CHAPTER THE FOURTH
WAR
Section 1
FROM that moment when I insulted old Mrs. Verrall I became
representative, I was a man who stood for all the disinherited of
the world. I had no hope of pride or pleasure left in me, I was
raging rebellion against God and mankind. There were no more vague
intentions swaying me this way and that; I was perfectly clear now
upon what I meant to do. I would make my protest and die.
I would make my protest and die. I was going to kill Nettie--Nettie
who had smiled and promised and given herself to another, and who
stood now for all the conceivable delightfulnesses, the lost imaginations
of the youthful heart, the unattainable joys in life; and Verrall
who stood for all who profited by the incurable injustice of our
social order. I would kill them both. And that being done I would
blow my brains out and see what vengeance followed my blank refusal
to live.
So indeed I was resolved. I raged monstrously. And above me,
abolishing the stars, triumphant over the yellow waning moon that
followed it below, the giant meteor towered up towards the zenith.
"Let me only kill!" I cried. "Let me only kill!"
So I shouted in my frenzy. I was in a fever that defied hunger
and fatigue; for a long time I had prowled over the heath towards
Lowchester talking to myself, and now that night had fully come I
was tramping homeward, walking the long seventeen miles without a
thought of rest. And I had eaten nothing since the morning.
I suppose I must count myself mad, but I can recall my ravings.
There were times when I walked weeping through that brightness that
was neither night nor day. There were times when I reasoned in a
topsy-turvy fashion with what I called the Spirit of All Things.
But always I spoke to that white glory in the sky.
"Why am I here only to suffer ignominies?" I asked. "Why have you
made me with pride that cannot be satisfied, with desires that
turn and rend me? Is it a jest, this world--a joke you play on your
guests? I--even I--have a better humor than that!"
"Why not learn from me a certain decency of mercy? Why not undo?
Have I ever tormented --day by day, some wretched worm--making
filth for it to trail through, filth that disgusts it, starving it,
bruising it, mocking it? Why should you? Your jokes are clumsy.
Try--try some milder fun up there; do you hear? Something that
doesn't hurt so infernally."
"You say this is your purpose--your purpose with me. You are making
something with me--birth pangs of a soul. Ah! How can I believe
you? You forget I have eyes for other things. Let my own case go,
but what of that frog beneath the cart-wheel, God?--and the bird
the cat had torn?"
And after such blasphemies I would fling out a ridiculous little
debating society hand. "Answer me that!"
A week ago it had been moonlight, white and black and hard across
the spaces of the park, but now the light was livid and full of
the quality of haze. An extraordinarily low white mist, not three
feet above the ground, drifted broodingly across the grass, and
the trees rose ghostly out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy
and strange was the world that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my
little cracked voice drifted solitary through the silent mysteries.
Sometimes I argued as I have told, sometimes I tumbled along in
moody vacuity, sometimes my torment was vivid and acute.
Abruptly out of apathy would come a boiling paroxysm of fury, when
I thought of Nettie mocking me and laughing, and of her and Verrall
clasped in one another's arms.
"I will not have it so!" I screamed. "I will not have it so!"
And in one of these raving fits I drew my revolver from my pocket
and fired into the quiet night. Three times I fired it.
The bullets tore through the air, the startled trees told one another
in diminishing echoes the thing I had done, and then, with a slow
finality, the vast and patient night healed again to calm. My shots,
my curses and blasphemies, my prayers --for anon I prayed--that
Silence took them all.
It was--how can I express it?--a stifled outcry tranquilized,
lost, amid the serene assumptions, the overwhelming empire of that
brightness. The noise of my shots, the impact upon things, had
for the instant been enormous, then it had passed away. I found
myself standing with the revolver held up, astonished, my emotions
penetrated by something I could not understand. Then I looked up
over my shoulder at the great star, and remained staring at it.
"Who are YOU?" I said at last.
I was like a man in a solitary desert who has suddenly heard a voice. . . .
That, too, passed.
As I came over Clayton Crest I recalled that I missed the multitude
that now night after night walked out to stare at the comet, and
the little preacher in the waste beyond the hoardings, who warned
sinners to repent before the Judgment, was not in his usual place.
It was long past midnight, and every one had gone home. But I did
not think of this at first, and the solitude perplexed me and left
a memory behind. The gas-lamps were all extinguished because of the
brightness of the comet, and that too was unfamiliar. The little
newsagent in the still High Street had shut up and gone to bed,
but one belated board had been put out late and forgotten, and it
still bore its placard.
The word upon it--there was but one word upon it in staring
letters--was: "WAR."
You figure that empty mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps--no
soul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And
amidst that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board,
a little askew and crumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool
meteoric glare, preposterous and appalling, the measureless evil
of that word--
"WAR!"
