The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

My story is over. Strange things have happened in the years since Pat and Robin left me: food for vivid narrative if the man experiencing them had been alive to them as well. To me they have left but a blurred and senseless jumble: neither food nor inspiration to my pen, for when Pat and Robin went away they took my very soul along with them, leaving a numbed, bewildered creature that I dimly recognise as ‘Edgar Hopkins’.

I remained alone in Beadle Valley for close upon two years. It is true that old Humphrey and Jim the boy were there, and a woman named Miss Tomlinson whom Pat had brought from Mulcaster to keep house for me, but never had I known such loneliness as came to me in those last days. All my life I had been a solitary man, but solitary through inherent shyness rather than desire. The coming of Pat and Robin had brought a breath of life and gaiety that I had never known before. Despite our hardships I can truly say that those were the happiest days of my life, and the passing of them brought a solitude deep and terrible.

For a little while I sustained myself with one grim resolve. Fiercely I told myself that Pat and Robin would soon return: fiercely and desperately I worked to keep our little estate clean and prosperous and worthy of their homecoming. I told myself that they might return quite unexpectedly – if only for a few days’ leave, and I devoted my whole life to that one abiding thought. At whatever time they returned, whether it be at dawn or midnight or in the full sunlight of noon, they would not catch me unawares: they would find their home as they had left it and know that I had kept, through all my loneliness, a stout heart.

Twice I had letters from Pat, and once from Robin. Pat was working in a big derelict factory, converted into a hospital, at Antwerp: she, too, was lonely, although I only read that through the lines. Her friend Joan Cranley had been sent elsewhere and most of Pat’s companions were French and German girls. ‘We are terribly busy,’ she wrote, ‘and horribly short of the things we need. Nobody seems to know who is fighting whom, but all the armies are moving eastward now – away from the moon – and we hear the strangest rumours…’

Robin sent me a brave, cheerful letter from ‘somewhere in Austria’. It was written on a scrap of tattered, dirty paper. ‘We are an awful-looking crowd of ragamuffins… there’s been some kind of alliance, because there are Germans and Spaniards and Frenchmen all fighting with us… we had our first scrap yesterday… a crowd of black men came swarming out of a forest… our guns are awful, but we put up a good show… I could do with a couple of good fresh Beadle eggs… I’m longing for the day when it’s all over and I come home…’

I spent hours in those winter evenings writing long letters to Pat and Robin. I told them all manner of little details: some so trivial that I felt almost silly to write them down, but I felt somehow that it would amuse and cheer them.

It was impossible to lose hope entirely when springtime came to Beadle: we struggled valiantly through that summer and on towards the autumn, but as winter approached I could no longer blind myself against reality.

I was fighting a hopeless, losing battle in Beadle Valley. Old Humphrey never disguised from me that his whole life and soul were devoted to ‘Miss Pat’ and ‘Master Robin’. By instinct and tradition he was the devoted feudal retainer of ‘the Parkers of The Manor House’. I meant nothing to him whatever: he treated me as a fellow workman rather than as a master.

For a little while he, too, lived for the day when his young master and mistress would return, but as the weeks stretched to months and the months to years he gave up all hope of seeing them again. I did my utmost to cheer him: I showed him the three letters I had received, pretending that they were new ones: I pretended to read paragraphs – imaginary paragraphs saying that Pat and Robin would soon return, but when nothing happened his indifference to me became hostility – he avoided me and I left him alone. His wheat field lay derelict: he turned into something hardly human – a very old, very dirty animal that brooded over a log fire in the granary, murmuring songs of days gone by in a cracked senile voice, baking potatoes to keep the clinging spark of life within him.

During that winter the last semblances of organised life passed into memory: the towns were back once more in the chaos that followed the cataclysm: back again, but now without the urge or energy to rise from it. The Mulcaster electricity supply was gone for lack of fuel and my radio died with it. I used to send Jim the boy to Mulcaster now and then in the hope of securing news: I sent him with a few eggs or vegetables in an endeavour to exchange them for candles and oil, but usually he returned empty-handed with vague rumours that the army was fighting ‘black men’ and getting beaten every day. Government control had gone with the collapse of communications and the silencing of radio, but the ‘War Ministry’ still scoured the country with lorries in a hunt for able-bodied men. One day I sent Jim to Mulcaster and he did not return.

I do not know when the conviction first came to me that I must leave my home. It may have been upon that bitter January morning when I ploughed through the snow to find my dear old Broodie dead beneath her perch. The passing of Broodie seemed to break my last link with Beadle, for day by day I grew more certain that my sanity depended upon escape from this overwhelming solitude.

I had hated Miss Tomlinson from the day she came to me. She was a dreary, unwholesome creature without any eyelashes, who never disguised the fact that she remained because there was nowhere else to go. She was unclean in her work and ruined my fast receding stores of food with careless cooking.

I scarcely exchanged a dozen words with her a day, and spent the long dark evenings reading in my library. I would doze and awake, thinking I had heard Pat’s gay laugh outside my door: I would start up, trembling with excitement, and hurry to the bleak deserted passage. I knew that when this endless winter passed, I would have to go.

The idea came to me quite suddenly, and I wondered why I had never thought of it before. Uncle Henry and Aunt Rose! They were old before the cataclysm five years ago, but they were the kind of people who might quite well survive. I had often rebuked myself for not enquiring after them, but in such universal and far-reaching chaos the fate of two aged and remote relatives had not seemed of great importance.

I would go to London! – to Notting Hill – to the house of Uncle Henry and Aunt Rose! There were certain to be some people in that great city: there would be news: possibly some semblance of organised society.

After long months of drifting despair the thought of my adventure put new life into me. I spent the whole spring in preparing for the journey – making a list of what I should carry with me, clearing up my affairs and locking away my valuables in the hope that I might one day return.

It was no use trying to send a letter in advance and our solitary train had long ceased running. I would have to walk, but I would do so leisurely, taking ten days to cover the seventy miles. I fixed upon the first of June, when the days were long and the nights were warm.

I sent Miss Tomlinson off to Mulcaster a week beforehand and spent the last days entirely alone. On my last night I wrote a long letter addressed ‘To Pat or Robin’ telling them where I had gone, giving them my address in London and asking them to come to me upon their return. ‘Then we shall all come back together,’ I ended, ‘and Beadle Valley will be like it was before you went away.’ I pinned the letter on the library table, drew the shutters over the windows and groped up the dark stairs to sleep the last night in my home.

I said ‘goodbye’ to Beadle Valley in the dawn of a clear June day. I saw it through a dream: remote and unreal to me as I went down the hill to the lane that led me to the old Winchester road.

Luckily the excitement of the adventure spared me the heart-break of that last view of my beloved valley. Memories were crowding in upon me: they were threatening to overwhelm me when mercifully I began to wonder whether I had packed my slippers. I was just closing my garden gate at the foot of the hill when the doubt came to me. I had sat upon the drawing-room sofa to put my walking boots on, and I could not for the life of me remember putting the slippers into the haversack. What a relief it was to find them there! – how awful to retrace my steps and enter that dim, curtained house again! Had I done so I believe my iron resolve may have broken down: some little, forgotten relic might have unleashed a flood of memories from which no escape would have been possible, and I would have remained in Beadle Valley till I died.

The tarred surface of the main road had long since worn away: over the hills it ran, straight as an arrow – spangled with young nettles and wild tufts of grass: empty and derelict, just as it was in the dark ages after the Romans left it sixteen centuries ago: empty and derelict as it settled down to sleep through the dark ages that were upon us once again.

I would like to dwell upon that lonely, leisured journey had I the strength and time. I think of it as a little oasis of repose and happiness in the arid months that lay around it. In a canvas sack I carried food: two boiled chickens, the last of my proud ‘Beadle-Hopkins’ breed, conveniently cut before leaving home into joints that needed neither knife nor fork: a parcel of hard but nourishing wheat cakes: baked potatoes and some hard-boiled eggs. Enough, I reckoned, for ten full days.

In my thermos flask was sealed the last of my favourite vintage of claret. A change of clothes in my haversack, my pipe and slippers and three favourite books completed my luggage, and as I trudged between those wild and lovely fields of cornflowers I dreamed sometimes that tragedy had never come – that I was back in the far-off days when, as a young schoolmaster, I found happiness upon the open road in days of holiday.

The nights were warm, spangled with stars and sweet with the scents of boyhood. Sometimes I slept in ruined cottages or barns, but mostly beneath some derelict haystack with the field mice rustling around my ears.

It was lovely to awake in the dawn of those June mornings: to lie and watch the clouds float overhead: to know that, even if an age were dying, this countryside would remain in all its beauty though centuries might pass before man came to it again.

I avoided the towns for fear of the things that might sadden and oppress me: I passed few people on the roads and those that I met would come and go with lowered heads and a wistful smile.

Once I was startled by a cloud of dust and a horrid, discordant jangle in the distance: I hid in the undergrowth to watch a dirty, battered lorry clatter by. It was using some crude oil that made a filthy smoke and a horrid stench, and was filled with tattered, bearded soldiers. I took them to be soldiers, for they were all in freakish cartoons of khaki uniform. I imagine it was a ‘recruiting’ lorry, for there was a boy amongst them in a dirty open cricket shirt and wondering, childish eyes. I remained in hiding until it was out of sight, for although I was well past military age there was just a risk of being pounced upon and whisked away.

I spent two peaceful days with an old railway signalman who was living in his signal box upon the deserted line near Windsor. He had served this box, he told me, for nearly twenty years: twelve years before the cataclysm, when he had signalled as many as a hundred trains a day: two years after the cataclysm, when the trains began again. It was now over a year since he had signalled through the last old luggage train to Oxford. He had waited hopefully for several weeks, sitting for hours beside the little bell that would tinkle the approach of another train. But none had passed that way again.

I had developed a bad blister on my heel and the old man gladly offered me the shelter of his little home. He had a small vegetable garden and a few chickens, and we slept in the box beside the signal levers which he still kept oiled and shining.

It was pleasant to sit out in the fading sunlight of those two restful evenings, smoking our pipes and watching the old man’s chickens roam beside the rusty, silent rails. I discovered that he had shown Bantam hens in a small way before the cataclysm and was very proud of having won a second prize at Windsor! This gave us much in common to pass the hours away but I did not tell him my name lest it should embarrass him and prevent him from talking with such disarming freedom of his own little triumphs in the poultry world.

I felt quite sorry when the outskirts of London told me that my happy, carefree journey was drawing to its close. I saw more people now: ragged, dejected people whose heads seemed permanently bent forward in a ceaseless search for food. I saw a few working in the fields – a few tending their own vegetable plots and chickens, but for the most part they seemed bereft of all creative energy: they just wandered in their unending, dreary search for food.

I crossed the Thames by the old, weed-grown lock gates at Teddington and followed the northern bank of the river towards the city. The tidal waves had thrown vast quantities of silt across the boroughs of Hammersmith and Chelsea and for one whole afternoon I plodded across a plateau of flat, sunbaked mud, threading my way between the chimney stacks and church spires, guiding myself by the course of the sun.

Towards sunset upon the twelfth day of my journey I climbed the steep, narrow road to Uncle Henry’s house. My heart was pounding with excitement: the houses were in good condition here and smoke wreathed from an occasional chimney. I had met quite a few people on the last stage of my journey: some working in little gangs to clear the debris from half-buried provision shops. At every step my hopes of finding my aunt and uncle alive had risen higher.

I reached the secluded little house. It was concealed between higher buildings and it was not until I was right upon it that the familiar red brick front revealed itself.

I knew in a moment that my uncle and aunt were no longer there. The wrought-iron railings were almost buried in wild, rank weeds and I had to climb over the rust-jammed gate. I could see in a flash that my aunt’s fastidious old fingers had long since fallen from the ragged, dejected curtains of the windows.

The front door was locked and bolted: I forced my way through the undergrowth to the tradesman’s entrance and found a mildewed fragment of paper, secured by a large stone upon the doorstep.

It requested, in Aunt Rose’s bold round hand, that the milkman should leave a pint of milk ‘if possible’. I remembered the faulty catch upon the pantry window and clambered inside. I drew the dusty curtains from the morning-room windows: breakfast things for two were neatly laid upon the table in readiness for my uncle and aunt’s return from the dugouts five years ago.

I went all over the house, opening the windows to the warm, summer evening breeze. Packed snugly away between bigger, taller buildings the little house had come almost unscathed through its ordeal.

I opened the French windows of the upstairs drawing-room, drew a chair onto the verandah and sat down to think.

It was better, after all, that my Uncle Henry and Aunt Rose were no longer there. It would have been very hard to have two old and failing people upon my hands, for by the look of things I should have my work cut out to keep myself alive.

From the balcony I could see a long stretch of the Bayswater Road, with the shadows of the Park beside it. Why had I left my house in Beadle Valley? Loneliness had driven me to leave, yet in this ruined city I seemed lonelier than ever.

But at least I had the advantage of new surroundings here. Even the labour of living might offer a new and diverting occupation. Desperate and derelict though the great city seemed, I might find little communities hidden away – even some remnant of social life to pass the hours.

Twilight came: an old man drove two cows across the road from Kensington Park and through the open doors of a bank. He closed them in for the night and went away. Two people came from the Park with bundles of wood and pails of water, and then it was too dark to see any more.

I groped for one of the spare candles in my haversack. I lit it and explored the house. There was some tinned food in the larder including condensed milk and coffee: there was still some wine left in the cellar. I cleared one place away from the breakfast table and ate a substantial meal. I took a book from Uncle Henry’s library and read for a little in a silence broken only by the distant baying of dogs – and then I went to bed in the room that was always reserved for me in days gone by.

I have no power to record my day-by-day existence through these final days. My hopes of finding a remnant of organised social life faded with my first day of exploration, and by force of necessity I fell into the strange routine of those around me. There were, at that time, perhaps five thousand people in London – scattered over its length and breadth – but only a few in each district. They lived a scattered life because it was easier that way. Food was the one absorbing factor of existence and although sufficient could still be found in ruined shops there was only enough so long as we lived well separated from one another and gained by mutual consent our own individual hunting grounds.

I found a little district that seemed to belong to no one: a row of small shops hidden away behind the Camden Road. One was a fried-fish shop, and amongst the debris I discovered some tins of oil and fat that served for my lamp and occasional cooking. A little grocery store adjoining had completely collapsed. I spent a week in clearing away the wreckage and my labour was well rewarded in sardines and tinned spaghetti. This little hunting ground served me without fail for the best part of six months and it was not until the winter that I had to search farther afield, with gradually diminishing success. Sometimes I met with little families hunting together, but mostly they were people like myself, hunting quite alone.

It was the custom of the people in my neighbourhood to meet, towards sunset, in Kensington Gardens, where we went to draw our daily bucket of water from the Round Pond. On fine evenings we would set our buckets down, stroll amongst the trees and pass the time of day.

We were a strangely assorted little community of about fifty people, varying in appearance and condition according to our temperaments, ability to hunt well, and our will to live. One old gentleman, with snow-white hair, invariably wore a buttonhole and always appeared, by some miracle of resourcefulness, sprucely dressed and immaculately clean. He had been a stockbroker in a very big way, I was told, and still lived amongst the ruins of his Park Lane mansion. In contrast came an old woman in whose hunting area must have lain a well-stocked wine store. She appeared every evening at the Pond, bleary-eyed and garrulous, her voice too blurred and thick to understand. But for the most part they were quiet, wistful people who talked and moved as if they were taking part in some ghostly charade. All of us were in middle age, for the ‘recruiting lorries’ had long since carried away the few young people that remained.

It was by the Round Pond that I met Professor Bransbury, and from him that I learnt all about the man who called himself ‘Selim the Liberator’.

Bransbury had been at Cambridge a few years before me, but we found much in common and several mutual acquaintances of our far-off student days. It became our custom to wander off together, to find a seat amongst the wild, unkempt shrubberies and to talk till twilight came.

He had been a Professor of Economics at London University – a man of wide reading and deep culture – Robinson Crusoe-like with his long-matted beard and straying locks of iron-grey hair. He wore a tattered morning coat with an open-necked cricket shirt and carried an old fur-lined motor rug that he had made into a kind of cloak. He told me the scraps of news that drifted into the ruined city, and one evening he casually remarked: ‘I hear that Selim is in Berlin.’

‘Selim?’ I enquired. ‘Who is Selim?’

Bransbury stared at me with wide, incredulous eyes. ‘My dear fellow,’ he began. ‘Selim! – surely you know!’

‘I know nothing,’ I replied, ‘for the past two years I have been buried in the country – completely isolated – without a word of news.’

‘You’ve never heard of Selim! – good heavens, man…’

‘Tell me who he is,’ I said.

My request for information pleased the old Professor. His instinct for teaching was awakened – he leaned back in the rotting Park seat and began in a dreamy voice – with faraway eyes.

‘You amaze me. I thought the whole world knew of Selim by this time. Selim, as far as I know, is a Persian, the son of a small local official who lived in Teheran. Apparently he was known in a small way for some years before the cataclysm. He was a revolutionary – possibly an anarchist. He preached against the exploitation and oppression of the Eastern peoples by the white nations of the West.

‘But it was the moon that made him. Whether he is a divine leader or a rank charlatan we shall never know. The fact remains that his magnetic power amounts to genius. By some means he discovered the secret of the moon’s approach before it was evident to the naked eye. He declared to his followers that the moon was the God of Oppressed Peoples: that very soon the Moon God would descend upon the earth to destroy their hated white oppressors.

‘I imagine his followers took it with a pinch of salt at first, but when it became evident that the moon was actually growing bigger and brighter every night, Selim’s name was made. His fame spread like a forest fire to every corner of the Eastern world, and he lost no time in cashing-in upon the superstition of those ignorant millions. He trained the best of his followers and sent a hundred young disciples to spread the word. To millions Selim became a god himself: a divine messenger from the silver god that was rushing to their aid from the skies above.

‘He had a big stroke of luck when the moon landed in the Atlantic. It would have been a different matter if it had landed on Selim himself, but he was able to announce that the Moon God had arrived: that it had crushed the white tyrants of Europe, leaving a miserable remnant for the oppressed peoples themselves to destroy as a sacrifice in honour of their deliverance. He called upon his followers to prepare for the Great Pilgrimage.

‘But Selim has a level head. He knew that Europe was by no means destroyed as completely as he had announced to his followers. All through those two years when Europe was re-gathering its strength and struggling back to life, Selim was collecting his hordes upon the plains of Turkestan. They came in their thousands to his camp – from the mountains of Afghanistan and the jungles of Africa – from China and Abyssinia – from India and the deserts of Arabia.

‘He trained them in discipline and in the use of arms, but he need not have gone to so much trouble. By the time his Holy Pilgrimage was ready to start our silly little leaders in Europe were busily at work destroying one another.

‘The Selimites swept in seething hordes across the Steppes of Russia and the eastern hills of Turkey: they were across the Volga – into Poland and the Balkans before our European leaders came to their senses.

‘A Congress of startled little Deputies met at The Hague about a year ago and patched up a hasty alliance against what they called “The Eastern Menace”. Even then they squabbled for months as to who should be “Leader-in-Chief”. In the end a Dutchman named van Hoyden took command…’

Dusk was coming. It was almost dark beneath the trees of the Park, and we were quite alone.

As Bransbury had been talking I had watched our small community file through the Park gates with their pails of water… dejected little animals, they seemed, in tattered clothes and grotesque, shapeless hats, creeping back to their ruined homes for another lonely night. The Professor’s story, strange though it was, had not surprised me. For a long time I had known instinctively that some deeper menace must have arisen to account for the hopeless collapse of our organised life. It explained two other things to me: Pat’s reference in her letter to our soldiers moving eastwards – Robin’s mystifying account of a fight with ‘black men’ in the forests of Bohemia…

‘What happened then?’ I asked.

‘Who knows?’ replied the old man. ‘There is no news – no touch with our men in Europe: only vague, scattered rumours come to us here. Van Hoyden, by all accounts, is a brave leader, and he has brave men to follow him. But what can a few thousands do against these seething millions? – a few thousand starving, bewildered, worn-out men who have fought each other and worn their guns out upon each other for three desperate years?

‘Last week I heard that the Selimites were in Vienna and Berlin – that they had sacked Venice and Milan. There was talk of van Hoyden making a stand upon the Rhine, but I heard the guns quite clearly last night… much nearer than the Rhine…’

‘It need not have happened,’ I whispered. ‘If Europe had remained united we could have scattered them to the winds…’ I was past all anger now. I had listened to Bransbury as if he were relating some legend of the Ancient World. I was living as those around me were living: in a fantasy of dreams that had no further kinship with this earthly world. ‘It need never have happened.’

‘Many things need never have happened,’ returned the old man in a low, patient voice. ‘It’s nearly dark. I think we ought to go.’

A young family of rabbits scuttled through the wild undergrowth as we walked in silence to the gates of the Park. I bade ‘goodnight’ to the Professor and hurried as fast as possible up the steep lane to the shelter of my home, for the baying of the starving dogs came ominously through the gathering darkness.

Until Professor Bransbury told me of ‘Selim the Liberator’ I had never quite lost hope. Always in the background of my thoughts lay the prayer that this tragic interlude might pass away: that reason would return and peace would come once more to our stricken earth.

I began my story when I returned from the Park that night. For over a year my determination to complete it has given me the will to live. Nothing more has happened save a bitter winter that has left me almost alone, and day by day I have watched the shadows close upon us. Night by night I have written through an unearthly silence, broken only by the clatter and fall of a decaying roof, the hooting of owls and the howl of wild, starving dogs. Selim and his men are no doubt upon the moon by now – probably building upon it a Temple of Deliverance. They have not disturbed me here. Once a great black aeroplane hovered overhead, buzzing like a bloated autumn bluebottle. It circled around and came again next day – then disappeared towards the east and left us alone.

My story is finished. By the setting of the sun this evening I would say that it must be November. Another winter is at hand. My flask stands beside me in readiness for the last page of my manuscript: the bricks lie on the floor beside the recess that I have made to conceal it in. I pray that it may some day be discovered: ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ that will light these dark ages for the men who may one day live in another era of happiness and culture.

Just beneath these windows, in Uncle Henry’s small wild garden, stands a seat beside an old twisted cherry tree. Tomorrow I shall go to it and sit there for the last time: it brings happy memories to me… memories of a seat beneath the elms of a village cricket ground where once, long years ago, I sat with Colonel Parker, and Pat, and Robin… as we watched the moon wane over us in its last course above this earth.

It is long past midnight and I am very tired. From the blackness of the city comes one solitary, flickering light… one fitful little gleam from a house in Ladbroke Square… I wonder who it is?