In the Days of the Comet (6 page)

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.

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.

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."

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 have 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.