In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 6

  I remember all that very distinctly to this day. I could almostvouch for the words I have put into our several mouths. Then comesa blank. I have a dim memory of being back in the house near theLinks and the bustle of Melmount's departure, of finding Parker'senergy distasteful, and of going away down the road with a strongdesire to say good-bye to Melmount alone.

  Perhaps I was already doubting my decision to part for ever fromNettie, for I think I had it in mind to tell him all thathad been said and done. . . .

  I don't think I had a word with him or anything but a hurried handclasp. I am not sure. It has gone out of my mind. But I have avery clear and certain memory of my phase of bleak desolation asI watched his car recede and climb and vanish over MapleboroughHill, and that I got there my first full and definite intimationthat, after all, this great Change and my new wide aims in life,were not to mean indiscriminate happiness for me. I had a sense ofprotest, as against extreme unfairness, as I saw him go. "It istoo soon," I said to myself, "to leave me alone."

  I felt I had sacrificed too much, that after I had said good-bye tothe hot immediate life of passion, to Nettie and desire, to physicaland personal rivalry, to all that was most intensely myself, it waswrong to leave me alone and sore hearted, to go on at once withthese steely cold duties of the wider life. I felt new born, andnaked, and at a loss.

  "Work!" I said with an effort at the heroic, and turned about witha sigh, and I was glad that the way I had to go would atleast take me to my mother. . . .

  But, curiously enough, I remember myself as being fairly cheerfulin the town of Birmingham that night, I recall an active andinterested mood. I spent the night in Birmingham because the trainservice on was disarranged, and I could not get on. I went to listento a band that was playing its brassy old-world music in the publicpark, and I fell into conversation with a man who said he had beena reporter upon one of their minor local papers. He was full andkeen upon all the plans of reconstruction that were now shapingover the lives of humanity, and I know that something of thatnoble dream came back to me with his words and phrases. We walkedup to a place called Bourneville by moonlight, and talked of thenew social groupings that must replace the old isolated homes, andhow the people would be housed.

  This Bourneville was germane to that matter. It had been anattempt on the part of a private firm of manufacturers to improvethe housing of their workers. To our ideas to-day it would seem thefeeblest of benevolent efforts, but at the time it was extraordinaryand famous, and people came long journeys to see its trim cottageswith baths sunk under the kitchen floors (of all conceivableplaces), and other brilliant inventions. No one seemed to see thedanger to liberty in that aggressive age, that might arise throughmaking workpeople tenants and debtors of their employer, though anAct called the Truck Act had long ago intervened to prevent minordevelopments in the same direction. . . . But I and my chanceacquaintance seemed that night always to have been aware of thatpossibility, and we had no doubt in our minds of the public natureof the housing duty. Our interest lay rather in the possibility ofcommon nurseries and kitchens and public rooms that should economizetoil and give people space and freedom.

  It was very interesting, but still a little cheerless, and when Ilay in bed that night I thought of Nettie and the queer modificationsof preference she had made, and among other things and in a way, Iprayed. I prayed that night, let me confess it, to an image I hadset up in my heart, an image that still serves with me as a symbolfor things inconceivable, to a Master Artificer, the unseen captainof all who go about the building of the world, the making of mankind.

  But before and after I prayed I imagined I was talking and reasoningand meeting again with Nettie. . . . She never came into the templeof that worshiping with me.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  MY MOTHER'S LAST DAYS