A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

He got briskly into his dog-cart, nodded to me over his shoulder, and, instead of driving himself, gave his servant the reins. I know I shouted something after him, telling him, I think, to be careful, and so found myself on the doorstep, looking at a bicycle which was leaning against the pillar of the porch, and was evidently not mine. But, like the dog-cart, it was not meaningless, for it was Helen’s, which I must have used by mistake. I must take it back; it was careless of me.

Then his advice occurred to me, but it sounded ridiculous, as senseless as some nursery-rhyme. And at the thought there suddenly started in my head the first two lines of ‘Humpty-Dumpty.’ I could not remember the last two lines, but the first went round and round in my brain, keeping time to my pedalling.

Soon after I was home again, only a moment behind him, for he was just getting out when I came to the gate, and I waited till he had gone in, so that he should not know I had failed to follow his advice—at least, I believe that was the reason, but I am not sure.

I went round by the back way into the garden, and sat down in the veranda outside my own room, where Fifi was lying in the sun. But I had to coax her silently indoors, for I could not bear that she should lie there, lest suddenly she should again look out into the garden, and howl at something she saw there. She would not come in at first, and once she pricked her ears at something she saw outside, and I stopped mine, lest I should hear her howl. And all the time ‘Humpty-Dumpty’—the first two lines of it—went on and on. It was so terribly lonely, too—just that silly rhyme, and I all alone. If only Legs were here, or anybody—anybody. You see, this was not expected to-day, nor for weeks yet. My mother was coming to stay with us next week, until....

Then I heard the muffled sound of steps in the room just above my head—Helen’s room—and at that for a little the babble and confusion of my troubled brain cleared, and ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ ceased, and I was not afraid of Fifi howling, for there was no room for anything except the thought of Helen, who lay there, and of the life yet unborn. And I could not help—I could not bear any of it for her. I could not even be with her: birth was as lonely as death.

Outside the garden lay basking in the heat of the early summer, and everywhere the expansion of life, which had seemed to us so wonderful and glorious a thing through all these weeks of May, suddenly became sinister and menacing. What travail may not go to the opening of a single flower, or the maturing of its casket of seeds? It would all be of a piece with the cruelty and the anguish that runs through life like a scarlet, bleeding thread, beginning, as now, even before birth, and not even ending with death, since those who remain have the wound of that yet to be healed. Right through life goes the scarlet thread, knotted on the farther side at each end, so that it shall not slip. And—‘Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall.’ Ah, yes! I had it all now. ‘The King’s horses’ was what I could not remember. And at that the crowd of trivialities again came between my mind and me.

We had set up the croquet-hoops again only last week, and had argued over the position of that particular corner one by which my ball had rested when last autumn a telegram had been brought me from the house. Helen had said it was square with the corresponding corner; I knew it was not, and from here it was perfectly easy to see that she had been wrong. I hate an awry disposition of hoops. ‘All the King’s horses’ ... they really should bring these rhymes up to date; it ought to be motor-cars instead of horses.

These things passed very slowly through my mind, for it acted as if it was numbed and half-paralyzed, and the croquet-hoop occupied the foreground of it for a considerable time. I had let Fifi out again, and she was racing about the lawn in the attempt to catch swallows, a feat of which she never realized the unreasonableness, and I had left the doors into my room, both from the hall and from here outside, open. And then, with the same rapidity as they had come, all these nonsense things passed away again, for I heard steps on the stairs, and, going in, saw the doctor standing on the landing above, talking in low tones to the nurse. He saw me, made a little movement of his hand as if to detain me, and when he had finished what he had to say to her, came downstairs.

‘I will have a word with you,’ he said gravely; and we went into my room. I saw him looking at me rather curiously, and was wondering why, when he suddenly seemed to lean up against me. Then I perceived that it was I who was swaying on my feet. He put me in a chair.

‘I suppose you have not had breakfast,’ he said. ‘You are to eat something immediately; I will ring the bell. And now listen. It is going to be difficult, and, I am afraid, dangerous, and it is better that you should know it now.’