A Reaping. E. F. Benson
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expense as well.
How the silence grew! I could not even hear any bees buzz among the flower-beds, and wondered whether bees do no work on Sunday. There was not a sound or murmur of them. Probably this is quite a new fact in natural history, which has never struck anybody before. It would never have struck me if I had gone to church. Then Fifi pricked one ear, sat up, and snapped at something. It was a winged thing, with a brown body, rather like a bee. How indescribably futile!
Then there came a little puff of wind from the end of the garden, and next moment the whole air was redolent with the scent of sweet-peas. Sweet-peas! How strangely, vastly more intimate is the sense of smell than any other! How at one whiff of odour the whole romance of life, its beautiful joys and scarcely less beautiful sorrows, the dust and struggle and the glory of it, rises up, clad not in the grey robes, or standing in the dim light of the past, but living, moving, breathing—part of the past, perhaps, but more truly part of the present. Like a huge wave from the immortal sea of life, cool and green, and speaking of the eternal depths, yet exulting in sunshine and rainbow-hued in spray, all the memories entwined about this house held and enveloped me. Here lived once Dick and Margery, those perfect friends; here, when they had passed to their triumphant peace, came she whom, when I first saw her, I thought to be Margery. From this house (where still in memory of Margery we plant the long avenue of sweet-peas, because she loved them) two years ago we were married, and here I sit now drowned in the beautiful past that is all so essential a part of this beautiful present.
But it would be as well, perhaps, if this book is to be in the slightest degree intelligible (a thing which I maintain is a merit rather than a defect), to put together a few simple facts concerning these last two years.
It was two years ago last April that we were married, and took a small house in town, though we still spent a good deal of time down here with Helen’s father. But before the year was out he died, leaving everything to Helen, who was his only child. So, as was natural, we continued to live in the house which was so dear to both of us.
Legs is my first cousin, and he has lived with us for a year past, for he has neither father nor mother; and since he was cramming for his Foreign Office work in town, it was far the best arrangement that he should make his home with us. Legs is the only name he is ever known by, since he is one of those people who are almost unknown by their real name (which in this case is Francis Horace Allenby), and are alluded to only by some nickname which is far more suitable. If, for instance, I said to somebody who knew him quite well, ‘Have you seen Francis lately?’ I should probably be favoured with an inquiring stare, and then, ‘Oh, Legs you mean!’ while to his million acquaintances (he has more than anyone I ever knew) he is equally Legs Allenby. The name, I need scarcely add, is a personal and descriptive nickname, for Legs chiefly consists of them. When he sits down, he would be guessed to be well on the short side of middle height; when he stands up he is seen to be well on the farther shore of it. He was Legs at school, and his family, very sensibly, and all his friends, saw how impossible it was to call him Francis any more. For the rest, he is just over twenty, sandy-haired, freckle-faced, and green-eyed, with a front tooth broken across, a fact that is continually in evidence, since he is nearly always laughing. It would be sheer nonsense to call him good-looking, but it would be as sheer to call him ugly, since, when you have got a face like Legs’, either epithet has nothing to do with it. But I have never seen any boy with nearly so attractive and charming a face, and Legs, whose nature is quite as nice as his face, and extremely like it, has the most splendid time.
And that, to finish these tedious explanations, is our household. There is no other inmate of it—no little one, you understand.
Legs is an enthusiast—a fanatic on the subject of life. Everything, including even his foreign languages, which he has to cram himself with, is the subject of his admiration, and he discovers more secrets of life than the rest of the world put together. At one time it is a chord which is meat and drink to him; at another the romances of Pierre Loti; or, again, golf is the only thing worth living for, while occasionally some girl, or, as often as not, a respectable elderly married woman, usurps his heart. Last week he discovered that there were only two people in town the least worth talking to, but yesterday, when I asked him who the second one was, having forgotten myself, I found that he had forgotten too, for if the ‘Meistersinger’ overture was not enough for anybody, he was a person of no perception.
‘Why, it contains all there is,’ he had said, when he finished it the other evening with Helen. ‘It’s all there, the whole caboodle.’
But this morning, from the silence indoors, I imagine he must have found another caboodle—a book probably. Or equally possible, Legs has an attack of acute middle-age, which occasionally takes him like a bad cold in the head. Then he wonders whether anything is worth doing, and is sorry for Helen and me, because we are so frivolous. Six months ago, I remember, he had such an attack, induced by reading a book about three acres and a cow, which raised in him the sense of injustice that all of us three had so much more than that. During this period he took no sugar in his tea, refused wine, and began to write a book which was called ‘Tramps,’ contrasting the horror of indigence with the even greater horror of extravagance. It was really directed against Helen and me, for we had lately bought a small, snuffling motor-car. These outbursts of Socialism are generally coincident with Atheism. But they do not last long: Legs soon feels better again.
I was right, it appeared, about the conjecture that he had found a book, but I was wrong about the attack of middle-age. Legs jumped out of the drawing-room window with wild excitement.
‘Oh, I say!’ he cried, ‘why did you never tell me? I thought Swinburne was an awful rotter! But just listen.’
And he read: ‘When the hounds of spring are in winter’s traces.’
‘Did you ever hear anything like it?’ he said. ‘“Blossom by blossom the spring begins!” Why, it’s magic! Oh, don’t I know it! Do you remember—I suppose you don’t—when all the daffodils came out together last year?’
‘Oh, Legs, what an ass you are!’ I said. ‘Because you never noticed them till I showed you them.’
‘No, I believe that’s true. Oh, don’t argue! Listen!’
And he began all over again.
Then he lay back on the grass with his hands underneath his head, looking up unblinking into the face of the sun. That, by the way, is another peculiarity of his: he looks straight at the sun at noonday, and is not dazzled. His eyes neither blink nor water. He can’t understand why other people don’t look at the sun.
Then—if by any chance you care to understand this quiet, delightful life we lead, it is necessary that you understand Legs—then his mood suddenly changed.
‘Oh, I’m wrong about the daffodils,’ he said; ‘you showed me them. But this chap is a daffodil. I suppose he’s quite old, too. I wonder how you can get old, if you have ever felt like that. What a waste of time it is to do anything if you can feel. I hate this Foreign Office affair: why shouldn’t I do nothing?’
‘Because you can’t,’ I remarked.
‘What do you mean?’
I had not been to church, and so had heard no sermon. Therefore, I preached one on my own account.
‘You will know in about fifteen years,’ I said. ‘Anyhow, you will find that, unless you are brainless and absurd, you must do something. You are quite wrong. It isn’t nearly enough to feel. The moment you “feel,” you want to create. You not only want, but you have to; you can’t possibly help yourself. You have just read that heavenly poem. You now want to write something like it. You hear what spring once said to a poet, and you want to put down what spring says to you!’
‘Oh, you’re quite wrong,’ said Legs. ‘He has said what spring means. That’s the last word on the subject. But summer now: this, to-day——’
‘So you want to create,’ said I.
A glorious trait about Legs is that he never admits conviction. He only changes the subject.