In the Days of the Comet

"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."

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.

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,
dessicated, 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.