Young Verrall!
I had not even drawn my revolver—I had forgotten it. I was covered with
coaly mud—knees, elbows, shoulders, back. I had not even drawn my
revolver! . . .
A feeling of ridiculous impotence overwhelmed me. I struggled painfully
to my feet.
I hesitated for a moment towards the gates of the colliery, and then
went limping homeward, thwarted, painful, confused, and ashamed. I had
not the heart nor desire to help in the wrecking and burning of Lord
Redcar’s motor.
§ 4
In the night, fever, pain, fatigue—it may be the indigestion of my
supper of bread and cheese—roused me at last out of a hag-rid sleep to
face despair. I was a soul lost amidst desolations and shame,
dishonored, evilly treated, hopeless. I raged against the God I denied,
and cursed him as I lay.
And it was in the nature of my fever, which was indeed only half
fatigue and illness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth,
that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through the
brief dreams that marked the exhaustions of that vigil, to dominate my
misery. I was sensible, with an exaggerated distinctness, of the
intensity of her physical charm for me, of her every grace and beauty;
she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me and the whole gamut
of pride. She, bodily, was my lost honor. It was not only loss but
disgrace to lose her. She stood for life and all that was denied; she
mocked me as a creature of failure and defeat. My spirit raised itself
towards her, and then the bruise upon my jaw glowed with a dull heat,
and I rolled in the mud again before my rivals.
There were times when something near madness took me, and I gnashed my
teeth and dug my nails into my hands and ceased to curse and cry out
only by reason of the insufficiency of words. And once towards dawn I
got out of bed, and sat by my looking-glass with my revolver loaded in
my hand. I stood up at last and put it carefully in my drawer and
locked it—out of reach of any gusty impulse. After that I slept for a
little while.
Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of the
world. Never a city, never a night the whole year round, but amidst
those who slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath and
misery. Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled, they
agonize near to the very border-line of madness, each one the center of
a universe darkened and lost. . .
The next day I spent in gloomy lethargy.
I had intended to go to Checkshill that day, but my bruised ankle was
too swollen for that to be possible. I sat indoors in the ill-lit
downstairs kitchen, with my foot bandaged, and mused darkly and read.
My dear old mother waited on me, and her brown eyes watched me and
wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations. I had not
told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and my clothes muddy.
She had brushed my clothes in the morning before I got up.
Ah well! Mothers are not treated in that way now. That I suppose must
console me. I wonder how far you will be able to picture that dark,
grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered wall paper,
the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but by no means
economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the rust-spotted steel
fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder how near you can come
to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy I was, unshaven and
collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little timid, dirty, devoted
old woman who hovered about me with love peering out from her puckered
eyelids. . .
When she went out to buy some vegetables in the middle of the morning
she got me a half-penny journal. It was just such a one as these upon
my desk, only that the copy I read was damp from the press, and these
are so dry and brittle, they crack if I touch them. I have a copy of
the actual issue I read that morning; it was a paper called
emphatically the _New Paper_, but everybody bought it and everybody
called it the “yell.” It was full that morning of stupendous news and
still more stupendous headlines, so stupendous that for a little while
I was roused from my egotistical broodings to wider interests. For it
seemed that Germany and England were on the brink of war.
Of all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, war was
certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality it was probably far
less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, the general
acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil
consequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling
confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there any
sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a multitude
of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material, and the
waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing. The old war
of savage and barbaric nations did at least change humanity, you
assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique and discipline,
you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and if successful you took
their land and their women and perpetuated and enlarged your
superiority. The new war changed nothing but the color of maps, the
design of postage stamps, and the relationship of a few accidentally
conspicuous individuals. In one of the last of these international
epileptic fits, for example, the English, with much dysentery and bad
poetry, and a few hundred deaths in battle, conquered the South African
Boers at a gross cost of about three thousand pounds per head—they
could have bought the whole of that preposterous imitation of a nation
for a tenth of that sum—and except for a few substitutions of
personalities, this group of partially corrupt officials in the place
of that, and so forth, the permanent change was altogether
insignificant. (But an excitable young man in Austria committed suicide
when at length the Transvaal ceased to be a “nation.”) Men went through
the seat of that war after it was all over, and found humanity
unchanged, except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of
an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge
cases—unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old
habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like kraal,
the white in his ugly ill-managed shanty. . .
But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them, through
the mirage of the _New Paper_, in a light of mania. All my adolescence
from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of that monstrous
resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the songs and the
waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller and the glorious heroism
of De Wet—who _always_ got away; that was the great point about the
heroic De Wet—and it never occurred to us that the total population we
fought against was less than half the number of those who lived cramped
ignoble lives within the compass of the Four Towns.
But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater
antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining
itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention
only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute
definitive expression and now percolating and pervading some new region
of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great Britain.
When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong entirely
to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest early
memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty in writing
down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of fact to their
fathers.
Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of
almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had
neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve, that
most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with our affairs
hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions of three
hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about the globe, and
here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six millions, in a state
of confusion no whit better than our own, and the noisy little
creatures who directed papers and wrote books and gave lectures, and
generally in that time of world-dementia pretended to be the national
mind, were busy in both countries, with a sort of infernal unanimity,
exhorting—and not only exhorting but successfully persuading—the two
peoples to divert such small common store of material, moral and
intellectual energy as either possessed, into the purely destructive
and wasteful business of war. And—I have to tell you these things even
if you do not believe them, because they are vital to my story—there
was not a man alive who could have told you of any real permanent
benefit, of anything whatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and
evil, that would result from a war between England and Germany, whether
England shattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever
the end might be.
The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was, in
the microcosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical
wrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measured the
excess of common emotion over the common intelligence, the legacy of
inordinate passion we have received from the brute from which we came.
Just as I had become the slave of my own surprise and anger and went
hither and thither with a loaded revolver, seeking and intending vague
fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went about the earth, hot
eared and muddle headed, with loaded navies and armies terribly ready
at hand. Only there was not even a Nettie to justify their stupidity.
There was nothing but quiet imaginary thwarting on either side.
And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two huge
multitudes of people directed against one another.
The press—those newspapers that are now so strange to us—like the
“Empires,” the “Nations,” the Trusts, and all the other great monstrous
shapes of that extraordinary time—was in the nature of an unanticipated
accident. It had happened, as weeds happen in abandoned gardens, just
as all our world has happened,—because there was no clear Will in the
world to bring about anything better. Towards the end this “press” was
almost entirely under the direction of youngish men of that eager,
rather unintelligent type, that is never able to detect itself aimless,
that pursues nothing with incredible pride and zeal, and if you would
really understand this mad era the comet brought to an end, you must
keep in mind that every phase in the production of these queer old
things was pervaded by a strong aimless energy and happened in a
concentrated rush.
Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.
Figure first, then, a hastily erected and still more hastily designed
building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old London, and a
number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile
swiftness, and within this factory companies of printers, tensely
active with nimble fingers—they were always speeding up the
printers—ply their type-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses
of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of
little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a
throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing
of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and
copy. Then begins a clatter roar of machinery catching the infection,
going faster and faster, and whizzing and banging,—engineers, who have
never had time to wash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans,
while paper runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor
you must suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor-car, leaping out
before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents
clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to “hustle,” getting
wonderfully in everybody’s way. At the sight of him even the messenger
boys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your
vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all the
parts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically toward a
crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last the
only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing vibrating
premises are the hands of the clock.
Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all those
stresses. Then in the small hours, into the now dark and deserted
streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place spurts paper at
every door, bales, heaps, torrents of papers, that are snatched and
flung about in what looks like a free fight, and off with a rush and
clatter east, west, north, and south. The interest passes outwardly;
the men from the little rooms are going homeward, the printers disperse
yawning, the roaring presses slacken. The paper exists. Distribution
follows manufacture, and we follow the bundles.
Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles hurling
into stations, catching trains by a hair’s breadth, speeding on their
way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce accuracy
out upon the platforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of
these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles, into dispersing
parcels, into separate papers, and the dawn happens unnoticed amidst a
great running and shouting of boys, a shoving through letter slots,
openings of windows, spreading out upon book-stalls. For the space of a
few hours you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling
papers—placards everywhere vociferating the hurried lie for the day;
men and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by
study-fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters
waiting for father to finish—a million scattered people reading—reading
headlong—or feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement
jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land.
. .
And then you know, wonderfully gone—gone utterly, vanished as foam
might vanish upon the sand.
Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable
excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—signifying nothing.
. . .
And one of those white parcels was the paper I held in my hands, as I
sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark underground
kitchen of my mother’s, clean roused from my personal troubles by the
yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms,
peeling potatoes as I read.
It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body,
that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the
English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for
all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment,
caught me and swung me about. And all over the country that day,
millions read as I read, and came round into line with me, under the
same magnetic spell, came round—how did we say it?—Ah!—“to face the
foe.”
The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf. The column headed
“Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth. Does it
Matter?” went unread. “Germany”—I usually figured this mythical
malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperor enhanced by
heraldic black wings and a large sword—had insulted our flag. That was
the message of the _New Paper_, and the monster towered over me,
threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting upon my faultless
country’s colors. Somebody had hoisted a British flag on the right bank
of some tropical river I had never heard of before, and a drunken
German officer under ambiguous instructions had torn it down. Then one
of the convenient abundant natives of the country, a British subject
indisputably, had been shot in the leg. But the facts were by no means
clear. Nothing was clear except that we were not going to stand any
nonsense from Germany. Whatever had or had not happened we meant to
have an apology for, and apparently they did not mean apologizing.
“HAS WAR COME AT LAST?”
That was the headline. One’s heart leapt to assent. . . .
There were hours that day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming of
battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and
entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men.
But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember, in
a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes, and
wars.
§ 5
You must understand that I had no set plan of murder when I walked over
to Checkshill. I had no set plan of any sort. There was a great
confusion of dramatically conceived intentions in my head, scenes of
threatening and denunciation and terror, but I did not mean to kill.
The revolver was to turn upon my rival my disadvantage in age and
physique. . . .
But that was not it really! The revolver!—I took the revolver because I
had the revolver and was a foolish young lout. It was a dramatic sort
of thing to take. I had, I say, no plan at all.
Ever and again during that second trudge to Checkshill I was irradiated
with a novel unreasonable hope. I had awakened in the morning with the
hope, it may have been the last unfaded trail of some obliterated
dream, that after all Nettie might relent toward me, that her heart was
kind toward me in spite of all that I imagined had happened. I even
thought it possible that I might have misinterpreted what I had seen.
Perhaps she would explain everything. My revolver was in my pocket for
all that.
I limped at the outset, but after the second mile my ankle warmed to
forgetfulness, and the rest of the way I walked well. Suppose, after
all, I was wrong?
I was still debating that, as I came through the park. By the corner of
the paddock near the keeper’s cottage, I was reminded by some belated
blue hyacinths of a time when I and Nettie had gathered them together.
It seemed impossible that we could really have parted ourselves for
good and all. A wave of tenderness flowed over me, and still flooded me
as I came through the little dell and drew towards the hollies. But
there the sweet Nettie of my boy’s love faded, and I thought of the new
Nettie of desire and the man I had come upon in the moonlight, I
thought of the narrow, hot purpose that had grown so strongly out of my
springtime freshness, and my mood darkened to night.
I crossed the beech wood and came towards the gardens with a resolute
and sorrowful heart. When I reached the green door in the garden wall I
was seized for a space with so violent a trembling that I could not
grip the latch to lift it, for I no longer had any doubt how this would
end. That trembling was succeeded by a feeling of cold, and whiteness,
and self-pity. I was astonished to find myself grimacing, to feel my
cheeks wet, and thereupon I gave way completely to a wild passion of
weeping. I must take just a little time before the thing was done. . .
. I turned away from the door and stumbled for a little distance,
sobbing loudly, and lay down out of sight among the bracken, and so
presently became calm again. I lay there some time. I had half a mind
to desist, and then my emotion passed like the shadow of a cloud, and I
walked very coolly into the gardens.
Through the open door of one of the glass houses I saw old Stuart. He
was leaning against the staging, his hands in his pockets, and so deep
in thought he gave no heed to me.