The Project Gutenberg eBook of In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells (2024)

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 tallwindow on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, aheadland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles awaymarks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, andin some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me andstrange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the manwore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the HappyFuture, 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 thatprohibited any historical retrospection, and as he finished each sheet, writingin an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing pile upon a graceful littletable under the window. His last done sheets lay loose, partly covering othersthat were clipped together into fascicles.

Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until his pen shouldcome 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; amovement in this caught my attention sharply, and I looked up to see, distortedand made fantastic but bright and beautifully colored, the magnified,reflected, evasive rendering of a palace, of a terrace, of the vista of a greatroadway with many people, people exaggerated, impossible-looking because of thecurvature of the mirror, going to and fro. I turned my head quickly that Imight see more clearly through the window behind me, but it was too high for meto survey this nearer scene directly, and after a momentary pause I came backto that distorting mirror again.

But now the writer was leaning back in his chair. He put down his pen andsighed the half resentful sigh—“ah! you, work, you! how you gratifyand 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 hisexpression 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 fasciclemarked very distinctly “1” caught my attention, and I took it up. Ismiled in his friendly eyes. “Very well,” said I, suddenly at myease, and he nodded and went on writing. And in a mood between confidence andcuriosity, I began to read.

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

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 hasaffected my own life and the lives of one or two people closely connected withme, 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 ofliterature and the lives of literary people. It is something, even amidst thispresent happiness, to find leisure and opportunity to take up and partiallyrealize these old and hopeless dreams. But that alone, in a world where so muchof vivid and increasing interest presents itself to be done, even by an oldman, would not, I think, suffice to set me at this desk. I find some suchrecapitulation of my past as this will involve, is becoming necessary to my ownsecure mental continuity. The passage of years brings a man at last toretrospection; at seventy-two one’s youth is far more important than itwas at forty. And I am out of touch with my youth. The old life seems so cutoff from the new, so alien and so unreasonable, that at times I find itbordering upon the incredible. The data have gone, the buildings and places. Istopped dead the other afternoon in my walk across the moor, where once thedismal outskirts of Swathinglea straggled toward Leet, and asked, “Was ithere indeed that I crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery andloaded 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 notsome queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland slipped a pseudo-memory into therecords of my vanished life?” There must be many alive still who have thesame perplexities. And I think too that those who are now growing up to takeour places in the great enterprise of mankind, will need many such narrativesas mine for even the most partial conception of the old world of shadows thatcame before our day. It chances too that my case is fairly typical of theChange; I was caught midway in a gust of passion; and a curious accident put mefor 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-litroom with a sash window open to a starry sky, and instantly there returns to methe characteristic smell of that room, the penetrating odor of an ill-trimmedlamp, burning cheap paraffin. Lighting by electricity had then been perfectedfor 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 olfactoryaccompaniment. That was the evening smell of the room. By day it had a moresubtle aroma, a closeness, a peculiar sort of faint pungency that Iassociate—I know not why—with dust.

Let me describe this room to you in detail. It was perhaps eight feet by sevenin area and rather higher than either of these dimensions; the ceiling was ofplaster, cracked and bulging in places, gray with the soot of the lamp, and inone place discolored by a system of yellow and olive-green stains caused by thepercolation of damp from above. The walls were covered with dun-colored paper,upon which had been printed in oblique reiteration a crimson shape, somethingof the nature of a curly ostrich feather, or an acanthus flower, that had inits less faded moments a sort of dingy gaiety. There were several bigplaster-rimmed wounds in this, caused by Parload’s ineffectual attemptsto get nails into the wall, whereby there might hang pictures. One nail had hitbetween two bricks and got home, and from this depended, sustained a littleinsecurely by frayed and knotted blind-cord, Parload’s hangingbookshelves, planks painted over with a treacly blue enamel and furtherdecorated by a fringe of pinked American cloth insecurely fixed by tacks. Belowthis was a little table that behaved with a mulish vindictiveness to any kneethat was thrust beneath it suddenly; it was covered with a cloth whose patternof red and black had been rendered less monotonous by the accidents ofParload’s versatile ink bottle, and on it, leit motif of thewhole, stood and stank the lamp. This lamp, you must understand, was of somewhitish translucent substance that was neither china nor glass, it had a shadeof the same substance, a shade that did not protect the eyes of a reader in anymeasure, and it seemed admirably adapted to bring into pitiless prominence thefact that, after the lamp’s trimming, dust and paraffin had been smearedover its exterior with a reckless generosity.

The uneven floor boards of this apartment were covered with scratched enamel ofchocolate hue, on which a small island of frayed carpet dimly blossomed in thedust 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 stoneof the hearth. No fire was laid, only a few scraps of torn paper and the bowlof a broken corn-cob pipe were visible behind the bars, and in the corner andrather thrust away was an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge. Itwas the custom in those days to warm every room separately from a separatefireplace, more prolific of dirt than heat, and the rickety sash window, thesmall chimney, and the loose-fitting door were expected to organize theventilation of the room among themselves without any further direction.

Parload’s truckle bed hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchworkcounterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlikeoddments, and invading the two corners of the window were an old whatnot andthe washhandstand, on which were distributed the simple appliances of histoilet.

This washhandstand had been made of deal by some one with an excess of turneryappliances in a hurry, who had tried to distract attention from the rougheconomies of his workmanship by an arresting ornamentation of blobs and bulbsupon the joints and legs. Apparently the piece had then been placed in thehands 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 thearticle, then, I fancy, smeared it with varnish, and then sat down to work withthe combs to streak and comb the varnish into a weird imitation of the grain ofsome nightmare timber. The washhandstand so made had evidently had a prolongedcareer of violent use, had been chipped, kicked, splintered, punched, stained,scorched, hammered, desiccated, damped, and defiled, had met indeed with almostevery possible adventure except a conflagration or a scrubbing, until at lastit had come to this high refuge of Parload’s attic to sustain the simplerequirements of Parload’s personal cleanliness. There were, in chief, abasin and a jug of water and a slop-pail of tin, and, further, a piece ofyellow soap in a tray, a tooth-brush, a rat-tailed shaving brush, one huckabacktowel, and one or two other minor articles. In those days only very prosperouspeople had more than such an equipage, and it is to be remarked that every dropof water Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servantgirl,—the “slavey,” Parload called her—up from thebasement to the top of the house and subsequently down again. Already we beginto forget how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a fact thatParload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never had a simultaneousbath all over his body since his childhood. Not one in fifty of us did in thedays of which I am telling you.

A chest, also singularly grained and streaked, of two large and two smalldrawers, held Parload’s reserve of garments, and pegs on the door carriedhis 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 achair with a “squab” that apologized inadequately for the defectsof its cane seat. I forgot that for the moment because I was sitting on thechair on the occasion that best begins this story.

I have described Parload’s room with such particularity because it willhelp you to understand the key in which my earlier chapters are written, butyou must not imagine that this singular equipment or the smell of the lampengaged my attention at that time to the slightest degree. I took all thisgrimy unpleasantness as if it were the most natural and proper setting forexistence imaginable. It was the world as I knew it. My mind was entirelyoccupied then by graver and intenser matters, and it is only now in the distantretrospect that I see these details of environment as being remarkable, assignificant, as indeed obviously the outward visible manifestations of the oldworld disorder in our hearts.

§ 2

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

I thought the comet no more than a nuisance then because I wanted to talk ofother matters. But Parload was full of it. My head was hot, I was feverish withinterlacing annoyances and bitterness, I wanted to open my heart tohim—at least I wanted to relieve my heart by some romantic rendering ofmy troubles—and I gave but little heed to the things he told me. It wasthe first time I had heard of this new speck among the countless specks ofheaven, 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, andeight months older than I. He was—I think his proper definition was“engrossing clerk” to a little solicitor in Overcastle, while I wasthird in the office staff of Rawdon’s pot-bank in Clayton. We had metfirst in the “Parliament” of the Young Men’s ChristianAssociation of Swathinglea; we had found we attended simultaneous classes inOvercastle, he in science and I in shorthand, and had started a practice ofwalking home together, and so our friendship came into being. (Swathinglea,Clayton, and Overcastle were contiguous towns, I should mention, in the greatindustrial area of the Midlands.) We had shared each other’s secret ofreligious 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 wasfree of his apartment. He was then a tall, flaxen-haired, gawky youth, with adisproportionate development of neck and wrist, and capable of vast enthusiasm;he gave two evenings a week to the evening classes of the organized scienceschool in Overcastle, physiography was his favorite “subject,” andthrough this insidious opening of his mind the wonder of outer space had cometo take possession of his soul. He had commandeered an old opera-glass from hisuncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had bought a cheap paperplanisphere and Whitaker’s Almanac, and for a time day andmoonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one satisfactory reality in hislife—star-gazing. It was the deeps that had seized him, the immensities,and the mysterious possibilities that might float unlit in that unplumbedabyss. With infinite labor and the help of a very precise article in TheHeavens, a little monthly magazine that catered for those who were underthis obsession, he had at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to oursystem from outer space. He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quiveringlittle smudge of light among the shining pin-points—and gazed. Mytroubles had to wait for him.

“Wonderful,” he sighed, and then as though his first emphasis didnot 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 intruderwas to be, was presently to be, one of the largest comets this world has everseen, how that its course must bring it within at most—so many score ofmillions of miles from the earth, a mere step, Parload seemed to think that;how that the spectroscope was already sounding its chemical secrets, perplexedby the unprecedented band in the green, how it was even now being photographedin 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 Iwas thinking first of Nettie Stuart and the letter she had just written me, andthen of old Rawdon’s detestable face as I had seen it that afternoon. NowI planned answers to Nettie and now belated repartees to my employer, and thenagain “Nettie” was blazing all across the background of mythoughts. . . .

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

You must understand—and every year it becomes increasingly difficult tounderstand—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; butyet, it may be even by virtue of the general darkness, there were moments of arare and evanescent beauty that seem no longer possible in my experience. Thegreat 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 ofreturning 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 anintensity, by perceptions of a keenness that it seems to me are now altogethergone out of life. Is it the Change, I wonder, that has robbed life of itsextremes, or is it perhaps only this, that youth has left me—even thestrength of middle years leaves me now—and taken its despairs andraptures, leaving me judgment, perhaps, sympathy, memories?

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

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

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

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

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

Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was in thestrangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate formulae, it wastortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary contrivances and adaptations,suppressions, conventions, and subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truthon every man’s lips. I was brought up by my mother in a quaintold-fashioned narrow faith in certain religious formulae, certain rules ofconduct, certain conceptions of social and political order, that had no morerelevance to the realities and needs of everyday contemporary life than if theywere clean linen that had been put away with lavender in a drawer. Indeed, herreligion did actually smell of lavender; on Sundays she put away all the thingsof reality, the garments and even the furnishings of everyday, hid her hands,that were gnarled and sometimes chapped with scrubbing, in black, carefullymended 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 heardsonorous prayers and joined in sonorous responses, and rose with acongregational sigh refreshed and relieved when the doxology, with its opening“Now to God the Father, God the Son,” bowed out the tame, briefsermon. There was a hell in that religion of my mother’s, a red-hairedhell of curly flames that had once been very terrible; there was a devil, whowas also ex officio the British King’s enemy, and muchdenunciation of the wicked lusts of the flesh; we were expected to believe thatmost of our poor unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here bysuffering exquisite torments for ever after, world without end, Amen. Butindeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had beenmellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long before my time; if it had muchterror even in my childhood I have forgotten it, it was not so terrible as thegiant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it all now as a setting for mypoor old mother’s worn and grimy face, and almost lovingly as a part ofher. And Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little lodger, strangely transformed in hisvestments and lifting his voice manfully to the quality of those Elizabethanprayers, 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 allthe implications of vindictive theologians; she was in truth, had I butperceived 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 ofyouth, and having at first taken all these things quite seriously, the fieryhell and God’s vindictiveness at any neglect, as though they were as mucha matter of fact as Bladden’s iron-works and Rawdon’s pot-bank, Ipresently with an equal seriousness flung them out of my mind again.

Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, “takenotice” 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 thetimes, he had lent me Burble’s “Scepticism Answered,” anddrawn my attention to the library of the Institute in Clayton.

The excellent Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear from his answersto the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all that faded and byno 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 gotfrom the Institute happened to be an American edition of the collected works ofShelley, his gassy prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was soon ripe forblatant unbelief. And at the Young Men’s Christian Association Ipresently made the acquaintance of Parload, who told me, under promises of themost sinister secrecy, that he was “a Socialist out and out.” Helent me several copies of a periodical with the clamant title of TheClarion, which was just taking up a crusade against the accepted religion.The adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will alwayslie healthily open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and newideas, 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 startledemphatic denial. “Have I believed this!” And I was also, youmust remember, just beginning love-letters to Nettie.

We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most thingsaccomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a sort ofintellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from our vigor, andit is hard to understand the stifled and struggling manner in which mygeneration of common young men did its thinking. To think at all about certainquestions was an act of rebellion that set one oscillating between the furtiveand the defiant. People begin to find Shelley—for all hismelody—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 breakingglass. It becomes a little difficult to imagine the yeasty state of mind, thedisposition to shout and say, “Yah!” at constituted authority, tosustain a persistent note of provocation such as we raw youngsters displayed. Ibegan to read with avidity such writing as Carlyle, Browning, and Heine haveleft for the perplexity of posterity, and not only to read and admire but toimitate. My letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended displays ofperfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology, and the cosmos inturgid and startling expressions. No doubt they puzzled her extremely.

I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to envy for myown departed youth, but I should find it difficult to maintain my case againstany 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 tryto recall what exactly must have been the quality and tenor of my moresustained 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 andbadly phrased. Her first two or three showed a shy pleasure in the use of theword “dear,” and I remember being first puzzled and then, when Iunderstood, delighted, because she had written “Willieasthore” under my name. “Asthore,” I gathered, meant“darling.” But when the evidences of my fermentation began, heranswers were less happy.

I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled in our silly youthfulway, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited, to Checkshill, and made itworse, and how afterward I wrote a letter that she thought was“lovely,” and mended the matter. Nor will I tell of all oursubsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding. Always I was the offender and thefinal penitent until this last trouble that was now beginning; and in betweenwe had some tender near moments, and I loved her very greatly. There was thismisfortune in the business, that in the darkness, and alone, I thought withgreat intensity of her, of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweet and delightfulpresence, but when I sat down to write I thought of Shelley and Burns andmyself, and other such irrelevant matters. When one is in love, in thisfermenting way, it is harder to make love than it is when one does not love atall. 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 letterscontinued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether she couldever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not believe in Church, andthen hard upon it came another note with unexpected novelties of phrasing. Shethought 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 Ireally did not apprehend it fully at the first shock, I was dismissed. Herletter had reached me when I came home after old Rawdon’s none too civilrefusal 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, twonearly overwhelming facts, that I was neither indispensable to Nettie nor atRawdon’s. And to talk of comets!

Where did I stand?

I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably mine—thewhole tradition of “true love” pointed me to that—that forher to face about with these precise small phrases toward abandonment, after wehad kissed and whispered and come so close in the little adventurousfamiliarities of the young, shocked me profoundly. I! I! And Rawdondidn’t find me indispensable either. I felt I was suddenly repudiated bythe universe and threatened with effacement, that in some positive and emphaticway I must at once assert myself. There was no balm in the religion I hadlearnt, 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 closelycompetitive 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 therest, Frobisher might fail me. That, however, was a secondary issue. Thepredominant affair was with Nettie. I found my mind thick-shot with flyingfragments 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 smokecomes 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 allthis. Old Rawdon won’t give me a rise in my wages, and after having askedI don’t think I can stand going on upon the old terms anymore. See? So Imay 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 littlepause.

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 othermen. One may as well starve one’s body out of a place as to starveone’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 thoselong, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal talks that will bedear to the hearts of intelligent youths until the world comes to an end. TheChange has not abolished that, anyhow.

It would be an incredible feat of memory for me now to recall all thatmeandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it, though itscircumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clear picture in my mind. Iposed after my manner and behaved very foolishly no doubt, a wounded, smartingegotist, and Parload played his part of the philosopher preoccupied with thedeeps.

We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer’s night andtalking 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 thisworld—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 onlymake 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 narrowstreet outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanes toward Clayton Crestand the high road.

But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days before the Changethat 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, andindeed all the world in which I was born and bred and made, has vanished cleanaway, out of space and out of time, and wellnigh out of the imagination of allthose who are younger by a generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see, thedark empty way between the mean houses, the dark empty way lit by a blearygas-lamp at the corner, you cannot feel the hard checkered pavement under yourboots, you cannot mark the dimly lit windows here and there, and the shadowsupon 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 slinkspast us down the steps.

We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting smoke andsparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one saw the greasy brillianceof shop fronts and the naphtha flares of hawkers’ barrows dripping fireinto the night. A hazy movement of people swayed along that road, and we heardthe voice of an itinerant preacher from a waste place between the houses. Youcannot see these things as I can see them, nor can you figure—unless youknow the pictures that great artist Hyde has left the world—the effect ofthe great hoarding by which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp and towering upto a sudden sharp black edge against the pallid sky.

Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in all that vanishedworld. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and paper, all the roughenterprises of that time joined in chromatic discord; pill vendors andpreachers, theaters and charities, marvelous soaps and astonishing pickles,typewriting machines and sewing machines, mingled in a sort of visualizedclamor. And passing that there was a muddy lane of cinders, a lane without alight, that used its many puddles to borrow a star or so from the sky. Wesplashed 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 ascendedin a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse or so, and round until all thevalley in which four industrial towns lay crowded and confluent was overlooked.

I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird magnificenceover all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The horrible meanness of itsdetails was veiled, the hutches that were homes, the bristling multitudes ofchimneys, the ugly patches of unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fencesof barrel-stave and wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges wherethe iron ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the blast furnaceswere veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust from foundry, pot-bank, andfurnace, transfigured and assimilated by the night. The dust-laden atmospherethat was gray oppression through the day became at sundown a mystery of deeptranslucent colors, of blues and purples, of somber and vivid reds, of strangebright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky. Each upstartfurnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itself with flames, the darkcinder heaps began to glow with quivering fires, and each pot-bank squattedrebellious in a volcanic coronet of light. The empire of the day broke into athousand feudal baronies of burning coal. The minor streets across the valleypicked themselves out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that brightened andmingled at all the principal squares and crossings with the greenish pallor ofincandescent mantles and the high cold glare of the electric arc. Theinterlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes over their intersections, andsignal stars of red and green in rectangular constellations. The trains becamearticulated 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, theuniverse of stars.

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

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

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

We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry, confidentsolutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of the robbers. Itwas a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there in those great houseslurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with his scoundrel the Lawyer, with hischeat the Priest, and we others were all the victims of their deliberatevillainies. No doubt they winked and chuckled over their rare wines, amidsttheir dazzling, wickedly dressed women, and plotted further grinding for thefaces of the poor. And amidst all the squalor on the other hand, amidstbrutalities, ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously theirblameless victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at the first glance, hadfound all this out, it had merely to be asserted now with sufficient rhetoricand vehemence to change the face of the whole world. The Working Man wouldarise—in the form of a Labor Party, and with young men like Parload andmyself to represent him—and come to his own, andthen———?

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

Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injustice to the creed ofthought 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 qualificationof its harshness. At times in our great talks we were full of heady hopes forthe near triumph of our doctrine, more often our mood was hot resentment at thewickedness and stupidity that delayed so plain and simple a reconstruction ofthe order of the world. Then we grew malignant, and thought of barricades andsignificant violence. I was very bitter, I know, upon this night of which I amnow particularly telling, and the only face upon the hydra of Capitalism andMonopoly that I could see at all clearly, smiled exactly as old Rawdon hadsmiled 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 Ifelt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, I might drag its carcassto the feet of Nettie, and settle my other trouble as well. “What do youthink of me now, Nettie?”

That at any rate comes near enough to the quality of my thinking, then, for youto imagine how I gesticulated and spouted to Parload that night. You figure usas little black figures, unprepossessing in the outline, set in the midst ofthat desolating night of flaming industrialism, and my little voice with arhetorical 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 youwill be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world thinks clearly, thinks withdeliberation, pellucid certainties, you find it impossible to imagine how anyother thinking could have been possible. Let me tell you then how you can bringyourself to something like the condition of our former state. In the firstplace you must get yourself out of health by unwise drinking and eating, andout of condition by neglecting your exercise, then you must contrive to beworried very much and made very anxious and uncomfortable, and then you mustwork very hard for four or five days and for long hours every day at somethingtoo petty to be interesting, too complex to be mechanical, and without anypersonal significance to you whatever. This done, get straightway into a roomthat is not ventilated at all, and that is already full of foul air, and thereset yourself to think out some very complicated problem. In a very little whileyou will find yourself in a state of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient,snatching at the obvious presently in choosing and rejecting conclusionshaphazard. Try to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidlyand lose your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper and youwill fail.

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

I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men are beginningto doubt the greatness of the Change our world has undergone, butread—read the newspapers of that time. Every age becomes mitigated and alittle ennobled in our minds as it recedes into the past. It is the part ofthose who like myself have stories of that time to tell, to supply, by ascrupulous 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 anythingin common with that boastful foolish youngster whose troubles I recall. I seehim vulgarly theatrical, egotistical, insincere, indeed I do not like him savewith that instinctive material sympathy that is the fruit of incessantintimacy. Because he was myself I may be able to feel and write understandinglyabout motives that will put him out of sympathy with nearly every reader, butwhy should I palliate or defend his quality?

Always, I say, I did the talking, and it would have amazed me beyond measure ifany one had told me that mine was not the greater intelligence in these wordyencounters. 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 ofcopious expression. Parload I diagnosed in my secret heart as a trifle dull; heposed as pregnant quiet, I thought, and was obsessed by the congenial notion of“scientific caution.” I did not remark that while my hands werechiefly useful for gesticulation or holding a pen Parload’s hands coulddo all sorts of things, and I did not think therefore that fibers must run fromthose fingers to something in his brain. Nor, though I bragged perpetually ofmy shorthand, of my literature, of my indispensable share in Rawdon’sbusiness, did Parload lay stress on the conics and calculus he“mugged” in the organized science school. Parload is a famous mannow, a great figure in a great time, his work upon intersecting radiations hasbroadened the intellectual horizon of mankind for ever, and I, who am at best ahewer of intellectual wood, a drawer of living water, can smile, and he cansmile, to think how I patronized and posed and jabbered over him in thedarkness of those early days.

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t stand Rawdon’s much longer,” I said to Parloadby 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 topotters. There’s been borrowing and speculation. The masters don’tstick to one business as they used to do. I can tell that much. Half the valleymay be ‘playing’ before two months are out.” Parloaddelivered himself of this unusually long speech in his most pithy and weightymanner.

“Playing” was our local euphemism for a time when there was no workand no money for a man, a time of stagnation and dreary hungry loafing dayafter day. Such interludes seemed in those days a necessary consequence ofindustrial 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 thebetter. This system has got to end, sooner or later. These capitalists withtheir speculation and corners and trusts make things go from bad to worse. Whyshould I cower in Rawdon’s office, like a frightened dog, while hungerwalks the streets? Hunger is the master revolutionary. When he comes we oughtto 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 gripswith all these Rawdons. I think perhaps if I was hungry and savage I could talkto hungry men—”

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

That was a difficulty.

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

§ 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 parishchurch. Mr. Gabbitas, the curate of all work, lodged on our ground floor, andupstairs there was an old lady, Miss Holroyd, who painted flowers on china andmaintained her blind sister in an adjacent room; my mother and I lived in thebasement and slept in the attics. The front of the house was veiled by aVirginian creeper that defied the Clayton air and clustered in untidy dependentmasses over the wooden porch.

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

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

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

My mother let me in.

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

“Good night, mummy,” said I, and kissed her a little roughly, andlit and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase to bed, notlooking 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 timebefore I got up to undress.

There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother’s face irritatedme unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had to struggle against it, thatI could not exist if I gave way to its pleadings, and it hurt me and divided meto resist it, almost beyond endurance. It was clear to me that I had to thinkout for myself religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct,questions of expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me atall—and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion, her onlysocial ideas were blind submissions to the accepted order—to laws, todoctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all respectable persons inauthority over us, and with her to believe was to fear. She knew from athousand little signs—though still at times I went to church withher—that I was passing out of touch of all these things that ruled herlife, into some terrible unknown. From things I said she could infer suchclumsy concealments as I made. She felt my socialism, felt my spirit in revoltagainst the accepted order, felt the impotent resentments that filled me withbitterness against all she held sacred. Yet, you know, it was not her dear godsshe sought to defend so much as me! She seemed always to be wanting to say tome, “Dear, I know it’s hard—but revolt is harder. Don’tmake 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 youdo.”

She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time had been, bythe sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing order dominated herinto a worship of abject observances. It had bent her, aged her, robbed her ofeyesight 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 herhands——— Her poor dear hands! Not in the whole world nowcould you find a woman with hands so grimy, so needle-worn, so misshapen bytoil, so chapped and coarsened, so evilly entreated. . . . At any rate, thereis this I can say for myself, that my bitterness against the world and fortunewas for her sake as well as for my own.

Yet that night I pushed by her harshly. I answered her curtly, left herconcerned 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 thecontempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie’s letter, at myweakness and insignificance, at the things I found intolerable, and the thingsI could not mend. Over and over went my poor little brain, tired out and unableto 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 quitedistinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very quickly in the dark, and hadhardly 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, thoughmy conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to Parload. I regret mybehavior to my mother before the days of the Change, it is a scar among mymemories that will always be a little painful to the end of my days, but I donot see how something of the sort was to be escaped under those formerconditions. In that time of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needsand toil and hot passions before they had the chance of even a year or so ofclear thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous application tosome partial but immediate duty, and the growth of thought ceased in them. Theyset and hardened into narrow ways. Few women remained capable of a new ideaafter five and twenty, few men after thirty-one or two. Discontent with thething that existed was regarded as immoral, it was certainly an annoyance, andthe only protest against it, the only effort against that universal tendency inall human institutions to thicken and clog, to work loosely and badly, to rustand weaken towards catastrophes, came from the young—the crude unmercifulyoung. It seemed in those days to thoughtful men the harsh law ofbeing—that either we must submit to our elders and be stifled, ordisregard them, disobey them, thrust them aside, and make our little step ofprogress before we too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.

My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own silentmeditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard relationshipbetween parents and son in those days. There appeared no other way; thatperpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed, part of the very nature of theprogress of the world. We did not think then that minds might grow ripe withoutgrowing 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 andvitiated air. That deliberate animation of the intelligence which is now theuniversal quality, that vigor with consideration, that judgment with confidententerprise which shine through all our world, were things disintegrated andunknown 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 thisill-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 pickedit up.)

CHAPTER THE SECOND
NETTIE

§ 1

I cannot now remember (the story resumed), what interval separated thatevening on which Parload first showed me the comet—I think I onlypretended 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 leaveRawdon’s, to seek for some other situation very strenuously in vain, tothink and say many hard and violent things to my mother and to Parload, and topass through some phases of very profound wretchedness. There must have been apassionate correspondence with Nettie, but all the froth and fury of that hasfaded now out of my memory. All I have clear now is that I wrote onemagnificent farewell to her, casting her off forever, and that I got in reply aprim 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 Iwrote again in a vein I considered satirical. To that she did not reply. Thatinterval was at least three weeks, and probably four, because the comet whichhad been on the first occasion only a dubious speck in the sky, certainlyvisible only when it was magnified, was now a great white presence, brighterthan Jupiter, and casting a shadow on its own account. It was now activelypresent in the world of human thought, every one was talking about it, everyone 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 clearto Nettie. And Parload had spent two hoarded pounds in buying himself aspectroscope, so that he could see for himself, night after night, thatmysterious, that stimulating line—the unknown line in the green. How manytimes I wonder did I look at the smudgy, quivering symbol of the unknown thingsthat were rushing upon us out of the inhuman void, before I rebelled? But atlast I could stand it no longer, and I reproached Parload very bitterly forwasting his time in “astronomical dilettantism.”

“Here,” said I. “We’re on the verge of the biggestlock-out in the history of this countryside; here’s distress and hungercoming, here’s all the capitalistic competitive system like a woundinflamed, and you spend your time gaping at that damned silly streak of nothingin the sky!”

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

“I want to start meetings of an evening on Howden’sWaste.”

“You think they’d listen?”

“They’d listen fast enough now.”

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

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

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

“But, after all,” he said at last, with an awkward movement towardshis 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 onearth?”

“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 upthere 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 growinginformation about the nearness of the paths of the earth and comet, and allthat might ensue from that. So I cut in with something I had got out of a nowforgotten writer called Ruskin, a volcano of beautiful language and nonsensicalsuggestions, who prevailed very greatly with eloquent excitable young men inthose days. Something it was about the insignificance of science and thesupreme importance of Life. Parload stood listening, half turned towards thesky with the tips of his fingers on his spectroscope. He seemed to come to asudden decision.

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

Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition. I was so used toentire possession of our talk that his brief contradiction struck me like ablow. “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 somethingmore.”

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

We embarked upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young men used alwaysto find so heating. Science or Socialism? It was, of course, like arguing whichis right, left handedness or a taste for onions, it was altogether impossibleopposition. But the range of my rhetoric enabled me at last to exasperateParload, 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 thestreet, but I felt that he was already back at the window worshiping hisblessed 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 willconfess that my mind ran persistently that evening upon revolutions after thebest French pattern, and I sat on a Committee of Safety and tried backsliders.Parload was there, among the prisoners, backsliderissimus, aware too late ofthe error of his ways. His hands were tied behind his back ready for theshambles; through the open door one heard the voice of justice, the rudejustice 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 asorrowful deliberation, “how much the more must we punish those who wouldgive over the State to the pursuit of useless knowledge”; and so with agloomy 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 onlygossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and think evil of him with noone 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 allday, partly to support a fiction that I was sedulously seeking anothersituation, and partly to escape the persistent question in my mother’seyes. “Why did you quarrel with Mr. Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keepon going about with a sullen face and risk offending IT more?” I spentmost of the morning in the newspaper-room of the public library, writingimpossible applications for impossible posts—I remember that among otherthings of the sort I offered my services to a firm of private detectives, asinister breed of traders upon base jealousies now happily vanished from theworld, and wrote apropos of an advertisement for “stevedores” thatI did not know what the duties of a stevedore might be, but that I was apt andwilling to learn—and in the afternoons and evenings I wandered throughthe strange lights and shadows of my native valley and hated all createdthings. Until my wanderings were checked by the discovery that I was wearingout my boots.

The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!

I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a greatcapacity for hatred, but—

There was an excuse for hate.

It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh, and vindictive tothis person or that, but indeed it would have been equally wrong to have takenthe manifest offer life made me, without resentment. I see now clearly andcalmly, what I then felt obscurely and with an unbalanced intensity, that myconditions were intolerable. My work was tedious and laborious and it took upan 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 pitchof torture, I had no reasonable pride in myself and no reasonable chance ofputting anything right. It was a life hardly worth living. That a largeproportion 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 beendisgraceful. If some of them were contented or resigned, so much the worse forevery 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 organizationthat I do not feel disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far asit 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” ofAmerican ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded furnace owners, hadsmelted far more iron than the whole world had any demand for. (In those daysthere existed no means of estimating any need of that sort beforehand.) Theyhad done this without even consulting the ironmasters of any other country.During their period of activity they had drawn into their employment a greatnumber of workers, and had erected a huge productive plant. It is manifestlyjust that people who do headlong stupid things of this sort should suffer, butin the old days it was quite possible, it was customary for the real blunderersin such disasters, to shift nearly all the consequences of their incapacity. Noone thought it wrong for a light-witted “captain of industry” whohad led his workpeople into overproduction, into the disproportionatemanufacture, that is to say, of some particular article, to abandon and dismissthem, nor was there anything to prevent the sudden frantic underselling of sometrade rival in order to surprise and destroy his trade, secure his customersfor one’s own destined needs, and shift a portion of one’spunishment upon him. This operation of spasmodic underselling was known as“dumping.” The American ironmasters were now dumping on the Britishmarket. The British employers were, of course, taking their loss out of theirworkpeople as much as possible, but in addition they were agitating for somelegislation that would prevent—not stupid relative excess in production,but “dumping”—not the disease, but the consequences of thedisease. The necessary knowledge to prevent either dumping or its causes, theuncorrelated production of commodities, did not exist, but this hardly weighedwith them at all, and in answer to their demands there had arisen a curiousparty of retaliatory-protectionists who combined vague proposals for spasmodicresponses to these convulsive attacks from foreign manufacturers, with the veryevident intention of achieving financial adventures. The dishonest and recklesselements were indeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to thegeneral atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil from theprospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of men known as the“New Financiers,” one heard frightened old-fashioned statesmenasserting with passion that “dumping” didn’t occur, or thatit was a very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody would face and handlethe rather intricate truth of the business. The whole effect upon the mind of acool observer was of a covey of unsubstantial jabbering minds drifting over aseries of irrational economic cataclysms, prices and employment tumbled aboutlike towers in an earthquake, and amidst the shifting masses were the commonwork-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 inthe old order of things. At one time there were people dying of actualstarvation in India, while men were burning unsalable wheat in America. Itsounds like the account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was adream, a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.

To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth, it seemedthat the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and misery could not possiblyresult simply from ignorance and want of thought and feeling. We needed moredramatic factors than these mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils. We fledtherefore to that common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callousinsensate plots—we called them “plots”—against thepoor.

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

§ 2

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

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

I found myself thinking constantly of Nettie, picturing her—sometimeswith stern satisfaction, sometimes with sympathetic remorse—mourning,regretting, realizing the absolute end that had come between us. At the bottomof my heart I no more believed that there was an end between us, than that anend would come to the world. Had we not kissed one another, had we not achievedan atmosphere of whispering nearness, breached our virgin shyness with oneanother? Of course she was mine, of course I was hers, and separations andfinal quarrels and harshness and distance were no more than flourishes uponthat 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 inas a matter of course, I thought of her recurrently all day and dreamt of herat night. On Saturday night I dreamt of her very vividly. Her face was flushedand wet with tears, her hair a little disordered, and when I spoke to her sheturned away. In some manner this dream left in my mind a feeling of distressand 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 adouble reason for that; she thought that it would certainly exercise afavorable influence upon my search for a situation throughout the next week,and in addition Mr. Gabbitas, with a certain mystery behind his glasses, hadpromised to see what he could do for me, and she wanted to keep him up to thatpromise. I half consented, and then my desire for Nettie took hold of me. Itold my mother I wasn’t going to church, and set off about eleven to walkthe seventeen miles to Checkshill.

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

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

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

We young people had practically no preparation at all for the stir and emotionsof adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained a conspiracy ofstimulating silences. There came no initiation. There were books, stories of acuriously conventional kind that insisted on certain qualities in every loveaffair and greatly intensified one’s natural desire for them, perfecttrust, perfect loyalty, lifelong devotion. Much of the complex essentials oflove were altogether hidden. One read these things, got accidental glimpses ofthis and that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew. Then strange emotions,novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an inexplicableimpulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purelyegotistical and materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood. We were likemisguided 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 weresuddenly 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 wereresolved to satisfy it against all the world. In this state it was we driftedin the most accidental way against some other blindly seeking creature, andlinked like nascent atoms.

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

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

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

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

§ 3

I recall with a vivid precision her queer start when she heard the rustle of myapproaching feet, her surprise, her eyes almost of dismay for me. I couldrecollect, I believe, every significant word she spoke during our meeting, andmost of what I said to her. At least, it seems I could, though indeed I maydeceive myself. But I will not make the attempt. We were both too ill-educatedto speak our full meanings, we stamped out our feelings with clumsy stereotypedphrases; you who are better taught would fail to catch our intention. Theeffect would be inanity. But our first words I may give you, because thoughthey 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 theelaborate things I had intended to say. “I thought I would surpriseyou—”

“Surprise me?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me for a moment. I can see her pretty face now as it looked atme—her impenetrable dear face. She laughed a queer little laugh and hercolor 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 meanquite . . . the things I put in my letter.”

§ 4

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

In an instant she grasped the situation. The hidden motives of her quickripened little mind flashed out their intuitive scheme of action. She treatedme 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. Imust be tired. I must come home with her at once and sit down. Indeed itwas 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 shesupposed a man thought nothing of seventeen miles. When could I havestarted!

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 wetalking?”

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 discrepantthings 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 herbright, straightforward-looking girlish eyes on me as we went; it seemed shedid so all the time, but now I know, better than I did then, that every now andthen she glanced over me and behind me towards the shrubbery. And all thewhile, 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 ofscarlet ribbon, was now caught up into an intricacy of pretty curves above herlittle ear and cheek, and the soft long lines of her neck; her white dress haddescended to her feet; her slender waist, which had once been a meregeographical expression, an imaginary line like the equator, was now a thing offlexible beauty. A year ago she had been a pretty girl’s face stickingout from a little unimportant frock that was carried upon an extremely activeand efficient pair of brown-stockinged legs. Now there was coming a strange newbody that flowed beneath her clothes with a sinuous insistence. Every movement,and particularly the novel droop of her hand and arm to the unaccustomed skirtsshe gathered about her, and a graceful forward inclination that had come toher, called softly to my eyes. A very fine scarf—I suppose you would callit a scarf—of green gossamer, that some new wakened instinct had told herto fling about her shoulders, clung now closely to the young undulations of herbody, and now streamed fluttering out for a moment in a breath of wind, andlike some shy independent tentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentarycontact 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 herto 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 offlower-beds near the head gardener’s cottage and the vistas of“glass” on our left. We walked between the box edgings and beds ofbegonias and into the shadow of a yew hedge within twenty yards of that verypond with the gold-fish, at whose brim we had plighted our vows, and so we cameto the wistaria-smothered porch.

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

Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair creaked. I judgedhe 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; “nowyou 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 thewaistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers. He was abrown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the bright effect of thered-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 biggestthings about him. She had taken all the possibility of beauty he possessed, hisclear skin, his bright hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain quicknessshe got from her mother. Her mother I remember as a sharp-eyed woman of greatactivity; she seems to me now to have been perpetually bringing in or takingout meals or doing some such service, and to me—for my mother’ssake and my own—she was always welcoming and kind. Puss was a youngsterof fourteen perhaps, of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like hermother’s, are the chief traces on my memory. All these people were verykind to me, and among them there was a common recognition, sometimes veryagreeably finding expression, that I was—“clever.” They allstood 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 suddenapparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie did not remain to keepthe conversation going.

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

“Lord! what a girl it is!” said Mrs. Stuart. “I don’tknow what’s come to her.”

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

“I left my book in the dell,” she said, panting. “Is teaready?” 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 andlittle cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spread upon a table. You mustimagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied, perplexed by the something thatwas inexplicably unexpected in Nettie, saying little, and glowering across thecake at her, and all the eloquence I had been concentrating for the previoustwenty-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 ofready speech, for his own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased andastonished him to hear me pouring out my views. Indeed, over there I was, Ithink, even more talkative than with Parload, though to the world at large Iwas a shy young lout. “You ought to write it out for thenewspapers,” 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 toha’ made a lawyer of you.”

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

§ 5

For a long time I feared I should have to go back to Clayton without anotherword 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 atransparent manoeuver of her mother’s who had been watching my face, thatsent us out at last together to do something—I forget now what—inone of the greenhouses. Whatever that little mission may have been it was themerest, most barefaced excuse, a door to shut, or a window to close, and Idon’t think it got done.

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

“Isn’t the maidenhair fern lovely?” she said, and looked atme with eyes that said, “Now.”

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

She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face. But she saidnothing, and stood waiting.

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

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

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

I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was stupid tothink otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware of the impossibility ofconveying 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, “Idon’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’sdifferent for good.”

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

But I did not mean it to end like that.

“For good?” said I. “No! . . Nettie! Nettie! You don’tmean that!”

“I do,” she said deliberately, still looking at me, and with allher pose conveying her finality. She seemed to brace herself for the outbreakthat 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. Iremember that our talk took the absurd form of disputing whether I could be inlove with her or not. And there was I, present in evidence, in a deepening andwidening distress of soul because she could stand there, defensive, brighterand prettier than ever, and in some inexplicable way cut off from me andinaccessible.

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

I pleaded, I argued. I tried to show that even my harsh and difficult letterscame from my desire to come wholly into contact with her. I made exaggeratedfine statements of the longing I felt for her when I was away, of the shock andmisery of finding her estranged and cool. She looked at me, feeling the emotionof my speech and impervious to its ideas. I had no doubt—whatever povertyin my words, coolly written down now—that I was eloquent then. I meantmost intensely what I said, indeed I was wholly concentrated upon it. I was setupon conveying to her with absolute sincerity my sense of distance, and thegreatness of my desire. I toiled toward her painfully and obstinately through ajungle of words.

Her face changed very slowly—by such imperceptible degrees as when atdawn light comes into a clear sky. I could feel that I touched her, that herhardness was in some manner melting, her determination softening towardhesitations. The habit of an old familiarity lurked somewhere within her. Butshe 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 differentnow—everything. We made a mistake. We two young sillies made a mistakeand everything is different for ever. Yes, yes.”

She turned about.

“Nettie!” cried I, and still protesting, pursued her along thenarrow alley between the staging toward the hot-house door. I pursued her likean accusation, and she went before me like one who is guilty and ashamed. So Irecall 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-cutdistance of our meeting in the park. Ever and again I found her hazel eyes uponme. They expressed something novel—a surprise, as though she realized anunwonted relationship, and a sympathetic pity. And still—somethingdefensive.

When we got back to the cottage, I fell talking rather more freely with herfather about the nationalization of railways, and my spirits and temper had sofar 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 thingswere better with me than they were, and began to beam mightily.

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

§ 6

I was, of course, too footsore to walk back to Clayton, but I had a shillingand 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 gotready to go, Nettie amazed me by waking up to the most remarkable solicitudefor me. I must, she said, go by the road. It was altogether too dark for theshort 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 aquick undertone, and with a persuasive look that puzzled me. Even in the momentI asked myself why should this please her?

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

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

“But those dogs! Supposing one was loose!”

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

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 andindistinct. I was not so preoccupied with my love-affairs as to neglect what Iwill confess was always my custom at night across that wild and lonely park. Imade myself a club by fastening a big flint to one end of my twistedhandkerchief 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 theshrubbery I was startled to come unexpectedly upon a young man in evening dresssmoking a cigar.

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

“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 wasan intermittent dispute between the House people and the villager public aboutthe use of this track, and it is needless to say where my sympathies fell inthat dispute.

“Eh?” he cried in surprise.

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

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, sonof the man who owned not only this great estate but more than half ofRawdon’s pot-bank, and who had interests and possessions, collieries andrents, 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 forhim; he had been a great success at the university, and he was being sedulouslypopularized 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 believedmyself a better man than he. He was, as he stood there, a concentrated figureof all that filled me with bitterness. One day he had stopped in a motoroutside our house, and I remember the thrill of rage with which I had noted thedutiful admiration in my mother’s eyes as she peered through her blind athim. “That’s young Mr. Verrall,” she said. “They sayhe’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 notechanged.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked.

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

“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 theright of way. You’ll ask us to get off the face of the earth next. Isha’n’t oblige. See?”

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

“Socialist, I presume?” he said, alert and quiet and with thefaintest 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 ofway.”

“You’d better not,” I said.

“No!”

“No.”

He replaced his cigar, and there was a brief pause. “Catching atrain?” 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, asthat intention took effect.

I growled a surly good-night.

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

§ 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 Checkshillstation, I perceived I had two shadows.

The thing jumped into my mind and stopped its tumid flow for a moment. Iremember 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 theclouds had now rather suddenly unveiled.

The comet was perhaps twenty degrees from the moon. What a wonderful thing itlooked floating there, a greenish-white apparition in the dark blue deeps! Itlooked 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 wenton noting these facts, watching my two shadows precede me.

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

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

I knew now why she had looked guilty at my appearance, what had brought her outthat 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 thehigh-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—fora moment standing rigid—and then again suddenly becoming active with animpotent gesture, becoming audible with an inarticulate cry, with two littleshadows mocking my dismay, and about this figure you must conceive a great widespace of moonlit grass, rimmed by the looming suggestion of distanttrees—trees very low and faint and dim, and over it all the domedserenity of that wonderful luminous night.

For a little while this realization stunned my mind. My thoughts came to apause, staring at my discovery. Meanwhile my feet and my previous directioncarried me through the warm darkness to Checkshill station with its littlelights, 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 ofthe dingy “third-class” compartments of that time—and thesudden nearly frantic insurgence of my rage. I stood up with the cry of anangry animal, and smote my fist with all my strength against the panel of woodbefore me. . . .

Curiously enough I have completely forgotten my mood after that for a littlewhile, but I know that later, for a minute perhaps, I hung for a time out ofthe carriage with the door open, contemplating a leap from the train. It was tobe 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 howit 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 goingback. I was sitting in the corner of the carriage with my bruised and woundedhand pressed under my arm, and still insensible to its pain, trying to thinkout clearly a scheme of action—action that should express the monstrousindignation 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’tblow up, shall us?”. . .

What did it matter to me?

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

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

§ 2

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

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

I stopped to hear him only for a moment or so. I do not think I should havehalted at all but his crowd blocked my path, and the sight of his queer wildexpression, 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 HighGod! It is appointed unto all men to die—unto all men todie”—his voice changed to a curious flat chant—“andafter death, the Judgment! The Judgment!”

I pushed and threaded my way through the bystanders and went on, and hiscurious harsh flat voice pursued me. I went on with the thoughts that hadoccupied me before—where I could buy a revolver, and how I might masterits use—and probably I should have forgotten all about him had he nottaken 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 whollyconcentrated upon one business.

This dominant business was the purchase of my revolver. I held myselfresolutely to the idea that I must either restore myself by some extraordinaryact of vigor and violence in Nettie’s eyes or I must kill her. I wouldnot let myself fall away from that. I felt that if I let this matter pass, mylast shred of pride and honor would pass with it, that for the rest of my lifeI should never deserve the slightest respect or any woman’s love. Pridekept 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 toask questions why I bought such a thing. I determined to say I was going toTexas, and I thought it might prove useful there. Texas in those days had thereputation of a wild lawless land. As I knew nothing of caliber or impact, Iwanted also to be able to ask with a steady face at what distance a man orwoman could be killed by the weapon that might be offered me. I was prettycool-headed in relation to such practical aspects of my affair. I had somelittle difficulty in finding a gunsmith. In Clayton there were some rook-riflesand so forth in a cycle shop, but the only revolvers these people had impressedme as being too small and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop windowin the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice, a reasonablyclumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed “As used in the Americanarmy.”

I had drawn out my balance from the savings bank, matter of two pounds andmore, 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 nightwith bulging pockets, an armed man.

The purchase of my revolver was, I say, the chief business of those days, butyou must not think I was so intent upon it as to be insensible to the stirringthings that were happening in the streets through which I went seeking themeans to effect my purpose. They were full of murmurings: the whole region ofthe Four Towns scowled lowering from its narrow doors. The ordinary healthyflow of people going to work, people going about their business, was chilledand checked. Numbers of men stood about the streets in knots and groups, ascorpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels in the opening stages ofinflammation. The women looked haggard and worried. The ironworkers had refusedthe proposed reduction of their wages, and the lockout had begun. They werealready at “play.” The Conciliation Board was doing its best tokeep the coal-miners and masters from a breach, but young Lord Redcar, thegreatest 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 ahandsome young man, a gallant young man; his pride revolted at the idea ofbeing dictated to by a “lot of bally miners,” and he meant, hesaid, to make a fight for it. The world had treated him sumptuously from hisearliest years; the shares in the common stock of five thousand people had goneto pay for his handsome upbringing, and large, romantic, expensive ambitionsfilled his generously nurtured mind. He had early distinguished himself atOxford by his scornful attitude towards democracy. There was something thatappealed to the imagination in his fine antagonism to the crowd—on theone 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 forwork and a wicked appetite for the good things it could so rarely get. Forcommon imaginative purposes one left out the policeman from the design, thestalwart policeman protecting his lordship, and ignored the fact that whileLord Redcar had his hands immediately and legally on the workman’sshelter and bread, they could touch him to the skin only by some violent breachof the law.

He lived at Lowchester House, five miles or so beyond Checkshill; but partly toshow how little he cared for his antagonists, and partly no doubt to keephimself in touch with the negotiations that were still going on, he was visiblealmost every day in and about the Four Towns, driving that big motor car of histhat could take him sixty miles an hour. The English passion for fair play onemight have thought sufficient to rob this bold procedure of any dangerouspossibilities, but he did not go altogether free from insult, and on oneoccasion 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, inthe market-place outside the Clayton Town Hall, where the conference was held.. . .

I consider myself justified in regarding Lord Redcar’s passing automobilewith 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 namedPettigrew, 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 repairsfor 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 shemight need the same mercy again made her his abject slave. She was afraid evento ask that he should cause the roof to be mended for fear he might takeoffence. But one night the rain poured in on her bed and gave her a cold, andstained and soaked her poor old patchwork counterpane. Then she got me tocompose an excessively polite letter to old Pettigrew, begging him as a favorto perform his legal obligations. It is part of the general imbecility of thosedays that such one-sided law as existed was a profound mystery to the commonpeople, its provisions impossible to ascertain, its machinery impossible to setin motion. Instead of the clearly written code, the lucid statements of rulesand principles that are now at the service of every one, the law was the muddlesecret of the legal profession. Poor people, overworked people, had constantlyto submit to petty wrongs because of the intolerable uncertainty not only oflaw but of cost, and of the demands upon time and energy, proceedings mightmake. There was indeed no justice for any one too poor to command a goodsolicitor’s deference and loyalty; there was nothing but rough policeprotection and the magistrate’s grudging or eccentric advice for the massof the population. The civil law, in particular, was a mysterious upper-classweapon, and I can imagine no injustice that would have been sufficient toinduce 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 allabout his rheumatism, to inspect the roof, and to allege that nothing wasneeded, gave way to my most frequent emotion in those days, a burningindignation, and took the matter into my own hands. I wrote and asked him, witha withering air of technicality, to have the roof repaired “as peragreement,” and added, “if not done in one week from now we shallbe obliged to take proceedings.” I had not mentioned this high line ofconduct to my mother at first, and so when old Pettigrew came down in a stateof 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 shehad settled everything with him—she wouldn’t say how, but I couldguess 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 ragingto old Pettigrew in order to put the whole thing before him in what Iconsidered the proper light. Old Pettigrew evaded my illumination; he saw mecoming up his front steps—I can still see his queer old nose and thecrinkled brow over his eye and the little wisp of gray hair that showed overthe corner of his window-blind—and he instructed his servant to put upthe 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” totake, the brilliant idea occurred to me of appealing to Lord Redcar as theground landlord, and, as it were, our feudal chief, and pointing out to himthat 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 revoltedat democracy, and who cultivated a pert humiliating manner with his inferiorsto show as much, earned my distinguished hatred for ever by causing hissecretary to present his compliments to me, and his request that I would mindmy own business and leave him to manage his. At which I was so greatly enragedthat I first tore this note into minute innumerable pieces, and then dashed itdramatically all over the floor of my room—from which, to keep my motherfrom the job, I afterward had to pick it up laboriously on all-fours.

I was still meditating a tremendous retort, an indictment of all LordRedcar’s class, their manners, morals, economic and political crimes,when my trouble with Nettie arose to swamp all minor troubles. Yet, not socompletely but that I snarled aloud when his lordship’s motor-car whizzedby me, as I went about upon my long meandering quest for a weapon. And Idiscovered 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 setherself to move her bed out of the way of the drip without my help, and she hadknocked her knee. All her poor furnishings, I discovered, were cowering nowclose to the peeling bedroom walls; there had come a vast discoloration of theceiling, 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 keyof inconvenience and uneasiness in which all things were arranged, shouldsuggest the breath of trouble that stirred along the hot summer streets, theanxiety about the strike, the rumors and indignations, the gatherings andmeetings, the increasing gravity of the policemen’s faces, the combativeheadlines of the local papers, the knots of picketers who scrutinized any onewho passed near the silent, smokeless forges, but in my mind, you mustunderstand, such impressions came and went irregularly; they made a movingbackground, changing undertones, to my preoccupation by that darkly shapingpurpose to which a revolver was so imperative an essential.

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

§ 3

It was three days after this—on Wednesday, that is to say—that thefirst of those sinister outbreaks occurred that ended in the bloody affair ofPeacock Grove and the flooding out of the entire line of the Swathingleacollieries. 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 readthem is to realize the extraordinary carelessness of truth that dishonored thepress of those latter days. In my bureau I have several files of the dailypapers of the old time—I collected them, as a matter of fact—andthree or four of about that date I have just this moment taken out and lookedthrough to refresh my impression of what I saw. They lie before me—queer,shriveled, incredible things; the cheap paper has already become brittle andbrown and split along the creases, the ink faded or smeared, and I have tohandle them with the utmost care when I glance among their raging headlines. AsI sit here in this serene place, their quality throughout, their arrangement,their tone, their arguments and exhortations, read as though they came fromdrugged and drunken men. They give one the effect of faded bawling, of screamsand shouts heard faintly in a little gramophone. . . . It is only on Monday Ifind, and buried deep below the war news, that these publications contain anyintimation that unusual happenings were forward in Clayton and Swathinglea.

What I saw was towards evening. I had been learning to shoot with my newpossession. I had walked out with it four or five miles across a patch ofmoorland and down to a secluded little coppice full of blue-bells, halfwayalong the high-road between Leet and Stafford. Here I had spent the afternoon,experimenting and practising with careful deliberation and grim persistence. Ihad brought an old kite-frame of cane with me, that folded and unfolded, andeach 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 ninetimes out of ten; the light was getting too bad for me to see my penciledbull’s-eye, and in that state of quiet moodiness that sometimes comeswith hunger to passionate men, I returned by the way of Swathinglea towards myhome.

The road I followed came down between banks of wretched-lookingworking-men’s houses, in close-packed rows on either side, and took uponitself the rôle of Swathinglea High Street, where, at a lamp and apillar-box, the steam-trams began. So far that dirty hot way had been unusuallyquiet and empty, but beyond the corner, where the first group of beershopsclustered, it became populous. It was very quiet still, even the children werea little inactive, but there were a lot of people standing dispersedly inlittle groups, and with a general direction towards the gates of the BantockBurden coalpit.

The place was being picketed, although at that time the miners were stillnominally at work, and the conferences between masters and men still in sessionat 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 violentletter upon the crisis to the leading socialistic paper in England, TheClarion, in which he had adventured among the motives of Lord Redcar. Thepublication of this had been followed by instant dismissal. As Lord Redcarwrote a day or so later to the Times—I have that Times, Ihave all the London papers of the last month before the Change—

“The man was paid off and kicked out. Any self-respecting employer woulddo the same.” The thing had happened overnight, and the men did not atonce take a clear line upon what was, after all, a very intricate and debatableoccasion. But they came out in a sort of semiofficial strike from all LordRedcar’s collieries beyond the canal that besets Swathinglea. They did sowithout formal notice, committing a breach of contract by this suddencessation. But in the long labor struggles of the old days the workers wereconstantly putting themselves in the wrong and committing illegalities throughthat overpowering craving for dramatic promptness natural to uneducated minds.

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

I believe I should have gone striding athwart the dark stage of that stagnantindustrial drama without asking a question, if Lord Redcar had not chanced tocome upon the scene about the same time as myself and incontinently end itsstagnation.

He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put up the bestfight they had ever had, and he had been active all that afternoon in meetingthe quarrel half way, and preparing as conspicuously as possible for thescratch force of “blacklegs”—as we called them—whowere, 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 livingroom doors of rows of dark, low cottages. The perspective of squat blue slateroofs and clustering chimneys drifted downward towards the irregular open spacebefore the colliery—a space covered with coaly, wheel-scarred mud, with apatch 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 thelines of the steam-tramway that started out from before my feet, and were hereshining 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 litgaslamp as they vanished round the bend. Beyond, spread a darkling marsh ofhomes, an infinitude of little smoking hovels, and emergent, meager churches,public-houses, board schools, and other buildings amidst the prevailingchimneys of Swathinglea. To the right, very clear and relatively high, theBantock Burden pit-mouth was marked by a gaunt lattice bearing a great blackwheel, very sharp and distinct in the twilight, and beyond, in an irregularperspective, were others following the lie of the seams. The general effect, asone came down the hill, was of a dark compressed life beneath a very high andwide and luminous evening sky, against which these pit-wheels rose. And rulingthe calm spaciousness of that heaven was the great comet, now green-white, andwonderful for all who had eyes to see.

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

By this time the comet had begun to assume the cloudlike form still familiarthrough the medium of a thousand photographs and sketches. At first it had beenan almost telescopic speck; it had brightened to the dimensions of the greateststar 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 andsurpassed the moon. Now it was the most splendid thing this sky of earth hasever held. I have never seen a photograph that gave a proper idea of it. Neverat any time did it assume the conventional tailed outline, comets are supposedto have. Astronomers talked of its double tail, one preceding it and onetrailing behind it, but these were foreshortened to nothing, so that it hadrather the form of a bellying puff of luminous smoke with an intenser, brighterheart. It rose a hot yellow color, and only began to show its distinctivegreenness when it was clear of the mists of the evening.

It compelled attention for a space. For all my earthly concentration of mind, Icould 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 notpossibly be a matter of absolute indifference to the scheme and values of mylife.

But how?

I thought of Parload. I thought of the panic and uneasiness that was spreadingin this very matter, and the assurances of scientific men that the thingweighed so little—at the utmost a few hundred tons of thinly diffused gasand dust—that even were it to smite this earth fully, nothing couldpossibly ensue. And, after all, said I, what earthly significance has any onefound in the stars?

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

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

The attention of every one swung round with an irresistible magnetism towardsthe 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 asound that mingled threat and protest, something between a prolonged“Ah!” and “Ugh!” Then with a hoarse intensity of angercame a low heavy booing, “Boo! boo—oo!” a note stupidlyexpressive of animal savagery. “Toot, toot!” said LordRedcar’s automobile in ridiculous repartee. “Toot, toot!” Oneheard 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 andmove forward again, and had a glimpse of something writhing on the ground.

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

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

For a moment every one seemed running away. A woman, carrying a shawl-wrappedchild, blundered into me, and sent me reeling back. Every one thought offirearms, 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 ofbluish smoke hung in the air behind the thing. The majority of the peoplescattered back in a disorderly fashion, and left a clear space about thestruggle that centered upon the motor-car.

The man or boy who had fallen was lying on the ground with no one near him, ablack 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 surroundedthe car, and appeared to be holding on to it as if to prevent it from startingagain; one—it was Mitchell, a well-known labor leader—argued infierce low tones with Lord Redcar. I could not hear anything they said, I wasnot near enough. Behind me the colliery gates were open, and there was a senseof help coming to the motor-car from that direction. There was an unoccupiedmuddy space for fifty yards, perhaps, between car and gate, and then the wheelsand head of the pit rose black against the sky. I was one of a rude semicircleof 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 mypocket.

I advanced with the vaguest intentions in the world, and not so quickly butthat 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 finefigure there, I must admit; he was a big, fair, handsome young man with a finetenor voice and an instinct for gallant effect. My eyes were drawn to him atfirst wholly. He seemed a symbol, a triumphant symbol, of all that the theoryof aristocracy claims, of all that filled my soul with resentment. Hischauffeur sat crouched together, peering at the crowd under hislordship’s arm. But Mitchell showed as a sturdy figure also, and hisvoice 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 thechauffeur, “Here! get down and look at it!”

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

The man on the back seat stood up, leant forward, and spoke to Lord Redcar, andfor the first time my attention was drawn to him. It was young Verrall! Hishandsome 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 LordRedcar. 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 herewe were—

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

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

A big young man striding forward with his fists clenched, halted for one secondat 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, andthe expression changed in his eyes. He hung perplexed at me. Then with a grunthe went on.

I heard the voices growing loud and sharp behind me.

I hesitated, half turned towards the dispute, then set off running towards theheaps. Some instinct told me not to be detected loading. I was cool enoughtherefore 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 fightnow? and then I dropped into the hollow, knelt among the weeds, and loaded witheager trembling fingers. I loaded one chamber, got up and went back a dozenpaces, thought of possibilities, vacillated, returned and loaded all theothers. I did it slowly because I felt a little clumsy, and at the end came amoment of inspection—had I forgotten any thing? And then for a fewseconds I crouched before I rose, resisting the first gust of reaction againstmy impulse. I took thought, and for a moment that great green-white meteoroverhead swam back into my conscious mind. For the first time then I linked itclearly with all the fierce violence that had crept into human life. I joinedup that with what I meant to do. I was going to shoot young Verrall as it wereunder 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 atthat particular time. I had not pictured such circumstances as these, I hadnever thought of him in connection with Lord Redcar and our black industrialworld. He was in that distant other world of Checkshill, the world of parks andgardens, the world of sunlit emotions and Nettie. His appearance here wasdisconcerting. I was taken by surprise. I was too tired and hungry to thinkclearly, and the hard implication of our antagonism prevailed with me. In thetumult of my passed emotions I had thought constantly of conflicts,confrontations, deeds of violence, and now the memory of these things tookpossession of me as though they were irrevocable resolutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sent him staggering, and as he went back I saw recognition mingle withastonishment 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 myjaw. I had an impression of Lord Redcar as a great furry bulk, towering likesome Homeric hero above the fray. I went down before him—it made him seemto rush up—and he ignored me further. His big flat voice counseled youngVerrall—

“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 wentstumbling. 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 LordRedcar—the latter holding up his long skirts of fur, and making agrotesque figure—one behind the other, in full bolt across a coldlycomet-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 withcoaly mud—knees, elbows, shoulders, back. I had not even drawn myrevolver! . . .

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

I hesitated for a moment towards the gates of the colliery, and then wentlimping homeward, thwarted, painful, confused, and ashamed. I had not the heartnor 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 supperof bread and cheese—roused me at last out of a hag-rid sleep to facedespair. I was a soul lost amidst desolations and shame, dishonored, evillytreated, 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 andillness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth, that Nettie, astrangely distorted Nettie, should come through the brief dreams that markedthe exhaustions of that vigil, to dominate my misery. I was sensible, with anexaggerated distinctness, of the intensity of her physical charm for me, of herevery grace and beauty; she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me andthe whole gamut of pride. She, bodily, was my lost honor. It was not only lossbut disgrace to lose her. She stood for life and all that was denied; shemocked me as a creature of failure and defeat. My spirit raised itself towardsher, and then the bruise upon my jaw glowed with a dull heat, and I rolled inthe mud again before my rivals.

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

Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of the world. Nevera city, never a night the whole year round, but amidst those who slept werethose who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath and misery. Countless thousandsthere were so ill, so troubled, they agonize near to the very border-line ofmadness, 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 tooswollen for that to be possible. I sat indoors in the ill-lit downstairskitchen, with my foot bandaged, and mused darkly and read. My dear old motherwaited 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 bebruised and my clothes muddy. She had brushed my clothes in the morning beforeI got up.

Ah well! Mothers are not treated in that way now. That I suppose must consoleme. 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 onthe narrow, cheap, but by no means economical range, the ashes under thefireplace, the rust-spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested; Iwonder how near you can come to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy Iwas, unshaven and collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little timid,dirty, devoted old woman who hovered about me with love peering out from herpuckered eyelids. . .

When she went out to buy some vegetables in the middle of the morning she gotme a half-penny journal. It was just such a one as these upon my desk, onlythat 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 thatmorning; it was a paper called emphatically the New Paper, but everybodybought it and everybody called it the “yell.” It was full thatmorning of stupendous news and still more stupendous headlines, so stupendousthat for a little while I was roused from my egotistical broodings to widerinterests. 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 certainlythe most strikingly insane. In reality it was probably far less mischievousthan such quieter evil as, for example, the general acquiescence in the privateownership of land, but its evil consequences showed so plainly that even inthose days of stifling confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable groundswas there any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of amultitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material, and thewaste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing. The old war ofsavage and barbaric nations did at least change humanity, you assumedyourselves to be a superior tribe in physique and discipline, you demonstratedthis upon your neighbors, and if successful you took their land and their womenand perpetuated and enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing butthe color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship of a fewaccidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the last of these internationalepileptic fits, for example, the English, with much dysentery and bad poetry,and a few hundred deaths in battle, conquered the South African Boers at agross cost of about three thousand pounds per head—they could have boughtthe whole of that preposterous imitation of a nation for a tenth of thatsum—and except for a few substitutions of personalities, this group ofpartially corrupt officials in the place of that, and so forth, the permanentchange was altogether insignificant. (But an excitable young man in Austriacommitted suicide when at length the Transvaal ceased to be a“nation.”) Men went through the seat of that war after it was allover, and found humanity unchanged, except for a general impoverishment, andthe convenience of an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire andcartridge cases—unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all itsold habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like kraal, thewhite in his ugly ill-managed shanty. . .

But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them, through the mirageof the New Paper, in a light of mania. All my adolescence from fourteento seventeen went to the music of that monstrous resonating futility, thecheering, the anxieties, the songs and the waving of flags, the wrongs ofgenerous Buller and the glorious heroism of De Wet—who always gotaway; that was the great point about the heroic De Wet—and it neveroccurred to us that the total population we fought against was less than halfthe number of those who lived cramped ignoble lives within the compass of theFour Towns.

But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater antagonismwas coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining itself as a thinginevitable, sinking now a little out of attention only to resume moreemphatically, now flashing into some acute definitive expression and nowpercolating and pervading some new region of thought, and that was theantagonism of Germany and Great Britain.

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

Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of almostindescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had neither thecourage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve, that most of us hadhardly the courage to think about, and with our affairs hopelessly entangledwith the entirely different confusions of three hundred and fifty million otherpersons 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, andthe noisy little creatures who directed papers and wrote books and gavelectures, and generally in that time of world-dementia pretended to be thenational mind, were busy in both countries, with a sort of infernal unanimity,exhorting—and not only exhorting but successfully persuading—thetwo peoples to divert such small common store of material, moral andintellectual energy as either possessed, into the purely destructive andwasteful business of war. And—I have to tell you these things even if youdo not believe them, because they are vital to my story—there was not aman alive who could have told you of any real permanent benefit, of anythingwhatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and evil, that would result from awar between England and Germany, whether England shattered Germany or wassmashed and overwhelmed, or whatever the end might be.

The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was, in themicrocosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical wrath andjealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measured the excess of commonemotion over the common intelligence, the legacy of inordinate passion we havereceived from the brute from which we came. Just as I had become the slave ofmy own surprise and anger and went hither and thither with a loaded revolver,seeking and intending vague fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went aboutthe earth, hot eared and muddle headed, with loaded navies and armies terriblyready 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 ofpeople 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 othergreat monstrous shapes of that extraordinary time—was in the nature of anunanticipated accident. It had happened, as weeds happen in abandoned gardens,just as all our world has happened,—because there was no clear Will inthe world to bring about anything better. Towards the end this“press” was almost entirely under the direction of youngish men ofthat eager, rather unintelligent type, that is never able to detect itselfaimless, that pursues nothing with incredible pride and zeal, and if you wouldreally understand this mad era the comet brought to an end, you must keep inmind that every phase in the production of these queer old things was pervadedby 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 buildingin a dirty, paper-littered back street of old London, and a number of shabbilydressed men coming and going in this with projectile swiftness, and within thisfactory companies of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers—theywere always speeding up the printers—ply their type-setting machines, andcast and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, ina beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. Thereis a throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing ofmessengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Thenbegins a clatter roar of machinery catching the infection, going faster andfaster, and whizzing and banging,—engineers, who have never had time towash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans, while paper runs off itsrolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor you must suppose arrivingexplosively on a swift motor-car, leaping out before the thing is at astandstill, 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 scamperto and fro. Sprinkle your vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies. Youimagine all the parts of this complex lunatic machine working hystericallytoward a crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last theonly things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing vibrating premisesare the hands of the clock.

Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all thosestresses. Then in the small hours, into the now dark and deserted streets comesa 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 likea free fight, and off with a rush and clatter east, west, north, and south. Theinterest 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 intostations, catching trains by a hair’s breadth, speeding on their way,breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce accuracy out upon theplatforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of these smaller bundlesinto still smaller bundles, into dispersing parcels, into separate papers, andthe dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys, ashoving through letter slots, openings of windows, spreading out uponbook-stalls. For the space of a few hours you must figure the whole countrydotted white with rustling papers—placards everywhere vociferating thehurried lie for the day; men and women in trains, men and women eating andreading, men by study-fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons anddaughters waiting for father to finish—a million scattered peoplereading—reading headlong—or feverishly ready to read. It is just asif some vehement jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface ofthe land. . .

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

Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonableexcitement, 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 witha bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark underground kitchen of mymother’s, clean roused from my personal troubles by the yelp of theheadlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as Iread.

It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body, thatpaper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the Englishcommunity, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for all mypreoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment, caught me and swungme about. And all over the country that day, millions read as I read, and cameround into line with me, under the same magnetic spell, came round—howdid 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 itMatter?” went unread. “Germany”—I usually figured thismythical malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperor enhanced byheraldic black wings and a large sword—had insulted our flag. That wasthe message of the New Paper, and the monster towered over me,threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting upon my faultless country’scolors. Somebody had hoisted a British flag on the right bank of some tropicalriver I had never heard of before, and a drunken German officer under ambiguousinstructions had torn it down. Then one of the convenient abundant natives ofthe country, a British subject indisputably, had been shot in the leg. But thefacts were by no means clear. Nothing was clear except that we were not goingto stand any nonsense from Germany. Whatever had or had not happened we meantto 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 battlesand victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and entrenchments, and the heapedslaughter of many thousands of men.

But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember, in acuriously 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 toCheckshill. I had no set plan of any sort. There was a great confusion ofdramatically conceived intentions in my head, scenes of threatening anddenunciation and terror, but I did not mean to kill. The revolver was to turnupon my rival my disadvantage in age and physique. . . .

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

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

I limped at the outset, but after the second mile my ankle warmed toforgetfulness, and the rest of the way I walked well. Suppose, after all, I waswrong?

I was still debating that, as I came through the park. By the corner of thepaddock near the keeper’s cottage, I was reminded by some belated bluehyacinths of a time when I and Nettie had gathered them together. It seemedimpossible that we could really have parted ourselves for good and all. A waveof tenderness flowed over me, and still flooded me as I came through the littledell and drew towards the hollies. But there the sweet Nettie of my boy’slove faded, and I thought of the new Nettie of desire and the man I had comeupon in the moonlight, I thought of the narrow, hot purpose that had grown sostrongly out of my springtime freshness, and my mood darkened to night.

I crossed the beech wood and came towards the gardens with a resolute andsorrowful heart. When I reached the green door in the garden wall I was seizedfor a space with so violent a trembling that I could not grip the latch to liftit, for I no longer had any doubt how this would end. That trembling wassucceeded by a feeling of cold, and whiteness, and self-pity. I was astonishedto find myself grimacing, to feel my cheeks wet, and thereupon I gave waycompletely to a wild passion of weeping. I must take just a little time beforethe thing was done. . . . I turned away from the door and stumbled for a littledistance, sobbing loudly, and lay down out of sight among the bracken, and sopresently became calm again. I lay there some time. I had half a mind todesist, and then my emotion passed like the shadow of a cloud, and I walkedvery coolly into the gardens.

Through the open door of one of the glass houses I saw old Stuart. He wasleaning against the staging, his hands in his pockets, and so deep in thoughthe 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 firstwhat it was. One of the bedroom windows was open, and the customary shortblind, with its brass upper rail partly unfastened, drooped obliquely acrossthe vacant space. It looked negligent and odd, for usually everything about thecottage was conspicuously trim.

The door was standing wide open, and everything was still. But giving thatusually orderly hall an odd look—it was about half-past two in theafternoon—was a pile of three dirty plates, with used knives and forksupon 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 followedthis up with an amiable “Hel-lo!”

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

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

For a moment we remained staring at one another without speaking. Her hair wasdisheveled, her face dirty, tear-stained, and irregularly red. Her expressionat the sight of me was pure astonishment. I thought she was about to saysomething, 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? ThenI heard some one upstairs.

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

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

She did not answer, but I heard her dress rustle as she moved. I Judged she wasupon 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 atlast submerged the words altogether and ended in a wail. Except that it camefrom a woman’s throat it was exactly the babbling sound of a weepingchild with a grievance. “I can’t,” she said, “Ican’t,” and that was all I could distinguish. It was to my youngears the strangest sound conceivable from a kindly motherly little woman, whomI had always thought of chiefly as an unparalleled maker of cakes. Itfrightened me. I went upstairs at once in a state of infinite alarm, and thereshe was upon the landing, leaning forward over the top of the chest of drawersbeside her open bedroom door, and weeping. I never saw such weeping. One thickstrand 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 shouldhave to tell you, Willie! Oh that I should have to tell you!” She droppedher 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 drippinghandkerchief abides with me to this day.

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

I began to understand.

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

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

I waited till her passion abated.

There came a lull. I forgot the weapon in my pocket. I said nothing, andsuddenly 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 wishher 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 herthere, 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 wentout yesterday morning! I said to her, ‘Nettie,’ I said to her,‘you’re mighty fine for a morning call.’ ‘Fineclo’s for a fine day,’ she said, and that was her last words tome!—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 fragmentaryhurry: “She went out bright and shining, out of this house for ever. Shewas smiling, Willie—as if she was glad to be going. (“Glad to begoing,” I echoed with soundless lips.) ‘You’re mighty finefor the morning,’ I says; ‘mighty fine.’ ‘Let the girlbe pretty,’ says her father, ‘while she’s young!’ Andsomewhere she’d got a parcel of her things hidden to pick up, and she wasgoing off—out of this house for ever!”

She became quiet.

“Let the girl be pretty,” she repeated; “let the girl bepretty 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 seemedto 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 ourgraves.”

“But”—I moistened my lips and spoke slowly—“shemay 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 agentleman.”

“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 onelike a storm—”

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

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 muteunconfident denial.

“Young Verrall?”

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

“Was it young Verrall?” I insisted.

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

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

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

§ 6

Old Stuart was pitiful.

I found him still inert in the greenhouse where I had first seen him. He didnot move as I drew near him; he glanced at me, and then stared hard again atthe flowerpots before him.

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

“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 todo? Suppose he won’t? Likely he won’t. What then?”

He drooped with an intensified despair.

“Here’s this cottage,” he said, pursuing some contractedargument. “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 gapsbetween these broken words. I found his lethargy, and the dimly shaped mentalattitudes his words indicated, abominable. I said abruptly, “You have herletter?”

He dived into his breast-pocket, became motionless for ten seconds, then wokeup again and produced her letter. He drew it clumsily from its envelope, andhanded 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 thanNettie’s usual triteness and inadequacy of expression. Her handwritingbore no traces of emotion; it was round and upright and clear as though it hadbeen done in a writing lesson. Always her letters were like masks upon herimage; they fell like curtains before the changing charm of her face; onealtogether forgot the sound of her light clear voice, confronted by aperplexing stereotyped thing that had mysteriously got a hold upon one’sheart 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 itseems that it had to be. Love is a very difficult thing, and takes hold of onein ways one does not expect. Do not think I am ashamed about this, I glory inmy 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 itwas, but at the time I read it in a suppressed anguish of rage. It plunged meinto a pit of hopeless shame; there seemed to remain no pride for me in lifeuntil I had revenge. I stood staring at those rounded upstanding letters, nottrusting 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 hishorny thumbnails.

“You can’t even tell where she is,” he said, turning thething round in a hopeless manner, and then desisting. “It’s hard onus, Willie. Here she is; she hadn’t anything to complain of; a sort ofpet for all of us. Not even made to do her share of the ‘ousework. Andshe goes off and leaves us like a bird that’s learnt to fly. Can’ttrust us, that’s what takes me. Puts ‘erself— Butthere! 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 envelopewith a gesture; “and what could I do? Even if I knew— How could Ileave the gardens?”

“Great God!” I cried, “not leave these gardens! It’syour Honor, man! If she was my daughter—if she was mydaughter—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’dstrangle 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 inmy boyhood I happened upon a bird terribly mangled by some cat, and killed itin a frenzy of horror and pity. I had a gust of that same emotion now, as thisshameful mutilated soul fluttered in the dust, before me. Then, you know, Idismissed 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-roughforefinger. “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 wasdefaced by a circular postmark, which bore the name of the office of departureand the date. The impact in this particular case had been light or made withoutsufficient ink, and half the letters of the name had left no impression. Icould distinguish—

I A PA M P

and very faintly below D.S.O.

I guessed the name in an instant flash of intuition. It was Shaphambury. Thevery gaps shaped that to my mind. Perhaps in a sort of semi-visibility otherletters were there, at least hinting themselves. It was a place somewhere onthe 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 makeHampton?” 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 hisbreast pocket.

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

“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 ladywith extraordinarily flaxen hair, her weak aquiline features were pursed upinto an assumption of dignity, and she was richly dressed. I would like tounderline that “richly dressed,” or have the words printed inflorid old English or Gothic lettering. No one on earth is now quite so richlydressed as she was, no one old or young indulges in so quiet and yet soprofound a sumptuosity. But you must not imagine any extravagance of outline orany beauty or richness of color. The predominant colors were black and furbrowns, and the effect of richness was due entirely to the extreme costlinessof the materials employed. She affected silk brocades with rich and elaboratepatterns, priceless black lace over creamy or purple satin, intricate trimmingsthrough which threads and bands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter rarefurs. Her gloves fitted exquisitely, and ostentatiously simple chains of finegold and pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced about her littleperson. One was forced to feel that the slightest article she wore cost morethan all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like Nettie; her bonnet affected thesimplicity that is beyond rubies. Richness, that is the first quality aboutthis old lady that I would like to convey to you, and the second wascleanliness. You felt that old Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean. If you hadboiled my poor dear old mother in soda for a month you couldn’t have gother so clean as Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was. And pervading allher presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidence in therespectful subordination of the world.

She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any loss of herultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she had come to interviewStuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged the gulf between theirfamilies.

And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as myyounger readers are concerned. You who know only the world that followed theGreat Change will find much that I am telling inconceivable. Upon these pointsI cannot appeal, as I have appealed for other confirmations, to the oldnewspapers; these were the things that no one wrote about because every oneunderstood and every one had taken up an attitude. There were in England andAmerica, and indeed throughout the world, two great informal divisions of humanbeings—the Secure and the Insecure. There was not and never had been ineither country a nobility—it was and remains a common error that theBritish peers were noble—neither in law nor custom were there noblefamilies, and we altogether lacked the edification one found in Russia, forexample, of a poor nobility. A peerage was an hereditary possession that, likethe family land, concerned only the eldest sons of the house; it radiated noluster of noblesse oblige. The rest of the world were in law andpractice common—and all America was common. But through the privateownership of land that had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations inBritain and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large massesof property had become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, towhom it was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, andwho were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but by thenatural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of living. It wasa class without any very definite boundaries; vigorous individualities, bymethods for the most part violent and questionable, were constantly thrustingthemselves from insecurity to security, and the sons and daughters of securepeople, by marrying insecurity or by wild extravagance or flagrant vice, wouldsink into the life of anxiety and insufficiency which was the ordinary life ofman. The rest of the population was landless and, except by working directly orindirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such was theshallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the stifled egotism of allour feelings before the Last Days, that very few indeed of the Secure could befound to doubt that this was the natural and only conceivable order of theworld.

It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am displaying, and Ihope that I am conveying something of its hopeless bitterness to you, but youmust not imagine that the Secure lived lives of paradisiacal happiness. The pitof 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-dressedpeople, the vulgar appeals of the dealers in popular commodities, were not tobe escaped. There was below the threshold of their minds an uneasiness; theynot only did not think clearly about social economy but they displayed aninstinctive disinclination to think. Their security was not so perfect thatthey had not a dread of falling towards the pit, they were always lashingthemselves by new ropes, their cultivation of “connexions,” ofinterests, their desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a constantignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the full flavor of theirlives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class distinctions, and theywere never really happy in their servants. Read their surviving books. Eachgeneration bewails the decay of that “fidelity” of servants, nogeneration ever saw. A world that is squalid in one corner is squalidaltogether, but that they never understood. They believed there was not enoughof anything to go round, they believed that this was the intention of God andan incurable condition of life, and they held passionately and with a sense ofright to their disproportionate share. They maintained a common intercourse as“Society” of all who were practically secure, and their choice ofthat word is exhaustively eloquent of the quality of their philosophy. But, ifyou can master these alien ideas upon which the old system rested, just in thesame measure will you understand the horror these people had for marriages withthe 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 lovedand gave way to the impulse of self-abandonment without marriage, and so youwill understand the peculiar situation of Nettie with young Verrall. One orother had to suffer. And as they were both in a state of great emotionalexaltation and capable of strange generosities toward each other, it was anopen question and naturally a source of great anxiety to a mother in Mrs.Verrall’s position, whether the sufferer might not be herson—whether as the outcome of that glowing irresponsible commerce Nettiemight not return prospective mistress of Checkshill Towers. The chances weregreatly against that conclusion, but such things did occur.

These laws and customs sound, I know, like a record of some nasty-mindedlunatic’s inventions. They were invincible facts in that vanished worldinto which, by some accident, I had been born, and it was the dream of anybetter state of things that was scouted as lunacy. Just think of it! This girlI loved with all my soul, for whom I was ready to sacrifice my life, was notgood 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 thanmyself. She was to be his pleasure until he chose to cast her aside, and thepoison of our social system had so saturated her nature—his eveningdress, his freedom and his money had seemed so fine to her and I so clothed insqualor—that to that prospect she had consented. And to resent the socialconventions that created their situation, was called “class envy,”and gently born preachers reproached us for the mildest resentment against aninjustice no living man would now either endure or consent to profit by.

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

But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesqueness of the old life, youwill begin to appreciate the interpretation of old Mrs. Verrall’sappearance 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 Stuartand his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrational way. I wanted toescape seeing that, seeing even Stuart’s first gesture in that, at anycost.

“I’m off,” said I, and turned my back on him without anyfurther 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 foreheadwrinkled, and her eyes grew round. She found me a queer customer even at thefirst sight, and there was something in the manner of my advance that took awayher breath.

She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to the level ofthe hothouse floor. She receded a pace or two, with a certain offended dignityat 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 nooccasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing I said to her—Istrip these things before you—if only I can get them stark enough youwill understand and forgive. I was filled with a brutal and overpowering desireto 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. “Youinfernal land thieves!” I said point-blank into her face. “Haveyou come to offer them money?”

And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudely beyond herand 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 asher particular universe went I had not existed at all, or I had existed only asa dim black thing, an insignificant speck, far away across her park inirrelevant, unimportant transit, until this moment when she came, sedatelytroubled, into her own secure gardens and sought for Stuart among thegreenhouses. Then abruptly I flashed into being down that green-walled,brick-floored vista as a black-avised, ill-clad young man, who first stared andthen advanced scowling toward her. Once in existence I developed rapidly. Igrew larger in perspective and became more and more important and sinisterevery moment. I came up the steps with inconceivable hostility and disrespectin my bearing, towered over her, becoming for an instant at least a sort ofsecond French Revolution, and delivered myself with the intensest concentrationof those wicked and incomprehensible words. Just for a second I threatenedannihilation. Happily that was my climax.

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

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

No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously. But she could notunderstand.

None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid flashes ofhate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below their feet. The thingleapt out of the black for a moment and vanished, like a threatening figure bya desolate roadside lit for a moment by one’s belated carriage-lamp andthen swallowed up by the night. They counted it with nightmares, and did theirbest 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, Iwas a man who stood for all the disinherited of the world. I had no hope ofpride 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 wasperfectly 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 whohad smiled and promised and given herself to another, and who stood now for allthe conceivable delightfulnesses, the lost imaginations of the youthful heart,the unattainable joys in life; and Verrall who stood for all who profited bythe incurable injustice of our social order. I would kill them both. And thatbeing done I would blow my brains out and see what vengeance followed my blankrefusal to live.

So indeed I was resolved. I raged monstrously. And above me, abolishing thestars, triumphant over the yellow waning moon that followed it below, the giantmeteor 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; fora 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 longseventeen miles without a thought of rest. And I had eaten nothing since themorning.

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 neithernight nor day. There were times when I reasoned in a topsy-turvy fashion withwhat I called the Spirit of All Things. But always I spoke to that white gloryin the sky.

“Why am I here only to suffer ignominies?” I asked. “Why haveyou made me with pride that cannot be satisfied, with desires that turn andrend 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 Iever tormented—day by day, some wretched worm—making filth for itto 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 makingsomething with me—birth pangs of a soul. Ah! How can I believe you? Youforget I have eyes for other things. Let my own case go, but what of that frogbeneath the cart-wheel, God?—and the bird the cat had torn?”

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

A week ago it had been moonlight, white and black and hard across the spaces ofthe park, but now the light was livid and full of the quality of haze. Anextraordinarily low white mist, not three feet above the ground, driftedbroodingly across the grass, and the trees rose ghostly out of that phantomsea. Great and shadowy and strange was the world that night, no one seemedabroad; I and my little cracked voice drifted solitary through the silentmysteries. Sometimes I argued as I have told, sometimes I tumbled along inmoody vacuity, sometimes my torment was vivid and acute.

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

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

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

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

It was—how can I express it?—a stifled outcry tranquilized, lost,amid the serene assumptions, the overwhelming empire of that brightness. Thenoise 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 Ilooked 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 nownight after night walked out to stare at the comet, and the little preacher inthe waste beyond the hoardings, who warned sinners to repent before theJudgment, was not in his usual place.

It was long past midnight, and every one had gone home. But I did not think ofthis at first, and the solitude perplexed me and left a memory behind. Thegas-lamps were all extinguished because of the brightness of the comet, andthat too was unfamiliar. The little newsagent in the still High Street had shutup 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 staringletters—was: “WAR.”

You figure that empty mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps—nosoul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And amidst thatsleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board, a little askew andcrumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool meteoric glare, preposterous andappalling, the measureless evil of that word—

“WAR!”

§ 2

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

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

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

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

My eyes went quietly to my coat pocket, where something still bulged. Sheprobably 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 putthe tray upon my knees, she kissed my hair softly. For a moment we bothremained 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 movedtowards them. “I’m still equal to a clothes-brush.”

And then, as she turned away, I astonished her by saying, “You dearmother, 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 ofsubmission 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 passionagain. A sorrowful firmness of the mind possessed me. My purpose seemed now asinflexible as iron; there was neither love nor hate nor fear left inme—only I pitied my mother greatly for all that was still to come. I atemy breakfast slowly, and thought where I could find out about Shaphambury, andhow 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 shavingmuch more carefully than was my wont; then I went down to the Public Library toconsult a map.

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

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

A fact intruded itself upon me. People seemed in an altogether exceptional stirabout 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 Ibethought me: “This war with Germany, of course!” A naval battlewas supposed to be in progress in the North Sea. Let them! I returned to theconsideration of my own affairs.

Parload?

Could I go and make it up with him, and then borrow? I weighed the chances ofthat. Then I thought of selling or pawning something, but that seemeddifficult. My winter overcoat had not cost a pound when it was new, my watchwas not likely to fetch many shillings. Still, both these things might befactors. I thought with a certain repugnance of the little store my mother wasprobably making for the rent. She was very secretive about that, and it waslocked in an old tea-caddy in her bedroom. I knew it would be almost impossibleto get any of that money from her willingly, and though I told myself that inthis issue of passion and death no detail mattered, I could not get rid oftormenting scruples whenever I thought of that tea-caddy. Was there no othercourse? Perhaps after every other source had been tapped I might supplementwith a few shillings frankly begged from her. “These others,” Isaid 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 geteverything thought out completely, to take a long aim and then to act as abullet flies.

I hesitated at a pawnshop on my way home to my midday meal, but I determinednot 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 somescraps of cabbage and bacon—I put on my overcoat and got it out of thehouse 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, thatwas rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the fact that into it thecoal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness, opened, and diffused smallcrunchable 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 aminute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, andrags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called“dish-clouts,” rise in my memory at the name. The altar of thisplace was the “sink,” a tank of stone, revolting to a refinedtouch, grease-filmed and unpleasant to see, and above this was a tap for coldwater, so arranged that when the water descended it splashed and wetted whoeverhad turned it on. This tap was our water supply. And in such a place you mustfancy a little old woman, rather incompetent and very gentle, a soul ofunselfishness and sacrifice, in dirty clothes, all come from their originalcolors to a common dusty dark gray, in worn, ill-fitting boots, with handsdistorted by ill use, and untidy graying hair—my mother. In the winterher hands would be “chapped,” and she would have a cough. And whileshe washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and watch in order that I maydesert her.

I gave way to queer hesitations in pawning my two negotiable articles. A weaklyindisposition to pawn in Clayton, where the pawnbroker knew me, carried me tothe door of the place in Lynch Street, Swathinglea, where I had bought myrevolver. Then came an idea that I was giving too many facts about myself toone 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 thesingle fare to Shaphambury. Still deliberate, I went back to the Public Libraryto find out whether it was possible, by walking for ten or twelve milesanywhere, to shorten the journey. My boots were in a dreadful state, the soleof the left one also was now peeling off, and I could not help perceiving thatall my plans might be wrecked if at this crisis I went on shoe leather in whichI could only shuffle. So long as I went softly they would serve, but not forhard walking. I went to the shoemaker in Hacker Street, but he would notpromise any repairs for me under forty-eight hours.

I got back home about five minutes to three, resolved to start by the fivetrain for Birmingham in any case, but still dissatisfied about my money. Ithought of pawning a book or something of that sort, but I could think ofnothing of obvious value in the house. My mother’s silver—twogravy-spoons and a salt-cellar—had been pawned for some weeks, since, infact, 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 mesuddenly round his dull red curtains with a sort of alarmed resolution in hiseye and vanished, and as I walked along the passage he opened his door upon mesuddenly 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 adiscolored red tie and frayed linen. My left hand keeps in my pocket as thoughthere is something it prefers to keep a grip upon there. Mr. Gabbitas wasshorter than I, and the first note he struck in the impression he made upon anyone was of something bright and birdlike. I think he wanted to be birdlike, hepossessed the possibility of an avian charm, but, as a matter of fact, therewas nothing of the glowing vitality of the bird in his being. And a bird isnever out of breath and with an open mouth. He was in the clerical dress ofthat time, that costume that seems now almost the strangest of all ourold-world clothing, and he presented it in its cheapest form—black of apoor texture, ill-fitting, strangely cut. Its long skirts accentuated thetubbiness of his body, the shortness of his legs. The white tie below hisall-round collar, beneath his innocent large-spectacled face, was a littlegrubby, and between his not very clean teeth he held a briar pipe. Hiscomplexion 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 ofall physical beauty or dignity about him. You would find him extraordinarilyodd, but in the old days he met not only with acceptance but respect. He wasalive until within a year or so ago, but his later appearance changed. As I sawhim 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 theman stark, you would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes fromflabby muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, and in the rounded shouldersand flawed and yellowish skin, the same failure of any effort toward cleanbeauty. 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 thechild of pride and high resolve, or of any splendid passion of love. He hadjust happened. . . But we all happened then. Why am I taking this toneover 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. Iwould have liked very greatly to have refused it, never was invitation moreinopportune, but I had not the wit to think of an excuse. “Allright,” I said awkwardly, and he held the door open for me.

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

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

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

There was an air of culture about his room that always cowed me, and that mademe constrained even on this occasion. The table under the window was litteredwith photographic material and the later albums of his continental souvenirs,and on the American cloth trimmed shelves that filled the recesses on eitherside of the fireplace were what I used to think in those days a quiteincredible number of books—perhaps eight hundred altogether, includingthe reverend gentleman’s photograph albums and college and schooltext-books. This suggestion of learning was enforced by the little woodenshield bearing a college coat-of-arms that hung over the looking-glass, and bya photograph of Mr. Gabbitas in cap and gown in an Oxford frame that adornedthe opposite wall. And in the middle of that wall stood his writing-desk, whichI knew to have pigeon-holes when it was open, and which made him seem notmerely cultured but literary. At that he wrote sermons, composing them himself!

“Yes,” he said, taking possession of the hearthrug, “the warhad 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 blandlythrough his spectacles at a water-color by his sister—the subject was abunch of violets—above the sideboard which was his pantry and tea-chestand 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 Ideclined, began talking in a confidential tone of this “dreadfulbusiness” of the strikes. “The war won’t improve thatoutlook,” he said, and was very grave for a moment.

He spoke of the want of thought for their wives and children shown by thecolliers in striking merely for the sake of the union, and this stirred me tocontroversy, 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 bebroken 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 whenthe masters were selling bottom-price coal. I replied, “That isn’tit. The masters don’t treat them fairly. They have to protectthemselves.”

To which Mr. Gabbitas answered, “Well, I don’t know. I’vebeen in the Four Towns some time, and I must say I don’t think thebalance 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 thisargument!” I thought; but I had no skill in self-extraction, and myirritation crept into my voice. Three little spots of color came into thecheeks and nose of Mr. Gabbitas, but his voice showed nothing of his ruffledtemper.

“You see,” I said, “I’m a socialist. I don’tthink this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else.”

“My dear fellow,” said the Rev. Gabbitas, “I’m asocialist too. Who isn’t. But that doesn’t lead me to classhatred.”

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

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

“Now,” thought I, and stood up, resolutely, but he would notlet me. “No, no, no!” said he. “It’s only for theDorcas money.”

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

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

He greeted her—she took no notice of me—and went to his bureau, andI 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 hisdesk. I could not help seeing what he did.

I was so fretted by my impotence to leave him that at the moment it did notconnect at all with the research of the morning that he was taking out money. Ilistened sullenly to his talk with Miss Ramell, and saw only, as they say inWales, 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 sounreasonable,” complained Miss Ramell. Who could be otherwise in a socialorganization that bordered on insanity?

I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow on theplush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs, pipes, and ash-traysthat 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 beingforced to leap over a bottomless chasm—and alighted upon the sovereignsthat 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 andconducted her into the passage, and for a moment or so I had the fullest senseof proximity to those—it seemed to me there must be ten ortwelve—sovereigns. . . .

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

§ 4

“I must be going,” I said, with a curiously reinforceddesire 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 anevident desire to shift the venue of our talk, he asked, “You never toldme what you thought of Burble’s little book.”

I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry with him. Itoccurred 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 towardhim. He asked what I thought of Burble. I resolved to tell him—ifnecessary with arrogance. Then perhaps he would release me. I did not sit downagain, 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 witha flat hand, and beamed persuasively.

I remained standing. “I didn’t think much of his reasoningpowers,” 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. Idon’t think Christianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender heis. His reasoning’s—Rot.”

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

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

He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a step or twotoward the window and turned. “I suppose you will admit—” hebegan, 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 lookfor them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book museums, the shriveled cheappublications—the publications of the Rationalist Press Association, forexample—on which my arguments were based. Lying in that curious limbowith them, mixed up with them and indistinguishable, are the endless“Replies” of orthodoxy, like the mixed dead in some hard-foughttrench. All those disputes of our fathers, and they were sometimes furiousdisputes, have gone now beyond the range of comprehension. You younger people,I know, read them with impatient perplexity. You cannot understand how sanecreatures could imagine they had joined issue at all in most of thesecontroversies. All the old methods of systematic thinking, the queerabsurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have followed magic numbers and mysticalnumbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin magic of names now into the blackness of theunthinkable. You can no more understand our theological passions than you canunderstand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods onlyby circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because they had beenphotographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from a day’s expeditionbecause he had met three crows. Even I, who have been through it all, recallour controversies now with something near incredulity.

Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the old timeevery one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced, incredible Belief incertain pseudo-concrete statements. I am inclined to say that neither believersnor unbelievers had faith as we understand it—they had insufficientintellectual power. They could not trust unless they had something to see andtouch and say, like their barbarous ancestors who could not make a bargainwithout exchange of tokens. If they no longer worshipped stocks and stones, oreked out their needs with pilgrimages and images, they still held fiercely toaudible 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—fromthe impartial perspective of my three and seventy years—I adjudicate thatif 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. Weinterrupted each other more and more rudely. We invented facts and appealed toauthorities whose names I mispronounced; and, finding Gabbitas shy of thehigher criticism and the Germans, I used the names of Karl Marx and Engels asBible exegetes with no little effect. A silly wrangle! a preposterouswrangle!—you must imagine our talk becoming louder, with a developingquarrelsome note—my mother no doubt hovering on the staircase andlistening in alarm as who should say, “My dear, don’t offend it!Oh, don’t offend it! Mr. Gabbitas enjoys its friendship. Try to thinkwhatever Mr. Gabbitas says”—though we still kept in touch with apretence of mutual deference. The ethical superiority of Christianity to allother religions came to the fore—I know not how. We dealt with the matterin bold, imaginative generalizations, because of the insufficiency of ourhistorical knowledge. I was moved to denounce Christianity as the ethic ofslaves, and declare myself a disciple of a German writer of no little vogue inthose days, named Nietzsche.

For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquainted with the worksof the master. Indeed, all I knew of him had come to me through a two-columnarticle 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 nowhave little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutely ignorant even of thename of Nietzsche, although that writer presented a separate and distinctattitude of attack upon the faith that was in the reverend gentleman’skeeping.

“I’m a disciple of Nietzsche,” said I, with an air ofextensive 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 tryingto carry it off.

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

§ 5

A happy accident relieved Mr. Gabbitas from the embarrassment of thatchallenge, 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 apair 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! Whatcan she want with me?”

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

“I get so many interruptions,” he said, almost grinning. “Youmust 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 youranswer,” I think it was he added, and “quite mistaken;” and Isaw 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 ofthat accursed drawer.

I glanced at it, and then at that old woman who was so absolutely powerful, andinstantly her son and Nettie’s face were flaming in my brain. The Stuartshad, 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 thecurate’s obsequious back, at the old lady’s projected nose andquivering hand, and then with swift, clean movements I had the little draweropen, four sovereigns in my pocket, and the drawer shut again. Then again atthe window—they were still talking.

That was all right. He might not look in that drawer for hours. I glanced athis clock. Twenty minutes still before the Birmingham train. Time to buy a pairof 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 pasthim?

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

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

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

“We could make a provisional list of that sort,” he wassaying, 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. Heturned again to his patroness as though he forgot me on the instant. Perhapsafter all he was not sorry.

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

§ 6

I missed the train.

Partly that was because the curate’s clock was slow, and partly it wasdue to the commercial obstinacy of the shoemaker, who would try on another pairafter I had declared my time was up. I bought the final pair however, gave hima wrong address for the return of the old ones, and only ceased to feel likethe 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 theevent of a prompt pursuit, there would be a great advantage in not taking atrain from Clayton; that, indeed, to have done so would have been an error fromwhich only luck had saved me. As it was, I had already been very indiscreet inmy inquiries about Shaphambury; for once on the scent the clerk could not failto remember me. Now the chances were against his coming into the case. I didnot go into the station therefore at all, I made no demonstration of havingmissed the train, but walked quietly past, down the road, crossed the ironfootbridge, and took the way back circuitously by White’s brickfields andthe allotments to the way over Clayton Crest to Two-Mile Stone, where Icalculated I should have an ample margin for the 6.13 train.

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

I resolved not to go directly to Shaphambury from Birmingham, but to go thenceto Monkshampton, thence to Wyvern, and then come down on Shaphambury from thenorth. That might involve a night at some intermediate stopping-place but itwould effectually conceal me from any but the most persistent pursuit. And thiswas 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 methat I was looking at this world for the last time. If I overtook the fugitivesand succeeded, I should die with them—or hang. I stopped and looked backmore 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 dwarfedand 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 wasveiled and softened by night; now it came out in all its weekday reek, under aclear afternoon sun. That may account a little for its unfamiliarity. Andperhaps, too, there was something in the emotions through which I had beenpassing for a week and more, to intensify my insight, to enable me to piercethe unusual, to question the accepted. But it came to me then, I am sure, forthe first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was the whole of thatjumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks, railway yards, canals,schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, allotment hovels, a vastirregular agglomeration of ugly smoking accidents in which men lived as happyas frogs in a dustbin. Each thing jostled and damaged the other things aboutit, each thing ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnacedefiled the potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers inchurch, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismalhomes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism, with aneffect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked amidst its products, and all itsenergy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing thatstruggles 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 ofdisorder and suffocation here and now as though I had thought it, but indeedthen I only felt it, felt it transitorily as I looked back, and then stood withthe 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 Ishould die in sweet air, under a clean sky.

From distant Swathinglea came a little sound, the minute undulation of a remotecrowd, 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 mymother.

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

Why?

I stopped again dead, with the hill crest rising between me and home. I hadmore 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 youngVerrall 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 somemessage, reassured her at least for a little while. All night she would listenand 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 courseI had taken, to bring pursuit upon me, swift and sure, if pursuit there was tobe. No. My mother must suffer!

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

I reached Birmingham before darkness came, and just caught the last train forMonkshampton, 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 notonly into a country where I had never been before, but out of the commonplacedaylight and the touch and quality of ordinary things, into the strangeunprecedented night that was ruled by the giant meteor of the last days.

There was at that time a curious accentuation of the common alternation ofnight and day. They became separated with a widening difference of value inregard to all mundane affairs. During the day, the comet was an item in thenewspapers, it was jostled by a thousand more living interests, it was asnothing in the skirts of the war storm that was now upon us. It was anastronomical phenomenon, somewhere away over China, millions of miles away inthe deeps. We forgot it. But directly the sun sank one turned ever and againtoward 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 itrose brighter than one had dared to think, always larger and with somewonderful change in its outline, and now with a strange, less luminous, greenerdisk upon it that grew with its growth, the umbra of the earth. It shone alsowith its own light, so that this shadow was not hard or black, but it shonephosphorescently and with a diminishing intensity where the stimulus of thesun’s rays was withdrawn. As it ascended toward the zenith, as the lasttrailing daylight went after the abdicating sun, its greenish whiteillumination banished the realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness overall 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 toMonkshampton, I perceived and was puzzled by a coppery red light that mingledwith all the shadows that were cast by it.

It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities. Everywhere thelocal authorities discontinued street lighting—one could read small printin the glare,—and so at Monkshampton I went about through pale, white,unfamiliar streets, whose electric globes had shadows on the path. Lit windowshere and there burnt ruddy orange, like holes cut in some dream curtain thathung before a furnace. A policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn wovenof moonshine, a green-faced man opened to us, and there I abode the night. Andthe next morning it opened with a mighty clatter, and was a dirty littlebeerhouse that stank of beer, and there was a fat and grimy landlord with redspots 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 bawlingsof two newsvendors and to the noisy yappings of a dog they had raised toemulation. 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 weregiven of this triumph of the old civilization, of the blowing up of this greatiron ship, full of guns and explosives and the most costly and beautifulmachinery of which that time was capable, together with nine hundredable-bodied men, all of them above the average, by a contact mine towed by aGerman submarine. I read myself into a fever of warlike emotions. Not only didI forget the meteor, but for a time I forgot even the purpose that took me onto the railway station, bought my ticket, and was now carrying me onward toShaphambury.

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, thepromise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveled for a space. And at thefirst gray sounds of dawn again, at the shooting of bolts and the noise ofmilk-carts, we forgot, and the dusty habitual day came yawning and stretchingback again. The stains of coal smoke crept across the heavens, and we rose tothe soiled disorderly routine of life.

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

The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded as spectacularmerely. It signified nothing to us. So far as western Europe went, it was onlya small and ignorant section of the lower classes who regarded the comet as aportent of the end of the world. Abroad, where there were peasantries, it wasdifferent, but in England the peasantry had already disappeared. Every oneread. The newspaper, in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germanyrushed to its climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilities of a panic inthis 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 afew score tons. This fact had been shown quite conclusively by the enormousdeflections that had at last swung it round squarely at our world. It hadpassed near three of the smallest asteroids without producing the minutestperceptible deflection in their course; while, on its own part, it haddescribed a course through nearly three degrees. When it struck our earth therewas to be a magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for those who were on the rightside of our planet to see, but beyond that nothing. It was doubtful whether wewere on the right side. The meteor would loom larger and larger in the sky, butwith the umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness out, and at last itwould be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green clouds, with a white brightnessabout the horizon, west and east. Then a pause—a pause of not veryexactly definite duration—and then, no doubt, a great blaze of shootingstars. They might be of some unwonted color because of the unknown element thatline in the green revealed. For a little while the zenith would spout shootingstars. 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, andthere 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 beenbefore. And since this was to happen between one and eleven in the morning ofthe approaching Tuesday—I slept at Monkshampton on Saturdaynight,—it would be only partially visible, if visible at all, on our sideof the earth. Perhaps, if it came late, one would see no more than a shootingstar low down in the sky. All this we had with the utmost assurances ofscience. Still it did not prevent the last nights being the most beautiful andmemorable of human experiences.

The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had ranged Shaphambury invain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleled glory of the nightreturned, to think that under its splendid benediction young Verrall and Nettiemade 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 mypocket 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 withthe star.

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

§ 2

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

So soon as I arrived I made a systematic exploration of Shaphambury. To thisday I retain the clearest memories of the plan I shaped out then, and how myinquiries were incommoded by the overpowering desire of every one to talk ofthe chances of a German raid, before the Channel Fleet got round to us. I sleptat a small public-house in a Shaphambury back street on Sunday night. I did notget on to Shaphambury from Wyvern until two in the afternoon, because of theinfrequency of Sunday trains, and I got no clue whatever until late in theafternoon of Monday. As the little local train bumped into sight of the placeround the curve of a swelling hill, one saw a series of undulating grassyspaces, amidst which a number of conspicuous notice-boards appealed to the eyeand cut up the distant sea horizon. Most of these referred to comestibles or toremedies to follow the comestibles; and they were colored with a view to bememorable rather than beautiful, to “stand out” amidst the gentlegrayish tones of the east coast scenery. The greater number, I may remark, ofthe 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 equanimitythese other articles had destroyed. Wherever one went one was reminded inglaring letters that, after all, man was little better than a worm, thateyeless, earless thing that burrows and lives uncomplainingly amidst nutritiousdirt, “an alimentary canal with the subservient appendagesthereto.” But in addition to such boards there were also the big blackand white boards of various grandiloquently named “estates.” Theindividualistic enterprise of that time had led to the plotting out of nearlyall the country round the seaside towns into roads and building-plots—allbut a small portion of the south and east coast was in this condition, and hadthe promises of those schemes been realized the entire population of the islandmight have been accommodated upon the sea frontiers. Nothing of the sorthappened, of course; the whole of this uglification of the coast-line was doneto stimulate a little foolish gambling in plots, and one saw everywhereagents’ boards in every state of freshness and decay, ill-madeexploitation roads overgrown with grass, and here and there, at a corner, alabel, “Trafalgar Avenue,” or “Sea View Road.” Here andthere, too, some small investor, some shopman with “savings,” haddelivered his soul to the local builders and built himself a house, and thereit stood, ill-designed, mean-looking, isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fencedplot, athwart which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst a bleakdesolation of enterprise. Then presently our railway crossed a high road, and arow of mean yellow brick houses—workmen’s cottages, and the filthyblack sheds that made the “allotments” of that time a universaleyesore, marked our approach to the more central areas of—I quote thelocal guidebook—“one of the most delightful resorts in the EastAnglian poppy-land.” Then more mean houses, the gaunt ungainliness of theelectric force station—it had a huge chimney, because no one understoodhow to make combustion of coal complete—and then we were in the railwaystation, and barely three-quarters of a mile from the center of this haunt ofhealth and pleasure.

I inspected the town thoroughly before I made my inquiries. The road beganbadly with a row of cheap, pretentious, insolvent-looking shops, apublic-house, and a cab-stand, but, after an interval of little red villas thatwere partly hidden amidst shrubbery gardens, broke into a confusedly bright butnot 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 ofstuccoed lodging-houses, that seemed a finer and cleaner version of my nativesquare, I came to a garden of asphalt and euonymus—the Sea Front. I satdown on a cast-iron seat, and surveyed first of all the broad stretches ofmuddy, sandy beach, with its queer wheeled bathing machines, painted with theadvertisements of somebody’s pills—and then at the house frontsthat stared out upon these visceral counsels. Boarding-houses, private hotels,and lodging-houses in terraces clustered closely right and left of me, and thencame to an end; in one direction scaffolding marked a building enterprise inprogress, in the other, after a waste interval, rose a monstrous bulging redshape, a huge hotel, that dwarfed all other things. Northward were low palecliffs with white denticulations of tents, where the local volunteers, allunder arms, lay encamped, and southward, a spreading waste of sandy dunes, withoccasional 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 heldpeople indoors.

A queer world! thought I even then—to you now it must seem impossiblyqueer,—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 overthat—at first I was a little tired and indolent—and then presentlyI had a flow of ideas.

My solution was fairly ingenious. I invented the following story. I happened tobe taking a holiday in Shaphambury, and I was making use of the opportunity toseek the owner of a valuable feather boa, which had been left behind in thehotel of my uncle at Wyvern by a young lady, traveling with a younggentleman—no doubt a youthful married couple. They had reachedShaphambury somewhen on Thursday. I went over the story many times, and gave myimaginary uncle and his hotel plausible names. At any rate this yarn wouldserve 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 Iturned toward the big hotel. Its gorgeous magnificence seemed to my inexpertjudgment to indicate the very place a rich young man of good family wouldselect.

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

“I want to find a lady and gentleman who came to Shaphambury onTuesday,” 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. Theymight have lunched there, but they had had no room. But I went out—dooropened again for me obsequiously—in a state of social discomfiture, anddid not attack any other establishment that afternoon.

My resolution had come to a sort of ebb. More people were promenading, andtheir Sunday smartness abashed me. I forgot my purpose in an acute sense ofmyself. I felt that the bulge of my pocket caused by the revolver wasconspicuous, 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 reactionprevailed with me all that afternoon. In the evening, about sundown, I went tothe station and asked questions of the outporters there. But outporters, Ifound, were a class of men who remembered luggage rather than people, and I hadno sort of idea what luggage young Verrall and Nettie were likely to have withthem.

Then I fell into conversation with a salacious wooden-legged old man with asilver 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 theparticular young couple I sought. He reminded me in the most disagreeable wayof the sensuous aspects of life, and I was not sorry when presently a gunboatappeared in the offing signalling the coastguard and the camp, and cut shorthis observations upon holidays, beaches, and morals.

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

I had a queer illusion that night, that Nettie and her lover were close athand, that suddenly I should come on them. I have already told how I wentthrough the dusk seeking them in every couple that drew near. And I droppedasleep 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 quicksuccession on a perplexing multitude of clues. After failing to find any youngcouple that corresponded to young Verrall and Nettie, I presently discovered anunsatisfactory quartette of couples.

Any of these four couples might have been the one I sought; with regard to noneof them was there conviction. They had all arrived either on Wednesday orThursday. Two couples were still in occupation of their rooms, but neither ofthese were at home. Late in the afternoon I reduced my list by eliminating ayoung man in drab, with side whiskers and long cuffs, accompanied by a lady, ofthirty or more, of consciously ladylike type. I was disgusted at the sight ofthem; the other two young people had gone for a long walk, and though I watchedtheir boarding-house until the fiery cloud shone out above, sharing andmingling in an unusually splendid sunset, I missed them. Then I discovered themdining at a separate table in the bow window, with red-shaded candles betweenthem, peering out ever and again at this splendor that was neither night norday. The girl in her pink evening dress looked very light and pretty tome—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 herears was full of subtle delights; but she was not Nettie, and the happy manwith her was that odd degenerate type our old aristocracy produced with suchodd frequency, chinless, large bony nose, small fair head, languid expression,and a neck that had demanded and received a veritable sleeve of collar. I stoodoutside in the meteor’s livid light, hating them and cursing them forhaving delayed me so long. I stood until it was evident they remarked me, ablack shape of envy, silhouetted against the glare.

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

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

One couple had gone to London; the other had gone to the Bungalow village atBone 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 thisblasted Milky Way gone green up there, we might see.”

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t answer. Only by making it clear I would distract him until hetold me what I wanted to know could I get him to turn from his absorbedcontemplation of that phantom dance between the sea rim and the shine. Indeed Igripped 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 setoff towards the bungalow village.

I found a policeman, standing star-gazing, a little way beyond the end of theparade, 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 thedark masses of Shaphambury behind me, and pushed out into the dim pallor ofthat 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, theone progressive thing is my memory of a growing fatigue. The sea was for themost part smooth and shining like a mirror, a great expanse of reflectingsilver, barred by slow broad undulations, but at one time a little breezebreathed like a faint sigh and ruffled their long bodies into faint scalyripples that never completely died out again. The way was sometimes sandy,thick with silvery colorless sand, and sometimes chalky and lumpy, with lumpsthat had shining facets; a black scrub was scattered, sometimes in thickets,sometimes in single bunches, among the somnolent hummocks of sand. At one placecame grass, and ghostly great sheep looming up among the gray. After a timeblack pinewoods intervened, and made sustained darknesses along the road, woodsthat frayed out at the edges to weirdly warped and stunted trees. Then isolatedpine 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 beenthinking 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 andbarrel as I turned the weapon in my hand.

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

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

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

At last I grew weary. I came to piled heaps of decaying seaweed and cart tracksrunning this way and that, and then I had missed the road and was stumblingamong sand hummocks quite close to the sea. I came out on the edge of the dimlyglittering sandy beach, and something phosphorescent drew me to thewater’s edge. I bent down and peered at the little luminous specks thatfloated in the ripples.

Presently with a sigh I stood erect, and contemplated the lonely peace of thatlast wonderful night. The meteor had now trailed its shining nets across thewhole space of the sky and was beginning to set; in the east the blue wascoming 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, oneweak elusive star could just be seen, hovering on the verge of the invisible.

How beautiful it was! how still and beautiful! Peace! peace!—the peacethat 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 Idid not want to kill.

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

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

And presently, there in the east, would come again the red discoloring curtainover these mysteries, the finite world again, the gray and growing harshcertainties of dawn. My resolve I knew would take up with me again. This was arest for me, an interlude, but to-morrow I should be William Leadford oncemore, 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 themother 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 endthe matter now and let these others go.

To wade out into the sea, into this warm lapping that mingled the natures ofwater and light, to stand there breast-high, to thrust my revolver barrel intomy 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 bushesbegan. I sat down amidst a black cluster of shrubs, and rested, chin on hand. Idrew 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 fellasleep, 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 bandof clear sky was no wider than before. These people must have come into sightas I fell asleep, and awakened me almost at once. They waded breast-deep in thewater, emerging, coming shoreward, a woman, with her hair coiled about herhead, and in pursuit of her a man, graceful figures of black and silver, with abright green surge flowing off from them, a pattering of flashing waveletsabout them. He smote the water and splashed it toward her, she retaliated, andthen they were knee-deep, and then for an instant their feet broke the longsilver 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 thebeach obliquely toward me, running like the wind, and passed me, vanishedamidst the black distorted bushes, and was gone—she and her pursuer, in amoment, 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 andclenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening, against the sky. . . .

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

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

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

§ 5

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

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

This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of the reaction ofartistic-minded and carelessly living people against the costly anduncomfortable social stiffness of the more formal seaside resorts of that time.It was, you must understand, the custom of the steam-railway companies to selltheir carriages after they had been obsolete for a sufficient length of years,and some genius had hit upon the possibility of turning these into littlehabitable cabins for the summer holiday. The thing had become a fashion with acertain Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and these littleimprovised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandas and supplementaryleantos added to their accommodation, made the brightest contrast conceivableto the dull rigidities of the decorous resorts. Of course there were manydiscomforts in such camping that had to be faced cheerfully, and so this broadsandy beach was sacred to high spirits and the young. Art muslin and banjoes,Chinese lanterns and frying, are leading “notes,” I find, in theimpression of those who once knew such places well. But so far as I wasconcerned this odd settlement of pleasure-squatters was a mystery as well as asurprise, enhanced rather than mitigated by an imaginative suggestion or so Ihad received from the wooden-legged man at Shaphambury. I saw the thing as nogathering of light hearts and gay idleness, but grimly—after the mannerof poor men poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy. To thepoor man, to the grimy workers, beauty and cleanness were absolutely denied;out of a life of greasy dirt, of muddied desires, they watched their happierfellows with a bitter envy and foul, tormenting suspicions. Fancy a world inwhich the common people held love to be a sort of beastliness, own sister tobeing drunk! . . .

There was in the old time always something cruel at the bottom of this businessof sexual love. At least that is the impression I have brought with me acrossthe gulf of the great Change. To succeed in love seemed such triumph as noother 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 throughthese emotions of mine and become now the whole strand of these emotions. Ibelieved, and I think I was right in believing, that the love of all truelovers was a sort of defiance then, that they closed a system in eachother’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 thethreat of a watchful fierceness. A sword, a sharp sword, the keenest edge inlife, lay among their roses.

Whatever may be true of this for others, for me and my imagination, at anyrate, it was altogether true. I was never for dalliance, I was never a jestinglover. I wanted fiercely; I made love impatiently. Perhaps I had writtenirrelevant love-letters for that very reason; because with this stark theme Icould not play. . .

The thought of Nettie’s shining form, of her shrinking bold abandon toher easy conqueror, gave me now a body of rage that was nearly too strong formy heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merely physical being. I camedown among the pale sand-heaps slowly toward that queer village of carelesssensuality, and now within my puny body I was coldly sharpset for pain anddeath, 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 answeredto my rap? But suppose some servant intervened!

Should I wait where I was—perhaps until morning—watching? Andmeanwhile———

All the nearer bungalows were very still now. If I walked softly to them, fromopen 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 tothe door? It was bright enough for her to recognize me clearly at a distance ofmany paces.

The difficulty to my mind lay in this, that if I involved other people byquestions, I might at last confront my betrayers with these others close aboutme, ready to snatch my weapon and seize my hands. Besides, what names mightthey 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 greatironclad not four miles out, steaming fast across the dappled silver, and fromits funnels sparks, intensely red, poured out into the night. As I turned, camethe hot flash of its guns, firing seaward, and answering this, red flashes anda streaming smoke in the line between sea and sky. So I remembered it, and Iremember myself staring at it—in a state of stupid arrest. It was anirrelevance. What had these things to do with me?

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

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

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

I became aware of the voices of people calling to one another in the village. Awhite-robed, hooded figure, some man in a bathing wrap, absurdly suggestive ofan Arab in his burnous, came out from one of the nearer bungalows, and stoodclear 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 theidea of approaching the three bungalows inconspicuously from the flank. Thisfight at sea might serve my purpose—except for that, it had no interestfor me at all. Boom! boom! The huge voluminous concussions rushed past me, beatat 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 tojoin the first. His arm pointed seaward, and his voice, a full tenor, rose inexplanation. 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 ofargument. I went on slowly in the circuit I had marked out, watching thesepeople as I went.

They shouted together with such a common intensity of direction that I haltedand looked seaward. I saw the tall fountain flung by a shot that had justmissed 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 headlandwhence 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 andcried, “Hit!”

Let me see! Of course, I had to go round beyond the bungalows, and then come uptowards 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 voiceanswered from within. What he said I did not catch, but suddenly I heard Nettiecalling 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 mydirection, and so I walked now straight toward the darkness that held Nettieand 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. Theyradiated from a point halfway between the western horizon and the zenith, andwithin the shining clouds of the meteor a streaming movement had begun, so thatit seemed to be pouring both westwardly and back toward the east, with acrackling sound, as though the whole heaven was stippled over with phantompistol-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 thisunmeaning foolishness of the sea.

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

To glance up at that streaky, stirring light scum of the sky made one’shead swim. I stood for a moment dazed, and more than a little giddy. I had acurious instant of purely speculative thought. Suppose, after all, the fanaticswere right, and the world was coming to an end! What a score that wouldbe for Parload!

Then it came into my head that all these things were happening to consecrate myrevenge! The war below, the heavens above, were the thunderous garment of mydeed. I heard Nettie’s voice cry out not fifty yards away, and my passionsurged again. I was to return to her amid these terrors bearing unanticipateddeath. I was to possess her, with a bullet, amidst thunderings and fear. At thethought I lifted up my voice to a shout that went unheard, and advanced nowrecklessly, 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 andthe fighting ships remoter. Some one darted out from the bungalow, with aninterrupted question, and stopped, suddenly aware of me. It was Nettie, withsome coquettish dark wrap about her, and the green glare shining on her sweetface and white throat. I could see her expression, stricken with dismay andterror, at my advance, as though something had seized her by the heart and heldher 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 wantto shoot her then. Indeed I did not want to shoot her then! Bang! and I hadfired 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 preposterousinterruption. His face was full of astonishment and terror. He rushed across mypath with arms extended and open hands, as one might try to stop a runawayhorse. He shouted some nonsense. He seemed to want to dissuade me, as thoughdissuasion had anything to do with it now.

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

By an enormous effort I resisted a mechanical impulse to shoot through his fatbody. 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 tothe left, and so found two others irresolutely in my way. I fired a third shotin the air, just over their heads, and ran at them. They hastened left andright; I pulled up and faced about within a yard of a foxy-faced young mancoming sideways, who seemed about to grapple me. At my resolute halt he fellback a pace, ducked, and threw up a defensive arm, and then I perceived thecourse was clear, and ahead of me, young Verrall and Nettie—he washolding her arm to help her—running away. “Of course!” saidI.

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. “Thesepeople!” I said, dismissing all these interferences. . . . “Ayard,” I panted, speaking aloud to myself, “a yard! Till then, takecare, you mustn’t—mustn’t shoot again.”

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

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

She staggered. He gripped her arm, and dragged her forward. They doubled to theleft. We were off the road again and on turf. It felt like turf. I tripped andfell at a ditch that was somehow full of smoke, and was up again, but now theywere 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 Istumbled. There was something about my feet that impeded me, tall grass orheather, but I could not see what it was, only this smoke that eddied about myknees. There was a noise and spinning in my brain, a vain resistance to a darkgreen curtain that was falling, falling, falling, fold upon fold. Everythinggrew darker and darker.

I made one last frantic effort, and raised my revolver, fired my penultimateshot at a venture, and fell headlong to the ground. And behold! the greencurtain 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 comfortablylooking at a line of extraordinarily scarlet poppies that glowed against aglowing sky. It was the sky of a magnificent sunrise, and an archipelago ofgold-beached purple islands floated in a sea of golden green. The poppies too,swan-necked buds, blazing corollas, translucent stout seed-vessels, stoutlyupheld, had a luminous quality, seemed wrought only from some more solid kindof light.

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

A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished again in mymind. 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 waslying 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 delicatelittle convolvulus that twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel that lacedthe ground below.

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

I could not remember.

It perplexed me that somehow my body felt strange to me. It wasunfamiliar—I could not tell how—and the barley, and the beautifulweeds, and the slowly developing glory of the dawn behind; all those thingspartook of the same unfamiliarity. I felt as though I was a thing in some veryluminous painted window, as though this dawn broke through me. I felt I waspart 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; butwith a quality of painted unreality, transfigured as a beggar might have beenby Botticelli. I looked for a time steadfastly at a beautiful pearlsleeve-link.

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

Of course! My history—its rough outline rather than the immediatepast—began to shape itself in my memory, very small, very bright andinaccessible, like a thing watched through a microscope. Clayton andSwathinglea returned to my mind; the slums and darkness, Dureresque, minute andin 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 withmy futile shot into the growing darkness of the End. The thought of that shotawoke 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, thetormented brains, the straining, striving things of hope and pain, who hadfound their peace at last beneath the pouring mist and suffocation of thecomet. Because certainly that world was over and done. They were all so weakand 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 andconfident peace. I had made an end of the fever called living. I was dead, andit was all right, and these———?

I felt an inconsistency.

These, then, must be the barley fields of God!—the still and silentbarley 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 manysurprises in store for me.

How still everything was! Peace! The peace that passeth understanding. Afterall 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 soundsof 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, Iknew; 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 thebarley. . . .

Blinded, I made a step. My foot struck something hard, and I looked down todiscover 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 mysoul. Dawn, and no birds singing!

How beautiful was the world! How beautiful, but how still! I walked slowlythrough the barley towards a line of elder bushes, wayfaring tree and bramblethat 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 thatthis did not leap aside from my footfalls, and I stooped and picked it up. Itsbody was limp like life, but it made no struggle, the brightness of its eye wasveiled, it did not move in my hand.

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

And then at my next movement something squealed sharply. I turned about, but Icould not see it, only I saw a little stir in a rut and heard the diminishingrustle of the unseen creature’s flight. And at that I turned to my toadagain, and its eye moved and it stirred. And presently, with infirm andhesitating 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 abrown and crimson butterfly perched upon a cornflower. I thought at first itwas the breeze that stirred it, and then I saw its wings were quivering. Andeven as I watched it, it started into life, and spread itself, and flutteredinto the air.

I watched it fly, a turn this way, a turn that, until suddenly it seemed tovanish. 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 andstir. . . .

I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of these drugged, feeblyawakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a very glorioushedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and interlaced like splendidmusic. It was rich with lupin, honeysuckle, campions, and ragged robin; bedstraw, hops, and wild clematis twined and hung among its branches, and allalong its ditch border the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces, andchorused in lines and masses. Never had I seen such a symphony of note-likeflowers and tendrils and leaves. And suddenly in its depths, I heard a chirrupand the whirr of startled wings.

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

“Tweedle-Tweezle,” a lark had shot the stillness with his shiningthread 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 togive the intense freshness of that dawn. For a time I was altogether taken upwith the beautiful details of being, as regardless of my old life of jealouspassion and impatient sorrow as though I was Adam new made. I could tell younow with infinite particularity of the shut flowers that opened as I looked, oftendrils and grass blades, of a blue-tit I picked up very tenderly—neverbefore had I remarked the great delicacy of feathers—that presentlydisclosed its bright black eye and judged me, and perched, swaying fearlessly,upon my finger, and spread unhurried wings and flew away, and of a greatebullition of tadpoles in the ditch; like all the things that lived beneath thewater, they had passed unaltered through the Change. Amid such incidents, Ilived those first great moments, losing for a time in the wonder of each littlepart the mighty wonder of the whole.

A little path ran between hedge and barley, and along this, leisurely andcontent and glad, looking at this beautiful thing and that, moving a step andstopping, 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 thesewords, “Swindells’ G 90 Pills.”

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

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

I read the label over and over again, and joined it to the fact that I stillwore my former clothes, and that my revolver had been lying at my feet. Oneconclusion stared out at me. This was no new planet, no glorious hereafter suchas I had supposed. This beautiful wonderland was the world, the same old worldof 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, aglowing certitude of health and happiness. It might be the old world, but thedust and fury of the old life was certainly done. At least I had no doubt ofthat.

I recalled the last phases of my former life, that darkling climax of pursuitand 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 wasassured.

But afterward? . . .

And now?

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

No doubt Swindells has got his deserts.

My mind ran for a time on Swindells, on the imbecile pushfulness of thatextinct creature, dealing in rubbish, covering the country-side with lies inorder to get—what had he sought?—a silly, ugly, great house, atemper-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 thesethings without bitterness. In the former days I had seen wickedness, I had seentragedy, but now I saw only the extraordinary foolishness of the old life. Theludicrous side of human wealth and importance turned itself upon me, a shiningnovelty, poured down upon me like the sunrise, and engulfed me in laughter.Swindells! Swindells, damned! My vision of Judgment became a delightfulburlesque. I saw the chuckling Angel sayer with his face veiled, and thecorporeal presence of Swindells upheld amidst the laughter of the spheres.“Here’s a thing, and a very pretty thing, and what’s to bedone with this very pretty thing?” I saw a soul being drawn from arotund, substantial-looking body like a whelk from its shell. . . .

I laughed loudly and long. And behold! even as I laughed the keen point ofthings 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 ofthe 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 suntouched it, the changing nitrogen of our atmosphere did not pass into itspermanent phase, and the sleepers lay as they had fallen. In its intermediatestate the air hung inert, incapable of producing either revival orstupefaction, no longer green, but not yet changed to the gas that now lives inus. . . .

To every one, I think, came some parallel to the mental states I have alreadysought to describe—a wonder, an impression of joyful novelty. There wasalso very commonly a certain confusion of the intelligence, a difficulty inself-recognition. I remember clearly as I sat on my stile that presently I hadthe clearest doubts of my own identity and fell into the oddest metaphysicalquestionings. “If this be I,” I said, “then how is it I am nolonger madly seeking Nettie? Nettie is now the remotest thing—and all mywrongs. Why have I suddenly passed out of all that passion? Why does not thethought of Verrall quicken my pulses?” . . .

I was only one of many millions who that morning had the same doubts. I supposeone knows one’s self for one’s self when one returns from sleep orinsensibility by the familiarity of one’s bodily sensations, and thatmorning all our most intimate bodily sensations were changed. The intimatechemical processes of life were changed, its nervous metaboly. For thefluctuating, uncertain, passion-darkened thought and feeling of the old timecame steady, full-bodied, wholesome processes. Touch was different, sight wasdifferent, sound and all the senses were subtler; had it not been that ourthought was steadier and fuller, I believe great multitudes of men would havegone mad. But, as it was, we understood. The dominant impression I would conveyin this account of the Change is one of enormous release, of a vast substantialexaltation. There was an effect, as it were, of light-headedness that was alsoclear-headedness, and the alteration in one’s bodily sensations, insteadof producing the mental obfuscation, the loss of identity that was a commonmental trouble under former conditions, gave simply a new detachment from thetumid passions and entanglements of the personal life.

In this story of my bitter, restricted youth that I have been telling you, Ihave 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 anhour 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 intotheir lungs—a deep long breath, and the past fell from them; they couldforgive, they could disregard, they could attempt. . . . And it was no newthing, no miracle that sets aside the former order of the world. It was achange in material conditions, a change in the atmosphere, that at one boundhad released them. Some of them it had released to death. . . . Indeed, manhimself had changed not at all. We knew before the Change, the meanest knew, byglowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories and music and beautifulthings, 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 theair, its poverty in all the nobler elements which made such moments rare andremarkable—all that has changed. The air was changed, and the Spirit ofMan 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 thetears. Only after some time did I come upon another man. Until I heard hisvoice 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 ofthe individual pit in which my shy egotism had lurked, I had overflowed to allhumanity, I had seemed to be all humanity; I had laughed at Swindells as Icould have laughed at myself, and this shout that came to me seemed like thecoming of an unexpected thought in my own mind. But when it was repeated Ianswered.

“I am hurt,” said the voice, and I descended into the laneforthwith, and so came upon Melmount sitting near the ditch with his back tome.

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

“What’s wrong?” said I.

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

I walked round him and stood looking at his face. I perceived he had his gaiterand sock and boot off, the motor gauntlets had been cast aside, and he waskneading 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,” hesaid, without looking up. . . . “But it doesn’t affect myankle.”

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,” hesaid.

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

“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 unexpectedpleasantness, and an interest was coming into his eyes. “I’ve beena little preoccupied with my own internal sensations. I remark an extraordinarybrightness about things. Is that it?”

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

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

“And I.”

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

“It was dark,” I said, “and a sort of green gas came out ofnothing 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 rushingalong a road in a motor-car, very much excited and preoccupied. I gotdown——” He held out a triumphant finger.“Ironclads!”

“Now I’ve got it! We’d strung our fleet from here toTexel. We’d got right across them and the Elbe mined. We’d lost theLord Warden. By Jove, yes. The Lord Warden! A battleship thatcost two million pounds—and that fool Rigby said it didn’t matter!Eleven hundred men went down. . . . I remember now. We were sweeping up theNorth 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, wasthat a dream? No! I told a lot of people as much—a meeting wasit?—to reassure them. They were warlike but extremely frightened. Queerpeople—paunchy and bald like gnomes, most of them. Where? Of course! Wehad it all over—a big dinner—oysters!—Colchester. I’dbeen there, just to show all this raid scare was nonsense. And I was comingback here. . . . But it doesn’t seem as though that was—recent. Isuppose it was. Yes, of course!—it was. I got out of my car at the bottomof the rise with the idea of walking along the cliff path, because every onesaid one of their battleships was being chased along the shore. That’sclear! I heard their guns———”

He reflected. “Queer I should have forgotten! Did you hear anyguns?”

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. “Evennow,” he said, “it’s odd, but the whole of that seems like asilly dream. Do you think there was a Lord Warden? Do you reallybelieve we sank all that machinery—for fun? It was a dream. Andyet—it happened.”

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

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

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

“You are in pain?”

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

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

It is a curious thing, that I cannot now recall any ideas whatever that I hadbefore the Change about the personalities of statesmen, but I doubt if ever inthose days I thought of them at all as tangible individual human beings,conceivably of some intellectual complexity. I believe that my impression was astraightforward blend of caricature and newspaper leader. I certainly had norespect for them. And now without servility or any insincerity whatever, as ifit were a first-fruit of the Change, I found myself in the presence of a humanbeing towards whom I perceived myself inferior and subordinate, before whom Istood without servility or any insincerity whatever, in an attitude of respectand attention. My inflamed, my rancid egotism—or was it after all onlythe 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 damnedmischievous 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 adoptthis incredible note of frankness, and that it should abate nothing from myrespect for him.

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

§ 5

That memory stands out against the dark past of the world with extraordinaryclearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was full of the calling andpiping and singing of birds. I have a curious persuasion too that there was adistant happy clamor of pealing bells, but that I am half convinced is amistake. Nevertheless, there was something in the fresh bite of things, in thedewy newness of sensation that set bells rejoicing in one’s brain. Andthat big, fair, pensive man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his clumsypose, 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, astranger, without reservations, carelessly, as men now speak to men. Beforethose days, not only did we think badly, but what we thought, a thousandshort-sighted considerations, dignity, objective discipline, discretion, ahundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of soul, made us muffle before we told itto our fellow-men.

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

I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out image after imageto my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragments of speech. If I had aprecise 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 blurredgeneral impressions. Throughout I have to make up again his half-forgottensentences and speeches, and be content with giving you the general effect. ButI 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 anightmare, you couldn’t do anything to escape from it—every one wasdriven!”

His sense of indiscretion was gone.

He opened the war out to me—as every one sees it now. Only that morningit was astonishing. He sat there on the ground, absurdly forgetful of his bareand swollen foot, treating me as the humblest accessory and as altogether anequal, talking out to himself the great obsessions of his mind. “We couldhave prevented it! Any of us who chose to speak out could have prevented it. Alittle decent frankness. What was there to prevent us being frank with oneanother? Their emperor—his position was a pile of ridiculous assumptions,no doubt, but at bottom—he was a sane man.” He touched off theemperor 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 halfguilty and wholly resentful. “Their damned little buttoned-upprofessors!” he cried, incidentally. “Were there ever such men? Andours! Some of us might have taken a firmer line. . . . If a lot of us had takena 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 isa fact that for the best part of the morning of the Change I forgot Nettie andVerrall as completely as though they were no more than characters in some novelthat I had put aside to finish at my leisure, in order that I might talk tothis man.

“Eh, well,” he said, waking startlingly from his thoughts.“Here we are awakened! The thing can’t go on now; all this mustend. How it ever began———! My dear boy, how did all thosethings ever begin? I feel like a new Adam. . . . Do you think this hashappened—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 himas far as his bungalow. There seemed nothing strange to either of us that heshould requisition my services or that I should cheerfully obey. I helped himbandage his ankle, and we set out, I his crutch, the two of us making up a sortof 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 thelane. We went down to the beach margin and along the pallid wave-smoothedsands, and we got along by making a swaying, hopping, tripod dance forwarduntil 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 withoutexquisite pain. So that it took us nearly two hours to get to the house, and itwould have taken longer if his butler-valet had not come out to assist me. Theyhad found motor-car and chauffeur smashed and still at the bend of the roadnear the house, and had been on that side looking for Melmount, or they wouldhave seen us before.

For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalk boulder, nowon a timber groin, and talking one to the other, with the frankness proper tothe intercourse of men of good intent, without reservations or aggressions, inthe common, open fashion of contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then,nevertheless, was the rarest and strangest thing in the world. He for the mostpart talked, but at some shape of a question I told him—as plainly as Icould tell of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible tome—of my murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how the greenvapors overcame me. He watched me with grave eyes and nodded understandingly,and afterwards he asked me brief penetrating questions about my education, myupbringing, 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 havebeen!” and said no more until we had made another of our tripod strugglesalong the beach. At first I did not see the connection of my story with thatself-accusation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love of brothers so plainbetween us it needed not a word. Our souls went out to one another in starkgood faith; never before had I had anything but a guarded watchfulness for anyfellow-man. Still I see him, upon that wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, Isee him leaning against the shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at thepoor drowned sailor whose body we presently found. For we found a newly drownedman who had just chanced to miss this great dawn in which we rejoiced. We foundhim lying in a pool of water, among brown weeds in the dark shadow of thetimberings. You must not overrate the horrors of the former days; in those daysit 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 Germanbattleship that—had we but known it—lay not four miles away alongthe coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn and battered massof machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and holding in its intersticesnine hundred drowned brave men, all strong and skilful, all once capable ofdoing fine things. . . .

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

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

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

But most I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting upon a greatchalk boulder with the sunlight on his big, perspiration-dewed face. He madehis resolves. “We must end war,” he said, in that full whisper ofhis; “it is stupidity. With so many people able to read andthink—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, toodull and sleepy and too base toward each other for any one to get up and openthe window. What haven’t we been at?”

A great powerful figure he sits there still in my memory, perplexed andastonished at himself and all things. “We must change all this,” herepeated, and threw out his broad hands in a powerful gesture against the seaand sky. “We have done so weakly—Heaven alone knows why!” Ican 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 inhis clumsiness and needless heat of the unawakened powers of the former time. Iremember it as an integral part of that picture that far away across the sandystretches one of those white estate boards I have described, stuck up a littleaskew 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 dawnedupon you to imagine the pettiness—the pettiness!—of every soulconcerned in a declaration of war?” he asked. He went on, as thoughspeech was necessary to make it credible, to describe Laycock, who first gavethe horror words at the cabinet council, “an undersized Oxford prig witha tenoring voice and a garbage of Greek—the sort of little fool who isbrought up on the admiration of his elder sisters. . . .

“All the time almost,” he said, “I was watchinghim—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 nothingto prevent it all! The damned little imbecile was up to his neck in the dramaof the thing, he liked to trumpet it out, he goggled round at us. ‘Thenit is war!’ he said. Richover shrugged his shoulders. I made some slightprotest and gave in. . . . Afterward I dreamt of him.

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

“And it’s fools like that lead to things like this!” Hejerked 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 myshoulder but making no further attempt to arise, “I’m going to putan end to war—to any sort of war! And all these things that must end. Theworld is beautiful, life is great and splendid, we had only to lift up our eyesand see. Think of the glories through which we have been driving, like a herdof swine in a garden place. The color in life—the sounds—theshapes! We have had our jealousies, our quarrels, our ticklish rights, ourinvincible prejudices, our vulgar enterprise and sluggish timidities, we havechattered and pecked one another and fouled the world—like daws in thetemple, like unclean birds in the holy place of God. All my life has beenfoolishness and pettiness, gross pleasures and mean discretions—all. I ama 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 poorlad there—amidst the squalor of my sins! No more of this! No more ofthis!—whether the whole world has changed or no, matters nothing. Wetwo 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 myshoulder 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 ofinsensibility; in an hour, at the touch of this new gas in the comet, theshiver of catalytic change had passed about the globe. They say it was thenitrogen of the air, the old azote, that in the twinkling of an eye waschanged out of itself, and in an hour or so became a respirable gas, differingindeed from oxygen, but helping and sustaining its action, a bath of strengthand healing for nerve and brain. I do not know the precise changes thatoccurred, nor the names our chemists give them, my work has carried me awayfrom such things, only this I know—I and all men were renewed.

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

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

Everywhere on earth that day, in the ears of every one who breathed, there hadbeen the same humming in the air, the same rush of green vapors, thecrepitation, the streaming down of shooting stars. The Hindoo had stayed hismorning’s work in the fields to stare and marvel and fall, theblue-clothed Chinaman fell head foremost athwart his midday bowl of rice, theJapanese merchant came out from some chaffering in his office amazed andpresently lay there before his door, the evening gazers by the Golden Gateswere overtaken as they waited for the rising of the great star. This hadhappened in every city of the world, in every lonely valley, in every home andhouse and shelter and every open place. On the high seas, the crowdingsteamship passengers, eager for any wonder, gaped and marveled, and weresuddenly terror-stricken, and struggled for the gangways and were overcome, thecaptain staggered on the bridge and fell, the stoker fell headlong among hiscoals, the engines throbbed upon their way untended, the fishing craft drove bywithout a hail, with swaying rudder, heeling and dipping. . . .

The great voice of material Fate cried Halt! And in the midst of the play theactors staggered, dropped, and were still. The figure runs from my pen. In NewYork that very thing occurred. Most of the theatrical audiences dispersed, butin two crowded houses the company, fearing a panic, went on playing amidst thegloom, and the people, trained by many a previous disaster, stuck to theirseats. There they sat, the back rows only moving a little, and there, indisciplined lines, they drooped and failed, nodded, and fell forward or sliddown upon the floor. I am told by Parload—though indeed I know nothing ofthe reasoning on which his confidence rests—-that within an hour of thegreat moment of impact the first green modification of nitrogen had dissolvedand passed away, leaving the air as translucent as ever. The rest of thatwonderful interlude was clear, had any had eyes to see its clearness. In Londonit was night, but in New York, for example, people were in the full bustle ofthe evening’s enjoyment, in Chicago they were sitting down to dinner, thewhole world was abroad. The moonlight must have illuminated streets and squareslittered with crumpled figures, through which such electric cars as had noautomatic brakes had ploughed on their way until they were stopped by thefallen bodies. People lay in their dress clothes, in dining-rooms, restaurants,on staircases, in halls, everywhere just as they had been overcome. Mengambling, men drinking, thieves lurking in hidden places, sinful couples, werecaught, to arise with awakened mind and conscience amidst the disorder of theirsin. America the comet reached in the full tide of evening life, but Britainlay asleep. But as I have told, Britain did not slumber so deeply but that shewas in the full tide of what may have been battle and a great victory. Up anddown the North Sea her warships swept together like a net about their foes. Onland, too, that night was to have decided great issues. The German camps wereunder arms from Redingen to Markirch, their infantry columns were lying inswathes like mown hay, in arrested night march on every track between Longuyonand Thiancourt, and between Avricourt and Donen. The hills beyond Spincourtwere dusted thick with hidden French riflemen; the thin lash of the Frenchskirmishers sprawled out amidst spades and unfinished rifle-pits in coils thatwrapped about the heads of the German columns, thence along the Vosgeswatershed and out across the frontier near Belfort nearly to the Rhine. . . .

The Hungarian, the Italian peasant, yawned and thought the morning dark, andturned over to fall into a dreamless sleep; the Mahometan world spread itscarpet 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-coursesand cricket-fields, and stopped the unloading of shipping and brought men outfrom their afternoon rest to stagger and litter the streets. . . .

§ 2

My thoughts go into the woods and wildernesses and jungles of the world, to thewild life that shared man’s suspension, and I think of a thousand feralacts interrupted and truncated—as it were frozen, like the frozen wordsPantagruel met at sea. Not only men it was that were quieted, all livingcreatures that breathe the air became insensible, impassive things. Motionlessbrutes and birds lay amidst the drooping trees and herbage in the universaltwilight, the tiger sprawled beside his fresh-struck victim, who bled to deathin a dreamless sleep. The very flies came sailing down the air with wingsoutspread; the spider hung crumpled in his loaded net; like some gaily paintedsnowflake the butterfly drifted to earth and grounded, and was still. And as aqueer 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 greatworld-dreaming. The odd fate of the crew of the submarine vessel B 94 hasalways seemed memorable to me. So far as I know, they were the only men alivewho never saw that veil of green drawn across the world. All the while that thestillness held above, they were working into the mouth of the Elbe, past thebooms 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 toguide their fellows from the mother ship floating awash outside. Then in thelong channel beyond the forts they came up at last to mark down their victimsand get air. That must have been before the twilight of dawn, for they tell ofthe brightness of the stars. They were amazed to find themselves not threehundred yards from an ironclad that had run ashore in the mud, and heeled overwith the falling tide. It was afire amidships, but no one heeded that—noone in all that strange clear silence heeded that—and not only thiswrecked vessel, but all the dark ships lying about them, it seemed to theirperplexed and startled minds must be full of dead men!

Theirs I think must have been one of the strangest of all experiences; theywere never insensible; at once, and, I am told, with a sudden catch oflaughter, 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 weknow these men were active and awake for an hour and a half at least before thegeneral awakening came, and when at last the Germans stirred and sat up theyfound these strangers in possession of their battleship, the submarinecarelessly adrift, and the Englishmen, begrimed and weary, but with a sort offurious exultation, still busy, in the bright dawn, rescuing insensible enemiesfrom the sinking conflagration. . . .

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

§ 3

Picture to yourself what happened between the printing and composing of thecopy of the New Paper that lies before me now. It was the firstnewspaper that was printed upon earth after the Great Change. It waspocket-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 Nettieand 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 whiteraiment against a blue-green background of sunlit garden, scrutinizing my faceas I read. . . .

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

The document before me must have helped us through the first awkwardness ofthat 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 thenlarge pieces of the stereo plates replaced subsequently. I do not know enoughof the old methods of printing to know precisely what happened. The thing givesone an impression of large pieces of type having been cut away and replaced byfresh blocks. There is something very rough and ready about it all, and the newportions 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 somethingof the old typography, has suggested to me that the machinery actually in usefor the New Paper was damaged that night, and that on the morning of theChange Banghurst borrowed a neighboring office—perhaps in financialdependence upon him—to print in.

The outer pages belong entirely to the old period, the only parts of the paperthat had undergone alteration are the two middle leaves. Here we found setforth in a curious little four-column oblong of print, WHAT HAS HAPPENED. Thiscut across a column with scare headings beginning, “Great Naval BattleNow in Progress. The Fate of Two Empires in the Balance. Reported Loss of TwoMore———”

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 thisdiscolored first intelligence of the new epoch.

The simple clear statements in the replaced portion of the paper impressed meat the time, I remember, as bald and strange, in that framework of shouting badEnglish. Now they seem like the voice of a sane man amidst a vast fadedviolence. But they witness to the prompt recovery of London from the gas; thenew, swift energy of rebound in that huge population. I am surprised now, as Ireread, to note how much research, experiment, and induction must have beenaccomplished in the day that elapsed before the paper was printed. . . . Butthat is by the way. As I sit and muse over this partly carbonized sheet, thatsame curious remote vision comes again to me that quickened in my mind thatmorning, a vision of those newspaper offices I have already described to yougoing through the crisis.

The catalytic wave must have caught the place in full swing, in its nocturnalhigh fever, indeed in a quite exceptional state of fever, what with the cometand the war, and more particularly with the war. Very probably the Change creptinto the office imperceptibly, amidst the noise and shouting, and the glare ofelectric light that made the night atmosphere in that place; even the greenflashes may have passed unobserved there, the preliminary descending trails ofgreen vapor seemed no more than unseasonable drifting wisps of London fog. (Inthose days London even in summer was not safe against dark fogs.) And then atthe last the Change poured in and overtook them.

If there was any warning at all for them, it must have been a sudden universaltumult in the street, and then a much more universal quiet. They could have hadno other intimation.

There was no time to stop the presses before the main development of greenvapor had overwhelmed every one. It must have folded about them, tumbled themto the earth, masked and stilled them. My imagination is always curiouslystirred by the thought of that, because I suppose it is the first picture Isucceeded in making for myself of what had happened in the towns. It has neverquite lost its strangeness for me that when the Change came, machinery went onworking. I don’t precisely know why that should have seemed so strange tome, but it did, and still to a certain extent does. One is so accustomed, Isuppose, to regard machinery as an extension of human personality that theextent of its autonomy the Change displayed came as a shock to me. The electriclights, for example, hazy green-haloed nebulas, must have gone on burning atleast for a time; amidst the thickening darkness the huge presses must haveroared on, printing, folding, throwing aside copy after copy of that fabricatedbattle report with its quarter column of scare headlines, and all the placemust 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 thatthickening 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 ofresistance to the vapor, and could he have walked amidst it.

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

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

The noises of life were all dying away, but some there were that abatednothing, that sounded triumphantly amidst the universal ebb. To a heedlessworld the church towers tolled out two and then three. Clocks ticked and chimedeverywhere 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, themachinery was still pulsing weakly, when the crumpled, booted heaps of clothbecame 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 NewPaper 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, stoodabout the damaged machinery, marveling and questioning; the editor read hisovernight headlines with incredulous laughter. There was much involuntarylaughter that morning. Outside, the mail men patted the necks and rubbed theknees of their awakening horses. . . .

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

Imagine those bemused, perplexed people, carried on by the inertia of their oldoccupations and doing their best with an enterprise that had suddenly becomealtogether extraordinary and irrational. They worked amidst questionings, andyet light-heartedly. At every stage there must have been interruptions fordiscussion. 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 prosaicperson, a grocer, named Wiggins, and how he passed through the Change. I heardthis man’s story in the post-office at Menton, when, in the afternoon ofthe First Day, I bethought me to telegraph to my mother. The place was also agrocer’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 tobreak the hostile silence of a score of years. The sparkle of the Change was intheir eyes, their slightly flushed cheeks, their more elastic gestures, spokeof 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 youcome to have a shop of your own. It was a sort of stupid bitterness possessedus, and I can’t make out we didn’t see it before in that light. Notso much downright wickedness it wasn’t as stupidity. A stupid jealousy!Think of it!—two human beings within a stone’s throw, who have notspoken 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 thetime.”

I stood affixing the adhesive stamp to my telegram.

“Only the other morning,” he went on to me, “I was cuttingFrench eggs. Selling at a loss to do it. He’d marked down with a greatstaring ticket to ninepence a dozen—I saw it as I went past. Here’smy answer!” He indicated a ticket. “‘Eightpence adozen—same as sold elsewhere for ninepence.’ A whole penny down,bang off! Just a touch above cost—if that—and eventhen———” He leant over the counter to say impressively,“Not the same eggs!”

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

I sent my telegram—the proprietor dispatched it for me, and while he didso I fell exchanging experiences with Mr. Wiggins. He knew no more than I didthen the nature of the change that had come over things. He had been alarmed bythe green flashes, he said, so much so that after watching for a time frombehind his bedroom window blind, he had got up and hastily dressed and made hisfamily get up also, so that they might be ready for the end. He made them puton their Sunday clothes. They all went out into the garden together, theirminds divided between admiration at the gloriousness of the spectacle and agreat and growing awe. They were Dissenters, and very religious people out ofbusiness 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 vaporscame conviction, and they prepared to meet their God. . . .

This man, you must understand, was a common-looking man, in his shirt-sleevesand with an apron about his paunch, and he told his story in an Anglian accentthat sounded mean and clipped to my Staffordshire ears; he told his storywithout a thought of pride, and as it were incidentally, and yet he gave me avision of something heroic.

These people did not run hither and thither as many people did. These foursimple, common people stood beyond their back door in their garden pathwaybetween the gooseberry bushes, with the terrors of their God and His Judgmentsclosing in upon them, swiftly and wonderfully—and there they began tosing. There they stood, father and mother and two daughters, chanting outstoutly, 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’sHope abiding.” . . .

It was the most extraordinary thing in the world to hear this flushed andhappy-eyed man telling that story of his recent death. It did not seem at allpossible 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 ascene 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 ofthings that had happened before the coming of the comet had undergone the sametransfiguring reduction. Other people, too, I have learnt since, had the sameillusion, a sense of enlargement. It seems to me even now that the little darkcreature who had stormed across England in pursuit of Nettie and her lover musthave been about an inch high, that all that previous life of ours had been anill-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 thefalling stars for shooting; there had been rioting in Clayton and all throughSwathinglea all day, and so she got out of bed to look. She had a dim sensethat 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, “andthought of you out in it, I thought there’d be no harm in saying a prayerfor you, dear? I thought you wouldn’t mind that.”

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

Through the meagre curtains and blinds of the flawed refracting window I seethe 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, rushingthrough the emptiness of space. . . .

§ 6

With the dawn that awakening went about the earth. I have told how it came tome, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured cornfields ofShaphambury. It came to every one. Near me, and for the time, clear forgottenby me, Verrall and Nettie woke—woke near one another, each heard beforeall 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 ofBungalow village, awoke; the sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat upin that unwonted freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the garden,with the hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the flowers, and touchedeach other timidly, and thought of Paradise. My mother found herself crouchedagainst the bed, and rose—rose with a glad invincible conviction ofaccepted prayer. . . .

Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the lines of dustypoplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting and sharing coffee with theFrench riflemen, who had hailed them from their carefully hidden pits among thevineyards up the slopes of Beauville. A certain perplexity had come to thesemarksmen, who had dropped asleep tensely ready for the rocket that should wakethe whirr and rattle of their magazines. At the sight and sound of the stir andhuman confusion in the roadway below, it had come to each man individually thathe could not shoot. One conscript, at least, has told his story of hisawakening, 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 grewclearer, he dropped the thing, and stood up with a kind of joyful horror at thecrime escaped, to look more closely at the men he was to have assassinated.“Brave types,” he thought, they looked for such a fate. Thesummoning rocket never flew. Below, the men did not fall into ranks again, butsat by the roadside, or stood in groups talking, discussing with a novelincredulity the ostensible causes of the war. “The Emperor!” saidthey; and “Oh, nonsense! We’re civilized men. Get some one else forthis job! . . . Where’s the coffee?”

The officers held their own horses, and talked to the men frankly, regardlessof discipline. Some Frenchmen out of the rifle-pits came sauntering down thehill. Others stood doubtfully, rifles still in hand. Curious faces scannedthese 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 theruins 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 queerelaborate equipment. The soldiers had awakened one by one, first one and thenanother. I wonder sometimes whether, perhaps, if the two armies had come awakein an instant, the battle, by mere habit and inertia, might not have begun. Butthe men who waked first, sat up, looked about them in astonishment, had time tothink 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 hadhitherto been irresistible, happy, hopeful, unselfishly energetic, rejectedaltogether the supposition that this was merely a change in the blood andmaterial texture of life. They denied the bodies God had given them, as oncethe Upper Nile savages struck out their canine teeth, because these made themlike the beasts. They declared that this was the coming of a spirit, andnothing else would satisfy their need for explanations. And in a sense theSpirit came. The Great Revival sprang directly from the Change—the last,the deepest, widest, and most enduring of all the vast inundations of religiousemotion that go by that name.

But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors. Theformer revivals were a phase of fever, this was the first movement of health,it was altogether quieter, more intellectual, more private, more religious thanany of those others. In the old time, and more especially in the Protestantcountries where the things of religion were outspoken, and the absence ofconfession and well-trained priests made religious states of emotion explosiveand contagious, revivalism upon various scales was a normal phase in thereligious life, revivals were always going on—now a little disturbance ofconsciences in a village, now an evening of emotion in a Mission Room, now agreat storm that swept a continent, and now an organized effort that came totown with bands and banners and handbills and motor-cars for the saving ofsouls. Never at any time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any of thesemovements. My nature, although passionate, was too critical (or sceptical ifyou like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shy to be drawn into thesewhirls; but on several occasions Parload and I sat, scoffing, but neverthelessdisturbed, in the back seats of revivalist meetings.

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

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

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

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

So the former revivals spent themselves, but the Great Revival did not spenditself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendom at least, the permanentexpression of the Change. For many it has taken the shape of an outrightdeclaration that this was the Second Advent—it is not for me to discussthe validity of that suggestion, for nearly all it has amounted to an enduringbroadening of all the issues of life. . . .

§ 8

One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by some subtletrick of quality it summarizes the Change for me. It is the memory of awoman’s very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed face and tear-brighteyes who went by me without speaking, rapt in some secret purpose. I passed herwhen in the afternoon of the first day, struck by a sudden remorse, I went downto 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 heragain, and only her face, glowing with that new and luminous resolve, standsout 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 waspresent, 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 hadnowhere to go particularly, and there was no one at his bungalow, to which hisbroken ankle confined him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin hisshare 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 inso soon as his ankle had been dressed, and sat at his desk to write at hisdictation. It is characteristic of the odd slackness that went with thespasmodic violence of the old epoch, that the secretary could not use shorthandand that there was no telephone whatever in the place. Every message had to betaken to the village post-office in that grocer’s shop at Menton, half amile away. . . . So I sat in the back of Melmount’s room, his desk hadbeen thrust aside, and made such memoranda as were needed. At that time hisroom seemed to me the most beautifully furnished in the world, and I couldidentify now the vivid cheerfulness of the chintz of the sofa on which thegreat statesman lay just in front of me, the fine rich paper, the redsealing-wax, the silver equipage of the desk I used. I know now that mypresence in that room was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, eventhe coming and going of Parker the secretary, innovations. In the old days acabinet council was a secret conclave, secrecy and furtiveness were in thetexture of all public life. In the old days everybody was always keepingsomething back from somebody, being wary and cunning, prevaricating,misleading—for the most part for no reason at all. Almost unnoticed, thatsecrecy had dropped out of life.

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

I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham. He came to the bungalow aday before the others, because he was Melmount’s personal friend. Let medescribe this statesman to you, this one of the fifteen men who made the lastwar. He was the youngest member of the Government, and an altogether pleasantand sunny man of forty. He had a clear profile to his clean gray face, asmiling eye, a friendly, careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, aneasy disabusing manner. He had the perfect quality of a man who had falleneasily into a place prepared for him. He had the temperament of what we used tocall a philosopher—an indifferent, that is to say. The Change had caughthim 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 thewater’s brim. In times of crisis Lord Adisham invariably went fly-fishingat the week-end to keep his mind in tone, and when there was no crisis thenthere was nothing he liked so much to do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, asthere was nothing to prevent it, he fished. He came resolved, among otherthings, to give up fly-fishing altogether. I was present when he came toMelmount, and heard him say as much; and by a more naive route it was evidentthat he had arrived at the same scheme of intention as my master. I left themto talk, but afterward I came back to take down their long telegrams to theircoming colleagues. He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as Melmount by theChange, but his tricks of civility and irony and acceptable humor had survivedthe Change, and he expressed his altered attitude, his expanded emotions, in aquaint modification of the old-time man-of-the-world style, with excessivemoderation, with a trained horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.

These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlike anything Ihad expected, and I watched them intently whenever my services were not inrequest. They made a peculiar class at that time, these English politicians andstatesmen, a class that has now completely passed away. In some respects theywere unlike the statesmen of any other region of the world, and I do not findthat any really adequate account remains of them. . . . Perhaps you are areader of the old books. If so, you will find them rendered with a note ofhostile exaggeration by Dickens in “Bleak House,” with a minglingof gross flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, who ruled among themaccidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasing the court, and all theirassumptions are set forth, portentously, perhaps, but truthfully, so far aspeople of the “permanent official” class saw them, in the novels ofMrs. Humphry Ward. All these books are still in this world and at the disposalof the curious, and in addition the philosopher Bagehot and the picturesquehistorian Macaulay give something of their method of thinking, the novelistThackeray skirts the seamy side of their social life, and there are some goodpassages of irony, personal descriptions, and reminiscence to be found in the“Twentieth Century Garner” from the pens of such writers, forexample, as Sidney Low. But a picture of them as a whole is wanting. Then theywere too near and too great; now, very rapidly, they have becomeincomprehensible.

We common people of the old time based our conception of our statesmen almostentirely on the caricatures that formed the most powerful weapon in politicalcontroversy. Like almost every main feature of the old condition of thingsthese caricatures were an unanticipated development, they were a sort ofparasitic outgrowth from, which had finally altogether replaced, the thin andvague aspirations of the original democratic ideals. They presented not onlythe personalities who led our public life, but the most sacred structuralconceptions of that life, in ludicrous, vulgar, and dishonorable aspects thatin the end came near to destroying entirely all grave and honorable emotion ormotive toward the State. The state of Britain was represented nearly always bya red-faced, purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that fine dream offreedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced rascal in striped trousersand a blue coat. The chief ministers of state were pickpockets, washerwomen,clowns, whales, asses, elephants, and what not, and issues that affected thewelfare of millions of men were dressed and judged like a rally in some idioticpantomime. A tragic war in South Africa, that wrecked many thousand homes,impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement to fiftythousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel between a violent queerbeing named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass, an orchid, and a short temper, and“old Kroojer,” an obstinate and very cunning old man in a shockingbad hat. The conflict was carried through in a mood sometimes of brutishirritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness, the merry peculator plied histrade congenially in that asinine squabble, and behind these fooleries andmasked by them, marched Fate—until at last the clowning of the boothopened and revealed—hunger and suffering, brands burning and swords andshame. . . . These men had come to fame and power in that atmosphere, and to methat day there was the oddest suggestion in them of actors who have suddenlylaid 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 wasentirely misleading. When I read of Laycock, for example, there arises apicture of a large, active, if a little wrong-headed, intelligence in a compactheroic body, emitting that “Goliath” speech of his that did so muchto precipitate hostilities, it tallies not at all with the stammering,high-pitched, slightly bald, and very conscience-stricken personage I saw, norwith Melmount’s contemptuous first description of him. I doubt if theworld at large will ever get a proper vision of those men as they were beforethe Change. Each year they pass more and more incredibly beyond ourintellectual sympathy. Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of theirportion in the past, but it will rob them of any effect of reality. The wholeof their history becomes more and more foreign, more and more like some queerbarbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue. There they strut through theirweird metamorphoses of caricature, those premiers and presidents, their heightpreposterously exaggerated by political buskins, their faces covered by greatresonant inhuman masks, their voices couched in the foolish idiom of publicutterance, disguised beyond any semblance to sane humanity, roaring andsqueaking through the public press. There it stands, this incomprehensiblefaded show, a thing left on one side, and now still and deserted by anyinterest, its many emptinesses as inexplicable now as the cruelties of medievalVenice, the theology of old Byzantium. And they ruled and influenced the livesof nearly a quarter of mankind, these politicians, their clownish conflictsswayed the world, made mirth perhaps, made excitement, andpermitted—infinite misery.

I saw these men quickened indeed by the Change, but still wearing the queerclothing of the old time, the manners and conventions of the old time; if theyhad disengaged themselves from the outlook of the old time they still had torefer back to it constantly as a common starting-point. My refreshedintelligence was equal to that, so that I think I did indeed see them. Therewas Gorrell-Browning, the Chancellor of the Duchy; I remember him as a biground-faced man, the essential vanity and foolishness of whose expression,whose habit of voluminous platitudinous speech, triumphed absurdly once ortwice over the roused spirit within. He struggled with it, he burlesquedhimself, and laughed. Suddenly he said simply, intensely—it was a momentfor every one of clean, clear pain, “I have been a vain andself-indulgent and presumptuous old man. I am of little use here. I have givenmyself to politics and intrigues, and life is gone from me.” Then for along time he sat still. There was Carton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-facedman with understanding, he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood amongthe busts of the Caesars, a slow, elaborating voice, with self-indulgent,slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary, voluntary, humoroustwinkle. “We have to forgive,” he said. “We have toforgive—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 frozensmile on his thin wry mouth, came next to Carton; he contributed little to thediscussion save intelligent comments, and when the electric lights above glowedout, the shadows deepened queerly in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzicalexpression of an ironical goblin. Next him was that great peer, the Earl ofRichover, whose self-indulgent indolence had accepted the rôle of atwentieth-century British Roman patrician of culture, who had divided his timealmost equally between his jockeys, politics, and the composition of literarystudies in the key of his rôle. “We have done nothing worthdoing,” he said. “As for me, I have cut a figure!” Hereflected—no doubt on his ample patrician years, on the fine great housesthat had been his setting, the teeming race-courses that had roared his name,the enthusiastic meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympianbeginnings. . . . “I have been a fool,” he said compactly. Theyheard him in a sympathetic and respectful silence.

Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, so far as Iwas concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham. Ever and again Gurker protrudedinto the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throaty voice, a big nose, acoarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip, eyes peering amidst folds andwrinkles. 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 beenmonstrous. We seem to have used our ample coarse intellectuality for no otherpurpose than to develop and master and maintain the convention of property, toturn 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—wemade 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 DigbyPrivet, Revel, Markheimer, and the others sat I do not now recall; they came inas voices, interruptions, imperfectly assigned comments. . . .

One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revel these menhad not particularly wanted the power they held; had desired to do nothing verymuch in the positions they had secured. They had found themselves in thecabinet, and until this moment of illumination they had not been ashamed; butthey had made no ungentlemanly fuss about the matter. Eight of that fifteencame 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 ortimidly orthodox English literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, andnineteenth centuries, all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanly traditionof behavior; essentially boyish, unimaginative—with neither keen swordsnor art in it, a tradition apt to slobber into sentiment at a crisis and make agreat virtue of a simple duty rather clumsily done. None of these eight hadmade any real experiments with life, they had lived in blinkers, they had beenpassed from nurse to governess, from governess to preparatory school, from Etonto Oxford, from Oxford to the politico-social routine. Even their vices andlapses had been according to certain conceptions of good form. They had allgone to the races surreptitiously from Eton, had all cut up to town from Oxfordto see life—music-hall life—had all come to heel again. Nowsuddenly they discovered their limitations. . . .

“What are we to do?” asked Melmount. “We have awakened; thisempire in our hands. . . .” I know this will seem the most fabulous ofall the things I have to tell of the old order, but, indeed, I saw it with myeyes, I heard it with my ears. It is a fact that this group of men whoconstituted the Government of one-fifth of the habitable land of the earth, whoruled over a million of armed men, who had such navies as mankind had neverseen before, whose empire of nations, tongues, peoples still dazzles in thesegreater days, had no common idea whatever of what they meant to do with theworld. They had been a Government for three long years, and before the Changecame to them it had never even occurred to them that it was necessary to havea common idea. There was no common idea at all. That great empire was no morethan a thing adrift, an aimless thing that ate and drank and slept and borearms, and was inordinately proud of itself because it had chanced to happen. Ithad no plan, no intention; it meant nothing at all. And the other great empiresadrift, perilously adrift like marine mines, were in the self-same case. Absurdas a British cabinet council must seem to you now, it was no whit more absurdthan 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 absenceof any discussion, any difference of opinion, about the broad principles of ourpresent state. These men had lived hitherto in a system of conventions andacquired motives, loyalty to a party, loyalty to various secret agreements andunderstandings, loyalty to the Crown; they had all been capable of the keenestattention to precedence, all capable of the most complete suppression ofsubversive doubts and inquiries, all had their religious emotions under perfectcontrol. They had seemed protected by invisible but impenetrable barriers fromall the heady and destructive speculations, the socialistic, republican, andcommunistic theories that one may still trace through the literature of thelast days of the comet. But now it was as if the very moment of the awakeningthose barriers and defences had vanished, as if the green vapors had washedthrough their minds and dissolved and swept away a hundred once rigidboundaries and obstacles. They had admitted and assimilated at once all thatwas good in the ill-dressed propagandas that had clamored so vehemently andvainly at the doors of their minds in the former days. It was exactly like theawakening from an absurd and limiting dream. They had come out togethernaturally and inevitably upon the broad daylight platform of obvious andreasonable 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. Therewas, first, the ancient system of “ownership” that made such anextraordinary tangle of our administration of the land upon which we lived. Inthe old time no one believed in that as either just or ideally convenient, butevery one accepted it. The community which lived upon the land was supposed tohave waived its necessary connection with the land, except in certain limitedinstances of highway and common. All the rest of the land was cut up in themaddest way into patches and oblongs and triangles of various sizes between ahundred square miles and a few acres, and placed under the nearly absolutegovernment of a series of administrators called landowners. They owned the landalmost as a man now owns his hat; they bought it and sold it, and cut it uplike cheese or ham; they were free to ruin it, or leave it waste, or erect uponit horrible and devastating eyesores. If the community needed a road or atramway, if it wanted a town or a village in any position, nay, even if itwanted to go to and fro, it had to do so by exorbitant treaties with each ofthe monarchs whose territory was involved. No man could find foothold on theface of the earth until he had paid toll and homage to one of them. They hadpractically no relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or nationalGovernment amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay. . . . Thissounds, I know, like a lunatic’s dream, but mankind was that lunatic; andnot only in the old countries of Europe and Asia, where this system had arisenout of the rational delegation of local control to territorial magnates, whohad in the universal baseness of those times at last altogether evaded andescaped their duties, did it obtain, but the “new countries,” as wecalled them then—the United States of America, the Cape Colony,Australia, and New Zealand—spent much of the nineteenth century in thefrantic 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 outfor scramblers, and a stream of shabby, tricky, and violent adventurers set outto found a new section of the landed aristocracy of the world. After a briefcentury 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 crowdof 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 amendicant, and spent its resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuriesas the world had never seen before. Here was a thing none of these statesmenbefore the Change would have regarded as anything but the natural order of theworld, which not one of them now regarded as anything but the mad and vanishedillusion of a period of dementia.

And as it was with the question of the land, so was it also with a hundredother systems and institutions and complicated and disingenuous factors in thelife of man. They spoke of trade, and I realized for the first time there couldbe buying and selling that was no loss to any man; they spoke of industrialorganization, and one saw it under captains who sought no base advantages. Thehaze of old associations, of personal entanglements and habitual recognitionshad 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 ofschools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative,half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusingsuggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubtedand stumbled and fell, became nothing but a curious and pleasantly fadedmemory. “There must be a common training of the young,” saidRichover; “a frank initiation. We have not so much educated them ashidden things from them, and set traps. And it might have been so easy—itcan all be done so easily.”

That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council, “It can all bedone so easily,” but when they said it then, it came to my ears with aquality of enormous refreshment and power. It can all be done so easily, givenfrankness, given courage. Time was when these platitudes had the freshness andwonder 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 amere exhausted episode. A truce had already been arranged by Melmount, andthese ministers, after some marveling reminiscences, set aside the matter ofpeace as a mere question of particular arrangements. . . . The whole scheme ofthe 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, theinterlacing, overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt of littleinterests and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiable multitude oflawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers lived like fleas in a dirty oldcoat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies, heated patchings up and jobbingsapart, of the old order—they flung it all on one side.

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

§ 3

“Let us begin afresh!” This piece of obvious common sense seemedthen to me instinct with courage, the noblest of words. My heart went out tohim as he spoke. It was, indeed, that day as vague as it was valiant; we didnot at all see the forms of what we were thus beginning. All that we saw wasthe clear inevitableness that the old order should end. . . .

And then in a little space of time mankind in halting but effectual brotherhoodwas moving out to make its world anew. Those early years, those first andsecond decades of the new epoch, were in their daily detail a time of rejoicingtoil; 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 hightower, that I see the dramatic sequence of its changes, see the cruel oldconfusions of the ancient time become clarified, simplified, and dissolve andvanish away. Where is that old world now? Where is London, that somber city ofsmoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music ofdisorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its blackpinnacles and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of smut-grayed houses, itsmyriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks? The veryleaves upon its trees were foul with greasy black defilements. Where islime-white Paris, with its green and disciplined foliage, its hard unflinchingtastefulness, its smartly organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers,noisily shod, streaming over the bridges in the gray cold light of dawn. Whereis New York, the high city of clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept andcompetition swept, its huge buildings jostling one another and straining everupward for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed. Where areits lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury, the shameful bludgeoningbribing vice of its ill ruled underways, and all the gaunt extravagant uglinessof its strenuous life? And where now is Philadelphia, with its innumerablesmall and isolated homes, and Chicago with its interminable blood-stainedstockyards, its polyglot underworld of furious discontent.

All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my native Potteries andthe Black Country have gone, and the lives that were caught, crippled, starved,and maimed amidst their labyrinths, their forgotten and neglectedmaladjustments, and their vast, inhuman, ill-conceived industrial machineryhave escaped—to life. Those cities of growth and accident are altogethergone, never a chimney smokes about our world to-day, and the sound of theweeping of children who toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdenedwomen, the noise of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures and allthe ugly grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, with the utter changein our lives. As I look back into the past I see a vast exultant dust ofhouse-breaking and removal rise up into the clear air that followed the hour ofthe green vapors, I live again the Year of Tents, the Year of Scaffolding, andlike the triumph of a new theme in a piece of music—the great cities ofour new days arise. Come Caerlyon and Armedon, the twin cities of lowerEngland, with the winding summer city of the Thames between, and I see thegaunt dirt of old Edinburgh die to rise again white and tall beneath the shadowof her ancient hill; and Dublin too, reshaped, returning enriched, fair,spacious, the city of rich laughter and warm hearts, gleaming gaily in a shaftof sunlight through the soft warm rain. I see the great cities America hasplanned and made; the Golden City, with ever-ripening fruit along its broadwarm ways, and the bell-glad City of a Thousand Spires. I see again as I haveseen, 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 observatorydome 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 lesserplaces, too, the townships, the quiet resting-places, villages half forest witha brawl of streams down their streets, villages laced with avenues of cedar,villages of garden, of roses and wonderful flowers and the perpetual humming ofbees. And through all the world go our children, our sons the old world wouldhave made into servile clerks and shopmen, plough drudges and servants; ourdaughters who were erst anaemic drudges, prostitutes, sluts, anxiety-rackedmothers or sere, repining failures; they go about this world glad and brave,learning, living, doing, happy and rejoicing, brave and free. I think of themwandering in the clear quiet of the ruins of Rome, among the tombs of Egypt orthe 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 tellof the fullness and pleasure of life, who can number all our new cities in theworld?—cities made by the loving hands of men for living men, cities menweep 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 therebehind Melmount’s couch, but now my knowledge of accomplished things hasmingled with and effaced my expectations. Something indeed I must haveforeseen—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 individualstory. I have tried to give you the effect of the change in relation to thegeneral framework of human life, its effect of swift, magnificent dawn, of anoverpowering letting in and inundation of light, and the spirit of living. Inmy memory all my life before the Change has the quality of a dark passage, withthe dimmest side gleams of beauty that come and go. The rest is dull pain anddarkness. Then suddenly the walls, the bitter confines, are smitten and vanish,and I walk, blinded, perplexed, and yet rejoicing, in this sweet, beautifulworld, 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 aworld-wide motif swell and amplify, gather to itself this theme andthat, and rise at last to sheer ecstasy of triumph and rejoicing. It should beall sound, all pride, all the hope of outsetting in the morning brightness, allthe glee of unexpected happenings, all the gladness of painful effort suddenlycome to its reward; it should be like blossoms new opened and the happy play ofchildren, like tearful, happy mothers holding their first-born, like citiesbuilding to the sound of music, and great ships, all hung with flags and winebespattered, gliding down through cheering multitudes to their first meetingwith the sea. Through it all should march Hope, confident Hope, radiant andinvincible, 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 memoriesnow, just as she came back then, rather quaintly at first—at first notseen 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 thewindow of the Menton post-office and grocer’s shop. It was on the secondday after the Change, and I had been sending telegrams for Melmount, who wasmaking arrangements for his departure for Downing Street. I saw the two of themat first as small, flawed figures. The glass made them seem curved, and itenhanced 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 onewho has sought, “Here he is!” And Nettie cried,“Willie!”

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

I seemed to see these two for the first time; how fine they were, how gracefuland 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. Theyhad shared the universal darkness and dwarfing of the former time; they sharedthe universal exaltation of the new. Now suddenly Nettie, and the love ofNettie, a great passion for Nettie, lived again in me. This change which hadenlarged men’s hearts had made no end to love. Indeed, it had enormouslyenlarged and glorified love. She stepped into the center of that dream of worldreconstruction that filled my mind and took possession of it all. A little wispof hair had blown across her cheek, her lips fell apart in that sweet smile ofhers; her eyes were full of wonder, of a welcoming scrutiny, of an infinitelycourageous friendliness.

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

“Afterward we looked for you,” said Verrall; “and we couldnot find you. . . . We heard another shot.”

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

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

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

Neither of them said a word, and though all facts had suddenly ceased to matteranything, I went on informatively, “He is to be taken to Downing Streetwhere there is a proper staff, so that there will be no need of me. . . . Ofcourse, you’re a little perplexed at my being with Melmount. You see Imet him—by accident—directly I recovered. I found him with a brokenankle—in that lane. . . . I am to go now to the Four Towns to helpprepare a report. So that I am glad to see you both again”—I founda catch in my voice—“to say good-bye to you, and wish youwell.”

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

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

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

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, Ithink, who shaped the thought for me, and said that to-morrow then we must meetand say good-bye, and so turned our encounter into a transitory making ofarrangements. 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 lookingback, surprised at myself, and infinitely perplexed. It was as if I haddiscovered something overlooked that disarranged all my plans, somethingentirely disconcerting. For the first time I went back preoccupied and withouteagerness to Melmount’s work. I wanted to go on thinking about Nettie; mymind 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 stronglyimpressed upon my memory. There was something fresh and simple about it,something young and flushed and exalted. We took up, we handled with a certainnaive timidity, the most difficult questions the Change had raised for men tosolve. I recall we made little of them. All the old scheme of human life haddissolved and passed away, the narrow competitiveness, the greed and baseaggression, the jealous aloofness of soul from soul. Where had it left us? Thatwas what we and a thousand million others were discussing. . . .

It chances that this last meeting with Nettie is inseparably associated—Idon’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 aninn of an unusual prosperity, much frequented by visitors from Shaphambury, andgiven 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, andhollyhock, and blue delphinium, and many such tall familiar summer flowers.These stood out against a background of laurels and holly, and above theseagain rose the gables of the inn and its signpost—a white-horsed Georgeslaying the dragon—against copper beeches under the sky.

While I waited for Nettie and Verrall in this agreeable trysting place, Italked to the landlady—a broad-shouldered, smiling, freckledwoman—about the morning of the Change. That motherly, abundant,red-haired figure of health was buoyantly sure that everything in the world wasnow 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,” shesaid, “all sorts of things will be put right that hadn’t any sensein them. Why? Oh! I’m sure of it.”

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

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

“Pay or not,” she said, “and what you like. It’sholiday 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 Ifeel sure. It’s the part I never had no fancy for. Many a time I peepedthrough 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 carefor. There’ll be mighty changes, be sure of that; but here I’llstay, and make people happy—them that go by on the roads. It’s apleasant place here when people are merry; it’s only when they’rejealous, or mean, or tired, or eat up beyond any stomach’s digesting, orwhen 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 likefriends, but nothing to equal what’s going to be, now things are beingset right.”

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

It was just then that Nettie and Verrall appeared under a rustic archway ofcrimson roses that led out from the inn. Nettie wore white and a sun-hat, andVerrall was a figure of gray. “Here are my friends,” I said; butfor all the magic of the Change, something passed athwart the sunlight in mysoul 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 lastrelic of a vanished age, is like the little piece of identification thesuperstitious of the old days—those queer religionists who brought acertain black-clad Mrs. Piper to the help of Christ—used to put into thehand of a clairvoyant. At the crisp touch of it I look across a gulf of fiftyyears and see again the three of us sitting about that table in the arbor, andI smell again the smell of the sweet-briar that filled the air about us, andhear in our long pauses the abundant murmuring of bees among the heliotrope ofthe borders.

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

I see myself, a dark, ill-dressed youth, with the bruise Lord Redcar gave mestill 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, butlooking no older than I because of his light complexion; and opposite me isNettie, with dark eyes upon my face, graver and more beautiful than I had everseen her in the former time. Her dress is still that white one she had wornwhen I came upon her in the park, and still about her dainty neck she wears herstring of pearls and that little coin of gold. She is so much the same, she isso changed; a girl then and now a woman—and all my agony and all themarvel of the Change between! Over the end of the green table about which wesit, a spotless cloth is spread, it bears a pleasant lunch spread out with asimple equipage. Behind me is the liberal sunshine of the green and variousgarden. I see it all. Again I sit there, eating awkwardly, this paper lies uponthe 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 itbefore.”

He leans over the table toward me with an evident desire to make himselfperfectly understood. “I find myself like some creature that is taken outof its shell—soft and new. I was trained to dress in a certain way, tobehave in a certain way, to think in a certain way; I see now it’s allwrong 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 hispleasant 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. “Youtwo,” I said, “will marry?”

They looked at one another.

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

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

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

I nodded. “All passion,” I said, “is madness.” Then Ifell 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 inadequateexpression.

Then she seemed to open out suddenly.

“Willie,” she cried with a sudden directness, with her eyesappealing to me, “I didn’t mean to treat you badly—indeed Ididn’t. I kept thinking of you—and of father and mother, all thetime. Only it didn’t seem to move me. It didn’t move me not one bitfrom 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 hisface to me again.

“Something said ‘Take her.’ Everything. It was a ragingdesire—for her. I don’t know. Everything contributed tothat—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 overyou,” I said. “But go on!”

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

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

Nettie’s hands fell upon the table. “I can’t tell what itwas,” she said, speaking bare-hearted straight to me. “Girlsaren’t trained as men are trained to look into their minds. I can’tsee it yet. All sorts of mean little motives were there—over and abovethe ‘must.’ Mean motives. I kept thinking of his clothes.”She smiled—a flash of brightness at Verrall. “I kept thinking ofbeing 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 meanerthan that!”

I can see her now pleading with me, speaking with a frankness as bright andamazing 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. “Isaw it all in little bright pictures. Do you know—thatjacket—there’s something——— You won’t mindmy telling you? But you won’t now!”

I nodded, “No.”

She spoke as if she spoke to my soul, very quietly and very earnestly, seekingto give the truth. “Something cottony in that cloth of yours,” shesaid. “I know there’s something horrible in being swung round bythings like that, but they did swing me round. In the old time—to haveconfessed 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—butthen 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 thatbefore!”

We sat silently for a time before our vivisected passions.

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

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

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

§ 4

“What are we to do?” asked Verrall.

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

“Well,” said I, “the matter seems fairly simple. Youtwo”—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 frommany points of view. I happened to want—impossible things. . . . Ibehaved 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 theair—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 somethingvery 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 downcastface, 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, sincethat affection is rich with the seeds of desire, since to see her yours andwholly yours is not to be endured by me—I must turn about and go fromyou; you must avoid me and I you. . . . We must divide the world like Jacob andEsau. . . . 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 butthat?”

I did not look up, I sat very tense with the red petals printing an indeliblememory in my brain, but I felt the assent of Verrall’s pose. There weresome 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 isperfectly simple,” I smiled, “now that we have cool heads.”

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

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

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

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

“It’s so difficult——— I’ve never before inall my life tried to get to the bottom of my mind. For one thing, I’venot treated Willie properly. He—he counted on me. I know he did. I washis hope. I was a promised delight—something, something to crownlife—better than anything he had ever had. And a secret pride. . . . Helived upon me. I knew—when we two began to meet together, you andI——— It was a sort of treachery tohim———”

“Treachery!” I said. “You were only feeling your way throughall 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 thehorrible things, the humiliation—the humiliation! he went through.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’tsee———”

“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 knownEdward. I know you better. Indeed I know you with all my heart. You think allyour talk was thrown away upon me, that I never understood that side of you, oryour 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 wassomething deeper than Edward brought me. I have it now. . . . You are a part ofmy life, and I don’t want to cut all that off from me now I havecomprehended it, and throw it away.”

“But you love Verrall.”

“Love is such a queer thing! . . . Is there one love? I mean, only onelove?” She turned to Verrall. “I know I love you. I can speak outabout that now. Before this morning I couldn’t have done. It’s justas though my mind had got out of a scented prison. But what is it, this lovefor you? It’s a mass of fancies—things about you—ways youlook, ways you have. It’s the senses—and the senses of certainbeauties. Flattery too, things you said, hopes and deceptions for myself. Andall that had rolled up together and taken to itself the wild help of those deepemotions 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 thickshade—everything else in the room was hidden. But you take the shade offand there they are—it is the same light—still there! Only it lightsevery 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 somepuzzling 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 Idid.

“We’re brought up to that. We’re told—it’s inbooks, in stories, in the way people look, in the way they behave—one daythere 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 knowthat. By nature they don’t believe it. But a woman believes nothing bynature. She goes into a mold hiding her secret thoughts almost fromherself.”

“She used to,” I said.

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

“I’ve come out. It’s this comet. And Willie. And because Inever 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 himagain—when I like him as much as I do. It is cruel, it is wicked andugly, to prance over him as if he was a defeated enemy, and pretend I’mgoing to be happy just the same. There’s no sense in a rule of life thatprescribes that. It’s selfish. It’s brutish. It’s likesomething that has no sense. I———” there was a sob inher 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 unemotionaldeliberation. “Nevertheless—it is in the nature of things. . . .No! . . . You see, after all, we are still half brutes, Nettie. And men, as yousay, 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 ofblind forces. . . . I come back to what I said just now; we have found our poorreasonable minds, our wills to live well, ourselves, adrift on a wash ofinstincts, passions, instinctive prejudices, half animal stupidities. . . .Here we are like people clinging to something—like peopleawakening—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 arenot the bodies of angels. They are the same bodies——— I haveread somewhere that in our bodies you can find evidence of the lowliestancestry; that about our inward ears—I think it is—and about ourteeth, there remains still something of the fish, that there are bones thatrecall little—what is it?—marsupial forebears—and a hundredtraces of the ape. Even your beautiful body, Nettie, carries this taint. No!Hear me out.” I leant forward earnestly. “Our emotions, ourpassions, 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 usnow a mind to minds—one can do that when one has had exercise and whenone 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 controlit.”

“Only through a measure of obedience. There is no magic in thebusiness—to conquer matter, we must divide the enemy, and take matter asan ally. Nowadays it is indeed true, by faith a man can remove mountains; hecan say to a mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea; but hedoes it because he helps and trusts his brother men, because he has the wit andpatience 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 maynot see you, I must take up other interests, thrust myself into struggles anddiscussions———”

“And forget?” said Nettie.

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

She hung on that for some moments.

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

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

“You know,” he said, “I haven’t thought much of thesethings. At school and the university, one doesn’t. . . . It was part ofthe system to prevent it. They’ll alter all that, no doubt. Weseem”—he thought—“to be skating about over questionsthat 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 intoliving realities. . . .” He halted and answered some unspoken questionfrom his own mind with, “No. I think with Leadford, Nettie, that, as heput it, it is in the nature of things for men to be exclusive. . . . Minds arefree things and go about the world, but only one man can possess a woman. Youmust dismiss rivals. We are made for the struggle for existence—weare the struggle for existence; the things that live are the strugglefor existence incarnate—and that works out that the men struggle fortheir 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 therough universal truth.”

“But,” said Nettie, “you don’t struggle. That has beenaltered 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 rightsolution 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 andpleasant, and because—because I like him! Here is Willie—apart 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 mealways as a thing to struggle for?” She paused; then she made herdistressful proposition to me. “Let us three keep together,” shesaid. “Let us not part. To part is hate, Willie. Why should we not anyhowkeep 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 wasthe 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 andcustoms of these things,” I said; “these passions are too close toone’s essential self. Better surgery than a lingering disease! FromNettie my love—asks all. A man’s love is not devotion—it is ademand, a challenge. And besides”—and here I forced mytheme—“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 ofthe World, and I am in that building. Dear heart! you are onlyhappiness—and that———Indeed that calls! If it is onlythat my life blood shall christen the foundation stones—I could almosthope that should be my part, Nettie—I will join myself in that.” Ithrew all the conviction I could into these words. . . . “No conflict ofpassion.” I added a little lamely, “must distract me.”

There was a pause.

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

I nodded assent. . . .

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

I do not think I watched them go. I only remember myself left theresomehow—horribly empty and alone. I sat down again and fell into a deepshapeless 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 haslet me come to you alone. And I feel perhaps I can talk better to youalone.”

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 youwill understand what I am saying, Willie. It is hard to say what I feel. But Iwant 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’straining which makes one hide. But——— Edward is not all ofme. Think of what I am saying—Edward is not all of me. . . . I wish Icould 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 shouldleave 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 understandyou 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. Thewhole 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 theunfathomable darkness below the surface and present reality of things dumbmeanings strove to be. She made to speak and desisted.

“But must I go?” she said at last, with quivering lips, andthe 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 ofall 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 passesaway. I had an impulse to take her hand and kiss it, and then a trembling cameto 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 hadchosen, 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 thewords I have put into our several mouths. Then comes a blank. I have a dimmemory of being back in the house near the Links and the bustle ofMelmount’s departure, of finding Parker’s energy distasteful, andof going away down the road with a strong desire to say good-bye to Melmountalone.

Perhaps I was already doubting my decision to part for ever from Nettie, for Ithink 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 certainmemory of my phase of bleak desolation as I watched his car recede and climband vanish over Mapleborough Hill, and that I got there my first full anddefinite intimation that, after all, this great Change and my new wide aims inlife, were not to mean indiscriminate happiness for me. I had a sense ofprotest, as against extreme unfairness, as I saw him go. “It is toosoon,” I said to myself, “to leave me alone.”

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

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

But, curiously enough, I remember myself as being fairly cheerful in the townof Birmingham that night, I recall an active and interested mood. I spent thenight in Birmingham because the train service on was disarranged, and I couldnot get on. I went to listen to a band that was playing its brassy old-worldmusic in the public park, and I fell into conversation with a man who said hehad been a reporter upon one of their minor local papers. He was full and keenupon all the plans of reconstruction that were now shaping over the lives ofhumanity, and I know that something of that noble dream came back to me withhis 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 isolatedhomes, and how the people would be housed.

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

It was very interesting, but still a little cheerless, and when I lay in bedthat night I thought of Nettie and the queer modifications of preference shehad 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 stillserves with me as a symbol for things inconceivable, to a Master Artificer, theunseen captain of all who go about the building of the world, the making ofmankind.

But before and after I prayed I imagined I was talking and reasoning andmeeting again with Nettie. . . . She never came into the temple of thatworshiping 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 thehost of dark distressful memories, of darkened childhood, toilsome youth,embittered adolescence that wove about the place for me. It seemed to me that Isaw morning there for the first time. No chimneys smoked that day, no furnaceswere burning, the people were busy with other things. The clear strong sun, thesparkle in the dustless air, made a strange gaiety in the narrow streets. Ipassed a number of smiling people coming home from the public breakfasts thatwere given in the Town Hall until better things could be arranged, and happenedon Parload among them. “You were right about that comet,” I sangout 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, “andwe’re going to level all these slums—and shift into tents on to themoors;” and he began to tell me of many things that were being arranged,the Midland land committees had got to work with remarkable celerity anddirectness of purpose, and the redistribution of population was already in itsbroad 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 againto get as much technical training as they could against the demands of the hugeenterprise of reconstruction that was now beginning.

He walked with me to my door, and there I met old Pettigrew coming down thesteps. 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 mustundergo very considerable revision—in the light of reason; but meanwhileI’ve been doing something to patch that disgraceful roof of mine! Tothink 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 kindand forgiving! To think of it! My dear young man!”—he said itmanfully—“I’m ashamed.”

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

I held out a forgiving hand, naively forgetful that in this place I was athief, and he took it and went his way, shaking his head and repeating he wasashamed, 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 myunaccountable temper still swayed her. “Ah deary!” she said,“ah deary! But you were sorely tried,” and kept her face close tomy shoulder, lest she should offend me by the sight of the tears that welledwithin her.

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

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

“It’s all well with me, mother dear,” I said, “and thedark 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 thathad been renewed. I did not know how short that time would be, but the little Icould do—perhaps after all it was not little to her—to atone forthe harshness of my days of wrath and rebellion, I did. I took care to beconstantly with her, for I perceived now her curious need of me. It was notthat we had ideas to exchange or pleasures to share, but she liked to see me attable, to watch me working, to have me go to and fro. There was no toil for herany more in the world, but only such light services as are easy and pleasantfor a worn and weary old woman to do, and I think she was happy even at herend.

She kept to her queer old eighteenth century version of religion, too, withouta change. She had worn this particular amulet so long it was a part of her. Yetthe 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, butstill———

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

§ 3

That talk stands out in my memory because of that agreeable theologicaldecision of hers, but it was only one of a great number of talks. It used to bepleasant in the afternoon, after the day’s work was done and before onewent on with the evening’s study—how odd it would have seemed inthe old time for a young man of the industrial class to be doing post-graduatework in sociology, and how much a matter of course it seems now!—to walkout into the gardens of Lowchester House, and smoke a cigarette or so and lether talk ramblingly of the things that interested her. . . . Physically theGreat Change did not do so very much to reinvigorate her—she had lived inthat dismal underground kitchen in Clayton too long for any materialrejuvenescence—she glowed out indeed as a dying spark among the ashesmight glow under a draught of fresh air—and assuredly it hastened herend. But those closing days were very tranquil, full of an effortlesscontentment. With her, life was like a rainy, windy day that clears only toshow the sunset afterglow. The light has passed. She acquired no new habitsamid the comforts of the new life, did no new things, but only found a happierlight upon the old.

She lived with a number of other old ladies belonging to our commune in theupper 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 givethe maximum of comfort and conveniences and to economize the need of skilledattendance. We had taken over the various “great houses,” as theyused to be called, to make communal dining-rooms and so forth—theirkitchens were conveniently large—and pleasant places for the old peopleof over sixty whose time of ease had come, and for suchlike public uses. We haddone this not only with Lord Redcar’s house, but also with CheckshillHouse—where old Mrs. Verrall made a dignified and capablehostess,—and indeed with most of the fine residences in the beautifulwide country between the Four Towns district and the Welsh mountains. Aboutthese great houses there had usually been good outbuildings, laundries, marriedservants’ quarters, stabling, dairies, and the like, suitably masked bytrees, we turned these into homes, and to them we added first tents and woodchalets and afterward quadrangular residential buildings. In order to be nearmy mother I had two small rooms in the new collegiate buildings which ourcommune was almost the first to possess, and they were very convenient for thestation of the high-speed electric railway that took me down to our dailyconferences and my secretarial and statistical work in Clayton.

Ours had been one of the first modern communes to get in order; we were greatlyhelped by the energy of Lord Redcar, who had a fine feeling for the picturesqueassociations of his ancestral home—the detour that took our line throughthe beeches and bracken and bluebells of the West Wood and saved the pleasantopen wildness of the park was one of his suggestions; and we had many reasonsto be proud of our surroundings. Nearly all the other communes that sprang upall 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 theresidential squares and quadrangles with which we had replaced the back streetsbetween the great houses and the ecclesiastical residences about the cathedral,and the way in which we had adapted all these buildings to our new socialneeds. Some claimed to have improved on us. But they could not emulate therhododendron garden out beyond our shrubberies; that was a thing altogether ourown in our part of England, because of its ripeness and of the rarity of goodpeat free from lime.

These gardens had been planned under the third Lord Redcar, fifty years ago andmore; they abounded in rhododendra and azaleas, and were in places so wellsheltered and sunny that great magnolias flourished and flowered. There weretall trees smothered in crimson and yellow climbing roses, and an endlessvariety of flowering shrubs and fine conifers, and such pampas grass as noother garden can show. And barred by the broad shadows of these, were gladesand broad spaces of emerald turf, and here and there banks of pegged roses, andflower-beds, and banks given over some to spring bulbs, and some to primrosesand primulas and polyanthuses. My mother loved these latter banks and thelittle round staring eyes of their innumerable yellow, ruddy brown, and purplecorollas, more than anything else the gardens could show, and in the spring ofthe Year of Scaffolding she would go with me day after day to the seat thatshowed them in the greatest multitude.

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

We would sit and think, or talk—there was a curious effect of completeunderstanding 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, wallsand gates of jewels—and singing.”

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

You of your happier generation cannot realize the wonderfulness of those earlydays in the new epoch, the sense of security, the extraordinary effects ofcontrast. In the morning, except in high summer, I was up before dawn, andbreakfasted upon the swift, smooth train, and perhaps saw the sunrise as Irushed out of the little tunnel that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work likea man. Now that we had got all the homes and schools and all the softness oflife away from our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousand obstructive“rights” and timidities had been swept aside, we could letourselves go, we merged this enterprise with that, cut across this or thatanciently obstructive piece of private land, joined and separated, effectedgigantic consolidations and gigantic economies, and the valley, no longer a pitof squalid human tragedies and meanly conflicting industries, grew into a sortof beauty of its own, a savage inhuman beauty of force and machinery andflames. One was a Titan in that Etna. Then back one came at midday to bathe andchange in the train, and so to the leisurely gossiping lunch in the clubdining-room in Lowchester House, and the refreshment of these green and sunlitafternoon tranquillities.

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

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

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

Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor roughhands—they never got softened—one over the other. She told me muchI had not heard before about my father, and her own early life. It was likefinding flat and faded flowers in a book still faintly sweet, to realize thatonce my mother had been loved with passion; that my remote father had once shedhot tears of tenderness in her arms. And she would sometimes even speaktentatively in those narrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of alltheir 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. “Nowoman is worthy of a man’s. I love her, dear mother, and that you cannotalter.”

“There’s others,” she would muse.

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

She sighed and said no more then.

At another time she said—I think her words were: “You’ll belonely 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 somesweet girl of a woman, some good, kind girl———”

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

“But to have nothing to do with women!”

“I have my friends. Don’t you trouble, mother. There’splentiful work for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast outfrom him. Nettie was life and beauty for me—is—will be. Don’tthink 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 backacross an epoch, to the protests of the former time, to those counsels ofsubmission, those appeals not to offend It, that had always stirred an angryspirit of rebellion within me.

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

But I did not always spend my afternoons with her. There were days when mycrushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be alone; I walked, orbicycled, 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 thefirst year of the new epoch, everywhere lugging and dragging and straining wasdone by machines, and the horse had become a beautiful instrument for thepleasure 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 ofenormous melancholy that came upon me, and when at last horse riding palled, Iwent and joined the aviators who practised soaring upon aeroplanes beyondHorsemarden Hill. . . . But at least every alternate day I spent with mymother, and altogether I think I gave her two-thirds of my afternoons.

§ 4

When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an euthanasia forso many of the older people in the beginning of the new time, took hold upon mymother, there came Anna Reeves to daughter her—after our new custom. Shechose to come. She was already known to us a little from chance meetings andchance services she had done my mother in the garden; she sought to give herhelp. She seemed then just one of those plainly good girls the world at itsworst has never failed to produce, who were indeed in the dark old times thehidden antiseptic of all our hustling, hating, faithless lives. They made theirsecret voiceless worship, they did their steadfast, uninspired, unthanked,unselfish work as helpful daughters, as nurses, as faithful servants, as thehumble 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 freckledhands 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, thatmoved in the shadows behind the bed on which my old mother lay and sankrestfully to death. She would come forward to anticipate some little need, toproffer some simple comfort, and always then my mother smiled on her. In alittle while I discovered the beauty of that helpful poise of her woman’sbody, I discovered the grace of untiring goodness, the sweetness of a tenderpity, and the great riches of her voice, of her few reassuring words andphrases. I noted and remembered very clearly how once my mother’s leanold hand patted the firm gold-flecked strength of hers, as it went by upon itsduties with the coverlet.

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

I had never heard of that little sister.

“November the tenth,” said my mother. “Twenty-nine months andthree days. . . . I cried. I cried. That was before you came, dear. So longago—and I can see it now. I was a young wife then, and your father wasvery 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 someone else, some one who paid. So your father went on into Swathinglea, and thatman wouldn’t come unless he had his fee. And your father had changed hisclothes to look more respectful and he hadn’t any money, not even histram 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 calledbefore?’ he said, and he took no pains. He was angry because some onehadn’t explained. I begged him—but it was too late.”

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

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

“Eh?” I said.

“Hippopotamus, dear—quite plainly one day, when her father wasshowing 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. Shewhispered 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 wasqueerly obsessed by the thought of that little life that had been glad andhopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of hope again into nonentity, thissister of whom I had never heard before. . . .

And presently I was in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows of thepast, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which this was but oneluminous and quivering red drop. I walked in the garden and the garden was toosmall for me; I went out to wander on the moors. “The past ispast,” I cried, and all the while across the gulf of five and twentyyears I could hear my poor mother’s heart-wrung weeping for that daughterbaby who had suffered and died. Indeed that old spirit of rebellion has notaltogether died in me, for all the transformation of the new time. . . . Iquieted down at last to a thin and austere comfort in thinking that the wholeis not told to us, that it cannot perhaps be told to such minds as ours; andanyhow, and what was far more sustaining, that now we have strength and courageand 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 oldlife, 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 cameinto view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit windows of oldLowchester House. “Those sorrows are sorrows no more.”

But I could not altogether cheat that common sadness of the new time, thatmemory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives that had stumbled andfailed 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 doingall they could to supply its deficiencies, but they were still extraordinarilyignorant. Some unintelligently observed factor of her illness came into playwith her, and she became feverish and sank and died very quickly. I do not knowwhat remedial measures were attempted. I hardly knew what was happening untilthe whole thing was over.

At that time my attention was much engaged by the stir of the great Beltanefestival that was held on May-day in the Year of Scaffolding. It was the firstof the ten great rubbish burnings that opened the new age. Young peoplenowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the enormous quantities of pure litterand useless accumulation with which we had to deal; had we not set aside aspecial day and season, the whole world would have been an incessant reek ofsmall fires; and it was, I think, a happy idea to revive this ancient festivalof the May and November burnings. It was inevitable that the old idea ofpurification should revive with the name, it was felt to be a burning of otherthan material encumbrances, innumerable quasi-spiritual things, deeds,documents, debts, vindictive records, went up on those great flares. Peoplepassed praying between the fires, and it was a fine symbol of the new and wisertolerance that had come to men, that those who still found their comfort in theorthodox faiths came hither unpersuaded, to pray that all hate might be burntout of their professions. For even in the fires of Baal, now that men have donewith base hatred, one may find the living God.

Endless were the things we had to destroy in those great purgings. First, therewere nearly all the houses and buildings of the old time. In the end we did notsave in England one building in five thousand that was standing when the cometcame. Year by year, as we made our homes afresh in accordance with the sanerneeds of our new social families, we swept away more and more of those horriblestructures, the ancient residential houses, hastily built, without imagination,without beauty, without common honesty, without even comfort or convenience, inwhich the early twentieth century had sheltered until scarcely one remained; wesaved nothing but what was beautiful or interesting out of all their gaunt andmelancholy abundance. The actual houses, of course, we could not drag to ourfires, but we brought all their ill-fitting deal doors, their dreadful windowsashes, their servant-tormenting staircases, their dank, dark cupboards, theverminous papers from their scaly walls, their dust and dirt-sodden carpets,their ill-designed and yet pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chestsof drawers, the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments—their dirty,decayed, and altogether painful ornaments—amidst which I remember therewere sometimes even stuffed dead birds!—we burnt them all. Thepaint-plastered woodwork, with coat above coat of nasty paint, that inparticular blazed finely. I have already tried to give you an impression ofold-world furniture, of Parload’s bedroom, my mother’s room, Mr.Gabbitas’s sitting-room, but, thank Heaven! there is nothing in life nowto convey the peculiar dinginess of it all. For one thing, there is no moreimperfect combustion of coal going on everywhere, and no roadways likegrassless open scars along the earth from which dust pours out perpetually. Weburnt and destroyed most of our private buildings and all the woodwork, all ourfurniture, except a few score thousand pieces of distinct and intentionalbeauty, from which our present forms have developed, nearly all our hangingsand 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 ourmuseums.

One writes now with a peculiar horror of the dress of the old world. Themen’s clothes were worn without any cleansing process at all, except anoccasional superficial brushing, for periods of a year or so; they were made ofdark obscurely mixed patterns to conceal the stage of defilement they hadreached, and they were of a felted and porous texture admirably calculated toaccumulate drifting matter. Many women wore skirts of similar substances, andof so long and inconvenient a form that they inevitably trailed among all theabomination of our horse-frequented roads. It was our boast in England that thewhole of our population was booted—their feet were for the most part uglyenough to need it,—but it becomes now inconceivable how they could haveimprisoned their feet in the amazing cases of leather and imitations of leatherthey used. I have heard it said that a large part of the physical decline thatwas 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. Theyshirked open-air exercise altogether because their boots wore out ruinously andpinched and hurt them if they took it. I have mentioned, I think, the part myown boots played in the squalid drama of my adolescence. I had a sense ofunholy triumph over a fallen enemy when at last I found myself steering truckafter truck of cheap boots and shoes (unsold stock from Swathinglea) to therun-off by the top of the Glanville blast furnaces.

“Plup!” they would drop into the cone when Beltane came, and theroar of their burning would fill the air. Never a cold would come from thesaturation 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 ofhabitation, our theater sheds, our banks, and inconvenient business warrens,our factories (these in the first year of all), and all the “unmeaningrepetition” of silly little sham Gothic churches and meeting-houses, meanlooking shells of stone and mortar without love, invention, or any beauty atall in them, that men had thrust into the face of their sweated God, even asthey thrust cheap food into the mouths of their sweated workers; all these wealso swept away in the course of that first decade. Then we had the whole ofthe superseded steam-railway system to scrap and get rid of, stations, signals,fences, rolling stock; a plant of ill-planned, smoke-distributing nuisanceapparatus, that would, under former conditions, have maintained an offensivedwindling obstructive life for perhaps half a century. Then also there was agreat harvest of fences, notice boards, hoardings, ugly sheds, all thecorrugated iron in the world, and everything that was smeared with tar, all ourgas works and petroleum stores, all our horse vehicles and vans and lorries hadto be erased. . . . But I have said enough now perhaps to give some idea of thebulk and quality of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down, ourtoil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in those earlyyears.

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; avast accumulation of insignia and uniforms neither curious enough nor beautifulenough to preserve, went to swell the blaze, and all (saving a few trulyglorious trophies and memories) of our symbols, our apparatus and material ofwar. Then innumerable triumphs of our old, bastard, half-commercial, fine-artwere presently condemned, great oil paintings, done to please the half-educatedmiddle-class, glared for a moment and were gone, Academy marbles crumbled touseful lime, a gross multitude of silly statuettes and decorative crockery, andhangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and musical instruments shared thisfate. And books, countless books, too, and bales of newspapers went also tothese pyres. From the private houses in Swathinglea alone—which I haddeemed, perhaps not unjustly, altogether illiterate—we gathered a wholedust-cart full of cheap ill-printed editions of the minor Englishclassics—for the most part very dull stuff indeed and stillclean—and about a truckload of thumbed and dog-eared penny fiction,watery base stuff, the dropsy of our nation’s mind. . . . And it seemedto me that when we gathered those books and papers together, we gatheredtogether something more than print and paper, we gathered warped and crippledideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulae of dull tolerances andstupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities of sluggish habits ofthinking and timid and indolent evasions. There was more than a touch ofmalignant 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 notnotice, as I should otherwise have done, the little indications of change in mymother’s state. Indeed, I thought her a little stronger; she was slightlyflushed, slightly more talkative. . . .

On Beltane Eve, and our Lowchester rummage being finished, I went along thevalley to the far end of Swathinglea to help sort the stock of the detachedgroup of potbanks there—their chief output had been mantel ornaments inimitation of marble, and there was very little sorting, I found, to bedone—and there it was nurse Anna found me at last by telephone, and toldme my mother had died in the morning suddenly and very shortly after mydeparture.

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

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

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

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

§ 2

I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonely night in mylife. It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments of intense feeling withforgotten 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 motherlay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as I came down. She had butjust heard of my return, and she was hurrying upstairs to me. She stopped andso did I, and we stood and clasped hands, and she scrutinized my face in theway women sometimes do. So we remained for a second or so. I could say nothingto her at all, but I could feel the wave of her emotion. I halted, answered theearnest pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and after a queer second ofhesitation went on down, returning to my own preoccupations. It did not occurto 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 wentmechanically some paces toward the dining-room. Then at the sight of the littletables, and a gusty outburst of talking voices as some one in front of me swungthe door open and to, I remembered that I did not want to eat. . . . After thatcomes an impression of myself walking across the open grass in front of thehouse, and the purpose I had of getting alone upon the moors, and how somebodypassing 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 uponturf 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 init 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 beingpiled, and sought the lonely places. . . .

I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a fold just belowthe crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its crowd, and I was looking atand admiring the sunset. The golden earth and sky seemed like a little bubblethat floated in the globe of human futility. . . . Then in the twilight Iwalked 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 nearmidnight at a little inn over toward Birmingham, and miles away from my home.Instinctively I had avoided the crests where the bonfire crowds gathered, buthere there were many people, and I had to share a table with a man who had someuseless mortgage deeds to burn. I talked to him about them—but my soulstood at a great distance behind my lips. . . .

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

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

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

I thought of many things that night, but chiefly of the overflowing personallove and tenderness that had come to me in the wake of the Change, of thegreater need, the unsatisfied need in which I stood, for this one person whocould fulfil all my desires. So long as my mother had lived, she had in ameasure held my heart, given me a food these emotions could live upon, andmitigated that emptiness of spirit, but now suddenly that one possible comforthad left me. There had been many at the season of the Change who had thoughtthat this great enlargement of mankind would abolish personal love; but indeedit had only made it finer, fuller, more vitally necessary. They had thoughtthat, seeing men now were all full of the joyful passion to make and do, andglad and loving and of willing service to all their fellows, there would be noneed of the one intimate trusting communion that had been the finest thing ofthe former life. And indeed, so far as this was a matter of advantage and thestruggle for existence, they were right. But so far as it was a matter of thespirit and the fine perceptions of life, it was altogether wrong.

We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped it of its basewrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenary and competitiveelements, 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 moreevident, there were for every one certain persons, mysteriously andindescribably in the key of one’s self, whose mere presence gavepleasure, whose mere existence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended withaccident to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestinedlovers. They were the essential thing in life. Without them the fine brave showof the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steed without a rider, a bowlwithout a flower, a theater without a play. . . . And to me that night ofBeltane, it was as clear as white flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, rousedthose harmonies in me. And she had gone! I had sent her from me; I knew notwhither she had gone. I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out of mylife for ever!

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

No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, from habitual andmechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarse imaginings, but from thepassions 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 rejectedhim, confessed his sway with tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .

I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor of my tortuouswanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires, nor how I evaded thelaughing and rejoicing multitudes who went streaming home between three andfour, to resume their lives, swept and garnished, stripped and clean. But atdawn, when the ashes of the world’s gladness were ceasing toglow—it was a bleak dawn that made me shiver in my thin summerclothes—I came across a field to a little copse full of dim bluehyacinths. 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 singularlymisshapen 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 lastvestiges 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 inwhich the dead, deserted image of my dear lost mother lay.

§ 3

I came back to Lowchester House very tired, very wretched; exhausted by myfruitless 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 thestillness 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 airof one who waits. She, too, was pale with watching; all night she had watchedbetween 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 handsabout her strong shoulders, she folded me to her, and my heart gave way. Iburied my face in her breast and clung to her weakly, and burst into a passionof 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. Shekissed me with a hungry intensity of passion, on my cheeks, on my lips. Shekissed me on my lips with lips that were salt with tears. And I returned herkisses. . . .

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 mymind at the touch of Anna’s lips. I loved Anna.

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

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

In the old days love was a cruel proprietary thing. But now Anna could letNettie live in the world of my mind, as freely as a rose will suffer thepresence 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 thanhers. And she, too, could see the beauty of Nettie. Life is so rich andgenerous now, giving friendship, and a thousand tender interests and helps andcomforts, that no one stints another of the full realization of allpossibilities of beauty. For me from the beginning Nettie was the figure ofbeauty, the shape and color of the divine principle that lights the world. Forevery one there are certain types, certain faces and forms, gestures, voicesand intonations that have that inexplicable unanalyzable quality. These comethrough the crowd of kindly friendly fellow-men and women—one’sown. These touch one mysteriously, stir deeps that must otherwise slumber,pierce and interpret the world. To refuse this interpretation is to refuse thesun, to darken and deaden all life. . . . I loved Nettie, I loved all who werelike 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 greatgoddess, the life-giver, Aphrodite, Queen of the living Seas, came to myimagination so. It qualified our mutual love not at all, since now in ourchanged world love is unstinted; it is a golden net about our globe that netsall humanity together.

I thought of Nettie much, and always movingly beautiful things restored me toher, all fine music, all pure deep color, all tender and solemn things. Thestars 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 andstrands 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 thethought of me had grown so strong as to pierce the silence I had imposed onher. We wrote to one another—like common friends with a certain restraintbetween us at first, and with a great longing to see her once more arising inmy heart. For a time I left that hunger unexpressed, and then I was moved totell it to her. And so on New Year’s Day in the Year Four, she came toLowchester 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. Thewindless morning was clear and cold, the ground new carpeted with snow, and allthe trees motionless lace and glitter of frosty crystals. The rising sun hadtouched 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 bluesky. And presently I saw the woman I loved coming through the white stilltrees. . . .

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 hereyes, 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 regretsand human kindliness. Her hands as I took them were a little cold. The goddessshone through her indeed, glowed in all her body, she was a worshipful templeof love for me—yes. But I could feel, like a thing new discovered, thetexture 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 hadbeen lost in his story throughout the earlier portions of it, forgetful of thewriter and his gracious room, and the high tower in which he was sitting. Butgradually, as I drew near the end, the sense of strangeness returned to me. Itwas more and more evident to me that this was a different humanity from any Ihad known, unreal, having different customs, different beliefs, differentinterpretations, different emotions. It was no mere change in conditions andinstitutions the comet had wrought. It had made a change of heart and mind. Ina manner it had dehumanized the world, robbed it of its spites, its littleintense jealousies, its inconsistencies, its humor. At the end, andparticularly after the death of his mother, I felt his story had slipped awayfrom my sympathies altogether. Those Beltane fires had burnt something in himthat worked living still and unsubdued in me, that rebelled in particular atthat return of Nettie. I became a little inattentive. I no longer felt withhim, nor gathered a sense of complete understanding from his phrases. His LordEros indeed! He and these transfigured people—they were beautiful andnoble people, like the people one sees in great pictures, like the gods ofnoble sculpture, but they had no nearer fellowship than these to men. As thechange was realized, with every stage of realization the gulf widened and itwas harder to follow his words.

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

I felt a subtle embarrassment in putting the question that perplexed me. Andyet it seemed so material to me I had to put it. “And didyou—?” 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 otherlovers?”

“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, youunderstand, we were friends, helpers, personal lovers in a world oflovers.”

“Four?”

“There was Verrall.”

Then suddenly it came to me that the thoughts that stirred in my mind weresinister and base, that the queer suspicions, the coarseness and coarsejealousies of my old world were over and done for these more finely livingsouls. “You made,” I said, trying to be liberal minded, “ahome together.”

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

“I forgot,” he said. “You are pretending the old world isstill 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. Therefor one clear moment I saw it; its galleries and open spaces, its trees ofgolden fruit and crystal waters, its music and rejoicing, love and beautywithout ceasing flowing through its varied and intricate streets. And thenearer people I saw now directly and plainly, and no longer in the distortedmirror that hung overhead. They really did not justify my suspicions, andyet—! They were such people as one sees on earth—save that theywere changed. How can I express that change? As a woman is changed in the eyesof 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 littlereddened, by the inconvenience of my curiosities, and by my uneasy sense ofprofound moral differences. He was taller than I. . . .

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

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions willbe renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyrightlaw means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the UnitedStates without permission and without paying copyrightroyalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use partof this license, apply to copying and distributing ProjectGutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by followingthe terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for useof the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything forcopies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is veryeasy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creationof derivative works, reports, performances and research. ProjectGutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you maydo practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protectedby U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademarklicense, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the freedistribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “ProjectGutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the FullProject Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online atwww.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree toand accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by allthe terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return ordestroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in yourpossession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to aProject Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be boundby the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the personor entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only beused on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people whoagree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a fewthings that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic workseven without complying with the full terms of this agreement. Seeparagraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with ProjectGutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of thisagreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“theFoundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collectionof Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individualworks in the collection are in the public domain in the UnitedStates. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in theUnited States and you are located in the United States, we do notclaim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long asall references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hopethat you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promotingfree access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping theProject Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easilycomply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in thesame format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License whenyou share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also governwhat you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries arein a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of thisagreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or anyother Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes norepresentations concerning the copyright status of any work in anycountry other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or otherimmediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appearprominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any workon which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which thephrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work isderived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does notcontain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of thecopyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone inthe United States without paying any fees or charges. If you areredistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “ProjectGutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must complyeither with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 orobtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is postedwith the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distributionmust comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and anyadditional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional termswill be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all worksposted with the permission of the copyright holder found at thebeginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of thiswork or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute thiselectronic work, or any part of this electronic work, withoutprominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 withactive links or immediate access to the full terms of the ProjectGutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, includingany word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide accessto or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a formatother than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the officialversion posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expenseto the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a meansof obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “PlainVanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include thefull Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ worksunless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providingaccess to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic worksprovided that:

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a ProjectGutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms thanare set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writingfrom the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager ofthe Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as setforth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerableeffort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofreadworks not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the ProjectGutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, maycontain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurateor corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or otherintellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk orother medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage orcannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Rightof Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the ProjectGutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the ProjectGutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a ProjectGutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim allliability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legalfees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICTLIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSEPROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THETRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BELIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE ORINCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCHDAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover adefect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you canreceive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending awritten explanation to the person you received the work from. If youreceived the work on a physical medium, you must return the mediumwith your written explanation. The person or entity that provided youwith the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy inlieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the personor entity providing it to you may choose to give you a secondopportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. Ifthe second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writingwithout further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forthin paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NOOTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOTLIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain impliedwarranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types ofdamages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreementviolates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, theagreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer orlimitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity orunenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void theremaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, thetrademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyoneproviding copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works inaccordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with theproduction, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any ofthe following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of thisor any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, oradditions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) anyDefect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™

Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution ofelectronic works in formats readable by the widest variety ofcomputers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. Itexists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donationsfrom people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with theassistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’sgoals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection willremain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the ProjectGutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secureand permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and futuregenerations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg LiteraryArchive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, seeSections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of thestate of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the InternalRevenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identificationnumber is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg LiteraryArchive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted byU.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and upto date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s websiteand official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespreadpublic support and donations to carry out its mission ofincreasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can befreely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widestarray of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exemptstatus with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulatingcharities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the UnitedStates. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes aconsiderable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep upwith these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locationswhere we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SENDDONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular statevisit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where wehave not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibitionagainst accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states whoapproach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot makeany statements concerning tax treatment of donations received fromoutside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donationmethods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of otherways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. Todonate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the ProjectGutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could befreely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced anddistributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network ofvolunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printededitions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright inthe U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do notnecessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paperedition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG searchfacility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg LiteraryArchive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how tosubscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.