The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

So I am living now on the outskirts of the town where Margery and Dick lived together for one month of their lives, and on this morning of the 1st of July I know that May and June have ended, and go back to the ordinary little daily affairs I had been telling you about up till the end of April. Many great little things have happened, and the extraordinary conduct of the Jackmanni which the cat from next door once disinterred seems to me to claim the first attention. It had been planted against a warm south-westerly wall; it had been pampered like an only child; for yards round the soil had been enriched; its dead leaves were diligently picked off. I really did all I could to make it happy. But instead of being happy, it sulked. It did not die—that would have been a regrettable incident, but, anyhow, a proper decisive line of conduct—but it sulked. It grew a little for a week, and put out several leaves; then it couldn’t be bothered, and the leaves withered again. Then it sent out a long tendril across the gravel path instead of climbing up the stick that led to the house-wall. I coaxed that tendril gently back, gave it an alternative route to the house-wall, but nothing would please it. Finally I tied it to the alternative route. So it died.

I was willing to give the thing every facility for behaving itself, so I transplanted it to a different place, where it got less sun and more wind. Also I tried watering it less. For a week it appreciated this enormously, and set about growing in earnest. Then one morning, I suppose, it got bored again, and began to wither slowly from the top downwards.

Now, I could not spend my life in moving one absurd Jackmanni from place to place, though I have no doubt that if I had done so, taken it to stay in other houses, given it champagne one day, coffee the next, and perhaps some fish or pudding on the third, it would have flourished. But I was tired of being kind, and towards the end of May I took it up for the third and last time, planted it on a north wall, where it never saw the sun and was starved by a thick growth of ivy. It was further shaded by an apple-tree growing about a yard from it. Then for a month I carefully refrained from looking in its direction; it had no water, no attention, and was put in the most undesirable situation. To-day I see it has leapt across to the apple-tree, up which it is diligently climbing, and clusters of purple buds are showing among its green leaves. Certainly severity is needed when you deal with Jackmanni.

To-day, on this 1st of July, a hot day full of the odours of complete summer, I sat for an hour in the big wooden shelter that now stands finished on my strip of lawn, and squared accounts. It happens to be my birthday, and I am thirty years old—no less—and as I added up profit and loss I was horribly puzzled how to make my affairs balance. For if one sits down by one’s self, with no conceivable object in the world but to see how one stands, it is probable that one is moderately honest with one’s self, for to be otherwise would be like cheating at Patience, one of the few forms of villainy which has never in the least tempted me. With regard to the big item on one page, ‘What good have you done?’ and on the other, ‘What harm have you done?’ I am bound to say I did not much concern myself, for to add up, even for one’s own information, on what rare occasions one has behaved decently is a priggishness of which, so I humbly trust, I am incapable; while to add up all the harm one has done would require a great deal of time, and would be productive of no good result whatever when it was added. For, short of being wicked, the next worst way of wasting time is to devote one’s time to thinking how wicked one has been. To repent in a horror of wickedness and a burning fire of contrition is one thing; to sit down in cold blood and count missed opportunities is another. The one is on certain occasions, as when one passionately desires to break an evil habit, inevitable and salutary, but to sit at ease in Hell is worse than sitting at ease in Zion.

No, it was not with the big item that I concerned myself. I wanted to see what cash I had in hand, rather than examine the main account—the bank-book of credit or deficit. Where was the small cash of thirty years, in fine—and God in His mercy give me a big loan. Indeed I do not wish to be profane, nor in intention am I. No doubt it would have been better to have felt an agony of contrition for all the bad things I had done, and for all the good things I had left undone. Daily I have thoughts which for no sum mentionable would I reveal to anyone whose respect I in the smallest degree desired to retain; daily and hourly I make some sort of brute of myself, not necessarily in deed, but anyhow in thought. Daily I say to myself, ‘If only there were not some kind of decency to be observed, social or moral, what an excellent time I could have! If only the Ten Commandments—hang them!—did not awake some glimmer of reflection in this muddy pool of my soul, I should——’ Anyone may fill in the rest according to his own shortcomings. In the same way, on the credit side, I believe I should be a better man if I lived on the bare necessities of life, and gave the rest to deserving charities. I had no earthly business, for instance, to buy the charming table at which I am writing, when that which I spent on it would have fed a starving family for months. Even the Jackmanni, which has cost me a week’s work, what with transplanting and cat-squirting, would, irrespective of this, have given several meals to a penniless man, for it was big when I bought it. All this, in my meditation, I took for granted. I did not concern myself with radical changes in my nature. I did not repent of the table and the Jackmanni, nor of the dinner I ordered, nor of the wine I have drunk, nor of the hours I have spent in mere amusement. In the main it was not in the least an edifying performance; I accepted the general lines of myself as being what they were. What, in fact, I wished to examine was not my nature, but my policy, and to this effect:

Two great things have happened to me—the one a great joy, the other a great sorrow. The great joy was when Margery thanked me with her dying breath, though Dick’s name came after. The great sorrow was when she died. Had she lived—though I do not for a moment believe I should ever have been her husband, nor do I believe I should ever have asked her to be my wife—I should have had some sort of mission, some constant pursuit, namely, to see that she was as happy as it was in my power to make her. Had I been a telegraph-boy, I should have done well if I had delivered my telegrams without loitering; had Margery lived, I should have done well to have given my life to that. But she did not live, and I am too old to be a telegraph-boy. But I have had a great joy, and it is great because she did not know how hardly it was earned. And that is my record. That is the sum earned, and the credit already given is thirty years. It does not look at all promising when the addition comes.

Hesitatingly, as I sat in the shelter, I put down another item to the sum earned, which is this: I still have a childlike pleasure in little things; I can play soldiers with absorbing zest; I can imagine that I am a white man in tropical forests, who has to get through with tricks that presuppose an almost pitiable stupidity on the part of my enemies; I can devote quite as much energy to the flowering of a nasturtium as Mr. Pierpont Morgan finds it necessary to give to the formation of a company with a capital of £30,000,000. That, with all deference to financiers, is an advantage. My nasturtium, in fact, implies as much energy as his colossal schemes, and it does not hurt anybody, except perhaps the nasturtium. Meantime, it unloads me of my force, and, considering what harm force can do, it is a great saving of suffering to expend it harmlessly. If I was richer, I would have a string quartet attached to this villa, and I would spend my force in devising programmes, and reconciling the second fiddle and the viola. But I am not, and the string quartet has not yet to be engaged. I know whom I shall have, and I shall be much disappointed if they have made other engagements.

For happiness consists not in getting a thing, but in hoping that one may get it. With satisfaction walks surfeit; but to keep your ambition steadily a little ahead of your possibilities is to be constantly eager. There is nothing in the world which, if I got, would make me happy. There are a million things in the world which the desire to get and the hope of getting make me happy. And it is this which a man sets out to seek when he falls in love, which is the best form of happiness devised in the world at large, and, thank God! the commonest. If man or woman knew all of the man or woman each sought, would either be content? On the contrary, the world would be full of spinsters and bachelors. It is because one is not certain, because there are ‘silver lights and darks undreamed of,’ that man seeks woman and woman man as the ultimate possible happiness. And for the same reason one plays silly games of croquet or bridge.

To want, to want! Do you know Blake’s picture of the two little men setting up a ladder on a bare headland towards a crescent moon. ‘I want, I want!’ is what the artist wrote beneath. The two little men wanted—they put a puny ladder up towards—the moon. That is the genius of the man, for through all the bad drawing and faulty perspective the ‘I want, I want!’ is clamorous. Others have attained. God help them!

Oh, I stretch out unsatisfied arms beyond the limits of the world! Whatever I get becomes in the getting of it dross. It is not dross really; it is the fact of my having got it which makes it dross to me. It is mine, therefore it is no use. Let the Great Bear tumble down from heaven, and let me find seven stars lying in my hand: what use are they when they are there? Cast them out—give them to a beggar, and make plans for Sirius. Of all the heartaches, that of Alexander when he sighed for new worlds to conquer is the most human. Yet the typhoid conquered him by Tigris. And his ambition was that of all of us in our degree. The man who has bought an empire or won it wishes for more empire, and the spinster who has seen her canary hatch out one egg, and eat the other, says: ‘Oh that there had been two young ones!’ Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ And because this preacher is not wise, but knows what is the matter with himself and many others, he gives these lamentable reflections on his thirtieth birthday.