622 



The Review of Reviews: 



Dece/nier 1, 1906. 



point when it was veiled and softened by night; 

 now it came out in all its week-day reek, under 

 a clear afternoon sun. That may account a little for 

 its unfamiliarity. And perhaps, too, there was 

 something in the emotions through which I had been 

 passing for a week or more, to intensify my insight, 

 to enable me to pierce the usual, to question the ac- 

 cepted. But it came to me then, I am sure, for the 

 first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy 

 was the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, 

 collieries and pot-banks, railway yards, canals, 

 schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, 

 allotment hovels, a vast, irregular agglomeration 

 of uglv. smoking accidents in which men lived as 

 happv as frogs in a dust bin. Each thing jostled 

 and damaged the other things about it. Each thing 

 ignored the other things about it. The smoke 

 of the furnace defiled the pot -bank clay, the clatter 

 of the railway deafened the worshippers in church, 

 the public-house thrust corruption at the school 

 doors, the dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst 

 the monstrosities of industrialism, with an effect of 

 groping imbecilitv. 



I did not think these things clearly that after- 

 noon. Much less did I ask how I, with my mur- 

 derous purpose, stood to them all. I write down 

 that realisation of disorder and suffocation here and 

 now, as though I had thought it, but, indeed, 

 then I onlv felt it, felt it transitorily as I looked 

 back, and "then stood with the thing escaping from 

 my mind. 



I should never see that countryside again. 



I came back to that. At any rate I wasn't sorry. 

 The chances were I should die in sweet air, under n 

 dean sky. Then, as I turned to go on, I thought 

 of mv mother. 



It seemed an evil world in which to leave one's 

 mother. Mv thoughts focussed upon her very 



vividly for a moment. Down there, under that 

 afterna:m light, she was going to and fro, unaware 

 as yet that she had lost me, bent and poking about 

 in the darkling underground kitchen, perhaps car- 

 rying a lamp into the scullery to trim, or sitting 

 patiently, staring into the fire, waiting tea for me. 

 A great pity for her, a great remorse at the blacker 

 troubles that lowered over her innocent head, came 

 to me. Why, after all, was I doing this thing? 



Why ? 



I stopped again dead, with the hill-crest rising 

 between me and home. I had more than half a 

 mind to return to her. 



Then I thought of the curate's sovereigns. If he 

 had missed them already, what should I return 

 to? And, even if I returned, how could I put 

 them back ? 



And what of the night after I renounced my re- 

 venge? What of the time w^hen young Verrall came 

 back? And Nettie? 



No ! The thing had to be done. 



But. at least, I might have kissed my mother 

 before I came away, left her some message, reas- 

 sured her, at least for a little while. All night she 

 would listen and wait for me. 



Should I send her a telegram from Two-Mile 

 Stone ? 



It was no good now ; too late, too late. To do 

 that would be to tell the course I had taken, to bring 

 pursuit upon me. swift and sure, if pursuit there was 

 to he. No. My mother must suffer. 



T went on grimly tow^ard Two-Mile Stone, but 

 now as if some greater will than mine directed 

 my footsteps thither. 



I reached Birmingham before darkness came, and 

 just caught the last train for Monkshampton. where 

 I had planned to pass the night. 



CHAPTER THE FIFTH THE 



I. 



As the train carried me on from Birmingham to 

 Monkshampton, it carried me not only into a country 

 where I had never been before, but out of the com- 

 monplace daylight and the touch and quality of 

 ordinary things, into the strange, unprecedented 

 night that was ruled by the giant meteor of the last 

 days. 



There was, at that time, a curious accentuation 

 of the common alternation of night and day. They 

 became separated with a widening difference of value 

 in regard to all mundane affairs. During the day, 

 the comet was an item in the newspapers ; it was 

 jostled bv a thousand more living interests ; it was 

 as nothing in the skirts of the war-storm that was 

 now upon us. It was an astronomical phenomenon, 

 awav over China, millions of miles awav in 

 the deeps. We forgot it. But directly the sun 



PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS. 



sank, one turned ever and again toward the east, 

 and the meteor resumed its sway over us. 



One waited for its rising, and yet each night it 

 came as a surprise Always, it rose brighter than 

 one had dared to think, always larger and with some 

 wonderful change in its outline, and now with a 

 strange, less luminous, greener di.sc upon it that 

 grew with its growth, the umbra of the earth. It 

 shone also with its own light, so that this shadow, 

 was not hard or black, hut it shone phosphorescently 

 and with a diminishing intensity where the stimulus 

 of the sun's rays was withdrawn. As it ascended to- 

 ward the zenith, as the last trailing davlight went 

 after the abdicating sun, its greenish-white illumi- 

 nation banished the realities of day and diffused a 

 bright ghostliness over all things. It changed the 

 starless sky about it to an extraordinary deep blue, 

 the profoundest colour in the w-orld, such as I have 

 never seen before or since. I remember, too, that 



