A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

She came closer yet, and, like Mr. Holmes, we talked below our breath, in whispers, as if afraid of disturbing this great joy that had come floating down on us, borne on the sea-spray, borne on the wind-tide, borne as you will, so that only it came here.

Then, very soon after, she went to bed, and I was left sitting in the nursery, with its new significance. Yet it was not quite new. I had, as Helen said, ‘half guessed before,’ and I but wondered, now I knew, how my imagination had halted half-way, and had not clearly seen the star on which Helen’s eyes were fixed. Yet who would have known? She had been so full of art in her wording; even that master-word she had used, ‘nursery,’ seemed but to have slipped in, and I had thought she meant only—as, indeed, she had said—that it was to be the room of young things, where she should sit when the shadow of childlessness was chill, and with the aid of the memories of youth and play keep the mists of middle age from closing round us, and the frosts of old from settling too stiffly on the later years of our travel. The room was to be but a palliative or a tonic, as you will, a consolation for the things that were not to be for us, and now it showed another face. It was not the past of which it spoke, but the future.

I suppose I sat long over the embers of the fire, but these were hours that had escaped from the hand of Time, and were not to be computed by his scale. Sometimes I threw a log into the open hearth of the fireplace (ah, but that open hearth must be altered now; it would never do in the nursery), and sometimes I plied an industrious pair of bellows, but for the most part I sat idle, looking into the fiery heart of the blaze; for the news that Helen had made me guess was at first unrealizable. Though I knew it to be true, I had to absorb, digest it, since a great joy is as stunning a thing as the stroke of sorrow. And gradually, as gradually as the workings of the process of beauty, I began to feel, and not only to know, the name of the room where I sat. It was the nursery.

But Helen was wrong about one thing. She had said that the wind would play to the dancing of the waves all night and all next day, but before I went to bed that wild orchestra of the storm had ceased. Its work was done for us. It had blown the bud of the blossom of life into the house that so longed for it.

It is strange how quickly the events of life become part of one. Next morning I woke in full possession of the new knowledge. There was no question or uncertainty as to what that was which made a rapture of waking. And with the same suddenness all real knowledge of what life had been before I knew this had passed from me. I could no longer in the least realize what I had felt like before the moment came when Helen had made me guess. Though that moment was so few hours away, yet I could no more conceive existence without it than one can form any mental picture of what life would be without the gift of sight or hearing. It is not that any huge event destroys all that went before it, but it so stains back through the turned pages of the past that they are all coloured and suffused with it.

How the blackbirds and thrushes sang on that March morning! I had awoke before dawn to hear the early tuning-up going on in the bushes, and before long, since I was too happy to sleep, I got up, dressed quietly, and went out. The tuning-up was just over, and the birds were all busy with breakfast, for you must know, as soon as they wake, they get in singing-trim for the day before their bright-eyed quest, listening, with head cocked as they scuttle over the lawn, for the sound of a worm moving. They are so close to the ground themselves that they can localize this to within a fraction of an inch, and then in goes the spear-like beak, and the poor thing is dragged out of the soft, dew-drenched earth. They are not quite tidy eaters, these dear minstrels of the garden, for the point is to get your breakfast inside you beyond recall, with the least possible delay. Swallow, gulp, swallow, and the thing is done. Then you give one long flute-like note of satisfaction, and listen again for the second course. But one cannot exactly say that they have bad manners at table, for the extreme sensibleness of the plan excludes all other considerations. Also, bad manners at table irresistibly suggest greediness, and no bird is ever greedy. They have excellent appetites, and when they have had enough they stop eating, and instantly begin to sing.

It was just at the end of birds’ breakfast that I got out—that is to say, it still wanted some minutes to sunrise. The lawn was all gossamer-webbed and shimmering with dew, as if some thin layer of moonstone or transparent pearl had been veneered over emerald, and I felt it almost a vandalism to walk over it, removing with my clumsy feet whole patches of thin inimitable jewellery. The three-hour gale of the night before had vanished to give place to a morning of halcyon calm, and I augured one of those rare and exquisite days which March sometimes gives us—days of warm windlessness and the promise of spring. Straight in front of me rose the Beacon, still submerged in clear dark shadow, but high in the heavens above dawn had come, for it made a golden fleece—one such as never Jason handled—of the little cirrhus clouds that the gale had forgotten to sweep away. Dawn would soon strike the Beacon, too, but before that I hoped to stand on its top, and see the huge embrace of day and night, the melting and absorption of darkness into light. Even the river, with its waving water-weeds and aqueous crystal, did not detain me, and I gave but ten minutes to the ascent, for I wanted to welcome the dawn from a high place, to stand on the roof of the hills to greet it.

Slowly dawn descended from the sky, quivering and palpitating with light. The great golden flood came nearer and nearer the earth, which as yet caught but the reflection from the radiant heavens. It hung a moment hovering, the bright-winged iridescent bird of dawn, just above my head, and then the sun leaped up, vaulting above the eastern hills. The level shafts of light swept across the land, a mantle of gold, while in the valleys below the clear dusk still lay like tideless waters. But down the hill-sides strode the day, throwing its bright arms about the night, enfolding and encompassing it in miraculous embrace, and I looked to where home was. Already the big elms in the garden were pillars of flame, then the roof burned, and suddenly the windows blazed signal-like. Dawn had come.

That was not half the miracle. Light had awoke, the hills were gilded with the sun, but at the touch of the gilding larks innumerable sprang from the warm tussocks of down-grass and aspired. A hundred singing specks rose against the sky, each infinitesimal, so that they seemed but like the little motes that swim across the eyeball, but these were living things with open throat that hailed the sunrise. Perpendicularly they rose, wings quivering, and throat a-tremble with song, till the eye lost them against the dazzling azure of day, and only enraptured voices from the air made the heavens musical, as if the morning stars sang together. Heaven made holiday. Its company of sweet singers and the gold of sunrise were one thing—the dawn.

Dear God, dear God, how I thank You for that indestructible minute! I knew now what the sunlit curtain that lay between the future and me was, and the very morning after I had known You let me see from this high place the birth of day. In this physical world there was reproduced that golden sunlit curtain. You made visible to me what my heart knew. And to me on the top of the Beacon the windows of my home flashed a beacon to me. And all was of Your making—the sun and the mounting skylarks, and down below the trees of the garden, and the beaconing, flushing window of my beloved, and the fruit of the womb. When I come to die, I want to remember all that. Truth and Life were there, and the Way also. And what is the sum of those three things?