Read Online In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells - Free Book Online Page B

was, as he stood
there, a concentrated figure of all that filled me with bitterness.
One day he had stopped in a motor outside our house, and I remember
the thrill of rage with which I had noted the dutiful admiration
in my mother's eyes as she peered through her blind at him. "That's
young Mr. Verrall," she said. "They say he's very clever."
    "They would," I answered. "Damn them and him!"
    But that is by the way.
    He was clearly astonished to find himself face to face with a man.
His note changed.
    "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 good-night.
    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 greenish-white 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 high-road, and why she had