In the Days of the Comet quotes

You must understand—and every year it becomes increasingly difficult to understand—how entirely different the world was then from what it is now.

It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder, preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent beauty that seem no longer possible in my experience.

The great Change has come forever more, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men.

I cannot tell.

One would need to be young now and to have been young then as well, to decide that impossible problem.

Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found little beauty in our grouping.

… that in the darkness, and alone, I thought with great intensity of her, of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweet and delightful presence, but when I sat down to write I thought of Shelley and Burns and myself, and other such irrelevant matters.

When one is in love, in this fermenting way, it is harder to make love than it is when one does not love at all.

And as for Nettie, she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries. It was not my voice should rouse her dreams to passion … So our letters continued to jar.

You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent stuff; particularly if you are of the younger generation born since the Change you will be of that opinion.

Nowadays the whole world thinks clearly, thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, you find it impossible to imagine how any other thinking could have been possible.

Let me tell you then how you can bring yourself to something like the condition of our former state.

Until my wanderings were checked by the discovery that I was wearing out my boots.

The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!

I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a great capacity for hatred, but—

It was a life hardly worth living. That a large proportion of the people about me had no better a lot, that many had a worse, does not affect these facts.

It was a life in which contentment would have been disgraceful.

If some of them were contented or resigned, so much the worse for everyone.

You cannot hope now to understand the infinite want of adjustment in the old order of things.

At one time there were people dying of actual starvation in India, while men were burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds like the account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a dream, a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.

To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth, it seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and misery could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want of thought and feeling.

Then strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purely egotistical and materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood.

We were like misguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropical river. Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood.

Our beings were suddenly going out from ourselves seeking other beings—we knew not why. This novel craving for abandonment to someone of the other sex, bore us away. We were ashamed and full of desire.

I meant most intensely what I said, indeed I was wholly concentrated upon it. I was set upon conveying to her with absolute sincerity my sense of distance, and the greatness of my desire.

I toiled toward her painfully and obstinately through a jungle of words.

Her face changed very slowly—by such imperceptible degrees as when at dawn light comes into a clear sky. I could feel that I touched her, that her hardness was in some manner melting, her determination softening toward hesitations.

“Nettie!” cried I, and still protesting, pursued her along the narrow alley between the staging toward the hothouse door.

I pursued her like an accusation, and she went before me like one who is guilty and ashamed.

So I recall it now.

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.

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.

He scratched slowly at his hairy cheek, opened his mouth, and shook his head. Then, with an intolerable note of sluggish gentle wisdom, he said,

“People of our sort, Willie, can’t do things like that.”

I came near to raving. I had a wild impulse to strike him in the face. Once in my boyhood I happened upon a bird terribly mangled by some cat, and killed it in a frenzy of horror and pity.

Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants. Read their surviving books. Each generation bewails the decay of that “fidelity” of servants, no generation ever saw.

A world that is squalid in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they never understood.

They believed there was not enough of anything to go round, they believed that this was the intention of God and an incurable condition of life, and they held passionately and with a sense of right to their disproportionate share.

I would go now down Hacker Street to the little shoemaker’s—get a sound, good pair of boots—ten minutes—and then to the railway-station—five minutes more—and off!

I felt as efficient and non-moral as if I was Nietzsche’s Over-man already come.

It did not occur to me that the curate’s clock might have a considerable margin of error.

the smoke of the furnace defiled the pot-bank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility.

Humanity choked amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass.

I did not think these things clearly that afternoon. Much less did I ask how I, with my murderous purpose, stood to them all.

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.

It perplexed me that somehow my body felt strange to me. It was unfamiliar—I could not tell how—and the barley, and the beautiful weeds, and the slowly developing glory of the dawn behind; all those things partook of the same unfamiliarity.

I felt as though I was a thing in some very luminous painted window, as though this dawn broke through me.

I felt I was part of some exquisite picture painted in light and joy.

There was something in it now, something absurd, that made me smile pityingly.

Poor little angry, miserable creature! Poor little angry, miserable world!

I sighed for pity, not only pity for myself, but for all the hot hearts, the tormented brains, the straining, striving things of hope and pain, who had found their peace at last beneath the pouring mist and suffocation of the comet.

For I felt sure I was dead; no one living could have this perfect assurance of good, this strong and confident peace. I had made an end of the fever called living. I was dead, and it was all right, and these—?

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.

It was queer to find barley fields in heaven, but no doubt there were many surprises in store for me.

“We must end war,” he said, in that full whisper of his; “it is stupidity. With so many people able to read and think—even as it is—there is no need of anything of the sort. Gods! What have we rulers been at? …

Drowsing like people in a stifling room, too dull and sleepy and too base toward each other for anyone to get up and open the window.

What haven’t we been at?”

…

The great voice of material Fate cried Halt! And in the midst of the play the actors staggered, dropped, and were still.

The figure runs from my pen. In New York that very thing occurred.

But the men who waked first, sat up, looked about them in astonishment, had time to think a little. …

Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere tears.

Men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly lit and exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible, incapable of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy, hopeful, unselfishly energetic, rejected altogether the supposition that this was merely a change in the …

There was Carton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-faced man with understanding, he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood among the busts of the Caesars, a slow, elaborating voice, with self-indulgent, slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary, voluntary, humorous twinkle.

“We have to forgive,” he said. “We have to forgive⁠—even ourselves.”

These two were at the top corner of the table, so that I saw their faces well. Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkled eyebrows and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next to Carton;

That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council,

“It can all be done so easily,”

but when they said it then, it came to my ears with a quality of enormous refreshment and power. It can all be done so easily, given frankness, given courage. Time was when these platitudes had the freshness and wonder of a gospel.

We sat silently for a time before our vivisected passions.

“Gods!” I cried, “and there was our poor little top-hamper of intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire, these foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like⁠—like a coop of hens washed overboard and clucking amidst the seas.”

Verrall laughed approval of the image I had struck out. “A week ago,” he said, trying it further, “we were clinging to our chicken coops and going with the heave and pour. That was true enough a week ago. But today—?”

“

Love is such a queer thing!⁠ ⁠… Is there one love? I mean, only one love?

” She turned to Verrall. “I know I love you. I can speak out about that now. Before this morning I couldn’t have done. It’s just as though my mind had got out of a scented prison. But what is it, this love for you?

Flattery too, things you said, hopes and deceptions for myself. And all that had rolled up together and taken to itself the wild help of those deep emotions that slumbered in my body; it seemed everything. But it wasn’t. How can I describe it?

It was like having a very bright lamp with a thick shade⁠—everything else in the room was hidden. But you take the shade off and there they are⁠—it is the same light⁠—still there! Only it lights everyone!

”

We would sit and think, or talk—there was a curious effect of complete understanding between us whether we talked or were still.

“Heaven,” she said to me one day, “Heaven is a garden.”

I was moved to tease her a little. “There’s jewels, you know, walls and gates of jewels—and singing.”

“

Hippopotamus, dear⁠—quite plainly one day, when her father was showing her pictures⁠ ⁠…

And her little prayers. ‘Now I lay me … down to sleep.’ … I made her little socks. Knitted they was, dear, and the heel most difficult.”