Dawn by S. Fowler Wright

Author:S. Fowler Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, apocalypse, post holocaust, disaster, end of the world
ISBN: 9781434443748
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

BOOK FOUR

Chapter Forty-Three

It would be illogical to conclude that Phillips had no Christian name because he was never known to produce it.

As a manservant, which had been his first occupation, and his father’s before him, he had no occasion for this distinction.

But even when his employer died, about two years before the period with which we are concerned, and he was persuaded by circumstance to take over the plumbing business of a deceased cousin in Cowley Thorn, he was never known to use it. He retained the business name of J. T. Couthlin and Co., and signed his letters and endorsed his cheques in a name which obviously was not his.

He was engaged to marry Betty Cotwin, Stacey Dobson’s housemaid, in the coming October, when it may be presumed that it would have been disclosed upon his marriage certificate, but even that occasion did not occur, for the flood came, and when the routine of the plumbing business departed he realized the necessity of extending his immediate protection to that young lady, and took up his residence with her on the following day, with Mr. Dobson’s decided approval.

Stacey Dobson had never been responsive to the pressure of outer circumstance. He had lived his own life in his own way and when the storm struck, and the news of flood and ruin assailed him from every side, he met the proposal of his frightened servants that he should join the discomforts of the northward flight with an indifferent but final negative.

His house was large, substantially built, isolated, and protected by the rising ground beyond Cowley Wood from the full force of the storm. It lost much of its roof: its upper rooms were damaged by falling timber. But beyond these injuries, and some internal displacements, it survived the fury of the first night, and it was from the window of an almost uninjured library (some plaster had fallen on his shoulder from a cracked ceiling, but it was nothing more than a clothes-brush would rectify) that he told the servants, who had spent a miserable night on the lawn, that they could please themselves, but that he would be obliged if they would not interrupt him further.

The fact was that he was composing a sonnet on Mutability, and the sonnet form is sufficiently exacting to make such interruptions almost intolerable.

Only Betty remained. She had already acquired a broken head, and some other damages, in attempting to rescue some of her master’s property from a roofless bedroom, and excused herself from joining the exodus of her fellow-servants by explaining that her head ached, and she did not feel fit to go.

Stacey Dobson did not fail to understand the loyalty of her decision. He even made a moderate protest against it. But it was somewhat perfunctory. He really doubted the wisdom of the wild migration which was proceeding around him. He was repelled by thoughts of the miserable conditions of food and shelter which this flying population must endure, if the floods should spare them.

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