In the Days of the Comet

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.