A Reaping - Softcover

Benson, E. F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1791640753 ISBN 13: 9781791640750

Publisher: Independently published, 2018

SOMETHING of the primeval savage blood still beats in us, we must suppose, else why is it that we, effete inhabitants of London, who love the closeness and proximity of our fellow-men so much, feel no less keenly the rapture of being miles and miles away from railways and the folk who travel on them? How quick, too, is the transition from one mood to another, so that while a week or two ago we rushed insanely, it may be, but with extraordinary pleasure, from party to party, jabbering with childlike delight to myriad acquaintances, face to face on a blocked staircase, or in the drawing-room unwillingly silent while somebody sang, we now take the same childlike pleasure in long days of solitude. But we may take our solitude in pairs, in company with a friend who for the time being is no friend at all, but a bitter (and, it is to be hoped, disappointed) golfer, or we may lie out all day in the heather with a silent stalker, or, as has been my fortunate lot for the last ten days, may spend long hours, with a sandwich and a fishing-rod and a gillie, in angling over coffee-coloured streams or windswept lochs.The oldest inhabitants never remember anything like this summer, but they are bad evidence, because their memories are probably very defective owing to their age; but, what is more convincing, younger people, whose memories are less impaired, never remember anything like it. So there has been little of the coffee-coloured streams for me personally, but, instead, long quiet days by this wonderful loch, supposed to hold trout of fabulous dimensions, which, as far as I can make out, nobody has ever caught, though every one agrees that they are there. Then came a wonderful day, with more than trout-wonder in it.I came up here to this remote lodge alone, for the trio of us usually go our own ways in holiday time. Legs, in any case, had to go to Germany to learn that classic and guttural tongue, and Helen and I always make visiting arrangements independently of each other, unless we are both bidden to a house to which we both want to go. But it stands to reason, so it seemed to us, that husband and wife probably do not have the same friends, and it is as absurd for her to stay at a house because the host is a great friend of mine as it is for me to stay at a house because the hostess is a great friend of hers. Coincidences sometimes happen, in which we both go together. Otherwise we make our own arrangements. I cannot bear some of her friends; she finds it almost impossible to tolerate some of mine. And with shouts of laughter we agree to differ. Then in September or October the trio will come together again, and will all talk at once, describing simultaneously, while nobody listens, our delightful adventures.I started from the lodge that morning after an early breakfast, the gillie having already gone on with lunch, and what we hoped would be the apparatus of death; for, the first time during this last week, it was a soft and cloudy morning, with a warm wind from the south-west, sufficient even in this cup of the hills, where the lodge stands, to set the trees tossing their branches, and to strip the red ripe rowanberries from their stalks. Upon the unsheltered tops, then, where lay the dark-coloured loch with its fabled inhabitants, there should be ripple enough for fishing purposes. I walked unencumbered but for the field-glasses I always carry; for nothing, during periods of waiting or in the half-hour that follows the sandwich, is so fascinating as to spy out the busy animal life on these empty moors, or find some three or four miles away two or three little human specks moving very gently up the hillside after the deer, or sitting there patiently till some untoward affair, suspicious hinds, or a foul wind are lulled into inactivity.

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