Читать книгу Six Common Things - E F Benson - Страница 4

Table of Contents

There is a day, I had almost said a moment, in every year when summer definitely stops. It dies a sudden death, and we seldom notice that the end is near, until it has come. This year it was even more sudden than usual. It occurred yesterday evening, while I was sitting out on the lawn below the terrace walk reading the account of the horrible scenes in Hamburg during the cholera there. A strange little wind swept across the still air, and a rose-leaf from the great climbing creeper fluttered down on to the page, and at that moment summer stopped.....

I awoke this morning from a deep dreamless sleep, which, with a strange mixture of cruelty and kindness, often follows on some great sorrow. It is no doubt a relief to lose, though only for a few hours, the sense of suffering, yet when we wake, we find that sleep has brought us a doubtful gift, for it has only quickened our capabilities for suffering. The first few moments of conscious thought are often the slow involuntary gathering up of the threads of our interrupted sensations, and it was with a vague reminiscence of some change which had taken place, that I began to piece together the events of the preceding evening. An old servant had come in late the night before to tell me that his little daughter, who had been slowly dying of consumption for months past, was just dead. He felt it to be a release, but that did not make it less sad: if she was only to have so few summers here, they might at least have been more full of that unthinking receptive happiness, which is the birthright of children, but which so few retain beyond childhood. He had asked me to come in and see the poor little face once more, “She looks so happy and peaceful,” he said, with that strange unreserve that many poor people have about death, “her arms are lying just as they were when she died, she had crossed them on her breast, as she used to do when she was saying her prayers to her mother, I could fancy that she had been saying them, and had fallen asleep so.”

The poor fellow evidently found a vague consolation in this. Death, which so closely resembled life, was partly robbed of its horror for him. It is a merciful arrangement.

There had been a slight frost in the night, the first of the year, and from the little chestnut tree in front of my windows unseen hands were stripping off the yellow leaves. There is something ironical in this yearly death of vegetation, which makes the fall of the leaves doubly dreadful to us, to whom, when autumn comes, no spring will bring a renewal of life. I had half hoped last night that I had been wrong about the death of the summer, the air was so mild, and the wind stirred so softly in the shrubbery, but this morning it is no longer possible to doubt; the freshness of the air cannot be mistaken for the coolness of a summer morning, it is the forerunner of cold and mist and long dark evenings.

After breakfast I went down to the old man’s cottage. The dead girl had been his only daughter; she was the child of old age, and nothing was left him now. By a former marriage he had one son, who had died in infancy, and his second wife had died in giving birth to this daughter. Life and death often walk hand in hand, and when we clasp the hand of life, we cannot but feel that we accept death as part of our union.

The father asked me to go in to see the dead child’s face; it was wonderfully dignified with the dignity that only can come to complete tranquillity; and he then took me back to his little front room, and told me the saddest story I have ever heard.

“I was sitting,” he said, “late last night in the room where she is lying, and I had gone to sleep, for I was very tired with the watching and the short nights. I had left the door ajar I suppose; for I was awakened by a scratching sound, and soon I saw her little dog, Tiny she called him, pushing through the crack. I was tired and weary, and I sat still and watched him. He put his two paws on the bed, and tried to lick her hand, but it was out of his reach. And he whined as dogs do, when they want to attract their master’s attention, and gave a little short bark. Then he got down on to the floor again, and sat up to beg, as she had taught him to do. He used to dislike it, and she often had trouble to make him do it, when she wanted him to show off to strangers and suchlike. But he couldn’t understand, I expect, why she took no notice of him, and he wanted to make her attend to him.”

He paused a moment, seeming half uncertain whether I wanted to hear him go on.

“It’s nothing in the telling,” he said, but it went to my heart to see the dog do so. He seemed to wonder why she didn’t speak to him. There was one other trick he used to do when he was younger, but I reckon he is getting old like the rest of us, and his joints are a bit stiff. He would turn head over his heels for all the world like a clown you see at the circus, but it must be a year and more since she tried to make him do it, for she saw it hurt him.

“But I reckon he couldn’t understand how it was she took no notice of him, for she had always petted him, and given him a bit of biscuit or something when he did his tricks well, his lessons, she used to call them, poor lamb! though it seemed to me he cared more for her attention than a bit of biscuit: so what should the dog do, but try to turn head over heels, as he hadn’t done for a year and more. But he was too stiff, and he fell over. He wagged his tail, and looked up at the bed, as if he should say he’d tried his best, and when he saw she didn’t notice him, he gave a whine like a thing in pain, and lay down by the bed. But he couldn’t rest, but he must keep jumping up and trying to get up on to the bed, until I took him down with me and gave him his supper. But he wouldn’t so much as look at it, and this morning when I came downstairs, he was lying at the door, instead of in his basket in the kitchen. And when I went to him, I found he was quite dead. I reckon he was getting old, and he didn’t feel to care for anything no more now she wasn’t there to pet him and tease him.”

The old man sat silent for a minute or two, looking into the fire in dry-eyed sorrow. The old do not shed tears very easily; they have learnt that it does no good. But in a few minutes the blessed relief came, and he sobbed like a little child.

“It seemed to bring it home to me that she was dead,” he said, “when I saw her not taking any notice of her Tiny.”

The horror of utter helplessness was upon me. The unfathomable mystery of death never seemed to me before to so utterly defy scrutiny. I tried to make him feel that though I could offer him no consolation, I wished to share his sorrow, and he talked on for an hour or so.

The sun was warm as I walked back, and the rime frost had completely disappeared. But the cruel glory of the dying woodland was there in all its thoughtless splendour; like some great lady, whose beauty has shone for a short hour or two in some dark hovel, where a servant or friend lies dying, the splendid trees mock us with their yearly renewal of loveliness, and when they pass from us in the autumn, we know that their glory will shine on in years to come, while we are left in the dark house, with the coffin and the pall and all the grim apparatus of death.

It is evening again, and as I sit by the open window, the faint sweet smells from the glimmering flower beds are wafted in with the sighing of the wind. This long melancholy day is drawing to a close, and everything is lying hushed beneath the benediction of evening. The same strange little wind that woke in the bushes last night, again stirs in the dusk, and strikes a sudden shiver in the still evening air. The birds call to each other in the shrubbery with low flute-like notes, and by-and-by a great yellow moon swings into sight. White winged moths hover noiselessly over the dim flowers, and pass away out of sight among the dark masses of the trees. One can almost believe in the possibility of peace on such a night as this, a burning brain and an aching heart seem almost a desecration; yet in that cottage beyond the dark meadow below, in the window of which there has just now sprung up a faint tiny light, there lies a dead child, and in the garden there is a small newly turned piece of turf, and under it sleeps a dumb dog, who could not make his mistress hear or see his little attempts to please her, and into whose soul such dim mysterious anguish entered that he could not live without her. I cannot but wonder and doubt whether there is anything in the world so strong as that necessity that made him die with her, and which we call love. If so, there is hope even in this still autumn evening, the absolute peace of which is so full of the presage of death.