In the Days of the Comet (14 page)

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!"

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.

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!