In the Days of the Comet

I was, of course, too footsore to walk back to Clayton, but I had a shilling and a penny in my pocket for the train between Checkshill and Two-Mile Stone, and that much of the distance I proposed to do in the train.  And when I got ready to go, Nettie amazed me by waking up to the most remarkable solicitude for me.  I must, she said, go by the road.  It was altogether too dark for the short way to the lodge gates.

I pointed out that it was moonlight.  “With the comet thrown in,” said old Stuart.

“No,” she insisted, “you must go by the road.”

I still disputed.

She was standing near me.  “To please me,” she urged, in a quick undertone, and with a persuasive look that puzzled me.  Even in the moment I asked myself why should this please her?

I might have agreed had she not followed that up with, “The hollies by the shrubbery are as dark as pitch.  And there’s the deer-hounds.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark,” said I.  “Nor of the deer-hounds, either.”

“But those dogs!  Supposing one was loose!”

That was a girl’s argument, a girl who still had to understand that fear is an overt argument only for her own sex.  I thought too of those grisly lank brutes straining at their chains and the chorus they could make of a night when they heard belated footsteps along the edge of the Killing Wood, and the thought banished my wish to please her.  Like most imaginative natures I was acutely capable of dreads and retreats, and constantly occupied with their suppression and concealment, and to refuse the short cut when it might appear that I did it on account of half a dozen almost certainly chained dogs was impossible.

So I set off in spite of her, feeling valiant and glad to be so easily brave, but a little sorry that she should think herself crossed by me.

A thin cloud veiled the moon, and the way under the beeches was dark and indistinct.  I was not so preoccupied with my love-affairs as to neglect what I will confess was always my custom at night across that wild and lonely park.  I made myself a club by fastening a big flint to one end of my twisted handkerchief and tying the other about my wrist, and with this in my pocket, went on comforted.

And it chanced that as I emerged from the hollies by the corner of the shrubbery I was startled to come unexpectedly upon a young man in evening dress smoking a cigar.

I was walking on turf, so that the sound I made was slight.  He stood clear in the moonlight, his cigar glowed like a blood-red star, and it did not occur to me at the time that I advanced towards him almost invisibly in an impenetrable shadow.

“Hullo,” he cried, with a sort of amiable challenge.  “I’m here first!”

I came out into the light.  “Who cares if you are?” said I.

I had jumped at once to an interpretation of his words.  I knew that there was an intermittent dispute between the House people and the villager public about the use of this track, and it is needless to say where my sympathies fell in that dispute.

“Eh?” he cried in surprise.

“Thought I would run away, I suppose,” said I, and came close up to him.

All my enormous hatred of his class had flared up at the sight of his costume, at the fancied challenge of his words.  I knew him.  He was Edward Verrall, son of the man who owned not only this great estate but more than half of Rawdon’s pot-bank, and who had interests and possessions, collieries and rents, all over the district of the Four Towns.  He was a gallant youngster, people said, and very clever.  Young as he was there was talk of parliament for him; he had been a great success at the university, and he was being sedulously popularized among us.  He took with a light confidence, as a matter of course, advantages that I would have faced the rack to get, and I firmly believed myself a better man than he.  He was, as he stood there, a concentrated figure of all that filled me with bitterness.  One day he had stopped in a motor outside our house, and I remember the thrill of rage with which I had noted the dutiful admiration in my mother’s eyes as she peered through her blind at him.  “That’s young Mr. Verrall,” she said.  “They say he’s very clever.”

“They would,” I answered.  “Damn them and him!”

But that is by the way.

He was clearly astonished to find himself face to face with a man.  His note changed.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked.

My retort was the cheap expedient of re-echoing, “Who the devil are you?”

“Well,” he said.

“I’m coming along this path if I like,” I said.  “See?  It’s a public path—­just as this used to be public land.  You’ve stolen the land—­you and yours, and now you want to steal the right of way.  You’ll ask us to get off the face of the earth next.  I sha’n’t oblige.  See?”

I was shorter and I suppose a couple of years younger than he, but I had the improvised club in my pocket gripped ready, and I would have fought with him very cheerfully.  But he fell a step backward as I came toward him.

“Socialist, I presume?” he said, alert and quiet and with the faintest note of badinage.

“One of many.”

“We’re all socialists nowadays,” he remarked philosophically, “and I haven’t the faintest intention of disputing your right of way.”

“You’d better not,” I said.

“No!”

“No.”

He replaced his cigar, and there was a brief pause.  “Catching a train?” he threw out.

It seemed absurd not to answer.  “Yes,” I said shortly.

He said it was a pleasant evening for a walk.

I hovered for a moment and there was my path before me, and he stood aside.  There seemed nothing to do but go on.  “Good night,” said he, as that intention took effect.

I growled a surly good-night.

I felt like a bombshell of swearing that must presently burst with some violence as I went on my silent way.  He had so completely got the best of our encounter.