I seemed to see these two for the first time; how fine they were, how graceful and human. It was as though I had never really looked at them before, and, indeed, always before I had beheld them through a mist of selfish passion. They had shared the universal darkness and dwarfing of the former time; they shared the universal exaltation of the new. Now suddenly Nettie, and the love of Nettie, a great passion for Nettie, lived again in me. This change which had enlarged men’s hearts had made no end to love. Indeed, it had enormously enlarged and glorified love. She stepped into the center of that dream of world reconstruction that filled my mind and took possession of it all. A little wisp of hair had blown across her cheek, her lips fell apart in that sweet smile of hers; her eyes were full of wonder, of a welcoming scrutiny, of an infinitely courageous friendliness.
I took her outstretched hand, and wonder overwhelmed me. “I wanted to kill you,” I said simply, trying to grasp that idea. It seemed now like stabbing the stars, or murdering the sunlight.
“Afterward we looked for you,” said Verrall; “and we could not find you… . We heard another shot.”
I turned my eyes to him, and Nettie’s hand fell from me. It was then I thought of how they had fallen together, and what it must have been to have awakened in that dawn with Nettie by one’s side. I had a vision of them as I had glimpsed them last amidst the thickening vapors, close together, hand in hand. The green hawks of the Change spread their darkling wings above their last stumbling paces. So they fell. And awoke — lovers together in a morning of Paradise. Who can tell how bright the sunshine was to them, how fair the flowers, how sweet the singing of the birds? …
This was the thought of my heart. But my lips were saying, “When
I awoke I threw my pistol away.” Sheer blankness kept my thoughts
silent for a little while; I said empty things. “I am very glad
I did not kill you — that you are here, so fair and well… .”
“I am going away back to Clayton on the day after tomorrow,” I said, breaking away to explanations. “I have been writing shorthand here for Melmount, but that is almost over now… .”
Neither of them said a word, and though all facts had suddenly ceased to matter anything, I went on informatively, “He is to be taken to Downing Street where there is a proper staff, so that there will be no need of me… . Of course, you’re a little perplexed at my being with Melmount. You see I met him — by accident — directly I recovered. I found him with a broken ankle — in that lane… . I am to go now to the Four Towns to help prepare a report. So that I am glad to see you both again” — I found a catch in my voice — “to say goodbye to you, and wish you well.”
This was after the quality of what had come into my mind when first I saw them through the grocer’s window, but it was not what I felt and thought as I said it. I went on saying it because otherwise there would have been a gap. It had come to me that it was going to be hard to part from Nettie. My words sounded with an effect of unreality. I stopped, and we stood for a moment in silence looking at one another.
It was I, I think, who was discovering most. I was realizing for the first time how little the Change had altered in my essential nature. I had forgotten this business of love for a time in a world of wonder. That was all. Nothing was lost from my nature, nothing had gone, only the power of thought and restraint had been wonderfully increased and new interests had been forced upon me. The Green Vapors had passed, our minds were swept and garnished, but we were ourselves still, though living in a new and finer air. My affinities were unchanged; Nettie’s personal charm for me was only quickened by the enhancement of my perceptions. In her presence, meeting her eyes, instantly my desire, no longer frantic but sane, was awake again.
It was just like going to Checkshill in the old time, after writing about socialism… .
I relinquished her hand. It was absurd to part in these terms.
So we all felt it. We hung awkwardly over our sense of that. It was Verrall, I think, who shaped the thought for me, and said that tomorrow then we must meet and say goodbye, and so turned our encounter into a transitory making of arrangements. We settled we would come to the inn at Menton, all three of us, and take our midday meal together… .
Yes, it was clear that was all we had to say now… .
We parted a little awkwardly. I went on down the village street, not looking back, surprised at myself, and infinitely perplexed. It was as if I had discovered something overlooked that disarranged all my plans, something entirely disconcerting. For the first time I went back preoccupied and without eagerness to Melmount’s work. I wanted to go on thinking about Nettie; my mind had suddenly become voluminously productive concerning her and Verrall.
Section 2
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 snapdragon, 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