“November the tenth,” said my mother. “Twenty-nine months and three
days. . . . I cried. I cried. That was before you came, dear. So long
ago—and I can see it now. I was a young wife then, and your father was
very kind. But I can see its hands, its dear little quiet hands. . . .
Dear, they say that now—now they will not let the little children die.”
“No, dear mother,” I said. “We shall do better now.”
“The club doctor could not come. Your father went twice. There was some
one else, some one who paid. So your father went on into Swathinglea,
and that man wouldn’t come unless he had his fee. And your father had
changed his clothes to look more respectful and he hadn’t any money,
not even his tram fare home. It seemed cruel to be waiting there with
my baby thing in pain. . . . And I can’t help thinking perhaps we might
have saved her. . . . But it was like that with the poor always in the
bad old times—always. When the doctor came at last he was angry. ‘Why
wasn’t I called before?’ he said, and he took no pains. He was angry
because some one hadn’t explained. I begged him—but it was too late.”
She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one who
describes a dream. “We are going to manage all these things better
now,” I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful little story
her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me.
“She talked,” my mother went on. “She talked for her age wonderfully. .
. . Hippopotamus.”
“Eh?” I said.
“Hippopotamus, dear—quite plainly one day, when her father was showing
her pictures. . . And her little prayers. ‘Now I lay me. . . . down to
sleep.’ . . . I made her little socks. Knitted they was, dear, and the
heel most difficult.”
Her eyes were closed now. She spoke no longer to me but to herself. She
whispered other vague things, little sentences, ghosts of long dead
moments. . . . Her words grew less distinct.
Presently she was asleep and I got up and went out of the room, but my
mind was queerly obsessed by the thought of that little life that had
been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of hope again
into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never heard before. . . .
And presently I was in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows of
the past, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which this was
but one luminous and quivering red drop. I walked in the garden and the
garden was too small for me; I went out to wander on the moors. “The
past is past,” I cried, and all the while across the gulf of five and
twenty years I could hear my poor mother’s heart-wrung weeping for that
daughter baby who had suffered and died. Indeed that old spirit of
rebellion has not altogether died in me, for all the transformation of
the new time. . . . I quieted down at last to a thin and austere
comfort in thinking that the whole is not told to us, that it cannot
perhaps be told to such minds as ours; and anyhow, and what was far
more sustaining, that now we have strength and courage and this new
gift of wise love, whatever cruel and sad things marred the past, none
of these sorrowful things that made the very warp and woof of the old
life, need now go on happening. We could foresee, we could prevent and
save. “The past is past,” I said, between sighing and resolve, as I
came into view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit
windows of old Lowchester House. “Those sorrows are sorrows no more.”
But I could not altogether cheat that common sadness of the new time,
that memory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives that had
stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before our air grew clear.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
BELTANE AND NEW YEAR’S EVE
§ 1
In the end my mother died rather suddenly, and her death came as a
shock to me. Diagnosis was still very inadequate at that time. The
doctors were, of course, fully alive to the incredible defects of their
common training and were doing all they could to supply its
deficiencies, but they were still extraordinarily ignorant. Some
unintelligently observed factor of her illness came into play with her,
and she became feverish and sank and died very quickly. I do not know
what remedial measures were attempted. I hardly knew what was happening
until the whole thing was over.
At that time my attention was much engaged by the stir of the great
Beltane festival that was held on May-day in the Year of Scaffolding.
It was the first of the ten great rubbish burnings that opened the new
age. Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the enormous
quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation with which we had to
deal; had we not set aside a special day and season, the whole world
would have been an incessant reek of small fires; and it was, I think,
a happy idea to revive this ancient festival of the May and November
burnings. It was inevitable that the old idea of purification should
revive with the name, it was felt to be a burning of other than
material encumbrances, innumerable quasi-spiritual things, deeds,
documents, debts, vindictive records, went up on those great flares.
People passed praying between the fires, and it was a fine symbol of
the new and wiser tolerance that had come to men, that those who still
found their comfort in the orthodox faiths came hither unpersuaded, to
pray that all hate might be burnt out of their professions. For even in
the fires of Baal, now that men have done with base hatred, one may
find the living God.
Endless were the things we had to destroy in those great purgings.
First, there were nearly all the houses and buildings of the old time.
In the end we did not save in England one building in five thousand
that was standing when the comet came. Year by year, as we made our
homes afresh in accordance with the saner needs of our new social
families, we swept away more and more of those horrible structures, the
ancient residential houses, hastily built, without imagination, without
beauty, without common honesty, without even comfort or convenience, in
which the early twentieth century had sheltered until scarcely one
remained; we saved nothing but what was beautiful or interesting out of
all their gaunt and melancholy abundance. The actual houses, of course,
we could not drag to our fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting
deal doors, their dreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting
staircases, their dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their
scaly walls, their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and
yet pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers,
the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments—their dirty, decayed, and
altogether painful ornaments—amidst which I remember there were
sometimes even _stuffed dead birds!_—we burnt them all. The
paint-plastered woodwork, with coat above coat of nasty paint, that in
particular blazed finely. I have already tried to give you an
impression of old-world furniture, of Parload’s bedroom, my mother’s
room, Mr. Gabbitas’s sitting-room, but, thank Heaven! there is nothing
in life now to convey the peculiar dinginess of it all. For one thing,
there is no more imperfect combustion of coal going on everywhere, and
no roadways like grassless open scars along the earth from which dust
pours out perpetually. We burnt and destroyed most of our private
buildings and all the woodwork, all our furniture, except a few score
thousand pieces of distinct and intentional beauty, from which our
present forms have developed, nearly all our hangings and carpets, and
also we destroyed almost every scrap of old-world clothing. Only a few
carefully disinfected types and vestiges of that remain now in our
museums.
One writes now with a peculiar horror of the dress of the old world.
The men’s clothes were worn without any cleansing process at all,
except an occasional superficial brushing, for periods of a year or so;
they were made of dark obscurely mixed patterns to conceal the stage of
defilement they had reached, and they were of a felted and porous
texture admirably calculated to accumulate drifting matter. Many women
wore skirts of similar substances, and of so long and inconvenient a
form that they inevitably trailed among all the abomination of our
horse-frequented roads. It was our boast in England that the whole of
our population was booted—their feet were for the most part ugly enough
to need it,—but it becomes now inconceivable how they could have
imprisoned their feet in the amazing cases of leather and imitations of
leather they used. I have heard it said that a large part of the
physical decline that was apparent in our people during the closing
years of the nineteenth century, though no doubt due in part to the
miscellaneous badness of the food they ate, was in the main
attributable to the vileness of the common footwear. They shirked
open-air exercise altogether because their boots wore out ruinously and
pinched and hurt them if they took it. I have mentioned, I think, the
part my own boots played in the squalid drama of my adolescence. I had
a sense of unholy triumph over a fallen enemy when at last I found
myself steering truck after truck of cheap boots and shoes (unsold
stock from Swathinglea) to the run-off by the top of the Glanville
blast furnaces.
“Plup!” they would drop into the cone when Beltane came, and the roar
of their burning would fill the air. Never a cold would come from the
saturation of their brown paper soles, never a corn from their foolish
shapes, never a nail in them get home at last in suffering flesh. . . .
Most of our public buildings we destroyed and burnt as we reshaped our
plan of habitation, our theater sheds, our banks, and inconvenient
business warrens, our factories (these in the first year of all), and
all the “unmeaning repetition” of silly little sham Gothic churches and
meeting-houses, mean looking shells of stone and mortar without love,
invention, or any beauty at all in them, that men had thrust into the
face of their sweated God, even as they thrust cheap food into the
mouths of their sweated workers; all these we also swept away in the
course of that first decade. Then we had the whole of the superseded
steam-railway system to scrap and get rid of, stations, signals,
fences, rolling stock; a plant of ill-planned, smoke-distributing
nuisance apparatus, that would, under former conditions, have
maintained an offensive dwindling obstructive life for perhaps half a
century. Then also there was a great harvest of fences, notice boards,
hoardings, ugly sheds, all the corrugated iron in the world, and
everything that was smeared with tar, all our gas works and petroleum
stores, all our horse vehicles and vans and lorries had to be erased. .
. . But I have said enough now perhaps to give some idea of the bulk
and quality of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down,
our toil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in
those early years.
But these were the coarse material bases of the Phœnix fires of the
world. These were but the outward and visible signs of the innumerable
claims, rights, adhesions, debts, bills, deeds, and charters that were
cast upon the fires; a vast accumulation of insignia and uniforms
neither curious enough nor beautiful enough to preserve, went to swell
the blaze, and all (saving a few truly glorious trophies and memories)
of our symbols, our apparatus and material of war. Then innumerable
triumphs of our old, bastard, half-commercial, fine-art were presently
condemned, great oil paintings, done to please the half-educated
middle-class, glared for a moment and were gone, Academy marbles
crumbled to useful lime, a gross multitude of silly statuettes and
decorative crockery, and hangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and
musical instruments shared this fate. And books, countless books, too,
and bales of newspapers went also to these pyres. From the private
houses in Swathinglea alone—which I had deemed, perhaps not unjustly,
altogether illiterate—we gathered a whole dust-cart full of cheap
ill-printed editions of the minor English classics—for the most part
very dull stuff indeed and still clean—and about a truckload of thumbed
and dog-eared penny fiction, watery base stuff, the dropsy of our
nation’s mind. . . . And it seemed to me that when we gathered those
books and papers together, we gathered together something more than
print and paper, we gathered warped and crippled ideas and contagious
base suggestions, the formulae of dull tolerances and stupid
impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities of sluggish habits of
thinking and timid and indolent evasions. There was more than a touch
of malignant satisfaction for me in helping gather it all together.
I was so busy, I say, with my share in this dustman’s work that I did
not notice, as I should otherwise have done, the little indications of
change in my mother’s state. Indeed, I thought her a little stronger;
she was slightly flushed, slightly more talkative. . . .
On Beltane Eve, and our Lowchester rummage being finished, I went along
the valley to the far end of Swathinglea to help sort the stock of the
detached group of potbanks there—their chief output had been mantel
ornaments in imitation of marble, and there was very little sorting, I
found, to be done—and there it was nurse Anna found me at last by
telephone, and told me my mother had died in the morning suddenly and
very shortly after my departure.
For a while I did not seem to believe it; this obviously imminent event
stunned me when it came, as though I had never had an anticipatory
moment. For a while I went on working, and then almost apathetically,
in a mood of half-reluctant curiosity, I started for Lowchester.
When I got there the last offices were over, and I was shown my old
mother’s peaceful white face, very still, but a little cold and stern
to me, a little unfamiliar, lying among white flowers.
I went in alone to her, into that quiet room, and stood for a long time
by her bedside. I sat down then and thought. . . .
Then at last, strangely hushed, and with the deeps of my loneliness
opening beneath me, I came out of that room and down into the world
again, a bright-eyed, active world, very noisy, happy, and busy with
its last preparations for the mighty cremation of past and superseded
things.
§ 2
I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonely
night in my life. It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments of
intense feeling with forgotten gaps between.
I recall very distinctly being upon the great staircase of Lowchester
House (though I don’t remember getting there from the room in which my
mother lay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as I came
down. She had but just heard of my return, and she was hurrying
upstairs to me. She stopped and so did I, and we stood and clasped
hands, and she scrutinized my face in the way women sometimes do. So we
remained for a second or so. I could say nothing to her at all, but I
could feel the wave of her emotion. I halted, answered the earnest
pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and after a queer second of
hesitation went on down, returning to my own preoccupations. It did not
occur to me at all then to ask myself what she might be thinking or
feeling.
I remember the corridor full of mellow evening light, and how I went
mechanically some paces toward the dining-room. Then at the sight of
the little tables, and a gusty outburst of talking voices as some one
in front of me swung the door open and to, I remembered that I did not
want to eat. . . . After that comes an impression of myself walking
across the open grass in front of the house, and the purpose I had of
getting alone upon the moors, and how somebody passing me said
something about a hat. I had come out without my hat.
A fragment of thought has linked itself with an effect of long shadows
upon turf golden with the light of the sinking sun. The world was
singularly empty, I thought, without either Nettie or my mother. There
wasn’t any sense in it any more. Nettie was already back in my mind
then. . . .
Then I am out on the moors. I avoided the crests where the bonfires
were being piled, and sought the lonely places. . . .
I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a fold
just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its crowd,
and I was looking at and admiring the sunset. The golden earth and sky
seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe of human
futility. . . . Then in the twilight I walked along an unknown,
bat-haunted road between high hedges.
I did not sleep under a roof that night. But I hungered and ate. I ate
near midnight at a little inn over toward Birmingham, and miles away
from my home. Instinctively I had avoided the crests where the bonfire
crowds gathered, but here there were many people, and I had to share a
table with a man who had some useless mortgage deeds to burn. I talked
to him about them—but my soul stood at a great distance behind my lips.
. . .
Soon each hilltop bore a little tulip-shaped flame flower. Little black
figures clustered round and dotted the base of its petals, and as for
the rest of the multitude abroad, the kindly night swallowed them up.
By leaving the roads and clear paths and wandering in the fields I
contrived to keep alone, though the confused noise of voices and the
roaring and crackling of great fires was always near me.
I wandered into a lonely meadow, and presently in a hollow of deep
shadows I lay down to stare at the stars. I lay hidden in the darkness,
and ever and again the sough and uproar of the Beltane fires that were
burning up the sere follies of a vanished age, and the shouting of the
people passing through the fires and praying to be delivered from the
prison of themselves, reached my ears. . . .
And I thought of my mother, and then of my new loneliness and the
hunger of my heart for Nettie.
I thought of many things that night, but chiefly of the overflowing
personal love and tenderness that had come to me in the wake of the
Change, of the greater need, the unsatisfied need in which I stood, for
this one person who could fulfil all my desires. So long as my mother
had lived, she had in a measure held my heart, given me a food these
emotions could live upon, and mitigated that emptiness of spirit, but
now suddenly that one possible comfort had left me. There had been many
at the season of the Change who had thought that this great enlargement
of mankind would abolish personal love; but indeed it had only made it
finer, fuller, more vitally necessary. They had thought that, seeing
men now were all full of the joyful passion to make and do, and glad
and loving and of willing service to all their fellows, there would be
no need of the one intimate trusting communion that had been the finest
thing of the former life. And indeed, so far as this was a matter of
advantage and the struggle for existence, they were right. But so far
as it was a matter of the spirit and the fine perceptions of life, it
was altogether wrong.
We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped it of
its base wrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenary and
competitive elements, until at last it stood up in our minds stark,
shining and invincible. Through all the fine, divaricating ways of the
new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for every one certain
persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the key of one’s self, whose
mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere existence was interest, whose
idiosyncrasy blended with accident to make a completing and predominant
harmony for their predestined lovers. They were the essential thing in
life. Without them the fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a
caparisoned steed without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater
without a play. . . . And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear
as white flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies
in me. And she had gone! I had sent her from me; I knew not whither she
had gone. I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out of my life
for ever!
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.
§ 3
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.
§ 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 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. . . .
THE EPILOGUE
THE WINDOW OF THE TOWER
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.