H G Wells Omnibus, page 772
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 leaned 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 know.”
“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 thrown 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 heap 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 everyone!”
Her voice ceased. For awhile no one spoke, and Nettie, with a quick movement, swept the petals into the shape of a pyramid.
Figures of speech always distract me, and it ran through my mind like some puzzling refrain, “It is still the same light… .”
“No woman believes these things,” she asserted abruptly.
“What things?”
“No woman ever has believed them.”
“You have to choose a man,” said Verrall, apprehending her before I did.
“We’re brought up to that. We’re told—it’s in books, in stories, in the way people look, in the way they behave—one day there will come a man. He will be everything, no one else will be anything. Leave everything else; live in him.”
“And a man, too, is taught that of some woman,” said Verrall.
“Only men don’t believe it! They have more obstinate minds… . Men have never behaved as though they believed it. One need not be old to know that. By nature they don’t believe it. But a woman believes nothing by nature. She goes into a mould hiding her secret thoughts almost from herself.”
“She used to,” I said.
“You haven’t,” said Verrall, “anyhow.”
“I’ve come out. It’s this comet. And Willie. And because I never really believed in the mould at all—even if I thought I did. It’s stupid to send Willie off—shamed, cast out, never to see him again—when I like him as much as I do. It is cruel, it is wicked and ugly, to prance over him as if he was a defeated enemy, and pretend I’m going to be happy just the same. There’s no sense in a rule of life that prescribes that. It’s selfish. It’s brutish. It’s like something that has no sense. I—” there was a sob in her voice, “Willie! I won’t.”
I sat lowering, I mused with my eyes upon her quick fingers.
“It is brutish,” I said at last, with a careful unemotional deliberation. “Nevertheless—it is in the nature of things… . No! . . . You see, after all, we are still half brutes, Nettie. And men, as you say, are more obstinate than women. The comet hasn’t altered that; it’s only made it clearer. We have come into being through a tumult of blind forces… . I come back to what I said just now! We have found our poor reasonable minds, our wills to live well, ourselves, adrift on a wash of instincts, passions, instinctive prejudices, half animal stupidities… . Here we are like people clinging to something—like people awakening—upon a raft.”
“We come back at last to my question,” said Verrall, softly; “what are we to do?”
“Part,” I said. “You see, Nettie, these bodies of ours are not the bodies of angels. They are the same bodies—I have read somewhere that in our bodies you can find evidence of the lowliest ancestry; that about our inward ears—I think it is—and about our teeth, there remains still something of the fish, that there are bones that recall little—what is it?—marsupial forbears—and a hundred traces of the ape. Even your beautiful body, Nettie, carries this taint. No! Hear me out.” I leaned forward earnestly. “Our emotions, our passions, our desires, the substance of them, like the substance of our bodies, is an animal, a competing thing, as well as a desiring thing. You speak to us now as mind to minds—one can do that when one has had exercise and when one has eaten, when one is not doing anything—but when one turns to live, one turns again to matter.”
“Yes,” said Nettie, slowly following me, “but you control it.”
“Only through a measure of obedience. There is no magic in the business—to conquer matter, we must divide the enemy, and take matter as an ally. Nowadays it is indeed true, by faith a man can remove mountains; he can say to a mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea; but he does it because he helps and trusts his brother men, because he has the wit and patience and courage to win over to his side iron, steel, obedience, dynamite, cranes, trucks, the money of other people… . To conquer my desire for you, I must not perpetually thwart it by your presence; I must go away so that I may not see you, I must take up other interests, thrust myself into struggles and discussions—”
“And forget?” said Nettie.
“Not forget,” I said; “but anyhow—cease to brood upon you.”
She hung on that for some moments.
“No,” she said, demolished her last pattern and looked up at Verrall as he stirred.
Verrall leaned forward on the table, elbows upon it, and the fingers of his two hands intertwined.
“You know,’ he said, “I haven’t thought much of these things. At school and the University, one doesn’t… . It was part of the system to prevent it. They’ll alter all that, no doubt. We seem”—he thought—“to be skating about over questions that one came to at last in Greek—with various readings—in Plato, but which it never occurred to any one to translate out of a dead language into living realities… .” he halted and answered some unspoken question from his own mind with, “No. I think with Lead-ford, Nettie, that, as he put it, it is in the nature of things for men to be exclusive; the things that live are the struggle for existence incarnate—and that works out that the men struggle for their mates; for each woman one prevails. The others go away.”
“Like animals,” said Nettie.
“Yes… .”
“There are many things in life,” I said, “but that is the rough universal truth.”
“But,” said Nettie, “you don’t struggle. That has been altered because men have minds.”
“You choose,” I said.
“If I don’t choose to choose?”
“You have chosen.”
She gave a little impatient “Oh! Why are women always the slaves of sex? Is this great age of Reason and Light that has come to alter nothing of that? And men too! I think it is all—stupid! I do not believe this is the right solution of the thing, or anything but the bad habits of the time that was… . Instinct! You don’t let your instincts rule you in a lot of other things. Here am I between you. Here is Edward. I—love him because he is gay and pleasant, and because—because I like him! Here is Willie—a part of me—my first secret, my oldest friend! Why must I not have both? Am I not a mind that you must think of me as nothing but a woman? Imagine me always as a thing to struggle for?” She paused; then she made her distressful proposition to me. “Let us three keep together,” she said. “Let us not part. To part is lame, Willie. Why should we not anyhow keep friends? Meet and talk?”
“Talk?” I said. “About this sort of thing?”
I looked across at Verrall and met his eyes, and we studied one another. It was the clean, straight scrutiny of honest antagonism. “No,” I decided. “Between us, nothing of that sort can be.”:
“Ever?” said Nettie.
“Never,” I said, convinced.
I made an effort within myself. “We cannot tamper with the law and customs of these things,” I said; “these passions are too close to one’s essential self. Better surgery than a lingering disease! From Nettie my love—asks all. A man’s love is not devotion—it is a demand, a challenge. And besides”—and here I forced my theme—”I have given myself now to a new mistress—and it is I, Nettie, who am unfaithful. Behind you and above you rises the coming City of the World, and I am in the building. Dear heart! You are only happiness—and that—Indeed that calls! If it is only that my life blood shall christen the foundation stones—I could almost hope that should be my part, Nettie—I will join myself in that.” I threw all the conviction I could into these words… . “No conflict of passion,” I added a little lamely, “must distract me.”
There was a pause.
“Then we must part,” said Nettie, with the eyes of a woman one strikes in the face.
I nodded assent… .
There was a little pause, and then I stood up. We stood up, all three. We parted almost sullenly, with no more memorable words, and I was left presently in the arbour alone.
I do not think I watched them go. I only remember myself left there somehow—horribly empty and alone. I sat down again and fell into a deep shapeless musing.
5
Suddenly I looked up. Nettie had come back and stood looking down at me.
“Since we talked I have been thinking,” she said. “Edward has let me come to you alone. And I feel perhaps I can talk better to you alone.”
I said nothing and that embarrassed her.
“I don’t think we ought to part,” she said.
“No—I don’t think we ought to part,” she repeated.
“One lives,” she said, “in different ways. I wonder if you will understand what I am saying, Willie. It is hard to say what I feel. But I want it said. If we are to part for ever I want it said—very plainly. Always before I have had the woman’s instinct and the woman’s training which makes one hide. But—Edward is not all of me. Think of what I am saying—Edward is not all of me… . I wish I could tell you better how I see it. I am not all of myself. You, at any rate, are a part of me and I cannot bear to leave you. And I cannot see why I should leave you. There is sort of blood link between us, Willie. We grew together. We are in one another’s bones. I understand you. Now indeed I understand. In some way I have come to an understanding at a stride. Indeed I understand you and your dream. I want to help you. Edward—Edward has no dreams… . It is dreadful to me, Willie, to think we two are to part.”
“But we have settled that—part we must.”
“But why?”
“I love you.”
“Well, and why should I hide it, Willie?—I love you… .” Our eyes met. She flushed, she went on resolutely: “You are stupid. The whole thing is stupid. I love you both.”
I said, “You do not understand what you say. No!”
“You mean that I must go.”
“Yes, yes. Go!”
For a moment we looked at one another, mute, as though deep down in the unfathomable darkness below the surface and present reality of things dumb meanings strove to be. She made to speak and desisted.
“But must I go?” she said at last, with quivering lips, and the tears in her eyes were stars. Then she began, “Willie—”
“Go!” I interrupted her… . “Yes.”
Then again we were still.
She stood there, a tearful figure of pity, longing for me, pitying me. Something of that wider love that will carry our descendants at last out of all the limits, the hard, clear obligations of our personal life, moved us, like the first breath of a coming wind out of the heaven that stirs and passes away. I had an impulse to take her hand and kiss it, and then a trembling came to me, and I knew that if I touched her, my strength would all pass from me… .
And so, standing at a distance one from the other, we parted, and Nettie went, reluctant and looking back, with the man she had chosen, to the lot she had chosen, out of my life—like the sunlight out of my life… .
Then, you know, I suppose I folded up this newspaper and put it in my pocket. But my memory of that meeting ends with the face of Nettie turning to go.
* * * * *
from CHAPTER THE THIRD
BELTANE AND NEW YEAR’S EVE
4
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 surplus 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 dishonour. 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 realisation of all possibilities of beauty. For me from the beginning Nettie was the figure of beauty, the shape and colour of the divine principle that lights the world. For everyone there are certain types, certain faces and forms, gestures, voices and intonations that have that inexplicable unanalysable 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 love 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.
