One bright morning, at the end of April, Jasper and Eileen sat on the cliffs at the Land’s End and talked of the future.

Ten days before, they had left Marlow on bicycles to make exploration. They intended to return; they had explained they would be away for a month at the outside, but in view of the growing depression and the loss of spirit shown by the community, they considered it necessary to go out and discover what conditions obtained in other parts of England. It might be, they urged, that the plague had been less deadly in other districts.

“We should not know, here,” Jasper had argued. “There may be many men left elsewhere; but they might not have been able to communicate with us yet. Their attention, like ours, would have been concentrated upon local conditions for a time. Eileen and I will find out. Perhaps we may be able to open up communication again. In any case we’ll come back within a month and report.”

His natural instinct had taken him into the West Country.

They had left Elsie Durham slightly more cheerful. They had given her a gleam of hope, given her something, at last, to which she might look forward.

Their own hopes had quickly faded and died as they rode on into the West. By the time they reached Plymouth they were thinking of Marlow as a place peculiarly favoured by Providence.

At first they had passed through communities conducted on lines resembling their own, greater or smaller groups of women working more or less in co-operation. In many of these communities a single man was living—in some cases two men—who viewed their duty towards society in the same light as the Adonis of Wycombe.

But the unit grew steadily smaller as they progressed. It was no longer the town or village community but the farm which was the centre of activity, and the occupied farms grew more scattered. For it appeared that here in the West the plague had attacked women as well as men. Another curious fact they learned was that the men had taken longer to die. One woman spoke of having nursed her husband for two months before the paralysis proved fatal....

And if the depression in Marlow had been great, the travellers soon learned that elsewhere it was greater still. The women worked mechanically, drudgingly. They spoke in low, melancholy voices when they were questioned, and save for a faint accession of interest in Thrale’s presence there, and the signs of some feeble flicker of hope as they asked of conditions further north and east, they appeared to have no thought beyond the instant necessity of sustaining the life to which they clung so feebly. Thrale and Eileen rode on into Cornwall, not because they still hoped, but because they both felt a vivid desire to reach the Land’s End and gaze out over the Atlantic. They wanted to leave this desolate land behind them for a few hours, and rest their minds in the presence of the unchangeable sea.

“Let us go on and forget for a few days,” Eileen had said, and so they had at last reached the furthest limit of land.

Cornwall had proved to be a land of the dead. Save for a few women in the neighbourhood of St Austell, they had not seen a living human being in the whole county.

And so, on this clear April morning, they sat upon this ultimate cliff and talked of the future.

The water below them was delicately flecked with white. No long rollers were riding in from the Atlantic, but the fresh April breeze was flicking the crests of little waves into foam; and, above, an ever-renewed drift of scattered white clouds threw coursing shadows upon the blues and purples of the curdling sea.

Eileen and Thrale had walked southwards as far as Carn Voel to avoid the obstruction to vision of the Longships, and on three sides they looked out to an unbroken horizon of water, which on that bright morning was clearly differentiated from the impending sky.

“One might forget—here,” remarked Eileen, after a long silence.

“If it were better to forget,” said Jasper.

Eileen drew up her knees until she could rest her chin upon them, embracing them with her arms. “What can one do?” she asked. “What good is it all, if there is no future?”

“Just to live out one’s own life in the best way,” was the answer.

She frowned over that for a time. “Do you really believe, dear,” she said, when she had considered Jasper’s suggestion, “do you really believe that this is the end of humanity?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have changed my mind half a dozen times in the last few days. There may be a race untouched somewhere—in the archipelagos of the South Seas, perhaps—which will gradually develop and repeople the world again.”

“Or in Australia, or New Zealand,” she prompted.

“We should have heard from them before this,” he said. “We must have heard before this.”

“And is there no hope for us, here in England, in Marlow? There are a few boys—infants born since the plague, you know—and there will be more children in the future—Evans’s children and those others. There were two men in some places, you remember.”

“Can they ever grow up? It seems to me that the women are dying. They’ve nothing to live for. It’s only a year since the plague first came, and look at them now. What will they be like in five years’ time? They’ll die of hopelessness, or commit suicide, or simply starve from the lack of any purpose in living, because work isn’t worth while. And the others, the mothers, that have some object in living, will fall back into savagery. They’ll be so occupied in the necessity for work, for forcing a living out of the ground somehow, that they’ll have neither time nor wish to teach their children. I don’t know, but it seems to me that we are faced with decrease, gradually leading on to extinction.

“And I doubt,” he continued, after a little hesitation, “I doubt whether these sons of the new conditions will have much vitality. They are the children of lust on the father’s side, worse still, of tired lust. It does make a difference. Perhaps if we were a young and vigorous people like the old Jews the seed would be strong enough to override any inherent weakness. But we are not, we are an old civilization. Before the plague, we had come to a consideration of eugenics. It had been forced upon us. A vital and growing people does not spend its time on such a question as that. Eugenics was a proposition that grew out of the necessity of the time. It was easy enough to deny decadence, and to prove our fitness by apparently sound argument, but, to me, it always seemed that this growing demand for some form of artificial selection of parents, by restriction of the palpably unfit, afforded the surest evidence. Things like that are only produced if there is a need for them. Eugenics was a symptom.”

Eileen sighed. “And what about us?” she asked.

“We’re happy,” replied Jasper. “Probably the happiest people in the world at the present time. And we must try to give some of our happiness to others. We must go back to Marlow and work for the community. And I think we’ll try in our limited way to do something for the younger generation. Perhaps, it might be possible for us to go north and try our hands at making steel, there are probably women there who would help us. But I don’t think it’s worth while, unless to preserve our knowledge and hand it on. We can only lessen the difficulty in one little district for a time. As the pressure of necessity grows, as it must grow, we shall be forced to abandon manufacture. The need for food will outrun us. We are too few, and it will be simpler and perhaps quicker to plough with a wooden plough than to wait for our faulty and slowly-produced steel. The adult population, small as it is, must decrease, and I’m afraid it will decrease more rapidly than we anticipate, owing to these causes of depression and lack of stimulus....”

“Oh, well,” said Eileen at last, getting to her feet, “we’re happy, as you say, and our job seems pretty plain before us. To-morrow, I suppose, we ought to be getting back, though I hate taking the news to Elsie.”

Jasper came and stood beside her, and put his arm across her shoulders. “We, at any rate, must keep our spirits up,” he said. “That, before everything.”

“I’m all right,” said Eileen, brightly. “I’ve got you and, for the moment, the sea. We’ll come back here sometimes, if the roads don’t get too bad.”

“Yes, if the roads don’t get too bad.”

“And, already, the briars are creeping across the road from hedge to hedge. The forest is coming back.”

“The forest and the wild.”

He drew her a little closer and they stood looking out towards the horizon.

In the south-west the clear line had been wiped out and what looked like mist was sweeping towards them.

“There’s a shower coming,” said Thrale.

They stood quietly and let the sharp spatter of rain beat in their faces, and then the shadow of the storm moved on and the horizon line was clear again.

“That’s a queer cloud out there,” said Eileen. “Is it another shower?”

She pointed to a tiny blur on the far rim of the sea.

“It is queer,” said Thrale. “It’s so precisely like the smoke of a steamer.”

For a few seconds they gazed in intent silence.

“It’s getting bigger,” broke out Eileen, suddenly excited. “What is it, Jasper?”

“I don’t know. I can’t make it out,” he said. He moved away from her and shaded his eyes from the glare of the momentarily cloudless sky.

“I can’t make it out,” he repeated mechanically.

The blur was widening into a grey-black smudge, into a vaguely diffused smear with a darker centre.

“With the wind blowing towards us——” said Jasper, and broke off.

“Yes, yes—what?” asked Eileen, and then as he did not answer, she gripped his arm and repeated importunately. “What? Jasper, what? With the wind blowing towards us?”

“By God it is,” he said in a low voice, disregarding her question. “By God it is,” he repeated, and then a third time, “It is.”

“Oh! what, what? Do answer me! I can’t see!” pleaded Eileen.

But still he did not answer. He stood like a rock and stared without wavering at the growing cloud on the horizon.

And then the cloud began to grow more diffused, to die away, and Eileen could see tiny indentations on the sky line, indentations which pushed up and presently revealed themselves as attached to a little black speck in the remotest distance.

“Oh, Jasper!” she cried, and her eyes filled with inexplicable tears, so that she could see only a misty field of troubled blue.

“It’s a liner,” said Jasper at last, turning to her. He looked puzzled and his eyes stared through her. “And its coming from America. Do you suppose the American women——”

The boat was revealed now. They could see the shape of her, the high deck, the two tall funnels and the three masts. She was passing across, fifteen miles or so to the south of them, making up Channel.

For a moment they felt like shipwrecked sailors on a lonely island, who see a vessel pass beyond hail.

“Oh, Jasper, what can it be?” Eileen besought him.

“It’s a White Star boat,” he said, and he still spoke as if his mind was far away. “Is it possible, is it anyway possible that America has survived? Is it possible that there is traffic between America and Europe, and that they pass us by for fear of infection? How do we know that vessels haven’t been passing up the Channel for months past? Why should we think that this is the first?”

“It is the first,” proclaimed Eileen. “I feel it. Oh, let us hurry. Let us ride and ride as fast as we can to Plymouth or Southampton. I know they’ll be coming to Plymouth or Southampton. Men, Jasper, men! No women would dare to run a boat at that pace. See how fast she is going. Oh hurry, hurry!”

He caught fire then. They ran back to find their bicycles. They ran, and presently they rode in silence, with fierce intensity. They rode at first as if they had but ten miles to go, and the lives of all the women in England depended upon their speed.

And though they slackened after the first few miles they still rode on with such eager determination that they reached Plymouth at sunset.

But they could see no sign of the liner in the waters about Plymouth. They saw only the deserted hulks of a hundred vessels that had ridden there untouched for twelve months, futile battleships and destroyers among them; great, venomous, useless things that had become void of all meaning in the struggle of humanity.

“It’s not here. Let’s go on!” said Eileen.

Jasper shrugged his shoulders. “It’s well over a hundred miles to Southampton,” he said. “Nearer a hundred and fifty, I should say.”

“But we must go on, we must,” urged Eileen.

It was evident that Jasper, too, felt a compelling desire to go on. He stood still with a look of intense concentration on his face. Eileen had seen him look thus, when he had been momentarily frustrated by some problem of mill machinery. She waited expectant for the solution she was sure would presently emerge.

“A motor,” he said, speaking in short disconnected sentences. “If we can find paraffin and petrol and candles—light of some sort. The engines wouldn’t rust, but they’d clog. It must be paraffin. We daren’t clean with petrol by artificial light. It’s possible. Let’s try....”

That night Jasper did not sleep, but Eileen, as she sat beside him in the softly moving motor, soon lost consciousness of the dim streak of road and black river of hedge. The moon, in her third quarter, had risen before midnight, and when they started was riding deep in the sky, half veiled by a vast wing of dappled cirrus. And that, too, merged into her dream. She thought she was driving out into the open sea in a ship which became miraculously winged and soared up towards an ever-approaching but unincreasing moon. She woke with a start to find that it was broad daylight and that a thin misty rain was coming up from the sea.

“The Solent,” said Jasper, pointing to a distant gleam below them.

On the common they stopped and stood up in the car, watching a distant smear of smoke that stained the thin mist.

“She’ll be coming up Southampton Water with the lead going,” said Jasper, trying desperately to be calm.