A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

‘Best of all, I like Socrates’ prayer,’ she said; ‘and I must say it to myself.’

Spring had been rather late this year, and a week ago, when we drove out to the foot of Pentelicus, to have a country ramble, the rubbish of last year’s autumn was still in evidence. Then the spring began to stir, and two days ago, when we had gone out again, all the anemones except one kind were in full flower. They are heralds, those mauve and violet and pink and white chalices of blossom, to tell us that the great procession of Primavera has begun. But last of all come the trumpeters, the scarlet anemones, and if the sun has been warm, and no north wind has delayed the procession, they blow their blasts over the land just two days after the heralds have appeared. So to-day after lunch we went out to hear the trumpeters; to-morrow we shall see Primavera herself.

Spring herself, the goddess Primavera, was very near to-day, for on thicket and brake and over the flank of the hill-side her trumpeters were blowing their shrill blasts of scarlet. Two days before, the land was sober-coloured; now, wherever you looked, the wonderful anemone, last to flower, stood high with full-blown petals. The movement and stir of the new life was hurrying to its climax. To-morrow, instead of the myriad buds of the cistus and the pale stalks of orchid, the flowers would be unfurled at the final touch of the spring, at the advent of the goddess herself. To-day a myriad folded bells hung from the great bushes of southern heath, like stars still cloaked in mist; to-morrow, with one night more of warm wind and a morning of sun, they would blaze and peal together; for it is thus in this wonderful Southern land that spring comes: a few heralds go before, and then the army of trumpeters. After this, She crosses the plain with the ardour of hot blood, so that all flowers blossom together, and every bud and beast goes suddenly a-mating. Here there is none of our limitative February, our pinched hopes of March; all is quiet till the heralding of the anemones and the trumpets of their scarlet brethren. Then, in full panoply of blossom, Primavera and summer, too, are there together. For a week or two the land is aflame with flower, and then already the maturing of fruit-trees has begun.

Northerners though we are, both Helen and I claimed some strain of Southern blood in the ecstasy of those days. That for which we wait and watch for patient weeks in the shy approach of spring in England was here done with a flame and a shout. There was no hesitancy or delay; no weak snowdrop said that winter was coming to an end weeks before spring came, to die before the crocuses endorsed its message. Here all was asleep together till all woke together. Ten days ago there was no hint of spring save in the strong sunshine: the wilderness of winter still spread its icy hands. Then faster than the melting of the snow on the top of Parnes came the heralds in the wilderness, and spring was there. It was like the winter of Kundry’s soul, to whom one morning Gurnemanz said: ‘Auf! Der Winter floh, und Lenz ist da.’ And on that day came Parsifal and her redemption, and the ransomed of the Lord returned with joy and singing.

I have no skill to tell of those days: for the past, all that I knew of the history of this wonderful land, and the present, all that love meant, and the future, the dear event that was coming closer, were so inextricably mingled that no coherence is possible. But if you love a place, and are there with your beloved, and know that she will bear a child to you before many weeks are over, you may make a paradise of Clapham Junction, and find the joy of it a thing incommunicable. And how much more difficult a material is the magic of this land to work in—this little Attic plain, peopled with the ghosts of that wonderful age, which are not dead at all, but instinct with life to-day, at this moment when spring has come, so forcibly that even the slow tortoises on the side of Pentelicus hurried breathlessly about, with deep sighs (I assure you) till they found a congenial lady. Then they ran—positively ran—round her in ever-narrowing circles, still sighing. There were grasshoppers, too—green gentlemen and brown ladies. The brown ladies genteelly ran away, but they never ran far. The great hawks sought each other in the sublime sky, and the young men and maidens of Athens as we drove back were taking discreet walks together into the country. And from the Acropolis the maiden goddess, who is the Wisdom of God, looked down, and was well pleased.

For, thank Heaven! the Wisdom of God in no prude. To all has it given a soul, and to all souls is desire of some sort given—to one the perfection of form, to another the perfection of wit, to another the perfection of colour, to another the perfection of truth. For each there is a way; each has got to follow it; and for many there are various ways, and these many must follow them all. If a thing is lovely and of good report, we all have to hunt it home. It is no excuse to say you have no time, for you have all the time there is. Search, search: there is the Way everywhere.

Indeed, this is no mystical affair: it is the plainest sense. Whatever happens, God is somehow revealed. But, being blind, we cannot always see the revelation.

To-night, as Helen and I sit on deck of the steamer that takes us back again to Marseilles, we wonder what gives Greece its inalienable magic. We saw the fading of its shores in the dusk, and though the phosphorescence of the sea was a thing to marvel at, it was no longer the phosphorescence of Greek waters. That little fig-leaf-fingered land has sentiment somehow in its soil; it cannot fail to move anybody. Its history since the Great Age—it is no use to deny it—has been tawdry beyond description. It yielded to the Romans, it scarcely resisted the Albanians; and though some flickering spirit of its old grandeur flamed again when its people rose against the Turkish rule in the early part of last century, what are we to say of the spirit of the people when, twelve years ago, they again fought their ancient and ancestral enemy? The Turks strolled slowly southwards from the North of Thessaly, and only the intervention of the Powers prevented Greece again becoming a Turkish province. The Hellenic battle-cry went shrilly up to Heaven, but the Hellenic army trotted like a flock of sheep before the foe, until the Powers said that the war must cease. Only the year before there had been revival of the Olympic games, and there had been a race from Marathon to Athens in memory of Pheidippides, who bore the news of that stupendous victory, and died as he reached Athens, saying, ‘Greece has conquered the Persians.’ A Greek won that peaceful race from Marathon; the same Greek won the peaceful race home, and arrived back in Attica in the very van and forefront of the retreating army. The ‘host of hares’ was the Turkish name for the foes they never had occasion to meet, who started from their fortresses like hares from their forms, and galloped quietly away. Meantime the Greek fleet cruised in the Adriatic, and sank a fishing-boat. When the war was over, they came home with the spoils of their victory—a hat, a fish, a net. Perhaps it is best to say that there was no war at all: the Turkish armies made peaceful manœuvres over Thessaly, until they came to Volo. Then the Powers of Europe said: ‘We think your manœuvres have extended far enough: kindly go home.’

Yet, somehow, the tragic futility of all this does not really touch Greece or the sentiment that the lovers of the lovely land feel for it. Supposing a Greek army, or a regiment of it, had met the Turk, and died in the cause of patriotism, that could not have added to the compelling charm of Greece, and so the fact that none of these patriotic events happened does not diminish it. In Greece, whatever may be done or left undone, you are in the country where once beauty shot up like the aloe-flower, so that all else is inconsiderable beside that, since whatever the world has achieved afterwards, whether in painting, or sculpture, or drama, or poetry, or in that eagerness of life which is the true romance of existence, is measured, if only it be fine enough, by the standard set then. That is the haunting, imperishable charm of this country, and, missing that, even the phosphorescence of waters by night, divided by the swift keel of the lonely ship, was for a time a soulless firework.

The magic of it—the magic of it!