E. F. Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He read this amiable epistle to his wife.

  “Upon my word, it sounds a very good plan,” he said brightly. “What do you say, Phoebe? It will give me the holiday of which you think I stand in need.”

  Phcebe shook her head.

  “Do you propose that I should come with you?” she asked. “Why should a holiday among the submarines do you more good than the Malvern Hills?”

  The thought of the deep holes in the Atlantic grew ever more rosy to Philip’s mind. Even the hideous notion of being torpedoed failed to take the colour out of it.

  “My dear, these are days in which a man must not mind taking risks,” he said.

  She smiled at him.

  “I know your fearless nature, darling,” she said; “but what is the point of running unnecessary risks?”

  “Local colour. There is a great deal in Mr. Elherington’s remarks.”

  “I don’t agree. I should think with our experience we ought to be able to describe New York without going there. We didn’t find it necessary to go to Athens, or Khartoum, or Mexico.”

  “True,” said he; “but perhaps my descriptions might have gained in veracity if we had. That was a tiresome letter to the Yorkshire Telegraph about the spires on the Acropolis. If we had been there, we should have known that there weren’t any.”

  He fingered the stud-box in his pocket for a moment, and his fingers itched to drop it over a ship’s side.

  “My part of our joint work might gain in true artistic feeling,” he said, “if I described what I had actually seen. Art holds the mirror up to nature, you know.”

  “Yes, darling; but do you think Shakespeare meant that Art must hold the mirror up to New York?” asked she. “I fancy there is very little nature in New York.”

  He took a turn or two up and down the room, while the box positively burned his finger-tips.

  “I can’t help feeling as I do about it,” he said. “And, Phcebe, one of our earliest vows to each other was that each of us should respect the other’s literary conscience!”

  She got up.

  “You disarm me, dear,” she said. “Apply for your passport, and if they give it you, go. I only ask you to respect my feminine weakness and not make me come with you among all those horrid submarines.”

  They sealed their compact with a kiss.

  By the time Phcebe had interviewed her cook, her husband had already written his letter applying for his passport, on the grounds of artistic necessity in his profession. She read it through with high approval.

  “Very dignified and proper,” she said. “By the way, dear, there will be no work for us this morning. We are going over the factory for explosives with kind Captain Traill. You and I must observe the processes very carefully, as we want all the information we can get for ‘The Hero of Ypres.’”

  He jumped up with something of his old alacrity.

  “Aha, there speaks your artistic conscience,” he said. “And don’t let me see too many soft glances between you and kind Captain Traill.”

  Phcebe looked hugely delighted and returned the compliment.

  “And there are some very pretty girls working there,” she observed slyly.

  An hour afterwards they were padding in felt slippers round the room where bombs were packed with a fatal grey treacle, one spoonful of which was sufficient to blow them and the whole building into a million fragments. A new type of bomb was being made there, consisting of a cast-iron shell fitted with a hole through which the grey treacle was poured; an iron stopper was then screwed into the hole. There were hundreds of those empty shells, which slid along grooved ways to where the treacle was put into them, and they then were passed on to the girls, who fixed their stoppers. It was all soft, silent, deadly work, and Philip recorded a hundred impressions on his retentive memory.

  Phcebe and Captain Traill were walking just ahead of him, when suddenly a great light broke, so vividly illuminating his brain that he almost thought some terrific explosion, seen and not heard, had occurred. Stealthily he drew from his pocket the stud-case, stealthily he opened it and took out the razor-blade. Then, bending over an empty bombcase as if to examine it, he dropped the blade into it. It fell inside with a slight chink, which nobody noticed.

  A couple of minutes afterwards the bomb-case had passed through the hands of the dispenser of treacle, and had its stopper screwed in.

  “And where are all those little surprise packets going?” asked Philip airily.

  “To aeroplanes on the west front,” said kind Captain Traill. “We’re sending off a lot tonight. Perhaps that one “—and he pointed to the identical bomb which Philip had had a hand in filling—“will make a mess in Mannheim next week.”

  “I hope so,” said Philip fervently.

  The only thing, now that Philip had disposed of the razor-blade, that clouded his complete content was the fear that his passport would be granted him, and that he would have to make a journey to America. Happily no such unnerving calamity occurred, for a week later he received a polite intimation from the passport office that the object for which he wanted to go there did not seem of sufficient importance to warrant the granting of a permit; so, wreathed in smiles, he passed this letter over to Phoebe.

  “There’s the end of that,” he said.

  “Philistines! Barbarians!” she said indignantly.

  “I suppose they are acting to the best of their judgment,” said he. “I dare say they have never heard of me.”

  “My dear, don’t be so cynical,” said Phcebe.

  “Well, well! Certainly I am bitterly disappointed.”

  He took up the morning paper.

  “Bitterly!” he said again. “Hallo! Our airmen bombed Mannheim two nights ago, and dropped three tons of high explosives. Well, that is very interesting. Captain Traill said that perhaps some of those bombs which we saw being filled would make a mess in Mannheim. I hope they were those actual ones.”

  “So do I,” said Phcebe. “Was there much damage done?”

  “The German account says that there was hardly any, but of course that is the German account. A few people were wounded and cut by fragments of the bombs. Cut!”

  He got up and could hardly refrain from dancing round the table among the rushes.

  “Some deep cuts, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said.

  SPOOK STORIES

  Table of Contents

  The Case of Frank Hampden

  Table of Contents

  There was a light visible from the chinks and crevices of drawn curtains in the window of Dr. Roupert’s study as I passed it on my way back from dinner one night. He lived some six doors farther up the same street as I, and since it had long been a frequent custom for us to smoke the “go-to-bed” cigarette together, I rang and asked if he was at leisure. His servant told me that he had already sent a message across to my house, asking me to look in on him if I got home while the evening was not too far advanced for a casual conversational quarter of an hour; and accordingly I took off my coat and went straight into the pleasant little front room, about which hung the studious fragrance of the books that lined it from floor to ceiling.

  Arthur Roupert was not alone this evening; there was sitting on the near side of the fire, which sparkled prosperously in this clear night of early December frost, a young man whom I was sure I had never seen before. As I entered, he stopped in the middle of a sentence, turning towards the door, and I looked on the most handsome and diabolical face that I had ever beheld.

  Simultaneously Roupert got up.

  “I hoped you would look in,” he said. “Let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Hampden, who is spending a day or two with me. This is Mr. Archdale, Frank, of whom I was speaking just now.”

  As the other rose, I saw that Roupert’s almost foolishly amiable fox-terrier shrank away from where she had been sitting by her master’s chair, instead of giving me her accustomed and effusive greeting, and retreated into a far corner of the room, where she sat quivering with raised hack
les, and with vigilant eyes full of hate and terror fixed on young Hampden. His right arm was in a sling, and he held out his left hand to me.

  “You must excuse me,” he said, “but I am only just recovering from a broken arm. My cousin’s dog doesn’t approve of it; she would like to get her teeth into it.”

  “The oddest thing I ever saw, Archdale,” said Roupert. “You know Fifi’s usual amiability. Call her, Frank.”

  Frank Hampden whistled, and clicked his fingers together in an encouraging manner.

  “Fifi—come here, Fifi!” he said.

  For a moment I thought that this most confiding of ladies was going to fly at him. But apparently she could not find the courage for an attack, and, snapping and growling, retreated behind the window curtains.

  “And that to me,” said Hampden, licking his lips as he spoke. “Me, who adore dogs. Don’t you, Mr. Archdale?”

  As he said that I knew that he lied; that Fifi’s detestation of him was met with a hatred quite as vivid but more controlled. I can no more account for that conviction than for the sense of hellish evil that my first glance at him had conveyed to me. He was quite young, twenty-two or twenty-three for a guess, and yet from behind the mask of that soft boyish face there looked out a spirit hard and malignant and mature, an adept in terrible paths. The impression was quite inexplicable but perfectly clear. Then, looking across to Roupert, I saw he was watching his cousin with eager intentness.

  I had to answer the direct question he had put to me, but it required an effort to speak to him or to look at him.

  “No; personally I don’t care about dogs,” I said. “I rather dislike them, and so enjoy a most unwelcome popularity among them. Fifi, for instance: your cousin will tell you how blind is her adoration for me!”

  “See if Fifi will come to you if I stand by you,” said Hampden. Fifi had half-emerged from her ambush behind the curtains, and I called to her. But she would not leave the retreat where her rage and terror had driven her. She gave a little apologetic whine, as if to signify that I was asking an impossible thing, and beat with her stumpy tail on the carpet.

  “Now go back to your chair again, Frank,” said Roupert.

  Fifi needed no further invitation when he had left my neighbourhood. She bundled herself across the room to me, her thin white body curled like a comma, wriggling with delight and making incomprehensible little explanations of her previous conduct. But the moment that Hampden moved in his chair, she bolted away from me again.

  He laughed and got up.

  “Well, I think I shall go to bed now that you have come to keep Arthur company,” he said. “By the way, where’s your cat, Arthur? I haven’t seen her about all day.”

  He was facing sideways to Roupert as he spoke, and I noticed that he did not turn his head towards him. This gave a certain casual cursory tone to his question, making it appear a mere careless inquiry.

  “I haven’t seen her, either,” said Roupert. “Perhaps, after taking counsel with Fifi, she has thought it prudent to fly from your baleful presence. Good night, Frank. Can you manage for yourself with your bandaged arm, or shall I come and help you?”

  “Oh, I’m all right, thanks,” he said; “good night. A kind good night, Fifi. We shall be good friends before long.”

  ** * * *

  Arthur Roupert had retired some two years before from regular medical practice, in which, as all the world knows, he was undoubtedly the first authority on disease and aberrations of the brain and nervous system, devoting his attention more particularly to those riddles of obscure and baffling disorders to which he so often supplied strange and correct answers. He was possessed of an ample competence, and so, finding that his large professional practice did not permit him the leisure which was necessary for these exploratory studies, he had, though always willing to be consulted by his colleagues, thrown up an active career for one of research. He wanted to learn rather than to practise, and without precisely mistrusting the methods which had earned him so brilliant a success, had inferred the presence of huge fields of the unknown, huge expanses of further possibilities which would perhaps put utterly out of date the most advanced of theories and treatments hitherto recognized in his profession. At the time of his retirement he had once talked to me about the uncharted seas on to which he proposed to push forth.

  “The most advanced of actual practitioners,” he said, “are but groping in the dark on the threshold of real knowledge, feeling for the handle, fumbling for the bell. At the most, that is to say, in cases of brain disease and nerve disorder we try to get at the mind of the patient, and influence that, so that it, not we, may exert its healing power, and cure the imperfect functioning of the material part. Of course that is a tremendous step forward when we look at what medical science was twenty years ago, when doctors prescribed tonics, tonics to heal the physical damage caused by a disordered mind. But mind itself is but a very subordinate denizen in that house of mystery which we call man.

  “Mind is no more than the servant who comes to the door, and takes your hat and coat, and tells you in a word or two how the patient has been. Mind is not the master of the house, whom you have really come to see, and who sits there alone, mortally sick, perhaps, and in terror and darkness for the master of the house is the spirit. We have got to examine him before we can touch the source of these diseases. For the farther that science advances, the more certain it is that there is a master sitting within to whom the mind is only the servant. As for the body, the tissues, the nerves, the grey matter, what shall we say that is? Why, it’s no more than the servant’s clothes, his jacket, or his boots. I’m not going to stay talking in the hall to ‘mind,’ the servant, any longer. I shall leave him there, and go straight up to the sick-chamber. I shall be called all sorts of names—charlatan, spiritualist, what you will—but I don’t care two straws about that. Besides, I know quite well that my colleagues will still be glad to call me in when they are puzzled, and I hope to be better equipped to help them.… I won’t reject any jungle-path without exploring it, not witchcraft, nor demoniacal possession, nor all the myths which science thinks she has exploded. In its first origin everything must be spiritual, be it comet or toothache or genius. Just as mental suggestion has taken the place of tonics, so must spiritual healing take the place of mental suggestion. The spirit is the original manifestation of God in man, and it is on prayer and on faith that the whole science of healing will some day rest. But first we have to investigate the conditions, the environment, the life.…”

  For these two years, then, which had followed his retirement, Roupert had given himself to these studies of occult and spiritual influences, learning about the healing powers contained in mental suggestion and trying to get behind that into the more elemental and essential mysteries of man; leaving the servant, as he had said, in the hall of the house, while he went further into the presence of the master of the house. Often, during these “go-to-bed” cigarettes that multiplied themselves into the night, he told me tales that did not make going to sleep any easier. Nothing was too extravagant for his investigations; witchcraft, spiritualism, Satanism, the healing touch, and, above all, demoniacal possession were the subjects of this study that went deeper into the human organism than mind. There was no myth or exploded superstition that he did not examine, to see whether the explosion had been complete and shattering, or whether among the debris there did not remain some grains of solid stuff that were still solid, though science had affirmed that a puff of scattered smoke was all that was extant.… Consequently this evening, when Frank Hampden had gone to bed, I was quite prepared to find that Roupert had something to tell, some guess to hazard that had illumined his inquiries, the more so indeed because I had not seen him for some dozen nights.

  “Did you receive the message I left at your house?” he asked abruptly as the door closed behind his cousin.

  “No; I haven’t been home. But your servant told me you had asked me to come in,” said I.

  “Yes, I did. You
have done just what I wanted. In my note I asked you to come in and observe my cousin, and tell me your impression. I saw you couldn’t help observing him, so now let us have the impression.”

  “Quite frankly? All?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “I never saw anyone so utterly terrible,” I said.

  “Terrible? Exactly how?” he asked.

  The very intensity of my feeling about Hampden blurred the outline of it, and I paused trying to put a definite shape to it.

  “Incomparably terrible,” I said. “Murderous, I think: murderous for the fun of it. I felt like Fifi.”

  “I saw you did,” he said; “and I suspect you are right, you and Fifi.…”

  He walked up and down the room once or twice, then sat down with the air of settling himself.

  “Did you hear him ask about my cat?” he said. “He killed her last night; he buried her in the garden.”

  There was a grotesqueness, a ludicrousness even in this after the talk of murder, but that only added horror to it.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Precisely what I say. It so happened that I slept very badly last night, because, as a matter of fact, I was thinking about Frank, and wondering if I was on the horrible track which would show me what ailed him. About three in the morning I heard the door into the garden being opened: the window of my bedroom, which was open, is just above it. The idea of burglars occurred to me, and, without turning on my light, I went and looked out. There was bright clear starlight, and I saw Frank come out of the house carrying something white in his arm. He put it down to fetch a spade from the tool-house, and I saw what it was. He dug up a couple of plants with lumps of soil ’round their roots, working slowly, for he could only use one arm. He buried the cat in the excavation, and very carefully replanted the Michaelmas daisies over it. Then, more terribly yet, he knelt down by the grave, and I could hear him sobbing.”