I felt like a bombshell of swearing that must presently burst with some
violence as I went on my silent way. He had so completely got the best
of our encounter.
§ 7
There comes a memory, an odd intermixture of two entirely divergent
things, that stands out with the intensest vividness.
As I went across the last open meadow, following the short cut to
Checkshill station, I perceived I had two shadows.
The thing jumped into my mind and stopped its tumid flow for a moment.
I remember the intelligent detachment of my sudden interest. I turned
sharply, and stood looking at the moon and the great white comet, that
the drift of the clouds had now rather suddenly unveiled.
The comet was perhaps twenty degrees from the moon. What a wonderful
thing it looked floating there, a greenish-white apparition in the dark
blue deeps! It looked brighter than the moon because it was smaller,
but the shadow it cast, though clearer cut, was much fainter than the
moon’s shadow. . . I went on noting these facts, watching my two
shadows precede me.
I am totally unable to account for the sequence of my thoughts on this
occasion. But suddenly, as if I had come on this new fact round a
corner, the comet was out of my mind again, and I was face to face with
an absolutely new idea. I wonder sometimes if the two shadows I cast,
one with a sort of feminine faintness with regard to the other and not
quite so tall, may not have suggested the word or the thought of an
assignation to my mind. All that I have clear is that with the
certitude of intuition I knew what it was that had brought the youth in
evening dress outside the shrubbery. Of course! He had come to meet
Nettie!
Once the mental process was started it took no time at all. The day
which had been full of perplexities for me, the mysterious invisible
thing that had held Nettie and myself apart, the unaccountable strange
something in her manner, was revealed and explained.
I knew now why she had looked guilty at my appearance, what had brought
her out that afternoon, why she had hurried me in, the nature of the
“book” she had run back to fetch, the reason why she had wanted me to
go back by the high-road, and why she had pitied me. It was all in the
instant clear to me.
You must imagine me a black little creature, suddenly stricken
still—for a moment standing rigid—and then again suddenly becoming
active with an impotent gesture, becoming audible with an inarticulate
cry, with two little shadows mocking my dismay, and about this figure
you must conceive a great wide space of moonlit grass, rimmed by the
looming suggestion of distant trees—trees very low and faint and dim,
and over it all the domed serenity of that wonderful luminous night.
For a little while this realization stunned my mind. My thoughts came
to a pause, staring at my discovery. Meanwhile my feet and my previous
direction carried me through the warm darkness to Checkshill station
with its little lights, to the ticket-office window, and so to the
train.
I remember myself as it were waking up to the thing—I was alone in one
of the dingy “third-class” compartments of that time—and the sudden
nearly frantic insurgence of my rage. I stood up with the cry of an
angry animal, and smote my fist with all my strength against the panel
of wood before me. . . .
Curiously enough I have completely forgotten my mood after that for a
little while, but I know that later, for a minute perhaps, I hung for a
time out of the carriage with the door open, contemplating a leap from
the train. It was to be a dramatic leap, and then I would go storming
back to her, denounce her, overwhelm her; and I hung, urging myself to
do it. I don’t remember how it was I decided not to do this, at last,
but in the end I didn’t.
When the train stopped at the next station I had given up all thoughts
of going back. I was sitting in the corner of the carriage with my
bruised and wounded hand pressed under my arm, and still insensible to
its pain, trying to think out clearly a scheme of action—action that
should express the monstrous indignation that possessed me.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE REVOLVER
§ 1
“That comet is going to hit the earth!”
So said one of the two men who got into the train and settled down.
“Ah!” said the other man.
“They do say that it is made of gas, that comet. We sha’n’t blow up,
shall us?”. . .
What did it matter to me?
I was thinking of revenge—revenge against the primary conditions of my
being. I was thinking of Nettie and her lover. I was firmly resolved he
should not have her—though I had to kill them both to prevent it. I did
not care what else might happen, if only that end was ensured. All my
thwarted passions had turned to rage. I would have accepted eternal
torment that night without a second thought, to be certain of revenge.
A hundred possibilities of action, a hundred stormy situations, a whirl
of violent schemes, chased one another through my shamed, exasperated
mind. The sole prospect I could endure was of some gigantic, inexorably
cruel vindication of my humiliated self.
And Nettie? I loved Nettie still, but now with the intensest jealousy,
with the keen, unmeasuring hatred of wounded pride, and baffled,
passionate desire.
§ 2
As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest—for my shilling and a penny
only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-Mile Stone, and
thence I had to walk over the hill—I remember very vividly a little man
with a shrill voice who was preaching under a gas-lamp against a
hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday evening loafers. He was a short man,
bald, with a little fair curly beard and hair and watery blue eyes, and
he was preaching that the end of the world drew near.
I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet with the
end of the world. He had got that jumbled up with international
politics and prophecies from the Book of Daniel.
I stopped to hear him only for a moment or so. I do not think I should
have halted at all but his crowd blocked my path, and the sight of his
queer wild expression, the gesture of his upward-pointing finger, held
me.
“There is the end of all your Sins and Follies,” he bawled. “There!
There is the Star of Judgments, the Judgments of the most High God! It
is appointed unto all men to die—unto all men to die”—his voice changed
to a curious flat chant—“and after death, the Judgment! The Judgment!”
I pushed and threaded my way through the bystanders and went on, and
his curious harsh flat voice pursued me. I went on with the thoughts
that had occupied me before—where I could buy a revolver, and how I
might master its use—and probably I should have forgotten all about him
had he not taken a part in the hideous dream that ended the little
sleep I had that night. For the most part I lay awake thinking of
Nettie and her lover.
Then came three strange days—three days that seem now to have been
wholly concentrated upon one business.
This dominant business was the purchase of my revolver. I held myself
resolutely to the idea that I must either restore myself by some
extraordinary act of vigor and violence in Nettie’s eyes or I must kill
her. I would not let myself fall away from that. I felt that if I let
this matter pass, my last shred of pride and honor would pass with it,
that for the rest of my life I should never deserve the slightest
respect or any woman’s love. Pride kept me to my purpose between my
gusts of passion.
Yet it was not easy to buy that revolver.
I had a kind of shyness of the moment when I should have to face the
shopman, and I was particularly anxious to have a story ready if he
should see fit to ask questions why I bought such a thing. I determined
to say I was going to Texas, and I thought it might prove useful there.
Texas in those days had the reputation of a wild lawless land. As I
knew nothing of caliber or impact, I wanted also to be able to ask with
a steady face at what distance a man or woman could be killed by the
weapon that might be offered me. I was pretty cool-headed in relation
to such practical aspects of my affair. I had some little difficulty in
finding a gunsmith. In Clayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth
in a cycle shop, but the only revolvers these people had impressed me
as being too small and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop
window in the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice,
a reasonably clumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed “As used in
the American army.”
I had drawn out my balance from the savings bank, matter of two pounds
and more, to make this purchase, and I found it at last a very easy
transaction. The pawnbroker told me where I could get ammunition, and I
went home that night with bulging pockets, an armed man.
The purchase of my revolver was, I say, the chief business of those
days, but you must not think I was so intent upon it as to be
insensible to the stirring things that were happening in the streets
through which I went seeking the means to effect my purpose. They were
full of murmurings: the whole region of the Four Towns scowled lowering
from its narrow doors. The ordinary healthy flow of people going to
work, people going about their business, was chilled and checked.
Numbers of men stood about the streets in knots and groups, as
corpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels in the opening stages
of inflammation. The women looked haggard and worried. The ironworkers
had refused the proposed reduction of their wages, and the lockout had
begun. They were already at “play.” The Conciliation Board was doing
its best to keep the coal-miners and masters from a breach, but young
Lord Redcar, the greatest of our coal owners and landlord of all
Swathinglea and half Clayton, was taking a fine upstanding attitude
that made the breach inevitable. He was a handsome young man, a gallant
young man; his pride revolted at the idea of being dictated to by a
“lot of bally miners,” and he meant, he said, to make a fight for it.
The world had treated him sumptuously from his earliest years; the
shares in the common stock of five thousand people had gone to pay for
his handsome upbringing, and large, romantic, expensive ambitions
filled his generously nurtured mind. He had early distinguished himself
at Oxford by his scornful attitude towards democracy. There was
something that appealed to the imagination in his fine antagonism to
the crowd—on the one hand, was the brilliant young nobleman,
picturesquely alone; on the other, the ugly, inexpressive multitude,
dressed inelegantly in shop-clothes, under-educated, under-fed,
envious, base, and with a wicked disinclination for work and a wicked
appetite for the good things it could so rarely get. For common
imaginative purposes one left out the policeman from the design, the
stalwart policeman protecting his lordship, and ignored the fact that
while Lord Redcar had his hands immediately and legally on the
workman’s shelter and bread, they could touch him to the skin only by
some violent breach of the law.
He lived at Lowchester House, five miles or so beyond Checkshill; but
partly to show how little he cared for his antagonists, and partly no
doubt to keep himself in touch with the negotiations that were still
going on, he was visible almost every day in and about the Four Towns,
driving that big motor car of his that could take him sixty miles an
hour. The English passion for fair play one might have thought
sufficient to rob this bold procedure of any dangerous possibilities,
but he did not go altogether free from insult, and on one occasion at
least an intoxicated Irish woman shook her fist at him. . . .
A dark, quiet crowd, that was greater each day, a crowd more than half
women, brooded as a cloud will sometimes brood permanently upon a
mountain crest, in the market-place outside the Clayton Town Hall,
where the conference was held. . . .
I consider myself justified in regarding Lord Redcar’s passing
automobile with a special animosity because of the leaks in our roof.
We held our little house on lease; the owner was a mean, saving old man
named Pettigrew, who lived in a villa adorned with plaster images of
dogs and goats, at Overcastle, and in spite of our specific agreement,
he would do no repairs for us at all. He rested secure in my mother’s
timidity. Once, long ago, she had been behind-hand with her rent, with
half of her quarter’s rent, and he had extended the days of grace a
month; her sense that some day she might need the same mercy again made
her his abject slave. She was afraid even to ask that he should cause
the roof to be mended for fear he might take offence. But one night the
rain poured in on her bed and gave her a cold, and stained and soaked
her poor old patchwork counterpane. Then she got me to compose an
excessively polite letter to old Pettigrew, begging him as a favor to
perform his legal obligations. It is part of the general imbecility of
those days that such one-sided law as existed was a profound mystery to
the common people, its provisions impossible to ascertain, its
machinery impossible to set in motion. Instead of the clearly written
code, the lucid statements of rules and principles that are now at the
service of every one, the law was the muddle secret of the legal
profession. Poor people, overworked people, had constantly to submit to
petty wrongs because of the intolerable uncertainty not only of law but
of cost, and of the demands upon time and energy, proceedings might
make. There was indeed no justice for any one too poor to command a
good solicitor’s deference and loyalty; there was nothing but rough
police protection and the magistrate’s grudging or eccentric advice for
the mass of the population. The civil law, in particular, was a
mysterious upper-class weapon, and I can imagine no injustice that
would have been sufficient to induce my poor old mother to appeal to
it.
All this begins to sound incredible. I can only assure you that it was
so.
But I, when I learned that old Pettigrew had been down to tell my
mother all about his rheumatism, to inspect the roof, and to allege
that nothing was needed, gave way to my most frequent emotion in those
days, a burning indignation, and took the matter into my own hands. I
wrote and asked him, with a withering air of technicality, to have the
roof repaired “as per agreement,” and added, “if not done in one week
from now we shall be obliged to take proceedings.” I had not mentioned
this high line of conduct to my mother at first, and so when old
Pettigrew came down in a state of great agitation with my letter in his
hand, she was almost equally agitated.
“How could you write to old Mr. Pettigrew like that?” she asked me.
I said that old Pettigrew was a shameful old rascal, or words to that
effect, and I am afraid I behaved in a very undutiful way to her when
she said that she had settled everything with him—she wouldn’t say how,
but I could guess well enough—and that I was to promise her, promise
her faithfully, to do nothing more in the matter. I wouldn’t promise
her.
And—having nothing better to employ me then—I presently went raging to
old Pettigrew in order to put the whole thing before him in what I
considered the proper light. Old Pettigrew evaded my illumination; he
saw me coming up his front steps—I can still see his queer old nose and
the crinkled brow over his eye and the little wisp of gray hair that
showed over the corner of his window-blind—and he instructed his
servant to put up the chain when she answered the door, and to tell me
that he would not see me. So I had to fall back upon my pen.
Then it was, as I had no idea what were the proper “proceedings” to
take, the brilliant idea occurred to me of appealing to Lord Redcar as
the ground landlord, and, as it were, our feudal chief, and pointing
out to him that his security for his rent was depreciating in old
Pettigrew’s hands. I added some general observations on leaseholds, the
taxation of ground rents, and the private ownership of the soil. And
Lord Redcar, whose spirit revolted at democracy, and who cultivated a
pert humiliating manner with his inferiors to show as much, earned my
distinguished hatred for ever by causing his secretary to present his
compliments to me, and his request that I would mind my own business
and leave him to manage his. At which I was so greatly enraged that I
first tore this note into minute innumerable pieces, and then dashed it
dramatically all over the floor of my room—from which, to keep my
mother from the job, I afterward had to pick it up laboriously on
all-fours.
I was still meditating a tremendous retort, an indictment of all Lord
Redcar’s class, their manners, morals, economic and political crimes,
when my trouble with Nettie arose to swamp all minor troubles. Yet, not
so completely but that I snarled aloud when his lordship’s motor-car
whizzed by me, as I went about upon my long meandering quest for a
weapon. And I discovered after a time that my mother had bruised her
knee and was lame. Fearing to irritate me by bringing the thing before
me again, she had set herself to move her bed out of the way of the
drip without my help, and she had knocked her knee. All her poor
furnishings, I discovered, were cowering now close to the peeling
bedroom walls; there had come a vast discoloration of the ceiling, and
a washing-tub was in occupation of the middle of her chamber. . . .
It is necessary that I should set these things before you, should give
the key of inconvenience and uneasiness in which all things were
arranged, should suggest the breath of trouble that stirred along the
hot summer streets, the anxiety about the strike, the rumors and
indignations, the gatherings and meetings, the increasing gravity of
the policemen’s faces, the combative headlines of the local papers, the
knots of picketers who scrutinized any one who passed near the silent,
smokeless forges, but in my mind, you must understand, such impressions
came and went irregularly; they made a moving background, changing
undertones, to my preoccupation by that darkly shaping purpose to which
a revolver was so imperative an essential.
Along the darkling streets, amidst the sullen crowds, the thought of
Nettie, my Nettie, and her gentleman lover made ever a vivid
inflammatory spot of purpose in my brain.
§ 3
It was three days after this—on Wednesday, that is to say—that the
first of those sinister outbreaks occurred that ended in the bloody
affair of Peacock Grove and the flooding out of the entire line of the
Swathinglea collieries. It was the only one of these disturbances I was
destined to see, and at most a mere trivial preliminary of that
struggle.
The accounts that have been written of this affair vary very widely. To
read them is to realize the extraordinary carelessness of truth that
dishonored the press of those latter days. In my bureau I have several
files of the daily papers of the old time—I collected them, as a matter
of fact—and three or four of about that date I have just this moment
taken out and looked through to refresh my impression of what I saw.
They lie before me—queer, shriveled, incredible things; the cheap paper
has already become brittle and brown and split along the creases, the
ink faded or smeared, and I have to handle them with the utmost care
when I glance among their raging headlines. As I sit here in this
serene place, their quality throughout, their arrangement, their tone,
their arguments and exhortations, read as though they came from drugged
and drunken men. They give one the effect of faded bawling, of screams
and shouts heard faintly in a little gramophone. . . . It is only on
Monday I find, and buried deep below the war news, that these
publications contain any intimation that unusual happenings were
forward in Clayton and Swathinglea.
What I saw was towards evening. I had been learning to shoot with my
new possession. I had walked out with it four or five miles across a
patch of moorland and down to a secluded little coppice full of
blue-bells, halfway along the high-road between Leet and Stafford. Here
I had spent the afternoon, experimenting and practising with careful
deliberation and grim persistence. I had brought an old kite-frame of
cane with me, that folded and unfolded, and each shot-hole I made I
marked and numbered to compare with my other endeavors. At last I was
satisfied that I could hit a playing-card at thirty paces nine times
out of ten; the light was getting too bad for me to see my penciled
bull’s-eye, and in that state of quiet moodiness that sometimes comes
with hunger to passionate men, I returned by the way of Swathinglea
towards my home.
The road I followed came down between banks of wretched-looking
working-men’s houses, in close-packed rows on either side, and took
upon itself the _rôle_ of Swathinglea High Street, where, at a lamp and
a pillar-box, the steam-trams began. So far that dirty hot way had been
unusually quiet and empty, but beyond the corner, where the first group
of beershops clustered, it became populous. It was very quiet still,
even the children were a little inactive, but there were a lot of
people standing dispersedly in little groups, and with a general
direction towards the gates of the Bantock Burden coalpit.
The place was being picketed, although at that time the miners were
still nominally at work, and the conferences between masters and men
still in session at Clayton Town Hall. But one of the men employed at
the Bantock Burden pit, Jack Briscoe, was a socialist, and he had
distinguished himself by a violent letter upon the crisis to the
leading socialistic paper in England, _The Clarion_, in which he had
adventured among the motives of Lord Redcar. The publication of this
had been followed by instant dismissal. As Lord Redcar wrote a day or
so later to the _Times_—I have that _Times_, I have all the London
papers of the last month before the Change—
“The man was paid off and kicked out. Any self-respecting employer
would do the same.” The thing had happened overnight, and the men did
not at once take a clear line upon what was, after all, a very
intricate and debatable occasion. But they came out in a sort of
semiofficial strike from all Lord Redcar’s collieries beyond the canal
that besets Swathinglea. They did so without formal notice, committing
a breach of contract by this sudden cessation. But in the long labor
struggles of the old days the workers were constantly putting
themselves in the wrong and committing illegalities through that
overpowering craving for dramatic promptness natural to uneducated
minds.
All the men had not come out of the Bantock Burden pit. Something was
wrong there, an indecision if nothing else; the mine was still working,
and there was a rumor that men from Durham had been held in readiness
by Lord Redcar, and were already in the mine. Now, it is absolutely
impossible to ascertain certainly how things stood at that time. The
newspapers say this and that, but nothing trustworthy remains.
I believe I should have gone striding athwart the dark stage of that
stagnant industrial drama without asking a question, if Lord Redcar had
not chanced to come upon the scene about the same time as myself and
incontinently end its stagnation.
He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put up the
best fight they had ever had, and he had been active all that afternoon
in meeting the quarrel half way, and preparing as conspicuously as
possible for the scratch force of “blacklegs”—as we called them—who
were, he said and we believed, to replace the strikers in his pits.
I was an eye-witness of the whole of the affair outside the Bantock
Burden pit, and—I do not know what happened.
Picture to yourself how the thing came to me.
I was descending a steep, cobbled, excavated road between banked-up
footways, perhaps six feet high, upon which, in a monotonous series,
opened the living room doors of rows of dark, low cottages. The
perspective of squat blue slate roofs and clustering chimneys drifted
downward towards the irregular open space before the colliery—a space
covered with coaly, wheel-scarred mud, with a patch of weedy dump to
the left and the colliery gates to the right. Beyond, the High Street
with shops resumed again in good earnest and went on, and the lines of
the steam-tramway that started out from before my feet, and were here
shining and acutely visible with reflected skylight and here lost in a
shadow, took up for one acute moment the greasy yellow irradiation of a
newly lit gaslamp as they vanished round the bend. Beyond, spread a
darkling marsh of homes, an infinitude of little smoking hovels, and
emergent, meager churches, public-houses, board schools, and other
buildings amidst the prevailing chimneys of Swathinglea. To the right,
very clear and relatively high, the Bantock Burden pit-mouth was marked
by a gaunt lattice bearing a great black wheel, very sharp and distinct
in the twilight, and beyond, in an irregular perspective, were others
following the lie of the seams. The general effect, as one came down
the hill, was of a dark compressed life beneath a very high and wide
and luminous evening sky, against which these pit-wheels rose. And
ruling the calm spaciousness of that heaven was the great comet, now
green-white, and wonderful for all who had eyes to see.
The fading afterglow of the sunset threw up all the contours and
skyline to the west, and the comet rose eastward out of the pouring
tumult of smoke from Bladden’s forges. The moon had still to rise.
By this time the comet had begun to assume the cloudlike form still
familiar through the medium of a thousand photographs and sketches. At
first it had been an almost telescopic speck; it had brightened to the
dimensions of the greatest star in the heavens; it had still grown,
hour by hour, in its incredibly swift, its noiseless and inevitable
rush upon our earth, until it had equaled and surpassed the moon. Now
it was the most splendid thing this sky of earth has ever held. I have
never seen a photograph that gave a proper idea of it. Never at any
time did it assume the conventional tailed outline, comets are supposed
to have. Astronomers talked of its double tail, one preceding it and
one trailing behind it, but these were foreshortened to nothing, so
that it had rather the form of a bellying puff of luminous smoke with
an intenser, brighter heart. It rose a hot yellow color, and only began
to show its distinctive greenness when it was clear of the mists of the
evening.
It compelled attention for a space. For all my earthly concentration of
mind, I could but stare at it for a moment with a vague anticipation
that, after all, in some way so strange and glorious an object must
have significance, could not possibly be a matter of absolute
indifference to the scheme and values of my life.
But how?
I thought of Parload. I thought of the panic and uneasiness that was
spreading in this very matter, and the assurances of scientific men
that the thing weighed so little—at the utmost a few hundred tons of
thinly diffused gas and dust—that even were it to smite this earth
fully, nothing could possibly ensue. And, after all, said I, what
earthly significance has any one found in the stars?
Then, as one still descended, the houses and buildings rose up, the
presence of those watching groups of people, the tension of the
situation; and one forgot the sky.
Preoccupied with myself and with my dark dream about Nettie and my
honor, I threaded my course through the stagnating threat of this
gathering, and was caught unawares, when suddenly the whole scene
flashed into drama. . . .
The attention of every one swung round with an irresistible magnetism
towards the High Street, and caught me as a rush of waters might catch
a wisp of hay. Abruptly the whole crowd was sounding one note. It was
not a word, it was a sound that mingled threat and protest, something
between a prolonged “Ah!” and “Ugh!” Then with a hoarse intensity of
anger came a low heavy booing, “Boo! boo—oo!” a note stupidly
expressive of animal savagery. “Toot, toot!” said Lord Redcar’s
automobile in ridiculous repartee. “Toot, toot!” One heard it whizzing
and throbbing as the crowd obliged it to slow down.
Everybody seemed in motion towards the colliery gates, I, too, with the
others.
I heard a shout. Through the dark figures about me I saw the motor-car
stop and move forward again, and had a glimpse of something writhing on
the ground.
It was alleged afterwards that Lord Redcar was driving, and that he
quite deliberately knocked down a little boy who would not get out of
his way. It is asserted with equal confidence that the boy was a man
who tried to pass across the front of the motor-car as it came slowly
through the crowd, who escaped by a hair’s breadth, and then slipped on
the tram-rail and fell down. I have both accounts set forth, under
screaming headlines, in two of these sere newspapers upon my desk. No
one could ever ascertain the truth. Indeed, in such a blind tumult of
passion, could there be any truth?
There was a rush forward, the horn of the car sounded, everything
swayed violently to the right for perhaps ten yards or so, and there
was a report like a pistol-shot.
For a moment every one seemed running away. A woman, carrying a
shawl-wrapped child, blundered into me, and sent me reeling back. Every
one thought of firearms, but, as a matter of fact, something had gone
wrong with the motor, what in those old-fashioned contrivances was
called a backfire. A thin puff of bluish smoke hung in the air behind
the thing. The majority of the people scattered back in a disorderly
fashion, and left a clear space about the struggle that centered upon
the motor-car.
The man or boy who had fallen was lying on the ground with no one near
him, a black lump, an extended arm and two sprawling feet. The
motor-car had stopped, and its three occupants were standing up. Six or
seven black figures surrounded the car, and appeared to be holding on
to it as if to prevent it from starting again; one—it was Mitchell, a
well-known labor leader—argued in fierce low tones with Lord Redcar. I
could not hear anything they said, I was not near enough. Behind me the
colliery gates were open, and there was a sense of help coming to the
motor-car from that direction. There was an unoccupied muddy space for
fifty yards, perhaps, between car and gate, and then the wheels and
head of the pit rose black against the sky. I was one of a rude
semicircle of people that hung as yet indeterminate in action about
this dispute.
It was natural, I suppose, that my fingers should close upon the
revolver in my pocket.
I advanced with the vaguest intentions in the world, and not so quickly
but that several men hurried past me to join the little knot holding up
the car.
Lord Redcar, in his big furry overcoat, towered up over the group about
him; his gestures were free and threatening, and his voice loud. He
made a fine figure there, I must admit; he was a big, fair, handsome
young man with a fine tenor voice and an instinct for gallant effect.
My eyes were drawn to him at first wholly. He seemed a symbol, a
triumphant symbol, of all that the theory of aristocracy claims, of all
that filled my soul with resentment. His chauffeur sat crouched
together, peering at the crowd under his lordship’s arm. But Mitchell
showed as a sturdy figure also, and his voice was firm and loud.
“You’ve hurt that lad,” said Mitchell, over and over again. “You’ll
wait here till you see if he’s hurt.”
“I’ll wait here or not as I please,” said Redcar; and to the chauffeur,
“Here! get down and look at it!”
“You’d better not get down,” said Mitchell; and the chauffeur stood
bent and hesitating on the step.
The man on the back seat stood up, leant forward, and spoke to Lord
Redcar, and for the first time my attention was drawn to him. It was
young Verrall! His handsome face shone clear and fine in the green
pallor of the comet.
I ceased to hear the quarrel that was raising the voice of Mitchell and
Lord Redcar. This new fact sent them spinning into the background.
Young Verrall!
It was my own purpose coming to meet me half way.
There was to be a fight here, it seemed certain to come to a scuffle,
and here we were—
What was I to do? I thought very swiftly. Unless my memory cheats me, I
acted with swift decision. My hand tightened on my revolver, and then I
remembered it was unloaded. I had thought my course out in an instant.
I turned round and pushed my way out of the angry crowd that was now
surging back towards the motor-car.
It would be quiet and out of sight, I thought, among the dump heaps
across the road, and there I might load unobserved. . .
A big young man striding forward with his fists clenched, halted for
one second at the sight of me.
“What!” said he. “Ain’t afraid of them, are you?”
I glanced over my shoulder and back at him, was near showing him my
pistol, and the expression changed in his eyes. He hung perplexed at
me. Then with a grunt he went on.