A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

Being extremely clever that morning, of course I understood, and reviled her for eating an unnatural phenomenon. It was criminal; she might as well have found the sea-serpent or the North Pole, and eaten it. But as usual she was artful, and led the conversation away to daffodils, which were behaving in a manner nearly equal to that of the strawberry-plant. One, indeed, was in bud (a thing incredible, but true), and I supposed she had eaten that, too. That led us back to the strawberry again, which she was not even sorry about, for she said it was far more interesting to be able to write to the Field to say she had eaten a strawberry on February 9 than that I should be able to say I had seen it. So I very kindly gave her my pen, and said:

‘Write quickly.’

She said:

‘Oh, but I am only a woman; I can’t. They wouldn’t put it in.’

‘I wish you hadn’t put the strawberry in,’ said I.

‘I think I shall wish that, too, before long,’ said she.

I only mention this in order to show the utter unreasonableness of my wife. If I want to write to the Field, and say there was a strawberry in my garden on February 9, she will allow me to say that though I did not see it, she ate it. (She certainly would not have eaten it if I had seen it.) But she will not write to say she ate it, like a true woman. She says it does not matter, but added with a changed voice that she was afraid it might. It did, for the fruitfulness of the season was not so mellow as might have been wished.

Yes, once again spring has begun to stir in the fiery heart of the world; once again the breath of Life blows the embers that seemed all winter to be but grey and lifeless cinders, and from the centre the glow spreads, till that grey surface of ash is alive with flame again. And as the flames shoot upwards they are like rockets, rising from over the whole face of the world. At present they are but going upwards, those slender lines of flame, which are the sap that is rising through branch and leafless stem until it reaches the very ends of the twigs. Then these rockets will burst in stars of leaf and opening flower, till the vast illumination is again complete. But in the warm soft February morning, though I feel and know that this is so, I cannot help my thoughts going back to the other side of things. What of the illumination of last year? It is quenched dead, and even while the world is getting ready for the next one there still lie broadcast the ashes and fallen sticks of the last rocket-shower. However many more gladden the world, even though to all infinity life was incessantly and beautifully renewed, yet I cannot forgive the perishing of a single flower. I know well that the material is indestructible, that of life and the death of it is born fresh life, so that we are quite right to say that life cannot be destroyed. But what of the individual rose, what of that one purple star of clematis that twinkled on the end of the stem I hold in my hand? Though it may be transformed, and will be transformed, into a myriad other things, so that by its death it is transfused into a hundred other flowers, and courses through the veins of life for ever, yet it, that individual object, will be seen no more. Its individuality is completely lost; it figures in new forms, not its own.

It is quite certain also that the same things happen to our bodies. The grass grows thick on the graves of those we have loved, and the roots of the roses penetrate deep. I saw once on the crumbling, sea-devoured East Coast of England the thing itself under my very eyes, which made it real to me in a way that nothing had ever done before. For a churchyard stood there on the very edge of the sandy cliff, and one night, with noise of huge murmurous thunder, an acre of it slid down into the sea. Next morning I visited the place, and there, sticking out of the cliff, were the bones of the dead that had been buried there. A ruin of roses that had sprawled and trumpeted over the churchyard gate, which had been plucked in half by the fall, lay on the ground, and I wondered how the trees had not slipped with the rest of the landslide, until I saw. Their roots had lain just where the fracture of the earth occurred, and in the exposed face of the new cliff I saw their anchorage. One was wrapped round a thigh-bone, another had made a network among ribs ... it was all horrible and revolting. And that has happened to the million dead who have lived and loved, whose limbs have been swift to move, who have drawn rapturous, long breaths of this keen sea-scented air, whose eyes have been bright and mouths eager when they met, lover and beloved. This is all—this ruin of red roses on the grass.

There is nothing in the world more certain than this, and one may as well face it. Helen will die, and I shall die, and one of us will die first. And the other will sometimes see a grave with the grass green over it, and roses triumphant thereon. For we have settled most things at one time or another, she and I, and the manner of our funerals and what happens after has passed under discussion. We have decided definitely against cremation, because it seems such a waste of tissue, and we are both of us going to be properly buried, the one close to the other so that the same rose may bloom from us both. But she will have roses and strawberries on her grave, so that the Sunday-school children may pluck and eat them, while I, on the other hand, am going to be a spring-man, and have daffodils, for I feel no leaning, as I have said, towards Sunday-schools. Here lies the difficulty: she wants a rich clayey soil for her roses and strawberries, and my daffodils will demand not clay but sand. Also she is going to plant purple clematis by my head, and clematis likes sand too. We have not yet perfectly decided where we are going to die, but it seems probable that the survivor will stay in the same place as the survived. But I want purple clematis, since it was when I saw that that I knew somebody whom I had thought to be a friend was false. Indeed, I have done all I could to forgive, but I think a clematis that feeds on me may make it surer.