In the Days of the Comet (23 page)

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.

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. . . .

The figure of my mother comes always into my conception of the
Change.

I remember how one day she confessed herself.

She had been very sleepless that night, she said, and took the
reports of the falling stars for shooting; there had been rioting
in Clayton and all through Swathinglea all day, and so she got out
of bed to look. She had a dim sense that I was in all such troubles.

But she was not looking when the Change came.

"When I saw the stars a-raining down, dear," she said, "and thought
of you out in it, I thought there'd be no harm in saying a prayer
for you, dear? I thought you wouldn't mind that."

And so I got another of my pictures—the green vapors come and go,
and there by her patched coverlet that dear old woman kneels and
droops, still clasping her poor gnarled hands in the attitude of
prayer—prayer to IT—for me!

Through the meagre curtains and blinds of the flawed refracting
window I see the stars above the chimneys fade, the pale light of
dawn creeps into the sky, and her candle flares and dies. . . .

That also went with me through the stillness—that silent
kneeling figure, that frozen prayer to God to shield me, silent
in a silent world, rushing through the emptiness of space. . . .

With the dawn that awakening went about the earth. I have told how
it came to me, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured
cornfields of Shaphambury. It came to every one. Near me, and for
the time, clear forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke—woke near
one another, each heard before all other sounds the other's voice
amidst the stillness, and the light. And the scattered people who
had run to and fro, and fallen on the beach of Bungalow village,
awoke; the sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat up in
that unwonted freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the
garden, with the hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the
flowers, and touched each other timidly, and thought of Paradise.
My mother found herself crouched against the bed, and rose—rose
with a glad invincible conviction of accepted prayer. . . .