E. F. Benson

“ There was nothing there but the rose-trees; there was no one there but Helen.
So the tale of the garden was told, and by the time it was finished dusk had begun to deepen, and cheerful beckoning lights were gleaming from the house. It was time to go in to take up, and with what love and alacrity, the pleasant hour of the present again; for it is not ever good to linger too long over memories, or for however short a time to indulge in regrets, unless those regrets are to be built into the fabric of the present, making it stronger and more courageous. ”

“ There will be nothing of us either, unless you mean that at some future time I am alive because part of me has become perhaps a murderer, and another part a politician, and another a housemaid, for all I know.
The February sun was warm; you might almost call it hot. A little wind pregnant with spring moved through the bushes; the snowdrops, those pale heralds of the triumphant march of the new year, were thick in the grass where we had planted them, Helen and I, last autumn, so that they should give us the earliest news of the returning tide of life. ”

“ We have snatched it from winter; it is our possession.
Yet the colour of the grass, no less than the underlying keenness of the air, savour of the sunless months. It is scarcely green; it has been bleached by the torrid months, and Nature is too wise to let it shine forth in a fresh coat of colour when so soon it will sleep, waiting for the spring. High up in the liquid blue, too, of the sky there is the sparkle of frost, for all the warm strength of the sunlight. It is not summer that floats above our heads, soon to descend earthwards, but the frost and cold. ”

“ And just as the drone of the hive lives immersed in the honey of his flowers and in the garnered stuff that the workers have brought home, so the drone man must continue to take active and continual pleasure in all the delightful things of this world. He must pounce on enjoyment with eager zeal, and glut himself on it till he reels with the stupefaction of pleasure; he must keep himself keen and alert for the smallest humorous or engrossing detail that is within his horizons: it is shameful if he does not go to bed every night tired with his own laughter and enjoyment. ”

“ And gradually, as gradually as the workings of the process of beauty, I began to feel, and not only to know, the name of the room where I sat. It was the nursery.
But Helen was wrong about one thing. She had said that the wind would play to the dancing of the waves all night and all next day, but before I went to bed that wild orchestra of the storm had ceased. Its work was done for us. It had blown the bud of the blossom of life into the house that so longed for it.
It is strange how quickly the events of life become part of one. ”

“ To make Helen and Legs and me say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful Horsfeldii!’ Then we shall look at the fritillary that prospers a yard away.
The eternal romance of it all! To the right-minded there is nothing that is not a fairy-story. Like children, we crowd round the knees of the wonderful teller of it, and say, ‘Is it true? Is it all true?’ And He can’t tell lies. Sometimes, when we have a sort of moral toothache, we sit apart, and sniff. We say that scientifically we have proved there is no God. ”

“ And that has happened to the million dead who have lived and loved, whose limbs have been swift to move, who have drawn rapturous, long breaths of this keen sea-scented air, whose eyes have been bright and mouths eager when they met, lover and beloved. This is all—this ruin of red roses on the grass.
There is nothing in the world more certain{253} than this, and one may as well face it. Helen will die, and I shall die, and one of us will die first. And the other will sometimes see a grave with the grass green over it, and roses triumphant thereon. ”

“ We had gone up to Legs’ room after dinner, and as she talked she went quickly from place to place, now pausing for a moment to look at a photograph, now putting coal on the fire, or drawing aside the curtain to look into the night.
‘Oh, there is the eternal youth of the world,’ she said—‘the song of the winds and the dance of the waves. I think all the souls of the little babies that are born come to land in the blowing from the sea. It is by that that vitality burns higher, and the fruitfulness of the world is renewed. ”

“ Spring herself, the goddess Primavera, was very near to-day, for on thicket and brake and over the flank of the hill-side her trumpeters were blowing their shrill blasts of scarlet. Two days before, the land was sober-coloured; now, wherever you looked, the wonderful anemone, last to flower, stood high with full-blown petals. The movement and stir of the new life was hurrying to its climax. To-morrow, instead of the myriad buds of the cistus and the pale stalks of orchid, the flowers would be unfurled at the final touch of the spring, at the advent of the goddess herself. ”

“ But there, at the back of my mind, are these two transparencies, so to speak—one sunlit, the other stormy—and it is through them that the events of the day are seen by me. They colour—both of them—all I do; but the happy one is the predominant one. They do not neutralize each other; they are both there to their full. But I despair at giving coherently so elusive a picture as they make in my own mind. But, though elusive, it is intensely real, and for the first time I neither can, nor do I desire to, speak to Helen about this thing which is so often in my mind. ”

“ SEPTEMBER THE ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ has indeed been a close bosom friend of the maturing sun, and for the last three days before Legs went back to his crammer in town, he, Helen, and I spent a prostrated existence. Heat that in July invigorates, is utterly intolerable if it occurs at the end of September, just as the crisp winter day, which would be so welcome in January, descending to the earth as it usually does in June, produces merely amazed horror at the weather, and probably a cold. ”

“ From the immediate green foreground slope after slope melted into grey, and from grey to the blue of distance, which fused itself into the tender azure of the sky’s horizon, so that the line between earth and air indistinguishable. It was as empty us the desert, yet one knew that from every inch of it a thousand lives{156} rejoiced in the sun of November. Yes, even the knowledge that there would be but few more of such hours before winter hurled its armoury of squalls on to the earth added, perhaps, to their joy. ”

“ Only this, that the sea which surrounds us on our little rock is not death at all, but life. Just as some day without doubt a wave will sweep us off our rock again, so there is no doubt that once a wave of that sea put us on the rock where you and I now are. If there is a wreck at all, it is a land-wreck, a wreck that puts us on shore. From the great sea of life we have been washed up for a little moment on to our little rock. ”

“ To-night, as Helen and I sit on deck of the steamer that takes us back again to Marseilles, we wonder what gives Greece its inalienable magic. We saw the fading of its shores in the dusk, and though the phosphorescence of the sea was a thing to marvel at, it was no longer the phosphorescence of Greek waters. That little fig-leaf-fingered land has sentiment somehow in its soil; it cannot fail to move anybody. ”

“ From all that—we cannot call it an effort since it is so completely spontaneous on both sides{57}—it is well to be free occasionally, to lie, so to speak, under the pelting rain of life that is ever poured out from the voiceless, eloquent, bright-eyed happiness of Nature, to make no plan, to contemplate no contingency, to drop that sort of fencing rapier that we all wield when we are with our fellow-men, and lie like a log, with one eye open it may be, and be rained upon by the things that live, and are clothed and nourished without toil or spinning. ”

“ But happiness—I but bungle with words over a thing that is obvious to everybody who knows the difference between happiness and pleasure—is a thing quite detached from the present moment, just as the sunlight which floods these downs is not of them. Happiness ever broods on the wing, and swings high{359} above the things of the earth, like some poised eagle, or like the sun itself. It illuminates what it looks on, turning dew to diamond, and striking sapphires into the heart of what has been a grey sea, but it is independent of material concerns ”

“ So the sun set, but on the violet crown of Athens—the hills there, Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes—the light still lingered, and shone like the river of beauty Socrates had told us about, till it faded also from the tops, and above the deep night was starry-kirtled.
Helen is the most delightful person in the world to tell stories to. However lamely you tell them, she is absorbed in them, and never asks about the weak points, as other children do. ”

“ How at one whiff of odour the whole romance of life, its beautiful joys and scarcely less beautiful sorrows, the dust and struggle and the glory of it, rises up, clad not in the grey robes, or standing in the dim light of the past, but living, moving, breathing—part of the past, perhaps, but more truly part of the present. Like a huge wave from the immortal sea of life, cool and green, and speaking of the eternal depths, yet exulting in sunshine and rainbow-hued in spray, all the memories entwined about this house held and enveloped me. Here lived once Dick and Margery, those perfect friends ”

“ Poor clematis! it is sick at heart. Its thin, bare{164} stalk shivers mournfully as this golden afternoon begins to turn a little grey with the chill wind of evening.
Ah, if only he had said he was sorry! If only he had said that he knew it was wrong, but that the flesh was weak! If only he had even contemplated the step, which to some extent undoes the wrong that has been done, I do not think the clematis would have shed a single one of its purple stars. All of us, saints or sinners, do dreadful things, the memory of which is sufficient to make us long to sink into the earth for shame. ”

“ The long herbaceous hedge was black, the lawn was black, Helen’s windows and Legs’ were black.
I went back to the seat I had just left, and lit a cigarette, meaning to go upstairs to bed when I had smoked it. Fifi still lay motionless, though generally any excursion into the garden at any time of day or night sets her scampering. And then, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, for nothing was further from my thoughts, I became aware that, though the physical world was asleep, there was some enormous stir and activity going on in the occult world which surrounds and permeates us. ”

“ So whether we regard life as a pleasant interlude in something else, or whether we regard death—a thing unthinkable to me—as the extinction of consciousness, I cannot believe that he is not a guest who is welcome when he comes. Personally I do not want him to come for a long time, since I am delighted with the world, and it would be most annoying to die now when one is just recovering from influenza, and hopes to go to the Richter concert to-morrow. But whatever one’s belief about the future is, I cannot see that there is an essential horror about death. ”

“ I know well that the material is indestructible, that of life and the death of it is born fresh life, so that we are quite right to say that life cannot be destroyed. But what of the individual rose, what of that one purple star of clematis that twinkled on the end of the stem I hold in my hand? Though it may be transformed, and will be transformed, into a myriad other things, so that by its death it is transfused into a hundred other flowers, and courses through the veins of life for ever, yet it, that individual object, will be seen no more. ”

“ It may have more for us yet, that corner hoop—more, I mean, than that memory of which I have spoken. Joy or sorrow may be so keen, so poignant on some day yet hid behind the veil of the future, when I shall be looking at it, that till the day of my death it will never again be seen by my mortal eye without rousing an immortal and imperishable memory. It is thus, in a manner antimaterialistic, so to speak, that men, material things, are woven into the psychical web of life, so that, almost before the eye has seen them, they have sent the message of their secret significance to the brain. ”

“ Holmes. It is so sad for them—sadder than the lady with the cork foot. Oh, think of it! This triumphant vindication of Helen (which is all wrong, by the way) will last him a long, long time. It has been a campaign, triumphantly concluded, and I should not in the least wonder if he has half a bottle of champagne to-night. And after a time the excitement will die away, fading like a golden sunset, and he will settle down to his ordinary life again, and read the paper in the morning, and go for a little drive in the afternoon, and have tea and toast at the club afterwards. ”

“ There is no myth that grew so close to the heart of things as the story of Pan, for it implies the central fact of all, the one fact that is so indisputably true, that all the perverted ingenuity of man has been unable to split into various creeds about it. For Pan is All, and to see Pan or to hear him playing on his pipes means to have the whole truth of the world and the stars, and Him who, as if by a twisting thumb and finger, set them endlessly spinning through infinite Space, suddenly made manifest. ”

“ The loafer may have been side by side with the life-loving drone all day, at the same parties, at the same games, at the same music, but the one goes to all these things in order to get through the hours without boredom, while the other wishes the hours in{145}finitely multiplied so that he might go to more. The one sucks enjoyment of but a stupefied sort from them; the other catches the iridescent balls and bubbles of joy that are cast like sea-spray over the tides of time, only to throw out double of what he has received. ”