The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

But turn from this gloomy picture to the reality. ‘The bloke,’ as I saw him this evening, had a huge crust stuffed into one cheek; in the other corner of his mouth was a cigarette. There was news about a test match in Australia, and papers were going like hot cakes. His pockets were not to be trusted, and that mouth of his had eight coppers on one side, and the crust, not yet masticated, on the other. But did ‘the bloke’ think about verdigris-poisoning and other inanities? Not a bit. If there was a moment to spare, wet pennies were ejected and stowed in a pocket somewhere at the back of his trousers. If there was no moment to spare, he merely cursed and prayed for a sixpence which got rid of five wet pennies. All the time he was shouting ‘Re-markable Collapse!’ chaffing the policeman at the corner, shouting hoarse profanities to the drivers of passing buses, and ogling miles of girls of his acquaintance.

Now consider, oh my cultured friend, where would you and I have been in such a crisis, which, you must remember, was a feast and a high-day to ‘the bloke.’ We should have retired behind a hoarding to eat our crust, and sat still—God help us—for several minutes in order to digest it. Then we should have lost the cream of the sale. Then, coyly re-entering Oxford Street, we should have murmured quaveringly, ‘A Bad Score on the Colonial Side’; we should have put our pennies in the untrustworthy pocket, whence they would have slithered coldly down our legs on to the pavement. Grasping the inadequacy of this, we should have held them in our other hand, and impeded the swift passage of the papers. We should have cast apprehensive glances at the policeman for fear he should tell us to move on—he tells ‘the bloke’ to move on, and ‘the bloke’ says ‘Garn!’—we should have frowned at bus-drivers who nearly ran over us, and made a feint of taking their numbers. We should have made a quantity of depressing reflections about the young women in London, so bold and bad-mannered, and as an upshot we should have sold, with infinite depression, one-fifth of what ‘the bloke’ sells with a gusto indescribable. And what is, perhaps, worst of all, we should have prayed that evening, if we were not too sleepy, for all the starving, homeless creatures of the street. ‘The bloke’ does not pray—but if he did, he would say, with Browning, ‘God’s in His heaven; all’s right with the world.’

Exit ‘the bloke.’

P.S. No, not exit just then. Yesterday only, I was coming round the corner from Davies Street, and caught sight of ‘the bloke’ dancing excitedly in mid-street, with his sheaf of papers, shouting the verdict of the Tonbridge murder. Next moment he had been knocked down by an omnibus and the wheel had gone over him. With many others I ran out into the roadway, and it so happened I was there first.

I picked ‘the bloke’ up and carried him to the pavement. His head bent inwards from my elbow to my chest, and two wet pennies fell into the crook of my arm from his mouth. His sheaf of papers had fallen from him and still lay in the road. Before we reached the pavement he looked up and saw me.

‘I’m damned dirty, sir,’ he said; ‘take care of your noo coat. That bloody bus—— Gawd—I’ll talk to Jim—running over me like that.’

There was an ambulance near at hand, and I delivered up ‘the bloke.’ Someone had picked up his papers from the roadway and put them by the side of the thin little body, and the pennies which he had dropped out of his mouth I put there too.

Next day I went to the hospital where he had been taken. But ‘the bloke’ will not stand at his corner any more.

Sad? Heaven help us all if we are going to be sad, because we are (quite assuredly) going to die; the sooner we die and get it over, the better. Anticipating sadness is an absolute drug in the market, and is it not better to be glad because at the present moment we happen to be alive, and not sad because at some future moment we are going to die? How long would the world go on if we all sat and sighed because we were going to die?

Yes, decidedly spring has come, and it amazes me to look back on what I wrote only a week ago, and find myself so blinded by that moment of languor which announced it, as not to have foreseen what should so shortly follow. Yet if that obsession of languor had not been so complete, I suppose this effervescence of spring would not have run riot in me as it did, and it is with infinite misgivings that I attempt to put into words any of that bubbling thrill, that ecstasy in the sensation of mere living, which is felt, I believe, in every growing thing, down to the humblest blade of grass which is trodden underfoot, even as the varnish of springtime is on it—at that divinest of all moments in the year, when in man and brute and as yet leafless tree the sap once more stirs.