Redwood's Two Days

: THE HARVEST OF THE FOOD.

I.



So soon as Caterham knew the moment for grasping his nettle had come, he

took the law into his own hands and sent to arrest Cossar and Redwood.



Redwood was there for the taking. He had been undergoing an operation in

the side, and the doctors had kept all disturbing things from him until

his convalescence was assured. Now they had released him. He was just

out of bed, sitting in a fire-wa med room, with a heap of newspapers

about him, reading for the first time of the agitation that had swept

the country into the hands of Caterham, and of the trouble that was

darkening over the Princess and his son. It was in the morning of the

day when young Caddies died, and when the policeman tried to stop young

Redwood on his way to the Princess. The latest newspapers Redwood had

did but vaguely prefigure these imminent things. He was re-reading these

first adumbrations of disaster with a sinking heart, reading the shadow

of death more and more perceptibly into them, reading to occupy his mind

until further news should come. When the officers followed the servant

into his room, he looked up eagerly.



"I thought it was an early evening paper," he said. Then standing up,

and with a swift change of manner: "What's this?"



After that Redwood had no news of anything for two days.



They had come with a vehicle to take him away, but when it became

evident that he was ill, it was decided to leave him for a day or so

until he could be safely removed, and his house was taken over by the

police and converted into a temporary prison. It was the same house in

winch Giant Redwood had been born and in which Herakleophorbia had for

the first time been given to a human being, and Redwood had now been a

widower and had lived alone in it eight years.



He had become an iron-grey man, with a little pointed grey beard and

still active brown eyes. He was slender and soft-voiced, as he had ever

been, but his features had now that indefinable quality that comes of

brooding over mighty things. To the arresting officer his appearance was

in impressive contrast to the enormity of his offences. "Here's this

feller," said the officer in command, to his next subordinate, "has done

his level best to bust up everything, and 'e's got a face like a quiet

country gentleman; and here's Judge Hangbrow keepin' everything nice and

in order for every one, and 'e's got a 'ead like a 'og. Then their

manners! One all consideration and the other snort and grunt. Which just

shows you, doesn't it, that appearances aren't to be gone upon, whatever

else you do."



But his praise of Redwood's consideration was presently dashed. The

officers found him troublesome at first until they had made it clear

that it was useless for him to ask questions or beg for papers. They

made a sort of inspection of his study indeed, and cleared away even

the papers he had. Redwood's voice was high and expostulatory. "But

don't you see," he said over and over again, it's my Son, my only Son,

that is in this trouble. It isn't the Food I care for, but my Son."



"I wish indeed I could tell you, Sir," said the officer. "But our orders

are strict."



"Who gave the orders?" cried Redwood.



"Ah! that, Sir---" said the officer, and moved towards the door....



"'E's going up and down 'is room," said the second officer, when his

superior came down. "That's all right. He'll walk it off a bit."



"I hope 'e will," said the chief officer. "The fact is I didn't see it

in that light before, but this here Giant what's been going on with the

Princess, you know, is this man's son."



The two regarded one another and the third policeman for a space.



"Then it is a bit rough on him," the third policeman said.



It became evident that Redwood had still imperfectly apprehended the

fact that an iron curtain had dropped between him and the outer world.

They heard him go to the door, try the handle and rattle the lock, and

then the voice of the officer who was stationed on the landing telling

him it was no good to do that. Then afterwards they heard him at the

windows and saw the men outside looking up. "It's no good that way,"

said the second officer. Then Redwood began upon the bell. The senior

officer went up and explained very patiently that it could do no good to

ring the bell like that, and if it was rung for nothing now it might

have to be disregarded presently when he had need of something. "Any

reasonable attendance, Sir," the officer said. "But if you ring it just

by way of protest we shall be obliged, Sir, to disconnect."



The last word the officer heard was Redwood's high-pitched, "But at

least you might tell me if my Son--"





II.



After that Redwood spent, most of his time at the windows.



But the windows offered him little of the march of events outside. It

was a quiet street at all times, and that day it was unusually quiet:

scarcely a cab, scarcely a tradesman's cart passed all that morning. Now

and then men went by--without any distinctive air of events--now and

then a little group of children, a nursemaid and a woman going shopping,

and so forth. They came on to the stage right or left, up or down the

street, with an exasperating suggestion of indifference to any concerns

more spacious than their own; they would discover the police-guarded

house with amazement and exit in the opposite direction, where the great

trusses of a giant hydrangea hung across the pavement, staring back or

pointing. Now and then a man would come and ask one of the policemen a

question and get a curt reply ...



Opposite the houses seemed dead. A housemaid appeared once at a bedroom

window and stared for a space, and it occurred to Redwood to signal to

her. For a time she watched his gestures as if with interest and made a

vague response to them, then looked over her shoulder suddenly and

turned and went away. An old man hobbled out of Number 37 and came down

the steps and went off to the right, altogether without looking up. For

ten minutes the only occupant of the road was a cat....



With such events that interminable momentous morning lengthened out.



About twelve there came a bawling of newsvendors from the adjacent road;

but it passed. Contrary to their wont they left Redwood's street alone,

and a suspicion dawned upon him that the police were guarding the end of

the street. He tried to open the window, but this brought a policeman

into the room forthwith....



The clock of the parish church struck twelve, and after an abyss of

time--one.



They mocked him with lunch.



He ate a mouthful and tumbled the food about a little in order to get it

taken away, drank freely of whisky, and then took a chair and went back

to the window. The minutes expanded into grey immensities, and for a

time perhaps he slept....



He woke with a vague impression of remote concussions. He perceived a

rattling of the windows like the quiver of an earthquake, that lasted

for a minute or so and died away. Then after a silence it returned....

Then it died away again. He fancied it might be merely the passage of

some heavy vehicle along the main road. What else could it be?



After a time he began to doubt whether he had heard this sound.



He began to reason interminably with himself. Why, after all, was he

seized? Caterham had been in office two days--just long enough--to grasp

his Nettle! Grasp his Nettle! Grasp his Giant Nettle! The refrain once

started, sang through his mind, and would not be dismissed.



What, after all, could Caterham do? He was a religious man. He was

bound in a sort of way by that not to do violence without a cause.



Grasp his Nettle I Perhaps, for example, the Princess was to be seized

and sent abroad. There might be trouble with his son. In which case--!

But why had he been arrested? Why was it necessary to keep him in

ignorance of a thing like that? The thing suggested--something more

extensive.



Perhaps, for example--they meant to lay all the giants by the heels I

They were all to be arrested together. There had been hints of that In

the election speeches. And then?



No doubt they had got Cossar also?



Caterham was a religious man. Redwood clung to that. The back of his

mind was a black curtain, and on that curtain there came and went a

word--a word written in letters of fixe. He struggled perpetually

against that word. It was always as it were beginning to get written on

the curtain and never getting completed.



He faced it at last. "Massacre!" There was the word in its full

brutality.



No! No! No! It was impossible! Caterham was a religious man, a civilised

man. And besides after all these years, after all these hopes!



Redwood sprang up; he paced the room. He spoke to himself; he shouted.



"No!"



Mankind was surely not so mad as that--surely not! It was impossible, it

was incredible, it could not be. What good would it do to kill the giant

human when the gigantic in all the lower things had now inevitably come?

They could not be so mad as that! "I must dismiss such an idea," he

said aloud; "dismiss such an idea! Absolutely!"



He pulled up short. What was that?



Certainly the windows had rattled. He went to look out into the street.

Opposite he saw the instant confirmation of his ears. At a bedroom at

Number 35 was a woman, towel in hand, and at the dining-room of Number

37 a man was visible behind a great vase of hypertrophied maidenhair

fern, both staring out and up, both disquieted and curious. He could see

now too, quite clearly, that the policeman on the pavement had heard it

also. The thing was not his imagination.



He turned to the darkling room.



"Guns," he said.



He brooded.



"Guns?"



They brought him in strong tea, such as he was accustomed to have. It

was evident his housekeeper had been taken into consultation. After

drinking it, he was too restless to sit any longer at the window, and he

paced the room. His mind became more capable of consecutive thought.



The room had been his study for four-and-twenty years. It had been

furnished at his marriage, and all the essential equipment dated from

then, the large complex writing-desk, the rotating chair, the easy chair

at the fire, the rotating bookcase, the fixture of indexed pigeon-holes

that filled the further recess. The vivid Turkey carpet, the later

Victorian rugs and curtains had mellowed now to a rich dignity of

effect, and copper and brass shone warm about the open fire. Electric

lights had replaced the lamp of former days; that was the chief

alteration in the original equipment. But among these things his

connection with the Food had left abundant traces. Along one wall, above

the dado, ran a crowded array of black-framed photographs and

photogravures, showing his son and Cossar's sons and others of the

Boom-children at various ages and amidst various surroundings. Even

young Caddles' vacant visage had its place in that collection. In the

corner stood a sheaf of the tassels of gigantic meadow grass from

Cheasing Eyebright, and on the desk there lay three empty poppy heads as

big as hats. The curtain rods were grass stems. And the tremendous skull

of the great hog of Oakham hung, a portentous ivory overmantel, with a

Chinese jar in either eye socket, snout down above the fire....



It was to the photographs that Redwood went, and in particular to the

photographs of his son.



They brought back countless memories of things that had passed out of

his mind, of the early days of the Food, of Bensington's timid presence,

of his cousin Jane, of Cossar and the night work at the Experimental

Farm. These things came to him now very little and bright and distinct,

like things seen through a telescope on a sunny day. And then there was

the giant nursery, the giant childhood, the young giant's first efforts

to speak, his first clear signs of affection.



Guns?



It flowed in on him, irresistibly, overwhelmingly, that outside there,

outside this accursed silence and mystery, his son and Cossar's sons,

and all these glorious first-fruits of a greater age were even

now--fighting. Fighting for life! Even now his son might be in some

dismal quandary, cornered, wounded, overcome....



He swung away from the pictures and went up and down the room

gesticulating. "It cannot be," he cried, "it cannot be. It cannot end

like that!"



"What was that?"



He stopped, stricken rigid.



The trembling of the windows had begun again, and then had come a

thud--a vast concussion that shook the house. The concussion seemed to

last for an age. It must have been very near. For a moment it seemed

that something had struck the house above him--an enormous impact that

broke into a tinkle of falling glass, and then a stillness that ended at

last with a minute clear sound of running feet in the street below.



Those feet released him from his rigor. He turned towards the window,

and saw it starred and broken.



His heart beat high with a sense of crisis, of conclusive occurrence, of

release. And then again, his realisation of impotent confinement fell

about him like a curtain!



He could see nothing outside except that the small electric lamp

opposite was not lighted; he could hear nothing after the first

suggestion of a wide alarm. He could add nothing to interpret or enlarge

that mystery except that presently there came a reddish fluctuating

brightness in the sky towards the south-east.



This light waxed and waned. When it waned he doubted if it had ever

waxed. It had crept upon him very gradually with the darkling. It became

the predominant fact in his long night of suspense. Sometimes it seemed

to him it had the quiver one associates with dancing flames, at others

he fancied it was no more than the normal reflection of the evening

lights. It waxed and waned through the long hours, and only vanished at

last when it was submerged altogether under the rising tide of dawn. Did

it mean--? What could it mean? Almost certainly it was some sort of

fire, near or remote, but he could not even tell whether it was smoke or

cloud drift that streamed across the sky. But about one o'clock there

began a flickering of searchlights athwart that ruddy tumult, a

nickering that continued for the rest of the night. That too might mean

many things? What could it mean? What did it mean? Just this stained

unrestful sky he had and the suggestion of a huge explosion to occupy

his mind. There came no further sounds, no further running, nothing but

a shouting that might have been only the distant efforts of drunken

men...



He did not turn up his lights; he stood at his draughty broken window, a

distressful, slight black outline to the officer who looked ever and

again into the room and exhorted him to rest.



All night Redwood remained at his window peering up at the ambiguous

drift of the sky, and only with the coming of the dawn did he obey his

fatigue and lie down upon the little bed they had prepared for him

between his writing-desk and the sinking fire in the fireplace under the

great hog's skull.





III.



For thirty-six long hours did Redwood remain imprisoned, closed in and

shut off from the great drama of the Two Days, while the little people

in the dawn of greatness fought against the Children of the Food. Then

abruptly the iron curtain rose again, and he found himself near the very

centre of the struggle. That curtain rose as unexpectedly as it fell. In

the late afternoon he was called to the window by the clatter of a cab,

that stopped without. A young man descended, and in another minute stood

before him in the room, a slightly built young man of thirty perhaps,

clean shaven, well dressed, well mannered.



"Mr. Redwood, Sir," he began, "would you be willing to come to Mr.

Caterham? He needs your presence very urgently."



"Needs my presence!" There leapt a question into Redwood's mind, that

for a moment he could not put. He hesitated. Then in a voice that broke

he asked: "What has he done to my Son?" and stood breathless for the

reply.



"Your Son, Sir? Your Son is doing well. So at least we gather."



"Doing well?"



"He was wounded, Sir, yesterday. Have you not heard?"



Redwood smote these pretences aside. His voice was no longer coloured by

fear, but by anger. "You know I have not heard. You know I have heard

nothing."



"Mr. Caterham feared, Sir--It was a time of upheaval. Every one--taken

by surprise. He arrested you to save you, Sir, from any misadventure--"



"He arrested me to prevent my giving any warning or advice to my son. Go

on. Tell me what has happened. Have you succeeded? Have you killed them

all?"



The young man made a pace or so towards the window, and turned.



"No, Sir," he said concisely.



"What have you to tell me?"



"It's our proof, Sir, that this fighting was not planned by us. They

found us ... totally unprepared." "You mean?"



"I mean, Sir, the Giants have--to a certain extent--held their own."



The world changed, for Redwood. For a moment something like hysteria had

the muscles of his face and throat. Then he gave vent to a profound

"Ah!" His heart bounded towards exultation. "The Giants have held their

own!"



"There has been terrible fighting--terrible destruction. It is all a

most hideous misunderstanding ... In the north and midlands Giants have

been killed ... Everywhere."



"They are fighting now?"



"No, Sir. There was a flag of truce."



"From them?"



"No, Sir. Mr. Caterham sent a flag of truce. The whole thing is a

hideous misunderstanding. That is why he wants to talk to you, and put

his case before you. They insist, Sir, that you should intervene--"



Redwood interrupted. "Do you know what happened to my Son?" he asked.



"He was wounded."



"Tell me! Tell me!"



"He and the Princess came--before the--the movement to surround the

Cossar camp was complete--the Cossar pit at Chislehurst. They came

suddenly, Sir, crashing through a dense thicket of giant oats, near

River, upon a column of infantry ... Soldiers had been very nervous all

day, and this produced a panic."



"They shot him?"



"No, Sir. They ran away. Some shot at him--wildly--against orders."



Redwood gave a note of denial. "It's true, Sir. Not on account of your

son, I won't pretend, but on account of the Princess."



"Yes. That's true."



"The two Giants ran shouting towards the encampment. The soldiers ran

this way and that, and then some began firing. They say they saw him

stagger--"



"Ugh!"



"Yes, Sir. But we know he is not badly hurt."



"How?"



"He sent the message, Sir, that he was doing well!"



"To me?"



"Who else, Sir?"



Redwood stood for nearly a minute with his arms tightly folded, taking

this in. Then his indignation found a voice.



"Because you were fools in doing the thing, because you miscalculated

and blundered, you would like me to think you are not murderers in

intention. And besides--The rest?"



The young man looked interrogation.



"The other Giants?"



The young man made no further pretence of misunderstanding. His tone

fell. "Thirteen, Sir, are dead."



"And others wounded?"



"Yes, Sir."



"And Caterham," he gasped, "wants to meet me! Where are the others?"



"Some got to the encampment during the fighting, Sir ... They seem to

have known--"



"Well, of course they did. If it hadn't been for Cossar--Cossar is

there?"



"Yes, Sir. And all the surviving Giants are there--the ones who didn't

get to the camp in the fighting have gone, or are going now under the

flag of trace."



"That means," said Redwood, "that you are beaten."



"We are not beaten. No, Sir. You cannot say we are beaten. But your sons

have broken the rules of war. Once last night, and now again. After our

attack had been withdrawn. This afternoon they began to bombard

London--"



"That's legitimate!"



"They have been firing shells filled with--poison."



"Poison?"



"Yes. Poison. The Food--"



"Herakleophorbia?"



"Yes, Sir. Mr. Caterham, Sir--"



"You are beaten! Of course that beats you. It's Cossar I What can you

hope to do now? What good is it to do anything now? You will breathe it

in the dust of every street. What is there to fight for more? Rules of

war, indeed! And now Caterham wants to humbug me to help him bargain.

Good heavens, man! Why should I come to your exploded windbag? He has

played his game ... murdered and muddled. Why should I?"



The young man stood with an air of vigilant respect.



"It is a fact, Sir," he interrupted, "that the Giants insist that they

shall see you. They will have no ambassador but you. Unless you come to

them, I am afraid, Sir, there will be more bloodshed."



"On your side, perhaps."



"No, Sir--on both sides. The world is resolved the thing must end."



Redwood looked about the study. His eyes rested for a moment on the

photograph of his boy. He turned and met the expectation of the young

man. "Yes," he said at last, "I will come."





IV.



His encounter with Caterham was entirely different from his

anticipation. He had seen the man only twice in his life, once at dinner

and once in the lobby of the House, and his imagination had been active

not with the man but with the creation of the newspapers and

caricaturists, the legendary Caterham, Jack the Giant-killer, Perseus,

and all the rest of it. The element of a human personality came in to

disorder all that.



Here was not the face of the caricatures and portraits, but the face of

a worn and sleepless man, lined and drawn, yellow in the whites of the

eyes, a little weakened about the mouth. Here, indeed, were the

red-brown eyes, the black hair, the distinctive aquiline profile of the

great demagogue, but here was also something else that smote any

premeditated scorn and rhetoric aside. This man was suffering; he was

suffering acutely; he was under enormous stress. From the beginning he

had an air of impersonating himself. Presently, with a single gesture,

the slightest movement, he revealed to Redwood that he was keeping

himself up with drags. He moved a thumb to his waistcoat pocket, and

then, after a few sentences more, threw concealment aside, and slipped

the little tabloid to his lips.



Moreover, in spite of the stresses upon him, in spite of the fact that

he was in the wrong, and Redwood's junior by a dozen years, that strange

quality in him, the something--personal magnetism one may call it for

want of a better name--that had won his way for him to this eminence of

disaster was with him still. On that also Redwood had failed to reckon.

From the first, so far as the course and conduct of their speech went,

Caterham prevailed over Redwood. All the quality of the first phase of

their meeting was determined by him, all the tone and procedure were

his. That happened as if it was a matter of course. All Redwood's

expectations vanished at his presence. He shook hands before Redwood

remembered that he meant to parry that familiarity; he pitched the note

of their conference from the outset, sure and clear, as a search for

expedients under a common catastrophe.



If he made any mistake it was when ever and again his fatigue got the

better of his immediate attention, and the habit of the public meeting

carried him away. Then he drew himself up--through all their interview

both men stood--and looked away from Redwood, and began to fence and

justify. Once even he said "Gentlemen!"



Quietly, expandingly, he began to talk....



There were moments when Redwood ceased even to feel himself an

interlocutor, when he became the mere auditor of a monologue. He became

the privileged spectator of an extraordinary phenomenon. He perceived

something almost like a specific difference between himself and this

being whose beautiful voice enveloped him, who was talking, talking.

This mind before him was so powerful and so limited. From its driving

energy, its personal weight, its invincible oblivion to certain things,

there sprang up in Redwood's mind the most grotesque and strange of

images. Instead of an antagonist who was a fellow-creature, a man one

could hold morally responsible, and to whom one could address

reasonable appeals, he saw Caterham as something, something like a

monstrous rhinoceros, as it were, a civilised rhinoceros begotten of the

jungle of democratic affairs, a monster of irresistible onset and

invincible resistance. In all the crashing conflicts of that tangle he

was supreme. And beyond? This man was a being supremely adapted to make

his way through multitudes of men. For him there was no fault so

important as self-contradiction, no science so significant as the

reconciliation of "interests." Economic realities, topographical

necessities, the barely touched mines of scientific expedients, existed

for him no more than railways or rifled guns or geographical literature

exist for his animal prototype. What did exist were gatherings, and

caucuses, and votes--above all, votes. He was votes incarnate--millions

of votes.



And now in the great crisis, with the Giants broken but not beaten, this

vote-monster talked.



It was so evident that even now he had everything to learn. He did not

know there were physical laws and economic laws, quantities and

reactions that all humanity voting nemine contradicente cannot vote

away, and that are disobeyed only at the price of destruction. He did

not know there are moral laws that cannot be bent by any force of

glamour, or are bent only to fly back with vindictive violence. In the

face of shrapnel or the Judgment Day, it was evident to Redwood that

this man would have sheltered behind some curiously dodged vote of the

House of Commons.



What most concerned his mind now was not the powers that held the

fastness away there to the south, not defeat and death, but the effect

of these things upon his Majority, the cardinal reality in his life. He

had to defeat the Giants or go under. He was by no means absolutely

despairful. In this hour of his utmost failure, with blood and disaster

upon his hands, and the rich promise of still more horrible disaster,

with the gigantic destinies of the world towering and toppling over him,

he was capable of a belief that by sheer exertion of his voice, by

explaining and qualifying and restating, he might yet reconstitute his

power. He was puzzled and distressed no doubt, fatigued and suffering,

but if only he could keep up, if only he could keep talking--



As he talked he seemed to Redwood to advance and recede, to dilate and

contract. Redwood's share of the talk was of the most subsidiary sort,

wedges as it were suddenly thrust in. "That's all nonsense." "No." "It's

no use suggesting that." "Then why did you begin?"



It is doubtful if Caterham really heard him at all. Round such

interpolations Caterham's speech flowed indeed like some swift stream

about a rock. There this incredible man stood, on his official

hearthrug, talking, talking with enormous power and skill, talking as

though a pause in his talk, his explanations, his presentation of

standpoints and lights, of considerations and expedients, would permit

some antagonistic influence to leap into being--into vocal being, the

only being he could comprehend. There he stood amidst the slightly faded

splendours of that official room in which one man after another had

succumbed to the belief that a certain power of intervention was the

creative control of an empire....



The more he talked the more certain Redwood's sense of stupendous

futility grew. Did this man realise that while he stood and talked

there, the whole great world was moving, that the invincible tide of

growth flowed and flowed, that there were any hours but parliamentary

hours, or any weapons in the hands of the Avengers of Blood? Outside,

darkling the whole room, a single leaf of giant Virginian creeper tapped

unheeded on the pane.



Redwood became anxious to end this amazing monologue, to escape to

sanity and judgment, to that beleaguered camp, the fastness of the

future, where, at the very nucleus of greatness, the Sons were gathered

together. For that this talking was endured. He had a curious impression

that unless this monologue ended he would presently find himself carried

away by it, that he must fight against Caterham's voice as one fights

against a drug. Facts had altered and were altering beneath that spell.



What was the man saying?



Since Redwood had to report it to the Children of the Food, in a sort of

way he perceived it did matter. He would have to listen and guard his

sense of realities as well as he could.



Much about bloodguiltiness. That was eloquence. That didn't matter.

Next?



He was suggesting a convention!



He was suggesting that the surviving Children of the Food should

capitulate and go apart and form a community of their own. There were

precedents, he said, for this. "We would assign them territory--"



"Where?" interjected Redwood, stooping to argue.



Caterham snatched at that concession. He turned his face to Redwood's,

and his voice fell to a persuasive reasonableness. That could be

determined. That, he contended, was a quite subsidiary question. Then he

went on to stipulate: "And except for them and where they are we must

have absolute control, the Food and all the Fruits of the Food must be

stamped out--"



Redwood found himself bargaining: "The Princess?"



"She stands apart."



"No," said Redwood, struggling to get back to the old footing. "That's

absurd."



"That afterwards. At any rate we are agreed that the making of the Food

must stop--"



"I have agreed to nothing. I have said nothing--"



"But on one planet, to have two races of men, one great, one small!

Consider what has happened! Consider that is but a little foretaste of

what might presently happen if this Food has its way! Consider all you

have already brought upon this world! If there is to be a race of

Giants, increasing and multiplying--"



"It is not for me to argue," said Redwood. "I must go to our sons. I

want to go to my son. That is why I have come to you. Tell me exactly

what you offer."



Caterham made a speech upon his terms.



The Children of the Food were to be given a great reservation--in North

America perhaps or Africa--in which they might live out their lives in

their own fashion.



"But it's nonsense," said Redwood. "There are other Giants now abroad.

All over Europe--here and there!"



"There could be an international convention. It's not impossible.

Something of the sort indeed has already been spoken of ... But in this

reservation they can live out their own lives in their own way. They may

do what they like; they may make what they like. We shall be glad if

they will make us things. They may be happy. Think!"



"Provided there are no more Children." "Precisely. The Children are for

us. And so, Sir, we shall save the world, we shall save it absolutely

from the fruits of your terrible discovery. It is not too late for us.

Only we are eager to temper expediency with mercy. Even now we are

burning and searing the places their shells hit yesterday. We can get it

under. Trust me we shall get it under. But in that way, without cruelty,

without injustice--"



"And suppose the Children do not agree?"



For the first time Caterham looked Redwood fully in the face.



"They must!"



"I don't think they will."



"Why should they not agree?" he asked, in richly toned amazement.



"Suppose they don't?"



"What can it be but war? We cannot have the thing go on. We cannot. Sir.

Have you scientific men no imagination? Have you no mercy? We cannot

have our world trampled under a growing herd of such monsters and

monstrous growths as your Food has made. We cannot and we cannot! I ask

you, Sir, what can it be but war? And remember--this that has happened

is only a beginning I This was a skirmish. A mere affair of police.

Believe me, a mere affair of police. Do not be cheated by perspective,

by the immediate bigness of these newer things. Behind us is the

nation--is humanity. Behind the thousands who have died there are

millions. Were it not for the fear of bloodshed, Sir, behind our first

attacks there would be forming other attacks, even now. Whether we can

kill this Food or not, most assuredly we can kill your sons! You reckon

too much on the things of yesterday, on the happenings of a mere score

of years, on one battle. You have no sense of the slow course of

history. I offer this convention for the sake of lives, not because it

can change the inevitable end. If you think that your poor two dozen of

Giants can resist all the forces of our people and of all the alien

peoples who will come to our aid; if you think you can change Humanity

at a blow, in a single generation, and alter the nature and stature of

Man--"



He flung out an arm. "Go to them now, Sir. I see them, for all the evil

they have done, crouching among their wounded--"



He stopped, as though he had glanced at Redwood's son by chance. There

came a pause. "Go to them," he said. "That is what I want to do." "Then

go now...."



He turned and pressed the button of a bell; without, in immediate

response, came a sound of opening doors and hastening feet.



The talk was at an end. The display was over. Abruptly Caterham seemed

to contract, to shrivel up into a yellow-faced, fagged-out,

middle-sized, middle-aged man. He stepped forward, as if he were

stepping out of a picture, and with a complete assumption of that,

friendliness that lies behind all the public conflicts of our race, he

held out his hand to Redwood.



As if it were a matter of course, Redwood shook hands with him for the

second time.