In the Days of the Comet (17 page)

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.

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.

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."