In the Days of the Comet

The miracle of the awakening came to me in solitude, the laughter, and then the tears.  Only after some time did I come upon another man.  Until I heard his voice calling I did not seem to feel there were any other people in the world.  All that seemed past, with all the stresses that were past.  I had come out of the individual pit in which my shy egotism had lurked, I had overflowed to all humanity, I had seemed to be all humanity; I had laughed at Swindells as I could have laughed at myself, and this shout that came to me seemed like the coming of an unexpected thought in my own mind.  But when it was repeated I answered.

“I am hurt,” said the voice, and I descended into the lane forthwith, and so came upon Melmount sitting near the ditch with his back to me.

Some of the incidental sensory impressions of that morning bit so deeply into my mind that I verily believe, when at last I face the greater mysteries that lie beyond this life, when the things of this life fade from me as the mists of the morning fade before the sun, these irrelevant petty details will be the last to leave me, will be the last wisps visible of that attenuating veil.  I believe, for instance, I could match the fur upon the collar of his great motoring coat now, could paint the dull red tinge of his big cheek with his fair eyelashes just catching the light and showing beyond.  His hat was off, his dome-shaped head, with its smooth hair between red and extreme fairness, was bent forward in scrutiny of his twisted foot.  His back seemed enormous.  And there was something about the mere massive sight of him that filled me with liking.

“What’s wrong?” said I.

“I say,” he said, in his full deliberate tones, straining round to see me and showing a profile, a well-modeled nose, a sensitive, clumsy, big lip, known to every caricaturist in the world, “I’m in a fix.  I fell and wrenched my ankle.  Where are you?”

I walked round him and stood looking at his face.  I perceived he had his gaiter and sock and boot off, the motor gauntlets had been cast aside, and he was kneading the injured part in an exploratory manner with his thick thumbs.

“By Jove!” I said, “you’re Melmount!”

“Melmount!” He thought.  “That’s my name,” he said, without looking up. . . .  “But it doesn’t affect my ankle.”

We remained silent for few moments except for a grunt of pain from him.

“Do you know?” I asked, “what has happened to things?”

He seemed to complete his diagnosis.  “It’s not broken,” he said.

“Do you know,” I repeated, “what has happened to everything?”

“No,” he said, looking up at me incuriously for the first time.

“There’s some difference------”

“There’s a difference.”  He smiled, a smile of unexpected pleasantness, and an interest was coming into his eyes.  “I’ve been a little preoccupied with my own internal sensations.  I remark an extraordinary brightness about things.  Is that it?”

“That’s part of it.  And a queer feeling, a clear-headedness------”

He surveyed me and meditated gravely.  “I woke up,” he said, feeling his way in his memory.

“And I.”

“I lost my way—­I forget quite how.  There was a curious green fog.”  He stared at his foot, remembering.  “Something to do with a comet.  I was by a hedge in the darkness.  Tried to run. . . .  Then I must have pitched into this lane.  Look!” He pointed with his head.  “There’s a wooden rail new broken there.  I must have stumbled over that out of the field above.”  He scrutinized this and concluded.  “Yes. . . .”

“It was dark,” I said, “and a sort of green gas came out of nothing everywhere.  That is the last I remember.”

“And then you woke up?  So did I. . . .  In a state of great bewilderment.  Certainly there’s something odd in the air.  I was—­I was rushing along a road in a motor-car, very much excited and preoccupied.  I got down——­” He held out a triumphant finger.  “Ironclads!”

“Now I’ve got it!  We’d strung our fleet from here to Texel.  We’d got right across them and the Elbe mined.  We’d lost the Lord Warden.  By Jove, yes.  The Lord Warden!  A battleship that cost two million pounds—­and that fool Rigby said it didn’t matter!  Eleven hundred men went down. . . .  I remember now.  We were sweeping up the North Sea like a net, with the North Atlantic fleet waiting at the Faroes for ’em—­and not one of ’em had three days’ coal!  Now, was that a dream?  No!  I told a lot of people as much—­a meeting was it?—­to reassure them.  They were warlike but extremely frightened.  Queer people—­paunchy and bald like gnomes, most of them.  Where?  Of course!  We had it all over—­a big dinner—­oysters!—­Colchester.  I’d been there, just to show all this raid scare was nonsense.  And I was coming back here. . . .  But it doesn’t seem as though that was—­recent.  I suppose it was.  Yes, of course!—­it was.  I got out of my car at the bottom of the rise with the idea of walking along the cliff path, because every one said one of their battleships was being chased along the shore.  That’s clear!  I heard their guns-—-”

He reflected.  “Queer I should have forgotten!  Did you hear any guns?”

I said I had heard them.

“Was it last night?”

“Late last night.  One or two in the morning.”

He leant back on his hand and looked at me, smiling frankly.  “Even now,” he said, “it’s odd, but the whole of that seems like a silly dream.  Do you think there was a Lord Warden?  Do you really believe we sank all that machinery—­for fun?  It was a dream.  And yet—­it happened.”

By all the standards of the former time it would have been remarkable that I talked quite easily and freely with so great a man.  “Yes,” I said; “that’s it.  One feels one has awakened—­from something more than that green gas.  As though the other things also—­weren’t quite real.”

He knitted his brows and felt the calf of his leg thoughtfully.  “I made a speech at Colchester,” he said.

I thought he was going to add something more about that, but there lingered a habit of reticence in the man that held him for the moment.  “It is a very curious thing,” he broke away; “that this pain should be, on the whole, more interesting than disagreeable.”

“You are in pain?”

“My ankle is!  It’s either broken or badly sprained—­I think sprained; it’s very painful to move, but personally I’m not in pain.  That sort of general sickness that comes with local injury—­not a trace of it! . . .”  He mused and remarked, “I was speaking at Colchester, and saying things about the war.  I begin to see it better.  The reporters—­scribble, scribble.  Max Sutaine, 1885.  Hubbub.  Compliments about the oysters.  Mm—­mm. . . .  What was it?  About the war?  A war that must needs be long and bloody, taking toll from castle and cottage, taking toll! . . .  Rhetorical gusto!  Was I drunk last night?”

His eyebrows puckered.  He had drawn up his right knee, his elbow rested thereon and his chin on his fist.  The deep-set gray eyes beneath his thatch of eyebrow stared at unknown things.  “My God!” he murmured, “My God!” with a note of disgust.  He made a big brooding figure in the sunlight, he had an effect of more than physical largeness; he made me feel that it became me to wait upon his thinking.  I had never met a man of this sort before; I did not know such men existed. . . .

It is a curious thing, that I cannot now recall any ideas whatever that I had before the Change about the personalities of statesmen, but I doubt if ever in those days I thought of them at all as tangible individual human beings, conceivably of some intellectual complexity.  I believe that my impression was a straightforward blend of caricature and newspaper leader.  I certainly had no respect for them.  And now without servility or any insincerity whatever, as if it were a first-fruit of the Change, I found myself in the presence of a human being towards whom I perceived myself inferior and subordinate, before whom I stood without servility or any insincerity whatever, in an attitude of respect and attention.  My inflamed, my rancid egotism—­or was it after all only the chances of life?—­had never once permitted that before the Change.

He emerged from his thoughts, still with a faint perplexity in his manner.  “That speech I made last night,” he said, “was damned mischievous nonsense, you know.  Nothing can alter that.  Nothing. . . .  No! . . .  Little fat gnomes in evening dress—­gobbling oysters.  Gulp!”

It was a most natural part of the wonder of that morning that he should adopt this incredible note of frankness, and that it should abate nothing from my respect for him.

“Yes,” he said, “you are right.  It’s all indisputable fact, and I can’t believe it was anything but a dream.”