Free In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells

pitied
me. It was all in the instant clear to me.
    You must imagine me a black little creature, suddenly stricken
still—for a moment standing rigid—and then again suddenly
becoming active with an impotent gesture, becoming audible with an
inarticulate cry, with two little shadows mocking my dismay, and
about this figure you must conceive a great wide space of moonlit
grass, rimmed by the looming suggestion of distant trees—trees
very low and faint and dim, and over it all the domed serenity of
that wonderful luminous night.
    For a little while this realization stunned my mind. My thoughts
came to a pause, staring at my discovery. Meanwhile my feet and my
previous direction carried me through the warm darkness to Checkshill
station with its little lights, to the ticket-office window, and
so to the train.
    I remember myself as it were waking up to the thing—I was alone
in one of the dingy "third-class" compartments of that time—and
the sudden nearly frantic insurgence of my rage. I stood up with the
cry of an angry animal, and smote my fist with all my strength
against the panel of wood before me. . . .
    Curiously enough I have completely forgotten my mood after that
for a little while, but I know that later, for a minute perhaps, I
hung for a time out of the carriage with the door open, contemplating
a leap from the train. It was to be a dramatic leap, and then I
would go storming back to her, denounce her, overwhelm her; and I
hung, urging myself to do it. I don't remember how it was I decided
not to do this, at last, but in the end I didn't.
    When the train stopped at the next station I had given up all
thoughts of going back. I was sitting in the corner of the carriage
with my bruised and wounded hand pressed under my arm, and still
insensible to its pain, trying to think out clearly a scheme of
action—action that should express the monstrous indignation that
possessed me.

Chapter the Third
— The Revolver
*
Section 1
    "THAT comet is going to hit the earth!"
    So said one of the two men who got into the train and settled down.
    "Ah!" said the other man.
    "They do say that it is made of gas, that comet. We sha'n't
blow up, shall us?". . .
    What did it matter to me?
    I was thinking of revenge—revenge against the primary conditions
of my being. I was thinking of Nettie and her lover. I was firmly
resolved he should not have her—though I had to kill them both to
prevent it. I did not care what else might happen, if only that end
was ensured. All my thwarted passions had turned to rage. I would
have accepted eternal torment that night without a second thought,
to be certain of revenge. A hundred possibilities of action, a
hundred stormy situations, a whirl of violent schemes, chased one
another through my shamed, exasperated mind. The sole prospect I
could endure was of some gigantic, inexorably cruel vindication of
my humiliated self.
    And Nettie? I loved Nettie still, but now with the intensest
jealousy, with the keen, unmeasuring hatred of wounded pride, and
baffled, passionate desire.
Section 2
    As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest—for my shilling and
a penny only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-Mile
Stone, and thence I had to walk over the hill—I remember very
vividly a little man with a shrill voice who was preaching under
a gas-lamp against a hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday evening
loafers. He was a short man, bald, with a little fair curly beard
and hair and watery blue eyes, and he was preaching that the end
of the world drew near.
    I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet with
the end of the world. He had got that jumbled up with international
politics and prophecies from the Book of Daniel.
    I stopped to hear him only for a moment or so. I do not think I
should have halted at all but his crowd blocked my path, and the
sight of his queer wild expression, the gesture of his upward-pointing
finger, held me.
    "There is the end of all your Sins and Follies,"