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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
_Crown 8vo., cloth, price 6s._
SCARLET AND HYSSOP
THE LUCK OF THE VAILS
MAMMON AND CO.
THE PRINCESS SOPHIA
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
20 & 21, BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
The
Book of Months
By
E. F. Benson
[Illustration: colophon]
London
William Heinemann
1903
_This Edition enjoys copyright in all countries signatory to the
Berne Treaty, and is not to be imported into the United States of
America_
TO MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
PAGE
JANUARY 1
FEBRUARY 23
MARCH 49
APRIL 79
MAY 97
JUNE 121
JULY 139
AUGUST 165
SEPTEMBER 197
OCTOBER 225
NOVEMBER 251
DECEMBER 273
_The publisher is informed by the Proprietors of Condy’s Fluid that
their preparation contains no permanganate of potash. In making
this correction he desires to express regret if the statement on
page 83 has done them an injury._
JANUARY
Thick yellow fog, and in consequence electric light to dress by and
breakfast by, was the opening day of the year. Never, to anyone who
looks at this fact in the right spirit, did a year dawn more
characteristically. The denseness, the utter inscrutability of the face
of that which should be, was never better typified. We blindly groped on
the threshold of the future, feeling here for a bell-handle, here for a
knocker, while the door still stood shut. Then, about mid-day, sudden
commotions shook the vapours; dim silhouettes of house-roofs, promised
lands perhaps, or profiled wrecks, stood suddenly out against swirling
orange whirlpools of mist; and from my window, which commanded a double
view up and down Oxford Street, I looked out over the crawling traffic,
with an interest, as if in the unfolding of some dramatic plot, on the
battle of the skies. From sick dead yellow the colour changed to gray,
and for a few moments the street seemed lit by a dawn of April; then
across the pearly tints came a sunbeam, lighting them with sudden
opalescence. Then the smoke from the house opposite, which had been
ascending slowly, like a tired man climbing stairs, was plucked away by
a breeze, and in two minutes the whole street was a blaze of
primrose-coloured sunshine.
All that week I was work-bound in London--a place where, as everyone
knows, there are forty-eight hours in every twenty-four. The reason for
this is obvious. It is impossible to sit idly in a chair in London; it
is impossible (almost) to read a book, and it is (happily) quite
impossible to write one. Hence the hours are multiplied. The sound and
spectacle of life induces a sort of intoxication of the mind. Ten yards
of Piccadilly is a volume, and the Circus an improper epic. Hence the
impossibility of reading; the books are in the flowing tides that jostle
from house-wall to house-wall, and they are vastly more entertaining
than anything that publishers have ever had the good fortune to bring
out.
Now, people who are incapable of reading bookprint--of which the
enormous mass is very sorry stuff--are held to be uneducated; but it
seems to me that people who cannot read, or at any rate conjecture at,
this splendid human print are much more ignorant. For it is here in
these places, alive with the original words and phrases out of which all
books are made, that there lies the key to all books that are worth
reading at all. At any rate, here lies the material; it is here, and
nowhere else, that the _chef_ does his marketing. There are, however,
several rules to be observed if you would read the original. The first
is, that you must attend with all your might; the book, so to speak,
shuts automatically if you cease to attend. The second is, that you must
at a moment’s notice be ready to pity and to praise. The third--and
perhaps the most important of all--is, that you must never be shocked.
For the whole attitude of the observer is covered by pity or praise. The
Great Author does not want his moral condemnation, and, in addition to
this, there is nothing so blinding to one’s self as being shocked. It is
like looking through a telescope at one point only, and that probably
wrongly focussed; for it is focussed by one’s own individual code, which
is almost certainly wrong. It is Human Life you are looking at; if that
is not good enough for you, go and look at something else. There are
plenty of dull things in the world, but remember always that, if you
find other people dull, it is only a sign that a dull person is present.
But if you are to read the book Living, come humble and alert. Try to
catch the point of every phrase, for of this you may be sure--that there
is a point. You will find there, thank God! many pages that will make
you laugh--laugh, that is, properly, with sheer childish, unreflecting
amusement; you will find there things that will make you think; and you
will certainly find there things that will make you want to weep. And if
we knew a little, instead of knowing nothing, we should probably--no,
certainly--fall on our knees, and thank God for that also.
One of each of these occurred to me to-day. The first was when I was
coming out of the club with a friend on our way to dinner. An obsequious
porter held the club door open, an obsequious page-boy stood by our
glittering hansom, with a hand on the wheel. My friend had an opulent
appearance and wore a fur coat. On the pavement were standing two
exceedingly small and ragged boys, and one of them whose hair drooped
over his eyes like a Skye terrier, seeing this resplendent exit, put his
thumbs in the place where the armholes of his waistcoat would have been,
had the merry little devil had one, and, with his nose in the air, said
very loud to the other, ‘Whare are we doining to-night, Bill?’
The second made one laugh at first, but think afterwards, and it was
thus: At the corner of Dover Street there lay a heap of mud and street
sweepings, and as we drew up just opposite, blocked by an opposing tide
of carriages in Piccadilly, a small, very dapper little gentleman in
dress-clothes stepped into the middle of this muck-heap, with the result
that one of his dress-pumps was drawn off his unfortunate foot with a
‘cloop’ and stuck there. On to it there swooped a vulture of the
highway, a lad of about twenty, who picked it out, and made off down
Dover Street with it. Now, what good was one shoe to him? Would he not
have done better to have wiped it carefully on his coat, which really
could not have deteriorated farther, and chanced a tip from the dapper
little gentleman? Or was the instinct of stealing so strong that he
never stopped to think? One would have supposed that a tip was a
practical certainty.
The third sight was merely a matter for tears.
I walked back from dinner, and my way lay up Piccadilly again. At a
populous corner stood a very stout elderly woman, dressed in violent and
ridiculous colours. Her hair was golden, her eyebrows broad, thick and
vilely drawn, her cheeks so burned with rouge that one blushed. She
addressed every passer-by in endearing terms. None regarded her. That
was quite right; but the pity of her standing there on this squally
night, with her horrid mission and her total ill-success! Yes, it is
difficult to thank God for that.
After five days I got deliverance from this entrancing slavery, and,
like a cork from a bottle, flew to Grindelwald. The journey I remember
as a dreadful dream, for I had a cold so bad that all sense of taste,
smell, and most of hearing and feeling, had passed from me, and I
seemed to myself to be a rough deal board being sent by train, and
turned out into a drizzling night at what appeared to be mere cowsheds
on the line, simply for the purpose of declaring that I had no spirit or
lace about me. Spirit! The Queen of Sheba when she had seen Solomon in
all his glory had more. As to lace, that diaphanous material seriously
occupied my waking dreams as we mounted the Jura. Was there anything in
my face that suggested lace, I wondered, or did lace frillings peep out
from my trousers? Anyhow, why lace? I was really almost anxious to
declare five hundred cigarettes, but nobody suggested such a thing.
Then----
The new heaven and the new earth, an earth covered with powdery snow,
thatched here and there by pines, and reaching beyond all power of
thought, by glacier and snowfield and rocks too steep for the settling
of the snow, into the pinnacles of the Eiger and the Wetterhorn. From
ridge to ridge the eye followed, lost in amazement at the wonder of the
earth and the greatness of its design. Austere and silent rose the
virgin snows, and more silent, growing from words to exclamation, and
from exclamation to silence itself, one’s wonder. There, out of the void
and formless pulp which was once the world, they were set, barren,
fruitless, useless, and that is the wonder of them and their glory.
Centuries have been as but seconds in the life of an idle man in the
forming of them; for centuries that have been to them but the winking of
an eye they have raised their immemorial crests, and the centuries shall
be as the sea-sand before they crumble. O ye Mountains and Hills, praise
ye the Lord! Every day you praise Him.
Now, this “Book of Months” is almost certainly worth nothing, anyhow,
and I take this opportunity to inform critics so, in case (as is not
likely) they have the slightest doubt about it. But if they and I are
wrong, it will be because we have both overlooked the possible value of
a true document--true, that is, as far as I personally am able to make
it true. Therefore I will state at once that for the next four weeks the
childish pursuit of making correct lines and edges on the ice occupied
me much more, except on a few occasions, than all the mountains, all
the heavenly blue of the sky, or the divine radiance of the marching
sun. Instead of attending to those big and beautiful things, I got up,
day after day, full of anxious thoughts, and had I been assured that
these anxieties would never trouble me again on condition that I never
again looked at the Eiger, or the scarlet finger of the Finster-Aarhorn
that caught the sunset long after the sun had set to us, I would quite
certainly have closed with the bargain. Those who do not know what a
clean outside-back-counter means can have no voice in this affair, since
they are not acquainted with the subject-matter of it, but those who do
will, I believe, extend to me their pitying sympathy. For no known
reason, I desired to make these and other turns, which when made are of
no conceivable use to anybody, and full of anxious thoughts, which
violent collisions with the elusive material on which I performed fully
justified, I proceeded to devote the hours of light to these utterly
indefensible pursuits. I wished to execute a movement in which the skate
left a certain mark on the ice, and no other (I am alluding, of course,
to involuntary change of edge), and to make these and other marks on the
ice (continuous loops, bracket-eight, and a few more, for the sake of
the curious) I signed a bond, so to speak, for three weeks of my short
mortal life. All morning, that is to say, I struggled with these
evanescent scratchings, ate a hurried lunch, and struggled again till it
was dark. Really, it is very odd, and I hope to do the same next winter.
I am perfectly aware that I could have spent my time much better, or, at
any rate, tried to. I knew that at the time; but I did not care then,
and I do not care now.
There were sane intervals, however. For instance, one Saturday evening
it began to snow. Now, I see nothing conceivably wrong in skating on
Sunday, and am unable to comprehend the position of those who do. But it
is certainly wrong to skate on Sunday when it will spoil the ice on
Monday, and on this particular Sunday I went to church in the morning,
and afterwards took a sandwich lunch from the hotel, and, tying it
securely to a toboggan, sat myself insecurely on the toboggan, and went
alone--that was an essential part of the plan--down past the church and
through the village, through fields of white snow that spouted as the
toboggan met them, even as the spray spouts round the bows of a liner.
In nothing, I suppose, does a man (unless he be M. Santos Dumont) come
nearer to the ecstasy of flight, some low skimming flight that follows
the contour of the ground as swallows when storm is imminent. So went I
down an ever-steepening mile, finishing at the end just by the side of
the bridge that crosses the stream from the glacier. The frost had been
severe for the last week, and this was nearly covered over with lids of
ice that grew out from backwaters and extended almost from bank to bank.
Wherever a stone stood in mid-current, there below it had the ice first
gathered, groping its way downstream till the cold feeler reached
another stone. Then, already half established, it had broadened and
broadened till a third anchorage met it. But in certain swift places the
water still ran unchecked, its flow, of course, greatly diminished with
the lesser melting of the glacier in winter, but still busy, busy,
seeking the sea with steadfast purpose. Round the banks and in the bed
itself of the stream grew an immense company of alders covered
completely with the inimitable confectionery of frost, a forest of
spiked branches.
Then mounting again, I passed up a long gentle slope by a few outlying
châlets, and, having come out of the shadow of the Eiger, sat down to
lunch. The air was utterly windless, the frost so keen that not a flake
of snow clung to my clothes, yet through the glory of that pellucid air
the sun struck so hot that a coat was altogether a superfluity.
Eastwards the Wetterhorn rose in glacier and snowfield, and its superb
and patient beauty, as of some noble woman waiting for the man she
loves, struck me with a pang of delight. Thereafter still climbing, I
entered the pine-woods below the Scheidegg, where the sun drew out a
thousand woodland and resinous smells, as if odorous summer instead of
midwinter held sway.
Alone! I had intended to be alone, but never was a man in more
delectable company. Trees, glimpses of the gorgeous dome above them,
drifts of driven snow, were my companions, while, if one grew overbold,
there was the Eiger to hazard a respectful remark to, and the sun
itself to be worshipped. On no other day, indeed, that I can remember
have I felt so strong a sympathy with Parsees. High it swung, benignant,
and all for the fir-trees and me. Then rising higher, I came to the edge
of the wood and the beginning of the snowfields again, and, resting for
a moment, did an exceedingly childish thing. Underneath a piece of
spreading root of the last tree of that heavenly wood I hid a Bryant and
May’s match-box containing a stick of chocolate, an English sixpence,
two nickel coins of ten centimes, a short piece of pencil, and four
matches. These I dedicate to the wayfarer should he need a light. Also I
should ask him to write his name with the pencil and put it in the
match-box, and, if he feels as foolish as I, add some small object of no
value. Next year I will go there again, and make some further striking
additions to the _cache_. The tree is a large one on the left of the
path, and quite notably the _last in the wood_. My initials are rudely
carved in the piece of root directly above the _cache_. An intelligent
traveller knowing this can hardly miss the place.
Now, where shall we look for the origin of this instructive piece of
foolishness? This is not a merely egotistic query, for I am perfectly
certain that many sober and mature citizens like myself will feel
sympathy with childishness that rejoices in such _caches_ as I made on
the slopes of the Scheidegg. Is it that we still preserve, even in this
well-civilized and restauranted century, some cell in our brain which
even now obeys the prudent instincts of some remote cave-dwelling
ancestor, and do we now in play imitate his serious precautions? Or--and
I like to think this better--have we still, in spite of our sober
maturity, some remnants still of an heritage more priceless than
cave-dwelling ancestors, namely, the lingering joys of our own
childhood? On the whole, the evidence points this way, especially when I
consider in connection with this certain other survivals, like that of
‘talking French.’ Here I feel that I may be treading on alien ground;
the _cache_ habit, I know, is not rare, but I have not at present met
anyone who ‘talks French,’ of which the manner is as follows.
Everyone, I suppose, has moments of sheer physical enjoyment. I need
mention two only: the one, getting into bed, with legs curled up, ere
yet the freezing sheets can be encountered; the other, when very cold
getting into a hot bath, a bath, that is to say, so hot that it is on
the border between bliss and anguish, when, in fact, to move is to
scream. On these occasions--for loneliness is essential,--I ‘talk
French’; that is to say, streams of gibberish flow in a hushed voice
from my lips, in the form of dialogue, and anyone present would hear
remarkable things of this nature:
(With deep anxiety) ‘Usti Icibon?’
(Reassuringly) ‘Mimi molat isto pacher.’
(Reassured) ‘Kaparando guilli. Amatinat skolot.’
I blush to reproduce more. But I long to know if anybody else ‘talks
French.’ I want to talk it with somebody, and compare vocabularies.
A long colloquy was held that afternoon, sitting in the sun, after the
_cache_ was made, and then towards sunset I started to go back through
the pine-wood with dim but welcome thoughts of bears and brigands lying
in wait on each side the path. One corner I remember I particularly
feared, for low-growing bushes bordering the path might conceal almost
anything. That I had good reason to fear it I soon found out, though I
had feared it for wrong reasons, for my toboggan threw me with reckless
gaiety into the middle of those same bushes. In fact, for the first
half-mile the track was abominable; bare stones and tree-roots
alternated with passages of breathless rapidity; never have I
experienced a quicker succession of violences. But as the wood grew less
dense the texture of the going became more uniform, and for the last
mile I hissed downwards with ever-increasing speed and smoothness
through the pallor of the snow-bright dusk. Large stars beamed luminous
overhead, and from scattered cottages sprang the twinkling lights,
showing that all were home from the frozen fields and safe within walls.
Then, wonder of wonders! the full moon rose over the top of the
Wetterhorn with a light as clear as running water and as soft as sleep,
making complete with its perfection this perfect day.
The other interlude from this rage of tracing useless marks on the ice
was a funeral. The funeral was that of Slam’s kitten, though the kitten
was not really Slam’s at all. But, to go back to the beginning of
things, it is necessary that you should know who Slam was. Her real
name was Evelyn Helen Anastasia, and goodness knows what; but what
matters more is that she was a child six years and one month old,
freckle-faced, snub-nosed, devoted to animals and the outside edge, and
by far the most popular person in the hotel. It was the outside edge
originally that had brought us together, for she had told me that I
didn’t do it properly, and, very kindly showing me how, she had fallen
heavily on the ice. As I picked her up, she said:
‘You see what I mean, don’t you? Let me show you again.’
Under her tuition I improved, and, what was more important, our
friendship ripened. I am proud to think that I was the only person who
ever heard about the kitten, which had followed Slam--I am sure I don’t
wonder--with pitiful mewings, down from the Happy Valley, an ownerless
beast that would have touched hearts more hard than Slam’s. She kept it
in a cupboard in her room and fed it with cake. This I learned on the
second day of the kitten’s imprisonment. That evening it died. I will
pass over Slam’s lamentations, and the wealth of falsehood by which I
convinced her that a diet of cake in an airless cupboard was the only
thing that could have saved it. Then, as it was dead, it had to be
buried, still without the cognizance of Slam’s nurse, whom I feared.
‘I don’t want a lot of people,’ said Slam. ‘It would be much nicer if we
buried her quietly. So when nurse is at dinner I will bring her down in
my hat.’
Meantime I had procured a cardboard box, and from Slam’s hat the kitten
passed into its coffin. The coffin was put on our toboggan--for Slam and
I were going to lunch out--and the catafalque left the hotel.
Slam put her hand into mine--a compliment that only children can
pay--and we debated about the cemetery. I personally inclined to the
riverbed at the bottom of the valley, but Slam would have none of it.
‘Up above,’ she said, ‘it is cleaner;’ and, though it was all pretty
clean, I assented. ‘Then we can eat our lunch and toboggan down,’ she
added. This was common-sense; to walk up after the funeral would be
depressing; we might recover our lightness of spirit if we left the
tobogganing till afterwards.
On the way up, through the village, that is, and towards the glacier,
the talk turned on serious subjects. Did I believe that animals would
have a resurrection? Why did God make them if they were just to die and
be finished? Again, if they were to have a resurrection, was it not
proper to bury them properly? Thus we arrived at the cemetery. Four
pine-trees stood there, with snow drifted high between them; the
benediction of the sun hallowed the place; never had anyone a more
virgin tomb. We scooped out the snow down to soil-level, and dropped the
box into the excavation. Then with pious hands we covered it up, and on
the top of the cairn planted sprigs taken from the pines.
‘And now I will say my prayers,’ said Slam.
She knelt down in the snow, and, even with the fear of her nurse before
my eyes, I could say nothing to dissuade her, but knelt by her and
uncovered my head. And then Slam said the Lord’s Prayer, and asked that
she might be a good girl always, and prayed that God might bless her
father and mother and nurse and me.
Do you know what it is to be remembered in the prayers of a child? Then
she paused: ‘and the kitten,’ she added. And I said ‘Amen.’
So there the kitten lies, between the sky and the beautiful snow-clad
earth. Pines whisper about it, and the Wetterhorn and Eiger watch over
its resting-place. And Slam said her prayers there.
What follows? As far as I am concerned, this: I believe that the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, and that there will
be one day a great healing and comforting. And when on that day,
mysteriously, unintelligibly, that little body, which meantime has fed
the grasses and the alpine flowers of the place, comes to itself and is
alive again, I believe that a happy little kitten will stand between
those four pine-trees, lost no longer. And Slam and I will recognise it.
And the kitten--who knows?--will recognise us, and Slam will say again,
in the phrase that is so often on her lips:
‘Oh, it is nice!’
FEBRUARY
A quantity of wholly uninteresting things have happened. I have with
infinite rackings of thought made £290 on the Stock Exchange, and never
was money more hardly earned. I am also well on the way to lose the
whole of it. If, as seems highly probable, I do, never will money be
more hardly lost. I have returned from Grindelwald to find a London of
the most icy cold, followed by a London of the most sickening tepidity,
swimming in mud, the colour of which and the texture of which is that of
nightmares. A pallid daylight strikes through rods of rain, the streets
smell of mackintosh, and an unfathomable depression prevails. The County
Council have seized this unrivalled opportunity for taking up the whole
of the principal thoroughfares, and it is impossible to get anywhere
without going in a totally different direction. I played bridge last
night, revoked and was not detected, which argues a mournful level of
intelligence both in one’s self and one’s adversaries, and went to bed
only to dream of a fifth suit, which, dimly veiled, swallowed aces of
trumps, or any such cards, like oysters, a gulp and no more, and woke to
find the same dark streaming and leaden heavens.
It is the weather that with me is chiefly responsible both for these
despondencies and for sky-scraping spirits. And I know of nothing so
hard to bear as weather-depressions. One cannot by employment of
idleness get rid of them, so long as the conditions that gave the
depressions birth still continue. And of all weather-depressions the one
that occurs when spring struggles to be born from dying winter is the
most despondent. One’s body, especially after a month in Switzerland,
has been adjusted to low temperatures, and the effect of the change is
the same as that produced by a tepid bath in the morning instead of a
cold one. Briskness of body and spirit alike vanish, and to-day, though
I am accustomed to these annual visitations, I went so far as to take
my temperature, there being, as I well knew, nothing whatever the matter
with me. Of course it was normal.
This transition-weather has now lasted a week, but there have been
certain intervals and alleviations. One of these occurred last Sunday. I
went in the afternoon to the Oratory at Brompton, and heard that service
of Vespers and Benediction which, whether mumbled unintelligibly by a
shabby priest in an empty church, or conducted with that splendid sense
of ‘form’ which characterizes the Oratory, never fails to give me a
feeling of ‘uplifting’ which I cannot hope to express. There in the
morning has the symbol of that Divine Mystery been laid on the Lord’s
Table, and there after the candles have been lit, and the worshipper
cleansed by the incense, is again revealed the ‘Salutaris Hostia,’ the
sign, outward and visible, of the Love through which existence is.
Then I crossed the park, and by degrees the unutterable languor of the
early spring began to thaw its way back into me, when suddenly I saw a
large tract of grass white with snowdrops that had budded and blossomed
in the last few days. Pointed leaves with the white line one knows so
well had first pricked the ground; then the weak, soft flower had
followed, led upwards from the buried bulb by the instinct it must obey,
for no purpose--who knows?--but to remind a stupid person or two like me
that there were other things in the world besides him. And I swear to
you that as I looked I blushed with shame. To-morrow I shall go and look
at them again, for I am afraid the memory is no longer medicinal.
Depend upon it, there is nothing so morbid as to encourage in one’s self
‘questionings.’ Any average ordinary person who walks down a London
street, and for five minutes devotes himself to the problem as to what
is the meaning of all these swarming people, what do they make of their
lives, what is the ultimate outcome--it is easy enough to find words,
but quite unnecessary--will reduce himself to a state of maudlin
incompetence in a week’s time. It is emphatically not one’s business to
be cheaply vague in this manner, and the man who helps a stumbler--be he
drunk or sober--across a street, or rings a bell for a small child who
cannot reach it, has done his duty and his part in the world’s work far
better that day than any philosopher who thinks a great deal and does
nothing. Indeed, I doubt not that a man who makes a friend smile at some
idiotic remark has better earned his daily bread than the man who has
given rise to profound thought, if thought is only to end in thought.
‘The world is made by the poet for the dreamer’ was said by someone--I
forget who. He might just as well have said, ‘The world is made by the
butcher for the baker.’
It is a very false estimate we should get of the world if we only looked
at other people from our own standpoint. It is useless, for instance, to
imagine one’s self in the position of a newsboy from whom I usually buy
an evening paper at the corner just outside. He is frightfully ragged.
Why his coat, for instance, holds together at all is beyond my
comprehension, and his boots are in a similar state of disintegration.
Certainly, if it was my lot to stand at that corner earning a penny only
out of every twelve papers I sold, and for the sake of earning my bread
at all being compelled to stand there for hours in frost, rain or fog,
I should quite assuredly be most unhappy. Yet nothing is falser than to
imagine that he is unhappy; he has, on the contrary, a ‘frolic welcome’
for everything that comes along, and evidently circumstances which would
depress what we may call the comfortable classes have no effect whatever
on his spirits. On the other hand, there are things which happen to you
and me every day, which we bear without undue complaints, that would be
almost insufferable to him. He would certainly revolt at a bath in the
morning; and though he would very likely be pleased at the breakfast
that followed it, I feel by no means certain that he would not sooner
sit on a coal-sack and chaff the nearest policeman, as he does, with his
mouth bulging with large crusts. Again, I doubt whether ‘the bloke,’
which is the name by which he is known in the neighbourhood of his
stand, could live through the sort of morning we live through. He would
consider it so unbearably dull to have to sit in a room for hour after
hour, while London and the humming streets roared outside, and read a
book--or, worse, write one. For supposing we endue him for a moment
with that sort of veneer of the mind which we call culture, literary
taste, artistic taste, or what not, a thing which he does not probably
possess at present, even then, should we set him down at ‘Romeo and
Juliet,’ let us say, what will be his verdict? Why, that he can see the
thing itself every evening, and, perhaps, has acted it, too, poor little
devil! and why should he spend his time in reading a pale moonlight
translation when the original jostles him? Here at this point, of
course, the _literati_ will hold up hands of horror. Do I mean to say,
they will ask, that the immortal tragedy I have referred to is to be
brought into comparison, even for a jest, with the idylls of the street
corner, with the walking out of a man with a maid, a marriage in the
registry office, or, perhaps, the omission of that ceremony? Yes, if
they will think, I mean all that. For why, if we consider the question
more closely, does the tragedy of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ strike us, and
rightly, as a masterpiece? and why does the sordid account of ‘murder
and suicide’ in the daily press strike us as a page to be turned over
with a ‘poor thing!’ shudder, if we are people of discernment, but if
we are only refined to be passed over in utter unconsciousness? It is
because Shakespeare showed us the terror and the tragedy of one, and we
have not the genius to see the terror and the tragedy of the other. Had
not Shakespeare been a man of human insight, he could never have written
his plays; but if we could see, we should find in life what he found.
That he gave it in the form of drama to the world is another matter.
That was because Nature--or I prefer to say God--gave a man of this
humanity this power of speech as well as the sense of drama. Hundreds, I
soberly believe, felt as keenly as Shakespeare felt, but are, so to
speak, born dumb; hundreds could write as Shakespeare wrote, could they
but feel. It is this conjunction of the two, rare as the transit of
Venus, that makes the supreme artist.
To return to ‘the bloke.’ All morning we have given him a translation
instead of the original, and the morning over we give him lunch. He will
eat largely, because for all the years he has lived it has been his
instinct to eat all there was to eat, for fear that there would soon be
nothing to eat when he wanted to eat. He will drink in immoderation for
the same reason, and grow somnolent. But he is plucked from his slumber
to call on someone who bores him, to be polite when he does not want to
be polite, and he will return to ‘dress’ in a collar that hurts him, and
to eat a dinner which he does not want. That evening he will be sick,
and three days later have a bilious attack.
But turn from this gloomy picture to the reality. ‘The bloke,’ as I saw
him this evening, had a huge crust stuffed into one cheek; in the other
corner of his mouth was a cigarette. There was news about a test match
in Australia, and papers were going like hot cakes. His pockets were not
to be trusted, and that mouth of his had eight coppers on one side, and
the crust, not yet masticated, on the other. But did ‘the bloke’ think
about verdigris-poisoning and other inanities? Not a bit. If there was a
moment to spare, wet pennies were ejected and stowed in a pocket
somewhere at the back of his trousers. If there was no moment to spare,
he merely cursed and prayed for a sixpence which got rid of five wet
pennies. All the time he was shouting ‘Re-markable Collapse!’ chaffing
the policeman at the corner, shouting hoarse profanities to the drivers
of passing buses, and ogling miles of girls of his acquaintance.
Now consider, oh my cultured friend, where would you and I have been in
such a crisis, which, you must remember, was a feast and a high-day to
‘the bloke.’ We should have retired behind a hoarding to eat our crust,
and sat still--God help us--for several minutes in order to digest it.
Then we should have lost the cream of the sale. Then, coyly re-entering
Oxford Street, we should have murmured quaveringly, ‘A Bad Score on the
Colonial Side’; we should have put our pennies in the untrustworthy
pocket, whence they would have slithered coldly down our legs on to the
pavement. Grasping the inadequacy of this, we should have held them in
our other hand, and impeded the swift passage of the papers. We should
have cast apprehensive glances at the policeman for fear he should tell
us to move on--he tells ‘the bloke’ to move on, and ‘the bloke’ says
‘Garn!’--we should have frowned at bus-drivers who nearly ran over us,
and made a feint of taking their numbers. We should have made a quantity
of depressing reflections about the young women in London, so bold and
bad-mannered, and as an upshot we should have sold, with infinite
depression, one-fifth of what ‘the bloke’ sells with a gusto
indescribable. And what is, perhaps, worst of all, we should have prayed
that evening, if we were not too sleepy, for all the starving, homeless
creatures of the street. ‘The bloke’ does not pray--but if he did, he
would say, with Browning, ‘God’s in His heaven; all’s right with the
world.’
Exit ‘the bloke.’
P.S. No, not exit just then. Yesterday only, I was coming round the
corner from Davies Street, and caught sight of ‘the bloke’ dancing
excitedly in mid-street, with his sheaf of papers, shouting the verdict
of the Tonbridge murder. Next moment he had been knocked down by an
omnibus and the wheel had gone over him. With many others I ran out into
the roadway, and it so happened I was there first.
I picked ‘the bloke’ up and carried him to the pavement. His head bent
inwards from my elbow to my chest, and two wet pennies fell into the
crook of my arm from his mouth. His sheaf of papers had fallen from him
and still lay in the road. Before we reached the pavement he looked up
and saw me.
‘I’m damned dirty, sir,’ he said; ‘take care of your noo coat. That
bloody bus---- Gawd--I’ll talk to Jim--running over me like that.’
There was an ambulance near at hand, and I delivered up ‘the bloke.’
Someone had picked up his papers from the roadway and put them by the
side of the thin little body, and the pennies which he had dropped out
of his mouth I put there too.
Next day I went to the hospital where he had been taken. But ‘the bloke’
will not stand at his corner any more.
Sad? Heaven help us all if we are going to be sad, because we are (quite
assuredly) going to die; the sooner we die and get it over, the better.
Anticipating sadness is an absolute drug in the market, and is it not
better to be glad because at the present moment we happen to be alive,
and not sad because at some future moment we are going to die? How long
would the world go on if we all sat and sighed because we were going to
die?
* * * * *
Yes, decidedly spring has come, and it amazes me to look back on what I
wrote only a week ago, and find myself so blinded by that moment of
languor which announced it, as not to have foreseen what should so
shortly follow. Yet if that obsession of languor had not been so
complete, I suppose this effervescence of spring would not have run riot
in me as it did, and it is with infinite misgivings that I attempt to
put into words any of that bubbling thrill, that ecstasy in the
sensation of mere living, which is felt, I believe, in every growing
thing, down to the humblest blade of grass which is trodden underfoot,
even as the varnish of springtime is on it--at that divinest of all
moments in the year, when in man and brute and as yet leafless tree the
sap once more stirs.
This year it came upon me in spate; that great flood of renewed
vitality which follows round the earth from continent to continent as
the spring returns suddenly lifted me off my feet, dictating what I did
as imperatively as an electric current dictates the involuntary
twitching of the muscles it passes through. And on this wise.
I was out of town for two days last week, staying in Sussex at a house
on the high downland near Ashdown Forest. As I drove from the station, I
was aware that some huge and subtle change was in the air, but put it
down only to the contrast of country breezes with the density of London.
The briskness of winter was altogether gone, but in its place was the
smell of earth and growing things, very fragrant and curiously strong;
for rain, which brings out all scent into the air, be it good or bad,
had fallen heavily that afternoon, drawing out, as I have said, the
smell of growth, and leaving behind it, just as a water-cart does in
streets, the smell of dust laid, or, rather, the smell which air has
when there is no longer any dust in it. Also the vividness of colour
surprised me; and in the yet leafless trees there was a certain vigorous
look, which I had missed all winter, a crispness of outline, a look of
tension as in an instantaneous photograph of a man about to leap. A
thrush bubbled suddenly in a bush by the roadside, and, fool that I was,
I did not know what was happening. I thought it was only a thrush
singing. But had I known, it was spring.
That night after dinner, instead of sitting down to bridge or some gray
pursuit glorified by the title of game, eight sober and mature people
did the silliest things. We played blindman’s-buff; we cock-fought on
the hearth-rug; we fell heavily to the ground in attempting to take out
with our teeth pins placed in inaccessible positions on the legs of
chairs: nobody cared what anybody else was doing; everyone talked
simultaneously and laughed causelessly. Eventually we dispersed to our
rooms flushed and hot.
My window had been shut, and a blind drawn down: here were the first
things to be remedied; up went the screaming blind, up went the window,
and the huge, exultant night poured in. That was better, but still bad,
and I tore off my clothes, leaving them on the floor, and as my mother
bore me, and as I shall go back to the great mother of all, leaned out
into the night, full of the excitement which at last I understood. It
was night--night, the time when even a stockbroker (who had made £290 on
the Stock Exchange) reverts in some degree to the beast from which he
has been evolved, when, unless one is fuddled with wine, or stupefied
with food, or addled and rotten with sensual thought, one occasionally
wins back to the old primeval prowling, excited joy of being alive, to
the bliss which childhood knows in nightfall, robbed of its terrors.
There it was, waiting for me, and I, as far as might be, ready for it,
free from all desire, carnal, mental, or spiritual, but caught and
burning in the flame of mere life. Huge and soft the night beckoned;
humped gray shapes of bushes were blots on the lawn outside, above them
rose the still gaunt shapes of trees, but hissing like a gas-jet with
the pressure from within. Rain-clouds obscured the sky, the cold
infinite stars were shut out, and only by the fact that it was not very
dark did I know that the moon was somewhere risen, though invisible.
That was as I would have it: for the time I was just a Live Thing,
conscious of life. I wanted no distant stars to remind me how small I
was, or how immense was heaven--for the time I desired only the kind
warm earth--no moon to evoke, as she always does, the need of
companionship. I was about on this earth, which, like I, was bursting
with the promise of spring. Mating-time was not yet; not yet was the
time of fresh leaves, or any outward sign of vitality. The vitality was
within, everything had drawn a long breath, and the long breath hung
suspended for the moment. Soon in a shower of starlike blossoms, in a
mist of green hung round the trees, in the complete song of birds, in
achievement or effort on my part, the tension would break. It was the
physical moment when completion is assured, and the pause comes,
delicious because all, all has been leading up to this, and one is
content, if it is possible to be content, because fruition is sure.
Exquisite pangs have gone before, the pangs of anticipation. Exquisite
pangs of completion will follow, but nothing can ever approach the
completeness of the assured moment.
Night and its veiled darkness, a soft rain falling and hissing among the
shrubs, the sleeping house--unless, indeed, there might be other
watchers like myself unclothed beside an open window--utter loneliness,
and the thrill of life. But it was not enough to stand there; I had to
mix with the night, I had to do my utmost to take it, the dripping
shrubs, the falling rain, the whole growing, quickening earth, nearer to
me. It was not enough to look at it. So for convention’s sake I pulled
on trousers again, buttoned a coat over me, and, hatless and barefooted,
opened my window further--a ground-floor window--and stepped out into
the night. What I wanted I did not know: it was certain, at any rate, I
did not want anybody else to be there; yes, I know, I wanted only to be
part of the growing sap-stirred world. No thought of either spiritual or
carnal aspiration did I feel; no gratitude to God, who made this
ecstatic machine called me, entered into my mind, no thought of love or
lust or desire. The gray curtain of cloud was the blanket under which,
like a child, I buried my head; I was too far gone, you will understand,
to ‘talk French’; simply, I was possessed by the joy of life, that life
which moved my muscles, making them tense and slack in turn as I walked,
that held a long breath in my lungs and blew it out again, that made the
soft rain drip from the clouds, that made the earth drink it in
instinctively, that made the shrubs whisper to its falling and give out
the odours of dampness and growth. Step by step, as I went over the
lawn, with my feet already dripping and my hair growing matted with the
benediction of the falling rain, this impulse grew and grew. Before I
knew it, from walking I had passed to running, before I knew it my coat
was lying somewhere on the grass, and the rain fell thick and cool on my
back and shoulders. Dim shapes of shrubs fled by me; then in front there
sprang out of the dark the lines of a wooden fence bounding the lawn.
This was taken in the stride almost, and the longer, coarser fibre of
the meadow grass wrapped itself round my feet. Then a sandpan--a bunker
guarding the eighteenth green of the golf-links--showed yellow in front,
and next moment a flag waved to my right. Thereafter coarser grass
again, and a hundred yards beyond, the streamlet, where I have delved
patiently with a niblick. Beyond, another fence, and in the field--out
of bounds--large dark shapes of cows lying down. One underneath the
shadow of a tree I stumbled against, leaving a snort and a stir behind,
and I remember laughing at that. Then in due time a certain failure of
wind, and a halt underneath a thin, young beech-tree with smooth,
rounded stem. Next moment the trunk was between my knees, and between my
arms strongly wound round it, my cheek against the bark, and, panting, I
clung to it. It, too, was alive, and strong and hard, and with that,
turning my head, I remember biting the bark, till strips of it came off
and my lips bled. Then a bed of old brown bracken, and with my fingers I
dug in the earth till I felt the buds of springing stems an inch below
the ground.
There I lay, a minute it may have been, or ten years, and the climax, I
must suppose, was reached. There was no more possible to me, the riddle
was unsolved, and for the moment I knew it to be insoluble: not because
it was a silly riddle, but because it was no riddle at all, but the
mystery of all mysteries--Life. As far as I personally could, I had done
my best to answer it, not by thought, which is futile, but by being of
the earth, by making myself one with growing things at the moment of
spring-time, and this not, I do assure you, consciously, but because I
had to. The current that ran through everything else ran through me
also. I was a savage, an animal, what you will.
The greatest moment was over; again I was conscious of one slack arm
hanging by my side, and one braced at the elbow to support my weight as
I sat up. I knew that my feet were wet, that my hair had to be brushed
from my eyes, that rain-drops fell from my eyebrows on to my face, that
a torn, distracted, mud-covered blackness represented dress-trousers,
that my coat was lying somewhere on the lawn, and that my bedroom window
was an invitation to robbers. So I rose and walked back, slowly, and
designedly slowly, in order to enjoy what I had not known. I had enjoyed
before, but had simply taken. The cool rain was exquisite to the skin,
so, too, the cool grass to the feet; the night above and around was
huge and solemn and ennobling. Thus the moral consciousness, I must
suppose, awoke. I was filled with edifying thoughts. They would be dull
if recorded; they were dull even then, for the memory of the savage
moments was still hot as a dream.
Well, what then? There is no ‘what then.’ That wild running through the
dark is flesh and blood of me. Perhaps you have no taste for
cannibalism. That is a very comfortable defect.
The next twenty-four hours were, it is true, full of spring, but to me,
licking the chops of my climax, they were jejune. My coat I picked up on
the lawn; I entered through my window--no robber _could_ have come in
that sacred hour--gazed on the wreck of dress-trousers, and went to bed,
and to sleep instantly and dreamlessly, awaking to a great bold sunlight
that streamed in through the windows when my valet drew up the blinds.
With him I held a shamefaced colloquy, as he gathered my dress-clothes.
‘I’m afraid they’re rather muddy,’ said I, stifling my face beneath the
sheet.
‘Yessir.’
‘Do they happen to be torn?’
A short pause.
‘Yessir--torn in five places.’
‘Well, see what can be done. Have I any more?’
‘No, sir. Cold or hot bath, sir?’
Bath! That was a sitting in a tin pan and lifting teaspoonfuls of water
on to one’s spine; acrobatic performances to get wet, towel, huddling on
of clothes.
‘Oh, cold! Bring it in half an hour.’
For half an hour I half dozed, half thought of the performance of the
night. I carefully considered the question as to whether I had gone mad,
and decided--rightly, I believe--that I had not, though other people
would say so.
Then after breakfast we went to play golf. Yes, I was right; the
anticipation, the unfulfilled certainty was over; already small buds
were red on the limes, and yellow on the elm. Spring had come, and we
all talked about its delights. But none knew of mine.
Eventually the eighteenth hole was reached, after a game that I should
normally consider exciting, since my adversary and I were all square at
the seventeenth. But this morning it struck me as colourless. Here,
however, his second shot--full with the cleek--was short, and he went
into the sandpan guarding the green, across which I had jumped in my
outward journey, and walked through on my return. I stopped on the edge
of the bunker, for I had warned him he could not be up, having myself
played a full shot landing just over it. Upon which this accursed man
took his niblick, and amid a shower of sand lay nearly dead.
‘Curious,’ says he.
Meantime I had been examining the sand, and saw there the trace of a
bare foot.
‘There’s something much more curious than any shot of yours close by
you,’ said I. ‘Look; do you see the trace of a naked foot close by you
on the sand?’
He looked.
‘By God,’ he said, ‘let me putt first.’