In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 2

  I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonelynight in my life. It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments ofintense feeling with forgotten gaps between.

  I recall very distinctly being upon the great staircase of LowchesterHouse (though I don't remember getting there from the room in whichmy mother lay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as Icame down. She had but just heard of my return, and she was hurryingupstairs to me. She stopped and so did I, and we stood and claspedhands, and she scrutinized my face in the way women sometimes do.So we remained for a second or so. I could say nothing to her atall, but I could feel the wave of her emotion. I halted, answeredthe earnest pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and aftera queer second of hesitation went on down, returning to my ownpreoccupations. It did not occur to me at all then to ask myselfwhat she might be thinking or feeling.

  I remember the corridor full of mellow evening light, and how Iwent mechanically some paces toward the dining-room. Then at thesight of the little tables, and a gusty outburst of talking voicesas some one in front of me swung the door open and to, I rememberedthat I did not want to eat. . . . After that comes an impressionof myself walking across the open grass in front of the house, andthe purpose I had of getting alone upon the moors, and how somebodypassing me said something about a hat. I had come out without myhat.

  A fragment of thought has linked itself with an effect of longshadows upon turf golden with the light of the sinking sun. Theworld was singularly empty, I thought, without either Nettie or mymother. There wasn't any sense in it any more. Nettie wasalready back in my mind then. . . .

  Then I am out on the moors. I avoided the crests where thebonfires were being piled, and sought the lonely places. . . .

  I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in afold just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and itscrowd, and I was looking at and admiring the sunset. The goldenearth and sky seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globeof human futility. . . . Then in the twilight I walked along anunknown, bat-haunted road between high hedges.

  I did not sleep under a roof that night. But I hungered and ate.I ate near midnight at a little inn over toward Birmingham, andmiles away from my home. Instinctively I had avoided the crestswhere the bonfire crowds gathered, but here there were many people,and I had to share a table with a man who had some useless mortgagedeeds to burn. I talked to him about them--but my soul stood at agreat distance behind my lips. . . .

  Soon each hilltop bore a little tulip-shaped flame flower. Littleblack figures clustered round and dotted the base of its petals,and as for the rest of the multitude abroad, the kindly nightswallowed them up. By leaving the roads and clear paths and wanderingin the fields I contrived to keep alone, though the confused noiseof voices and the roaring and crackling of great fires was alwaysnear me.

  I wandered into a lonely meadow, and presently in a hollow ofdeep shadows I lay down to stare at the stars. I lay hidden in thedarkness, and ever and again the sough and uproar of the Beltanefires that were burning up the sere follies of a vanished age, andthe shouting of the people passing through the fires and praying tobe delivered from the prison of themselves, reached my ears. . . .

  And I thought of my mother, and then of my new loneliness and thehunger of my heart for Nettie.

  I thought of many things that night, but chiefly of the overflowingpersonal love and tenderness that had come to me in the wake ofthe Change, of the greater need, the unsatisfied need in which Istood, for this one person who could fulfil all my desires. So longas my mother had lived, she had in a measure held my heart, givenme a food these emotions could live upon, and mitigated that emptinessof spirit, but now suddenly that one possible comfort had left me.There had been many at the season of the Change who had thought thatthis great enlargement of mankind would abolish personal love; butindeed it had only made it finer, fuller, more vitally necessary.They had thought that, seeing men now were all full of the joyfulpassion to make and do, and glad and loving and of willing serviceto all their fellows, there would be no need of the one intimatetrusting communion that had been the finest thing of the formerlife. And indeed, so far as this was a matter of advantage andthe struggle for existence, they were right. But so far as it wasa matter of the spirit and the fine perceptions of life, it wasaltogether wrong.

  We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped itof its base wrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenaryand competitive elements, until at last it stood up in our mindsstark, shining and invincible. Through all the fine, divaricatingways of the new life, it grew ever more evident, there were forevery one certain persons, mysteriously and indescribably in thekey of one's self, whose mere presence gave pleasure, whose mereexistence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accidentto make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestinedlovers. They were the essential thing in life. Without them thefine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steedwithout a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater without a play.. . . And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear as whiteflames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies inme. And she had gone! I had sent her from me; I knew not whithershe had gone. I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her outof my life for ever!

  So I saw it then, and I lay unseen in the darkness and called uponNettie, and wept for her, lay upon my face and wept for her, whilethe glad people went to and fro, and the smoke streamed thickacross the distant stars, and the red reflections, the shadows andthe fluctuating glares, danced over the face of the world.

  No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, fromhabitual and mechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarseimaginings, but from the passions of love it had not freed us. Ithad but brought the lord of life, Eros, to his own. All through thelong sorrow of that night I, who had rejected him, confessedhis sway with tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .

  I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor ofmy tortuous wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires,nor how I evaded the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who wentstreaming home between three and four, to resume their lives, sweptand garnished, stripped and clean. But at dawn, when the ashes ofthe world's gladness were ceasing to glow--it was a bleak dawn thatmade me shiver in my thin summer clothes--I came across a fieldto a little copse full of dim blue hyacinths. A queer senseof familiarity arrested my steps, and I stood puzzled. Then I wasmoved to go a dozen paces from the path, and at once a singularlymisshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my memory. This wasthe place! Here I had stood, there I had placed my old kite, andshot with my revolver, learning to use it, against the day when Ishould encounter Verrall.

  Kite and revolver had gone now, and all my hot and narrow past, itslast vestiges had shriveled and vanished in the whirling gusts ofthe Beltane fires. So I walked through a world of gray ashes atlast, back to the great house in which the dead, deserted image ofmy dear lost mother lay.