In the Days of the Comet (9 page)

All this begins to sound incredible. I can only assure you that it
was so.

But I, when I learned that old Pettigrew had been down to tell my
mother all about his rheumatism, to inspect the roof, and to allege
that nothing was needed, gave way to my most frequent emotion in
those days, a burning indignation, and took the matter into my own
hands. I wrote and asked him, with a withering air of technicality,
to have the roof repaired "as per agreement," and added, "if not
done in one week from now we shall be obliged to take proceedings."
I had not mentioned this high line of conduct to my mother at first,
and so when old Pettigrew came down in a state of great agitation
with my letter in his hand, she was almost equally agitated.

"How could you write to old Mr. Pettigrew like that?" she asked
me.

I said that old Pettigrew was a shameful old rascal, or words to
that effect, and I am afraid I behaved in a very undutiful way to
her when she said that she had settled everything with him—she
wouldn't say how, but I could guess well enough—and that I was
to promise her, promise her faithfully, to do nothing more in the
matter. I wouldn't promise her.

And—having nothing better to employ me then—I presently went
raging to old Pettigrew in order to put the whole thing before him
in what I considered the proper light. Old Pettigrew evaded my
illumination; he saw me coming up his front steps—I can still see
his queer old nose and the crinkled brow over his eye and the little
wisp of gray hair that showed over the corner of his window-blind—and
he instructed his servant to put up the chain when she answered
the door, and to tell me that he would not see me. So I had to fall
back upon my pen.

Then it was, as I had no idea what were the proper "proceedings"
to take, the brilliant idea occurred to me of appealing to Lord
Redcar as the ground landlord, and, as it were, our feudal chief,
and pointing out to him that his security for his rent was depreciating
in old Pettigrew's hands. I added some general observations on
leaseholds, the taxation of ground rents, and the private ownership
of the soil. And Lord Redcar, whose spirit revolted at democracy,
and who cultivated a pert humiliating manner with his inferiors to
show as much, earned my distinguished hatred for ever by causing
his secretary to present his compliments to me, and his request
that I would mind my own business and leave him to manage his. At
which I was so greatly enraged that I first tore this note into
minute innumerable pieces, and then dashed it dramatically all over
the floor of my room—from which, to keep my mother from the job,
I afterward had to pick it up laboriously on all-fours.

I was still meditating a tremendous retort, an indictment of all
Lord Redcar's class, their manners, morals, economic and political
crimes, when my trouble with Nettie arose to swamp all minor
troubles. Yet, not so completely but that I snarled aloud when his
lordship's motor-car whizzed by me, as I went about upon my long
meandering quest for a weapon. And I discovered after a time that
my mother had bruised her knee and was lame. Fearing to irritate
me by bringing the thing before me again, she had set herself to
move her bed out of the way of the drip without my help, and she
had knocked her knee. All her poor furnishings, I discovered, were
cowering now close to the peeling bedroom walls; there had come a
vast discoloration of the ceiling, and a washing-tub was
in occupation of the middle of her chamber. . . .

It is necessary that I should set these things before you, should
give the key of inconvenience and uneasiness in which all things
were arranged, should suggest the breath of trouble that stirred
along the hot summer streets, the anxiety about the strike, the
rumors and indignations, the gatherings and meetings, the increasing
gravity of the policemen's faces, the combative headlines of the
local papers, the knots of picketers who scrutinized any one who
passed near the silent, smokeless forges, but in my mind, you must
understand, such impressions came and went irregularly; they made
a moving background, changing undertones, to my preoccupation by
that darkly shaping purpose to which a revolver was so imperative
an essential.

Along the darkling streets, amidst the sullen crowds, the thought
of Nettie, my Nettie, and her gentleman lover made ever a vivid
inflammatory spot of purpose in my brain.

It was three days after this—on Wednesday, that is to say—that
the first of those sinister outbreaks occurred that ended in the
bloody affair of Peacock Grove and the flooding out of the entire
line of the Swathinglea collieries. It was the only one of these
disturbances I was destined to see, and at most a mere trivial
preliminary of that struggle.

The accounts that have been written of this affair vary very widely.
To read them is to realize the extraordinary carelessness of truth
that dishonored the press of those latter days. In my bureau I
have several files of the daily papers of the old time—I collected
them, as a matter of fact—and three or four of about that date I
have just this moment taken out and looked through to refresh my
impression of what I saw. They lie before me—queer, shriveled,
incredible things; the cheap paper has already become brittle and
brown and split along the creases, the ink faded or smeared, and I
have to handle them with the utmost care when I glance among their
raging headlines. As I sit here in this serene place, their quality
throughout, their arrangement, their tone, their arguments and
exhortations, read as though they came from drugged and drunken men.
They give one the effect of faded bawling, of screams and shouts
heard faintly in a little gramophone. . . . It is only on Monday
I find, and buried deep below the war news, that these publications
contain any intimation that unusual happenings were forward in
Clayton and Swathinglea.

What I saw was towards evening. I had been learning to shoot with
my new possession. I had walked out with it four or five miles
across a patch of moorland and down to a secluded little coppice
full of blue-bells, halfway along the high-road between Leet and
Stafford. Here I had spent the afternoon, experimenting and practising
with careful deliberation and grim persistence. I had brought an
old kite-frame of cane with me, that folded and unfolded, and each
shot-hole I made I marked and numbered to compare with my other
endeavors. At last I was satisfied that I could hit a playing-card
at thirty paces nine times out of ten; the light was getting too
bad for me to see my penciled bull's-eye, and in that state of
quiet moodiness that sometimes comes with hunger to passionate men,
I returned by the way of Swathinglea towards my home.

The road I followed came down between banks of wretched-looking
working-men's houses, in close-packed rows on either side, and took
upon itself the role of Swathinglea High Street, where, at a lamp
and a pillar-box, the steam-trams began. So far that dirty hot way
had been unusually quiet and empty, but beyond the corner, where
the first group of beershops clustered, it became populous. It was
very quiet still, even the children were a little inactive, but
there were a lot of people standing dispersedly in little groups,
and with a general direction towards the gates of the Bantock Burden
coalpit.

The place was being picketed, although at that time the miners
were still nominally at work, and the conferences between masters
and men still in session at Clayton Town Hall. But one of the men
employed at the Bantock Burden pit, Jack Briscoe, was a socialist,
and he had distinguished himself by a violent letter upon the crisis
to the leading socialistic paper in England, The Clarion, in which
he had adventured among the motives of Lord Redcar. The publication
of this had been followed by instant dismissal. As Lord Redcar wrote
a day or so later to the Times—I have that Times, I have all the
London papers of the last month before the Change—

"The man was paid off and kicked out. Any self-respecting employer
would do the same." The thing had happened overnight, and the men
did not at once take a clear line upon what was, after all, a very
intricate and debatable occasion. But they came out in a sort of
semiofficial strike from all Lord Redcar's collieries beyond the
canal that besets Swathinglea. They did so without formal notice,
committing a breach of contract by this sudden cessation. But in
the long labor struggles of the old days the workers were constantly
putting themselves in the wrong and committing illegalities
through that overpowering craving for dramatic promptness natural
to uneducated minds.

All the men had not come out of the Bantock Burden pit. Something
was wrong there, an indecision if nothing else; the mine was still
working, and there was a rumor that men from Durham had been held
in readiness by Lord Redcar, and were already in the mine. Now, it
is absolutely impossible to ascertain certainly how things stood at
that time. The newspapers say this and that, but nothing trustworthy
remains.

I believe I should have gone striding athwart the dark stage of
that stagnant industrial drama without asking a question, if Lord
Redcar had not chanced to come upon the scene about the same time
as myself and incontinently end its stagnation.

He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put
up the best fight they had ever had, and he had been active all
that afternoon in meeting the quarrel half way, and preparing as
conspicuously as possible for the scratch force of "blacklegs"—as
we called them—who were, he said and we believed, to replace the
strikers in his pits.

I was an eye-witness of the whole of the affair outside the Bantock
Burden pit, and—I do not know what happened.

Picture to yourself how the thing came to me.

I was descending a steep, cobbled, excavated road between banked-up
footways, perhaps six feet high, upon which, in a monotonous
series, opened the living room doors of rows of dark, low cottages.
The perspective of squat blue slate roofs and clustering chimneys
drifted downward towards the irregular open space before the
colliery—a space covered with coaly, wheel-scarred mud, with a
patch of weedy dump to the left and the colliery gates to the right.
Beyond, the High Street with shops resumed again in good earnest
and went on, and the lines of the steam-tramway that started out
from before my feet, and were here shining and acutely visible
with reflected skylight and here lost in a shadow, took up for one
acute moment the greasy yellow irradiation of a newly lit gaslamp
as they vanished round the bend. Beyond, spread a darkling marsh
of homes, an infinitude of little smoking hovels, and emergent,
meager churches, public-houses, board schools, and other buildings
amidst the prevailing chimneys of Swathinglea. To the right, very
clear and relatively high, the Bantock Burden pit-mouth was marked
by a gaunt lattice bearing a great black wheel, very sharp and
distinct in the twilight, and beyond, in an irregular perspective,
were others following the lie of the seams. The general effect,
as one came down the hill, was of a dark compressed life beneath
a very high and wide and luminous evening sky, against which these
pit-wheels rose. And ruling the calm spaciousness of that heaven
was the great comet, now green-white, and wonderful for all who
had eyes to see.

The fading afterglow of the sunset threw up all the contours and
skyline to the west, and the comet rose eastward out of the pouring
tumult of smoke from Bladden's forges. The moon had still to rise.

By this time the comet had begun to assume the cloudlike form still
familiar through the medium of a thousand photographs and sketches.
At first it had been an almost telescopic speck; it had brightened
to the dimensions of the greatest star in the heavens; it had
still grown, hour by hour, in its incredibly swift, its noiseless
and inevitable rush upon our earth, until it had equaled and surpassed
the moon. Now it was the most splendid thing this sky of earth has
ever held. I have never seen a photograph that gave a proper idea
of it. Never at any time did it assume the conventional tailed
outline, comets are supposed to have. Astronomers talked of its
double tail, one preceding it and one trailing behind it, but these
were foreshortened to nothing, so that it had rather the form of a
bellying puff of luminous smoke with an intenser, brighter heart.
It rose a hot yellow color, and only began to show its distinctive
greenness when it was clear of the mists of the evening.

It compelled attention for a space. For all my earthly concentration of
mind, I could but stare at it for a moment with a vague anticipation
that, after all, in some way so strange and glorious an object
must have significance, could not possibly be a matter of absolute
indifference to the scheme and values of my life.

But how?

I thought of Parload. I thought of the panic and uneasiness that
was spreading in this very matter, and the assurances of scientific
men that the thing weighed so little—at the utmost a few hundred
tons of thinly diffused gas and dust—that even were it to smite
this earth fully, nothing could possibly ensue. And, after all,
said I, what earthly significance has any one found in the stars?

Then, as one still descended, the houses and buildings rose up,
the presence of those watching groups of people, the tension of
the situation; and one forgot the sky.

Preoccupied with myself and with my dark dream about Nettie and my
honor, I threaded my course through the stagnating threat of this
gathering, and was caught unawares, when suddenly the whole
scene flashed into drama. . . .

The attention of every one swung round with an irresistible magnetism
towards the High Street, and caught me as a rush of waters might
catch a wisp of hay. Abruptly the whole crowd was sounding one note.
It was not a word, it was a sound that mingled threat and protest,
something between a prolonged "Ah!" and "Ugh!" Then with a hoarse
intensity of anger came a low heavy booing, "Boo! boo—oo!" a note
stupidly expressive of animal savagery. "Toot, toot!" said Lord
Redcar's automobile in ridiculous repartee. "Toot, toot!" One heard
it whizzing and throbbing as the crowd obliged it to slow down.