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.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

BELTANE AND NEW YEAR'S EVE

Section 1

IN the end my mother died rather suddenly, and her death came as
a shock to me. Diagnosis was still very inadequate at that time.
The doctors were, of course, fully alive to the incredible defects
of their common training and were doing all they could to supply
its deficiencies, but they were still extraordinarily ignorant.
Some unintelligently observed factor of her illness came into play
with her, and she became feverish and sank and died very quickly.
I do not know what remedial measures were attempted. I hardly knew
what was happening until the whole thing was over.

At that time my attention was much engaged by the stir of the great
Beltane festival that was held on May-day in the Year of Scaffolding.
It was the first of the ten great rubbish burnings that opened the
new age. Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the
enormous quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation with
which we had to deal; had we not set aside a special day and season,
the whole world would have been an incessant reek of small fires;
and it was, I think, a happy idea to revive this ancient festival of
the May and November burnings. It was inevitable that the old idea
of purification should revive with the name, it was felt to be a
burning of other than material encumbrances, innumerable quasi-spiritual
things, deeds, documents, debts, vindictive records, went up on
those great flares. People passed praying between the fires, and
it was a fine symbol of the new and wiser tolerance that had come
to men, that those who still found their comfort in the orthodox
faiths came hither unpersuaded, to pray that all hate might be burnt
out of their professions. For even in the fires of Baal, now that
men have done with base hatred, one may find the living God.

Endless were the things we had to destroy in those great purgings.
First, there were nearly all the houses and buildings of the old
time. In the end we did not save in England one building in five
thousand that was standing when the comet came. Year by year, as
we made our homes afresh in accordance with the saner needs of our
new social families, we swept away more and more of those horrible
stru