In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 1

  AND what a strange unprecedented thing was that cabinet council atwhich I was present, the council that was held two days later inMelmount's bungalow, and which convened the conference to frame theconstitution of the World State. I was there because it was convenientfor me to stay with Melmount. I had nowhere to go particularly,and there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankleconfined him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin hisshare of the enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulersof the world. I wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonographavailable, I went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, andsat at his desk to write at his dictation. It is characteristicof the odd slackness that went with the spasmodic violence of theold epoch, that the secretary could not use shorthand and thatthere was no telephone whatever in the place. Every message hadto be taken to the village post-office in that grocer's shop atMenton, half a mile away. . . . So I sat in the back of Melmount'sroom, his desk had been thrust aside, and made such memoranda aswere needed. At that time his room seemed to me the most beautifullyfurnished in the world, and I could identify now the vivid cheerfulnessof the chintz of the sofa on which the great statesman lay just infront of me, the fine rich paper, the red sealing-wax, the silverequipage of the desk I used. I know now that my presence in thatroom was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, even thecoming and going of Parker the secretary, innovations. In the olddays a cabinet council was a secret conclave, secrecy and furtivenesswere in the texture of all public life. In the old days everybodywas always keeping something back from somebody, being wary andcunning, prevaricating, misleading--for the most part for no reasonat all. Almost unnoticed, that secrecy had dropped out of life.

  I close my eyes and see those men again, hear their deliberatingvoices. First I see them a little diffusely in the cold explicitnessof daylight, and then concentrated and drawn together amidst theshadow and mystery about shaded lamps. Integral to this and veryclear is the memory of biscuit crumbs and a drop of spilt water,that at first stood shining upon and then sank into thegreen table-cloth. . . .

  I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham. He came to thebungalow a day before the others, because he was Melmount's personalfriend. Let me describe this statesman to you, this one of thefifteen men who made the last war. He was the youngest member ofthe Government, and an altogether pleasant and sunny man of forty.He had a clear profile to his clean gray face, a smiling eye, afriendly, careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, an easydisabusing manner. He had the perfect quality of a man who hadfallen easily into a place prepared for him. He had the temperamentof what we used to call a philosopher--an indifferent, that is to say.The Change had caught him at his week-end recreation, fly-fishing;and, indeed, he said, I remember, that he recovered to find himselfwith his head within a yard of the water's brim. In times of crisisLord Adisham invariably went fly-fishing at the week-end to keep hismind in tone, and when there was no crisis then there was nothinghe liked so much to do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, as therewas nothing to prevent it, he fished. He came resolved, among otherthings, to give up fly-fishing altogether. I was present when hecame to Melmount, and heard him say as much; and by a more naiveroute it was evident that he had arrived at the same scheme ofintention as my master. I left them to talk, but afterward I cameback to take down their long telegrams to their coming colleagues.He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as Melmount by theChange, but his tricks of civility and irony and acceptable humorhad survived the Change, and he expressed his altered attitude,his expanded emotions, in a quaint modification of the old-timeman-of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a trainedhorror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.

  These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlikeanything I had expected, and I watched them intently whenever myservices were not in request. They made a peculiar class at thattime, these English politicians and statesmen, a class that hasnow completely passed away. In some respects they were unlike thestatesmen of any other region of the world, and I do not find thatany really adequate account remains of them. . . . Perhaps you area reader of the old books. If so, you will find them rendered witha note of hostile exaggeration by Dickens in "Bleak House," witha mingling of gross flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, whoruled among them accidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasingthe court, and all their assumptions are set forth, portentously,perhaps, but truthfully, so far as people of the "permanentofficial" class saw them, in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Allthese books are still in this world and at the disposal of thecurious, and in addition the philosopher Bagehot and the picturesquehistorian Macaulay give something of their method of thinking, thenovelist Thackeray skirts the seamy side of their social life, andthere are some good passages of irony, personal descriptions, andreminiscence to be found in the "Twentieth Century Garner" from thepens of such writers, for example, as Sidney Low. But a picture ofthem as a whole is wanting. Then they were too near and too great;now, very rapidly, they have become incomprehensible.

  We common people of the old time based our conception of ourstatesmen almost entirely on the caricatures that formed the mostpowerful weapon in political controversy. Like almost every mainfeature of the old condition of things these caricatures were anunanticipated development, they were a sort of parasitic outgrowthfrom, which had finally altogether replaced, the thin and vagueaspirations of the original democratic ideals. They presentednot only the personalities who led our public life, but the mostsacred structural conceptions of that life, in ludicrous, vulgar,and dishonorable aspects that in the end came near to destroyingentirely all grave and honorable emotion or motive toward the State.The state of Britain was represented nearly always by a red-faced,purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that fine dreamof freedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced rascalin striped trousers and a blue coat. The chief ministers of statewere pickpockets, washerwomen, clowns, whales, asses, elephants,and what not, and issues that affected the welfare of millions ofmen were dressed and judged like a rally in some idiotic pantomime.A tragic war in South Africa, that wrecked many thousand homes,impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablementto fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrelbetween a violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass,an orchid, and a short temper, and "old Kroojer," an obstinateand very cunning old man in a shocking bad hat. The conflict wascarried through in a mood sometimes of brutish irritability andsometimes of lax slovenliness, the merry peculator plied his tradecongenially in that asinine squabble, and behind these fooleriesand masked by them, marched Fate--until at last the clowning ofthe booth opened and revealed--hunger and suffering, brands burningand swords and shame. . . . These men had come to fame and power inthat atmosphere, and to me that day there was the oddest suggestionin them of actors who have suddenly laid aside grotesque and foolishparts; the paint was washed from their faces, the posing put aside.

  Even when the presentation was not frankly grotesque and degradingit was entirely misleading. When I read of Laycock, for example,there arises a picture of a large, active, if a little wrong-headed,intelligence in a compact heroic body, emitting that "Goliath" speechof his that did so much to precipitate hostilities, it tallies notat all with the stammering, high-pitched, slightly bald, and veryconscience-stricken personage I saw, nor with Melmount's contemptuousfirst description of him. I doubt if the world at large will everget a proper vision of those men as they were before the Change.Each year they pass more and more incredibly beyond our intellectualsympathy. Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of theirportion in the past, but it will rob them of any effect of reality.The whole of their history becomes more and more foreign, more andmore like some queer barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue.There they strut through their weird metamorphoses of caricature,those premiers and presidents, their height preposterously exaggerated bypolitical buskins, their faces covered by great resonant inhumanmasks, their voices couche
d in the foolish idiom of publicutterance, disguised beyond any semblance to sane humanity, roaringand squeaking through the public press. There it stands, thisincomprehensible faded show, a thing left on one side, and now stilland deserted by any interest, its many emptinesses as inexplicablenow as the cruelties of medieval Venice, the theology of old Byzantium.And they ruled and influenced the lives of nearly a quarter ofmankind, these politicians, their clownish conflicts swayed theworld, made mirth perhaps, made excitement, and permitted--infinitemisery.

  I saw these men quickened indeed by the Change, but still wearingthe queer clothing of the old time, the manners and conventions ofthe old time; if they had disengaged themselves from the outlookof the old time they still had to refer back to it constantly as acommon starting-point. My refreshed intelligence was equal to that,so that I think I did indeed see them. There was Gorrell-Browning,the Chancellor of the Duchy; I remember him as a big round-facedman, the essential vanity and foolishness of whose expression, whosehabit of voluminous platitudinous speech, triumphed absurdly onceor twice over the roused spirit within. He struggled with it, heburlesqued himself, and laughed. Suddenly he said simply, intensely--itwas a moment for every one of clean, clear pain, "I have been avain and self-indulgent and presumptuous old man. I am of littleuse here. I have given myself to politics and intrigues, and lifeis gone from me." Then for a long time he sat still. There wasCarton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-faced man with understanding,he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood among the bustsof the Caesars, a slow, elaborating voice, with self-indulgent,slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary, voluntary,humorous twinkle. "We have to forgive," he said. "We have toforgive--even ourselves."

  These two were at the top corner of the table, so that I saw theirfaces well. Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkledeyebrows and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next toCarton; he contributed little to the discussion save intelligentcomments, and when the electric lights above glowed out, the shadowsdeepened queerly in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzicalexpression of an ironical goblin. Next him was that great peer,the Earl of Richover, whose self-indulgent indolence had acceptedthe role of a twentieth-century British Roman patrician of culture,who had divided his time almost equally between his jockeys,politics, and the composition of literary studies in the key ofhis role. "We have done nothing worth doing," he said. "As for me,I have cut a figure!" He reflected--no doubt on his ample patricianyears, on the fine great houses that had been his setting, theteeming race-courses that had roared his name, the enthusiasticmeetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian beginnings.. . . "I have been a fool," he said compactly. They heard him ina sympathetic and respectful silence.

  Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, sofar as I was concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham. Ever and againGurker protruded into the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throatyvoice, a big nose, a coarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip,eyes peering amidst folds and wrinkles. He made his confession forhis race. "We Jews," he said, "have gone through the system of thisworld, creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much.Our racial self-conceit has been monstrous. We seem to have used ourample coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to developand master and maintain the convention of property, to turn life intoa sort of mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. . . . Wehave had no sense of service to mankind. Beauty which is godhead--wemade it a possession."

  These men and these sayings particularly remain in my memory.Perhaps, indeed, I wrote them down at the time, but that I do notnow remember. How Sir Digby Privet, Revel, Markheimer, and the otherssat I do not now recall; they came in as voices, interruptions,imperfectly assigned comments. . . .

  One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revelthese men had not particularly wanted the power they held; haddesired to do nothing very much in the positions they had secured.They had found themselves in the cabinet, and until this momentof illumination they had not been ashamed; but they had made noungentlemanly fuss about the matter. Eight of that fifteen came fromthe same school, had gone through an entirely parallel education;some Greek linguistics, some elementary mathematics, some emasculated"science," a little history, a little reading in the silent ortimidly orthodox English literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth,and nineteenth centuries, all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanlytradition of behavior; essentially boyish, unimaginative--withneither keen swords nor art in it, a tradition apt to slobber intosentiment at a crisis and make a great virtue of a simple duty ratherclumsily done. None of these eight had made any real experimentswith life, they had lived in blinkers, they had been passed fromnurse to governess, from governess to preparatory school, from Etonto Oxford, from Oxford to the politico-social routine. Even theirvices and lapses had been according to certain conceptions of goodform. They had all gone to the races surreptitiously from Eton, hadall cut up to town from Oxford to see life--music-hall life--hadall come to heel again. Now suddenly they discovered theirlimitations. . . .

  "What are we to do?" asked Melmount. "We have awakened; this empirein our hands. . . ." I know this will seem the most fabulous of allthe things I have to tell of the old order, but, indeed, I saw itwith my eyes, I heard it with my ears. It is a fact that this groupof men who constituted the Government of one-fifth of the habitableland of the earth, who ruled over a million of armed men, whohad such navies as mankind had never seen before, whose empire ofnations, tongues, peoples still dazzles in these greater days, hadno common idea whatever of what they meant to do with the world.They had been a Government for three long years, and before theChange came to them it had never even occurred to them that it wasnecessary to have no common idea. There was no common idea at all.That great empire was no more than a thing adrift, an aimless thingthat ate and drank and slept and bore arms, and was inordinatelyproud of itself because it had chanced to happen. It had no plan,no intention; it meant nothing at all. And the other great empiresadrift, perilously adrift like marine mines, were in the self-samecase. Absurd as a British cabinet council must seem to you now, itwas no whit more absurd than the controlling ganglion, autocraticcouncil, president's committee, or what not, of each ofits blind rivals. . . .