In the Days of the Comet (31 page)

Endless were the things we had to destroy in those great purgings.
First, there were nearly all the houses and buildings of the old
time. In the end we did not save in England one building in five
thousand that was standing when the comet came. Year by year, as
we made our homes afresh in accordance with the saner needs of our
new social families, we swept away more and more of those horrible
structures, the ancient residential houses, hastily built, without
imagination, without beauty, without common honesty, without even
comfort or convenience, in which the early twentieth century had
sheltered until scarcely one remained; we saved nothing but what
was beautiful or interesting out of all their gaunt and melancholy
abundance. The actual houses, of course, we could not drag to
our fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting deal doors, their
dreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting staircases, their
dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their scaly walls,
their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and yet
pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers,
the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments—their dirty, decayed,
and altogether painful ornaments—amidst which I remember there
were sometimes even STUFFED DEAD BIRDS!—we burnt them all. The
paint-plastered woodwork, with coat above coat of nasty paint, that
in particular blazed finely. I have already tried to give you an
impression of old-world furniture, of Parload's bedroom, my mother's
room, Mr. Gabbitas's sitting-room, but, thank Heaven! there is
nothing in life now to convey the peculiar dinginess of it all. For
one thing, there is no more imperfect combustion of coal going on
everywhere, and no roadways like grassless open scars along the
earth from which dust pours out perpetually. We burnt and destroyed
most of our private buildings and all the woodwork, all our furniture,
except a few score thousand pieces of distinct and intentional
beauty, from which our present forms have developed, nearly all
our hangings and carpets, and also we destroyed almost every scrap
of old-world clothing. Only a few carefully disinfected types and
vestiges of that remain now in our museums.

One writes now with a peculiar horror of the dress of the old world.
The men's clothes were worn without any cleansing process at all,
except an occasional superficial brushing, for periods of a year
or so; they were made of dark obscurely mixed patterns to conceal
the stage of defilement they had reached, and they were of a felted
and porous texture admirably calculated to accumulate drifting
matter. Many women wore skirts of similar substances, and of so
long and inconvenient a form that they inevitably trailed among
all the abomination of our horse-frequented roads. It was our boast
in England that the whole of our population was booted—their feet
were for the most part ugly enough to need it,—but it becomes
now inconceivable how they could have imprisoned their feet in the
amazing cases of leather and imitations of leather they used. I
have heard it said that a large part of the physical decline that
was apparent in our people during the closing years of the nineteenth
century, though no doubt due in part to the miscellaneous badness
of the food they ate, was in the main attributable to the vileness
of the common footwear. They shirked open-air exercise altogether
because their boots wore out ruinously and pinched and hurt them
if they took it. I have mentioned, I think, the part my own boots
played in the squalid drama of my adolescence. I had a sense
of unholy triumph over a fallen enemy when at last I found myself
steering truck after truck of cheap boots and shoes (unsold stock
from Swathinglea) to the run-off by the top of the Glanville blast
furnaces.

"Plup!" they would drop into the cone when Beltane came, and the
roar of their burning would fill the air. Never a cold would come
from the saturation of their brown paper soles, never a corn from
their foolish shapes, never a nail in them get home at last in
suffering flesh. . . .

Most of our public buildings we destroyed and burnt as we reshaped
our plan of habitation, our theater sheds, our banks, and inconvenient
business warrens, our factories (these in the first year of all),
and all the "unmeaning repetition" of silly little sham Gothic
churches and meeting-houses, mean looking shells of stone and
mortar without love, invention, or any beauty at all in them, that
men had thrust into the face of their sweated God, even as they
thrust cheap food into the mouths of their sweated workers; all
these we also swept away in the course of that first decade. Then
we had the whole of the superseded steam-railway system to scrap
and get rid of, stations, signals, fences, rolling stock; a plant
of ill-planned, smoke-distributing nuisance apparatus, that would,
under former conditions, have maintained an offensive dwindling
obstructive life for perhaps half a century. Then also there was a
great harvest of fences, notice boards, hoardings, ugly sheds, all
the corrugated iron in the world, and everything that was smeared
with tar, all our gas works and petroleum stores, all our horse
vehicles and vans and lorries had to be erased. . . . But I have
said enough now perhaps to give some idea of the bulk and quality
of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down, our
toil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in
those early years.

But these were the coarse material bases of the Phoenix fires
of the world. These were but the outward and visible signs of the
innumerable claims, rights, adhesions, debts, bills, deeds, and
charters that were cast upon the fires; a vast accumulation of
insignia and uniforms neither curious enough nor beautiful enough
to preserve, went to swell the blaze, and all (saving a few truly
glorious trophies and memories) of our symbols, our apparatus and
material of war. Then innumerable triumphs of our old, bastard,
half-commercial, fine-art were presently condemned, great oil
paintings, done to please the half-educated middle-class, glared
for a moment and were gone, Academy marbles crumbled to useful lime,
a gross multitude of silly statuettes and decorative crockery, and
hangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and musical instruments
shared this fate. And books, countless books, too, and bales
of newspapers went also to these pyres. From the private houses
in Swathinglea alone—which I had deemed, perhaps not unjustly,
altogether illiterate—we gathered a whole dust-cart full of cheap
ill-printed editions of the minor English classics—for the most
part very dull stuff indeed and still clean—and about a truckload
of thumbed and dog-eared penny fiction, watery base stuff, the
dropsy of our nation's mind. . . . And it seemed to me that when
we gathered those books and papers together, we gathered together
something more than print and paper, we gathered warped and
crippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulae of dull
tolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities
of sluggish habits of thinking and timid and indolent evasions.
There was more than a touch of malignant satisfaction for me in
helping gather it all together.

I was so busy, I say, with my share in this dustman's work that
I did not notice, as I should otherwise have done, the little
indications of change in my mother's state. Indeed, I thought her
a little stronger; she was slightly flushed, slightly more talkative. . . .

On Beltane Eve, and our Lowchester rummage being finished, I went
along the valley to the far end of Swathinglea to help sort the
stock of the detached group of potbanks there—their chief output
had been mantel ornaments in imitation of marble, and there was
very little sorting, I found, to be done—and there it was nurse
Anna found me at last by telephone, and told me my mother had died
in the morning suddenly and very shortly after my departure.

For a while I did not seem to believe it; this obviously imminent
event stunned me when it came, as though I had never had an
anticipatory moment. For a while I went on working, and then almost
apathetically, in a mood of half-reluctant curiosity, I started
for Lowchester.

When I got there the last offices were over, and I was shown my
old mother's peaceful white face, very still, but a little cold
and stern to me, a little unfamiliar, lying among white flowers.

I went in alone to her, into that quiet room, and stood for
a long time by her bedside. I sat down then and thought. . . .

Then at last, strangely hushed, and with the deeps of my loneliness
opening beneath me, I came out of that room and down into the world
again, a bright-eyed, active world, very noisy, happy, and busy
with its last preparations for the mighty cremation of past and
superseded things.

I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonely
night in my life. It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments of
intense feeling with forgotten gaps between.

I recall very distinctly being upon the great staircase of Lowchester
House (though I don't remember getting there from the room in which
my mother lay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as I
came down. She had but just heard of my return, and she was hurrying
upstairs to me. She stopped and so did I, and we stood and clasped
hands, and she scrutinized my face in the way women sometimes do.
So we remained for a second or so. I could say nothing to her at
all, but I could feel the wave of her emotion. I halted, answered
the earnest pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and after
a queer second of hesitation went on down, returning to my own
preoccupations. It did not occur to me at all then to ask myself
what she might be thinking or feeling.

I remember the corridor full of mellow evening light, and how I
went mechanically some paces toward the dining-room. Then at the
sight of the little tables, and a gusty outburst of talking voices
as some one in front of me swung the door open and to, I remembered
that I did not want to eat. . . . After that comes an impression
of myself walking across the open grass in front of the house, and
the purpose I had of getting alone upon the moors, and how somebody
passing me said something about a hat. I had come out without my
hat.

A fragment of thought has linked itself with an effect of long
shadows upon turf golden with the light of the sinking sun. The
world was singularly empty, I thought, without either Nettie or my
mother. There wasn't any sense in it any more. Nettie was
already back in my mind then. . . .

Then I am out on the moors. I avoided the crests where the
bonfires were being piled, and sought the lonely places. . . .

I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a
fold just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its
crowd, and I was looking at and admiring the sunset. The golden
earth and sky seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe
of human futility. . . . Then in the twilight I walked along an
unknown, bat-haunted road between high hedges.

I did not sleep under a roof that night. But I hungered and ate.
I ate near midnight at a little inn over toward Birmingham, and
miles away from my home. Instinctively I had avoided the crests
where the bonfire crowds gathered, but here there were many people,
and I had to share a table with a man who had some useless mortgage
deeds to burn. I talked to him about them—but my soul stood at a
great distance behind my lips. . . .

Soon each hilltop bore a little tulip-shaped flame flower. Little
black figures clustered round and dotted the base of its petals,
and as for the rest of the multitude abroad, the kindly night
swallowed them up. By leaving the roads and clear paths and wandering
in the fields I contrived to keep alone, though the confused noise
of voices and the roaring and crackling of great fires was always
near me.

I wandered into a lonely meadow, and presently in a hollow of
deep shadows I lay down to stare at the stars. I lay hidden in the
darkness, and ever and again the sough and uproar of the Beltane
fires that were burning up the sere follies of a vanished age, and
the shouting of the people passing through the fires and praying to
be delivered from the prison of themselves, reached my ears. . . .

And I thought of my mother, and then of my new loneliness and the
hunger of my heart for Nettie.

I thought of many things that night, but chiefly of the overflowing
personal love and tenderness that had come to me in the wake of
the Change, of the greater need, the unsatisfied need in which I
stood, for this one person who could fulfil all my desires. So long
as my mother had lived, she had in a measure held my heart, given
me a food these emotions could live upon, and mitigated that emptiness
of spirit, but now suddenly that one possible comfort had left me.
There had been many at the season of the Change who had thought that
this great enlargement of mankind would abolish personal love; but
indeed it had only made it finer, fuller, more vitally necessary.
They had thought that, seeing men now were all full of the joyful
passion to make and do, and glad and loving and of willing service
to all their fellows, there would be no need of the one intimate
trusting communion that had been the finest thing of the former
life. And indeed, so far as this was a matter of advantage and
the struggle for existence, they were right. But so far as it was
a matter of the spirit and the fine perceptions of life, it was
altogether wrong.

We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped it
of its base wrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenary
and competitive elements, until at last it stood up in our minds
stark, shining and invincible. Through all the fine, divaricating
ways of the new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for
every one certain persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the
key of one's self, whose mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere
existence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accident
to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestined
lovers. They were the essential thing in life. Without them the
fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steed
without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater without a play.
. . . And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear as white
flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies in
me. And she had gone! I had sent her from me; I knew not whither
she had gone. I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out
of my life for ever!