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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells
+
+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.
+
+Title: In the Days of the Comet
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: 09, 2001 [eBook #3797]
+[Most recently updated: November 14, 2020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Judy Boss
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+In the Days of the Comet
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+
+“The World’s Great Age begins anew,
+    The Golden Years return,
+The Earth doth like a Snake renew
+    Her Winter Skin outworn:
+Heaven smiles, and Faiths and Empires gleam
+Like Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream.”
+
+
+Contents
+
+ PROLOGUE
+ THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER
+
+ BOOK THE FIRST — THE COMET
+ I. DUST IN THE SHADOWS
+ II. NETTIE
+ III. THE REVOLVER
+ IV. WAR
+ V. THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS
+
+ BOOK THE SECOND — THE GREEN VAPORS
+ I. THE CHANGE
+ II. THE AWAKENING
+ III. THE CABINET COUNCIL
+
+ BOOK THE THIRD — THE NEW WORLD
+ I. LOVE AFTER THE CHANGE
+ II. MY MOTHER’S LAST DAYS
+ III. BELTANE AND NEW YEAR’S EVE
+
+ EPILOGUE
+ THE WINDOW OF THE TOWER
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER
+
+
+I saw a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and
+writing.
+
+He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the
+tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon
+of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that
+many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were
+orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small
+difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I
+could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither
+period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or
+Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry
+James’s phrase and story of “The Great Good Place,” twinkled across my
+mind, and passed and left no light.
+
+The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen, a modern touch
+that prohibited any historical retrospection, and as he finished each
+sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing pile
+upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done sheets lay
+loose, partly covering others that were clipped together into
+fascicles.
+
+Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until his
+pen should come to a pause. Old as he certainly was he wrote with a
+steady hand. . . .
+
+I discovered that a concave speculum hung slantingly high over his
+head; a movement in this caught my attention sharply, and I looked up
+to see, distorted and made fantastic but bright and beautifully
+colored, the magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a palace, of a
+terrace, of the vista of a great roadway with many people, people
+exaggerated, impossible-looking because of the curvature of the mirror,
+going to and fro. I turned my head quickly that I might see more
+clearly through the window behind me, but it was too high for me to
+survey this nearer scene directly, and after a momentary pause I came
+back to that distorting mirror again.
+
+But now the writer was leaning back in his chair. He put down his pen
+and sighed the half resentful sigh—“ah! you, work, you! how you gratify
+and tire me!”—of a man who has been writing to his satisfaction.
+
+“What is this place,” I asked, “and who are you?”
+
+He looked around with the quick movement of surprise.
+
+“What is this place?” I repeated, “and where am I?”
+
+He regarded me steadfastly for a moment under his wrinkled brows, and
+then his expression softened to a smile. He pointed to a chair beside
+the table. “I am writing,” he said.
+
+“About this?”
+
+“About the change.”
+
+I sat down. It was a very comfortable chair, and well placed under the
+light.
+
+“If you would like to read—” he said.
+
+I indicated the manuscript. “This explains?” I asked.
+
+“That explains,” he answered.
+
+He drew a fresh sheet of paper toward him as he looked at me.
+
+I glanced from him about his apartment and back to the little table. A
+fascicle marked very distinctly “1” caught my attention, and I took it
+up. I smiled in his friendly eyes. “Very well,” said I, suddenly at my
+ease, and he nodded and went on writing. And in a mood between
+confidence and curiosity, I began to read.
+
+This is the story that happy, active-looking old man in that pleasant
+place had written.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FIRST THE COMET
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST DUST IN THE SHADOWS
+
+
+§ 1
+
+I have set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far as it
+has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people closely
+connected with me, primarily to please myself.
+
+Long ago in my crude unhappy youth, I conceived the desire of writing a
+book. To scribble secretly and dream of authorship was one of my chief
+alleviations, and I read with a sympathetic envy every scrap I could
+get about the world of literature and the lives of literary people. It
+is something, even amidst this present happiness, to find leisure and
+opportunity to take up and partially realize these old and hopeless
+dreams. But that alone, in a world where so much of vivid and
+increasing interest presents itself to be done, even by an old man,
+would not, I think, suffice to set me at this desk. I find some such
+recapitulation of my past as this will involve, is becoming necessary
+to my own secure mental continuity. The passage of years brings a man
+at last to retrospection; at seventy-two one’s youth is far more
+important than it was at forty. And I am out of touch with my youth.
+The old life seems so cut off from the new, so alien and so
+unreasonable, that at times I find it bordering upon the incredible.
+The data have gone, the buildings and places. I stopped dead the other
+afternoon in my walk across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts
+of Swathinglea straggled toward Leet, and asked, “Was it here indeed
+that I crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and
+loaded my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my
+life? Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to me?
+Rather, has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland slipped a
+pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?” There must be many
+alive still who have the same perplexities. And I think too that those
+who are now growing up to take our places in the great enterprise of
+mankind, will need many such narratives as mine for even the most
+partial conception of the old world of shadows that came before our
+day. It chances too that my case is fairly typical of the Change; I was
+caught midway in a gust of passion; and a curious accident put me for a
+time in the very nucleus of the new order.
+
+My memory takes me back across the interval of fifty years to a little
+ill-lit room with a sash window open to a starry sky, and instantly
+there returns to me the characteristic smell of that room, the
+penetrating odor of an ill-trimmed lamp, burning cheap paraffin.
+Lighting by electricity had then been perfected for fifteen years, but
+still the larger portion of the world used these lamps. All this first
+scene will go, in my mind at least, to that olfactory accompaniment.
+That was the evening smell of the room. By day it had a more subtle
+aroma, a closeness, a peculiar sort of faint pungency that I
+associate—I know not why—with dust.
+
+Let me describe this room to you in detail. It was perhaps eight feet
+by seven in area and rather higher than either of these dimensions; the
+ceiling was of plaster, cracked and bulging in places, gray with the
+soot of the lamp, and in one place discolored by a system of yellow and
+olive-green stains caused by the percolation of damp from above. The
+walls were covered with dun-colored paper, upon which had been printed
+in oblique reiteration a crimson shape, something of the nature of a
+curly ostrich feather, or an acanthus flower, that had in its less
+faded moments a sort of dingy gaiety. There were several big
+plaster-rimmed wounds in this, caused by Parload’s ineffectual attempts
+to get nails into the wall, whereby there might hang pictures. One nail
+had hit between two bricks and got home, and from this depended,
+sustained a little insecurely by frayed and knotted blind-cord,
+Parload’s hanging bookshelves, planks painted over with a treacly blue
+enamel and further decorated by a fringe of pinked American cloth
+insecurely fixed by tacks. Below this was a little table that behaved
+with a mulish vindictiveness to any knee that was thrust beneath it
+suddenly; it was covered with a cloth whose pattern of red and black
+had been rendered less monotonous by the accidents of Parload’s
+versatile ink bottle, and on it, _leit motif_ of the whole, stood and
+stank the lamp. This lamp, you must understand, was of some whitish
+translucent substance that was neither china nor glass, it had a shade
+of the same substance, a shade that did not protect the eyes of a
+reader in any measure, and it seemed admirably adapted to bring into
+pitiless prominence the fact that, after the lamp’s trimming, dust and
+paraffin had been smeared over its exterior with a reckless generosity.
+
+The uneven floor boards of this apartment were covered with scratched
+enamel of chocolate hue, on which a small island of frayed carpet dimly
+blossomed in the dust and shadows.
+
+There was a very small grate, made of cast-iron in one piece and
+painted buff, and a still smaller misfit of a cast-iron fender that
+confessed the gray stone of the hearth. No fire was laid, only a few
+scraps of torn paper and the bowl of a broken corn-cob pipe were
+visible behind the bars, and in the corner and rather thrust away was
+an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge. It was the custom in
+those days to warm every room separately from a separate fireplace,
+more prolific of dirt than heat, and the rickety sash window, the small
+chimney, and the loose-fitting door were expected to organize the
+ventilation of the room among themselves without any further direction.
+
+Parload’s truckle bed hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchwork
+counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlike
+oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were an old
+whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed the simple
+appliances of his toilet.
+
+This washhandstand had been made of deal by some one with an excess of
+turnery appliances in a hurry, who had tried to distract attention from
+the rough economies of his workmanship by an arresting ornamentation of
+blobs and bulbs upon the joints and legs. Apparently the piece had then
+been placed in the hands of some person of infinite leisure equipped
+with a pot of ocherous paint, varnish, and a set of flexible combs.
+This person had first painted the article, then, I fancy, smeared it
+with varnish, and then sat down to work with the combs to streak and
+comb the varnish into a weird imitation of the grain of some nightmare
+timber. The washhandstand so made had evidently had a prolonged career
+of violent use, had been chipped, kicked, splintered, punched, stained,
+scorched, hammered, desiccated, damped, and defiled, had met indeed
+with almost every possible adventure except a conflagration or a
+scrubbing, until at last it had come to this high refuge of Parload’s
+attic to sustain the simple requirements of Parload’s personal
+cleanliness. There were, in chief, a basin and a jug of water and a
+slop-pail of tin, and, further, a piece of yellow soap in a tray, a
+tooth-brush, a rat-tailed shaving brush, one huckaback towel, and one
+or two other minor articles. In those days only very prosperous people
+had more than such an equipage, and it is to be remarked that every
+drop of water Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servant
+girl,—the “slavey,” Parload called her—up from the basement to the top
+of the house and subsequently down again. Already we begin to forget
+how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a fact that
+Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never had a
+simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. Not one in
+fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you.
+
+A chest, also singularly grained and streaked, of two large and two
+small drawers, held Parload’s reserve of garments, and pegs on the door
+carried his two hats and completed this inventory of a
+“bed-sitting-room” as I knew it before the Change. But I had
+forgotten—there was also a chair with a “squab” that apologized
+inadequately for the defects of its cane seat. I forgot that for the
+moment because I was sitting on the chair on the occasion that best
+begins this story.
+
+I have described Parload’s room with such particularity because it will
+help you to understand the key in which my earlier chapters are
+written, but you must not imagine that this singular equipment or the
+smell of the lamp engaged my attention at that time to the slightest
+degree. I took all this grimy unpleasantness as if it were the most
+natural and proper setting for existence imaginable. It was the world
+as I knew it. My mind was entirely occupied then by graver and intenser
+matters, and it is only now in the distant retrospect that I see these
+details of environment as being remarkable, as significant, as indeed
+obviously the outward visible manifestations of the old world disorder
+in our hearts.
+
+§ 2
+
+Parload stood at the open window, opera-glass in hand, and sought and
+found and was uncertain about and lost again, the new comet.
+
+I thought the comet no more than a nuisance then because I wanted to
+talk of other matters. But Parload was full of it. My head was hot, I
+was feverish with interlacing annoyances and bitterness, I wanted to
+open my heart to him—at least I wanted to relieve my heart by some
+romantic rendering of my troubles—and I gave but little heed to the
+things he told me. It was the first time I had heard of this new speck
+among the countless specks of heaven, and I did not care if I never
+heard of the thing again.
+
+We were two youths much of an age together, Parload was two and twenty,
+and eight months older than I. He was—I think his proper definition was
+“engrossing clerk” to a little solicitor in Overcastle, while I was
+third in the office staff of Rawdon’s pot-bank in Clayton. We had met
+first in the “Parliament” of the Young Men’s Christian Association of
+Swathinglea; we had found we attended simultaneous classes in
+Overcastle, he in science and I in shorthand, and had started a
+practice of walking home together, and so our friendship came into
+being. (Swathinglea, Clayton, and Overcastle were contiguous towns, I
+should mention, in the great industrial area of the Midlands.) We had
+shared each other’s secret of religious doubt, we had confided to one
+another a common interest in Socialism, he had come twice to supper at
+my mother’s on a Sunday night, and I was free of his apartment. He was
+then a tall, flaxen-haired, gawky youth, with a disproportionate
+development of neck and wrist, and capable of vast enthusiasm; he gave
+two evenings a week to the evening classes of the organized science
+school in Overcastle, physiography was his favorite “subject,” and
+through this insidious opening of his mind the wonder of outer space
+had come to take possession of his soul. He had commandeered an old
+opera-glass from his uncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had
+bought a cheap paper planisphere and _Whitaker’s Almanac_, and for a
+time day and moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one
+satisfactory reality in his life—star-gazing. It was the deeps that had
+seized him, the immensities, and the mysterious possibilities that
+might float unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor and the
+help of a very precise article in _The Heavens_, a little monthly
+magazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, he had
+at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our system from
+outer space. He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quivering little
+smudge of light among the shining pin-points—and gazed. My troubles had
+to wait for him.
+
+“Wonderful,” he sighed, and then as though his first emphasis did not
+satisfy him, “wonderful!”
+
+He turned to me. “Wouldn’t you like to see?”
+
+I had to look, and then I had to listen, how that this scarce-visible
+intruder was to be, was presently to be, one of the largest comets this
+world has ever seen, how that its course must bring it within at
+most—so many score of millions of miles from the earth, a mere step,
+Parload seemed to think that; how that the spectroscope was already
+sounding its chemical secrets, perplexed by the unprecedented band in
+the green, how it was even now being photographed in the very act of
+unwinding—in an unusual direction—a sunward tail (which presently it
+wound up again), and all the while in a sort of undertow I was thinking
+first of Nettie Stuart and the letter she had just written me, and then
+of old Rawdon’s detestable face as I had seen it that afternoon. Now I
+planned answers to Nettie and now belated repartees to my employer, and
+then again “Nettie” was blazing all across the background of my
+thoughts. . . .
+
+Nettie Stuart was daughter of the head gardener of the rich Mr.
+Verrall’s widow, and she and I had kissed and become sweethearts before
+we were eighteen years old. My mother and hers were second cousins and
+old schoolfellows, and though my mother had been widowed untimely by a
+train accident, and had been reduced to letting lodgings (she was the
+Clayton curate’s landlady), a position esteemed much lower than that of
+Mrs. Stuart, a kindly custom of occasional visits to the gardener’s
+cottage at Checkshill Towers still kept the friends in touch. Commonly
+I went with her. And I remember it was in the dusk of one bright
+evening in July, one of those long golden evenings that do not so much
+give way to night as admit at last, upon courtesy, the moon and a
+choice retinue of stars, that Nettie and I, at the pond of goldfish
+where the yew-bordered walks converged, made our shy beginners’ vow. I
+remember still—something will always stir in me at that memory—the
+tremulous emotion of that adventure. Nettie was dressed in white, her
+hair went off in waves of soft darkness from above her dark shining
+eyes; there was a little necklace of pearls about her sweetly modeled
+neck, and a little coin of gold that nestled in her throat. I kissed
+her half-reluctant lips, and for three years of my life thereafter—nay!
+I almost think for all the rest of her life and mine—I could have died
+for her sake.
+
+You must understand—and every year it becomes increasingly difficult to
+understand—how entirely different the world was then from what it is
+now. It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder,
+preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid
+unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the
+general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent beauty
+that seem no longer possible in my experience. The great Change has
+come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is
+peace on earth and good will to all men. None would dare to dream of
+returning to the sorrows of the former time, and yet that misery was
+pierced, ever and again its gray curtain was stabbed through and
+through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions of a keenness that it
+seems to me are now altogether gone out of life. Is it the Change, I
+wonder, that has robbed life of its extremes, or is it perhaps only
+this, that youth has left me—even the strength of middle years leaves
+me now—and taken its despairs and raptures, leaving me judgment,
+perhaps, sympathy, memories?
+
+I cannot tell. One would need to be young now and to have been young
+then as well, to decide that impossible problem.
+
+Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found little
+beauty in our grouping. I have our two photographs at hand in this
+bureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fitting
+ready-made clothing, and Nettie—Indeed Nettie is badly dressed, and her
+attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see her through the
+picture, and her living brightness and something of that mystery of
+charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind. Her face has
+triumphed over the photographer—or I would long ago have cast this
+picture away.
+
+The reality of beauty yields itself to no words. I wish that I had the
+sister art and could draw in my margin something that escapes
+description. There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There was
+something, a matter of the minutest difference, about her upper lip so
+that her mouth closed sweetly and broke very sweetly to a smile. That
+grave, sweet smile!
+
+After we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents for awhile of
+the irrevocable choice we had made, the time came for us to part, shyly
+and before others, and I and my mother went off back across the moonlit
+park—the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer—to the railway
+station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement in Clayton, and I
+saw no more of Nettie—except that I saw her in my thoughts—for nearly a
+year. But at our next meeting it was decided that we must correspond,
+and this we did with much elaboration of secrecy, for Nettie would have
+no one at home, not even her only sister, know of her attachment. So I
+had to send my precious documents sealed and under cover by way of a
+confidential schoolfellow of hers who lived near London. . . . I could
+write that address down now, though house and street and suburb have
+gone beyond any man’s tracing.
+
+Our correspondence began our estrangement, because for the first time
+we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds sought
+expression.
+
+Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was in
+the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate
+formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary
+contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and
+subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man’s lips. I
+was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrow faith in
+certain religious formulae, certain rules of conduct, certain
+conceptions of social and political order, that had no more relevance
+to the realities and needs of everyday contemporary life than if they
+were clean linen that had been put away with lavender in a drawer.
+Indeed, her religion did actually smell of lavender; on Sundays she put
+away all the things of reality, the garments and even the furnishings
+of everyday, hid her hands, that were gnarled and sometimes chapped
+with scrubbing, in black, carefully mended gloves, assumed her old
+black silk dress and bonnet and took me, unnaturally clean and sweet
+also, to church. There we sang and bowed and heard sonorous prayers and
+joined in sonorous responses, and rose with a congregational sigh
+refreshed and relieved when the doxology, with its opening “Now to God
+the Father, God the Son,” bowed out the tame, brief sermon. There was a
+hell in that religion of my mother’s, a red-haired hell of curly flames
+that had once been very terrible; there was a devil, who was also _ex
+officio_ the British King’s enemy, and much denunciation of the wicked
+lusts of the flesh; we were expected to believe that most of our poor
+unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here by suffering
+exquisite torments for ever after, world without end, Amen. But indeed
+those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had been
+mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long before my time; if it
+had much terror even in my childhood I have forgotten it, it was not so
+terrible as the giant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it all
+now as a setting for my poor old mother’s worn and grimy face, and
+almost lovingly as a part of her. And Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little
+lodger, strangely transformed in his vestments and lifting his voice
+manfully to the quality of those Elizabethan prayers, seemed, I think,
+to give her a special and peculiar interest with God. She radiated her
+own tremulous gentleness upon Him, and redeemed Him from all the
+implications of vindictive theologians; she was in truth, had I but
+perceived it, the effectual answer to all she would have taught me.
+
+So I see it now, but there is something harsh in the earnest intensity
+of youth, and having at first taken all these things quite seriously,
+the fiery hell and God’s vindictiveness at any neglect, as though they
+were as much a matter of fact as Bladden’s iron-works and Rawdon’s
+pot-bank, I presently with an equal seriousness flung them out of my
+mind again.
+
+Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, “take notice”
+of me, he had induced me to go on reading after I left school, and with
+the best intentions in the world and to anticipate the poison of the
+times, he had lent me Burble’s “Scepticism Answered,” and drawn my
+attention to the library of the Institute in Clayton.
+
+The excellent Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear from his
+answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all
+that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had hitherto
+accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor one, and to
+hammer home that idea the first book I got from the Institute happened
+to be an American edition of the collected works of Shelley, his gassy
+prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was soon ripe for blatant
+unbelief. And at the Young Men’s Christian Association I presently made
+the acquaintance of Parload, who told me, under promises of the most
+sinister secrecy, that he was “a Socialist out and out.” He lent me
+several copies of a periodical with the clamant title of _The Clarion_,
+which was just taking up a crusade against the accepted religion. The
+adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will
+always lie healthily open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of
+scorns and new ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase
+badly. Doubt, I say, but it was not so much doubt—which is a complex
+thing—as startled emphatic denial. “Have I believed _this!_” And I was
+also, you must remember, just beginning love-letters to Nettie.
+
+We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most
+things accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a
+sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from
+our vigor, and it is hard to understand the stifled and struggling
+manner in which my generation of common young men did its thinking. To
+think at all about certain questions was an act of rebellion that set
+one oscillating between the furtive and the defiant. People begin to
+find Shelley—for all his melody—noisy and ill conditioned now because
+his Anarchs have vanished, yet there was a time when novel thought HAD
+to go to that tune of breaking glass. It becomes a little difficult to
+imagine the yeasty state of mind, the disposition to shout and say,
+“Yah!” at constituted authority, to sustain a persistent note of
+provocation such as we raw youngsters displayed. I began to read with
+avidity such writing as Carlyle, Browning, and Heine have left for the
+perplexity of posterity, and not only to read and admire but to
+imitate. My letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended
+displays of perfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology,
+and the cosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they
+puzzled her extremely.
+
+I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to envy
+for my own departed youth, but I should find it difficult to maintain
+my case against any one who would condemn me altogether as having been
+a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy indeed and quite like my
+faded photograph. And when I try to recall what exactly must have been
+the quality and tenor of my more sustained efforts to write memorably
+to my sweetheart, I confess I shiver. . . Yet I wish they were not all
+destroyed.
+
+Her letters to me were simple enough, written in a roundish, unformed
+hand and badly phrased. Her first two or three showed a shy pleasure in
+the use of the word “dear,” and I remember being first puzzled and
+then, when I understood, delighted, because she had written “Willie
+_asthore_” under my name. “Asthore,” I gathered, meant “darling.” But
+when the evidences of my fermentation began, her answers were less
+happy.
+
+I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled in our silly
+youthful way, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited, to
+Checkshill, and made it worse, and how afterward I wrote a letter that
+she thought was “lovely,” and mended the matter. Nor will I tell of all
+our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding. Always I was the
+offender and the final penitent until this last trouble that was now
+beginning; and in between we had some tender near moments, and I loved
+her very greatly. There was this misfortune in the business, that in
+the darkness, and alone, I thought with great intensity of her, of her
+eyes, of her touch, of her sweet and delightful presence, but when I
+sat down to write I thought of Shelley and Burns and myself, and other
+such irrelevant matters. When one is in love, in this fermenting way,
+it is harder to make love than it is when one does not love at all. And
+as for Nettie, she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries. It
+was not my voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . . So our letters
+continued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether she
+could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not believe in
+Church, and then hard upon it came another note with unexpected
+novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suited to each other, we
+differed so in tastes and ideas, she had long thought of releasing me
+from our engagement. In fact, though I really did not apprehend it
+fully at the first shock, I was dismissed. Her letter had reached me
+when I came home after old Rawdon’s none too civil refusal to raise my
+wages. On this particular evening of which I write, therefore, I was in
+a state of feverish adjustment to two new and amazing, two nearly
+overwhelming facts, that I was neither indispensable to Nettie nor at
+Rawdon’s. And to talk of comets!
+
+Where did I stand?
+
+I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably mine—the
+whole tradition of “true love” pointed me to that—that for her to face
+about with these precise small phrases toward abandonment, after we had
+kissed and whispered and come so close in the little adventurous
+familiarities of the young, shocked me profoundly. I! I! And Rawdon
+didn’t find me indispensable either. I felt I was suddenly repudiated
+by the universe and threatened with effacement, that in some positive
+and emphatic way I must at once assert myself. There was no balm in the
+religion I had learnt, or in the irreligion I had adopted, for wounded
+self-love.
+
+Should I fling up Rawdon’s place at once and then in some
+extraordinary, swift manner make the fortune of Frobisher’s adjacent
+and closely competitive pot-bank?
+
+The first part of that program, at any rate, would be easy of
+accomplishment, to go to Rawdon and say, “You will hear from me again,”
+but for the rest, Frobisher might fail me. That, however, was a
+secondary issue. The predominant affair was with Nettie. I found my
+mind thick-shot with flying fragments of rhetoric that might be of
+service in the letter I would write her. Scorn, irony, tenderness—what
+was it to be?
+
+“Brother!” said Parload, suddenly.
+
+“What?” said I.
+
+“They’re firing up at Bladden’s iron-works, and the smoke comes right
+across my bit of sky.”
+
+The interruption came just as I was ripe to discharge my thoughts upon
+him.
+
+“Parload,” said I, “very likely I shall have to leave all this. Old
+Rawdon won’t give me a rise in my wages, and after having asked I don’t
+think I can stand going on upon the old terms anymore. See? So I may
+have to clear out of Clayton for good and all.”
+
+§ 3
+
+That made Parload put down the opera-glass and look at me.
+
+“It’s a bad time to change just now,” he said after a little pause.
+
+Rawdon had said as much, in a less agreeable tone.
+
+But with Parload I felt always a disposition to the heroic note. “I’m
+tired,” I said, “of humdrum drudgery for other men. One may as well
+starve one’s body out of a place as to starve one’s soul in one.”
+
+“I don’t know about that altogether,” began Parload, slowly. . . .
+
+And with that we began one of our interminable conversations, one of
+those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal talks
+that will be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths until the world
+comes to an end. The Change has not abolished that, anyhow.
+
+It would be an incredible feat of memory for me now to recall all that
+meandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it, though
+its circumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clear picture in
+my mind. I posed after my manner and behaved very foolishly no doubt, a
+wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his part of the
+philosopher preoccupied with the deeps.
+
+We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer’s night and
+talking all the more freely for that. But one thing that I said I can
+remember. “I wish at times,” said I, with a gesture at the heavens,
+“that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this
+world—and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults, loves, jealousies,
+and all the wretchedness of life!”
+
+“Ah!” said Parload, and the thought seemed to hang about him.
+
+“It could only add to the miseries of life,” he said irrelevantly, when
+presently I was discoursing of other things.
+
+“What would?”
+
+“Collision with a comet. It would only throw things back. It would only
+make what was left of life more savage than it is at present.”
+
+“But why should _anything_ be left of life?” said I. . . .
+
+That was our style, you know, and meanwhile we walked together up the
+narrow street outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanes toward
+Clayton Crest and the high road.
+
+But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days before the
+Change that I forget that now all these places have been altered beyond
+recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway and the view from
+Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world in which I was born and bred
+and made, has vanished clean away, out of space and out of time, and
+wellnigh out of the imagination of all those who are younger by a
+generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see, the dark empty way
+between the mean houses, the dark empty way lit by a bleary gas-lamp at
+the corner, you cannot feel the hard checkered pavement under your
+boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit windows here and there, and the
+shadows upon the ugly and often patched and crooked blinds of the
+people cooped within. Nor can you presently pass the beerhouse with its
+brighter gas and its queer, screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul
+air and foul language from its door, nor see the crumpled furtive
+figure—some rascal child—that slinks past us down the steps.
+
+We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting
+smoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one saw the
+greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares of hawkers’
+barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement of people swayed
+along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerant preacher from a
+waste place between the houses. You cannot see these things as I can
+see them, nor can you figure—unless you know the pictures that great
+artist Hyde has left the world—the effect of the great hoarding by
+which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp and towering up to a sudden
+sharp black edge against the pallid sky.
+
+Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in all that
+vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and paper, all
+the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromatic discord; pill
+vendors and preachers, theaters and charities, marvelous soaps and
+astonishing pickles, typewriting machines and sewing machines, mingled
+in a sort of visualized clamor. And passing that there was a muddy lane
+of cinders, a lane without a light, that used its many puddles to
+borrow a star or so from the sky. We splashed along unheeding as we
+talked.
+
+Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-looking
+sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road. The
+high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse or so,
+and round until all the valley in which four industrial towns lay
+crowded and confluent was overlooked.
+
+I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird
+magnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The
+horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were
+homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of
+unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave and
+wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where the iron
+ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the blast furnaces
+were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust from foundry,
+pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated by the night. The
+dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression through the day became
+at sundown a mystery of deep translucent colors, of blues and purples,
+of somber and vivid reds, of strange bright clearnesses of green and
+yellow athwart the darkling sky. Each upstart furnace, when its monarch
+sun had gone, crowned itself with flames, the dark cinder heaps began
+to glow with quivering fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in
+a volcanic coronet of light. The empire of the day broke into a
+thousand feudal baronies of burning coal. The minor streets across the
+valley picked themselves out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that
+brightened and mingled at all the principal squares and crossings with
+the greenish pallor of incandescent mantles and the high cold glare of
+the electric arc. The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes
+over their intersections, and signal stars of red and green in
+rectangular constellations. The trains became articulated black
+serpents breathing fire.
+
+Moreover, high overhead, like a thing put out of reach and near
+forgotten, Parload had rediscovered a realm that was ruled by neither
+sun nor furnace, the universe of stars.
+
+This was the scene of many a talk we two had held together. And if in
+the daytime we went right over the crest and looked westward there was
+farmland, there were parks and great mansions, the spire of a distant
+cathedral, and sometimes when the weather was near raining, the crests
+of remote mountains hung clearly in the sky. Beyond the range of sight
+indeed, out beyond, there was Checkshill; I felt it there always, and
+in the darkness more than I did by day. Checkshill, and Nettie!
+
+And to us two youngsters as we walked along the cinder path beside the
+rutted road and argued out our perplexities, it seemed that this ridge
+gave us compendiously a view of our whole world.
+
+There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factories
+and work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, ill
+nourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasion
+in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from day to
+day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidst
+their wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption, and
+on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heeding the few
+cottages, as overcrowded as they were picturesque, in which the
+laborers festered, lived the landlords and masters who owned pot-banks
+and forge and farm and mine. Far away, distant, beautiful, irrelevant,
+from out of a little cluster of secondhand bookshops, ecclesiastical
+residences, and the inns and incidentals of a decaying market town, the
+cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful, unemphatic spire to vague
+incredible skies. So it seemed to us that the whole world was planned
+in those youthful first impressions.
+
+We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry,
+confident solutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of
+the robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there
+in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with his
+scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others were all
+the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt they winked and
+chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling, wickedly dressed
+women, and plotted further grinding for the faces of the poor. And
+amidst all the squalor on the other hand, amidst brutalities,
+ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously their blameless
+victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at the first glance, had found
+all this out, it had merely to be asserted now with sufficient rhetoric
+and vehemence to change the face of the whole world. The Working Man
+would arise—in the form of a Labor Party, and with young men like
+Parload and myself to represent him—and come to his own, and then———?
+
+Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremely
+satisfactory.
+
+Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injustice to the
+creed of thought and action that Parload and I held as the final result
+of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejected with heat the
+most obvious qualification of its harshness. At times in our great
+talks we were full of heady hopes for the near triumph of our doctrine,
+more often our mood was hot resentment at the wickedness and stupidity
+that delayed so plain and simple a reconstruction of the order of the
+world. Then we grew malignant, and thought of barricades and
+significant violence. I was very bitter, I know, upon this night of
+which I am now particularly telling, and the only face upon the hydra
+of Capitalism and Monopoly that I could see at all clearly, smiled
+exactly as old Rawdon had smiled when he refused to give me more than a
+paltry twenty shillings a week.
+
+I wanted intensely to salve my self-respect by some revenge upon him,
+and I felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, I might
+drag its carcass to the feet of Nettie, and settle my other trouble as
+well. “What do you think of me _now_, Nettie?”
+
+That at any rate comes near enough to the quality of my thinking, then,
+for you to imagine how I gesticulated and spouted to Parload that
+night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing in the
+outline, set in the midst of that desolating night of flaming
+industrialism, and my little voice with a rhetorical twang protesting,
+denouncing. . . .
+
+You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent stuff;
+particularly if you are of the younger generation born since the Change
+you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world thinks clearly,
+thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, you find it impossible
+to imagine how any other thinking could have been possible. Let me tell
+you then how you can bring yourself to something like the condition of
+our former state. In the first place you must get yourself out of
+health by unwise drinking and eating, and out of condition by
+neglecting your exercise, then you must contrive to be worried very
+much and made very anxious and uncomfortable, and then you must work
+very hard for four or five days and for long hours every day at
+something too petty to be interesting, too complex to be mechanical,
+and without any personal significance to you whatever. This done, get
+straightway into a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is
+already full of foul air, and there set yourself to think out some very
+complicated problem. In a very little while you will find yourself in a
+state of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the
+obvious presently in choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try
+to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly and lose
+your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper and you
+will fail.
+
+Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as
+that, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that
+would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it was
+in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing; there
+was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There was nothing in
+the mind of the world anywhere but half-truths, hasty assumptions,
+hallucinations, and emotions. Nothing. . . .
+
+I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men are
+beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has undergone,
+but read—read the newspapers of that time. Every age becomes mitigated
+and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes into the past. It is
+the part of those who like myself have stories of that time to tell, to
+supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism, some antidote to that
+glamour.
+
+§ 4
+
+Always with Parload I was chief talker.
+
+I can look back upon myself with, I believe, an almost perfect
+detachment, things have so changed that indeed now I am another being,
+with scarce anything in common with that boastful foolish youngster
+whose troubles I recall. I see him vulgarly theatrical, egotistical,
+insincere, indeed I do not like him save with that instinctive material
+sympathy that is the fruit of incessant intimacy. Because he was myself
+I may be able to feel and write understandingly about motives that will
+put him out of sympathy with nearly every reader, but why should I
+palliate or defend his quality?
+
+Always, I say, I did the talking, and it would have amazed me beyond
+measure if any one had told me that mine was not the greater
+intelligence in these wordy encounters. Parload was a quiet youth, and
+stiff and restrained in all things, while I had that supreme gift for
+young men and democracies, the gift of copious expression. Parload I
+diagnosed in my secret heart as a trifle dull; he posed as pregnant
+quiet, I thought, and was obsessed by the congenial notion of
+“scientific caution.” I did not remark that while my hands were chiefly
+useful for gesticulation or holding a pen Parload’s hands could do all
+sorts of things, and I did not think therefore that fibers must run
+from those fingers to something in his brain. Nor, though I bragged
+perpetually of my shorthand, of my literature, of my indispensable
+share in Rawdon’s business, did Parload lay stress on the conics and
+calculus he “mugged” in the organized science school. Parload is a
+famous man now, a great figure in a great time, his work upon
+intersecting radiations has broadened the intellectual horizon of
+mankind for ever, and I, who am at best a hewer of intellectual wood, a
+drawer of living water, can smile, and he can smile, to think how I
+patronized and posed and jabbered over him in the darkness of those
+early days.
+
+That night I was shrill and eloquent beyond measure. Rawdon was, of
+course, the hub upon which I went round—Rawdon and the Rawdonesque
+employer and the injustice of “wages slavery” and all the immediate
+conditions of that industrial blind alley up which it seemed our lives
+were thrust. But ever and again I glanced at other things. Nettie was
+always there in the background of my mind, regarding me enigmatically.
+It was part of my pose to Parload that I had a romantic love-affair
+somewhere away beyond the sphere of our intercourse, and that note gave
+a Byronic resonance to many of the nonsensical things I produced for
+his astonishment.
+
+I will not weary you with too detailed an account of the talk of a
+foolish youth who was also distressed and unhappy, and whose voice was
+balm for the humiliations that smarted in his eyes. Indeed, now in many
+particulars I cannot disentangle this harangue of which I tell from
+many of the things I may have said in other talks to Parload. For
+example, I forget if it was then or before or afterwards that, as it
+were by accident, I let out what might be taken as an admission that I
+was addicted to drugs.
+
+“You shouldn’t do that,” said Parload, suddenly. “It won’t do to poison
+your brains with that.”
+
+My brains, my eloquence, were to be very important assets to our party
+in the coming revolution. . . .
+
+But one thing does clearly belong to this particular conversation I am
+recalling. When I started out it was quite settled in the back of my
+mind that I must not leave Rawdon’s. I simply wanted to abuse my
+employer to Parload. But I talked myself quite out of touch with all
+the cogent reasons there were for sticking to my place, and I got home
+that night irrevocably committed to a spirited—not to say a
+defiant—policy with my employer.
+
+“I can’t stand Rawdon’s much longer,” I said to Parload by way of a
+flourish.
+
+“There’s hard times coming,” said Parload.
+
+“Next winter.”
+
+“Sooner. The Americans have been overproducing, and they mean to dump.
+The iron trade is going to have convulsions.”
+
+“I don’t care. Pot-banks are steady.”
+
+“With a corner in borax? No. I’ve heard—”
+
+“What have you heard?”
+
+“Office secrets. But it’s no secret there’s trouble coming to potters.
+There’s been borrowing and speculation. The masters don’t stick to one
+business as they used to do. I can tell that much. Half the valley may
+be ‘playing’ before two months are out.” Parload delivered himself of
+this unusually long speech in his most pithy and weighty manner.
+
+“Playing” was our local euphemism for a time when there was no work and
+no money for a man, a time of stagnation and dreary hungry loafing day
+after day. Such interludes seemed in those days a necessary consequence
+of industrial organization.
+
+“You’d better stick to Rawdon’s,” said Parload.
+
+“Ugh,” said I, affecting a noble disgust.
+
+“There’ll be trouble,” said Parload.
+
+“Who cares?” said I. “Let there be trouble—the more the better. This
+system has got to end, sooner or later. These capitalists with their
+speculation and corners and trusts make things go from bad to worse.
+Why should I cower in Rawdon’s office, like a frightened dog, while
+hunger walks the streets? Hunger is the master revolutionary. When he
+comes we ought to turn out and salute him. Anyway, _I’m_ going to do so
+now.”
+
+“That’s all very well,” began Parload.
+
+“I’m tired of it,” I said. “I want to come to grips with all these
+Rawdons. I think perhaps if I was hungry and savage I could talk to
+hungry men—”
+
+“There’s your mother,” said Parload, in his slow judicial way.
+
+That _was_ a difficulty.
+
+I got over it by a rhetorical turn. “Why should one sacrifice the
+future of the world—why should one even sacrifice one’s own
+future—because one’s mother is totally destitute of imagination?”
+
+§ 5
+
+It was late when I parted from Parload and came back to my own home.
+
+Our house stood in a highly respectable little square near the Clayton
+parish church. Mr. Gabbitas, the curate of all work, lodged on our
+ground floor, and upstairs there was an old lady, Miss Holroyd, who
+painted flowers on china and maintained her blind sister in an adjacent
+room; my mother and I lived in the basement and slept in the attics.
+The front of the house was veiled by a Virginian creeper that defied
+the Clayton air and clustered in untidy dependent masses over the
+wooden porch.
+
+As I came up the steps I had a glimpse of Mr. Gabbitas printing
+photographs by candle light in his room. It was the chief delight of
+his little life to spend his holiday abroad in the company of a queer
+little snap-shot camera, and to return with a great multitude of foggy
+and sinister negatives that he had made in beautiful and interesting
+places. These the camera company would develop for him on advantageous
+terms, and he would spend his evenings the year through in printing
+from them in order to inflict copies upon his undeserving friends.
+There was a long frameful of his work in the Clayton National School,
+for example, inscribed in old English lettering, “Italian Travel
+Pictures, by the Rev. E. B. Gabbitas.” For this it seemed he lived and
+traveled and had his being. It was his only real joy. By his shaded
+light I could see his sharp little nose, his little pale eyes behind
+his glasses, his mouth pursed up with the endeavor of his employment.
+
+“Hireling Liar,” I muttered, for was not he also part of the system,
+part of the scheme of robbery that made wages serfs of Parload and
+me?—though his share in the proceedings was certainly small.
+
+“Hireling Liar,” said I, standing in the darkness, outside even his
+faint glow of traveled culture. . .
+
+My mother let me in.
+
+She looked at me, mutely, because she knew there was something wrong
+and that it was no use for her to ask what.
+
+“Good night, mummy,” said I, and kissed her a little roughly, and lit
+and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase to bed, not
+looking back at her.
+
+“I’ve kept some supper for you, dear.”
+
+“Don’t want any supper.”
+
+“But, dearie———”
+
+“Good night, mother,” and I went up and slammed my door upon her, blew
+out my candle, and lay down at once upon my bed, lay there a long time
+before I got up to undress.
+
+There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother’s face
+irritated me unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had to
+struggle against it, that I could not exist if I gave way to its
+pleadings, and it hurt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyond
+endurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myself
+religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questions of
+expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me at
+all—and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion, her
+only social ideas were blind submissions to the accepted order—to laws,
+to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all respectable persons
+in authority over us, and with her to believe was to fear. She knew
+from a thousand little signs—though still at times I went to church
+with her—that I was passing out of touch of all these things that ruled
+her life, into some terrible unknown. From things I said she could
+infer such clumsy concealments as I made. She felt my socialism, felt
+my spirit in revolt against the accepted order, felt the impotent
+resentments that filled me with bitterness against all she held sacred.
+Yet, you know, it was not her dear gods she sought to defend so much as
+me! She seemed always to be wanting to say to me, “Dear, I know it’s
+hard—but revolt is harder. Don’t make war on it, dear—don’t! Don’t do
+anything to offend it. I’m sure it will hurt you if you do—it will hurt
+you if you do.”
+
+She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time had
+been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing order
+dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It had bent her,
+aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-five she peered
+through cheap spectacles at my face, and saw it only dimly, filled her
+with a habit of anxiety, made her hands——— Her poor dear hands! Not in
+the whole world now could you find a woman with hands so grimy, so
+needle-worn, so misshapen by toil, so chapped and coarsened, so evilly
+entreated. . . . At any rate, there is this I can say for myself, that
+my bitterness against the world and fortune was for her sake as well as
+for my own.
+
+Yet that night I pushed by her harshly. I answered her curtly, left her
+concerned and perplexed in the passage, and slammed my door upon her.
+
+And for a long time I lay raging at the hardship and evil of life, at
+the contempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie’s letter,
+at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I found intolerable,
+and the things I could not mend. Over and over went my poor little
+brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmill of troubles.
+Nettie. Rawdon. My mother. Gabbitas. Nettie. . .
+
+Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion. Some clock was striking
+midnight. After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions. I
+remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very quickly
+in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again before I was
+asleep.
+
+But how my mother slept that night I do not know.
+
+Oddly enough, I do not blame myself for behaving like this to my
+mother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to
+Parload. I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of the
+Change, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a little
+painful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something of the
+sort was to be escaped under those former conditions. In that time of
+muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and toil and hot
+passions before they had the chance of even a year or so of clear
+thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous application to
+some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of thought ceased in
+them. They set and hardened into narrow ways. Few women remained
+capable of a new idea after five and twenty, few men after thirty-one
+or two. Discontent with the thing that existed was regarded as immoral,
+it was certainly an annoyance, and the only protest against it, the
+only effort against that universal tendency in all human institutions
+to thicken and clog, to work loosely and badly, to rust and weaken
+towards catastrophes, came from the young—the crude unmerciful young.
+It seemed in those days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being—that
+either we must submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them,
+disobey them, thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress
+before we too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.
+
+My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own silent
+meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard
+relationship between parents and son in those days. There appeared no
+other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed, part of
+the very nature of the progress of the world. We did not think then
+that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, or children honor
+their parents and still think for themselves. We were angry and hasty
+because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisoned and vitiated air.
+That deliberate animation of the intelligence which is now the
+universal quality, that vigor with consideration, that judgment with
+confident enterprise which shine through all our world, were things
+disintegrated and unknown in the corrupting atmosphere of our former
+state.
+
+(So the first fascicle ended. I put it aside and looked for the second.
+
+“Well?” said the man who wrote.
+
+“This is fiction?”
+
+“It’s my story.”
+
+“But you— Amidst this beauty— You are not this ill-conditioned,
+squalidly bred lad of whom I have been reading?”
+
+He smiled. “There intervenes a certain Change,” he said. “Have I not
+hinted at that?”
+
+I hesitated upon a question, then saw the second fascicle at hand, and
+picked it up.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+NETTIE
+
+
+§ 1
+
+I cannot now remember (_the story resumed_), what interval separated
+that evening on which Parload first showed me the comet—I think I only
+pretended to see it then—and the Sunday afternoon I spent at
+Checkshill.
+
+Between the two there was time enough for me to give notice and leave
+Rawdon’s, to seek for some other situation very strenuously in vain, to
+think and say many hard and violent things to my mother and to Parload,
+and to pass through some phases of very profound wretchedness. There
+must have been a passionate correspondence with Nettie, but all the
+froth and fury of that has faded now out of my memory. All I have clear
+now is that I wrote one magnificent farewell to her, casting her off
+forever, and that I got in reply a prim little note to say, that even
+if there was to be an end to everything, that was no excuse for writing
+such things as I had done, and then I think I wrote again in a vein I
+considered satirical. To that she did not reply. That interval was at
+least three weeks, and probably four, because the comet which had been
+on the first occasion only a dubious speck in the sky, certainly
+visible only when it was magnified, was now a great white presence,
+brighter than Jupiter, and casting a shadow on its own account. It was
+now actively present in the world of human thought, every one was
+talking about it, every one was looking for its waxing splendor as the
+sun went down—the papers, the music-halls, the hoardings, echoed it.
+
+Yes; the comet was already dominant before I went over to make
+everything clear to Nettie. And Parload had spent two hoarded pounds in
+buying himself a spectroscope, so that he could see for himself, night
+after night, that mysterious, that stimulating line—the unknown line in
+the green. How many times I wonder did I look at the smudgy, quivering
+symbol of the unknown things that were rushing upon us out of the
+inhuman void, before I rebelled? But at last I could stand it no
+longer, and I reproached Parload very bitterly for wasting his time in
+“astronomical dilettantism.”
+
+“Here,” said I. “We’re on the verge of the biggest lock-out in the
+history of this countryside; here’s distress and hunger coming, here’s
+all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed, and you
+spend your time gaping at that damned silly streak of nothing in the
+sky!”
+
+Parload stared at me. “Yes, I do,” he said slowly, as though it was a
+new idea. “Don’t I? . . . I wonder why.”
+
+“_I_ want to start meetings of an evening on Howden’s Waste.”
+
+“You think they’d listen?”
+
+“They’d listen fast enough now.”
+
+“They didn’t before,” said Parload, looking at his pet instrument.
+
+“There was a demonstration of unemployed at Swathinglea on Sunday. They
+got to stone throwing.”
+
+Parload said nothing for a little while and I said several things. He
+seemed to be considering something.
+
+“But, after all,” he said at last, with an awkward movement towards his
+spectroscope, “that does signify something.”
+
+“The comet?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“What can it signify? You don’t want me to believe in astrology. What
+does it matter what flames in the heavens—when men are starving on
+earth?”
+
+“It’s—it’s science.”
+
+“Science! What we want now is socialism—not science.”
+
+He still seemed reluctant to give up his comet.
+
+“Socialism’s all right,” he said, “but if that thing up there _was_ to
+hit the earth it might matter.”
+
+“Nothing matters but human beings.”
+
+“Suppose it killed them all.”
+
+“Oh,” said I, “that’s Rot,”
+
+“I wonder,” said Parload, dreadfully divided in his allegiance.
+
+He looked at the comet. He seemed on the verge of repeating his growing
+information about the nearness of the paths of the earth and comet, and
+all that might ensue from that. So I cut in with something I had got
+out of a now forgotten writer called Ruskin, a volcano of beautiful
+language and nonsensical suggestions, who prevailed very greatly with
+eloquent excitable young men in those days. Something it was about the
+insignificance of science and the supreme importance of Life. Parload
+stood listening, half turned towards the sky with the tips of his
+fingers on his spectroscope. He seemed to come to a sudden decision.
+
+“No. I don’t agree with you, Leadford,” he said. “You don’t understand
+about science.”
+
+Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition. I was so used
+to entire possession of our talk that his brief contradiction struck me
+like a blow. “Don’t agree with me!” I repeated.
+
+“No,” said Parload
+
+“But how?”
+
+“I believe science is of more importance than socialism,” he said.
+“Socialism’s a theory. Science—science is something more.”
+
+And that was really all he seemed to be able to say.
+
+We embarked upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young men used
+always to find so heating. Science or Socialism? It was, of course,
+like arguing which is right, left handedness or a taste for onions, it
+was altogether impossible opposition. But the range of my rhetoric
+enabled me at last to exasperate Parload, and his mere repudiation of
+my conclusions sufficed to exasperate me, and we ended in the key of a
+positive quarrel. “Oh, very well!” said I. “So long as I know where we
+are!”
+
+I slammed his door as though I dynamited his house, and went raging
+down the street, but I felt that he was already back at the window
+worshiping his blessed line in the green, before I got round the
+corner.
+
+I had to walk for an hour or so, before I was cool enough to go home.
+
+And it was Parload who had first introduced me to socialism!
+
+Recreant!
+
+The most extraordinary things used to run through my head in those
+days. I will confess that my mind ran persistently that evening upon
+revolutions after the best French pattern, and I sat on a Committee of
+Safety and tried backsliders. Parload was there, among the prisoners,
+backsliderissimus, aware too late of the error of his ways. His hands
+were tied behind his back ready for the shambles; through the open door
+one heard the voice of justice, the rude justice of the people. I was
+sorry, but I had to do my duty.
+
+“If we punish those who would betray us to Kings,” said I, with a
+sorrowful deliberation, “how much the more must we punish those who
+would give over the State to the pursuit of useless knowledge”; and so
+with a gloomy satisfaction sent him off to the guillotine.
+
+“Ah, Parload! Parload! If only you’d listened to me earlier, Parload. .
+. .”
+
+None the less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy. Parload was my
+only gossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and think evil
+of him with no one to listen to me, evening after evening.
+
+That was a very miserable time for me, even before my last visit to
+Checkshill. My long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands. I kept
+away from home all day, partly to support a fiction that I was
+sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escape the
+persistent question in my mother’s eyes. “Why did you quarrel with Mr.
+Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keep on going about with a sullen face
+and risk offending IT more?” I spent most of the morning in the
+newspaper-room of the public library, writing impossible applications
+for impossible posts—I remember that among other things of the sort I
+offered my services to a firm of private detectives, a sinister breed
+of traders upon base jealousies now happily vanished from the world,
+and wrote apropos of an advertisement for “stevedores” that I did not
+know what the duties of a stevedore might be, but that I was apt and
+willing to learn—and in the afternoons and evenings I wandered through
+the strange lights and shadows of my native valley and hated all
+created things. Until my wanderings were checked by the discovery that
+I was wearing out my boots.
+
+The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!
+
+I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a great
+capacity for hatred, _but_—
+
+There was an excuse for hate.
+
+It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh, and
+vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have been
+equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me, without
+resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt obscurely
+and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were intolerable.
+My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an unreasonable
+proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed, ill housed, ill
+educated and ill trained, my will was suppressed and cramped to the
+pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride in myself and no reasonable
+chance of putting anything right. It was a life hardly worth living.
+That a large proportion of the people about me had no better a lot,
+that many had a worse, does not affect these facts. It was a life in
+which contentment would have been disgraceful. If some of them were
+contented or resigned, so much the worse for every one. No doubt it was
+hasty and foolish of me to throw up my situation, but everything was so
+obviously aimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not
+feel disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as it
+pained my mother and caused her anxiety.
+
+Think of the one comprehensive fact of the lock-out!
+
+That year was a bad year, a year of world-wide economic
+disorganization. Through their want of intelligent direction the great
+“Trust” of American ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded
+furnace owners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any
+demand for. (In those days there existed no means of estimating any
+need of that sort beforehand.) They had done this without even
+consulting the ironmasters of any other country. During their period of
+activity they had drawn into their employment a great number of
+workers, and had erected a huge productive plant. It is manifestly just
+that people who do headlong stupid things of this sort should suffer,
+but in the old days it was quite possible, it was customary for the
+real blunderers in such disasters, to shift nearly all the consequences
+of their incapacity. No one thought it wrong for a light-witted
+“captain of industry” who had led his workpeople into overproduction,
+into the disproportionate manufacture, that is to say, of some
+particular article, to abandon and dismiss them, nor was there anything
+to prevent the sudden frantic underselling of some trade rival in order
+to surprise and destroy his trade, secure his customers for one’s own
+destined needs, and shift a portion of one’s punishment upon him. This
+operation of spasmodic underselling was known as “dumping.” The
+American ironmasters were now dumping on the British market. The
+British employers were, of course, taking their loss out of their
+workpeople as much as possible, but in addition they were agitating for
+some legislation that would prevent—not stupid relative excess in
+production, but “dumping”—not the disease, but the consequences of the
+disease. The necessary knowledge to prevent either dumping or its
+causes, the uncorrelated production of commodities, did not exist, but
+this hardly weighed with them at all, and in answer to their demands
+there had arisen a curious party of retaliatory-protectionists who
+combined vague proposals for spasmodic responses to these convulsive
+attacks from foreign manufacturers, with the very evident intention of
+achieving financial adventures. The dishonest and reckless elements
+were indeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to the
+general atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil from
+the prospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of men known as
+the “New Financiers,” one heard frightened old-fashioned statesmen
+asserting with passion that “dumping” didn’t occur, or that it was a
+very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody would face and handle the
+rather intricate truth of the business. The whole effect upon the mind
+of a cool observer was of a covey of unsubstantial jabbering minds
+drifting over a series of irrational economic cataclysms, prices and
+employment tumbled about like towers in an earthquake, and amidst the
+shifting masses were the common work-people going on with their lives
+as well as they could, suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for
+anything but violent, fruitless protests, impotent. You cannot hope now
+to understand the infinite want of adjustment in the old order of
+things. At one time there were people dying of actual starvation in
+India, while men were burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds
+like the account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a
+dream, a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.
+
+To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth, it
+seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and misery
+could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want of thought and
+feeling. We needed more dramatic factors than these mental fogs, these
+mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore to that common refuge of the
+unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous insensate plots—we called them
+“plots”—against the poor.
+
+You can still see how we figured it in any museum by looking up the
+caricatures of capital and labor that adorned the German and American
+socialistic papers of the old time.
+
+§ 2
+
+I had cast Nettie off in an eloquent epistle, had really imagined the
+affair was over forever—“I’ve done with women,” I said to Parload—and
+then there was silence for more than a week.
+
+Before that week was over I was wondering with a growing emotion what
+next would happen between us.
+
+I found myself thinking constantly of Nettie, picturing her—sometimes
+with stern satisfaction, sometimes with sympathetic remorse—mourning,
+regretting, realizing the absolute end that had come between us. At the
+bottom of my heart I no more believed that there was an end between us,
+than that an end would come to the world. Had we not kissed one
+another, had we not achieved an atmosphere of whispering nearness,
+breached our virgin shyness with one another? Of course she was mine,
+of course I was hers, and separations and final quarrels and harshness
+and distance were no more than flourishes upon that eternal fact. So at
+least I felt the thing, however I shaped my thoughts.
+
+Whenever my imagination got to work as that week drew to its close, she
+came in as a matter of course, I thought of her recurrently all day and
+dreamt of her at night. On Saturday night I dreamt of her very vividly.
+Her face was flushed and wet with tears, her hair a little disordered,
+and when I spoke to her she turned away. In some manner this dream left
+in my mind a feeling of distress and anxiety. In the morning I had a
+raging thirst to see her.
+
+That Sunday my mother wanted me to go to church very particularly. She
+had a double reason for that; she thought that it would certainly
+exercise a favorable influence upon my search for a situation
+throughout the next week, and in addition Mr. Gabbitas, with a certain
+mystery behind his glasses, had promised to see what he could do for
+me, and she wanted to keep him up to that promise. I half consented,
+and then my desire for Nettie took hold of me. I told my mother I
+wasn’t going to church, and set off about eleven to walk the seventeen
+miles to Checkshill.
+
+It greatly intensified the fatigue of that long tramp that the sole of
+my boot presently split at the toe, and after I had cut the flapping
+portion off, a nail worked through and began to torment me. However,
+the boot looked all right after that operation and gave no audible hint
+of my discomfort. I got some bread and cheese at a little inn on the
+way, and was in Checkshill park about four. I did not go by the road
+past the house and so round to the gardens, but cut over the crest
+beyond the second keeper’s cottage, along a path Nettie used to call
+her own. It was a mere deer track. It led up a miniature valley and
+through a pretty dell in which we had been accustomed to meet, and so
+through the hollies and along a narrow path close by the wall of the
+shrubbery to the gardens.
+
+In my memory that walk through the park before I came upon Nettie
+stands out very vividly. The long tramp before it is foreshortened to a
+mere effect of dusty road and painful boot, but the bracken valley and
+sudden tumult of doubts and unwonted expectations that came to me,
+stands out now as something significant, as something unforgettable,
+something essential to the meaning of all that followed. Where should I
+meet her? What would she say? I had asked these questions before and
+found an answer. Now they came again with a trail of fresh implications
+and I had no answer for them at all. As I approached Nettie she ceased
+to be the mere butt of my egotistical self-projection, the custodian of
+my sexual pride, and drew together and became over and above this a
+personality of her own, a personality and a mystery, a sphinx I had
+evaded only to meet again.
+
+I find a little difficulty in describing the quality of the old-world
+love-making so that it may be understandable now.
+
+We young people had practically no preparation at all for the stir and
+emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained a
+conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation. There
+were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that insisted on
+certain qualities in every love affair and greatly intensified one’s
+natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfect loyalty, lifelong
+devotion. Much of the complex essentials of love were altogether
+hidden. One read these things, got accidental glimpses of this and
+that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew. Then strange emotions,
+novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an
+inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly
+amongst the familiar purely egotistical and materialistic things of
+boyhood and girlhood. We were like misguided travelers who had camped
+in the dry bed of a tropical river. Presently we were knee deep and
+neck deep in the flood. Our beings were suddenly going out from
+ourselves seeking other beings—we knew not why. This novel craving for
+abandonment to some one of the other sex, bore us away. We were ashamed
+and full of desire. We kept the thing a guilty secret, and were
+resolved to satisfy it against all the world. In this state it was we
+drifted in the most accidental way against some other blindly seeking
+creature, and linked like nascent atoms.
+
+We were obsessed by the books we read, by all the talk about us that
+once we had linked ourselves we were linked for life. Then afterwards
+we discovered that other was also an egotism, a thing of ideas and
+impulses, that failed to correspond with ours.
+
+So it was, I say, with the young of my class and most of the young
+people in our world. So it came about that I sought Nettie on the
+Sunday afternoon and suddenly came upon her, light bodied, slenderly
+feminine, hazel eyed, with her soft sweet young face under the shady
+brim of her hat of straw, the pretty Venus I had resolved should be
+wholly and exclusively mine.
+
+There, all unaware of me still, she stood, my essential feminine, the
+embodiment of the inner thing in life for me—and moreover an unknown
+other, a person like myself.
+
+She held a little book in her hand, open as if she were walking along
+and reading it. That chanced to be her pose, but indeed she was
+standing quite still, looking away towards the gray and lichenous
+shrubbery wall and, as I think now, listening. Her lips were a little
+apart, curved to that faint, sweet shadow of a smile.
+
+§ 3
+
+I recall with a vivid precision her queer start when she heard the
+rustle of my approaching feet, her surprise, her eyes almost of dismay
+for me. I could recollect, I believe, every significant word she spoke
+during our meeting, and most of what I said to her. At least, it seems
+I could, though indeed I may deceive myself. But I will not make the
+attempt. We were both too ill-educated to speak our full meanings, we
+stamped out our feelings with clumsy stereotyped phrases; you who are
+better taught would fail to catch our intention. The effect would be
+inanity. But our first words I may give you, because though they
+conveyed nothing to me at the time, afterwards they meant much.
+
+“_You_, Willie!” she said.
+
+“I have come,” I said—forgetting in the instant all the elaborate
+things I had intended to say. “I thought I would surprise you—”
+
+“Surprise me?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She stared at me for a moment. I can see her pretty face now as it
+looked at me—her impenetrable dear face. She laughed a queer little
+laugh and her color went for a moment, and then so soon as she had
+spoken, came back again.
+
+“Surprise me at what?” she said with a rising note.
+
+I was too intent to explain myself to think of what might lie in that.
+
+“I wanted to tell you,” I said, “that I didn’t mean quite . . . the
+things I put in my letter.”
+
+§ 4
+
+When I and Nettie had been sixteen we had been just of an age and
+contemporaries altogether. Now we were a year and three-quarters older,
+and she—her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I was still only at
+the beginning of a man’s long adolescence.
+
+In an instant she grasped the situation. The hidden motives of her
+quick ripened little mind flashed out their intuitive scheme of action.
+She treated me with that neat perfection of understanding a young woman
+has for a boy.
+
+“But how did you come?” she asked.
+
+I told her I had walked.
+
+“Walked!” In an instant she was leading me towards the gardens. I
+_must_ be tired. I must come home with her at once and sit down. Indeed
+it was near tea-time (the Stuarts had tea at the old-fashioned hour of
+five). Every one would be _so_ surprised to see me. Fancy walking!
+Fancy! But she supposed a man thought nothing of seventeen miles. When
+_could_ I have started!
+
+All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch of her
+hand.
+
+“But, Nettie! I came over to talk to you!”
+
+“My dear boy! Tea first, if you please! And besides—aren’t we talking?”
+
+The “dear boy” was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.
+
+She quickened her pace a little.
+
+“I wanted to explain—” I began.
+
+Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so. I said a few
+discrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation than her
+words.
+
+When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in her
+urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to the
+garden. She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish eyes on me
+as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now I know, better
+than I did then, that every now and then she glanced over me and behind
+me towards the shrubbery. And all the while, behind her quick
+breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.
+
+Her dress marked the end of her transition.
+
+Can I recall it?
+
+Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use. But her bright brown
+hair, which had once flowed down her back in a jolly pig-tail tied with
+a bit of scarlet ribbon, was now caught up into an intricacy of pretty
+curves above her little ear and cheek, and the soft long lines of her
+neck; her white dress had descended to her feet; her slender waist,
+which had once been a mere geographical expression, an imaginary line
+like the equator, was now a thing of flexible beauty. A year ago she
+had been a pretty girl’s face sticking out from a little unimportant
+frock that was carried upon an extremely active and efficient pair of
+brown-stockinged legs. Now there was coming a strange new body that
+flowed beneath her clothes with a sinuous insistence. Every movement,
+and particularly the novel droop of her hand and arm to the
+unaccustomed skirts she gathered about her, and a graceful forward
+inclination that had come to her, called softly to my eyes. A very fine
+scarf—I suppose you would call it a scarf—of green gossamer, that some
+new wakened instinct had told her to fling about her shoulders, clung
+now closely to the young undulations of her body, and now streamed
+fluttering out for a moment in a breath of wind, and like some shy
+independent tentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentary
+contact with my arm.
+
+She caught it back and reproved it.
+
+We went through the green gate in the high garden wall. I held it open
+for her to pass through, for this was one of my restricted stock of
+stiff politenesses, and then for a second she was near touching me. So
+we came to the trim array of flower-beds near the head gardener’s
+cottage and the vistas of “glass” on our left. We walked between the
+box edgings and beds of begonias and into the shadow of a yew hedge
+within twenty yards of that very pond with the gold-fish, at whose brim
+we had plighted our vows, and so we came to the wistaria-smothered
+porch.
+
+The door was wide open, and she walked in before me. “Guess who has
+come to see us!” she cried.
+
+Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair creaked.
+I judged he was disturbed in his nap.
+
+“Mother!” she called in her clear young voice. “Puss!”
+
+Puss was her sister.
+
+She told them in a marveling key that I had walked all the way from
+Clayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.
+
+“You’d better sit down, Willie,” said her father; “now you have got
+here. How’s your mother?”
+
+He looked at me curiously as he spoke.
+
+He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, but
+the waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers. He
+was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the bright
+effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from his cheek to flow
+down into his beard. He was short but strongly built, and his beard and
+mustache were the biggest things about him. She had taken all the
+possibility of beauty he possessed, his clear skin, his bright
+hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain quickness she got from
+her mother. Her mother I remember as a sharp-eyed woman of great
+activity; she seems to me now to have been perpetually bringing in or
+taking out meals or doing some such service, and to me—for my mother’s
+sake and my own—she was always welcoming and kind. Puss was a youngster
+of fourteen perhaps, of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like
+her mother’s, are the chief traces on my memory. All these people were
+very kind to me, and among them there was a common recognition,
+sometimes very agreeably finding expression, that I was—“clever.” They
+all stood about me as if they were a little at a loss.
+
+“Sit down!” said her father. “Give him a chair, Puss.”
+
+We talked a little stiffly—they were evidently surprised by my sudden
+apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie did not remain
+to keep the conversation going.
+
+“There!” she cried suddenly, as if she were vexed. “I declare!” and she
+darted out of the room.
+
+“Lord! what a girl it is!” said Mrs. Stuart. “I don’t know what’s come
+to her.”
+
+It was half an hour before Nettie came back. It seemed a long time to
+me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in again she was
+out of breath. In the meantime, I had thrown out casually that I had
+given up my place at Rawdon’s. “I can do better than that,” I said.
+
+“I left my book in the dell,” she said, panting. “Is tea ready?” and
+that was her apology. . .
+
+We didn’t shake down into comfort even with the coming of the
+tea-things. Tea at the gardener’s cottage was a serious meal, with a
+big cake and little cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spread upon
+a table. You must imagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied,
+perplexed by the something that was inexplicably unexpected in Nettie,
+saying little, and glowering across the cake at her, and all the
+eloquence I had been concentrating for the previous twenty-four hours,
+miserably lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Nettie’s father tried
+to set me talking; he had a liking for my gift of ready speech, for his
+own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased and astonished him to
+hear me pouring out my views. Indeed, over there I was, I think, even
+more talkative than with Parload, though to the world at large I was a
+shy young lout. “You ought to write it out for the newspapers,” he used
+to say. “That’s what you ought to do. _I_ never heard such nonsense.”
+
+Or, “You’ve got the gift of the gab, young man. We ought to ha’ made a
+lawyer of you.”
+
+But that afternoon, even in his eyes, I didn’t shine. Failing any other
+stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but even that did
+not engage me.
+
+§ 5
+
+For a long time I feared I should have to go back to Clayton without
+another word to Nettie, she seemed insensible to the need I felt for a
+talk with her, and I was thinking even of a sudden demand for that
+before them all. It was a transparent manoeuver of her mother’s who had
+been watching my face, that sent us out at last together to do
+something—I forget now what—in one of the greenhouses. Whatever that
+little mission may have been it was the merest, most barefaced excuse,
+a door to shut, or a window to close, and I don’t think it got done.
+
+Nettie hesitated and obeyed. She led the way through one of the
+hot-houses. It was a low, steamy, brick-floored alley between staging
+that bore a close crowd of pots and ferns, and behind big branching
+plants that were spread and nailed overhead so as to make an impervious
+cover of leaves, and in that close green privacy she stopped and turned
+on me suddenly like a creature at bay.
+
+“Isn’t the maidenhair fern lovely?” she said, and looked at me with
+eyes that said, “_Now_.”
+
+“Nettie,” I began, “I was a fool to write to you as I did.”
+
+She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face. But she
+said nothing, and stood waiting.
+
+“Nettie,” I plunged, “I can’t do without you. I—I love you.”
+
+“If you loved me,” she said trimly, watching the white fingers she
+plunged among the green branches of a selaginella, “could you write the
+things you do to me?”
+
+“I don’t mean them,” I said. “At least not always.”
+
+I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was
+stupid to think otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware of
+the impossibility of conveying that to her.
+
+“You wrote them.”
+
+“But then I tramp seventeen miles to say I don’t mean them.”
+
+“Yes. But perhaps you do.”
+
+I think I was at a loss; then I said, not very clearly, “I don’t.”
+
+“You think you—you love me, Willie. But you don’t.”
+
+“I do. Nettie! You know I do.”
+
+For answer she shook her head.
+
+I made what I thought was a most heroic plunge. “Nettie,” I said, “I’d
+rather have you than—than my own opinions.”
+
+The selaginella still engaged her. “You think so now,” she said.
+
+I broke out into protestations.
+
+“No,” she said shortly. “It’s different now.”
+
+“But why should two letters make so much difference?” I said.
+
+“It isn’t only the letters. But it is different. It’s different for
+good.”
+
+She halted a little with that sentence, seeking her expression. She
+looked up abruptly into my eyes and moved, indeed slightly, but with
+the intimation that she thought our talk might end.
+
+But I did not mean it to end like that.
+
+“For good?” said I. “No! . . Nettie! Nettie! You don’t mean that!”
+
+“I do,” she said deliberately, still looking at me, and with all her
+pose conveying her finality. She seemed to brace herself for the
+outbreak that must follow.
+
+Of course I became wordy. But I did not submerge her. She stood
+entrenched, firing her contradictions like guns into my scattered
+discursive attack. I remember that our talk took the absurd form of
+disputing whether I could be in love with her or not. And there was I,
+present in evidence, in a deepening and widening distress of soul
+because she could stand there, defensive, brighter and prettier than
+ever, and in some inexplicable way cut off from me and inaccessible.
+
+You know, we had never been together before without little enterprises
+of endearment, without a faintly guilty, quite delightful excitement.
+
+I pleaded, I argued. I tried to show that even my harsh and difficult
+letters came from my desire to come wholly into contact with her. I
+made exaggerated fine statements of the longing I felt for her when I
+was away, of the shock and misery of finding her estranged and cool.
+She looked at me, feeling the emotion of my speech and impervious to
+its ideas. I had no doubt—whatever poverty in my words, coolly written
+down now—that I was eloquent then. I meant most intensely what I said,
+indeed I was wholly concentrated upon it. I was set upon conveying to
+her with absolute sincerity my sense of distance, and the greatness of
+my desire. I toiled toward her painfully and obstinately through a
+jungle of words.
+
+Her face changed very slowly—by such imperceptible degrees as when at
+dawn light comes into a clear sky. I could feel that I touched her,
+that her hardness was in some manner melting, her determination
+softening toward hesitations. The habit of an old familiarity lurked
+somewhere within her. But she would not let me reach her.
+
+“No,” she cried abruptly, starting into motion.
+
+She laid a hand on my arm. A wonderful new friendliness came into her
+voice. “It’s impossible, Willie. Everything is different
+now—everything. We made a mistake. We two young sillies made a mistake
+and everything is different for ever. Yes, yes.”
+
+She turned about.
+
+“Nettie!” cried I, and still protesting, pursued her along the narrow
+alley between the staging toward the hot-house door. I pursued her like
+an accusation, and she went before me like one who is guilty and
+ashamed. So I recall it now.
+
+She would not let me talk to her again.
+
+Yet I could see that my talk to her had altogether abolished the
+clear-cut distance of our meeting in the park. Ever and again I found
+her hazel eyes upon me. They expressed something novel—a surprise, as
+though she realized an unwonted relationship, and a sympathetic pity.
+And still—something defensive.
+
+When we got back to the cottage, I fell talking rather more freely with
+her father about the nationalization of railways, and my spirits and
+temper had so far mended at the realization that I could still produce
+an effect upon Nettie, that I was even playful with Puss. Mrs. Stuart
+judged from that that things were better with me than they were, and
+began to beam mightily.
+
+But Nettie remained thoughtful and said very little. She was lost in
+perplexities I could not fathom, and presently she slipped away from us
+and went upstairs.
+
+§ 6
+
+I was, of course, too footsore to walk back to Clayton, but I had a
+shilling and a penny in my pocket for the train between Checkshill and
+Two-Mile Stone, and that much of the distance I proposed to do in the
+train. And when I got ready to go, Nettie amazed me by waking up to the
+most remarkable solicitude for me. I must, she said, go by the road. It
+was altogether too dark for the short way to the lodge gates.
+
+I pointed out that it was moonlight. “With the comet thrown in,” said
+old Stuart.
+
+“No,” she insisted, “you _must_ go by the road.”
+
+I still disputed.
+
+She was standing near me. “To please _me_,” she urged, in a quick
+undertone, and with a persuasive look that puzzled me. Even in the
+moment I asked myself why should this please her?
+
+I might have agreed had she not followed that up with, “The hollies by
+the shrubbery are as dark as pitch. And there’s the deer-hounds.”
+
+“I’m not afraid of the dark,” said I. “Nor of the deer-hounds, either.”
+
+“But those dogs! Supposing one was loose!”
+
+That was a girl’s argument, a girl who still had to understand that
+fear is an overt argument only for her own sex. I thought too of those
+grisly lank brutes straining at their chains and the chorus they could
+make of a night when they heard belated footsteps along the edge of the
+Killing Wood, and the thought banished my wish to please her. Like most
+imaginative natures I was acutely capable of dreads and retreats, and
+constantly occupied with their suppression and concealment, and to
+refuse the short cut when it might appear that I did it on account of
+half a dozen almost certainly chained dogs was impossible.
+
+So I set off in spite of her, feeling valiant and glad to be so easily
+brave, but a little sorry that she should think herself crossed by me.
+
+A thin cloud veiled the moon, and the way under the beeches was dark
+and indistinct. I was not so preoccupied with my love-affairs as to
+neglect what I will confess was always my custom at night across that
+wild and lonely park. I made myself a club by fastening a big flint to
+one end of my twisted handkerchief and tying the other about my wrist,
+and with this in my pocket, went on comforted.
+
+And it chanced that as I emerged from the hollies by the corner of the
+shrubbery I was startled to come unexpectedly upon a young man in
+evening dress smoking a cigar.
+
+I was walking on turf, so that the sound I made was slight. He stood
+clear in the moonlight, his cigar glowed like a blood-red star, and it
+did not occur to me at the time that I advanced towards him almost
+invisibly in an impenetrable shadow.
+
+“Hullo,” he cried, with a sort of amiable challenge. “I’m here first!”
+
+I came out into the light. “Who cares if you are?” said I.
+
+I had jumped at once to an interpretation of his words. I knew that
+there was an intermittent dispute between the House people and the
+villager public about the use of this track, and it is needless to say
+where my sympathies fell in that dispute.
+
+“Eh?” he cried in surprise.
+
+“Thought I would run away, I suppose,” said I, and came close up to
+him.
+
+All my enormous hatred of his class had flared up at the sight of his
+costume, at the fancied challenge of his words. I knew him. He was
+Edward Verrall, son of the man who owned not only this great estate but
+more than half of Rawdon’s pot-bank, and who had interests and
+possessions, collieries and rents, all over the district of the Four
+Towns. He was a gallant youngster, people said, and very clever. Young
+as he was there was talk of parliament for him; he had been a great
+success at the university, and he was being sedulously popularized
+among us. He took with a light confidence, as a matter of course,
+advantages that I would have faced the rack to get, and I firmly
+believed myself a better man than he. He was, as he stood there, a
+concentrated figure of all that filled me with bitterness. One day he
+had stopped in a motor outside our house, and I remember the thrill of
+rage with which I had noted the dutiful admiration in my mother’s eyes
+as she peered through her blind at him. “That’s young Mr. Verrall,” she
+said. “They say he’s very clever.”
+
+“They would,” I answered. “Damn them and him!”
+
+But that is by the way.
+
+He was clearly astonished to find himself face to face with a man. His
+note changed.
+
+“Who the devil are _you?_” he asked.
+
+My retort was the cheap expedient of re-echoing, “Who the devil are
+you?”
+
+“_Well_,” he said.
+
+“I’m coming along this path if I like,” I said. “See? It’s a public
+path—just as this used to be public land. You’ve stolen the land—you
+and yours, and now you want to steal the right of way. You’ll ask us to
+get off the face of the earth next. I sha’n’t oblige. See?”
+
+I was shorter and I suppose a couple of years younger than he, but I
+had the improvised club in my pocket gripped ready, and I would have
+fought with him very cheerfully. But he fell a step backward as I came
+toward him.
+
+“Socialist, I presume?” he said, alert and quiet and with the faintest
+note of badinage.
+
+“One of many.”
+
+“We’re all socialists nowadays,” he remarked philosophically, “and I
+haven’t the faintest intention of disputing your right of way.”
+
+“You’d better not,” I said.
+
+“No!”
+
+“No.”
+
+He replaced his cigar, and there was a brief pause. “Catching a train?”
+he threw out.
+
+It seemed absurd not to answer. “Yes,” I said shortly.
+
+He said it was a pleasant evening for a walk.
+
+I hovered for a moment and there was my path before me, and he stood
+aside. There seemed nothing to do but go on. “Good night,” said he, as
+that intention took effect.
+
+I growled a surly good-night.
+
+I felt like a bombshell of swearing that must presently burst with some
+violence as I went on my silent way. He had so completely got the best
+of our encounter.
+
+§ 7
+
+There comes a memory, an odd intermixture of two entirely divergent
+things, that stands out with the intensest vividness.
+
+As I went across the last open meadow, following the short cut to
+Checkshill station, I perceived I had two shadows.
+
+The thing jumped into my mind and stopped its tumid flow for a moment.
+I remember the intelligent detachment of my sudden interest. I turned
+sharply, and stood looking at the moon and the great white comet, that
+the drift of the clouds had now rather suddenly unveiled.
+
+The comet was perhaps twenty degrees from the moon. What a wonderful
+thing it looked floating there, a greenish-white apparition in the dark
+blue deeps! It looked brighter than the moon because it was smaller,
+but the shadow it cast, though clearer cut, was much fainter than the
+moon’s shadow. . . I went on noting these facts, watching my two
+shadows precede me.
+
+I am totally unable to account for the sequence of my thoughts on this
+occasion. But suddenly, as if I had come on this new fact round a
+corner, the comet was out of my mind again, and I was face to face with
+an absolutely new idea. I wonder sometimes if the two shadows I cast,
+one with a sort of feminine faintness with regard to the other and not
+quite so tall, may not have suggested the word or the thought of an
+assignation to my mind. All that I have clear is that with the
+certitude of intuition I knew what it was that had brought the youth in
+evening dress outside the shrubbery. Of course! He had come to meet
+Nettie!
+
+Once the mental process was started it took no time at all. The day
+which had been full of perplexities for me, the mysterious invisible
+thing that had held Nettie and myself apart, the unaccountable strange
+something in her manner, was revealed and explained.
+
+I knew now why she had looked guilty at my appearance, what had brought
+her out that afternoon, why she had hurried me in, the nature of the
+“book” she had run back to fetch, the reason why she had wanted me to
+go back by the high-road, and why she had pitied me. It was all in the
+instant clear to me.
+
+You must imagine me a black little creature, suddenly stricken
+still—for a moment standing rigid—and then again suddenly becoming
+active with an impotent gesture, becoming audible with an inarticulate
+cry, with two little shadows mocking my dismay, and about this figure
+you must conceive a great wide space of moonlit grass, rimmed by the
+looming suggestion of distant trees—trees very low and faint and dim,
+and over it all the domed serenity of that wonderful luminous night.
+
+For a little while this realization stunned my mind. My thoughts came
+to a pause, staring at my discovery. Meanwhile my feet and my previous
+direction carried me through the warm darkness to Checkshill station
+with its little lights, to the ticket-office window, and so to the
+train.
+
+I remember myself as it were waking up to the thing—I was alone in one
+of the dingy “third-class” compartments of that time—and the sudden
+nearly frantic insurgence of my rage. I stood up with the cry of an
+angry animal, and smote my fist with all my strength against the panel
+of wood before me. . . .
+
+Curiously enough I have completely forgotten my mood after that for a
+little while, but I know that later, for a minute perhaps, I hung for a
+time out of the carriage with the door open, contemplating a leap from
+the train. It was to be a dramatic leap, and then I would go storming
+back to her, denounce her, overwhelm her; and I hung, urging myself to
+do it. I don’t remember how it was I decided not to do this, at last,
+but in the end I didn’t.
+
+When the train stopped at the next station I had given up all thoughts
+of going back. I was sitting in the corner of the carriage with my
+bruised and wounded hand pressed under my arm, and still insensible to
+its pain, trying to think out clearly a scheme of action—action that
+should express the monstrous indignation that possessed me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+THE REVOLVER
+
+
+§ 1
+
+“That comet is going to hit the earth!”
+
+So said one of the two men who got into the train and settled down.
+
+“Ah!” said the other man.
+
+“They do say that it is made of gas, that comet. We sha’n’t blow up,
+shall us?”. . .
+
+What did it matter to me?
+
+I was thinking of revenge—revenge against the primary conditions of my
+being. I was thinking of Nettie and her lover. I was firmly resolved he
+should not have her—though I had to kill them both to prevent it. I did
+not care what else might happen, if only that end was ensured. All my
+thwarted passions had turned to rage. I would have accepted eternal
+torment that night without a second thought, to be certain of revenge.
+A hundred possibilities of action, a hundred stormy situations, a whirl
+of violent schemes, chased one another through my shamed, exasperated
+mind. The sole prospect I could endure was of some gigantic, inexorably
+cruel vindication of my humiliated self.
+
+And Nettie? I loved Nettie still, but now with the intensest jealousy,
+with the keen, unmeasuring hatred of wounded pride, and baffled,
+passionate desire.
+
+§ 2
+
+
+As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest—for my shilling and a penny
+only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-Mile Stone, and
+thence I had to walk over the hill—I remember very vividly a little man
+with a shrill voice who was preaching under a gas-lamp against a
+hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday evening loafers. He was a short man,
+bald, with a little fair curly beard and hair and watery blue eyes, and
+he was preaching that the end of the world drew near.
+
+I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet with the
+end of the world. He had got that jumbled up with international
+politics and prophecies from the Book of Daniel.
+
+I stopped to hear him only for a moment or so. I do not think I should
+have halted at all but his crowd blocked my path, and the sight of his
+queer wild expression, the gesture of his upward-pointing finger, held
+me.
+
+“There is the end of all your Sins and Follies,” he bawled. “There!
+There is the Star of Judgments, the Judgments of the most High God! It
+is appointed unto all men to die—unto all men to die”—his voice changed
+to a curious flat chant—“and after death, the Judgment! The Judgment!”
+
+I pushed and threaded my way through the bystanders and went on, and
+his curious harsh flat voice pursued me. I went on with the thoughts
+that had occupied me before—where I could buy a revolver, and how I
+might master its use—and probably I should have forgotten all about him
+had he not taken a part in the hideous dream that ended the little
+sleep I had that night. For the most part I lay awake thinking of
+Nettie and her lover.
+
+Then came three strange days—three days that seem now to have been
+wholly concentrated upon one business.
+
+This dominant business was the purchase of my revolver. I held myself
+resolutely to the idea that I must either restore myself by some
+extraordinary act of vigor and violence in Nettie’s eyes or I must kill
+her. I would not let myself fall away from that. I felt that if I let
+this matter pass, my last shred of pride and honor would pass with it,
+that for the rest of my life I should never deserve the slightest
+respect or any woman’s love. Pride kept me to my purpose between my
+gusts of passion.
+
+Yet it was not easy to buy that revolver.
+
+I had a kind of shyness of the moment when I should have to face the
+shopman, and I was particularly anxious to have a story ready if he
+should see fit to ask questions why I bought such a thing. I determined
+to say I was going to Texas, and I thought it might prove useful there.
+Texas in those days had the reputation of a wild lawless land. As I
+knew nothing of caliber or impact, I wanted also to be able to ask with
+a steady face at what distance a man or woman could be killed by the
+weapon that might be offered me. I was pretty cool-headed in relation
+to such practical aspects of my affair. I had some little difficulty in
+finding a gunsmith. In Clayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth
+in a cycle shop, but the only revolvers these people had impressed me
+as being too small and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop
+window in the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice,
+a reasonably clumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed “As used in
+the American army.”
+
+I had drawn out my balance from the savings bank, matter of two pounds
+and more, to make this purchase, and I found it at last a very easy
+transaction. The pawnbroker told me where I could get ammunition, and I
+went home that night with bulging pockets, an armed man.
+
+The purchase of my revolver was, I say, the chief business of those
+days, but you must not think I was so intent upon it as to be
+insensible to the stirring things that were happening in the streets
+through which I went seeking the means to effect my purpose. They were
+full of murmurings: the whole region of the Four Towns scowled lowering
+from its narrow doors. The ordinary healthy flow of people going to
+work, people going about their business, was chilled and checked.
+Numbers of men stood about the streets in knots and groups, as
+corpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels in the opening stages
+of inflammation. The women looked haggard and worried. The ironworkers
+had refused the proposed reduction of their wages, and the lockout had
+begun. They were already at “play.” The Conciliation Board was doing
+its best to keep the coal-miners and masters from a breach, but young
+Lord Redcar, the greatest of our coal owners and landlord of all
+Swathinglea and half Clayton, was taking a fine upstanding attitude
+that made the breach inevitable. He was a handsome young man, a gallant
+young man; his pride revolted at the idea of being dictated to by a
+“lot of bally miners,” and he meant, he said, to make a fight for it.
+The world had treated him sumptuously from his earliest years; the
+shares in the common stock of five thousand people had gone to pay for
+his handsome upbringing, and large, romantic, expensive ambitions
+filled his generously nurtured mind. He had early distinguished himself
+at Oxford by his scornful attitude towards democracy. There was
+something that appealed to the imagination in his fine antagonism to
+the crowd—on the one hand, was the brilliant young nobleman,
+picturesquely alone; on the other, the ugly, inexpressive multitude,
+dressed inelegantly in shop-clothes, under-educated, under-fed,
+envious, base, and with a wicked disinclination for work and a wicked
+appetite for the good things it could so rarely get. For common
+imaginative purposes one left out the policeman from the design, the
+stalwart policeman protecting his lordship, and ignored the fact that
+while Lord Redcar had his hands immediately and legally on the
+workman’s shelter and bread, they could touch him to the skin only by
+some violent breach of the law.
+
+He lived at Lowchester House, five miles or so beyond Checkshill; but
+partly to show how little he cared for his antagonists, and partly no
+doubt to keep himself in touch with the negotiations that were still
+going on, he was visible almost every day in and about the Four Towns,
+driving that big motor car of his that could take him sixty miles an
+hour. The English passion for fair play one might have thought
+sufficient to rob this bold procedure of any dangerous possibilities,
+but he did not go altogether free from insult, and on one occasion at
+least an intoxicated Irish woman shook her fist at him. . . .
+
+A dark, quiet crowd, that was greater each day, a crowd more than half
+women, brooded as a cloud will sometimes brood permanently upon a
+mountain crest, in the market-place outside the Clayton Town Hall,
+where the conference was held. . . .
+
+I consider myself justified in regarding Lord Redcar’s passing
+automobile with a special animosity because of the leaks in our roof.
+
+We held our little house on lease; the owner was a mean, saving old man
+named Pettigrew, who lived in a villa adorned with plaster images of
+dogs and goats, at Overcastle, and in spite of our specific agreement,
+he would do no repairs for us at all. He rested secure in my mother’s
+timidity. Once, long ago, she had been behind-hand with her rent, with
+half of her quarter’s rent, and he had extended the days of grace a
+month; her sense that some day she might need the same mercy again made
+her his abject slave. She was afraid even to ask that he should cause
+the roof to be mended for fear he might take offence. But one night the
+rain poured in on her bed and gave her a cold, and stained and soaked
+her poor old patchwork counterpane. Then she got me to compose an
+excessively polite letter to old Pettigrew, begging him as a favor to
+perform his legal obligations. It is part of the general imbecility of
+those days that such one-sided law as existed was a profound mystery to
+the common people, its provisions impossible to ascertain, its
+machinery impossible to set in motion. Instead of the clearly written
+code, the lucid statements of rules and principles that are now at the
+service of every one, the law was the muddle secret of the legal
+profession. Poor people, overworked people, had constantly to submit to
+petty wrongs because of the intolerable uncertainty not only of law but
+of cost, and of the demands upon time and energy, proceedings might
+make. There was indeed no justice for any one too poor to command a
+good solicitor’s deference and loyalty; there was nothing but rough
+police protection and the magistrate’s grudging or eccentric advice for
+the mass of the population. The civil law, in particular, was a
+mysterious upper-class weapon, and I can imagine no injustice that
+would have been sufficient to induce my poor old mother to appeal to
+it.
+
+All this begins to sound incredible. I can only assure you that it was
+so.
+
+But I, when I learned that old Pettigrew had been down to tell my
+mother all about his rheumatism, to inspect the roof, and to allege
+that nothing was needed, gave way to my most frequent emotion in those
+days, a burning indignation, and took the matter into my own hands. I
+wrote and asked him, with a withering air of technicality, to have the
+roof repaired “as per agreement,” and added, “if not done in one week
+from now we shall be obliged to take proceedings.” I had not mentioned
+this high line of conduct to my mother at first, and so when old
+Pettigrew came down in a state of great agitation with my letter in his
+hand, she was almost equally agitated.
+
+“How could you write to old Mr. Pettigrew like that?” she asked me.
+
+I said that old Pettigrew was a shameful old rascal, or words to that
+effect, and I am afraid I behaved in a very undutiful way to her when
+she said that she had settled everything with him—she wouldn’t say how,
+but I could guess well enough—and that I was to promise her, promise
+her faithfully, to do nothing more in the matter. I wouldn’t promise
+her.
+
+And—having nothing better to employ me then—I presently went raging to
+old Pettigrew in order to put the whole thing before him in what I
+considered the proper light. Old Pettigrew evaded my illumination; he
+saw me coming up his front steps—I can still see his queer old nose and
+the crinkled brow over his eye and the little wisp of gray hair that
+showed over the corner of his window-blind—and he instructed his
+servant to put up the chain when she answered the door, and to tell me
+that he would not see me. So I had to fall back upon my pen.
+
+Then it was, as I had no idea what were the proper “proceedings” to
+take, the brilliant idea occurred to me of appealing to Lord Redcar as
+the ground landlord, and, as it were, our feudal chief, and pointing
+out to him that his security for his rent was depreciating in old
+Pettigrew’s hands. I added some general observations on leaseholds, the
+taxation of ground rents, and the private ownership of the soil. And
+Lord Redcar, whose spirit revolted at democracy, and who cultivated a
+pert humiliating manner with his inferiors to show as much, earned my
+distinguished hatred for ever by causing his secretary to present his
+compliments to me, and his request that I would mind my own business
+and leave him to manage his. At which I was so greatly enraged that I
+first tore this note into minute innumerable pieces, and then dashed it
+dramatically all over the floor of my room—from which, to keep my
+mother from the job, I afterward had to pick it up laboriously on
+all-fours.
+
+I was still meditating a tremendous retort, an indictment of all Lord
+Redcar’s class, their manners, morals, economic and political crimes,
+when my trouble with Nettie arose to swamp all minor troubles. Yet, not
+so completely but that I snarled aloud when his lordship’s motor-car
+whizzed by me, as I went about upon my long meandering quest for a
+weapon. And I discovered after a time that my mother had bruised her
+knee and was lame. Fearing to irritate me by bringing the thing before
+me again, she had set herself to move her bed out of the way of the
+drip without my help, and she had knocked her knee. All her poor
+furnishings, I discovered, were cowering now close to the peeling
+bedroom walls; there had come a vast discoloration of the ceiling, and
+a washing-tub was in occupation of the middle of her chamber. . . .
+
+It is necessary that I should set these things before you, should give
+the key of inconvenience and uneasiness in which all things were
+arranged, should suggest the breath of trouble that stirred along the
+hot summer streets, the anxiety about the strike, the rumors and
+indignations, the gatherings and meetings, the increasing gravity of
+the policemen’s faces, the combative headlines of the local papers, the
+knots of picketers who scrutinized any one who passed near the silent,
+smokeless forges, but in my mind, you must understand, such impressions
+came and went irregularly; they made a moving background, changing
+undertones, to my preoccupation by that darkly shaping purpose to which
+a revolver was so imperative an essential.
+
+Along the darkling streets, amidst the sullen crowds, the thought of
+Nettie, my Nettie, and her gentleman lover made ever a vivid
+inflammatory spot of purpose in my brain.
+
+§ 3
+
+
+It was three days after this—on Wednesday, that is to say—that the
+first of those sinister outbreaks occurred that ended in the bloody
+affair of Peacock Grove and the flooding out of the entire line of the
+Swathinglea collieries. It was the only one of these disturbances I was
+destined to see, and at most a mere trivial preliminary of that
+struggle.
+
+The accounts that have been written of this affair vary very widely. To
+read them is to realize the extraordinary carelessness of truth that
+dishonored the press of those latter days. In my bureau I have several
+files of the daily papers of the old time—I collected them, as a matter
+of fact—and three or four of about that date I have just this moment
+taken out and looked through to refresh my impression of what I saw.
+They lie before me—queer, shriveled, incredible things; the cheap paper
+has already become brittle and brown and split along the creases, the
+ink faded or smeared, and I have to handle them with the utmost care
+when I glance among their raging headlines. As I sit here in this
+serene place, their quality throughout, their arrangement, their tone,
+their arguments and exhortations, read as though they came from drugged
+and drunken men. They give one the effect of faded bawling, of screams
+and shouts heard faintly in a little gramophone. . . . It is only on
+Monday I find, and buried deep below the war news, that these
+publications contain any intimation that unusual happenings were
+forward in Clayton and Swathinglea.
+
+What I saw was towards evening. I had been learning to shoot with my
+new possession. I had walked out with it four or five miles across a
+patch of moorland and down to a secluded little coppice full of
+blue-bells, halfway along the high-road between Leet and Stafford. Here
+I had spent the afternoon, experimenting and practising with careful
+deliberation and grim persistence. I had brought an old kite-frame of
+cane with me, that folded and unfolded, and each shot-hole I made I
+marked and numbered to compare with my other endeavors. At last I was
+satisfied that I could hit a playing-card at thirty paces nine times
+out of ten; the light was getting too bad for me to see my penciled
+bull’s-eye, and in that state of quiet moodiness that sometimes comes
+with hunger to passionate men, I returned by the way of Swathinglea
+towards my home.
+
+The road I followed came down between banks of wretched-looking
+working-men’s houses, in close-packed rows on either side, and took
+upon itself the _rôle_ of Swathinglea High Street, where, at a lamp and
+a pillar-box, the steam-trams began. So far that dirty hot way had been
+unusually quiet and empty, but beyond the corner, where the first group
+of beershops clustered, it became populous. It was very quiet still,
+even the children were a little inactive, but there were a lot of
+people standing dispersedly in little groups, and with a general
+direction towards the gates of the Bantock Burden coalpit.
+
+The place was being picketed, although at that time the miners were
+still nominally at work, and the conferences between masters and men
+still in session at Clayton Town Hall. But one of the men employed at
+the Bantock Burden pit, Jack Briscoe, was a socialist, and he had
+distinguished himself by a violent letter upon the crisis to the
+leading socialistic paper in England, _The Clarion_, in which he had
+adventured among the motives of Lord Redcar. The publication of this
+had been followed by instant dismissal. As Lord Redcar wrote a day or
+so later to the _Times_—I have that _Times_, I have all the London
+papers of the last month before the Change—
+
+“The man was paid off and kicked out. Any self-respecting employer
+would do the same.” The thing had happened overnight, and the men did
+not at once take a clear line upon what was, after all, a very
+intricate and debatable occasion. But they came out in a sort of
+semiofficial strike from all Lord Redcar’s collieries beyond the canal
+that besets Swathinglea. They did so without formal notice, committing
+a breach of contract by this sudden cessation. But in the long labor
+struggles of the old days the workers were constantly putting
+themselves in the wrong and committing illegalities through that
+overpowering craving for dramatic promptness natural to uneducated
+minds.
+
+All the men had not come out of the Bantock Burden pit. Something was
+wrong there, an indecision if nothing else; the mine was still working,
+and there was a rumor that men from Durham had been held in readiness
+by Lord Redcar, and were already in the mine. Now, it is absolutely
+impossible to ascertain certainly how things stood at that time. The
+newspapers say this and that, but nothing trustworthy remains.
+
+I believe I should have gone striding athwart the dark stage of that
+stagnant industrial drama without asking a question, if Lord Redcar had
+not chanced to come upon the scene about the same time as myself and
+incontinently end its stagnation.
+
+He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put up the
+best fight they had ever had, and he had been active all that afternoon
+in meeting the quarrel half way, and preparing as conspicuously as
+possible for the scratch force of “blacklegs”—as we called them—who
+were, he said and we believed, to replace the strikers in his pits.
+
+I was an eye-witness of the whole of the affair outside the Bantock
+Burden pit, and—I do not know what happened.
+
+Picture to yourself how the thing came to me.
+
+I was descending a steep, cobbled, excavated road between banked-up
+footways, perhaps six feet high, upon which, in a monotonous series,
+opened the living room doors of rows of dark, low cottages. The
+perspective of squat blue slate roofs and clustering chimneys drifted
+downward towards the irregular open space before the colliery—a space
+covered with coaly, wheel-scarred mud, with a patch of weedy dump to
+the left and the colliery gates to the right. Beyond, the High Street
+with shops resumed again in good earnest and went on, and the lines of
+the steam-tramway that started out from before my feet, and were here
+shining and acutely visible with reflected skylight and here lost in a
+shadow, took up for one acute moment the greasy yellow irradiation of a
+newly lit gaslamp as they vanished round the bend. Beyond, spread a
+darkling marsh of homes, an infinitude of little smoking hovels, and
+emergent, meager churches, public-houses, board schools, and other
+buildings amidst the prevailing chimneys of Swathinglea. To the right,
+very clear and relatively high, the Bantock Burden pit-mouth was marked
+by a gaunt lattice bearing a great black wheel, very sharp and distinct
+in the twilight, and beyond, in an irregular perspective, were others
+following the lie of the seams. The general effect, as one came down
+the hill, was of a dark compressed life beneath a very high and wide
+and luminous evening sky, against which these pit-wheels rose. And
+ruling the calm spaciousness of that heaven was the great comet, now
+green-white, and wonderful for all who had eyes to see.
+
+The fading afterglow of the sunset threw up all the contours and
+skyline to the west, and the comet rose eastward out of the pouring
+tumult of smoke from Bladden’s forges. The moon had still to rise.
+
+By this time the comet had begun to assume the cloudlike form still
+familiar through the medium of a thousand photographs and sketches. At
+first it had been an almost telescopic speck; it had brightened to the
+dimensions of the greatest star in the heavens; it had still grown,
+hour by hour, in its incredibly swift, its noiseless and inevitable
+rush upon our earth, until it had equaled and surpassed the moon. Now
+it was the most splendid thing this sky of earth has ever held. I have
+never seen a photograph that gave a proper idea of it. Never at any
+time did it assume the conventional tailed outline, comets are supposed
+to have. Astronomers talked of its double tail, one preceding it and
+one trailing behind it, but these were foreshortened to nothing, so
+that it had rather the form of a bellying puff of luminous smoke with
+an intenser, brighter heart. It rose a hot yellow color, and only began
+to show its distinctive greenness when it was clear of the mists of the
+evening.
+
+It compelled attention for a space. For all my earthly concentration of
+mind, I could but stare at it for a moment with a vague anticipation
+that, after all, in some way so strange and glorious an object must
+have significance, could not possibly be a matter of absolute
+indifference to the scheme and values of my life.
+
+But how?
+
+I thought of Parload. I thought of the panic and uneasiness that was
+spreading in this very matter, and the assurances of scientific men
+that the thing weighed so little—at the utmost a few hundred tons of
+thinly diffused gas and dust—that even were it to smite this earth
+fully, nothing could possibly ensue. And, after all, said I, what
+earthly significance has any one found in the stars?
+
+Then, as one still descended, the houses and buildings rose up, the
+presence of those watching groups of people, the tension of the
+situation; and one forgot the sky.
+
+Preoccupied with myself and with my dark dream about Nettie and my
+honor, I threaded my course through the stagnating threat of this
+gathering, and was caught unawares, when suddenly the whole scene
+flashed into drama. . . .
+
+The attention of every one swung round with an irresistible magnetism
+towards the High Street, and caught me as a rush of waters might catch
+a wisp of hay. Abruptly the whole crowd was sounding one note. It was
+not a word, it was a sound that mingled threat and protest, something
+between a prolonged “Ah!” and “Ugh!” Then with a hoarse intensity of
+anger came a low heavy booing, “Boo! boo—oo!” a note stupidly
+expressive of animal savagery. “Toot, toot!” said Lord Redcar’s
+automobile in ridiculous repartee. “Toot, toot!” One heard it whizzing
+and throbbing as the crowd obliged it to slow down.
+
+Everybody seemed in motion towards the colliery gates, I, too, with the
+others.
+
+I heard a shout. Through the dark figures about me I saw the motor-car
+stop and move forward again, and had a glimpse of something writhing on
+the ground.
+
+It was alleged afterwards that Lord Redcar was driving, and that he
+quite deliberately knocked down a little boy who would not get out of
+his way. It is asserted with equal confidence that the boy was a man
+who tried to pass across the front of the motor-car as it came slowly
+through the crowd, who escaped by a hair’s breadth, and then slipped on
+the tram-rail and fell down. I have both accounts set forth, under
+screaming headlines, in two of these sere newspapers upon my desk. No
+one could ever ascertain the truth. Indeed, in such a blind tumult of
+passion, could there be any truth?
+
+There was a rush forward, the horn of the car sounded, everything
+swayed violently to the right for perhaps ten yards or so, and there
+was a report like a pistol-shot.
+
+For a moment every one seemed running away. A woman, carrying a
+shawl-wrapped child, blundered into me, and sent me reeling back. Every
+one thought of firearms, but, as a matter of fact, something had gone
+wrong with the motor, what in those old-fashioned contrivances was
+called a backfire. A thin puff of bluish smoke hung in the air behind
+the thing. The majority of the people scattered back in a disorderly
+fashion, and left a clear space about the struggle that centered upon
+the motor-car.
+
+The man or boy who had fallen was lying on the ground with no one near
+him, a black lump, an extended arm and two sprawling feet. The
+motor-car had stopped, and its three occupants were standing up. Six or
+seven black figures surrounded the car, and appeared to be holding on
+to it as if to prevent it from starting again; one—it was Mitchell, a
+well-known labor leader—argued in fierce low tones with Lord Redcar. I
+could not hear anything they said, I was not near enough. Behind me the
+colliery gates were open, and there was a sense of help coming to the
+motor-car from that direction. There was an unoccupied muddy space for
+fifty yards, perhaps, between car and gate, and then the wheels and
+head of the pit rose black against the sky. I was one of a rude
+semicircle of people that hung as yet indeterminate in action about
+this dispute.
+
+It was natural, I suppose, that my fingers should close upon the
+revolver in my pocket.
+
+I advanced with the vaguest intentions in the world, and not so quickly
+but that several men hurried past me to join the little knot holding up
+the car.
+
+Lord Redcar, in his big furry overcoat, towered up over the group about
+him; his gestures were free and threatening, and his voice loud. He
+made a fine figure there, I must admit; he was a big, fair, handsome
+young man with a fine tenor voice and an instinct for gallant effect.
+My eyes were drawn to him at first wholly. He seemed a symbol, a
+triumphant symbol, of all that the theory of aristocracy claims, of all
+that filled my soul with resentment. His chauffeur sat crouched
+together, peering at the crowd under his lordship’s arm. But Mitchell
+showed as a sturdy figure also, and his voice was firm and loud.
+
+“You’ve hurt that lad,” said Mitchell, over and over again. “You’ll
+wait here till you see if he’s hurt.”
+
+“I’ll wait here or not as I please,” said Redcar; and to the chauffeur,
+“Here! get down and look at it!”
+
+“You’d better not get down,” said Mitchell; and the chauffeur stood
+bent and hesitating on the step.
+
+The man on the back seat stood up, leant forward, and spoke to Lord
+Redcar, and for the first time my attention was drawn to him. It was
+young Verrall! His handsome face shone clear and fine in the green
+pallor of the comet.
+
+I ceased to hear the quarrel that was raising the voice of Mitchell and
+Lord Redcar. This new fact sent them spinning into the background.
+Young Verrall!
+
+It was my own purpose coming to meet me half way.
+
+There was to be a fight here, it seemed certain to come to a scuffle,
+and here we were—
+
+What was I to do? I thought very swiftly. Unless my memory cheats me, I
+acted with swift decision. My hand tightened on my revolver, and then I
+remembered it was unloaded. I had thought my course out in an instant.
+I turned round and pushed my way out of the angry crowd that was now
+surging back towards the motor-car.
+
+It would be quiet and out of sight, I thought, among the dump heaps
+across the road, and there I might load unobserved. . .
+
+A big young man striding forward with his fists clenched, halted for
+one second at the sight of me.
+
+“What!” said he. “Ain’t afraid of them, are you?”
+
+I glanced over my shoulder and back at him, was near showing him my
+pistol, and the expression changed in his eyes. He hung perplexed at
+me. Then with a grunt he went on.
+
+I heard the voices growing loud and sharp behind me.
+
+I hesitated, half turned towards the dispute, then set off running
+towards the heaps. Some instinct told me not to be detected loading. I
+was cool enough therefore to think of the aftermath of the thing I
+meant to do.
+
+I looked back once again towards the swaying discussion—or was it a
+fight now? and then I dropped into the hollow, knelt among the weeds,
+and loaded with eager trembling fingers. I loaded one chamber, got up
+and went back a dozen paces, thought of possibilities, vacillated,
+returned and loaded all the others. I did it slowly because I felt a
+little clumsy, and at the end came a moment of inspection—had I
+forgotten any thing? And then for a few seconds I crouched before I
+rose, resisting the first gust of reaction against my impulse. I took
+thought, and for a moment that great green-white meteor overhead swam
+back into my conscious mind. For the first time then I linked it
+clearly with all the fierce violence that had crept into human life. I
+joined up that with what I meant to do. I was going to shoot young
+Verrall as it were under the benediction of that green glare.
+
+But about Nettie?
+
+I found it impossible to think out that obvious complication.
+
+I came up over the heap again, and walked slowly back towards the
+wrangle.
+
+Of course I had to kill him. . . .
+
+Now I would have you believe I did not want to murder young Verrall at
+all at that particular time. I had not pictured such circumstances as
+these, I had never thought of him in connection with Lord Redcar and
+our black industrial world. He was in that distant other world of
+Checkshill, the world of parks and gardens, the world of sunlit
+emotions and Nettie. His appearance here was disconcerting. I was taken
+by surprise. I was too tired and hungry to think clearly, and the hard
+implication of our antagonism prevailed with me. In the tumult of my
+passed emotions I had thought constantly of conflicts, confrontations,
+deeds of violence, and now the memory of these things took possession
+of me as though they were irrevocable resolutions.
+
+There was a sharp exclamation, the shriek of a woman, and the crowd
+came surging back. The fight had begun.
+
+Lord Redcar, I believe, had jumped down from his car and felled
+Mitchell, and men were already running out to his assistance from the
+colliery gates.
+
+I had some difficulty in shoving through the crowd; I can still
+remember very vividly being jammed at one time between two big men so
+that my arms were pinned to my sides, but all the other details are
+gone out of my mind until I found myself almost violently projected
+forward into the “scrap.”
+
+I blundered against the corner of the motor-car, and came round it face
+to face with young Verrall, who was descending from the back
+compartment. His face was touched with orange from the automobile’s big
+lamps, which conflicted with the shadows of the comet light, and
+distorted him oddly. That effect lasted but an instant, but it put me
+out. Then he came a step forward, and the ruddy lights and queerness
+vanished.
+
+I don’t think he recognized me, but he perceived immediately I meant
+attacking. He struck out at once at me a haphazard blow, and touched me
+on the cheek.
+
+Instinctively I let go of the pistol, snatched my right hand out of my
+pocket and brought it up in a belated parry, and then let out with my
+left full in his chest.
+
+It sent him staggering, and as he went back I saw recognition mingle
+with astonishment in his face.
+
+“You know me, you swine,” I cried and hit again.
+
+Then I was spinning sideways, half-stunned, with a huge lump of a fist
+under my jaw. I had an impression of Lord Redcar as a great furry bulk,
+towering like some Homeric hero above the fray. I went down before
+him—it made him seem to rush up—and he ignored me further. His big flat
+voice counseled young Verrall—
+
+“Cut, Teddy! It won’t do. The picketa’s got i’on bahs. . . .”
+
+Feet swayed about me, and some hobnailed miner kicked my ankle and went
+stumbling. There were shouts and curses, and then everything had swept
+past me. I rolled over on my face and beheld the chauffeur, young
+Verrall, and Lord Redcar—the latter holding up his long skirts of fur,
+and making a grotesque figure—one behind the other, in full bolt across
+a coldly comet-lit interval, towards the open gates of the colliery.
+
+I raised myself up on my hands.
+
+Young Verrall!
+
+I had not even drawn my revolver—I had forgotten it. I was covered with
+coaly mud—knees, elbows, shoulders, back. I had not even drawn my
+revolver! . . .
+
+A feeling of ridiculous impotence overwhelmed me. I struggled painfully
+to my feet.
+
+I hesitated for a moment towards the gates of the colliery, and then
+went limping homeward, thwarted, painful, confused, and ashamed. I had
+not the heart nor desire to help in the wrecking and burning of Lord
+Redcar’s motor.
+
+§ 4
+
+
+In the night, fever, pain, fatigue—it may be the indigestion of my
+supper of bread and cheese—roused me at last out of a hag-rid sleep to
+face despair. I was a soul lost amidst desolations and shame,
+dishonored, evilly treated, hopeless. I raged against the God I denied,
+and cursed him as I lay.
+
+And it was in the nature of my fever, which was indeed only half
+fatigue and illness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth,
+that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through the
+brief dreams that marked the exhaustions of that vigil, to dominate my
+misery. I was sensible, with an exaggerated distinctness, of the
+intensity of her physical charm for me, of her every grace and beauty;
+she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me and the whole gamut
+of pride. She, bodily, was my lost honor. It was not only loss but
+disgrace to lose her. She stood for life and all that was denied; she
+mocked me as a creature of failure and defeat. My spirit raised itself
+towards her, and then the bruise upon my jaw glowed with a dull heat,
+and I rolled in the mud again before my rivals.
+
+There were times when something near madness took me, and I gnashed my
+teeth and dug my nails into my hands and ceased to curse and cry out
+only by reason of the insufficiency of words. And once towards dawn I
+got out of bed, and sat by my looking-glass with my revolver loaded in
+my hand. I stood up at last and put it carefully in my drawer and
+locked it—out of reach of any gusty impulse. After that I slept for a
+little while.
+
+Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of the
+world. Never a city, never a night the whole year round, but amidst
+those who slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath and
+misery. Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled, they
+agonize near to the very border-line of madness, each one the center of
+a universe darkened and lost. . .
+
+The next day I spent in gloomy lethargy.
+
+I had intended to go to Checkshill that day, but my bruised ankle was
+too swollen for that to be possible. I sat indoors in the ill-lit
+downstairs kitchen, with my foot bandaged, and mused darkly and read.
+My dear old mother waited on me, and her brown eyes watched me and
+wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations. I had not
+told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and my clothes muddy.
+She had brushed my clothes in the morning before I got up.
+
+Ah well! Mothers are not treated in that way now. That I suppose must
+console me. I wonder how far you will be able to picture that dark,
+grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered wall paper,
+the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but by no means
+economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the rust-spotted steel
+fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder how near you can come
+to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy I was, unshaven and
+collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little timid, dirty, devoted
+old woman who hovered about me with love peering out from her puckered
+eyelids. . .
+
+When she went out to buy some vegetables in the middle of the morning
+she got me a half-penny journal. It was just such a one as these upon
+my desk, only that the copy I read was damp from the press, and these
+are so dry and brittle, they crack if I touch them. I have a copy of
+the actual issue I read that morning; it was a paper called
+emphatically the _New Paper_, but everybody bought it and everybody
+called it the “yell.” It was full that morning of stupendous news and
+still more stupendous headlines, so stupendous that for a little while
+I was roused from my egotistical broodings to wider interests. For it
+seemed that Germany and England were on the brink of war.
+
+Of all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, war was
+certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality it was probably far
+less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, the general
+acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil
+consequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling
+confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there any
+sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a multitude
+of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material, and the
+waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing. The old war
+of savage and barbaric nations did at least change humanity, you
+assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique and discipline,
+you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and if successful you took
+their land and their women and perpetuated and enlarged your
+superiority. The new war changed nothing but the color of maps, the
+design of postage stamps, and the relationship of a few accidentally
+conspicuous individuals. In one of the last of these international
+epileptic fits, for example, the English, with much dysentery and bad
+poetry, and a few hundred deaths in battle, conquered the South African
+Boers at a gross cost of about three thousand pounds per head—they
+could have bought the whole of that preposterous imitation of a nation
+for a tenth of that sum—and except for a few substitutions of
+personalities, this group of partially corrupt officials in the place
+of that, and so forth, the permanent change was altogether
+insignificant. (But an excitable young man in Austria committed suicide
+when at length the Transvaal ceased to be a “nation.”) Men went through
+the seat of that war after it was all over, and found humanity
+unchanged, except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of
+an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge
+cases—unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old
+habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like kraal,
+the white in his ugly ill-managed shanty. . .
+
+But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them, through
+the mirage of the _New Paper_, in a light of mania. All my adolescence
+from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of that monstrous
+resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the songs and the
+waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller and the glorious heroism
+of De Wet—who _always_ got away; that was the great point about the
+heroic De Wet—and it never occurred to us that the total population we
+fought against was less than half the number of those who lived cramped
+ignoble lives within the compass of the Four Towns.
+
+But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater
+antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining
+itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention
+only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute
+definitive expression and now percolating and pervading some new region
+of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great Britain.
+
+When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong entirely
+to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest early
+memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty in writing
+down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of fact to their
+fathers.
+
+Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of
+almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had
+neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve, that
+most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with our affairs
+hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions of three
+hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about the globe, and
+here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six millions, in a state
+of confusion no whit better than our own, and the noisy little
+creatures who directed papers and wrote books and gave lectures, and
+generally in that time of world-dementia pretended to be the national
+mind, were busy in both countries, with a sort of infernal unanimity,
+exhorting—and not only exhorting but successfully persuading—the two
+peoples to divert such small common store of material, moral and
+intellectual energy as either possessed, into the purely destructive
+and wasteful business of war. And—I have to tell you these things even
+if you do not believe them, because they are vital to my story—there
+was not a man alive who could have told you of any real permanent
+benefit, of anything whatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and
+evil, that would result from a war between England and Germany, whether
+England shattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever
+the end might be.
+
+The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was, in
+the microcosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical
+wrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measured the
+excess of common emotion over the common intelligence, the legacy of
+inordinate passion we have received from the brute from which we came.
+Just as I had become the slave of my own surprise and anger and went
+hither and thither with a loaded revolver, seeking and intending vague
+fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went about the earth, hot
+eared and muddle headed, with loaded navies and armies terribly ready
+at hand. Only there was not even a Nettie to justify their stupidity.
+There was nothing but quiet imaginary thwarting on either side.
+
+And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two huge
+multitudes of people directed against one another.
+
+The press—those newspapers that are now so strange to us—like the
+“Empires,” the “Nations,” the Trusts, and all the other great monstrous
+shapes of that extraordinary time—was in the nature of an unanticipated
+accident. It had happened, as weeds happen in abandoned gardens, just
+as all our world has happened,—because there was no clear Will in the
+world to bring about anything better. Towards the end this “press” was
+almost entirely under the direction of youngish men of that eager,
+rather unintelligent type, that is never able to detect itself aimless,
+that pursues nothing with incredible pride and zeal, and if you would
+really understand this mad era the comet brought to an end, you must
+keep in mind that every phase in the production of these queer old
+things was pervaded by a strong aimless energy and happened in a
+concentrated rush.
+
+Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.
+
+Figure first, then, a hastily erected and still more hastily designed
+building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old London, and a
+number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile
+swiftness, and within this factory companies of printers, tensely
+active with nimble fingers—they were always speeding up the
+printers—ply their type-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses
+of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of
+little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a
+throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing
+of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and
+copy. Then begins a clatter roar of machinery catching the infection,
+going faster and faster, and whizzing and banging,—engineers, who have
+never had time to wash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans,
+while paper runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor
+you must suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor-car, leaping out
+before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents
+clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to “hustle,” getting
+wonderfully in everybody’s way. At the sight of him even the messenger
+boys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your
+vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all the
+parts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically toward a
+crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last the
+only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing vibrating
+premises are the hands of the clock.
+
+Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all those
+stresses. Then in the small hours, into the now dark and deserted
+streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place spurts paper at
+every door, bales, heaps, torrents of papers, that are snatched and
+flung about in what looks like a free fight, and off with a rush and
+clatter east, west, north, and south. The interest passes outwardly;
+the men from the little rooms are going homeward, the printers disperse
+yawning, the roaring presses slacken. The paper exists. Distribution
+follows manufacture, and we follow the bundles.
+
+Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles hurling
+into stations, catching trains by a hair’s breadth, speeding on their
+way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce accuracy
+out upon the platforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of
+these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles, into dispersing
+parcels, into separate papers, and the dawn happens unnoticed amidst a
+great running and shouting of boys, a shoving through letter slots,
+openings of windows, spreading out upon book-stalls. For the space of a
+few hours you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling
+papers—placards everywhere vociferating the hurried lie for the day;
+men and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by
+study-fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters
+waiting for father to finish—a million scattered people reading—reading
+headlong—or feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement
+jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land.
+. .
+
+And then you know, wonderfully gone—gone utterly, vanished as foam
+might vanish upon the sand.
+
+Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable
+excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—signifying nothing.
+. . .
+
+And one of those white parcels was the paper I held in my hands, as I
+sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark underground
+kitchen of my mother’s, clean roused from my personal troubles by the
+yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms,
+peeling potatoes as I read.
+
+It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body,
+that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the
+English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for
+all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment,
+caught me and swung me about. And all over the country that day,
+millions read as I read, and came round into line with me, under the
+same magnetic spell, came round—how did we say it?—Ah!—“to face the
+foe.”
+
+The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf. The column headed
+“Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth. Does it
+Matter?” went unread. “Germany”—I usually figured this mythical
+malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperor enhanced by
+heraldic black wings and a large sword—had insulted our flag. That was
+the message of the _New Paper_, and the monster towered over me,
+threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting upon my faultless
+country’s colors. Somebody had hoisted a British flag on the right bank
+of some tropical river I had never heard of before, and a drunken
+German officer under ambiguous instructions had torn it down. Then one
+of the convenient abundant natives of the country, a British subject
+indisputably, had been shot in the leg. But the facts were by no means
+clear. Nothing was clear except that we were not going to stand any
+nonsense from Germany. Whatever had or had not happened we meant to
+have an apology for, and apparently they did not mean apologizing.
+
+“HAS WAR COME AT LAST?”
+
+
+That was the headline. One’s heart leapt to assent. . . .
+
+There were hours that day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming of
+battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and
+entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men.
+
+But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember, in
+a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes, and
+wars.
+
+§ 5
+
+
+You must understand that I had no set plan of murder when I walked over
+to Checkshill. I had no set plan of any sort. There was a great
+confusion of dramatically conceived intentions in my head, scenes of
+threatening and denunciation and terror, but I did not mean to kill.
+The revolver was to turn upon my rival my disadvantage in age and
+physique. . . .
+
+But that was not it really! The revolver!—I took the revolver because I
+had the revolver and was a foolish young lout. It was a dramatic sort
+of thing to take. I had, I say, no plan at all.
+
+Ever and again during that second trudge to Checkshill I was irradiated
+with a novel unreasonable hope. I had awakened in the morning with the
+hope, it may have been the last unfaded trail of some obliterated
+dream, that after all Nettie might relent toward me, that her heart was
+kind toward me in spite of all that I imagined had happened. I even
+thought it possible that I might have misinterpreted what I had seen.
+Perhaps she would explain everything. My revolver was in my pocket for
+all that.
+
+I limped at the outset, but after the second mile my ankle warmed to
+forgetfulness, and the rest of the way I walked well. Suppose, after
+all, I was wrong?
+
+I was still debating that, as I came through the park. By the corner of
+the paddock near the keeper’s cottage, I was reminded by some belated
+blue hyacinths of a time when I and Nettie had gathered them together.
+It seemed impossible that we could really have parted ourselves for
+good and all. A wave of tenderness flowed over me, and still flooded me
+as I came through the little dell and drew towards the hollies. But
+there the sweet Nettie of my boy’s love faded, and I thought of the new
+Nettie of desire and the man I had come upon in the moonlight, I
+thought of the narrow, hot purpose that had grown so strongly out of my
+springtime freshness, and my mood darkened to night.
+
+I crossed the beech wood and came towards the gardens with a resolute
+and sorrowful heart. When I reached the green door in the garden wall I
+was seized for a space with so violent a trembling that I could not
+grip the latch to lift it, for I no longer had any doubt how this would
+end. That trembling was succeeded by a feeling of cold, and whiteness,
+and self-pity. I was astonished to find myself grimacing, to feel my
+cheeks wet, and thereupon I gave way completely to a wild passion of
+weeping. I must take just a little time before the thing was done. . .
+. I turned away from the door and stumbled for a little distance,
+sobbing loudly, and lay down out of sight among the bracken, and so
+presently became calm again. I lay there some time. I had half a mind
+to desist, and then my emotion passed like the shadow of a cloud, and I
+walked very coolly into the gardens.
+
+Through the open door of one of the glass houses I saw old Stuart. He
+was leaning against the staging, his hands in his pockets, and so deep
+in thought he gave no heed to me.
+
+I hesitated and went on towards the cottage, slowly.
+
+Something struck me as unusual about the place, but I could not tell at
+first what it was. One of the bedroom windows was open, and the
+customary short blind, with its brass upper rail partly unfastened,
+drooped obliquely across the vacant space. It looked negligent and odd,
+for usually everything about the cottage was conspicuously trim.
+
+The door was standing wide open, and everything was still. But giving
+that usually orderly hall an odd look—it was about half-past two in the
+afternoon—was a pile of three dirty plates, with used knives and forks
+upon them, on one of the hall chairs.
+
+I went into the hall, looked into either room, and hesitated.
+
+Then I fell to upon the door-knocker and gave a loud rat-tat-too, and
+followed this up with an amiable “Hel-lo!”
+
+For a time no one answered me, and I stood listening and expectant,
+with my fingers about my weapon. Some one moved about upstairs
+presently, and was still again. The tension of waiting seemed to brace
+my nerves.
+
+I had my hand on the knocker for the second time, when Puss appeared in
+the doorway.
+
+For a moment we remained staring at one another without speaking. Her
+hair was disheveled, her face dirty, tear-stained, and irregularly red.
+Her expression at the sight of me was pure astonishment. I thought she
+was about to say something, and then she had darted away out of the
+house again.
+
+“I say, Puss!” I said. “Puss!”
+
+I followed her out of the door. “Puss! What’s the matter? Where’s
+Nettie?”
+
+She vanished round the corner of the house.
+
+I hesitated, perplexed whether I should pursue her. What did it all
+mean? Then I heard some one upstairs.
+
+“Willie!” cried the voice of Mrs. Stuart. “Is that you?”
+
+“Yes,” I answered. “Where’s every one? Where’s Nettie? I want to have a
+talk with her.”
+
+She did not answer, but I heard her dress rustle as she moved. I Judged
+she was upon the landing overhead.
+
+I paused at the foot of the stairs, expecting her to appear and come
+down.
+
+Suddenly came a strange sound, a rush of sounds, words jumbled and
+hurrying, confused and shapeless, borne along upon a note of throaty
+distress that at last submerged the words altogether and ended in a
+wail. Except that it came from a woman’s throat it was exactly the
+babbling sound of a weeping child with a grievance. “I can’t,” she
+said, “I can’t,” and that was all I could distinguish. It was to my
+young ears the strangest sound conceivable from a kindly motherly
+little woman, whom I had always thought of chiefly as an unparalleled
+maker of cakes. It frightened me. I went upstairs at once in a state of
+infinite alarm, and there she was upon the landing, leaning forward
+over the top of the chest of drawers beside her open bedroom door, and
+weeping. I never saw such weeping. One thick strand of black hair had
+escaped, and hung with a spiral twist down her back; never before had I
+noticed that she had gray hairs.
+
+As I came up upon the landing her voice rose again. “Oh that I should
+have to tell you, Willie! Oh that I should have to tell you!” She
+dropped her head again, and a fresh gust of tears swept all further
+words away.
+
+I said nothing, I was too astonished; but I drew nearer to her, and
+waited. . . .
+
+I never saw such weeping; the extraordinary wetness of her dripping
+handkerchief abides with me to this day.
+
+“That I should have lived to see this day!” she wailed. “I had rather a
+thousand times she was struck dead at my feet.”
+
+I began to understand.
+
+“Mrs. Stuart,” I said, clearing my throat; “what has become of Nettie?”
+
+“That I should have lived to see this day!” she said by way of reply.
+
+I waited till her passion abated.
+
+There came a lull. I forgot the weapon in my pocket. I said nothing,
+and suddenly she stood erect before me, wiping her swollen eyes.
+“Willie,” she gulped, “she’s gone!”
+
+“Nettie?”
+
+“Gone! . . . Run away. . . . Run away from her home. Oh, Willie,
+Willie! The shame of it! The sin and shame of it!”
+
+She flung herself upon my shoulder, and clung to me, and began again to
+wish her daughter lying dead at our feet.
+
+“There, there,” said I, and all my being was a-tremble. “Where has she
+gone?” I said as softly as I could.
+
+But for the time she was preoccupied with her own sorrow, and I had to
+hold her there, and comfort her with the blackness of finality
+spreading over my soul.
+
+“Where has she gone?” I asked for the fourth time.
+
+“I don’t know—we don’t know. And oh, Willie, she went out yesterday
+morning! I said to her, ‘Nettie,’ I said to her, ‘you’re mighty fine
+for a morning call.’ ‘Fine clo’s for a fine day,’ she said, and that
+was her last words to me!—Willie!—the child I suckled at my breast!”
+
+“Yes, yes. But where has she gone?” I said.
+
+She went on with sobs, and now telling her story with a sort of
+fragmentary hurry: “She went out bright and shining, out of this house
+for ever. She was smiling, Willie—as if she was glad to be going.
+(“Glad to be going,” I echoed with soundless lips.) ‘You’re mighty fine
+for the morning,’ I says; ‘mighty fine.’ ‘Let the girl be pretty,’ says
+her father, ‘while she’s young!’ And somewhere she’d got a parcel of
+her things hidden to pick up, and she was going off—out of this house
+for ever!”
+
+She became quiet.
+
+“Let the girl be pretty,” she repeated; “let the girl be pretty while
+she’s young. . . . Oh! how can we go on _living_, Willie? He doesn’t
+show it, but he’s like a stricken beast. He’s wounded to the heart. She
+was always his favorite. He never seemed to care for Puss like he did
+for her. And she’s wounded him—”
+
+“Where has she gone?” I reverted at last to that.
+
+“We don’t know. She leaves her own blood, she trusts herself— Oh,
+Willie, it’ll kill me! I wish she and me together were lying in our
+graves.”
+
+“But”—I moistened my lips and spoke slowly—“she may have gone to
+marry.”
+
+“If that was so! I’ve prayed to God it might be so, Willie. I’ve prayed
+that he’d take pity on her—him, I mean, she’s with.”
+
+I jerked out: “Who’s that?”
+
+“In her letter, she said he was a gentleman. She did say he was a
+gentleman.”
+
+“In her letter. Has she written? Can I see her letter?”
+
+“Her father took it.”
+
+“But if she writes— When did she write?”
+
+“It came this morning.”
+
+“But where did it come from? You can tell—”
+
+“She didn’t say. She said she was happy. She said love took one like a
+storm—”
+
+“Curse that! Where is her letter? Let me see it. And as for this
+gentleman—”
+
+She stared at me.
+
+“You know who it is.”
+
+“Willie!” she protested.
+
+“You know who it is, whether she said or not?” Her eyes made a mute
+unconfident denial.
+
+“Young Verrall?”
+
+She made no answer. “All I could do for you, Willie,” she began
+presently.
+
+“Was it young Verrall?” I insisted.
+
+For a second, perhaps, we faced one another in stark understanding. . .
+. Then she plumped back to the chest of drawers, and her wet
+pocket-handkerchief, and I knew she sought refuge from my relentless
+eyes.
+
+My pity for her vanished. She knew it was her mistress’s son as well as
+I! And for some time she had known, she had felt.
+
+I hovered over her for a moment, sick with amazed disgust. I suddenly
+bethought me of old Stuart, out in the greenhouse, and turned and went
+downstairs. As I did so, I looked up to see Mrs. Stuart moving
+droopingly and lamely back into her own room.
+
+§ 6
+
+
+Old Stuart was pitiful.
+
+I found him still inert in the greenhouse where I had first seen him.
+He did not move as I drew near him; he glanced at me, and then stared
+hard again at the flowerpots before him.
+
+“Eh, Willie,” he said, “this is a black day for all of us.”
+
+“What are you going to do?” I asked.
+
+“The missus takes on so,” he said. “I came out here.”
+
+“What do you mean to do?”
+
+“What _is_ a man to do in such a case?”
+
+“Do!” I cried, “why— Do!”
+
+“He ought to marry her,” he said.
+
+“By God, yes!” I cried. “He must do that anyhow.”
+
+“He ought to. It’s—it’s cruel. But what am _I_ to do? Suppose he won’t?
+Likely he won’t. What then?”
+
+He drooped with an intensified despair.
+
+“Here’s this cottage,” he said, pursuing some contracted argument.
+“We’ve lived here all our lives, you might say. . . . Clear out. At my
+age. . . . One can’t die in a slum.”
+
+I stood before him for a space, speculating what thoughts might fill
+the gaps between these broken words. I found his lethargy, and the
+dimly shaped mental attitudes his words indicated, abominable. I said
+abruptly, “You have her letter?”
+
+He dived into his breast-pocket, became motionless for ten seconds,
+then woke up again and produced her letter. He drew it clumsily from
+its envelope, and handed it to me silently.
+
+“Why!” he cried, looking at me for the first time, “What’s come to your
+chin, Willie?”
+
+“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s a bruise;” and I opened the letter.
+
+It was written on greenish tinted fancy note-paper, and with all and
+more than Nettie’s usual triteness and inadequacy of expression. Her
+handwriting bore no traces of emotion; it was round and upright and
+clear as though it had been done in a writing lesson. Always her
+letters were like masks upon her image; they fell like curtains before
+the changing charm of her face; one altogether forgot the sound of her
+light clear voice, confronted by a perplexing stereotyped thing that
+had mysteriously got a hold upon one’s heart and pride. How did that
+letter run?—
+
+“MY DEAR MOTHER,
+    “Do not be distressed at my going away. I have gone somewhere safe,
+    and with some one who cares for me very much. I am sorry for your
+    sakes, but it seems that it had to be. Love is a very difficult
+    thing, and takes hold of one in ways one does not expect. Do not
+    think I am ashamed about this, I glory in my love, and you must not
+    trouble too much about me. I am very, very happy (deeply
+    underlined).
+
+
+“Fondest love to Father and Puss.
+“Your loving
+“Nettie.”
+
+
+That queer little document! I can see it now for the childish simple
+thing it was, but at the time I read it in a suppressed anguish of
+rage. It plunged me into a pit of hopeless shame; there seemed to
+remain no pride for me in life until I had revenge. I stood staring at
+those rounded upstanding letters, not trusting myself to speak or move.
+At last I stole a glance at Stuart.
+
+He held the envelope in his hand, and stared down at the postmark
+between his horny thumbnails.
+
+“You can’t even tell where she is,” he said, turning the thing round in
+a hopeless manner, and then desisting. “It’s hard on us, Willie. Here
+she is; she hadn’t anything to complain of; a sort of pet for all of
+us. Not even made to do her share of the ‘ousework. And she goes off
+and leaves us like a bird that’s learnt to fly. Can’t _trust_ us,
+that’s what takes me. Puts ‘erself— But there! What’s to happen to
+her?”
+
+“What’s to happen to him?”
+
+He shook his head to show that problem was beyond him.
+
+“You’ll go after her,” I said in an even voice; “you’ll make him marry
+her?”
+
+“Where am I to go?” he asked helplessly, and held out the envelope with
+a gesture; “and what could I do? Even if I knew— How could I leave the
+gardens?”
+
+“Great God!” I cried, “not leave these gardens! It’s your Honor, man!
+If she was my daughter—if she was my daughter—I’d tear the world to
+pieces!” . . I choked. “You mean to stand it?”
+
+“What can I do?”
+
+“Make him marry her! Horsewhip him! Horsewhip him, I say!—I’d strangle
+him!”
+
+He scratched slowly at his hairy cheek, opened his mouth, and shook his
+head. Then, with an intolerable note of sluggish gentle wisdom, he
+said, “People of our sort, Willie, can’t do things like that.”
+
+I came near to raving. I had a wild impulse to strike him in the face.
+Once in my boyhood I happened upon a bird terribly mangled by some cat,
+and killed it in a frenzy of horror and pity. I had a gust of that same
+emotion now, as this shameful mutilated soul fluttered in the dust,
+before me. Then, you know, I dismissed him from the case.
+
+“May I look?” I asked.
+
+He held out the envelope reluctantly.
+
+“There it is,” he said, and pointing with his garden-rough forefinger.
+“I.A.P.A.M.P. What can you make of that?”
+
+I took the thing in my hands. The adhesive stamp customary in those
+days was defaced by a circular postmark, which bore the name of the
+office of departure and the date. The impact in this particular case
+had been light or made without sufficient ink, and half the letters of
+the name had left no impression. I could distinguish—
+
+I A P    A M P
+
+
+and very faintly below D.S.O.
+
+I guessed the name in an instant flash of intuition. It was
+Shaphambury. The very gaps shaped that to my mind. Perhaps in a sort of
+semi-visibility other letters were there, at least hinting themselves.
+It was a place somewhere on the east coast, I knew, either in Norfolk
+or Suffolk.
+
+“Why!” cried I—and stopped.
+
+What was the good of telling him?
+
+Old Stuart had glanced up sharply, I am inclined to think almost
+fearfully, into my face. “You—you haven’t got it?” he said.
+
+Shaphambury—I should remember that.
+
+“You don’t think you got it?” he said.
+
+I handed the envelope back to him.
+
+“For a moment I thought it might be Hampton,” I said.
+
+“Hampton,” he repeated. “Hampton. How could you make Hampton?” He
+turned the envelope about. “H.A.M.—why, Willie, you’re a worse hand at
+the job than me!”
+
+He replaced the letter in the envelope and stood erect to put this back
+in his breast pocket.
+
+I did not mean to take any risks in this affair. I drew a stump of
+pencil from my waistcoat pocket, turned a little away from him and
+wrote “Shaphambury” very quickly on my frayed and rather grimy shirt
+cuff.
+
+“Well,” said I, with an air of having done nothing remarkable.
+
+I turned to him with some unimportant observation—I have forgotten
+what.
+
+I never finished whatever vague remark I commenced.
+
+I looked up to see a third person waiting at the greenhouse door.
+
+§ 7
+
+
+It was old Mrs. Verrall.
+
+I wonder if I can convey the effect of her to you. She was a little old
+lady with extraordinarily flaxen hair, her weak aquiline features were
+pursed up into an assumption of dignity, and she was richly dressed. I
+would like to underline that “richly dressed,” or have the words
+printed in florid old English or Gothic lettering. No one on earth is
+now quite so richly dressed as she was, no one old or young indulges in
+so quiet and yet so profound a sumptuosity. But you must not imagine
+any extravagance of outline or any beauty or richness of color. The
+predominant colors were black and fur browns, and the effect of
+richness was due entirely to the extreme costliness of the materials
+employed. She affected silk brocades with rich and elaborate patterns,
+priceless black lace over creamy or purple satin, intricate trimmings
+through which threads and bands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter
+rare furs. Her gloves fitted exquisitely, and ostentatiously simple
+chains of fine gold and pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced
+about her little person. One was forced to feel that the slightest
+article she wore cost more than all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like
+Nettie; her bonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies.
+Richness, that is the first quality about this old lady that I would
+like to convey to you, and the second was cleanliness. You felt that
+old Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean. If you had boiled my poor dear
+old mother in soda for a month you couldn’t have got her so clean as
+Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was. And pervading all her
+presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidence in the
+respectful subordination of the world.
+
+She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any loss
+of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she had come to
+interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged the gulf
+between their families.
+
+And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as
+my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the world that
+followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling
+inconceivable. Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed
+for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things
+that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one had
+taken up an attitude. There were in England and America, and indeed
+throughout the world, two great informal divisions of human beings—the
+Secure and the Insecure. There was not and never had been in either
+country a nobility—it was and remains a common error that the British
+peers were noble—neither in law nor custom were there noble families,
+and we altogether lacked the edification one found in Russia, for
+example, of a poor nobility. A peerage was an hereditary possession
+that, like the family land, concerned only the eldest sons of the
+house; it radiated no luster of _noblesse oblige_. The rest of the
+world were in law and practice common—and all America was common. But
+through the private ownership of land that had resulted from the
+neglect of feudal obligations in Britain and the utter want of
+political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had
+become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it
+was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and
+who were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but
+by the natural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of
+living. It was a class without any very definite boundaries; vigorous
+individualities, by methods for the most part violent and questionable,
+were constantly thrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and
+the sons and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by
+wild extravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety
+and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The rest of the
+population was landless and, except by working directly or indirectly
+for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such was the
+shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the stifled egotism
+of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very few indeed of the
+Secure could be found to doubt that this was the natural and only
+conceivable order of the world.
+
+It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am
+displaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopeless
+bitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure lived lives
+of paradisiacal happiness. The pit of insecurity below them made itself
+felt, even though it was not comprehended. Life about them was ugly;
+the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressed people, the vulgar
+appeals of the dealers in popular commodities, were not to be escaped.
+There was below the threshold of their minds an uneasiness; they not
+only did not think clearly about social economy but they displayed an
+instinctive disinclination to think. Their security was not so perfect
+that they had not a dread of falling towards the pit, they were always
+lashing themselves by new ropes, their cultivation of “connexions,” of
+interests, their desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a
+constant ignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the full
+flavor of their lives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class
+distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants. Read
+their surviving books. Each generation bewails the decay of that
+“fidelity” of servants, no generation ever saw. A world that is squalid
+in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they never understood.
+They believed there was not enough of anything to go round, they
+believed that this was the intention of God and an incurable condition
+of life, and they held passionately and with a sense of right to their
+disproportionate share. They maintained a common intercourse as
+“Society” of all who were practically secure, and their choice of that
+word is exhaustively eloquent of the quality of their philosophy. But,
+if you can master these alien ideas upon which the old system rested,
+just in the same measure will you understand the horror these people
+had for marriages with the Insecure. In the case of their girls and
+women it was extraordinarily rare, and in the case of either sex it was
+regarded as a disastrous social crime. Anything was better than that.
+
+You are probably aware of the hideous fate that was only too probably
+the lot, during those last dark days, of every girl of the insecure
+classes who loved and gave way to the impulse of self-abandonment
+without marriage, and so you will understand the peculiar situation of
+Nettie with young Verrall. One or other had to suffer. And as they were
+both in a state of great emotional exaltation and capable of strange
+generosities toward each other, it was an open question and naturally a
+source of great anxiety to a mother in Mrs. Verrall’s position, whether
+the sufferer might not be her son—whether as the outcome of that
+glowing irresponsible commerce Nettie might not return prospective
+mistress of Checkshill Towers. The chances were greatly against that
+conclusion, but such things did occur.
+
+These laws and customs sound, I know, like a record of some
+nasty-minded lunatic’s inventions. They were invincible facts in that
+vanished world into which, by some accident, I had been born, and it
+was the dream of any better state of things that was scouted as lunacy.
+Just think of it! This girl I loved with all my soul, for whom I was
+ready to sacrifice my life, was not good enough to marry young Verrall.
+And I had only to look at his even, handsome, characterless face to
+perceive a creature weaker and no better than myself. She was to be his
+pleasure until he chose to cast her aside, and the poison of our social
+system had so saturated her nature—his evening dress, his freedom and
+his money had seemed so fine to her and I so clothed in squalor—that to
+that prospect she had consented. And to resent the social conventions
+that created their situation, was called “class envy,” and gently born
+preachers reproached us for the mildest resentment against an injustice
+no living man would now either endure or consent to profit by.
+
+What was the sense of saying “peace” when there was no peace? If there
+was one hope in the disorders of that old world it lay in revolt and
+conflict to the death.
+
+But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesqueness of the old life,
+you will begin to appreciate the interpretation of old Mrs. Verrall’s
+appearance that leapt up at once in my mind.
+
+She had come to compromise the disaster!
+
+And the Stuarts _would_ compromise! I saw that only too well.
+
+An enormous disgust at the prospect of the imminent encounter between
+Stuart and his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrational way.
+I wanted to escape seeing that, seeing even Stuart’s first gesture in
+that, at any cost.
+
+“I’m off,” said I, and turned my back on him without any further
+farewell.
+
+My line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so I advanced toward her.
+
+I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a little way open, her
+forehead wrinkled, and her eyes grew round. She found me a queer
+customer even at the first sight, and there was something in the manner
+of my advance that took away her breath.
+
+She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to the
+level of the hothouse floor. She receded a pace or two, with a certain
+offended dignity at the determination of my rush.
+
+I gave her no sort of salutation.
+
+Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation. There
+is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing I said to
+her—I strip these things before you—if only I can get them stark enough
+you will understand and forgive. I was filled with a brutal and
+overpowering desire to insult her.
+
+And so I addressed this poor little expensive old woman in the
+following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into a
+comprehensive plural. “You infernal land thieves!” I said point-blank
+into her face. “_Have you come to offer them money?_”
+
+And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudely
+beyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched, out of her
+world again. . .
+
+I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked to her. So
+far as her particular universe went I had not existed at all, or I had
+existed only as a dim black thing, an insignificant speck, far away
+across her park in irrelevant, unimportant transit, until this moment
+when she came, sedately troubled, into her own secure gardens and
+sought for Stuart among the greenhouses. Then abruptly I flashed into
+being down that green-walled, brick-floored vista as a black-avised,
+ill-clad young man, who first stared and then advanced scowling toward
+her. Once in existence I developed rapidly. I grew larger in
+perspective and became more and more important and sinister every
+moment. I came up the steps with inconceivable hostility and disrespect
+in my bearing, towered over her, becoming for an instant at least a
+sort of second French Revolution, and delivered myself with the
+intensest concentration of those wicked and incomprehensible words.
+Just for a second I threatened annihilation. Happily that was my
+climax.
+
+And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it had always
+been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint sense of insecurity
+my episode left in its wake.
+
+The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a large
+proportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith. I thought they
+saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied. But indeed old
+Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection of her
+family’s right to dominate a wide country side, than she was of
+examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other of the
+adamantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security.
+
+No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously. But she could not
+understand.
+
+None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid
+flashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below their
+feet. The thing leapt out of the black for a moment and vanished, like
+a threatening figure by a desolate roadside lit for a moment by one’s
+belated carriage-lamp and then swallowed up by the night. They counted
+it with nightmares, and did their best to forget what was evidently as
+insignificant as it was disturbing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH WAR
+
+
+§ 1
+
+From that moment when I insulted old Mrs. Verrall I became
+representative, I was a man who stood for all the disinherited of the
+world. I had no hope of pride or pleasure left in me, I was raging
+rebellion against God and mankind. There were no more vague intentions
+swaying me this way and that; I was perfectly clear now upon what I
+meant to do. I would make my protest and die.
+
+I would make my protest and die. I was going to kill Nettie—Nettie who
+had smiled and promised and given herself to another, and who stood now
+for all the conceivable delightfulnesses, the lost imaginations of the
+youthful heart, the unattainable joys in life; and Verrall who stood
+for all who profited by the incurable injustice of our social order. I
+would kill them both. And that being done I would blow my brains out
+and see what vengeance followed my blank refusal to live.
+
+So indeed I was resolved. I raged monstrously. And above me, abolishing
+the stars, triumphant over the yellow waning moon that followed it
+below, the giant meteor towered up towards the zenith.
+
+“Let me only kill!” I cried. “Let me only kill!”
+
+So I shouted in my frenzy. I was in a fever that defied hunger and
+fatigue; for a long time I had prowled over the heath towards
+Lowchester talking to myself, and now that night had fully come I was
+tramping homeward, walking the long seventeen miles without a thought
+of rest. And I had eaten nothing since the morning.
+
+I suppose I must count myself mad, but I can recall my ravings.
+
+There were times when I walked weeping through that brightness that was
+neither night nor day. There were times when I reasoned in a
+topsy-turvy fashion with what I called the Spirit of All Things. But
+always I spoke to that white glory in the sky.
+
+“Why am I here only to suffer ignominies?” I asked. “Why have you made
+me with pride that cannot be satisfied, with desires that turn and rend
+me? Is it a jest, this world—a joke you play on your guests? I—even
+I—have a better humor than that!”
+
+“Why not learn from me a certain decency of mercy? Why not undo? Have I
+ever tormented—day by day, some wretched worm—making filth for it to
+trail through, filth that disgusts it, starving it, bruising it,
+mocking it? Why should you? Your jokes are clumsy. Try—try some milder
+fun up there; do you hear? Something that doesn’t hurt so infernally.”
+
+“You say this is your purpose—your purpose with me. You are making
+something with me—birth pangs of a soul. Ah! How can I believe you? You
+forget I have eyes for other things. Let my own case go, but what of
+that frog beneath the cart-wheel, God?—and the bird the cat had torn?”
+
+And after such blasphemies I would fling out a ridiculous little
+debating society hand. “Answer me that!”
+
+A week ago it had been moonlight, white and black and hard across the
+spaces of the park, but now the light was livid and full of the quality
+of haze. An extraordinarily low white mist, not three feet above the
+ground, drifted broodingly across the grass, and the trees rose ghostly
+out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy and strange was the world
+that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my little cracked voice drifted
+solitary through the silent mysteries. Sometimes I argued as I have
+told, sometimes I tumbled along in moody vacuity, sometimes my torment
+was vivid and acute.
+
+Abruptly out of apathy would come a boiling paroxysm of fury, when I
+thought of Nettie mocking me and laughing, and of her and Verrall
+clasped in one another’s arms.
+
+“I will not have it so!” I screamed. “I will not have it so!”
+
+And in one of these raving fits I drew my revolver from my pocket and
+fired into the quiet night. Three times I fired it.
+
+The bullets tore through the air, the startled trees told one another
+in diminishing echoes the thing I had done, and then, with a slow
+finality, the vast and patient night healed again to calm. My shots, my
+curses and blasphemies, my prayers—for anon I prayed—that Silence took
+them all.
+
+It was—how can I express it?—a stifled outcry tranquilized, lost, amid
+the serene assumptions, the overwhelming empire of that brightness. The
+noise of my shots, the impact upon things, had for the instant been
+enormous, then it had passed away. I found myself standing with the
+revolver held up, astonished, my emotions penetrated by something I
+could not understand. Then I looked up over my shoulder at the great
+star, and remained staring at it.
+
+“Who are _you_?” I said at last.
+
+I was like a man in a solitary desert who has suddenly heard a voice. .
+. .
+
+That, too, passed.
+
+As I came over Clayton Crest I recalled that I missed the multitude
+that now night after night walked out to stare at the comet, and the
+little preacher in the waste beyond the hoardings, who warned sinners
+to repent before the Judgment, was not in his usual place.
+
+It was long past midnight, and every one had gone home. But I did not
+think of this at first, and the solitude perplexed me and left a memory
+behind. The gas-lamps were all extinguished because of the brightness
+of the comet, and that too was unfamiliar. The little newsagent in the
+still High Street had shut up and gone to bed, but one belated board
+had been put out late and forgotten, and it still bore its placard.
+
+The word upon it—there was but one word upon it in staring letters—was:
+“WAR.”
+
+You figure that empty mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps—no
+soul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And amidst
+that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board, a little askew
+and crumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool meteoric glare,
+preposterous and appalling, the measureless evil of that word—
+
+“WAR!”
+
+§ 2
+
+
+I awoke in that state of equanimity that so often follows an emotional
+drenching.
+
+It was late, and my mother was beside my bed. She had some breakfast
+for me on a battered tray.
+
+“Don’t get up yet, dear,” she said. “You’ve been sleeping. It was three
+o’clock when you got home last night. You must have been tired out.”
+
+“Your poor face,” she went on, “was as white as a sheet and your eyes
+shining. . . . It frightened me to let you in. And you stumbled on the
+stairs.”
+
+My eyes went quietly to my coat pocket, where something still bulged.
+She probably had not noticed. “I went to Checkshill,” I said. “You
+know—perhaps—?”
+
+“I got a letter last evening, dear,” and as she bent near me to put the
+tray upon my knees, she kissed my hair softly. For a moment we both
+remained still, resting on that, her cheek just touching my head.
+
+I took the tray from her to end the pause.
+
+“Don’t touch my clothes, mummy,” I said sharply, as she moved towards
+them. “I’m still equal to a clothes-brush.”
+
+And then, as she turned away, I astonished her by saying, “You dear
+mother, you! A little—I understand. Only—now—dear mother; oh! let me
+be! Let me be!”
+
+And, with the docility of a good servant, she went from me. Dear heart
+of submission that the world and I had used so ill!
+
+It seemed to me that morning that I could never give way to a gust of
+passion again. A sorrowful firmness of the mind possessed me. My
+purpose seemed now as inflexible as iron; there was neither love nor
+hate nor fear left in me—only I pitied my mother greatly for all that
+was still to come. I ate my breakfast slowly, and thought where I could
+find out about Shaphambury, and how I might hope to get there. I had
+not five shillings in the world.
+
+I dressed methodically, choosing the least frayed of my collars, and
+shaving much more carefully than was my wont; then I went down to the
+Public Library to consult a map.
+
+Shaphambury was on the coast of Essex, a long and complicated journey
+from Clayton. I went to the railway-station and made some memoranda
+from the time-tables. The porters I asked were not very clear about
+Shaphambury, but the booking-office clerk was helpful, and we puzzled
+out all I wanted to know. Then I came out into the coaly street again.
+At the least I ought to have two pounds.
+
+I went back to the Public Library and into the newspaper room to think
+over this problem.
+
+A fact intruded itself upon me. People seemed in an altogether
+exceptional stir about the morning journals, there was something
+unusual in the air of the room, more people and more talking than
+usual, and for a moment I was puzzled. Then I bethought me: “This war
+with Germany, of course!” A naval battle was supposed to be in progress
+in the North Sea. Let them! I returned to the consideration of my own
+affairs.
+
+Parload?
+
+Could I go and make it up with him, and then borrow? I weighed the
+chances of that. Then I thought of selling or pawning something, but
+that seemed difficult. My winter overcoat had not cost a pound when it
+was new, my watch was not likely to fetch many shillings. Still, both
+these things might be factors. I thought with a certain repugnance of
+the little store my mother was probably making for the rent. She was
+very secretive about that, and it was locked in an old tea-caddy in her
+bedroom. I knew it would be almost impossible to get any of that money
+from her willingly, and though I told myself that in this issue of
+passion and death no detail mattered, I could not get rid of tormenting
+scruples whenever I thought of that tea-caddy. Was there no other
+course? Perhaps after every other source had been tapped I might
+supplement with a few shillings frankly begged from her. “These
+others,” I said to myself, thinking without passion for once of the
+sons of the Secure, “would find it difficult to run their romances on a
+pawnshop basis. However, we must manage it.”
+
+I felt the day was passing on, but I did not get excited about that.
+“Slow is swiftest,” Parload used to say, and I meant to get everything
+thought out completely, to take a long aim and then to act as a bullet
+flies.
+
+I hesitated at a pawnshop on my way home to my midday meal, but I
+determined not to pledge my watch until I could bring my overcoat also.
+
+I ate silently, revolving plans.
+
+§ 3
+
+
+After our midday dinner—it was a potato-pie, mostly potato with some
+scraps of cabbage and bacon—I put on my overcoat and got it out of the
+house while my mother was in the scullery at the back.
+
+A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a
+damp, unsavory, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room
+kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the
+fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness,
+opened, and diffused small crunchable particles about the uneven brick
+floor. It was the region of “washing-up,” that greasy, damp function
+that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess
+and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where
+saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of
+potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, and rags of a
+quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called “dish-clouts,”
+rise in my memory at the name. The altar of this place was the “sink,”
+a tank of stone, revolting to a refined touch, grease-filmed and
+unpleasant to see, and above this was a tap for cold water, so arranged
+that when the water descended it splashed and wetted whoever had turned
+it on. This tap was our water supply. And in such a place you must
+fancy a little old woman, rather incompetent and very gentle, a soul of
+unselfishness and sacrifice, in dirty clothes, all come from their
+original colors to a common dusty dark gray, in worn, ill-fitting
+boots, with hands distorted by ill use, and untidy graying hair—my
+mother. In the winter her hands would be “chapped,” and she would have
+a cough. And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and
+watch in order that I may desert her.
+
+I gave way to queer hesitations in pawning my two negotiable articles.
+A weakly indisposition to pawn in Clayton, where the pawnbroker knew
+me, carried me to the door of the place in Lynch Street, Swathinglea,
+where I had bought my revolver. Then came an idea that I was giving too
+many facts about myself to one man, and I came back to Clayton after
+all. I forget how much money I got, but I remember that it was rather
+less than the sum I had made out to be the single fare to Shaphambury.
+Still deliberate, I went back to the Public Library to find out whether
+it was possible, by walking for ten or twelve miles anywhere, to
+shorten the journey. My boots were in a dreadful state, the sole of the
+left one also was now peeling off, and I could not help perceiving that
+all my plans might be wrecked if at this crisis I went on shoe leather
+in which I could only shuffle. So long as I went softly they would
+serve, but not for hard walking. I went to the shoemaker in Hacker
+Street, but he would not promise any repairs for me under forty-eight
+hours.
+
+I got back home about five minutes to three, resolved to start by the
+five train for Birmingham in any case, but still dissatisfied about my
+money. I thought of pawning a book or something of that sort, but I
+could think of nothing of obvious value in the house. My mother’s
+silver—two gravy-spoons and a salt-cellar—had been pawned for some
+weeks, since, in fact, the June quarter day. But my mind was full of
+hypothetical opportunities.
+
+As I came up the steps to our door, I remarked that Mr. Gabbitas looked
+at me suddenly round his dull red curtains with a sort of alarmed
+resolution in his eye and vanished, and as I walked along the passage
+he opened his door upon me suddenly and intercepted me.
+
+You are figuring me, I hope, as a dark and sullen lout in shabby,
+cheap, old-world clothes that are shiny at all the wearing surfaces,
+and with a discolored red tie and frayed linen. My left hand keeps in
+my pocket as though there is something it prefers to keep a grip upon
+there. Mr. Gabbitas was shorter than I, and the first note he struck in
+the impression he made upon any one was of something bright and
+birdlike. I think he wanted to be birdlike, he possessed the
+possibility of an avian charm, but, as a matter of fact, there was
+nothing of the glowing vitality of the bird in his being. And a bird is
+never out of breath and with an open mouth. He was in the clerical
+dress of that time, that costume that seems now almost the strangest of
+all our old-world clothing, and he presented it in its cheapest
+form—black of a poor texture, ill-fitting, strangely cut. Its long
+skirts accentuated the tubbiness of his body, the shortness of his
+legs. The white tie below his all-round collar, beneath his innocent
+large-spectacled face, was a little grubby, and between his not very
+clean teeth he held a briar pipe. His complexion was whitish, and
+although he was only thirty-three or four perhaps, his sandy hair was
+already thinning from the top of his head.
+
+To your eye, now, he would seem the strangest figure, in the utter
+disregard of all physical beauty or dignity about him. You would find
+him extraordinarily odd, but in the old days he met not only with
+acceptance but respect. He was alive until within a year or so ago, but
+his later appearance changed. As I saw him that afternoon he was a very
+slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only was his clothing
+altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped the man stark, you
+would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes from flabby
+muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, and in the rounded shoulders
+and flawed and yellowish skin, the same failure of any effort toward
+clean beauty. You had an instinctive sense that so he had been from the
+beginning. You felt he was not only drifting through life, eating what
+came in his way, believing what came in his way, doing without any
+vigor what came in his way, but that _into_ life also he had drifted.
+You could not believe him the child of pride and high resolve, or of
+any splendid passion of love. He had just _happened_. . . But we all
+happened then. Why am I taking this tone over this poor little curate
+in particular?
+
+“Hello!” he said, with an assumption of friendly ease. “Haven’t seen
+you for weeks! Come in and have a gossip.”
+
+An invitation from the drawing-room lodger was in the nature of a
+command. I would have liked very greatly to have refused it, never was
+invitation more inopportune, but I had not the wit to think of an
+excuse. “All right,” I said awkwardly, and he held the door open for
+me.
+
+“I’d be very glad if you would,” he amplified. “One doesn’t get much
+opportunity of intelligent talk in this parish.”
+
+What the devil was he up to, was my secret preoccupation. He fussed
+about me with a nervous hospitality, talking in jumpy fragments,
+rubbing his hands together, and taking peeps at me over and round his
+glasses. As I sat down in his leather-covered armchair, I had an odd
+memory of the one in the Clayton dentist’s operating-room—I know not
+why.
+
+“They’re going to give us trouble in the North Sea, it seems,” he
+remarked with a sort of innocent zest. “I’m glad they mean fighting.”
+
+There was an air of culture about his room that always cowed me, and
+that made me constrained even on this occasion. The table under the
+window was littered with photographic material and the later albums of
+his continental souvenirs, and on the American cloth trimmed shelves
+that filled the recesses on either side of the fireplace were what I
+used to think in those days a quite incredible number of books—perhaps
+eight hundred altogether, including the reverend gentleman’s photograph
+albums and college and school text-books. This suggestion of learning
+was enforced by the little wooden shield bearing a college coat-of-arms
+that hung over the looking-glass, and by a photograph of Mr. Gabbitas
+in cap and gown in an Oxford frame that adorned the opposite wall. And
+in the middle of that wall stood his writing-desk, which I knew to have
+pigeon-holes when it was open, and which made him seem not merely
+cultured but literary. At that he wrote sermons, composing them
+himself!
+
+“Yes,” he said, taking possession of the hearthrug, “the war had to
+come sooner or later. If we smash their fleet for them now; well,
+there’s an end to the matter!”
+
+He stood on his toes and then bumped down on his heels, and looked
+blandly through his spectacles at a water-color by his sister—the
+subject was a bunch of violets—above the sideboard which was his pantry
+and tea-chest and cellar. “Yes,” he said as he did so.
+
+I coughed, and wondered how I might presently get away.
+
+He invited me to smoke—that queer old practice!—and then when I
+declined, began talking in a confidential tone of this “dreadful
+business” of the strikes. “The war won’t improve _that_ outlook,” he
+said, and was very grave for a moment.
+
+He spoke of the want of thought for their wives and children shown by
+the colliers in striking merely for the sake of the union, and this
+stirred me to controversy, and distracted me a little from my
+resolution to escape.
+
+“I don’t quite agree with that,” I said, clearing my throat. “If the
+men didn’t strike for the union now, if they let that be broken up,
+where would they be when the pinch of reductions did come?”
+
+To which he replied that they couldn’t expect to get top-price wages
+when the masters were selling bottom-price coal. I replied, “That isn’t
+it. The masters don’t treat them fairly. They have to protect
+themselves.”
+
+To which Mr. Gabbitas answered, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve been in the
+Four Towns some time, and I must say I don’t think the balance of
+injustice falls on the masters’ side.”
+
+“It falls on the men,” I agreed, wilfully misunderstanding him.
+
+And so we worked our way toward an argument. “Confound this argument!”
+I thought; but I had no skill in self-extraction, and my irritation
+crept into my voice. Three little spots of color came into the cheeks
+and nose of Mr. Gabbitas, but his voice showed nothing of his ruffled
+temper.
+
+“You see,” I said, “I’m a socialist. I don’t think this world was made
+for a small minority to dance on the faces of every one else.”
+
+“My dear fellow,” said the Rev. Gabbitas, “_I’m_ a socialist too. Who
+isn’t. But that doesn’t lead me to class hatred.”
+
+“You haven’t felt the heel of this confounded system. _I_ have.”
+
+“Ah!” said he; and catching him on that note came a rap at the front
+door, and, as he hung suspended, the sound of my mother letting some
+one in and a timid rap.
+
+“_Now_,” thought I, and stood up, resolutely, but he would not let me.
+“No, no, no!” said he. “It’s only for the Dorcas money.”
+
+He put his hand against my chest with an effect of physical compulsion,
+and cried, “Come in!”
+
+“Our talk’s just getting interesting,” he protested; and there entered
+Miss Ramell, an elderly little young lady who was mighty in Church help
+in Clayton.
+
+He greeted her—she took no notice of me—and went to his bureau, and I
+remained standing by my chair but unable to get out of the room. “I’m
+not interrupting?” asked Miss Ramell.
+
+“Not in the least,” he said; drew out the carriers and opened his desk.
+I could not help seeing what he did.
+
+I was so fretted by my impotence to leave him that at the moment it did
+not connect at all with the research of the morning that he was taking
+out money. I listened sullenly to his talk with Miss Ramell, and saw
+only, as they say in Wales, with the front of my eyes, the small flat
+drawer that had, it seemed, quite a number of sovereigns scattered over
+its floor. “They’re so unreasonable,” complained Miss Ramell. Who could
+be otherwise in a social organization that bordered on insanity?
+
+I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow on
+the plush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs, pipes, and
+ash-trays that adorned it. What was it I had to think out before I went
+to the station?
+
+Of course! My mind made a queer little reluctant leap—it felt like
+being forced to leap over a bottomless chasm—and alighted upon the
+sovereigns that were just disappearing again as Mr. Gabbitas shut his
+drawer.
+
+“I won’t interrupt your talk further,” said Miss Ramell, receding
+doorward.
+
+Mr. Gabbitas played round her politely, and opened the door for her and
+conducted her into the passage, and for a moment or so I had the
+fullest sense of proximity to those—it seemed to me there must be ten
+or twelve—sovereigns. . . .
+
+The front door closed and he returned. My chance of escape had gone.
+
+§ 4
+
+
+“_I must_ be going,” I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to get
+away out of that room.
+
+“My dear chap!” he insisted, “I can’t think of it. Surely—there’s
+nothing to call you away.” Then with an evident desire to shift the
+venue of our talk, he asked, “You never told me what you thought of
+Burble’s little book.”
+
+I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry with
+him. It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer and qualify my
+opinions to him. Why should I pretend a feeling of intellectual and
+social inferiority toward him. He asked what I thought of Burble. I
+resolved to tell him—if necessary with arrogance. Then perhaps he would
+release me. I did not sit down again, but stood by the corner of the
+fireplace.
+
+“That was the little book you lent me last summer?” I said.
+
+“He reasons closely, eh?” he said, and indicated the armchair with a
+flat hand, and beamed persuasively.
+
+I remained standing. “I didn’t think much of his reasoning powers,” I
+said.
+
+“He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had.”
+
+“That may be. But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,” said I.
+
+“You mean?”
+
+“That he’s wrong. I don’t think he proves his case. I don’t think
+Christianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender he is. His
+reasoning’s—Rot.”
+
+Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and
+propitiation vanished from his manner. His eyes and mouth were round,
+his face seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.
+
+“I’m sorry you think that,” he said at last, with a catch in his
+breath.
+
+He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a step or
+two toward the window and turned. “I suppose you will admit—” he began,
+with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension. . . . .
+
+I will not tell you of his arguments or mine. You will find if you care
+to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book museums, the
+shriveled cheap publications—the publications of the Rationalist Press
+Association, for example—on which my arguments were based. Lying in
+that curious limbo with them, mixed up with them and indistinguishable,
+are the endless “Replies” of orthodoxy, like the mixed dead in some
+hard-fought trench. All those disputes of our fathers, and they were
+sometimes furious disputes, have gone now beyond the range of
+comprehension. You younger people, I know, read them with impatient
+perplexity. You cannot understand how sane creatures could imagine they
+had joined issue at all in most of these controversies. All the old
+methods of systematic thinking, the queer absurdities of the
+Aristotelian logic, have followed magic numbers and mystical numbers,
+and the Rumpelstiltskin magic of names now into the blackness of the
+unthinkable. You can no more understand our theological passions than
+you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of
+their gods only by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die
+because they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back
+from a day’s expedition because he had met three crows. Even I, who
+have been through it all, recall our controversies now with something
+near incredulity.
+
+Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the old
+time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced, incredible
+Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements. I am inclined to say that
+neither believers nor unbelievers had faith as we understand it—they
+had insufficient intellectual power. They could not trust unless they
+had something to see and touch and say, like their barbarous ancestors
+who could not make a bargain without exchange of tokens. If they no
+longer worshipped stocks and stones, or eked out their needs with
+pilgrimages and images, they still held fiercely to audible images, to
+printed words and formulae.
+
+But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?
+
+Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of God and
+Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side. And on the
+whole—from the impartial perspective of my three and seventy years—I
+adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that of the Rev. Gabbitas was
+altogether worse.
+
+Little pink spots came into his cheeks, a squealing note into his
+voice. We interrupted each other more and more rudely. We invented
+facts and appealed to authorities whose names I mispronounced; and,
+finding Gabbitas shy of the higher criticism and the Germans, I used
+the names of Karl Marx and Engels as Bible exegetes with no little
+effect. A silly wrangle! a preposterous wrangle!—you must imagine our
+talk becoming louder, with a developing quarrelsome note—my mother no
+doubt hovering on the staircase and listening in alarm as who should
+say, “My dear, don’t offend it! Oh, don’t offend it! Mr. Gabbitas
+enjoys its friendship. Try to think whatever Mr. Gabbitas says”—though
+we still kept in touch with a pretence of mutual deference. The ethical
+superiority of Christianity to all other religions came to the fore—I
+know not how. We dealt with the matter in bold, imaginative
+generalizations, because of the insufficiency of our historical
+knowledge. I was moved to denounce Christianity as the ethic of slaves,
+and declare myself a disciple of a German writer of no little vogue in
+those days, named Nietzsche.
+
+For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquainted with
+the works of the master. Indeed, all I knew of him had come to me
+through a two-column article in _The Clarion_ for the previous week. .
+. . But the Rev. Gabbitas did not read _The Clarion_.
+
+I am, I know, putting a strain upon your credulity when I tell you that
+I now have little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutely ignorant
+even of the name of Nietzsche, although that writer presented a
+separate and distinct attitude of attack upon the faith that was in the
+reverend gentleman’s keeping.
+
+“I’m a disciple of Nietzsche,” said I, with an air of extensive
+explanation.
+
+He shied away so awkwardly at the name that I repeated it at once.
+
+“But do you know what Nietzsche says?” I pressed him viciously.
+
+“He has certainly been adequately answered,” said he, still trying to
+carry it off.
+
+“Who by?” I rapped out hotly. “Tell me that!” and became mercilessly
+expectant.
+
+§ 5
+
+
+A happy accident relieved Mr. Gabbitas from the embarrassment of that
+challenge, and carried me another step along my course of personal
+disaster.
+
+It came on the heels of my question in the form of a clatter of horses
+without, and the gride and cessation of wheels. I glimpsed a
+straw-hatted coachman and a pair of grays. It seemed an incredibly
+magnificent carriage for Clayton.
+
+“Eh!” said the Rev. Gabbitas, going to the window. “Why, it’s old Mrs.
+Verrall! It’s old Mrs. Verrall. Really! What _can_ she want with me?”
+
+He turned to me, and the flush of controversy had passed and his face
+shone like the sun. It was not every day, I perceived, that Mrs.
+Verrall came to see him.
+
+“I get so many interruptions,” he said, almost grinning. “You must
+excuse me a minute! Then—then I’ll tell you about that fellow. But
+don’t go. I pray you don’t go. I can assure you. . . . _most_
+interesting.”
+
+He went out of the room waving vague prohibitory gestures.
+
+“I _must_ go,” I cried after him.
+
+“No, no, no!” in the passage. “I’ve got your answer,” I think it was he
+added, and “quite mistaken;” and I saw him running down the steps to
+talk to the old lady.
+
+I swore. I made three steps to the window, and this brought me within a
+yard of that accursed drawer.
+
+I glanced at it, and then at that old woman who was so absolutely
+powerful, and instantly her son and Nettie’s face were flaming in my
+brain. The Stuarts had, no doubt, already accepted accomplished facts.
+And I too—
+
+What was I doing here?
+
+What was I doing here while judgment escaped me?
+
+I woke up. I was injected with energy. I took one reassuring look at
+the curate’s obsequious back, at the old lady’s projected nose and
+quivering hand, and then with swift, clean movements I had the little
+drawer open, four sovereigns in my pocket, and the drawer shut again.
+Then again at the window—they were still talking.
+
+That was all right. He might not look in that drawer for hours. I
+glanced at his clock. Twenty minutes still before the Birmingham train.
+Time to buy a pair of boots and get away. But how I was to get to the
+station?
+
+I went out boldly into the passage, and took my hat and stick. . . .
+Walk past him?
+
+Yes. That was all right! He could not argue with me while so important
+a person engaged him. . . . I came boldly down the steps.
+
+“I want a list made, Mr. Gabbitas, of all the really _deserving_
+cases,” old Mrs. Verrall was saying.
+
+It is curious, but it did not occur to me that here was a mother whose
+son I was going to kill. I did not see her in that aspect at all.
+Instead, I was possessed by a realization of the blazing imbecility of
+a social system that gave this palsied old woman the power to give or
+withhold the urgent necessities of life from hundreds of her
+fellow-creatures just according to her poor, foolish old fancies of
+desert.
+
+“We could make a _provisional_ list of that sort,” he was saying, and
+glanced round with a preoccupied expression at me.
+
+“I _must_ go,” I said at his flash of inquiry, and added, “I’ll be back
+in twenty minutes,” and went on my way. He turned again to his
+patroness as though he forgot me on the instant. Perhaps after all he
+was not sorry.
+
+I felt extraordinarily cool and capable, exhilarated, if anything, by
+this prompt, effectual theft. After all, my great determination would
+achieve itself. I was no longer oppressed by a sense of obstacles, I
+felt I could grasp accidents and turn them to my advantage. I would go
+now down Hacker Street to the little shoemaker’s—get a sound, good pair
+of boots—ten minutes—and then to the railway-station—five minutes
+more—and off! I felt as efficient and non-moral as if I was Nietzsche’s
+Over-man already come. It did not occur to me that the curate’s clock
+might have a considerable margin of error.
+
+§ 6
+
+
+I missed the train.
+
+Partly that was because the curate’s clock was slow, and partly it was
+due to the commercial obstinacy of the shoemaker, who would try on
+another pair after I had declared my time was up. I bought the final
+pair however, gave him a wrong address for the return of the old ones,
+and only ceased to feel like the Nietzschean Over-man, when I saw the
+train running out of the station.
+
+Even then I did not lose my head. It occurred to me almost at once
+that, in the event of a prompt pursuit, there would be a great
+advantage in not taking a train from Clayton; that, indeed, to have
+done so would have been an error from which only luck had saved me. As
+it was, I had already been very indiscreet in my inquiries about
+Shaphambury; for once on the scent the clerk could not fail to remember
+me. Now the chances were against his coming into the case. I did not go
+into the station therefore at all, I made no demonstration of having
+missed the train, but walked quietly past, down the road, crossed the
+iron footbridge, and took the way back circuitously by White’s
+brickfields and the allotments to the way over Clayton Crest to
+Two-Mile Stone, where I calculated I should have an ample margin for
+the 6.13 train.
+
+I was not very greatly excited or alarmed then. Suppose, I reasoned,
+that by some accident the curate goes to that drawer at once: will he
+be certain to miss four out of ten or eleven sovereigns? If he does,
+will he at once think I have taken them? If he does, will he act at
+once or wait for my return? If he acts at once, will he talk to my
+mother or call in the police? Then there are a dozen roads and even
+railways out of the Clayton region, how is he to know which I have
+taken? Suppose he goes straight at once to the right station, they will
+not remember my departure for the simple reason that I didn’t depart.
+But they may remember about Shaphambury? It was unlikely.
+
+I resolved not to go directly to Shaphambury from Birmingham, but to go
+thence to Monkshampton, thence to Wyvern, and then come down on
+Shaphambury from the north. That might involve a night at some
+intermediate stopping-place but it would effectually conceal me from
+any but the most persistent pursuit. And this was not a case of murder
+yet, but only the theft of four sovereigns.
+
+I had argued away all anxiety before I reached Clayton Crest.
+
+At the Crest I looked back. What a world it was! And suddenly it came
+to me that I was looking at this world for the last time. If I overtook
+the fugitives and succeeded, I should die with them—or hang. I stopped
+and looked back more attentively at that wide ugly valley.
+
+It was my native valley, and I was going out of it, I thought never to
+return, and yet in that last prospect, the group of towns that had
+borne me and dwarfed and crippled and made me, seemed, in some
+indefinable manner, strange. I was, perhaps, more used to seeing it
+from this comprehensive view-point when it was veiled and softened by
+night; now it came out in all its weekday reek, under a clear afternoon
+sun. That may account a little for its unfamiliarity. And perhaps, too,
+there was something in the emotions through which I had been passing
+for a week and more, to intensify my insight, to enable me to pierce
+the unusual, to question the accepted. But it came to me then, I am
+sure, for the first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was
+the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks,
+railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches,
+chapels, allotment hovels, a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly
+smoking accidents in which men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin.
+Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing
+ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the
+potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in
+church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the
+dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of
+industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked
+amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its
+disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a
+morass.
+
+I did not think these things clearly that afternoon. Much less did I
+ask how I, with my murderous purpose, stood to them all. I write down
+that realization of disorder and suffocation here and now as though I
+had thought it, but indeed then I only felt it, felt it transitorily as
+I looked back, and then stood with the thing escaping from my mind.
+
+I should never see that country-side again.
+
+I came back to that. At any rate I wasn’t sorry. The chances were I
+should die in sweet air, under a clean sky.
+
+From distant Swathinglea came a little sound, the minute undulation of
+a remote crowd, and then rapidly three shots.
+
+That held me perplexed for a space. . . . Well, anyhow I was leaving it
+all! Thank God I was leaving it all! Then, as I turned to go on, I
+thought of my mother.
+
+It seemed an evil world in which to leave one’s mother. My thoughts
+focused upon her very vividly for a moment. Down there, under that
+afternoon light, she was going to and fro, unaware as yet that she had
+lost me, bent and poking about in the darkling underground kitchen,
+perhaps carrying a lamp into the scullery to trim, or sitting
+patiently, staring into the fire, waiting tea for me. A great pity for
+her, a great remorse at the blacker troubles that lowered over her
+innocent head, came to me. Why, after all, was I doing this thing?
+
+Why?
+
+I stopped again dead, with the hill crest rising between me and home. I
+had more than half a mind to return to her.
+
+Then I thought of the curate’s sovereigns. If he has missed them
+already, what should I return to? And, even if I returned, how could I
+put them back?
+
+And what of the night after I renounced my revenge? What of the time
+when young Verrall came back? And Nettie?
+
+No! The thing had to be done.
+
+But at least I might have kissed my mother before I came away, left her
+some message, reassured her at least for a little while. All night she
+would listen and wait for me. . . . .
+
+Should I send her a telegram from Two-Mile Stone?
+
+It was no good now; too late, too late. To do that would be to tell the
+course I had taken, to bring pursuit upon me, swift and sure, if
+pursuit there was to be. No. My mother must suffer!
+
+I went on grimly toward Two-Mile Stone, but now as if some greater will
+than mine directed my footsteps thither.
+
+I reached Birmingham before darkness came, and just caught the last
+train for Monkshampton, where I had planned to pass the night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS
+
+
+§ 1
+
+As the train carried me on from Birmingham to Monkshampton, it carried
+me not only into a country where I had never been before, but out of
+the commonplace daylight and the touch and quality of ordinary things,
+into the strange unprecedented night that was ruled by the giant meteor
+of the last days.
+
+There was at that time a curious accentuation of the common alternation
+of night and day. They became separated with a widening difference of
+value in regard to all mundane affairs. During the day, the comet was
+an item in the newspapers, it was jostled by a thousand more living
+interests, it was as nothing in the skirts of the war storm that was
+now upon us. It was an astronomical phenomenon, somewhere away over
+China, millions of miles away in the deeps. We forgot it. But directly
+the sun sank one turned ever and again toward the east, and the meteor
+resumed its sway over us.
+
+One waited for its rising, and yet each night it came as a surprise.
+Always it rose brighter than one had dared to think, always larger and
+with some wonderful change in its outline, and now with a strange, less
+luminous, greener disk upon it that grew with its growth, the umbra of
+the earth. It shone also with its own light, so that this shadow was
+not hard or black, but it shone phosphorescently and with a diminishing
+intensity where the stimulus of the sun’s rays was withdrawn. As it
+ascended toward the zenith, as the last trailing daylight went after
+the abdicating sun, its greenish white illumination banished the
+realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness over all things. It
+changed the starless sky about it to an extraordinary deep blue, the
+profoundest color in the world, such as I have never seen before or
+since. I remember, too, that as I peered from the train that was
+rattling me along to Monkshampton, I perceived and was puzzled by a
+coppery red light that mingled with all the shadows that were cast by
+it.
+
+It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities.
+Everywhere the local authorities discontinued street lighting—one could
+read small print in the glare,—and so at Monkshampton I went about
+through pale, white, unfamiliar streets, whose electric globes had
+shadows on the path. Lit windows here and there burnt ruddy orange,
+like holes cut in some dream curtain that hung before a furnace. A
+policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn woven of moonshine, a
+green-faced man opened to us, and there I abode the night. And the next
+morning it opened with a mighty clatter, and was a dirty little
+beerhouse that stank of beer, and there was a fat and grimy landlord
+with red spots upon his neck, and much noisy traffic going by on the
+cobbles outside.
+
+I came out, after I had paid my bill, into a street that echoed to the
+bawlings of two newsvendors and to the noisy yappings of a dog they had
+raised to emulation. They were shouting: “Great British disaster in the
+North Sea. A battleship lost with all hands!”
+
+I bought a paper, went on to the railway station reading such details
+as were given of this triumph of the old civilization, of the blowing
+up of this great iron ship, full of guns and explosives and the most
+costly and beautiful machinery of which that time was capable, together
+with nine hundred able-bodied men, all of them above the average, by a
+contact mine towed by a German submarine. I read myself into a fever of
+warlike emotions. Not only did I forget the meteor, but for a time I
+forgot even the purpose that took me on to the railway station, bought
+my ticket, and was now carrying me onward to Shaphambury.
+
+So the hot day came to its own again, and people forgot the night.
+
+Each night, there shone upon us more and more insistently, beauty,
+wonder, the promise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveled for
+a space. And at the first gray sounds of dawn again, at the shooting of
+bolts and the noise of milk-carts, we forgot, and the dusty habitual
+day came yawning and stretching back again. The stains of coal smoke
+crept across the heavens, and we rose to the soiled disorderly routine
+of life.
+
+“Thus life has always been,” we said; “thus it will always be.”
+
+The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded as
+spectacular merely. It signified nothing to us. So far as western
+Europe went, it was only a small and ignorant section of the lower
+classes who regarded the comet as a portent of the end of the world.
+Abroad, where there were peasantries, it was different, but in England
+the peasantry had already disappeared. Every one read. The newspaper,
+in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germany rushed to its
+climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilities of a panic in this
+matter. The very tramps upon the high-roads, the children in the
+nursery, had learnt that at the utmost the whole of that shining cloud
+could weigh but a few score tons. This fact had been shown quite
+conclusively by the enormous deflections that had at last swung it
+round squarely at our world. It had passed near three of the smallest
+asteroids without producing the minutest perceptible deflection in
+their course; while, on its own part, it had described a course through
+nearly three degrees. When it struck our earth there was to be a
+magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for those who were on the right side
+of our planet to see, but beyond that nothing. It was doubtful whether
+we were on the right side. The meteor would loom larger and larger in
+the sky, but with the umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness
+out, and at last it would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green
+clouds, with a white brightness about the horizon, west and east. Then
+a pause—a pause of not very exactly definite duration—and then, no
+doubt, a great blaze of shooting stars. They might be of some unwonted
+color because of the unknown element that line in the green revealed.
+For a little while the zenith would spout shooting stars. Some, it was
+hoped, would reach the earth and be available for analysis.
+
+That, science said, would be all. The green clouds would whirl and
+vanish, and there might be thunderstorms. But through the attenuated
+wisps of comet shine, the old sky, the old stars, would reappear, and
+all would be as it had been before. And since this was to happen
+between one and eleven in the morning of the approaching Tuesday—I
+slept at Monkshampton on Saturday night,—it would be only partially
+visible, if visible at all, on our side of the earth. Perhaps, if it
+came late, one would see no more than a shooting star low down in the
+sky. All this we had with the utmost assurances of science. Still it
+did not prevent the last nights being the most beautiful and memorable
+of human experiences.
+
+The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had ranged
+Shaphambury in vain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleled
+glory of the night returned, to think that under its splendid
+benediction young Verrall and Nettie made love to one another.
+
+I walked backward and forward, backward and forward, along the sea
+front, peering into the faces of the young couples who promenaded, with
+my hand in my pocket ready, and a curious ache in my heart that had no
+kindred with rage. Until at last all the promenaders had gone home to
+bed, and I was alone with the star.
+
+My train from Wyvern to Shaphambury that morning was a whole hour late;
+they said it was on account of the movement of troops to meet a
+possible raid from the Elbe.
+
+§ 2
+
+
+Shaphambury seemed an odd place to me even then. But something was
+quickening in me at that time to feel the oddness of many accepted
+things. Now in the retrospect I see it as intensely queer. The whole
+place was strange to my untraveled eyes; the sea even was strange. Only
+twice in my life had I been at the seaside before, and then I had gone
+by excursion to places on the Welsh coast whose great cliffs of rock
+and mountain backgrounds made the effect of the horizon very different
+from what it is upon the East Anglian seaboard. Here what they call a
+cliff was a crumbling bank of whitey-brown earth not fifty feet high.
+
+So soon as I arrived I made a systematic exploration of Shaphambury. To
+this day I retain the clearest memories of the plan I shaped out then,
+and how my inquiries were incommoded by the overpowering desire of
+every one to talk of the chances of a German raid, before the Channel
+Fleet got round to us. I slept at a small public-house in a Shaphambury
+back street on Sunday night. I did not get on to Shaphambury from
+Wyvern until two in the afternoon, because of the infrequency of Sunday
+trains, and I got no clue whatever until late in the afternoon of
+Monday. As the little local train bumped into sight of the place round
+the curve of a swelling hill, one saw a series of undulating grassy
+spaces, amidst which a number of conspicuous notice-boards appealed to
+the eye and cut up the distant sea horizon. Most of these referred to
+comestibles or to remedies to follow the comestibles; and they were
+colored with a view to be memorable rather than beautiful, to “stand
+out” amidst the gentle grayish tones of the east coast scenery. The
+greater number, I may remark, of the advertisements that were so
+conspicuous a factor in the life of those days, and which rendered our
+vast tree-pulp newspapers possible, referred to foods, drinks, tobacco,
+and the drugs that promised a restoration of the equanimity these other
+articles had destroyed. Wherever one went one was reminded in glaring
+letters that, after all, man was little better than a worm, that
+eyeless, earless thing that burrows and lives uncomplainingly amidst
+nutritious dirt, “an alimentary canal with the subservient appendages
+thereto.” But in addition to such boards there were also the big black
+and white boards of various grandiloquently named “estates.” The
+individualistic enterprise of that time had led to the plotting out of
+nearly all the country round the seaside towns into roads and
+building-plots—all but a small portion of the south and east coast was
+in this condition, and had the promises of those schemes been realized
+the entire population of the island might have been accommodated upon
+the sea frontiers. Nothing of the sort happened, of course; the whole
+of this uglification of the coast-line was done to stimulate a little
+foolish gambling in plots, and one saw everywhere agents’ boards in
+every state of freshness and decay, ill-made exploitation roads
+overgrown with grass, and here and there, at a corner, a label,
+“Trafalgar Avenue,” or “Sea View Road.” Here and there, too, some small
+investor, some shopman with “savings,” had delivered his soul to the
+local builders and built himself a house, and there it stood,
+ill-designed, mean-looking, isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced
+plot, athwart which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst
+a bleak desolation of enterprise. Then presently our railway crossed a
+high road, and a row of mean yellow brick houses—workmen’s cottages,
+and the filthy black sheds that made the “allotments” of that time a
+universal eyesore, marked our approach to the more central areas of—I
+quote the local guidebook—“one of the most delightful resorts in the
+East Anglian poppy-land.” Then more mean houses, the gaunt ungainliness
+of the electric force station—it had a huge chimney, because no one
+understood how to make combustion of coal complete—and then we were in
+the railway station, and barely three-quarters of a mile from the
+center of this haunt of health and pleasure.
+
+I inspected the town thoroughly before I made my inquiries. The road
+began badly with a row of cheap, pretentious, insolvent-looking shops,
+a public-house, and a cab-stand, but, after an interval of little red
+villas that were partly hidden amidst shrubbery gardens, broke into a
+confusedly bright but not unpleasing High Street, shuttered that
+afternoon and sabbatically still. Somewhere in the background a church
+bell jangled, and children in bright, new-looking clothes were going to
+Sunday-school. Thence through a square of stuccoed lodging-houses, that
+seemed a finer and cleaner version of my native square, I came to a
+garden of asphalt and euonymus—the Sea Front. I sat down on a cast-iron
+seat, and surveyed first of all the broad stretches of muddy, sandy
+beach, with its queer wheeled bathing machines, painted with the
+advertisements of somebody’s pills—and then at the house fronts that
+stared out upon these visceral counsels. Boarding-houses, private
+hotels, and lodging-houses in terraces clustered closely right and left
+of me, and then came to an end; in one direction scaffolding marked a
+building enterprise in progress, in the other, after a waste interval,
+rose a monstrous bulging red shape, a huge hotel, that dwarfed all
+other things. Northward were low pale cliffs with white denticulations
+of tents, where the local volunteers, all under arms, lay encamped, and
+southward, a spreading waste of sandy dunes, with occasional bushes and
+clumps of stunted pine and an advertisement board or so. A hard blue
+sky hung over all this prospect, the sunshine cast inky shadows, and
+eastward was a whitish sea. It was Sunday, and the midday meal still
+held people indoors.
+
+A queer world! thought I even then—to you now it must seem impossibly
+queer,—and after an interval I forced myself back to my own affair.
+
+How was I to ask? What was I to ask for? I puzzled for a long time over
+that—at first I was a little tired and indolent—and then presently I
+had a flow of ideas.
+
+My solution was fairly ingenious. I invented the following story. I
+happened to be taking a holiday in Shaphambury, and I was making use of
+the opportunity to seek the owner of a valuable feather boa, which had
+been left behind in the hotel of my uncle at Wyvern by a young lady,
+traveling with a young gentleman—no doubt a youthful married couple.
+They had reached Shaphambury somewhen on Thursday. I went over the
+story many times, and gave my imaginary uncle and his hotel plausible
+names. At any rate this yarn would serve as a complete justification
+for all the questions I might wish to ask.
+
+I settled that, but I still sat for a time, wanting the energy to
+begin. Then I turned toward the big hotel. Its gorgeous magnificence
+seemed to my inexpert judgment to indicate the very place a rich young
+man of good family would select.
+
+Huge draught-proof doors were swung round for me by an ironically
+polite under-porter in a magnificent green uniform, who looked at my
+clothes as he listened to my question and then with a German accent
+referred me to a gorgeous head porter, who directed me to a princely
+young man behind a counter of brass and polish, like a bank—like
+several banks. This young man, while he answered me, kept his eye on my
+collar and tie—and I knew that they were abominable.
+
+“I want to find a lady and gentleman who came to Shaphambury on
+Tuesday,” I said.
+
+“Friends of yours?” he asked with a terrible fineness of irony.
+
+I made out at last that here at any rate the young people had not been.
+They might have lunched there, but they had had no room. But I went
+out—door opened again for me obsequiously—in a state of social
+discomfiture, and did not attack any other establishment that
+afternoon.
+
+My resolution had come to a sort of ebb. More people were promenading,
+and their Sunday smartness abashed me. I forgot my purpose in an acute
+sense of myself. I felt that the bulge of my pocket caused by the
+revolver was conspicuous, and I was ashamed. I went along the sea front
+away from the town, and presently lay down among pebbles and sea
+poppies. This mood of reaction prevailed with me all that afternoon. In
+the evening, about sundown, I went to the station and asked questions
+of the outporters there. But outporters, I found, were a class of men
+who remembered luggage rather than people, and I had no sort of idea
+what luggage young Verrall and Nettie were likely to have with them.
+
+Then I fell into conversation with a salacious wooden-legged old man
+with a silver ring, who swept the steps that went down to the beach
+from the parade. He knew much about young couples, but only in general
+terms, and nothing of the particular young couple I sought. He reminded
+me in the most disagreeable way of the sensuous aspects of life, and I
+was not sorry when presently a gunboat appeared in the offing
+signalling the coastguard and the camp, and cut short his observations
+upon holidays, beaches, and morals.
+
+I went, and now I was past my ebb, and sat in a seat upon the parade,
+and watched the brightening of those rising clouds of chilly fire that
+made the ruddy west seem tame. My midday lassitude was going, my blood
+was running warmer again. And as the twilight and that filmy brightness
+replaced the dusty sunlight and robbed this unfamiliar place of all its
+matter-of-fact queerness, its sense of aimless materialism, romance
+returned to me, and passion, and my thoughts of honor and revenge. I
+remember that change of mood as occurring very vividly on this
+occasion, but I fancy that less distinctly I had felt this before many
+times. In the old times, night and the starlight had an effect of
+intimate reality the daytime did not possess. The daytime—as one saw it
+in towns and populous places—had hold of one, no doubt, but only as an
+uproar might, it was distracting, conflicting, insistent. Darkness
+veiled the more salient aspects of those agglomerations of human
+absurdity, and one could exist—one could imagine.
+
+I had a queer illusion that night, that Nettie and her lover were close
+at hand, that suddenly I should come on them. I have already told how I
+went through the dusk seeking them in every couple that drew near. And
+I dropped asleep at last in an unfamiliar bedroom hung with gaudily
+decorated texts, cursing myself for having wasted a day.
+
+§ 3
+
+
+I sought them in vain the next morning, but after midday I came in
+quick succession on a perplexing multitude of clues. After failing to
+find any young couple that corresponded to young Verrall and Nettie, I
+presently discovered an unsatisfactory quartette of couples.
+
+Any of these four couples might have been the one I sought; with regard
+to none of them was there conviction. They had all arrived either on
+Wednesday or Thursday. Two couples were still in occupation of their
+rooms, but neither of these were at home. Late in the afternoon I
+reduced my list by eliminating a young man in drab, with side whiskers
+and long cuffs, accompanied by a lady, of thirty or more, of
+consciously ladylike type. I was disgusted at the sight of them; the
+other two young people had gone for a long walk, and though I watched
+their boarding-house until the fiery cloud shone out above, sharing and
+mingling in an unusually splendid sunset, I missed them. Then I
+discovered them dining at a separate table in the bow window, with
+red-shaded candles between them, peering out ever and again at this
+splendor that was neither night nor day. The girl in her pink evening
+dress looked very light and pretty to me—pretty enough to enrage
+me,—she had well shaped arms and white, well-modeled shoulders, and the
+turn of her cheek and the fair hair about her ears was full of subtle
+delights; but she was not Nettie, and the happy man with her was that
+odd degenerate type our old aristocracy produced with such odd
+frequency, chinless, large bony nose, small fair head, languid
+expression, and a neck that had demanded and received a veritable
+sleeve of collar. I stood outside in the meteor’s livid light, hating
+them and cursing them for having delayed me so long. I stood until it
+was evident they remarked me, a black shape of envy, silhouetted
+against the glare.
+
+That finished Shaphambury. The question I now had to debate was which
+of the remaining couples I had to pursue.
+
+I walked back to the parade trying to reason my next step out, and
+muttering to myself, because there was something in that luminous
+wonderfulness that touched one’s brain, and made one feel a little
+light-headed.
+
+One couple had gone to London; the other had gone to the Bungalow
+village at Bone Cliff. Where, I wondered, was Bone Cliff?
+
+I came upon my wooden-legged man at the top of his steps.
+
+“Hullo,” said I.
+
+He pointed seaward with his pipe, his silver ring shone in the sky
+light.
+
+“Rum,” he said.
+
+“What is?” I asked.
+
+“Search-lights! Smoke! Ships going north! If it wasn’t for this blasted
+Milky Way gone green up there, we might see.”
+
+He was too intent to heed my questions for a time. Then he vouchsafed
+over his shoulder—
+
+“Know Bungalow village?—rather. Artis’ and such. Nice goings on! Mixed
+bathing—something scandalous. Yes.”
+
+“But where is it?” I said, suddenly exasperated.
+
+“There!” he said. “What’s that flicker? A gunflash—or I’m a lost soul!”
+
+“You’d hear,” I said, “long before it was near enough to see a flash.”
+
+He didn’t answer. Only by making it clear I would distract him until he
+told me what I wanted to know could I get him to turn from his absorbed
+contemplation of that phantom dance between the sea rim and the shine.
+Indeed I gripped his arm and shook him. Then he turned upon me cursing.
+
+“Seven miles,” he said, “along this road. And now go to ‘ell with yer!”
+
+I answered with some foul insult by way of thanks, and so we parted,
+and I set off towards the bungalow village.
+
+I found a policeman, standing star-gazing, a little way beyond the end
+of the parade, and verified the wooden-legged man’s directions.
+
+“It’s a lonely road, you know,” he called after me. . . .
+
+I had an odd intuition that now at last I was on the right track. I
+left the dark masses of Shaphambury behind me, and pushed out into the
+dim pallor of that night, with the quiet assurance of a traveler who
+nears his end.
+
+The incidents of that long tramp I do not recall in any orderly
+succession, the one progressive thing is my memory of a growing
+fatigue. The sea was for the most part smooth and shining like a
+mirror, a great expanse of reflecting silver, barred by slow broad
+undulations, but at one time a little breeze breathed like a faint sigh
+and ruffled their long bodies into faint scaly ripples that never
+completely died out again. The way was sometimes sandy, thick with
+silvery colorless sand, and sometimes chalky and lumpy, with lumps that
+had shining facets; a black scrub was scattered, sometimes in thickets,
+sometimes in single bunches, among the somnolent hummocks of sand. At
+one place came grass, and ghostly great sheep looming up among the
+gray. After a time black pinewoods intervened, and made sustained
+darknesses along the road, woods that frayed out at the edges to
+weirdly warped and stunted trees. Then isolated pine witches would
+appear, and make their rigid gestures at me as I passed. Grotesquely
+incongruous amidst these forms, I presently came on estate boards,
+appealing, “Houses can be built to suit purchaser,” to the silence, to
+the shadows, and the glare.
+
+Once I remember the persistent barking of a dog from somewhere inland
+of me, and several times I took out and examined my revolver very
+carefully. I must, of course, have been full of my intention when I did
+that, I must have been thinking of Nettie and revenge, but I cannot now
+recall those emotions at all. Only I see again very distinctly the
+greenish gleams that ran over lock and barrel as I turned the weapon in
+my hand.
+
+Then there was the sky, the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless
+sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and
+the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon the shine, and
+very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, or
+sails, or smoke, or any lights, dark, deadly, furtive things, traveling
+very swiftly and keeping an equal distance. And when I looked again
+they were very small, and then the shine had swallowed them up.
+
+Then once a flash and what I thought was a gun, until I looked up and
+saw a fading trail of greenish light still hanging in the sky. And
+after that there was a shiver and whispering in the air, a stronger
+throbbing in one’s arteries, a sense of refreshment, a renewal of
+purpose. . . .
+
+Somewhere upon my way the road forked, but I do not remember whether
+that was near Shaphambury or near the end of my walk. The hesitation
+between two rutted unmade roads alone remains clear in my mind.
+
+At last I grew weary. I came to piled heaps of decaying seaweed and
+cart tracks running this way and that, and then I had missed the road
+and was stumbling among sand hummocks quite close to the sea. I came
+out on the edge of the dimly glittering sandy beach, and something
+phosphorescent drew me to the water’s edge. I bent down and peered at
+the little luminous specks that floated in the ripples.
+
+Presently with a sigh I stood erect, and contemplated the lonely peace
+of that last wonderful night. The meteor had now trailed its shining
+nets across the whole space of the sky and was beginning to set; in the
+east the blue was coming to its own again; the sea was an intense edge
+of blackness, and now, escaped from that great shine, and faint and
+still tremulously valiant, one weak elusive star could just be seen,
+hovering on the verge of the invisible.
+
+How beautiful it was! how still and beautiful! Peace! peace!—the peace
+that passeth understanding, robed in light descending! . . .
+
+My heart swelled, and suddenly I was weeping.
+
+There was something new and strange in my blood. It came to me that
+indeed I did not want to kill.
+
+I did not want to kill. I did not want to be the servant of my passions
+any more. A great desire had come to me to escape from life, from the
+daylight which is heat and conflict and desire, into that cool night of
+eternity—and rest. I had played—I had done.
+
+I stood upon the edge of the great ocean, and I was filled with an
+inarticulate spirit of prayer, and I desired greatly—peace from myself.
+
+And presently, there in the east, would come again the red discoloring
+curtain over these mysteries, the finite world again, the gray and
+growing harsh certainties of dawn. My resolve I knew would take up with
+me again. This was a rest for me, an interlude, but to-morrow I should
+be William Leadford once more, ill-nourished, ill-dressed, ill-equipped
+and clumsy, a thief and shamed, a wound upon the face of life, a source
+of trouble and sorrow even to the mother I loved; no hope in life left
+for me now but revenge before my death.
+
+Why this paltry thing, revenge? It entered into my thoughts that I
+might end the matter now and let these others go.
+
+To wade out into the sea, into this warm lapping that mingled the
+natures of water and light, to stand there breast-high, to thrust my
+revolver barrel into my mouth———?
+
+Why not?
+
+I swung about with an effort. I walked slowly up the beach thinking. .
+. .
+
+I turned and looked back at the sea. No! Something within me said,
+“No!”
+
+I must think.
+
+It was troublesome to go further because the hummocks and the tangled
+bushes began. I sat down amidst a black cluster of shrubs, and rested,
+chin on hand. I drew my revolver from my pocket and looked at it, and
+held it in my hand. Life? Or Death? . . .
+
+I seemed to be probing the very deeps of being, but indeed
+imperceptibly I fell asleep, and sat dreaming.
+
+§ 4
+
+
+Two people were bathing in the sea.
+
+I had awakened. It was still that white and wonderful night, and the
+blue band of clear sky was no wider than before. These people must have
+come into sight as I fell asleep, and awakened me almost at once. They
+waded breast-deep in the water, emerging, coming shoreward, a woman,
+with her hair coiled about her head, and in pursuit of her a man,
+graceful figures of black and silver, with a bright green surge flowing
+off from them, a pattering of flashing wavelets about them. He smote
+the water and splashed it toward her, she retaliated, and then they
+were knee-deep, and then for an instant their feet broke the long
+silver margin of the sea.
+
+Each wore a tightly fitting bathing dress that hid nothing of the
+shining, dripping beauty of their youthful forms.
+
+She glanced over her shoulder and found him nearer than she thought,
+started, gesticulated, gave a little cry that pierced me to the heart,
+and fled up the beach obliquely toward me, running like the wind, and
+passed me, vanished amidst the black distorted bushes, and was gone—she
+and her pursuer, in a moment, over the ridge of sand.
+
+I heard him shout between exhaustion and laughter. . . .
+
+And suddenly I was a thing of bestial fury, standing up with hands held
+up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening, against the
+sky. . . .
+
+For this striving, swift thing of light and beauty was Nettie—and this
+was the man for whom I had been betrayed!
+
+And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbing of
+my will—unavenged!
+
+In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, in
+quiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless sand.
+
+§ 5
+
+
+I came up over the little ridge and discovered the bungalow village I
+had been seeking, nestling in a crescent lap of dunes. A door slammed,
+the two runners had vanished, and I halted staring.
+
+There was a group of three bungalows nearer to me than the others. Into
+one of these three they had gone, and I was too late to see which. All
+had doors and windows carelessly open, and none showed a light.
+
+This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of the
+reaction of artistic-minded and carelessly living people against the
+costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the more formal seaside
+resorts of that time. It was, you must understand, the custom of the
+steam-railway companies to sell their carriages after they had been
+obsolete for a sufficient length of years, and some genius had hit upon
+the possibility of turning these into little habitable cabins for the
+summer holiday. The thing had become a fashion with a certain
+Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and these little
+improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandas and
+supplementary leantos added to their accommodation, made the brightest
+contrast conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorous resorts. Of
+course there were many discomforts in such camping that had to be faced
+cheerfully, and so this broad sandy beach was sacred to high spirits
+and the young. Art muslin and banjoes, Chinese lanterns and frying, are
+leading “notes,” I find, in the impression of those who once knew such
+places well. But so far as I was concerned this odd settlement of
+pleasure-squatters was a mystery as well as a surprise, enhanced rather
+than mitigated by an imaginative suggestion or so I had received from
+the wooden-legged man at Shaphambury. I saw the thing as no gathering
+of light hearts and gay idleness, but grimly—after the manner of poor
+men poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy. To the
+poor man, to the grimy workers, beauty and cleanness were absolutely
+denied; out of a life of greasy dirt, of muddied desires, they watched
+their happier fellows with a bitter envy and foul, tormenting
+suspicions. Fancy a world in which the common people held love to be a
+sort of beastliness, own sister to being drunk! . . .
+
+There was in the old time always something cruel at the bottom of this
+business of sexual love. At least that is the impression I have brought
+with me across the gulf of the great Change. To succeed in love seemed
+such triumph as no other success could give, but to fail was as if one
+was tainted. . . .
+
+I felt no sense of singularity that this thread of savagery should run
+through these emotions of mine and become now the whole strand of these
+emotions. I believed, and I think I was right in believing, that the
+love of all true lovers was a sort of defiance then, that they closed a
+system in each other’s arms and mocked the world without. You loved
+against the world, and these two loved AT me. They had their business
+with one another, under the threat of a watchful fierceness. A sword, a
+sharp sword, the keenest edge in life, lay among their roses.
+
+Whatever may be true of this for others, for me and my imagination, at
+any rate, it was altogether true. I was never for dalliance, I was
+never a jesting lover. I wanted fiercely; I made love impatiently.
+Perhaps I had written irrelevant love-letters for that very reason;
+because with this stark theme I could not play. . .
+
+The thought of Nettie’s shining form, of her shrinking bold abandon to
+her easy conqueror, gave me now a body of rage that was nearly too
+strong for my heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merely
+physical being. I came down among the pale sand-heaps slowly toward
+that queer village of careless sensuality, and now within my puny body
+I was coldly sharpset for pain and death, a darkly gleaming hate, a
+sword of evil, drawn.
+
+§ 6
+
+
+I halted, and stood planning what I had to do.
+
+Should I go to bungalow after bungalow until one of the two I sought
+answered to my rap? But suppose some servant intervened!
+
+Should I wait where I was—perhaps until morning—watching? And
+meanwhile———
+
+All the nearer bungalows were very still now. If I walked softly to
+them, from open windows, from something seen or overheard, I might get
+a clue to guide me. Should I advance circuitously, creeping upon them,
+or should I walk straight to the door? It was bright enough for her to
+recognize me clearly at a distance of many paces.
+
+The difficulty to my mind lay in this, that if I involved other people
+by questions, I might at last confront my betrayers with these others
+close about me, ready to snatch my weapon and seize my hands. Besides,
+what names might they bear here?
+
+“Boom!” the sound crept upon my senses, and then again it came.
+
+I turned impatiently as one turns upon an impertinence, and beheld a
+great ironclad not four miles out, steaming fast across the dappled
+silver, and from its funnels sparks, intensely red, poured out into the
+night. As I turned, came the hot flash of its guns, firing seaward, and
+answering this, red flashes and a streaming smoke in the line between
+sea and sky. So I remembered it, and I remember myself staring at it—in
+a state of stupid arrest. It was an irrelevance. What had these things
+to do with me?
+
+With a shuddering hiss, a rocket from a headland beyond the village
+leapt up and burst hot gold against the glare, and the sound of the
+third and fourth guns reached me.
+
+The windows of the dark bungalows, one after another, leapt out,
+squares of ruddy brightness that flared and flickered and became
+steadily bright. Dark heads appeared looking seaward, a door opened,
+and sent out a brief lane of yellow to mingle and be lost in the
+comet’s brightness. That brought me back to the business in hand.
+
+“Boom! boom!” and when I looked again at the great ironclad, a little
+torchlike spurt of flame wavered behind her funnels. I could hear the
+throb and clangor of her straining engines. . . .
+
+I became aware of the voices of people calling to one another in the
+village. A white-robed, hooded figure, some man in a bathing wrap,
+absurdly suggestive of an Arab in his burnous, came out from one of the
+nearer bungalows, and stood clear and still and shadowless in the
+glare.
+
+He put his hands to shade his seaward eyes, and shouted to people
+within.
+
+The people within—_my_ people! My fingers tightened on my revolver.
+What was this war nonsense to me? I would go round among the hummocks
+with the idea of approaching the three bungalows inconspicuously from
+the flank. This fight at sea might serve my purpose—except for that, it
+had no interest for me at all. Boom! boom! The huge voluminous
+concussions rushed past me, beat at my heart and passed. In a moment
+Nettie would come out to see.
+
+First one and then two other wrappered figures came out of the
+bungalows to join the first. His arm pointed seaward, and his voice, a
+full tenor, rose in explanation. I could hear some of the words. “It’s
+a German!” he said. “She’s caught.”
+
+Some one disputed that, and there followed a little indistinct babble
+of argument. I went on slowly in the circuit I had marked out, watching
+these people as I went.
+
+They shouted together with such a common intensity of direction that I
+halted and looked seaward. I saw the tall fountain flung by a shot that
+had just missed the great warship. A second rose still nearer us, a
+third, and a fourth, and then a great uprush of dust, a whirling cloud,
+leapt out of the headland whence the rocket had come, and spread with a
+slow deliberation right and left. Hard on that an enormous crash, and
+the man with the full voice leapt and cried, “Hit!”
+
+Let me see! Of course, I had to go round beyond the bungalows, and then
+come up towards the group from behind.
+
+A high-pitched woman’s voice called, “Honeymooners! honeymooners! Come
+out and see!”
+
+Something gleamed in the shadow of the nearer bungalow, and a man’s
+voice answered from within. What he said I did not catch, but suddenly
+I heard Nettie calling very distinctly, “We’ve been bathing.”
+
+The man who had first come out shouted, “Don’t you hear the guns?
+They’re fighting—not five miles from shore.”
+
+“Eh?” answered the bungalow, and a window opened.
+
+“Out there!”
+
+I did not hear the reply, because of the faint rustle of my own
+movements. Clearly these people were all too much occupied by the
+battle to look in my direction, and so I walked now straight toward the
+darkness that held Nettie and the black desire of my heart.
+
+“Look!” cried some one, and pointed skyward.
+
+I glanced up, and behold! The sky was streaked with bright green
+trails. They radiated from a point halfway between the western horizon
+and the zenith, and within the shining clouds of the meteor a streaming
+movement had begun, so that it seemed to be pouring both westwardly and
+back toward the east, with a crackling sound, as though the whole
+heaven was stippled over with phantom pistol-shots. It seemed to me
+then as if the meteor was coming to help me, descending with those
+thousand pistols like a curtain to fend off this unmeaning foolishness
+of the sea.
+
+“Boom!” went a gun on the big ironclad, and “boom!” and the guns of the
+pursuing cruisers flashed in reply.
+
+To glance up at that streaky, stirring light scum of the sky made one’s
+head swim. I stood for a moment dazed, and more than a little giddy. I
+had a curious instant of purely speculative thought. Suppose, after
+all, the fanatics were right, and the world _was_ coming to an end!
+What a score that would be for Parload!
+
+Then it came into my head that all these things were happening to
+consecrate my revenge! The war below, the heavens above, were the
+thunderous garment of my deed. I heard Nettie’s voice cry out not fifty
+yards away, and my passion surged again. I was to return to her amid
+these terrors bearing unanticipated death. I was to possess her, with a
+bullet, amidst thunderings and fear. At the thought I lifted up my
+voice to a shout that went unheard, and advanced now recklessly,
+revolver displayed in my hand.
+
+It was fifty yards, forty yards, thirty yards—the little group of
+people, still heedless of me, was larger and more important now, the
+green-shot sky and the fighting ships remoter. Some one darted out from
+the bungalow, with an interrupted question, and stopped, suddenly aware
+of me. It was Nettie, with some coquettish dark wrap about her, and the
+green glare shining on her sweet face and white throat. I could see her
+expression, stricken with dismay and terror, at my advance, as though
+something had seized her by the heart and held her still—a target for
+my shots.
+
+“Boom!” came the ironclad’s gunshot like a command. “Bang!” the bullet
+leapt from my hand. Do you know, I did not want to shoot her then.
+Indeed I did not want to shoot her then! Bang! and I had fired again,
+still striding on, and—each time it seemed I had missed.
+
+She moved a step or so toward me, still staring, and then someone
+intervened, and near beside her I saw young Verrall.
+
+A heavy stranger, the man in the hooded bath-gown, a fat,
+foreign-looking man, came out of nowhere like a shield before them. He
+seemed a preposterous interruption. His face was full of astonishment
+and terror. He rushed across my path with arms extended and open hands,
+as one might try to stop a runaway horse. He shouted some nonsense. He
+seemed to want to dissuade me, as though dissuasion had anything to do
+with it now.
+
+“Not you, you fool!” I said hoarsely. “Not you!” But he hid Nettie
+nevertheless.
+
+By an enormous effort I resisted a mechanical impulse to shoot through
+his fat body. Anyhow, I knew I mustn’t shoot him. For a moment I was in
+doubt, then I became very active, turned aside abruptly and dodged his
+pawing arm to the left, and so found two others irresolutely in my way.
+I fired a third shot in the air, just over their heads, and ran at
+them. They hastened left and right; I pulled up and faced about within
+a yard of a foxy-faced young man coming sideways, who seemed about to
+grapple me. At my resolute halt he fell back a pace, ducked, and threw
+up a defensive arm, and then I perceived the course was clear, and
+ahead of me, young Verrall and Nettie—he was holding her arm to help
+her—running away. “Of course!” said I.
+
+I fired a fourth ineffectual shot, and then in an access of fury at my
+misses, started out to run them down and shoot them barrel to backbone.
+“These people!” I said, dismissing all these interferences. . . . “A
+yard,” I panted, speaking aloud to myself, “a yard! Till then, take
+care, you mustn’t—mustn’t shoot again.”
+
+Some one pursued me, perhaps several people—I do not know, we left them
+all behind. . . .
+
+We ran. For a space I was altogether intent upon the swift monotony of
+flight and pursuit. The sands were changed to a whirl of green
+moonshine, the air was thunder. A luminous green haze rolled about us.
+What did such things matter? We ran. Did I gain or lose? that was the
+question. They ran through a gap in a broken fence that sprang up
+abruptly out of nothingness and turned to the right. I noted we were in
+a road. But this green mist! One seemed to plough through it. They were
+fading into it, and at that thought I made a spurt that won a dozen
+feet or more.
+
+She staggered. He gripped her arm, and dragged her forward. They
+doubled to the left. We were off the road again and on turf. It felt
+like turf. I tripped and fell at a ditch that was somehow full of
+smoke, and was up again, but now they were phantoms half gone into the
+livid swirls about me. . . .
+
+Still I ran.
+
+On, on! I groaned with the violence of my effort. I staggered again and
+swore. I felt the concussions of great guns tear past me through the
+murk.
+
+They were gone! Everything was going, but I kept on running. Once more
+I stumbled. There was something about my feet that impeded me, tall
+grass or heather, but I could not see what it was, only this smoke that
+eddied about my knees. There was a noise and spinning in my brain, a
+vain resistance to a dark green curtain that was falling, falling,
+falling, fold upon fold. Everything grew darker and darker.
+
+I made one last frantic effort, and raised my revolver, fired my
+penultimate shot at a venture, and fell headlong to the ground. And
+behold! the green curtain was a black one, and the earth and I and all
+things ceased to be.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+THE GREEN VAPORS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+THE CHANGE
+
+
+§ 1
+
+I seemed to awaken out of a refreshing sleep.
+
+I did not awaken with a start, but opened my eyes, and lay very
+comfortably looking at a line of extraordinarily scarlet poppies that
+glowed against a glowing sky. It was the sky of a magnificent sunrise,
+and an archipelago of gold-beached purple islands floated in a sea of
+golden green. The poppies too, swan-necked buds, blazing corollas,
+translucent stout seed-vessels, stoutly upheld, had a luminous quality,
+seemed wrought only from some more solid kind of light.
+
+I stared unwonderingly at these things for a time, and then there rose
+upon my consciousness, intermingling with these, the bristling golden
+green heads of growing barley.
+
+A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished again
+in my mind. Everything was very still.
+
+Everything was as still as death.
+
+I felt very light, full of the sense of physical well-being. I
+perceived I was lying on my side in a little trampled space in a weedy,
+flowering barley field, that was in some inexplicable way saturated
+with light and beauty. I sat up, and remained for a long time filled
+with the delight and charm of the delicate little convolvulus that
+twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel that laced the ground
+below.
+
+Then that question returned. What was this place? How had I come to be
+sleeping here?
+
+I could not remember.
+
+It perplexed me that somehow my body felt strange to me. It was
+unfamiliar—I could not tell how—and the barley, and the beautiful
+weeds, and the slowly developing glory of the dawn behind; all those
+things partook of the same unfamiliarity. I felt as though I was a
+thing in some very luminous painted window, as though this dawn broke
+through me. I felt I was part of some exquisite picture painted in
+light and joy.
+
+A faint breeze bent and rustled the barley-heads, and jogged my mind
+forward.
+
+Who was I? That was a good way of beginning.
+
+I held up my left hand and arm before me, a grubby hand, a frayed cuff;
+but with a quality of painted unreality, transfigured as a beggar might
+have been by Botticelli. I looked for a time steadfastly at a beautiful
+pearl sleeve-link.
+
+I remembered Willie Leadford, who had owned that arm and hand, as
+though he had been some one else.
+
+Of course! My history—its rough outline rather than the immediate
+past—began to shape itself in my memory, very small, very bright and
+inaccessible, like a thing watched through a microscope. Clayton and
+Swathinglea returned to my mind; the slums and darkness, Dureresque,
+minute and in their rich dark colors pleasing, and through them I went
+towards my destiny. I sat hands on knees recalling that queer
+passionate career that had ended with my futile shot into the growing
+darkness of the End. The thought of that shot awoke my emotions again.
+
+There was something in it now, something absurd, that made me smile
+pityingly.
+
+Poor little angry, miserable creature! Poor little angry, miserable
+world!
+
+I sighed for pity, not only pity for myself, but for all the hot
+hearts, the tormented brains, the straining, striving things of hope
+and pain, who had found their peace at last beneath the pouring mist
+and suffocation of the comet. Because certainly that world was over and
+done. They were all so weak and unhappy, and I was now so strong and so
+serene. For I felt sure I was dead; no one living could have this
+perfect assurance of good, this strong and confident peace. I had made
+an end of the fever called living. I was dead, and it was all right,
+and these———?
+
+I felt an inconsistency.
+
+These, then, must be the barley fields of God!—the still and silent
+barley fields of God, full of unfading poppy flowers whose seeds bear
+peace.
+
+§ 2
+
+
+It was queer to find barley fields in heaven, but no doubt there were
+many surprises in store for me.
+
+How still everything was! Peace! The peace that passeth understanding.
+After all it had come to me! But, indeed, everything was very still! No
+bird sang. Surely I was alone in the world! No birds sang. Yes, and all
+the distant sounds of life had ceased, the lowing of cattle, the
+barking of dogs. . . .
+
+Something that was like fear beatified came into my heart. It was all
+right, I knew; but to be alone! I stood up and met the hot summons of
+the rising sun, hurrying towards me, as it were, with glad tidings,
+over the spikes of the barley. . . .
+
+Blinded, I made a step. My foot struck something hard, and I looked
+down to discover my revolver, a blue-black thing, like a dead snake at
+my feet.
+
+For a moment that puzzled me.
+
+Then I clean forgot about it. The wonder of the quiet took possession
+of my soul. Dawn, and no birds singing!
+
+How beautiful was the world! How beautiful, but how still! I walked
+slowly through the barley towards a line of elder bushes, wayfaring
+tree and bramble that made the hedge of the field. I noted as I passed
+along a dead shrew mouse, as it seemed to me, among the halms; then a
+still toad. I was surprised that this did not leap aside from my
+footfalls, and I stooped and picked it up. Its body was limp like life,
+but it made no struggle, the brightness of its eye was veiled, it did
+not move in my hand.
+
+It seems to me now that I stood holding that lifeless little creature
+for some time. Then very softly I stooped down and replaced it. I was
+trembling—trembling with a nameless emotion. I looked with quickened
+eyes closely among the barley stems, and behold, now everywhere I saw
+beetles, flies, and little creatures that did not move, lying as they
+fell when the vapors overcame them; they seemed no more than painted
+things. Some were novel creatures to me. I was very unfamiliar with
+natural things. “My God!” I cried; “but is it only I———?”
+
+And then at my next movement something squealed sharply. I turned
+about, but I could not see it, only I saw a little stir in a rut and
+heard the diminishing rustle of the unseen creature’s flight. And at
+that I turned to my toad again, and its eye moved and it stirred. And
+presently, with infirm and hesitating gestures, it stretched its limbs
+and began to crawl away from me.
+
+But wonder, that gentle sister of fear, had me now. I saw a little way
+ahead a brown and crimson butterfly perched upon a cornflower. I
+thought at first it was the breeze that stirred it, and then I saw its
+wings were quivering. And even as I watched it, it started into life,
+and spread itself, and fluttered into the air.
+
+I watched it fly, a turn this way, a turn that, until suddenly it
+seemed to vanish. And now, life was returning to this thing and that on
+every side of me, with slow stretchings and bendings, with twitterings,
+with a little start and stir. . . .
+
+I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of these drugged, feebly
+awakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a very
+glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and interlaced
+like splendid music. It was rich with lupin, honeysuckle, campions, and
+ragged robin; bed straw, hops, and wild clematis twined and hung among
+its branches, and all along its ditch border the starry stitchwort
+lifted its childish faces, and chorused in lines and masses. Never had
+I seen such a symphony of note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves.
+And suddenly in its depths, I heard a chirrup and the whirr of startled
+wings.
+
+Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I stood for
+a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the intricate delicacy
+before me and marveling how richly God has made his worlds. . . . .
+
+“Tweedle-Tweezle,” a lark had shot the stillness with his shining
+thread of song; one lark, and then presently another, invisibly in the
+air, making out of that blue quiet a woven cloth of gold. . . .
+
+The earth recreated—only by the reiteration of such phrases may I hope
+to give the intense freshness of that dawn. For a time I was altogether
+taken up with the beautiful details of being, as regardless of my old
+life of jealous passion and impatient sorrow as though I was Adam new
+made. I could tell you now with infinite particularity of the shut
+flowers that opened as I looked, of tendrils and grass blades, of a
+blue-tit I picked up very tenderly—never before had I remarked the
+great delicacy of feathers—that presently disclosed its bright black
+eye and judged me, and perched, swaying fearlessly, upon my finger, and
+spread unhurried wings and flew away, and of a great ebullition of
+tadpoles in the ditch; like all the things that lived beneath the
+water, they had passed unaltered through the Change. Amid such
+incidents, I lived those first great moments, losing for a time in the
+wonder of each little part the mighty wonder of the whole.
+
+A little path ran between hedge and barley, and along this, leisurely
+and content and glad, looking at this beautiful thing and that, moving
+a step and stopping, then moving on again, I came presently to a stile,
+and deep below it, and overgrown, was a lane.
+
+And on the worn oak of the stile was a round label, and on the label
+these words, “Swindells’ G 90 Pills.”
+
+I sat myself astraddle on the stile, not fully grasping all the
+implications of these words. But they perplexed me even more than the
+revolver and my dirty cuff.
+
+About me now the birds lifted up their little hearts and sang, ever
+more birds and more.
+
+I read the label over and over again, and joined it to the fact that I
+still wore my former clothes, and that my revolver had been lying at my
+feet. One conclusion stared out at me. This was no new planet, no
+glorious hereafter such as I had supposed. This beautiful wonderland
+was the world, the same old world of my rage and death! But at least it
+was like meeting a familiar house-slut, washed and dignified, dressed
+in a queen’s robes, worshipful and fine. . . .
+
+It might be the old world indeed, but something new lay upon all
+things, a glowing certitude of health and happiness. It might be the
+old world, but the dust and fury of the old life was certainly done. At
+least I had no doubt of that.
+
+I recalled the last phases of my former life, that darkling climax of
+pursuit and anger and universal darkness and the whirling green vapors
+of extinction. The comet had struck the earth and made an end to all
+things; of that too I was assured.
+
+But afterward? . . .
+
+And now?
+
+The imaginations of my boyhood came back as speculative possibilities.
+In those days I had believed firmly in the necessary advent of a last
+day, a great coming out of the sky, trumpetings and fear, the
+Resurrection, and the Judgment. My roving fancy now suggested to me
+that this Judgment must have come and passed. That it had passed and in
+some manner missed me. I was left alone here, in a swept and garnished
+world (except, of course, for this label of Swindells’) to begin again
+perhaps. . . .
+
+No doubt Swindells has got his deserts.
+
+My mind ran for a time on Swindells, on the imbecile pushfulness of
+that extinct creature, dealing in rubbish, covering the country-side
+with lies in order to get—what had he sought?—a silly, ugly, great
+house, a temper-destroying motor-car, a number of disrespectful, abject
+servants; thwarted intrigues for a party-fund baronetcy as the crest of
+his life, perhaps. You cannot imagine the littleness of those former
+times; their naive, queer absurdities! And for the first time in my
+existence I thought of these things without bitterness. In the former
+days I had seen wickedness, I had seen tragedy, but now I saw only the
+extraordinary foolishness of the old life. The ludicrous side of human
+wealth and importance turned itself upon me, a shining novelty, poured
+down upon me like the sunrise, and engulfed me in laughter. Swindells!
+Swindells, damned! My vision of Judgment became a delightful burlesque.
+I saw the chuckling Angel sayer with his face veiled, and the corporeal
+presence of Swindells upheld amidst the laughter of the spheres.
+“Here’s a thing, and a very pretty thing, and what’s to be done with
+this very pretty thing?” I saw a soul being drawn from a rotund,
+substantial-looking body like a whelk from its shell. . . .
+
+I laughed loudly and long. And behold! even as I laughed the keen point
+of things accomplished stabbed my mirth, and I was weeping, weeping
+aloud, convulsed with weeping, and the tears were pouring down my face.
+
+§ 3
+
+
+Everywhere the awakening came with the sunrise. We awakened to the
+gladness of the morning; we walked dazzled in a light that was joy.
+Everywhere that was so. It was always morning. It was morning because,
+until the direct rays of the sun touched it, the changing nitrogen of
+our atmosphere did not pass into its permanent phase, and the sleepers
+lay as they had fallen. In its intermediate state the air hung inert,
+incapable of producing either revival or stupefaction, no longer green,
+but not yet changed to the gas that now lives in us. . . .
+
+To every one, I think, came some parallel to the mental states I have
+already sought to describe—a wonder, an impression of joyful novelty.
+There was also very commonly a certain confusion of the intelligence, a
+difficulty in self-recognition. I remember clearly as I sat on my stile
+that presently I had the clearest doubts of my own identity and fell
+into the oddest metaphysical questionings. “If this be I,” I said,
+“then how is it I am no longer madly seeking Nettie? Nettie is now the
+remotest thing—and all my wrongs. Why have I suddenly passed out of all
+that passion? Why does not the thought of Verrall quicken my pulses?” .
+. .
+
+I was only one of many millions who that morning had the same doubts. I
+suppose one knows one’s self for one’s self when one returns from sleep
+or insensibility by the familiarity of one’s bodily sensations, and
+that morning all our most intimate bodily sensations were changed. The
+intimate chemical processes of life were changed, its nervous metaboly.
+For the fluctuating, uncertain, passion-darkened thought and feeling of
+the old time came steady, full-bodied, wholesome processes. Touch was
+different, sight was different, sound and all the senses were subtler;
+had it not been that our thought was steadier and fuller, I believe
+great multitudes of men would have gone mad. But, as it was, we
+understood. The dominant impression I would convey in this account of
+the Change is one of enormous release, of a vast substantial
+exaltation. There was an effect, as it were, of light-headedness that
+was also clear-headedness, and the alteration in one’s bodily
+sensations, instead of producing the mental obfuscation, the loss of
+identity that was a common mental trouble under former conditions, gave
+simply a new detachment from the tumid passions and entanglements of
+the personal life.
+
+In this story of my bitter, restricted youth that I have been telling
+you, I have sought constantly to convey the narrowness, the intensity,
+the confusion, muddle, and dusty heat of the old world. It was quite
+clear to me, within an hour of my awakening, that all that was, in some
+mysterious way, over and done. That, too, was the common experience.
+Men stood up; they took the new air into their lungs—a deep long
+breath, and the past fell from them; they could forgive, they could
+disregard, they could attempt. . . . And it was no new thing, no
+miracle that sets aside the former order of the world. It was a change
+in material conditions, a change in the atmosphere, that at one bound
+had released them. Some of them it had released to death. . . . Indeed,
+man himself had changed not at all. We knew before the Change, the
+meanest knew, by glowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories
+and music and beautiful things, by heroic instances and splendid
+stories, how fine mankind could be, how fine almost any human being
+could upon occasion be; but the poison in the air, its poverty in all
+the nobler elements which made such moments rare and remarkable—all
+that has changed. The air was changed, and the Spirit of Man that had
+drowsed and slumbered and dreamt dull and evil things, awakened, and
+stood with wonder-clean eyes, refreshed, looking again on life.
+
+§ 4
+
+
+The miracle of the awakening came to me in solitude, the laughter, and
+then the tears. Only after some time did I come upon another man. Until
+I heard his voice calling I did not seem to feel there were any other
+people in the world. All that seemed past, with all the stresses that
+were past. I had come out of the individual pit in which my shy egotism
+had lurked, I had overflowed to all humanity, I had seemed to be all
+humanity; I had laughed at Swindells as I could have laughed at myself,
+and this shout that came to me seemed like the coming of an unexpected
+thought in my own mind. But when it was repeated I answered.
+
+“I am hurt,” said the voice, and I descended into the lane forthwith,
+and so came upon Melmount sitting near the ditch with his back to me.
+
+Some of the incidental sensory impressions of that morning bit so
+deeply into my mind that I verily believe, when at last I face the
+greater mysteries that lie beyond this life, when the things of this
+life fade from me as the mists of the morning fade before the sun,
+these irrelevant petty details will be the last to leave me, will be
+the last wisps visible of that attenuating veil. I believe, for
+instance, I could match the fur upon the collar of his great motoring
+coat now, could paint the dull red tinge of his big cheek with his fair
+eyelashes just catching the light and showing beyond. His hat was off,
+his dome-shaped head, with its smooth hair between red and extreme
+fairness, was bent forward in scrutiny of his twisted foot. His back
+seemed enormous. And there was something about the mere massive sight
+of him that filled me with liking.
+
+“What’s wrong?” said I.
+
+“I say,” he said, in his full deliberate tones, straining round to see
+me and showing a profile, a well-modeled nose, a sensitive, clumsy, big
+lip, known to every caricaturist in the world, “I’m in a fix. I fell
+and wrenched my ankle. Where are you?”
+
+I walked round him and stood looking at his face. I perceived he had
+his gaiter and sock and boot off, the motor gauntlets had been cast
+aside, and he was kneading the injured part in an exploratory manner
+with his thick thumbs.
+
+“By Jove!” I said, “you’re Melmount!”
+
+“Melmount!” He thought. “That’s my name,” he said, without looking up.
+. . . “But it doesn’t affect my ankle.”
+
+We remained silent for few moments except for a grunt of pain from him.
+
+“Do you know?” I asked, “what has happened to things?”
+
+He seemed to complete his diagnosis. “It’s not broken,” he said.
+
+“Do you know,” I repeated, “what has happened to everything?”
+
+“No,” he said, looking up at me incuriously for the first time.
+
+“There’s some difference———”
+
+“There’s a difference.” He smiled, a smile of unexpected pleasantness,
+and an interest was coming into his eyes. “I’ve been a little
+preoccupied with my own internal sensations. I remark an extraordinary
+brightness about things. Is that it?”
+
+“That’s part of it. And a queer feeling, a clear-headedness———”
+
+He surveyed me and meditated gravely. “I woke up,” he said, feeling his
+way in his memory.
+
+“And I.”
+
+“I lost my way—I forget quite how. There was a curious green fog.” He
+stared at his foot, remembering. “Something to do with a comet. I was
+by a hedge in the darkness. Tried to run. . . . Then I must have
+pitched into this lane. Look!” He pointed with his head. “There’s a
+wooden rail new broken there. I must have stumbled over that out of the
+field above.” He scrutinized this and concluded. “Yes. . . .”
+
+“It was dark,” I said, “and a sort of green gas came out of nothing
+everywhere. That is the last _I_ remember.”
+
+“And then you woke up? So did I. . . . In a state of great
+bewilderment. Certainly there’s something odd in the air. I was—I was
+rushing along a road in a motor-car, very much excited and preoccupied.
+I got down——” He held out a triumphant finger. “Ironclads!”
+
+“_Now_ I’ve got it! We’d strung our fleet from here to Texel. We’d got
+right across them and the Elbe mined. We’d lost the _Lord Warden_. By
+Jove, yes. The _Lord Warden!_ A battleship that cost two million
+pounds—and that fool Rigby said it didn’t matter! Eleven hundred men
+went down. . . . I remember now. We were sweeping up the North Sea like
+a net, with the North Atlantic fleet waiting at the Faroes for ‘em—and
+not one of ‘em had three days’ coal! Now, was that a dream? No! I told
+a lot of people as much—a meeting was it?—to reassure them. They were
+warlike but extremely frightened. Queer people—paunchy and bald like
+gnomes, most of them. Where? Of course! We had it all over—a big
+dinner—oysters!—Colchester. I’d been there, just to show all this raid
+scare was nonsense. And I was coming back here. . . . But it doesn’t
+seem as though that was—recent. I suppose it was. Yes, of course!—it
+was. I got out of my car at the bottom of the rise with the idea of
+walking along the cliff path, because every one said one of their
+battleships was being chased along the shore. That’s clear! I heard
+their guns———”
+
+He reflected. “Queer I should have forgotten! Did _you_ hear any guns?”
+
+I said I had heard them.
+
+“Was it last night?”
+
+“Late last night. One or two in the morning.”
+
+He leant back on his hand and looked at me, smiling frankly. “Even
+now,” he said, “it’s odd, but the whole of that seems like a silly
+dream. Do you think there _was_ a _Lord Warden?_ Do you really believe
+we sank all that machinery—for fun? It was a dream. And yet—it
+happened.”
+
+By all the standards of the former time it would have been remarkable
+that I talked quite easily and freely with so great a man. “Yes,” I
+said; “that’s it. One feels one has awakened—from something more than
+that green gas. As though the other things also—weren’t quite real.”
+
+He knitted his brows and felt the calf of his leg thoughtfully. “I made
+a speech at Colchester,” he said.
+
+I thought he was going to add something more about that, but there
+lingered a habit of reticence in the man that held him for the moment.
+“It is a very curious thing,” he broke away; “that this pain should be,
+on the whole, more interesting than disagreeable.”
+
+“You are in pain?”
+
+“My ankle is! It’s either broken or badly sprained—I think sprained;
+it’s very painful to move, but personally I’m not in pain. That sort of
+general sickness that comes with local injury—not a trace of it! . . .”
+He mused and remarked, “I was speaking at Colchester, and saying things
+about the war. I begin to see it better. The reporters—scribble,
+scribble. Max Sutaine, 1885. Hubbub. Compliments about the oysters.
+Mm—mm. . . . What was it? About the war? A war that must needs be long
+and bloody, taking toll from castle and cottage, taking toll! . . .
+Rhetorical gusto! Was I drunk last night?”
+
+His eyebrows puckered. He had drawn up his right knee, his elbow rested
+thereon and his chin on his fist. The deep-set gray eyes beneath his
+thatch of eyebrow stared at unknown things. “My God!” he murmured, “My
+God!” with a note of disgust. He made a big brooding figure in the
+sunlight, he had an effect of more than physical largeness; he made me
+feel that it became me to wait upon his thinking. I had never met a man
+of this sort before; I did not know such men existed. . . .
+
+It is a curious thing, that I cannot now recall any ideas whatever that
+I had before the Change about the personalities of statesmen, but I
+doubt if ever in those days I thought of them at all as tangible
+individual human beings, conceivably of some intellectual complexity. I
+believe that my impression was a straightforward blend of caricature
+and newspaper leader. I certainly had no respect for them. And now
+without servility or any insincerity whatever, as if it were a
+first-fruit of the Change, I found myself in the presence of a human
+being towards whom I perceived myself inferior and subordinate, before
+whom I stood without servility or any insincerity whatever, in an
+attitude of respect and attention. My inflamed, my rancid egotism—or
+was it after all only the chances of life?—had never once permitted
+that before the Change.
+
+He emerged from his thoughts, still with a faint perplexity in his
+manner. “That speech I made last night,” he said, “was damned
+mischievous nonsense, you know. Nothing can alter that. Nothing. . . .
+No! . . . Little fat gnomes in evening dress—gobbling oysters. Gulp!”
+
+It was a most natural part of the wonder of that morning that he should
+adopt this incredible note of frankness, and that it should abate
+nothing from my respect for him.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “you are right. It’s all indisputable fact, and I can’t
+believe it was anything but a dream.”
+
+§ 5
+
+
+That memory stands out against the dark past of the world with
+extraordinary clearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was full
+of the calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a curious
+persuasion too that there was a distant happy clamor of pealing bells,
+but that I am half convinced is a mistake. Nevertheless, there was
+something in the fresh bite of things, in the dewy newness of sensation
+that set bells rejoicing in one’s brain. And that big, fair, pensive
+man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his clumsy pose, as though
+indeed some Great Master of strength and humor had made him.
+
+And—it is so hard now to convey these things—he spoke to me, a
+stranger, without reservations, carelessly, as men now speak to men.
+Before those days, not only did we think badly, but what we thought, a
+thousand short-sighted considerations, dignity, objective discipline,
+discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of soul, made us
+muffle before we told it to our fellow-men.
+
+“It’s all returning now,” he said, and told me half soliloquizingly
+what was in his mind.
+
+I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out image after
+image to my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragments of
+speech. If I had a precise full memory of that morning I should give it
+you, verbatim, minutely. But here, save for the little sharp things
+that stand out, I find only blurred general impressions. Throughout I
+have to make up again his half-forgotten sentences and speeches, and be
+content with giving you the general effect. But I can see and hear him
+now as he said, “The dream got worst at the end. The war—a perfectly
+horrible business! Horrible! And it was just like a nightmare, you
+couldn’t do anything to escape from it—every one was driven!”
+
+His sense of indiscretion was gone.
+
+He opened the war out to me—as every one sees it now. Only that morning
+it was astonishing. He sat there on the ground, absurdly forgetful of
+his bare and swollen foot, treating me as the humblest accessory and as
+altogether an equal, talking out to himself the great obsessions of his
+mind. “We could have prevented it! Any of us who chose to speak out
+could have prevented it. A little decent frankness. What was there to
+prevent us being frank with one another? Their emperor—his position was
+a pile of ridiculous assumptions, no doubt, but at bottom—he was a sane
+man.” He touched off the emperor in a few pithy words, the German
+press, the German people, and our own. He put it as we should put it
+all now, but with a certain heat as of a man half guilty and wholly
+resentful. “Their damned little buttoned-up professors!” he cried,
+incidentally. “Were there ever such men? And ours! Some of us might
+have taken a firmer line. . . . If a lot of us had taken a firmer line
+and squashed that nonsense early. . . .”
+
+He lapsed into inaudible whisperings, into silence. . . .
+
+I stood regarding him, understanding him, learning marvelously from
+him. It is a fact that for the best part of the morning of the Change I
+forgot Nettie and Verrall as completely as though they were no more
+than characters in some novel that I had put aside to finish at my
+leisure, in order that I might talk to this man.
+
+“Eh, well,” he said, waking startlingly from his thoughts. “Here we are
+awakened! The thing can’t go on now; all this must end. How it ever
+began———! My dear boy, how did all those things ever begin? I feel like
+a new Adam. . . . Do you think this has happened—generally? Or shall we
+find all these gnomes and things? . . . Who cares?”
+
+He made as if to rise, and remembered his ankle. He suggested I should
+help him as far as his bungalow. There seemed nothing strange to either
+of us that he should requisition my services or that I should
+cheerfully obey. I helped him bandage his ankle, and we set out, I his
+crutch, the two of us making up a sort of limping quadruped, along the
+winding lane toward the cliffs and the sea.
+
+§ 6
+
+
+His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and a quarter
+from the lane. We went down to the beach margin and along the pallid
+wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying, hopping,
+tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, and then, as soon
+as we could, sitting down. His ankle was, in fact, broken, and he could
+not put it to the ground without exquisite pain. So that it took us
+nearly two hours to get to the house, and it would have taken longer if
+his butler-valet had not come out to assist me. They had found
+motor-car and chauffeur smashed and still at the bend of the road near
+the house, and had been on that side looking for Melmount, or they
+would have seen us before.
+
+For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalk
+boulder, now on a timber groin, and talking one to the other, with the
+frankness proper to the intercourse of men of good intent, without
+reservations or aggressions, in the common, open fashion of
+contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then, nevertheless, was the
+rarest and strangest thing in the world. He for the most part talked,
+but at some shape of a question I told him—as plainly as I could tell
+of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible to me—of my
+murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how the green vapors
+overcame me. He watched me with grave eyes and nodded understandingly,
+and afterwards he asked me brief penetrating questions about my
+education, my upbringing, my work. There was a deliberation in his
+manner, brief full pauses, that had in them no element of delay.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “yes—of course. What a fool I have been!” and said no
+more until we had made another of our tripod struggles along the beach.
+At first I did not see the connection of my story with that
+self-accusation.
+
+“Suppose,” he said, panting on the groin, “there had been such a thing
+as a statesman! . . .”
+
+He turned to me. “If one had decided all this muddle shall end! If one
+had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who builds takes
+site and stone, and made———” He flung out his big broad hand at the
+glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, “something to fit that
+setting.”
+
+He added in explanation, “Then there wouldn’t have been such stories as
+yours at all, you know. . . .”
+
+“Tell me more about it,” he said, “tell me all about yourself. I feel
+all these things have passed away, all these things are to be changed
+for ever. . . . You won’t be what you have been from this time forth.
+All the things you have done—don’t matter now. To us, at any rate, they
+don’t matter at all. We have met, who were separated in that darkness
+behind us. Tell me.
+
+“Yes,” he said; and I told my story straight and as frankly as I have
+told it to you. “And there, where those little skerries of weed rock
+run out to the ebb, beyond the headland, is Bungalow village. What did
+you do with your pistol?”
+
+“I left it lying there—among the barley.”
+
+He glanced at me from under his light eyelashes. “If others feel like
+you and I,” he said, “there’ll be a lot of pistols left among the
+barley to-day. . . .”
+
+So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love of brothers
+so plain between us it needed not a word. Our souls went out to one
+another in stark good faith; never before had I had anything but a
+guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man. Still I see him, upon that
+wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see him leaning against the
+shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at the poor drowned sailor
+whose body we presently found. For we found a newly drowned man who had
+just chanced to miss this great dawn in which we rejoiced. We found him
+lying in a pool of water, among brown weeds in the dark shadow of the
+timberings. You must not overrate the horrors of the former days; in
+those days it was scarcely more common to see death in England than it
+would be to-day. This dead man was a sailor from the _Rother Adler_,
+the great German battleship that—had we but known it—lay not four miles
+away along the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn
+and battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and
+holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all strong
+and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .
+
+I remember that poor boy very vividly. He had been drowned during the
+anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young face was quiet and calm,
+but the skin of his chest had been crinkled by scalding water and his
+right arm was bent queerly back. Even to this needless death and all
+its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come. Everything flowed
+together to significance as we stood there, I, the ill-clad, cheaply
+equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his great fur-trimmed coat—he was
+hot with walking but he had not thought to remove it—leaning upon the
+clumsy groins and pitying this poor victim of the war he had helped to
+make. “Poor lad!” he said, “poor lad! A child we blunderers sent to
+death! Do look at the quiet beauty of that face, that body—to be flung
+aside like this!”
+
+(I remember that near this dead man’s hand a stranded star-fish writhed
+its slowly feeling limbs, struggling back toward the sea. It left
+grooved traces in the sand.)
+
+“There must be no more of this,” panted Melmount, leaning on my
+shoulder, “no more of this. . . .”
+
+But most I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting upon a
+great chalk boulder with the sunlight on his big, perspiration-dewed
+face. He made his resolves. “We must end war,” he said, in that full
+whisper of his; “it is stupidity. With so many people able to read and
+think—even as it is—there is no need of anything of the sort. Gods!
+What have we rulers been at? . . . Drowsing like people in a stifling
+room, too dull and sleepy and too base toward each other for any one to
+get up and open the window. What haven’t we been at?”
+
+A great powerful figure he sits there still in my memory, perplexed and
+astonished at himself and all things. “We must change all this,” he
+repeated, and threw out his broad hands in a powerful gesture against
+the sea and sky. “We have done so weakly—Heaven alone knows why!” I can
+see him now, queer giant that he looked on that dawnlit beach of
+splendor, the sea birds flying about us and that crumpled death hard
+by, no bad symbol in his clumsiness and needless heat of the unawakened
+powers of the former time. I remember it as an integral part of that
+picture that far away across the sandy stretches one of those white
+estate boards I have described, stuck up a little askew amidst the
+yellow-green turf upon the crest of the low cliffs.
+
+He talked with a sort of wonder of the former things. “Has it ever
+dawned upon you to imagine the pettiness—the pettiness!—of every soul
+concerned in a declaration of war?” he asked. He went on, as though
+speech was necessary to make it credible, to describe Laycock, who
+first gave the horror words at the cabinet council, “an undersized
+Oxford prig with a tenoring voice and a garbage of Greek—the sort of
+little fool who is brought up on the admiration of his elder sisters. .
+. .
+
+“All the time almost,” he said, “I was watching him—thinking what an
+ass he was to be trusted with men’s lives. . . . I might have done
+better to have thought that of myself. I was doing nothing to prevent
+it all! The damned little imbecile was up to his neck in the drama of
+the thing, he liked to trumpet it out, he goggled round at us. ‘Then it
+is war!’ he said. Richover shrugged his shoulders. I made some slight
+protest and gave in. . . . Afterward I dreamt of him.
+
+“What a lot we were! All a little scared at ourselves—all, as it were,
+instrumental. . . .
+
+“And it’s fools like that lead to things like this!” He jerked his head
+at that dead man near by us.
+
+“It will be interesting to know what has happened to the world. . . .
+This green vapor—queer stuff. But I know what has happened to me. It’s
+Conversion. I’ve always known. . . . But this is being a fool. Talk!
+I’m going to stop it.”
+
+He motioned to rise with his clumsy outstretched hands.
+
+“Stop what?” said I, stepping forward instinctively to help him.
+
+“War,” he said in his great whisper, putting his big hand on my
+shoulder but making no further attempt to arise, “I’m going to put an
+end to war—to any sort of war! And all these things that must end. The
+world is beautiful, life is great and splendid, we had only to lift up
+our eyes and see. Think of the glories through which we have been
+driving, like a herd of swine in a garden place. The color in life—the
+sounds—the shapes! We have had our jealousies, our quarrels, our
+ticklish rights, our invincible prejudices, our vulgar enterprise and
+sluggish timidities, we have chattered and pecked one another and
+fouled the world—like daws in the temple, like unclean birds in the
+holy place of God. All my life has been foolishness and pettiness,
+gross pleasures and mean discretions—all. I am a meagre dark thing in
+this morning’s glow, a penitence, a shame! And, but for God’s mercy, I
+might have died this night—like that poor lad there—amidst the squalor
+of my sins! No more of this! No more of this!—whether the whole world
+has changed or no, matters nothing. _We two have seen this dawn!_ . .
+.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“I will arise and go unto my Father,” he began presently, “and will say
+unto Him———”
+
+His voice died away in an inaudible whisper. His hand tightened
+painfully on my shoulder and he rose. . . .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+THE AWAKENING
+
+
+§ 1
+
+So the great Day came to me.
+
+And even as I had awakened so in that same dawn the whole world awoke.
+
+For the whole world of living things had been overtaken by the same
+tide of insensibility; in an hour, at the touch of this new gas in the
+comet, the shiver of catalytic change had passed about the globe. They
+say it was the nitrogen of the air, the old _azote_, that in the
+twinkling of an eye was changed out of itself, and in an hour or so
+became a respirable gas, differing indeed from oxygen, but helping and
+sustaining its action, a bath of strength and healing for nerve and
+brain. I do not know the precise changes that occurred, nor the names
+our chemists give them, my work has carried me away from such things,
+only this I know—I and all men were renewed.
+
+I picture to myself this thing happening in space, a planetary moment,
+the faint smudge, the slender whirl of meteor, drawing nearer to this
+planet,—this planet like a ball, like a shaded rounded ball, floating
+in the void, with its little, nearly impalpable coat of cloud and air,
+with its dark pools of ocean, its gleaming ridges of land. And as that
+midge from the void touches it, the transparent gaseous outer shell
+clouds in an instant green and then slowly clears again. . . .
+
+Thereafter, for three hours or more,—we know the minimum time for the
+Change was almost exactly three hours because all the clocks and
+watches kept going—everywhere, no man nor beast nor bird nor any living
+thing that breathes the air stirred at all but lay still. . . .
+
+Everywhere on earth that day, in the ears of every one who breathed,
+there had been the same humming in the air, the same rush of green
+vapors, the crepitation, the streaming down of shooting stars. The
+Hindoo had stayed his morning’s work in the fields to stare and marvel
+and fall, the blue-clothed Chinaman fell head foremost athwart his
+midday bowl of rice, the Japanese merchant came out from some
+chaffering in his office amazed and presently lay there before his
+door, the evening gazers by the Golden Gates were overtaken as they
+waited for the rising of the great star. This had happened in every
+city of the world, in every lonely valley, in every home and house and
+shelter and every open place. On the high seas, the crowding steamship
+passengers, eager for any wonder, gaped and marveled, and were suddenly
+terror-stricken, and struggled for the gangways and were overcome, the
+captain staggered on the bridge and fell, the stoker fell headlong
+among his coals, the engines throbbed upon their way untended, the
+fishing craft drove by without a hail, with swaying rudder, heeling and
+dipping. . . .
+
+The great voice of material Fate cried Halt! And in the midst of the
+play the actors staggered, dropped, and were still. The figure runs
+from my pen. In New York that very thing occurred. Most of the
+theatrical audiences dispersed, but in two crowded houses the company,
+fearing a panic, went on playing amidst the gloom, and the people,
+trained by many a previous disaster, stuck to their seats. There they
+sat, the back rows only moving a little, and there, in disciplined
+lines, they drooped and failed, nodded, and fell forward or slid down
+upon the floor. I am told by Parload—though indeed I know nothing of
+the reasoning on which his confidence rests—-that within an hour of the
+great moment of impact the first green modification of nitrogen had
+dissolved and passed away, leaving the air as translucent as ever. The
+rest of that wonderful interlude was clear, had any had eyes to see its
+clearness. In London it was night, but in New York, for example, people
+were in the full bustle of the evening’s enjoyment, in Chicago they
+were sitting down to dinner, the whole world was abroad. The moonlight
+must have illuminated streets and squares littered with crumpled
+figures, through which such electric cars as had no automatic brakes
+had ploughed on their way until they were stopped by the fallen bodies.
+People lay in their dress clothes, in dining-rooms, restaurants, on
+staircases, in halls, everywhere just as they had been overcome. Men
+gambling, men drinking, thieves lurking in hidden places, sinful
+couples, were caught, to arise with awakened mind and conscience amidst
+the disorder of their sin. America the comet reached in the full tide
+of evening life, but Britain lay asleep. But as I have told, Britain
+did not slumber so deeply but that she was in the full tide of what may
+have been battle and a great victory. Up and down the North Sea her
+warships swept together like a net about their foes. On land, too, that
+night was to have decided great issues. The German camps were under
+arms from Redingen to Markirch, their infantry columns were lying in
+swathes like mown hay, in arrested night march on every track between
+Longuyon and Thiancourt, and between Avricourt and Donen. The hills
+beyond Spincourt were dusted thick with hidden French riflemen; the
+thin lash of the French skirmishers sprawled out amidst spades and
+unfinished rifle-pits in coils that wrapped about the heads of the
+German columns, thence along the Vosges watershed and out across the
+frontier near Belfort nearly to the Rhine. . . .
+
+The Hungarian, the Italian peasant, yawned and thought the morning
+dark, and turned over to fall into a dreamless sleep; the Mahometan
+world spread its carpet and was taken in prayer. And in Sydney, in
+Melbourne, in New Zealand, the thing was a fog in the afternoon, that
+scattered the crowd on race-courses and cricket-fields, and stopped the
+unloading of shipping and brought men out from their afternoon rest to
+stagger and litter the streets. . . .
+
+§ 2
+
+
+My thoughts go into the woods and wildernesses and jungles of the
+world, to the wild life that shared man’s suspension, and I think of a
+thousand feral acts interrupted and truncated—as it were frozen, like
+the frozen words Pantagruel met at sea. Not only men it was that were
+quieted, all living creatures that breathe the air became insensible,
+impassive things. Motionless brutes and birds lay amidst the drooping
+trees and herbage in the universal twilight, the tiger sprawled beside
+his fresh-struck victim, who bled to death in a dreamless sleep. The
+very flies came sailing down the air with wings outspread; the spider
+hung crumpled in his loaded net; like some gaily painted snowflake the
+butterfly drifted to earth and grounded, and was still. And as a queer
+contrast one gathers that the fishes in the sea suffered not at all. .
+. .
+
+Speaking of the fishes reminds me of a queer little inset upon that
+great world-dreaming. The odd fate of the crew of the submarine vessel
+B 94 has always seemed memorable to me. So far as I know, they were the
+only men alive who never saw that veil of green drawn across the world.
+All the while that the stillness held above, they were working into the
+mouth of the Elbe, past the booms and the mines, very slowly and
+carefully, a sinister crustacean of steel, explosive crammed, along the
+muddy bottom. They trailed a long clue that was to guide their fellows
+from the mother ship floating awash outside. Then in the long channel
+beyond the forts they came up at last to mark down their victims and
+get air. That must have been before the twilight of dawn, for they tell
+of the brightness of the stars. They were amazed to find themselves not
+three hundred yards from an ironclad that had run ashore in the mud,
+and heeled over with the falling tide. It was afire amidships, but no
+one heeded that—no one in all that strange clear silence heeded
+that—and not only this wrecked vessel, but all the dark ships lying
+about them, it seemed to their perplexed and startled minds must be
+full of dead men!
+
+Theirs I think must have been one of the strangest of all experiences;
+they were never insensible; at once, and, I am told, with a sudden
+catch of laughter, they began to breathe the new air. None of them has
+proved a writer; we have no picture of their wonder, no description of
+what was said. But we know these men were active and awake for an hour
+and a half at least before the general awakening came, and when at last
+the Germans stirred and sat up they found these strangers in possession
+of their battleship, the submarine carelessly adrift, and the
+Englishmen, begrimed and weary, but with a sort of furious exultation,
+still busy, in the bright dawn, rescuing insensible enemies from the
+sinking conflagration. . . .
+
+But the thought of certain stokers the sailors of the submarine failed
+altogether to save brings me back to the thread of grotesque horror
+that runs through all this event, the thread I cannot overlook for all
+the splendors of human well-being that have come from it. I cannot
+forget the unguided ships that drove ashore, that went down in disaster
+with all their sleeping hands, nor how, inland, motor-cars rushed to
+destruction upon the roads, and trains upon the railways kept on in
+spite of signals, to be found at last by their amazed, reviving drivers
+standing on unfamiliar lines, their fires exhausted, or, less lucky, to
+be discovered by astonished peasants or awakening porters smashed and
+crumpled up into heaps of smoking, crackling ruin. The foundry fires of
+the Four Towns still blazed, the smoke of our burning still denied the
+sky. Fires burnt indeed the brighter for the Change—and spread. . . .
+
+§ 3
+
+
+Picture to yourself what happened between the printing and composing of
+the copy of the _New Paper_ that lies before me now. It was the first
+newspaper that was printed upon earth after the Great Change. It was
+pocket-worn and browned, made of a paper no man ever intended for
+preservation. I found it on the arbor table in the inn garden while I
+was waiting for Nettie and Verrall, before that last conversation of
+which I have presently to tell. As I look at it all that scene comes
+back to me, and Nettie stands in her white raiment against a blue-green
+background of sunlit garden, scrutinizing my face as I read. . . .
+
+It is so frayed that the sheet cracks along the folds and comes to
+pieces in my hands. It lies upon my desk, a dead souvenir of the dead
+ages of the world, of the ancient passions of my heart. I know we
+discussed its news, but for the life of me I cannot recall what we
+said, only I remember that Nettie said very little, and that Verrall
+for a time read it over my shoulder. And I did not like him to read
+over my shoulder. . . .
+
+The document before me must have helped us through the first
+awkwardness of that meeting.
+
+But of all that we said and did then I must tell in a later chapter. .
+. .
+
+It is easy to see the _New Paper_ had been set up overnight, and then
+large pieces of the stereo plates replaced subsequently. I do not know
+enough of the old methods of printing to know precisely what happened.
+The thing gives one an impression of large pieces of type having been
+cut away and replaced by fresh blocks. There is something very rough
+and ready about it all, and the new portions print darker and more
+smudgily than the old, except toward the left, where they have missed
+ink and indented. A friend of mine, who knows something of the old
+typography, has suggested to me that the machinery actually in use for
+the _New Paper_ was damaged that night, and that on the morning of the
+Change Banghurst borrowed a neighboring office—perhaps in financial
+dependence upon him—to print in.
+
+The outer pages belong entirely to the old period, the only parts of
+the paper that had undergone alteration are the two middle leaves. Here
+we found set forth in a curious little four-column oblong of print,
+WHAT HAS HAPPENED. This cut across a column with scare headings
+beginning, “Great Naval Battle Now in Progress. The Fate of Two Empires
+in the Balance. Reported Loss of Two More———”
+
+These things, one gathered, were beneath notice now. Probably it was
+guesswork, and fabricated news in the first instance.
+
+It is curious to piece together the worn and frayed fragments, and
+reread this discolored first intelligence of the new epoch.
+
+The simple clear statements in the replaced portion of the paper
+impressed me at the time, I remember, as bald and strange, in that
+framework of shouting bad English. Now they seem like the voice of a
+sane man amidst a vast faded violence. But they witness to the prompt
+recovery of London from the gas; the new, swift energy of rebound in
+that huge population. I am surprised now, as I reread, to note how much
+research, experiment, and induction must have been accomplished in the
+day that elapsed before the paper was printed. . . . But that is by the
+way. As I sit and muse over this partly carbonized sheet, that same
+curious remote vision comes again to me that quickened in my mind that
+morning, a vision of those newspaper offices I have already described
+to you going through the crisis.
+
+The catalytic wave must have caught the place in full swing, in its
+nocturnal high fever, indeed in a quite exceptional state of fever,
+what with the comet and the war, and more particularly with the war.
+Very probably the Change crept into the office imperceptibly, amidst
+the noise and shouting, and the glare of electric light that made the
+night atmosphere in that place; even the green flashes may have passed
+unobserved there, the preliminary descending trails of green vapor
+seemed no more than unseasonable drifting wisps of London fog. (In
+those days London even in summer was not safe against dark fogs.) And
+then at the last the Change poured in and overtook them.
+
+If there was any warning at all for them, it must have been a sudden
+universal tumult in the street, and then a much more universal quiet.
+They could have had no other intimation.
+
+There was no time to stop the presses before the main development of
+green vapor had overwhelmed every one. It must have folded about them,
+tumbled them to the earth, masked and stilled them. My imagination is
+always curiously stirred by the thought of that, because I suppose it
+is the first picture I succeeded in making for myself of what had
+happened in the towns. It has never quite lost its strangeness for me
+that when the Change came, machinery went on working. I don’t precisely
+know why that should have seemed so strange to me, but it did, and
+still to a certain extent does. One is so accustomed, I suppose, to
+regard machinery as an extension of human personality that the extent
+of its autonomy the Change displayed came as a shock to me. The
+electric lights, for example, hazy green-haloed nebulas, must have gone
+on burning at least for a time; amidst the thickening darkness the huge
+presses must have roared on, printing, folding, throwing aside copy
+after copy of that fabricated battle report with its quarter column of
+scare headlines, and all the place must have still quivered and
+throbbed with the familiar roar of the engines. And this though no men
+ruled there at all any more! Here and there beneath that thickening fog
+the crumpled or outstretched forms of men lay still.
+
+A wonderful thing that must have seemed, had any man had by chance the
+power of resistance to the vapor, and could he have walked amidst it.
+
+And soon the machines must have exhausted their feed of ink and paper,
+and thumped and banged and rattled emptily amidst the general quiet.
+Then I suppose the furnaces failed for want of stoking, the steam
+pressure fell in the pistons, the machinery slackened, the lights burnt
+dim, and came and went with the ebb of energy from the power-station.
+Who can tell precisely the sequence of these things now?
+
+And then, you know, amidst the weakening and terminating noises of men,
+the green vapor cleared and vanished, in an hour indeed it had gone,
+and it may be a breeze stirred and blew and went about the earth.
+
+The noises of life were all dying away, but some there were that abated
+nothing, that sounded triumphantly amidst the universal ebb. To a
+heedless world the church towers tolled out two and then three. Clocks
+ticked and chimed everywhere about the earth to deafened ears. . . .
+
+And then came the first flush of morning, the first rustlings of the
+revival. Perhaps in that office the filaments of the lamps were still
+glowing, the machinery was still pulsing weakly, when the crumpled,
+booted heaps of cloth became men again and began to stir and stare. The
+chapel of the printers was, no doubt, shocked to find itself asleep.
+Amidst that dazzling dawn the _New Paper_ woke to wonder, stood up and
+blinked at its amazing self. . . .
+
+The clocks of the city churches, one pursuing another, struck four. The
+staffs, crumpled and disheveled, but with a strange refreshment in
+their veins, stood about the damaged machinery, marveling and
+questioning; the editor read his overnight headlines with incredulous
+laughter. There was much involuntary laughter that morning. Outside,
+the mail men patted the necks and rubbed the knees of their awakening
+horses. . . .
+
+Then, you know, slowly and with much conversation and doubt, they set
+about to produce the paper.
+
+Imagine those bemused, perplexed people, carried on by the inertia of
+their old occupations and doing their best with an enterprise that had
+suddenly become altogether extraordinary and irrational. They worked
+amidst questionings, and yet light-heartedly. At every stage there must
+have been interruptions for discussion. The paper only got down to
+Menton five days late.
+
+§ 4
+
+
+Then let me give you a vivid little impression I received of a certain
+prosaic person, a grocer, named Wiggins, and how he passed through the
+Change. I heard this man’s story in the post-office at Menton, when, in
+the afternoon of the First Day, I bethought me to telegraph to my
+mother. The place was also a grocer’s shop, and I found him and the
+proprietor talking as I went in. They were trade competitors, and
+Wiggins had just come across the street to break the hostile silence of
+a score of years. The sparkle of the Change was in their eyes, their
+slightly flushed cheeks, their more elastic gestures, spoke of new
+physical influences that had invaded their beings.
+
+“It did us no good, all our hatred,” Mr. Wiggins said to me, explaining
+the emotion of their encounter; “it did our customers no good. I’ve
+come to tell him that. You bear that in mind, young man, if ever you
+come to have a shop of your own. It was a sort of stupid bitterness
+possessed us, and I can’t make out we didn’t see it before in that
+light. Not so much downright wickedness it wasn’t as stupidity. A
+stupid jealousy! Think of it!—two human beings within a stone’s throw,
+who have not spoken for twenty years, hardening our hearts against each
+other!”
+
+“I can’t think how we came to such a state, Mr. Wiggins,” said the
+other, packing tea into pound packets out of mere habit as he spoke.
+“It was wicked pride and obstinacy. We _knew_ it was foolish all the
+time.”
+
+I stood affixing the adhesive stamp to my telegram.
+
+“Only the other morning,” he went on to me, “I was cutting French eggs.
+Selling at a loss to do it. He’d marked down with a great staring
+ticket to ninepence a dozen—I saw it as I went past. Here’s my answer!”
+He indicated a ticket. “‘Eightpence a dozen—same as sold elsewhere for
+ninepence.’ A whole penny down, bang off! Just a touch above cost—if
+that—and even then———” He leant over the counter to say impressively,
+“_Not the same eggs!_”
+
+“Now, what people in their senses would do things like that?” said Mr.
+Wiggins.
+
+I sent my telegram—the proprietor dispatched it for me, and while he
+did so I fell exchanging experiences with Mr. Wiggins. He knew no more
+than I did then the nature of the change that had come over things. He
+had been alarmed by the green flashes, he said, so much so that after
+watching for a time from behind his bedroom window blind, he had got up
+and hastily dressed and made his family get up also, so that they might
+be ready for the end. He made them put on their Sunday clothes. They
+all went out into the garden together, their minds divided between
+admiration at the gloriousness of the spectacle and a great and growing
+awe. They were Dissenters, and very religious people out of business
+hours, and it seemed to them in those last magnificent moments that,
+after all, science must be wrong and the fanatics right. With the green
+vapors came conviction, and they prepared to meet their God. . . .
+
+This man, you must understand, was a common-looking man, in his
+shirt-sleeves and with an apron about his paunch, and he told his story
+in an Anglian accent that sounded mean and clipped to my Staffordshire
+ears; he told his story without a thought of pride, and as it were
+incidentally, and yet he gave me a vision of something heroic.
+
+These people did not run hither and thither as many people did. These
+four simple, common people stood beyond their back door in their garden
+pathway between the gooseberry bushes, with the terrors of their God
+and His Judgments closing in upon them, swiftly and wonderfully—and
+there they began to sing. There they stood, father and mother and two
+daughters, chanting out stoutly, but no doubt a little flatly after the
+manner of their kind—
+
+“In Zion’s Hope abiding,
+My soul in Triumph sings—”
+
+
+until one by one they fell, and lay still.
+
+The postmaster had heard them in the gathering darkness, “In Zion’s
+Hope abiding.” . . .
+
+It was the most extraordinary thing in the world to hear this flushed
+and happy-eyed man telling that story of his recent death. It did not
+seem at all possible to have happened in the last twelve hours. It was
+minute and remote, these people who went singing through the darkling
+to their God. It was like a scene shown to me, very small and very
+distinctly painted, in a locket.
+
+But that effect was not confined to this particular thing. A vast
+number of things that had happened before the coming of the comet had
+undergone the same transfiguring reduction. Other people, too, I have
+learnt since, had the same illusion, a sense of enlargement. It seems
+to me even now that the little dark creature who had stormed across
+England in pursuit of Nettie and her lover must have been about an inch
+high, that all that previous life of ours had been an ill-lit
+marionette show, acted in the twilight. . . .
+
+§ 5
+
+
+The figure of my mother comes always into my conception of the Change.
+
+I remember how one day she confessed herself.
+
+She had been very sleepless that night, she said, and took the reports
+of the falling stars for shooting; there had been rioting in Clayton
+and all through Swathinglea all day, and so she got out of bed to look.
+She had a dim sense that I was in all such troubles.
+
+But she was not looking when the Change came.
+
+“When I saw the stars a-raining down, dear,” she said, “and thought of
+you out in it, I thought there’d be no harm in saying a prayer for you,
+dear? I thought you wouldn’t mind that.”
+
+And so I got another of my pictures—the green vapors come and go, and
+there by her patched coverlet that dear old woman kneels and droops,
+still clasping her poor gnarled hands in the attitude of prayer—prayer
+to IT—for me!
+
+Through the meagre curtains and blinds of the flawed refracting window
+I see the stars above the chimneys fade, the pale light of dawn creeps
+into the sky, and her candle flares and dies. . . .
+
+That also went with me through the stillness—that silent kneeling
+figure, that frozen prayer to God to shield me, silent in a silent
+world, rushing through the emptiness of space. . . .
+
+§ 6
+
+
+With the dawn that awakening went about the earth. I have told how it
+came to me, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured
+cornfields of Shaphambury. It came to every one. Near me, and for the
+time, clear forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke—woke near one
+another, each heard before all other sounds the other’s voice amidst
+the stillness, and the light. And the scattered people who had run to
+and fro, and fallen on the beach of Bungalow village, awoke; the
+sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat up in that unwonted
+freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the garden, with the
+hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the flowers, and touched
+each other timidly, and thought of Paradise. My mother found herself
+crouched against the bed, and rose—rose with a glad invincible
+conviction of accepted prayer. . . .
+
+Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the lines of
+dusty poplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting and sharing
+coffee with the French riflemen, who had hailed them from their
+carefully hidden pits among the vineyards up the slopes of Beauville. A
+certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who had dropped asleep
+tensely ready for the rocket that should wake the whirr and rattle of
+their magazines. At the sight and sound of the stir and human confusion
+in the roadway below, it had come to each man individually that he
+could not shoot. One conscript, at least, has told his story of his
+awakening, and how curious he thought the rifle there beside him in his
+pit, how he took it on his knees to examine. Then, as his memory of its
+purpose grew clearer, he dropped the thing, and stood up with a kind of
+joyful horror at the crime escaped, to look more closely at the men he
+was to have assassinated. “_Brave types_,” he thought, they looked for
+such a fate. The summoning rocket never flew. Below, the men did not
+fall into ranks again, but sat by the roadside, or stood in groups
+talking, discussing with a novel incredulity the ostensible causes of
+the war. “The Emperor!” said they; and “Oh, nonsense! We’re civilized
+men. Get some one else for this job! . . . Where’s the coffee?”
+
+The officers held their own horses, and talked to the men frankly,
+regardless of discipline. Some Frenchmen out of the rifle-pits came
+sauntering down the hill. Others stood doubtfully, rifles still in
+hand. Curious faces scanned these latter. Little arguments sprang as:
+“Shoot at us! Nonsense! They’re respectable French citizens.” There is
+a picture of it all, very bright and detailed in the morning light, in
+the battle gallery amidst the ruins at old Nancy, and one sees the
+old-world uniform of the “soldier,” the odd caps and belts and boots,
+the ammunition-belt, the water-bottle, the sort of tourist’s pack the
+men carried, a queer elaborate equipment. The soldiers had awakened one
+by one, first one and then another. I wonder sometimes whether,
+perhaps, if the two armies had come awake in an instant, the battle, by
+mere habit and inertia, might not have begun. But the men who waked
+first, sat up, looked about them in astonishment, had time to think a
+little. . . .
+
+§ 7
+
+
+Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere tears.
+
+Men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly lit and
+exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible, incapable
+of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy, hopeful,
+unselfishly energetic, rejected altogether the supposition that this
+was merely a change in the blood and material texture of life. They
+denied the bodies God had given them, as once the Upper Nile savages
+struck out their canine teeth, because these made them like the beasts.
+They declared that this was the coming of a spirit, and nothing else
+would satisfy their need for explanations. And in a sense the Spirit
+came. The Great Revival sprang directly from the Change—the last, the
+deepest, widest, and most enduring of all the vast inundations of
+religious emotion that go by that name.
+
+But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors.
+The former revivals were a phase of fever, this was the first movement
+of health, it was altogether quieter, more intellectual, more private,
+more religious than any of those others. In the old time, and more
+especially in the Protestant countries where the things of religion
+were outspoken, and the absence of confession and well-trained priests
+made religious states of emotion explosive and contagious, revivalism
+upon various scales was a normal phase in the religious life, revivals
+were always going on—now a little disturbance of consciences in a
+village, now an evening of emotion in a Mission Room, now a great storm
+that swept a continent, and now an organized effort that came to town
+with bands and banners and handbills and motor-cars for the saving of
+souls. Never at any time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any
+of these movements. My nature, although passionate, was too critical
+(or sceptical if you like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shy to
+be drawn into these whirls; but on several occasions Parload and I sat,
+scoffing, but nevertheless disturbed, in the back seats of revivalist
+meetings.
+
+I saw enough of them to understand their nature, and I am not surprised
+to learn now that before the comet came, all about the world, even
+among savages, even among cannibals, these same, or at any rate closely
+similar, periodic upheavals went on. The world was stifling; it was in
+a fever, and these phenomena were neither more nor less than the
+instinctive struggle of the organism against the ebb of its powers, the
+clogging of its veins, the limitation of its life. Invariably these
+revivals followed periods of sordid and restricted living. Men obeyed
+their base immediate motives until the world grew unendurably bitter.
+Some disappointment, some thwarting, lit up for them—darkly indeed, but
+yet enough for indistinct vision—the crowded squalor, the dark
+inclosure of life. A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the
+old-world way of living, a realization of sin, a sense of the
+unworthiness of all individual things, a desire for something
+comprehensive, sustaining, something greater, for wider communions and
+less habitual things, filled them. Their souls, which were shaped for
+wider issues, cried out suddenly amidst the petty interests, the narrow
+prohibitions, of life, “Not this! not this!” A great passion to escape
+from the jealous prison of themselves, an inarticulate, stammering,
+weeping passion shook them. . . .
+
+I have seen——— I remember how once in Clayton Calvinistic Methodist
+chapel I saw—his spotty fat face strangely distorted under the
+flickering gas-flares—old Pallet the ironmonger repent. He went to the
+form of repentance, a bench reserved for such exhibitions, and
+slobbered out his sorrow and disgust for some sexual indelicacy—he was
+a widower—and I can see now how his loose fat body quivered and swayed
+with his grief. He poured it out to five hundred people, from whom in
+common times he hid his every thought and purpose. And it is a fact, it
+shows where reality lay, that we two youngsters laughed not at all at
+that blubbering grotesque, we did not even think the distant shadow of
+a smile. We two sat grave and intent—perhaps wondering.
+
+Only afterward and with an effort did we scoff. . . .
+
+Those old-time revivals were, I say, the convulsive movements of a body
+that suffocates. They are the clearest manifestations from before the
+Change of a sense in all men that things were not right. But they were
+too often but momentary illuminations. Their force spent itself in
+inco-ordinated shouting, gesticulations, tears. They were but flashes
+of outlook. Disgust of the narrow life, of all baseness, took shape in
+narrowness and baseness. The quickened soul ended the night a
+hypocrite; prophets disputed for precedence; seductions, it is
+altogether indisputable, were frequent among penitents! and Ananias
+went home converted and returned with a falsified gift. And it was
+almost universal that the converted should be impatient and immoderate,
+scornful of reason and a choice of expedients, opposed to balance,
+skill, and knowledge. Incontinently full of grace, like thin old
+wine-skins overfilled, they felt they must burst if once they came into
+contact with hard fact and sane direction.
+
+So the former revivals spent themselves, but the Great Revival did not
+spend itself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendom at least,
+the permanent expression of the Change. For many it has taken the shape
+of an outright declaration that this was the Second Advent—it is not
+for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion, for nearly all it
+has amounted to an enduring broadening of all the issues of life. . . .
+
+§ 8
+
+
+One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by some
+subtle trick of quality it summarizes the Change for me. It is the
+memory of a woman’s very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed face
+and tear-bright eyes who went by me without speaking, rapt in some
+secret purpose. I passed her when in the afternoon of the first day,
+struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton to send a telegram to
+my mother telling her all was well with me. Whither this woman went I
+do not know, nor whence she came; I never saw her again, and only her
+face, glowing with that new and luminous resolve, stands out for me. .
+. .
+
+But that expression was the world’s.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+THE CABINET COUNCIL
+
+
+§ 1
+
+And what a strange unprecedented thing was that cabinet council at
+which I was present, the council that was held two days later in
+Melmount’s bungalow, and which convened the conference to frame the
+constitution of the World State. I was there because it was convenient
+for me to stay with Melmount. I had nowhere to go particularly, and
+there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankle confined
+him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin his share of the
+enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulers of the world. I
+wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonograph available, I
+went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, and sat at his desk to
+write at his dictation. It is characteristic of the odd slackness that
+went with the spasmodic violence of the old epoch, that the secretary
+could not use shorthand and that there was no telephone whatever in the
+place. Every message had to be taken to the village post-office in that
+grocer’s shop at Menton, half a mile away. . . . So I sat in the back
+of Melmount’s room, his desk had been thrust aside, and made such
+memoranda as were needed. At that time his room seemed to me the most
+beautifully furnished in the world, and I could identify now the vivid
+cheerfulness of the chintz of the sofa on which the great statesman lay
+just in front of me, the fine rich paper, the red sealing-wax, the
+silver equipage of the desk I used. I know now that my presence in that
+room was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, even the coming
+and going of Parker the secretary, innovations. In the old days a
+cabinet council was a secret conclave, secrecy and furtiveness were in
+the texture of all public life. In the old days everybody was always
+keeping something back from somebody, being wary and cunning,
+prevaricating, misleading—for the most part for no reason at all.
+Almost unnoticed, that secrecy had dropped out of life.
+
+I close my eyes and see those men again, hear their deliberating
+voices. First I see them a little diffusely in the cold explicitness of
+daylight, and then concentrated and drawn together amidst the shadow
+and mystery about shaded lamps. Integral to this and very clear is the
+memory of biscuit crumbs and a drop of spilt water, that at first stood
+shining upon and then sank into the green table-cloth. . . .
+
+I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham. He came to the
+bungalow a day before the others, because he was Melmount’s personal
+friend. Let me describe this statesman to you, this one of the fifteen
+men who made the last war. He was the youngest member of the
+Government, and an altogether pleasant and sunny man of forty. He had a
+clear profile to his clean gray face, a smiling eye, a friendly,
+careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, an easy disabusing
+manner. He had the perfect quality of a man who had fallen easily into
+a place prepared for him. He had the temperament of what we used to
+call a philosopher—an indifferent, that is to say. The Change had
+caught him at his week-end recreation, fly-fishing; and, indeed, he
+said, I remember, that he recovered to find himself with his head
+within a yard of the water’s brim. In times of crisis Lord Adisham
+invariably went fly-fishing at the week-end to keep his mind in tone,
+and when there was no crisis then there was nothing he liked so much to
+do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, as there was nothing to prevent
+it, he fished. He came resolved, among other things, to give up
+fly-fishing altogether. I was present when he came to Melmount, and
+heard him say as much; and by a more naive route it was evident that he
+had arrived at the same scheme of intention as my master. I left them
+to talk, but afterward I came back to take down their long telegrams to
+their coming colleagues. He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as
+Melmount by the Change, but his tricks of civility and irony and
+acceptable humor had survived the Change, and he expressed his altered
+attitude, his expanded emotions, in a quaint modification of the
+old-time man-of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a
+trained horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.
+
+These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlike
+anything I had expected, and I watched them intently whenever my
+services were not in request. They made a peculiar class at that time,
+these English politicians and statesmen, a class that has now
+completely passed away. In some respects they were unlike the statesmen
+of any other region of the world, and I do not find that any really
+adequate account remains of them. . . . Perhaps you are a reader of the
+old books. If so, you will find them rendered with a note of hostile
+exaggeration by Dickens in “Bleak House,” with a mingling of gross
+flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, who ruled among them
+accidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasing the court, and all
+their assumptions are set forth, portentously, perhaps, but truthfully,
+so far as people of the “permanent official” class saw them, in the
+novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward. All these books are still in this world
+and at the disposal of the curious, and in addition the philosopher
+Bagehot and the picturesque historian Macaulay give something of their
+method of thinking, the novelist Thackeray skirts the seamy side of
+their social life, and there are some good passages of irony, personal
+descriptions, and reminiscence to be found in the “Twentieth Century
+Garner” from the pens of such writers, for example, as Sidney Low. But
+a picture of them as a whole is wanting. Then they were too near and
+too great; now, very rapidly, they have become incomprehensible.
+
+We common people of the old time based our conception of our statesmen
+almost entirely on the caricatures that formed the most powerful weapon
+in political controversy. Like almost every main feature of the old
+condition of things these caricatures were an unanticipated
+development, they were a sort of parasitic outgrowth from, which had
+finally altogether replaced, the thin and vague aspirations of the
+original democratic ideals. They presented not only the personalities
+who led our public life, but the most sacred structural conceptions of
+that life, in ludicrous, vulgar, and dishonorable aspects that in the
+end came near to destroying entirely all grave and honorable emotion or
+motive toward the State. The state of Britain was represented nearly
+always by a red-faced, purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that
+fine dream of freedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced
+rascal in striped trousers and a blue coat. The chief ministers of
+state were pickpockets, washerwomen, clowns, whales, asses, elephants,
+and what not, and issues that affected the welfare of millions of men
+were dressed and judged like a rally in some idiotic pantomime. A
+tragic war in South Africa, that wrecked many thousand homes,
+impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement to
+fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel between a
+violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass, an orchid, and
+a short temper, and “old Kroojer,” an obstinate and very cunning old
+man in a shocking bad hat. The conflict was carried through in a mood
+sometimes of brutish irritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness,
+the merry peculator plied his trade congenially in that asinine
+squabble, and behind these fooleries and masked by them, marched
+Fate—until at last the clowning of the booth opened and revealed—hunger
+and suffering, brands burning and swords and shame. . . . These men had
+come to fame and power in that atmosphere, and to me that day there was
+the oddest suggestion in them of actors who have suddenly laid aside
+grotesque and foolish parts; the paint was washed from their faces, the
+posing put aside.
+
+Even when the presentation was not frankly grotesque and degrading it
+was entirely misleading. When I read of Laycock, for example, there
+arises a picture of a large, active, if a little wrong-headed,
+intelligence in a compact heroic body, emitting that “Goliath” speech
+of his that did so much to precipitate hostilities, it tallies not at
+all with the stammering, high-pitched, slightly bald, and very
+conscience-stricken personage I saw, nor with Melmount’s contemptuous
+first description of him. I doubt if the world at large will ever get a
+proper vision of those men as they were before the Change. Each year
+they pass more and more incredibly beyond our intellectual sympathy.
+Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of their portion in the past,
+but it will rob them of any effect of reality. The whole of their
+history becomes more and more foreign, more and more like some queer
+barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue. There they strut through
+their weird metamorphoses of caricature, those premiers and presidents,
+their height preposterously exaggerated by political buskins, their
+faces covered by great resonant inhuman masks, their voices couched in
+the foolish idiom of public utterance, disguised beyond any semblance
+to sane humanity, roaring and squeaking through the public press. There
+it stands, this incomprehensible faded show, a thing left on one side,
+and now still and deserted by any interest, its many emptinesses as
+inexplicable now as the cruelties of medieval Venice, the theology of
+old Byzantium. And they ruled and influenced the lives of nearly a
+quarter of mankind, these politicians, their clownish conflicts swayed
+the world, made mirth perhaps, made excitement, and permitted—infinite
+misery.
+
+I saw these men quickened indeed by the Change, but still wearing the
+queer clothing of the old time, the manners and conventions of the old
+time; if they had disengaged themselves from the outlook of the old
+time they still had to refer back to it constantly as a common
+starting-point. My refreshed intelligence was equal to that, so that I
+think I did indeed see them. There was Gorrell-Browning, the Chancellor
+of the Duchy; I remember him as a big round-faced man, the essential
+vanity and foolishness of whose expression, whose habit of voluminous
+platitudinous speech, triumphed absurdly once or twice over the roused
+spirit within. He struggled with it, he burlesqued himself, and
+laughed. Suddenly he said simply, intensely—it was a moment for every
+one of clean, clear pain, “I have been a vain and self-indulgent and
+presumptuous old man. I am of little use here. I have given myself to
+politics and intrigues, and life is gone from me.” Then for a long time
+he sat still. There was Carton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-faced man
+with understanding, he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood
+among the busts of the Caesars, a slow, elaborating voice, with
+self-indulgent, slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary,
+voluntary, humorous twinkle. “We have to forgive,” he said. “We have to
+forgive—even ourselves.”
+
+These two were at the top corner of the table, so that I saw their
+faces well. Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkled
+eyebrows and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next to Carton;
+he contributed little to the discussion save intelligent comments, and
+when the electric lights above glowed out, the shadows deepened queerly
+in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzical expression of an ironical
+goblin. Next him was that great peer, the Earl of Richover, whose
+self-indulgent indolence had accepted the _rôle_ of a twentieth-century
+British Roman patrician of culture, who had divided his time almost
+equally between his jockeys, politics, and the composition of literary
+studies in the key of his _rôle_. “We have done nothing worth doing,”
+he said. “As for me, I have cut a figure!” He reflected—no doubt on his
+ample patrician years, on the fine great houses that had been his
+setting, the teeming race-courses that had roared his name, the
+enthusiastic meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian
+beginnings. . . . “I have been a fool,” he said compactly. They heard
+him in a sympathetic and respectful silence.
+
+Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, so far
+as I was concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham. Ever and again Gurker
+protruded into the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throaty voice, a
+big nose, a coarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip, eyes
+peering amidst folds and wrinkles. He made his confession for his race.
+“We Jews,” he said, “have gone through the system of this world,
+creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much. Our
+racial self-conceit has been monstrous. We seem to have used our ample
+coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to develop and master
+and maintain the convention of property, to turn life into a sort of
+mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. . . . We have had no
+sense of service to mankind. Beauty which is godhead—we made it a
+possession.”
+
+These men and these sayings particularly remain in my memory. Perhaps,
+indeed, I wrote them down at the time, but that I do not now remember.
+How Sir Digby Privet, Revel, Markheimer, and the others sat I do not
+now recall; they came in as voices, interruptions, imperfectly assigned
+comments. . . .
+
+One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revel
+these men had not particularly wanted the power they held; had desired
+to do nothing very much in the positions they had secured. They had
+found themselves in the cabinet, and until this moment of illumination
+they had not been ashamed; but they had made no ungentlemanly fuss
+about the matter. Eight of that fifteen came from the same school, had
+gone through an entirely parallel education; some Greek linguistics,
+some elementary mathematics, some emasculated “science,” a little
+history, a little reading in the silent or timidly orthodox English
+literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries,
+all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanly tradition of behavior;
+essentially boyish, unimaginative—with neither keen swords nor art in
+it, a tradition apt to slobber into sentiment at a crisis and make a
+great virtue of a simple duty rather clumsily done. None of these eight
+had made any real experiments with life, they had lived in blinkers,
+they had been passed from nurse to governess, from governess to
+preparatory school, from Eton to Oxford, from Oxford to the
+politico-social routine. Even their vices and lapses had been according
+to certain conceptions of good form. They had all gone to the races
+surreptitiously from Eton, had all cut up to town from Oxford to see
+life—music-hall life—had all come to heel again. Now suddenly they
+discovered their limitations. . . .
+
+“What are we to do?” asked Melmount. “We have awakened; this empire in
+our hands. . . .” I know this will seem the most fabulous of all the
+things I have to tell of the old order, but, indeed, I saw it with my
+eyes, I heard it with my ears. It is a fact that this group of men who
+constituted the Government of one-fifth of the habitable land of the
+earth, who ruled over a million of armed men, who had such navies as
+mankind had never seen before, whose empire of nations, tongues,
+peoples still dazzles in these greater days, had no common idea
+whatever of what they meant to do with the world. They had been a
+Government for three long years, and before the Change came to them it
+had never even occurred to them that it was necessary to have a common
+idea. There was no common idea at all. That great empire was no more
+than a thing adrift, an aimless thing that ate and drank and slept and
+bore arms, and was inordinately proud of itself because it had chanced
+to happen. It had no plan, no intention; it meant nothing at all. And
+the other great empires adrift, perilously adrift like marine mines,
+were in the self-same case. Absurd as a British cabinet council must
+seem to you now, it was no whit more absurd than the controlling
+ganglion, autocratic council, president’s committee, or what not, of
+each of its blind rivals. . . .
+
+§ 2
+
+
+I remember as one thing that struck me very forcibly at the time, the
+absence of any discussion, any difference of opinion, about the broad
+principles of our present state. These men had lived hitherto in a
+system of conventions and acquired motives, loyalty to a party, loyalty
+to various secret agreements and understandings, loyalty to the Crown;
+they had all been capable of the keenest attention to precedence, all
+capable of the most complete suppression of subversive doubts and
+inquiries, all had their religious emotions under perfect control. They
+had seemed protected by invisible but impenetrable barriers from all
+the heady and destructive speculations, the socialistic, republican,
+and communistic theories that one may still trace through the
+literature of the last days of the comet. But now it was as if the very
+moment of the awakening those barriers and defences had vanished, as if
+the green vapors had washed through their minds and dissolved and swept
+away a hundred once rigid boundaries and obstacles. They had admitted
+and assimilated at once all that was good in the ill-dressed
+propagandas that had clamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of
+their minds in the former days. It was exactly like the awakening from
+an absurd and limiting dream. They had come out together naturally and
+inevitably upon the broad daylight platform of obvious and reasonable
+agreement upon which we and all the order of our world now stand.
+
+Let me try to give the chief things that had vanished from their minds.
+There was, first, the ancient system of “ownership” that made such an
+extraordinary tangle of our administration of the land upon which we
+lived. In the old time no one believed in that as either just or
+ideally convenient, but every one accepted it. The community which
+lived upon the land was supposed to have waived its necessary
+connection with the land, except in certain limited instances of
+highway and common. All the rest of the land was cut up in the maddest
+way into patches and oblongs and triangles of various sizes between a
+hundred square miles and a few acres, and placed under the nearly
+absolute government of a series of administrators called landowners.
+They owned the land almost as a man now owns his hat; they bought it
+and sold it, and cut it up like cheese or ham; they were free to ruin
+it, or leave it waste, or erect upon it horrible and devastating
+eyesores. If the community needed a road or a tramway, if it wanted a
+town or a village in any position, nay, even if it wanted to go to and
+fro, it had to do so by exorbitant treaties with each of the monarchs
+whose territory was involved. No man could find foothold on the face of
+the earth until he had paid toll and homage to one of them. They had
+practically no relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or
+national Government amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay.
+. . . This sounds, I know, like a lunatic’s dream, but mankind was that
+lunatic; and not only in the old countries of Europe and Asia, where
+this system had arisen out of the rational delegation of local control
+to territorial magnates, who had in the universal baseness of those
+times at last altogether evaded and escaped their duties, did it
+obtain, but the “new countries,” as we called them then—the United
+States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New Zealand—spent
+much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving away of land for
+ever to any casual person who would take it. Was there coal, was there
+petroleum or gold, was there rich soil or harborage, or the site for a
+fine city, these obsessed and witless Governments cried out for
+scramblers, and a stream of shabby, tricky, and violent adventurers set
+out to found a new section of the landed aristocracy of the world.
+After a brief century of hope and pride, the great republic of the
+United States of America, the hope as it was deemed of mankind, became
+for the most part a drifting crowd of landless men; landlords and
+railway lords, food lords (for the land is food) and mineral lords
+ruled its life, gave it Universities as one gave coins to a mendicant,
+and spent its resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as
+the world had never seen before. Here was a thing none of these
+statesmen before the Change would have regarded as anything but the
+natural order of the world, which not one of them now regarded as
+anything but the mad and vanished illusion of a period of dementia.
+
+And as it was with the question of the land, so was it also with a
+hundred other systems and institutions and complicated and disingenuous
+factors in the life of man. They spoke of trade, and I realized for the
+first time there could be buying and selling that was no loss to any
+man; they spoke of industrial organization, and one saw it under
+captains who sought no base advantages. The haze of old associations,
+of personal entanglements and habitual recognitions had been dispelled
+from every stage and process of the social training of men. Things long
+hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness.
+These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old
+muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling,
+half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of
+weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride
+and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing
+but a curious and pleasantly faded memory. “There must be a common
+training of the young,” said Richover; “a frank initiation. We have not
+so much educated them as hidden things from them, and set traps. And it
+might have been so easy—it can all be done so easily.”
+
+That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council, “It can all be
+done so easily,” but when they said it then, it came to my ears with a
+quality of enormous refreshment and power. It can all be done so
+easily, given frankness, given courage. Time was when these platitudes
+had the freshness and wonder of a gospel.
+
+In this enlarged outlook the war with the Germans—that mythical,
+heroic, armed female, Germany, had vanished from men’s imaginations—was
+a mere exhausted episode. A truce had already been arranged by
+Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences, set
+aside the matter of peace as a mere question of particular
+arrangements. . . . The whole scheme of the world’s government had
+become fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details as in
+great, the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries, districts and
+municipalities, counties, states, boards, and nations, the interlacing,
+overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt of little interests
+and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiable multitude of
+lawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers lived like fleas in a
+dirty old coat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies, heated patchings
+up and jobbings apart, of the old order—they flung it all on one side.
+
+“What are the new needs?” said Melmount. “This muddle is too rotten to
+handle. We’re beginning again. Well, let us begin afresh.”
+
+§ 3
+
+
+“Let us begin afresh!” This piece of obvious common sense seemed then
+to me instinct with courage, the noblest of words. My heart went out to
+him as he spoke. It was, indeed, that day as vague as it was valiant;
+we did not at all see the forms of what we were thus beginning. All
+that we saw was the clear inevitableness that the old order should end.
+. . .
+
+And then in a little space of time mankind in halting but effectual
+brotherhood was moving out to make its world anew. Those early years,
+those first and second decades of the new epoch, were in their daily
+detail a time of rejoicing toil; one saw chiefly one’s own share in
+that, and little of the whole. It is only now that I look back at it
+all from these ripe years, from this high tower, that I see the
+dramatic sequence of its changes, see the cruel old confusions of the
+ancient time become clarified, simplified, and dissolve and vanish
+away. Where is that old world now? Where is London, that somber city of
+smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music
+of disorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river,
+its black pinnacles and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of
+smut-grayed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions
+of hurrying clerks? The very leaves upon its trees were foul with
+greasy black defilements. Where is lime-white Paris, with its green and
+disciplined foliage, its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly
+organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers, noisily shod,
+streaming over the bridges in the gray cold light of dawn. Where is New
+York, the high city of clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept and
+competition swept, its huge buildings jostling one another and
+straining ever upward for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly
+overshadowed. Where are its lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury,
+the shameful bludgeoning bribing vice of its ill ruled underways, and
+all the gaunt extravagant ugliness of its strenuous life? And where now
+is Philadelphia, with its innumerable small and isolated homes, and
+Chicago with its interminable blood-stained stockyards, its polyglot
+underworld of furious discontent.
+
+All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my native
+Potteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives that were
+caught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their labyrinths, their
+forgotten and neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman,
+ill-conceived industrial machinery have escaped—to life. Those cities
+of growth and accident are altogether gone, never a chimney smokes
+about our world to-day, and the sound of the weeping of children who
+toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdened women, the noise
+of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures and all the ugly
+grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, with the utter change
+in our lives. As I look back into the past I see a vast exultant dust
+of house-breaking and removal rise up into the clear air that followed
+the hour of the green vapors, I live again the Year of Tents, the Year
+of Scaffolding, and like the triumph of a new theme in a piece of
+music—the great cities of our new days arise. Come Caerlyon and
+Armedon, the twin cities of lower England, with the winding summer city
+of the Thames between, and I see the gaunt dirt of old Edinburgh die to
+rise again white and tall beneath the shadow of her ancient hill; and
+Dublin too, reshaped, returning enriched, fair, spacious, the city of
+rich laughter and warm hearts, gleaming gaily in a shaft of sunlight
+through the soft warm rain. I see the great cities America has planned
+and made; the Golden City, with ever-ripening fruit along its broad
+warm ways, and the bell-glad City of a Thousand Spires. I see again as
+I have seen, the city of theaters and meeting-places, the City of the
+Sunlight Bight, and the new city that is still called Utah; and
+dominated by its observatory dome and the plain and dignified lines of
+the university façade upon the cliff, Martenābar the great white winter
+city of the upland snows. And the lesser places, too, the townships,
+the quiet resting-places, villages half forest with a brawl of streams
+down their streets, villages laced with avenues of cedar, villages of
+garden, of roses and wonderful flowers and the perpetual humming of
+bees. And through all the world go our children, our sons the old world
+would have made into servile clerks and shopmen, plough drudges and
+servants; our daughters who were erst anaemic drudges, prostitutes,
+sluts, anxiety-racked mothers or sere, repining failures; they go about
+this world glad and brave, learning, living, doing, happy and
+rejoicing, brave and free. I think of them wandering in the clear quiet
+of the ruins of Rome, among the tombs of Egypt or the temples of
+Athens, of their coming to Mainington and its strange happiness, to
+Orba and the wonder of its white and slender tower. . . . But who can
+tell of the fullness and pleasure of life, who can number all our new
+cities in the world?—cities made by the loving hands of men for living
+men, cities men weep to enter, so fair they are, so gracious and so
+kind. . . .
+
+Some vision surely of these things must have been vouchsafed me as I
+sat there behind Melmount’s couch, but now my knowledge of accomplished
+things has mingled with and effaced my expectations. Something indeed I
+must have foreseen—or else why was my heart so glad?
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE THIRD
+THE NEW WORLD
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+LOVE AFTER THE CHANGE
+
+
+§ 1
+
+So far I have said nothing of Nettie. I have departed widely from my
+individual story. I have tried to give you the effect of the change in
+relation to the general framework of human life, its effect of swift,
+magnificent dawn, of an overpowering letting in and inundation of
+light, and the spirit of living. In my memory all my life before the
+Change has the quality of a dark passage, with the dimmest side gleams
+of beauty that come and go. The rest is dull pain and darkness. Then
+suddenly the walls, the bitter confines, are smitten and vanish, and I
+walk, blinded, perplexed, and yet rejoicing, in this sweet, beautiful
+world, in its fair incessant variety, its satisfaction, its
+opportunities, exultant in this glorious gift of life. Had I the power
+of music I would make a world-wide _motif_ swell and amplify, gather to
+itself this theme and that, and rise at last to sheer ecstasy of
+triumph and rejoicing. It should be all sound, all pride, all the hope
+of outsetting in the morning brightness, all the glee of unexpected
+happenings, all the gladness of painful effort suddenly come to its
+reward; it should be like blossoms new opened and the happy play of
+children, like tearful, happy mothers holding their first-born, like
+cities building to the sound of music, and great ships, all hung with
+flags and wine bespattered, gliding down through cheering multitudes to
+their first meeting with the sea. Through it all should march Hope,
+confident Hope, radiant and invincible, until at last it would be the
+triumph march of Hope the conqueror, coming with trumpetings and
+banners through the wide-flung gates of the world.
+
+And then out of that luminous haze of gladness comes Nettie,
+transfigured.
+
+So she came again to me—amazing, a thing incredibly forgotten.
+
+She comes back, and Verrall is in her company. She comes back into my
+memories now, just as she came back then, rather quaintly at first—at
+first not seen very clearly, a little distorted by intervening things,
+seen with a doubt, as I saw her through the slightly discolored panes
+of crinkled glass in the window of the Menton post-office and grocer’s
+shop. It was on the second day after the Change, and I had been sending
+telegrams for Melmount, who was making arrangements for his departure
+for Downing Street. I saw the two of them at first as small, flawed
+figures. The glass made them seem curved, and it enhanced and altered
+their gestures and paces. I felt it became me to say “Peace” to them,
+and I went out, to the jangling of the door-bell. At the sight of me
+they stopped short, and Verrall cried with the note of one who has
+sought, “Here he is!” And Nettie cried, “Willie!”
+
+I went toward them, and all the perspectives of my reconstructed
+universe altered as I did so.
+
+I seemed to see these two for the first time; how fine they were, how
+graceful and human. It was as though I had never really looked at them
+before, and, indeed, always before I had beheld them through a mist of
+selfish passion. They had shared the universal darkness and dwarfing of
+the former time; they shared the universal exaltation of the new. Now
+suddenly Nettie, and the love of Nettie, a great passion for Nettie,
+lived again in me. This change which had enlarged men’s hearts had made
+no end to love. Indeed, it had enormously enlarged and glorified love.
+She stepped into the center of that dream of world reconstruction that
+filled my mind and took possession of it all. A little wisp of hair had
+blown across her cheek, her lips fell apart in that sweet smile of
+hers; her eyes were full of wonder, of a welcoming scrutiny, of an
+infinitely courageous friendliness.
+
+I took her outstretched hand, and wonder overwhelmed me. “I wanted to
+kill you,” I said simply, trying to grasp that idea. It seemed now like
+stabbing the stars, or murdering the sunlight.
+
+“Afterward we looked for you,” said Verrall; “and we could not find
+you. . . . We heard another shot.”
+
+I turned my eyes to him, and Nettie’s hand fell from me. It was then I
+thought of how they had fallen together, and what it must have been to
+have awakened in that dawn with Nettie by one’s side. I had a vision of
+them as I had glimpsed them last amidst the thickening vapors, close
+together, hand in hand. The green hawks of the Change spread their
+darkling wings above their last stumbling paces. So they fell. And
+awoke—lovers together in a morning of Paradise. Who can tell how bright
+the sunshine was to them, how fair the flowers, how sweet the singing
+of the birds? . . .
+
+This was the thought of my heart. But my lips were saying, “When I
+awoke I threw my pistol away.” Sheer blankness kept my thoughts silent
+for a little while; I said empty things. “I am very glad I did not kill
+you—that you are here, so fair and well. . . .”
+
+“I am going away back to Clayton on the day after to-morrow,” I said,
+breaking away to explanations. “I have been writing shorthand here for
+Melmount, but that is almost over now. . . .”
+
+Neither of them said a word, and though all facts had suddenly ceased
+to matter anything, I went on informatively, “He is to be taken to
+Downing Street where there is a proper staff, so that there will be no
+need of me. . . . Of course, you’re a little perplexed at my being with
+Melmount. You see I met him—by accident—directly I recovered. I found
+him with a broken ankle—in that lane. . . . I am to go now to the Four
+Towns to help prepare a report. So that I am glad to see you both
+again”—I found a catch in my voice—“to say good-bye to you, and wish
+you well.”
+
+This was after the quality of what had come into my mind when first I
+saw them through the grocer’s window, but it was not what I felt and
+thought as I said it. I went on saying it because otherwise there would
+have been a gap. It had come to me that it was going to be hard to part
+from Nettie. My words sounded with an effect of unreality. I stopped,
+and we stood for a moment in silence looking at one another.
+
+It was I, I think, who was discovering most. I was realizing for the
+first time how little the Change had altered in my essential nature. I
+had forgotten this business of love for a time in a world of wonder.
+That was all. Nothing was lost from my nature, nothing had gone, only
+the power of thought and restraint had been wonderfully increased and
+new interests had been forced upon me. The Green Vapors had passed, our
+minds were swept and garnished, but we were ourselves still, though
+living in a new and finer air. My affinities were unchanged; Nettie’s
+personal charm for me was only quickened by the enhancement of my
+perceptions. In her presence, meeting her eyes, instantly my desire, no
+longer frantic but sane, was awake again.
+
+It was just like going to Checkshill in the old time, after writing
+about socialism. . . .
+
+I relinquished her hand. It was absurd to part in these terms.
+
+So we all felt it. We hung awkwardly over our sense of that. It was
+Verrall, I think, who shaped the thought for me, and said that
+to-morrow then we must meet and say good-bye, and so turned our
+encounter into a transitory making of arrangements. We settled we would
+come to the inn at Menton, all three of us, and take our midday meal
+together. . . .
+
+Yes, it was clear that was all we had to say now. . . .
+
+We parted a little awkwardly. I went on down the village street, not
+looking back, surprised at myself, and infinitely perplexed. It was as
+if I had discovered something overlooked that disarranged all my plans,
+something entirely disconcerting. For the first time I went back
+preoccupied and without eagerness to Melmount’s work. I wanted to go on
+thinking about Nettie; my mind had suddenly become voluminously
+productive concerning her and Verrall.
+
+§ 2
+
+
+The talk we three had together in the dawn of the new time is very
+strongly impressed upon my memory. There was something fresh and simple
+about it, something young and flushed and exalted. We took up, we
+handled with a certain naive timidity, the most difficult questions the
+Change had raised for men to solve. I recall we made little of them.
+All the old scheme of human life had dissolved and passed away, the
+narrow competitiveness, the greed and base aggression, the jealous
+aloofness of soul from soul. Where had it left us? That was what we and
+a thousand million others were discussing. . . .
+
+It chances that this last meeting with Nettie is inseparably
+associated—I don’t know why—with the landlady of the Menton inn.
+
+The Menton inn was one of the rare pleasant corners of the old order;
+it was an inn of an unusual prosperity, much frequented by visitors
+from Shaphambury, and given to the serving of lunches and teas. It had
+a broad mossy bowling-green, and round about it were creeper-covered
+arbors amidst beds of snap-dragon, and hollyhock, and blue delphinium,
+and many such tall familiar summer flowers. These stood out against a
+background of laurels and holly, and above these again rose the gables
+of the inn and its signpost—a white-horsed George slaying the
+dragon—against copper beeches under the sky.
+
+While I waited for Nettie and Verrall in this agreeable trysting place,
+I talked to the landlady—a broad-shouldered, smiling, freckled
+woman—about the morning of the Change. That motherly, abundant,
+red-haired figure of health was buoyantly sure that everything in the
+world was now to be changed for the better. That confidence, and
+something in her voice, made me love her as I talked to her. “Now we’re
+awake,” she said, “all sorts of things will be put right that hadn’t
+any sense in them. Why? Oh! I’m sure of it.”
+
+Her kind blue eyes met mine in an infinitude of friendliness. Her lips
+in her pauses shaped in a pretty faint smile.
+
+Old tradition was strong in us; all English inns in those days charged
+the unexpected, and I asked what our lunch was to cost.
+
+“Pay or not,” she said, “and what you like. It’s holiday these days. I
+suppose we’ll still have paying and charging, however we manage it, but
+it won’t be the worry it has been—that I feel sure. It’s the part I
+never had no fancy for. Many a time I peeped through the bushes
+worrying to think what was just and right to me and mine, and what
+would send ‘em away satisfied. It isn’t the money I care for. There’ll
+be mighty changes, be sure of that; but here I’ll stay, and make people
+happy—them that go by on the roads. It’s a pleasant place here when
+people are merry; it’s only when they’re jealous, or mean, or tired, or
+eat up beyond any stomach’s digesting, or when they got the drink in
+‘em that Satan comes into this garden. Many’s the happy face I’ve seen
+here, and many that come again like friends, but nothing to equal
+what’s going to be, now things are being set right.”
+
+She smiled, that bounteous woman, with the joy of life and hope. “You
+shall have an omelet,” she said, “you and your friends; such an
+omelet—like they’ll have ‘em in heaven! I feel there’s cooking in me
+these days like I’ve never cooked before. I’m rejoiced to have it to
+do. . . .”
+
+It was just then that Nettie and Verrall appeared under a rustic
+archway of crimson roses that led out from the inn. Nettie wore white
+and a sun-hat, and Verrall was a figure of gray. “Here are my friends,”
+I said; but for all the magic of the Change, something passed athwart
+the sunlight in my soul like the passing of the shadow of a cloud. “A
+pretty couple,” said the landlady, as they crossed the velvet green
+toward us. . . .
+
+They were indeed a pretty couple, but that did not greatly gladden me.
+No—I winced a little at that.
+
+§ 3
+
+
+This old newspaper, this first reissue of the _New Paper_, desiccated
+last relic of a vanished age, is like the little piece of
+identification the superstitious of the old days—those queer
+religionists who brought a certain black-clad Mrs. Piper to the help of
+Christ—used to put into the hand of a clairvoyant. At the crisp touch
+of it I look across a gulf of fifty years and see again the three of us
+sitting about that table in the arbor, and I smell again the smell of
+the sweet-briar that filled the air about us, and hear in our long
+pauses the abundant murmuring of bees among the heliotrope of the
+borders.
+
+It is the dawn of the new time, but we bear, all three of us, the marks
+and liveries of the old.
+
+I see myself, a dark, ill-dressed youth, with the bruise Lord Redcar
+gave me still blue and yellow beneath my jaw; and young Verrall sits
+cornerwise to me, better grown, better dressed, fair and quiet, two
+years my senior indeed, but looking no older than I because of his
+light complexion; and opposite me is Nettie, with dark eyes upon my
+face, graver and more beautiful than I had ever seen her in the former
+time. Her dress is still that white one she had worn when I came upon
+her in the park, and still about her dainty neck she wears her string
+of pearls and that little coin of gold. She is so much the same, she is
+so changed; a girl then and now a woman—and all my agony and all the
+marvel of the Change between! Over the end of the green table about
+which we sit, a spotless cloth is spread, it bears a pleasant lunch
+spread out with a simple equipage. Behind me is the liberal sunshine of
+the green and various garden. I see it all. Again I sit there, eating
+awkwardly, this paper lies upon the table and Verrall talks of the
+Change.
+
+“You can’t imagine,” he says in his sure, fine accents, “how much the
+Change has destroyed of me. I still don’t feel awake. Men of my sort
+are so tremendously _made;_ I never suspected it before.”
+
+He leans over the table toward me with an evident desire to make
+himself perfectly understood. “I find myself like some creature that is
+taken out of its shell—soft and new. I was trained to dress in a
+certain way, to behave in a certain way, to think in a certain way; I
+see now it’s all wrong and narrow—most of it anyhow—a system of class
+shibboleths. We were decent to each other in order to be a gang to the
+rest of the world. Gentlemen indeed! But it’s perplexing———”
+
+I can hear his voice saying that now, and see the lift of his eyebrows
+and his pleasant smile.
+
+He paused. He had wanted to say that, but it was not the thing we had
+to say.
+
+I leant forward a little and took hold of my glass very tightly. “You
+two,” I said, “will marry?”
+
+They looked at one another.
+
+Nettie spoke very softly. “I did not mean to marry when I came away,”
+she said.
+
+“I know,” I answered. I looked up with a sense of effort and met
+Verrall’s eyes.
+
+He answered me. “I think we two have joined our lives. . . . But the
+thing that took us was a sort of madness.”
+
+I nodded. “All passion,” I said, “is madness.” Then I fell into a
+doubting of those words.
+
+“Why did we do these things?” he said, turning to her suddenly.
+
+Her hands were clasped under her chin, her eyes downcast.
+
+“We _had_ to,” she said, with her old trick of inadequate expression.
+
+Then she seemed to open out suddenly.
+
+“Willie,” she cried with a sudden directness, with her eyes appealing
+to me, “I didn’t mean to treat you badly—indeed I didn’t. I kept
+thinking of you—and of father and mother, all the time. Only it didn’t
+seem to move me. It didn’t move me not one bit from the way I had
+chosen.”
+
+“Chosen!” I said.
+
+“Something seemed to have hold of me,” she admitted. “It’s all so
+unaccountable. . . .”
+
+She gave a little gesture of despair.
+
+Verrall’s fingers played on the cloth for a space. Then he turned his
+face to me again.
+
+“Something said ‘Take her.’ Everything. It was a raging desire—for her.
+I don’t know. Everything contributed to that—or counted for nothing.
+You———”
+
+“Go on,” said I.
+
+“When I knew of you———”
+
+I looked at Nettie. “You never told him about me?” I said, feeling, as
+it were, a sting out of the old time.
+
+Verrall answered for her. “No. But things dropped; I saw you that
+night, my instincts were all awake. I knew it was you.”
+
+“You triumphed over me? . . . If I could I would have triumphed over
+you,” I said. “But go on!”
+
+“Everything conspired to make it the finest thing in life. It had an
+air of generous recklessness. It meant mischief, it might mean failure
+in that life of politics and affairs, for which I was trained, which it
+was my honor to follow. That made it all the finer. It meant ruin or
+misery for Nettie. That made it all the finer. No sane or decent man
+would have approved of what we did. That made it more splendid than
+ever. I had all the advantages of position and used them basely. That
+mattered not at all.”
+
+“Yes,” I said; “it is true. And the same dark wave that lifted you,
+swept me on to follow. With that revolver—and blubbering with hate. And
+the word to you, Nettie, what was it? ‘Give?’ Hurl yourself down the
+steep?”
+
+Nettie’s hands fell upon the table. “I can’t tell what it was,” she
+said, speaking bare-hearted straight to me. “Girls aren’t trained as
+men are trained to look into their minds. I can’t see it yet. All sorts
+of mean little motives were there—over and above the ‘must.’ Mean
+motives. I kept thinking of his clothes.” She smiled—a flash of
+brightness at Verrall. “I kept thinking of being like a lady and
+sitting in an hotel—with men like butlers waiting. It’s the dreadful
+truth, Willie. Things as mean as that! Things meaner than that!”
+
+I can see her now pleading with me, speaking with a frankness as bright
+and amazing as the dawn of the first great morning.
+
+“It wasn’t all mean,” I said slowly, after a pause.
+
+“No!” They spoke together.
+
+“But a woman chooses more than a man does,” Nettie added. “I saw it all
+in little bright pictures. Do you know—that jacket—there’s something———
+You won’t mind my telling you? But you won’t now!”
+
+I nodded, “No.”
+
+She spoke as if she spoke to my soul, very quietly and very earnestly,
+seeking to give the truth. “Something cottony in that cloth of yours,”
+she said. “I know there’s something horrible in being swung round by
+things like that, but they did swing me round. In the old time—to have
+confessed that! And I hated Clayton—and the grime of it. That kitchen!
+Your mother’s dreadful kitchen! And besides, Willie, I was afraid of
+you. I didn’t understand you and I did him. It’s different now—but then
+I knew what he meant. And there was his voice.”
+
+“Yes,” I said to Verrall, making these discoveries quietly, “yes,
+Verrall, you have a good voice. Queer I never thought of that before!”
+
+We sat silently for a time before our vivisected passions.
+
+“Gods!” I cried, “and there was our poor little top-hamper of
+intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire, these
+foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like—like a coop of hens
+washed overboard and clucking amidst the seas.”
+
+Verrall laughed approval of the image I had struck out. “A week ago,”
+he said, trying it further, “we were clinging to our chicken coops and
+going with the heave and pour. That was true enough a week ago. But
+to-day———?”
+
+“To-day,” I said, “the wind has fallen. The world storm is over. And
+each chicken coop has changed by a miracle to a vessel that makes head
+against the sea.”
+
+§ 4
+
+
+“What are we to do?” asked Verrall.
+
+Nettie drew a deep crimson carnation from the bowl before us, and began
+very neatly and deliberately to turn down the sepals of its calyx and
+remove, one by one, its petals. I remember that went on through all our
+talk. She put those ragged crimson shreds in a long row and adjusted
+them and readjusted them. When at last I was alone with these vestiges
+the pattern was still incomplete.
+
+“Well,” said I, “the matter seems fairly simple. You two”—I swallowed
+it—“love one another.”
+
+I paused. They answered me by silence, by a thoughtful silence.
+
+“You belong to each other. I have thought it over and looked at it from
+many points of view. I happened to want—impossible things. . . . I
+behaved badly. I had no right to pursue you.” I turned to Verrall. “You
+hold yourself bound to her?”
+
+He nodded assent.
+
+“No social influence, no fading out of all this generous clearness in
+the air—for that might happen—will change you back . . . ?”
+
+He answered me with honest eyes meeting mine, “No, Leadford, no!”
+
+“I did not know you,” I said. “I thought of you as something very
+different from this.”
+
+“I was,” he interpolated.
+
+“Now,” I said, “it is all changed.”
+
+Then I halted—for my thread had slipped away from me.
+
+“As for me,” I went on, and glanced at Nettie’s downcast face, and then
+sat forward with my eyes upon the flowers between us, “since I am
+swayed and shall be swayed by an affection for Nettie, since that
+affection is rich with the seeds of desire, since to see her yours and
+wholly yours is not to be endured by me—I must turn about and go from
+you; you must avoid me and I you. . . . We must divide the world like
+Jacob and Esau. . . . I must direct myself with all the will I have to
+other things. After all—this passion is not life! It is perhaps for
+brutes and savages, but for men. No! We must part and I must forget.
+What else is there but that?”
+
+I did not look up, I sat very tense with the red petals printing an
+indelible memory in my brain, but I felt the assent of Verrall’s pose.
+There were some moments of silence. Then Nettie spoke. “But———” she
+said, and ceased.
+
+I waited for a little while. I sighed and leant back in my chair. “It
+is perfectly simple,” I smiled, “now that we have cool heads.”
+
+“But IS it simple?” asked Nettie, and slashed my discourse out of
+being.
+
+I looked up and found her with her eyes on Verrall. “You see,” she
+said, “I like Willie. It’s hard to say what one feels—but I don’t want
+him to go away like that.”
+
+“But then,” objected Verrall, “how———?”
+
+“No,” said Nettie, and swept her half-arranged carnation petals back
+into a heap of confusion. She began to arrange them very quickly into
+one long straight line.
+
+“It’s so difficult——— I’ve never before in all my life tried to get to
+the bottom of my mind. For one thing, I’ve not treated Willie properly.
+He—he counted on me. I know he did. I was his hope. I was a promised
+delight—something, something to crown life—better than anything he had
+ever had. And a secret pride. . . . He lived upon me. I knew—when we
+two began to meet together, you and I——— It was a sort of treachery to
+him———”
+
+“Treachery!” I said. “You were only feeling your way through all these
+perplexities.”
+
+“You thought it treachery.”
+
+“I don’t now.”
+
+“I did. In a sense I think so still. For you had need of me.”
+
+I made a slight protest at this doctrine and fell thinking.
+
+“And even when he was trying to kill us,” she said to her lover, “I
+felt for him down in the bottom of my mind. I can understand all the
+horrible things, the humiliation—the humiliation! he went through.”
+
+“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t see———”
+
+“_I_ don’t see. I’m only trying to see. But you know, Willie, you are a
+part of my life. I have known you longer than I have known Edward. I
+know you better. Indeed I know you with all my heart. You think all
+your talk was thrown away upon me, that I never understood that side of
+you, or your ambitions or anything. I did. More than I thought at the
+time. Now—now it is all clear to me. What I had to understand in you
+was something deeper than Edward brought me. I have it now. . . . You
+are a part of my life, and I don’t want to cut all that off from me now
+I have comprehended it, and throw it away.”
+
+“But you love Verrall.”
+
+“Love is such a queer thing! . . . Is there one love? I mean, only one
+love?” She turned to Verrall. “I know I love you. I can speak out about
+that now. Before this morning I couldn’t have done. It’s just as though
+my mind had got out of a scented prison. But what is it, this love for
+you? It’s a mass of fancies—things about you—ways you look, ways you
+have. It’s the senses—and the senses of certain beauties. Flattery too,
+things you said, hopes and deceptions for myself. And all that had
+rolled up together and taken to itself the wild help of those deep
+emotions that slumbered in my body; it seemed everything. But it
+wasn’t. How can I describe it? It was like having a very bright lamp
+with a thick shade—everything else in the room was hidden. But you take
+the shade off and there they are—it is the same light—still there! Only
+it lights every one!”
+
+Her voice ceased. For awhile no one spoke, and Nettie, with a quick
+movement, swept the petals into the shape of a pyramid.
+
+Figures of speech always distract me, and it ran through my mind like
+some puzzling refrain, “It is still the same light. . . .”
+
+“No woman believes these things,” she asserted abruptly.
+
+“What things?”
+
+“No woman ever has believed them.”
+
+“You have to choose a man,” said Verrall, apprehending her before I
+did.
+
+“We’re brought up to that. We’re told—it’s in books, in stories, in the
+way people look, in the way they behave—one day there will come a man.
+He will be everything, no one else will be anything. Leave everything
+else; live in him.”
+
+“And a man, too, is taught that of some woman,” said Verrall.
+
+“Only men don’t believe it! They have more obstinate minds. . . . Men
+have never behaved as though they believed it. One need not be old to
+know that. By nature they don’t believe it. But a woman believes
+nothing by nature. She goes into a mold hiding her secret thoughts
+almost from herself.”
+
+“She used to,” I said.
+
+“You haven’t,” said Verrall, “anyhow.”
+
+“I’ve come out. It’s this comet. And Willie. And because I never really
+believed in the mold at all—even if I thought I did. It’s stupid to
+send Willie off—shamed, cast out, never to see him again—when I like
+him as much as I do. It is cruel, it is wicked and ugly, to prance over
+him as if he was a defeated enemy, and pretend I’m going to be happy
+just the same. There’s no sense in a rule of life that prescribes that.
+It’s selfish. It’s brutish. It’s like something that has no sense.
+I———” there was a sob in her voice: “Willie! I _won’t_.”
+
+I sat lowering, I mused with my eyes upon her quick fingers.
+
+“It IS brutish,” I said at last, with a careful unemotional
+deliberation. “Nevertheless—it is in the nature of things. . . . No! .
+. . You see, after all, we are still half brutes, Nettie. And men, as
+you say, are more obstinate than women. The comet hasn’t altered that;
+it’s only made it clearer. We have come into being through a tumult of
+blind forces. . . . I come back to what I said just now; we have found
+our poor reasonable minds, our wills to live well, ourselves, adrift on
+a wash of instincts, passions, instinctive prejudices, half animal
+stupidities. . . . Here we are like people clinging to something—like
+people awakening—upon a raft.”
+
+“We come back at last to my question,” said Verrall, softly; “what are
+we to do?”
+
+“Part,” I said. “You see, Nettie, these bodies of ours are not the
+bodies of angels. They are the same bodies——— I have read somewhere
+that in our bodies you can find evidence of the lowliest ancestry; that
+about our inward ears—I think it is—and about our teeth, there remains
+still something of the fish, that there are bones that recall
+little—what is it?—marsupial forebears—and a hundred traces of the ape.
+Even your beautiful body, Nettie, carries this taint. No! Hear me out.”
+I leant forward earnestly. “Our emotions, our passions, our desires,
+the substance of them, like the substance of our bodies, is an animal,
+a competing thing, as well as a desiring thing. You speak to us now a
+mind to minds—one can do that when one has had exercise and when one
+has eaten, when one is not doing anything—but when one turns to live,
+one turns again to matter.”
+
+“Yes,” said Nettie, slowly following me, “but you control it.”
+
+“Only through a measure of obedience. There is no magic in the
+business—to conquer matter, we must divide the enemy, and take matter
+as an ally. Nowadays it is indeed true, by faith a man can remove
+mountains; he can say to a mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast
+into the sea; but he does it because he helps and trusts his brother
+men, because he has the wit and patience and courage to win over to his
+side iron, steel, obedience, dynamite, cranes, trucks, the money of
+other people. . . . To conquer my desire for you, I must not
+perpetually thwart it by your presence; I must go away so that I may
+not see you, I must take up other interests, thrust myself into
+struggles and discussions———”
+
+“And forget?” said Nettie.
+
+“Not forget,” I said; “but anyhow—cease to brood upon you.”
+
+She hung on that for some moments.
+
+“No,” she said, demolished her last pattern and looked up at Verrall as
+he stirred.
+
+Verrall leant forward on the table, elbows upon it, and the fingers of
+his two hands intertwined.
+
+“You know,” he said, “I haven’t thought much of these things. At school
+and the university, one doesn’t. . . . It was part of the system to
+prevent it. They’ll alter all that, no doubt. We seem”—he thought—“to
+be skating about over questions that one came to at last in Greek—with
+variorum readings—in Plato, but which it never occurred to any one to
+translate out of a dead language into living realities. . . .” He
+halted and answered some unspoken question from his own mind with, “No.
+I think with Leadford, Nettie, that, as he put it, it is in the nature
+of things for men to be exclusive. . . . Minds are free things and go
+about the world, but only one man can possess a woman. You must dismiss
+rivals. We are made for the struggle for existence—we _are_ the
+struggle for existence; the things that live are the struggle for
+existence incarnate—and that works out that the men struggle for their
+mates; for each woman one prevails. The others go away.”
+
+“Like animals,” said Nettie.
+
+“Yes. . . .”
+
+“There are many things in life,” I said, “but that is the rough
+universal truth.”
+
+“But,” said Nettie, “you don’t struggle. That has been altered because
+men have minds.”
+
+“You choose,” I said.
+
+“If I don’t choose to choose?”
+
+“You have chosen.”
+
+She gave a little impatient “Oh! Why are women always the slaves of
+sex? Is this great age of Reason and Light that has come to alter
+nothing of that? And men too! I think it is all—stupid. I do not
+believe this is the right solution of the thing, or anything but the
+bad habits of the time that was. . . Instinct! You don’t let your
+instincts rule you in a lot of other things. Here am I between you.
+Here is Edward. I—love him because he is gay and pleasant, and
+because—because I _like_ him! Here is Willie—a part of me—my first
+secret, my oldest friend! Why must I not have both? Am I not a mind
+that you must think of me as nothing but a woman? imagine me always as
+a thing to struggle for?” She paused; then she made her distressful
+proposition to me. “Let us three keep together,” she said. “Let us not
+part. To part is hate, Willie. Why should we not anyhow keep friends?
+Meet and talk?”
+
+“Talk?” I said. “About this sort of thing?”
+
+I looked across at Verrall and met his eyes, and we studied one
+another. It was the clean, straight scrutiny of honest antagonism.
+“No,” I decided. “Between us, nothing of that sort can be.”
+
+“Ever?” said Nettie.
+
+“Never,” I said, convinced.
+
+I made an effort within myself. “We cannot tamper with the law and
+customs of these things,” I said; “these passions are too close to
+one’s essential self. Better surgery than a lingering disease! From
+Nettie my love—asks all. A man’s love is not devotion—it is a demand, a
+challenge. And besides”—and here I forced my theme—“I have given myself
+now to a new mistress—and it is I, Nettie, who am unfaithful. Behind
+you and above you rises the coming City of the World, and I am in that
+building. Dear heart! you are only happiness—and that———Indeed that
+calls! If it is only that my life blood shall christen the foundation
+stones—I could almost hope that should be my part, Nettie—I will join
+myself in that.” I threw all the conviction I could into these words. .
+. . “No conflict of passion.” I added a little lamely, “must distract
+me.”
+
+There was a pause.
+
+“Then we must part,” said Nettie, with the eyes of a woman one strikes
+in the face.
+
+I nodded assent. . . .
+
+There was a little pause, and then I stood up. We stood up, all three.
+We parted almost sullenly, with no more memorable words, and I was left
+presently in the arbor alone.
+
+I do not think I watched them go. I only remember myself left there
+somehow—horribly empty and alone. I sat down again and fell into a deep
+shapeless musing.
+
+§ 5
+
+
+Suddenly I looked up. Nettie had come back and stood looking down at
+me.
+
+“Since we talked I have been thinking,” she said. “Edward has let me
+come to you alone. And I feel perhaps I can talk better to you alone.”
+
+I said nothing and that embarrassed her.
+
+“I don’t think we ought to part,” she said.
+
+“No—I don’t think we ought to part,” she repeated.
+
+“One lives,” she said, “in different ways. I wonder if you will
+understand what I am saying, Willie. It is hard to say what I feel. But
+I want it said. If we are to part for ever I want it said—very plainly.
+Always before I have had the woman’s instinct and the woman’s training
+which makes one hide. But——— Edward is not all of me. Think of what I
+am saying—Edward is not all of me. . . . I wish I could tell you better
+how I see it. I am not all of myself. You, at any rate, are a part of
+me and I cannot bear to leave you. And I cannot see why I should leave
+you. There is a sort of blood link between us, Willie. We grew
+together. We are in one another’s bones. I understand you. Now indeed I
+understand. In some way I have come to an understanding at a stride.
+Indeed I understand you and your dream. I want to help you.
+Edward—Edward has no dreams. . . . It is dreadful to me, Willie, to
+think we two are to part.”
+
+“But we have settled that—part we must.”
+
+“But _why?_”
+
+“I love you.”
+
+“Well, and why should I hide it Willie?—I love you. . . .” Our eyes
+met. She flushed, she went on resolutely: “You are stupid. The whole
+thing is stupid. I love you both.”
+
+I said, “You do not understand what you say. No!”
+
+“You mean that I must go.”
+
+“Yes, yes. Go!”
+
+For a moment we looked at one another, mute, as though deep down in the
+unfathomable darkness below the surface and present reality of things
+dumb meanings strove to be. She made to speak and desisted.
+
+“But _must_ I go?” she said at last, with quivering lips, and the tears
+in her eyes were stars. Then she began, “Willie———”
+
+“Go!” I interrupted her. . . . “Yes.”
+
+Then again we were still.
+
+She stood there, a tearful figure of pity, longing for me, pitying me.
+Something of that wider love, that will carry our descendants at last
+out of all the limits, the hard, clear obligations of our personal
+life, moved us, like the first breath of a coming wind out of heaven
+that stirs and passes away. I had an impulse to take her hand and kiss
+it, and then a trembling came to me, and I knew that if I touched her,
+my strength would all pass from me. . . .
+
+And so, standing at a distance one from the other, we parted, and
+Nettie went, reluctant and looking back, with the man she had chosen,
+to the lot she had chosen, out of my life—like the sunlight out of my
+life. . . .
+
+Then, you know, I suppose I folded up this newspaper and put it in my
+pocket. But my memory of that meeting ends with the face of Nettie
+turning to go.
+
+§ 6
+
+
+I remember all that very distinctly to this day. I could almost vouch
+for the words I have put into our several mouths. Then comes a blank. I
+have a dim memory of being back in the house near the Links and the
+bustle of Melmount’s departure, of finding Parker’s energy distasteful,
+and of going away down the road with a strong desire to say good-bye to
+Melmount alone.
+
+Perhaps I was already doubting my decision to part for ever from
+Nettie, for I think I had it in mind to tell him all that had been said
+and done. . . .
+
+I don’t think I had a word with him or anything but a hurried hand
+clasp. I am not sure. It has gone out of my mind. But I have a very
+clear and certain memory of my phase of bleak desolation as I watched
+his car recede and climb and vanish over Mapleborough Hill, and that I
+got there my first full and definite intimation that, after all, this
+great Change and my new wide aims in life, were not to mean
+indiscriminate happiness for me. I had a sense of protest, as against
+extreme unfairness, as I saw him go. “It is too soon,” I said to
+myself, “to leave me alone.”
+
+I felt I had sacrificed too much, that after I had said good-bye to the
+hot immediate life of passion, to Nettie and desire, to physical and
+personal rivalry, to all that was most intensely myself, it was wrong
+to leave me alone and sore hearted, to go on at once with these steely
+cold duties of the wider life. I felt new born, and naked, and at a
+loss.
+
+“Work!” I said with an effort at the heroic, and turned about with a
+sigh, and I was glad that the way I had to go would at least take me to
+my mother. . . .
+
+But, curiously enough, I remember myself as being fairly cheerful in
+the town of Birmingham that night, I recall an active and interested
+mood. I spent the night in Birmingham because the train service on was
+disarranged, and I could not get on. I went to listen to a band that
+was playing its brassy old-world music in the public park, and I fell
+into conversation with a man who said he had been a reporter upon one
+of their minor local papers. He was full and keen upon all the plans of
+reconstruction that were now shaping over the lives of humanity, and I
+know that something of that noble dream came back to me with his words
+and phrases. We walked up to a place called Bourneville by moonlight,
+and talked of the new social groupings that must replace the old
+isolated homes, and how the people would be housed.
+
+This Bourneville was germane to that matter. It had been an attempt on
+the part of a private firm of manufacturers to improve the housing of
+their workers. To our ideas to-day it would seem the feeblest of
+benevolent efforts, but at the time it was extraordinary and famous,
+and people came long journeys to see its trim cottages with baths sunk
+under the kitchen floors (of all conceivable places), and other
+brilliant inventions. No one seemed to see the danger to liberty in
+that aggressive age, that might arise through making workpeople tenants
+and debtors of their employer, though an Act called the Truck Act had
+long ago intervened to prevent minor developments in the same
+direction. . . . But I and my chance acquaintance seemed that night
+always to have been aware of that possibility, and we had no doubt in
+our minds of the public nature of the housing duty. Our interest lay
+rather in the possibility of common nurseries and kitchens and public
+rooms that should economize toil and give people space and freedom.
+
+It was very interesting, but still a little cheerless, and when I lay
+in bed that night I thought of Nettie and the queer modifications of
+preference she had made, and among other things and in a way, I prayed.
+I prayed that night, let me confess it, to an image I had set up in my
+heart, an image that still serves with me as a symbol for things
+inconceivable, to a Master Artificer, the unseen captain of all who go
+about the building of the world, the making of mankind.
+
+But before and after I prayed I imagined I was talking and reasoning
+and meeting again with Nettie. . . . She never came into the temple of
+that worshiping with me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+MY MOTHER’S LAST DAYS
+
+
+§ 1
+
+Next day I came home to Clayton.
+
+The new strange brightness of the world was all the brighter there, for
+the host of dark distressful memories, of darkened childhood, toilsome
+youth, embittered adolescence that wove about the place for me. It
+seemed to me that I saw morning there for the first time. No chimneys
+smoked that day, no furnaces were burning, the people were busy with
+other things. The clear strong sun, the sparkle in the dustless air,
+made a strange gaiety in the narrow streets. I passed a number of
+smiling people coming home from the public breakfasts that were given
+in the Town Hall until better things could be arranged, and happened on
+Parload among them. “You were right about that comet,” I sang out at
+the sight of him; and he came toward me and clasped my hand.
+
+“What are people doing here?” said I.
+
+“They’re sending us food from outside,” he said, “and we’re going to
+level all these slums—and shift into tents on to the moors;” and he
+began to tell me of many things that were being arranged, the Midland
+land committees had got to work with remarkable celerity and directness
+of purpose, and the redistribution of population was already in its
+broad outlines planned. He was working at an improvised college of
+engineering. Until schemes of work were made out, almost every one was
+going to school again to get as much technical training as they could
+against the demands of the huge enterprise of reconstruction that was
+now beginning.
+
+He walked with me to my door, and there I met old Pettigrew coming down
+the steps. He looked dusty and tired, but his eye was brighter than it
+used to be, and he carried in a rather unaccustomed manner, a workman’s
+tool basket.
+
+“How’s the rheumatism, Mr. Pettigrew?” I asked.
+
+“Dietary,” said old Pettigrew, “can work wonders. . . .” He looked me
+in the eye. “These houses,” he said, “will have to come down, I
+suppose, and our notions of property must undergo very considerable
+revision—in the light of reason; but meanwhile I’ve been doing
+something to patch that disgraceful roof of mine! To think that I could
+have dodged and evaded———”
+
+He raised a deprecatory hand, drew down the loose corners of his ample
+mouth, and shook his old head.
+
+“The past is past, Mr. Pettigrew.”
+
+“Your poor dear mother! So good and honest a woman! So simple and kind
+and forgiving! To think of it! My dear young man!”—he said it
+manfully—“I’m ashamed.”
+
+“The whole world blushed at dawn the other day, Mr. Pettigrew,” I said,
+“and did it very prettily. That’s over now. God knows, who is _not_
+ashamed of all that came before last Tuesday.”
+
+I held out a forgiving hand, naively forgetful that in this place I was
+a thief, and he took it and went his way, shaking his head and
+repeating he was ashamed, but I think a little comforted.
+
+The door opened and my poor old mother’s face, marvelously cleaned,
+appeared. “Ah, Willie, boy! _You_. You!”
+
+I ran up the steps to her, for I feared she might fall.
+
+How she clung to me in the passage, the dear woman! . . .
+
+But first she shut the front door. The old habit of respect for my
+unaccountable temper still swayed her. “Ah deary!” she said, “ah deary!
+But you were sorely tried,” and kept her face close to my shoulder,
+lest she should offend me by the sight of the tears that welled within
+her.
+
+She made a sort of gulping noise and was quiet for a while, holding me
+very tightly to her heart with her worn, long hands . . .
+
+She thanked me presently for my telegram, and I put my arm about her
+and drew her into the living room.
+
+“It’s all well with me, mother dear,” I said, “and the dark times are
+over—are done with for ever, mother.”
+
+Whereupon she had courage and gave way and sobbed aloud, none chiding
+her.
+
+She had not let me know she could still weep for five grimy years. . .
+.
+
+§ 2
+
+
+Dear heart! There remained for her but a very brief while in this world
+that had been renewed. I did not know how short that time would be, but
+the little I could do—perhaps after all it was not little to her—to
+atone for the harshness of my days of wrath and rebellion, I did. I
+took care to be constantly with her, for I perceived now her curious
+need of me. It was not that we had ideas to exchange or pleasures to
+share, but she liked to see me at table, to watch me working, to have
+me go to and fro. There was no toil for her any more in the world, but
+only such light services as are easy and pleasant for a worn and weary
+old woman to do, and I think she was happy even at her end.
+
+She kept to her queer old eighteenth century version of religion, too,
+without a change. She had worn this particular amulet so long it was a
+part of her. Yet the Change was evident even in that persistence. I
+said to her one day, “But do you still believe in that hell of flame,
+dear mother? You—with your tender heart!”
+
+She vowed she did.
+
+Some theological intricacy made it necessary to her, but still———
+
+She looked thoughtfully at a bank of primulas before her for a time,
+and then laid her tremulous hand impressively on my arm. “You know,
+Willie, dear,” she said, as though she was clearing up a childish
+misunderstanding of mine, “I don’t think any one will _go_ there. I
+never _did_ think that. . . .”
+
+§ 3
+
+
+That talk stands out in my memory because of that agreeable theological
+decision of hers, but it was only one of a great number of talks. It
+used to be pleasant in the afternoon, after the day’s work was done and
+before one went on with the evening’s study—how odd it would have
+seemed in the old time for a young man of the industrial class to be
+doing post-graduate work in sociology, and how much a matter of course
+it seems now!—to walk out into the gardens of Lowchester House, and
+smoke a cigarette or so and let her talk ramblingly of the things that
+interested her. . . . Physically the Great Change did not do so very
+much to reinvigorate her—she had lived in that dismal underground
+kitchen in Clayton too long for any material rejuvenescence—she glowed
+out indeed as a dying spark among the ashes might glow under a draught
+of fresh air—and assuredly it hastened her end. But those closing days
+were very tranquil, full of an effortless contentment. With her, life
+was like a rainy, windy day that clears only to show the sunset
+afterglow. The light has passed. She acquired no new habits amid the
+comforts of the new life, did no new things, but only found a happier
+light upon the old.
+
+She lived with a number of other old ladies belonging to our commune in
+the upper rooms of Lowchester House. Those upper apartments were simple
+and ample, fine and well done in the Georgian style, and they had been
+organized to give the maximum of comfort and conveniences and to
+economize the need of skilled attendance. We had taken over the various
+“great houses,” as they used to be called, to make communal
+dining-rooms and so forth—their kitchens were conveniently large—and
+pleasant places for the old people of over sixty whose time of ease had
+come, and for suchlike public uses. We had done this not only with Lord
+Redcar’s house, but also with Checkshill House—where old Mrs. Verrall
+made a dignified and capable hostess,—and indeed with most of the fine
+residences in the beautiful wide country between the Four Towns
+district and the Welsh mountains. About these great houses there had
+usually been good outbuildings, laundries, married servants’ quarters,
+stabling, dairies, and the like, suitably masked by trees, we turned
+these into homes, and to them we added first tents and wood chalets and
+afterward quadrangular residential buildings. In order to be near my
+mother I had two small rooms in the new collegiate buildings which our
+commune was almost the first to possess, and they were very convenient
+for the station of the high-speed electric railway that took me down to
+our daily conferences and my secretarial and statistical work in
+Clayton.
+
+Ours had been one of the first modern communes to get in order; we were
+greatly helped by the energy of Lord Redcar, who had a fine feeling for
+the picturesque associations of his ancestral home—the detour that took
+our line through the beeches and bracken and bluebells of the West Wood
+and saved the pleasant open wildness of the park was one of his
+suggestions; and we had many reasons to be proud of our surroundings.
+Nearly all the other communes that sprang up all over the pleasant
+parkland round the industrial valley of the Four Towns, as the workers
+moved out, came to us to study the architecture of the residential
+squares and quadrangles with which we had replaced the back streets
+between the great houses and the ecclesiastical residences about the
+cathedral, and the way in which we had adapted all these buildings to
+our new social needs. Some claimed to have improved on us. But they
+could not emulate the rhododendron garden out beyond our shrubberies;
+that was a thing altogether our own in our part of England, because of
+its ripeness and of the rarity of good peat free from lime.
+
+These gardens had been planned under the third Lord Redcar, fifty years
+ago and more; they abounded in rhododendra and azaleas, and were in
+places so well sheltered and sunny that great magnolias flourished and
+flowered. There were tall trees smothered in crimson and yellow
+climbing roses, and an endless variety of flowering shrubs and fine
+conifers, and such pampas grass as no other garden can show. And barred
+by the broad shadows of these, were glades and broad spaces of emerald
+turf, and here and there banks of pegged roses, and flower-beds, and
+banks given over some to spring bulbs, and some to primroses and
+primulas and polyanthuses. My mother loved these latter banks and the
+little round staring eyes of their innumerable yellow, ruddy brown, and
+purple corollas, more than anything else the gardens could show, and in
+the spring of the Year of Scaffolding she would go with me day after
+day to the seat that showed them in the greatest multitude.
+
+It gave her, I think, among other agreeable impressions, a sense of
+gentle opulence. In the old time she had never known what it was to
+have more than enough of anything agreeable in the world at all.
+
+We would sit and think, or talk—there was a curious effect of complete
+understanding between us whether we talked or were still.
+
+“Heaven,” she said to me one day, “Heaven is a garden.”
+
+I was moved to tease her a little. “There’s jewels, you know, walls and
+gates of jewels—and singing.”
+
+“For such as like them,” said my mother firmly, and thought for a
+while. “There’ll be things for all of us, o’ course. But for me it
+couldn’t be Heaven, dear, unless it was a garden—a nice sunny garden. .
+. . And feeling such as we’re fond of, are close and handy by.”
+
+You of your happier generation cannot realize the wonderfulness of
+those early days in the new epoch, the sense of security, the
+extraordinary effects of contrast. In the morning, except in high
+summer, I was up before dawn, and breakfasted upon the swift, smooth
+train, and perhaps saw the sunrise as I rushed out of the little tunnel
+that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work like a man. Now that we had
+got all the homes and schools and all the softness of life away from
+our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousand obstructive
+“rights” and timidities had been swept aside, we could let ourselves
+go, we merged this enterprise with that, cut across this or that
+anciently obstructive piece of private land, joined and separated,
+effected gigantic consolidations and gigantic economies, and the
+valley, no longer a pit of squalid human tragedies and meanly
+conflicting industries, grew into a sort of beauty of its own, a savage
+inhuman beauty of force and machinery and flames. One was a Titan in
+that Etna. Then back one came at midday to bathe and change in the
+train, and so to the leisurely gossiping lunch in the club dining-room
+in Lowchester House, and the refreshment of these green and sunlit
+afternoon tranquillities.
+
+Sometimes in her profounder moments my mother doubted whether all this
+last phase of her life was not a dream.
+
+“A dream,” I used to say, “a dream indeed—but a dream that is one step
+nearer awakening than that nightmare of the former days.”
+
+She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes—she liked
+the new fashions of dress, she alleged. It was not simply altered
+clothes. I did grow two inches, broaden some inches round my chest, and
+increase in weight three stones before I was twenty-three. I wore a
+soft brown cloth and she would caress my sleeve and admire it
+greatly—she had the woman’s sense of texture very strong in her.
+
+Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor rough
+hands—they never got softened—one over the other. She told me much I
+had not heard before about my father, and her own early life. It was
+like finding flat and faded flowers in a book still faintly sweet, to
+realize that once my mother had been loved with passion; that my remote
+father had once shed hot tears of tenderness in her arms. And she would
+sometimes even speak tentatively in those narrow, old-world phrases
+that her lips could rob of all their bitter narrowness, of Nettie.
+
+“She wasn’t worthy of you, dear,” she would say abruptly, leaving me to
+guess the person she intended.
+
+“No man is worthy of a woman’s love,” I answered. “No woman is worthy
+of a man’s. I love her, dear mother, and that you cannot alter.”
+
+“There’s others,” she would muse.
+
+“Not for me,” I said. “No! I didn’t fire a shot that time; I burnt my
+magazine. I can’t begin again, mother, not from the beginning.”
+
+She sighed and said no more then.
+
+At another time she said—I think her words were: “You’ll be lonely when
+I’m gone dear.”
+
+“You’ll not think of going, then,” I said.
+
+“Eh, dear! but man and maid should come together.”
+
+I said nothing to that.
+
+“You brood overmuch on Nettie, dear. If I could see you married to some
+sweet girl of a woman, some good, _kind_ girl———”
+
+“Dear mother, I’m married enough. Perhaps some day——— Who knows? I can
+wait.”
+
+“But to have nothing to do with women!”
+
+“I have my friends. Don’t you trouble, mother. There’s plentiful work
+for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out from him.
+Nettie was life and beauty for me—is—will be. Don’t think I’ve lost too
+much, mother.”
+
+(Because in my heart I told myself the end had still to come.)
+
+And once she sprang a question on me suddenly that surprised me.
+
+“Where are they now?” she asked.
+
+“Who?”
+
+“Nettie and—him.”
+
+She had pierced to the marrow of my thoughts. “I don’t know,” I said
+shortly.
+
+Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.
+
+“It’s better so,” she said, as if pleading. “Indeed . . . it is better
+so.”
+
+There was something in her quivering old voice that for a moment took
+me back across an epoch, to the protests of the former time, to those
+counsels of submission, those appeals not to offend It, that had always
+stirred an angry spirit of rebellion within me.
+
+“That is the thing I doubt,” I said, and abruptly I felt I could talk
+no more to her of Nettie. I got up and walked away from her, and came
+back after a while, to speak of other things, with a bunch of daffodils
+for her in my hand.
+
+But I did not always spend my afternoons with her. There were days when
+my crushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be alone; I
+walked, or bicycled, and presently I found a new interest and relief in
+learning to ride. For the horse was already very swiftly reaping the
+benefit to the Change. Hardly anywhere was the inhumanity of horse
+traction to be found after the first year of the new epoch, everywhere
+lugging and dragging and straining was done by machines, and the horse
+had become a beautiful instrument for the pleasure and carriage of
+youth. I rode both in the saddle and, what is finer, naked and
+barebacked. I found violent exercises were good for the states of
+enormous melancholy that came upon me, and when at last horse riding
+palled, I went and joined the aviators who practised soaring upon
+aeroplanes beyond Horsemarden Hill. . . . But at least every alternate
+day I spent with my mother, and altogether I think I gave her
+two-thirds of my afternoons.
+
+§ 4
+
+
+When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an
+euthanasia for so many of the older people in the beginning of the new
+time, took hold upon my mother, there came Anna Reeves to daughter
+her—after our new custom. She chose to come. She was already known to
+us a little from chance meetings and chance services she had done my
+mother in the garden; she sought to give her help. She seemed then just
+one of those plainly good girls the world at its worst has never failed
+to produce, who were indeed in the dark old times the hidden antiseptic
+of all our hustling, hating, faithless lives. They made their secret
+voiceless worship, they did their steadfast, uninspired, unthanked,
+unselfish work as helpful daughters, as nurses, as faithful servants,
+as the humble providences of homes. She was almost exactly three years
+older than I. At first I found no beauty in her, she was short but
+rather sturdy and ruddy, with red-tinged hair, and fair hairy brows and
+red-brown eyes. But her freckled hands I found, were full of apt help,
+her voice carried good cheer. . . .
+
+At first she was no more than a blue-clad, white-aproned benevolence,
+that moved in the shadows behind the bed on which my old mother lay and
+sank restfully to death. She would come forward to anticipate some
+little need, to proffer some simple comfort, and always then my mother
+smiled on her. In a little while I discovered the beauty of that
+helpful poise of her woman’s body, I discovered the grace of untiring
+goodness, the sweetness of a tender pity, and the great riches of her
+voice, of her few reassuring words and phrases. I noted and remembered
+very clearly how once my mother’s lean old hand patted the firm
+gold-flecked strength of hers, as it went by upon its duties with the
+coverlet.
+
+“She is a good girl to me,” said my mother one day. “A good girl. Like
+a daughter should be. . . . I never had a daughter—really.” She mused
+peacefully for a space. “Your little sister died,” she said.
+
+I had never heard of that little sister.
+
+“November the tenth,” said my mother. “Twenty-nine months and three
+days. . . . I cried. I cried. That was before you came, dear. So long
+ago—and I can see it now. I was a young wife then, and your father was
+very kind. But I can see its hands, its dear little quiet hands. . . .
+Dear, they say that now—now they will not let the little children die.”
+
+“No, dear mother,” I said. “We shall do better now.”
+
+“The club doctor could not come. Your father went twice. There was some
+one else, some one who paid. So your father went on into Swathinglea,
+and that man wouldn’t come unless he had his fee. And your father had
+changed his clothes to look more respectful and he hadn’t any money,
+not even his tram fare home. It seemed cruel to be waiting there with
+my baby thing in pain. . . . And I can’t help thinking perhaps we might
+have saved her. . . . But it was like that with the poor always in the
+bad old times—always. When the doctor came at last he was angry. ‘Why
+wasn’t I called before?’ he said, and he took no pains. He was angry
+because some one hadn’t explained. I begged him—but it was too late.”
+
+She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one who
+describes a dream. “We are going to manage all these things better
+now,” I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful little story
+her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me.
+
+“She talked,” my mother went on. “She talked for her age wonderfully. .
+. . Hippopotamus.”
+
+“Eh?” I said.
+
+“Hippopotamus, dear—quite plainly one day, when her father was showing
+her pictures. . . And her little prayers. ‘Now I lay me. . . . down to
+sleep.’ . . . I made her little socks. Knitted they was, dear, and the
+heel most difficult.”
+
+Her eyes were closed now. She spoke no longer to me but to herself. She
+whispered other vague things, little sentences, ghosts of long dead
+moments. . . . Her words grew less distinct.
+
+Presently she was asleep and I got up and went out of the room, but my
+mind was queerly obsessed by the thought of that little life that had
+been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of hope again
+into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never heard before. . . .
+
+And presently I was in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows of
+the past, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which this was
+but one luminous and quivering red drop. I walked in the garden and the
+garden was too small for me; I went out to wander on the moors. “The
+past is past,” I cried, and all the while across the gulf of five and
+twenty years I could hear my poor mother’s heart-wrung weeping for that
+daughter baby who had suffered and died. Indeed that old spirit of
+rebellion has not altogether died in me, for all the transformation of
+the new time. . . . I quieted down at last to a thin and austere
+comfort in thinking that the whole is not told to us, that it cannot
+perhaps be told to such minds as ours; and anyhow, and what was far
+more sustaining, that now we have strength and courage and this new
+gift of wise love, whatever cruel and sad things marred the past, none
+of these sorrowful things that made the very warp and woof of the old
+life, need now go on happening. We could foresee, we could prevent and
+save. “The past is past,” I said, between sighing and resolve, as I
+came into view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit
+windows of old Lowchester House. “Those sorrows are sorrows no more.”
+
+But I could not altogether cheat that common sadness of the new time,
+that memory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives that had
+stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before our air grew clear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+BELTANE AND NEW YEAR’S EVE
+
+
+§ 1
+
+In the end my mother died rather suddenly, and her death came as a
+shock to me. Diagnosis was still very inadequate at that time. The
+doctors were, of course, fully alive to the incredible defects of their
+common training and were doing all they could to supply its
+deficiencies, but they were still extraordinarily ignorant. Some
+unintelligently observed factor of her illness came into play with her,
+and she became feverish and sank and died very quickly. I do not know
+what remedial measures were attempted. I hardly knew what was happening
+until the whole thing was over.
+
+At that time my attention was much engaged by the stir of the great
+Beltane festival that was held on May-day in the Year of Scaffolding.
+It was the first of the ten great rubbish burnings that opened the new
+age. Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the enormous
+quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation with which we had to
+deal; had we not set aside a special day and season, the whole world
+would have been an incessant reek of small fires; and it was, I think,
+a happy idea to revive this ancient festival of the May and November
+burnings. It was inevitable that the old idea of purification should
+revive with the name, it was felt to be a burning of other than
+material encumbrances, innumerable quasi-spiritual things, deeds,
+documents, debts, vindictive records, went up on those great flares.
+People passed praying between the fires, and it was a fine symbol of
+the new and wiser tolerance that had come to men, that those who still
+found their comfort in the orthodox faiths came hither unpersuaded, to
+pray that all hate might be burnt out of their professions. For even in
+the fires of Baal, now that men have done with base hatred, one may
+find the living God.
+
+Endless were the things we had to destroy in those great purgings.
+First, there were nearly all the houses and buildings of the old time.
+In the end we did not save in England one building in five thousand
+that was standing when the comet came. Year by year, as we made our
+homes afresh in accordance with the saner needs of our new social
+families, we swept away more and more of those horrible structures, the
+ancient residential houses, hastily built, without imagination, without
+beauty, without common honesty, without even comfort or convenience, in
+which the early twentieth century had sheltered until scarcely one
+remained; we saved nothing but what was beautiful or interesting out of
+all their gaunt and melancholy abundance. The actual houses, of course,
+we could not drag to our fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting
+deal doors, their dreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting
+staircases, their dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their
+scaly walls, their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and
+yet pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers,
+the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments—their dirty, decayed, and
+altogether painful ornaments—amidst which I remember there were
+sometimes even _stuffed dead birds!_—we burnt them all. The
+paint-plastered woodwork, with coat above coat of nasty paint, that in
+particular blazed finely. I have already tried to give you an
+impression of old-world furniture, of Parload’s bedroom, my mother’s
+room, Mr. Gabbitas’s sitting-room, but, thank Heaven! there is nothing
+in life now to convey the peculiar dinginess of it all. For one thing,
+there is no more imperfect combustion of coal going on everywhere, and
+no roadways like grassless open scars along the earth from which dust
+pours out perpetually. We burnt and destroyed most of our private
+buildings and all the woodwork, all our furniture, except a few score
+thousand pieces of distinct and intentional beauty, from which our
+present forms have developed, nearly all our hangings and carpets, and
+also we destroyed almost every scrap of old-world clothing. Only a few
+carefully disinfected types and vestiges of that remain now in our
+museums.
+
+One writes now with a peculiar horror of the dress of the old world.
+The men’s clothes were worn without any cleansing process at all,
+except an occasional superficial brushing, for periods of a year or so;
+they were made of dark obscurely mixed patterns to conceal the stage of
+defilement they had reached, and they were of a felted and porous
+texture admirably calculated to accumulate drifting matter. Many women
+wore skirts of similar substances, and of so long and inconvenient a
+form that they inevitably trailed among all the abomination of our
+horse-frequented roads. It was our boast in England that the whole of
+our population was booted—their feet were for the most part ugly enough
+to need it,—but it becomes now inconceivable how they could have
+imprisoned their feet in the amazing cases of leather and imitations of
+leather they used. I have heard it said that a large part of the
+physical decline that was apparent in our people during the closing
+years of the nineteenth century, though no doubt due in part to the
+miscellaneous badness of the food they ate, was in the main
+attributable to the vileness of the common footwear. They shirked
+open-air exercise altogether because their boots wore out ruinously and
+pinched and hurt them if they took it. I have mentioned, I think, the
+part my own boots played in the squalid drama of my adolescence. I had
+a sense of unholy triumph over a fallen enemy when at last I found
+myself steering truck after truck of cheap boots and shoes (unsold
+stock from Swathinglea) to the run-off by the top of the Glanville
+blast furnaces.
+
+“Plup!” they would drop into the cone when Beltane came, and the roar
+of their burning would fill the air. Never a cold would come from the
+saturation of their brown paper soles, never a corn from their foolish
+shapes, never a nail in them get home at last in suffering flesh. . . .
+
+Most of our public buildings we destroyed and burnt as we reshaped our
+plan of habitation, our theater sheds, our banks, and inconvenient
+business warrens, our factories (these in the first year of all), and
+all the “unmeaning repetition” of silly little sham Gothic churches and
+meeting-houses, mean looking shells of stone and mortar without love,
+invention, or any beauty at all in them, that men had thrust into the
+face of their sweated God, even as they thrust cheap food into the
+mouths of their sweated workers; all these we also swept away in the
+course of that first decade. Then we had the whole of the superseded
+steam-railway system to scrap and get rid of, stations, signals,
+fences, rolling stock; a plant of ill-planned, smoke-distributing
+nuisance apparatus, that would, under former conditions, have
+maintained an offensive dwindling obstructive life for perhaps half a
+century. Then also there was a great harvest of fences, notice boards,
+hoardings, ugly sheds, all the corrugated iron in the world, and
+everything that was smeared with tar, all our gas works and petroleum
+stores, all our horse vehicles and vans and lorries had to be erased. .
+. . But I have said enough now perhaps to give some idea of the bulk
+and quality of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down,
+our toil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in
+those early years.
+
+But these were the coarse material bases of the Phœnix fires of the
+world. These were but the outward and visible signs of the innumerable
+claims, rights, adhesions, debts, bills, deeds, and charters that were
+cast upon the fires; a vast accumulation of insignia and uniforms
+neither curious enough nor beautiful enough to preserve, went to swell
+the blaze, and all (saving a few truly glorious trophies and memories)
+of our symbols, our apparatus and material of war. Then innumerable
+triumphs of our old, bastard, half-commercial, fine-art were presently
+condemned, great oil paintings, done to please the half-educated
+middle-class, glared for a moment and were gone, Academy marbles
+crumbled to useful lime, a gross multitude of silly statuettes and
+decorative crockery, and hangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and
+musical instruments shared this fate. And books, countless books, too,
+and bales of newspapers went also to these pyres. From the private
+houses in Swathinglea alone—which I had deemed, perhaps not unjustly,
+altogether illiterate—we gathered a whole dust-cart full of cheap
+ill-printed editions of the minor English classics—for the most part
+very dull stuff indeed and still clean—and about a truckload of thumbed
+and dog-eared penny fiction, watery base stuff, the dropsy of our
+nation’s mind. . . . And it seemed to me that when we gathered those
+books and papers together, we gathered together something more than
+print and paper, we gathered warped and crippled ideas and contagious
+base suggestions, the formulae of dull tolerances and stupid
+impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities of sluggish habits of
+thinking and timid and indolent evasions. There was more than a touch
+of malignant satisfaction for me in helping gather it all together.
+
+I was so busy, I say, with my share in this dustman’s work that I did
+not notice, as I should otherwise have done, the little indications of
+change in my mother’s state. Indeed, I thought her a little stronger;
+she was slightly flushed, slightly more talkative. . . .
+
+On Beltane Eve, and our Lowchester rummage being finished, I went along
+the valley to the far end of Swathinglea to help sort the stock of the
+detached group of potbanks there—their chief output had been mantel
+ornaments in imitation of marble, and there was very little sorting, I
+found, to be done—and there it was nurse Anna found me at last by
+telephone, and told me my mother had died in the morning suddenly and
+very shortly after my departure.
+
+For a while I did not seem to believe it; this obviously imminent event
+stunned me when it came, as though I had never had an anticipatory
+moment. For a while I went on working, and then almost apathetically,
+in a mood of half-reluctant curiosity, I started for Lowchester.
+
+When I got there the last offices were over, and I was shown my old
+mother’s peaceful white face, very still, but a little cold and stern
+to me, a little unfamiliar, lying among white flowers.
+
+I went in alone to her, into that quiet room, and stood for a long time
+by her bedside. I sat down then and thought. . . .
+
+Then at last, strangely hushed, and with the deeps of my loneliness
+opening beneath me, I came out of that room and down into the world
+again, a bright-eyed, active world, very noisy, happy, and busy with
+its last preparations for the mighty cremation of past and superseded
+things.
+
+§ 2
+
+
+I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonely
+night in my life. It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments of
+intense feeling with forgotten gaps between.
+
+I recall very distinctly being upon the great staircase of Lowchester
+House (though I don’t remember getting there from the room in which my
+mother lay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as I came
+down. She had but just heard of my return, and she was hurrying
+upstairs to me. She stopped and so did I, and we stood and clasped
+hands, and she scrutinized my face in the way women sometimes do. So we
+remained for a second or so. I could say nothing to her at all, but I
+could feel the wave of her emotion. I halted, answered the earnest
+pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and after a queer second of
+hesitation went on down, returning to my own preoccupations. It did not
+occur to me at all then to ask myself what she might be thinking or
+feeling.
+
+I remember the corridor full of mellow evening light, and how I went
+mechanically some paces toward the dining-room. Then at the sight of
+the little tables, and a gusty outburst of talking voices as some one
+in front of me swung the door open and to, I remembered that I did not
+want to eat. . . . After that comes an impression of myself walking
+across the open grass in front of the house, and the purpose I had of
+getting alone upon the moors, and how somebody passing me said
+something about a hat. I had come out without my hat.
+
+A fragment of thought has linked itself with an effect of long shadows
+upon turf golden with the light of the sinking sun. The world was
+singularly empty, I thought, without either Nettie or my mother. There
+wasn’t any sense in it any more. Nettie was already back in my mind
+then. . . .
+
+Then I am out on the moors. I avoided the crests where the bonfires
+were being piled, and sought the lonely places. . . .
+
+I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a fold
+just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its crowd,
+and I was looking at and admiring the sunset. The golden earth and sky
+seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe of human
+futility. . . . Then in the twilight I walked along an unknown,
+bat-haunted road between high hedges.
+
+I did not sleep under a roof that night. But I hungered and ate. I ate
+near midnight at a little inn over toward Birmingham, and miles away
+from my home. Instinctively I had avoided the crests where the bonfire
+crowds gathered, but here there were many people, and I had to share a
+table with a man who had some useless mortgage deeds to burn. I talked
+to him about them—but my soul stood at a great distance behind my lips.
+. . .
+
+Soon each hilltop bore a little tulip-shaped flame flower. Little black
+figures clustered round and dotted the base of its petals, and as for
+the rest of the multitude abroad, the kindly night swallowed them up.
+By leaving the roads and clear paths and wandering in the fields I
+contrived to keep alone, though the confused noise of voices and the
+roaring and crackling of great fires was always near me.
+
+I wandered into a lonely meadow, and presently in a hollow of deep
+shadows I lay down to stare at the stars. I lay hidden in the darkness,
+and ever and again the sough and uproar of the Beltane fires that were
+burning up the sere follies of a vanished age, and the shouting of the
+people passing through the fires and praying to be delivered from the
+prison of themselves, reached my ears. . . .
+
+And I thought of my mother, and then of my new loneliness and the
+hunger of my heart for Nettie.
+
+I thought of many things that night, but chiefly of the overflowing
+personal love and tenderness that had come to me in the wake of the
+Change, of the greater need, the unsatisfied need in which I stood, for
+this one person who could fulfil all my desires. So long as my mother
+had lived, she had in a measure held my heart, given me a food these
+emotions could live upon, and mitigated that emptiness of spirit, but
+now suddenly that one possible comfort had left me. There had been many
+at the season of the Change who had thought that this great enlargement
+of mankind would abolish personal love; but indeed it had only made it
+finer, fuller, more vitally necessary. They had thought that, seeing
+men now were all full of the joyful passion to make and do, and glad
+and loving and of willing service to all their fellows, there would be
+no need of the one intimate trusting communion that had been the finest
+thing of the former life. And indeed, so far as this was a matter of
+advantage and the struggle for existence, they were right. But so far
+as it was a matter of the spirit and the fine perceptions of life, it
+was altogether wrong.
+
+We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped it of
+its base wrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenary and
+competitive elements, until at last it stood up in our minds stark,
+shining and invincible. Through all the fine, divaricating ways of the
+new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for every one certain
+persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the key of one’s self, whose
+mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere existence was interest, whose
+idiosyncrasy blended with accident to make a completing and predominant
+harmony for their predestined lovers. They were the essential thing in
+life. Without them the fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a
+caparisoned steed without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater
+without a play. . . . And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear
+as white flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies
+in me. And she had gone! I had sent her from me; I knew not whither she
+had gone. I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out of my life
+for ever!
+
+So I saw it then, and I lay unseen in the darkness and called upon
+Nettie, and wept for her, lay upon my face and wept for her, while the
+glad people went to and fro, and the smoke streamed thick across the
+distant stars, and the red reflections, the shadows and the fluctuating
+glares, danced over the face of the world.
+
+No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, from
+habitual and mechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarse
+imaginings, but from the passions of love it had not freed us. It had
+but brought the lord of life, Eros, to his own. All through the long
+sorrow of that night I, who had rejected him, confessed his sway with
+tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .
+
+I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor of my tortuous
+wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires, nor how I evaded
+the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who went streaming home between
+three and four, to resume their lives, swept and garnished, stripped
+and clean. But at dawn, when the ashes of the world’s gladness were
+ceasing to glow—it was a bleak dawn that made me shiver in my thin
+summer clothes—I came across a field to a little copse full of dim blue
+hyacinths. A queer sense of familiarity arrested my steps, and I stood
+puzzled. Then I was moved to go a dozen paces from the path, and at
+once a singularly misshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my
+memory. This was the place! Here I had stood, there I had placed my old
+kite, and shot with my revolver, learning to use it, against the day
+when I should encounter Verrall.
+
+Kite and revolver had gone now, and all my hot and narrow past, its
+last vestiges had shriveled and vanished in the whirling gusts of the
+Beltane fires. So I walked through a world of gray ashes at last, back
+to the great house in which the dead, deserted image of my dear lost
+mother lay.
+
+§ 3
+
+
+I came back to Lowchester House very tired, very wretched; exhausted by
+my fruitless longing for Nettie. I had no thought of what lay before
+me.
+
+A miserable attraction drew me into the great house to look again on
+the stillness that had been my mother’s face, and as I came into that
+room, Anna, who had been sitting by the open window, rose to meet me.
+She had the air of one who waits. She, too, was pale with watching; all
+night she had watched between the dead within and the Beltane fires
+abroad, and longed for my coming. I stood mute between her and the
+bedside. . . .
+
+“Willie,” she whispered, and eyes and body seemed incarnate pity.
+
+An unseen presence drew us together. My mother’s face became resolute,
+commanding. I turned to Anna as a child may turn to its nurse. I put my
+hands about her strong shoulders, she folded me to her, and my heart
+gave way. I buried my face in her breast and clung to her weakly, and
+burst into a passion of weeping. . . .
+
+She held me with hungry arms. She whispered to me, “There, there!” as
+one whispers comfort to a child. . . . Suddenly she was kissing me. She
+kissed me with a hungry intensity of passion, on my cheeks, on my lips.
+She kissed me on my lips with lips that were salt with tears. And I
+returned her kisses. . . .
+
+Then abruptly we desisted and stood apart—looking at one another.
+
+§ 4
+
+
+It seems to me as if the intense memory of Nettie vanished utterly out
+of my mind at the touch of Anna’s lips. I loved Anna.
+
+We went to the council of our group—commune it was then called—and she
+was given me in marriage, and within a year she had borne me a son. We
+saw much of one another, and talked ourselves very close together. My
+faithful friend she became and has been always, and for a time we were
+passionate lovers. Always she has loved me and kept my soul full of
+tender gratitude and love for her; always when we met our hands and
+eyes clasped in friendly greeting, all through our lives from that hour
+we have been each other’s secure help and refuge, each other’s
+ungrudging fastness of help and sweetly frank and open speech. . . .
+And after a little while my love and desire for Nettie returned as
+though it had never faded away.
+
+No one will have a difficulty now in understanding how that could be,
+but in the evil days of the world malaria, that would have been held to
+be the most impossible thing. I should have had to crush that second
+love out of my thoughts, to have kept it secret from Anna, to have lied
+about it to all the world. The old-world theory was there was only one
+love—we who float upon a sea of love find that hard to understand. The
+whole nature of a man was supposed to go out to the one girl or woman
+who possessed him, her whole nature to go out to him. Nothing was left
+over—it was a discreditable thing to have any overplus at all. They
+formed a secret secluded system of two, two and such children as she
+bore him. All other women he was held bound to find no beauty in, no
+sweetness, no interest; and she likewise, in no other man. The old-time
+men and women went apart in couples, into defensive little houses, like
+beasts into little pits, and in these “homes” they sat down purposing
+to love, but really coming very soon to jealous watching of this
+extravagant mutual proprietorship. All freshness passed very speedily
+out of their love, out of their conversation, all pride out of their
+common life. To permit each other freedom was blank dishonor. That I
+and Anna should love, and after our love-journey together, go about our
+separate lives and dine at the public tables, until the advent of her
+motherhood, would have seemed a terrible strain upon our unmitigable
+loyalty. And that I should have it in me to go on loving Nettie—who
+loved in different manner both Verrall and me—would have outraged the
+very quintessence of the old convention.
+
+In the old days love was a cruel proprietary thing. But now Anna could
+let Nettie live in the world of my mind, as freely as a rose will
+suffer the presence of white lilies. If I could hear notes that were
+not in her compass, she was glad, because she loved me, that I should
+listen to other music than hers. And she, too, could see the beauty of
+Nettie. Life is so rich and generous now, giving friendship, and a
+thousand tender interests and helps and comforts, that no one stints
+another of the full realization of all possibilities of beauty. For me
+from the beginning Nettie was the figure of beauty, the shape and color
+of the divine principle that lights the world. For every one there are
+certain types, certain faces and forms, gestures, voices and
+intonations that have that inexplicable unanalyzable quality. These
+come through the crowd of kindly friendly fellow-men and women—one’s
+own. These touch one mysteriously, stir deeps that must otherwise
+slumber, pierce and interpret the world. To refuse this interpretation
+is to refuse the sun, to darken and deaden all life. . . . I loved
+Nettie, I loved all who were like her, in the measure that they were
+like her, in voice, or eyes, or form, or smile. And between my wife and
+me there was no bitterness that the great goddess, the life-giver,
+Aphrodite, Queen of the living Seas, came to my imagination so. It
+qualified our mutual love not at all, since now in our changed world
+love is unstinted; it is a golden net about our globe that nets all
+humanity together.
+
+I thought of Nettie much, and always movingly beautiful things restored
+me to her, all fine music, all pure deep color, all tender and solemn
+things. The stars were hers, and the mystery of moonlight; the sun she
+wore in her hair, powdered finely, beaten into gleams and threads of
+sunlight in the wisps and strands of her hair. . . . Then suddenly one
+day a letter came to me from her, in her unaltered clear handwriting,
+but in a new language of expression, telling me many things. She had
+learnt of my mother’s death, and the thought of me had grown so strong
+as to pierce the silence I had imposed on her. We wrote to one
+another—like common friends with a certain restraint between us at
+first, and with a great longing to see her once more arising in my
+heart. For a time I left that hunger unexpressed, and then I was moved
+to tell it to her. And so on New Year’s Day in the Year Four, she came
+to Lowchester and me. How I remember that coming, across the gulf of
+fifty years! I went out across the park to meet her, so that we should
+meet alone. The windless morning was clear and cold, the ground new
+carpeted with snow, and all the trees motionless lace and glitter of
+frosty crystals. The rising sun had touched the white with a spirit of
+gold, and my heart beat and sang within me. I remember now the snowy
+shoulder of the down, sunlit against the bright blue sky. And presently
+I saw the woman I loved coming through the white still trees. . . .
+
+I had made a goddess of Nettie, and behold she was a fellow-creature!
+She came, warm-wrapped and tremulous, to me, with the tender promise of
+tears in her eyes, with her hands outstretched and that dear smile
+quivering upon her lips. She stepped out of the dream I had made of
+her, a thing of needs and regrets and human kindliness. Her hands as I
+took them were a little cold. The goddess shone through her indeed,
+glowed in all her body, she was a worshipful temple of love for me—yes.
+But I could feel, like a thing new discovered, the texture and sinews
+of her living, her dear personal and mortal hands. . . .
+
+
+
+
+THE EPILOGUE
+THE WINDOW OF THE TOWER
+
+
+This was as much as this pleasant-looking, gray-haired man had written.
+I had been lost in his story throughout the earlier portions of it,
+forgetful of the writer and his gracious room, and the high tower in
+which he was sitting. But gradually, as I drew near the end, the sense
+of strangeness returned to me. It was more and more evident to me that
+this was a different humanity from any I had known, unreal, having
+different customs, different beliefs, different interpretations,
+different emotions. It was no mere change in conditions and
+institutions the comet had wrought. It had made a change of heart and
+mind. In a manner it had dehumanized the world, robbed it of its
+spites, its little intense jealousies, its inconsistencies, its humor.
+At the end, and particularly after the death of his mother, I felt his
+story had slipped away from my sympathies altogether. Those Beltane
+fires had burnt something in him that worked living still and unsubdued
+in me, that rebelled in particular at that return of Nettie. I became a
+little inattentive. I no longer felt with him, nor gathered a sense of
+complete understanding from his phrases. His Lord Eros indeed! He and
+these transfigured people—they were beautiful and noble people, like
+the people one sees in great pictures, like the gods of noble
+sculpture, but they had no nearer fellowship than these to men. As the
+change was realized, with every stage of realization the gulf widened
+and it was harder to follow his words.
+
+I put down the last fascicle of all, and met his friendly eyes. It was
+hard to dislike him.
+
+I felt a subtle embarrassment in putting the question that perplexed
+me. And yet it seemed so material to me I had to put it. “And did
+you—?” I asked. “Were you—lovers?”
+
+His eyebrows rose. “Of course.”
+
+“But your wife—?”
+
+It was manifest he did not understand me.
+
+I hesitated still more. I was perplexed by a conviction of baseness.
+“But—” I began. “You remained lovers?”
+
+“Yes.” I had grave doubts if I understood him. Or he me.
+
+I made a still more courageous attempt. “And had Nettie no other
+lovers?”
+
+“A beautiful woman like that! I know not how many loved beauty in her,
+nor what she found in others. But we four from that time were very
+close, you understand, we were friends, helpers, personal lovers in a
+world of lovers.”
+
+“Four?”
+
+“There was Verrall.”
+
+Then suddenly it came to me that the thoughts that stirred in my mind
+were sinister and base, that the queer suspicions, the coarseness and
+coarse jealousies of my old world were over and done for these more
+finely living souls. “You made,” I said, trying to be liberal minded,
+“a home together.”
+
+“A home!” He looked at me, and, I know not why, I glanced down at my
+feet. What a clumsy, ill-made thing a boot is, and how hard and
+colorless seemed my clothing! How harshly I stood out amidst these
+fine, perfected things. I had a moment of rebellious detestation. I
+wanted to get out of all this. After all, it wasn’t my style. I wanted
+intensely to say something that would bring him down a peg, make sure,
+as it were, of my suspicions by launching an offensive accusation. I
+looked up and he was standing.
+
+“I forgot,” he said. “You are pretending the old world is still going
+on. A home!”
+
+He put out his hand, and quite noiselessly the great window widened
+down to us, and the splendid nearer prospect of that dreamland city was
+before me. There for one clear moment I saw it; its galleries and open
+spaces, its trees of golden fruit and crystal waters, its music and
+rejoicing, love and beauty without ceasing flowing through its varied
+and intricate streets. And the nearer people I saw now directly and
+plainly, and no longer in the distorted mirror that hung overhead. They
+really did not justify my suspicions, and yet—! They were such people
+as one sees on earth—save that they were changed. How can I express
+that change? As a woman is changed in the eyes of her lover, as a woman
+is changed by the love of a lover. They were exalted. . . .
+
+I stood up beside him and looked out. I was a little flushed, my ears a
+little reddened, by the inconvenience of my curiosities, and by my
+uneasy sense of profound moral differences. He was taller than I. . . .
+
+“This is our home,” he said smiling, and with thoughtful eyes on me.
+
+
+
+
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