A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

There is nothing more to be recorded of this month, since the only things that seemed to us to have any real importance were just the childishnesses of which I have already given you such amplitude of specimens, until the morning of the last day of May.

The rule of the house was that there was no rule of any sort as regards breakfast. Anybody who came into the dining-room at most hours of the morning would find the breakfast perennials (bread, butter, sugar, milk, the morning paper and marmalade) on the table, and would, on ringing a bell, be given the annuals—i.e., fresh tea and a hot dish. Similarly, anybody who did not come into the dining-room was supposed to be breakfasting either elsewhere or not at all. So on this last morning of May, on coming down, I rang the bell, and read the paper till bacon came. An hour before I had just looked into Helen’s room, and seen that she was still asleep.

The bacon was rather long coming that morning—I try to reconstruct the day exactly as it happened—and I had already skimmed the news, and found there was not any, and in default of it was reading a superb account of the visit of a member of the Royal Family to Naples, who in the afternoon had ‘honoured’ (so said the loyal press) the volcano of Vesuvius with a visit. How gratifying for the immortal principle of fire! One hoped it would not become swollen in the head. This fortunate volcano, whose cone had been blessed——

At the moment I heard a step outside. It was not from the kitchen: it was coming from upstairs, and it came very quickly. Then, instantaneously, terror seized me, for time and place were no longer now and here, but it was the evening when I heard my name called in the garden, and thereafter heard Legs running downstairs. And quickly as the steps came, they seemed to me to go on for ever; yet I had only just time to get up, when there came a fumbling hand on the door, and Helen’s maid came in.

‘If you please, sir, would you send at once,’ she began. ‘The nurse—— ’

There were quicker ways than sending, and next minute I was flying up the road on my bicycle. My mind, as I think must always happen with any mind in such moments, seemed curiously inactive, though somewhere there was inside me a little bit of tissue, so to speak, that agonized, and hoped, and prayed. But for the most I only thought of one thing—that once before I had gone on just the same errand, from this same house, up the same road, to fetch the doctor for her, my dearest friend. O Margery! I go quickly to God and tell Him.... We want Him.

And then the tissue that agonized and prayed sank out of sight again, and I was just speeding up the sunny, dusty road, on which, as I got nearer the town, the traffic became denser. Once a butcher’s cart pulled suddenly out into the middle of the road in front of me, and I thought collision was inevitable, except that I knew that it was not possible that I should be stopped when going on such an errand as this, and several times I passed people I knew, yet, though I knew them, their faces were meaningless: they conveyed names, but nothing whatever more. And then—whether very soon or countless ages later, I had no idea—I was at the doctor’s door in the quiet, decorous street, which also was meaningless—neither strange nor familiar, but purely without significance. Everything I saw was detached; nothing had any relation to life, except just one thing: his dog-cart, which was at the door, concerned me.

He had not yet started on his rounds, and it was not five minutes before he was ready. He had only to pick up a little bag, into which he put a case of some kind, and something bright, that I turned my eyes from, and a bottle which he wrapped up—it seemed to me very neatly and slowly—which clinked against that which was already in the bag.

Then he turned to me.

‘Now, if you take my advice,’ he said, ‘you won’t come back with me, but will go for a ride on this beautiful morning. You will not see your wife, and for the next hour or so it is not possible that I should have anything to tell you. We don’t want you in the house: we don’t want to be bothered with you.’