In the Days of the Comet (18 page)

"But where is it?" I said, suddenly exasperated.

"There!" he said. "What's that flicker? A gunflash—or I'm a lost
soul!"

"You'd hear," I said, "long before it was near enough to see a
flash."

He didn't answer. Only by making it clear I would distract him until
he told me what I wanted to know could I get him to turn from his
absorbed contemplation of that phantom dance between the sea rim and
the shine. Indeed I gripped his arm and shook him. Then he turned
upon me cursing.

"Seven miles," he said, "along this road. And now go to 'ell with
yer!"

I answered with some foul insult by way of thanks, and so we parted,
and I set off towards the bungalow village.

I found a policeman, standing star-gazing, a little way beyond the
end of the parade, and verified the wooden-legged man's directions.

"It's a lonely road, you know," he called after me. . . .

I had an odd intuition that now at last I was on the right track.
I left the dark masses of Shaphambury behind me, and pushed out
into the dim pallor of that night, with the quiet assurance of a
traveler who nears his end.

The incidents of that long tramp I do not recall in any orderly
succession, the one progressive thing is my memory of a growing
fatigue. The sea was for the most part smooth and shining like a
mirror, a great expanse of reflecting silver, barred by slow broad
undulations, but at one time a little breeze breathed like a faint
sigh and ruffled their long bodies into faint scaly ripples that
never completely died out again. The way was sometimes sandy, thick
with silvery colorless sand, and sometimes chalky and lumpy, with
lumps that had shining facets; a black scrub was scattered, sometimes
in thickets, sometimes in single bunches, among the somnolent
hummocks of sand. At one place came grass, and ghostly great sheep
looming up among the gray. After a time black pinewoods intervened,
and made sustained darknesses along the road, woods that frayed
out at the edges to weirdly warped and stunted trees. Then isolated
pine witches would appear, and make their rigid gestures at me as
I passed. Grotesquely incongruous amidst these forms, I presently
came on estate boards, appealing, "Houses can be built to suit
purchaser," to the silence, to the shadows, and the glare.

Once I remember the persistent barking of a dog from somewhere inland
of me, and several times I took out and examined my revolver very
carefully. I must, of course, have been full of my intention when
I did that, I must have been thinking of Nettie and revenge, but
I cannot now recall those emotions at all. Only I see again very
distinctly the greenish gleams that ran over lock and barrel as I
turned the weapon in my hand.

Then there was the sky, the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless
sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor
and the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon
the shine, and very small and distant, three long black warships,
without masts, or sails, or smoke, or any lights, dark, deadly,
furtive things, traveling very swiftly and keeping an equal distance.
And when I looked again they were very small, and then the shine
had swallowed them up.

Then once a flash and what I thought was a gun, until I looked
up and saw a fading trail of greenish light still hanging in the
sky. And after that there was a shiver and whispering in the air,
a stronger throbbing in one's arteries, a sense of refreshment,
a renewal of purpose. . . .

Somewhere upon my way the road forked, but I do not remember
whether that was near Shaphambury or near the end of my walk. The
hesitation between two rutted unmade roads alone remains clear in
my mind.

At last I grew weary. I came to piled heaps of decaying seaweed
and cart tracks running this way and that, and then I had missed
the road and was stumbling among sand hummocks quite close to the
sea. I came out on the edge of the dimly glittering sandy beach,
and something phosphorescent drew me to the water's edge. I bent
down and peered at the little luminous specks that floated in the
ripples.

Presently with a sigh I stood erect, and contemplated the lonely
peace of that last wonderful night. The meteor had now trailed its
shining nets across the whole space of the sky and was beginning
to set; in the east the blue was coming to its own again; the sea
was an intense edge of blackness, and now, escaped from that great
shine, and faint and still tremulously valiant, one weak elusive
star could just be seen, hovering on the verge of the invisible.

How beautiful it was! how still and beautiful! Peace! peace!—the
peace that passeth understanding, robed in light descending! . . .

My heart swelled, and suddenly I was weeping.

There was something new and strange in my blood. It came to me that
indeed I did not want to kill.

I did not want to kill. I did not want to be the servant of my
passions any more. A great desire had come to me to escape from
life, from the daylight which is heat and conflict and desire, into
that cool night of eternity—and rest. I had played—I had done.

I stood upon the edge of the great ocean, and I was filled with an
inarticulate spirit of prayer, and I desired greatly—peace from
myself.

And presently, there in the east, would come again the red discoloring
curtain over these mysteries, the finite world again, the gray and
growing harsh certainties of dawn. My resolve I knew would take up
with me again. This was a rest for me, an interlude, but to-morrow
I should be William Leadford once more, ill-nourished, ill-dressed,
ill-equipped and clumsy, a thief and shamed, a wound upon the face
of life, a source of trouble and sorrow even to the mother I loved;
no hope in life left for me now but revenge before my death.

Why this paltry thing, revenge? It entered into my thoughts that
I might end the matter now and let these others go.

To wade out into the sea, into this warm lapping that mingled the
natures of water and light, to stand there breast-high, to thrust
my revolver barrel into my mouth——?

Why not?

I swung about with an effort. I walked slowly up the beach thinking. . . .

I turned and looked back at the sea. No! Something within me said,
"No!"

I must think.

It was troublesome to go further because the hummocks and
the tangled bushes began. I sat down amidst a black cluster of
shrubs, and rested, chin on hand. I drew my revolver from my pocket
and looked at it, and held it in my hand. Life? Or Death? . . .

I seemed to be probing the very deeps of being, but indeed
imperceptibly I fell asleep, and sat dreaming.

Two people were bathing in the sea.

I had awakened. It was still that white and wonderful night, and
the blue band of clear sky was no wider than before. These people
must have come into sight as I fell asleep, and awakened me almost
at once. They waded breast-deep in the water, emerging, coming
shoreward, a woman, with her hair coiled about her head, and in
pursuit of her a man, graceful figures of black and silver, with a
bright green surge flowing off from them, a pattering of flashing
wavelets about them. He smote the water and splashed it toward
her, she retaliated, and then they were knee-deep, and then for an
instant their feet broke the long silver margin of the sea.

Each wore a tightly fitting bathing dress that hid nothing of the
shining, dripping beauty of their youthful forms.

She glanced over her shoulder and found him nearer than she thought,
started, gesticulated, gave a little cry that pierced me to the
heart, and fled up the beach obliquely toward me, running like the
wind, and passed me, vanished amidst the black distorted bushes,
and was gone—she and her pursuer, in a moment, over the ridge of
sand.

I heard him shout between exhaustion and laughter. . . .

And suddenly I was a thing of bestial fury, standing up with hands
held up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening,
against the sky. . . .

For this striving, swift thing of light and beauty was Nettie—and
this was the man for whom I had been betrayed!

And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbing
of my will—unavenged!

In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, in
quiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless
sand.

I came up over the little ridge and discovered the bungalow village
I had been seeking, nestling in a crescent lap of dunes. A door
slammed, the two runners had vanished, and I halted staring.

There was a group of three bungalows nearer to me than the others.
Into one of these three they had gone, and I was too late to see
which. All had doors and windows carelessly open, and none showed
a light.

This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of the
reaction of artistic-minded and carelessly living people against
the costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the more formal
seaside resorts of that time. It was, you must understand, the custom
of the steam-railway companies to sell their carriages after they
had been obsolete for a sufficient length of years, and some genius
had hit upon the possibility of turning these into little habitable
cabins for the summer holiday. The thing had become a fashion with
a certain Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and
these little improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandas
and supplementary leantos added to their accommodation, made the
brightest contrast conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorous
resorts. Of course there were many discomforts in such camping that
had to be faced cheerfully, and so this broad sandy beach was sacred
to high spirits and the young. Art muslin and banjoes, Chinese
lanterns and frying, are leading "notes," I find, in the impression
of those who once knew such places well. But so far as I was
concerned this odd settlement of pleasure-squatters was a mystery
as well as a surprise, enhanced rather than mitigated by an
imaginative suggestion or so I had received from the wooden-legged
man at Shaphambury. I saw the thing as no gathering of light
hearts and gay idleness, but grimly—after the manner of poor men
poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy. To the
poor man, to the grimy workers, beauty and cleanness were absolutely
denied; out of a life of greasy dirt, of muddied desires, they
watched their happier fellows with a bitter envy and foul, tormenting
suspicions. Fancy a world in which the common people held love
to be a sort of beastliness, own sister to being drunk! . . .

There was in the old time always something cruel at the bottom of
this business of sexual love. At least that is the impression I
have brought with me across the gulf of the great Change. To succeed
in love seemed such triumph as no other success could give,
but to fail was as if one was tainted. . . .

I felt no sense of singularity that this thread of savagery should
run through these emotions of mine and become now the whole strand
of these emotions. I believed, and I think I was right in believing,
that the love of all true lovers was a sort of defiance then, that
they closed a system in each other's arms and mocked the world
without. You loved against the world, and these two loved AT me.
They had their business with one another, under the threat of a
watchful fierceness. A sword, a sharp sword, the keenest edge in
life, lay among their roses.

Whatever may be true of this for others, for me and my imagination,
at any rate, it was altogether true. I was never for dalliance, I was
never a jesting lover. I wanted fiercely; I made love impatiently.
Perhaps I had written irrelevant love-letters for that very reason;
because with this stark theme I could not play. . .

The thought of Nettie's shining form, of her shrinking bold abandon
to her easy conqueror, gave me now a body of rage that was nearly
too strong for my heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merely
physical being. I came down among the pale sand-heaps slowly toward
that queer village of careless sensuality, and now within my puny
body I was coldly sharpset for pain and death, a darkly gleaming
hate, a sword of evil, drawn.

I halted, and stood planning what I had to do.

Should I go to bungalow after bungalow until one of the two I sought
answered to my rap? But suppose some servant intervened!

Should I wait where I was—perhaps until morning—watching? And
meanwhile——

All the nearer bungalows were very still now. If I walked softly
to them, from open windows, from something seen or overheard,
I might get a clue to guide me. Should I advance circuitously,
creeping upon them, or should I walk straight to the door? It was
bright enough for her to recognize me clearly at a distance of many
paces.

The difficulty to my mind lay in this, that if I involved other
people by questions, I might at last confront my betrayers with
these others close about me, ready to snatch my weapon and seize
my hands. Besides, what names might they bear here?

"Boom!" the sound crept upon my senses, and then again it came.

I turned impatiently as one turns upon an impertinence, and beheld
a great ironclad not four miles out, steaming fast across the
dappled silver, and from its funnels sparks, intensely red, poured
out into the night. As I turned, came the hot flash of its guns,
firing seaward, and answering this, red flashes and a streaming
smoke in the line between sea and sky. So I remembered it, and I
remember myself staring at it—in a state of stupid arrest. It was
an irrelevance. What had these things to do with me?

With a shuddering hiss, a rocket from a headland beyond the village
leapt up and burst hot gold against the glare, and the sound of
the third and fourth guns reached me.