Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Further down the street is a factory, where they make little glass ornaments, and for six weeks before Christmas a larger staff is employed, and the result is that they turn out or finish a great stock of Christmas cards with frosted foregrounds. These foregrounds are, or used to be, made by a fine glass-dust blown on to a slightly adhesive surface. One year they were very much in vogue, and the staff employed was consequently very large.

  The impalpable glass-dust is blown down a tube on to the cards, chiefly by children, for it is a work that requires little or no skill. Some of it sticks on the adhesive surface, some of it is blown too hard or too softly — it does not matter much, for it is very cheap — and floats about in the air, and the children breathe it into their lungs. It is not at all good for the lungs, but children are nearly as cheap as glass-dust. The Christmas cards are fashionable, and they have delightful mottoes on them. The picture often represents a country church, in the background, with sprigs of holly in the corners, and in front those terrible frosted foregrounds. They would not be nearly so pretty if they were the colour of blood. Even the realistic tendencies of this age might not quite like that.

  A realistic age likes to be harrowed, and it likes to read things which it reflects with pride do not make it feel sick. These it calls strong, and it is very fond of strong things. But it draws a curious inconsistent line between the things that stir its sluggish emotions, and produce fear, longing, or pity, and those which make it feel ashamed, or make it ashamed of not feeling ashamed.

  This last class of things is altogether in bad taste; and the writer who speaks of them is fain to fill his belly with the husks the swine eat, and everyone says, “How very suitable.” While those who tell us things that should not even be named among us, these are they that sit in kings’ houses. It is very easy to be disgusting, and no wonder it is a common profession.

  The grinding need for going on is what seems to me so horrible, and what makes it so much worse is, that these poor people do not know how to be quiet, do not even want to be quiet. The real Londoner of these orders feels lonely in the country; he misses the bustle and the stir of his home. Sometimes, however, he can see the other point of view, though he cannot attain it. In these moods he will go to the National Gallery, and the sunlit mists of Turner, the sleeping Italian valley, the remote serenity of early Madonnas, and the smooth animals of Landseer have a certain effect. He sees the existence of another sort of life; he realises, though he does not know it, that such scenes are the legitimate outcome of another mood than his. I often speak to men whom I see there. One of them said to me once, “Yes, sir, I like to see the pictures; they seem to make me feel quieter when I get home.” Atmosphere is responsible for a great deal. Twenty years ago a consumptive patient was kept in hot rooms, was forbidden to go out when it was at all cold, and under this regime grew worse and died. But there are Swiss valleys, where you may see in the depth of winter a hundred men and women skating and tobogganing in a temperature of something below zero. These are the consumptive patients, who live out of doors, and do not die. It is exactly the same with our moral nature; it lives not by the care that is taken of it, but by the atmosphere it breathes; and an air of tranquillity, a sense of space is what the National Gallery gives to those who could scarcely tell you the name or the subject of any picture they had seen in it.

  I once saw two very promising figures standing in front of an entombment, which used to be attributed to Michael Angelo. The man had got hold of a catalogue, and he and the girl who was with him, laboriously spelled out this information. They neither of them looked at the picture at all, but before they went on to the next the girl remarked: “Michael Angelo. Ain’t it a rum name?’

  But even these were somehow worked upon by the sense of space and peace. I passed them again as they came out into the Square. They parted at the top of the steps, and the man said: Well, Liza, them pictures is ‘evingly. Goodbye. I’ll be reound ‘o Sunday.” And they kissed each other resoundingly.

  The comedy of the great play is so inextricably mixed up with the tragedy, that one is puzzled as to which is the most inevitably radical, and whether we ought to laugh or cry. If that be the true definition of humour, London is humorous enough, and Heine need concern us no longer, nor Jerome K. Jerome either, for upon my life, I know not whether I want to laugh or to cry when I see what he has done. Perhaps after all London is a great comedy, and I have been mistaking it for a tragedy — such mistakes have been made before — but think of the frosted Christmas cards. That is very melancholy: the comedy is in temporary eclipse.

  It is not the fashion to get up very early in London, for those at least of us who need not work all the time it is day, but sometimes when you are returning from your balls at five in the morning, you might drive round to look at Covent Garden Market. It would amuse you, or I should not recommend it to you, and you would form a very fine contrast as you stood there in your ball dress, with a handful of cotillion toys in your hand. The critics of the New English Art Club would do well to see you then, and you would be a fugue or a diapason for the rest of your life, with a Leit-motif embroidered on your skirt, and an adagio worked into your coils of black hair.

  One morning, early in June, I stood there at the corner, where the traffic passes from the roaring Strand up to the Market. A small donkey-cart had caught my eye some twenty yards down the street. The donkey trotted along contentedly, a mouse-coloured patient donkey, hardly bigger than a Newfoundland dog. Behind it lumbered a rampaging ‘bus, nodding twelve feet high above the pavement. In the donkey-cart were sitting an old woman who was driving, and a child of about four on the seat beside her. At the moment when they reached the corner, the road was blocked by a lumbering fruit van which was also going into the Market. The ‘bus threatened to overwhelm them from behind, or to crush them against the fruit van in front. But the small child, without looking round, held up a tiny chubby fist with admirable gravity and importance, as he had seen footmen do on their smart carriages when the way is blocked. The ‘bus driver saw it — though it was very, very small — and pulled up his horses just in time, but they were so close that one of them put down his head and nipped off a small piece of lettuce from the back of the donkey-cart. The owner of the small fist maintained his professional gravity to the end, and kept that ridiculously tiny hand in the air till the fruit van had passed round the corner, and the donkey’s head was directed up the side street, and then he lowered the danger signal.

  The night had been very wet, though the sky was now blue and clear. One old man arrived rather late: the thick mud on the wheels of his cart showed he had come over a bad road, and had passed through much rain, and the contents of one of his hampers was quite spoiled. It was full of cherries; they looked a little over ripe, and the rain had gutted them, and they were nothing more than a red mess of juice and stones and stalks. When he saw the state they were in, he stripped off the label which advertised them at 4d the pound, and substituted one offering them at half that price. But the cherries remained unsold, till a seedy-looking man dismounting from a van belonging to a jam manufactory offered him three shillings for the lot. There could not have been less than twenty or twenty-five pounds weight of fruit, and he refused the offer. Half an hour later they were still unsold, and as I left the Market I saw him look wistfully at me. “The lot for half-a-crown,” he said. “They’re a bit spoiled by the rain, sir.”

  What could I do? I could not buy up all the spoiled fruit in the Market, and twenty pounds of crushed cherries were hardly a purchase which a housekeeper would welcome. But I remembered a scene which happened at King’s Cross Station, and I bought them. It would have been easier to have given him half-a-crown, and told him to throw the cherries away, but it was not safe. Even poor people, you must know, have feelings, and it is as well not to hurt people’s feelings, even those of poor people, if you can avoid doing so. From a Political Economist’s point of view my purchase was horribly immoral: indirectly, I believe, it encouraged the
sale of fruit which was unfit for consumption, and the consequence was that I had to take a hansom back home, for I could not carry twenty pounds of cherries about the street, and the juice ran out and made a little purple puddle on the floor, and the driver demanded half-a-crown for a new mat. “But it was the old man’s fault for not packing his cherries properly.” Quite so. I am not defending myself: on the contrary I pleaded guilty without reservation, or an appeal for mercy. Yet the old man looked very wistful, and very disappointed. He had taken a great deal of trouble in the picking of the cherries, and they had been very good cherries, rich black-hearts with plenty of juice; and it you had felt as I felt one day, when my train glided out of King’s Cross Station, I think you would perhaps have done as I did.

  BLUE STRIPE

  THE sight of some very familiar object, observed again even half unconsciously after some great change has happened, is full of a pathos almost unbearable. That ruthless unchangingness of pieces of wood, of cloth, of a picture, or a wall-paper, which you see again, after the whole court of your being has been altered, mocks you with its unfeeling sameness. The chair where she used to sit, which had for you a special clearness, which seemed almost like part of her, a companion, a familiar thing, remains the same in form, but the soul is gone. Wherever you turn, you see corpses from which a life has been withdrawn, phantoms to remind you of what you have lost. I remember, many years ago, standing here at this window, and looking out over the level lawn that stretches southwards from the house. Three days had passed since I saw it consciously. During those three days, no doubt it had often been in front of my eyes, but I had not seen it. A great change had happened, upstairs there was a darkened room — a life withdrawn, and a little life just started on its uncertain pilgrimage.

  The servants of course had drawn down the blinds, in decorous propriety; but the sun was shining brightly outside, throwing the shadows of the window-bars definedly on to the red stuff, and the colour it cast into the room was horrible — ominous, like a theatrical hell. I drew up one blind, and let the light in; the other, I remember it perfectly to this day, was out of order, and my efforts only resulted in pulling the blind-cord down.

  “It is a morning pure and sweet;” I know no other words to express it, a day that might have been the herald of summer, had not the bare trees and yellow leaves lying thick on the ground told of November. The sky was woven over near the horizon with streamers of thinnest cloud; above the clear, pale blue. The air was unusually still, and the trees delicately defined against the sky and the dark masses of the cypresses reminded me of Albert Durer’s etchings. At one end of the lawn stood a lime tree, not yet entirely bare and gaunt, but the last leaves were now detaching themselves, and falling without twist or turn through the windless air, on to the grass below.

  A little further on the lawn ceased under thick evergreen bushes.

  Croquet hoops were still standing in order on the grass, but the dead leaves had drifted among them, and were clinging to their wires. I could see into the summer house opposite, and the mallets and balls were lying about in disorder on the floor; one was leaning against the back of a green garden chair. Everything was pitilessly unchanged. It was nearly a month since they had been touched, since she and I had come in together one October evening. Her sister and brother-in-law had been staying with us, and on the last day of their visit, the warm mildness of the late afternoon had tempted us out again, after we had all returned from a ride, and we had played croquet together till the carriage came round to take them to the station; and when we had seen them off, we wandered together round into the garden again, and continued the game in the state it had been left, taking two balls each. Eventually she put one of my balls out, and from sheer malice croquetted the other into the bushes at the end of the lawn, and by two extremely lucky shots finished the game, and stood laughing at my complete defeat.

  “Never say women can’t play games,” she said, drawing her arm through mine.

  “It was foolish of you to croquet me into the bushes,” I remarked, “because now you’ll have to go and find the ball.”

  This she positively refused to do. It was my ball, and I must look for it.

  “The batsman doesn’t look for the lost ball at cricket,” she said, with a superficial show of reason.

  The matter admitted of no compromise, so we went to the summer house, and placed our mallets there, leaving the ball in the bushes to take care of itself. She leaned her mallet against a green garden chair.

  The mellow glow in the western sky faded into the palest saffron, and overhead the vault grew deeper at the approach of night. Birds chuckled in the bushes, and before we turned to go indoors, a great yellow star had swung over the dim edge of the earth. In the stillness our souls were mingled together, and we spoke of the dear event that was coming. That night a vague dread began to take shape in my mind, but she was blissfully serene and happy; the infinite yearning of a mother’s heart waiting for its fulfilment left no room for fear.

  She paused for a moment on the threshold of the door opening on to the steps that led into the garden; a waft of late jasmine was carried to us, and she stood to pluck a few blossoms, and gave me them to smell. I hardly know whether I love that smell or hate it most. Then she turned again, and looked out over the darkening earth.

  “This beautiful world,” she said, “it has been very good to us. But the winter is very close. I wish spring was nearer.”

  Till the morning after the child was born all was going very well. She was weak, of course, and looked very fragile, but I never saw her looking more happy. Then something happened, the doctor was sent for hurriedly — He was grave, he would not say anything for certain, he hoped it would be all right. But after his second visit, as he came from the room to where I was standing waiting on the landing outside, he shook his head, and held the door open for me to enter. “You can go in,” he said, “for a few minutes. Then you will have to leave her with us. You had better.... his eyes looked compassionately at me.... you had better prepare for the worst. It is not hopeless, but.... yes, yes; be brave, and leave it in God’s hands, when we have done our best.”

  The nurses had removed the little wailing child. She smiled at me as I entered, but lay very still. The doctors had not told her how ill she was, but she must have heard his words to me, or guessed the import, and her eyes questioned me as I knelt down by her bed.

  “I think I know all,” she said. “It is good-bye, isn’t it?”

  “No, no,” I whispered, “they hope—”

  “Ah, I thought it had come to that. There is not much time then. Ah, my darling, what shall we say to each other? We do not need to say much, do we? We know without that. But it is very hard on you — very hard. Don’t grieve too much. The years are only little things. Till then — ah, Jack, there’s the boy.”

  “How can I bear it?” I cried. “You mustn’t leave me.”

  “It has been very sweet,” she whispered, “there is that, though I should wish to live.”

  I do not remember how the next minutes passed. All I know is that after a time the door opened again, and I was led out, that I kissed her once more — that I saw her dear eyes for the last time.

  Then twenty-four grey hours passed by, and on the next morning I remember going downstairs and pulling up one red blind, and breaking the cord of the other, and looking out again over the croquet lawn.

  This morning a curious fancy seized me. I went down among the bushes at the end of the lawn, and poked about them with a stick. They grew very thick, and I could see only a few feet into them. Where was it exactly? Ah, I recollect now seeing the green fans of that dwarf fir bend and nod suddenly. The shrub has grown a good deal, and it must be somewhere near the middle. That is it. My stick struck a hard substance, and after some pushing and shoving, something came out on the far side, and as it rolled down the little slope to the gravel path, the tassels of the dwarf fir again bent and rustled.

  There it lay, rather mildewy with long
exposure, and slimed with snails. I see it has two red stripes, and my ball was blue. She must have croquetted her own ball away by mistake.

  A WINTER MORNING

  FOR four long weeks we have been living in a world of whiteness. Late in December the first snows fell, and morning after morning I have seen the fine tracery of frost thick on my windows, bringing back to me one of the earliest and most mysterious of my childish memories. It was always a matter of dim wonder, and sometimes of serious speculation to me, how in the cover of the still barren nights those aeriel sheets of white vegetation grew and filled the nursery panes. I still remember the scorn poured on me by an elder brother, when I asked him what it was, though his answer that it was the frost, rendered it hardly more intelligible. These things do not get less wonderful as one gets older; the knowledge that those white forests are the effect of a condensation of the moist particles in the air, and their subsequent crystallisation, seems to me only the substitution for a simple and unknown expression, one equally unknown and more complicated.

  But yesterday afternoon a message of change was whispered among the bushes, and the armies of the frost dropped their spears and swords. The soft plunge of spongy snow was busy in the shrubbery, and on the leaves the little icicles seemed to have grown less hard in outline. At nightfall a little bitter wind rose and sobbed round the house, and from time to time a cold patter of rain shivered against the windows, and with it there swept over me a memory which is ever new, but which the first relenting of the grip of frost brings back with a distinctness which does not grow less with years.