In the Days of the Comet

As the train carried me on from Birmingham to Monkshampton, it carried me not only into a country where I had never been before, but out of the commonplace daylight and the touch and quality of ordinary things, into the strange unprecedented night that was ruled by the giant meteor of the last days.

There was at that time a curious accentuation of the common alternation of night and day.  They became separated with a widening difference of value in regard to all mundane affairs.  During the day, the comet was an item in the newspapers, it was jostled by a thousand more living interests, it was as nothing in the skirts of the war storm that was now upon us.  It was an astronomical phenomenon, somewhere away over China, millions of miles away in the deeps.  We forgot it.  But directly the sun sank one turned ever and again toward the east, and the meteor resumed its sway over us.

One waited for its rising, and yet each night it came as a surprise.  Always it rose brighter than one had dared to think, always larger and with some wonderful change in its outline, and now with a strange, less luminous, greener disk upon it that grew with its growth, the umbra of the earth.  It shone also with its own light, so that this shadow was not hard or black, but it shone phosphorescently and with a diminishing intensity where the stimulus of the sun’s rays was withdrawn.  As it ascended toward the zenith, as the last trailing daylight went after the abdicating sun, its greenish white illumination banished the realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness over all things.  It changed the starless sky about it to an extraordinary deep blue, the profoundest color in the world, such as I have never seen before or since.  I remember, too, that as I peered from the train that was rattling me along to Monkshampton, I perceived and was puzzled by a coppery red light that mingled with all the shadows that were cast by it.

It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities.  Everywhere the local authorities discontinued street lighting—­one could read small print in the glare,—­and so at Monkshampton I went about through pale, white, unfamiliar streets, whose electric globes had shadows on the path.  Lit windows here and there burnt ruddy orange, like holes cut in some dream curtain that hung before a furnace.  A policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn woven of moonshine, a green-faced man opened to us, and there I abode the night.  And the next morning it opened with a mighty clatter, and was a dirty little beerhouse that stank of beer, and there was a fat and grimy landlord with red spots upon his neck, and much noisy traffic going by on the cobbles outside.

I came out, after I had paid my bill, into a street that echoed to the bawlings of two newsvendors and to the noisy yappings of a dog they had raised to emulation.  They were shouting:  “Great British disaster in the North Sea.  A battleship lost with all hands!”

I bought a paper, went on to the railway station reading such details as were given of this triumph of the old civilization, of the blowing up of this great iron ship, full of guns and explosives and the most costly and beautiful machinery of which that time was capable, together with nine hundred able-bodied men, all of them above the average, by a contact mine towed by a German submarine.  I read myself into a fever of warlike emotions.  Not only did I forget the meteor, but for a time I forgot even the purpose that took me on to the railway station, bought my ticket, and was now carrying me onward to Shaphambury.

So the hot day came to its own again, and people forgot the night.

Each night, there shone upon us more and more insistently, beauty, wonder, the promise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveled for a space.  And at the first gray sounds of dawn again, at the shooting of bolts and the noise of milk-carts, we forgot, and the dusty habitual day came yawning and stretching back again.  The stains of coal smoke crept across the heavens, and we rose to the soiled disorderly routine of life.

“Thus life has always been,” we said; “thus it will always be.”

The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded as spectacular merely.  It signified nothing to us.  So far as western Europe went, it was only a small and ignorant section of the lower classes who regarded the comet as a portent of the end of the world.  Abroad, where there were peasantries, it was different, but in England the peasantry had already disappeared.  Every one read.  The newspaper, in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germany rushed to its climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilities of a panic in this matter.  The very tramps upon the high-roads, the children in the nursery, had learnt that at the utmost the whole of that shining cloud could weigh but a few score tons.  This fact had been shown quite conclusively by the enormous deflections that had at last swung it round squarely at our world.  It had passed near three of the smallest asteroids without producing the minutest perceptible deflection in their course; while, on its own part, it had described a course through nearly three degrees.  When it struck our earth there was to be a magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for those who were on the right side of our planet to see, but beyond that nothing.  It was doubtful whether we were on the right side.  The meteor would loom larger and larger in the sky, but with the umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness out, and at last it would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green clouds, with a white brightness about the horizon, west and east.  Then a pause—­a pause of not very exactly definite duration—­and then, no doubt, a great blaze of shooting stars.  They might be of some unwonted color because of the unknown element that line in the green revealed.  For a little while the zenith would spout shooting stars.  Some, it was hoped, would reach the earth and be available for analysis.

That, science said, would be all.  The green clouds would whirl and vanish, and there might be thunderstorms.  But through the attenuated wisps of comet shine, the old sky, the old stars, would reappear, and all would be as it had been before.  And since this was to happen between one and eleven in the morning of the approaching Tuesday—­I slept at Monkshampton on Saturday night,—­it would be only partially visible, if visible at all, on our side of the earth.  Perhaps, if it came late, one would see no more than a shooting star low down in the sky.  All this we had with the utmost assurances of science.  Still it did not prevent the last nights being the most beautiful and memorable of human experiences.

The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had ranged Shaphambury in vain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleled glory of the night returned, to think that under its splendid benediction young Verrall and Nettie made love to one another.

I walked backward and forward, backward and forward, along the sea front, peering into the faces of the young couples who promenaded, with my hand in my pocket ready, and a curious ache in my heart that had no kindred with rage.  Until at last all the promenaders had gone home to bed, and I was alone with the star.

My train from Wyvern to Shaphambury that morning was a whole hour late; they said it was on account of the movement of troops to meet a possible raid from the Elbe.