In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 3

  That talk stands out in my memory because of that agreeable theologicaldecision of hers, but it was only one of a great number of talks.It used to be pleasant in the afternoon, after the day's work wasdone and before one went on with the evening's study--how odd itwould have seemed in the old time for a young man of the industrialclass to be doing post-graduate work in sociology, and how mucha matter of course it seems now!--to walk out into the gardensof Lowchester House, and smoke a cigarette or so and let her talkramblingly of the things that interested her. . . . Physicallythe Great Change did not do so very much to reinvigorate her--shehad lived in that dismal underground kitchen in Clayton too longfor any material rejuvenescence--she glowed out indeed as a dyingspark among the ashes might glow under a draught of fresh air--andassuredly it hastened her end. But those closing days were verytranquil, full of an effortless contentment. With her, life was likea rainy, windy day that clears only to show the sunset afterglow.The light has passed. She acquired no new habits amid the comfortsof the new life, did no new things, but only found a happier lightupon the old.

  She lived with a number of other old ladies belonging to our communein the upper rooms of Lowchester House. Those upper apartmentswere simple and ample, fine and well done in the Georgian style,and they had been organized to give the maximum of comfort andconveniences and to economize the need of skilled attendance. Wehad taken over the various "great houses," as they used to becalled, to make communal dining-rooms and so forth--their kitchenswere conveniently large--and pleasant places for the old peopleof over sixty whose time of ease had come, and for suchlike publicuses. We had done this not only with Lord Redcar's house, but alsowith Checkshill House--where old Mrs. Verrall made a dignifiedand capable hostess,--and indeed with most of the fine residencesin the beautiful wide country between the Four Towns district andthe Welsh mountains. About these great houses there had usuallybeen good outbuildings, laundries, married servants' quarters,stabling, dairies, and the like, suitably masked by trees, weturned these into homes, and to them we added first tents and woodchalets and afterward quadrangular residential buildings. In orderto be near my mother I had two small rooms in the new collegiatebuildings which our commune was almost the first to possess, and theywere very convenient for the station of the high-speed electricrailway that took me down to our daily conferences and my secretarialand statistical work in Clayton.

  Ours had been one of the first modern communes to get in order; wewere greatly helped by the energy of Lord Redcar, who had a finefeeling for the picturesque associations of his ancestral home--thedetour that took our line through the beeches and bracken andbluebells of the West Wood and saved the pleasant open wildnessof the park was one of his suggestions; and we had many reasons tobe proud of our surroundings. Nearly all the other communes thatsprang up all over the pleasant parkland round the industrialvalley of the Four Towns, as the workers moved out, came to us tostudy the architecture of the residential squares and quadrangleswith which we had replaced the back streets between the greathouses and the ecclesiastical residences about the cathedral, andthe way in which we had adapted all these buildings to our newsocial needs. Some claimed to have improved on us. But they couldnot emulate the rhododendron garden out beyond our shrubberies; thatwas a thing altogether our own in our part of England, because ofits ripeness and of the rarity of good peat free from lime.

  These gardens had been planned under the third Lord Redcar, fiftyyears ago and more; they abounded in rhododendra and azaleas, andwere in places so well sheltered and sunny that great magnoliasflourished and flowered. There were tall trees smothered in crimsonand yellow climbing roses, and an endless variety of floweringshrubs and fine conifers, and such pampas grass as no other gardencan show. And barred by the broad shadows of these, were glades andbroad spaces of emerald turf, and here and there banks of peggedroses, and flower-beds, and banks given over some to spring bulbs,and some to primroses and primulas and polyanthuses. My motherloved these latter banks and the little round staring eyes of theirinnumerable yellow, ruddy brown, and purple corollas, more thananything else the gardens could show, and in the spring of the Yearof Scaffolding she would go with me day after day to the seat thatshowed them in the greatest multitude.

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

  We would sit and think, or talk--there was a curious effect ofcomplete 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, wallsand gates of jewels--and singing."

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

  You of your happier generation cannot realize the wonderfulnessof those early days in the new epoch, the sense of security, theextraordinary effects of contrast. In the morning, except in highsummer, I was up before dawn, and breakfasted upon the swift, smoothtrain, and perhaps saw the sunrise as I rushed out of the littletunnel that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work like a man. Nowthat we had got all the homes and schools and all the softness oflife away from our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousandobstructive "rights" and timidities had been swept aside, we couldlet ourselves go, we merged this enterprise with that, cut acrossthis or that anciently obstructive piece of private land, joined andseparated, effected gigantic consolidations and gigantic economies,and the valley, no longer a pit of squalid human tragedies andmeanly conflicting industries, grew into a sort of beauty of itsown, a savage inhuman beauty of force and machinery and flames.One was a Titan in that Etna. Then back one came at midday to bathand change in the train, and so to the leisurely gossiping lunchin the club dining-room in Lowchester House, and the refreshmentof these green and sunlit afternoon tranquillities.

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

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

  She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes--sheliked the new fashions of dress, she alleged. It was not simplyaltered clothes. I did grow two inches, broaden some inchesround my chest, and increase in weight three stones before I wastwenty-three. I wore a soft brown cloth and she would caress mysleeve and admire it greatly--she had the woman's sense of texturevery strong in her.

  Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poorrough hands--they never got softened--one over the other. She toldme much I had not heard before about my father, and her own earlylife. It was like finding flat and faded flowers in a book stillfaintly sweet, to realize that once my mother had been loved withpassion; that my remote father had once shed hot tears of tenderness inher arms. And she would sometimes even speak tentatively in thosenarrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of all theirbitter narrowness, of Nettie.

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

  "No man is worthy of a woman's love," I answered. "No woman isworthy of a man's. I love her, dear mother, and that you cannotalter."

  "There's others," she would muse.

  "Not for me," I said. "No! I didn't fire a shot that time; I burntmy 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 lonelywhen 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 tosome 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 plentifulwork for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast outfrom him. Nettie was life and beauty for me--is--will be. Don'tthink 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," Isaid shortly.

  Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.

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

  There was something in her quivering old voice that for a momenttook 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 couldtalk 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 bunchof daffodils for her in my hand.

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