In the Days of the Comet (4 page)

Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremely
satisfactory.

Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injustice
to the creed of thought and action that Parload and I held as the
final result of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejected
with heat the most obvious qualification of its harshness. At
times in our great talks we were full of heady hopes for the near
triumph of our doctrine, more often our mood was hot resentment
at the wickedness and stupidity that delayed so plain and simple a
reconstruction of the order of the world. Then we grew malignant,
and thought of barricades and significant violence. I was very
bitter, I know, upon this night of which I am now particularly
telling, and the only face upon the hydra of Capitalism and Monopoly
that I could see at all clearly, smiled exactly as old Rawdon had
smiled when he refused to give me more than a paltry twenty shillings
a week.

I wanted intensely to salve my self-respect by some revenge upon
him, and I felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, I
might drag its carcass to the feet of Nettie, and settle my other
trouble as well. "What do you think of me NOW, Nettie?"

That at any rate comes near enough to the quality of my thinking,
then, for you to imagine how I gesticulated and spouted to Parload
that night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing in
the outline, set in the midst of that desolating night of flaming
industrialism, and my little voice with a rhetorical twang
protesting, denouncing. . . .

You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent
stuff; particularly if you are of the younger generation born since
the Change you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world
thinks clearly, thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, you
find it impossible to imagine how any other thinking could have
been possible. Let me tell you then how you can bring yourself
to something like the condition of our former state. In the first
place you must get yourself out of health by unwise drinking and
eating, and out of condition by neglecting your exercise, then you
must contrive to be worried very much and made very anxious and
uncomfortable, and then you must work very hard for four or five
days and for long hours every day at something too petty to be
interesting, too complex to be mechanical, and without any personal
significance to you whatever. This done, get straightway into
a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is already full of
foul air, and there set yourself to think out some very complicated
problem. In a very little while you will find yourself in a state
of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the obvious
presently in choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try
to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly and
lose your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper
and you will fail.

Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as
that, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that
would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it
was in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing;
there was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There
was nothing in the mind of the world anywhere but half-truths,
hasty assumptions, hallucinations, and emotions. Nothing. . . .

I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men
are beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has
undergone, but read—read the newspapers of that time. Every age
becomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes
into the past. It is the part of those who like myself have stories
of that time to tell, to supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism,
some antidote to that glamour.

Always with Parload I was chief talker.

I can look back upon myself with, I believe, an almost perfect
detachment, things have so changed that indeed now I am another
being, with scarce anything in common with that boastful foolish
youngster whose troubles I recall. I see him vulgarly theatrical,
egotistical, insincere, indeed I do not like him save with
that instinctive material sympathy that is the fruit of incessant
intimacy. Because he was myself I may be able to feel and write
understandingly about motives that will put him out of sympathy
with nearly every reader, but why should I palliate or defend his
quality?

Always, I say, I did the talking, and it would have amazed me
beyond measure if any one had told me that mine was not the greater
intelligence in these wordy encounters. Parload was a quiet youth,
and stiff and restrained in all things, while I had that supreme
gift for young men and democracies, the gift of copious expression.
Parload I diagnosed in my secret heart as a trifle dull; he posed
as pregnant quiet, I thought, and was obsessed by the congenial
notion of "scientific caution." I did not remark that while my hands
were chiefly useful for gesticulation or holding a pen Parload's
hands could do all sorts of things, and I did not think therefore
that fibers must run from those fingers to something in his brain.
Nor, though I bragged perpetually of my shorthand, of my literature,
of my indispensable share in Rawdon's business, did Parload lay
stress on the conics and calculus he "mugged" in the organized
science school. Parload is a famous man now, a great figure in
a great time, his work upon intersecting radiations has broadened
the intellectual horizon of mankind for ever, and I, who am at best
a hewer of intellectual wood, a drawer of living water, can smile,
and he can smile, to think how I patronized and posed and jabbered
over him in the darkness of those early days.

That night I was shrill and eloquent beyond measure. Rawdon was, of
course, the hub upon which I went round—Rawdon and the Rawdonesque
employer and the injustice of "wages slavery" and all the immediate
conditions of that industrial blind alley up which it seemed our
lives were thrust. But ever and again I glanced at other things.
Nettie was always there in the background of my mind, regarding
me enigmatically. It was part of my pose to Parload that I had
a romantic love-affair somewhere away beyond the sphere of our
intercourse, and that note gave a Byronic resonance to many of the
nonsensical things I produced for his astonishment.

I will not weary you with too detailed an account of the talk of a
foolish youth who was also distressed and unhappy, and whose voice
was balm for the humiliations that smarted in his eyes. Indeed,
now in many particulars I cannot disentangle this harangue of which
I tell from many of the things I may have said in other talks to
Parload. For example, I forget if it was then or before or afterwards
that, as it were by accident, I let out what might be taken as an
admission that I was addicted to drugs.

"You shouldn't do that," said Parload, suddenly. "It won't do to
poison your brains with that."

My brains, my eloquence, were to be very important assets
to our party in the coming revolution. . . .

But one thing does clearly belong to this particular conversation
I am recalling. When I started out it was quite settled in the back
of my mind that I must not leave Rawdon's. I simply wanted to abuse
my employer to Parload. But I talked myself quite out of touch
with all the cogent reasons there were for sticking to my place,
and I got home that night irrevocably committed to a spirited—not
to say a defiant—policy with my employer.

"I can't stand Rawdon's much longer," I said to Parload by way of
a flourish.

"There's hard times coming," said Parload.

"Next winter."

"Sooner. The Americans have been overproducing, and they mean to
dump. The iron trade is going to have convulsions."

"I don't care. Pot-banks are steady."

"With a corner in borax? No. I've heard—"

"What have you heard?"

"Office secrets. But it's no secret there's trouble coming to
potters. There's been borrowing and speculation. The masters don't
stick to one business as they used to do. I can tell that much.
Half the valley may be 'playing' before two months are out." Parload
delivered himself of this unusually long speech in his most pithy
and weighty manner.

"Playing" was our local euphemism for a time when there was no work
and no money for a man, a time of stagnation and dreary hungry
loafing day after day. Such interludes seemed in those days a
necessary consequence of industrial organization.

"You'd better stick to Rawdon's," said Parload.

"Ugh," said I, affecting a noble disgust.

"There'll be trouble," said Parload.

"Who cares?" said I. "Let there be trouble—the more the better.
This system has got to end, sooner or later. These capitalists with
their speculation and corners and trusts make things go from bad to
worse. Why should I cower in Rawdon's office, like a frightened dog,
while hunger walks the streets? Hunger is the master revolutionary.
When he comes we ought to turn out and salute him. Anyway, I'M
going to do so now."

"That's all very well," began Parload.

"I'm tired of it," I said. "I want to come to grips with all these
Rawdons. I think perhaps if I was hungry and savage I could talk
to hungry men—"

"There's your mother," said Parload, in his slow judicial way.

That WAS a difficulty.

I got over it by a rhetorical turn. "Why should one sacrifice
the future of the world—why should one even sacrifice one's own
future—because one's mother is totally destitute of imagination?"

It was late when I parted from Parload and came back to my own
home.

Our house stood in a highly respectable little square near
the Clayton parish church. Mr. Gabbitas, the curate of all work,
lodged on our ground floor, and upstairs there was an old lady,
Miss Holroyd, who painted flowers on china and maintained her blind
sister in an adjacent room; my mother and I lived in the basement
and slept in the attics. The front of the house was veiled by
a Virginian creeper that defied the Clayton air and clustered in
untidy dependent masses over the wooden porch.

As I came up the steps I had a glimpse of Mr. Gabbitas printing
photographs by candle light in his room. It was the chief delight
of his little life to spend his holiday abroad in the company of a
queer little snap-shot camera, and to return with a great multitude
of foggy and sinister negatives that he had made in beautiful and
interesting places. These the camera company would develop for him
on advantageous terms, and he would spend his evenings the year
through in printing from them in order to inflict copies upon his
undeserving friends. There was a long frameful of his work in the
Clayton National School, for example, inscribed in old English
lettering, "Italian Travel Pictures, by the Rev. E. B. Gabbitas."
For this it seemed he lived and traveled and had his being. It was
his only real joy. By his shaded light I could see his sharp little
nose, his little pale eyes behind his glasses, his mouth pursed up
with the endeavor of his employment.

"Hireling Liar," I muttered, for was not he also part of the system,
part of the scheme of robbery that made wages serfs of Parload and
me?—though his share in the proceedings was certainly small.

"Hireling Liar," said I, standing in the darkness, outside
even his faint glow of traveled culture. . .

My mother let me in.

She looked at me, mutely, because she knew there was something
wrong and that it was no use for her to ask what.

"Good night, mummy," said I, and kissed her a little roughly, and
lit and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase to
bed, not looking back at her.

"I've kept some supper for you, dear."

"Don't want any supper."

"But, dearie——"

"Good night, mother," and I went up and slammed my door upon her,
blew out my candle, and lay down at once upon my bed, lay there a
long time before I got up to undress.

There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother's face
irritated me unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had to
struggle against it, that I could not exist if I gave way to its
pleadings, and it hurt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyond
endurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myself
religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questions
of expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me
at all—and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion,
her only social ideas were blind submissions to the accepted
order—to laws, to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all
respectable persons in authority over us, and with her to believe
was to fear. She knew from a thousand little signs—though still at
times I went to church with her—that I was passing out of touch of
all these things that ruled her life, into some terrible unknown.
From things I said she could infer such clumsy concealments as I
made. She felt my socialism, felt my spirit in revolt against the
accepted order, felt the impotent resentments that filled me with
bitterness against all she held sacred. Yet, you know, it was not
her dear gods she sought to defend so much as me! She seemed always
to be wanting to say to me, "Dear, I know it's hard—but revolt
is harder. Don't make war on it, dear—don't! Don't do anything to
offend it. I'm sure it will hurt you if you do—it will hurt you
if you do."

She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time
had been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing
order dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It had
bent her, aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-five
she peered through cheap spectacles at my face, and saw it only
dimly, filled her with a habit of anxiety, made her hands——
Her poor dear hands! Not in the whole world now could you find a
woman with hands so grimy, so needle-worn, so misshapen by toil,
so chapped and coarsened, so evilly entreated. . . . At any rate,
there is this I can say for myself, that my bitterness against the
world and fortune was for her sake as well as for my own.