“A somewhat oppressive orthodoxy around these parts,” he remarked. The grin disappeared as he added: “Rum type, you know. Pride and prejudice. She’s wanting help. She knows she needs it badly, but nothing’s going to make her admit it.”
He paused opposite an open door. It was almost too dark now to make out anything in the room, but when we had passed it before there had been enough light to reveal it as a men’s dormitory.
“I’m going in to have a word with these chaps. See you later.”
I watched him stroll into the room and greet it collectively with a cheerful “Worcher, mates! ‘Ow’s it goin7” and then made my own way back to the dining hail.
The only light there came from three candles set close together on one table. Beside them a girl peered exasperatedly at same mending.
“Hullo,” she said. “Awful, isn’t it? How on earth did they manage to do anything after dark in the old days?”
“Not such old days, either,” I told her. “This is the future as well as the past-provided there’s somebody to show us how to make candles.”
“I suppose so.” She raised her head and regarded me. “You Came from London today?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“It’s bad there now?”
“It’s finished,” I said.
Of Josella, the girl could tell me nothing. Clearly she had never heard the name before, and my attempts at description roused no recollections.
While we were talking, the electric lights in the room suddenly went on. The girl looked up at them with the awed expression of one receiving a revelation. She blew out the candies, and as she went on with her mending she looked up at the bulbs occasionally as if to make certain they were still there.
A few minutes later Coker strolled in.
“That was you, I suppose?” I said, nodding at the lights.
“Yes,” he admitted. “They’ve got their own plant here. We might as well use up the Las as let it evaporate.”
“Do you mean to say we could have had lights all the time we’ve been here?” asked the girl.
“If you had just taken the trouble to start the engine,” Coker said, looking at her. “II you wanted light, why didn’t you try to start it?”
“I didn’t know it was there; besides, I don’t know anything about engines or electricity.”
Coker continued to look at her, thoughtfully.
“So you just went on sitting in the dark,” he remarked. “And how long do you think you are likely to survive if you just go on sitting in the dark when things need doing?”
She was stung by his tone.
“it’s not my fault if I’m not any good at things like that.”
“I’ll differ there,” Coker told her. “It’s not only your fault-it’s a self-created fault. Moreover, it’s an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him-and even her-brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised; even in women it is a gap to be deplored.”
She looked understandably annoyed. Coker himself had been annoyed from the time he came in. She said:
“I don’t see why you need to pour all your contempt for women onto me-just because of one dirty old engine.”
Coker raised his eyes.
“Great God! And here have I been explaining that women have as many brains as anyone else, if they’d only take the trouble to use them.”
“You said we were all petty and vain. That wasn’t at all a nice thing to say.”
“I’m not trying to say nice things. And what I meant was that in the world that has vanished women had a vested interest in acting the part of parasites.”
“And all that just because I don’t happen to know anything about a smelly, noisy engine.”
“Hell!” said Coker. “Just drop that engine a minute, will you.”
“Then why–”
“Listen,” said Coker patiently. “If you have a baby, do you want him to grow up to be a savage or a civilized man?”
“A civilized man, of course.”
“Well, then, you have to see to it that he has civilized surroundings to do it in. The standards he’ll learn, he’ll learn from us. We’ve all got to understand as much as we can, and live as intelligently as we can, in order to give him the most we can. It’s going to mean hard work and more thinking for all of us. Changed conditions must mean changed outlooks.”
The girl gathered up her mending. She regarded Cokes critically for a few moments.
“With views like yours I should think you’d find Mr. Beadley’s party more congenial,” she said. “Here we have no intention of changing our outlook-or of giving up our principles. That’s why we separated from the other party. So if the ways of decent, respectable people are not good enough for you, I should think you’d better go somewhere else.” And with a sound very like a sniff, she walked away.
Coker watched her leave. When the door closed he expressed his feelings with a fish porter’s fluency. I laughed.
“What did you expect?” I said. “You prance in and address the girl as if she were a reactionary debating society-and responsible for the whole western social system as well. And then you’re surprised when she’s huffed.”
“You’d think she’d be reasonable,” he muttered.
“Most people aren’t, even though they’d protest that they are. They prefer to be coaxed or wheedled, or even driven. That way they never make a mistake: if there is one, it’s at’ ways due to something or somebody else. This going headlong for things is a mechanistic view, and people in general aren’t machines. They have minds of their own-mostly peasant minds, at their easiest when they are in the familiar furrow.”
“That doesn’t sound as if you’d give Beadley much chance of making a go of it. He’s all plan.”
“He’ll have his troubles. But his party did choose,. This lot is negative,” I pointed out. “It is simply here on account of its resistance to any kind of plan.” I paused. Then I added:
“That girl was right about one thing, you know. You would k better off with his lot. Her reaction is a sample of what you’d get all round if you were to try to handle this lot your way. You can’t drive a flock of sheep to market in a dead straight line, but there are ways of getting ‘em there.”
“You’re being unusually cynical, as well as very metaphorical, this evening,” Coker observed.
I objected to that.
“It isn’t cynical to have noticed how a shepherd handles his
sheep.”
“To regard human beings as sheep might be thought so by some.”
“But less cynical and much more rewarding than regarding
them as a lot of chassis fitted for remote-thought control.”
“H’m,” said Coker, “I’ll have to consider the implications
of that.”
-AND FARTHER ON
My next morning was desultory. I looked around, I lent a hand here and there, and asked a lot of questions.
It had been a wretched night. Until I lay down I had not fully realized the extent to which 21 had counted on finding Josella at Tynsham. Weary though I was after the day’s journey, I could not sleep; I lay awake in the darkness feeling stranded and planless. So confidently had I assumed that she find the Beadley patty would be there that there bad been no reason to consider any plan beyond joining them. It now came home to me for the first time that even if I did succeed in catching up with them I still might not find her. As she had left the Westminster district only a short time before I arrived there in search of her, she must in any case have been well behind the main party. Obviously the thing to do was to make detailed inquiries regarding everyone who had arrived at Tynsham during the previous two days.
For the present I must assume that she had come this way. It was my only lead. And that meant assuming also that she bad gone back to the university and had found the chalked address-whereas it was quite on the cards that she had not gone there at all, but, sickened by the whole thing, had taken the quickest route out of the reeking place that London had now become.
The thing I bad to fight hardest against admitting was that she might have caught the disease, whatever it was, that had dissolved both our groups. I would not consider the possibility of that until I had to.
In the sleepless clarity of the small hours I made one discovery-it was that my desire to join the i3eadley party was very secondary indeed to my wish to find Josella. If, when I did find them, she was not with them … Well, the next move would have to wait upon the moment, but it would not be resignation…