In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 3

  "Let us begin afresh!" This piece of obvious common sense seemedthen to me instinct with courage, the noblest of words. My heartwent out to him as he spoke. It was, indeed, that day as vague asit was valiant; we did not at all see the forms of what we werethus beginning. All that we saw was the clear inevitablenessthat the old order should end. . . .

  And then in a little space of time mankind in halting but effectualbrotherhood was moving out to make its world anew. Those earlyyears, those first and second decades of the new epoch, were intheir daily detail a time of rejoicing toil; one saw chiefly one'sown share in that, and little of the whole. It is only now that Ilook back at it all from these ripe years, from this high tower,that I see the dramatic sequence of its changes, see the cruel oldconfusions of the ancient time become clarified, simplified, anddissolve and vanish away. Where is that old world now? Where isLondon, that somber city of smoke and drifting darkness, full of thedeep roar and haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shining,mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles and blackeneddome, its sad wildernesses of smut-grayed houses, its myriads ofdraggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks? The veryleaves upon its trees were foul with greasy black defilements.Where is lime-white Paris, with its green and disciplined foliage,its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly organized viciousness,and the myriads of workers, noisily shod, streaming over the bridgesin the gray cold light of dawn. Where is New York, the high cityof clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept,its huge buildings jostling one another and straining ever upwardfor a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed. Whereare its lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury, the shamefulbludgeoning bribing vice of its ill ruled underways, and all thegaunt extravagant ugliness of its strenuous life? And where now isPhiladelphia, with its innumerable small and isolated homes, andChicago with its interminable blood-stained stockyards, its polyglotunderworld of furious discontent.

  All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my nativePotteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives that werecaught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their labyrinths, theirforgotten and neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman,ill-conceived industrial machinery have escaped--to life. Thosecities of growth and accident are altogether gone, never a chimneysmokes about our world to-day, and the sound of the weeping ofchildren who toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdenedwomen, the noise of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasuresand all the ugly grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them,with the utter change in our lives. As I look back into the pastI see a vast exultant dust of house-breaking and removal riseup into the clear air that followed the hour of the green vapors,I live again the Year of Tents, the Year of Scaffolding, and likethe triumph of a new theme in a piece of music--the great citiesof our new days arise. Come Caerlyon and Armedon, the twin citiesof lower England, with the winding summer city of the Thames between,and I see the gaunt dirt of old Edinburgh die to rise again whiteand tall beneath the shadow of her ancient hill; and Dublin too,reshaped, returning enriched, fair, spacious, the city of richlaughter and warm hearts, gleaming gaily in a shaft of sunlightthrough the soft warm rain. I see the great cities America hasplanned and made; the Golden City, with ever-ripening fruit alongits broad warm ways, and the bell-glad City of a Thousand Spires.I see again as I have seen, the city of theaters and meeting-places,the City of the Sunlight Bight, and the new city that is stillcalled Utah; and dominated by its observatory dome and the plain anddignified lines of the university facade upon the cliff, Martenabarthe great white winter city of the upland snows. And the lesserplaces, too, the townships, the quiet resting-places, villages halfforest with a brawl of streams down their streets, villages lacedwith avenues of cedar, villages of garden, of roses and wonderfulflowers and the perpetual humming of bees. And through all theworld go our children, our sons the old world would have made intoservile clerks and shopmen, plough drudges and servants; our daughterswho were erst anaemic drudges, prostitutes, sluts, anxiety-rackedmothers or sere, repining failures; they go about this world gladand brave, learning, living, doing, happy and rejoicing, brave andfree. I think of them wandering in the clear quiet of the ruins ofRome, among the tombs of Egypt or the temples of Athens, of theircoming to Mainington and its strange happiness, to Orba and thewonder of its white and slender tower. . . . But who can tell ofthe fullness and pleasure of life, who can number all our new citiesin the world?--cities made by the loving hands of men for livingmen, cities men weep to enter, so fair they are, so graciousand so kind. . . .

  Some vision surely of these things must have been vouchsafed meas I sat there behind Melmount's couch, but now my knowledge ofaccomplished things has mingled with and effaced my expectations.Something indeed I must have foreseen--or else why was my heart soglad?

  BOOK THE THIRD

  THE NEW WORLD

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  LOVE AFTER THE CHANGE