In the Days of the Comet, H. G. Wells [small books to read .TXT] 📗

“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.”

Section 4

“What are we to do?” asked Verrall.

Nettie drew a deep crimson carnation from the bowl before us, and began very neatly and deliberately to turn down the sepals of its calyx and remove, one by one, its petals. I remember that went on through all our talk. She put those ragged crimson shreds in a long row and adjusted them and readjusted them. When at last I was alone with these vestiges the pattern was still incomplete.

“Well,” said I, “the matter seems fairly simple. You two”—I swallowed it—“love one another.”

I paused. They answered me by silence, by a thoughtful silence.

“You belong to each other. I have thought it over and looked at it from many points of view. I happened to want—impossible things… . I behaved badly. I had no right to pursue you.” I turned to Verrall. “You hold yourself bound to her?”

He nodded assent.

“No social influence, no fading out of all this generous clearness in the air—for that might happen—will change you back … ?”

He answered me with honest eyes meeting mine, “No, Leadford, no!”

“I did not know you,” I said. “I thought of you as something very different from this.”

“I was,” he interpolated.

“Now,” I said, “it is all changed.”

Then I halted—for my thread had slipped away from me.

“As for me,” I went on, and glanced at Nettie’s downcast face, and then sat forward with my eyes upon the flowers between us, “since I am swayed and shall be swayed by an affection for Nettie, since that affection is rich with the seeds of desire, since to see her yours and wholly yours is not to be endured by me—I must turn about and go from you; you must avoid me and I you… . We must divide the world like Jacob and Esau. … I must direct myself with all the will I have to other things. After all—this passion is not life! It is perhaps for brutes and savages, but for men. No! We must part and I must forget. What else is there but that?”

I did not look up, I sat very tense with the red petals printing an indelible memory in my brain, but I felt the assent of Verrall’s pose. There were some moments of silence. Then Nettie spoke. “But––” she said, and ceased.

I waited for a little while. I sighed and leant back in my chair. “It is perfectly simple,” I smiled, “now that we have cool heads.”

“But IS it simple?” asked Nettie, and slashed my discourse out of being.

I looked up and found her with her eyes on Verrall. “You see,” she said, “I like Willie. It’s hard to say what one feels—but I don’t want him to go away like that.”

“But then,” objected Verrall, “how––?”

“No,” said Nettie, and swept her half-arranged carnation petals back into a heap of confusion. She began to arrange them very quickly into one long straight line.

“It’s so difficult–– I’ve never before in all my life tried to get to the bottom of my mind. For one thing, I’ve not treated Willie properly. He—he counted on me. I know he did. I was his hope. I was a promised delight—something, something to crown life—better than anything he had ever had. And a secret pride… . He lived upon me. I knew—when we two began to meet together, you and I–– It was a sort of treachery to him––”

“Treachery!” I said. “You were only feeling your way through all these perplexities.”

“You thought it treachery.”

“I don’t now.”

“I did. In a sense I think so still. For you had need of me.”

I made a slight protest at this doctrine and fell thinking.

“And even when he was trying to kill us,” she said to her lover, “I felt for him down in the bottom of my mind. I can understand all the horrible things, the humiliation—the humiliation! he went through.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t see––”

“I don’t see. I’m only trying to see. But you know, Willie, you are a part of my life. I have known you longer than I have known Edward. I know you better. Indeed I know you with all my heart. You think all your talk was thrown away upon me, that I never understood that side of you, or your ambitions or anything. I did. More than I thought at the time. Now —now it is all clear to me. What I had to understand in you was something deeper than Edward brought me. I have it now… . You are a part of my life, and I don’t want to cut all that off from me now I have comprehended it, and throw it away.”

“But you love Verrall.”

“Love is such a queer thing! … Is there one love? I mean, only one love?” She turned to Verrall. “I know I love you. I can speak out about that now. Before this morning I couldn’t have done. It’s just as though my mind had got out of a scented prison. But what is it, this love for you? It’s a mass of fancies—things about you—ways you look, ways you have. It’s the senses—and the senses of certain beauties. Flattery too, things you said, hopes and deceptions for myself. And all that had rolled up together and taken to itself the wild help of those deep emotions that slumbered in my body; it seemed everything. But it wasn’t. How can I describe it? It was like having a very bright lamp with a thick shade—everything else in the room was hidden. But you take the shade off and there they are—it is the same light—still there! Only it lights every one!”

Her voice ceased. For awhile no one spoke, and Nettie, with a quick movement, swept the petals into the shape of a pyramid.

Figures of speech always distract me, and it ran through my mind like some puzzling refrain, “It is still the same light… .”

“No woman believes these things,” she asserted abruptly.

“What things?”

“No woman ever has believed them.”

“You have to choose a man,” said Verrall, apprehending her before I did.

“We’re brought up to that. We’re told—it’s in books, in stories, in the way people look, in the way they behave—one day there will come a man. He will be everything, no one else will be anything. Leave everything else; live in him.”

“And a man, too, is taught that of some woman,” said Verrall.

“Only men don’t believe it! They have more obstinate minds… . Men have never behaved as though they believed it. One need not be old to know that. By nature they don’t believe it. But a woman believes nothing by nature. She goes into a mold hiding her secret thoughts almost from herself.”

“She used to,” I said.

“You haven’t,” said Verrall, “anyhow.”

“I’ve come out. It’s this comet. And Willie. And because I never really believed in the mold at all—even if I thought I did. It’s stupid to send Willie off—shamed, cast out, never to see him again—when I like him as much as I do. It is cruel, it is wicked and ugly, to prance over him as if he was a defeated enemy, and pretend I’m going to be happy just the same. There’s no sense in a rule of life that prescribes that. It’s selfish. It’s brutish. It’s like something that has no sense. I––” there was a sob in her voice: “Willie! I WON’T.”

I sat lowering, I mused with my eyes upon her quick fingers.

“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