In the Days of the Comet (5 page)

Yet that night I pushed by her harshly. I answered her curtly,
left her concerned and perplexed in the passage, and slammed my
door upon her.

And for a long time I lay raging at the hardship and evil of life,
at the contempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie's
letter, at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I found
intolerable, and the things I could not mend. Over and over went
my poor little brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmill
of troubles. Nettie. Rawdon. My mother. Gabbitas. Nettie. . .

Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion. Some clock was striking
midnight. After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions.
I remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very
quickly in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again before
I was asleep.

But how my mother slept that night I do not know.

Oddly enough, I do not blame myself for behaving like this to my
mother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to
Parload. I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of the
Change, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a little
painful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something of
the sort was to be escaped under those former conditions. In that
time of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and
toil and hot passions before they had the chance of even a year or
so of clear thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous
application to some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of
thought ceased in them. They set and hardened into narrow ways.
Few women remained capable of a new idea after five and twenty,
few men after thirty-one or two. Discontent with the thing that
existed was regarded as immoral, it was certainly an annoyance, and
the only protest against it, the only effort against that universal
tendency in all human institutions to thicken and clog, to work
loosely and badly, to rust and weaken towards catastrophes, came
from the young—the crude unmerciful young. It seemed in those
days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being—that either we must
submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them, disobey them,
thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress before we
too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.

My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own
silent meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard
relationship between parents and son in those days. There appeared
no other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed,
part of the very nature of the progress of the world. We did not
think then that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, or
children honor their parents and still think for themselves. We were
angry and hasty because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisoned
and vitiated air. That deliberate animation of the intelligence
which is now the universal quality, that vigor with consideration,
that judgment with confident enterprise which shine through all
our world, were things disintegrated and unknown in the corrupting
atmosphere of our former state.

(So the first fascicle ended. I put it aside and looked for the
second.

"Well?" said the man who wrote.

"This is fiction?"

"It's my story."

"But you— Amidst this beauty— You are not this ill-conditioned,
squalidly bred lad of whom I have been reading?"

He smiled. "There intervenes a certain Change," he said. "Have I
not hinted at that?"

I hesitated upon a question, then saw the second fascicle at hand,
and picked it up.)

I CANNOT now remember (the story resumed), what interval separated
that evening on which Parload first showed me the comet—I think
I only pretended to see it then—and the Sunday afternoon I spent
at Checkshill.

Between the two there was time enough for me to give notice and
leave Rawdon's, to seek for some other situation very strenuously
in vain, to think and say many hard and violent things to my mother
and to Parload, and to pass through some phases of very profound
wretchedness. There must have been a passionate correspondence
with Nettie, but all the froth and fury of that has faded now out
of my memory. All I have clear now is that I wrote one magnificent
farewell to her, casting her off forever, and that I got in reply
a prim little note to say, that even if there was to be an end to
everything, that was no excuse for writing such things as I had done,
and then I think I wrote again in a vein I considered satirical.
To that she did not reply. That interval was at least three weeks,
and probably four, because the comet which had been on the first
occasion only a dubious speck in the sky, certainly visible only
when it was magnified, was now a great white presence, brighter
than Jupiter, and casting a shadow on its own account. It was
now actively present in the world of human thought, every one was
talking about it, every one was looking for its waxing splendor
as the sun went down—the papers, the music-halls, the hoardings,
echoed it.

Yes; the comet was already dominant before I went over to make
everything clear to Nettie. And Parload had spent two hoarded pounds
in buying himself a spectroscope, so that he could see for himself,
night after night, that mysterious, that stimulating line—the
unknown line in the green. How many times I wonder did I look at
the smudgy, quivering symbol of the unknown things that were rushing
upon us out of the inhuman void, before I rebelled? But at last I
could stand it no longer, and I reproached Parload very bitterly
for wasting his time in "astronomical dilettantism."

"Here," said I. "We're on the verge of the biggest lock-out in the
history of this countryside; here's distress and hunger coming,
here's all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed,
and you spend your time gaping at that damned silly streak of
nothing in the sky!"

Parload stared at me. "Yes, I do," he said slowly, as though it
was a new idea. "Don't I? . . . I wonder why."

"
I
want to start meetings of an evening on Howden's Waste."

"You think they'd listen?"

"They'd listen fast enough now."

"They didn't before," said Parload, looking at his pet instrument.

"There was a demonstration of unemployed at Swathinglea on Sunday.
They got to stone throwing."

Parload said nothing for a little while and I said several things.
He seemed to be considering something.

"But, after all," he said at last, with an awkward movement towards
his spectroscope, "that does signify something."

"The comet?"

"Yes."

"What can it signify? You don't want me to believe in astrology.
What does it matter what flames in the heavens—when men are starving
on earth?"

"It's—it's science."

"Science! What we want now is socialism—not science."

He still seemed reluctant to give up his comet.

"Socialism's all right," he said, "but if that thing up there WAS
to hit the earth it might matter."

"Nothing matters but human beings."

"Suppose it killed them all."

"Oh," said I, "that's Rot,"

"I wonder," said Parload, dreadfully divided in his allegiance.

He looked at the comet. He seemed on the verge of repeating his
growing information about the nearness of the paths of the earth
and comet, and all that might ensue from that. So I cut in with
something I had got out of a now forgotten writer called Ruskin,
a volcano of beautiful language and nonsensical suggestions, who
prevailed very greatly with eloquent excitable young men in those
days. Something it was about the insignificance of science and the
supreme importance of Life. Parload stood listening, half turned
towards the sky with the tips of his fingers on his spectroscope.
He seemed to come to a sudden decision.

"No. I don't agree with you, Leadford," he said. "You don't understand
about science."

Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition. I was so
used to entire possession of our talk that his brief contradiction
struck me like a blow. "Don't agree with me!" I repeated.

"No," said Parload

"But how?"

"I believe science is of more importance than socialism," he said.
"Socialism's a theory. Science—science is something more."

And that was really all he seemed to be able to say.

We embarked upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young men
used always to find so heating. Science or Socialism? It was, of
course, like arguing which is right, left handedness or a taste for
onions, it was altogether impossible opposition. But the range of
my rhetoric enabled me at last to exasperate Parload, and his mere
repudiation of my conclusions sufficed to exasperate me, and we
ended in the key of a positive quarrel. "Oh, very well!" said I.
"So long as I know where we are!"

I slammed his door as though I dynamited his house, and went raging
down the street, but I felt that he was already back at the window
worshiping his blessed line in the green, before I got round the
corner.

I had to walk for an hour or so, before I was cool enough to go
home.

And it was Parload who had first introduced me to socialism!

Recreant!

The most extraordinary things used to run through my head in those
days. I will confess that my mind ran persistently that evening upon
revolutions after the best French pattern, and I sat on a Committee
of Safety and tried backsliders. Parload was there, among the
prisoners, backsliderissimus, aware too late of the error of his
ways. His hands were tied behind his back ready for the shambles;
through the open door one heard the voice of justice, the rude
justice of the people. I was sorry, but I had to do my duty.

"If we punish those who would betray us to Kings," said I, with
a sorrowful deliberation, "how much the more must we punish those
who would give over the State to the pursuit of useless knowledge";
and so with a gloomy satisfaction sent him off to the guillotine.

"Ah, Parload! Parload! If only you'd listened to me earlier,
Parload. . . ."

None the less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy. Parload was
my only gossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and think
evil of him with no one to listen to me, evening after evening.

That was a very miserable time for me, even before my last visit
to Checkshill. My long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands.
I kept away from home all day, partly to support a fiction that
I was sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escape
the persistent question in my mother's eyes. "Why did you quarrel
with Mr. Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keep on going about with
a sullen face and risk offending IT more?" I spent most of the
morning in the newspaper-room of the public library, writing
impossible applications for impossible posts—I remember that among
other things of the sort I offered my services to a firm of private
detectives, a sinister breed of traders upon base jealousies now
happily vanished from the world, and wrote apropos of an advertisement
for "stevedores" that I did not know what the duties of a stevedore
might be, but that I was apt and willing to learn—and in the
afternoons and evenings I wandered through the strange lights and
shadows of my native valley and hated all created things. Until my
wanderings were checked by the discovery that I was wearing out my
boots.

The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!

I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a
great capacity for hatred, BUT—

There was an excuse for hate.

It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh,
and vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have
been equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me,
without resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt
obscurely and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were
intolerable. My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an
unreasonable proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed,
ill housed, ill educated and ill trained, my will was suppressed
and cramped to the pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride in
myself and no reasonable chance of putting anything right. It was
a life hardly worth living. That a large proportion of the people
about me had no better a lot, that many had a worse, does not
affect these facts. It was a life in which contentment would have
been disgraceful. If some of them were contented or resigned, so
much the worse for every one. No doubt it was hasty and foolish
of me to throw up my situation, but everything was so obviously
aimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not feel
disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as it
pained my mother and caused her anxiety.

Think of the one comprehensive fact of the lock-out!

That year was a bad year, a year of world-wide economic disorganization.
Through their want of intelligent direction the great "Trust" of
American ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded furnace
owners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any demand
for. (In those days there existed no means of estimating any need
of that sort beforehand.) They had done this without even consulting
the ironmasters of any other country. During their period of activity
they had drawn into their employment a great number of workers,
and had erected a huge productive plant. It is manifestly just that
people who do headlong stupid things of this sort should suffer,
but in the old days it was quite possible, it was customary for
the real blunderers in such disasters, to shift nearly all the
consequences of their incapacity. No one thought it wrong for a
light-witted "captain of industry" who had led his workpeople into
overproduction, into the disproportionate manufacture, that is to
say, of some particular article, to abandon and dismiss them, nor
was there anything to prevent the sudden frantic underselling of
some trade rival in order to surprise and destroy his trade, secure
his customers for one's own destined needs, and shift a portion of
one's punishment upon him. This operation of spasmodic underselling
was known as "dumping." The American ironmasters were now dumping on
the British market. The British employers were, of course, taking
their loss out of their workpeople as much as possible, but in addition
they were agitating for some legislation that would prevent—not
stupid relative excess in production, but "dumping"—not the disease,
but the consequences of the disease. The necessary knowledge to
prevent either dumping or its causes, the uncorrelated production
of commodities, did not exist, but this hardly weighed with them
at all, and in answer to their demands there had arisen a curious
party of retaliatory-protectionists who combined vague proposals
for spasmodic responses to these convulsive attacks from foreign
manufacturers, with the very evident intention of achieving
financial adventures. The dishonest and reckless elements were
indeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to the
general atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil
from the prospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of men
known as the "New Financiers," one heard frightened old-fashioned
statesmen asserting with passion that "dumping" didn't occur, or
that it was a very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody would
face and handle the rather intricate truth of the business. The
whole effect upon the mind of a cool observer was of a covey of
unsubstantial jabbering minds drifting over a series of irrational
economic cataclysms, prices and employment tumbled about like towers
in an earthquake, and amidst the shifting masses were the common
work-people going on with their lives as well as they could,
suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for anything but violent,
fruitless protests, impotent. You cannot hope now to understand
the infinite want of adjustment in the old order of things. At one
time there were people dying of actual starvation in India, while
men were burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds like the
account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a dream,
a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.