In the Days of the Comet

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. . . .