In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 4

  When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an euthanasiafor so many of the older people in the beginning of the new time,took hold upon my mother, there came Anna Reeves to daughterher--after our new custom. She chose to come. She was alreadyknown to us a little from chance meetings and chance services shehad done my mother in the garden; she sought to give her help. Sheseemed then just one of those plainly good girls the world at itsworst has never failed to produce, who were indeed in the dark oldtimes the hidden antiseptic of all our hustling, hating, faithlesslives. They made their secret voiceless worship, they did theirsteadfast, 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 foundno beauty in her, she was short but rather sturdy and ruddy, withred-tinged hair, and fair hairy brows and red-brown eyes. But herfreckled hands I found, were full of apt help, her voicecarried 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 layand sank restfully to death. She would come forward to anticipatesome little need, to proffer some simple comfort, and always thenmy mother smiled on her. In a little while I discovered the beautyof that helpful poise of her woman's body, I discovered the graceof untiring goodness, the sweetness of a tender pity, and thegreat riches of her voice, of her few reassuring words and phrases.I noted and remembered very clearly how once my mother's lean oldhand patted the firm gold-flecked strength of hers, as it went byupon 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," shesaid.

  I had never heard of that little sister.

  "November the tenth," said my mother. "Twenty-nine months and threedays. . . . I cried. I cried. That was before you came, dear. Solong ago--and I can see it now. I was a young wife then, and yourfather was very kind. But I can see its hands, its dear littlequiet hands. . . . Dear, they say that now--now they will not letthe little children die."

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

  "The club doctor could not come. Your father went twice. Therewas some one else, some one who paid. So your father went on intoSwathinglea, and that man wouldn't come unless he had his fee. Andyour father had changed his clothes to look more respectful and hehadn't any money, not even his tram fare home. It seemed cruel tobe waiting there with my baby thing in pain. . . . And I can't helpthinking perhaps we might have saved her. . . . But it was likethat with the poor always in the bad old times--always. When thedoctor 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'texplained. I begged him--but it was too late."

  She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like onewho describes a dream. "We are going to manage all these thingsbetter now," I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitifullittle 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 wasshowing her pictures. . . And her little prayers. 'Now I lay me.. . . down to sleep.' . . . I made her little socks. Knitted theywas, 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 longdead 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 lifethat had been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out ofhope again into nonentity, this sister of whom I had neverheard before. . . .

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

  But I could not altogether cheat that common sadness of the newtime, that memory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives thathad stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before our air grewclear.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  BELTANE AND NEW YEAR'S EVE