In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 2

  Parload stood at the open window, opera-glass in hand, and soughtand found and was uncertain about and lost again, the new comet.

  I thought the comet no more than a nuisance then because I wantedto talk of other matters. But Parload was full of it. My head washot, I was feverish with interlacing annoyances and bitterness,I wanted to open my heart to him--at least I wanted to relieve myheart by some romantic rendering of my troubles--and I gave butlittle heed to the things he told me. It was the first time I hadheard of this new speck among the countless specks of heaven, andI did not care if I never heard of the thing again.

  We were two youths much of an age together, Parload was two andtwenty, and eight months older than I. He was--I think his properdefinition was "engrossing clerk" to a little solicitor in Overcastle,while I was third in the office staff of Rawdon's pot-bank inClayton. We had met first in the "Parliament" of the Young Men'sChristian Association of Swathinglea; we had found we attendedsimultaneous classes in Overcastle, he in science and I in shorthand,and had started a practice of walking home together, and so ourfriendship came into being. (Swathinglea, Clayton, and Overcastlewere contiguous towns, I should mention, in the great industrialarea of the Midlands.) We had shared each other's secret of religiousdoubt, 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, andI 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 tothe evening classes of the organized science school in Overcastle,physiography was his favorite "subject," and through this insidiousopening of his mind the wonder of outer space had come to takepossession of his soul. He had commandeered an old opera-glassfrom his uncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had bought acheap paper planisphere and Whitaker's Almanac, and for a time dayand moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one satisfactoryreality in his life--star-gazing. It was the deeps that had seizedhim, the immensities, and the mysterious possibilities that mightfloat unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor and thehelp of a very precise article in The Heavens, a little monthlymagazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, hehad at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our systemfrom outer space. He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quiveringlittle smudge of light among the shining pin-points--and gazed. Mytroubles had to wait for him.

  "Wonderful," he sighed, and then as though his first emphasis didnot 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-visibleintruder was to be, was presently to be, one of the largest cometsthis world has ever seen, how that its course must bring it withinat most--so many score of millions of miles from the earth, a merestep, Parload seemed to think that; how that the spectroscope wasalready sounding its chemical secrets, perplexed by the unprecedentedband in the green, how it was even now being photographed in thevery act of unwinding--in an unusual direction--a sunward tail(which presently it wound up again), and all the while in a sortof undertow I was thinking first of Nettie Stuart and the lettershe had just written me, and then of old Rawdon's detestable faceas I had seen it that afternoon. Now I planned answers to Nettieand 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 sweetheartsbefore we were eighteen years old. My mother and hers were secondcousins and old schoolfellows, and though my mother had been widoweduntimely by a train accident, and had been reduced to letting lodgings(she was the Clayton curate's landlady), a position esteemed muchlower than that of Mrs. Stuart, a kindly custom of occasionalvisits to the gardener's cottage at Checkshill Towers still keptthe friends in touch. Commonly I went with her. And I remember itwas in the dusk of one bright evening in July, one of those longgolden evenings that do not so much give way to night as admit atlast, upon courtesy, the moon and a choice retinue of stars, thatNettie and I, at the pond of goldfish where the yew-bordered walksconverged, made our shy beginners' vow. I remember still--somethingwill always stir in me at that memory--the tremulous emotion ofthat adventure. Nettie was dressed in white, her hair went off inwaves of soft darkness from above her dark shining eyes; there wasa little necklace of pearls about her sweetly modeled neck, anda little coin of gold that nestled in her throat. I kissed herhalf-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 havedied for her sake.

  You must understand--and every year it becomes increasingly difficultto understand--how entirely different the world was then from whatit is now. It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder,preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupidunpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue ofthe general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescentbeauty that seem no longer possible in my experience. Thegreat Change has come for ever more, happiness and beauty are ouratmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men. Nonewould dare to dream of returning to the sorrows of the former time,and yet that misery was pierced, ever and again its gray curtain wasstabbed through and through by joys of an intensity, by perceptionsof a keenness that it seems to me are now altogether gone outof life. Is it the Change, I wonder, that has robbed life of itsextremes, or is it perhaps only this, that youth has left me--eventhe strength of middle years leaves me now--and taken its despairsand raptures, leaving me judgment, perhaps, sympathy, memories?

  I cannot tell. One would need to be young now and to have beenyoung then as well, to decide that impossible problem.

  Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found littlebeauty in our grouping. I have our two photographs at hand in thisbureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fittingready-made clothing, and Nettie--Indeed Nettie is badly dressed,and her attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see herthrough the picture, and her living brightness and something ofthat mystery of charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind.Her face has triumphed over the photographer--or I would long agohave cast this picture away.

  The reality of beauty yields itself to no words. I wish that I hadthe sister art and could draw in my margin something that escapesdescription. There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There wassomething, a matter of the minutest difference, about her upperlip so that her mouth closed sweetly and broke very sweetly to asmile. That grave, sweet smile!

  After we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents for awhileof 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 acrossthe moonlit park--the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer--tothe railway station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement inClayton, and I saw no more of Nettie--except that I saw her in mythoughts--for nearly a year. But at our next meeting it was decidedthat we must correspond, and this we did with much elaborationof secrecy, for Nettie would have no one at home, not even heronly sister, know of her attachment. So I had to send my preciousdocuments sealed and under cover by way of a confidential schoolfellowof hers who lived near London. . . . I could write that addressdown now, though house and street and suburb have gone beyond anyman's tracing.

  Our correspondence began our estrangement, because for the firsttime we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds soughtexpression.

  Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days wasin the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequateformulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondarycontrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, andsubterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man'slips. I was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrowfaith in certain religious formulae, certain rules of conduct,certain c
onceptions of social and political order, that had no morerelevance to the realities and needs of everyday contemporary lifethan if they were clean linen that had been put away with lavenderin a drawer. Indeed, her religion did actually smell of lavender;on Sundays she put away all the things of reality, the garments andeven the furnishings of everyday, hid her hands, that were gnarledand sometimes chapped with scrubbing, in black, carefully mendedgloves, assumed her old black silk dress and bonnet and took me,unnaturally clean and sweet also, to church. There we sang andbowed and heard sonorous prayers and joined in sonorous responses,and rose with a congregational sigh refreshed and relieved when thedoxology, with its opening "Now to God the Father, God the Son,"bowed out the tame, brief sermon. There was a hell in that religionof my mother's, a red-haired hell of curly flames that had oncebeen very terrible; there was a devil, who was also ex officio theBritish King's enemy, and much denunciation of the wicked lustsof the flesh; we were expected to believe that most of our poorunhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here bysuffering exquisite torments for ever after, world without end,Amen. But indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The wholething had been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality longbefore my time; if it had much terror even in my childhood I haveforgotten it, it was not so terrible as the giant who was killedby the Beanstalk, and I see it all now as a setting for my poorold mother's worn and grimy face, and almost lovingly as a partof her. And Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little lodger, strangelytransformed in his vestments and lifting his voice manfully tothe quality of those Elizabethan prayers, seemed, I think, to giveher a special and peculiar interest with God. She radiated herown tremulous gentleness upon Him, and redeemed Him from all theimplications of vindictive theologians; she was in truth, had Ibut perceived it, the effectual answer to all she would have taughtme.

  So I see it now, but there is something harsh in the earnestintensity of youth, and having at first taken all these things quiteseriously, the fiery hell and God's vindictiveness at any neglect,as though they were as much a matter of fact as Bladden's iron-worksand Rawdon's pot-bank, I presently with an equal seriousness flungthem out of my mind again.

  Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, "takenotice" of me, he had induced me to go on reading after I leftschool, and with the best intentions in the world and to anticipatethe poison of the times, he had lent me Burble's "ScepticismAnswered," and drawn my attention to the library of the Institutein Clayton.

  The excellent Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear fromhis answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxyand all that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I hadhitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poorone, and to hammer home that idea the first book I got from theInstitute happened to be an American edition of the collected worksof Shelley, his gassy prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I wassoon ripe for blatant unbelief. And at the Young Men's ChristianAssociation I presently made the acquaintance of Parload, who toldme, under promises of the most sinister secrecy, that he was "aSocialist out and out." He lent me several copies of a periodicalwith the clamant title of The Clarion, which was just taking up acrusade against the accepted religion. The adolescent years of anyfairly intelligent youth lie open, and will always lie healthilyopen, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and newideas, 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--asstartled 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 mostthings accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to asort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothingfrom our vigor, and it is hard to understand the stifled andstruggling manner in which my generation of common young men didits thinking. To think at all about certain questions was an actof rebellion that set one oscillating between the furtive and thedefiant. People begin to find Shelley--for all his melody--noisyand ill conditioned now because his Anarchs have vanished, yet therewas a time when novel thought HAD to go to that tune of breakingglass. It becomes a little difficult to imagine the yeasty stateof mind, the disposition to shout and say, "Yah!" at constitutedauthority, to sustain a persistent note of provocation such as weraw youngsters displayed. I began to read with avidity such writingas Carlyle, Browning, and Heine have left for the perplexityof posterity, and not only to read and admire but to imitate. Myletters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended displays ofperfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology, and thecosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they puzzledher extremely.

  I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near toenvy for my own departed youth, but I should find it difficult tomaintain my case against any one who would condemn me altogether ashaving been a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy indeedand quite like my faded photograph. And when I try to recall whatexactly must have been the quality and tenor of my more sustainedefforts 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 ashy pleasure in the use of the word "dear," and I remember beingfirst puzzled and then, when I understood, delighted, because shehad 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 oursilly youthful way, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited,to Checkshill, and made it worse, and how afterward I wrote a letterthat she thought was "lovely," and mended the matter. Nor will Itell of all our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding. AlwaysI was the offender and the final penitent until this last troublethat was now beginning; and in between we had some tender nearmoments, and I loved her very greatly. There was this misfortunein the business, that in the darkness, and alone, I thought withgreat intensity of her, of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweetand delightful presence, but when I sat down to write I thought ofShelley and Burns and myself, and other such irrelevant matters.When one is in love, in this fermenting way, it is harder to makelove 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 notmy voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . . So our letterscontinued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whethershe could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did notbelieve in Church, and then hard upon it came another note withunexpected novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suitedto each other, we differed so in tastes and ideas, she had longthought of releasing me from our engagement. In fact, though I reallydid not apprehend it fully at the first shock, I was dismissed.Her letter had reached me when I came home after old Rawdon's nonetoo civil refusal to raise my wages. On this particular evening ofwhich I write, therefore, I was in a state of feverish adjustmentto two new and amazing, two nearly overwhelming facts, that I wasneither indispensable to Nettie nor at Rawdon's. And to talk ofcomets!

  Where did I stand?

  I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparablymine--the whole tradition of "true love" pointed me to that--thatfor her to face about with these precise small phrases towardabandonment, after we had kissed and whispered and come so closein the little adventurous familiarities of the young, shocked meprofoundly. I! I! And Rawdon didn't find me indispensable either.I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the universe and threatenedwith effacement, that in some positive and emphatic way I must atonce 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 closelycompetitive pot-bank?

  The first part of that program, at any rate, wo
uld be easy ofaccomplishment, to go to Rawdon and say, "You will hear from meagain," 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 thatmight 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 comesright across my bit of sky."

  The interruption came just as I was ripe to discharge my thoughtsupon him.

  "Parload," said I, "very likely I shall have to leave all this. OldRawdon won't give me a rise in my wages, and after having asked Idon'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."