In the Days of the Comet (22 page)

(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. . . .

So the great Day came to me.

And even as I had awakened so in that same dawn the whole world
awoke.

For the whole world of living things had been overtaken by the
same tide of insensibility; in an hour, at the touch of this new
gas in the comet, the shiver of catalytic change had passed about
the globe. They say it was the nitrogen of the air, the old AZOTE,
that in the twinkling of an eye was changed out of itself, and in an
hour or so became a respirable gas, differing indeed from oxygen,
but helping and sustaining its action, a bath of strength and
healing for nerve and brain. I do not know the precise changes
that occurred, nor the names our chemists give them, my work has
carried me away from such things, only this I know—I and all men
were renewed.

I picture to myself this thing happening in space, a planetary
moment, the faint smudge, the slender whirl of meteor, drawing
nearer to this planet,—this planet like a ball, like a shaded
rounded ball, floating in the void, with its little, nearly impalpable
coat of cloud and air, with its dark pools of ocean, its gleaming
ridges of land. And as that midge from the void touches it, the
transparent gaseous outer shell clouds in an instant green
and then slowly clears again. . . .

Thereafter, for three hours or more,—we know the minimum time for
the Change was almost exactly three hours because all the clocks
and watches kept going—everywhere, no man nor beast nor bird nor
any living thing that breathes the air stirred at all but lay still. . . .

Everywhere on earth that day, in the ears of every one who breathed,
there had been the same humming in the air, the same rush of green
vapors, the crepitation, the streaming down of shooting stars.
The Hindoo had stayed his morning's work in the fields to stare
and marvel and fall, the blue-clothed Chinaman fell head foremost
athwart his midday bowl of rice, the Japanese merchant came out
from some chaffering in his office amazed and presently lay there
before his door, the evening gazers by the Golden Gates were overtaken
as they waited for the rising of the great star. This had happened
in every city of the world, in every lonely valley, in every home
and house and shelter and every open place. On the high seas, the
crowding steamship passengers, eager for any wonder, gaped and
marveled, and were suddenly terror-stricken, and struggled for the
gangways and were overcome, the captain staggered on the bridge
and fell, the stoker fell headlong among his coals, the engines
throbbed upon their way untended, the fishing craft drove by
without a hail, with swaying rudder, heeling and dipping. . . .

The great voice of material Fate cried Halt! And in the midst of
the play the actors staggered, dropped, and were still. The figure
runs from my pen. In New York that very thing occurred. Most of
the theatrical audiences dispersed, but in two crowded houses the
company, fearing a panic, went on playing amidst the gloom, and the
people, trained by many a previous disaster, stuck to their seats.
There they sat, the back rows only moving a little, and there, in
disciplined lines, they drooped and failed, nodded, and fell forward
or slid down upon the floor. I am told by Parload—though indeed I
know nothing of the reasoning on which his confidence rests—that
within an hour of the great moment of impact the first green
modification of nitrogen had dissolved and passed away, leaving the
air as translucent as ever. The rest of that wonderful interlude
was clear, had any had eyes to see its clearness. In London it
was night, but in New York, for example, people were in the full
bustle of the evening's enjoyment, in Chicago they were sitting
down to dinner, the whole world was abroad. The moonlight must have
illuminated streets and squares littered with crumpled figures,
through which such electric cars as had no automatic brakes had
ploughed on their way until they were stopped by the fallen bodies.
People lay in their dress clothes, in dining-rooms, restaurants,
on staircases, in halls, everywhere just as they had been overcome.
Men gambling, men drinking, thieves lurking in hidden places, sinful
couples, were caught, to arise with awakened mind and conscience
amidst the disorder of their sin. America the comet reached in the
full tide of evening life, but Britain lay asleep. But as I have
told, Britain did not slumber so deeply but that she was in the
full tide of what may have been battle and a great victory. Up and
down the North Sea her warships swept together like a net about
their foes. On land, too, that night was to have decided great
issues. The German camps were under arms from Redingen to Markirch,
their infantry columns were lying in swathes like mown hay, in
arrested night march on every track between Longuyon and Thiancourt,
and between Avricourt and Donen. The hills beyond Spincourt were
dusted thick with hidden French riflemen; the thin lash of the French
skirmishers sprawled out amidst spades and unfinished rifle-pits
in coils that wrapped about the heads of the German columns,
thence along the Vosges watershed and out across the frontier
near Belfort nearly to the Rhine. . . .

The Hungarian, the Italian peasant, yawned and thought the morning
dark, and turned over to fall into a dreamless sleep; the Mahometan
world spread its carpet and was taken in prayer. And in Sydney,
in Melbourne, in New Zealand, the thing was a fog in the afternoon,
that scattered the crowd on race-courses and cricket-fields,
and stopped the unloading of shipping and brought men out from
their afternoon rest to stagger and litter the streets. . . .

My thoughts go into the woods and wildernesses and jungles of the
world, to the wild life that shared man's suspension, and I think
of a thousand feral acts interrupted and truncated—as it were
frozen, like the frozen words Pantagruel met at sea. Not only men
it was that were quieted, all living creatures that breathe the air
became insensible, impassive things. Motionless brutes and birds
lay amidst the drooping trees and herbage in the universal twilight,
the tiger sprawled beside his fresh-struck victim, who bled to
death in a dreamless sleep. The very flies came sailing down the
air with wings outspread; the spider hung crumpled in his loaded
net; like some gaily painted snowflake the butterfly drifted
to earth and grounded, and was still. And as a queer contrast
one gathers that the fishes in the sea suffered not at all. . . .

Speaking of the fishes reminds me of a queer little inset upon that
great world-dreaming. The odd fate of the crew of the submarine
vessel B 94 has always seemed memorable to me. So far as I know,
they were the only men alive who never saw that veil of green drawn
across the world. All the while that the stillness held above, they
were working into the mouth of the Elbe, past the booms and the
mines, very slowly and carefully, a sinister crustacean of steel,
explosive crammed, along the muddy bottom. They trailed a long
clue that was to guide their fellows from the mother ship floating
awash outside. Then in the long channel beyond the forts they came
up at last to mark down their victims and get air. That must have
been before the twilight of dawn, for they tell of the brightness
of the stars. They were amazed to find themselves not three hundred
yards from an ironclad that had run ashore in the mud, and heeled
over with the falling tide. It was afire amidships, but no one heeded
that—no one in all that strange clear silence heeded that—and
not only this wrecked vessel, but all the dark ships lying about
them, it seemed to their perplexed and startled minds must be full
of dead men!

Theirs I think must have been one of the strangest of all experiences;
they were never insensible; at once, and, I am told, with a sudden
catch of laughter, they began to breathe the new air. None of
them has proved a writer; we have no picture of their wonder, no
description of what was said. But we know these men were active and
awake for an hour and a half at least before the general awakening
came, and when at last the Germans stirred and sat up they found
these strangers in possession of their battleship, the submarine
carelessly adrift, and the Englishmen, begrimed and weary, but
with a sort of furious exultation, still busy, in the bright dawn,
rescuing insensible enemies from the sinking conflagration. . . .

But the thought of certain stokers the sailors of the submarine
failed altogether to save brings me back to the thread of grotesque
horror that runs through all this event, the thread I cannot overlook
for all the splendors of human well-being that have come from it.
I cannot forget the unguided ships that drove ashore, that went
down in disaster with all their sleeping hands, nor how, inland,
motor-cars rushed to destruction upon the roads, and trains upon
the railways kept on in spite of signals, to be found at last by
their amazed, reviving drivers standing on unfamiliar lines, their
fires exhausted, or, less lucky, to be discovered by astonished
peasants or awakening porters smashed and crumpled up into heaps
of smoking, crackling ruin. The foundry fires of the Four Towns
still blazed, the smoke of our burning still denied the sky.
Fires burnt indeed the brighter for the Change—and spread. . . .

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. . . .