There were times when I walked weeping through that brightness that was
neither night nor day. There were times when I reasoned in a
topsy-turvy fashion with what I called the Spirit of All Things. But
always I spoke to that white glory in the sky.
“Why am I here only to suffer ignominies?” I asked. “Why have you made
me with pride that cannot be satisfied, with desires that turn and rend
me? Is it a jest, this world—a joke you play on your guests? I—even
I—have a better humor than that!”
“Why not learn from me a certain decency of mercy? Why not undo? Have I
ever tormented—day by day, some wretched worm—making filth for it to
trail through, filth that disgusts it, starving it, bruising it,
mocking it? Why should you? Your jokes are clumsy. Try—try some milder
fun up there; do you hear? Something that doesn’t hurt so infernally.”
“You say this is your purpose—your purpose with me. You are making
something with me—birth pangs of a soul. Ah! How can I believe you? You
forget I have eyes for other things. Let my own case go, but what of
that frog beneath the cart-wheel, God?—and the bird the cat had torn?”
And after such blasphemies I would fling out a ridiculous little
debating society hand. “Answer me that!”
A week ago it had been moonlight, white and black and hard across the
spaces of the park, but now the light was livid and full of the quality
of haze. An extraordinarily low white mist, not three feet above the
ground, drifted broodingly across the grass, and the trees rose ghostly
out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy and strange was the world
that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my little cracked voice drifted
solitary through the silent mysteries. Sometimes I argued as I have
told, sometimes I tumbled along in moody vacuity, sometimes my torment
was vivid and acute.
Abruptly out of apathy would come a boiling paroxysm of fury, when I
thought of Nettie mocking me and laughing, and of her and Verrall
clasped in one another’s arms.
“I will not have it so!” I screamed. “I will not have it so!”
And in one of these raving fits I drew my revolver from my pocket and
fired into the quiet night. Three times I fired it.
The bullets tore through the air, the startled trees told one another
in diminishing echoes the thing I had done, and then, with a slow
finality, the vast and patient night healed again to calm. My shots, my
curses and blasphemies, my prayers—for anon I prayed—that Silence took
them all.
It was—how can I express it?—a stifled outcry tranquilized, lost, amid
the serene assumptions, the overwhelming empire of that brightness. The
noise of my shots, the impact upon things, had for the instant been
enormous, then it had passed away. I found myself standing with the
revolver held up, astonished, my emotions penetrated by something I
could not understand. Then I looked up over my shoulder at the great
star, and remained staring at it.
“Who are _you_?” I said at last.
I was like a man in a solitary desert who has suddenly heard a voice. .
. .
That, too, passed.
As I came over Clayton Crest I recalled that I missed the multitude
that now night after night walked out to stare at the comet, and the
little preacher in the waste beyond the hoardings, who warned sinners
to repent before the Judgment, was not in his usual place.
It was long past midnight, and every one had gone home. But I did not
think of this at first, and the solitude perplexed me and left a memory
behind. The gas-lamps were all extinguished because of the brightness
of the comet, and that too was unfamiliar. The little newsagent in the
still High Street had shut up and gone to bed, but one belated board
had been put out late and forgotten, and it still bore its placard.
The word upon it—there was but one word upon it in staring letters—was:
“WAR.”
You figure that empty mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps—no
soul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And amidst
that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board, a little askew
and crumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool meteoric glare,
preposterous and appalling, the measureless evil of that word—
“WAR!”
§ 2
I awoke in that state of equanimity that so often follows an emotional
drenching.
It was late, and my mother was beside my bed. She had some breakfast
for me on a battered tray.
“Don’t get up yet, dear,” she said. “You’ve been sleeping. It was three
o’clock when you got home last night. You must have been tired out.”
“Your poor face,” she went on, “was as white as a sheet and your eyes
shining. . . . It frightened me to let you in. And you stumbled on the
stairs.”
My eyes went quietly to my coat pocket, where something still bulged.
She probably had not noticed. “I went to Checkshill,” I said. “You
know—perhaps—?”
“I got a letter last evening, dear,” and as she bent near me to put the
tray upon my knees, she kissed my hair softly. For a moment we both
remained still, resting on that, her cheek just touching my head.