The
Book of Months

By
E. F. Benson

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

The publisher is informed by the Proprietors
of Condy’s 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 moment’s 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 one’s 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 one’s 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, ‘Whare are we doining to-night, Bill?’

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 ‘cloop’ 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, one’s 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 “Book of Months” 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 châlets, 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 May’s 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 ‘talking French.’ 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 ‘talks French,’ 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 ‘talk French’; 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) ‘Usti Icibon?’

(Reassuringly) ‘Mimi molat isto pacher.’

(Reassured) ‘Kaparando guilli. Amatinat skolot.’

I blush to reproduce more. But I long to know if anybody else ‘talks French.’ 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 Slam’s kitten, though the kitten was not really Slam’s 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 didn’t do it properly, and, very kindly showing me how, she had fallen heavily on the ice. As I picked her up, she said:

‘You see what I mean, don’t you? Let me show you again.’

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 don’t wonder—with pitiful mewings, down from the Happy Valley, an ownerless beast that would have touched hearts more hard than Slam’s. She kept it in a cupboard in her room and fed it with cake. This I learned on the second day of the kitten’s imprisonment. That evening it died. I will pass over Slam’s 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 Slam’s nurse, whom I feared.

‘I don’t want a lot of people,’ said Slam. ‘It would be much nicer if we buried her quietly. So when nurse is at dinner I will bring her down in my hat.’

Meantime I had procured a cardboard box, and from Slam’s 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.

‘Up above,’ she said, ‘it is cleaner;’ and, though it was all pretty clean, I assented. ‘Then we can eat our lunch and toboggan down,’ 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.

‘And now I will say my prayers,’ 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 Lord’s 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: ‘and the kitten,’ she added. And I said ‘Amen.’

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:

‘Oh, it is nice!’

FEBRUARY

A quantity of wholly uninteresting things have happened. I have with infinite rackings of thought made £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 one’s self and one’s 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. One’s 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 ‘form’ which characterizes the Oratory, never fails to give me a feeling of ‘uplifting’ which I cannot hope to express. There in the morning has the symbol of that Divine Mystery been laid on the Lord’s Table, and there after the candles have been lit, and the worshipper cleansed by the incense, is again revealed the ‘Salutaris Hostia,’ 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 one’s self ‘questionings.’ 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 week’s time. It is emphatically not one’s 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 world’s 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. ‘The world is made by the poet for the dreamer’ was said by someone—I forget who. He might just as well have said, ‘The world is made by the butcher for the baker.’

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 one’s 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 ‘frolic welcome’ 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 ‘the bloke,’ 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 ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 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 ‘Romeo and Juliet’ strike us, and rightly, as a masterpiece? and why does the sordid account of ‘murder and suicide’ in the daily press strike us as a page to be turned over with a ‘poor thing!’ 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 ‘the bloke.’ 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 ‘dress’ 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. ‘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.

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.

‘Yessir.’

‘Do they happen to be torn?’

A short pause.

‘Yessir—torn in five places.’

‘Well, see what can be done. Have I any more?’

‘No, sir. Cold or hot bath, sir?’

Bath! That was a sitting in a tin pan and lifting teaspoonfuls of water on to one’s spine; acrobatic performances to get wet, towel, huddling on of clothes.

‘Oh, cold! Bring it in half an hour.’

For half an hour I half dozed, half thought of the performance of the night. I carefully considered the question as to whether I had gone mad, and decided—rightly, I believe—that I had not, though other people would say so.

Then after breakfast we went to play golf. Yes, I was right; the anticipation, the unfulfilled certainty was over; already small buds were red on the limes, and yellow on the elm. Spring had come, and we all talked about its delights. But none knew of mine.

Eventually the eighteenth hole was reached, after a game that I should normally consider exciting, since my adversary and I were all square at the seventeenth. But this morning it struck me as colourless. Here, however, his second shot—full with the cleek—was short, and he went into the sandpan guarding the green, across which I had jumped in my outward journey, and walked through on my return. I stopped on the edge of the bunker, for I had warned him he could not be up, having myself played a full shot landing just over it. Upon which this accursed man took his niblick, and amid a shower of sand lay nearly dead.

‘Curious,’ says he.

Meantime I had been examining the sand, and saw there the trace of a bare foot.

‘There’s something much more curious than any shot of yours close by you,’ said I. ‘Look; do you see the trace of a naked foot close by you on the sand?’

He looked.

‘By God,’ he said, ‘let me putt first.’

He missed it. So I had two for the hole and won.

MARCH

I wonder if any of those who perchance read this know of any formula, Christian, pagan, even Christian Scientist, which insures, or has any chance of insuring, decent habit of body or mind during an attack of lumbago. I have been trying my best in all three; that is to say, as a Christian I have tried to be cheerful, to wear a helpful sort of smile, and have said to myself, ‘Think of the early Christian martyrs, the boiling oil, and the lions, and those horrors.’ But myself has said to me, ‘That was for a good cause; besides, they soon died.’ Now, lumbago does not kill anybody, and, as far as I am aware, it is an invention of the devil. Thus Christianity failed to help me.

Then I tried paganism. In other words, I swore. It did not do the slightest good.

Then I tried Christian Science. I said: ‘There is no such thing as pain—ow!—-- Moral mind refuses to recognise the existence of mortal mind. There is nothing material; all material is mortal mind, and there isn’t any. Therefore I have no back, and consequently no small of it. It is all a false claim. Thus, as there isn’t any, it is perfectly ridiculous to think I have a shooting pain there, for there is no such thing as either (i.) the small of my back, (ii.) pain, either there or anywhere else. I will therefore smile, and get up with a firm, brisk movement.’ I did.

Oh, Mrs. Eddy! The false claim was more than usually clamant.

In fact, for two days I have felt myself such a martyr that I am now, happily, beginning to feel that I cannot possibly be a martyr at all. Nobody can conceivably have suffered such agonies as I have been thinking I suffered and survived. All the same——

I was riding down Davies Street on my bicycle two mornings ago, in the very best of health and spirits. Where Grosvenor Street crosses it, a fool of a cabman (though I had rung my bell) drove slowly across my path, and I had to dismount. I exchanged a pleasantry or two with him of a bitingly high-spirited nature, and essayed to get on again. At that moment, so it seemed, I was stabbed in the back, and I heard the cabman say, ‘Comin’ over me like that, and drunk at this hour of the morning’—continuing, you will have seen, our previous conversation. Bad, untrue, unkind as it was, it was the last word, and so is entitled to a certain respect. But next time I see No. 24,304 I will see if I cannot give him lumbago. (This, evidently, is the pagan mood returning.)

Since that moment the joy of life has vanished. It—I cannot write the word again, and I will only remark that it sounds like a second-rate Spanish watering-place—has known my down-sitting and mine uprising, and has smirched my days. I have eaten no meat, I have drunk no wine, I have been incapable of taking part in all social and pleasant affairs. I was told that exercise was good, and went to skate at Niagara, and retired after one stroke with a cold-dewed brow. I was told a Turkish bath was good, and caught a cold in the head on the top of it. I was told not to think about it—this was the Christian Science treatment, more or less—and the effect was that the Spanish watering-place thought the more of me. Only two hours ago, dressing for dinner—I dined alone in my horrid room—I dropped a sovereign on the floor, seriously considered whether it was worth picking up, and decided it was not. At that moment any tramp could have had it. Then by pure chance my servant came in, and I regained it. I was told to take Lithia Varalettes: the only effect, as far as I am aware, is that I am lowered for life. I even went so far as to see a doctor, who asked me whether I had done anything which might have produced a chill. Thank goodness, I had the face to say ‘No.’ In consequence he talked of the functions of certain internal organs; into these regions I did not attempt to follow him.

Now, all that I have written with regard to the second-rate Spanish watering-place is literally true. All the things which I am conscious of enjoying every day, such as reading, food, silly conversation, proper wine, violent physical exertion, cold baths, grew pale or impossible. But looking back even from the middle of it all—for to-night it is, if anything, a little more acute—I begin to see that nothing on the whole matters less than physical pain. Once before in my life, when I was eight years old, I had bad earache, so my family assure me. Of that I can remember nothing whatever, except that in consequence I went to stay near Dartmouth for change of air. But of Dartmouth I remember much. There was an aloe in the garden, and one of its great fibrous leaves projected across the path, and was cut off. This had to be done by a strong gardener with a saw. A leaf cut by a saw! There were also rock pools in the estuary, with strawberry anemones—so we called them—waving in the water; steamers passed, visible through a telescope, that would go straight on, self-contained, unhelped till they reached America. Ruta-muraria, a small mean fern (I cannot even remember hearing its name except then), grew in crevices in the garden wall; it was rare, and began and ended my collection of ferns. That is what remains to me of the earache. Once again I had a tooth out. That was half a crown.

And now I have lumbago, and from analogy I see that a fortnight hence, and a week hence (I hope), and a year hence, I shall remember nothing of it, except that for a few days I stopped indoors mostly, wrote notes of regret, and read a variety of delightful books. ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ I have read; I have quaked with Hyde, and shuddered with Jekyll: I have been down the Sambre canalized; I have been sucked under the fallen tree on the Oise; I have understood why Mr. Crummles deluded himself into thinking the Phenomenon was a phenomenon; I have admired the moral valour of Mrs. Nickleby when she convinced herself about the previous sanity of the gentleman in small-clothes and gray stockings; I have killed the Red Dhole from the Deccan, and have sat (a remarkable feat) with Princess Napraxine in a temperature of over 130° Fahrenheit. But for the lumbago, I should probably have done none of these delightful things. Also I have learned (I shall have to learn it again and again) that the moment is always tolerable. Even this tiny pin-prick of a pain can teach one that. ‘Circumscribe the moment’ as Marcus Aurelius said. You can get along all right for the moment (unless you die, and then the trouble is solved): why think of the moments to come? When they come, deal with them. And I hope that if I ever suffer from carcinomato-cerebrospinal sciatica, I may think of that.

Besides—I must justify my conscience with respect to the doctor—I do not think it proved that my night adventure had anything to do with the lumbago. Thus, it would have been unfair to cast it, like bread on the waters, to a suspicious physician. And even if it had, it was well worth it. I would do it again to-morrow night, if the mood only could come again.

I wonder how the writing and the subsequent publication of any book, the meanest, affects the average author? No doubt the great powers in authorship, so to speak, care as little when another volume is launched as does the Empire at large when another battleship leaves the slips to join its mighty brothers. But for the majority—those of us, in fact, who hope some day (however vainglorious the hope, we all cling to it) to produce a book which may rouse laughter or tears or interest twenty years hence—I imagine that there is scarcely any excitement, depression, exaltation or misgiving that we have ever felt which is comparable to those attendant on the writing and launching of our little paper fleets. And as I have just launched another little paper boat to go and look after its drowned brothers, and the memory of all the emotions attendant on it is consequently keen, it may be of interest, in however small a degree, to others to read what even so uneminent an author as myself experiences in these times.

Birds, perhaps, give one the only simile possible for the first period. For the idea of the book, its scope, its aim, its plot, and, to a certain degree, its characters, all exist, in my case, before I put a word down on paper. When these are complete, we may say that the egg is there. The writing it, to my mind, is equivalent to the hatching only; but the definite production of the egg—of that which contains potential vitality—is over and complete at the moment the writing begins. If there is no potential vitality in it then, there never will be. When I begin to write, I am sitting on my egg.

Now, this first period—here we dismiss the simile of the egg, and take that of disease—lasts for a very ill-defined period. During it the patient is continually conscious of an abnormality of condition. His spirits are very variable: sometimes for days together the appetite will be good (mine always is), and the only symptom of the malady is a slightly increased vividness. Speech is coherent, but rather more fluent than usual; he tends to talk nonsense (this must not be confused with the subsequent wandering). Then, without apparent cause, stages of depression, irritability, and general peevishness ensue: he will decry his favourite pursuits, particularly authorship, and express audibly a desire for a large and settled income in Consols. Shortly before the crisis approaches (i.e., the first dip of the pen in ink) a period of febrile excitement ensues; he will put sudden problems to his nurses as to how A would act given B, C, and D did so-and-so, and, whatever the answers given him, he will certainly take exception to them. This is the period of wandering alluded to above. Both the period of excitement previous to this and the period of depression are marked by a certain listlessness with regard to other pursuits; the patient takes nothing, except his malady, quite seriously, and though he performs the ordinary routine of life with correctness, he performs it somehow subaqueously. Indeed, he is never quite himself from the time the seeds of the malady first attack him.

All these symptoms are temporarily ameliorated when, to go back to our first simile, the egg is laid. For a time the nurses are encouraged to hope that the worst is over. Large quantities of what is known as ‘sermon-paper’ should be given without stint, and special care taken that there should be in every room, where the patient can possibly desire to sit, plenty of black ink and suitable pens. For a day or two he may refuse to go out altogether, or play any game, and here it is a mistake on the part of the nurses to urge him to do so. He may, in fact, be entirely left to himself. Probably these favourable symptoms will last for a week or two (during which the supply of sermon-paper should be renewed), and then a change for the worse comes over the patient. The irritability returns, and with it an attack, more or less severe, of complete idleness and indescribable misgivings. He again expresses a wish for a settled income in Consols, and often goes suddenly to stay with his friends, or, if the disease is not so acute, merely lunches and dines out every day, and seems to fear being left alone. Then the malady becomes spasmodic, the periods of inaction alternate with periods of feverish industry, to which succeeds an attack of apparent coma with regard to everything except the disease itself, which is now confluent and completely encompasses him. A series of absolutely happy days ensue, accompanied by great mental activity and enormous consumption of sermon-paper. As soon as this definitely sets in, the nurses may make themselves quite happy for the time being. All fears of suicide may be considered over, and there is no allusion to Consols. And thus the egg is hatched in a blaze of hypertrophied glory.

It is hatched. That is to say, the MS.—such as it is—is complete, and personally one is completely happy for about a week. Then ensues a very tedious period, which is at times brightened by finding that something is better than one thought, but oftener darkened by finding that something is worse than one thought. In other words, after a week of idleness, I sit laboriously down, and copy out the whole thing from beginning to end. Other patients at this point, I believe, use a typewriter, but personally, on the one occasion when I did so, I found that the corrections were not compassable even in triple-spaced type. So now, when the first MS. is complete, I begin from the beginning, and write the whole story out again. Chapters are often excised, and chapters (more rarely) inserted, since in my first MS. I find that I much more commonly say too much than too little. (Here is an opening for critics to point out how extraordinarily superfluous the first MS. must have been.) This period is the tiresome part of the hatching of the egg. The writing of the first MS., astounding though it may appear, was attended by a certain excitement: whereas the writing of the second is due to the desire, shall we call it? to catch one’s self tripping, to detect, by the painful process of copying, one, perhaps, of the hundred absurdities that one has committed. Yet there is a certain delight even in this, for since one would not set pen to paper at all unless one thought that one had an idea of some kind, it is mildly pleasant even now, when the first excitement is over, to see in cool blood what the idea was, to emphasize what appear to be its decent points, to suppress its bad ones. After that the second MS. goes to the typewriter, and peace again reigns.

Now, during the first writing of the MS. a curious thing has more than once happened to me; that is to say, a character, or a situation, or even the story itself, takes the bit between its teeth, and, as far as I know, bolts. One had meant to do and to say something different, but whether it is that even in the meanest-imagined character one, so to speak, raises the devil, and cannot be held responsible for his subsequent action, or whatever the cause, this phenomenon occurs. In the terms of our first simile, this is the cuckoo’s egg in the hedge-sparrow’s nest. One sits on the thing—writes it, that is—but it is not going to be a hedge-sparrow at all, but something quite different. This has happened to me more than once, in —— and —— (my egotism does not go quite so far as to write the names of these obscure tales), I had definitely meant to give a different outcome. I had meant a character to be different in character, and thus to play another part. But writing I found it was not so. That character would go another way. And did. I followed faint but pursuing.

To resume. The MS. comes back from the typewriter’s, and the sickening part of the work begins. In print, somehow, the degrading stuff looks even more degraded; for print, as Hazlitt said, in more senses than one, had he known it, ‘print settles it.’ What one suspected was rather sketchy and amateur becomes indubitably so. What one thought was somewhat workmanlike appears merely slip-shod carpentering, unplaned, out of line, with screws and nails not driven home. One taps here, one whacks there; one planes down, and finds one has planed too much; one planes down, and finds one has to plane more. One thinks—and this is, perhaps, the worst of all—that A rather resembles one’s dear friend, John Smith, and ruthlessly takes all the stuff out of him, leaving an enfeebled marionette. Then, like a pin-prick to a man on fire, come the inevitable typewriter’s errors, necessitating reference to the MS. Some typewriters omit whole sentences, because they are not certain (no wonder); others rush in where angels fear to tread, with brilliant repartees of a sort undreamed of; others spell a name wrong throughout; others—and they are worse—spell it wrong occasionally. When I have time I will write an article on typewriters. They will not, after that, hold their heads so high.

Then comes the last step. When the typoscript (an awful word) has been corrected, and if necessary another made, and also corrected, the whole thing goes to the publisher, and in course of time come proofs. Proofs are of two kinds—galley proofs and page proofs. Galley proofs are interminable strips of paper which slide off one’s desk, get mixed, and are altogether impossible. Page proofs, though depressing, are manageable, because they come in folded sheets of sixteen pages. Then once again are all weak points glaringly emphasized, the indescribable misgivings return with redoubled vigour, and invariably I long to live the last year, or whatever it may be, over again, in order to have profited by my previous experience and do better. Usually at this stage—perhaps because I am used to it—the ‘idea’ does not seem to me so bad. It is only everything else that is wrong. Yet even then come sanguine moments. Quite suddenly I find myself thinking it is extremely good. How delicate, for instance, is the way in which Y behaves, how subtle and correct is Z’s induction. Back swings the pendulum: over go these unstable ninepins.

There is probably a revise—there may be two—and the bread is cast upon the waters. As the date for publication approaches I feel ill. If I could, I would recall it all. One has felt a certain situation, or a certain character, keenly; was it not enough to have felt it, without throwing it, like early Christians, to the public? They will tear it into shreds, and probably refuse to swallow it.

But just then—when, in my experience, the darkest hour is on one, when one distrusts utterly all one has done, when one is afraid that that which is to one’s self a chiefest joy of life is to everyone else just a mud-pie made by a child in a populous roadway, to be carefully stepped over by three-quarters of the passers-by, to be stepped into by the remaining quarter, who, with a careless cuff to the maker of it, will pass on, remembering it only as they would remember some tiny untowardness in the menu at dinner—then comes quite suddenly the remembrance of an exceeding unexpected joy. A man or a woman, otherwise quite unknown to one, has on the last occasion of this kind thought it worth while to send a line, it may be a postcard only, to say ‘thank you.’ Once this ‘thank you’ arrived to me from New Zealand, and was accompanied by two frozen sheep bred on the reader’s farm. The letter said, ‘Please do not answer this, or you will think I am wanting an autograph.’ Or, again, it may be just a press-cutting from a provincial paper, that shows me that someone whom I have never seen, and probably will never see, has understood something of what made me so happy when I thought of it. And that—unreasonably, perhaps—more than counterbalances the vituperation or the scorn of those who either do not or will not see. For a friend concerns me very much: an enemy, or, if that is too big a word, an acquaintance to whom I am antipathetic, concerns me not at all. He is a negative quantity, and in this life of ours the negative quantities do not matter, for the man who has one friend is infinitely better off than the man who has no enemies and a million acquaintances.

Acquaintances! They are the bane and the absurdity of life, and especially of ordinary London life. How often has one heard it said, and, indeed, said one’s self, ‘Such a bore! I’ve got to go and call on So-and-so.’ For if one finds it a burden to go and talk to anybody, for social reasons, it shows a very unbecoming conceit if one imagines that one’s hostess will fail to find it a bore too. The custom, for instance, of calling after one has dined at a house is a very sensible and pleasant one, but it presumes that you have been dining with a friend. In this case the call will not bore you. But if the call bores you, it is probable that the dinner bored you too, in which case, unless you dined there for the sake of being fed gratis, why did you dine there at all? Again, a step further, how often have you exclaimed, ‘What a bore! I’ve got to dine with —— to-night.’ And if you say that, you have no business to eat ——’s cutlet.

Of course, there is another side to the question—for questions with only one side to them have ceased to be questions at all—and that is, that at any such house you may meet a friend, or you may meet someone who will eventually become a friend. Then, I grant, it were worth while trudging there a hundred miles on foot, for from pole to pole, if you search the earth, you will find nothing better than a friend. How many have you? I have nine, and consider myself most fortunate. Or, again, you may find the very fact of meeting a certain number of people, though they are the barest acquaintances, stimulating, just as there are certain plants which thrive better with others of their species than alone. That, again, is a good reason: only when social etiquette demands a call of you, do not say, ‘What a bore!’ You have received a benefit: pay the current coin for it and don’t grumble.

Now, this herding together of human beings with wealth and leisure into London for several months every year—there to meet their friends, of course, but also a whole host of people who will never, and can never, be more than acquaintances—is a very curious modern phenomenon. London—in this sense of the word—was born not so many decades ago, and since then has grown, and is growing, in a manner perfectly amazing. There was a time, say eighty years ago, when London in this sense practically did not exist; the ‘season’ was enjoyed by those who now go to London in a dozen country towns, to which the rank and fashion of the country flocked, and there made gay on their native pavements. And, by all accounts, they did make gay. Then, by degrees, this remarkable monster of London began growing. People of leisure—or so I take it—began to weary of that priceless benefit, and in a couple of generations have turned themselves into perfect galley-slaves in the barque which they term, some of them mistakenly, ‘Pleasure.’ Means of travel got easier, quicker, and cheaper; more families every year, who had no business, either political or of money-making, took to going to London, where they found twenty theatres instead of one, a million people to move among instead of a thousand. Intimacies, it is true, were less common there than in the friendly and less populous streets of their county town, but, instead, they might in the streets or at the houses of their acquaintances behold, in propriâ personâ, the man or woman with whose name at the moment the world was ringing; or a new play claimed their attention and provided an easy subject of conversation—for conversation, unless they were people of brains, and many excellent folk are not, began, perhaps, to wear a little thin in the sixth week of their season at York or Winchester. But it would be impossible to be in London in the autumn or winter, during the months of shooting and hunting, and so, by common consent, the London season—a unique fact—was fixed for the months May, June, and July—a time when air in town is scarce, and suns are sultry, but a time in the country when Nature holds high festival, and all who have eyes to see and ears to hear are equally honoured at her banquet. But—and this could only happen in the Anglo-Saxon race, and it is symptomatic of the strength, and possibly, in years to come, of its weakness—Sport said the final word. Half-fledged pheasants are not shootable, and foxes, that strange breed, which would have been exterminated long ago were it not for the ordinance that they shall be killed in one way only, were busy with the propagation of their species. And thus, though Nature spreads her feast, but sits alone at her empty board, she still has the last compelling word on the subject.

In fact, during the last half-dozen decades a new feverish and nervous disease has spread over England in a terrifying manner. We may call it Turbamania, or the passion for crowds, and, like the influenza, it attacks the upper classes more, it would appear, than the lower. No cure for it has yet been found, and it has not received, as a specific disease, the attention it deserves. This is curious: for in this inquisitive age, though it was a disease that only manifested itself in, let us say, slight redness of the little finger, and was perfectly harmless, we should probably by this time be possessed of a hospital for treatment of the cases, and dozens of savants squinting themselves purblind in the hope of discovering its bacillus. Many daily, and especially weekly, papers have columns devoted to its symptoms, though they apparently do not know that they are speaking of it. But whenever I see that the Marquis of —— entertained the following distinguished company to dinner, I recognise Turbamania. For whom (except the sufferers from this distressing malady) can such an announcement concern? Not the diners, surely, for they were aware of it before. Nor, as far as I can see, those who were not asked, for the simple reason that they were not asked. Or who (except Turbamaniacs) care to hear how Lady —— was dressed? She herself, those who saw her, or those who did not see her? For the life of me I cannot tell. Yet how great must be the demand for such information, if we consider in what enormous quantities it is supplied! It must be read and looked for by thousands who do not know Lady —— by sight. Her mother, her sister, her daughter perhaps, if in India, might have gentle emotions raised by the knowledge of how she was dressed. But who else?

The theme is not worth consideration, except from my own standpoint, my own private view of it, which at this moment occupies me enormously. Six months ago I decided to leave London, that most jealous of all mistresses, who exacts from us not merely our conscious thoughts, but pervades us in a way that no Cleopatra ever did yet. To anyone who has not known London the idea is unintelligible; to anyone who has, all explanations fall short of what he knows.

Think of it! Five million people, awake or asleep, round one—five million, each of whom is as important to himself as I to me, stealing about like thoughts in the brain of this busy city, intent, alert, as are no other five million people in the world. My God! how I love the sense of it! how each street is to me a room, a passage, in a great house to which I have but lately succeeded, and is crammed with treasures, some few of which I know by sight, but of which as yet I do not know the thousandth part. What are they? Men and women, that is all; and is that not enough?

What is it? What is it, I vainly ask myself, that stirs me so? Me, who know unconsciously the drone of the four-wheeler as it passes up this huge beating artery of life, and, without distraction of thought, can distinguish it from the quick cloop-cloop of the hansom, and can recognise the boom of the omnibus, and divine the meaning of a hundred noises in the street without raising my eyes or losing the thread of what I am doing. Life, jostling, vulgar, crowded, commonplace (God forgive me!) life. Oh, how excellent! I do not look at the placards of the latest news; I look at the seedy man who carries them about like a plaster on his usually weak chest. How can I convey it all? The wet asphalt of the roadway, the streaked mud of the roadway, the smell of the Twopenny Tube, the reek from the restaurant next door, the reprints of Cosway in the shop-window adjoining, my own door with a circling lock, which is always upside down to my key. What does it all mean to the person who does not know what it means? and what can that which I say mean to the person who does know?

Yet, drunk as I am with crowds (here indeed is Turbamania), I propose to-morrow to go forth to a house in a sleepy county town, where no one is ever in a hurry, though many have the impression that they are, and there are oiled wheels of existence continually gently turning, which, as far as I know at present, find no particular grist, instead of these grating, roaring, spinning fly-wheels of the world. There is a hotel bus there, and no hansoms; no vomiting of crowds from embowelled stations, no—no anything, as it seems to me this moment, except—and this is in the main the reason for which I go—there is as much time there as in London (all the time there is, in fact), and less to do in it. I want, in fact, to arrive at a greater simplicity of life than seems to me possible in London, to get into what I believe to be more normal and healthy conditions, instead of living an existence which, however delightful and absorbing, is yet slightly feverish. I want to get out of the habit of thinking of the next delightful thing I am going to do in the course of the one which I am doing, and so largely missing its point—not to be in a hurry, not to clutch so much at pleasures.

Also, in spite of my passion for crowds, I have desired all this last year, with a haunting intensity which I cannot hope to convey, to watch the bursting of the spring, to see it mix into the great triumph of the summer, to follow step by step the fruition of the sun, and, to round the perfect circle, see the accomplished and completed year fall to sleep again in the arms of winter—the year which, since the beginning of time, has been waiting among the crowds of the uncounted centuries for its turn to give to the sons of men sweet and bitter, ecstasy, and life and death, as God has ordained.

APRIL

I have been here nearly a month without spending a single night away—that in itself is a sign of improvement, for I suppose (to my shame I own it) that it must be years since I have slept thirty consecutive nights in the same bed. And what I believe is a greater sign of improvement is that I have not wanted to go away, and I do not want to go away. I like these level, uneventful days: these mornings of work, followed by a few hours of out-of-doors, and in the evening ‘the face of a friend,’ in this house or another. How dull I should have thought it, not long ago; how antipodal to dull I find it!

I said ‘uneventful’ just now—that was a mistake. I have been through fiery trials, in the shape of a cook, who could not only not cook decently, but could not cook at all. In any case, she didn’t, and I have eaten raw flesh on the altar of rusticity. Then there was a personage who represented herself as a charwoman. Though I cannot say she was a housebreaker, she was certainly nearer that than anything else; for though she did not actually break the house, she broke everything inside it. She began ‘cleaning,’ as she called it, before it was yet day, and till nightfall the house was resonant with fracture. When there was nothing left to break, she upset her washpail over anything that came handy, brocade for choice. She upset, also, permanganate of potash, with which I was staining a floor, over a green carpet, and one evening I found her eating asparagus (my asparagus, too!) in the scullery. Thereupon I said ‘Board-wages,’ and it is my belief that she simply added board-wages to her ordinary diet, which she ate at my expense. Otherwise, there is no possible way of accounting for the fact that a sirloin of beef, which had come in in the morning—— Enough! She is gone.

Stevenson recommends weeding and cacao-seed planting as a suitable pursuit for anyone who thinks he can make his living out of writing ‘measly yarns.’ But now I have one advantage over that divine author: I know a far better employment. It is to paint floors with permanganate of potash (otherwise known as Condy’s fluid; but you can get much more of it for your money, though it is cheap anyhow, if you buy it in the raw). For a shilling you get enough to stain all the floors in your house (unless you live in an exceptionally large one) the most beautiful brown. The very process reminds one of the scene of the powder-mixing in ‘Jekyll and Hyde.’ It is laid on dark purple; before your eyes it changes to a livid angry green, and while yet it is wet it becomes a dark brown. You lay it on with a large paste-brush, and feel you are saving money. Incidentally you get a quantity on to your hands, and it is apparently indelible. Then you rub it with beeswax, and your deal floor becomes positively ancestral. A few Persian rugs on the top bring you back from a villa to the gorgeous East.

But even before I stained the floors I bought seeds, and planted sweet-peas and nasturtiums broadcast, also (these in seedlings) Jackmanni,[A] and tropæolum and tobacco-plant, and two Crimson Ramblers. Then, on a day to be marked with red in the annals of scarification, I took a trowel and a pocket-knife, and went into the highways and hedges to cut standards for rose-trees. But I took no gloves. Hinc illæ lacrimæ. Anyhow, I cut seven standards. This is the way not to do it.

[A] Purple clematis.

I started cheerfully along an unfrequented lane. Larks hovered trilling: spring was bursting in numberless buds, and the green mist of leaves hung round the hedgerows. Before long I saw in the hedge by which I went a suitable standard. It was rather inaccessible, but the lust of the gardener burned in me, and I took a sort of header into the hedge. A shoot from the coveted standard playfully retained my cap, another took one arm in keeping, a third gently fixed itself to my left hand. That had to be very carefully disengaged, since the thorns were encompassing it, and in disengaging it I dropped the trowel. An incautious recovery of the trowel drew the first blood. Then I began.

It is necessary in cutting a standard to get a piece of real root. This particular standard, however, seemed to have no particular roots. It went on and on below ground without object, so far as I could judge; infirm of purpose, it could not begin. When it did begin, it was already mixed up with a bramble, the thorns of which were set on the parent stem on a perfectly different principle, and I did not want the bramble. But, with a totally undeserved popularity on my part, the bramble wanted me. It got me—in pieces which I hope were no use to it; and I began to see that, under certain circumstances and to a certain extent, as Mr. Gladstone might have said, gloves were, if not necessary to human life, at any rate a protective agent against possibly fatal hæmorrhage. Just then the root began.

I destroyed the bramble, root and branch; I destroyed a hazel (branch), and I destroyed the standard (root). That was all at present.

Clearly this would not do: I was as far from standards as ever, but I was bleeding like a pig. So I went home, got some gloves, and became successful. But to be successful in a tale of adventure is to become dull, and with a view to avoiding this as much as is possible, short of not writing at all, I will merely say that I cut seven standards on that divine afternoon, and—but that I can’t sing—went home singing.

The cat next door, so it appeared, had observed the planting of the Jackmanni with a disapproving eye, and even as I went into the garden with my seven standards (like a Roman Emperor) I saw a stealthy form moving slowly away from the corner where I had put one of them. Now, I know something about cats, though nothing, it appears, about standards, and, without the least hurry, I walked into the garden and said ‘Poor puss,’ and saw, out of the corner of my eye (I dared not look honestly round for fear ‘Poor puss’ should see), that my Jackmanni was entirely disinterred, and a scurry of freshly-dug earth lay round it. There were therefore two courses open to me: either the direct, which lay in taking the cat, which (with the shallow diplomacy of its species) had advanced towards me, straight to the disinterred Jackmanni and there slapping it, or the subtle course. I chose the subtle. The cat was a knave—I knew that perfectly well—I chose to be the knave set to catch it. So I said ‘Poor puss’ again, and went to the uprooted Jackmanni and planted it again in the sight of ‘Poor puss.’ Then I went slowly indoors, a very Bismarck. Once arrived inside, I flew to the lumber-room, and with feverish hands unearthed a large garden squirt, and, filling it with cold water (I wish it had been iced), flew to what we may call the wing of the house—it consists merely of a bootroom, which commands, strategically speaking, the Jackmanni. The window was open, and with great caution I advanced to it and looked out. Already, once more that very stupid knave of a cat was busy in the bed. I took careful aim, and the cold water drenched the knave. I will teach it—at least, I think I have taught it—that I do not plant Jackmanni merely to give it a few moments’ senseless amusement. Besides, to-morrow I shall have a fox-terrier; so the garden squirt was the kindest sort of cruelty.

I am afraid that, in talking thus vaguely of ‘the house’ and ‘the garden,’ the reader may have formed a totally erroneous impression of scale, and I must inform him at once that ‘the house’ is the kind of house which is called The Cedars, because, apparently, it has one withered furze-bush in the garden. It is semi-detached, stands on the outskirts of the town, and is of an external appearance which is better forgotten. Inside, however, the rooms are good, high and airy, and, anyhow, it suits me. There is a small strip of garden in front, in which at present I take no interest, and a square of garden behind measuring some sixty or seventy feet by thirty, encompassed by a wall of old and very large brick. A strip of border, sown from end to end with sweet-peas, runs up one side. At the far end is a small raised terrace of grass, on which grow an apple-tree and a plum-tree, by which I have planted the Crimson Ramblers. The seven standards, to be budded in June, stand in a formal row below the terrace, and parallel to the border of sweet-peas stand half a dozen tubs, in which are sown nasturtiums of the large climbing kind. This leaves a space of grass, twenty feet by forty, and on this is being now erected ‘the shelter,’ a wooden room with trellis on two sides, match-boarding on one, and entirely open on the other. Felt will be laid down over the grass, and over the felt rugs. There will be a couple of basket-chairs there, an old French mattress covered with rugs, a writing-table, and a small dining-table, with four chairs. There I propose to live as soon as the summer comes. Over one side the nasturtiums in the tubs will trail their green and ruddy arms, and I shall look towards the seven standards and the Scarlet Ramblers. In the evening an Arab lamp with electric light, brought on a long cord from the house, will illuminate it.

The very planning of ‘the shelter’ was an absorbing joy; absorbing, too, is it to see it rise, smelling clean of freshly-chiselled wood. Then it will be painted green, and ready for habitation. In front of it, towards the terrace, will stand a sundial, which will not get, as far as I can see, any sun at all, since the stately shelter will entirely shade it. However, I dare say it will do better in the shade, like lilies of the valley. Besides, one never uses a sundial in order to tell the time.

I often wonder how large an area of house and garden it is possible to get really fond of. The fact of broad acres and limitless corridors may be, and often is, delightful to the possessor, especially if they are of long-standing possession; but to be fond of a place in the way that I mean implies to be intimate with every square inch of it. Your own niche, your own particular angulus terræ, must, I think, be small; the great reception-rooms, the huge lawns, are delightful to have, but you will often find the owner of such choosing a small room for himself to work in and live in, and making perfect, according to his own taste, some sequestered angle of his garden, shut out from vastness, and brought within the scope of his invention. The great lawns and shrubberies he may plan and take pleasure in, but he will not be fond of them with the personal affection he feels for his own room, his own garden corner. And it is the personal aroma, the definite impress of an individual taste on rooms and gardens, that makes them alive with their own individual entity: they are parasitic, like mistletoe, drawing their life from a parent stem. The large rooms, the rows of marbles, the acres of signed canvas, are beautiful and wonderful things; but no one man can appropriate them and fashion them to himself, or himself to them, for they are too large, and are the setting not for one person, but for the brilliant crowd. But his own ‘den,’ where he has the books he wants, the chair he likes, the few pictures he loves, it is there that he is chez lui—at home. That is the good part; to have the other is enviable, no doubt, but one does not envy it with the sense of need. Of course, no two people may have the same idea of a chez lui; and it is always with a certain anxiety that one awaits the arrival of a friend who has not seen one’s own. He may easily not like it at all (as I have said, the appearance of the house outside is among the things to be forgotten), and if he does not, it is part of me he does not like. But it takes all sorts to make a world; if it were not so, the world would be infinitely less entertaining than it is and infinitely less lovable.

Almost exactly opposite my windows is an old graveyard, the stones in which are for the most part mossed and gray. A gravel path winds in and out of the sleeping-places of men long dead, and round it stand a half-dozen of fine elms. It borders on the road, and is separated from it by only a low paling. And looking out of my window this morning, I saw here one of those very simple little common things that give the lie to cynics. It was a fine sunshiny morning and the road was populous, and among others there came down it two big, strapping privates out of the regiment that is stationed here, all trappings and scarlet, while between them, with a hand in the arm of each, walked a little old lady dressed in black. Each of the two men carried a cross of white flowers, and they walked very slowly, hanging on their steps, and suiting their pace to the woman. All three passed in at the cemetery gate, and went across the grass to a tomb which lay underneath the elms, and had an old weatherworn stone to mark it. On it the two soldiers laid down their crosses, and took off their forage-caps, and all three knelt side by side for a couple of minutes, it may be, at the foot of the grave, close by the road. Then they rose, and the old lady kissed her tall sons very tenderly, and stood with them there a minute more, a hand clasped by each, while they talked together, I suppose of the dead. Then they passed out of the cemetery gate again, and, for aught I know, out of my life. But a little later I went across the road, and to the grave where the crosses of lilies lay. The stone, as I had seen, was of old standing, and I read that it was in memory of a man who had died in the year 1880, on April 17, so that to-day was the twenty-second anniversary of his death. Two days afterwards I happened to ask the Colonel of that regiment whether there were two privates of a certain name among the men.

‘Yes,’ said he, ‘excellent steady fellows; they look after their old mother, who lives here.’

So the reconstruction was simple enough. The father must have died while the two sons were still boys of five or six; yet on the anniversary of his death, so it seems, they still go to the grave with their mother, quite simply and naturally, and say a prayer there with her. The grass, too, on the grave itself was, I noticed, kept short and carefully tended, so I suppose they go there not infrequently. I think the man who lies there must have been a good husband. God keep all our memories as green in loving hearts!

Meantime April is here, and it is good to be in England, for in no other country that I have ever seen is the rush of colour more jubilant. Flowers you may get in plenty on the Grecian hills when ‘blossom by blossom the spring begins,’ but nowhere do you get such green as that in which here April hangs the trees and hedgerows. Star-like the pink petalled daisies shine in the grass of the water-meadows, and soon the yellow shower of buttercups will make Danaë of the earth. In lonely places the daffodils dance together for the joy of their renewed life, and the warm wind shakes the snow of almond and apple-blossom on to the thick-bladed turf. Morning by morning fresh spears of living stuff have pierced the earth, rising upwards in obedience to the great law that moves all life, to look on the kingdom of the sun; and every day the sap of growth hums and tingles to the end of twig and tree, bursting forth through pink-sheathed bud into stars and crescents of leaf and blossom. On the great downs the grass of last year already shows gray and withered by the newness of the excellent emerald, soon to be wrought with tapestries of thyme, where the bee scrambles heavy-legged with the pollen of its fragrant labour, and the chimes of the harebells, to which, so the legend of the countryside has it, the fairies dance, leaving a deeper green where their feet have trod.

Brimful from bank to grassy bank the chalk-streams drawn from the cool deep brain of the downs hurry steadfastly through the meadows, setting the reeds quivering and jerking. Here their courses lie over beds of white chalk and gravel, each pebble shining lucently, jewel-like; here the water-weeds, growing thickly from bank to bank, are combed and waved by the passage of the water; here the stream is set on a more industrious and earnest purpose, as it twirls itself together in the bricked and narrowed passage that leads to the melodious thunder of a mill, from which, having accomplished its work without any loss or fatigue, it emerges in a soda-water of bubble from the dripping sides of the sluice and the mist of its own outpouring. There in the pool below lie its great mysterious citizens, the aldermen of the river, for whom on many days I shall, with my heart in my mouth, cast flies upon the water. Think, if I should catch the Lord Mayor himself—an eight-pounder at least, so the miller tells me, who has broken as many lines, it appears, as there are bubbles in the stream, or heads of racing thistledown in a windy meadow. And if, as is highly probable, the lord of the stream defends his own, and will put such slight wisdom into the heads of his fish that not even the least cautious stripling among them is lured by me, yet he cannot wean me from that fond hope that this cast or this will meet its reward, or when evening comes, and the creel is still unburdened, take away from me the benefit of those waterside hours, the combing of the water-weeds, the translucency of sun-smitten ripples, the infinite refreshment of companionship with things that are quiet and alive. Nor at the end of the day will my machinations against his citizens debar me from becoming for a moment one of them, and dividing the frothy waters of his deepest pool.

MAY

May has come in with gleams of sunshine and gusty fits of tears: half the time that one is out-of-doors, one is being soaked; the other half, being dried by the sun and the boisterousness of west wind. The heavens, indeed, are like some wayward woman, scolding and stormy, then suddenly showing the divinest tenderness. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ say the sun and the west wind. ‘I only wet you for fun. Oh, don’t go indoors and change; I will make you quite dry in a minute.’

But for as long as I live, I think, every May that comes round in the circle of months will be to me, not the May of the year whose course is now running, but the May of three years ago. So, too, when we come to June, you will find the June of two years ago. For to me now, and to me always, as I think, May will mean the things that happened then, and June will mean the things that happened thirteen months later. I will tell you that story. It concerns three people only, and two of them are dead.

Dick Alington and I were very old friends: we had been at school together, and his father’s house was next to ours in the country, the woods belonging to each running contiguous, separated only by the park paling. In consequence, from our frequent passages the one to the other, a beaten track lay through the woods in a bee-line from house to house, and the paling at the particular point where the bee-line crossed it, was, from the frequent scrambling over it, broken and splintered, till after the lapse of some years it was no more than a stile, that could be walked over without any scrambling at all, and the path was known as the ‘boys’ path.’ We had remarkably kindred tastes, because we both of us liked practically everything except parsnips and being indoors, even down to London fogs, when we used to have games of hide-and-seek in Berkeley Square—where we also both lived—which for sheer mysterious excitement beat any pursuit in which I have ever been engaged, either before or since. The game itself is one of the utmost simplicity. I stood in the porch of either house while Dick was given ten seconds’ law. He had then, without leaving Berkeley Square, to remain uncaught for five minutes, while I pursued him blindly in the fog. We were not allowed to run nor to hide, but only to walk about the square, and we were properly dressed with tall hats and gloves, so that in case of the fog clearing rapidly we should appear respectable. Of course, for the whole of that five minutes we were both utterly lost, and the hider was usually caught by walking straight into the seeker. Hence the excitement: the pursued guiltily sneaked aside from every figure that loomed through the fog, the pursuer eagerly peered at such, to vanish precipitately again if this was not his quarry, to merely annex it if it was. At the end of the five minutes, if the pursued was yet uncaught, both returned—if they could find it—to the house from which they set out, and pursued and pursuer changed rôles.

I have not, indeed, yet heard of the employment with which we did not amuse ourselves, and we ranged from birds’ eggs to carpentering, from chess to squash-rackets, from football to the writing of Tennysonian lyrics, with equal fervour. We also revived the pentathlon as follows: Dick won the toss and said ‘Golf,’ and I retorted with ‘Tennis.’ He then chose the hundred yards and I croquet. The odd event was, of course, selected by the winner of the toss. Two games were barred, namely, single wicket at cricket, because we neither could ever get the other out, and long-jump, because Dick could jump just about twice as far as I. The whole pentathlon had to be decided on one day, so that staying powers counted for something.

Then a stormy day would come, too bad for man or beast to be abroad in, and we had pentathlons of the intellect, playing chess, draughts, backgammon, the poetry-game, and Halma in feverish succession. Here, too, games at cards were barred, because of Dick’s strange inability to grasp the hang of any card-game whatever. He merely fell asleep over them, so that made it quits in the matter of the long-jump; in fact, the balance was in my favour, since there is only one long-jump, but there are many games of cards, and I could have named all the events of which I had the call from among them.

So from school we passed out into life. Dick went into the army, and I took up as a profession the work on which I am at this moment engaged. We had many mutual friends, and there never came, as long as Dick was alive, any break in our intimacy; nor, until a certain day, did we either of us, as far as we were aware, grow any older. The pentathlons continued with unabated fervour, and I should be ashamed to say now how old we both were when we last played hide-and-seek in Berkeley Square. It would appear hardly credible to any serious and right-minded person, while those who did believe it would be filled with contempt for us; and, as it is bad to be contemptuous, I will not mention the ages.

Now, there had always been in our lives a third person, a girl rather younger than either of us, a neighbour both in town and country and a distant cousin of Dick’s. For years Dick and I had liked Margery, but had necessarily despised her because she was a girl. Then there succeeded years when we had begun to be men, not boys, and Margery not a girl, but a woman. The contempt ceased (that was so kind of us), and we three formed what I may call an alliance of laughter. Margery was always present at the pentathlons, acted as umpire in case of dispute, and was even allowed to join in them herself. Then quite suddenly I became aware that I had fallen in love with her. And it was in this manner I knew it:

It was at the conclusion of the golf item in the pentathlon, and on the eighteenth green. Dick had holed out his last putt and won from me. He had also won from Margery, and Margery had a long putt of ten yards to halve with me. She looked at it for some time. She was standing with her back to the sun, so that her brown hair was flushed and gilded with it; her eyes, very blue and vivid with thought, were intent on the line to the hole, her mouth was a little drooped, and the white line of her teeth showed below her lip.

Suddenly she said, ‘Yes, I see,’ and putted.

The ball travelled smoothly along the turf, and she threw her arms wide.

‘It’s going in,’ she cried. ‘What a darling!’ and as the ball dropped into the hole she looked up at me. Then something caught in my breath, and it was no longer the Margery that I knew that stood there, but She. She who was completion and perfection—woman to me a man.

For a time the old intimacy of the alliance of laughter went on externally, I suppose, as before. I think we laughed no less. We contested as many pentathlons. We made plans for every day of Dick’s leave, and usually abandoned them for subsequent improvisations. Then, not more than a week afterwards, there came a day when Margery had to go to town, and Dick and I were left alone. She was coming back in the evening, and we were to go to the station to meet her, have tea there, and ride our bicycles back over the ridge of Ashdown Forest, down home in time to be exceedingly late for dinner.

The afternoon was very hot and sultry, and Dick and I abandoned the game at tennis we had begun, for we were both slack and heavy-handed, and strolled through the woods up the ‘boys’ path’ for the coolness and shelter of the beech-trees. The ground rises rapidly near the broken paling, and, finding a suitable bed of bracken, we lay down and smoked, looking out from cover over the great ridge of gorse and heather that stretched below us. The air was full of the innumerable murmurs of a hot day, and a warm heathery smell hung idly on the air. Near at hand was a flaming bank of gorse, and as we lay there, far more silent than our wont, we could hear the popping of the ripened seeds. The birds, too, were very silent in the bushes; only the grasshopper chirped unweariedly in the grass. Dick, I remember, was cleaning his pipe with yellow grass-stems, his straw hat tilted over his eyes. I, though lying there, was in reality waiting for the train at Victoria, No. 6 Platform. It started in five minutes, and had two hours’ run before it. Then Dick sat up.

‘Look here,’ he said: ‘I’ve something to tell you. There’s no doubt about it—I’ve fallen in love.’

I think I knew, almost before he spoke, what he would say; certainly before he spoke again I knew what was coming.

‘Yes, Margery,’ he went on: ‘my God! I have fallen in love.’

He turned his brown eyes suddenly from the hot reeling landscape in front to me.

‘Why, Jack,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter? You look queer, somehow.’

‘Dick, are you—are you sure?’ I asked.

‘That you look queer?’

‘No—that you have fallen in love with Margery?’

‘Sure? You’ll be sure enough when you do the same. There’s no mistake about it, I can tell you. Why, Margery is the whole point of the pentathlons now.’

‘She has been so to me for the last week,’ said I.

Dick said nothing for a minute. Then, below his breath, ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘That you and I are in the same boat,’ I said.

‘How long have you known this?’ he asked.

‘A week yesterday.’

‘And you didn’t tell me.’

‘No; I couldn’t. It has been too wonderful to speak of. I’m made like that. I should have told you, though, before long.’

‘Have you spoken to Margery?’ he asked. ‘No, of course you haven’t.’

‘No; I haven’t spoken to anybody.’

Dick got up.

‘Come away,’ he said. ‘I don’t like this place. And what are we to do?’

I looked at my watch.

‘Start for Braceton at once,’ I said, ‘or the train will be in before we get there.’

Dick put his arm in mine.

‘I say, Jack,’ he said, ‘whatever happens, we’ll behave decently, won’t we?’

‘Yes, probably,’ said I.

‘That’s all right, then. We must talk this over to-night. It must simmer a bit before we can get used to it. Don’t let us say another word about it now.’

So we rode off through the heat to Braceton, found the train already in, and Margery waiting for us on the platform, looking, for all the oppressive stagnation of the day, like some nymph of Grecian waterways. And Dick and I looked thirstily on her, but feared to meet each other’s eye, for life and love were in the balance, and we were friends.

That evening, when the others had gone to bed, we sat on in the chairs that had been taken for coolness out of the smoking-room on to the lawn. The odour of the hot summer night hung heavily, and nothing stirred in the windless air, except that from time to time a faint ghost of a tired breeze whispered from the bed of tobacco-plant, and brought with it a waft of the thick scent.

The sky had grown overcast, and from a bank of cloud which rose slowly in the west the fires of lightning flickered, and a drone of distant thunder answered. In the rooms downstairs the lights were already put out, but the bedrooms above showed illuminated squares of blind. Nearly opposite us was Margery’s room, and now and then her shadow crossed it. Then that light was put out, and presently afterwards we heard the scream of the blind updrawn, and at the open window through the darkness her white figure glimmered dimly.

We could neither of us move nor speak, and in the silence I remember hearing the creak of Dick’s shirt grow more rapid as his breathing quickened. Then, in a bush close at hand, a nightingale suddenly burst into bubbling song—no lament, as the Greeks thought it, but the lyric passion of mating-time, when the stir of love goes through the world, and the lion seeks the lioness, and the Libyan hills re-echo to the roaring of his irresistible need; when the feathered and bright-eyed birds lie breast to breast in their swaying habitations; when the man seeks the woman, and cannot rest till he has found her.

Then a flash of lightning, somewhat more vivid, lit up for a moment the lawn and the house, and she must have seen us there, for from her window came a little stifled exclamation, and before the thunder answered she was gone.

‘The storm is coming up,’ said Dick. ‘Let’s go indoors, and talk there. Besides, I’m as dry as dust, and I want a drink. We’ll go upstairs; all the lights are out down here.’

Our rooms were next each other, communicating by a door, and, drawing our chairs up to the window for coolness, we sat down.

‘Somehow or other we’ve got to settle it now,’ said he—‘settle it, that is, as far as we are able.’

How long we talked I do not know, but before we had finished we had to shut the window, for the storm came nearer, and burst round us in sheets of heavy rain and violet fires of lightning. Then it passed, and still we sat there, till at the end the moon came out, and rode high in a clean-washed heaven, with the stars clustering round her like swarming bees, while to the east the sky grew dove-coloured with the first hint of dawn. At last I rose.

‘It remains, then, just to toss,’ said I, and spun a coin.

‘Heads!’ said he.

‘It is. You speak to Margery first, then,’ I said.

He got up too, irresolute, and we looked at each other gravely, rivals in that which makes life sweet, but friends. And that makes life sweet, too.

‘And whatever happens, Jack,’ he said rather huskily, ‘we will do our very utmost not to let this stand between us, and to keep all knowledge of it from her.’

‘Yes, whatever happens,’ said I. ‘Time to go to bed, Dick. Good-night.’

I went into my room, closing the door of communication; but before I was half undressed it opened, and Dick came in.

‘One thing more,’ he said: ‘we didn’t settle when.’

‘That must be left to you,’ said I; ‘but oh, Dick, for God’s sake let it be soon! Surely it had better be soon.’

His face lit up with the unimaginable light of love.

‘Yes; the sooner the better,’ he said.

I slept long and late that night, from the mere exhaustion, I suppose, of thought and suspense; did no more than turn and sleep again, when I was called; and woke finally to find it was after ten, and the calmness of the promise in the dawn had been fulfilled by a perfect day of unclouded blue. I went through into Dick’s room, but he had already dressed and gone down, and even as I passed the window I saw him and Margery come from the conservatory and out on to the lawn, surrounded, as was her wont, by a wave of dogs. But this morning it seemed that Dick had no word for any of them; and thus they passed out of sight behind the bushes. I knew as surely as if the thing had already happened that Dick would have something to tell me when they came back, but what that should be I had no kind of idea. We three had played like children together for years: had Margery her secret, even as Dick and I had had? Or had she none? Were both of us her playmates?

It cannot have been very long before Dick came back, for I was still in the dining-room, staring blankly at the morning paper, with my breakfast yet untasted. As soon as I saw him I knew.

‘So it is you,’ I said, and stopped. Then our compact and our friendship aided me. ‘Oh, make her happy, Dick!’ said I.

The dear man sat down on the edge of the table.

‘Jack, I’m cut in two about it all,’ he said, and never have I seen so intense a happiness on the face of living being. ‘Really I am. Oh, damn it all! And Margery told me to come and tell you, and she wants to see you. She says she’ll see you alone first, and then we’ll all play the fool together, as we’ve always done. So I had to lie to her. First thing I did was to lie to her, and I told her that you were not particularly fit this morning—thunderstorm kept you awake—and that I didn’t know if you’d be up to a pentathlon.’

He broke off suddenly.

‘My God, if it only wasn’t you!’ he said.

I remember feeling then as if I was a piece of mechanism external to myself. This mechanism saw Dick sitting on the edge of the table, saw breakfast waiting and ate it, and spoke and moved in obedience to an instinct that seemed to have nothing to do with me. Behind somewhere sat Me, watching what went on.

‘No; a pentathlon by all means,’ said the tongue of the mechanism. ‘We’ve got to have one more to settle the last, and you go back to-morrow. It begins with croquet. Margery chose that.’

Dick’s eyebrows suddenly grew into a frown, and he bit his lip.

‘Oh, Jack!’ he said.

Then for a moment I took possession of the mechanism.

‘It’s no use talking,’ I said, ‘The thing is so, and all I can do at present is to behave with some semblance of decency—anyhow, so that Margery shall not know. I can manage that perfectly, and it will give me something to do. It’s no use your being sorry for me. Besides, it’s not humanly possible for you, nor would it be for me if I was in your place, to have sorrow predominant. Margery fills the world for you—she does for me——’

‘No, not fills it,’ said he. ‘You don’t understand——’

‘I understand perfectly. You’re a decent sort of fellow, and—well, I am your friend. It’s no manner of good talking about it. All we settled last night I feel fully—fully! Do you understand? I can only assure you it is so. Whatever happens—do you remember saying that? I do, and—oh, for God’s sake, don’t worry!’

Dick got off the table, turned his back to me, and blew his nose very long and loudly, and, drawing up a chair, sat down by me with a quivering lip.

‘I’ve made a fool of myself, I suppose,’ he said, ‘and I’ve done not a particle of good, but only made it harder for you. That’s like me. I’m happier than I thought it was allowed for a man to be, and I’m wretcheder than I hoped was permitted. That’s all; there was no need to say it, because you knew it. But I had to.’

Then again the mechanism moved, and I sat and watched. And now I find it is quite easy to write down what happened, for I only watched. But it was hard to write down what happened when, as on the last page, I was doing it myself. If you think of it you will see it must be so.

‘Where is Margery?’ I said. ‘Oh, Dick, don’t be a fool!’

Again he blew his nose.

‘Out in the garden,’ he said. ‘Are you going now?’

‘Yes. The pentathlon begins in ten minutes. Nothing has happened. Just the pentathlon!’

I walked out of the dining-room, leaving him still there, into the blinding blaze of sunshine. She—the She—was sitting in a chair at the end of the lawn, and my mother beside her. The latter got up as I came near.

‘You have heard?’ she said; and in her beloved face there was that look which I have seen three or four times in my life, when great sorrow or great joy has brought us into that union which, so I verily believe, can only exist between mother and son. I knew that she had guessed what unspoken word to Margery had been on my lips.

‘Yes; Dick told me,’ said I.

‘Be a man, then,’ said she, seeing that I knew that she knew. ‘And God bless you, my darling, and comfort you.’

It was but a step to where Margery sat, and I held out both hands.

‘Oh, Jack, I am so happy!’ she said, and with that she rose on tiptoe, put her arms round my neck, and kissed me. It was all right, you see, that she should do that now, for she was my friend, and I was Dick’s friend, and she loved Dick.

* * * * *

There is but little more to say about that May, since even in a diary one has to avoid certain depths of egotism, in order to avoid being unbearable. The pentathlon was played, and I won. Also I had ten minutes with my mother that night, while Dick and Margery were together. Nothing much was said on either side, but I knew again, with the vividness that usually comes only with a thing heretofore unrealized, that she was my mother and that I was her son—part of her being, born from her body, indivisibly, while the ages lasted, hers. Hers was every little effort that I made towards ordinary human decency of behaviour; hers was the resolve I made then, and have tried (with how many failures!) to keep since, to realize that these things could not have happened with any but a benignant purpose, blind and incomprehensible as it might seem to me or to her; and that to become in the least degree embittered, or to fail in the smallest particle of friendship to my friend, or of love to the woman whom I loved, was to miss the Divine purpose, and to make of one’s self a senseless animal. For then, and even now as I write, and do know the human outcome of that love, who knows now what the meaning and the great purpose of all this is? A flaw, a failure—can one say that? Not so do I believe, for I know it is all a fragment of the circumference of that great circle, the centre of which and the whole of which—you and me, and the drunkard in the street, and the prostitute in the street, and summer rain, and love and death, are included, and none higher or lower than another—is God.

One word more; for the tired, puzzled entity which I know as myself turns back to the time when it was neither puzzled nor tired, and turned then in childlike faith to what never failed it, even as it now, mute, with its years of experience to back its childlike faith, turns to her whom it now knows can never fail it.

Mother, mother! I hope you are asleep, for this is an unseasonable and timeless hour of night, but I know that before you slept you prayed for your child. You prayed that God of His great grace would continue to keep him unembittered, for he humbly hopes that no touch of that has ever come near him because of what May brought; you prayed that the wound in his heart would be healed, and your prayer was heard; you prayed that some day he would find his Margery—not she of whom June will tell you, for she was Dick’s, but another—the one predestined in the eternal purpose of God.

JUNE

The early-planted sweet-peas are in flower; so, too, are the nasturtiums. It was Margery’s plan always to sow seeds very early in the year; indeed, she was supposed to have been seen sowing in a snowstorm. Then she used to cover the earth up with matting if it was very cold, and uncover it for any glint of sun. Her gardening was of the most unorthodox order. She would pull up seedlings to see how their roots were getting on, disturb sown earth to see what was occurring below; if a plant looked sickly, she took it up and shook it, and replanted it again with a warning; but everything answered with her, and it was she who taught me to sow sweet-peas in March, so that you got the first flowers early in June.

The year after the events of this May, I remember, she sowed a long row of sweet-peas, running right up from the house to the end of the garden. The garden was not a large one, any more than was the house, for she and Dick were not rich, and the whole row was not a hundred feet long. But there was a pleasant piece of lawn, with a thicket of lilac and syringa at one end, and on each side of the path she had placed old petroleum barrels, sawn in half, for flower-tubs. These she and I had painted green, and in the process had painted ourselves too, and everything tasted and smelt of green paint for a week afterwards. In these she planted nasturtiums and love-lies-bleeding, and both sweet-peas and nasturtiums were in flower early in June, just as mine are flowering now. She always loved sweet-peas. They gave her ‘a feeling,’ she said; therefore they grow thick in a certain place.

Dick and she had been married in the September of the same year when they were engaged. In October the Boer War broke out, and Dick’s regiment was among the first to go out, and she and I went down to Southampton to see the Maplemore off. It was a bleak, gray day, with an angry, fretful wind which raised little ripples on the water, and, as soon as raised, cut their heads off. There was a good deal of delay, and she did not sail for two hours after the advertised time, and we all three said openly to each other that we wished she would be quick. But when the time came I think that Margery would have given her life for half an hour more—had she known.

Then in December came the week which no one can think of even now without a shudder, when Stormberg was succeeded by Magersfontein, and Magersfontein by Colenso. But those wintry days passed, and the scars they left in many homes began to heal, and the year and the tide turned.

I saw Margery many times that spring, and I went to stay with her for two days on the 24th of May, for the 25th was the anniversary of her engagement to Dick, and she had long ago settled that we should spend it together. The 24th had been a very hot day, close and sultry, and by a curious coincidence late that night the storm which had for several hours flickered and grumbled in the west came very quickly closer, and burst over us in appalling riot. Sleep was out of the question, and about two in the morning I got up and sat at the window watching it, thinking very intently of how just a year ago Dick and I had sat together through it, until the ivory calmness of the moon and the dove-coloured dawn had succeeded the tumult. Step by step I went through the talk we had had together, while overhead the violence of the storm abated and passed into the distance again. And whether I actually went to sleep or not I do not know, though in any case I was unconscious of having done so; but suddenly I heard Dick’s voice, as I thought, close to me.

‘And whatever happens, Jack,’ he said.

Then, whether I had been asleep or not, I was awake now, and alone. Outside a moon rode high and clear amid the swarming stars, and in the east the sky was dove-coloured with the approaching dawn.

The next day we spent very quietly. There was no one there but Margery’s mother and myself, and we hardly went beyond the garden; for Margery’s time, you will understand, was nearly come, and in a week or two she would be the mother of Dick’s child. After tea that afternoon we had a long talk together, for her mother had gone out on some household business, and she spoke to me of that which was coming to her, with all the simplicity of her nature, all the triumph and glory of her loving heart.

‘I want you to come down again as soon as possible after it,’ she said, ‘because it seems so inevitable that you must be here to take part in this great joy of Dick’s and mine. You see, Jack, I can’t remember a single joy or sorrow of my life with which you and Dick were not bound up, as it were. And this—the greatest of all. Do come as soon as mother writes to you.’

The dusk began to fall in layers over the sky, and the evening breeze got up and tossed the incense of the flowers’ evensong over the garden. Then, as night closed in, the smell of syringa and lilac fell asleep, and the sweet-peas closed, and the benediction of the stars shone from the heights of heaven. Then Margery rose from her chair, and held out both hands to me.

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘every day I thank God for giving me you as my friend and Dick’s. For years I have done that, even when I was a child. And now that I am a woman, and the crown of womanhood is coming to me, I tell you this, and I ask you to continue to be the friend of all of us. I thank you, Jack; I bless you with my whole heart.’

And once again she kissed me.

My God, how content I was at that moment! For at that moment the foe which I had been fighting all the year, whose sword was jealousy of Dick, whose spear was bitterness of heart, whose armour was the human longing and the crying of the flesh for this woman, dropped dead. No longer would I have had anything different: all was utterly good; and she whom I loved stood over me in the gathering silence of the night, and under her feet lay that devilish enemy whom her goodness and sweetness had slain.

We dined with great gaiety and foolishness, and dinner was succeeded by absurd games, in which the two members of the alliance of laughter did wonders for the cause. Then Margery and her mother went upstairs, and I strolled into the garden again to smoke for half an hour before going to bed, with the reaction of laughter rather strong upon me, and feeling, in spite of what had happened before dinner, vaguely disquieted and depressed, and my mind went back and dwelt with curious insistence on the hallucination of Dick’s voice the night before. Then, even while I was pondering on the strangeness of it, and telling myself that I must have been asleep, I suddenly heard the clang of the gate leading from the road to the front-door on the other side of the house, followed by the crunching of gravel, and after a moment the sound of the front-door bell. At that a sudden nameless fear leaped into my heart, and before the bell sounded again I was at the front-door. Outside was a telegraph-boy, with a War Office telegram addressed to Margery. I took it from him, closed the door quietly, and stood there with it in my hand, struck motionless and incapable of thought.

Then upstairs I heard a door open, and next moment my name was called by Margery, her voice half strangled and struggling for utterance. ‘Jack, Jack, what is it?’ she called. ‘What is it? what is it?’ Next moment I saw her leaning over the banisters of the landing above, her hair down, and with a dressing-gown on, and she saw what I held in my hand.

‘Will you bring it up to me, please, Jack, or open it there?’ she said faintly, and I heard the banisters creak as she leaned on them and clutched them. Then her mother hurried out of her room and put her arm round her.

I can hear the tearing of that envelope now, the rustle of the unfolding sheet. The few words it contained for a moment meant nothing. Then they became coherent.

‘Is it about Dick?’ whispered Margery. ‘Is he wounded? Tell me quick.’

I looked up, and I do not remember whether I said anything or not. But she knew, and in the dim light from the turned-down lamp in the hall I saw her rise to her full height, with arms outstretched, then sway, and fall back into her mother’s arms.

The telegram fluttered to the ground, and I ran upstairs. Together we lifted her up, carried her into her room, and laid her on the bed.

‘Dick is killed?’ whispered her mother to me, and I nodded. Then at her request I left them, and ran to wake one of the servants.

‘Don’t go to bed,’ she said, as I left the room; ‘you may be wanted. Would you sit up till I see you? Have your bicycle ready.’

The drawing-room, through which I had come a minute before in answer to the bell, looked out through French windows on to the garden, and here I sat waiting for her mother. As yet the news to me was inconceivable; it seemed merely impossible that it should be so. Something would happen: another telegraph-boy would come, or, what seemed more likely, I should wake to find that I was not here and the time was not now. Perhaps the place would be Braceton, perhaps the time would be a year ago. Yet how could that be? For she had spoken to me of Dick, and of Dick’s child. There was nothing in the world so real as those minutes. And in this dumb, dazed mood I went once into the hall to see if my bicycle was there; for if these things were a dream, surely I should find some incongruity, and perhaps that which should have been a bicycle might be Dick. But the bicycle stood there, with its lamp already lit, as I had left it.

Then came quick steps descending the stairs, and I went out into the hall.

‘Please go into the town at once, Jack,’ said her mother, ‘and bring Dr. Carlton. Make him come at once. If he is not in, bring somebody.’

‘What—what! Oh, tell me something!’ I said.

‘Her child will be born sooner than we expected,’ said she. ‘Oh, be quick!’

The road was empty of passengers and very dark. Once a man—a policeman, I think—shouted something after me; once the shadow of a dog raced me for awhile, snarling and snapping. Otherwise all I know of that four miles is a round space of illumination on the road cast by my lamp, I seemingly motionless, while to right and left trees and houses went noiselessly by, and a wind blew steadily, in spite of the turns of the road, from the direction in which I was speeding. Then the lamp-posts of the town began, and I had the sense to go somewhat more slowly for fear of being taken up, and so delayed. Then, crossing the High Street, I came to the square red-brick house.

For an interminable time, so it seemed to me, I waited on the doorstep, and then the door was opened by an impassive man-servant. Dr. Carlton was at dinner, and there was a party, but as soon as he came out the message should be delivered; and I remember saying that I would go into the dining-room myself unless I could see him at once. Then, after another interminable delay, Dr. Carlton, whom I knew slightly, came out.

‘Come at once,’ I said—‘Mrs. Alington.’

‘Not her confinement?’ he said, frowning.

‘She has just had news of Dick’s death,’ said I, ‘and her mother told me that—that the baby might be born sooner than they expected. Oh, man, don’t argue!’

‘How did you come?’ said he.

‘Bicycle. It’s outside.’

He turned to his servant.

‘Tell them to put the pony in at once,’ he said, ‘and bring it round. And’—he looked at me sharply a moment—‘bring some brandy.’

I suppose I made some gesture of impatience, for he laid his hand on my arm with a quieting force.

‘Now, be sensible,’ he said; ‘I am going to get what I may require, and shall go off on your bicycle. You will follow in the cart, and, until it is ready, you will sit down here and drink a wine-glassful of brandy—neat, mind: I order it.’

He nodded at me, pointing to a chair, and I stumbled towards it, conscious for the first time of an overpowering exhaustion. My blood beat through my temples very thin and far away, but with frightful rapidity, and something sang in my ears like the whistle of a distant train. Then I became conscious that the butler had put a glass of brandy into my hand, and I drank it.

‘The cart will be round in ten minutes, sir,’ he said.

‘But Dr. Carlton?’ I asked.

‘Rode off a couple of minutes ago, sir. I should sit still, sir, if I were you.’

It can hardly have been an hour from the time the telegram first came to when the cart with me inside it drew up at Margery’s house. Against the porch leaned my bicycle, the lamp still burning, and lights, I saw, were burning in her bedroom directly over the door. Standing on a chair inside the hall was Dr. Carlton’s hat and a small black bag; on the floor close by was the pink sheet of the telegram, which I must have dropped when I ran upstairs. Even then I remember clinging in some desperate, dazed fashion to the hope that it was all a dream, and that the telegram would prove to be some trivial absurdity, and I picked it up and read it again.

Then I sat down and waited.

From time to time there was some muffled sound of footsteps and movement above, then silence again, then more steps. Then I heard a door open above, and a droning voice which I knew to be Margery’s speaking in level, meaningless tones. Then the doctor’s voice said sharply:

‘Yes, it is in my bag. Bring it all upstairs if you don’t understand.’

With the bag in my hand, I met the servant hurrying downstairs, sobbing in a helpless manner. She took the bag from me without a word, and went up again. And step by step, after I had heard the door close, I moved to the top of the stairs and sat there. Below, the clock in the hall beat out metallic minutes, and once the hour—twelve only—struck. Through the fanlight above the front-door I could see the lamps of the doctor’s dogcart; three or four times they moved away, and after a minute or so returned again to the same spot. At intervals that terrible droning voice came from Margery’s room.

How long these things lasted I cannot say, but it must have been less than two hours, for I knew the hall clock struck once only. Then the droning voice ceased altogether, and in its place came short, incisive sentences in a man’s voice, the purport of which, of course, I could not hear. Then came the cry of a child, and I knew that in the midst of death we are in life.

Then, as if I had been drawn by cords, I crept nearer and nearer to the door of the room, and the crying of the child still sounded—the cry of Dick’s child. And Dick? Oh, Dick! if your brave, blithe spirit in the paradise of God, now free of its habitation of flesh, keeps watch, as it surely must, over those it loves, come here, come here, where there is so sore a need of you and your comforting. Speak to her through that frail tabernacle of time and space; comfort the soul you love, if the laws of your world permit it. Come!

* * * * *

Later in that long night Dr. Carlton told me all he could tell. The child had been born, and it lived. There was no reason why it should not live, for it was quite healthy, though it had been born before its time. About Margery he could not say. She had not rallied satisfactorily. She had been perfectly conscious for a time after the birth of the child, but with her consciousness had returned the knowledge of her husband’s death, and she had relapsed again into a semi-comatose state. He proposed to wait, visiting her from time to time, till he could feel more happy about her.

Twice before the dawn broke I tried to go to bed, and as many times I crept downstairs again to where Dr. Carlton sat in the drawing-room, his genial, florid face looking more anxious and troubled each time he returned from a visit upstairs. Then, just as morning broke in thin red lines on the horizon, I heard his voice call to me, and I went upstairs. He beckoned to me to come in.

Margery was lying in bed, propped up on pillows, and her eyes were closed. I sat by the bedside and waited. They had taken the baby away, and only her mother knelt there, with her eyes fixed on Margery’s face. Suddenly she raised her head a little, opened her eyes, and saw me.