A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

Our funerals will shock the neighbourhood, I am afraid. I am going to have the A flat Fugue and Prelude blared on the organ (it is time somebody began to learn to play) at that distressing moment when my coffin is wheeled out of the church, simply to show that I have enjoyed myself enormously. Great Heaven! I should as soon think of having a dead march of whatever kind played over me as I should let them play the works of Mr. Mendelssohn. I shall have had (whatever happens) an immensely good time. It seems to me much fitter to return thanks for that than to remind people that my poor body is dead, which they knew already, or why did they come to my funeral service? As for requiems, I will have none of them. Whatever happens, I, my body at least, cannot possibly lie quiet in my grave. The dear flowers planted there will see to that.

Oh, my God, my God, what unanswerable riddles you set us! Even this body, and what happens to it, is so occupying a subject. I don’t really care what happens to mine: it may be set up in an anatomical museum if it will teach anybody anything; but Helen’s.... Somehow, when I come out of the valley of the shadow, something of that must wait for her; or, if she has gone through that passage first, I shall not know myself unless at the end of it, when the darkness lifts a little, I shall see grey eyes looking at the procession of those passing over, and meeting mine, and saying somehow, ‘I am here.’ She must be there (is it not so?) waiting on the eternal shore for me.

There she must be. I can’t help what I believe; that is the one thing in oneself which one can never change. And Dick will be there, and Margery ... what a splendid day!

Then the one horrible certainty descended on me again. In so few years we shall all—our bodies, I mean, the appearance by which we recognize each other—not be our bodies at all, but part of the fibre of other living things which are having their day, even as we have had ours. It is so now with Dick and Margery, so how shall I know them? Are they to be just voices in the air, presences that are felt? Is that all? Shall I never see again that quiver on Margery’s mouth, which means that a smile is ready to break from it? I don’t want incorporeal presences. I want Dick and his crooked nose, and Margery’s smile....

Then, on this warm February morning I must suppose that I went down into Hell. Dead leaves and flowers, it was certain, were transformed into fresh living forms, the bones, too, and flesh of dead animals, and of men and women, passed again into the great machine of life, and were served up in new transformations, so that of the individual body nothing at all was left. That is bad enough; I shall never see Margery and Dick again as I used to see them. Helen will pass, too, into other forms ... that is bad enough. But this is infinitely worse. What of the individual soul, the spirit that we love? Will that, too, as analogy grimly insists, be put back again into the principle of eternal life from which it came, so that its identity, too, is lost, and lives but only as the autumn leaves of last year live in the verdure of the next spring? With everything else that happens; the bodies of those we love even, a cruel thing surely, but certainly true, are used up again to make fresh forms of life. Why should we suppose that God makes any exception in dealing with the souls of men, the individuals? Every other form of life He uses and re-uses ... the world is but a lump of modelling clay, with which He beguiles the leisure of eternity, making now one shape, then crushing it all up and making another.

So this is all that the promise of Eternal Life amounts to, that we shall pass back into the crucible, and issue forth again as bits of somebody else! It seems to me a very mean affair; frankly, it seems a swindle. It is a poor trick to make us puny little creatures love one another, and try to be kind, and console ourselves for the evil days and the sorrows of the world with thoughts of the everlasting day that shall dawn for us all, if that everlasting day is nothing more than the day that is here already; if the souls whom we have believed are at rest in some ineffable peace and content, or, on the other hand, through further suffering are getting nearer, ever nearer, to the perfection and flower of their being, have already passed into other forms of life, so that Dante and Beatrice are themselves no longer (as we should call ‘themselves’), but have been infinitely divided into soldiers, sailors, tinkers, and tailors. In that sense they may be said to be alive still, but it is a very paltry sense. They (what we mistakenly call ‘they’) are as dead as if they had never been.

It is all very well to say that Dante is immortal by reason of his deathless verse; that is all very well for us, but how is it for that fiery soul which is split up into a thousand other bodies? When he thought to open his eyes on the Mystical Rose as the dark waves of death slowly drew back from his emancipated spirit, it was all a dismal mistake. No Beatrice awaited him; she, too, is split into a million other forms of life. They were absorbed back into the central fire, and a spark of Dante’s soul went into this man, and another into that, so that in this sense there is eternal life for him. But in no other; the Dante which we mean was formed out of other lives, and into other lives he went. The man is there no more, and there is no Beatrice. There will be nothing of us either, unless you mean that at some future time I am alive because part of me has become perhaps a murderer, and another part a politician, and another a housemaid, for all I know.

The February sun was warm; you might almost call it hot. A little wind pregnant with spring moved through the bushes; the snowdrops, those pale heralds of the triumphant march of the new year, were thick in the grass where we had planted them, Helen and I, last autumn, so that they should give us the earliest news of the returning tide of life. And to me this morning they brought but bitter news, for they spoke not of the returning of life, but of the thousand deaths which made them alive. They pointed not forwards towards the glory of the many-coloured summer, but back to the innumerable decay of the autumn. And the quiet garden which I loved, the tiled mossy roof which I had called home, became the place of death, even as last autumn death had called to me from it, and had been seen by Legs, and had made the dog howl. Was it this that was hinted at by those dim forebodings which for months had never been absent from me? Was the fear that crouched in the shadow ready to spring taking form now? It seemed to me that the logic which had turned the world to hell was irrefutable; I expected some shattering stroke that should blot out sunshine and sensation from me for ever, proving that I and my logic were right. I had guessed the horrid secret of the world; I was like a spy found with the plans of the enemy’s fortress on me, and must die, lest I should communicate them. I said that to myself; I said ‘Enemy’s fortress,’ meaning the world where I had loved and been loved. ‘Enemy,’ mark you; I knew what I meant. The world was the enemy’s fortress.

And then, thank God—oh! thank God!—before that which was impending happened, I said to myself that I was wrong. I did not at the moment see where I was wrong, but I knew that I must have made some gross and awful mistake. Things could not be as I had imagined them. And the moment I said that to myself the darkness lifted a little. It was all dark still, but the quality of the darkness changed. And then, unbidden as a tune that suddenly rings in one’s head, a few words made themselves recollected. And they were, ‘If I go down into hell, Thou art there also.’

At that I caught a glimpse again of this dear garden and house, as I had seen and known them. I do not suppose that this blackness and loneliness of spirit which I have tried to indicate could have lasted more than a few minutes, as measured in the world of time, but time has nothing to do with the spirit. In a second, as computed by the unmeaning scale of hours and days, the soul may live a thousand lifetimes or die a thousand deaths. Redemption may be wrought there in an infinitesimal fraction of a moment, or in that same fraction a soul may damn itself. For it is not the moment which is anything: it is the instantaneous choice which therein sums up the infinite series of deeds which one has already done, and thoughts which one has harboured. And the message that leaps round the world on electric wires is a sluggard to choice. My choice at this moment was between the truth of what I had been elaborately thinking out and the truth of the words that rang in my head. There was reason on one side; there was just It on the other. And what was ‘It’? Just that which, very faintly, but quite audibly, said that I had come near to blasphemy. There are many names for it: we all know its visitation, though it is obscured sometimes because we encourage the Devil, who comes to us all in many forms, and can take the most respectable disguises, like those of intellect and mind. But perhaps the simplest name and the truest for It is the Grace of God.