The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

This year it came upon me in spate; that great flood of renewed vitality which follows round the earth from continent to continent as the spring returns suddenly lifted me off my feet, dictating what I did as imperatively as an electric current dictates the involuntary twitching of the muscles it passes through. And on this wise.

I was out of town for two days last week, staying in Sussex at a house on the high downland near Ashdown Forest. As I drove from the station, I was aware that some huge and subtle change was in the air, but put it down only to the contrast of country breezes with the density of London. The briskness of winter was altogether gone, but in its place was the smell of earth and growing things, very fragrant and curiously strong; for rain, which brings out all scent into the air, be it good or bad, had fallen heavily that afternoon, drawing out, as I have said, the smell of growth, and leaving behind it, just as a water-cart does in streets, the smell of dust laid, or, rather, the smell which air has when there is no longer any dust in it. Also the vividness of colour surprised me; and in the yet leafless trees there was a certain vigorous look, which I had missed all winter, a crispness of outline, a look of tension as in an instantaneous photograph of a man about to leap. A thrush bubbled suddenly in a bush by the roadside, and, fool that I was, I did not know what was happening. I thought it was only a thrush singing. But had I known, it was spring.

That night after dinner, instead of sitting down to bridge or some gray pursuit glorified by the title of game, eight sober and mature people did the silliest things. We played blindman’s-buff; we cock-fought on the hearth-rug; we fell heavily to the ground in attempting to take out with our teeth pins placed in inaccessible positions on the legs of chairs: nobody cared what anybody else was doing; everyone talked simultaneously and laughed causelessly. Eventually we dispersed to our rooms flushed and hot.

My window had been shut, and a blind drawn down: here were the first things to be remedied; up went the screaming blind, up went the window, and the huge, exultant night poured in. That was better, but still bad, and I tore off my clothes, leaving them on the floor, and as my mother bore me, and as I shall go back to the great mother of all, leaned out into the night, full of the excitement which at last I understood. It was night—night, the time when even a stockbroker (who had made £290 on the Stock Exchange) reverts in some degree to the beast from which he has been evolved, when, unless one is fuddled with wine, or stupefied with food, or addled and rotten with sensual thought, one occasionally wins back to the old primeval prowling, excited joy of being alive, to the bliss which childhood knows in nightfall, robbed of its terrors. There it was, waiting for me, and I, as far as might be, ready for it, free from all desire, carnal, mental, or spiritual, but caught and burning in the flame of mere life. Huge and soft the night beckoned; humped gray shapes of bushes were blots on the lawn outside, above them rose the still gaunt shapes of trees, but hissing like a gas-jet with the pressure from within. Rain-clouds obscured the sky, the cold infinite stars were shut out, and only by the fact that it was not very dark did I know that the moon was somewhere risen, though invisible. That was as I would have it: for the time I was just a Live Thing, conscious of life. I wanted no distant stars to remind me how small I was, or how immense was heaven—for the time I desired only the kind warm earth—no moon to evoke, as she always does, the need of companionship. I was about on this earth, which, like I, was bursting with the promise of spring. Mating-time was not yet; not yet was the time of fresh leaves, or any outward sign of vitality. The vitality was within, everything had drawn a long breath, and the long breath hung suspended for the moment. Soon in a shower of starlike blossoms, in a mist of green hung round the trees, in the complete song of birds, in achievement or effort on my part, the tension would break. It was the physical moment when completion is assured, and the pause comes, delicious because all, all has been leading up to this, and one is content, if it is possible to be content, because fruition is sure. Exquisite pangs have gone before, the pangs of anticipation. Exquisite pangs of completion will follow, but nothing can ever approach the completeness of the assured moment.

Night and its veiled darkness, a soft rain falling and hissing among the shrubs, the sleeping house—unless, indeed, there might be other watchers like myself unclothed beside an open window—utter loneliness, and the thrill of life. But it was not enough to stand there; I had to mix with the night, I had to do my utmost to take it, the dripping shrubs, the falling rain, the whole growing, quickening earth, nearer to me. It was not enough to look at it. So for convention’s sake I pulled on trousers again, buttoned a coat over me, and, hatless and barefooted, opened my window further—a ground-floor window—and stepped out into the night. What I wanted I did not know: it was certain, at any rate, I did not want anybody else to be there; yes, I know, I wanted only to be part of the growing sap-stirred world. No thought of either spiritual or carnal aspiration did I feel; no gratitude to God, who made this ecstatic machine called me, entered into my mind, no thought of love or lust or desire. The gray curtain of cloud was the blanket under which, like a child, I buried my head; I was too far gone, you will understand, to ‘talk French’; simply, I was possessed by the joy of life, that life which moved my muscles, making them tense and slack in turn as I walked, that held a long breath in my lungs and blew it out again, that made the soft rain drip from the clouds, that made the earth drink it in instinctively, that made the shrubs whisper to its falling and give out the odours of dampness and growth. Step by step, as I went over the lawn, with my feet already dripping and my hair growing matted with the benediction of the falling rain, this impulse grew and grew. Before I knew it, from walking I had passed to running, before I knew it my coat was lying somewhere on the grass, and the rain fell thick and cool on my back and shoulders. Dim shapes of shrubs fled by me; then in front there sprang out of the dark the lines of a wooden fence bounding the lawn. This was taken in the stride almost, and the longer, coarser fibre of the meadow grass wrapped itself round my feet. Then a sandpan—a bunker guarding the eighteenth green of the golf-links—showed yellow in front, and next moment a flag waved to my right. Thereafter coarser grass again, and a hundred yards beyond, the streamlet, where I have delved patiently with a niblick. Beyond, another fence, and in the field—out of bounds—large dark shapes of cows lying down. One underneath the shadow of a tree I stumbled against, leaving a snort and a stir behind, and I remember laughing at that. Then in due time a certain failure of wind, and a halt underneath a thin, young beech-tree with smooth, rounded stem. Next moment the trunk was between my knees, and between my arms strongly wound round it, my cheek against the bark, and, panting, I clung to it. It, too, was alive, and strong and hard, and with that, turning my head, I remember biting the bark, till strips of it came off and my lips bled. Then a bed of old brown bracken, and with my fingers I dug in the earth till I felt the buds of springing stems an inch below the ground.

There I lay, a minute it may have been, or ten years, and the climax, I must suppose, was reached. There was no more possible to me, the riddle was unsolved, and for the moment I knew it to be insoluble: not because it was a silly riddle, but because it was no riddle at all, but the mystery of all mysteries—Life. As far as I personally could, I had done my best to answer it, not by thought, which is futile, but by being of the earth, by making myself one with growing things at the moment of spring-time, and this not, I do assure you, consciously, but because I had to. The current that ran through everything else ran through me also. I was a savage, an animal, what you will.

The greatest moment was over; again I was conscious of one slack arm hanging by my side, and one braced at the elbow to support my weight as I sat up. I knew that my feet were wet, that my hair had to be brushed from my eyes, that rain-drops fell from my eyebrows on to my face, that a torn, distracted, mud-covered blackness represented dress-trousers, that my coat was lying somewhere on the lawn, and that my bedroom window was an invitation to robbers. So I rose and walked back, slowly, and designedly slowly, in order to enjoy what I had not known. I had enjoyed before, but had simply taken. The cool rain was exquisite to the skin, so, too, the cool grass to the feet; the night above and around was huge and solemn and ennobling. Thus the moral consciousness, I must suppose, awoke. I was filled with edifying thoughts. They would be dull if recorded; they were dull even then, for the memory of the savage moments was still hot as a dream.

Well, what then? There is no ‘what then.’ That wild running through the dark is flesh and blood of me. Perhaps you have no taste for cannibalism. That is a very comfortable defect.

The next twenty-four hours were, it is true, full of spring, but to me, licking the chops of my climax, they were jejune. My coat I picked up on the lawn; I entered through my window—no robber could have come in that sacred hour—gazed on the wreck of dress-trousers, and went to bed, and to sleep instantly and dreamlessly, awaking to a great bold sunlight that streamed in through the windows when my valet drew up the blinds. With him I held a shamefaced colloquy, as he gathered my dress-clothes.

‘I’m afraid they’re rather muddy,’ said I, stifling my face beneath the sheet.