Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / In the Days of the Comet Book First Chapter First Section 3

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In the Days of the Comet Book First Chapter First Section 3 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book first, chapter first, section three of In the Days
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  Speaker 1: of the Comet. This is the liberyvox 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 liberyvox dot org. Recording by Felicity Campbell.
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  Speaker 1: In the Days of the Comet by H. T. Wells,
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  Speaker 1: Book one, Chapter one, section three. That made Parload put
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  Speaker 1: down the opera glass and look at me. It's a
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  Speaker 1: bad time to change just now, he said, after a
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  Speaker 1: little pause. Rawdon had said as much in a less
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  Speaker 1: agreeable tone, but with Parload, I felt always a disposition
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  Speaker 1: to the heroic note. I'm tired, I said, of humdrum
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  Speaker 1: drudgery for other men. One may as well starve one's
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  Speaker 1: body out of a place to starve one's soul in one.
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  Speaker 1: I don't know about that altogether. Began Parload slowly, and
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  Speaker 1: with that we began one of our interminable conversations, one
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  Speaker 1: of those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal talks that
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  Speaker 1: will be dare to the hearts of intelligent youths until
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  Speaker 1: the world comes to an end. The change has not
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  Speaker 1: abolished that anyhow, It would be an incredible feat of
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  Speaker 1: memory for me now to recall all that meandering haze
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  Speaker 1: of words. Indeed, I recall scarcely any of it, though
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  Speaker 1: its circumstances an atmosphere stand out a sharp clear picture
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  Speaker 1: in my mind. I posed after my manner, and behaved
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  Speaker 1: very foolishly, no doubt, a wounded, smarting egotist, And Parload
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  Speaker 1: played his part of the philosopher preoccupied with the deeps.
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  Speaker 1: We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer's night,
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  Speaker 1: and talking all the more freely for that. But one
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  Speaker 1: thing that I said I can remember. I wish at times,
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  Speaker 1: said I, with a gesture at the heavens, that comet
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  Speaker 1: of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this
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  Speaker 1: world and wipe us all away. Strikes walls, tumults, loves, jealousies,
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  Speaker 1: and all the wretchedness of life. Ah, said Parload, and
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  Speaker 1: the thought seemed to hang about him. It could only
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  Speaker 1: add to the miseries of life, he said, irrelevantly, When
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  Speaker 1: presently I was discoursing of other things. What would collision
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  Speaker 1: with a comet? It would only throw things back, It
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  Speaker 1: would only make what was left of life more savage
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  Speaker 1: than it is at present. But why should anything be
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  Speaker 1: left of life, said I. That was our style, you know.
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  Speaker 1: And meanwhile we walked together up the narrow street outside
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  Speaker 1: his lodging up the stepway and the lanes toward Clayton
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  Speaker 1: Crest and the high Road. But my memories carry me
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  Speaker 1: back so effectually to those days before the change, that
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  Speaker 1: I forget that now all these places have been altered
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  Speaker 1: beyond recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway, and
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  Speaker 1: the view from Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world
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  Speaker 1: in which I was born and bred and made, has
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  Speaker 1: vanished clean away, out of space and out of time,
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  Speaker 1: and well nigh out of the imagination of all those
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  Speaker 1: who are younger by a generation than I. You cannot
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  Speaker 1: see as eye can see the dark empty way between
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  Speaker 1: the mean houses, the dark empty way lit by a
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  Speaker 1: bleary gas lamp at the corner. You cannot feel the
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  Speaker 1: hard checkered pavement under your boots. You cannot mark the
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  Speaker 1: dimly lit windows here and there, and the shadows upon
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  Speaker 1: the ugly and often patched in crooked blinds of the
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  Speaker 1: people cooped within. Nor can you presently pass the beer
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  Speaker 1: house with its brighter gas and its queer screening windows,
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  Speaker 1: nor get a whiff of foul air and foul language
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  Speaker 1: from its door. Nor see the crumpled vertive figure some
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  Speaker 1: rascal child that SLINKs past us. Down the steps we
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  Speaker 1: crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam train,
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  Speaker 1: vomiting smoke and sparks made its clangorous way, And a
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  Speaker 1: down which one saw the greasy brilliance of shop fronts,
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  Speaker 1: and the napther flares of hawkers barrows dripping fire into
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  Speaker 1: the night. A hazy movement of people swayed along that road,
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  Speaker 1: and we heard the voice of an itinerant preacher from
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  Speaker 1: a waste place between the houses. You cannot see these
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  Speaker 1: things as I can see them, nor can you figure
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  Speaker 1: unless you know the pictures that great artist hired has
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  Speaker 1: left the world. The effect of the great hoarding by
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  Speaker 1: which we passed, lit below by a gas lamp, and
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  Speaker 1: towering up to a sudden, sharp black edge against the
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  Speaker 1: pallid sky. Those hoardings, they were the brightest colored things
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  Speaker 1: in all that vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers
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  Speaker 1: of paste and paper, all the rough end prizes of
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  Speaker 1: that time joined in chromatic discord. Pill ven doors and preachers,
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  Speaker 1: theaters and charities, marvelous soaps and astonishing pickles, typewriting machines
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  Speaker 1: and sewing machines, mingled in a sort of visualized calamor,
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  Speaker 1: and passing that there was a muddy lane of cinders,
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  Speaker 1: a lane without a light that used its many puddles
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  Speaker 1: to borrow a star or soap on the sky. We
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  Speaker 1: splashed along, unheeding as we talked. Then across the allotments,
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  Speaker 1: a wilderness of cabbages and evil looking sheds passed, a
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  Speaker 1: gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road. The
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  Speaker 1: high road ascended in a curve, past a few houses
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  Speaker 1: and a beer house, or so and round, until all
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  Speaker 1: the valley in which four industrial towns lay crowded and confluent,
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  Speaker 1: was overlooked. I will admit that with the twilight there
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  Speaker 1: came a spell of weird magnificence over all that land,
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  Speaker 1: and brooded on it until dawn. The horrible meanness of
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  Speaker 1: its details was veiled. The hutches that were homes, the
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  Speaker 1: bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of unwilling vegetation
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  Speaker 1: amidst the makeshift fences of barrel, stave and wire, the
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  Speaker 1: rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where the iron
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  Speaker 1: ore was taken, and the barren mountains of slag from
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  Speaker 1: the blast furnaces were veiled. The reek and boiling smoke
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  Speaker 1: and dust from foundry, pot bank and furnace transfigured and
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  Speaker 1: assimilated by the night. The dust late and atmosphere that
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  Speaker 1: was gray oppression through the day became at sundown a
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  Speaker 1: mystery of deep, translucent colors, of blues and purples, of
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  Speaker 1: somber and vivid reds, of strange bright clearnesses of green
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  Speaker 1: and yellow athwart the darkling sky. Each upstart furnace, when
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  Speaker 1: its monarch's sun had gone, crowned itself with flames. The
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  Speaker 1: dark cinder heaps began to glow with quivering fires, and
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  Speaker 1: each pot bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet of light.
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  Speaker 1: The empire of the day broke into a thousand feudal
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  Speaker 1: baronies of burning coal. The minor streets across the valley
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  Speaker 1: picked themselves out with gas lamps of faint yellow that
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  Speaker 1: brightened and mingled at all the principal squares and crossings
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  Speaker 1: with the greenish pallor of incandescent mantles, The high cold
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  Speaker 1: glare of the electric arc, the interlacing railways lifted bright
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  Speaker 1: signal boxes over their intersections, and signal stars of red
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  Speaker 1: and green and rectangular constellations. The trains became articulated black
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  Speaker 1: serpents breathing fire. Moreover high overhead, like a thing put
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  Speaker 1: out of reach and near forgotten. Parload had rediscovered a
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  Speaker 1: realm that was ruled by neither sun nor furnace, the
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  Speaker 1: universe of stars. This was the scene of many a
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  Speaker 1: talk we two had held together. And if in the
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  Speaker 1: daytime we went right over the crest and looked westward,
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  Speaker 1: there was farm land, There were parks, and great mansions,
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  Speaker 1: the spire of a distant cathedral, and sometimes when the
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  Speaker 1: weather was near raining, the crests of remote mountains hung
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  Speaker 1: clearly in the sky, beyond the range of sight. And indeed,
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  Speaker 1: out beyond there was Zeck's Hill. I felt it there always,
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  Speaker 1: and in the darkness, more than I did by day,
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  Speaker 1: Czech's Hill and Netty and to us two youngsters, as
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  Speaker 1: we walked along the cinder path beside the rutted road
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  Speaker 1: and argued out our perplexities, it seemed that this ridge
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  Speaker 1: gave us compendiously a view of our whole world. There
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  Speaker 1: on the one hand in a crowded darkness. About the
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  Speaker 1: ugly factories and workplaces, the workers herded together, ill clothed,
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  Speaker 1: ill nourished, ill, taught badly and expensively, served at every
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  Speaker 1: occasion in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from
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  Speaker 1: day to day, the chapels and churches and public houses
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  Speaker 1: swelling up amidst their wretched homes like sacrifices, amidst a
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  Speaker 1: general corruption, and on the other in Spain, freedom and
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  Speaker 1: dignity scarce heading the few cottages as overcrowded as they
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  Speaker 1: were picturesque, in which the laborers fested, lived the landlords
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  Speaker 1: and masters who owned pot banks and forge and farm
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  Speaker 1: and mine, far away, distant, beautiful, irrelevant, from out of
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  Speaker 1: a little cluster of second hand bookshops, ecclesiastical residences, in
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  Speaker 1: the inns and incidentals of a decaying market town. The
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  Speaker 1: cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful, unemphatic spire to vague,
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  Speaker 1: incredible skies. So it seemed to us that the whole
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  Speaker 1: world is planned. In those youthful first impressions, we saw
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  Speaker 1: everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry,
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  Speaker 1: confident solutions, and whoso ever would criticize them was a
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  Speaker 1: friend of the robbers. It was a clear case of
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  Speaker 1: robbery we held visibly. So there in those great houses
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  Speaker 1: lurked the landlord and the capitalist with his scoundrel, the
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  Speaker 1: lawyer with his cheek, the priest, and we others were
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  Speaker 1: all the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt, they
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  Speaker 1: winked and chuckled over their rare wines amidst their dazzling
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  Speaker 1: wickedly dressed women, and plotted further grinding for the faces
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  Speaker 1: of the poor, And amidst all the squalor. On the
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  Speaker 1: other hand, amidst brutalities, ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously their
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  Speaker 1: blameeness victim the working man, and we, almost at the
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  Speaker 1: first glance, had found all this out. It had merely
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  Speaker 1: to be asserted. Now, with sufficient rhetoric envenements to change
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  Speaker 1: the face of the whole world, the workingman would arise
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  Speaker 1: in the form of a labor party, and with young
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  Speaker 1: men like Parload and myself to represent him and come
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  Speaker 1: to his own And then then the robbers would get
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  Speaker 1: it hot, and everything would be extremely satisfactory. And as
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  Speaker 1: my memory plays me, strange tricks that does no injustice
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  Speaker 1: to the creed of thought and action that parload de
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  Speaker 1: I held as the final result of human wisdom. We
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  Speaker 1: believed it with heat, and rejected with heat the most
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  Speaker 1: obvious qualification of its harshness. At times in our great
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  Speaker 1: talks we were full of heady hopes for the near
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  Speaker 1: triumph of our doctrine. More often our mood was hot
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  Speaker 1: resentment at the wickedness and stupidity that delayed so plain
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  Speaker 1: and simple a reconstruction of the order of the world.
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  Speaker 1: Then we grew malignant and thought of barricades and significant violence.
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  Speaker 1: I was very bitter, I know, upon this night of
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  Speaker 1: which I am now particularly telling, and the only face
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  Speaker 1: upon the hydra of capitalism and monopoly that I could
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  Speaker 1: see at all clearly smiled, exactly as old Rawdon had
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  Speaker 1: smiled when he refused to give me more than a
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  Speaker 1: paltry twenty shillings a week. I wanted intensely to solve
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  Speaker 1: my self respect by some revenge upon him, and I
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  Speaker 1: felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra,
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  Speaker 1: I might drag its carcass to the feet of Netty
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  Speaker 1: and settle my other trouble as well. What do you
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  Speaker 1: think of me? Now, netty, that at any rate comes
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  Speaker 1: near enough to the quality of my thinking. Then for
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  Speaker 1: you to imagine how I gesticulated and spouted to parload
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  Speaker 1: that night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing
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  Speaker 1: in the outline set in the midst of that desolating
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  Speaker 1: night of flaming industrialism, and my little voice with a
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  Speaker 1: rhetorical twang, attesting, denouncing, you will consider those notions of
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  Speaker 1: my youth, poor, silly, violent stuff. Particularly if you are
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  Speaker 1: of the younger generation born since the change, you will
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  Speaker 1: be of that opinion. Nowadays, the whole world thinks clearly,
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  Speaker 1: thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties. You find it impossible to
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  Speaker 1: imagine how any other thinking could have been possible. Let
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  Speaker 1: me tell you, then, how you can bring yourself to
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  Speaker 1: something like the condition of our former stake. In the
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  Speaker 1: first place, you must get yourself out of health by
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  Speaker 1: unwise drinking and eating, and out of condition by neglecting
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  Speaker 1: your exercise. Then you must contrive to be worried very
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  Speaker 1: much and made very anxious and uncomfortable. And then you
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  Speaker 1: must work very hard for four or five days and
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  Speaker 1: for long hours every day. It's something too petty to
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  Speaker 1: be interesting, too complex to be mechanical, and without any
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  Speaker 1: personal significance to you. Whatever this done gets straightway into
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  Speaker 1: a room that is not ventilated at all, and that
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  Speaker 1: is already full of foul air. And there set yourself
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  Speaker 1: to think out some very complicated problem. In a very
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  Speaker 1: little while, you will find yourself in a state of
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  Speaker 1: intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the obvious, presently in
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  Speaker 1: choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try to play chess under
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  Speaker 1: such conditions and you will play stupidly and lose your temper.
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  Speaker 1: Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper,
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  Speaker 1: and you will fail. Now, the whole world before the
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  Speaker 1: change was as sick and feverish as that. It was
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  Speaker 1: worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that would not
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  Speaker 1: get stated simply that changed and evaded solution. It was
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  Speaker 1: in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing.
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  Speaker 1: There was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all.
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  Speaker 1: There was nothing in the mind of the world anywhere
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  Speaker 1: but half truths, hasty assumptions, hallucinations, and emotions. Nothing I know.
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  Speaker 1: It seems incredible that already some of the younger men
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  Speaker 1: are beginning to dart the greatness of the change our
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  Speaker 1: world has undergone. But read read the newspapers of that time.
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  Speaker 1: Every age becomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our
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  Speaker 1: minds as it recedes into the past. It is the
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  Speaker 1: part of those who, like myself, have stories of that
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  Speaker 1: time to tell, to supply by a scrupulous spirit, aritual realism,
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  Speaker 1: some antidote to that glamor. End of Book one, Chapter one,
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  Speaker 1: Section three. Recording by Felicity Campbell, Book one for me
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  Speaker 1: dot com, fog Nui, New Zealand,