In the Days of the Comet

Shaphambury seemed an odd place to me even then.  But something was quickening in me at that time to feel the oddness of many accepted things.  Now in the retrospect I see it as intensely queer.  The whole place was strange to my untraveled eyes; the sea even was strange.  Only twice in my life had I been at the seaside before, and then I had gone by excursion to places on the Welsh coast whose great cliffs of rock and mountain backgrounds made the effect of the horizon very different from what it is upon the East Anglian seaboard.  Here what they call a cliff was a crumbling bank of whitey-brown earth not fifty feet high.

So soon as I arrived I made a systematic exploration of Shaphambury.  To this day I retain the clearest memories of the plan I shaped out then, and how my inquiries were incommoded by the overpowering desire of every one to talk of the chances of a German raid, before the Channel Fleet got round to us.  I slept at a small public-house in a Shaphambury back street on Sunday night.  I did not get on to Shaphambury from Wyvern until two in the afternoon, because of the infrequency of Sunday trains, and I got no clue whatever until late in the afternoon of Monday.  As the little local train bumped into sight of the place round the curve of a swelling hill, one saw a series of undulating grassy spaces, amidst which a number of conspicuous notice-boards appealed to the eye and cut up the distant sea horizon.  Most of these referred to comestibles or to remedies to follow the comestibles; and they were colored with a view to be memorable rather than beautiful, to “stand out” amidst the gentle grayish tones of the east coast scenery.  The greater number, I may remark, of the advertisements that were so conspicuous a factor in the life of those days, and which rendered our vast tree-pulp newspapers possible, referred to foods, drinks, tobacco, and the drugs that promised a restoration of the equanimity these other articles had destroyed.  Wherever one went one was reminded in glaring letters that, after all, man was little better than a worm, that eyeless, earless thing that burrows and lives uncomplainingly amidst nutritious dirt, “an alimentary canal with the subservient appendages thereto.”  But in addition to such boards there were also the big black and white boards of various grandiloquently named “estates.”  The individualistic enterprise of that time had led to the plotting out of nearly all the country round the seaside towns into roads and building-plots—­all but a small portion of the south and east coast was in this condition, and had the promises of those schemes been realized the entire population of the island might have been accommodated upon the sea frontiers.  Nothing of the sort happened, of course; the whole of this uglification of the coast-line was done to stimulate a little foolish gambling in plots, and one saw everywhere agents’ boards in every state of freshness and decay, ill-made exploitation roads overgrown with grass, and here and there, at a corner, a label, “Trafalgar Avenue,” or “Sea View Road.”  Here and there, too, some small investor, some shopman with “savings,” had delivered his soul to the local builders and built himself a house, and there it stood, ill-designed, mean-looking, isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced plot, athwart which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst a bleak desolation of enterprise.  Then presently our railway crossed a high road, and a row of mean yellow brick houses—­workmen’s cottages, and the filthy black sheds that made the “allotments” of that time a universal eyesore, marked our approach to the more central areas of—­I quote the local guidebook—­“one of the most delightful resorts in the East Anglian poppy-land.”  Then more mean houses, the gaunt ungainliness of the electric force station—­it had a huge chimney, because no one understood how to make combustion of coal complete—­and then we were in the railway station, and barely three-quarters of a mile from the center of this haunt of health and pleasure.

I inspected the town thoroughly before I made my inquiries.  The road began badly with a row of cheap, pretentious, insolvent-looking shops, a public-house, and a cab-stand, but, after an interval of little red villas that were partly hidden amidst shrubbery gardens, broke into a confusedly bright but not unpleasing High Street, shuttered that afternoon and sabbatically still.  Somewhere in the background a church bell jangled, and children in bright, new-looking clothes were going to Sunday-school.  Thence through a square of stuccoed lodging-houses, that seemed a finer and cleaner version of my native square, I came to a garden of asphalt and euonymus—­the Sea Front.  I sat down on a cast-iron seat, and surveyed first of all the broad stretches of muddy, sandy beach, with its queer wheeled bathing machines, painted with the advertisements of somebody’s pills—­and then at the house fronts that stared out upon these visceral counsels.  Boarding-houses, private hotels, and lodging-houses in terraces clustered closely right and left of me, and then came to an end; in one direction scaffolding marked a building enterprise in progress, in the other, after a waste interval, rose a monstrous bulging red shape, a huge hotel, that dwarfed all other things.  Northward were low pale cliffs with white denticulations of tents, where the local volunteers, all under arms, lay encamped, and southward, a spreading waste of sandy dunes, with occasional bushes and clumps of stunted pine and an advertisement board or so.  A hard blue sky hung over all this prospect, the sunshine cast inky shadows, and eastward was a whitish sea.  It was Sunday, and the midday meal still held people indoors.

A queer world! thought I even then—­to you now it must seem impossibly queer,—­and after an interval I forced myself back to my own affair.

How was I to ask?  What was I to ask for?  I puzzled for a long time over that—­at first I was a little tired and indolent—­and then presently I had a flow of ideas.

My solution was fairly ingenious.  I invented the following story.  I happened to be taking a holiday in Shaphambury, and I was making use of the opportunity to seek the owner of a valuable feather boa, which had been left behind in the hotel of my uncle at Wyvern by a young lady, traveling with a young gentleman—­no doubt a youthful married couple.  They had reached Shaphambury somewhen on Thursday.  I went over the story many times, and gave my imaginary uncle and his hotel plausible names.  At any rate this yarn would serve as a complete justification for all the questions I might wish to ask.

I settled that, but I still sat for a time, wanting the energy to begin.  Then I turned toward the big hotel.  Its gorgeous magnificence seemed to my inexpert judgment to indicate the very place a rich young man of good family would select.

Huge draught-proof doors were swung round for me by an ironically polite under-porter in a magnificent green uniform, who looked at my clothes as he listened to my question and then with a German accent referred me to a gorgeous head porter, who directed me to a princely young man behind a counter of brass and polish, like a bank—­like several banks.  This young man, while he answered me, kept his eye on my collar and tie—­and I knew that they were abominable.

“I want to find a lady and gentleman who came to Shaphambury on Tuesday,” I said.

“Friends of yours?” he asked with a terrible fineness of irony.

I made out at last that here at any rate the young people had not been.  They might have lunched there, but they had had no room.  But I went out—­door opened again for me obsequiously—­in a state of social discomfiture, and did not attack any other establishment that afternoon.

My resolution had come to a sort of ebb.  More people were promenading, and their Sunday smartness abashed me.  I forgot my purpose in an acute sense of myself.  I felt that the bulge of my pocket caused by the revolver was conspicuous, and I was ashamed.  I went along the sea front away from the town, and presently lay down among pebbles and sea poppies.  This mood of reaction prevailed with me all that afternoon.  In the evening, about sundown, I went to the station and asked questions of the outporters there.  But outporters, I found, were a class of men who remembered luggage rather than people, and I had no sort of idea what luggage young Verrall and Nettie were likely to have with them.

Then I fell into conversation with a salacious wooden-legged old man with a silver ring, who swept the steps that went down to the beach from the parade.  He knew much about young couples, but only in general terms, and nothing of the particular young couple I sought.  He reminded me in the most disagreeable way of the sensuous aspects of life, and I was not sorry when presently a gunboat appeared in the offing signalling the coastguard and the camp, and cut short his observations upon holidays, beaches, and morals.

I went, and now I was past my ebb, and sat in a seat upon the parade, and watched the brightening of those rising clouds of chilly fire that made the ruddy west seem tame.  My midday lassitude was going, my blood was running warmer again.  And as the twilight and that filmy brightness replaced the dusty sunlight and robbed this unfamiliar place of all its matter-of-fact queerness, its sense of aimless materialism, romance returned to me, and passion, and my thoughts of honor and revenge.  I remember that change of mood as occurring very vividly on this occasion, but I fancy that less distinctly I had felt this before many times.  In the old times, night and the starlight had an effect of intimate reality the daytime did not possess.  The daytime—­as one saw it in towns and populous places—­had hold of one, no doubt, but only as an uproar might, it was distracting, conflicting, insistent.  Darkness veiled the more salient aspects of those agglomerations of human absurdity, and one could exist—­one could imagine.

I had a queer illusion that night, that Nettie and her lover were close at hand, that suddenly I should come on them.  I have already told how I went through the dusk seeking them in every couple that drew near.  And I dropped asleep at last in an unfamiliar bedroom hung with gaudily decorated texts, cursing myself for having wasted a day.