Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/141

Rh, that all that we call progress is not so much response to "urge" as it is response to a hiatus—or if you want something to grow somewhere, dig out everything else in its area. So I have to accept that the positive assurances of astronomers are necessary to us, or the blunderings, evasions and disguises of astronomers would never be tolerated: that, given such latitude as they are permitted to take, they could not be very disastrously mistaken. Suppose the comet called Halley's had not appeared

Early in 1910, a far more important comet than the anæmic luminosity said to be Halley's, appeared. It was so brilliant that it was visible in daylight. The astronomers would have been saved anyway. If this other comet did not have the predicted orbit—perturbation. If you're going to Coney Island, and predict there'll be a special kind of a pebble on the beach, I don't see how you can disgrace yourself, if some other pebble will do just as well—because the feeble thing said to have been seen in 1910 was no more in accord with the sensational descriptions given out by astronomers in advance than is a pale pebble with a brick-red bowlder.

I predict that next Wednesday, a large Chinaman, in evening clothes, will cross Broadway, at 42nd Street, at 9 p. m. He doesn't, but a tubercular Jap, in a sailor's uniform does cross Broadway, at 35th Street, Friday, at noon. Well, a Jap is a perturbed Chinaman, and clothes are clothes.

I remember the terrifying predictions made by the honest and credulous astronomers, who must have been themselves hypnotized, or they could not have hypnotized the rest of us, in 1909. Wills were made. Human life might be swept from this planet. In quasi-existence, which is essentially Hibernian, that would be no reason why wills should not be made. The less excitable of us did expect at least some pretty good fireworks.

I have to admit that it is said that, in New York, a light was seen in the sky.

It was about as terrifying as the scratch of a match on the seat of some breeches half a mile away.

It was not on time.

Though I have heard that a faint nebulosity, which I did not see, myself, though I looked when I was told to look, was seen in the sky, it appeared several days after the time predicted.

A hypnotized host of imbeciles of us: told to look up at the sky: we did—like a lot of pointers hypnotized by a partridge.