In the Days of the Comet

H >> H. G. Wells >> In the Days of the Comet


I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow
on the plush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs,
pipes, and ash-trays that adorned it. What was it I had to think
out before I went to the station?

Of course! My mind made a queer little reluctant leap--it felt like
being forced to leap over a bottomless chasm--and alighted upon the
sovereigns that were just disappearing again as Mr. Gabbitas shut
his drawer.

"I won't interrupt your talk further," said Miss Ramell, receding
doorward.

Mr. Gabbitas played round her politely, and opened the door for her
and conducted her into the passage, and for a moment or so I had
the fullest sense of proximity to those--it seemed to me
there must be ten or twelve--sovereigns. . . .

The front door closed and he returned. My chance of escape had
gone.



Section 4

"I MUST be going," I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to
get away out of that room.

"My dear chap!" he insisted, "I can't think of it. Surely--there's
nothing to call you away." Then with an evident desire to shift the
venue of our talk, he asked, "You never told me what you thought
of Burble's little book."

I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry
with him. It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer
and qualify my opinions to him. Why should I pretend a feeling
of intellectual and social inferiority toward him. He asked what
I thought of Burble. I resolved to tell him--if necessary with
arrogance. Then perhaps he would release me. I did not sit down
again, but stood by the corner of the fireplace.

"That was the little book you lent me last summer?" I said.

"He reasons closely, eh?" he said, and indicated the armchair with
a flat hand, and beamed persuasively.

I remained standing. "I didn't think much of his reasoning powers,"
I said.

"He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had."

"That may be. But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,"
said I.

"You mean?"

"That he's wrong. I don't think he proves his case. I don't think
Christianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender he is.
His reasoning's--Rot."

Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and propitiation
vanished from his manner. His eyes and mouth were round, his face
seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.

"I'm sorry you think that," he said at last, with a catch in his
breath.

He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a step
or two toward the window and turned. "I suppose you will admit--" he
began, with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension.
. . . .

I will not tell you of his arguments or mine. You will find if
you care to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book
museums, the shriveled cheap publications--the publications of the
Rationalist Press Association, for example--on which my arguments
were based. Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up with
them and indistinguishable, are the endless "Replies" of orthodoxy,
like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench. All those disputes
of our fathers, and they were sometimes furious disputes, have
gone now beyond the range of comprehension. You younger people, I
know, read them with impatient perplexity. You cannot understand
how sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at all
in most of these controversies. All the old methods of systematic
thinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have
followed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin
magic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable. You can
no more understand our theological passions than you can understand
the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only
by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because
they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from
a day's expedition because he had met three crows. Even I, who have
been through it all, recall our controversies now with something
near incredulity.

Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the
old time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced,
incredible Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements. I am
inclined to say that neither believers nor unbelievers had faith as
we understand it--they had insufficient intellectual power. They
could not trust unless they had something to see and touch and
say, like their barbarous ancestors who could not make a bargain
without exchange of tokens. If they no longer worshipped stocks and
stones, or eked out their needs with pilgrimages and images, they
still held fiercely to audible images, to printed words and formulae.

But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?

Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of
God and Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side.
And on the whole--from the impartial perspective of my three and
seventy years--I adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that of
the Rev. Gabbitas was altogether worse.

Little pink spots came into his cheeks, a squealing note into his
voice. We interrupted each other more and more rudely. We invented
facts and appealed to authorities whose names I mispronounced;
and, finding Gabbitas shy of the higher criticism and the Germans,
I used the names of Karl Marx and Engels as Bible exegetes with no
little effect. A silly wrangle! a preposterous wrangle!--you must
imagine our talk becoming louder, with a developing quarrelsome
note--my mother no doubt hovering on the staircase and listening
in alarm as who should say, "My dear, don't offend it! Oh, don't
offend it! Mr. Gabbitas enjoys its friendship. Try to think whatever
Mr. Gabbitas says"--though we still kept in touch with a pretence
of mutual deference. The ethical superiority of Christianity to
all other religions came to the fore--I know not how. We dealt with
the matter in bold, imaginative generalizations, because of the
insufficiency of our historical knowledge. I was moved to denounce
Christianity as the ethic of slaves, and declare myself a disciple
of a German writer of no little vogue in those days, named Nietzsche.

For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquainted
with the works of the master. Indeed, all I knew of him had come
to me through a two-column article in The Clarion for the previous
week. . . . But the Rev. Gabbitas did not read The Clarion.

I am, I know, putting a strain upon your credulity when I tell you
that I now have little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutely
ignorant even of the name of Nietzsche, although that writer presented
a separate and distinct attitude of attack upon the faith that was
in the reverend gentleman's keeping.

"I'm a disciple of Nietzsche," said I, with an air of extensive
explanation.

He shied away so awkwardly at the name that I repeated it at once.

"But do you know what Nietzsche says?" I pressed him viciously.

"He has certainly been adequately answered," said he, still trying
to carry it off.

"Who by?" I rapped out hotly. "Tell me that!" and became mercilessly
expectant.



Section 5

A happy accident relieved Mr. Gabbitas from the embarrassment
of that challenge, and carried me another step along my course of
personal disaster.

It came on the heels of my question in the form of a clatter of
horses without, and the gride and cessation of wheels. I glimpsed
a straw-hatted coachman and a pair of grays. It seemed an incredibly
magnificent carriage for Clayton.

"Eh!" said the Rev. Gabbitas, going to the window. "Why, it's old
Mrs. Verrall! It's old Mrs. Verrall. Really! What CAN she want with
me?"

He turned to me, and the flush of controversy had passed and his
face shone like the sun. It was not every day, I perceived, that
Mrs. Verrall came to see him.

"I get so many interruptions," he said, almost grinning. "You must
excuse me a minute! Then--then I'll tell you about that fellow.
But don't go. I pray you don't go. I can assure you. . . . MOST
interesting."

He went out of the room waving vague prohibitory gestures.

"I MUST go," I cried after him.

"No, no, no!" in the passage. "I've got your answer," I think it
was he added, and "quite mistaken;" and I saw him running down the
steps to talk to the old lady.

I swore. I made three steps to the window, and this brought me
within a yard of that accursed drawer.

I glanced at it, and then at that old woman who was so absolutely
powerful, and instantly her son and Nettie's face were flaming in
my brain. The Stuarts had, no doubt, already accepted accomplished
facts. And I too--

What was I doing here?

What was I doing here while judgment escaped me?

I woke up. I was injected with energy. I took one reassuring look
at the curate's obsequious back, at the old lady's projected nose
and quivering hand, and then with swift, clean movements I had the
little drawer open, four sovereigns in my pocket, and the drawer
shut again. Then again at the window--they were still talking.

That was all right. He might not look in that drawer for hours. I
glanced at his clock. Twenty minutes still before the Birmingham
train. Time to buy a pair of boots and get away. But how I was to
get to the station?

I went out boldly into the passage, and took my hat and stick. . . .
Walk past him?

Yes. That was all right! He could not argue with me while so
important a person engaged him. . . . I came boldly down the steps.

"I want a list made, Mr. Gabbitas, of all the really DESERVING
cases," old Mrs. Verrall was saying.

It is curious, but it did not occur to me that here was a mother
whose son I was going to kill. I did not see her in that aspect
at all. Instead, I was possessed by a realization of the blazing
imbecility of a social system that gave this palsied old woman
the power to give or withhold the urgent necessities of life from
hundreds of her fellow-creatures just according to her poor, foolish
old fancies of desert.

"We could make a PROVISIONAL list of that sort," he was saying,
and glanced round with a preoccupied expression at me.

"I MUST go," I said at his flash of inquiry, and added, "I'll be
back in twenty minutes," and went on my way. He turned again to
his patroness as though he forgot me on the instant. Perhaps after
all he was not sorry.

I felt extraordinarily cool and capable, exhilarated, if anything,
by this prompt, effectual theft. After all, my great determination
would achieve itself. I was no longer oppressed by a sense
of obstacles, I felt I could grasp accidents and turn them to
my advantage. I would go now down Hacker Street to the little
shoemaker's--get a sound, good pair of boots--ten minutes--and then to
the railway-station--five minutes more--and off! I felt as efficient
and non-moral as if I was Nietzsche's Over-man already come. It did
not occur to me that the curate's clock might have a considerable
margin of error.



Section 6

I missed the train.

Partly that was because the curate's clock was slow, and partly
it was due to the commercial obstinacy of the shoemaker, who would
try on another pair after I had declared my time was up. I bought
the final pair however, gave him a wrong address for the return of
the old ones, and only ceased to feel like the Nietzschean Over-man,
when I saw the train running out of the station.

Even then I did not lose my head. It occurred to me almost at once
that, in the event of a prompt pursuit, there would be a great
advantage in not taking a train from Clayton; that, indeed, to have
done so would have been an error from which only luck had saved
me. As it was, I had already been very indiscreet in my inquiries
about Shaphambury; for once on the scent the clerk could not fail
to remember me. Now the chances were against his coming into the
case. I did not go into the station therefore at all, I made no
demonstration of having missed the train, but walked quietly past,
down the road, crossed the iron footbridge, and took the way back
circuitously by White's brickfields and the allotments to the way
over Clayton Crest to Two-Mile Stone, where I calculated I should
have an ample margin for the 6.13 train.

I was not very greatly excited or alarmed then. Suppose, I reasoned,
that by some accident the curate goes to that drawer at once: will
he be certain to miss four out of ten or eleven sovereigns? If he
does, will he at once think I have taken them? If he does, will
he act at once or wait for my return? If he acts at once, will he
talk to my mother or call in the police? Then there are a dozen
roads and even railways out of the Clayton region, how is he to
know which I have taken? Suppose he goes straight at once to the
right station, they will not remember my departure for the simple
reason that I didn't depart. But they may remember about Shaphambury?
It was unlikely.

I resolved not to go directly to Shaphambury from Birmingham, but
to go thence to Monkshampton, thence to Wyvern, and then come down
on Shaphambury from the north. That might involve a night at some
intermediate stopping-place but it would effectually conceal me
from any but the most persistent pursuit. And this was not a case
of murder yet, but only the theft of four sovereigns.

I had argued away all anxiety before I reached Clayton Crest.

At the Crest I looked back. What a world it was! And suddenly it
came to me that I was looking at this world for the last time. If
I overtook the fugitives and succeeded, I should die with them--or
hang. I stopped and looked back more attentively at that wide ugly
valley.

It was my native valley, and I was going out of it, I thought never
to return, and yet in that last prospect, the group of towns that
had borne me and dwarfed and crippled and made me, seemed, in some
indefinable manner, strange. I was, perhaps, more used to seeing it
from this comprehensive view-point when it was veiled and softened
by night; now it came out in all its weekday reek, under a clear
afternoon sun. That may account a little for its unfamiliarity.
And perhaps, too, there was something in the emotions through which
I had been passing for a week and more, to intensify my insight,
to enable me to pierce the unusual, to question the accepted. But
it came to me then, I am sure, for the first time, how promiscuous,
how higgledy-piggledy was the whole of that jumble of mines and
homes, collieries and potbanks, railway yards, canals, schools,
forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, allotment hovels,
a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly smoking accidents in which
men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin. Each thing jostled and
damaged the other things about it, each thing ignored the other
things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the potbank clay,
the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in church, the
public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismal
homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism,
with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked amidst its
products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like
a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass.

I did not think these things clearly that afternoon. Much less did
I ask how I, with my murderous purpose, stood to them all. I write
down that realization of disorder and suffocation here and now as
though I had thought it, but indeed then I only felt it, felt it
transitorily as I looked back, and then stood with the thing escaping
from my mind.

I should never see that country-side again.

I came back to that. At any rate I wasn't sorry. The chances were
I should die in sweet air, under a clean sky.

From distant Swathinglea came a little sound, the minute undulation
of a remote crowd, and then rapidly three shots.

That held me perplexed for a space. . . . Well, anyhow I was
leaving it all! Thank God I was leaving it all! Then, as I turned
to go on, I thought of my mother.

It seemed an evil world in which to leave one's mother. My thoughts
focused upon her very vividly for a moment. Down there, under that
afternoon light, she was going to and fro, unaware as yet that
she had lost me, bent and poking about in the darkling underground
kitchen, perhaps carrying a lamp into the scullery to trim, or
sitting patiently, staring into the fire, waiting tea for me. A
great pity for her, a great remorse at the blacker troubles that
lowered over her innocent head, came to me. Why, after all, was
I doing this thing?

Why?

I stopped again dead, with the hill crest rising between me and
home. I had more than half a mind to return to her.

Then I thought of the curate's sovereigns. If he has missed them
already, what should I return to? And, even if I returned, how
could I put them back?

And what of the night after I renounced my revenge? What of the
time when young Verrall came back? And Nettie?

No! The thing had to be done.

But at least I might have kissed my mother before I came away, left
her some message, reassured her at least for a little while.
All night she would listen and wait for me. . . . .

Should I send her a telegram from Two-Mile Stone?

It was no good now; too late, too late. To do that would be to tell
the course I had taken, to bring pursuit upon me, swift and sure,
if pursuit there was to be. No. My mother must suffer!

I went on grimly toward Two-Mile Stone, but now as if some greater
will than mine directed my footsteps thither.

I reached Birmingham before darkness came, and just caught the last
train for Monkshampton, where I had planned to pass the night.




CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS



Section 1

As the train carried me on from Birmingham to Monkshampton, it
carried me not only into a country where I had never been before,
but out of the commonplace daylight and the touch and quality
of ordinary things, into the strange unprecedented night that was
ruled by the giant meteor of the last days.

There was at that time a curious accentuation of the common alternation
of night and day. They became separated with a widening difference
of value in regard to all mundane affairs. During the day, the
comet was an item in the newspapers, it was jostled by a thousand
more living interests, it was as nothing in the skirts of the war
storm that was now upon us. It was an astronomical phenomenon,
somewhere away over China, millions of miles away in the deeps.
We forgot it. But directly the sun sank one turned ever and again
toward the east, and the meteor resumed its sway over us.

One waited for its rising, and yet each night it came as a surprise.
Always it rose brighter than one had dared to think, always larger and
with some wonderful change in its outline, and now with a strange,
less luminous, greener disk upon it that grew with its growth, the
umbra of the earth. It shone also with its own light, so that this
shadow was not hard or black, but it shone phosphorescently and with
a diminishing intensity where the stimulus of the sun's rays was
withdrawn. As it ascended toward the zenith, as the last trailing
daylight went after the abdicating sun, its greenish white illumination
banished the realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness over
all things. It changed the starless sky about it to an extraordinary
deep blue, the profoundest color in the world, such as I have never
seen before or since. I remember, too, that as I peered from the
train that was rattling me along to Monkshampton, I perceived and
was puzzled by a coppery red light that mingled with all the shadows
that were cast by it.

It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities.
Everywhere the local authorities discontinued street lighting--one
could read small print in the glare,--and so at Monkshampton I
went about through pale, white, unfamiliar streets, whose electric
globes had shadows on the path. Lit windows here and there burnt
ruddy orange, like holes cut in some dream curtain that hung before
a furnace. A policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn woven
of moonshine, a green-faced man opened to us, and there I abode
the night. And the next morning it opened with a mighty clatter,
and was a dirty little beerhouse that stank of beer, and there was
a fat and grimy landlord with red spots upon his neck, and much
noisy traffic going by on the cobbles outside.

I came out, after I had paid my bill, into a street that echoed
to the bawlings of two newsvendors and to the noisy yappings of a
dog they had raised to emulation. They were shouting: "Great British
disaster in the North Sea. A battleship lost with all hands!"

I bought a paper, went on to the railway station reading such
details as were given of this triumph of the old civilization, of
the blowing up of this great iron ship, full of guns and explosives
and the most costly and beautiful machinery of which that time was
capable, together with nine hundred able-bodied men, all of them
above the average, by a contact mine towed by a German submarine.
I read myself into a fever of warlike emotions. Not only did I
forget the meteor, but for a time I forgot even the purpose that
took me on to the railway station, bought my ticket, and was now
carrying me onward to Shaphambury.

So the hot day came to its own again, and people forgot the night.

Each night, there shone upon us more and more insistently, beauty,
wonder, the promise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveled
for a space. And at the first gray sounds of dawn again, at the
shooting of bolts and the noise of milk-carts, we forgot, and the
dusty habitual day came yawning and stretching back again. The
stains of coal smoke crept across the heavens, and we rose to the
soiled disorderly routine of life.

"Thus life has always been," we said; "thus it will always be."

The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded as
spectacular merely. It signified nothing to us. So far as western
Europe went, it was only a small and ignorant section of the lower
classes who regarded the comet as a portent of the end of the
world. Abroad, where there were peasantries, it was different, but
in England the peasantry had already disappeared. Every one read.
The newspaper, in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germany
rushed to its climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilities
of a panic in this matter. The very tramps upon the high-roads, the
children in the nursery, had learnt that at the utmost the whole
of that shining cloud could weigh but a few score tons. This fact
had been shown quite conclusively by the enormous deflections that
had at last swung it round squarely at our world. It had passed
near three of the smallest asteroids without producing the minutest
perceptible deflection in their course; while, on its own part, it
had described a course through nearly three degrees. When it struck
our earth there was to be a magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for
those who were on the right side of our planet to see, but beyond
that nothing. It was doubtful whether we were on the right side.
The meteor would loom larger and larger in the sky, but with the
umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness out, and at last
it would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green clouds, with
a white brightness about the horizon, west and east. Then a pause--a
pause of not very exactly definite duration--and then, no doubt,
a great blaze of shooting stars. They might be of some unwonted
color because of the unknown element that line in the green revealed.
For a little while the zenith would spout shooting stars. Some,
it was hoped, would reach the earth and be available for analysis.

That, science said, would be all. The green clouds would whirl and
vanish, and there might be thunderstorms. But through the attenuated
wisps of comet shine, the old sky, the old stars, would reappear,
and all would be as it had been before. And since this was to happen
between one and eleven in the morning of the approaching Tuesday--I
slept at Monkshampton on Saturday night,--it would be only partially
visible, if visible at all, on our side of the earth. Perhaps, if
it came late, one would see no more than a shooting star low down
in the sky. All this we had with the utmost assurances of science.
Still it did not prevent the last nights being the most beautiful
and memorable of human experiences.

The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had ranged
Shaphambury in vain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleled
glory of the night returned, to think that under its splendid
benediction young Verrall and Nettie made love to one another.

I walked backward and forward, backward and forward, along the sea
front, peering into the faces of the young couples who promenaded,
with my hand in my pocket ready, and a curious ache in my heart
that had no kindred with rage. Until at last all the promenaders
had gone home to bed, and I was alone with the star.

My train from Wyvern to Shaphambury that morning was a whole hour
late; they said it was on account of the movement of troops to meet
a possible raid from the Elbe.