In the Days of the Comet

In the night, fever, pain, fatigue—­it may be the indigestion of my supper of bread and cheese—­roused me at last out of a hag-rid sleep to face despair.  I was a soul lost amidst desolations and shame, dishonored, evilly treated, hopeless.  I raged against the God I denied, and cursed him as I lay.

And it was in the nature of my fever, which was indeed only half fatigue and illness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth, that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through the brief dreams that marked the exhaustions of that vigil, to dominate my misery.  I was sensible, with an exaggerated distinctness, of the intensity of her physical charm for me, of her every grace and beauty; she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me and the whole gamut of pride.  She, bodily, was my lost honor.  It was not only loss but disgrace to lose her.  She stood for life and all that was denied; she mocked me as a creature of failure and defeat.  My spirit raised itself towards her, and then the bruise upon my jaw glowed with a dull heat, and I rolled in the mud again before my rivals.

There were times when something near madness took me, and I gnashed my teeth and dug my nails into my hands and ceased to curse and cry out only by reason of the insufficiency of words.  And once towards dawn I got out of bed, and sat by my looking-glass with my revolver loaded in my hand.  I stood up at last and put it carefully in my drawer and locked it—­out of reach of any gusty impulse.  After that I slept for a little while.

Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of the world.  Never a city, never a night the whole year round, but amidst those who slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath and misery.  Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled, they agonize near to the very border-line of madness, each one the center of a universe darkened and lost. . .

The next day I spent in gloomy lethargy.

I had intended to go to Checkshill that day, but my bruised ankle was too swollen for that to be possible.  I sat indoors in the ill-lit downstairs kitchen, with my foot bandaged, and mused darkly and read.  My dear old mother waited on me, and her brown eyes watched me and wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations.  I had not told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and my clothes muddy.  She had brushed my clothes in the morning before I got up.

Ah well!  Mothers are not treated in that way now.  That I suppose must console me.  I wonder how far you will be able to picture that dark, grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered wall paper, the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but by no means economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the rust-spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder how near you can come to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy I was, unshaven and collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little timid, dirty, devoted old woman who hovered about me with love peering out from her puckered eyelids. . .

When she went out to buy some vegetables in the middle of the morning she got me a half-penny journal.  It was just such a one as these upon my desk, only that the copy I read was damp from the press, and these are so dry and brittle, they crack if I touch them.  I have a copy of the actual issue I read that morning; it was a paper called emphatically the New Paper, but everybody bought it and everybody called it the “yell.”  It was full that morning of stupendous news and still more stupendous headlines, so stupendous that for a little while I was roused from my egotistical broodings to wider interests.  For it seemed that Germany and England were on the brink of war.

Of all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, war was certainly the most strikingly insane.  In reality it was probably far less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, the general acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil consequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling confusion one marveled at it.  On no conceivable grounds was there any sense in modern war.  Save for the slaughter and mangling of a multitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material, and the waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing.  The old war of savage and barbaric nations did at least change humanity, you assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique and discipline, you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and if successful you took their land and their women and perpetuated and enlarged your superiority.  The new war changed nothing but the color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals.  In one of the last of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English, with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths in battle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of about three thousand pounds per head—­they could have bought the whole of that preposterous imitation of a nation for a tenth of that sum—­and except for a few substitutions of personalities, this group of partially corrupt officials in the place of that, and so forth, the permanent change was altogether insignificant. (But an excitable young man in Austria committed suicide when at length the Transvaal ceased to be a “nation.”) Men went through the seat of that war after it was all over, and found humanity unchanged, except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge cases—­unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like kraal, the white in his ugly ill-managed shanty. . .

But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them, through the mirage of the New Paper, in a light of mania.  All my adolescence from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of that monstrous resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the songs and the waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller and the glorious heroism of De Wet—­who always got away; that was the great point about the heroic De Wet—­and it never occurred to us that the total population we fought against was less than half the number of those who lived cramped ignoble lives within the compass of the Four Towns.

But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute definitive expression and now percolating and pervading some new region of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great Britain.

When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong entirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest early memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty in writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of fact to their fathers.

Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve, that most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with our affairs hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions of three hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about the globe, and here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six millions, in a state of confusion no whit better than our own, and the noisy little creatures who directed papers and wrote books and gave lectures, and generally in that time of world-dementia pretended to be the national mind, were busy in both countries, with a sort of infernal unanimity, exhorting—­and not only exhorting but successfully persuading—­the two peoples to divert such small common store of material, moral and intellectual energy as either possessed, into the purely destructive and wasteful business of war.  And—­I have to tell you these things even if you do not believe them, because they are vital to my story—­there was not a man alive who could have told you of any real permanent benefit, of anything whatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and evil, that would result from a war between England and Germany, whether England shattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever the end might be.

The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was, in the microcosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical wrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm.  It measured the excess of common emotion over the common intelligence, the legacy of inordinate passion we have received from the brute from which we came.  Just as I had become the slave of my own surprise and anger and went hither and thither with a loaded revolver, seeking and intending vague fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went about the earth, hot eared and muddle headed, with loaded navies and armies terribly ready at hand.  Only there was not even a Nettie to justify their stupidity.  There was nothing but quiet imaginary thwarting on either side.

And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two huge multitudes of people directed against one another.

The press—­those newspapers that are now so strange to us—­like the “Empires,” the “Nations,” the Trusts, and all the other great monstrous shapes of that extraordinary time—­was in the nature of an unanticipated accident.  It had happened, as weeds happen in abandoned gardens, just as all our world has happened,—­because there was no clear Will in the world to bring about anything better.  Towards the end this “press” was almost entirely under the direction of youngish men of that eager, rather unintelligent type, that is never able to detect itself aimless, that pursues nothing with incredible pride and zeal, and if you would really understand this mad era the comet brought to an end, you must keep in mind that every phase in the production of these queer old things was pervaded by a strong aimless energy and happened in a concentrated rush.

Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.

Figure first, then, a hastily erected and still more hastily designed building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old London, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile swiftness, and within this factory companies of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers—­they were always speeding up the printers—­ply their type-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble.  There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and copy.  Then begins a clatter roar of machinery catching the infection, going faster and faster, and whizzing and banging,—­engineers, who have never had time to wash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans, while paper runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste.  The proprietor you must suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor-car, leaping out before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to “hustle,” getting wonderfully in everybody’s way.  At the sight of him even the messenger boys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro.  Sprinkle your vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies.  You imagine all the parts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically toward a crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on.  At last the only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing vibrating premises are the hands of the clock.

Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all those stresses.  Then in the small hours, into the now dark and deserted streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place spurts paper at every door, bales, heaps, torrents of papers, that are snatched and flung about in what looks like a free fight, and off with a rush and clatter east, west, north, and south.  The interest passes outwardly; the men from the little rooms are going homeward, the printers disperse yawning, the roaring presses slacken.  The paper exists.  Distribution follows manufacture, and we follow the bundles.

Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal.  You see those bundles hurling into stations, catching trains by a hair’s breadth, speeding on their way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce accuracy out upon the platforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles, into dispersing parcels, into separate papers, and the dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys, a shoving through letter slots, openings of windows, spreading out upon book-stalls.  For the space of a few hours you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling papers—­placards everywhere vociferating the hurried lie for the day; men and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by study-fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for father to finish—­a million scattered people reading—­reading headlong—­or feverishly ready to read.  It is just as if some vehement jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land. . .

And then you know, wonderfully gone—­gone utterly, vanished as foam might vanish upon the sand.

Nonsense!  The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—­signifying nothing. . . .

And one of those white parcels was the paper I held in my hands, as I sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark underground kitchen of my mother’s, clean roused from my personal troubles by the yelp of the headlines.  She sat, sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as I read.

It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body, that paper.  There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about.  And all over the country that day, millions read as I read, and came round into line with me, under the same magnetic spell, came round—­how did we say it?—­Ah!—­“to face the foe.”

The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf.  The column headed “Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth.  Does it Matter?” went unread.  “Germany”—­I usually figured this mythical malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperor enhanced by heraldic black wings and a large sword—­had insulted our flag.  That was the message of the New Paper, and the monster towered over me, threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting upon my faultless country’s colors.  Somebody had hoisted a British flag on the right bank of some tropical river I had never heard of before, and a drunken German officer under ambiguous instructions had torn it down.  Then one of the convenient abundant natives of the country, a British subject indisputably, had been shot in the leg.  But the facts were by no means clear.  Nothing was clear except that we were not going to stand any nonsense from Germany.  Whatever had or had not happened we meant to have an apology for, and apparently they did not mean apologizing.

“Has war come at last?”

That was the headline.  One’s heart leapt to assent. . . .

There were hours that day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming of battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men.

But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember, in a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes, and wars.