The history of mankind is the history of human law. The larger ordinances of the universe are commonly referred to some superior lawgiver, under such names as God and physico-chemical action; names which appear mutually subversive only to the bigot, whether theologian or biologist. These larger ordinances sometimes appear inflexible, as in the domain of physics and chemistry, sometimes empirical as in the development of species, but we may believe that if they change at all, the period of change is so great as to be outside any possibility of observation by a few thousand generations of mankind.

Human law, on the other hand, is tentative, without sound precedent and in its very nature mutable. In our miserably limited record of history, that paltry ten thousand years which is but a single tick of the cosmic watch, we have been unable to formulate any overruling law to which other laws are subject. Climate, race and condition impose certain limitations, and within that enceinte civilizations have developed a system of rules, increasing always in complexity, and have then failed to maintain their place in the competitive struggle. It has been rashly suggested that the overriding law of laws is that rigidity is fatal to the nation. An analogy has been found in the growth of the child. Here and there some bold spirit has ventured the daring hypothesis that if a young child be confined within a perfectly fitting iron shell he will not grow. Such speculations, however, do not appeal to mankind as a whole. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that nothing appals us so much as the idea that man is capable of growth. Is it not inconceivable that any race of men could be wiser, more perfect than ourselves?

Nevertheless, out of all vague speculation one deliciously certain axiom presents itself, namely that mankind cannot live without law of some kind. The most primitive savage has his ordinances. The least primary concussion of individuals develops a rule of practice, whether it takes such diverse forms as “hit first,” or “present the other cheek”; although the latter rule has not yet been developed beyond the stage of theory.

In the unprecedented year of the new plague, the old rules were thrown into the melting pot, but within three months humanity was evolving precedents for a new statute book. The concussions of these three months were fierce and destructive. Women, in the face of death, killed and stole in the old primitive ways, unhampered now by the necessity to kill and steal according to the tedious rules of twentieth-century civilization, rules that women had never been foolish enough to reverence in the letter. All those complex and incomprehensible laws had been made by men for men, and after the plague there was none to administer them, for no women and few men had ever had the least idea what the law was. Even the lawgivers themselves had had to wait for the pronouncement of some prejudiced or unprejudiced judge. Women had long known what our Bumbles can only learn by bitter experience, inspired to vision in some moment of fury or desolation.

But within three months of the first great exodus of women from the town, one dominant law was being brought to birth. It was not written on tables of stone, nor incorporated in any swollen, dyspeptic book of statutes; it was not formulated by logic, nor was it the outcome of serious thought by any individual or by a solemn committee. The law rose into recognition because it was a necessity for the life of the majority, and although that majority was not compact, had no common deliberate purpose, and had never formulated their demand in precise language, the new law came into being before harvest and was accepted by all but a small resentful minority of aristocrats and landowners, as a supreme ordinance, indisputably just.

This law was that every woman had a right to her share in the bounty of Nature, and the corollary was that she earned her right by labour.

In those days the justice of the principle was perfectly obvious; so obvious, indeed, that the law came to birth without the obstetric skill of any parliament whatever.

It is now impossible to say why such different types of male humanity as Jasper Thrale, George Gosling or the Bacchus of Wycombe Abbey escaped the plague. The bacillus (surely a strangely individual type, it must have been) was never isolated, nor the pathology of the disease investigated. The germ was some new unprecedented growth which ran through a fierce cycle of development within a few months, changed its nature as it swarmed into every corner of the earth, and finally expired more quickly than it had come into being.

If the male survivors in Europe and the East had been of one type, some theory might be formulated to account for their immunity; but so far as science can pronounce an opinion, the living male residue can only be explained by the doctrine of chances. A few escaped, by accident. In the British Isles there may have been 1,500 men who thus survived. In the whole of Europe, besides, there were less than a thousand. It seems probable that even before Scotland was attacked the climax had been reached; by the time the plague reached England the first faint evidences of a decline in virulence may be marked....

From the first, Jasper Thrale ventured his life without an afterthought. He was fearless by nature. He did not lack those powers of imagination which are commonly supposed to add so greatly to the terror of death, he simply lacked the feeling of fear. In all his life he had never experienced that sickness of apprehension which dissolves our fibre into a quivering jelly—as though the spirit had already withdrawn from the trembling inertia of the flesh. Perhaps Thrale’s spirit was too dominant for such retreat, was more completely master of its material than is the spirit of the common man. For the spirit cannot know bodily fear, it is the apprehensive flesh that wilts and curdles at the approach of danger. And it is worthy of notice that in the old days, up to the early twentieth century, these rare cases of fearlessness in individuals were more often found among women than among men.

Thrale, with his perfectly careless courage, found plenty of work for himself in London during May and early June. He acted as a scavenger, and still went far afield with his burial cart long after every trace of living male humanity had disappeared from the streets of London.

Then one day, at the end of June, he realized that his task was futile, and it came to him that there was work awaiting him of more importance than this purification of streets which might never again echo to the traffic of humanity.

So he chose the best bicycle he could find in Holborn Viaduct, stripped a relay of four tyres from other machines, and with these and a reserve of food made into a somewhat cumbrous parcel, he set out to explore the new world.

He took the Bath Road, intending to make exploration of the fertile West Country. He had Cornish blood in his veins, and his ultimate goal was the county which had almost escaped urbanization. As he then visualized the problem, it appeared that life would offer greater possibilities in such places.

But before he reached Colnbrook, he had recognized that work was required of him nearer home. The exodus was then in progress. He came through armies of helpless women and children flying from starvation; women who had no object in view save that of escape to the country; “Silly Londoners” with no knowledge of how food was to be obtained when their goal was reached.

He did not stay there, however. He was beginning to see the outline of his plan, and at the same time the limitation of his own powers. He saw that enough food could not be raised near London to support the multitude, that the death of the many was demanded by the needs of the few if any were to survive, and that communities must be formed with the common purpose of tilling the land and excluding those who could not earn their right to support. In such a catastrophe as this, charity became a crime.

He intended even then to push on beyond Reading, but in Maidenhead he met a woman who influenced him to a nearer goal.

She stepped into the road and held up her hand.

Thrale stopped; he thought she was about to make the familiar demand either for food or a direction.

“Well?” he said curtly.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “To find room,” he said.

“There is room for you near here,” said the woman, “if you’ll work.”

“At what?” he asked.

“Machinery, harvesting machinery, agricultural machinery of all sorts.”

“Where?” asked Thrale.

She dropped her voice and looked about her. “Marlow,” she said. “It—it’s an eddy. Off the main roads and by the river. There are less than a thousand women there at present, and we are keeping the others out; at least until after harvest. There is plenty of land about, and we’re keeping ourselves at present. Only we do want a man for the machines. Will you come and help us?”

“I’ll come and see what I can do,” said Thrale “I won’t promise to stay.”

“Aren’t there any other men, there?” he added after a moment’s hesitation.

“One at Wycombe,” said the women. “He’s a butcher, but——”

“I understand,” said Thrale.

“And meanwhile you might help me,” said the woman. “I come over here with a horse and cart to raid the seedsmen’s shops. If we leave them the women would eat all the beans and peas and things, you know; enough to feed us for the winter gone in a week, and no one any the better. Isn’t it awful how careless we are?”

She was a fair, clear-eyed girl, with the figure and complexion of one who had devoted considerable attention to outdoor sports. She was wearing a man’s Norfolk jacket (men’s clothing was so plentiful), and a skirt that barely reached her knees, and did not entirely hide cloth knickerbockers which might also have been adapted from a man’s garment. Below the knickerbockers she displayed thick stockings and sandals. Her splendid fair hair furnished sufficient protection for her head, and she had dressed a pillow of it into the nape of her neck as a shield for the sun.

Thrale looked at her with a frank curiosity as they made their way up the town to a seedsman’s shop. She had left the horse and cart there, she explained, while she explored other streets of the town.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Eileen, of Marlow,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be another Eileen there, so one name’s enough.”

“Is that how your community feel about it?” he asked.

She smiled. “We’re beginning,” she said.

He pondered that for a time, and then asked, “Who were you?”

“Does it matter?” was the answer.

“Not in the least,” said Thrale. “Never did much so far as I was concerned, but I have a memory of having seen your photographs in the illustrated papers. I was wondering whether you had been actress, peeress, scandal; or perhaps all three.”

She laughed. “I’m the eldest daughter of the late Duke of Hertford,” she said, “the ci-devant Lady Eileen Ferrar, citizen.”

“Oh, was that it?” replied Thrale carelessly. “Where’s this shop of yours?”

The loot was heavier than Eileen had anticipated. The shop had been ransacked, but they found an untouched store, containing such valuables as beans, potatoes and a few small sacks of turnip seed at the bottom of a yard. When these had been placed in the cart, they decided that the load was sufficient for one horse.

They took the longer road to Marlow, through Bourne End, to avoid the hill. Eileen walked at the horse’s head, with Thrale beside her wheeling his bicycle, and during those two hours he learnt much of the little community which he proposed to serve for a time.

It seemed that in Marlow—and the same thing must have happened in a hundred other small towns throughout the country—a few women had taken control of the community. These women were of all classes and the committee included an Earl’s widow, a national schoolmistress, a small green-grocer, and an unmarried woman of property living half a mile out of the town. These women had worked together in an eminently practical way; at first to relieve distress, and then to plan the future. They had wasted little time in discussions among themselves—none of them had the parliamentary sense of the uses of debate. When they had disagreed, they had had plenty of scope to carry out varying methods within their own spheres of influence.

Their first and most difficult task had been to teach the members of their community to work for the common good, and that task was by no means perfected as yet. Co-operation was agreeable enough to those who had nothing to lose, but the women in temporary possession of the sources of food supply were not so easily convinced. In many instances the committee’s arguments had been suddenly clenched by an exposition of force majeure, and property owners had discovered to their amazement that they had no remedy.

But the head and leader of Marlow was a farmer’s daughter of nineteen, a certain Carrie Oliver. Her father had had a small farm in the Chilterns not far from Fingest. He had been a lazy, drunken creature, and from the time Carrie had left the national school she had practically carried on the work of the farm single handed. She liked the work; the interest of it absorbed her.

The Marlow schoolmistress had remembered her when the committee had first faced the daunting task of providing for the future. They had been more or less capable of organizing a majority of the women, but no member of the committee knew the secrets of agriculture and stock-breeding, and in all Marlow and the neighbourhood no woman had been found who was capable of instructing them in all that was necessary.

A deputation of three had been sent to Fingest, and had discovered Miss Oliver in the midst of plenty, cultivating her farm in comfort now that she had been relieved of her father’s unwelcome presence.

She had been covered with confusion when requested to leave her retreat and take command of a town and the surrounding twenty thousand acres or so within reach of the new community.

“Oh! I can’t,” she had said, blushing and ducking her head. “It’s easy enough; I’ll tell you if there’s anything you want to know.”

The deputation had then put the case very clearly before her, pointing out that in Miss Oliver’s hands lay the future of a thousand lives.

“Oh, dear. I dunno. What can I do?” Carrie had said, and when the deputation had urged that she should return with them and take charge forthwith, she had replied that that was quite impossible, that there were the cows to milk, the calves, pigs and chickens to feed, and goodness knew how many other necessary things to be done before sunset.

The deputation had said that cows, calves, horses, sheep, pigs and chickens might and should be transferred forthwith to the neighbourhood of Marlow.

It had taken three days to convince her, Eileen said, and added, “But she’s splendid, now. It’s wonderful what a lot she knows; and she rides about on a horse everywhere and sees to everything. The difficulty is to stop her getting down and doing the work herself.”

Thrale understood that, exceptional male as he was, his position in Marlow would be subordinate to that of Miss Oliver.

“Does she understand agricultural machinery?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” returned Eileen. “But she hasn’t time, you see, to attend to all that, and it’s so jolly difficult to learn. I’ve been doing a bit. I’m better at it than most of ’em. But when I saw you it struck me how ripping it would be if you’d come and take over that side. Men are so jolly good at machinery. We shouldn’t miss them much if it weren’t for that.”

After a marked preliminary hesitation the committee appointed Jasper Thrale chief mechanic of Marlow. The hesitation was understandable. Their only experience of the ways of men in this altered civilization had been drawn from observations of Mr Evans at Wycombe. His manner of life appeared representative of what they might expect. Nevertheless they did not openly condemn him, although he proved an immediate source of trouble, even to these organizers in Marlow. The youth of the place was apt to wander over the hill in the evenings; “just for fun,” they said. They went in twos and threes, and occasionally one of them stayed behind. These evening walks interfered with work. “Later on I shouldn’t mind so much,” Lady Durham had said, commenting on the loss of a young and active worker, “but there is so much to do just now.” Her comment showed that even then the situation was being accepted, and that many women were prepared to adapt their old opinions to new conditions. It also showed why the committee hesitated to accept Thrale’s services.

Thrale understood their difficulty, and went straight to the point.

“You are afraid that the young women will be wasting time, running after me,” he said. “Set your minds at rest. That won’t last. And if you give me pupils for my machinery I should prefer women over forty in any case. I believe I shall find them more capable.”

He was right in one way. When the excitement of his coming had subsided, he was not the cause of much wasted time. He adopted a manner with the younger women which did not encourage advances. He was, in fact, quite brutally frank. When the young women devised all kinds of impossible excuses to linger in his vicinity he sent them away with hot indignant faces. Among those who sought their sterile amusements in Wycombe it became the fashion openly to express hatred and contempt for “that engine fellow.” It was agreed that he “wasn’t a proper man.” Another section, however, talked scandal, and hinted that assistant-engineer Eileen was the cause of Thrale’s pretended misogyny.

The committee found their work more complicated in some respects after Thrale’s coming.

Thrale, himself, was supremely indifferent to any scandal or expression of hatred. He had his hands full, his hours of work were only limited by daylight, and six hours sleep was all he asked for or desired. After a very brief introduction to the intricacies of reaper and rake at the hands of Miss Oliver—her father had never been able to afford a binder, but the days of corn-harvest were still far ahead—he set himself to learn the mysteries of all the agricultural machinery in the neighbourhood; traction engines, steam ploughs and thrashing machines, and to pass on the knowledge he gained to his pupils. He found them stupid at first, but they were patient and willing for the most part.

Then, handicapped by the lack of coal, he rode over to Bourne End and discovered two locomotives. One of them was standing on the line a mile out of the station with a full complement of coaches attached, the other was an unencumbered goods engine in a siding. He chose the latter for his first experiment, and succeeded in driving it back to Marlow. It groaned and screamed in a way that indicated serious organic trouble, but after he had overhauled it, it proved capable of taking him to Maidenhead, where he found a sound engine in a shed.

After that he devoted three days to getting a clear line to Paddington, a tedious process which involved endless descents from the cab, and mountings into signal boxes, experiments with levers and the occasional necessity for pushing whole trains out of his path into some siding. But at last he returned with magnificent loot of coal from the almost untouched London yards beyond Ealing.

London was still the storehouse of certain valuable commodities.

His passage through the surrounding country was hailed with cries of amazement and jubilant acclamation. The first railway surely excited less astonishment than did Thrale on his solitary engine. Doubtless the unfortunate women who saw him pass believed that the gods of machinery had returned once more to bring relief from all the burden of misery and unfamiliar work.

And once the points were set and the way open to London by rail he could go and return with tools and many other necessaries that had offered no temptation to the starving multitude who had fled from the town.

Marlow was greatly blessed among the communities in those days.

The harvest was early that year, and Miss Oliver decided to cut certain fields of barley at the end of July.

Thrale’s energies were then diverted to the superintendence of the reapers and binders, and he rode from field to field, overlooking the work of his pupils or spending furious hours in struggle with some refractory mechanism.

One Saturday, an hour or two after midday, he was returning from some such struggle, when he saw a strange procession coming down that long hill from Handy Cross, which some pious women regarded as the road to hell.

Casual immigration had almost ceased by that time, but the sight indicated the necessity for immediate action. The immigration laws of Marlow, though not coded as yet, were strict; and only bona fide workers were admitted, and even those were critically examined.

Thrale shouted to attract attention and the procession stopped.

When he came through the gate on to the road, he was accosted by name.

“Oh, Mr Thrale, fancy finding you,” said the young woman at the pole of the truck.

The meeting of Livingstone and Stanley was far less amazing.

An old woman perched on the truck and partly sheltered by the remains of an umbrella, regarded his appearance with some show of displeasure.

“By rights ’e should ’ave written to me in the first place,” she muttered.

“Mother’s got a touch of the sun,” explained Blanche hurriedly.

Thrale had not yet spoken. He was considering the problem of whether he owed any duty to these wanderers, which could override his duty to Marlow.

“Where have you come from?” he asked.

Blanche and Millie explained volubly, by turns and together.

“You see, we don’t let anyone stay here,” said Thrale.

Blanche’s eyebrows went up and she waved her too exuberant sister aside. “We’re willing to work,” she said.

“And your mother?” queried Thrale. “And this other woman?”

“Ach! I work too,” put in Mrs Isaacson. “I have learnt all that is necessary for the farm. I milk and feed chickens and everything.”

“You’ll have to come before the committee,” said Thrale.

“Anywhere out of the sun,” replied Blanche, “and somewhere where we can put mother. She’s very bad, I’m afraid.”

“You can stay to-night, anyway,” returned Thrale.

Millie made a face at him behind his back, and whispered to Mrs Isaacson, who pursed her mouth.

“Well, you do seem more civilized here,” remarked Blanche as the procession restarted towards Marlow. Thrale, with something of the air of a policeman, was walking by the side of the pole.

“You’ve come at a good time,” was his only comment.

Millie had another shock before they reached the town. She saw what she thought was a second man, on horseback this time, coming towards them. Marlow, she thought, was evidently a place to live in. But the figure was only that of Miss Oliver in corduroy trousers, riding astride.

Fate had dropped the Goslings into Buckinghamshire to fulfil their destiny. They had been led to Marlow by a casual direction, here and there, after the first propulsion of Blanche’s instinct had sent them into the country beyond Harrow. And fate, doubtless with some incomprehensible purpose of its own in view, had quietly decided that in Marlow they were to stay. They had been dropped at a season when, for the first time in the long three months’ history of the community, there was a shortage of labour; and Blanche and Millie, browned by exposure and generally improved by their first six days of healthy life, were quite acceptable additions to the population at that moment. As for Mrs Isaacson, a lady of sufficient initiative and force of character to require no kindly interposition of Providence on her behalf, she arranged her own future as an expert of farm management, and incidentally as the Goslings’ housemate. Mrs Isaacson was a burr that would stick anywhere for a time. She displayed an unexpected and highly specialized knowledge of the management of farms, when confronted with the expert Miss Oliver who was far too embarrassed to press her questions home. The casual remarks of Aunt May and her helpers had been retained in Mrs Isaacson’s brilliant memory and she displayed her knowledge to the best possible advantage, filling the gaps with irrelevant volubility, gesture and histrionic struggles with the English language, which proved suddenly inadequate to the expression of these recondities that the German would have so aptly expressed. It was inferred that in her native Bavaria, Mrs Isaacson had farmed in the grand style.

Only Mrs Gosling, useless and ineligible, remained for consideration, and she for once took a firm line of her own, and defied the committee, Marlow generally, and the negligible remainder of the cosmos, to alter her determination.

The home at which they had finally arrived did not suit her. The tiny cottage of three rooms in the little street that runs down to the town landing stage had no lace curtains in the front window, no suites of furniture, no hall to save the discreet caller from stepping through the front door straight into the single living-room, no accumulation of dustable ornaments, not even a strip of carpet or linoleum to cover the nakedness of a bricked floor. It was not civilized; it was not decent according to the refined standards of Wisteria Grove; it was an impossible place for any respectable woman to live in, and Mrs Gosling, with unexpected force of character, chose the obvious alternative. She did not, however, make any announcement of her determination; she was wrapped in a speculative depression that found no relief in words. She had been so ordered, hoisted, dragged and bumped through the detested country during the past six days that all show of authority had been taken from her. It may be that deep in her own mind she cherished a sullen and enduring resentment against her daughters, and had vowed to take the last and unanswerable revenge of which humanity is capable. But outwardly she preserved that air of incomprehension which had marked her during the last stages of their journey, and committed herself to no statement of the enormous plan which must have been forming in her mind.

When they took her into the small, brick-paved room and deposited her temporarily on a wooden-seated chair, while they unpacked what remained to them in the accursed trolly, Mrs Gosling took one brief but comprehensive survey of her naked surroundings.

“She’s a bit touched, isn’t she?” whispered Millie to her sister. “Do you think she understands where we are or what we’re doing?”

Blanche shook her head. “I expect she’ll be all right in a day or two,” she ventured, “It’s the sun.”

The two girls, stirred to a new outlook on life by the extraordinary experiences of the past months, were on the threshold of diverse adventures. After the toil and anxiety of their tramp through inhospitable country, and the hazard of the open air, this reception into a community and settlement into a permanent shelter afforded a relief which was too unexpected to be qualified as yet by criticism, or any comparison with past glories. They were young and plastic, and to each of them the future seemed to hold some promise; to them the silence and immobility of their mother could only be evidence of impaired faculties.

“We must get her to bed,” said Blanche.

Even when Mrs Gosling asked with perfect relevance, “Are we going to stop ’ere, Blanche?” they humoured her with evasive replies. “Well, for a day or two, perhaps,” and “Look here, don’t you worry about that. We’re going to put you to bed.”

Her head dropped again and she fell back into her moody silence. Doubtless she meditated on the many wrongs her daughters had done her, and wondered why she should have been brought out to die in this wilderness?

During the nine days that elapsed before her plan matured, she made no further comment on her surroundings. She lay in the upstairs room, sleeping little, with no desire ever again to face the terror of a world which demanded a new mode of thought. Unconsciously she had adopted Blanche’s phrase, “Everything’s different,” but to her the message was one of doom, she could not live in a different world.

And Blanche on her side was puzzled at her mother’s apathy and said, “I can’t understand it.” Yet both the changed conditions and Mrs Gosling’s unchangeable habit were fundamental things.