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In the Days of the Comet Book First Chapter Third Section 4 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book one, chapter three, section four of In the Days
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  Speaker 1: of the Comet. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox
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  Speaker 1: recordings are in the public domain. For more information or
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  Speaker 1: to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. In the Days
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  Speaker 1: of the Comet by H. G. Wells, Book one, chapter three,
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  Speaker 1: Section four. In the night fever pained fatigue. It may
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  Speaker 1: be the indigestion of my supper of bread and cheese
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  Speaker 1: roused me at last out of a hagrid sleep to
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  Speaker 1: face despair. I was a soul lost amidst desolation and shame, dishonored, evilly,
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  Speaker 1: treated hopeless. I raged against the God. I denied and
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  Speaker 1: cursed him as I lay. And it was in the
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  Speaker 1: nature of my fever, which was indeed only half fatigue
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  Speaker 1: and illness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth,
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  Speaker 1: that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through the
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  Speaker 1: brief dreams that marked the exhaustion of that vigil, to
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  Speaker 1: dominate my misery. I was sensible with an exaggerated distinctness
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  Speaker 1: of the intensity of her physical charm for me, of
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  Speaker 1: her every grace and beauty. She took to herself the
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  Speaker 1: whole gamut of desire in me, and the whole gamut
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  Speaker 1: of pride. She bodily was my lost honor. It was
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  Speaker 1: not only loss but disgrace to lose her. She stood
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  Speaker 1: for life and all that was denied. She mocked me
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  Speaker 1: as a creature of failure and defeat. My spirit raised
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  Speaker 1: itself towards her, And then the bruise upon my jaw
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  Speaker 1: glowed with a dull heat, and I rolled in the
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  Speaker 1: mud again before my rivals. There were times when something
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  Speaker 1: near madness took me, and I gnashed my teeth and
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  Speaker 1: dug my names into my hands, and ceased to curse
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  Speaker 1: and cry out only by reason of the insufficiency of words.
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  Speaker 1: And once towards dawn, I got out of bed and
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  Speaker 1: sat by my looking glass, with my revolver loaded in
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  Speaker 1: my hand. I stood up at last and put it
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  Speaker 1: carefully in my drawer and locked it out of reach
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  Speaker 1: of any gutsy impulse. After that I slept for a
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  Speaker 1: little while. Such nights were nothing rare and strange in
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  Speaker 1: that old order of the world, never a city, never
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  Speaker 1: a night, the whole year round. But amidst those who
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  Speaker 1: slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath
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  Speaker 1: and misery. Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled,
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  Speaker 1: they agonized near to the very border line of madness,
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  Speaker 1: each one the center of a universe darkened and lost.
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  Speaker 1: The next day I spent in glooming lethargy. I had
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  Speaker 1: intended to go to Cheeks Hill that day, but my
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  Speaker 1: bruised ankle was too swollen for that to be possible.
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  Speaker 1: I sat indoors in the ill lit downstairs kitchen with
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  Speaker 1: my foot bandaged, and mused darkly and red. My dear
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  Speaker 1: old mother waited on me. Her brown eyes watched me
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  Speaker 1: and wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations. I
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  Speaker 1: had not told her how it was my ankle came
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  Speaker 1: to be bruised and my clothes muddy. She had brushed
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  Speaker 1: my clothes in the morning before I got up. Ah. Well,
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  Speaker 1: mothers are not treated in that way now, But I
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  Speaker 1: suppose must console me. I wonder how far you will
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  Speaker 1: be able to picture that dark, grimy, untidy room, with
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  Speaker 1: its bare deal table, its tattered wall paper, the sauce
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  Speaker 1: pans and kettle on the narrow cheap but by no
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  Speaker 1: means economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the rust
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  Speaker 1: spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested. I
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  Speaker 1: wonder how near you can come to seeing the scowling,
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  Speaker 1: pale faced, hobbledyhoy. I was unshaven and collarless in the
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  Speaker 1: windsor chair, and the little timid, dirty, devoted old woman
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  Speaker 1: who hovered about me with love peering out of her
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  Speaker 1: puckered eyelids. When she went out to buy some vegetables
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  Speaker 1: in the middle of the morning, she got me a
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  Speaker 1: halfpenny journal. It was just such a one as these
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  Speaker 1: upon my desk, only that the copy I read was
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  Speaker 1: damp from the press. And these are so dry and
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  Speaker 1: brittle they crack if I touch them. I have a
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  Speaker 1: copy of the actual issue I read that morning. It
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  Speaker 1: was a paper called emphatically the new Paper, but everybody
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  Speaker 1: bought it, and everybody called it the Yell. It was
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  Speaker 1: full that morning of stupendous news and still more stupendous headlines,
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  Speaker 1: so stupendous that for a little while I was roused
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  Speaker 1: from my egotistical broodings to wider interests, for it seemed
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  Speaker 1: that Germany and England were on the brink of war.
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  Speaker 1: Of all the monstrous, irrational phenomena of the former time.
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  Speaker 1: War was certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality, it
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  Speaker 1: was probably far less mischievous than such quieter evil, as,
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  Speaker 1: for example, the general acquiescence in the private ownership of land.
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  Speaker 1: But its evil consequences showed so plainly that even in
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  Speaker 1: those days of stifling confusion, one marveled at it. On
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  Speaker 1: no conceivable grounds was there any sense in modern war.
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  Speaker 1: Save for the slaughter and mangling of a multitude of people,
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  Speaker 1: the destruction of vast quantities of material, and the waste
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  Speaker 1: of innumerable units of energy. It effected nothing. The old
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  Speaker 1: war of savage and barbaric nations did at least change humanity.
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  Speaker 1: You assumed yourself to be a superior tribe in physique
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  Speaker 1: and discipline. You demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and if successful,
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  Speaker 1: you took their land and their women, and perpetuated and
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  Speaker 1: enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing but the
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  Speaker 1: color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the
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  Speaker 1: relationship of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of
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  Speaker 1: the last of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English,
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  Speaker 1: with much dysentery and bad poetry and a few hundred
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  Speaker 1: deaths in battle conquered the South African Boers at a
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  Speaker 1: gross cost of about three thousand pounds per head. They
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  Speaker 1: could have bought the whole of that preposterous imitation of
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  Speaker 1: a nation for a tenth of that sum. And, except
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  Speaker 1: for a few substitutions of personalities, this group of partially
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  Speaker 1: corrupt officials in the place of that, and so forth,
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  Speaker 1: the permanent change was altogether insignificant. But an excitable young
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  Speaker 1: man in Austria committed suicide when at length the Transvaal
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  Speaker 1: ceased to be a nation. Men went through the seat
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  Speaker 1: of that war after it was all over, and found
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  Speaker 1: humanity unchanged, except for a general impoverishment and the convenience
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  Speaker 1: of an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed
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  Speaker 1: wire and cartridge cases, unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity,
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  Speaker 1: all its old habits and misunderstandings. The nigger was still
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  Speaker 1: in his slum like corral, the white in his ugly,
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  Speaker 1: ill managed shanty. But we in England saw all these things,
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  Speaker 1: or did not see them, through the mirage of the
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  Speaker 1: new paper in a light of mania. All my adolescence
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  Speaker 1: from fourteen the Seventhvantine went to the music of that monstrous,
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  Speaker 1: resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the songs and the
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  Speaker 1: waving flags, the wrongs of generous Bueller, and the glorious
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  Speaker 1: heroism of DeWitt, who always got away. That was a
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  Speaker 1: great point about the heroic DeWitt. And it never occurred
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  Speaker 1: to us that the total population we fought against was
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  Speaker 1: less than half the number of those who lived cramped,
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  Speaker 1: ignoble lives within the compass of the four towns. But
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  Speaker 1: before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater
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  Speaker 1: antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining
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  Speaker 1: itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out
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  Speaker 1: of our attention, only to resume more emphatically, now flashing
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  Speaker 1: into some acute, definitive expression, and now percolating and pervading
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  Speaker 1: some new region of thought. And that was the antagonism
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  Speaker 1: of Germany and Great Britain. When I think of that
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  Speaker 1: growing proportion of readers who belong entirely to the new order,
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  Speaker 1: who are growing up with only the vaguest early memories
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  Speaker 1: of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty in
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  Speaker 1: writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of fact
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  Speaker 1: to their fathers. Here were we British, forty one million
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  Speaker 1: of people, in a state of almost indescribably aimless economic
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  Speaker 1: and moral muddle that we had neither the courage, the energy,
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  Speaker 1: nor the intelligence to improve. That most of us had
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  Speaker 1: hardly the courage to think about, and with our affairs
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  Speaker 1: hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions of three hundred
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  Speaker 1: and fifty million other persons scattered about the globe. And
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  Speaker 1: here were the Germans over against us fifty six millions,
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  Speaker 1: in a state of confusion, no whit better than our own.
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  Speaker 1: In the no lay little creatures who directed papers and
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  Speaker 1: wrote books and gave lectures, and generally, in that time
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  Speaker 1: of world dementia, pretended to be the national mind, were
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  Speaker 1: busy in both countries with a sword of infernal unanimity,
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  Speaker 1: exhorting and not only exhorting, but successfully persuading the two
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  Speaker 1: peoples to divert Such small common store of material, moral
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  Speaker 1: and intellectual energy has either possessed into the purely destructive
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  Speaker 1: and wasteful business of war. And I have to tell
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  Speaker 1: you these things even if you do not believe them,
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  Speaker 1: because they are vital to my story. There was not
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  Speaker 1: a man alive who could have told you of any real,
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  Speaker 1: permanent benefit of anything whatever to counterbalance the obvious waste
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  Speaker 1: and evil that would result from a war between England
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  Speaker 1: and Germany. Whether England shattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed,
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  Speaker 1: or whatever the end might be, the thing was, in
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  Speaker 1: fact an enormous irrational obsession. It was in the microcosm
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  Speaker 1: of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical wrath and
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  Speaker 1: jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measured the excess
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  Speaker 1: of common emotion over the common intelligence, the legacy of
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  Speaker 1: inordinate passion we have received from the brute from which
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  Speaker 1: we came, just as I had become the slave of
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  Speaker 1: my own surprise and anger, and went hither and thither
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  Speaker 1: with a loaded revolver, seeking and intending vague, fluctuating crimes.
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  Speaker 1: So these two nations went about the earth hot eared
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  Speaker 1: and muddle headed, with loaded navies and armies terribly ready
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  Speaker 1: at hand. Only there was not even a netty to
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  Speaker 1: justify their stupidity. There was nothing but quiet, imaginary thwarting
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  Speaker 1: on either side. And the press was the chief instrument
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  Speaker 1: that kept these two huge multitudes of people directed against
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  Speaker 1: one another. The press, those newspapers that are now so
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  Speaker 1: strange to us, like the empires, the nations, the trusts,
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  Speaker 1: and all the other great monstrous shapes of that extraordinary time,
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  Speaker 1: was in the nature of an unanticipated accident. It happened
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  Speaker 1: has weeds, happened in abandoned gardens, just as all our
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  Speaker 1: world has happened, because there was no clear will in
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  Speaker 1: the world to bring about anything better. Towards the end,
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  Speaker 1: this press was almost entirely under the direction of youngish
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  Speaker 1: men of that eager, rather unintelligent type that is never
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  Speaker 1: able to detect itself, aimless, that pursues nothing with incredible
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  Speaker 1: pride and zeal and. If you would really understand this
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  Speaker 1: mad era the Comet brought to an end, you must
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  Speaker 1: keep in mind that every phase in the production of
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  Speaker 1: these queer old things was pervaded by a strong, aimless energy,
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  Speaker 1: and happened in a concentrated rush. Let me describe to
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  Speaker 1: you very briefly a newspaper day figure. First, then a
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  Speaker 1: hastily erected and still more hastily designed building in a dirty,
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  Speaker 1: paper littered back street of old London, and a number
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  Speaker 1: of shabbily dressed men, coming and going in this with
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  Speaker 1: projectile swiftness. And within this factory companies of printers, tensely
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  Speaker 1: active with nimble fingers. They were always speeding up, the
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  Speaker 1: printers ply their type, setting machines and cast and arrange
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  Speaker 1: masses of metal in a sort of kitchen infernal, above which,
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  Speaker 1: in a beehive of little, brightly lit rooms, disheveled men
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  Speaker 1: sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of telephones and
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  Speaker 1: a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers running
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  Speaker 1: to and row of heated men clutching proofs and copy.
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  Speaker 1: Then begins a clatter roar of machinery catching the infection,
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  Speaker 1: going faster and faster, and whizzing and banging, engineers who
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  Speaker 1: have never had time to wash since their birth, flying
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  Speaker 1: about with oil cans, while paper runs off its rolls
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  Speaker 1: with a shudder of haste. The proprietor, you must suppose,
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  Speaker 1: arriving explosively on a swift motor car, leaping out before
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  Speaker 1: the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents
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  Speaker 1: clutched in his hand, rushing in resolute to hustle, getting
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  Speaker 1: wonderfully in everybody's way, at the sight of him. Even
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  Speaker 1: the messenger boys who are waiting get up and scamper
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  Speaker 1: to and fro, sprinkle your vision with collisions, curses incoherencies.
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  Speaker 1: You imagine all the parts of this complex lunatic machine
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  Speaker 1: working hysterically toward a crush shindo of haste and excitement.
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  Speaker 1: As the night wears on. At last, the only things
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  Speaker 1: that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing, vibrating
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  Speaker 1: premises are the hands of the clock. Slowly things draw
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  Speaker 1: on toward publication, the consummation of all those stresses. Then,
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  Speaker 1: in the small hours, into the now dark and deserted streets,
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  Speaker 1: comes a wild whirl of carts and men. The place
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  Speaker 1: spurts paper at every door, bales heaps, torrents of paper
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  Speaker 1: that are snatched and flung about in what looks like
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  Speaker 1: a free fight, and off with a rush and clatter east, west,
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  Speaker 1: north and south, the interest passes outwardly. The men from
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  Speaker 1: the little rooms are going homeward, the printers dispersing, yawning,
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  Speaker 1: the roaring presses slacken. The paper exists. Distribution follows manufacture,
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  Speaker 1: and we follow the bundles. Our vision becomes a vision
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  Speaker 1: of dispersal, you see those bundles hurling into stations, catching
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  Speaker 1: trains by a hair's breadth, and speeding on their way,
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  Speaker 1: breaking up smaller bundles of them, hurled with a fierce
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  Speaker 1: accuracy out upon platforms that rush by. And then everywhere
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  Speaker 1: a division of these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles,
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  Speaker 1: into dispersing parcels, into separate papers. And the dawn happens
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  Speaker 1: unnoticed amidst the great running and shouting of boys and
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  Speaker 1: is shoving through letter slots, openings of windows, spreading out
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  Speaker 1: upon book stalls. For the space of a few hours,
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  Speaker 1: you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling papers,
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  Speaker 1: placards everywhere, vociferating the hurried lie for the day, Men
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  Speaker 1: and women in trains, men and women eating and reading,
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  Speaker 1: men by study fenders, people sitting up in bed, mother
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  Speaker 1: and sons and daughters waiting for father to finish. A
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  Speaker 1: million scattered people reading, reading headlong or feverishly ready to read.
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  Speaker 1: It is just as if some vehement jet had sprayed
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  Speaker 1: that white foam of paper over the surface of the land,
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  Speaker 1: and then you know, wonderfully gone, gone, utterly vanished, as
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  Speaker 1: foam might vanish upon the sand nonsense, the whole affair
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  Speaker 1: of a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable excitement, witless mischief,
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  Speaker 1: and a waste of strength signifying nothing. And one of
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  Speaker 1: those white parcels was the paper I held in my
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  Speaker 1: hands as I sat with a bandished foot on the
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  Speaker 1: steel fender in that dark underground kitchen of my mother's
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  Speaker 1: clean roused from my personal troubles by the yelp of
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  Speaker 1: the headlines. She sat sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms,
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  Speaker 1: peeling potatoes. As I read it was like one of
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  Speaker 1: a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body
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  Speaker 1: that paper. There I was one corpuscle in the big
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  Speaker 1: amorphous body of the English community, one of forty one
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  Speaker 1: million such corpuscles. And for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines,
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  Speaker 1: this paper ferment caught me and swung me about and
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  Speaker 1: all over the country that day, millions read as I read,
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  Speaker 1: and came round into line with me under the same
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  Speaker 1: magnetic spell came round. How did we say it? Ah
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  Speaker 1: to face the foe. The comet had been driven into obscurity.
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  Speaker 1: Overleaf the column headed distinguished Scientists says comet will strike
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  Speaker 1: our earth. Does it matter? When unread Germany, I usually
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  Speaker 1: figure this mythical, malignant creature has a corseted, stiff, mustached emperor,
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  Speaker 1: enhanced by her maldic black wings and a large sword.
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  Speaker 1: Had insulted our flag. That was the message of the
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  Speaker 1: new paper, And the monster towered over me, threatening fresh outrages,
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  Speaker 1: visibly spitting upon my faultless country's colors. Someone had hoisted
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  Speaker 1: a British flag on the right bank of some tropical
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  Speaker 1: river I had never heard of before, and a drunken
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  Speaker 1: German officer, under ambiguous instructions, had torn it down. Then
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  Speaker 1: one of the convenient, abundant natives of the country, a
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  Speaker 1: British subject, indisputably, had been shot in the leg. But
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  Speaker 1: the facts were by no means clear. Nothing was clear
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  Speaker 1: except that we were not going to stand any nonsense
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  Speaker 1: from Germany. Whatever had or had not happened, we meant
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  Speaker 1: to have an apology for, and apparently they did not
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  Speaker 1: mean apologizing. Has war come at last? That was a
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  Speaker 1: headline one's heart leapt to ascent. There were hours that
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  Speaker 1: day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming of battles
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  Speaker 1: and victories by land and sea of shell fire and entrenchments,
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  Speaker 1: and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men. But
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  Speaker 1: the next morning I started for checks Hill started. I remember,
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  Speaker 1: in a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comments,
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  Speaker 1: strikes and wars. End of Book one, Chapter three, Section four,
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  Speaker 1: recording by Richard Kilmer, Real, Medina, Texas,