The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

Now, the Spirit of the falling leaf is a most unprofitable demon. To dwell on the thought of decay and age and death cannot, I believe, be salutary for anybody. Pereunt et imputantur. That motto, surely, was written by an atheist and an idiot. For, in the first place, the hours that go so swiftly by do not perish—each hour that passes goes to form the present; what we did or were then is exactly that which makes us what we are now. And if we are to seriously give our minds to the contemplation of what is written up against us in the ledger-book of the hours that have passed, we shall, if we have any conscience at all, only secure for ourselves paralysis in the future. No decently-minded man, if he dwells on his missed opportunities with any honesty, can possibly raise his head again. A lively repentance sets its face steadily forwards, never backwards.

This Spirit of the falling leaf is my especial foe, and I detest him with all the fervour of familiarity. Every autumn he whispers to me, ‘Look at the trees from which the yellow leaves are falling slowly, slowly, but steadily. Soon they will be quite bare; their summer is over, a year is gone. But they will renew their youth in the spring, the green buds will burst again, and June will laugh among the revivified branches, and the birds will again make there a melodious habitation. But no spring will renew you; each year you are older; your spring is past, and your summer days will not come again.’ And I turn cold.

Now, though the Spirit of the falling leaf may speak the truth, that is one of the truths which it is our duty steadily to ignore. What is past is past; but to-day, at any rate, lies in front of us; to-day is our immediate and vital concern, and if we are fortunate enough to live till to-morrow, to-morrow will be our vital concern. No, to talk with the Spirit of the falling leaf is to invite paralysis of the soul. It is wise to guard against such paralysis by that simple antidote which is within the reach of everybody, and its name is Work.

‘How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark autumn evenings come!’

There speaks the healthful man. Browning set himself to read Greek, prose, he tells us, not poetry now, for he was old. Yet so green and full of immortal youth were his years, that in his reverie, dwelling on the past, no falling-leaf dirge comes to his lips, but the passionate lyric rapture of love relived. But the point just now is that when the autumn evenings were near he gave himself a task, set himself to do something, opened a bottle of the only real tonic the world contains, which is work. And most of us certainly need that tonic more in winter than in summer. In summer the mere fact that we sit at the great banquet of the spectacle of sun and flowers and green things is royal entertainment. But the year turns, the lights burn lower, and we have to employ ourselves; but, like children in the dark, we quake at the gathering shadows.

What one sets one’s self to do matters nothing in comparison of the main point, namely, that we set ourselves to do something, for any employment, so long as it is not harmful, is essentially good. Many of us have our ordinary work to do, which takes most of the day now days are short. In the summer, perhaps, we were accustomed, when the day’s work was over, to be out-of-doors; but now, in these lengthening nights, we have to seek our employment inside. The great thing, then, is to do something definite, and to do it seriously. To read the whole of Shakespeare before next March is one employment that recommends itself to me, but supposing the choice was made for me by another, who told me that bridge was to be my winter employment, I should be quite content. But in that case I should try very hard to get rid by March of the fatal indecision which prompts one sometimes to make spades, sometimes no trumps, out of practically the same hand. I should try to establish once and for all the best suit to play if my partner doubles no trumps. I should try to find out definitely what chance of success certain heavy finesses have, and act accordingly, and I should consider that I had wasted my winter if by next March I had not improved out of recognition. But what I hope I should not do would be to play slackly, for in that case one might as well talk to the Spirit of the falling leaf at once.

Meantime October is to me personally the month when I am most beset by this spirit, for October is full of the sweet and tender memories of certain people, very near to me, who are dead. Two days in particular stand out, of which one was spent on the sea on my return from Naples, and the other, October 27, will be here in a few days. On that day the psalm for the evening, you will remember, is ‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion.’ It was the anthem, you know, in Winchester Cathedral on the night when Henry Esmond returned, when his ‘dear mistress’ looked up and saw the sunshine round his head as they sang ‘bringing their sheaves with them.’ And she came to him and blessed him.

That immortal scene has in my own mind got so intertwined with my own memories of the 27th of October that I cannot disentangle them. Twice, I remember, I saw Margery again after a long absence on the 27th, and with the tender memory of one who is dead there always wreathes itself the other association of the return of someone beloved. Dimly, as if the future would fulfil some dream of years ago, I picture some great joy coming to me on that day. I think that on that day I shall return from some captivity, and find that my life has been but a dream in the light of what shall be; that I shall have a joyful reaping—God knows what or how—for certain seed I have sown in tears; that some empty granary in my heart shall be made full of golden grain.

September was a month of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ in England, and I have returned to find my garden gone rampant. Somehow growth in autumn is utterly unlike summer growth in its wild opulence, as if the dear plants knew that it was nearly time for them to go to bed, but were determined to have one great romp first. A huge nasturtium, like a boisterous schoolboy, has sprung on to a Gloire de Dijon and is wrestling with it. A canariensis which I thought was finished has played hide-and-seek all over the trellis of the shelter until it met a wandering eccremocarpus, which it instantly embraced like a long-lost brother, and the sunshine of the flowers of the one is mixed with the orange trumpet of the other. Phloxes are still in flower, sunflowers have topped the garden wall, and the beautiful sylvestris is vigorous with pale leaf and snowy flower. But—only fancy—that vile Jackmanni is dead. Quite dead. God forgive it for a senseless fool.

These golden October days! Every morning I stray out before breakfast, sometimes only into the garden, sometimes as far as the water-meadows, to find the same glorious return of day. This morning the least pallor of hoar-frost was on the grass, and the clean smell of the morning was more exquisite than all the perfumes of Arabia. A tall chestnut had grown very suddenly yellow—how delightful if our hair turned brilliant gold (it does sometimes) when we grew old!—and the leaves were dropping one by one, without twist or turn, in the calm air, till a heap of unminted gold lay underneath the tree. Every now and then there was a thump on the grass, and the green rind of the chestnut fruit, split by the blow, jerked out its smooth and glossy globes. The chalk-streams flowing through the meadows were full and brimming, streams of living water, and the luxuriant grasses, grown to their longest, swam and dabbled in the flawless crystal. How good it was to breathe the chill of the morning, to look across the emerald of the meadows to the red town in the hollow, full of clustering roofs, over which the mists lay thin and level, pricked by the gray towers and solemn steeples which show golden in the clearness of the upper air! Then back to breakfast, and to this long quiet morning of work by the open window, interrupted only by the rapturous contemplation of a man in the road trying to drive a tandem. The leaders thought otherwise and went in different directions.