In the Days of the Comet

For a long time I feared I should have to go back to Clayton without another word to Nettie, she seemed insensible to the need I felt for a talk with her, and I was thinking even of a sudden demand for that before them all.  It was a transparent manoeuver of her mother’s who had been watching my face, that sent us out at last together to do something—­I forget now what—­in one of the greenhouses.  Whatever that little mission may have been it was the merest, most barefaced excuse, a door to shut, or a window to close, and I don’t think it got done.

Nettie hesitated and obeyed.  She led the way through one of the hot-houses.  It was a low, steamy, brick-floored alley between staging that bore a close crowd of pots and ferns, and behind big branching plants that were spread and nailed overhead so as to make an impervious cover of leaves, and in that close green privacy she stopped and turned on me suddenly like a creature at bay.

“Isn’t the maidenhair fern lovely?” she said, and looked at me with eyes that said, “Now.”

“Nettie,” I began, “I was a fool to write to you as I did.”

She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face.  But she said nothing, and stood waiting.

“Nettie,” I plunged, “I can’t do without you.  I—­I love you.”

“If you loved me,” she said trimly, watching the white fingers she plunged among the green branches of a selaginella, “could you write the things you do to me?”

“I don’t mean them,” I said.  “At least not always.”

I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was stupid to think otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware of the impossibility of conveying that to her.

“You wrote them.”

“But then I tramp seventeen miles to say I don’t mean them.”

“Yes.  But perhaps you do.”

I think I was at a loss; then I said, not very clearly, “I don’t.”

“You think you—­you love me, Willie.  But you don’t.”

“I do.  Nettie!  You know I do.”

For answer she shook her head.

I made what I thought was a most heroic plunge.  “Nettie,” I said,
“I’d rather have you than—­than my own opinions.”

The selaginella still engaged her.  “You think so now,” she said.

I broke out into protestations.

“No,” she said shortly.  “It’s different now.”

“But why should two letters make so much difference?” I said.

“It isn’t only the letters.  But it is different.  It’s different for good.”

She halted a little with that sentence, seeking her expression.  She looked up abruptly into my eyes and moved, indeed slightly, but with the intimation that she thought our talk might end.

But I did not mean it to end like that.

“For good?” said I.  “No! . .  Nettie!  Nettie!  You don’t mean that!”

“I do,” she said deliberately, still looking at me, and with all her pose conveying her finality.  She seemed to brace herself for the outbreak that must follow.

Of course I became wordy.  But I did not submerge her.  She stood entrenched, firing her contradictions like guns into my scattered discursive attack.  I remember that our talk took the absurd form of disputing whether I could be in love with her or not.  And there was I, present in evidence, in a deepening and widening distress of soul because she could stand there, defensive, brighter and prettier than ever, and in some inexplicable way cut off from me and inaccessible.

You know, we had never been together before without little enterprises of endearment, without a faintly guilty, quite delightful excitement.

I pleaded, I argued.  I tried to show that even my harsh and difficult letters came from my desire to come wholly into contact with her.  I made exaggerated fine statements of the longing I felt for her when I was away, of the shock and misery of finding her estranged and cool.  She looked at me, feeling the emotion of my speech and impervious to its ideas.  I had no doubt—­whatever poverty in my words, coolly written down now—­that I was eloquent then.  I meant most intensely what I said, indeed I was wholly concentrated upon it.  I was set upon conveying to her with absolute sincerity my sense of distance, and the greatness of my desire.  I toiled toward her painfully and obstinately through a jungle of words.

Her face changed very slowly—­by such imperceptible degrees as when at dawn light comes into a clear sky.  I could feel that I touched her, that her hardness was in some manner melting, her determination softening toward hesitations.  The habit of an old familiarity lurked somewhere within her.  But she would not let me reach her.

“No,” she cried abruptly, starting into motion.

She laid a hand on my arm.  A wonderful new friendliness came into her voice.  “It’s impossible, Willie.  Everything is different now—­everything.  We made a mistake.  We two young sillies made a mistake and everything is different for ever.  Yes, yes.”

She turned about.

“Nettie!” cried I, and still protesting, pursued her along the narrow alley between the staging toward the hot-house door.  I pursued her like an accusation, and she went before me like one who is guilty and ashamed.  So I recall it now.

She would not let me talk to her again.

Yet I could see that my talk to her had altogether abolished the clear-cut distance of our meeting in the park.  Ever and again I found her hazel eyes upon me.  They expressed something novel—­a surprise, as though she realized an unwonted relationship, and a sympathetic pity.  And still—­something defensive.

When we got back to the cottage, I fell talking rather more freely with her father about the nationalization of railways, and my spirits and temper had so far mended at the realization that I could still produce an effect upon Nettie, that I was even playful with Puss.  Mrs. Stuart judged from that that things were better with me than they were, and began to beam mightily.

But Nettie remained thoughtful and said very little.  She was lost in perplexities I could not fathom, and presently she slipped away from us and went upstairs.