In the Days of the Comet (21 page)

"And I."

"I lost my way—I forget quite how. There was a curious green fog."
He stared at his foot, remembering. "Something to do with a comet.
I was by a hedge in the darkness. Tried to run. . . . Then I
must have pitched into this lane. Look!" He pointed with his head.
"There's a wooden rail new broken there. I must have stumbled over
that out of the field above." He scrutinized this and concluded.
"Yes. . . ."

"It was dark," I said, "and a sort of green gas came out of nothing
everywhere. That is the last I remember."

"And then you woke up? So did I. . . . In a state of great bewilderment.
Certainly there's something odd in the air. I was—I was rushing
along a road in a motor-car, very much excited and preoccupied. I
got down—-" He held out a triumphant finger. "Ironclads!"

"NOW I've got it! We'd strung our fleet from here to Texel. We'd
got right across them and the Elbe mined. We'd lost the Lord Warden.
By Jove, yes. The Lord Warden! A battleship that cost two million
pounds—and that fool Rigby said it didn't matter! Eleven hundred
men went down. . . . I remember now. We were sweeping up the North
Sea like a net, with the North Atlantic fleet waiting at the Faroes
for 'em—and not one of 'em had three days' coal! Now, was that a
dream? No! I told a lot of people as much—a meeting was it?—to
reassure them. They were warlike but extremely frightened. Queer
people—paunchy and bald like gnomes, most of them. Where? Of
course! We had it all over—a big dinner—oysters!—Colchester.
I'd been there, just to show all this raid scare was nonsense. And
I was coming back here. . . . But it doesn't seem as though that
was—recent. I suppose it was. Yes, of course!—it was. I got out
of my car at the bottom of the rise with the idea of walking along
the cliff path, because every one said one of their battleships was
being chased along the shore. That's clear! I heard their guns——"

He reflected. "Queer I should have forgotten! Did YOU hear any
guns?"

I said I had heard them.

"Was it last night?"

"Late last night. One or two in the morning."

He leant back on his hand and looked at me, smiling frankly. "Even
now," he said, "it's odd, but the whole of that seems like a silly
dream. Do you think there WAS a Lord Warden? Do you really believe
we sank all that machinery—for fun? It was a dream. And yet—it
happened."

By all the standards of the former time it would have been remarkable
that I talked quite easily and freely with so great a man. "Yes,"
I said; "that's it. One feels one has awakened—from something
more than that green gas. As though the other things also—weren't
quite real."

He knitted his brows and felt the calf of his leg thoughtfully. "I
made a speech at Colchester," he said.

I thought he was going to add something more about that, but there
lingered a habit of reticence in the man that held him for the
moment. "It is a very curious thing," he broke away; "that this
pain should be, on the whole, more interesting than disagreeable."

"You are in pain?"

"My ankle is! It's either broken or badly sprained—I think sprained;
it's very painful to move, but personally I'm not in pain. That
sort of general sickness that comes with local injury—not a trace
of it! . . ." He mused and remarked, "I was speaking at Colchester,
and saying things about the war. I begin to see it better. The
reporters—scribble, scribble. Max Sutaine, 1885. Hubbub. Compliments
about the oysters. Mm—mm. . . . What was it? About the war? A war
that must needs be long and bloody, taking toll from castle and
cottage, taking toll! . . . Rhetorical gusto! Was I drunk last
night?"

His eyebrows puckered. He had drawn up his right knee, his elbow
rested thereon and his chin on his fist. The deep-set gray eyes
beneath his thatch of eyebrow stared at unknown things. "My God!"
he murmured, "My God!" with a note of disgust. He made a big brooding
figure in the sunlight, he had an effect of more than physical
largeness; he made me feel that it became me to wait upon his thinking.
I had never met a man of this sort before; I did not know
such men existed. . . .

It is a curious thing, that I cannot now recall any ideas whatever
that I had before the Change about the personalities of statesmen,
but I doubt if ever in those days I thought of them at all as
tangible individual human beings, conceivably of some intellectual
complexity. I believe that my impression was a straightforward blend
of caricature and newspaper leader. I certainly had no respect for
them. And now without servility or any insincerity whatever, as if
it were a first-fruit of the Change, I found myself in the presence
of a human being towards whom I perceived myself inferior and
subordinate, before whom I stood without servility or any insincerity
whatever, in an attitude of respect and attention. My inflamed, my
rancid egotism—or was it after all only the chances of life?—had
never once permitted that before the Change.

He emerged from his thoughts, still with a faint perplexity in
his manner. "That speech I made last night," he said, "was damned
mischievous nonsense, you know. Nothing can alter that. Nothing. . . .
No! . . . Little fat gnomes in evening dress—gobbling oysters.
Gulp!"

It was a most natural part of the wonder of that morning that he
should adopt this incredible note of frankness, and that it should
abate nothing from my respect for him.

"Yes," he said, "you are right. It's all indisputable fact, and I
can't believe it was anything but a dream."

That memory stands out against the dark past of the world with
extraordinary clearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was full
of the calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a curious
persuasion too that there was a distant happy clamor of pealing
bells, but that I am half convinced is a mistake. Nevertheless, there
was something in the fresh bite of things, in the dewy newness of
sensation that set bells rejoicing in one's brain. And that big,
fair, pensive man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his
clumsy pose, as though indeed some Great Master of strength and
humor had made him.

And—it is so hard now to convey these things—he spoke to me,
a stranger, without reservations, carelessly, as men now speak to
men. Before those days, not only did we think badly, but what we
thought, a thousand short-sighted considerations, dignity, objective
discipline, discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of
soul, made us muffle before we told it to our fellow-men.

"It's all returning now," he said, and told me half soliloquizingly
what was in his mind.

I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out image
after image to my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragments
of speech. If I had a precise full memory of that morning I should
give it you, verbatim, minutely. But here, save for the little
sharp things that stand out, I find only blurred general impressions.
Throughout I have to make up again his half-forgotten sentences
and speeches, and be content with giving you the general effect.
But I can see and hear him now as he said, "The dream got worst at
the end. The war—a perfectly horrible business! Horrible! And it
was just like a nightmare, you couldn't do anything to escape from
it—every one was driven!"

His sense of indiscretion was gone.

He opened the war out to me—as every one sees it now. Only that
morning it was astonishing. He sat there on the ground, absurdly
forgetful of his bare and swollen foot, treating me as the humblest
accessory and as altogether an equal, talking out to himself the
great obsessions of his mind. "We could have prevented it! Any of
us who chose to speak out could have prevented it. A little decent
frankness. What was there to prevent us being frank with one another?
Their emperor—his position was a pile of ridiculous assumptions,
no doubt, but at bottom—he was a sane man." He touched off the
emperor in a few pithy words, the German press, the German people,
and our own. He put it as we should put it all now, but with a
certain heat as of a man half guilty and wholly resentful. "Their
damned little buttoned-up professors!" he cried, incidentally.
"Were there ever such men? And ours! Some of us might have taken
a firmer line. . . . If a lot of us had taken a firmer line and
squashed that nonsense early. . . ."

He lapsed into inaudible whisperings, into silence. . . .

I stood regarding him, understanding him, learning marvelously
from him. It is a fact that for the best part of the morning of
the Change I forgot Nettie and Verrall as completely as though they
were no more than characters in some novel that I had put aside to
finish at my leisure, in order that I might talk to this man.

"Eh, well," he said, waking startlingly from his thoughts. "Here we
are awakened! The thing can't go on now; all this must end. How it
ever began——! My dear boy, how did all those things ever begin?
I feel like a new Adam. . . . Do you think this has happened—generally?
Or shall we find all these gnomes and things? . . . Who cares?"

He made as if to rise, and remembered his ankle. He suggested I should
help him as far as his bungalow. There seemed nothing strange to
either of us that he should requisition my services or that I should
cheerfully obey. I helped him bandage his ankle, and we set out,
I his crutch, the two of us making up a sort of limping quadruped,
along the winding lane toward the cliffs and the sea.

His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and a
quarter from the lane. We went down to the beach margin and along
the pallid wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying,
hopping, tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, and
then, as soon as we could, sitting down. His ankle was, in fact,
broken, and he could not put it to the ground without exquisite
pain. So that it took us nearly two hours to get to the house,
and it would have taken longer if his butler-valet had not come
out to assist me. They had found motor-car and chauffeur smashed
and still at the bend of the road near the house, and had been on
that side looking for Melmount, or they would have seen us before.

For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalk
boulder, now on a timber groin, and talking one to the other, with
the frankness proper to the intercourse of men of good intent,
without reservations or aggressions, in the common, open fashion
of contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then, nevertheless,
was the rarest and strangest thing in the world. He for the most
part talked, but at some shape of a question I told him—as plainly
as I could tell of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible
to me—of my murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how the
green vapors overcame me. He watched me with grave eyes and nodded
understandingly, and afterwards he asked me brief penetrating
questions about my education, my upbringing, my work. There was a
deliberation in his manner, brief full pauses, that had in them no
element of delay.

"Yes," he said, "yes—of course. What a fool I have been!" and said
no more until we had made another of our tripod struggles along
the beach. At first I did not see the connection of my story with
that self-accusation.

"Suppose," he said, panting on the groin, "there had been such a
thing as a statesman! . . ."

He turned to me. "If one had decided all this muddle shall end! If
one had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who builds
takes site and stone, and made——" He flung out his big broad hand
at the glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, "something
to fit that setting."

He added in explanation, "Then there wouldn't have been such stories
as yours at all, you know. . . ."

"Tell me more about it," he said, "tell me all about yourself. I
feel all these things have passed away, all these things are to be
changed for ever. . . . You won't be what you have been from this
time forth. All the things you have done—don't matter now. To
us, at any rate, they don't matter at all. We have met, who were
separated in that darkness behind us. Tell me.

"Yes," he said; and I told my story straight and as frankly as I
have told it to you. "And there, where those little skerries of weed
rock run out to the ebb, beyond the headland, is Bungalow village.
What did you do with your pistol?"

"I left it lying there—among the barley."

He glanced at me from under his light eyelashes. "If others feel
like you and I," he said, "there'll be a lot of pistols left among
the barley to-day. . . ."

So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love of
brothers so plain between us it needed not a word. Our souls went
out to one another in stark good faith; never before had I had
anything but a guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man. Still I
see him, upon that wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see him
leaning against the shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at the
poor drowned sailor whose body we presently found. For we found a
newly drowned man who had just chanced to miss this great dawn in
which we rejoiced. We found him lying in a pool of water, among
brown weeds in the dark shadow of the timberings. You must not
overrate the horrors of the former days; in those days it was scarcely
more common to see death in England than it would be to-day. This
dead man was a sailor from the Rother Adler, the great German
battleship that—had we but known it—lay not four miles away along
the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn and
battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and
holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all
strong and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .

I remember that poor boy very vividly. He had been drowned during
the anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young face was quiet
and calm, but the skin of his chest had been crinkled by scalding
water and his right arm was bent queerly back. Even to this needless
death and all its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come.
Everything flowed together to significance as we stood there, I,
the ill-clad, cheaply equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his
great fur-trimmed coat—he was hot with walking but he had not
thought to remove it—leaning upon the clumsy groins and pitying
this poor victim of the war he had helped to make. "Poor lad!" he
said, "poor lad! A child we blunderers sent to death! Do look at
the quiet beauty of that face, that body—to be flung aside like
this!"