarsely. “Yes, Ben Jonson would have understood me!”

“Or,” Frank rejoined, stepping out on to his balcony, “as Goethe said, ‘In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister’.”

“Very true, very true.”

“But not too true to be good. One should have watched you. One should have known that somebody like you, with more science than sense, must attempt this sort of thing sooner or later.”

“You supply your own answer. Someone, if not me then another, would have done the same thing. No idea, not one so obvious, ever comes to one mind alone. Thousands must have cherished it. Not for ever was mankind to be mocked.”

“And poor Rex,” said Eva, joining them on the balcony. “A few seconds, and he would have been with us last night.”

“And Vernon Sprott.”

“And Vernon Sprott.”

“Yes—I can picture Rex with us! He would have called for Mrs. Hannibal, and there wouldn’t have been a Mrs. Hannibal. He would want to print newspapers, and there would be nothing to print newspapers with or on. He is better where he is.”

“Poor Rex. I did want him to be saved,” said Eva. She was in a loose dressing-gown. It had become more and more evident that she was expecting a baby—“of the old world,” said Christopher de Jones regretfully.

“I know. He was a great lad. We shall never see the like of him again.”

“There was,” said Frank, “nothing ‘tinny’ or snobbish about him. He was a great, warm-hearted creature, sensitive, knowing, not rancorous, kind and unspoilt. What energy, what enthusiasm, what mobility of mind! And withal what magnanimity! He was, I think, the most magnanimous man I have ever met. If he caught you red-handed, plotting against his life and fortune, and you politely put away your pistol or poison with the words: ‘So sorry, Rex,’ he’d tell you: ‘Say no more about it! If it’s money you want, why the hell don’t you say so?’ and, so as not to hurt your feelings by simply giving you a batch of Bank of England notes, he would appoint you Editor-in-chief of all his newspapers.”

“And then worry the life out of you, till you resigned your job of your own accord.”

“He was the big drum in the jazz band of our civilisation, in which I was the ukulele. But he was a rare friend, and, characteristically, he died trying to save his friend’s life. There was at least nothing jazz-like in that.”

All Ottercove’s sympathetic qualities, unnoticed when he was alive, now stood out and called for notice. They stood up as a mute reproach to them and called up images of callous and ungrateful thoughts about a man now mute, felled in the fullness of his strength, prematurely disintegrated. He felt sore, badly hit by the loss. He was fond, he knew it now, of Ottercove. Never again would he behold the glint of those eyes. Never hear that robust voice....

“But why have been so half-hearted? Why not have finished off everything?” He looked grievously at Chris.

“That the race may survive.”

“Must it survive?”

“Of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“To honour my name and my memory.”

“What a name! What a memory!”

“We must recuperate, start afresh. My descendants will breed and multiply, expand, develop trade, build fleets of aeroplanes, and shops and factories. Ultimately we shall hope to open a new Bank of England.”

“And we shall. As Goethe said, ‘Aller Anfang ist schwer.’ Glorious life! Glorious beginning!”

“But what is there, you fool, to begin from?”

“Don’t call me fool.”

“What is there that the race, if indeed it survive, can learn from? Where is there a picture, a book, a gramaphone record to pass on to those who shall follow us? Nothing. Not even an Outline of History!”

“Wells? Ha!”

“We could do with Wells here. The earnest, regenerative Wells. Where is he now?”

“Wells?” De Jones adjusted his telescope and peered at the clouds. “I am looking if that be him over there.”

“Let me look.” Frank looked and saw what looked like Mr. Wells floating, it seemed, only a few yards away, a compact, self-contained little figure, apparently immune from dissolution. “I think,” Frank said, still peering, “I can see Winston’s hat.”

“I might have saved Shaw.”

They strained into the skies at a few dissociated splinters which may have been fragments of George Bernard Shaw.

de Jones quoted.

“The attitude of the press and the reading public towards Shaw has been one protracted joke.”

“How so?”

“You see, when Shaw began he was not taken seriously but was treated as a joke. It was not till recently that he succeeded in being regarded as a serious artist.”

“But where is the joke?”

“That is the joke.”

“And do you see that blot on the clear sky?”

“Let me look. Yes, I see.”

“That is Lord Birkenhead.”

“You are forgiven.”

“I am touched by your recognition. You were rather chary of it last night.”

“Well, you must admit, de Jones, that, near as you have come, you have not quite brought it off.”

“I suppose, like Jesus and Napoleon and Lenin, I will be deemed a failure.”

“A splendid failure.”

“Not brought it off, as you say.”

“Not quite.”

The cook, who was never seen about in the week, and thus was not missed in the upheaval, came up to say that breakfast was served; and they all repaired downstairs, Eva placing Herr Kogl on her right (because he was old and had suffered), and de Jones, though he was a peer of England, on her left. De Jones did not like it. He had scattered his title about, but now he would take himself in hand. He would take care to leave his full history to his descendants, so that they should all know who their ancestor was. It occurred to him that possibly Adam himself was, had we been privileged to enquire more closely into his record, the ninth earl of something or other. “I dare say,” he said aloud, “it will tickle them no end to know that their founder was of the English aristocracy.”

“I am not sure,” said Frank, “whether I should not contest your sovereignty. The last of the Romanovs having disintegrated (and even the last before so doing having relinquished his claim in my favour), I am by all accounts the Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, Czar of Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland.”

“With no heir to the throne,” said de Jones.

“That depends on my Queen Consort, who in the case of my death and no issue would succeed to the throne as Eva the Second.”

“Eva is my consort, already by the fact that she is bearing me a child.”

“My child?”

“Eva, whose child?”

“I don’t know.”

“Strange not to know.”

“Don’t you see, Chris, we must have children, little boys and girls, so that they may marry again and carry on the race.”

“What! their own half-sisters! Eva, I am shocked.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Well, so long as they are good de Jones stock. Say what you like, there’s something in having blue blood. I’m a believer in old families.”

“My mother,” Dickin proffered shyly, “was an Adams.”

“Adams and Eva!”

“And we must hand down such knowledge as we possess, do you hear, de Jones? We must put it down on paper—all we know and remember. There is Mrs. Hannibal’s typewriter. Though we have no printing press, we can make carbon copies. When I was at Cambridge—”

“Were you at Cambridge?”

“Why?”

“It’s a rare thing.”

“Why?”

“It’s no more.”

“When I was at Cambridge I made a point of recording all I knew. Do you know any algebra?”

“I don’t know any algebra. Leave me alone.”

“But poetry? Has anyone got any poetry? My God! There is no poetry.”

“Yes, darling, there is poetry.”

“Give it here. Let me have it, quick. Where is it?”

“I have some. Here, in my album.”

“Give it to me. God! Not real poetry?”

“Yes, darling, very nice poetry. There in the middle. There.”

“Thanks.

Thanks.”

“You can copy it out on the typewriter, darling, for all the boy and girl lovers after our time. I suppose they will be able to read English.”

“Yes,” said Chris. English, he laid down, was to be the only language of the new world, to perpetuate the traditions of the English-speaking world. On the other hand, to show his complete lack of racial prejudice, the daring unconventionality of his mind, he confessed, with a smile, that though he preferred to stick to the criminal law of England, in civic matters he was in favour of the Code Napoléon. He looked upon himself as holding the new world under a mandate from the British Empire; in fact he was himself in lineal descent from the Stuarts. He was in reality the trustee of the British Crown. “Gentlemen,” he said: “The King!”

“The King!”

The Baron and Herr Kogl, both of them confirmed anglophiles, did not protest.

After breakfast, they carried the body of Frau Kogl into the wood and buried her among the trees and flowers. De Jones, who presided, said a few unsentimental words over the open grave, the burden of which was that to understand everything was to forgive everything. After that he marched Herr Kogl away, the while enquiring in detail as to the number and condition of the cattle, the orchard, the poultry farm, the vegetable garden, and even the household utensils. “I shall require from you,” he said, “a regular account of these.” And when later he inspected the cattle, he said: “I am anxious at all cost to prevent the outbreak of the foot-and-mouth disease. I shall hold you personally responsible.”

Herr Kogl, wondering sorrowfully what his poor Anna would have said to the noble lord’s attitude to her own property, took it all in with good grace. His reputed strong will availed him but little, but his good sense a great deal; and when on returning home he addressed Lord de Jones as “Il Duce,” Lord de Jones appointed Herr Kogl Chief Intendant and Quartermaster-General with the acting rank of Minister of the Interior.

While Il Duce and his Quartermaster were discussing economy, Frank Dickin, after being appointed Poet Laureate of the New World, strolled away in search of inspiration. A thought struck him. He ambled on and, when he was well out of sight, dashed across to the archducal Schloss and hoisted his striped shirt, for want of a flag, according to the rules of the old world. And according to the rules of the old world, he looked about for something with which to defend the newly acquired possession, and felt that in so doing he was also performing an act of loyalty to the old world so ignominiously done in overnight. He waited for Lord de Jones to attack him with bombs and shrapnel and machine guns. And he reflected that if Lord de Jones did not attack him with bombs and machine guns, it was because Lord de Jones had no bombs and machine guns to attack him with.

It was odd, this feeling of proprietorship, in the face of all this dissolution. And yet he told himself again and again that this castle with the stately staircase, those long rows of red-gold rooms succeeding one another as in a picture gallery, the quadrangle and the park and the surrounding moat, the drawbridge and the water falling down the steep of the enshrouding hills, and not a soul around—was his and his alone. And when Eva visited him there that morning, he showed her round till she felt faint.

“Talking of castles,” she said, lying down on the archducal sofa, “look: is it not sweet?”

And she displayed her garters with a castle worked in silk and bearing the inscription on the castle gate: “For one only.”

“Chris gave me this on leaving London.” She moved about the room and fingered his things. “What’s this bottle, Ferdinand?”

“The beautiful crop you see on my head I owe to the regular use of this lotion, reinforced by sheer strength of will.”

“Where will you get a new bottle when this is used up?”

“Not in this world. It’s a French make of pre-Dissolution days, with an excellent translation of the instructions for use. Read the label.”

“I see. ‘This very energical and excitative lotion for the hair whose it favours the growth and gives to the hair, sweetness strength. Mode of use: with a little sponge, washing plentifully the head during a week. Afterwards thrice in a week.’ Quite amusing.” She put it back. “You have fine hair now.”

“It’s the only thing I have left. And it wasn’t there before.”

It seemed a shame that this fine crop of hair should survive in the teeth of a dissolving world. Survive? How survive?

“We had better go back to the pension for lunch now,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed sourly. “That is the annoying thing about large houses. All this luxury, and not a cook on the premises. What good owning a castle with a hundred and seventy rooms, and no servants? Spend all my days mopping the floors. Saw an automatic mopper in Tottenham Court Road the other day. Ought to have secured one. Lacked vision. Lacked faith.”

It would not always be so. He saw in the future unborn Dickins living in these lofty halls. A brilliant party. Bare-armed women. And his portrait looking down at them from the wall. His great granddaughter eloping with a de Jones youth. Romeo and Juliet. Family feud. Capulets and Montagues. Noble families. Hundred per cent. pre-Dissolution. Dreams, dreams, dreams....

The prospect of there being nothing to eat at first upset them all so much that they lost their appetite. But when they ascertained that there was a great deal to eat, they were so delighted that they began to drink heavily. While they were at lunch, the cook came in to say that she had just come upon Frau König in the cellar, where she had evidently hidden herself since yesterday’s sham earthquake and bore signs of being of unsound mind.

“Bring her forth,” commanded de Jones.

Frau König, disshevelled, and looking more than ever like a gipsy, was led into the room, whereupon Lord de Jones addressed her courteously but firmly. “Your appearance,” he said, “is both timely and opportune and, in the sociological sense, clearly an asset. The world has reached a stage at which immediate repopulation has become of paramount importance. We lack women, though we do not lack men. We have but two women and five men. I do not count the cook as a woman because she is clearly beyond the age of reproduction. The men, on the other hand, are all (I do not exempt even the older gentlemen, such as the Herr Baron and Herr Kogl) rare examples of virility coupled with a high sense of public duty.”

“Unfortunately,” said Frau König, “my fiancé in Paris, having again failed in his examinations at the University, it has set us back two years with our knitting factory. Otherwise—”

“Frau König, it’s not knitting factories I am talking of, though we could do with one here at a later stage, when we have reproduced an adequate number of mill hands, which is the task we have in hand. And you have no right to shirk the call.”

“I don’t understand. My fiancé is still in Paris—”

“Don’t understand? Am I not making myself clear? Frau König, I cannot presume to know your opinion of our late educational system, and I know that in a purely scholastic sense it perhaps ranked below that of the late Continent. But we were taught at our English public schools something which was called ‘playing the game.’ Now is this, if I may ask you, ‘playing the game?’”

“But I desire nothing better. If my fiancé were here, of course. I’m quite ill waiting for him all these years, living on hope deferred.”

“Your fiancé! Your fiancé! What do I care for a fiancé who exists but in your memory?” De Jones grasped her by the wrist. “Frau König,” he said, “there is no room for thoughts of self. It’s a question of repopulating this planet at the shortest possible notice. Are you (I will not say patriotic, for patriotism, as such, has lost all meaning): are you mundic?”

“I am not averse,” said Frau König. “In marriage one contracts certain habits.... But,” she added, “my condition is that you take me out into society.”

“But, good heavens!” Eva cried. “Her offspring will be as mad as hatters!”

“Which may add a touch of genius to those who will follow. We have come near enough to the Kingdom of God but have not quite tumbled to it. They, with a touch of genius, may go one further and clear up the mess after themselves, and themselves as well.”

“Better let me do what I can.”

“Now Eva, don’t be jealous. You can’t, Lilith, do it all yourself. You will kill yourself.”

“I am willing to do my bit.”

“There must be no slacking, no half-heartedness,” cried de Jones. “Here we start anew!”

“A message of courage and hope,” said de Jones. “Our new mundic anthem.” De Jones had changed; he was “another man,” as they say. He was like an artist who had just finished a picture, or a scholar who had completed a treatise. This his work had been the making of him. He was lighthearted, positively gay. Only the wrinkles round his mouth had deepened still more.

“Art thou man or devil?” Eva asked.

But he cried, jumping to his feet with a glass in his hand: “Now all together, please:

The Baron and Herr Kogl, unable to contribute to the singing, since the Baron’s knowledge of English was confined to saying good-morning in the evening, and Herr Kogl’s was nil, yet contrived to join in the chorus at the end, and shouted lustily with the others:

XLV.

In due course, that is exactly in the course of time prescribed by nature, and unaffected by changed meteorological conditions, Eva gave birth to a son, who, though both Frank Dickin and Christopher de Jones were anxious to claim his paternity, proved to be, on inspection, without the remotest shadow of a doubt, the second Baron Ottercove of Ottercove. And all day long he laughed to himself.

“That’s all right,” said de Jones, on being admitted. “But let him not expect too much of the new world. For we came crying hither: thou know’st the first time we smell the air we waul and cry.”

“Alack! alack the day!”

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this (small) stage of fools.”

“What shall we call him?” asked his overjoyed mother. And many nice names were suggested.

“Rex Alexander,” by Eva herself, in undying memory of his illustrious father.

“Christopher,” by Lord de Jones, in honour of himself and Christopher Columbus, the explorer, and Christopher Morley, the American critic.

“Ferdinand,” by Ferdinand, and in honour of Ferdinand, “Ex-King of Greece,” he explained when Lord de Jones frowned on him.

“Call him Adam,” suggested Herr Kogl. “For he is the first-born of this new earth.”

“Yes, yes, Adam,” said Eva.

And he was called Adam. In honour of the late Miss Adams (which was Frank’s mother’s maiden name), as Frank liked to think fondly but on insufficient evidence.

Eva had become very competent. The Pension Kogl was transferred into a day and night nursery; the kitchen was used for drying the second Baron Ottercove’s garments; and when the men argued as to whether their world could survive, she invariably cut short the discussion by saying, What mattered the world? It was the survival of baby that mattered.

“I wish,” she said, “Pilling could have seen my baby.”

“Damn Pilling! Didn’t you think of your mother when you were making your selection for your Noah’s ark?”

“Well, darling, I thought she wouldn’t be alone in all this. She would have all the other people with her. And Mummy always loved crowds.”

Chris looked away, ashamed. “It was no use,” he said at last. “It was a hopeless, incurable race. A perverted mentality. Nothing to be done with them. Even the best of them were beyond salvation. Take my aunt. An amiable old lady, yet cruel in her very kindness. During the last war, like most old ladies, she had been vehemently, almost indecently, anti-German. After the war, travelling about in Italy and being the really nice old English lady that she was, she confessed to a feeling of shame at the snarling attitude of The Continental Daily Mail, while so many titled Germans were about. What she most quickly recovered was her interest in the imperial family of Germany, and she confessed a heart-felt sympathy for the ex-Kaiser. ‘Rather a fascinating man,’ she said, ‘and after all, he was the grandson of our own dear Queen Victoria, so we shouldn’t be too hard on him.’ The dear old lady! I can see her now as she walked beside me, stopping every few paces to recover her breath, but pretending she was doing so to bring home a point in our conversation: ‘Now isn’t that remarkable!’ or else to examine a bicycle propped up in front of a shop: ‘What an unusual bicycle!’ or to read a poster: ‘Have you seen this?’ She was a good woman, and the very stuff our race was made of. You might have thought that it would have profited by its mistakes and devised a working social order. But (as Goethe said about politics) men would not learn, and God did not seem to want it.”

“That is so, but if anything you have made things worse.”

“Hardly worse,” said de Jones. “I have in my pocket a newspaper fragment. Let me read it aloud so that you may realise what you have been saved from. Here it is. It is entitled ‘Royal Month of February,’ and it goes on: ‘Many famous hostesses have already come to town, and during the next few days will make the final preparations for their participation in the stately pageant in the House of Lords when the King opens Parliament in state to-morrow week. New Court gowns will be tried on in Mayfair, St. James’s, and Belgravia, and priceless family jewels will be brought from the strong-rooms of historic banks.’

“Almighty God!

“‘Among the weddings within the next week or two will be that of Major the Hon. Maurice Duff Glayton and Lady Ursula Blaming at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. The Marquis of Lillingsworth’s two charming daughters will be among the bridesmaids. Both bride and bridegroom are well known in the yachting world of Cowes.’

“Almighty God!

“‘The Marquis and Marchioness of Epping spent the week-end in town in Curzon-street. Lord and Lady Castle have come from Kent, Lady Walden de Munford from Paris, the Dowager Duchess of Hawke from Ireland, and the American Ambassador from the United States. Countess Buxham and her daughter are back again in Eaton-place.’

“God Almighty!” He wiped his brow with his handkerchief, and as he walked away he stopped every few paces and said:

“God Almighty! God Almighty!”

XLVI.

He returned to his Schloss park, went down the gravel path into the hidden nooks where the waters dashing down from steep heights broke their fall in cool spray. All was as still and wild and pure as on the first day. So Adam must have brooded, too, in the cool and quiet of Eden.

He walked on. And suddenly he came upon her in the pine wood.

“My pale primrose.”

“No, no, not here.”

“Yes, here and now. To make sure that you bear me a child.”

“Yes, you and Chris, and everybody.”

He was overwhelmed with tremulous anxiety that he might lose her, his one, his only woman. To hold her, for a moment, if only for a moment, was to hold all—eternity in a moment. There was Eva, and no other woman; and she included all the beauty and the passion in the world. “Oh, my Eva! My dear love!” He thought of all the loving lost and gone for ever: of moonlight meetings, heartthrobs, lingering farewells, by waterfalls, in drifting gondolas, and sunlit glades, and cloistered streets, and heaths, and lanes, and bridges: the water rushes, the heart throbs loud; he tried to collect it all and impress it on these lips, these taut, supple fingers, these heaving young breasts.

And they took of the fruit thereof, and did eat: and they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

“It’s you, only you now. When I hold you, Eva, I hold the world.”

“Yes, darling, what is left of it.”

“No distraction left.” He clutched his chin savagely. “I can’t have them!” he cried. “Can’t have them!”

“Who?”

“All those other women.”

“What’s to be done, darling?”

“I can’t have them! Oh, aren’t I glad!”

“No regrets?”

“None! Eva,” he murmured, “my little Eva.”

“And do you remember,” she said, “how we were lost on the hill?”

“I remember.”

“And how the storm came on, and how you held me, and how it rained and we ran to hide under the rock?”

“And you remember Count Kolberg?”

“Yes, that soppy-face! And how when he asked us out to dinner he sent in a long bill next day, charging up to Mummy our share of the meal, giving all the details:

and so on. And that night he took us to the “München” he ordered champagne. But when it came to paying, he had no money and began to cry. And Mummy said to him very kindly: ‘But why, if you knew you hadn’t any money, did you order champagne?’ ‘Because all the others did,’ he said.”

“And what happened?”

“Oh, the waiter boxed his ears for him and kicked him out and called him names. It was very disagreeable for us.”

“How did he take it?”

“Not very badly. Sort of half playfully. ‘You don’t know what I was going through in my inner soul,’ he said, when we were out of doors. ‘Ach! Ai, ai, ai! Ai, ai, ai!’”

“Then it was we who were lost. Now it is the world. The poor world, with no lovers in it any more, save you and me. It seems we must love for the lot. Justify love. We shall not fail. We shall not fail.”

She looked wistful.

“Eva ... honey love....”

“Yes.”

“I am unworthy. But God in His infinite love has brought all this about that we may come together again, you and I, Eva.”

“Darling,” she said, “I don’t believe it!”

“Nor do I, for that matter,” he said, pressing her to him, “and I scarcely think that this was an end pursued by de Jones.”

“The last thing that he intended.”

The sun subsided towards evening, and suddenly the landscape shone forth with a crystalline clearness, as though you had adjusted your binoculars to the required focus. Before them stretched a plain. No more horizons.

They stood up and walked on, lifting themselves from the ground with one foot and coming down in a leisurely curve with the other, as horses in a slow-motion picture clearing a fence.

“The gravitation,” he sniffed, “is ludicrously weak.”

“It’s only a small planet, darling,” she said, “and hasn’t much strength.”

“We walk as on air.”

“I don’t mind it, darling. And we’re in no great hurry.”

The sun came out again, and, as they climbed up the steep ridge to the pine wood, shone through the trees with a dazzling whiteness such as only acetyline lamps can produce. On the edge of the wood they halted; below was a lake surrounded by firs: a little lake, like a plum dipped in water. Sky, firs, hills, water, all was blue, each just a shade darker; all blue and motionless, as if still waiting for something. They stood still, their hearts thumping; till the sun sank and the first silver stars twinkled feebly in the sky.

“And don’t you miss your dear Rex?”

“He was so strange and peculiar.”

“Yet I never met anyone who did not like him. It was his eagerness which fascinated one. I once arrived during a very agitated conversation between him and Vernon Sprott, who was pained by the alterations made by Ottercove in his last article, when Ottercove defended himself with spirit. ‘What’s the good of being a newspaper proprietor,’ he said, ‘if you can’t butt in occasionally?’ There was a rare dash about him. It was a joy to dine with him; all the waiting service congregated round his table in the restaurants. Dinner over, he would step into the lift, a panting waiter stepping in with him to present the bill, which Ottercove would sign without looking. ‘Don’t they ever swindle you?’ I once asked him. He looked at me earnestly. ‘Dickin: I expect them to swindle me.’ This was great, if you like. But he would come out with better things, too. Once, in failing to please him with my definition of him I suggested that my definition was not flattering enough, and he said: ‘Not a bit. If I only listened to flatteries, it wouldn’t do my character any good, now would it? I wouldn’t develop, would I?’”

“The darling,” said Eva. “The little pet.”

“What made him greater than most men of action was that there was, side by side with his sense of his own abilities, an essential humility in him. It would have been the most natural thing in the world for one who had started literally with nothing, and rose to a share in the control, and an enlightened control, of the destiny of a great empire, himself surrounded on every side by awe-struck relatives and bowing sycophants, to grow bumptious and megalomaniacal, intolerant and overbearing. Not a sign of it in Ottercove! Instead, an enquiring charm, a readiness to listen and learn even from youths. The same bright-eyed mischievous boyishness at forty as at twenty, a touching eagerness to do worthwhile things, ever the man of the world equal to every situation, and yet, a sort of wayward kindness, an engaging modesty which left him unaware of what it was in him that made up his charm. And withal a public fearlessness, the sure touch of a genius in everything he did. I doubt if he was ever told his worth. We did not tell him. And now it is too late.”

He paused before he spoke again. “For us who can remember him he is gentle, human, and kind. But to those who will follow us he will be just a star god, together with Sprott-Pollux, the two gods of material success! What I say is, if not Ottercove, then the cigar of Ottercove! May it shine for ever and ever.”

They kneeled down and bowed low, touching the earth with their brow. And in that attitude of holy prostration they remained a long time.

“Look,” he said, lifting his face from the ground and sitting back on his heels, “there they are, Castor and Pollux, looking down on us through the clouds.” Eva, who, like a small girl in church, had followed all Frank’s movements through her spread fingers while prostrate in prayer, uncouched as yet in the new ritual, now also sat back on her heels and looked up at the stars. “Pollux once wrote something about somebody with the High Hand.”

“Yes. There he stands with raised hand; you feel as if the whole of the Five Towns were gazing down on us with quiet, benignant reproach. And next him is Castor. Even in life Castor never used more than one eye at a time: he closed one and put it all into the other. What an eye! All the fire of Zeus was in that eye; it could pierce through stone walls. He sees everything we do. There, read that look now. He seems to say: ‘You have disintegrated my thousand reporters: yet from here I see everything and report it all direct to my God.’”

“Good God!” Eva turned to him, alarmed. “Then he has seen how you have loved me a minute ago.”

“Castor was a reasonable being. His morality was pragmatic and rational. Look again at that eye of his. What does it say? Not ‘go and sin no more,’ but ‘sin and sin again till you have brought the population of the earth back to pre-dissolution standard.’ Rex, you see, was always a man who believed in giving you another chance.”

Eva looked thoughtful.

“The curse of Eve is upon you, my girl!”

“What is that, darling?”

“I haven’t got my Bible here—and I fear we haven’t a copy of it in this world—but I believe it is something to do with bringing forth children in pain and labour.”

“It is a pity,” she said, “that we haven’t brought with us any labour-saving devices.”

“Lacked foresight, lacked vision.”

“And you, darling, will have to work in the sweat of your brow.”

“Not I! My motto is: ‘Give us peace in our time, O Lord, and après nous le déluge.’”

“They may do it yet. They may come to it yet. We must not lose faith.”

“No, we must not! We must not lose faith in the sense of mankind to wipe out mankind. But must wait, must be patient. That this idea may occur to one among millions of men, we must breed millions of men, till there emerges out of these masses the new Messiah, not a half-hearted devil like de Jones who has let himself be tempted by this blue-eyed woman Eva, but a man who will at last administer the coup de grâce. And so, allons, enfants de la patrie! Breed, breed, breed!”

“There’s only Frau König and me,” sighed Eva. “The cook does not count.”

“Cook or no cook, we shall have to bring down the age of consent, or else to precipitate the age of puberty, to twelve. In twelve years nine months from to-day you and Frau König (for I have commended her to the bereaved policeman) will be able, all being well, to give birth to sixteen children, a total of thirty-two, of which two will come of age that day. Some of the children may die, and the Baron’s may prove apoplectic. But the general outlook, if not rosy, yet enables me to look into the future with confidence.”

He sat down, and was lost in reverie. He saw the population of their little planet rising annually, in geometrical progression, till it was black with people, like a dish with cranberries, people packed like sardines: working in mills, the din of machines, roaring furnaces: producing, producing, producing roaring furnaces: producing, producing—a sight fit to delight the eyes of the gods. And Sunday always spent in devotion, kneeling (for lack of other gods) before Castor and Pollux, while a priest in flowing robes held forth on the dignity, the nobility of hard work, winding up his oration with the new mundic anthem, and from a million throttles came one long roar: