BOOK THE SECOND
THE GREEN VAPORS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE CHANGE
Section 1
I SEEMED to awaken out of a refreshing sleep.
I did not awaken with a start, but opened my eyes, and lay very
comfortably looking at a line of extraordinarily scarlet poppies
that glowed against a glowing sky. It was the sky of a magnificent
sunrise, and an archipelago of gold-beached purple islands floated in
a sea of golden green. The poppies too, swan-necked buds, blazing
corollas, translucent stout seed-vessels, stoutly upheld, had a
luminous quality, seemed wrought only from some more solid kind of
light.
I stared unwonderingly at these things for a time, and then there
rose upon my consciousness, intermingling with these, the bristling
golden green heads of growing barley.
A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished
again in my mind. Everything was very still.
Everything was as still as death.
I felt very light, full of the sense of physical well-being.
I perceived I was lying on my side in a little trampled space
in a weedy, flowering barley field, that was in some inexplicable
way saturated with light and beauty. I sat up, and remained for a
long time filled with the delight and charm of the delicate little
convolvulus that twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel that
laced the ground below.
Then that question returned. What was this place? How had I come
to be sleeping here?
I could not remember.
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.
A faint breeze bent and rustled the barley-heads, and jogged my
mind forward.
Who was I? That was a good way of beginning.
I held up my left hand and arm before me, a grubby hand, a frayed
cuff; but with a quality of painted unreality, transfigured as a
beggar might have been by Botticelli. I looked for a time steadfastly
at a beautiful pearl sleeve-link.
I remembered Willie Leadford, who had owned that arm and hand, as
though he had been some one else.
Of course! My history--its rough outline rather than the immediate
past--began to shape itself in my memory, very small, very bright
and inaccessible, like a thing watched through a microscope.
Clayton and Swathinglea returned to my mind; the slums and darkness,
Dureresque, minute and in their rich dark colors pleasing, and through
them I went towards my destiny. I sat hands on knees recalling that
queer passionate career that had ended with my futile shot into
the growing darkness of the End. The thought of that shot awoke my
emotions again.
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. Because certainly that world was
over and done. They were all so weak and unhappy, and I was now so
strong and so serene. 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------?
I felt an inconsistency.
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.
