Likewise, before the war, in Germany I used to see advertised in the newspapers a moustache-lifter, which you tied on at night and it would make your moustache stay turned up, like the immortal moustache of Kaiser Wilhelm Ⅱ, whose moustache alone is immortal. This moustache-lifter was called: Es ist erreicht! In other words: It is reached! Consummatum est!
Was it· Was it reached· With the moustache lifter·
So the ghost of my mother, in my sister’s garden. I see it each time I am there, bending over the violas, or looking up at the almond tree. Actually an almond tree! And I always ask, of the grey-haired, good little ghost:“Well what of it, my dear· What is the verdict·”
But she never answers, though I press her:
“Do look at the house, my dear! Do look at the tiled hall, and the rug from Mexico, and the brass from Venice, seen through the open doors, beyond the lilies and the carnations of the lawn beds! Do look! And do look at me, and see if I’m not a gentleman! Do say that I’m almost upper class!”
But the dear little ghost says never a word.
“Do say we’ve got on!Do say, we’ve arrived. Do Say, it is reached, es ist erreicht, consummatum est!”
But the tittle ghost turns aside, she knows I am teasing her. She gives me one look, which is a look I know, and which says: “I shan’t tell you, so you can’t laugh at me. You must find out for yourself.” And she steals away, to her place, wherever it may be— “In my father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you.”
The black slate roofs beyond the wind-worn young trees at the end of the garden are the same thick layers of black roofs of blackened brick houses, as ever. There is the same smell of sulphur from the burning pit bank. Smuts fly on the white violas. There is a harsh sound of machinery. Persephone couldn’t quite get out of hell, so she let spring fall from her lap along the upper workings.
But no! There are no smuts, there is even no smell of the burning pit bank. They cut the bank, and the pits are not working. The strike has been going on for months. It is September, but there are lots of roses on the lawn beds.
“Where shall we go this afternoon· Shall we go to Hardwick·”
Let us go to Hardwick. I have not been for twenty years. Let us go to Hardwick.
Hardwick Hall
More window than wall.
Built in the days of good Queen Bess, by that other Bess, termagant and tartar, Countess of Shrewsbury.
Butterley, Alfreton, Tibshelf—what was once the Hardwick district is now the Notts-Derby coal area. The country is the same, but scarred and splashed all over with mines and mining settlements. Great houses loom from hill-brows, old villages are smothered in rows of miners’ dwellings, Bolsover Castle rises from the mass of the colliery village of Bolsover—B·wser, we called it, when I was a boy.
