In the Days of the Comet Part 23

"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 rea.s.sure 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y, 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 G.o.d!"

he murmured, "My G.o.d!" 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 att.i.tude 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 d.a.m.ned 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."

Section 5

That memory stands out against the dark past of the world with extraordinary clearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was full of the calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a curious persuasion too that there was a distant happy clamor of pealing bells, but that I am half convinced is a mistake. Nevertheless, there was something in the fresh bite of things, in the dewy newness of sensation that set bells rejoicing in one's brain. And that big, fair, pensive man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his clumsy pose, as though indeed some Great Master of strength and humor had made him.

And--it is so hard now to convey these things--he spoke to me, a stranger, without reservations, carelessly, as men now speak to men. Before those days, not only did we think badly, but what we thought, a thousand short-sighted considerations, dignity, objective discipline, discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of soul, made us m.u.f.fle before we told it to our fellow-men.

"It's all returning now," he said, and told me half soliloquizingly what was in his mind.

I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out image after image to my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragments of speech. If I had a precise full memory of that morning I should give it you, verbatim, minutely. But here, save for the little sharp things that stand out, I find only blurred general impressions.

Throughout I have to make up again his half-forgotten sentences and speeches, and be content with giving you the general effect.

But I can see and hear him now as he said, "The dream got worst at the end. The war--a perfectly horrible business! Horrible! And it was just like a nightmare, you couldn't do anything to escape from it--every one was driven!"

His sense of indiscretion was gone.

He opened the war out to me--as every one sees it now. Only that morning it was astonishing. He sat there on the ground, absurdly forgetful of his bare and swollen foot, treating me as the humblest accessory and as altogether an equal, talking out to himself the great obsessions of his mind. "We could have prevented it! Any of us who chose to speak out could have prevented it. A little decent frankness. What was there to prevent us being frank with one another?

Their emperor--his position was a pile of ridiculous a.s.sumptions, no doubt, but at bottom--he was a sane man." He touched off the emperor in a few pithy words, the German press, the German people, and our own. He put it as we should put it all now, but with a certain heat as of a man half guilty and wholly resentful. "Their d.a.m.ned little b.u.t.toned-up professors!" he cried, incidentally.

"Were there ever such men? And ours! Some of us might have taken a firmer line. . . . If a lot of us had taken a firmer line and squashed that nonsense early. . . ."

He lapsed into inaudible whisperings, into silence. . . .

I stood regarding him, understanding him, learning marvelously from him. It is a fact that for the best part of the morning of the Change I forgot Nettie and Verrall as completely as though they were no more than characters in some novel that I had put aside to finish at my leisure, in order that I might talk to this man.

"Eh, well," he said, waking startlingly from his thoughts. "Here we are awakened! The thing can't go on now; all this must end. How it ever began------! My dear boy, how did all those things ever begin?

I feel like a new Adam. . . . Do you think this has happened--generally?

Or shall we find all these gnomes and things? . . . Who cares?"

He made as if to rise, and remembered his ankle. He suggested I should help him as far as his bungalow. There seemed nothing strange to either of us that he should requisition my services or that I should cheerfully obey. I helped him bandage his ankle, and we set out, I his crutch, the two of us making up a sort of limping quadruped, along the winding lane toward the cliffs and the sea.

Section 6

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 a.s.sist 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.