Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Small strips of blotting-paper — this was our procedure — were taken, and moons of chloroform, quite similar to the eau-de-Cologne moons, were made on them from an unstoppered bottle of chloroform. These were inserted in the chip boxes while Arthur, the executioner, got the oxalic acid and a nib. With this lethal weapon he speared their unconscious thoraxes, and out came the setting-boards. Nocturnal expeditions for purposes of “sugaring” tree-trunks were even more exciting. We mixed beer and sugar, heating them together, and at dusk pasted trees in the garden with the compound which Watch found so delicious that if the jug containing it was left on the ground for a moment, he began lapping it up. On such sugaring nights I was allowed to sit up later than usual, and about ten o’clock the excited procession again started with more chip boxes, and a dark lantern, which was turned on to the sugared patches. There were the bright-eyed creatures of the night, drunkenly feasting, and Arthur enriched his pill-boxes with Silver Y and an occasional Golden Y, and rejected the Yellow Underwing, and grew taut over the Crimson Underwing, while I carried a butterfly net, and swooped with it at wandering moths which were attracted by the unveiled lantern carried by Maggie, and Watch wagged his tail and licked up gratefully the droppings from the sugared tree and any moths that might be on them. And then Beth would come out and say that “my Mamma” said that I must go to bed at once, and I usually didn’t. O happy nights!

  I think every day in those holidays must have lasted a week, and every month a year, for when I consider it, we surely spent the whole afternoons in playing “Pirates” in the garden. Theoretically now, as well as practically then, I believe that “Pirates,” a game evolved by the family generally, and speedily brought to its perfect and stereotyped form, was the best sporting invention, requiring no material implements, of modem time. What powers of the mind, what refinements of cunning, compared to which deer-stalking is mere child’s play, were brought into action! For here we were up against each other’s wits, and awful were the results of any psychological mistake. I must describe that game for the benefit of families of energetic children who like thinking and running and scoring off each other.

  At the top of the garden there was a summer-house, and that of course was “home.” There was a lateral laurel hedge to the left of it which screened a path that led by the copse outside the nursery windows, and communicated by means of a garden door with the abysses of the stable copse, and the stable yard. The henyard, an outlying piece of kitchen garden, and the other copse, excellent hiding-places in themselves, were outside the range of pirates, and the touch-line, so to speak, beyond which neither pirates nor trophy-seekers might go passed on the hither side of these. Straight in front of “home” was an open space, safe in itself but hedged in with peril, for there were climbable trees, from which a pirate might almost drop on your head, and thickets. To the right was a most dangerous door, because the latch was stiff and if you were pursued from outside by the pirate you were almost bound to be caught before you could kick it open. In the middle distance, straight ahead were beehives; beyond, kitchen garden and orchard. Never was there anything so trappy.

  So much for the theatre: the dramatis persona were five (occasionally six when my mother played, once seven when my father played), and of this number there were chosen in rotation two pirates, but my father and mother, of course, were never pirates, because they would not have had a chance, as you will see. The pirates, being chosen, went away together, and were given five minutes law to hide wherever they chose within the assigned limits. During these five minutes a captain was chosen from among the blockade runners, who directed his side as to what trophy each of them was to bring from his cruise. One had, for instance, to bring back a croquet hoop from the lawn, another an apple from the third tree in the orchard, another an ivy-leaf from the stable-yard. With their trophies in their hands they had to return in safety to the summer-house without being caught by a pirate.

  So far all is simple, but now there comes in the great point of the game. No pirate could catch you, until you had your trophy, whatever it was, about you. Thus if your trophy was the curry-brush, you might (and did) if you were seen by a pirate and knew it, hastily pluck up a croquet hoop and begin running. Then the pirate, supposing that this was your trophy, ran like mad after you, and when he caught you, you merely assured him that the croquet hoop wasn’t your trophy. That was a score, it also winded the pirate a little, and perhaps Nellie, going cautiously towards the croquet-lawn where her real mission was, would have observed this, and plucking up a croquet hoop (which was her true trophy) begin to run. On which the slightly winded pirate would leave you and run after Nellie, who generally screamed, thus giving away the fact that she had her trophy. Meantime you would proceed with caution towards the stable-yard, seize up a curry-brush and instantly hear a crash from the copse and find the second pirate in pursuit. Even as deep called unto deep the pirates would then shout to each other, and though you thought you could get away from one, the other, having captured Nellie, would appear in front of you....

  There were infinite psychological problems. Supposing your trophy had been an apple, you would, if you were very cunning, put it in your pocket, and continue a pleasant stroll, without hurry, more or less in the direction of “home.” Then if a fast pirate like Arthur sighted you, you would not run away at all, but ask him sarcastically if he had caught anybody yet. There was a good chance that he would think you had not yet got your trophy and would continue to follow you, till he saw another blockade runner looking guilty. On the other hand, he might conceivably suspect you had it already and clap an awful hand on your shoulder, and say, “Caught.” But probably he preferred to watch you, for that made more sport, and then you would suddenly sprint for home, while he was off his guard. There was a bay tree round which a skilful dodger could score off a heavier and faster craft, but under no circumstances might you jump over flowerbeds, because that led to running through them instead, which was ruinous to petunias.

  In the same summer-house which was “home,” we also held a mystical “Chapter,” of which Arthur was warden, Nellie, Maggie and myself, sub-warden, secretary and treasurer, and Hugh was Henchman. The word “Chapter” was no doubt of Cathedral origin, and denoted a ceremonious meeting. We all subscribed to the funds of the Chapter (my mother, who was an honorary member, subscribed most) and the money was spent in official salaries, and in providing decorations, chains and crosses and ribands for the officials. The largest salary, which I think was half a crown, was drawn by Arthur as warden; he also wore the most magnificent jewel, while Hugh, the menial, drew but the salary of one penny, and had a very poor gaud to console himself with. As Henchman, his duty was chiefly to run errands for the rest of the Chapter, to summon my mother when she was allowed to appear, to kill wasps, and to fetch the warden’s straw hat. He was the only member of the Chapter who dared to dispute the will of the warden, and was known to exclaim, “Why shouldn’t Fred?” (the treasurer) when he was tired of running about. Even more subversive of canonical discipline was his assertion one day that he would not be a member of any more societies, in which he was only deputy sub-sub-bootboy. But I secretly (though treasurer) rather sympathized with him, for I considered then, and consider still, that the Chapter was rather a soft job for Arthur. It is true that he invented it, that he covered our symbols of office with sealing-wax lacquer — what has happened to sealing-wax lacquer all these years? — and that he wrote out in exquisite black-letter hand the patents whereby we held office, signed by himself, but a salary of half a crown was excessive. At the meetings we had to present these patents to him before we took our seats, and then had a short formal conversation in which we were “Brother Subwarden, Brother Secretary” and so forth, and read the minutes of the last meeting, and when the presence of the Honorary Member was requested, Brother Henchman had to go to find her. Donations were made, and salaries were paid, but I am confident that nothing else happened. The Chapter was then adjourned; the orders were put back in a
box, and we played pirates....

  And yet though we played Pirates all day, and collected clouded yellows all day, and printed the most exquisite poems as well as writing them, and held Chapters, and did a certain amount of holiday-task, and rode with my father, and drove with my mother, there was always time for other excitements. There was bathing in the Fal, there were picnics at Perran, especially when a southwest gale had been blowing, and from seven miles inland there was audible the thump of Atlantic waves on that bleak beach. Then in Truro itself there were great things to be done, for the volcanic energy of my father had soon kindled the county into pouring out money for the erection of a new Cathedral, the first that had been built in England since the time of the Reformation. St. Mary’s Church was the site of it, and to-day an aisle of St. Mary’s (the rest of a wonderfully hideous church being demolished) forms the baptistery of the Cathedral. The ground was cleared and foundations were dug, and slowly the great stately building began to rise flower-like from the barren soil. I do not suppose that any of us cared independently two straws about a Cathedral, but to go down there with my father, and hear him talk to Mr. Bubb, the Clerk of the Works, infected us with his noble zeal, and the rising walls got pleasingly confused with the rebuilding of the temple by Nehemiah, and the vision of the New Jerusalem. Hugh, I am certain, was allowed to lay a stone himself, and Mr. Bubb presented him with the trowel and mallet with which he had laid it. Or did we all lay stones? I seem to hear my father say in an awestruck voice, “There, you have helped to build Truro Cathedral!” but I am not sure whether that was said to me or not, and my uncertainty is the measure, I am afraid, of the impression that the building of the Cathedral really made on me....

  I wonder if it could have been otherwise, and with regret I do not see how it could. As his own childish records show, my father at my age then was a zealous ecclesiastic, for did he not when ripely eleven obtain the use in his mother’s house of an empty room, which he converted into an oratory? There was an altar there, and it was hung with rubbings he had made from brasses in churches. This piece of childish piety was certainly natural to him, and as certainly there was no kind of priggishness in it, for he set a booby-trap over the door, so that his sisters should not be able to enter “his” oratory in his absence without being detected. He did not want his sisters praying there: and the booby-trap over the chapel door was certainly an admirable device to keep them out. But in none of us, nor indeed in my mother, was there implanted an ecclesiastical mind, not even in Hugh. He took orders it is true, in the English Church, and subsequently the Catholic Church claimed him, and to it and its service he gave his whole love and energy. But the ecclesiastical mind in him was a later development, for it must be remembered that before taking orders at all he had tried and failed to get into the Indian Civil Service. (He and I, at that time, used to dress up in nightshirts, with trousers over our shoulders to represent stoles, and celebrate the “rite of the Silver Cow” in our sitting-room at Addington. I feel sure that there was not any solid profanity in it: we but parodied, and that with great amusement, the genuflexions, the bobbings and bowings, the waving of a censer, considered merely as ridiculous pieces of ritual, but such a rite could not be held indicative of a reverent attitude towards ritual as such.) But my father’s mind, even as a child, was strongly ecclesiastical; only his children did not share it, nor did my mother. Of all men and women that I have ever known, she was the most deeply religious in her realization of the pervading presence of God, but the garb, the habiliments of her religion were not the same as my father’s. To him the Church and its ceremonies were a natural self-expression, and in that he gorgeously clothed his love of God. To none of us was such expression natural, and thus his enthusiasms though they infected us to some extent were things caught from him, not cathedraically developed. That he missed this in all of us, I think could not be helped, but I do not think, at that time at any rate, that he missed it much, for he was Elijah in the whirlwind of his enthusiasms, and caught us all up, as in the fringes of a dust-cloud, to subside again when he had passed.

  What estranged was my continued fear of him, which now yields easily to analysis and dispersal, but was in those days regarded by me merely as an instinct, as natural and as incontrovertible as hunger or thirst. I understood neither him nor any part of him. I did not grasp the fact that the root in him as regards his children was his love for them, and that it was his love and nothing else that, at bottom, was accountable for his quickness in putting his finger on a fault and his sternness in rebuke. It was out of his love that he regarded himself so strictly as responsible for our mental and moral education, and what I thought his readiness to blame was only the watchfulness of it. For instance, if, as I so well specifically remember, I appeared with an umbrella huddled up anyhow in its confining elastic, he saw in that a tendency towards slovenliness, and he made, in the fervency of his wish that I should not grow up to be of slovenly habit, no allowance for the natural frailty of tender years. Trivial carelessness and unpunctuality in the same way were pounced upon with a severity that altogether overbrimmed the cup of the occasion; he saw in them (and his love hastened to correct) instances of a dangerous tendency. In consequence he brought great and formidable guns to bear on small faults, which could just as efficiently have been visited with a light instead of a heavy hand. Sometimes, too, he was utterly wrong in his interpretation of our motives, and this gave us a sense of injustice; etchingly recorded on my memory, for instance, is a Sunday afternoon walk when Maggie and I pranced and ran ahead, from the mere exuberance, as far as I can judge, produced by a heavy meal and a fine day. But my father put the gloomiest interpretation on our antics, telling us that we were behaving thus in order to excite the admiration of passers-by at our agility. “You are saying to yourselves, ‘I am Hercules, I am Diana,’” he witheringly observed; whereas, nothing was farther from our thoughts. But it was unthinkable to argue the point, to assure him that no similitude of that kind had ever suggested itself. The only course was to walk soberly and sedately instead of running. And since the lives of young children, especially if they are at all vividly inclined, are a chessboard of small faults, this fear of the rebuke, in the absence of comprehension of its root-cause, became a constant anxiety to us, making us mere smooth-faced, blue-eyed dolls in his presence, with set fixed movements and expressions; and when released from it, we scampered off as if from an examination under a magnifying-glass.

  I do not mean to convey the idea that my father was continually pulling us up, for nothing is further from the truth. Continually we played to him, and he danced the most fascinating measure; continually he played to us, and our dancing strove to keep time with his enchanting airs. He could render us speechless with laughter at his inimitable mirth, or breathless with suspense at his stories. But all the time there was this sense that at any moment the mirth might cease, and that a formidable rebuke might be visited on an offence that we had no idea we had committed. But it was never any joy in faultfinding that prompted it: the real cause was the watchfulness and responsibility of his love. How often our fear was ill-founded, passes enumeration, but one way or another, it had become a habit with all of us, except perhaps Nellie, for she, out of a remarkable faculty of not knowing at all what fear meant (except when playing Pirates) arrived at a much completer comprehension of my father than any of us.

  Still less did the rest of us understand those fits of black depression which from time to time assailed and overwhelmed my father, not grasping the fact that when they were on him, he really ceased to be himself, and was under a sort of obsession. They were, I imagine, as purely physical as a cold in the head or an ache of indigestion, but during the two or three days that they lasted he was utterly unapproachable. He would sit through a meal, or take us out for a walk in a silence which if broken at all, was broken only by blame or irony. If we spoke to him, there would be no reply; if, under the intolerable heaviness we were silent, he would ask if there was nothing that interested us whi
ch he was worthy of hearing.... And all the time, as we knew later, he was struggling with this demoniacal load, longing to be rid of it, yearning to burst out of it, but possessed by it to the point of helplessness. While the fit was on him, and he was in this abnormal state, the most innocent of words and actions would evoke a formidable censure, and I suspect that three-quarters of our fear for him were derived from our belief that these attacks were a part of him, always there, and always liable to come into play. That was an entire mistake, though it was a natural one. As it was, these black fits were not incapsulated by us, but suffered to mingle with and make part of our estimate of him. That we should so have feared him, that we should so have made ourselves unnatural and formal with him, when all the time his love was streaming out towards us, makes a pathos so pitiful that I cannot bear to think of it. But there it was, and long it lasted, and all the time I never got a true perspective of him. We saw ourselves as a nervous row of pupils before a schoolmaster, and all the time it was his very strictness which was a manifestation of his love, and his love hungered for ours. Our troubles and our joys, the worst of us and the best of us, went like homing pigeons to my mother, and she gave the same welcome to the one and to the other, and for ever treasured both.