Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Again he paused a moment, taking a deep breath of the night air into his lungs. Then he turned round.

  “You told me not to pity you,” he said, “and I tacitly agreed not to, and fully intended not to. But the time has come when my pity cannot hurt you. For I pity you from the same plane as that on which I perhaps some day may be glad of your pity. You have suffered, and you are suffering. Well, I pity you, as God pities you, supposing that suffering does happen to be necessary. I would not spare you one pang of it, if this is so, but I just put out my hand to you, saying that I am there, and watching and worshipping, I may say, for if suffering is necessary it is certainly sacred. I don’t know that it is necessary; but if it is, there am I, if that will do you any good, and there also are all those who have suffered, watching you with the pity that cannot help healing a little, and the sympathy that lightens. But if I were convinced, even for the winking of an eye, and to save a woodlouse from the absence of its dinner, that suffering must be, I should accept it all, and take not only my share of it, but the share of anybody else who would be so good as to shoulder me with it, for it is impossible to have enough or too much of anything that is right. At present I have not seen — so as to know — the necessity of it, though I have long known that all Nature groans under it. Everything preys on something else — you prey on the animals you eat, and the folk you make fools of on the Stock Exchange. And Evelyn preys on you. Yes, yes. And I — I try to prey on nobody, but perhaps this law of preying will some day be brought home to me. My joy, which so weighs down the scale, may have its compensating burden of suffering given to it. And whatever blackness of horror awaits me, I won’t turn back. My way of approach is this: to others there is the rough-and-tumble of the world, to others the ascetic life. But I believe that joy and life are the predominant factors; that is why I have chosen them, it has been my business to get acquainted anyhow with them. But what I absolutely refuse is the horrible mean, where one makes no ventures, and but paddles on the shore of the eternal sea. Let the breakers leave me high and dry and smashed on the shingle, or let me steer through them and see the unimagined islands of myth and fable. But I will not just pull my shoes and stockings off, and shriek when the water comes up to my knee. Something, whatever it is, must infallibly be so much better than nothing.”

  He walked up and down the verandah once or twice with his long, smooth step, moving with that peculiar grace and ease which denotes great physical strength. He had forgotten about Philip, and Philip for the first time had forgotten about Philip too.

  “But during these last years,” he went on, “I have consciously and deliberately turned my back on pain, because it is hideous, because it is a foe to joy, and because I have not and do not now realise its necessity. All I can say is, with Oliver Cromwell, it is just possible I may be mistaken, and in that case I am sure I shall have to — ah, no, be allowed to — learn my mistake. A child crying seems to me a dreadful thing, a beggar by the wayside with a broken tobacco-pipe, and not a penny to get another, the shriek of the rabbit when the stoat’s teeth fasten in its throat; they are all dreadful, and enemies to joy. But I am no longer convinced, as I used to be, that pain is unnecessary; I am beginning, as I said, to hold an open mind on the subject, and only say that I believe I can realise myself best and bring myself best into harmony with Nature, with the whole design, by avoiding it. Yet for me also pain and suffering may be necessary. If so, let them come; I am quite ready. I only hope that it will be soon over, that it will be so frightful that I can’t stand it. I should prefer that, some blinding, dreadful flash of revelation, to any slow, remorseless grinding of the truth into me. That, however, is not in my hands.”

  Philip’s mind had gone back again on to himself.

  “But how can it possibly be any good that those two should have behaved like this to me?” he cried, speaking directly for the first time. “What monstrous image do you make of the controller of the world and all our destinies, if it is by his will that this is done to me which turns all that may have been good in me into hatred and bitterness? Is that the lesson that I am meant to learn — that those whom one loves best are one’s bitterest foes, and will hurt one most?”

  Tom stopped in his walk and sat down on the edge of the table by Philip.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “Oliver Cromwell will help us again. Is it not just possible that you too are mistaken when you assume that your trouble was sent you in order that your love might be turned into hate? That it should have happened so may (just possibly again) be in some measure your fault. Could you not have done otherwise, and done better? I don’t want to preach, you know.”

  Philip sat silent, but his face hardened again.

  “If I could have done better, it would not have been I,” he said. “It would have been altogether another man.”

  Tom got down off the table.

  “Ah, you repudiate moral responsibility for your own acts,” he said.

  “Not exactly that. I say that there may be circumstances under which one’s will is crumpled up like a piece of waste paper, and one’s powers of resistance are paralysed. Don’t you believe that?”

  Merivale shook his head.

  “No, I don’t believe that the power of choice is ever taken away from one while one remains sane,” he said. “The moment one cannot choose, the doors of Bedlam are opened.”

  Philip got up.

  “They are still ajar for me,” he said. “But they were more widely open when I came here. For pity’s sake, Tom, go on helping me. It is only you, I think, who can get them closed for me.”

  He paused a moment, looking out into the still blackness of the garden, and again something stirred and creaked in the bushes, and the drowsy wind was tainted with some sharp smell. He turned to Tom —

  “I wonder if all that you have been saying is a fairy tale,” he said, “and whether I have been taking it literally, so that I imagine that things which are only, and can only be, allegorical and mythical are true.”

  “You mean the Pan-pipes, for instance, which I heard for the first time at Pangbourne, and which I hear so often now?” asked Merivale.

  “Yes, that among other things. Pan himself, too. I begin to think of Pan as a real being, the incarnation of all the terror and fear and sorrow of the world. The crying child you spoke of is part of Pan, the shriek of the rabbit is part of him. All these things, as you say, you have turned your back on. What if they should all be shown you suddenly, they and the huge significance and universality of them?”

  Merivale looked quite grave; anyhow it was no fairy story to him, whatever it might be to others.

  “Yes, that is all possible,” he said, “and that will mean that I shall see Pan. What a wonderful mode of expression that is of the Greeks. For Pan means ‘everything,’ and to see everything would be clearly more than one could stand. And so to see Pan means death.”

  Once again the strange, pungent odour was noticeable.

  “Where are you going to sleep to-night?” asked Philip suddenly.

  “Oh, in the hammock,” said Tom. “I hardly ever sleep in the house.”

  Then a more definite, though utterly fantastic, fear seized Philip.

  “No, sleep in the house to-night,” he said, feeling that his fear was too childish to be allowed utterance.

  At that Merivale laughed; there was no need for Philip to utter his thought, for he knew perfectly well what it was.

  “I know what you mean,” he said, “but do you think that if Pan is going to visit me he will only come into the garden, and not into the house? You are mixing up the fear of Pan with the general sense of insecurity about sleeping out of doors, which comes from unfamiliarity with that delightful way of spending the night. And I know another thing you felt; you heard an odd rustling in the bushes, as I often hear it, and you smelt a rather queer smell, something rather pungent, and it reminded you of a goat. Of course Pan used to appear, so the Greek myth said, in goat form, and your inference was that Pan was
in those bushes. But he is just as much in this verandah, and, for that matter, in Piccadilly, poor thing! There is quite certainly no getting away from him; I am as safe here as I should be if I was locked into the strong-room in the Bank of England. For it is not just to this place or that that he comes, but to this person or that.”

  They parted after this, Philip going upstairs to his bedroom, while Tom, after changing into a sleeping suit, went out with a rug over his arm into the dusky halls of the night. Sleep, when the time for sleep had come, visited him as quickly as it visits every healthy animal; and if it kept aloof, he no more worried about it, or tried to woo it, than he would take appetising scraps of caviare or olives to make him hungry. And to-night he lay for some time, not tossing or turning in his hammock, but with eyes wide open, looking through the tracery of briar and leaf above him into the sombre darkness of the clouds overhead. So dark was it that the foliage was only just blacker than the sky, and to right and left the trees were shapeless blots against it. But all that mattered was that sky and clouds and trees were all round him, and that he could sink and merge himself in the spirit and the life with which they were impregnated. He lay open to it; just as his lungs were filled with the open air and his body vivified by it, so his soul and spirit drank in and breathed that open, essential life that ran through all things, the life that day by day he more fully realised to be One thing, expressing itself in the myriad forms of tree and beast and man. And though still that curious rustle and stir went on in the bushes, and though once he thought he heard the tap as of some hoofed thing upon the brick path of the pergola, he did not stir, nor did any sense of dismay or fear come to him. He had followed the path which he believed was his, striving to make himself one with the eternal harmony of Nature, and if the revelation of her discords was to come to him, come it would; the matter was not in his hands. But in whoever’s hands it was, he was content to leave it there.

  Philip meantime fared less easily in his bed indoors. The talk this evening had brought back to him with a terrible vividness all he had been through, the bitterness and hatred of his own heart all blossomed poisonously again, now that Merivale had gone, and he was left alone in the darkness and quiet of the night. That there was some subtle and very powerful influence which surrounded the Hermit like an atmosphere of his own he felt fully; in his company he knew how strong a sense of healing and serenity was abroad, but to-night, at any rate, all his foes, which he had almost dared to hope were being vanquished and left for dead, were rising about him again in ghostly battalions. He had, so he dimly hoped, begun to slay them, but it seemed for the moment that he had been but smiting at shadows that took no hurt from his blows. For a little while he had been able to set his face forward, to fancy that he was beginning really to make way, but now, as he glanced back over his shoulder, the enemy pursued undiminished after him. Again he felt his lips were quivering with sheer hatred of those who had so hurt him, and his hands were clenched in passionate desire to strike. And thus for hours he tossed and turned, until his window again, as in Jermyn Street, began to “grow a glimmering square,” and the tentative notes of birds to flute in the bushes, and he was back again in those darkest hours he had ever known.

  Then his bed became intolerable, and he rose from it and walked about the room, until the huelessness of the earliest dawn began to be touched with colour. Never since the blow had fallen upon him had he been able to pray; his bitterness and hatred had come like the figure of Satan himself between him and prayer.

  Philip suddenly paused; another dawn was beginning to break, a dawn yet remote and far off in the Eastern skies, but a faint, dim streak of light was there. It was indeed true; it was his own hatred, his own bitterness, not what others had done to him, which had stood in his way, and, as Merivale had said, the power of choice was in possession of every man who was fit to move about the world. He had accepted that when it was stated to him; he knew it to be true, and thus choice was still his. He had to choose, and to choose now. Did he want to hate and be bitter? Did he deliberately, in so far as he could choose, choose that?

  So, though no word crossed his lips or was even formed in his brain, he prayed.

  SIXTEENTH

  THE elder Lady Ellington had never yet in the whole course of her combative life been knocked out of time by the blows of adverse circumstances, and she did not intend to begin being knocked out now. That Madge’s marriage was a frightful disaster she did not deny or seek to conceal, but her admirable habits of self-control and her invariable custom of never letting anything dwell on her mind or make her worry, served her in good stead now. She considered that Madge and Evelyn had both behaved quite unpardonably, and though she had no thought of pardoning either of them, she had no thought of dwelling on the matter. When the thing was done, it was done, and, like David, she, so to speak, proposed to go and oil herself — in other words, to pay her customary round of summer and autumn visits, carrying with her all her old inflexible firmness and readiness to advise. For Philip, finally, she hardly felt pity at all; a man really must be a fool if he could lose his wife like that at the eleventh hour. It was impossible to acquit him altogether of blame, though it would have puzzled her who had so nearly been his mother-in-law to say exactly where the blame lay. General incapacity to keep what was morally one’s own perhaps covered it, and incapacity of all kinds she detested.

  These visits took her up to Scotland about the middle of August, since this was on the whole the easiest way of not getting out of touch with people. Scotland, if one went to the right houses, she considered to be a sort of barometer as to the way people would behave, and the general trend of affairs go, when the gatherings began for the autumn parties in England and people came up to London in the spring; and though she could not have been considered exactly a conventional woman, she very much wanted to know what kind of line society in general would take about Madge. For with all her hard shrewdness, she had not what we may call a sensitive social touch. When Society beat time she could follow it with scrupulous exactitude, but she was not capable of conducting herself. And this concerted piece was rather complex, and though Society had been so unanimous in its condemnation at the time, Lady Ellington, knowing it pretty well, did not feel at all sure that the sentence it passed on July 28th would not be reprieved, whether, in fact, Society would not say that there had been a miscarriage of justice, and that Madge — and Evelyn, for that matter — were entirely innocent and even laudable. For if Philip had wealth, which he undoubtedly had, and Madge had thrown that overboard, she had at any rate picked up, as one picks up a pilot, a man with extraordinary charm and extraordinary gifts, about whom Society was even now on the point of losing its head. Evelyn, in fact, if he continued to be as gay as he always was, to enjoy himself as thoroughly, and also continued to paint pictures which really furnished Society with conversation to quite a remarkable degree, promised well to be as desirable a husband as the other. Also Philip’s stern attention to business during the month of August had done his cause, as has been mentioned, no inconsiderable damage. Indeed if he had married old Lady Ellington instead it perhaps would have been more suitable. But having failed to secure the rose, he had not shown any inclination to be near it, and had gone to the City instead.

  It was all this which Lady Ellington hoped to pick up in Scotland. She wanted, in fact, to know what would be her most correct attitude towards Madge. Her own personal attitude she knew well enough; she was still quite furious with her. But (she put it to herself almost piously) it is better sometimes to sink the personal feeling in the deep waters of the public good, just as you drown a superfluous kitten. However she felt privately, it might be kinder and wiser to conceal and even eradicate that personal grudge. She went, in fact, in order to see whether Society was possibly taking a more Christian line about her daughter than her daughter’s mother really was. Strange as the fact may sound, this was the fact, for it would never do that Madge’s mother should on the one hand be estranged from her daughter,
while all the world embraced her; nor, on the other, that Madge’s mother should continue to embrace her daughter while all the world discreetly looked the other way and said “That minx!”

  Now, as has already been briefly stated, the country verdict about Madge, the verdict, that is to say, of London gone into the country, had reaped the benefit of country air and early hours. The personal inconvenience and the necessary incidental chatter had died down; nobody really cared about it; the stern condemnation originally made was felt to be but a hollow voice, and Society, which, whatever may be said about it, is really rather indulgent, just as it hopes individually for indulgence, in that most unlikely contingency of indulgence being desirable, was already, without the slightest sign of embarrassment, executing a volte-face. For if the volte-face is general, the only embarrassment arises from not executing it. And Lady Dover’s house, which, so to speak, kept social Greenwich time without error, was the first place that Lady Ellington visited.

  It was only this strong sense of duty — duty towards Madge — that drew her there; otherwise nothing would have induced her to go. There was a night in the train and a day in the train, and at the end of that a thirty-mile drive starting from a spot called Golspie. Her experience of Golspie was that it rained, and that an endless road stretched over mile after mile of moor, where it rained worse than in Golspie. But in Scotland it is officially supposed never to rain; the utmost that can happen in the way of moisture is that it should be “saft.” She arrived at Golspie, an open motor-car was waiting for her, and it was “saft.” Also the motor could not take all her luggage; that was to follow in a cart. The cart, so she mentally calculated, if it did not stick in a bog (not a wet one, only a “saft” one) might arrive about midnight. Another passenger also alighted at Golspie; the present bearer of her husband’s title. He too was going to Lady Dover’s, and the motor was to take them both. He hazarded that this was “awfully jolly,” but he seemed not to have said the right thing.