In the Days of the Comet (27 page)

It was I, I think, who was discovering most. I was realizing for
the first time how little the Change had altered in my essential
nature. I had forgotten this business of love for a time in
a world of wonder. That was all. Nothing was lost from my nature,
nothing had gone, only the power of thought and restraint had been
wonderfully increased and new interests had been forced upon me.
The Green Vapors had passed, our minds were swept and garnished, but
we were ourselves still, though living in a new and finer air. My
affinities were unchanged; Nettie's personal charm for me was only
quickened by the enhancement of my perceptions. In her presence,
meeting her eyes, instantly my desire, no longer frantic but sane,
was awake again.

It was just like going to Checkshill in the old time, after
writing about socialism. . . .

I relinquished her hand. It was absurd to part in these terms.

So we all felt it. We hung awkwardly over our sense of that. It
was Verrall, I think, who shaped the thought for me, and said that
to-morrow then we must meet and say good-bye, and so turned our
encounter into a transitory making of arrangements. We settled we
would come to the inn at Menton, all three of us, and take
our midday meal together. . . .

Yes, it was clear that was all we had to say now. . . .

We parted a little awkwardly. I went on down the village street,
not looking back, surprised at myself, and infinitely perplexed.
It was as if I had discovered something overlooked that disarranged
all my plans, something entirely disconcerting. For the first time
I went back preoccupied and without eagerness to Melmount's work.
I wanted to go on thinking about Nettie; my mind had suddenly become
voluminously productive concerning her and Verrall.

The talk we three had together in the dawn of the new time is very
strongly impressed upon my memory. There was something fresh and
simple about it, something young and flushed and exalted. We took
up, we handled with a certain naive timidity, the most difficult
questions the Change had raised for men to solve. I recall we
made little of them. All the old scheme of human life had dissolved
and passed away, the narrow competitiveness, the greed and base
aggression, the jealous aloofness of soul from soul. Where had
it left us? That was what we and a thousand million others
were discussing. . . .

It chances that this last meeting with Nettie is inseparably
associated—I don't know why—with the landlady of the Menton inn.

The Menton inn was one of the rare pleasant corners of the old
order; it was an inn of an unusual prosperity, much frequented by
visitors from Shaphambury, and given to the serving of lunches and
teas. It had a broad mossy bowling-green, and round about it were
creeper-covered arbors amidst beds of snap-dragon, and hollyhock,
and blue delphinium, and many such tall familiar summer flowers.
These stood out against a background of laurels and holly, and
above these again rose the gables of the inn and its signpost—a
white-horsed George slaying the dragon—against copper beeches under
the sky.

While I waited for Nettie and Verrall in this agreeable trysting
place, I talked to the landlady—a broad-shouldered, smiling,
freckled woman—about the morning of the Change. That motherly,
abundant, red-haired figure of health was buoyantly sure that
everything in the world was now to be changed for the better.
That confidence, and something in her voice, made me love her as
I talked to her. "Now we're awake," she said, "all sorts of things
will be put right that hadn't any sense in them. Why? Oh! I'm sure
of it."

Her kind blue eyes met mine in an infinitude of friendliness. Her
lips in her pauses shaped in a pretty faint smile.

Old tradition was strong in us; all English inns in those days
charged the unexpected, and I asked what our lunch was to cost.

"Pay or not," she said, "and what you like. It's holiday these days.
I suppose we'll still have paying and charging, however we manage
it, but it won't be the worry it has been—that I feel sure. It's
the part I never had no fancy for. Many a time I peeped through the
bushes worrying to think what was just and right to me and mine,
and what would send 'em away satisfied. It isn't the money I care
for. There'll be mighty changes, be sure of that; but here I'll
stay, and make people happy—them that go by on the roads. It's a
pleasant place here when people are merry; it's only when they're
jealous, or mean, or tired, or eat up beyond any stomach's digesting, or
when they got the drink in 'em that Satan comes into this garden.
Many's the happy face I've seen here, and many that come again
like friends, but nothing to equal what's going to be, now things
are being set right."

She smiled, that bounteous woman, with the joy of life and hope.
"You shall have an omelet," she said, "you and your friends; such
an omelet—like they'll have 'em in heaven! I feel there's cooking
in me these days like I've never cooked before. I'm rejoiced
to have it to do. . . ."

It was just then that Nettie and Verrall appeared under a rustic
archway of crimson roses that led out from the inn. Nettie wore
white and a sun-hat, and Verrall was a figure of gray. "Here
are my friends," I said; but for all the magic of the Change,
something passed athwart the sunlight in my soul like the passing
of the shadow of a cloud. "A pretty couple," said the landlady,
as they crossed the velvet green toward us. . . .

They were indeed a pretty couple, but that did not greatly gladden
me. No—I winced a little at that.

This old newspaper, this first reissue of the New Paper,
dessicated last relic of a vanished age, is like the little piece
of identification the superstitious of the old days—those queer
religionists who brought a certain black-clad Mrs. Piper to the
help of Christ—used to put into the hand of a clairvoyant. At
the crisp touch of it I look across a gulf of fifty years and see
again the three of us sitting about that table in the arbor, and I
smell again the smell of the sweet-briar that filled the air about
us, and hear in our long pauses the abundant murmuring of bees
among the heliotrope of the borders.

It is the dawn of the new time, but we bear, all three of us, the
marks and liveries of the old.

I see myself, a dark, ill-dressed youth, with the bruise Lord Redcar
gave me still blue and yellow beneath my jaw; and young Verrall
sits cornerwise to me, better grown, better dressed, fair and quiet,
two years my senior indeed, but looking no older than I because of
his light complexion; and opposite me is Nettie, with dark eyes upon
my face, graver and more beautiful than I had ever seen her in the
former time. Her dress is still that white one she had worn when
I came upon her in the park, and still about her dainty neck she
wears her string of pearls and that little coin of gold. She is so
much the same, she is so changed; a girl then and now a woman—and
all my agony and all the marvel of the Change between! Over the end
of the green table about which we sit, a spotless cloth is spread,
it bears a pleasant lunch spread out with a simple equipage. Behind
me is the liberal sunshine of the green and various garden. I see
it all. Again I sit there, eating awkwardly, this paper lies upon
the table and Verrall talks of the Change.

"You can't imagine," he says in his sure, fine accents, "how much
the Change has destroyed of me. I still don't feel awake. Men of
my sort are so tremendously MADE; I never suspected it before."

He leans over the table toward me with an evident desire to make
himself perfectly understood. "I find myself like some creature
that is taken out of its shell—soft and new. I was trained to
dress in a certain way, to behave in a certain way, to think in
a certain way; I see now it's all wrong and narrow—most of it
anyhow—a system of class shibboleths. We were decent to each other
in order to be a gang to the rest of the world. Gentlemen indeed!
But it's perplexing——"

I can hear his voice saying that now, and see the lift of his
eyebrows and his pleasant smile.

He paused. He had wanted to say that, but it was not the thing we
had to say.

I leant forward a little and took hold of my glass very tightly.
"You two," I said, "will marry?"

They looked at one another.

Nettie spoke very softly. "I did not mean to marry when I came
away," she said.

"I know," I answered. I looked up with a sense of effort and met
Verrall's eyes.

He answered me. "I think we two have joined our lives. . . . But
the thing that took us was a sort of madness."

I nodded. "All passion," I said, "is madness." Then I fell into a
doubting of those words.

"Why did we do these things?" he said, turning to her suddenly.

Her hands were clasped under her chin, her eyes downcast.

"We HAD to," she said, with her old trick of inadequate expression.

Then she seemed to open out suddenly.

"Willie," she cried with a sudden directness, with her eyes appealing
to me, "I didn't mean to treat you badly—indeed I didn't. I kept
thinking of you—and of father and mother, all the time. Only it
didn't seem to move me. It didn't move me not one bit from the way
I had chosen."

"Chosen!" I said.

"Something seemed to have hold of me," she admitted. "It's all so
unaccountable. . . ."

She gave a little gesture of despair.

Verrall's fingers played on the cloth for a space. Then he turned
his face to me again.

"Something said 'Take her.' Everything. It was a raging desire—for
her. I don't know. Everything contributed to that—or counted for
nothing. You——"

"Go on," said I.

"When I knew of you——"

I looked at Nettie. "You never told him about me?" I said, feeling,
as it were, a sting out of the old time.

Verrall answered for her. "No. But things dropped; I saw you that
night, my instincts were all awake. I knew it was you."

"You triumphed over me? . . . If I could I would have triumphed
over you," I said. "But go on!"

"Everything conspired to make it the finest thing in life. It had
an air of generous recklessness. It meant mischief, it might mean
failure in that life of politics and affairs, for which I was
trained, which it was my honor to follow. That made it all the
finer. It meant ruin or misery for Nettie. That made it all the
finer. No sane or decent man would have approved of what we did.
That made it more splendid than ever. I had all the advantages of
position and used them basely. That mattered not at all."

"Yes," I said; "it is true. And the same dark wave that lifted you,
swept me on to follow. With that revolver—and blubbering with
hate. And the word to you, Nettie, what was it? 'Give?' Hurl yourself
down the steep?"

Nettie's hands fell upon the table. "I can't tell what it was," she
said, speaking bare-hearted straight to me. "Girls aren't trained
as men are trained to look into their minds. I can't see it yet.
All sorts of mean little motives were there—over and above the
'must.' Mean motives. I kept thinking of his clothes." She smiled—a
flash of brightness at Verrall. "I kept thinking of being like a
lady and sitting in an hotel—with men like butlers waiting. It's
the dreadful truth, Willie. Things as mean as that! Things meaner
than that!"

I can see her now pleading with me, speaking with a frankness as
bright and amazing as the dawn of the first great morning.

"It wasn't all mean," I said slowly, after a pause.

"No!" They spoke together.

"But a woman chooses more than a man does," Nettie added. "I saw
it all in little bright pictures. Do you know—that jacket—there's
something—— You won't mind my telling you? But you won't now!"

I nodded, "No."

She spoke as if she spoke to my soul, very quietly and very
earnestly, seeking to give the truth. "Something cottony in that
cloth of yours," she said. "I know there's something horrible in
being swung round by things like that, but they did swing me round.
In the old time—to have confessed that! And I hated Clayton—and
the grime of it. That kitchen! Your mother's dreadful kitchen!
And besides, Willie, I was afraid of you. I didn't understand you
and I did him. It's different now—but then I knew what he meant.
And there was his voice."

"Yes," I said to Verrall, making these discoveries quietly, "yes,
Verrall, you have a good voice. Queer I never thought of that
before!"

We sat silently for a time before our vivisected passions.

"Gods!" I cried, "and there was our poor little top-hamper of
intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire,
these foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like—like
a coop of hens washed overboard and clucking amidst the seas."

Verrall laughed approval of the image I had struck out. "A week
ago," he said, trying it further, "we were clinging to our chicken
coops and going with the heave and pour. That was true enough a
week ago. But to-day——?"

"To-day," I said, "the wind has fallen. The world storm is over.
And each chicken coop has changed by a miracle to a vessel that
makes head against the sea."

"What are we to do?" asked Verrall.

Nettie drew a deep crimson carnation from the bowl before us, and
began very neatly and deliberately to turn down the sepals of its
calyx and remove, one by one, its petals. I remember that went
on through all our talk. She put those ragged crimson shreds in a
long row and adjusted them and readjusted them. When at last I was
alone with these vestiges the pattern was still incomplete.

"Well," said I, "the matter seems fairly simple. You two"—I
swallowed it—"love one another."

I paused. They answered me by silence, by a thoughtful silence.

"You belong to each other. I have thought it over and looked at it
from many points of view. I happened to want—impossible things.
. . . I behaved badly. I had no right to pursue you." I turned to
Verrall. "You hold yourself bound to her?"