In the Days of the Comet

I seemed to awaken out of a refreshing sleep.

I did not awaken with a start, but opened my eyes, and lay very comfortably looking at a line of extraordinarily scarlet poppies that glowed against a glowing sky.  It was the sky of a magnificent sunrise, and an archipelago of gold-beached purple islands floated in a sea of golden green.  The poppies too, swan-necked buds, blazing corollas, translucent stout seed-vessels, stoutly upheld, had a luminous quality, seemed wrought only from some more solid kind of light.

I stared unwonderingly at these things for a time, and then there rose upon my consciousness, intermingling with these, the bristling golden green heads of growing barley.

A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished again in my mind.  Everything was very still.

Everything was as still as death.

I felt very light, full of the sense of physical well-being.  I perceived I was lying on my side in a little trampled space in a weedy, flowering barley field, that was in some inexplicable way saturated with light and beauty.  I sat up, and remained for a long time filled with the delight and charm of the delicate little convolvulus that twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel that laced the ground below.

Then that question returned.  What was this place?  How had I come to be sleeping here?

I could not remember.

It perplexed me that somehow my body felt strange to me.  It was unfamiliar—­I could not tell how—­and the barley, and the beautiful weeds, and the slowly developing glory of the dawn behind; all those things partook of the same unfamiliarity.  I felt as though I was a thing in some very luminous painted window, as though this dawn broke through me.  I felt I was part of some exquisite picture painted in light and joy.

A faint breeze bent and rustled the barley-heads, and jogged my mind forward.

Who was I?  That was a good way of beginning.

I held up my left hand and arm before me, a grubby hand, a frayed cuff; but with a quality of painted unreality, transfigured as a beggar might have been by Botticelli.  I looked for a time steadfastly at a beautiful pearl sleeve-link.

I remembered Willie Leadford, who had owned that arm and hand, as though he had been some one else.

Of course!  My history—­its rough outline rather than the immediate past—­began to shape itself in my memory, very small, very bright and inaccessible, like a thing watched through a microscope.  Clayton and Swathinglea returned to my mind; the slums and darkness, Dureresque, minute and in their rich dark colors pleasing, and through them I went towards my destiny.  I sat hands on knees recalling that queer passionate career that had ended with my futile shot into the growing darkness of the End.  The thought of that shot awoke my emotions again.

There was something in it now, something absurd, that made me smile pityingly.

Poor little angry, miserable creature!  Poor little angry, miserable world!

I sighed for pity, not only pity for myself, but for all the hot hearts, the tormented brains, the straining, striving things of hope and pain, who had found their peace at last beneath the pouring mist and suffocation of the comet.  Because certainly that world was over and done.  They were all so weak and unhappy, and I was now so strong and so serene.  For I felt sure I was dead; no one living could have this perfect assurance of good, this strong and confident peace.  I had made an end of the fever called living.  I was dead, and it was all right, and these-—-?

I felt an inconsistency.

These, then, must be the barley fields of God!—­the still and silent barley fields of God, full of unfading poppy flowers whose seeds bear peace.