Theodore Savage

“ Theodore Savage
9 I If it had been possible for Theodore Savage to place on record for those who came after him the story of his life and experiences, he would have been the first to admit that the interest of the record lay in circumstance and not in himself. From beginning to end he was much what surroundings made of him; in his youth the product of a public school, Wadham and the Civil Service; in maturity and age a toiler with his hands in the company of men who lived brutishly. ”

“ It was Hewlett, one of his juniors at the office, out of breath with running and excitement.
“I say, Savage, come along out. There’s no end going on—fires, the whole sky’s red. They’ve come over at last and no mistake. Crashaw and I have been watching ’em and I 71thought you’d like to have a look. It’s worth seeing—we’re just along there, on the wall. Hurry up!”
The boy was dancing with eagerness to get back and Theodore had to run to keep up with him. He and Crashaw, Hewlett explained in gasps, had spent the evening in a billiard-room ”

“ The woman eyed him sullenly, mistrustful and resenting his neighbourhood—knew nothing, had not seen any soldiers—and turned again to grub in her refuse. A skeleton of a man was no wiser; had only just turned off the road to search, did not know what had happened except that there must have been a fight—but it was all over when he came up. He also had seen no soldiers—only the dead ones over there.... Theodore saw in their eyes that they feared him, were dreading lest he should compete with them for their possible treasure of refuse. ”

“ Outcasts of civilization flung into the world of savagery, they had in the beginning none of the adaptability and none of the resources of the savage—knew nothing of the properties of unfamiliar plants, knew neither what to weave nor how to weave it, and often from sheer lack of understanding, starved and shivered in the midst of plenty. ”

“ As they ran they broke instinctively—avoiding each other, since a group made a mark for a gunner. Theodore, when he dared cower no longer, rushed with a dozen through 106the gate of the camp but, once outside it, they scattered right and left and there was no one near him when his flight ended with a stumble. He stayed where he had fallen, a good mile from the camp, in the blessed shadow of a hedgerow; he crept close to it and lay in the blackness of the shadow, breathing great sobs and trembling—crouching in dank grass and peering through the leafage at the distant furnace he had fled from. ”

“ As he questioned his new-made comrades and heard their answers, there died in Theodore’s heart the hope that these people into whose midst he had stumbled—these people living like the beasts of the field—were but dwellers on the outskirts of a world reviving and civilized. Of men existing in any other fashion than their own he heard no mention, no rumour; there was talk only of a camp here and a village there—where men fished and hunted and scratched the ground that they might find the remains of other’s sowing. ”

“ Theodore, after his first instinctive lunge and struggle, lay motionless—flaccid and beaten; understanding in a flash that was agony that men were still what they had been when he fled from them into the wilderness—beast-men 211who stalked and tore each other. In the torchlight the dirty, coarse faces were savage and animal ”

“ And even if that had not been the case, there was no man in the tribe, save Theodore, whose mind was the mind of a student; thus his other life, his life of the past, was lived to himself alone. It was a vivid memory-life in which he delved, turning over its vanished treasures—the intangible treasures of dead beauty, dead literature, learning and art; a life that at times receded to a dream of the impossible and at others was so real and overwhelming in its nearness that the everyday sweating and toiling and lusting grew vague and misty—was a veil drawn over reality. ”

“ Theodore, in whom the instinct of fatherhood was strong, was sometimes roused to wrath by her stupid mishandling of her children; but, on the whole he was patient with her—knowing it useless to be otherwise. He beat her as seldom as possible and she was looked on by her neighbours as a woman kindly handled and unduly blessed in her husband. To the end she remained what she had always been; essentially a parasite, a minor product of civilization, machine-bred and crowd-developed—bewildered by a life not lived in crowds 297and not subject to the laws of the Machine. ”

“ To the end Theodore remembered him like that; a square-jawed man, leaning back in his chair, speaking slowly, unemotionally—the harbinger of infinite misfortune.... And himself, the listener, a young man engrossed by his own new happiness; irritated, at first, by the intrusion of that which did not concern it; then (as once before in Vallance’s rooms) uneasy and conscious of a threat.
He heard himself asking, “You think it’s—serious?” 39and saw Rathbone’s mouth twist into the odd semblance of a smile. ”

“ Theodore and his guardians shared a bowl of steaming mess; a mingling of potatoes, dried greenstuff and gobbets of meat which he guessed to be rat-flesh. They shared it wolfishly, each man eating fast lest his fellows had more than their portion; the meal over, the bowl was flung back to the women for washing, and his gaolers—his mates now—relaxed; there was no further reason for unfriendliness and they were willing enough to be communicative, with the slow uncommunicativeness of men who have little but their daily round to talk about. ”

“ By the time his first son was of an age to think and question, Theodore understood more than the growth and workings of a child-mind—much that had hitherto seemed dark and fantastic in the origins of a world that had ended with the Ruin of Man. It was the workings of a child-mind that made oddly clear to him the significance of primitive religious doctrine and beliefs handed down through the ages—the once meaningless doctrine of the Fall of Man and the belief in a vanished Golden Age. ”

“ To Theodore the tragicomic outburst was a reminder that his dependent, for all her childish helplessness, was a woman, not only a creature to be fed; while the stirrings of Ada’s personal vanity were a sign and token that she, also, was emerging from the cowed stupor of body and mind produced by long terror and starvation, that her thoughts, like her companion’s, were turning again to the human surroundings they had fled from.... ”

“ Markham’s unemotional and matter-of-fact acceptance of “periodic blood-letting” made rumour suddenly real, and for the first time Theodore saw the Karthanian imbroglio as more than the substance of telegrams and articles, something human, actual, and alive.... Saw himself, even Phillida, concerned in it—through a medley of confused and threatening shadows.... For the moment he was roused from his self-absorption and thrust into the world that he shared with the common herd of men. He and Phillida were no longer as the gods apart, with their lives to make in Eden ”

“ In the intensity of her relief at the ending of her ordeal she forgot, at first, to be greatly disappointed because the world of Theodore’s discovery was a world without a cinema or char-à-banc; with her craving for company, it was sheer delight to know that in a few days more she would be in the midst of some two score human beings, whatever their manner of living. It took time and explanation to make her understand that the desire for char-à-banc and cinema must no longer be openly expressed ”

“ More than once Theodore suspected in the secret recesses of his youngsters’ minds a natural and wondering contempt for the men of the last generation; the fools and blind who had overreached themselves and forfeited the splendour of the Golden Age by their blundering greed and unwisdom. So history was writing itself in their minds; making of a race that had acquiesced in science and drifted to destruction a legendary people whose sin was deliberate—a people whose encroachments had angered a self-important Deity and brought down his 274wrath upon their heads. ”

“ One November evening Theodore, trudging in with his catch, saw a group round the headman’s fire; the centre of interest, a youth who had returned from poaching on other men’s land and brought back news of their doings. His trespassing had taken him within sight of the neighbouring village—which lately was a cluster of huts, like their own, and now was surrounded by a wall. A stockade, fully the height of a man, with only one gap for a gate.... The poacher’s news was discussed with uneasy 288interest. The fortified tribe, in point of numbers, was already stronger than its rival ”

“ She was helpless in her new surroundings, with the dazed helplessness of those who have never lived alone or bereft of the minor appliances of civilization; to Theodore, at times, she seemed half-witted, and he treated her perforce as a backward child, to be supervised constantly lest it fail in the simplest of tasks. ”

“ Even Phillida had left him; the power of loving her was gone. “I hadn’t thought of it like that—but it’s right.... We can only hate.”
“It’s that,” said the dying man, “that’s beyond all torment.... God pity us!”
He covered his eyes and sat silent until Theodore asked him, “Does that mean you still believe in God?”
123“There’s Law,” said the other. “Is that God?... We have got to see into our own souls and to pay for everything we take. That’s all I know, so far—except that what we think we own—owns us. That’s what the wise men meant by renunciation.... ”

“ With time, with experiment and returning strength, Theodore made their refuge more habitable; tools, left lying in other men’s houses, fields and gardens, were to be had for the searching, and, when he had brought home a spade discovered in a weed-patch and an axe found rusting on a cottage floor, he built a clay oven that their fire might not quench in the rain and hewed wood for the bettering of their shelters. Ada—when he told her where to look for it—gathered moss and heather for their bed-places and spread it to dry in the 147sun ”

“ Theodore, being male, was not troubled by 173her abstract longings for the minor dignities of matrimony—and, expecting little from his married life, it could not bring him disillusion. Ada might have fancied that what stirred in her was love; he had always known himself moved by a physical instinct only. ”

“ He found a woman to suit his needs without going further than his own tribe; a woman left widowed a year or two before, who was glad enough to accept the offer of a better living than she could hope to make by her own scratching of a rod or two of earth and the uncertain charity of neighbours. The proposal of marriage, made in stolid fashion, was accepted as a matter of course ... and, that night, Theodore stared through the fire into a room in Westminster where a girl in a yellow dress made music ... ”

“ Do you know where we made the mistake?”—he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger—“We were not civilized—it was 121only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was always there—lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh—clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.” ”

“ He was with Markham, listening to the Westminster chimes— (on the crest of the centuries, Markham had said) —when there were sudden yelping screams outside and a patter of feet on the road. The human rats who had crept into the town for shelter from the night were bolting in panic from their holes.
“They’re running,” said the dying man and felt towards the stairs. “It’s gas—it must be gas! Oh God, where’s the door—where’s the door?”
As they groped and stumbled through the door and up the stairway, he was clutching at Theodore’s arm and gasping in an ecstasy of terror ”

“ But for the rigid departmental order, he knew he should have thought it his duty to volunteer and take his share of the danger that others were clamouring to face; but he had not cursed vehemently, like his junior, Cassidy, when 48Holles, equally blasphemous, burst into the room with the news that enlistment was barred. He thought of Cassidy’s angry blue eyes as he swore that, by hook or by crook, he would find his way into the air-service.... Phillida would have sympathized with Cassidy and the flash of her eyes answered his ”

“ While he was in prosperity, he did not behave with a moderation likely to procure friends amongst his inferiors. He took an opportunity in the sun-shine of his fortune, to revenge himself of those creatures, who, as they are the worshippers of power, made court to him, whom they had before contemptuously treated. This assuming behaviour of Savage was not altogether unnatural. He had been avoided and despised by those despicable sycophants, who were proud of his acquaintance when railed to eminence. ”

“ Such was the beginning of the life of Richard Savage. Born with a legal claim to honour and to affluence, he was in two months illegitimated by the parliament, and disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life, only that he might be swallowed by its quicksands, or dashed upon its rocks.
His mother could not indeed infect others with the same cruelty. As it was impossible to avoid the inquiries which the curiosity or tenderness of her relations made after her child, she was obliged to give some account of the measures she had taken ”