In the Days of the Comet

A happy accident relieved Mr. Gabbitas from the embarrassment of that challenge, and carried me another step along my course of personal disaster.

It came on the heels of my question in the form of a clatter of horses without, and the gride and cessation of wheels.  I glimpsed a straw-hatted coachman and a pair of grays.  It seemed an incredibly magnificent carriage for Clayton.

“Eh!” said the Rev. Gabbitas, going to the window.  “Why, it’s old Mrs. Verrall!  It’s old Mrs. Verrall.  Really!  What can she want with me?”

He turned to me, and the flush of controversy had passed and his face shone like the sun.  It was not every day, I perceived, that Mrs. Verrall came to see him.

“I get so many interruptions,” he said, almost grinning.  “You must excuse me a minute!  Then—­then I’ll tell you about that fellow.  But don’t go.  I pray you don’t go.  I can assure you. . . .  Most interesting.”

He went out of the room waving vague prohibitory gestures.

“I must go,” I cried after him.

“No, no, no!” in the passage.  “I’ve got your answer,” I think it was he added, and “quite mistaken;” and I saw him running down the steps to talk to the old lady.

I swore.  I made three steps to the window, and this brought me within a yard of that accursed drawer.

I glanced at it, and then at that old woman who was so absolutely powerful, and instantly her son and Nettie’s face were flaming in my brain.  The Stuarts had, no doubt, already accepted accomplished facts.  And I too—­

What was I doing here?

What was I doing here while judgment escaped me?

I woke up.  I was injected with energy.  I took one reassuring look at the curate’s obsequious back, at the old lady’s projected nose and quivering hand, and then with swift, clean movements I had the little drawer open, four sovereigns in my pocket, and the drawer shut again.  Then again at the window—­they were still talking.

That was all right.  He might not look in that drawer for hours.  I glanced at his clock.  Twenty minutes still before the Birmingham train.  Time to buy a pair of boots and get away.  But how I was to get to the station?

I went out boldly into the passage, and took my hat and stick. . . .  Walk past him?

Yes.  That was all right!  He could not argue with me while so important a person engaged him. . . .  I came boldly down the steps.

“I want a list made, Mr. Gabbitas, of all the really DESERVING cases,” old Mrs. Verrall was saying.

It is curious, but it did not occur to me that here was a mother whose son I was going to kill.  I did not see her in that aspect at all.  Instead, I was possessed by a realization of the blazing imbecility of a social system that gave this palsied old woman the power to give or withhold the urgent necessities of life from hundreds of her fellow-creatures just according to her poor, foolish old fancies of desert.

“We could make a provisional list of that sort,” he was saying, and glanced round with a preoccupied expression at me.

“I must go,” I said at his flash of inquiry, and added, “I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” and went on my way.  He turned again to his patroness as though he forgot me on the instant.  Perhaps after all he was not sorry.

I felt extraordinarily cool and capable, exhilarated, if anything, by this prompt, effectual theft.  After all, my great determination would achieve itself.  I was no longer oppressed by a sense of obstacles, I felt I could grasp accidents and turn them to my advantage.  I would go now down Hacker Street to the little shoemaker’s—­get a sound, good pair of boots—­ten minutes—­and then to the railway-station—­five minutes more—­and off!  I felt as efficient and non-moral as if I was Nietzsche’s Over-man already come.  It did not occur to me that the curate’s clock might have a considerable margin of error.