In the Days of the Comet

When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an euthanasia for so many of the older people in the beginning of the new time, took hold upon my mother, there came Anna Reeves to daughter her—­after our new custom.  She chose to come.  She was already known to us a little from chance meetings and chance services she had done my mother in the garden; she sought to give her help.  She seemed then just one of those plainly good girls the world at its worst has never failed to produce, who were indeed in the dark old times the hidden antiseptic of all our hustling, hating, faithless lives.  They made their secret voiceless worship, they did their steadfast, 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 found no beauty in her, she was short but rather sturdy and ruddy, with red-tinged hair, and fair hairy brows and red-brown eyes.  But her freckled hands I found, were full of apt help, her voice carried 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 lay and sank restfully to death.  She would come forward to anticipate some little need, to proffer some simple comfort, and always then my mother smiled on her.  In a little while I discovered the beauty of that helpful poise of her woman’s body, I discovered the grace of untiring goodness, the sweetness of a tender pity, and the great riches of her voice, of her few reassuring words and phrases.  I noted and remembered very clearly how once my mother’s lean old hand patted the firm gold-flecked strength of hers, as it went by upon 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,” she said.

I had never heard of that little sister.

“November the tenth,” said my mother.  “Twenty-nine months and three days. . . .  I cried.  I cried.  That was before you came, dear.  So long ago—­and I can see it now.  I was a young wife then, and your father was very kind.  But I can see its hands, its dear little quiet hands. . . .  Dear, they say that now—­now they will not let the little children die.”

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

“The club doctor could not come.  Your father went twice.  There was some one else, some one who paid.  So your father went on into Swathinglea, and that man wouldn’t come unless he had his fee.  And your father had changed his clothes to look more respectful and he hadn’t any money, not even his tram fare home.  It seemed cruel to be waiting there with my baby thing in pain. . . .  And I can’t help thinking perhaps we might have saved her. . . .  But it was like that with the poor always in the bad old times—­always.  When the doctor 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’t explained.  I begged him—­but it was too late.”

She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one who describes a dream.  “We are going to manage all these things better now,” I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful little 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 was showing her pictures. . .  And her little prayers.  ’Now I lay me. . . . down to sleep.’ . . .  I made her little socks.  Knitted they was, 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 long dead 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 life that had been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of hope again into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never heard before. . . .

And presently I was in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows of the past, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which this was but one luminous and quivering red drop.  I walked in the garden and the garden was too small for me; I went out to wander on the moors.  “The past is past,” I cried, and all the while across the gulf of five and twenty years I could hear my poor mother’s heart-wrung weeping for that daughter baby who had suffered and died.  Indeed that old spirit of rebellion has not altogether died in me, for all the transformation of the new time. . . .  I quieted down at last to a thin and austere comfort in thinking that the whole is not told to us, that it cannot perhaps be told to such minds as ours; and anyhow, and what was far more sustaining, that now we have strength and courage and this new gift of wise love, whatever cruel and sad things marred the past, none of these sorrowful things that made the very warp and woof of the old life, need now go on happening.  We could foresee, we could prevent and save.  “The past is past,” I said, between sighing and resolve, as I came into view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit windows of old Lowchester House.  “Those sorrows are sorrows no more.”

But I could not altogether cheat that common sadness of the new time, that memory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives that had stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before our air grew clear.