The Day of the Triffids

VII. Conference

I fancy all of us had expected the meeting to be simply a kind of briefing talk. Just the timetable, course instructions, the day’s objective—that kind of thing. Certainly I had no expectation of the food for thought that we received.

It was held in a small lecture theater, lit for the occasion by an arrangement of car headlamps and batteries. When we went in, some half dozen men and two women, who appeared to have constituted themselves a committee, were conferring behind the lecturer’s desk. To our surprise we found nearly a hundred people seated in the body of the hail. Young women predominated at a ratio of about four to one. I had not realized until Josella pointed it out to me how few of them were able to see.

Michael Beadley dominated the consulting group by his height. I recognized the Colonel beside hint The other faces were new to me, save that of Elspeth Cary, who had now exchanged her camera for a notebook, presumably for the benefit of posterity. Most of their interest was centered round an elderly man of ugly but benign aspect who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and had fine white hair trimmed to a rather political length. They all had an air of being a little worried about him.

The other woman in the party was not much more than a girl—perhaps twenty-two or -three. She did not appear happy at finding herself where she was. She cast occasional looks of nervous uncertainty at the audience.

Sandra Telmont came in, carrying a sheet of foolscap. She studied it a moment, then briskly broke the group up and sorted it into chairs. With a wave of her hand she directed Michael to the desk, and the meeting began.

He stood there, a little bent, watching the audience from somber eyes as he waited for the murmuring to die down.

When he spoke, it was in a pleasant, practiced voice and with a fireside manner.

“Many of us here,” he began, “must still be feeling numbed under this catastrophe. The world we knew has ended in a flash. Some of us may be feeling that it is the end of everything. It is not. But to all of you I will say at once that it can be the end of everything—if we let it.

“Stupendous as this disaster is, there is, however, still a margin of survival. It may be worth remembering just now that we are not unique in looking upon vast calamity. Whatever the myths that have grown up about it, there can be no doubt that somewhere far back in our history there was a Great Flood. Those who survived that must have looked upon a disaster comparable in scale with this and, in some ways, more formidable. But they cannot have despaired; they must have begun again—as we can begin again.

“Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are going to build nothing at all. So we had better throw them out at once, for it is builders that we must become.

“And further to deflate any romantic dramatization, I would like to point out to you that this, even now, is not the worst that could have happened. I, and quite likely many of you, have spent most of my life in expectation of something worse. And I still believe that it this had not happened to us, that worse thing would.

“From August 6, 1945, the margin of survival has narrowed appallingly. Indeed, two days ago it was narrower than it is at this moment. If you need to dramatize, you could well take for your material the years succeeding 1945, when the path of safety staffed to shrink to a tightrope along which we had to walk with our eyes deliberately closed to the depths beneath us.

“In any single moment ofthe years since then the fatal slip might have been made. It is a miracle that it was not. It is a double miracle that can go on happening for years.

“But sooner or later that slip must have occurred. It would not have mattered whether it came through malice, carelessness, or sheer accident: the balance would have been lost and the destruction let loose.

“How bad it would have been, we cannot say. How bad it could have been—well, there might have been no survivors; there might possibly have been no planet..

“And now contrast our situation. The Earth is intact, Un-scarred, still fruitful. It can provide us with food and raw materials. We have repositories of knowledge that can teach us to do anything that has been done before—though there are some things that may be better unremembered. And we have the means, the health, and the strength to begin to build again.”

He did not make a long speech, but it bad effect. It must have made quite a number of the members of his audience begin to feel that perhaps they were at the beginning of something, after all, rather than at the end of everything. In spite of his offering little but generalities, there was a more alert air in the place when he sat down.

The Colonel, who followed him, was practical and factual. He reminded us that for reasons of health it would be advisable for us to get away from all built-up areas as soon as practicable—which was expected to be at about 1200 hours on the following day. Almost all the primary necessities, as well as extras enough to give a reasonable standard of comfort, had now been collected. In considering our stocks, our aim must be to make ourselves as nearly independent of outside sources as possible for a minimum of one year. We should spend that period in virtually a state of siege. There were, no doubt, many things we should all like to take besides those on our lists, but they would have to wait until the medical staff (and here the girl on the committee blushed deeply) considered it safe for parties to leave isolation and fetch them. As for the scene of our isolation, the committee had given it considerable thought, and, bearing in mind the desiderata of compactness, self-sufficiency, and detachment, had come to the conclusion that a country hoarding school, or, failing that, some large country mansion, would best serve our purposes.

Whether the committee had, in fact, not yet decided on any particular place, or whether the military notion that secrecy has some intrinsic value persisted in the Colonel’s mind, I cannot say, but I have no doubt that his failure to name the place, or even the probable locality, was the gravest mistake made that evening. At the time, however, his practical manner had a further reassuring effect.

As he sat down, Michael rose again. He spoke encouragingly to the girl and then introduced her. It had, he said, been one of our greatest worries that we had no one among us with medical knowledge; therefore it was with great relief that he welcomed Miss Berr. It was true that she did not hold medical degrees with impressive letters, but she did have high nursing qualifications. For himself, he thought that knowledge recently attained might be worth more than degrees acquired years ago.

The girl, blushing again, said a little piece about her determination to carry the job through, and ended a trifle abruptly with the information that she would inoculate us all against a variety of things before we left the hall.

A small, sparrowlike man whose name I did not catch rubbed it in that the health of each was the concern of all, and that any suspicion of illness should be reported at once, since the effects of a contagious disease among us would he serious.

When he had finished, Sandra rose and introduced the last speaker of the group: Dr. E. H. Vorless, D.Sc., of Edinburgh, professor of sociology at the University of Kingston.

The white-haired man walked to the desk. He stood there a few moments with his finger tips resting upon it and his head bent down as if he were studying it. Those behind regarded him carefully, with a trace of anxiety. The Colonel leaned over to whisper something to Michael, who nodded without taking his eyes off the doctor. The old man looked up. He passed a hand over his hair.

“My friends,” he said, “I think I may claim to be the oldest among you. In nearly seventy years I have learned, and had to unlearn, many things—though not nearly so many as I could have wished. But if, in the course of a long study of man’s institutions, one thing has struck me more than their stubbornness, it is their variety.

“Well, indeed do the French say autres temps, autres maurs. We must all see, if we pause to think, that one kind of community’s virtue may well be another kind of community’s crime; that what is frowned upon here may be considered laudable elsewhere; that customs condemned in one century are condoned in another. And we must also see that in each community and each period there is a widespread belief in the moral rightness of its own customs.

“Now, clearly, since many of these beliefs conflict, they cannot all be ‘right’ in an absolute sense. The most judgment one can pass on them—if one has to pass judgments at all is to say that they have at some period been ‘right’ for those communities that bold them. It may be that they still are, but it frequently is found that they are not, and that the communities who continue to follow them blindly without heed to changed circumstances do so to their own disadvantage—perhaps to their ultimate destruction.”

The audience did not perceive where this introduction might be leading. It fidgeted. Most of it was accustomed, when it encountered this kind of thing, to turn the radio off at once. Now it felt tapped. The speaker decided to make himself clearer.

“Thus,” he continued, “you would not expect to find the same manners, customs, and forms in a penurious Indian village living on the edge of starvation as you would in, say. Mayfair. Similarly, the people in a warm country, where life is easy, are going to differ quite a deal from the people of an overcrowded, hard-working country as to the nature of the principle virtues. In other words, different environments set different standards.

“I point this out to you because the world we knew is gone—finished.

“The conditions which framed and taught us our standards have gone with it. Our needs are now different, and our aims must be different. If you want an example. I would point out to you that we have all spent the day indulging with perfectly easy consciences in what two days ago would have been housebreaking and theft. With the old pattern broken, we have now to find out what mode of life is best suited to the new. We have not simply to start building again; we have to start thinking again—which is much more difficult, and far more distasteful.

“Man remains physically adaptable to a remarkable degree.

But it is the custom of each community to form the minds of its young in a mold, introducing a binding agent of prejudice. The result is a remarkably tough substance capable of withstanding successfully even the pressure of many innate tendencies and instincts. In this way it has been possible to produce a man who against all his basic sense of self-preservation will voluntarily risk death for an ideal—but also in this way is produced the dolt who is sure of everything and knows what is ‘right.’

“In the time now ahead of us a great many of these prejudices we have been given will have to go, or be radically altered. We can accept and retain only one primary prejudice, and that is that the race is worth preserving. To that consideration all else will, for a time at least, be subordinate. We must look at all we do, with this question in mind: ‘Is this going to help our race survive—or will it hinder us?’ If it will help, we must do it, whether or not it conflicts with the ideas in which we were brought up. If not, we must avoid it, even though the omission may clash with our previous notions of duty and even of justice.

“It will not be easy; old prejudices die hard. The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept; so do the timid; so do the mentally lazy—and so do all of us, more than we imagine. Now that the organization has gone, our ready reckoners for conduct within it no longer Live the right answers. We must have the moral courage to think and to plan for ourselves.”

He paused to survey his audience thoughtfully. Then he said:

“There is one thing to be made quite clear to you before you decide to join our community. It is that those of us who start on this task will all have our parts to play. The men must work—the women must have babies. Unless you can agree to that, there can be no place for you in our community.”

After an interval of dead silence, he added:

“We can afford to support a limited number of women who cannot see, because they will have babies who can see. We cannot afford to support men who cannot see. In our new world, then, babies become very much more important than husbands.”

For some seconds after he stopped speaking, silence continued, then isolated murmurs grew quickly into a general buzz.

I looked at Josella. To my astonishment, she was grinning impishly.

“What do you find funny about this?” I asked a trifle shortly.

“People’s expressions mostly,” she replied.

I had to admit it as a reason. I looked round the place, and then across at Michael. His eyes were moving from one section to another of the audience as he tried to sum up the reaction.

“Michael’s looking a bit anxious,” I observed.

“He should worry,” said Josella. “If Brigham Young could bring it off in the middle of the nineteenth century, this ought to be a pushover.”

“What a crude young woman you are at times,” I said. “Were you in on this before?”

“Not exactly, but I’m not quite dumb, you know. Besides, while you were away someone drove in a bus with most of these blind girls on board. They all came from some institution. I said to myself, why collect them from there when you could gather up thousands in a few streets round here?

The answer obviously was that (a) being blind before this happened, they had been trained to do work of some kind, and (b) they were all girls. The deduction wasn’t terribly difficult.”

“H’m,” I said. “Depends on one’s outlook, I suppose. I must say, it wouldn’t have struck me. Do you—”

“Sh-sh,” she told me as a quietness came over the hail. A tail, dark, purposeful-looking, youngish woman had risen. While she waited, she appeared to have a mouth not made to open, but later it did.

“Are we to understand,” she inquired, using a kind of carbon-steel voice, “are we to understand that the last speaker is advocating free love?” And she sat down, with spine-jarring decision.

Dr. Vorless smoothed back his hair as he regarded her.

“I think the questioner must be aware that I never mentioned love, free, bought, or bartered. Will she please make her question clearer?”

The woman stood up again.

“I think the speaker understood me. I am asking if he suggests the abolition of the marriage law?”

“The laws we knew have been abolished by circumstances. It now falls to us to make laws suitable to the conditions, and to enforce them if necessary.”

“There is still God’s law, and the law of decency.”

“Madam. Solomon had three hundred—or was it five hundred?—wives, and God did not apparently hold them against him. A Mohammedan preserves rigid respectability with three wives. These are matters of local custom. Just what our laws in these matters, and in others, will be is for us all to decide later for the greatest benefit of the community.

“This committee, after discussion, has decided that if we are to build a new state of things and avoid a relapse into barbarism—which is an appreciable danger—we must have certain undertakings from those who wish to join us.

“Not one of us is going to recapture the conditions we have lost. What we offer is a busy life in the best conditions we can contrive, and the happiness which will come of achievement against odds. In return we ask willingness and fruitfulness. There is no compulsion. The choice is yours. Those to whom our offer does not appeal are at perfect liberty to go elsewhere and start a separate community on such lines as they prefer.

“But I would ask you to consider very carefully whether or not you do hold a warrant from God to deprive any woman of the happiness of carrying out her natural functions.”

The discussion which followed was a rambling affair, descending frequently to points of detail and hypothesis on which there could as yet be no answers. But there was no move to cut it short. The longer it went on, the less strangeness the idea would have.

Josella and I moved over to the table where Nurse Berr had set up her paraphernalia. We took several shots in our arms and then sat down again to listen to the wrangling.

“How many of them will decide to come, do you think?” I asked her.

She glanced round.

“Nearly all of them—by the morning,” she told me.

I felt doubtful. There was a lot of objecting and questioning going on. Josella said:

“If you were a woman who was going to spend an hour or two before you went to sleep tonight considering whether you would choose babies and an organization to look after you or adherence to a principle which might quite likely mean no babies and no one to look after you, you’d not really be very doubtful, you know. And after all, most women want babies anyway—the husband’s just what Dr. Vorless might call the local means to the end.”

“That’s rather cynical of you.”

“If you really think that’s cynical, you must be a very sentimental character. I’m talking about real women, not those in the world.”

“Oh,” I said.

She sat pensively awhile, and gradually acquired a frown. At last she said;

“The thing that worries me is how many will they expect? I like babies, all right, but there are limits.”

After the debate had gone on raggedly for an hour or so it was wound up. Michael asked that the names of all those willing to join in his plan should be left in his office by ten o’clock the next morning. The Colonel requested all who could drive a truck to report to him by 700 hours, and the meeting broke up.

Josella and I wandered out of doors. The evening was mild. The light on the tower was again stabbing hopefully into the sky. The moon had just risen clear of the museum roof. We found a low wall and sat on it, looking into the shadows of the Square garden and listening to the faint sound of the wind in the branches of the trees there. We smoked a cigarette each almost in silence. When I reached the end of mine I threw it away and drew a breath.

“Josella,” I said.

“M’m?” she replied, scarcely emerging from her thoughts. Josella,” I said again. “Er—those babies. I’d—er—I’d be sort of terribly proud and happy if they could be mine as well as yours.”

She sat quite still for a moment, saying nothing. Then she turned her head. The moonlight was glinting on her fair hair, but her face and eyes were in shadow. I waited, with a hammered and slightly sick feeling inside me. She said, with surprising calm:

“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 P 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 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 though 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