Section 1
I SEEMED to awaken out of a refreshing sleep.
I did not awaken with a start, but opened my eyes, and lay verycomfortably looking at a line of extraordinarily scarlet poppiesthat glowed against a glowing sky. It was the sky of a magnificentsunrise, and an archipelago of gold-beached purple islands floated ina sea of golden green. The poppies too, swan-necked buds, blazingcorollas, translucent stout seed-vessels, stoutly upheld, had aluminous quality, seemed wrought only from some more solid kind oflight.
I stared unwonderingly at these things for a time, and then thererose upon my consciousness, intermingling with these, the bristlinggolden green heads of growing barley.
A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanishedagain in my mind. Everything was very still.
Everything was as still as death.
I felt very light, full of the sense of physical well-being.I perceived I was lying on my side in a little trampled spacein a weedy, flowering barley field, that was in some inexplicableway saturated with light and beauty. I sat up, and remained for along time filled with the delight and charm of the delicate littleconvolvulus that twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel thatlaced the ground below.
Then that question returned. What was this place? How had I cometo be sleeping here?
I could not remember.
It perplexed me that somehow my body felt strange to me. It wasunfamiliar--I could not tell how--and the barley, and the beautifulweeds, and the slowly developing glory of the dawn behind; allthose things partook of the same unfamiliarity. I felt as thoughI was a thing in some very luminous painted window, as though thisdawn broke through me. I felt I was part of some exquisite picturepainted in light and joy.
A faint breeze bent and rustled the barley-heads, and jogged mymind forward.
Who was I? That was a good way of beginning.
I held up my left hand and arm before me, a grubby hand, a frayedcuff; but with a quality of painted unreality, transfigured as abeggar might have been by Botticelli. I looked for a time steadfastlyat a beautiful pearl sleeve-link.
I remembered Willie Leadford, who had owned that arm and hand, asthough he had been some one else.
Of course! My history--its rough outline rather than the immediatepast--began to shape itself in my memory, very small, very brightand inaccessible, like a thing watched through a microscope.Clayton and Swathinglea returned to my mind; the slums and darkness,Dureresque, minute and in their rich dark colors pleasing, and throughthem I went towards my destiny. I sat hands on knees recalling thatqueer passionate career that had ended with my futile shot intothe growing darkness of the End. The thought of that shot awoke myemotions again.
There was something in it now, something absurd, that made me smilepityingly.
Poor little angry, miserable creature! Poor little angry, miserableworld!
I sighed for pity, not only pity for myself, but for all the hothearts, the tormented brains, the straining, striving things of hopeand pain, who had found their peace at last beneath the pouringmist and suffocation of the comet. Because certainly that world wasover and done. They were all so weak and unhappy, and I was now sostrong and so serene. For I felt sure I was dead; no one livingcould have this perfect assurance of good, this strong and confidentpeace. I had made an end of the fever called living. I was dead,and it was all right, and these------?
I felt an inconsistency.
These, then, must be the barley fields of God!--the still andsilent barley fields of God, full of unfading poppy flowers whoseseeds bear peace.