IT always seems to me a matter for wonder why the astronomers, or Julius C?sar, or whoever it was who took the trouble to divide time up into months and years, should have made the day of the New Year come in the middle of winter. Probably it has got something to do with the solar eclipse, or the lunar theory, or movements and motions quite unintelligible to the ordinary mind, which would easily have the point of beginning the New Year in spring—for instance, on May-day—when the season is clearly suitable for beginning again. But to make a fresh start by candlelight in a fog on the first of January implies a more vivid effort of the imagination and a sterner resolve of the spirit than most of us able to manage. You might as well try to make up for misspent years by selecting{354} Blackfriars or Baker Street Station as a place to start afresh in.
Personally, though I think the 1st of May would be a quite reasonable occasion on which to begin a New Year, I should prefer a rather later date, when summer is more certain, and it was for this reason that when I formed this (I hope) harmless little project of putting down the quiet happenings of a year of life, I began in June. Month by month I kept this diary, and you will see when you come to the end of this month of May that my plan was endorsed by what happened then, and that New Year must, in the future, always begin for Helen and me on the first of June.
Even with the early days of May summer descended on us, and Mr. Holmes’s Panama hat and a neat new suit of yellowish flannel made their due appearance to confirm the fact. Soon, if this goes on, he will be handing ices instead of buns at tea-parties, and I have often seen him lately on the ladies’ links playing golf in his little buttoned boots. He came to call yesterday, and told me of Charlotte’s engage{355}ment, and announced the fact that my Archdeacon (I call him mine because of what happened at that dreadful Sunday-school) was giving a garden-party on the 11th, and the wife of the younger son of our Baronet had not been invited. The fact of the garden-party on the 11th was not new to us, because We Had Been Invited. Oh, revenge is sweet, and we gloated over the discomfiture of the foe. Her mother had been a governess, too. That was a new fact that Mr. Holmes had gathered in the last half-year—just a governess, and not in a noble family even, but in the employment of a retired tradesman. That accounted for the fact that her daughter spoke French so well; no wonder, since the mother had to teach it. Her knowledge of that language, scraps of which she constantly introduced into her conversation, had always puzzled Mr. Holmes; now he knew how it had been acquired. Indeed, she had come rightly by it, poor thing! We none of us grudged it her. And it was no wonder now to Mr. Holmes that she looked so thin; probably she had never had enough to eat when she was a{356} child, and that indescribable air of commonness about her was perfectly accounted for. Indeed, Mr. Holmes became so sardonic that you would have thought that his family was one (as I dare say it is) compared to which the Plantagenets were parvenus; and Helen changed the subject, which I thought was a pity, as I wanted to hear ever so much more about the lady’s obscure origin.
We chatted very pleasantly for a long time, and learned all that the Morning Post had said in little paragraphs during the past week, and all that the Close and the County (I recommend that expression) and the Military were doing here. We were going to be very gay indeed; there was already an absolute clash of entertainments during a week of cricket next month, so that the Mayor was forced to give a luncheon-party one day instead of a mere tea, which he would probably not like at all, since if ever there was a Mayor who collected candle-ends, this was the one. Did I remember that which was called champagne at the famous lunch which has already been spoken of?{357}
In fact, Mr. Holmes shook his head over the general trend of affairs, and spoke quite bitterly about the wave of Radicalism which was passing over the country. The County Club, so he said, which had always prided itself on being a little exclusive, was tainted with commonness now, and had positively disgraced itself at the last election by letting in those three new members. They were nobodies—local nobodies—one the son of a doctor, another the father of a doctor; the third nobody at all. And—would I believe it?—there had been a veterinary surgeon up for election as well. Luckily, the club had pulled itself together over him, and given him a smart shower of black-balls. No doubt the club was in want of funds, but why, then, have built a new billiard-room? How much better to poke the butt-end of our cues into the chimney-piece, as we had always done when playing from over the left-hand middle pocket, than purchase increased cue-room at the sacrifice of our standing as a County Club? If we did not draw the line somewhere, where were we to draw the line? That was unanswerable. We{358} all said what is written, ‘Tut!’ and looked very proud. Helen, I consider, looked prouder than Mr. Holmes, but she disagrees with me, having seen her own face in the looking-glass over the mantelpiece. True, she had not the natural advantage that Mr. Holmes’s aquiline nose conferred upon him, but the assumed curl of her lip was superb: she looked like a Duchess in her own right.
How slowly these beautiful days of May passed, for when one is very happy and very expectant, time seems to stop. Exactly the opposite happens when one is spending days that are full of pleasures, and living entirely in the moment, for then hours and days pass on unregarded, so that it is Saturday again before you know the week has really begun. But happiness—I but bungle with words over a thing that is obvious to everybody who knows the difference between happiness and pleasure—is a thing quite detached from the present moment, just as the sunlight which floods these downs is not of them. Happiness ever broods on the wing, and swings high{359} above the things of the earth, like some poised eagle, or like the sun itself. It illuminates what it looks on, turning dew to diamond, and striking sapphires into the heart of what has been a grey sea, but it is independent of material concerns; and were the world to be withdrawn and extinguished, it would shine still. True, it shines on the dewdrop and turns it into wondrous prismatic colours, and thus the common surface of life is always iridescent when we are happy. But happiness—that golden, high-swung sun—does not, I think, particularly regard the jewels he makes out of common things: his own bright shining, perhaps, weaves a golden haze between him and what he shines upon.
It was somehow thus, I think, that things were with us during that first fortnight of May. Below the golden haze were these entrancing facts which I have just recorded about the Archdeacon’s party, the frightful disclosures concerning the mother of the wife of the younger son of the Baronet, and the growing plebeianism of the County Club; but neither{360} Helen nor I could focus our attention on them; for though, as I have said, time went so slowly, yet there was not time enough to regard them: they belonged to a different plane to that on which we were living. We could penetrate down into it and giggle, but then our attention wandered, and before we knew it, we had swum up again like bubbles through water to the sunlit surface.
There took place, in fact, a revision in our list of joyful and dreadful affairs. No one could appreciate the humour of Mr. Holmes more than Helen did, but, as I have said, she could not attend to him now. Nor could she attend to the perfectly hideous fact that the greater part of the ceiling in the dining-room in Sloane Street had fallen, and that our tenants had (quite reasonably) demanded to be released from their tenancy, of which there was still six weeks to run, since the house was uninhabitable. Nor did I think she would have cared if the ceiling had smothered them as they sat at dinner. And the dreadful earthquake in China failed to move her, and so did the church crisis in France. But for certain{361} other things she cared more than ever, though you would have said they were little enough. All the growth of the spring-time made her eyes brighten and ever grow dim again, and she would dream over the tiny buds of the rose-garden with smiles that were sped to her mouth from the inmost spring of happiness. She spread fat Heliogabalian feasts for the birds, since they wanted nourishment now that they were so busy over their nests, and many dyspeptic bachelors and spinsters, I expect, reeled daily from their table laid on the lawn to sleep off the results of their excess. She loved the sun, too, more than she had ever loved it, and the shade also, and day and night, and all the firm, great forces of the world.
Not less, too, did she love the little things of little rooms, and now we never sat in the drawing-room, with its Reynolds’ prints, but went always to the nursery, with its rocking-horse and its Noah’s ark, and its lead soldiers, and its play-table. But when there—when playing these silly games of soldiers, which Helen had been wont to play as if eternal salvation depended on the nice adjustment of a{362} small tin cannon, which, when you pulled a string, shot a pea—she had a change of mood most disconcerting at first. Now and again she shot down my Generalissimo, posted, as he should be, out of possibility of attack almost, in the very rear of my army, by some inconceivable ricochet which would a few weeks ago have filled her mouth with laughter. But now, when these unspeakable flukes occurred, and she upset the heaviest soldiers in my brigade, instead of being delighted, she was sorry, and apologized. To injury, which was bad enough, she added insult, which was worse, and said: ‘I am afraid I must win now.’
There is another curious thing (Helen looks over my shoulder as I write, and agrees) that, though she still loves to play soldiers, she wants me to win. Consider it: whoever before wanted to play a game (and the more childish the game, the less worth while you would have thought to play it), if he did not care about winning? Besides, it is so exceedingly unlike her—she is looking over my shoulder no more—not to play any game as if life and death{363} depended on it. But now she applauds my skill and my luck, and apologizes for her own.
And then, when the game is over, and the Duke of Wellington on one side and Julius C?sar on the other lie dead, she still sits on the ground beside the low play-table, and looks round the room with wandering, happy eyes. There are the playthings I have told you of—the Noah’s ark, the rocking-horse, the great dolls’-house, the front of which, windows and door and all, is unfastened by a neat latch in the wall of the second story, and swings open altogether, so that you must be careful not to unlatch it early in the morning or late at night, else you would see all the ladies and gentlemen at their toilet in an embarrassing state of undress. I found Helen the other morning playing at dolls all by herself. She had laid a banquet in the dining-room, and had arranged the ladies and gentlemen on the stairs, so that one could see at once that they were going down to dinner. From their attitudes, and a tendency to lean against each other or{364} the wall, you might have thought that they were trying to get upstairs after the banquet. But that, Helen told me, was foolish, since their faces were all turned in the direction of downstairs. The answer was that they had indulged even more freely than I had supposed, and were trying to get upstairs backwards.
Yes; we did all these extremely childish things, and so far from being ashamed of them, I set them all down here for you to laugh at if you like, or merely to be bored with. Things like these—playing at soldiers or at dolls—retained their interest, just as did the spirit of the blossoming summer, when Mr. Holmes’s discoveries or the fall of the ceiling in Sloane Street lacked the calibre to interest us. And, if you come to think of it, though I thought an explanation would be difficult, nothing in the world could be more simple. Things about children, and birth, and growth were clearly the only affairs that could concern us. One morning, I remember, it was found that the foundations of the cathedral were in a dreadful state, and that it would probably fall down. I told Helen this as she was engaged on pre{365}paring a Gargantuan breakfast for the birds. She only said:
‘Oh, what a pity!’
That was all she cared for the historic Norman pile, with all kinds of Kings and Queens buried inside it!
There is nothing more to be recorded of this month, since the only things that seemed to us to have any real importance were just the childishnesses of which I have already given you such amplitude of specimens, until the morning of the last day of May.
The rule of the house was that there was no rule of any sort as regards breakfast. Anybody who came into the dining-room at most hours of the morning would find the breakfast perennials (bread, butter, sugar, milk, the morning paper and marmalade) on the table, and would, on ringing a bell, be given the annuals—i.e., fresh tea and a hot dish. Similarly, anybody who did not come into the dining-room was supposed to be breakfasting either elsewhere or not at all. So on this last morning of May, on coming down, I rang the{366} bell, and read the paper till bacon came. An hour before I had just looked into Helen’s room, and seen that she was still asleep.
The bacon was rather long coming that morning—I try to reconstruct the day exactly as it happened—and I had already skimmed the news, and found there was not any, and in default of it was reading a superb account of the visit of a member of the Royal Family to Naples, who in the afternoon had ‘honoured’ (so said the loyal press) the volcano of Vesuvius with a visit. How gratifying for the immortal principle of fire! One hoped it would not become swollen in the head. This fortunate volcano, whose cone had been blessed——
At the moment I heard a step outside. It was not from the kitchen: it was coming from upstairs, and it came very quickly. Then, instantaneously, terror seized me, for time and place were no longer now and here, but it was the evening when I heard my name called in the garden, and thereafter heard Legs running downstairs. And quickly as the steps came, they seemed to me to go on for ever; yet I had{367} only just time to get up, when there came a fumbling hand on the door, and Helen’s maid came in.
‘If you please, sir, would you send at once,’ she began. ‘The nurse—— ’
There were quicker ways than sending, and next minute I was flying up the road on my bicycle. My mind, as I think must always happen with any mind in su............