In the Days of the Comet (26 page)

And as it was with the question of the land, so was it also
with a hundred other systems and institutions and complicated and
disingenuous factors in the life of man. They spoke of trade, and
I realized for the first time there could be buying and selling
that was no loss to any man; they spoke of industrial organization,
and one saw it under captains who sought no base advantages. The
haze of old associations, of personal entanglements and habitual
recognitions had been dispelled from every stage and process of
the social training of men. Things long hidden appeared discovered
with an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who had
awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools
and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative,
half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and
confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor
of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing but
a curious and pleasantly faded memory. "There must be a common
training of the young," said Richover; "a frank initiation. We have
not so much educated them as hidden things from them, and set traps.
And it might have been so easy—it can all be done so easily."

That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council, "It can
all be done so easily," but when they said it then, it came to my
ears with a quality of enormous refreshment and power. It can all
be done so easily, given frankness, given courage. Time was when
these platitudes had the freshness and wonder of a gospel.

In this enlarged outlook the war with the Germans—that mythical,
heroic, armed female, Germany, had vanished from men's imaginations—was
a mere exhausted episode. A truce had already been arranged
by Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences,
set aside the matter of peace as a mere question of particular
arrangements. . . . The whole scheme of the world's government had
become fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details as
in great, the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries, districts
and municipalities, counties, states, boards, and nations, the
interlacing, overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt of
little interests and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiable
multitude of lawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers lived
like fleas in a dirty old coat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies,
heated patchings up and jobbings apart, of the old order—they
flung it all on one side.

"What are the new needs?" said Melmount. "This muddle is too rotten
to handle. We're beginning again. Well, let us begin afresh."

"Let us begin afresh!" This piece of obvious common sense seemed
then to me instinct with courage, the noblest of words. My heart
went out to him as he spoke. It was, indeed, that day as vague as
it was valiant; we did not at all see the forms of what we were
thus beginning. All that we saw was the clear inevitableness
that the old order should end. . . .

And then in a little space of time mankind in halting but effectual
brotherhood was moving out to make its world anew. Those early
years, those first and second decades of the new epoch, were in
their daily detail a time of rejoicing toil; one saw chiefly one's
own share in that, and little of the whole. It is only now that I
look back at it all from these ripe years, from this high tower,
that I see the dramatic sequence of its changes, see the cruel old
confusions of the ancient time become clarified, simplified, and
dissolve and vanish away. Where is that old world now? Where is
London, that somber city of smoke and drifting darkness, full of the
deep roar and haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shining,
mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles and blackened
dome, its sad wildernesses of smut-grayed houses, its myriads of
draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks? The very
leaves upon its trees were foul with greasy black defilements.
Where is lime-white Paris, with its green and disciplined foliage,
its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly organized viciousness,
and the myriads of workers, noisily shod, streaming over the bridges
in the gray cold light of dawn. Where is New York, the high city
of clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept,
its huge buildings jostling one another and straining ever upward
for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed. Where
are its lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury, the shameful
bludgeoning bribing vice of its ill ruled underways, and all the
gaunt extravagant ugliness of its strenuous life? And where now is
Philadelphia, with its innumerable small and isolated homes, and
Chicago with its interminable blood-stained stockyards, its polyglot
underworld of furious discontent.

All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my native
Potteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives that were
caught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their labyrinths, their
forgotten and neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman,
ill-conceived industrial machinery have escaped—to life. Those
cities of growth and accident are altogether gone, never a chimney
smokes about our world to-day, and the sound of the weeping of
children who toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdened
women, the noise of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures
and all the ugly grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them,
with the utter change in our lives. As I look back into the past
I see a vast exultant dust of house-breaking and removal rise
up into the clear air that followed the hour of the green vapors,
I live again the Year of Tents, the Year of Scaffolding, and like
the triumph of a new theme in a piece of music—the great cities
of our new days arise. Come Caerlyon and Armedon, the twin cities
of lower England, with the winding summer city of the Thames between,
and I see the gaunt dirt of old Edinburgh die to rise again white
and tall beneath the shadow of her ancient hill; and Dublin too,
reshaped, returning enriched, fair, spacious, the city of rich
laughter and warm hearts, gleaming gaily in a shaft of sunlight
through the soft warm rain. I see the great cities America has
planned and made; the Golden City, with ever-ripening fruit along
its broad warm ways, and the bell-glad City of a Thousand Spires.
I see again as I have seen, the city of theaters and meeting-places,
the City of the Sunlight Bight, and the new city that is still
called Utah; and dominated by its observatory dome and the plain and
dignified lines of the university facade upon the cliff, Martenabar
the great white winter city of the upland snows. And the lesser
places, too, the townships, the quiet resting-places, villages half
forest with a brawl of streams down their streets, villages laced
with avenues of cedar, villages of garden, of roses and wonderful
flowers and the perpetual humming of bees. And through all the
world go our children, our sons the old world would have made into
servile clerks and shopmen, plough drudges and servants; our daughters
who were erst anaemic drudges, prostitutes, sluts, anxiety-racked
mothers or sere, repining failures; they go about this world glad
and brave, learning, living, doing, happy and rejoicing, brave and
free. I think of them wandering in the clear quiet of the ruins of
Rome, among the tombs of Egypt or the temples of Athens, of their
coming to Mainington and its strange happiness, to Orba and the
wonder of its white and slender tower. . . . But who can tell of
the fullness and pleasure of life, who can number all our new cities
in the world?—cities made by the loving hands of men for living
men, cities men weep to enter, so fair they are, so gracious
and so kind. . . .

Some vision surely of these things must have been vouchsafed me
as I sat there behind Melmount's couch, but now my knowledge of
accomplished things has mingled with and effaced my expectations.
Something indeed I must have foreseen—or else why was my heart so
glad?

So far I have said nothing of Nettie. I have departed widely from
my individual story. I have tried to give you the effect of the
change in relation to the general framework of human life, its
effect of swift, magnificent dawn, of an overpowering letting in
and inundation of light, and the spirit of living. In my memory all
my life before the Change has the quality of a dark passage, with
the dimmest side gleams of beauty that come and go. The rest is dull
pain and darkness. Then suddenly the walls, the bitter confines,
are smitten and vanish, and I walk, blinded, perplexed, and yet
rejoicing, in this sweet, beautiful world, in its fair incessant
variety, its satisfaction, its opportunities, exultant in this glorious
gift of life. Had I the power of music I would make a world-wide
motif swell and amplify, gather to itself this theme and that, and
rise at last to sheer ecstasy of triumph and rejoicing. It should
be all sound, all pride, all the hope of outsetting in the morning
brightness, all the glee of unexpected happenings, all the gladness
of painful effort suddenly come to its reward; it should be like
blossoms new opened and the happy play of children, like tearful,
happy mothers holding their first-born, like cities building to
the sound of music, and great ships, all hung with flags and wine
bespattered, gliding down through cheering multitudes to their first
meeting with the sea. Through it all should march Hope, confident
Hope, radiant and invincible, until at last it would be the triumph
march of Hope the conqueror, coming with trumpetings and banners
through the wide-flung gates of the world.

And then out of that luminous haze of gladness comes Nettie,
transfigured.

So she came again to me—amazing, a thing incredibly forgotten.

She comes back, and Verrall is in her company. She comes back
into my memories now, just as she came back then, rather quaintly
at first—at first not seen very clearly, a little distorted by
intervening things, seen with a doubt, as I saw her through the
slightly discolored panes of crinkled glass in the window of the
Menton post-office and grocer's shop. It was on the second day
after the Change, and I had been sending telegrams for Melmount,
who was making arrangements for his departure for Downing Street.
I saw the two of them at first as small, flawed figures. The glass
made them seem curved, and it enhanced and altered their gestures
and paces. I felt it became me to say "Peace" to them, and I went
out, to the jangling of the door-bell. At the sight of me they
stopped short, and Verrall cried with the note of one who has
sought, "Here he is!" And Nettie cried, "Willie!"

I went toward them, and all the perspectives of my reconstructed
universe altered as I did so.

I seemed to see these two for the first time; how fine they were,
how graceful and human. It was as though I had never really looked
at them before, and, indeed, always before I had beheld them through
a mist of selfish passion. They had shared the universal darkness
and dwarfing of the former time; they shared the universal exaltation
of the new. Now suddenly Nettie, and the love of Nettie, a great
passion for Nettie, lived again in me. This change which had enlarged
men's hearts had made no end to love. Indeed, it had enormously
enlarged and glorified love. She stepped into the center of that
dream of world reconstruction that filled my mind and took possession
of it all. A little wisp of hair had blown across her cheek, her
lips fell apart in that sweet smile of hers; her eyes were full
of wonder, of a welcoming scrutiny, of an infinitely courageous
friendliness.

I took her outstretched hand, and wonder overwhelmed me. "I wanted
to kill you," I said simply, trying to grasp that idea. It seemed
now like stabbing the stars, or murdering the sunlight.

"Afterward we looked for you," said Verrall; "and we could not find
you. . . . We heard another shot."

I turned my eyes to him, and Nettie's hand fell from me. It was
then I thought of how they had fallen together, and what it must
have been to have awakened in that dawn with Nettie by one's side.
I had a vision of them as I had glimpsed them last amidst the
thickening vapors, close together, hand in hand. The green hawks of
the Change spread their darkling wings above their last stumbling
paces. So they fell. And awoke—lovers together in a morning
of Paradise. Who can tell how bright the sunshine was to them,
how fair the flowers, how sweet the singing of the birds? . . .

This was the thought of my heart. But my lips were saying, "When
I awoke I threw my pistol away." Sheer blankness kept my thoughts
silent for a little while; I said empty things. "I am very glad
I did not kill you—that you are here, so fair and well. . . ."

"I am going away back to Clayton on the day after to-morrow," I
said, breaking away to explanations. "I have been writing shorthand
here for Melmount, but that is almost over now. . . ."

Neither of them said a word, and though all facts had suddenly ceased
to matter anything, I went on informatively, "He is to be taken to
Downing Street where there is a proper staff, so that there will
be no need of me. . . . Of course, you're a little perplexed at
my being with Melmount. You see I met him—by accident—directly
I recovered. I found him with a broken ankle—in that lane. . . .
I am to go now to the Four Towns to help prepare a report. So that
I am glad to see you both again"—I found a catch in my voice—"to
say good-bye to you, and wish you well."

This was after the quality of what had come into my mind when first
I saw them through the grocer's window, but it was not what I felt
and thought as I said it. I went on saying it because otherwise
there would have been a gap. It had come to me that it was going
to be hard to part from Nettie. My words sounded with an effect of
unreality. I stopped, and we stood for a moment in silence looking
at one another.