“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 forebears—and a hundred traces of the ape.
Even your beautiful body, Nettie, carries this taint. No! Hear me out.”
I leant 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 a
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 leant 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
variorum 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 Leadford, Nettie, that, as he put it, it is in the nature
of things for men to be exclusive. . . . Minds are free things and go
about the world, but only one man can possess a woman. You must dismiss
rivals. We are made for the struggle for existence—we _are_ the
struggle for existence; 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 hate, 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 that
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.