In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 2

  The talk we three had together in the dawn of the new time is verystrongly impressed upon my memory. There was something fresh andsimple about it, something young and flushed and exalted. We tookup, we handled with a certain naive timidity, the most difficultquestions the Change had raised for men to solve. I recall wemade little of them. All the old scheme of human life had dissolvedand passed away, the narrow competitiveness, the greed and baseaggression, the jealous aloofness of soul from soul. Where hadit left us? That was what we and a thousand million otherswere discussing. . . .

  It chances that this last meeting with Nettie is inseparablyassociated--I don't know why--with the landlady of the Menton inn.

  The Menton inn was one of the rare pleasant corners of the oldorder; it was an inn of an unusual prosperity, much frequented byvisitors from Shaphambury, and given to the serving of lunches andteas. It had a broad mossy bowling-green, and round about it werecreeper-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, andabove these again rose the gables of the inn and its signpost--awhite-horsed George slaying the dragon--against copper beeches underthe sky.

  While I waited for Nettie and Verrall in this agreeable trystingplace, 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 thateverything in the world was now to be changed for the better.That confidence, and something in her voice, made me love her asI talked to her. "Now we're awake," she said, "all sorts of thingswill be put right that hadn't any sense in them. Why? Oh! I'm sureof it."

  Her kind blue eyes met mine in an infinitude of friendliness. Herlips in her pauses shaped in a pretty faint smile.

  Old tradition was strong in us; all English inns in those dayscharged 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 manageit, but it won't be the worry it has been--that I feel sure. It'sthe part I never had no fancy for. Many a time I peeped through thebushes 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 carefor. There'll be mighty changes, be sure of that; but here I'llstay, and make people happy--them that go by on the roads. It's apleasant place here when people are merry; it's only when they'rejealous, or mean, or tired, or eat up beyond any stomach's digesting, orwhen 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 againlike friends, but nothing to equal what's going to be, now thingsare 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; suchan omelet--like they'll have 'em in heaven! I feel there's cookingin me these days like I've never cooked before. I'm rejoicedto have it to do. . . ."

  It was just then that Nettie and Verrall appeared under a rusticarchway of crimson roses that led out from the inn. Nettie worewhite and a sun-hat, and Verrall was a figure of gray. "Hereare my friends," I said; but for all the magic of the Change,something passed athwart the sunlight in my soul like the passingof 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 gladdenme. No--I winced a little at that.