In the Days of the Comet Read Free Page A

I saw no more of Nettie—except that I saw her in my
thoughts—for nearly a year. But at our next meeting it was decided
that we must correspond, and this we did with much elaboration
of secrecy, for Nettie would have no one at home, not even her
only sister, know of her attachment. So I had to send my precious
documents sealed and under cover by way of a confidential schoolfellow
of hers who lived near London. . . . I could write that address
down now, though house and street and suburb have gone beyond any
man's tracing.
    Our correspondence began our estrangement, because for the first
time we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds sought
expression.
    Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was
in the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate
formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary
contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and
subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man's
lips. I was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrow
faith in certain religious formulae, certain rules of conduct,
certain conceptions of social and political order, that had no more
relevance to the realities and needs of everyday contemporary life
than if they were clean linen that had been put away with lavender
in a drawer. Indeed, her religion did actually smell of lavender;
on Sundays she put away all the things of reality, the garments and
even the furnishings of everyday, hid her hands, that were gnarled
and sometimes chapped with scrubbing, in black, carefully mended
gloves, assumed her old black silk dress and bonnet and took me,
unnaturally clean and sweet also, to church. There we sang and
bowed and heard sonorous prayers and joined in sonorous responses,
and rose with a congregational sigh refreshed and relieved when the
doxology, with its opening "Now to God the Father, God the Son,"
bowed out the tame, brief sermon. There was a hell in that religion
of my mother's, a red-haired hell of curly flames that had once
been very terrible; there was a devil, who was also ex officio the
British King's enemy, and much denunciation of the wicked lusts
of the flesh; we were expected to believe that most of our poor
unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here by
suffering exquisite torments for ever after, world without end,
Amen. But indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole
thing had been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long
before my time; if it had much terror even in my childhood I have
forgotten it, it was not so terrible as the giant who was killed
by the Beanstalk, and I see it all now as a setting for my poor
old mother's worn and grimy face, and almost lovingly as a part
of her. And Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little lodger, strangely
transformed in his vestments and lifting his voice manfully to
the quality of those Elizabethan prayers, seemed, I think, to give
her a special and peculiar interest with God. She radiated her
own tremulous gentleness upon Him, and redeemed Him from all the
implications of vindictive theologians; she was in truth, had I
but perceived it, the effectual answer to all she would have taught
me.
    So I see it now, but there is something harsh in the earnest
intensity of youth, and having at first taken all these things quite
seriously, the fiery hell and God's vindictiveness at any neglect,
as though they were as much a matter of fact as Bladden's iron-works
and Rawdon's pot-bank, I presently with an equal seriousness flung
them out of my mind again.
    Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, "take
notice" of me, he had induced me to go on reading after I left
school, and with the best intentions in the world and to anticipate
the poison of the times, he had lent me Burble's "Scepticism
Answered," and drawn my attention to the library of the Institute
in Clayton.
    The excellent Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear from
his answers to