The Last Man

Chapter 8

AFTER a long interval, I am again impelled by the restless spirit within me

to continue my narration; but I must alter the mode which I have hitherto

adopted. The details contained in the foregoing pages, apparently trivial,

yet each slightest one weighing like lead in the depressed scale of human

afflictions; this tedious dwelling on the sorrows of others, while my own

were only in apprehension; this slowly laying bare of my soul's wounds:

this journal of death; this long drawn and tortuous path, leading to the

ocean of countless tears, awakens me again to keen grief. I had used this

history as an opiate; while it described my beloved friends, fresh with

life and glowing with hope, active assistants on the scene, I was soothed;

there will be a more melancholy pleasure in painting the end of all. But

the intermediate steps, the climbing the wall, raised up between what was

and is, while I still looked back nor saw the concealed desert beyond, is a

labour past my strength. Time and experience have placed me on an height

from which I can comprehend the past as a whole; and in this way I must

describe it, bringing forward the leading incidents, and disposing light

and shade so as to form a picture in whose very darkness there will be

harmony.

It would be needless to narrate those disastrous occurrences, for which a

parallel might be found in any slighter visitation of our gigantic

calamity. Does the reader wish to hear of the pest-houses, where death is

the comforter--of the mournful passage of the death-cart--of the

insensibility of the worthless, and the anguish of the loving heart--of

harrowing shrieks and silence dire--of the variety of disease, desertion,

famine, despair, and death? There are many books which can feed the

appetite craving for these things; let them turn to the accounts of

Boccaccio, De Foe, and Browne. The vast annihilation that has swallowed all

things--the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth--the lonely state

of singleness which hems me in, has deprived even such details of their

stinging reality, and mellowing the lurid tints of past anguish with poetic

hues, I am able to escape from the mosaic of circumstance, by perceiving

and reflecting back the grouping and combined colouring of the past.

I had returned from London possessed by the idea, with the intimate feeling

that it was my first duty to secure, as well as I was able, the well-being

of my family, and then to return and take my post beside Adrian. The events

that immediately followed on my arrival at Windsor changed this view of

things. The plague was not in London alone, it was every where--it came

on us, as Ryland had said, like a thousand packs of wolves, howling through

the winter night, gaunt and fierce. When once disease was introduced into

the rural districts, its effects appeared more horrible, more exigent, and

more difficult to cure, than in towns. There was a companionship in

suffering there, and, the neighbours keeping constant watch on each other,

and inspired by the active benevolence of Adrian, succour was afforded, and

the path of destruction smoothed. But in the country, among the scattered

farm-houses, in lone cottages, in fields, and barns, tragedies were acted

harrowing to the soul, unseen, unheard, unnoticed. Medical aid was less

easily procured, food was more difficult to obtain, and human beings,

unwithheld by shame, for they were unbeheld of their fellows, ventured on

deeds of greater wickedness, or gave way more readily to their abject

fears.

Deeds of heroism also occurred, whose very mention swells the heart and

brings tears into the eyes. Such is human nature, that beauty and deformity

are often closely linked. In reading history we are chiefly struck by the

generosity and self-devotion that follow close on the heels of crime,

veiling with supernal flowers the stain of blood. Such acts were not

wanting to adorn the grim train that waited on the progress of the plague.

The inhabitants of Berkshire and Bucks had been long aware that the plague

was in London, in Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, York, in short, in all

the more populous towns of England. They were not however the less

astonished and dismayed when it appeared among themselves. They were

impatient and angry in the midst of terror. They would do something to

throw off the clinging evil, and, while in action, they fancied that a

remedy was applied. The inhabitants of the smaller towns left their houses,

pitched tents in the fields, wandering separate from each other careless of

hunger or the sky's inclemency, while they imagined that they avoided the

death-dealing disease. The farmers and cottagers, on the contrary, struck

with the fear of solitude, and madly desirous of medical assistance,

flocked into the towns.

But winter was coming, and with winter, hope. In August, the plague had

appeared in the country of England, and during September it made its

ravages. Towards the end of October it dwindled away, and was in some

degree replaced by a typhus, of hardly less virulence. The autumn was warm

and rainy: the infirm and sickly died off--happier they: many young

people flushed with health and prosperity, made pale by wasting malady,

became the inhabitants of the grave. The crop had failed, the bad corn, and

want of foreign wines, added vigour to disease. Before Christmas half

England was under water. The storms of the last winter were renewed; but

the diminished shipping of this year caused us to feel less the tempests of

the sea. The flood and storms did more harm to continental Europe than to

us--giving, as it were, the last blow to the calamities which destroyed

it. In Italy the rivers were unwatched by the diminished peasantry; and,

like wild beasts from their lair when the hunters and dogs are afar, did

Tiber, Arno, and Po, rush upon and destroy the fertility of the plains.

Whole villages were carried away. Rome, and Florence, and Pisa were

overflowed, and their marble palaces, late mirrored in tranquil streams,

had their foundations shaken by their winter-gifted power. In Germany and

Russia the injury was still more momentous.

But frost would come at last, and with it a renewal of our lease of earth.

Frost would blunt the arrows of pestilence, and enchain the furious

elements; and the land would in spring throw off her garment of snow,

released from her menace of destruction. It was not until February that the

desired signs of winter appeared. For three days the snow fell, ice stopped

the current of the rivers, and the birds flew out from crackling branches

of the frost-whitened trees. On the fourth morning all vanished. A

south-west wind brought up rain--the sun came out, and mocking the usual

laws of nature, seemed even at this early season to burn with solsticial

force. It was no consolation, that with the first winds of March the lanes

were filled with violets, the fruit trees covered with blossoms, that the

corn sprung up, and the leaves came out, forced by the unseasonable heat.

We feared the balmy air--we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered

earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no

longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land smelled to the

apprehension of fear like a wide church-yard.