Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Another effect of this last year of tension, besides that of sundering our present lives and consciousness from pre-war days, is that it has made a vast quantity of people very much older. That has advantages and disadvantages, for while there are certainly many very admirable things connected with the sense of youth, there are some which are not so admirable when manifested by those of mature and middle age. It is admirable, for instance, that the middle-aged should have enough vitality to devote themselves to learning the fox-trot, or the bunny-bump, but it is less admirable that they should actually spend their vitality in doing so. The war has taken the wish to bunny-bump out of them, the desire for bunny-bumping has failed, and that has caused them to realize that they are not quite so young as they thought, or as they proposed to be for the next twenty years or so. The sense of middle-age has come upon them as suddenly as the war itself came, and many have found it extremely disconcerting. It is as if they were introduced to a perfect stranger, whom they have to take into their house and live with. They don’t like the look of the stranger, nor his manners, nor his habits, and this infernal intruder does not propose, they feel, to make a short visit, but has come to stop with them permanently. He eats and walks and reads with them, and when they wake up at night they see his head on their pillow. He seems to them ungracious and angular and forbidding; they dearly long to get away from him, but that is impossible. What, then, are they to do? There is only one thing to be done, to make friends with him without loss of time, and never to regret the vanishing of the jolly days before he came. If they had been wise (hardly anybody is in this respect), they would have made friends with him long before he came as a permanent guest; they would have asked him to lunch, so to speak, on one day, and gone out a walk with him on another, and have thus got accustomed to his ways by degrees. But as they have not done that, they must resign themselves to a period of discomfort now.

  Probably they will find that he is much easier to get on with than they think at first. They fancy that they will never be happy again with that old bore always at their elbows, and it is quite true that they never will be happy again in the old way. They must find a new way, and the first step towards that is not to call this guest, middle-age, an old bore, but discover what he can do, and what his good points are. He really has a good many, if you take the trouble to look for them. He has not got the tearing high spirits which they are accustomed to, but he has a certain serenity which is far from disagreeable if you will be at the pains to draw it out. He is not very quick, he has but little of that quality compounded of wit and activity and nonsense which they were wont to consider the basis of all social enjoyment; but he has a certain rather kindly humour which gives a twinkle to the eye that sparkles no longer. He has boiled down his experiences, sad and joyful alike, into a sort of broth which is nutritive and palatable, though without bubble. But patience is one of its excellent ingredients, a wholesome herb, which, for all its homeliness, has a very pleasant taste. He can be a very good friend, not liable to take offence, and though his affections are not passionate, they are very sincere.

  But if you refuse to see his good points, and will not make friends with him (he will always allow you to do that; it is “up to you”), he will prove himself a very cantankerous old person indeed. He will give you the most annoying reminders of his presence, digging you with his skinny elbow, and making all sorts of sarcastic interruptions when you are talking. You will get to hate him more and more, for he will always be spoiling your pleasure until you are cordially inclined towards him. He will trip you up in the bunny-bump; he will give you aches and pains if you persist in behaving as if you were twenty-five still; he will make you feel very unwell if you choose to eat lobster-salad at sunrise. And you can’t get rid of him; the more strenuously you deny his existence, the more indefatigably he will remind you of it. He is quite a good friend, in fact, but a perfectly pernicious enemy. But naturally you will do what you choose about him, as you have always done about everything else....

  To revert to Francis (a far more exhilarating subject than New Year reflections), he was at home for a few days last week. After the Dardanelles expedition was abandoned, he went out to France (after having condescended to accept a commission), where he proceeded at once to earn the V.C. for a deed of ludicrous valour, under a storm of machine-gun bullets, and while on leave received his decoration.

  “Of course I like it awfully,” was his comment about it; “but, as a matter of fact, I didn’t deserve it, because on that particular morning I didn’t happen to be frightened. I usually am frightened, and I’ve deserved the V.C. millions of times, but just when I got it I didn’t deserve it. They ought to give the V.C. to fellows who are in the devil of a fright all the time they are doing their job. But that day I wasn’t; I had had a delicious breakfast, and felt as calm as Matilda is looking. I don’t believe she can speak a word by the way; you made it all up.”

  I was very much mortified by Matilda’s conduct. Ever since Francis’s return she had sat in dead silence, though I had taught her to say “Hurrah for the V.C.,” and she had repeated it without stopping for several hours the day before he arrived. But the moment she saw him, she looked at him with a cold grey eye and remained absolutely speechless. Of course I did not tell Francis what I had taught her to say, because she might take it into her head to begin to talk at any time, and her congratulations would not then be a surprise to him. So I held my tongue, and Matilda hers.

  Then a most unfortunate incident occurred, for Francis left his decoration in a taxi next day, and though we telephoned to all the taxi-ranks and police-stations in the world, we could hear nothing of it. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so furious as he was.

  “No one will believe I got it,” he shouted. “I meant to wear it day and night, so that even a burglar coming into the house should see it. But now no one will know. I can’t go about chanting ‘I am a V.C., but I left it in a taxi.’ Who would believe such a cock-and-bull story? If you heard a fellow in the street saying ‘I am a V.C.,’ you wouldn’t believe him. Of course there’s the riband, but it was the Cross I wanted to wear day and night — nobody looks at an inch of riband. Don’t laugh.”

  Matilda suddenly cleared her throat, and blew her nose, which is often the prologue to conversation. I sincerely hoped she wouldn’t say “Hurrah for the V.C.” just this moment, for it really seemed possible that the enraged Francis might wring her neck if she mocked at him. I hastened to talk myself, for Matilda usually waits for silence before she scatters her pearls of wisdom.

  “Well, apply for another one,” I said. “They’ll surely give you another one. Or earn another one, but apply first.”

  “And how many years do you think I should have to wait for it?” he asked. “How many departments do you think I should have to visit? How many papers and affidavits do you think I should have to sign? Apply for another one, indeed, as if the V.C. was only a pound of sugar!”

  “Only a pound of sugar!” I said. “Certainly, if it takes as long as it takes to get a pound of sugar — —”

  Matilda gave a loud shriek.

  “Gott strafe the V.C.!” she screamed. “Hurrah for Germany! Gott scratch the Kaiser’s head! Bow, wow, wow, wow, wow! Pussy!”

  Francis stopped dead and turned his head slowly round to where Matilda was screaming like a Pythian prophetess. She whistled like the milkman, she cuckooed, she called on her Maker’s name, and on Taffy’s; in a couple of minutes she had said everything she had ever known, and mixed the V.C. up with them all. She laughed at the V.C.; she blew her nose at him, accompanying these awful manifestations of Matilda-ism with dancing a strange Brazilian measure on her perch. Then she stopped as suddenly as if her power of speech had been blown out like a candle, and hermetically sealed her horny beak for all conversational purposes for precisely three weeks.

  Francis had stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth, so that his laughter should not interrupt Matilda, and got so red in the face I was afraid he was going t
o have a fit. But when she definitely stopped, he took the handkerchief out of his mouth, and laughed till exhaustion set in.

  “O Lord! I’m so glad Matilda is true!” he said. “I was half afraid you might have invented her, though I was surprised at the impeccable art of your invention.”

  “Why surprised?” I asked coldly.

  “Oh, I don’t know. The ordinary reason. But she’s really more like the British public than King Tino. They get things more mixed up than anyone I ever came across. For instance, they think that they ought to be very grave and serious, because the war is very grave and serious. Why, there’s Matilda-ism for you! The only possible way of meeting a grave situation is to meet it gaily, and they would learn that if they came out to the trenches. Unless you were flippant there you would expire with depression. They are beavers at work, I allow that, but when the day’s work is over they ought to be compelled to amuse themselves.”

  “But they don’t feel inclined to,” said I.

  “No, and I don’t feel inclined to get up in the morning, but that is no justification for lying in bed. There ought to be an amusement-board, which should make raids on private houses, if they suspected that unseemly seriousness was practised there. People talk of unseemly mirth, but they don’t realize that gloom, as a general rule, is much more unseemly. Besides, you don’t arrive at anything like the proper output of work if it is done by depressed people. Also, the quality of it is different.”

  “Do you mean that a shell made by cheerful munition workers has a greater explosive force than when it has been made by the melancholy?” I asked.

  “I daresay that is the case, and it would account for the fact that the Boches’ shells haven’t been nearly so devastating lately, because beyond doubt the Boches are a good deal depressed. There is a marked sluggishness stealing into their explosives. If you want to do a good day’s work on Thursday, by far the best preparation you can make for it is to have a howling, jolly time on Wednesday evening. Pleasure gives you energy, and pleasure is every bit as real as pain, and cheerfulness as depression. I know you will say that it is the fogs that make people depressed, but it is more likely, as someone suggested, that the depressed people make the fogs. If so, I don’t wonder at the impenetrable state of affairs outside.”

  He pointed at the window, which, as far as purposes of illumination went, was about as useful as the wall. Since dawn no light had broken through that opaque cloud of brown vapour; a moonless night was not darker than this beleaguered noonday. It had penetrated into the house and veiled the corners of the room in obscurity, and filled eyes and nose with smarting ill-smelling stuff.

  “Yes, decidedly it’s the depressed people who make the fog,” said he. “They are the same thing on two different planes, for they both refuse to admit the sunshine.”

  “But, good heavens, aren’t you ever depressed?” I asked.

  “Not inside. I don’t count surface depression, which can be easily produced by an aching tooth, though, indeed, I haven’t got much experience of that. But I am never fundamentally depressed; I never doubt that behind the clouds is the sun still shining, as that odious school-marm Longfellow tells us. Often things are immensely tiresome, but tiresome things, painful things, have no root. They don’t penetrate down to the central reality. But all happiness springs from it. Even mere pleasure is as real as pain, as I said just now; but joy, happiness, is infinitely more real than either. But somehow — I don’t quite understand this, though I know it’s true — somehow happiness casts a shadow, like a tree growing in the sunshine. Thomas à Kempis, as usual, is quite right when he says, ‘Without sorrow none liveth in love.’ But that sorrow is a thing that passes; it wheels with the sun; it is not steadfast; it is not everlasting. But it’s the devil to try to describe that which from its very nature is indescribable. Only there are so many excellent folk who think that the shadow is more real than the object which causes it.”

  He came and sat on the hearth-rug, where presently he stretched himself at length.

  “And yet some of the best people who have ever lived,” he said, “have experienced what they call the darkness of the soul. The whole of their belief in God and in love, all that has made them far the happiest creatures on the earth, suddenly leaves them. Their naked souls are left in outer darkness; they are convinced in their own minds — minds, I say — that there is nothing in the world except darkness. And their souls must remain perfectly steadfast, clinging in this freezing blindness to the conviction that it can’t be so, that all their senses and their reasoning powers are wrong. Nothing can help them except their own unaided faith, from which all support seems withdrawn. Job had it pretty badly. It must be beastly, for you can’t guess at the time what is the matter with you. Your mind simply tells you that it has become a reasoned and convinced atheist. It’s a sort of possession; the devil, for some inscrutable reason, is allowed to enter into you, and he’s an awful sort of tenant. He’s so plausible too, so convincing. He gets hold of your mind and says, ‘Just chuck overboard all that you once blindly believed, and now clear-sightedly know to be false. You needn’t bother yourself to curse God and die, because there isn’t such a thing as God. And instead of dying live and thoroughly enjoy yourself.’ That sounds ridiculous to you and me, whose minds the devil doesn’t entirely possess, but imagine what it would be if your mind had his spell cast on it, if all you had ever believed drifted away from you, and left you in the outer darkness. It would sound excellent advice then. Your mind would tell you that there was nothing beyond the mere material pleasures of the world. It would seem very foolish not to make the most of them, regardless of everything else, if there was nothing else.”

  “But all atheists are not unbridled hedonists,” said I.

  “More fools they. At least, from my point of view, the only possible bridle on one’s carnal and material desires is the fact that one is not an atheist. What does the progress of mankind amount to considered by itself? A few scientific inventions, a little less small-pox. Is it for that that unnumbered generations have lived and suffered and enjoyed?”

  “But can’t atheists believe in and work for the progress of the world?” I asked.

  “I know they do, but for the life of me I can’t see why. I wouldn’t stir a finger or make a single act of renunciation if all that inspired me was the welfare of the next generation. To me the brotherhood of man is a meaningless phrase unless it is coupled with the fatherhood of God.”

  “But you left Alatri, you went to fight, you won the V.C. you left in a taxi for the sake of men.”

  “No, for the sake of what they stood for,” he said. “For the sake of that of which they are the manifestation.”

  He got up and looked at his watch.

  “Blow it! I’ve got to go and see the manifestation known as the War Office,” he said.

  “After which?” I asked. “Will you be back for lunch?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Lord, I wish I wasn’t going to the War Office, specially since you have a morning off. Why shouldn’t I say that I’m tired of the war — I might telephone it — or that I have become a conscientious objector, or that I’ve got an indisposition?”

  “There’s the telephone,” said I.

  He buckled his belt.

  “Wonderful thing the telephone,” he said. “And what if it’s true that there’s another telephone possible: I mean the telephone between the people whom we think of as living, and the people whom we don’t really think of as dead? I’m going to lunch with an Aunt, by the way, who is steeped in spiritual things; so much so, indeed, that she forgets that the chief spiritual duties, as far as we know them for certain, are to be truthful and cheerful, and all those dull affairs which liars and pessimists say that anybody can do. Aunt Aggie doesn’t do any of them; she’s an awful liar and a hopeless pessimist, and her temper — well! But as I said, or didn’t I say it — I’m going to lunch with her and go to a séance afterwards. She’s going to inquire after Uncle Willy, who was no
comfort to her in this life; but perhaps he’ll make up for that now. Really London is getting rather cracked, which is the most sensible thing it ever did. I think it’s the cold stodgy granite of the English temperament which I dislike so. But really it’s getting chipped, it’s getting cracked. Aunt Aggie bows to the new moon just like a proper Italian, and wouldn’t sit down thirteen to dinner however hungry she was. Oh, there are flaws in Aunt Aggie’s granite, and she does have such horrible food! Good-bye.”

  I settled down with a book, and an electric light at my elbow, and a large fire at my feet, to the entrancing occupation of not doing anything at all. The blessed sixth morning of the week had arrived, when I was not obliged to go out to a large chilly office after breakfast, and I mentally contrasted the nuisance of having to go out into a beastly morning with the bliss of not having to go out, and found the latter was far bigger with blessing than the former with beastliness. I needn’t read my book. I needn’t do anything that I did not want to do, but very soon the book, that I had really taken up for fear of being surprised by a servant doing nothing at all, began to engross me. It was concerned with the inexplicable telephone to which Francis had alluded, and contained an account of the communications which had been made by a young soldier killed in France with his relatives. As Francis had said, London had got cracked on the subject....