BOOK THE FIRST
THE COMET
CHAPTER THE FIRST
DUST IN THE SHADOWS
Section 1
I HAVE set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far
as it has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people
closely connected with me, primarily to please myself.
Long ago in my crude unhappy youth, I conceived the desire of
writing a book. To scribble secretly and dream of authorship was
one of my chief alleviations, and I read with a sympathetic envy
every scrap I could get about the world of literature and the
lives of literary people. It is something, even amidst this present
happiness, to find leisure and opportunity to take up and partially
realize these old and hopeless dreams. But that alone, in a world
where so much of vivid and increasing interest presents itself to
be done, even by an old man, would not, I think, suffice to set
me at this desk. I find some such recapitulation of my past as
this will involve, is becoming necessary to my own secure mental
continuity. The passage of years brings a man at last to retrospection;
at seventy-two one's youth is far more important than it was at
forty. And I am out of touch with my youth. The old life seems so
cut off from the new, so alien and so unreasonable, that at times
I find it bordering upon the incredible. The data have gone, the
buildings and places. I stopped dead the other afternoon in my walk
across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts of Swathinglea
straggled toward Leet, and asked, "Was it here indeed that I
crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and loaded
my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my
life? Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to
me? Rather, has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland
slipped a pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?"
There must be many alive still who have the same perplexities. And
I think too that those who are now growing up to take our places
in the great enterprise of mankind, will need many such narratives
as mine for even the most partial conception of the old world
of shadows that came before our day. It chances too that my case
is fairly typical of the Change; I was caught midway in a gust
of passion; and a curious accident put me for a time in the very
nucleus of the new order.
My memory takes me back across the interval of fifty years to a
little ill-lit room with a sash window open to a starry sky, and
instantly there returns to me the characteristic smell of that
room, the penetrating odor of an ill-trimmed lamp, burning cheap
paraffin. Lighting by electricity had then been perfected for fifteen
years, but still the larger portion of the world used these lamps.
All this first scene will go, in my mind at least, to that olfactory
accompaniment. That was the evening smell of the room. By day
it had a more subtle aroma, a closeness, a peculiar sort of faint
pungency that I associate--I know not why--with dust.
Let me describe this room to you in detail. It was perhaps eight
feet by seven in area and rather higher than either of these
dimensions; the ceiling was of plaster, cracked and bulging in
places, gray with the soot of the lamp, and in one place discolored
by a system of yellow and olive-green stains caused by the percolation
of damp from above. The walls were covered with dun-colored paper,
upon which had been printed in oblique reiteration a crimson shape,
something of the nature of a curly ostrich feather, or an acanthus
flower, that had in its less faded moments a sort of dingy gaiety.
There were several big plaster-rimmed wounds in this, caused by
Parload's ineffectual attempts to get nails into the wall, whereby
there might hang pictures. One nail had hit between two bricks and
got home, and from this depended, sustained a little insecurely
by frayed and knotted blind-cord, Parload's hanging bookshelves,
planks painted over with a treacly blue enamel and further decorated
by a fringe of pinked American cloth insecurely fixed by tacks. Below
this was a little table that behaved with a mulish vindictiveness
to any knee that was thrust beneath it suddenly; it was covered
with a cloth whose pattern of red and black had been rendered less
monotonous by the accidents of Parload's versatile ink bottle, and
on it, leit motif of the whole, stood and stank the lamp. This lamp,
you must understand, was of some whitish translucent substance that
was neither china nor glass, it had a shade of the same substance,
a shade that did not protect the eyes of a reader in any measure,
and it seemed admirably adapted to bring into pitiless prominence
the fact that, after the lamp's trimming, dust and paraffin had
been smeared over its exterior with a reckless generosity.
The uneven floor boards of this apartment were covered with scratched
enamel of chocolate hue, on which a small island of frayed carpet
dimly blossomed in the dust and shadows.
There was a very small grate, made of cast-iron in one piece and
painted buff, and a still smaller misfit of a cast-iron fender
that confessed the gray stone of the hearth. No fire was laid, only
a few scraps of torn paper and the bowl of a broken corn-cob pipe
were visible behind the bars, and in the corner and rather thrust
away was an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge. It
was the custom in those days to warm every room separately from a
separate fireplace, more prolific of dirt than heat, and the rickety
sash window, the small chimney, and the loose-fitting door were
expected to organize the ventilation of the room among themselves
without any further direction.
Parload's truckle bed hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchwork
counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and
suchlike oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were
an old whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed
the simple appliances of his toilet.
This washhandstand had been made of deal by some one with an
excess of turnery appliances in a hurry, who had tried to distract
attention from the rough economies of his workmanship by an arresting
ornamentation of blobs and bulbs upon the joints and legs. Apparently
the piece had then been placed in the hands of some person of
infinite leisure equipped with a pot of ocherous paint, varnish,
and a set of flexible combs. This person had first painted the
article, then, I fancy, smeared it with varnish, and then sat down
to work with the combs to streak and comb the varnish into a weird
imitation of the grain of some nightmare timber. The washhandstand so
made had evidently had a prolonged career of violent use, had been
chipped, kicked, splintered, punched, stained, scorched, hammered,
dessicated, damped, and defiled, had met indeed with almost every
possible adventure except a conflagration or a scrubbing, until at
last it had come to this high refuge of Parload's attic to sustain
the simple requirements of Parload's personal cleanliness. There
were, in chief, a basin and a jug of water and a slop-pail of tin,
and, further, a piece of yellow soap in a tray, a tooth-brush, a
rat-tailed shaving brush, one huckaback towel, and one or two other
minor articles. In those days only very prosperous people had more
than such an equipage, and it is to be remarked that every drop
of water Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servant
girl,--the "slavey," Parload called her--up from the basement to
the top of the house and subsequently down again. Already we begin
to forget how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a
fact that Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never
had a simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. Not
one in fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you.
A chest, also singularly grained and streaked, of two large and
two small drawers, held Parload's reserve of garments, and pegs
on the door carried his two hats and completed this inventory
of a "bed-sitting-room" as I knew it before the Change. But I had
forgotten--there was also a chair with a "squab" that apologized
inadequately for the defects of its cane seat. I forgot that for
the moment because I was sitting on the chair on the occasion that
best begins this story.
I have described Parload's room with such particularity because it
will help you to understand the key in which my earlier chapters
are written, but you must not imagine that this singular equipment
or the smell of the lamp engaged my attention at that time to the
slightest degree. I took all this grimy unpleasantness as if it
were the most natural and proper setting for existence imaginable.
It was the world as I knew it. My mind was entirely occupied then
by graver and intenser matters, and it is only now in the distant
retrospect that I see these details of environment as being
remarkable, as significant, as indeed obviously the outward visible
manifestations of the old world disorder in our hearts.
