In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 6

  His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and aquarter from the lane. We went down to the beach margin and alongthe pallid wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying,hopping, tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, andthen, as soon as we could, sitting down. His ankle was, in fact,broken, and he could not put it to the ground without exquisitepain. 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 comeout to assist me. They had found motor-car and chauffeur smashedand still at the bend of the road near the house, and had been onthat side looking for Melmount, or they would have seen us before.

  For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalkboulder, now on a timber groin, and talking one to the other, withthe frankness proper to the intercourse of men of good intent,without reservations or aggressions, in the common, open fashionof contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then, nevertheless,was the rarest and strangest thing in the world. He for the mostpart talked, but at some shape of a question I told him--as plainlyas I could tell of passions that had for a time become incomprehensibleto me--of my murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how thegreen vapors overcame me. He watched me with grave eyes and noddedunderstandingly, and afterwards he asked me brief penetratingquestions about my education, my upbringing, my work. There was adeliberation in his manner, brief full pauses, that had in them noelement of delay.

  "Yes," he said, "yes--of course. What a fool I have been!" and saidno more until we had made another of our tripod struggles alongthe beach. At first I did not see the connection of my story withthat self-accusation.

  "Suppose," he said, panting on the groin, "there had been such athing as a statesman! . . ."

  He turned to me. "If one had decided all this muddle shall end! Ifone had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who buildstakes site and stone, and made------" He flung out his big broad handat the glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, "somethingto fit that setting."

  He added in explanation, "Then there wouldn't have been such storiesas yours at all, you know. . . ."

  "Tell me more about it," he said, "tell me all about yourself. Ifeel all these things have passed away, all these things are to bechanged for ever. . . . You won't be what you have been from thistime forth. All the things you have done--don't matter now. Tous, at any rate, they don't matter at all. We have met, who wereseparated in that darkness behind us. Tell me.

  "Yes," he said; and I told my story straight and as frankly as Ihave told it to you. "And there, where those little skerries of weedrock run out to the ebb, beyond the headland, is Bungalow village.What did you do with your pistol?"

  "I left it lying there--among the barley."

  He glanced at me from under his light eyelashes. "If others feellike you and I," he said, "there'll be a lot of pistols left amongthe barley to-day. . . ."

  So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love ofbrothers so plain between us it needed not a word. Our souls wentout to one another in stark good faith; never before had I hadanything but a guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man. Still Isee him, upon that wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see himleaning against the shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at thepoor drowned sailor whose body we presently found. For we found anewly drowned man who had just chanced to miss this great dawn inwhich we rejoiced. We found him lying in a pool of water, amongbrown weeds in the dark shadow of the timberings. You must notoverrate the horrors of the former days; in those days it was scarcelymore common to see death in England than it would be to-day. Thisdead man was a sailor from the Rother Adler, the great Germanbattleship that--had we but known it--lay not four miles away alongthe coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn andbattered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, andholding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, allstrong and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .

  I remember that poor boy very vividly. He had been drowned duringthe anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young face was quietand calm, but the skin of his chest had been crinkled by scaldingwater and his right arm was bent queerly back. Even to this needlessdeath and all its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come.Everything flowed together to significance as we stood there, I,the ill-clad, cheaply equipped proletarian, and Melmount in hisgreat fur-trimmed coat--he was hot with walking but he had notthought to remove it--leaning upon the clumsy groins and pityingthis poor victim of the war he had helped to make. "Poor lad!" hesaid, "poor lad! A child we blunderers sent to death! Do look atthe quiet beauty of that face, that body--to be flung aside likethis!"

  (I remember that near this dead man's hand a stranded star-fishwrithed 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 myshoulder, "no more of this. . . ."

  But most I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting upona great chalk boulder with the sunlight on his big, perspiration-dewedface. He made his resolves. "We must end war," he said, in thatfull whisper of his; "it is stupidity. With so many people ableto read and think--even as it is--there is no need of anything ofthe sort. Gods! What have we rulers been at? . . . Drowsing likepeople in a stifling room, too dull and sleepy and too base towardeach other for any one to get up and open the window. What haven'twe been at?"

  A great powerful figure he sits there still in my memory, perplexedand astonished at himself and all things. "We must change all this,"he repeated, and threw out his broad hands in a powerful gestureagainst the sea and sky. "We have done so weakly--Heaven aloneknows why!" I can see him now, queer giant that he looked on thatdawnlit beach of splendor, the sea birds flying about us and thatcrumpled death hard by, no bad symbol in his clumsiness and needlessheat of the unawakened powers of the former time. I remember itas an integral part of that picture that far away across the sandystretches one of those white estate boards I have described, stuckup a little askew amidst the yellow-green turf upon the crest ofthe low cliffs.

  He talked with a sort of wonder of the former things. "Has it everdawned upon you to imagine the pettiness--the pettiness!--of everysoul concerned in a declaration of war?" he asked. He went on,as though speech was necessary to make it credible, to describeLaycock, who first gave the horror words at the cabinet council,"an undersized Oxford prig with a tenoring voice and a garbage ofGreek--the sort of little fool who is brought up on theadmiration of his elder sisters. . . .

  "All the time almost," he said, "I was watching him--thinking whatan ass he was to be trusted with men's lives. . . . I might havedone better to have thought that of myself. I was doing nothingto prevent it all! The damned little imbecile was up to his neckin the drama of the thing, he liked to trumpet it out, he goggledround at us. 'Then it is war!' he said. Richover shrugged hisshoulders. I made some slight protest and gave in. . . . AfterwardI 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 hishead 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 myshoulder but making no further attempt to arise, "I'm going to putan end to war--to any sort of war! And all these things that mustend. The world is beautiful, life is great and splendid, we hadonly to lift up our eyes and see. Think of the glories through whichwe have been driving, like a herd of swine in a garden place. Thecolor in life--the sounds--the shapes! We have had our jealousies,our quarrels, our ticklish
rights, our invincible prejudices, ourvulgar enterprise and sluggish timidities, we have chattered andpecked one another and fouled the world--like daws in the temple,like unclean birds in the holy place of God. All my life has beenfoolishness and pettiness, gross pleasures and mean discretions--all.I am a meagre dark thing in this morning's glow, a penitence, ashame! And, but for God's mercy, I might have died this night--likethat poor lad there--amidst the squalor of my sins! No more ofthis! 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 willsay unto Him------"

  His voice died away in an inaudible whisper. His handtightened painfully on my shoulder and he rose. . . .

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  THE AWAKENING