Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Well?” said his father.

  “I’m not sorry,” said Archie.

  “I’ll give you one more chance,” said his father, moving towards a cupboard above one of the bookcases.

  “I’m not sorry,” said Archie again.

  His father opened the cupboard.

  “Lock the door,” he said.

  But, before he could lock it, it was opened from without, and his mother entered. His father had already a cane in his hand, and he turned round as she came in. She looked at him and then at Miss Schwarz’s medicine-bottle on the table.

  “Go away, Marion,” he said. “I’m going to give the boy a lesson.”

  She pointed at the bottle.

  “You had better learn yours first,” she said.

  “Never mind that. Archie says he’s not sorry. It is my duty to teach him.”

  Suddenly Archie felt tremendously interested. He had no idea what all this was about, or what his father’s lesson was, but he felt he was in the presence of some drama apart from his own. It was with a sense of the interruption of this that he saw his mother turn to him.

  “Archie, my dear,” she said. “You have vexed and grieved me very much. Supposing I had felt wicked and had burned you stylograph pen, shouldn’t I be sorry for having injured you? And aren’t you sorry for having burned my hearthrug? What had I done to deserve that? Hadn’t I given you leave to sit in my room, and look at my treasures? Why did you hurt me?”

  Immediately the whole affair wore a different aspect. Instead of anger and justice, there was the sound of love. His heart melted, and he ran to her.

  “Oh mummy, I didn’t mean to vex you,” he cried. “I didn’t think of that. You hadn’t done anything beastly to me.”

  He burst into tears.

  “Oh, mummy, forgive me,” he said. “I don’t mind being whipped, at least not much; but I’m sorry; I beg your pardon. Please stop my allowance till I’ve paid for it.”

  “Yes, dear, it’s only right that you should pay some of it. You shall have no more allowance for three weeks. Now go straight upstairs, and go to bed till I come to you and tell you that you may get up. And Blessington tells me you have been rude to her. Go and beg her pardon first.”

  * * * * *

  The effect of this episode on Archie’s mind was that his mother understood, and his father didn’t. The prospect of a whipping had not made him falter in his resolve not to say he was sorry, so long as he wasn’t sorry, but the moment his mother had put his misdeeds in a sensible light he saw them sensibly, and would not have minded being whipped if by that drastic method he could have borne witness to the reality of his sorrow. But only three days later he received six smart cuts with that horrible cane for climbing on to the unparapetted roof of the house out of his bedroom window, which he had been expressly forbidden to do. But then there was no question of being sorry or not — as a matter of fact he was not — summary justice was executed for mere disobedience, and, before doing the same thing again, he added up the pleasure of going on the roof, and balanced it against the pain inflicted on the tight seat of his sailor-trousers as he bent over a chair, and found it wanting.

  It was during this same month which saw his seven completed years that he did a very strange and unintelligible thing, though he suffered it rather than committed it. He did it, that is to say, quite involuntarily, and did not know he was doing it till it was done. This was the manner of it.

  Miss Bampton had set him one of her delightful exercises in handwriting in his copy-book. “Never brush your teeth with the housemaid’s broom” she had written in her beautiful copper-plate hand at the top of the page, and Archie was sitting with his tongue out copying this remarkable maxim, and amusing himself with conjectures as to what other strange habits such people as were likely to brush their teeth with the housemaid’s broom might be supposed to have — perhaps they would lace their boots with the tongs, or write their letters with a poker… He had got about half-way down the page when suddenly there came over him that sensation with which he was beginning to become familiar, that feeling of extension and expansion within himself, that falling away of the limitations of consciousness which opened some new interior world to him.

  His pen paused, and then in the wrist of his right hand and in the fingers that still held his pen he felt a curious imperative kind of twitching, and knew that they wanted to write of their own volition, as it were, though it was not his copy that they were concerned with. Under this sensation of absolute compulsion, he took a sheet of paper that lay at his elbow, and let his pen rest on it, watching with the intensest curiosity what it would do. He had no idea what would happen, but he felt that something had to be written. For a couple of minutes perhaps his pen traced random lines on the paper, moving from left to right with a much greater speed than it was wont to go, and the letters began to form themselves with a rapidity and certainty unknown to his careful, halting calligraphy, and in firm upright characters. He saw his own name traced on the paper followed by a sentence, and then his pen (still apparently obedient to some unknown impulse from his fingers) gave a great dash and stopped altogether. And this is what he read:

  “Archie, do let me talk to you sometimes.

  “MARTIN.”

  The queer sensation had ceased altogether, and Archie stared blankly at the words that he knew his hand had written. But what they meant, he had no notion, nor did he know who Martin was. The whole thing was quite unintelligible to him, both the impulse that made him write, and that which he had written.

  Miss Bampton had left the room on some errand, when she had set Archie his copy, and came back at this moment expecting to find the copy finished. She looked over his shoulder to see how he was getting on.

  “My dear, haven’t you got further than that?” she said. “I thought you would have finished it by this time.”

  She saw the other piece of paper half-concealed by Archie’s left hand.

  “Why, you’ve been writing something else,” she said. “That’s why you haven’t got on further. Let me look.”

  “Please not,” said Archie. “It’s private.”

  Miss Bampton remembered that, a week ago, Archie had been seized with a strong desire for literary composition, and had composed a very remarkable short story, which may be given in full.

  “CHAPTER I

  “There was once a merderer with yellow eyes, and his wife said to him,

  “‘If you merder me you will be hung.’

  “And he was hung on Tuesday next.

  “FINIS.”

  When Archie had brought this yarn to her she had laughed so uncontrollably that he was hurt. So, in the hope of finding another such (though Archie had no business to write stories in lesson-time) she said:

  “My dear, do show me; I won’t laugh.”

  Archie hesitated; he felt shy about disclosing this sentence he had written, but, on the other hand, Miss Bampton, who appeared to know everything, might help him towards the interpretation.

  “Well, it’s not a story,” he said. “It’s just this. I wrote it without knowing. Oh, Miss Bampton, what does it mean, and who is Martin?”

  If it was Archie who hesitated before, it was Miss Bampton who hesitated now. Suddenly she had a clever thought.

  “My dear, you’ve been thinking about the Martins that built in the sandpit last spring,” she said. “Don’t you remember how you and Jeannie made up a story about them?”

  This was true enough, but it failed to satisfy Archie. Also he had a notion that Miss Bampton had made a call on her ingenuity in offering this explanation.

  “But isn’t there any other Martin?” he asked.

  “None that you ever knew, Archie,” she said. “I think it’s one of those in the sandpit. Now get on with your copy, and we’ll walk there before your dinner.”

  The incident passed into the medley of impressions that were crowding so quickly into the storehouse of Archie’s consciousness, but it did not lie there quite unconn
ected with others. He laid it on the same shelf, so to speak, as that which held the memory of his waking vision one night in remote days, and held also the fact of his knowing what Miss Bampton had thought of in the guessing game. But those were among the secret things of which he spoke to nobody. One more impression for secret pondering, though of different sort from those, he had lately added to his store, and that was when a whipping seemed imminent, and he saw one of Miss Schwarz’s medicine-bottles standing on his father’s table.

  CHAPTER IV

  Lady Davidstow and Miss Bampton were sitting together that night in Lady Davidstow’s bedroom. She had sent her maid away, saying that she would not want her again that night, and now she held in her hand the sheet of paper covered with lines of meaningless scribbles, with the one intelligible sentence at the end, which Archie had written that day when he should have been doing his copy. In the other hand she held a letter written in ink that was now rather faded, and she was comparing the two. She looked at them for some time in silence, then turned to Miss Bampton.

  “Yes, you are quite right, Cathie,” she said. “What Archie wrote might actually be in Martin’s handwriting. Look for yourself: there’s the last letter he ever wrote to me.”

  Miss Bampton took the two papers from her.

  “There’s absolutely no difference,” she said. “The moment I saw what Archie had written, I thought of Martin’s handwriting. And then it was signed ‘Martin.’ Are you sure he has never heard of him? Not that that would account for the handwriting.”

  Lady Davidstow shook her head.

  “I think it’s impossible,” she said. “Jeannie assured me she had never spoken to him about Martin, nor has Blessington. He may have heard his name. He probably has heard his name mentioned. I remember mentioning it in Archie’s hearing the other day, but he didn’t pay the slightest attention. And he can’t possibly recollect him even in the vaguest way. It is five years now since Martin died, and Archie was then only just two, and for six months before that Martin was with me at Grives.”

  Cathie Bampton laid down the two papers.

  “I can’t think why you never told Archie about him,” she said.

  Lady Davidstow’s great grey eyes grew dim.

  “Ah, my dear, if you were Martin’s mother and Archie’s mother you would know,” she said. “If you had seen your eldest son die of consumption and your second son threatened with it, you would understand how natural it was not to tell Archie yet of the brother he had never consciously seen. Jack agreed with me, too. I have long been prepared for Archie asking questions, which certainly I would answer truthfully, and let the knowledge come to him quietly by degrees. I may have done wrong; I don’t know. But I think I did right. I couldn’t begin saying to Archie, ‘You had a brother, but he died.’ More would have come out; that he died of consumption; that for fear of that Archie lives so much in the open air.”

  “But, my dear, how will Archie begin to know unless you tell him?”

  “Oh, in many ways. There is Martin’s picture, for instance, in my room. Archie may ask who it is. Or, when he hears Martin’s name mentioned, he will ask some time who Martin was. Indeed, I have often thought it odd that he hasn’t. Only the other day Jack was talking to me about it, suggesting that it was time that Archie knew. Indeed, he rather urged me to tell him. And now, all of a sudden, we find Archie writing in Martin’s handwriting, and signing with Martin’s name.”

  “Shall you tell Lord Davidstow?” asked Miss Bampton.

  “No, I certainly shall not. Jack hates all that approaches the neighbourhood of anything that might be called occult or spiritualistic. He says ‘Pshaw,’ as you know, if even hypnotism is mentioned. I did tell him about Archie’s intuition in that guessing game, and, as you again know, he asked you not to play it any more, though at the same time he insisted that it was a mere guess on Archie’s part.”

  Cathie was silent a moment.

  “And those scribbles of Archie’s?” she asked. “Do they not make it more difficult for you to tell him about Martin now? A sensitive boy like that might get it into his head that his dead brother was writing to him.”

  “Certainly I don’t want Archie to think that,” said his mother. “No, I shall put off telling him now.”

  “And if he asks?” said Miss Bampton.

  “I have an idea that he won’t ask.”

  She got up and moved about the room for a moment in silence.

  “My dear, all children have got a secret life of their own,” she said, “and, oh, how their mothers want to be admitted! But every young thing has a walled-up place in his heart, to which he admits nobody, and, if you ask to be admitted, not only is the door shut, but locked. We all had our secret places, and I make a guess that this bit of paper — by the way, mind you put it back in the school-room where Archie left it — lives in Archie’s secret place. How I long to get in, the darling! But all I can do is to wait outside, and take what he gives me. Archie doesn’t tell me everything, why should he? He didn’t tell me what it was that made him put the burning coals out of the fire on to my hearthrug.”

  “Probably he didn’t know.”

  “Something inside him knew, or else he wouldn’t have done it. All we do is accountable for by what is inside us. Impulses come from within.”

  “But they are suggested by what is without,” said Miss Bampton.

  “Yes; that’s the box on which the match is struck, but the fire is in the match. All you can do for a child, even your own child, is to suggest, and hope he’ll take your suggestions.”

  Miss Bampton got up.

  “It’s late; I must go,” she said. “But I want to ask you one thing. Do you believe in the possibility of Martin’s having made a communication to Archie?”

  “Yes; I think I do. That’s why this affair has upset me so. The idea is so strange and new, that I’m frightened about it, though why I should be so I can’t tell. With my whole heart I believe that my darling is living somewhere in an existence as individual as ever, and even more vivid, because the weakness and the illness and the weariness are past. So why should I be frightened at the thought that he could communicate with Archie? Ah, my dear, if only he would communicate with me! Or with Jack! Poor Jack, how he would scout the idea! How shocked he would be! I suppose that’s part of my secret garden which I keep from Jack!”

  She held her friend a moment after kissing her.

  “Jack never really got over Martin’s death,” she said. “He couldn’t bring himself into line with it. It was then that it became a settled habit with him to try to forget… Just lately he has been very bad. There, good-night, my dear; I can’t talk about it.”

  * * * * *

  The whole incident affected Archie far less than it affected either his mother or his governess, and next day when he found his scribbled paper lying where he had left it the day before, it excited no further curiosity in his mind. He put the thought of it away on his shelf of secret things which had nothing to do with his ordinary normal life. In certain moods, which, after all only lasted for a moment or two, the things that shelf contained became far more real to him than any other of his experiences; but for weeks and months at a time its contents remained out of his reach, and if he shared them, as his mother had said, with nobody else, he had no share in them himself except at these odd, queer moments. So when, next day, he came across this curious sentence again, caught by him, as by some process of wireless telegraphy, he felt but little interest in it, though he sat for a couple of minutes with his pen held idly in his hand, just to see if anything else happened. But there was no sensation that ever so faintly resembled the twitching and yearning of his hand to write he knew not what, and he crumpled the paper up, and put it into the fire. Somewhere below the threshold of his conscious self lay the perceptions that were concerned with it, those perceptions that guessed what Miss Bampton had thought of, that somehow swam up to the surface, as he used to lie in bed of a morning, and sink into the depths that lay below
the green-tinted ceiling of his room; and, while they lay dormant, it was as if they never existed.

  But now for some weeks there had been no light whatever on his ceiling, and morning after morning he awoke with no sense of exhilaration at all in the coming of another day, but with a drowsy depression lying thick upon him, as he heard the rustle of the endless rain in the shrubs outside, and languidly went through those exercises that used to invigorate him but now only tired him. All through the month the damp chilly weather persisted, and day after day the same lowering heavens obscured the sun; never in this bright Sussex upland had there been so continuous a succession of rain-streaked hours. The wonder of seeing the lake slowly rising till it engulfed the lower end of the lawn, and made an island of the summer-house failed to stir him, and there was no magic in the unique experience of punting across the lawn to it. Then, one morning early in December, the deluge was stayed, once more the sun slid up a cloudless sky, and the whole nature of the world was changed.

  Archie had again been indoors for a couple of days, with a return of the cold that really was responsible for the burning of his mother’s hearthrug, and once more the ecstasy of living possessed him. As consolation for his imprisonment, he and Jeannie were both given a holiday, and, breakfast over, they scampered out, and once more saw their shadows racing in front of them. The game was to tread on somebody else’s shadow. Blessington’s shadow did not count because anybody could tread on that; but it required real agility to tread on Jeannie’s, for it had the nippiest way of dodging before your foot could really descend on it. So they ran in circles round Blessington, and Marco, the collie, ran in circles round them; and though it counted two to tread on Marco’s shadow (you must not hold Marco and then stamp on his shadow), no one had got nearer than a doubtful claim to have trod on his tail.

  Quite suddenly Archie stopped; he had an odd, warm sensation in his mouth that required investigation. Two days ago Jeannie’s nose had bled, which Archie thought rather grand. There had been rather a fuss about it: she was laid down on the floor, and Miss Bampton put the door-key down her back, and eventually some ice was brought, and it was all quite important. But now it was not his nose that was bleeding, but his mouth.