Eemew of Heviews, 1/7/0 



In the Days of the Gomet. 



91 



•older than 1. He was — I think his proper defini- 

 tion was " engrossing clerk " to a little solicitor in 

 Overcastle ; while I was third in the office staff of 

 Rawdons pot-bank in Clayton. We had met first in 

 the '■ Parliament " of the Young Men's Christian 

 Association of Swathinglea ; we had found we at- 

 tended simultaneous classes in Overstone, he in 

 science 'and I in shorthand, and had started a 

 practice of walking home together, and so our 

 friendship came into being (Swathinglea, Clayton 

 and Overcastle are contiguous towns, 1 should men- 

 tion, in the great industrial area of the Midlands). 

 We had shared each other's secret of religious 

 doubt, we had confided to each other a common 

 interest in socialism, he had come twice to supper 

 at my mother's on a Sunday night, and I was tree 

 of his apartment. He was then a tall, flaxen-haired, 

 gawky youth, with a disproportionate development 

 of neck and wrist, and capable of vast enthusiasm ; 

 he gave two evenings a week to the evening classes 

 of the organised science-school in Overcastle, where 

 physiography was his favourite subject ; and 

 through this insidious opening of his mind, the 

 wonder of outer space had come to take possession 

 of his soul. He had commandeered an old opera- 

 glass from his uncle who farmed at Leet over the 

 moors, he had bought a cheap paper planisphere 

 and Whitaker's almanac, and for a time day and 

 moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one 

 satisfactory reality in his life — star-gazing. It was 

 the deeps that had seized him, the immensities, 

 and the mysterious possibilities that might float 

 unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labour, 

 and the help of a very precise article in '' The 

 Heavens," a little monthly magazine that catered for 

 those who were under this obsession, he had at last 

 got his opera-gla&s upon the new visitor to our sys- 

 tem from outer space. He gazed in a sort of rap- 

 ture upon that quivering little smudge of light among 

 the shining pin-points — and gazed. My troubles 

 had to wait for him. 



'• Wonderful," he sighed, and then, as though his 

 first emphasis did not satisfy him — " wonderful !" 

 He turned to me. " Wouldn't you like to see ? ' 

 I had to look, and then I had to listen, how that 

 this scarcely visible intruder was to be, was presently 

 to be one of the largest comets this world has ever 

 seen ; how that its course must bring it within at 

 most — so many score of millions of miles from the 

 earth (a mere step, Parload seemed to think that) ; 

 how that the spectroscope was already sounding its 

 chemical secrets, perplexed by an unprecedented 

 band in the green ; how it was even now being 

 phcjtographed in the ve'ry act of unwinding — in an 

 unusual direction — a sunward tail (which presently 

 it wound up again); and all the while, in a sort of 

 undertow, I was thinking, first of Nettie Stuart and 

 the letter she had just written me, and then of old 

 Rawdon's detestable face as I had seen it that 



afternoon. Now I planned answers to Nettie, and 

 now belated repartees to my employer, and then 

 again " Nettie " was blazing all across the back- 

 ground of my thoughts. . . . 



Nettie Stuart was daughter of the head gardener 

 of the rich Mr. "Verrall's widow, and she and J. had 

 kissed and become sweethearts before we were 

 eighteen years old. My mother and hers were 

 second cousins and old schoolfellows, and though 

 my mother had been widowed untimely by a train 

 accident and had been reduced to letting lodgings 

 (she was the Clayton curate's landlady), a function 

 esteemed much lower than that of Mrs. Stuart, a 

 kindly custom of occasional visits to the gardener's 

 cottage at Checkshill I'owers still kept the friends 

 in touch. Commonly I went with her. And I re- 

 member it was in the dusk of one bright evening 

 in July, one of those long golden evenings which 

 do not so much give way to night as admit at last 

 upon courtesy the moon and a choice retinue of 

 stars, that Nettie and I, at the pond of goldfish 

 where the yew-bordered walks converge, made our 

 shy beginners' vow. I remember still — something 

 will always stir in me at that memory — the tremulous 

 emotion of that adventure. Nettie was dressed in 

 white, her hair went oft" in waves of soft darkness 

 from above her dark, shining eyes, and there was 

 a little necklace of pearb about her sweetly modelled 

 neck, and a little coin of gold that nestled in her 

 throat. I kissed her half-reluctant lips, and for three 

 years of my life thereafter — nay ! I almost think 

 for all the rest of her life and mine — I could have 

 died for her sake. 



You must understand — and every year it becomes 

 increasingly difficult to understand — how entirely 

 different the world was then from what it is now. 

 It was a dark world; it was full of preventable dis- 

 order, preventable diseases and preventable pain, 

 of harshness, of a savage universal jealousv and 

 stupid unpremeditated cruelties, but yet, it may be 

 even by virtue of the general darkness, there were 

 moments of a rare and evanescent beauty that seem 

 no longer possible in my experience. The Great 

 Change has come forevermore, happiness and 

 beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on 

 earth and goodwill to all men, none would dare 

 to dream of returning to the sorrows of the 

 former time, and yet that misery was pierced, 

 ever and again its grey curtain was stabbed through 

 and through by joys of an intensity, by percep- 

 tions of a keenness, that it seems to me are now 

 altogether gone out of life. Is it the Change, I 

 wonder, that has robbed life of its extremes, or is 

 it perhaps only this, that youth has left me — even 

 the strength of the middle years leaves me now — 

 and taken its despairs and raptures, leaving me 

 judgment perhaps, sympathy, memories ? 



I cannot tell. One would need to be young now, 

 and to have been young then as well, to decide that 

 impossible problem. 



