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In the Days of the Comet Book Third Chapter Third Section 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book three, Chapter three, Section one of In the Days
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  Speaker 1: of the Comet. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox
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  Speaker 1: recordings are in the public domain. For more information or
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  Speaker 1: to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. In the Days
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  Speaker 1: of the Comet by H. G. Wells, Book three, Chapter three,
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  Speaker 1: Section one, Bell Tane and New Year's Eve. In the end,
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  Speaker 1: my mother died rather suddenly, and her death came as
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  Speaker 1: a shock to me. Diagnosis was still very inadequate at
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  Speaker 1: that time. The doctors were, of course fully alive to
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  Speaker 1: the incredible defects of their common training, and were doing
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  Speaker 1: all they could to supply its deficiencies. But they were
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  Speaker 1: still extraordinarily ignorant. Some unintelligently observed factor of her illness
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  Speaker 1: came into play with her, and she became feverish and
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  Speaker 1: sank and died very quickly. I do not know what
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  Speaker 1: remedial measures were attempted. I hardly knew what was happening
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  Speaker 1: until the whole thing was over. At that time, my
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  Speaker 1: attention was much engaged by the stir of the Great
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  Speaker 1: Beltane Festival that was held on May Day in the
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  Speaker 1: year of Scaffolding. It was the first of ten great
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  Speaker 1: rubbish burnings that opened the New age. Young people nowadays
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  Speaker 1: can scarcely hope to imagine the enormous quantities of pure
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  Speaker 1: litter and useless accumulation with which we had to deal.
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  Speaker 1: Had we not set aside a special day and season,
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  Speaker 1: the whole world would have been an incessant reek of
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  Speaker 1: small fires. And it was, I think, a happy idea
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  Speaker 1: to revive this ancient festival of the May and November burnings.
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  Speaker 1: It was inevitable that the old idea of purification should
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  Speaker 1: revive with a name. It was felt to be a
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  Speaker 1: burning of other than material encumbrances. Innumerable quasi spiritual things. Deeds, documents, debts,
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  Speaker 1: vindictive records went up in these great flares. People passed
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  Speaker 1: praying between the fires, and it was a fine symbol
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  Speaker 1: of the new and wiser tolerance that had come to
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  Speaker 1: men that those who still found their comfort in the
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  Speaker 1: orthodox faiths came hither unpersuaded, to pray that all hate
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  Speaker 1: might be burnt out of their professions. For even in
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  Speaker 1: the fires of bail, now that men have done with
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  Speaker 1: base hatred, one may find the living God. Endless were
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  Speaker 1: the things we had to destroy in those great purgings first,
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  Speaker 1: there were nearly all the houses and buildings of the
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  Speaker 1: old time. In the end we did not save in
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  Speaker 1: England one building in five thousand that was standing when
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  Speaker 1: the COmON came. Year by year, as we made our
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  Speaker 1: homes afresh, in accordance with the saner needs of our
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  Speaker 1: new social families, we swept away more and more of
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  Speaker 1: those horrible structures, the ancient residential houses, hastily built without imagination,
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  Speaker 1: without beauty, without common honesty, without even comfort or convenience,
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  Speaker 1: in which the early twentieth century had sheltered, until scarcely
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  Speaker 1: one remained. We saved nothing but what was beautiful or
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  Speaker 1: interesting out of all their gaunt and melancholy abundance. The
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  Speaker 1: actual houses, of course, we could not drag to our fires.
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  Speaker 1: But we brought all their ill fitting deal doors, their
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  Speaker 1: dreadful window sashes, their servant, tormenting staircases, their dank, dark cupboards,
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  Speaker 1: the verminous papers from their scaly walls, their dust and
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  Speaker 1: dirt sudden carpets, their ill designed and yet pretentious tables
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  Speaker 1: and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers, the old, dirt
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  Speaker 1: saturated books, their ornaments, their dirty decay and altogether painful
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  Speaker 1: ornaments amidst which I remember they were sometimes even stuffed
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  Speaker 1: dead birds. We burnt them all the paint plastered woodwork,
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  Speaker 1: with coat above coat of nasty paint that in particular
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  Speaker 1: blazed finely. I have already tried to give you an
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  Speaker 1: impression of old world furniture, of Parload's bedroom, my mother's room,
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  Speaker 1: mister Gapite's sitting room. Thank Heaven, there's nothing in life
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  Speaker 1: now to convey the particular dinginess of it all. For
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  Speaker 1: one thing, there is no more imperfect combustion of coal
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  Speaker 1: going on everywhere, and no roadways like grassless open scars
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  Speaker 1: along the earth from which dust pours out perpetually. We
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  Speaker 1: burnt and destroyed most of our private buildings and all
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  Speaker 1: the would work, all our furniture except a few score
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  Speaker 1: thousand pieces of distinct and intentional beauty from which our
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  Speaker 1: present forms have developed, nearly all our hangings and carpets.
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  Speaker 1: And also we destroyed almost every scrap of old world clothing.
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  Speaker 1: Only a few carefully disinfected types and vestiges of that
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  Speaker 1: remain now in our museums. One writes now with a
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  Speaker 1: particular horror of the dress of the old world. The
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  Speaker 1: men's clothes were worn without any cleansing process at all
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  Speaker 1: except an occasional superficial brushing for periods of a year
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  Speaker 1: or so. They were made of dark, obscurely mixed patterns
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  Speaker 1: to conceal the stage of defilement they had reached, and
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  Speaker 1: they were of a felted and porous texture, admirably calculated
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  Speaker 1: to accumulate drifting matter. Many women wore skirts of similar substances,
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  Speaker 1: and of so long and inconvenient a form that they
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  Speaker 1: inevitably trailed among all the abomination of our horse frequented roads.
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  Speaker 1: It was our boast in England that the whole of
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  Speaker 1: our population was booted. Their feet were, for the most
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  Speaker 1: part ugly enough to need it. But it becomes now
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  Speaker 1: inconceivable how they could have imprisoned their feet in the
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  Speaker 1: amazing cases of leather and imitations of leather they used.
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  Speaker 1: I have heard it said that a large part of
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  Speaker 1: the physical decline that was apparent in our people during
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  Speaker 1: the closing years of the nineteenth century, though no doubt
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  Speaker 1: due in part to the miscellaneous badness of the food
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  Speaker 1: they ate, was in the main attributable to the vileness
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  Speaker 1: of the common footwear they shirked. Open air exercise altogether,
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  Speaker 1: because their boots wore out ruinously and pinched and hurt
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  Speaker 1: them if they took it. I have mentioned I think
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  Speaker 1: the part my own boots played in the squalid drama
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  Speaker 1: of my adolescence. I had a sense of unholy triumph
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  Speaker 1: over a fallen enemy when at last I found myself
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  Speaker 1: steering truck after truck of cheap boots and shoes, unsold stock,
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  Speaker 1: from swathingly to the runoff by the top of the
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  Speaker 1: Glansville Blast furnaces. PLoP. They would drop into the cone
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  Speaker 1: when beltane came, and the roar of their burning would
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  Speaker 1: fill the air. Never a cold would come from the
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  Speaker 1: saturation of their brown paper soles, never a corn from
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  Speaker 1: their foolish shapes, never a nail in them. Get home
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  Speaker 1: at last, in suffering flesh. Most of our public buildings
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  Speaker 1: we destroyed and burnt as we reshaped our plan of habitation.
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  Speaker 1: Our fairs, sheds, our banks, and inconvenient business warrens, our factories.
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  Speaker 1: These in the first year of all, and all the
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  Speaker 1: unmeaning repetition of silly little sham gothic church and meeting houses,
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  Speaker 1: mean looking shells of stone and mortar, without love, invention,
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  Speaker 1: or any beauty at all in them that men had
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  Speaker 1: thrust into the face of their sweated guard, even as
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  Speaker 1: they thrust cheap food into the mouths of their sweated workers.
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  Speaker 1: All these we also swept away in the course of
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  Speaker 1: that first decade. Then we had the whole of the
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  Speaker 1: superseded steam railway system to scrap and get rid of stations, signals, fences,
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  Speaker 1: rolling stock, a plant of ill planned, a smoke distributing
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  Speaker 1: nuisance apparatus that would, on the former conditions have maintained
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  Speaker 1: an offensive, dwindling, obstructive life for perhaps half a century.
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  Speaker 1: Then also there was a great harvest of fences, notice boards, hoardings,
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  Speaker 1: ugly sheds, all the corrugated iron in the world, and
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  Speaker 1: everything that was smeared with tar, All our gas works
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  Speaker 1: and petroleum stores, all our horse vehicles and vans and
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  Speaker 1: lorries had to be erased. But I've said enough now,
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  Speaker 1: perhaps to give some idea of the bulk and quality
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  Speaker 1: of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down,
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  Speaker 1: our toil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive
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  Speaker 1: effort in those early years. But these were the coarse
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  Speaker 1: material bases of the phoenix fires of the world. These
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  Speaker 1: were but the outward and visible signs of the innumerable claims, rites, adhesions, debts, bills,
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  Speaker 1: deeds and charters that were cast upon the fires. A
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  Speaker 1: vast accumulation of insignia and uniforms, neither curious enough nor
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  Speaker 1: beautiful enough to preserve, were to swell the blaze, and
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  Speaker 1: all saving a few truly glorious trophies and memories of
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  Speaker 1: our symbols, our apparatus, and material of war. Then innumerable
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  Speaker 1: triumphs of our old bastard half commercial fine art were
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  Speaker 1: presently condemned. Great oil paintings dune to please the half
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  Speaker 1: educated middle class glared for a moment, and were gone.
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  Speaker 1: Academy marbles crumbled to useful lime. A gross multitude of
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  Speaker 1: silly statuettes, and decorative crockery and hangings, and embroideries, and
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  Speaker 1: bad music and musical instruments shared this fate. And books,
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  Speaker 1: countless books too, and bales of newspapers went also to
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  Speaker 1: these pyres. From the private houses in Swathington alone, which
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  Speaker 1: I had deemed perhaps not unjustly altogether illiterate, we gathered
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  Speaker 1: a whole dust cart full of cheap, ill printed editions
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  Speaker 1: of the minor English classics for the most part, very
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  Speaker 1: dull stuff, indeed, and still clean, and about a truckload
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  Speaker 1: of thumb and dog eared penny fiction, watery based stuff,
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  Speaker 1: the dropsy of our nation's mind. And it seemed to
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  Speaker 1: me that when we gathered those books and papers together,
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  Speaker 1: we gathered together something more than print and paper. We
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  Speaker 1: gathered warped and crippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the
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  Speaker 1: formula of dull tolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean, defensive ingenuities,
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  Speaker 1: of sluggish habits of thinking, and timid and indolent evasions.
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  Speaker 1: There was more than a touch of malignant satisfaction for
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  Speaker 1: me in helping gather it all together. I was so busy,
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  Speaker 1: i say, with my sheer in dis dustman's work, but
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  Speaker 1: I did not notice, as I should otherwise have done,
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  Speaker 1: the little indications of change in my mother's state. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: I thought her a little stronger. She was slightly flushed,
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  Speaker 1: slightly more talkative. On Beltane Eve and our Lowchester rummage
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  Speaker 1: being finished, I went along the valley to the far
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  Speaker 1: end of Swathingly to help sort the stock of the
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  Speaker 1: detached group of put banks. There. Their chief output had
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  Speaker 1: been mantle ornaments in imitation of marble, and there was
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  Speaker 1: very little sorting I found to be done. And there
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  Speaker 1: it was. Nurse Anna found me at last by telephone
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  Speaker 1: and told me my mother had died in the morning,
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  Speaker 1: suddenly and very shortly after my departure. For a while
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  Speaker 1: I did not seem to believe it. This obviously imminent
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  Speaker 1: event stunned me when it came, as though I had
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  Speaker 1: never had an anticipatory moment. For a while, I went
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  Speaker 1: on working, and then, almost apathetically, in a mood of
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  Speaker 1: half reluctant curiosity, I started for Lowchester. When I got there,
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  Speaker 1: the last offices were over, and I was shown my
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  Speaker 1: old mother's peaceful white face, very still, but a little
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  Speaker 1: cold and stern to me, a little unfamiliar, lying among
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  Speaker 1: white flowers. I went in alone to her, into that
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  Speaker 1: quiet room, and stood for a long time by her bedside.
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  Speaker 1: I sat down then and thought. Then, at last, strangely hushed,
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  Speaker 1: and with the deeps of my loneliness opening beneath me,
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  Speaker 1: I came out of that room and down into the
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  Speaker 1: world again, a bright eyed, active, world, very noisy, happy
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  Speaker 1: and busy with its last preparations for the mighty cremation.
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  Speaker 1: Of past and superseded things. End of Book three, Chapter three,
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  Speaker 1: Section one,