Section 4
Then let me give you a vivid little impression I received of a
certain prosaic person, a grocer, named Wiggins, and how he passed
through the Change. I heard this man's story in the post-office at
Menton, when, in the afternoon of the First Day, I bethought me to
telegraph to my mother. The place was also a grocer's shop, and I
found him and the proprietor talking as I went in. They were trade
competitors, and Wiggins had just come across the street to break
the hostile silence of a score of years. The sparkle of the Change
was in their eyes, their slightly flushed cheeks, their more elastic
gestures, spoke of new physical influences that had invaded their
beings.
"It did us no good, all our hatred," Mr. Wiggins said to me,
explaining the emotion of their encounter; "it did our customers
no good. I've come to tell him that. You bear that in mind, young
man, if ever you come to have a shop of your own. It was a sort
of stupid bitterness possessed us, and I can't make out we didn't
see it before in that light. Not so much downright wickedness it
wasn't as stupidity. A stupid jealousy! Think of it!--two human
beings within a stone's throw, who have not spoken for twenty years,
hardening our hearts against each other!"
"I can't think how we came to such a state, Mr. Wiggins," said
the other, packing tea into pound packets out of mere habit as he
spoke. "It was wicked pride and obstinacy. We KNEW it was foolish
all the time."
I stood affixing the adhesive stamp to my telegram.
"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. . . .
