In the Days of the Comet

Then let me give you a vivid little impression I received of a certain prosaic person, a grocer, named Wiggins, and how he passed through the Change.  I heard this man’s story in the post-office at Menton, when, in the afternoon of the First Day, I bethought me to telegraph to my mother.  The place was also a grocer’s shop, and I found him and the proprietor talking as I went in.  They were trade competitors, and Wiggins had just come across the street to break the hostile silence of a score of years.  The sparkle of the Change was in their eyes, their slightly flushed cheeks, their more elastic gestures, spoke of new physical influences that had invaded their beings.

“It did us no good, all our hatred,” Mr. Wiggins said to me, explaining the emotion of their encounter; “it did our customers no good.  I’ve come to tell him that.  You bear that in mind, young man, if ever you come to have a shop of your own.  It was a sort of stupid bitterness possessed us, and I can’t make out we didn’t see it before in that light.  Not so much downright wickedness it wasn’t as stupidity.  A stupid jealousy!  Think of it!—­two human beings within a stone’s throw, who have not spoken for twenty years, hardening our hearts against each other!”

“I can’t think how we came to such a state, Mr. Wiggins,” said the other, packing tea into pound packets out of mere habit as he spoke.  “It was wicked pride and obstinacy.  We knew it was foolish all the time.”

I stood affixing the adhesive stamp to my telegram.

“Only the other morning,” he went on to me, “I was cutting French eggs.  Selling at a loss to do it.  He’d marked down with a great staring ticket to ninepence a dozen—­I saw it as I went past.  Here’s my answer!” He indicated a ticket. “’Eightpence a dozen—­same as sold elsewhere for ninepence.’  A whole penny down, bang off!  Just a touch above cost—if that-and even then-—” He leant over the counter to say impressively, “Not the same eggs!”

“Now, what people in their senses would do things like that?” said Mr. Wiggins.

I sent my telegram—­the proprietor dispatched it for me, and while he did so I fell exchanging experiences with Mr. Wiggins.  He knew no more than I did then the nature of the change that had come over things.  He had been alarmed by the green flashes, he said, so much so that after watching for a time from behind his bedroom window blind, he had got up and hastily dressed and made his family get up also, so that they might be ready for the end.  He made them put on their Sunday clothes.  They all went out into the garden together, their minds divided between admiration at the gloriousness of the spectacle and a great and growing awe.  They were Dissenters, and very religious people out of business hours, and it seemed to them in those last magnificent moments that, after all, science must be wrong and the fanatics right.  With the green vapors came conviction, and they prepared to meet their God. . . .

This man, you must understand, was a common-looking man, in his shirt-sleeves and with an apron about his paunch, and he told his story in an Anglian accent that sounded mean and clipped to my Staffordshire ears; he told his story without a thought of pride, and as it were incidentally, and yet he gave me a vision of something heroic.

These people did not run hither and thither as many people did.  These four simple, common people stood beyond their back door in their garden pathway between the gooseberry bushes, with the terrors of their God and His Judgments closing in upon them, swiftly and wonderfully—­and there they began to sing.  There they stood, father and mother and two daughters, chanting out stoutly, but no doubt a little flatly after the manner of their kind—­

  “In Zion’s Hope abiding,
   My soul in Triumph sings—–­”

until one by one they fell, and lay still.

The postmaster had heard them in the gathering darkness,
“In Zion’s Hope abiding.” . . .

It was the most extraordinary thing in the world to hear this flushed and happy-eyed man telling that story of his recent death.  It did not seem at all possible to have happened in the last twelve hours.  It was minute and remote, these people who went singing through the darkling to their God.  It was like a scene shown to me, very small and very distinctly painted, in a locket.

But that effect was not confined to this particular thing.  A vast number of things that had happened before the coming of the comet had undergone the same transfiguring reduction.  Other people, too, I have learnt since, had the same illusion, a sense of enlargement.  It seems to me even now that the little dark creature who had stormed across England in pursuit of Nettie and her lover must have been about an inch high, that all that previous life of ours had been an ill-lit marionette show, acted in the twilight. . . .