H G Wells Omnibus, page 117
This was after the quality of what had come into my mind when first I saw them through the grocer’s window, but it was not what I felt and thought as I said it. I went on saying it because otherwise there would have been a gap. It had come to me that it was going to be hard to part from Nettie. My words sounded with an effect of unreality. I stopped, and we stood for a moment in silence looking at one another.
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.
2.
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.
3.
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.”
4.
“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?”
He nodded assent.
“No social influence, no fading out of all this generous clearness in the air—for that might happen—will change you back … ?”
He answered me with honest eyes meeting mine, “No, Leadford, no!”
“I did not know you,” I said. “I thought of you as something very different from this.”
“I was,” he interpolated.
“Now,” I said, “it is all changed.”
Then I halted—for my thread had slipped away from me.
“As for me,” I went on, and glanced at Nettie’s downcast face, and then sat forward with my eyes upon the flowers between us, “since I am swayed and shall be swayed by an affection for Nettie, since that affection is rich with the seeds of desire, since to see her yours and wholly yours is not to be endured by me—I must turn about and go from you; you must avoid me and I you… . We must divide the world like Jacob and Esau… . I must direct myself with all the will I have to other things. After all—this passion is not life! It is perhaps for brutes and savages, but for men. No! We must part and I must forget. What else is there but that?”
I did not look up, I sat very tense with the red petals printing an indelible memory in my brain, but I felt the assent of Verrall’s pose. There were some moments of silence. Then Nettie spoke. “But———” she said, and ceased.
I waited for a little while. I sighed and leant back in my chair. “It is perfectly simple,” I smiled, “now that we have cool heads.”
“But IS it simple?” asked Nettie, and slashed my discourse out of being.
I looked up and found her with her eyes on Verrall. “You see,” she said, “I like Willie. It’s hard to say what one feels—but I don’t want him to go away like that.”
“But then,” objected Verrall, “how———?”
“No,” said Nettie, and swept her half-arranged carnation petals back into a heap of confusion. She began to arrange them very quickly into one long straight line.
“It’s so difficult——— I’ve never before in all my life tried to get to the bottom of my mind. For one thing, I’ve not treated Willie properly. He—he counted on me. I know he did. I was his hope. I was a promised delight—something, something to crown life—better than anything he had ever had. And a secret pride… . He lived upon me. I knew—when we two began to meet together, you and I——— It was a sort of treachery to him———”
“Treachery!” I said. “You were only feeling your way through all these perplexities.”
“You thought it treachery.”
“I don’t now.”
“I did. In a sense I think so still. For you had need of me.”
I made a slight protest at this doctrine and fell thinking.
“And even when he was trying to kill us,” she said to her lover, “I felt for him down in the bottom of my mind. I can understand all the horrible things, the humiliation—the humiliation! he went through.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t see———”
“I don’t see. I’m only trying to see. But you know, Willie, you are a part of my life. I have known you longer than I have known Edward. I know you better. Indeed I know you with all my heart. You think all your talk was thrown away upon me, that I never understood that side of you, or your ambitions or anything. I did. More than I thought at the time. Now —now it is all clear to me. What I had to understand in you was something deeper than Edward brought me. I have it now… . You are a part of my life, and I don’t want to cut all that off from me now I have comprehended it, and throw it away.”
“But you love Verrall.”
“Love is such a queer thing! … Is there one love? I mean, only one love?” She turned to Verrall. “I know I love you. I can speak out about that now. Before this morning I couldn’t have done. It’s just as though my mind had got out of a scented prison. But what is it, this love for you? It’s a mass of fancies—things about you—ways you look, ways you have. It’s the senses—and the senses of certain beauties. Flattery too, things you said, hopes and deceptions for myself. And all that had rolled up together and taken to itself the wild help of those deep emotions that slumbered in my body; it seemed everything. But it wasn’t. How can I describe it? It was like having a very bright lamp with a thick shade—everything else in the room was hidden. But you take the shade off and there they are—it is the same light—still there! Only it lights every one!”
