In the Days of the Comet (3 page)

We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most
things accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a
sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing
from our vigor, and it is hard to understand the stifled and
struggling manner in which my generation of common young men did
its thinking. To think at all about certain questions was an act
of rebellion that set one oscillating between the furtive and the
defiant. People begin to find Shelley—for all his melody—noisy
and ill conditioned now because his Anarchs have vanished, yet there
was a time when novel thought HAD to go to that tune of breaking
glass. It becomes a little difficult to imagine the yeasty state
of mind, the disposition to shout and say, "Yah!" at constituted
authority, to sustain a persistent note of provocation such as we
raw youngsters displayed. I began to read with avidity such writing
as Carlyle, Browning, and Heine have left for the perplexity
of posterity, and not only to read and admire but to imitate. My
letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended displays of
perfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology, and the
cosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they puzzled
her extremely.

I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to
envy for my own departed youth, but I should find it difficult to
maintain my case against any one who would condemn me altogether as
having been a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy indeed
and quite like my faded photograph. And when I try to recall what
exactly must have been the quality and tenor of my more sustained
efforts to write memorably to my sweetheart, I confess I shiver. . .
Yet I wish they were not all destroyed.

Her letters to me were simple enough, written in a roundish,
unformed hand and badly phrased. Her first two or three showed a
shy pleasure in the use of the word "dear," and I remember being
first puzzled and then, when I understood, delighted, because she
had written "Willie ASTHORE" under my name. "Asthore," I gathered,
meant "darling." But when the evidences of my fermentation began,
her answers were less happy.

I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled in our
silly youthful way, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited,
to Checkshill, and made it worse, and how afterward I wrote a letter
that she thought was "lovely," and mended the matter. Nor will I
tell of all our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding. Always
I was the offender and the final penitent until this last trouble
that was now beginning; and in between we had some tender near
moments, and I loved her very greatly. There was this misfortune
in the business, that in the darkness, and alone, I thought with
great intensity of her, of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweet
and delightful presence, but when I sat down to write I thought of
Shelley and Burns and myself, and other such irrelevant matters.
When one is in love, in this fermenting way, it is harder to make
love than it is when one does not love at all. And as for Nettie,
she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries. It was not
my voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . . So our letters
continued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether
she could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not
believe in Church, and then hard upon it came another note with
unexpected novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suited
to each other, we differed so in tastes and ideas, she had long
thought of releasing me from our engagement. In fact, though I really
did not apprehend it fully at the first shock, I was dismissed.
Her letter had reached me when I came home after old Rawdon's none
too civil refusal to raise my wages. On this particular evening of
which I write, therefore, I was in a state of feverish adjustment
to two new and amazing, two nearly overwhelming facts, that I was
neither indispensable to Nettie nor at Rawdon's. And to talk of
comets!

Where did I stand?

I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably
mine—the whole tradition of "true love" pointed me to that—that
for her to face about with these precise small phrases toward
abandonment, after we had kissed and whispered and come so close
in the little adventurous familiarities of the young, shocked me
profoundly. I! I! And Rawdon didn't find me indispensable either.
I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the universe and threatened
with effacement, that in some positive and emphatic way I must at
once assert myself. There was no balm in the religion I had learnt,
or in the irreligion I had adopted, for wounded self-love.

Should I fling up Rawdon's place at once and then in some extraordinary,
swift manner make the fortune of Frobisher's adjacent and closely
competitive pot-bank?

The first part of that program, at any rate, would be easy of
accomplishment, to go to Rawdon and say, "You will hear from me
again," but for the rest, Frobisher might fail me. That, however,
was a secondary issue. The predominant affair was with Nettie.
I found my mind thick-shot with flying fragments of rhetoric that
might be of service in the letter I would write her. Scorn, irony,
tenderness—what was it to be?

"Brother!" said Parload, suddenly.

"What?" said I.

"They're firing up at Bladden's iron-works, and the smoke comes
right across my bit of sky."

The interruption came just as I was ripe to discharge my thoughts
upon him.

"Parload," said I, "very likely I shall have to leave all this. Old
Rawdon won't give me a rise in my wages, and after having asked I
don't think I can stand going on upon the old terms anymore. See?
So I may have to clear out of Clayton for good and all."

That made Parload put down the opera-glass and look at me.

"It's a bad time to change just now," he said after a little pause.

Rawdon had said as much, in a less agreeable tone.

But with Parload I felt always a disposition to the heroic note.
"I'm tired," I said, "of humdrum drudgery for other men. One may
as well starve one's body out of a place as to starve one's soul
in one."

"I don't know about that altogether," began Parload, slowly. . . .

And with that we began one of our interminable conversations, one
of those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal
talks that will be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths until
the world comes to an end. The Change has not abolished that,
anyhow.

It would be an incredible feat of memory for me now to recall all
that meandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it,
though its circumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clear
picture in my mind. I posed after my manner and behaved very foolishly
no doubt, a wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his part
of the philosopher preoccupied with the deeps.

We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer's night
and talking all the more freely for that. But one thing that I
said I can remember. "I wish at times," said I, with a gesture at
the heavens, "that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed
strike this world—and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults,
loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!"

"Ah!" said Parload, and the thought seemed to hang about him.

"It could only add to the miseries of life," he said irrelevantly,
when presently I was discoursing of other things.

"What would?"

"Collision with a comet. It would only throw things back. It would
only make what was left of life more savage than it is at present."

"But why should ANYTHING be left of life?" said I. . . .

That was our style, you know, and meanwhile we walked together up
the narrow street outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanes
toward Clayton Crest and the high road.

But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days before
the Change that I forget that now all these places have been altered
beyond recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway and the
view from Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world in which I was
born and bred and made, has vanished clean away, out of space and
out of time, and wellnigh out of the imagination of all those who
are younger by a generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see,
the dark empty way between the mean houses, the dark empty way
lit by a bleary gas-lamp at the corner, you cannot feel the hard
checkered pavement under your boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit
windows here and there, and the shadows upon the ugly and often
patched and crooked blinds of the people cooped within. Nor can you
presently pass the beerhouse with its brighter gas and its queer,
screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul air and foul language
from its door, nor see the crumpled furtive figure—some rascal
child—that slinks past us down the steps.

We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting
smoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one
saw the greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares of
hawkers' barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement of
people swayed along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerant
preacher from a waste place between the houses. You cannot see these
things as I can see them, nor can you figure—unless you know the
pictures that great artist Hyde has left the world—the effect of
the great hoarding by which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp and
towering up to a sudden sharp black edge against the pallid sky.

Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in all
that vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and
paper, all the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromatic
discord; pill vendors and preachers, theaters and charities,
marvelous soaps and astonishing pickles, typewriting machines and
sewing machines, mingled in a sort of visualized clamor. And passing
that there was a muddy lane of cinders, a lane without a light,
that used its many puddles to borrow a star or so from the sky. We
splashed along unheeding as we talked.

Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-looking
sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road.
The high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse
or so, and round until all the valley in which four industrial
towns lay crowded and confluent was overlooked.

I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird
magnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The
horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were
homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of
unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave
and wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where
the iron ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the
blast furnaces were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust
from foundry, pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated
by the night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression
through the day became at sundown a mystery of deep translucent
colors, of blues and purples, of somber and vivid reds, of strange
bright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky.
Each upstart furnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itself
with flames, the dark cinder heaps began to glow with quivering
fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet of
light. The empire of the day broke into a thousand feudal baronies
of burning coal. The minor streets across the valley picked themselves
out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that brightened and mingled at
all the principal squares and crossings with the greenish pallor of
incandescent mantles and the high cold glare of the electric arc.
The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes over their
intersections, and signal stars of red and green in rectangular
constellations. The trains became articulated black serpents
breathing fire.

Moreover, high overhead, like a thing put out of reach and near
forgotten, Parload had rediscovered a realm that was ruled by
neither sun nor furnace, the universe of stars.

This was the scene of many a talk we two had held together. And
if in the daytime we went right over the crest and looked westward
there was farmland, there were parks and great mansions, the spire
of a distant cathedral, and sometimes when the weather was near
raining, the crests of remote mountains hung clearly in the sky.
Beyond the range of sight indeed, out beyond, there was Checkshill;
I felt it there always, and in the darkness more than I did by day.
Checkshill, and Nettie!

And to us two youngsters as we walked along the cinder path beside
the rutted road and argued out our perplexities, it seemed that
this ridge gave us compendiously a view of our whole world.

There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factories
and work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, ill
nourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasion
in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from day
to day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidst
their wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption,
and on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heeding
the few cottages, as overcrowded as they were picturesque, in which
the laborers festered, lived the landlords and masters who owned
pot-banks and forge and farm and mine. Far away, distant, beautiful,
irrelevant, from out of a little cluster of secondhand bookshops,
ecclesiastical residences, and the inns and incidentals of a decaying
market town, the cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful,
unemphatic spire to vague incredible skies. So it seemed to us that
the whole world was planned in those youthful first impressions.

We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry, confident
solutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of the
robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there
in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with
his scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others
were all the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt they
winked and chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling,
wickedly dressed women, and plotted further grinding for the faces
of the poor. And amidst all the squalor on the other hand, amidst
brutalities, ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously
their blameless victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at the
first glance, had found all this out, it had merely to be asserted
now with sufficient rhetoric and vehemence to change the face
of the whole world. The Working Man would arise—in the form of a
Labor Party, and with young men like Parload and myself to represent
him—and come to his own, and then——?