In the Days of the Comet

  Section 4

  Then let me give you a vivid little impression I received of acertain prosaic person, a grocer, named Wiggins, and how he passedthrough the Change. I heard this man's story in the post-office atMenton, when, in the afternoon of the First Day, I bethought me totelegraph to my mother. The place was also a grocer's shop, and Ifound him and the proprietor talking as I went in. They were tradecompetitors, and Wiggins had just come across the street to breakthe hostile silence of a score of years. The sparkle of the Changewas in their eyes, their slightly flushed cheeks, their more elasticgestures, spoke of new physical influences that had invaded theirbeings.

  "It did us no good, all our hatred," Mr. Wiggins said to me,explaining the emotion of their encounter; "it did our customersno good. I've come to tell him that. You bear that in mind, youngman, if ever you come to have a shop of your own. It was a sortof stupid bitterness possessed us, and I can't make out we didn'tsee it before in that light. Not so much downright wickedness itwasn't as stupidity. A stupid jealousy! Think of it!--two humanbeings within a stone's throw, who have not spoken for twenty years,hardening our hearts against each other!"

  "I can't think how we came to such a state, Mr. Wiggins," saidthe other, packing tea into pound packets out of mere habit as hespoke. "It was wicked pride and obstinacy. We KNEW it was foolishall the time."

  I stood affixing the adhesive stamp to my telegram.

  "Only the other morning," he went on to me, "I was cutting Frencheggs. Selling at a loss to do it. He'd marked down with a greatstaring ticket to ninepence a dozen--I saw it as I went past. Here'smy answer!" He indicated a ticket. "'Eightpence a dozen--same assold elsewhere for ninepence.' A whole penny down, bang off! Justa touch above cost--if that--and even then------" He leant overthe counter to say impressively, "NOT THE SAME EGGS!"

  "Now, what people in their senses would do things like that?" saidMr. Wiggins.

  I sent my telegram--the proprietor dispatched it for me, and whilehe did so I fell exchanging experiences with Mr. Wiggins. He knewno more than I did then the nature of the change that had come overthings. He had been alarmed by the green flashes, he said, so muchso that after watching for a time from behind his bedroom windowblind, he had got up and hastily dressed and made his family getup also, so that they might be ready for the end. He made them puton their Sunday clothes. They all went out into the garden together,their minds divided between admiration at the gloriousness of thespectacle and a great and growing awe. They were Dissenters, andvery religious people out of business hours, and it seemed to themin those last magnificent moments that, after all, science must bewrong and the fanatics right. With the green vapors cameconviction, and they prepared to meet their God. . . .

  This man, you must understand, was a common-looking man, in hisshirt-sleeves and with an apron about his paunch, and he told hisstory in an Anglian accent that sounded mean and clipped to myStaffordshire ears; he told his story without a thought of pride,and as it were incidentally, and yet he gave me a vision of somethingheroic.

  These people did not run hither and thither as many people did. Thesefour simple, common people stood beyond their back door in theirgarden pathway between the gooseberry bushes, with the terrorsof their God and His Judgments closing in upon them, swiftlyand wonderfully--and there they began to sing. There they stood,father and mother and two daughters, chanting out stoutly, but nodoubt a little flatly after the manner of their kind--

  "In Zion's Hope abiding, My soul in Triumph sings---"

  until one by one they fell, and lay still.

  The postmaster had heard them in the gathering darkness,"In Zion's Hope abiding." . . .

  It was the most extraordinary thing in the world to hear this flushedand happy-eyed man telling that story of his recent death. It didnot seem at all possible to have happened in the last twelve hours.It was minute and remote, these people who went singing throughthe darkling to their God. It was like a scene shown to me, verysmall and very distinctly painted, in a locket.

  But that effect was not confined to this particular thing. A vastnumber of things that had happened before the coming of the comethad undergone the same transfiguring reduction. Other people, too,I have learnt since, had the same illusion, a sense of enlargement.It seems to me even now that the little dark creature who hadstormed across England in pursuit of Nettie and her lover musthave been about an inch high, that all that previous life of ourshad been an ill-lit marionette show, acted in the twilight. . . .