by E. F. Benson
He went swiftly about his preparations. He fetched a couple of tins of paraffin from the store-hole beyond the scullery and sticks and faggots for firing. He brought out the empty cases of whisky from the cupboard, strewed the stairs with the straw from them, and set the cases on the steps. Then going back to the kitchen, he made a pile there and ranged straw and faggots about them, and laid two wicker chairs on top. He poured one tin of paraffin over the stairs and the fuel, he had placed there, and the other over the pile in the kitchen. “’Tis a burnt offering to the Lord,” he muttered to himself, “’tis a pillar of fire by night, ’tis a fire as’ll never be quenched till the whole is consumed. And, by God, if I didn’t insure the house against fire. There’s a providential thing!”
All was ready now, and he set light to the pile in the kitchen. Up it flared, pouring out volumes of black smoke. Then plucking a flaming brand from it he ran with it to the foot of the stairs and thrust it into the straw. High leaped the flame, mounting swiftly from step to step, roaring as it rose.
He stood there just for a moment, exulting in his deed. Never had he imagined that there’d be so brave a blaze, such clouds of black smoke with the flames piercing through them. Why, if those who were sleeping above came out into the passage they’d be suffocated, and never could any plunge through that raging furnace. They’d have to wait for their leaping till John Pentreath’s bonfire died down.
Suddenly the big fanlight above the garden door close beside him crashed down in splinters of shattered glass, and there sailed in a great brown owl. It circled round him, menacing him with claws and beak, and as often as he tried to get near the door into the garden, it beat its heavy wings in his face. Panic seized him, for there was come in that terror by night, which had been creeping up from the churchyard at St. Columb’s. Mollie had come back knowing all.
He screamed aloud, and rushed back into the kitchen, slamming the door behind him, to keep that dread visitant out, meaning to escape by the kitchen-door into the farmyard. The room was choked with smoke, from which long tongues of flame darted like swords. But though he had banged the door, it had failed to latch itself, and there, now shrouded in smoke, now with eyes gleaming in the fierce light, was the bird circling round him again. He shu1f1edacross the floor, groping along the wall, to get to the door, but he had missed his bearings, and as he clutched, so he thought, at the corner of the doorway, it rocked in his hand, and the tall clock went headlong to the ground with a jingle of striking and a crash of glass. He stumbled against it and fell prone on the ground, his head so close to the flame that he heard his hair singe. Once more he managed to get to his feet, and wings flapped in his face.
Dennis and Nell had danced till they could dance no more, and now, panting for breath, they were lying in the shadow of one of the stones, alone under the night, for none had come to the circle. A hundred yards away there was noise of shouting and laughing, for the bonfire had died down, and the leaping had begun.
Suddenly Dennis sat up.
“’Tis strange,” he said, “but I smell burning, and there’s smoke in the air. The wind sets opposite, so it’s not from the bonfire. Lord, what’s that?”
He pointed in the direction of the farm. The trees that stood between them and it were black against a red glow behind them.
“’Tis the house afire,” he cried. “Speed down quick to the folk, and bid them fetch the engine. I’ll go up there.”
He ran through the wheat already growing high, and leaped the garden fence, and trampled across the beds. The garden-door was unlocked, as he and Nell had left it, but so fierce a blast of heat poured out from the burning stairs that there was no getting in that: way. He bolted round to the farmyard to see if there was access by the kitchen, but flames blazed from the windows, and even as he looked the door fell in and showed the furnace within. Back he went to the garden side, and saw that the windows in the upper story were still dark, not lit from the blaze on the ground-floor, and he fetched a ladder, propping it against the wall below his grandfather’s room.
Just the bare chance that he’s gone tipsy to bed, and hasn’t awakened,” he thought, as he climbed up. The window was unlatched, and he threw it open and stepped in. The room was thick with smoke, but not alight yet, and he felt his way across to the bed, and ran his hands over it, but there was no one there. He tried Willie’s room next door, but that was empty, and when he opened the door into the passage, so fierce was the heat of the fire on the stairs, and so dense the smoke, that there was no facing it.
By the time he had got down the ladder again the crowd was streaming up from the field, and soon there arrived the small fire engine, hand-worked, which was all that St. Columb’s could supply. But the fire had now taken such hold that nothing could have been of any avail. The roof fell in, and the flames soared higher yet, but the stout-built walls of stone still stood, and they alone were left when the blaze burned itself out.
The short midsummer night brightened into day: the sun swung up over the hills to the east, and larks mounted and sang in the sparkle of the morning.
The Short Story Collections
King’s College, Cambridge — where Benson attended university
SIX COMMON THINGS; OR, A DOUBLE OVERTURE
This collection was published in 1893 and was Benson’s first published book after Sketches from Marlborough, which had been privately printed when he was still a student. Not all of the items included are fiction – some are non-fictional essays, fragments of autobiography, or portraits of people and places.
‘Autumn and Love’ and its sequel ‘Two Days After’ set the tone for the collection, which is contemplative, nostalgic and melancholy, effectively conveying an elegiac tone of bittersweet loss. The exception is ‘The Defeat of Lady Grantham’, which is characteristic of the biting social satire with which Benson would become most associated as his career progressed. Benson went on to write dozens of short stories and is particularly well-remembered for his horror fiction or ‘spook stories’, as he termed them.
Title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
ONCE
AUTUMN AND LOVE
TWO DAYS AFTER
CARRINGTON
JACK AND POLL
AT KING’S CROSS STATION
THE SOUND OF THE GRINDING
BLUE STRIPE
A WINTER MORNING
THE ZOO
THE THREE OLD LADIES
GRAMMARIAN
POOR MISS HUNTING- FORD
THE DEFEAT OF LADY GRANTHAM
THE TRAGEDY OF A GREEN TOTEM
THE DEATH WARRANT
Benson aged 27, close to the time of the publication of his first book
ONCE
CERTAIN early years of childhood have to most of us, though we have perhaps become since then middle-aged and quite prosaic, an air of mystery, of romance, of a vague vastness, that remains to us long after we have decided once and for all that we are average and commonplace individuals. It is a difficult question to decide whether we were happier as children than we are now; and we are apt to be biased by the obvious palpable happiness that all children, who are real children, can find in simple ordinary things, which are no longer sufficient to produce in us any absorbing bliss. But if the joys of childhood are entirely absorbing, it is equally true that its troubles are productive of the same fine order of emotion, and the bliss of the first half-crown is quite counterbalanced by the blind misery of the dentist. Though now a half-crown does not convert the whole of life into a garden of Sharon, we have our compensation in the power to look beyond that hour in the dentist’s chair, and to realise that though our immediate horizon is black with clouds, tea-time will come as usual at five o’clock, and that the visit to the dentist will be numbered with the dead joys and sorrows of this uncertain world.
The explanation is simple enough; a child lives wholly in the present moment, whether it is sweet or bitter, while the ordinary adult can conceive a future, and can dwell in the past
. Moreover, by whatever names we may call ourselves, whether we are pessimists or the “morbid fin de siècle outcome of a disillusioned and over cultivated civilisation” — it is easy enough to find sufficiently bad names for the most modern of our race — the fact remains, that however flat and stale the present appears to us, however uninteresting the future, we still look with something of longing and regret on our own past years. We forget all that was unpleasant, pessimists though we be, and to us now, childhood was a long sunny day, without any lessons to do, and full of strange lovely mysteries. I remember being promised by an elder brother in return for some small service, a purple box with stars upon it, that was in a wood. I do not think that the purple box ever existed; certainly I never got it, yet I used to lie awake at night thinking of it, and wondering when it would come; whereas what I do not remember is the period when the advent of the purple box passed in my mind from being imminent to being remote, and the first moment when I realised that it was not going to come at all. That the moment was bitter I do not doubt, but that I have forgotten; what does remain with me, is the mystery and the joy that hung round the purple box which I have never yet set eyes on.
When I was eight years old, we moved from a midland county town into a house near Truro, deep in the rural heart of Cornwall. I think I shall never forget the first sight of primroses growing wild in the lanes. We had arrived at the house late one night, and after the long journey, we children were put to bed at once. But I awoke early the next morning, and saw in my room a light that was altogether unfamiliar to me, and which I thought then and think still, is one of the most lovely things in the world. It is the light which comes from the level rays of the sun, when they shine through fresh green leaves. You may see it on most days of the year, if you care to look for it; whether you seek it at morning or evening in some little hollow fringed by tender beech trees, or loveliest of all, where young elms and ashes lean and listen together over a brook which makes its valley melodious, or whether you see it, as I saw it now for the first time, reflected on to the whitewashed ceiling of a small bedroom. It is an aqueous quivering light, full of tender shifting shadows and dim tranquillity, too delicate for words. Child as I was, I felt something of its spell, and dressed quickly and went out, and at that moment realised consciously for the first time something of what a spring morning is always ready to tell us, if we will only stand quiet and listen to its message.
It was just half-past six, and from where I stood at the front door, I looked over a long deep Cornish valley stretching away to the east and lost in morning. Thin skeins of fine cloud still lingered on the lower slopes of the hills, and in the centre of the valley the dim forms of houses, and the steeples of the Truro churches pricked the mist. The fields that sloped gently away from my feet were shining with the early May dew; to the right stretched a mossy bird-haunted lawn, and in the air there was the keen scent of morning, that indescribable suggestion of something too ethereal to call fragrance, and which seems only the smell of pure and complete cleanliness.
I followed a little path that led to a small copse, and there in the hedge — I could show you the place to this day — I saw for the first time a clump of wild primroses. I had never heard of Linnaeus and the gorse, and I think it would have seemed to me rather profane to introduce primroses into my prayers, but I certainly felt that life would be something quite different ever afterwards.
The next days were full of beautiful surprises. Hens really did lay eggs in totally unexpected places, and on the second evening I found one in a hawthorn hedge. Cows were milked visibly, and the milk was good to drink. There was a hay-rick with a little niche in it, where one could lie in fragrant seclusion, and watch the mysteries of poultry life. Best of all there was a hedge-sparrow’s nest, in which one morning there appeared what might have been a piece of blue sky. Later there were four half-naked little forms, with veiled eyes and open mouths, which by degrees grew feathered and timid, and stared at me with apprehension. It was all strange and new and beautiful.
Near the hay-rick was a creviced wall, the home of tiny spiral snail shells, who lived in a wide forest of moss and lichen, and went out walking to see their friends on damp evenings.
We soon started a collection of these, and looked out their names in a green conchological manual, which described them as “minute shells.” This was taken to be a compound substantive, evidently constructed on the same principle as the word hour-glass.
About a week after we came to live in this new earth, I remember a great gale, which raged for two or three days, and on the second morning I was standing at the window of the nursery which looked towards the north, and heard during a temporary lull, a low rhythmical thunder, the sound of which for some reason, frightened me, and I was told it was the sound of the Atlantic waves seven miles away. That morning a great elm-tree was blown down, and I ran out, hoping to find something new and wonderful among the leaves at the top of the tree, now placed unexpectedly within my reach. I was just turning away disappointed, for the topmost branch seemed to be like any other branch, when I caught sight of a piece of blue mottled eggshell on the ground, and lying near it a little unfledged rook, dead and crushed.
The gardener said it was a pity it was so young, for a few more weeks would have qualified it for a rook pie. I thought it extremely unfeeling of him, and we buried the little body that afternoon with much ceremony in the shrubbery, and over its grave put a cross, formed of two hazel-twigs, and came in to tea with the feeling that we had done something very pious, and that it was rather like Sunday. At the same time I felt that we had had a perfectly charming time, and next morning I searched carefully round the neighbourhood of the fallen tree hoping to find another dead rook, or indeed anything capable of receiving decent and Christian burial.
These things are trifles, are they not? I found a dead rabbit here in the woods yesterday, and I did not get an empty box of Pears’ soap, and dig its grave under the cedar tree. It would have been quite ridiculous. Yet I thought that I would like to feel once more the childish instinct that made me bury the young rook that had rocked securely in the nest to the soft breeze, till that morning, when a blind gust overturned its home and its world. We have learnt so much since these dim childish days, and yet, after all, we are so little wiser: the mysteries of childhood have ceased to interest us, but not because we have found the key to them. The mystery is there in all its old beauty; it is we who have changed; we can calculate the force per square inch of the wind that lays our elm trees low, and the young dead rook may lie and rot. The gardener was quite right; it was a pity it did not live to qualify for a rook pie. That would have been far more useful. Yet I remember the burial of that young rook under the white flowering laurustinus more keenly than I remember any rook pie. The moral is that there are at least two ways of looking at everything, and which is the better, who shall say?
The next great joy was the aquarium. Measured by the limitations of actual space and cubic contents, the capacities of the aquarium were not large, for it was only a brown earthen-ware bowl with a diameter of about eighteen inches; but its potentialities were infinite. We had even dim ideas of rearing a salmon parr in it.
The happy hunting ground, from which the treasures of the aquarium were drawn, was a little stream that ran swiftly over gravelly soil about half-a-mile from our house. On each side of it stretched low lying water meadows, rich with ragwort and meadow-sweet, among which one day we found a lark’s nest. Every now and then the stream spread out into shallow tranquil pools, overhung by thick angular hawthorns. Sticklebacks made their nests under the banks; small trout flashed through the clear shallows, and the caddice-worms collected the small twigs which fell from the trees, and made of them the rafters of their houses.
It was by such pools as these that we spent hours dabbling in the stream and filling small tin cans with water snails and caddices, for subsequent transference to the aquarium: here, too, we watched for the salmon parr, which did not exist, and laid dark pl
ots against the little trout, which treated them with severe disdain, and here one evening we caught a stickleback. It was my sister’s doing, but I considered then, and consider still, that the credit was as much mine as hers.
It was this way: she had been poking our net as usual among the débris that lay in the backwater of the pool, and had found four caddices and two water snails, one of which was a new sort. She had just said “That’s all,” and was preparing to throw the rest back into the stream, when I saw something move at the bottom of the net, and there among the dead leaves and twigs lay a live stickleback. That night, the aquarium, which usually lived in an empty coach house, was moved solemnly up to the nursery. The idea of Gray’s cat and the gold fish was too strong for us: besides, if the cat did get at our stickleback, the aquarium would not be deep enough to drown it; and in any case the nervous shock to the stickleback might be fatal.
The week that followed was the balmiest period the aquarium ever knew. One morning, as we were watching the stickleback, a small gauzy being crawled up from the water and rested on the edge of the bowl. There was a bright sun shining, and in a moment or two his water-logged wings grew rapidly firm and iridescent, he fanned them up and down, and they became larger and more wonderful under our very eyes — Ah well, it was only a caddice-worm turning into a fly. Such things happen very often.