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  The noise of the falling walls, as the cottage flattened to the wind, roused her to a momentary further effort. She rose with difficulty, made two stumbling steps, and fell to her knees. Then she lay flat again on the wet earth that seemed the only stable thing remaining in a world of ruin. She did not doubt the earth.

  She lay there for an hour or more, while the wind blew over her. As, she did so her body recovered a measure of its strength from the violent ordeal it had endured. She had a natural desire to find some place of rest and shelter. She did not think that any of the cottages in the lane could offer such a haven, even if they had stood more solidly than the one from which she had fled.

  Perhaps the Rectory, which she had scarcely seen, but which she knew lay in the hollow of the hill behind the church, not more than three or four hundred yards away, might give her rest and shelter.

  As she lay face downward, half sunk in the rain-soaked soil, and among the stems and litter of the rhubarb-bed, torn and beaten and motionless, she might have seemed dead already to anyone who could have seen her in the darkness. But her mind, courageous, practical, tenacious, was already planning the way to the safety of which she had thought. She must find the back gate, and avoid the well; the lower lane would be a little longer, but it would be so much easier to follow its curving hollow and not to face the wind. She tried to remember, to construct the way which she must take before making any effort to commence the journey. Then she rose on her knees, and was surprised to find how well she could see among the surrounding shadows. But they were strange, confusing shadows. The contours of familiar things were changed and flailed and flattened. Yet she could see the gap of the back-lane gate in the low hawthorn hedge that still stood stoutly. But the walls and roof of the well must have fallen in.

  An uprooted plum-tree, dragging at intervals farther across the garden, lengthened her progress, but she found the gate at last, or, rather, the gap where the gate had been, and scrambled down the three stone steps to the lower level of the lane.

  After that progress was easier.

  Chapter Four

  The lane was very deep and narrow. Its width was just suffi­cient to allow two farm-carts to pass each other, with one wheel in the gutter, or tilted somewhat on the bank-side. These sides rose steeply for thirty feet to the level of the ploughed lands. Trees grew thickly from the steep slopes of the banks, and lined the edges, which were fenced with hedges of untrimmed hawthorn—un­trimmed because the countryside had been deserted of all but the most inevitable labour, and those who remained to do it were old men whose ancient habit still enabled them to overcome the reluc­tance of stiffened muscles and the vagueness of failing sight; and such of the younger generation as lacked the restless energy of a race more virile than were those who led it.

  The lane was older than any record of the lives of men: older than those straight and narrow ways that the Romans cut blindly through the midland swamps and forests. The wild strawberries on its banks had an ancestry of possession that outdated the flood of Genesis.

  There was an old oak on the northern bank. Its roots went deep in the sloping side. They projected also where the feet of climbing children had kicked away the soil that had once sustained them. Its branches spread, broad and low, over the narrow lane, and stretched across the field above, from which the wheat was springing.

  The storm struck it, but it felt no fear. It had fought with storms for three centuries. There was no lightning, and it was only lightning it hated. A half-dead branch on its western side, and a weal down its wrinkled trunk, showed how nearly it had met disaster eighty years ago. But that was when the elms on the farther side had been too small to shade it.

  If it thrilled to the first impact of the wind through all its sap-fed fibres, it was not with fear, but with the pleasure of a sport it knew, and to which it knew itself to be equal.

  It did not meet the wind’s assault as do the palms of tropic lands with a slim bole that could bend over, at the worst, without snapping, and with a feathery crest of a similar flexibility—the elms had tried the idea of the straight bole, and a poor job they made of it. Nor did it grow to a full and equal amplitude, as did the ash, as in pretence of a perpetual calm, or in mere contempt of the wind’s power to harm it. The ash was a tree of good repute, not to be contemned by any neighbour. It would not snap and show a rotten heart, as the elm may, when it looks most confident. But yet the oak, its clutching claws deep in the rocky soil, its short, thick arms jutting awkwardly from its squat and stubborn trunk, knew that it might still be there when the ash’s children had perished.

  It met the early fury of the storm with a joyous quickening of tenacious life in nerves that were alert and vivid with the youth of spring, and veins in which the sap pulsed strongly, despite the centuries which it carried.

  But the storm did not strike with the sudden and interrupted violences of the tempests which it had known so often. It struck once, and the blow endured and continued, a relentless pressure. And the hours passed, and it did not slacken, and the stubborn strength endured it, and would not fear, though the joy of strife was gone, and every fibre ached and quivered; and the time came when the aching of the boughs was in the deep roots also, clutching, in terror now, to the hard rock which they had riven deeper for centuries The aching of the great east limb, which stretched horizontally across the path of the unceasing wind, became an increasing pain, and when it snapped at last, as a twig snaps, through its eight-foot girth, the stunned tree scarcely felt the pain of its parting. When the storm paused for a moment, and then struck with a fresh force, that bore the great tree bodily, with all its roots, and a hundred tons of the rock it gripped, into the hollow of the lane, it was scarcely conscious of the calamity that had overthrown it: it leaned, still half-erect, conscious, as in a dream, of the cessation of that intolerable strain, and falling into the heavy sleep from which it must wake at last to be aware of its ruin.

  * * * * * * *

  Muriel made her way up the deep lane with comparatively little difficulty, till she came to the place at which the oak had fallen. Here she found herself wading in loose soil, and sinking deeper at every step, till she fell over a projecting root of the fallen giant, that had held its position almost upright as it slid into the hollow.

  To surmount this impediment would have been difficult in the daylight for one of her physical limitations. It was impossible in the darkness. But she was of the kind that does not easily turn from any purpose when once it has been undertaken. The bank rose steeply, its surface hidden by the overhanging shadows of bush and tree, and coated with a heavy undergrowth of weed and bramble. But she tried it, after an interval of rest—fortunately, in the blind chance of the darkness, selecting the opposite side from that on which the oak had grown, and in which it had left a gaping pit as far as its roots had spread beneath the surface level.

  Actually, it was not as difficult as might be thought for one who had ceased to regard the scratching of face and arms or the tearing of sodden garments. Bush and tree gave support as well as hindrance to slipping feet, and aid as well as obstacle to hands that groped vaguely upward.

  The time came when she felt the wind on the level field, and having struggled against it for a hundred difficult yards was glad to take to the bank again, and descend as best she might into the shelter of the narrow lane.

  Having surmounted this obstacle, she might have had some difficulty in finding the hillside path that left the lane and straggled vaguely toward the Rectory and the church, with no evidence of where it forked in mid-field which she could have observed in the darkness, but that there was now a measure of light around her, of which she became conscious as soon as she had outflanked the obstacle of the fallen oak.

  By this light she found her way round the hill as easily as the storm permitted, and learnt its cause as the Rectory came into sight. It was burning fiercely. Whether from the fire itself, or from the earlier action of the storm, its main structure, old and timber-built, had collaps
ed entirely. It showed now like a huge bonfire, from which a long trail of flame and smoke held down by the pressure of the wind, lay almost horizontally upon an ancient orchard, finding fresh fuel in its uprooted trees, and stretching on across a farther field, till it formed a hot and choking barrier to any who might attempt to struggle along the road that led to the shelter of the church from the eastern end of the village. For the church stood. It showed no lights, for its northern windows had fallen in, and its southern ones blown outward, and it would have been impossible to keep its candles or its ancient lamps alight in the tempest of wind and rain which blew through it.

  But the walls remained, and the squat tower that was itself scarcely as high as the swell of land upon its northern side. And in the darkness, half lit by the flickering glow of the burning house, the Rector’s household, and about thirty others of the four hundred inhabitants of Sterrington village, crouched and sobbed and whimpered, or spoke confident words to others, as their natures led them.

  The Rector stood in the shelter of the east porch, looking out in hesitation as Muriel reached it. He had just quietened an injured, frantic woman who had lost one of her children in the darkness as they had made their way to the church by promising that he would himself go to its rescue.

  It was not a promise that he would lightly break. Yet what could he do till the wind should slacken and there be some light to guide him! The glare of the burning Rectory shone in his eyes, and made the howling darkness blacker. It would be difficult, he thought, on such a night, to find familiar paths, but now, when all landmarks were flattening, and the air was perilous with flying boughs and falling timber, and the ground was strewn with ruin…. And what cries could reach him through the screaming storm?

  The firelight glowed up suddenly as Muriel approached, and shone directly upon her; yet at the first glance he did not recognize who she was.

  Her sodden clothes were torn from her left shoulder and arm, and were otherwise filthed and shredded. Her face was smeared with soil and streaked with blood and rain and her hair was a wild disorder above it. He could see from her stumbling walk that she was in the last stage of exhaustion.

  “Miss Temple! Are you hurt?” he said fatuously as he drew her on to the seat within the porch that gave some shelter from the wind.

  She could not answer for some time, but leaned back, breathing with difficulty. There was the dreaded pain in her side. He was aware that she had fainted.

  What could he do but wait beside, supporting her lest she should slip from the narrow bench.

  After a time she revived.

  “I think I’m all right now,” she said. “You mustn’t stay with me. There must be so much to do.”

  The words reminded him of the errand on which he had been starting.

  He said, “I am going to look for Mrs. Walkley’s Maud. She was struck by something as she came here, and some neighbours brought her along, and the other children; but Maud’s missing.”

  “Then you mustn’t stay for me. I shall be all right now. I wish you hadn’t waited.”

  The Rector still stood for a moment. He was not a hero. He hated to be out in the rain, even with an overcoat and some good boots. And now he was insufficiently clad and wearing bedroom slippers. And besides, his cough. He had been tired when he went to bed last night, and now, after barely escaping with his life from the collapse of the Rectory…. And what a loss for a poor man such as he! His library was known to book-collectors throughout the country. It was only last month that a self-invited dealer had offered him two thousand pounds for it. An absurd price! He believed that it was worth four. And it was insured for only three hundred pounds….

  Certainly he did not want to go into the storm again in this half-clad condition to look for Maudie Walkley….

  If the height of heroism is to be measured by the depth of disinclination or cowardice from which it springs, rather than from a ‘sea-level’ of normality, there was no braver deed in that night of a million of hidden heroisms that the advancing waters would cover than that of the Rev. Peter Smithers, stumbling down the slippery side of the hill into the rain-swept darkness, in his useless search for a child that was already dead.

  Lost and bewildered, knowing only that he was somewhere in the lower meadows, he turned sharply more than once at the thought that he must be heading for the unfenced danger of the river-bank, till he knew that all sense of direction had left him.

  He tried to read 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 s
moke 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.