The Day of the Triffids(58)

He looked round the circle to see if we were following him.

“We can do that—if we will. The most valuable part of our flying start is knowledge. That’s the short cut to save us starting where our ancestors did. We’ve got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.”

The rest were looking at Coker curiously. It was the first time they had heard him in one of his oratorical moods.

“Now,” he went on, “from my reading of history, the thing you have to have to use knowledge is leisure. Where everybody has to work hard just to get a living and there is leisure to think, knowledge stagnates, and people with it. The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive—by people who appear to be living almost entirely on the work of others, but are, in fact, a long-term investment. Learning grew up in the cities, and in great institutions—it was the labor of the countryside that supported them. Similarly, we must become big enough to support at very least the leader, the teacher, and the doctor.”

“Well?” said Stephen after a pause.

“I’ve been thinking of that place Bill and I saw at Tynsham. We’ve told you about it. The woman who is trying to run it wanted help, and she wanted it badly. She has about fifty or sixty people on her hands, and a dozen or so of them able to see. That way she can’t do it. She knows she can’t—but she wasn’t going to admit it to us. She wasn’t going to put herself in our debt by asking us to stay. But she’d be very glad if we were to go back there after all and ask to be admitted.”

“Good Lord,” I said. “You don’t think she deliberately put us on the wrong track?”

“I don’t know. I may be doing her an injustice, but it is an odd thing that we’ve not seen or heard a single sign of Beadley and Company, isn’t it? Anyhow, whether she meant it or not, that’s the way it works, because I’ve decided to go back there. If you want my reasons, here they are—the two main ones. First, unless that place is taken in hand, it’s going to crash, which would be a waste and a shame for all those people there. The other is that it is much better situated than this. It has a farm which should not take a lot of putting in order; it is practically self-contained, but could be extended if necessary. This place would cost a lot more labor to start and to work.

“More important, it is big enough to afford time for teaching—teaching both the present blind there and the sighted children they’ll have later on. I believe it can be done, and I’ll do my best to do it—and if the haughty Miss Durrant can’t take it, she can go jump in the river.

“Now the point is this. I think I could do it as it stands—but I know that if the lot of us were to go we could get the place reorganized and running in a few weeks. Then we’d be living in a community that’s going to grow and make a damned good attempt to hold its own. The alternative is to stay in a small party which is going to decline and get more desperately lonely as time goes on. So, how about it?”

There was some debate and inquiry for details, but not much doubt. Those of us who had been out on the search had had a glimpse of the awful loneliness that might come. No one was attached to the present house. It had been chosen for defensible qualities, and had little more to commend it. Most of them could feel the oppression of isolation growing round them already. The thought of wider and more varied company was in itself attractive. The end of an hour found the discussion dealing with questions of transport and details of the removal, and the decision to adopt Coker’s suggestion had more or less made itself. Only Stephen’s girl friend was doubtful.

“This place Tynsham—it’s pretty much off the map?” she asked uneasily.

“Don’t you worry,” Coker assured her. “It’s marked on all the best American maps.”



* * *



—

It was sometime in the early hours of the following morning that I knew I was not going to Tynsham with the rest. Later, perhaps, I would, but not yet….

My first inclination had been to accompany them, if only for the purpose of choking the truth out of Miss Durrant regarding the Beadley party’s destination. But then I had to make again the disturbing admission that I did not know that Josella was with them—and, indeed, all the information I had been able to collect so far suggested that she was not. She had pretty certainly not passed through Tynsham. But if she had not gone in search of them, then where had she gone? It was scarcely likely that there had been a second direction in the University Building, one that I had missed….

And then, as if it had been a flash of light, I recalled the discussion we had had in our commandeered apartment. I could see her sitting there in her blue party frock, with the light of the candles catching the diamonds as we talked…. “What about the Sussex Downs? I know a lovely old farmhouse on the north side…” And then I knew what I must do….

I told Coker about it in the morning. He was sympathetic, but obviously anxious not to raise my hopes too much.

“Okay. You do as you think best,” he agreed. “I hope—Well, anyway, you’ll know where we are, and you can both come on to Tynsham and help to put that woman through the hoop until she sees sense.”

That morning the weather broke. The rain was falling in sheets as I climbed once more into the familiar truck, yet I was feeling elated and hopeful; it could have rained ten times harder without depressing me or altering my intention. Coker came out to see me off. I knew why he made a point of it, for I was aware without his telling me that the memory of his first rash plan and its consequences troubled him. He stood beside the cab, with his hair flattened and the water trickling down his neck, and held up his hand.