The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

But the manner of it was this:

They came, as you know, to lunch some three days ago, and I dined there next day, though I had made up my mind, as you also know, not to see her again. That was my plan, and the sweet rain of blows battered it down and crushed it with supreme and certain suddenness. One moment—it was after dinner, I remember, and we were playing cards—I was looking at her, seeing in every line of her face that friend whom I had lost, and the next she looked up, and in her eye there sat, not Margery nor another, but Helen, wraith no longer, but herself. And as at that moment, now three years ago, when Margery, with the sun kindling her hair, said, ‘It’s going in; what a darling!’ even so now I surrendered; I gave up all I had or was. The moment was to me so tremendous that I felt as if the whole world must know it. But even she did not know it, for she smiled and said, ‘I think there must be another in,’ and played the thirteenth card, losing the game for herself and me.

Is it not prosaic that I remember that? Yes, if you wish, but it is just that prosaicness which makes the romance of life, the intertwining of the common little everyday affairs with the great lords of romance, Love and Death, who by their presence lift life entire into their domain, so that nothing is common or commonplace.

That night, as I walked home, it seemed to me that never before had Margery been so close to me. Do you know how sometimes you can almost hear a voice you are familiar with, so that it seems as if the person to whom it belongs had just spoken? It was so with me. Each moment it seemed as if she had just said something to me, and I waited and waited for what she should say next. Each moment I expected to see her walking by me, her arm in mine, as we had walked together in the garden the evening before she died. She knew, I must believe, what had happened, and, like the dear friend she always was, she came to tell me, as far as the laws of her world permitted, that she was glad. Yet some immense but subtle change had come over our relations; less dear she could not be, but I no longer ached for her. And that, too, I think she knew, and at that also she was glad.

Again that night I sat long by the fire, where those visions and inhuman schemes of self-isolation and petty mediocrity had beset me a few evenings ago. How infinitesimal had been their scope, and, thank God, how futile they proved! Like some timid child, my soul had sat shivering on the brink of the great ocean of human life, not daring to put out, distrusting the frail vessel which should carry it towards the golden island which no man can reach unless he adventures. Even then the golden gleam shone on me; I saw the bright shining of those shores, and turned my face earthwards, saying that it was good to play with the shells and seaweed on the beach. Every day those waters which divide us from the golden island are thick with sails; every day hundreds of happy adventurers land on its shores; every day, too, hundreds are shipwrecked. But for me the wind beckons, my vessel flaps its sail, and though I do not cast away the shells and seaweeds I have gathered, I put them in my locker and think no more of them just now. The tide favours: my vessel tugs its chain, and I put out.

DECEMBER

Snow over all, and it is summer. Frost binds the icy fields, and in my heart every nightingale in the world makes melody. The bare trees are hung with icicles, and a shrill wind whistles through them; yet to me they are the green habitations of mating birds, and in the hedgerows, with their mask of snow where the wind has drifted it, are the nests of the hedge-sparrows with the blue eggs that reflect the skies of April. December! Was there ever such a December? All the honey of the summer, all the warmth of the long days, all the mellow autumn, all the promise of spring, is gathered here into one sheaf—the sheaf that we put in the chancel at the harvest festival, symbol of offering, symbol of the fruitful, kindly earth offering in kind to the Lord of the harvest.

Did you see the sun to-day about eleven in the morning come suddenly out through parted clouds and shine on the great fields of virgin snow? He came on purpose to see me. Did you see the maddened whirl of the snow-flakes in the afternoon flying in eddies through the air? They were dancing together at my party. I engaged them to dance. They did it well, did they not? Did you hear the cathedral bells ringing this afternoon, sounding dim and deep through the snow? They were also my guests. Everything in the world to-day was my guest, and stars were ranged on my ceiling, and the Pleiades lay in my hand, and close by my heart there lay the moon, and it was not cold, as it looks, but warm.