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

he bawled. "There!
There is the Star of Judgments, the Judgments of the most High
God! It is appointed unto all men to die—unto all men to die"—his
voice changed to a curious flat chant—"and after death, the
Judgment! The Judgment!"
    I pushed and threaded my way through the bystanders and went on,
and his curious harsh flat voice pursued me. I went on with the
thoughts that had occupied me before—where I could buy a revolver,
and how I might master its use—and probably I should have forgotten
all about him had he not taken a part in the hideous dream that
ended the little sleep I had that night. For the most part I lay
awake thinking of Nettie and her lover.
    Then came three strange days—three days that seem now to have been
wholly concentrated upon one business.
    This dominant business was the purchase of my revolver. I held
myself resolutely to the idea that I must either restore myself by
some extraordinary act of vigor and violence in Nettie's eyes or I
must kill her. I would not let myself fall away from that. I felt
that if I let this matter pass, my last shred of pride and honor
would pass with it, that for the rest of my life I should never
deserve the slightest respect or any woman's love. Pride kept me
to my purpose between my gusts of passion.
    Yet it was not easy to buy that revolver.
    I had a kind of shyness of the moment when I should have to face
the shopman, and I was particularly anxious to have a story ready
if he should see fit to ask questions why I bought such a thing.
I determined to say I was going to Texas, and I thought it might
prove useful there. Texas in those days had the reputation of a
wild lawless land. As I knew nothing of caliber or impact, I wanted
also to be able to ask with a steady face at what distance a man
or woman could be killed by the weapon that might be offered me.
I was pretty cool-headed in relation to such practical aspects of
my affair. I had some little difficulty in finding a gunsmith. In
Clayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth in a cycle shop,
but the only revolvers these people had impressed me as being too
small and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop window in
the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice, a
reasonably clumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed "As used
in the American army."
    I had drawn out my balance from the savings bank, matter of two
pounds and more, to make this purchase, and I found it at last
a very easy transaction. The pawnbroker told me where I could get
ammunition, and I went home that night with bulging pockets, an
armed man.
    The purchase of my revolver was, I say, the chief business of
those days, but you must not think I was so intent upon it as to
be insensible to the stirring things that were happening in the
streets through which I went seeking the means to effect my purpose.
They were full of murmurings: the whole region of the Four Towns
scowled lowering from its narrow doors. The ordinary healthy flow
of people going to work, people going about their business, was
chilled and checked. Numbers of men stood about the streets in knots
and groups, as corpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels in
the opening stages of inflammation. The woman looked haggard and
worried. The ironworkers had refused the proposed reduction of
their wages, and the lockout had begun. They were already at "play."
The Conciliation Board was doing its best to keep the coal-miners
and masters from a breach, but young Lord Redcar, the greatest of
our coal owners and landlord of all Swathinglea and half Clayton, was
taking a fine upstanding attitude that made the breach inevitable.
He was a handsome young man, a gallant young man; his pride revolted
at the idea of being dictated to by a "lot of bally miners," and
he meant, he said, to make a fight for it. The world had treated
him sumptuously from his earliest years; the shares in the common
stock of five thousand people had gone to pay for his