Section 2
I had cast Nettie off in an eloquent epistle, had really imaginedthe affair was over forever--"I've done with women," I said toParload--and then there was silence for more than a week.
Before that week was over I was wondering with a growing emotionwhat next would happen between us.
I found myself thinking constantly of Nettie, picturing her--sometimeswith stern satisfaction, sometimes with sympathetic remorse--mourning,regretting, realizing the absolute end that had come between us.At the bottom of my heart I no more believed that there was an endbetween us, than that an end would come to the world. Had we notkissed one another, had we not achieved an atmosphere of whisperingnearness, breached our virgin shyness with one another? Of courseshe was mine, of course I was hers, and separations and finalquarrels and harshness and distance were no more than flourishesupon that eternal fact. So at least I felt the thing, however Ishaped my thoughts.
Whenever my imagination got to work as that week drew to its close,she came in as a matter of course, I thought of her recurrentlyall day and dreamt of her at night. On Saturday night I dreamt ofher very vividly. Her face was flushed and wet with tears, herhair a little disordered, and when I spoke to her she turned away.In some manner this dream left in my mind a feeling of distressand anxiety. In the morning I had a raging thirst to see her.
That Sunday my mother wanted me to go to church very particularly.She had a double reason for that; she thought that it would certainlyexercise a favorable influence upon my search for a situationthroughout the next week, and in addition Mr. Gabbitas, witha certain mystery behind his glasses, had promised to see what hecould do for me, and she wanted to keep him up to that promise. Ihalf consented, and then my desire for Nettie took hold of me. Itold my mother I wasn't going to church, and set off about elevento walk the seventeen miles to Checkshill.
It greatly intensified the fatigue of that long tramp that thesole of my boot presently split at the toe, and after I had cut theflapping portion off, a nail worked through and began to tormentme. However, the boot looked all right after that operation andgave no audible hint of my discomfort. I got some bread and cheeseat a little inn on the way, and was in Checkshill park about four.I did not go by the road past the house and so round to the gardens,but cut over the crest beyond the second keeper's cottage, alonga path Nettie used to call her own. It was a mere deer track. Itled up a miniature valley and through a pretty dell in which wehad been accustomed to meet, and so through the hollies and alonga narrow path close by the wall of the shrubbery to the gardens.
In my memory that walk through the park before I came upon Nettiestands out very vividly. The long tramp before it is foreshortenedto a mere effect of dusty road and painful boot, but the brackenvalley and sudden tumult of doubts and unwonted expectations thatcame to me, stands out now as something significant, as somethingunforgettable, something essential to the meaning of all thatfollowed. Where should I meet her? What would she say? I had askedthese questions before and found an answer. Now they came againwith a trail of fresh implications and I had no answer for them atall. As I approached Nettie she ceased to be the mere butt of myegotistical self-projection, the custodian of my sexual pride, anddrew together and became over and above this a personality of herown, a personality and a mystery, a sphinx I had evaded only tomeet again.
I find a little difficulty in describing the quality of the old-worldlove-making so that it may be understandable now.
We young people had practically no preparation at all for the stirand emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintaineda conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation.There were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind thatinsisted on certain qualities in every love affair and greatlyintensified one's natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfectloyalty, lifelong devotion. Much of the complex essentials oflove were altogether hidden. One read these things, got accidentalglimpses of this and that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew.Then strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams strangelycharged with feeling; an inexplicable impulse of self-abandonmentbegan to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purely egotisticaland materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood. We were likemisguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropicalriver. Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood.Our beings were suddenly going out from ourselves seeking otherbeings--we knew not why. This novel craving for abandonment tosome one of the other sex, bore us away. We were ashamed and fullof desire. We kept the thing a guilty secret, and were resolved tosatisfy it against all the world. In this state it was we driftedin the most accidental way against some other blindly seekingcreature, and linked like nascent atoms.
We were obsessed by the books we read, by all the talk about usthat once we had linked ourselves we were linked for life. Thenafterwards we discovered that other was also an egotism, a thingof ideas and impulses, that failed to correspond with ours.
So it was, I say, with the young of my class and most of the youngpeople in our world. So it came about that I sought Nettie on theSunday afternoon and suddenly came upon her, light bodied, slenderlyfeminine, hazel eyed, with her soft sweet young face under the shadybrim of her hat of straw, the pretty Venus I had resolved shouldbe wholly and exclusively mine.
There, all unaware of me still, she stood, my essential feminine,the embodiment of the inner thing in life for me--and moreover anunknown other, a person like myself.
She held a little book in her hand, open as if she were walkingalong and reading it. That chanced to be her pose, but indeed she wasstanding quite still, looking away towards the gray and lichenousshrubbery wall and, as I think now, listening. Her lips were alittle apart, curved to that faint, sweet shadow of a smile.