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In the Days of the Comet

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #3797 · 473,926 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: In the Days of the Comet

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: October 25, 2004 [eBook #3797]
                Most recently updated: June 5, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3797

Credits: Judy Boss


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET ***

[Illustration]




In the Days of the Comet

by H. G. Wells


“The World’s Great Age begins anew,
    The Golden Years return,
The Earth doth like a Snake renew
    Her Winter Skin outworn:
Heaven smiles, and Faiths and Empires gleam
Like Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream.”


Contents

 PROLOGUE
 THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER

 BOOK THE FIRST — THE COMET
 I. DUST IN THE SHADOWS
 II. NETTIE
 III. THE REVOLVER
 IV. WAR
 V. THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS

 BOOK THE SECOND — THE GREEN VAPORS
 I. THE CHANGE
 II. THE AWAKENING
 III. THE CABINET COUNCIL

 BOOK THE THIRD — THE NEW WORLD
 I. LOVE AFTER THE CHANGE
 II. MY MOTHER’S LAST DAYS
 III. BELTANE AND NEW YEAR’S EVE

 EPILOGUE
 THE WINDOW OF THE TOWER




PROLOGUE
THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER


I saw a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and
writing.

He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the
tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon
of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that
many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were
orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small
difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I
could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither
period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or
Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry
James’s phrase and story of “The Great Good Place,” twinkled across my
mind, and passed and left no light.

The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen, a modern touch
that prohibited any historical retrospection, and as he finished each
sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing pile
upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done sheets lay
loose, partly covering others that were clipped together into
fascicles.

Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until his
pen should come to a pause. Old as he certainly was he wrote with a
steady hand. . . .

I discovered that a concave speculum hung slantingly high over his
head; a movement in this caught my attention sharply, and I looked up
to see, distorted and made fantastic but bright and beautifully
colored, the magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a palace, of a
terrace, of the vista of a great roadway with many people, people
exaggerated, impossible-looking because of the curvature of the mirror,
going to and fro. I turned my head quickly that I might see more
clearly through the window behind me, but it was too high for me to
survey this nearer scene directly, and after a momentary pause I came
back to that distorting mirror again.

But now the writer was leaning back in his chair. He put down his pen
and sighed the half resentful sigh—“ah! you, work, you! how you gratify
and tire me!”—of a man who has been writing to his satisfaction.

“What is this place,” I asked, “and who are you?”

He looked around with the quick movement of surprise.

“What is this place?” I repeated, “and where am I?”

He regarded me steadfastly for a moment under his wrinkled brows, and
then his expression softened to a smile. He pointed to a chair beside
the table. “I am writing,” he said.

“About this?”

“About the change.”

I sat down. It was a very comfortable chair, and well placed under the
light.

“If you would like to read—” he said.

I indicated the manuscript. “This explains?” I asked.

“That explains,” he answered.

He drew a fresh sheet of paper toward him as he looked at me.

I glanced from him about his apartment and back to the little table. A
fascicle marked very distinctly “1” caught my attention, and I took it
up. I smiled in his friendly eyes. “Very well,” said I, suddenly at my
ease, and he nodded and went on writing. And in a mood between
confidence and curiosity, I began to read.

This is the story that happy, active-looking old man in that pleasant
place had written.




BOOK THE FIRST THE COMET




CHAPTER THE FIRST DUST IN THE SHADOWS


§ 1

I have set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far as it
has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people closely
connected with me, primarily to please myself.

Long ago in my crude unhappy youth, I conceived the desire of writing a
book. To scribble secretly and dream of authorship was one of my chief
alleviations, and I read with a sympathetic envy every scrap I could
get about the world of literature and the lives of literary people. It
is something, even amidst this present happiness, to find leisure and
opportunity to take up and partially realize these old and hopeless
dreams. But that alone, in a world where so much of vivid and
increasing interest presents itself to be done, even by an old man,
would not, I think, suffice to set me at this desk. I find some such
recapitulation of my past as this will involve, is becoming necessary
to my own secure mental continuity. The passage of years brings a man
at last to retrospection; at seventy-two one’s youth is far more
important than it was at forty. And I am out of touch with my youth.
The old life seems so cut off from the new, so alien and so
unreasonable, that at times I find it bordering upon the incredible.
The data have gone, the buildings and places. I stopped dead the other
afternoon in my walk across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts
of Swathinglea straggled toward Leet, and asked, “Was it here indeed
that I crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and
loaded my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my
life? Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to me?
Rather, has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland slipped a
pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?” There must be many
alive still who have the same perplexities. And I think too that those
who are now growing up to take our places in the great enterprise of
mankind, will need many such narratives as mine for even the most
partial conception of the old world of shadows that came before our
day. It chances too that my case is fairly typical of the Change; I was
caught midway in a gust of passion; and a curious accident put me for a
time in the very nucleus of the new order.

My memory takes me back across the interval of fifty years to a little
ill-lit room with a sash window open to a starry sky, and instantly
there returns to me the characteristic smell of that room, the
penetrating odor of an ill-trimmed lamp, burning cheap paraffin.
Lighting by electricity had then been perfected for fifteen years, but
still the larger portion of the world used these lamps. All this first
scene will go, in my mind at least, to that olfactory accompaniment.
That was the evening smell of the room. By day it had a more subtle
aroma, a closeness, a peculiar sort of faint pungency that I
associate—I know not why—with dust.

Let me describe this room to you in detail. It was perhaps eight feet
by seven in area and rather higher than either of these dimensions; the
ceiling was of plaster, cracked and bulging in places, gray with the
soot of the lamp, and in one place discolored by a system of yellow and
olive-green stains caused by the percolation of damp from above. The
walls were covered with dun-colored paper, upon which had been printed
in oblique reiteration a crimson shape, something of the nature of a
curly ostrich feather, or an acanthus flower, that had in its less
faded moments a sort of dingy gaiety. There were several big
plaster-rimmed wounds in this, caused by Parload’s ineffectual attempts
to get nails into the wall, whereby there might hang pictures. One nail
had hit between two bricks and got home, and from this depended,
sustained a little insecurely by frayed and knotted blind-cord,
Parload’s hanging bookshelves, planks painted over with a treacly blue
enamel and further decorated by a fringe of pinked American cloth
insecurely fixed by tacks. Below this was a little table that behaved
with a mulish vindictiveness to any knee that was thrust beneath it
suddenly; it was covered with a cloth whose pattern of red and black
had been rendered less monotonous by the accidents of Parload’s
versatile ink bottle, and on it, _leit motif_ of the whole, stood and
stank the lamp. This lamp, you must understand, was of some whitish
translucent substance that was neither china nor glass, it had a shade
of the same substance, a shade that did not protect the eyes of a
reader in any measure, and it seemed admirably adapted to bring into
pitiless prominence the fact that, after the lamp’s trimming, dust and
paraffin had been smeared over its exterior with a reckless generosity.

The uneven floor boards of this apartment were covered with scratched
enamel of chocolate hue, on which a small island of frayed carpet dimly
blossomed in the dust and shadows.

There was a very small grate, made of cast-iron in one piece and
painted buff, and a still smaller misfit of a cast-iron fender that
confessed the gray stone of the hearth. No fire was laid, only a few
scraps of torn paper and the bowl of a broken corn-cob pipe were
visible behind the bars, and in the corner and rather thrust away was
an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge. It was the custom in
those days to warm every room separately from a separate fireplace,
more prolific of dirt than heat, and the rickety sash window, the small
chimney, and the loose-fitting door were expected to organize the
ventilation of the room among themselves without any further direction.

Parload’s truckle bed hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchwork
counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlike
oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were an old
whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed the simple
appliances of his toilet.

This washhandstand had been made of deal by some one with an excess of
turnery appliances in a hurry, who had tried to distract attention from
the rough economies of his workmanship by an arresting ornamentation of
blobs and bulbs upon the joints and legs. Apparently the piece had then
been placed in the hands of some person of infinite leisure equipped
with a pot of ocherous paint, varnish, and a set of flexible combs.
This person had first painted the article, then, I fancy, smeared it
with varnish, and then sat down to work with the combs to streak and
comb the varnish into a weird imitation of the grain of some nightmare
timber. The washhandstand so made had evidently had a prolonged career
of violent use, had been chipped, kicked, splintered, punched, stained,
scorched, hammered, desiccated, damped, and defiled, had met indeed
with almost every possible adventure except a conflagration or a
scrubbing, until at last it had come to this high refuge of Parload’s
attic to sustain the simple requirements of Parload’s personal
cleanliness. There were, in chief, a basin and a jug of water and a
slop-pail of tin, and, further, a piece of yellow soap in a tray, a
tooth-brush, a rat-tailed shaving brush, one huckaback towel, and one
or two other minor articles. In those days only very prosperous people
had more than such an equipage, and it is to be remarked that every
drop of water Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servant
girl,—the “slavey,” Parload called her—up from the basement to the top
of the house and subsequently down again. Already we begin to forget
how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a fact that
Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never had a
simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. Not one in
fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you.

A chest, also singularly grained and streaked, of two large and two
small drawers, held Parload’s reserve of garments, and pegs on the door
carried his two hats and completed this inventory of a
“bed-sitting-room” as I knew it before the Change. But I had
forgotten—there was also a chair with a “squab” that apologized
inadequately for the defects of its cane seat. I forgot that for the
moment because I was sitting on the chair on the occasion that best
begins this story.

I have described Parload’s room with such particularity because it will
help you to understand the key in which my earlier chapters are
written, but you must not imagine that this singular equipment or the
smell of the lamp engaged my attention at that time to the slightest
degree. I took all this grimy unpleasantness as if it were the most
natural and proper setting for existence imaginable. It was the world
as I knew it. My mind was entirely occupied then by graver and intenser
matters, and it is only now in the distant retrospect that I see these
details of environment as being remarkable, as significant, as indeed
obviously the outward visible manifestations of the old world disorder
in our hearts.

§ 2

Parload stood at the open window, opera-glass in hand, and sought and
found and was uncertain about and lost again, the new comet.

I thought the comet no more than a nuisance then because I wanted to
talk of other matters. But Parload was full of it. My head was hot, I
was feverish with interlacing annoyances and bitterness, I wanted to
open my heart to him—at least I wanted to relieve my heart by some
romantic rendering of my troubles—and I gave but little heed to the
things he told me. It was the first time I had heard of this new speck
among the countless specks of heaven, and I did not care if I never
heard of the thing again.

We were two youths much of an age together, Parload was two and twenty,
and eight months older than I. He was—I think his proper definition was
“engrossing clerk” to a little solicitor in Overcastle, while I was
third in the office staff of Rawdon’s pot-bank in Clayton. We had met
first in the “Parliament” of the Young Men’s Christian Association of
Swathinglea; we had found we attended simultaneous classes in
Overcastle, he in science and I in shorthand, and had started a
practice of walking home together, and so our friendship came into
being. (Swathinglea, Clayton, and Overcastle were contiguous towns, I
should mention, in the great industrial area of the Midlands.) We had
shared each other’s secret of religious doubt, we had confided to one
another a common interest in Socialism, he had come twice to supper at
my mother’s on a Sunday night, and I was free of his apartment. He was
then a tall, flaxen-haired, gawky youth, with a disproportionate
development of neck and wrist, and capable of vast enthusiasm; he gave
two evenings a week to the evening classes of the organized science
school in Overcastle, physiography was his favorite “subject,” and
through this insidious opening of his mind the wonder of outer space
had come to take possession of his soul. He had commandeered an old
opera-glass from his uncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had
bought a cheap paper planisphere and _Whitaker’s Almanac_, and for a
time day and moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one
satisfactory reality in his life—star-gazing. It was the deeps that had
seized him, the immensities, and the mysterious possibilities that
might float unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor and the
help of a very precise article in _The Heavens_, a little monthly
magazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, he had
at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our system from
outer space. He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quivering little
smudge of light among the shining pin-points—and gazed. My troubles had
to wait for him.

“Wonderful,” he sighed, and then as though his first emphasis did not
satisfy him, “wonderful!”

He turned to me. “Wouldn’t you like to see?”

I had to look, and then I had to listen, how that this scarce-visible
intruder was to be, was presently to be, one of the largest comets this
world has ever seen, how that its course must bring it within at
most—so many score of millions of miles from the earth, a mere step,
Parload seemed to think that; how that the spectroscope was already
sounding its chemical secrets, perplexed by the unprecedented band in
the green, how it was even now being photographed in the very act of
unwinding—in an unusual direction—a sunward tail (which presently it
wound up again), and all the while in a sort of undertow I was thinking
first of Nettie Stuart and the letter she had just written me, and then
of old Rawdon’s detestable face as I had seen it that afternoon. Now I
planned answers to Nettie and now belated repartees to my employer, and
then again “Nettie” was blazing all across the background of my
thoughts. . . .

Nettie Stuart was daughter of the head gardener of the rich Mr.
Verrall’s widow, and she and I had kissed and become sweethearts before
we were eighteen years old. My mother and hers were second cousins and
old schoolfellows, and though my mother had been widowed untimely by a
train accident, and had been reduced to letting lodgings (she was the
Clayton curate’s landlady), a position esteemed much lower than that of
Mrs. Stuart, a kindly custom of occasional visits to the gardener’s
cottage at Checkshill Towers still kept the friends in touch. Commonly
I went with her. And I remember it was in the dusk of one bright
evening in July, one of those long golden evenings that do not so much
give way to night as admit at last, upon courtesy, the moon and a
choice retinue of stars, that Nettie and I, at the pond of goldfish
where the yew-bordered walks converged, made our shy beginners’ vow. I
remember still—something will always stir in me at that memory—the
tremulous emotion of that adventure. Nettie was dressed in white, her
hair went off in waves of soft darkness from above her dark shining
eyes; there was a little necklace of pearls about her sweetly modeled
neck, and a little coin of gold that nestled in her throat. I kissed
her half-reluctant lips, and for three years of my life thereafter—nay!
I almost think for all the rest of her life and mine—I could have died
for her sake.

You must understand—and every year it becomes increasingly difficult to
understand—how entirely different the world was then from what it is
now. It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder,
preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid
unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the
general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent beauty
that seem no longer possible in my experience. The great Change has
come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is
peace on earth and good will to all men. None would dare to dream of
returning to the sorrows of the former time, and yet that misery was
pierced, ever and again its gray curtain was stabbed through and
through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions of a keenness that it
seems to me are now altogether gone out of life. Is it the Change, I
wonder, that has robbed life of its extremes, or is it perhaps only
this, that youth has left me—even the strength of middle years leaves
me now—and taken its despairs and raptures, leaving me judgment,
perhaps, sympathy, memories?

I cannot tell. One would need to be young now and to have been young
then as well, to decide that impossible problem.

Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found little
beauty in our grouping. I have our two photographs at hand in this
bureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fitting
ready-made clothing, and Nettie—Indeed Nettie is badly dressed, and her
attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see her through the
picture, and her living brightness and something of that mystery of
charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind. Her face has
triumphed over the photographer—or I would long ago have cast this
picture away.

The reality of beauty yields itself to no words. I wish that I had the
sister art and could draw in my margin something that escapes
description. There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There was
something, a matter of the minutest difference, about her upper lip so
that her mouth closed sweetly and broke very sweetly to a smile. That
grave, sweet smile!

After we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents for awhile of
the irrevocable choice we had made, the time came for us to part, shyly
and before others, and I and my mother went off back across the moonlit
park—the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer—to the railway
station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement in Clayton, and I
saw no more of Nettie—except that I saw her in my thoughts—for nearly a
year. But at our next meeting it was decided that we must correspond,
and this we did with much elaboration of secrecy, for Nettie would have
no one at home, not even her only sister, know of her attachment. So I
had to send my precious documents sealed and under cover by way of a
confidential schoolfellow of hers who lived near London. . . . I could
write that address down now, though house and street and suburb have
gone beyond any man’s tracing.

Our correspondence began our estrangement, because for the first time
we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds sought
expression.

Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was in
the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate
formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary
contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and
subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man’s lips. I
was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrow faith in
certain religious formulae, certain rules of conduct, certain
conceptions of social and political order, that had no more relevance
to the realities and needs of everyday contemporary life than if they
were clean linen that had been put away with lavender in a drawer.
Indeed, her religion did actually smell of lavender; on Sundays she put
away all the things of reality, the garments and even the furnishings
of everyday, hid her hands, that were gnarled and sometimes chapped
with scrubbing, in black, carefully mended gloves, assumed her old
black silk dress and bonnet and took me, unnaturally clean and sweet
also, to church. There we sang and bowed and heard sonorous prayers and
joined in sonorous responses, and rose with a congregational sigh
refreshed and relieved when the doxology, with its opening “Now to God
the Father, God the Son,” bowed out the tame, brief sermon. There was a
hell in that religion of my mother’s, a red-haired hell of curly flames
that had once been very terrible; there was a devil, who was also _ex
officio_ the British King’s enemy, and much denunciation of the wicked
lusts of the flesh; we were expected to believe that most of our poor
unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here by suffering
exquisite torments for ever after, world without end, Amen. But indeed
those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had been
mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long before my time; if it
had much terror even in my childhood I have forgotten it, it was not so
terrible as the giant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it all
now as a setting for my poor old mother’s worn and grimy face, and
almost lovingly as a part of her. And Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little
lodger, strangely transformed in his vestments and lifting his voice
manfully to the quality of those Elizabethan prayers, seemed, I think,
to give her a special and peculiar interest with God. She radiated her
own tremulous gentleness upon Him, and redeemed Him from all the
implications of vindictive theologians; she was in truth, had I but
perceived it, the effectual answer to all she would have taught me.

So I see it now, but there is something harsh in the earnest intensity
of youth, and having at first taken all these things quite seriously,
the fiery hell and God’s vindictiveness at any neglect, as though they
were as much a matter of fact as Bladden’s iron-works and Rawdon’s
pot-bank, I presently with an equal seriousness flung them out of my
mind again.

Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, “take notice”
of me, he had induced me to go on reading after I left school, and with
the best intentions in the world and to anticipate the poison of the
times, he had lent me Burble’s “Scepticism Answered,” and drawn my
attention to the library of the Institute in Clayton.

The excellent Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear from his
answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all
that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had hitherto
accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor one, and to
hammer home that idea the first book I got from the Institute happened
to be an American edition of the collected works of Shelley, his gassy
prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was soon ripe for blatant
unbelief. And at the Young Men’s Christian Association I presently made
the acquaintance of Parload, who told me, under promises of the most
sinister secrecy, that he was “a Socialist out and out.” He lent me
several copies of a periodical with the clamant title of _The Clarion_,
which was just taking up a crusade against the accepted religion. The
adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will
always lie healthily open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of
scorns and new ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase
badly. Doubt, I say, but it was not so much doubt—which is a complex
thing—as startled emphatic denial. “Have I believed _this!_” And I was
also, you must remember, just beginning love-letters to Nettie.

We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most
things accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a
sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from
our vigor, and it is hard to understand the stifled and struggling
manner in which my generation of common young men did its thinking. To
think at all about certain questions was an act of rebellion that set
one oscillating between the furtive and the defiant. People begin to
find Shelley—for all his melody—noisy and ill conditioned now because
his Anarchs have vanished, yet there was a time when novel thought HAD
to go to that tune of breaking glass. It becomes a little difficult to
imagine the yeasty state of mind, the disposition to shout and say,
“Yah!” at constituted authority, to sustain a persistent note of
provocation such as we raw youngsters displayed. I began to read with
avidity such writing as Carlyle, Browning, and Heine have left for the
perplexity of posterity, and not only to read and admire but to
imitate. My letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended
displays of perfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology,
and the cosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they
puzzled her extremely.

I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to envy
for my own departed youth, but I should find it difficult to maintain
my case against any one who would condemn me altogether as having been
a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy indeed and quite like my
faded photograph. And when I try to recall what exactly must have been
the quality and tenor of my more sustained efforts to write memorably
to my sweetheart, I confess I shiver. . . Yet I wish they were not all
destroyed.

Her letters to me were simple enough, written in a roundish, unformed
hand and badly phrased. Her first two or three showed a shy pleasure in
the use of the word “dear,” and I remember being first puzzled and
then, when I understood, delighted, because she had written “Willie
_asthore_” under my name. “Asthore,” I gathered, meant “darling.” But
when the evidences of my fermentation began, her answers were less
happy.

I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled in our silly
youthful way, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited, to
Checkshill, and made it worse, and how afterward I wrote a letter that
she thought was “lovely,” and mended the matter. Nor will I tell of all
our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding. Always I was the
offender and the final penitent until this last trouble that was now
beginning; and in between we had some tender near moments, and I loved
her very greatly. There was this misfortune in the business, that in
the darkness, and alone, I thought with great intensity of her, of her
eyes, of her touch, of her sweet and delightful presence, but when I
sat down to write I thought of Shelley and Burns and myself, and other
such irrelevant matters. When one is in love, in this fermenting way,
it is harder to make love than it is when one does not love at all. And
as for Nettie, she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries. It
was not my voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . . So our letters
continued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether she
could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not believe in
Church, and then hard upon it came another note with unexpected
novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suited to each other, we
differed so in tastes and ideas, she had long thought of releasing me
from our engagement. In fact, though I really did not apprehend it
fully at the first shock, I was dismissed. Her letter had reached me
when I came home after old Rawdon’s none too civil refusal to raise my
wages. On this particular evening of which I write, therefore, I was in
a state of feverish adjustment to two new and amazing, two nearly
overwhelming facts, that I was neither indispensable to Nettie nor at
Rawdon’s. And to talk of comets!

Where did I stand?

I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably mine—the
whole tradition of “true love” pointed me to that—that for her to face
about with these precise small phrases toward abandonment, after we had
kissed and whispered and come so close in the little adventurous
familiarities of the young, shocked me profoundly. I! I! And Rawdon
didn’t find me indispensable either. I felt I was suddenly repudiated
by the universe and threatened with effacement, that in some positive
and emphatic way I must at once assert myself. There was no balm in the
religion I had learnt, or in the irreligion I had adopted, for wounded
self-love.

Should I fling up Rawdon’s place at once and then in some
extraordinary, swift manner make the fortune of Frobisher’s adjacent
and closely competitive pot-bank?

The first part of that program, at any rate, would be easy of
accomplishment, to go to Rawdon and say, “You will hear from me again,”
but for the rest, Frobisher might fail me. That, however, was a
secondary issue. The predominant affair was with Nettie. I found my
mind thick-shot with flying fragments of rhetoric that might be of
service in the letter I would write her. Scorn, irony, tenderness—what
was it to be?

“Brother!” said Parload, suddenly.

“What?” said I.

“They’re firing up at Bladden’s iron-works, and the smoke comes right
across my bit of sky.”

The interruption came just as I was ripe to discharge my thoughts upon
him.

“Parload,” said I, “very likely I shall have to leave all this. Old
Rawdon won’t give me a rise in my wages, and after having asked I don’t
think I can stand going on upon the old terms anymore. See? So I may
have to clear out of Clayton for good and all.”

§ 3

That made Parload put down the opera-glass and look at me.

“It’s a bad time to change just now,” he said after a little pause.

Rawdon had said as much, in a less agreeable tone.

But with Parload I felt always a disposition to the heroic note. “I’m
tired,” I said, “of humdrum drudgery for other men. One may as well
starve one’s body out of a place as to starve one’s soul in one.”

“I don’t know about that altogether,” began Parload, slowly. . . .

And with that we began one of our interminable conversations, one of
those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal talks
that will be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths until the world
comes to an end. The Change has not abolished that, anyhow.

It would be an incredible feat of memory for me now to recall all that
meandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it, though
its circumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clear picture in
my mind. I posed after my manner and behaved very foolishly no doubt, a
wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his part of the
philosopher preoccupied with the deeps.

We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer’s night and
talking all the more freely for that. But one thing that I said I can
remember. “I wish at times,” said I, with a gesture at the heavens,
“that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this
world—and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults, loves, jealousies,
and all the wretchedness of life!”

“Ah!” said Parload, and the thought seemed to hang about him.

“It could only add to the miseries of life,” he said irrelevantly, when
presently I was discoursing of other things.

“What would?”

“Collision with a comet. It would only throw things back. It would only
make what was left of life more savage than it is at present.”

“But why should _anything_ be left of life?” said I. . . .

That was our style, you know, and meanwhile we walked together up the
narrow street outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanes toward
Clayton Crest and the high road.

But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days before the
Change that I forget that now all these places have been altered beyond
recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway and the view from
Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world in which I was born and bred
and made, has vanished clean away, out of space and out of time, and
wellnigh out of the imagination of all those who are younger by a
generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see, the dark empty way
between the mean houses, the dark empty way lit by a bleary gas-lamp at
the corner, you cannot feel the hard checkered pavement under your
boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit windows here and there, and the
shadows upon the ugly and often patched and crooked blinds of the
people cooped within. Nor can you presently pass the beerhouse with its
brighter gas and its queer, screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul
air and foul language from its door, nor see the crumpled furtive
figure—some rascal child—that slinks past us down the steps.

We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting
smoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one saw the
greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares of hawkers’
barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement of people swayed
along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerant preacher from a
waste place between the houses. You cannot see these things as I can
see them, nor can you figure—unless you know the pictures that great
artist Hyde has left the world—the effect of the great hoarding by
which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp and towering up to a sudden
sharp black edge against the pallid sky.

Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in all that
vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and paper, all
the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromatic discord; pill
vendors and preachers, theaters and charities, marvelous soaps and
astonishing pickles, typewriting machines and sewing machines, mingled
in a sort of visualized clamor. And passing that there was a muddy lane
of cinders, a lane without a light, that used its many puddles to
borrow a star or so from the sky. We splashed along unheeding as we
talked.

Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-looking
sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road. The
high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse or so,
and round until all the valley in which four industrial towns lay
crowded and confluent was overlooked.

I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird
magnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The
horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were
homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of
unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave and
wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where the iron
ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the blast furnaces
were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust from foundry,
pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated by the night. The
dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression through the day became
at sundown a mystery of deep translucent colors, of blues and purples,
of somber and vivid reds, of strange bright clearnesses of green and
yellow athwart the darkling sky. Each upstart furnace, when its monarch
sun had gone, crowned itself with flames, the dark cinder heaps began
to glow with quivering fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in
a volcanic coronet of light. The empire of the day broke into a
thousand feudal baronies of burning coal. The minor streets across the
valley picked themselves out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that
brightened and mingled at all the principal squares and crossings with
the greenish pallor of incandescent mantles and the high cold glare of
the electric arc. The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes
over their intersections, and signal stars of red and green in
rectangular constellations. The trains became articulated black
serpents breathing fire.

Moreover, high overhead, like a thing put out of reach and near
forgotten, Parload had rediscovered a realm that was ruled by neither
sun nor furnace, the universe of stars.

This was the scene of many a talk we two had held together. And if in
the daytime we went right over the crest and looked westward there was
farmland, there were parks and great mansions, the spire of a distant
cathedral, and sometimes when the weather was near raining, the crests
of remote mountains hung clearly in the sky. Beyond the range of sight
indeed, out beyond, there was Checkshill; I felt it there always, and
in the darkness more than I did by day. Checkshill, and Nettie!

And to us two youngsters as we walked along the cinder path beside the
rutted road and argued out our perplexities, it seemed that this ridge
gave us compendiously a view of our whole world.

There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factories
and work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, ill
nourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasion
in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from day to
day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidst
their wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption, and
on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heeding the few
cottages, as overcrowded as they were picturesque, in which the
laborers festered, lived the landlords and masters who owned pot-banks
and forge and farm and mine. Far away, distant, beautiful, irrelevant,
from out of a little cluster of secondhand bookshops, ecclesiastical
residences, and the inns and incidentals of a decaying market town, the
cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful, unemphatic spire to vague
incredible skies. So it seemed to us that the whole world was planned
in those youthful first impressions.

We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry,
confident solutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of
the robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there
in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with his
scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others were all
the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt they winked and
chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling, wickedly dressed
women, and plotted further grinding for the faces of the poor. And
amidst all the squalor on the other hand, amidst brutalities,
ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously their blameless
victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at the first glance, had found
all this out, it had merely to be asserted now with sufficient rhetoric
and vehemence to change the face of the whole world. The Working Man
would arise—in the form of a Labor Party, and with young men like
Parload and myself to represent him—and come to his own, and then———?

Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremely
satisfactory.

Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injustice to the
creed of thought and action that Parload and I held as the final result
of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejected with heat the
most obvious qualification of its harshness. At times in our great
talks we were full of heady hopes for the near triumph of our doctrine,
more often our mood was hot resentment at the wickedness and stupidity
that delayed so plain and simple a reconstruction of the order of the
world. Then we grew malignant, and thought of barricades and
significant violence. I was very bitter, I know, upon this night of
which I am now particularly telling, and the only face upon the hydra
of Capitalism and Monopoly that I could see at all clearly, smiled
exactly as old Rawdon had smiled when he refused to give me more than a
paltry twenty shillings a week.

I wanted intensely to salve my self-respect by some revenge upon him,
and I felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, I might
drag its carcass to the feet of Nettie, and settle my other trouble as
well. “What do you think of me _now_, Nettie?”

That at any rate comes near enough to the quality of my thinking, then,
for you to imagine how I gesticulated and spouted to Parload that
night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing in the
outline, set in the midst of that desolating night of flaming
industrialism, and my little voice with a rhetorical twang protesting,
denouncing. . . .

You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent stuff;
particularly if you are of the younger generation born since the Change
you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world thinks clearly,
thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, you find it impossible
to imagine how any other thinking could have been possible. Let me tell
you then how you can bring yourself to something like the condition of
our former state. In the first place you must get yourself out of
health by unwise drinking and eating, and out of condition by
neglecting your exercise, then you must contrive to be worried very
much and made very anxious and uncomfortable, and then you must work
very hard for four or five days and for long hours every day at
something too petty to be interesting, too complex to be mechanical,
and without any personal significance to you whatever. This done, get
straightway into a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is
already full of foul air, and there set yourself to think out some very
complicated problem. In a very little while you will find yourself in a
state of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the
obvious presently in choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try
to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly and lose
your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper and you
will fail.

Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as
that, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that
would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it was
in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing; there
was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There was nothing in
the mind of the world anywhere but half-truths, hasty assumptions,
hallucinations, and emotions. Nothing. . . .

I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men are
beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has undergone,
but read—read the newspapers of that time. Every age becomes mitigated
and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes into the past. It is
the part of those who like myself have stories of that time to tell, to
supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism, some antidote to that
glamour.

§ 4

Always with Parload I was chief talker.

I can look back upon myself with, I believe, an almost perfect
detachment, things have so changed that indeed now I am another being,
with scarce anything in common with that boastful foolish youngster
whose troubles I recall. I see him vulgarly theatrical, egotistical,
insincere, indeed I do not like him save with that instinctive material
sympathy that is the fruit of incessant intimacy. Because he was myself
I may be able to feel and write understandingly about motives that will
put him out of sympathy with nearly every reader, but why should I
palliate or defend his quality?

Always, I say, I did the talking, and it would have amazed me beyond
measure if any one had told me that mine was not the greater
intelligence in these wordy encounters. Parload was a quiet youth, and
stiff and restrained in all things, while I had that supreme gift for
young men and democracies, the gift of copious expression. Parload I
diagnosed in my secret heart as a trifle dull; he posed as pregnant
quiet, I thought, and was obsessed by the congenial notion of
“scientific caution.” I did not remark that while my hands were chiefly
useful for gesticulation or holding a pen Parload’s hands could do all
sorts of things, and I did not think therefore that fibers must run
from those fingers to something in his brain. Nor, though I bragged
perpetually of my shorthand, of my literature, of my indispensable
share in Rawdon’s business, did Parload lay stress on the conics and
calculus he “mugged” in the organized science school. Parload is a
famous man now, a great figure in a great time, his work upon
intersecting radiations has broadened the intellectual horizon of
mankind for ever, and I, who am at best a hewer of intellectual wood, a
drawer of living water, can smile, and he can smile, to think how I
patronized and posed and jabbered over him in the darkness of those
early days.

That night I was shrill and eloquent beyond measure. Rawdon was, of
course, the hub upon which I went round—Rawdon and the Rawdonesque
employer and the injustice of “wages slavery” and all the immediate
conditions of that industrial blind alley up which it seemed our lives
were thrust. But ever and again I glanced at other things. Nettie was
always there in the background of my mind, regarding me enigmatically.
It was part of my pose to Parload that I had a romantic love-affair
somewhere away beyond the sphere of our intercourse, and that note gave
a Byronic resonance to many of the nonsensical things I produced for
his astonishment.

I will not weary you with too detailed an account of the talk of a
foolish youth who was also distressed and unhappy, and whose voice was
balm for the humiliations that smarted in his eyes. Indeed, now in many
particulars I cannot disentangle this harangue of which I tell from
many of the things I may have said in other talks to Parload. For
example, I forget if it was then or before or afterwards that, as it
were by accident, I let out what might be taken as an admission that I
was addicted to drugs.

“You shouldn’t do that,” said Parload, suddenly. “It won’t do to poison
your brains with that.”

My brains, my eloquence, were to be very important assets to our party
in the coming revolution. . . .

But one thing does clearly belong to this particular conversation I am
recalling. When I started out it was quite settled in the back of my
mind that I must not leave Rawdon’s. I simply wanted to abuse my
employer to Parload. But I talked myself quite out of touch with all
the cogent reasons there were for sticking to my place, and I got home
that night irrevocably committed to a spirited—not to say a
defiant—policy with my employer.

“I can’t stand Rawdon’s much longer,” I said to Parload by way of a
flourish.

“There’s hard times coming,” said Parload.

“Next winter.”

“Sooner. The Americans have been overproducing, and they mean to dump.
The iron trade is going to have convulsions.”

“I don’t care. Pot-banks are steady.”

“With a corner in borax? No. I’ve heard—”

“What have you heard?”

“Office secrets. But it’s no secret there’s trouble coming to potters.
There’s been borrowing and speculation. The masters don’t stick to one
business as they used to do. I can tell that much. Half the valley may
be ‘playing’ before two months are out.” Parload delivered himself of
this unusually long speech in his most pithy and weighty manner.

“Playing” was our local euphemism for a time when there was no work and
no money for a man, a time of stagnation and dreary hungry loafing day
after day. Such interludes seemed in those days a necessary consequence
of industrial organization.

“You’d better stick to Rawdon’s,” said Parload.

“Ugh,” said I, affecting a noble disgust.

“There’ll be trouble,” said Parload.

“Who cares?” said I. “Let there be trouble—the more the better. This
system has got to end, sooner or later. These capitalists with their
speculation and corners and trusts make things go from bad to worse.
Why should I cower in Rawdon’s office, like a frightened dog, while
hunger walks the streets? Hunger is the master revolutionary. When he
comes we ought to turn out and salute him. Anyway, _I’m_ going to do so
now.”

“That’s all very well,” began Parload.

“I’m tired of it,” I said. “I want to come to grips with all these
Rawdons. I think perhaps if I was hungry and savage I could talk to
hungry men—”

“There’s your mother,” said Parload, in his slow judicial way.

That _was_ a difficulty.

I got over it by a rhetorical turn. “Why should one sacrifice the
future of the world—why should one even sacrifice one’s own
future—because one’s mother is totally destitute of imagination?”

§ 5

It was late when I parted from Parload and came back to my own home.

Our house stood in a highly respectable little square near the Clayton
parish church. Mr. Gabbitas, the curate of all work, lodged on our
ground floor, and upstairs there was an old lady, Miss Holroyd, who
painted flowers on china and maintained her blind sister in an adjacent
room; my mother and I lived in the basement and slept in the attics.
The front of the house was veiled by a Virginian creeper that defied
the Clayton air and clustered in untidy dependent masses over the
wooden porch.

As I came up the steps I had a glimpse of Mr. Gabbitas printing
photographs by candle light in his room. It was the chief delight of
his little life to spend his holiday abroad in the company of a queer
little snap-shot camera, and to return with a great multitude of foggy
and sinister negatives that he had made in beautiful and interesting
places. These the camera company would develop for him on advantageous
terms, and he would spend his evenings the year through in printing
from them in order to inflict copies upon his undeserving friends.
There was a long frameful of his work in the Clayton National School,
for example, inscribed in old English lettering, “Italian Travel
Pictures, by the Rev. E. B. Gabbitas.” For this it seemed he lived and
traveled and had his being. It was his only real joy. By his shaded
light I could see his sharp little nose, his little pale eyes behind
his glasses, his mouth pursed up with the endeavor of his employment.

“Hireling Liar,” I muttered, for was not he also part of the system,
part of the scheme of robbery that made wages serfs of Parload and
me?—though his share in the proceedings was certainly small.

“Hireling Liar,” said I, standing in the darkness, outside even his
faint glow of traveled culture. . .

My mother let me in.

She looked at me, mutely, because she knew there was something wrong
and that it was no use for her to ask what.

“Good night, mummy,” said I, and kissed her a little roughly, and lit
and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase to bed, not
looking back at her.

“I’ve kept some supper for you, dear.”

“Don’t want any supper.”

“But, dearie———”

“Good night, mother,” and I went up and slammed my door upon her, blew
out my candle, and lay down at once upon my bed, lay there a long time
before I got up to undress.

There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother’s face
irritated me unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had to
struggle against it, that I could not exist if I gave way to its
pleadings, and it hurt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyond
endurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myself
religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questions of
expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me at
all—and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion, her
only social ideas were blind submissions to the accepted order—to laws,
to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all respectable persons
in authority over us, and with her to believe was to fear. She knew
from a thousand little signs—though still at times I went to church
with her—that I was passing out of touch of all these things that ruled
her life, into some terrible unknown. From things I said she could
infer such clumsy concealments as I made. She felt my socialism, felt
my spirit in revolt against the accepted order, felt the impotent
resentments that filled me with bitterness against all she held sacred.
Yet, you know, it was not her dear gods she sought to defend so much as
me! She seemed always to be wanting to say to me, “Dear, I know it’s
hard—but revolt is harder. Don’t make war on it, dear—don’t! Don’t do
anything to offend it. I’m sure it will hurt you if you do—it will hurt
you if you do.”

She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time had
been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing order
dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It had bent her,
aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-five she peered
through cheap spectacles at my face, and saw it only dimly, filled her
with a habit of anxiety, made her hands——— Her poor dear hands! Not in
the whole world now could you find a woman with hands so grimy, so
needle-worn, so misshapen by toil, so chapped and coarsened, so evilly
entreated. . . . At any rate, there is this I can say for myself, that
my bitterness against the world and fortune was for her sake as well as
for my own.

Yet that night I pushed by her harshly. I answered her curtly, left her
concerned and perplexed in the passage, and slammed my door upon her.

And for a long time I lay raging at the hardship and evil of life, at
the contempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie’s letter,
at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I found intolerable,
and the things I could not mend. Over and over went my poor little
brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmill of troubles.
Nettie. Rawdon. My mother. Gabbitas. Nettie. . .

Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion. Some clock was striking
midnight. After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions. I
remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very quickly
in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again before I was
asleep.

But how my mother slept that night I do not know.

Oddly enough, I do not blame myself for behaving like this to my
mother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to
Parload. I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of the
Change, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a little
painful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something of the
sort was to be escaped under those former conditions. In that time of
muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and toil and hot
passions before they had the chance of even a year or so of clear
thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous application to
some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of thought ceased in
them. They set and hardened into narrow ways. Few women remained
capable of a new idea after five and twenty, few men after thirty-one
or two. Discontent with the thing that existed was regarded as immoral,
it was certainly an annoyance, and the only protest against it, the
only effort against that universal tendency in all human institutions
to thicken and clog, to work loosely and badly, to rust and weaken
towards catastrophes, came from the young—the crude unmerciful young.
It seemed in those days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being—that
either we must submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them,
disobey them, thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress
before we too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.

My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own silent
meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard
relationship between parents and son in those days. There appeared no
other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed, part of
the very nature of the progress of the world. We did not think then
that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, or children honor
their parents and still think for themselves. We were angry and hasty
because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisoned and vitiated air.
That deliberate animation of the intelligence which is now the
universal quality, that vigor with consideration, that judgment with
confident enterprise which shine through all our world, were things
disintegrated and unknown in the corrupting atmosphere of our former
state.

(So the first fascicle ended. I put it aside and looked for the second.

“Well?” said the man who wrote.

“This is fiction?”

“It’s my story.”

“But you— Amidst this beauty— You are not this ill-conditioned,
squalidly bred lad of whom I have been reading?”

He smiled. “There intervenes a certain Change,” he said. “Have I not
hinted at that?”

I hesitated upon a question, then saw the second fascicle at hand, and
picked it up.)




CHAPTER THE SECOND
NETTIE


§ 1

I cannot now remember (_the story resumed_), what interval separated
that evening on which Parload first showed me the comet—I think I only
pretended to see it then—and the Sunday afternoon I spent at
Checkshill.

Between the two there was time enough for me to give notice and leave
Rawdon’s, to seek for some other situation very strenuously in vain, to
think and say many hard and violent things to my mother and to Parload,
and to pass through some phases of very profound wretchedness. There
must have been a passionate correspondence with Nettie, but all the
froth and fury of that has faded now out of my memory. All I have clear
now is that I wrote one magnificent farewell to her, casting her off
forever, and that I got in reply a prim little note to say, that even
if there was to be an end to everything, that was no excuse for writing
such things as I had done, and then I think I wrote again in a vein I
considered satirical. To that she did not reply. That interval was at
least three weeks, and probably four, because the comet which had been
on the first occasion only a dubious speck in the sky, certainly
visible only when it was magnified, was now a great white presence,
brighter than Jupiter, and casting a shadow on its own account. It was
now actively present in the world of human thought, every one was
talking about it, every one was looking for its waxing splendor as the
sun went down—the papers, the music-halls, the hoardings, echoed it.

Yes; the comet was already dominant before I went over to make
everything clear to Nettie. And Parload had spent two hoarded pounds in
buying himself a spectroscope, so that he could see for himself, night
after night, that mysterious, that stimulating line—the unknown line in
the green. How many times I wonder did I look at the smudgy, quivering
symbol of the unknown things that were rushing upon us out of the
inhuman void, before I rebelled? But at last I could stand it no
longer, and I reproached Parload very bitterly for wasting his time in
“astronomical dilettantism.”

“Here,” said I. “We’re on the verge of the biggest lock-out in the
history of this countryside; here’s distress and hunger coming, here’s
all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed, and you
spend your time gaping at that damned silly streak of nothing in the
sky!”

Parload stared at me. “Yes, I do,” he said slowly, as though it was a
new idea. “Don’t I? . . . I wonder why.”

“_I_ want to start meetings of an evening on Howden’s Waste.”

“You think they’d listen?”

“They’d listen fast enough now.”

“They didn’t before,” said Parload, looking at his pet instrument.

“There was a demonstration of unemployed at Swathinglea on Sunday. They
got to stone throwing.”

Parload said nothing for a little while and I said several things. He
seemed to be considering something.

“But, after all,” he said at last, with an awkward movement towards his
spectroscope, “that does signify something.”

“The comet?”

“Yes.”

“What can it signify? You don’t want me to believe in astrology. What
does it matter what flames in the heavens—when men are starving on
earth?”

“It’s—it’s science.”

“Science! What we want now is socialism—not science.”

He still seemed reluctant to give up his comet.

“Socialism’s all right,” he said, “but if that thing up there _was_ to
hit the earth it might matter.”

“Nothing matters but human beings.”

“Suppose it killed them all.”

“Oh,” said I, “that’s Rot,”

“I wonder,” said Parload, dreadfully divided in his allegiance.

He looked at the comet. He seemed on the verge of repeating his growing
information about the nearness of the paths of the earth and comet, and
all that might ensue from that. So I cut in with something I had got
out of a now forgotten writer called Ruskin, a volcano of beautiful
language and nonsensical suggestions, who prevailed very greatly with
eloquent excitable young men in those days. Something it was about the
insignificance of science and the supreme importance of Life. Parload
stood listening, half turned towards the sky with the tips of his
fingers on his spectroscope. He seemed to come to a sudden decision.

“No. I don’t agree with you, Leadford,” he said. “You don’t understand
about science.”

Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition. I was so used
to entire possession of our talk that his brief contradiction struck me
like a blow. “Don’t agree with me!” I repeated.

“No,” said Parload

“But how?”

“I believe science is of more importance than socialism,” he said.
“Socialism’s a theory. Science—science is something more.”

And that was really all he seemed to be able to say.

We embarked upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young men used
always to find so heating. Science or Socialism? It was, of course,
like arguing which is right, left handedness or a taste for onions, it
was altogether impossible opposition. But the range of my rhetoric
enabled me at last to exasperate Parload, and his mere repudiation of
my conclusions sufficed to exasperate me, and we ended in the key of a
positive quarrel. “Oh, very well!” said I. “So long as I know where we
are!”

I slammed his door as though I dynamited his house, and went raging
down the street, but I felt that he was already back at the window
worshiping his blessed line in the green, before I got round the
corner.

I had to walk for an hour or so, before I was cool enough to go home.

And it was Parload who had first introduced me to socialism!

Recreant!

The most extraordinary things used to run through my head in those
days. I will confess that my mind ran persistently that evening upon
revolutions after the best French pattern, and I sat on a Committee of
Safety and tried backsliders. Parload was there, among the prisoners,
backsliderissimus, aware too late of the error of his ways. His hands
were tied behind his back ready for the shambles; through the open door
one heard the voice of justice, the rude justice of the people. I was
sorry, but I had to do my duty.

“If we punish those who would betray us to Kings,” said I, with a
sorrowful deliberation, “how much the more must we punish those who
would give over the State to the pursuit of useless knowledge”; and so
with a gloomy satisfaction sent him off to the guillotine.

“Ah, Parload! Parload! If only you’d listened to me earlier, Parload. .
. .”

None the less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy. Parload was my
only gossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and think evil
of him with no one to listen to me, evening after evening.

That was a very miserable time for me, even before my last visit to
Checkshill. My long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands. I kept
away from home all day, partly to support a fiction that I was
sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escape the
persistent question in my mother’s eyes. “Why did you quarrel with Mr.
Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keep on going about with a sullen face
and risk offending IT more?” I spent most of the morning in the
newspaper-room of the public library, writing impossible applications
for impossible posts—I remember that among other things of the sort I
offered my services to a firm of private detectives, a sinister breed
of traders upon base jealousies now happily vanished from the world,
and wrote apropos of an advertisement for “stevedores” that I did not
know what the duties of a stevedore might be, but that I was apt and
willing to learn—and in the afternoons and evenings I wandered through
the strange lights and shadows of my native valley and hated all
created things. Until my wanderings were checked by the discovery that
I was wearing out my boots.

The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!

I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a great
capacity for hatred, _but_—

There was an excuse for hate.

It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh, and
vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have been
equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me, without
resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt obscurely
and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were intolerable.
My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an unreasonable
proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed, ill housed, ill
educated and ill trained, my will was suppressed and cramped to the
pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride in myself and no reasonable
chance of putting anything right. It was a life hardly worth living.
That a large proportion of the people about me had no better a lot,
that many had a worse, does not affect these facts. It was a life in
which contentment would have been disgraceful. If some of them were
contented or resigned, so much the worse for every one. No doubt it was
hasty and foolish of me to throw up my situation, but everything was so
obviously aimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not
feel disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as it
pained my mother and caused her anxiety.

Think of the one comprehensive fact of the lock-out!

That year was a bad year, a year of world-wide economic
disorganization. Through their want of intelligent direction the great
“Trust” of American ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded
furnace owners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any
demand for. (In those days there existed no means of estimating any
need of that sort beforehand.) They had done this without even
consulting the ironmasters of any other country. During their period of
activity they had drawn into their employment a great number of
workers, and had erected a huge productive plant. It is manifestly just
that people who do headlong stupid things of this sort should suffer,
but in the old days it was quite possible, it was customary for the
real blunderers in such disasters, to shift nearly all the consequences
of their incapacity. No one thought it wrong for a light-witted
“captain of industry” who had led his workpeople into overproduction,
into the disproportionate manufacture, that is to say, of some
particular article, to abandon and dismiss them, nor was there anything
to prevent the sudden frantic underselling of some trade rival in order
to surprise and destroy his trade, secure his customers for one’s own
destined needs, and shift a portion of one’s punishment upon him. This
operation of spasmodic underselling was known as “dumping.” The
American ironmasters were now dumping on the British market. The
British employers were, of course, taking their loss out of their
workpeople as much as possible, but in addition they were agitating for
some legislation that would prevent—not stupid relative excess in
production, but “dumping”—not the disease, but the consequences of the
disease. The necessary knowledge to prevent either dumping or its
causes, the uncorrelated production of commodities, did not exist, but
this hardly weighed with them at all, and in answer to their demands
there had arisen a curious party of retaliatory-protectionists who
combined vague proposals for spasmodic responses to these convulsive
attacks from foreign manufacturers, with the very evident intention of
achieving financial adventures. The dishonest and reckless elements
were indeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to the
general atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil from
the prospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of men known as
the “New Financiers,” one heard frightened old-fashioned statesmen
asserting with passion that “dumping” didn’t occur, or that it was a
very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody would face and handle the
rather intricate truth of the business. The whole effect upon the mind
of a cool observer was of a covey of unsubstantial jabbering minds
drifting over a series of irrational economic cataclysms, prices and
employment tumbled about like towers in an earthquake, and amidst the
shifting masses were the common work-people going on with their lives
as well as they could, suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for
anything but violent, fruitless protests, impotent. You cannot hope now
to understand the infinite want of adjustment in the old order of
things. At one time there were people dying of actual starvation in
India, while men were burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds
like the account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a
dream, a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.

To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth, it
seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and misery
could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want of thought and
feeling. We needed more dramatic factors than these mental fogs, these
mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore to that common refuge of the
unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous insensate plots—we called them
“plots”—against the poor.

You can still see how we figured it in any museum by looking up the
caricatures of capital and labor that adorned the German and American
socialistic papers of the old time.

§ 2

I had cast Nettie off in an eloquent epistle, had really imagined the
affair was over forever—“I’ve done with women,” I said to Parload—and
then there was silence for more than a week.

Before that week was over I was wondering with a growing emotion what
next would happen between us.

I found myself thinking constantly of Nettie, picturing her—sometimes
with stern satisfaction, sometimes with sympathetic remorse—mourning,
regretting, realizing the absolute end that had come between us. At the
bottom of my heart I no more believed that there was an end between us,
than that an end would come to the world. Had we not kissed one
another, had we not achieved an atmosphere of whispering nearness,
breached our virgin shyness with one another? Of course she was mine,
of course I was hers, and separations and final quarrels and harshness
and distance were no more than flourishes upon that eternal fact. So at
least I felt the thing, however I shaped my thoughts.

Whenever my imagination got to work as that week drew to its close, she
came in as a matter of course, I thought of her recurrently all day and
dreamt of her at night. On Saturday night I dreamt of her very vividly.
Her face was flushed and wet with tears, her hair a little disordered,
and when I spoke to her she turned away. In some manner this dream left
in my mind a feeling of distress and anxiety. In the morning I had a
raging thirst to see her.

That Sunday my mother wanted me to go to church very particularly. She
had a double reason for that; she thought that it would certainly
exercise a favorable influence upon my search for a situation
throughout the next week, and in addition Mr. Gabbitas, with a certain
mystery behind his glasses, had promised to see what he could do for
me, and she wanted to keep him up to that promise. I half consented,
and then my desire for Nettie took hold of me. I told my mother I
wasn’t going to church, and set off about eleven to walk the seventeen
miles to Checkshill.

It greatly intensified the fatigue of that long tramp that the sole of
my boot presently split at the toe, and after I had cut the flapping
portion off, a nail worked through and began to torment me. However,
the boot looked all right after that operation and gave no audible hint
of my discomfort. I got some bread and cheese at a little inn on the
way, and was in Checkshill park about four. I did not go by the road
past the house and so round to the gardens, but cut over the crest
beyond the second keeper’s cottage, along a path Nettie used to call
her own. It was a mere deer track. It led up a miniature valley and
through a pretty dell in which we had been accustomed to meet, and so
through the hollies and along a narrow path close by the wall of the
shrubbery to the gardens.

In my memory that walk through the park before I came upon Nettie
stands out very vividly. The long tramp before it is foreshortened to a
mere effect of dusty road and painful boot, but the bracken valley and
sudden tumult of doubts and unwonted expectations that came to me,
stands out now as something significant, as something unforgettable,
something essential to the meaning of all that followed. Where should I
meet her? What would she say? I had asked these questions before and
found an answer. Now they came again with a trail of fresh implications
and I had no answer for them at all. As I approached Nettie she ceased
to be the mere butt of my egotistical self-projection, the custodian of
my sexual pride, and drew together and became over and above this a
personality of her own, a personality and a mystery, a sphinx I had
evaded only to meet again.

I find a little difficulty in describing the quality of the old-world
love-making so that it may be understandable now.

We young people had practically no preparation at all for the stir and
emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained a
conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation. There
were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that insisted on
certain qualities in every love affair and greatly intensified one’s
natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfect loyalty, lifelong
devotion. Much of the complex essentials of love were altogether
hidden. One read these things, got accidental glimpses of this and
that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew. Then strange emotions,
novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an
inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly
amongst the familiar purely egotistical and materialistic things of
boyhood and girlhood. We were like misguided travelers who had camped
in the dry bed of a tropical river. Presently we were knee deep and
neck deep in the flood. Our beings were suddenly going out from
ourselves seeking other beings—we knew not why. This novel craving for
abandonment to some one of the other sex, bore us away. We were ashamed
and full of desire. We kept the thing a guilty secret, and were
resolved to satisfy it against all the world. In this state it was we
drifted in the most accidental way against some other blindly seeking
creature, and linked like nascent atoms.

We were obsessed by the books we read, by all the talk about us that
once we had linked ourselves we were linked for life. Then afterwards
we discovered that other was also an egotism, a thing of ideas and
impulses, that failed to correspond with ours.

So it was, I say, with the young of my class and most of the young
people in our world. So it came about that I sought Nettie on the
Sunday afternoon and suddenly came upon her, light bodied, slenderly
feminine, hazel eyed, with her soft sweet young face under the shady
brim of her hat of straw, the pretty Venus I had resolved should be
wholly and exclusively mine.

There, all unaware of me still, she stood, my essential feminine, the
embodiment of the inner thing in life for me—and moreover an unknown
other, a person like myself.

She held a little book in her hand, open as if she were walking along
and reading it. That chanced to be her pose, but indeed she was
standing quite still, looking away towards the gray and lichenous
shrubbery wall and, as I think now, listening. Her lips were a little
apart, curved to that faint, sweet shadow of a smile.

§ 3

I recall with a vivid precision her queer start when she heard the
rustle of my approaching feet, her surprise, her eyes almost of dismay
for me. I could recollect, I believe, every significant word she spoke
during our meeting, and most of what I said to her. At least, it seems
I could, though indeed I may deceive myself. But I will not make the
attempt. We were both too ill-educated to speak our full meanings, we
stamped out our feelings with clumsy stereotyped phrases; you who are
better taught would fail to catch our intention. The effect would be
inanity. But our first words I may give you, because though they
conveyed nothing to me at the time, afterwards they meant much.

“_You_, Willie!” she said.

“I have come,” I said—forgetting in the instant all the elaborate
things I had intended to say. “I thought I would surprise you—”

“Surprise me?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me for a moment. I can see her pretty face now as it
looked at me—her impenetrable dear face. She laughed a queer little
laugh and her color went for a moment, and then so soon as she had
spoken, came back again.

“Surprise me at what?” she said with a rising note.

I was too intent to explain myself to think of what might lie in that.

“I wanted to tell you,” I said, “that I didn’t mean quite . . . the
things I put in my letter.”

§ 4

When I and Nettie had been sixteen we had been just of an age and
contemporaries altogether. Now we were a year and three-quarters older,
and she—her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I was still only at
the beginning of a man’s long adolescence.

In an instant she grasped the situation. The hidden motives of her
quick ripened little mind flashed out their intuitive scheme of action.
She treated me with that neat perfection of understanding a young woman
has for a boy.

“But how did you come?” she asked.

I told her I had walked.

“Walked!” In an instant she was leading me towards the gardens. I
_must_ be tired. I must come home with her at once and sit down. Indeed
it was near tea-time (the Stuarts had tea at the old-fashioned hour of
five). Every one would be _so_ surprised to see me. Fancy walking!
Fancy! But she supposed a man thought nothing of seventeen miles. When
_could_ I have started!

All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch of her
hand.

“But, Nettie! I came over to talk to you!”

“My dear boy! Tea first, if you please! And besides—aren’t we talking?”

The “dear boy” was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.

She quickened her pace a little.

“I wanted to explain—” I began.

Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so. I said a few
discrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation than her
words.

When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in her
urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to the
garden. She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish eyes on me
as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now I know, better
than I did then, that every now and then she glanced over me and behind
me towards the shrubbery. And all the while, behind her quick
breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.

Her dress marked the end of her transition.

Can I recall it?

Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use. But her bright brown
hair, which had once flowed down her back in a jolly pig-tail tied with
a bit of scarlet ribbon, was now caught up into an intricacy of pretty
curves above her little ear and cheek, and the soft long lines of her
neck; her white dress had descended to her feet; her slender waist,
which had once been a mere geographical expression, an imaginary line
like the equator, was now a thing of flexible beauty. A year ago she
had been a pretty girl’s face sticking out from a little unimportant
frock that was carried upon an extremely active and efficient pair of
brown-stockinged legs. Now there was coming a strange new body that
flowed beneath her clothes with a sinuous insistence. Every movement,
and particularly the novel droop of her hand and arm to the
unaccustomed skirts she gathered about her, and a graceful forward
inclination that had come to her, called softly to my eyes. A very fine
scarf—I suppose you would call it a scarf—of green gossamer, that some
new wakened instinct had told her to fling about her shoulders, clung
now closely to the young undulations of her body, and now streamed
fluttering out for a moment in a breath of wind, and like some shy
independent tentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentary
contact with my arm.

She caught it back and reproved it.

We went through the green gate in the high garden wall. I held it open
for her to pass through, for this was one of my restricted stock of
stiff politenesses, and then for a second she was near touching me. So
we came to the trim array of flower-beds near the head gardener’s
cottage and the vistas of “glass” on our left. We walked between the
box edgings and beds of begonias and into the shadow of a yew hedge
within twenty yards of that very pond with the gold-fish, at whose brim
we had plighted our vows, and so we came to the wistaria-smothered
porch.

The door was wide open, and she walked in before me. “Guess who has
come to see us!” she cried.

Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair creaked.
I judged he was disturbed in his nap.

“Mother!” she called in her clear young voice. “Puss!”

Puss was her sister.

She told them in a marveling key that I had walked all the way from
Clayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.

“You’d better sit down, Willie,” said her father; “now you have got
here. How’s your mother?”

He looked at me curiously as he spoke.

He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, but
the waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers. He
was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the bright
effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from his cheek to flow
down into his beard. He was short but strongly built, and his beard and
mustache were the biggest things about him. She had taken all the
possibility of beauty he possessed, his clear skin, his bright
hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain quickness she got from
her mother. Her mother I remember as a sharp-eyed woman of great
activity; she seems to me now to have been perpetually bringing in or
taking out meals or doing some such service, and to me—for my mother’s
sake and my own—she was always welcoming and kind. Puss was a youngster
of fourteen perhaps, of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like
her mother’s, are the chief traces on my memory. All these people were
very kind to me, and among them there was a common recognition,
sometimes very agreeably finding expression, that I was—“clever.” They
all stood about me as if they were a little at a loss.

“Sit down!” said her father. “Give him a chair, Puss.”

We talked a little stiffly—they were evidently surprised by my sudden
apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie did not remain
to keep the conversation going.

“There!” she cried suddenly, as if she were vexed. “I declare!” and she
darted out of the room.

“Lord! what a girl it is!” said Mrs. Stuart. “I don’t know what’s come
to her.”

It was half an hour before Nettie came back. It seemed a long time to
me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in again she was
out of breath. In the meantime, I had thrown out casually that I had
given up my place at Rawdon’s. “I can do better than that,” I said.

“I left my book in the dell,” she said, panting. “Is tea ready?” and
that was her apology. . .

We didn’t shake down into comfort even with the coming of the
tea-things. Tea at the gardener’s cottage was a serious meal, with a
big cake and little cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spread upon
a table. You must imagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied,
perplexed by the something that was inexplicably unexpected in Nettie,
saying little, and glowering across the cake at her, and all the
eloquence I had been concentrating for the previous twenty-four hours,
miserably lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Nettie’s father tried
to set me talking; he had a liking for my gift of ready speech, for his
own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased and astonished him to
hear me pouring out my views. Indeed, over there I was, I think, even
more talkative than with Parload, though to the world at large I was a
shy young lout. “You ought to write it out for the newspapers,” he used
to say. “That’s what you ought to do. _I_ never heard such nonsense.”

Or, “You’ve got the gift of the gab, young man. We ought to ha’ made a
lawyer of you.”

But that afternoon, even in his eyes, I didn’t shine. Failing any other
stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but even that did
not engage me.

§ 5

For a long time I feared I should have to go back to Clayton without
another word to Nettie, she seemed insensible to the need I felt for a
talk with her, and I was thinking even of a sudden demand for that
before them all. It was a transparent manoeuver of her mother’s who had
been watching my face, that sent us out at last together to do
something—I forget now what—in one of the greenhouses. Whatever that
little mission may have been it was the merest, most barefaced excuse,
a door to shut, or a window to close, and I don’t think it got done.

Nettie hesitated and obeyed. She led the way through one of the
hot-houses. It was a low, steamy, brick-floored alley between staging
that bore a close crowd of pots and ferns, and behind big branching
plants that were spread and nailed overhead so as to make an impervious
cover of leaves, and in that close green privacy she stopped and turned
on me suddenly like a creature at bay.

“Isn’t the maidenhair fern lovely?” she said, and looked at me with
eyes that said, “_Now_.”

“Nettie,” I began, “I was a fool to write to you as I did.”

She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face. But she
said nothing, and stood waiting.

“Nettie,” I plunged, “I can’t do without you. I—I love you.”

“If you loved me,” she said trimly, watching the white fingers she
plunged among the green branches of a selaginella, “could you write the
things you do to me?”

“I don’t mean them,” I said. “At least not always.”

I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was
stupid to think otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware of
the impossibility of conveying that to her.

“You wrote them.”

“But then I tramp seventeen miles to say I don’t mean them.”

“Yes. But perhaps you do.”

I think I was at a loss; then I said, not very clearly, “I don’t.”

“You think you—you love me, Willie. But you don’t.”

“I do. Nettie! You know I do.”

For answer she shook her head.

I made what I thought was a most heroic plunge. “Nettie,” I said, “I’d
rather have you than—than my own opinions.”

The selaginella still engaged her. “You think so now,” she said.

I broke out into protestations.

“No,” she said shortly. “It’s different now.”

“But why should two letters make so much difference?” I said.

“It isn’t only the letters. But it is different. It’s different for
good.”

She halted a little with that sentence, seeking her expression. She
looked up abruptly into my eyes and moved, indeed slightly, but with
the intimation that she thought our talk might end.

But I did not mean it to end like that.

“For good?” said I. “No! . . Nettie! Nettie! You don’t mean that!”

“I do,” she said deliberately, still looking at me, and with all her
pose conveying her finality. She seemed to brace herself for the
outbreak that must follow.

Of course I became wordy. But I did not submerge her. She stood
entrenched, firing her contradictions like guns into my scattered
discursive attack. I remember that our talk took the absurd form of
disputing whether I could be in love with her or not. And there was I,
present in evidence, in a deepening and widening distress of soul
because she could stand there, defensive, brighter and prettier than
ever, and in some inexplicable way cut off from me and inaccessible.

You know, we had never been together before without little enterprises
of endearment, without a faintly guilty, quite delightful excitement.

I pleaded, I argued. I tried to show that even my harsh and difficult
letters came from my desire to come wholly into contact with her. I
made exaggerated fine statements of the longing I felt for her when I
was away, of the shock and misery of finding her estranged and cool.
She looked at me, feeling the emotion of my speech and impervious to
its ideas. I had no doubt—whatever poverty in my words, coolly written
down now—that I was eloquent then. I meant most intensely what I said,
indeed I was wholly concentrated upon it. I was set upon conveying to
her with absolute sincerity my sense of distance, and the greatness of
my desire. I toiled toward her painfully and obstinately through a
jungle of words.

Her face changed very slowly—by such imperceptible degrees as when at
dawn light comes into a clear sky. I could feel that I touched her,
that her hardness was in some manner melting, her determination
softening toward hesitations. The habit of an old familiarity lurked
somewhere within her. But she would not let me reach her.

“No,” she cried abruptly, starting into motion.

She laid a hand on my arm. A wonderful new friendliness came into her
voice. “It’s impossible, Willie. Everything is different
now—everything. We made a mistake. We two young sillies made a mistake
and everything is different for ever. Yes, yes.”

She turned about.

“Nettie!” cried I, and still protesting, pursued her along the narrow
alley between the staging toward the hot-house door. I pursued her like
an accusation, and she went before me like one who is guilty and
ashamed. So I recall it now.

She would not let me talk to her again.

Yet I could see that my talk to her had altogether abolished the
clear-cut distance of our meeting in the park. Ever and again I found
her hazel eyes upon me. They expressed something novel—a surprise, as
though she realized an unwonted relationship, and a sympathetic pity.
And still—something defensive.

When we got back to the cottage, I fell talking rather more freely with
her father about the nationalization of railways, and my spirits and
temper had so far mended at the realization that I could still produce
an effect upon Nettie, that I was even playful with Puss. Mrs. Stuart
judged from that that things were better with me than they were, and
began to beam mightily.

But Nettie remained thoughtful and said very little. She was lost in
perplexities I could not fathom, and presently she slipped away from us
and went upstairs.

§ 6

I was, of course, too footsore to walk back to Clayton, but I had a
shilling and a penny in my pocket for the train between Checkshill and
Two-Mile Stone, and that much of the distance I proposed to do in the
train. And when I got ready to go, Nettie amazed me by waking up to the
most remarkable solicitude for me. I must, she said, go by the road. It
was altogether too dark for the short way to the lodge gates.

I pointed out that it was moonlight. “With the comet thrown in,” said
old Stuart.

“No,” she insisted, “you _must_ go by the road.”

I still disputed.

She was standing near me. “To please _me_,” she urged, in a quick
undertone, and with a persuasive look that puzzled me. Even in the
moment I asked myself why should this please her?

I might have agreed had she not followed that up with, “The hollies by
the shrubbery are as dark as pitch. And there’s the deer-hounds.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark,” said I. “Nor of the deer-hounds, either.”

“But those dogs! Supposing one was loose!”

That was a girl’s argument, a girl who still had to understand that
fear is an overt argument only for her own sex. I thought too of those
grisly lank brutes straining at their chains and the chorus they could
make of a night when they heard belated footsteps along the edge of the
Killing Wood, and the thought banished my wish to please her. Like most
imaginative natures I was acutely capable of dreads and retreats, and
constantly occupied with their suppression and concealment, and to
refuse the short cut when it might appear that I did it on account of
half a dozen almost certainly chained dogs was impossible.

So I set off in spite of her, feeling valiant and glad to be so easily
brave, but a little sorry that she should think herself crossed by me.

A thin cloud veiled the moon, and the way under the beeches was dark
and indistinct. I was not so preoccupied with my love-affairs as to
neglect what I will confess was always my custom at night across that
wild and lonely park. I made myself a club by fastening a big flint to
one end of my twisted handkerchief and tying the other about my wrist,
and with this in my pocket, went on comforted.

And it chanced that as I emerged from the hollies by the corner of the
shrubbery I was startled to come unexpectedly upon a young man in
evening dress smoking a cigar.

I was walking on turf, so that the sound I made was slight. He stood
clear in the moonlight, his cigar glowed like a blood-red star, and it
did not occur to me at the time that I advanced towards him almost
invisibly in an impenetrable shadow.

“Hullo,” he cried, with a sort of amiable challenge. “I’m here first!”

I came out into the light. “Who cares if you are?” said I.

I had jumped at once to an interpretation of his words. I knew that
there was an intermittent dispute between the House people and the
villager public about the use of this track, and it is needless to say
where my sympathies fell in that dispute.

“Eh?” he cried in surprise.

“Thought I would run away, I suppose,” said I, and came close up to
him.

All my enormous hatred of his class had flared up at the sight of his
costume, at the fancied challenge of his words. I knew him. He was
Edward Verrall, son of the man who owned not only this great estate but
more than half of Rawdon’s pot-bank, and who had interests and
possessions, collieries and rents, all over the district of the Four
Towns. He was a gallant youngster, people said, and very clever. Young
as he was there was talk of parliament for him; he had been a great
success at the university, and he was being sedulously popularized
among us. He took with a light confidence, as a matter of course,
advantages that I would have faced the rack to get, and I firmly
believed myself a better man than he. He was, as he stood there, a
concentrated figure of all that filled me with bitterness. One day he
had stopped in a motor outside our house, and I remember the thrill of
rage with which I had noted the dutiful admiration in my mother’s eyes
as she peered through her blind at him. “That’s young Mr. Verrall,” she
said. “They say he’s very clever.”

“They would,” I answered. “Damn them and him!”

But that is by the way.

He was clearly astonished to find himself face to face with a man. His
note changed.

“Who the devil are _you?_” he asked.

My retort was the cheap expedient of re-echoing, “Who the devil are
you?”

“_Well_,” he said.

“I’m coming along this path if I like,” I said. “See? It’s a public
path—just as this used to be public land. You’ve stolen the land—you
and yours, and now you want to steal the right of way. You’ll ask us to
get off the face of the earth next. I sha’n’t oblige. See?”

I was shorter and I suppose a couple of years younger than he, but I
had the improvised club in my pocket gripped ready, and I would have
fought with him very cheerfully. But he fell a step backward as I came
toward him.

“Socialist, I presume?” he said, alert and quiet and with the faintest
note of badinage.

“One of many.”

“We’re all socialists nowadays,” he remarked philosophically, “and I
haven’t the faintest intention of disputing your right of way.”

“You’d better not,” I said.

“No!”

“No.”

He replaced his cigar, and there was a brief pause. “Catching a train?”
he threw out.

It seemed absurd not to answer. “Yes,” I said shortly.

He said it was a pleasant evening for a walk.

I hovered for a moment and there was my path before me, and he stood
aside. There seemed nothing to do but go on. “Good night,” said he, as
that intention took effect.

I growled a surly good-night.

I felt like a bombshell of swearing that must presently burst with some
violence as I went on my silent way. He had so completely got the best
of our encounter.

§ 7

There comes a memory, an odd intermixture of two entirely divergent
things, that stands out with the intensest vividness.

As I went across the last open meadow, following the short cut to
Checkshill station, I perceived I had two shadows.

The thing jumped into my mind and stopped its tumid flow for a moment.
I remember the intelligent detachment of my sudden interest. I turned
sharply, and stood looking at the moon and the great white comet, that
the drift of the clouds had now rather suddenly unveiled.

The comet was perhaps twenty degrees from the moon. What a wonderful
thing it looked floating there, a greenish-white apparition in the dark
blue deeps! It looked brighter than the moon because it was smaller,
but the shadow it cast, though clearer cut, was much fainter than the
moon’s shadow. . . I went on noting these facts, watching my two
shadows precede me.

I am totally unable to account for the sequence of my thoughts on this
occasion. But suddenly, as if I had come on this new fact round a
corner, the comet was out of my mind again, and I was face to face with
an absolutely new idea. I wonder sometimes if the two shadows I cast,
one with a sort of feminine faintness with regard to the other and not
quite so tall, may not have suggested the word or the thought of an
assignation to my mind. All that I have clear is that with the
certitude of intuition I knew what it was that had brought the youth in
evening dress outside the shrubbery. Of course! He had come to meet
Nettie!

Once the mental process was started it took no time at all. The day
which had been full of perplexities for me, the mysterious invisible
thing that had held Nettie and myself apart, the unaccountable strange
something in her manner, was revealed and explained.

I knew now why she had looked guilty at my appearance, what had brought
her out that afternoon, why she had hurried me in, the nature of the
“book” she had run back to fetch, the reason why she had wanted me to
go back by the high-road, and why she had pitied me. It was all in the
instant clear to me.

You must imagine me a black little creature, suddenly stricken
still—for a moment standing rigid—and then again suddenly becoming
active with an impotent gesture, becoming audible with an inarticulate
cry, with two little shadows mocking my dismay, and about this figure
you must conceive a great wide space of moonlit grass, rimmed by the
looming suggestion of distant trees—trees very low and faint and dim,
and over it all the domed serenity of that wonderful luminous night.

For a little while this realization stunned my mind. My thoughts came
to a pause, staring at my discovery. Meanwhile my feet and my previous
direction carried me through the warm darkness to Checkshill station
with its little lights, to the ticket-office window, and so to the
train.

I remember myself as it were waking up to the thing—I was alone in one
of the dingy “third-class” compartments of that time—and the sudden
nearly frantic insurgence of my rage. I stood up with the cry of an
angry animal, and smote my fist with all my strength against the panel
of wood before me. . . .

Curiously enough I have completely forgotten my mood after that for a
little while, but I know that later, for a minute perhaps, I hung for a
time out of the carriage with the door open, contemplating a leap from
the train. It was to be a dramatic leap, and then I would go storming
back to her, denounce her, overwhelm her; and I hung, urging myself to
do it. I don’t remember how it was I decided not to do this, at last,
but in the end I didn’t.

When the train stopped at the next station I had given up all thoughts
of going back. I was sitting in the corner of the carriage with my
bruised and wounded hand pressed under my arm, and still insensible to
its pain, trying to think out clearly a scheme of action—action that
should express the monstrous indignation that possessed me.




CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE REVOLVER


§ 1

“That comet is going to hit the earth!”

So said one of the two men who got into the train and settled down.

“Ah!” said the other man.

“They do say that it is made of gas, that comet. We sha’n’t blow up,
shall us?”. . .

What did it matter to me?

I was thinking of revenge—revenge against the primary conditions of my
being. I was thinking of Nettie and her lover. I was firmly resolved he
should not have her—though I had to kill them both to prevent it. I did
not care what else might happen, if only that end was ensured. All my
thwarted passions had turned to rage. I would have accepted eternal
torment that night without a second thought, to be certain of revenge.
A hundred possibilities of action, a hundred stormy situations, a whirl
of violent schemes, chased one another through my shamed, exasperated
mind. The sole prospect I could endure was of some gigantic, inexorably
cruel vindication of my humiliated self.

And Nettie? I loved Nettie still, but now with the intensest jealousy,
with the keen, unmeasuring hatred of wounded pride, and baffled,
passionate desire.

§ 2


As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest—for my shilling and a penny
only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-Mile Stone, and
thence I had to walk over the hill—I remember very vividly a little man
with a shrill voice who was preaching under a gas-lamp against a
hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday evening loafers. He was a short man,
bald, with a little fair curly beard and hair and watery blue eyes, and
he was preaching that the end of the world drew near.

I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet with the
end of the world. He had got that jumbled up with international
politics and prophecies from the Book of Daniel.

I stopped to hear him only for a moment or so. I do not think I should
have halted at all but his crowd blocked my path, and the sight of his
queer wild expression, the gesture of his upward-pointing finger, held
me.

“There is the end of all your Sins and Follies,” he bawled. “There!
There is the Star of Judgments, the Judgments of the most High God! It
is appointed unto all men to die—unto all men to die”—his voice changed
to a curious flat chant—“and after death, the Judgment! The Judgment!”

I pushed and threaded my way through the bystanders and went on, and
his curious harsh flat voice pursued me. I went on with the thoughts
that had occupied me before—where I could buy a revolver, and how I
might master its use—and probably I should have forgotten all about him
had he not taken a part in the hideous dream that ended the little
sleep I had that night. For the most part I lay awake thinking of
Nettie and her lover.

Then came three strange days—three days that seem now to have been
wholly concentrated upon one business.

This dominant business was the purchase of my revolver. I held myself
resolutely to the idea that I must either restore myself by some
extraordinary act of vigor and violence in Nettie’s eyes or I must kill
her. I would not let myself fall away from that. I felt that if I let
this matter pass, my last shred of pride and honor would pass with it,
that for the rest of my life I should never deserve the slightest
respect or any woman’s love. Pride kept me to my purpose between my
gusts of passion.

Yet it was not easy to buy that revolver.

I had a kind of shyness of the moment when I should have to face the
shopman, and I was particularly anxious to have a story ready if he
should see fit to ask questions why I bought such a thing. I determined
to say I was going to Texas, and I thought it might prove useful there.
Texas in those days had the reputation of a wild lawless land. As I
knew nothing of caliber or impact, I wanted also to be able to ask with
a steady face at what distance a man or woman could be killed by the
weapon that might be offered me. I was pretty cool-headed in relation
to such practical aspects of my affair. I had some little difficulty in
finding a gunsmith. In Clayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth
in a cycle shop, but the only revolvers these people had impressed me
as being too small and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop
window in the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice,
a reasonably clumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed “As used in
the American army.”

I had drawn out my balance from the savings bank, matter of two pounds
and more, to make this purchase, and I found it at last a very easy
transaction. The pawnbroker told me where I could get ammunition, and I
went home that night with bulging pockets, an armed man.

The purchase of my revolver was, I say, the chief business of those
days, but you must not think I was so intent upon it as to be
insensible to the stirring things that were happening in the streets
through which I went seeking the means to effect my purpose. They were
full of murmurings: the whole region of the Four Towns scowled lowering
from its narrow doors. The ordinary healthy flow of people going to
work, people going about their business, was chilled and checked.
Numbers of men stood about the streets in knots and groups, as
corpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels in the opening stages
of inflammation. The women looked haggard and worried. The ironworkers
had refused the proposed reduction of their wages, and the lockout had
begun. They were already at “play.” The Conciliation Board was doing
its best to keep the coal-miners and masters from a breach, but young
Lord Redcar, the greatest of our coal owners and landlord of all
Swathinglea and half Clayton, was taking a fine upstanding attitude
that made the breach inevitable. He was a handsome young man, a gallant
young man; his pride revolted at the idea of being dictated to by a
“lot of bally miners,” and he meant, he said, to make a fight for it.
The world had treated him sumptuously from his earliest years; the
shares in the common stock of five thousand people had gone to pay for
his handsome upbringing, and large, romantic, expensive ambitions
filled his generously nurtured mind. He had early distinguished himself
at Oxford by his scornful attitude towards democracy. There was
something that appealed to the imagination in his fine antagonism to
the crowd—on the one hand, was the brilliant young nobleman,
picturesquely alone; on the other, the ugly, inexpressive multitude,
dressed inelegantly in shop-clothes, under-educated, under-fed,
envious, base, and with a wicked disinclination for work and a wicked
appetite for the good things it could so rarely get. For common
imaginative purposes one left out the policeman from the design, the
stalwart policeman protecting his lordship, and ignored the fact that
while Lord Redcar had his hands immediately and legally on the
workman’s shelter and bread, they could touch him to the skin only by
some violent breach of the law.

He lived at Lowchester House, five miles or so beyond Checkshill; but
partly to show how little he cared for his antagonists, and partly no
doubt to keep himself in touch with the negotiations that were still
going on, he was visible almost every day in and about the Four Towns,
driving that big motor car of his that could take him sixty miles an
hour. The English passion for fair play one might have thought
sufficient to rob this bold procedure of any dangerous possibilities,
but he did not go altogether free from insult, and on one occasion at
least an intoxicated Irish woman shook her fist at him. . . .

A dark, quiet crowd, that was greater each day, a crowd more than half
women, brooded as a cloud will sometimes brood permanently upon a
mountain crest, in the market-place outside the Clayton Town Hall,
where the conference was held. . . .

I consider myself justified in regarding Lord Redcar’s passing
automobile with a special animosity because of the leaks in our roof.

We held our little house on lease; the owner was a mean, saving old man
named Pettigrew, who lived in a villa adorned with plaster images of
dogs and goats, at Overcastle, and in spite of our specific agreement,
he would do no repairs for us at all. He rested secure in my mother’s
timidity. Once, long ago, she had been behind-hand with her rent, with
half of her quarter’s rent, and he had extended the days of grace a
month; her sense that some day she might need the same mercy again made
her his abject slave. She was afraid even to ask that he should cause
the roof to be mended for fear he might take offence. But one night the
rain poured in on her bed and gave her a cold, and stained and soaked
her poor old patchwork counterpane. Then she got me to compose an
excessively polite letter to old Pettigrew, begging him as a favor to
perform his legal obligations. It is part of the general imbecility of
those days that such one-sided law as existed was a profound mystery to
the common people, its provisions impossible to ascertain, its
machinery impossible to set in motion. Instead of the clearly written
code, the lucid statements of rules and principles that are now at the
service of every one, the law was the muddle secret of the legal
profession. Poor people, overworked people, had constantly to submit to
petty wrongs because of the intolerable uncertainty not only of law but
of cost, and of the demands upon time and energy, proceedings might
make. There was indeed no justice for any one too poor to command a
good solicitor’s deference and loyalty; there was nothing but rough
police protection and the magistrate’s grudging or eccentric advice for
the mass of the population. The civil law, in particular, was a
mysterious upper-class weapon, and I can imagine no injustice that
would have been sufficient to induce my poor old mother to appeal to
it.

All this begins to sound incredible. I can only assure you that it was
so.

But I, when I learned that old Pettigrew had been down to tell my
mother all about his rheumatism, to inspect the roof, and to allege
that nothing was needed, gave way to my most frequent emotion in those
days, a burning indignation, and took the matter into my own hands. I
wrote and asked him, with a withering air of technicality, to have the
roof repaired “as per agreement,” and added, “if not done in one week
from now we shall be obliged to take proceedings.” I had not mentioned
this high line of conduct to my mother at first, and so when old
Pettigrew came down in a state of great agitation with my letter in his
hand, she was almost equally agitated.

“How could you write to old Mr. Pettigrew like that?” she asked me.

I said that old Pettigrew was a shameful old rascal, or words to that
effect, and I am afraid I behaved in a very undutiful way to her when
she said that she had settled everything with him—she wouldn’t say how,
but I could guess well enough—and that I was to promise her, promise
her faithfully, to do nothing more in the matter. I wouldn’t promise
her.

And—having nothing better to employ me then—I presently went raging to
old Pettigrew in order to put the whole thing before him in what I
considered the proper light. Old Pettigrew evaded my illumination; he
saw me coming up his front steps—I can still see his queer old nose and
the crinkled brow over his eye and the little wisp of gray hair that
showed over the corner of his window-blind—and he instructed his
servant to put up the chain when she answered the door, and to tell me
that he would not see me. So I had to fall back upon my pen.

Then it was, as I had no idea what were the proper “proceedings” to
take, the brilliant idea occurred to me of appealing to Lord Redcar as
the ground landlord, and, as it were, our feudal chief, and pointing
out to him that his security for his rent was depreciating in old
Pettigrew’s hands. I added some general observations on leaseholds, the
taxation of ground rents, and the private ownership of the soil. And
Lord Redcar, whose spirit revolted at democracy, and who cultivated a
pert humiliating manner with his inferiors to show as much, earned my
distinguished hatred for ever by causing his secretary to present his
compliments to me, and his request that I would mind my own business
and leave him to manage his. At which I was so greatly enraged that I
first tore this note into minute innumerable pieces, and then dashed it
dramatically all over the floor of my room—from which, to keep my
mother from the job, I afterward had to pick it up laboriously on
all-fours.

I was still meditating a tremendous retort, an indictment of all Lord
Redcar’s class, their manners, morals, economic and political crimes,
when my trouble with Nettie arose to swamp all minor troubles. Yet, not
so completely but that I snarled aloud when his lordship’s motor-car
whizzed by me, as I went about upon my long meandering quest for a
weapon. And I discovered after a time that my mother had bruised her
knee and was lame. Fearing to irritate me by bringing the thing before
me again, she had set herself to move her bed out of the way of the
drip without my help, and she had knocked her knee. All her poor
furnishings, I discovered, were cowering now close to the peeling
bedroom walls; there had come a vast discoloration of the ceiling, and
a washing-tub was in occupation of the middle of her chamber. . . .

It is necessary that I should set these things before you, should give
the key of inconvenience and uneasiness in which all things were
arranged, should suggest the breath of trouble that stirred along the
hot summer streets, the anxiety about the strike, the rumors and
indignations, the gatherings and meetings, the increasing gravity of
the policemen’s faces, the combative headlines of the local papers, the
knots of picketers who scrutinized any one who passed near the silent,
smokeless forges, but in my mind, you must understand, such impressions
came and went irregularly; they made a moving background, changing
undertones, to my preoccupation by that darkly shaping purpose to which
a revolver was so imperative an essential.

Along the darkling streets, amidst the sullen crowds, the thought of
Nettie, my Nettie, and her gentleman lover made ever a vivid
inflammatory spot of purpose in my brain.

§ 3


It was three days after this—on Wednesday, that is to say—that the
first of those sinister outbreaks occurred that ended in the bloody
affair of Peacock Grove and the flooding out of the entire line of the
Swathinglea collieries. It was the only one of these disturbances I was
destined to see, and at most a mere trivial preliminary of that
struggle.

The accounts that have been written of this affair vary very widely. To
read them is to realize the extraordinary carelessness of truth that
dishonored the press of those latter days. In my bureau I have several
files of the daily papers of the old time—I collected them, as a matter
of fact—and three or four of about that date I have just this moment
taken out and looked through to refresh my impression of what I saw.
They lie before me—queer, shriveled, incredible things; the cheap paper
has already become brittle and brown and split along the creases, the
ink faded or smeared, and I have to handle them with the utmost care
when I glance among their raging headlines. As I sit here in this
serene place, their quality throughout, their arrangement, their tone,
their arguments and exhortations, read as though they came from drugged
and drunken men. They give one the effect of faded bawling, of screams
and shouts heard faintly in a little gramophone. . . . It is only on
Monday I find, and buried deep below the war news, that these
publications contain any intimation that unusual happenings were
forward in Clayton and Swathinglea.

What I saw was towards evening. I had been learning to shoot with my
new possession. I had walked out with it four or five miles across a
patch of moorland and down to a secluded little coppice full of
blue-bells, halfway along the high-road between Leet and Stafford. Here
I had spent the afternoon, experimenting and practising with careful
deliberation and grim persistence. I had brought an old kite-frame of
cane with me, that folded and unfolded, and each shot-hole I made I
marked and numbered to compare with my other endeavors. At last I was
satisfied that I could hit a playing-card at thirty paces nine times
out of ten; the light was getting too bad for me to see my penciled
bull’s-eye, and in that state of quiet moodiness that sometimes comes
with hunger to passionate men, I returned by the way of Swathinglea
towards my home.

The road I followed came down between banks of wretched-looking
working-men’s houses, in close-packed rows on either side, and took
upon itself the _rôle_ of Swathinglea High Street, where, at a lamp and
a pillar-box, the steam-trams began. So far that dirty hot way had been
unusually quiet and empty, but beyond the corner, where the first group
of beershops clustered, it became populous. It was very quiet still,
even the children were a little inactive, but there were a lot of
people standing dispersedly in little groups, and with a general
direction towards the gates of the Bantock Burden coalpit.

The place was being picketed, although at that time the miners were
still nominally at work, and the conferences between masters and men
still in session at Clayton Town Hall. But one of the men employed at
the Bantock Burden pit, Jack Briscoe, was a socialist, and he had
distinguished himself by a violent letter upon the crisis to the
leading socialistic paper in England, _The Clarion_, in which he had
adventured among the motives of Lord Redcar. The publication of this
had been followed by instant dismissal. As Lord Redcar wrote a day or
so later to the _Times_—I have that _Times_, I have all the London
papers of the last month before the Change—

“The man was paid off and kicked out. Any self-respecting employer
would do the same.” The thing had happened overnight, and the men did
not at once take a clear line upon what was, after all, a very
intricate and debatable occasion. But they came out in a sort of
semiofficial strike from all Lord Redcar’s collieries beyond the canal
that besets Swathinglea. They did so without formal notice, committing
a breach of contract by this sudden cessation. But in the long labor
struggles of the old days the workers were constantly putting
themselves in the wrong and committing illegalities through that
overpowering craving for dramatic promptness natural to uneducated
minds.

All the men had not come out of the Bantock Burden pit. Something was
wrong there, an indecision if nothing else; the mine was still working,
and there was a rumor that men from Durham had been held in readiness
by Lord Redcar, and were already in the mine. Now, it is absolutely
impossible to ascertain certainly how things stood at that time. The
newspapers say this and that, but nothing trustworthy remains.

I believe I should have gone striding athwart the dark stage of that
stagnant industrial drama without asking a question, if Lord Redcar had
not chanced to come upon the scene about the same time as myself and
incontinently end its stagnation.

He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put up the
best fight they had ever had, and he had been active all that afternoon
in meeting the quarrel half way, and preparing as conspicuously as
possible for the scratch force of “blacklegs”—as we called them—who
were, he said and we believed, to replace the strikers in his pits.

I was an eye-witness of the whole of the affair outside the Bantock
Burden pit, and—I do not know what happened.

Picture to yourself how the thing came to me.

I was descending a steep, cobbled, excavated road between banked-up
footways, perhaps six feet high, upon which, in a monotonous series,
opened the living room doors of rows of dark, low cottages. The
perspective of squat blue slate roofs and clustering chimneys drifted
downward towards the irregular open space before the colliery—a space
covered with coaly, wheel-scarred mud, with a patch of weedy dump to
the left and the colliery gates to the right. Beyond, the High Street
with shops resumed again in good earnest and went on, and the lines of
the steam-tramway that started out from before my feet, and were here
shining and acutely visible with reflected skylight and here lost in a
shadow, took up for one acute moment the greasy yellow irradiation of a
newly lit gaslamp as they vanished round the bend. Beyond, spread a
darkling marsh of homes, an infinitude of little smoking hovels, and
emergent, meager churches, public-houses, board schools, and other
buildings amidst the prevailing chimneys of Swathinglea. To the right,
very clear and relatively high, the Bantock Burden pit-mouth was marked
by a gaunt lattice bearing a great black wheel, very sharp and distinct
in the twilight, and beyond, in an irregular perspective, were others
following the lie of the seams. The general effect, as one came down
the hill, was of a dark compressed life beneath a very high and wide
and luminous evening sky, against which these pit-wheels rose. And
ruling the calm spaciousness of that heaven was the great comet, now
green-white, and wonderful for all who had eyes to see.

The fading afterglow of the sunset threw up all the contours and
skyline to the west, and the comet rose eastward out of the pouring
tumult of smoke from Bladden’s forges. The moon had still to rise.

By this time the comet had begun to assume the cloudlike form still
familiar through the medium of a thousand photographs and sketches. At
first it had been an almost telescopic speck; it had brightened to the
dimensions of the greatest star in the heavens; it had still grown,
hour by hour, in its incredibly swift, its noiseless and inevitable
rush upon our earth, until it had equaled and surpassed the moon. Now
it was the most splendid thing this sky of earth has ever held. I have
never seen a photograph that gave a proper idea of it. Never at any
time did it assume the conventional tailed outline, comets are supposed
to have. Astronomers talked of its double tail, one preceding it and
one trailing behind it, but these were foreshortened to nothing, so
that it had rather the form of a bellying puff of luminous smoke with
an intenser, brighter heart. It rose a hot yellow color, and only began
to show its distinctive greenness when it was clear of the mists of the
evening.

It compelled attention for a space. For all my earthly concentration of
mind, I could but stare at it for a moment with a vague anticipation
that, after all, in some way so strange and glorious an object must
have significance, could not possibly be a matter of absolute
indifference to the scheme and values of my life.

But how?

I thought of Parload. I thought of the panic and uneasiness that was
spreading in this very matter, and the assurances of scientific men
that the thing weighed so little—at the utmost a few hundred tons of
thinly diffused gas and dust—that even were it to smite this earth
fully, nothing could possibly ensue. And, after all, said I, what
earthly significance has any one found in the stars?

Then, as one still descended, the houses and buildings rose up, the
presence of those watching groups of people, the tension of the
situation; and one forgot the sky.

Preoccupied with myself and with my dark dream about Nettie and my
honor, I threaded my course through the stagnating threat of this
gathering, and was caught unawares, when suddenly the whole scene
flashed into drama. . . .

The attention of every one swung round with an irresistible magnetism
towards the High Street, and caught me as a rush of waters might catch
a wisp of hay. Abruptly the whole crowd was sounding one note. It was
not a word, it was a sound that mingled threat and protest, something
between a prolonged “Ah!” and “Ugh!” Then with a hoarse intensity of
anger came a low heavy booing, “Boo! boo—oo!” a note stupidly
expressive of animal savagery. “Toot, toot!” said Lord Redcar’s
automobile in ridiculous repartee. “Toot, toot!” One heard it whizzing
and throbbing as the crowd obliged it to slow down.

Everybody seemed in motion towards the colliery gates, I, too, with the
others.

I heard a shout. Through the dark figures about me I saw the motor-car
stop and move forward again, and had a glimpse of something writhing on
the ground.

It was alleged afterwards that Lord Redcar was driving, and that he
quite deliberately knocked down a little boy who would not get out of
his way. It is asserted with equal confidence that the boy was a man
who tried to pass across the front of the motor-car as it came slowly
through the crowd, who escaped by a hair’s breadth, and then slipped on
the tram-rail and fell down. I have both accounts set forth, under
screaming headlines, in two of these sere newspapers upon my desk. No
one could ever ascertain the truth. Indeed, in such a blind tumult of
passion, could there be any truth?

There was a rush forward, the horn of the car sounded, everything
swayed violently to the right for perhaps ten yards or so, and there
was a report like a pistol-shot.

For a moment every one seemed running away. A woman, carrying a
shawl-wrapped child, blundered into me, and sent me reeling back. Every
one thought of firearms, but, as a matter of fact, something had gone
wrong with the motor, what in those old-fashioned contrivances was
called a backfire. A thin puff of bluish smoke hung in the air behind
the thing. The majority of the people scattered back in a disorderly
fashion, and left a clear space about the struggle that centered upon
the motor-car.

The man or boy who had fallen was lying on the ground with no one near
him, a black lump, an extended arm and two sprawling feet. The
motor-car had stopped, and its three occupants were standing up. Six or
seven black figures surrounded the car, and appeared to be holding on
to it as if to prevent it from starting again; one—it was Mitchell, a
well-known labor leader—argued in fierce low tones with Lord Redcar. I
could not hear anything they said, I was not near enough. Behind me the
colliery gates were open, and there was a sense of help coming to the
motor-car from that direction. There was an unoccupied muddy space for
fifty yards, perhaps, between car and gate, and then the wheels and
head of the pit rose black against the sky. I was one of a rude
semicircle of people that hung as yet indeterminate in action about
this dispute.

It was natural, I suppose, that my fingers should close upon the
revolver in my pocket.

I advanced with the vaguest intentions in the world, and not so quickly
but that several men hurried past me to join the little knot holding up
the car.

Lord Redcar, in his big furry overcoat, towered up over the group about
him; his gestures were free and threatening, and his voice loud. He
made a fine figure there, I must admit; he was a big, fair, handsome
young man with a fine tenor voice and an instinct for gallant effect.
My eyes were drawn to him at first wholly. He seemed a symbol, a
triumphant symbol, of all that the theory of aristocracy claims, of all
that filled my soul with resentment. His chauffeur sat crouched
together, peering at the crowd under his lordship’s arm. But Mitchell
showed as a sturdy figure also, and his voice was firm and loud.

“You’ve hurt that lad,” said Mitchell, over and over again. “You’ll
wait here till you see if he’s hurt.”

“I’ll wait here or not as I please,” said Redcar; and to the chauffeur,
“Here! get down and look at it!”

“You’d better not get down,” said Mitchell; and the chauffeur stood
bent and hesitating on the step.

The man on the back seat stood up, leant forward, and spoke to Lord
Redcar, and for the first time my attention was drawn to him. It was
young Verrall! His handsome face shone clear and fine in the green
pallor of the comet.

I ceased to hear the quarrel that was raising the voice of Mitchell and
Lord Redcar. This new fact sent them spinning into the background.
Young Verrall!

It was my own purpose coming to meet me half way.

There was to be a fight here, it seemed certain to come to a scuffle,
and here we were—

What was I to do? I thought very swiftly. Unless my memory cheats me, I
acted with swift decision. My hand tightened on my revolver, and then I
remembered it was unloaded. I had thought my course out in an instant.
I turned round and pushed my way out of the angry crowd that was now
surging back towards the motor-car.

It would be quiet and out of sight, I thought, among the dump heaps
across the road, and there I might load unobserved. . .

A big young man striding forward with his fists clenched, halted for
one second at the sight of me.

“What!” said he. “Ain’t afraid of them, are you?”

I glanced over my shoulder and back at him, was near showing him my
pistol, and the expression changed in his eyes. He hung perplexed at
me. Then with a grunt he went on.

I heard the voices growing loud and sharp behind me.

I hesitated, half turned towards the dispute, then set off running
towards the heaps. Some instinct told me not to be detected loading. I
was cool enough therefore to think of the aftermath of the thing I
meant to do.

I looked back once again towards the swaying discussion—or was it a
fight now? and then I dropped into the hollow, knelt among the weeds,
and loaded with eager trembling fingers. I loaded one chamber, got up
and went back a dozen paces, thought of possibilities, vacillated,
returned and loaded all the others. I did it slowly because I felt a
little clumsy, and at the end came a moment of inspection—had I
forgotten any thing? And then for a few seconds I crouched before I
rose, resisting the first gust of reaction against my impulse. I took
thought, and for a moment that great green-white meteor overhead swam
back into my conscious mind. For the first time then I linked it
clearly with all the fierce violence that had crept into human life. I
joined up that with what I meant to do. I was going to shoot young
Verrall as it were under the benediction of that green glare.

But about Nettie?

I found it impossible to think out that obvious complication.

I came up over the heap again, and walked slowly back towards the
wrangle.

Of course I had to kill him. . . .

Now I would have you believe I did not want to murder young Verrall at
all at that particular time. I had not pictured such circumstances as
these, I had never thought of him in connection with Lord Redcar and
our black industrial world. He was in that distant other world of
Checkshill, the world of parks and gardens, the world of sunlit
emotions and Nettie. His appearance here was disconcerting. I was taken
by surprise. I was too tired and hungry to think clearly, and the hard
implication of our antagonism prevailed with me. In the tumult of my
passed emotions I had thought constantly of conflicts, confrontations,
deeds of violence, and now the memory of these things took possession
of me as though they were irrevocable resolutions.

There was a sharp exclamation, the shriek of a woman, and the crowd
came surging back. The fight had begun.

Lord Redcar, I believe, had jumped down from his car and felled
Mitchell, and men were already running out to his assistance from the
colliery gates.

I had some difficulty in shoving through the crowd; I can still
remember very vividly being jammed at one time between two big men so
that my arms were pinned to my sides, but all the other details are
gone out of my mind until I found myself almost violently projected
forward into the “scrap.”

I blundered against the corner of the motor-car, and came round it face
to face with young Verrall, who was descending from the back
compartment. His face was touched with orange from the automobile’s big
lamps, which conflicted with the shadows of the comet light, and
distorted him oddly. That effect lasted but an instant, but it put me
out. Then he came a step forward, and the ruddy lights and queerness
vanished.

I don’t think he recognized me, but he perceived immediately I meant
attacking. He struck out at once at me a haphazard blow, and touched me
on the cheek.

Instinctively I let go of the pistol, snatched my right hand out of my
pocket and brought it up in a belated parry, and then let out with my
left full in his chest.

It sent him staggering, and as he went back I saw recognition mingle
with astonishment in his face.

“You know me, you swine,” I cried and hit again.

Then I was spinning sideways, half-stunned, with a huge lump of a fist
under my jaw. I had an impression of Lord Redcar as a great furry bulk,
towering like some Homeric hero above the fray. I went down before
him—it made him seem to rush up—and he ignored me further. His big flat
voice counseled young Verrall—

“Cut, Teddy! It won’t do. The picketa’s got i’on bahs. . . .”

Feet swayed about me, and some hobnailed miner kicked my ankle and went
stumbling. There were shouts and curses, and then everything had swept
past me. I rolled over on my face and beheld the chauffeur, young
Verrall, and Lord Redcar—the latter holding up his long skirts of fur,
and making a grotesque figure—one behind the other, in full bolt across
a coldly comet-lit interval, towards the open gates of the colliery.

I raised myself up on my hands.

Young Verrall!

I had not even drawn my revolver—I had forgotten it. I was covered with
coaly mud—knees, elbows, shoulders, back. I had not even drawn my
revolver! . . .

A feeling of ridiculous impotence overwhelmed me. I struggled painfully
to my feet.

I hesitated for a moment towards the gates of the colliery, and then
went limping homeward, thwarted, painful, confused, and ashamed. I had
not the heart nor desire to help in the wrecking and burning of Lord
Redcar’s motor.

§ 4


In the night, fever, pain, fatigue—it may be the indigestion of my
supper of bread and cheese—roused me at last out of a hag-rid sleep to
face despair. I was a soul lost amidst desolations and shame,
dishonored, evilly treated, hopeless. I raged against the God I denied,
and cursed him as I lay.

And it was in the nature of my fever, which was indeed only half
fatigue and illness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth,
that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through the
brief dreams that marked the exhaustions of that vigil, to dominate my
misery. I was sensible, with an exaggerated distinctness, of the
intensity of her physical charm for me, of her every grace and beauty;
she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me and the whole gamut
of pride. She, bodily, was my lost honor. It was not only loss but
disgrace to lose her. She stood for life and all that was denied; she
mocked me as a creature of failure and defeat. My spirit raised itself
towards her, and then the bruise upon my jaw glowed with a dull heat,
and I rolled in the mud again before my rivals.

There were times when something near madness took me, and I gnashed my
teeth and dug my nails into my hands and ceased to curse and cry out
only by reason of the insufficiency of words. And once towards dawn I
got out of bed, and sat by my looking-glass with my revolver loaded in
my hand. I stood up at last and put it carefully in my drawer and
locked it—out of reach of any gusty impulse. After that I slept for a
little while.

Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of the
world. Never a city, never a night the whole year round, but amidst
those who slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath and
misery. Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled, they
agonize near to the very border-line of madness, each one the center of
a universe darkened and lost. . .

The next day I spent in gloomy lethargy.

I had intended to go to Checkshill that day, but my bruised ankle was
too swollen for that to be possible. I sat indoors in the ill-lit
downstairs kitchen, with my foot bandaged, and mused darkly and read.
My dear old mother waited on me, and her brown eyes watched me and
wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations. I had not
told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and my clothes muddy.
She had brushed my clothes in the morning before I got up.

Ah well! Mothers are not treated in that way now. That I suppose must
console me. I wonder how far you will be able to picture that dark,
grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered wall paper,
the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but by no means
economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the rust-spotted steel
fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder how near you can come
to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy I was, unshaven and
collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little timid, dirty, devoted
old woman who hovered about me with love peering out from her puckered
eyelids. . .

When she went out to buy some vegetables in the middle of the morning
she got me a half-penny journal. It was just such a one as these upon
my desk, only that the copy I read was damp from the press, and these
are so dry and brittle, they crack if I touch them. I have a copy of
the actual issue I read that morning; it was a paper called
emphatically the _New Paper_, but everybody bought it and everybody
called it the “yell.” It was full that morning of stupendous news and
still more stupendous headlines, so stupendous that for a little while
I was roused from my egotistical broodings to wider interests. For it
seemed that Germany and England were on the brink of war.

Of all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, war was
certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality it was probably far
less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, the general
acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil
consequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling
confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there any
sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a multitude
of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material, and the
waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing. The old war
of savage and barbaric nations did at least change humanity, you
assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique and discipline,
you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and if successful you took
their land and their women and perpetuated and enlarged your
superiority. The new war changed nothing but the color of maps, the
design of postage stamps, and the relationship of a few accidentally
conspicuous individuals. In one of the last of these international
epileptic fits, for example, the English, with much dysentery and bad
poetry, and a few hundred deaths in battle, conquered the South African
Boers at a gross cost of about three thousand pounds per head—they
could have bought the whole of that preposterous imitation of a nation
for a tenth of that sum—and except for a few substitutions of
personalities, this group of partially corrupt officials in the place
of that, and so forth, the permanent change was altogether
insignificant. (But an excitable young man in Austria committed suicide
when at length the Transvaal ceased to be a “nation.”) Men went through
the seat of that war after it was all over, and found humanity
unchanged, except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of
an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge
cases—unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old
habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like kraal,
the white in his ugly ill-managed shanty. . .

But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them, through
the mirage of the _New Paper_, in a light of mania. All my adolescence
from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of that monstrous
resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the songs and the
waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller and the glorious heroism
of De Wet—who _always_ got away; that was the great point about the
heroic De Wet—and it never occurred to us that the total population we
fought against was less than half the number of those who lived cramped
ignoble lives within the compass of the Four Towns.

But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater
antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining
itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention
only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute
definitive expression and now percolating and pervading some new region
of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great Britain.

When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong entirely
to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest early
memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty in writing
down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of fact to their
fathers.

Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of
almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had
neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve, that
most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with our affairs
hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions of three
hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about the globe, and
here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six millions, in a state
of confusion no whit better than our own, and the noisy little
creatures who directed papers and wrote books and gave lectures, and
generally in that time of world-dementia pretended to be the national
mind, were busy in both countries, with a sort of infernal unanimity,
exhorting—and not only exhorting but successfully persuading—the two
peoples to divert such small common store of material, moral and
intellectual energy as either possessed, into the purely destructive
and wasteful business of war. And—I have to tell you these things even
if you do not believe them, because they are vital to my story—there
was not a man alive who could have told you of any real permanent
benefit, of anything whatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and
evil, that would result from a war between England and Germany, whether
England shattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever
the end might be.

The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was, in
the microcosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical
wrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measured the
excess of common emotion over the common intelligence, the legacy of
inordinate passion we have received from the brute from which we came.
Just as I had become the slave of my own surprise and anger and went
hither and thither with a loaded revolver, seeking and intending vague
fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went about the earth, hot
eared and muddle headed, with loaded navies and armies terribly ready
at hand. Only there was not even a Nettie to justify their stupidity.
There was nothing but quiet imaginary thwarting on either side.

And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two huge
multitudes of people directed against one another.

The press—those newspapers that are now so strange to us—like the
“Empires,” the “Nations,” the Trusts, and all the other great monstrous
shapes of that extraordinary time—was in the nature of an unanticipated
accident. It had happened, as weeds happen in abandoned gardens, just
as all our world has happened,—because there was no clear Will in the
world to bring about anything better. Towards the end this “press” was
almost entirely under the direction of youngish men of that eager,
rather unintelligent type, that is never able to detect itself aimless,
that pursues nothing with incredible pride and zeal, and if you would
really understand this mad era the comet brought to an end, you must
keep in mind that every phase in the production of these queer old
things was pervaded by a strong aimless energy and happened in a
concentrated rush.

Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.

Figure first, then, a hastily erected and still more hastily designed
building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old London, and a
number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile
swiftness, and within this factory companies of printers, tensely
active with nimble fingers—they were always speeding up the
printers—ply their type-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses
of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of
little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a
throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing
of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and
copy. Then begins a clatter roar of machinery catching the infection,
going faster and faster, and whizzing and banging,—engineers, who have
never had time to wash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans,
while paper runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor
you must suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor-car, leaping out
before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents
clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to “hustle,” getting
wonderfully in everybody’s way. At the sight of him even the messenger
boys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your
vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all the
parts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically toward a
crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last the
only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing vibrating
premises are the hands of the clock.

Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all those
stresses. Then in the small hours, into the now dark and deserted
streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place spurts paper at
every door, bales, heaps, torrents of papers, that are snatched and
flung about in what looks like a free fight, and off with a rush and
clatter east, west, north, and south. The interest passes outwardly;
the men from the little rooms are going homeward, the printers disperse
yawning, the roaring presses slacken. The paper exists. Distribution
follows manufacture, and we follow the bundles.

Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles hurling
into stations, catching trains by a hair’s breadth, speeding on their
way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce accuracy
out upon the platforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of
these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles, into dispersing
parcels, into separate papers, and the dawn happens unnoticed amidst a
great running and shouting of boys, a shoving through letter slots,
openings of windows, spreading out upon book-stalls. For the space of a
few hours you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling
papers—placards everywhere vociferating the hurried lie for the day;
men and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by
study-fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters
waiting for father to finish—a million scattered people reading—reading
headlong—or feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement
jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land.
. .

And then you know, wonderfully gone—gone utterly, vanished as foam
might vanish upon the sand.

Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable
excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—signifying nothing.
. . .

And one of those white parcels was the paper I held in my hands, as I
sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark underground
kitchen of my mother’s, clean roused from my personal troubles by the
yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms,
peeling potatoes as I read.

It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body,
that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the
English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for
all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment,
caught me and swung me about. And all over the country that day,
millions read as I read, and came round into line with me, under the
same magnetic spell, came round—how did we say it?—Ah!—“to face the
foe.”

The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf. The column headed
“Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth. Does it
Matter?” went unread. “Germany”—I usually figured this mythical
malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperor enhanced by
heraldic black wings and a large sword—had insulted our flag. That was
the message of the _New Paper_, and the monster towered over me,
threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting upon my faultless
country’s colors. Somebody had hoisted a British flag on the right bank
of some tropical river I had never heard of before, and a drunken
German officer under ambiguous instructions had torn it down. Then one
of the convenient abundant natives of the country, a British subject
indisputably, had been shot in the leg. But the facts were by no means
clear. Nothing was clear except that we were not going to stand any
nonsense from Germany. Whatever had or had not happened we meant to
have an apology for, and apparently they did not mean apologizing.

“HAS WAR COME AT LAST?”


That was the headline. One’s heart leapt to assent. . . .

There were hours that day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming of
battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and
entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men.

But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember, in
a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes, and
wars.

§ 5


You must understand that I had no set plan of murder when I walked over
to Checkshill. I had no set plan of any sort. There was a great
confusion of dramatically conceived intentions in my head, scenes of
threatening and denunciation and terror, but I did not mean to kill.
The revolver was to turn upon my rival my disadvantage in age and
physique. . . .

But that was not it really! The revolver!—I took the revolver because I
had the revolver and was a foolish young lout. It was a dramatic sort
of thing to take. I had, I say, no plan at all.

Ever and again during that second trudge to Checkshill I was irradiated
with a novel unreasonable hope. I had awakened in the morning with the
hope, it may have been the last unfaded trail of some obliterated
dream, that after all Nettie might relent toward me, that her heart was
kind toward me in spite of all that I imagined had happened. I even
thought it possible that I might have misinterpreted what I had seen.
Perhaps she would explain everything. My revolver was in my pocket for
all that.

I limped at the outset, but after the second mile my ankle warmed to
forgetfulness, and the rest of the way I walked well. Suppose, after
all, I was wrong?

I was still debating that, as I came through the park. By the corner of
the paddock near the keeper’s cottage, I was reminded by some belated
blue hyacinths of a time when I and Nettie had gathered them together.
It seemed impossible that we could really have parted ourselves for
good and all. A wave of tenderness flowed over me, and still flooded me
as I came through the little dell and drew towards the hollies. But
there the sweet Nettie of my boy’s love faded, and I thought of the new
Nettie of desire and the man I had come upon in the moonlight, I
thought of the narrow, hot purpose that had grown so strongly out of my
springtime freshness, and my mood darkened to night.

I crossed the beech wood and came towards the gardens with a resolute
and sorrowful heart. When I reached the green door in the garden wall I
was seized for a space with so violent a trembling that I could not
grip the latch to lift it, for I no longer had any doubt how this would
end. That trembling was succeeded by a feeling of cold, and whiteness,
and self-pity. I was astonished to find myself grimacing, to feel my
cheeks wet, and thereupon I gave way completely to a wild passion of
weeping. I must take just a little time before the thing was done. . .
. I turned away from the door and stumbled for a little distance,
sobbing loudly, and lay down out of sight among the bracken, and so
presently became calm again. I lay there some time. I had half a mind
to desist, and then my emotion passed like the shadow of a cloud, and I
walked very coolly into the gardens.

Through the open door of one of the glass houses I saw old Stuart. He
was leaning against the staging, his hands in his pockets, and so deep
in thought he gave no heed to me.

I hesitated and went on towards the cottage, slowly.

Something struck me as unusual about the place, but I could not tell at
first what it was. One of the bedroom windows was open, and the
customary short blind, with its brass upper rail partly unfastened,
drooped obliquely across the vacant space. It looked negligent and odd,
for usually everything about the cottage was conspicuously trim.

The door was standing wide open, and everything was still. But giving
that usually orderly hall an odd look—it was about half-past two in the
afternoon—was a pile of three dirty plates, with used knives and forks
upon them, on one of the hall chairs.

I went into the hall, looked into either room, and hesitated.

Then I fell to upon the door-knocker and gave a loud rat-tat-too, and
followed this up with an amiable “Hel-lo!”

For a time no one answered me, and I stood listening and expectant,
with my fingers about my weapon. Some one moved about upstairs
presently, and was still again. The tension of waiting seemed to brace
my nerves.

I had my hand on the knocker for the second time, when Puss appeared in
the doorway.

For a moment we remained staring at one another without speaking. Her
hair was disheveled, her face dirty, tear-stained, and irregularly red.
Her expression at the sight of me was pure astonishment. I thought she
was about to say something, and then she had darted away out of the
house again.

“I say, Puss!” I said. “Puss!”

I followed her out of the door. “Puss! What’s the matter? Where’s
Nettie?”

She vanished round the corner of the house.

I hesitated, perplexed whether I should pursue her. What did it all
mean? Then I heard some one upstairs.

“Willie!” cried the voice of Mrs. Stuart. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Where’s every one? Where’s Nettie? I want to have a
talk with her.”

She did not answer, but I heard her dress rustle as she moved. I Judged
she was upon the landing overhead.

I paused at the foot of the stairs, expecting her to appear and come
down.

Suddenly came a strange sound, a rush of sounds, words jumbled and
hurrying, confused and shapeless, borne along upon a note of throaty
distress that at last submerged the words altogether and ended in a
wail. Except that it came from a woman’s throat it was exactly the
babbling sound of a weeping child with a grievance. “I can’t,” she
said, “I can’t,” and that was all I could distinguish. It was to my
young ears the strangest sound conceivable from a kindly motherly
little woman, whom I had always thought of chiefly as an unparalleled
maker of cakes. It frightened me. I went upstairs at once in a state of
infinite alarm, and there she was upon the landing, leaning forward
over the top of the chest of drawers beside her open bedroom door, and
weeping. I never saw such weeping. One thick strand of black hair had
escaped, and hung with a spiral twist down her back; never before had I
noticed that she had gray hairs.

As I came up upon the landing her voice rose again. “Oh that I should
have to tell you, Willie! Oh that I should have to tell you!” She
dropped her head again, and a fresh gust of tears swept all further
words away.

I said nothing, I was too astonished; but I drew nearer to her, and
waited. . . .

I never saw such weeping; the extraordinary wetness of her dripping
handkerchief abides with me to this day.

“That I should have lived to see this day!” she wailed. “I had rather a
thousand times she was struck dead at my feet.”

I began to understand.

“Mrs. Stuart,” I said, clearing my throat; “what has become of Nettie?”

“That I should have lived to see this day!” she said by way of reply.

I waited till her passion abated.

There came a lull. I forgot the weapon in my pocket. I said nothing,
and suddenly she stood erect before me, wiping her swollen eyes.
“Willie,” she gulped, “she’s gone!”

“Nettie?”

“Gone! . . . Run away. . . . Run away from her home. Oh, Willie,
Willie! The shame of it! The sin and shame of it!”

She flung herself upon my shoulder, and clung to me, and began again to
wish her daughter lying dead at our feet.

“There, there,” said I, and all my being was a-tremble. “Where has she
gone?” I said as softly as I could.

But for the time she was preoccupied with her own sorrow, and I had to
hold her there, and comfort her with the blackness of finality
spreading over my soul.

“Where has she gone?” I asked for the fourth time.

“I don’t know—we don’t know. And oh, Willie, she went out yesterday
morning! I said to her, ‘Nettie,’ I said to her, ‘you’re mighty fine
for a morning call.’ ‘Fine clo’s for a fine day,’ she said, and that
was her last words to me!—Willie!—the child I suckled at my breast!”

“Yes, yes. But where has she gone?” I said.

She went on with sobs, and now telling her story with a sort of
fragmentary hurry: “She went out bright and shining, out of this house
for ever. She was smiling, Willie—as if she was glad to be going.
(“Glad to be going,” I echoed with soundless lips.) ‘You’re mighty fine
for the morning,’ I says; ‘mighty fine.’ ‘Let the girl be pretty,’ says
her father, ‘while she’s young!’ And somewhere she’d got a parcel of
her things hidden to pick up, and she was going off—out of this house
for ever!”

She became quiet.

“Let the girl be pretty,” she repeated; “let the girl be pretty while
she’s young. . . . Oh! how can we go on _living_, Willie? He doesn’t
show it, but he’s like a stricken beast. He’s wounded to the heart. She
was always his favorite. He never seemed to care for Puss like he did
for her. And she’s wounded him—”

“Where has she gone?” I reverted at last to that.

“We don’t know. She leaves her own blood, she trusts herself— Oh,
Willie, it’ll kill me! I wish she and me together were lying in our
graves.”

“But”—I moistened my lips and spoke slowly—“she may have gone to
marry.”

“If that was so! I’ve prayed to God it might be so, Willie. I’ve prayed
that he’d take pity on her—him, I mean, she’s with.”

I jerked out: “Who’s that?”

“In her letter, she said he was a gentleman. She did say he was a
gentleman.”

“In her letter. Has she written? Can I see her letter?”

“Her father took it.”

“But if she writes— When did she write?”

“It came this morning.”

“But where did it come from? You can tell—”

“She didn’t say. She said she was happy. She said love took one like a
storm—”

“Curse that! Where is her letter? Let me see it. And as for this
gentleman—”

She stared at me.

“You know who it is.”

“Willie!” she protested.

“You know who it is, whether she said or not?” Her eyes made a mute
unconfident denial.

“Young Verrall?”

She made no answer. “All I could do for you, Willie,” she began
presently.

“Was it young Verrall?” I insisted.

For a second, perhaps, we faced one another in stark understanding. . .
. Then she plumped back to the chest of drawers, and her wet
pocket-handkerchief, and I knew she sought refuge from my relentless
eyes.

My pity for her vanished. She knew it was her mistress’s son as well as
I! And for some time she had known, she had felt.

I hovered over her for a moment, sick with amazed disgust. I suddenly
bethought me of old Stuart, out in the greenhouse, and turned and went
downstairs. As I did so, I looked up to see Mrs. Stuart moving
droopingly and lamely back into her own room.

§ 6


Old Stuart was pitiful.

I found him still inert in the greenhouse where I had first seen him.
He did not move as I drew near him; he glanced at me, and then stared
hard again at the flowerpots before him.

“Eh, Willie,” he said, “this is a black day for all of us.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“The missus takes on so,” he said. “I came out here.”

“What do you mean to do?”

“What _is_ a man to do in such a case?”

“Do!” I cried, “why— Do!”

“He ought to marry her,” he said.

“By God, yes!” I cried. “He must do that anyhow.”

“He ought to. It’s—it’s cruel. But what am _I_ to do? Suppose he won’t?
Likely he won’t. What then?”

He drooped with an intensified despair.

“Here’s this cottage,” he said, pursuing some contracted argument.
“We’ve lived here all our lives, you might say. . . . Clear out. At my
age. . . . One can’t die in a slum.”

I stood before him for a space, speculating what thoughts might fill
the gaps between these broken words. I found his lethargy, and the
dimly shaped mental attitudes his words indicated, abominable. I said
abruptly, “You have her letter?”

He dived into his breast-pocket, became motionless for ten seconds,
then woke up again and produced her letter. He drew it clumsily from
its envelope, and handed it to me silently.

“Why!” he cried, looking at me for the first time, “What’s come to your
chin, Willie?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s a bruise;” and I opened the letter.

It was written on greenish tinted fancy note-paper, and with all and
more than Nettie’s usual triteness and inadequacy of expression. Her
handwriting bore no traces of emotion; it was round and upright and
clear as though it had been done in a writing lesson. Always her
letters were like masks upon her image; they fell like curtains before
the changing charm of her face; one altogether forgot the sound of her
light clear voice, confronted by a perplexing stereotyped thing that
had mysteriously got a hold upon one’s heart and pride. How did that
letter run?—

“MY DEAR MOTHER,
    “Do not be distressed at my going away. I have gone somewhere safe,
    and with some one who cares for me very much. I am sorry for your
    sakes, but it seems that it had to be. Love is a very difficult
    thing, and takes hold of one in ways one does not expect. Do not
    think I am ashamed about this, I glory in my love, and you must not
    trouble too much about me. I am very, very happy (deeply
    underlined).


“Fondest love to Father and Puss.
“Your loving
“Nettie.”


That queer little document! I can see it now for the childish simple
thing it was, but at the time I read it in a suppressed anguish of
rage. It plunged me into a pit of hopeless shame; there seemed to
remain no pride for me in life until I had revenge. I stood staring at
those rounded upstanding letters, not trusting myself to speak or move.
At last I stole a glance at Stuart.

He held the envelope in his hand, and stared down at the postmark
between his horny thumbnails.

“You can’t even tell where she is,” he said, turning the thing round in
a hopeless manner, and then desisting. “It’s hard on us, Willie. Here
she is; she hadn’t anything to complain of; a sort of pet for all of
us. Not even made to do her share of the ‘ousework. And she goes off
and leaves us like a bird that’s learnt to fly. Can’t _trust_ us,
that’s what takes me. Puts ‘erself— But there! What’s to happen to
her?”

“What’s to happen to him?”

He shook his head to show that problem was beyond him.

“You’ll go after her,” I said in an even voice; “you’ll make him marry
her?”

“Where am I to go?” he asked helplessly, and held out the envelope with
a gesture; “and what could I do? Even if I knew— How could I leave the
gardens?”

“Great God!” I cried, “not leave these gardens! It’s your Honor, man!
If she was my daughter—if she was my daughter—I’d tear the world to
pieces!” . . I choked. “You mean to stand it?”

“What can I do?”

“Make him marry her! Horsewhip him! Horsewhip him, I say!—I’d strangle
him!”

He scratched slowly at his hairy cheek, opened his mouth, and shook his
head. Then, with an intolerable note of sluggish gentle wisdom, he
said, “People of our sort, Willie, can’t do things like that.”

I came near to raving. I had a wild impulse to strike him in the face.
Once in my boyhood I happened upon a bird terribly mangled by some cat,
and killed it in a frenzy of horror and pity. I had a gust of that same
emotion now, as this shameful mutilated soul fluttered in the dust,
before me. Then, you know, I dismissed him from the case.

“May I look?” I asked.

He held out the envelope reluctantly.

“There it is,” he said, and pointing with his garden-rough forefinger.
“I.A.P.A.M.P. What can you make of that?”

I took the thing in my hands. The adhesive stamp customary in those
days was defaced by a circular postmark, which bore the name of the
office of departure and the date. The impact in this particular case
had been light or made without sufficient ink, and half the letters of
the name had left no impression. I could distinguish—

I A P    A M P


and very faintly below D.S.O.

I guessed the name in an instant flash of intuition. It was
Shaphambury. The very gaps shaped that to my mind. Perhaps in a sort of
semi-visibility other letters were there, at least hinting themselves.
It was a place somewhere on the east coast, I knew, either in Norfolk
or Suffolk.

“Why!” cried I—and stopped.

What was the good of telling him?

Old Stuart had glanced up sharply, I am inclined to think almost
fearfully, into my face. “You—you haven’t got it?” he said.

Shaphambury—I should remember that.

“You don’t think you got it?” he said.

I handed the envelope back to him.

“For a moment I thought it might be Hampton,” I said.

“Hampton,” he repeated. “Hampton. How could you make Hampton?” He
turned the envelope about. “H.A.M.—why, Willie, you’re a worse hand at
the job than me!”

He replaced the letter in the envelope and stood erect to put this back
in his breast pocket.

I did not mean to take any risks in this affair. I drew a stump of
pencil from my waistcoat pocket, turned a little away from him and
wrote “Shaphambury” very quickly on my frayed and rather grimy shirt
cuff.

“Well,” said I, with an air of having done nothing remarkable.

I turned to him with some unimportant observation—I have forgotten
what.

I never finished whatever vague remark I commenced.

I looked up to see a third person waiting at the greenhouse door.

§ 7


It was old Mrs. Verrall.

I wonder if I can convey the effect of her to you. She was a little old
lady with extraordinarily flaxen hair, her weak aquiline features were
pursed up into an assumption of dignity, and she was richly dressed. I
would like to underline that “richly dressed,” or have the words
printed in florid old English or Gothic lettering. No one on earth is
now quite so richly dressed as she was, no one old or young indulges in
so quiet and yet so profound a sumptuosity. But you must not imagine
any extravagance of outline or any beauty or richness of color. The
predominant colors were black and fur browns, and the effect of
richness was due entirely to the extreme costliness of the materials
employed. She affected silk brocades with rich and elaborate patterns,
priceless black lace over creamy or purple satin, intricate trimmings
through which threads and bands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter
rare furs. Her gloves fitted exquisitely, and ostentatiously simple
chains of fine gold and pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced
about her little person. One was forced to feel that the slightest
article she wore cost more than all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like
Nettie; her bonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies.
Richness, that is the first quality about this old lady that I would
like to convey to you, and the second was cleanliness. You felt that
old Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean. If you had boiled my poor dear
old mother in soda for a month you couldn’t have got her so clean as
Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was. And pervading all her
presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidence in the
respectful subordination of the world.

She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any loss
of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she had come to
interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged the gulf
between their families.

And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as
my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the world that
followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling
inconceivable. Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed
for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things
that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one had
taken up an attitude. There were in England and America, and indeed
throughout the world, two great informal divisions of human beings—the
Secure and the Insecure. There was not and never had been in either
country a nobility—it was and remains a common error that the British
peers were noble—neither in law nor custom were there noble families,
and we altogether lacked the edification one found in Russia, for
example, of a poor nobility. A peerage was an hereditary possession
that, like the family land, concerned only the eldest sons of the
house; it radiated no luster of _noblesse oblige_. The rest of the
world were in law and practice common—and all America was common. But
through the private ownership of land that had resulted from the
neglect of feudal obligations in Britain and the utter want of
political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had
become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it
was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and
who were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but
by the natural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of
living. It was a class without any very definite boundaries; vigorous
individualities, by methods for the most part violent and questionable,
were constantly thrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and
the sons and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by
wild extravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety
and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The rest of the
population was landless and, except by working directly or indirectly
for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such was the
shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the stifled egotism
of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very few indeed of the
Secure could be found to doubt that this was the natural and only
conceivable order of the world.

It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am
displaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopeless
bitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure lived lives
of paradisiacal happiness. The pit of insecurity below them made itself
felt, even though it was not comprehended. Life about them was ugly;
the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressed people, the vulgar
appeals of the dealers in popular commodities, were not to be escaped.
There was below the threshold of their minds an uneasiness; they not
only did not think clearly about social economy but they displayed an
instinctive disinclination to think. Their security was not so perfect
that they had not a dread of falling towards the pit, they were always
lashing themselves by new ropes, their cultivation of “connexions,” of
interests, their desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a
constant ignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the full
flavor of their lives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class
distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants. Read
their surviving books. Each generation bewails the decay of that
“fidelity” of servants, no generation ever saw. A world that is squalid
in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they never understood.
They believed there was not enough of anything to go round, they
believed that this was the intention of God and an incurable condition
of life, and they held passionately and with a sense of right to their
disproportionate share. They maintained a common intercourse as
“Society” of all who were practically secure, and their choice of that
word is exhaustively eloquent of the quality of their philosophy. But,
if you can master these alien ideas upon which the old system rested,
just in the same measure will you understand the horror these people
had for marriages with the Insecure. In the case of their girls and
women it was extraordinarily rare, and in the case of either sex it was
regarded as a disastrous social crime. Anything was better than that.

You are probably aware of the hideous fate that was only too probably
the lot, during those last dark days, of every girl of the insecure
classes who loved and gave way to the impulse of self-abandonment
without marriage, and so you will understand the peculiar situation of
Nettie with young Verrall. One or other had to suffer. And as they were
both in a state of great emotional exaltation and capable of strange
generosities toward each other, it was an open question and naturally a
source of great anxiety to a mother in Mrs. Verrall’s position, whether
the sufferer might not be her son—whether as the outcome of that
glowing irresponsible commerce Nettie might not return prospective
mistress of Checkshill Towers. The chances were greatly against that
conclusion, but such things did occur.

These laws and customs sound, I know, like a record of some
nasty-minded lunatic’s inventions. They were invincible facts in that
vanished world into which, by some accident, I had been born, and it
was the dream of any better state of things that was scouted as lunacy.
Just think of it! This girl I loved with all my soul, for whom I was
ready to sacrifice my life, was not good enough to marry young Verrall.
And I had only to look at his even, handsome, characterless face to
perceive a creature weaker and no better than myself. She was to be his
pleasure until he chose to cast her aside, and the poison of our social
system had so saturated her nature—his evening dress, his freedom and
his money had seemed so fine to her and I so clothed in squalor—that to
that prospect she had consented. And to resent the social conventions
that created their situation, was called “class envy,” and gently born
preachers reproached us for the mildest resentment against an injustice
no living man would now either endure or consent to profit by.

What was the sense of saying “peace” when there was no peace? If there
was one hope in the disorders of that old world it lay in revolt and
conflict to the death.

But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesqueness of the old life,
you will begin to appreciate the interpretation of old Mrs. Verrall’s
appearance that leapt up at once in my mind.

She had come to compromise the disaster!

And the Stuarts _would_ compromise! I saw that only too well.

An enormous disgust at the prospect of the imminent encounter between
Stuart and his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrational way.
I wanted to escape seeing that, seeing even Stuart’s first gesture in
that, at any cost.

“I’m off,” said I, and turned my back on him without any further
farewell.

My line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so I advanced toward her.

I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a little way open, her
forehead wrinkled, and her eyes grew round. She found me a queer
customer even at the first sight, and there was something in the manner
of my advance that took away her breath.

She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to the
level of the hothouse floor. She receded a pace or two, with a certain
offended dignity at the determination of my rush.

I gave her no sort of salutation.

Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation. There
is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing I said to
her—I strip these things before you—if only I can get them stark enough
you will understand and forgive. I was filled with a brutal and
overpowering desire to insult her.

And so I addressed this poor little expensive old woman in the
following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into a
comprehensive plural. “You infernal land thieves!” I said point-blank
into her face. “_Have you come to offer them money?_”

And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudely
beyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched, out of her
world again. . .

I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked to her. So
far as her particular universe went I had not existed at all, or I had
existed only as a dim black thing, an insignificant speck, far away
across her park in irrelevant, unimportant transit, until this moment
when she came, sedately troubled, into her own secure gardens and
sought for Stuart among the greenhouses. Then abruptly I flashed into
being down that green-walled, brick-floored vista as a black-avised,
ill-clad young man, who first stared and then advanced scowling toward
her. Once in existence I developed rapidly. I grew larger in
perspective and became more and more important and sinister every
moment. I came up the steps with inconceivable hostility and disrespect
in my bearing, towered over her, becoming for an instant at least a
sort of second French Revolution, and delivered myself with the
intensest concentration of those wicked and incomprehensible words.
Just for a second I threatened annihilation. Happily that was my
climax.

And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it had always
been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint sense of insecurity
my episode left in its wake.

The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a large
proportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith. I thought they
saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied. But indeed old
Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection of her
family’s right to dominate a wide country side, than she was of
examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other of the
adamantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security.

No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously. But she could not
understand.

None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid
flashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below their
feet. The thing leapt out of the black for a moment and vanished, like
a threatening figure by a desolate roadside lit for a moment by one’s
belated carriage-lamp and then swallowed up by the night. They counted
it with nightmares, and did their best to forget what was evidently as
insignificant as it was disturbing.




CHAPTER THE FOURTH WAR


§ 1

From that moment when I insulted old Mrs. Verrall I became
representative, I was a man who stood for all the disinherited of the
world. I had no hope of pride or pleasure left in me, I was raging
rebellion against God and mankind. There were no more vague intentions
swaying me this way and that; I was perfectly clear now upon what I
meant to do. I would make my protest and die.

I would make my protest and die. I was going to kill Nettie—Nettie who
had smiled and promised and given herself to another, and who stood now
for all the conceivable delightfulnesses, the lost imaginations of the
youthful heart, the unattainable joys in life; and Verrall who stood
for all who profited by the incurable injustice of our social order. I
would kill them both. And that being done I would blow my brains out
and see what vengeance followed my blank refusal to live.

So indeed I was resolved. I raged monstrously. And above me, abolishing
the stars, triumphant over the yellow waning moon that followed it
below, the giant meteor towered up towards the zenith.

“Let me only kill!” I cried. “Let me only kill!”

So I shouted in my frenzy. I was in a fever that defied hunger and
fatigue; for a long time I had prowled over the heath towards
Lowchester talking to myself, and now that night had fully come I was
tramping homeward, walking the long seventeen miles without a thought
of rest. And I had eaten nothing since the morning.

I suppose I must count myself mad, but I can recall my ravings.

There were times when I walked weeping through that brightness that was
neither night nor day. There were times when I reasoned in a
topsy-turvy fashion with what I called the Spirit of All Things. But
always I spoke to that white glory in the sky.

“Why am I here only to suffer ignominies?” I asked. “Why have you made
me with pride that cannot be satisfied, with desires that turn and rend
me? Is it a jest, this world—a joke you play on your guests? I—even
I—have a better humor than that!”

“Why not learn from me a certain decency of mercy? Why not undo? Have I
ever tormented—day by day, some wretched worm—making filth for it to
trail through, filth that disgusts it, starving it, bruising it,
mocking it? Why should you? Your jokes are clumsy. Try—try some milder
fun up there; do you hear? Something that doesn’t hurt so infernally.”

“You say this is your purpose—your purpose with me. You are making
something with me—birth pangs of a soul. Ah! How can I believe you? You
forget I have eyes for other things. Let my own case go, but what of
that frog beneath the cart-wheel, God?—and the bird the cat had torn?”

And after such blasphemies I would fling out a ridiculous little
debating society hand. “Answer me that!”

A week ago it had been moonlight, white and black and hard across the
spaces of the park, but now the light was livid and full of the quality
of haze. An extraordinarily low white mist, not three feet above the
ground, drifted broodingly across the grass, and the trees rose ghostly
out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy and strange was the world
that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my little cracked voice drifted
solitary through the silent mysteries. Sometimes I argued as I have
told, sometimes I tumbled along in moody vacuity, sometimes my torment
was vivid and acute.

Abruptly out of apathy would come a boiling paroxysm of fury, when I
thought of Nettie mocking me and laughing, and of her and Verrall
clasped in one another’s arms.

“I will not have it so!” I screamed. “I will not have it so!”

And in one of these raving fits I drew my revolver from my pocket and
fired into the quiet night. Three times I fired it.

The bullets tore through the air, the startled trees told one another
in diminishing echoes the thing I had done, and then, with a slow
finality, the vast and patient night healed again to calm. My shots, my
curses and blasphemies, my prayers—for anon I prayed—that Silence took
them all.

It was—how can I express it?—a stifled outcry tranquilized, lost, amid
the serene assumptions, the overwhelming empire of that brightness. The
noise of my shots, the impact upon things, had for the instant been
enormous, then it had passed away. I found myself standing with the
revolver held up, astonished, my emotions penetrated by something I
could not understand. Then I looked up over my shoulder at the great
star, and remained staring at it.

“Who are _you_?” I said at last.

I was like a man in a solitary desert who has suddenly heard a voice. .
. .

That, too, passed.

As I came over Clayton Crest I recalled that I missed the multitude
that now night after night walked out to stare at the comet, and the
little preacher in the waste beyond the hoardings, who warned sinners
to repent before the Judgment, was not in his usual place.

It was long past midnight, and every one had gone home. But I did not
think of this at first, and the solitude perplexed me and left a memory
behind. The gas-lamps were all extinguished because of the brightness
of the comet, and that too was unfamiliar. The little newsagent in the
still High Street had shut up and gone to bed, but one belated board
had been put out late and forgotten, and it still bore its placard.

The word upon it—there was but one word upon it in staring letters—was:
“WAR.”

You figure that empty mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps—no
soul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And amidst
that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board, a little askew
and crumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool meteoric glare,
preposterous and appalling, the measureless evil of that word—

“WAR!”

§ 2


I awoke in that state of equanimity that so often follows an emotional
drenching.

It was late, and my mother was beside my bed. She had some breakfast
for me on a battered tray.

“Don’t get up yet, dear,” she said. “You’ve been sleeping. It was three
o’clock when you got home last night. You must have been tired out.”

“Your poor face,” she went on, “was as white as a sheet and your eyes
shining. . . . It frightened me to let you in. And you stumbled on the
stairs.”

My eyes went quietly to my coat pocket, where something still bulged.
She probably had not noticed. “I went to Checkshill,” I said. “You
know—perhaps—?”

“I got a letter last evening, dear,” and as she bent near me to put the
tray upon my knees, she kissed my hair softly. For a moment we both
remained still, resting on that, her cheek just touching my head.

I took the tray from her to end the pause.

“Don’t touch my clothes, mummy,” I said sharply, as she moved towards
them. “I’m still equal to a clothes-brush.”

And then, as she turned away, I astonished her by saying, “You dear
mother, you! A little—I understand. Only—now—dear mother; oh! let me
be! Let me be!”

And, with the docility of a good servant, she went from me. Dear heart
of submission that the world and I had used so ill!

It seemed to me that morning that I could never give way to a gust of
passion again. A sorrowful firmness of the mind possessed me. My
purpose seemed now as inflexible as iron; there was neither love nor
hate nor fear left in me—only I pitied my mother greatly for all that
was still to come. I ate my breakfast slowly, and thought where I could
find out about Shaphambury, and how I might hope to get there. I had
not five shillings in the world.

I dressed methodically, choosing the least frayed of my collars, and
shaving much more carefully than was my wont; then I went down to the
Public Library to consult a map.

Shaphambury was on the coast of Essex, a long and complicated journey
from Clayton. I went to the railway-station and made some memoranda
from the time-tables. The porters I asked were not very clear about
Shaphambury, but the booking-office clerk was helpful, and we puzzled
out all I wanted to know. Then I came out into the coaly street again.
At the least I ought to have two pounds.

I went back to the Public Library and into the newspaper room to think
over this problem.

A fact intruded itself upon me. People seemed in an altogether
exceptional stir about the morning journals, there was something
unusual in the air of the room, more people and more talking than
usual, and for a moment I was puzzled. Then I bethought me: “This war
with Germany, of course!” A naval battle was supposed to be in progress
in the North Sea. Let them! I returned to the consideration of my own
affairs.

Parload?

Could I go and make it up with him, and then borrow? I weighed the
chances of that. Then I thought of selling or pawning something, but
that seemed difficult. My winter overcoat had not cost a pound when it
was new, my watch was not likely to fetch many shillings. Still, both
these things might be factors. I thought with a certain repugnance of
the little store my mother was probably making for the rent. She was
very secretive about that, and it was locked in an old tea-caddy in her
bedroom. I knew it would be almost impossible to get any of that money
from her willingly, and though I told myself that in this issue of
passion and death no detail mattered, I could not get rid of tormenting
scruples whenever I thought of that tea-caddy. Was there no other
course? Perhaps after every other source had been tapped I might
supplement with a few shillings frankly begged from her. “These
others,” I said to myself, thinking without passion for once of the
sons of the Secure, “would find it difficult to run their romances on a
pawnshop basis. However, we must manage it.”

I felt the day was passing on, but I did not get excited about that.
“Slow is swiftest,” Parload used to say, and I meant to get everything
thought out completely, to take a long aim and then to act as a bullet
flies.

I hesitated at a pawnshop on my way home to my midday meal, but I
determined not to pledge my watch until I could bring my overcoat also.

I ate silently, revolving plans.

§ 3


After our midday dinner—it was a potato-pie, mostly potato with some
scraps of cabbage and bacon—I put on my overcoat and got it out of the
house while my mother was in the scullery at the back.

A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a
damp, unsavory, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room
kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the
fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness,
opened, and diffused small crunchable particles about the uneven brick
floor. It was the region of “washing-up,” that greasy, damp function
that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess
and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where
saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of
potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, and rags of a
quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called “dish-clouts,”
rise in my memory at the name. The altar of this place was the “sink,”
a tank of stone, revolting to a refined touch, grease-filmed and
unpleasant to see, and above this was a tap for cold water, so arranged
that when the water descended it splashed and wetted whoever had turned
it on. This tap was our water supply. And in such a place you must
fancy a little old woman, rather incompetent and very gentle, a soul of
unselfishness and sacrifice, in dirty clothes, all come from their
original colors to a common dusty dark gray, in worn, ill-fitting
boots, with hands distorted by ill use, and untidy graying hair—my
mother. In the winter her hands would be “chapped,” and she would have
a cough. And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and
watch in order that I may desert her.

I gave way to queer hesitations in pawning my two negotiable articles.
A weakly indisposition to pawn in Clayton, where the pawnbroker knew
me, carried me to the door of the place in Lynch Street, Swathinglea,
where I had bought my revolver. Then came an idea that I was giving too
many facts about myself to one man, and I came back to Clayton after
all. I forget how much money I got, but I remember that it was rather
less than the sum I had made out to be the single fare to Shaphambury.
Still deliberate, I went back to the Public Library to find out whether
it was possible, by walking for ten or twelve miles anywhere, to
shorten the journey. My boots were in a dreadful state, the sole of the
left one also was now peeling off, and I could not help perceiving that
all my plans might be wrecked if at this crisis I went on shoe leather
in which I could only shuffle. So long as I went softly they would
serve, but not for hard walking. I went to the shoemaker in Hacker
Street, but he would not promise any repairs for me under forty-eight
hours.

I got back home about five minutes to three, resolved to start by the
five train for Birmingham in any case, but still dissatisfied about my
money. I thought of pawning a book or something of that sort, but I
could think of nothing of obvious value in the house. My mother’s
silver—two gravy-spoons and a salt-cellar—had been pawned for some
weeks, since, in fact, the June quarter day. But my mind was full of
hypothetical opportunities.

As I came up the steps to our door, I remarked that Mr. Gabbitas looked
at me suddenly round his dull red curtains with a sort of alarmed
resolution in his eye and vanished, and as I walked along the passage
he opened his door upon me suddenly and intercepted me.

You are figuring me, I hope, as a dark and sullen lout in shabby,
cheap, old-world clothes that are shiny at all the wearing surfaces,
and with a discolored red tie and frayed linen. My left hand keeps in
my pocket as though there is something it prefers to keep a grip upon
there. Mr. Gabbitas was shorter than I, and the first note he struck in
the impression he made upon any one was of something bright and
birdlike. I think he wanted to be birdlike, he possessed the
possibility of an avian charm, but, as a matter of fact, there was
nothing of the glowing vitality of the bird in his being. And a bird is
never out of breath and with an open mouth. He was in the clerical
dress of that time, that costume that seems now almost the strangest of
all our old-world clothing, and he presented it in its cheapest
form—black of a poor texture, ill-fitting, strangely cut. Its long
skirts accentuated the tubbiness of his body, the shortness of his
legs. The white tie below his all-round collar, beneath his innocent
large-spectacled face, was a little grubby, and between his not very
clean teeth he held a briar pipe. His complexion was whitish, and
although he was only thirty-three or four perhaps, his sandy hair was
already thinning from the top of his head.

To your eye, now, he would seem the strangest figure, in the utter
disregard of all physical beauty or dignity about him. You would find
him extraordinarily odd, but in the old days he met not only with
acceptance but respect. He was alive until within a year or so ago, but
his later appearance changed. As I saw him that afternoon he was a very
slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only was his clothing
altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped the man stark, you
would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes from flabby
muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, and in the rounded shoulders
and flawed and yellowish skin, the same failure of any effort toward
clean beauty. You had an instinctive sense that so he had been from the
beginning. You felt he was not only drifting through life, eating what
came in his way, believing what came in his way, doing without any
vigor what came in his way, but that _into_ life also he had drifted.
You could not believe him the child of pride and high resolve, or of
any splendid passion of love. He had just _happened_. . . But we all
happened then. Why am I taking this tone over this poor little curate
in particular?

“Hello!” he said, with an assumption of friendly ease. “Haven’t seen
you for weeks! Come in and have a gossip.”

An invitation from the drawing-room lodger was in the nature of a
command. I would have liked very greatly to have refused it, never was
invitation more inopportune, but I had not the wit to think of an
excuse. “All right,” I said awkwardly, and he held the door open for
me.

“I’d be very glad if you would,” he amplified. “One doesn’t get much
opportunity of intelligent talk in this parish.”

What the devil was he up to, was my secret preoccupation. He fussed
about me with a nervous hospitality, talking in jumpy fragments,
rubbing his hands together, and taking peeps at me over and round his
glasses. As I sat down in his leather-covered armchair, I had an odd
memory of the one in the Clayton dentist’s operating-room—I know not
why.

“They’re going to give us trouble in the North Sea, it seems,” he
remarked with a sort of innocent zest. “I’m glad they mean fighting.”

There was an air of culture about his room that always cowed me, and
that made me constrained even on this occasion. The table under the
window was littered with photographic material and the later albums of
his continental souvenirs, and on the American cloth trimmed shelves
that filled the recesses on either side of the fireplace were what I
used to think in those days a quite incredible number of books—perhaps
eight hundred altogether, including the reverend gentleman’s photograph
albums and college and school text-books. This suggestion of learning
was enforced by the little wooden shield bearing a college coat-of-arms
that hung over the looking-glass, and by a photograph of Mr. Gabbitas
in cap and gown in an Oxford frame that a

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