In the Days of the Comet

This old newspaper, this first reissue of the New Paper, dessicated 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!”

I nodded, “No.”

She spoke as if she spoke to my soul, very quietly and very earnestly, seeking to give the truth.  “Something cottony in that cloth of yours,” she said.  “I know there’s something horrible in being swung round by things like that, but they did swing me round.  In the old time—­to have confessed that!  And I hated Clayton—­and the grime of it.  That kitchen!  Your mother’s dreadful kitchen!  And besides, Willie, I was afraid of you.  I didn’t understand you and I did him.  It’s different now—­but then I knew what he meant.  And there was his voice.”

“Yes,” I said to Verrall, making these discoveries quietly, “yes, Verrall, you have a good voice.  Queer I never thought of that before!”

We sat silently for a time before our vivisected passions.

“Gods!” I cried, “and there was our poor little top-hamper of intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire, these foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like—­like a coop of hens washed overboard and clucking amidst the seas.”

Verrall laughed approval of the image I had struck out.  “A week ago,” he said, trying it further, “we were clinging to our chicken coops and going with the heave and pour.  That was true enough a week ago.  But to-day-—-?”

“To-day,” I said, “the wind has fallen.  The world storm is over.  And each chicken coop has changed by a miracle to a vessel that makes head against the sea.”