In the Days of the Comet

I halted, and stood planning what I had to do.

Should I go to bungalow after bungalow until one of the two I sought answered to my rap?  But suppose some servant intervened!

Should I wait where I was—­perhaps until morning—­watching?  And
meanwhile------

All the nearer bungalows were very still now.  If I walked softly to them, from open windows, from something seen or overheard, I might get a clue to guide me.  Should I advance circuitously, creeping upon them, or should I walk straight to the door?  It was bright enough for her to recognize me clearly at a distance of many paces.

The difficulty to my mind lay in this, that if I involved other people by questions, I might at last confront my betrayers with these others close about me, ready to snatch my weapon and seize my hands.  Besides, what names might they bear here?

“Boom!” the sound crept upon my senses, and then again it came.

I turned impatiently as one turns upon an impertinence, and beheld a great ironclad not four miles out, steaming fast across the dappled silver, and from its funnels sparks, intensely red, poured out into the night.  As I turned, came the hot flash of its guns, firing seaward, and answering this, red flashes and a streaming smoke in the line between sea and sky.  So I remembered it, and I remember myself staring at it—­in a state of stupid arrest.  It was an irrelevance.  What had these things to do with me?

With a shuddering hiss, a rocket from a headland beyond the village leapt up and burst hot gold against the glare, and the sound of the third and fourth guns reached me.

The windows of the dark bungalows, one after another, leapt out, squares of ruddy brightness that flared and flickered and became steadily bright.  Dark heads appeared looking seaward, a door opened, and sent out a brief lane of yellow to mingle and be lost in the comet’s brightness.  That brought me back to the business in hand.

“Boom! boom!” and when I looked again at the great ironclad, a little torchlike spurt of flame wavered behind her funnels.  I could hear the throb and clangor of her straining engines. . . .

I became aware of the voices of people calling to one another in the village.  A white-robed, hooded figure, some man in a bathing wrap, absurdly suggestive of an Arab in his burnous, came out from one of the nearer bungalows, and stood clear and still and shadowless in the glare.

He put his hands to shade his seaward eyes, and shouted to people within.

The people within—­my people!  My fingers tightened on my revolver.  What was this war nonsense to me?  I would go round among the hummocks with the idea of approaching the three bungalows inconspicuously from the flank.  This fight at sea might serve my purpose—­except for that, it had no interest for me at all.  Boom! boom!  The huge voluminous concussions rushed past me, beat at my heart and passed.  In a moment Nettie would come out to see.

First one and then two other wrappered figures came out of the bungalows to join the first.  His arm pointed seaward, and his voice, a full tenor, rose in explanation.  I could hear some of the words.  “It’s a German!” he said.  “She’s caught.”

Some one disputed that, and there followed a little indistinct babble of argument.  I went on slowly in the circuit I had marked out, watching these people as I went.

They shouted together with such a common intensity of direction that I halted and looked seaward.  I saw the tall fountain flung by a shot that had just missed the great warship.  A second rose still nearer us, a third, and a fourth, and then a great uprush of dust, a whirling cloud, leapt out of the headland whence the rocket had come, and spread with a slow deliberation right and left.  Hard on that an enormous crash, and the man with the full voice leapt and cried, “Hit!”

Let me see!  Of course, I had to go round beyond the bungalows, and then come up towards the group from behind.

A high-pitched woman’s voice called, “Honeymooners! honeymooners!  Come out and see!”

Something gleamed in the shadow of the nearer bungalow, and a man’s voice answered from within.  What he said I did not catch, but suddenly I heard Nettie calling very distinctly, “We’ve been bathing.”

The man who had first come out shouted, “Don’t you hear the guns?  They’re fighting—­not five miles from shore.”

“Eh?” answered the bungalow, and a window opened.

“Out there!”

I did not hear the reply, because of the faint rustle of my own movements.  Clearly these people were all too much occupied by the battle to look in my direction, and so I walked now straight toward the darkness that held Nettie and the black desire of my heart.

“Look!” cried some one, and pointed skyward.

I glanced up, and behold!  The sky was streaked with bright green trails.  They radiated from a point halfway between the western horizon and the zenith, and within the shining clouds of the meteor a streaming movement had begun, so that it seemed to be pouring both westwardly and back toward the east, with a crackling sound, as though the whole heaven was stippled over with phantom pistol-shots.  It seemed to me then as if the meteor was coming to help me, descending with those thousand pistols like a curtain to fend off this unmeaning foolishness of the sea.

“Boom!” went a gun on the big ironclad, and “boom!” and the guns of the pursuing cruisers flashed in reply.

To glance up at that streaky, stirring light scum of the sky made one’s head swim.  I stood for a moment dazed, and more than a little giddy.  I had a curious instant of purely speculative thought.  Suppose, after all, the fanatics were right, and the world was coming to an end!  What a score that would be for Parload!

Then it came into my head that all these things were happening to consecrate my revenge!  The war below, the heavens above, were the thunderous garment of my deed.  I heard Nettie’s voice cry out not fifty yards away, and my passion surged again.  I was to return to her amid these terrors bearing unanticipated death.  I was to possess her, with a bullet, amidst thunderings and fear.  At the thought I lifted up my voice to a shout that went unheard, and advanced now recklessly, revolver displayed in my hand.

It was fifty yards, forty yards, thirty yards—­the little group of people, still heedless of me, was larger and more important now, the green-shot sky and the fighting ships remoter.  Some one darted out from the bungalow, with an interrupted question, and stopped, suddenly aware of me.  It was Nettie, with some coquettish dark wrap about her, and the green glare shining on her sweet face and white throat.  I could see her expression, stricken with dismay and terror, at my advance, as though something had seized her by the heart and held her still—­a target for my shots.

“Boom!” came the ironclad’s gunshot like a command.  “Bang!” the bullet leapt from my hand.  Do you know, I did not want to shoot her then.  Indeed I did not want to shoot her then!  Bang! and I had fired again, still striding on, and—­each time it seemed I had missed.

She moved a step or so toward me, still staring, and then someone intervened, and near beside her I saw young Verrall.

A heavy stranger, the man in the hooded bath-gown, a fat, foreign-looking man, came out of nowhere like a shield before them.  He seemed a preposterous interruption.  His face was full of astonishment and terror.  He rushed across my path with arms extended and open hands, as one might try to stop a runaway horse.  He shouted some nonsense.  He seemed to want to dissuade me, as though dissuasion had anything to do with it now.

“Not you, you fool!” I said hoarsely.  “Not you!” But he hid Nettie nevertheless.

By an enormous effort I resisted a mechanical impulse to shoot through his fat body.  Anyhow, I knew I mustn’t shoot him.  For a moment I was in doubt, then I became very active, turned aside abruptly and dodged his pawing arm to the left, and so found two others irresolutely in my way.  I fired a third shot in the air, just over their heads, and ran at them.  They hastened left and right; I pulled up and faced about within a yard of a foxy-faced young man coming sideways, who seemed about to grapple me.  At my resolute halt he fell back a pace, ducked, and threw up a defensive arm, and then I perceived the course was clear, and ahead of me, young Verrall and Nettie—­he was holding her arm to help her—­running away.  “Of course!” said I.

I fired a fourth ineffectual shot, and then in an access of fury at my misses, started out to run them down and shoot them barrel to backbone.  “These people!” I said, dismissing all these interferences. . . .  “A yard,” I panted, speaking aloud to myself, “a yard!  Till then, take care, you mustn’t—­mustn’t shoot again.”

Some one pursued me, perhaps several people—­I do not know, we left them all behind. . . .

We ran.  For a space I was altogether intent upon the swift monotony of flight and pursuit.  The sands were changed to a whirl of green moonshine, the air was thunder.  A luminous green haze rolled about us.  What did such things matter?  We ran.  Did I gain or lose? that was the question.  They ran through a gap in a broken fence that sprang up abruptly out of nothingness and turned to the right.  I noted we were in a road.  But this green mist!  One seemed to plough through it.  They were fading into it, and at that thought I made a spurt that won a dozen feet or more.

She staggered.  He gripped her arm, and dragged her forward.  They doubled to the left.  We were off the road again and on turf.  It felt like turf.  I tripped and fell at a ditch that was somehow full of smoke, and was up again, but now they were phantoms half gone into the livid swirls about me. . . .

Still I ran.

On, on!  I groaned with the violence of my effort.  I staggered again and swore.  I felt the concussions of great guns tear past me through the murk.

They were gone!  Everything was going, but I kept on running.  Once more I stumbled.  There was something about my feet that impeded me, tall grass or heather, but I could not see what it was, only this smoke that eddied about my knees.  There was a noise and spinning in my brain, a vain resistance to a dark green curtain that was falling, falling, falling, fold upon fold.  Everything grew darker and darker.

I made one last frantic effort, and raised my revolver, fired my penultimate shot at a venture, and fell headlong to the ground.  And behold! the green curtain was a black one, and the earth and I and all things ceased to be.