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

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  Speaker 1: Book one, chapter one, section two 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. Recorded by Lewis.
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  Speaker 1: In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells,
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  Speaker 1: Book one, Chapter one, Section two. Parload stood at the
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  Speaker 1: open window opera, glasses in hand, and sought and found,
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  Speaker 1: and was uncertain about and lost again the new Comet.
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  Speaker 1: I thought the comment no more than a nuisance then,
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  Speaker 1: because I wanted to talk of other matters, but Parload
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  Speaker 1: was full of it. My head was hot, I was
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  Speaker 1: feverish with interlacing annoyances and bitterness. I wanted to open
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  Speaker 1: my heart to him, at least, I wanted to relieve
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  Speaker 1: my heart by some romantic rendering of my troubles. And
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  Speaker 1: I gave but little heed to the things he told me.
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  Speaker 1: It was the first time I had heard of this
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  Speaker 1: new speck among the countless specks of heaven, and I
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  Speaker 1: did not care if I ever heard of the thing again.
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  Speaker 1: We were two youths, much of an age together. Parload
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  Speaker 1: was two and twenty and eight months older than I.
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  Speaker 1: He was I think his proper definition was engrossing clerk
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  Speaker 1: to a little solicitor in Overcastle, while I was third
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  Speaker 1: in the office staff of Rawdon's pot Bank in Clayton.
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  Speaker 1: We had met first in the parliament of the young
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  Speaker 1: Men's Christian Association of Swathinglea's. We had found we attended
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  Speaker 1: simultaneous classes in Overcastle in science and I in Shorthand,
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  Speaker 1: and had started a practice of walking home together, and
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  Speaker 1: so our friendship came into being. Swathinglea's, Clayton and Overcastle
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  Speaker 1: were contiguous towns, I should mention in the great industrial
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  Speaker 1: area of the Midlands. We had shared each other's secrets
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  Speaker 1: of religious doubt. We had confided to one another a
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  Speaker 1: common interest in socialism. He had come twice to supper
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  Speaker 1: at my mother's on a Sunday night, and I was
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  Speaker 1: free of his apartment. He was then a tall, flaxen haired,
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  Speaker 1: gawky youth with a disproportionate development of neck and wrist,
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  Speaker 1: and capable of vast enthusiasms. He gave two evenings a
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  Speaker 1: week to the evening classes of the organized Science school
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  Speaker 1: in Overcastle. Physiography was his favorite subject, and through this
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  Speaker 1: insidious opening of his mind the wonder of outer space
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  Speaker 1: had come to take possession of his soul. He had
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  Speaker 1: commandeered an old opera glass from his uncle, who farmed
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  Speaker 1: at leet over the moors. He had bought a cheap
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  Speaker 1: plastic planisphere and Whittaker's almanac, and for a time, day
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  Speaker 1: and moonlight were mere blank interruptions in the one satisfactory
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  Speaker 1: reality in his life, stargazing. It was the deeps that
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  Speaker 1: had seized him, the immensities and the mysterious possibilities that
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  Speaker 1: might float unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor
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  Speaker 1: and the help of a very precise article in the Heavens,
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  Speaker 1: a little monthly magazine that catered for those who were
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  Speaker 1: under this obsession, he had at last got his opera glasses.
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  Speaker 1: Upon the new visitor to our system from outer space,
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  Speaker 1: he gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quivering
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  Speaker 1: little smudge of light among the shining pin points, and gazed.
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  Speaker 1: My troubles had to wait for him. Wonderful, he sighed,
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  Speaker 1: And then, as though his first emphasis did not satisfy him,
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  Speaker 1: wonderful he turned to me, wouldn't you like to see?
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  Speaker 1: I had to look, and then I had to listen,
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  Speaker 1: how this scarce visible intruder was to be, was presently
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  Speaker 1: to be one of the largest comets this world has
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  Speaker 1: ever seen. How that its course must bring it within,
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  Speaker 1: at most so many scores of millions of miles from
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  Speaker 1: the Earth. A mere step parload seemed to think that,
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  Speaker 1: now that the spectroscope had already sounded its chemical secrets,
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  Speaker 1: perplexed by the unprecedented band in the green, how it
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  Speaker 1: was even now being photographed in the very act of
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  Speaker 1: unwinding in an unusual direction, a sunward tale which presently
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  Speaker 1: it wound up again, And all the while in a
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  Speaker 1: sort of undertow. I was thinking first of Nettie Stuart
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  Speaker 1: and the letter she had just written me, and then
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  Speaker 1: of old Rawdon's detestable face as I had seen it
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  Speaker 1: that afternoon. Now I planned answers to Nettie and now
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  Speaker 1: belated repartees to my employer. And then again Nettie was
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  Speaker 1: blazing all across the background of my thoughts. Nettie Stuart
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  Speaker 1: was daughter of the head gardener of the rich mister
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  Speaker 1: Verral's widow, and she and I had kissed and become
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  Speaker 1: sweethearts before we were eighteen years old. My mother and
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  Speaker 1: hers were second cousins and old schoolfellows. And though my
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  Speaker 1: mother had been widowed untimely by a train accident and
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  Speaker 1: had been reduced to letting lodgings, she was the Clay
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  Speaker 1: and Curate's landlady, a position esteemed much lower than that
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  Speaker 1: of missus Stuart. A kindly custom of occasional visits to
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  Speaker 1: the gardener's cottage at Checkshill Towers still kept the friends
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  Speaker 1: in touch commonly. I went with her, and I remember
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  Speaker 1: it was in the dusk of one bright evening in July,
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  Speaker 1: one of those long golden evenings that do not so
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  Speaker 1: much give way tonight as admit at last, upon courtesy
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  Speaker 1: the moon and a choice retinue of stars, that Nettie
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  Speaker 1: and I at the pond of Goldfish, where the ewe
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  Speaker 1: bordering walks converged, made our shy beginner's vow. I remember
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  Speaker 1: still something will always stir in me at that memory,
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  Speaker 1: the tremulous emotion of that adventure. Nettie was dressed in white,
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  Speaker 1: her hair went off in waves of soft darkness. From
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  Speaker 1: above her dark shad shining eyes. There was a little
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  Speaker 1: necklace of pearls around her sweetly modeled neck, and a
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  Speaker 1: little coign of gold that nestled in her throat. I
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  Speaker 1: kissed her half reluctant lips, and for three years of
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  Speaker 1: my life thereafter, nay, I almost think for all the
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  Speaker 1: rest of her life and mine, I could have died
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  Speaker 1: for her sake. You must understand, and every year it
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  Speaker 1: becomes increasingly difficult to understand how entirely different the world
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  Speaker 1: was then from what it is now. It was a
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  Speaker 1: dark world. It was full of preventable disorder, preventable diseases,
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  Speaker 1: and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid, unpremeditated cruelties. But
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  Speaker 1: yet it may be even by virtue of the general darkness,
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  Speaker 1: there were moments of a rare and evanascent beauty that
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  Speaker 1: seemed no longer possible. In my experience, the great change
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  Speaker 1: has come, for evermore, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere.
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  Speaker 1: There is peace on earth and goodwill to all men.
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  Speaker 1: None would dare to dream of returning to the sorrows
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  Speaker 1: of the former time. And yet that misery was pierced
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  Speaker 1: ever and again. Its gray curtain was stabbed through and
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  Speaker 1: through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions of a
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  Speaker 1: keenness that it seems to me are now altogether gone
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  Speaker 1: out of life. Is it the change, I wonder, that
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  Speaker 1: has robbed life of its extremes? Or is it perhaps
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  Speaker 1: only this that youth has left me? Even the strength
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  Speaker 1: of middle years leaves me now, and taking its despairs
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  Speaker 1: and raptures, leaving me judgment, perhaps sympathy, memories I cannot tell.
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  Speaker 1: One would need to be young now, and to have
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  Speaker 1: been young then as well to decide that impossible problem.
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  Speaker 1: Perhaps a cool observer, even in the old days, would
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  Speaker 1: have found little beauty in our grouping. I have our
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  Speaker 1: two photographs at hand in this bureau as I write,
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  Speaker 1: and they show me a gaulky youth in ill fitting,
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  Speaker 1: ready made clothing, and Nettie. Indeed, Nettie is badly dressed,
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  Speaker 1: and her attitude is more than a little stuff. But
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  Speaker 1: I can see her through the picture, and her living brightness,
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  Speaker 1: and something of that mystery of charm she had for
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  Speaker 1: me comes back again to my mind. Her face has
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  Speaker 1: triumphed over the photographer, or I would long ago have
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  Speaker 1: cast this picture away. The reality of beauty you'll itself
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  Speaker 1: to no words. I wished that I had the sister
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  Speaker 1: art and could draw in my margin something that escapes description.
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  Speaker 1: There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There
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  Speaker 1: was something a matter of the minutest difference about her
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  Speaker 1: upper lip, so that her mouth closed sweetly and broke
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  Speaker 1: very sweetly to a smile, that grave, sweet smile. After
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  Speaker 1: we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents
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  Speaker 1: for a while of the irrevocable choice we had made,
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  Speaker 1: the time came for us to part, shyly and before others,
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  Speaker 1: and I and my mother went off back across the
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  Speaker 1: moonlit park, the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer to
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  Speaker 1: the railway station at checks Hill, and so to our
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  Speaker 1: dingy basement in Clayton. And I saw no more of Nettie,
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  Speaker 1: except that I saw her in my thoughts for nearly
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  Speaker 1: a year. But at our next meeting it was decided
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  Speaker 1: that we must correspond, and this we did with much
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  Speaker 1: elaboration of secrecy, for Nettie would have no one at home,
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  Speaker 1: not even her only sister, know of her attachment. So
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  Speaker 1: I had to send my precious documents sealed and under cover,
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  Speaker 1: by way of a confidential schoolfellow of hers who lived
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  Speaker 1: near London. I could write that address down now, though
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  Speaker 1: house and street and suburb have gone beyond any man's tracing.
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  Speaker 1: Our correspondence began our estrangement because for the first time
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  Speaker 1: we came into more than sensuous contact, and our minds
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  Speaker 1: sought expression. Now you must understand that the world of
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  Speaker 1: thought in those days was in the strangest condition. It
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  Speaker 1: was choked with obsolete, inadequate formula. It was tortuous to
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  Speaker 1: a maze like degree, with secondary contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions,
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  Speaker 1: and subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man's lips.
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  Speaker 1: I was brought up by my mother in a quaint,
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  Speaker 1: old fashioned, narrow faith in certain religious formula, certain rules
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  Speaker 1: of conduct, certain conceptions of social and political order that
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  Speaker 1: had no more relevance to the realities and needs of
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  Speaker 1: everyday contemporary life than if they were clean linen that
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  Speaker 1: had been put away with lavender in a drawer. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: her religion did actually smell of lavender. On Sundays, she
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  Speaker 1: put away all the things of reality, the garments and
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  Speaker 1: even the furnishings of every day. Hid her hands that
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  Speaker 1: were gnarled and sometimes chapped with scrubbing in black, carefully
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  Speaker 1: mended gloves, assumed her old black silk dress and body
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  Speaker 1: on it, and took me unnaturally clean and sweet also
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  Speaker 1: to church. There we sang and bowed, and heard sonorous prayers,
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  Speaker 1: and joined insnorous responses, and rose with a congregation sigh
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  Speaker 1: refreshed and relieved when the doxology, with its opening now
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  Speaker 1: to God, the Father, God the Son, bowed out the
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  Speaker 1: tame brief sermon. There was a hell in that religion
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  Speaker 1: of my mother's, a red haired hell of curly flames
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  Speaker 1: that had once been very terrible. There was a devil.
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  Speaker 1: He was also ex officio the British King's enemy. And
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  Speaker 1: much denunciation of the wicked lust of the flesh. We
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  Speaker 1: were expected to believe that most of our poor, unhappy
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  Speaker 1: world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here
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  Speaker 1: by suffering exquisite torments forever after world without end amen.
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  Speaker 1: But indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole
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  Speaker 1: thing had been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality
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  Speaker 1: long before my time. If it had much terror, even
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  Speaker 1: in my childhood, I have forgotten it. It was not
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  Speaker 1: so terrible as the giant who was killed by the beanstalk.
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  Speaker 1: And I see it all now as a setting for
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  Speaker 1: my poor old mother's worn and grimy face, and almost
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  Speaker 1: lovingly as part of her, and mister gibdis, our plump
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  Speaker 1: little lodger, strangely transformed in his vestments, and lifting his
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  Speaker 1: voice manfully to the quality of those Elizabethan prayers, seemed
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  Speaker 1: I think, to give her a special and peculiar interest
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  Speaker 1: with God. She radiated her own tremulous gentleness upon him
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  Speaker 1: and redeemed him from all the implications of vindictive theologians.
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  Speaker 1: She was, in truth, had I but perceived it the
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  Speaker 1: effectual answer to all she would have taught me. So
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  Speaker 1: I see it now. But there is something harsh in
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  Speaker 1: the earnest intensity of youth. And having at first taken
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  Speaker 1: all these things quite seriously, the fiery hell and God's
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  Speaker 1: vindictiveness at any neglect, as though they were as much
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  Speaker 1: a matter of fact as Bladden's ironworks and Rawdon's pot bank,
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  Speaker 1: I presently, with an equal seriousness, flung them out of
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  Speaker 1: my mind. Again. Mister Gibidis, you see, did sometimes, as
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  Speaker 1: the phrase went, take notice of me. He had induced
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  Speaker 1: me to go on reading after I left school, and
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  Speaker 1: with the best intentions in the world, and to anticipate
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  Speaker 1: the poison of the times he had lent me Burbell's skepticism,
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  Speaker 1: answered and drawn my attention to the library of the
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  Speaker 1: Institute in Clayton. The excellent Burbal was a great shock
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  Speaker 1: to me. It seemed clear from his answers to the
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  Speaker 1: skeptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all that
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  Speaker 1: faded and by no means awful hereafter which I had
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  Speaker 1: hitherto accepted as I accepted the son was an extremely
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  Speaker 1: poor one, and to hammer home that idea, the first
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  Speaker 1: book I got from the Institute happened to be an
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  Speaker 1: American edition of the collected works of Shelley his Gassie
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  Speaker 1: Prose as well as his atmospheric Verse. I was soon
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  Speaker 1: ripe for blatant unbelief, and at the young Men's Christian
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  Speaker 1: Association I presently made the acquaintance of Parload, who told me,
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  Speaker 1: under promise of the most sinister secrecy, that he was
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  Speaker 1: a socialist. Out and out. He lent me several copies
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  Speaker 1: of a periodical with the claimant title of the Clarion,
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  Speaker 1: which was just taking up a crusade against the accepted religion.
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  Speaker 1: The adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open,
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  Speaker 1: and will always lie healthily open to the contagion of
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  Speaker 1: philosophical doubts, of scorns and new ideas. And I will
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  Speaker 1: confess I had the fever of that phase badly doubt,
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  Speaker 1: I say, But it was not so much doubt, which
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  Speaker 1: is a complex thing as startled emphatic denial. Have I
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  Speaker 1: believed this? And I was also, you must remember, just
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  Speaker 1: beginning love letters to Nettie. We live now in these
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  Speaker 1: days when the great change has been in most things accomplished,
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  Speaker 1: in a time when everyone is being educated to a
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  Speaker 1: sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from
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  Speaker 1: our vigor. And it is hard to understand the stifled
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  Speaker 1: and struggling manner in which my generation of common young
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: men did its thinking. To think at all about certain
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: questions was an act of rebellion that set one oscillating
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  Speaker 1: between the furtive and the defiant. People begin to find Shelley,
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  Speaker 1: for all his melody, noisy and ill conditioned now because
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  Speaker 1: his anarchs have vanished. Yet there was a time when
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  Speaker 1: novel thought had to go to that tune of breaking glass.
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  Speaker 1: It becomes a little difficult to imagine the yeasty state
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  Speaker 1: of mind, the disposition to shout and say yah at
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  Speaker 1: constituted authority to sustain a persistent note of provocation, such
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  Speaker 1: as we raw youngsters displayed. I began to read with
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  Speaker 1: avidity such writings as Carlyle Browning and hind have left
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  Speaker 1: for the perplexity of posterity, and not only to read
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  Speaker 1: and admire, but to imitate. My letters to Nettie. After
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  Speaker 1: one or two genuinely intended displays of prefervid tenderness broke
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  Speaker 1: out towards theology, sociology, and the cosmos in turgid and
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  Speaker 1: startling expressions. No doubt they puzzled her extremely. I retained
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  Speaker 1: the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to envy for
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  Speaker 1: my own departed youth. But I should find it difficult
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  Speaker 1: to maintain my case against anyone who would condemn me
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  Speaker 1: altogether as having been a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy, indeed,
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  Speaker 1: and quite like my fated photograph. And when I try
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  Speaker 1: to recall what exactly must have been the quality and
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  Speaker 1: tenor of my more sustained efforts to write memorably to
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  Speaker 1: my sweetheart, I confess I shiver. Yet I wish they
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  Speaker 1: were not all destroyed. Her letters to me were simple enough,
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  Speaker 1: written in a roundish, unformed hand and badly phrased. First
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  Speaker 1: two or three showed a shy pleasure in the use
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  Speaker 1: of the word dear, and I remember being puzzled, And
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  Speaker 1: then when I understood delighted because she had written Willie
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  Speaker 1: ash Thor under my name ash Thor, I gathered meant darling.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: But when the evidences of my fermentation began, her answers
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  Speaker 1: were less happy. I will not weary you with the
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  Speaker 1: story of how we quarreled in our silly, youthful way,
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  Speaker 1: and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited, to
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  Speaker 1: Checkshill and made it worse, and how afterwards I wrote
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  Speaker 1: a letter that she thought was lovely and mended the matter.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: Nor will I tell of our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Always I was the offender, in the final penitent, until
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: this last trouble that was now beginning. And in between
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: we had some tender near moments, and her very greatly.
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  Speaker 1: There was this misfortune in the business that in the
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  Speaker 1: darkness and alone, I thought with great intensity of her,
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  Speaker 1: of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweet and
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  Speaker 1: delightful presence. But when I sat down to write, I
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  Speaker 1: thought of Shelley and Burns and myself and other such
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: irrelevant matters. When one is in love in this fermenting way,
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  Speaker 1: it is harder to make love than it is when
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  Speaker 1: one does not love at all. And as for Nettie,
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  Speaker 1: she loved I know, not me, but those gentle mysteries.
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  Speaker 1: It was not my voice should rouse her dreams to passion.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: So our letters continued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote
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  Speaker 1: me one doubting whether she could ever care for anyone
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  Speaker 1: who was a socialist and did not believe in church.
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  Speaker 1: And then hard upon it came another note with unexpected
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  Speaker 1: novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suited to
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  Speaker 1: each other. We differed so in taste and ideas. She
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  Speaker 1: had long thought of releasing me from our engagement. In fact,
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  Speaker 1: though I really did not apprehend it fully at the
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  Speaker 1: first shock, I was dismissed her letter had reached me.
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  Speaker 1: When I came home after Old Rawdon's none too civil
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  Speaker 1: refusal to raise my wages on this particular evening of
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  Speaker 1: which I write, Therefore, I was in a state of
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  Speaker 1: feverish adjustment to too new and amazing, to nearly overwhelming
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  Speaker 1: facts that I was neither indispensable to Nettie nor to Rawdon's.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: And to talk of comments, where did I stand? I
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  Speaker 1: had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably mine.
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  Speaker 1: The whole tradition of true love pointed me to that
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  Speaker 1: that for her to face about with these precise small
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  Speaker 1: phrases towards abandonment, after we had kissed and whispered and
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  Speaker 1: come so close in the little adventurous familiarities of the young,
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  Speaker 1: shocked me profoundly. I I and Rawdon didn't find me
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  Speaker 1: indispensable either. I felt that I was suddenly repudiated by
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  Speaker 1: the universe, and threatened with a facement that in some
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  Speaker 1: positive and emphatic way I must at once assert myself.
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  Speaker 1: There was no balm in the religion I had learned,
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  Speaker 1: or in the irreligion I had adopted for wounded self love.
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  Speaker 1: Should I fling up Rawdon's place at once, and then,
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: in some extraordinary swift manner make the fortune of Frobisher's
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: adjacent and closely competitive pot bank. The first part of
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: that program, at any rate, would be easy of a
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: accomplishment to go to Rawdon and say you will hear
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: from me again? But for the rest frubishers might fail me. That, however,
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: was a secondary issue. The predominant affair was with Nettie.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: I found my mind thick shot with flying fragments of
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: rhetoric that might be of service in the letter I
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: would write her scorn, irony, tenderness. What was it to be? Brother?
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Said Parload? Suddenly, what said I? They're firing up Bladden's
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: iron works, and the smoke comes right across my bit
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: of sky. The interruption came just as I was ripe
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: to discharge my thoughts upon him. Parload said, I, very
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: likely I shall have to leave all this old rawdon
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: won't give me a rise of my wages, And after
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: having asked, I don't think I can stand going on
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: upon the old terms any more. See so I may
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: have to clear out of Clayton for good and all.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: End of Book one, Chapter one, Section two.