A Reaping. E. F. Benson
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that moment I suddenly felt as if something was dreadfully wrong, though I did not at once guess what it was. Then came the thought, the identification of what was wrong: it seemed as if the world was dead; then came the reason for it: it was because there was no sound. For a moment I listened in order to verify this—listened with poised breath and immovable limbs. Yes, I was right: there was no sound of anything at all; for once the ears were deprived of the delicate orchestra that goes up, a hymn of praise, day and night from the earth. It was like a dreadful nightmare.
I first tried coughing, to see if that would be companionable, but that did not do; I coughed, and then silence resumed its reign. I lit a cigarette. I moved, rustled, even got up and walked a little, kicking the pebbles that lay about in the sand. But that was no use, and I perceived where the defect was. I knew I was alive, and could make sounds, but what I wanted was some evidence that something else was alive. But there was none.
Somehow this fact was so disquieting that I sat down again to think about it. In my reasonable mind I knew that absolutely everything was alive, only there was at this moment nothing to tell me so. Not a fly buzzed over the hot sand, not a kite was to be seen wheeling slow as if in sleep, a black speck against the inviolable blue that stretched from horizon to horizon. I was the only thing alive as far as I had evidence. Or supposing—the thought flashed suddenly across me—supposing I, too, was dead? And what was this—this dome of air and the golden sand? Was it hell?
I cannot describe the horror of this. Momentary as was the sensation, it was of a quality, a depth of surcharged panic, which comes to us only in nightmares. I was alone, I was not within touch, in this utter stillness, of any other consciousness, and surely that must be hell, the outer darkness of absolute loneliness, which not even the glorious golden orb swung centre-high in the blue could ever so faintly penetrate. Indeed, it and this iridescent panorama at my feet only added some secret bitter irony to the outer darkness. All the light, the colour, the heat, which one had so loved was there still, but life was arrested, and there was nobody.
Then quite suddenly and unexpectedly the farcical happened, for from some hundred yards away down below the steep cliff up which I had climbed came a long discordant bray from my donkey, who perhaps felt lonely, too. But I have never heard a sound which was to the spirit so overpoweringly sweet. I heard that, and gave a long breath, and shouted, ‘Thank you very much!’ for the whole glory of the noon, which silence had blackened, was instantly restored.
One of the interesting things to which I have alluded, in contrast with the tedium of Mrs. Armstrong’s health, was occurring to-day, for the thermometer had indeed been up in the nineties, a fact which fills all proper-minded people with pride. Our dear, stuffy old London had registered 92 degrees in the shade at Messrs. Negretti and Zambra’s that morning, and I with my own eyes had seen it. It was impossible not to be proud, just as it is impossible not to be proud when one is in a train that is going over seventy miles an hour, a thing that may be timed by the small white quarter-mile posts that are so conveniently established by the side of the line. Once I went in a train that did a mile and a half in seventy-three seconds. I have not got over my elation yet. Or when an extraordinarily vivid flash of lightning occurs, with a congested angry spasm of thunder coming simultaneously with it, are you not sorry for the nerveless soul that does not thrill with personal elation at power made manifest? Or when Madame Melba sings the last long note of the first act of ‘La Bohème’? Or when the organist in King’s College Chapel pulls out the tubas, making the windows to rattle in their leaded panes by the concussion of the astonished air? Or when a perfectly enormous wave rides in from the Atlantic, and is transformed suddenly from the illustrious blue giant into a myriad cascades of snowy white, as, jovially dealing itself its own death, as it were, it is dashed against the brown steadfast rock of the land? Or when Legs (I shall speak of him soon), as he did to-day, sliced his drive very badly at the fourth hole at Woking, and hit the front of the engine of an up-train with extraordinary violence, and thereupon collapsed on the tee in speechless laughter for the sheer joy of the gorgeously improbable feat?
For all these things, so I take it, are evidence of the splendid energy of things in general in which we, each of us, have our share. So that when our train goes very fast, or when thunder cracks very loudly, or when blue waves are turned to smoke, though we are not actually responsible in any way for these encouraging facts, which are dependent on pressure in a boiler, electricity in the air, and a disturbance in mid-Atlantic, yet as by some wireless telegraphy, the energy of them is caught in the receiver of ourselves, and we throb back to it, feeling the pulse of life, which is exactly the same life in boiler and cloud and wave as that pulse in ourselves, which beats at the wrist. Life! Life! Life! All one—all absolutely one!
And to-night, too, though not in any of these particular ways, how it throbs and beats in this hot darkness of June! For a moment I wished I was in the country, to feel the pulse of the woodland and the garden. For the green things of the earth are awake all June; they never sleep day or night; they hold their breath sometimes in the hour before dawn, and they hang their heads sometimes beneath some scurry of summer rain; but day and night their eyes shine; they are growing and living, and are always awake till autumn comes, when they doze, and winter comes, when they sleep sound, day and night alike, dreaming, perhaps, of the spring, when from deep sleep they will slowly awake again, aconites first, and soon after daffodils, and then the buds of the hawthorn, little green squibs of leaf. …
But I had not gone a hundred yards from the doors within which I had dined, when the mysterious joy of London summer night smote these thoughts of the country into silence. The whole town was awake, theatres were pouring out into the streets, and boarding the giants of the roadway, the snorting smelling motor-buses, their trotting brothers, and the inferior cabs and hansoms, where one could be alone and not stop on the way, but be taken decorously and dully to one’s destination. There was news, too, in the evening papers—a horrible murder, I think it was, but the nature of the incident mattered very little. It was incident, anyhow; something had happened. And without wishing to know exactly what it was, I felt extraordinarily pleased that something had happened.
The dip of Piccadilly between Devonshire House and Hyde Park was comparatively empty, and a sudden shudder of the mind came across me. I had been sitting next a dear friend, condemned to death. How could I have forgotten that, for forgotten it I had, in this riotous summer of London. Then I knew why I had forgotten it. It was because she had been so superior (an odious word, but there is no other) to it herself. That courage, that passionate interest in the dear things of the world, her contempt (for this time there is no need of another word) of death, had been infectious. To her it was a mere incident of life. ‘Things in general’ were no less real and delightful to her because this incident was coming close, than they were to me, who had not yet, as far as I knew, to look it in the face.
Yet, after all, to any of the others sitting at that table, death, so small an incident to her who had steadfastly regarded it, might in reality be closer than to her. And she exulted in the things of life still: they had lost no interest for her.
I stopped for a moment at the bottom of the hill, as one must when something quite new to oneself strikes one. That was the ideal she had shown. Fearless, undismayed, full of summer. ‘And with God be the rest.’
At Hyde Park Corner a coffee-stall and an ice-cream stall jostled each other. Each had its following. But both at the moment seemed to me to be heretical, and instead I turned into the Park to walk as far as the Alexandra Gate, whence I had to get into Sloane Street.
It was like coming out of the roar of a tunnel into the day again, and one’s eyes (though conversely) had to get accustomed to the dark after the glare and noise of the dear streets. A little wind whispered overhead in the planes; a little odour of moist earth came from Rotten Row. Quiet, solitary figures passed, or figures in pairs, closely linked, but for the most part silent. On benches underneath the trees there were pairs of figures. In Heaven’s name why not? To flirt, to make love, to look into eyes, is an applauded, and rightly applauded, pursuit in sequestered corners, under palms, beneath the eaves of the staircase, with the band blaring from the ball-room just beyond. But it doesn’t seem to strike the fastidious, who write letters to papers about the ‘state’ of the parks, that it is just possible that there are other people in the world