In the Days of the Comet

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.