“Indeed!” I said again.
I had had a distaste for this young man and his decisive ways at our first meeting. Further acquaintance was doing nothing to mellow it. He went on:
“This is a matter of survival. Sentiment cannot be allowed to interfere with the necessary practical measures. Now, Mrs. Masen has told me that you number eight altogether. Five adults, this girl, and two small children. All of you are sighted, except these three.” He indicated Dennis, Mary, and Joyce.
“That is so,” I admitted.
“H’m. That’s quite disproportionate, you know. There’ll have to be some changes here, I’m afraid. We have to be realistic in times like this.”
Josella’s eye caught mine. I saw a warning in it. But, in any case, I had no intention of breaking out just then. I had seen the redheaded man’s direct methods in action, and I wanted to know more of what I was up against. Apparently he realized that I would.
“I’d better put you in the picture,” he said. “Briefly, it is this. Regional H.Q. is at Brighton. London soon became too bad for us. But in Brighton we were able to clear and quarantine a part of the town, and we ran it. Brighton’s a big place. When the sickness had passed and we could get around more, there were plenty of stores to begin with. More recently we have been running in convoys from other places. But that’s folding up now. The roads are getting too bad for trucks, and they are having to go too far. It had to come, of course. We’d figured that we could last out there several years longer—still, there it is. It’s possible we undertook to look after too many from the start. Anyway, we are now having to disperse. The only way to keep going will be to live off the land. To do that, we’ve got to break up into smaller units. The standard unit has been fixed at one sighted person to ten blind, plus any children.
“You have a good place here, fully capable of supporting two units. We shall allocate to you seventeen blind persons, making twenty with the three already here—again, of course, plus any children they may have.”
I stared at him in amazement.
“You’re seriously suggesting that twenty people and their children can live off this land,” I said. “Why, it’s utterly impossible. We’ve been wondering whether we shall be able to support ourselves on it.”
He shook his head confidently.
“It is perfectly possible. And what I am offering you is the command of the double unit we shall install here. Frankly, if you do not care to take it, we shall put in someone else who will. We can’t afford waste in these times.”
“But just look at the place,” I repeated. “It simply can’t do it.”
“I assure you that it can, Mr. Masen. Of course you’ll have to lower your standards a bit—we all shall, for the next few years, but when the children grow up you’ll begin to have labor to expand with. For six or seven years it’s going to mean personal hard work for you, I admit—that can’t be helped. From then on, however, you’ll gradually be able to relax until you are simply supervising. Surely that’s going to make a good return for just a few years of the tougher going?
“Placed as you are now, what sort of future would you have? Nothing but hard work until you died in your tracks—and your children would be faced with working in the same way, just to keep going, not more than that. Where are the future leaders and administrators to come from in that kind of setup? Your way, you’d be worn out and still in harness in another twenty years—and all your children would be yokels. Our way, you’ll be the head of a clan that’s working for you, and you’ll have an inheritance to hand on to your sons.”
Comprehension began to come to me. I said wonderingly:
“Am I to understand that you are offering me a kind of—feudal seigneury?”
“Ah,” he said. “I see you do begin to understand. It is, of course, the obvious and quite natural social and economic form for that state of things we are having to face now.”