In the Days of the Comet (10 page)

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.

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. . .