In the Days of the Comet

Picture to yourself what happened between the printing and composing of the copy of the New Paper that lies before me now.  It was the first newspaper that was printed upon earth after the Great Change.  It was pocket-worn and browned, made of a paper no man ever intended for preservation.  I found it on the arbor table in the inn garden while I was waiting for Nettie and Verrall, before that last conversation of which I have presently to tell.  As I look at it all that scene comes back to me, and Nettie stands in her white raiment against a blue-green background of sunlit garden, scrutinizing my face as I read. . . .

It is so frayed that the sheet cracks along the folds and comes to pieces in my hands.  It lies upon my desk, a dead souvenir of the dead ages of the world, of the ancient passions of my heart.  I know we discussed its news, but for the life of me I cannot recall what we said, only I remember that Nettie said very little, and that Verrall for a time read it over my shoulder.  And I did not like him to read over my shoulder. . . .

The document before me must have helped us through the first awkwardness of that meeting.

But of all that we said and did then I must tell in a later chapter. . . .

It is easy to see the New Paper had been set up overnight, and then large pieces of the stereo plates replaced subsequently.  I do not know enough of the old methods of printing to know precisely what happened.  The thing gives one an impression of large pieces of type having been cut away and replaced by fresh blocks.  There is something very rough and ready about it all, and the new portions print darker and more smudgily than the old, except toward the left, where they have missed ink and indented.  A friend of mine, who knows something of the old typography, has suggested to me that the machinery actually in use for the New Paper was damaged that night, and that on the morning of the Change Banghurst borrowed a neighboring office—­perhaps in financial dependence upon him—­to print in.

The outer pages belong entirely to the old period, the only parts of the paper that had undergone alteration are the two middle leaves.  Here we found set forth in a curious little four-column oblong of print, what has happened. This cut across a column with scare headings beginning, “Great Naval Battle Now in Progress.  The Fate of Two Empires in the Balance.  Reported Loss of Two More-—-”

These things, one gathered, were beneath notice now.  Probably it was guesswork, and fabricated news in the first instance.

It is curious to piece together the worn and frayed fragments, and reread this discolored first intelligence of the new epoch.

The simple clear statements in the replaced portion of the paper impressed me at the time, I remember, as bald and strange, in that framework of shouting bad English.  Now they seem like the voice of a sane man amidst a vast faded violence.  But they witness to the prompt recovery of London from the gas; the new, swift energy of rebound in that huge population.  I am surprised now, as I reread, to note how much research, experiment, and induction must have been accomplished in the day that elapsed before the paper was printed. . . .  But that is by the way.  As I sit and muse over this partly carbonized sheet, that same curious remote vision comes again to me that quickened in my mind that morning, a vision of those newspaper offices I have already described to you going through the crisis.

The catalytic wave must have caught the place in full swing, in its nocturnal high fever, indeed in a quite exceptional state of fever, what with the comet and the war, and more particularly with the war.  Very probably the Change crept into the office imperceptibly, amidst the noise and shouting, and the glare of electric light that made the night atmosphere in that place; even the green flashes may have passed unobserved there, the preliminary descending trails of green vapor seemed no more than unseasonable drifting wisps of London fog. (In those days London even in summer was not safe against dark fogs.) And then at the last the Change poured in and overtook them.

If there was any warning at all for them, it must have been a sudden universal tumult in the street, and then a much more universal quiet.  They could have had no other intimation.

There was no time to stop the presses before the main development of green vapor had overwhelmed every one.  It must have folded about them, tumbled them to the earth, masked and stilled them.  My imagination is always curiously stirred by the thought of that, because I suppose it is the first picture I succeeded in making for myself of what had happened in the towns.  It has never quite lost its strangeness for me that when the Change came, machinery went on working.  I don’t precisely know why that should have seemed so strange to me, but it did, and still to a certain extent does.  One is so accustomed, I suppose, to regard machinery as an extension of human personality that the extent of its autonomy the Change displayed came as a shock to me.  The electric lights, for example, hazy green-haloed nebulas, must have gone on burning at least for a time; amidst the thickening darkness the huge presses must have roared on, printing, folding, throwing aside copy after copy of that fabricated battle report with its quarter column of scare headlines, and all the place must have still quivered and throbbed with the familiar roar of the engines.  And this though no men ruled there at all any more!  Here and there beneath that thickening fog the crumpled or outstretched forms of men lay still.

A wonderful thing that must have seemed, had any man had by chance the power of resistance to the vapor, and could he have walked amidst it.

And soon the machines must have exhausted their feed of ink and paper, and thumped and banged and rattled emptily amidst the general quiet.  Then I suppose the furnaces failed for want of stoking, the steam pressure fell in the pistons, the machinery slackened, the lights burnt dim, and came and went with the ebb of energy from the power-station.  Who can tell precisely the sequence of these things now?

And then, you know, amidst the weakening and terminating noises of men, the green vapor cleared and vanished, in an hour indeed it had gone, and it may be a breeze stirred and blew and went about the earth.

The noises of life were all dying away, but some there were that abated nothing, that sounded triumphantly amidst the universal ebb.  To a heedless world the church towers tolled out two and then three.  Clocks ticked and chimed everywhere about the earth to deafened ears. . . .

And then came the first flush of morning, the first rustlings of the revival.  Perhaps in that office the filaments of the lamps were still glowing, the machinery was still pulsing weakly, when the crumpled, booted heaps of cloth became men again and began to stir and stare.  The chapel of the printers was, no doubt, shocked to find itself asleep.  Amidst that dazzling dawn the New Paper woke to wonder, stood up and blinked at its amazing self. . . .

The clocks of the city churches, one pursuing another, struck four.  The staffs, crumpled and disheveled, but with a strange refreshment in their veins, stood about the damaged machinery, marveling and questioning; the editor read his overnight headlines with incredulous laughter.  There was much involuntary laughter that morning.  Outside, the mail men patted the necks and rubbed the knees of their awakening horses. . . .

Then, you know, slowly and with much conversation and doubt, they set about to produce the paper.

Imagine those bemused, perplexed people, carried on by the inertia of their old occupations and doing their best with an enterprise that had suddenly become altogether extraordinary and irrational.  They worked amidst questionings, and yet light-heartedly.  At every stage there must have been interruptions for discussion.  The paper only got down to Menton five days late.