In the Days of the Comet (16 page)

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.

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.

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.