not hard for her to admire. He stood erect and silent on a part of the floor which was slightly beneath the main level, of somewhat different and harder material than its polished boards, with a gutter along the edge. She stood hesitant, and he said, with more impatience than he had yet shown: “Well, will you begin?”
She said “I will do what you wish. It is strange to me.”
“It is strange that you do not know where a sponge would be—a sponge which is in your sight now.”
As he spoke, she knew; and became aware of a danger she had not realized before. She had two sets of memories, and she had thought that she must use care that those of her distant self—of her real self, she would have said—must not be allowed to fade. She had been dwelling on them, and had not realized that the two sets of memories could not be active at once.
Instantly, but none too soon, she became the girl he had captured the day before. She knew what to do now.
She took a sponge which was made of absorbent leaves, sewn together in a flat way, such as she had used all her life, and rubbed him down with warm water from head to foot as he stood motionless there, while a towel of somewhat similar material warmed at the fire. While he dried himself, she dealt with her own body in the same way.
His eyes were on her as she did this, in a fashion that she was not sure she liked, nor yet sure that she would not have. But he did not speak, and the short silence had seemed long by the time she put the towel down, and was conscious of the nervousness in her voice as she asked: “Shall I get breakfast now? Are there no nuts at all?”
“That can wait,” he said. He caught her in a strong grasp. “Do you not know what a wife does—or is done to? Well, you are near to learn.”
And in the next moments she did.
CHAPTER VI: THE EVILS OF AN OLD TIME
They sat at the evening meal, about which they had agreed that Destra’s liver was good.
Gleda ate with relish, the repulsion she might otherwise have felt at the consumption of human entrails being controlled by her hatred of the woman who had felt her own buttock with such greedy anticipation, prodding her like a pig. And the position might have been so precisely reversed! Her liver might have been on the dish, and Destra eating it now. It was impossible not to feel some satisfaction at that. And Destra’s liver was good.
It had been a wonderful day. After the morning consummation, they had talked freely together, and found affinities of mind which (it was easy to guess) Destra had not possessed.
Indeed, a remark he had made during the day—that it was a good thing he hadn’t put his knife into the wrong belly—was proof enough that he was contented with her, not only in herself, but in comparison with what might have been.
Now she was asking: “If it’s true you’ve not been cannibals till now, any more than we are on the other side of the river, how did you owe Relf a ham?”
“Relf had a man at his house who fell off a tree gathering nuts.”
“Not really?” Everyone was so at home in the trees! And the trees were the safest of all.
He did not resent her exclamation of incredulity. He explained: “The only nuts left hanging were on the extreme outer boughs, such as we had never had occasion to gather before.”
“Yes…I see. Was he killed?”
“No. But it was unlikely that he would have lived. He was badly hurt. And we were starving men.”
“Will you tell me why the times about which you are reading were so bad? Were they worse than these?”
“There could be no reasonable comparison. These are probably the best that have ever been. Those were indescribably bad.”
“Did they eat each other?”
“I have come on no evidence that they did, so I cannot say. But it is a point of little importance. It is not what they did to the dead, but to the living.”
“Do you mean that they had horrible wars?”
“They did. Very horrible ones. But I did not mean that. The worst wars have a heroic side. It was not what they did to their enemies but to their friends by which their values were shown. Can you believe that they used to kill children so that they could move about quickly?”
“But not intentionally.”
“You said that as though you know something about them yourself.”
“But how could I?”
“No. But, in an unimportant way, what you said was right. They knew that large numbers of children would be killed every week by what they did, though not which children, nor which of themselves the killers would be. And, so far as I have been able to find the facts, they had no reason for speed. They were not frightened of anything. They were not running away.”
“As you put it, it certainly has a strange sound. I suppose they would have made it appear in another way.”
“No doubt they would. But I have told you the fact, on which their records are clear. They used to count the dead every month, and compare them with what they had done during the same month of the previous year. It must have been a kind of game. But there were other features of that time which were more fantastic, though not worse. There were their laws.”
“Did they have many bad ones?”
“It was a question concerning which no man, even though he should give a whole life to their study, could be fully informed. There were too many for that. There was one country, England, where the making of restrictive laws was so excessive that its parliament could not produce new ones quickly enough to suit them, so they delegated authority to many officials who could make laws which their fellowmen must obey, as rapidly as they could dictate or sign them.”
“It does sound absurd.”
“I have not yet come to the point at which the final result of such a form of civil organization will appear, but some of its consequences in the decade with which I am dealing had been slightly mitigated by the fact that men had largely lost respect for laws which were broken continually, both through ignorance and resentment; and it followed from this that standards of both public and private honour were declining.
“It is particularly curious that while offences against these arbitrary edicts—which, had they not been declared illegal, would not have been wrong at all—were punished with increasing severity, sometimes with fines of fantastic amounts; crimes against individuals, whether of violence or greed, were condoned, and, unless they were persistently committed by the same individual, were hardly punished at all.
“In that country, a period of decadence was also threatened by the fact that the products of a man’s labour had ceased to be under his own control, a very large proportion of every income being seized by the state, and spent—more or less—for him, as the governing officials might consider his welfare required, after it had inevitably been much reduced in amount by deductions for their own support, and that of the civil armies which they maintained for distribution, regulation, and control.”
“But you don’t know how it all ended?”
“Not
