Read Ebook: A Reaping by Benson E F Edward Frederic

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Ebook has 759 lines and 76614 words, and 16 pages

'I've finished,' said Helen.

Legs had one thump more.

'So have I,' he said. 'Isn't it ripping?'

JULY

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 Sunday morning 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 , 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, and that his 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 have to consult Whitaker to find out who the present Secretary of State is, and write to him, and--probably-- 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 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 , 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 , 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 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 occasionally takes 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.

'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!'

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 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.

Legs had, as it seemed to me, run over most of 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 , 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 very soon 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 , 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?

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 a year 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.'

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 had the 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 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.

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