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."