She looked thoughtfully at a bank of primulas before her for a time,
and then laid her tremulous hand impressively on my arm. “You know,
Willie, dear,” she said, as though she was clearing up a childish
misunderstanding of mine, “I don’t think any one will _go_ there. I
never _did_ think that. . . .”
§ 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 bathe 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.”