In the Days of the Comet

His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and a quarter from the lane.  We went down to the beach margin and along the pallid wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying, hopping, tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, and then, as soon as we could, sitting down.  His ankle was, in fact, broken, and he could not put it to the ground without exquisite pain.  So that it took us nearly two hours to get to the house, and it would have taken longer if his butler-valet had not come out to assist me.  They had found motor-car and chauffeur smashed and still at the bend of the road near the house, and had been on that side looking for Melmount, or they would have seen us before.

For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalk boulder, now on a timber groin, and talking one to the other, with the frankness proper to the intercourse of men of good intent, without reservations or aggressions, in the common, open fashion of contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then, nevertheless, was the rarest and strangest thing in the world.  He for the most part talked, but at some shape of a question I told him—­as plainly as I could tell of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible to me—­of my murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how the green vapors overcame me.  He watched me with grave eyes and nodded understandingly, and afterwards he asked me brief penetrating questions about my education, my upbringing, my work.  There was a deliberation in his manner, brief full pauses, that had in them no element of delay.

“Yes,” he said, “yes—­of course.  What a fool I have been!” and said no more until we had made another of our tripod struggles along the beach.  At first I did not see the connection of my story with that self-accusation.

“Suppose,” he said, panting on the groin, “there had been such a thing as a statesman! . . .”

He turned to me.  “If one had decided all this muddle shall end!  If one had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who builds takes site and stone, and made-—-” He flung out his big broad hand at the glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, “something to fit that setting.”

He added in explanation, “Then there wouldn’t have been such stories as yours at all, you know. . . .”

“Tell me more about it,” he said, “tell me all about yourself.  I feel all these things have passed away, all these things are to be changed for ever. . . .  You won’t be what you have been from this time forth.  All the things you have done—­don’t matter now.  To us, at any rate, they don’t matter at all.  We have met, who were separated in that darkness behind us.  Tell me.

“Yes,” he said; and I told my story straight and as frankly as I have told it to you.  “And there, where those little skerries of weed rock run out to the ebb, beyond the headland, is Bungalow village.  What did you do with your pistol?”

“I left it lying there—­among the barley.”

He glanced at me from under his light eyelashes.  “If others feel like you and I,” he said, “there’ll be a lot of pistols left among the barley to-day. . . .”

So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love of brothers so plain between us it needed not a word.  Our souls went out to one another in stark good faith; never before had I had anything but a guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man.  Still I see him, upon that wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see him leaning against the shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at the poor drowned sailor whose body we presently found.  For we found a newly drowned man who had just chanced to miss this great dawn in which we rejoiced.  We found him lying in a pool of water, among brown weeds in the dark shadow of the timberings.  You must not overrate the horrors of the former days; in those days it was scarcely more common to see death in England than it would be to-day.  This dead man was a sailor from the Rother Adler, the great German battleship that—­had we but known it—­lay not four miles away along the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn and battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all strong and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .

I remember that poor boy very vividly.  He had been drowned during the anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young face was quiet and calm, but the skin of his chest had been crinkled by scalding water and his right arm was bent queerly back.  Even to this needless death and all its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come.  Everything flowed together to significance as we stood there, I, the ill-clad, cheaply equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his great fur-trimmed coat—­he was hot with walking but he had not thought to remove it—­leaning upon the clumsy groins and pitying this poor victim of the war he had helped to make.  “Poor lad!” he said, “poor lad!  A child we blunderers sent to death!  Do look at the quiet beauty of that face, that body—­to be flung aside like this!”

(I remember that near this dead man’s hand a stranded star-fish writhed its slowly feeling limbs, struggling back toward the sea.  It left grooved traces in the sand.)

“There must be no more of this,” panted Melmount, leaning on my shoulder, “no more of this. . . .”

But most I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting upon a great chalk boulder with the sunlight on his big, perspiration-dewed face.  He made his resolves.  “We must end war,” he said, in that full whisper of his; “it is stupidity.  With so many people able to read and think—­even as it is—­there is no need of anything of the sort.  Gods!  What have we rulers been at? . . .  Drowsing like people in a stifling room, too dull and sleepy and too base toward each other for any one to get up and open the window.  What haven’t we been at?”

A great powerful figure he sits there still in my memory, perplexed and astonished at himself and all things.  “We must change all this,” he repeated, and threw out his broad hands in a powerful gesture against the sea and sky.  “We have done so weakly—­Heaven alone knows why!” I can see him now, queer giant that he looked on that dawnlit beach of splendor, the sea birds flying about us and that crumpled death hard by, no bad symbol in his clumsiness and needless heat of the unawakened powers of the former time.  I remember it as an integral part of that picture that far away across the sandy stretches one of those white estate boards I have described, stuck up a little askew amidst the yellow-green turf upon the crest of the low cliffs.

He talked with a sort of wonder of the former things.  “Has it ever dawned upon you to imagine the pettiness—­the pettiness!—­of every soul concerned in a declaration of war?” he asked.  He went on, as though speech was necessary to make it credible, to describe Laycock, who first gave the horror words at the cabinet council, “an undersized Oxford prig with a tenoring voice and a garbage of Greek—­the sort of little fool who is brought up on the admiration of his elder sisters. . . .

“All the time almost,” he said, “I was watching him—­thinking what an ass he was to be trusted with men’s lives. . . .  I might have done better to have thought that of myself.  I was doing nothing to prevent it all!  The damned little imbecile was up to his neck in the drama of the thing, he liked to trumpet it out, he goggled round at us.  ‘Then it is war!’ he said.  Richover shrugged his shoulders.  I made some slight protest and gave in. . . .  Afterward I dreamt of him.

“What a lot we were!  All a little scared at ourselves—­all, as it were, instrumental. . . .

“And it’s fools like that lead to things like this!” He jerked his head at that dead man near by us.

“It will be interesting to know what has happened to the world. . . .  This green vapor—­queer stuff.  But I know what has happened to me.  It’s Conversion.  I’ve always known. . . .  But this is being a fool.  Talk!  I’m going to stop it.”

He motioned to rise with his clumsy outstretched hands.

“Stop what?” said I, stepping forward instinctively to help him.

“War,” he said in his great whisper, putting his big hand on my shoulder but making no further attempt to arise, “I’m going to put an end to war—­to any sort of war!  And all these things that must end.  The world is beautiful, life is great and splendid, we had only to lift up our eyes and see.  Think of the glories through which we have been driving, like a herd of swine in a garden place.  The color in life—­the sounds—­the shapes!  We have had our jealousies, our quarrels, our ticklish rights, our invincible prejudices, our vulgar enterprise and sluggish timidities, we have chattered and pecked one another and fouled the world—­like daws in the temple, like unclean birds in the holy place of God.  All my life has been foolishness and pettiness, gross pleasures and mean discretions—­all.  I am a meagre dark thing in this morning’s glow, a penitence, a shame!  And, but for God’s mercy, I might have died this night—­like that poor lad there—­amidst the squalor of my sins!  No more of this!  No more of this!—­whether the whole world has changed or no, matters nothing.  We two have seen this dawn! . . .”

He paused.

“I will arise and go unto my Father,” he began presently, “and will
say unto Him------”

His voice died away in an inaudible whisper.  His hand
tightened painfully on my shoulder and he rose. . . .