In the Days of the Comet Read Free Page B

the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy
and all that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had
hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor
one, and to hammer home that idea the first book I got from the
Institute happened to be an American edition of the collected works
of Shelley, his gassy prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was
soon ripe for blatant unbelief. And at the Young Men's Christian
Association I presently made the acquaintance of Parload, who told
me, under promises of the most sinister secrecy, that he was "a
Socialist out and out." He lent me several copies of a periodical
with the clamant title of The Clarion, which was just taking up a
crusade against the accepted religion. The adolescent years of any
fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will always lie healthily
open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and new
ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase badly. Doubt,
I say, but it was not so much doubt—which is a complex thing—as
startled emphatic denial. "Have I believed THIS!" And I was also,
you must remember, just beginning love-letters to Nettie.
    We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most
things accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a
sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing
from our vigor, and it is hard to understand the stifled and
struggling manner in which my generation 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 furtive 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 HAD 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!" at constituted
authority, to sustain a persistent note of provocation such as we
raw youngsters displayed. I began to read with avidity such writing
as Carlyle, Browning, and Heine have left for the perplexity
of posterity, 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 toward theology, sociology, and the
cosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they puzzled
her extremely.
    I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to
envy for my own departed youth, but I should find it difficult to
maintain my case against any one who would condemn me altogether as
having been a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy indeed
and quite like my faded photograph. And when I try to recall what
exactly must have been the quality and tenor of my more sustained
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, delighted, because she
had written "Willie ASTHORE" under my name. "Asthore," I gathered,
meant "darling." But when the evidences of my fermentation began,
her answers were less happy.
    I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled 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,