A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

In fact, Mr. Holmes shook his head over the general trend of affairs, and spoke quite bitterly about the wave of Radicalism which was passing over the country. The County Club, so he said, which had always prided itself on being a little exclusive, was tainted with commonness now, and had positively disgraced itself at the last election by letting in those three new members. They were nobodies—local nobodies—one the son of a doctor, another the father of a doctor; the third nobody at all. And—would I believe it?—there had been a veterinary surgeon up for election as well. Luckily, the club had pulled itself together over him, and given him a smart shower of black-balls. No doubt the club was in want of funds, but why, then, have built a new billiard-room? How much better to poke the butt-end of our cues into the chimney-piece, as we had always done when playing from over the left-hand middle pocket, than purchase increased cue-room at the sacrifice of our standing as a County Club? If we did not draw the line somewhere, where were we to draw the line? That was unanswerable. We all said what is written, ‘Tut!’ and looked very proud. Helen, I consider, looked prouder than Mr. Holmes, but she disagrees with me, having seen her own face in the looking-glass over the mantelpiece. True, she had not the natural advantage that Mr. Holmes’s aquiline nose conferred upon him, but the assumed curl of her lip was superb: she looked like a Duchess in her own right.

How slowly these beautiful days of May passed, for when one is very happy and very expectant, time seems to stop. Exactly the opposite happens when one is spending days that are full of pleasures, and living entirely in the moment, for then hours and days pass on unregarded, so that it is Saturday again before you know the week has really begun. But happiness—I but bungle with words over a thing that is obvious to everybody who knows the difference between happiness and pleasure—is a thing quite detached from the present moment, just as the sunlight which floods these downs is not of them. Happiness ever broods on the wing, and swings high above the things of the earth, like some poised eagle, or like the sun itself. It illuminates what it looks on, turning dew to diamond, and striking sapphires into the heart of what has been a grey sea, but it is independent of material concerns; and were the world to be withdrawn and extinguished, it would shine still. True, it shines on the dewdrop and turns it into wondrous prismatic colours, and thus the common surface of life is always iridescent when we are happy. But happiness—that golden, high-swung sun—does not, I think, particularly regard the jewels he makes out of common things: his own bright shining, perhaps, weaves a golden haze between him and what he shines upon.

It was somehow thus, I think, that things were with us during that first fortnight of May. Below the golden haze were these entrancing facts which I have just recorded about the Archdeacon’s party, the frightful disclosures concerning the mother of the wife of the younger son of the Baronet, and the growing plebeianism of the County Club; but neither Helen nor I could focus our attention on them; for though, as I have said, time went so slowly, yet there was not time enough to regard them: they belonged to a different plane to that on which we were living. We could penetrate down into it and giggle, but then our attention wandered, and before we knew it, we had swum up again like bubbles through water to the sunlit surface.

There took place, in fact, a revision in our list of joyful and dreadful affairs. No one could appreciate the humour of Mr. Holmes more than Helen did, but, as I have said, she could not attend to him now. Nor could she attend to the perfectly hideous fact that the greater part of the ceiling in the dining-room in Sloane Street had fallen, and that our tenants had (quite reasonably) demanded to be released from their tenancy, of which there was still six weeks to run, since the house was uninhabitable. Nor did I think she would have cared if the ceiling had smothered them as they sat at dinner. And the dreadful earthquake in China failed to move her, and so did the church crisis in France. But for certain other things she cared more than ever, though you would have said they were little enough. All the growth of the spring-time made her eyes brighten and ever grow dim again, and she would dream over the tiny buds of the rose-garden with smiles that were sped to her mouth from the inmost spring of happiness. She spread fat Heliogabalian feasts for the birds, since they wanted nourishment now that they were so busy over their nests, and many dyspeptic bachelors and spinsters, I expect, reeled daily from their table laid on the lawn to sleep off the results of their excess. She loved the sun, too, more than she had ever loved it, and the shade also, and day and night, and all the firm, great forces of the world.

Not less, too, did she love the little things of little rooms, and now we never sat in the drawing-room, with its Reynolds’ prints, but went always to the nursery, with its rocking-horse and its Noah’s ark, and its lead soldiers, and its play-table. But when there—when playing these silly games of soldiers, which Helen had been wont to play as if eternal salvation depended on the nice adjustment of a small tin cannon, which, when you pulled a string, shot a pea—she had a change of mood most disconcerting at first. Now and again she shot down my Generalissimo, posted, as he should be, out of possibility of attack almost, in the very rear of my army, by some inconceivable ricochet which would a few weeks ago have filled her mouth with laughter. But now, when these unspeakable flukes occurred, and she upset the heaviest soldiers in my brigade, instead of being delighted, she was sorry, and apologized. To injury, which was bad enough, she added insult, which was worse, and said: ‘I am afraid I must win now.’

There is another curious thing (Helen looks over my shoulder as I write, and agrees) that, though she still loves to play soldiers, she wants me to win. Consider it: whoever before wanted to play a game (and the more childish the game, the less worth while you would have thought to play it), if he did not care about winning? Besides, it is so exceedingly unlike her—she is looking over my shoulder no more—not to play any game as if life and death depended on it. But now she applauds my skill and my luck, and apologizes for her own.

And then, when the game is over, and the Duke of Wellington on one side and Julius Cæsar on the other lie dead, she still sits on the ground beside the low play-table, and looks round the room with wandering, happy eyes. There are the playthings I have told you of—the Noah’s ark, the rocking-horse, the great dolls’-house, the front of which, windows and door and all, is unfastened by a neat latch in the wall of the second story, and swings open altogether, so that you must be careful not to unlatch it early in the morning or late at night, else you would see all the ladies and gentlemen at their toilet in an embarrassing state of undress. I found Helen the other morning playing at dolls all by herself. She had laid a banquet in the dining-room, and had arranged the ladies and gentlemen on the stairs, so that one could see at once that they were going down to dinner. From their attitudes, and a tendency to lean against each other or the wall, you might have thought that they were trying to get upstairs after the banquet. But that, Helen told me, was foolish, since their faces were all turned in the direction of downstairs. The answer was that they had indulged even more freely than I had supposed, and were trying to get upstairs backwards.

Yes; we did all these extremely childish things, and so far from being ashamed of them, I set them all down here for you to laugh at if you like, or merely to be bored with. Things like these—playing at soldiers or at dolls—retained their interest, just as did the spirit of the blossoming summer, when Mr. Holmes’s discoveries or the fall of the ceiling in Sloane Street lacked the calibre to interest us. And, if you come to think of it, though I thought an explanation would be difficult, nothing in the world could be more simple. Things about children, and birth, and growth were clearly the only affairs that could concern us. One morning, I remember, it was found that the foundations of the cathedral were in a dreadful state, and that it would probably fall down. I told Helen this as she was engaged on preparing a Gargantuan breakfast for the birds. She only said:

‘Oh, what a pity!’

That was all she cared for the historic Norman pile, with all kinds of Kings and Queens buried inside it!