In the Days of the Comet (30 page)

These gardens had been planned under the third Lord Redcar, fifty
years ago and more; they abounded in rhododendra and azaleas, and
were in places so well sheltered and sunny that great magnolias
flourished and flowered. There were tall trees smothered in crimson
and yellow climbing roses, and an endless variety of flowering
shrubs and fine conifers, and such pampas grass as no other garden
can show. And barred by the broad shadows of these, were glades and
broad spaces of emerald turf, and here and there banks of pegged
roses, and flower-beds, and banks given over some to spring bulbs,
and some to primroses and primulas and polyanthuses. My mother
loved these latter banks and the little round staring eyes of their
innumerable yellow, ruddy brown, and purple corollas, more than
anything else the gardens could show, and in the spring of the Year
of Scaffolding she would go with me day after day to the seat that
showed them in the greatest multitude.

It gave her, I think, among other agreeable impressions, a sense
of gentle opulence. In the old time she had never known what it was
to have more than enough of anything agreeable in the world at all.

We would sit and think, or talk—there was a curious effect of
complete understanding between us whether we talked or were still.

"Heaven," she said to me one day, "Heaven is a garden."

I was moved to tease her a little. "There's jewels, you know, walls
and gates of jewels—and singing."

"For such as like them," said my mother firmly, and thought for
a while. "There'll be things for all of us, o' course. But for me
it couldn't be Heaven, dear, unless it was a garden—a nice sunny
garden. . . . And feeling such as we're fond of, are close and
handy by"

You of your happier generation cannot realize the wonderfulness
of those early days in the new epoch, the sense of security, the
extraordinary effects of contrast. In the morning, except in high
summer, I was up before dawn, and breakfasted upon the swift, smooth
train, and perhaps saw the sunrise as I rushed out of the little
tunnel that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work like a man. Now
that we had got all the homes and schools and all the softness of
life away from our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousand
obstructive "rights" and timidities had been swept aside, we could
let ourselves go, we merged this enterprise with that, cut across
this or that anciently obstructive piece of private land, joined and
separated, effected gigantic consolidations and gigantic economies,
and the valley, no longer a pit of squalid human tragedies and
meanly conflicting industries, grew into a sort of beauty of its
own, a savage inhuman beauty of force and machinery and flames.
One was a Titan in that Etna. Then back one came at midday to bath
and change in the train, and so to the leisurely gossiping lunch
in the club dining-room in Lowchester House, and the refreshment
of these green and sunlit afternoon tranquillities.

Sometimes in her profounder moments my mother doubted whether all
this last phase of her life was not a dream.

"A dream," I used to say, "a dream indeed—but a dream that is one
step nearer awakening than that nightmare of the former days."

She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes—she
liked the new fashions of dress, she alleged. It was not simply
altered clothes. I did grow two inches, broaden some inches
round my chest, and increase in weight three stones before I was
twenty-three. I wore a soft brown cloth and she would caress my
sleeve and admire it greatly—she had the woman's sense of texture
very strong in her.

Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor
rough hands—they never got softened—one over the other. She told
me much I had not heard before about my father, and her own early
life. It was like finding flat and faded flowers in a book still
faintly sweet, to realize that once my mother had been loved with
passion; that my remote father had once shed hot tears of tenderness in
her arms. And she would sometimes even speak tentatively in those
narrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of all their
bitter narrowness, of Nettie.

"She wasn't worthy of you, dear," she would say abruptly, leaving
me to guess the person she intended.

"No man is worthy of a woman's love," I answered. "No woman is
worthy of a man's. I love her, dear mother, and that you cannot
alter."

"There's others," she would muse.

"Not for me," I said. "No! I didn't fire a shot that time; I burnt
my magazine. I can't begin again, mother, not from the beginning."

She sighed and said no more then.

At another time she said—I think her words were: "You'll be lonely
when I'm gone dear."

"You'll not think of going, then," I said.

"Eh, dear! but man and maid should come together."

I said nothing to that.

"You brood overmuch on Nettie, dear. If I could see you married to
some sweet girl of a woman, some good, KIND girl——"

"Dear mother, I'm married enough. Perhaps some day—— Who knows?
I can wait."

"But to have nothing to do with women!"

"I have my friends. Don't you trouble, mother. There's plentiful
work for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out
from him. Nettie was life and beauty for me—is—will be. Don't
think I've lost too much, mother."

(Because in my heart I told myself the end had still to come.)

And once she sprang a question on me suddenly that surprised me.

"Where are they now?" she asked.

"Who?"

"Nettie and—him."

She had pierced to the marrow of my thoughts. "I don't know," I
said shortly.

Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.

"It's better so," she said, as if pleading. "Indeed . . . it is
better so."

There was something in her quivering old voice that for a moment
took me back across an epoch, to the protests of the former time,
to those counsels of submission, those appeals not to offend It,
that had always stirred an angry spirit of rebellion within me.

"That is the thing I doubt," I said, and abruptly I felt I could
talk no more to her of Nettie. I got up and walked away from her,
and came back after a while, to speak of other things, with a bunch
of daffodils for her in my hand.

But I did not always spend my afternoons with her. There were days
when my crushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be
alone; I walked, or bicycled, and presently I found a new interest
and relief in learning to ride. For the horse was already very
swiftly reaping the benefit to the Change. Hardly anywhere was the
inhumanity of horse traction to be found after the first year of
the new epoch, everywhere lugging and dragging and straining was
done by machines, and the horse had become a beautiful instrument
for the pleasure and carriage of youth. I rode both in the saddle
and, what is finer, naked and barebacked. I found violent exercises
were good for the states of enormous melancholy that came upon me,
and when at last horse riding palled, I went and joined the aviators
who practised soaring upon aeroplanes beyond Horsemarden Hill. . . .
But at least every alternate day I spent with my mother, and
altogether I think I gave her two-thirds of my afternoons.

When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an euthanasia
for so many of the older people in the beginning of the new time,
took hold upon my mother, there came Anna Reeves to daughter
her—after our new custom. She chose to come. She was already
known to us a little from chance meetings and chance services she
had done my mother in the garden; she sought to give her help. She
seemed then just one of those plainly good girls the world at its
worst has never failed to produce, who were indeed in the dark old
times the hidden antiseptic of all our hustling, hating, faithless
lives. They made their secret voiceless worship, they did their
steadfast, uninspired, unthanked, unselfish work as helpful daughters,
as nurses, as faithful servants, as the humble providences of homes.
She was almost exactly three years older than I. At first I found
no beauty in her, she was short but rather sturdy and ruddy, with
red-tinged hair, and fair hairy brows and red-brown eyes. But her
freckled hands I found, were full of apt help, her voice
carried good cheer. . . .

At first she was no more than a blue-clad, white-aproned benevolence,
that moved in the shadows behind the bed on which my old mother lay
and sank restfully to death. She would come forward to anticipate
some little need, to proffer some simple comfort, and always then
my mother smiled on her. In a little while I discovered the beauty
of that helpful poise of her woman's body, I discovered the grace
of untiring goodness, the sweetness of a tender pity, and the
great riches of her voice, of her few reassuring words and phrases.
I noted and remembered very clearly how once my mother's lean old
hand patted the firm gold-flecked strength of hers, as it went by
upon its duties with the coverlet.

"She is a good girl to me," said my mother one day. "A good girl.
Like a daughter should be. . . . I never had a daughter—really."
She mused peacefully for a space. "Your little sister died," she
said.

I had never heard of that little sister.

"November the tenth," said my mother. "Twenty-nine months and three
days. . . . I cried. I cried. That was before you came, dear. So
long ago—and I can see it now. I was a young wife then, and your
father was very kind. But I can see its hands, its dear little
quiet hands. . . . Dear, they say that now—now they will not let
the little children die."

"No, dear mother," I said. "We shall do better now."

"The club doctor could not come. Your father went twice. There
was some one else, some one who paid. So your father went on into
Swathinglea, and that man wouldn't come unless he had his fee. And
your father had changed his clothes to look more respectful and he
hadn't any money, not even his tram fare home. It seemed cruel to
be waiting there with my baby thing in pain. . . . And I can't help
thinking perhaps we might have saved her. . . . But it was like
that with the poor always in the bad old times—always. When the
doctor came at last he was angry. 'Why wasn't I called before?'
he said, and he took no pains. He was angry because some one hadn't
explained. I begged him—but it was too late."

She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one
who describes a dream. "We are going to manage all these things
better now," I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful
little story her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me.

"She talked," my mother went on. "She talked for her age wonderfully.
. . . Hippopotamus."

"Eh?" I said.

"Hippopotamus, dear—quite plainly one day, when her father was
showing her pictures. . . And her little prayers. 'Now I lay me.
. . . down to sleep.' . . . I made her little socks. Knitted they
was, dear, and the heel most difficult."

Her eyes were closed now. She spoke no longer to me but to herself.
She whispered other vague things, little sentences, ghosts of long
dead moments. . . . Her words grew less distinct.

Presently she was asleep and I got up and went out of the room,
but my mind was queerly obsessed by the thought of that little life
that had been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of
hope again into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never
heard before. . . .

And presently I was in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows
of the past, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which
this was but one luminous and quivering red drop. I walked in the
garden and the garden was too small for me; I went out to wander
on the moors. "The past is past," I cried, and all the while across
the gulf of five and twenty years I could hear my poor mother's
heart-wrung weeping for that daughter baby who had suffered and
died. Indeed that old spirit of rebellion has not altogether died
in me, for all the transformation of the new time. . . . I quieted
down at last to a thin and austere comfort in thinking that the
whole is not told to us, that it cannot perhaps be told to such
minds as ours; and anyhow, and what was far more sustaining, that
now we have strength and courage and this new gift of wise love,
whatever cruel and sad things marred the past, none of these sorrowful
things that made the very warp and woof of the old life, need now
go on happening. We could foresee, we could prevent and save. "The
past is past," I said, between sighing and resolve, as I came into
view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit windows of
old Lowchester House. "Those sorrows are sorrows no more."

But I could not altogether cheat that common sadness of the new
time, that memory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives that
had stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before our air grew
clear.

IN the end my mother died rather suddenly, and her death came as
a shock to me. Diagnosis was still very inadequate at that time.
The doctors were, of course, fully alive to the incredible defects
of their common training and were doing all they could to supply
its deficiencies, but they were still extraordinarily ignorant.
Some unintelligently observed factor of her illness came into play
with her, and she became feverish and sank and died very quickly.
I do not know what remedial measures were attempted. I hardly knew
what was happening until the whole thing was over.

At that time my attention was much engaged by the stir of the great
Beltane festival that was held on May-day in the Year of Scaffolding.
It was the first of the ten great rubbish burnings that opened the
new age. Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the
enormous quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation with
which we had to deal; had we not set aside a special day and season,
the whole world would have been an incessant reek of small fires;
and it was, I think, a happy idea to revive this ancient festival of
the May and November burnings. It was inevitable that the old idea
of purification should revive with the name, it was felt to be a
burning of other than material encumbrances, innumerable quasi-spiritual
things, deeds, documents, debts, vindictive records, went up on
those great flares. People passed praying between the fires, and
it was a fine symbol of the new and wiser tolerance that had come
to men, that those who still found their comfort in the orthodox
faiths came hither unpersuaded, to pray that all hate might be burnt
out of their professions. For even in the fires of Baal, now that
men have done with base hatred, one may find the living God.