In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 1

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

  At that time my attention was much engaged by the stir of the greatBeltane festival that was held on May-day in the Year of Scaffolding.It was the first of the ten great rubbish burnings that opened thenew age. Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine theenormous quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation withwhich 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 ofthe May and November burnings. It was inevitable that the old ideaof purification should revive with the name, it was felt to be aburning of other than material encumbrances, innumerable quasi-spiritualthings, deeds, documents, debts, vindictive records, went up onthose great flares. People passed praying between the fires, andit was a fine symbol of the new and wiser tolerance that had cometo men, that those who still found their comfort in the orthodoxfaiths came hither unpersuaded, to pray that all hate might be burntout of their professions. For even in the fires of Baal, now thatmen have done with base hatred, one may find the living God.

  Endless were the things we had to destroy in those great purgings.First, there were nearly all the houses and buildings of the oldtime. In the end we did not save in England one building in fivethousand that was standing when the comet came. Year by year, aswe made our homes afresh in accordance with the saner needs of ournew social families, we swept away more and more of those horriblestructures, the ancient residential houses, hastily built, withoutimagination, without beauty, without common honesty, without evencomfort or convenience, in which the early twentieth century hadsheltered until scarcely one remained; we saved nothing but whatwas beautiful or interesting out of all their gaunt and melancholyabundance. The actual houses, of course, we could not drag toour fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting deal doors, theirdreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting staircases, theirdank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their scaly walls,their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and yetpretentious 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 therewere sometimes even STUFFED DEAD BIRDS!--we burnt them all. Thepaint-plastered woodwork, with coat above coat of nasty paint, thatin particular blazed finely. I have already tried to give you animpression of old-world furniture, of Parload's bedroom, my mother'sroom, Mr. Gabbitas's sitting-room, but, thank Heaven! there isnothing in life now to convey the peculiar dinginess of it all. Forone thing, there is no more imperfect combustion of coal going oneverywhere, and no roadways like grassless open scars along theearth from which dust pours out perpetually. We burnt and destroyedmost of our private buildings and all the woodwork, all our furniture,except a few score thousand pieces of distinct and intentionalbeauty, from which our present forms have developed, nearly allour hangings and carpets, and also we destroyed almost every scrapof old-world clothing. Only a few carefully disinfected types andvestiges 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 yearor so; they were made of dark obscurely mixed patterns to concealthe stage of defilement they had reached, and they were of a feltedand porous texture admirably calculated to accumulate driftingmatter. Many women wore skirts of similar substances, and of solong and inconvenient a form that they inevitably trailed amongall the abomination of our horse-frequented roads. It was our boastin England that the whole of our population was booted--their feetwere for the most part ugly enough to need it,--but it becomesnow inconceivable how they could have imprisoned their feet in theamazing cases of leather and imitations of leather they used. Ihave heard it said that a large part of the physical decline thatwas apparent in our people during the closing years of the nineteenthcentury, though no doubt due in part to the miscellaneous badnessof the food they ate, was in the main attributable to the vilenessof the common footwear. They shirked open-air exercise altogetherbecause their boots wore out ruinously and pinched and hurt themif they took it. I have mentioned, I think, the part my own bootsplayed in the squalid drama of my adolescence. I had a senseof unholy triumph over a fallen enemy when at last I found myselfsteering truck after truck of cheap boots and shoes (unsold stockfrom Swathinglea) to the run-off by the top of the Glanville blastfurnaces.

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

  Most of our public buildings we destroyed and burnt as we reshapedour plan of habitation, our theater sheds, our banks, and inconvenientbusiness warrens, our factories (these in the first year of all),and all the "unmeaning repetition" of silly little sham Gothicchurches and meeting-houses, mean looking shells of stone andmortar without love, invention, or any beauty at all in them, thatmen had thrust into the face of their sweated God, even as theythrust cheap food into the mouths of their sweated workers; allthese we also swept away in the course of that first decade. Thenwe had the whole of the superseded steam-railway system to scrapand get rid of, stations, signals, fences, rolling stock; a plantof ill-planned, smoke-distributing nuisance apparatus, that would,under former conditions, have maintained an offensive dwindlingobstructive life for perhaps half a century. Then also there was agreat harvest of fences, notice boards, hoardings, ugly sheds, allthe corrugated iron in the world, and everything that was smearedwith tar, all our gas works and petroleum stores, all our horsevehicles and vans and lorries had to be erased. . . . But I havesaid enough now perhaps to give some idea of the bulk and qualityof our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down, ourtoil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, inthose early years.

  But these were the coarse material bases of the Phoenix firesof the world. These were but the outward and visible signs of theinnumerable claims, rights, adhesions, debts, bills, deeds, andcharters that were cast upon the fires; a vast accumulation ofinsignia and uniforms neither curious enough nor beautiful enoughto preserve, went to swell the blaze, and all (saving a few trulyglorious trophies and memories) of our symbols, our apparatus andmaterial of war. Then innumerable triumphs of our old, bastard,half-commercial, fine-art were presently condemned, great oilpaintings, done to please the half-educated middle-class, glaredfor a moment and were gone, Academy marbles crumbled to useful lime,a gross multitude of silly statuettes and decorative crockery, andhangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and musical instrumentsshared this fate. And books, countless books, too, and balesof newspapers went also to these pyres. From the private housesin Swathinglea alone--which I had deemed, perhaps not unjustly,altogether illiterate--we gathered a whole dust-cart full of cheapill-printed editions of the minor English classics--for the mostpart very dull stuff indeed and still clean--and about a truckloadof thumbed and dog-eared penny fiction, watery base stuff, thedropsy of our nation's mind. . . . And it seemed to me that whenwe gathered those books and papers together, we gathered togethersomething more than print and paper, we gathered warped andcrippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulae of dulltolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuitiesof sluggish habits of thinking and timid and indolent evasions.There was more tha
n a touch of malignant satisfaction for me inhelping gather it all together.

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

  On Beltane Eve, and our Lowchester rummage being finished, I wentalong the valley to the far end of Swathinglea to help sort thestock of the detached group of potbanks there--their chief outputhad been mantel ornaments in imitation of marble, and there wasvery little sorting, I found, to be done--and there it was nurseAnna found me at last by telephone, and told me my mother had diedin the morning suddenly and very shortly after my departure.

  For a while I did not seem to believe it; this obviously imminentevent stunned me when it came, as though I had never had ananticipatory moment. For a while I went on working, and then almostapathetically, in a mood of half-reluctant curiosity, I startedfor Lowchester.

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

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

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