“Only the other morning,” he went on to me, “I was cutting French eggs.
Selling at a loss to do it. He’d marked down with a great staring
ticket to ninepence a dozen—I saw it as I went past. Here’s my answer!”
He indicated a ticket. “‘Eightpence a dozen—same as sold elsewhere for
ninepence.’ A whole penny down, bang off! Just a touch above cost—if
that—and even then———” He leant over the counter to say impressively,
“_Not the same eggs!_”
“Now, what people in their senses would do things like that?” said Mr.
Wiggins.
I sent my telegram—the proprietor dispatched it for me, and while he
did so I fell exchanging experiences with Mr. Wiggins. He knew no more
than I did then the nature of the change that had come over things. He
had been alarmed by the green flashes, he said, so much so that after
watching for a time from behind his bedroom window blind, he had got up
and hastily dressed and made his family get up also, so that they might
be ready for the end. He made them put on their Sunday clothes. They
all went out into the garden together, their minds divided between
admiration at the gloriousness of the spectacle and a great and growing
awe. They were Dissenters, and very religious people out of business
hours, and it seemed to them in those last magnificent moments that,
after all, science must be wrong and the fanatics right. With the green
vapors came conviction, and they prepared to meet their God. . . .
This man, you must understand, was a common-looking man, in his
shirt-sleeves and with an apron about his paunch, and he told his story
in an Anglian accent that sounded mean and clipped to my Staffordshire
ears; he told his story without a thought of pride, and as it were
incidentally, and yet he gave me a vision of something heroic.
These people did not run hither and thither as many people did. These
four simple, common people stood beyond their back door in their garden
pathway between the gooseberry bushes, with the terrors of their God
and His Judgments closing in upon them, swiftly and wonderfully—and
there they began to sing. There they stood, father and mother and two
daughters, chanting out stoutly, but no doubt a little flatly after the
manner of their kind—
“In Zion’s Hope abiding,
My soul in Triumph sings—”
until one by one they fell, and lay still.
The postmaster had heard them in the gathering darkness, “In Zion’s
Hope abiding.” . . .
It was the most extraordinary thing in the world to hear this flushed
and happy-eyed man telling that story of his recent death. It did not
seem at all possible to have happened in the last twelve hours. It was
minute and remote, these people who went singing through the darkling
to their God. It was like a scene shown to me, very small and very
distinctly painted, in a locket.
But that effect was not confined to this particular thing. A vast
number of things that had happened before the coming of the comet had
undergone the same transfiguring reduction. Other people, too, I have
learnt since, had the same illusion, a sense of enlargement. It seems
to me even now that the little dark creature who had stormed across
England in pursuit of Nettie and her lover must have been about an inch
high, that all that previous life of ours had been an ill-lit
marionette show, acted in the twilight. . . .
§ 5
The figure of my mother comes always into my conception of the Change.