The H.G. Wells Reader (56 page)

And then you know, wonderfully gone—gone utterly, vanished as foam might vanish upon the sand.

Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable excitement, witless mischief and waste of strength—signifying nothing. . . .

And one of those white particles was the paper I held in my hands as I sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark underground kitchen of my mother's, clean roused from my personal troubles by the yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as I read.

It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles; and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all over the country that day, millions read as I read, and came round into line with me, under the same magnetic spell, came round—how did we say it!—Ah!—”to face the foe.”

The comet had been driven into obscurity overnight. The column headed “Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth. Does it Matter?” went unread. “Germany”—I usually figured this mythical malignant creature as a corseted stiff-moustached Emperor enhanced by heraldic black wings and a large sword—had insulted our flag. That was the message of the
New Paper
, and the monster towered over me, threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting upon my faultless country's colours. Somebody had hoisted a British flag on the right bank of some tropical river I had never heard of before, and a drunken German officer under ambiguous instructions had torn it down. Then one of the convenient abundant natives of the country, a British subject indisputably, had been shot in the leg. But the facts were by no means clear. Nothing was clear except that we were not going to stand any nonsense from Germany. Whatever had or had not happened we meant to have an apology for, and apparently they did not mean apologising.

“Has War Come at Last?”

That was the headline. One's heart leaped to assent. . . .

There were hours that day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming of battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men.

But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember, in a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes, and wars.

You must understand that I had no set plan of murder when I walked over to Check-shill. I had no set plan of any sort. There was a great confusion of dramatically conceived intentions in my head, scenes of threatening and denunciation and terror, but I did not mean to kill. The revolver was to turn upon my rival my disadvantage in age and physique. . . . But that was not it really! The revolver!—I took the revolver because I had the revolver and was a foolish young lout. It was a dramatic sort of thing to take. I had, I say, no plan at all.

Ever and again during that second trudge to Checkshill I was irradiated with a novel unreasonable hope. I had awakened in the morning with the hope, it may have been the last unfaded train of some obliterated dream, that after all Nettie might relent towards me, that her heart was kind towards me in spite of all that I imagined had happened. I even thought it possible that I might have misinterpreted what I had seen. Perhaps she would explain everything. My revolver was in my pocket for all that.

I limped at the outset, but after the second mile my ankle warmed to forgetfulness, and rest of the way I walked well. Suppose, after all, I was wrong?

I was still debating that, as I came through the park. By the corner of the paddock near the keeper's cottage, I was reminded by some belated blue hyacinths of a time when I and Nettie had gathered them together. It seemed impossible that we could really have parted for good and all. A wave of tenderness flowed over me, and still flooded me as I came through the little dell and drew towards the hollies. But there the sweet Nettie of my boy's love faded, and I thought of the new Nettie of desire and the man I had come upon in the moonlight, I thought of the narrow, hot purpose that had grown so strongly out of my springtime's freshness and my mood darkened to night.

I crossed the beech wood and came towards the gardens with a resolute and sorrowful heart. When I reached the green door in the garden wall I was seized for a space with so violent a trembling that I could not grip the latch to lift it, for I no longer had any doubt how this would end. That trembling was succeeded by a feeling of cold and whiteness and self-pity. I was astonished to find myself grimacing, to feel my cheeks wet, and thereupon I gave way completely to a wild passion of weeping. I must take just a little time before the thing was done. . . . I turned away from the door and stumbled for a short distance sobbing loudly, and lay down out of sight among the bracken, and so presently became calm again. I lay there some time. I had half a mind to desist, and then my emotion passed like the shadow of a cloud, and I walked very coolly into the gardens.

Through the open door of one of the glasshouses I saw old Stuart. He was leaning against the staging, his hands in his pockets, and so deep in thought he gave no heed to me. . . .

I hesitated and went on towards the cottage, slowly.

Something struck me as unusual about the place, but I could not tell at first what it was. One of the bedroom windows was open, and the customary short blind, with its brass upper rail partly unfastened, drooped obliquely across the vacant space. It looked negligent and odd, for usually everything about the cottage was conspicuously trim.

The door was standing wide open, and everything was still. But giving that usually orderly hall an odd look—it was about half-past two in the afternoon—was a pile of three dirty plates, with used knives and forks upon them, on one of the hall chairs.

I went into the hall, looked into either room and hesitated.

Then I fell to upon the door-knocker and gave a loud rat-tat-too, and followed this up with an amiable “Hel-lo!”

For a time no one answered me, and I stood listening and expectant, with my fingers about my weapon. Someone moved about upstairs presently, and was still again. The tension of waiting seemed to brace my nerves.

I had my hand on the knocker for the second time, when Puss appeared in the doorway.

For a moment we remained staring at one another without speaking. Her hair was dishevelled, her face dirty, tear-stained, and irregularly red. Her expression at the sight of me was pure astonishment. I thought she was about to say something, and then she had darted away out of the house again.

“I say, Puss!” I said. “Puss!”

I followed her out of the door. “Puss! What's the matter? Where's Nettie?”

She vanished round the corner of the house.

I hesitated, perplexed whether I should pursue her. What did it all mean? Then I heard someone upstairs.

“Willie!” cried the voice of Mrs. Stuart. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Where's everyone? Where's Nettie? I want to have a talk with her.”

She did not answer, but I heard her dress rustle as she moved. I judged she was upon the landing overhead.

I paused at the foot of the stairs, expecting her to appear and come down.

Suddenly came a strange sound, a rush of sounds, words jumbled and hurrying, confused and shapeless, borne along upon a note of throaty distress that at last submerged the words altogether and ended in a wail. Except that it came from a woman's throat it was exactly the babbling sound of a weeping child with a grievance. “I can't,” she said, “I can't,” and that was all I could distinguish. It was to my young ears the strangest sound conceivable from a kindly motherly little woman whom I had always thought of chiefly as an unparalleled maker of cakes. It frightened me. I went upstairs at once in a state of infinite alarm, and there she was upon the landing, leaning forward over the top of the chest of drawers beside her open bedroom door, and weeping. I never saw such weeping. One thick strand of black hair had escaped, and hung with a spiral twist down her back; never before had I noticed that she had grey hairs.

As I came upon the landing her voice rose again “Oh that I should have to tell you, Willie! Oh that I should have to tell you!” She dropped her head again, and a fresh gust of tears swept all further words away.

I said nothing, I was too astonished; but I drew nearer to her, and waited. . . .

I never saw such weeping; the extraordinary wetness of her dripping handkerchief abides with me to this day.

“That I should have lived to see this day!” she wailed. “I had rather a thousand times she was struck dead at my feet.”

I began to understand.

“Mrs. Stuart,” I said, clearing my throat; “what has become of Nettie?”

“That I should have lived to see this day!” she said by way of reply.

I waited till her passion abated.

There came a lull. I forgot the weapon in my pocket. I said nothing, and suddenly she stood erect before me, wiping her swollen eyes. “Willie,” she gulped, “she's gone!”

“Nettie?”

“Gone! . . . Run away. . . . Run away from her home. Oh, Willie, Willie! The shame of it! The sin and shame of it!”

She flung herself upon my shoulder, and clung to me, and began again to wish her daughter lying dead at our feet.

“There, there,” said I, and all my being was a-tremble. “Where has she gone?” I said as softly as I could.

But for the time she was preoccupied with her own sorrow, and I had to hold her there and comfort her with the blackness of finality spreading over my soul.

“Where has she gone?” I asked for the fourth time.

“I don't know—we don't know. And oh, Willie, she went out yesterday morning! I said to her, ‘Nettie,' I said to her, ‘you're mighty fine for a morning call.' ‘Fine do's for a fine day,' she said, and that was her last words to me!—Willie!—the child I suckled at my breast!”

“Yes, yes. But where has she gone?” I said.

She went on with sobs, and now telling her story with a sort of fragmentary hurry: “She went out bright and shining, out of this house for ever. She was smiling, Willie—as if she was glad to be going. (‘Glad to be going.' I echoed with soundless lips.) ‘You're mighty fine for the morning,' I says: ‘mighty fine.' ‘Let the girl be pretty,' says her father, ‘while she's young!' And somewhere she'd got a parcel of her things hidden to pick up, and she was going off—out of this house for ever!”

She became quiet.

“Let the girl be pretty,” she repeated; ‘let the girl be pretty while she's young'. . . . Oh! how can he go on
living
, Willie? . . . He doesn't show it, but he is like a stricken beast. He's wounded to the heart. She was always his favourite. He never seemed to care for Puss like he did for her. And she's wounded him—”

“Where has she gone?” I reverted at last to that.

“We don't know. She leaves her own blood, she trusts herself—Oh, Willie, it'll kill me! I wish she and me together were lying in our graves.”

“But”—I moistened my lips and spoke slowly—“she may have gone to marry.”

“If that was so! I've prayed to God it might be so, Willie. I've prayed that he'd take pity on her—him, I mean, she's with.”

I jerked out: “Who's that?”

“In her letter, she said he was a gentleman. She did say he was a gentleman.”

“In her letter. Has she written? Can I see her letter?”

“Her father took it.”

“But if she writes—When did she write?”

“It came this morning.”

“But where did it come from? You can tell—”

“She didn't say. She said she was happy. She said love took one like a storm—”

“Curse that! Where is her letter? Let me see it. And as for this gentleman—”

She stared at me.

“You know who it is.”

“Willie!” she protested.

“You know who it is, whether she said or not?” Her eyes made a mute unconfident denial.

“Young Verrall?”

She made no answer. “All I could do for you, Willie,” she began presently.

“Was it young Verrall?” I insisted.

For a second, perhaps, we faced one another in stark understandings. . . . Then she plumped back to the chest of drawers, and her wet pocket-handkerchief, and I knew she sought refuge from my relentless eyes.

My pity for her vanished. She knew it was her mistress's son as well as I! And for some time she had known, she had felt.

I hovered over her for a moment, sick with amazed disgust. I suddenly bethought me of old Stuart, out in the greenhouse, and turned and went downstairs. As I did so I looked up to see Mrs. Stuart moving droopingly and lamely back into her own room.

Old Stuart was pitiful.

I found him still inert in the greenhouse where I had first seen him. He did not move as I drew near him; he glanced at me, and then stared hard again at the flowerpots before him.

“Eh Willie,” he said, “this is a black day for all of us.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“The missus takes on so,” he said. “I came out here.”

“What do you mean to do?”

“What is a man to do in such a case?”

“Do!” I cried, “why—Do!”

“He ought to marry her,” he said.

“By god, yes!” I cried. “He must do that anyhow.”

“He ought to. It's—it's cruel. But what am I to do? Suppose he won't? Likely he won't. What then?”

He drooped with an intensified despair.

“Here's this cottage,” he said, pursuing some contracted argument. “We've lived here all our lives, you might say. . . . Clear out. At my age. . . . One can't die in a slum.”

I stood before him for a space, speculating what thoughts might fill the gaps between these broken words. I found his lethargy, and the dimly shaped mental attitudes his words indicated, abominable. I said abruptly, “You have her letter?”