[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 adorned the opposite wall. And
in the middle of that wall stood his writing-desk, which I knew to have
pigeon-holes when it was open, and which made him seem not merely
cultured but literary. At that he wrote sermons, composing them
himself!

“Yes,” he said, taking possession of the hearthrug, “the war had to
come sooner or later. If we smash their fleet for them now; well,
there’s an end to the matter!”

He stood on his toes and then bumped down on his heels, and looked
blandly through his spectacles at a water-color by his sister—the
subject was a bunch of violets—above the sideboard which was his pantry
and tea-chest and cellar. “Yes,” he said as he did so.

I coughed, and wondered how I might presently get away.

He invited me to smoke—that queer old practice!—and then when I
declined, began talking in a confidential tone of this “dreadful
business” of the strikes. “The war won’t improve _that_ outlook,” he
said, and was very grave for a moment.

He spoke of the want of thought for their wives and children shown by
the colliers in striking merely for the sake of the union, and this
stirred me to controversy, and distracted me a little from my
resolution to escape.

“I don’t quite agree with that,” I said, clearing my throat. “If the
men didn’t strike for the union now, if they let that be broken up,
where would they be when the pinch of reductions did come?”

To which he replied that they couldn’t expect to get top-price wages
when the masters were selling bottom-price coal. I replied, “That isn’t
it. The masters don’t treat them fairly. They have to protect
themselves.”

To which Mr. Gabbitas answered, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve been in the
Four Towns some time, and I must say I don’t think the balance of
injustice falls on the masters’ side.”

“It falls on the men,” I agreed, wilfully misunderstanding him.

And so we worked our way toward an argument. “Confound this argument!”
I thought; but I had no skill in self-extraction, and my irritation
crept into my voice. Three little spots of color came into the cheeks
and nose of Mr. Gabbitas, but his voice showed nothing of his ruffled
temper.

“You see,” I said, “I’m a socialist. I don’t think this world was made
for a small minority to dance on the faces of every one else.”

“My dear fellow,” said the Rev. Gabbitas, “_I’m_ a socialist too. Who
isn’t. But that doesn’t lead me to class hatred.”

“You haven’t felt the heel of this confounded system. _I_ have.”

“Ah!” said he; and catching him on that note came a rap at the front
door, and, as he hung suspended, the sound of my mother letting some
one in and a timid rap.

“_Now_,” thought I, and stood up, resolutely, but he would not let me.
“No, no, no!” said he. “It’s only for the Dorcas money.”

He put his hand against my chest with an effect of physical compulsion,
and cried, “Come in!”

“Our talk’s just getting interesting,” he protested; and there entered
Miss Ramell, an elderly little young lady who was mighty in Church help
in Clayton.

He greeted her—she took no notice of me—and went to his bureau, and I
remained standing by my chair but unable to get out of the room. “I’m
not interrupting?” asked Miss Ramell.

“Not in the least,” he said; drew out the carriers and opened his desk.
I could not help seeing what he did.

I was so fretted by my impotence to leave him that at the moment it did
not connect at all with the research of the morning that he was taking
out money. I listened sullenly to his talk with Miss Ramell, and saw
only, as they say in Wales, with the front of my eyes, the small flat
drawer that had, it seemed, quite a number of sovereigns scattered over
its floor. “They’re so unreasonable,” complained Miss Ramell. Who could
be otherwise in a social organization that bordered on insanity?

I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow on
the plush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs, pipes, and
ash-trays that adorned it. What was it I had to think out before I went
to the station?

Of course! My mind made a queer little reluctant leap—it felt like
being forced to leap over a bottomless chasm—and alighted upon the
sovereigns that were just disappearing again as Mr. Gabbitas shut his
drawer.

“I won’t interrupt your talk further,” said Miss Ramell, receding
doorward.

Mr. Gabbitas played round her politely, and opened the door for her and
conducted her into the passage, and for a moment or so I had the
fullest sense of proximity to those—it seemed to me there must be ten
or twelve—sovereigns. . . .

The front door closed and he returned. My chance of escape had gone.

§ 4


“_I must_ be going,” I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to get
away out of that room.

“My dear chap!” he insisted, “I can’t think of it. Surely—there’s
nothing to call you away.” Then with an evident desire to shift the
venue of our talk, he asked, “You never told me what you thought of
Burble’s little book.”

I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry with
him. It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer and qualify my
opinions to him. Why should I pretend a feeling of intellectual and
social inferiority toward him. He asked what I thought of Burble. I
resolved to tell him—if necessary with arrogance. Then perhaps he would
release me. I did not sit down again, but stood by the corner of the
fireplace.

“That was the little book you lent me last summer?” I said.

“He reasons closely, eh?” he said, and indicated the armchair with a
flat hand, and beamed persuasively.

I remained standing. “I didn’t think much of his reasoning powers,” I
said.

“He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had.”

“That may be. But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,” said I.

“You mean?”

“That he’s wrong. I don’t think he proves his case. I don’t think
Christianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender he is. His
reasoning’s—Rot.”

Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and
propitiation vanished from his manner. His eyes and mouth were round,
his face seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.

“I’m sorry you think that,” he said at last, with a catch in his
breath.

He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a step or
two toward the window and turned. “I suppose you will admit—” he began,
with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension. . . . .

I will not tell you of his arguments or mine. You will find if you care
to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book museums, the
shriveled cheap publications—the publications of the Rationalist Press
Association, for example—on which my arguments were based. Lying in
that curious limbo with them, mixed up with them and indistinguishable,
are the endless “Replies” of orthodoxy, like the mixed dead in some
hard-fought trench. All those disputes of our fathers, and they were
sometimes furious disputes, have gone now beyond the range of
comprehension. You younger people, I know, read them with impatient
perplexity. You cannot understand how sane creatures could imagine they
had joined issue at all in most of these controversies. All the old
methods of systematic thinking, the queer absurdities of the
Aristotelian logic, have followed magic numbers and mystical numbers,
and the Rumpelstiltskin magic of names now into the blackness of the
unthinkable. You can no more understand our theological passions than
you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of
their gods only by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die
because they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back
from a day’s expedition because he had met three crows. Even I, who
have been through it all, recall our controversies now with something
near incredulity.

Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the old
time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced, incredible
Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements. I am inclined to say that
neither believers nor unbelievers had faith as we understand it—they
had insufficient intellectual power. They could not trust unless they
had something to see and touch and say, like their barbarous ancestors
who could not make a bargain without exchange of tokens. If they no
longer worshipped stocks and stones, or eked out their needs with
pilgrimages and images, they still held fiercely to audible images, to
printed words and formulae.

But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?

Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of God and
Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side. And on the
whole—from the impartial perspective of my three and seventy years—I
adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that of the Rev. Gabbitas was
altogether worse.

Little pink spots came into his cheeks, a squealing note into his
voice. We interrupted each other more and more rudely. We invented
facts and appealed to authorities whose names I mispronounced; and,
finding Gabbitas shy of the higher criticism and the Germans, I used
the names of Karl Marx and Engels as Bible exegetes with no little
effect. A silly wrangle! a preposterous wrangle!—you must imagine our
talk becoming louder, with a developing quarrelsome note—my mother no
doubt hovering on the staircase and listening in alarm as who should
say, “My dear, don’t offend it! Oh, don’t offend it! Mr. Gabbitas
enjoys its friendship. Try to think whatever Mr. Gabbitas says”—though
we still kept in touch with a pretence of mutual deference. The ethical
superiority of Christianity to all other religions came to the fore—I
know not how. We dealt with the matter in bold, imaginative
generalizations, because of the insufficiency of our historical
knowledge. I was moved to denounce Christianity as the ethic of slaves,
and declare myself a disciple of a German writer of no little vogue in
those days, named Nietzsche.

For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquainted with
the works of the master. Indeed, all I knew of him had come to me
through a two-column article in _The Clarion_ for the previous week. .
. . But the Rev. Gabbitas did not read _The Clarion_.

I am, I know, putting a strain upon your credulity when I tell you that
I now have little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutely ignorant
even of the name of Nietzsche, although that writer presented a
separate and distinct attitude of attack upon the faith that was in the
reverend gentleman’s keeping.

“I’m a disciple of Nietzsche,” said I, with an air of extensive
explanation.

He shied away so awkwardly at the name that I repeated it at once.

“But do you know what Nietzsche says?” I pressed him viciously.

“He has certainly been adequately answered,” said he, still trying to
carry it off.

“Who by?” I rapped out hotly. “Tell me that!” and became mercilessly
expectant.

§ 5


A happy accident relieved Mr. Gabbitas from the embarrassment of that
challenge, and carried me another step along my course of personal
disaster.

It came on the heels of my question in the form of a clatter of horses
without, and the gride and cessation of wheels. I glimpsed a
straw-hatted coachman and a pair of grays. It seemed an incredibly
magnificent carriage for Clayton.

“Eh!” said the Rev. Gabbitas, going to the window. “Why, it’s old Mrs.
Verrall! It’s old Mrs. Verrall. Really! What _can_ she want with me?”

He turned to me, and the flush of controversy had passed and his face
shone like the sun. It was not every day, I perceived, that Mrs.
Verrall came to see him.

“I get so many interruptions,” he said, almost grinning. “You must
excuse me a minute! Then—then I’ll tell you about that fellow. But
don’t go. I pray you don’t go. I can assure you. . . . _most_
interesting.”

He went out of the room waving vague prohibitory gestures.

“I _must_ go,” I cried after him.

“No, no, no!” in the passage. “I’ve got your answer,” I think it was he
added, and “quite mistaken;” and I saw him running down the steps to
talk to the old lady.

I swore. I made three steps to the window, and this brought me within a
yard of that accursed drawer.

I glanced at it, and then at that old woman who was so absolutely
powerful, and instantly her son and Nettie’s face were flaming in my
brain. The Stuarts had, no doubt, already accepted accomplished facts.
And I too—

What was I doing here?

What was I doing here while judgment escaped me?

I woke up. I was injected with energy. I took one reassuring look at
the curate’s obsequious back, at the old lady’s projected nose and
quivering hand, and then with swift, clean movements I had the little
drawer open, four sovereigns in my pocket, and the drawer shut again.
Then again at the window—they were still talking.

That was all right. He might not look in that drawer for hours. I
glanced at his clock. Twenty minutes still before the Birmingham train.
Time to buy a pair of boots and get away. But how I was to get to the
station?

I went out boldly into the passage, and took my hat and stick. . . .
Walk past him?

Yes. That was all right! He could not argue with me while so important
a person engaged him. . . . I came boldly down the steps.

“I want a list made, Mr. Gabbitas, of all the really _deserving_
cases,” old Mrs. Verrall was saying.

It is curious, but it did not occur to me that here was a mother whose
son I was going to kill. I did not see her in that aspect at all.
Instead, I was possessed by a realization of the blazing imbecility of
a social system that gave this palsied old woman the power to give or
withhold the urgent necessities of life from hundreds of her
fellow-creatures just according to her poor, foolish old fancies of
desert.

“We could make a _provisional_ list of that sort,” he was saying, and
glanced round with a preoccupied expression at me.

“I _must_ go,” I said at his flash of inquiry, and added, “I’ll be back
in twenty minutes,” and went on my way. He turned again to his
patroness as though he forgot me on the instant. Perhaps after all he
was not sorry.

I felt extraordinarily cool and capable, exhilarated, if anything, by
this prompt, effectual theft. After all, my great determination would
achieve itself. I was no longer oppressed by a sense of obstacles, I
felt I could grasp accidents and turn them to my advantage. I would go
now down Hacker Street to the little shoemaker’s—get a sound, good pair
of boots—ten minutes—and then to the railway-station—five minutes
more—and off! I felt as efficient and non-moral as if I was Nietzsche’s
Over-man already come. It did not occur to me that the curate’s clock
might have a considerable margin of error.

§ 6


I missed the train.

Partly that was because the curate’s clock was slow, and partly it was
due to the commercial obstinacy of the shoemaker, who would try on
another pair after I had declared my time was up. I bought the final
pair however, gave him a wrong address for the return of the old ones,
and only ceased to feel like the Nietzschean Over-man, when I saw the
train running out of the station.

Even then I did not lose my head. It occurred to me almost at once
that, in the event of a prompt pursuit, there would be a great
advantage in not taking a train from Clayton; that, indeed, to have
done so would have been an error from which only luck had saved me. As
it was, I had already been very indiscreet in my inquiries about
Shaphambury; for once on the scent the clerk could not fail to remember
me. Now the chances were against his coming into the case. I did not go
into the station therefore at all, I made no demonstration of having
missed the train, but walked quietly past, down the road, crossed the
iron footbridge, and took the way back circuitously by White’s
brickfields and the allotments to the way over Clayton Crest to
Two-Mile Stone, where I calculated I should have an ample margin for
the 6.13 train.

I was not very greatly excited or alarmed then. Suppose, I reasoned,
that by some accident the curate goes to that drawer at once: will he
be certain to miss four out of ten or eleven sovereigns? If he does,
will he at once think I have taken them? If he does, will he act at
once or wait for my return? If he acts at once, will he talk to my
mother or call in the police? Then there are a dozen roads and even
railways out of the Clayton region, how is he to know which I have
taken? Suppose he goes straight at once to the right station, they will
not remember my departure for the simple reason that I didn’t depart.
But they may remember about Shaphambury? It was unlikely.

I resolved not to go directly to Shaphambury from Birmingham, but to go
thence to Monkshampton, thence to Wyvern, and then come down on
Shaphambury from the north. That might involve a night at some
intermediate stopping-place but it would effectually conceal me from
any but the most persistent pursuit. And this was not a case of murder
yet, but only the theft of four sovereigns.

I had argued away all anxiety before I reached Clayton Crest.

At the Crest I looked back. What a world it was! And suddenly it came
to me that I was looking at this world for the last time. If I overtook
the fugitives and succeeded, I should die with them—or hang. I stopped
and looked back more attentively at that wide ugly valley.

It was my native valley, and I was going out of it, I thought never to
return, and yet in that last prospect, the group of towns that had
borne me and dwarfed and crippled and made me, seemed, in some
indefinable manner, strange. I was, perhaps, more used to seeing it
from this comprehensive view-point when it was veiled and softened by
night; now it came out in all its weekday reek, under a clear afternoon
sun. That may account a little for its unfamiliarity. And perhaps, too,
there was something in the emotions through which I had been passing
for a week and more, to intensify my insight, to enable me to pierce
the unusual, to question the accepted. But it came to me then, I am
sure, for the first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was
the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks,
railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches,
chapels, allotment hovels, a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly
smoking accidents in which men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin.
Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing
ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the
potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in
church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the
dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of
industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked
amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its
disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a
morass.

I did not think these things clearly that afternoon. Much less did I
ask how I, with my murderous purpose, stood to them all. I write down
that realization of disorder and suffocation here and now as though I
had thought it, but indeed then I only felt it, felt it transitorily as
I looked back, and then stood with the thing escaping from my mind.

I should never see that country-side again.

I came back to that. At any rate I wasn’t sorry. The chances were I
should die in sweet air, under a clean sky.

From distant Swathinglea came a little sound, the minute undulation of
a remote crowd, and then rapidly three shots.

That held me perplexed for a space. . . . Well, anyhow I was leaving it
all! Thank God I was leaving it all! Then, as I turned to go on, I
thought of my mother.

It seemed an evil world in which to leave one’s mother. My thoughts
focused upon her very vividly for a moment. Down there, under that
afternoon light, she was going to and fro, unaware as yet that she had
lost me, bent and poking about in the darkling underground kitchen,
perhaps carrying a lamp into the scullery to trim, or sitting
patiently, staring into the fire, waiting tea for me. A great pity for
her, a great remorse at the blacker troubles that lowered over her
innocent head, came to me. Why, after all, was I doing this thing?

Why?

I stopped again dead, with the hill crest rising between me and home. I
had more than half a mind to return to her.

Then I thought of the curate’s sovereigns. If he has missed them
already, what should I return to? And, even if I returned, how could I
put them back?

And what of the night after I renounced my revenge? What of the time
when young Verrall came back? And Nettie?

No! The thing had to be done.

But at least I might have kissed my mother before I came away, left her
some message, reassured her at least for a little while. All night she
would listen and wait for me. . . . .

Should I send her a telegram from Two-Mile Stone?

It was no good now; too late, too late. To do that would be to tell the
course I had taken, to bring pursuit upon me, swift and sure, if
pursuit there was to be. No. My mother must suffer!

I went on grimly toward Two-Mile Stone, but now as if some greater will
than mine directed my footsteps thither.

I reached Birmingham before darkness came, and just caught the last
train for Monkshampton, where I had planned to pass the night.




CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS


§ 1

As the train carried me on from Birmingham to Monkshampton, it carried
me not only into a country where I had never been before, but out of
the commonplace daylight and the touch and quality of ordinary things,
into the strange unprecedented night that was ruled by the giant meteor
of the last days.

There was at that time a curious accentuation of the common alternation
of night and day. They became separated with a widening difference of
value in regard to all mundane affairs. During the day, the comet was
an item in the newspapers, it was jostled by a thousand more living
interests, it was as nothing in the skirts of the war storm that was
now upon us. It was an astronomical phenomenon, somewhere away over
China, millions of miles away in the deeps. We forgot it. But directly
the sun sank one turned ever and again toward the east, and the meteor
resumed its sway over us.

One waited for its rising, and yet each night it came as a surprise.
Always it rose brighter than one had dared to think, always larger and
with some wonderful change in its outline, and now with a strange, less
luminous, greener disk upon it that grew with its growth, the umbra of
the earth. It shone also with its own light, so that this shadow was
not hard or black, but it shone phosphorescently and with a diminishing
intensity where the stimulus of the sun’s rays was withdrawn. As it
ascended toward the zenith, as the last trailing daylight went after
the abdicating sun, its greenish white illumination banished the
realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness over all things. It
changed the starless sky about it to an extraordinary deep blue, the
profoundest color in the world, such as I have never seen before or
since. I remember, too, that as I peered from the train that was
rattling me along to Monkshampton, I perceived and was puzzled by a
coppery red light that mingled with all the shadows that were cast by
it.

It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities.
Everywhere the local authorities discontinued street lighting—one could
read small print in the glare,—and so at Monkshampton I went about
through pale, white, unfamiliar streets, whose electric globes had
shadows on the path. Lit windows here and there burnt ruddy orange,
like holes cut in some dream curtain that hung before a furnace. A
policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn woven of moonshine, a
green-faced man opened to us, and there I abode the night. And the next
morning it opened with a mighty clatter, and was a dirty little
beerhouse that stank of beer, and there was a fat and grimy landlord
with red spots upon his neck, and much noisy traffic going by on the
cobbles outside.

I came out, after I had paid my bill, into a street that echoed to the
bawlings of two newsvendors and to the noisy yappings of a dog they had
raised to emulation. They were shouting: “Great British disaster in the
North Sea. A battleship lost with all hands!”

I bought a paper, went on to the railway station reading such details
as were given of this triumph of the old civilization, of the blowing
up of this great iron ship, full of guns and explosives and the most
costly and beautiful machinery of which that time was capable, together
with nine hundred able-bodied men, all of them above the average, by a
contact mine towed by a German submarine. I read myself into a fever of
warlike emotions. Not only did I forget the meteor, but for a time I
forgot even the purpose that took me on to the railway station, bought
my ticket, and was now carrying me onward to Shaphambury.

So the hot day came to its own again, and people forgot the night.

Each night, there shone upon us more and more insistently, beauty,
wonder, the promise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveled for
a space. And at the first gray sounds of dawn again, at the shooting of
bolts and the noise of milk-carts, we forgot, and the dusty habitual
day came yawning and stretching back again. The stains of coal smoke
crept across the heavens, and we rose to the soiled disorderly routine
of life.

“Thus life has always been,” we said; “thus it will always be.”

The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded as
spectacular merely. It signified nothing to us. So far as western
Europe went, it was only a small and ignorant section of the lower
classes who regarded the comet as a portent of the end of the world.
Abroad, where there were peasantries, it was different, but in England
the peasantry had already disappeared. Every one read. The newspaper,
in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germany rushed to its
climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilities of a panic in this
matter. The very tramps upon the high-roads, the children in the
nursery, had learnt that at the utmost the whole of that shining cloud
could weigh but a few score tons. This fact had been shown quite
conclusively by the enormous deflections that had at last swung it
round squarely at our world. It had passed near three of the smallest
asteroids without producing the minutest perceptible deflection in
their course; while, on its own part, it had described a course through
nearly three degrees. When it struck our earth there was to be a
magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for those who were on the right side
of our planet to see, but beyond that nothing. It was doubtful whether
we were on the right side. The meteor would loom larger and larger in
the sky, but with the umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness
out, and at last it would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green
clouds, with a white brightness about the horizon, west and east. Then
a pause—a pause of not very exactly definite duration—and then, no
doubt, a great blaze of shooting stars. They might be of some unwonted
color because of the unknown element that line in the green revealed.
For a little while the zenith would spout shooting stars. Some, it was
hoped, would reach the earth and be available for analysis.

That, science said, would be all. The green clouds would whirl and
vanish, and there might be thunderstorms. But through the attenuated
wisps of comet shine, the old sky, the old stars, would reappear, and
all would be as it had been before. And since this was to happen
between one and eleven in the morning of the approaching Tuesday—I
slept at Monkshampton on Saturday night,—it would be only partially
visible, if visible at all, on our side of the earth. Perhaps, if it
came late, one would see no more than a shooting star low down in the
sky. All this we had with the utmost assurances of science. Still it
did not prevent the last nights being the most beautiful and memorable
of human experiences.

The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had ranged
Shaphambury in vain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleled
glory of the night returned, to think that under its splendid
benediction young Verrall and Nettie made love to one another.

I walked backward and forward, backward and forward, along the sea
front, peering into the faces of the young couples who promenaded, with
my hand in my pocket ready, and a curious ache in my heart that had no
kindred with rage. Until at last all the promenaders had gone home to
bed, and I was alone with the star.

My train from Wyvern to Shaphambury that morning was a whole hour late;
they said it was on account of the movement of troops to meet a
possible raid from the Elbe.

§ 2


Shaphambury seemed an odd place to me even then. But something was
quickening in me at that time to feel the oddness of many accepted
things. Now in the retrospect I see it as intensely queer. The whole
place was strange to my untraveled eyes; the sea even was strange. Only
twice in my life had I been at the seaside before, and then I had gone
by excursion to places on the Welsh coast whose great cliffs of rock
and mountain backgrounds made the effect of the horizon very different
from what it is upon the East Anglian seaboard. Here what they call a
cliff was a crumbling bank of whitey-brown earth not fifty feet high.

So soon as I arrived I made a systematic exploration of Shaphambury. To
this day I retain the clearest memories of the plan I shaped out then,
and how my inquiries were incommoded by the overpowering desire of
every one to talk of the chances of a German raid, before the Channel
Fleet got round to us. I slept at a small public-house in a Shaphambury
back street on Sunday night. I did not get on to Shaphambury from
Wyvern until two in the afternoon, because of the infrequency of Sunday
trains, and I got no clue whatever until late in the afternoon of
Monday. As the little local train bumped into sight of the place round
the curve of a swelling hill, one saw a series of undulating grassy
spaces, amidst which a number of conspicuous notice-boards appealed to
the eye and cut up the distant sea horizon. Most of these referred to
comestibles or to remedies to follow the comestibles; and they were
colored with a view to be memorable rather than beautiful, to “stand
out” amidst the gentle grayish tones of the east coast scenery. The
greater number, I may remark, of the advertisements that were so
conspicuous a factor in the life of those days, and which rendered our
vast tree-pulp newspapers possible, referred to foods, drinks, tobacco,
and the drugs that promised a restoration of the equanimity these other
articles had destroyed. Wherever one went one was reminded in glaring
letters that, after all, man was little better than a worm, that
eyeless, earless thing that burrows and lives uncomplainingly amidst
nutritious dirt, “an alimentary canal with the subservient appendages
thereto.” But in addition to such boards there were also the big black
and white boards of various grandiloquently named “estates.” The
individualistic enterprise of that time had led to the plotting out of
nearly all the country round the seaside towns into roads and
building-plots—all but a small portion of the south and east coast was
in this condition, and had the promises of those schemes been realized
the entire population of the island might have been accommodated upon
the sea frontiers. Nothing of the sort happened, of course; the whole
of this uglification of the coast-line was done to stimulate a little
foolish gambling in plots, and one saw everywhere agents’ boards in
every state of freshness and decay, ill-made exploitation roads
overgrown with grass, and here and there, at a corner, a label,
“Trafalgar Avenue,” or “Sea View Road.” Here and there, too, some small
investor, some shopman with “savings,” had delivered his soul to the
local builders and built himself a house, and there it stood,
ill-designed, mean-looking, isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced
plot, athwart which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst
a bleak desolation of enterprise. Then presently our railway crossed a
high road, and a row of mean yellow brick houses—workmen’s cottages,
and the filthy black sheds that made the “allotments” of that time a
universal eyesore, marked our approach to the more central areas of—I
quote the local guidebook—“one of the most delightful resorts in the
East Anglian poppy-land.” Then more mean houses, the gaunt ungainliness
of the electric force station—it had a huge chimney, because no one
understood how to make combustion of coal complete—and then we were in
the railway station, and barely three-quarters of a mile from the
center of this haunt of health and pleasure.

I inspected the town thoroughly before I made my inquiries. The road
began badly with a row of cheap, pretentious, insolvent-looking shops,
a public-house, and a cab-stand, but, after an interval of little red
villas that were partly hidden amidst shrubbery gardens, broke into a
confusedly bright but not unpleasing High Street, shuttered that
afternoon and sabbatically still. Somewhere in the background a church
bell jangled, and children in bright, new-looking clothes were going to
Sunday-school. Thence through a square of stuccoed lodging-houses, that
seemed a finer and cleaner version of my native square, I came to a
garden of asphalt and euonymus—the Sea Front. I sat down on a cast-iron
seat, and surveyed first of all the broad stretches of muddy, sandy
beach, with its queer wheeled bathing machines, painted with the
advertisements of somebody’s pills—and then at the house fronts that
stared out upon these visceral counsels. Boarding-houses, private
hotels, and lodging-houses in terraces clustered closely right and left
of me, and then came to an end; in one direction scaffolding marked a
building enterprise in progress, in the other, after a waste interval,
rose a monstrous bulging red shape, a huge hotel, that dwarfed all
other things. Northward were low pale cliffs with white denticulations
of tents, where the local volunteers, all under arms, lay encamped, and
southward, a spreading waste of sandy dunes, with occasional bushes and
clumps of stunted pine and an advertisement board or so. A hard blue
sky hung over all this prospect, the sunshine cast inky shadows, and
eastward was a whitish sea. It was Sunday, and the midday meal still
held people indoors.

A queer world! thought I even then—to you now it must seem impossibly
queer,—and after an interval I forced myself back to my own affair.

How was I to ask? What was I to ask for? I puzzled for a long time over
that—at first I was a little tired and indolent—and then presently I
had a flow of ideas.

My solution was fairly ingenious. I invented the following story. I
happened to be taking a holiday in Shaphambury, and I was making use of
the opportunity to seek the owner of a valuable feather boa, which had
been left behind in the hotel of my uncle at Wyvern by a young lady,
traveling with a young gentleman—no doubt a youthful married couple.
They had reached Shaphambury somewhen on Thursday. I went over the
story many times, and gave my imaginary uncle and his hotel plausible
names. At any rate this yarn would serve as a complete justification
for all the questions I might wish to ask.

I settled that, but I still sat for a time, wanting the energy to
begin. Then I turned toward the big hotel. Its gorgeous magnificence
seemed to my inexpert judgment to indicate the very place a rich young
man of good family would select.

Huge draught-proof doors were swung round for me by an ironically
polite under-porter in a magnificent green uniform, who looked at my
clothes as he listened to my question and then with a German accent
referred me to a gorgeous head porter, who directed me to a princely
young man behind a counter of brass and polish, like a bank—like
several banks. This young man, while he answered me, kept his eye on my
collar and tie—and I knew that they were abominable.

“I want to find a lady and gentleman who came to Shaphambury on
Tuesday,” I said.

“Friends of yours?” he asked with a terrible fineness of irony.

I made out at last that here at any rate the young people had not been.
They might have lunched there, but they had had no room. But I went
out—door opened again for me obsequiously—in a state of social
discomfiture, and did not attack any other establishment that
afternoon.

My resolution had come to a sort of ebb. More people were promenading,
and their Sunday smartness abashed me. I forgot my purpose in an acute
sense of myself. I felt that the bulge of my pocket caused by the
revolver was conspicuous, and I was ashamed. I went along the sea front
away from the town, and presently lay down among pebbles and sea
poppies. This mood of reaction prevailed with me all that afternoon. In
the evening, about sundown, I went to the station and asked questions
of the outporters there. But outporters, I found, were a class of men
who remembered luggage rather than people, and I had no sort of idea
what luggage young Verrall and Nettie were likely to have with them.

Then I fell into conversation with a salacious wooden-legged old man
with a silver ring, who swept the steps that went down to the beach
from the parade. He knew much about young couples, but only in general
terms, and nothing of the particular young couple I sought. He reminded
me in the most disagreeable way of the sensuous aspects of life, and I
was not sorry when presently a gunboat appeared in the offing
signalling the coastguard and the camp, and cut short his observations
upon holidays, beaches, and morals.

I went, and now I was past my ebb, and sat in a seat upon the parade,
and watched the brightening of those rising clouds of chilly fire that
made the ruddy west seem tame. My midday lassitude was going, my blood
was running warmer again. And as the twilight and that filmy brightness
replaced the dusty sunlight and robbed this unfamiliar place of all its
matter-of-fact queerness, its sense of aimless materialism, romance
returned to me, and passion, and my thoughts of honor and revenge. I
remember that change of mood as occurring very vividly on this
occasion, but I fancy that less distinctly I had felt this before many
times. In the old times, night and the starlight had an effect of
intimate reality the daytime did not possess. The daytime—as one saw it
in towns and populous places—had hold of one, no doubt, but only as an
uproar might, it was distracting, conflicting, insistent. Darkness
veiled the more salient aspects of those agglomerations of human
absurdity, and one could exist—one could imagine.

I had a queer illusion that night, that Nettie and her lover were close
at hand, that suddenly I should come on them. I have already told how I
went through the dusk seeking them in every couple that drew near. And
I dropped asleep at last in an unfamiliar bedroom hung with gaudily
decorated texts, cursing myself for having wasted a day.

§ 3


I sought them in vain the next morning, but after midday I came in
quick succession on a perplexing multitude of clues. After failing to
find any young couple that corresponded to young Verrall and Nettie, I
presently discovered an unsatisfactory quartette of couples.

Any of these four couples might have been the one I sought; with regard
to none of them was there conviction. They had all arrived either on
Wednesday or Thursday. Two couples were still in occupation of their
rooms, but neither of these were at home. Late in the afternoon I
reduced my list by eliminating a young man in drab, with side whiskers
and long cuffs, accompanied by a lady, of thirty or more, of
consciously ladylike type. I was disgusted at the sight of them; the
other two young people had gone for a long walk, and though I watched
their boarding-house until the fiery cloud shone out above, sharing and
mingling in an unusually splendid sunset, I missed them. Then I
discovered them dining at a separate table in the bow window, with
red-shaded candles between them, peering out ever and again at this
splendor that was neither night nor day. The girl in her pink evening
dress looked very light and pretty to me—pretty enough to enrage
me,—she had well shaped arms and white, well-modeled shoulders, and the
turn of her cheek and the fair hair about her ears was full of subtle
delights; but she was not Nettie, and the happy man with her was that
odd degenerate type our old aristocracy produced with such odd
frequency, chinless, large bony nose, small fair head, languid
expression, and a neck that had demanded and received a veritable
sleeve of collar. I stood outside in the meteor’s livid light, hating
them and cursing them for having delayed me so long. I stood until it
was evident they remarked me, a black shape of envy, silhouetted
against the glare.

That finished Shaphambury. The question I now had to debate was which
of the remaining couples I had to pursue.

I walked back to the parade trying to reason my next step out, and
muttering to myself, because there was something in that luminous
wonderfulness that touched one’s brain, and made one feel a little
light-headed.

One couple had gone to London; the other had gone to the Bungalow
village at Bone Cliff. Where, I wondered, was Bone Cliff?

I came upon my wooden-legged man at the top of his steps.

“Hullo,” said I.

He pointed seaward with his pipe, his silver ring shone in the sky
light.

“Rum,” he said.

“What is?” I asked.

“Search-lights! Smoke! Ships going north! If it wasn’t for this blasted
Milky Way gone green up there, we might see.”

He was too intent to heed my questions for a time. Then he vouchsafed
over his shoulder—

“Know Bungalow village?—rather. Artis’ and such. Nice goings on! Mixed
bathing—something scandalous. Yes.”

“But where is it?” I said, suddenly exasperated.

“There!” he said. “What’s that flicker? A gunflash—or I’m a lost soul!”

“You’d hear,” I said, “long before it was near enough to see a flash.”

He didn’t answer. Only by making it clear I would distract him until he
told me what I wanted to know could I get him to turn from his absorbed
contemplation of that phantom dance between the sea rim and the shine.
Indeed I gripped his arm and shook him. Then he turned upon me cursing.

“Seven miles,” he said, “along this road. And now go to ‘ell with yer!”

I answered with some foul insult by way of thanks, and so we parted,
and I set off towards the bungalow village.

I found a policeman, standing star-gazing, a little way beyond the end
of the parade, and verified the wooden-legged man’s directions.

“It’s a lonely road, you know,” he called after me. . . .

I had an odd intuition that now at last I was on the right track. I
left the dark masses of Shaphambury behind me, and pushed out into the
dim pallor of that night, with the quiet assurance of a traveler who
nears his end.

The incidents of that long tramp I do not recall in any orderly
succession, the one progressive thing is my memory of a growing
fatigue. The sea was for the most part smooth and shining like a
mirror, a great expanse of reflecting silver, barred by slow broad
undulations, but at one time a little breeze breathed like a faint sigh
and ruffled their long bodies into faint scaly ripples that never
completely died out again. The way was sometimes sandy, thick with
silvery colorless sand, and sometimes chalky and lumpy, with lumps that
had shining facets; a black scrub was scattered, sometimes in thickets,
sometimes in single bunches, among the somnolent hummocks of sand. At
one place came grass, and ghostly great sheep looming up among the
gray. After a time black pinewoods intervened, and made sustained
darknesses along the road, woods that frayed out at the edges to
weirdly warped and stunted trees. Then isolated pine witches would
appear, and make their rigid gestures at me as I passed. Grotesquely
incongruous amidst these forms, I presently came on estate boards,
appealing, “Houses can be built to suit purchaser,” to the silence, to
the shadows, and the glare.

Once I remember the persistent barking of a dog from somewhere inland
of me, and several times I took out and examined my revolver very
carefully. I must, of course, have been full of my intention when I did
that, I must have been thinking of Nettie and revenge, but I cannot now
recall those emotions at all. Only I see again very distinctly the
greenish gleams that ran over lock and barrel as I turned the weapon in
my hand.

Then there was the sky, the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless
sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and
the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon the shine, and
very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, or
sails, or smoke, or any lights, dark, deadly, furtive things, traveling
very swiftly and keeping an equal distance. And when I looked again
they were very small, and then the shine had swallowed them up.

Then once a flash and what I thought was a gun, until I looked up and
saw a fading trail of greenish light still hanging in the sky. And
after that there was a shiver and whispering in the air, a stronger
throbbing in one’s arteries, a sense of refreshment, a renewal of
purpose. . . .

Somewhere upon my way the road forked, but I do not remember whether
that was near Shaphambury or near the end of my walk. The hesitation
between two rutted unmade roads alone remains clear in my mind.

At last I grew weary. I came to piled heaps of decaying seaweed and
cart tracks running this way and that, and then I had missed the road
and was stumbling among sand hummocks quite close to the sea. I came
out on the edge of the dimly glittering sandy beach, and something
phosphorescent drew me to the water’s edge. I bent down and peered at
the little luminous specks that floated in the ripples.

Presently with a sigh I stood erect, and contemplated the lonely peace
of that last wonderful night. The meteor had now trailed its shining
nets across the whole space of the sky and was beginning to set; in the
east the blue was coming to its own again; the sea was an intense edge
of blackness, and now, escaped from that great shine, and faint and
still tremulously valiant, one weak elusive star could just be seen,
hovering on the verge of the invisible.

How beautiful it was! how still and beautiful! Peace! peace!—the peace
that passeth understanding, robed in light descending! . . .

My heart swelled, and suddenly I was weeping.

There was something new and strange in my blood. It came to me that
indeed I did not want to kill.

I did not want to kill. I did not want to be the servant of my passions
any more. A great desire had come to me to escape from life, from the
daylight which is heat and conflict and desire, into that cool night of
eternity—and rest. I had played—I had done.

I stood upon the edge of the great ocean, and I was filled with an
inarticulate spirit of prayer, and I desired greatly—peace from myself.

And presently, there in the east, would come again the red discoloring
curtain over these mysteries, the finite world again, the gray and
growing harsh certainties of dawn. My resolve I knew would take up with
me again. This was a rest for me, an interlude, but to-morrow I should
be William Leadford once more, ill-nourished, ill-dressed, ill-equipped
and clumsy, a thief and shamed, a wound upon the face of life, a source
of trouble and sorrow even to the mother I loved; no hope in life left
for me now but revenge before my death.

Why this paltry thing, revenge? It entered into my thoughts that I
might end the matter now and let these others go.

To wade out into the sea, into this warm lapping that mingled the
natures of water and light, to stand there breast-high, to thrust my
revolver barrel into my mouth———?

Why not?

I swung about with an effort. I walked slowly up the beach thinking. .
. .

I turned and looked back at the sea. No! Something within me said,
“No!”

I must think.

It was troublesome to go further because the hummocks and the tangled
bushes began. I sat down amidst a black cluster of shrubs, and rested,
chin on hand. I drew my revolver from my pocket and looked at it, and
held it in my hand. Life? Or Death? . . .

I seemed to be probing the very deeps of being, but indeed
imperceptibly I fell asleep, and sat dreaming.

§ 4


Two people were bathing in the sea.

I had awakened. It was still that white and wonderful night, and the
blue band of clear sky was no wider than before. These people must have
come into sight as I fell asleep, and awakened me almost at once. They
waded breast-deep in the water, emerging, coming shoreward, a woman,
with her hair coiled about her head, and in pursuit of her a man,
graceful figures of black and silver, with a bright green surge flowing
off from them, a pattering of flashing wavelets about them. He smote
the water and splashed it toward her, she retaliated, and then they
were knee-deep, and then for an instant their feet broke the long
silver margin of the sea.

Each wore a tightly fitting bathing dress that hid nothing of the
shining, dripping beauty of their youthful forms.

She glanced over her shoulder and found him nearer than she thought,
started, gesticulated, gave a little cry that pierced me to the heart,
and fled up the beach obliquely toward me, running like the wind, and
passed me, vanished amidst the black distorted bushes, and was gone—she
and her pursuer, in a moment, over the ridge of sand.

I heard him shout between exhaustion and laughter. . . .

And suddenly I was a thing of bestial fury, standing up with hands held
up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening, against the
sky. . . .

For this striving, swift thing of light and beauty was Nettie—and this
was the man for whom I had been betrayed!

And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbing of
my will—unavenged!

In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, in
quiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless sand.

§ 5


I came up over the little ridge and discovered the bungalow village I
had been seeking, nestling in a crescent lap of dunes. A door slammed,
the two runners had vanished, and I halted staring.

There was a group of three bungalows nearer to me than the others. Into
one of these three they had gone, and I was too late to see which. All
had doors and windows carelessly open, and none showed a light.

This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of the
reaction of artistic-minded and carelessly living people against the
costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the more formal seaside
resorts of that time. It was, you must understand, the custom of the
steam-railway companies to sell their carriages after they had been
obsolete for a sufficient length of years, and some genius had hit upon
the possibility of turning these into little habitable cabins for the
summer holiday. The thing had become a fashion with a certain
Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and these little
improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandas and
supplementary leantos added to their accommodation, made the brightest
contrast conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorous resorts. Of
course there were many discomforts in such camping that had to be faced
cheerfully, and so this broad sandy beach was sacred to high spirits
and the young. Art muslin and banjoes, Chinese lanterns and frying, are
leading “notes,” I find, in the impression of those who once knew such
places well. But so far as I was concerned this odd settlement of
pleasure-squatters was a mystery as well as a surprise, enhanced rather
than mitigated by an imaginative suggestion or so I had received from
the wooden-legged man at Shaphambury. I saw the thing as no gathering
of light hearts and gay idleness, but grimly—after the manner of poor
men poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy. To the
poor man, to the grimy workers, beauty and cleanness were absolutely
denied; out of a life of greasy dirt, of muddied desires, they watched
their happier fellows with a bitter envy and foul, tormenting
suspicions. Fancy a world in which the common people held love to be a
sort of beastliness, own sister to being drunk! . . .

There was in the old time always something cruel at the bottom of this
business of sexual love. At least that is the impression I have brought
with me across the gulf of the great Change. To succeed in love seemed
such triumph as no other success could give, but to fail was as if one
was tainted. . . .

I felt no sense of singularity that this thread of savagery should run
through these emotions of mine and become now the whole strand of these
emotions. I believed, and I think I was right in believing, that the
love of all true lovers was a sort of defiance then, that they closed a
system in each other’s arms and mocked the world without. You loved
against the world, and these two loved AT me. They had their business
with one another, under the threat of a watchful fierceness. A sword, a
sharp sword, the keenest edge in life, lay among their roses.

Whatever may be true of this for others, for me and my imagination, at
any rate, it was altogether true. I was never for dalliance, I was
never a jesting lover. I wanted fiercely; I made love impatiently.
Perhaps I had written irrelevant love-letters for that very reason;
because with this stark theme I could not play. . .

The thought of Nettie’s shining form, of her shrinking bold abandon to
her easy conqueror, gave me now a body of rage that was nearly too
strong for my heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merely
physical being. I came down among the pale sand-heaps slowly toward
that queer village of careless sensuality, and now within my puny body
I was coldly sharpset for pain and death, a darkly gleaming hate, a
sword of evil, drawn.

§ 6


I halted, and stood planning what I had to do.

Should I go to bungalow after bungalow until one of the two I sought
answered to my rap? But suppose some servant intervened!

Should I wait where I was—perhaps until morning—watching? And
meanwhile———

All the nearer bungalows were very still now. If I walked softly to
them, from open windows, from something seen or overheard, I might get
a clue to guide me. Should I advance circuitously, creeping upon them,
or should I walk straight to the door? It was bright enough for her to
recognize me clearly at a distance of many paces.

The difficulty to my mind lay in this, that if I involved other people
by questions, I might at last confront my betrayers with these others
close about me, ready to snatch my weapon and seize my hands. Besides,
what names might they bear here?

“Boom!” the sound crept upon my senses, and then again it came.

I turned impatiently as one turns upon an impertinence, and beheld a
great ironclad not four miles out, steaming fast across the dappled
silver, and from its funnels sparks, intensely red, poured out into the
night. As I turned, came the hot flash of its guns, firing seaward, and
answering this, red flashes and a streaming smoke in the line between
sea and sky. So I remembered it, and I remember myself staring at it—in
a state of stupid arrest. It was an irrelevance. What had these things
to do with me?

With a shuddering hiss, a rocket from a headland beyond the village
leapt up and burst hot gold against the glare, and the sound of the
third and fourth guns reached me.

The windows of the dark bungalows, one after another, leapt out,
squares of ruddy brightness that flared and flickered and became
steadily bright. Dark heads appeared looking seaward, a door opened,
and sent out a brief lane of yellow to mingle and be lost in the
comet’s brightness. That brought me back to the business in hand.

“Boom! boom!” and when I looked again at the great ironclad, a little
torchlike spurt of flame wavered behind her funnels. I could hear the
throb and clangor of her straining engines. . . .

I became aware of the voices of people calling to one another in the
village. A white-robed, hooded figure, some man in a bathing wrap,
absurdly suggestive of an Arab in his burnous, came out from one of the
nearer bungalows, and stood clear and still and shadowless in the
glare.

He put his hands to shade his seaward eyes, and shouted to people
within.

The people within—_my_ people! My fingers tightened on my revolver.
What was this war nonsense to me? I would go round among the hummocks
with the idea of approaching the three bungalows inconspicuously from
the flank. This fight at sea might serve my purpose—except for that, it
had no interest for me at all. Boom! boom! The huge voluminous
concussions rushed past me, beat at my heart and passed. In a moment
Nettie would come out to see.

First one and then two other wrappered figures came out of the
bungalows to join the first. His arm pointed seaward, and his voice, a
full tenor, rose in explanation. I could hear some of the words. “It’s
a German!” he said. “She’s caught.”

Some one disputed that, and there followed a little indistinct babble
of argument. I went on slowly in the circuit I had marked out, watching
these people as I went.

They shouted together with such a common intensity of direction that I
halted and looked seaward. I saw the tall fountain flung by a shot that
had just missed the great warship. A second rose still nearer us, a
third, and a fourth, and then a great uprush of dust, a whirling cloud,
leapt out of the headland whence the rocket had come, and spread with a
slow deliberation right and left. Hard on that an enormous crash, and
the man with the full voice leapt and cried, “Hit!”

Let me see! Of course, I had to go round beyond the bungalows, and then
come up towards the group from behind.

A high-pitched woman’s voice called, “Honeymooners! honeymooners! Come
out and see!”

Something gleamed in the shadow of the nearer bungalow, and a man’s
voice answered from within. What he said I did not catch, but suddenly
I heard Nettie calling very distinctly, “We’ve been bathing.”

The man who had first come out shouted, “Don’t you hear the guns?
They’re fighting—not five miles from shore.”

“Eh?” answered the bungalow, and a window opened.

“Out there!”

I did not hear the reply, because of the faint rustle of my own
movements. Clearly these people were all too much occupied by the
battle to look in my direction, and so I walked now straight toward the
darkness that held Nettie and the black desire of my heart.

“Look!” cried some one, and pointed skyward.

I glanced up, and behold! The sky was streaked with bright green
trails. They radiated from a point halfway between the western horizon
and the zenith, and within the shining clouds of the meteor a streaming
movement had begun, so that it seemed to be pouring both westwardly and
back toward the east, with a crackling sound, as though the whole
heaven was stippled over with phantom pistol-shots. It seemed to me
then as if the meteor was coming to help me, descending with those
thousand pistols like a curtain to fend off this unmeaning foolishness
of the sea.

“Boom!” went a gun on the big ironclad, and “boom!” and the guns of the
pursuing cruisers flashed in reply.

To glance up at that streaky, stirring light scum of the sky made one’s
head swim. I stood for a moment dazed, and more than a little giddy. I
had a curious instant of purely speculative thought. Suppose, after
all, the fanatics were right, and the world _was_ coming to an end!
What a score that would be for Parload!

Then it came into my head that all these things were happening to
consecrate my revenge! The war below, the heavens above, were the
thunderous garment of my deed. I heard Nettie’s voice cry out not fifty
yards away, and my passion surged again. I was to return to her amid
these terrors bearing unanticipated death. I was to possess her, with a
bullet, amidst thunderings and fear. At the thought I lifted up my
voice to a shout that went unheard, and advanced now recklessly,
revolver displayed in my hand.

It was fifty yards, forty yards, thirty yards—the little group of
people, still heedless of me, was larger and more important now, the
green-shot sky and the fighting ships remoter. Some one darted out from
the bungalow, with an interrupted question, and stopped, suddenly aware
of me. It was Nettie, with some coquettish dark wrap about her, and the
green glare shining on her sweet face and white throat. I could see her
expression, stricken with dismay and terror, at my advance, as though
something had seized her by the heart and held her still—a target for
my shots.

“Boom!” came the ironclad’s gunshot like a command. “Bang!” the bullet
leapt from my hand. Do you know, I did not want to shoot her then.
Indeed I did not want to shoot her then! Bang! and I had fired again,
still striding on, and—each time it seemed I had missed.

She moved a step or so toward me, still staring, and then someone
intervened, and near beside her I saw young Verrall.

A heavy stranger, the man in the hooded bath-gown, a fat,
foreign-looking man, came out of nowhere like a shield before them. He
seemed a preposterous interruption. His face was full of astonishment
and terror. He rushed across my path with arms extended and open hands,
as one might try to stop a runaway horse. He shouted some nonsense. He
seemed to want to dissuade me, as though dissuasion had anything to do
with it now.

“Not you, you fool!” I said hoarsely. “Not you!” But he hid Nettie
nevertheless.

By an enormous effort I resisted a mechanical impulse to shoot through
his fat body. Anyhow, I knew I mustn’t shoot him. For a moment I was in
doubt, then I became very active, turned aside abruptly and dodged his
pawing arm to the left, and so found two others irresolutely in my way.
I fired a third shot in the air, just over their heads, and ran at
them. They hastened left and right; I pulled up and faced about within
a yard of a foxy-faced young man coming sideways, who seemed about to
grapple me. At my resolute halt he fell back a pace, ducked, and threw
up a defensive arm, and then I perceived the course was clear, and
ahead of me, young Verrall and Nettie—he was holding her arm to help
her—running away. “Of course!” said I.

I fired a fourth ineffectual shot, and then in an access of fury at my
misses, started out to run them down and shoot them barrel to backbone.
“These people!” I said, dismissing all these interferences. . . . “A
yard,” I panted, speaking aloud to myself, “a yard! Till then, take
care, you mustn’t—mustn’t shoot again.”

Some one pursued me, perhaps several people—I do not know, we left them
all behind. . . .

We ran. For a space I was altogether intent upon the swift monotony of
flight and pursuit. The sands were changed to a whirl of green
moonshine, the air was thunder. A luminous green haze rolled about us.
What did such things matter? We ran. Did I gain or lose? that was the
question. They ran through a gap in a broken fence that sprang up
abruptly out of nothingness and turned to the right. I noted we were in
a road. But this green mist! One seemed to plough through it. They were
fading into it, and at that thought I made a spurt that won a dozen
feet or more.

She staggered. He gripped her arm, and dragged her forward. They
doubled to the left. We were off the road again and on turf. It felt
like turf. I tripped and fell at a ditch that was somehow full of
smoke, and was up again, but now they were phantoms half gone into the
livid swirls about me. . . .

Still I ran.

On, on! I groaned with the violence of my effort. I staggered again and
swore. I felt the concussions of great guns tear past me through the
murk.

They were gone! Everything was going, but I kept on running. Once more
I stumbled. There was something about my feet that impeded me, tall
grass or heather, but I could not see what it was, only this smoke that
eddied about my knees. There was a noise and spinning in my brain, a
vain resistance to a dark green curtain that was falling, falling,
falling, fold upon fold. Everything grew darker and darker.

I made one last frantic effort, and raised my revolver, fired my
penultimate shot at a venture, and fell headlong to the ground. And
behold! the green curtain was a black one, and the earth and I and all
things ceased to be.




BOOK THE SECOND
THE GREEN VAPORS




CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE CHANGE


§ 1

I seemed to awaken out of a refreshing sleep.

I did not awaken with a start, but opened my eyes, and lay very
comfortably looking at a line of extraordinarily scarlet poppies that
glowed against a glowing sky. It was the sky of a magnificent sunrise,
and an archipelago of gold-beached purple islands floated in a sea of
golden green. The poppies too, swan-necked buds, blazing corollas,
translucent stout seed-vessels, stoutly upheld, had a luminous quality,
seemed wrought only from some more solid kind of light.

I stared unwonderingly at these things for a time, and then there rose
upon my consciousness, intermingling with these, the bristling golden
green heads of growing barley.

A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished again
in my mind. Everything was very still.

Everything was as still as death.

I felt very light, full of the sense of physical well-being. I
perceived I was lying on my side in a little trampled space in a weedy,
flowering barley field, that was in some inexplicable way saturated
with light and beauty. I sat up, and remained for a long time filled
with the delight and charm of the delicate little convolvulus that
twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel that laced the ground
below.

Then that question returned. What was this place? How had I come to be
sleeping here?

I could not remember.

It perplexed me that somehow my body felt strange to me. It was
unfamiliar—I could not tell how—and the barley, and the beautiful
weeds, and the slowly developing glory of the dawn behind; all those
things partook of the same unfamiliarity. I felt as though I was a
thing in some very luminous painted window, as though this dawn broke
through me. I felt I was part of some exquisite picture painted in
light and joy.

A faint breeze bent and rustled the barley-heads, and jogged my mind
forward.

Who was I? That was a good way of beginning.

I held up my left hand and arm before me, a grubby hand, a frayed cuff;
but with a quality of painted unreality, transfigured as a beggar might
have been by Botticelli. I looked for a time steadfastly at a beautiful
pearl sleeve-link.

I remembered Willie Leadford, who had owned that arm and hand, as
though he had been some one else.

Of course! My history—its rough outline rather than the immediate
past—began to shape itself in my memory, very small, very bright and
inaccessible, like a thing watched through a microscope. Clayton and
Swathinglea returned to my mind; the slums and darkness, Dureresque,
minute and in their rich dark colors pleasing, and through them I went
towards my destiny. I sat hands on knees recalling that queer
passionate career that had ended with my futile shot into the growing
darkness of the End. The thought of that shot awoke my emotions again.

There was something in it now, something absurd, that made me smile
pityingly.

Poor little angry, miserable creature! Poor little angry, miserable
world!

I sighed for pity, not only pity for myself, but for all the hot
hearts, the tormented brains, the straining, striving things of hope
and pain, who had found their peace at last beneath the pouring mist
and suffocation of the comet. Because certainly that world was over and
done. They were all so weak and unhappy, and I was now so strong and so
serene. For I felt sure I was dead; no one living could have this
perfect assurance of good, this strong and confident peace. I had made
an end of the fever called living. I was dead, and it was all right,
and these———?

I felt an inconsistency.

These, then, must be the barley fields of God!—the still and silent
barley fields of God, full of unfading poppy flowers whose seeds bear
peace.

§ 2


It was queer to find barley fields in heaven, but no doubt there were
many surprises in store for me.

How still everything was! Peace! The peace that passeth understanding.
After all it had come to me! But, indeed, everything was very still! No
bird sang. Surely I was alone in the world! No birds sang. Yes, and all
the distant sounds of life had ceased, the lowing of cattle, the
barking of dogs. . . .

Something that was like fear beatified came into my heart. It was all
right, I knew; but to be alone! I stood up and met the hot summons of
the rising sun, hurrying towards me, as it were, with glad tidings,
over the spikes of the barley. . . .

Blinded, I made a step. My foot struck something hard, and I looked
down to discover my revolver, a blue-black thing, like a dead snake at
my feet.

For a moment that puzzled me.

Then I clean forgot about it. The wonder of the quiet took possession
of my soul. Dawn, and no birds singing!

How beautiful was the world! How beautiful, but how still! I walked
slowly through the barley towards a line of elder bushes, wayfaring
tree and bramble that made the hedge of the field. I noted as I passed
along a dead shrew mouse, as it seemed to me, among the halms; then a
still toad. I was surprised that this did not leap aside from my
footfalls, and I stooped and picked it up. Its body was limp like life,
but it made no struggle, the brightness of its eye was veiled, it did
not move in my hand.

It seems to me now that I stood holding that lifeless little creature
for some time. Then very softly I stooped down and replaced it. I was
trembling—trembling with a nameless emotion. I looked with quickened
eyes closely among the barley stems, and behold, now everywhere I saw
beetles, flies, and little creatures that did not move, lying as they
fell when the vapors overcame them; they seemed no more than painted
things. Some were novel creatures to me. I was very unfamiliar with
natural things. “My God!” I cried; “but is it only I———?”

And then at my next movement something squealed sharply. I turned
about, but I could not see it, only I saw a little stir in a rut and
heard the diminishing rustle of the unseen creature’s flight. And at
that I turned to my toad again, and its eye moved and it stirred. And
presently, with infirm and hesitating gestures, it stretched its limbs
and began to crawl away from me.

But wonder, that gentle sister of fear, had me now. I saw a little way
ahead a brown and crimson butterfly perched upon a cornflower. I
thought at first it was the breeze that stirred it, and then I saw its
wings were quivering. And even as I watched it, it started into life,
and spread itself, and fluttered into the air.

I watched it fly, a turn this way, a turn that, until suddenly it
seemed to vanish. And now, life was returning to this thing and that on
every side of me, with slow stretchings and bendings, with twitterings,
with a little start and stir. . . .

I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of these drugged, feebly
awakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a very
glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and interlaced
like splendid music. It was rich with lupin, honeysuckle, campions, and
ragged robin; bed straw, hops, and wild clematis twined and hung among
its branches, and all along its ditch border the starry stitchwort
lifted its childish faces, and chorused in lines and masses. Never had
I seen such a symphony of note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves.
And suddenly in its depths, I heard a chirrup and the whirr of startled
wings.

Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I stood for
a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the intricate delicacy
before me and marveling how richly God has made his worlds. . . . .

“Tweedle-Tweezle,” a lark had shot the stillness with his shining
thread of song; one lark, and then presently another, invisibly in the
air, making out of that blue quiet a woven cloth of gold. . . .

The earth recreated—only by the reiteration of such phrases may I hope
to give the intense freshness of that dawn. For a time I was altogether
taken up with the beautiful details of being, as regardless of my old
life of jealous passion and impatient sorrow as though I was Adam new
made. I could tell you now with infinite particularity of the shut
flowers that opened as I looked, of tendrils and grass blades, of a
blue-tit I picked up very tenderly—never before had I remarked the
great delicacy of feathers—that presently disclosed its bright black
eye and judged me, and perched, swaying fearlessly, upon my finger, and
spread unhurried wings and flew away, and of a great ebullition of
tadpoles in the ditch; like all the things that lived beneath the
water, they had passed unaltered through the Change. Amid such
incidents, I lived those first great moments, losing for a time in the
wonder of each little part the mighty wonder of the whole.

A little path ran between hedge and barley, and along this, leisurely
and content and glad, looking at this beautiful thing and that, moving
a step and stopping, then moving on again, I came presently to a stile,
and deep below it, and overgrown, was a lane.

And on the worn oak of the stile was a round label, and on the label
these words, “Swindells’ G 90 Pills.”

I sat myself astraddle on the stile, not fully grasping all the
implications of these words. But they perplexed me even more than the
revolver and my dirty cuff.

About me now the birds lifted up their little hearts and sang, ever
more birds and more.

I read the label over and over again, and joined it to the fact that I
still wore my former clothes, and that my revolver had been lying at my
feet. One conclusion stared out at me. This was no new planet, no
glorious hereafter such as I had supposed. This beautiful wonderland
was the world, the same old world of my rage and death! But at least it
was like meeting a familiar house-slut, washed and dignified, dressed
in a queen’s robes, worshipful and fine. . . .

It might be the old world indeed, but something new lay upon all
things, a glowing certitude of health and happiness. It might be the
old world, but the dust and fury of the old life was certainly done. At
least I had no doubt of that.

I recalled the last phases of my former life, that darkling climax of
pursuit and anger and universal darkness and the whirling green vapors
of extinction. The comet had struck the earth and made an end to all
things; of that too I was assured.

But afterward? . . .

And now?

The imaginations of my boyhood came back as speculative possibilities.
In those days I had believed firmly in the necessary advent of a last
day, a great coming out of the sky, trumpetings and fear, the
Resurrection, and the Judgment. My roving fancy now suggested to me
that this Judgment must have come and passed. That it had passed and in
some manner missed me. I was left alone here, in a swept and garnished
world (except, of course, for this label of Swindells’) to begin again
perhaps. . . .

No doubt Swindells has got his deserts.

My mind ran for a time on Swindells, on the imbecile pushfulness of
that extinct creature, dealing in rubbish, covering the country-side
with lies in order to get—what had he sought?—a silly, ugly, great
house, a temper-destroying motor-car, a number of disrespectful, abject
servants; thwarted intrigues for a party-fund baronetcy as the crest of
his life, perhaps. You cannot imagine the littleness of those former
times; their naive, queer absurdities! And for the first time in my
existence I thought of these things without bitterness. In the former
days I had seen wickedness, I had seen tragedy, but now I saw only the
extraordinary foolishness of the old life. The ludicrous side of human
wealth and importance turned itself upon me, a shining novelty, poured
down upon me like the sunrise, and engulfed me in laughter. Swindells!
Swindells, damned! My vision of Judgment became a delightful burlesque.
I saw the chuckling Angel sayer with his face veiled, and the corporeal
presence of Swindells upheld amidst the laughter of the spheres.
“Here’s a thing, and a very pretty thing, and what’s to be done with
this very pretty thing?” I saw a soul being drawn from a rotund,
substantial-looking body like a whelk from its shell. . . .

I laughed loudly and long. And behold! even as I laughed the keen point
of things accomplished stabbed my mirth, and I was weeping, weeping
aloud, convulsed with weeping, and the tears were pouring down my face.

§ 3


Everywhere the awakening came with the sunrise. We awakened to the
gladness of the morning; we walked dazzled in a light that was joy.
Everywhere that was so. It was always morning. It was morning because,
until the direct rays of the sun touched it, the changing nitrogen of
our atmosphere did not pass into its permanent phase, and the sleepers
lay as they had fallen. In its intermediate state the air hung inert,
incapable of producing either revival or stupefaction, no longer green,
but not yet changed to the gas that now lives in us. . . .

To every one, I think, came some parallel to the mental states I have
already sought to describe—a wonder, an impression of joyful novelty.
There was also very commonly a certain confusion of the intelligence, a
difficulty in self-recognition. I remember clearly as I sat on my stile
that presently I had the clearest doubts of my own identity and fell
into the oddest metaphysical questionings. “If this be I,” I said,
“then how is it I am no longer madly seeking Nettie? Nettie is now the
remotest thing—and all my wrongs. Why have I suddenly passed out of all
that passion? Why does not the thought of Verrall quicken my pulses?” .
. .

I was only one of many millions who that morning had the same doubts. I
suppose one knows one’s self for one’s self when one returns from sleep
or insensibility by the familiarity of one’s bodily sensations, and
that morning all our most intimate bodily sensations were changed. The
intimate chemical processes of life were changed, its nervous metaboly.
For the fluctuating, uncertain, passion-darkened thought and feeling of
the old time came steady, full-bodied, wholesome processes. Touch was
different, sight was different, sound and all the senses were subtler;
had it not been that our thought was steadier and fuller, I believe
great multitudes of men would have gone mad. But, as it was, we
understood. The dominant impression I would convey in this account of
the Change is one of enormous release, of a vast substantial
exaltation. There was an effect, as it were, of light-headedness that
was also clear-headedness, and the alteration in one’s bodily
sensations, instead of producing the mental obfuscation, the loss of
identity that was a common mental trouble under former conditions, gave
simply a new detachment from the tumid passions and entanglements of
the personal life.

In this story of my bitter, restricted youth that I have been telling
you, I have sought constantly to convey the narrowness, the intensity,
the confusion, muddle, and dusty heat of the old world. It was quite
clear to me, within an hour of my awakening, that all that was, in some
mysterious way, over and done. That, too, was the common experience.
Men stood up; they took the new air into their lungs—a deep long
breath, and the past fell from them; they could forgive, they could
disregard, they could attempt. . . . And it was no new thing, no
miracle that sets aside the former order of the world. It was a change
in material conditions, a change in the atmosphere, that at one bound
had released them. Some of them it had released to death. . . . Indeed,
man himself had changed not at all. We knew before the Change, the
meanest knew, by glowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories
and music and beautiful things, by heroic instances and splendid
stories, how fine mankind could be, how fine almost any human being
could upon occasion be; but the poison in the air, its poverty in all
the nobler elements which made such moments rare and remarkable—all
that has changed. The air was changed, and the Spirit of Man that had
drowsed and slumbered and dreamt dull and evil things, awakened, and
stood with wonder-clean eyes, refreshed, looking again on life.

§ 4


The miracle of the awakening came to me in solitude, the laughter, and
then the tears. Only after some time did I come upon another man. Until
I heard his voice calling I did not seem to feel there were any other
people in the world. All that seemed past, with all the stresses that
were past. I had come out of the individual pit in which my shy egotism
had lurked, I had overflowed to all humanity, I had seemed to be all
humanity; I had laughed at Swindells as I could have laughed at myself,
and this shout that came to me seemed like the coming of an unexpected
thought in my own mind. But when it was repeated I answered.

“I am hurt,” said the voice, and I descended into the lane forthwith,
and so came upon Melmount sitting near the ditch with his back to me.

Some of the incidental sensory impressions of that morning bit so
deeply into my mind that I verily believe, when at last I face the
greater mysteries that lie beyond this life, when the things of this
life fade from me as the mists of the morning fade before the sun,
these irrelevant petty details will be the last to leave me, will be
the last wisps visible of that attenuating veil. I believe, for
instance, I could match the fur upon the collar of his great motoring
coat now, could paint the dull red tinge of his big cheek with his fair
eyelashes just catching the light and showing beyond. His hat was off,
his dome-shaped head, with its smooth hair between red and extreme
fairness, was bent forward in scrutiny of his twisted foot. His back
seemed enormous. And there was something about the mere massive sight
of him that filled me with liking.

“What’s wrong?” said I.

“I say,” he said, in his full deliberate tones, straining round to see
me and showing a profile, a well-modeled nose, a sensitive, clumsy, big
lip, known to every caricaturist in the world, “I’m in a fix. I fell
and wrenched my ankle. Where are you?”

I walked round him and stood looking at his face. I perceived he had
his gaiter and sock and boot off, the motor gauntlets had been cast
aside, and he was kneading the injured part in an exploratory manner
with his thick thumbs.

“By Jove!” I said, “you’re Melmount!”

“Melmount!” He thought. “That’s my name,” he said, without looking up.
. . . “But it doesn’t affect my ankle.”

We remained silent for few moments except for a grunt of pain from him.

“Do you know?” I asked, “what has happened to things?”

He seemed to complete his diagnosis. “It’s not broken,” he said.

“Do you know,” I repeated, “what has happened to everything?”

“No,” he said, looking up at me incuriously for the first time.

“There’s some difference———”

“There’s a difference.” He smiled, a smile of unexpected pleasantness,
and an interest was coming into his eyes. “I’ve been a little
preoccupied with my own internal sensations. I remark an extraordinary
brightness about things. Is that it?”

“That’s part of it. And a queer feeling, a clear-headedness———”

He surveyed me and meditated gravely. “I woke up,” he said, feeling his
way in his memory.

“And I.”

“I lost my way—I forget quite how. There was a curious green fog.” He
stared at his foot, remembering. “Something to do with a comet. I was
by a hedge in the darkness. Tried to run. . . . Then I must have
pitched into this lane. Look!” He pointed with his head. “There’s a
wooden rail new broken there. I must have stumbled over that out of the
field above.” He scrutinized this and concluded. “Yes. . . .”

“It was dark,” I said, “and a sort of green gas came out of nothing
everywhere. That is the last _I_ remember.”

“And then you woke up? So did I. . . . In a state of great
bewilderment. Certainly there’s something odd in the air. I was—I was
rushing along a road in a motor-car, very much excited and preoccupied.
I got down——” He held out a triumphant finger. “Ironclads!”

“_Now_ I’ve got it! We’d strung our fleet from here to Texel. We’d got
right across them and the Elbe mined. We’d lost the _Lord Warden_. By
Jove, yes. The _Lord Warden!_ A battleship that cost two million
pounds—and that fool Rigby said it didn’t matter! Eleven hundred men
went down. . . . I remember now. We were sweeping up the North Sea like
a net, with the North Atlantic fleet waiting at the Faroes for ‘em—and
not one of ‘em had three days’ coal! Now, was that a dream? No! I told
a lot of people as much—a meeting was it?—to reassure them. They were
warlike but extremely frightened. Queer people—paunchy and bald like
gnomes, most of them. Where? Of course! We had it all over—a big
dinner—oysters!—Colchester. I’d been there, just to show all this raid
scare was nonsense. And I was coming back here. . . . But it doesn’t
seem as though that was—recent. I suppose it was. Yes, of course!—it
was. I got out of my car at the bottom of the rise with the idea of
walking along the cliff path, because every one said one of their
battleships was being chased along the shore. That’s clear! I heard
their guns———”

He reflected. “Queer I should have forgotten! Did _you_ hear any guns?”

I said I had heard them.

“Was it last night?”

“Late last night. One or two in the morning.”

He leant back on his hand and looked at me, smiling frankly. “Even
now,” he said, “it’s odd, but the whole of that seems like a silly
dream. Do you think there _was_ a _Lord Warden?_ Do you really believe
we sank all that machinery—for fun? It was a dream. And yet—it
happened.”

By all the standards of the former time it would have been remarkable
that I talked quite easily and freely with so great a man. “Yes,” I
said; “that’s it. One feels one has awakened—from something more than
that green gas. As though the other things also—weren’t quite real.”

He knitted his brows and felt the calf of his leg thoughtfully. “I made
a speech at Colchester,” he said.

I thought he was going to add something more about that, but there
lingered a habit of reticence in the man that held him for the moment.
“It is a very curious thing,” he broke away; “that this pain should be,
on the whole, more interesting than disagreeable.”

“You are in pain?”

“My ankle is! It’s either broken or badly sprained—I think sprained;
it’s very painful to move, but personally I’m not in pain. That sort of
general sickness that comes with local injury—not a trace of it! . . .”
He mused and remarked, “I was speaking at Colchester, and saying things
about the war. I begin to see it better. The reporters—scribble,
scribble. Max Sutaine, 1885. Hubbub. Compliments about the oysters.
Mm—mm. . . . What was it? About the war? A war that must needs be long
and bloody, taking toll from castle and cottage, taking toll! . . .
Rhetorical gusto! Was I drunk last night?”

His eyebrows puckered. He had drawn up his right knee, his elbow rested
thereon and his chin on his fist. The deep-set gray eyes beneath his
thatch of eyebrow stared at unknown things. “My God!” he murmured, “My
God!” with a note of disgust. He made a big brooding figure in the
sunlight, he had an effect of more than physical largeness; he made me
feel that it became me to wait upon his thinking. I had never met a man
of this sort before; I did not know such men existed. . . .

It is a curious thing, that I cannot now recall any ideas whatever that
I had before the Change about the personalities of statesmen, but I
doubt if ever in those days I thought of them at all as tangible
individual human beings, conceivably of some intellectual complexity. I
believe that my impression was a straightforward blend of caricature
and newspaper leader. I certainly had no respect for them. And now
without servility or any insincerity whatever, as if it were a
first-fruit of the Change, I found myself in the presence of a human
being towards whom I perceived myself inferior and subordinate, before
whom I stood without servility or any insincerity whatever, in an
attitude of respect and attention. My inflamed, my rancid egotism—or
was it after all only the chances of life?—had never once permitted
that before the Change.

He emerged from his thoughts, still with a faint perplexity in his
manner. “That speech I made last night,” he said, “was damned
mischievous nonsense, you know. Nothing can alter that. Nothing. . . .
No! . . . Little fat gnomes in evening dress—gobbling oysters. Gulp!”

It was a most natural part of the wonder of that morning that he should
adopt this incredible note of frankness, and that it should abate
nothing from my respect for him.

“Yes,” he said, “you are right. It’s all indisputable fact, and I can’t
believe it was anything but a dream.”

§ 5


That memory stands out against the dark past of the world with
extraordinary clearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was full
of the calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a curious
persuasion too that there was a distant happy clamor of pealing bells,
but that I am half convinced is a mistake. Nevertheless, there was
something in the fresh bite of things, in the dewy newness of sensation
that set bells rejoicing in one’s brain. And that big, fair, pensive
man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his clumsy pose, as though
indeed some Great Master of strength and humor had made him.

And—it is so hard now to convey these things—he spoke to me, a
stranger, without reservations, carelessly, as men now speak to men.
Before those days, not only did we think badly, but what we thought, a
thousand short-sighted considerations, dignity, objective discipline,
discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of soul, made us
muffle before we told it to our fellow-men.

“It’s all returning now,” he said, and told me half soliloquizingly
what was in his mind.

I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out image after
image to my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragments of
speech. If I had a precise full memory of that morning I should give it
you, verbatim, minutely. But here, save for the little sharp things
that stand out, I find only blurred general impressions. Throughout I
have to make up again his half-forgotten sentences and speeches, and be
content with giving you the general effect. But I can see and hear him
now as he said, “The dream got worst at the end. The war—a perfectly
horrible business! Horrible! And it was just like a nightmare, you
couldn’t do anything to escape from it—every one was driven!”

His sense of indiscretion was gone.

He opened the war out to me—as every one sees it now. Only that morning
it was astonishing. He sat there on the ground, absurdly forgetful of
his bare and swollen foot, treating me as the humblest accessory and as
altogether an equal, talking out to himself the great obsessions of his
mind. “We could have prevented it! Any of us who chose to speak out
could have prevented it. A little decent frankness. What was there to
prevent us being frank with one another? Their emperor—his position was
a pile of ridiculous assumptions, no doubt, but at bottom—he was a sane
man.” He touched off the emperor in a few pithy words, the German
press, the German people, and our own. He put it as we should put it
all now, but with a certain heat as of a man half guilty and wholly
resentful. “Their damned little buttoned-up professors!” he cried,
incidentally. “Were there ever such men? And ours! Some of us might
have taken a firmer line. . . . If a lot of us had taken a firmer line
and squashed that nonsense early. . . .”

He lapsed into inaudible whisperings, into silence. . . .

I stood regarding him, understanding him, learning marvelously from
him. It is a fact that for the best part of the morning of the Change I
forgot Nettie and Verrall as completely as though they were no more
than characters in some novel that I had put aside to finish at my
leisure, in order that I might talk to this man.

“Eh, well,” he said, waking startlingly from his thoughts. “Here we are
awakened! The thing can’t go on now; all this must end. How it ever
began———! My dear boy, how did all those things ever begin? I feel like
a new Adam. . . . Do you think this has happened—generally? Or shall we
find all these gnomes and things? . . . Who cares?”

He made as if to rise, and remembered his ankle. He suggested I should
help him as far as his bungalow. There seemed nothing strange to either
of us that he should requisition my services or that I should
cheerfully obey. I helped him bandage his ankle, and we set out, I his
crutch, the two of us making up a sort of limping quadruped, along the
winding lane toward the cliffs and the sea.

§ 6


His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and a quarter
from the lane. We went down to the beach margin and along the pallid
wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying, hopping,
tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, and then, as soon
as we could, sitting down. His ankle was, in fact, broken, and he could
not put it to the ground without exquisite pain. So that it took us
nearly two hours to get to the house, and it would have taken longer if
his butler-valet had not come out to assist me. They had found
motor-car and chauffeur smashed and still at the bend of the road near
the house, and had been on that side looking for Melmount, or they
would have seen us before.

For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalk
boulder, now on a timber groin, and talking one to the other, with the
frankness proper to the intercourse of men of good intent, without
reservations or aggressions, in the common, open fashion of
contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then, nevertheless, was the
rarest and strangest thing in the world. He for the most part talked,
but at some shape of a question I told him—as plainly as I could tell
of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible to me—of my
murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how the green vapors
overcame me. He watched me with grave eyes and nodded understandingly,
and afterwards he asked me brief penetrating questions about my
education, my upbringing, my work. There was a deliberation in his
manner, brief full pauses, that had in them no element of delay.

“Yes,” he said, “yes—of course. What a fool I have been!” and said no
more until we had made another of our tripod struggles along the beach.
At first I did not see the connection of my story with that
self-accusation.

“Suppose,” he said, panting on the groin, “there had been such a thing
as a statesman! . . .”

He turned to me. “If one had decided all this muddle shall end! If one
had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who builds takes
site and stone, and made———” He flung out his big broad hand at the
glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, “something to fit that
setting.”

He added in explanation, “Then there wouldn’t have been such stories as
yours at all, you know. . . .”

“Tell me more about it,” he said, “tell me all about yourself. I feel
all these things have passed away, all these things are to be changed
for ever. . . . You won’t be what you have been from this time forth.
All the things you have done—don’t matter now. To us, at any rate, they
don’t matter at all. We have met, who were separated in that darkness
behind us. Tell me.

“Yes,” he said; and I told my story straight and as frankly as I have
told it to you. “And there, where those little skerries of weed rock
run out to the ebb, beyond the headland, is Bungalow village. What did
you do with your pistol?”

“I left it lying there—among the barley.”

He glanced at me from under his light eyelashes. “If others feel like
you and I,” he said, “there’ll be a lot of pistols left among the
barley to-day. . . .”

So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love of brothers
so plain between us it needed not a word. Our souls went out to one
another in stark good faith; never before had I had anything but a
guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man. Still I see him, upon that
wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see him leaning against the
shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at the poor drowned sailor
whose body we presently found. For we found a newly drowned man who had
just chanced to miss this great dawn in which we rejoiced. We found him
lying in a pool of water, among brown weeds in the dark shadow of the
timberings. You must not overrate the horrors of the former days; in
those days it was scarcely more common to see death in England than it
would be to-day. This dead man was a sailor from the _Rother Adler_,
the great German battleship that—had we but known it—lay not four miles
away along the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn
and battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and
holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all strong
and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .

I remember that poor boy very vividly. He had been drowned during the
anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young face was quiet and calm,
but the skin of his chest had been crinkled by scalding water and his
right arm was bent queerly back. Even to this needless death and all
its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come. Everything flowed
together to significance as we stood there, I, the ill-clad, cheaply
equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his great fur-trimmed coat—he was
hot with walking but he had not thought to remove it—leaning upon the
clumsy groins and pitying this poor victim of the war he had helped to
make. “Poor lad!” he said, “poor lad! A child we blunderers sent to
death! Do look at the quiet beauty of that face, that body—to be flung
aside like this!”

(I remember that near this dead man’s hand a stranded star-fish writhed
its slowly feeling limbs, struggling back toward the sea. It left
grooved traces in the sand.)

“There must be no more of this,” panted Melmount, leaning on my
shoulder, “no more of this. . . .”

But most I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting upon a
great chalk boulder with the sunlight on his big, perspiration-dewed
face. He made his resolves. “We must end war,” he said, in that full
whisper of his; “it is stupidity. With so many people able to read and
think—even as it is—there is no need of anything of the sort. Gods!
What have we rulers been at? . . . Drowsing like people in a stifling
room, too dull and sleepy and too base toward each other for any one to
get up and open the window. What haven’t we been at?”

A great powerful figure he sits there still in my memory, perplexed and
astonished at himself and all things. “We must change all this,” he
repeated, and threw out his broad hands in a powerful gesture against
the sea and sky. “We have done so weakly—Heaven alone knows why!” I can
see him now, queer giant that he looked on that dawnlit beach of
splendor, the sea birds flying about us and that crumpled death hard
by, no bad symbol in his clumsiness and needless heat of the unawakened
powers of the former time. I remember it as an integral part of that
picture that far away across the sandy stretches one of those white
estate boards I have described, stuck up a little askew amidst the
yellow-green turf upon the crest of the low cliffs.

He talked with a sort of wonder of the former things. “Has it ever
dawned upon you to imagine the pettiness—the pettiness!—of every soul
concerned in a declaration of war?” he asked. He went on, as though
speech was necessary to make it credible, to describe Laycock, who
first gave the horror words at the cabinet council, “an undersized
Oxford prig with a tenoring voice and a garbage of Greek—the sort of
little fool who is brought up on the admiration of his elder sisters. .
. .

“All the time almost,” he said, “I was watching him—thinking what an
ass he was to be trusted with men’s lives. . . . I might have done
better to have thought that of myself. I was doing nothing to prevent
it all! The damned little imbecile was up to his neck in the drama of
the thing, he liked to trumpet it out, he goggled round at us. ‘Then it
is war!’ he said. Richover shrugged his shoulders. I made some slight
protest and gave in. . . . Afterward I dreamt of him.

“What a lot we were! All a little scared at ourselves—all, as it were,
instrumental. . . .

“And it’s fools like that lead to things like this!” He jerked his head
at that dead man near by us.

“It will be interesting to know what has happened to the world. . . .
This green vapor—queer stuff. But I know what has happened to me. It’s
Conversion. I’ve always known. . . . But this is being a fool. Talk!
I’m going to stop it.”

He motioned to rise with his clumsy outstretched hands.

“Stop what?” said I, stepping forward instinctively to help him.

“War,” he said in his great whisper, putting his big hand on my
shoulder but making no further attempt to arise, “I’m going to put an
end to war—to any sort of war! And all these things that must end. The
world is beautiful, life is great and splendid, we had only to lift up
our eyes and see. Think of the glories through which we have been
driving, like a herd of swine in a garden place. The color in life—the
sounds—the shapes! We have had our jealousies, our quarrels, our
ticklish rights, our invincible prejudices, our vulgar enterprise and
sluggish timidities, we have chattered and pecked one another and
fouled the world—like daws in the temple, like unclean birds in the
holy place of God. All my life has been foolishness and pettiness,
gross pleasures and mean discretions—all. I am a meagre dark thing in
this morning’s glow, a penitence, a shame! And, but for God’s mercy, I
might have died this night—like that poor lad there—amidst the squalor
of my sins! No more of this! No more of this!—whether the whole world
has changed or no, matters nothing. _We two have seen this dawn!_ . .
.”

He paused.

“I will arise and go unto my Father,” he began presently, “and will say
unto Him———”

His voice died away in an inaudible whisper. His hand tightened
painfully on my shoulder and he rose. . . .




CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE AWAKENING


§ 1

So the great Day came to me.

And even as I had awakened so in that same dawn the whole world awoke.

For the whole world of living things had been overtaken by the same
tide of insensibility; in an hour, at the touch of this new gas in the
comet, the shiver of catalytic change had passed about the globe. They
say it was the nitrogen of the air, the old _azote_, that in the
twinkling of an eye was changed out of itself, and in an hour or so
became a respirable gas, differing indeed from oxygen, but helping and
sustaining its action, a bath of strength and healing for nerve and
brain. I do not know the precise changes that occurred, nor the names
our chemists give them, my work has carried me away from such things,
only this I know—I and all men were renewed.

I picture to myself this thing happening in space, a planetary moment,
the faint smudge, the slender whirl of meteor, drawing nearer to this
planet,—this planet like a ball, like a shaded rounded ball, floating
in the void, with its little, nearly impalpable coat of cloud and air,
with its dark pools of ocean, its gleaming ridges of land. And as that
midge from the void touches it, the transparent gaseous outer shell
clouds in an instant green and then slowly clears again. . . .

Thereafter, for three hours or more,—we know the minimum time for the
Change was almost exactly three hours because all the clocks and
watches kept going—everywhere, no man nor beast nor bird nor any living
thing that breathes the air stirred at all but lay still. . . .

Everywhere on earth that day, in the ears of every one who breathed,
there had been the same humming in the air, the same rush of green
vapors, the crepitation, the streaming down of shooting stars. The
Hindoo had stayed his morning’s work in the fields to stare and marvel
and fall, the blue-clothed Chinaman fell head foremost athwart his
midday bowl of rice, the Japanese merchant came out from some
chaffering in his office amazed and presently lay there before his
door, the evening gazers by the Golden Gates were overtaken as they
waited for the rising of the great star. This had happened in every
city of the world, in every lonely valley, in every home and house and
shelter and every open place. On the high seas, the crowding steamship
passengers, eager for any wonder, gaped and marveled, and were suddenly
terror-stricken, and struggled for the gangways and were overcome, the
captain staggered on the bridge and fell, the stoker fell headlong
among his coals, the engines throbbed upon their way untended, the
fishing craft drove by without a hail, with swaying rudder, heeling and
dipping. . . .

The great voice of material Fate cried Halt! And in the midst of the
play the actors staggered, dropped, and were still. The figure runs
from my pen. In New York that very thing occurred. Most of the
theatrical audiences dispersed, but in two crowded houses the company,
fearing a panic, went on playing amidst the gloom, and the people,
trained by many a previous disaster, stuck to their seats. There they
sat, the back rows only moving a little, and there, in disciplined
lines, they drooped and failed, nodded, and fell forward or slid down
upon the floor. I am told by Parload—though indeed I know nothing of
the reasoning on which his confidence rests—-that within an hour of the
great moment of impact the first green modification of nitrogen had
dissolved and passed away, leaving the air as translucent as ever. The
rest of that wonderful interlude was clear, had any had eyes to see its
clearness. In London it was night, but in New York, for example, people
were in the full bustle of the evening’s enjoyment, in Chicago they
were sitting down to dinner, the whole world was abroad. The moonlight
must have illuminated streets and squares littered with crumpled
figures, through which such electric cars as had no automatic brakes
had ploughed on their way until they were stopped by the fallen bodies.
People lay in their dress clothes, in dining-rooms, restaurants, on
staircases, in halls, everywhere just as they had been overcome. Men
gambling, men drinking, thieves lurking in hidden places, sinful
couples, were caught, to arise with awakened mind and conscience amidst
the disorder of their sin. America the comet reached in the full tide
of evening life, but Britain lay asleep. But as I have told, Britain
did not slumber so deeply but that she was in the full tide of what may
have been battle and a great victory. Up and down the North Sea her
warships swept together like a net about their foes. On land, too, that
night was to have decided great issues. The German camps were under
arms from Redingen to Markirch, their infantry columns were lying in
swathes like mown hay, in arrested night march on every track between
Longuyon and Thiancourt, and between Avricourt and Donen. The hills
beyond Spincourt were dusted thick with hidden French riflemen; the
thin lash of the French skirmishers sprawled out amidst spades and
unfinished rifle-pits in coils that wrapped about the heads of the
German columns, thence along the Vosges watershed and out across the
frontier near Belfort nearly to the Rhine. . . .

The Hungarian, the Italian peasant, yawned and thought the morning
dark, and turned over to fall into a dreamless sleep; the Mahometan
world spread its carpet and was taken in prayer. And in Sydney, in
Melbourne, in New Zealand, the thing was a fog in the afternoon, that
scattered the crowd on race-courses and cricket-fields, and stopped the
unloading of shipping and brought men out from their afternoon rest to
stagger and litter the streets. . . .

§ 2


My thoughts go into the woods and wildernesses and jungles of the
world, to the wild life that shared man’s suspension, and I think of a
thousand feral acts interrupted and truncated—as it were frozen, like
the frozen words Pantagruel met at sea. Not only men it was that were
quieted, all living creatures that breathe the air became insensible,
impassive things. Motionless brutes and birds lay amidst the drooping
trees and herbage in the universal twilight, the tiger sprawled beside
his fresh-struck victim, who bled to death in a dreamless sleep. The
very flies came sailing down the air with wings outspread; the spider
hung crumpled in his loaded net; like some gaily painted snowflake the
butterfly drifted to earth and grounded, and was still. And as a queer
contrast one gathers that the fishes in the sea suffered not at all. .
. .

Speaking of the fishes reminds me of a queer little inset upon that
great world-dreaming. The odd fate of the crew of the submarine vessel
B 94 has always seemed memorable to me. So far as I know, they were the
only men alive who never saw that veil of green drawn across the world.
All the while that the stillness held above, they were working into the
mouth of the Elbe, past the booms and the mines, very slowly and
carefully, a sinister crustacean of steel, explosive crammed, along the
muddy bottom. They trailed a long clue that was to guide their fellows
from the mother ship floating awash outside. Then in the long channel
beyond the forts they came up at last to mark down their victims and
get air. That must have been before the twilight of dawn, for they tell
of the brightness of the stars. They were amazed to find themselves not
three hundred yards from an ironclad that had run ashore in the mud,
and heeled over with the falling tide. It was afire amidships, but no
one heeded that—no one in all that strange clear silence heeded
that—and not only this wrecked vessel, but all the dark ships lying
about them, it seemed to their perplexed and startled minds must be
full of dead men!

Theirs I think must have been one of the strangest of all experiences;
they were never insensible; at once, and, I am told, with a sudden
catch of laughter, they began to breathe the new air. None of them has
proved a writer; we have no picture of their wonder, no description of
what was said. But we know these men were active and awake for an hour
and a half at least before the general awakening came, and when at last
the Germans stirred and sat up they found these strangers in possession
of their battleship, the submarine carelessly adrift, and the
Englishmen, begrimed and weary, but with a sort of furious exultation,
still busy, in the bright dawn, rescuing insensible enemies from the
sinking conflagration. . . .

But the thought of certain stokers the sailors of the submarine failed
altogether to save brings me back to the thread of grotesque horror
that runs through all this event, the thread I cannot overlook for all
the splendors of human well-being that have come from it. I cannot
forget the unguided ships that drove ashore, that went down in disaster
with all their sleeping hands, nor how, inland, motor-cars rushed to
destruction upon the roads, and trains upon the railways kept on in
spite of signals, to be found at last by their amazed, reviving drivers
standing on unfamiliar lines, their fires exhausted, or, less lucky, to
be discovered by astonished peasants or awakening porters smashed and
crumpled up into heaps of smoking, crackling ruin. The foundry fires of
the Four Towns still blazed, the smoke of our burning still denied the
sky. Fires burnt indeed the brighter for the Change—and spread. . . .

§ 3


Picture to yourself what happened between the printing and composing of
the copy of the _New Paper_ that lies before me now. It was the first
newspaper that was printed upon earth after the Great Change. It was
pocket-worn and browned, made of a paper no man ever intended for
preservation. I found it on the arbor table in the inn garden while I
was waiting for Nettie and Verrall, before that last conversation of
which I have presently to tell. As I look at it all that scene comes
back to me, and Nettie stands in her white raiment against a blue-green
background of sunlit garden, scrutinizing my face as I read. . . .

It is so frayed that the sheet cracks along the folds and comes to
pieces in my hands. It lies upon my desk, a dead souvenir of the dead
ages of the world, of the ancient passions of my heart. I know we
discussed its news, but for the life of me I cannot recall what we
said, only I remember that Nettie said very little, and that Verrall
for a time read it over my shoulder. And I did not like him to read
over my shoulder. . . .

The document before me must have helped us through the first
awkwardness of that meeting.

But of all that we said and did then I must tell in a later chapter. .
. .

It is easy to see the _New Paper_ had been set up overnight, and then
large pieces of the stereo plates replaced subsequently. I do not know
enough of the old methods of printing to know precisely what happened.
The thing gives one an impression of large pieces of type having been
cut away and replaced by fresh blocks. There is something very rough
and ready about it all, and the new portions print darker and more
smudgily than the old, except toward the left, where they have missed
ink and indented. A friend of mine, who knows something of the old
typography, has suggested to me that the machinery actually in use for
the _New Paper_ was damaged that night, and that on the morning of the
Change Banghurst borrowed a neighboring office—perhaps in financial
dependence upon him—to print in.

The outer pages belong entirely to the old period, the only parts of
the paper that had undergone alteration are the two middle leaves. Here
we found set forth in a curious little four-column oblong of print,
WHAT HAS HAPPENED. This cut across a column with scare headings
beginning, “Great Naval Battle Now in Progress. The Fate of Two Empires
in the Balance. Reported Loss of Two More———”

These things, one gathered, were beneath notice now. Probably it was
guesswork, and fabricated news in the first instance.

It is curious to piece together the worn and frayed fragments, and
reread this discolored first intelligence of the new epoch.

The simple clear statements in the replaced portion of the paper
impressed me at the time, I remember, as bald and strange, in that
framework of shouting bad English. Now they seem like the voice of a
sane man amidst a vast faded violence. But they witness to the prompt
recovery of London from the gas; the new, swift energy of rebound in
that huge population. I am surprised now, as I reread, to note how much
research, experiment, and induction must have been accomplished in the
day that elapsed before the paper was printed. . . . But that is by the
way. As I sit and muse over this partly carbonized sheet, that same
curious remote vision comes again to me that quickened in my mind that
morning, a vision of those newspaper offices I have already described
to you going through the crisis.

The catalytic wave must have caught the place in full swing, in its
nocturnal high fever, indeed in a quite exceptional state of fever,
what with the comet and the war, and more particularly with the war.
Very probably the Change crept into the office imperceptibly, amidst
the noise and shouting, and the glare of electric light that made the
night atmosphere in that place; even the green flashes may have passed
unobserved there, the preliminary descending trails of green vapor
seemed no more than unseasonable drifting wisps of London fog. (In
those days London even in summer was not safe against dark fogs.) And
then at the last the Change poured in and overtook them.

If there was any warning at all for them, it must have been a sudden
universal tumult in the street, and then a much more universal quiet.
They could have had no other intimation.

There was no time to stop the presses before the main development of
green vapor had overwhelmed every one. It must have folded about them,
tumbled them to the earth, masked and stilled them. My imagination is
always curiously stirred by the thought of that, because I suppose it
is the first picture I succeeded in making for myself of what had
happened in the towns. It has never quite lost its strangeness for me
that when the Change came, machinery went on working. I don’t precisely
know why that should have seemed so strange to me, but it did, and
still to a certain extent does. One is so accustomed, I suppose, to
regard machinery as an extension of human personality that the extent
of its autonomy the Change displayed came as a shock to me. The
electric lights, for example, hazy green-haloed nebulas, must have gone
on burning at least for a time; amidst the thickening darkness the huge
presses must have roared on, printing, folding, throwing aside copy
after copy of that fabricated battle report with its quarter column of
scare headlines, and all the place must have still quivered and
throbbed with the familiar roar of the engines. And this though no men
ruled there at all any more! Here and there beneath that thickening fog
the crumpled or outstretched forms of men lay still.

A wonderful thing that must have seemed, had any man had by chance the
power of resistance to the vapor, and could he have walked amidst it.

And soon the machines must have exhausted their feed of ink and paper,
and thumped and banged and rattled emptily amidst the general quiet.
Then I suppose the furnaces failed for want of stoking, the steam
pressure fell in the pistons, the machinery slackened, the lights burnt
dim, and came and went with the ebb of energy from the power-station.
Who can tell precisely the sequence of these things now?

And then, you know, amidst the weakening and terminating noises of men,
the green vapor cleared and vanished, in an hour indeed it had gone,
and it may be a breeze stirred and blew and went about the earth.

The noises of life were all dying away, but some there were that abated
nothing, that sounded triumphantly amidst the universal ebb. To a
heedless world the church towers tolled out two and then three. Clocks
ticked and chimed everywhere about the earth to deafened ears. . . .

And then came the first flush of morning, the first rustlings of the
revival. Perhaps in that office the filaments of the lamps were still
glowing, the machinery was still pulsing weakly, when the crumpled,
booted heaps of cloth became men again and began to stir and stare. The
chapel of the printers was, no doubt, shocked to find itself asleep.
Amidst that dazzling dawn the _New Paper_ woke to wonder, stood up and
blinked at its amazing self. . . .

The clocks of the city churches, one pursuing another, struck four. The
staffs, crumpled and disheveled, but with a strange refreshment in
their veins, stood about the damaged machinery, marveling and
questioning; the editor read his overnight headlines with incredulous
laughter. There was much involuntary laughter that morning. Outside,
the mail men patted the necks and rubbed the knees of their awakening
horses. . . .

Then, you know, slowly and with much conversation and doubt, they set
about to produce the paper.

Imagine those bemused, perplexed people, carried on by the inertia of
their old occupations and doing their best with an enterprise that had
suddenly become altogether extraordinary and irrational. They worked
amidst questionings, and yet light-heartedly. At every stage there must
have been interruptions for discussion. The paper only got down to
Menton five days late.

§ 4


Then let me give you a vivid little impression I received of a certain
prosaic person, a grocer, named Wiggins, and how he passed through the
Change. I heard this man’s story in the post-office at Menton, when, in
the afternoon of the First Day, I bethought me to telegraph to my
mother. The place was also a grocer’s shop, and I found him and the
proprietor talking as I went in. They were trade competitors, and
Wiggins had just come across the street to break the hostile silence of
a score of years. The sparkle of the Change was in their eyes, their
slightly flushed cheeks, their more elastic gestures, spoke of new
physical influences that had invaded their beings.

“It did us no good, all our hatred,” Mr. Wiggins said to me, explaining
the emotion of their encounter; “it did our customers no good. I’ve
come to tell him that. You bear that in mind, young man, if ever you
come to have a shop of your own. It was a sort of stupid bitterness
possessed us, and I can’t make out we didn’t see it before in that
light. Not so much downright wickedness it wasn’t as stupidity. A
stupid jealousy! Think of it!—two human beings within a stone’s throw,
who have not spoken for twenty years, hardening our hearts against each
other!”

“I can’t think how we came to such a state, Mr. Wiggins,” said the
other, packing tea into pound packets out of mere habit as he spoke.
“It was wicked pride and obstinacy. We _knew_ it was foolish all the
time.”

I stood affixing the adhesive stamp to my telegram.

“Only the other morning,” he went on to me, “I was cutting French eggs.
Selling at a loss to do it. He’d marked down with a great staring
ticket to ninepence a dozen—I saw it as I went past. Here’s my answer!”
He indicated a ticket. “‘Eightpence a dozen—same as sold elsewhere for
ninepence.’ A whole penny down, bang off! Just a touch above cost—if
that—and even then———” He leant over the counter to say impressively,
“_Not the same eggs!_”

“Now, what people in their senses would do things like that?” said Mr.
Wiggins.

I sent my telegram—the proprietor dispatched it for me, and while he
did so I fell exchanging experiences with Mr. Wiggins. He knew no more
than I did then the nature of the change that had come over things. He
had been alarmed by the green flashes, he said, so much so that after
watching for a time from behind his bedroom window blind, he had got up
and hastily dressed and made his family get up also, so that they might
be ready for the end. He made them put on their Sunday clothes. They
all went out into the garden together, their minds divided between
admiration at the gloriousness of the spectacle and a great and growing
awe. They were Dissenters, and very religious people out of business
hours, and it seemed to them in those last magnificent moments that,
after all, science must be wrong and the fanatics right. With the green
vapors came conviction, and they prepared to meet their God. . . .

This man, you must understand, was a common-looking man, in his
shirt-sleeves and with an apron about his paunch, and he told his story
in an Anglian accent that sounded mean and clipped to my Staffordshire
ears; he told his story without a thought of pride, and as it were
incidentally, and yet he gave me a vision of something heroic.

These people did not run hither and thither as many people did. These
four simple, common people stood beyond their back door in their garden
pathway between the gooseberry bushes, with the terrors of their God
and His Judgments closing in upon them, swiftly and wonderfully—and
there they began to sing. There they stood, father and mother and two
daughters, chanting out stoutly, but no doubt a little flatly after the
manner of their kind—

“In Zion’s Hope abiding,
My soul in Triumph sings—”


until one by one they fell, and lay still.

The postmaster had heard them in the gathering darkness, “In Zion’s
Hope abiding.” . . .

It was the most extraordinary thing in the world to hear this flushed
and happy-eyed man telling that story of his recent death. It did not
seem at all possible to have happened in the last twelve hours. It was
minute and remote, these people who went singing through the darkling
to their God. It was like a scene shown to me, very small and very
distinctly painted, in a locket.

But that effect was not confined to this particular thing. A vast
number of things that had happened before the coming of the comet had
undergone the same transfiguring reduction. Other people, too, I have
learnt since, had the same illusion, a sense of enlargement. It seems
to me even now that the little dark creature who had stormed across
England in pursuit of Nettie and her lover must have been about an inch
high, that all that previous life of ours had been an ill-lit
marionette show, acted in the twilight. . . .

§ 5


The figure of my mother comes always into my conception of the Change.

I remember how one day she confessed herself.

She had been very sleepless that night, she said, and took the reports
of the falling stars for shooting; there had been rioting in Clayton
and all through Swathinglea all day, and so she got out of bed to look.
She had a dim sense that I was in all such troubles.

But she was not looking when the Change came.

“When I saw the stars a-raining down, dear,” she said, “and thought of
you out in it, I thought there’d be no harm in saying a prayer for you,
dear? I thought you wouldn’t mind that.”

And so I got another of my pictures—the green vapors come and go, and
there by her patched coverlet that dear old woman kneels and droops,
still clasping her poor gnarled hands in the attitude of prayer—prayer
to IT—for me!

Through the meagre curtains and blinds of the flawed refracting window
I see the stars above the chimneys fade, the pale light of dawn creeps
into the sky, and her candle flares and dies. . . .

That also went with me through the stillness—that silent kneeling
figure, that frozen prayer to God to shield me, silent in a silent
world, rushing through the emptiness of space. . . .

§ 6


With the dawn that awakening went about the earth. I have told how it
came to me, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured
cornfields of Shaphambury. It came to every one. Near me, and for the
time, clear forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke—woke near one
another, each heard before all other sounds the other’s voice amidst
the stillness, and the light. And the scattered people who had run to
and fro, and fallen on the beach of Bungalow village, awoke; the
sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat up in that unwonted
freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the garden, with the
hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the flowers, and touched
each other timidly, and thought of Paradise. My mother found herself
crouched against the bed, and rose—rose with a glad invincible
conviction of accepted prayer. . . .

Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the lines of
dusty poplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting and sharing
coffee with the French riflemen, who had hailed them from their
carefully hidden pits among the vineyards up the slopes of Beauville. A
certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who had dropped asleep
tensely ready for the rocket that should wake the whirr and rattle of
their magazines. At the sight and sound of the stir and human confusion
in the roadway below, it had come to each man individually that he
could not shoot. One conscript, at least, has told his story of his
awakening, and how curious he thought the rifle there beside him in his
pit, how he took it on his knees to examine. Then, as his memory of its
purpose grew clearer, he dropped the thing, and stood up with a kind of
joyful horror at the crime escaped, to look more closely at the men he
was to have assassinated. “_Brave types_,” he thought, they looked for
such a fate. The summoning rocket never flew. Below, the men did not
fall into ranks again, but sat by the roadside, or stood in groups
talking, discussing with a novel incredulity the ostensible causes of
the war. “The Emperor!” said they; and “Oh, nonsense! We’re civilized
men. Get some one else for this job! . . . Where’s the coffee?”

The officers held their own horses, and talked to the men frankly,
regardless of discipline. Some Frenchmen out of the rifle-pits came
sauntering down the hill. Others stood doubtfully, rifles still in
hand. Curious faces scanned these latter. Little arguments sprang as:
“Shoot at us! Nonsense! They’re respectable French citizens.” There is
a picture of it all, very bright and detailed in the morning light, in
the battle gallery amidst the ruins at old Nancy, and one sees the
old-world uniform of the “soldier,” the odd caps and belts and boots,
the ammunition-belt, the water-bottle, the sort of tourist’s pack the
men carried, a queer elaborate equipment. The soldiers had awakened one
by one, first one and then another. I wonder sometimes whether,
perhaps, if the two armies had come awake in an instant, the battle, by
mere habit and inertia, might not have begun. But the men who waked
first, sat up, looked about them in astonishment, had time to think a
little. . . .

§ 7


Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere tears.

Men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly lit and
exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible, incapable
of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy, hopeful,
unselfishly energetic, rejected altogether the supposition that this
was merely a change in the blood and material texture of life. They
denied the bodies God had given them, as once the Upper Nile savages
struck out their canine teeth, because these made them like the beasts.
They declared that this was the coming of a spirit, and nothing else
would satisfy their need for explanations. And in a sense the Spirit
came. The Great Revival sprang directly from the Change—the last, the
deepest, widest, and most enduring of all the vast inundations of
religious emotion that go by that name.

But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors.
The former revivals were a phase of fever, this was the first movement
of health, it was altogether quieter, more intellectual, more private,
more religious than any of those others. In the old time, and more
especially in the Protestant countries where the things of religion
were outspoken, and the absence of confession and well-trained priests
made religious states of emotion explosive and contagious, revivalism
upon various scales was a normal phase in the religious life, revivals
were always going on—now a little disturbance of consciences in a
village, now an evening of emotion in a Mission Room, now a great storm
that swept a continent, and now an organized effort that came to town
with bands and banners and handbills and motor-cars for the saving of
souls. Never at any time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any
of these movements. My nature, although passionate, was too critical
(or sceptical if you like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shy to
be drawn into these whirls; but on several occasions Parload and I sat,
scoffing, but nevertheless disturbed, in the back seats of revivalist
meetings.

I saw enough of them to understand their nature, and I am not surprised
to learn now that before the comet came, all about the world, even
among savages, even among cannibals, these same, or at any rate closely
similar, periodic upheavals went on. The world was stifling; it was in
a fever, and these phenomena were neither more nor less than the
instinctive struggle of the organism against the ebb of its powers, the
clogging of its veins, the limitation of its life. Invariably these
revivals followed periods of sordid and restricted living. Men obeyed
their base immediate motives until the world grew unendurably bitter.
Some disappointment, some thwarting, lit up for them—darkly indeed, but
yet enough for indistinct vision—the crowded squalor, the dark
inclosure of life. A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the
old-world way of living, a realization of sin, a sense of the
unworthiness of all individual things, a desire for something
comprehensive, sustaining, something greater, for wider communions and
less habitual things, filled them. Their souls, which were shaped for
wider issues, cried out suddenly amidst the petty interests, the narrow
prohibitions, of life, “Not this! not this!” A great passion to escape
from the jealous prison of themselves, an inarticulate, stammering,
weeping passion shook them. . . .

I have seen——— I remember how once in Clayton Calvinistic Methodist
chapel I saw—his spotty fat face strangely distorted under the
flickering gas-flares—old Pallet the ironmonger repent. He went to the
form of repentance, a bench reserved for such exhibitions, and
slobbered out his sorrow and disgust for some sexual indelicacy—he was
a widower—and I can see now how his loose fat body quivered and swayed
with his grief. He poured it out to five hundred people, from whom in
common times he hid his every thought and purpose. And it is a fact, it
shows where reality lay, that we two youngsters laughed not at all at
that blubbering grotesque, we did not even think the distant shadow of
a smile. We two sat grave and intent—perhaps wondering.

Only afterward and with an effort did we scoff. . . .

Those old-time revivals were, I say, the convulsive movements of a body
that suffocates. They are the clearest manifestations from before the
Change of a sense in all men that things were not right. But they were
too often but momentary illuminations. Their force spent itself in
inco-ordinated shouting, gesticulations, tears. They were but flashes
of outlook. Disgust of the narrow life, of all baseness, took shape in
narrowness and baseness. The quickened soul ended the night a
hypocrite; prophets disputed for precedence; seductions, it is
altogether indisputable, were frequent among penitents! and Ananias
went home converted and returned with a falsified gift. And it was
almost universal that the converted should be impatient and immoderate,
scornful of reason and a choice of expedients, opposed to balance,
skill, and knowledge. Incontinently full of grace, like thin old
wine-skins overfilled, they felt they must burst if once they came into
contact with hard fact and sane direction.

So the former revivals spent themselves, but the Great Revival did not
spend itself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendom at least,
the permanent expression of the Change. For many it has taken the shape
of an outright declaration that this was the Second Advent—it is not
for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion, for nearly all it
has amounted to an enduring broadening of all the issues of life. . . .

§ 8


One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by some
subtle trick of quality it summarizes the Change for me. It is the
memory of a woman’s very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed face
and tear-bright eyes who went by me without speaking, rapt in some
secret purpose. I passed her when in the afternoon of the first day,
struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton to send a telegram to
my mother telling her all was well with me. Whither this woman went I
do not know, nor whence she came; I never saw her again, and only her
face, glowing with that new and luminous resolve, stands out for me. .
. .

But that expression was the world’s.




CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE CABINET COUNCIL


§ 1

And what a strange unprecedented thing was that cabinet council at
which I was present, the council that was held two days later in
Melmount’s bungalow, and which convened the conference to frame the
constitution of the World State. I was there because it was convenient
for me to stay with Melmount. I had nowhere to go particularly, and
there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankle confined
him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin his share of the
enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulers of the world. I
wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonograph available, I
went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, and sat at his desk to
write at his dictation. It is characteristic of the odd slackness that
went with the spasmodic violence of the old epoch, that the secretary
could not use shorthand and that there was no telephone whatever in the
place. Every message had to be taken to the village post-office in that
grocer’s shop at Menton, half a mile away. . . . So I sat in the back
of Melmount’s room, his desk had been thrust aside, and made such
memoranda as were needed. At that time his room seemed to me the most
beautifully furnished in the world, and I could identify now the vivid
cheerfulness of the chintz of the sofa on which the great statesman lay
just in front of me, the fine rich paper, the red sealing-wax, the
silver equipage of the desk I used. I know now that my presence in that
room was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, even the coming
and going of Parker the secretary, innovations. In the old days a
cabinet council was a secret conclave, secrecy and furtiveness were in
the texture of all public life. In the old days everybody was always
keeping something back from somebody, being wary and cunning,
prevaricating, misleading—for the most part for no reason at all.
Almost unnoticed, that secrecy had dropped out of life.

I close my eyes and see those men again, hear their deliberating
voices. First I see them a little diffusely in the cold explicitness of
daylight, and then concentrated and drawn together amidst the shadow
and mystery about shaded lamps. Integral to this and very clear is the
memory of biscuit crumbs and a drop of spilt water, that at first stood
shining upon and then sank into the green table-cloth. . . .

I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham. He came to the
bungalow a day before the others, because he was Melmount’s personal
friend. Let me describe this statesman to you, this one of the fifteen
men who made the last war. He was the youngest member of the
Government, and an altogether pleasant and sunny man of forty. He had a
clear profile to his clean gray face, a smiling eye, a friendly,
careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, an easy disabusing
manner. He had the perfect quality of a man who had fallen easily into
a place prepared for him. He had the temperament of what we used to
call a philosopher—an indifferent, that is to say. The Change had
caught him at his week-end recreation, fly-fishing; and, indeed, he
said, I remember, that he recovered to find himself with his head
within a yard of the water’s brim. In times of crisis Lord Adisham
invariably went fly-fishing at the week-end to keep his mind in tone,
and when there was no crisis then there was nothing he liked so much to
do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, as there was nothing to prevent
it, he fished. He came resolved, among other things, to give up
fly-fishing altogether. I was present when he came to Melmount, and
heard him say as much; and by a more naive route it was evident that he
had arrived at the same scheme of intention as my master. I left them
to talk, but afterward I came back to take down their long telegrams to
their coming colleagues. He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as
Melmount by the Change, but his tricks of civility and irony and
acceptable humor had survived the Change, and he expressed his altered
attitude, his expanded emotions, in a quaint modification of the
old-time man-of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a
trained horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.

These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlike
anything I had expected, and I watched them intently whenever my
services were not in request. They made a peculiar class at that time,
these English politicians and statesmen, a class that has now
completely passed away. In some respects they were unlike the statesmen
of any other region of the world, and I do not find that any really
adequate account remains of them. . . . Perhaps you are a reader of the
old books. If so, you will find them rendered with a note of hostile
exaggeration by Dickens in “Bleak House,” with a mingling of gross
flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, who ruled among them
accidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasing the court, and all
their assumptions are set forth, portentously, perhaps, but truthfully,
so far as people of the “permanent official” class saw them, in the
novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward. All these books are still in this world
and at the disposal of the curious, and in addition the philosopher
Bagehot and the picturesque historian Macaulay give something of their
method of thinking, the novelist Thackeray skirts the seamy side of
their social life, and there are some good passages of irony, personal
descriptions, and reminiscence to be found in the “Twentieth Century
Garner” from the pens of such writers, for example, as Sidney Low. But
a picture of them as a whole is wanting. Then they were too near and
too great; now, very rapidly, they have become incomprehensible.

We common people of the old time based our conception of our statesmen
almost entirely on the caricatures that formed the most powerful weapon
in political controversy. Like almost every main feature of the old
condition of things these caricatures were an unanticipated
development, they were a sort of parasitic outgrowth from, which had
finally altogether replaced, the thin and vague aspirations of the
original democratic ideals. They presented not only the personalities
who led our public life, but the most sacred structural conceptions of
that life, in ludicrous, vulgar, and dishonorable aspects that in the
end came near to destroying entirely all grave and honorable emotion or
motive toward the State. The state of Britain was represented nearly
always by a red-faced, purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that
fine dream of freedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced
rascal in striped trousers and a blue coat. The chief ministers of
state were pickpockets, washerwomen, clowns, whales, asses, elephants,
and what not, and issues that affected the welfare of millions of men
were dressed and judged like a rally in some idiotic pantomime. A
tragic war in South Africa, that wrecked many thousand homes,
impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement to
fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel between a
violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass, an orchid, and
a short temper, and “old Kroojer,” an obstinate and very cunning old
man in a shocking bad hat. The conflict was carried through in a mood
sometimes of brutish irritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness,
the merry peculator plied his trade congenially in that asinine
squabble, and behind these fooleries and masked by them, marched
Fate—until at last the clowning of the booth opened and revealed—hunger
and suffering, brands burning and swords and shame. . . . These men had
come to fame and power in that atmosphere, and to me that day there was
the oddest suggestion in them of actors who have suddenly laid aside
grotesque and foolish parts; the paint was washed from their faces, the
posing put aside.

Even when the presentation was not frankly grotesque and degrading it
was entirely misleading. When I read of Laycock, for example, there
arises a picture of a large, active, if a little wrong-headed,
intelligence in a compact heroic body, emitting that “Goliath” speech
of his that did so much to precipitate hostilities, it tallies not at
all with the stammering, high-pitched, slightly bald, and very
conscience-stricken personage I saw, nor with Melmount’s contemptuous
first description of him. I doubt if the world at large will ever get a
proper vision of those men as they were before the Change. Each year
they pass more and more incredibly beyond our intellectual sympathy.
Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of their portion in the past,
but it will rob them of any effect of reality. The whole of their
history becomes more and more foreign, more and more like some queer
barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue. There they strut through
their weird metamorphoses of caricature, those premiers and presidents,
their height preposterously exaggerated by political buskins, their
faces covered by great resonant inhuman masks, their voices couched in
the foolish idiom of public utterance, disguised beyond any semblance
to sane humanity, roaring and squeaking through the public press. There
it stands, this incomprehensible faded show, a thing left on one side,
and now still and deserted by any interest, its many emptinesses as
inexplicable now as the cruelties of medieval Venice, the theology of
old Byzantium. And they ruled and influenced the lives of nearly a
quarter of mankind, these politicians, their clownish conflicts swayed
the world, made mirth perhaps, made excitement, and permitted—infinite
misery.

I saw these men quickened indeed by the Change, but still wearing the
queer clothing of the old time, the manners and conventions of the old
time; if they had disengaged themselves from the outlook of the old
time they still had to refer back to it constantly as a common
starting-point. My refreshed intelligence was equal to that, so that I
think I did indeed see them. There was Gorrell-Browning, the Chancellor
of the Duchy; I remember him as a big round-faced man, the essential
vanity and foolishness of whose expression, whose habit of voluminous
platitudinous speech, triumphed absurdly once or twice over the roused
spirit within. He struggled with it, he burlesqued himself, and
laughed. Suddenly he said simply, intensely—it was a moment for every
one of clean, clear pain, “I have been a vain and self-indulgent and
presumptuous old man. I am of little use here. I have given myself to
politics and intrigues, and life is gone from me.” Then for a long time
he sat still. There was Carton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-faced man
with understanding, he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood
among the busts of the Caesars, a slow, elaborating voice, with
self-indulgent, slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary,
voluntary, humorous twinkle. “We have to forgive,” he said. “We have to
forgive—even ourselves.”

These two were at the top corner of the table, so that I saw their
faces well. Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkled
eyebrows and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next to Carton;
he contributed little to the discussion save intelligent comments, and
when the electric lights above glowed out, the shadows deepened queerly
in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzical expression of an ironical
goblin. Next him was that great peer, the Earl of Richover, whose
self-indulgent indolence had accepted the _rôle_ of a twentieth-century
British Roman patrician of culture, who had divided his time almost
equally between his jockeys, politics, and the composition of literary
studies in the key of his _rôle_. “We have done nothing worth doing,”
he said. “As for me, I have cut a figure!” He reflected—no doubt on his
ample patrician years, on the fine great houses that had been his
setting, the teeming race-courses that had roared his name, the
enthusiastic meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian
beginnings. . . . “I have been a fool,” he said compactly. They heard
him in a sympathetic and respectful silence.

Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, so far
as I was concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham. Ever and again Gurker
protruded into the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throaty voice, a
big nose, a coarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip, eyes
peering amidst folds and wrinkles. He made his confession for his race.
“We Jews,” he said, “have gone through the system of this world,
creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much. Our
racial self-conceit has been monstrous. We seem to have used our ample
coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to develop and master
and maintain the convention of property, to turn life into a sort of
mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. . . . We have had no
sense of service to mankind. Beauty which is godhead—we made it a
possession.”

These men and these sayings particularly remain in my memory. Perhaps,
indeed, I wrote them down at the time, but that I do not now remember.
How Sir Digby Privet, Revel, Markheimer, and the others sat I do not
now recall; they came in as voices, interruptions, imperfectly assigned
comments. . . .

One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revel
these men had not particularly wanted the power they held; had desired
to do nothing very much in the positions they had secured. They had
found themselves in the cabinet, and until this moment of illumination
they had not been ashamed; but they had made no ungentlemanly fuss
about the matter. Eight of that fifteen came from the same school, had
gone through an entirely parallel education; some Greek linguistics,
some elementary mathematics, some emasculated “science,” a little
history, a little reading in the silent or timidly orthodox English
literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries,
all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanly tradition of behavior;
essentially boyish, unimaginative—with neither keen swords nor art in
it, a tradition apt to slobber into sentiment at a crisis and make a
great virtue of a simple duty rather clumsily done. None of these eight
had made any real experiments with life, they had lived in blinkers,
they had been passed from nurse to governess, from governess to
preparatory school, from Eton to Oxford, from Oxford to the
politico-social routine. Even their vices and lapses had been according
to certain conceptions of good form. They had all gone to the races
surreptitiously from Eton, had all cut up to town from Oxford to see
life—music-hall life—had all come to heel again. Now suddenly they
discovered their limitations. . . .

“What are we to do?” asked Melmount. “We have awakened; this empire in
our hands. . . .” I know this will seem the most fabulous of all the
things I have to tell of the old order, but, indeed, I saw it with my
eyes, I heard it with my ears. It is a fact that this group of men who
constituted the Government of one-fifth of the habitable land of the
earth, who ruled over a million of armed men, who had such navies as
mankind had never seen before, whose empire of nations, tongues,
peoples still dazzles in these greater days, had no common idea
whatever of what they meant to do with the world. They had been a
Government for three long years, and before the Change came to them it
had never even occurred to them that it was necessary to have a common
idea. There was no common idea at all. That great empire was no more
than a thing adrift, an aimless thing that ate and drank and slept and
bore arms, and was inordinately proud of itself because it had chanced
to happen. It had no plan, no intention; it meant nothing at all. And
the other great empires adrift, perilously adrift like marine mines,
were in the self-same case. Absurd as a British cabinet council must
seem to you now, it was no whit more absurd than the controlling
ganglion, autocratic council, president’s committee, or what not, of
each of its blind rivals. . . .

§ 2


I remember as one thing that struck me very forcibly at the time, the
absence of any discussion, any difference of opinion, about the broad
principles of our present state. These men had lived hitherto in a
system of conventions and acquired motives, loyalty to a party, loyalty
to various secret agreements and understandings, loyalty to the Crown;
they had all been capable of the keenest attention to precedence, all
capable of the most complete suppression of subversive doubts and
inquiries, all had their religious emotions under perfect control. They
had seemed protected by invisible but impenetrable barriers from all
the heady and destructive speculations, the socialistic, republican,
and communistic theories that one may still trace through the
literature of the last days of the comet. But now it was as if the very
moment of the awakening those barriers and defences had vanished, as if
the green vapors had washed through their minds and dissolved and swept
away a hundred once rigid boundaries and obstacles. They had admitted
and assimilated at once all that was good in the ill-dressed
propagandas that had clamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of
their minds in the former days. It was exactly like the awakening from
an absurd and limiting dream. They had come out together naturally and
inevitably upon the broad daylight platform of obvious and reasonable
agreement upon which we and all the order of our world now stand.

Let me try to give the chief things that had vanished from their minds.
There was, first, the ancient system of “ownership” that made such an
extraordinary tangle of our administration of the land upon which we
lived. In the old time no one believed in that as either just or
ideally convenient, but every one accepted it. The community which
lived upon the land was supposed to have waived its necessary
connection with the land, except in certain limited instances of
highway and common. All the rest of the land was cut up in the maddest
way into patches and oblongs and triangles of various sizes between a
hundred square miles and a few acres, and placed under the nearly
absolute government of a series of administrators called landowners.
They owned the land almost as a man now owns his hat; they bought it
and sold it, and cut it up like cheese or ham; they were free to ruin
it, or leave it waste, or erect upon it horrible and devastating
eyesores. If the community needed a road or a tramway, if it wanted a
town or a village in any position, nay, even if it wanted to go to and
fro, it had to do so by exorbitant treaties with each of the monarchs
whose territory was involved. No man could find foothold on the face of
the earth until he had paid toll and homage to one of them. They had
practically no relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or
national Government amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay.
. . . This sounds, I know, like a lunatic’s dream, but mankind was that
lunatic; and not only in the old countries of Europe and Asia, where
this system had arisen out of the rational delegation of local control
to territorial magnates, who had in the universal baseness of those
times at last altogether evaded and escaped their duties, did it
obtain, but the “new countries,” as we called them then—the United
States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New Zealand—spent
much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving away of land for
ever to any casual person who would take it. Was there coal, was there
petroleum or gold, was there rich soil or harborage, or the site for a
fine city, these obsessed and witless Governments cried out for
scramblers, and a stream of shabby, tricky, and violent adventurers set
out to found a new section of the landed aristocracy of the world.
After a brief century of hope and pride, the great republic of the
United States of America, the hope as it was deemed of mankind, became
for the most part a drifting crowd of landless men; landlords and
railway lords, food lords (for the land is food) and mineral lords
ruled its life, gave it Universities as one gave coins to a mendicant,
and spent its resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as
the world had never seen before. Here was a thing none of these
statesmen before the Change would have regarded as anything but the
natural order of the world, which not one of them now regarded as
anything but the mad and vanished illusion of a period of dementia.

And as it was with the question of the land, so was it also with a
hundred other systems and institutions and complicated and disingenuous
factors in the life of man. They spoke of trade, and I realized for the
first time there could be buying and selling that was no loss to any
man; they spoke of industrial organization, and one saw it under
captains who sought no base advantages. The haze of old associations,
of personal entanglements and habitual recognitions had been dispelled
from every stage and process of the social training of men. Things long
hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness.
These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old
muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling,
half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of
weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride
and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing
but a curious and pleasantly faded memory. “There must be a common
training of the young,” said Richover; “a frank initiation. We have not
so much educated them as hidden things from them, and set traps. And it
might have been so easy—it can all be done so easily.”

That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council, “It can all be
done so easily,” but when they said it then, it came to my ears with a
quality of enormous refreshment and power. It can all be done so
easily, given frankness, given courage. Time was when these platitudes
had the freshness and wonder of a gospel.

In this enlarged outlook the war with the Germans—that mythical,
heroic, armed female, Germany, had vanished from men’s imaginations—was
a mere exhausted episode. A truce had already been arranged by
Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences, set
aside the matter of peace as a mere question of particular
arrangements. . . . The whole scheme of the world’s government had
become fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details as in
great, the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries, districts and
municipalities, counties, states, boards, and nations, the interlacing,
overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt of little interests
and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiable multitude of
lawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers lived like fleas in a
dirty old coat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies, heated patchings
up and jobbings apart, of the old order—they flung it all on one side.

“What are the new needs?” said Melmount. “This muddle is too rotten to
handle. We’re beginning again. Well, let us begin afresh.”

§ 3


“Let us begin afresh!” This piece of obvious common sense seemed then
to me instinct with courage, the noblest of words. My heart went out to
him as he spoke. It was, indeed, that day as vague as it was valiant;
we did not at all see the forms of what we were thus beginning. All
that we saw was the clear inevitableness that the old order should end.
. . .

And then in a little space of time mankind in halting but effectual
brotherhood was moving out to make its world anew. Those early years,
those first and second decades of the new epoch, were in their daily
detail a time of rejoicing toil; one saw chiefly one’s own share in
that, and little of the whole. It is only now that I look back at it
all from these ripe years, from this high tower, that I see the
dramatic sequence of its changes, see the cruel old confusions of the
ancient time become clarified, simplified, and dissolve and vanish
away. Where is that old world now? Where is London, that somber city of
smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music
of disorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river,
its black pinnacles and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of
smut-grayed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions
of hurrying clerks? The very leaves upon its trees were foul with
greasy black defilements. Where is lime-white Paris, with its green and
disciplined foliage, its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly
organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers, noisily shod,
streaming over the bridges in the gray cold light of dawn. Where is New
York, the high city of clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept and
competition swept, its huge buildings jostling one another and
straining ever upward for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly
overshadowed. Where are its lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury,
the shameful bludgeoning bribing vice of its ill ruled underways, and
all the gaunt extravagant ugliness of its strenuous life? And where now
is Philadelphia, with its innumerable small and isolated homes, and
Chicago with its interminable blood-stained stockyards, its polyglot
underworld of furious discontent.

All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my native
Potteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives that were
caught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their labyrinths, their
forgotten and neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman,
ill-conceived industrial machinery have escaped—to life. Those cities
of growth and accident are altogether gone, never a chimney smokes
about our world to-day, and the sound of the weeping of children who
toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdened women, the noise
of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures and all the ugly
grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, with the utter change
in our lives. As I look back into the past I see a vast exultant dust
of house-breaking and removal rise up into the clear air that followed
the hour of the green vapors, I live again the Year of Tents, the Year
of Scaffolding, and like the triumph of a new theme in a piece of
music—the great cities of our new days arise. Come Caerlyon and
Armedon, the twin cities of lower England, with the winding summer city
of the Thames between, and I see the gaunt dirt of old Edinburgh die to
rise again white and tall beneath the shadow of her ancient hill; and
Dublin too, reshaped, returning enriched, fair, spacious, the city of
rich laughter and warm hearts, gleaming gaily in a shaft of sunlight
through the soft warm rain. I see the great cities America has planned
and made; the Golden City, with ever-ripening fruit along its broad
warm ways, and the bell-glad City of a Thousand Spires. I see again as
I have seen, the city of theaters and meeting-places, the City of the
Sunlight Bight, and the new city that is still called Utah; and
dominated by its observatory dome and the plain and dignified lines of
the university façade upon the cliff, Martenābar the great white winter
city of the upland snows. And the lesser places, too, the townships,
the quiet resting-places, villages half forest with a brawl of streams
down their streets, villages laced with avenues of cedar, villages of
garden, of roses and wonderful flowers and the perpetual humming of
bees. And through all the world go our children, our sons the old world
would have made into servile clerks and shopmen, plough drudges and
servants; our daughters who were erst anaemic drudges, prostitutes,
sluts, anxiety-racked mothers or sere, repining failures; they go about
this world glad and brave, learning, living, doing, happy and
rejoicing, brave and free. I think of them wandering in the clear quiet
of the ruins of Rome, among the tombs of Egypt or the temples of
Athens, of their coming to Mainington and its strange happiness, to
Orba and the wonder of its white and slender tower. . . . But who can
tell of the fullness and pleasure of life, who can number all our new
cities in the world?—cities made by the loving hands of men for living
men, cities men weep to enter, so fair they are, so gracious and so
kind. . . .

Some vision surely of these things must have been vouchsafed me as I
sat there behind Melmount’s couch, but now my knowledge of accomplished
things has mingled with and effaced my expectations. Something indeed I
must have foreseen—or else why was my heart so glad?




BOOK THE THIRD
THE NEW WORLD




CHAPTER THE FIRST
LOVE AFTER THE CHANGE


§ 1

So far I have said nothing of Nettie. I have departed widely from my
individual story. I have tried to give you the effect of the change in
relation to the general framework of human life, its effect of swift,
magnificent dawn, of an overpowering letting in and inundation of
light, and the spirit of living. In my memory all my life before the
Change has the quality of a dark passage, with the dimmest side gleams
of beauty that come and go. The rest is dull pain and darkness. Then
suddenly the walls, the bitter confines, are smitten and vanish, and I
walk, blinded, perplexed, and yet rejoicing, in this sweet, beautiful
world, in its fair incessant variety, its satisfaction, its
opportunities, exultant in this glorious gift of life. Had I the power
of music I would make a world-wide _motif_ swell and amplify, gather to
itself this theme and that, and rise at last to sheer ecstasy of
triumph and rejoicing. It should be all sound, all pride, all the hope
of outsetting in the morning brightness, all the glee of unexpected
happenings, all the gladness of painful effort suddenly come to its
reward; it should be like blossoms new opened and the happy play of
children, like tearful, happy mothers holding their first-born, like
cities building to the sound of music, and great ships, all hung with
flags and wine bespattered, gliding down through cheering multitudes to
their first meeting with the sea. Through it all should march Hope,
confident Hope, radiant and invincible, until at last it would be the
triumph march of Hope the conqueror, coming with trumpetings and
banners through the wide-flung gates of the world.

And then out of that luminous haze of gladness comes Nettie,
transfigured.

So she came again to me—amazing, a thing incredibly forgotten.

She comes back, and Verrall is in her company. She comes back into my
memories now, just as she came back then, rather quaintly at first—at
first not seen very clearly, a little distorted by intervening things,
seen with a doubt, as I saw her through the slightly discolored panes
of crinkled glass in the window of the Menton post-office and grocer’s
shop. It was on the second day after the Change, and I had been sending
telegrams for Melmount, who was making arrangements for his departure
for Downing Street. I saw the two of them at first as small, flawed
figures. The glass made them seem curved, and it enhanced and altered
their gestures and paces. I felt it became me to say “Peace” to them,
and I went out, to the jangling of the door-bell. At the sight of me
they stopped short, and Verrall cried with the note of one who has
sought, “Here he is!” And Nettie cried, “Willie!”

I went toward them, and all the perspectives of my reconstructed
universe altered as I did so.

I seemed to see these two for the first time; how fine they were, how
graceful and human. It was as though I had never really looked at them
before, and, indeed, always before I had beheld them through a mist of
selfish passion. They had shared the universal darkness and dwarfing of
the former time; they shared the universal exaltation of the new. Now
suddenly Nettie, and the love of Nettie, a great passion for Nettie,
lived again in me. This change which had enlarged men’s hearts had made
no end to love. Indeed, it had enormously enlarged and glorified love.
She stepped into the center of that dream of world reconstruction that
filled my mind and took possession of it all. A little wisp of hair had
blown across her cheek, her lips fell apart in that sweet smile of
hers; her eyes were full of wonder, of a welcoming scrutiny, of an
infinitely courageous friendliness.

I took her outstretched hand, and wonder overwhelmed me. “I wanted to
kill you,” I said simply, trying to grasp that idea. It seemed now like
stabbing the stars, or murdering the sunlight.

“Afterward we looked for you,” said Verrall; “and we could not find
you. . . . We heard another shot.”

I turned my eyes to him, and Nettie’s hand fell from me. It was then I
thought of how they had fallen together, and what it must have been to
have awakened in that dawn with Nettie by one’s side. I had a vision of
them as I had glimpsed them last amidst the thickening vapors, close
together, hand in hand. The green hawks of the Change spread their
darkling wings above their last stumbling paces. So they fell. And
awoke—lovers together in a morning of Paradise. Who can tell how bright
the sunshine was to them, how fair the flowers, how sweet the singing
of the birds? . . .

This was the thought of my heart. But my lips were saying, “When I
awoke I threw my pistol away.” Sheer blankness kept my thoughts silent
for a little while; I said empty things. “I am very glad I did not kill
you—that you are here, so fair and well. . . .”

“I am going away back to Clayton on the day after to-morrow,” I said,
breaking away to explanations. “I have been writing shorthand here for
Melmount, but that is almost over now. . . .”

Neither of them said a word, and though all facts had suddenly ceased
to matter anything, I went on informatively, “He is to be taken to
Downing Street where there is a proper staff, so that there will be no
need of me. . . . Of course, you’re a little perplexed at my being with
Melmount. You see I met him—by accident—directly I recovered. I found
him with a broken ankle—in that lane. . . . I am to go now to the Four
Towns to help prepare a report. So that I am glad to see you both
again”—I found a catch in my voice—“to say good-bye to you, and wish
you well.”

This was after the quality of what had come into my mind when first I
saw them through the grocer’s window, but it was not what I felt and
thought as I said it. I went on saying it because otherwise there would
have been a gap. It had come to me that it was going to be hard to part
from Nettie. My words sounded with an effect of unreality. I stopped,
and we stood for a moment in silence looking at one another.

It was I, I think, who was discovering most. I was realizing for the
first time how little the Change had altered in my essential nature. I
had forgotten this business of love for a time in a world of wonder.
That was all. Nothing was lost from my nature, nothing had gone, only
the power of thought and restraint had been wonderfully increased and
new interests had been forced upon me. The Green Vapors had passed, our
minds were swept and garnished, but we were ourselves still, though
living in a new and finer air. My affinities were unchanged; Nettie’s
personal charm for me was only quickened by the enhancement of my
perceptions. In her presence, meeting her eyes, instantly my desire, no
longer frantic but sane, was awake again.

It was just like going to Checkshill in the old time, after writing
about socialism. . . .

I relinquished her hand. It was absurd to part in these terms.

So we all felt it. We hung awkwardly over our sense of that. It was
Verrall, I think, who shaped the thought for me, and said that
to-morrow then we must meet and say good-bye, and so turned our
encounter into a transitory making of arrangements. We settled we would
come to the inn at Menton, all three of us, and take our midday meal
together. . . .

Yes, it was clear that was all we had to say now. . . .

We parted a little awkwardly. I went on down the village street, not
looking back, surprised at myself, and infinitely perplexed. It was as
if I had discovered something overlooked that disarranged all my plans,
something entirely disconcerting. For the first time I went back
preoccupied and without eagerness to Melmount’s work. I wanted to go on
thinking about Nettie; my mind had suddenly become voluminously
productive concerning her and Verrall.

§ 2


The talk we three had together in the dawn of the new time is very
strongly impressed upon my memory. There was something fresh and simple
about it, something young and flushed and exalted. We took up, we
handled with a certain naive timidity, the most difficult questions the
Change had raised for men to solve. I recall we made little of them.
All the old scheme of human life had dissolved and passed away, the
narrow competitiveness, the greed and base aggression, the jealous
aloofness of soul from soul. Where had it left us? That was what we and
a thousand million others were discussing. . . .

It chances that this last meeting with Nettie is inseparably
associated—I don’t know why—with the landlady of the Menton inn.

The Menton inn was one of the rare pleasant corners of the old order;
it was an inn of an unusual prosperity, much frequented by visitors
from Shaphambury, and given to the serving of lunches and teas. It had
a broad mossy bowling-green, and round about it were creeper-covered
arbors amidst beds of snap-dragon, and hollyhock, and blue delphinium,
and many such tall familiar summer flowers. These stood out against a
background of laurels and holly, and above these again rose the gables
of the inn and its signpost—a white-horsed George slaying the
dragon—against copper beeches under the sky.

While I waited for Nettie and Verrall in this agreeable trysting place,
I talked to the landlady—a broad-shouldered, smiling, freckled
woman—about the morning of the Change. That motherly, abundant,
red-haired figure of health was buoyantly sure that everything in the
world was now to be changed for the better. That confidence, and
something in her voice, made me love her as I talked to her. “Now we’re
awake,” she said, “all sorts of things will be put right that hadn’t
any sense in them. Why? Oh! I’m sure of it.”

Her kind blue eyes met mine in an infinitude of friendliness. Her lips
in her pauses shaped in a pretty faint smile.

Old tradition was strong in us; all English inns in those days charged
the unexpected, and I asked what our lunch was to cost.

“Pay or not,” she said, “and what you like. It’s holiday these days. I
suppose we’ll still have paying and charging, however we manage it, but
it won’t be the worry it has been—that I feel sure. It’s the part I
never had no fancy for. Many a time I peeped through the bushes
worrying to think what was just and right to me and mine, and what
would send ‘em away satisfied. It isn’t the money I care for. There’ll
be mighty changes, be sure of that; but here I’ll stay, and make people
happy—them that go by on the roads. It’s a pleasant place here when
people are merry; it’s only when they’re jealous, or mean, or tired, or
eat up beyond any stomach’s digesting, or when they got the drink in
‘em that Satan comes into this garden. Many’s the happy face I’ve seen
here, and many that come again like friends, but nothing to equal
what’s going to be, now things are being set right.”

She smiled, that bounteous woman, with the joy of life and hope. “You
shall have an omelet,” she said, “you and your friends; such an
omelet—like they’ll have ‘em in heaven! I feel there’s cooking in me
these days like I’ve never cooked before. I’m rejoiced to have it to
do. . . .”

It was just then that Nettie and Verrall appeared under a rustic
archway of crimson roses that led out from the inn. Nettie wore white
and a sun-hat, and Verrall was a figure of gray. “Here are my friends,”
I said; but for all the magic of the Change, something passed athwart
the sunlight in my soul like the passing of the shadow of a cloud. “A
pretty couple,” said the landlady, as they crossed the velvet green
toward us. . . .

They were indeed a pretty couple, but that did not greatly gladden me.
No—I winced a little at that.

§ 3


This old newspaper, this first reissue of the _New Paper_, desiccated
last relic of a vanished age, is like the little piece of
identification the superstitious of the old days—those queer
religionists who brought a certain black-clad Mrs. Piper to the help of
Christ—used to put into the hand of a clairvoyant. At the crisp touch
of it I look across a gulf of fifty years and see again the three of us
sitting about that table in the arbor, and I smell again the smell of
the sweet-briar that filled the air about us, and hear in our long
pauses the abundant murmuring of bees among the heliotrope of the
borders.

It is the dawn of the new time, but we bear, all three of us, the marks
and liveries of the old.

I see myself, a dark, ill-dressed youth, with the bruise Lord Redcar
gave me still blue and yellow beneath my jaw; and young Verrall sits
cornerwise to me, better grown, better dressed, fair and quiet, two
years my senior indeed, but looking no older than I because of his
light complexion; and opposite me is Nettie, with dark eyes upon my
face, graver and more beautiful than I had ever seen her in the former
time. Her dress is still that white one she had worn when I came upon
her in the park, and still about her dainty neck she wears her string
of pearls and that little coin of gold. She is so much the same, she is
so changed; a girl then and now a woman—and all my agony and all the
marvel of the Change between! Over the end of the green table about
which we sit, a spotless cloth is spread, it bears a pleasant lunch
spread out with a simple equipage. Behind me is the liberal sunshine of
the green and various garden. I see it all. Again I sit there, eating
awkwardly, this paper lies upon the table and Verrall talks of the
Change.

“You can’t imagine,” he says in his sure, fine accents, “how much the
Change has destroyed of me. I still don’t feel awake. Men of my sort
are so tremendously _made;_ I never suspected it before.”

He leans over the table toward me with an evident desire to make
himself perfectly understood. “I find myself like some creature that is
taken out of its shell—soft and new. I was trained to dress in a
certain way, to behave in a certain way, to think in a certain way; I
see now it’s all wrong and narrow—most of it anyhow—a system of class
shibboleths. We were decent to each other in order to be a gang to the
rest of the world. Gentlemen indeed! But it’s perplexing———”

I can hear his voice saying that now, and see the lift of his eyebrows
and his pleasant smile.

He paused. He had wanted to say that, but it was not the thing we had
to say.

I leant forward a little and took hold of my glass very tightly. “You
two,” I said, “will marry?”

They looked at one another.

Nettie spoke very softly. “I did not mean to marry when I came away,”
she said.

“I know,” I answered. I looked up with a sense of effort and met
Verrall’s eyes.

He answered me. “I think we two have joined our lives. . . . But the
thing that took us was a sort of madness.”

I nodded. “All passion,” I said, “is madness.” Then I fell into a
doubting of those words.

“Why did we do these things?” he said, turning to her suddenly.

Her hands were clasped under her chin, her eyes downcast.

“We _had_ to,” she said, with her old trick of inadequate expression.

Then she seemed to open out suddenly.

“Willie,” she cried with a sudden directness, with her eyes appealing
to me, “I didn’t mean to treat you badly—indeed I didn’t. I kept
thinking of you—and of father and mother, all the time. Only it didn’t
seem to move me. It didn’t move me not one bit from the way I had
chosen.”

“Chosen!” I said.

“Something seemed to have hold of me,” she admitted. “It’s all so
unaccountable. . . .”

She gave a little gesture of despair.

Verrall’s fingers played on the cloth for a space. Then he turned his
face to me again.

“Something said ‘Take her.’ Everything. It was a raging desire—for her.
I don’t know. Everything contributed to that—or counted for nothing.
You———”

“Go on,” said I.

“When I knew of you———”

I looked at Nettie. “You never told him about me?” I said, feeling, as
it were, a sting out of the old time.

Verrall answered for her. “No. But things dropped; I saw you that
night, my instincts were all awake. I knew it was you.”

“You triumphed over me? . . . If I could I would have triumphed over
you,” I said. “But go on!”

“Everything conspired to make it the finest thing in life. It had an
air of generous recklessness. It meant mischief, it might mean failure
in that life of politics and affairs, for which I was trained, which it
was my honor to follow. That made it all the finer. It meant ruin or
misery for Nettie. That made it all the finer. No sane or decent man
would have approved of what we did. That made it more splendid than
ever. I had all the advantages of position and used them basely. That
mattered not at all.”

“Yes,” I said; “it is true. And the same dark wave that lifted you,
swept me on to follow. With that revolver—and blubbering with hate. And
the word to you, Nettie, what was it? ‘Give?’ Hurl yourself down the
steep?”

Nettie’s hands fell upon the table. “I can’t tell what it was,” she
said, speaking bare-hearted straight to me. “Girls aren’t trained as
men are trained to look into their minds. I can’t see it yet. All sorts
of mean little motives were there—over and above the ‘must.’ Mean
motives. I kept thinking of his clothes.” She smiled—a flash of
brightness at Verrall. “I kept thinking of being like a lady and
sitting in an hotel—with men like butlers waiting. It’s the dreadful
truth, Willie. Things as mean as that! Things meaner than that!”

I can see her now pleading with me, speaking with a frankness as bright
and amazing as the dawn of the first great morning.

“It wasn’t all mean,” I said slowly, after a pause.

“No!” They spoke together.

“But a woman chooses more than a man does,” Nettie added. “I saw it all
in little bright pictures. Do you know—that jacket—there’s something———
You won’t mind my telling you? But you won’t now!”

I nodded, “No.”

She spoke as if she spoke to my soul, very quietly and very earnestly,
seeking to give the truth. “Something cottony in that cloth of yours,”
she said. “I know there’s something horrible in being swung round by
things like that, but they did swing me round. In the old time—to have
confessed that! And I hated Clayton—and the grime of it. That kitchen!
Your mother’s dreadful kitchen! And besides, Willie, I was afraid of
you. I didn’t understand you and I did him. It’s different now—but then
I knew what he meant. And there was his voice.”

“Yes,” I said to Verrall, making these discoveries quietly, “yes,
Verrall, you have a good voice. Queer I never thought of that before!”

We sat silently for a time before our vivisected passions.

“Gods!” I cried, “and there was our poor little top-hamper of
intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire, these
foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like—like a coop of hens
washed overboard and clucking amidst the seas.”

Verrall laughed approval of the image I had struck out. “A week ago,”
he said, trying it further, “we were clinging to our chicken coops and
going with the heave and pour. That was true enough a week ago. But
to-day———?”

“To-day,” I said, “the wind has fallen. The world storm is over. And
each chicken coop has changed by a miracle to a vessel that makes head
against the sea.”

§ 4


“What are we to do?” asked Verrall.

Nettie drew a deep crimson carnation from the bowl before us, and began
very neatly and deliberately to turn down the sepals of its calyx and
remove, one by one, its petals. I remember that went on through all our
talk. She put those ragged crimson shreds in a long row and adjusted
them and readjusted them. When at last I was alone with these vestiges
the pattern was still incomplete.

“Well,” said I, “the matter seems fairly simple. You two”—I swallowed
it—“love one another.”

I paused. They answered me by silence, by a thoughtful silence.

“You belong to each other. I have thought it over and looked at it from
many points of view. I happened to want—impossible things. . . . I
behaved badly. I had no right to pursue you.” I turned to Verrall. “You
hold yourself bound to her?”

He nodded assent.

“No social influence, no fading out of all this generous clearness in
the air—for that might happen—will change you back . . . ?”

He answered me with honest eyes meeting mine, “No, Leadford, no!”

“I did not know you,” I said. “I thought of you as something very
different from this.”

“I was,” he interpolated.

“Now,” I said, “it is all changed.”

Then I halted—for my thread had slipped away from me.

“As for me,” I went on, and glanced at Nettie’s downcast face, and then
sat forward with my eyes upon the flowers between us, “since I am
swayed and shall be swayed by an affection for Nettie, since that
affection is rich with the seeds of desire, since to see her yours and
wholly yours is not to be endured by me—I must turn about and go from
you; you must avoid me and I you. . . . We must divide the world like
Jacob and Esau. . . . I must direct myself with all the will I have to
other things. After all—this passion is not life! It is perhaps for
brutes and savages, but for men. No! We must part and I must forget.
What else is there but that?”

I did not look up, I sat very tense with the red petals printing an
indelible memory in my brain, but I felt the assent of Verrall’s pose.
There were some moments of silence. Then Nettie spoke. “But———” she
said, and ceased.

I waited for a little while. I sighed and leant back in my chair. “It
is perfectly simple,” I smiled, “now that we have cool heads.”

“But IS it simple?” asked Nettie, and slashed my discourse out of
being.

I looked up and found her with her eyes on Verrall. “You see,” she
said, “I like Willie. It’s hard to say what one feels—but I don’t want
him to go away like that.”

“But then,” objected Verrall, “how———?”

“No,” said Nettie, and swept her half-arranged carnation petals back
into a heap of confusion. She began to arrange them very quickly into
one long straight line.

“It’s so difficult——— I’ve never before in all my life tried to get to
the bottom of my mind. For one thing, I’ve not treated Willie properly.
He—he counted on me. I know he did. I was his hope. I was a promised
delight—something, something to crown life—better than anything he had
ever had. And a secret pride. . . . He lived upon me. I knew—when we
two began to meet together, you and I——— It was a sort of treachery to
him———”

“Treachery!” I said. “You were only feeling your way through all these
perplexities.”

“You thought it treachery.”

“I don’t now.”

“I did. In a sense I think so still. For you had need of me.”

I made a slight protest at this doctrine and fell thinking.

“And even when he was trying to kill us,” she said to her lover, “I
felt for him down in the bottom of my mind. I can understand all the
horrible things, the humiliation—the humiliation! he went through.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t see———”

“_I_ don’t see. I’m only trying to see. But you know, Willie, you are a
part of my life. I have known you longer than I have known Edward. I
know you better. Indeed I know you with all my heart. You think all
your talk was thrown away upon me, that I never understood that side of
you, or your ambitions or anything. I did. More than I thought at the
time. Now—now it is all clear to me. What I had to understand in you
was something deeper than Edward brought me. I have it now. . . . You
are a part of my life, and I don’t want to cut all that off from me now
I have comprehended it, and throw it away.”

“But you love Verrall.”

“Love is such a queer thing! . . . Is there one love? I mean, only one
love?” She turned to Verrall. “I know I love you. I can speak out about
that now. Before this morning I couldn’t have done. It’s just as though
my mind had got out of a scented prison. But what is it, this love for
you? It’s a mass of fancies—things about you—ways you look, ways you
have. It’s the senses—and the senses of certain beauties. Flattery too,
things you said, hopes and deceptions for myself. And all that had
rolled up together and taken to itself the wild help of those deep
emotions that slumbered in my body; it seemed everything. But it
wasn’t. How can I describe it? It was like having a very bright lamp
with a thick shade—everything else in the room was hidden. But you take
the shade off and there they are—it is the same light—still there! Only
it lights every one!”

Her voice ceased. For awhile no one spoke, and Nettie, with a quick
movement, swept the petals into the shape of a pyramid.

Figures of speech always distract me, and it ran through my mind like
some puzzling refrain, “It is still the same light. . . .”

“No woman believes these things,” she asserted abruptly.

“What things?”

“No woman ever has believed them.”

“You have to choose a man,” said Verrall, apprehending her before I
did.

“We’re brought up to that. We’re told—it’s in books, in stories, in the
way people look, in the way they behave—one day there will come a man.
He will be everything, no one else will be anything. Leave everything
else; live in him.”

“And a man, too, is taught that of some woman,” said Verrall.

“Only men don’t believe it! They have more obstinate minds. . . . Men
have never behaved as though they believed it. One need not be old to
know that. By nature they don’t believe it. But a woman believes
nothing by nature. She goes into a mold hiding her secret thoughts
almost from herself.”

“She used to,” I said.

“You haven’t,” said Verrall, “anyhow.”

“I’ve come out. It’s this comet. And Willie. And because I never really
believed in the mold at all—even if I thought I did. It’s stupid to
send Willie off—shamed, cast out, never to see him again—when I like
him as much as I do. It is cruel, it is wicked and ugly, to prance over
him as if he was a defeated enemy, and pretend I’m going to be happy
just the same. There’s no sense in a rule of life that prescribes that.
It’s selfish. It’s brutish. It’s like something that has no sense.
I———” there was a sob in her voice: “Willie! I _won’t_.”

I sat lowering, I mused with my eyes upon her quick fingers.

“It IS brutish,” I said at last, with a careful unemotional
deliberation. “Nevertheless—it is in the nature of things. . . . No! .
. . You see, after all, we are still half brutes, Nettie. And men, as
you say, are more obstinate than women. The comet hasn’t altered that;
it’s only made it clearer. We have come into being through a tumult of
blind forces. . . . I come back to what I said just now; we have found
our poor reasonable minds, our wills to live well, ourselves, adrift on
a wash of instincts, passions, instinctive prejudices, half animal
stupidities. . . . Here we are like people clinging to something—like
people awakening—upon a raft.”

“We come back at last to my question,” said Verrall, softly; “what are
we to do?”

“Part,” I said. “You see, Nettie, these bodies of ours are not the
bodies of angels. They are the same bodies——— I have read somewhere
that in our bodies you can find evidence of the lowliest ancestry; that
about our inward ears—I think it is—and about our teeth, there remains
still something of the fish, that there are bones that recall
little—what is it?—marsupial forebears—and a hundred traces of the ape.
Even your beautiful body, Nettie, carries this taint. No! Hear me out.”
I leant forward earnestly. “Our emotions, our passions, our desires,
the substance of them, like the substance of our bodies, is an animal,
a competing thing, as well as a desiring thing. You speak to us now a
mind to minds—one can do that when one has had exercise and when one
has eaten, when one is not doing anything—but when one turns to live,
one turns again to matter.”

“Yes,” said Nettie, slowly following me, “but you control it.”

“Only through a measure of obedience. There is no magic in the
business—to conquer matter, we must divide the enemy, and take matter
as an ally. Nowadays it is indeed true, by faith a man can remove
mountains; he can say to a mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast
into the sea; but he does it because he helps and trusts his brother
men, because he has the wit and patience and courage to win over to his
side iron, steel, obedience, dynamite, cranes, trucks, the money of
other people. . . . To conquer my desire for you, I must not
perpetually thwart it by your presence; I must go away so that I may
not see you, I must take up other interests, thrust myself into
struggles and discussions———”

“And forget?” said Nettie.

“Not forget,” I said; “but anyhow—cease to brood upon you.”

She hung on that for some moments.

“No,” she said, demolished her last pattern and looked up at Verrall as
he stirred.

Verrall leant forward on the table, elbows upon it, and the fingers of
his two hands intertwined.

“You know,” he said, “I haven’t thought much of these things. At school
and the university, one doesn’t. . . . It was part of the system to
prevent it. They’ll alter all that, no doubt. We seem”—he thought—“to
be skating about over questions that one came to at last in Greek—with
variorum readings—in Plato, but which it never occurred to any one to
translate out of a dead language into living realities. . . .” He
halted and answered some unspoken question from his own mind with, “No.
I think with Leadford, Nettie, that, as he put it, it is in the nature
of things for men to be exclusive. . . . Minds are free things and go
about the world, but only one man can possess a woman. You must dismiss
rivals. We are made for the struggle for existence—we _are_ the
struggle for existence; the things that live are the struggle for
existence incarnate—and that works out that the men struggle for their
mates; for each woman one prevails. The others go away.”

“Like animals,” said Nettie.

“Yes. . . .”

“There are many things in life,” I said, “but that is the rough
universal truth.”

“But,” said Nettie, “you don’t struggle. That has been altered because
men have minds.”

“You choose,” I said.

“If I don’t choose to choose?”

“You have chosen.”

She gave a little impatient “Oh! Why are women always the slaves of
sex? Is this great age of Reason and Light that has come to alter
nothing of that? And men too! I think it is all—stupid. I do not
believe this is the right solution of the thing, or anything but the
bad habits of the time that was. . . Instinct! You don’t let your
instincts rule you in a lot of other things. Here am I between you.
Here is Edward. I—love him because he is gay and pleasant, and
because—because I _like_ him! Here is Willie—a part of me—my first
secret, my oldest friend! Why must I not have both? Am I not a mind
that you must think of me as nothing but a woman? imagine me always as
a thing to struggle for?” She paused; then she made her distressful
proposition to me. “Let us three keep together,” she said. “Let us not
part. To part is hate, Willie. Why should we not anyhow keep friends?
Meet and talk?”

“Talk?” I said. “About this sort of thing?”

I looked across at Verrall and met his eyes, and we studied one
another. It was the clean, straight scrutiny of honest antagonism.
“No,” I decided. “Between us, nothing of that sort can be.”

“Ever?” said Nettie.

“Never,” I said, convinced.

I made an effort within myself. “We cannot tamper with the law and
customs of these things,” I said; “these passions are too close to
one’s essential self. Better surgery than a lingering disease! From
Nettie my love—asks all. A man’s love is not devotion—it is a demand, a
challenge. And besides”—and here I forced my theme—“I have given myself
now to a new mistress—and it is I, Nettie, who am unfaithful. Behind
you and above you rises the coming City of the World, and I am in that
building. Dear heart! you are only happiness—and that———Indeed that
calls! If it is only that my life blood shall christen the foundation
stones—I could almost hope that should be my part, Nettie—I will join
myself in that.” I threw all the conviction I could into these words. .
. . “No conflict of passion.” I added a little lamely, “must distract
me.”

There was a pause.

“Then we must part,” said Nettie, with the eyes of a woman one strikes
in the face.

I nodded assent. . . .

There was a little pause, and then I stood up. We stood up, all three.
We parted almost sullenly, with no more memorable words, and I was left
presently in the arbor alone.

I do not think I watched them go. I only remember myself left there
somehow—horribly empty and alone. I sat down again and fell into a deep
shapeless musing.

§ 5


Suddenly I looked up. Nettie had come back and stood looking down at
me.

“Since we talked I have been thinking,” she said. “Edward has let me
come to you alone. And I feel perhaps I can talk better to you alone.”

I said nothing and that embarrassed her.

“I don’t think we ought to part,” she said.

“No—I don’t think we ought to part,” she repeated.

“One lives,” she said, “in different ways. I wonder if you will
understand what I am saying, Willie. It is hard to say what I feel. But
I want it said. If we are to part for ever I want it said—very plainly.
Always before I have had the woman’s instinct and the woman’s training
which makes one hide. But——— Edward is not all of me. Think of what I
am saying—Edward is not all of me. . . . I wish I could tell you better
how I see it. I am not all of myself. You, at any rate, are a part of
me and I cannot bear to leave you. And I cannot see why I should leave
you. There is a sort of blood link between us, Willie. We grew
together. We are in one another’s bones. I understand you. Now indeed I
understand. In some way I have come to an understanding at a stride.
Indeed I understand you and your dream. I want to help you.
Edward—Edward has no dreams. . . . It is dreadful to me, Willie, to
think we two are to part.”

“But we have settled that—part we must.”

“But _why?_”

“I love you.”

“Well, and why should I hide it Willie?—I love you. . . .” Our eyes
met. She flushed, she went on resolutely: “You are stupid. The whole
thing is stupid. I love you both.”

I said, “You do not understand what you say. No!”

“You mean that I must go.”

“Yes, yes. Go!”

For a moment we looked at one another, mute, as though deep down in the
unfathomable darkness below the surface and present reality of things
dumb meanings strove to be. She made to speak and desisted.

“But _must_ I go?” she said at last, with quivering lips, and the tears
in her eyes were stars. Then she began, “Willie———”

“Go!” I interrupted her. . . . “Yes.”

Then again we were still.

She stood there, a tearful figure of pity, longing for me, pitying me.
Something of that wider love, that will carry our descendants at last
out of all the limits, the hard, clear obligations of our personal
life, moved us, like the first breath of a coming wind out of heaven
that stirs and passes away. I had an impulse to take her hand and kiss
it, and then a trembling came to me, and I knew that if I touched her,
my strength would all pass from me. . . .

And so, standing at a distance one from the other, we parted, and
Nettie went, reluctant and looking back, with the man she had chosen,
to the lot she had chosen, out of my life—like the sunlight out of my
life. . . .

Then, you know, I suppose I folded up this newspaper and put it in my
pocket. But my memory of that meeting ends with the face of Nettie
turning to go.

§ 6


I remember all that very distinctly to this day. I could almost vouch
for the words I have put into our several mouths. Then comes a blank. I
have a dim memory of being back in the house near the Links and the
bustle of Melmount’s departure, of finding Parker’s energy distasteful,
and of going away down the road with a strong desire to say good-bye to
Melmount alone.

Perhaps I was already doubting my decision to part for ever from
Nettie, for I think I had it in mind to tell him all that had been said
and done. . . .

I don’t think I had a word with him or anything but a hurried hand
clasp. I am not sure. It has gone out of my mind. But I have a very
clear and certain memory of my phase of bleak desolation as I watched
his car recede and climb and vanish over Mapleborough Hill, and that I
got there my first full and definite intimation that, after all, this
great Change and my new wide aims in life, were not to mean
indiscriminate happiness for me. I had a sense of protest, as against
extreme unfairness, as I saw him go. “It is too soon,” I said to
myself, “to leave me alone.”

I felt I had sacrificed too much, that after I had said good-bye to the
hot immediate life of passion, to Nettie and desire, to physical and
personal rivalry, to all that was most intensely myself, it was wrong
to leave me alone and sore hearted, to go on at once with these steely
cold duties of the wider life. I felt new born, and naked, and at a
loss.

“Work!” I said with an effort at the heroic, and turned about with a
sigh, and I was glad that the way I had to go would at least take me to
my mother. . . .

But, curiously enough, I remember myself as being fairly cheerful in
the town of Birmingham that night, I recall an active and interested
mood. I spent the night in Birmingham because the train service on was
disarranged, and I could not get on. I went to listen to a band that
was playing its brassy old-world music in the public park, and I fell
into conversation with a man who said he had been a reporter upon one
of their minor local papers. He was full and keen upon all the plans of
reconstruction that were now shaping over the lives of humanity, and I
know that something of that noble dream came back to me with his words
and phrases. We walked up to a place called Bourneville by moonlight,
and talked of the new social groupings that must replace the old
isolated homes, and how the people would be housed.

This Bourneville was germane to that matter. It had been an attempt on
the part of a private firm of manufacturers to improve the housing of
their workers. To our ideas to-day it would seem the feeblest of
benevolent efforts, but at the time it was extraordinary and famous,
and people came long journeys to see its trim cottages with baths sunk
under the kitchen floors (of all conceivable places), and other
brilliant inventions. No one seemed to see the danger to liberty in
that aggressive age, that might arise through making workpeople tenants
and debtors of their employer, though an Act called the Truck Act had
long ago intervened to prevent minor developments in the same
direction. . . . But I and my chance acquaintance seemed that night
always to have been aware of that possibility, and we had no doubt in
our minds of the public nature of the housing duty. Our interest lay
rather in the possibility of common nurseries and kitchens and public
rooms that should economize toil and give people space and freedom.

It was very interesting, but still a little cheerless, and when I lay
in bed that night I thought of Nettie and the queer modifications of
preference she had made, and among other things and in a way, I prayed.
I prayed that night, let me confess it, to an image I had set up in my
heart, an image that still serves with me as a symbol for things
inconceivable, to a Master Artificer, the unseen captain of all who go
about the building of the world, the making of mankind.

But before and after I prayed I imagined I was talking and reasoning
and meeting again with Nettie. . . . She never came into the temple of
that worshiping with me.




CHAPTER THE SECOND
MY MOTHER’S LAST DAYS


§ 1

Next day I came home to Clayton.

The new strange brightness of the world was all the brighter there, for
the host of dark distressful memories, of darkened childhood, toilsome
youth, embittered adolescence that wove about the place for me. It
seemed to me that I saw morning there for the first time. No chimneys
smoked that day, no furnaces were burning, the people were busy with
other things. The clear strong sun, the sparkle in the dustless air,
made a strange gaiety in the narrow streets. I passed a number of
smiling people coming home from the public breakfasts that were given
in the Town Hall until better things could be arranged, and happened on
Parload among them. “You were right about that comet,” I sang out at
the sight of him; and he came toward me and clasped my hand.

“What are people doing here?” said I.

“They’re sending us food from outside,” he said, “and we’re going to
level all these slums—and shift into tents on to the moors;” and he
began to tell me of many things that were being arranged, the Midland
land committees had got to work with remarkable celerity and directness
of purpose, and the redistribution of population was already in its
broad outlines planned. He was working at an improvised college of
engineering. Until schemes of work were made out, almost every one was
going to school again to get as much technical training as they could
against the demands of the huge enterprise of reconstruction that was
now beginning.

He walked with me to my door, and there I met old Pettigrew coming down
the steps. He looked dusty and tired, but his eye was brighter than it
used to be, and he carried in a rather unaccustomed manner, a workman’s
tool basket.

“How’s the rheumatism, Mr. Pettigrew?” I asked.

“Dietary,” said old Pettigrew, “can work wonders. . . .” He looked me
in the eye. “These houses,” he said, “will have to come down, I
suppose, and our notions of property must undergo very considerable
revision—in the light of reason; but meanwhile I’ve been doing
something to patch that disgraceful roof of mine! To think that I could
have dodged and evaded———”

He raised a deprecatory hand, drew down the loose corners of his ample
mouth, and shook his old head.

“The past is past, Mr. Pettigrew.”

“Your poor dear mother! So good and honest a woman! So simple and kind
and forgiving! To think of it! My dear young man!”—he said it
manfully—“I’m ashamed.”

“The whole world blushed at dawn the other day, Mr. Pettigrew,” I said,
“and did it very prettily. That’s over now. God knows, who is _not_
ashamed of all that came before last Tuesday.”

I held out a forgiving hand, naively forgetful that in this place I was
a thief, and he took it and went his way, shaking his head and
repeating he was ashamed, but I think a little comforted.

The door opened and my poor old mother’s face, marvelously cleaned,
appeared. “Ah, Willie, boy! _You_. You!”

I ran up the steps to her, for I feared she might fall.

How she clung to me in the passage, the dear woman! . . .

But first she shut the front door. The old habit of respect for my
unaccountable temper still swayed her. “Ah deary!” she said, “ah deary!
But you were sorely tried,” and kept her face close to my shoulder,
lest she should offend me by the sight of the tears that welled within
her.

She made a sort of gulping noise and was quiet for a while, holding me
very tightly to her heart with her worn, long hands . . .

She thanked me presently for my telegram, and I put my arm about her
and drew her into the living room.

“It’s all well with me, mother dear,” I said, “and the dark times are
over—are done with for ever, mother.”

Whereupon she had courage and gave way and sobbed aloud, none chiding
her.

She had not let me know she could still weep for five grimy years. . .
.

§ 2


Dear heart! There remained for her but a very brief while in this world
that had been renewed. I did not know how short that time would be, but
the little I could do—perhaps after all it was not little to her—to
atone for the harshness of my days of wrath and rebellion, I did. I
took care to be constantly with her, for I perceived now her curious
need of me. It was not that we had ideas to exchange or pleasures to
share, but she liked to see me at table, to watch me working, to have
me go to and fro. There was no toil for her any more in the world, but
only such light services as are easy and pleasant for a worn and weary
old woman to do, and I think she was happy even at her end.

She kept to her queer old eighteenth century version of religion, too,
without a change. She had worn this particular amulet so long it was a
part of her. Yet the Change was evident even in that persistence. I
said to her one day, “But do you still believe in that hell of flame,
dear mother? You—with your tender heart!”

She vowed she did.

Some theological intricacy made it necessary to her, but still———

She looked thoughtfully at a bank of primulas before her for a time,
and then laid her tremulous hand impressively on my arm. “You know,
Willie, dear,” she said, as though she was clearing up a childish
misunderstanding of mine, “I don’t think any one will _go_ there. I
never _did_ think that. . . .”

§ 3


That talk stands out in my memory because of that agreeable theological
decision of hers, but it was only one of a great number of talks. It
used to be pleasant in the afternoon, after the day’s work was done and
before one went on with the evening’s study—how odd it would have
seemed in the old time for a young man of the industrial class to be
doing post-graduate work in sociology, and how much a matter of course
it seems now!—to walk out into the gardens of Lowchester House, and
smoke a cigarette or so and let her talk ramblingly of the things that
interested her. . . . Physically the Great Change did not do so very
much to reinvigorate her—she had lived in that dismal underground
kitchen in Clayton too long for any material rejuvenescence—she glowed
out indeed as a dying spark among the ashes might glow under a draught
of fresh air—and assuredly it hastened her end. But those closing days
were very tranquil, full of an effortless contentment. With her, life
was like a rainy, windy day that clears only to show the sunset
afterglow. The light has passed. She acquired no new habits amid the
comforts of the new life, did no new things, but only found a happier
light upon the old.

She lived with a number of other old ladies belonging to our commune in
the upper rooms of Lowchester House. Those upper apartments were simple
and ample, fine and well done in the Georgian style, and they had been
organized to give the maximum of comfort and conveniences and to
economize the need of skilled attendance. We had taken over the various
“great houses,” as they used to be called, to make communal
dining-rooms and so forth—their kitchens were conveniently large—and
pleasant places for the old people of over sixty whose time of ease had
come, and for suchlike public uses. We had done this not only with Lord
Redcar’s house, but also with Checkshill House—where old Mrs. Verrall
made a dignified and capable hostess,—and indeed with most of the fine
residences in the beautiful wide country between the Four Towns
district and the Welsh mountains. About these great houses there had
usually been good outbuildings, laundries, married servants’ quarters,
stabling, dairies, and the like, suitably masked by trees, we turned
these into homes, and to them we added first tents and wood chalets and
afterward quadrangular residential buildings. In order to be near my
mother I had two small rooms in the new collegiate buildings which our
commune was almost the first to possess, and they were very convenient
for the station of the high-speed electric railway that took me down to
our daily conferences and my secretarial and statistical work in
Clayton.

Ours had been one of the first modern communes to get in order; we were
greatly helped by the energy of Lord Redcar, who had a fine feeling for
the picturesque associations of his ancestral home—the detour that took
our line through the beeches and bracken and bluebells of the West Wood
and saved the pleasant open wildness of the park was one of his
suggestions; and we had many reasons to be proud of our surroundings.
Nearly all the other communes that sprang up all over the pleasant
parkland round the industrial valley of the Four Towns, as the workers
moved out, came to us to study the architecture of the residential
squares and quadrangles with which we had replaced the back streets
between the great houses and the ecclesiastical residences about the
cathedral, and the way in which we had adapted all these buildings to
our new social needs. Some claimed to have improved on us. But they
could not emulate the rhododendron garden out beyond our shrubberies;
that was a thing altogether our own in our part of England, because of
its ripeness and of the rarity of good peat free from lime.

These gardens had been planned under the third Lord Redcar, fifty years
ago and more; they abounded in rhododendra and azaleas, and were in
places so well sheltered and sunny that great magnolias flourished and
flowered. There were tall trees smothered in crimson and yellow
climbing roses, and an endless variety of flowering shrubs and fine
conifers, and such pampas grass as no other garden can show. And barred
by the broad shadows of these, were glades and broad spaces of emerald
turf, and here and there banks of pegged roses, and flower-beds, and
banks given over some to spring bulbs, and some to primroses and
primulas and polyanthuses. My mother loved these latter banks and the
little round staring eyes of their innumerable yellow, ruddy brown, and
purple corollas, more than anything else the gardens could show, and in
the spring of the Year of Scaffolding she would go with me day after
day to the seat that showed them in the greatest multitude.

It gave her, I think, among other agreeable impressions, a sense of
gentle opulence. In the old time she had never known what it was to
have more than enough of anything agreeable in the world at all.

We would sit and think, or talk—there was a curious effect of complete
understanding between us whether we talked or were still.

“Heaven,” she said to me one day, “Heaven is a garden.”

I was moved to tease her a little. “There’s jewels, you know, walls and
gates of jewels—and singing.”

“For such as like them,” said my mother firmly, and thought for a
while. “There’ll be things for all of us, o’ course. But for me it
couldn’t be Heaven, dear, unless it was a garden—a nice sunny garden. .
. . And feeling such as we’re fond of, are close and handy by.”

You of your happier generation cannot realize the wonderfulness of
those early days in the new epoch, the sense of security, the
extraordinary effects of contrast. In the morning, except in high
summer, I was up before dawn, and breakfasted upon the swift, smooth
train, and perhaps saw the sunrise as I rushed out of the little tunnel
that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work like a man. Now that we had
got all the homes and schools and all the softness of life away from
our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousand obstructive
“rights” and timidities had been swept aside, we could let ourselves
go, we merged this enterprise with that, cut across this or that
anciently obstructive piece of private land, joined and separated,
effected gigantic consolidations and gigantic economies, and the
valley, no longer a pit of squalid human tragedies and meanly
conflicting industries, grew into a sort of beauty of its own, a savage
inhuman beauty of force and machinery and flames. One was a Titan in
that Etna. Then back one came at midday to bathe and change in the
train, and so to the leisurely gossiping lunch in the club dining-room
in Lowchester House, and the refreshment of these green and sunlit
afternoon tranquillities.

Sometimes in her profounder moments my mother doubted whether all this
last phase of her life was not a dream.

“A dream,” I used to say, “a dream indeed—but a dream that is one step
nearer awakening than that nightmare of the former days.”

She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes—she liked
the new fashions of dress, she alleged. It was not simply altered
clothes. I did grow two inches, broaden some inches round my chest, and
increase in weight three stones before I was twenty-three. I wore a
soft brown cloth and she would caress my sleeve and admire it
greatly—she had the woman’s sense of texture very strong in her.

Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor rough
hands—they never got softened—one over the other. She told me much I
had not heard before about my father, and her own early life. It was
like finding flat and faded flowers in a book still faintly sweet, to
realize that once my mother had been loved with passion; that my remote
father had once shed hot tears of tenderness in her arms. And she would
sometimes even speak tentatively in those narrow, old-world phrases
that her lips could rob of all their bitter narrowness, of Nettie.

“She wasn’t worthy of you, dear,” she would say abruptly, leaving me to
guess the person she intended.

“No man is worthy of a woman’s love,” I answered. “No woman is worthy
of a man’s. I love her, dear mother, and that you cannot alter.”

“There’s others,” she would muse.

“Not for me,” I said. “No! I didn’t fire a shot that time; I burnt my
magazine. I can’t begin again, mother, not from the beginning.”

She sighed and said no more then.

At another time she said—I think her words were: “You’ll be lonely when
I’m gone dear.”

“You’ll not think of going, then,” I said.

“Eh, dear! but man and maid should come together.”

I said nothing to that.

“You brood overmuch on Nettie, dear. If I could see you married to some
sweet girl of a woman, some good, _kind_ girl———”

“Dear mother, I’m married enough. Perhaps some day——— Who knows? I can
wait.”

“But to have nothing to do with women!”

“I have my friends. Don’t you trouble, mother. There’s plentiful work
for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out from him.
Nettie was life and beauty for me—is—will be. Don’t think I’ve lost too
much, mother.”

(Because in my heart I told myself the end had still to come.)

And once she sprang a question on me suddenly that surprised me.

“Where are they now?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Nettie and—him.”

She had pierced to the marrow of my thoughts. “I don’t know,” I said
shortly.

Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.

“It’s better so,” she said, as if pleading. “Indeed . . . it is better
so.”

There was something in her quivering old voice that for a moment took
me back across an epoch, to the protests of the former time, to those
counsels of submission, those appeals not to offend It, that had always
stirred an angry spirit of rebellion within me.

“That is the thing I doubt,” I said, and abruptly I felt I could talk
no more to her of Nettie. I got up and walked away from her, and came
back after a while, to speak of other things, with a bunch of daffodils
for her in my hand.

But I did not always spend my afternoons with her. There were days when
my crushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be alone; I
walked, or bicycled, and presently I found a new interest and relief in
learning to ride. For the horse was already very swiftly reaping the
benefit to the Change. Hardly anywhere was the inhumanity of horse
traction to be found after the first year of the new epoch, everywhere
lugging and dragging and straining was done by machines, and the horse
had become a beautiful instrument for the pleasure and carriage of
youth. I rode both in the saddle and, what is finer, naked and
barebacked. I found violent exercises were good for the states of
enormous melancholy that came upon me, and when at last horse riding
palled, I went and joined the aviators who practised soaring upon
aeroplanes beyond Horsemarden Hill. . . . But at least every alternate
day I spent with my mother, and altogether I think I gave her
two-thirds of my afternoons.

§ 4


When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an
euthanasia for so many of the older people in the beginning of the new
time, took hold upon my mother, there came Anna Reeves to daughter
her—after our new custom. She chose to come. She was already known to
us a little from chance meetings and chance services she had done my
mother in the garden; she sought to give her help. She seemed then just
one of those plainly good girls the world at its worst has never failed
to produce, who were indeed in the dark old times the hidden antiseptic
of all our hustling, hating, faithless lives. They made their secret
voiceless worship, they did their steadfast, uninspired, unthanked,
unselfish work as helpful daughters, as nurses, as faithful servants,
as the humble providences of homes. She was almost exactly three years
older than I. At first I found no beauty in her, she was short but
rather sturdy and ruddy, with red-tinged hair, and fair hairy brows and
red-brown eyes. But her freckled hands I found, were full of apt help,
her voice carried good cheer. . . .

At first she was no more than a blue-clad, white-aproned benevolence,
that moved in the shadows behind the bed on which my old mother lay and
sank restfully to death. She would come forward to anticipate some
little need, to proffer some simple comfort, and always then my mother
smiled on her. In a little while I discovered the beauty of that
helpful poise of her woman’s body, I discovered the grace of untiring
goodness, the sweetness of a tender pity, and the great riches of her
voice, of her few reassuring words and phrases. I noted and remembered
very clearly how once my mother’s lean old hand patted the firm
gold-flecked strength of hers, as it went by upon its duties with the
coverlet.

“She is a good girl to me,” said my mother one day. “A good girl. Like
a daughter should be. . . . I never had a daughter—really.” She mused
peacefully for a space. “Your little sister died,” she said.

I had never heard of that little sister.

“November the tenth,” said my mother. “Twenty-nine months and three
days. . . . I cried. I cried. That was before you came, dear. So long
ago—and I can see it now. I was a young wife then, and your father was
very kind. But I can see its hands, its dear little quiet hands. . . .
Dear, they say that now—now they will not let the little children die.”

“No, dear mother,” I said. “We shall do better now.”

“The club doctor could not come. Your father went twice. There was some
one else, some one who paid. So your father went on into Swathinglea,
and that man wouldn’t come unless he had his fee. And your father had
changed his clothes to look more respectful and he hadn’t any money,
not even his tram fare home. It seemed cruel to be waiting there with
my baby thing in pain. . . . And I can’t help thinking perhaps we might
have saved her. . . . But it was like that with the poor always in the
bad old times—always. When the doctor came at last he was angry. ‘Why
wasn’t I called before?’ he said, and he took no pains. He was angry
because some one hadn’t explained. I begged him—but it was too late.”

She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one who
describes a dream. “We are going to manage all these things better
now,” I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful little story
her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me.

“She talked,” my mother went on. “She talked for her age wonderfully. .
. . Hippopotamus.”

“Eh?” I said.

“Hippopotamus, dear—quite plainly one day, when her father was showing
her pictures. . . And her little prayers. ‘Now I lay me. . . . down to
sleep.’ . . . I made her little socks. Knitted they was, dear, and the
heel most difficult.”

Her eyes were closed now. She spoke no longer to me but to herself. She
whispered other vague things, little sentences, ghosts of long dead
moments. . . . Her words grew less distinct.

Presently she was asleep and I got up and went out of the room, but my
mind was queerly obsessed by the thought of that little life that had
been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of hope again
into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never heard before. . . .

And presently I was in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows of
the past, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which this was
but one luminous and quivering red drop. I walked in the garden and the
garden was too small for me; I went out to wander on the moors. “The
past is past,” I cried, and all the while across the gulf of five and
twenty years I could hear my poor mother’s heart-wrung weeping for that
daughter baby who had suffered and died. Indeed that old spirit of
rebellion has not altogether died in me, for all the transformation of
the new time. . . . I quieted down at last to a thin and austere
comfort in thinking that the whole is not told to us, that it cannot
perhaps be told to such minds as ours; and anyhow, and what was far
more sustaining, that now we have strength and courage and this new
gift of wise love, whatever cruel and sad things marred the past, none
of these sorrowful things that made the very warp and woof of the old
life, need now go on happening. We could foresee, we could prevent and
save. “The past is past,” I said, between sighing and resolve, as I
came into view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit
windows of old Lowchester House. “Those sorrows are sorrows no more.”

But I could not altogether cheat that common sadness of the new time,
that memory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives that had
stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before our air grew clear.




CHAPTER THE THIRD
BELTANE AND NEW YEAR’S EVE


§ 1

In the end my mother died rather suddenly, and her death came as a
shock to me. Diagnosis was still very inadequate at that time. The
doctors were, of course, fully alive to the incredible defects of their
common training and were doing all they could to supply its
deficiencies, but they were still extraordinarily ignorant. Some
unintelligently observed factor of her illness came into play with her,
and she became feverish and sank and died very quickly. I do not know
what remedial measures were attempted. I hardly knew what was happening
until the whole thing was over.

At that time my attention was much engaged by the stir of the great
Beltane festival that was held on May-day in the Year of Scaffolding.
It was the first of the ten great rubbish burnings that opened the new
age. Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the enormous
quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation with which we had to
deal; had we not set aside a special day and season, the whole world
would have been an incessant reek of small fires; and it was, I think,
a happy idea to revive this ancient festival of the May and November
burnings. It was inevitable that the old idea of purification should
revive with the name, it was felt to be a burning of other than
material encumbrances, innumerable quasi-spiritual things, deeds,
documents, debts, vindictive records, went up on those great flares.
People passed praying between the fires, and it was a fine symbol of
the new and wiser tolerance that had come to men, that those who still
found their comfort in the orthodox faiths came hither unpersuaded, to
pray that all hate might be burnt out of their professions. For even in
the fires of Baal, now that men have done with base hatred, one may
find the living God.

Endless were the things we had to destroy in those great purgings.
First, there were nearly all the houses and buildings of the old time.
In the end we did not save in England one building in five thousand
that was standing when the comet came. Year by year, as we made our
homes afresh in accordance with the saner needs of our new social
families, we swept away more and more of those horrible structures, the
ancient residential houses, hastily built, without imagination, without
beauty, without common honesty, without even comfort or convenience, in
which the early twentieth century had sheltered until scarcely one
remained; we saved nothing but what was beautiful or interesting out of
all their gaunt and melancholy abundance. The actual houses, of course,
we could not drag to our fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting
deal doors, their dreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting
staircases, their dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their
scaly walls, their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and
yet pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers,
the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments—their dirty, decayed, and
altogether painful ornaments—amidst which I remember there were
sometimes even _stuffed dead birds!_—we burnt them all. The
paint-plastered woodwork, with coat above coat of nasty paint, that in
particular blazed finely. I have already tried to give you an
impression of old-world furniture, of Parload’s bedroom, my mother’s
room, Mr. Gabbitas’s sitting-room, but, thank Heaven! there is nothing
in life now to convey the peculiar dinginess of it all. For one thing,
there is no more imperfect combustion of coal going on everywhere, and
no roadways like grassless open scars along the earth from which dust
pours out perpetually. We burnt and destroyed most of our private
buildings and all the woodwork, all our furniture, except a few score
thousand pieces of distinct and intentional beauty, from which our
present forms have developed, nearly all our hangings and carpets, and
also we destroyed almost every scrap of old-world clothing. Only a few
carefully disinfected types and vestiges of that remain now in our
museums.

One writes now with a peculiar horror of the dress of the old world.
The men’s clothes were worn without any cleansing process at all,
except an occasional superficial brushing, for periods of a year or so;
they were made of dark obscurely mixed patterns to conceal the stage of
defilement they had reached, and they were of a felted and porous
texture admirably calculated to accumulate drifting matter. Many women
wore skirts of similar substances, and of so long and inconvenient a
form that they inevitably trailed among all the abomination of our
horse-frequented roads. It was our boast in England that the whole of
our population was booted—their feet were for the most part ugly enough
to need it,—but it becomes now inconceivable how they could have
imprisoned their feet in the amazing cases of leather and imitations of
leather they used. I have heard it said that a large part of the
physical decline that was apparent in our people during the closing
years of the nineteenth century, though no doubt due in part to the
miscellaneous badness of the food they ate, was in the main
attributable to the vileness of the common footwear. They shirked
open-air exercise altogether because their boots wore out ruinously and
pinched and hurt them if they took it. I have mentioned, I think, the
part my own boots played in the squalid drama of my adolescence. I had
a sense of unholy triumph over a fallen enemy when at last I found
myself steering truck after truck of cheap boots and shoes (unsold
stock from Swathinglea) to the run-off by the top of the Glanville
blast furnaces.

“Plup!” they would drop into the cone when Beltane came, and the roar
of their burning would fill the air. Never a cold would come from the
saturation of their brown paper soles, never a corn from their foolish
shapes, never a nail in them get home at last in suffering flesh. . . .

Most of our public buildings we destroyed and burnt as we reshaped our
plan of habitation, our theater sheds, our banks, and inconvenient
business warrens, our factories (these in the first year of all), and
all the “unmeaning repetition” of silly little sham Gothic churches and
meeting-houses, mean looking shells of stone and mortar without love,
invention, or any beauty at all in them, that men had thrust into the
face of their sweated God, even as they thrust cheap food into the
mouths of their sweated workers; all these we also swept away in the
course of that first decade. Then we had the whole of the superseded
steam-railway system to scrap and get rid of, stations, signals,
fences, rolling stock; a plant of ill-planned, smoke-distributing
nuisance apparatus, that would, under former conditions, have
maintained an offensive dwindling obstructive life for perhaps half a
century. Then also there was a great harvest of fences, notice boards,
hoardings, ugly sheds, all the corrugated iron in the world, and
everything that was smeared with tar, all our gas works and petroleum
stores, all our horse vehicles and vans and lorries had to be erased. .
. . But I have said enough now perhaps to give some idea of the bulk
and quality of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down,
our toil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in
those early years.

But these were the coarse material bases of the Phœnix fires of the
world. These were but the outward and visible signs of the innumerable
claims, rights, adhesions, debts, bills, deeds, and charters that were
cast upon the fires; a vast accumulation of insignia and uniforms
neither curious enough nor beautiful enough to preserve, went to swell
the blaze, and all (saving a few truly glorious trophies and memories)
of our symbols, our apparatus and material of war. Then innumerable
triumphs of our old, bastard, half-commercial, fine-art were presently
condemned, great oil paintings, done to please the half-educated
middle-class, glared for a moment and were gone, Academy marbles
crumbled to useful lime, a gross multitude of silly statuettes and
decorative crockery, and hangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and
musical instruments shared this fate. And books, countless books, too,
and bales of newspapers went also to these pyres. From the private
houses in Swathinglea alone—which I had deemed, perhaps not unjustly,
altogether illiterate—we gathered a whole dust-cart full of cheap
ill-printed editions of the minor English classics—for the most part
very dull stuff indeed and still clean—and about a truckload of thumbed
and dog-eared penny fiction, watery base stuff, the dropsy of our
nation’s mind. . . . And it seemed to me that when we gathered those
books and papers together, we gathered together something more than
print and paper, we gathered warped and crippled ideas and contagious
base suggestions, the formulae of dull tolerances and stupid
impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities of sluggish habits of
thinking and timid and indolent evasions. There was more than a touch
of malignant satisfaction for me in helping gather it all together.

I was so busy, I say, with my share in this dustman’s work that I did
not notice, as I should otherwise have done, the little indications of
change in my mother’s state. Indeed, I thought her a little stronger;
she was slightly flushed, slightly more talkative. . . .

On Beltane Eve, and our Lowchester rummage being finished, I went along
the valley to the far end of Swathinglea to help sort the stock of the
detached group of potbanks there—their chief output had been mantel
ornaments in imitation of marble, and there was very little sorting, I
found, to be done—and there it was nurse Anna found me at last by
telephone, and told me my mother had died in the morning suddenly and
very shortly after my departure.

For a while I did not seem to believe it; this obviously imminent event
stunned me when it came, as though I had never had an anticipatory
moment. For a while I went on working, and then almost apathetically,
in a mood of half-reluctant curiosity, I started for Lowchester.

When I got there the last offices were over, and I was shown my old
mother’s peaceful white face, very still, but a little cold and stern
to me, a little unfamiliar, lying among white flowers.

I went in alone to her, into that quiet room, and stood for a long time
by her bedside. I sat down then and thought. . . .

Then at last, strangely hushed, and with the deeps of my loneliness
opening beneath me, I came out of that room and down into the world
again, a bright-eyed, active world, very noisy, happy, and busy with
its last preparations for the mighty cremation of past and superseded
things.

§ 2


I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonely
night in my life. It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments of
intense feeling with forgotten gaps between.

I recall very distinctly being upon the great staircase of Lowchester
House (though I don’t remember getting there from the room in which my
mother lay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as I came
down. She had but just heard of my return, and she was hurrying
upstairs to me. She stopped and so did I, and we stood and clasped
hands, and she scrutinized my face in the way women sometimes do. So we
remained for a second or so. I could say nothing to her at all, but I
could feel the wave of her emotion. I halted, answered the earnest
pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and after a queer second of
hesitation went on down, returning to my own preoccupations. It did not
occur to me at all then to ask myself what she might be thinking or
feeling.

I remember the corridor full of mellow evening light, and how I went
mechanically some paces toward the dining-room. Then at the sight of
the little tables, and a gusty outburst of talking voices as some one
in front of me swung the door open and to, I remembered that I did not
want to eat. . . . After that comes an impression of myself walking
across the open grass in front of the house, and the purpose I had of
getting alone upon the moors, and how somebody passing me said
something about a hat. I had come out without my hat.

A fragment of thought has linked itself with an effect of long shadows
upon turf golden with the light of the sinking sun. The world was
singularly empty, I thought, without either Nettie or my mother. There
wasn’t any sense in it any more. Nettie was already back in my mind
then. . . .

Then I am out on the moors. I avoided the crests where the bonfires
were being piled, and sought the lonely places. . . .

I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a fold
just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its crowd,
and I was looking at and admiring the sunset. The golden earth and sky
seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe of human
futility. . . . Then in the twilight I walked along an unknown,
bat-haunted road between high hedges.

I did not sleep under a roof that night. But I hungered and ate. I ate
near midnight at a little inn over toward Birmingham, and miles away
from my home. Instinctively I had avoided the crests where the bonfire
crowds gathered, but here there were many people, and I had to share a
table with a man who had some useless mortgage deeds to burn. I talked
to him about them—but my soul stood at a great distance behind my lips.
. . .

Soon each hilltop bore a little tulip-shaped flame flower. Little black
figures clustered round and dotted the base of its petals, and as for
the rest of the multitude abroad, the kindly night swallowed them up.
By leaving the roads and clear paths and wandering in the fields I
contrived to keep alone, though the confused noise of voices and the
roaring and crackling of great fires was always near me.

I wandered into a lonely meadow, and presently in a hollow of deep
shadows I lay down to stare at the stars. I lay hidden in the darkness,
and ever and again the sough and uproar of the Beltane fires that were
burning up the sere follies of a vanished age, and the shouting of the
people passing through the fires and praying to be delivered from the
prison of themselves, reached my ears. . . .

And I thought of my mother, and then of my new loneliness and the
hunger of my heart for Nettie.

I thought of many things that night, but chiefly of the overflowing
personal love and tenderness that had come to me in the wake of the
Change, of the greater need, the unsatisfied need in which I stood, for
this one person who could fulfil all my desires. So long as my mother
had lived, she had in a measure held my heart, given me a food these
emotions could live upon, and mitigated that emptiness of spirit, but
now suddenly that one possible comfort had left me. There had been many
at the season of the Change who had thought that this great enlargement
of mankind would abolish personal love; but indeed it had only made it
finer, fuller, more vitally necessary. They had thought that, seeing
men now were all full of the joyful passion to make and do, and glad
and loving and of willing service to all their fellows, there would be
no need of the one intimate trusting communion that had been the finest
thing of the former life. And indeed, so far as this was a matter of
advantage and the struggle for existence, they were right. But so far
as it was a matter of the spirit and the fine perceptions of life, it
was altogether wrong.

We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped it of
its base wrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenary and
competitive elements, until at last it stood up in our minds stark,
shining and invincible. Through all the fine, divaricating ways of the
new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for every one certain
persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the key of one’s self, whose
mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere existence was interest, whose
idiosyncrasy blended with accident to make a completing and predominant
harmony for their predestined lovers. They were the essential thing in
life. Without them the fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a
caparisoned steed without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater
without a play. . . . And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear
as white flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies
in me. And she had gone! I had sent her from me; I knew not whither she
had gone. I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out of my life
for ever!

So I saw it then, and I lay unseen in the darkness and called upon
Nettie, and wept for her, lay upon my face and wept for her, while the
glad people went to and fro, and the smoke streamed thick across the
distant stars, and the red reflections, the shadows and the fluctuating
glares, danced over the face of the world.

No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, from
habitual and mechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarse
imaginings, but from the passions of love it had not freed us. It had
but brought the lord of life, Eros, to his own. All through the long
sorrow of that night I, who had rejected him, confessed his sway with
tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .

I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor of my tortuous
wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires, nor how I evaded
the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who went streaming home between
three and four, to resume their lives, swept and garnished, stripped
and clean. But at dawn, when the ashes of the world’s gladness were
ceasing to glow—it was a bleak dawn that made me shiver in my thin
summer clothes—I came across a field to a little copse full of dim blue
hyacinths. A queer sense of familiarity arrested my steps, and I stood
puzzled. Then I was moved to go a dozen paces from the path, and at
once a singularly misshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my
memory. This was the place! Here I had stood, there I had placed my old
kite, and shot with my revolver, learning to use it, against the day
when I should encounter Verrall.

Kite and revolver had gone now, and all my hot and narrow past, its
last vestiges had shriveled and vanished in the whirling gusts of the
Beltane fires. So I walked through a world of gray ashes at last, back
to the great house in which the dead, deserted image of my dear lost
mother lay.

§ 3


I came back to Lowchester House very tired, very wretched; exhausted by
my fruitless longing for Nettie. I had no thought of what lay before
me.

A miserable attraction drew me into the great house to look again on
the stillness that had been my mother’s face, and as I came into that
room, Anna, who had been sitting by the open window, rose to meet me.
She had the air of one who waits. She, too, was pale with watching; all
night she had watched between the dead within and the Beltane fires
abroad, and longed for my coming. I stood mute between her and the
bedside. . . .

“Willie,” she whispered, and eyes and body seemed incarnate pity.

An unseen presence drew us together. My mother’s face became resolute,
commanding. I turned to Anna as a child may turn to its nurse. I put my
hands about her strong shoulders, she folded me to her, and my heart
gave way. I buried my face in her breast and clung to her weakly, and
burst into a passion of weeping. . . .

She held me with hungry arms. She whispered to me, “There, there!” as
one whispers comfort to a child. . . . Suddenly she was kissing me. She
kissed me with a hungry intensity of passion, on my cheeks, on my lips.
She kissed me on my lips with lips that were salt with tears. And I
returned her kisses. . . .

Then abruptly we desisted and stood apart—looking at one another.

§ 4


It seems to me as if the intense memory of Nettie vanished utterly out
of my mind at the touch of Anna’s lips. I loved Anna.

We went to the council of our group—commune it was then called—and she
was given me in marriage, and within a year she had borne me a son. We
saw much of one another, and talked ourselves very close together. My
faithful friend she became and has been always, and for a time we were
passionate lovers. Always she has loved me and kept my soul full of
tender gratitude and love for her; always when we met our hands and
eyes clasped in friendly greeting, all through our lives from that hour
we have been each other’s secure help and refuge, each other’s
ungrudging fastness of help and sweetly frank and open speech. . . .
And after a little while my love and desire for Nettie returned as
though it had never faded away.

No one will have a difficulty now in understanding how that could be,
but in the evil days of the world malaria, that would have been held to
be the most impossible thing. I should have had to crush that second
love out of my thoughts, to have kept it secret from Anna, to have lied
about it to all the world. The old-world theory was there was only one
love—we who float upon a sea of love find that hard to understand. The
whole nature of a man was supposed to go out to the one girl or woman
who possessed him, her whole nature to go out to him. Nothing was left
over—it was a discreditable thing to have any overplus at all. They
formed a secret secluded system of two, two and such children as she
bore him. All other women he was held bound to find no beauty in, no
sweetness, no interest; and she likewise, in no other man. The old-time
men and women went apart in couples, into defensive little houses, like
beasts into little pits, and in these “homes” they sat down purposing
to love, but really coming very soon to jealous watching of this
extravagant mutual proprietorship. All freshness passed very speedily
out of their love, out of their conversation, all pride out of their
common life. To permit each other freedom was blank dishonor. That I
and Anna should love, and after our love-journey together, go about our
separate lives and dine at the public tables, until the advent of her
motherhood, would have seemed a terrible strain upon our unmitigable
loyalty. And that I should have it in me to go on loving Nettie—who
loved in different manner both Verrall and me—would have outraged the
very quintessence of the old convention.

In the old days love was a cruel proprietary thing. But now Anna could
let Nettie live in the world of my mind, as freely as a rose will
suffer the presence of white lilies. If I could hear notes that were
not in her compass, she was glad, because she loved me, that I should
listen to other music than hers. And she, too, could see the beauty of
Nettie. Life is so rich and generous now, giving friendship, and a
thousand tender interests and helps and comforts, that no one stints
another of the full realization of all possibilities of beauty. For me
from the beginning Nettie was the figure of beauty, the shape and color
of the divine principle that lights the world. For every one there are
certain types, certain faces and forms, gestures, voices and
intonations that have that inexplicable unanalyzable quality. These
come through the crowd of kindly friendly fellow-men and women—one’s
own. These touch one mysteriously, stir deeps that must otherwise
slumber, pierce and interpret the world. To refuse this interpretation
is to refuse the sun, to darken and deaden all life. . . . I loved
Nettie, I loved all who were like her, in the measure that they were
like her, in voice, or eyes, or form, or smile. And between my wife and
me there was no bitterness that the great goddess, the life-giver,
Aphrodite, Queen of the living Seas, came to my imagination so. It
qualified our mutual love not at all, since now in our changed world
love is unstinted; it is a golden net about our globe that nets all
humanity together.

I thought of Nettie much, and always movingly beautiful things restored
me to her, all fine music, all pure deep color, all tender and solemn
things. The stars were hers, and the mystery of moonlight; the sun she
wore in her hair, powdered finely, beaten into gleams and threads of
sunlight in the wisps and strands of her hair. . . . Then suddenly one
day a letter came to me from her, in her unaltered clear handwriting,
but in a new language of expression, telling me many things. She had
learnt of my mother’s death, and the thought of me had grown so strong
as to pierce the silence I had imposed on her. We wrote to one
another—like common friends with a certain restraint between us at
first, and with a great longing to see her once more arising in my
heart. For a time I left that hunger unexpressed, and then I was moved
to tell it to her. And so on New Year’s Day in the Year Four, she came
to Lowchester and me. How I remember that coming, across the gulf of
fifty years! I went out across the park to meet her, so that we should
meet alone. The windless morning was clear and cold, the ground new
carpeted with snow, and all the trees motionless lace and glitter of
frosty crystals. The rising sun had touched the white with a spirit of
gold, and my heart beat and sang within me. I remember now the snowy
shoulder of the down, sunlit against the bright blue sky. And presently
I saw the woman I loved coming through the white still trees. . . .

I had made a goddess of Nettie, and behold she was a fellow-creature!
She came, warm-wrapped and tremulous, to me, with the tender promise of
tears in her eyes, with her hands outstretched and that dear smile
quivering upon her lips. She stepped out of the dream I had made of
her, a thing of needs and regrets and human kindliness. Her hands as I
took them were a little cold. The goddess shone through her indeed,
glowed in all her body, she was a worshipful temple of love for me—yes.
But I could feel, like a thing new discovered, the texture and sinews
of her living, her dear personal and mortal hands. . . .




THE EPILOGUE
THE WINDOW OF THE TOWER


This was as much as this pleasant-looking, gray-haired man had written.
I had been lost in his story throughout the earlier portions of it,
forgetful of the writer and his gracious room, and the high tower in
which he was sitting. But gradually, as I drew near the end, the sense
of strangeness returned to me. It was more and more evident to me that
this was a different humanity from any I had known, unreal, having
different customs, different beliefs, different interpretations,
different emotions. It was no mere change in conditions and
institutions the comet had wrought. It had made a change of heart and
mind. In a manner it had dehumanized the world, robbed it of its
spites, its little intense jealousies, its inconsistencies, its humor.
At the end, and particularly after the death of his mother, I felt his
story had slipped away from my sympathies altogether. Those Beltane
fires had burnt something in him that worked living still and unsubdued
in me, that rebelled in particular at that return of Nettie. I became a
little inattentive. I no longer felt with him, nor gathered a sense of
complete understanding from his phrases. His Lord Eros indeed! He and
these transfigured people—they were beautiful and noble people, like
the people one sees in great pictures, like the gods of noble
sculpture, but they had no nearer fellowship than these to men. As the
change was realized, with every stage of realization the gulf widened
and it was harder to follow his words.

I put down the last fascicle of all, and met his friendly eyes. It was
hard to dislike him.

I felt a subtle embarrassment in putting the question that perplexed
me. And yet it seemed so material to me I had to put it. “And did
you—?” I asked. “Were you—lovers?”

His eyebrows rose. “Of course.”

“But your wife—?”

It was manifest he did not understand me.

I hesitated still more. I was perplexed by a conviction of baseness.
“But—” I began. “You remained lovers?”

“Yes.” I had grave doubts if I understood him. Or he me.

I made a still more courageous attempt. “And had Nettie no other
lovers?”

“A beautiful woman like that! I know not how many loved beauty in her,
nor what she found in others. But we four from that time were very
close, you understand, we were friends, helpers, personal lovers in a
world of lovers.”

“Four?”

“There was Verrall.”

Then suddenly it came to me that the thoughts that stirred in my mind
were sinister and base, that the queer suspicions, the coarseness and
coarse jealousies of my old world were over and done for these more
finely living souls. “You made,” I said, trying to be liberal minded,
“a home together.”

“A home!” He looked at me, and, I know not why, I glanced down at my
feet. What a clumsy, ill-made thing a boot is, and how hard and
colorless seemed my clothing! How harshly I stood out amidst these
fine, perfected things. I had a moment of rebellious detestation. I
wanted to get out of all this. After all, it wasn’t my style. I wanted
intensely to say something that would bring him down a peg, make sure,
as it were, of my suspicions by launching an offensive accusation. I
looked up and he was standing.

“I forgot,” he said. “You are pretending the old world is still going
on. A home!”

He put out his hand, and quite noiselessly the great window widened
down to us, and the splendid nearer prospect of that dreamland city was
before me. There for one clear moment I saw it; its galleries and open
spaces, its trees of golden fruit and crystal waters, its music and
rejoicing, love and beauty without ceasing flowing through its varied
and intricate streets. And the nearer people I saw now directly and
plainly, and no longer in the distorted mirror that hung overhead. They
really did not justify my suspicions, and yet—! They were such people
as one sees on earth—save that they were changed. How can I express
that change? As a woman is changed in the eyes of her lover, as a woman
is changed by the love of a lover. They were exalted. . . .

I stood up beside him and looked out. I was a little flushed, my ears a
little reddened, by the inconvenience of my curiosities, and by my
uneasy sense of profound moral differences. He was taller than I. . . .

“This is our home,” he said smiling, and with thoughtful eyes on me.