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_, desiccated
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!”