by E. F. Benson
May God preserve him to us yet for some years [she wrote to Ellen]. The wish for his continued life, together with a certain solicitude for his happiness and health seems, I scarcely know why, even stronger in me now than it was before I was married. Papa has taken no duty since we returned, and each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on gown or surplice I feel comforted to think that this marriage has secured papa good aid in his old age.
But though, whenever her husband was at leisure, Charlotte ‘must have occupations in which he can share,’ he had practically the whole of the work of the parish on his hands, for Mr. Brontë took little or no duty, and while Mr. Nicholls was busy she took up her writing again. Just as she had done before getting embarked on Shirley, she made several beginnings of a new novel; one of these got as far as its fiftieth page. This renewed industry disposes of the supposition that her husband discouraged her literary work, and he himself emphatically denied that he had ever done so. She only wrote when the mood was on her, and in the year and a half that had elapsed between the publication of Villette and her marriage she had only written a fragment of eighteen pages called Willie Ellin. It was not till after she was married that, as a matter of fact, she set to work again.
The autumn passed into winter. Snow had fallen early, then melted again, and one morning she and her husband walked out a distance of over three miles to see the waterfall on the moor. Rain came on, and she returned drenched, and never quite recovered the excellent health that she had enjoyed ever since her marriage. She was well enough to go to Gawthorpe for a day or two, early in January, and she had planned a visit to Ellen for the end of the month. But before that could be paid, she became really unwell and took to her bed.
She knew now that she was with child, and the doctor was reassuring: these fits of sickness were normal symptoms. But she grew worse and weaker, prostrated with the continued sickness and fever, though there was as yet no acuteness of anxiety. From bed, in pencil, she wrote just three more notes, and in them all, clear and unwavering, shone the lamp of love which had illuminated these last months for her, with a light serene and tranquil, such as she had never known before. To one friend of the far-off Brussels days she wrote: ‘No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world. I do not want now for kind companionship in health and the tenderest nursing in sickness.’ And then to Ellen: ‘I want to give you an assurance that will comfort you — and that is that I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support — the best earthly comfort that ever woman had.’
Then came the third and last note: ‘I cannot talk — even to my dear, patient, constant Arthur I can say but few words at once.’
Then there seemed to be an improvement, and it was not till within a few days of her death that her recovery was despaired of. She was conscious till the end, speaking but seldom, and at the very last she turned her dimmed eyes to her ‘dear boy,’ clinging to the life which his love had made sweet for her. She whispered: ‘Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us — we have been so happy.’
She died in the night of March 30, 1855.
The Autobiography
Benson, 1932
OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS
This autobiography was first published in 1920 and deals not only with Benson’s life, but with his memories of his famous father and brothers. Most of the book is taken up with recollections of Benson’s childhood and school-days in the South-West of England. Benson went on to write two further volumes of autobiography: Mother (1925) and Final Edition, which was handed to his publisher only days before his death in 1940.
Title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING
CHAPTER II. LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS
CHAPTER III. LINCOLN AND DEMONIACAL POSSESSION
CHAPTER IV. THE NEW HOME AT TRURO
CHAPTER V. PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS
CHAPTER VI. THE DUNCE’S PROGRESS
CHAPTER VII. THE WIDENING HORIZONS
CHAPTER VIII. LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON
CHAPTER IX. THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF
CHAPTER X. CAMBRIDGE
CHAPTER XI. THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN
CHAPTER XII. AN ARCHÆOLOGICAL EXCURSION
CHAPTER XIII. ATHENS AND DODO
CHAPTER XIV. ATHENS AND EGYPT
The original frontispiece: “My Father, ÆT. 50”
CHAPTER I. WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING
MY father was headmaster of Wellington College, where and when I was born, but of him there, in spite of his extraordinarily forcible personality, I have no clear memory, though the first precise and definite recollection that I retain at all, heaving out of nothingness, was connected with him, for it certainly was he, who, standing by the table in the window of the dining room with an open newspaper in his hand, told me never to forget this day on which the Franco-German war came to an end. Otherwise as regards him, somebody swept by in an academic cap and gown, a figure not at all awe-inspiring as he became to me very soon after, but simply a rather distinguished natural phenomenon to be regarded in the same light as rain or wall-paper or sunshine. Cudgel my memory as I may, I can evoke no other figure of him at Wellington, except as something shining and swift; an external object whirling along on an orbit as inconjecturable as those of the stars, and wholly uninteresting. He had a study on the left of the front door into the Master’s Lodge, where there was a big desk with a shiny circular cover. I know that I was taken in there to say good night to him, but the most remarkable thing there was the big desk with large handles, and perhaps a boy standing by it, mountainous in height and looking extremely polite and gentle. There was the same ceremony every evening: my father kissed me, put his hand on my head and said, “God bless you and make you a good boy always.” The most significant detail of that ritual was that my father’s face was rough, not smooth like the face of my mother and of Beth, and that there lingered round him or the room a smell of books and a smell of soap.
A little later on than that there came a period when for half an hour before bedtime my two sisters and I (for the present the youngest) used to visit him in that same study while he drew entrancing pictures for us, each in turn. One of these I found only the other day: it represents a hill crowned with a castle and a church, in front of which is a small knight waving his sword in the direction of a terrifying dragon, homed and tailed, who is flying across the sky. Below in minute capitals runs a rhyming legend. Or I went to the College chapel, though not often, and by way of a treat, and there was the same figure in a surplice, in a stall on the right hand of the door of entrance. I believe I was there on the last Sunday of his Headmastership and that they sang a hymn which he wrote.
Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my first five years, but externally I have impressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumultuously alive. All these (and I think the experience is universal) were external happenings, trivial in themselves, but far more lasting than emotional affairs in later life. Never shall I forget, though I have forgotten so much of far vaster import since then, the discovery of an adder on the croquet lawn outside the nursery windows. The gardener attacked it with the shears that he had been using for clipping the edges of the grass: he made fine chopping gestures, and presently disappeared into the belt of wood with the adder slung on the blades. There is the vignette: something terribly vivid but girt about with mist. I have no other knowledge of the gardener but that he killed an adder with his shears and went into the belt of wood with the corpse dangling thereon.
There was an evening when, having had my bath in the nursery I escaped from the hands of my nurse, slippery with soapy water, and looked out of the nursery window. Then a miracle burst upon my astounded eyes, for, though it was bedtime my mother was in the act of putting her foot on her own croquet ball, and with a smart stroke sending the adversary into the limbo of a flowerbed. That
was allowed by the rule of 1870 or thereabouts, and it gave me the impression of consummate skill and energy. My mother, you must understand, stood quite still with her own ball in chancery below her foot. The concussion of her violent mallet sent the adversary into a flower-bed, and the calceolarias nodded.... Then Beth, my nurse, caught me, and rubbed me dry, and I went to bed with the delicious sense of my mother’s magnificence, and the marvel of people still playing croquet in daylight when I had to go to bed. I think that this occasion was the first on which I recognised my mother as having a personality of her own. The next confused me again, for on some birthday of one of us, or at Christmas, Beth told me that Abracadabra was coming, and that I mustn’t be frightened. I was then taken to see my mother, who was lying down in her bedroom, and said that she was very sleepy, and I returned to the nursery. Shortly afterwards there was a general hubbub in the house, and on being taken downstairs from the nursery into the hall, I saw a huge bedizened fairy standing in front of the fireplace. She blew a piercing trumpet at intervals, and made dance-steps to the right and left. She had a wonderful hat covered with lilies, and a dress covered with jewels, and in front of her was a thing that might have been mistaken for the clothes-basket out of which Beth took clean shirts and socks, but it could not possibly have been that, because it gleamed with pure gold. A sheet lay on the top of it, and Abracadabra blew her trumpet, and Beth, holding me close, said, “Eh, dear, don’t be frightened; it’s all right!” Obviously it was all right; for to put an end to all tearful tendencies, Abracadabra, with a magnificent gesture, withdrew the sheet, and hastily presented me with a clockwork train, just what I had always wanted. She turned a key in the engine, and the engine then capsized with loud buzzings, but when Abracadabra put it on its wheels again, it proceeded to draw three tin carriages after it. And it was mine, the very thing I had wanted, and Abracadabra smiled as she gave it me, and I thought that her face was rather like Mamma’s. But the likeness must have been purely accidental, because Mamma was in her bedroom feeling sleepy. And when Abracadabra went through the door into the kitchen passage blowing loudly on her trumpet, and when, after a few excursions of the clockwork train, I was allowed to go up to her room again, and found her still sleepy, it might be indeed considered proved that she was not Abracadabra. Besides, when I told her about Abracadabra’s visit, she was very much vexed that she had missed her, and asked whether Abracadabra had not left any present for her, which she had not. That is the first clear and definite memory I have of Abracadabra, and also, in a way, it is the last, for when next that amiable fairy visited us, I knew, alas, that she was no fairy at all, but my mother, dressed in the amazing garb of fairyland. But though that particular brand of fairyland was finished for me, those subsequent occasions were girt with grandeur, for I, concealing my own superior knowledge, must pretend that this was genuine Abracadabra, thus indulging and buttressing the belief of my youngest brother Hugh, who still, innocent thing, had no grown-up doubts on the subject..... found those selfsame garments only lately in a trunk stowed away in an attic at the last home my mother lived in; a skirt covered with sprays of artificial flowers, a bodice and stomacher set with gems of pure glass, a hat of white satin embowered in flowers, a pair of wings, gauze and gold, and a pair of high-heeled shoes covered with gilt paper. They were moth-eaten and mouldy, and it was scarcely possible for the most sentimental pilgrim to preserve them. Besides I had the memory of the day when the authentic fairy appeared in them, and that memory was sweeter than the condition, forty-five years later, of the robes themselves. My mother had kept them, I make no doubt, when her own days of Abracadabra were over by reason of our emergence from childhood, in the hope that one day a daughter or daughter-in-law would assume them again for the joy and mystification of grandchildren, but that day never came. So the robes of fairyland stowed away in their trunk were forgotten, until that day at Tremans when I found them, as I turned out the treasures and the rubbish of the vanished years before the house passed into other hands. It was a dark autumn day, and the rain beat softly on the roof, but verily, when I opened the trunk and found them there, the sunlight of the dawn of life shot level and delicious rays from the far horizon, and cast a rainbow over the weeping sky.
People in those very early days, with the exception of Beth, were more part of the general landscape of life than human beings, similar in kind to myself, with an individuality of their own. They were not loved or feared: they were but a part of the general environment, like the walls of the nursery, or trees or dinner or beds. But, as by some superior swiftness of evolution, Beth ceased to be landscape, and became a human being, wholly to be adored and generally to be obeyed, sooner than any of the family. She was well over fifty when first I remember her, and had by now almost completed the nursing of a second generation, for she had been nursery-maid with Mrs. Sidgwick, my mother’s mother, when her family came into the world, and had gone to my mother when at the mature age of nineteen the first of her six children was born. Thereafter Beth remained with my mother until the end of her long and utterly beautiful life of love and service. Very soon after she came to my grandmother, at the age of fifteen, she gave notice because she wanted to go back from Rugby to her native Yorkshire, and did not settle into more southerly ways. But my grandmother encouraged her to think that she soon would do so, and so Beth, instead of leaving, stopped on till the age of ninety-three, in an unbroken devotion to us of seventy-eight years.
MY MOTHER, ÆT. 20
That devotion was returned: we were all her children, and the darlingest of all to Beth’s big heart was Hugh.
Beth then, to my sense, emerged first of all into the ranks of human beings, servant and friend and to a very considerable extent mistress. But she gave us no weak and sentimental devotion, and though she never inspired the smallest degree of fear, her rare displeasure caused an awful feeling of loneliness and desolation. If we had done wrong, she demanded sorrow before her forgiveness was granted, and if to her wise mind the sorrow was not sufficiently sincere, she was quite capable of saying, when we said we were sorry in too superficial a manner, “I don’t want your sorrer,” and the day grew black, until she accepted it and beamed forgiveness. That granted, there was never any nagging, and next minute she would be running races with us again until panting and bright-eyed she would stop and say, “Eh, dear, I can’t run any more: I’ve got a bone in my leg.”
She mingles in almost every memory that I have of those days, a loved and protecting presence. She it was who lifted me up to look out of the nursery window when a sham fight was going on, perhaps at Aldershot. There were reports of guns to be heard and, so I fancy, flashes and wreaths of smoke, and like George III I got it firmly embedded in my mind that this was the battle of Waterloo that I had witnessed. The connection I think lay through the fact of this place being Wellington. She it was who led me through a delicious sandy piece of waste ground near the house called the Wilderness, and allowed me to pick and eat a blackberry from a bramble that grew by a rubbish heap on which was a broken plate. Never have I seen such a blackberry. I can still hardly believe it was not of the size of an apricot, for I know it entirely filled my mouth and the juice spurted therefrom as out of a wine-vat. She too consoled me for the loss of two front teeth which came out into a piece of butter-scotch that she had given me. She removed the teeth and I proceeded with the toffee. She too allowed me to take out of the Noah’s ark with which we played on Sundays a brown dog remotely resembling a setter, two of whose legs had been broken. Her brilliant surgery had repaired this loss by inserting in the stumps a couple of pins so that it stood up as well as ever. This I was permitted to carry about with me, partly in my pocket, but mostly in a warm damp hand, which caused the setter to exude a pleasant smell of paint and varnish. A moment of tragedy, the first that I had known, was the sequel, and I do not believe that ever in my life I have been more utterly miserable. What happened was this.
It was Christmas Eve, and the five of us, Martin, Arthur, Nellie, Ma
ggie, and myself — Hugh, so I guess, being then little more than a month old — were returning from our walk, and the setter should have been in my hand or in my pocket. We were going through a wood of fir trees, the ground was brown and slippery with pine-needles, and the sun low and red shone through the tall trunks making, with the fact that it was Christmas Eve, an enchanted moment. I had just found out that my breath steamed, as it came out of my mouth, and Beth and I were playing steamers. Then suddenly I became aware that the setter was neither in my hand nor my pocket, and the abomination of desolation descended on me. For a little while we looked for it, and then Beth decreed that we must go on. But Martin — this is the first thing that I can recollect about him — being eleven years old and able to walk alone after dark, got leave to stop behind and look for it, while the rest of the bereaved procession went homewards. At that point my memory fails, and I have no idea whether he found it or not. But here were the two first crystallized emotions of my life; the black misery of the loss of the setter, and the sense of Martin’s amazing kindness and bravery in stopping behind by himself in the terrible wood. There was a moon in the sky when we came out into the open and frosty stars, but no heart within me to care for playing steamers any more that day.