In the Days of the Comet (19 page)

The windows of the dark bungalows, one after another, leapt out,
squares of ruddy brightness that flared and flickered and became
steadily bright. Dark heads appeared looking seaward, a door opened,
and sent out a brief lane of yellow to mingle and be lost in the
comet's brightness. That brought me back to the business in hand.

"Boom! boom!" and when I looked again at the great ironclad,
a little torchlike spurt of flame wavered behind her funnels. I
could hear the throb and clangor of her straining engines. . . .

I became aware of the voices of people calling to one another in
the village. A white-robed, hooded figure, some man in a bathing
wrap, absurdly suggestive of an Arab in his burnous, came out from
one of the nearer bungalows, and stood clear and still and shadowless
in the glare.

He put his hands to shade his seaward eyes, and shouted to people
within.

The people within—MY people! My fingers tightened on my revolver.
What was this war nonsense to me? I would go round among the hummocks
with the idea of approaching the three bungalows inconspicuously
from the flank. This fight at sea might serve my purpose—except
for that, it had no interest for me at all. Boom! boom! The huge
voluminous concussions rushed past me, beat at my heart and passed.
In a moment Nettie would come out to see.

First one and then two other wrappered figures came out of the
bungalows to join the first. His arm pointed seaward, and his voice,
a full tenor, rose in explanation. I could hear some of the words.
"It's a German!" he said. "She's caught."

Some one disputed that, and there followed a little indistinct
babble of argument. I went on slowly in the circuit I had marked
out, watching these people as I went.

They shouted together with such a common intensity of direction
that I halted and looked seaward. I saw the tall fountain flung by
a shot that had just missed the great warship. A second rose still
nearer us, a third, and a fourth, and then a great uprush of dust,
a whirling cloud, leapt out of the headland whence the rocket had
come, and spread with a slow deliberation right and left. Hard on
that an enormous crash, and the man with the full voice leapt and
cried, "Hit!"

Let me see! Of course, I had to go round beyond the bungalows, and
then come up towards the group from behind.

A high-pitched woman's voice called, "Honeymooners! honeymooners!
Come out and see!"

Something gleamed in the shadow of the nearer bungalow, and
a man's voice answered from within. What he said I did not catch,
but suddenly I heard Nettie calling very distinctly, "We've been
bathing."

The man who had first come out shouted, "Don't you hear the guns?
They're fighting—not five miles from shore."

"Eh?" answered the bungalow, and a window opened.

"Out there!"

I did not hear the reply, because of the faint rustle of my own
movements. Clearly these people were all too much occupied by the
battle to look in my direction, and so I walked now straight toward
the darkness that held Nettie and the black desire of my heart.

"Look!" cried some one, and pointed skyward.

I glanced up, and behold! The sky was streaked with bright green
trails. They radiated from a point halfway between the western
horizon and the zenith, and within the shining clouds of the meteor
a streaming movement had begun, so that it seemed to be pouring
both westwardly and back toward the east, with a crackling sound, as
though the whole heaven was stippled over with phantom pistol-shots.
It seemed to me then as if the meteor was coming to help me,
descending with those thousand pistols like a curtain to fend off
this unmeaning foolishness of the sea.

"Boom!" went a gun on the big ironclad, and "boom!" and the guns
of the pursuing cruisers flashed in reply.

To glance up at that streaky, stirring light scum of the sky made
one's head swim. I stood for a moment dazed, and more than a little
giddy. I had a curious instant of purely speculative thought. Suppose,
after all, the fanatics were right, and the world WAS coming to an
end! What a score that would be for Parload!

Then it came into my head that all these things were happening to
consecrate my revenge! The war below, the heavens above, were the
thunderous garment of my deed. I heard Nettie's voice cry out not
fifty yards away, and my passion surged again. I was to return to
her amid these terrors bearing unanticipated death. I was to possess
her, with a bullet, amidst thunderings and fear. At the thought I
lifted up my voice to a shout that went unheard, and advanced now
recklessly, revolver displayed in my hand.

It was fifty yards, forty yards, thirty yards—the little group
of people, still heedless of me, was larger and more important now,
the green-shot sky and the fighting ships remoter. Some one darted
out from the bungalow, with an interrupted question, and stopped,
suddenly aware of me. It was Nettie, with some coquettish dark
wrap about her, and the green glare shining on her sweet face and
white throat. I could see her expression, stricken with dismay and
terror, at my advance, as though something had seized her by the
heart and held her still—a target for my shots.

"Boom!" came the ironclad's gunshot like a command. "Bang!" the
bullet leapt from my hand. Do you know, I did not want to shoot
her then. Indeed I did not want to shoot her then! Bang! and I
had fired again, still striding on, and—each time it seemed I had
missed.

She moved a step or so toward me, still staring, and then someone
intervened, and near beside her I saw young Verrall.

A heavy stranger, the man in the hooded bath-gown, a fat, foreign-looking
man, came out of nowhere like a shield before them. He seemed a
preposterous interruption. His face was full of astonishment and
terror. He rushed across my path with arms extended and open hands,
as one might try to stop a runaway horse. He shouted some nonsense.
He seemed to want to dissuade me, as though dissuasion had anything
to do with it now.

"Not you, you fool!" I said hoarsely. "Not you!" But he hid Nettie
nevertheless.

By an enormous effort I resisted a mechanical impulse to shoot
through his fat body. Anyhow, I knew I mustn't shoot him. For
a moment I was in doubt, then I became very active, turned aside
abruptly and dodged his pawing arm to the left, and so found two
others irresolutely in my way. I fired a third shot in the air, just
over their heads, and ran at them. They hastened left and right; I
pulled up and faced about within a yard of a foxy-faced young man
coming sideways, who seemed about to grapple me. At my resolute
halt he fell back a pace, ducked, and threw up a defensive arm,
and then I perceived the course was clear, and ahead of me, young
Verrall and Nettie—he was holding her arm to help her—running
away. "Of course!" said I.

I fired a fourth ineffectual shot, and then in an access of fury
at my misses, started out to run them down and shoot them barrel to
backbone. "These people!" I said, dismissing all these interferences.
. . . "A yard," I panted, speaking aloud to myself, "a yard! Till
then, take care, you mustn't—mustn't shoot again."

Some one pursued me, perhaps several people—I do not
know, we left them all behind. . . .

We ran. For a space I was altogether intent upon the swift monotony
of flight and pursuit. The sands were changed to a whirl of green
moonshine, the air was thunder. A luminous green haze rolled about
us. What did such things matter? We ran. Did I gain or lose? that
was the question. They ran through a gap in a broken fence that
sprang up abruptly out of nothingness and turned to the right. I
noted we were in a road. But this green mist! One seemed to plough
through it. They were fading into it, and at that thought I made
a spurt that won a dozen feet or more.

She staggered. He gripped her arm, and dragged her forward. They
doubled to the left. We were off the road again and on turf. It
felt like turf. I tripped and fell at a ditch that was somehow
full of smoke, and was up again, but now they were phantoms
half gone into the livid swirls about me. . . .

Still I ran.

On, on! I groaned with the violence of my effort. I staggered
again and swore. I felt the concussions of great guns tear past me
through the murk.

They were gone! Everything was going, but I kept on running. Once
more I stumbled. There was something about my feet that impeded
me, tall grass or heather, but I could not see what it was, only
this smoke that eddied about my knees. There was a noise and spinning
in my brain, a vain resistance to a dark green curtain that was
falling, falling, falling, fold upon fold. Everything grew darker
and darker.

I made one last frantic effort, and raised my revolver, fired my
penultimate shot at a venture, and fell headlong to the ground.
And behold! the green curtain was a black one, and the earth and
I and all things ceased to be.

I SEEMED to awaken out of a refreshing sleep.

I did not awaken with a start, but opened my eyes, and lay very
comfortably looking at a line of extraordinarily scarlet poppies
that glowed against a glowing sky. It was the sky of a magnificent
sunrise, and an archipelago of gold-beached purple islands floated in
a sea of golden green. The poppies too, swan-necked buds, blazing
corollas, translucent stout seed-vessels, stoutly upheld, had a
luminous quality, seemed wrought only from some more solid kind of
light.

I stared unwonderingly at these things for a time, and then there
rose upon my consciousness, intermingling with these, the bristling
golden green heads of growing barley.

A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished
again in my mind. Everything was very still.

Everything was as still as death.

I felt very light, full of the sense of physical well-being.
I perceived I was lying on my side in a little trampled space
in a weedy, flowering barley field, that was in some inexplicable
way saturated with light and beauty. I sat up, and remained for a
long time filled with the delight and charm of the delicate little
convolvulus that twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel that
laced the ground below.

Then that question returned. What was this place? How had I come
to be sleeping here?

I could not remember.

It perplexed me that somehow my body felt strange to me. It was
unfamiliar—I could not tell how—and the barley, and the beautiful
weeds, and the slowly developing glory of the dawn behind; all
those things partook of the same unfamiliarity. I felt as though
I was a thing in some very luminous painted window, as though this
dawn broke through me. I felt I was part of some exquisite picture
painted in light and joy.

A faint breeze bent and rustled the barley-heads, and jogged my
mind forward.

Who was I? That was a good way of beginning.

I held up my left hand and arm before me, a grubby hand, a frayed
cuff; but with a quality of painted unreality, transfigured as a
beggar might have been by Botticelli. I looked for a time steadfastly
at a beautiful pearl sleeve-link.

I remembered Willie Leadford, who had owned that arm and hand, as
though he had been some one else.

Of course! My history—its rough outline rather than the immediate
past—began to shape itself in my memory, very small, very bright
and inaccessible, like a thing watched through a microscope.
Clayton and Swathinglea returned to my mind; the slums and darkness,
Dureresque, minute and in their rich dark colors pleasing, and through
them I went towards my destiny. I sat hands on knees recalling that
queer passionate career that had ended with my futile shot into
the growing darkness of the End. The thought of that shot awoke my
emotions again.

There was something in it now, something absurd, that made me smile
pityingly.

Poor little angry, miserable creature! Poor little angry, miserable
world!

I sighed for pity, not only pity for myself, but for all the hot
hearts, the tormented brains, the straining, striving things of hope
and pain, who had found their peace at last beneath the pouring
mist and suffocation of the comet. Because certainly that world was
over and done. They were all so weak and unhappy, and I was now so
strong and so serene. For I felt sure I was dead; no one living
could have this perfect assurance of good, this strong and confident
peace. I had made an end of the fever called living. I was dead,
and it was all right, and these——?

I felt an inconsistency.

These, then, must be the barley fields of God!—the still and
silent barley fields of God, full of unfading poppy flowers whose
seeds bear peace.

It was queer to find barley fields in heaven, but no doubt there
were many surprises in store for me.

How still everything was! Peace! The peace that passeth understanding.
After all it had come to me! But, indeed, everything was very still!
No bird sang. Surely I was alone in the world! No birds sang. Yes,
and all the distant sounds of life had ceased, the lowing
of cattle, the barking of dogs. . . .

Something that was like fear beatified came into my heart. It was
all right, I knew; but to be alone! I stood up and met the hot
summons of the rising sun, hurrying towards me, as it were,
with glad tidings, over the spikes of the barley. . . .

Blinded, I made a step. My foot struck something hard, and I looked
down to discover my revolver, a blue-black thing, like a dead snake
at my feet.

For a moment that puzzled me.

Then I clean forgot about it. The wonder of the quiet took possession
of my soul. Dawn, and no birds singing!

How beautiful was the world! How beautiful, but how still! I walked
slowly through the barley towards a line of elder bushes, wayfaring
tree and bramble that made the hedge of the field. I noted as
I passed along a dead shrew mouse, as it seemed to me, among the
halms; then a still toad. I was surprised that this did not leap
aside from my footfalls, and I stooped and picked it up. Its body
was limp like life, but it made no struggle, the brightness of its
eye was veiled, it did not move in my hand.