A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

Meantime in this first week of March the winds were roaring out of the south-west, and for a while, days together sometimes, squalls which the Valkyrie maidens might have bridled to make steeds for their swift going came in unbroken procession from the Atlantic. Helen is a lover of the sea, and these gales coming out of the waste of waters touch something within her as mysterious as the sixth sense of animals, who feel and are excited by things that the five-sensed mortal is unaware of. To-day, however, was quiet and calm, and we stormed the steep ascent of the downs till we stood on the highest point of the Beacon, which looks down on all other land towards the south-west, so that the river of wind that flows from the Atlantic comes here unbreathed and untamed by traverse of other country, and you get it fresh and salt as it was when it left the ocean.

In that interval of quiet weather there was nothing to be perceived by the ordinary sense, but she sniffed the air like a filly at grass.

‘Wind is coming,’ she said, ‘the great wind from the sea. I don’t care whether your little barometer has gone up or not; what does it know of the winds? We shall be at home before it comes, but I will tell you then, as we sit close to the fire, what is happening in the big places.’

She was quite right; though the silly barometer had gone up, we were but half through dinner when the wind, which had been no more than a breeze all afternoon, struck the house as suddenly as a blow. The wood fire on the hearth gave a little puff of smoke into the room, and then, thinking better, suddenly sparkled as if with frost, as the passage of the air above the chimney drew it up. At that Helen’s eyes were alight. She ate no more, but sat with her elbows on the table, while I, who have not the sixth sense, went gravely through mutton and anchovies on toast and an orange. Then they brought in coffee, and she shook her head to that. Meantime that first warning of the wind had been justified; a Niagara of air poured over us, screaming and hooting, and making a mad orchestra of sound. At times it ceased altogether—the long pause of the conductor—and then, before one heard the wind at all, a tattoo of the drums of rain, sounded on the window-pane. Then, heralded by those drums, the whole mad orchestra burst into a great tutti of screaming, hooting, sobbing. So much I could hear, but Helen was of it somehow. Something secret and sensitive within her vibrated to the uproar.

I have seen her in the grip of the wind, as she expresses it, perhaps half a dozen times, and it always makes me vaguely uneasy. It is no less than a possession, and yet I can think of no one whom I would have imagined less liable to such a thing. I can imagine her surrounded by the terrors of fire or shipwreck, or any catastrophe that overthrows the reason, and makes men mere panic-stricken maniacs, keeping absolutely calm, and infecting others by her self-possession. But now and then the wind takes possession of her, and she becomes like the Pythian prophetess.

‘Oh, to be alone with the sea and the gale to-night!’ she said. ‘Jack, what splendid things are happening in the great empty places of the world! This has been brewing out on the Atlantic for a couple of days by now, and there are thousands of miles of great white-headed waves rising and falling in the darkness, and calling to each other, and dancing together. Up above them, as in the gallery of the ball-room, is the great mad band of which we hear a little in our stuffy house, and it will play to them all night and all to-morrow, and the waves will dance without ceasing, growing bigger as they dance, like some nightmare. Oh, you can imagine nothing! But I see so clearly Mr. and Mrs. Wave and all their family dancing, dancing, all young, though white-headed, and growing bigger as they dance. They are cannibals, too, and a big wave will eat up a little one, which makes it bigger yet. The wind loves to see that. He gives a great blare of trumpets when he sees a cannibal wave. Oh, it must have happened this moment! That scream meant, “Well done, wave! That was a big one you swallowed!”

‘Sometimes they see a ship coming along, and they love playing with ships, because all proper ships like being out in the Atlantic ball-room, and the waves crowd towards it, seeing which can lift it highest. Whiz! Can’t you hear the screw racing, as the wave that lifted the stern runs away from under it? How the masts strike right and left across a thousand stars, for the sky is quite clear! The winds have turned out the clouds as you turn out the chairs and tables from a room where you dance.’

We had gone up to Legs’ room after dinner, and as she talked she went quickly from place to place, now pausing for a moment to look at a photograph, now putting coal on the fire, or drawing aside the curtain to look into the night.

‘Oh, there is the eternal youth of the world,’ she said—‘the song of the winds and the dance of the waves. I think all the souls of the little babies that are born come to land in the blowing from the sea. It is by that that vitality burns higher, and the fruitfulness of the world is renewed. Millions of blossoms of life are rushing over the land to-night, ready to drop into lonely homes——’

‘Ah, don’t, don’t,’ I said. ‘Helen, come and sit down and be quiet.’