The Project Gutenberg eBook ofA ReapingThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: A ReapingAuthor: E. F. BensonRelease date: October 30, 2018 [eBook #58202]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A REAPING ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: A ReapingAuthor: E. F. BensonRelease date: October 30, 2018 [eBook #58202]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)
Title: A Reaping
Author: E. F. Benson
Author: E. F. Benson
Release date: October 30, 2018 [eBook #58202]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A REAPING ***
[Photo of E. F. Benson unavailable.]E. F. Benson.
BY E. F. BENSON
THOMAS NELSON AND SONSLONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLINAND NEW YORK
TOLADY EVELYN LISTER
C O N T E N T SJune9July35August63September87October113November149December181January215February247March281April319May353
OF all subjects under or over the sun, there is none perhaps, even including bimetallism, or the lengthy description of golf-links which one has never seen, so utterly below possible zones of interest as that of health. Health, of course, matters quite enormously to the individual, but nobody with good health ever gives two thoughts (far less one word) to the subject. Nobody, in fact, begins to think about health until his own begins to be inferior. But, then, as if that was not bad enough, he at once clubs and belabours his unhappy friends with its inferiority. It becomes to him the one affair of absorbing importance. Emperors may be assassinated, Governments may crumble,it may even be 92 degrees in the shade, but he recks nothing of those colossal things. He ate strawberries yesterday, and has had a bilious headache almost ever since. And the world ceases to revolve round the sun, and the moon is turned to blood, or ashes—I forget which.
But the real invalid, just like the man who enjoys real health, never talks about such matters. It is only to the amateur in disease that they are of the smallest interest. The man who is well never thinks about his health, and certainly never mentions it; to the man who is really ill some divine sense of irresponsibility is given. He brushes it aside, just as one brushes aside any innate inability; with common courage—how lavishly is beautiful gift given to whomever really needs it—he makes the best of other things.
These poignant though obvious reflections are the outcome of what occurred this evening. I sat between two friends at dinner, both of them people in whom one’s heart rejoices. But one of them is obsessed just now with this devil of health-seeking. The other has longago given up the notion of seeking for health at all, for it is not for her. She faces incurable with gaiety. So I have to record two conversations, the worse first.
‘Oh, I always have ten minutes’ deep-breathing every morning. It is the only way I can get enough air. You have to lie on your back, you know, and stop one nostril with your finger, while you breathe in slowly through the other; and you should do it near an open window. There is no fear of catching cold, or if you do I can send you a wonderful prescription.... Then you breathe out through the other nostril. I wish you would try it; it makes the whole difference. No, thanks, caviare is poison to me!’
‘Well, so is arsenic to me,’ I said. ‘But why say so?’
(It did not sound quite so brusque as it looks when written down, and native modesty prevents my explaining how abjectly patient I had been up till then.)
Then there came the reshifting of conversation, and we started again, with change of partners.
‘I do hope you will come to see us again in August,’ said the quiet, pleasant voice. ‘I shall go up to Scotland at the end of the month. Your beloved river should be in order: there has been heaps of rain.’
But I could not help asking another question.
‘Ah, then they let you go there?’ I said.
She laughed gently.
‘No, that is just what they don’t do,’ she said. ‘But I am going. What does it matter if one hastens it by a few weeks? I am going to shorten it probably by a few weeks, but instead of having six tiresome months on board a yacht, I am going to have rather fewer months among all the things I love. Oh, Dick quite agrees with me. Do let’s talk about something more interesting. Did you hear “Tristan” the other night? No? Richter conducted. He is such a splendid Isolde! There is no one to approach him!’
There, there was the glory of it! And how that little tiny joke about Richter touched the heart! Here on one side was a woman dying, and she knew it, but the wonder and the pleasure of the world was intensely hers.There, on the other, was the excellent Mrs. Armstrong. She could not think about the opera or anything else except her absurd deep-breathing and her ridiculous liver. Nobody else did; nobody cared. Even now I could hear her explaining to her left-hand neighbour that next to deep-breathing, the really important thing is to drink a glass of water in the middle of the morning. Slowly, of course, in sips. And she proceeded to describe what the water did. Well, I suppose I am old-fashioned, but I could no more think of discussing these intimate matters at the dinner-table than I should think of performing my toilet there. Besides—and this is perhaps the most unanswerable objection to doing so—besides being slightly disgusting, it is so immensely dull!
However, on the other side there was a topic as entrancing as the other was tedious, and in two minutes my other neighbour and I were deep in the fascinating inquiry as to how far a conductor—a supreme conductor—identified himself with the characters of the opera. Certainly the phrase ‘Richter is sucha splendid Isolde’ was an alluring theme, and by degrees it spread round the corner of the table (we were sitting close to it), and was taken up opposite, when a member of the Purcell Society gave vent to the highly interesting observation that the conductor had practically nothing to do with the singers, and was no more than a sort of visible metronome put there for the guidance of the orchestra. It was impossible not to retort that the last performance of the Purcell Society completely confirmed the truth of that view of the conductor. Indeed, the chorus hardly thought of him even as a metronome. Or else, perhaps, they were deaf, which would account for their sinking a tone and a half; in fact there were flowers of speech on the subject.
But how extraordinary a thing (taking the view, that is to say, that a conductor conceivably does more than beat time) is this transference of emotion, so that first of all Wagner, by means of merely black notes and words on white paper, can inspire the conductor with that tragedy of love which years ago, he wove out of the sunlight and lagoonsof Venice; that, secondly, the conductor can enter into that mysterious and mystical union with his band and his singers, and reflect his own mood on them so strongly that from throat or strings or wailing of flutes they give us, who sit and listen, what the conductor bade them read into the music, so that all, bassoons and double-bass, flutes and strings, trumpets and oboes and horns, become the spiritual mirror of his emotion. By means of that little baton, by the beckoning of his fingers, he pulls out from them the music which is in his own soul, makes it communicable to them. Indeed, we need not go to the Society for Psychical Research for experiments in thought-transference, for here is an instance of it (unless, indeed, we take the view of this member of the Purcell Society) far more magical, far further uplifted out of the sphere of things which we think we can explain. For the mere degrees of loud or soft, mere alterations intempo, are, of course, less than the ABC of the conductor’s office. His real work, the exercise of his real power, lies remote from, though doubtless connected with them. And of that we can explainnothing whatever. He obsesses every member of his orchestra so that by a motion of his hand he gets the same quality of tone from every member of it. For apart from the mere loudness and the mere time of any passage, there are probably an infinite number of ways of playing each note. Yet at his bidding every single member of the band plays it the same way. It is his thought they all make audible with a hundred instruments which have all one tone; else, how does that unity reach us sitting in our stalls?
That is the eternal mystery of music, which alone of the arts deals with its materials direct. It is not an imitation of sound, but sound itself, the employment of the actual waves of air that are the whistle of the wind, and the crash of breakers, and the love-song of nightingales. All other branches of art deal only second-hand; they but give us an imitation of what they wish to represent. The pictorial artist can do no more than lay a splash of pigment from a leaden tube on to his canvas when he wishes to speak to us of sunlight; he can only touch an eye with a reflection in its cornerto show grief, or take a little from the size of the pupil to produce in us who look the feeling of terror that contracts it. Similarly, too, the sculptor has to render the soft swell of a woman’s bosom in marble, as if it was on marble a man would pillow his head. It is all a translation, a rendering in another material, of the image that fills us with love or pity, or the open-air intoxication of an April morning. But the musician works first-hand; the intangible waves of air, not a representation of them, are his material. It is not with a pigment of sound, so to speak, that the violins shiver, or the trumpets tell us that the gods are entering Valhalla. Music deals with sound itself, with the whisper that went round the formless void when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ with all that makes this delicate orchestra of the world, no copy of it, no translation of it, but it itself.
And for the time being, while the curtain is up, the control of these forces, their wail and their triumph, belongs to the conductor. He gives them birth in the strings and the wind; he by the movement of a hand makesthem express all that sound expressed to the magician who first mapped them on his paper. Indeed, he does more; he interprets them through his own personality, giving them, as it were, an extra dip in the bath of life, so that their colours are more brilliant, more vital of hue. Or is the member of the Purcell Society right, and is the man who gives us this wonderful Isolde only a metronome?
It is often said that the deaf are far more lonely, far more remotely sundered from the world we know, than are the blind. It is impossible to imagine that this should not be so, for it is not only the sounds that we know we hear, but the sounds of which for the most part we are unconscious, that form the link between us and external things. It commonly happens, as in the dark, that we are cut off from all exercise of the eyes, and yet at such moments we have not been very conscious of loneliness. But it is rare that we are cut off from all sound, and the loneliness of that isolation is indescribable. It happened to me once in the golden desert to the west of Luxor, above the limestone cliffs that risefrom the valley where the Kings of Egypt lie entombed.
I had sat down on the topmost bluff of these cliffs, having tethered my donkey down below, for the way was too steep for him, and for several minutes observed my surroundings with extreme complacency. Below me lay the grey limestone cliffs, but where I sat a wave of the desert had broken, and the immediate foreground was golden sand. Farther away, in all hues of peacock green, lay the strip of cultivated land, and beyond, the steel blue of the ancient and mysterious river. It was early yet in the afternoon, and the sun still high, so that the whole land glittered in this glorious high festival of light and colour. And, looking at the imperishable monuments of that eternal civilization, it seemed that one could not desire a more convincing example of the kindliness of the circling seasons, of the beneficence that overlooked the world from generation to generation, so that man might well say that this treasure-house of the earth was inexhaustible. No breeze of any sort was stirring, but the air, pure, hot, invigorating, was absolutely still.But at that moment I suddenly felt as if something was dreadfully wrong, though I did not at once guess what it was. Then came the thought, the identification of what was wrong: it seemed as if the world was dead; then came the reason for it: it was because there was no sound. For a moment I listened in order to verify this—listened with poised breath and immovable limbs. Yes, I was right: there was no sound of anything at all; for once the ears were deprived of the delicate orchestra that goes up, a hymn of praise, day and night from the earth. It was like a dreadful nightmare.
I first tried coughing, to see if that would be companionable, but that did not do; I coughed, and then silence resumed its reign. I lit a cigarette. I moved, rustled, even got up and walked a little, kicking the pebbles that lay about in the sand. But that was no use, and I perceived where the defect was. I knew I was alive, and could make sounds, but what I wanted was some evidence that something else was alive. But there was none.
Somehow this fact was so disquieting that Isat down again to think about it. In my reasonable mind I knew that absolutely everything was alive, only there was at this moment nothing to tell me so. Not a fly buzzed over the hot sand, not a kite was to be seen wheeling slow as if in sleep, a black speck against the inviolable blue that stretched from horizon to horizon. I was the only thing alive as far as I had evidence. Or supposing—the thought flashed suddenly across me—supposing I, too, was dead? And what was this—this dome of air and the golden sand? Was it hell?
I cannot describe the horror of this. Momentary as was the sensation, it was of a quality, a depth of surcharged panic, which comes to us only in nightmares. I was alone, I was not within touch, in this utter stillness, of any other consciousness, and surely that must be hell, the outer darkness of absolute loneliness, which not even the glorious golden orb swung centre-high in the blue could ever so faintly penetrate. Indeed, it and this iridescent panorama at my feet only added some secret bitter irony to the outer darkness. All the light, the colour, the heat, which one had so loved wasthere still, but life was arrested, and there was nobody.
Then quite suddenly and unexpectedly the farcical happened, for from some hundred yards away down below the steep cliff up which I had climbed came a long discordant bray from my donkey, who perhaps felt lonely, too. But I have never heard a sound which was to the spirit so overpoweringly sweet. I heard that, and gave a long breath, and shouted, ‘Thank you very much!’ for the whole glory of the noon, which silence had blackened, was instantly restored.
One of the interesting things to which I have alluded, in contrast with the tedium of Mrs. Armstrong’s health, was occurring to-day, for the thermometer had indeed been up in the nineties, a fact which fills all proper-minded people with pride. Our dear, stuffy old London had registered 92 degrees in the shade at Messrs. Negretti and Zambra’s that morning, and I with my own eyes had seen it. It was impossible not to be proud, just as it is impossible not to be proud when one is in a train that isgoing over seventy miles an hour, a thing that may be timed by the small white quarter-mile posts that are so conveniently established by the side of the line. Once I went in a train that did a mile and a half in seventy-three seconds. I have not got over my elation yet. Or when an extraordinarily vivid flash of lightning occurs, with a congested angry spasm of thunder coming simultaneously with it, are you not sorry for the nerveless soul that does not thrill with personal elation at power made manifest? Or when Madame Melba sings the last long note of the first act of ‘La Bohème’? Or when the organist in King’s College Chapel pulls out the tubas, making the windows to rattle in their leaded panes by the concussion of the astonished air? Or when a perfectly enormous wave rides in from the Atlantic, and is transformed suddenly from the illustrious blue giant into a myriad cascades of snowy white, as, jovially dealing itself its own death, as it were, it is dashed against the brown steadfast rock of the land? Or when Legs (I shall speak of him soon), as he did to-day, sliced his drive very badly at the fourth hole at Woking,and hit the front of the engine of an up-train with extraordinary violence, and thereupon collapsed on the tee in speechless laughter for the sheer joy of the gorgeously improbable feat?
For all these things, so I take it, are evidence of the splendid energy of things in general in which we, each of us, have our share. So that when our train goes very fast, or when thunder cracks very loudly, or when blue waves are turned to smoke, though we are not actually responsible in any way for these encouraging facts, which are dependent on pressure in a boiler, electricity in the air, and a disturbance in mid-Atlantic, yet as by some wireless telegraphy, the energy of them is caught in the receiver of ourselves, and we throb back to it, feeling the pulse of life, which is exactly the same life in boiler and cloud and wave as that pulse in ourselves, which beats at the wrist. Life! Life! Life! All one—all absolutely one!
And to-night, too, though not in any of these particular ways, how it throbs and beats in this hot darkness of June! For a moment I wished I was in the country, to feel the pulse of the woodland and the garden. For the green thingsof the earth are awake all June; they never sleep day or night; they hold their breath sometimes in the hour before dawn, and they hang their heads sometimes beneath some scurry of summer rain; but day and night their eyes shine; they are growing and living, and are always awake till autumn comes, when they doze, and winter comes, when they sleep sound, day and night alike, dreaming, perhaps, of the spring, when from deep sleep they will slowly awake again, aconites first, and soon after daffodils, and then the buds of the hawthorn, little green squibs of leaf....
But I had not gone a hundred yards from the doors within which I had dined, when the mysterious joy of London summer night smote these thoughts of the country into silence. The whole town was awake, theatres were pouring out into the streets, and boarding the giants of the roadway, the snorting smelling motor-buses, their trotting brothers, and the inferior cabs and hansoms, where one could be alone and not stop on the way, but be taken decorously and dully to one’s destination. There was news, too, in the evening papers—a horrible murder, I thinkit was, but the nature of the incident mattered very little. It was incident, anyhow; something had happened. And without wishing to know exactly what it was, I felt extraordinarily pleased that something had happened.
The dip of Piccadilly between Devonshire House and Hyde Park was comparatively empty, and a sudden shudder of the mind came across me. I had been sitting next a dear friend, condemned to death. HowcouldI have forgotten that, for forgotten it I had, in this riotous summer of London. Then I knew why I had forgotten it. It was because she had been so superior (an odious word, but there is no other) to it herself. That courage, that passionate interest in the dear things of the world, her contempt (for this time there is no need of another word) of death, had been infectious. To her it was a mere incident of life. ‘Things in general’ were no less real and delightful to her because this incident was coming close, than they were to me, who had not yet, as far as I knew, to look it in the face.
Yet, after all, to any of the others sitting atthat table, death, so small an incident to her who had steadfastly regarded it, might in reality be closer than to her. And she exulted in the things of life still: they had lost no interest for her.
I stopped for a moment at the bottom of the hill, as one must when something quite new to oneself strikes one. That was the ideal she had shown. Fearless, undismayed, full of summer. ‘And with God be the rest.’
At Hyde Park Corner a coffee-stall and an ice-cream stall jostled each other. Each had its following. But both at the moment seemed to me to be heretical, and instead I turned into the Park to walk as far as the Alexandra Gate, whence I had to get into Sloane Street.
It was like coming out of the roar of a tunnel into the day again, and one’s eyes (though conversely) had to get accustomed to the dark after the glare and noise of the dear streets. A little wind whispered overhead in the planes; a little odour of moist earth came from Rotten Row. Quiet, solitary figures passed, or figures in pairs, closely linked, but for the most part silent. Onbenches underneath the trees there were pairs of figures. In Heaven’s name why not? To flirt, to make love, to look into eyes, is an applauded, and rightly applauded, pursuit in sequestered corners, under palms, beneath the eaves of the staircase, with the band blaring from the ball-room just beyond. But it doesn’t seem to strike the fastidious, who write letters to papers about the ‘state’ of the parks, that it is just possible that there are other people in the world who haven’t got ball-rooms and palms, and marble staircases. What are they to do, then? The answer of these letter-writers is deplorably futile, for they talk about indigent marriages! As if you could stop the life of the world by pointing with impious hands towards the Savings Bank! God laughs at it!
But the people who most call attention to the state of the park are those who have sat in the back drawing-room with their ‘gurls,’ while mamma has been Grenadier at the door, and papa has put a handkerchief over his broad face, when he has finished his glass of port after lunch (after lunch!), and smokes his cigar in the dining room. It really is so. Young menand maidens may sit on a plush sofa in the dreadful back drawing-room and behave as young men and maidens should (and if they shouldn’t, they will); and why in the name of all that is decent should they not sit on a bench in the Park and kiss each other? Yet the person who objects to their doing so, and who writes to the papers in consequence, is exactly the man who, in his semi-detached villa at some nameless suburb, draws his handkerchief over his face, and obscenely snores, while Jack, a respectable bank-clerk, kisses Maria in the back drawing-room. Good luck to them all, except to the horrible man who snores and writes to the papers when he is awake! He would be better snoring.
The moon had risen and rode high in a star-kirtled heaven, making a diaper of light and shifting shadow below the shade of the many-elbowed planes. Even now, close on midnight, it was extraordinarily hot, and for a little the grass and the trees made me long again for the true country, where the green things on the earth are native, not, as here, outcasts in the desert island of the streets. Yet, when there is,as in London, so large a colony of castaways, extending, you will remember, right down from beyond the Serpentine Bridge to Westminster, so that, except for the crossing at Hyde Park, one may walk on grass for all these solid miles, one hopes that the trees and flowers are tolerably cheerful, and do not sigh much for the wild places away from houses. Never was there a town so full of trees as this, for walk as you may in it, you will, I think, with three exceptions only, never find a street from some point in which you cannot see a tree to remind you of shade at noontide and grassy hollows. But the names of those streets shall not here be stated; they must, however, consider themselves warned.
Then the streets again, crowded still with moving figures, each an entrancing enigma to any passenger whose soul is at all alert, and swift with the passage of those glorious motor-buses, pounding and flashing along on their riotous ways, the very incarnation to me of all that ‘town’ means! I cannot imagine now what London was like without them. It must have been but half alive, half itself. It is impossible to be patient with these curious folk who consider them nuisances, who say (as if anyone denied it) that they both smell and clatter. That is exactly why they are so typical of London; indeed, one is disposed to think that they were not made with hands, but spontaneously generated out of the Spirit of the Town.
And how delightful to observe their elephantine antics if the streets are slippery, when they behave exactly like a drunken man, with appearance still portentously solemn, as if he had heard grave news, but afflicted with strange indecision and uncertainty on questions of the direction in which he intends to walk. I was on one the other day which did the most entrancing things, and had it all to myself, as everybody else got down, not seeming to see that if a motor-bus has been ‘overtaken’ it is far safer to be on it than anywhere else in the street, just as a drunken man may lurch heavily with damage to others, but never hurts himself. It was in Piccadilly, too, a beautiful theatre for its manœuvres. Trouble began as we descended the hill by the Green Park: it hadvin gai, andwas boisterously cheerful; but it was extraordinarily uncertain about direction, and slewed violently once or twice, so that hansoms started away from our vicinity as rabbits scuttle from you in the brushwood. Then my bus suddenly pulled itself together and walked quite straight for a lamp-post by the kerb. It felt tired, I suppose, and leaned wearily against it, snapping it neatly off with as little effort as it takes to pluck a daisy. Then it hooted, moved gravely on again, and, thinking it was a member of the Junior Athenæum, made straight for the door. But it forgot to lift its feet up to get on to the pavement, and stumbled. Then it saw a sister-bus, backed away from the pavement, and tried to make friends. But the other simply cut it and passed by. So it gave a heavy sigh, and began to mount the hill towards Devonshire House. But it had scarcely gone twenty yards when the behaviour of its sister so smote upon its heart that it could not go on, and turned slowly round in the street to look back at that respectable but uncharitable relation with pathetic and appealing eyes. It might happen to anybody, it seemed to say, ‘to take adrop too much, and you shouldn’t judge too severely.’
This sense of being misunderstood gave itvin tristeof the most pronounced kind. I have seldom seen so despondent a drunkard. It moaned and muttered to itself, and I longed to console it. But beneficent Nature came to its aid: laid her cool hand upon its throbbing head, and it slept. I got gently off, feeling, as Mr. Rossetti, I think, says (if it was not he, it was somebody else), that I must step softly, for I was treading on its dreams.
And all this for a penny, which the conductor very obligingly refunded to me, as I had not been taken where I wanted to go!
Sloane Street, and soon my dear house, into which I was towed by my watch-chain. For my latchkey was on the end of it, and, having opened the door, I could not get the latchkey out, and had to step on tiptoe, following the door as it opened. Wild music came from the upstairs, and, having disentangled my key, I ran up, to find Helen and Legs trying with singular ill-success to play the overture to the‘Meistersingers,’ from a performance of which they had just returned. They took not the slightest notice of my entry.
‘No!’ shouted Legs. ‘One, two; wait for two! Oh, do get on! Yes, that’s it. Sorry; I thought it was a sharp.’
They were nearing the end, and several loud and unsimultaneous thumps came.
‘I’ve finished,’ said Helen.
Legs had one thump more.
‘So have I,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it ripping?’
HELEN has gone to church, after several scathing remarks about Sabbath-breakers, by whom she means me, and probably also Legs, as I hear the piano being played indoors. As a matter of fact, I have not the slightest intention of breaking anything—though Legs seems to have designs on the strings—for even here under the trees on the lawn it is far too hot to think of such a thing. Several slightly disappointed dogs repose round me, who hoped that perhaps, as I was not going to church, I was going for a walk. This afternoon, I am afraid, they will be disappointed again, for I propose to go to afternoon service in the cathedral, and they will think I am going for a walk. But on Sunday dogs have to pay for the commissions and omissions of the week.
The bells have stopped, so Helen will quite certainly be late, and the silence of Sundaymorning in the country grows a shade deeper. Fifi just now, with an air of grim determination, sat up to scratch herself; but she could not be bothered, and sank down again in collapse on the grass. Legs, too, has apparently found the heat too much even for him, and has stopped playing. And I abandoned myself to that luxury which can only be really enjoyed on Sunday morning, when other people have gone to church (I wish to state again that I am going this afternoon), of thinking of all the things I ought to do, and not doing them. On Monday and Tuesday, and all through the week, in fact, you can indulge in that same pursuit, but it lacks aroma: it is without bouquet. But give me a chair under a tree on Sunday morning, and let my wife call me names for sitting in it, and then let the church-bells stop. Fifi wants washing. Legs said so yesterday, and we meant to wash her this morning. I must carefully avoid the subject if he comes out, since I don’t intend to do so. Then I ought to write to the Secretary of State—having first ascertained who he is—to remind him that Legs is going up for his Foreign Office examination in November, andthat his (the Secretary of State’s) predecessor in the late Government promised him a nomination. How tiresome these changes of Government are! One would have thought the Conservatives might have held on till Legs’ examination. Then I should not (1) have to consult Whitaker to find out who the present Secretary of State is, and (2) write to him, and—probably—(3) find that either I haven’t got a Whitaker, or else that it is an old one. This will entail expense as well.
How the silence grew! I could not even hear any bees buzz among the flower-beds, and wondered whether bees do no work on Sunday. There was not a sound or murmur of them. Probably this is quite a new fact in natural history, which has never struck anybody before. It would never have struck me if I had gone to church. Then Fifi pricked one ear, sat up, and snapped at something. It was a winged thing, with a brown body, rather like a bee. How indescribably futile!
Then there came a little puff of wind from the end of the garden, and next moment the whole air was redolent with the scent of sweet-peas.Sweet-peas! How strangely, vastly more intimate is the sense of smell than any other! How at one whiff of odour the whole romance of life, its beautiful joys and scarcely less beautiful sorrows, the dust and struggle and the glory of it, rises up, clad not in the grey robes, or standing in the dim light of the past, but living, moving, breathing—part of the past, perhaps, but more truly part of the present. Like a huge wave from the immortal sea of life, cool and green, and speaking of the eternal depths, yet exulting in sunshine and rainbow-hued in spray, all the memories entwined about this house held and enveloped me. Here lived once Dick and Margery, those perfect friends; here, when they had passed to their triumphant peace, came she whom, when I first saw her, I thought to be Margery. From this house (where still in memory of Margery we plant the long avenue of sweet-peas, because she loved them) two years ago we were married, and here I sit now drowned in the beautiful past that is all so essential a part of this beautiful present.
But it would be as well, perhaps, if this book is to be in the slightest degree intelligible (a thing which I maintain is a merit rather than adefect), to put together a few simple facts concerning these last two years.
It was two years ago last April that we were married, and took a small house in town, though we still spent a good deal of time down here with Helen’s father. But before the year was out he died, leaving everything to Helen, who was his only child. So, as was natural, we continued to live in the house which was so dear to both of us.
Legs is my first cousin, and he has lived with us for a year past, for he has neither father nor mother; and since he was cramming for his Foreign Office work in town, it was far the best arrangement that he should make his home with us. Legs is the only name he is ever known by, since he is one of those people who are almost unknown by their real name (which in this case is Francis Horace Allenby), and are alluded to only by some nickname which is far more suitable. If, for instance, I said to somebody who knew him quite well, ‘Have you seen Francis lately?’ I should probably be favoured with an inquiring stare, and then, ‘Oh, Legs you mean!’ while to his million acquaintances (he has morethan anyone I ever knew) he is equally Legs Allenby. The name, I need scarcely add, is a personal and descriptive nickname, for Legs chiefly consists of them. When he sits down, he would be guessed to be well on the short side of middle height; when he stands up he is seen to be well on the farther shore of it. He was Legs at school, and his family, very sensibly, and all his friends, saw how impossible it was to call him Francis any more. For the rest, he is just over twenty, sandy-haired, freckle-faced, and green-eyed, with a front tooth broken across, a fact that is continually in evidence, since he is nearly always laughing. It would be sheer nonsense to call him good-looking, but it would be as sheer to call him ugly, since, when you have got a face like Legs’, either epithet has nothing to do with it. But I have never seen any boy with nearly so attractive and charming a face, and Legs, whose nature is quite as nice as his face, and extremely like it, has the most splendid time.
And that, to finish these tedious explanations, is our household. There is no other inmate of it—no little one, you understand.
Legs is an enthusiast—a fanatic on the subject of life. Everything, including even his foreign languages, which he has to cram himself with, is the subject of his admiration, and he discovers more secrets of life than the rest of the world put together. At one time it is a chord which is meat and drink to him; at another the romances of Pierre Loti; or, again, golf is the only thing worth living for, while occasionally some girl, or, as often as not, a respectable elderly married woman, usurps his heart. Last week he discovered that there were only two people in town the least worth talking to, but yesterday, when I asked him who the second one was, having forgotten myself, I found that he had forgotten too, for if the ‘Meistersinger’ overture was not enough for anybody, he was a person of no perception.
‘Why, it contains all there is,’ he had said, when he finished it the other evening with Helen. ‘It’s all there, the whole caboodle.’
But this morning, from the silence indoors, I imagine he must have found another caboodle—a book probably. Or equally possible, Legs has an attack of acute middle-age, which occasionallytakes him like a bad cold in the head. Then he wonders whether anything is worth doing, and is sorry for Helen and me, because we are so frivolous. Six months ago, I remember, he had such an attack, induced by reading a book about three acres and a cow, which raised in him the sense of injustice that all of us three had so much more than that. During this period he took no sugar in his tea, refused wine, and began to write a book which was called ‘Tramps,’ contrasting the horror of indigence with the even greater horror of extravagance. It was really directed against Helen and me, for we had lately bought a small, snuffling motor-car. These outbursts of Socialism are generally coincident with Atheism. But they do not last long: Legs soon feels better again.
I was right, it appeared, about the conjecture that he had found a book, but I was wrong about the attack of middle-age. Legs jumped out of the drawing-room window with wild excitement.
‘Oh, I say!’ he cried, ‘why did you never tell me? I thought Swinburne was an awful rotter! But just listen.’
And he read: ‘When the hounds of spring are in winter’s traces.’
‘Did you ever hear anything like it?’ he said. ‘“Blossom by blossom the spring begins!” Why, it’s magic! Oh, don’t I know it! Do you remember—I suppose you don’t—when all the daffodils came out together last year?’
‘Oh, Legs, what an ass you are!’ I said. ‘Because you never noticed them till I showed you them.’
‘No, I believe that’s true. Oh, don’t argue! Listen!’
And he began all over again.
Then he lay back on the grass with his hands underneath his head, looking up unblinking into the face of the sun. That, by the way, is another peculiarity of his: he looks straight at the sun at noonday, and is not dazzled. His eyes neither blink nor water. He can’t understand why other people don’t look at the sun.
Then—if by any chance you care to understand this quiet, delightful life we lead, it is necessary that you understand Legs—then his mood suddenly changed.
‘Oh, I’m wrong about the daffodils,’ he said; ‘you showed me them. But this chapisa daffodil. I suppose he’s quite old, too. I wonder how you can get old, if you have ever felt like that. What a waste of time it is to do anything if you can feel. I hate this Foreign Office affair: why shouldn’t I do nothing?’
‘Because you can’t,’ I remarked.
‘What do you mean?’
I had not been to church, and so had heard no sermon. Therefore, I preached one on my own account.
‘You will know in about fifteen years,’ I said. ‘Anyhow, you will find that, unless you are brainless and absurd, you must do something. You are quite wrong. It isn’t nearly enough to feel. The moment you “feel,” you want to create. You not only want, but you have to; you can’t possibly help yourself. You have just read that heavenly poem. You now want to write something like it. You hear what spring once said to a poet, and you want to put down what spring says to you!’
‘Oh, you’re quite wrong,’ said Legs. ‘Hehas said what spring means. That’s the last word on the subject. But summer now: this, to-day——’
‘So you want to create,’ said I.
A glorious trait about Legs is that he never admits conviction. He only changes the subject. Thus, if the subject is changed by him, his controversialist is satisfied.
‘I don’t believe in the highest of the shortest suit if your partner doubles,’ he said. ‘What are you to do if you have two spades and two clubs all contemptible?’
‘Lead the less contemptible.’
Legs turned slowly over on his side, and lay with his face against the short turf of the lawn. ‘“Blossom by blossom,”’he said, ‘“the spring begins.” I wonder if he meant more than that! Did he mean to tell of the time when one is young oneself, and it is all blossom? Lord, how priggish that sounds! But it is all blossom, except for this beastly German. I hate German! It sounds as if you were gargling. Damn! I have to go up by the early train to-morrow, too! And you and Helen will stop here till after lunch. Grind, grind—oh, I lead the life of adog! And then, if I am very successful, I shall have the privilege of sitting on a stool in a beastly building in Whitehall, and writing aprécisfrom some silly old man in Vienna or Madrid, about nothing at all. It isn’t worth it!’
Legs and I, it will be observed, deal largely in contradictions.
‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘Everything almost that one does is worth it. As long as you are actively doing anything with all your heart, you can’t be wasting time, nor can there be anything better worth doing. It is only when you say that a thing isn’t worth doing that it becomes so.’
Legs sat up again.
‘Oh, I want nine lives at least!’ he said. ‘Or why can’t one buy some of the time that hangs so heavy on other people’s hands? I know a man who reads theTimesall through every morning, and theGlobeevery evening. Yet, after all, I dare say it is quite as improving as sitting here and talking rot as we are doing. I shall go and put in half an hour over that accursed Teutonic language before lunch.’
Legs had, as it seemed to me, run over mostof the topics of human interest in the few minutes he had been out, and since I was still irrevocably determined neither to wash Fifi, nor to write to the Secretary of State, nor, indeed, to open the very large book on the crisis in Russia, which I had brought out with me (to bring out a book on Sunday morning and not to open it is strictly in accordance with the spirit of the thing), my mind went slowly browsing, like a meditative cow, over the dazzling display he had spread before me. And instinctively and instantaneously I found myself envying him, though why I envied him I did not immediately know. But it was soon obvious; I envied his power of making soul-stirring discoveries; his rapture over that magical spring song of the man he had thought ‘an awful rotter.’ I envied him his ignorance of the perfectly patent fact that it is only fools who can go on doing nothing, and of the fact that it is infinitely better to sit on a stool and do arithmetic for stockbrokers than to do nothing at all. But youth does not know that, and I think I envied him his youth. Yet—so often does one contradict oneself—I knew verysoon that I did not envy him any of these things. After all, I still went on making soul-stirring discoveries, and propose to do so until the very end of my life, when I shall make the most soul-stirring discovery of all, which is death. And to envy the fact of his having just discovered the magic of Swinburne’s spring song would be exactly the same as envying the appetite of somebody who has just come down to breakfast, when you are half-way through. Your eggs and bacon were delicious, but the fact that you have eaten them makes it impossible to wish for them again. And it should make you only delighted that other people keep coming down to breakfast—till the end of your life they will do that, unless the world comes to an end first—and, thank God, they will find eggs and bacon delicious too, hungry and fresh in the morning of their lives.
I was becoming slightly too active in mind for the proper observance of Sunday morning (given, of course, that you have chosen not to go to church), for the real attitude is a state of tranquil bemusedness, but it was too late to stop now.... What, in fact, did I want?Did I want to be twenty again, and go through the days and hours of those fifteen years once more?
Yes, I did. If the world could be turned back for fifteen years, I would gladly take my place there, and go through it all, good and bad together, just as it has happened. I would encore this delightful song, in fact, and be content that it should be sung again—it, not another song. Of course, if one could start again at the age of twenty—or ten, for that matter—and live it over again with the knowledge, infinitesimal as it is, that one has gained now, I imagine that the vast majority of the world would put the hands of the clock back. On all those thousands of occasions on which one has acted stupidly, unkindly, evilly, and has probably suffered for it without delay (for it is mercifully ordained that we have not long to wait before our punishment begins, especially if we have been foolish), we should now do differently, remembering that it did not pay—to put things at their lowest—to be asses and knaves. Apart from that, we should have the same beautiful, flawless days again, when, soI cannot but think, the beneficent power has somehow come very close to us and our surroundings, and by its neighbourhood has given us a series, again and again repeated, of hours in which we have been unable to imagine anything better than what we have got. We have wanted, with all the eager happiness that wanting gives, and we have obtained; but before any leanness of the soul has entered we have wanted again. We have had happiness, not content (since that implies the end of wanting) but happiness, the content that dwells not in the present only, but looked forward. I have no idea whether, on the whole, I am happier than the average of other people, since there is no thermometer yet invented that can register that. But I do know that I would choose to go back and live it all over again,as it has been. With the little experience, the little knowledge that must inevitably come with years, whether one is stupid or not, I imagine that everybody would choose to go back, but I wish to state distinctly that I would go back without that. I suppose it was that which made me just now feel I enviedLegs. But I don’t do that really for this reason.
Supposing that what I should choose (because I really should) were given me, what then? I should arrive again eventually in the mere measure of years at the point where I am now, no different, no better, no worse. I should like to go back, because it has beensuch fun. But there is better than that ahead: of that I am completely convinced. There are as many (if not more, and I think there are more) entrancing discoveries from middle age as there have been from youth, and I am convinced again that if one happens to live to be old there will be as many more.
After all, to re-read life again would be like re-reading the first volume of an absorbing book. One has revelled in the first volume, and naturally wants to revel again. But what is going to happen? There is nothing that interests me so much as that. To-day, even in this quiet domestic life of ours, there are a hundred threads leading out into unknown countries, all of which, if one lives, one will follow up. And all, big and tiny alike, are so stupendous.If, to take the forward view, I could see in a mirror now what and where all those people—few of them, no doubt, but friends—those who really matter, would be in a year’s time, how I should seize the magic reflector, and gaze into it! Incomparable as has been the romance of life up till now, it is known to me. But to peep into the second volume!
The sun, in the full blaze of which Legs had laid, peeped over the top of the elm in shade of which I had seated myself, and, not being Leggish, I shifted my chair again to consider this point.
It is a question of scale that is here concerned, though the scale seems to me to be an unreal one. If I happened to be the Emperor of All the Russias, and the magic mirror were given me, I should look eagerly out for my own figure, and see if I still wore a crown. I should scrutinize the faces of those around me, to see if war and the hell-hag of revolution had been shrieking through my illimitable country. But my interests are not soul-stirring to any but me, and anyhow not of European importance. So I should look to see who sat on this lawn ayear hence; I should ask for a short survey of the Embassy at Paris, to see if Legs was attached; I should visit a dozen houses or so. But if I was allowed to put the clock back fifteen years, I should have to wait longer for this.... So I must reconsider my choice, and I am afraid I must reverse it. But it must be understood that I choose not to be twenty again, merely because it will take longer to be forty and fifty. I want the second volume so much.
‘Or....’ Here Helen’s voice broke in. She had come back from church, and had seated herself on the grass, and I believe that half of what appeared to be soliloquy was actually spoken to her. But she is wonderfully patient.
‘It is youth you want,’ she said, ‘and you have got it till you cease to want it. It is only people who don’t care about it that grow old. Or is there more than that? Is it wanting to go on learning that keeps one young?’
A dreadful misgiving came over me.
‘Am I dreaming?’ I said. ‘Or did you tell me the other day that I showed signs of wishing to teach?’
She laughed.
‘No; it is quite true. But I will tell you when you cease to wish to learn. I shall say it quite, quite clearly.’
She took off her hat, and speared it absently with a pin.
‘We had an awful sermon,’ she said, ‘all about the grim seriousness of life, and the opportunities that will never come back. It does seem to me it is most absolute waste of time to give a thought to that. I shan’t go to church next Sunday. I don’t feel fortified by thoughts like that. It’s much better for me to know that you would put the clock back, live it all over again. But about looking forward. Oh, Jack, I think I shouldn’t look in the magic mirror if I had the chance. What if one saw oneself all alone? One would live in dread afterwards.’
‘Or what if you saw a cradle in the room?’ said I.
She looked up at me quickly, and then put out her hands for me to pull her up.
‘Perhaps I should look in the mirror,’ she said.
Poor Legs, as he had said, left by a very early train next morning, and Helen, moved by a sudden violent attack of vague duty, went with him. The access was quite indeterminate. She thought merely that one ought to get back to town early on Monday, so as to have the whole day there instead of splitting it up. Personally I followed neither her reasoning nor example, and intended to spend the day in dignified inaction in the country, and not split it up by going to town till after dinner. But to the owner of a motor-car the train appears a degraded sort of business, and, greatly daring, I meant to start about nine in the evening, and be the monarch of the road; for when there is no other traffic, any car becomes a chariot of triumph. Helen, I may remark, loves our motor when she does not want to go anywhere particular. When she does she takes the train. I think, in fact, that it was my proposal that we should drive up together after dinner that was the direct parent of her sense of duty.
So, when I came down at the not unreasonable hour of nine to breakfast, I found that I hadthe house to myself, and—I am not in the least ashamed of the confession—found that the prospect of an absolutely solitary day was quite to my mind. I do not believe myself to be unsociable or morose, but every now and then I confess that I like a day in which I see nobody. It is not that one is busy, and wants to get through one’s work, for, on the contrary, when I have a great deal to do, I hugely desire the presence and the conversation of friends in the intervals of ‘doing.’ But occasionally it is a very good thing to chew and ruminate, to be surrounded by the quiet green things of the earth, which give you all their best without waking the corresponding instinct to exchange ideas, to give something of yours to meet theirs. For intercourse with one’s fellow-men, especially with one’s friends, is like some rapid interchange of presents. Everybody (everybody, at least, who has the smallest sense of sociability) searches in his mind for any little thing that may be there, and gives it his friend, while the friend, accepting it, gives something back. From all that—we cannot call it an effort since it is so completely spontaneous on both sides—it is well to be free occasionally, to lie, so to speak, under the pelting rain of life that is ever poured out from the voiceless, eloquent, bright-eyed happiness of Nature, to make no plan, to contemplate no contingency, to drop that sort of fencing rapier that we all wield when we are with our fellow-men, and lie like a log, with one eye open it may be, and be rained upon by the things that live, and are clothed and nourished without toil or spinning.
I am aware that the great Strenuists, from Mr. Roosevelt downwards, would hold up their toil-hardened hands at this, exclaiming: ‘You mean it is better now and then to be a cow than a Man?’ Precisely so, but cows are not nearly as inactive as Man on these occasions ought to be. They eat too long, and they switch their tails, and stamp their feet. But the long, stupid, bovine gaze is moderately correct. At least, I have never detected a shadow of intelligence in a cow’s eye. If there is any, the man who occasionally becomes a cow must be careful to get rid of it. Nor must he be a cow too often: that is fatal. If he is a cow for one day inevery six weeks, I think he will find the proportion is about right.
So all day, literally all day, I sat, or, when sitting became too fatiguing, lay on the lawn, and nothing happened that did not always happen, but all was worth observing in a purely bovine manner, without intelligence. Little brown twigs occasionally fell from the elms, and once or twice a withered yellow leaf came spinning on its own axis, as if it was the screw of some unseen steamer. A stag-beetle walked slowly down from the wooden paling, and came some ten yards across the lawn. It stopped there about an hour, I should think, doing nothing whatever. Then it turned and went back on to the paling again. A robin took about the same length of time to make up his mind that I was quite harmless, and eventually pecked at my bootlace, which was undone. It took him an enormous time to decide, with his head cocked sideways, whether it tasted nice or not, but eventually he settled it did not, for he did not peck it again. Then a jackdaw sat on one of the poles of the tennis-net, and said ‘Jarck’ seventeen times after I began to count.He began to say it the eighteenth time, but stopped in the middle and ate an incautious earwig.
That was almost too exciting, and I transferred not my attention, because I had not got any, but my bovine gaze to the big flower-bed opposite. All summer was there, dim, hot, blossoming summer in full luxuriance of growth, so that scarcely a square inch of earth was visible. I did not even name the dear familiar flowers that grew there. One was a spire of blue, one was a cluster of orange; there was an orchestra of red trumpets, a mist of starry grey, and bits of sky caught in a web of green. And from beyond (I could not help naming that) the odour of sweet-peas. I lay and soaked in it.
To use a simile, do you know those mysterious things which are to be found on the chalk downs, called dew-ponds? Often, of course, they are fed with rain, but even when for months no rain has fallen, you will still find them full. They just lie open to the sky and that is all. And the mind, so it seems to me, issomething like them. Often it is fed in the obvious way, as the dew-pond with rain, by conscious thought, by active intercourse with others. But sometimes it is not a bad thing for it to be like the dew-pond, just to lie open to the sky, and drink in the eternal wine of Nature, which fills its pond again. All that is required of it is to do nothing whatever, not to think even, but just to be there, to be in existence, to let go of everything. It really is worth the experiment, though it is not quite so easy as it sounds, for thoughts, ideas of some kind, keep leaking in. They must be firmly excluded.
The snuffling motor rose like a hero to the occasion, and came round throbbing with excitement. Something in the idea of this drive by night had evidently taken its fancy, and it positively burned to exceed the legal limit, a wish that I was only too glad to gratify. When we started the crimson of the sunset was still aflame in the west, but gradually the colour was withdrawn, as if some unseen hand was pulling out scarlet threads that ran through some exquisite fabric of dainty embroidery, leavingthere only the soft transparent ground of it. Then more gradually, so that the eye could not trace the appearance of each, but only knew that the number was being multiplied, behind the dark velvet of the sky were lit the myriad suns that make a flame of space, and sing in their orbits. Colours faded and disappeared, and soon the world was turned to an etching of black and white. The roads were empty of traffic, and though July was here, still from dark coppice and leafy screen there sounded the one eternal song, the rapture of nightingales. Often it seemed to me as if we were standing still, while the world in its revolution span by us; there was but a space of lamp-lit road by which, shadow-like, dream-like, the trees and open spaces ran. For a long piece together, as over the Hartford Bridge flats, nothing marked our passage except this whirling of the world. It seemed in the darkness that time had ceased, and that from its own impetus this globe and the thousand globes above were circling still.
Then in front there began to shine, like the reflected light of some comet coming nearer, the huge glow-worm of London. For a while itrested, like some remote befogged star on the horizon; then its light brightened, and its little crawling caterpillars, the trains and buses, began to creep by us, reaching out, as it were, to the end of the leaf, the greenest and most succulent parts.
Then, like the opening of a photographer’s shutter, so swift it was, we were in the traffic of the town again, and all was familiar, all was home. The country was home too, and here was another. Which was the truer sense? The sense that claimed the jackdaw on the tennis-net as a brother, or the sense that rejoiced in this fierce-beating pulse of life?
Perhaps, since they are both true, there is no question of comparison.