In the Days of the Comet

That talk stands out in my memory because of that agreeable theological decision 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 was done and before one went on with the evening’s study—­how odd it would have seemed in the old time for a young man of the industrial class to be doing post-graduate work in sociology, and how much a matter of course it seems now!—­to walk out into the gardens of Lowchester House, and smoke a cigarette or so and let her talk ramblingly of the things that interested her. . . .  Physically the Great Change did not do so very much to reinvigorate her—­she had lived in that dismal underground kitchen in Clayton too long for any material rejuvenescence—­she glowed out indeed as a dying spark among the ashes might glow under a draught of fresh air—­and assuredly it hastened her end.  But those closing days were very tranquil, full of an effortless contentment.  With her, life was like a rainy, windy day that clears only to show the sunset afterglow.  The light has passed.  She acquired no new habits amid the comforts of the new life, did no new things, but only found a happier light upon the old.

She lived with a number of other old ladies belonging to our commune in the upper rooms of Lowchester House.  Those upper apartments were simple and ample, fine and well done in the Georgian style, and they had been organized to give the maximum of comfort and conveniences and to economize the need of skilled attendance.  We had taken over the various “great houses,” as they used to be called, to make communal dining-rooms and so forth—­their kitchens were conveniently large—­and pleasant places for the old people of over sixty whose time of ease had come, and for suchlike public uses.  We had done this not only with Lord Redcar’s house, but also with Checkshill House—­where old Mrs. Verrall made a dignified and capable hostess,—­and indeed with most of the fine residences in the beautiful wide country between the Four Towns district and the Welsh mountains.  About these great houses there had usually been good outbuildings, laundries, married servants’ quarters, stabling, dairies, and the like, suitably masked by trees, we turned these into homes, and to them we added first tents and wood chalets and afterward quadrangular residential buildings.  In order to be near my mother I had two small rooms in the new collegiate buildings which our commune was almost the first to possess, and they were very convenient for the station of the high-speed electric railway that took me down to our daily conferences and my secretarial and statistical work in Clayton.

Ours had been one of the first modern communes to get in order; we were greatly helped by the energy of Lord Redcar, who had a fine feeling for the picturesque associations of his ancestral home—­the detour that took our line through the beeches and bracken and bluebells of the West Wood and saved the pleasant open wildness of the park was one of his suggestions; and we had many reasons to be proud of our surroundings.  Nearly all the other communes that sprang up all over the pleasant parkland round the industrial valley of the Four Towns, as the workers moved out, came to us to study the architecture of the residential squares and quadrangles with which we had replaced the back streets between the great houses and the ecclesiastical residences about the cathedral, and the way in which we had adapted all these buildings to our new social needs.  Some claimed to have improved on us.  But they could not emulate the rhododendron garden out beyond our shrubberies; that was a thing altogether our own in our part of England, because of its ripeness and of the rarity of good peat free from lime.

These gardens had been planned under the third Lord Redcar, fifty years ago and more; they abounded in rhododendra and azaleas, and were in places so well sheltered and sunny that great magnolias flourished and flowered.  There were tall trees smothered in crimson and yellow climbing roses, and an endless variety of flowering shrubs and fine conifers, and such pampas grass as no other garden can show.  And barred by the broad shadows of these, were glades and broad spaces of emerald turf, and here and there banks of pegged roses, and flower-beds, and banks given over some to spring bulbs, and some to primroses and primulas and polyanthuses.  My mother loved these latter banks and the little round staring eyes of their innumerable yellow, ruddy brown, and purple corollas, more than anything else the gardens could show, and in the spring of the Year of Scaffolding she would go with me day after day to the seat that showed them in the greatest multitude.

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

We would sit and think, or talk—­there was a curious effect of complete 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, walls and gates of jewels—­and singing.”

“For such as like them,” said my mother firmly, and thought for a while.  “There’ll be things for all of us, o’ course.  But for me it couldn’t be Heaven, dear, unless it was a garden—­a nice sunny garden. . . .  And feeling such as we’re fond of, are close and handy by”

You of your happier generation cannot realize the wonderfulness of those early days in the new epoch, the sense of security, the extraordinary effects of contrast.  In the morning, except in high summer, I was up before dawn, and breakfasted upon the swift, smooth train, and perhaps saw the sunrise as I rushed out of the little tunnel that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work like a man.  Now that we had got all the homes and schools and all the softness of life away from our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousand obstructive “rights” and timidities had been swept aside, we could let ourselves go, we merged this enterprise with that, cut across this or that anciently obstructive piece of private land, joined and separated, effected gigantic consolidations and gigantic economies, and the valley, no longer a pit of squalid human tragedies and meanly conflicting industries, grew into a sort of beauty of its own, a savage inhuman beauty of force and machinery and flames.  One was a Titan in that Etna.  Then back one came at midday to bath and change in the train, and so to the leisurely gossiping lunch in the club dining-room in Lowchester House, and the refreshment of these green and sunlit afternoon tranquillities.

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

“A dream,” I used to say, “a dream indeed—­but a dream that is one step nearer awakening than that nightmare of the former days.”

She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes—­she liked the new fashions of dress, she alleged.  It was not simply altered clothes.  I did grow two inches, broaden some inches round my chest, and increase in weight three stones before I was twenty-three.  I wore a soft brown cloth and she would caress my sleeve and admire it greatly—­she had the woman’s sense of texture very strong in her.

Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor rough hands—­they never got softened—­one over the other.  She told me much I had not heard before about my father, and her own early life.  It was like finding flat and faded flowers in a book still faintly sweet, to realize that once my mother had been loved with passion; that my remote father had once shed hot tears of tenderness in her arms.  And she would sometimes even speak tentatively in those narrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of all their bitter narrowness, of Nettie.

“She wasn’t worthy of you, dear,” she would say abruptly, leaving me to guess the person she intended.

“No man is worthy of a woman’s love,” I answered.  “No woman is worthy of a man’s.  I love her, dear mother, and that you cannot alter.”

“There’s others,” she would muse.

“Not for me,” I said.  “No!  I didn’t fire a shot that time; I burnt my 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 lonely when 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 to
some sweet girl of a woman, some good, <i>kind</i> girl------&#8221;

“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 plentiful work for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out from him.  Nettie was life and beauty for me—­is—­will be.  Don’t think 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,” I said shortly.

Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.

“It’s better so,” she said, as if pleading.  “Indeed . . . it is better so.”

There was something in her quivering old voice that for a moment took 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 could talk 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 bunch of daffodils for her in my hand.

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