In the Days of the CometWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science
In the Days of the Comet
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Comets -- Collisions with Earth -- Fiction; Political fiction; Science fiction; Utopian fiction; Utopias -- Fiction
I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham. He came to the
bungalow a day before the others, because he was Melmount’s personal
friend. Let me describe this statesman to you, this one of the fifteen
men who made the last war. He was the youngest member of the
Government, and an altogether pleasant and sunny man of forty. He had a
clear profile to his clean gray face, a smiling eye, a friendly,
careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, an easy disabusing
manner. He had the perfect quality of a man who had fallen easily into
a place prepared for him. He had the temperament of what we used to
call a philosopher—an indifferent, that is to say. The Change had
caught him at his week-end recreation, fly-fishing; and, indeed, he
said, I remember, that he recovered to find himself with his head
within a yard of the water’s brim. In times of crisis Lord Adisham
invariably went fly-fishing at the week-end to keep his mind in tone,
and when there was no crisis then there was nothing he liked so much to
do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, as there was nothing to prevent
it, he fished. He came resolved, among other things, to give up
fly-fishing altogether. I was present when he came to Melmount, and
heard him say as much; and by a more naive route it was evident that he
had arrived at the same scheme of intention as my master. I left them
to talk, but afterward I came back to take down their long telegrams to
their coming colleagues. He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as
Melmount by the Change, but his tricks of civility and irony and
acceptable humor had survived the Change, and he expressed his altered
attitude, his expanded emotions, in a quaint modification of the
old-time man-of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a
trained horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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