In the Days of the Comet (2 page)

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.

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.