the stars, but the sky was dark with cloud already tinged with a faint red glow, that would be deeper before the morning came. He tried to locate his position from the light of the burning Rectory, but that fire was fading now, and others shone or flickered around him…. The faint light did not prevent him stumbling over a horse that lay flatly on the ground. It sprang up in panic, neighing with a voice that started half a dozen around it. The Rector tried to avoid their rush as they came upon him. He started a stumbling run, not looking where he went…. At the last moment a great horse that was almost upon him tried to turn, either to avoid collision or from a greater peril which it perceived better than he. But the wet flank struck him as it swerved. He lost his balance, and was aware that his feet were slipping beneath him as he fell. He called out, “Oh, my God!” once only as he fell into the weed-grown water, and died, as so many died that night, not knowing the full extent of the catastrophe that overwhelmed the world.
In the fire-lit church, beneath the shadow of the chancel wall, Muriel had joined the huddled group of refugees, some of whom were in little better plight than herself, and most of whom were in a terror which she did not share.
A weak and frightened voice came from one of Mrs. Walkley’s wounded but rescued children, “Oh, mummy, it does bleed,” and she felt her way to adjust the clumsy bandages with more skilful fingers than had been previously available.
What more, she thought, could she do? The mental habit of many years made her less concerned at the physical ruin around her than for the spiritual attitude of those who met it. She knew the power of song in the darkest places of the earth, among the lowest of her kind. It must not be one of her private favourites. It must be a hymn they knew.
“Abide with me. Fast falls the even-tide.
The darkness deepens. Lord with me abide.”
Her voice rose, weak and solitary against the elemental fury of the storm.
Then a man’s voice joined her. A rough, loud voice, as of an outdoor worker; it could be imagined as of a carter, who used it mostly as a horses’ call. Then others, tuneless enough some of them. Voices that halted and quavered beneath others that were of a stronger quality.
“Change and decay in all around I see,
Oh, Thou, Who changest not! Abide with me.”
What matter that the weak sound was beaten down and swept along to perish in the fury of the louder wind?
It was the voice of two thousand years. The Christian miracle. The assertion of immortality. The voice which was first heard in the serene confidence of the Founder of a faith transcending all its foolish creeds, “If it were not so, I would have told you.” In the triumphal boast of the greatest of His apostles, “O Grave, where is thy victory?” What matters, if all things change and fade, whether the process be slow or sudden, to those whose appeal is made to the unchanging God.
Chapter Five
Dawn came on a ruined world. A world that was strewn with wreckage. A world in which all the interdependent complexities by which its civilization was sustained had been rudely broken; on fence, and farmhouse, and forest, that the storm had flattened, on burning cities that rose up, a pillar of lurid smoke, as the wind fell, there came the light of the indifferent dawn. And as the north wind slackened the water came across the sinking land. Not violently, as it had poured, one huge and dreadful wave, into the sunken Mediterranean basin; a wave which millions must have seen—but who that saw it could have lived to tell? Gently, inexorably, as the dawn-light pierced the heavy pall of air, red as with volcanic dust, tainted with the smoke of a thousand fires, the water rose. It spread gently over the Essex marshes. It lapped against the Thames Embankment with something more than a tidal lifting. Lapped, and spilled over, and spread widely, and more widely, in among the burning streets; for in London, as in every city in Southern England, there had been more conflagrations in the falling buildings than there was any hope of quenching, and every hour the fires had got a surer hold, while beneath the feet of a populace that fled the flooded fire-fringed streets in an ever-greater congestion of panic there were a million rats that squealed and dodged as they made their way to the higher ground which, in its turn, would fail them.
Watchers in the early morning, on the hills above the Severn Valley, looking down the broadening stretch of the Bristol Channel, saw a succession of advancing ripples, long, gentle ripples, stretching from coast to coast, as though a giant stone had been thrown into the central waters; and as each ripple spread it lapped over a few miles farther of the level land. There was an upward rush of water in the river channel. Gloucester—Tewkesbury—Worcester one by one, as the morning passed, were underneath the floods. At midday the long waves heaved and broke against the barrier of the Malvern Hills. During the afternoon the inexorable advance spread out around this ten-mile barrier, and flooded the higher Hereford levels on the farther side. Then it seemed, in one appalling moment, that the whole land westward of the Severn cleft broke off, and Wales, with all its hills, slid downward, to be covered by a rush of water that had already drowned the lower Irish land. Eastward the water moved, drowning the Cotswold hills, meeting the flood that had risen in the Thames valley at an equal rate, lapping higher and higher around the northern Oxford wolds and against the ridge which is the watershed of England, leaving tide-swept shallows, and islands here and there, with casual salvage of beast or man that fled across it just as the circling waters closed, or that had not tried to fly. But farther north the land broke off, as it had done to westward—broke off, and sank away.
And all that day the northward roads were choked with crowds that fled the horror of the southern flood, to perish even more surely when the farther north should sink beneath the waters. Ceaseless lines of rapid, over-loaded motors, held up continually by the impedimenta of the storm-strewn roads, or by the accidents of their own impatience; offering wild rewards—anything but the priceless-seeming benefit of the lift in the overcrowded vehicle—to pedestrians who would help to drag aside the broken tree, to clear the rubble of the fallen wall; cursing the slowness of men who worked heroically to keep the roadways clear, or frightening the slower cars with threats or actual violence into the byways that soon became as congested as the wider roads.
So the day passed, and the next sun rose on an ocean that had spread from the Rocky Mountains to the northern coasts of Africa, and had obliterated the isolation of the Baltic Sea.
Chapter Six
With the first dawn the wind had somewhat lessened the relentless pressure of the night, lessened also in the steadiness of its direction, till, with the broader day, it became variable both in force and direction, a matter of short and violent gales, and sudden calms, and fierce whirlwinds of contending air.
With the first light a straggling company from the church porch came out to survey the havoc of the storm.
For the most part they were a white-faced group, cowed and bewildered by the magnitude of the calamity which the morning showed them. They were in no physical condition to regard it bravely. They were shaking with cold, or stiff with rheumatism, after their vigil in rain-soaked garments on the unfriendly stones. They were hungry, and uncertain how to look for food. They saw a world in which the familiar buildings, that held the endless things that they had come to regard as the inevitable necessities of life, were burnt or fallen. They gazed at horizons, livid or dusky red, which told of more than local ruin. Vaguely they realized that there was no help but in themselves, and they were untrained in self-reliance, as they were unpractised in self-discipline.
All their customs, all the tendency of their laws for a generation, had discouraged their initiatives and reduced their freedoms. They had been taught the ethics of slavery. They had not been encouraged to think, nor allowed to act. They were not permitted to build even their own houses to their own designs, or to teach their own children as they would. Everything was under
