The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was beyond reason to expect my romantic exultation to survive the night and live on to the dawn. I had crawled beneath the sheets of my makeshift bed and fallen asleep with a sense of nobility and inspiration that had never entered my life before, but I awoke in the chill, grey hours with a stiff neck and a feeling of discomfort down one side of my throat that suggested the onset of a chill. I had no idea what time it was, and my head throbbed painfully when I got up to put the hearthrug over my couch for greater warmth.

I crept back between the crumpled sheets, shivering all over, and began to consider my situation a little more practically than I had done on the previous night. Nothing, during dinner, had mattered beyond the thrill and adventure of starting out to build a new and better world – but there were many less exciting things to consider in the cheerless light of dawn.

I was still glad that Pat and Robin had come to share my home, but I began to develop an extreme reluctance to face them in my present condition. The encrusted habits of long and self-indulgent bachelorhood were reasserting themselves. I liked being silent in the morning, particularly at breakfast, but the presence of this charming girl and exuberant boy was going to call for a higher standard of morning behaviour than I was accustomed to. If I were to hold their affection and respect I must be buoyant and amusing at all times, but it was going to need all my resolution to be buoyant at seven in the morning with a stiff neck.

There is a prevalent idea that it does a man a lot of good to be shaken out of his rut of self-complacency, but I have never quite understood how it benefits him except to make him uncomfortable and irritable. I would gladly have exchanged the youth and charm of Pat and Robin for the middle-aged stolidity of Mrs Buller, who needed no living up to, and who accepted me as placidly without my false teeth as with them.

The business of being ‘self-supporting’, which had seemed so novel and exciting over a glass of good claret at dinner, now began to disturb and oppress me. There would be no hot shaving water this morning, and no hot bath. Pat and Robin were probably accustomed to cold baths, but to me a cold bath was a certain inducement to sciatica, and with my present sore throat and stiff neck… the prospect would not bear thinking of…

And how were we to live if, as I imagined, the whole fabric of civilisation had collapsed? No butter, no milk, no bread, no meat? I had a few potatoes stored and some carrots and beetroots earthed up in my vegetable garden, but a diet of vegetables and water would not sustain our strength for long. The grim, unanswerable problems paraded before me in the dawn like spectres: no electric light – no sanitary services – no pure water – thousands of dead, festering bodies that we had yet to see… flies… rats… disease… had we survived so bravely to meet slow death from hunger – or swift death from typhoid?

I missed the morning paper, too: I missed the dawn song of birds in spring. And even the cheerful whistling of the milkman. The morning was as dead and as silent as the previous day – a heavy, suffocating silence that pressed and throbbed against my aching head.

I must have dozed, for I heard no movement in the room, nor the opening of the door: I suddenly started up in surprise at someone standing beside my couch.

It was Pat. Pat in a blue silk dressing-gown – as fresh and as lovely as when first I had met her upon those windswept downs, and in her hand was a steaming cup of tea!

‘Pat!’ I blurted, ‘my dear girl! – what on earth!…’

‘What on earth – what?’ she laughed.

‘What on earth have you been doing?’ I added rather lamely. ‘Hot tea! – how did you do it?’

‘What a man you are! Didn’t you know there was a stove in the kitchen? A grand little fellow – burns like fury… the bath water’s nearly boiling.’

Her voice turned suddenly to concern: she was looking at the hearthrug and began to draw it over me. ‘You poor darling! – you’ve been freezing all night while I slept like a log in your bed!’

I laughed. All my distaste at letting her see me in my crumpled, unprepossessing condition melted away in the warmth of that friendly smile. I knew that my eyes looked small and bleary without my spectacles and that my hair, when rumpled, looked much balder than when properly brushed – but it seemed to matter nothing: Pat had seen me at my worst and her eyes told me that I had lost nothing by it.

‘I wasn’t cold in the slightest,’ I assured her. ‘Hearthrugs are useless things as a rule. I thought I’d make it do a job of work for once!’

I sipped the tea and she watched me closely.

‘How is it?… sweet enough?’

‘It’s grand,’ I said. It brought back the memory of those hot, strong cups of tea that Pat had made at the dugout. She went away, and returned with my dressing-gown and slippers.

‘How long have you been up?’ I asked. I remembered now that through my drowsiness I had heard movement in the kitchen, but subconscious habit had connected it with Mrs Buller, my housekeeper.

‘About an hour,’ she said. ‘I wanted to dress Robin’s face.’

‘How is he?’

‘Poor kid,’ she said. ‘It’s badly swollen and hurting him like mad. It needs a doctor, really… but Robin’s tough… he’ll be all right.’

I swung myself off the couch and pulled my slippers on. ‘I feel a lazy brute… lying here… you doing all this…’

‘You look like a gangster with that scrubby beard!’

‘In half an hour you won’t know me!’ I declared.

I went to the bathroom and shaved. The tea had soothed my throat, and as I lay stretched in a piping hot bath, feeling my stiffness dissolving like magic, I thought with wonder of the girl who had wrought this miracle. I had thought of Pat as a delightful, modern girl who could ride well, play games with vigour and talk charmingly of casual, modern things: I had not expected depth or seriousness in her, or an understanding of things that her happy, protected life had never called for. But as I thought of her now I flushed with shame at my cowardly misgivings in the dawn. If but a few more girls like Pat had survived, then this world of ours, however sorely wounded, would live and vibrate with strength and pride again.

Never again would I allow cowardice to assail me: whatever lay in store for us, whatever horrors, whatever privations lay ahead, I knew that I could face and defeat them with Pat and Robin by my side.

I felt a new man as I dressed into easy, comfortable flannels, and a stimulating smell of frying bacon was coming up the stairs as I went to Robin’s room.

‘How goes it, Robin?’

The boy was huddled upon his side, his hands pressed tightly to his bandaged face, but he sat up quickly as I entered.

‘Hullo!’ he said.

‘How’s the wounded hero?’

‘I’m all right.’

His forehead looked hot and flushed and I could see that his wounded cheek was badly swollen, but his eyes were clear and healthy.

‘Pat’s been fussing around like an old hen. Says I’ve got to stay in bed. I’ll stay till you’re ready to go exploring and that’s that!’

I promised to tell the boy when we were ready to go out and went down to my breakfast.

Pat had laid the meal on the kitchen table: the eggs were a trifle hard and the yolks broken, but it is ungenerous to criticise. I was loud in my praise of the bacon, although it lacked the crispness that I was accustomed to.

‘I’ll improve,’ said Pat. ‘Seems a bit luxurious, having eggs and bacon, but we’ve got to eat the fresh stuff first.’

We delayed our journey of exploration in order that Robin might rest, and it was nearly midday when we started out.

We were very silent as we picked our way across my wreck-strewn garden and stood upon the slope that commanded a view of the village: our keen anticipation was mingled with a shrinking dread…

It was a dull, dispiriting morning. A queer brownish haze filled sky and air, a relic, probably, of the great dust-storm of Monday night: myriads of minute particles were floating in the clouds, obscuring the sun and giving a tinge of autumn to this day of early spring.

From the hillside the view beneath us gave little food for encouragement. The brown tints of the sky found harmony in the earth beneath it: the receding flood had slimed the valley and the lower slopes of the downs with a muddy silt: the lines of the hedgerows were marked by ridges of dark debris. It was like a drawing in sepia, with no contrasting colour – no trees to soften the grim, storm-swept edges of the downs. The lake that had submerged the village on the previous day had partly drained off down the valley, but many pools of muddy, stagnant water remained around the silent, ruined houses.

Deserted, too, was this landscape before us – shorn not merely of its trees and hedgerows, but of life itself: a village of No Man’s Land: a village that might have stood beneath an ocean for a thousand years. Not a living soul: not a sound came from that tragic little cluster of houses as we descended the hillside.

The village street was deep in half-dried mud, and we made our way behind the houses where gardens had once been. Now and then we stopped to peer through a paneless window or broken door. Although I knew the village intimately, it was extraordinarily difficult to identify the houses now: it seemed that the hurricane or the first waves of the flood had carried away the roofs of nearly all the buildings, so that hollow cups were formed, receptacles for the mud to settle in. In some cases I saw the mud still trickling down the stairs and through the doorways, horribly like blood oozing from the wounds of fresh-dead bodies: the church was recognisable from its ruined tower and the Fox & Hounds by the open space that lay before it, but the rest were brown, grinning ruins, featureless and impossible to name.

Now and then I called out ‘Hullo!’ or ‘Anybody there?’, but my voice sounded small and stupid as it echoed off the sodden walls and up the silent valley.

We came to the end of the poor, broken street, and nothing lay ahead but empty stretches of mud. We looked at one another with puzzled eyes.

‘Where are they all?’ said Robin.

‘Possibly they came down from the dugout… saw all this and… and went away.’ My last words sounded so lame that Pat laughed. ‘Where to?’ she asked.

‘Ask me another!’ I replied.

Pat and Robin had turned their heads away from me: both were staring up at the silent dugout in Burgin Park.

‘Hadn’t we better go up there?’ said Robin.

I would gladly have returned home: our journey through the village had been eerie and depressing, but at least it was relieved by everything being open and clear to see. My whole instinct recoiled from those grim doorways in the hillside above us: I hated the thought of going up to face the nameless horror of them.

But Pat and Robin were waiting: it was my duty to give them a lead.

‘Come on,’ I said.

It was less than half a mile, but it seemed an endless journey. There was something horribly menacing and sinister in those two closed doors, and the one that stood half-open beside them.

I stole a glance at Pat as we walked in silence: her face was very pale, her lips firmly set: she too was feeling the horror that was stealing through my limbs.

We passed the two closed doors without a glance and made straight for the one that stood ajar. I shuddered even as I gripped it and pulled it fully open. It was like taking the shoulder of a corpse and turning it upon its face.

The dullness of the day helped little to dispel the gloom as we peered down the steps.

‘Got a match?’ said Robin.

I drew a box from my pocket and Robin took them from me. We watched him anxiously as he began to grope down into the darkness.

‘Mind how you go!’ I called.

A little flame spat out: we saw the boy’s body silhouetted against the light and heard his exclamation of surprise.

‘It’s full of water,’ he said.

I groped down and stood beside him. Level with the sixth step lay an inky surface of water.

As we returned to the doorway, Robin picked up something from the steps.

‘A woman’s scarf,’ he said.

We stood together beside the door, talking in hushed voices as if people slept nearby.

‘Somebody opened the door,’ said Robin, ‘somebody from inside. If they could open it, they could come out.’

‘Perhaps they opened it before the flood had gone,’ I said: ‘the water inside suggests that.’

‘Nobody could open the door against the weight of a flood.’

That was true. I could think of nothing else.

Pat was staring at the scarf. ‘Do you recognise it?’ I asked.

‘No,’ replied Pat. ‘But it’s bone dry.’

I struggled to make my thoughts run clearly and logically. My terror of that silent dugout was lost in the baffling problem of that open door and dry scarf.

The fact that the dugout was filled with water made it obvious that, for some unknown reason, it was opened before the flood arrived. If it were opened afterwards, how could the water have got in? On the other hand, if the dugout were flooded by water pouring through the open doorway, how on earth could one account for the dry scarf lying on the steps?

Above all – where were the people who had opened the door?

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ I said at last. ‘It’s useless to stay here.’

Before we took our departure we hammered against both of the closed doors and called out ‘Hullo!’ I knew that it was a fruitless effort, but somehow it seemed part of a ceremony that we must perform before we could go.

‘I suppose we shall know one day,’ whispered Pat as we went together down the barren slopes where bluebells should now have thrown a haze around us.

Pat was right. In due time we were to learn the solution to that baffling mystery – but it must come in the proper sequence of my story.

The reader can well imagine our feelings as we retraced our steps through the lifeless village and climbed the hillside to my home. What we had expected to find upon that journey of discovery I cannot truly say: at least we had hoped for something: some tangible clue: some evidence to give us a better understanding of what had happened to the world.

We had been spared the horrors of drowned, mutilated bodies, but even a body would have broken this terrifying solitude: even a cry of agony would have eased this ghostly silence.

‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Pat.

We had paused beside the front door of my home and were looking back across the ruined village: the setting sun gave shadowed depth to the trail of our footsteps across the drying silt.

‘I was thinking,’ I replied, ‘how terrible it would be if my companions were a hysterical girl, and a boy without any guts.’

Directly I had spoken I felt hot around the ears at having made the sort of remark that Robin would consider ‘bad form’, but Pat saved my embarrassment by laughing. ‘Or worse still,’ she said, ‘if it were Dr Hax.’

I looked up in surprise. ‘How did you know I didn’t like Dr Hax?’

‘Who does?’ she answered, ‘or perhaps I ought to say “who did”?’… her voice dropped almost to a whisper: ‘Poor Dr Hax… poor old Vicar… where are they?’

‘We mustn’t think of that,’ I said. ‘The thing to consider at the moment is a cup of tea. We’ve earned it.’

Robin had borne up wonderfully throughout our long and tiring expedition, but on entering the house he almost fainted. I took him to his room: I made him lie down and pulled the blankets around him, for he was shivering.

‘Your job,’ I said, in reply to his protests, ‘is to get strong again, and to get strong you must rest.’

I went downstairs and found Pat in the kitchen. She had built up the fire: she had put the kettle upon it and spread the cloth upon the table. She was standing by the window, her eyes upon the gaunt crest of the downs that were dark and pitiless against the setting sun – and she was crying.

I had not seen Pat cry before. I laid my hand upon her shoulder and she started violently – her tortured nerves were stretched to breaking point: she looked up at me in confusion and shame.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Fine thing to do after… after what you said just now!’

‘After what I said?’

‘About me not… not being hysterical…’

‘My dear…’ I felt such a hopeless, clumsy fool. Some men would have found wonderful words to cheer that brave, pitiful girl: I could think of nothing. I just stood there patting her shoulder like a foolish old man.

It was characteristic of Pat that she did not try to stifle her tears: nor did she embarrass me by completely breaking down. I stood in silence until it was over, until she looked up at me, smiling through her tears, and slipped her arm through mine.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m all right now… you won’t think I’m… I’m giving up, will you? It isn’t that… it’s just that it… it takes so much understanding, and I’m not clever, if you know what I mean – I can’t realise it all at once. Do you like Russian tea?’

Her final words were so unexpected that for a moment I had a horrid fear of her mind giving way.

‘Russian tea?’ I stammered.

She nodded. ‘There isn’t any milk – but there’s a lemon.’

I laughed out loud in relief. ‘Pat! – what an unexpected person you are!’ And then I grew concerned. ‘But surely there’s tinned milk in the larder?’

She shook her head. ‘I congratulated you on your organisation too soon. Lots of sardines – plenty of tinned tongue – no milk.’

This was an unpleasant surprise. I counted upon sufficient of everything to last a siege of at least a month – and I could not stand tea without milk at any price.

‘I’ll go down to the shop and get some!’ I said.

It was a crazy remark, designed more to cheer Pat up than anything else, but there was a wild possibility of finding something in the ruins of the shop. I told Pat to rest for a while, took my hat and retraced my steps to the ruined houses in the valley.

I knew the general store of Mr Thatcher because it stood upon the corner, almost opposite the church. The door was still shut but the glass panel was broken, and up to the level of the glass the shop was filled almost waist high with liquid mud. It was impossible to open the door against the weight of this morass. I kicked the panel until it split and had to jump hastily aside as the mud gushed out like water through a mill sluice. I watched it ooze away down the road and had the fright of my life when, as I opened the door, the little bell clanged overhead. It was the eeriest sound I had ever heard, and I stood there for quite a time, half-expecting to see the mud-encrusted corpse of Mr Thatcher walk from his little back room to serve me.

The counter and shelves behind it were completely bare, but when I went into the small room behind the shop my mission was rewarded beyond my wildest dreams. A big cupboard stood in one corner, the key still in the lock, and when I opened it, out of curiosity rather than hope, I was almost stunned by a cascade of tins and packages that descended upon me.

The shop was a general one in the widest sense of the word: there were tins of herrings in tomato sauce by the dozen, curry powders and butterscotch, soup squares and lunch biscuits: the treasure hoard of a fairy tale.

I emptied out a box of cocoa tins and filled it with a varied selection, including, to my immense satisfaction, three tins of condensed milk.

I struggled up the twilit hillside with the box upon my shoulder; my spirits higher than they had been for many months: I was forced to put the box down and rest for a moment before entering the kitchen in a calm, offhand manner to impress Pat the more.

I stood by with a smile as the astonished Pat unloaded the booty upon the table: there were two tins of herrings in tomato sauce, a box of chocolate biscuits, a packet of candles, half a dozen cubes of compressed soup and numerous smaller delicacies, including a bottle of Bovril for Robin.

‘Magician!’ gasped Pat. ‘How on earth did you do it?’

‘Just waved my wand,’ I replied.

While Pat opened the tin of milk and made the tea I took a steaming cup of Bovril to Robin’s room, with biscuits arranged around it in the saucer.

‘You seem to spend your whole time saving my life,’ said Robin, as he sat up in bed sipping the beverage and munching the biscuits.

‘You’ll get plenty of chances to save mine,’ I told him. ‘Turn over and have a sleep and be down to dinner at seven. Pat’s going to make a stew. If that doesn’t kill you, nothing will!’

There was magic in the twilight of those brave, early days. With the coming of darkness the barren solitude around us was robbed of its menace: we would light the candles, draw the curtains, make up the fire and feel the spell of adventure sweep in triumph through anxiety and care.

If fate had given to me, as my companions, a couple of quarrelsome old ladies or even the Vicar and Mr Murgatroyd the publican, the situation would have been completely different and I have no idea how I should have faced it. But the youth and spirits of Pat and Robin were of a quality beyond the infection of danger and solitude: courage and gaiety were bred in their bones: it bubbled out of them as naturally as spring water from a mountainside. Robin had a constitution that rebounded from exhaustion like a rubber ball. Long before dinner was ready he was in the library persuading me to go across to The Manor House with him to fetch his portable gramophone and a pile of records.

We followed our tracks of the previous day across the valley, for there were no other signs to guide us. We followed them in the pale light of my dying torch and the sparkle of the undying stars above us.

Robin clambered over dark heaps of wreckage to a cupboard beneath the stairs, and as we staggered back to my house with our heavy burdens we were met by the savoury odour of Pat’s much-debated stew.

I still believe that stew was a lucky, glorious fluke, for Pat admitted to me afterwards that she had never made a stew before. For my own part I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life. Into the casserole had gone the remains of the tongue, the four surviving slices of bacon and a hard-boiled egg, a beetroot, and a spoonful of Bovril, three onions, a parsnip and some other vegetables I had brought in that morning. Within ten minutes nothing remained except the carrots, which were the only failure, and which Robin referred to as ‘goldfish stuffed with cement’.

We followed up the stew with tinned pineapple and coffee brewed by Robin over the library fire.

The meal was taken with orchestral accompaniment. Robin’s selection of gramophone records was bright if somewhat upon the same plane, consisting mainly of American minstrel songs, and I am not sure whether I did not prefer the quietness of the previous evening with its peaceful unbroken conversation.

But there was magic in that evening: a magic that even now surrounds me as I think of it in my solitude – in this dusty, ruined room in which I write. I think of the high hopes – the unquenchable courage of it all, and my hand trembles with weak, impotent rage at the senseless manner of its end.

Now and then my thoughts would wander from that warm, happy room, into the desolate world beyond those curtained windows. I thought how strange and wonderful it would be for some lonely survivor, wandering through what he thought to be a dead world, suddenly to hear the music of an American minstrel band in the distance – to see a chink of light – to hear the clatter of knives and forks and the laughter of happy people.

And then a remark from Pat or Robin would draw me back to the room again: I would feel the warmth of the fire upon my back and see those lively faces with the candlelight upon them.

When we had washed up I produced the port and pulled my chair up to the fire.

‘Now!’ said I, ‘Committee Meeting!’

Pat and Robin pulled up the couch, and over the glowing logs, far into the quiet night, we planned the new life that lay before us.

‘It would be silly to drift along in an aimless way,’ I began, ‘waiting for something to turn up. If we face the worst, here and now, we shall have nothing unpleasant in store for us. We’ve got to make our plans as if we are absolutely dependent upon our own resources – as if we are the only people in the world.’

‘I don’t care if we are!’ said Robin rather brutally, as he drank the remains of his port.

‘Our first needs,’ I went on, ‘are food, water, and as much comfort as we can make for ourselves. Of water we have plenty – the well that supplies my house is deep and good, and has never failed. Of preserved food we have enough for two months if we bring up the rest of the provisions from the shop: our job is to protect ourselves by organising our resources against the future, and providing our larder with fresh food.’

‘Hear! hear!’ said Robin.

I took pencil and paper from my desk, and we wrote down in detail our respective duties.

Robin was to be Minister of Fresh Food Supplies. Next day he was to get his fishing tackle from The Manor House, together with a gun and cartridges, and become our hunter. He was to ply the river for fish, snare rabbits (if any) and keep an eye open for game. It was to be his duty to supply some fresh meat or fish to the household every day.

Robin was delighted with his job. It was, he said, ‘completely down his street’, and he spent the remainder of the evening utterly oblivious to Pat and me – his mind far away in the river valley – over the downs to the Hackwood spinneys – to the burrows and the coverts.

Pat was to be in complete charge of the house. Quickly and methodically she jotted down her duties. She would cook our food – wash and repair our clothes, keep the rooms clean and tidy and take an inventory of our stores.

I was to be Minister of Fruit and Vegetables and keep the house supplied each day with all that I could produce. Pat herself suggested this, and I think I became as excited and as preoccupied with my job as Robin was with his. I had always loved gardening, and my endeavours in the past had only been marred by the cheapness and abundance of vegetables in the markets. It was thrilling to realise that from now onwards our health, indeed our lives, depended upon my efforts: upon the fresh vegetables and fruit that must come from my skill and enterprise.

Tired though I was, I could only sleep that night in restless snatches. My hands were itching to take my spade and fork to prepare new areas of my ground for food: every time I closed my eyes the darkness was filled with big, juicy turnips – purple beets – and the slim hands of Pat as they placed upon the table a bowl of luscious, home-grown salad.