In the Days of the Comet

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.

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.)