In the Days of the Comet (24 page)

Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the
lines of dusty poplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting
and sharing coffee with the French riflemen, who had hailed them
from their carefully hidden pits among the vineyards up the slopes
of Beauville. A certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who
had dropped asleep tensely ready for the rocket that should wake
the whirr and rattle of their magazines. At the sight and sound of
the stir and human confusion in the roadway below, it had come to
each man individually that he could not shoot. One conscript, at
least, has told his story of his awakening, and how curious he thought
the rifle there beside him in his pit, how he took it on his knees
to examine. Then, as his memory of its purpose grew clearer, he
dropped the thing, and stood up with a kind of joyful horror at
the crime escaped, to look more closely at the men he was to have
assassinated. "Brave types," he thought, they looked for such
a fate. The summoning rocket never flew. Below, the men did not
fall into ranks again, but sat by the roadside, or stood in groups
talking, discussing with a novel incredulity the ostensible causes
of the war. "The Emperor!" said they; and "Oh, nonsense! We're
civilized men. Get some one else for this job! . . . Where's the
coffee?"

The officers held their own horses, and talked to the men frankly,
regardless of discipline. Some Frenchmen out of the rifle-pits came
sauntering down the hill. Others stood doubtfully, rifles still in
hand. Curious faces scanned these latter. Little arguments sprang
as: "Shoot at us! Nonsense! They're respectable French citizens."
There is a picture of it all, very bright and detailed in the
morning light, in the battle gallery amidst the ruins at old Nancy,
and one sees the old-world uniform of the "soldier," the odd caps
and belts and boots, the ammunition-belt, the water-bottle, the
sort of tourist's pack the men carried, a queer elaborate equipment.
The soldiers had awakened one by one, first one and then another.
I wonder sometimes whether, perhaps, if the two armies had come
awake in an instant, the battle, by mere habit and inertia, might
not have begun. But the men who waked first, sat up, looked
about them in astonishment, had time to think a little. . . .

Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere tears.

Men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly lit
and exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible,
incapable of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy,
hopeful, unselfishly energetic, rejected altogether the supposition
that this was merely a change in the blood and material texture of
life. They denied the bodies God had given them, as once the Upper
Nile savages struck out their canine teeth, because these made
them like the beasts. They declared that this was the coming of a
spirit, and nothing else would satisfy their need for explanations.
And in a sense the Spirit came. The Great Revival sprang directly
from the Change—the last, the deepest, widest, and most enduring
of all the vast inundations of religious emotion that go by that
name.

But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors.
The former revivals were a phase of fever, this was the first
movement of health, it was altogether quieter, more intellectual,
more private, more religious than any of those others. In the old
time, and more especially in the Protestant countries where the
things of religion were outspoken, and the absence of confession
and well-trained priests made religious states of emotion explosive
and contagious, revivalism upon various scales was a normal phase
in the religious life, revivals were always going on—now a little
disturbance of consciences in a village, now an evening of emotion
in a Mission Room, now a great storm that swept a continent, and
now an organized effort that came to town with bands and banners
and handbills and motor-cars for the saving of souls. Never at
any time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any of these
movements. My nature, although passionate, was too critical (or
sceptical if you like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shy
to be drawn into these whirls; but on several occasions Parload and
I sat, scoffing, but nevertheless disturbed, in the back seats of
revivalist meetings.

I saw enough of them to understand their nature, and I am not
surprised to learn now that before the comet came, all about the
world, even among savages, even among cannibals, these same, or
at any rate closely similar, periodic upheavals went on. The world
was stifling; it was in a fever, and these phenomena were neither
more nor less than the instinctive struggle of the organism against
the ebb of its powers, the clogging of its veins, the limitation
of its life. Invariably these revivals followed periods of sordid
and restricted living. Men obeyed their base immediate motives
until the world grew unendurably bitter. Some disappointment, some
thwarting, lit up for them—darkly indeed, but yet enough for
indistinct vision—the crowded squalor, the dark inclosure of life.
A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the old-world way
of living, a realization of sin, a sense of the unworthiness of all
individual things, a desire for something comprehensive, sustaining,
something greater, for wider communions and less habitual things,
filled them. Their souls, which were shaped for wider issues, cried
out suddenly amidst the petty interests, the narrow prohibitions,
of life, "Not this! not this!" A great passion to escape from the
jealous prison of themselves, an inarticulate, stammering, weeping
passion shook them. . . .

I have seen—— I remember how once in Clayton Calvinistic
Methodist chapel I saw—his spotty fat face strangely distorted
under the flickering gas-flares—old Pallet the ironmonger repent.
He went to the form of repentance, a bench reserved for such
exhibitions, and slobbered out his sorrow and disgust for some
sexual indelicacy—he was a widower—and I can see now how his
loose fat body quivered and swayed with his grief. He poured it
out to five hundred people, from whom in common times he hid his
every thought and purpose. And it is a fact, it shows where reality
lay, that we two youngsters laughed not at all at that blubbering
grotesque, we did not even think the distant shadow of a smile.
We two sat grave and intent—perhaps wondering.

Only afterward and with an effort did we scoff. . . .

Those old-time revivals were, I say, the convulsive movements of
a body that suffocates. They are the clearest manifestations from
before the Change of a sense in all men that things were not right.
But they were too often but momentary illuminations. Their force
spent itself in inco-ordinated shouting, gesticulations, tears.
They were but flashes of outlook. Disgust of the narrow life, of
all baseness, took shape in narrowness and baseness. The quickened
soul ended the night a hypocrite; prophets disputed for precedence;
seductions, it is altogether indisputable, were frequent among
penitents! and Ananias went home converted and returned with
a falsified gift. And it was almost universal that the converted
should be impatient and immoderate, scornful of reason and
a choice of expedients, opposed to balance, skill, and knowledge.
Incontinently full of grace, like thin old wine-skins overfilled,
they felt they must burst if once they came into contact with hard
fact and sane direction.

So the former revivals spent themselves, but the Great Revival did
not spend itself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendom
at least, the permanent expression of the Change. For many it has
taken the shape of an outright declaration that this was the Second
Advent—it is not for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion,
for nearly all it has amounted to an enduring broadening
of all the issues of life. . . .

One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by some
subtle trick of quality it summarizes the Change for me. It is the
memory of a woman's very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed
face and tear-bright eyes who went by me without speaking, rapt
in some secret purpose. I passed her when in the afternoon of the
first day, struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton to send
a telegram to my mother telling her all was well with me. Whither
this woman went I do not know, nor whence she came; I never saw her
again, and only her face, glowing with that new and luminous
resolve, stands out for me. . . .

But that expression was the world's.

AND what a strange unprecedented thing was that cabinet council at
which I was present, the council that was held two days later in
Melmount's bungalow, and which convened the conference to frame the
constitution of the World State. I was there because it was convenient
for me to stay with Melmount. I had nowhere to go particularly,
and there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankle
confined him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin his
share of the enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulers
of the world. I wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonograph
available, I went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, and
sat at his desk to write at his dictation. It is characteristic
of the odd slackness that went with the spasmodic violence of the
old epoch, that the secretary could not use shorthand and that
there was no telephone whatever in the place. Every message had
to be taken to the village post-office in that grocer's shop at
Menton, half a mile away. . . . So I sat in the back of Melmount's
room, his desk had been thrust aside, and made such memoranda as
were needed. At that time his room seemed to me the most beautifully
furnished in the world, and I could identify now the vivid cheerfulness
of the chintz of the sofa on which the great statesman lay just in
front of me, the fine rich paper, the red sealing-wax, the silver
equipage of the desk I used. I know now that my presence in that
room was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, even the
coming and going of Parker the secretary, innovations. In the old
days a cabinet council was a secret conclave, secrecy and furtiveness
were in the texture of all public life. In the old days everybody
was always keeping something back from somebody, being wary and
cunning, prevaricating, misleading—for the most part for no reason
at all. Almost unnoticed, that secrecy had dropped out of life.

I close my eyes and see those men again, hear their deliberating
voices. First I see them a little diffusely in the cold explicitness
of daylight, and then concentrated and drawn together amidst the
shadow and mystery about shaded lamps. Integral to this and very
clear is the memory of biscuit crumbs and a drop of spilt water,
that at first stood shining upon and then sank into the
green table-cloth. . . .

I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham. He came to the
bungalow a day before the others, because he was Melmount's personal
friend. Let me describe this statesman to you, this one of the
fifteen men who made the last war. He was the youngest member of
the Government, and an altogether pleasant and sunny man of forty.
He had a clear profile to his clean gray face, a smiling eye, a
friendly, careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, an easy
disabusing manner. He had the perfect quality of a man who had
fallen easily into a place prepared for him. He had the temperament
of what we used to call a philosopher—an indifferent, that is to say.
The Change had caught him at his week-end recreation, fly-fishing;
and, indeed, he said, I remember, that he recovered to find himself
with his head within a yard of the water's brim. In times of crisis
Lord Adisham invariably went fly-fishing at the week-end to keep his
mind in tone, and when there was no crisis then there was nothing
he liked so much to do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, as there
was nothing to prevent it, he fished. He came resolved, among other
things, to give up fly-fishing altogether. I was present when he
came to Melmount, and heard him say as much; and by a more naive
route it was evident that he had arrived at the same scheme of
intention as my master. I left them to talk, but afterward I came
back to take down their long telegrams to their coming colleagues.
He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as Melmount by the
Change, but his tricks of civility and irony and acceptable humor
had survived the Change, and he expressed his altered attitude,
his expanded emotions, in a quaint modification of the old-time
man-of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a trained
horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.

These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlike
anything I had expected, and I watched them intently whenever my
services were not in request. They made a peculiar class at that
time, these English politicians and statesmen, a class that has
now completely passed away. In some respects they were unlike the
statesmen of any other region of the world, and I do not find that
any really adequate account remains of them. . . . Perhaps you are
a reader of the old books. If so, you will find them rendered with
a note of hostile exaggeration by Dickens in "Bleak House," with
a mingling of gross flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, who
ruled among them accidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasing
the court, and all their assumptions are set forth, portentously,
perhaps, but truthfully, so far as people of the "permanent
official" class saw them, in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward. All
these books are still in this world and at the disposal of the
curious, and in addition the philosopher Bagehot and the picturesque
historian Macaulay give something of their method of thinking, the
novelist Thackeray skirts the seamy side of their social life, and
there are some good passages of irony, personal descriptions, and
reminiscence to be found in the "Twentieth Century Garner" from the
pens of such writers, for example, as Sidney Low. But a picture of
them as a whole is wanting. Then they were too near and too great;
now, very rapidly, they have become incomprehensible.