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In the Days of the Comet Book First Chapter Second Section 1-2 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book, first chapter, second sections one and two. This is
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  Speaker 1: the liberyvox recording. All liberyvox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit liberyvox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Felicity Campbell. In the days of the Comet
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  Speaker 1: book first chapter, second sections one and two, Section one
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  Speaker 1: chapter the second Netty Section one, I cannot now remember
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  Speaker 1: the story resumed. What interval separated that evening on which
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  Speaker 1: Parload first showed me the Comet. I think I only
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  Speaker 1: pretended to see it then, and the Sunday afternoon I
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  Speaker 1: spent at Check's Hill. Between the two, there was time
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  Speaker 1: enough for me to give notice in leave Rawdon's, to
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  Speaker 1: seek for some other situation, very strenuously in Vain, to
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  Speaker 1: think and say many hard and violent things to my mother,
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  Speaker 1: and to Parload, and to pass through some phases of
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  Speaker 1: very profound wretchedness. There must have been a passionate correspondence
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  Speaker 1: with Nettie, but all the froth and fury of that
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  Speaker 1: has faded now out of my memory. All I have
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  Speaker 1: clear now is that I wrote one magnificent farewell to her,
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  Speaker 1: casting her off forever, and that I got in reply
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  Speaker 1: a prim little note to say. But even if there
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  Speaker 1: was to be an end to everything, that was no
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  Speaker 1: excuse for writing such things as I had done. And
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  Speaker 1: then I think I wrote again, in a vain I
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  Speaker 1: considered satirical to that She did not reply. That interval
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  Speaker 1: was at least three weeks, and probably four. Because the comet,
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  Speaker 1: which had been on the first occasion only a dubious
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  Speaker 1: speck in the sky, certainly visible only when it was magnified,
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  Speaker 1: was now a great white presence, brighter than Jupiter and
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  Speaker 1: casting a shadow on its own account. It was now
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  Speaker 1: actively present in the world of human thought. Every One
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  Speaker 1: was talking about it, every one was looking for its
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  Speaker 1: waxing splendor as the sun went down. The papers, the musicals,
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  Speaker 1: the hoardings echoed it. Yes, the comet was already dominant.
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  Speaker 1: Before I went over to make everything clear to Etty
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  Speaker 1: and Parload had spent two hoarded pounds in buying himself
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  Speaker 1: a spectroscope so that he could see for himself, night
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  Speaker 1: after night, that mysterious, that stimulating line, the unknown line
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  Speaker 1: in the green. How many times, I wonder did I
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  Speaker 1: look at this mudgy, quivering symbol of the unknown things
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  Speaker 1: that were rushing upon us out of the inhuman void.
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  Speaker 1: Before I rebelled, But at last I could stand it
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  Speaker 1: no longer, and I reproached Parload very bitterly for wasting
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  Speaker 1: his time in astronomical diletantism. Yes, said I where on
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  Speaker 1: the verse which of the biggest lock out in the
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  Speaker 1: history of this countryside? He has distress and hunger coming,
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  Speaker 1: He has all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed,
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  Speaker 1: and you spend your time gaping at that damned silly
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  Speaker 1: streak of nothing in the sky. Parload stared at me. Yes,
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  Speaker 1: I do, he said, slowly, as though it was a
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  Speaker 1: new idea, don't I. I wonder why I want to
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  Speaker 1: start meetings of an evening on Harden's waist. You think
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  Speaker 1: they'd listen. They've listened fast enough now. They didn't. Before,
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  Speaker 1: said Parload, looking at his pet instrument. There was a
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  Speaker 1: demonstration of unemployed at Swathingly on Sunday. They got to
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  Speaker 1: stone throwing. Parload said nothing for a little while, and
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  Speaker 1: I said several things. He seemed to be considering something.
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  Speaker 1: But after all, he said, at last, with an awkward
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  Speaker 1: movement towards his spectroscope, that does signify something, the comet. Yes,
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  Speaker 1: what can it signify. You don't want me to believe
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  Speaker 1: in astrology. What does it matter what flames in the
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  Speaker 1: heavens when men are starving on earth. It's it's science science.
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  Speaker 1: What we want now is socialism, not science. He still
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  Speaker 1: seemed reluctant to give up his comet. Socialism's all right,
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  Speaker 1: he said. But if that thing up there was to
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  Speaker 1: hit the earth, it might matter. Nothing matters, but human beings.
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  Speaker 1: Suppose it killed them all, Oh, said I that's rot
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  Speaker 1: I wonder, said Parlod, dreadfully divided in his allegiance, he
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  Speaker 1: looked at the comet. He seemed on the verge of
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  Speaker 1: repeating his growing information about the nearness of the parts
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  Speaker 1: of the Earth and comet, and all that might ensue
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  Speaker 1: from that. So I cut in with something I had
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  Speaker 1: got out of a now forgotten writer called Ruskin, a
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  Speaker 1: volcano of beautiful language and nonsensical suggestions, who prevailed very
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  Speaker 1: greatly with eloquent, excitable young men in those days. Something.
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  Speaker 1: It was about the insignificance of science and the supreme
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  Speaker 1: importance of life. Parlod stood listening, half turned towards the sky.
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  Speaker 1: With the tips of his fingers on his spectroscope. He
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  Speaker 1: seemed to come to a sudden decision. No, I don't
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  Speaker 1: agree with you, Ladford, He said, you don't understand about science.
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  Speaker 1: Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition. I was
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  Speaker 1: so used to entire possession of our talk that his
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  Speaker 1: brief contradiction struck me like a blow. Don't agree with me,
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  Speaker 1: I repeated, No, said Parload. But how I believe science
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  Speaker 1: is of more importance than socialism? He said, Socialism's a theory.
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  Speaker 1: Science science is something more. And that was really all
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  Speaker 1: he seemed to be able to say. We embarked upon
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  Speaker 1: one of those queer arguments illiterate young man used always
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  Speaker 1: to find so heating science or socialism. It was, of course,
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  Speaker 1: like arguing which is right left handedness, or a taste
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  Speaker 1: for onions. It was altogether impossible opposition. But the range
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  Speaker 1: of my rhetoric enabled me at last to exasperate Parload,
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  Speaker 1: and his mere repudiation of my conclusions sufficed to exasperate me,
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  Speaker 1: and we ended in the key of a positive quarrel.
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  Speaker 1: Oh very well, said I, so long as I know
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  Speaker 1: where we are, as slammed his door as though I
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  Speaker 1: dynamited his house, and went raging down the street, but
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  Speaker 1: I felt that he was already back at the window,
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  Speaker 1: worshiping his blessed line in the green before I got
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  Speaker 1: round the corner. I had to walk for an hour
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  Speaker 1: or so before I was cool enough to go home.
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  Speaker 1: And it was Parload who had first introduced me to socialism, recreant.
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  Speaker 1: The most extraordinary things used to run through my head
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  Speaker 1: in those days. I will confess that my mind ran
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  Speaker 1: persistently that evening upon revolutions after the best French pattern,
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  Speaker 1: and I sat on a committee of safety and tried backsliders.
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  Speaker 1: Parload was there among the prisoners, Backsliderissimus, aware too late
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  Speaker 1: of the error of his ways. His hands were tied
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  Speaker 1: behind his back, ready for the shambles. Through the open
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  Speaker 1: door one heard the voice of justice, the rude justice
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  Speaker 1: of the people. I was sorry, but I had to
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  Speaker 1: do my duty. If we punish those who would be
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  Speaker 1: trustic kings, said I, with a sorrowful deliberation, how much
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  Speaker 1: the more must be punish those who would give over
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  Speaker 1: the state to the pursuit of useless knowledge, And so,
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  Speaker 1: with a gloomy satisfaction, sent him off to the guillotine. Ah, Parload, Parload,
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  Speaker 1: if only you'd listened to me earlier. Parload. None the
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  Speaker 1: less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy. Parload was my
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  Speaker 1: ownly gossip, and it cost me much to keep away
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  Speaker 1: from him and think evil of him. With no one
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  Speaker 1: to listen to me evening after evening, that was a
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  Speaker 1: very miserable time for me. Even before my last visit
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  Speaker 1: to Chexhill, my long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands.
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  Speaker 1: I kept away from home all day, partly to support
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  Speaker 1: a fiction that I was sedulously seeking another situation, and
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  Speaker 1: partly to escape the persistent question in my mother's eyes,
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  Speaker 1: why did you quarrel with mister Rawdon? Why did you?
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  Speaker 1: Why do you keep on going about with a sullen
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  Speaker 1: face and risk offending it more? I spent most of
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  Speaker 1: the morning in the newspaper room of the public library,
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  Speaker 1: writing impossible applications for impossible posts. I remember that, among
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  Speaker 1: other things of the sort, I offered my services to
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  Speaker 1: affirm of private detectives, a sinister breed of traders upon
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  Speaker 1: base jealousies now happily vanished from the world, and wrote
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  Speaker 1: apropos of an advertisement for stevedores that I did not
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  Speaker 1: know what the duties of a stever door might be,
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  Speaker 1: but that I was apt and willing to learn. And
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  Speaker 1: in the afternoons and evenings I wandered through the strange
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  Speaker 1: lights and shadows of my native valley and hated all
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  Speaker 1: created things, until my wanderings were checked by the discovery
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  Speaker 1: that I was wearing out my boots the stagnant, inconclusive
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  Speaker 1: malaria of that time. I perceived that I was an
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  Speaker 1: evil tempered, ill disposed youth with a great capacity for hatred.
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  Speaker 1: But there was an excuse for hate. It was wrong
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  Speaker 1: of me to hate individual, to be rude, harsh, and
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  Speaker 1: vindictive to this person or that. But indeed it would
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  Speaker 1: have been equally wrong to have taken the manifest off
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  Speaker 1: a life made me without resentment. I see now clearly
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  Speaker 1: and calmly what I then felt, obscurely and with an
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  Speaker 1: unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were intolerable. My work was
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  Speaker 1: tedious and laborious, and it took up an unreasonable proportion
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  Speaker 1: of my time. I was ill clothed, ill fed, ill housed,
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  Speaker 1: ill educated, and ill trained. My will was suppressed and
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  Speaker 1: cramped to the pitch of torture. I had no reasonable
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  Speaker 1: pride in myself and no reasonable chance of putting anything right.
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  Speaker 1: It was a life hardly worth living. That a large
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  Speaker 1: proportion of the people about me had no better a lot,
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  Speaker 1: that many had a worse does not affect these facts.
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  Speaker 1: It was a life in which contentment would have been
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  Speaker 1: disgraceful if some of them were intended or resigned so
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  Speaker 1: much the worse for every one. No doubt, it was
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  Speaker 1: hasty and foolish me to throw out my situation. But
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  Speaker 1: everything was so obviously aimless and foolish in our social
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  Speaker 1: organization that I do not feel disposed to blame myself
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  Speaker 1: even for that, except in so far as it pained
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  Speaker 1: to my mother and cause to anxiety. Think of the
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  Speaker 1: one comprehensive fact of the lockout. That year was a
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  Speaker 1: bad year, a year of worldwide economic disorganization. Through their
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  Speaker 1: want of intelligent direction, the great Trust of American iron masters,
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  Speaker 1: a gang of energetic, narrow minded furnace owners, had smelted
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  Speaker 1: far more iron than the whole world had any demand
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  Speaker 1: for in those days. There existed no means of estimating
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  Speaker 1: any need of that sort beforehand. They had done this
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  Speaker 1: without even consulting the iron masters of any other country.
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  Speaker 1: During their period of activity, they had drawn into their
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  Speaker 1: employment a great number of workers and had erected a
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  Speaker 1: huge productive plant. It is manifestly as that people who
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  Speaker 1: do headlongst with things of this sort should suffer. But
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: in the old days it was quite possible. It was
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  Speaker 1: customary for the real blunderers and such disasters to shift
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  Speaker 1: nearly all the consequences of their incapacity. No one thought
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  Speaker 1: it wrong for a light witted captain of industry who
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: had led his work people into overproduction, into the disproportionate manufacture,
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  Speaker 1: that is to say, of some particular article, to abandon
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  Speaker 1: and dismiss them. Nor was there anything to prevent the
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: sudden frantic underselling of some trade rival in order to
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  Speaker 1: surprise and destroy his trade, secure his customers for one's
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  Speaker 1: own destined needs, and shift a portion of one's punishment
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  Speaker 1: upon him. This operation of spasmodic underselling was known as dumping.
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  Speaker 1: The American iron masters were now dumping on the British market.
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  Speaker 1: The British employers were, of course taking their loss of
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  Speaker 1: their workpeople as much as possible, but in addition they
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  Speaker 1: were agitating for some legislation that would prevent not stupid
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  Speaker 1: relative excess and production, but dumping. Not the disease, but
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  Speaker 1: the consequences of the disease. The necessary knowledge to prevent
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  Speaker 1: either dumping or its causes the uncorrelated production of commodities
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  Speaker 1: did not exist, but this hardly weighed with them at all,
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  Speaker 1: And in answer to their demands there had arisen a
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  Speaker 1: curious party of retaliatory protectionists who combined vague proposals for
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  Speaker 1: spasmodic responses to these convulsive attacks from foreign manufacturers with
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  Speaker 1: the very evident intention of achieving financial adventures. The dishonest
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  Speaker 1: and reckless elements were indeed so evident in this movement
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  Speaker 1: as to add very greatly to the general atmosphere of
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  Speaker 1: distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil from the prospect
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  Speaker 1: of physical power in the hands of the class of
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  Speaker 1: men known as the new financier. One heard frightened old
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  Speaker 1: fashioned statesmen asserting with passion that dumping didn't occur, or
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  Speaker 1: that it was a very charming sort of thing to happen.
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  Speaker 1: Nobody would face and handle the rather intricate truth of
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  Speaker 1: the business. The whole effect upon the mind of a
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  Speaker 1: cold observer was of a covey of unsubstantial, jabbering minds
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: drifting over a series of irrational economic cataclysms, prices and
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  Speaker 1: employment tumbled about like towers in an earthquake. And amidst
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: the shifting masses were the common work, people going on
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  Speaker 1: with their lives as well as they could, suffering, perplexed, unorganized,
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  Speaker 1: and for anything but violent, fruitless protests, impotent. You cannot
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  Speaker 1: hope now to understand the infinite want of adjustment in
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: the old order of things. At one time there were
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: people dying of actual starvation in India, while men were
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds like the account
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  Speaker 1: of a particularly mad dream, does it not. It was
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: a dream, a dream from which no one on earth
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  Speaker 1: expected an awakening. To us youngsters, with the positiveness the
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: rationalism of youth, it seemed that the strikes and lock arts,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: the overproduction and misery could not possibly result simply from
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: ignorance and want of thought and feeling. We needed more
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  Speaker 1: dramatic factors than these mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: We fled therefore, to that common refuge of the unhappy, ignorant,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: a belief in callous and sensate plots. We called them
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: plots against the poor. You can still see how we
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: figured it in any museum by looking up the caricatures
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: of capital and labor that adorned the German and American
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: socialistic papers of the old time. End of Section one,
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Section two. I had cast Nettie off in an eloquent epistle,
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: had really imagined the affair was over forever. I've done
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  Speaker 1: with women, I said to Parload. And then there was
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  Speaker 1: silence for more than a week. Before that week was over,
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: I was bundering with a growing emotion. What next would
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  Speaker 1: happen between us? I found myself thinking constantly of Nettie,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: picturing her, sometimes with stern satisfaction, sometimes with sympathetic remorse, mourning, regretting,
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  Speaker 1: realizing the absolute end that had come between us. At
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  Speaker 1: the bottom of my heart, I no more believed that
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: there was an end between us than that an end
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: would come to the world. Had we not kissed one another,
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: had we not achieved an atmosphere of whispering nearness, breached
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: our virgin shyness with one another. Of course she was mine,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: of course I was hers. And separations and final quarrels,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: and harshness and distance were no more than flourishes upon
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: that eternal fact. So at least I felt the thing however,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: I shaped my thoughts whenever my imagination got to work.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: As that week drew to its clothes, she came in.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: As a matter of course, I thought of her recurrently
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: all day, and dreamt of her at night. On Saturday night,
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  Speaker 1: I dreamt of her very vividly. Her face was flushed
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: and wet with tears, her hair a little disordered, and
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  Speaker 1: when I spoke to her, she turned away in some manner.
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  Speaker 1: This dream left in my mind a feeling of distress
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: and anxiety. In the morning, I had a raging thirst
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  Speaker 1: to see her. That Sunday, my mother wanted me to
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: go to church very particularly. She had a double reason
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  Speaker 1: for that. She thought that it would certainly exercise a
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: favorable influence upon my search of a situation through the
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: next week. And in addition, mister Gabbertaz, with a certain
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: mystery behind his glasses, had promised to see what he
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: could do for me, and she wanted to keep him
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: up to that promise. I half consented, and then my
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: desire for Nettie took hold of me. I told my
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: mother I wasn't going to church, and set off about
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: eleven to walk the seventeen miles to checks hill. It
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: greatly intensified the fatigue of that long tramp that the
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: sole of my boot presently split at the toe, and
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: after I had cut the flapping portion off, a nail
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: worked through and began to torment me. However, the boot
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: looked all right after that operation, and gave no audible
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: hint of my discomfort. I got some bread and cheese
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: at a little inn on the way, and was in
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: checks Hill Park about four. I did not go by
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: the road past the house and so round to the gardens,
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: but cut over the crest beyond the second keeper's cottage
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: along a path Nettie used to call her own. It
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: was a mere deer track. It led up a miniature
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: valley and through a pretty dell in which we had
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: been accustomed to meet, and so through the hollies and
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: along a narrow path close by the wall of the
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: shrubbery to the gardens. In my memory, that walk through
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the park before I came upon Nettie stands out very vividly.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: The long tramp before it is foreshortened to a mere
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: effect of dusty road and painful boot, But the bracken
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: valley and the sudden tumult of doubts and unwonted expectations
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: that came to me stands out now as something significant,
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: as something unforgettable, something essential to the meaning of all
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: that followed. Where should I meet her? What which you say?
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: I had asked these questions before and found an answer. No.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: They came again with a trial of fresh implications, and
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: I had no answer for them at all. As I
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: approached Nettie, she ceased to be the mere butt of
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: my egotistical self protection, the custodian of my sexual pride,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: and drew together and became over and above this a
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: personality of her own, a personality and a mystery, a
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: sphinx I had evaded only to meet again. I find
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: a little difficulty in describing the quality of the old
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: world love making, so that it may be understandable. Now.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: We young people had practically no preparation at all for
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: the stir and emotions of adolescence. Towards the young, the
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: world maintained a conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: There were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: insisted on certain qualities in every love affair, and greatly
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: intensified one's natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfect loyalty,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: life long devotion. Much of the complex essentials of love
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: were altogether hidden. One read these things, got accidental glimpses
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: of this and that, wondered and forgot, and so one
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: grew them. Strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams, strangely charged
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: with feeling. An inexplicable impulse of self abandonment began to
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: tipple queerly amongst the familiar, purely egotistical and materialistic things
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: of boyhood and girlhood. We were like misguided travelers who
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: had camped in the dry bed of a tropical river.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: Presently we were needed, and neck deep in the flood.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Our beings were suddenly going out from ourselves seeking other beings.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: We knew not why this novel craving for abandonment to
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: some one of the other sex, bore us away. We
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: were ashamed and full of desire. We kept the thing
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: a guilty secret, and were resolved to satisfy it against
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: all the world. In this state it was we drifted
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: in the most accidental way against some other blindly seeking creature,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: and linked like nascent atoms. We were obsessed by the
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: books we read, by all the talk about us that
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: once we had linked ourselves, we were linked for life.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: Then afterwards we discovered that other was also an egotism,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: a thing of ideas and impulses that failed to correspond
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: with ours. So it was, I say, with the young
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: of my class, and most of the young people in
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: our world. So it came about that I sought Nettie
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: on the Sunday afternoon, and suddenly came upon her, light bodied,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: slenderly feminine, hazel eyed, with her soft, sweet young face
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: under the shady brim of her hat of straw, the
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: pretty venus I had resolved should be wholly and exclusively mine. There,
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: all unaware of me, still she stood my essential feminine,
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: the embodiment of the inner thing in life for me
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: and moreover an unknown other, a person like myself. She
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: held a little book in her hand, open as if
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: she were walking along and reading it. That chanced to
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: be her pose, But indeed she was standing quite still,
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: looking away towards the gray and likeness shrubbery wall, and
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: as I I think now listening, her lips were a
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: little apart, curved to that faint, sweet shadow of a smile.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: End of book, first chapter, second sections one and two.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Recording by Felicity Campbell, Book one for me dot Com Wongonery,
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: New Zealand,