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[Illustration: E. F. BENSON.]
A REAPING
BY
E. F. BENSON
[Illustration: colophon]
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
AND NEW YORK
TO
LADY EVELYN LISTER
CONTENTS
JUNE 9
JULY 35
AUGUST 63
SEPTEMBER 87
OCTOBER 113
NOVEMBER 149
DECEMBER 181
JANUARY 215
FEBRUARY 247
MARCH 281
APRIL 319
MAY 353
A REAPING
JUNE
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 long ago 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 such a 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 lagoons of
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 in _tempo_, 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 explain nothing 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 corner to 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
makes them 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
rise from 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 I sat 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 was there 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 is going 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 things of 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 think it
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. How _could_ I
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 at that 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. On benches 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 men and 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 had _vin gai_, and was 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 a drop too much, and you
shouldn’t judge too severely.’
This sense of being misunderstood gave it _vin triste_ of 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?’
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 (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, and that 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 a
defect), 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
more than 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 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.
‘Oh, I’m wrong about the daffodils,’ he said; ‘you showed me them. But
this chap _is_ a 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. ‘He has 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 a dog! 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 a _précis_ from
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 the _Times_ all through every morning, and the _Globe_ every
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 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 (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 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 (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, so I 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 envied Legs. 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 been _such 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 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.’