The next day was so busy that there was hardly time to think, certainly none to waste on grief over the people who had been alive the day before and weren’t alive now. Edith, Jack, and all the others had been the price for our own continued safety.
“We must replace our losses,” said Mil in her businesslike way. “We must be ready for another attack tonight.”
“There won’t be one,” said Jake positively. Things had turned out well for him, but he showed no sign of pleasure. I guessed he never would. He had admitted that there was American Indian blood in his veins, and he certainly acted as we’d have expected an Indian brave to act — silent, stoic, rather cruel in a way that had something admirable in it, because it was the cruelty of a man who found the whole world cruel and faced its harshness with courage and without complaint. He didn’t say so in so many words, but I soon found why he hated the Knifers and wanted to join us.
The Greetham community was noisy, quarrelsome, greedy, and intemperate, and it was their intemperance which Jake hated most. Not intemperance with drink, for there was no alcohol left unless people cared to make it themselves, but intemperance in love, feasting, killing, quarreling, living. Jake wanted little and in his eyes it was sinful for anyone to take more than they needed.
There would be no attack, he said, because though the Knifers would be enraged by their defeat, they’d also be very much afraid, and it would be a long time before Grimblo could incite them to another attack on us. Grimblo himself hadn’t taken part in the raid the night before.
“He’s big and fat and lazy,” said Jake contemptuously. “He’s the leader because he’s biggest and strongest among us — among them, I mean. He’s cunning, too — not clever, but with the cunning of the rat. He understands the paggets because he thinks as they do.”
“Nevertheless,” said Mil, unimpressed, “we’ll have to replace our losses, and the sooner the better.”
Jake didn’t argue. On the contrary, he urged us to carry the attack to the Knifers, and as soon as possible.
“The village isn’t defended as you are here,” he said. “You and the people you call the Knifers can never live in peace, for they’re born thieves. If you attack today, at once — ”
But that was impossible, we said. We could muster no more than about a dozen people who could fight, if that, and we were all sick of fighting.
“Why let them prepare?” Jake asked. “Today they’re beaten, tired, frightened, demoralized. Next week they may be as strong as ever. They, too, can find others to join them.”
“He may be right,” said Ginette. Naturally she’d be the one most likely to see Jake’s point of view and agree with it. “We could round up a score of people from Cottesmore and Grantham and raid Greetham tonight.”
“There’s Eva,” Dave said slowly.
Jake had never to his knowledge seen Eva; certainly she was nothing to him. But he seized on this as an argument in favor of his own plan.
“I’ll find out what’s happened to this Eva, if you like,” he said.
I stared at him. “You? You don’t dare go back to the village.”
He drew himself up proudly. “I certainly dare. Didn’t I tell you I was a hunter? I can get into the village without a living soul seeing me, and …”
We all started to talk at once. The probability was that Eva had been captured, not killed; the Knifers would naturally want to take back with them someone from whom they could force information about our numbers, our resources, our plans. So long as there was nothing we could do about Eva we had been avoiding even mentioning her. But if there was anything we could do, we felt we had to do it. It was mad, in a way, to risk many lives to save one, yet that’s the sort of madness that makes human beings human.
Thirty men in a lifeboat risk their lives in a storm to save two or three, and if they save even one man from the raging sea, they think the risk worth while.
And Jake, who, I suspected, wouldn’t think in that way himself, was shrewd enough to use our humanity to make us act in the way he thought we should act.
“I’ll find out what’s happened to this woman,” he said, “and tonight, perhaps, we’ll raid the village and try to get her back.”
He had his way. We left him to do what he could to find out about Eva. In the meantime, someone would go to Cottesmore and bring a dozen recruits from there. Dave, Mil, and I would go to Grantham and bring some more.
Dave and Mil were coming with me because it was a chance for them to get married. They were very businesslike and unromantic about it. They wanted to get married, but that was a relatively incidental matter. It could wait, if necessary. Still, if someone had to go to Grantham anyway, they might as well go along.
I’d have let them go themselves, and gone to Cottesmore or stayed in command at Saxham, but for one thing they might have difficulty in getting married without anyone who knew them both, without anyone to give Mil away and be a witness, and for another, Grantham would probably be in an even more terrified, disorganized, and lawless state than it had been when Dave and I were there last.
Anyway, there was small risk of a Knifer attack in daylight on Saxham, particularly so soon after the last. In daylight the defenders could see them a long way away and shoot most of them before they reached the outer walls. We left Roy in charge at Saxham and sent Ginette to Cottesmore with some of the men from Tontine who knew everybody in the district. Jake had already disappeared on his scouting mission.
Before Ginette left for Cottesmore, on foot, and Mil, Dave, and I for Grantham, in the car, we had a brief discussion on policy, just the four of us.
“We’ll have to make it clear to everyone we bring here,” said Mil, “that they may have to fight tonight.”
Ginette nodded. “And it’ll be safe enough to bring more than we really want here,” she said thoughtfully, “because some will die to-night.”
There was an awkward pause. She was right, of course, but nobody wanted to agree with her. Except Mil, once she had considered the matter.
“Exactly,” she said briskly. “They’ll fight our battle, for a chance to live in safety at Saxham afterward. Particularly the Cottesmore people.”
That was a point — the Cottesmore people, without exception, hated the Knifers and would be glad of a chance to fight back with some chance of success. On the other hand, only those we brought to Saxham as friends and colleagues could be trusted to obey orders and work in the interests of Saxham above all. It was agreed that Ginette should recruit about twenty people, if she could, and we should bring half a dozen or so.
Two tacit assumptions were being made by this time — one, that there would be a raid on Greetham; two, that quite a few of our force were going to die. I wondered uneasily what was going to happen if Jake came back and reported, as he very well might, either that Eva had never been a prisoner of the Knifers or that she had been killed and there was no longer any point in forming a rescue party.
No one acted as if I had any particular concern in the rescue of Eva. Of course, they didn’t know. I hadn’t shown much interest in Eva earlier, when she was making no secret of her feeling for me. Probably they assumed I was concerned about Eva just as I’d have been concerned over Mona, say, if it had been she who was captured. None of them knew about the episode just before Eva and I came on guard duty the night before.
I looked in on the three invalids before we left. Mary, the ex-nurse, was in charge of them. She looked at me helplessly, shrugging her shoulders. Ben and Steve were asleep or unconscious in one room. In the other, Mona was awake, and, worse still, her mind was perfectly clear.
“You know it’s no use, Don,” she gasped, her voice raw with screaming. “Finish it — please.” As I hesitated, she went on: “Get Mil. If you can’t do it, she …” A spasm of pain shot through her, and she writhed horribly. It was a terrifying spectacle, a human being trying to writhe out of her own body because it was hurting her so much.
If it had been Mil, I think I’d have given her the final relief she wanted. But we knew so little — by all the indications Mona was going to die, yet suppose we were wrong, in our ignorance? I’d seen her two knife wounds, and would never forget them. They were clean, however, and the one in her belly, though it was ghastly, had not so far had the effects we’d expect from a fatal abdominal injury — except the pain.
“Hang on,” I said. “I’m going to find a doctor.”
Mona turned away hopelessly.
Grantham, when we got there, was about what we had expected to see — a town without pride, a town of terror. We had to wrench our minds back from the more normal menace of evil men to the menace of the paggets.
The truth was, we were beating the paggets, in our own small way. There was a sense of anti-climax in life at Saxham in that respect — apart from occasional parat raids, apart from incidents like the death of Clare, we could almost forget the paggets.
But we only had to go outside the walls of Saxham to see that all we had done was build and fortify a tiny sanctuary in the midst of terror, death, and famine.
I don’t know where to start in describing Grantham. We should have brought someone else with us, someone to leave with the car outside the town. The people in the town stared incredulously at the car, unable to believe that such things as automobiles still existed. It might have been two years since we had been there, instead of two weeks. Dissolution, when it sets in, is often rapid.
When we stopped, they crowded round us, suddenly insanely optimistic at sight of us, deluding themselves into the belief that we were representatives of a powerful, all-conquering anti-pagget force, or of the government that was still mentioned on the radio but of which no sign was ever seen.
We had to start and stop several times before we found a place where it was safe to get out and begin the business of our visit.
Picking up reinforcements was even easier than it had been the last time. Everyone wanted to join us. The people we saw were ragged, hungry, most of them dirty. Mil, for the first time since we had joined her at Saxham, had dressed to kill, and though she had neither the Parisian smartness of Ginette nor the simple beauty of Eva, Mil could be quite a sensation when she chose. The very sight of her must have been sufficient to convince the people we encountered that there was still some sort of civilization somewhere, and that Mil certainly belonged to it.
We couldn’t find a qualified doctor, but we did find a young woman, Jenny Mulpeter, who had been a fourth-year medical student and who was prepared to join us. That was good enough for us. We left her to make her preparations — she, of course, would be one of the two or three recruits we took back with us in the car.
Our first visit to a clergyman was unfortunate. We found the Reverend Thaddeus Wilkins dozing in a dark parlor. He was a thin, jerky little man with sparse red hair and a nose which had size without being commanding.
“Marry you?” he said, and laughed acidly.
I turned for a moment from the window, where I had been anxiously watching the car, as Mil said bluntly: “Exactly. Why not?”
“What does it matter whether you’re married or not?” Wilkins asked bitterly. “You’re male and female, aren’t you? Go and take what action you consider appropriate. It won’t stave off your doom. Neither will it bring it any nearer.”
“True enough,” Mil observed. “We still want to be married.”
“Then persuade someone else to go through the futile ceremony. I’ve given up being interested in the last struggles of cursed humanity.”
“A strange thing for a clergyman to say,” I observed.
“These are strange times for a clergyman to live in. I don’t know whether God has deserted us because of some fault of ours or as part of some plan of His own, but in either case it’s desertion. Why should I pretend to bless you when God has removed all His blessings?”
“You ought,” said Mil severely, “to be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.”
“Why? I’m not responsible for the scourge which has fallen on us.”
“No, but you’re responsible for how you face it. And you’re not facing it at all.”
Wilkins made an impatient gesture. “I’ve no wish to argue. I didn’t abandon God, He abandoned us — all of us, saints and sinners, the guilty and the innocent. Go away.”
When we showed no sign of doing so, he went on petulantly: “Go to Peter Smith. He is still keeping up the ridiculous pretense. Leave me in peace.”
Jenny Mulpeter had given us the names and present whereabouts of two clergymen, Wilkins and the Reverend Peter Smith, advising us to go to Smith, but since we’d been much nearer Wilkins we’d come to him. By this time we realized why she’d suggested Smith.
We found the Reverend Peter Smith asleep and didn’t want to rouse him. But the people in the house took it so much for granted that we’d waken him that we did so. He was a younger man, taller and stronger, and, we soon found, a very different type from the apathetic Wilkins.
Yet he hesitated when he heard what Mil and Dave wanted.
“We’re not worried about the strict legality of the marriage,” Mil said, thinking he was troubled over questions of form. “If you marry us we’ll be man and wife as far as we’re concerned, and as far as the Church is concerned. That’s all we want.”
He smiled. “I was merely wondering whether you’d have wanted me to marry you in — other circumstances.”
“If there hadn’t been any paggets? Of course not. My husband would still be alive, and so would Dave’s wife. But what has that got to do with it?”
“I’ve been asking people who come to me with similar requests — suppose the conditions of a few years ago return, would they still wish the marriage to stand?” He looked at them keenly, to see how they reacted to that.
Mil shrugged. “Frankly, I don’t see what that has to do with it either. If we take each other for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, that covers the paggets too, surely? But if you like, put in a bit about paggets or no paggets.”
Smith smiled more broadly. “I see that with you my doubts are groundless. But in other cases I’ve felt it to be my duty to point out that marriage is the same as it always was … never mind. You come from Saxham?”
He knew quite a bit about Saxham, about Greetham and Cottesmore, and probably all the other communities around where people still lived, and he talked with us for some time without returning to the question of marrying Mil and Dave. Every minute or two I went outside to assure myself that the car was still safe. Once I had to threaten a group of loiterers with my gun, for they were obviously going to loot the car whenever it was left untended — for no other purpose but the joy of destruction and looting, and perhaps the pleasure of reducing others more fortunate than themselves to their own miserable level.
I had never thought to see human morale sink so low.
On another occasion I shot a parat which was running along the gutter. Parats were too numerous to be worth a bullet each, but I shot this one as a warning to any others who might be in the vicinity. Paggets could generally be relied on to heed such warnings. I expected the sound of the shot would bring scores of people running to see what was the matter. Most of the people in the town, however, had sunk too low for curiosity. A gunshot was a good reason to stay out of the vicinity, not something to investigate.
On impulse, after Smith had married Mil and Dave, I sent them out to the car and stayed behind.
“Mind if I ask your opinion?” I said.
“Not at all.”
I had only the slightest of reasons for assuming his opinion would be worth anything. Yet I certainly felt it would be — the Reverend Peter Smith gave the impression of goodness and wisdom, and something more at least as valuable as either — practicality. I felt somehow that he wouldn’t say something apparently good and wise but totally unrelated to present circumstances.
So I told him about the Knifers, about us, about the fight the night before, about Eva, about our present plans, and asked what he thought of them.
“What I say,” he remarked at the end of all this, “relieves you of nothing.”
Fair enough. “I know that,” I said. “But often bias can blind a man to things a stranger would see. I want to know what you think to check whether I’m thinking straight myself.”
He nodded, satisfied. “And do you make the decisions for your group?”
I hesitated. “Not exactly,” I said at last. “We agree on things together. But I think in this case I could either make sure we attack the Knifers tonight, or persuade the others to call it off.”
For the first time he became slightly diffident. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, “but don’t take it as the attitude of the Church, or what Christ would have said, or anything like that.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
“Well, you can’t leave Saxham. I think I believe you when you say you can’t make peace with the people you call the Knifers — I have other sources of information. And only the most impractical theologian would suggest that you must allow the Knifers to do what they like with the girl they’ve captured, and to prepare as they undoubtedly will do for a final attack in which they will overwhelm you.
“Fighting, killing, is never right. Don’t think for a moment that if you attack your enemies tonight God will be on your side. To justify your actions, even to yourself, you must be as merciful as you feel you can be, and, later, you must in your way of life go on justifying them.”
“You think we should attack the Knifers?” I asked bluntly.
He shook his head. “A man may believe he’s forced to kill another man. But no third party can say he’s right. That’s a matter between him and God.”
Smith had answered me, in his way. “Thank you,” I said. “Another thing — will you join us?”
He shook his head without hesitation. “Please don’t ask my reasons,” he said. “I don’t know them myself, but I know I must stay here.”
I joined Mil and Dave in the car.
We collected Jenny and two other recruits for Saxham. We invited several more to join us there, advising them to meet and make the journey in a body, for their own safety. It was a long walk to accomplish in a day with the prospect of battle at the end of it, but men and women who couldn’t or wouldn’t do it would be no use to us anyway.
• • •
We arrived at Saxham about the same time as Ginette, with the reinforcements from Cottesmore, and Jake, from Greetham.
I sent Jenny to see what she could do for Mona, Steve, and Ben, and we held a council of war.
“They have the girl,” Jake told us.
“Is she still alive?” I asked quickly. “Did you see her?”
“She’s alive,” said Jake. “No, I didn’t see her. I got into a house and managed to — but that’s unimportant.”
“What’s happened to her?” Mil asked.
Jake shrugged. “What would you expect?”
It took some time to get what he had learned out of him. I think his reluctance to talk stemmed from the fact that the Knifers had done to Eva only what he’d have done himself in similar circumstances, and the concern of some of us over it was to him stupid, unreasonable, and a little embarrassing.
And perhaps he was right. What Grimblo had done to Eva was unimportant; what mattered was that she was still alive, and that Grimblo knew everything about us that Eva herself had known. She was locked in a room in the house Grimblo occupied and was considered his personal property. It was said that she had cried constantly until Grimblo, sick of her weeping, had picked her up and bent her double, backward, like one of the iron bars he used to bend in the circus, and promised that the next time he had to do it her ribs would burst through her skin. There had been no more crying.
Jake’s news settled the matter. Eva was alive; it was up to us to rescue her if we could. We couldn’t leave her in the Knifers’ hands.