A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

Yet was I content even then? Good heavens, no! There were many beautiful things yet to be, and the glory of His gifts just lies in this—that there is always something better to come. This great bran-pie of the earth never gives to our little groping hands its best present. There is always something more. Your heart’s desire is given you, but at the moment of giving your heart is enlarged, and you ask for something better yet. And if you want it enough, you get it. The only difficulty is to want enough. For you are not given, so I take it, things that you have not really desired. All sorts of bonuses come in, pleasant surprises, but the solid dividend is for the man who wills. There are fluctuations, of course, but to look upwards, without doubt, is a gilt-edged affair. I correct that. The edge is gilt, and so is the rest of it, and the gilt is laid over gold.

It was thus that I looked from the top of the Beacon, with the mist of the song of the invisible skylarks all round, and the blazing reflection of the windows of our room in the valley; and there among the skylarks it seemed that Legs joined me. It was of no use to deny he was there, simply because it was silly to deny it. There is a French word—revenant—to express his presence, but even the solidity of that word failed to do justice. He had never gone away, and so he could never have come back. He was with us all the time, and rejoiced in the arrangement of the nursery, even as he had been so hopelessly amused at the correctness of Mr. Holmes on the morning of his funeral.

And at the moment of this I expected the ‘open vision.’ Life, and death, and birth, the three great facts, were so near realization. Again I expected to see Pan peep over the brow of the Beacon, and to hear a flute-like song that was not of skylarks. I was ready—dear God, I was ready.

So I thought for the moment, but before the next had beaten I knew I was not. I wanted more—more of this divine world, more of what the next few months will bring. Should all be well when summer comes, I think I would choose to die now. And the moment I thought that I knew its unreality. I want to live through the beautiful years that will come. I want to have a son at Eton or a daughter who turns the heads of eligible youths. I want both, and more than both. Die! Who talked of that? I want to have a full nursery. I want to see Helen old and grey-headed, with grandchildren round her, and herself the youngest of them all. I want to live through the whole of this beautiful life till old age; and though that is called the winter of life, there is no need that it should be so. The last day of a man of eighty should be the most luxuriant of autumn, before the touch of winter has blackened the flowers; for it is only the thought of death that makes us think of old age and winter together, and the thought that does that conceives falsely of death.

So, anyhow, it seemed to me on this midsummer morning of March. I knew that all that was was kind. Pan smiled without cruelty, and if he smiled from the cross, it was from the throne of ineffable light that he smiled also.

One by one the skylarks, sated with song, dropped down again to the sunlit down. Dawn had passed, and day had come, and—oh, bathos of bathos!—I was so hungry. If I had given but ten minutes to the ascent, I made but five of the reversed journey, and designed an early breakfast to make existence possible till Helen came down; for it was yet not long after seven, and a Sahara of starvation lay between me and bacon. Yet, though I have said that this was bathos, I do not know that I really think so, since in this delightful muddle of life everything is so inextricably intertwined that bathos of some kind invariably is the sequel of all high adventure. The great scene is played, the sublime thing said, and then you have tea or take a ticket for somewhere. So I confess only to literary bathos, and to disarm the critic I may state that these quiet chronicles are not supposed to be literary at all, but merely the plain account of quiet things as they happened.

So I lingered for a moment after the knee-shaking descent was over to talk for a little, but not for long, with the river. There was a great trout just below the bridge, and I am sure he knew it was still March, for he wagged his impudent head at me, saying: ‘I am perfectly safe. I shall eat steadily till April, and then observe your silly flies with a contemptuous eye.’ And though he was a three-pounder at least, I bore him no grudge. I don’t think I wanted to kill anything that morning.

Then I crossed the further field, and came down into the rose-garden, still meditating on the immediate assuagement of hunger. But then I saw who stood there, and I meditated on this no more; for she was there.

‘I got up early,’ she said, ‘and found you had already gone. Oh, good-morning! I forgot.’

‘I shall never forget the goodness of this morning,’ said I.