In the Days of the Comet (13 page)

She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any
loss of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she
had come to interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had
bridged the gulf between their families.

And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far
as my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the world
that followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling
inconceivable. Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed
for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things
that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one
had taken up an attitude. There were in England and America, and
indeed throughout the world, two great informal divisions of human
beings—the Secure and the Insecure. There was not and never had
been in either country a nobility—it was and remains a common
error that the British peers were noble—neither in law nor custom
were there noble families, and we altogether lacked the edification
one found in Russia, for example, of a poor nobility. A peerage
was an hereditary possession that, like the family land, concerned
only the eldest sons of the house; it radiated no luster of noblesse
oblige. The rest of the world were in law and practice common—and
all America was common. But through the private ownership of land
that had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britain
and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large
masses of property had become artificially stable in the hands
of a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all new
public and private enterprises, and who were held together not by
any tradition of service and nobility but by the natural sympathy
of common interests and a common large scale of living. It was a class
without any very definite boundaries; vigorous individualities, by
methods for the most part violent and questionable, were constantly
thrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and the sons
and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by wild
extravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety
and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The rest
of the population was landless and, except by working directly or
indirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such
was the shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the
stifled egotism of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very
few indeed of the Secure could be found to doubt that this was the
natural and only conceivable order of the world.

It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am
displaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopeless
bitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure lived
lives of paradisiacal happiness. The pit of insecurity below them
made itself felt, even though it was not comprehended. Life about
them was ugly; the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressed
people, the vulgar appeals of the dealers in popular commodities,
were not to be escaped. There was below the threshold of their minds
an uneasiness; they not only did not think clearly about social
economy but they displayed an instinctive disinclination to think.
Their security was not so perfect that they had not a dread of
falling towards the pit, they were always lashing themselves by
new ropes, their cultivation of "connexions," of interests, their
desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a constant
ignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the full
flavor of their lives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class
distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants.
Read their surviving books. Each generation bewails the decay
of that "fidelity" of servants, no generation ever saw. A world
that is squalid in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they
never understood. They believed there was not enough of anything
to go round, they believed that this was the intention of God and
an incurable condition of life, and they held passionately and with
a sense of right to their disproportionate share. They maintained
a common intercourse as "Society" of all who were practically
secure, and their choice of that word is exhaustively eloquent
of the quality of their philosophy. But, if you can master these
alien ideas upon which the old system rested, just in the same
measure will you understand the horror these people had for marriages
with the Insecure. In the case of their girls and women it was
extraordinarily rare, and in the case of either sex it was regarded
as a disastrous social crime. Anything was better than that.

You are probably aware of the hideous fate that was only too probably
the lot, during those last dark days, of every girl of the insecure
classes who loved and gave way to the impulse of self-abandonment
without marriage, and so you will understand the peculiar situation
of Nettie with young Verrall. One or other had to suffer. And as
they were both in a state of great emotional exaltation and capable
of strange generosities toward each other, it was an open question
and naturally a source of great anxiety to a mother in Mrs. Verrall's
position, whether the sufferer might not be her son—whether as
the outcome of that glowing irresponsible commerce Nettie might
not return prospective mistress of Checkshill Towers. The chances
were greatly against that conclusion, but such things did occur.

These laws and customs sound, I know, like a record of some
nasty-minded lunatic's inventions. They were invincible facts in
that vanished world into which, by some accident, I had been born,
and it was the dream of any better state of things that was scouted
as lunacy. Just think of it! This girl I loved with all my soul,
for whom I was ready to sacrifice my life, was not good enough to
marry young Verrall. And I had only to look at his even, handsome,
characterless face to perceive a creature weaker and no better
than myself. She was to be his pleasure until he chose to cast her
aside, and the poison of our social system had so saturated her
nature—his evening dress, his freedom and his money had seemed
so fine to her and I so clothed in squalor—that to that prospect
she had consented. And to resent the social conventions that
created their situation, was called "class envy," and gently born
preachers reproached us for the mildest resentment against an injustice
no living man would now either endure or consent to profit by.

What was the sense of saying "peace" when there was no peace? If
there was one hope in the disorders of that old world it lay in
revolt and conflict to the death.

But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesqueness of the old
life, you will begin to appreciate the interpretation of old Mrs.
Verrall's appearance that leapt up at once in my mind.

She had come to compromise the disaster!

And the Stuarts WOULD compromise! I saw that only too well.

An enormous disgust at the prospect of the imminent encounter between
Stuart and his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrational
way. I wanted to escape seeing that, seeing even Stuart's first
gesture in that, at any cost.

"I'm off," said I, and turned my back on him without any further
farewell.

My line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so I advanced toward
her.

I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a little way open, her
forehead wrinkled, and her eyes grew round. She found me a queer
customer even at the first sight, and there was something in the
manner of my advance that took away her breath.

She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to
the level of the hothouse floor. She receded a pace or two, with
a certain offended dignity at the determination of my rush.

I gave her no sort of salutation.

Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation.
There is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing
I said to her—I strip these things before you—if only I can get
them stark enough you will understand and forgive. I was filled
with a brutal and overpowering desire to insult her.

And so I addressed this poor little expensive old woman in
the following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into a
comprehensive plural. "You infernal land thieves!" I said point-blank
into her face. "HAVE YOU COME TO OFFER THEM MONEY?"

And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudely
beyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched,
out of her world again. . .

I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked to
her. So far as her particular universe went I had not existed at
all, or I had existed only as a dim black thing, an insignificant
speck, far away across her park in irrelevant, unimportant transit,
until this moment when she came, sedately troubled, into her own
secure gardens and sought for Stuart among the greenhouses. Then
abruptly I flashed into being down that green-walled, brick-floored
vista as a black-avised, ill-clad young man, who first stared and
then advanced scowling toward her. Once in existence I developed
rapidly. I grew larger in perspective and became more and more
important and sinister every moment. I came up the steps with
inconceivable hostility and disrespect in my bearing, towered
over her, becoming for an instant at least a sort of second French
Revolution, and delivered myself with the intensest concentration
of those wicked and incomprehensible words. Just for a second I
threatened annihilation. Happily that was my climax.

And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it had
always been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint sense
of insecurity my episode left in its wake.

The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a large
proportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith. I thought
they saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied. But indeed
old Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection
of her family's right to dominate a wide country side, than she was
of examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other of
the adamantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security.

No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously. But she could
not understand.

None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid
flashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below
their feet. The thing leapt out of the black for a moment and
vanished, like a threatening figure by a desolate roadside lit for
a moment by one's belated carriage-lamp and then swallowed up by
the night. They counted it with nightmares, and did their best to
forget what was evidently as insignificant as it was disturbing.

FROM that moment when I insulted old Mrs. Verrall I became
representative, I was a man who stood for all the disinherited of
the world. I had no hope of pride or pleasure left in me, I was
raging rebellion against God and mankind. There were no more vague
intentions swaying me this way and that; I was perfectly clear now
upon what I meant to do. I would make my protest and die.

I would make my protest and die. I was going to kill Nettie—Nettie
who had smiled and promised and given herself to another, and who
stood now for all the conceivable delightfulnesses, the lost imaginations
of the youthful heart, the unattainable joys in life; and Verrall
who stood for all who profited by the incurable injustice of our
social order. I would kill them both. And that being done I would
blow my brains out and see what vengeance followed my blank refusal
to live.

So indeed I was resolved. I raged monstrously. And above me,
abolishing the stars, triumphant over the yellow waning moon that
followed it below, the giant meteor towered up towards the zenith.

"Let me only kill!" I cried. "Let me only kill!"

So I shouted in my frenzy. I was in a fever that defied hunger
and fatigue; for a long time I had prowled over the heath towards
Lowchester talking to myself, and now that night had fully come I
was tramping homeward, walking the long seventeen miles without a
thought of rest. And I had eaten nothing since the morning.

I suppose I must count myself mad, but I can recall my ravings.

There were times when I walked weeping through that brightness that
was neither night nor day. There were times when I reasoned in a
topsy-turvy fashion with what I called the Spirit of All Things.
But always I spoke to that white glory in the sky.

"Why am I here only to suffer ignominies?" I asked. "Why have you
made me with pride that cannot be satisfied, with desires that
turn and rend me? Is it a jest, this world—a joke you play on your
guests? I—even I—have a better humor than that!"

"Why not learn from me a certain decency of mercy? Why not undo?
Have I ever tormented—day by day, some wretched worm—making
filth for it to trail through, filth that disgusts it, starving it,
bruising it, mocking it? Why should you? Your jokes are clumsy.
Try—try some milder fun up there; do you hear? Something that
doesn't hurt so infernally."

"You say this is your purpose—your purpose with me. You are making
something with me—birth pangs of a soul. Ah! How can I believe
you? You forget I have eyes for other things. Let my own case go,
but what of that frog beneath the cart-wheel, God?—and the bird
the cat had torn?"

And after such blasphemies I would fling out a ridiculous little
debating society hand. "Answer me that!"

A week ago it had been moonlight, white and black and hard across
the spaces of the park, but now the light was livid and full of
the quality of haze. An extraordinarily low white mist, not three
feet above the ground, drifted broodingly across the grass, and
the trees rose ghostly out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy
and strange was the world that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my
little cracked voice drifted solitary through the silent mysteries.
Sometimes I argued as I have told, sometimes I tumbled along in
moody vacuity, sometimes my torment was vivid and acute.