In the Days of the Comet - H. G. Wells (sci fi books to read txt) 📗

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, 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 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.

 

Section 4

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