The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

AUGUST

I do not think that I have hitherto mentioned that, since I came here in the spring, the house in which Dick and Margery spent those few weeks together before he went out to South Africa has stood untenanted, and often during the past months I have wandered slowly by it, noting with a sort of pleasure, I think, that at any rate no one I knew lived there. The feeling was, I am aware, utterly unreasonable, but it was of the same childish and instinctive kind as that which prompts us to put away and not use, or at least not let others use, some little object which has been in any way closely connected with someone who is dead, whom we have loved. I do not think this feeling is in the least defensible, for it implies that we cut the dead off in ever so small a degree from the living, and thus tend to keep alive the sting of death. For in that the dead have once been intertwined with our ordinary workaday lives, it is altogether a false sentiment which makes us separate them now, if we believe at all, as I do most fully, that they still are about and around us. All the same, it was with a certain surprise and shock that I saw early in August that the signboard that the house was to let was taken down, and that a few days later a furniture-van was drawn up at the door. In fact, this very natural and reasonable event disturbed me to a degree which I was totally unable to understand. It seemed dreadful, somehow, that others should be at home there (it never occurred to me at the time that it was highly unlikely that the house had stood vacant for two years), so wholly was it consecrated in my mind to those two. At the same time I realized my utter unreasonableness about the matter, and, instead of trying to combat it, attempted to take a shorter cut, and dismiss it as far as I could from the range of my conscious thoughts. Yet for weeks it lurked there in the shade, and as the weeks went on, though I never consciously dwelt on the thought, yet somehow the thought seemed to grow there in the dusk of my mind, until I knew that all my subconscious brain was full of it. More especially I desired to remain in ignorance of who the intruders—for so I thought of them—were. As long as they remained utterly vague and unknown, I could feel no definite and incarnated resentment, but if once they were visualized I felt that the growth in the shadow might peer out with poisonous leaves into the sunlight of active and conscious thought.

I have tried to put incoherency coherently, and I feel I am drawing with definite outline that which was necessarily ill-defined; but in no other way, except by words of definite meaning, can one indicate any impression, however mist-like. Let me, then, say at once that what I have said is overstated in the sense that if one tries to draw the actual phantoms of a nightmare they are overstated, because to state them at all is to lose the pervading vagueness, for hard outline. On the other hand, again, what I have written down is, I think, understated, since I try in vain to convey by words the vague and abiding disquiet I felt at the thought of the owner of the furniture-van that unloaded at the door. Only, as I have said, this all lurked in the shadow, and though it grew, yet by persistent refusal to think directly of it, and by persistently endeavouring to continue in ignorance of whom the new tenants were, the dark growth never emerged into sunlight.

But it seems a curious irony of fate that so soon after I have written about the road to happiness this phantasmal and unreal ghost should ‘arise to poison joy.’ This, at any rate, is not exaggerated language, for the thought of the house tenanted once more lay like a shadow over my spirits. I was wholly unable (or at any rate I thought I was, which comes to the same thing) to banish the shadow from my mind, and it haunted both waking and sleeping thoughts with a dull never-ceasing weight. I, who hardly ever dream, and then only of astounding and mirthful adventure, groped nightly about ill-lit passages, which I believed to be passages in that house, in intolerable apprehension.

Sometimes, so it seemed to me, certain rooms were vividly lit inside, and through cracks below the door, or through the chink of the door ajar, I saw that there were bright lights inside the rooms, which yet cast no filtering illumination into the passages through which I had to feel my way. At other times the whole house was wrapped in a misty obscurity, which was not the light of early morning nor yet the dusk of falling night, but something almost palpable to the touch; it was as if the gray veil of the future brushed across my eyes, some unseen hand stirring it, as if to lift it away, and in my dreams my eyes would strain into the darkness for the light that should show me what agencies moved about me.

These dreams, which were very persistent and occurred in dim sequence many times during the night, always opened in the same way. On falling asleep I passed straight into the nebulous atmosphere I have tried to describe, and was walking up to Margery’s house. For the darkness, I never could see more of it than its square shape, a blot against the blotted sky; the door was always open, and the groping in the passages began. I was conscious always of many presences close round me, but the dusk hid them, and into the lighted rooms I never could enter, for it was somehow forbidden. Then one night an entirely new dream came, sandwiched between the dreams of dusk, and in that I was going along the road to the house, not wrapped in obscurity, but in brilliant sunshine. Birds trilled in the bushes, flowers of extraordinary brilliance grew in the hedgerows, and I thought with an upleap of exultation that the passages would be blind no longer. Then I turned the corner and came on the house, and though I knew it was the right one, yet it had changed almost beyond recognition. The steps that led to the front-door were cracked and moss-ridden; the creepers had so grown that they hung in curtains over the windows; an indescribable air of age had passed over it. But the room over the front-door—Margery’s room—was untouched by the gray hand of Time: the walls were still smooth, and it seemed to me the bricks newly-pointed; the creepers were cut back from the window, which was wide open, and from inside came a voice singing. It sang a song that Margery always loved, and though the voice was like hers, yet it was not quite like.

It was with the wildest hopes and expectations that I entered the house, but once again, though all was bright outside, the passages were dark. But I groped my way upstairs, and saw that the door of Margery’s room stood open, and there, framed in the misty obscurity, stood a figure that must be hers. Line for line it repeated that form I knew so well; the slight bend of the neck, the outward sweep of the shoulders, were all hers. And in the darkness I gazed and gazed, for the veil seemed to brush upwards against my eyes, but it did not lift, and in an agony I cried out, ‘Margery, Margery, is it you?’ And my own voice, I suppose, awoke me, for I found myself seated up in bed, and the night outside was still very dark and hot, and I heard the hissing of steady rain on the shrubs.

So I lay down again, and must have gone to sleep immediately, for, without conscious pause, I was back in the dark passages as usual. But once again on that same night a new factor appeared in my dreams, for the presences, though still invisible, were inaudible no longer, and their footsteps passed about and around me very close. For a long time I listened, but heard none that concerned me; but at last there came one which I knew to be Dick’s, and with it went another that was Margery’s, and they passed near me and went out—I suppose to the garden. It never occurred to me to follow, for I was outside their lives somehow, and if we came near each other it was that they came near to me. After that the steps of many strangers passed and repassed, and then once more I heard Margery’s footstep alone. But when it came close I knew it was not Margery’s, but like it, as the singing voice was like hers. Then slowly, as at the hint of dawn, the dim passages began to grow bright, and I looked to see where Margery was. But the brightness as it grew showed me only the walls and furniture of my own room, and through the open window came in the pale light of early day, as the morning breeze flapped the blind.

Now, by this time the dreams of the dark passages had lasted about a week, and the days betwixt the nights had been full of a corresponding depression; for by night it was the darkness that troubled me, and by day the shadow of the new folk who were coming to live there. Then came that night which I have described, and simultaneously both the dream of the dark passages and the depression by day ceased entirely and altogether. I went back at once to the dreamless nights to which I was accustomed, and my days were once more a mosaic of happy hours. But the heaviness of those days and the ill-defined fear of those nights was so blackening to the spirit that at the time I soberly thought that some madness had begun to lay its finger on my brain; and now that I no longer fear that, I find myself wondering what could have induced this melancholy. The weather, it is true, was extremely hot and depressing, and for the whole week it is also true I was working against time at a piece of work I did not wish to do. Before I had been a day at it, I knew that it was distasteful; before I had been two at it, I felt sure it was not worth while to do it at all.