THE seasons, according to the literary and artistic view of things, have been rather out of joint this year. The autumn was not a time of mellow fruitfulness at all, because all the green things upon this earth had exhausted themselves in the long hot summer, and had no more spirit left to be fruitful with. Then January in England had been of the usual warm mugginess and mist which poets say are characteristic of autumn, but which in reality characterize winter. Indeed, I doubt if winter was ever a time of hard frosts and sparkling snow, which is the artistic ideal, and I am disposed to believe that that version of it was really brought from Germany by the Prince Consort, and popularized by Charles Dickens. Then after the mists came the mellow fruitfulness, for I myself saw strawberries in flower on February 2, and on February 9 Helen came in saying she had found a{248} real strawberry. That was strange enough, though perhaps the finding of an unreal strawberry would have been stranger still, so I said, ‘Where?’ and she said, ‘On the strawberry beds, silly.’

Therefore I started up, leaving a most important and epoch-making sentence unfinished (and I have never been able to remember what the end of it was going to be), because I wanted to see the strawberry, and write to the Field about it. So she said, ‘Are you going out already?’ and I said, ‘Yes, just to see the strawberry, and write to the Field, saying I have.’

Then she pointed to half-way down her person (since we are so abstemious of words that indicate the anatomy below the throat), and said:

‘Would X rays help?’

Being extremely clever that morning, of course I understood, and reviled her for eating an unnatural phenomenon. It was criminal; she might as well have found the sea-serpent or the North Pole, and eaten it. But as usual she was artful, and led the conversation away to daffodils, which were behaving in a manner nearly equal to that of the strawberry-plant. One, indeed,{249} was in bud (a thing incredible, but true), and I supposed she had eaten that, too. That led us back to the strawberry again, which she was not even sorry about, for she said it was far more interesting to be able to write to the Field to say she had eaten a strawberry on February 9 than that I should be able to say I had seen it. So I very kindly gave her my pen, and said:

‘Write quickly.’

She said:

‘Oh, but I am only a woman; I can’t. They wouldn’t put it in.’

‘I wish you hadn’t put the strawberry in,’ said I.

‘I think I shall wish that, too, before long,’ said she.

I only mention this in order to show the utter unreasonableness of my wife. If I want to write to the Field, and say there was a strawberry in my garden on February 9, she will allow me to say that though I did not see it, she ate it. (She certainly would not have eaten it if I had seen it.) But she will not write to say she ate it, like a true woman. She says it does not matter, but added with a{250} changed voice that she was afraid it might. It did, for the fruitfulness of the season was not so mellow as might have been wished.

 

Yes, once again spring has begun to stir in the fiery heart of the world; once again the breath of Life blows the embers that seemed all winter to be but grey and lifeless cinders, and from the centre the glow spreads, till that grey surface of ash is alive with flame again. And as the flames shoot upwards they are like rockets, rising from over the whole face of the world. At present they are but going upwards, those slender lines of flame, which are the sap that is rising through branch and leafless stem until it reaches the very ends of the twigs. Then these rockets will burst in stars of leaf and opening flower, till the vast illumination is again complete. But in the warm soft February morning, though I feel and know that this is so, I cannot help my thoughts going back to the other side of things. What of the illumination of last year? It is quenched dead, and even while the world is getting ready for the next one there still lie broadcast the ashes and fallen{251} sticks of the last rocket-shower. However many more gladden the world, even though to all infinity life was incessantly and beautifully renewed, yet I cannot forgive the perishing of a single flower. I know well that the material is indestructible, that of life and the death of it is born fresh life, so that we are quite right to say that life cannot be destroyed. But what of the individual rose, what of that one purple star of clematis that twinkled on the end of the stem I hold in my hand? Though it may be transformed, and will be transformed, into a myriad other things, so that by its death it is transfused into a hundred other flowers, and courses through the veins of life for ever, yet it, that individual object, will be seen no more. Its individuality is completely lost; it figures in new forms, not its own.

It is quite certain also that the same things happen to our bodies. The grass grows thick on the graves of those we have loved, and the roots of the roses penetrate deep. I saw once on the crumbling, sea-devoured East Coast of England the thing itself under my very eyes, which made it real to me in a way that nothing{252} had ever done before. For a churchyard stood there on the very edge of the sandy cliff, and one night, with noise of huge murmurous thunder, an acre of it slid down into the sea. Next morning I visited the place, and there, sticking out of the cliff, were the bones of the dead that had been buried there. A ruin of roses that had sprawled and trumpeted over the churchyard gate, which had been plucked in half by the fall, lay on the ground, and I wondered how the trees had not slipped with the rest of the landslide, until I saw. Their roots had lain just where the fracture of the earth occurred, and in the exposed face of the new cliff I saw their anchorage. One was wrapped round a thigh-bone, another had made a network among ribs ... it was all horrible and revolting. And that has happened to the million dead who have lived and loved, whose limbs have been swift to move, who have drawn rapturous, long breaths of this keen sea-scented air, whose eyes have been bright and mouths eager when they met, lover and beloved. This is all—this ruin of red roses on the grass.

There is nothing in the world more certain{253} than this, and one may as well face it. Helen will die, and I shall die, and one of us will die first. And the other will sometimes see a grave with the grass green over it, and roses triumphant thereon. For we have settled most things at one time or another, she and I, and the manner of our funerals and what happens after has passed under discussion. We have decided definitely against cremation, because it seems such a waste of tissue, and we are both of us going to be properly buried, the one close to the other so that the same rose may bloom from us both. But she will have roses and strawberries on her grave, so that the Sunday-school children may pluck and eat them, while I, on the other hand, am going to be a spring-man, and have daffodils, for I feel no leaning, as I have said, towards Sunday-schools. Here lies the difficulty: she wants a rich clayey soil for her roses and strawberries, and my daffodils will demand not clay but sand. Also she is going to plant purple clematis by my head, and clematis likes sand too. We have not yet perfectly decided where we are going to die, but it seems probable that the survivor will stay in the same place as{254} the survived. But I want purple clematis, since it was when I saw that that I knew somebody whom I had thought to be a friend was false. Indeed, I have done all I could to forgive, but I think a clematis that feeds on me may make it surer.

Our funerals will shock the neighbourhood, I am afraid. I am going to have the A flat Fugue and Prelude blared on the organ (it is time somebody began to learn to play) at that distressing moment when my coffin is wheeled out of the church, simply to show that I have enjoyed myself enormously. Great Heaven! I should as soon think of having a dead march of whatever kind played over me as I should let them play the works of Mr. Mendelssohn. I shall have had (whatever happens) an immensely good time. It seems to me much fitter to return thanks for that than to remind people that my poor body is dead, which they knew already, or why did they come to my funeral service? As for requiems, I will have none of them. Whatever happens, I, my body at least, cannot possibly lie quiet in my grave. The dear flowers planted there will see to that.{255}

Oh, my God, my God, what unanswerable riddles you set us! Even this body, and what happens to it, is so occupying a subject. I don’t really care what happens to mine: it may be set up in an anatomical museum if it will teach anybody anything; but Helen’s.... Somehow, when I come out of the valley of the shadow, something of that must wait for her; or, if she has gone through that passage first, I shall not know myself unless at the end of it, when the darkness lifts a little, I shall see grey eyes looking at the procession of those passing over, and meeting mine, and saying somehow, ‘I am here.’ She must be there (is it not so?) waiting on the eternal shore for me.

There she must be. I can’t help what I believe; that is the one thing in oneself which one can never change. And Dick will be there, and Margery ... what a splendid day!

 

Then the one horrible certainty descended on me again. In so few years we shall all—our bodies, I mean, the appearance by which we recognize each other—not be our bodies at all, but part of the fibre of other living things{256} which are having their day, even as we have had ours. It is so now with Dick and Margery, so how shall I know them? Are they to be just voices in the air, presences that are felt? Is that all? Shall I never see again that quiver on Margery’s mouth, which means that a smile is ready to break from it? I don’t want incorporeal presences. I want Dick and his crooked nose, and Margery’s smile....

Then, on this warm February morning I must suppose that I went down into Hell. Dead leaves and flowers, it was certain, were transformed into fresh living forms, the bones, too, and flesh of dead animals, and of men and women, passed again into the great machine of life, and were served up in new transformations, so that of the individual body nothing at all was left. That is bad enough; I shall never see Margery and Dick again as I used to see them. Helen will pass, too, into other forms ... that is bad enough. But this is infinitely worse. What of the individual soul, the spirit that we love? Will that, too, as analogy grimly insists, be put back again into the principle of eternal life from which it came, so that its identity, too,{257} is lost, and lives but only as the autumn leaves of last year live in the verdure of the next spring? With everything else that happens; the bodies of those we love even, a cruel thing surely, but certainly true, are used up again to make fresh forms of life. Why should we suppose that God makes any exception in dealing with the souls of men, the individuals? Every other form of life He uses and re-uses ... the world is but a lump of modelling clay, with which He beguiles the leisure of eternity, making now one shape, then crushing it all up and making another.

So this is all that the promise of Eternal Life amounts to, that we shall pass back into the crucible, and issue forth again as bits of somebody else! It seems to me a very mean affair; frankly, it seems a swindle. It is a poor trick to make us puny little creatures love one another, and try to be kind, and console ourselves for the evil days and the sorrows of the world with thoughts of the everlasting day that shall dawn for us all, if that everlasting day is nothing more than the day that is here already; if the souls whom we have believed{258} are at rest in some ineffable peace and content, or, on the other hand, through further suffering are getting nearer, ever nearer, to the perfection and flower of their being, have already passed into other forms of life, so that Dante and Beatrice are themselves no longer (as we should call ‘themselves’), but have been infinitely divided into soldiers, sailors, tinkers, and tailors. In that sense they may be said to be alive still, but it is a very paltry sense. They (what we mistakenly call ‘they’) are as dead as if they had never been.

It is all very well to say that Dante is immortal by reason of his deathless verse; that is all very well for us, but how is it for that fiery soul which is split up into a thousand other bodies? When he thought to open his eyes on the Mystical Rose as the dark waves of death slowly drew back from his emancipated spirit, it was all a dismal mistake. No Beatrice awaited him; she, too, is split into a million other forms of life. They were absorbed back into the central fire, and a spark of Dante’s soul went into this man, and another into that, so that in this sense there is eternal life for him.{259} But in no other; the Dante which we mean was formed out of other lives, and into other lives he went. The man is there no more, and there is no Beatrice. There will be nothing of us either, unless you mean that at some future time I am alive because part of me has become perhaps a murderer, and another part a politician, and another a housemaid, for all I know.

The February sun was warm; you might almost call it hot. A little wind pregnant with spring moved through the bushes; the snowdrops, those pale heralds of the triumphant march of the new year, were thick in the grass where we had planted them, Helen and I, last autumn, so that they should give us the earliest news of the returning tide of life. And to me this morning they brought but bitter news, for they spoke not of the returning of life, but of the thousand deaths which made them alive. They pointed not forwards towards the glory of the many-coloured summer, but back to the innumerable decay of the autumn. And the quiet garden which I loved, the tiled mossy roof which I had called home, became the place of death, even as last autumn death had called to{260} me from it, and had been seen by Legs, and had made the dog howl. Was it this that was hinted at by those dim forebodings which for months had never been absent from me? Was the fear that crouched in the shadow ready to spring taking form now? It seemed to me that the logic which had turned the world to hell was irrefutable; I expected some shattering stroke that should blot out sunshine and sensation from me for ever, proving that I and my logic were right. I had guessed the horrid secret of the world; I was like a spy found with the plans of the enemy’s fortress on me, and must die, lest I should communicate them. I said that to myself; I said ‘Enemy’s fortress,’ meaning the world where I had loved and been loved. ‘Enemy,’ mark you; I knew what I meant. The world was the enemy’s fortress.

And then, thank God—oh! thank God!—before that which was impending happened, I said to myself that I was wrong. I did not at the moment see where I was wrong, but I knew that I must have made some gross and awful mistake. Things could not be as I had imagined them. And the moment I said that{261} to myself the darkness lifted a little. It was all dark still, but the quality of the darkness changed. And then, unbidden as a tune that suddenly rings in one’s head, a few words made themselves recollected. And they were, ‘If I go down into hell, Thou art there also.’

At that I caught a glimpse again of this dear garden and house, as I had seen and known them. I do not suppose that this blackness and loneliness of spirit which I have tried to indicate could have lasted more than a few minutes, as measured in the world of time, but time has nothing to do with the spirit. In a second, as computed by the unmeaning scale of hours and days, the soul may live a thousand lifetimes or die a thousand deaths. Redemption may be wrought there in an infinitesimal fraction of a moment, or in that same fraction a soul may damn itself. For it is not the moment which is anything: it is the instantaneous choice which therein sums up the infinite series of deeds which one has already done, and thoughts which one has harboured. And the message that leaps round the world on electric wires is a sluggard to choice. My{262} choice at this moment was between the truth of what I had been elaborately thinking out and the truth of the words that rang in my head. There was reason on one side; there was just It on the other. And what was ‘It’? Just that which, very faintly, but quite audibly, said that I had come near to blasphemy. There are many names for it: we all know its visitation, though it is obscured sometimes because we encourage the Devil, who comes to us all in many forms, and can take the most respectable disguises, like those of intellect and mind. But perhaps the simplest name and the truest for It is the Grace of God.

Then, in the same moment (I am lumbering in words, and trying to express what I know cannot be said), I saw that Helen was already half-way across the grass, coming towards me. She held a telegraphic sheet in her hand, and there was in her face a gravity infinitely tender, and quite quiet, and quite normal. I had seen it there once before, when the news came of her father’s death, which was sudden.

‘Legs won’t come down this afternoon,’ she said gently. ‘We have got to go up to him.{263}’

And then she showed me the telegram.

 

It was not many hours before we knew all there was to be known. Legs had started to ride down from town, and turning into the King’s Road from Sloane Square his motor bicycle had skidded, and he had fallen under an omnibus. A wheel had passed over him.

He had a letter or two, which identified him, in his pockets, and he had been taken, since it was so near, back to t............