Section 2

Parload stood at the open window, opera-glass in hand, and sought and found and was uncertain about and lost again, the new comet.

I thought the comet no more than a nuisance then because I wanted to talk of other matters.  But Parload was full of it.  My head was hot, I was feverish with interlacing annoyances and bitterness, I wanted to open my heart to him—­at least I wanted to relieve my heart by some romantic rendering of my troubles—­and I gave but little heed to the things he told me.  It was the first time I had heard of this new speck among the countless specks of heaven, and I did not care if I never heard of the thing again.

We were two youths much of an age together, Parload was two and twenty, and eight months older than I. He was—­I think his proper definition was “engrossing clerk” to a little solicitor in Overcastle, while I was third in the office staff of Rawdon’s pot-bank in Clayton.  We had met first in the “Parliament” of the Young Men’s Christian Association of Swathinglea; we had found we attended simultaneous classes in Overcastle, he in science and I in shorthand, and had started a practice of walking home together, and so our friendship came into being. (Swathinglea, Clayton, and Overcastle were contiguous towns, I should mention, in the great industrial area of the Midlands.) We had shared each other’s secret of religious doubt, we had confided to one another a common interest in Socialism, he had come twice to supper at my mother’s on a Sunday night, and I was free of his apartment.  He was then a tall, flaxen-haired, gawky youth, with a disproportionate development of neck and wrist, and capable of vast enthusiasm; he gave two evenings a week to the evening classes of the organized science school in Overcastle, physiography was his favorite “subject,” and through this insidious opening of his mind the wonder of outer space had come to take possession of his soul.  He had commandeered an old opera-glass from his uncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had bought a cheap paper planisphere and Whitaker’s Almanac, and for a time day and moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one satisfactory reality in his life—­star-gazing.  It was the deeps that had seized him, the immensities, and the mysterious possibilities that might float unlit in that unplumbed abyss.  With infinite labor and the help of a very precise article in The Heavens, a little monthly magazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, he had at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our system from outer space.  He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quivering little smudge of light among the shining pin-points—­and gazed.  My troubles had to wait for him.

“Wonderful,” he sighed, and then as though his first emphasis did not satisfy him, “wonderful!”

He turned to me.  “Wouldn’t you like to see?”