A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

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 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 of six young and cheerful optimists, who should decide whether such opinions were fit for publication. Quite rightly literature of an indecent 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 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 circumambient 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 laughter. 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 laughed at what was written with such seriousness, than that all those into whose hands the printed record of that manuscript might have fallen should have sighed once over my jaundiced 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 unfortunate 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 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 consciousness, I cannot believe that he is not a guest who is welcome when he comes. Personally 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!

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

There was Isolde in his high chair. (Probably 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 upturned 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 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.