The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

We dined with great gaiety and foolishness, and dinner was succeeded by absurd games, in which the two members of the alliance of laughter did wonders for the cause. Then Margery and her mother went upstairs, and I strolled into the garden again to smoke for half an hour before going to bed, with the reaction of laughter rather strong upon me, and feeling, in spite of what had happened before dinner, vaguely disquieted and depressed, and my mind went back and dwelt with curious insistence on the hallucination of Dick’s voice the night before. Then, even while I was pondering on the strangeness of it, and telling myself that I must have been asleep, I suddenly heard the clang of the gate leading from the road to the front-door on the other side of the house, followed by the crunching of gravel, and after a moment the sound of the front-door bell. At that a sudden nameless fear leaped into my heart, and before the bell sounded again I was at the front-door. Outside was a telegraph-boy, with a War Office telegram addressed to Margery. I took it from him, closed the door quietly, and stood there with it in my hand, struck motionless and incapable of thought.

Then upstairs I heard a door open, and next moment my name was called by Margery, her voice half strangled and struggling for utterance. ‘Jack, Jack, what is it?’ she called. ‘What is it? what is it?’ Next moment I saw her leaning over the banisters of the landing above, her hair down, and with a dressing-gown on, and she saw what I held in my hand.

‘Will you bring it up to me, please, Jack, or open it there?’ she said faintly, and I heard the banisters creak as she leaned on them and clutched them. Then her mother hurried out of her room and put her arm round her.

I can hear the tearing of that envelope now, the rustle of the unfolding sheet. The few words it contained for a moment meant nothing. Then they became coherent.

‘Is it about Dick?’ whispered Margery. ‘Is he wounded? Tell me quick.’

I looked up, and I do not remember whether I said anything or not. But she knew, and in the dim light from the turned-down lamp in the hall I saw her rise to her full height, with arms outstretched, then sway, and fall back into her mother’s arms.

The telegram fluttered to the ground, and I ran upstairs. Together we lifted her up, carried her into her room, and laid her on the bed.

‘Dick is killed?’ whispered her mother to me, and I nodded. Then at her request I left them, and ran to wake one of the servants.

‘Don’t go to bed,’ she said, as I left the room; ‘you may be wanted. Would you sit up till I see you? Have your bicycle ready.’

The drawing-room, through which I had come a minute before in answer to the bell, looked out through French windows on to the garden, and here I sat waiting for her mother. As yet the news to me was inconceivable; it seemed merely impossible that it should be so. Something would happen: another telegraph-boy would come, or, what seemed more likely, I should wake to find that I was not here and the time was not now. Perhaps the place would be Braceton, perhaps the time would be a year ago. Yet how could that be? For she had spoken to me of Dick, and of Dick’s child. There was nothing in the world so real as those minutes. And in this dumb, dazed mood I went once into the hall to see if my bicycle was there; for if these things were a dream, surely I should find some incongruity, and perhaps that which should have been a bicycle might be Dick. But the bicycle stood there, with its lamp already lit, as I had left it.