In the Days of the Comet (8 page)

I felt like a bombshell of swearing that must presently burst with
some violence as I went on my silent way. He had so completely got
the best of our encounter.

There comes a memory, an odd intermixture of two entirely divergent
things, that stands out with the intensest vividness.

As I went across the last open meadow, following the short cut to
Checkshill station, I perceived I had two shadows.

The thing jumped into my mind and stopped its tumid flow for a
moment. I remember the intelligent detachment of my sudden interest.
I turned sharply, and stood looking at the moon and the great white
comet, that the drift of the clouds had now rather suddenly unveiled.

The comet was perhaps twenty degrees from the moon. What a wonderful
thing it looked floating there, a greenish-white apparition in
the dark blue deeps! It looked brighter than the moon because it
was smaller, but the shadow it cast, though clearer cut, was much
fainter than the moon's shadow. . . I went on noting these facts,
watching my two shadows precede me.

I am totally unable to account for the sequence of my thoughts
on this occasion. But suddenly, as if I had come on this new fact
round a corner, the comet was out of my mind again, and I was face
to face with an absolutely new idea. I wonder sometimes if the two
shadows I cast, one with a sort of feminine faintness with regard
to the other and not quite so tall, may not have suggested the
word or the thought of an assignation to my mind. All that I have
clear is that with the certitude of intuition I knew what it was
that had brought the youth in evening dress outside the shrubbery.
Of course! He had come to meet Nettie!

Once the mental process was started it took no time at all. The
day which had been full of perplexities for me, the mysterious
invisible thing that had held Nettie and myself apart, the unaccountable
strange something in her manner, was revealed and explained.

I knew now why she had looked guilty at my appearance, what had
brought her out that afternoon, why she had hurried me in, the
nature of the "book" she had run back to fetch, the reason why she
had wanted me to go back by the high-road, and why she had pitied
me. It was all in the instant clear to me.

You must imagine me a black little creature, suddenly stricken
still—for a moment standing rigid—and then again suddenly
becoming active with an impotent gesture, becoming audible with an
inarticulate cry, with two little shadows mocking my dismay, and
about this figure you must conceive a great wide space of moonlit
grass, rimmed by the looming suggestion of distant trees—trees
very low and faint and dim, and over it all the domed serenity of
that wonderful luminous night.

For a little while this realization stunned my mind. My thoughts
came to a pause, staring at my discovery. Meanwhile my feet and my
previous direction carried me through the warm darkness to Checkshill
station with its little lights, to the ticket-office window, and
so to the train.

I remember myself as it were waking up to the thing—I was alone
in one of the dingy "third-class" compartments of that time—and
the sudden nearly frantic insurgence of my rage. I stood up with the
cry of an angry animal, and smote my fist with all my strength
against the panel of wood before me. . . .

Curiously enough I have completely forgotten my mood after that
for a little while, but I know that later, for a minute perhaps, I
hung for a time out of the carriage with the door open, contemplating
a leap from the train. It was to be a dramatic leap, and then I
would go storming back to her, denounce her, overwhelm her; and I
hung, urging myself to do it. I don't remember how it was I decided
not to do this, at last, but in the end I didn't.

When the train stopped at the next station I had given up all
thoughts of going back. I was sitting in the corner of the carriage
with my bruised and wounded hand pressed under my arm, and still
insensible to its pain, trying to think out clearly a scheme of
action—action that should express the monstrous indignation that
possessed me.

"THAT comet is going to hit the earth!"

So said one of the two men who got into the train and settled down.

"Ah!" said the other man.

"They do say that it is made of gas, that comet. We sha'n't
blow up, shall us?". . .

What did it matter to me?

I was thinking of revenge—revenge against the primary conditions
of my being. I was thinking of Nettie and her lover. I was firmly
resolved he should not have her—though I had to kill them both to
prevent it. I did not care what else might happen, if only that end
was ensured. All my thwarted passions had turned to rage. I would
have accepted eternal torment that night without a second thought,
to be certain of revenge. A hundred possibilities of action, a
hundred stormy situations, a whirl of violent schemes, chased one
another through my shamed, exasperated mind. The sole prospect I
could endure was of some gigantic, inexorably cruel vindication of
my humiliated self.

And Nettie? I loved Nettie still, but now with the intensest
jealousy, with the keen, unmeasuring hatred of wounded pride, and
baffled, passionate desire.

As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest—for my shilling and
a penny only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-Mile
Stone, and thence I had to walk over the hill—I remember very
vividly a little man with a shrill voice who was preaching under
a gas-lamp against a hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday evening
loafers. He was a short man, bald, with a little fair curly beard
and hair and watery blue eyes, and he was preaching that the end
of the world drew near.

I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet with
the end of the world. He had got that jumbled up with international
politics and prophecies from the Book of Daniel.

I stopped to hear him only for a moment or so. I do not think I
should have halted at all but his crowd blocked my path, and the
sight of his queer wild expression, the gesture of his upward-pointing
finger, held me.

"There is the end of all your Sins and Follies," he bawled. "There!
There is the Star of Judgments, the Judgments of the most High
God! It is appointed unto all men to die—unto all men to die"—his
voice changed to a curious flat chant—"and after death, the
Judgment! The Judgment!"

I pushed and threaded my way through the bystanders and went on,
and his curious harsh flat voice pursued me. I went on with the
thoughts that had occupied me before—where I could buy a revolver,
and how I might master its use—and probably I should have forgotten
all about him had he not taken a part in the hideous dream that
ended the little sleep I had that night. For the most part I lay
awake thinking of Nettie and her lover.

Then came three strange days—three days that seem now to have been
wholly concentrated upon one business.

This dominant business was the purchase of my revolver. I held
myself resolutely to the idea that I must either restore myself by
some extraordinary act of vigor and violence in Nettie's eyes or I
must kill her. I would not let myself fall away from that. I felt
that if I let this matter pass, my last shred of pride and honor
would pass with it, that for the rest of my life I should never
deserve the slightest respect or any woman's love. Pride kept me
to my purpose between my gusts of passion.

Yet it was not easy to buy that revolver.

I had a kind of shyness of the moment when I should have to face
the shopman, and I was particularly anxious to have a story ready
if he should see fit to ask questions why I bought such a thing.
I determined to say I was going to Texas, and I thought it might
prove useful there. Texas in those days had the reputation of a
wild lawless land. As I knew nothing of caliber or impact, I wanted
also to be able to ask with a steady face at what distance a man
or woman could be killed by the weapon that might be offered me.
I was pretty cool-headed in relation to such practical aspects of
my affair. I had some little difficulty in finding a gunsmith. In
Clayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth in a cycle shop,
but the only revolvers these people had impressed me as being too
small and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop window in
the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice, a
reasonably clumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed "As used
in the American army."

I had drawn out my balance from the savings bank, matter of two
pounds and more, to make this purchase, and I found it at last
a very easy transaction. The pawnbroker told me where I could get
ammunition, and I went home that night with bulging pockets, an
armed man.

The purchase of my revolver was, I say, the chief business of
those days, but you must not think I was so intent upon it as to
be insensible to the stirring things that were happening in the
streets through which I went seeking the means to effect my purpose.
They were full of murmurings: the whole region of the Four Towns
scowled lowering from its narrow doors. The ordinary healthy flow
of people going to work, people going about their business, was
chilled and checked. Numbers of men stood about the streets in knots
and groups, as corpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels in
the opening stages of inflammation. The woman looked haggard and
worried. The ironworkers had refused the proposed reduction of
their wages, and the lockout had begun. They were already at "play."
The Conciliation Board was doing its best to keep the coal-miners
and masters from a breach, but young Lord Redcar, the greatest of
our coal owners and landlord of all Swathinglea and half Clayton, was
taking a fine upstanding attitude that made the breach inevitable.
He was a handsome young man, a gallant young man; his pride revolted
at the idea of being dictated to by a "lot of bally miners," and
he meant, he said, to make a fight for it. The world had treated
him sumptuously from his earliest years; the shares in the common
stock of five thousand people had gone to pay for his handsome
upbringing, and large, romantic, expensive ambitions filled
his generously nurtured mind. He had early distinguished himself
at Oxford by his scornful attitude towards democracy. There was
something that appealed to the imagination in his fine antagonism
to the crowd—on the one hand, was the brilliant young nobleman,
picturesquely alone; on the other, the ugly, inexpressive multitude,
dressed inelegantly in shop-clothes, under-educated, under-fed,
envious, base, and with a wicked disinclination for work and a wicked
appetite for the good things it could so rarely get. For common
imaginative purposes one left out the policeman from the design,
the stalwart policeman protecting his lordship, and ignored the
fact that while Lord Redcar had his hands immediately and legally
on the workman's shelter and bread, they could touch him to the
skin only by some violent breach of the law.

He lived at Lowchester House, five miles or so beyond Checkshill;
but partly to show how little he cared for his antagonists, and
partly no doubt to keep himself in touch with the negotiations that
were still going on, he was visible almost every day in and about
the Four Towns, driving that big motor car of his that could take
him sixty miles an hour. The English passion for fair play one
might have thought sufficient to rob this bold procedure of any
dangerous possibilities, but he did not go altogether free from
insult, and on one occasion at least an intoxicated Irish
woman shook her fist at him. . . .

A dark, quiet crowd, that was greater each day, a crowd more than
half women, brooded as a cloud will sometimes brood permanently upon
a mountain crest, in the market-place outside the Clayton
Town Hall, where the conference was held. . . .

I consider myself justified in regarding Lord Redcar's passing
automobile with a special animosity because of the leaks in our
roof.

We held our little house on lease; the owner was a mean, saving
old man named Pettigrew, who lived in a villa adorned with plaster
images of dogs and goats, at Overcastle, and in spite of our specific
agreement, he would do no repairs for us at all. He rested secure
in my mother's timidity. Once, long ago, she had been behind-hand
with her rent, with half of her quarter's rent, and he had extended
the days of grace a month; her sense that some day she might need
the same mercy again made her his abject slave. She was afraid even
to ask that he should cause the roof to be mended for fear he might
take offence. But one night the rain poured in on her bed and gave
her a cold, and stained and soaked her poor old patchwork counterpane.
Then she got me to compose an excessively polite letter to old
Pettigrew, begging him as a favor to perform his legal obligations.
It is part of the general imbecility of those days that such one-sided
law as existed was a profound mystery to the common people, its
provisions impossible to ascertain, its machinery impossible to set
in motion. Instead of the clearly written code, the lucid statements
of rules and principles that are now at the service of every one,
the law was the muddle secret of the legal profession. Poor people,
overworked people, had constantly to submit to petty wrongs because
of the intolerable uncertainty not only of law but of cost, and of
the demands upon time and energy, proceedings might make. There
was indeed no justice for any one too poor to command a good
solicitor's deference and loyalty; there was nothing but rough
police protection and the magistrate's grudging or eccentric advice
for the mass of the population. The civil law, in particular, was
a mysterious upper-class weapon, and I can imagine no injustice that
would have been sufficient to induce my poor old mother to appeal
to it.