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In the Days of the Comet Book Second Chapter Third Section 2-3 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book two, Chapter three, Sections two and three of In
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  Speaker 1: the Days of the Comet. This is a LibriVox recording.
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  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. In
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  Speaker 1: the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells, Book two,
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  Speaker 1: Chapter three, Sections two and three. I remember as one
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  Speaker 1: thing that struck me very forcibly at the time, the
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  Speaker 1: absence of any discussion, any difference of opinion about the
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  Speaker 1: broad principles of our present state. These men had lived
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  Speaker 1: hitherto in a system of conventions and acquired motives, loyalty
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  Speaker 1: to a party, loyalty to various secret agreements and understandings,
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  Speaker 1: loyalty to the crown. They had all been capable of
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  Speaker 1: the keenest attention to precedence, all capable of the most
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  Speaker 1: complete suppression of subversive doubts and inquiries, All had their
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  Speaker 1: religious emotions under perfect control. They had seen protected by
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  Speaker 1: invisible but impenetrable barriers from all the heady and destructive
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  Speaker 1: speculations the socialistic, republican and communistic theories that one may
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  Speaker 1: still trace through the literature of the last Days of
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  Speaker 1: the Comet. But now as It was as if the
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  Speaker 1: very moment of the awakening, those barriers and defenses had vanished,
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  Speaker 1: as if the green vapors had washed through their minds
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  Speaker 1: and dissolved and swept away a hundred once rigid boundaries
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  Speaker 1: and obstacles. They had admitted and dissimilated at once all
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  Speaker 1: that was good in the ill dressed proper ganders that
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  Speaker 1: had clamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of
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  Speaker 1: their minds in the former days. It was exactly like
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  Speaker 1: the awakening from an absurd and limiting dream. They had
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  Speaker 1: come out together, naturally and inevitably upon the broad daylight
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  Speaker 1: platform of obvious and reasonable agreement upon which we and
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  Speaker 1: all the order of our world now stand. Let me
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  Speaker 1: try to give the chief things that had vanished from
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  Speaker 1: their minds. There was first the ancient system of ownership
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  Speaker 1: that made such an extraordinary tangle of our administration of
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  Speaker 1: the land upon which we lived in the old time.
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  Speaker 1: No one believed in that as either just or ideally convenient,
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  Speaker 1: but everyone accepted it. The community which lived upon the
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  Speaker 1: land was supposed to have waived its necessary connection with
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  Speaker 1: the land, except in certain limited instances of highway and
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  Speaker 1: common all The rest of the land was cut up
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  Speaker 1: in the maddest way into patches and oblongs and triangles
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  Speaker 1: of various sizes between a hundred square miles and a
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  Speaker 1: few acres, and placed under the nearly absolute government of
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  Speaker 1: a series of administrators called landowners. They owned the land
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  Speaker 1: almost as a man now owns his hat. They bought
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  Speaker 1: it and sold it and cut it up like cheese
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  Speaker 1: or ham. They were free to ruin it or leave
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  Speaker 1: it waste, or erect upon it horrible and devastating i sores.
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  Speaker 1: If the community needed a road or a tramway, if
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  Speaker 1: it wanted a town or a village in any position, Nay,
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  Speaker 1: even if it wanted to go to and fro, it
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  Speaker 1: had to do so by exorbitant treaties with each of
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  Speaker 1: the monarchs whose territory was involved. No man could find
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  Speaker 1: foothold on the face of the earth until he had
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  Speaker 1: paid toll and homage to one of them. They had
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  Speaker 1: practically no relations and no duties to the nominal municipal
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  Speaker 1: or national government amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay.
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  Speaker 1: This sounds, I know, like a lunatic's dream, But mankind
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  Speaker 1: was that lunatic and not only in the old countries
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  Speaker 1: of Europe and Asia, where the system had arisen out
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  Speaker 1: of the rational delegation of local control to territorial magnates
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  Speaker 1: who had, in the universal baseness of those times, at
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  Speaker 1: last altogether evaded and escaped their duties. Did it obtain
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  Speaker 1: but the new countries, as we call them then, the
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  Speaker 1: United States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New Zealand,
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  Speaker 1: spent much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving
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  Speaker 1: away of land forever to any casual person who would
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  Speaker 1: take it. Was their call, was their petroleum or gold,
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  Speaker 1: Was there rich soil or harborage, or the sight for
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  Speaker 1: a fine city. These obsessed and witless governments cried out
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  Speaker 1: for scramblers, and a stream of shabby, tricky, and violent
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  Speaker 1: adventurers set out to found a new section of the
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  Speaker 1: landed aristocracy of the world. After a brief century of
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  Speaker 1: hope and pride, the Great Republic of the United States
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  Speaker 1: of America, the hope as it was deemed of mankind,
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  Speaker 1: became for the most part, a drifting crowd of landless men,
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  Speaker 1: landlords and railway lords, food lords, or the land as
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  Speaker 1: food and mineral lords ruled its life, gave it universities
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  Speaker 1: as one gave coins to a mendicant, and spent its
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  Speaker 1: resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as the
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  Speaker 1: world had never seen before. Here was a thing none
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  Speaker 1: of these statesmen before the change would have regarded as
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  Speaker 1: anything but the natural order of the world, which not
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  Speaker 1: one of them now regard guarded as anything but the
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  Speaker 1: mad and vanished delusion of a period of dementia. And
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  Speaker 1: as it was with the question of the land, so
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  Speaker 1: was it also with a hundred other systems and institutions
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  Speaker 1: and complicated and disingenuous factors in the life of man.
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  Speaker 1: They spoke of trade, and I realized for the first
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  Speaker 1: time there could be buying and selling. There was no
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  Speaker 1: loss to any man. They spoke of industrial organization, and
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  Speaker 1: one sort on the captains who sought no base advantages.
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  Speaker 1: The haze of old associations, of personal entanglements and habitual
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  Speaker 1: recognitions had been dispelled from every stage and process of
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  Speaker 1: the social training of men. Things long hidden appeared discovered
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  Speaker 1: with an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who had
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  Speaker 1: awakened laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools
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  Speaker 1: and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half figurative,
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  Speaker 1: half formal teachings of the churches, the complex of weakening
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  Speaker 1: and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and
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  Speaker 1: honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing
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  Speaker 1: but a curious and pleasantly faded memory. There must be
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  Speaker 1: a common training of the young, said ricover a frank initiation.
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  Speaker 1: We have not so much educated them as hidden things
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  Speaker 1: from them and set traps. And it might have been
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  Speaker 1: so easy. It can all be done so easily. That
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  Speaker 1: hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council.
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  Speaker 1: It can all be done so easily. But when they
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  Speaker 1: said it, then it came to my ears with a
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  Speaker 1: quality of enormous refreshment and power. It can all be
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  Speaker 1: done so easily, given frankness, given courage. Time was when
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  Speaker 1: these platitudes had the freshener of wonder of a gospel.
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  Speaker 1: In this enlarged outlook. The war with the Germans, that
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  Speaker 1: mythical heroic armed female Germany had vanished from men's imaginations,
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  Speaker 1: was a mere exhausted episode. A truce had already been arranged.
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  Speaker 1: By Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences, set
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  Speaker 1: aside the matter of peace as a mere question of
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  Speaker 1: particular arrangements. The whole scheme of the world government had
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  Speaker 1: become fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details,
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  Speaker 1: as in great the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries,
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  Speaker 1: districts and municipalities, counties, states, boards and nations, The interlacing,
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  Speaker 1: overlapping and conflicting authorities, The felt of little interests and claims,
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  Speaker 1: in which an innumerable and insatiable multitude of lawyers, agents, managers, bosses,
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  Speaker 1: organizers lived like fleas in a dirty old coat. The
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  Speaker 1: web of the conflicts, jealousies, heated patchings up and jobbings.
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  Speaker 1: Apart of the old order, they flung at all on
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  Speaker 1: one side. What are the new needs? Said Melmount, This
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  Speaker 1: muddle is too rotten to handle. We're beginning again. Well,
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  Speaker 1: let us begin afresh, Section three. Let us begin afresh.
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  Speaker 1: This piece of obvious common sense seemed then to me
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  Speaker 1: instinct with courage, the noblest of words. My heart went
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  Speaker 1: out to him as he spoke. It was indeed, that day,
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  Speaker 1: as vague as it was valiant. We did not at
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  Speaker 1: all see the forms of what we were thus beginning.
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  Speaker 1: All that we saw was the clear, inevitableness that the
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  Speaker 1: old order should end. And then, in a little space
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  Speaker 1: of time, mankind, in halting but effectual brotherhood, was moving
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  Speaker 1: out to make its world anew. Those early years, those
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  Speaker 1: first and second decades of the New Epoch, were, in
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  Speaker 1: their daily detail, a time of rejoicing toil once sow,
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  Speaker 1: chiefly one's own share in that, and little of the whole.
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  Speaker 1: It is only now that I look back at it
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  Speaker 1: from these ripe years, from this high tower, that I
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  Speaker 1: see the dramatic sequence of its changes. See the cruel
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  Speaker 1: old confusions of the ancient time become clarified, simplified, and
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  Speaker 1: dissolve and vanish away. Where is that old world now?
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  Speaker 1: Where is London, that somber city of smoke and drifting darkness,
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  Speaker 1: full of the deep roar and haunting music of disorder,
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  Speaker 1: with its oily, shining, mud rimmed barge, crowded river, its
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  Speaker 1: black pinnacles and blackened dome, Its sad wildernesses of smut
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  Speaker 1: grayed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions of
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  Speaker 1: hurrying clerks, the very leaves upon its trees were foul
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  Speaker 1: with greasy, black defilements. Where is lime white Paris, with
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  Speaker 1: its green and disciplined foliage, its hard, unflinching tastefulness, its
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  Speaker 1: smartly organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers noisily shod
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  Speaker 1: streaming over the bridges in the gray, cold light of dawn.
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  Speaker 1: Where is New York, the high city of clangor and
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  Speaker 1: infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept, its huge buildings,
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  Speaker 1: jostling one another and straining ever upward for a place
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  Speaker 1: in the sky, the fallen, piteously overshadowed. Where are its
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  Speaker 1: lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury, the shameful, bludgeoning,
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  Speaker 1: bribing vice of its ill ruled under ways, and all
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  Speaker 1: the gaunt, extravagant ugliness of its strenuous life. And where
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  Speaker 1: now is Philadelphia with its innumerable small and isolated homes,
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  Speaker 1: and Chicago with its interminable blood stained stockyards, its polyglot
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  Speaker 1: underworld of furious discontent. All these vast cities have given
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  Speaker 1: way and gone, even as my native potteries and the
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  Speaker 1: Black country have gone, and the lives that were caught, crippled, starved,
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  Speaker 1: and maimed. Amidst their labyrinths, their forgotten and neglected maladjustments,
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  Speaker 1: and their vast inhuman, ill conceived industrial machinery have escaped
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  Speaker 1: to life. Those cities of growth and accident are altogether gone.
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  Speaker 1: Never a chimney smokes about our world to day, and
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  Speaker 1: the sound of the weeping of children who toiled and hungered,
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  Speaker 1: the dull despair of overburdened women, the noise of brute
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  Speaker 1: quarrels in alleys, All shameful pleasures, and all the ugly
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  Speaker 1: grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, with the
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  Speaker 1: utter change in our lives. As I look back into
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  Speaker 1: the past, I see a vast, exultant dust of house
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  Speaker 1: breaking and removal rise up into the clear air that
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  Speaker 1: followed the hour of the green vapors. I live again
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  Speaker 1: the year of tense, the year of scaffolding, And like
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  Speaker 1: the triumph of a new theme in a piece of music,
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  Speaker 1: the great cities of our new days arise come Karlian
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  Speaker 1: and Armadan, the twin cities of Lower England, with the
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  Speaker 1: winding summer city of the Thames between, and I see
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  Speaker 1: the gaunt dirt of old Edinburgh die to rise again,
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  Speaker 1: white and tall beneath the shadow of her ancient hill,
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  Speaker 1: and Dublin too reshaped, returning, enriched, fair, spacious, the city
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  Speaker 1: of rich laughter and warm hearts, gleaming daily in a
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  Speaker 1: shaft of sunlight through the soft, warm rain. I see
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  Speaker 1: the great cities America has planned and made. The Golden
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  Speaker 1: City with ever ripening fruit along its broad, warm ways,
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  Speaker 1: and the bell glad city of a thousand spires. I
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  Speaker 1: see again as I have seen, the city of theaters
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  Speaker 1: and meeting places, the city of the sunlight bight, and
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  Speaker 1: the new city that is still called Utah and dominated
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  Speaker 1: by its observatory dome, and the plain and dignified lines
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  Speaker 1: of the University facade upon the cliff Martenabar, the great
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  Speaker 1: white winter city of the upland snows, and the lesser
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  Speaker 1: places too, the townships, the quiet, resting places, the villages
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  Speaker 1: half forest with a all of streams down their streets,
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  Speaker 1: villages laced with avenues of cedar, villages of garden of
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  Speaker 1: roses and wonderful flowers, and the perpetual humming of bees.
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  Speaker 1: And through all the world go our children, our sons.
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  Speaker 1: The old world would have made into servile clerks and shopmen,
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  Speaker 1: plow drudges and servants, our daughters who were erst anemic drudges, prostitutes, sluts,
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  Speaker 1: anxiety racked mothers, or seer repining failures. They go about
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  Speaker 1: this world glad and brave, learning, living, doing, happy and rejoicing,
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  Speaker 1: brave and free. I think of them wandering in the
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  Speaker 1: clear quiet of the ruins of Rome, among the tombs
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  Speaker 1: of Egypt, or the temples of Athens, of their coming
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  Speaker 1: to Mainington and its strange happiness, to Orba and the
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  Speaker 1: wonder of its white and slender tower. But who can
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  Speaker 1: tell of the fullness and pleasures of life? Who can
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  Speaker 1: number all our new cities in the world, cities made
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  Speaker 1: by the loving hands of men for living men, cities
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  Speaker 1: men weep to enter, so fair, they are, so gracious,
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  Speaker 1: and so kind some visit. Surely of these things must
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  Speaker 1: have been vouchsafed me as I sat there behind Melmouth's couch.
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  Speaker 1: But now my knowledge of accomplished things as mingled with
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  Speaker 1: and effaced my expectations. Something indeed I must have foreseen,
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  Speaker 1: or else Why was my heart so glad? End of
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  Speaker 1: Book two, Chapter three, Sections two and three