In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 2

  Shaphambury seemed an odd place to me even then. But something wasquickening in me at that time to feel the oddness of many acceptedthings. Now in the retrospect I see it as intensely queer. The wholeplace was strange to my untraveled eyes; the sea even was strange.Only twice in my life had I been at the seaside before, and thenI had gone by excursion to places on the Welsh coast whose greatcliffs of rock and mountain backgrounds made the effect of the horizonvery different from what it is upon the East Anglian seaboard. Herewhat they call a cliff was a crumbling bank of whitey-brown earthnot fifty feet high.

  So soon as I arrived I made a systematic exploration of Shaphambury.To this day I retain the clearest memories of the plan I shapedout then, and how my inquiries were incommoded by the overpoweringdesire of every one to talk of the chances of a German raid, beforethe Channel Fleet got round to us. I slept at a small public-housein a Shaphambury back street on Sunday night. I did not get on toShaphambury from Wyvern until two in the afternoon, because of theinfrequency of Sunday trains, and I got no clue whatever until latein the afternoon of Monday. As the little local train bumped intosight of the place round the curve of a swelling hill, one sawa series of undulating grassy spaces, amidst which a number ofconspicuous notice-boards appealed to the eye and cut up the distantsea horizon. Most of these referred to comestibles or to remediesto follow the comestibles; and they were colored with a view to bememorable rather than beautiful, to "stand out" amidst the gentlegrayish tones of the east coast scenery. The greater number, I mayremark, of the advertisements that were so conspicuous a factorin the life of those days, and which rendered our vast tree-pulpnewspapers possible, referred to foods, drinks, tobacco, and thedrugs that promised a restoration of the equanimity these otherarticles had destroyed. Wherever one went one was reminded in glaringletters that, after all, man was little better than a worm, thateyeless, earless thing that burrows and lives uncomplaininglyamidst nutritious dirt, "an alimentary canal with the subservientappendages thereto." But in addition to such boards there were alsothe big black and white boards of various grandiloquently named"estates." The individualistic enterprise of that time had led tothe plotting out of nearly all the country round the seaside townsinto roads and building-plots--all but a small portion of the southand east coast was in this condition, and had the promises of thoseschemes been realized the entire population of the island mighthave been accommodated upon the sea frontiers. Nothing of the sorthappened, of course; the whole of this uglification of the coast-linewas done to stimulate a little foolish gambling in plots, andone saw everywhere agents' boards in every state of freshness anddecay, ill-made exploitation roads overgrown with grass, and hereand there, at a corner, a label, "Trafalgar Avenue," or "Sea ViewRoad." Here and there, too, some small investor, some shopman with"savings," had delivered his soul to the local builders and builthimself a house, and there it stood, ill-designed, mean-looking,isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced plot, athwart which hisdomestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst a bleak desolationof enterprise. Then presently our railway crossed a high road,and a row of mean yellow brick houses--workmen's cottages, andthe filthy black sheds that made the "allotments" of that time auniversal eyesore, marked our approach to the more central areasof--I quote the local guidebook--"one of the most delightful resortsin the East Anglian poppy-land." Then more mean houses, the gauntungainliness of the electric force station--it had a huge chimney,because no one understood how to make combustion of coal complete--andthen we were in the railway station, and barely three-quarters ofa mile from the center of this haunt of health and pleasure.

  I inspected the town thoroughly before I made my inquiries. Theroad began badly with a row of cheap, pretentious, insolvent-lookingshops, a public-house, and a cab-stand, but, after an interval oflittle red villas that were partly hidden amidst shrubbery gardens,broke into a confusedly bright but not unpleasing High Street,shuttered that afternoon and sabbatically still. Somewhere in thebackground a church bell jangled, and children in bright, new-lookingclothes were going to Sunday-school. Thence through a square ofstuccoed lodging-houses, that seemed a finer and cleaner version ofmy native square, I came to a garden of asphalt and euonymus--theSea Front. I sat down on a cast-iron seat, and surveyed first of allthe broad stretches of muddy, sandy beach, with its queer wheeledbathing machines, painted with the advertisements of somebody'spills--and then at the house fronts that stared out upon these visceralcounsels. Boarding-houses, private hotels, and lodging-houses interraces clustered closely right and left of me, and then came toan end; in one direction scaffolding marked a building enterprisein progress, in the other, after a waste interval, rose a monstrousbulging red shape, a huge hotel, that dwarfed all other things.Northward were low pale cliffs with white denticulations of tents,where the local volunteers, all under arms, lay encamped, andsouthward, a spreading waste of sandy dunes, with occasional bushesand clumps of stunted pine and an advertisement board or so. Ahard blue sky hung over all this prospect, the sunshine cast inkyshadows, and eastward was a whitish sea. It was Sunday, and themidday meal still held people indoors.

  A queer world! thought I even then--to you now it must seem impossiblyqueer,--and after an interval I forced myself back to my own affair.

  How was I to ask? What was I to ask for? I puzzled for a long timeover that--at first I was a little tired and indolent--and thenpresently I had a flow of ideas.

  My solution was fairly ingenious. I invented the following story.I happened to be taking a holiday in Shaphambury, and I was makinguse of the opportunity to seek the owner of a valuable feather boa,which had been left behind in the hotel of my uncle at Wyvern by ayoung lady, traveling with a young gentleman--no doubt a youthfulmarried couple. They had reached Shaphambury somewhen on Thursday.I went over the story many times, and gave my imaginary uncle andhis hotel plausible names. At any rate this yarn would serve asa complete justification for all the questions I might wish to ask.

  I settled that, but I still sat for a time, wanting the energy tobegin. Then I turned toward the big hotel. Its gorgeous magnificenceseemed to my inexpert judgment to indicate the very place a richyoung man of good family would select.

  Huge draught-proof doors were swung round for me by an ironicallypolite under-porter in a magnificent green uniform, who looked atmy clothes as he listened to my question and then with a Germanaccent referred me to a gorgeous head porter, who directed me toa princely young man behind a counter of brass and polish, like abank--like several banks. This young man, while he answered me, kepthis eye on my collar and tie--and I knew that they were abominable.

  "I want to find a lady and gentleman who came to Shaphambury onTuesday," I said.

  "Friends of yours?" he asked with a terrible fineness of irony.

  I made out at last that here at any rate the young people had notbeen. They might have lunched there, but they had had no room. ButI went out--door opened again for me obsequiously--in a state ofsocial discomfiture, and did not attack any other establishmentthat afternoon.

  My resolution had come to a sort of ebb. More people were promenading,and their Sunday smartness abashed me. I forgot my purpose in anacute sense of myself. I felt that the bulge of my pocket causedby the revolver was conspicuous, and I was ashamed. I went alongthe sea front away from the town, and presently lay down amongpebbles and sea poppies. This mood of reaction prevailed with meall that afternoon. In the evening, about sundown, I went to thestation and asked questions of the outporters there. But outporters,I found, were a class of men who remembered luggage rather thanpeople, and I had no sort of idea what luggage young Verrall andNettie were likely to have with them.

  Then I fell into conversation with a salacious wooden-legged oldman with a silver ring, who swept the steps that went down to thebeach from the parade. He knew much about young couples, but onlyin general terms, and nothing of the particular young couple Isought. He reminded me in the most disagreeable way of the sensuousaspects of life, and I was not sorry when pr
esently a gunboatappeared in the offing signalling the coastguard and the camp, andcut short his observations upon holidays, beaches, and morals.

  I went, and now I was past my ebb, and sat in a seat upon the parade,and watched the brightening of those rising clouds of chilly firethat made the ruddy west seem tame. My midday lassitude was going,my blood was running warmer again. And as the twilight and that filmybrightness replaced the dusty sunlight and robbed this unfamiliarplace of all its matter-of-fact queerness, its sense of aimlessmaterialism, romance returned to me, and passion, and my thoughtsof honor and revenge. I remember that change of mood as occurringvery vividly on this occasion, but I fancy that less distinctly Ihad felt this before many times. In the old times, night and thestarlight had an effect of intimate reality the daytime did not possess.The daytime--as one saw it in towns and populous places--had holdof one, no doubt, but only as an uproar might, it was distracting,conflicting, insistent. Darkness veiled the more salient aspects ofthose agglomerations of human absurdity, and one could exist--onecould imagine.

  I had a queer illusion that night, that Nettie and her lover wereclose at hand, that suddenly I should come on them. I have alreadytold how I went through the dusk seeking them in every couple thatdrew near. And I dropped asleep at last in an unfamiliar bedroomhung with gaudily decorated texts, cursing myself for having wasteda day.