These, then, must be the barley fields of God!—the still and silent
barley fields of God, full of unfading poppy flowers whose seeds bear
peace.
§ 2
It was queer to find barley fields in heaven, but no doubt there were
many surprises in store for me.
How still everything was! Peace! The peace that passeth understanding.
After all it had come to me! But, indeed, everything was very still! No
bird sang. Surely I was alone in the world! No birds sang. Yes, and all
the distant sounds of life had ceased, the lowing of cattle, the
barking of dogs. . . .
Something that was like fear beatified came into my heart. It was all
right, I knew; but to be alone! I stood up and met the hot summons of
the rising sun, hurrying towards me, as it were, with glad tidings,
over the spikes of the barley. . . .
Blinded, I made a step. My foot struck something hard, and I looked
down to discover my revolver, a blue-black thing, like a dead snake at
my feet.
For a moment that puzzled me.
Then I clean forgot about it. The wonder of the quiet took possession
of my soul. Dawn, and no birds singing!
How beautiful was the world! How beautiful, but how still! I walked
slowly through the barley towards a line of elder bushes, wayfaring
tree and bramble that made the hedge of the field. I noted as I passed
along a dead shrew mouse, as it seemed to me, among the halms; then a
still toad. I was surprised that this did not leap aside from my
footfalls, and I stooped and picked it up. Its body was limp like life,
but it made no struggle, the brightness of its eye was veiled, it did
not move in my hand.
It seems to me now that I stood holding that lifeless little creature
for some time. Then very softly I stooped down and replaced it. I was
trembling—trembling with a nameless emotion. I looked with quickened
eyes closely among the barley stems, and behold, now everywhere I saw
beetles, flies, and little creatures that did not move, lying as they
fell when the vapors overcame them; they seemed no more than painted
things. Some were novel creatures to me. I was very unfamiliar with
natural things. “My God!” I cried; “but is it only I———?”
And then at my next movement something squealed sharply. I turned
about, but I could not see it, only I saw a little stir in a rut and
heard the diminishing rustle of the unseen creature’s flight. And at
that I turned to my toad again, and its eye moved and it stirred. And
presently, with infirm and hesitating gestures, it stretched its limbs
and began to crawl away from me.
But wonder, that gentle sister of fear, had me now. I saw a little way
ahead a brown and crimson butterfly perched upon a cornflower. I
thought at first it was the breeze that stirred it, and then I saw its
wings were quivering. And even as I watched it, it started into life,
and spread itself, and fluttered into the air.
I watched it fly, a turn this way, a turn that, until suddenly it
seemed to vanish. And now, life was returning to this thing and that on
every side of me, with slow stretchings and bendings, with twitterings,
with a little start and stir. . . .
I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of these drugged, feebly
awakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a very
glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and interlaced
like splendid music. It was rich with lupin, honeysuckle, campions, and
ragged robin; bed straw, hops, and wild clematis twined and hung among
its branches, and all along its ditch border the starry stitchwort
lifted its childish faces, and chorused in lines and masses. Never had
I seen such a symphony of note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves.
And suddenly in its depths, I heard a chirrup and the whirr of startled
wings.
Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I stood for
a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the intricate delicacy
before me and marveling how richly God has made his worlds. . . . .
“Tweedle-Tweezle,” a lark had shot the stillness with his shining
thread of song; one lark, and then presently another, invisibly in the
air, making out of that blue quiet a woven cloth of gold. . . .
The earth recreated—only by the reiteration of such phrases may I hope
to give the intense freshness of that dawn. For a time I was altogether
taken up with the beautiful details of being, as regardless of my old
life of jealous passion and impatient sorrow as though I was Adam new
made. I could tell you now with infinite particularity of the shut
flowers that opened as I looked, of tendrils and grass blades, of a
blue-tit I picked up very tenderly—never before had I remarked the
great delicacy of feathers—that presently disclosed its bright black
eye and judged me, and perched, swaying fearlessly, upon my finger, and
spread unhurried wings and flew away, and of a great ebullition of
tadpoles in the ditch; like all the things that lived beneath the
water, they had passed unaltered through the Change. Amid such
incidents, I lived those first great moments, losing for a time in the
wonder of each little part the mighty wonder of the whole.
A little path ran between hedge and barley, and along this, leisurely
and content and glad, looking at this beautiful thing and that, moving
a step and stopping, then moving on again, I came presently to a stile,
and deep below it, and overgrown, was a lane.
And on the worn oak of the stile was a round label, and on the label
these words, “Swindells’ G 90 Pills.”
I sat myself astraddle on the stile, not fully grasping all the
implications of these words. But they perplexed me even more than the
revolver and my dirty cuff.
About me now the birds lifted up their little hearts and sang, ever
more birds and more.
I read the label over and over again, and joined it to the fact that I
still wore my former clothes, and that my revolver had been lying at my
feet. One conclusion stared out at me. This was no new planet, no
glorious hereafter such as I had supposed. This beautiful wonderland
was the world, the same old world of my rage and death! But at least it
was like meeting a familiar house-slut, washed and dignified, dressed
in a queen’s robes, worshipful and fine. . . .
It might be the old world indeed, but something new lay upon all
things, a glowing certitude of health and happiness. It might be the
old world, but the dust and fury of the old life was certainly done. At
least I had no doubt of that.
I recalled the last phases of my former life, that darkling climax of
pursuit and anger and universal darkness and the whirling green vapors
of extinction. The comet had struck the earth and made an end to all
things; of that too I was assured.
But afterward? . . .
And now?
The imaginations of my boyhood came back as speculative possibilities.
In those days I had believed firmly in the necessary advent of a last
day, a great coming out of the sky, trumpetings and fear, the
Resurrection, and the Judgment. My roving fancy now suggested to me
that this Judgment must have come and passed. That it had passed and in
some manner missed me. I was left alone here, in a swept and garnished
world (except, of course, for this label of Swindells’) to begin again
perhaps. . . .
No doubt Swindells has got his deserts.
My mind ran for a time on Swindells, on the imbecile pushfulness of
that extinct creature, dealing in rubbish, covering the country-side
with lies in order to get—what had he sought?—a silly, ugly, great
house, a temper-destroying motor-car, a number of disrespectful, abject
servants; thwarted intrigues for a party-fund baronetcy as the crest of
his life, perhaps. You cannot imagine the littleness of those former
times; their naive, queer absurdities! And for the first time in my
existence I thought of these things without bitterness. In the former
days I had seen wickedness, I had seen tragedy, but now I saw only the
extraordinary foolishness of the old life. The ludicrous side of human
wealth and importance turned itself upon me, a shining novelty, poured
down upon me like the sunrise, and engulfed me in laughter. Swindells!
Swindells, damned! My vision of Judgment became a delightful burlesque.
I saw the chuckling Angel sayer with his face veiled, and the corporeal
presence of Swindells upheld amidst the laughter of the spheres.
“Here’s a thing, and a very pretty thing, and what’s to be done with
this very pretty thing?” I saw a soul being drawn from a rotund,
substantial-looking body like a whelk from its shell. . . .
I laughed loudly and long. And behold! even as I laughed the keen point
of things accomplished stabbed my mirth, and I was weeping, weeping
aloud, convulsed with weeping, and the tears were pouring down my face.
§ 3
Everywhere the awakening came with the sunrise. We awakened to the
gladness of the morning; we walked dazzled in a light that was joy.
Everywhere that was so. It was always morning. It was morning because,
until the direct rays of the sun touched it, the changing nitrogen of
our atmosphere did not pass into its permanent phase, and the sleepers
lay as they had fallen. In its intermediate state the air hung inert,
incapable of producing either revival or stupefaction, no longer green,
but not yet changed to the gas that now lives in us. . . .
To every one, I think, came some parallel to the mental states I have
already sought to describe—a wonder, an impression of joyful novelty.
There was also very commonly a certain confusion of the intelligence, a
difficulty in self-recognition. I remember clearly as I sat on my stile
that presently I had the clearest doubts of my own identity and fell
into the oddest metaphysical questionings. “If this be I,” I said,
“then how is it I am no longer madly seeking Nettie? Nettie is now the
remotest thing—and all my wrongs. Why have I suddenly passed out of all
that passion? Why does not the thought of Verrall quicken my pulses?” .
. .
I was only one of many millions who that morning had the same doubts. I
suppose one knows one’s self for one’s self when one returns from sleep
or insensibility by the familiarity of one’s bodily sensations, and
that morning all our most intimate bodily sensations were changed. The
intimate chemical processes of life were changed, its nervous metaboly.
For the fluctuating, uncertain, passion-darkened thought and feeling of
the old time came steady, full-bodied, wholesome processes. Touch was
different, sight was different, sound and all the senses were subtler;
had it not been that our thought was steadier and fuller, I believe
great multitudes of men would have gone mad. But, as it was, we
understood. The dominant impression I would convey in this account of
the Change is one of enormous release, of a vast substantial
exaltation. There was an effect, as it were, of light-headedness that
was also clear-headedness, and the alteration in one’s bodily
sensations, instead of producing the mental obfuscation, the loss of
identity that was a common mental trouble under former conditions, gave
simply a new detachment from the tumid passions and entanglements of
the personal life.
In this story of my bitter, restricted youth that I have been telling
you, I have sought constantly to convey the narrowness, the intensity,
the confusion, muddle, and dusty heat of the old world. It was quite
clear to me, within an hour of my awakening, that all that was, in some
mysterious way, over and done. That, too, was the common experience.
Men stood up; they took the new air into their lungs—a deep long
breath, and the past fell from them; they could forgive, they could
disregard, they could attempt. . . . And it was no new thing, no
miracle that sets aside the former order of the world. It was a change
in material conditions, a change in the atmosphere, that at one bound
had released them. Some of them it had released to death. . . . Indeed,
man himself had changed not at all. We knew before the Change, the
meanest knew, by glowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories
and music and beautiful things, by heroic instances and splendid
stories, how fine mankind could be, how fine almost any human being
could upon occasion be; but the poison in the air, its poverty in all
the nobler elements which made such moments rare and remarkable—all
that has changed. The air was changed, and the Spirit of Man that had
drowsed and slumbered and dreamt dull and evil things, awakened, and
stood with wonder-clean eyes, refreshed, looking again on life.
§ 4
The miracle of the awakening came to me in solitude, the laughter, and
then the tears. Only after some time did I come upon another man. Until
I heard his voice calling I did not seem to feel there were any other
people in the world. All that seemed past, with all the stresses that
were past. I had come out of the individual pit in which my shy egotism
had lurked, I had overflowed to all humanity, I had seemed to be all
humanity; I had laughed at Swindells as I could have laughed at myself,
and this shout that came to me seemed like the coming of an unexpected
thought in my own mind. But when it was repeated I answered.
“I am hurt,” said the voice, and I descended into the lane forthwith,
and so came upon Melmount sitting near the ditch with his back to me.
Some of the incidental sensory impressions of that morning bit so
deeply into my mind that I verily believe, when at last I face the
greater mysteries that lie beyond this life, when the things of this
life fade from me as the mists of the morning fade before the sun,
these irrelevant petty details will be the last to leave me, will be
the last wisps visible of that attenuating veil. I believe, for
instance, I could match the fur upon the collar of his great motoring
coat now, could paint the dull red tinge of his big cheek with his fair
eyelashes just catching the light and showing beyond. His hat was off,
his dome-shaped head, with its smooth hair between red and extreme
fairness, was bent forward in scrutiny of his twisted foot. His back
seemed enormous. And there was something about the mere massive sight
of him that filled me with liking.
“What’s wrong?” said I.
“I say,” he said, in his full deliberate tones, straining round to see
me and showing a profile, a well-modeled nose, a sensitive, clumsy, big
lip, known to every caricaturist in the world, “I’m in a fix. I fell
and wrenched my ankle. Where are you?”
I walked round him and stood looking at his face. I perceived he had
his gaiter and sock and boot off, the motor gauntlets had been cast
aside, and he was kneading the injured part in an exploratory manner
with his thick thumbs.
“By Jove!” I said, “you’re Melmount!”
“Melmount!” He thought. “That’s my name,” he said, without looking up.
. . . “But it doesn’t affect my ankle.”
We remained silent for few moments except for a grunt of pain from him.
“Do you know?” I asked, “what has happened to things?”
He seemed to complete his diagnosis. “It’s not broken,” he said.
“Do you know,” I repeated, “what has happened to everything?”
“No,” he said, looking up at me incuriously for the first time.
“There’s some difference———”
“There’s a difference.” He smiled, a smile of unexpected pleasantness,
and an interest was coming into his eyes. “I’ve been a little
preoccupied with my own internal sensations. I remark an extraordinary
brightness about things. Is that it?”
“That’s part of it. And a queer feeling, a clear-headedness———”
He surveyed me and meditated gravely. “I woke up,” he said, feeling his
way in his memory.
“And I.”
“I lost my way—I forget quite how. There was a curious green fog.” He
stared at his foot, remembering. “Something to do with a comet. I was
by a hedge in the darkness. Tried to run. . . . Then I must have
pitched into this lane. Look!” He pointed with his head. “There’s a
wooden rail new broken there. I must have stumbled over that out of the
field above.” He scrutinized this and concluded. “Yes. . . .”
“It was dark,” I said, “and a sort of green gas came out of nothing
everywhere. That is the last _I_ remember.”
“And then you woke up? So did I. . . . In a state of great
bewilderment. Certainly there’s something odd in the air. I was—I was
rushing along a road in a motor-car, very much excited and preoccupied.
I got down——” He held out a triumphant finger. “Ironclads!”
“_Now_ I’ve got it! We’d strung our fleet from here to Texel. We’d got
right across them and the Elbe mined. We’d lost the _Lord Warden_. By
Jove, yes. The _Lord Warden!_ A battleship that cost two million
pounds—and that fool Rigby said it didn’t matter! Eleven hundred men
went down. . . . I remember now. We were sweeping up the North Sea like
a net, with the North Atlantic fleet waiting at the Faroes for ‘em—and
not one of ‘em had three days’ coal! Now, was that a dream? No! I told
a lot of people as much—a meeting was it?—to reassure them. They were
warlike but extremely frightened. Queer people—paunchy and bald like
gnomes, most of them. Where? Of course! We had it all over—a big
dinner—oysters!—Colchester. I’d been there, just to show all this raid
scare was nonsense. And I was coming back here. . . . But it doesn’t
seem as though that was—recent. I suppose it was. Yes, of course!—it
was. I got out of my car at the bottom of the rise with the idea of
walking along the cliff path, because every one said one of their
battleships was being chased along the shore. That’s clear! I heard
their guns———”
He reflected. “Queer I should have forgotten! Did _you_ hear any guns?”