In the Days of the Comet (20 page)

It seems to me now that I stood holding that lifeless little creature
for some time. Then very softly I stooped down and replaced it. I
was trembling—trembling with a nameless emotion. I looked with
quickened eyes closely among the barley stems, and behold, now
everywhere I saw beetles, flies, and little creatures that did not
move, lying as they fell when the vapors overcame them; they seemed
no more than painted things. Some were novel creatures to me. I
was very unfamiliar with natural things. "My God!" I cried; "but
is it only I——?"

And then at my next movement something squealed sharply. I turned
about, but I could not see it, only I saw a little stir in a rut
and heard the diminishing rustle of the unseen creature's flight.
And at that I turned to my toad again, and its eye moved and it
stirred. And presently, with infirm and hesitating gestures, it
stretched its limbs and began to crawl away from me.

But wonder, that gentle sister of fear, had me now. I saw a little
way ahead a brown and crimson butterfly perched upon a cornflower.
I thought at first it was the breeze that stirred it, and then I
saw its wings were quivering. And even as I watched it, it started
into life, and spread itself, and fluttered into the air.

I watched it fly, a turn this way, a turn that, until suddenly it
seemed to vanish. And now, life was returning to this thing and
that on every side of me, with slow stretchings and bendings,
with twitterings, with a little start and stir. . . .

I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of these drugged,
feebly awakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a
very glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and
interlaced like splendid music. It was rich with lupin, honeysuckle,
campions, and ragged robin; bed straw, hops, and wild clematis
twined and hung among its branches, and all along its ditch border
the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces, and chorused in
lines and masses. Never had I seen such a symphony of note-like
flowers and tendrils and leaves. And suddenly in its depths, I
heard a chirrup and the whirr of startled wings.

Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I
stood for a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the intricate
delicacy before me and marveling how richly God has made
his worlds. . . . .

"Tweedle-Tweezle," a lark had shot the stillness with his shining
thread of song; one lark, and then presently another, invisibly in
the air, making out of that blue quiet a woven cloth of gold. . . .

The earth recreated—only by the reiteration of such phrases
may I hope to give the intense freshness of that dawn. For a time
I was altogether taken up with the beautiful details of being, as
regardless of my old life of jealous passion and impatient sorrow
as though I was Adam new made. I could tell you now with infinite
particularity of the shut flowers that opened as I looked, of tendrils
and grass blades, of a blue-tit I picked up very tenderly—never
before had I remarked the great delicacy of feathers—that presently
disclosed its bright black eye and judged me, and perched, swaying
fearlessly, upon my finger, and spread unhurried wings and flew
away, and of a great ebullition of tadpoles in the ditch; like all
the things that lived beneath the water, they had passed unaltered
through the Change. Amid such incidents, I lived those first great
moments, losing for a time in the wonder of each little part the
mighty wonder of the whole.

A little path ran between hedge and barley, and along this, leisurely
and content and glad, looking at this beautiful thing and that,
moving a step and stopping, then moving on again, I came presently
to a stile, and deep below it, and overgrown, was a lane.

And on the worn oak of the stile was a round label, and on the
label these words, "Swindells' G 90 Pills."

I sat myself astraddle on the stile, not fully grasping all the
implications of these words. But they perplexed me even more than
the revolver and my dirty cuff.

About me now the birds lifted up their little hearts and sang, ever
more birds and more.

I read the label over and over again, and joined it to the fact
that I still wore my former clothes, and that my revolver had been
lying at my feet. One conclusion stared out at me. This was no new
planet, no glorious hereafter such as I had supposed. This beautiful
wonderland was the world, the same old world of my rage and death!
But at least it was like meeting a familiar house-slut, washed and
dignified, dressed in a queen's robes, worshipful and fine. . . .

It might be the old world indeed, but something new lay upon all
things, a glowing certitude of health and happiness. It might be
the old world, but the dust and fury of the old life was certainly
done. At least I had no doubt of that.

I recalled the last phases of my former life, that darkling climax
of pursuit and anger and universal darkness and the whirling green
vapors of extinction. The comet had struck the earth and made an
end to all things; of that too I was assured.

But afterward? . . .

And now?

The imaginations of my boyhood came back as speculative possibilities.
In those days I had believed firmly in the necessary advent of a
last day, a great coming out of the sky, trumpetings and fear, the
Resurrection, and the Judgment. My roving fancy now suggested to
me that this Judgment must have come and passed. That it had passed
and in some manner missed me. I was left alone here, in a swept and
garnished world (except, of course, for this label of Swindells')
to begin again perhaps. . . .

No doubt Swindells has got his deserts.

My mind ran for a time on Swindells, on the imbecile pushfulness of
that extinct creature, dealing in rubbish, covering the country-side
with lies in order to get—what had he sought?—a silly, ugly,
great house, a temper-destroying motor-car, a number of disrespectful,
abject servants; thwarted intrigues for a party-fund baronetcy as
the crest of his life, perhaps. You cannot imagine the littleness
of those former times; their naive, queer absurdities! And for
the first time in my existence I thought of these things without
bitterness. In the former days I had seen wickedness, I had
seen tragedy, but now I saw only the extraordinary foolishness of
the old life. The ludicrous side of human wealth and importance
turned itself upon me, a shining novelty, poured down upon me like
the sunrise, and engulfed me in laughter. Swindells! Swindells,
damned! My vision of Judgment became a delightful burlesque. I saw
the chuckling Angel sayer with his face veiled, and the corporeal
presence of Swindells upheld amidst the laughter of the spheres.
"Here's a thing, and a very pretty thing, and what's to be done with
this very pretty thing?" I saw a soul being drawn from a rotund,
substantial-looking body like a whelk from its shell. . . .

I laughed loudly and long. And behold! even as I laughed the keen
point of things accomplished stabbed my mirth, and I was weeping,
weeping aloud, convulsed with weeping, and the tears were pouring
down my face.

Everywhere the awakening came with the sunrise. We awakened to the
gladness of the morning; we walked dazzled in a light that was joy.
Everywhere that was so. It was always morning. It was morning
because, until the direct rays of the sun touched it, the changing
nitrogen of our atmosphere did not pass into its permanent phase,
and the sleepers lay as they had fallen. In its intermediate
state the air hung inert, incapable of producing either revival or
stupefaction, no longer green, but not yet changed to the
gas that now lives in us. . . .

To every one, I think, came some parallel to the mental states I
have already sought to describe—a wonder, an impression of joyful
novelty. There was also very commonly a certain confusion of the
intelligence, a difficulty in self-recognition. I remember clearly
as I sat on my stile that presently I had the clearest doubts of
my own identity and fell into the oddest metaphysical questionings.
"If this be I," I said, "then how is it I am no longer madly seeking
Nettie? Nettie is now the remotest thing—and all my wrongs. Why
have I suddenly passed out of all that passion? Why does
not the thought of Verrall quicken my pulses?" . . .

I was only one of many millions who that morning had the same doubts. I
suppose one knows one's self for one's self when one returns from
sleep or insensibility by the familiarity of one's bodily sensations,
and that morning all our most intimate bodily sensations were
changed. The intimate chemical processes of life were changed, its
nervous metaboly. For the fluctuating, uncertain, passion-darkened
thought and feeling of the old time came steady, full-bodied,
wholesome processes. Touch was different, sight was different, sound
and all the senses were subtler; had it not been that our thought
was steadier and fuller, I believe great multitudes of men would
have gone mad. But, as it was, we understood. The dominant impression
I would convey in this account of the Change is one of enormous
release, of a vast substantial exaltation. There was an effect, as
it were, of light-headedness that was also clear-headedness, and
the alteration in one's bodily sensations, instead of producing the
mental obfuscation, the loss of identity that was a common mental
trouble under former conditions, gave simply a new detachment from
the tumid passions and entanglements of the personal life.

In this story of my bitter, restricted youth that I have been
telling you, I have sought constantly to convey the narrowness, the
intensity, the confusion, muddle, and dusty heat of the old world.
It was quite clear to me, within an hour of my awakening, that all
that was, in some mysterious way, over and done. That, too, was the
common experience. Men stood up; they took the new air into their
lungs—a deep long breath, and the past fell from them; they could
forgive, they could disregard, they could attempt. . . . And it
was no new thing, no miracle that sets aside the former order of
the world. It was a change in material conditions, a change in the
atmosphere, that at one bound had released them. Some of them it
had released to death. . . . Indeed, man himself had changed not
at all. We knew before the Change, the meanest knew, by glowing
moments in ourselves and others, by histories and music and beautiful
things, by heroic instances and splendid stories, how fine mankind
could be, how fine almost any human being could upon occasion be;
but the poison in the air, its poverty in all the nobler elements
which made such moments rare and remarkable—all that has changed.
The air was changed, and the Spirit of Man that had drowsed and
slumbered and dreamt dull and evil things, awakened, and stood with
wonder-clean eyes, refreshed, looking again on life.

The miracle of the awakening came to me in solitude, the laughter,
and then the tears. Only after some time did I come upon another
man. Until I heard his voice calling I did not seem to feel there
were any other people in the world. All that seemed past, with
all the stresses that were past. I had come out of the individual
pit in which my shy egotism had lurked, I had overflowed to all
humanity, I had seemed to be all humanity; I had laughed at Swindells
as I could have laughed at myself, and this shout that came to me
seemed like the coming of an unexpected thought in my own mind.
But when it was repeated I answered.

"I am hurt," said the voice, and I descended into the lane forthwith,
and so came upon Melmount sitting near the ditch with his back to
me.

Some of the incidental sensory impressions of that morning bit so
deeply into my mind that I verily believe, when at last I face the
greater mysteries that lie beyond this life, when the things of
this life fade from me as the mists of the morning fade before the
sun, these irrelevant petty details will be the last to leave me,
will be the last wisps visible of that attenuating veil. I believe,
for instance, I could match the fur upon the collar of his great
motoring coat now, could paint the dull red tinge of his big
cheek with his fair eyelashes just catching the light and showing
beyond. His hat was off, his dome-shaped head, with its smooth hair
between red and extreme fairness, was bent forward in scrutiny of
his twisted foot. His back seemed enormous. And there was something
about the mere massive sight of him that filled me with liking.

"What's wrong?" said I.

"I say," he said, in his full deliberate tones, straining round
to see me and showing a profile, a well-modeled nose, a sensitive,
clumsy, big lip, known to every caricaturist in the world, "I'm in
a fix. I fell and wrenched my ankle. Where are you?"

I walked round him and stood looking at his face. I perceived he
had his gaiter and sock and boot off, the motor gauntlets had been
cast aside, and he was kneading the injured part in an exploratory
manner with his thick thumbs.

"By Jove!" I said, "you're Melmount!"

"Melmount!" He thought. "That's my name," he said, without looking
up. . . . "But it doesn't affect my ankle."

We remained silent for few moments except for a grunt of pain from
him.

"Do you know?" I asked, "what has happened to things?"

He seemed to complete his diagnosis. "It's not broken," he said.

"Do you know," I repeated, "what has happened to everything?"

"No," he said, looking up at me incuriously for the first time.

"There's some difference——"

"There's a difference." He smiled, a smile of unexpected pleasantness,
and an interest was coming into his eyes. "I've been a little
preoccupied with my own internal sensations. I remark an extraordinary
brightness about things. Is that it?"

"That's part of it. And a queer feeling, a clear-headedness——"

He surveyed me and meditated gravely. "I woke up," he said, feeling
his way in his memory.