In the Days of the Comet

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.

To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth, it seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and misery could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want of thought and feeling.  We needed more dramatic factors than these mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils.  We fled therefore to that common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous insensate plots—­we called them “plots”—­against the poor.

You can still see how we figured it in any museum by looking up the caricatures of capital and labor that adorned the German and American socialistic papers of the old time.