In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells Read Free Book Online

we punish those
who would give over the State to the pursuit of useless knowledge";
and so with a gloomy satisfaction sent him off to the guillotine.
    "Ah, Parload! Parload! If only you'd listened to me earlier,
Parload. . . ."
    None the less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy. Parload was
my only gossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and think
evil of him with no one to listen to me, evening after evening.
    That was a very miserable time for me, even before my last visit
to Checkshill. My long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands.
I kept away from home all day, partly to support a fiction that
I was sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escape
the persistent question in my mother's eyes. "Why did you quarrel
with Mr. Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keep on going about with
a sullen face and risk offending IT more?" I spent most of the
morning in the newspaper-room of the public library, writing
impossible applications for impossible posts—I remember that among
other things of the sort I offered my services to a firm of private
detectives, a sinister breed of traders upon base jealousies now
happily vanished from the world, and wrote apropos of an advertisement
for "stevedores" that I did not know what the duties of a stevedore
might be, but that I was apt and willing to learn—and in the
afternoons and evenings I wandered through the strange lights and
shadows of my native valley and hated all created things. Until my
wanderings were checked by the discovery that I was wearing out my
boots.
    The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!
    I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a
great capacity for hatred, BUT—
    There was an excuse for hate.
    It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh,
and vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have
been equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me,
without resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt
obscurely and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were
intolerable. My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an
unreasonable proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed,
ill housed, ill educated and ill trained, my will was suppressed
and cramped to the pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride in
myself and no reasonable chance of putting anything right. It was
a life hardly worth living. That a large proportion of the people
about me had no better a lot, that many had a worse, does not
affect these facts. It was a life in which contentment would have
been disgraceful. If some of them were contented or resigned, so
much the worse for every one. No doubt it was hasty and foolish
of me to throw up my situation, but everything was so obviously
aimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not feel
disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as it
pained my mother and caused her anxiety.
    Think of the one comprehensive fact of the lock-out!
    That year was a bad year, a year of world-wide economic disorganization.
Through their want of intelligent direction the great "Trust" of
American ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded furnace
owners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any demand
for. (In those days there existed no means of estimating any need
of that sort beforehand.) They had done this without even consulting
the ironmasters of any other country. During their period of activity
they had drawn into their employment a great number of workers,
and had erected a huge productive plant. It is manifestly just that
people who do headlong stupid things of this sort should suffer,
but in the old days it was quite possible, it was customary for
the real blunderers in such disasters, to shift nearly all the
consequences of their incapacity. No one thought it wrong for a
light-witted "captain of industry" who had led his workpeople into
overproduction, into the disproportionate manufacture, that is