Section 2
As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest--for my shilling anda penny only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-MileStone, and thence I had to walk over the hill--I remember veryvividly a little man with a shrill voice who was preaching undera gas-lamp against a hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday eveningloafers. He was a short man, bald, with a little fair curly beardand hair and watery blue eyes, and he was preaching that the endof the world drew near.
I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet withthe end of the world. He had got that jumbled up with internationalpolitics and prophecies from the Book of Daniel.
I stopped to hear him only for a moment or so. I do not think Ishould have halted at all but his crowd blocked my path, and thesight of his queer wild expression, the gesture of his upward-pointingfinger, held me.
"There is the end of all your Sins and Follies," he bawled. "There!There is the Star of Judgments, the Judgments of the most HighGod! It is appointed unto all men to die--unto all men to die"--hisvoice changed to a curious flat chant--"and after death, theJudgment! The Judgment!"
I pushed and threaded my way through the bystanders and went on,and his curious harsh flat voice pursued me. I went on with thethoughts that had occupied me before--where I could buy a revolver,and how I might master its use--and probably I should have forgottenall about him had he not taken a part in the hideous dream thatended the little sleep I had that night. For the most part I layawake thinking of Nettie and her lover.
Then came three strange days--three days that seem now to have beenwholly concentrated upon one business.
This dominant business was the purchase of my revolver. I heldmyself resolutely to the idea that I must either restore myself bysome extraordinary act of vigor and violence in Nettie's eyes or Imust kill her. I would not let myself fall away from that. I feltthat if I let this matter pass, my last shred of pride and honorwould pass with it, that for the rest of my life I should neverdeserve the slightest respect or any woman's love. Pride kept meto my purpose between my gusts of passion.
Yet it was not easy to buy that revolver.
I had a kind of shyness of the moment when I should have to facethe shopman, and I was particularly anxious to have a story readyif he should see fit to ask questions why I bought such a thing.I determined to say I was going to Texas, and I thought it mightprove useful there. Texas in those days had the reputation of awild lawless land. As I knew nothing of caliber or impact, I wantedalso to be able to ask with a steady face at what distance a manor woman could be killed by the weapon that might be offered me.I was pretty cool-headed in relation to such practical aspects ofmy affair. I had some little difficulty in finding a gunsmith. InClayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth in a cycle shop,but the only revolvers these people had impressed me as being toosmall and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop window inthe narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice, areasonably clumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed "As usedin the American army."
I had drawn out my balance from the savings bank, matter of twopounds and more, to make this purchase, and I found it at lasta very easy transaction. The pawnbroker told me where I could getammunition, and I went home that night with bulging pockets, anarmed man.
The purchase of my revolver was, I say, the chief business ofthose days, but you must not think I was so intent upon it as tobe insensible to the stirring things that were happening in thestreets through which I went seeking the means to effect my purpose.They were full of murmurings: the whole region of the Four Townsscowled lowering from its narrow doors. The ordinary healthy flowof people going to work, people going about their business, waschilled and checked. Numbers of men stood about the streets in knotsand groups, as corpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels inthe opening stages of inflammation. The woman looked haggard andworried. The ironworkers had refused the proposed reduction oftheir wages, and the lockout had begun. They were already at "play."The Conciliation Board was doing its best to keep the coal-minersand masters from a breach, but young Lord Redcar, the greatest ofour coal owners and landlord of all Swathinglea and half Clayton, wastaking a fine upstanding attitude that made the breach inevitable.He was a handsome young man, a gallant young man; his pride revoltedat the idea of being dictated to by a "lot of bally miners," andhe meant, he said, to make a fight for it. The world had treatedhim sumptuously from his earliest years; the shares in the commonstock of five thousand people had gone to pay for his handsomeupbringing, and large, romantic, expensive ambitions filledhis generously nurtured mind. He had early distinguished himselfat Oxford by his scornful attitude towards democracy. There wassomething that appealed to the imagination in his fine antagonismto the crowd--on the one hand, was the brilliant young nobleman,picturesquely alone; on the other, the ugly, inexpressive multitude,dressed inelegantly in shop-clothes, under-educated, under-fed,envious, base, and with a wicked disinclination for work and a wickedappetite for the good things it could so rarely get. For commonimaginative purposes one left out the policeman from the design,the stalwart policeman protecting his lordship, and ignored thefact that while Lord Redcar had his hands immediately and legallyon the workman's shelter and bread, they could touch him to theskin only by some violent breach of the law.
He lived at Lowchester House, five miles or so beyond Checkshill;but partly to show how little he cared for his antagonists, andpartly no doubt to keep himself in touch with the negotiations thatwere still going on, he was visible almost every day in and aboutthe Four Towns, driving that big motor car of his that could takehim sixty miles an hour. The English passion for fair play onemight have thought sufficient to rob this bold procedure of anydangerous possibilities, but he did not go altogether free frominsult, and on one occasion at least an intoxicated Irishwoman shook her fist at him. . . .
A dark, quiet crowd, that was greater each day, a crowd more thanhalf women, brooded as a cloud will sometimes brood permanently upona mountain crest, in the market-place outside the ClaytonTown Hall, where the conference was held. . . .
I consider myself justified in regarding Lord Redcar's passingautomobile with a special animosity because of the leaks in ourroof.
We held our little house on lease; the owner was a mean, savingold man named Pettigrew, who lived in a villa adorned with plasterimages of dogs and goats, at Overcastle, and in spite of our specificagreement, he would do no repairs for us at all. He rested securein my mother's timidity. Once, long ago, she had been behind-handwith her rent, with half of her quarter's rent, and he had extendedthe days of grace a month; her sense that some day she might needthe same mercy again made her his abject slave. She was afraid evento ask that he should cause the roof to be mended for fear he mighttake offence. But one night the rain poured in on her bed and gaveher a cold, and stained and soaked her poor old patchwork counterpane.Then she got me to compose an excessively polite letter to oldPettigrew, begging him as a favor to perform his legal obligations.It is part of the general imbecility of those days that such one-sidedlaw as existed was a profound mystery to the common people, itsprovisions impossible to ascertain, its machinery impossible to setin motion. Instead of the clearly written code, the lucid statementsof rules and principles that are now at the service of every one,the law was the muddle secret of the legal profession. Poor people,overworked people, had constantly to submit to petty wrongs becauseof the intolerable uncertainty not only of law but of cost, and ofthe demands upon time and energy, proceedings might make. Therewas indeed no justice for any one too poor to command a goodsolicitor's deference and loyalty; there was nothing but roughpolice protection and the magistrate's grudging or eccentric advicefor the mass of the population. The civil law, in particular, wasa mysterious upper-class weapon, and I can imagine no injustice thatwould have been sufficient to induce my poor old mother to appealto it.
All this begins to sound incredible. I can only assure you that itwas so.
But I, when I learned that old Pettigre
w had been down to tell mymother all about his rheumatism, to inspect the roof, and to allegethat nothing was needed, gave way to my most frequent emotion inthose days, a burning indignation, and took the matter into my ownhands. I wrote and asked him, with a withering air of technicality,to have the roof repaired "as per agreement," and added, "if notdone in one week from now we shall be obliged to take proceedings."I had not mentioned this high line of conduct to my mother at first,and so when old Pettigrew came down in a state of great agitationwith my letter in his hand, she was almost equally agitated.
"How could you write to old Mr. Pettigrew like that?" she askedme.
I said that old Pettigrew was a shameful old rascal, or words tothat effect, and I am afraid I behaved in a very undutiful way toher when she said that she had settled everything with him--shewouldn't say how, but I could guess well enough--and that I wasto promise her, promise her faithfully, to do nothing more in thematter. I wouldn't promise her.
And--having nothing better to employ me then--I presently wentraging to old Pettigrew in order to put the whole thing before himin what I considered the proper light. Old Pettigrew evaded myillumination; he saw me coming up his front steps--I can still seehis queer old nose and the crinkled brow over his eye and the littlewisp of gray hair that showed over the corner of his window-blind--andhe instructed his servant to put up the chain when she answeredthe door, and to tell me that he would not see me. So I had to fallback upon my pen.
Then it was, as I had no idea what were the proper "proceedings"to take, the brilliant idea occurred to me of appealing to LordRedcar as the ground landlord, and, as it were, our feudal chief,and pointing out to him that his security for his rent was depreciatingin old Pettigrew's hands. I added some general observations onleaseholds, the taxation of ground rents, and the private ownershipof the soil. And Lord Redcar, whose spirit revolted at democracy,and who cultivated a pert humiliating manner with his inferiors toshow as much, earned my distinguished hatred for ever by causinghis secretary to present his compliments to me, and his requestthat I would mind my own business and leave him to manage his. Atwhich I was so greatly enraged that I first tore this note intominute innumerable pieces, and then dashed it dramatically all overthe floor of my room--from which, to keep my mother from the job,I afterward had to pick it up laboriously on all-fours.
I was still meditating a tremendous retort, an indictment of allLord Redcar's class, their manners, morals, economic and politicalcrimes, when my trouble with Nettie arose to swamp all minortroubles. Yet, not so completely but that I snarled aloud when hislordship's motor-car whizzed by me, as I went about upon my longmeandering quest for a weapon. And I discovered after a time thatmy mother had bruised her knee and was lame. Fearing to irritateme by bringing the thing before me again, she had set herself tomove her bed out of the way of the drip without my help, and shehad knocked her knee. All her poor furnishings, I discovered, werecowering now close to the peeling bedroom walls; there had come avast discoloration of the ceiling, and a washing-tub wasin occupation of the middle of her chamber. . . .
It is necessary that I should set these things before you, shouldgive the key of inconvenience and uneasiness in which all thingswere arranged, should suggest the breath of trouble that stirredalong the hot summer streets, the anxiety about the strike, therumors and indignations, the gatherings and meetings, the increasinggravity of the policemen's faces, the combative headlines of thelocal papers, the knots of picketers who scrutinized any one whopassed near the silent, smokeless forges, but in my mind, you mustunderstand, such impressions came and went irregularly; they madea moving background, changing undertones, to my preoccupation bythat darkly shaping purpose to which a revolver was so imperativean essential.
Along the darkling streets, amidst the sullen crowds, the thoughtof Nettie, my Nettie, and her gentleman lover made ever a vividinflammatory spot of purpose in my brain.