In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 1

  As the train carried me on from Birmingham to Monkshampton, itcarried me not only into a country where I had never been before,but out of the commonplace daylight and the touch and qualityof ordinary things, into the strange unprecedented night that wasruled by the giant meteor of the last days.

  There was at that time a curious accentuation of the common alternationof night and day. They became separated with a widening differenceof value in regard to all mundane affairs. During the day, thecomet was an item in the newspapers, it was jostled by a thousandmore living interests, it was as nothing in the skirts of the warstorm that was now upon us. It was an astronomical phenomenon,somewhere away over China, millions of miles away in the deeps.We forgot it. But directly the sun sank one turned ever and againtoward the east, and the meteor resumed its sway over us.

  One waited for its rising, and yet each night it came as a surprise.Always it rose brighter than one had dared to think, always larger andwith some wonderful change in its outline, and now with a strange,less luminous, greener disk upon it that grew with its growth, theumbra of the earth. It shone also with its own light, so that thisshadow was not hard or black, but it shone phosphorescently and witha diminishing intensity where the stimulus of the sun's rays waswithdrawn. As it ascended toward the zenith, as the last trailingdaylight went after the abdicating sun, its greenish white illuminationbanished the realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness overall things. It changed the starless sky about it to an extraordinarydeep blue, the profoundest color in the world, such as I have neverseen before or since. I remember, too, that as I peered from thetrain that was rattling me along to Monkshampton, I perceived andwas puzzled by a coppery red light that mingled with all the shadowsthat were cast by it.

  It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities.Everywhere the local authorities discontinued street lighting--onecould read small print in the glare,--and so at Monkshampton Iwent about through pale, white, unfamiliar streets, whose electricglobes had shadows on the path. Lit windows here and there burntruddy orange, like holes cut in some dream curtain that hung beforea furnace. A policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn wovenof moonshine, a green-faced man opened to us, and there I abodethe night. And the next morning it opened with a mighty clatter,and was a dirty little beerhouse that stank of beer, and there wasa fat and grimy landlord with red spots upon his neck, and muchnoisy traffic going by on the cobbles outside.

  I came out, after I had paid my bill, into a street that echoedto the bawlings of two newsvendors and to the noisy yappings of adog they had raised to emulation. They were shouting: "Great Britishdisaster in the North Sea. A battleship lost with all hands!"

  I bought a paper, went on to the railway station reading suchdetails as were given of this triumph of the old civilization, ofthe blowing up of this great iron ship, full of guns and explosivesand the most costly and beautiful machinery of which that time wascapable, together with nine hundred able-bodied men, all of themabove the average, by a contact mine towed by a German submarine.I read myself into a fever of warlike emotions. Not only did Iforget the meteor, but for a time I forgot even the purpose thattook me on to the railway station, bought my ticket, and was nowcarrying me onward to Shaphambury.

  So the hot day came to its own again, and people forgot the night.

  Each night, there shone upon us more and more insistently, beauty,wonder, the promise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveledfor a space. And at the first gray sounds of dawn again, at theshooting of bolts and the noise of milk-carts, we forgot, and thedusty habitual day came yawning and stretching back again. Thestains of coal smoke crept across the heavens, and we rose to thesoiled disorderly routine of life.

  "Thus life has always been," we said; "thus it will always be."

  The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded asspectacular merely. It signified nothing to us. So far as westernEurope went, it was only a small and ignorant section of the lowerclasses who regarded the comet as a portent of the end of theworld. Abroad, where there were peasantries, it was different, butin England the peasantry had already disappeared. Every one read.The newspaper, in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germanyrushed to its climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilitiesof a panic in this matter. The very tramps upon the high-roads, thechildren in the nursery, had learnt that at the utmost the wholeof that shining cloud could weigh but a few score tons. This facthad been shown quite conclusively by the enormous deflections thathad at last swung it round squarely at our world. It had passednear three of the smallest asteroids without producing the minutestperceptible deflection in their course; while, on its own part, ithad described a course through nearly three degrees. When it struckour earth there was to be a magnificent spectacle, no doubt, forthose who were on the right side of our planet to see, but beyondthat nothing. It was doubtful whether we were on the right side.The meteor would loom larger and larger in the sky, but with theumbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness out, and at lastit would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green clouds, witha white brightness about the horizon, west and east. Then a pause--apause of not very exactly definite duration--and then, no doubt,a great blaze of shooting stars. They might be of some unwontedcolor because of the unknown element that line in the green revealed.For a little while the zenith would spout shooting stars. Some,it was hoped, would reach the earth and be available for analysis.

  That, science said, would be all. The green clouds would whirl andvanish, and there might be thunderstorms. But through the attenuatedwisps of comet shine, the old sky, the old stars, would reappear,and all would be as it had been before. And since this was to happenbetween one and eleven in the morning of the approaching Tuesday--Islept at Monkshampton on Saturday night,--it would be only partiallyvisible, if visible at all, on our side of the earth. Perhaps, ifit came late, one would see no more than a shooting star low downin the sky. All this we had with the utmost assurances of science.Still it did not prevent the last nights being the most beautifuland memorable of human experiences.

  The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had rangedShaphambury in vain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleledglory of the night returned, to think that under its splendidbenediction young Verrall and Nettie made love to one another.

  I walked backward and forward, backward and forward, along the seafront, peering into the faces of the young couples who promenaded,with my hand in my pocket ready, and a curious ache in my heartthat had no kindred with rage. Until at last all the promenadershad gone home to bed, and I was alone with the star.

  My train from Wyvern to Shaphambury that morning was a whole hourlate; they said it was on account of the movement of troops to meeta possible raid from the Elbe.