A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

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

I think we were very moderate in our exchanges, 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 the question ‘What’s the point?’ we wrote, ‘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 understood 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 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 futilities, 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 investment of your time; for enjoyment is not (as is falsely supposed) finished with when the thing 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, R. 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, is more retentive of its pleasures than of its pain. In the moment of the happening either may seem the top note of acuteness, but the echoes of the one indisputably live longer than the echoes of the other; and though our consciousness, if you care to 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 corresponding 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, however, 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 something I do not yet know which is happier than 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 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 consistent 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 him. He will view things differently, and therefore 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 feelings and directing them all. That is the consistency that has to be observed. Otherwise it ceases to be one story, but becomes a series of really unconnected short stories, with the technical 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 constructed 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 suppose 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 is changed to me, and yet there is no inconsistency. 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 diamond changed; it is merely that the refracted light has taken another colour.