In the Days of the Comet Read Free

"Nettie"
was blazing all across the background of my thoughts. . . .
    Nettie Stuart was daughter of the head gardener of the rich Mr.
Verrall's widow, and she and I 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 position esteemed much
lower than that of Mrs. Stuart, a kindly custom of occasional
visits to the gardener's cottage at Checkshill Towers still kept
the friends in touch. Commonly I went with her. And I remember it
was in the dusk of one bright evening in July, one of those long
golden evenings that 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
converged, 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 off in
waves of soft darkness from above her dark shining eyes; there was
a little necklace of pearls about her sweetly modeled 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 disorder,
preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness 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 for ever more, happiness and beauty are our
atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will 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 gray curtain was
stabbed through and through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions
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 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.
    Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found little
beauty in our grouping. I have our two photographs at hand in this
bureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fitting
ready-made clothing, and Nettie—Indeed Nettie is badly dressed,
and her attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see her
through the picture, and her living brightness and something of
that mystery of charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind.
Her face has triumphed over the photographer—or I would long ago
have cast this picture away.
    The reality of beauty yields itself to no words. I wish that I had
the sister art and could draw in my margin something that escapes
description. There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There was
something, a matter of the minutest difference, about her upper
lip so that her mouth closed sweetly and broke very sweetly to a
smile. That grave, sweet smile!
    After we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents for awhile
of the irrevocable choice we had made, the time came for us to part,
shyly and before others, and I and my mother went off back across
the moonlit park—the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer—to
the railway station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement in
Clayton, and