The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

Now, being temporarily bored with one’s work is one thing; radical disapproval is another. It may easily happen that, to bring about a situation rightly, several chapters of what seems to one at the time (and very likely is) sorry stuff have to be hammered into shape. Due preparation for the situation has to be made without giving the situation away; only when it comes the reader should say to himself: ‘Of course it must be so; why didn’t I think of it?’ But radical disapproval is a far different matter. It is rank immorality to go on spending time and pains over what is worthless or worse, and that rank immorality I committed. Then, when the work in question, the oppressive weather, and the disordered dreams, which began simultaneously, also ended simultaneously, I felt that it was highly probable that they were all bound up together. Certainly, it is more than possible that they all reacted on each other—that the thunder in the skies led to a general depression that made my immorality sit heavy on me, and induced a gloom by day that was carried over into the night. Again, the fact that I slept in the shadows brought shadows into the day; and the fact that I spent the hours unprofitably, and knew it, predisposed to gloomy visions. At the same time, the persistence of the same dream was curious, and the society that collects nightmares are at liberty to put it on a pin. Such, however, is the record of what happened during the first week of August.

Thereafter ensued three spoilt days, spoilt not by outside agencies, but by fussy stupidity on my part. To the ordinary citizen such spoiling means nothing, for in all probability he will never experience it, and thus to him the trials of these three days are senseless. But given that your household comprises only a plain (very plain) cook, and what would be called in London a ‘general’—though such have no idea of campaign—it will appeal to the minority to know that the question of what one wanted for ten days at Bayreuth, and perhaps a week’s wandering in Germany, was crucial. It was no use saying vaguely—as I suppose one does to a valet—‘I shall be away for ten days; pack’; but seriatim I had to think of all that I should conceivably want. The result was that early on the second day I found that I had packed all the necessaries of life, and had to unpack them all again. This, and the subsequent repacking, took the whole of the third day. Even then, since I had to leave at cockcrow to catch the evening boat to Ostend, there were many things insoluble. Were there baths at Bayreuth, or should I take an indiarubber bath? Were there washerwomen, or should I take as much linen as there were days? Seigneur, quelle vie!

Now, though I regret these pin-points of indecision, yet I defend them. For if one is going abroad for six months, all that is necessary to do is to put out every stick and button you have in the world, and bid the grand portmanteaux advance. But for ten days or a fortnight surely such equipment is beyond the mark. Therefore one has to select. Here comes in the worst of an imaginative mind. One can easily picture circumstances, even in the course of ten days, in which one will want each single suit of clothes one possesses. For instance, there may quite easily be a cold spell of weather, and therefore it is necessary to take one suit of thick clothes, also to be worn on the night journey. But supposing one gets caught during this cold spell by a sudden storm? The cold spell continues, but the thick clothes are wet. Therefore one must take two suits of thick clothes. However, warm weather is more likely, and there must be at least two suits of flannels. Four suits. Then for emergencies of the social kind one must not be found defenceless, and some sort of tailed apparatus must come. Five suits. Dress-clothes. Six. Also there is excellent trout-fishing not far from Bayreuth, and I have been particularly told to bring a rod. That entails knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket. Seven suits.

At this point I paused; I was taking seven suits in order to clothe my unworthy body for a space of ten days in a Bavarian village. Yet where was the flaw? Of all things in the world I hate to be away from home, wanting something which I have forgotten to take, and, which is worse, decided not to take. Time was when it was so simple to put in that article, but the opportunity is mine no longer, and I sigh for the undenuded wardrobes.

I scorn to reproduce more of these indecisions; I would sooner reproduce French as spoken in the hot bath, and it will suffice to say that, having spent hours which will never return in process of careful selection, I eventually discarded selection altogether, and filled all the portmanteaux I possess. However, for the future I shall waste no more time in thinking what I shall want on short journeys, for I know I shall end in taking all I have, and it saves trouble to begin with that.

I do not know whether we are all descended from gipsies, but certainly in most people something of the instinct which loves to wander, to make a journey merely for the joy of going, survives. True it is that punctual trains (the South-Eastern, however, has a good deal of admirable romance and uncertainty about it) and well-appointed steamboats, which leave stone-jettied ports at regular and ascertainable times, have sucked much of the unknown from travel, and so robbed this instinct of its fruition, but they cannot quite starve it. Even though you travel in a Pullman car, and sit on plush with your head among voluptuous gildings, and gaze into looking-glasses which show you the country and the telegraph-posts reeling giddily backwards, yet you still travel; and, at any rate, if you are going where you have never been before, something new and unknown waits for you behind the advancing line of the horizon. Thus, the one thing I never need on a journey is a book; it is sufficient entertainment for me merely to look out of the window and see new country—vale and glen or plain and mountain-peak—come up to greet me in endless procession. So swiftly one moves that it is hardly possible to weary of what one sees before it is gone, and every bend in the line may show something admirable. But above all things the headlong passage through the station of a large town delights me. First comes a mile of sordid house-backs built on to the line; then a short tunnel at which the engine screams; then a wider glance of the town, with perhaps a gray cathedral tower watching over it all; then close against the window slanting lines of people, like rain, on the gray, tapering platform, the name of the station hidden, like a plum in a bun from its refreshment-room, in plasters of advertisement; the signal-box with its rows of gleaming semaphores; the mile of sordid house-roofs again; and out into the green fields. Then at a stile giving on to the line there wait a couple of children, whom in all human probability you will never see again, waving their hats at the gay express. For a glimpse only you saw them, but they have their lives in front of them, fraught with momentousness to themselves at least, and perhaps to others. It is even possible that in years to come the lines of your life may cross theirs—that tragedy or comedy is already weaving the ropes that will bind you together in love or death or laughter. For of all phrases ‘a chance meeting’ is the most illogical. If chance exists at all, nothing exists except chance. Your most careful plan may be spoiled ‘by chance,’ as you will say. Then, your careful plan was chance, too, since chance can wreck it.

The backwaters of life, like the backwaters of streams, have an enormous fascination for me, for both are extraordinarily pleasing to the eye and restful to the mind. The great stream of progress hurries by them, while they revolve gently under shelter in sedate eddies, and sometimes sticks and straws from the stream get flung aside into them, and at once they join that slow, unhurrying circle. Such a backwater is Bayreuth; a tram-line and an advertisement of Sunlight Soap are the only touches of modernity I noticed in the town, for the theatre stands apart from it, a mile away beneath the pine-woods of the pleasant Bavarian hills. But otherwise it is a backwater of the purest type, not ancient and not modern, any more than is a backwater in a stream, but merely existent and unhurrying.

The inhabitants, we must suppose, buy and sell things from each other; some are richer than others, but apparently not much, and none, I should think, are either very rich or very poor. Some also are better-looking than others, but not much; some rather wider-awake, but all seem to have set as a seal on their foreheads a ruminating mediocrity in all points and qualities which the human mind is able to conceive. Apart from the festival, it is impossible to imagine being either very happy or very unhappy in Bayreuth; ‘very,’ in fact, is a word which is without meaning there.

Yet here, by a strange irony of fate, is planted the cult of perhaps the most ‘very’ mind that ever existed, for the brick theatre on the hill-side is the casket which holds that heart of flame and song. Critics have beggared dictionaries to express their feelings about Wagner, and whether it is synonyms for ‘charlatan’ they have searched for, or synonyms for ‘sublime,’ none have yet thought of levelling at him the charge of dulness or mediocrity. Indeed, to discuss him at all seems to imply that you are not in that calm frame of mind in which alone can discussion be profitable, and the violence which marks his music and drama seem at once to infect the mind of his critic. Strangest of all, even Tolstoi—who of all great writers seems to be almost utterly devoid of any sense of beauty, though in matters of sordidness and ugliness the skill of his art is worthy to stand by Shakespeare’s—has allowed himself to be drawn into the mad circle, and has given us in his volume on Art a dozen pages which for sheer ineptitude of criticism, complete ignorance of his subject, and utter incompetence to deal with it, must rank for ever with the colossal failures of the world, such as the Panama Canal and the fall of Napoleon. But the calm frame of mind deserts me; discussion is not profitable.