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In the Days of the Comet Book Second Chapter First Section 5-6 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book two, chapter one, sections five and six 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 one, sections five and six. That memory stands out
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  Speaker 1: against the dark past of the world with extraordinary clearness
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  Speaker 1: and brightness. The air I remember was full of the
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  Speaker 1: calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a
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  Speaker 1: curious persuasion, too, that there was a distant, happy clamor
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  Speaker 1: of pealing bells, but that I am half convinced is
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  Speaker 1: a mistake. Nevertheless, there was something in the fresh bite
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  Speaker 1: of things, in the dewy newness of sensation, that set
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  Speaker 1: bells rejoicing in one's brain. And that big, fair, pensive
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  Speaker 1: man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his
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  Speaker 1: clumsy pose, as though indeed some great master of strength
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  Speaker 1: and humor had made him. And it is so hard
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  Speaker 1: now to convey these things. He spoke to me a stranger,
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  Speaker 1: without reservations, carelessly as men now speak to men. Before
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  Speaker 1: those days, not only did we think badly, but what
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  Speaker 1: we thought, a thousand short sighted considerations, dignity, objective, discipline, discretion,
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  Speaker 1: a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of soul made us
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  Speaker 1: muffle before we told it to our fellow men. It's
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  Speaker 1: all returning now, he said, and told me, half soliloquising,
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  Speaker 1: what was on his mind. I wish I could give
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  Speaker 1: every word he said to me. He struck out image
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  Speaker 1: after image to my nascent intelligence, with swift, broken fragments
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  Speaker 1: of speech. If I had a precise, full memory of
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  Speaker 1: that morning, I should give it to you verbatim, minutely.
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  Speaker 1: But here, save for the little sharp things that stand out,
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  Speaker 1: I find only blurred general impressions throughout. I have to
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  Speaker 1: make up again his half forgotten sentences and speeches, and
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  Speaker 1: be content with giving you the general effect. But I
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  Speaker 1: can see and hear him now, as he said, the
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  Speaker 1: dream got worse at the end. The war a perfectly
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  Speaker 1: horrible business, horrible, and it was just like a nightmare.
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  Speaker 1: You couldn't do anything to escape from it. Every One
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  Speaker 1: was driven. His sense of indiscretion was gone. He opened
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  Speaker 1: the war out to me as every one sees it now.
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  Speaker 1: Only that morning it was astonishing. He sat there on
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  Speaker 1: the ground, absurdly, a forgetful of his bare and swollen foot,
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  Speaker 1: treating me as the humblest accessory, and as altogether an equal,
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  Speaker 1: talking out to himself the great obsessions of his mind.
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  Speaker 1: We could have prevented it. Any of us who chose
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  Speaker 1: to speak out, could have prevented it. A little decent frankness.
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  Speaker 1: What was there to prevent us being frank with one another?
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  Speaker 1: Their emperor? His position was a pile of ridiculous assumptions,
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  Speaker 1: no doubt, But at the bottom he was a sane man.
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  Speaker 1: He touched off the Emperor in a few pithy words,
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  Speaker 1: the German press, the German people, and our own. He
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  Speaker 1: put it as we should put it all now, but
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  Speaker 1: with a certain heat, as of a man half guilty
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  Speaker 1: and wholly resentful. Their damned little buttoned up professors, he cried. Incidentally,
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  Speaker 1: were there ever such men and ours, some of us
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  Speaker 1: might have taken a fermoline. If a lot of us
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  Speaker 1: had taken fermoline and squashed that nonsense early he lapsed
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  Speaker 1: into inorderable whisperings and into silence. I stood regarding him,
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  Speaker 1: understanding him, learning marvelously from him. It is a fact
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  Speaker 1: that for the best part of the morning of the change.
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  Speaker 1: I forgot Nettie and thereof as completely, as though they
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  Speaker 1: were no more than characters in some novel that I
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  Speaker 1: had put aside to finish at my leisure in order
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  Speaker 1: that I might talk to this man. Eh well, he said,
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  Speaker 1: waking startlingly from his thoughts. Here we are awakened. The
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  Speaker 1: thing can't go on now. All this must end? How
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  Speaker 1: it ever began, My dear boy, how did all those
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  Speaker 1: things ever begin? I feel like a new atom. Do
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  Speaker 1: you think this has happened generally? Or shall we find
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  Speaker 1: all those gnomes and things? Who cares? He made as
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  Speaker 1: if to rise and remember his ankle. He suggested I
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  Speaker 1: should help him as far as his bungalow. There seemed
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  Speaker 1: nothing strange to either of us that he should requisition
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  Speaker 1: my services, or that I should cheerfully obey. I helped
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  Speaker 1: him bandage his ankle, and we set out. I his crutch.
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  Speaker 1: The two of us, making up a sort of a
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  Speaker 1: limping quadruped along the winding lane toward the cliffs and
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  Speaker 1: the sea. Section six. His bungalow, beyond the golf links,
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  Speaker 1: was perhaps a mile and the quarter from the lane.
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  Speaker 1: We went down to the beach margin and along the
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  Speaker 1: pallid wave smooth sands, and we got along by making
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  Speaker 1: us swaying, hopping tripod dance forward until I began to
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  Speaker 1: give under him, and then as soon as we could
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  Speaker 1: sitting down. His ankle was in fact broken, and he
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  Speaker 1: could not put it to the ground without exquisite pain,
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  Speaker 1: so that it took us nearly two hours to get
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  Speaker 1: to the house, and it have taken longer if his
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  Speaker 1: butler Valet had not come out to assist me. They
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  Speaker 1: had found motor car and chauffeur smashed and still at
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  Speaker 1: the bend of the road near the house, and had
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  Speaker 1: been on that side looking for Melmount, or they would
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  Speaker 1: have seen us before. For most of that time we
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  Speaker 1: were sitting now on turf, now on chalk boulder, now
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  Speaker 1: on a timber groin, and talking one to the other
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  Speaker 1: with a frankness proper to the intercourse of men of
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  Speaker 1: good intent, without reservations or aggressions, in the common, open
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  Speaker 1: fashion of contemporary intercourse to day, but which then, nevertheless
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  Speaker 1: was the rarest and strangest thing in the world. He
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  Speaker 1: for the most part talked, but at some shape of
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  Speaker 1: a question. I told him as plainly as I could
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  Speaker 1: tell of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible
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  Speaker 1: to me, of my murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover,
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  Speaker 1: and other green vapors overcame me. He watched me with
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  Speaker 1: grave eyes and nodded understandingly. And afterwards he asked me brief,
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  Speaker 1: penetrating questions about my education, my upbringing, my work. There
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  Speaker 1: was a deliberation in his manner, brief full of pauses
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  Speaker 1: that had in them no element of delay. Yes, he said, yes,
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  Speaker 1: of course, what a fool I have been, and said
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  Speaker 1: no more until we had made another of our tripod
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  Speaker 1: struggles along the beach. At first I did not see
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  Speaker 1: the connection of my story with that self accusation. Suppose,
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  Speaker 1: he said, panting on the groin, there had been such
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  Speaker 1: a thing as a statesman, He turned to me, if
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  Speaker 1: one had decided all this muddle shall end, if one
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  Speaker 1: had taken it as an artist takes his clay, as
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  Speaker 1: a man who builds takes sight and stone and made.
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  Speaker 1: He flung out his big broad hand at the glories
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  Speaker 1: of sky and sea and drew a deep breath. Something
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  Speaker 1: to fit that setting, he added an explanation. Then there
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  Speaker 1: wouldn't have been such stories as yours at all you know,
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  Speaker 1: Tell me more about it, he said, tell me all
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  Speaker 1: about yourself. I feel all these things have passed away,
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  Speaker 1: All these things are to be changed forever. You won't
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  Speaker 1: be what you have been from this time forth. All
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  Speaker 1: the things you have done don't matter now to us
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  Speaker 1: at any rate. They don't matter at all. We have
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  Speaker 1: met who were separated in that darkness behind us. Tell me, yes,
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  Speaker 1: he said. And I told my story straight and as
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  Speaker 1: frankly as I have told it to you. And there
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  Speaker 1: were those little skerries of weed rock run out to
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  Speaker 1: the ebb beyond the headland is Bungalow village. What did
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  Speaker 1: you do with your pistol? I left it lying there
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  Speaker 1: among the barley. He glanced at me from under his
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  Speaker 1: light eyelashes. If others feel like you and I, he said,
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  Speaker 1: there'll be a lot of pistols left among the barley
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  Speaker 1: to day. So we talked, I and that great strong
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  Speaker 1: man with a love of brother so plain between us
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  Speaker 1: it needed not a word. Our souls went out to
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  Speaker 1: one another in stark good faith. Never before had I
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  Speaker 1: had anything but a guarded watchfulness for any fellow man.
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  Speaker 1: Still I see him upon that wild, desolate beach of
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  Speaker 1: the ebb tide. I see him leaning against the shelly
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  Speaker 1: buttress of a groin, looking down at the poor drowned
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  Speaker 1: sailor whose body we presently found. For we found a
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  Speaker 1: newly drowned man who had just chanced to miss this
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  Speaker 1: great dawn in which we rejoiced. We found him lying
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  Speaker 1: in a pool of water, among brown weeds, in the
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  Speaker 1: dark shadow of the timberings. You must not overreet the
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  Speaker 1: horrors of the former days. In those days it was
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  Speaker 1: scarcely more common to see death in England than it
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  Speaker 1: would be to day. This dead man was a sailor
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  Speaker 1: from the Rother Adler, the great German battleship that had
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  Speaker 1: we but known it, lay not four miles away along
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  Speaker 1: the coast amidst plowed up mountains of chalk Ooze, a
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  Speaker 1: torn and battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water,
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  Speaker 1: and holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned, brave men,
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  Speaker 1: all strong and skillful, all once capable of doing fine things.
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  Speaker 1: I remember that poor boy very vividly. He had been
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  Speaker 1: drowned during the anesthesia of the green gas. His fair
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  Speaker 1: young face was quiet and calm, But the skin of
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  Speaker 1: his chest had been crinkled by scalding water, and his
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  Speaker 1: right arm was bent queerly. Back Even to this needless death,
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  Speaker 1: and all its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come.
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  Speaker 1: Everything flowed together to significance as we stood there, I
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  Speaker 1: the ill clad, cheaply equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his
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  Speaker 1: great fur trimmed coat. He was hot with walking, but
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  Speaker 1: he had not thought to remove it. Leaning upon the
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  Speaker 1: clumsy groins and pitying this poor victim of the war
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  Speaker 1: he had helped to make, poor Lad, he said, poor Lad,
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  Speaker 1: a child we blunderers sent to death. Do look at
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  Speaker 1: the quiet beauty of that face, that body to be
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  Speaker 1: flung aside like this? I remember that near this dead
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  Speaker 1: man's hand a stranded starfish writhed its slowly feeling limbs,
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  Speaker 1: Struggling back toward the sea, It left groove traces in
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  Speaker 1: the sand. There must be no more of this, padded Melmount,
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  Speaker 1: leaning on my shoulder, no more of this, But most
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  Speaker 1: I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting
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  Speaker 1: upon a great chalk boulder, with the sunlight on his big,
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  Speaker 1: perspiration dewed face, he made his resolves. We must end war,
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  Speaker 1: he said, in that full whisper of his It is stupidity.
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  Speaker 1: With so many people able to read and think, even
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  Speaker 1: as it is, there is no need of anything of
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  Speaker 1: the sort. Gods, what have we rulers been at, drowsing
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  Speaker 1: like people in a stifling room, too dull and sleepy
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  Speaker 1: and too base toward each other for any one to
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  Speaker 1: get up and open the window? Why haven't we been
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  Speaker 1: at a great powerful figure? He sits there still in
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  Speaker 1: my memory, perplexed and astonished at himself and all things.
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  Speaker 1: We must change all this, he repeated, and threw out
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  Speaker 1: his broad hands in a powerful gesture against the sea
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  Speaker 1: and sky. We have done so weakly. Heaven alone knows
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  Speaker 1: why I can see him now, queer giant, that he
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  Speaker 1: looked on that dornlet beach of splendor, the sea birds
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  Speaker 1: flying about us, and that crumpled death hard by no
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  Speaker 1: bad symbol in his clumsiness and needless heat of the
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  Speaker 1: unawakened powers of the former time. I remember it as
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  Speaker 1: an integral part of that picture. That far away across
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  Speaker 1: the sandy stretches one of those white estate boards I
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  Speaker 1: have described, stuck up a little askew amidst the yellow
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  Speaker 1: green turf upon the crest of the low cliffs. He talked,
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  Speaker 1: with a sort of wonder of the former things. Has
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  Speaker 1: it ever dawned upon you to imagine the pettiness, the
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  Speaker 1: pettiness of every soul concerned in a declaration of war?
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  Speaker 1: He asked. He went on, as though speech was necessary
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  Speaker 1: to make it credible to describe Lacock, who first gave
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  Speaker 1: the horror words at the Cabinet Council and undersized Oxford
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  Speaker 1: Brigg with a tenoring voice and the garbage of Greek,
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  Speaker 1: A sort of little fool who was brought up on
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  Speaker 1: the admiration of his elder sisters. All the time almost
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  Speaker 1: he said, I was watching him, thinking what an ass
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  Speaker 1: he was to be trusted with men's lives. I might
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  Speaker 1: have done better to have thought that of myself. I
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  Speaker 1: was doing nothing to prevent it. All that damned little
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  Speaker 1: imbecile was up to his neck in the drama of
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  Speaker 1: the thing. He liked to trumpet it out. He goggled
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  Speaker 1: round at us. Then it is war, he said. Richover
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  Speaker 1: shrugged his shoulders. I made some slight protest and gave in. Afterward,
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  Speaker 1: I dreamt of him what a lot. We were all
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  Speaker 1: a little scared at ourselves, all as it were, instrumental
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  Speaker 1: and its fools like that lead to things like this.
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  Speaker 1: He jerked his head at that dead man near by us.
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  Speaker 1: It will be interesting to know what has happened to
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  Speaker 1: the world, this green, vapor, queer stuff. But I know
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  Speaker 1: what has happened to me. It's conversion. I've always known.
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  Speaker 1: But this is being a fool talk. I'm going to
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  Speaker 1: stop it. He motioned to rise with his clumsy outstretched hands.
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  Speaker 1: Stop what said, I stepping forward instinctively to help him. War,
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  Speaker 1: he said in his great whisper, putting his big hand
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  Speaker 1: on my shoulder, but making no further attempt to arise.
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  Speaker 1: I'm going to put an end to war, to any
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  Speaker 1: sort of war, and all these things that must end.
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  Speaker 1: The world is beautiful, Life is great and splendid. We
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  Speaker 1: had only to lift up our eyes and see. Think
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  Speaker 1: of the glories through which we have been driving like
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  Speaker 1: a herd of swine in a garden place. The color
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  Speaker 1: in life, the sounds, the shapes. We have had, our jealousies,
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  Speaker 1: our quarrels, our ticklish rites, our invincible prejudices, our vulgar enterprise,
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  Speaker 1: and sluggish, timidities. We have chattered and picked one another,
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  Speaker 1: and fouled the world like DAWs in the temple, like
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  Speaker 1: unclean birds in the holy place of God. All my
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  Speaker 1: life has been foolishness and pettiness, gross pleasures and mean discretions.
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  Speaker 1: All I am a meager, dark thing in this morning's glow,
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  Speaker 1: a penitence, a shame, And but for God's mercy, I
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  Speaker 1: might have died this night like that poor lad there
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  Speaker 1: amidst the squalor of my sins. No more of this,
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  Speaker 1: No more of this, Whether the whole world has changed
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  Speaker 1: or no matters nothing. We too have seen this dawn.
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  Speaker 1: He paused, I will arise and go on to my
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  Speaker 1: father he began presently, and will say unto him. His
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  Speaker 1: voice died away in an inaudible whisper. His hand tightened
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  Speaker 1: painfully on my shoulder, and he rose. End of Book two,
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  Speaker 1: Chapter one, Sections five and six.