A reaping

E. F. BENSON.

A REAPING

BY

E. F. BENSON

f

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 EEAPING

JUNE

OF all subjects under or over the sun, there
is none perhaps, even including bimetal-
lism, 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,
108

10 A REAPING.

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 irre-
sponsibility is given. He brushes it aside, just
as ^one brushes aside any innate inability ; with
common courage — how lavishly is that 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

JUNE. 11

ago given up the notion of seeking for health
at all, for it is not for her. She faces incurable
disease 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 pre-
vents my explaining how abjectly patient I
had been up till then.)

Then there came the reshifting of conver-
sation, and we started again, with change of
partners.

12 A HEAPING.

' 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.

JUISTE. 13

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 un-
answerable 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

14 A REAPING.

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 in-
teresting 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 con-
ceivably 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 con-
ductor with that tragedy of love which years
ago he wove out of the sunlight and lagoons

JUNE. 15

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 Re-
search 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

16 A REAPING.

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

JUNE. B 17

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 repre-
sentation 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 trans-
lation 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

18 .A REAPING.

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 com-
monly 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

JUNE. 19

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 fore-
ground 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 gener-
ation, 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.

20 A HEAPING.

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

JUNE. 21

sat down again to think about it. In my reason-
able 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. Momen-
tary 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 pano-
rama 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

22 A HEAPING.

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
1^ 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 9 2 degrees in the shade at Messrs.
Negretti and Zambra's that morning, and I
with my own eyes had seen it. It was impos-
sible not to be proud, just as it is impossible
not to be proud when one is in a train that is

JUNE. 23

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 light-
ning 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 Boheme ' ?
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 stead-
fast 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,

24: A REAPING.

and hit the front of the engine of an up-train
with extraordinary violence, and thereupon col-
lapsed 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

JUNE. 25

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

26 A HEAPING.

ib was, but the nature of the incident mattered
very little. It was incident, anyhow ; some-
thing 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 in-
fectious. 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

JUNE. 27

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 o£ life still : they had lost no interest
for her.

I stopped for a momsnt 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 eaclj. or,her. 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 con-
versely) 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

28 A REAPING.

benches underneath the trees there were pairs of
figures. In Heaven's name why not ? To flirt,
to make love, to look into eyas, 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

JUNE. 29

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,

30 A HEAPING.

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 im-

JUNE. 31

possible 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 elephan-
tine antics if the streets are slippery, when they
behave exactly like a drunken man, with appear-
ance 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 en-
trancing 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 manoeuvres. Trouble began as we descended
the hill by the Green Park : it had vin gai, and

32 A REAPING.

was boisterously cheerful ; but it was extraor-
dinarily 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 Athenaeum, 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

JUNE. 33

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

2

34 A HEAPING.

1 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 omis-
sions of the week.

The bells have stopped, so Helen will quite
certainly be late, and the silence of Sunday

36 A REAPING.

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 wash-
ing. 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

JULY. 37

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 in-
describably 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

38 A REAPING.

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 beauti-
ful 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

JULY. 39

defect), to put together a few simple facts con-
cerning 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 con-
tinued 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 suit-
able. 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

40 A REAPING.

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.

JULY. 41

Legs is an enthusiast — a fanatic on the sub-
ject 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

42 A REAPING.

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,' con-
trasting 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 out-
bursts 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/

JULY. 43

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 itl 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 under-
stand this quiet, delightful life we lead, it is
necessary that you understand Legs — then his
mood suddenly changed.

44 A HEAPING.

' 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

JULY. 45

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 con-
troversialist 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

40 A HEAPING.

have the privilege of sitting on a stool in a
beastly building in Whitehall, and writing a
precis 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

JULY. 47

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

48 A REAPING.

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 impos-
sible 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 ?

JULY. 49

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 know-
ledge, 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

50 A REAPING.

I cannot but think, the beneficent power has
somehow come very close to us and our surround-
ings, 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 want-
ing) 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

JULY. 51

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) entran-
cing 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 inter-
ests me so much as that. To-day, even in this
quiet domestic life of ours, there are a hun-
dred 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.

52 A REAPING.

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

JULY. 53

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.

c Am I dreaming ? ' I said. < Or did you tell
me the other day that I showed signs of wishing
to teach ? '

54 A HEAPING.

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.

e 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, and
live it all over again. But about looking
forward. Oh, Jack, I think I shouldn't look
in the magic mirror if I had the chance. What
if one saw oneself all alone ? One would live
in dread afterwards/

' Or what if you r_a,w a cradle in the room ? *
said I.

She looked up at me quickly, and then put
out her hands for me to pull her up.

' Perhaps I should look in the mirror/ she
said.

JULY. 55

Poor Legs, as he had said, left by a very
early train next morning, and Helen, moved by
a sudden violent attack of vague duty, went
with him. The access was quite indeterminate.
She thought merely that one ought to get back
to town early on Monday, so as to have the
whole day there instead of splitting it up.
Personally I followed neither her reasoning nor
her example, and intended to spend the day in
dignified inaction in the country, and not split
it up by going to town till after dinner. But
to the owner of a motor-car the train appears
a degraded sort of business, and, greatly daring,
I meant to start about nine in the evening, and
be the monarch of the road ; for when there is
no other traffic, any car becomes a chariot of
triumph. Helen, I may remark, loves our
motor when she does not want to go anywhere
particular. When she does she takes the train.
I think, in fact, that it was my proposal that
we should drive up together after dinner that
was the direct parent of her sense of duty.

So, when I came down at the not unreason-
able hour of nine to breakfast, I found that I had

56 A REAPING.

the house to myself, and — I am not in the least
ashamed of the confession — found that the
prospect of an absolutely solitary day was quite
to my mind. I do not believe myself to be
unsociable or morose, but every now and then
I confess that I like a day in which I see
nobody. It is not that one is busy, and wants
to get through one's work, for, on the contrary,
when I have a great deal to do, I hugely desire
the presence and the conversation of friends in
the intervals of ' doing/ But occasionally it is
a very good thing to chew and ruminate, to be
surrounded by the quiet green things of the
earth, which give you all their best without
waking the corresponding instinct to exchange
ideas, to give something of yours to meet theirs.
For intercourse with one's fellow-men, especially
with one's friends, is like some rapid inter-
change of presents. Everybody (everybody, at
least, who has the smallest sense of sociability)
searches in his mind for any little thing that
may be there, and gives it his friend, while the
friend, accepting it, gives something back.
From all that — we cannot call it an effort since
it is so completely spontaneous on both sides —

JULY. 57

it is well to be free occasionally, to lie, so to
speak, under the pelting rain of life that is
ever poured out from the voiceless, eloquent,
bright-eyed happiness of Nature, to make no
plan, to contemplate no contingency, to drop
that sort of fencing rapier that we all wield
when we are with our fellow-men, and lie
like a log, with one eye open it may be, and
be rained upon by the things that live, and
are clothed and nourished without toil or
spinning.

I am aware that the great Strenuists, from
Mr. Roosevelt downwards, would hold up their
toil-hardened hands at this, exclaiming: 'You
mean it is better now and then to be a cow than
a Man ? Precisely so, but cows are not nearly
as inactive as Man on these occasions ought to
be. They eat too long, and they switch their
tails, and stamp their feet. But the long, stupid,
bovine gaze is moderately correct. At least, I
have never detected a shadow of intelligence in
a cow's eye. If there is any, the man who
occasionally becomes a cow must be careful to
get} rid of it. Nor must he be a cow too often :
that is fatal. If he is a cow for one day in

58 A HEAPING.

every six weeks, I think he will find the pro-
portion is about right.

So all day, literally all day, I sat, or, when
sitting became too fatiguing, lay on the lawn,
and nothing happened that did not always
happen, but all was worth observing in a purely
bovine manner, without intelligence. Little
brown twigs occasionally fell from the elms, and
once or twice a withered yellow leaf came spin-
ning on its own axis, as if it was the screw of
some unseen steamer. A stag-beetle walked
slowly down from the wooden paling, and came
some ten yards across the lawn. It stopped
there about an hour, I should think, doing noth-
ing whatever. Then it turned and went back
on to the paling again. A robin took about
the same length of time to make up his mind
that I was quite harmless, and eventually pecked
at my bootlace, which was undone. It took
him an enormous time to decide, with his head
cocked sideways, whether it had tasted nice or
not, but eventually he settled it did not, for he
did not peck it again. Then a jackdaw sat on
one of the poles of the tennis-net, and said
' Jarck ' seventeen times after I began to count.

JULY. 59

He began to say it the eighteenth time, but
stopped in the middle and ate an incautious
earwig.

That was almost too exciting, and I trans-
ferred not my attention, because I had not got
any, but my bovine gaze to the big flower-bed
opposite. All summer was there, dim, hot,
blossoming summer in full luxuriance of growth,
so that scarcely a square inch of earth was
visible. I did not even name the dear familiar
flowers that grew there. One was a spire of
blue, one was a cluster of orange ; there was an
orchestra of red trumpets, a mist of starry grey,
and bits of sky caught in a web of green. And
from beyond (I could not help naming that)
came the odour of sweet-peas. I lay and soaked
in it.

To use a simile, do you know those mysterious
things which are to be found on the chalk
downs, called dew-ponds ? Often, of course,
they are fed with rain, but even when for
months no rain has fallen, you will still find
them full They just lie open to the sky, and
that is all. And the mind, so it seems to me, is

60 A REAPING.

something like them. Often it is fed in the
obvious way, as the dew-pond with rain, by
conscious thought, by active intercourse with
others. But sometimes it is not a bad thing for
it to be like the dew-pond, just to lie open to
the sky, and drink in the eternal wine of
Nature, which fills its pond again. All that is
required of it is to do nothing whatever, not to
think even, but just to be there, to be in exist-
ence, to let go of everything. It really is worth
the experiment, though it is not quite so easy
as it sounds, for thoughts, ideas of some kind,
keep leaking in. They must be firmly excluded.

The snuffling motor rose like a hero to the
occasion, and came round throbbing with excite-
ment. Something in the idea of this drive by
night had evidently taken its fancy, and it
positively burned to exceed the legal limit, a
wish that I was only too glad to gratify. When
we started the crimson of the sunset was still
aflame in the west, but gradually the colour was
withdrawn, as if some unseen hand was pulling
out scarlet threads that ran through some ex-
quisite fabric of dainty embroidery,, leaving

JULY. 61

there only the soft transparent ground of it.
Then more gradually, so that the eye could not
trace the appearance of each, but only knew
that the number was being multiplied, behind
the dark velvet of the sky were lit the myriad
suns that make a flame of space, and sing in
their orbits. Colours faded and disappeared,
and soon the world was turned to an etching
of black and white. The roads were empty of
traffic, and though July was here, still from dark
coppice and leafy screen there sounded the one
eternal song, the rapture of nightingales. Often
it seemed to me as if we were standing still,
while the world in its revolution span by us ;
there was but a space of lamp-lit road by which,
shadow -like, dream -like, the trees and open
spaces ran. For a long piece together, as over
the Hartford Bridge flats, nothing marked our
passage except this whirling of the world. It
seemed in the darkness that time had ceased,
and . that from its own impetus this globe and
the thousand globes above were circling still.

Then in front there began to shine, like the
reflected light of some comet coming nearer,
the huge glow-worm of London. For a while it

62 A REAPING.

rested, like some remote befogged star on the
horizon ; then its light brightened, and its little
crawling caterpillars, the trams and buses, began
to creep by us, reaching out, as it were, to the
end of the leaf, the greenest and most succulent
parts.

Then, like the opening of a photographer's
shutter, so swift it was, we were in the traffic
of the town again, and all was familiar, all was
home. The country was home too, and here was
another. Which was the truer sense ? The
sense that claimed the jackdaw on the tennis-
net as a brother, or the sense that rejoiced in
this fierce-beating pulse of life ?

Perhaps, since they are both true, there is no
question of comparison.

AUGUST

SOMETHING of the primeval savage blood
still beats in us, we must suppose, else why
is it that we, effete inhabitants of London, who
love the closeness and proximity of our fellow-men
so much, feel no less keenly the rapture of being
miles and miles away from railways and the
folk who travel on them ? How quick, too, is
the transition from one mood to another, so that
while a week or two ago we rushed insanely, it
may be, but with extraordinary pleasure, from
party to party, jabbering with childlike delight
to myriad acquaintances, face to face on a
blocked staircase, or in the drawing-room un-
willingly silent while somebody sang, we now
take, the same childlike pleasure in long days
of solitude. But we may take our solitude in
pairs, in company with a friend who for the
time being is no friend at all, but a bitter (and,
it is to be hoped, disappointed) golfer, or we

64 A REAPING.

may lie out all day in the heather with a silent
stalker, or, as has been my fortunate lot for the
last ten days, may spend long hours, with a
sandwich and a fishing-rod and a gillie, in
angling over coffee-coloured streams or wind-
swept lochs.

The oldest inhabitants never remember any-
thing like this summer, but they are bad
evidence, because their memories are probably
very defective owing to their age ; but, what is
more convincing, younger people, whose memo-
ries are less impaired, never remember anything
like it. So there has been little of the coffee-
coloured streams for me personally, but, instead,
long quiet days by this wonderful loch, supposed
to hold trout of fabulous dimensions, which, as
far as I can make out, nobody has ever caught,
though every one agrees that they are there.
Then came a wonderful day, with more than
trout- wonder in it.

I came up here to this remote lodge alone,
for the trio of us usually go our own ways in
holiday time. Legs, in any case, had to go to
Germany to learn that classic and guttural
tongue, and Helen and I always make visiting

AUGUST. 65

arrangements independently of each other, unless
we are both bidden to a house to which we both
want to go. But it stands to reason, so it
seemed to us, that husband and wife probably
do not have the same friends, and it is as absurd
for her to stay at a house because the host is a
great friend of mine as it is for me to stay at a
house because the hostess is a great friend of
hers. Coincidences sometimes happen, in which
case we both go together. Otherwise we make
our own arrangements. I cannot bear some of
her friends ; she finds it almost impossible to
tolerate some of mine. And with shouts of
laughter we agree to differ. Then in September
or October the trio will come together again,
and will all talk at once, describing simulta-
neously, while nobody listens, our delightful
adventures.

I started from the lodge that morning after
an early breakfast, the gillie having already
gone on with lunch, and what we hoped would
be the apparatus of death; for, the first time
during this last week, it was a soft and cloudy
morning, with a warm wind from the south-
west, sufficient even in this cup of the hills,
3

66 A REAPING.

where the lodge stands, to set the trees tossing
their branches, and to strip the red ripe rowan-
berries from their stalks. Upon the unsheltered
tops, then, where lay the dark-coloured loch
with its fabled inhabitants, there should be
ripple enough for fishing purposes. I walked
unencumbered but for the field-glasses I always
carry ; for nothing, during periods of waiting
or in the half-hour that follows the sandwich,
is so fascinating as to spy out the busy animal
life on these empty moors, or find some three
or four miles away two or three little human
specks moving very gently up the hillside after
the deer, or sitting there patiently till some
untoward affair, suspicious hinds, or a foul wind
are lulled into inactivity,

But first I had a mile of pine-wood to climb,
up steep, slippery, needle-strewn paths, with
bracken already yellowing on each side, making
a sea of russet and green, while from overhead,
in the thick arching boughs, there came, as it
were, the noise of an aerial sea, the hiss of
ripples on a sandy shore as the wind whistled
through the stiff springy foliage. Now and
then a rabbit scuttled through the ferns, and

AUGUST. 67

once I saw quite close at hand a roe-deer with
flicking ears and startled eyes, that, as it caught
sight o£ me, gave me one shy look of the wood-
land, and then galloped off, cutting its way
through the tall bracken. The path sometimes
led by the side of the stream that came out of
the loch to which I was bound, but the dryness
of the summer had hushed its voice, and it but
trickled down the ways it was wont to prance
along in spring. Here and there a tree of the
tamer woodland, a beech, or stripling elm, grew
among the primeval firs, but it looked as if it
had wandered here by mistake, had strayed, a
member of some later civilization, into a settle-
ment peopled by those of the older world.

And as I walked something of the same
feeling of strangeness, of having gone back to
the earlier ages of the world, came over me also.
Like the lost beech, there were none of my kind
here, and I felt, though in an immeasurably
greater degree, what one feels when one stands
in the valley of the tombs of the Egyptian
Kings. But all round me here were things far
more ancient than they. -5Cons before Pharaoh
oppressed the children of promise there stood

68 A REAPING.

here on this hillside the ancestors in direct line
of this woodland. The knowledge of the dawn
of the world, when it was still but a little time
since God had bidden the green things to
live upon the earth, had been transmitted to
these citizens of the hillside, and to them time
had been but a little thing, and a thousand ages
were but as yesterday.

As I ascended farther and more remotely into
the heart of the wood, a sort of eager tremor, a
desire to see that which I knew was there, and
which must be so overpowering in its immensity,
began to grow on me. Wild silent life bubbled
and hummed round me ; eyes watched me from
beneath the fern, and looked down on me from
the over-arching fans of the pines ; ears were
pricked at my footstep ; strange wild smiles
broadened into a laugh at the intruder, at this
child of immeasurably later ages. Sometimes
it seemed to me as if this ancient consciousness
of the woods was scornful and contemptuous, so
that I quickened my pace and longed to get out
of this dark room ; at other moments, and truer
ones, I knew better, knowing that I, too, was of

AUGUST. 69

it all, a manifestation of life, a piece of the
pine-woods and brother of the bracken.

There is no myth that grew so close to the
heart of things as the story of Pan, for it im-
plies the central fact of all, the one fact that
is so indisputably true, that all the perverted
ingenuity of man has been unable to split into
various creeds about it. For Pan is All, and to
see Pan or to hear him playing on his pipes
means to have the whole truth of the world
and the stars, and Him who, as if by a twisting
thumb and finger, set them endlessly spinning
through infinite Space, suddenly made manifest.
Flesh and blood, as the saying is, could not
stand that, and there must be a bursting of
the mortal envelope. Yet that, indisputably
also, is but the cracking of the chrysalis. How
we shall stand, weak-eyed still and quivering,
when transported from the dusk in which we
have lived this little life, into the full radiance
of the eternal day ! How shall our eyes gain
strength and our wings expansion and complete-
ness, when the sun of which we have seen but
the reflection and image is revealed ! That is
to see Pan. It killed the mortal body of

70 A REAPING.

Psyche — the soul — when she saw him on the
hill-top by the river, and heard the notes of
his reed float down to her; but she and every
soul who has burst the flimsy barrier of death
into life joins in his music, and every day
makes it the more compelling. Drop by drop
the ocean of life, made up of the lives that
have been, rises in the bowl in which God dips
His hands. He touches every drop.

The wood in front had grown thin, and I
was nearly out on the open heather of the
hills. Just here the path crossed the stream
bed ; a great grey cliff of rock was above me,
in which a pattern of lichens had found crevices
for their roots ; the pine-trees waved solemnly
overhead ; the miracle of running water, perhaps
the greatest miracle of all, chuckled and eddied
as it slid into the brown pool. And quite
seriously I waited to see Pan. The ferns would
be pushed aside, and the merry face would smile
at me (for Pan, though he kills you, is kind),
and he would put his pipes to his lips, and
the world, as I had hitherto seen it, would
swim away from me. And just before he puts

AUGUST. 71

his pipes to his mouth, I hope I shall say i
' Yes, begin ; I am ready ! ' Or shall I stop
my ears, and shut my eyes to him ? I hope
not. But the fern waved only, and the water
ran, and . . . and I was going a-fishing.

I suppose I had not gone more than a
hundred yards after this pause when execrable
events occurred. It seemed as if some dreadful
celestial housemaid suddenly woke up, and went
on with her work. She shut the window (that
is to say, the wind dropped), and began to dust.
She dusted all the clouds away, and in ten
minutes there was not one left. From horizon
to horizon there was a sky positively Egyptian,
and an abominable sun shone with hooligan
ferocity. And I was going a-fishing ! I said
what I should not say with such extraordinary
distinctness and emphasis that I rapidly took
out my field-glass, and swept the untenanted
fields of heather to see that there was no one
within a mile or two. But I expect the roe-
deer heard.

Sandy was waiting for me at the near end
of the loch, when I arrived there a quarter of

72 A REAPING.

an hour afterwards. Scotchmen are never
cynical, but I should otherwise have suspected
him of cynicism when I saw that he had been
at pains to set up my rod, and was soaking
a length of gut. The brilliance of the sun
from the polished and untarnished field of water
was a thing to make the eyes dazzle. So I
was cynical in turn, and, from pure cynicism
and nothing else at all, I put on (for the sake
of the curious) an astonishing fly, with a green
body bound with silver, and a Zulu. It was
a shade too cynical to go out in the boat, for
I think Sandy would have seen through that,
as it was impossible that any fish should rise
at anything in this state of affairs, and I fished
from the shore. Fishing at all was an idiotic
proceeding, and so the incredible happened. I
wish to call attention to the incredibility of it,
since it happens to be true.

Here was I, then, on a still and windless
morning, with a blazing sun overhead, and a
looking-glass loch in which were supposed to
be monstrous fish, whose shyness apparently
increased in ratio to their weight, for nobody

AUGUST. 73

had ever seen them before, but had only heard
about them second-hand, like ghost-stories.
Half a dozen casts carried out a convenient
length of line, which fell, so it appeared to me,
on the glassy surface of the water like the
cane of an angry schoolmaster, resonant and
cruel. Then at the end of the cane, where
the Zulu was, there came a boil just underneath
the looking-glass ; my rod bent, and the reel
screamed. For one moment I knew, so I
thought (for the boil came just as I was
preparing to cast again), that I had hooked
some stalwart weed, or perhaps a snag of tree-
trunk. Then I knew I had hooked a fish.
He was clearly insane to have taken a fly at
all, but what mattered was that he was a
large lunatic. I thought I knew also that this
was but the first act of what would turn out
to be a tragedy. But the tragedy was not
for me.

Again, for the sake of the curious, I will
give his weight. He turned the scale at five
pounds some six hours later. So I imagine
he was about five and a half when he came
out of the water with the Zulu in his mouth.

74 A REAPING.

He was mad ; he turned a fierce Bedlamite eye
on me.

I dare say I am more impatient than the
true fisherman, but when I have cast my fly
upon the waters for three hours without a hint
of a rise, I sit down, and do not feel it in-
cumbent on me to rise again unless conditions
change. So when, at about two o'clock, nothing
further had broken the surface of the loch
except the cane of the schoolmaster, I felt,
after eating my sandwich, that I was not
unlikely, without incurring the contempt of
Sandy, to prolong the interval. I wanted also,
after my mis-tryst with Pan that morning,
vaguely also, after that day of bovine observ-
ance of Nature which I had spent a week or
two ago in the garden at home, to * sit up
and take notice/ Instead of nirvanic con-
templation, I wanted to focus all that sur-
rounded me, not to see a stag-beetle advance
ten yards, and then go back to the place he
advanced from, but to see the activity of it
all, to be alert and to collect, not to be lazy
and to soak.

Yes ; it was a wonderful day. Almost

AUGUST. 75

immediately I spied two little human figures
on the adjoining forest creeping, creeping up
a steep brae. A mile below I saw their ponies.
They moved so slowly that it was only possible
to see they moved at all, because they passed
out of the field of my glass ; the deer I could
not find.

Then, after watching them for ten minutes
more, I saw they stopped. Stealthy movements
went on. Then came the sharp crack of a
rifle, but before the report reached me they
had both jumped up, and ran into a hollow
of the hills, where I lost them. It was like
being at sea, and having news twitched out
from the receiver of a Marconi apparatus,

But hardly had that drama been played to
its curtain when another started. The call of
a startled grouse, ' Come back, come back, come
back ! ' sounded close at hand, and it was
followed by another and yet another. Sandy
had remained by the edge of the loch when I
climbed this hillock for my lunch, and since
then I had been very quiet, so I could not
imagine what had caused this commotion on
the hill, as the stalkers were not on this beat

70 A REAPING.

at all to-day. I could account, in fact, for
the movements of any human being that could
have disturbed grouse for a mile or two. Then
I looked^up to the enormous sky, and saw.

Above me, but close, so that I could see
the outspread feathers of the wing, was a
golden eagle. As I watched I saw he was
not vaguely circling, looking out for prey, but
employed in his stalk, even as on the other
side of the valley ten minutes ago I had
watched another stalk. He was sweeping wide
circles of the moor, and driving up towards a
gully of the hills behind the fowls of the
mountain, flying in low and ever narrowing
semicircles, so that it must seem to the terrified
grouse and black game that huge-winged danger
threatened from every quarter but that. Yet
still I could not guess what his plan was when
he had driven them there.

And then I saw. Straight down from the
grey crag of cliff that rose on the west of
this gully, into which he had driven the birds,
there dropped his mate, savage and hungry,
seeking her meat from God. Aha, you grand
Mistress Eagle ; it is dinner-time I

AUGUST. 77

Merrily and well has the old cock-grouse
lived in the heather, lying warm in the sun,
and filling himself with the good things of the
moorland, but to-day Pan sends him. to your
table, and in the swift hissing down-rush of
your wings he hears his pipes. Pan will play
them for you, too, some day, and the grey
film will cover over your fierce yellow eye
that was wont undazzled to behold the sun
in his strength, and the strong hooked beak
which gasped for one breath more of the
aromatic moorland air will close, and be hungry
no more, and the crooked, horny talon will
relax, and next year, maybe, I shall find
whitened bones on the hillside, and perhaps,
crumpled up under them, a feather, an eagle's
feather. But I shall not be so foolish as to
say I have found you, for do I imagine that
that is all there is of you, that your life,
your spirit, has been blown out like a candle ?
I know better than that.

For, indeed, there is no other explanation
possible of the incessant war, the death, the
murder, the butchery in which Nature's fair
hands are steeped and stained, except by this

78 A REAPING.

one supposition that the spirit of bird and
beast escapes at the moment of death from the
splendid sunlit prison of this beautiful world,
which has the bright-eyed hours for its bars.
Otherwise [the world becomes a mere intolerable
shambles, viler than Chicago. I at any rate
cannot believe otherwise, but should any scep-
tical reader at this point ask me to sketch
out for him the subsequent movements of the
wasp he has just squashed in the tongs, or the
trout I have just landed, I hasten to assure
him that I have not the slightest idea about
them. But that does not invalidate the ex-
planation, nor in the least disturb my complete
belief in it. I do not know what the weather
will be this day year. But I make no manner
of doubt that there will be weather of some
kind. I only insist that he with his tongs,
and I with my Zulu-fly, cannot destroy life.
One cannot even destroy matter ; how much
less, then, the lord and master of matter !

I think I have never been in a house where
absurd gaiety — the gaiety of friends, of health,
of outdoor spirits — was so rampant as here;

AUGUST. 79

and she whose house it was, and who was
leader of the ludicrous, was she, as you may
have guessed, who in June had asked me to
come here for the last time. That evening
when I got home I found her sitting out in
the garden enjoying the last half -hour of sun-
set, and she beckoned to me across the lawn.

* It's true/ I said. ' I have caught the
original trout. He had gone mad from old
age and riotous living, and came to the fly
when the sun was brightest and the winds
were dead/

1 1 wish you wouldn't use such beautiful
language/ she said. ' How much does he
weigh ? '

' About a ton. He has gone to be weighed
now.'

' And anything else ? '

' Not a fin. No more bites, as somebody
said last night. I chattered with rage/

' You did ; and what have you been thinking
about ? ' she asked.

' Pan chiefly. No, to be honest, I think I have
thought about the fish most. But Pan next ! '

She turned rather slowly on her long wicker-

80 A REAPING.

couch, the tired aching body for the moment
usurping the use of her eyes.

* Ah, don't let us talk/ I said ; ' you are tired
and suffering/

At that she laughed.

' All the more reason for thinking about some-
thing less inferior than one's own health/ she
said. ' What cowards we are nowadays ! Why,
our forebears in Elizabeth's time used to go
smiling to the rack for the sake of some small
difference of dogma, and we snivel when we
have the opportunity of showing, by our con-
tempt for pain, the truth of things that matter
much more. If bravery in the abstract and
cheerfulness are not worth being brave and
cheerful for, I don't know what is. In any
case, what conclusion did you come to about
Pan ? Oddly enough, I have been thinking of
him, too. Let's compare notes, and see if we
mean the same person.'

I told her more or less what I have already
written down on the subject, and at the end she
nodded at me with the quick eager gesture that
was so characteristic of her.

AUGUST. 81

1 Hurrah ! ' she said. ' I have guessed the
same. So perhaps our guesses are right. But
I put it to myself rather more personally, and,
though it sounds conceited, so much more vividly
than you. That is only natural, you know ;
Pan concerns me much more immediately than
he concerns you, we hope. And another image
of him suggested itself to me, which appeals to
ine more than your figure of the ferns being
pushed aside, and the hand with the pipes in it
being raised to the smiling lips. Listen ! '

The sun had dropped behind the big trees to
the west of the lawn, leaving us in shadow,
though it still shone on the hills to the east of
the house. But evening was coming without
any chill or whisper of autumn in it, and in this
northern latitude nights were short in August.
It was as if she already saw dawn.

' Jim and I and our children,' she said, ' and
you and all my friends are shipwrecked, or so it
would seem to anyone who did not understand,
on a little rock surrounded by infinite sea.
Every one alive in the world is there, too, as a
matter of fact, but our friends somehow are so

82 A REAPING.

big to us, and strangers and acquaintances so
small in comparison, that all that really is seen
by us is our own immediate circle. Huge
thumping seas surround our rock, and, for some
occult reason, we all have to sit exactly where
we are, while the waves rush up, and every
moment sweep somebody away. We can't move
our places, and go higher up on the rock, and
we have to sit and look at the big waves, we
poor shipwrecked people (so a man who does not
understand would say), and know that this wave
or the next will wash us off. That is the
ignorant view of the situation, and the most
pessimistic, so we will answer it at once.

' Even if it was right, what then ? Supposing
we were shipwrecked, and all round us was the
howling sea of death, would it not be much
better, until the wave swept us off, to make the
best of it, to talk, and laugh, and be pleasant
with our friends, instead of looking with terror-
stricken eyes at the hungry sea ? How much
nicer even for ourselves to be amused and talk a
little while, instead of being frightened, and how
much nicer for our friends when we are swept
off, as we all certainly shall be, to know that

AUGUST. 83

before we were swept off we were moderately
cheerful, and picked up bits of seaweed, and
played with shells ! I say nothing of the moral
aspect of it all, because if you once bring that
in there is no question any more about the
matter, since in one case we are brave, and in
the other merely cowardly. But given that we
are shipwrecked, that the sea of hungry death
surrounds us, and will soon pick us off, how
much better, on the lowest possible view of the
affair, to play about, to be kind and gentle, even
if to-morrow there will be an end of us, utterly
and for ever !

'Yes, I am using beautiful language too.
But I am talking of beautiful things.

' Well, that view is the silliest and most
incomprehensible possible. How did we get on
this absurd rock, if only death surrounds us ?
Did we come from death into life ? That is im-
possible, since scientifically you can't produce
life, out of dead things. Or did some ship
founder on the sea of death, and did we swim
to shore, where we shall live until a wave sweeps
us off again ? That is possible ; but, then, what
was that ship 011 which we once were passengers,

84 A REAPING.

that for a time anyhow, until it foundered, if it
did founder, rode over these waves ? That is a
serious question, but there is only one answer
to it. The ship must have been life in some
form. But the image does not seem convincing,
does it ?

c What is left, then ? Only this, that the sea
which surrounds us on our little rock is not
death at all, but life. Just as some day without
doubt a wave will sweep us off our rock again,
so there is no doubt that once a wave of that
sea put us on the rock where you and I now
are. If there is a wreck at all, it is a land-
wreck, a wreck that puts us on shore. From
the great sea of life we have been washed up
for a little moment on to our little rock. Soon
we shall be received back into life again !

' In the interval, though in a new sense we
are wrecked, how interesting is our rock, and
how full of dear people, and pink shells, and
divine things of the sea that life, not death,
casts up round us, and nourishes by the spent
water of its waves ! How utterly idiotic it
would be not to collect them eagerly, these little
bits, for when we go back into life we shall see

AUGUST. 85

the forests from which they come, the sapphire
caves in which they really dwell. A little bit
of life, that grouse that the eagles ate, was cast
up close to you to-day. I shall particularly
ask, when the wave takes me off again, where it
came from. And I shall go and see the place.
And certainly I shall see Mistress Eagle come
back.'

Courage, huge, natural courage like this, abso-
lutely unassumed, absolutely instinctive, may
have one of two effects on the beholder of it.
It may make him weep for the admiration of it,
or it may make him laugh out of joyousness of
heart for the same admiration. At least I
laughed.

' Oh, be sure to show me the place when I
come,' I said. e I am certain that Mistress Eagle
will have a nice house/

' They all have,' she said. ' There are many
mansions/

She looked at me in silence a moment.

' But I was not so certain of all these things
when first I knew that I was so soon to see
them all/ she said. ' At first, though I was
never exactly frightened, I was dazed and

86 A REAPING.

stunned. I saw nothing clearly. I must use
another image for that, and say that days passed
as one sees the landscape pass through a railway-
carriage window which is blurred by rain. I
could see nothing clearly ; it was all dim and
rain-streaked. But then, without any conscious
effort on my part, except perhaps a little exer-
cise of patience, we passed — the train and I—
out of the scud again, and soon the glass cleared,
and I saw the green valleys and the sunny
hillside just as they had always been/

Again she paused,

' I have not told you anything of importance
yet,' she said ; ' all I have said is really quite
obvious. But this now

'You think of Pan as the smiling face that
peeps from the fern, the presence that assures all
suffering things that he is kind when he pipes
to them, even though the sound means death.
But surely that is no more than a sort of pagan
mythical aspect of him. I always think that
he suffers too, that every pain which he seems
to inflict is only the reflection of the pain in his
own universal heart, although he still smiles.
It is from the cross that He smiles at us all/

SEPTEMBER

THE 'Season of mists and mellow fruitful-
ness ' has indeed been a close bosom friend
of the maturing sun, and for the last three days
before Legs went back to his crammer in town,
he, Helen, and I spent a prostrated existence.
Heat that in July invigorates, is utterly intoler-
able if it occurs at the end of September, just as
the crisp winter day, which would be so welcome
in January, descending to the earth as it usually
does in June, produces merely amazed horror at
the weather, and probably a cold. The super-
ficial view that we suffer because we are im-
properly clad for these climatic surprises (a
view that Helen put forward the other night) is
beside the point. During these days, if I was
improperly clad, it was only because I had so
little on. In fact, only ten minutes before she
had said as much.

88 A REAPING.

The state of Legs' affections, I am bound to
add, aggravated the sultriness of the weather,
and made me feel exactly 350 (three hundred
and fifty) years old. To take it at its best, he
was embarked on a violent flirtation with a
dreadful girl; to take it at its worst, he was
falling in love with her. She is the daughter
of a neighbouring minute squire, who owns three
turnip-fields, and calls it shooting. Legs shot
over it the other day, and after walking over
the whole estate twice, got back to The Grange
in time for lunch. This was before I returned
from Scotland, or I should have tried to prevent
it. Probably I should not have succeeded.

The neighbouring squire's name is Ampthump.
I know quite well that it is not his fault, but
that, wedded to what he is and a German wife,
makes me unable to like him. His wife makes
incredible quantities of jam, which, again, is an
innocent pursuit; and Charlotte, the daughter,
talks German to Legs, who I wish was more like
Goethe. The whole family, in fact, as may have
been already perceived, appear to me to be
simply intolerable.

The attachment also has already led to

SEPTEMBER. 89

equivocation on the part of Legs. He pretends
that he talks to Charlotte because it is so good
for his German. He knows that it is not so,
and I know it is not so, and I think he knows
that I know it is not so. But it really looks at
the moment that unless they marry each other
there will be a broken or, at any rate, a cracked
heart. I only hope it will not be Legs'. I don't
care the least what happens to Charlotte's heart.
It may, however, be only a flirtation, in which
case there probably will not even be a crack.
Legs will wake up one morning, and after han-
dling some precious withered flowers will wonder
what on earth they ever meant to him, and
throw them in the fire. Or Charlotte will do
something equally desperate. That is my hope ;
my fear is that they are falling in love with
each other.

This narrative, it should be understood, is the
gist of what I have been saying fragmentarily to
Helen. She considers it a cynical view, which
alarms me, since I hold the creed that all cynics
are properly and irretrievably damned. To-night
Legs went to bed early, with dishevelled hair, a
wakeful eye, and a gale of sighs, and I came

90 A REAPING.

upstairs to talk to Helen about it all while she
brushed her hair.

'You are quite ridiculous about it/ she said.
' Because you happen not to like the Ampses
(we have agreed on that abbreviation), you think
that they are unlovable. Legs has proved the
contrary. Besides, what on earth does her name
matter, if she is going to change it ? '

I groaned intentionally, and in a graveyard
manner.

1 Do you mean that you think Legs is in love
with her ? ' I asked.

' Yes ; at least, I hope so. He had a long
talk with me to-day. He said he felt it was
time he settled down. What a darling ! Just
twenty ! I wish I was.'

Most of this was irrelevant. I tried to pick
out pieces that were not.

1 Of course, her name doesn't matter,' I said.

' Her name might be Well, you can't do

worse than Ampthump, and it does happen
to be exactly that. But her face is like a
ham '

' That is superficial,' said Helen. ' Beside, it
isn't. It's oval.'

SEPTEMBER. 91

'So is a ham. And she's a prig. Amp-
thump ! Good Lord ! "

I am afraid I shouted this, because she said :
' Hush ! Legs will hear/

' Not he. Or if he does, he will think it is
only the wind whispering the beloved name.'

' Yes, but you didn't whisper it. Oh, do take
the brush. You made me send my maid away,
so you must do it yourself. I can't brush from
here, because my arms are in front/

Now in my heart I pity everybody who has
not seen Helen with her hair down. All such
folk, in all their millions, lead impoverished
existences. There is a wave in it that is like
the big unbroken billows which succeed a storm,
when the clouds have passed and the sun shines.
It is lit from within, even as they seem to be
irradiated from the depths. Those billows must
go over a sandy foreshore, for they are yellow,
and the sun — I know not how — must be foggy,
for -there is a little red light in them. And
brushing, as I did now, I held my hand over
them, and the hair rose to it with a tiny crack-
ing sound. Her hair came to my hand, lifted
towards it that unminted gold that framed her

92 A REAPING.

face, and covered her ears. And for a little
while it was no wonder that I forgot about Legs
and his Charlotte.

I suppose every knows the sensation of being
lost. You can be lost all by yourself, as I was
once, as I have said, in the western desert of
Egypt, on which occasion the bray of a donkey
was to me the trumpet of the Seraphin. That
was a dreadful experience, since it implied being
out of touch with life. But I should be glad to
know if there is anything the world holds which
is more enraptured than the sense of being lost
with one other person, to feel the world swim
away, and be dissolved, so that you and the
comrade you are with are quite alone. To feel
that there is no existence except the existence of
her who is lost with you. ... It was Helen's
hair.

' That's the world's side ; there's the wonder ! '
That lover understood. Everyone saw Helen's
hair.

( " But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious moonshine,
Come out on the other side. .

SEPTEMBER. 93

I never could quote correctly. The point is
that the beloved has another face, the face she
turns to her lover. No one else sees it; it is
' blind to Keats, him even.'

A moment ago I thought that no one but me
must see Helen's hair. Now let them all see it,
the waves of the sunlit sea, not breaking, unless
the break be where I put my hand an inch
above them.

c Thanks, dear/ she said soon. ' You brush it
much better than my maid. Now shall we talk
for five minutes ? Then I must go to bed.'

I had hideous accumulations of various fag-
ends of work to do, and at the end of the five
minutes, or it might be ten, I went downstairs
again, to begin at any rate this dreadful patch-
work of odds and ends. - It was still, I was
almost sorry to observe, only just eleven, and
since I had with both eyes open deliberately and
firmly wasted all the hours of the day, my un-
easy Conscience told me that I had better, if it
was to have the ease it craved, not think of
leaving my chair for a couple of hours at least.
I argued this point with it, and lost some

94 A REAPING.

minutes, for I told it that it was extremely bad
for me to work at night ; that it took more out of
one than work in the day ; that work done under
these circumstances was never good work ; that
doctors recommended one never to work at night,
but go peacefully to bed before the evening fever
— whatever that might be — set in. Then there
ensued a short spirited dialogue.

* Most sensible,' said Conscience. * Give me
your word that you will get up at six to-morrow,
then, and work for two hours before breakfast,
and you have my leave to go to bed now/

c But I shan't wake at six/ said I, ' and the
servants have gone to bed.'

' I will wake you/ said Conscience. (Con-
science is quite capable of the odious feat.)

1 But I can't work before breakfast/ I said.
' It makes me feel '—I could not think of the
word for the moment — ' oh yes, faint.'

' Well, feel faint, then/ said Conscience.

' But I would sooner not ; it implies weakness
of the heart.'

c Not to do your work implies weakness of
character.'

' Shut up/ said I, ' and let me begin, then/

SEPTEMBER. 95

And I could swear that my Conscience gave
a self-satisfied chuckle.

For an hour I waded wearily, knee-deep only,
so to speak, in work, like a man who wants to
swim, but has to trudge out over level sands.
Most people, I fancy, even the laziest o£ us, like
working, when we get up to our necks, or, better
even, out of our depths, in it, but the wading is
weary work. The worst of it was that the fact
that I had to wade so far was entirely my own
fault, for the whole of the last week I had never
taken the trouble to finish up any one job, and
now there waited for me several bills to pay,
since a few mornings ago I had sat down to pay
bills, and had paid them all except two or three ;
several letters to write, all of which had to begin
either falsely (i.e., ' I have just found your letter
of the 17th') or apologetically (i.e., (I haven't

answered your letter before because '). Then

there was a half -corrected proof of an unfinished
article, badly written originally, and, what is
more, written without conviction. It was on
a subject that did not particularly interest me,
and I had only written it because the misguided
editor of a magazine had offered me £25 for it,

96 A REAPING.

and I very much wished to buy a seal-top spoon
which cost exactly that sum, and which I knew
perfectly well I had no right to buy. So, say-
ing to myself that I would write this article
(which I should not otherwise have done), I had
bought it, and here was the dismal price that I
had to pay for it — namely, that this wretched
article was a piece of literary dishonesty. I had
to fudge and vamp over it, trying to conceal the
nakedness of the land by ornamental expressions.
That was brought home to me now. It was all
bad cheap stuff, and though most of us are con-
tinually turning out bad cheap stuff, not know-
ing it is bad and cheap, such manufactures
become criminal when we do know it. As long
as work is honest from the workman's point of
view, it is only his misfortune when he does not
know its valuelessness ; but when he does know
its valuelessness, he sins by intention, and is a for-
ger. I was one, and by my forgery I had bought
a seal-top that was not. I thought that when I
tacitly agreed to work for two hours to-night, my
tiresome Conscience would put its head under its
wing, and leave me alone ; but I found now that it
was broad awake again, and chirping like a canary.

SEPTEMBER. 97

4 What are you going to do ? 9 it chirped. ' Are
you going to send out a rotten forgery which
everybody who knows anything will detect ? or
are you going to tear it up, and be left with a
purchase that you know you can't really afford ?
Remember that -you must get a new dining-room
carpet too; you promised Helen you would.
Chirp, chirp, chirp ! '

I am bound to say that this enraged me.

' What's the use of making that row ? ' I said.
4 It's you, Conscience, who has to settle.'

' 1 haven't the slightest idea,' said Conscience.
* It's your fault ; you wouldn't listen to me when
I told you that you had no right to accept £25
for your dreadful article.'

* You didn't say it so loud, then,' said I.

4 No, but you heard all right,' said Conscience.
' I hardly heard,' said I. * You spoke so
indistinctly.'

* Yes, but you did hear,' it chirped, with a sort
of devilish cheerfulness. * You knew quite well
what I meant. Now you suffer for it. Hurrah ! '

I wonder if I am cursed in this matter of Con-
science beyond the majority of mankind. Often
and often (I will swear to this in the House of

98 A REAPING.

Lords if necessary) my Conscience is hardly
audible at all at the time when I do anything
which I ought not to do, or omit to do anything
which I ought. To continue the simile of the
canary, which really fits the case, when the
actual choice comes, it is as if -the canary had
a thick green-baize cover round its cage, and
only hoarse and muffled notes reach me. Very
often, indeed, I am sorry to say, I don't attend
to them, or say it is only the cat, and in conse-
quence do what I should not. Then the moment
it is done the baize cover is whisked off, and the
infernal and cheerful chirping, or so it sounds,
succeeds to the wrong choice or the weak
omission. And the burden of the chirping is
always the same.

1 1 told you so ; I told you so. Now you are
in a mess ! What are you going to do now ?
Chirp, chirp, chirp ! '

And a hurricane of dry and deafening notes
follows.

I sat there with this column of stupid twaddle
in my hands, and Conscience watched me with
its bright bird-like eye. Much as I like birds,

SEPTEMBER. 99

I hate their eyes, because they remind me of
Conscience. They are beady and absolutely un-
sympathetic, frightfully quick to see, and with-
out a particle of pity in them. Conscience never
pities one at all ; it is the foe that is of a man's
household. It always gloats over one's mistakes,
and things that are more than mistakes, and
only says :

' Here comes the master with the whip. A
new lash, I see, this time. And what a thin
shirt you have got on ! "

Nor, when the whipping is over, does Con-
science sympathize.

1 1 told you so ; I told you so/ it says. ' No,
there is no soothing ointment of any kind in the
house. I ate it all up. Wasn't that a beautiful
new lash ? '

Well, I tore that dreadful nonsense up, and
wrote another apologetic letter. I am getting
quite, good at them. But to-morrow — this is
what makes Conscience mad — I shall tell Helen
about it. The telling is not pleasant ; it never
is. But as soon as Helen knows, Conscience has
simply to retire. It does not understand why it

100 A REAPING.

suddenly becomes so unimportant, and that gives
it a fit of impotent rage. Nor do I quite under-
stand, though I am nearer to the explanation
than Conscience is. But she understands. At
least, I suppose so, or else she would not be able
to put the green-baize cover on again.

And then, what with apologetic letters, and
the drawing of two or three cheques, and the
stupid attempts, in this matter of the dishonest
article, to produce something out of nothing, by
covering up the nothingness by more ornamental
expressions, and the eventual destruction of it
all, I found that the two hours were gone, and
that I had kept my promise to the idiotic
canary. It had ceased chirping from experience
when I told it I was going to confess to Helen.

The night was intensely hot, and through
the long open windows of the room in which I
had been working no breeze entered. Though
September had but a quarter more of its course
to run, it was like some sultry July midnight,
portending storm, for when I went out to take
the night-breath the sky was thickly overcast,
so that no direct ray, either of moonlight or of
starshine, came earthwards. The serrated out-

SEPTEMBER. 101

line of the elms at the end of the lawn was
scarce distinguishable against the scape of the
clouds, and the low land of the water-meadows
was blanketed in a mist that was only just
visible by its whiteness against the black blot
of the hills behind. Fifi, who had very sen-
sibly decided to sleep on the veranda, did not
stir when I came out, though I heard the in-
stinctive thump of her short tail on the tiles,
the natural politeness of the dear dog, though
she really could not stand on ceremony with me
to the length of getting up. So, maliciously, I
am afraid, since I thought this slightly cavalier
conduct, I said ' Puss,' though there was no Puss
of any sort, as far as I was aware. But my
malice was again thwarted, for Fifi just tapped
again with her tail, in courteous recognition of
a stale old joke, just to show that she ap-
preciated my intention, but she made not the
smallest further effort towards activity.

So- she was half asleep, and all the world,
this dear, blessed world, which is so full of
merriness and simple, innocent pleasure, despite
the fulminations of fashionable priests, was
quite asleep, not stirring, scarcely breathing,

102 A REAPING.

just sleeping, sleeping. It was not yet the hour
when, just before the hold of the night begins
to tremble and be weakened in the sky, all
living things wake for a moment — that mys-
terious moment, when sheep take a bite of grass,
and cows twitch their grave ears, and horses
stand up for a minute before they settle down
to the light morning sleep which dissolves with
day, and when even indoors, if you sleep with a
dog in your room, and happen yourself to be
awake, you will hear a stretching of limbs on
your bed or on the carpet, and a long sigh
breathed into the blankets. Plants and flowers,
so I truly believe, feel the same thing; and
though there may be no wind perceptible to you
if you are abroad, as sometimes I am, at that
hour, you will hear, just at the moment when
cattle move and sheep take their bite of grass, a
stir go through the trees, and a hushed whisper
lisp in the flower-beds. At that moment, too
(you need not credit this, though it is absolutely
true), though it has rained all night till then,
and will rain thereafter, steadily, soakingly till
morning, the rain ceases, as suddenly as if a tap
was turned off. Time ana again I have tested that.

SEPTEMBER. 103

But, as I have said, that mysterious moment
was not due yet. It was still two hours short
of it, and everything was still asleep. Even in
the last minute or two Fifi had fallen fast asleep,
too, after I had sat down in a wicker chair on
the veranda, for when I called her there was no
tap of response. To-night, too, the sleep of the
world seemed to me (feeling it as one does by
that sixth sense, which still exists dormant in
us, and is most awake at night) to be extraordi-
narily deep. It was the sleep of a world that
was very tired with this long hot summer.
There seemed no pulse stirring in it at all, as
you may find it stir in the light sleep in which
Nature indulges in June, or still more in the
dark, wet nights of spring, when the secret
boiling up of life begins again from hidden root
to budding tendril, so that if you lay your ear
to the trunk of a tree it seems that the effer-
vescence of the young year is audible, and sings
within it, even as the telegraph poles are res-
onant with the wind that hums in the wires.
Nor could I hear, when I rose and walked
across the lawn, even though the dew was
heavy on the grass, the hiss of startled worms,

104 A REAPING.

withdrawing from the approaching footfall.
Black, too, and lifeless, was the oblong of the
house except where the lights burned in the
room in which I had been trying to be honest.
The long herbaceous hedge was black, the lawn
was black, Helen's windows and Legs' were
black.

I went back to the seat I had just left, and
lit a cigarette, meaning to go upstairs to bed
when I had smoked it. Fifi still lay motionless,
though generally any excursion into the garden
at any time of day or night sets her scampering.
And then, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly,
for nothing was further from my thoughts, I
became aware that, though the physical world
was asleep, there was some enormous stir and
activity going on in the occult world which
surrounds and permeates us. Yet that is
perhaps a wrong expression, for the same
activity and stir always goes on in that un-
sleeping realm ; and I must express it more
accurately by saying that the part of me which
was able to perceive it was suddenly quickened.
It is quite possible, of course, since I confess to
being able to go to sleep whenever I choose,

SEPTEMBER. 105

and often without delay, when I do not, that
at that moment I fell asleep. But whether I fell
asleep or not, does not make the slightest differ-
ence, for there was clearly some part of my
brain awake, and it made my eyes think that
they saw, and my ears think that they heard,
that which immediately followed.

As far as I am aware, in any case, I sat
down again in a rather creaky basket-chair and
lit a cigarette. The match with which I lit it, I
threw on to the gravel path in front of me, and,
since I required it no further, it proceeded to
burn prosperously. By its light I could see Fifi
with her nose between her paws. I saw, also,
that my shoe-lace was untied.

And then I heard my name called from the
garden, in a voice that was perfectly familiar to
me, though for the moment I could not say, so
elusive is the ear, whose voice it was that called.
It was not Helen's, it was not Legs', it was not
. . . and then I remembered whose voice it was.
It called me by name, once only, in the voice
that had said, 'It is from the cross that He
smiles at us all.'

I do not think I was frightened, but simply

106 A REAPING.

for the purely personal reason that to me there
was nothing to be frightened at. The match
still burned on the gravel path, so short had
been the measurement of this in the world of
time, and I could still see Fifi's nose buried
between her paws. Then she raised it, looked
out into the garden with terrified scrutinizing
eyes, focussing them on something invisible to
me, and gave one long howl. But there was
no moon. It was at something else she howled.
Then, I confess, as if some bomb had burst
within me, terror flooded my whole mind, sub-
merging it, and I sprang up. Simultaneously I
heard a sort of strangled scream from the room
above, and the scurry of unshod feet overhead.
Next moment the sound of an opening door
came to my ears, and a quick stumbling tread
on the stairs. I ran indoors, and reached the
door leading from my room into the hall, just as
the handle was seized and shaken by someone
on the other side of it, and Legs burst into the
room, his hair all tumbled and erect, and his
face wearing such a mask of terror that for
the moment I recognized him only because it
must be he.

SEPTEMBER. 107

' Who is that in the garden ? ' he said.
' Someone in white, who looked up at my win-
dow ? And Fifi howled at her/

This would never do. Nerves, terror are the
most infectious things in the world, and unless I
took steps, there would, I knew, be standing
here two babbling lunatics.

' I was dozing in the veranda/ I said, ' and
Fifi woke me by howling. She woke you, too !
Legs, don't be an ass ! Pull yourself together.
If there had been anything, I should have
seen it.'

Legs was as white as a sheet. The white-
ness somehow showed through his freckled sun-
tanned skin. He was swaying to and fro
on his feet, as if he would fall, and I put
my arm around him, and deposited him in a
chair. Then I poured out a wineglassful of
neat whisky.

' Don't speak another word till you have
drunk that,' I said. 'Then I shall count ten
slowly, and then you may speak.'

Fifi had followed me in, and sat close to the
door whimpering. With my heart in my mouth
and a perspiring forehead, I went across to the

108 A REAPING.

window as I counted, shut and locked it, and
pulled down the blind.

' Nine, ten/ I said.

A little colour had begun to come back to
Leg's face. He had drunk the whisky, a
beverage which he detested, like water, and the
frozen fear of his eyes was less biting. And
then, as suddenly as it had come on, my terror
left me. Whatever it was that I had heard,
whatever it was that Legs had seen and Fifi
perceived, there was nothing to terrify. Besides,
within myself, now that the cowardly disorder
of my nerves had passed* I believed I knew
what it was that had made its presence so
strangely perceived by us all. The mortal
suffering of a dear friend was over. Already I
was ashamed of having told Legs that I had
been asleep and had neither seen nor heard
anything.

' Legs, I lied just now,' I said. ' I heard my
name called from the garden in Margaret's
voice.'

' You mean she is dead ? ' asked he gently.
' The last accounts had been better, I thought.'

' I am sure she is.'

SEPTEMBER. 109

Then for a moment, like a sudden squall, the
white terror passed over Legs' face again.

' It was not her I saw,' he said hoarsely ; ' it
was Death. I thought she had come for me.
Fifi saw her too.'

I sat down on the arm of his chair.

' Yes, old boy/ I said, ' I think that you and
Fifi both saw some manifestation of what I
heard. But there is nothing to be frightened
at. But how was it you were at your window ?
You had gone to bed hours ago/

' I know, but I couldn't sleep, so I got up and
sat by the window/

We sat there for some time after that, and by
degrees Legs recovered from his collapse, and
soon, instead of terror, mere sleepiness invaded
his face. Once or twice he stifled a yawn, and
at length he got up.

' I am dead sleepy/ he said. ' I think I shall
go to bed/

'You are not frightened any longer, are
you ? ' I asked.

Legs looked at me out of drooping eyelids,
and he seemed puzzled.

110 A REAPING.

' Frightened ? What about ? ' he said. ' Good-
night/

I was very late down next morning, and found
that Helen and Legs had nearly finished break-
fast. As I came in he jumped up.

' Ah, here he is ! ' he cried. ' Now, did you
sit up very late last night ? '

When he asked that I began to have some
suspicion of what was coming next.

' Yes, very. Why ? '

* Well, were you talking to yourself ? Helen
and I both woke in the night, and heard talking
in your room. I had had some dream that
frightened me, and I nearly came downstairs for
human companionship/

« Why didn't you ? '

I 1 was too sleepy. But — were you talking ? '
' No. You were dreaming, So was Helen,

I may have groaned now and then over proofs,
but not more than that/

Legs nodded at Helen.

' I told you it was ghosts,' he said.

' And you heard voices too ? ' I asked Helen.

SEPTEMBER. Ill

' Yes ; at least, I thought so. But I was
very sleepy. I thought also I heard Fifi howl.'

So, you see, there is no corroboration of my
story, and if I dreamed it at all, or made it
up, there is no one to whom I can appeal for
confirmation of its verity. But there is just
this little bit of evidence — namely, that though
Legs had finished breakfast, he went on drink-
ing cup after cup of tea. When Helen left us
he explained this to me.

'I woke with a mouth like a lime-kiln/ he
said — 'just as if I had been drinking that
dreadful whisky of yours. I drank most of my
jug, too, and they had to bring me more water
to wash in/

What happened last night, then, had been
wiped clean off Legs' brain again. Whatever
it was that he had seen, that which made him
stumble white-faced downstairs, had gone. But
an hour or two later, while we were out playing
croquet in the garden, some faint echo of it, I
think, crossed him again. A telegram was
brought out for me, which contained what I
knew it would contain, and I handed it to him

112 A REAPING.

when I had read it. Then we went quietly
indoors.

Just as we got into my room again, he said :
' How odd that sensation is of feeling that
something has happened before ! When you
handed me the telegram, I felt I knew what
was in it. And during the last week she had
been rather better, had she not ? '

OCTOBER

THE business of the dining-room carpet (a
case of conscience makes the whole world
kin, so I confidently return to this matter) was
settled more beautifully than I had thought
possible. I told Helen all about it, and she said :
' Thank goodness you tore the thing up !
Dear, you are such a silly ass ! There's nothing
whatever more to be said. You are, aren't
you ? '

* There's nothing more to be said, I believe
you remarked.'

' Well, you may just say " Yes," ' said she.
So I said ' Yes.' It was a variant of the
woman's last word, spoken by a man instead.

* There, now we'll go and quarrel about the
rose-garden,' said she.

We went and quarrelled. She was flushed
with triumph over making me say * Yes,' and
in consequence I got my way about several dis-

114 A REAPING.

puted points, which to-day the darling thinks
she chose herself.

The rose-garden is a design of unparalleled
audacity, and when it grows up, it will be
nothing short of stupendous. For between us
Helen and I are territorial magnates, and
beyond this house and garden, which are hers,
I am owner of two fields, and limitless possi-
bilities. I bought them a year ago, in a sudden
flush of extravagance, and for six: months we
maintained there (at staggering loss) a poultry-
yard in one corner and a cow over the rest.
The original design, of course, was to make a
sound investment in land, which, in addition to
the fathomless pleasure of owning it, would
keep us in butter, eggs, chickens to eat (not to
mention, as I hasten to do, savouries of chicken
liver on toast), and possibly beef. If one con-
siders the question closely, it is difficult to see
how a cow can (1) give milk, and (2) give beef ;
but Helen, in visionary enthusiasm, said we
should have oxen as well, and why not pigs
in the farther corner ? I did not at once see
why not, and I bought the two fields with the
same unconcern as I should have bought a box

OCTOBER. 115

of matches, which yield so sure an enjoyment
in the matter of lighting cigarettes.

Then we both began to learn that, though we
might be gardeners, we were not farmers. The
poultry-yard was (mistakenly, no doubt) erected
at the corner of the field nearest the house, and
morning after morning we were awakened at
dead and timeless hours. Helen said that when
a hen made a long clucking noise, it meant she
had laid an egg, and that, till the thing became
incredible, consoled me. For if she was right,
it was clear that hens laid invisible eggs, or that
they were doing tiresome conjuring tricks, and
that the long-drawn crow meant, * I have laid
an egg, but see if you can find it. I am the
mother of this disappearing egg.' We usually
were not able to do so, but sometimes an egg
was found in a hedge, or in a ditch, which when
found was totally uneatable, except by the
Chinese. Personally, I believe that by some
unhappy mischance we had bought celibate and
barren poultry, whose customs drove us daily
nearer Bedlam ; in fact, it was the pig that was
our hellebore.

The pig was not a pig, but a sow. She went

116 A REAPING.

mad, too — or so I must believe — jumped the
pigsty in the opposite corner, made a bee-line
for the poultry-yard, went through our beautiful
wire-fencing as if it had been a paper hoop in
a circus, and ate two hens. The cock beat a
masterly retreat, and was never heard of again.
The other four hens followed him. And the sow,
dripping with gore, lay down in the hen-house
and slept. Almost before she woke, she was
sold for a song.

Then the cow came. I do not wish to libel
her, but I think I may safely say that she was
milkless and excitable, and had a wild eye. She
roamed over my fields (mine, I had bought them)
as if they were her own. Had not Legs been so
agile and swift, she might have tossed him. As
it was, she ran into the brick wall at the lower
end of the garden, and made her nose bleed. As
far as I know, that was the only liquor that she
parted with. She was probably mad also, for
she used to low in the middle of the night, when
all proper cows are fast asleep. Asleep or
awake, however, now she makes her fantasias
elsewhere. I almost hope she is dead, for it
requires a larger optimism than I possess to

OCTOBER. 117

believe that she will ever become a proper cow,
for she was more of a steed for Mazeppa.
Perhaps she was a horse after all, a horned
horse. I wish we had thought of that at the
time. As it was, we sold her at outrageous
loss, as a cow. And with her we parted with
any idea of keeping farmyard animals for
purposes of gain. Perhaps we were not serious
enough about it, and the animals saw that.

/

Through last spring and summer the fields
rested after this invasion of outrageous animals,
and about the middle of May it struck Helen
and me simultaneously that we were going to
have a crop of hay. That was delightful, and
much less harassing than hens. Hay would not
wake one at timeless hours, nor would it go
mad, and have to be sold at a quarter of the
price we gave for it, since we gave nothing for
it at all. It was the pound of tea thrown in
with the fields we had bought, or the Times
newspaper thrown in with your subscription to
that extraordinary library.

From this there was born the scheme of giv-
ing a haymaking party, to which we originally

118 A REAPING.

planned to ask everybody we knew, amended
that to asking all the children we knew, and
afterwards (this was Helen's amendment) decided
not to ask anybody at all, partly because
children were so serious, but chiefly because
there might not be enough hay to go round.
We neither of us knew how many square yards
of hay it was reasonable to supply to each
person, and it would be dreadful if there was
not enough. Either Helen or I, or both of us,
would have to go without, and it was safer to
give the haymaking party to each other. We
were in town all May, and the first half of June,
but had left word with the gardener to send us
a postcard when the hay was ready. The
weather throughout these weeks was gloriously
sunny, and in our mind's teye we saw the
crop growing taller and thicker with each blaz-
ing day.

Then one evening came the memorable post-
card :

' A reddy.'

We flew to the ' A.' In the middle of the
largest field was a small haycock like a pen-
wiper. One not quite so large and round at the

OCTOBER, 119

top, more like a pincushion, was visible in the
next field.

It was clear after this that the Powers that
Are willed that our fields should not be used
for utilitarian purposes. Hence the inception
of the rose-garden.

A brick wall (the one against which the
insane cow had blooded her nose) bounded the
garden. From there the ground declined
steeply away into the middle of the larger
field, which was cup-shaped, the ground rising
on all sides of it. (It was at the centre of the
cup, where the sugar is, that the penwiper had
been raked together.) To-day a flight of steps
made of broken paving-stones — an entrancing
material — led down the side of the cup from
the rgarden-gate, and up the opposite slope.
Standing where the sugar is, therefore, you saw
on every side of you rising ground, which had
been , terraced, and walks of broken paving-
stone, communicating with the two staircases,
lay concentrically round. And the Herculean
labour which had already occupied us so many
rapturous afternoons was to plant the whole

120 A REAPING.

cup with rose-trees, so that, standing in the
centre, there was nothing visible except sky
and roses. That was practically done ; and
to-day what occupied us was the consideration
of the level remainder of the field, of which
there was some half acre. It was rough, coarse
grass, starred with dandelion, which gave the
first hint. We wanted to get rid of the

dandelion, and

At last I got Helen to agree, and I mixed
together in a wheelbarrow an infinity of bulbs,
and other delectable roots. There were big
onion-like daffodils, neat crocuses with an
impatient little yellow horn sticking up, fritil-
lary roots, bottle-shaped tulips, the corms of
anemones, and the orris of the iris. Then,
trowel in hand, each with a bag of bulbs taken
haphazard out of the wheelbarrow and with
a bag of sand to make a delectable sprouting-
place for the roots, we started. Every dandelion
encountered was to be dug up with honesty and
thoroughness, and where the dandelion had been
there was to be planted a bulb taken at random
out of the bag. Helen said it would take ten
years. Personally, when I looked, I thought

OCTOBER. 121

longer, but I did not say so, for I practice
reticence on discouraging occasions.

I wonder how many people know the extra-
ordinary delight of doing a thing for oneself,
starting from the beginning. I do not say that
it gives me the smallest pleasure to black my
boots or brush my clothes, since somebody has
already made those boots and woven the cloth.
But there is nothing more entrancing than to
deal first-hand with Nature, to make holes in
the earth, and put in them roots, the farthest
back that we can go with regard to vegetable
life. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me a
pleasure as clean and as elemental as the joy
of creation itself. Whether we write a book,
or paint a picture, or carve a statue, we, though
we do not really create, but only arrange what
is in existence already, are going back as far as
we can, taking just the root-thoughts and trans-
lating them to song or shape. And though we
do not really create at all, but only use and
arrange, as I have said, the already existing facts
of the world, passing them, it may be, through
the crucible of the mind, we get quite as near
to Nature, if not nearer, when we go a-bulb-

122 A REAPING.

planting. The bulbs are our thoughts, our pig-
ments, what you will, and when in spring-time
we shall see them making a meadow of Fra
Angelieo, it will be because we have actually
planted these things ourselves that the joy of
creation will be ours. Not to do that would
be as if an artist laid no brush on the canvas
himself, but merely dictated to a dependent
where such a colour should be spread. But
given that he had a slave so intelligent and so
obedient that he could follow to a hair's-breadth
the directions given him, can you imagine the
artist feeling the possessive joy of creation in the
result, even though it realized the conception
to the uttermost ? Not I ; nor, in the garden,
do I care, like that, to see what others have
done. It is not sufficient to direct ; one has to
do it oneself.

I love, too, and cannot conceive not loving,
getting hot and dirty over the wrestling with
the clean, black earth. A great deal of nonsense
is talked about the dignity of labour, but it is
chiefly talked by those whose labour lies indoors,
who, excellent craftsmen as they may be, go
spudding about in the intangible realms of the

OCTOBER. 123

mind. I doubt, indeed, whether any market-
gardener has ever spoken of the dignity of
labour. We leave that to those who only know
it by repute. But I long to put down the
manner of the transaction. I do not in the
least think it dignified, but it is such fun.

The green had mostly faded from the grass,
leaving the meadow, as is always the case in
October, far more grey than green. Certain
plants, however, were still of varnished bright-
ness, and the dandelion leaf was one. There
was no need to pick and choose, and without
moving a step, I dug the trowel down into the
earth, loosened it all round the vegetable enemy,
and lifted it. An ominous muffled snap came
from inches down in the earth, which I tried
to pretend I had not heard. But one could not
cheat the eye also. There, at the bottom of my
excavation, was a milky root, showing a danger-
signal of white against the brown loam. I had
to go deeper yet : the whole of the tap-root must
be exhumed. Another dig, another snap, a raw-
looking worm recoiled from the trowel, only just
in time, and eventually up came the remotest

124 A REAPING.

fibre. How good the earth smelt ! How reeking
with the life of the world ! Cold, clammy, rich
earth, ever drawn upon by the needs of the
Bank of Life, ever renewed by that which life
paid back to it. A thousand years had gone to
the formation of my trowelful, and a few inches
below was the chalk, where a million lives a
million years ago had spent themselves on the
square inch of it. Slowly, by work of the
myriad sea-beasts, this shoulder of chalk was
heaved from the sea, the myriad lives became
a myriad myriad, and here I had the little lump
of chalk borne up on the end of the trowel
which told of the labourers of the unnumbered
years. Then, in a spoonful of sand, I put the
sign, the evidence of another decade of millions
on the top of them, and stuck thereon an onion-
like daffodil root that was born last year. In
a fortnight's time that child of to-day will
have reached downwards, feeling with delicate,
pleased touch the sand of a thousand years ago,
will delve through the time of the pyramids of
Egypt, will draw moisture from the chalk that
was old when our computation of time was not
yet born, and will blossom next April, feeding

OCTOBER. 125

its sap on the primeval years. And for what ?
To make Helen and Legs and me say, ' Oh, what
a beautiful Horsf eldii ! ' Then we shall look at
the fritillary that prospers a yard away.

The eternal romance of it all ! To the right-
minded there is nothing that is not a fairy-story.
Like children, we crowd round the knees of the
wonderful teller of it, and say, ' Is it true ? Is
it all true ? ' And He can't tell lies. Sometimes,
when we have a sort of moral toothache, we sit
apart, and sniff. We say that scientifically we
have proved there is no God. So said the fool
in his heart. But nowadays the fools write it
down in their damned books, and correct the
proofs of it, and choose the bindings of it, and
read, with gusto, the thoughtful reviews of it.
And, God forgive them, they think they are very
clever people, if I may be excused for mention-
ing them at all.

But fairy -stories ! How surprising and en-
trancing are even those which people make up
and put in books, while round us every day a
fairy-story far more wonderful is being told not
only for us to read, but enacted for us to see. It
is only familiarity with it which robs us of the

126 A REAPING.

sense of its wonder, for imagine, if we could make
ourselves ignorant again of what happens to bulbs
when we put them in the earth, how the possi-
bilities of flying-machines would grow flat and
stale before the opening of the daffodil. For a
man's capacity for happiness is in great measure
the same as his capacity for wonder and interest,
and considering that there is absolutely nothing
round us which does not teem with wonder if
only we had the sense to see it, it argues very
ill for our

A wild shriek from the hillside opposite
(distance forty yards) interrupted me.

' I didn't mean to/ cried Helen ; ' but I cut a
centipede in half. They are going in opposite
directions/

' Dig another hole ! ' I shouted. ' Then go
back when the halves have gone away. Yes,
very distressing, but you can't avoid every-
thing/

' Murderer ! ' said Helen.

This was feminine logic. I had not cut the
centipede in half !

It was one of those golden October days of

OCTOBER. 127

which we have now had some half-dozen. Every
night there is a little frost, so that morning both
looks and smells exquisitely clean, and it is hardly
possible to regret the turn of the year ; though
dahlias are blackened, the trees blaze with copper
and gold, for in this week of windless days
scarce a leaf has fallen, and the stems are as
thick with foliage as they were in the summer,
and to my mind doubly beautiful. And this work
of bulb-planting seems to bridge over the winter,
for we are already at work on spring. But in
November, Helen and I mean to turn our faces
townwards again, for it is possible there to be
unaware of the transition to winter, which is so
patently before one's eyes in the country, and
which, with the best will in the world, it is
impossible not to find rather depressing. Some
people, I know, label the squalls of February
and March as execrable, and flee the country
then. But we both love them. These are the
last despairing efforts of winter. His hand is
already loosed from the earth ; he strikes wildly,
knowing that there are but few blows left in
him. But in the autumn he is gaining strength
every day : it is life whose hold is being loosed.

128 A REAPING.

And that is not exhilarating to watch. True, it
is only a mimic death-bed, but personally we
don't want to sit by the bedside. In London
there is no bedside. The shorter the day, the
earlier the lamps are lit. Those avenues of
shining eyes, which are not shocked whatever
they see. . . . And the fogs — the mysterious
fogs ! I suppose we are Cockneys.

Helen gave out first in the matter of bulbs,
•and came and sat by me.

' How very dirty you are ! ' she said. ' And
have you been planting bulbs with your
nose ? '

' Not at present. But it tickled, and so I
rubbed it.'

' Well, let's stop now. I want to go for a
walk. My back aches with bending, and though
I haven't got toothache, I feel as if I might
have, and the kitchen-maid has given notice, and
I don't think anybody loves me, and if Legs
marries that awful girl, I will never speak to
you again. And they are coming to dinner to-
night ! I pray Heaven that Legs may miss his
train, and not get here till late/

OCTOBER. 129

* So do I. Yes ; let's go for a real tramp on
fche downs. Hadn't I better go and wash my
face first ? '

' Oh no ; what does it matter ? But are you
sure you don't want to go on bulbing ? '

' Quite sure. I think we won't go by the road,
do you know. We can strike across the meadows
and up the beacon.'

Helen gave a little purr — a querulous rumble
of the throat.

1 1 have the blues,' she said, with great distinct-
ness. ' I was as happy as possible till ten
minutes ago, and then they came on like — like a
thunderstorm. Everything ached. I groaned
aloud : my mind hurt me like lumbago. It
hurts still. Oh, do rub something on it/

That is one of the heavenly things about
Helen. If she ( feels bad/ she comes and tells
me about it like a child. She scolds me for all
sorts of things of which I am perfectly innocent,
because she knows I don't mind one scrap (I love
it, really, but I don't tell her that), and it makes
her feel better. She scolded now, even when
we had passed the water-meadow and began a
really steep ascent of the flanking hills.

130 A REAPING.

6 1 knew the kitchen-maid wouldn't stop/ she
said, 'because those London girls hate the country.
So do I. And it was all your fault. You
engaged her ; I had nothing to do with it. And
we never had such a kitchen-maid. She cooks
better than the cook, and does everybody else's
work as well. You might have known she
wouldn't stand the country/

4 Go on,' said I. f My fault entirely. So is
the toothache, isn't it ? '

1 1 haven't got one, but I might have. And
that's your fault, too. I wanted to go to the
dentist as I passed through London, and you
persuaded me to come down here without stop-
ping. It did ache just then — it did/

The hill got rather steeper.

' Go on/ said I. ' How slowly you walk ! '

' Yes, but I have to do all the talking. You
have no conversation. Oh dear, what a devil I
am ! Aren't I ? '

'Yes/

' There ! I told you nobody loved me. Oh,
look ! we are going to have a real red sunset.
All the hills are getting molten, as if they were
red-hot and glowing/

OCTOBER. 131

She was feeling a little better-~not much, but
a little. We had come Up the two hundred feet
of steep down-side as if we had been storming a
breach. To walk very fast up a hill makes all
proper people feel better, unless they have heart
disease, in which case they die, and so, we hope,
feel better also. But for those who have not
heart disease, and want to feel better, the
prescription is confidently recommended.

1 And then that awful girl ! ' she went on.
'You insisted on being neighbourly, as you call
it, with the Ampses, and this is the result.'

' There has been none at present/

'No; but you tell me to ask the family to
dinner on the very day that Legs comes down.
Oh dear, what a heavenly evening ! I should so
enjoy it if everything wasn't, wrong. Look at
the sky ! Fifty thousand little pink, fluffy
angels floating about in it ! Do you want to go
right to the top of the hill ? '

' Yes, right to the top. Then I shall begin to
answer you back.'

Helen laughed.

' Oh no, don't,' she said. 'It is no fun plaguing
you if you dispute my facts. So tell me quickly :

132 A REAPING.

isn't everything your fault, and not mine ?
Please pull me, if you intend to go that pace.'

So I pulled her, she holding the end of my
stick, and we arrived at the very top of all.
Sunset was below us, evening stars were above
us, and on the huge expanse of down there was
no one else. It was the loneliness I love.

£ The devil has gone/ she said, after a while.
1 You are rather nice to me. And I don't think
I have toothache, and — well, you thought that
Charlotte was a little Ampsy before I did. And
even if nobody loves me — oh, how dirty your
nose is ! '

That was true, anyhow.

An extraordinary phenomenon in country
towns is that, though nobody has anything to do,
everyone feels extremely busy ; whereas in town,
though you have got an enormous deal to do, you
never feel busy at all, and can, without fail, find
time for anything else. I think there must be
some microbe which cannot live in London, but
thrives elsewhere, which produces the illusion of
being rushed. Personally, I know it well : it
is not an old enemy of mine, nor is it an old
friend, but it is a pleasant old humbug, which

OCTOBER. 133

I am afraid I rather encourage. This evening,
for instance, when I went to my room after
tea, I encouraged it, and argued that one never
had a moment to oneself. I had two hours in
front of me now, as a matter of fact, in which I
should be undisturbed; but the Old Humbug said
that it was all very well to think about the future.
All he knew was that he — that is, I — had been
rushed — yes, rushed — all day and all yesterday,
and ever since we came down to this dear, sleepy
old town. To-day was Tuesday, and people were
coming to dinner. We had gone out to lunch
yesterday, and had dined out twice last week.
Also, there was the garden to attend to, and a
little golf (almost every day, as a matter of fact)
was necessary for the health, and what with
letters to write and cigarettes to smoke, and the
Meistersinger overture to learn, in order to play
it with Legs, I was a victim of this hurrying,
bustling mode of life, which in a generation or
so more would assuredly send everybody off their
heads.

I made myself quite comfortable in my chair,
and proceeded to think about it seriously, because
I had two hours in front of me. It was all quite

134 A REAPING.

true (I was encouraging the Old Humbug, you
will understand), and the modern mode of life
was insane. London, anyhow, was insane, and
in a little while I should probably get to agree
with the Old Humbug that I was rushed and
driven in the country also. But, to encourage
credulity, I took London first. There one
certainly was busy — all the hours, that is to
say, of a day that began quite early and ended
next morning were full, and I reconstructed one
such as I often spend, and hope to spend many
times more. I do not give it, because it seems
to me the least edifying, and all stern moralists
(the Old Humbug is an awfully stern moralist)
would — as, indeed, they have done — -shake their
heads over it, and say, ' To what purpose ? ' I
will tell you that afterwards.

I was called, let me say, at half -past seven, and
after a few incredulous groans got up. I shaved,
washed a little- — not much, for reasons that will
appear — drank some tea, and in a quarter of an
hour was wildly bicycling towards the Park,
When things flourished very much, and money
flowed, Helen and I rode champing steeds ; but
just now things were what is called fluctuating,

OCTOBER. 135

and I rode a bicycle, and she stayed in bed. An
hour and a half of frantic pedalling on a hot
June morning produces excellent physical results ;
and at half -past nine I was in the swimming-bath
at the Bath Club, where I became cool and clean.
I changed into another suit of flannels there, rode
sedately home, and had breakfast at precisely a
quarter-past ten. By eleven I had eaten break-
fast, read the Daily Mail, and smoked a cigarette,
and was about to spend a quiet, studious morn-
ing until half-past one (for we were lunching
out at two), when Helen came in.

' Do come to Lord's,' she said ; * it's Gentlemen
and Players, and we can sit there till lunch.
We can't go this afternoon, and you are playing
golf at Woking to-morrow.'

1 1 can't. Not time/

' Oh, just this once.'

Just this once, then, we went. It was too
heavenly, and we were late for lunch.

It was one of the rather long lunches, and
it was nearly four when we left the house.
Then, as we had neither of us seen the Sargents
at the Academy, we went there, since the after-
noon was already gone, and got home about six ;

136 A REAPING.

and as we had been given a box at the opera
for ' Tristan/ which began at half -past seven,
it was necessary to dine at half-past six — a
terrible hour, but true. At the opera Legs
picked Helen up to go to a ball, and I went
home to answer my morning's post, which I
had not yet read.

But, it will be objected, Gentlemen and
Players, and the one necessary visit to the
Academy, and 'Tristan' does not occur every
day. Quite true ; but something else always
does, and the Old Humbug, who had got quite
large and important during this short survey,
said in those canting tones which I knew so
well : ' You are wasting your life over this
insensate rush and hurry. And you do no
better down here. What have you done to-day ?
Planted bulbs, and written two or three pages
of your silly book. What will you do to-
morrow ? You won't even write your silly
book, because you are going to play golf with
Legs in the morning, and you say you can't
work after lunch. And the days will make
themselves into months, and the months into
years ' (here he dropped into poetry), ' and you

OCTOBER. 137

will ever be a name of sc*rn — at least, you
would if ten minutes after you were dead
anybody remembered what your name was.
But you will have gone to your account.'

Well, I join issue with the Old Humbug
over this. For my part, I assert that it was
perfectly right for me to go to the Gentlemen
and Players, and to the opera, and to plant
bulbs, and to play golf with Legs to-morrow
morning if fine. And as for his objection
to what he calls ' rush,' why, I fling it in his
face, since I must rush. If I set apart a certain
time every day for private meditation, I should
be simply bored. I should get — I suppose
this must be the proposed practical effect of the
plan — no great and ennobling thoughts out
of my solitary meditations, and instead of
feeling that I had spent the morning to some
serious purpose, I should feel, and I think
rightly, that I had merely wasted it. But
if I have planted bulbs all morning, I haven't
wasted it. I will assert that on the Day of
Judgment ; for I have been busy walking
along the path I feel sure I was meant to
walk on. There are a thousand other paths

138 A REAPING.

all leading to the* central and celestial light,
and they are for other people to walk on.
It would, of course, be a terrible waste of time
for one who by nature 'was a meditative recluse
to go to the match between the Gentlemen and
Players, or for a deaf man to go to ' Tristan,'
or for a blind one to lie on his back and look
at the filtering sunlight between the leaves
of beech-trees in June, But the point for every-
body is to get into touch with life as continually
as he can, and at as many points as he can.
This is gospel. I would I had the palate of a
wine-taster to get into touch with life there ;
the prehensile toe and sense of balance of a
tight-rope walker to get into touch there, the
mathematical head of the astronomer to learn
the orbit of a star that has never been seen,
but only conjectured ; or I wish very much
indeed that I had the missionary spirit. In-
deed, then I would go to the nearest cannibal
islands and (probably a good thing, too) be
cheerfully devoured ; or, again, if I had it
in a lesser degree, I would go and teach in
the Sunday-school, and have a class for boys
in the evening. I did try the Sunday-school

OCTOBER. 139

when first I lived here, and for four un-
hallowed Sundays I passed a feverish hour
surrounded by mystified infants and intolerable
lithographs. You never saw such a failure
as I was : I dreaded those hours so much that
I thought my reason would be unhinged.
And the children used to regard me, I am
sure, as they would have regarded some queer,
though harmless, creature of the menagerie.
I couldn't do that sort of thing.

I neither made them happy nor could I
teach them anything. That latter was quite
proved when, on the Sunday succeeding my
fourth lesson, an Archdeacon came round and
examined all the classes in turn. I think I
shall never get over the nightmare horror of
that scrutiny when he sat in my arm-chair
at the desk, and I, the trembling instructor,
stood by the side while he asked my idiot
flock who Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel
were, and other really elementary things. One
child said that Eve was God's wife, and I
wished the earth might open and swallow
me up. Then he came to the Catechism, and

140 A REAPING.

it really seemed as if nobody knew his own
name. And it was for that nightmare thaf I
had spent four feverish Sunday afternoons and
a parody of days between, for every moment
Sunday was coming nearer.

No ; I give more happiness to Legs by being
soundly beaten by him at golf, or by wasting
(so says the Old Humbug) a morning in taking
Helen up to Lord's to see the Gentlemen and
Players. Also — I hasten to forestall criticism
— I like it much better myself; and though
you may, if you like, call it selfish, I hereby
state that to like doing anything is a very
good and Christian reason for doing it. Be-
hold the gauntlet !

For we poor folk who really cannot teach in
Sunday-schools, and are not employed in mak-
ing discoveries which will alleviate painful
diseases, and do not serve our constituency
or our King, and sneakingly throw pamphlets
about the Education Bill into the fire without
reading them, because we know we don't
actually care one pin what happens, and are
in every single respect quite unsatisfactory
and useless and unornamental, have yet, some-

OCTOBER. 141

how (there can be no doubt of this), to add if
we can to the happiness, anyhow, of those dear
folk among whom our lot has been so
graciously cast. We have no great gifts of
any description ; we are neither wise nor witty,
and there has been only one talent given us,
which is the power of enjoyment. Well, that
is a very little one, you may say, and a very
selfish one to cultivate, but if we have nothing
else at all, had we not better try to make some
use of that ?

For the fact remains that it can be made
some use of. Every one feels better for seeing
one of these drones, who are neither soldiers,
nor sailors, nor politicians, nor teachers, enjoy
himself. Enjoyment in the air is like oxygen
in the air : it quickens everybody, and in its
way makes them happier. The poor drones
can neither teach nor fight, nor make anybody
good, but they can in their humdrum way
make people a little more cheerful for a few
minutes. For they have — this is what I mean
by drones — a happy temperament, and as they
are no good at all in any other direction, it
is indeed time that they should be done to

142 A REAPING.

death "by the workers of the hive if they do not
exert themselves in the mere exercise of their
temperament. And just as the drone of the
hive lives immersed in the honey of his flowers
and in the garnered stuff that the workers have
brought home, so the drone man must continue
to take active and continual pleasure in all
the delightful things of this world. He must
pounce on enjoyment with eager zeal, and glut
himself on it till he reels with the stupefaction
of pleasure; he must keep himself keen and
alert for the smallest humorous or engrossing
detail that is within his horizons : it is shame-
ful if he does not go to bed every night tired
with his own laughter and enjoyment. And
woe to him if he invests his pleasures with
the serious garb of duty 5 The leader of the
delectable life who says that he plays golf
because he finds exercise so important for
his health, or who sits out all afternoon to
watch other people playing other games, and
explains that his doctor (his doctor, forsooth !)
tells him to have plenty of fresh air, or who
drinks his delicious wine and says that it is
good for his digestion, is a mere scampish

OCTOBER. 143

hypocrite. He plays games because they are
such fun; he watches other people play be-
cause it amuses him ; he drinks wine because
it tastes so nice.

And he must never falter on his primrose
path ; the high gods have given him but one
little talent, and all that is asked of him is that
he should enjoy life enormously. He has got
to do that, then. The soldier and sailor may
not, perhaps, enjoy life, but they are useful in
other ways. The drone is only useful in this one.
He must never remit his efforts, and must never
want to ; he must ' rush,' as the Old Humbug
said, all the time, for if he ceases to rush he
ceases to justify his existence at all. And — a
heavenly destiny, one, too, beyond all desert
of his — he does, if he is at all a conscientious
drone, make other people a shade more cheer-
fully disposed than they would otherwise have
been.

This breathless dissertation on drones requires
at this point, as printers say, * paragraphing.'
In other words, I began to talk about one
thing, and without pause talked about another.
It was really the fault of the Old Humbug,

144 A REAPING.

who said that I wasted those days in which
I didn't do something for somebody. I then
justified my position on those days by pleading
the desire to be a drone — a life which, as
I have sketched it out, seems to me to be wholly
admirable. I wish to Heaven I could be in
the least like those adorable people. Mis-
begotten industry stands in my way, and a
deep-rooted, but equally misbegotten, idea that
if I am very industrious I shall one day write
a good story. Also, I have not the drone
temperament necessary for dronage. I am not,
in fact, any longer defending myself, but
extolling other people.

Loafers there are in plenty in this world,
but personally I have no use for them. They
lead the same external lives as the lover of
life leads, but how different is the spirit that
animates them ! The loafer may have been
side by side with the life-loving drone all day,
at the same parties, at the same games, at the
same music, but the one goes to all these things
in order to get through the hours without
boredom, while the other wishes the hours in-

OCTOBER. 145

finitely multiplied so that he might go to more.
The one sucks enjoyment of but a stupefied sort
from them ; the other catches the iridescent
balls and bubbles of joy that are cast like sea-
spray over the tides of time, only to throw out
double of what he has received. He is like
some joyful juggler: a stream of objects pours
into the air from his flashing hands ; he catches
them and hurls them into the air again, so that
the eye cannot follow the procession of flying
joys. And at the end, at the close of each day,
he stands still for a moment, his hands full
of them, his memory stored with them, eager
for the next day.

How different is the loafer ! Have you ever
seen the chameleon feed on flies ? It is just
so that the loafer, who wants only to get
through the hours, feeds on the simple, silly
joys of life. In expression the chameleon is
like a tired old gentleman with the face-ache,
though the impression of face-ache is chiefly
produced by cheeks swollen in other ways,
for he rolls up his tongue in a ball in his
mouth when he is going to feed. Then, with
an expression of bored senility, he moves very

146 A REAPING.

cautiously to where a fly is sitting. When he
is within range, he shoots out his tongue, and
the fly sticks to the adhesive tip of it. There
is a slight swallowing motion, and the chameleon
again rolls about his greasy eye, looking for
the next victim. The loafer, in a metaphysical
sense, has got just such an adhesive tongue
as the chameleon. He puts it out, and pleasures
stick to it like postage stamps. Then he
swallows them. Observe, too, when he has to
make occupations for himself, how heavily, and
stupidly he passes the hours ! He will read the
morning paper till midday, then totter out into
his garden, sadly remove one weed from the
path, and totter back to the house to throw
it in the fire. Then he will re-read a page
of his paper, and write an unnecessary note
with unnecessary care, probably wiping his
pen afterwards. It will then be lunch-time.
How different would the drone's morning have
been ! Even if he had been compelled to spend
it on the platform of Clapham Junction, he
would have constructed some ' dome in air ' out
of that depressing suburb. The flashing trains
would have allured him (especially the boat-

OCTOBER. 147

trains), and his mind would have gone long
journeys to the sunny South. He would have
built romance round the signals, and found a
fairy-tale in the advertisements.

And what is the practical side of all this ?
for is it not temperament which makes the
magic of these wonderful persons, and tempera-
ment is a thing which is supposed to be quite
outside the power of its possessor to alter or
amend ?

Broadly speaking, I suppose that is true, and
we who do not possess the magic would bungle
terribly if we attempted to rival the flashing
hands of the true conjurer. I do not suppose,
at any rate, that it is worth while for the medi-
tative recluse to spend his days and nights at
festive gatherings, since he will never enjoy
them himself, and, what is more important, he
will, in his small way, eclipse the gaiety of
those parties on which he sheds the gloom of
his depressing countenance. Yet, since I be-
lieve with my whole heart that joy and simple
pleasure, so long as they hurt nobody, are things
wholly and entirely good, it behoves every one

148 A HEAPING.

to look sedulously in the garden of his mind to
see whether he cannot find there a few little
seedlings of that species of temperament which
I have tried to indicate. His garden may be
the most strenuous and improving plot — a regu-
lar arboretum of high aspirations and earnest
endeavours with the most beautiful gravel paths
of cardinal virtues leading by the thickets and
shrubberies of spiritual strivings, but, should he
happen to find a few of these seedlings, and be
able to raise them, they will not spoil the effect
of the wholly admirable grove of moral purpose.
To be quite candid, I think a little colour ' sets
off/ as they say, the grandeur of high endea-
vour. It — well, it brightens it up.

NOVEMBER

I' remarked Helen, ' am the rose of Sharon,
and the lily of the valley.'

She laid great stress on the 'and,' which
gave a perfectly new significance to the verse.

' The French for lily of the valley is muguet'
said Legs, with an intolerably superior air.

' Oh, don't show off ! ' said she. ' The great
thing in walking along a rail is to keep your
balance.'

* Through the looking-glass,' said I. ' Upon
which the White Knight fell head foremost into
a hole '

' And kept on saying " Plenty of practice," '
said Legs.

' It's easier if you wave your arms,' said
she. ' Oh, there's a train coming. Where's the
gum ?'

Legs had the gum — a small penny bottle —

150 A REAPING.

and Helen hastily gummed a penny to the
rail, and we all retired to the side of the line.

If you merely lay a penny on the rail, the
chances are that the first wheel that goes over
it causes it to jump, and it falls off, whereas if
you gum it

There was a wild maniac shriek from the
engine, suddenly dropping an octave as it passed
us, and the huge train, towering high above us,
thundered by with rattle of wheels and the
throbbing oscillation of very high speed. A
dozen bits of paper came trundling and dancing
after it. The rear of the van telescoped itself
into a tiny square, and the signal just above us,
which had been down to let the train pass, shot
up a warning, right-angled arm.

' Oh, well over sixty/ said Legs, with deep
appreciation, ' and there's the penny sitting as
tight as, as — I don't know. Lord, how hot ! '

The penny had already been under half the
wheels of four trains, and was so flattened that
it was of knife-edge sharpness.

' If you stropped it a little, you could shave
with it/ said Helen. ' What babies you are ! '

Legs was already busy on the up-line, ar-

NOVEMBER. 151

ranging two pins crossways on the gummed,
rail, so that they should be flattened and welded
together, making an entrancing object closely
resembling a pair of scissors.

* The up-train will be through in five min-
utes,' he said. ' Chuck me the penny, Helen.'

I had another object of interest — namely, a
threepenny piece with a hole in it. I had tied
a long string to this, the far end of which I
held in my hand. The reason for this was that
the coin was beginning to crack, but it would
stand a wheel or two more, though it was al-
ready bigger than a sixpence ; after a wheel or
two I could pull it away.

' Gum ! ' said I.

We moved to the far side of the up-line, and
waited. Soon from the tunnel a hundred yards
below came a wreath of smoke, and the black-
fronted engine raced towards us. Everything
went right on that divine afternoon, and after
four wheels had passed I jerked my threepenny
piece away. The scissors were adorable also,
and it would be scarcely necessary to strop
the penny. Of course, we made a cache of
these objects, burying them in a small tin box

152 A HEAPING.

with the addition of a piece of paper recording
our names, weights, and ages. Legs also wrote
a short confession of how he murdered his two
infant children, and hid the bodies in a bramble-
bush ten paces from the cache. There was no
such bramble-bush really, which would make it
more puzzling to the inquiring mind. He re-
presented himself as being perfectly impenitent,
and ready to commit similar crimes should
opportunity occur. He signed it, Benjamin
Yates of 21 A, Park Lane, W. Then we went
home to tea.

Legs had been in for his Foreign Office
examination, and had come down to spend the
next two days with us, before we all moved up
to town ; also, to our deep-felt and secret joy, he
had shown no desire to visit the Ampses, or talk
any more German with Charlotte. The process
of disillusionment began, I think, on the evening
in October when he was here last, and the
Ampses dined with us ; for I saw him overhear
Mrs. Amps ask Helen who ' was the heir to all
our beautiful property.' At that moment I
almost pitied Mrs. Amps. She had begun by

NOVEMBER. 153

making jam, but I felt that she had gone on to
cook Charlotte's goose. Legs, anyhow, stopped
in the middle of a sentence, and took a couple
of seconds to recover himself. I am sure I
don't wonder. You require to recuperate after
that sort of remark. I felt that I knew all
about Mrs. Amps when she asked that simple
question. I felt as if I had known her parents
and grandparents, and could prophesy about her
children and grandchildren ; and Legs' eyes,
which till that moment had been quite shut,
began to open, just to blink.

Next day, however, he lunched with them.
What happened I do not know, since he has not
told rne ; but he was rather silent in the evening,
ate little, but drank four glasses of port after
dinner. I think the instinct of the drowning
of care was there, and he was slightly cynical
and Byronic afterwards. I love Legs.

I hasten to add, lest I may appear unfeeling,
that Charlotte has for the last week or two been
kind and encouraging to another young man,
who is the heir to far more beautiful property.
I saw him at the golf-links yesterday in a
bunker. He was arranging her hands so as to

154 A REAPING.

grasp her niblick properly. They seemed to
want a great deal of arranging. By-and-by
they allowed my opponent and me to pass.
Charlotte seemed not to recognize me, or else
she was really so much employed in making her
hat stay on that she did not see me. I mentioned,
however, to Legs that I had seen her, but that
she had not seen me. It seemed to interest him
very little.

But this morning, as Legs and I played golf
over the grey back of the huge down that rises
from our happy valley, it seemed a sheer insanity
that we should all go up to London the next
day, so blithe was the air, so invigorating to the
whole sense. The short, springy turf seemed to
put its own vitality into one's feet ; they were
shot forward automatically without conscious
effort. And — ah, the rapture ! — (it occurred
more frequently to Legs than to me) of seeing
a clean white ball scud for a hundred yards or
so low over the ground, and then rise swallow-
like against the ineffable blue ! Golfers, I am
told, reck nothing of their surroundings, provided
only they drive far, approach dead, and hole
their puts ; and so I must conclude — indeed, I

NOVEMBER. 155

conclude it for other reasons — that I am no
golfer. But I am an epicure in my surround-
ings when I go a-golfing, and though the grey
dunes and sandy hollows of the seaside course
are most to my mind, I place very near those
perfect joys the hugeness of scale which you get
only on the uplands. To-day no whiff of vapour
flecked the whole field of the shining heavens,
and the country, grey and green, with fire of
autumn beech-wood here and there, stretched
map-like round us. But to the west the view
was even more stirring to that desire of the
infinite which lies so close to the heart of man.
There fold after fold of downs, the knitted
muscles of the huge, kind earth lay in unending
interlacement. And it was all empty. There
were no trees, no lines of hedgerows to break
the void, and lend a scale to the eye. From
the immediate green foreground slope after
slope melted into grey, and from grey to the
blue of distance, which fused itself into the
tender azure of the sky's horizon, so that the
line between earth and air was indistinguishable,
It was as empty as the desert, yet one knew
that from every inch of it a thousand lives

156 A REAPING.

rejoiced in the sun of November. Yes, even
the .knowledge that there would be but few
more of such hours before winter hurled its
armoury of squalls on to the earth added,
perhaps, to their joy. None could have ex-
pected such a November as has been ours.
We have snatched it from winter ; it is our
possession.

Yet the colour of the grass, no less than the
underlying keenness of the air, savour of the
sunless months. It is scarcely green; it has
been bleached by the torrid months, and Nature
is too wise to let it shine forth in a fresh coat
of colour when so soon it will sleep, waiting for
the spring. High up in the liquid blue, too, of
the sky there is the sparkle of frost, for all the
warm strength of the sunlight. It is not summer
that floats above our heads, soon to descend
earthwards, but the frost and cold. Yet they
bless the Lord also.

But though I feel all this, feel it in every
bone and fibre of my body, I know that I feel
it more when I am doing something else — as,
for instance, playing golf. I think it must be
that one pleasure quickens others. The fact of

NOVEMBER. 157

attempting to keep one's eye on the ball as one
hits it makes the whole of one's perceptions
more alert. If I was taking a solitary walk
here, with no occupation except that of walking,
I know quite well that I should not be conscious
of the same rapturous well-being as I am now,
when the object of my walk is to hit a small
piece of indiarubber for three or four miles,
hitting it, too, as seldom as possible. So it is
not the mere hitting it that gives rapture, else
the rapture would be increased by the frequency
of the operation. Oh, I have been talking on
the stroke ! This will never do. But it was
my own stroke, and Hampshire flew about in
fids in consequence.

This was at the twelfth hole, and it made the
match square. Legs, I need hardly remark, was
playing a pitiful game for him. But on the
moment — this is one of the inexplicable things
about those foolish people who play games — my
whole mood changed. I cared no more at all
for the empty, glorious downs. I did not mind
whether the grass was blue, or grey, or green,
or magenta. I saw no more flaring beech-
woods, no more mapped counties. There was

168 A REAPING.

one desire only in the entire contents of my
soul, and that was to beat Legs. I did not feel
as if I even wanted anything so much as that,
and if Mephistopheles had appeared at that
moment to bargain for my salvation as the
price of my victory, I should have signed in
my blood or any other blood that was handy.
But Mephistopheles was probably otherwise
engaged. At any rate, after being still all
square at the seventeenth, I drove into a silly
irrational bunker that ought never to have been
there at the eighteenth. I took three to get
out. But we had a heavenly morning. If
only . . . well, well. And Legs told Helen that
he only just won, because he was completely off
his game! The tongue is an unruly member.
Mine is. Had I won, I should have certainly
told Helen that Legs played a magnificent game,
and I had only just won. That sounds more
generous than his remark, but if you think it
over, you will see that it comes to exactly the
same thing.

Yes ; it seems an insanity to leave the country
just now, especially since there is no earthly
reason for our doing so* Divine things, it is

NOVEMBER. 159

true, are going on in town, for our matchless
Isolde is conducting symphony concerts, and a
perfect constellation of evening stars are singing
together at the opera ; but, after all, Legs and I
play the ' Meistersinger ' overture arranged for
four hands on the piano; while, for the rich
soup of Sloane Street mud and the vapour-
ridden sky, we have here the turf of the
downland and the ineffable blue. In fact, I
am sorry to go, but should be rather disap-
pointed if I was told that I was not going.
Helen characterizes this state of mind as feeble,
which it undoubtedly is, and says that she is
perfectly willing either to go to-morrow or to
stop on another week, if I will only make up
my mind which I want to do. But there is the
whole difficulty: I haven't the slightest idea
which I want to do. You might as well say
to a dog which is being called from opposite
quarters by two beloved voices : ' Only make
up your mind which of us you like best.' If
it knew, the question would be solved.

Well, the question was solved by tossing up,
and then, of course, doing the opposite to what
we had decided the arbitrament of the coin

160 A REAPING.

should indicate. If it was heads, we were to
stop in the country; and since it was heads,
that helped us to decide that we would go to
town. That, too, may seem a feeble proceeding,
but I do not think it really is. To do anything
as irrational as tossing causes the mind to revolt
from the absurdity of abiding by the result.
The consequence is that a weighty factor for
doing what the coin did not indicate is supplied ;
for you never toss unless you are quite unable
to decide.

So for the last afternoon the garden claimed
me, for not only is the garden the symbol and
embodiment of the country, but to me it is a
sort of diary almost, since the manual acts of
planting and ^tending have got so interwoven
with that which made one's mind busy while
the hands were thus occupied that the sight of
this plant or that, of a new trellis, or the
stacked sticks of the summer's sweet-peas, are,
when one looks at them as now, retrospectively,
on the eve of departure, retranslated back, as
are the records of a phonograph, into the
memories that have been pricked and stamped
into them. All I see — croquet-hoops, flower-

NOVEMBER. 161

beds — without ceasing to be themselves, have
all become a secret cipher. By some mysterious
alchemy, something of oneself has passed into
them. Secret fibres of soul-stuff are woven into
them. Through the touch of the hands that
tended them, something from the being of that
which directed those hands has entered into
their life, so that next year, it may be, some
regret belonging to an autumn day will flower
in the daffodils of our planting. Hope, I am
sure, will flower too; and with how vivid a
wave of memory do I know what silent resolve
went into the cutting back of that Gloire de
Dijon ! Thus, when in June its fragrance
streams in the air, one must trust that some
fragrance not its own, but of a fruit-bearing
effort, will be spread about the garden.

There, for instance, are the croquet-hoops
still standing, though it must be a month since
we had played. A few withered leaves of the
plane have drifted against the wires, and the
worms have been busy on the neglected lawn,
that speaks only of November. But that
corner hoop has a significance beyond paint
and wire. It is the record of the telegram
6

162 A HEAPING.

that came out to me one morning in late
September which I showed Legs. After that
we abandoned the game, and went to the house.
It may have more for us yet, that corner hoop
— more, I mean, than that memory of which I
have spoken. Joy or sorrow may be so keen,
so poignant on some day yet hid behind the
veil of the future, when I shall be looking at it,
that till the day of my death it will never again
be seen by my mortal eye without rousing an
immortal and imperishable memory. It is thus,
in a manner antimaterialistic, so to speak, that
men, material things, are woven into the psy-
chical web of life, so that, almost before the eye
has seen them, they have sent the message of
their secret significance to the brain.

Everywhere, wherever I look, the tangle of
these subtle threads is spread, even as on
summer dawns the myriad spinning of gossamer
makes network on the grass, so that each is
crossed and intertwined with a woof of others.
There is the bank where I lay all one hot July
day doing nothing, thinking nothing, just lapped
in the tide of living things. That has gone
home. That bank and the hours I passed there

NOVEMBER. 163

are part of me now, even as I feel that I am
part of it, and I have but to look at it now to
bask again in the absorbing stupor of the mid-
summer. There, in its blades of grass and
shadowed turf, is written my doing for the
day. The bank holds it in kind, safe keeping,
so that when God inquires of me what I have
done with that day that He gave me, the bank
will be able to answer for me. Nor does it tell
my secret to the croquet-hoop that holds another,
nor to the clematis that on that day was a
heaven full of purple stars spread over the
trellis. There was nothing in all the treasure
of the summer so beautiful, so triumphant as
that ; but what to me now is the memory of
the clematis ? The memory of a friendship that
is over. At least, I was looking at it when I
know that somebody I had loved and trusted
was neither trustworthy nor lovable. It was
as if a friend had pushed back the carpet from
the boards of the room where he and I had so
often been merry and intimate together, and
showed me, with a sort of secret hideous glee,
that a sewer flowed beneath the floor. Poor
clematis ! it is sick at heart. Its thin, bare

164 A REAPING.

stalk shivers mournfully as this golden after-
noon begins to turn a little grey with the chill
wind of evening.

Ah, if only he had said he was sorry ! If
only he had said that he knew it was wrong,
but that the flesh was weak ! If only he had
even contemplated the step, which to some extent
undoes the wrong that has been done, I do not
think the clematis would have shed a single one
of its purple stars. All of us, saints or sinners,
do dreadful things, the memory of which is suffi-
cient to make us long to sink into the earth for
shame. But he only smiled behind his hand, and
with whispered gusto told me about it, licking
the chops of memory. It is that which matters.

That corner of the garden had delayed me
long, and it was already getting dark when I
had gathered up and fingered the gossamer '
threads that lay so thickly down the border
that led to the gate from which descend the
steps of the rose-garden. There were so
many messages there. The bare stalks of
phloxes and campanulas, Oriental poppies and
hollyhocks, Japanese anemone and iris — all had

NOVEMBER. 165

something to say. Some memories were a little
vague, faint, and dim even as the odour of
the phloxes ; some were tall and resplendent
like the hollyhocks ; some were vivid as the
poppies. And then I went through the gate
of the rose-garden and stood there. There was
nothing there but the rose-trees; there was no
one there but Helen.

So the tale of the garden was told, and by
the time it was finished dusk had begun to
deepen, and cheerful beckoning lights were
gleaming from the house. It was time to go in
to take up, and with what love and alacrity, the
pleasant hour of the present again ; for it is not
ever good to linger too long over memories, or
for however short a time to indulge in regrets,
unless those regrets are to be built into the
fabric of the present, making it stronger and
and more courageous. All other regrets, all
other regarding of the past, which says, ' It is
past; it is irretrievably done/ is enervating
and poisonous, and but paralyzes our energies.
Indeed, it is better not to be sorry at all for the
unwise, unkind, and mistaken things we have

166 A REAPING.

done if our sorrow tends to unfit us for doing
better in the future.

But just as I crossed the lawn, going towards
the house, another memory started up out of the
dusk so clearly that I almost thought that again
I heard my name called from the garden, and
almost expected, when I got indoors, to hear
again the sound of shuffling, unshod feet on the
stairs. The memory of that mysterious mid-
night hour, though I have not spoken of it again,
is seldom out of my thoughts. It does not sit,
so to speak, in the front row, but in the dimness
that lies at the back of one's mind, out of which
come those vague vapours which are, if they
have body enough, eventually condensed into
thought, just as out of thought is coined speech
and action. There in that dark kitchen of the
mind I know that the thought of that night has
ever been simmering on the fire. Something
within me is not content with the fact that even
at the moment that the voice cried from the
garden, at the moment when Legs saw the
white face smiling at him, that dear soul passed
to the other side. There is more to come yet.
Else — here is the vapour taking the shape of

NOVEMBER. 167

thought at last — else why did Legs, who scarcely
knew her, receive that warning ? No echo of
any memory of that night, strangely also, has
ever come back to him. He knows no more
about it now than he did the next morning,
when he asked me if I had been sitting up
late talking.

I have told Helen all about it ; I have told
her too — for there is nothing so wild and fan-
tastical that I would not tell it her — that there
is some uneasy guest sitting at my hearth who
stays in the shadow, so that I cannot see his
face. And she answered with a serenity that
was almost reassuring, saying that, if some-
thing more was coming, there was still, what-
ever it was, nothing to fear ; if otherwise, the
uneasy guest was moonshine of the imagination.
That seems to cover the whole ground. But the
fact is that I am afraid of my fear — a thing for
which it is idle to try to find excuses.

We are leaving quite early to-morrow
morning, so, when I entered the house that
evening after the tour of the garden, I had
definitely finished with the country for some

168 A REAPING.

weeks to come. So, too, had Helen and Legs,
for tea had already gone into the drawing-
room. And even as I locked the garden-door
behind me, I heard a sudden gust of wind come
and shake the panes, as if this calm, golden day
had been sent just for us, and that the moment
we had finished with it the winds, overdue, but
kindly waiting for us, began to drive their
cloud-flocks out of the south-west. Nor was
the coming of the rain long delayed. Even
while we sat at tea, a sheet of it was flung with
a sudden wild tattoo against the panes, and
there hissed on to the logs of the open hearth a
few stray drops. Legs paused, with his mouth
full of crumpet.

'It makes me feel twice as comfortable as I
was before/ he said. ' It must be so beastly out
of doors/

Legs had just uttered this thoroughly Lucre-
tian sentiment, when —

The door opened, and Mr. Holmes was
announced. I have refrained from mentioning
Mr. Holmes before because I expected he would
come in about now, big with purpose. He is
a kind little gentleman, about forty-five years

NOVEMBER. 169

old, who lives with his sister, and does not do
anything whatever. He is generally known as
the Bun-hander, because no tea-party has ever
been known to take place for miles round at
which Mr. Holmes was not handing refreshments
to the ladies. That is his strength, his forte.
His weakness is just as amiable — though,
perhaps, hardly so useful — for his weakness
is E/ank.

He constantly comes to see Helen — about
once a fortnight, that is to say (for in the autumn
he is very busy going to tea-parties) — for the
reason, so Legs and I believe, that she is the
daughter of the younger son of a peer. Helen
will have none of this, and maintains that he
comes to see her for Herself. Personally, I can
behave beautifully when Mr. Holmes finds
Helen and me alone, but I am rather nervous if
Legs happens to be in the room, for he is quite
unable to take his eyes off Mr. Holmes, but
stares at him in a sort of stupor of wonderment.
Once (that is a year ago now) he left the room
very suddenly. Choking and muffled sounds
were heard from the hall and the stamping of
feet. Helen and I talked very loud to overscore

170 A REAPING.

this, and I trust Mr. Holmes did not hear. But
when Legs is there, I am afraid (it is a sort of
nightmare) that I shall be overtaken, too, with
helpless giggling. If I begin, Helen will go off,
and I can imagine no way of satisfactorily
terminating the interview. Because if once I
began laughing at Mr. Holmes, I do not see how
I could ever stop. His appearance, his voice,
his conversation, are all quite inimitable.

He is small and inclined to stoutness, and has
a fierce little moustache, so much on end that it
looks as if it had just seen a ghost. Not long
ago he had no teeth to speak of ; now they are
as dazzling and continuous, as Mr. Wordsworth
said, as the stars that shine. He has rather
thin brown hair, which I will swear used to be
streaked with grey, but is so no longer, and he
wears three rings with stones in them. One is
an emerald, so magnificent that it is almost
impossible to believe in it. He is dressed in the
very height and zenith of provincial fashion, and
would no more be seen in shabby clothes than
he would be seen without stays. Yes ; I main-
tain it, and even Helen, who was a perfect St.
Thomas about it for long, has admitted that

NOVEMBER. 171

occasional creaks proceed from Mr. Holmes's
person for which it is difficult to offer any other
explanation. It was a creak, in fact, more than
usually loud that made Legs leave the room on
the occasion I have referred to. Down his
trousers he has the most beautiful creases, and
all his clothes nearly fit perfectly. He wears
brown boots with cloth tops, above which when
he sits down you can see socks with clocks on them
stranglingly suspended. In the winter he wears
a hat with a furrow in it, and in the summer a
panama. He wears a knitted tie (just now it is
rather the fashion here for young men to have
ties knitted for them by their friends), which
Helen says is certainly machine-made, with a
pin in it. His shirt always has some stripe or
colour in it, and his links are invariably the
same colour as the stripe. To-day the links
were turquoise and the stripe light blue. And
from top to toe it is all a little wrong,
though since I do not know how clothes are
made, I cannot tell you what is wrong. The
effect, however, is that, though so carefully
arrayed, Mr. Holmes looks like a rather elderly
shop-assistant going out on Sunday afternoon.

172 A REAPING.

Mr. Holmes goes out much oftener than that,
for he may be seen in the window of the club
every morning from about half-past eleven till
one. I have often seen him sitting in the
window there looking at illustrated papers, and
smoking a cork-tipped cigarette, ladies* size.
Then he goes home to lunch, and after lunch
either drives with his sister in a hired fly, or
else, if it is very fine, goes round the ladies'
golf-links, which are a good deal shorter than
the men's. He has tea at the club and sits
there till dinner. Then, after a blameless day,
he goes home to dine and sleep. I suppose no
one in the world has ever done less of any
description.

I have alluded to his weakness — rank ; he
has another, which is gossip. He knows who
was dining at the Ampses last Wednesday, and
who lunched with the Archdeacon on Sunday,
and how the Bishop's wife is. It is he for
whom also the fashionable intelligence is written
in the daily papers, and, though he never goes
there, he knows who is in town, and who
lunched at Prince's last Sunday, or walked in
the Park, and how the Marquis of God-knows-

NOVEMBER. 173

what is after his operation. (He always refers
to a Marquis as a Marquis, to an Earl as an
Earl.) But, best of all, perhaps, he loves infini-
tesimal intrigue, especially if it concerns Rank.

And here my portentous secret must burst
from rne. For the fact is that for the last three
days the town has been convulsed, and I have
been holding it all back, assuming an unnatural
calm, so that it might all come in a deluge.
For three days ago a xDuchess came here to
open a window, or shut a door in the town-hall,
which had been put up in memory of something,
and was entertained to luncheon afterwards by
the Corporation. And on this eye-opening
occasion Helen was sent in before the wife of
the younger son of a Baronet. And in conse-
quence the wife of the younger son of the Baronet
cut her afterwards, as with a knife ; yet knife
was no word for it: the averted eye was more
like a scimitar. Before the assembled company,
when Helen went to shake hands with her after
lunch, she cut her, and she turned from her,
revolving on her own axis like the eternal stars.
Upon which, very properly, after two days'
heated discussion, and a great demand for

174 A REAPING.

Debrett, public opinion sided with, the wife
of the younger son of the Baronet, on the
ground that Helen took her husband's rank,
which in this case happened to be none at all.
What made it worse was that the Duchess, who
should have known better, being an old friend of
Helen's, came to tea with her afterwards in a
motor-car covered with coronets for all the
world to see.

You may imagine that the fat was in the fire
after that. Helen had no idea why the wife of
the Baronet's younger son had cut her, and
perhaps might never have known had not Mr.
Holmes dropped in only yesterday and told her,
adding that he was sure he could clear it up.
I was not at home when this interview took
place, but when he entered the room this after-
noon, after having called only yesterday, it was
certain that he must have come on this subject.
He had a book in his pocket, which made an
unusual bulge.

Legs was steeped in wide-eyed contemplation
as Mr. Holmes had his tea. From time to time
I glanced at him, and saw that the corners
of his mouth were faintly twitching. His eye

NOVEMBER. 175

travelled from Mr. Holmes's face to his jewelled
hands; it lingered about his clothes, but came
ftack, loverlike, to his face. In a few minutes
vre had learned about everbody — how the Lord-
Lieutenant of the county had driven through in
his motor — not the Daimler, but a new Panhard
— yesterday afternoon, stopping only at the fish-
monger's, and taking the London road after-
wards ; how there had been a party at the
barracks last night, at which there was music ;
but not very good music, Mr. Holmes was
afraid ; how the Bishop had not influenza at all,
but only a bad cold ; how The Pines had been
taken by the Hon. Alice Accrington, who had a
cork foot — so sad. A rhinoceros had trodden on
the original one.

I had ceased to be able to look at Legs, but
here I heard him give a little whimper, as a dog
does when it wants a door to be opened for it.
Helen all the time had been of impeccable
behaviour. She had asked just the right
questions, and appeared so genuinely interested
that I felt I had never known before of what
depth of hypocrisy she was capable. Then Mr.
Holmes's wealth of information began to grow

176 A REAPING.

thin, even as the stars burn thin at daybreak,
and I knew that he was going to dawn, and
that the true reason for which he came was
going to break forth. He put down his cup on
the tea-table, took a cigarette, and suddenly
creaked.

If you can imagine a sneeze, a cough, a spit,
the strangled wheeze caused by a fish-bone in
the throat, and the noise an empty siphon of
soda-water makes when you press the handle,
all combined, you will faintly grasp what Legs
did. His effort to swallow the whole of this
mixed convulsion was most praiseworthy, though
I should think dangerous, and it came to my
ears only as if someone had done it half a mile
away. Mr. Holmes, I am sure, heard nothing
this time, and Legs left the room with his
handkerchief to his mouth in the manner of
mourners in the second coach at a funeral.
There was no sound outside, but soon after
a muffled tread overhead, where is his bedroom.
Then for a moment I caught Helen's eye. She
looked so inexpressibly grave that I nearly
asked her who was dead. . Then dawn came.
Mr. Holmes has a high cackling voice, and the

NOVEMBER. 177

bulgy volume in his pocket was ' Whitaker's
Almanack.'

' I should have come before/ he said, ' but I
wanted to come to you last, and really the after-
noon has flown. About Tuesday now. Dear
lady, you only took your right place. There is
no question about it. I have been to the
Mayor, I have been to the Archdeacon. Look.'

He found a page in Whitaker, and gave
Helen the volume. It was a table of prece-
dence. I saw ' Eldest sons of younger sons of
peers' underlined.

' Look at the next column,' he said. ' The
sister takes the rank of her husband or her
elder brother. Now see where younger sons
of Baronets and their wives come ! '

Far away below eldest sons of younger
sons of peers, in an outer darkness below even
members of the fifth class of the Victorian
Order, I saw that obscure relationship. My
emotions of various kinds almost suffocated
me. Helen was justified before all the world.
It was her turn to cut the wife of the younger
son of the Baronet if she chose.

So we talked very pleasantly for a quarter

178 A REAPING.

of an hour about the movements of the aristoc-
racy, and then Mr. Holmes 'rose to go/ His
cab was waiting, and I helped him on with a
very magnificent fur coat in the hall, which
in the somewhat indistinct light seemed to be
made of the purest rabbit skin. In the dim-
ness of the landing above I thought I could
see an obscure shadow leaning over the ban-
isters which resembled Legs.

'I hope, after this, your wife will take her
proper place/ said Mr. Holmes. ' Of course,
everyone knows the Duchess came here to tea.'

He lit a cigarette, and I heard the banister
tremble slightly, as if from an infinitesimal
earthquake.

' It is so kind of you to have taken so much
trouble/ said I firmly.

' It was nothing. I am sure you need have
no further anxiety/

I went back to the drawing-room. Helen's
face was buried in a sofa-cushion, and Legs
came downstairs in three jumps.

So we laughed till it was time to dress for
dinner. Occasionally we seemed to be recover-

NOVEMBER. 179

ing, but then somebody said ' Creak/ or
' Baronet,' and a fresh relapse took place.

I pity all poor souls who do not know Mr.
Holmes. It is so sad for them — sadder than
the lady with the cork foot. Oh, think of it !
This triumphant vindication of Helen (which is
all wrong, by the way) will last him a long,
long time. It has been a campaign, triumph-
antly concluded, and I should not in the least
wonder if he has half a bottle of champagne
to-night. And after a time the excitement
will die away, fading like a golden sunset,
and he will settle down to his ordinary life
again, and read the paper in the morning,
and go for a little drive in the afternoon, and
have tea and toast at the club afterwards.
And in the spring the Panama hat will come
out, and the rich fur coat be put away, and
he will hand strawberries instead of buns,
and iced coffee instead of tea, and perhaps play
a little croquet. But this week has been a great
week for him — it really has. If you want to
understand the gloriousness of Mr. Holmes, you
must take my word for it that nothing so en-
grossing has happened to him for months.

DECEMBER

^HIS once-happy family has suddenly re-
X turned to the pit whence it was digged,
and it is impossible to imagine any more
depressing spectacle than we present. Dawn in
faint flickers is beginning to shine on the wreck,
and occasionally for a moment or two, though
we may be over-sanguine, Helen and I can
dimly imagine being happy again. Legs
cannot do that yet ; it is still midnight gloom
with him.

The intelligent reader will scarcely need to
be told that it is the influenza that has
blackened the world like this. Helen began,
and Legs and I followed within twenty-four
hours. That, somehow, is a relief to her,
since she feels she did not give it us. As
if it mattered where it came from ! Besides,
personally I would rather catch it from her

182 A HEAPING.

than anyone else. Legs has had the worst
visitation, because, after it was quite certain
he had got it, he persisted in attending the
last night of the autumn opera season, did not
enjoy it at all, of course, by reason of a split-
ting headache, and was really ill for a day or
two. I was infinitely wiser. As soon as the
nymph touched me with her fairy hand I
went firmly to bed, turned my face to the
wall like Hezekiah, and stopped there till the
fever was over. After five days I tottered
downstairs to find an old, old woman sitting
by the fire. It was Helen.

I think that was the most dreadful day
I ever remember. She told me again and
again how ill I looked until I was goaded
into a sort of depressed frenzy, and said I
couldn't possibly look as ill as she. We both
had beef-tea in the middle of the morning,
and to my horror, when it was brought, it
was brought not by Raikes, my man who is
as indispensable to this house as is the carbu-
retter to a motor-car (for it won't run without),
but by an Awful Thing that I never saw
before. In answer to an inquiry, I was told

DECEMBER. 183

that Raikes felt very ill, and had asked the
Awful Thing to bring us our beef-tea instead
of him. So I sent her back to Raikes with
a thermometer that he was to be so good as
to put under his tongue for one minute, and
then return. It came back recording 102
degrees. I gave the Awful Thing the ther-
mometer to wash, and she instantly dropped
it on the floor. It was, of course, broken
into twenty million fragments, but I remem-
bered that, though I was a worm, I was a
Christian worm, and said : ' Never mind.
Please tell Raikes that he is to go to bed
instantly.' I then picked up the twenty
million fragments, and cut myself severely.
I said c Damn ! ' quite softly.

Helen winced, which was merely intended
to annoy me, and it succeeded admirably.

So there we sat exactly like that awful
picture called ' Les Frileux,' in which an old
man and an old woman sit apart under a
leafless tree. The ground is covered with the
dead leaves. Soon they will die, too.

It is impossible to depict the dreariness of
that morning. Outside a sort of jaundiced day

184 A REAPING.

showed the soupy mud that flooded Sloane
Street, through which motor-buses, which once
I thought so fine, splashed their way. A few
sordid people under umbrellas bobbed by the
windows, and as the darkness increased a
man with a long stick began to turn up the
lamps. Then it instantly got rather lighter,
and another man (not the same one) with
another long stick came and turned them
down again. Upon which Egyptian dark-
ness settled down over the town, and I
must suppose that the first man had caught
the influenza, for he never turned them up
any more.

Helen was not reading ; she was sitting by
the fire looking mournfully at the coals. This
would not do at all, and in the intervals of a
paroxysm of coughing I asked :

' How is Legs this morning ? '

' Worse/ said Helen.

I took up the Daily Telegraph, and read
the list of the people who were dead. I
knew one of them slightly. Then my cut
finger began to bleed again, which reminded
me of the Awful Thing.

DECEMBER.

185

'Servants are so ridiculous and tiresome/
I said. ' I should think your maid might
havo found time to bring up our beef-tea,
instead of that dreadful girl. I don't know
where you get your servants from/

' Barton went to bed yesterday with influenza,'
said Helen wheezily. ' She is very feverish —
worse than Legs.'

I can't say why, but this news made me
feel rather better, so I lit a cigarette. It
tasted exactly as if it had been made of the
green weed which grows on stagnant horse-
ponds. I felt much worse again at once, and
was quite sure my temperature was going up.
But I could not have the mournful satisfaction
of knowing that this was true, because the
thermometer was broken. And my finger con-
tinued to bleed. The blood was very bright
red — probably arterial. Yet, whatever was
happening, it seemed impossible that things
were as desperate as I thought them, and I
made the excellent determination to do some-
thing.

' Will it disturb you if I play the piano ? '
I asked Helen.

186 A REAPING.

' Not the least/

I attempted to play the ' Etudes Sympho-
niques,' beginning with the last variation, by
reason of the sky-scraping spirits of it. I
don't think I played any correct notes at all,
and Helen (again to annoy me) made the
noise which tiresome people make to show
that a wrong note gets on their highly sensi-
tive nerves. It consists of a whistling intake
of the breath. Though I had only played a
dozen bars, the white notes in the treble were
spotted with blood, as if I was a Jew and
the piano was the lintel of the door on Pass-
over night. It was absurd to go on playing
on a blood-boltered piano, even if I could play
the right notes, which I could not. So again,
with the laudable idea of doing something, I
staggered upstairs, brought down a moistened
towel, and proceeded to clean the keys. I
struck notes from time to time, and Helen
kept on wincing.

' Is that necessary ? ' she asked at length.

' Yes, because I have bled over the piano.
Besides, I'm cleaning it with the soft pedal
down.'

DECEMBER. 187

The door was flung open, and the Awful
Thing appeared.

' Dinner/ she said, and left the door open.

We went downstairs. ' Dinner ' in Raikes'
indisposition was huddled on to the table.
There were pieces of moist fish under one cover.
There was a ginger pudding under another.
There were large potatoes under a third ; and
under the fourth a rich and red beef-steak.
Then despair descended on me.

' Is the cook ill, too ? ' I asked of the Awful
Thing.

' Yes, sir/

< Who cooked this ? Or, rather, didn't ? '

' Please, sir, I did/

Then quite suddenly, both for Helen and me,
dawn began to break for a little. Here was
three-quarters of the establishment incapaci-
tated, and the Awful Thing was calmly doing
everybody's work as well as her own, which
was that of a housemaid. Helen cheered up
at once.

' Please give me some fish/ she said to me.
' It looks quite excellent/

I helped her largely and sumptuously. We

188 A BE APING.

both understood each other at this moment,
and I put a thumping helping on to my own
plate.

Helen, greatly daring, took a greedy mouth-
ful, and spoke to the Awful Thing, who was
beginning to beam largely on us.

' Delicious,' she said to her. e I had no idea
you could cook so beautifully. You needn't
wait ; we will ring. And you must have
help in at once. Will you telephone to Mrs.
Watkins' agency, asking for a — (she paused,
and I know she was going to say ' cook ') — a
housemaid ? '

The Awful Thing smiled from ear to ear, and
a moment afterwards we heard the insane
ringing of the telephone.

' Oh, I couldn't send for a cook just this
moment/ said Helen, when the girl had left the
room. e She was bursting with pride at having
cooked this. But if I eat it I shall be sick.
What are we to do ? '

The girl in her enthusiasm had built the
fire three-quarters of the way up the chimney,
though the day was muggy and warm beyond
all telling. Into the heart of the blaze we

DECEMBER. 189

stuffed large pieces of fish, which burned with a
blue and oily flame.

' Now ring/ said Helen.

The girl returned after a long pause.

c Please 'm, Mrs. Watkins hasn't a housemaid
to send, by reason of so much illness. But
she can send a cook,' she said, and her face
fell.

' It's such a pity, when you can cook so well,'
said Helen ; ' but we must have somebody. You
can't do all the work/

' A char and I could manage, 'm/ she said,
changing the plates with an awful clatter. .

' Oh, not with Mr. Legs ill/ said Helen. ' We
shall have you knocked up next, and where
should we be then ? '

The radiant smile returned to the girl's
face.

' Give me some steak, Jack/ said Helen, ' and
a potato. How delicious it smells I '

The Awful Thing again left the room, leav-
ing, as it were, the fragrance of her smile
behind her.

We made no attempt to eat any of the second
course, but put two large slices of steak, two

190 A REAPING.

potatoes, and a big spoonful of perspiring
cauliflower into the fire. Pieces of ginger-
pudding followed it to the burning ghaut, and
soon the door again opened, and coffee was
brought in. This was an after-thought, I fancy,
though ill-inspired and gritty. But there was
a coal-scuttle.

I am afraid we both relapsed again after
lunch, though for a time the shining example
of the housemaid who had done the work
of everybody else inspired us to attempt to
play piquet, bezique, and the piano. But these
were all hopeless : it did not seem worth
while dealing, and, in point of fact, the attempt
at a duet came to a conclusion at the end
of the first page, for Helen only groaned and
said:

I 1 can't turn over/

But that, I am thankful to say, was our low-
water mark.

Sunshine began to shine more strongly on
the wreck when Legs, two days afterwards,
came downstairs, with the cheering remark that
he felt so ill that he was sure he couldn't be

DECEMBER. 191

as ill as he felt. Soon after he burst into
hoarse laughter.

'I shall cheer up when I have counted ten/
he remarked.

Well, on the whole, when it was put simply
and firmly like that, it seemed the best thing
to do. Legs took change of the cheering pro-
cess, and ordered a basin, soap, and three
churchwarden pipes, and we blew soap-bubbles,
which, though it may not be in itself a work
of high endeavour, had at least the result of
making us do something, which is always a
good thing. So, when that was over, in order
to contribute to the wholesome atmosphere
of employment, I brought in and read to him
and Helen what I had written that morning,
and had designed to appear in the book you
are now reading. It was — I will not deceive
you — a string (a long one) of cheap and gloomy
reflections on the mutability of life, the
reality of suffering, and the certainty of death.
I had taken some trouble with it, but the
most poignant and searing sentences made
Legs simply roll in his chair with laughter
that was noiseless merely because his throat

192 A REAPING.

was in such a state of relaxation that it could
not make sounds. But with eyes streaming
and in a strangled whisper he said :

' Oh, do stop a moment till I don't hurt so
much with laughing, and then read it again.'

I looked at Helen. She had a handkerchief
to her face, and her shoulders shook with in-
controllable laughter.

1 It's much the funniest thing you ever wrote/
she said. ' Isn't it, now ? Begin again at " All
the pain and sorrow with which we are sur-
rounded " — oh, no, before that — something about
" It is when we are racked with suffering our-
selves." Oh, Legs, isn't it heavenly ? '

Legs had recovered himself a little, but still
drummed with his feet on the carpet.

' I never knew I could feel so much better
so quickly/ he said. 'I felt a mere worm
when I proposed soap-bubbles. I want it all
again from the beginning, where what you
thought was sunlight was barred with strange
shadows. O Lor ! '

So I gave them this intellectual — or should
I say spiritual ? — treat once more, and then
threw the manuscript into the fire, amid the

DECEMBER. 193

shrill expostulations of the others. Legs made
heroic attempts to save it, but fruitlessly, or,
indeed, I would print it here, as a warning to
those who do not feel very well to postpone
their meditations upon life and death until they
feel a little better. Also, I do not think that
one's reflections on any subject are likely to
be of much value unless they are founded on
some sort of experience, and, to be quite honest,
I had founded my views that morning on the
mutability of life and the anguish of the
world on the depression which was the result
of a feverish cold. They were depressing
enough, but I do not think that they were
of sufficiently solid foundations. They proved,
it is true, extraordinarily cheering to Helen
and Legs, but one cannot be certain that the
rest of the world would be equally exhilarated.
They might be taken seriously, though Helen
says I need not have been afraid of that.

Every man, even a pessimist, is supposed to
have a perfect right to form his own opinions,
but if I had my way (there is not the least
likelihood of it) I should establish a censorship
of the press, which should be in the hands

194 A REAPING.

of six young and cheerful optimists, who should
decide whether such opinions were fit for
publication. Quite rightly literature of an in-
decent nature, and work which may be supposed
to have a tendency encouraging to criminals,
is not allowed to be disseminated. I should
put a similar prohibition on the dissemination
of discouraging books, books which might be
expected to suggest or foster the opinion that
the world is a poor sort of place, and that
God isn't in His heaven at all. Even if this
was proved to be true, I would count it
criminal to attempt to convince anybody of
it; it would be a murderous assault on the
happiness of private individuals. The law does
not allow one to poison a man's bread with
impunity, so how much more stringently should
it forbid the poisoning of the inward health of
his soul ! Nothing but harm ever came from
the dissemination of depressing truths, nothing
but good from the dissemination of innocent
and joyful beliefs, even should it be proved
that they had no foundation whatever. For
if the world is a dreary and painful place, so
much more need is there of courage and a

DECEMBER. 195

high heart to render it the least tolerable, and
if we are to be snuffed out like candles when
we come to the end of our few and evil years,
how much more is it the part of wisdom to
snatch a little happiness out of the circumam-
bient annihilation !

And to think that only this morning I had
actually tried to commit this crime, and was
only saved from it by Legs' unutterable laugh-
ter. To be truthful, I felt a little offended
when he first began to laugh, and inwardly
hoped that he would soon grow depressed and
thoughtful as I continued to tell my rosary of
discouraging things. But I need not have
indulged that hope ; it was forlorn from the
beginning.

Instead, it made both him and Helen feel
much better. I am so content to leave it at
that. I had hoped — I had, indeed — when I
wrote those depressing pages (which I wish to
Heaven I had not burned) that possible readers
might see part of the serious side of things
under the discouragement of my winged words.
But now — two days later — I am far more
content that those two darlings should have

196 A REAPING.

laughed at what was written with such serious-
ness, than that all those into whose hands the
printed record of that manuscript might have
fallen should have sighed once over my jaun-
diced views about life and death, and sickness
and mutability.

Of course, death is an extremely solemn
affair, but it seems to me now — we are all
recovering fast, and are drinking hypophosphates,
and beginning to be greedy again — that the
solemnity of it ought to have been discounted
long ago, if it is going to be solemn at all.
Everyone, of course, is at liberty to take life
solemnly from the time he begins to think at
all. But whatever our attitude towards life is,
the same ought to be our attitude towards death,
whether we believe that there is a continuance
of life afterwards, or whether we are so unfor-
tunate as to believe that there is the quenched
candle. For in the one case death is but the
opening of a door into a fuller light, a thing, it
is true, that may affect one for the moment, since
from the weakness of the flesh we cling to
what we know, while in the other death is just
extinction, a consummation which no pessimist

DECEMBER.

197

should fear, since while he lived he had held
so poor an opinion of life. So whether we
regard life as a pleasant interlude in something
else, or whether we regard death — a thing
unthinkable to me — as the extinction of con-
sciousness, I cannot believe that he is not a
guest who is welcome when he comes. Person-
ally I do not want him to come for a long
time, since I am delighted with the world, and
it would be most annoying to die now when
one is just recovering from influenza, and hopes
to go to the Richter concert to-morrow. But
whatever one's belief about the future is, I
cannot see that there is an essential horror
about death. I can conjure up horror of some
kind about going to the dentist, about looking
up trains in a Bradshaw, since the print is so
execrable and the connections so unruly, but
I go my journey, or I go to the dentist, and
get to my destination, or am relieved of a
troublesome tooth. Life does not seem to me
the least troublesome, it is true, but let us take
it that by death I get to my destination, or in
any case get nearer it.

Besides, how frightfully interesting !

198 A REAPING.

I did not die, but went to the Bichter concert
instead. Legs wished to go, too, but that was
clearly idiotic, and so Helen and I tossed up as
to which o£ us should go, and which remain at
home. I won, and went.

There was Isolde in his high chair. (Pro-
bably an intelligent critic will say that Isolde
was a woman, and I mean Tristan. But I
don't.) He waved a little wand, and the spirit
of the Meistersingers filled the hall. It was
not, so it struck me, a remembrance only of
their harmonious joviality, a mere picture of
them ; it was they who rollicked and made
processions in the great thumping triads of
their march. There they sat, each with his
business, town clerk, and vintner burgomaster,
and lawyer, and, best of all, the old tender-
hearted shoemaker, on whose kindly face up-
turned to the sky one feather of the bird of
love had fallen, though it had never come and
nestled in his bosom. But it was not with
bitterness that so great a loss had filled him ;
it had but refined him to a mellow kindliness
that made all young things love him. There
they all sat, so the band told me, over their

DECEMBER. 199

songs and their sober carousing, till the others
went home, and Sachs was left alone with
music yet unsung echoing in his kind old head,
and throbbing in his youthful heart. But he
knew that such Divine melody was not to be
realized by him ; some master of music had
yet to come and put into notes and audible
harmony that which existed but in the temple
of his dreams, in the garden of things a man
may conceive, but may not realize. Then came
there the gracious young knight, and Sachs
heard that of which he had dreamed, the song
taught by the birds and the choirs of Nature
to the ardent heart of youth.

The triumph took wings and soared, lifting
Sachs with it, him and his yearnings, and that
fine old music, too, which was his. Inextricably
mingled, they were knit one into each other,
soaring into the sunrise.

Thereafter we were taken to the bleak moun-
tain, where should gather the maidens of storm,
who did the will of Wotan. It was high and
exposed above the region of the trees, and
shrill blew the winds over it, and the heavens

200 A REAPING.

streamed above it. Fast and thick rode the
army of menacing clouds, for the tempest in
which the Valkyries rejoice, riding their un-
tamed steeds down the swift roadway of the
winds, was broken out in mad fury. Yelling
and screaming, it drove in mad circles of wrath
round the place where the nine maidens should
foregather that evening, each with the fruit
of her day's quest slung across her saddle, each
with a hero who should drink that night of
the wine of the gods, which should pour into
his veins the fire of eternal life in place of the
faint mortal blood that had beaten there before.
Yet it was not love the maidens sought. It
was danger and death and heroic enterprise
that bore them so swiftly on their errands,
and lit in them a fire brighter than love
has ever kindled. Their wine was the buffet
of the tempest, their meat the strong winds
of God.

Then there was heard, faint at first, the
beating of the immortal hoofs in the rush of
flying steeds ; from east and west there shone
out remote fires in the bedlam of the clouds,
increasing, getting nearer and more blinding, till

DECEMBER. 201

through the darkness of the tempest could be
seen the figures of the maidens gathering to
their trysting-place, some at the gallop, some
flying, and all drunk with adventure and swift
deeds. Each that day had prospered, each
had a hero at her saddle, swooning now in
death, but soon to be restored to the fuller
life.

So gathered they, but as yet one was still
missing — Briinnhilde, the swiftest and best of
them all, the dearest to the heart of Wotan, for,
indeed, she was none other than his heart and
his inviolable will. And while yet the others
wondered at her tarrying, she came. But no
hero had she. She but led a woman into the
midst of her sisters, for pity had touched her
fierce heart with so keen and intimate a pang
that she had disobeyed the behest of Wotan,
and saved her of the race which he had doomed
to destruction. ... The sorrow and the pain of
the world had entered into her. Henceforth no
more there would be for her the starry splen-
dour of Valhalla, throned on the thunder and
rosy with the light of eternal dawn. Soon for
this her deed should another light shine on

202 A REAPING.

tower and palace wall — the light of the flames
that consumed it.

Tempest, and love, and sorrow, and the doom
of the immortal gods all made audible in the
eternal kingdom of the air! How is it that,
when once one has heard a miracle like this,
one can ever so far forget it as to go back
to the meanness of little miry ways ? There
are so many big things in the world, and
though one knows that, and has, according to
one's scale, seen and understood their size, yet
we can still be so gross of perception that one
can sit down, blear-eyed of vision, to write two-
penny-halfpenny reflections about sorrow and
mutability ! (And be rather pleased with them,
too, until Legs and Helen laughed themselves
all out of shape.)

How large a place, too, in that which makes
for size and the breeziness of living, does Art
in some form or other occupy for most of us !
Music and painting, literature and drama, are
great doors flung wide to admit one to the sun-
shine of God. Often, even to the spiritually-
minded, the avenues of prayer and director

DECEMBER. 203

communion seem somehow blocked ; to others,
the majority, they are never wholly open. But
to any who have an appreciation at all of what
is beautiful, it must be a dark hour indeed
when that approach is altogether shrouded and
black, when neither Angelo, nor Velasquez, nor
Shelley, nor Wagner, has a candle to give one
to light the way. Millions of beautiful minds
have their approach here. To millions all idea
of a personal God, to be approached directly,
seems inconceivable, but it seems to me to be
one of the perfectly certain things in this very
uncertain world that the passionate worship of
beauty, in whatever sort manifested, is no less
a direct invocation than prayer and the bent
knee. The study and the love for ' whatsoever
things are lovely* is as royal a road, perhaps,
as the other, for the passion for what is beauti-
ful is no less than the passion for the only
Beautiful, and by such as, feel that, all that is
filthy is as unerringly condemned as it is by
those who call 'filthy' by another name —
' sinful/ For the perception of anything beau-
tiful has to the perceiver a force of purging,
while to the gross sense it is a sealed thing.

204 A REAPING.

' O world as God has made it, all is beauty ;
And knowing this is love, and love is duty,
What further can be sought for or declared ? '

And to that I say ' Amen/

The ' kennel/ as that same magician of words
said, is ' a-yelp ' at this. Artists, of whatever
sort, are supposed to be loose of life. Where
that extraordinary delusion arose I have no
idea, unless it had its origin in some superficial
observer of the manners and ways in the Latin
quarter of Paris. That things not technically
parochial may have occurred there, who would
deny ? But for my part I think it just as un-
Christian to nag, and to vex, and to be unkind
as to be anything else under the sun. In fact,
to put it broadly, I would as soon be a drunken
and kind man as be a sour and total abstainer.
Sour and total abstainers will turn on me their
eyes of smiling pity and horror, but perhaps it
is only a matter of taste.

But to be ' nice ' to people seems so im-
mensely important. You may lecture on the
Lamentations of Jeremiah for hours together,
with a battery of historical facts to help you,

DECEMBER. 205

and yet do no particular good ; but if you help
a lame dog, canine or human, over a stile,
you have been a far better Christian. I
dare say that word offends some people, so I
will cancel it, and say that you have been of
far greater service in a world that has for-
tuitously come into being, and will as for-
tuitously go out of being. Whatever may be
the truth about things seen and unseen, happi-
ness is quite certainly better than misery, and
laughter is better than the most edifying tears.

The finger of the gloomy moralist is pointed
at me. I knew it was going to be pointed —
and in a sepulchral voice he says : ' What about
death ? '

The fact is that I don't know (nor does he),
and it is not my affair. While I am alive I
prefer to drink deep of the joy of life than to
speculate about what may come next. I can
conjure up my death-bed as often as I choose,
and make it a scene of moving pathos and dim
vexed doubts. There is nothing so easy. I
can without the slightest effort advance really
profound problems as to ' what it all means/
since there is nothing so easy as asking un-

206 A REAPING.

answerable questions. What of the death of
the wasp which I killed gleefully last August
with a tennis-racquet ? I haven't the slightest
idea. All I know is that if next August
another ventures to buzz round my head when
I am having tea on the lawn after a perspiring
set, I shall, if possible, kill it again.

If only the gloomy moralist could give me
a reasonable theory to show why I could not
exterminate wasps, I would accept it. But he
can't. He only says it puzzles him. It puzzles
me, too, but in the interval I kill the wasp.

The fact is (degrading though it may sound)
that I do not really believe that we are any of
us capable of understanding the mind of the
Infinite God. Philosophers try to explain little
bits of it, and in their explanation of the little
bit of it bang their heads together like children
playing hide-and-seek in the dark. Hino illce
lacrimce. The poor children have terrible head-
aches. I am extremely sorry, but it is, after
all, their fault. Instead of playing hide-and-
seek in the dark, they should go out and play
in the light; then no heads would be hit to-
gether.

DECEMBER. 207

It is quite maddening to think of the energy
expended over this hide-and-seek, when all the
time the garden of the world's beauty is ready
waiting outside the door. If you have the
instincts of a beast, perhaps it is better to
grope in the dark ; but if you have the rudi-
ments of any other condition, go and play.
All the beauty that the world holds is at your
command. All that really matters in this world
is to be enjoyed very cheaply. Most things
worth reading can be bought for a shilling or
two, and if that is not ' handy/ look at a tree
instead, and absorb the life that shines in each
growing twig of it. Or if you are musically
minded, hear, as I have just heard, the glories
of the maidens of the storm.

Of course, no one thing is the least more
wonderful than any other. All that happens,
if we look at it at all closely, is a marvellous
conjuring-trick. Why don't ducks corne out of
hen's eggs ? Is it not marvellous that chickens
invariably issue ? If you go a step farther
back, and learn something about the continuance
of type, it becomes even more wonderful.
' How ' can be told us, but never ' why/ And

208 A REAPING.

so I am confident in the unanswerableness of
my riddle. Why do sounds like those of the
violin and the brass in the 'Ride of the Val-
kyries' convey the essence of storm and
tempest ?

Another conjuring-trick of the most delight-
ful kind occurred next morning. At twelve
o'clock last night the streets of London had,
without asking (thereby reversing the sad tale
of Oliver Twist), been given a second helping
of brown porridge. It was ankle-deep on the
roadway of Sloane Street, thick brown porridge
of mud ; then during the night the temperature
went down, and it froze. The result is that
for the copious soup we are given a clean, dry
roadway. There is no mud of any kind, not
even frozen mud. The street is clear and dry,
as if Oliver Twist had licked it. But where
has gone that two inches of obf use lather ?
Has the wood-pavement drunk it in ? Has it
gone into the air ? Has some celestial house-
maid, like the Awful Thing, been set to sweep
the streets, even as she has swept the sky, and
given us the invigoration of frost in exchange

DECEMBER. 209

for the wet blanket of chilly cloud ? Coming
back from Bichter last night, the streets were
swimming ; eight hours later (or it may be
nine) one might walk barefoot across the road,
or spread one's dinner there, and get no taint.
How it will be sparkling on the grasses and
brave evergreens at home, turned to diamond
spray by the red sun of frosty mornings !

1 0 world as God has made it ! ' . . . How
often involuntarily, as if coming from without,
that line .rings in my head ! And how very
little we, with all our jealousies, and depressions,
and bickerings, and follies, are able to spoil or
dim the beauty that is cast so broadly there.
Puny as are our efforts for good, it really seems
to me that our attempts at being evil are even
more impotent and microscopic. We are often
as tiresome and unpleasant as we know how
to be, yet all the time we are swimming against
that. huge quiet tide of the beauty of the world
as God made it, the knowledge of which is love,
and beyond which there is no further declara-
tion possible. Sometimes, if we are very active
indeed, and exert ourselves very much, we can

210 A REAPING.

stand still or even move a little way in oppo-
sition to the great tide, but soon our efforts
must relax, and we are swept down again with
the current that eternally flows from the heart
of the Infinite, and returns there again in those
pulsations that are the life and the light of the
world.

It is impossible, indeed, unless we say that
evil is the vital principle of the world, to think
otherwise. War there is between the two
huge forces, but it is just Satanism, and nothing
else whatever, that makes people say that the
world is going from bad to worse. If you are
so unfortunate as to be a Satanist, there is noth-
ing more to be said, and I hope the devil will
give you your due ; but if otherwise, there can
be no other conclusion than that good, all that
is lovely and fine, is steadily gaining ground.
For it does not seem reasonable to suppose that
God contemplates some swift heady manoeuvre
which shall suddenly take evil in the rear, and
in a moment rout the antagonism. At any
rate, as far as we can possibly judge, it is by
quiet processes that He deals with the sum of
the world, even as He deals with the units that

DECEMBER. 211

make it. For just as nobody has any right to
expect that the evil in his nature will be sud-
denly expunged, even though the moment should
be one of blinding revelation, so we should
acquiesce in the slow progress of the sum-
total. For there are only three possible alter-
natives— the first (namely, that the progress is
from bad to worse), which is Satanism ; the
second, that there is now in the world (and
will be) exactly the same amount of evil and
good as there has always been, in which case
you are confronted with the absurd proposition
of two absolutely equal forces having made this
scheme of things, which will war to all eternity ;
and the third, that good is stronger than evil,
and is quietly gaining ground.

The objection to 'the first alternative is that
it is Satanism — a very fatal objection. The
objection to the second is that it is so stupen-
dously dull. There cannot possibly be any
point in anything if the two forces are equal.
There can be no struggle in the mind as to
whether one ought or ought not to do certain
things, if whatever you do or don't does not
make any difference. There remains the third

212 A REAPING.

alternative. The objection to that is ... well,
I can't see there is any.

Hours ago this house has been asleep, the
house in which I write on this early morning of
the New Year, the house which is home to me,
even as my own is; for it is the house — you
will have guessed — where lives she who is
neither dearer nor less dear than Helen, and
where we always spend the week and a little
more that begins before Christmas and finishes
a little after the New Year has been swung
from the voices of mellow bells. Before mid-
night we sat in the oak-panelled room and played
the most heavenly games, charades, and insane
gymnastic exercises, and table-turning, with
terror when the dreadful* table turned in a
really unaccountable manner, all consecrated by
love and laughter; and then, when the Old
Year was to be numbered by minutes that the
fingers could reckon, we drew nearer to the log
fire and wished each other that which we all
wanted for each. Legs' triumphant entry into
the Foreign Office was no longer capable of
a wish, since it was already accomplished, so he

DECEMBER. 213

was wished a wife ; and — you will understand
that we were all very intimate — my mother
was wished freedom from all anxiety of what-
ever kind ; and the old nurse of ninety years
who had acted* charades with us with astonish-
ing power was wished her century ; and I
was wished the holding of the frost, so that I
might skate — they were flippant again — and
two cousins were respectively wished a micro-
scope— one is of tender years — and a motor-
. car ; and then, just as the clock jarred, telling us
there was but a minute more to the New Year,
it was Helen's turn to be wished, and somebody
said, ' Your heart's desire ' ; and she understood.
Immediately afterwards the clock struck, and
everybody kissed everybody else, and said
'Happy New Year,' and no more. For you
must not say anything more than that : you
must not even say ' Good-night/ else the charm
is broken. So in dead silence we lighted bed-
room candles, for the ritual was well known,
and separated. And who knows but that all
about the house, as in the ' Midsummer Night's
Dream,' the dances of the fairies circled up and
down by the light of drowsy fires ?

JANUARY

A HUNDRED pounds have suddenly and
unexpectedly appeared on the horizon.
People who are very rich have not the slightest
idea what that means to us. People who are
very poor have not the slightest idea either, be-
cause they would probably buy a public-house,
or goodwill, or something of that nature, and
never have any fun out of it at all. But to
people who 'jog along' a hundred pounds is a
treat which neither rich people nor poor can
form any conception of. To those who just pay
their way, as we do, it means several weeks
somewhere. The only question is ' Where ? '
At this point in our argument it was impossible
to proceed. Helen and I were both being so
unselfish that we couldn't go on. She said she
longed to have two or three weeks in Switzer-
land ; I said that what I really wanted was to
go to the Riviera for a fortnight. Then, as

216 A REAPING.

always happens, these subterfuges broke down,
and we both confessed that we neither of us
really wanted to go where we said we did. She
wanted to go to Nice ; I wanted to go to the
high altitudes. So, with the understanding
that we were to go where the coin said we
should, and not otherwise, we tossed up. It
was high altitudes.

His country put in a claim for Legs at the
Foreign Office, unfortunately, and he should not
come with us ; but we felt, when we observed
the urbanity of the French customs-house offi-
cials, who obligingly shut their eyes to the
presence of large quantities of tobacco, and the
politeness of the railway officials, that Legs had
probably made himself felt in our foreign
relations already, and that he was responsible
for all this very civil behaviour. At Bale,
however, where we had to change at the awful
hour in the morning which is neither night nor
day, we found that Legs' diplomacy had not yet
had time to make itself felt, for we were
subjected to a searching scrutiny. Luckily, I
had had experience of the manners and customs-
house officials of Bale before, and had trans-

JANUARY. 217

ferred my tobacco into my coat pockets, thus
frustrating the baffled Teuton. But I am afraid
it gave certain secret glee to observe that my
travelling companion of the night before — a
stout white man, with a name on his labels so
long that I could not read it, who had snored
all the time — was caught, and his rich stores of
cigarettes taken from him, to be sent, I suppose,
to Berne, for the delectation of the President of
the Republic.

Switzerland is a land that always arouses
curiosity as to how it came about that a country
in which the people are so small, so ' toy/ should
in itself be on so gigantic and marvellous a
scale. Is it that the living among these
stupendous surroundings has somehow dwarfed
the people, or has Nature, by one of her
inimitable contrasts, made the human part of
Switzerland so insignificant in order to set off
the vastness of peak and snowfield ? Certainly
the glib commonplace that national character is
influenced and formed by national surroundings
is here gloriously contradicted, since, as far as I
am aware, no Swiss has ever attained to eminence
in anything. They are a little toy people, who

218 A REAPING.

live in little toy towns, and make excellent
chocolate, and run innumerable hotels on the
most economical principles. But even then
they do not (as one would expect) get very
rich. They are never 'very' anything. 'But
the chocolate is excellent/ said Helen to these
speculations.

It requires faith this morning to believe that
in a few hours we shall be crunching the dry,
powdery snow beneath our feet, and before
sunset be skating or gliding down the white
frozen road, with puffs of snow coming from the
bows of the toboggan, for here all down the
shore of the Lake of Thun the country is brown
and grey, with scarce a streak of white to show
that it is winter. Low overhead are fat masses
of dirty-looking cloud, but between them (and
this is the door where faith enters) are glimpses
of the perfect azure which we expect up above.
Now and then the sun strikes some distant hill-
side, or, like a flashlight, is turned on to the
waters of the lake, making of them a sudden
aquamarine of luminous green. But the
weather is undoubtedly mild ; the eaves of the
wooden toy-stations drip with discouraging

JANUARY. 219

moisture, and Interlaken, when we reach it,
wears a dreadful spring-like aspect, and people
are sitting out of doors at the cafes, and appear
to find it relaxing.

Then the first of these wonderful winter
miracles happened. There was the flat alluvial
land at the end of the lake, across which ran
the fussy little light railway which should take
us above (so we hoped) the region of cloudland.
Grey and puddle-strewn was it, with here and
there a patch of dirty snow stained through
with the earthy moistness beneath. A low-lying
mist was spread over the nearer distance, which
melted into the thicker clouds of the sky itself.
It was just such a view as you shall see any-
where in the English fen-land during February.

We were looking at this with, I am bound to
say, a certain despondency. It seemed almost cer-
tain that we should find dull weather (which means
thaw) up above, when a sudden draught from
some funnel of the hills came down, making
agitation and disturbance both among the low-
lying mist and the higher clouds. The former
was vanquished first, and, torn to ribbons by
the wind, and scorched up by a sudden divine

220 A REAPING.

gleam of sun that smote downwards, disclosed in
its vanishing the long, piney sides of an upward-
leading gorge. The higher clouds, being thicker,
took longer to disperse, I suppose, for at its
farther end the gorge was still full of scudding
vapours. Then suddenly they cleared, and
high, high above, a vignette of fairyland — the
Jungfrau herself, queen of the snows — stood out
in glacier, and snowfield, and peak, against a
sky of incredible blue. There she stood in full
blaze of sunshine, the silver-crystal maiden,
donned in blue, enough to open the eyes of the
blind and make the dumb mouth sing.

Then afterwards, as the little Turkish bath of
a train went heavenwards, how magical and
divine a change happened ! Inside the steamy
carriages, smelling of railway-bags, and rugs,
and forgotten sandwiches, it was not possible to
see through the condensation on the window-
panes, but the blood that trots through the body
knew the change, and took a more staccato
note. Then — I suppose that travelling stupidity
had seized us both — it suddenly occurred to
Helen that we might, without fear of prosecu-
tion, put the windows down, though by a

JANUARY. 221

printed notice of by-laws of the railway it was
still defended that we should not agitate our-
selves out of it. Once a ticket-puncher, exactly
like a figure out of Noah's ark, put them
scowlingly up again ; but with the boldness that
this whiff of mountain-air supplied, we again
lowered them, after a further consultation of
the by-laws.

The ineffable change had begun. Soon for
the moistness of the lowland there was ex-
changed a hint of frost — something that made
outlines a little more determinate, a little
crisper. Then, as we mounted higher, there
was further change. For dripping twigs of the
trees there were trees that showed a hard,
white outline of frost; for the sullen muddy
stream there was clearer water, that went
on its way beneath half -formed lids of ice;
and thinner and thinner above our heads grew
the grey blanket of cloud.

Then that, too, was folded away, and above
us was the sun and the sparkling of the un-
ending firmament. Below it had been like a
London fog, when you cannot see the tops of the
shrouded houses ; now we saw the roofs of the

222 A REAPING.

world, the Queen Anne's mansion 01 Europe, all
clean, all clear, just as they were when I saw
this land three years ago. No tile had slipped,
no chimney-pot required repairs. The top of
the world was good. Oh, how good !

The clear dry air, the sunset lights on the
peaks, the liquid twilight (keen as snuff to the
nostril), from which the sun had gone ! There
was the rose-tinted Wetterhorn, black Eiger,
flaming finger of Finster-Aarhorn ; or, on more
human plane, the hiss of skates over the perfect
ice, the passage of a toboggan, with a little
Swiss girl holding in front of her a baby sister,
and steering with her heels, and shrilly shouting
' Achtung ! ' There was ' Madame ' who keeps
a restaurant (I do not know her name), standing
to see the train-passengers come in, and shaking
hands, and saying, ' You shall have wings to-
morrow, no legs ' (alluding to an amiable alter-
cation of three years ago, when I drew a kind
but firm sort of line about eating chickens' legs
for lunch on four consecutive days); and there
was the beerman, whose admirable beverage I
always drank at 11.30 a.m., being thirsty with
skating ; and there was a skater I knew, who

JANUARY. 223

attempted a rather swift back -bracket for the
admiration of the new arrivals by the train to
see, and fell down in a particularly complicated
manner in the middle of it ; and there was the
barrack of an hotel which always smells of
roasting leather, because people put their skates
and boots on the hot-water pipes, and right
above it was the Mettelhorn ; and to the left
was the Lady Wetterhorn; and to the right
the smooth, steely-looking toboggan-run down

into the valley. ' Oh, world ' I beg your

pardon.

I have omitted to mention the magic word
on our luggage-labels, ' Grindelwald.'

Three years ago, I must tell you, among other
foolish and futile deeds, I made a cache under-
neath a particular tree on the path leading to
the Scheidegg, consisting, as far as I remem-
ber, of chocolate, coins, and matches. These in-
significant facts I published in another place,
and since then I have received every winter
mysterious letters from Grindelwald, showing
that other people are as absurd as myself. My
cache, in fact, has been found (I gave directions
which I hoped would be sufficient), and it has

224 A REAPING.

been, so these letters tell me, enriched by other
secret and beautiful things. There has been
placed there, on separate occasions, by separate
passionate pilgrims, all manner of store, and the
very next morning, instead of going to skate,
Helen and I skulked off with a toboggan to see
what we should find A poem on the Wetter-
horn, so I had been informed, was there, to
form the nucleus of a library; there were a
tin of potted meat and some caramels for the
larder; and furniture had been added by a
third person in the shape of a lead soldier and
an ink-bottle ; while the exchequer, I knew, also
had been enriched by at least half a franc in
nickel pieces. We had debated earnestly last
night as to" what to add to the establishment,
if we found it, and eventually decided on a
handkerchief, which is to be regarded by
passionate pilgrims as a tablecloth, a reel of
cotton, and a copy of ' Shirley ' in the sixpenny
edition, to swell the library shelves. This
latter was in a small linen bag, to keep it from
the wet.

Of course, we did not expect to find all the
objects that I had been informed had been

JANUARY. 225

placed there from time to time, for the rule
of the cache is that you may use what you
find there, provided only you replace it with
something else. The potted meat, for instance,
one could not expect to go undiscussed, and I
cannot personally conceive leaving caramels
uneaten. But in place of those, if only
passionate pilgrims had played the game, we
should find other objects. Thus the cache
becomes a sort of exchange and mart — a
reciprocal table laid in the wilderness, where
you take one dish and replace it with another.

How it all savours of romance to the childish
mind ! With agitated fingers you scoop away
the earth and moss which form the entrance to
the cache, under a pine tree on the empty,
frozen hillside, and you know you will find
treasure of some kind, but what it is you can-
not possibly tell. And inviolable secrecy must
surround and embellish your manoeuvres; the
cache should not be mentioned at all except dis-
creetly to the elect, for it partakes of Free-
masonry, the masons of which are those who
delight in idiotic proceedings. But just as
three years ago I gave the inventory of the

226 A REAPING.

cache as it was then, so in the minds of the
idiotic there may be felt some interest as to
its inventory when the founder again revisited
it. Caches, of course, are socialistic in spirit,
and anybody may appropriate whatever he
chooses ; but I should be glad if the copy of
' Shirley ' is left there. It is such a pleasant
book to read after lunch, if you are tobog-
ganing alone. A book, at any rate, is rather
a good thing to have in a cache, and the wishes
of the founder will be satisfied if another book
is put there instead. But let us have a book.
I should prefer that it should not be the
' Encyclopaedia Britannica.'

The morning, I think, must have been ordered
on purpose, for I can imagine nothing so ex-
quisite being served up in the ordinary way, a
la carte ; such weather must have been specially
chosen. Not a single ripple of air stirred ; an
unflecked sky was overhead, and the sun, as we
set off, just topped the hills to the south-east,
and sat like a huge golden bandbox on the rim
of them. The frost had been severe in the
night, but in this windlessness and entire absence
of moisture no feeling of cold reached one.

JAOTJARY. 227

There was in the air a briskness of quality more
than magical ; it was as if made of ice and fire
and wine, and in a sort of intoxication we slid
down into the valley. Then, crossing the stream,
since there was water about, it suddenly seemed
desperately chill ; but no sooner had we mounted
a dozen yards of ascent again than the same
dry kindling of the blood reasserted itself.
Toboggans will not run of their own accord
uphill, so I put ours under my arm, and for a
hundred yards we danced a pas de quatre up
the trodden snow. We both sang all the time,
different tunes, when suddenly we saw a clergy-
man observing us from a few yards ahead. He
had a wildish and severe eye, and we stopped.
David before the Ark would have stopped if he
had unexpectedly come on that man. He was
sitting in the snow, and wore a black hat, black
coat, and black trousers, but he had yellow
boots. He kept his eye on us all the time that
we were within sight, and seemed to have no
other occupation. We neither of us dared to
look round till we had left him some way
behind, neither did we dare to dance again.
Eventually I turned my head to look at him

228 A REAPING.

from behind a tree. He was still sitting in the
snow, not on a rug, you understand, nor on a
toboggan, nor on any of the things upon which
you usually sit in the snow. He was not
breakfasting or lunching or looking at the view.
He was sitting in the snow, and that was all.
I have no explanation of any kind to offer about
this unusual incident. Helen thinks he was
mad. That very likely is the case, but it is an
interesting form of mania. Perhaps by-and-by
we shall have an asylum for snow-sitters. Or
is it a new kind of rest-cure ?

It is astonishing how you can argue about
things of which you know nothing. Indeed, I
think that all proper arguments are based on
ignorance. If you know anything whatever on
the subject of which you are talking, you pro-
duce a fact of some kind, which knocks argu-
ment flat. It is only possible to reason rightly
on those subjects concerning which no fact,
except the phenomenon itself, is ascertainable.
Had we asked the clergyman why he sat in the
snow, he would probably have told us, and the
subject would have ceased to interest us con-
versationally. As it was, we held heated debate

JANUARY. 229

upon him, just as if he was the Education Bill,
for a long time. But the unusualness of it
merited attention and conjecture. And think
how divine an opening for conversation at
dinner-parties, if you know nothing of your
neighbour, and have not caught her name.

' Did you ever see a clergyman sitting in the
snow ? '

That, in fact, was the outcome of our argu-
ment. No theory about him would really hold
water. He was probably a conversational
gambit, which might lead to much. For in-
stance, in answer to your question, your inter-
locutor might reply in five obvious ways :

1. 'I once saw a clergyman, but he was not
sitting in the snow.'

2. 'I have seen snow, but I never saw a
clergyman sitting in it/

3. ' I once saw a clergyman being snowballed.'

4. 'Yes. What are your views about the
best treatment for the insane ? '

5. ' Such strange things happen at Grindel-
wald. Did you know '

Yes ; he was probably a conversational open-
ing made manifest to mortal eyes. Anyhow,

230 A REAPING.

when we returned he was not sitting there.
If he had been real, he probably would have
been — at least, if you once sit in the snow there
is no reason why you should ever get up.
Obviously it is your mdtier.

Now, everybody who lives in fogs and rainy
places will fail to understand anything of these
last deplorable pages. But if they go to the
thin clear air of Alps in winter, they will know
that this sort of thing (given you have the
luck to see a clergyman sitting in the snow) is
invested with supreme importance. When the
hot sun shines on ice, it produces some kindly
confusion of the brain ; there is no longer any
point in trying to be clever or well-informed, or
witty, or any of those things that are supposed
to convey distinction down below to their for-
tunate possessors : you go back to mere existence
and joy of life. It is a trouble to be consecutive
or conduct a reasonable argument ; instead, you
open your mouth and say anything that happens
to come out of it. Most frequently what issues
is laughter, but apart from that, the only con-
versation you can indulge in is preposterous, and
the only behaviour possible is childish. That is

JANUARY. 231

why I love these roofs of the world. The
intoxication of interstellar space is in the air.
Everything is so light — you, your body, your
mind, your tongue, your aims and objects. The
only things that you take seriously are the
things that do not matter : the snow-sitter was
one, the cache was another. But as we got
nearer the cache, we became even more solemn
than on the question of the snow-sitter. There
was no telling what we should find there, even
if we found the place at all. The tree might
have been cut down since last year ; the whole
cache might have been rifled by some impercep-
tive hand. There was no end to the list of
untoward circumstances that might have de-
spoiled us.

And so we went through the wood : we came
to the end of it, and there was a tree — ' of many
one,' as Mr. Wordsworth prophetically remarked.
On its roots were cut my humble initials : it
was certainly The Tree.

' Oh, quick, quick ! ' said Helen ; ' let us know
the worst ! '

The root had arched a little since I saw it
last. Moss and snow were plastered on it in a

232 A REAPING.

manner scarcely natural. I plucked the bandage
away with hands that trembled. We found :

1. A pencil.

2. Something sticky, which I believe to have
been the caramels.

3. An empty potted-meat tin, with a wisp of
paper inside it, on which was written : ' I ate it.
Quite excellent/

4. A candle-end.

5. The famous poem on the Wetterhorn done
up in canvas. (How laudable !)

6. A Jock-Scot, salmon-trout size.

7. A paper on which was written: 'What's
the point ? '

8. A cigarette, very sloppy.

9. A five-franc piece, wrapped up in paper,
on which was written: *I took 4.50 away.'

1 0. A little wooden pill-box containing a very
small moonstone.

I think we were very moderate in our ex-
changes, which is right, since you must always
leave the cache richer for your presence, and we
% merely took away the pencil and the poem on
the Wetterhorn, leaving our handkerchief, the
reel of cotton, and the copy of ' Shirley/ Below

JANUARY. 233

the question ' "What's the point ? ' we wrote,
f None, if you can't see it/ and added, ' The
founder and his wife visited the cache on
January 12, 1907. They saw a clergyman
sitting in the snow. Selah.'

Then an awful thing happened. Even while
these treasures were openly and sumptuously
spread round us, down the path there came a
merry Swiss peasant about a hundred years old.
He looked at us and the treasures with curiosity
and contempt, and then burst into a perfect
flood of speech, of which neither of us under-
stood one single word. When he stopped, I said
politely, ' Ich weiss nicht/ just like Parsifal, and
he began it, or something like it, all over again,
with gesticulations added, and in a rather louder
tone, as if he was talking to a deaf man. Until
this torrent of gibberish was let loose on me, I
had no idea how much there was in the world
that I did not know; so with the desire to
reduce his opinion of himself also, I addressed
him in English. I said ' God save the King '
right through, as much as I could remember of
* To be or not to be ' from the play called
' Hamlet/ and had just begun on ' When the

234 A REAPING.

hounds of spring are on winter's traces/ when
he suddenly turned pale, crossed himself (though
it was a Protestant canton), and fairly fled down
the path. I make no doubt that he thought he
had met the devil. Anyhow, he had met his
match at unintelligible conversation.

But it was clearly no use running risks, for
more of the merry Swiss might come down the
path, who, it was conceivable, might not be so
much impressed by unintelligible sounds, and we
hurriedly reburied the treasure, ate our lunch,
and turned the bow of the toboggan homewards,
since we proposed to skate all afternoon. It
was a year since I had been shod with steel.
I burned for the frozen surface. But it was
right to see to the cache first. There are some
things you cannot wait for.

We spent three weeks in these divine futili-
ties, if anything so utterly enjoyable can be
considered futile. For my part, I do not believe
it can, since, as I have already said, to enjoy a
thing very much, supposing always that it does
not injure anybody else, is a gilt-edged invest-
ment of your time ; for enjoyment is not (as is
falsely supposed) finished with when the thing

JANTJARY. 235

itself is done and over, for it is just then that
the high interest of it (though gilt-edged) begins
to be paid. Until one forgets about it (and by
a merciful dispensation one remembers what is
pleasant far longer and far more keenly than
what is painful), subsequent days and hours are
all enriched, and therefore made more productive,
by these pleasurable memories. It is here, I
think, that a wonderfully fresh and vivid student
of the human mind — namely, K L. Stevenson —
goes all wrong when he says that the past is all
of one texture. It seems to me — one is only
responsible for one's own experience — to be of
two textures, one strong and the other weak ;
and the strong one is the memory of things you
have enjoyed, of happy days ; the other of times
when, for some reason or other — pain, or
anxiety, or fear — the lights have been low, and
the sound of the grinding not low, but loud.
The human mind, in fact, 4s more retentive of
its pileasures than of its pain. In the moment
of the happening either may seem the top note
of acuteness, but the echoes of the one indisput-
ably live longer than the echoes of the other ;
and though our consciousness, if you care to

236 A REAPING.

look at it that way, is largely a haunted house
of the dead hours, yet happy ghosts are in
preponderance, and seem solider than the shadows
of its dark places ; also (and this, I think, too,
is indubitable) the anticipation of happiness is
more acute than the anticipation of a corre-
sponding pain. In the future there are two
textures also, as in the past.

Since our return this contrast has been rather
markedly brought before me. There are many
things I much look forward to; at the same
time, there is something ahead which I am
dreading. What it is I do not know. I think
I should dread it less if I did. But it is, though
quite certain, quite vague. I connect it, how-
ever, with that evening in September when I
heard my name called, and when Legs saw
something which has since been expunged from
his memory. And here is the contrast: the
happiness that lies stored for me in the hive of
the future is more potent than the bitterness
that is there. Both are coming — of that I am
sure — and among the many very happy things
which I know and expect, I feel there is some-
thing I do not yet know which is happier than

JANUARY. 237

any. It is futile to guess at it. One might
make a hundred guesses, and each would seem
feasible of accomplishment. But there, at the
back of my mind, are these two transparencies,
so to speak — one sunlit, the other stormy — and
it is through them that the events of the day
are seen by me. They colour — both of them —
all I do ; but the happy one is the predominant
one. They do not neutralize each other ; they
are both there to their full. But I despair at
giving coherently so elusive a picture as they
make in my own mind. But, though elusive, it
is intensely real, and for the first time I neither
can, nor do I desire to, speak to Helen about
this thing which is so often in my mind. It is
incommunicable.

But after these Swiss weeks there was not
much time for me to think about this, as it was
imperatively demanded, by reasons over which I
have no control, that I should exercise my mind
on the extremely difficult art of the composition
of English prose, which incidentally implies
doing two things at once ; for not only have you
to invent your lively and inspiring tale, but you
have to tell it in a certain way. You may

238 A REAPING.

choose at the beginning any way of the hundreds
that there are of telling it ; but in the key in
which it is originally pitched, in that key it has
to remain all the time. As a matter of fact, it
probably does not, and goes wandering about in
other modes and scales ; but every book ought
to be in the one key in which it opens, just as
a picture ought to be in one key. It is within
the writer's liberties, of course, to write other
books in other keys, and I think he is perfectly
justified in largely contradicting in one work
what he has unhesitatingly affirmed in another,
but in each his point of view has to be con-
sistent throughout.

The thing is not quite so easy as it sounds,
and it is further complicated by a very real
difficulty. Every story that is worth reading at
all is bound to record change in the characters
and general attitude of the people with whom it
deals. The jaded author has to keep his eye
on each, and see that he behaves after some
atrocious battering with which fate has visited
him in a different manner than before this
visitation took place. If he is living in any
sense of the word, the event will have altered

JANUARY. 239

him. He will view things differently, and there-
fore behave differently. Yet all the time he is
the same personality. It were better for him
that he should be as adamant to the blows of
circumstance than that the inner essence which
is individuality should be uncertainly rendered ;
and, like the dexterous Mr. Maskelyne with his
spinning-plates, the scribe has to keep his eye
on all his puppets to see that none lapse into
stagnation, and to poke them up with his
industrious pen.

It is here that the complicated question of
consistency comes in which just now is worrying
me to bewilderment. Dreadful and stinging
events are happening to a most favourite puppet
of mine. Providence is dealing with her in a
cruelly ironical manner, in a way that makes
the poor distracted lady take quite fresh views
of a world she thought so warm and kindly.
Yet it must be the same personality which has
to be. shown sitting behind these changed feel-
ings and directing them all. That is the con-
sistency that has to be observed. Otherwise it
ceases to be one story, but becomes a series of
really unconnected short stories, with the tech-

240 A REAPING.

nical absurdity that the heroine in each has the
same name.

Yet there is this also: it takes all sorts to
make a world (at least, a world otherwise con-
structed would be an extremely dull one), but
It, It itself, Life, lies somewhere in the middle
of us all, and is the centre to which we approach.
We, the all sorts which make the world, view it
very differently, though we are all looking at
the same object. And here a simile, a thing
usually unconvincing, may assist. What if in
the centre there is something like a great
diamond, blazing in the rays of the sun ? I,
from the south, see soft blue lights in it; you,
from the west, see a great ruby ray coming out
of the heart of it ; another on the north says,
' This diamond is emerald green ' ; while from
the east it seems of transcendent orange. So
far, it is quite certain that we are all right, for
the world, so to speak, refracts God, making Him
many-hued, even as white light is refracted by
the triangle of a prism. And then let us sup-
pose circumstances enter and shift me, who have
been on the south, where I saw blue, to the west,
where I see red. The whole colour of the world

JANUARY. 241

is changed to me, and yet there is no incon-
sistency. The same Ego honestly sees a changed
colour. There would, on the other hand, when
my place was shifted by circumstance, be grave
inconsistency if I continued to declare that I
still saw blue. I do not. My eyes tell me it is
red. Just now my eyes told me it was blue.
But I have not changed, nor has the great dia-
mond changed ; it is merely that the refracted
light has taken another colour.

It is just that which one must perceive in the
telling of a story. A person who sees blue all
his life probably sees nothing at all, nothing,
anyhow, in the least worth recording. He is
bound as the wheel of circumstances goes round
to see things in other lights. But that is not
inconsistency ; it is the truly consistent. Who
wants, after all, for ever to draw the same con-
clusion from the same premises ? Only fossils,
and possibly molluscs.

But pity the sorrows of the story-teller ! The
quality of the red has to be of the same quality
as the blue. The same fire which strikes to the
south will indubitably strike to all other points
of the compass, and when X is wheeled north,

242 A REAPING.

he will not see the same green as Y sees there.
He saw it through the alchemy of his own mind ;
it will be green, but nobody else's green. Or if
it is, he has no individuality to speak of. At
least he belongs to a type that sees everything
through the eyes of others. That is generally
labelled conventional, and there seems no reason
to change the name.

How I laboured during those last ten days of
January, and how little result there seems to be !
Only — I console myself with this — the real
labour of writing does not chiefly consist in the
effort of putting things down, but in the moral
effort of rejecting them. There is nothing easier
than to fill pages and pages with improving re-
flections or inspiring events. But having done
that, it is necessary to sound the tuning-fork
and see if, as I said at first, the story is in tune,
if the key is kept. Usually it is not. On which
the fire ought to make to itself a momentary
beacon, or the waste-paper basket be replete.
But the pile of numbered pages should in any
case be starving. That, as a matter of fact, is
my sole argument that I have justified my exist-
ence during these ten days. I have really

JANUARY. 243

worked a great deal, and the waste-paper basket
could say how generous has been i'ts diet. I
have really left out a very great deal, and I
hasten to forestall the critic who will say that
I should, in order to act up to this excellent
standard, have left out the rest. I do not agree
with him.

The key of which I have spoken has to be
preserved, not only in matters of consistency in
character-drawing, but in style as well. If you
lead off with verbiage from the Orient, the East
must continue, I submit, to dye your paragraphs
till the last page is turned. Though you may
have also at your command pure wells of the
most limpid simplicity, you will have to reserve
them for some other immortal work ; they will
not mix with the incense and heady draughts
from the East. Or should you fancy a mysteri-
ous Delphic mode of diction, Delphic you must
be to the end. But — as if all this was not so
difficult, that, like Dr. Johnson, we almost wish
it was frankly impossible — interwoven in your
Delphic or Oriental narrative there must be a
totally different woof — namely, the thread of
the spoken word, the speeches that you put into

244 A REAPING.

the mouths of your various characters. And
the written word, be it remembered, is never like
the spoken word : the two vocabularies, to begin
with, are totally distinct, and though I would
not go so far as to affirm that the spoken word
ought to be ungrammatical, it should, if it is to
recall human speech, be colloquial, conversational.
In interchange of ideas by means of the mouth
real people do not use fine language, especially
when their emotions are strongly aroused. Then,
instead of becoming high-flown and ornate in
their speech, real people go to the opposite
extreme, and instinctively use only the very
simplest words. When this is stated, it seems
natural enough, but you will find it very seldom
practised. Novelists have a tendency to let
their puppets employ magnificent high-sounding
words to express the intensity and splendour of
great emotion; in fact, you may gauge the
strength of their emotions, as a rule, by the
sonorous quality of their adjectives. I believe
the very opposite to be the truth of the matter :
people in the grip of passion do not use beautiful
or highly-coloured words ; above all, they do
not, like Mr. Wegg, 'drop into poetry/ Yet

JANUARY. 245

nothing is commoner than to find prose degen-
erating into blank verse in the spoken records
of emotional crises, as if blank verse was a
sublime form of prose. Little Nell is continu-
ally half-way between prose and poetry, so also
is Nicholas Nickleby when his indignation is
roused. In fact, in some of his scenes with
Ralph they both forget themselves so much in
their passion that torrents of decasyllabic lines
flow from their lips. But, on the other hand,
the language of narrative should undoubtedly
grow more coloured, more vivid in such descrip-
tions as are the setting of some very emotional
scene. Yet it should not depart from its original
key. . . . Well, as Mr. Tulliver said, ' It's
puzzling work talking.'

But though the days have been so full, I
have seen everything, everything through the
two transparencies that seem drawn between
external happenings and me.

FEBRUARY

THE seasons, according to the literary and
artistic view of things, have been rather out
of joint this year. The autumn was not a time of
mellow fruitfulness at all, because all the green
things upon this earth had exhausted themselves
in the long hot summer, and had no more spirit
left to be fruitful with. Then January in Eng-
land had been of the usual warm mugginess
and mist which poets say are characteristic of
autumn, but which in reality characterize winter.
Indeed, I doubt if winter was ever a time of
hard frosts and sparkling snow, which is the
artistic ideal, and I am disposed to believe uthat
that version of it was really brought from Ger-
many by the Prince Consort, and popularized by
Charles Dickens. Then after the mists came
the mellow fruitfulness, for I myself saw straw-
berries in flower on February 2, and on Feb-
ruary 9 Helen came in saying she had found a

248 A REAPING.

real strawberry. That was strange enough,
though perhaps the finding of an unreal straw-
berry would have been stranger still, so I said,
' Where ? ' and she said, ' On the strawberry
beds, silly.'

Therefore I started up, leaving a most im-
portant and epoch-making sentence unfinished
(and I have never been able to remember what
the end of it was going to be), because I wanted
to see the strawberry, and write to the Field
about it. So she said, 'Are you going out
already ? ' and I said, ' Yes, just to see the straw-
berry, and write to the Field, saying I have/

Then she pointed to half-way down her person
(since we are so abstemious of words that indi-
cate the anatomy below the throat), and said :

' Would X rays help ? '

Being extremely clever that morning, of course
I understood, and reviled her for eating an
unnatural phenomenon. It was criminal ; she
might as well have found the sea-serpent or the
North Pole, and eaten it. But as usual she was
artful, and led the conversation away to daffodils,
which were behaving in a manner nearly equal
to that of the strawberry-plant. One, indeed,

FEBRUARY. 249

was in bud (a thing incredible, but true), and
I supposed she had eaten that, too. That led
us back to the strawberry again, which she was
not even sorry about, for she said it was far
more interesting to be able to write to the Field
to say she had eaten a strawberry on February 9
than that I should be able to say I had seen it.
So I very kindly gave her my pen, and said :

* Write quickly/
She said :

' Oh, but I am only a woman ; I can't. They
wouldn't put it in/

'I wish you hadn't put the strawberry in/
said I.

* I think I shall wish that, too, before long/
said she.

I only mention this in order to show the
utter unreasonableness of my wife. If I want
to write to the Field, and say there was a
strawberry in my garden on February 9, she
will allow me to say that though I did not see
it, she ate it. (She certainly would not have
eaten it if I had seen it.) But she will not
write to say she ate it, like a true woman. She
says it does not matter, but added with a

250 A REAPING.

changed voice that she was afraid it might. It
did, for the fruitfulness of the season was not so
mellow as might have been wished.

Yes, once again spring has begun to stir in
the fiery heart of the world ; once again the
breath of Life blows the embers that seemed
all winter to be but grey and lifeless cinders,
and from the centre the glow spreads, till that
grey surface of ash is alive with flame again.
And as the flames shoot upwards they are like
rockets, rising from over the whole face of the
world. At present they are but going upwards,
those slender lines of flame, which are the sap
that is rising through branch and leafless stem
until it reaches the very ends of the twigs.
Then these rockets will burst in stars of leaf
and opening flower, till the vast illumination is
again complete. But in the warm soft February
morning, though I feel and know that this is so,
I cannot help my thoughts going back to the
other side of things. What of the illumination
of last year ? It is quenched, dead, and even
while the world is getting ready for the next
one there still lie broadcast the ashes and fallen

FEBRUARY. 251

sticks of the last rocket -shower. However
many more gladden the world, even though to
all infinity life was incessantly and beautifully
renewed, yet I cannot forgive the perishing of
a single flower. I know well that the material
is indestructible, that of life and the death of it
is born fresh life, so that we are quite right to
say that life cannot be destroyed. But what of
the individual rose, what of that one purple star
of clematis that twinkled on the end of the stem
I hold in my hand ? Though it may be trans-
formed, and will be transformed, into a myriad
other things, so that by its death it is trans-
fused into a hundred other flowers, and courses
through the veins of life for ever, yet it, that
individual object, will be seen no more. Its
individuality is completely lost; it figures in
new forms, not its own.

It is quite certain also that the same things
happen to our bodies. The grass grows thick
on the graves of those we have loved, and the
roots of the roses penetrate deep. I saw once
on the crumbling, sea-devoured East Coast of
England the thing itself under my very eyes,
which made it real to me in a way that nothing

252 A REAPING.

had ever done before. For a churchyard stood
there on the very edge of the sandy cliff, and
one night, with noise of huge murmurous thun-
der, an acre of it slid down into the sea. Next
morning I visited the place, and there, sticking
out of the cliff, were the bones of the dead that
had been buried there. A ruin of roses that
had sprawled and trumpeted over the church-
yard gate, which had been plucked in half by
the fall, lay on the ground, and I wondered how
the trees had not slipped with the rest of the
landslide, until I saw. Their roots had lain just
where the fracture of the earth occurred, and
in the exposed face of the new cliff I saw their
anchorage. One was wrapped round a thigh-
bone, another had made a network among ribs
... it was all horrible and revolting. And
that has happened to the million dead who have
lived and loved, whose limbs have been swift to
move, who have drawn rapturous long breaths
of this keen sea-scented air, whose eyes have
been bright and mouths eager when they met,
lover and beloved. This is all — this ruin of
red roses on the grass.

There is nothing in the world more certain

FEBRUARY. 253

than this, and one may as well face it. Helen
will die, and I shall die, and one of us will die
first. And the other will sometimes see a grave
with the grass green over it, and roses triumph-
ant thereon. For we have settled most things
at one time or another, she and I, and the
manner of our funerals and what happens after
has passed under discussion. We have decided
definitely against cremation, because it seems
such a waste of tissue, and we are both of us
going to be properly buried, the one close to the
other, so that the same rose may bloom from us
both. But she will have roses and strawberries
on her grave, so that the Sunday-school children
may pluck and eat them, while I, on the other
hand, am going to be a spring-man, and have
daffodils, for I feel no leaning, as I have said,
towards Sunday-schools. Here lies the difficulty :
she wants a rich clayey soil for her roses and
strawberries, and my daffodils will demand not
clay . but sand. Also she is going to plant
purple clematis by my head, and clematis likes
sand too. We have not yet perfectly decided
where we are going to die, but it seems probable
that the survivor will stay in the same place aS|

254 A REAPING.

the survived. But I want purple clematis, since
it was when I saw that that I knew somebody
whom I had thought to be a friend was false.
Indeed, I have done all I could to forgive, but I
think a clematis that feeds on me may make it
surer.

Our funerals will shock the neighbourhood,
I am afraid. I am going to have the A flat
Fugue and Prelude blared on the organ (it is
time somebody began to learn to play) at that
distressing moment when my coffin is wheeled
out of the church, simply to show that I have
enjoyed myself enormously. Great Heaven ! I
should as soon think of having a dead march of
whatever kind played over me as I should let
them play the works of Mr. Mendelssohn. I
shall have had (whatever happens) an immensely
good time. It seems to me much fitter to
return thanks for that than to remind people
that my poor body is dead, which they knew
already, or why did they come to my funeral
service ? As for requiems, I will have none of
them. Whatever happens, 7, my body at least,
cannot possibly lie quiet in my grave. The
plear flowers planted there will see to that.

FEBRUARY. 255

Oh, my God, my God, what unanswerable
riddles you set us ! Even this body, and what
happens to it, is so occupying a subject. I don't
really care what happens to mine: it may be
set up in an anatomical museum if it will teach
anybody anything ; but Helen's. . . . Somehow,
when I come out of the valley of the shadow,
something of that must wait for her ; or, if she
has gone through that passage first, I shall not
know myself unless at the end of it, when the
darkness lifts a little, I shall see grey eyes
looking at the procession of those passing over,
and meeting mine, and saying somehow, ' I am
here.' She must be there (is it not so ?) waiting
on the eternal shore for me.

There she must be. I can't help what I
believe ; that is the one thing in oneself which
one can never change. And Dick will be there,
and Margery . . . what a splendid day !

Then the one horrible certainty descended on
me again. In so few years we shall all — our
bodies, I mean, the appearance by which we
recognize each other — not be our bodies at all,
but part of the fibre of other living things

256 A REAPING.

which are having their day, even as we have
had ours. It is so now with Dick and Margery,
so how shall I know them ? Are they to be
just voices in the air, presences that are felt ?
Is that all ? Shall I never see again that quiver
on Margery's mouth, which means that a smile
is ready to break from it ? I don't want incor-
poreal presences. I want Dick and his crooked
nose, and Margery's smile. . . .

Then, on this warm February morning I must
suppose that I went down into Hell. Dead
leaves and flowers, it was certain, were trans-
formed into fresh living forms, the bones, too,
and flesh of dead animals, and of men and
women, passed again into the great machine of
life, and were served up in new transformations,
so that of the individual body nothing at all
was left. That is bad enough; I shall never
see Margery and Dick again as I used to see
them. Helen will pass, too, into other forms . . .
that is bad enough. But this is infinitely worse.
What of the individual soul, the spirit that we
love ? Will that, too, as analogy grimly insists,
be put back again into the principle of eternal
life from which it came, so that its identity, too,

FEBRUARY. 257

is lost, and lives but only as the autumn leaves
of last year live in the verdure of the next
spring ? With everything else that happens ;
the bodies of those we love even, a cruel thing
surely, but certainly true, are used up again to
make fresh forms of life. Why should we
suppose that God makes any exception in deal-
ing with the souls of men, the individuals ?
Every other form of life He uses and re-uses
. . . the world is but a lump of modelling clay,
with which He beguiles the leisure of eternity,
making now one shape, then crushing it all up
and making another.

So this is all that the promise of Eternal
Life amounts to, that we shall pass back into
the crucible, and issue forth again as bits of
somebody else ! It seems to me a very mean
affair ; frankly, it seems a swindle. It is a
poor trick to make us puny little creatures love
one another, and try to be kind, and console
ourselves for the evil days and the sorrows of
the world with thoughts of the everlasting day
that shall dawn for us all, if that everlasting
day is nothing more than the day that is here
already ; if the souls whom we have believed
9

258 A REAPING.

are at rest in some ineffable peace and content,
or, on the other hand, through further suffering
are getting nearer, ever nearer, to the perfection
and flower of their being, have already passed
into other forms of life, so that Dante and
Beatrice are themselves no longer (as we should
call ' themselves '), but have been infinitely
divided into soldiers, sailors, tinkers, and tailors.
In that sense they may be said to be alive still,
but it is a very paltry sense. They (what we
mistakenly call ' they ') are as dead as if they
had never been.

It is all very well to say that Dante is im-
mortal by reason of his deathless verse ; that is
all very well for us, but how is it for that fiery
soul which is spilt up into a thousand other
bodies ? When he thought to open his eyes on
the Mystical Rose as the dark waves of death
slowly drew back from his emancipated spirit,
it was all a dismal mistake. No Beatrice
awaited him ; she, too, is spilt into a million
other forms of life. They were absorbed back
into the central fire, and a spark of Dante's soul
went into this man, and another into that, so
that in this sense there is eternal life for him.

FEBRUARY. 259

But in no other ; the Dante which we mean was
formed out of other lives, and into other lives
he went. The man is there no more, and there
is no Beatrice. There will be nothing of us
either, unless you mean that at some future
time I am alive because part of me has become
perhaps a murderer, and another part a poli-
tician, and another a housemaid, for all I know.
The February sun was warm ; you might
almost call it hot. A little wind pregnant with
spring moved through the bushes ; the snow-
drops, those pale heralds of the triumphant
march of the new year, were thick in the grass
where we had planted them, Helen and I, last
autumn, so that they should give us the earliest
news of the returning tide of life. And to me
this morning th^y brought but bitter news, for
they spoke not of the returning of life, but of
the thousand deaths which made them alive.
They pointed not forwards towards the glory of
the many-coloured summer, but back to the
innumerable decay of the autumn. And the
quiet garden which I loved, the tiled mossy roof
which I had called home, became the place of
death, even as last autumn death had called to

260 A REAPING.

me from it, and had been seen by Legs, and had
made the dog howl. Was it this that was
hinted at by those dim forebodings which for
months had never been absent from me ? "Was
the fear that crouched in the shadow ready to
spring taking form now ? It seemed to me that
the logic which had turned the world to hell
was irrefutable ; I expected some shattering
stroke that should blot out sunshine and sensa-
tion from me for ever, proving that I and my
logic were right. I had guessed the horrid
secret of the world; I was like a spy found
with the plans of the enemy's fortress on me,
and must die, lest I should communicate them.
I said that to myself ; I said ' Enemy's fortress/
meaning the world where I had loved and been
loved. ' Enemy/ mark you ; I knew what I
meant. The world was the enemy's fortress.

And then, thank God — oh! thank God! —
before that which was impending happened, I
said to myself that I was wrong. I did not at
the moment see where I was wrong, but I knew
that I must have made some gross and awful
mistake. Things could not be as I had
imagined them. And the moment I said that

FEBRUARY. 261

to myself the darkness lifted a little. It was
all dark still, but the quality of the darkness
changed. And then, unbidden as a tune that
suddenly rings in one's head, a few words made
themselves recollected. And they were, ' If I go
down into hell, Thou art there also/

At that I caught a glimpse again of this dear
garden and house, as I had seen and known
them. I do not suppose that this blackness
and loneliness of spirit which I have tried to
indicate could have lasted more than a few
minutes, as measured in the world of time, but
time has nothing to do with the spirit. In a
second, as computed by the unmeaning scale of
hours and days, the soul may live a thousand
lifetimes or die a thousand deaths. Redemption
may be wrought there in an infinitesimal
fraction of a moment, or in that same fraction
a soul may damn itself. For it is not the
moment which is anything: it is the instan-
taneous choice which therein sums up the
infinite series of deeds which one has already
done, and thoughts which one has harboured.
And the message that leaps round the world on
electric wires is a sluggard to choice. My

262 A REAPING.

choice at this moment was between the truth
of what I had been elaborately thinking out and
the truth of the words that rang in my head.
There was reason on one side ; there was just It
on the other. And what was ' It ' ? Just that
which, very faintly, but quite audibly, said that
I had come near to blasphemy. There are
many names for it : we all know its visitation,
though it is obscured sometimes because we
encourage the Devil, who comes to us all in
many forms, and can take the most respectable
disguises, like those of intellect and mind. But
perhaps the simplest name and the truest for It
is the Grace of God.

Then, in the same moment (I am lumbering
in words, and trying to express what I know
cannot be said), I saw that Helen was already
half-way across the grass, coming towards me.
She held a telegraphic sheet in her hand, and
there was in her face a gravity infinitely tender,
and quite quiet, and quite normal. I had seen
it there once before, when the news came of her
father's death, which was sudden.

'Legs won't come down this afternoon,' she
said gently. ' We have got to go up to him.'

FEBRUARY. 263

And then she showed me the telegram.

It was not many hours before we knew all
there was to be known. Legs had started to
ride down from town, and turning into the King's
Road from Sloane Square his motor bicycle had
skidded, and he had fallen under an omnibus.
A wheel had passed over him.

He had a letter or two, which identified him,
in his pockets, and he had been taken, since it
was so near, back to the house in Sloane Street.
When we got there he was still alive.

His room was at the back of the house, and
we were allowed to go in at once. He lay
there, quite unconscious, and in no pain, for the
only thing that could be done for him was to
keep him like that. The bedclothes were not
allowed to touch him, and a round wooden
frame was under them. There was no hope
at all.

His bed ran out into the middle of the room,
and Helen and I sat one on each side of it,
while a little distance off was the doctor, who
just watched him. Sometimes he got up and
looked at him, sometimes he softly left the

264 A REAPING.

room, returning as quietly. And in those hours
of waiting, for a long time I was conscious of
nothing except the trivial details of the room
itself. I suppose I had been there before — ah !
yes, of course, I had, when Legs had the in-
fluenza in the winter — but it was not familiar.
Yet it was just like what I should have ex-
pected Leg's room to be, and in a moment I
found I knew it as well as I knew him. There
was a pile of letters on the writing-table, a bag
of golf -clubs in the corner, an enormous sponge
on the washing-stand, and on the dressing-table
a most elaborate shaving apparatus — a metal
bowl, a little Etna for hot water, a half-dozen
razor blades in a neat case, with a sort of
mowing-machine handle. He had not packed
them, since he was only going to be with us for
a couple of days, and he could never have used
all those blades once each on that smooth
chin. . . .

He had been, as I remembered now, to a
fancy-dress ball the night before, and his ward-
robe, gaping open, showed the hose and ruffles
of the Elizabethan period, while hanging up by
them was a small pointed beard and a high

FEBRUARY. 265

head-top, with long and rather scanty brown
hair. ' For the point is,' Legs had said rather
shrilly, ' everyone will say, " Shakespeare, I
presume ? " and I shall say, " How dare you ! I
am Hall Caine ! " And if some people are a
little cleverer and say, " ' The Bondman/ I
suppose ? " I shall say, " You seem to have
forgotten William Shakespeare." Perhaps you
don't think it funny. But then, you see, you
are not going to the ball/

No ; we had not thought it very funny, and
Legs had been rather ruffled. He told us we
had spoiled his pleasure, but if so, it must have
very quickly become unspoiled again, for — it
was only a week ago that he had conceived
that idea — he spent a boisterously hilarious
evening afterwards. But, how I wish we had
not spoiled his pleasure even for that moment !
As if it mattered whether it was funny or not,
so long as it amused him. Helen had said it
was rather a cheap sort of joke. . . . And just
then her eyes, too, saw the fancy dress hanging
up in the wardrobe, and the moment afterwards
she looked across to me. And then she left the

266 A REAPING.

room for a little while. She, too, I am sure,
had thought of that.

I had a friend once who was killed in a
railway accident. A year afterwards I was
staying with his mother, and one evening, when
we were alone, she began crying gently. ' Jim
took his lunch with him to eat in the train that
day/ she said to me soon, and he had asked me
to put him up an orange. But I forgot.'

That is the pathos of little things. Yes, you
dear soul, weep a little over the forgotten
orange, and let Helen weep a little because she
said Leg's joke was cheap. And then let us
think of the bigger things — the love and the
loving-kindness that have been ours, that bright,
boyish spirit that made mirth in the home.
Even now let us try to thank God for what
has been. You know what Legs was to us — a
sort of son, a sort of brother.

All that afternoon we sat there, hearing
London rumble distantly around us, and little
stirrings and creakings came from different
parts of the room. Now the blind flapped, now
a curtain sighed, or, as often happens in spring-

FEBRUARY. 267

time, a board of the flooring gave a little sharp
rap, some infinitesimal particle of sap still
lingering in it, perhaps, and hearing the heralds
of spring blowing their horns outside. Only
from the bed there came no sound at all : he
was still sunk deep in that sleep which the
doctor hoped would join and be one with death.
If he woke at all, there was a chance that he
would suffer blinding, excruciating pain. On
the other hand, he might come to himself, just
at the last moment of all, when pain would be
already passed.

The doctor was saying this in the hushed
whisper with which we speak in the chamber
of death, though there may be no real reason
why we should not speak openly, when I heard
a little stir from the bed, and, looking round, I
saw that Leg's eyes were open, and that he was
moving them this way and that, as if in search
of something. Helen had seen, too, and next
moment she was by him. He recognized her,
for there was welcome in his eyes, and then,
turning his head a little, he saw me. The
doctor meantime had moved to the head of the
bed and looked at Leg's face very intently.

268 A REAPING.

Then he made a little sign to me that I should
come up to the bed, and he himself went and
stood by the window, looking out.

And I understood.

Then Legs spoke in his ordinary voice.

' Wasn't it bad luck ? ' he said. My bicycle
skidded, and the omnibus

' What is happening to me ? ' he asked
quickly. * Is it '

Helen laid her hand on his head.

' Yes, my darling/ she said. ' But you are
not afraid, are you ? '

For a moment the pupils of his eyes con-
tracted ; then they grew quite normal again.

' No/ he said quickly. l I've had an awfully
good time. Oh, and it was a great success —
Shakespeare, you know/

Then a shadow seemed to pass over his face
and his eyelids fluttered.

1 Now ? Is it coming now ? ' he said.

' Yes, my darling/ said she again, and kissed
him.

Legs lay quite still for a moment with closed
eyes. Then he quickly opened them again, and
made as if he would raise his head

FEBRUARY. 269

' Buck up, you two, won't you ? ' he said.

From outside there came the dim roar of
London, and little noises crept about the room.
But from the bed came no sound at all.

Two days afterwards we went down home
again, arriving in the evening, and the body
rested that night in his own room down here, to
be taken next day to the churchyard, which the
sun blesses more than any other place I have
ever seen, and over which the grey Norman
tower keeps watch. His last charge to us had
been to 'buck up/ and I do not know how it
was, but it seemed to us both as if he was still
liking us to 'buck up.' So, in so far as we
found it possible, we did what Legs wished us
to do.

But to-night he would have been here, making
the third of a merry table, and when the servants
had come in for the last time, bringing us coffee,
it was not possible not to remember that, and
Helen rose. And when she spoke, her voice
trembled.

' Is it very foolish of me ? ' she asked. ' And
do you think Legs will mind ? But I feel as if

270 A REAPING.

I can't face to-morrow, unless I go and look at
the place where we shall put him. It is quite
warm outside, Jack. Oh, let us go out and look
at it. It will seem more natural then. I think
I shall " buck up " better if I see it first/

So we went across the garden, and through
the place of roses, and through the gate on the
far side, and through the field which bounded the
churchyard. There was a great yellow moon
just risen, and shadows were sharp-cut, so that
there was no doubt when we came to the place
that had been so newly dug. His uncle, Helen's
father, lay there ; the two graves were side
by side.

So we sat there in silence for some time, very
still, for a rat ran on to the mound of earth by
the graveside, and sat there, smartening itself up,
brushing its face and whiskers with nimble

o

paws. The shadow of the tower swung just
clear of the place, and sharp-cut in the light was
that oblong hole in the ground. There was
nothing as yet to be said, for Helen was crying
quietly to herself, and I could not stay those
loving tears. Once she said to me : ' Oh, let us
buck up ! ' But then she silently wept again.

FEBRUARY. 271

You see, I know Helen. I knew that there
was nothing of bitterness in her crying. Tears
of that sort were not opposed to the bucking up.
Legs did not mean that he wanted us not to
miss his dear companionship. He only wanted
us to stand up and be cheery, not be bitter or
broken. But since Helen felt she could face
to-morrow better if she faced the scene of it,
why, that was all right ; it was bucking up.

Then in a few little sentences we talked of
the next day. There should be the A flat Fugue
— no funeral march — and we would have no
funeral hymns, but just one Psalm, ' The Lord
is my Shepherd/ and one hymn after all that
had to be done was over ; so then we would
sing ' Adeste Fideles,' Helen thought, for it is
always Christmas since the first Christmas Day.

Helen just moved as she sat there on the edge
of his grave when we had settled this as if to
go home again, but

And then I told her all that I had thought
three mornings ago — all the doubts that
merged into certainty, all the logical con-
clusions. Whether I then at that moment
inclined more to the side of the Devil or of

272 A REAPING.

God I do not know, but in any case I told her
all ; and then she put her arms round me.

' Yes, dear/ she said, ' but in hell He is
there also. And we are all there sometimes,
and it is but the lowest step of the beautiful
stair to heaven.'

The moon had swung behind the tower, and
we sat in the darkness of its shadow.

' It is all so simple/ she said. * It all depends
upon what you believe, not what you think or
what you reason about. Do you believe that
we bury Legs to-morrow ? Do you believe that
he is dead, or that he has ceased to be an in-
dividual ? You may reason about it, and ask
me, as you asked yourself, how you will recognize
him if his body has become grass and flowers ?
I am quite content to say that' I have no
idea. You see, one doesn't know all God's
plans quite completely, and sometimes we are
apt to think that if one doesn't know the
plans about a certain thing He hasn't got one.
We put our intelligence above His. That is a
mistake/

And we sat in silence again ; then Helen spoke,
asking me an extremely simple question.

FEBRUARY. 273

' What does faith mean if you are right about
it ? ' she said.

* It means nothing. It is without meaning.'

* And are you prepared to abide by that ? '
Again there was silence. She sat a little apart

from me, so that her questions came from the
darkness ; they were put impersonally, so to
speak, not by Helen, but just by a voice.

* Do you believe that Margery and Dick are
nothing now except grass and flowers, and
perhaps a little bit of the lives of other people ?
Do you really believe it ? And is Legs nothing
now?'

It was quite still. We had come to a very
sequestered corner of the great house of life to
talk about these things. In front was the
shadow of the grave, and over it now lay the
shadow of the tower. Once from the grave's
side a few pebbles detached themselves and fell
rattling to the bottom, and I had no answer to
this. Three days ago I had asked myself the
same questions, and what I call my brain
answered them ; but now it gave no answer.
Something, I suppose, had made it uncertain.

' How can the wheel of an omnibus hurt

274 A REAPING.

Legs ? ' she asked. ' It can do no more than
hurt his body.'

Then she came closer to me again.

' And what does love mean ? ' she said.

I think Legs must have enjoyed his funeral
next day, because it was so extremely funny, and
I think by this time that you know enough
about him and Helen and me to allow us all to
be amused at it. We had sent a note to our
Vicar saying that we should like the A flat Pre-
lude, and the Psalm, and the hymn which I have
mentioned. He came in person, not to remon-
strate, but to put on to us the correcter attitude.
Death was a solemn occasion. There was none
so solemn, and the Hymns Ancient and Modern
provided some very suitable verses to be sung —
' Now the labourer's task is o'er,' for instance.
(Legs a labourer, who was the most gorgeous
player at life that has ever been seen !) Besides,
surely a Christmas hymn was out of place,
when it would be Ash Wednesday in no time.
I said feebly that a Christmas hymn was
surely always in place ; but dear Mr. Eversley
looked pained, and Helen at once yielded. She

FEBRUARY. 275

was sure that the ' labourer's task ' was most
suitable.

Then about the Psalm. There were two
Psalms already provided for the Burial Service,
and surely ' " The Lord is my Shepherd " struck
a different note/ So said our Vicar. That was
undeniable. And when should we sing that
Psalm ? Then Helen was firm, and said that
we thought we should go back into church
at the end of the service, and — well, just sing it.
It was rather good to end with. But Mr.
Eversley looked even more pained than before.
He had never heard of such a thing being done.
That point was left undecided for the moment,
for there was clearly something even more crucial
to come.

It came.

Ever since the organist had heard of Legs'
death he had been most diligent at Chopin's
Funeral March, of which he had of his own
initiative bought a copy in order to be able to
perform it. The organist in question, who was
also the schoolmaster, had had a sort of distant
adoration for Legs ever since a year ago he had
seen him drive a golf -ball two hundred and sixty

276 A REAPING.

measured yards. Since then Legs had played
with him once or twice, giving him enormous
odds, and the distant adoration had ripened into
a nearer one. ' He was such a pleasant young
gentleman/ was the upshot of it. And the dear
man had bought Chopin's Funeral March, since
he wanted to play something ' more uncommon '
than the Dead March in ' Saul ' !

Here Helen and I were completely at one.
There should be no A flat Preludes ; it was to
be Chopin's Funeral March.

There remained the question of the Twenty-
third Psalm. Oh yes, it would strike a different
note, that was quite true ; so there would be no
going back into church, but we should have
Chopin's Funeral March and ' Now the labourer's
task is o'er/

The Vicar did not exactly beam when these
things were settled, but he was visibly relieved.
He shook hands with us both, and said :

* Terribly sudden, terribly sudden. At two
precisely.'

(Oh, Legs, how you would have enjoyed that !
We did, too, for you told us to buck up. And
it was so funny, after all we had planned !)

FEBRUARY. 277

The Vicar's call had been made quite early,
and it was scarcely twelve when he went away ;
but to us both it seemed as if Legs had been
waiting somewhere upstairs till he went in order
to laugh over it with us. It was as if he had
been waiting on the landing, fresh from his
bath, with just a dressing-gown on, so that he
could not appear when other people were there,
but might come down barefooted when they had
gone. He must have been so amused at it.
How he would skip into the drawing-room,
afraid of prowling housemaids, to find us alone,
and say, ' Sorry I haven't got much on, but I
had to come down after my bath/ Yes, after
his bath. It was so that it seemed to us. That
wholesome spirit had been washed, we thought,
by what is called death. It was fresher, more
jubilant than ever. And on the Vicar's de-
parture down he came to join us again. I
have no other words for it.

There was more to come, for hardly had the
Vicar gone when it was announced to us that
Mr. Holmes had called, and might he see one of
us for a moment only. I felt that Legs was

278 A REAPING.

cornered now. He would have to stop here, hide
behind the piano or something. I hoped he
would behave himself, and not make me laugh.
So Mr. Holmes came in.

I never saw anybody so wonderfully attired.
He was all in black, including his gloves and
his stick, and above his small neat buttoned
boots when he sat down I saw a black sock.
That may only have been accidental, but no
accident would account for the fact that his cuffs
had a neat black border about half an inch wide.
I wondered if he had blacked himself all over
like the enthusiastic impersonator of Othello.

He had ventured to intrude on our grief, but
only for a moment. Here Helen dropped her
handkerchief, and they both bent down to pick
it up and knocked their heads together, and I
almost thought I heard a little stifled gasp from
behind the piano. But Mr. Holmes had received
no notice of the funeral, which he had understood
was to be to-day, and did not know if we wished
it to be quite private ; if not, he would esteem
it a privilege to be allowed to pay his last
respects. And here little Mr. Holmes gave a
great gulp, and could not get on.

FEBRUARY. 279

' 1 did like him so much,' he said, after a
moment. f Two. Thank you, I can let myself
out!'

And he walked away on tiptoe, as if it was
most important not to make a noise.

It was one of those sparkling February days,
sunny and windless, and the air was full of the
chirruping of birds. There was a moment's
pause at the gate of the churchyard, a moment's
silence. Inside the church the organ ceased ;
then came great simple words :

' I am the Resurrection and the Life.'

MARCH

HELEN and I have a failing, though you
may not have thought that such a thing
was possible. It is a foolish weakness for old
bits of rubbish. We can neither of us without
anguish and unutterable rendings bear to throw
old and useless things away. The weakness has
to be got over sometimes, but we keep putting
the work of destruction off, just as one puts
off a visit to the dentist, with the result that
when it comes to pass we find that it would
have been far better to have done it long ago.
However, if we did not occasionally tear things
up, and throw things away, the house would
become uninhabitable, so this morning we
vowed to each other to spend the hours till
lunch in the work of destruction. Our rubbish
collects chiefly in the room that is called mine,
where she has a knee-hole table with nine

282 A REAPING.

drawers. She opened these one after the other.
They were all full, and despair seized her.

' I can't/ she said. * Here are nine drawers
all quite full of heart's blood. O Jack,
look ! '

And she brought across to me a photograph
I had taken of Legs jumping the lawn-tennis
net. He was sitting in the air apparently in
an easy attitude. One knee seemed crossed
over the other, and his mouth was wide open.

'It will be harder than ever this year,' she
said, half to herself. 'And there are nine
drawers full ! '

' Circumscribe the drops of heart's blood as
they come/ said I. 'Don't think there are
nine drawers full. Only keep thinking of the
particular thing that has to be kept or thrown
away.'

' Oh, but it's only the fact that there are
nine drawers full that makes it possible to
throw anything away at all/ said she.

' Hush, woman ! ' said I.

Personally, I am extremely methodical over
the work of destruction. I clear a table and
dump upon it a pile of heart's blood. This I

MARCH. 283

sort into three heaps, one of which is for
destruction, one for preservation, and one for
further consideration. I proceeded to do so
now.

There were many pieces of string. Through-
out the year I keep pieces of string, because
I know I shall use them. As a matter of fact,
when I want a piece of string I cut it off
Helen's ball, and never use any of the bits
that I have saved, because I don't know where
they are, and they would prove to be the
wrong length if I did. So on the day of
destruction I consign them to the dust-bin,
and begin to collect again immediately. Then
there was a pill-box full of soft yellow powder,
which Legs and I had collected from the little
cedar-cones at some house where we were
staying in the autumn. That I put on to
the heap of destruction, but transferred it to
the heap of consideration. Then there were
a dozen little bits of verd-antique which I
had picked up years ago on the beach at Capri,
and which I had periodically tried to throw
away. But I never could manage it, and this
morning, knowing it was useless to strive

284 A REAPING.

against the irresistible, I made no attempt
whatever to steel myself to their destruction,
but put them at once into the pile that was pre-
destined unto life. There was a chunk of amber
that I had picked up at Cromer, equally imperish-
able ; yards and yards of indiarubber tape that
is the filling of a rubber-cored golf-ball ; a small
bottle with a glass stopper, clearly impossible
to throw away, since it might come in useful
any day, and how foolish I should feel if this
afternoon I wanted a bottle with a glass
stopper, and had to send into the town for
one, whereas, if I had been less iconoclastic,
I might have airily produced the exact thing
needed out of the left-hand top drawer. Then
came a little tin box full of pink powder, which
I concluded was rouge. This was puzzling.

' When did I use rouge ? ' I asked Helen.

' I don't know. Was it Legs', do you think,
when he acted the Ked Queen last year ? '

No, I couldn't throw that away. The Red
Queen had been a piece of genius. And next
came the telegram from him to me saying that
he had passed into the Foreign Office. Then
there was a vile caricature of myself at the

MARCH. 285

top of my so-called swing at golf — quite un-
recognizable, I assure you, but . . .

Then came a mass of letters, receipted bills,
and accounts rendered. Accounts rendered
always fill me with suspicion, and I have to
hunt among unpaid bills to find the items of
the account rendered, as I feel a moral
certainty that this is an attempt to defraud
me. But they are invariably correct. But
these and the receipted bills, which had to be
docketed and tied up together in a bundle,
took time. Probably, however, I could tie
them up with one of those many pieces of
string which I had so diligently collected. By
a rare and happy chance I found one that
would do exactly, and tied them up with a
beautiful hard knot, and put them on the
predestination heap. A moment afterwards
I found several more to join the same packet,
split my nail over trying to untie my beautiful
knot, and had to go upstairs for nail-scissors to
cut it smooth, and brought them down to cut the
knot. No other piece of string in my collection
would do, and so I cut a piece off Helen's
ball, for she had left the room for the moment.

286 A REAPING.

Then I came upon a large quantity of boxes
of fusees, all partly empty. How it happens
is this : I go to play golf on a windy day,
and, of course, have to buy at the club-house
a box of fusees. These, on my return, or what
remains of them, I methodically put in a
drawer on reaching home. By an oversight
I forget to take them out again when I play
next day, and so buy another box, which I
similarly place in a drawer. And if you play
golf four or five times a week on these downs,
where there is almost always a high wind, it
follows that in the course of a year the amount
of partly filled boxes of fusees which you collect
about you is nothing short of prodigious. I
did not know how great a supporter I was
of home industries.

My methodical mind saw at once how these
had to be treated. Of course, throwing them
all away was out of the question, and the
right thing to do was to produce out of every
dozen of partly filled boxes some eight or nine
completely full. This plan I began to put
into practice at once.

It was necessary, of course, to find how

MARCH. 287

many matches a full fusee-box contained, but
they are awkward to pack, and some seemed
to hold ten and others only seven ; so when
Helen came back, the table was covered, among
other things, with fusees. So I waved my
arms violently, and said : ' You shall not ! '
This was because the female nose, and the male
nose if it is unaccustomed to tobacco-smoke,
likes, positively likes, the smell of fusees ; but
to anyone who smokes tobacco the smell of
them is, for some^reason, perfectly nauseating,
and that is why we only use them in the
open air.

Then Helen's mean nature asserted itself.
She said, ' Oh, I forgot you don't like the
smell,' and soon after (not at once, mark you)
called my attention to some non-existent object
of horticultural interest out of the window.
I turned, and in a moment she had lit a fusee,
and positively inhaled the sickening perfume of
it. I only wished she had inhaled it all.

The upshot was that we took a turn on
the lawn, while the room with open door and
windows recovered from its degrading odour.

' How were you getting on ? ' she asked.

288 A REAPING.

' Not very well. I decided to destroy some
string. I nearly destroyed a pill-box with
some cedar-flower dust in it. But I reserved
that. At least, I think I did/

'Why?'

' Legs and I collected it, and I know Legs
wouldn't have thrown it away, so I can't.'

Helen was silent a moment ; then,

* Do you miss Legs very much ? ' she asked.
* His bodily presence, I mean, of course/

' Of course I do, just a^ you do. I miss
him all the time. Oh, he is in the room, and
he laughs at us, or with us. I know that/

' Then what do you miss ? ' she asked.

' The young body about the house/

Then Helen said : ' Oh, you darling ! '

That sort of remark is always extremely
pleasant, but I had no notion of her artfulness.
I am glad to say that she has often said it
before, so that it was not particularly stupid
of me not to guess that it meant anything
especial. And with her artfulness she changed
the subject to that which I happened to be
thinking about, thus making no transition.

' I gave up/ she said. ' I found all my

MARCH. 289

things were so connected with Legs that I
couldn't destroy them. It is just what you
said. We want to keep the young thing in
the house, since we are getting old — yes, it's
no use saying " Pouf ! " — and I can't destroy
anything connected with him. So shall we
move our rubbish straight into Legs' room, and
make a sort of young museum ? Then, when
we feel particularly middle-aged, we can go
up there and sit among the young things. If
we don't do that, we must clear out his room
as we'll, and I can't see how we can. There
are rough copies of letters to that dreadful
Charlotte ; there is a letter in his handwriting,
there on his table, beginning '

* Beginning " You're a damned fool ! " ' said
I, ' "Jbut I don't intend to quarrel with you."
Did you mean that one ? '

' Then you have been there, too ? ' she said.

* Why, of course, every day. I go when you
attend to household affairs after breakfast ; you
go when you say you are going to bed. Didn't
you know ? '

' Certainly I did, but I thought you didn't

know that I went there,' she said.
10

290 A HEAPING.

< Ditto/ said I.

There was a huge rushing wind out of the
south-west, and we stood a little while inhaling
the boisterousness of it. All spring was in it,
all the renewal of life.

' How Legs is laughing at us ! ' she said.

* I don't care. Let's have the museum of
young things. Let's put there all the things
we can't throw away. Oh, Helen, there are
photographs, too ! There is one of him in his
last half at Eton. . . . There is one of you and
me when the Canadian canoe sank gently, and
as we stood dripping on the shore he photo-
graphed us. And I photographed him and you
when you said you would skate a rocking-turn
together, and fell down. Heart's blood, heart's
blood ! There ought to be a law which makes
it a penal offence to keep photographs.'

I suppose I had got excited, for Helen took
my arm and said :

1 There, there ! '

But even that did not do.

1 Oh, the pity of it,' I cried — ' the pity of it !
Why didn't he take a train to come down ?
Why didn't that omnibus pull up ? He was

MARCH. 291

ours, and he would have married, and still been
ours, and there would have been young things
about the house again.'

I suppose I had torn away from her, for now
we were apart, facing each other, at the end of
this ; and she smiled so quietly, so serenely.

' Do you think that I don't feel that, too ? '
she asked. * Can't you see that the wife who
is mother of nothing must feel it more than the
husband who is father of nothing? Besides,
you make your books — you are father to them.
What do I do ? I order dinner.'

And yet— -it seems to me so strange now —
I did not see. There was bitterness in her
words, but all I thought was that there was no
bitterness in her voice, or her face, or her smile.
I did not quite understand that, I remember,
but Helen has told me since that she did not
mean me to. She wanted — well, her plan
evolves itself.

And then she took my arm again.

* It is nearly a month since dear Legs went
away,' she said, c since we have actually heard
and seen him. The last we heard was that he
wanted us to buck up. Do you know, I think

292 A REAPING.

we have bucked up. But we have been doing
that singly; we have somehow lived rather
apart, dear. Surely it is better to buck up
together. I think the idea of a young museum
is a very good one. Let us put all the things
we can't throw away into his room. We have
never used the room before, because Legs might
always rush down and want a bed ; and so let
us keep it like that. We might call it the
nursery.'

And so the young museum was started. Helen
had all manner of tender trifles for it, all con-
nected with Legs. She had all sorts of things
I had known nothing of : little baby garments,
Legs' bottle, some baby socks. Then there were
child things as well : ' Alice in Wonderland/ the
depressing Swiss family called Robinson, a far
better Robinson called Crusoe.

And thus the nursery grew. ' Treasure Island '
went there; a rocking-horse, which I remembered
of old days, was brought down from an attic.
Oh, how well, when I saw him again, I remem-
bered him ! He had a green base, nicely curved,
on which he pranced to and fro, and my foot

MARCH. 293

had once been under it when he pranced, so
that I lost a toenail, and was rewarded with
sixpence for stopping crying. He had a hollow
interior, the only communication with which
were the holes of the pommels, and on another
dreadful day my sister had dropped a three-
penny-bit into one of them, with some idea of
making a bank. A bank it was, but the capital
was irrecoverable. The coin was still there, for
now I took up the whole horse with ease, that
steed which had so often carried me, and heard
a faint chink from his stomach. He had a wild
eye, too, and naming red nostrils, and the paint
smelt just the same as ever. And Helen pro-
duced a Noah's ark, in which the paint was
of familiar odour, but different, and there was
Ham without a stand, and Mrs. Noah in a neat
brown ulster, and Noah with a beard, and one
good foot, but the other was a pin. Elephants
were there with pink trunks (I never could
understand why), and enormous ducks with pink
bills (which now threw a light on the colour of
the elephants' trunks, since I suppose that a
brush full of pink was indiscriminately be-
stowed), and small spotted tigers, and nameless

294 A REAPING.

beasts which we called lynxes, chiefly because
we did not know what they were, and did not
know what lynxes were, so they were probably
the ones. The ark itself had Gothic windows,
and a mean white bird, with a piece of asparagus
in its mouth, painted on the roof, probably
indicated the dove and the leaf.

We must have spent two days over the
nursery, and during those days We concentrated
there all the young things of the house, and
when it was finished it was a motley room.
There Were photographs of Legs everywhere ;
all his papers were kept ; everything that had
any connection with Legs and with youth was
crammed into it. And when it Was finished we
found that We sat there together, instead of pay-
ing secret visits to the room, and we played at
Noah's ark, sitting on the carpet, and played at
soldiers, clearing a low table Which had been
Helen's nursery-table (for you cannot play
soldiers on the floor, since they stagger on a
carpet), and peas from pea-shooters sent whole
rows of Grenadiers down like ninepins, But
we could neither of us ride the rocking-horse,
so instead we tilted him backwards and for-

MARCH. 295

wards, and pretended he was charging the
foe.

Of course, all reasonably-minded readers will
say we were two absurd people. We both of us
disagree altogether. For you have to judge of
any proceedings by its effects, and the effect in
this case was that Legs' injunction that we
should 'buck up* became a habit. That
inimitable youth which Legs gave the home,
he, his bodily presence, had gone. But some-
how the atmosphere was recaptured. We played
at youth, at childhood, till it became real again.
For a household without youth in it is a dead
household ; a puppy or a kitten may supply it,
or an old man of eighty may supply it. But
youth of some kind must be part of one's
environment. Else the world withers.

Another thing has happened to me personally.
I have said that at the beginning of the year
I looked forward into the future through two
transparencies, one sunlit, the other dark. But
now the dark one (I can express it in no other
way) had been withdrawn. Dear Legs' death
was not quite identical with it, for it was not
withdrawn then. But during the month that

296 A REAPING.

followed it gradually melted away. I can trace
just two causes for it.

The first was this : In ineptitude of spirit I
had reasoned to myself that the death of the
body logically implied the merging of the life
into the one central life. But after his death
Legs became to my spirit more individual than
ever. And the second cause was this establish-
ment of the nursery. Though youth might
have passed for oneself, it still lived. One was
wrong, too (at least I was), in thinking it had
passed from oneself. Else how did I feel so
singularly annoyed when Helen shot down with
a wet pea a whole regiment of my Life Guards ?
I was annoyed; I am still. It was a perfect
fluke that the Colonel on horseback fell in such
a way that he more than decimated his own
regiment. And I am sure Helen shook the table,
else why should the Brigadier-General, posted in
the extreme rear, have fallen off the table alto-
gether ? She won.

Meantime in this first week of March the
winds were roaring out of the south-west, and
for a while, days together sometimes, squalls
which the Valkyrie maidens might have bridled

MARCH. 297

to make steeds for their swift going came in
unbroken procession from the Atlantic. Helen
is a lover of the sea, and these gales coming out
of the waste of waters touch something within
her as mysterious as the sixth sense of animals,
who feel and are excited by things that the five-
sensed mortal is unaware of. To-day, however,
was quiet and calm, and we stormed the steep
ascent of the downs till we stood on the highest
point of the Beacon, which looks down on all
other land towards the south-west, so that the
river of wind that flows from the Atlantic comes
here unbreathed and untamed by traverse of
other country, and you get it fresh and salt as it
was when it left the ocean.

In that interval of quiet weather there was
nothing to be perceived by the ordinary sense,
but she sniffed the air like a filly at grass.

' Wind is coming/ she said, ' the great wind
from the sea. I don't care whether your little
barometer has gone up or not; what does it
know of the winds ? We shall be at home
before it comes, but I will tell you then, as
we sit close to the fire, what is happening in
the big places/

298 A REAPING.

She was quite right ; though the silly barom-
eter had gone up, we were but half through
dinner when the wind, which had been no more
than a breeze all afternoon, struck the house as
suddenly as a blow. The wood fire on the
hearth gave a little puff of smoke into the room,
and then, thinking better, suddenly sparkled as
if with frost, as the passage of the air above
the chimney drew it up. At that Helen's eyes
were alight. She ate no more, but sat with her
elbows on the table, while I, who have not the
sixth sense, went gravely through mutton and
anchovies on toast and an orange. Then they
brought in coffee, and she shook her head to
that. Meantime that first warning of the wind
had been justified ; a Niagara of air poured over
us, screaming and hooting, and making a mad
orchestra of sound. At times it ceased altogether
—the long pause of. the conductor — and then,
before one heard the wind at all, a tattoo of the
drums of rain sounded on the window-pane.
Then, heralded by those drums, the whole mad
orchestra burst into a great tutti of screaming,
hooting, sobbing. So much I could hear, but
Helen was of it somehow. Something secret

MARCH. 299

and sensitive within her vibrated to the
uproar.

I have seen her in the grip of the wind, as
she expresses it, perhaps half a dozen times, and
it always makes me vaguely uneasy. It is no
less than a possession, and yet I can think of no
one whom I would have imagined less liable to
such a thing. I can imagine her surrounded
by the terrors of fire or shipwreck, or any
catastrophe that overthrows the reason, and
makes men mere panic-stricken maniacs, keep-
ing absolutely calm, and infecting others by her
self-possession. But now and then the wind
takes possession of her, and she becomes like
the Pythian prophetess.

' Oh, to be alone with the sea and the gale
to-night ! ' she said. ' Jack, what splendid things
are happening in the great empty places of the
world ! This has been brewing out on the
Atlantic for a couple of days by now, and there
are. thousands of miles of great white-headed
waves rising and falling in the darkness, and
calling to each other, and dancing together. Up
above them, as in the gallery of the ball-room, is
the great mad band of which we hear a little

A REAPING.

in our stuffy house, and it will play to them all
night and all to-morrow, and the waves will
dance without ceasing, growing bigger as they
dance, like some nightmare. Oh, you can
imagine nothing ! But I see so clearly Mr.
and Mrs. Wave and all their family dancing,
dancing, all young, though white-headed, and
growing bigger as they dance. They are
cannibals, too, and a big wave will eat up a
little one, which makes it bigger yet. The
wind loves to see that. He gives a great blare
of trumpets when he sees a cannibal wave. Oh,
it must have happened this moment ! That
scream meant, " Well done, wave ! That was
a big one you swallowed ! "

' Sometimes they see a ship coming along, and
they love playing with ships, because all proper
ships like being out in the Atlantic ball-room,
and the waves crowd towards it, seeing which
can lift it highest. Whiz ! Can't you hear
the screw racing, as the wave that lifted the
stern runs away from under it ? How the
masts strike right and left across a thousand
stars, for the sky is quite clear ! The winds
have turned out the clouds as you turn out

MARCH. 301

the chairs and tables from a room where you
dance.'

We had gone up to Legs* room after dinner,
and as she talked she went quickly from place
to place, now pausing for a moment to look at a
photograph, now putting coal on the fire, or
drawing aside the curtain to look into the
night.

' Oh, there is the eternal youth of the world,'
she said — ' the song of the winds and the dance
of the waves. I think all the souls of the little
babies that are born come to land in the blow-
ing from the sea. It is by that that vitality
burns higher, and the fruitfulness of the world
is renewed. Millions of blossoms of life are
rushing over the land to-night, ready to drop
into lonely homes

* Ah, don't, don't,' I said. ' Helen, come and
sit down and be quiet.'

She paused for a moment opposite me, looking
at me with her wonderful shining eyes.

1 Not I, not I,' she said.

She still paused, still looking at me, still
waiting for me to join her, as it were. And in
that pause a sudden faint far-away light broke

302 A REAPING.

on me. She had said words which must have
awoke in her, even as they awoke in me, the
most keen and poignant sorrow that can touch
those who love each other, and yet she was still
smiling, and her eyes shone.

I got up. Something of that huge joy that
transfigured her was wrapping me round also.
The thrill, the rapture in which she was en-
veloped, began to encompass us.

' What do you mean ? ' I asked,

' It is for you to tell me/ she said. ' It must
be done that way/

* You said " ready to drop into lonely homes," '
I said.

<«So that they are filled with laughter/"
said she.

Then I knew.

« It is here/ I said™' the nursery/

And at that the exciterae&t, the exultation
slowly passed from the face of my beloved, for
there wag no room there for more than mother-
hood. Though the wind still bugled and
trumpeted outside, she heard it no more ; the
wildness of the dancing waves, grey-heacled,
growing waves, passed by outside her. , . . The

MARCH. 303

blossom ready to drop filled her heart with the
tenderness of the infinite deep love of the
mother that shall be.

She sat there on the floor at my feet, with
her arms round my knees and her head pillowed
there.

' I have got to confess, too/ she said, ' though
I am not ashamed of my confession. But don't
allow yourself to be hurt, Jack. Just hold on
for a minute without being hurt, and you
will find that you are not. Now I shall hide
my face, and speak to you like that. I have
known it quite a long time : before Legs died I
knew it.'

Well, I had to hold on for a minute or two,
and not be hurt. If you think it over, you
will agree it was rather a hard task that I had
been set. On the other hand, about big things,
about things that really matter, you must take
my word for it that Helen is never wrong.
But I had not been forbidden to ask a question.

' Then why did you not tell me ? ' I said.

Her head with the sunlit billows just stirred
a moment, but she did not look up, but spoke
with a hidden face,

304 A REAPING.

' Because through all these weeks, my darling,
you have been struggling against some bitter-
ness of soul. You have made light of it to
me, but I had to be quite sure it had gone from
you before I told you this. I know what it
was — it was the doubts you talked about to
me when we sat one night at the edge of dear
Legs' grave — when it was dug, but empty.
And I had to be quite sure it had all passed
from you before I told you this. I have not
been sure till now, and — and I wanted you so
much to guess. You nearly guessed, I felt,
when we arranged this heavenly nursery/

Then again there was silence, and I think I
never knew till then how desperately difficult it
is to be honest with oneself. It is so much
easier to be honest with other people. At the
first glance I told myself I had got over the
bitterness and blindness of which she had
spoken when we talked together over Legs'
grave, but gradually I became aware that I had
not. Somewhere deep down, so that while the
days passed it concealed itself from me, that
bitterness had still been there. In this book,
which has tried to be honest, you will, I dare

MARCH. 305

say, find no trace of it since that night, but I
had not probed deep enough. It had been
there, and I think the days when we arranged
the nursery finally expelled it. To-night, at
least, I believed it was gone, and since Helen
believed so, too, perhaps we are right about it.
She, the witch, the diviner, had known me so
much better than I had known myself all along.

All this took time, for the processes of
honesty with me are slow. But there is no
difficulty about the matter, perhaps, if the head
you love best in all the world is pillowed on
your knee. That is a stimulant, one must
imagine. So at last I said :

' Yes, it's done.'

She came closer yet, and, like Mr. Holmes,
we talked below our breath, in whispers, as if
afraid of disturbing this great joy that had
come floating down on us, borne on the sea-
spray, borne on the wind-tide, borne as you
will, so that only it came here.

Then, very soon after, she went to bed, and I
was left sitting in the nursery, with its new
significance. Yet it was not quite new. I had,
as Helen said, * half guessed before/ and I but

306 A REAPING.

wondered, now I knew, how my imagination
had halted half-way, and had not clearly seen
the star on which Helen's eyes were fixed. Yet
who would have known ? She had been so
full of art in her wording; even that master-
word she had used, ' nursery/ seemed but to
have slipped in, and I had thought she meant
only — as, indeed, she had said— that it was to
be the room of young things, where she should
sit when the shadow of childlessness was chill,
and with the aid of the memories of youth and
play keep the mists of middle age from closing
round us, and the frosts of old age from settling
too stiffly on the later years of our travel. The
room was to be but a palliative or a tonic, as
you will, a consolation for the things that were
not to be for us, and now it showed another
face. It was not the past of which it spoke,
but the future.

I suppose I sat long over the embers of the
fire, but these were hours that had escaped from
the hand of Time, and were not to be computed
by his scale. Sometimes I threw a log into the
open hearth of the fireplace (ah, but that open

MARCH. 307

hearth must be altered now ; it would never
do in the nursery), and sometimes I plied an
industrious pair of bellows, but for the most
part I sat idle, looking into the fiery heart of
the blaze ; for the news that Helen had made
me guess was at first unrealizable. Though I
knew it to be true, I had to absorb, digest it,
since a great joy is as stunning a thing as the
stroke of sorrow. And gradually, as gradually
as the workings of the process of beauty, I
began to feel, and not only to know, the name
of the room where I sat. It was the nursery.

But Helen was wrong about one thing. She
had said that the wind would play to the
dancing of the waves all night and all next day,
but before I went to bed that wild orchestra of
the storm had ceased. Its work was done for
us. It had blown the bud of the blossom of life
into the house that so longed for it

It is strange how quickly the events of life
become part of one. Next morning I woke in
full possession of the new knowledge. There
was no question or uncertainty as to what that

308 A REAPING.

was which made a rapture of waking. And
with the same suddenness all real knowledge
of what life had been before I knew this had
passed from me. I could no longer in the least
realize what I had felt like before the moment
came when Helen had made me guess. Though
that moment was so few hours away, yet I could
no more conceive existence without it than one
can form any mental picture of what life would
be without the gift of sight or hearing. It is
not that any huge event destroys all that went
before it, but it so stains back through the
turned pages of the past that they are all
coloured and suffused with it.

How the blackbirds and thrushes sang on
that March morning ! I had awoke before
dawn to hear the early tuning-up going on in
the bushes, and before long, since I was too
happy to sleep, I got up, dressed quietly, and
went out. The tuning-up was just over, and
the birds were all busy with breakfast, for you
must know, as soon as they wake, they get in
singing-trim for the day before they have their
food. That done, they go on their bright-eyed
quest, listening, with head cocked as they scuttle

MARCH. 309

over the lawn, for the sound of a worm moving.
They are so close to the ground themselves that
they can localize this to within a fraction of an
inch, and then in goes the spear-like beak, and
the poor thing is dragged out of the soft, dew-
drenched earth. They are not quite tidy eaters,
these dear minstrels of the garden, for the point
is to get your breakfast inside you beyond recall,
with the least possible delay. Swallow, gulp,
swallow, and the thing is done. Then you give
one long flute-like note of satisfaction, and listen
again for the second course. But one cannot
exactly say that they have bad manners at table,
for the extreme sensibleness of the plan excludes
all other considerations. Also, bad manners at
table irresistibly suggest greediness, and no bird
is ever greedy. They have excellent appetites,
and when they have had enough they stop
eating, and instantly begin to sing.

It was just at the end of birds' breakfast that
I got out — that is to say, it still wanted some
minutes to sunrise. The lawn was all gossamer-
webbed and shimmering with dew, as if some
thin layer of moonstone or transparent pearl
had been veneered over emerald, and I felt it

310 A REAPING.

almost a vandalism to walk over it, removing
with my clumsy feet whole patches o£ thin
inimitable jewellery. The three-hour gale of
the night before had vanished to give place to a
morning of halcyon calm, and I augured one of
those rare and exquisite days which March
sometimes gives us— days of warm windlessness
and the promise of spring. Straight in front
of me rose the Beacon, still submerged in clear
dark shadow, but high in the heavens above
dawn had come, for it made a golden fleece —
one such as never Jason handled— of the little
cirrhus clouds that the gale had forgotten to
sweep away. Dawn would soon strike the
Beacon, too, but before that I hoped to stand
on its top, and see the huge embrace of day and
night, the melting and absorption of darkness
into light. Even the river, with its waving
water-weeds and aqueous crystal, did not detain
me, and I gave but ten minutes to the ascent,
for I wanted to welcome the dawn from a
high place, to stand on the roof of the hills to
greet it.

Slowly dawn descended from the sky, quiver-
ing and palpitating with light. The great golden

MARCH. 311

flood came nearer and nearer the earth, which
as yet caught but the reflection from the radiant
heavens. It hung a moment hovering, the
bright- winged iridescent bird of dawn, just
above my head, and then the sun leaped up,
vaulting above the eastern hills. The level
shafts of light swept across the land, a mantle
of gold, while in the valleys below the clear
dusk still lay like tideless waters. But down
the hill-sides strode the day, throwing its bright
arms about the night, enfolding and encompass-
ing it in miraculous embrace, and I looked to
where home was. Already the big elms in the
garden were pillars of flame, then the roof
burned, and suddenly the windows blazed signal-
like. Dawn had come.

That was not half the miracle. Light had
awoke, the hills were gilded with the sun, but at
the touch of the gilding larks innumerable sprang
from the warm tussocksof down-grass andaspired.
A hundred singing specks rose against the sky,
each infinitesimal, so that they seemed but like
the little motes that swim across the eyeball, but
these were living things with open throat that
hailed the sunrise. Perpendicularly they rose,

312 A REAPING.

wings quivering, and throat a-tremble with song,
till the eye lost them against the dazzling azure
of day, and only enraptured voices from the air
made the heavens musical, as if the morning
stars sang together. Heaven made holiday. Its
company of sweet singers and the gold of sunrise
were one thing — the dawn.

Dear God, dear God, how I thank You for that
indestructible minute ! I knew now what the
sunlit curtain that lay between the future and me
was, and the very morning after I had known
You let me see from this high place the birth
of day. In this physical world there was repro-
duced that golden sunlit curtain. You made
visible to me what my heart knew. And to me
on the top of the Beacon the windows of my
home flashed a beacon to me. And all was of
Your making — the sun and the mounting sky-
larks, and down below the trees of the garden,
and the beaconing, flushing window of my
beloved, and the fruit of the womb. When I
come to die, I want to remember all that.
Truth and Life were there, and the Way
also. And what is the sum of those three
things ?

MARCH. 313

Yet was I content even then ? Good heavens,
no ! There were many beautiful things yet to
be, and the glory of His gifts just lies in this —
that there is always something better to come.
This great bran-pie of the earth never gives to
our little groping hands its best present. There
is always something more. Your heart's desire
is given you, but at the moment of giving your
heart is enlarged, and you ask for something
better yet. And if you want it enough, you
get it. The only difficulty is to want enough.
For you are not given, so I take it, things that
you have not really desired. All sorts of bonuses
come in, pleasant surprises, but the solid dividend
is for the man who wills. There are fluctua-
tions, of course, but to look upwards, without
doubt, is a gilt-edged affair. I correct that.
The edge is gilt, and so is the rest of it, and the
gilt is laid over gold.

It was thus that I looked from the top
of the Beacon, with the mist of the song of the
invisible skylarks all round, and the blazing
reflection of the windows of our room in the
valley ; and there among the skylarks it seemed

314 A HEAPING.

that Legs joined me. It was of no use to deny
he was there, simply because it was silly to deny
it. There is a French word — revenant— to
express his presence, but even the solidity of
that word failed to do justice. He had never
gone away, and so he could never have come
back. He was with us all the time, and rejoiced
in the arrangement of the nursery, even as he
had been so hopelessly amused at the correctness
of Mr. Holmes on the morning of his funeral.

And at the moment of this I expected the
'open vision.' Life, and death, and birth, the
three great facts, were so near realization.
Again I expected to see Pan peep over the
brow of the Beacon, and to hear a flute-like song
that was not of skylarks. I was ready-— dear
God, I was ready.

So I thought for the moment, but before the
next had beaten I knew I was not. I wanted
more — more of this divine world, more of what
the next few months will bring. Should all be
well when summer comes, I think I would choose
to die now. And the moment I thought that I
knew its unreality. I want to live through the
beautiful years that will come. I want to have

MARCH. 315

a son at Eton or a daughter who turns the heads
of eligible youths. I want both, and more than
both. Die ! Who talked of that ? I want to
have a full nursery. I want to see Helen old
and grey-headed, with grandchildren round her,
and herself the youngest of them all. I want to
live through the whole of this beautiful life till
old age ; and though that is called the winter
of life, there is no need that it should be SO.
The last day of a man of eighty should be the
most luxuriant of autumn, before the touch of
winter has blackened the flowers ; for it is only
the thought of death that makes us think of old
age and winter together, and the thought thab
does that conceives falsely of death.

So, anyhow, it seemed to me on this mid-
summer morning of March. I knew that all that
was was kind. Pan smiled Without cruelty, and
if he smiled from the dross, it was from the
throne of ineffable light that he smiled also.

One by one the skylarks, sated with song,
dropped down again to the sunlit down. Dawn
had passed, and day had come, and-^oh, bathos
of bathos ! — I was so hungry. If I had given
but ten minutes to the ascent, I made but five of

316 A REAPING.

the reversed journey, and designed an early
breakfast to make existence possible till Helen
came down ; for it was yet not long after seven,
and a Sahara of starvation lay between me and
bacon. Yet, though I have said that this was
bathos, I do not know that I really think so,
since in this delightful muddle of life everything
is so inextricably intertwined that bathos of
some kind invariably is the sequel of all high
adventure. The great scene is played, the
sublime thing said, and then you have tea or
take a ticket for somewhere. So I confess only
to literary bathos, and to disarm the critic I may
state that these quiet chronicles are not supposed
to be literary at all, but merely the plain account
of quiet things as they happened.

So I lingered for a moment after the knee-
shaking descent was over to talk for a little, but
not for long, with the river. There was a great
trout just below the bridge, and I am sure he
knew it was still March, for he wagged his
impudent head at me, saying : ' I am perfectly
safe. I shall eat steadily till April, and then
observe your silly flies with a contemptuous
eye/ And though he was a three-pounder at

MARCH. 317

least, I bore him no grudge. I don't think
I wanted to kill anything that morning.

Then I crossed the further field, and came
down into the rose-garden, still meditating on the
immediate assuagement of hunger. But then I
saw who stood there, and I meditated on this
no more ; for she was there.

' I got up early/ she said, ' and found you
had already gone. Oh, good-morning ! I
forgot.'

' I shall never forget the goodness of this
morning,' said I.

Then I saw that her eyes were brimming.

' Ought I to have told you before ? ' she said.
' Forgive me if I ought.'

In that first hour of day we came closer to
each other than ever before. My beloved was
mine, and the time of the singing-birds had
come.

APRIL

I MUST remind the indulgent reader, lest Helen
and I should appear tediously opulent, that
our Swiss trip in the winter was due to a windfall
of a hundred pounds — a thing which may con-
ceivably happen to anybody, and in this instance
happened to us. Consequently, the fact that we
went abroad again in April does not, if it is
considered fairly, argue aggressive riches. In
any case, I refuse to stoop to degrading justifica-
tions. We did not go because it was good for
our healths, which were both excellent, nor
because foreign travel improves and expands the
mind. As a matter of fact, I do not believe it
does, for the majority of travellers are always
comparing the foreign scenes they visit with
spots in their native land, vastly to the advan-
tage of the latter, and the farther and more
frequently they go, the more deep-rooted becomes
their insularity. We went merely because we

320 A REAPING.

enjoyed it, and had formed a careful plan of
retrenchment afterwards, being about to let the
Sloane Street house for the three summer months.
That was rather a severe decision to come to,
since we both hate the idea of strangers using
1 our things ' and sleeping in our beds ; but by
these means this expedition to Greece became
possible, and when once it was possible it had
already become necessary.

So here we sat this morning on the steps of
the little temple of Wingless Victory, wingless,
as the old sunlit myth said, because, when the
nymph lighted on the sacred rock of the Acrop-
olis, she stripped off her wings, which were
henceforward useless to her, since she would
abide here for ever, just below the great house
of defence that the Athenians had raised to the
Wisdom of God, Athene, who was born full-
grown and in panoply of shield, and helmet, and
spear, from the head of Zeus. Out of his head
she sprang in painless birth, with a cry that was
heard by Echo on Hymettus, and rang back in
Echo's voice across the plain, the shout of the
wisdom of God incarnate.

APRIL. 321

And then Poseidon, the lord of the sea, who
coveted these fair Attic plains, challenged Athene
for the ownership thereof. Each must produce
a sign of godhead, and the most excellent should
win for its manifestor all the plain of Attica.
There, high on the rock, where the great birth
had taken place, were the lists set, and with his
trident Poseidon struck the mountain-top, and
from the dent there flowed a stream of the salt
sea, which was his kingdom ; and then the grey-
eyed goddess of wisdom laid aside her spear,
and from the waving of her white hands there
sprang an olive-tree, the sign of peace and of
plenty. So Poseidon went down to his realm
again, where no man may gather the harvest ;
for none could question which was the more
excellent sign.

It was after this, after the Athenians had
raised the great house to the Wisdom of God,
that Wingless Victory came to abide here. It
was not fit, for all her greatness, to build her a
house on the ground that had been given to
Athene, so just outside the gates they made this
platform of stone, and raised on it the shrine

that looks towards Salamis.
11

322 A REAPING.

Fables, so beautiful that they needed no
further evidence of their truth, sprang from
ancient Greece, as flowers from a fruitful field.
Whether they were true or not, whether that
peerless woman's form that stands now in stone
in the Louvre, alighting with rush of windy
draperies on the ship's prow, ever was seen here
by mortal eye, or whether the myth but grew
from the brain of this wonderful people, matters
not at all. Beauty, according to their creed, was
one with truth, just as ugliness was falsehood.
They denied ugliness : they would have none of
it, and it was from the practice of that con-
viction that there rose the flawless city of art.
Never, so we must believe, during that wonderful
century and a half, when from the ground,
maybe, of the lifeless hieratic Egyptian art there
shot up that transcendent flower of loveliness,
of which even the fragments that remain to us
now, battered and disfigured as they are, are in
another zone of beauty compared to all that
went before or has come afterwards, was any-
thing ugly produced at all, except as deliberate
caricature. It was no Renaissance — it was
Naissance itself — -the birth of the beautiful

APRIL. 323

On every side shot out the rays of the mirac-
ulous many-coloured star: from the marble of
Pentelicus flowed that torrent of statues which
make all others look coarse and unlovely, for
the speed of the Greek eye was such that they
saw attitudes which pass before we of slower
vision have perceived them. Sometimes they
saw things that were in themselves ungraceful,
but how Pheidias must have laughed with glee
when, among the seventy horses of the great
procession on the frieze, he put in one that,
cantering, stood upon one leg, while the other
three were bunched underneath it. Taken by
itself, it is a grotesque ; taken with the others,
it gives to the jubilant procession of youths and
horses the one perfect touch. More than two
thousand years ago a Greek saw that; two
thousand years later we with our focal planes in
photography can say he was right.

In all arts the Greeks were right ; they cut
through the onyx of the sardonyx, leaving the
lucent image in the sard ; in the less eternal
clay they made the statuettes of Tanagra — those
sketches of attitudes so natural and momentary
that, looking, we can scarcely believe that they

324 A REAPING.

do not move : where a woman has already made
up her mind to take a step forward, but has just
not taken it; where she is in act of throwing
the knuckle-bones, but has yet not thrown them ;
where a boy has determined to push back his
chiton (for the day is hot), but has just not
made the movement. You cannot hope to
understand the Greek genius, unless you realize
that our eyes are snails as compared with theirs.
They saw with the naked eye what our instan-
taneous photograph now tells us is the case.

And of their paintings ! We have none left
(and there's the pity of it) which even reflect
the Greek master at his best. But correspond-
ing to our English paintings on china, we have
the Greek vases of the fourth and fifth centuries.
They were made by journeymen in potters'
shops, but there is not one that lacks the
supremacy of knowledge and observation. It
is as if a china-shop in the Seven Dials sud-
denly displayed in its window examples of the
nude figure which showed a perfect knowledge
not only of anatomy, but of the romance of
movement. The sculptors and painters of
Greece saw perfectly. Even our academicians

APRIL. 325

themselves appear to us to be not flawless. But
in Greece we are not dealing with these great
lords of colour and drawing : we deal only, as
far as drawing goes, with little people in back
streets. The noble church of St. Paul in the
City of London, which so few people visit, was
lately decorated. At this moment I look on a
sketch of a fragment of pottery. ... It is by
one like whom there were thousands. It hap-
pens to be perfect in draughtsmanship.

To think of one day in ancient Athens ! In
. the morning I went up (I feel as if I must have
done this) to see the new statue of Athene
Promachos, which Pheidias had just finished.
We knew little then about his work, except that
he had been chosen to decorate the Parthenon,
and those who had seen his sketches for the
frieze (which we can see now in the British
Museum) said that they were 'not bad.' So
after breakfast my friend and I strolled towards
the Acropolis, talking, as Athenians talked, of
1 some new thing ' — in fact, we talked of several
new things, and, being Athenians, we got quite
hot about them, since we had (being Athenians)
that keenness of soul that never says ' I don't

326 A REAPING.

care about that/ or ' I take no interest in
Everything was intensely interesting. It was a
hot morning, and the plane-trees by the Ilyssus
looked attractive, and there was a company of
people there whose talk might be stimulating,
but to-day we were too busy : we had to see the
Athene Promachos, a bronze statue by Pheidias,
forty feet high, and after lunch (lunch was going
to be rather grand, because a new play was
coming out, and Pericles was going to be there,
and perhaps Aspasia) we were going to ^Eschy-
lus's new tragedy, called the ' Agamemnon/ And
my friend, who was Alcibiades, was giving a
supper-party in the evening. Socrates was
coming, and a man who was really very pleasant,
only he listened and made notes, but seldom
talked. His name was Plato.

Alcibiades was rather profane sometimes, and
spoke of the great gods as if he did not really
believe in them. I, knowing him so well, knew
that he did, and that it was only his Puck-like
spirit which made him in talk make light of
what he believed. All up the steps of the
Propylsea he was, though amusing, rather pro-
fane, and then we came through the central

APRIL. 327

gate, which was yet unfinished, and straight in
front of us was the statue. And some jest — I
know not what — died on my friend's lips, and
his great grey eyes suddenly became dim with
tears at the sight of beauty, and his mouth
quivered as he said :

' Mighty Lady Athene, my goddess I '
And with that he knelt down on the rock
in front of where she stood, and prayed to the
wisdom of God.

He refused to go to the grand lunch after
this, and insisted on our remaining up here
till it was time to get to the theatre, quoting
something that Socrates had said about the
cleansing power of beauty ; ' so we will not
soil ourselves just yet/ quoth he, ' with the
intrigues we should hear about at lunch, but
go straight from here to the theatre.' So we
bought from a peasant some cheese wrapped
up in a vine-leaf, and a bottle of wine, and a
loaf of bread and some grapes, and then went
down the rock to the theatre. And still that
divine vision had possession of Alcibiades, for
he paid no attention to the greeting of his
friends, and bade them be silent. And soon

328 A REAPING.

the actors were come, and the watchman went
up to the tower, and looked east, and saw the
beacons leap across the land, to show that the
ten-year siege was over, and that Troy had
fallen. Then slowly began to be unfolded the
tale of the stupendous tragedy. Home came
Agamemnon, with his captive, the Princess
Cassandra, riding behind him in his chariot of
triumph. Clytemnestra, his wife, met him at
the palace door, and with feigned obeisance
and lying words of love welcomed him in,
leaving Cassandra outside. Then there de-
scended on the Princess the spirit of prophecy,
and in wild words she shrieked out the doom
that was coming. Quickly it came : from with-
in we heard the death-cry of the King, and the
palace doors swung open, and out came the
Queen, fondling the axe with which she had
slain him. . . . The doom of the gods was
accomplished.

Then afterwards we went round to the green-
room, and found ^Eschylus there, and Alcibiades,
in his impulsive way — I tell him he has the
feelings of a woman — must kneel and kiss the
hand that wrote this wonderful play. Socrates

APRIL. 329

was there, too, putting absurd questions to
everybody about the difference between the
muse of tragedy and the muse of comedy; as
if anybody cared, so long as ^Eschylus wrote
plays like that I However, he got Plato to
listen to him, and soon made him contradict
himself, which is what Socrates chiefly cares
about. Pericles came in, too, with Aspasia, to
whom he kindly introduced me. Certainly
she is extraordinarily beautiful, and has great
wit. But she called attention to her physical
charms too much, which is silly, since they
are quite capable of calling attention to them-
selves.

Afterwards, since only Alcibiades and I had
seen the wonderful statue, we all strolled up to
the Acropolis again to look at it and the sunset.
Socrates came, too, and after we had examined
and admired the bronze goddess again, we went
and sat on the steps of the temple of Athene.
He tried his usual game of asking us questions
till we contradicted ourselves, but before long
all of us refused to answer him any more,
saying that we were aware that we were totally
ignorant of everything, and that there was

330 A REAPING.

no longer any need for him to prove it to us.
And then-~exactly how it arose I don't know,
but I think it was from the questions and
answers that had already passed — he began to
weave us the most wonderful fable, showing
us how all that we thought beautiful here
on earth was but the reflection, the pale copy,
of the beauty which was eternal Round the
outer rim of the earth and the stars, he said,
ran the living stream of a great river, which,
indeed, was heaven, and everything that we
thought beautiful here had its archetype there,
and all day and all night the gods drove round
and round on this river of beauty in their
chariots. It was our business, then, here on
earth, to look for beauty everywhere, and never
falter in the quest of it, for so we prepared
ourselves for the sight of that of which these
things were but the shadow, so that the greater
would be the initiation which would be ours
after death. More especially we must seek for
the beauty of spiritual things, which was the
real beauty, and so order our bodies, our words,
and actions, that they were all in tune with
it, with the beauty of prudence, and temperance,

APRIL. 331

and kindness, and wisdom, for it was of these
that heaven itself and the living stream was
composed, and these shone from the eyes of the
immortal gods.

' So there is my prayer,' said he, rising and
stretching out his hands to the great statue,
while we all rose with him. ' O Athene, give
me inward beauty of soul, and let the inward
and the outward man be at one.'

So the sun set, but on the violet crown of
Athens — the hills there, Hymettus, Pentelicus,
and Parnes — the light still lingered, and shone
like the river of beauty Socrates had told us
about, till it faded also from the tops, and above
the deep night was starry -kirtled.

# # * * *

Helen is the most delightful person in the
world to tell stories to. However ]amely you
tell them, she is absorbed in them, and never
asks about the weak points, as other children
do. She might, for instance, have asked if I
was correct about my dates ; did the ' Agamem-
non ' come out in the year that the ' Promachos '
was made ? Instead

' And who was I ? ' she asked. ' Don't tell

332 A REAPING.

me I was Aspasia, because I don't like what
you told me about her/

' No ; you were not Aspasia/ I said rather
hurriedly; 'and I rather think you had had
your turn in Greece at some other time. I
didn't know you then, except, perhaps, in the
myths, for I am not sure that you were not
Electra.'

' Was she nice ? ' asked Helen.

' She was very nice to Orestes.'

'Oh, don't! Who was Orestes? What a
nice name ! '

'You were his sister. That's all about my-
thology just now/

The plain quivered under the sunlit haze of
blue. To the south the dim sea was in tone
like two skies poured together, and the isles
of Greece floated in it like swimmers asleep.
Below, to the left, lay the theatre where I had
seen the ' Agamemnon,' empty, but ready as if
the play was just going to begin. Who knew
what ghosts of those supreme actors were there,
what audience of the bright-eyed Greeks fol-
lowed the drama ? And above us stood the

APRIL. 333

presiding genius of Athens, the beautiful house
built for the virgin who sprang from the brain
of God. A little more, and it would be her
birthday again, and we should hear the sound
of horse-hoofs coming up the hill, and see the
procession of the Athenian youths, and the men
with the bulls for sacrifice, and the wine-
carriers, and the incense-bearer, and the priests
of the great goddess. Another company would
be there, too — the hierarchy of Olympus — come
down on Athene's birthday to visit her in her
beautiful home. With Zeus would be the
mother of the gods ; and Aphrodite would
be there, the spirit of love that renews the
earth ; and Apollo, who makes it bright with
sunshine ; and Demeter, the mother of the
cornfields; and Persephone, radiant, and re-
turned from the gate of death ; and Hermes,
the swift messenger whose feet were winged ;
and Iris, who was rainbow, the sign of the
beneficent seasons.

And . . . though we saw them not, there
was not one missing. Love was here, and
below were the ripening cornfields, on which
the sun shone ; and beyond was the realm of

334 A REAPING.

Poseidon, and a squall of spring rain, that
passed like a curtain in front of Hymettus,
showed us Iris.

Then it was time to go down townwards
again, for the morning was passed ; but Helen
paused at the doorway at the gate of the
Acropolis, and looked towards the temple.

' Best of all, I like Socrates' prayer/ she said ;
* and I must say it to myself.'

Spring had been rather late this year, and
a week ago, when we drove out to the foot
of Pentelicus, to have a country ramble, the
rubbish of last year's autumn was still in
evidence. Then the spring began to stir, and
two days ago, when we had gone out again,
all the anemones except one kind were in full
nowen They are heralds, those mauve and
violet and pink and white chalices of blossom,
to tell us that the great procession of Primavera
has begun. But last of all come the trumpeters,
the scarlet anemones, and if the sun has been
warm, and no north wind has delayed the
procession, they blow their blasts over the land
just two days after the heralds have appeared.,

APRIL. 335

So to-day after lunch we went out to hear the
trumpeters; to-morrow we shall see Primavera
herself.

Spring herself, the goddess Primavera, was
very near to-day, for on thicket and brake and
over the flank of the hill-side her trumpeters
were blowing their shrill blasts of scarlet.
Two days before, the land was sober-coloured ;
now, wherever you looked, the wonderful
anemone, last to flower, stood high with full"
blown petals. The movement and stir of the
new life was hurrying to its climax. To-
morrow, instead of the myriad buds of the
cistus and the pale stalks of orchid, the flowers
would be unfurled at the final touch of the
spring, at the advent of the goddess herself.
To-day a myriad folded bells hung from the
great bushes of southern heath, like stars still
cloaked in mist ; to-morrow, with one night more
of warm wind and a morning of sun, they
would blaze and peal together; for it is thus
in this wonderful Southern land that spring
comes : a few heralds go before, and then the
army of trumpeters. After this, She crosses
the plain with the ardour of hot blood, so that

336 A REAPING.

all flowers blossom together, and every bud and
beast goes suddenly a-mating. Here there is
none of our limitative February, our pinched
hopes of March ; all is quiet till the heralding
of the anemones and the trumpets of their
scarlet brethren. Then, in full panoply of
blossom, Primavera and summer, too, are there
together. For a week or two the land is
aflame with flower, and then already the matur-
ing of fruit-trees has begun.

Northerners though we are, both Helen and
I claimed some strain of Southern blood in
the ecstasy of those days. That for which
we wait and watch for patient weeks in the
shy approach of spring in England was here
done with a flame and a shout. There was
no hesitancy or delay ; no weak snowdrop
said that winter was coming to an end weeks
before spring came, to die before the crocuses
endorsed its message. Here all was asleep
together till all woke together. Ten days
ago there was no hint of spring save in the
strong sunshine : the wilderness of winter
still spread its icy hands. Then faster than
the melting of the snow on the top of Parnes

APRIL. 337

came the heralds in the wilderness, and spring
was there. It was like the winter of Kundry's
soul, to whom one morning Gurnemanz said:
! Auf ! Der Winter noh, und Lenz ist da/
And on that day came Parsifal and her re-
demption, and the ransomed of the Lord
returned with joy and singing.

I have no skill to tell of those days: for
the past, all that I knew of the history of
this wonderful land, and the present, all that
love meant, and the future, the dear event
that was coming closer, were so inextricably
mingled that no coherence is possible. But
if you love a place, and are there with your
beloved, and know that she will bear a child
to you before many weeks are over, you may
make a paradise of Clapham Junction, and
find the joy of it a thing incommunicable.
And how much more difficult a material is
the magic of this land to work in — this little
Attic plain, peopled with the ghosts of that
wonderful age, which are not dead at all, but
instinct with life to-day, at this moment when
spring has come, so forcibly that even the
slow tortoises on the side of Pentelicus hurried

338 A REAPING.

breathlessly about, with deep sighs (I assure
you) till they found a congenial lady. Then
they ran — positively ran— -round her in ever-
narrowing circles, still sighing. There were
grasshoppers, too^ — green gentlemen and brown
ladies. The brown ladies genteelly ran away,
but they never ran far. The great hawks
sought each other in the sublime sky, and
the young men and maidens of Athens as we
drove back were taking discreet walks together
into the country. And from the Acropolis
the maiden goddess, who is the Wisdom of
God, looked down, and was well pleased.

For, thank Heaven ! the Wisdom of God
is no prude. To all has it given a soul, and
to all souls is desire of some sort given — to
one the perfection of form, to another the
perfection of wit, to another the perfection of
colour, to another the perfection of truth.
For each there is a way; each has got to
follow it; and for many there are various
ways, and these many must follow them
all. If a thing is lovely and of good
report, we all have to hunt it home. It is
no excuse to say you have no time, for you

APRIL. 339

have all the time there is. Search, search :
there is the Way everywhere.

Indeed, this is no mystical affair: it is the
plainest sense. Whatever happens, God is
somehow revealed. But, being blind, we can-
not always see the revelation.

# * # # #

To-night, as Helen and I sit on deck of
the steamer that takes us back again to
Marseilles, we wonder what gives Greece its
inalienable magic. We saw the fading of its
shores in the dusk, and though the phosphor-
escence of the sea was a thing to marvel at,
it was no longer the phosphorescence of
Greek waters. That little fig-leaf-fingered
land has sentiment somehow in its soil ; it
cannot fail to move anybody. Its history
since the Great Age — it is no Use to deny
it — has been tawdry beyond description. It
yielded to the ; Romans, it scarcely resisted
the Albanians ; and though some flickering
spirit of its old grandeur flamed again when
its people rose against the Turkish rule in
the early part of last century, what are we
to say of the spirit of the people when, twelve

340 A REAPING.

years ago, they again fought their ancient and
ancestral enemy ? The Turks strolled slowly
southwards from the North of Thessaly, and
only the intervention of the Powers prevented
Greece again becoming a Turkish province.
The Hellenic battle-cry went shrilly up to
Heaven, but the Hellenic army trotted like
a flock of sheep before the foe, until the
Powers said that the war must cease. Only
the year before there had been revival of the
Olympic games, and there had been a race
from Marathon to Athens in memory of
Pheidippides, who bore the news of that
stupendous victory, and died as he reached
Athens, saying, ' Greece has conquered the
Persians/ A Greek won that peaceful race
from Marathon ; the same Greek won the
peaceful race home, and arrived back in Attica
in the very van and forefront of the retreating
army. The 'host of hares' was the Turkish
name for the foes they never had occasion to
meet, who started from their fortresses like
hares from their forms, and galloped quietly
away. Meantime the Greek fleet cruised in
the Adriatic, and sank a fishing-boat. When

APRIL. 341

the war was over, they came home with the
spoils of their victory — a hat, a fish, a net.
Perhaps it is best to say that there was no
war at all: the Turkish armies made peaceful
manoeuvres over Thessaly, until they came to
Volo. Then the Powers of Europe said : ' We
think your manoeuvres have extended far
enough : kindly go home/

Yet, somehow, the tragic futility of all this
does not really touch Greece or the sentiment
that the lovers of the lovely land feel for it.
Supposing a Greek army, or a regiment of it,
had met the Turk, and died in the cause of
patriotism, that could not have added to the
compelling charm of Greece, and so the fact
that none of these patriotic events happened
does not diminish it. In Greece, whatever may
be done or left undone, you are in the country
where once beauty shot up like the aloe-flower,
so that all else is inconsiderable beside that,
since whatever the world has achieved after-
wards, whether in painting, or sculpture, or
drama, or poetry, or in that eagerness of life
which is the true romance of existence, is

342 A REAPING.

measured, if only it be fine enough, by the
standard set then. That is the haunting,
imperishable charm o£ this country, and,
missing that, even the phosphorescence of
waters by night, divided by the swift keel of
the lonely ship, was for a time a soulless fire-
work.

The magic of it — the magic of it !

Thereafter we staggered across the Adriatic,
over the ridge and furrow of a grey and
unquiet sea, till we found quiet below the
heel of Italy. Soon to the south-west the
horizon lay in skeins of smoke, and it was
not for hours afterward that the cone of Etna,
uprearing itself, showed whence the trouble
came. Narrower grew the straits, till we
passed out beside Messina, and for the pillar
of smoke which Etna had raised all day we
sighted Stromboli, a pillar of fire by night.
Next morning we were in the narrows between
Corsica and Sardinia, and saw the little villages,
tiny and toy-like, in the island whence sprang
the brain that was to light all Europe with
the devouring flame of its burning. If the
dead return, I think it is not in Elba or St.

APRIL. 343

Helena, nor even in the pomp of Paris, nor on
the battle-field, that we must guess that
Napoleon wanders. He sees the impotence of
his destructive and untiring genius. The lines
of his new map of Europe have been gently
defaced again by time, and he sits quiet enough
by the little house, where still the descendants
of his old nurse dwell, and sees the innocent
campaigning of her grandchildren in their
childish games. And when the time comes
for unflinching justice to be done to that
unflinching spirit, who spared none, nor had
pity, so long as by any sacrifice the realiza-
tion of his ruthless imaginings came true, will
not the spirit of his old nurse stand advocate,
and remind Justice that, even in the midst of
his gigantic schemes, he remembered her who
had given him suck, and provided for her
maintenance ? Somewhere in that iron soul
was the soft touch of childish days : he was
kind who was so terrible, and that pen so
unfacile and so bungling that he hated to
write at all put a little paragraph of scarcely
decipherable words to his will that showed
(what would otherwise have been incredible)

344 A REAPING.

how a certain gentleness of heart underlay the
iron.

Though all these sights — the chimney of
Etna, the furnace of Stromboli, the island of
Napoleon — were but milestones, passed before,
to show us now how far we were travelling
from the magic land, yet each brought us
nearer in time and space to the magic of
home, and of the day, yet unnamed, which
must already, like some peak of an unknown
range, be beginning to rear itself up in the
foreground of the future.

Then, as the magnet of Greece grew more
remote, the magnet of home gained potentiality,
until there was no question which was the
stronger. We had intended — that is to say,
more than half intended — to stay a day or
two in Paris; instead, we fled through Paris
as if it had been a spot plague-ridden, meaning
to pass the night in London. But even as
we scurried from Gare de Lyon to Gare du
Nord, so, too, we scurried from Victoria to
Waterloo, with intention now fully declared to
get down to the dear home without pause.
As far as I remember, we sustained life on

APRIL. 345

thick brown tea and a Sahara of currant-cake ;
but at the end there was the snorting motor
waiting at the station, and a mile of sleeping
streets, cheered by the vision of Mr. Holmes
going somewhere in a neat Inverness cape and
buttoned boots, a mile of spring-scented country
road, and then the little house, discreet behind
its shrubbery, where was the rose-garden,
among other things, and among other things
the nursery.

The night was very warm, and lit by the
full moon of April, so, after we had dined,
and run like two children from room to
room in the house, first to greet all the
precious things of home, with Fifi, like an
animated corkscrew, performing prodigies of
circular locomotion round us, we found that
there was still a large part of home to greet,
and so went out into the garden, to see what
April had brought forth there. No sudden
riot or conflagration of leaf and flower, like
that which we had seen blaze over the lower
slopes of Pentelicus, was there, but April day
by day had done his gentle work, so that
where we had left a bed still winter-naked

346 A REAPING.

it was now mapped out into the claims of
the plants. To-morrow there would be disputes
to be settled, for the day-lily had pegged out
more than her share, and between her and
the iris a delphinium would be crowded out
of existence. But every plant — such is our
rule— -may claim all the ground it can get
until the end of April; then come round the
judges of the court of appeal, and if any
plant distinctly says, ' I have not room to
grow, because of these encroachers,' his appeal,
if he promises at all well, is usually upheld,
and the encroacher is shorn of his unreason-
able encroachments. Even by the moonlight
it was quite certain that the court of appeal
had a heavy day in front of it: there were
lawsuits regarding land to settle, which would
require most careful adjustment, for the court
hates depriving a rightful possessor of that
which his vigour has appropriated. On the
other hand, the slender aristocracy of the
bed (for the aristocrat grows upwards rather
than sideways) must not be elbowed out of
existence. One plant only is allowed to do
exactly what it pleases and when it pleases

APRIL. 347

— the pansy, which is ' for thoughts ' that
are always sweet, and so may roam unchecked
and welcome, for who would set limits to the
wanderings of so kindly and humble a soul ?
It but touches the ground, too (to be absolutely
honest, I must confess that this has something
to do with the liberties we give it), as a moth
still hovering and on the wing draws from
the flower the sustenance it needs. It does
not, so to speak, sit down to make a square
meal, or burrow with searching roots deep
into the earth, and drain it of all its treasure,
but it is ever on the move, like some bright-
eyed beggar-girl, to whom none but the
churlish would grudge the wayside halfpenny.
She will not linger and settle and sponge on
your bounty, but be off again elsewhere next
moment, just turning to you a smiling face,
and whispering a murmured thanks in the
bright language of flowers. So she is privi-
leged to wander even in the sacred territory
of the roses, where I hope she has already
wandered wide. There, however, we did not
penetrate to-night, for it and the meadow we
kept for the morrow. But on the top margin

348 A REAPING.

of the field against the sky I saw shapes
that were unmistakable. To-morrow our hearts
will go dancing with the daffodils.

But to-night we are content with the
thoughts that the pansies have given us, and
can even forgive Milton for speaking of them
as ' freaked with jet.' Freaked with jet ! —
when Ophelia had said that they were 'for
thoughts ' ! But, then, Milton speaks of the
' well-attired woodbine/ which is almost as
bad. Imagine looking at pansies, and finding
it incumbent on one to say : ' I perceive they
are freaked with jet'! But, as one who had
the highest appreciation of Milton remarked,
to appreciate Milton is the reward of consum-
mate scholarship, which was certainly a very
pleasant reflection for himself, and perhaps if
I were a better scholar I should think with
appreciation of the pansy 'freaked with jet.'
As it is, I merely conclude that Milton was
flower-blind — a sad affliction.

Helen is absolutely ultra-Japanese in her
observance of the flower-festivals, of which
she marks some dozen of red-letter days in

APRIL. 349

the year. They cannot, of course, be cele-
brated on any fixed day, since, owing to the
vagaries of climate, there might not be a
single lily to be seen, for instance, this year
on the actual day which was Lily-day a year
ago. She waits instead, like the Japanese,
until the particular flower is in the zenith of
its blossoming, and then proclaims the festival.
Other flowers, naturally, sometimes are at their
best on the red-letter day of another, but this,
as she observes, is canonically correct, since St.
Simon and St. Jude, and St. Philip and St.
James, are celebrated together. I was not,
therefore, the least surprised next morning,
when, after a short excursion to the garden,
she came in to breakfast, saying :

' It is Daffodil-day, and the day of its sisters
of the spring/

' But we had the sisters of the spring in
Greece/ said I.

1 Yes ; that is the advantage of going to
Greece : the Greek calendar is different to ours.
We had Easter Day before we started, and
another Easter Day when we got there.
Besides, it was Anemone-day, and the day of

350 A HEAPING.

its sisters of the spring. The anemone's sisters
were not the same as the daffodil's/

This was convincing (even if I needed
conviction, which I did not), and Daffodil-day
it was.

After the early heats of February the year
had had a long set-back in March, and though
April was nearly over, I doubt whether there
had been any more gorgeous decoration in our
absence than that which we found waiting
this morning in the church of the daffodils
and its sisters of the spring. It was not in
vain that we had dug and delved last autumn
with such strenuous patience, for that half-acre
of field beside the rose-garden was a thing to
make the blind see. A rainbow of blossom lay
over it all : the early tulips had opened their
great chalices of gold and damask ; the blue
mist of forget-me-nots seemed as if a piece
of the sky had fallen, and lay mutely under
the trees; brown-speckled fritillaries crouched
shyly in the grass, and their white-belled sister
nestled beside them ; narcissus was there, all
yellow, and narcissus with the eye of the
pheasant ; primroses still lingered, waiting for

APRIL. 351

Helen's proclamation to take part in the
festival; while some bluebells had hurried to
be here in time ; crocuses in the grass were
like the dancing of the sun on green waters,
or purple as the deep-sea caves ; and anemones,
greedy for more festivals, had hurried overland
from Greece to be here before us ; and clumps
of iris were like banners carried in procession.
These were the sisters of the spring. It was
their day ; but first it was Daffodil-day.
Slender and single, tall and yellow, it was as
if through the web of them, the golden net
that they had laid over the field, that you
perceived their sisters. And the sun shone
on them, and the great blue sky was over
them, and the warm wind made them dance
together.

After a long time, Helen spoke.

' Oh, oh ! * she said.

That about expressed it.

*My heart with pleasure fills/ she added.

MAY

IT always seems to me a matter for wonder
why the astronomers, or Julius Caesar, or
whoever it was who took the trouble to divide
time up into months and years, should have
made the day of the New Year come in the
middle of winter. Probably it has got something
to do with the solar eclipse, or the lunar theory,
or movements and motions quite unintelligible
to the ordinary mind, which would easily have
seen the point of beginning the New Year
in spring — for instance, on May-day — when
the season is clearly suitable for beginning
again. But to make a fresh start by candle-
light in a fog on the first of January implies
a more vivid effort of the imagination and a
sterner resolve of the spirit than most of us
are able to manage. You might as well try

to make up for misspent years by selecting
12

354 A REAPING.

Blackfriars or Baker Street Station as a place
to start afresh in.

Personally, though I think the 1st of May
would be a quite reasonable occasion on which
to begin a New Year, I should prefer a rather
later date, when summer is more certain, and
it was for this reason that when I formed this
(I hope) harmless little project of putting down
the quiet happenings of a year of life, I began
in June. Month by month I kept this diary,
and you will see when you come to the end
of this month of May that my plan was en-
dorsed by what happened then, and that New
Year must, in the future, always begin for
Helen and me on the first of June.

Even with the. early days of May summer
descended on us, and Mr. Holmes's Panama hat
and a neat new suit of yellowish flannel made
their due appearance to confirm the fact. Soon,
if this goes on, he will be handing ices instead
of buns at tea-parties, and I have often seen
him lately on the ladies' links playing golf
in his little buttoned boots. He came to call
yesterday, and told me of Charlotte's engage-

MAY. 355

ment, and announced the fact that my Arch-
deacon (I call him mine because of what
happened at that dreadful Sunday-school) was
giving a garden-party on the llth, and the
wife of the younger son of our Baronet had
not been invited. The fact of the garden-party
on the llth was not new to us, because We
Had Been Invited. Oh, revenge is sweet, and
we gloated over the discomfiture of the foe.
Her mother had been a governess, too. That
was a new fact that Mr. Holmes had gathered
in the last half-year — just a governess, and
not in a noble family even, but in the employ-
ment of a retired tradesman. That accounted
for the fact that her daughter spoke French
so well; no wonder, since the mother had to
teach it. Her knowledge of that language,
scraps of which she constantly introduced into
her conversation, had always puzzled Mr.
Holmes ; now he knew how it had been
acquired. Indeed, she had come rightly by it,
poor thing ! We none of us grudged it her.
And it was no wonder now to Mr. Holmes
that she looked so thin; probably she had
never had enough to eat when she was a

S56 A REAPING.

child, and that indescribable air of commonness
about her was perfectly accounted for. Indeed,
Mr. Holmes became so sardonic that you would
have thought that his family was one (as I
dare say it is) compared to which the Plan-
tagenets were parvenus ; and Helen changed
the subject, which I thought was a pity, as
I wanted to hear ever so much more about
the lady's obscure origin.

We chatted very pleasantly for a long time,
and learned all that the Morning Post had
said in little paragraphs during the past week,
and all that the Close and the County (I
recommend that expression) and the Military
were doing here. We were going to be very
gay indeed ; there was already an absolute
clash of entertainments during a week of
cricket next month, so that the Mayor was
forced to give a luncheon-party one day instead
of a mere tea, which he would probably not
like at all, since if ever there was a Mayor
who collected candle-ends, this was the one.
Did I remember that which was called cham-
pagne at the famous lunch which has already
been spoken of ?

MAY. 357

In fact, Mr. Holmes shook his head over
the general trend of affairs, and spoke quite
bitterly about the wave of Radicalism which
was passing over the country. The County
Club, so he said, which had always prided itself
on being a little exclusive, was tainted with
commonness now, and had positively disgraced
itself at the last election by letting in those
three new members. They were nobodies —
local nobodies — one the son of a doctor, another
the father of a doctor ; the third nobody at
all. And — would I believe it ? — there had
been a veterinary surgeon up for election as
well. Luckily, the club had pulled itself to-
gether over him, and given him a smart shower
of black-balls. No doubt the club was in
want of funds, but why, then, have built a
new billiard-room ? How much better to poke
the butt-end of our cues into the chimney-piece,
as we had always done when playing from
over the left-hand middle pocket, than purchase
increased cue-room at the sacrifice of our
standing as a County Club ? If we did not
draw the line somewhere, where were we to
draw the line ? That was unanswerable. We

358 A REAPING.

all said what is written, ' Tut ! * and looked
very proud. Helen, I consider, looked prouder
than Mr. Holmes, but she disagrees with me,
having seen her own face in the looking-glass
over the mantelpiece. True, she had not the
natural advantage that Mr. Holmes's aquiline
nose conferred upon him, but the assumed curl
of her lip was superb: she looked like a
Duchess in her own right.

How slowly these beautiful days of May
passed, for when one is very happy and very
expectant, time seems to stop. Exactly the
opposite happens when one is spending days
that are full of pleasures, and living entirely
in the moment, for then hours and days pass
on unregarded, so that it is Saturday again
before you know the week has really begun.
But happiness — I but bungle with words over
a thing that is obvious to everybody who
knows the difference between happiness and
pleasure— -is a thing quite detached from the
present moment, just as the sunlight which
floods these downs is not of them. Happiness
ever brooda on the wing, and swings high

MAY. 359

above the things of the earth, like some poised
eagle, or like the sun itself. It illuminates
what it looks on, turning dew to diamond,
and striking sapphires into the heart of what
has been a grey sea, but it is independent of
material concerns ; and were the world to be
withdrawn and extinguished, it would shine
still. True, it shines on the dewdrop and turns
it into wondrous prismatic colours, and thus
the common surface of life is always iridescent
when we are happy. But happiness — that
golden, high-swung sun — does not, I think,
particularly regard the jewels he makes out
of common things : his own bright shining,
perhaps, weaves a golden haze between him and
what he shines upon.

It was somehow thus, I think, that things
were with us during that first fortnight of
May. Below the golden haze were these en-
trancing facts which I have just recorded about
the Archdeacon's party, the frightful disclosures
concerning the mother of the wife of the
younger son of the Baronet, and the growing
plebeianism of the County Club ; but neither

360 A REAPING.

Helen nor I could focus our attention on them ;
for though, as I have said, time went so slowly,
yet there was not time enough to regard
them : they belonged to a different plane to
that on which we were living. We could
penetrate down into it and giggle, but then
our attention wandered, and before we knew
it, we had swum up again like bubbles through
water to the sunlit surface.

There took place, in fact, a revision in our
list of joyful and dreadful affairs. No one
could appreciate the humour of Mr. Holmes
more than Helen did, but, as I have said, she
could not attend to him now. Nor could she
attend to the perfectly hideous fact that the
greater part of the ceiling in the dining-room
in Sloane Street had fallen, and that our
tenants had (quite reasonably) demanded to be
released from their tenancy, of which there
was still six weeks to run, since the house
was uninhabitable. Nor did I think she would
have cared if the ceiling had smothered them
as they sat at dinner. And the dreadful earth-
quake in China failed to move her, and so did
the church crisis in France. But for certain

MAY. 361

other things she cared more than ever, though
you would have said they were little enough.
All the growth of the spring-time made her
eyes brighten and ever grow dim again, and
she would dream over the tiny buds of the
rose-garden with smiles that were sped to her
mouth from the inmost spring of happiness.
She spread fat Heliogabalian feasts for the
birds, since they wanted nourishment now that
they were so busy over their nests, and many
dyspeptic bachelors and spinsters, I expect,
reeled daily from their table laid on the lawn
to sleep off the results of their excess. She
loved the sun, too, more than she had ever
loved it, and the shade also, and day and night,
and all the firm, great forces of the world.

Not less, too, did she love the little things of
little rooms, and now we never sat in the
drawing-room, with its Reynolds' prints, but
went always to the nursery, with its rocking-
horse and its Noah's ark, and its lead soldiers,
and its play-table. But when there — when
playing these silly games of soldiers, which
Helen had been wont to play as if eternal
salvation depended on the nice adjustment of a

362 A REAPING.

small tin cannon, which, when you pulled a
string, shot a pea — she had a change of mood
most disconcerting at first. Now and again she
shot down my Generalissimo, posted, as- he
should be, out of possibility of attack almost, in
the very rear of my army, by some inconceiv-
able ricochet which would a few weeks ago
have filled her mouth with laughter. But now,
when these unspeakable flukes occurred, and
she upset the heaviest soldiers in my brigade,
instead of being delighted, she was sorry, and
apologized. To injury, which was bad enough,
she added insult, which was worse, and said :
'I am afraid I must win now.'

There is another curious thing (Helen looks
over my shoulder as I write, and agrees) that,
though she still loves to play soldiers, she wants
me to win. Consider it: whoever before
wanted to play a game (and the more childish
the game, the less worth while you would have
thought to play it), if he did not care about
winning ? Besides, it is so exceedingly unlike
her — she is looking over my shoulder no more
— not to play any game as if life and death

MAY. 363

depended on it. But now she applauds my
skill and my luck, and apologizes for her
own.

And then, when the game is over, and the
Duke of Wellington on one side and Julius
Caesar on the other lie dead, she still sits on the
ground beside the low play-table, and looks
round the room with wandering, happy eyes.
There are the playthings I have told you of —
the Noah's ark, the rocking-horse, the great
dolls'-house, the front of which, windows and
door and all, is unfastened by a neat latch in
the wall of the second story, and swings open
altogether, so that you must be careful not to
unlatch it early in the morning or late at night,
else you would see all the ladies and gentlemen
at their toilet in an embarrassing state of
undress. I found Helen the other morning
playing at dolls all by herself. She had
laid a banquet in the dining-room, and had
arranged the ladies and gentlemen on the stairs,
so that one could see at once that they were
going down to dinner. From their attitudes,
and a tendency to lean against each other or

364 A REAPING.

the wall, you might have thought that they
were trying to get upstairs after the banquet.
But that, Helen told me, was foolish, since their
faces were all turned in the direction of down-
stairs. The answer was that they had indulged
even more freely than I had supposed, and were
trying to get upstairs backwards.

Yes ; we did all these extremely childish
things, and so far from being ashamed of them,
I set them all down here for you to laugh at if
you like, or merely to be bored with. Things
like these — playing at soldiers or at dolls —
retained their interest, just as did the spirit of
the blossoming summer, when Mr. Holmes's
discoveries or the fall of the ceiling in Sloane
Street lacked the calibre to interest us. And,
if you come to think of it, though I thought an
explanation would be difficult, nothing in the
world could be more simple. Things about
children, and birth, and growth were clearly
the only affairs that could concern us. One
morning, I remember, it was found that the
foundations of the cathedral were in a dreadful
state, and that it would probably fall down. I
told Helen this as she was engaged on pre-

MAY. 365

paring a Gargantuan breakfast for the birds.
She only said :

' Oh, what a pity ! '

That was all she cared for the historic
Norman pile, with all kinds of Kings and
Queens buried inside it I

There is nothing more to be recorded of
this month, since the only things that seemed
to us to have any real importance were just the
childishnesses of which I have already given
you such amplitude of specimens, until the
morning of the last day of May.

The rule of the house was that there was no
rule of any sort as regards breakfast. Anybody
who came into the dining-room at most hours
of the morning would find the breakfast
perennials (bread, butter, sugar, milk, the
morning paper and marmalade) on the table,
and would, on ringing a bell, be given the
annuals — i.e., fresh tea and a hot dish. Simi-
larly, anybody who did not come into the
dining-room was supposed to be breakfasting
either elsewhere or not at all. So on this last
morning of May, on coming down, I rang the

366 A HEAPING.

bell, and read the paper till bacon came. An
hour before I had just looked into Helen's room,
and seen that she was still asleep.

The bacon was rather long coming that
morning — I try to reconstruct the day exactly
as it happened — and I had already skimmed
the news, and found there was not any, and in
default of it was reading a superb -account of
the visit of a member of the Koyal Family to
Naples, who in the afternoon had ' honoured '
(so said the loyal press) the volcano of Vesuvius
with a visit. How gratifying for the immortal
• principle of fire ! One hoped it would not be-
come swollen in the head. This fortunate

volcano, whose cone had been blessed

At the moment I heard a step outside. It
was not from the kitchen : it was coming from
upstairs, and it came very quickly. Then,
instantaneously, terror seized me, for time and
place were no longer now and here, but it was
the evening when I heard my name called in
the garden, and thereafter heard Legs running
downstairs. And quickly as the steps came,
they seemed to me to go on for ever ; yet I had

MAY. 367

only just time to get up, when there came a
fumbling hand on the door, and Helen's maid
came in.

' If you please, sir, would you send at once/
she began. ' The nurse '

There were quicker ways than sending, and
next minute I was flying up the road on my1
bicycle. My mind, as I think must always
happen with any mind in such moments, seemed
curiously inactive, though somewhere there was
inside me a little bit of tissue, so to speak, that
agonized, and hoped, and prayed. But for the
most I only thought of one thing — that once
before I had gone on just the same errand,
from this same house, up the same road, to
fetch the doctor for her, my dearest friend. O
Margery ! go quickly to God and tell Him. . . .
We want Him.

And then the tissue that agonized and prayed
sank out of sight again, and I was just speeding
up the sunny, dusty road, on which, as I got
nearer the town, the traffic became denser.
Once a butcher's cart pulled suddenly out into
the middle of the road in front of me, and I
thought collision was inevitable, except that I

368 A REAPING.

knew that it was not possible that I should be
stopped when going on such an errand as this,
and several times I passed people I knew, yet,
though I knew them, their faces were meaning-
less: they conveyed names, but nothing what-
ever more. And then — whether very soon or
countless ages later, I had no idea — I was at
the doctor's door in the quiet, decorous street,
which also was meaningless — neither strange
nor familiar, but purely without significance.
Everything I saw was detached; nothing had
any relation to life, except just one thing : his
dog-cart, which was at the door, concerned me.

He had not yet started on his rounds, and it
was not five minutes before he was ready. He
had only to pick up a little bag, into which
he put a case of some kind, and something
bright, that I turned my eyes from, and a
bottle which he wrapped up — it seemed to me
very neatly and slowly — which clinked against
that which was already in the bag.

Then he turned to me.

' Now, if you take my advice/ he said, ' you
won't come back with me, but will go for a ride
on this beautiful morning. You will not see

MAY. 369

your wife, and for the next hour or so it is not
possible that I should have anything to tell you.
We don't want you in the house : we don't
want to be bothered with you/

He got briskly into his dog-cart, nodded to
me over his shoulder, and, instead of driving
himself, gave his servant the reins. I know I
shouted something after him, telling him, I
think, to be careful, and so found myself on the
doorstep, looking at a bicycle which was leaning
against the pillar of the porch, and was
evidently not mine. But, like the dog-cart, it
was not meaningless, for it was Helen's, which
I must have used by mistake. I must take it
back ; it was careless of me.

Then his advice occurred to me, but it
sounded ridiculous, as senseless as some nursery-
rhyme. And at the thought there suddenly
started in my head the first two lines of
' Hurnpty-Dumpty/ I could not remember the
last two lines, but the first went round and round
in my brain, keeping time to my pedalling.

Soon after I was home again, only a moment
behind him, for he was just getting out when
I came to the gate, and I waited till he had

370 A REAPING.

gone in, so that he should not know I had
failed to follow his advice — at least, I believe
that was the reason, but I am not sure.

I went round by the back way into the
garden, and sat down in the veranda outside
my own room, where Fifi was lying in the
sun. But I had to coax her silently indoors,
for I could not bear that she should lie there,
lest suddenly she should again look out into the
garden, and howl at something she saw there.
She would not come in at first, and once she
pricked her ears at something she saw outside,
and I stopped mine, lest I should hear her
howl. And all the time ' Humpty-Dumpty ' —
the first two lines of it — went on and on. It
was so terribly lonely, too — just that silly
rhyme, and I all alone. If only Legs were
here, or anybody — anybody. You see, this was
not expected to-day, nor for weeks yet. My
mother was coming to stay with us next week,
until . . . -

Then I heard the muffled sound of steps in
the room just above my head — Helen's room —
and at that for a little the babble and confusion
of my troubled brain cleared, and ' Humpty-

MAY. 371

Dumpty' ceased, and I was not afraid of Fifi
howling, for there was no room for anything ex-
cept the thought of Helen, who lay there, and of
the life yet unborn. And I could not help — I
could not bear any of it for her. I could not
even be with her : birth was as lonely as death.
Outside the garden lay basking in the heat
of the early summer, and everywhere the ex-
pansion of life, which had seemed to us so
wonderful and glorious a thing through all
these weeks of May, suddenly became sinister
and menacing. What travail may not go to
the opening of a single flower, or the maturing
of its casket of seeds ? It would all be of a
piece with the cruelty and the anguish that
runs through life like a scarlet, bleeding thread,
beginning, as now, even before birth, and not
even ending with death, since those who remain
have the wound of that yet to be healed.
Bight through life goes the scarlet thread,
knotted on the farther side at each end, so
that it shall not slip. And — * Humpty-Dumpty
sat on a wall/ Ah, yes ! I had it all
now. "The King's horses' was what I could
not remember. And at that the crowd of

372 A HEAPING.

trivialities again came between my mind
and me.

We had set up the croquet-hoops again only
last week, and had argued over the position of
that particular corner one by which my ball
had rested when last autumn a telegram had
been brought me from the house. Helen had
said it was square with the corresponding
corner; I knew it was not, and from here it
was perfectly easy to see that she had been
wrong. I hate an awry disposition of hoops.
' All the King's horses ' . . . they really should
bring these rhymes up to date ; it ought to be
motor-cars instead of horses.

These things passed very slowly through my
mind, for it acted as if it was numbed and
half-paralyzed, and the croquet-hoop occupied
the foreground of it for a considerable time.
I had let Fifi out again, and she was racing
about the lawn in the attempt to catch swallows,
a feat of which she never realized the un-
reasonableness, and I had left the doors into
my room, both from the hall and from here
outside, open. And then, with the same rapid-
ity as they had come, all these nonsense things

MAY. 373

passed away again, for I heard steps on the
stairs, and, going in, saw the doctor standing
on the landing above, talking in low tones to
the nurse. He saw me, made a little move-
ment of his hand as if to detain me, and when
he had finished what he had to say to her, came
downstairs.

c I will have a word with you,' he said
gravely ; and we went into my room. I saw
him looking at me rather curiously, and was
wondering why, when he suddenly seemed to
lean up against me. Then I perceived that it
was I who was swaying on my feet. He put
me in a chair.

' I suppose you have not had breakfast,' he
said. ' You are to eat something immediately ;
I will ring the bell. And now listen. It is
going to be difficult, and, I am afraid, danger-
ous, and it is better that you should know
it now.'

A.nd then the dear, kind man just laid his
hand on my arm.

' I'm awfully sorry,' he said ; ' you can't
think how I hate to tell you this. I hope it
will be all right; there is nothing yet that

374 A REAPING.

forbids me to hope that. Please God, we shall
pull her through, but — well, well.'

He broke off as the door opened, and a
servant came in.

' Just bring a tray in here,' he said. ' Tea ?
Yes, tea, and an egg and a couple of bits of
toast. Thank you.'

' Remember, I still hope it will be all right,'
he said. 'And even if — well, you are both
young still. Now I shall be back here in an
hour at the outside.'

' You are not going,' I said. ' You mustn't.'

* Yes, yes. I know what you feel,' he said.
' But there is nothing for me to do here yet,
and I have to make arrangements so that I
can come back and remain here till all — is
satisfactory.'

* You don't stir from this house/ I said.

* Do you think I should go if there was the
slightest possibility of your wife needing me ? '
he said quietly.

' No ; I beg your pardon.'

' That's all right. Now when your break-
fast comes, eat it, and read a book if you can,
or go and garden. I am sure those roses of

MAY 375

yours want looking after, and I tell you it's a
hard thing for a man in your position, and a
thing which we doctors respect, to go and
occupy himself. If you can't, you can't, but
you might have a try/

The servant brought in a tray before many
minutes, and with it the morning paper. When
I had eaten, I took it up and looked at it.
There was no news, but the middle page con-
tained an account of a visit to Vesuvius by
an English Prince. He ' honoured * the volcano
with a visit. And then I knew that I had
seen the paper before. But when ? Years and
years ago, or this morning ?

What the doctor had said to me needed no
time or thought for realizing it. I felt as if
I had known it all along — known it all my life.
But — what happened next, if that all happened
long ago ? Was the room overhead the cham-
ber of death or the chamber of birth ? Next
door to it was the nursery, with its Noah's ark
and its soldiers and its rocking-horse. Who
was going to ride on that ? And the dolls'-
house, with its tottering inhabitants—who next
was to play with those, and open the wall ?

376 A REAPING.

Oh, Helen, Helen, you and your child, will it
be ? Or will it be you and I again, but after
a long time, hoping once more ? Or — dear
God, no, not that !

Daffodil-day, and its sisters of the spring!
And Rose-day will come next month. Roses . . .
heaped for the beloved's bed. Dear God, not
that: it does not mean that bed. Indeed — in-
deed it does not. You have so many souls
already in Your house of many mansions.
Give us a few more years together, for they
are so sweet, and a thousand years in Your
sight are but as yesterday. And we should so
like a young thing, one of our own, in the
house. But . . . thank You very much for
the years that have been so sweet. They have
been — they have been. And, please don't let
her suffer or be frightened.

Then I went across the lawn and into the
rose-garden. Though we had been very in-
dustrious there, I never saw yet the rose-tree
on which there is nothing to be done, and for
a little my hands made themselves busy. Then
quite suddenly it all became impossible, and

MAY. 377

there was nothing in the world except what
the doctor had told me, and floating on the top
of that * Humpty-Dumpty, Humpty-Dumpty/

So it was within the hour that I got back
again to the house, and the doctor had not yet
returned. I missed something familiar on the
lawn, without at once knowing what it was,
and then I saw that the birds' breakfast was
not there. That took me to the dining-room,
where I found lunch was already laid, and with
bread-crumb and little bits of cheese, and cold
meat mixed, I made a plateful for them, though,
as you know, it was the last day of May, and
I suppose it was but pauperism among the
thrushes that I encouraged. But Helen all
these days had done so. I knew she would
not like them to miss their provision.

Soon after — so soon that the news of their
belated meal had not yet become public among
the birds — the doctor returned. I heard him
go upstairs, and after that I crept into the hall,
and sat down on the lowest step of the seven-
teen that led to the landing. Legs used to
jump down them in two bounds, taking eight
steps first, and then nine, and get up (with a

378 A REAPING.

run) in three — two sixes and a five. . . .
What am I maundering about ? And before
very long I must have been sitting higher up
the stairs, for I could see out of the window on
the staircase. The dog-cart had drawn away
from the door into the shade, and the groom
had got down, and was gently stroking the
mare's nose. Then he laid his smooth young
cheek against it, and she stood quite still,
liking it. I expect he is kind to her.

The sun had swung round farther to the
west, and it came in through the window. But
now I was nearly at the top of the stairs ; there
were but three above where I sat. The house
was very still ; below me on the ground-floor
there had been no step or sign of life, and there
was nothing from behind the second door to the
left just above me. Then came the sharp tingle
of an electric bell. There was only one room
from which it could have come.

I tapped very gently, though my heart beat
so that I thought it must have been a hammer-
noise to those inside. The door opened a chink,
and a level, quiet voice said : ' Some hot water,
please — very hot/ Perhaps a minute afterwards

MAY. 379

I tapped again, and a hand took the can of hot
water from me.

I went back again, this time to the top step,
and still waited. Since I had done something,
though it was but the handing of a can of hot
water into the room, that nightmare of incoherent
thoughts began to clear more completely, and,
like some remembered sunlight breaking clouds,
and shining with the serene quietude of eventide,
Helen — she herself, no intercepted vision, no
vision even of remembrance only or anxiousness
— shone out. Whatever happened, she was I,
and I was she, and the Will of God, whatever
It might ordain for us, could not alter that.
She and I, I think, have never feared anything
when we were together, and surely of all days
that life or death could hold for us, we could
never be more together than to-day. So, surely,
of all hours this is the one when fear should be
farthest from us, for never have we been to-
gether like this. Yet, O my God, my God, since
Christ was born of a woman, let Him go in
there, the second door. . . .

And the next door, You know, is the nursery.
. . . No, not the farther one, but the one this

380 A REAPING.

side. Yes, yes, of course You know, but You
might have forgotten. There's the Noah's ark
there, and the dolls'-house, and the lead soldiers.
We had hoped . . .

Red light came in through the window on
the stairs — light of sunset. Once more the
stinging sound of the electric bell came to me ;
once more I took up a can of hot water.

Then it grew dark; in the hall below the
lamp had been lit, and from the window, after
the last red of sunset had faded, there came the
distant shining of stars, endlessly remote. Then
the door opened again, and the nurse came
hurrying out, forgetting to close it. From
within came the cry of a child.

*****

June 1. — I overstep the bounds of the year,
but you may like to know. Quite early this
morning I was allowed to go in and look.
They were sleeping, both of them — she and he.

Afterwards I went into the nursery.

THE END.

ESTABLISHED 1798

T. NELSON
AND SONS

PRINTERS AND
PUBLISHERS

THE

NELSON LIBRARY

OF NOTABLE BOOKS.

Uniform with Ms Volume and same Price.

ISSUED.

LIFE AT THE ZOO. C. J. Cornish.

The Zoo is one of our great national playgrounds, and
Mr. C. J, Cornish, who had few rivals as a naturalist,
provides in this volume a most instructive and fascinat-
ing guide.

THE FOUR MEN, Hilaire Belloc.

What "The Path to Rome" did for Central Europe
Mr. Belloc's new book does in equally pleasant fashion
for the south country of England.

THE CRUISE OF THE "FALCON." E. F. Knight.
Mr. E. F. Knight's tale of his cruise in distant South
American waters in a small yacht is one of the classics
of sea adventure.

PR Benson, Edward Frederic

4099 A reaping

B6R35

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY