Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) BY THE SAME AUTHOR _Crown 8vo., cloth, price 6s._ SCARLET AND HYSSOP THE LUCK OF THE VAILS MAMMON AND CO. THE PRINCESS SOPHIA LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 20 & 21, BEDFORD STREET, W.C. The Book of Months By E. F. Benson [Illustration: colophon] London William Heinemann 1903 _This Edition enjoys copyright in all countries signatory to the Berne Treaty, and is not to be imported into the United States of America_ TO MY MOTHER CONTENTS PAGE JANUARY 1 FEBRUARY 23 MARCH 49 APRIL 79 MAY 97 JUNE 121 JULY 139 AUGUST 165 SEPTEMBER 197 OCTOBER 225 NOVEMBER 251 DECEMBER 273 _The publisher is informed by the Proprietors of Condyâs Fluid that their preparation contains no permanganate of potash. In making this correction he desires to express regret if the statement on page 83 has done them an injury._ JANUARY Thick yellow fog, and in consequence electric light to dress by and breakfast by, was the opening day of the year. Never, to anyone who looks at this fact in the right spirit, did a year dawn more characteristically. The denseness, the utter inscrutability of the face of that which should be, was never better typified. We blindly groped on the threshold of the future, feeling here for a bell-handle, here for a knocker, while the door still stood shut. Then, about mid-day, sudden commotions shook the vapours; dim silhouettes of house-roofs, promised lands perhaps, or profiled wrecks, stood suddenly out against swirling orange whirlpools of mist; and from my window, which commanded a double view up and down Oxford Street, I looked out over the crawling traffic, with an interest, as if in the unfolding of some dramatic plot, on the battle of the skies. From sick dead yellow the colour changed to gray, and for a few moments the street seemed lit by a dawn of April; then across the pearly tints came a sunbeam, lighting them with sudden opalescence. Then the smoke from the house opposite, which had been ascending slowly, like a tired man climbing stairs, was plucked away by a breeze, and in two minutes the whole street was a blaze of primrose-coloured sunshine. All that week I was work-bound in London--a place where, as everyone knows, there are forty-eight hours in every twenty-four. The reason for this is obvious. It is impossible to sit idly in a chair in London; it is impossible (almost) to read a book, and it is (happily) quite impossible to write one. Hence the hours are multiplied. The sound and spectacle of life induces a sort of intoxication of the mind. Ten yards of Piccadilly is a volume, and the Circus an improper epic. Hence the impossibility of reading; the books are in the flowing tides that jostle from house-wall to house-wall, and they are vastly more entertaining than anything that publishers have ever had the good fortune to bring out. Now, people who are incapable of reading bookprint--of which the enormous mass is very sorry stuff--are held to be uneducated; but it seems to me that people who cannot read, or at any rate conjecture at, this splendid human print are much more ignorant. For it is here in these places, alive with the original words and phrases out of which all books are made, that there lies the key to all books that are worth reading at all. At any rate, here lies the material; it is here, and nowhere else, that the _chef_ does his marketing. There are, however, several rules to be observed if you would read the original. The first is, that you must attend with all your might; the book, so to speak, shuts automatically if you cease to attend. The second is, that you must at a momentâs notice be ready to pity and to praise. The third--and perhaps the most important of all--is, that you must never be shocked. For the whole attitude of the observer is covered by pity or praise. The Great Author does not want his moral condemnation, and, in addition to this, there is nothing so blinding to oneâs self as being shocked. It is like looking through a telescope at one point only, and that probably wrongly focussed; for it is focussed by oneâs own individual code, which is almost certainly wrong. It is Human Life you are looking at; if that is not good enough for you, go and look at something else. There are plenty of dull things in the world, but remember always that, if you find other people dull, it is only a sign that a dull person is present. But if you are to read the book Living, come humble and alert. Try to catch the point of every phrase, for of this you may be sure--that there is a point. You will find there, thank God! many pages that will make you laugh--laugh, that is, properly, with sheer childish, unreflecting amusement; you will find there things that will make you think; and you will certainly find there things that will make you want to weep. And if we knew a little, instead of knowing nothing, we should probably--no, certainly--fall on our knees, and thank God for that also. One of each of these occurred to me to-day. The first was when I was coming out of the club with a friend on our way to dinner. An obsequious porter held the club door open, an obsequious page-boy stood by our glittering hansom, with a hand on the wheel. My friend had an opulent appearance and wore a fur coat. On the pavement were standing two exceedingly small and ragged boys, and one of them whose hair drooped over his eyes like a Skye terrier, seeing this resplendent exit, put his thumbs in the place where the armholes of his waistcoat would have been, had the merry little devil had one, and, with his nose in the air, said very loud to the other, âWhare are we doining to-night, Bill?â The second made one laugh at first, but think afterwards, and it was thus: At the corner of Dover Street there lay a heap of mud and street sweepings, and as we drew up just opposite, blocked by an opposing tide of carriages in Piccadilly, a small, very dapper little gentleman in dress-clothes stepped into the middle of this muck-heap, with the result that one of his dress-pumps was drawn off his unfortunate foot with a âcloopâ and stuck there. On to it there swooped a vulture of the highway, a lad of about twenty, who picked it out, and made off down Dover Street with it. Now, what good was one shoe to him? Would he not have done better to have wiped it carefully on his coat, which really could not have deteriorated farther, and chanced a tip from the dapper little gentleman? Or was the instinct of stealing so strong that he never stopped to think? One would have supposed that a tip was a practical certainty. The third sight was merely a matter for tears. I walked back from dinner, and my way lay up Piccadilly again. At a populous corner stood a very stout elderly woman, dressed in violent and ridiculous colours. Her hair was golden, her eyebrows broad, thick and vilely drawn, her cheeks so burned with rouge that one blushed. She addressed every passer-by in endearing terms. None regarded her. That was quite right; but the pity of her standing there on this squally night, with her horrid mission and her total ill-success! Yes, it is difficult to thank God for that. After five days I got deliverance from this entrancing slavery, and, like a cork from a bottle, flew to Grindelwald. The journey I remember as a dreadful dream, for I had a cold so bad that all sense of taste, smell, and most of hearing and feeling, had passed from me, and I seemed to myself to be a rough deal board being sent by train, and turned out into a drizzling night at what appeared to be mere cowsheds on the line, simply for the purpose of declaring that I had no spirit or lace about me. Spirit! The Queen of Sheba when she had seen Solomon in all his glory had more. As to lace, that diaphanous material seriously occupied my waking dreams as we mounted the Jura. Was there anything in my face that suggested lace, I wondered, or did lace frillings peep out from my trousers? Anyhow, why lace? I was really almost anxious to declare five hundred cigarettes, but nobody suggested such a thing. Then---- The new heaven and the new earth, an earth covered with powdery snow, thatched here and there by pines, and reaching beyond all power of thought, by glacier and snowfield and rocks too steep for the settling of the snow, into the pinnacles of the Eiger and the Wetterhorn. From ridge to ridge the eye followed, lost in amazement at the wonder of the earth and the greatness of its design. Austere and silent rose the virgin snows, and more silent, growing from words to exclamation, and from exclamation to silence itself, oneâs wonder. There, out of the void and formless pulp which was once the world, they were set, barren, fruitless, useless, and that is the wonder of them and their glory. Centuries have been as but seconds in the life of an idle man in the forming of them; for centuries that have been to them but the winking of an eye they have raised their immemorial crests, and the centuries shall be as the sea-sand before they crumble. O ye Mountains and Hills, praise ye the Lord! Every day you praise Him. Now, this âBook of Monthsâ is almost certainly worth nothing, anyhow, and I take this opportunity to inform critics so, in case (as is not likely) they have the slightest doubt about it. But if they and I are wrong, it will be because we have both overlooked the possible value of a true document--true, that is, as far as I personally am able to make it true. Therefore I will state at once that for the next four weeks the childish pursuit of making correct lines and edges on the ice occupied me much more, except on a few occasions, than all the mountains, all the heavenly blue of the sky, or the divine radiance of the marching sun. Instead of attending to those big and beautiful things, I got up, day after day, full of anxious thoughts, and had I been assured that these anxieties would never trouble me again on condition that I never again looked at the Eiger, or the scarlet finger of the Finster-Aarhorn that caught the sunset long after the sun had set to us, I would quite certainly have closed with the bargain. Those who do not know what a clean outside-back-counter means can have no voice in this affair, since they are not acquainted with the subject-matter of it, but those who do will, I believe, extend to me their pitying sympathy. For no known reason, I desired to make these and other turns, which when made are of no conceivable use to anybody, and full of anxious thoughts, which violent collisions with the elusive material on which I performed fully justified, I proceeded to devote the hours of light to these utterly indefensible pursuits. I wished to execute a movement in which the skate left a certain mark on the ice, and no other (I am alluding, of course, to involuntary change of edge), and to make these and other marks on the ice (continuous loops, bracket-eight, and a few more, for the sake of the curious) I signed a bond, so to speak, for three weeks of my short mortal life. All morning, that is to say, I struggled with these evanescent scratchings, ate a hurried lunch, and struggled again till it was dark. Really, it is very odd, and I hope to do the same next winter. I am perfectly aware that I could have spent my time much better, or, at any rate, tried to. I knew that at the time; but I did not care then, and I do not care now. There were sane intervals, however. For instance, one Saturday evening it began to snow. Now, I see nothing conceivably wrong in skating on Sunday, and am unable to comprehend the position of those who do. But it is certainly wrong to skate on Sunday when it will spoil the ice on Monday, and on this particular Sunday I went to church in the morning, and afterwards took a sandwich lunch from the hotel, and, tying it securely to a toboggan, sat myself insecurely on the toboggan, and went alone--that was an essential part of the plan--down past the church and through the village, through fields of white snow that spouted as the toboggan met them, even as the spray spouts round the bows of a liner. In nothing, I suppose, does a man (unless he be M. Santos Dumont) come nearer to the ecstasy of flight, some low skimming flight that follows the contour of the ground as swallows when storm is imminent. So went I down an ever-steepening mile, finishing at the end just by the side of the bridge that crosses the stream from the glacier. The frost had been severe for the last week, and this was nearly covered over with lids of ice that grew out from backwaters and extended almost from bank to bank. Wherever a stone stood in mid-current, there below it had the ice first gathered, groping its way downstream till the cold feeler reached another stone. Then, already half established, it had broadened and broadened till a third anchorage met it. But in certain swift places the water still ran unchecked, its flow, of course, greatly diminished with the lesser melting of the glacier in winter, but still busy, busy, seeking the sea with steadfast purpose. Round the banks and in the bed itself of the stream grew an immense company of alders covered completely with the inimitable confectionery of frost, a forest of spiked branches. Then mounting again, I passed up a long gentle slope by a few outlying chÃ¢lets, and, having come out of the shadow of the Eiger, sat down to lunch. The air was utterly windless, the frost so keen that not a flake of snow clung to my clothes, yet through the glory of that pellucid air the sun struck so hot that a coat was altogether a superfluity. Eastwards the Wetterhorn rose in glacier and snowfield, and its superb and patient beauty, as of some noble woman waiting for the man she loves, struck me with a pang of delight. Thereafter still climbing, I entered the pine-woods below the Scheidegg, where the sun drew out a thousand woodland and resinous smells, as if odorous summer instead of midwinter held sway. Alone! I had intended to be alone, but never was a man in more delectable company. Trees, glimpses of the gorgeous dome above them, drifts of driven snow, were my companions, while, if one grew overbold, there was the Eiger to hazard a respectful remark to, and the sun itself to be worshipped. On no other day, indeed, that I can remember have I felt so strong a sympathy with Parsees. High it swung, benignant, and all for the fir-trees and me. Then rising higher, I came to the edge of the wood and the beginning of the snowfields again, and, resting for a moment, did an exceedingly childish thing. Underneath a piece of spreading root of the last tree of that heavenly wood I hid a Bryant and Mayâs match-box containing a stick of chocolate, an English sixpence, two nickel coins of ten centimes, a short piece of pencil, and four matches. These I dedicate to the wayfarer should he need a light. Also I should ask him to write his name with the pencil and put it in the match-box, and, if he feels as foolish as I, add some small object of no value. Next year I will go there again, and make some further striking additions to the _cache_. The tree is a large one on the left of the path, and quite notably the _last in the wood_. My initials are rudely carved in the piece of root directly above the _cache_. An intelligent traveller knowing this can hardly miss the place. Now, where shall we look for the origin of this instructive piece of foolishness? This is not a merely egotistic query, for I am perfectly certain that many sober and mature citizens like myself will feel sympathy with childishness that rejoices in such _caches_ as I made on the slopes of the Scheidegg. Is it that we still preserve, even in this well-civilized and restauranted century, some cell in our brain which even now obeys the prudent instincts of some remote cave-dwelling ancestor, and do we now in play imitate his serious precautions? Or--and I like to think this better--have we still, in spite of our sober maturity, some remnants still of an heritage more priceless than cave-dwelling ancestors, namely, the lingering joys of our own childhood? On the whole, the evidence points this way, especially when I consider in connection with this certain other survivals, like that of âtalking French.â Here I feel that I may be treading on alien ground; the _cache_ habit, I know, is not rare, but I have not at present met anyone who âtalks French,â of which the manner is as follows. Everyone, I suppose, has moments of sheer physical enjoyment. I need mention two only: the one, getting into bed, with legs curled up, ere yet the freezing sheets can be encountered; the other, when very cold getting into a hot bath, a bath, that is to say, so hot that it is on the border between bliss and anguish, when, in fact, to move is to scream. On these occasions--for loneliness is essential,--I âtalk Frenchâ; that is to say, streams of gibberish flow in a hushed voice from my lips, in the form of dialogue, and anyone present would hear remarkable things of this nature: (With deep anxiety) âUsti Icibon?â (Reassuringly) âMimi molat isto pacher.â (Reassured) âKaparando guilli. Amatinat skolot.â I blush to reproduce more. But I long to know if anybody else âtalks French.â I want to talk it with somebody, and compare vocabularies. A long colloquy was held that afternoon, sitting in the sun, after the _cache_ was made, and then towards sunset I started to go back through the pine-wood with dim but welcome thoughts of bears and brigands lying in wait on each side the path. One corner I remember I particularly feared, for low-growing bushes bordering the path might conceal almost anything. That I had good reason to fear it I soon found out, though I had feared it for wrong reasons, for my toboggan threw me with reckless gaiety into the middle of those same bushes. In fact, for the first half-mile the track was abominable; bare stones and tree-roots alternated with passages of breathless rapidity; never have I experienced a quicker succession of violences. But as the wood grew less dense the texture of the going became more uniform, and for the last mile I hissed downwards with ever-increasing speed and smoothness through the pallor of the snow-bright dusk. Large stars beamed luminous overhead, and from scattered cottages sprang the twinkling lights, showing that all were home from the frozen fields and safe within walls. Then, wonder of wonders! the full moon rose over the top of the Wetterhorn with a light as clear as running water and as soft as sleep, making complete with its perfection this perfect day. The other interlude from this rage of tracing useless marks on the ice was a funeral. The funeral was that of Slamâs kitten, though the kitten was not really Slamâs at all. But, to go back to the beginning of things, it is necessary that you should know who Slam was. Her real name was Evelyn Helen Anastasia, and goodness knows what; but what matters more is that she was a child six years and one month old, freckle-faced, snub-nosed, devoted to animals and the outside edge, and by far the most popular person in the hotel. It was the outside edge originally that had brought us together, for she had told me that I didnât do it properly, and, very kindly showing me how, she had fallen heavily on the ice. As I picked her up, she said: âYou see what I mean, donât you? Let me show you again.â Under her tuition I improved, and, what was more important, our friendship ripened. I am proud to think that I was the only person who ever heard about the kitten, which had followed Slam--I am sure I donât wonder--with pitiful mewings, down from the Happy Valley, an ownerless beast that would have touched hearts more hard than Slamâs. She kept it in a cupboard in her room and fed it with cake. This I learned on the second day of the kittenâs imprisonment. That evening it died. I will pass over Slamâs lamentations, and the wealth of falsehood by which I convinced her that a diet of cake in an airless cupboard was the only thing that could have saved it. Then, as it was dead, it had to be buried, still without the cognizance of Slamâs nurse, whom I feared. âI donât want a lot of people,â said Slam. âIt would be much nicer if we buried her quietly. So when nurse is at dinner I will bring her down in my hat.â Meantime I had procured a cardboard box, and from Slamâs hat the kitten passed into its coffin. The coffin was put on our toboggan--for Slam and I were going to lunch out--and the catafalque left the hotel. Slam put her hand into mine--a compliment that only children can pay--and we debated about the cemetery. I personally inclined to the riverbed at the bottom of the valley, but Slam would have none of it. âUp above,â she said, âit is cleaner;â and, though it was all pretty clean, I assented. âThen we can eat our lunch and toboggan down,â she added. This was common-sense; to walk up after the funeral would be depressing; we might recover our lightness of spirit if we left the tobogganing till afterwards. On the way up, through the village, that is, and towards the glacier, the talk turned on serious subjects. Did I believe that animals would have a resurrection? Why did God make them if they were just to die and be finished? Again, if they were to have a resurrection, was it not proper to bury them properly? Thus we arrived at the cemetery. Four pine-trees stood there, with snow drifted high between them; the benediction of the sun hallowed the place; never had anyone a more virgin tomb. We scooped out the snow down to soil-level, and dropped the box into the excavation. Then with pious hands we covered it up, and on the top of the cairn planted sprigs taken from the pines. âAnd now I will say my prayers,â said Slam. She knelt down in the snow, and, even with the fear of her nurse before my eyes, I could say nothing to dissuade her, but knelt by her and uncovered my head. And then Slam said the Lordâs Prayer, and asked that she might be a good girl always, and prayed that God might bless her father and mother and nurse and me. Do you know what it is to be remembered in the prayers of a child? Then she paused: âand the kitten,â she added. And I said âAmen.â So there the kitten lies, between the sky and the beautiful snow-clad earth. Pines whisper about it, and the Wetterhorn and Eiger watch over its resting-place. And Slam said her prayers there. What follows? As far as I am concerned, this: I believe that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, and that there will be one day a great healing and comforting. And when on that day, mysteriously, unintelligibly, that little body, which meantime has fed the grasses and the alpine flowers of the place, comes to itself and is alive again, I believe that a happy little kitten will stand between those four pine-trees, lost no longer. And Slam and I will recognise it. And the kitten--who knows?--will recognise us, and Slam will say again, in the phrase that is so often on her lips: âOh, it is nice!â FEBRUARY A quantity of wholly uninteresting things have happened. I have with infinite rackings of thought made Â£290 on the Stock Exchange, and never was money more hardly earned. I am also well on the way to lose the whole of it. If, as seems highly probable, I do, never will money be more hardly lost. I have returned from Grindelwald to find a London of the most icy cold, followed by a London of the most sickening tepidity, swimming in mud, the colour of which and the texture of which is that of nightmares. A pallid daylight strikes through rods of rain, the streets smell of mackintosh, and an unfathomable depression prevails. The County Council have seized this unrivalled opportunity for taking up the whole of the principal thoroughfares, and it is impossible to get anywhere without going in a totally different direction. I played bridge last night, revoked and was not detected, which argues a mournful level of intelligence both in oneâs self and oneâs adversaries, and went to bed only to dream of a fifth suit, which, dimly veiled, swallowed aces of trumps, or any such cards, like oysters, a gulp and no more, and woke to find the same dark streaming and leaden heavens. It is the weather that with me is chiefly responsible both for these despondencies and for sky-scraping spirits. And I know of nothing so hard to bear as weather-depressions. One cannot by employment of idleness get rid of them, so long as the conditions that gave the depressions birth still continue. And of all weather-depressions the one that occurs when spring struggles to be born from dying winter is the most despondent. Oneâs body, especially after a month in Switzerland, has been adjusted to low temperatures, and the effect of the change is the same as that produced by a tepid bath in the morning instead of a cold one. Briskness of body and spirit alike vanish, and to-day, though I am accustomed to these annual visitations, I went so far as to take my temperature, there being, as I well knew, nothing whatever the matter with me. Of course it was normal. This transition-weather has now lasted a week, but there have been certain intervals and alleviations. One of these occurred last Sunday. I went in the afternoon to the Oratory at Brompton, and heard that service of Vespers and Benediction which, whether mumbled unintelligibly by a shabby priest in an empty church, or conducted with that splendid sense of âformâ which characterizes the Oratory, never fails to give me a feeling of âupliftingâ which I cannot hope to express. There in the morning has the symbol of that Divine Mystery been laid on the Lordâs Table, and there after the candles have been lit, and the worshipper cleansed by the incense, is again revealed the âSalutaris Hostia,â the sign, outward and visible, of the Love through which existence is. Then I crossed the park, and by degrees the unutterable languor of the early spring began to thaw its way back into me, when suddenly I saw a large tract of grass white with snowdrops that had budded and blossomed in the last few days. Pointed leaves with the white line one knows so well had first pricked the ground; then the weak, soft flower had followed, led upwards from the buried bulb by the instinct it must obey, for no purpose--who knows?--but to remind a stupid person or two like me that there were other things in the world besides him. And I swear to you that as I looked I blushed with shame. To-morrow I shall go and look at them again, for I am afraid the memory is no longer medicinal. Depend upon it, there is nothing so morbid as to encourage in oneâs self âquestionings.â Any average ordinary person who walks down a London street, and for five minutes devotes himself to the problem as to what is the meaning of all these swarming people, what do they make of their lives, what is the ultimate outcome--it is easy enough to find words, but quite unnecessary--will reduce himself to a state of maudlin incompetence in a weekâs time. It is emphatically not oneâs business to be cheaply vague in this manner, and the man who helps a stumbler--be he drunk or sober--across a street, or rings a bell for a small child who cannot reach it, has done his duty and his part in the worldâs work far better that day than any philosopher who thinks a great deal and does nothing. Indeed, I doubt not that a man who makes a friend smile at some idiotic remark has better earned his daily bread than the man who has given rise to profound thought, if thought is only to end in thought. âThe world is made by the poet for the dreamerâ was said by someone--I forget who. He might just as well have said, âThe world is made by the butcher for the baker.â It is a very false estimate we should get of the world if we only looked at other people from our own standpoint. It is useless, for instance, to imagine oneâs self in the position of a newsboy from whom I usually buy an evening paper at the corner just outside. He is frightfully ragged. Why his coat, for instance, holds together at all is beyond my comprehension, and his boots are in a similar state of disintegration. Certainly, if it was my lot to stand at that corner earning a penny only out of every twelve papers I sold, and for the sake of earning my bread at all being compelled to stand there for hours in frost, rain or fog, I should quite assuredly be most unhappy. Yet nothing is falser than to imagine that he is unhappy; he has, on the contrary, a âfrolic welcomeâ for everything that comes along, and evidently circumstances which would depress what we may call the comfortable classes have no effect whatever on his spirits. On the other hand, there are things which happen to you and me every day, which we bear without undue complaints, that would be almost insufferable to him. He would certainly revolt at a bath in the morning; and though he would very likely be pleased at the breakfast that followed it, I feel by no means certain that he would not sooner sit on a coal-sack and chaff the nearest policeman, as he does, with his mouth bulging with large crusts. Again, I doubt whether âthe bloke,â which is the name by which he is known in the neighbourhood of his stand, could live through the sort of morning we live through. He would consider it so unbearably dull to have to sit in a room for hour after hour, while London and the humming streets roared outside, and read a book--or, worse, write one. For supposing we endue him for a moment with that sort of veneer of the mind which we call culture, literary taste, artistic taste, or what not, a thing which he does not probably possess at present, even then, should we set him down at âRomeo and Juliet,â let us say, what will be his verdict? Why, that he can see the thing itself every evening, and, perhaps, has acted it, too, poor little devil! and why should he spend his time in reading a pale moonlight translation when the original jostles him? Here at this point, of course, the _literati_ will hold up hands of horror. Do I mean to say, they will ask, that the immortal tragedy I have referred to is to be brought into comparison, even for a jest, with the idylls of the street corner, with the walking out of a man with a maid, a marriage in the registry office, or, perhaps, the omission of that ceremony? Yes, if they will think, I mean all that. For why, if we consider the question more closely, does the tragedy of âRomeo and Julietâ strike us, and rightly, as a masterpiece? and why does the sordid account of âmurder and suicideâ in the daily press strike us as a page to be turned over with a âpoor thing!â shudder, if we are people of discernment, but if we are only refined to be passed over in utter unconsciousness? It is because Shakespeare showed us the terror and the tragedy of one, and we have not the genius to see the terror and the tragedy of the other. Had not Shakespeare been a man of human insight, he could never have written his plays; but if we could see, we should find in life what he found. That he gave it in the form of drama to the world is another matter. That was because Nature--or I prefer to say God--gave a man of this humanity this power of speech as well as the sense of drama. Hundreds, I soberly believe, felt as keenly as Shakespeare felt, but are, so to speak, born dumb; hundreds could write as Shakespeare wrote, could they but feel. It is this conjunction of the two, rare as the transit of Venus, that makes the supreme artist. To return to âthe bloke.â All morning we have given him a translation instead of the original, and the morning over we give him lunch. He will eat largely, because for all the years he has lived it has been his instinct to eat all there was to eat, for fear that there would soon be nothing to eat when he wanted to eat. He will drink in immoderation for the same reason, and grow somnolent. But he is plucked from his slumber to call on someone who bores him, to be polite when he does not want to be polite, and he will return to âdressâ in a collar that hurts him, and to eat a dinner which he does not want. That evening he will be sick, and three days later have a bilious attack. But turn from this gloomy picture to the reality. âThe bloke,â 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 âthe blokeâ 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 âRe-markable Collapse!â 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 âthe bloke.â 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, âA Bad Score on the Colonial Sideâ; 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 âthe blokeâ to move on, and âthe blokeâ says âGarn!â--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 âthe blokeâ 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. âThe blokeâ does not pray--but if he did, he would say, with Browning, âGodâs in His heaven; allâs right with the world.â Exit âthe bloke.â P.S. No, not exit just then. Yesterday only, I was coming round the corner from Davies Street, and caught sight of âthe blokeâ 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 âthe blokeâ 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. âIâm damned dirty, sir,â he said; âtake care of your noo coat. That bloody bus---- Gawd--Iâll talk to Jim--running over me like that.â There was an ambulance near at hand, and I delivered up âthe bloke.â 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 âthe blokeâ 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. 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 blindmanâs-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 Â£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 conventionâs 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 âtalk Frenchâ; 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
{'title': 'The Book of Months by E. F. Benson', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}