I came back to that. At any rate I wasn’t sorry. The chances were I
should die in sweet air, under a clean sky.
From distant Swathinglea came a little sound, the minute undulation of
a remote crowd, and then rapidly three shots.
That held me perplexed for a space. . . . Well, anyhow I was leaving it
all! Thank God I was leaving it all! Then, as I turned to go on, I
thought of my mother.
It seemed an evil world in which to leave one’s mother. My thoughts
focused upon her very vividly for a moment. Down there, under that
afternoon light, she was going to and fro, unaware as yet that she had
lost me, bent and poking about in the darkling underground kitchen,
perhaps carrying a lamp into the scullery to trim, or sitting
patiently, staring into the fire, waiting tea for me. A great pity for
her, a great remorse at the blacker troubles that lowered over her
innocent head, came to me. Why, after all, was I doing this thing?
Why?
I stopped again dead, with the hill crest rising between me and home. I
had more than half a mind to return to her.
Then I thought of the curate’s sovereigns. If he has missed them
already, what should I return to? And, even if I returned, how could I
put them back?
And what of the night after I renounced my revenge? What of the time
when young Verrall came back? And Nettie?
No! The thing had to be done.
But at least I might have kissed my mother before I came away, left her
some message, reassured her at least for a little while. All night she
would listen and wait for me. . . . .
Should I send her a telegram from Two-Mile Stone?
It was no good now; too late, too late. To do that would be to tell the
course I had taken, to bring pursuit upon me, swift and sure, if
pursuit there was to be. No. My mother must suffer!
I went on grimly toward Two-Mile Stone, but now as if some greater will
than mine directed my footsteps thither.
I reached Birmingham before darkness came, and just caught the last
train for Monkshampton, where I had planned to pass the night.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS
§ 1
As the train carried me on from Birmingham to Monkshampton, it carried
me not only into a country where I had never been before, but out of
the commonplace daylight and the touch and quality of ordinary things,
into the strange unprecedented night that was ruled by the giant meteor
of the last days.
There was at that time a curious accentuation of the common alternation
of night and day. They became separated with a widening difference of
value in regard to all mundane affairs. During the day, the comet was
an item in the newspapers, it was jostled by a thousand more living
interests, it was as nothing in the skirts of the war storm that was
now upon us. It was an astronomical phenomenon, somewhere away over
China, millions of miles away in the deeps. We forgot it. But directly
the sun sank one turned ever and again toward the east, and the meteor
resumed its sway over us.
One waited for its rising, and yet each night it came as a surprise.
Always it rose brighter than one had dared to think, always larger and
with some wonderful change in its outline, and now with a strange, less
luminous, greener disk upon it that grew with its growth, the umbra of
the earth. It shone also with its own light, so that this shadow was
not hard or black, but it shone phosphorescently and with a diminishing
intensity where the stimulus of the sun’s rays was withdrawn. As it
ascended toward the zenith, as the last trailing daylight went after
the abdicating sun, its greenish white illumination banished the
realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness over all things. It
changed the starless sky about it to an extraordinary deep blue, the
profoundest color in the world, such as I have never seen before or
since. I remember, too, that as I peered from the train that was
rattling me along to Monkshampton, I perceived and was puzzled by a
coppery red light that mingled with all the shadows that were cast by
it.
It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities.
Everywhere the local authorities discontinued street lighting—one could
read small print in the glare,—and so at Monkshampton I went about
through pale, white, unfamiliar streets, whose electric globes had
shadows on the path. Lit windows here and there burnt ruddy orange,
like holes cut in some dream curtain that hung before a furnace. A
policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn woven of moonshine, a
green-faced man opened to us, and there I abode the night. And the next
morning it opened with a mighty clatter, and was a dirty little
beerhouse that stank of beer, and there was a fat and grimy landlord
with red spots upon his neck, and much noisy traffic going by on the
cobbles outside.
I came out, after I had paid my bill, into a street that echoed to the
bawlings of two newsvendors and to the noisy yappings of a dog they had
raised to emulation. They were shouting: “Great British disaster in the
North Sea. A battleship lost with all hands!”
I bought a paper, went on to the railway station reading such details
as were given of this triumph of the old civilization, of the blowing
up of this great iron ship, full of guns and explosives and the most
costly and beautiful machinery of which that time was capable, together
with nine hundred able-bodied men, all of them above the average, by a
contact mine towed by a German submarine. I read myself into a fever of
warlike emotions. Not only did I forget the meteor, but for a time I
forgot even the purpose that took me on to the railway station, bought
my ticket, and was now carrying me onward to Shaphambury.
So the hot day came to its own again, and people forgot the night.
Each night, there shone upon us more and more insistently, beauty,
wonder, the promise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveled for
a space. And at the first gray sounds of dawn again, at the shooting of
bolts and the noise of milk-carts, we forgot, and the dusty habitual
day came yawning and stretching back again. The stains of coal smoke
crept across the heavens, and we rose to the soiled disorderly routine
of life.
“Thus life has always been,” we said; “thus it will always be.”
The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded as
spectacular merely. It signified nothing to us. So far as western
Europe went, it was only a small and ignorant section of the lower
classes who regarded the comet as a portent of the end of the world.
Abroad, where there were peasantries, it was different, but in England
the peasantry had already disappeared. Every one read. The newspaper,
in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germany rushed to its
climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilities of a panic in this
matter. The very tramps upon the high-roads, the children in the
nursery, had learnt that at the utmost the whole of that shining cloud
could weigh but a few score tons. This fact had been shown quite
conclusively by the enormous deflections that had at last swung it
round squarely at our world. It had passed near three of the smallest
asteroids without producing the minutest perceptible deflection in
their course; while, on its own part, it had described a course through
nearly three degrees. When it struck our earth there was to be a
magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for those who were on the right side
of our planet to see, but beyond that nothing. It was doubtful whether
we were on the right side. The meteor would loom larger and larger in
the sky, but with the umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness
out, and at last it would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green
clouds, with a white brightness about the horizon, west and east. Then
a pause—a pause of not very exactly definite duration—and then, no
doubt, a great blaze of shooting stars. They might be of some unwonted
color because of the unknown element that line in the green revealed.
For a little while the zenith would spout shooting stars. Some, it was
hoped, would reach the earth and be available for analysis.
That, science said, would be all. The green clouds would whirl and
vanish, and there might be thunderstorms. But through the attenuated
wisps of comet shine, the old sky, the old stars, would reappear, and
all would be as it had been before. And since this was to happen
between one and eleven in the morning of the approaching Tuesday—I
slept at Monkshampton on Saturday night,—it would be only partially
visible, if visible at all, on our side of the earth. Perhaps, if it
came late, one would see no more than a shooting star low down in the
sky. All this we had with the utmost assurances of science. Still it
did not prevent the last nights being the most beautiful and memorable
of human experiences.
The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had ranged
Shaphambury in vain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleled
glory of the night returned, to think that under its splendid
benediction young Verrall and Nettie made love to one another.
I walked backward and forward, backward and forward, along the sea
front, peering into the faces of the young couples who promenaded, with
my hand in my pocket ready, and a curious ache in my heart that had no
kindred with rage. Until at last all the promenaders had gone home to
bed, and I was alone with the star.
My train from Wyvern to Shaphambury that morning was a whole hour late;
they said it was on account of the movement of troops to meet a
possible raid from the Elbe.
§ 2
Shaphambury seemed an odd place to me even then. But something was
quickening in me at that time to feel the oddness of many accepted
things. Now in the retrospect I see it as intensely queer. The whole
place was strange to my untraveled eyes; the sea even was strange. Only
twice in my life had I been at the seaside before, and then I had gone
by excursion to places on the Welsh coast whose great cliffs of rock
and mountain backgrounds made the effect of the horizon very different
from what it is upon the East Anglian seaboard. Here what they call a
cliff was a crumbling bank of whitey-brown earth not fifty feet high.
So soon as I arrived I made a systematic exploration of Shaphambury. To
this day I retain the clearest memories of the plan I shaped out then,
and how my inquiries were incommoded by the overpowering desire of
every one to talk of the chances of a German raid, before the Channel
Fleet got round to us. I slept at a small public-house in a Shaphambury
back street on Sunday night. I did not get on to Shaphambury from
Wyvern until two in the afternoon, because of the infrequency of Sunday
trains, and I got no clue whatever until late in the afternoon of
Monday. As the little local train bumped into sight of the place round
the curve of a swelling hill, one saw a series of undulating grassy
spaces, amidst which a number of conspicuous notice-boards appealed to
the eye and cut up the distant sea horizon. Most of these referred to
comestibles or to remedies to follow the comestibles; and they were
colored with a view to be memorable rather than beautiful, to “stand
out” amidst the gentle grayish tones of the east coast scenery. The
greater number, I may remark, of the advertisements that were so
conspicuous a factor in the life of those days, and which rendered our
vast tree-pulp newspapers possible, referred to foods, drinks, tobacco,
and the drugs that promised a restoration of the equanimity these other
articles had destroyed. Wherever one went one was reminded in glaring
letters that, after all, man was little better than a worm, that
eyeless, earless thing that burrows and lives uncomplainingly amidst
nutritious dirt, “an alimentary canal with the subservient appendages
thereto.” But in addition to such boards there were also the big black
and white boards of various grandiloquently named “estates.” The
individualistic enterprise of that time had led to the plotting out of
nearly all the country round the seaside towns into roads and
building-plots—all but a small portion of the south and east coast was
in this condition, and had the promises of those schemes been realized
the entire population of the island might have been accommodated upon
the sea frontiers. Nothing of the sort happened, of course; the whole
of this uglification of the coast-line was done to stimulate a little
foolish gambling in plots, and one saw everywhere agents’ boards in
every state of freshness and decay, ill-made exploitation roads
overgrown with grass, and here and there, at a corner, a label,
“Trafalgar Avenue,” or “Sea View Road.” Here and there, too, some small
investor, some shopman with “savings,” had delivered his soul to the
local builders and built himself a house, and there it stood,
ill-designed, mean-looking, isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced
plot, athwart which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst
a bleak desolation of enterprise. Then presently our railway crossed a
high road, and a row of mean yellow brick houses—workmen’s cottages,
and the filthy black sheds that made the “allotments” of that time a
universal eyesore, marked our approach to the more central areas of—I
quote the local guidebook—“one of the most delightful resorts in the
East Anglian poppy-land.” Then more mean houses, the gaunt ungainliness
of the electric force station—it had a huge chimney, because no one
understood how to make combustion of coal complete—and then we were in
the railway station, and barely three-quarters of a mile from the
center of this haunt of health and pleasure.
I inspected the town thoroughly before I made my inquiries. The road
began badly with a row of cheap, pretentious, insolvent-looking shops,
a public-house, and a cab-stand, but, after an interval of little red
villas that were partly hidden amidst shrubbery gardens, broke into a
confusedly bright but not unpleasing High Street, shuttered that
afternoon and sabbatically still. Somewhere in the background a church
bell jangled, and children in bright, new-looking clothes were going to
Sunday-school. Thence through a square of stuccoed lodging-houses, that
seemed a finer and cleaner version of my native square, I came to a
garden of asphalt and euonymus—the Sea Front. I sat down on a cast-iron
seat, and surveyed first of all the broad stretches of muddy, sandy
beach, with its queer wheeled bathing machines, painted with the
advertisements of somebody’s pills—and then at the house fronts that
stared out upon these visceral counsels. Boarding-houses, private
hotels, and lodging-houses in terraces clustered closely right and left
of me, and then came to an end; in one direction scaffolding marked a
building enterprise in progress, in the other, after a waste interval,
rose a monstrous bulging red shape, a huge hotel, that dwarfed all
other things. Northward were low pale cliffs with white denticulations
of tents, where the local volunteers, all under arms, lay encamped, and
southward, a spreading waste of sandy dunes, with occasional bushes and
clumps of stunted pine and an advertisement board or so. A hard blue
sky hung over all this prospect, the sunshine cast inky shadows, and
eastward was a whitish sea. It was Sunday, and the midday meal still
held people indoors.
A queer world! thought I even then—to you now it must seem impossibly
queer,—and after an interval I forced myself back to my own affair.
How was I to ask? What was I to ask for? I puzzled for a long time over
that—at first I was a little tired and indolent—and then presently I
had a flow of ideas.
My solution was fairly ingenious. I invented the following story. I
happened to be taking a holiday in Shaphambury, and I was making use of
the opportunity to seek the owner of a valuable feather boa, which had
been left behind in the hotel of my uncle at Wyvern by a young lady,
traveling with a young gentleman—no doubt a youthful married couple.
They had reached Shaphambury somewhen on Thursday. I went over the
story many times, and gave my imaginary uncle and his hotel plausible
names. At any rate this yarn would serve as a complete justification
for all the questions I might wish to ask.
I settled that, but I still sat for a time, wanting the energy to
begin. Then I turned toward the big hotel. Its gorgeous magnificence
seemed to my inexpert judgment to indicate the very place a rich young
man of good family would select.
Huge draught-proof doors were swung round for me by an ironically
polite under-porter in a magnificent green uniform, who looked at my
clothes as he listened to my question and then with a German accent
referred me to a gorgeous head porter, who directed me to a princely
young man behind a counter of brass and polish, like a bank—like
several banks. This young man, while he answered me, kept his eye on my
collar and tie—and I knew that they were abominable.
“I want to find a lady and gentleman who came to Shaphambury on
Tuesday,” I said.
“Friends of yours?” he asked with a terrible fineness of irony.
I made out at last that here at any rate the young people had not been.
They might have lunched there, but they had had no room. But I went
out—door opened again for me obsequiously—in a state of social
discomfiture, and did not attack any other establishment that
afternoon.
My resolution had come to a sort of ebb. More people were promenading,
and their Sunday smartness abashed me. I forgot my purpose in an acute
sense of myself. I felt that the bulge of my pocket caused by the
revolver was conspicuous, and I was ashamed. I went along the sea front
away from the town, and presently lay down among pebbles and sea
poppies. This mood of reaction prevailed with me all that afternoon. In
the evening, about sundown, I went to the station and asked questions
of the outporters there. But outporters, I found, were a class of men
who remembered luggage rather than people, and I had no sort of idea
what luggage young Verrall and Nettie were likely to have with them.
Then I fell into conversation with a salacious wooden-legged old man
with a silver ring, who swept the steps that went down to the beach
from the parade. He knew much about young couples, but only in general
terms, and nothing of the particular young couple I sought. He reminded
me in the most disagreeable way of the sensuous aspects of life, and I
was not sorry when presently a gunboat appeared in the offing
signalling the coastguard and the camp, and cut short his observations
upon holidays, beaches, and morals.
I went, and now I was past my ebb, and sat in a seat upon the parade,
and watched the brightening of those rising clouds of chilly fire that
made the ruddy west seem tame. My midday lassitude was going, my blood
was running warmer again. And as the twilight and that filmy brightness
replaced the dusty sunlight and robbed this unfamiliar place of all its
matter-of-fact queerness, its sense of aimless materialism, romance
returned to me, and passion, and my thoughts of honor and revenge. I
remember that change of mood as occurring very vividly on this
occasion, but I fancy that less distinctly I had felt this before many
times. In the old times, night and the starlight had an effect of
intimate reality the daytime did not possess. The daytime—as one saw it
in towns and populous places—had hold of one, no doubt, but only as an
uproar might, it was distracting, conflicting, insistent. Darkness
veiled the more salient aspects of those agglomerations of human
absurdity, and one could exist—one could imagine.
I had a queer illusion that night, that Nettie and her lover were close
at hand, that suddenly I should come on them. I have already told how I
went through the dusk seeking them in every couple that drew near. And
I dropped asleep at last in an unfamiliar bedroom hung with gaudily
decorated texts, cursing myself for having wasted a day.
§ 3
I sought them in vain the next morning, but after midday I came in
quick succession on a perplexing multitude of clues. After failing to
find any young couple that corresponded to young Verrall and Nettie, I
presently discovered an unsatisfactory quartette of couples.
Any of these four couples might have been the one I sought; with regard
to none of them was there conviction. They had all arrived either on
Wednesday or Thursday. Two couples were still in occupation of their
rooms, but neither of these were at home. Late in the afternoon I
reduced my list by eliminating a young man in drab, with side whiskers
and long cuffs, accompanied by a lady, of thirty or more, of
consciously ladylike type. I was disgusted at the sight of them; the
other two young people had gone for a long walk, and though I watched
their boarding-house until the fiery cloud shone out above, sharing and
mingling in an unusually splendid sunset, I missed them. Then I
discovered them dining at a separate table in the bow window, with
red-shaded candles between them, peering out ever and again at this
splendor that was neither night nor day. The girl in her pink evening
dress looked very light and pretty to me—pretty enough to enrage
me,—she had well shaped arms and white, well-modeled shoulders, and the
turn of her cheek and the fair hair about her ears was full of subtle
delights; but she was not Nettie, and the happy man with her was that
odd degenerate type our old aristocracy produced with such odd
frequency, chinless, large bony nose, small fair head, languid
expression, and a neck that had demanded and received a veritable
sleeve of collar. I stood outside in the meteor’s livid light, hating
them and cursing them for having delayed me so long. I stood until it
was evident they remarked me, a black shape of envy, silhouetted
against the glare.
That finished Shaphambury. The question I now had to debate was which
of the remaining couples I had to pursue.
I walked back to the parade trying to reason my next step out, and
muttering to myself, because there was something in that luminous
wonderfulness that touched one’s brain, and made one feel a little
light-headed.
One couple had gone to London; the other had gone to the Bungalow
village at Bone Cliff. Where, I wondered, was Bone Cliff?