Deluge: A Novel of Global Warming Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1927, 1928 by S. Fowler Wright

  Copyright © 2012 by the Estate of S. Fowler Wright

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  NOTE

  This Borgo Press edition is taken from the Gilbert Dalton edition, with the preface to the second edition added.

  PREFACE

  TO THE SECOND EDITION

  The issue of a second edition of this book, before its sequel is published, provides an earlier opportunity of answering some of the criticisms which it has provoked, most of which were based upon the supposition that it was written in a spirit of propaganda, which is a mistake.

  It was, in fact, written somewhat randomly, allowing circumstances and character to develop to what ends they would, which is the way of life, and should, I think, be that of fiction also. Its conclusion—if such it can be called, being the event of a critical moment, which must work out its further and most uncertain issues—was neither foreseen nor intended.

  Imagining a quite probable physical incidence, and certain people to be involved therein, I was only concerned to observe the interaction of character and circumstance, under conditions which would never be exactly duplicated. If such people, under such circumstances, would not act in such manner, the book is open to legitimate criticism, but not otherwise. As to that, readers must judge for themselves. But the actions must be regarded as individual, not typical.

  One American reviewer challenges me definitely on this ground, stating that no woman would act as Helen does in the last chapter, and that I show ignorance of feminine psychology. Women may be as inevitable as the moon, but, like her, they act with a delusive appearance of inconstancy, and the error may not be mine.

  A woman has just brought an action against her husband in the Turkish courts on the ground that he failed to take a second wife within a reasonable interval after his marriage to herself, which she had a right to expect from one in his social position. Does he suppose, she asks, that she will be content to consort with servants indefinitely?

  I notice that this line of criticism reaches me only from American sources. “A frequent change of wife,” in Sir Owen Seaman’s delightful phrase, is one of the basic privileges of American citizenship, which we of the old world, bound to our monotonous loyalties, can only admire from a distance; but they are extremely particular that neither they nor their neighbours shall have more than one at a time.

  I am puzzled by both these characteristics. I have a strong preference for keeping the wife I have, and if my neighbour were to tell me that he has half a dozen I should hear him with sympathy, but my mind would not be disturbed by any violent reaction. It might be supposed that an American citizen, having emerged once or twice from the disaster of marriage, would prefer to take his remaining wives in bulk rather than seriatim, and get through them as quickly as possible. Perhaps he would; and the objection may be on the side of the women only. A woman commonly has a retail mind.

  In England, one (otherwise too-kindly) reviewer considers that the book contains evidences of “ferocious prejudices.”

  Now I am not without prejudices (who is?), but if I were told that I have fewer than any other inhabitant of these islands, I should be less surprised than if almost any other singularity were alleged against me.

  I believe that human life has some value; and I am prejudiced in favour of populating the British Empire.

  I am equally prejudiced against walking across Oxford Circus with my eyes closed at midday, and reducing our fleet while our land goes out of cultivation, although I realise that either folly may be perpetrated without inevitable penalty following.

  I am prejudiced in the belief that the death of one careless chauffeur daily in the hangman’s shed, however regrettable, would be less so than is the death of seven careless pedestrians daily on the open road. (The actual road fatalities in England now number fourteen a day, not seven, but half of these are motorists who kill themselves or each other.)

  I am also prejudiced against the opinion of the Home Secretary that the perils and abuses of road traffic will increase indefinitely, because I have not observed that it is in the nature of pendulums to continue to swing in the same direction.

  But my prejudices are very few, and are easily challenged. I am prejudiced in the beliefs that the earth is spherical, and that Marie Stopes is intellectually subnormal, yet if I were told that she is capable of a logical argument, or that the earth is flat, I should approach either proposition with an alert curiosity and a very open mind.

  A correspondent reproaches me for alluding to “the mercy of another war” as though it implied either callousness or stupidity. War is, in many aspects, the supreme evil; and to initiate it is the supreme crime. It may be strongly, though not conclusively argued, that it is incompatible with Christianity under every circumstance. But there are evils of peace, also, which are no less deadly because they are slower and less dramatic in operation; and if war be permanently avoidable without national degeneration, we must carry the high spirit of conflict into the years of peace, which we have failed to do.

  The end of the war left us with a Government assuring us that we were too tired for further effort, and ordering the retreat to be sounded. We were to reap the blessings of peace, but we were to make no effort to cultivate them. We were to talk about homes for heroes rather than to exert ourselves to build them. We were to recover prosperity, not by hard work, but by increasing each other’s wages indefinitely.

  Naturally, privations followed.

  Pitiless taxation and currency manoeuvres may have kept some parts of the nation in continued comfort, but for the community as a whole they proved an obstructive curse. Such are the common sequels of prolonged war, and the politicians who are responsible for them will tell us complacently that they are inevitable. But is there any historical record of the difficulties of post-martial years being attacked with the national spirit which is provoked by the impact of a dangerous enmity?

  Consider the question of housing. The end of the war found us deficient both in quantity and condition. There was no proper accommodation for the millions of men who were returning to civil life from tent and trench and shipboard. There were no roofs beneath which they could form the homes which the nation needed, with the women who were waiting for them, or whom they had married already. Can it be said that we were lacking in the labour or skill to build the houses they needed, or that it was beyond possibility to procure the necessary materials?

  Suppose that at the crisis of war, in the spring of 1918, these houses had suddenly been realised as a condition of victory. Suppose that we had known certainly that if half a million houses could be solidly erected in six months we should win the war, and if there were one short we should lose it. Would Mr Lloyd George have been content to make a “homes for heroes” speech, and then such a bargain with those who were expert to build them as would enable them, from brickmaker to bricklayer, to live comfortably while working slackly, and to debar anyone else from assisting their operations?

  Would it have been tolerated, had the result of the war depended upon their occupation, that thousands of houses, whether large or small, should have been held empty to satisfy the private greed of their owners?

  There are many instances of nations that have maintained themselves through centuries of successful war. In all history, there is no record of any nation that has retained its character or vitality through centuries of successful peace. If we would venture that higher and harder enterprise with reasonable hope of achievement, we must first recognise its conditions and dangers, which we show no disposition to do, and we shall
need some better guidance than will come from the muddled wobblings of Dean Inge, or the vicious cowardice of the gospel of Marie Stopes.

  We need not observe these facts in any spirit of pessimism, for they are only formidable the while we fail to observe them. But it would be foolish to ignore their significance. It is not a trivial circumstance that the English post-office, which once prided itself on the certainty with which it would deliver any communication entrusted to it, however badly addressed, now takes an equal pride in the ingenuity with which it can find reasons for failing to do so. But it will not be the first time that England has seen evil days and survived them.

  Quiet, uncomplaining, oppressed with a weight of taxation which is without excuse, as it is without precedent, shamefully told that the payment of these exactions is more important than their children’s lives, there are still in England, unless my faith is mistaken, a million of uncorrupted homes, where children are received with love, and privations are met with courage.

  The pressure of unjust taxation may yet find a Hampden to resist it. A materialistic “science” may yet rouse a prophet to deride its superstitions, and to denounce its counsels of degradation.

  However cunningly entrenched may be the bureaucracy which controls us, it is a fundamental law that it cannot endure unless its spirit be one of service rather than of acquisition.

  Feudalism was impregnable until its ideal of service faltered. The monasteries would have endured until today, had they been content to express the ideality which conceived them.

  Our “captains of industry” may become the rulers of their race, or they may end beneath the feet of a howling mob. The decision does not rest with the mob, nor with chance, nor with a settled destiny. It rests with them. If they be more concerned for their own wealth than for the welfare of those they lead, even the stupidity of the Labour party (which is almost absolute) will be sufficient for their undoing.

  We may contemplate the probability that our civilisation may be swept away by physical catastrophe, and be succeeded by a period of simpler and more primitive life, from which new complexities will develop, without pessimism, and, if we understand the nature and purpose of human life intelligently, without regret.

  Even if this civilisation were realised as the highest that the earth has borne, and could it be freed from various sinister practices, (such as that of usury), which are so woven into its fabric that it may be doubted whether it could survive their removal, we might still contemplate its conclusion with equanimity, or even with satisfaction.

  Having won a game, we do not desire to remain static in victory. We clear the field for the contest which is sure to follow. But whether our civilisation be of such quality that it could be accounted pessimistic, from any standpoint, to anticipate its destruction, is not beyond argument. It might be considered evidence of an exceptionally sanguine temperament.

  —S. Fowler Wright

  PRELUDE

  To an observer from a distant planet the whole movement would have appeared trivial. There was probably no point at which land either sank or rose to one five-thousandth of the earth’s diameter. But water and land were so nearly at one level that the slightest tremor was sufficient either to drain or flood them.

  The surface trembled, and was still, and the Himalayas were untroubled, and the great tableland of Central Asia was still behind them, but the tides lapped the foothills to the south, and India was no more, and China a forgotten dream.

  Once before the earth had trembled along the volcanic fissure which was then the fertile Eden of the human race, and a hundred legends and the Mediterranean were its mementoes.

  Now it sank again, slightly and gently, along the same path. It was as though it breathed in its sleep, but scarcely turned, and Southern Europe was gone, and Germany a desolation that the seas had swept over.

  Ocean covered the plain of the Mississippi, and broke against the barrier of the Rockies. The next day it receded, leaving the naked wrecks of a civilisation that a night had ended.

  There were different changes southward, where the Saharan desert wrinkled into the greatest mountain range that the world had seen, and the sea creatures of the West Atlantic learnt in bewildered death that the ocean had failed them.

  In the Indian tropics a hundred leagues of sea-slime that had known the weight of mile-deep waters streamed naked to a torrid sun.

  The subsistence of the first night must have been comparatively local. It was nothing more than an extension of the Mediterranean basin, which had flooded the lower lands of Spain and Italy and part of France.

  In England, as in Europe generally, the intervening day had been used in such attempts at escape as may be made by a cockroach in the middle floor when the lantern finds it.

  The sea offered nothing, for the western coast was piled with the wreckage of the North Atlantic and the Irish Sea. There were no ships coming to the southern ports that day. There had been none in sight when its dawn had risen. The night-wind had swept the Channel clear, and if any had outlived the gale, which is not to be reasonably supposed, they must have been hurried far to south, where wind and water poured into the vortex.

  The air offered a slight hope for the few who could avail themselves of its possibility. When the wind lessened, during the day, there were those who tried it, and may have lived, if they were able to find a place of safety before the storm resumed, but at best they could not have been many, and their hope was slender.

  To most there came the blind instinct of northward flight, and as the pressure of the gale slackened, it had crowded many of the main roads with burdened stumbling crowds, or jammed them with motor vehicles which could make little progress against uprooted trees, and fallen poles, and blown wreckage, which confronted every mile of the smooth surfaces on which they had been accustomed to the high speed for which they paid so frequently in the deaths of their drivers, and in the slaughter of their fellowmen.

  Now, when they felt that speed would have been their salvation, they could not gain it; but it would have availed them nothing. When the horror of the next night was over, Scotland, Wales, and all the heights of Northern England had disappeared forever. Only, by some freak of fate, the cause of which is beyond knowing, some portions of the midland plain were still above the ocean level, with unimpaired fertility, and some life upon them. Larger portions had been drowned by the wild floods that receded when all life had ended, and the salt-soaked fields could only return in the course of gradual years to a reduced fertility. There was little of human life that remained, even in the higher ground, for those whom fire and storm had spared fled northward, to their own undoing, and few from the pasture-country to southward (one of the least populated portions of the England of that time) had had the good fortune to come so far, and no farther; but life there was, both of beast and man—life equally released from its accustomed slavery, lawless, confused, and incompetent.

  The wild creatures of the woods adapted themselves the more readily to the new conditions. The change was only one of reduced caution, or of an added boldness. Man had ceased to count for the moment, and the fox walked where he would. To the rabbit it meant only that, if he had one foe the less, the others slaughtered with an assured impunity. To his undrowsing watchfulness it made no change at all.

  Rats increased in the deserted ruins, and the owls fed freely.

  The domesticated animals adjusted themselves more easily than their tyrants. The cat hunted now for food, as she had done for sport before. Sheep broke out from ruined fences, or where a tree fell in the hedgerow, and gathered into larger flocks, and rams fought for their leadership. The lambs were grown, and the roaming dogs had not yet combined to molest the flocks. Within a week, the sheep had collected on the high and open fields; and a herd of horses had gathered in the meadows of a river which still flowed on its shortened course—horses that wheeled with a flash of sudden hooves if a strange sound startled, or a strange object stirred in the grass as the wind found it, and came round in a ga
lloped arc with tossing necks and lifted tails, to face the cause of their flurry. They were a strangely assorted troop of mare and gelding, of every size and colour, from shire horse to pony, absurdly led by a bright-eyed, half-grown yearling, who took the unchallenged right of the only male among them.

  Herds of cattle lurked in the woods, and splashed in shady pools; and in the woods, too, were the pigs, to which the sows that roamed loosely round the farm buildings, finding that the morning meal was no more forthcoming, had led their hungry litters. They lay also in the potato fields, and would find their way later into the corn and to the acorn harvest, so that they ran no risk of scarcity, and before the winter came they would have worn the rings from their noses, and be able to burrow for a score of succulent roots that the woods could offer, as their free-roaming ancestors had done in the England of an earlier millennium.

  Men fared more hardly. It was upon their artificial environment that the storm spent its force. There were many thousands whom this environment destroyed, quite literally, beneath its falling debris. Those who escaped from such catastrophe were less capable than the beasts they despised, either to find a temporary security or to provide for their bodily necessities when the storm subsided. They had used their boasted intelligence to evade the natural laws of their beings, and they were to reap the fruits of their folly. They had degraded their purblind and toothless bodies, until even those which were still reasonably sound in heart and lungs, in liver and kidneys, were incapable of sustained exertion without continual food, or of retaining warmth without the clumsy encumbrance of the skins of superior animals, or by the weaving of various vegetable substances.

  Every natural law that their lives had denied and their lips derided was now released to scourge them. They had despised the teaching of the earth that bore them, and her first care was given to her more obedient offspring.

  It was not only that they were physically ill-adapted for life on the earth’s surface, but the minds of most of them were empty of the most elementary knowledge of their physical environment.