In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 1

  I CANNOT now remember (the story resumed), what interval separatedthat evening on which Parload first showed me the comet--I thinkI only pretended to see it then--and the Sunday afternoon I spentat Checkshill.

  Between the two there was time enough for me to give notice andleave Rawdon's, to seek for some other situation very strenuouslyin vain, to think and say many hard and violent things to my motherand to Parload, and to pass through some phases of very profoundwretchedness. There must have been a passionate correspondencewith Nettie, but all the froth and fury of that has faded now outof my memory. All I have clear now is that I wrote one magnificentfarewell to her, casting her off forever, and that I got in replya prim little note to say, that even if there was to be an end toeverything, that was no excuse for writing such things as I had done,and then I think I wrote again in a vein I considered satirical.To that she did not reply. That interval was at least three weeks,and probably four, because the comet which had been on the firstoccasion only a dubious speck in the sky, certainly visible onlywhen it was magnified, was now a great white presence, brighterthan Jupiter, and casting a shadow on its own account. It wasnow actively present in the world of human thought, every one wastalking about it, every one was looking for its waxing splendoras the sun went down--the papers, the music-halls, the hoardings,echoed it.

  Yes; the comet was already dominant before I went over to makeeverything clear to Nettie. And Parload had spent two hoarded poundsin buying himself a spectroscope, so that he could see for himself,night after night, that mysterious, that stimulating line--theunknown line in the green. How many times I wonder did I look atthe smudgy, quivering symbol of the unknown things that were rushingupon us out of the inhuman void, before I rebelled? But at last Icould stand it no longer, and I reproached Parload very bitterlyfor wasting his time in "astronomical dilettantism."

  "Here," said I. "We're on the verge of the biggest lock-out in thehistory of this countryside; here's distress and hunger coming,here's all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed,and you spend your time gaping at that damned silly streak ofnothing in the sky!"

  Parload stared at me. "Yes, I do," he said slowly, as though itwas a new idea. "Don't I? . . . I wonder why."

  "_I_ want to start meetings of an evening on Howden's Waste."

  "You think they'd listen?"

  "They'd listen fast enough now."

  "They didn't before," said Parload, looking at his pet instrument.

  "There was a demonstration of unemployed at Swathinglea on Sunday.They got to stone throwing."

  Parload said nothing for a little while and I said several things.He seemed to be considering something.

  "But, after all," he said at last, with an awkward movement towardshis spectroscope, "that does signify something."

  "The comet?"

  "Yes."

  "What can it signify? You don't want me to believe in astrology.What does it matter what flames in the heavens--when men are starvingon earth?"

  "It's--it's science."

  "Science! What we want now is socialism--not science."

  He still seemed reluctant to give up his comet.

  "Socialism's all right," he said, "but if that thing up there WASto hit the earth it might matter."

  "Nothing matters but human beings."

  "Suppose it killed them all."

  "Oh," said I, "that's Rot,"

  "I wonder," said Parload, dreadfully divided in his allegiance.

  He looked at the comet. He seemed on the verge of repeating hisgrowing information about the nearness of the paths of the earthand comet, and all that might ensue from that. So I cut in withsomething I had got out of a now forgotten writer called Ruskin,a volcano of beautiful language and nonsensical suggestions, whoprevailed very greatly with eloquent excitable young men in thosedays. Something it was about the insignificance of science and thesupreme importance of Life. Parload stood listening, half turnedtowards the sky with the tips of his fingers on his spectroscope.He seemed to come to a sudden decision.

  "No. I don't agree with you, Leadford," he said. "You don't understandabout science."

  Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition. I was soused to entire possession of our talk that his brief contradictionstruck me like a blow. "Don't agree with me!" I repeated.

  "No," said Parload

  "But how?"

  "I believe science is of more importance than socialism," he said."Socialism's a theory. Science--science is something more."

  And that was really all he seemed to be able to say.

  We embarked upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young menused always to find so heating. Science or Socialism? It was, ofcourse, like arguing which is right, left handedness or a taste foronions, it was altogether impossible opposition. But the range ofmy rhetoric enabled me at last to exasperate Parload, and his mererepudiation of my conclusions sufficed to exasperate me, and weended in the key of a positive quarrel. "Oh, very well!" said I."So long as I know where we are!"

  I slammed his door as though I dynamited his house, and went ragingdown the street, but I felt that he was already back at the windowworshiping his blessed line in the green, before I got round thecorner.

  I had to walk for an hour or so, before I was cool enough to gohome.

  And it was Parload who had first introduced me to socialism!

  Recreant!

  The most extraordinary things used to run through my head in thosedays. I will confess that my mind ran persistently that evening uponrevolutions after the best French pattern, and I sat on a Committeeof Safety and tried backsliders. Parload was there, among theprisoners, backsliderissimus, aware too late of the error of hisways. His hands were tied behind his back ready for the shambles;through the open door one heard the voice of justice, the rudejustice of the people. I was sorry, but I had to do my duty.

  "If we punish those who would betray us to Kings," said I, witha sorrowful deliberation, "how much the more must we punish thosewho would give over the State to the pursuit of useless knowledge";and so with a gloomy satisfaction sent him off to the guillotine.

  "Ah, Parload! Parload! If only you'd listened to me earlier,Parload. . . ."

  None the less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy. Parload wasmy only gossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and thinkevil of him with no one to listen to me, evening after evening.

  That was a very miserable time for me, even before my last visitto Checkshill. My long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands.I kept away from home all day, partly to support a fiction thatI was sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escapethe persistent question in my mother's eyes. "Why did you quarrelwith Mr. Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keep on going about witha sullen face and risk offending IT more?" I spent most of themorning in the newspaper-room of the public library, writingimpossible applications for impossible posts--I remember that amongother things of the sort I offered my services to a firm of privatedetectives, a sinister breed of traders upon base jealousies nowhappily vanished from the world, and wrote apropos of an advertisementfor "stevedores" that I did not know what the duties of a stevedoremight be, but that I was apt and willing to learn--and in theafternoons and evenings I wandered through the strange lights andshadows of my native valley and hated all created things. Until mywanderings were checked by the discovery that I was wearing out myboots.

  The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!

  I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with agreat capacity for hatred, BUT--

  There was an excuse for hate.

  It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh,and vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would havebeen equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me,without resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then feltobscurely and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions wereintolerable. My work was tedious and laborious and it took up anunreasonable proportio
n of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed,ill housed, ill educated and ill trained, my will was suppressedand cramped to the pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride inmyself and no reasonable chance of putting anything right. It wasa life hardly worth living. That a large proportion of the peopleabout me had no better a lot, that many had a worse, does notaffect these facts. It was a life in which contentment would havebeen disgraceful. If some of them were contented or resigned, somuch the worse for every one. No doubt it was hasty and foolishof me to throw up my situation, but everything was so obviouslyaimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not feeldisposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as itpained my mother and caused her anxiety.

  Think of the one comprehensive fact of the lock-out!

  That year was a bad year, a year of world-wide economic disorganization.Through their want of intelligent direction the great "Trust" ofAmerican ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded furnaceowners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any demandfor. (In those days there existed no means of estimating any needof that sort beforehand.) They had done this without even consultingthe ironmasters of any other country. During their period of activitythey had drawn into their employment a great number of workers,and had erected a huge productive plant. It is manifestly just thatpeople who do headlong stupid things of this sort should suffer,but in the old days it was quite possible, it was customary forthe real blunderers in such disasters, to shift nearly all theconsequences of their incapacity. No one thought it wrong for alight-witted "captain of industry" who had led his workpeople intooverproduction, into the disproportionate manufacture, that is tosay, of some particular article, to abandon and dismiss them, norwas there anything to prevent the sudden frantic underselling ofsome trade rival in order to surprise and destroy his trade, securehis customers for one's own destined needs, and shift a portion ofone's punishment upon him. This operation of spasmodic undersellingwas known as "dumping." The American ironmasters were now dumping onthe British market. The British employers were, of course, takingtheir loss out of their workpeople as much as possible, but in additionthey were agitating for some legislation that would prevent--notstupid relative excess in production, but "dumping"--not the disease,but the consequences of the disease. The necessary knowledge toprevent either dumping or its causes, the uncorrelated productionof commodities, did not exist, but this hardly weighed with themat all, and in answer to their demands there had arisen a curiousparty of retaliatory-protectionists who combined vague proposalsfor spasmodic responses to these convulsive attacks from foreignmanufacturers, with the very evident intention of achievingfinancial adventures. The dishonest and reckless elements wereindeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to thegeneral atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoilfrom the prospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of menknown as the "New Financiers," one heard frightened old-fashionedstatesmen asserting with passion that "dumping" didn't occur, orthat it was a very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody wouldface and handle the rather intricate truth of the business. Thewhole effect upon the mind of a cool observer was of a covey ofunsubstantial jabbering minds drifting over a series of irrationaleconomic cataclysms, prices and employment tumbled about like towersin an earthquake, and amidst the shifting masses were the commonwork-people going on with their lives as well as they could,suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for anything but violent,fruitless protests, impotent. You cannot hope now to understandthe infinite want of adjustment in the old order of things. At onetime there were people dying of actual starvation in India, whilemen were burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds like theaccount of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a dream,a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.

  To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth,it seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction andmisery could not possibly result simply from ignorance and wantof thought and feeling. We needed more dramatic factors than thesemental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore tothat common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callousinsensate plots--we called them "plots"--against the poor.

  You can still see how we figured it in any museum by looking upthe caricatures of capital and labor that adorned the German andAmerican socialistic papers of the old time.