The Project Gutenberg EBook of In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells

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Title: In the Days of the Comet

Author: H. G. Wells

Release Date: October 25, 2004 [EBook #3797]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET ***

This etext was produced by Judy Boss.

IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET

BY H. G. WELLS

  "The World's Great Age begins anew,
     The Golden Years return,
   The Earth doth like a Snake renew
     Her Winter Skin outworn:
   Heaven smiles, and Faiths and Empires gleam
   Like Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream."

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

PAGE

THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER . . . 3

BOOK THE FIRST

THE COMET

CHAPTER

I. DUST IN THE SHADOWS . . . . . . 9 II. NETTIE . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 III. THE REVOLVER . . . . . . . . . 89 IV. WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 V. THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS . . 184

BOOK THE SECOND

THE GREEN VAPORS

I. THE CHANGE . . . . . . . . . 221 II. THE AWAKENING . . . . . . . . . 252 III. THE CABINET COUNCIL . . . . . . . 279

BOOK THE THIRD

THE NEW WORLD

CHAPTER PAGE

I. LOVE AFTER THE CHANGE . . . . . . 303 II. MY MOTHER'S LAST DAYS . . . . . . 335 III. BELTANE AND NEW YEAR'S EVE . . . 353

EPILOGUE

THE WINDOW OF THE TOWER . . . . . . . 375

IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET

PROLOGUE

THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER

I SAW a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing.

He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed and left no light.

The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen, a modern touch that prohibited any historical retrospection, and as he finished each sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing pile upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done sheets lay loose, partly covering others that were clipped together into fascicles.

Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until his pen should come to a pause. Old as he certainly was he wrote with a steady hand. . . .

I discovered that a concave speculum hung slantingly high over his head; a movement in this caught my attention sharply, and I looked up to see, distorted and made fantastic but bright and beautifully colored, the magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a palace, of a terrace, of the vista of a great roadway with many people, people exaggerated, impossible-looking because of the curvature of the mirror, going to and fro. I turned my head quickly that I might see more clearly through the window behind me, but it was too high for me to survey this nearer scene directly, and after a momentary pause I came back to that distorting mirror again.

But now the writer was leaning back in his chair. He put down his pen and sighed the half resentful sigh—"ah! you, work, you! how you gratify and tire me!"—of a man who has been writing to his satisfaction.

"What is this place," I asked, "and who are you?"

He looked around with the quick movement of surprise.

"What is this place?" I repeated, "and where am I?"

He regarded me steadfastly for a moment under his wrinkled brows, and then his expression softened to a smile. He pointed to a chair beside the table. "I am writing," he said.

"About this?"

"About the change."

I sat down. It was a very comfortable chair, and well placed under the light.

"If you would like to read—" he said.

I indicated the manuscript. "This explains?" I asked.

"That explains," he answered.

He drew a fresh sheet of paper toward him as he looked at me.

I glanced from him about his apartment and back to the little table. A fascicle marked very distinctly "1" caught my attention, and I took it up. I smiled in his friendly eyes. "Very well," said I, suddenly at my ease, and he nodded and went on writing. And in a mood between confidence and curiosity, I began to read.

This is the story that happy, active-looking old man in that pleasant place had written.

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