Myself, a snotty-nosed little collier’s lad, I call myself at home when I sit in a heavy old Cinque-cento Italian villa, of which I rent only half, even then—surely I can be considered to have “got on”. When I wrote my first book, and it was going to be published—sixteen years ago—and my mother was dying, a fairly well-known editor wrote to my mother and said, of me:“By the time he is forty, he will be riding in his carriage!”
To which my mother is supposed to have said, sighing: “Ay, if he lives to be forty!”
Well, I am forty-one, so there’s one in the eye for that sighing remark. I was always weak in health, but my life was strong. Why had they all made up their minds that I was to die· Perhaps they thought I was too good to live. Well, in that case they were had!
And when I was forty, I was not even in my own motor-car. But I did drive my own two horses in a light buggy (my own) on a little ranch (also my own, or my wife’s, through me) away on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. And sitting in my corduroy trousers and blue shirt, calling: “Get up Aaron! Ambrose !” then I thought of Austin Harrison’s prophecy. Oh Oracle of Delphos! Oracle of Dodona! “Get up, Ambrose!” Bump! went the buggy over a rock, and the pine-needles slashed my face! See him driving in his carriage, at forty!—driving it pretty badly too! Put the brake on!
So I suppose I’ve got on, snotty-nosed little collier’s lad, of whom most of the women said: “He’s a nice little lad!” They don’t say it now: if ever they say anything, which is doubtful. They’ve forgotten me entirely.
But my sister’s “getting on” is much more concrete than mine. She is almost on the spot. Within six miles of that end dwelling in The Breach, which is the house I first remember—an end house of hideous rows of miners’dwellings, though I loved it, too—stands my sister’s new house, “a lovely house!” —and her garden: “I wish mother could see my garden in June!”
And if my mother did see it, what then· It is wonderful the flowers that bloom in these Midlands, in June. A northern Persephone seems to steal out from the Plutonic, coal-mining depths and give a real hoot of blossoms. But if my mother did return from the dead, and see that garden in full bloom, and the glass doors open from the hall of the new house, what then· Wbuld she then say: It is reached! Consummatum est!
When Jesus gave up the ghost, he cried: It is finished! Consummatum est! But was it· And if so, what· What was it that was consummate·
