Section 3
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, 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.
