In the Days of the Comet
by
H. G. Wells
Part 1 out of 5
This etext was produced by Dudley P. Duck.
This etext was produced by Judy Boss.
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
BY H. G. WELLS
"The World's Great Age begins anew,
The Golden Years return,
The Earth doth like a Snake renew
Her Winter Skin outworn:
Heaven smiles, and Faiths and Empires gleam
Like Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PAGE
THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER . 3
BOOK THE FIRST
THE COMET
CHAPTER
I. DUST IN THE SHADOWS . . . . . . 9
II. NETTIE . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
III. THE REVOLVER . . . . . . . . . 89
IV. WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
V. THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS . . 184
BOOK THE SECOND
THE GREEN VAPORS
I. THE CHANGE . . . . . . . . . 221
II. THE AWAKENING . . . . . . . . . 252
III. THE CABINET COUNCIL . . . . . . . 279
BOOK THE THIRD
THE NEW WORLD
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LOVE AFTER THE CHANGE . . . . . . 303
II. MY MOTHER'S LAST DAYS . . . . . . 335
III. BELTANE AND NEW YEAR'S EVE . . . 353
EPILOGUE
THE WINDOW OF THE TOWER . . . . . . . 375
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
PROLOGUE
THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER
I SAW a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk
and writing:
He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through
the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote
horizon of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the
sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of
this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality,
in this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were
in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore
suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the
Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant
mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good
Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed and left no light.
The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen, a modern touch
that prohibited any historical retrospection, and as he finished
each sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing
pile upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done
sheets lay loose, partly covering others that were clipped together
into fascicles.
Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until
his pen should come to a pause. Old as he certainly was
he wrote with a steady hand. . . .
I discovered that a concave speculum hung slantingly high over his
head; a movement in this caught my attention sharply, and I looked
up to see, distorted and made fantastic but bright and beautifully
colored, the magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a palace,
of a terrace, of the vista of a great roadway with many people,
people exaggerated, impossible-looking because of the curvature of
the mirror, going to and fro. I turned my head quickly that I might
see more clearly through the window behind me, but it was too high
for me to survey this nearer scene directly, and after a momentary
pause I came back to that distorting mirror again.
But now the writer was leaning back in his chair. He put down his
pen and sighed the half resentful sigh--"ah! you, work, you! how
you gratify and tire me!"--of a man who has been writing to his
satisfaction.
"What is this place," I asked, "and who are you?"
He looked around with the quick movement of surprise.
"What is this place?" I repeated, "and where am I?"
He regarded me steadfastly for a moment under his wrinkled brows,
and then his expression softened to a smile. He pointed to a chair
beside the table. "I am writing," he said.
"About this?"
"About the change."
I sat down. It was a very comfortable chair, and well placed under
the light.
"If you would like to read--" he said.
I indicated the manuscript. "This explains?" I asked.
"That explains," he answered.
He drew a fresh sheet of paper toward him as he looked at me.
I glanced from him about his apartment and back to the little
table. A fascicle marked very distinctly "1" caught my attention,
and I took it up. I smiled in his friendly eyes. "Very well," said
I, suddenly at my ease, and he nodded and went on writing. And in
a mood between confidence and curiosity, I began to read.
This is the story that happy, active-looking old man in that pleasant
place had written.
BOOK THE FIRST
THE COMET
CHAPTER THE FIRST
DUST IN THE SHADOWS
Section 1
I HAVE set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far
as it has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people
closely connected with me, primarily to please myself.
Long ago in my crude unhappy youth, I conceived the desire of
writing a book. To scribble secretly and dream of authorship was
one of my chief alleviations, and I read with a sympathetic envy
every scrap I could get about the world of literature and the
lives of literary people. It is something, even amidst this present
happiness, to find leisure and opportunity to take up and partially
realize these old and hopeless dreams. But that alone, in a world
where so much of vivid and increasing interest presents itself to
be done, even by an old man, would not, I think, suffice to set
me at this desk. I find some such recapitulation of my past as
this will involve, is becoming necessary to my own secure mental
continuity. The passage of years brings a man at last to retrospection;
at seventy-two one's youth is far more important than it was at
forty. And I am out of touch with my youth. The old life seems so
cut off from the new, so alien and so unreasonable, that at times
I find it bordering upon the incredible. The data have gone, the
buildings and places. I stopped dead the other afternoon in my walk
across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts of Swathinglea
straggled toward Leet, and asked, "Was it here indeed that I
crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and loaded
my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my
life? Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to
me? Rather, has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland
slipped a pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?"
There must be many alive still who have the same perplexities. And
I think too that those who are now growing up to take our places
in the great enterprise of mankind, will need many such narratives
as mine for even the most partial conception of the old world
of shadows that came before our day. It chances too that my case
is fairly typical of the Change; I was caught midway in a gust
of passion; and a curious accident put me for a time in the very
nucleus of the new order.
My memory takes me back across the interval of fifty years to a
little ill-lit room with a sash window open to a starry sky, and
instantly there returns to me the characteristic smell of that
room, the penetrating odor of an ill-trimmed lamp, burning cheap
paraffin. Lighting by electricity had then been perfected for fifteen
years, but still the larger portion of the world used these lamps.
All this first scene will go, in my mind at least, to that olfactory
accompaniment. That was the evening smell of the room. By day
it had a more subtle aroma, a closeness, a peculiar sort of faint
pungency that I associate--I know not why--with dust.
Let me describe this room to you in detail. It was perhaps eight
feet by seven in area and rather higher than either of these
dimensions; the ceiling was of plaster, cracked and bulging in
places, gray with the soot of the lamp, and in one place discolored
by a system of yellow and olive-green stains caused by the percolation
of damp from above. The walls were covered with dun-colored paper,
upon which had been printed in oblique reiteration a crimson shape,
something of the nature of a curly ostrich feather, or an acanthus
flower, that had in its less faded moments a sort of dingy gaiety.
There were several big plaster-rimmed wounds in this, caused by
Parload's ineffectual attempts to get nails into the wall, whereby
there might hang pictures. One nail had hit between two bricks and
got home, and from this depended, sustained a little insecurely
by frayed and knotted blind-cord, Parload's hanging bookshelves,
planks painted over with a treacly blue enamel and further decorated
by a fringe of pinked American cloth insecurely fixed by tacks. Below
this was a little table that behaved with a mulish vindictiveness
to any knee that was thrust beneath it suddenly; it was covered
with a cloth whose pattern of red and black had been rendered less
monotonous by the accidents of Parload's versatile ink bottle, and
on it, leit motif of the whole, stood and stank the lamp. This lamp,
you must understand, was of some whitish translucent substance that
was neither china nor glass, it had a shade of the same substance,
a shade that did not protect the eyes of a reader in any measure,
and it seemed admirably adapted to bring into pitiless prominence
the fact that, after the lamp's trimming, dust and paraffin had
been smeared over its exterior with a reckless generosity.
The uneven floor boards of this apartment were covered with scratched
enamel of chocolate hue, on which a small island of frayed carpet
dimly blossomed in the dust and shadows.
There was a very small grate, made of cast-iron in one piece and
painted buff, and a still smaller misfit of a cast-iron fender
that confessed the gray stone of the hearth. No fire was laid, only
a few scraps of torn paper and the bowl of a broken corn-cob pipe
were visible behind the bars, and in the corner and rather thrust
away was an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge. It
was the custom in those days to warm every room separately from a
separate fireplace, more prolific of dirt than heat, and the rickety
sash window, the small chimney, and the loose-fitting door were
expected to organize the ventilation of the room among themselves
without any further direction.
Parload's truckle bed hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchwork
counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and
suchlike oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were
an old whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed
the simple appliances of his toilet.
This washhandstand had been made of deal by some one with an
excess of turnery appliances in a hurry, who had tried to distract
attention from the rough economies of his workmanship by an arresting
ornamentation of blobs and bulbs upon the joints and legs. Apparently
the piece had then been placed in the hands of some person of
infinite leisure equipped with a pot of ocherous paint, varnish,
and a set of flexible combs. This person had first painted the
article, then, I fancy, smeared it with varnish, and then sat down
to work with the combs to streak and comb the varnish into a weird
imitation of the grain of some nightmare timber. The washhandstand so
made had evidently had a prolonged career of violent use, had been
chipped, kicked, splintered, punched, stained, scorched, hammered,
dessicated, damped, and defiled, had met indeed with almost every
possible adventure except a conflagration or a scrubbing, until at
last it had come to this high refuge of Parload's attic to sustain
the simple requirements of Parload's personal cleanliness. There
were, in chief, a basin and a jug of water and a slop-pail of tin,
and, further, a piece of yellow soap in a tray, a tooth-brush, a
rat-tailed shaving brush, one huckaback towel, and one or two other
minor articles. In those days only very prosperous people had more
than such an equipage, and it is to be remarked that every drop
of water Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servant
girl,--the "slavey," Parload called her--up from the basement to
the top of the house and subsequently down again. Already we begin
to forget how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a
fact that Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never
had a simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. Not
one in fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you.
A chest, also singularly grained and streaked, of two large and
two small drawers, held Parload's reserve of garments, and pegs
on the door carried his two hats and completed this inventory
of a "bed-sitting-room" as I knew it before the Change. But I had
forgotten--there was also a chair with a "squab" that apologized
inadequately for the defects of its cane seat. I forgot that for
the moment because I was sitting on the chair on the occasion that
best begins this story.
I have described Parload's room with such particularity because it
will help you to understand the key in which my earlier chapters
are written, but you must not imagine that this singular equipment
or the smell of the lamp engaged my attention at that time to the
slightest degree. I took all this grimy unpleasantness as if it
were the most natural and proper setting for existence imaginable.
It was the world as I knew it. My mind was entirely occupied then
by graver and intenser matters, and it is only now in the distant
retrospect that I see these details of environment as being
remarkable, as significant, as indeed obviously the outward visible
manifestations of the old world disorder in our hearts.
Section 2
Parload stood at the open window, opera-glass in hand, and sought
and found and was uncertain about and lost again, the new comet.
I thought the comet no more than a nuisance then because I wanted
to talk of other matters. But Parload was full of it. My head was
hot, I was feverish with interlacing annoyances and bitterness,
I wanted to open my heart to him--at least I wanted to relieve my
heart by some romantic rendering of my troubles--and I gave but
little heed to the things he told me. It was the first time I had
heard of this new speck among the countless specks of heaven, and
I did not care if I never heard of the thing again.
We were two youths much of an age together, Parload was two and
twenty, and eight months older than I. He was--I think his proper
definition was "engrossing clerk" to a little solicitor in Overcastle,
while I was third in the office staff of Rawdon's pot-bank in
Clayton. We had met first in the "Parliament" of the Young Men's
Christian Association of Swathinglea; we had found we attended
simultaneous classes in Overcastle, he in science and I in shorthand,
and had started a practice of walking home together, and so our
friendship came into being. (Swathinglea, Clayton, and Overcastle
were contiguous towns, I should mention, in the great industrial
area of the Midlands.) We had shared each other's secret of religious
doubt, we had confided to one another a common interest in Socialism,
he had come twice to supper at my mother's on a Sunday night, and
I was free of his apartment. He was then a tall, flaxen-haired,
gawky youth, with a disproportionate development of neck and wrist,
and capable of vast enthusiasm; he gave two evenings a week to
the evening classes of the organized science school in Overcastle,
physiography was his favorite "subject," and through this insidious
opening of his mind the wonder of outer space had come to take
possession of his soul. He had commandeered an old opera-glass
from his uncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had bought a
cheap paper planisphere and Whitaker's Almanac, and for a time day
and moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one satisfactory
reality in his life--star-gazing. It was the deeps that had seized
him, the immensities, and the mysterious possibilities that might
float unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor and the
help of a very precise article in The Heavens, a little monthly
magazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, he
had at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our system
from outer space. He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quivering
little smudge of light among the shining pin-points--and gazed. My
troubles had to wait for him.
"Wonderful," he sighed, and then as though his first emphasis did
not satisfy him, "wonderful!"
He turned to me. "Wouldn't you like to see?"
I had to look, and then I had to listen, how that this scarce-visible
intruder was to be, was presently to be, one of the largest comets
this world has ever seen, how that its course must bring it within
at most--so many score of millions of miles from the earth, a mere
step, Parload seemed to think that; how that the spectroscope was
already sounding its chemical secrets, perplexed by the unprecedented
band in the green, how it was even now being photographed in the
very act of unwinding--in an unusual direction--a sunward tail
(which presently it wound up again), and all the while in a sort
of undertow I was thinking first of Nettie Stuart and the letter
she had just written me, and then of old Rawdon's detestable face
as I had seen it that afternoon. Now I planned answers to Nettie
and now belated repartees to my employer, and then again "Nettie"
was blazing all across the background of my thoughts. . . .
Nettie Stuart was daughter of the head gardener of the rich Mr.
Verrall's widow, and she and I had kissed and become sweethearts
before we were eighteen years old. My mother and hers were second
cousins and old schoolfellows, and though my mother had been widowed
untimely by a train accident, and had been reduced to letting lodgings
(she was the Clayton curate's landlady), a position esteemed much
lower than that of Mrs. Stuart, a kindly custom of occasional
visits to the gardener's cottage at Checkshill Towers still kept
the friends in touch. Commonly I went with her. And I remember it
was in the dusk of one bright evening in July, one of those long
golden evenings that do not so much give way to night as admit at
last, upon courtesy, the moon and a choice retinue of stars, that
Nettie and I, at the pond of goldfish where the yew-bordered walks
converged, made our shy beginners' vow. I remember still--something
will always stir in me at that memory--the tremulous emotion of
that adventure. Nettie was dressed in white, her hair went off in
waves of soft darkness from above her dark shining eyes; there was
a little necklace of pearls about her sweetly modeled neck, and
a little coin of gold that nestled in her throat. I kissed her
half-reluctant lips, and for three years of my life thereafter--nay!
I almost think for all the rest of her life and mine--I could have
died for her sake.
You must understand--and every year it becomes increasingly difficult
to understand--how entirely different the world was then from what
it is now. It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder,
preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid
unpremeditated cruelties, but yet, it may be even by virtue of
the general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent
beauty that seem no longer possible in my experience. The
great Change has come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our
atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men. None
would dare to dream of returning to the sorrows of the former time,
and yet that misery was pierced, ever and again its gray curtain was
stabbed through and through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions
of a keenness that it seems to me are now altogether gone out
of life. Is it the Change, I wonder, that has robbed life of its
extremes, or is it perhaps only this, that youth has left me--even
the strength of middle years leaves me now--and taken its despairs
and raptures, leaving me judgment, perhaps, sympathy, memories?
I cannot tell. One would need to be young now and to have been
young then as well, to decide that impossible problem.
Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found little
beauty in our grouping. I have our two photographs at hand in this
bureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fitting
ready-made clothing, and Nettie--Indeed Nettie is badly dressed,
and her attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see her
through the picture, and her living brightness and something of
that mystery of charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind.
Her face has triumphed over the photographer --or I would long ago
have cast this picture away.
The reality of beauty yields itself to no words. I wish that I had
the sister art and could draw in my margin something that escapes
description. There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There was
something, a matter of the minutest difference, about her upper
lip so that her mouth closed sweetly and broke very sweetly to a
smile. That grave, sweet smile!
After we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents for awhile
of the irrevocable choice we had made, the time came for us to part,
shyly and before others, and I and my mother went off back across
the moonlit park--the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer--to
the railway station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement in
Clayton, and I saw no more of Nettie--except that I saw her in my
thoughts--for nearly a year. But at our next meeting it was decided
that we must correspond, and this we did with much elaboration
of secrecy, for Nettie would have no one at home, not even her
only sister, know of her attachment. So I had to send my precious
documents sealed and under cover by way of a confidential schoolfellow
of hers who lived near London. . . . I could write that address
down now, though house and street and suburb have gone beyond any
man's tracing.
Our correspondence began our estrangement, because for the first
time we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds sought
expression.
Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was
in the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate
formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary
contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and
subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man's
lips. I was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrow
faith in certain religious formulae, certain rules of conduct,
certain conceptions of social and political order, that had no more
relevance to the realities and needs of everyday contemporary life
than if they were clean linen that had been put away with lavender
in a drawer. Indeed, her religion did actually smell of lavender;
on Sundays she put away all the things of reality, the garments and
even the furnishings of everyday, hid her hands, that were gnarled
and sometimes chapped with scrubbing, in black, carefully mended
gloves, assumed her old black silk dress and bonnet and took me,
unnaturally clean and sweet also, to church. There we sang and
bowed and heard sonorous prayers and joined in sonorous responses,
and rose with a congregational sigh refreshed and relieved when the
doxology, with its opening "Now to God the Father, God the Son,"
bowed out the tame, brief sermon. There was a hell in that religion
of my mother's, a red-haired hell of curly flames that had once
been very terrible; there was a devil, who was also ex officio the
British King's enemy, and much denunciation of the wicked lusts
of the flesh; we were expected to believe that most of our poor
unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here by
suffering exquisite torments for ever after, world without end,
Amen. But indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole
thing had been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long
before my time; if it had much terror even in my childhood I have
forgotten it, it was not so terrible as the giant who was killed
by the Beanstalk, and I see it all now as a setting for my poor
old mother's worn and grimy face, and almost lovingly as a part
of her. And Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little lodger, strangely
transformed in his vestments and lifting his voice manfully to
the quality of those Elizabethan prayers, seemed, I think, to give
her a special and peculiar interest with God. She radiated her
own tremulous gentleness upon Him, and redeemed Him from all the
implications of vindictive theologians; she was in truth, had I
but perceived it, the effectual answer to all she would have taught
me.
So I see it now, but there is something harsh in the earnest
intensity of youth, and having at first taken all these things quite
seriously, the fiery hell and God's vindictiveness at any neglect,
as though they were as much a matter of fact as Bladden's iron-works
and Rawdon's pot-bank, I presently with an equal seriousness flung
them out of my mind again.
Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, "take
notice" of me, he had induced me to go on reading after I left
school, and with the best intentions in the world and to anticipate
the poison of the times, he had lent me Burble's "Scepticism
Answered," and drawn my attention to the library of the Institute
in Clayton.
The excellent Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear from
his answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy
and all that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had
hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor
one, and to hammer home that idea the first book I got from the
Institute happened to be an American edition of the collected works
of Shelley, his gassy prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was
soon ripe for blatant unbelief. And at the Young Men's Christian
Association I presently made the acquaintance of Parload, who told
me, under promises of the most sinister secrecy, that he was "a
Socialist out and out." He lent me several copies of a periodical
with the clamant title of The Clarion, which was just taking up a
crusade against the accepted religion. The adolescent years of any
fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will always lie healthily
open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and new
ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase badly. Doubt,
I say, but it was not so much doubt--which is a complex thing--as
startled emphatic denial. "Have I believed THIS!" And I was also,
you must remember, just beginning love-letters to Nettie.
We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most
things accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a
sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing
from our vigor, and it is hard to understand the stifled and
struggling manner in which my generation of common young men did
its thinking. To think at all about certain questions was an act
of rebellion that set one oscillating between the furtive and the
defiant. People begin to find Shelley--for all his melody--noisy
and ill conditioned now because his Anarchs have vanished, yet there
was a time when novel thought HAD to go to that tune of breaking
glass. It becomes a little difficult to imagine the yeasty state
of mind, the disposition to shout and say, "Yah!" at constituted
authority, to sustain a persistent note of provocation such as we
raw youngsters displayed. I began to read with avidity such writing
as Carlyle, Browning, and Heine have left for the perplexity
of posterity, and not only to read and admire but to imitate. My
letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended displays of
perfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology, and the
cosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they puzzled
her extremely.
I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to
envy for my own departed youth, but I should find it difficult to
maintain my case against any one who would condemn me altogether as
having been a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy indeed
and quite like my faded photograph. And when I try to recall what
exactly must have been the quality and tenor of my more sustained
efforts to write memorably to my sweetheart, I confess I shiver.
. . Yet I wish they were not all destroyed.
Her letters to me were simple enough, written in a roundish,
unformed hand and badly phrased. Her first two or three showed a
shy pleasure in the use of the word "dear," and I remember being
first puzzled and then, when I understood, delighted, because she
had written "Willie ASTHORE" under my name. "Asthore," I gathered,
meant "darling." But when the evidences of my fermentation began,
her answers were less happy.
I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled in our
silly youthful way, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited,
to Checkshill, and made it worse, and how afterward I wrote a letter
that she thought was "lovely," and mended the matter. Nor will I
tell of all our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding. Always
I was the offender and the final penitent until this last trouble
that was now beginning; and in between we had some tender near
moments, and I loved her very greatly. There was this misfortune
in the business, that in the darkness, and alone, I thought with
great intensity of her, of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweet
and delightful presence, but when I sat down to write I thought of
Shelley and Burns and myself, and other such irrelevant matters.
When one is in love, in this fermenting way, it is harder to make
love than it is when one does not love at all. And as for Nettie,
she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries. It was not
my voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . . So our letters
continued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether
she could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not
believe in Church, and then hard upon it came another note with
unexpected novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suited
to each other, we differed so in tastes and ideas, she had long
thought of releasing me from our engagement. In fact, though I really
did not apprehend it fully at the first shock, I was dismissed.
Her letter had reached me when I came home after old Rawdon's none
too civil refusal to raise my wages. On this particular evening of
which I write, therefore, I was in a state of feverish adjustment
to two new and amazing, two nearly overwhelming facts, that I was
neither indispensable to Nettie nor at Rawdon's. And to talk of
comets!
Where did I stand?
I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably
mine--the whole tradition of "true love" pointed me to that--that
for her to face about with these precise small phrases toward
abandonment, after we had kissed and whispered and come so close
in the little adventurous familiarities of the young, shocked me
profoundly. I! I! And Rawdon didn't find me indispensable either.
I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the universe and threatened
with effacement, that in some positive and emphatic way I must at
once assert myself. There was no balm in the religion I had learnt,
or in the irreligion I had adopted, for wounded self-love.
Should I fling up Rawdon's place at once and then in some extraordinary,
swift manner make the fortune of Frobisher's adjacent and closely
competitive pot-bank?
The first part of that program, at any rate, would be easy of
accomplishment, to go to Rawdon and say, "You will hear from me
again," but for the rest, Frobisher might fail me. That, however,
was a secondary issue. The predominant affair was with Nettie.
I found my mind thick-shot with flying fragments of rhetoric that
might be of service in the letter I would write her. Scorn, irony,
tenderness--what was it to be?
"Brother!" said Parload, suddenly.
"What?" said I.
"They're firing up at Bladden's iron-works, and the smoke comes
right across my bit of sky."
The interruption came just as I was ripe to discharge my thoughts
upon him.
"Parload," said I, "very likely I shall have to leave all this. Old
Rawdon won't give me a rise in my wages, and after having asked I
don't think I can stand going on upon the old terms anymore. See?
So I may have to clear out of Clayton for good and all."
Section 3
That made Parload put down the opera-glass and look at me.
"It's a bad time to change just now," he said after a little pause.
Rawdon had said as much, in a less agreeable tone.
But with Parload I felt always a disposition to the heroic note.
"I'm tired," I said, "of humdrum drudgery for other men. One may
as well starve one's body out of a place as to starve one's soul
in one."
"I don't know about that altogether," began Parload, slowly. . . .
And with that we began one of our interminable conversations, one
of those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal
talks that will be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths until
the world comes to an end. The Change has not abolished that,
anyhow.
It would be an incredible feat of memory for me now to recall all
that meandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it,
though its circumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clear
picture in my mind. I posed after my manner and behaved very foolishly
no doubt, a wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his part
of the philosopher preoccupied with the deeps.
We were presently abroad, walking through the warm summer's night
and talking all the more freely for that. But one thing that I
said I can remember. "I wish at times," said I, with a gesture at
the heavens, "that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed
strike this world--and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults,
loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!"
"Ah!" said Parload, and the thought seemed to hang about him.
"It could only add to the miseries of life," he said irrelevantly,
when presently I was discoursing of other things.
"What would?"
"Collision with a comet. It would only throw things back. It would
only make what was left of life more savage than it is at present."
"But why should ANYTHING be left of life?" said I. . . .
That was our style, you know, and meanwhile we walked together up
the narrow street outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanes
toward Clayton Crest and the high road.
But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days before
the Change that I forget that now all these places have been altered
beyond recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway and the
view from Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world in which I was
born and bred and made, has vanished clean away, out of space and
out of time, and wellnigh out of the imagination of all those who
are younger by a generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see,
the dark empty way between the mean houses, the dark empty way
lit by a bleary gas-lamp at the corner, you cannot feel the hard
checkered pavement under your boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit
windows here and there, and the shadows upon the ugly and often
patched and crooked blinds of the people cooped within. Nor can you
presently pass the beerhouse with its brighter gas and its queer,
screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul air and foul language
from its door, nor see the crumpled furtive figure--some rascal
child--that slinks past us down the steps.
We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting
smoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one
saw the greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares of
hawkers' barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement of
people swayed along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerant
preacher from a waste place between the houses. You cannot see these
things as I can see them, nor can you figure--unless you know the
pictures that great artist Hyde has left the world--the effect of
the great hoarding by which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp and
towering up to a sudden sharp black edge against the pallid sky.
Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in all
that vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and
paper, all the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromatic
discord; pill vendors and preachers, theaters and charities,
marvelous soaps and astonishing pickles, typewriting machines and
sewing machines, mingled in a sort of visualized clamor. And passing
that there was a muddy lane of cinders, a lane without a light,
that used its many puddles to borrow a star or so from the sky. We
splashed along unheeding as we talked.
Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-looking
sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road.
The high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse
or so, and round until all the valley in which four industrial
towns lay crowded and confluent was overlooked.
I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird
magnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The
horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were
homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of
unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave
and wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where
the iron ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the
blast furnaces were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust
from foundry, pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated
by the night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression
through the day became at sundown a mystery of deep translucent
colors, of blues and purples, of somber and vivid reds, of strange
bright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky.
Each upstart furnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itself
with flames, the dark cinder heaps began to glow with quivering
fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet of
light. The empire of the day broke into a thousand feudal baronies
of burning coal. The minor streets across the valley picked themselves
out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that brightened and mingled at
all the principal squares and crossings with the greenish pallor of
incandescent mantles and the high cold glare of the electric arc.
The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes over their
intersections, and signal stars of red and green in rectangular
constellations. The trains became articulated black serpents
breathing fire.
Moreover, high overhead, like a thing put out of reach and near
forgotten, Parload had rediscovered a realm that was ruled by
neither sun nor furnace, the universe of stars.
This was the scene of many a talk we two had held together. And
if in the daytime we went right over the crest and looked westward
there was farmland, there were parks and great mansions, the spire
of a distant cathedral, and sometimes when the weather was near
raining, the crests of remote mountains hung clearly in the sky.
Beyond the range of sight indeed, out beyond, there was Checkshill;
I felt it there always, and in the darkness more than I did by day.
Checkshill, and Nettie!
And to us two youngsters as we walked along the cinder path beside
the rutted road and argued out our perplexities, it seemed that
this ridge gave us compendiously a view of our whole world.
There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factories
and work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, ill
nourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasion
in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from day
to day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidst
their wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption,
and on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heeding
the few cottages, as overcrowded as they were picturesque, in which
the laborers festered, lived the landlords and masters who owned
pot-banks and forge and farm and mine. Far away, distant, beautiful,
irrelevant, from out of a little cluster of secondhand bookshops,
ecclesiastical residences, and the inns and incidentals of a decaying
market town, the cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful,
unemphatic spire to vague incredible skies. So it seemed to us that
the whole world was planned in those youthful first impressions.
We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry, confident
solutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of the
robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there
in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with
his scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others
were all the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt they
winked and chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling,
wickedly dressed women, and plotted further grinding for the faces
of the poor. And amidst all the squalor on the other hand, amidst
brutalities, ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously
their blameless victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at the
first glance, had found all this out, it had merely to be asserted
now with sufficient rhetoric and vehemence to change the face
of the whole world. The Working Man would arise--in the form of a
Labor Party, and with young men like Parload and myself to represent
him--and come to his own, and then------?
Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremely
satisfactory.
Unless my memory plays me strange tricks that does no injustice
to the creed of thought and action that Parload and I held as the
final result of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejected
with heat the most obvious qualification of its harshness. At
times in our great talks we were full of heady hopes for the near
triumph of our doctrine, more often our mood was hot resentment
at the wickedness and stupidity that delayed so plain and simple a
reconstruction of the order of the world. Then we grew malignant,
and thought of barricades and significant violence. I was very
bitter, I know, upon this night of which I am now particularly
telling, and the only face upon the hydra of Capitalism and Monopoly
that I could see at all clearly, smiled exactly as old Rawdon had
smiled when he refused to give me more than a paltry twenty shillings
a week.
I wanted intensely to salve my self-respect by some revenge upon
him, and I felt that if that could be done by slaying the hydra, I
might drag its carcass to the feet of Nettie, and settle my other
trouble as well. "What do you think of me NOW, Nettie?"
That at any rate comes near enough to the quality of my thinking,
then, for you to imagine how I gesticulated and spouted to Parload
that night. You figure us as little black figures, unprepossessing in
the outline, set in the midst of that desolating night of flaming
industrialism, and my little voice with a rhetorical twang
protesting, denouncing. . . .
You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent
stuff; particularly if you are of the younger generation born since
the Change you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world
thinks clearly, thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties, you
find it impossible to imagine how any other thinking could have
been possible. Let me tell you then how you can bring yourself
to something like the condition of our former state. In the first
place you must get yourself out of health by unwise drinking and
eating, and out of condition by neglecting your exercise, then you
must contrive to be worried very much and made very anxious and
uncomfortable, and then you must work very hard for four or five
days and for long hours every day at something too petty to be
interesting, too complex to be mechanical, and without any personal
significance to you whatever. This done, get straightway into
a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is already full of
foul air, and there set yourself to think out some very complicated
problem. In a very little while you will find yourself in a state
of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the obvious
presently in choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try
to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly and
lose your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper
and you will fail.
Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as
that, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that
would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it
was in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing;
there was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There
was nothing in the mind of the world anywhere but half-truths,
hasty assumptions, hallucinations, and emotions. Nothing. . . .
I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men
are beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has
undergone, but read--read the newspapers of that time. Every age
becomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes
into the past. It is the part of those who like myself have stories
of that time to tell, to supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism,
some antidote to that glamour.
Section 4
Always with Parload I was chief talker.
I can look back upon myself with, I believe, an almost perfect
detachment, things have so changed that indeed now I am another
being, with scarce anything in common with that boastful foolish
youngster whose troubles I recall. I see him vulgarly theatrical,
egotistical, insincere, indeed I do not like him save with
that instinctive material sympathy that is the fruit of incessant
intimacy. Because he was myself I may be able to feel and write
understandingly about motives that will put him out of sympathy
with nearly every reader, but why should I palliate or defend his
quality?
Always, I say, I did the talking, and it would have amazed me
beyond measure if any one had told me that mine was not the greater
intelligence in these wordy encounters. Parload was a quiet youth,
and stiff and restrained in all things, while I had that supreme
gift for young men and democracies, the gift of copious expression.
Parload I diagnosed in my secret heart as a trifle dull; he posed
as pregnant quiet, I thought, and was obsessed by the congenial
notion of "scientific caution." I did not remark that while my hands
were chiefly useful for gesticulation or holding a pen Parload's
hands could do all sorts of things, and I did not think therefore
that fibers must run from those fingers to something in his brain.
Nor, though I bragged perpetually of my shorthand, of my literature,
of my indispensable share in Rawdon's business, did Parload lay
stress on the conics and calculus he "mugged" in the organized
science school. Parload is a famous man now, a great figure in
a great time, his work upon intersecting radiations has broadened
the intellectual horizon of mankind for ever, and I, who am at best
a hewer of intellectual wood, a drawer of living water, can smile,
and he can smile, to think how I patronized and posed and jabbered
over him in the darkness of those early days.
That night I was shrill and eloquent beyond measure. Rawdon was, of
course, the hub upon which I went round--Rawdon and the Rawdonesque
employer and the injustice of "wages slavery" and all the immediate
conditions of that industrial blind alley up which it seemed our
lives were thrust. But ever and again I glanced at other things.
Nettie was always there in the background of my mind, regarding
me enigmatically. It was part of my pose to Parload that I had
a romantic love-affair somewhere away beyond the sphere of our
intercourse, and that note gave a Byronic resonance to many of the
nonsensical things I produced for his astonishment.
I will not weary you with too detailed an account of the talk of a
foolish youth who was also distressed and unhappy, and whose voice
was balm for the humiliations that smarted in his eyes. Indeed,
now in many particulars I cannot disentangle this harangue of which
I tell from many of the things I may have said in other talks to
Parload. For example, I forget if it was then or before or afterwards
that, as it were by accident, I let out what might be taken as an
admission that I was addicted to drugs.
"You shouldn't do that," said Parload, suddenly. "It won't do to
poison your brains with that."
My brains, my eloquence, were to be very important assets
to our party in the coming revolution. . . .
But one thing does clearly belong to this particular conversation
I am recalling. When I started out it was quite settled in the back
of my mind that I must not leave Rawdon's. I simply wanted to abuse
my employer to Parload. But I talked myself quite out of touch
with all the cogent reasons there were for sticking to my place,
and I got home that night irrevocably committed to a spirited--not
to say a defiant--policy with my employer.
"I can't stand Rawdon's much longer," I said to Parload by way of
a flourish.
"There's hard times coming," said Parload.
"Next winter."
"Sooner. The Americans have been overproducing, and they mean to
dump. The iron trade is going to have convulsions."
"I don't care. Pot-banks are steady."
"With a corner in borax? No. I've heard--"
"What have you heard?"
"Office secrets. But it's no secret there's trouble coming to
potters. There's been borrowing and speculation. The masters don't
stick to one business as they used to do. I can tell that much.
Half the valley may be 'playing' before two months are out." Parload
delivered himself of this unusually long speech in his most pithy
and weighty manner.
"Playing" was our local euphemism for a time when there was no work
and no money for a man, a time of stagnation and dreary hungry
loafing day after day. Such interludes seemed in those days a
necessary consequence of industrial organization.
"You'd better stick to Rawdon's," said Parload.
"Ugh," said I, affecting a noble disgust.
"There'll be trouble," said Parload.
"Who cares?" said I. "Let there be trouble --the more the better.
This system has got to end, sooner or later. These capitalists with
their speculation and corners and trusts make things go from bad to
worse. Why should I cower in Rawdon's office, like a frightened dog,
while hunger walks the streets? Hunger is the master revolutionary.
When he comes we ought to turn out and salute him. Anyway, I'M
going to do so now."
"That's all very well," began Parload.
"I'm tired of it," I said. "I want to come to grips with all these
Rawdons. I think perhaps if I was hungry and savage I could talk
to hungry men--"
"There's your mother," said Parload, in his slow judicial way.
That WAS a difficulty.
I got over it by a rhetorical turn. "Why should one sacrifice
the future of the world--why should one even sacrifice one's own
future--because one's mother is totally destitute of imagination?"
Section 5
It was late when I parted from Parload and came back to my own
home.
Our house stood in a highly respectable little square near
the Clayton parish church. Mr. Gabbitas, the curate of all work,
lodged on our ground floor, and upstairs there was an old lady,
Miss Holroyd, who painted flowers on china and maintained her blind
sister in an adjacent room; my mother and I lived in the basement
and slept in the attics. The front of the house was veiled by
a Virginian creeper that defied the Clayton air and clustered in
untidy dependant masses over the wooden porch.
As I came up the steps I had a glimpse of Mr. Gabbitas printing
photographs by candle light in his room. It was the chief delight
of his little life to spend his holiday abroad in the company of a
queer little snap-shot camera, and to return with a great multitude
of foggy and sinister negatives that he had made in beautiful and
interesting places. These the camera company would develop for him
on advantageous terms, and he would spend his evenings the year
through in printing from them in order to inflict copies upon his
undeserving friends. There was a long frameful of his work in the
Clayton National School, for example, inscribed in old English
lettering, "Italian Travel Pictures, by the Rev. E. B. Gabbitas."
For this it seemed he lived and traveled and had his being. It was
his only real joy. By his shaded light I could see his sharp little
nose, his little pale eyes behind his glasses, his mouth pursed up
with the endeavor of his employment.
"Hireling Liar," I muttered, for was not he also part of the system,
part of the scheme of robbery that made wages serfs of Parload and
me?--though his share in the proceedings was certainly small.
"Hireling Liar," said I, standing in the darkness, outside
even his faint glow of traveled culture. . .
My mother let me in.
She looked at me, mutely, because she knew there was something
wrong and that it was no use for her to ask what.
"Good night, mummy," said I, and kissed her a little roughly, and
lit and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase to
bed, not looking back at her.
"I've kept some supper for you, dear."
"Don't want any supper."
"But, dearie------"
"Good night, mother," and I went up and slammed my door upon her,
blew out my candle, and lay down at once upon my bed, lay there a
long time before I got up to undress.
There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother's face
irritated me unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had to
struggle against it, that I could not exist if I gave way to its
pleadings, and it hurt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyond
endurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myself
religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questions
of expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me
at all--and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion,
her only social ideas were blind submissions to the accepted
order--to laws, to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all
respectable persons in authority over us, and with her to believe
was to fear. She knew from a thousand little signs--though still at
times I went to church with her--that I was passing out of touch of
all these things that ruled her life, into some terrible unknown.
From things I said she could infer such clumsy concealments as I
made. She felt my socialism, felt my spirit in revolt against the
accepted order, felt the impotent resentments that filled me with
bitterness against all she held sacred. Yet, you know, it was not
her dear gods she sought to defend so much as me! She seemed always
to be wanting to say to me, "Dear, I know it's hard--but revolt
is harder. Don't make war on it, dear--don't! Don't do anything to
offend it. I'm sure it will hurt you if you do--it will hurt you
if you do."
She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time
had been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing
order dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It had
bent her, aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-five
she peered through cheap spectacles at my face, and saw it only
dimly, filled her with a habit of anxiety, made her hands------
Her poor dear hands! Not in the whole world now could you find a
woman with hands so grimy, so needle-worn, so misshapen by toil,
so chapped and coarsened, so evilly entreated. . . . At any rate,
there is this I can say for myself, that my bitterness against the
world and fortune was for her sake as well as for my own.
Yet that night I pushed by her harshly. I answered her curtly,
left her concerned and perplexed in the passage, and slammed my
door upon her.
And for a long time I lay raging at the hardship and evil of life,
at the contempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie's
letter, at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I found
intolerable, and the things I could not mend. Over and over went
my poor little brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmill
of troubles. Nettie. Rawdon. My mother. Gabbitas. Nettie. . .
Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion. Some clock was striking
midnight. After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions.
I remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very
quickly in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again before
I was asleep.
But how my mother slept that night I do not know.
Oddly enough, I do not blame myself for behaving like this to my
mother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to
Parload. I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of the
Change, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a little
painful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something of
the sort was to be escaped under those former conditions. In that
time of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and
toil and hot passions before they had the chance of even a year or
so of clear thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous
application to some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of
thought ceased in them. They set and hardened into narrow ways.
Few women remained capable of a new idea after five and twenty,
few men after thirty-one or two. Discontent with the thing that
existed was regarded as immoral, it was certainly an annoyance, and
the only protest against it, the only effort against that universal
tendency in all human institutions to thicken and clog, to work
loosely and badly, to rust and weaken towards catastrophes, came
from the young--the crude unmerciful young. It seemed in those
days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being--that either we must
submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them, disobey them,
thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress before we
too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.
My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own
silent meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard
relationship between parents and son in those days. There appeared
no other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed,
part of the very nature of the progress of the world. We did not
think then that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, or
children honor their parents and still think for themselves. We were
angry and hasty because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisoned
and vitiated air. That deliberate animation of the intelligence
which is now the universal quality, that vigor with consideration,
that judgment with confident enterprise which shine through all
our world, were things disintegrated and unknown in the corrupting
atmosphere of our former state.
(So the first fascicle ended. I put it aside and looked for the
second.
"Well?" said the man who wrote.
"This is fiction?"
"It's my story."
"But you-- Amidst this beauty-- You are not this ill-conditioned,
squalidly bred lad of whom I have been reading?"
He smiled. "There intervenes a certain Change," he said. "Have I
not hinted at that?"
I hesitated upon a question, then saw the second fascicle at hand,
and picked it up.)
CHAPTER THE SECOND
NETTIE
Section 1
I CANNOT now remember (the story resumed), what interval separated
that evening on which Parload first showed me the comet--I think
I only pretended to see it then--and the Sunday afternoon I spent
at Checkshill.
Between the two there was time enough for me to give notice and
leave Rawdon's, to seek for some other situation very strenuously
in vain, to think and say many hard and violent things to my mother
and to Parload, and to pass through some phases of very profound
wretchedness. There must have been a passionate correspondence
with Nettie, but all the froth and fury of that has faded now out
of my memory. All I have clear now is that I wrote one magnificent
farewell to her, casting her off forever, and that I got in reply
a prim little note to say, that even if there was to be an end to
everything, that was no excuse for writing such things as I had done,
and then I think I wrote again in a vein I considered satirical.
To that she did not reply. That interval was at least three weeks,
and probably four, because the comet which had been on the first
occasion only a dubious speck in the sky, certainly visible only
when it was magnified, was now a great white presence, brighter
than Jupiter, and casting a shadow on its own account. It was
now actively present in the world of human thought, every one was
talking about it, every one was looking for its waxing splendor
as the sun went down --the papers, the music-halls, the hoardings,
echoed it.
Yes; the comet was already dominant before I went over to make
everything clear to Nettie. And Parload had spent two hoarded pounds
in buying himself a spectroscope, so that he could see for himself,
night after night, that mysterious, that stimulating line--the
unknown line in the green. How many times I wonder did I look at
the smudgy, quivering symbol of the unknown things that were rushing
upon us out of the inhuman void, before I rebelled? But at last I
could stand it no longer, and I reproached Parload very bitterly
for wasting his time in "astronomical dilettantism."
"Here," said I. "We're on the verge of the biggest lock-out in the
history of this countryside; here's distress and hunger coming,
here's all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed,
and you spend your time gaping at that damned silly streak of
nothing in the sky!"
Parload stared at me. "Yes, I do," he said slowly, as though it
was a new idea. "Don't I? . . . I wonder why."
"I want to start meetings of an evening on Howden's Waste."
"You think they'd listen?"
"They'd listen fast enough now."
"They didn't before," said Parload, looking at his pet instrument.
"There was a demonstration of unemployed at Swathinglea on Sunday.
They got to stone throwing."
Parload said nothing for a little while and I said several things.
He seemed to be considering something.
"But, after all," he said at last, with an awkward movement towards
his spectroscope, "that does signify something."
"The comet?"
"Yes."
"What can it signify? You don't want me to believe in astrology.
What does it matter what flames in the heavens--when men are starving
on earth?"
"It's--it's science."
"Science! What we want now is socialism--not science."
He still seemed reluctant to give up his comet.
"Socialism's all right," he said, "but if that thing up there WAS
to hit the earth it might matter."
"Nothing matters but human beings."
"Suppose it killed them all."
"Oh," said I, "that's Rot,"
"I wonder," said Parload, dreadfully divided in his allegiance.
He looked at the comet. He seemed on the verge of repeating his
growing information about the nearness of the paths of the earth
and comet, and all that might ensue from that. So I cut in with
something I had got out of a now forgotten writer called Ruskin,
a volcano of beautiful language and nonsensical suggestions, who
prevailed very greatly with eloquent excitable young men in those
days. Something it was about the insignificance of science and the
supreme importance of Life. Parload stood listening, half turned
towards the sky with the tips of his fingers on his spectroscope.
He seemed to come to a sudden decision.
"No. I don't agree with you, Leadford," he said. "You don't understand
about science."
Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition. I was so
used to entire possession of our talk that his brief contradiction
struck me like a blow. "Don't agree with me!" I repeated.
"No," said Parload
"But how?"
"I believe science is of more importance than socialism," he said.
"Socialism's a theory. Science--science is something more."
And that was really all he seemed to be able to say.
We embarked upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young men
used always to find so heating. Science or Socialism? It was, of
course, like arguing which is right, left handedness or a taste for
onions, it was altogether impossible opposition. But the range of
my rhetoric enabled me at last to exasperate Parload, and his mere
repudiation of my conclusions sufficed to exasperate me, and we
ended in the key of a positive quarrel. "Oh, very well!" said I.
"So long as I know where we are!"
I slammed his door as though I dynamited his house, and went raging
down the street, but I felt that he was already back at the window
worshiping his blessed line in the green, before I got round the
corner.
I had to walk for an hour or so, before I was cool enough to go
home.
And it was Parload who had first introduced me to socialism!
Recreant!
The most extraordinary things used to run through my head in those
days. I will confess that my mind ran persistently that evening upon
revolutions after the best French pattern, and I sat on a Committee
of Safety and tried backsliders. Parload was there, among the
prisoners, backsliderissimus, aware too late of the error of his
ways. His hands were tied behind his back ready for the shambles;
through the open door one heard the voice of justice, the rude
justice of the people. I was sorry, but I had to do my duty.
"If we punish those who would betray us to Kings," said I, with
a sorrowful deliberation, "how much the more must 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 to
say, of some particular article, to abandon and dismiss them, nor
was there anything to prevent the sudden frantic underselling of
some trade rival in order to surprise and destroy his trade, secure
his customers for one's own destined needs, and shift a portion of
one's punishment upon him. This operation of spasmodic underselling
was known as "dumping." The American ironmasters were now dumping on
the British market. The British employers were, of course, taking
their loss out of their workpeople as much as possible, but in addition
they were agitating for some legislation that would prevent--not
stupid relative excess in production, but "dumping"--not the disease,
but the consequences of the disease. The necessary knowledge to
prevent either dumping or its causes, the uncorrelated production
of commodities, did not exist, but this hardly weighed with them
at all, and in answer to their demands there had arisen a curious
party of retaliatory-protectionists who combined vague proposals
for spasmodic responses to these convulsive attacks from foreign
manufacturers, with the very evident intention of achieving
financial adventures. The dishonest and reckless elements were
indeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to the
general atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil
from the prospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of men
known as the "New Financiers," one heard frightened old-fashioned
statesmen asserting with passion that "dumping" didn't occur, or
that it was a very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody would
face and handle the rather intricate truth of the business. The
whole effect upon the mind of a cool observer was of a covey of
unsubstantial jabbering minds drifting over a series of irrational
economic cataclysms, prices and employment tumbled about like towers
in an earthquake, and amidst the shifting masses were the common
work-people going on with their lives as well as they could,
suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for anything but violent,
fruitless protests, impotent. You cannot hope now to understand
the infinite want of adjustment in the old order of things. At one
time there were people dying of actual starvation in India, while
men were burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds like the
account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a dream,
a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.
To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth,
it seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and
misery could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want
of thought and feeling. We needed more dramatic factors than these
mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore to
that common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous
insensate plots--we called them "plots"--against the poor.
You can still see how we figured it in any museum by looking up
the caricatures of capital and labor that adorned the German and
American socialistic papers of the old time.
Section 2
I had cast Nettie off in an eloquent epistle, had really imagined
the affair was over forever --"I've done with women," I said to
Parload--and then there was silence for more than a week.
Before that week was over I was wondering with a growing emotion
what next would happen between us.
I found myself thinking constantly of Nettie, picturing her--sometimes
with stern satisfaction, sometimes with sympathetic remorse--mourning,
regretting, realizing the absolute end that had come between us.
At the bottom of my heart I no more believed that there was an end
between us, than that an end would come to the world. Had we not
kissed one another, had we not achieved an atmosphere of whispering
nearness, breached our virgin shyness with one another? Of course
she was mine, of course I was hers, and separations and final
quarrels and harshness and distance were no more than flourishes
upon that eternal fact. So at least I felt the thing, however I
shaped my thoughts.
Whenever my imagination got to work as that week drew to its close,
she came in as a matter of course, I thought of her recurrently
all day and dreamt of her at night. On Saturday night I dreamt of
her very vividly. Her face was flushed and wet with tears, her
hair a little disordered, and when I spoke to her she turned away.
In some manner this dream left in my mind a feeling of distress
and anxiety. In the morning I had a raging thirst to see her.
That Sunday my mother wanted me to go to church very particularly.
She had a double reason for that; she thought that it would certainly
exercise a favorable influence upon my search for a situation
throughout the next week, and in addition Mr. Gabbitas, with
a certain mystery behind his glasses, had promised to see what he
could do for me, and she wanted to keep him up to that promise. I
half consented, and then my desire for Nettie took hold of me. I
told my mother I wasn't going to church, and set off about eleven
to walk the seventeen miles to Checkshill.
It greatly intensified the fatigue of that long tramp that the
sole of my boot presently split at the toe, and after I had cut the
flapping portion off, a nail worked through and began to torment
me. However, the boot looked all right after that operation and
gave no audible hint of my discomfort. I got some bread and cheese
at a little inn on the way, and was in Checkshill park about four.
I did not go by the road past the house and so round to the gardens,
but cut over the crest beyond the second keeper's cottage, along
a path Nettie used to call her own. It was a mere deer track. It
led up a miniature valley and through a pretty dell in which we
had been accustomed to meet, and so through the hollies and along
a narrow path close by the wall of the shrubbery to the gardens.
In my memory that walk through the park before I came upon Nettie
stands out very vividly. The long tramp before it is foreshortened
to a mere effect of dusty road and painful boot, but the bracken
valley and sudden tumult of doubts and unwonted expectations that
came to me, stands out now as something significant, as something
unforgettable, something essential to the meaning of all that
followed. Where should I meet her? What would she say? I had asked
these questions before and found an answer. Now they came again
with a trail of fresh implications and I had no answer for them at
all. As I approached Nettie she ceased to be the mere butt of my
egotistical self-projection, the custodian of my sexual pride, and
drew together and became over and above this a personality of her
own, a personality and a mystery, a sphinx I had evaded only to
meet again.
I find a little difficulty in describing the quality of the old-world
love-making so that it may be understandable now.
We young people had practically no preparation at all for the stir
and emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained
a conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation.
There were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that
insisted on certain qualities in every love affair and greatly
intensified one's natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfect
loyalty, lifelong devotion. Much of the complex essentials of
love were altogether hidden. One read these things, got accidental
glimpses of this and that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew.
Then strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams strangely
charged with feeling; an inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment
began to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purely egotistical
and materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood. We were like
misguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropical
river. Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood.
Our beings were suddenly going out from ourselves seeking other
beings--we knew not why. This novel craving for abandonment to
some one of the other sex, bore us away. We were ashamed and full
of desire. We kept the thing a guilty secret, and were resolved to
satisfy it against all the world. In this state it was we drifted
in the most accidental way against some other blindly seeking
creature, and linked like nascent atoms.
We were obsessed by the books we read, by all the talk about us
that once we had linked ourselves we were linked for life. Then
afterwards we discovered that other was also an egotism, a thing
of ideas and impulses, that failed to correspond with ours.
So it was, I say, with the young of my class and most of the young
people in our world. So it came about that I sought Nettie on the
Sunday afternoon and suddenly came upon her, light bodied, slenderly
feminine, hazel eyed, with her soft sweet young face under the shady
brim of her hat of straw, the pretty Venus I had resolved should
be wholly and exclusively mine.
There, all unaware of me still, she stood, my essential feminine,
the embodiment of the inner thing in life for me--and moreover an
unknown other, a person like myself.
She held a little book in her hand, open as if she were walking
along and reading it. That chanced to be her pose, but indeed she was
standing quite still, looking away towards the gray and lichenous
shrubbery wall and, as I think now, listening. Her lips were a
little apart, curved to that faint, sweet shadow of a smile.
Section 3
I recall with a vivid precision her queer start when she heard the
rustle of my approaching feet, her surprise, her eyes almost of
dismay for me. I could recollect, I believe, every significant word
she spoke during our meeting, and most of what I said to her. At
least, it seems I could, though indeed I may deceive myself. But
I will not make the attempt. We were both too ill-educated to
speak our full meanings, we stamped out our feelings with clumsy
stereotyped phrases; you who are better taught would fail to catch
our intention. The effect would be inanity. But our first words
I may give you, because though they conveyed nothing to me at the
time, afterwards they meant much.
"YOU, Willie!" she said.
"I have come," I said--forgetting in the instant all the elaborate
things I had intended to say. "I thought I would surprise you--"
"Surprise me?"
"Yes."
She stared at me for a moment. I can see her pretty face now as
it looked at me--her impenetrable dear face. She laughed a queer
little laugh and her color went for a moment, and then so soon as
she had spoken, came back again.
"Surprise me at what?" she said with a rising note.
I was too intent to explain myself to think of what might lie in
that.
"I wanted to tell you," I said, "that I didn't mean quite . . .
the things I put in my letter."
Section 4
When I and Nettie had been sixteen we had been just of an age and
contemporaries altogether. Now we were a year and three-quarters
older, and she--her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I was
still only at the beginning of a man's long adolescence.
In an instant she grasped the situation. The hidden motives of her
quick ripened little mind flashed out their intuitive scheme of
action. She treated me with that neat perfection of understanding
a young woman has for a boy.
"But how did you come?" she asked.
I told her I had walked.
"Walked!" In an instant she was leading me towards the gardens.
I MUST be tired. I must come home with her at once and sit down.
Indeed it was near tea-time (the Stuarts had tea at the old-fashioned
hour of five). Every one would be SO surprised to see me. Fancy
walking! Fancy! But she supposed a man thought nothing of seventeen
miles. When COULD I have started!
All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch of
her hand.
"But, Nettie! I came over to talk to you?"
"My dear boy! Tea first, if you please! And besides--aren't we
talking?"
The "dear boy" was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.
She quickened her pace a little.
"I wanted to explain--" I began.
Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so. I said a few
discrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation than
her words.
When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in
her urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to
the garden. She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish
eyes on me as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now
I know, better than I did then, that every now and then she glanced
over me and behind me towards the shrubbery. And all the while,
behind her quick breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.
Her dress marked the end of her transition.
Can I recall it?
Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use. But her bright
brown hair, which had once flowed down her back in a jolly pig-tail
tied with a bit of scarlet ribbon, was now caught up into an
intricacy of pretty curves above her little ear and cheek, and the
soft long lines of her neck; her white dress had descended to her
feet; her slender waist, which had once been a mere geographical
expression, an imaginary line like the equator, was now a thing
of flexible beauty. A year ago she had been a pretty girl's face
sticking out from a little unimportant frock that was carried upon
an extremely active and efficient pair of brown-stockinged legs.
Now there was coming a strange new body that flowed beneath her
clothes with a sinuous insistence. Every movement, and particularly
the novel droop of her hand and arm to the unaccustomed skirts she
gathered about her, and a graceful forward inclination that had come
to her, called softly to my eyes. A very fine scarf--I suppose you
would call it a scarf--of green gossamer, that some new wakened
instinct had told her to fling about her shoulders, clung now closely
to the young undulations of her body, and now streamed fluttering
out for a moment in a breath of wind, and like some shy independent
tentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentary contact with
my arm.
She caught it back and reproved it.
We went through the green gate in the high garden wall. I held it
open for her to pass through, for this was one of my restricted
stock of stiff politenesses, and then for a second she was near
touching me. So we came to the trim array of flower-beds near the
head gardener's cottage and the vistas of "glass" on our left. We
walked between the box edgings and beds of begonias and into the
shadow of a yew hedge within twenty yards of that very pond with
the gold-fish, at whose brim we had plighted our vows, and so we
came to the wistaria-smothered porch.
The door was wide open, and she walked in before me. "Guess who
has come to see us!" she cried.
Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair
creaked. I judged he was disturbed in his nap.
"Mother!" she called in her clear young voice. "Puss!"
Puss was her sister.
She told them in a marveling key that I had walked all the way from
Clayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.
"You'd better sit down, Willie," said her father; "now you hae got
here. How's your mother?"
He looked at me curiously as he spoke.
He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, but
the waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers.
He was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the
bright effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from his
cheek to flow down into his beard. He was short but strongly built,
and his beard and mustache were the biggest things about him. She
had taken all the possibility of beauty he possessed, his clear
skin, his bright hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain
quickness she got from her mother. Her mother I remember as
a sharp-eyed woman of great activity; she seems to me now to have
been perpetually bringing in or taking out meals or doing some
such service, and to me--for my mother's sake and my own--she was
always welcoming and kind. Puss was a youngster of fourteen perhaps,
of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like her mother's, are
the chief traces on my memory. All these people were very kind to
me, and among them there was a common recognition, sometimes very
agreeably finding expression, that I was--"clever." They all stood
about me as if they were a little at a loss.
"Sit down!" said her father. "Give him a chair, Puss."
We talked a little stiffly--they were evidently surprised by my
sudden apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie
did not remain to keep the conversation going.
"There!" she cried suddenly, as if she were vexed. "I declare!"
and she darted out of the room.
"Lord! what a girl it is!" said Mrs. Stuart. "I don't know what's
come to her."
It was half an hour before Nettie came back. It seemed a long time
to me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in again
she was out of breath. In the meantime, I had thrown out casually
that I had given up my place at Rawdon's. "I can do better than
that," I said.
"I left my book in the dell," she said, panting. "Is tea
ready?" and that was her apology. . .
We didn't shake down into comfort even with the coming of the
tea-things. Tea at the gardener's cottage was a serious meal, with
a big cake and little cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spread
upon a table. You must imagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied,
perplexed by the something that was inexplicably unexpected in
Nettie, saying little, and glowering across the cake at her, and all
the eloquence I had been concentrating for the previous twenty-four
hours, miserably lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Nettie's
father tried to set me talking; he had a liking for my gift of ready
speech, for his own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased and
astonished him to hear me pouring out my views. Indeed, over there
I was, I think, even more talkative than with Parload, though to
the world at large I was a shy young lout. "You ought to write it
out for the newspapers," he used to say. "That's what you ought to
do. I never heard such nonsense."
Or, "You've got the gift of the gab, young man. We ought to ha'
made a lawyer of you."
But that afternoon, even in his eyes, I didn't shine. Failing any
other stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but even
that did not engage me.
Section 5
For a long time I feared I should have to go back to Clayton without
another word to Nettie, she seemed insensible to the need I felt
for a talk with her, and I was thinking even of a sudden demand
for that before them all. It was a transparent manoeuver of her
mother's who had been watching my face, that sent us out at last
together to do something--I forget now what--in one of the greenhouses.
Whatever that little mission may have been it was the merest, most
barefaced excuse, a door to shut, or a window to close, and I don't
think it got done.
Nettie hesitated and obeyed. She led the way through one of
the hot-houses. It was a low, steamy, brick-floored alley between
staging that bore a close crowd of pots and ferns, and behind big
branching plants that were spread and nailed overhead so as to make
an impervious cover of leaves, and in that close green privacy she
stopped and turned on me suddenly like a creature at bay.
"Isn't the maidenhair fern lovely?" she said, and looked at me with
eyes that said, "NOW."
"Nettie," I began, "I was a fool to write to you as I did."
She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face. But
she said nothing, and stood waiting.
"Nettie," I plunged, "I can't do without you. I--I love you."
"If you loved me," she said trimly, watching the white fingers
she plunged among the green branches of a selaginella, "could you
write the things you do to me?"
"I don't mean them," I said. "At least not always."
I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was
stupid to think otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware
of the impossibility of conveying that to her.
"You wrote them."
"But then I tramp seventeen miles to say I don't mean them."
"Yes. But perhaps you do."
I think I was at a loss; then I said, not very clearly, "I don't."
"You think you--you love me, Willie. But you don't."
"I do. Nettie! You know I do."
For answer she shook her head.
I made what I thought was a most heroic plunge. "Nettie," I said,
"I'd rather have you than--than my own opinions."
The selaginella still engaged her. "You think so now," she said.
I broke out into protestations.
"No," she said shortly. "It's different now."
"But why should two letters make so much difference?" I said.
"It isn't only the letters. But it is different. It's different
for good."
She halted a little with that sentence, seeking her expression.
She looked up abruptly into my eyes and moved, indeed slightly,
but with the intimation that she thought our talk might end.
But I did not mean it to end like that.
"For good?" said I. "No! . . Nettie! Nettie! You don't mean that!"
"I do," she said deliberately, still looking at me, and with all
her pose conveying her finality. She seemed to brace herself for
the outbreak that must follow.
Of course I became wordy. But I did not submerge her. She stood
entrenched, firing her contradictions like guns into my scattered
discursive attack. I remember that our talk took the absurd form
of disputing whether I could be in love with her or not. And there
was I, present in evidence, in a deepening and widening distress
of soul because she could stand there, defensive, brighter and
prettier than ever, and in some inexplicable way cut off from me
and inaccessible.
You know, we had never been together before without little enterprises
of endearment, without a faintly guilty, quite delightful excitement.
I pleaded, I argued. I tried to show that even my harsh and difficult
letters came from my desire to come wholly into contact with her.
I made exaggerated fine statements of the longing I felt for her
when I was away, of the shock and misery of finding her estranged
and cool. She looked at me, feeling the emotion of my speech and
impervious to its ideas. I had no doubt--whatever poverty in my
words, coolly written down now--that I was eloquent then. I meant
most intensely what I said, indeed I was wholly concentrated upon
it. I was set upon conveying to her with absolute sincerity my
sense of distance, and the greatness of my desire. I toiled toward
her painfully and obstinately through a jungle of words.
Her face changed very slowly--by such imperceptible degrees as when
at dawn light comes into a clear sky. I could feel that I touched
her, that her hardness was in some manner melting, her determination
softening toward hesitations. The habit of an old familiarity lurked
somewhere within her. But she would not let me reach her.
"No," she cried abruptly, starting into motion.
She laid a hand on my arm. A wonderful new friendliness came into
her voice. "It's impossible, Willie. Everything is different now
--everything. We made a mistake. We two young sillies made a mistake
and everything is different for ever. Yes, yes."
She turned about.
"Nettie!" cried I, and still protesting, pursued her along the narrow
alley between the staging toward the hot-house door. I pursued her
like an accusation, and she went before me like one who is guilty
and ashamed. So I recall it now.
She would not let me talk to her again.
Yet I could see that my talk to her had altogether abolished
the clear-cut distance of our meeting in the park. Ever and again
I found her hazel eyes upon me. They expressed something novel--a
surprise, as though she realized an unwonted relationship, and a
sympathetic pity. And still--something defensive.
When we got back to the cottage, I fell talking rather more freely
with her father about the nationalization of railways, and my spirits
and temper had so far mended at the realization that I could still
produce an effect upon Nettie, that I was even playful with Puss.
Mrs. Stuart judged from that that things were better with me than
they were, and began to beam mightily.
But Nettie remained thoughtful and said very little. She was lost
in perplexities I could not fathom, and presently she slipped away
from us and went upstairs.
Section 6
I was, of course, too footsore to walk back to Clayton, but I had
a shilling and a penny in my pocket for the train between Checkshill
and Two-Mile Stone, and that much of the distance I proposed to
do in the train. And when I got ready to go, Nettie amazed me by
waking up to the most remarkable solicitude for me. I must, she
said, go by the road. It was altogether too dark for the short way
to the lodge gates.
I pointed out that it was moonlight. "With the comet thrown in,"
said old Stuart.
"No," she insisted, "you MUST go by the road."
I still disputed.
She was standing near me. "To please ME," she urged, in a quick
undertone, and with a persuasive look that puzzled me. Even in the
moment I asked myself why should this please her?
I might have agreed had she not followed that up with, "The hollies
by the shrubbery are as dark as pitch. And there's the deer-hounds."
"I'm not afraid of the dark," said I. "Nor of the deer-hounds,
either."
"But those dogs! Supposing one was loose!"
That was a girl's argument, a girl who still had to understand that
fear is an overt argument only for her own sex. I thought too of
those grisly lank brutes straining at their chains and the chorus
they could make of a night when they heard belated footsteps along
the edge of the Killing Wood, and the thought banished my wish to
please her. Like most imaginative natures I was acutely capable of
dreads and retreats, and constantly occupied with their suppression
and concealment, and to refuse the short cut when it might appear
that I did it on account of half a dozen almost certainly chained
dogs was impossible.
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