A Reaping. E. F. Benson
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don’t believe in the highest of the shortest suit if your partner doubles,’ he said. ‘What are you to do if you have two spades and two clubs all contemptible?’
‘Lead the less contemptible.’
Legs turned slowly over on his side, and lay with his face against the short turf of the lawn. ‘“Blossom by blossom,”’ he said, ‘“the spring begins.” I wonder if he meant more than that! Did he mean to tell of the time when one is young oneself, and it is all blossom? Lord, how priggish that sounds! But it is all blossom, except for this beastly German. I hate German! It sounds as if you were gargling. Damn! I have to go up by the early train to-morrow, too! And you and Helen will stop here till after lunch. Grind, grind—oh, I lead the life of a dog! And then, if I am very successful, I shall have the privilege of sitting on a stool in a beastly building in Whitehall, and writing a précis from some silly old man in Vienna or Madrid, about nothing at all. It isn’t worth it!’
Legs and I, it will be observed, deal largely in contradictions.
‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘Everything almost that one does is worth it. As long as you are actively doing anything with all your heart, you can’t be wasting time, nor can there be anything better worth doing. It is only when you say that a thing isn’t worth doing that it becomes so.’
Legs sat up again.
‘Oh, I want nine lives at least!’ he said. ‘Or why can’t one buy some of the time that hangs so heavy on other people’s hands? I know a man who reads the Times all through every morning, and the Globe every evening. Yet, after all, I dare say it is quite as improving as sitting here and talking rot as we are doing. I shall go and put in half an hour over that accursed Teutonic language before lunch.’
Legs had, as it seemed to me, run over most of the topics of human interest in the few minutes he had been out, and since I was still irrevocably determined neither to wash Fifi, nor to write to the Secretary of State, nor, indeed, to open the very large book on the crisis in Russia, which I had brought out with me (to bring out a book on Sunday morning and not to open it is strictly in accordance with the spirit of the thing), my mind went slowly browsing, like a meditative cow, over the dazzling display he had spread before me. And instinctively and instantaneously I found myself envying him, though why I envied him I did not immediately know. But it was soon obvious; I envied his power of making soul-stirring discoveries; his rapture over that magical spring song of the man he had thought ‘an awful rotter.’ I envied him his ignorance of the perfectly patent fact that it is only fools who can go on doing nothing, and of the fact that it is infinitely better to sit on a stool and do arithmetic for stockbrokers than to do nothing at all. But youth does not know that, and I think I envied him his youth. Yet—so often does one contradict oneself—I knew very soon that I did not envy him any of these things. After all, I still went on making soul-stirring discoveries, and propose to do so until the very end of my life, when I shall make the most soul-stirring discovery of all, which is death. And to envy the fact of his having just discovered the magic of Swinburne’s spring song would be exactly the same as envying the appetite of somebody who has just come down to breakfast, when you are half-way through. Your eggs and bacon were delicious, but the fact that you have eaten them makes it impossible to wish for them again. And it should make you only delighted that other people keep coming down to breakfast—till the end of your life they will do that, unless the world comes to an end first—and, thank God, they will find eggs and bacon delicious too, hungry and fresh in the morning of their lives.
I was becoming slightly too active in mind for the proper observance of Sunday morning (given, of course, that you have chosen not to go to church), for the real attitude is a state of tranquil bemusedness, but it was too late to stop now. … What, in fact, did I want? Did I want to be twenty again, and go through the days and hours of those fifteen years once more?
Yes, I did. If the world could be turned back for fifteen years, I would gladly take my place there, and go through it all, good and bad together, just as it has happened. I would encore this delightful song, in fact, and be content that it should be sung again—it, not another song. Of course, if one could start again at the age of twenty—or ten, for that matter—and live it over again with the knowledge, infinitesimal as it is, that one has gained now, I imagine that the vast majority of the world would put the hands of the clock back. On all those thousands of occasions on which one has acted stupidly, unkindly, evilly, and has probably suffered for it without delay (for it is mercifully ordained that we have not long to wait before our punishment begins, especially if we have been foolish), we should now do differently, remembering that it did not pay—to put things at their lowest—to be asses and knaves. Apart from that, we should have the same beautiful, flawless days again, when, so I cannot but think, the beneficent power has somehow come very close to us and our surroundings, and by its neighbourhood has given us a series, again and again repeated, of hours in which we have been unable to imagine anything better than what we have got. We have wanted, with all the eager happiness that wanting gives, and we have obtained; but before any leanness of the soul has entered we have wanted again. We have had happiness, not content (since that implies the end of wanting) but happiness, the content that dwells not in the present only, but looked forward. I have no idea whether, on the whole, I am happier than the average of other people, since there is no thermometer yet invented that can register that. But I do know that I would choose to go back and live it all over again, as it has been. With the little experience, the little knowledge that must inevitably come with years, whether one is stupid or not, I imagine that everybody would choose to go back, but I wish to state distinctly that I would go back without that. I suppose it was that which made me just now feel I envied Legs. But I don’t do that really for this reason.
Supposing that what I should choose (because I really should) were given me, what then? I should arrive again eventually in the mere measure of years at the point where I am now, no different, no better, no worse. I should like to go back, because it has been such fun. But there is better than that ahead: of that I am completely convinced. There are as many (if not more, and I think there are more) entrancing discoveries from middle age as there have been from youth, and I am convinced again that if one happens to live to be old there will be as many more.
After all, to re-read life again would be like re-reading the first volume of an absorbing book. One has revelled in the first volume, and naturally wants to revel again. But what is going to happen? There is nothing that interests me so much as that. To-day, even in this quiet domestic life of ours, there are a hundred threads leading out into unknown countries, all of which, if one lives, one will follow up. And all, big and tiny alike, are so stupendous. If, to take the forward view, I could see in a mirror now what and where all those people—few of them, no doubt, but friends—those who really matter, would be in a year’s time, how I should seize the magic reflector, and gaze into it! Incomparable as has been the romance of life up till now, it is known to me. But to peep into the second volume!
The sun, in the full blaze of which Legs had laid, peeped over the top of the elm in shade of which I had seated myself, and, not being Leggish, I shifted my chair again to consider this point.
It is a question of scale that is here concerned, though the scale seems to me to be an unreal one. If I happened to be the Emperor of All the Russias, and the magic mirror were given me, I should look eagerly out for my own figure, and see if I still wore a crown. I should scrutinize the faces of those around me, to see if war and the hell-hag of revolution had been shrieking through my illimitable country. But my interests are not soul-stirring to any but me, and anyhow not of European importance. So I should look to see who sat on this lawn a year hence; I should ask for a short survey of the Embassy at Paris, to see if Legs was attached; I should visit a dozen houses or so. But if I was allowed to put the clock back fifteen years, I should have to wait longer for this. … So I must reconsider my choice, and I am afraid I must reverse it. But it must be understood that I choose not to be twenty again, merely because it will take longer to be forty and fifty. I want the second volume so much.
‘Or. …’ Here Helen’s voice broke in. She had come back from church, and had seated herself on the grass, and I believe that half of what appeared to be soliloquy