Hevieir of Reviews, l/lll' 'j. 



//I the Days of the Gomet. 



523 



was scouted as lunacy. Just think of it ! This girl 

 I loved with all my soul, for whom I was ready to 

 sacrilice my life, was not good enough to marry 

 young Verrall. And I had only to look at his even, 

 handsome, characterless face to perceive a creature 

 weaker and no better than myself. She was to be 

 his pleasure until he chose to cast her aside and 

 the poison of our social system had so saturated her 

 nature — his evening dress, his freedom and his 

 money had seemed so fine to her and I so clothed 

 in squalor — that to that prospect she had con- 

 sented. And to resent the social conventions that 

 created their situation, was called " class envy," and 

 gentlv born preachers reproached us for the mildest 

 resentment against an injustice no living man would 

 now either endure or consent to profit by. 



What was the sense of saying " peace '' when 

 there was no peace ? If there was one hope in the 

 disorders of that old world it lay in revolt and con- 

 flict to the death. 



But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesque- 

 ness of the old^'if^' you will begin to appreciate the 

 interpretation of old Mrs. Verrall's appearance that 

 leaped up at once in my mind. 



She had come to compromise the disaster ! 



And the Stuarts zvoiild compromise ! I saw that 

 only too well. 



An enormous disgust at the prospect of the immi- 

 nent encounter between Stuart and his mistress 

 made me behave in a violent and irrational way. I 

 wanted to escape seeing that, seeing even Stuart's 

 first gesture in that, at any cost. 



" I'm off," said I, and turned my back on him 

 without anv further farewell. 



Mv line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so I 

 advanced toward her. 



I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a 

 little wav open, her forehead wrinkled, and her eyes 

 grew round. She found me a queer customer even 

 at the first sight, and there was something in the 

 manner of my advance that took away her breath. 



She stood at the top of the three or four steps 

 that descended to the level of the hothouse floor. 

 She receded a pace or two, with a certain offended 

 dignitv at the determination of my rush. 



I gave her no sort of salutation. 



Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort 

 of salutation. There is no occasion for me to begin 

 apologising now for the thing I said to her — I strip 

 these things before you--if only I can get them 

 stark enough vou will understand ami forgive. I 

 was filled with a brutal and overpowering desire to 

 insult her. 



And so I addressed this poor, little, expensive, old 



woman in the following terms, converting her by a 

 violent metonymy into a comprehensive plural. 

 " You infernal land-thieves !" I said point-blank into 

 her face; "have you come to offer them money?" 



And without waiting to test her powers of repar- 

 tee, I passed rudely beyond her and vanished, strid- 

 ing with my fists clenched out of her world again. 



I have tried since to imagine how the thing must 

 have looked to her. So far as her particular uni- 

 verse went, I had not existed at all, or I had 

 existed only as a dim, black thing, an insignificant 

 speck, far away across her park in irrelevant, unim- 

 portant transit, until this moment when she came, 

 sedately troubled, into her own secure gardens and 

 sought for Stuart among the greenhouses. Then, 

 abruptly, I flashed into being down that green- 

 walled, brick-floored vista as a black-avi.sed, ill-clad 

 young man, who first stared, and then advanced, 

 scowling, toward her. Once in existence, I de- 

 veloped rapidly. I grew larger in perspective 

 and became more and more important and sinister 

 everv moment. I came up the steps with inconceiv- 

 able hostility and disrespect in my bearing, towering 

 over her, becoming for an instant at least a sort of 

 second French Revolution, and delivered myself, 

 with the intensest concentration, of those wicked and 

 incomprehensible words. Just for a second, I 

 threatened annihilation. Happily that was my climax. 



And then I had gone by, and the Universe was 

 very much as it had always been, except for the wild 

 swirl in it, and the faint sense of insecurity, my 

 episode left in its wake. 



The thing that never entered my head in those 

 days was that a large proportion of the rich were 

 rich in absolute good faith. I thought they saw 

 things exactlv as T saw them, and wickedly denied. 

 But, indeed, old Mrs. Verrall was no more capable 

 of doubting the perfection of her family's right to 

 dominate a wide countryside, than she was of ex- 

 amining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any 

 other of the adamantine pillars upon which her uni- 

 verse rested in securitx'. 



No doubt I startled and frightened her tremen- 

 dously. But she could not understand. 



None of her sort of people ever did seem to un- 

 derstand such livid flashes of hate, as ever and 

 again lit the crowded darkness below their feet. The 

 thing leaped out of the black for a moment and 

 vanished, like a threatening figure by a desolate 

 roadside, lit for a moment by one's belated carriage 

 lamp and then swallowed up by the night. They 

 counted it with nightmares, and did their best to 

 forget what was evidently as insignificant as it was 

 disturbinsf. 



CHAPTER THE FOURTH— WAR. 



I. Stood for all the disinherited of the world. I had 



From that moment when I insulted old Mrs. no hope of pride or pleasure left in me, I was 



Verrall I became representative, I was a man who nigiiig rebellion against God and mankind. There 



