Greybeard

When Martha was asleep, he rose. The mutton-fat light still burned, though he had shielded its glow from the window. He stood, letting his mind become like a landscape into which strange thoughts could wander. He felt the frost gathering outside the house, and the silence, and turned away to close his mind again. The light stood on an old chest of drawers. He opened one of the drawers at random and looked in. It contained family trinkets, a broken clock, some pencil stubs, an ink bottle empty of ink. With a feeling of wrong-doing, he pocketed the two longest bits of pencil and opened the neighbouring drawer. Two photograph albums of an old-fashioned kind lay there. On top of them was the framed picture of a child.

The child was a boy of about six, a cheerful boy whose smile showed a gap in his teeth. He was holding a model railway engine and wore long tartan trousers. The print had faded somewhat. Probably it was a boyhood photograph of the man now stacked carelessly out in the sheep shed.

Sudden tears stood in Greybeard’s eyes. Childhood itself lay in the rotting drawers of the world, a memory that could not stand permanently against time. Since that awful — accident, crime, disaster — in the last century, there were no more babies born. There were no more children, no more boys like this. Nor, by now, were there any more adolescents, no young men, no young women with their proud style, not even the middle-aged were left now. Of the seven ages of man, little but the last remained.

“The fifties group are still pretty youthful,” Greybeard told himself, bracing his shoulders. And despite all the hardships, and the ghastliness that had gone before, there were plenty of spry sixty-year-olds about. Oh, it would take a few years yet before… But the fact remained that he was one of the youngest men on earth.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Persistent rumour had it that an occasional couple was still bearing children; and in the past there had been cases… There had even been the pathetic instance of Eve, in the early days of Sparcot, who had borne a girl to Major Trouter and then disappeared. A month later, both she and her baby were found dead by a wood-gathering expedition… But apart from that, you never saw anyone young. The accident had been thorough. The old had inherited the earth.

Mortal flesh now wore only the gothic shapes of age. Death stood impatiently over the land, waiting to count his last few pilgrims.

…And from all this, I do derive a terrible pleasure, Greybeard admitted, looking down at the impaled smile in the photograph. They could tear me apart before I’d confess, but somewhere it is there, a little stoaty thing that makes of a global disaster a personal triumph. Perhaps it’s this fool attitude I’ve always taken that any experience can be of value. Perhaps it’s the reassurance to be derived from knowing that even if you live to be a hundred, you’ll never be an old fogey: you’ll always be the younger generation.

He beat out the silly thought that had grown in him so often. Yet it remained smouldering. His life had been lucky, wonderfully lucky, for all mankind’s ill luck.

Not that mankind suffered alone. All mammals were nearly as hard hit. Dogs had ceased to whelp. The fox had almost died out; its habit of rearing its young in earths had doubtless contributed to its ultimate recovery — that and the abundance of food that came its way as man’s grip on the land slackened. The domestic pig had died out even before the dogs, though perhaps as much because it was everywhere killed and eaten recklessly as because it failed to litter. The domestic cat and the horse proved as sterile as man; only its comparatively large number of offspring per litter had allowed the cat to survive. It was said to be multiplying in some districts again; pedlars visiting Sparcot spoke of plagues of feral cats here and there.

Bigger members of the cat tribe had also suffered. All over the world, the story in the early nineteen-eighties had been the same: the creatures of the world were incapable of reproduction. The earth — such was the apocalyptic nature of the event that it was easy even for an agnostic to think of it in biblical terms — the earth failed to bring forth its increase. Only the smaller creatures that sheltered in the earth itself had escaped wholly unscathed from that period when man had fallen victim of his own inventions.

Oh, it was an old tale now, and nearly half a century separated the milk teeth smiling in the photograph from the corrupt grin that let in frost out in the sheep shed.