“Who the devil are YOU?” he asked.
My retort was the cheap expedient of re-echoing, “Who the devil are you?”
“WELL,” he said.
“I’m coming along this path if I like,” I said. “See? It’s a public path — just as this used to be public land. You’ve stolen the land — you and yours, and now you want to steal the right of way. You’ll ask us to get off the face of the earth next. I sha’n’t oblige. See?”
I was shorter and I suppose a couple of years younger than he, but I had the improvised club in my pocket gripped ready, and I would have fought with him very cheerfully. But he fell a step backward as I came toward him.
“Socialist, I presume?” he said, alert and quiet and with the faintest note of badinage.
“One of many.”
“We’re all socialists nowadays,” he remarked philosophically, “and
I haven’t the faintest intention of disputing your right of way.”
“You’d better not,” I said.
“No!”
“No.”
He replaced his cigar, and there was a brief pause. “Catching a train?” he threw out.
It seemed absurd not to answer. “Yes,” I said shortly.
He said it was a pleasant evening for a walk.
I hovered for a moment and there was my path before me, and he stood aside. There seemed nothing to do but go on. “Good night,” said he, as that intention took effect.
I growled a surly goodnight.
I felt like a bombshell of swearing that must presently burst with some violence as I went on my silent way. He had so completely got the best of our encounter.
Section 7
There comes a memory, an odd intermixture of two entirely divergent things, that stands out with the intensest vividness.
As I went across the last open meadow, following the short cut to
Checkshill station, I perceived I had two shadows.
The thing jumped into my mind and stopped its tumid flow for a moment. I remember the intelligent detachment of my sudden interest. I turned sharply, and stood looking at the moon and the great white comet, that the drift of the clouds had now rather suddenly unveiled.
The comet was perhaps twenty degrees from the moon. What a wonderful thing it looked floating there, a greenishwhite apparition in the dark blue deeps! It looked brighter than the moon because it was smaller, but the shadow it cast, though clearer cut, was much fainter than the moon’s shadow… I went on noting these facts, watching my two shadows precede me.
I am totally unable to account for the sequence of my thoughts on this occasion. But suddenly, as if I had come on this new fact round a corner, the comet was out of my mind again, and I was face to face with an absolutely new idea. I wonder sometimes if the two shadows I cast, one with a sort of feminine faintness with regard to the other and not quite so tall, may not have suggested the word or the thought of an assignation to my mind. All that I have clear is that with the certitude of intuition I knew what it was that had brought the youth in evening dress outside the shrubbery. Of course! He had come to meet Nettie!
Once the mental process was started it took no time at all. The day which had been full of perplexities for me, the mysterious invisible thing that had held Nettie and myself apart, the unaccountable strange something in her manner, was revealed and explained.
I knew now why she had looked guilty at my appearance, what had brought her out that afternoon, why she had hurried me in, the nature of the “book” she had run back to fetch, the reason why she had wanted me to go back by the highroad, and why she had pitied me. It was all in the instant clear to me.
You must imagine me a black little creature, suddenly stricken still — for a moment standing rigid — and then again suddenly becoming active with an impotent gesture, becoming audible with an inarticulate cry, with two little shadows mocking my dismay, and about this figure you must conceive a great wide space of moonlit grass, rimmed by the looming suggestion of distant trees — trees very low and faint and dim, and over it all the domed serenity of that wonderful luminous night.
For a little while this realization stunned my mind. My thoughts came to a pause, staring at my discovery. Meanwhile my feet and my previous direction carried me through the warm darkness to Checkshill station with its little lights, to the ticket-office window, and so to the train.
I remember myself as it were waking up to the thing — I was alone in one of the dingy “third-class” compartments of that time — and the sudden nearly frantic insurgence of my rage. I stood up with the cry of an angry animal, and smote my fist with all my strength against the panel of wood before me… .
Curiously enough I have completely forgotten my mood after that for a little while, but I know that later, for a minute perhaps, I hung for a time out of the carriage with the door open, contemplating a leap from the train. It was to be a dramatic leap, and then I would go storming back to her, denounce her, overwhelm her; and I hung, urging myself to do it. I don’t remember how it was I decided not to do this, at last, but in the end I didn’t.
When the train stopped at the next station I had given up all thoughts of going back. I was sitting in the corner of the carriage with my bruised and wounded hand pressed under my arm, and still insensible to its pain, trying to think out clearly a scheme of action — action that should express the monstrous indignation that possessed me.
Chapter the Third
The Revolver
Section 1
“That comet is going to hit the earth!”
So said one of the two men who got into the train and settled down.
“Ah!” said the other man.
“They do say that it is made of gas, that comet. We sha’n’t blow up, shall us?”…
What did it matter to me?
I was thinking of revenge — revenge against the primary conditions of my being. I was thinking of Nettie and her lover. I was firmly resolved he should not have her — though I had to kill them both to prevent it. I did not care what else might happen, if only that end was ensured. All my thwarted passions had turned to rage. I would have accepted eternal torment that night without a second thought, to be certain of revenge. A hundred possibilities of action, a hundred stormy situations, a whirl of violent schemes, chased one another through my shamed, exasperated mind. The sole prospect I could endure was of some gigantic, inexorably cruel vindication of my humiliated self.
And Nettie? I loved Nettie still, but now with the intensest jealousy, with the keen, unmeasuring hatred of wounded pride, and baffled, passionate desire.
Section 2
As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest — for my shilling and a penny only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-Mile Stone, and thence I had to walk over the hill — I remember very vividly a little man with a shrill voice who was preaching under a gaslamp against a hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday evening loafers. He was a short man, bald, with a little fair curly beard and hair and watery blue eyes, and he was preaching that the end of the world drew near.
I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet with