In the Days of the Comet

I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonely night in my life.  It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments of intense feeling with forgotten gaps between.

I recall very distinctly being upon the great staircase of Lowchester House (though I don’t remember getting there from the room in which my mother lay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as I came down.  She had but just heard of my return, and she was hurrying upstairs to me.  She stopped and so did I, and we stood and clasped hands, and she scrutinized my face in the way women sometimes do.  So we remained for a second or so.  I could say nothing to her at all, but I could feel the wave of her emotion.  I halted, answered the earnest pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and after a queer second of hesitation went on down, returning to my own preoccupations.  It did not occur to me at all then to ask myself what she might be thinking or feeling.

I remember the corridor full of mellow evening light, and how I went mechanically some paces toward the dining-room.  Then at the sight of the little tables, and a gusty outburst of talking voices as some one in front of me swung the door open and to, I remembered that I did not want to eat. . . .  After that comes an impression of myself walking across the open grass in front of the house, and the purpose I had of getting alone upon the moors, and how somebody passing me said something about a hat.  I had come out without my hat.

A fragment of thought has linked itself with an effect of long shadows upon turf golden with the light of the sinking sun.  The world was singularly empty, I thought, without either Nettie or my mother.  There wasn’t any sense in it any more.  Nettie was already back in my mind then. . . .

Then I am out on the moors.  I avoided the crests where the bonfires were being piled, and sought the lonely places. . . .

I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a fold just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its crowd, and I was looking at and admiring the sunset.  The golden earth and sky seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe of human futility. . . .  Then in the twilight I walked along an unknown, bat-haunted road between high hedges.

I did not sleep under a roof that night.  But I hungered and ate.  I ate near midnight at a little inn over toward Birmingham, and miles away from my home.  Instinctively I had avoided the crests where the bonfire crowds gathered, but here there were many people, and I had to share a table with a man who had some useless mortgage deeds to burn.  I talked to him about them—­but my soul stood at a great distance behind my lips. . . .

Soon each hilltop bore a little tulip-shaped flame flower.  Little black figures clustered round and dotted the base of its petals, and as for the rest of the multitude abroad, the kindly night swallowed them up.  By leaving the roads and clear paths and wandering in the fields I contrived to keep alone, though the confused noise of voices and the roaring and crackling of great fires was always near me.

I wandered into a lonely meadow, and presently in a hollow of deep shadows I lay down to stare at the stars.  I lay hidden in the darkness, and ever and again the sough and uproar of the Beltane fires that were burning up the sere follies of a vanished age, and the shouting of the people passing through the fires and praying to be delivered from the prison of themselves, reached my ears. . . .

And I thought of my mother, and then of my new loneliness and the hunger of my heart for Nettie.

I thought of many things that night, but chiefly of the overflowing personal love and tenderness that had come to me in the wake of the Change, of the greater need, the unsatisfied need in which I stood, for this one person who could fulfil all my desires.  So long as my mother had lived, she had in a measure held my heart, given me a food these emotions could live upon, and mitigated that emptiness of spirit, but now suddenly that one possible comfort had left me.  There had been many at the season of the Change who had thought that this great enlargement of mankind would abolish personal love; but indeed it had only made it finer, fuller, more vitally necessary.  They had thought that, seeing men now were all full of the joyful passion to make and do, and glad and loving and of willing service to all their fellows, there would be no need of the one intimate trusting communion that had been the finest thing of the former life.  And indeed, so far as this was a matter of advantage and the struggle for existence, they were right.  But so far as it was a matter of the spirit and the fine perceptions of life, it was altogether wrong.

We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped it of its base wrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenary and competitive elements, until at last it stood up in our minds stark, shining and invincible.  Through all the fine, divaricating ways of the new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for every one certain persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the key of one’s self, whose mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere existence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accident to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestined lovers.  They were the essential thing in life.  Without them the fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steed without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater without a play. . . .  And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear as white flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies in me.  And she had gone!  I had sent her from me; I knew not whither she had gone.  I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out of my life for ever!

So I saw it then, and I lay unseen in the darkness and called upon Nettie, and wept for her, lay upon my face and wept for her, while the glad people went to and fro, and the smoke streamed thick across the distant stars, and the red reflections, the shadows and the fluctuating glares, danced over the face of the world.

No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, from habitual and mechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarse imaginings, but from the passions of love it had not freed us.  It had but brought the lord of life, Eros, to his own.  All through the long sorrow of that night I, who had rejected him, confessed his sway with tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .

I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor of my tortuous wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires, nor how I evaded the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who went streaming home between three and four, to resume their lives, swept and garnished, stripped and clean.  But at dawn, when the ashes of the world’s gladness were ceasing to glow—­it was a bleak dawn that made me shiver in my thin summer clothes—­I came across a field to a little copse full of dim blue hyacinths.  A queer sense of familiarity arrested my steps, and I stood puzzled.  Then I was moved to go a dozen paces from the path, and at once a singularly misshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my memory.  This was the place!  Here I had stood, there I had placed my old kite, and shot with my revolver, learning to use it, against the day when I should encounter Verrall.

Kite and revolver had gone now, and all my hot and narrow past, its last vestiges had shriveled and vanished in the whirling gusts of the Beltane fires.  So I walked through a world of gray ashes at last, back to the great house in which the dead, deserted image of my dear lost mother lay.