Review of Heviewe, 1J7/06. 



in the Days of the Gomet. 



93 



We live now in these days when the Great Change 

 has been in most things accomplished, in a time 

 when everyone is being educated to a sort of in- 

 tellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing 

 from our vigour, and it is hard to understand the 

 stifled and struggling manner in which my genera- 

 tion of common young men did its thinking. To 

 think at all about certain questions was an act of 

 rebellion that set one oscillating between the fur- 

 tive and the defiant. People begin to find Shelley — 

 for all his melody — noisy and ill-conditioned now, 

 because his Anarchs have vanished, yet there was 

 a time when novel thought /lad to go to that tune 

 of breaking glass. It becomes a little difficult to 

 imagine the yeasty state of mind, the disposition to 

 shout and say Yah I at constituted authority, to sus- 

 tain a persistent note of provocation, such as we 

 raw youngsters displayed. I began to read with 

 avidity such writings as Carlyle, Browning and 

 Heine have left for the perplexity of posterit)-, and 

 not only to read and admire, but to imitate. My 

 letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely-intended 

 displays of perfervid tenderness, broke out towards 

 theolog)-, sociology and the cosmos in turgid and 

 startling expressions. No doubt they puzzled her 

 extremely. 



I retain the keenest sympathy, and something in- 

 explicably near to envy, for my owti departed youth, 

 but I should find it difficult to maintain my case 

 against anyone who would condemn nie altogether 

 as having been a very silly, posturing, emotional 

 hobbledehoy indeed, and quite like my faded photo- 

 graph. And when I try to recall what exactly must 

 have been the quality and tenor of my more sus- 

 tained efforts to write memorably to my sweetheart, 

 I confess I shiver. . . . Yet I wish they were 

 not all destroyed. 



Her letters to me were simple enough, written in 

 a roundish, unformed hand, and badly phrased. 

 Her first two or three showed a shy pleasure in the 

 use of the word " dear " ; and I remember being 

 first puzzled and then, when I understood, de- 

 lighted, because she had written " Willie asthore " 

 under my name. " Asthore," I gathered, meant 

 " darling." But when the evidences of my fermen- 

 tation began, her answers were less happy. 



I will not weary you with the story of how we 

 quarrelled in our silly youthful way ; and how I 

 went the next Sunday, all uninvited, to Checkshill 

 and made it worse ; and how afterward I wrote a 

 letter that she thought was " lovely " and mended 

 the matter. Nor will I tell of all our subsequent 

 fluctuations of misunderstanding. Always I was the 

 offender and the final penitent, until this last 

 trouble that was now beginning; and in between 

 we had some tender near moments and I loved her 

 very greatly. There was this misfortune in the 

 business, that in the darkness and alone I thought 

 with great intensity of her, of her eyes, of her 

 touch, of her swe<;t, delightful presence, but when T 



sat down to write I thought of Shelley and Burns 

 and myself and other such irrelevant matters. When 

 one is in love in this fermenting way, it is harder 

 to make love than it is when one does not love at 

 all. And as for Nettie, she loved, I knew, not me, 

 but those gentle mysteries. It was not my voice 

 should rouse her dreams to passion. ... So 

 our letters continued to jar. Then suddenly she 

 wrote me one doubting whether she could ever care 

 for anyone who was a socialist and did not believe 

 in the church; and then, hard upon it, came 

 another note with unexpected novelties of phrasing. 

 She thought we were not suited to each other; we 

 differed so in tastes and ideas ; she had long 

 thought of releasing me from our engagement. In 

 fact, though I really did not apprehend it fully at 

 the first shock, I was dismissed. Her letter had 

 reached me when I came home after old Rawdon's 

 none too civil refusal to raise my wages. On this 

 particular evening of which I write, therefore, I was 

 in a state of feverish adjustment to two new and 

 amazing, two nearly overwhelming, facts, that I was 

 indispensable neither to Nettie nor at Rawdon's. 

 And to talk of comets I 



Where did I stand? 



I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as 

 inseparably mine — ^the whole tradition of " true 

 love " pointed me to that — that for her to face 

 about with these precise small phrases toward 

 abandonment, after we had kissed and whispered 

 and come so close in the little adventurous 

 familiarities of the young, shocked me profoundly. 

 I ! I ! And Rawdon didn't find me indispensable, 

 either. I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the 

 universe and threatened with effacement ; that in 

 some positive and emphatic way I must at once 

 assert myself. 



Should I fling up Rawdon's place at once, and 

 then, in some extraordinarily swift manner, make 

 the fortune of Frobisher's adjacent and closely com- 

 petitive pot-bank? 



The first part of that programme, at any rate, 

 would be easy of accomplishment — to go to Rawdon 

 and say, " You will hear from me again " — but for 

 the rest, Frobisher might fail me. That, however, 

 was a secondary issue. The predominant affair was 

 with Nettie. I found my mind thick-shot with fly- 

 ing fragments of rhetoric that might be of service 

 in the letter I would write her. Scorn, irony, tender- 

 ness — what was it to be ? . . . 



" Bother !" said Parload suddenly. 



"What?" said I. 



" They're firing up at Bladden's ironworks, and 

 the smoke comes right across my bit of sky." 



The interruption Came just as I was ripe to dis- 

 charge mv thought upon him. 



"Parload," said I, "very likely I shall have to 

 leave all this. Old Rawdon won't give me a rise 

 in my wages, and after having asked I don't think 

 I can stand going on upon the old terms any more. 



