In the Days of the Comet

It was old Mrs. Verrall.

I wonder if I can convey the effect of her to you.  She was a little old lady with extraordinarily flaxen hair, her weak aquiline features were pursed up into an assumption of dignity, and she was richly dressed.  I would like to underline that “richly dressed,” or have the words printed in florid old English or Gothic lettering.  No one on earth is now quite so richly dressed as she was, no one old or young indulges in so quiet and yet so profound a sumptuosity.  But you must not imagine any extravagance of outline or any beauty or richness of color.  The predominant colors were black and fur browns, and the effect of richness was due entirely to the extreme costliness of the materials employed.  She affected silk brocades with rich and elaborate patterns, priceless black lace over creamy or purple satin, intricate trimmings through which threads and bands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter rare furs.  Her gloves fitted exquisitely, and ostentatiously simple chains of fine gold and pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced about her little person.  One was forced to feel that the slightest article she wore cost more than all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like Nettie; her bonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies.  Richness, that is the first quality about this old lady that I would like to convey to you, and the second was cleanliness.  You felt that old Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean.  If you had boiled my poor dear old mother in soda for a month you couldn’t have got her so clean as Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was.  And pervading all her presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidence in the respectful subordination of the world.

She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any loss of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she had come to interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged the gulf between their families.

And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as my younger readers are concerned.  You who know only the world that followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling inconceivable.  Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one had taken up an attitude.  There were in England and America, and indeed throughout the world, two great informal divisions of human beings—­the Secure and the Insecure.  There was not and never had been in either country a nobility—­it was and remains a common error that the British peers were noble—­neither in law nor custom were there noble families, and we altogether lacked the edification one found in Russia, for example, of a poor nobility.  A peerage was an hereditary possession that, like the family land, concerned only the eldest sons of the house; it radiated no luster of noblesse oblige.  The rest of the world were in law and practice common—­and all America was common.  But through the private ownership of land that had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britain and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and who were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but by the natural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of living.  It was a class without any very definite boundaries; vigorous individualities, by methods for the most part violent and questionable, were constantly thrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and the sons and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by wild extravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man.  The rest of the population was landless and, except by working directly or indirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist.  And such was the shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the stifled egotism of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very few indeed of the Secure could be found to doubt that this was the natural and only conceivable order of the world.

It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am displaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopeless bitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure lived lives of paradisiacal happiness.  The pit of insecurity below them made itself felt, even though it was not comprehended.  Life about them was ugly; the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressed people, the vulgar appeals of the dealers in popular commodities, were not to be escaped.  There was below the threshold of their minds an uneasiness; they not only did not think clearly about social economy but they displayed an instinctive disinclination to think.  Their security was not so perfect that they had not a dread of falling towards the pit, they were always lashing themselves by new ropes, their cultivation of “connexions,” of interests, their desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a constant ignoble preoccupation.  You must read Thackeray to get the full flavor of their lives.  Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants.  Read their surviving books.  Each generation bewails the decay of that “fidelity” of servants, no generation ever saw.  A world that is squalid in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they never understood.  They believed there was not enough of anything to go round, they believed that this was the intention of God and an incurable condition of life, and they held passionately and with a sense of right to their disproportionate share.  They maintained a common intercourse as “Society” of all who were practically secure, and their choice of that word is exhaustively eloquent of the quality of their philosophy.  But, if you can master these alien ideas upon which the old system rested, just in the same measure will you understand the horror these people had for marriages with the Insecure.  In the case of their girls and women it was extraordinarily rare, and in the case of either sex it was regarded as a disastrous social crime.  Anything was better than that.

You are probably aware of the hideous fate that was only too probably the lot, during those last dark days, of every girl of the insecure classes who loved and gave way to the impulse of self-abandonment without marriage, and so you will understand the peculiar situation of Nettie with young Verrall.  One or other had to suffer.  And as they were both in a state of great emotional exaltation and capable of strange generosities toward each other, it was an open question and naturally a source of great anxiety to a mother in Mrs. Verrall’s position, whether the sufferer might not be her son—­whether as the outcome of that glowing irresponsible commerce Nettie might not return prospective mistress of Checkshill Towers.  The chances were greatly against that conclusion, but such things did occur.

These laws and customs sound, I know, like a record of some nasty-minded lunatic’s inventions.  They were invincible facts in that vanished world into which, by some accident, I had been born, and it was the dream of any better state of things that was scouted as lunacy.  Just think of it!  This girl I loved with all my soul, for whom I was ready to sacrifice my life, was not good enough to marry young Verrall.  And I had only to look at his even, handsome, characterless face to perceive a creature weaker and no better than myself.  She was to be his pleasure until he chose to cast her aside, and the poison of our social system had so saturated her nature—­his evening dress, his freedom and his money had seemed so fine to her and I so clothed in squalor—­that to that prospect she had consented.  And to resent the social conventions that created their situation, was called “class envy,” and gently born preachers reproached us for the mildest resentment against an injustice no living man would now either endure or consent to profit by.

What was the sense of saying “peace” when there was no peace?  If there was one hope in the disorders of that old world it lay in revolt and conflict to the death.

But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesqueness of the old life, you will begin to appreciate the interpretation of old Mrs. Verrall’s appearance that leapt up at once in my mind.

She had come to compromise the disaster!

And the Stuarts would compromise!  I saw that only too well.

An enormous disgust at the prospect of the imminent encounter between Stuart and his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrational way.  I wanted to escape seeing that, seeing even Stuart’s first gesture in that, at any cost.

“I’m off,” said I, and turned my back on him without any further farewell.

My line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so I advanced toward her.

I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a little way open, her forehead wrinkled, and her eyes grew round.  She found me a queer customer even at the first sight, and there was something in the manner of my advance that took away her breath.

She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to the level of the hothouse floor.  She receded a pace or two, with a certain offended dignity at the determination of my rush.

I gave her no sort of salutation.

Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation.  There is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing I said to her—­I strip these things before you—­if only I can get them stark enough you will understand and forgive.  I was filled with a brutal and overpowering desire to insult her.

And so I addressed this poor little expensive old woman in the following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into a comprehensive plural.  “You infernal land thieves!” I said point-blank into her face.  “Have you come to offer them money?”

And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudely beyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched, out of her world again. . .

I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked to her.  So far as her particular universe went I had not existed at all, or I had existed only as a dim black thing, an insignificant speck, far away across her park in irrelevant, unimportant transit, until this moment when she came, sedately troubled, into her own secure gardens and sought for Stuart among the greenhouses.  Then abruptly I flashed into being down that green-walled, brick-floored vista as a black-avised, ill-clad young man, who first stared and then advanced scowling toward her.  Once in existence I developed rapidly.  I grew larger in perspective and became more and more important and sinister every moment.  I came up the steps with inconceivable hostility and disrespect in my bearing, towered over her, becoming for an instant at least a sort of second French Revolution, and delivered myself with the intensest concentration of those wicked and incomprehensible words.  Just for a second I threatened annihilation.  Happily that was my climax.

And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it had always been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint sense of insecurity my episode left in its wake.

The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a large proportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith.  I thought they saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied.  But indeed old Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection of her family’s right to dominate a wide country side, than she was of examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other of the adamantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security.

No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously.  But she could not understand.

None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid flashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below their feet.  The thing leapt out of the black for a moment and vanished, like a threatening figure by a desolate roadside lit for a moment by one’s belated carriage-lamp and then swallowed up by the night.  They counted it with nightmares, and did their best to forget what was evidently as insignificant as it was disturbing.