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In the Days of the Comet Book Second Chapter Second Section 5-8 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book two, Chapter two, sections five through eight of In
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  Speaker 1: the Days of the Comet. This is a LibriVox recording.
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  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot ORGA In
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  Speaker 1: the Days of the Comet by eight G. Wells, Book two,
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  Speaker 1: Chapter two, sections five through eight. The figure of my
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  Speaker 1: mother comes always into my conception of a change. I
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  Speaker 1: remember how one day she confessed herself. She had been
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  Speaker 1: very sleepless that night, she said, and took the reports
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  Speaker 1: of the falling stars for shooting. There had been rioting
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  Speaker 1: in Clayton and all through Swathingly all day, and so
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  Speaker 1: she got out of bed to look. She had a
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  Speaker 1: dim sense that I was in all such trouble, but
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  Speaker 1: she was not looking when the change came. When I
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  Speaker 1: saw the stars were raining down, dear, she said, and
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  Speaker 1: thought of you out in it. I thought there'd be
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  Speaker 1: no harm in saying a prayer for you, dear. I
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  Speaker 1: thought you wouldn't mind that, And so I got another
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  Speaker 1: of my pictures. The green vapors come and go, and
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  Speaker 1: there by her patched coverlet that dear old woman kneels
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  Speaker 1: and droops, still clasping her poor gnarled hands in the
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  Speaker 1: attitude of prayer, prayer to it for me. Through the
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  Speaker 1: meager curtains and blinds of the flawed, refracting window, I
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  Speaker 1: see the stars above the chimney's fade, the pale light
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  Speaker 1: of dawn creeps into the sky, and her candle flares
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  Speaker 1: and dies. That also went with me through the stillness,
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  Speaker 1: that silent, kneeling figure, that frozen prayer to God to
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  Speaker 1: shield me, silent in a silent world, rushing through the
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  Speaker 1: emptyiness of space. Section six. With the dawn, that awakening
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  Speaker 1: went about the earth. I have told how it came
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  Speaker 1: to me, and how I walked in wonder through the
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  Speaker 1: transfigured corn fields of Chapambrey. It came to every one
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  Speaker 1: near me, and for the time clear forgotten by me,
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  Speaker 1: where all and Nettie woke, woke near one another, each
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  Speaker 1: heard before all other sounds, the other's voice. Amidst the
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  Speaker 1: stillness and the light, and the scattered people who had
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  Speaker 1: run to and fro and fallen on the beach of
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  Speaker 1: Bungalow Village awoke. The sleeping villagers of men had started
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  Speaker 1: and sat up in that unwonted freshness and newness. The
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  Speaker 1: contorted figures in the garden with a hemn still upon
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  Speaker 1: their lips, stirred amidst the flowers, and touched each other timidly,
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  Speaker 1: and thought of paradise. My mother found herself crouched against
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  Speaker 1: the bed, and rose rose with a glad, invincible conviction
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  Speaker 1: of accepted prayer. Already when it came to us. The
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  Speaker 1: soldiers crowded between the lines of dusty poplars along the
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  Speaker 1: road to Alamont were chatting and sharing coffee with the
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  Speaker 1: French riflemen who had hailed them from their carefully hidden
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  Speaker 1: pits among the vineyards up the slopes of Belleville. A
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  Speaker 1: certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who had dropped asleep,
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  Speaker 1: tensely ready for the rocket that should wake the whir
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  Speaker 1: and rattle of their magazines. At the sight and sound
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  Speaker 1: of the stir and human confusion in the roadway below,
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  Speaker 1: it had come to each man individually that he could
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  Speaker 1: not shoot one constript at least, as told his story
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  Speaker 1: of his awakening, and how curious he thought the rifle
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  Speaker 1: there beside him in his pit, and how he took
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  Speaker 1: it on his knees to examine the as his memory
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  Speaker 1: of its purpose grew clearer, he dropped the thing and
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  Speaker 1: stood up with a kind of joyful horror at the crime.
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  Speaker 1: Escaped to look more closely at the men he was
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  Speaker 1: to have assassinated, brave types. He thought they looked for
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  Speaker 1: such a fate. The summoning rocket never flew below. The
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  Speaker 1: men did not fall into ranks again, but sat by
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  Speaker 1: the road side or stood in groups talking, discussing with
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  Speaker 1: a novel incredulity, the ostensible causes of the war, the
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  Speaker 1: emperor said they, and oh nonsense, Where civilized men get
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  Speaker 1: some one else for this job? Where's the coffee? The
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  Speaker 1: officers held their own horses and talked to the men frankly,
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  Speaker 1: regardless of discipline. Some frenchmen, out of the rifle pits,
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  Speaker 1: came sauntering down the hill. Others stood doubtfully, rifles still
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  Speaker 1: in hand. Curious faces scanned these latter little arguments sprang
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  Speaker 1: as shoot at us, nonsense, their respectable French citizens. There
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  Speaker 1: is a picture of it, all very bright and detailed
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  Speaker 1: in the morning light, in the battle gallery, amidst the
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  Speaker 1: ruins at Old Nancy, and one sees the old world
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  Speaker 1: uniform of the soldier, the odd caps and belts, and boots,
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  Speaker 1: the ammunition belt, the water bottle, the sort of tourists pack.
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  Speaker 1: The men carried a queer elaborate equipment. The soldiers had
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  Speaker 1: awakened one by one, first one and then another. I
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  Speaker 1: wonder sometimes whether, perhaps, if the two armies had come
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  Speaker 1: awake in an instant, the battle, by mere habit and inertia,
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  Speaker 1: might not have begun. But the men who waked first,
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  Speaker 1: sat up, looked about them in astonishment, had time to
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  Speaker 1: think a little Section seven. Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere, tears,
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  Speaker 1: men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly
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  Speaker 1: lit and exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible,
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  Speaker 1: incapable of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy, hopeful,
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  Speaker 1: unselfishly energetic. Rejected altogether the supposition that this was merely
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  Speaker 1: a change in the blood and material texture of life.
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  Speaker 1: They denied the body's God had given them as once
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  Speaker 1: the Upper Nile savages struck out their canine teeth, because
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  Speaker 1: these made them like the beasts. They declared that this
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  Speaker 1: was the coming of a spirit, and nothing else would
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  Speaker 1: satisfy their need for explanations, And in a sense the
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  Speaker 1: spirit came. The Great Revival sprang directly from the change,
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  Speaker 1: the last, the deepest, widest, and most enduring of all
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  Speaker 1: the last inundations of religious emotion that go by that name.
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  Speaker 1: But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors. The
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  Speaker 1: former revivals were a phase of fever. This was the
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  Speaker 1: first movement of health, and it was altogether quieter, more intellectual,
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  Speaker 1: more private, more religious than any of the others in
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  Speaker 1: the old time, and more especially in the Protestant countries,
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  Speaker 1: where the things of religion were outspoken, and the absence
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  Speaker 1: of confession and well trained priests made religious states of
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  Speaker 1: emotion explosive and contagious. Revivalism, upon various scales, was a
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  Speaker 1: normal phase in the religious life. Revivals were always going on.
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  Speaker 1: Now a little disturbance of consciences in a village, Now
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  Speaker 1: an evening of a motion in a mission room, and
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  Speaker 1: now a great storm that swept a continent. And now
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  Speaker 1: an organized the life effort that came to town with
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  Speaker 1: bands and banners and handbills and motor cars for the
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  Speaker 1: saving of souls. Never, at any time did I take
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  Speaker 1: part in, nor was I attracted by, any of these movements.
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  Speaker 1: My nature, although passionate, was too critical or skeptical if
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  Speaker 1: you like, ford amounts of the same thing, and shy
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  Speaker 1: to be drawn into these worlds. But on several occasions
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  Speaker 1: Parload and I sat scoffing but nevertheless disturbed, in the
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  Speaker 1: back seats of revivalist meetings. I saw enough of them
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  Speaker 1: to understand their nature. And I am not surprised to
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  Speaker 1: learn now that before the comet came, all about the world,
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  Speaker 1: even among savages, even among cannibals, these same, or at
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  Speaker 1: any rate closely similar periodic upheavals went on. The world
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  Speaker 1: was stifling, it was in a fever. And these phenomena
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  Speaker 1: were neither more nor less than the instinctive struggle of
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  Speaker 1: the organism against the ebb of its powers, the clogging
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  Speaker 1: of its veins, the limitation of its life. Invariably, these
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  Speaker 1: revivals followed periods of sordid and restricted living. Men obeyed
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  Speaker 1: their base immediate motives, until the world grew unendurably bitter.
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  Speaker 1: Some disappointment, some thwarting, lit up for them, darkly, indeed,
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  Speaker 1: but yet enough for indistinct vision, the crowded squalor of
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  Speaker 1: the dark enclosure of life, a sudden disgust with the
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  Speaker 1: insensate smallness of the old world way of living, a
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  Speaker 1: realization of sin, a sense of the unworthiness of all
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  Speaker 1: individual things. A desire for something comprehensive, sustaining something greater,
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  Speaker 1: for wider communions and less habitual things filled them. Their souls,
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  Speaker 1: which were shaped for wider issues, cried out suddenly amidst
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  Speaker 1: the petty interests, the narrow prohibitions of life. Not this,
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  Speaker 1: Not this, a great passion to escape from the jealous
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  Speaker 1: prison of themselves, and inarticulate, stammering, weeping passion shook them.
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  Speaker 1: I have seen. I remember how once in Clayton's Calvinistic
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  Speaker 1: Methodist Chapel, I saw his spotty, fat face, strangely distorted
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  Speaker 1: under the flickering gas flares, old pallet, the ironmunger repent.
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  Speaker 1: He went to the form of repentance, a bench reserved
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  Speaker 1: for such exhibitions, and slabbed out his sorrow and disgust
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  Speaker 1: for some sexual indelicacy. He was a widower, and I
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  Speaker 1: can see now how his loose, fat body quivered and
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  Speaker 1: swayed with his grief. He poured it out to five
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  Speaker 1: hundred people from whom in common times he hid his
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  Speaker 1: every thought and purpose. And it is a fact It
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  Speaker 1: shows where reality that we two youngsters laughed not at
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  Speaker 1: all at that blubbering grotesque. We did not even think
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  Speaker 1: the distant shadow of a smile. We two sat grave
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  Speaker 1: and intent, perhaps wondering. Only afterward and with an effort
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  Speaker 1: did we scoff. Those old time revivals were I say,
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  Speaker 1: the convulsive movements of a body that suffocates. They are
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  Speaker 1: the clearest manifestations from before the change of a sense
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  Speaker 1: in all men that things were not right. But they
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  Speaker 1: were too often but momentary illuminations. There force spent itself
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  Speaker 1: in in coordinated shouting, gesticulations, tears. They were the flashes
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  Speaker 1: of outlook, disgust of the narrow life of all baseness
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  Speaker 1: took shape in narrowness and baseness. The quickened soul ended
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  Speaker 1: the night a hypocrite. Prophets disputed, mute it for precedence. Seductions,
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  Speaker 1: it is altogether indisputable, were frequent among penitents, and Anonius
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  Speaker 1: went home converted and returned with a falsified gift. And
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  Speaker 1: was almost universal that the converted should be impatient and immoderate,
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  Speaker 1: scornful of reason and the choice of expedients opposed to
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  Speaker 1: balance skill and knowledge. Incontinently full of grace, like thin
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  Speaker 1: old wine skins. Overfilled, they felt they must burst if
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  Speaker 1: once they came into contact with hard fact and sane direction.
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  Speaker 1: So the former revivals spent themselves. But the Great Revival
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  Speaker 1: did not spend itself, but grew to be, for the
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  Speaker 1: majority of Christendom at least, the permanent expression of the change.
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  Speaker 1: For many, it has taken the shape of an outright
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  Speaker 1: declaration that this was the second Advent. It is not
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  Speaker 1: for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion. For
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  Speaker 1: nearly all, it has amounted to an enduring broadening of
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  Speaker 1: all the issues of life. Section eight. One irrelevant memory
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  Speaker 1: comes back to me irrelevant, and yet by some subtle
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  Speaker 1: trick of quality, it summarizes the change. For me, it
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  Speaker 1: is the memory of a woman's very beautiful face, a
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  Speaker 1: woman with a flushed face and tear bright eyes, who
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  Speaker 1: went by me without speaking, wrapped in some secret purpose.
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  Speaker 1: I passed her when in the afternoon of the first day,
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  Speaker 1: struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton
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  Speaker 1: to send a telegram to my mother, telling her all
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  Speaker 1: was well with me. Whither this woman went, I do
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  Speaker 1: not know, nor whence she came. I never saw her again,
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  Speaker 1: and only her face, glowing with that new and luminous resolve,
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  Speaker 1: stands out for me. But that expression was the world's
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  Speaker 1: end of Book two, Chapter two, Sections five through eight.