In the Days of the Comet (32 page)

So I saw it then, and I lay unseen in the darkness and called upon
Nettie, and wept for her, lay upon my face and wept for her, while
the glad people went to and fro, and the smoke streamed thick
across the distant stars, and the red reflections, the shadows and
the fluctuating glares, danced over the face of the world.

No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, from
habitual and mechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarse
imaginings, but from the passions of love it had not freed us. It
had but brought the lord of life, Eros, to his own. All through the
long sorrow of that night I, who had rejected him, confessed
his sway with tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .

I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor of
my tortuous wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires,
nor how I evaded the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who went
streaming home between three and four, to resume their lives, swept
and garnished, stripped and clean. But at dawn, when the ashes of
the world's gladness were ceasing to glow—it was a bleak dawn that
made me shiver in my thin summer clothes—I came across a field
to a little copse full of dim blue hyacinths. A queer sense
of familiarity arrested my steps, and I stood puzzled. Then I was
moved to go a dozen paces from the path, and at once a singularly
misshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my memory. This was
the place! Here I had stood, there I had placed my old kite, and
shot with my revolver, learning to use it, against the day when I
should encounter Verrall.

Kite and revolver had gone now, and all my hot and narrow past, its
last vestiges had shriveled and vanished in the whirling gusts of
the Beltane fires. So I walked through a world of gray ashes at
last, back to the great house in which the dead, deserted image of
my dear lost mother lay.

I came back to Lowchester House very tired, very wretched; exhausted
by my fruitless longing for Nettie. I had no thought of what lay
before me.

A miserable attraction drew me into the great house to look again
on the stillness that had been my mother's face, and as I came into
that room, Anna, who had been sitting by the open window, rose to
meet me. She had the air of one who waits. She, too, was pale with
watching; all night she had watched between the dead within and
the Beltane fires abroad, and longed for my coming. I stood
mute between her and the bedside. . . .

"Willie," she whispered, and eyes and body seemed incarnate pity.

An unseen presence drew us together. My mother's face became resolute,
commanding. I turned to Anna as a child may turn to its nurse. I
put my hands about her strong shoulders, she folded me to her, and
my heart gave way. I buried my face in her breast and clung
to her weakly, and burst into a passion of weeping. . . .

She held me with hungry arms. She whispered to me, "There, there!"
as one whispers comfort to a child. . . . Suddenly she was kissing
me. She kissed me with a hungry intensity of passion, on my cheeks,
on my lips. She kissed me on my lips with lips that were
salt with tears. And I returned her kisses. . . .

Then abruptly we desisted and stood apart—looking at one another.

It seems to me as if the intense memory of Nettie vanished utterly
out of my mind at the touch of Anna's lips. I loved Anna.

We went to the council of our group—commune it was then called—and
she was given me in marriage, and within a year she had borne me
a son. We saw much of one another, and talked ourselves very close
together. My faithful friend she became and has been always, and
for a time we were passionate lovers. Always she has loved me and
kept my soul full of tender gratitude and love for her; always
when we met our hands and eyes clasped in friendly greeting, all
through our lives from that hour we have been each other's secure
help and refuge, each other's ungrudging fastness of help and sweetly
frank and open speech. . . . And after a little while my love and
desire for Nettie returned as though it had never faded away.

No one will have a difficulty now in understanding how that could
be, but in the evil days of the world malaria, that would have been
held to be the most impossible thing. I should have had to crush
that second love out of my thoughts, to have kept it secret from
Anna, to have lied about it to all the world. The old-world theory
was there was only one love—we who float upon a sea of love find
that hard to understand. The whole nature of a man was supposed to
go out to the one girl or woman who possessed him, her whole nature
to go out to him. Nothing was left over—it was a discreditable
thing to have any overplus at all. They formed a secret secluded
system of two, two and such children as she bore him. All other
women he was held bound to find no beauty in, no sweetness, no
interest; and she likewise, in no other man. The old-time men and
women went apart in couples, into defensive little houses, like
beasts into little pits, and in these "homes" they sat down purposing
to love, but really coming very soon to jealous watching of this
extravagant mutual proprietorship. All freshness passed very
speedily out of their love, out of their conversation, all pride
out of their common life. To permit each other freedom was blank
dishonor. That I and Anna should love, and after our love-journey
together, go about our separate lives and dine at the public tables,
until the advent of her motherhood, would have seemed a terrible
strain upon our unmitigable loyalty. And that I should have it
in me to go on loving Nettie—who loved in different manner both
Verrall and me—would have outraged the very quintessence of the
old convention.

In the old days love was a cruel proprietary thing. But now Anna
could let Nettie live in the world of my mind, as freely as a rose
will suffer the presence of white lilies. If I could hear notes that
were not in her compass, she was glad, because she loved me, that
I should listen to other music than hers. And she, too, could see
the beauty of Nettie. Life is so rich and generous now, giving
friendship, and a thousand tender interests and helps and comforts, that
no one stints another of the full realization of all possibilities
of beauty. For me from the beginning Nettie was the figure of beauty,
the shape and color of the divine principle that lights the world.
For every one there are certain types, certain faces and forms,
gestures, voices and intonations that have that inexplicable
unanalyzable quality. These come through the crowd of kindly friendly
fellow-men and women—one's own. These touch one mysteriously, stir
deeps that must otherwise slumber, pierce and interpret the world.
To refuse this interpretation is to refuse the sun, to darken and
deaden all life. . . . I loved Nettie, I loved all who were like
her, in the measure that they were like her, in voice, or eyes, or
form, or smile. And between my wife and me there was no bitterness
that the great goddess, the life-giver, Aphrodite, Queen of the
living Seas, came to my imagination so. It qualified our mutual
love not at all, since now in our changed world love is unstinted;
it is a golden net about our globe that nets all humanity together.

I thought of Nettie much, and always movingly beautiful things
restored me to her, all fine music, all pure deep color, all
tender and solemn things. The stars were hers, and the mystery of
moonlight; the sun she wore in her hair, powdered finely, beaten
into gleams and threads of sunlight in the wisps and strands of her
hair. . . . Then suddenly one day a letter came to me from her, in
her unaltered clear handwriting, but in a new language of expression,
telling me many things. She had learnt of my mother's death, and
the thought of me had grown so strong as to pierce the silence I
had imposed on her. We wrote to one another—like common friends
with a certain restraint between us at first, and with a great
longing to see her once more arising in my heart. For a time I left
that hunger unexpressed, and then I was moved to tell it to her. And
so on New Year's Day in the Year Four, she came to Lowchester and
me. How I remember that coming, across the gulf of fifty years! I
went out across the park to meet her, so that we should meet alone.
The windless morning was clear and cold, the ground new carpeted
with snow, and all the trees motionless lace and glitter of frosty
crystals. The rising sun had touched the white with a spirit
of gold, and my heart beat and sang within me. I remember now the
snowy shoulder of the down, sunlit against the bright blue sky. And
presently I saw the woman I loved coming through the white
still trees. . . .

I had made a goddess of Nettie, and behold she was a fellow-creature!
She came, warm-wrapped and tremulous, to me, with the tender promise
of tears in her eyes, with her hands outstretched and that dear
smile quivering upon her lips. She stepped out of the dream I had
made of her, a thing of needs and regrets and human kindliness. Her
hands as I took them were a little cold. The goddess shone through
her indeed, glowed in all her body, she was a worshipful temple of
love for me—yes. But I could feel, like a thing new discovered,
the texture and sinews of her living, her dear personal
and mortal hands. . . .

This was as much as this pleasant-looking, gray-haired man
had written. I had been lost in his story throughout the earlier
portions of it, forgetful of the writer and his gracious room, and
the high tower in which he was sitting. But gradually, as I drew
near the end, the sense of strangeness returned to me. It was more
and more evident to me that this was a different humanity from any
I had known, unreal, having different customs, different beliefs,
different interpretations, different emotions. It was no mere change
in conditions and institutions the comet had wrought. It had made
a change of heart and mind. In a manner it had dehumanized the
world, robbed it of its spites, its little intense jealousies, its
inconsistencies, its humor. At the end, and particularly after
the death of his mother, I felt his story had slipped away from my
sympathies altogether. Those Beltane fires had burnt something in
him that worked living still and unsubdued in me, that rebelled in
particular at that return of Nettie. I became a little inattentive.
I no longer felt with him, nor gathered a sense of complete
understanding from his phrases. His Lord Eros indeed! He and these
transfigured people—they were beautiful and noble people, like the
people one sees in great pictures, like the gods of noble sculpture,
but they had no nearer fellowship than these to men. As the change
was realized, with every stage of realization the gulf widened and
it was harder to follow his words.

I put down the last fascicle of all, and met his friendly eyes. It
was hard to dislike him.

I felt a subtle embarrassment in putting the question that perplexed
me. And yet it seemed so material to me I had to put it. "And did
you—?" I asked. "Were you—lovers?"

His eyebrows rose. "Of course."

"But your wife—?"

It was manifest he did not understand me.

I hesitated still more. I was perplexed by a conviction of baseness.
"But—" I began. "You remained lovers?"

"Yes." I had grave doubts if I understood him. Or he me.

I made a still more courageous attempt. "And had Nettie no other
lovers?"

"A beautiful woman like that! I know not how many loved beauty in
her, nor what she found in others. But we four from that time were
very close, you understand, we were friends, helpers, personal
lovers in a world of lovers."

"Four?"

"There was Verrall."

Then suddenly it came to me that the thoughts that stirred in my mind
were sinister and base, that the queer suspicions, the coarseness
and coarse jealousies of my old world were over and done for these
more finely living souls. "You made," I said, trying to be liberal
minded, "a home together."

"A home!" He looked at me, and, I know not why, I glanced down at
my feet. What a clumsy, ill-made thing a boot is, and how hard and
colorless seemed my clothing! How harshly I stood out amidst these
fine, perfected things. I had a moment of rebellious detestation.
I wanted to get out of all this. After all, it wasn't my style. I
wanted intensely to say something that would bring him down a peg,
make sure, as it were, of my suspicions by launching an offensive
accusation. I looked up and he was standing.

"I forgot," he said. "You are pretending the old world is still
going on. A home!"

He put out his hand, and quite noiselessly the great window widened
down to us, and the splendid nearer prospect of that dreamland city
was before me. There for one clear moment I saw it; its galleries
and open spaces, its trees of golden fruit and crystal waters,
its music and rejoicing, love and beauty without ceasing flowing
through its varied and intricate streets. And the nearer people I
saw now directly and plainly, and no longer in the distorted mirror
that hung overhead. They really did not justify my suspicions, and
yet—! They were such people as one sees on earth—save that they
were changed. How can I express that change? As a woman is changed
in the eyes of her lover, as a woman is changed by the love of a
lover. They were exalted. . . .

I stood up beside him and looked out. I was a little flushed, my
ears a little reddened, by the inconvenience of my curiosities,
and by my uneasy sense of profound moral differences. He
was taller than I. . . .

"This is our home," he said smiling, and with thoughtful eyes on me.