In the Days of the Comet

After our midday dinner—­it was a potato-pie, mostly potato with some scraps of cabbage and bacon—­I put on my overcoat and got it out of the house while my mother was in the scullery at the back.

A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a damp, unsavory, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness, opened, and diffused small crunchable particles about the uneven brick floor.  It was the region of “washing-up,” that greasy, damp function that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, and rags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called “dish-clouts,” rise in my memory at the name.  The altar of this place was the “sink,” a tank of stone, revolting to a refined touch, grease-filmed and unpleasant to see, and above this was a tap for cold water, so arranged that when the water descended it splashed and wetted whoever had turned it on.  This tap was our water supply.  And in such a place you must fancy a little old woman, rather incompetent and very gentle, a soul of unselfishness and sacrifice, in dirty clothes, all come from their original colors to a common dusty dark gray, in worn, ill-fitting boots, with hands distorted by ill use, and untidy graying hair—­my mother.  In the winter her hands would be “chapped,” and she would have a cough.  And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and watch in order that I may desert her.

I gave way to queer hesitations in pawning my two negotiable articles.  A weakly indisposition to pawn in Clayton, where the pawnbroker knew me, carried me to the door of the place in Lynch Street, Swathinglea, where I had bought my revolver.  Then came an idea that I was giving too many facts about myself to one man, and I came back to Clayton after all.  I forget how much money I got, but I remember that it was rather less than the sum I had made out to be the single fare to Shaphambury.  Still deliberate, I went back to the Public Library to find out whether it was possible, by walking for ten or twelve miles anywhere, to shorten the journey.  My boots were in a dreadful state, the sole of the left one also was now peeling off, and I could not help perceiving that all my plans might be wrecked if at this crisis I went on shoe leather in which I could only shuffle.  So long as I went softly they would serve, but not for hard walking.  I went to the shoemaker in Hacker Street, but he would not promise any repairs for me under forty-eight hours.

I got back home about five minutes to three, resolved to start by the five train for Birmingham in any case, but still dissatisfied about my money.  I thought of pawning a book or something of that sort, but I could think of nothing of obvious value in the house.  My mother’s silver—­two gravy-spoons and a salt-cellar—­had been pawned for some weeks, since, in fact, the June quarter day.  But my mind was full of hypothetical opportunities.

As I came up the steps to our door, I remarked that Mr. Gabbitas looked at me suddenly round his dull red curtains with a sort of alarmed resolution in his eye and vanished, and as I walked along the passage he opened his door upon me suddenly and intercepted me.

You are figuring me, I hope, as a dark and sullen lout in shabby, cheap, old-world clothes that are shiny at all the wearing surfaces, and with a discolored red tie and frayed linen.  My left hand keeps in my pocket as though there is something it prefers to keep a grip upon there.  Mr. Gabbitas was shorter than I, and the first note he struck in the impression he made upon any one was of something bright and birdlike.  I think he wanted to be birdlike, he possessed the possibility of an avian charm, but, as a matter of fact, there was nothing of the glowing vitality of the bird in his being.  And a bird is never out of breath and with an open mouth.  He was in the clerical dress of that time, that costume that seems now almost the strangest of all our old-world clothing, and he presented it in its cheapest form—­black of a poor texture, ill-fitting, strangely cut.  Its long skirts accentuated the tubbiness of his body, the shortness of his legs.  The white tie below his all-round collar, beneath his innocent large-spectacled face, was a little grubby, and between his not very clean teeth he held a briar pipe.  His complexion was whitish, and although he was only thirty-three or four perhaps, his sandy hair was already thinning from the top of his head.

To your eye, now, he would seem the strangest figure, in the utter disregard of all physical beauty or dignity about him.  You would find him extraordinarily odd, but in the old days he met not only with acceptance but respect.  He was alive until within a year or so ago, but his later appearance changed.  As I saw him that afternoon he was a very slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only was his clothing altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped the man stark, you would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes from flabby muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, and in the rounded shoulders and flawed and yellowish skin, the same failure of any effort toward clean beauty.  You had an instinctive sense that so he had been from the beginning.  You felt he was not only drifting through life, eating what came in his way, believing what came in his way, doing without any vigor what came in his way, but that into life also he had drifted.  You could not believe him the child of pride and high resolve, or of any splendid passion of love.  He had just happened. . .  But we all happened then.  Why am I taking this tone over this poor little curate in particular?

“Hello!” he said, with an assumption of friendly ease.  “Haven’t seen you for weeks!  Come in and have a gossip.”

An invitation from the drawing-room lodger was in the nature of a command.  I would have liked very greatly to have refused it, never was invitation more inopportune, but I had not the wit to think of an excuse.  “All right,” I said awkwardly, and he held the door open for me.

“I’d be very glad if you would,” he amplified.  “One doesn’t get much opportunity of intelligent talk in this parish.”

What the devil was he up to, was my secret preoccupation.  He fussed about me with a nervous hospitality, talking in jumpy fragments, rubbing his hands together, and taking peeps at me over and round his glasses.  As I sat down in his leather-covered armchair, I had an odd memory of the one in the Clayton dentist’s operating-room—­I know not why.

“They’re going to give us trouble in the North Sea, it seems,” he remarked with a sort of innocent zest.  “I’m glad they mean fighting.”

There was an air of culture about his room that always cowed me, and that made me constrained even on this occasion.  The table under the window was littered with photographic material and the later albums of his continental souvenirs, and on the American cloth trimmed shelves that filled the recesses on either side of the fireplace were what I used to think in those days a quite incredible number of books—­perhaps eight hundred altogether, including the reverend gentleman’s photograph albums and college and school text-books.  This suggestion of learning was enforced by the little wooden shield bearing a college coat-of-arms that hung over the looking-glass, and by a photograph of Mr. Gabbitas in cap and gown in an Oxford frame that adorned the opposite wall.  And in the middle of that wall stood his writing-desk, which I knew to have pigeon-holes when it was open, and which made him seem not merely cultured but literary.  At that he wrote sermons, composing them himself!

“Yes,” he said, taking possession of the hearthrug, “the war had to come sooner or later.  If we smash their fleet for them now; well, there’s an end to the matter!”

He stood on his toes and then bumped down on his heels, and looked blandly through his spectacles at a water-color by his sister—­the subject was a bunch of violets—­above the sideboard which was his pantry and tea-chest and cellar.  “Yes,” he said as he did so.

I coughed, and wondered how I might presently get away.

He invited me to smoke—­that queer old practice!—­and then when I declined, began talking in a confidential tone of this “dreadful business” of the strikes.  “The war won’t improve that outlook,” he said, and was very grave for a moment.

He spoke of the want of thought for their wives and children shown by the colliers in striking merely for the sake of the union, and this stirred me to controversy, and distracted me a little from my resolution to escape.

“I don’t quite agree with that,” I said, clearing my throat.  “If the men didn’t strike for the union now, if they let that be broken up, where would they be when the pinch of reductions did come?”

To which he replied that they couldn’t expect to get top-price wages when the masters were selling bottom-price coal.  I replied, “That isn’t it.  The masters don’t treat them fairly.  They have to protect themselves.”

To which Mr. Gabbitas answered, “Well, I don’t know.  I’ve been in the Four Towns some time, and I must say I don’t think the balance of injustice falls on the masters’ side.”

“It falls on the men,” I agreed, wilfully misunderstanding him.

And so we worked our way toward an argument.  “Confound this argument!” I thought; but I had no skill in self-extraction, and my irritation crept into my voice.  Three little spots of color came into the cheeks and nose of Mr. Gabbitas, but his voice showed nothing of his ruffled temper.

“You see,” I said, “I’m a socialist.  I don’t think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of every one else.”

“My dear fellow,” said the Rev. Gabbitas, “I’m a socialist too.  Who isn’t.  But that doesn’t lead me to class hatred.”

“You haven’t felt the heel of this confounded system.  I have.”

“Ah!” said he; and catching him on that note came a rap at the front door, and, as he hung suspended, the sound of my mother letting some one in and a timid rap.

“Now,” thought I, and stood up, resolutely, but he would not let me.  “No, no, no!” said he.  “It’s only for the Dorcas money.”

He put his hand against my chest with an effect of physical compulsion, and cried, “Come in!”

“Our talk’s just getting interesting,” he protested; and there entered Miss Ramell, an elderly little young lady who was mighty in Church help in Clayton.

He greeted her—­she took no notice of me—­and went to his bureau, and I remained standing by my chair but unable to get out of the room.  “I’m not interrupting?” asked Miss Ramell.

“Not in the least,” he said; drew out the carriers and opened his desk.  I could not help seeing what he did.

I was so fretted by my impotence to leave him that at the moment it did not connect at all with the research of the morning that he was taking out money.  I listened sullenly to his talk with Miss Ramell, and saw only, as they say in Wales, with the front of my eyes, the small flat drawer that had, it seemed, quite a number of sovereigns scattered over its floor.  “They’re so unreasonable,” complained Miss Ramell.  Who could be otherwise in a social organization that bordered on insanity?

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.