In the Days of the Comet Read Online Free PDF Page A

like Parload and myself to represent
him—and come to his own, and then——?
    Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremely
satisfactory.
    Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injustice
to the creed of thought and action that Parload and I held as the
final result of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejected
with heat the most obvious qualification of its harshness. At
times in our great talks we were full of heady hopes for the near
triumph of our doctrine, more often our mood was hot resentment
at the wickedness and stupidity that delayed so plain and simple a
reconstruction of the order of the world. Then we grew malignant,
and thought of barricades and significant violence. I was very
bitter, I know, upon this night of which I am now particularly
telling, and the only face upon the hydra of Capitalism and Monopoly
that I could see at all clearly, smiled exactly as old Rawdon had
smiled when he refused to give me more than a paltry twenty shillings
a week.
    I wanted intensely to salve my self-respect by some revenge upon
him, and I felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, I
might drag its carcass to the feet of Nettie, and settle my other
trouble as well. "What do you think of me NOW, Nettie?"
    That at any rate comes near enough to the quality of my thinking,
then, for you to imagine how I gesticulated and spouted to Parload
that night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing in
the outline, set in the midst of that desolating night of flaming
industrialism, and my little voice with a rhetorical twang
protesting, denouncing. . . .
    You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent
stuff; particularly if you are of the younger generation born since
the Change you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world
thinks clearly, thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, you
find it impossible to imagine how any other thinking could have
been possible. Let me tell you then how you can bring yourself
to something like the condition of our former state. In the first
place you must get yourself out of health by unwise drinking and
eating, and out of condition by neglecting your exercise, then you
must contrive to be worried very much and made very anxious and
uncomfortable, and then you must work very hard for four or five
days and for long hours every day at something too petty to be
interesting, too complex to be mechanical, and without any personal
significance to you whatever. This done, get straightway into
a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is already full of
foul air, and there set yourself to think out some very complicated
problem. In a very little while you will find yourself in a state
of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the obvious
presently in choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try
to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly and
lose your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper
and you will fail.
    Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as
that, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that
would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it
was in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing;
there was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There
was nothing in the mind of the world anywhere but half-truths,
hasty assumptions, hallucinations, and emotions. Nothing. . . .
    I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men
are beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has
undergone, but read—read the newspapers of that time. Every age
becomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes
into the past. It is the part of those who like myself have stories
of that time to tell, to supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism,
some antidote to that glamour.
Section 4
    Always with Parload I was chief talker.
    I can look back