In the Days of the Comet

I missed the train.

Partly that was because the curate’s clock was slow, and partly it was due to the commercial obstinacy of the shoemaker, who would try on another pair after I had declared my time was up.  I bought the final pair however, gave him a wrong address for the return of the old ones, and only ceased to feel like the Nietzschean Over-man, when I saw the train running out of the station.

Even then I did not lose my head.  It occurred to me almost at once that, in the event of a prompt pursuit, there would be a great advantage in not taking a train from Clayton; that, indeed, to have done so would have been an error from which only luck had saved me.  As it was, I had already been very indiscreet in my inquiries about Shaphambury; for once on the scent the clerk could not fail to remember me.  Now the chances were against his coming into the case.  I did not go into the station therefore at all, I made no demonstration of having missed the train, but walked quietly past, down the road, crossed the iron footbridge, and took the way back circuitously by White’s brickfields and the allotments to the way over Clayton Crest to Two-Mile Stone, where I calculated I should have an ample margin for the 6.13 train.

I was not very greatly excited or alarmed then.  Suppose, I reasoned, that by some accident the curate goes to that drawer at once:  will he be certain to miss four out of ten or eleven sovereigns?  If he does, will he at once think I have taken them?  If he does, will he act at once or wait for my return?  If he acts at once, will he talk to my mother or call in the police?  Then there are a dozen roads and even railways out of the Clayton region, how is he to know which I have taken?  Suppose he goes straight at once to the right station, they will not remember my departure for the simple reason that I didn’t depart.  But they may remember about Shaphambury?  It was unlikely.

I resolved not to go directly to Shaphambury from Birmingham, but to go thence to Monkshampton, thence to Wyvern, and then come down on Shaphambury from the north.  That might involve a night at some intermediate stopping-place but it would effectually conceal me from any but the most persistent pursuit.  And this was not a case of murder yet, but only the theft of four sovereigns.

I had argued away all anxiety before I reached Clayton Crest.

At the Crest I looked back.  What a world it was!  And suddenly it came to me that I was looking at this world for the last time.  If I overtook the fugitives and succeeded, I should die with them—­or hang.  I stopped and looked back more attentively at that wide ugly valley.

It was my native valley, and I was going out of it, I thought never to return, and yet in that last prospect, the group of towns that had borne me and dwarfed and crippled and made me, seemed, in some indefinable manner, strange.  I was, perhaps, more used to seeing it from this comprehensive view-point when it was veiled and softened by night; now it came out in all its weekday reek, under a clear afternoon sun.  That may account a little for its unfamiliarity.  And perhaps, too, there was something in the emotions through which I had been passing for a week and more, to intensify my insight, to enable me to pierce the unusual, to question the accepted.  But it came to me then, I am sure, for the first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks, railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, allotment hovels, a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly smoking accidents in which men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin.  Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility.  Humanity choked amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass.

I did not think these things clearly that afternoon.  Much less did I ask how I, with my murderous purpose, stood to them all.  I write down that realization of disorder and suffocation here and now as though I had thought it, but indeed then I only felt it, felt it transitorily as I looked back, and then stood with the thing escaping from my mind.

I should never see that country-side again.

I came back to that.  At any rate I wasn’t sorry.  The chances were
I should die in sweet air, under a clean sky.

From distant Swathinglea came a little sound, the minute undulation of a remote crowd, and then rapidly three shots.

That held me perplexed for a space. . . .  Well, anyhow I was leaving it all!  Thank God I was leaving it all!  Then, as I turned to go on, I thought of my mother.

It seemed an evil world in which to leave one’s mother.  My thoughts focused upon her very vividly for a moment.  Down there, under that afternoon light, she was going to and fro, unaware as yet that she had lost me, bent and poking about in the darkling underground kitchen, perhaps carrying a lamp into the scullery to trim, or sitting patiently, staring into the fire, waiting tea for me.  A great pity for her, a great remorse at the blacker troubles that lowered over her innocent head, came to me.  Why, after all, was I doing this thing?

Why?

I stopped again dead, with the hill crest rising between me and home.  I had more than half a mind to return to her.

Then I thought of the curate’s sovereigns.  If he has missed them already, what should I return to?  And, even if I returned, how could I put them back?

And what of the night after I renounced my revenge?  What of the time when young Verrall came back?  And Nettie?

No!  The thing had to be done.

But at least I might have kissed my mother before I came away, left her some message, reassured her at least for a little while.  All night she would listen and wait for me. . . . .

Should I send her a telegram from Two-Mile Stone?

It was no good now; too late, too late.  To do that would be to tell the course I had taken, to bring pursuit upon me, swift and sure, if pursuit there was to be.  No.  My mother must suffer!

I went on grimly toward Two-Mile Stone, but now as if some greater will than mine directed my footsteps thither.

I reached Birmingham before darkness came, and just caught the last train for Monkshampton, where I had planned to pass the night.