The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

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There is but little more to say about that May, since even in a diary one has to avoid certain depths of egotism, in order to avoid being unbearable. The pentathlon was played, and I won. Also I had ten minutes with my mother that night, while Dick and Margery were together. Nothing much was said on either side, but I knew again, with the vividness that usually comes only with a thing heretofore unrealized, that she was my mother and that I was her son—part of her being, born from her body, indivisibly, while the ages lasted, hers. Hers was every little effort that I made towards ordinary human decency of behaviour; hers was the resolve I made then, and have tried (with how many failures!) to keep since, to realize that these things could not have happened with any but a benignant purpose, blind and incomprehensible as it might seem to me or to her; and that to become in the least degree embittered, or to fail in the smallest particle of friendship to my friend, or of love to the woman whom I loved, was to miss the Divine purpose, and to make of one’s self a senseless animal. For then, and even now as I write, and do know the human outcome of that love, who knows now what the meaning and the great purpose of all this is? A flaw, a failure—can one say that? Not so do I believe, for I know it is all a fragment of the circumference of that great circle, the centre of which and the whole of which—you and me, and the drunkard in the street, and the prostitute in the street, and summer rain, and love and death, are included, and none higher or lower than another—is God.

One word more; for the tired, puzzled entity which I know as myself turns back to the time when it was neither puzzled nor tired, and turned then in childlike faith to what never failed it, even as it now, mute, with its years of experience to back its childlike faith, turns to her whom it now knows can never fail it.

Mother, mother! I hope you are asleep, for this is an unseasonable and timeless hour of night, but I know that before you slept you prayed for your child. You prayed that God of His great grace would continue to keep him unembittered, for he humbly hopes that no touch of that has ever come near him because of what May brought; you prayed that the wound in his heart would be healed, and your prayer was heard; you prayed that some day he would find his Margery—not she of whom June will tell you, for she was Dick’s, but another—the one predestined in the eternal purpose of God.

JUNE

The early-planted sweet-peas are in flower; so, too, are the nasturtiums. It was Margery’s plan always to sow seeds very early in the year; indeed, she was supposed to have been seen sowing in a snowstorm. Then she used to cover the earth up with matting if it was very cold, and uncover it for any glint of sun. Her gardening was of the most unorthodox order. She would pull up seedlings to see how their roots were getting on, disturb sown earth to see what was occurring below; if a plant looked sickly, she took it up and shook it, and replanted it again with a warning; but everything answered with her, and it was she who taught me to sow sweet-peas in March, so that you got the first flowers early in June.

The year after the events of this May, I remember, she sowed a long row of sweet-peas, running right up from the house to the end of the garden. The garden was not a large one, any more than was the house, for she and Dick were not rich, and the whole row was not a hundred feet long. But there was a pleasant piece of lawn, with a thicket of lilac and syringa at one end, and on each side of the path she had placed old petroleum barrels, sawn in half, for flower-tubs. These she and I had painted green, and in the process had painted ourselves too, and everything tasted and smelt of green paint for a week afterwards. In these she planted nasturtiums and love-lies-bleeding, and both sweet-peas and nasturtiums were in flower early in June, just as mine are flowering now. She always loved sweet-peas. They gave her ‘a feeling,’ she said; therefore they grow thick in a certain place.

Dick and she had been married in the September of the same year when they were engaged. In October the Boer War broke out, and Dick’s regiment was among the first to go out, and she and I went down to Southampton to see the Maplemore off. It was a bleak, gray day, with an angry, fretful wind which raised little ripples on the water, and, as soon as raised, cut their heads off. There was a good deal of delay, and she did not sail for two hours after the advertised time, and we all three said openly to each other that we wished she would be quick. But when the time came I think that Margery would have given her life for half an hour more—had she known.