A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

Then, in the same moment (I am lumbering in words, and trying to express what I know cannot be said), I saw that Helen was already half-way across the grass, coming towards me. She held a telegraphic sheet in her hand, and there was in her face a gravity infinitely tender, and quite quiet, and quite normal. I had seen it there once before, when the news came of her father’s death, which was sudden.

‘Legs won’t come down this afternoon,’ she said gently. ‘We have got to go up to him.’

And then she showed me the telegram.

It was not many hours before we knew all there was to be known. Legs had started to ride down from town, and turning into the King’s Road from Sloane Square his motor bicycle had skidded, and he had fallen under an omnibus. A wheel had passed over him.

He had a letter or two, which identified him, in his pockets, and he had been taken, since it was so near, back to the house in Sloane Street. When we got there he was still alive.

His room was at the back of the house, and we were allowed to go in at once. He lay there, quite unconscious, and in no pain, for the only thing that could be done for him was to keep him like that. The bedclothes were not allowed to touch him, and a round wooden frame was under them. There was no hope at all.

His bed ran out into the middle of the room, and Helen and I sat one on each side of it, while a little distance off was the doctor, who just watched him. Sometimes he got up and looked at him, sometimes he softly left the room, returning as quietly. And in those hours of waiting, for a long time I was conscious of nothing except the trivial details of the room itself. I suppose I had been there before—ah! yes, of course, I had, when Legs had the influenza in the winter—but it was not familiar. Yet it was just like what I should have expected Leg’s room to be, and in a moment I found I knew it as well as I knew him. There was a pile of letters on the writing-table, a bag of golf-clubs in the corner, an enormous sponge on the washing-stand, and on the dressing-table a most elaborate shaving apparatus—a metal bowl, a little Etna for hot water, a half-dozen razor blades in a neat case, with a sort of mowing-machine handle. He had not packed them, since he was only going to be with us for a couple of days, and he could never have used all those blades once each on that smooth chin....

He had been, as I remembered now, to a fancy-dress ball the night before, and his wardrobe, gaping open, showed the hose and ruffles of the Elizabethan period, while hanging up by them was a small pointed beard and a high head-top, with long and rather scanty brown hair. ‘For the point is,’ Legs had said rather shrilly, ‘everyone will say, “Shakespeare, I presume?” and I shall say, “How dare you! I am Hall Caine!” And if some people are a little cleverer and say, “‘The Bondman,’ I suppose?” I shall say, “You seem to have forgotten William Shakespeare.” Perhaps you don’t think it funny. But then, you see, you are not going to the ball.’

No; we had not thought it very funny, and Legs had been rather ruffled. He told us we had spoiled his pleasure, but if so, it must have very quickly become unspoiled again, for—it was only a week ago that he had conceived that idea—he spent a boisterously hilarious evening afterwards. But, how I wish we had not spoiled his pleasure even for that moment! As if it mattered whether it was funny or not, so long as it amused him. Helen had said it was rather a cheap sort of joke.... And just then her eyes, too, saw the fancy dress hanging up in the wardrobe, and the moment afterwards she looked across to me. And then she left the room for a little while. She, too, I am sure, had thought of that.

I had a friend once who was killed in a railway accident. A year afterwards I was staying with his mother, and one evening, when we were alone, she began crying gently. ‘Jim took his lunch with him to eat in the train that day,’ she said to me soon, and he had asked me to put him up an orange. But I forgot.’