The Day of the Triffids(37)

“Thank you, Bill dear. I think I would too.”

I sighed. The hammering did not ease up much, and I saw that my hand was trembling as it reached for hers. I didn’t have any words, for the moment. Josella, however, did. She said:

“But it isn’t quite as easy as that now.”

I was jolted.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She said consideringly: “I think that if I were those people in there”—she nodded in the direction of the tower—“I think that I should make a rule. I should divide us up into lots. I should say every man who marries a sighted girl must take two blind girls as well. I’m pretty sure that’s what I should do.”

I stared at her face in the shadow.

“You don’t mean that,” I protested.

“I’m afraid I do, Bill.”

“But look here——”

“Don’t you think they may have some idea like that in their minds—from what they’ve been saying?”

“Not unlikely,” I conceded. “But if they make the rule, that’s one thing. I don’t see——”

“You mean you don’t love me enough to take on two other women as well?”

I swallowed. I also objected:

“Look here. This is all crazy. It’s unnatural. What you’re suggesting——”

She put up a hand to stop me.

“Just listen to me, Bill. I know it sounds a bit startling at first, but there’s nothing crazy about it. It’s all quite clear—and it’s not very easy.

“All this”—she waved her hand around—“it’s done something to me. It’s like suddenly seeing everything differently. And one of the things I think I see is that those of us who get through are going to be much nearer to one another, more dependent on one another, more like—well, more like a tribe than we ever were before.

“All day long as we went about I’ve been seeing unfortunate people who are going to die very soon. And all the time I’ve been saying to myself: ‘There, but for the grace of God…’ And then I’ve told myself: ‘This is a miracle! I don’t deserve anything better than any of these people. But it has happened. Here I still am—so now it’s up to me to justify it.’ Somehow it’s made me feel closer to other people than I have ever done before. That’s made me keep wondering all the time what I can do to help some of them.

“You see, we must do something to justify that miracle, Bill. I might have been any of these blind girls; you might have been any of these wandering men. There’s nothing big we can do. But if we try to look after just a few and give them what happiness we can, we shall be paying back a little—just a tiny part of what we owe. You do see that, don’t you, Bill?”

I turned it over in my mind for a minute or more.

“I think,” I said, “that that’s the queerest argument I’ve heard today—if not ever. And yet——”

“And yet it’s right, isn’t it, Bill? I know it’s right. I’ve tried to put myself in the place of one of those blind girls, and I know. We hold the chance of as full a life as they can have, for some of them. Shall we give it to them as part of our gratitude—or shall we simply withhold it on account of the prejudices we’ve been taught? That’s what it amounts to.”

I sat silently for a time. I had not a moment’s doubt that Josella meant every word she said. I ruminated a little on the ways of purposeful, subversive-minded women like Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry. You can’t do anything with such women—and they so often turn out to have been right after all.

“Very well,” I said at last. “If that’s the way you think it ought to be. But I hope——”

She cut me short.

“Oh, Bill, I knew you’d understand. Oh, I’m glad—so very glad. You’ve made me so happy.”

After a time:

“I hope——” I began again.

Josella patted my hand.

“You won’t need to worry at all, my dear. I shall choose two nice, sensible girls.”

“Oh,” I said.

We went on sitting there on the wall hand in hand, looking at the dappled trees—but not seeing them very much; at least I wasn’t. Then, in the building behind us, someone started up a phonograph, playing a Strauss waltz. It was painfully nostalgic as it lilted through the empty courtyard. For an instant the road before us became the ghost of a ballroom: a swirl of color, with the moon for a crystal chandelier.

Josella slid off the wall. With her arms outstretched, her wrists and fingers rippling, her body swaying, she danced, light as a thistledown, in a big circle in the moonlight. She came round to me, her eyes shining and her arms beckoning.

And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.





FRUSTRATION


I was walking through an unknown and deserted city where a bell rang dismally and a sepulchral, disembodied voice called in the emptiness: “The Beast is Loose! Beware! The Beast is Loose!” when I woke to find that a bell really was ringing. It was a handbell that jangled with a brassy double clatter so harsh and startling that for a moment I could not remember where I was. Then, as I sat up still bemused, there came a sound of voices calling “Fire!” I jumped just as I was from my blankets, and ran into the corridor. There was a smell of smoke there, a noise of hurried feet, doors banging. Most of the sound seemed to come from my right where the bell kept on clanging and the frightened voices were calling, so it was that way I turned and ran. A little moonlight filtered in through tall windows at the end of the passage, relieving the dimness just enough for me to keep to the middle of the way, and avoid the people who were feeling their way along the walls.