Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  I went up to bed last night with the old pain creeping and stirring again at the heart, till at last I dropped into the vague, shadow-haunted twilight of those grey slopes that lie between the shores of living consciousness and the deeper gulfs of sleep. Whenever our souls would pass into that dark sea beyond, they have always to wade through these ill-defined shallows, where the restless little waves beat upon the land, where we feel the chill of the deeps of unconsciousness, but not their quiet, as we stumble dizzily from the shore, only wanting to rest, yet not able to lose ourselves in the still depths beyond.

  All night I wandered as it seemed for long half-conscious years, on that grey borderland, not sleeping and not waking, moving painfully forward under a sunless sky, hearing strange moans and cries from the land which I could not leave, and the shrill pipe of a wind that seemed to blow all round me, and yet touched me not. Now and then that long monotony of sea and sky would resolve itself into the dim square of my window, and the blast that blew over those grey wastes was only the soughing of the breeze outside, and the flapping of the dying flame. But at last there came along the shore a little figure moving quickly towards me, and as it came nearer I saw it was no dull contortion which my tired brain drew from some object in the room, for against the greyness it glowed with a lucid outline, and when it got close to me, I seemed to mingle with it, and the weary twilight deepened into the blackness of dreamless sleep.

  To day a faint sun looks on the trees that are muffled no longer, and the snow that still lies somewhat thick on the grass seems less impenetrably white; the oozy droppings from shrubs, and the last dead leaves that fell when the snow was yet thin, have stained it with an ugly brown.

  To me this first false hint of spring is laden with a memory which seems to grow more vivid with each slow turning year; perhaps the dream that I had last night has made its presence more insistent, for this morning it is with me like those strange throbs of double consciousness, which most of us know, the sense that something we have just said or seen is only the repetition of a real event which is intensely vivid to us, yet which we cannot grasp or localise.

  What I am going to tell you happened many years ago, twenty years ago this winter. I will try to say it in simple straightforward words, for it is a very simple story, and a very common one.

  It is twenty-six years ago since my wife died, since I was left alone with a year-old baby; and it is twenty years ago since the baby died.

  We had twenty years ago a month of weather very like these last four weeks. The snow had fallen thickly for a day or two, and after that, the earth had lain still and white under the grip of a windless frost. One evening I was playing billiards here in the hall with my brother. The boy, Jack, was sitting on the hearthrug teasing his dog. The dog had enough of it before Jack ceased to find it amusing, and he walked with dignity to the door. Jack was left with nothing to do, and he came to give a wide-eyed inspection to us.

  After a while it became clear that the little boxes under the table that held the chalk, and the square blocks of chalk, with their green paper coverings, were quite the most fascinating things on earth. It was necessary to screw these boxes round on their pivots as fast as possible, and if the chalk flew out, it was simply charming. I have got one of these pieces of chalk still: I am going to tell you why I keep it.

  Jack was in the way, and when he was told so, it hurt his feelings rather: at any rate he did not understand it. But he retired to the hearth-rug with his bit of chalk, and drew on the baize carpet a picture of a somewhat irregular horse.

  In the course of a few minutes, my brother was about to make a stroke from over the box which had held Jack’s piece of chalk. It was a stroke involving a certain amount of screw back, and he wished to chalk his cue. Jack’s feelings were hurt again, when it was found that his chalk was wanted, and he was told not to touch it any more. Soon afterwards he went to bed.

  That night the snow, which had lain thick across the fields, was breathed on by the south wind; and when we let Jack’s dog out for a run, we stood in the porch for a moment and listened to the thud of the soft stuff as it slid off the labouring trees, which rustled and stirred as their burden dropped off them, and all round the bitter rain fell coldly through the dark night As we passed into the hall again, I happened to notice Jack’s picture on the carpet. It was not quite finished, for it had only three legs, and the entire absence of any eye gave it a blind idiotic appearance.

  To Jack this thaw was delightful; his pony passed from being a beautiful dream into a dear reality. After breakfast he cantered off with a groom in attendance, scattering gleefully behind him the lumps of slushy snow.

  Two hours after, I was kneeling by his side in the hall. His pony had slipped on the hard treacherous ground beneath, and Jack was dying. He was quite unconscious, and it was doubtful whether he would regain consciousness again. His back — ah, God! — was broken, and he had only an hour or so to live.

  He lay on a pile of rugs, close to the hearth. Near his head, on the carpet, I could see the faint outline of the unfinished horse, which the housemaids had not quite succeeded in obliterating. He lay quite still, and there was no disfigurement. His breath came evenly, and his eyes were shut. He looked like a child tired with play; but Jack never used to be tired.

  Just before the end he stirred and opened his eyes, and saw me kneeling by him. The shadow of death was on his face.

  “I want to tell you,” he whispered, “I took—”

  So he went out alone into the dark valley.

  They took him up to his room, and laid him on the bed. Death had been very merciful; he had come swiftly and silently; there had been no struggle and no fear. But what was it he wanted to tell me?

  Later in the day I went up again. His clothes were lying on a chair by the bed, and a sheet covered the still body of a child.

  More than half unconsciously I took them up, and laid them in a drawer. As I carried them across the room, something fell out of his coat pocket.

  It was a piece of chalk from the billiard table.

  But why does that little thing stand out so clearly to me from the heavy background of my sorrow? Why is the pathos of that one moment, when Jack wished to tell me of that tiny act of disobedience before the great silence closed about him, so piercingly sharp? The thought of it must have been present to him all the morning; for, when he woke for a moment from that dim hour which preceded death, the threads of interrupted consciousness reasserted themselves, though he went out into the dark valley with his secret untold. I cannot help feeling, quite irrationally, that if I had only remembered his childish desire for that bit of chalk in the morning, and given it to him, if only he had finished drawing his horse, that the bitterness which now fills me would be measurably less. Yet there are those who in an ignorance which seems to be almost insolent, talk of little things not mattering, who would rob life of half its deepest emotions of joy and sorrow. Yet it is not that we need these little things to keep sorrow and joy alive, the strength of memory does not depend on them. Perhaps it is because those we loved and still love are human, because they were full of little wants and little failings, because the idea of a cold disembodied perfection is not so dear to us as the memory of one who was human, who was imperfect, full of little cares and trivial wants, who felt small disappointments and small homely joys, and whom, because we are human too, we loved for these little things.

  The cold unkind morning creeps on to noon: the trees look drowsy and tired, as if they had been awakened in the middle of the night by some bad news that banished sleep, though not the weary craving for it. A few birds peck aimlessly among the brown leaves that are beginning to appear again through the pitted snow. They seem half to realise that this promise of warmth and spring is delusive.

  Ah, my little Jack, I am very lonely and very tired.

  THE ZOO

  SOME of the saddest sights that I know in the saddest city of all the world, our English London, are to be seen at the Zoological Gard
ens. You may see there also some of the most amusing comedies, and screaming farces, that have ever been exhibited. The name “variety entertainment,” always makes me think of the Zoo, and I never yet saw the entertainment which was half so varied, or half so entertaining. The chief comedians are the birds, particularly the parrots, but of parrots I have spoken elsewhere, and the comedies performed by parrots, as a dramatic company, are rather noisy. The reflective mind is out of its element in the parrot house. One might as well try to reflect during a railway accident.

  One of the most charming little comedies à deux is performed by a stork and a small seal. It is worth seeing more than once. The little seal spends his life in a tiny enclosure, in the centre of which is a sunk iron basin full of water, and he passes the day in swimming rapidly round it, coming up every now and again to take breath, or to look at the prospect. He balances himself on the edge of the basin with one fin, and regards the world with a serious contemplative air.

  Sooner or later the stork, who lives on the adjoining estate, walks up to the wire netting, which separates them, and looks coldly at the seal. The seal has a warm heart, and he doesn’t like it; so by way of amusing his friend he drops back into the iron basin and races round it at express speed. When he is tired, he comes up and looks wistfully at the stork. The stork opens and shuts his mouth like a middle-aged gentleman, waking up from an after-dinner nap, and says, “How very improper.” Poor little seal!

  Even the comedies for the most part are really tragedies, for they end rather sadly. The small black bears who stand on their hind legs, when you look at them, and keep their mouths permanently open, in case a piece of bun wanders by, are not properly comedians. Sometimes the bun strikes a bar of their cage, and falls where neither you nor they can reach it, and as you turn to go, they drop down on all-fours, and wait rather sadly for the next bun-bearer. I once saw a boy throw a pebble into the bear’s mouth. The bear snapped his teeth upon it, and then dropped it on the floor, but opened its mouth again, in case a bun flew in. But before he dropped the pebble he looked at us, and as Pierre Loti says, at that moment I caught his soul. He was surprised, and sorry, not angry, but puzzled. I was horribly afraid that he would think it was I who had thrown it, which was of course extremely foolish of me, and I went to buy him something to eat. He was being fed by others when I came back, but in an interval, I saw him sniff at the pebble, which lay at the bottom of his cage, before he remembered about it.

  Do you know the dingoes? They are an Australian wild-dog, I believe, and they have a seven-fold portion of the doggy spirit. In their eyes is the liquid pathos of the collie’s, the trustfulness of the retriever’s, the honour of the mastiff’s. Perhaps a dog’s eyes mean nothing to you, and if so, I am talking nonsense, as far as you are concerned, but if they do, go and talk to the dingo, for he will show you what I mean.

  I go to the snake-house for purely moral reasons. I do not talk to the snakes, and I cannot feed them, because they have glass instead of wire in front of their dens; I go merely to look at what seems to me an embodiment of all that is low and hateful and mean; for the same reason I would go to look at the Devil, if he was on view, but as he is not, I find the snakes come most near my idea of him.

  It is possible to catch a snake’s eye. He will not look at you for long, but in one second of that glance you will get to know something of the eternal mystery of evil, which you will scarcely learn elsewhere. I cannot think of him as an animal, he is evil, no more. I once saw the snakes fed; the public are no longer allowed to see it, and quite rightly. There were about a dozen people in the snake-house, at the time, and I think we were all silent as we went out, when the feeding was over. The snake I watched was a large python from South America — I cannot remember his name, and I have never been near the cage since — and he was given a live rat, for they will not eat the dead food. The rat was let in through a small wire grating, and seemed quite at his ease at first, for the snake was asleep. He ran about the cage for a little while, and eventually walked across two of the reptile’s coils. At that moment the other opened his eyes and saw the rat. He was in no hurry, and stretched himself slowly. That was the most awful motion I ever saw; though the head and the end of the tail of the beast remained still, the great coils stirred and glided along one another, parallel lines moved in opposite directions, and passed and repassed silently and smoothly.

  The rat was still unconcerned, he was sitting in a corner, performing his last toilet, which was not worth while, and it was very pitiful. Presently he looked up, and saw that which made him drop down on all-fours, and tremble. The snake had fully awoke, he was hungry and it was dinner time; two small eyes were looking towards the living meal.... it was horrible.

  It is many years since I saw that sight. It was, I think, the most terrifying thing I ever beheld. In sleep, the horror of it sometimes still reaches me. I am in a dim unfamiliar room, alone at first, but as I sit there, something wakes into existence which is horrible, evil, not understood, and I cannot get away.

  But the creatures who know best the anguish of not being able to think, and the pain of frequent striving after thought, are the monkeys. And what makes their existence so much sadder is that they are by nature, as it were, philosophers, with the craving but not the power for thought, who somehow find themselves forced to play the rôle of low comedians.

  If you have ever watched monkeys at play, you will know what I mean; lighthearted mischief is not their nature; the infinite sadness of their eyes is a contradiction to their gambols. They chase each other round the cage with anxious care-worn faces, muttering and scolding to themselves, and when they are tired they do not go to sleep contentedly like other animals; they sit down mournfully, and from their eyes looks forth a lost soul. Their existence comes near to being a problem to them, and thus they come near to being the saddest things on earth.

  I once saw a monkey at the Zoological Gardens, which I believe reached this boundary line between animals and man. Some one had put a small looking-glass in its cage, and it stretched out a skinny arm, and began examining it. It was not good to eat, and it was just going to throw it away, when it caught sight of its own eyes in the glass. For one half second that monkey was more man than animal. It was puzzled at itself. I have seen many animals look at themselves in a glass, but none as that monkey did. A dog, for instance, will say to itself: “That’s a dog; how did it get there?” and I have known one run round behind a pier glass to find the dog. It is hard to make a cat see itself in a glass, but if it does, it will paw the glass, and dismiss it from its mind. A parrot strikes its image with the upper part of its beak, using its head like a hammer, but it is not really interested.

  Now this monkey’s conduct was different in kind, not in degree, from that of all these other animals. It said: That is I; I am what? For one moment it stared and wondered, in the next the animal had reasserted itself, and the only trace of its humanity left took the form, at the bidding of the animal, of fright and anger. It dashed the glass down, and ran away.

  Into that dim-lit brain there entered for a moment all the sadness of human life. The problem of what we are lies at the root of all human anguish. If that was solved for us, we should all of us either find existence impossible or should discover in life a joy that would transcend all thought.

  We have creeds, as all mankind have had creeds, since the beginning of the world, all directed against that impregnable rock: “What are we?” The whole puzzle of life, how we came here, where we are going, what is good, what is evil, all depend directly on that. A creed is a probability to many who do not believe it; to a few who do believe it, a certainty. Yet who has realised for the space of a lightning flash any creed, and has retained it as a creed? For a realised creed is no longer a creed, but an experience.

  But what of the monkey, who for one half second was a man? Has that flash of blind thought that glimmered into his small brain, passed away as entirely as those hundred other flashes that did just not reach his dim narr
ow consciousness? Was that to him the supreme intellectual and spiritual effort of his life, a struggle, the tearing asunder of his normal limits of consciousness, a statement of that supremest mystery, self? I dare not say that it was, yet who dare say that it was not? One mystery the more in this illimitable riddle of things, one more confession, “We cannot tell,” is no startling phenomenon.

  Yet that moment seems to have made no difference to the monkey. It is, I think, the most melancholy of all those sad prisoners; but the keeper tells me that it was never very lively. It has a curious way of looking earnestly at people who visit the monkey house, and I have heard more than one person say: “What odd, sad eyes that monkey has.” But perhaps they would say that of all monkeys, if they looked at them. This one naturally attracts a good deal of attention. It has a blue face, and a tail with two green rings on it.

  THE THREE OLD LADIES

  WHAT the name of the three old ladies was, I never knew; the Christian name of one, I learned by implication, but I am quite possibly wrong about it, and of the Christian names of the others, or the surname of any, I have no idea. That they were sisters is fairly obvious. They all dressed quite alike, and very curiously; they were between sixty and seventy years of age, I should say, when I first saw them; they lived together, and there was a strong family resemblance between them. Some people have faces which it is impossible to forget; the three old ladies, on the other hand, had faces which it was impossible to remember. If I saw any one of them now, dressed in an ordinary manner, somewhere away from this town, and if she was sitting down, not walking — I think I know their walk; they all walked exactly alike — I do not suppose I should recognise her.