Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  All such arrangements, all such “fittings in” were a pure delight to my mother. She revelled in her dexterity, and revelled no less in the multitude of her engagements. She loved, after a busy day, to dine at some political house, and hear the talk of the hour, and follow that up with some party at the Foreign Office, for though she cared very little if at all about political questions themselves, she delighted in the froth and bustle and movement. She was great friends with Mr. Gladstone, though she cared not one atom about the Home Rule question, and he in turn had the greatest appreciation of her wit, her humour which would strike a spark out of the most humdrum of happenings: and I believe it is authentically told that when once at Hawarden there was discussion as to the identity of the cleverest woman in England, and someone suggested my mother as the fittest candidate for the post, he said in that impressive voice, reinforced with the pointed forefinger, “No, you’re wrong: she’s the cleverest woman in Europe.” Quite unfatigued, she would be up and dressed in her very oldest clothes before seven next morning, and walk for a full hour before breakfast, since the rest of the day held for her no leisure for exercise. Never was there anyone so acutely observant as she, and at breakfast there would be some grotesque or comic side-show of the streets for narration. Parks and open places were of no use to her at all in those rambles; Lambeth Walk, or the humours of Covent Garden Market were her diversion, and refreshed by these humours she tackled her new and delightful day. Never by any chance did she go out to lunch, but never by any chance did we lunch en famille; guests were invariably there. Even more to her mind were her dinner-parties, in the selection and arrangement of which she took an infinity of rapturous trouble, and the bigger they were the more I think she enjoyed them. There was, of course, a great deal of clerical entertainment, but half a dozen times in the season she gave more secular dinner-parties of about thirty guests, when literature and science, and art and politics, and the great world magnificently assembled. And when the last guest had gone, a piece of invariable ritual was that she with any of us children who were at home, executed a wild war-dance all over the drawingroom in a sort of general jubilation. I remember Lord Halsbury coming back unexpectedly to tell my mother some story which he had forgotten to mention, and finding us all at it.

  But however full was the day, my mother seemed possessed of complete and unlimited leisure for talk with any of us who wanted her. I can remember no occasion on which she was too busy for a talk. Her letters could wait; anything could wait, and she would slew round from her writing-table, saving, “Hurrah! Oh, this is nice!” She would listen alert and eager to some infinitesimal problem, some critical observation, and say, “Now tell me exactly why you think that. I don’t agree at all. Let’s have it out.” It seemed that nothing in the world interested her nearly as much as the point in question, and verily I believe that it was so. She projected her whole self on to it: she desired nothing so much, just then, as to put herself completely in your place, and realize, before she formed an opinion of her own, precisely what your opinion was. Then invariably the magic of her sympathy seized on any point with which she agreed, “Quite so: I see that, yes I feel that,” she would say. “But how about this? Let me see if I can put it to you.”

  It was no wonder that the closeness of her special, particular relation to each of us was ever growing. The primary desire of her heart was to give love: when it was given her (and who ever had it in larger abundance?) she welcomed and revelled in it, but her business above all was to give. And her love was no soft indulgent thing: there was even an austerity in its intenseness, and it burned with that lambent quality, which was so characteristic of her. Never was anyone so like a flame as she: her light illuminated you, her ardour warmed and stimulated. Withal, there was never anyone who less resembled a saint, for she was much too human to be anything of the kind; she had no atom of asceticism in her, and without being at all artistic she adored beauty.

  Spiritual beauty came first, for she loved God more than she loved any of His works, but how close to her heart was intellectual beauty, things subtly and finely observed, things humorously and delicately touched! How, too, she hated spiritual ugliness, as expressed by priggishness with regard to the Kingdom of Heaven, and mental ugliness as expressed by conceit or narrowness, and hardly less did she dislike physical ugliness. Her tones would rise from a calmness which she found quite impossible to maintain, into a crescendo of violent emphasis and capital letters as she said something to the following effect:

  “Yes, I know: I’m sure he’s a very good man, and that’s so trying, because he is such a prig, and always does his duty, and, my dear, that awful mouth, and the Beautiful sentiments that come out of it. Besides he’s so Very, Very Plain!”

  No one was ever more beset with human frailties. She was afraid of getting stout, and in her diary recorded solemn vows that she would not eat more than two dishes at dinner, nor take sugar. Then came an entry, “Soup, fish, pheasant and soufflé. What a Pig I am!”... Or again if she found herself in some difficulty, where a precise statement of what had really occurred would make things worse, she would say, “I shall have to be very diplomatic about it,” and a perfectly well justified chorus went up from her irreverent family, “That means that Ma’s going to tell a lie about it.”

  With all her intense spirituality, she had no use for conventional worship, and I can hear her say, on an occasion when my father was out, “We won’t have prayers to-night for a treat.” Similarly she could never take any emotional interest (and I think gave up trying) in Synods and Pan-Anglican Conferences, and Bishops’ meetings, though she knew that her tepidity about these things that concerned my father so intimately was a distress to him. But while he drove on his fervent way along the roads of organization, tradition, ritual and ecclesiastical practice, her religion was on quite other lines: prayer and meditation were the solitary methods of it, and in the world which she delighted in, love and sympathy. And whatever she sought for and gathered there, with all her own temptations and fallings and new resolves, she brought with humble confident hands and laid them at the feet of Christ.

  Though the beauty of living and sentient beings — whether in the region of the soul, the mind or the body — made so irresistible an appeal to her, she never really cared for the beauty of plants or trees or skies or scenery. Just there a firm frontier-line was drawn round the territory of her real sympathies, and it accorded very fitly with her lack of touch with mere organizations. Just as she cared not two straws for the Pan-Anglican Conference, yet delighted in the human members of it, so, when standing in front of the west façade of, say Rheims Cathedral, or looking across from the Riffel Alp to the Matterhorn, her real attention would not be devoted to these silent sublimities, but much rather to a cat blinking in the sun, or a sparrow building in the eaves. Things must move or think or form opinions or commit voluntary actions to enchant her, and in the Swiss holidays which often followed the end of the London season, I doubt if she ever looked with eagerness or wonder at the Matterhorn, except on the day when she knew that one of her sons was somewhere near the summit in the early morning. On such another day her eye was glued with enthusiasm on the Rothhorn because two of us were making the ascent, but towards the Rothhorn in itself, or towards the waving of poplars, or the flame of a sunset, she never felt the emotional heart-leap. Thus, when August in Switzerland or elsewhere was over, the ensuing five months or so at Addington, with its delights for us of shooting and riding and all the genial thrill of country life, made no appeal to her. As far as they affected us, she threw herself into them, but at any moment, she would have chosen to be in the swim and the thick of things again, and have taken those early morning walks down the Lambeth Road with the interest of fishshops and costermongers to enlighten her, rather than walk under the ‘flaming autumn beech trees, or see the frail white children of the spring beginning to prick through the thawing earth of January. There had to be a beating heart in that which enchained her; she could not bother about pri
mroses. That may have been a limitation, but such limitation as that merely stored her force of sympathy and discernment towards the rest. She did not attempt to let it dribble out in exiguous channels, but conserved the whole vigour of it for the supply of the mansions where her treasure and her heart lay. In the country also, she was a far more defenceless victim against the one strong foe of her triumphal banners, and that foe was fear.

  In real trouble, especially when the trouble was concerned with those she loved best, she walked boldly; no one faced the large sorrows and bereavements that fell to her destiny with a more courageous front. The magnitude called forth the faith which unwaveringly supported her, but when all seemed peaceful and prosperous, she was often a prey to acute imaginative apprehensions. She could not bear, for instance, to see us all start out riding together, and when the announcement came that the half-dozen of riding horses were at the front door, she went back to her room on the other side of the house. Certainly she had some slight basis for her feelings, for among those steeds there was a bad bucker and a rearer. None of the riders minded that in the slightest, and away went the cavalcade at a violent gallop up the long slope of turf in front of the house with “Braemar” in the shape of a comma, and “Quentin” playing the piano in the air with his forelegs, and “Ajax” kicking up behind, and “Peggy” going sideways, just because my father had mounted first and smacked “Columba” over the rump while the rest of us were betwixt and between the gravel and the saddle. There were hurdles stuck up on the slope, and Braemer, shrilly squealing, bucked over the first and Ajax ran out, and Peggy trod solemnly on the top of one, and Quentin still hopping on his hind legs refused and was whacked, and my father went pounding on ahead as we rocketed after him. He was not a good horseman, but he had no knowledge of fear, and, though he avoided the hurdles, he went tobogganing down the steep sides of Croham Hurst with Columba slipping and sliding on the pebbles and putting her foot into rabbit holes, while her rider with slack rein enjoyed it all enormously. In the meantime my mother had dreadful visions of two or three of us being brought back on hurdles, and carried into the house. But exactly at that point her essential courage knocked her nervousness on the head, for she would not at any price have had any one of us not go out riding. Only, she didn’t want to see the start.

  It was this vague fear that was her enemy all her life, and it could pounce on any quarry. She did not really believe that the corpses of her children were soon to be brought back to her, any more than she really believed that when my father had a bad cold, it was speedily to develop into double pneumonia, but she was prey in imagination to these disastrous possibilities. Hardly ever did she suffer under them as regards herself; once only do I remember her conjuring up a personal spectre. On that occasion she got the idea that she was going to die before the end of the month, a prognostication which she unfortunately made public. Thereupon, as the days went by, some one of her children hurried from the tea-table every evening, and stood spectre-like in the corner of the room, and in a sepulchral voice said, “Nine days now”: or “Eight days now,” until the fatal and last evening of her prophetic intuition arrived. The “To-night” was received with roars of laughter, and she was in brilliant health and spirits next morning, when she ought to have been a corpse. She laughed at her fears herself (which is just the reason why I treat them humorously now) but, for all her laughter, they were year after year a miserable bugbear to her, mostly and mainly during the leisurely months at Addington. Oftenest they were quite vague, but couched to pounce on any excuse for definiteness: if my father had a cold she would evoke the image of pneumonia, if he was tired she would conjure up visions of a breakdown. She kept these groundless imaginings to herself, and no one could ever have guessed how often she was a victim to them, or how heavily they rode her. They did not, except quite occasionally, get between her and the sunlight, for she forced them into the shadow, caught them and shut them in cupboards, steadily and continually disowned them. And when any real trouble came they haunted her no more; she rose serene and faithful to any great occasion, welcoming it almost, as she had done with Martin’s death, as a direct dealing from God, receiving it sacramentally.

  I wonder if children ever ran so breathless a race in pursuit of manifold interests and enjoyments as did we in those years when our ages ranged from the early twenties to the early teens, and the Christmas holidays in particular, brought us together. One year, about 1884, a snowfall was succeeded by a week’s frost, and that by another week of icy fog, and the foggy week I look back on as having given us the fullest scope of hazardous activity in hopeless circumstances, for shooting and riding were impossible. We made a toboggan-run which soon became unmitigated ice, down a steep hill in the park among Scotch firs that loomed dim and menacing through the mist. Half-way down the hill, just where the pace was swiftest, and the toboggan skidding most insanely, grew one of these firs close to the track, and on the other side was a bramble-bush. From the top you could not see this gut at all, and with eyes peering agonizedly through the thick air you waited for the appearance of this opening somewhere ahead. Sometimes you saw so late that the bramble-bush or the Scotch fir must inevitably receive you, and there was just time to slide off behind, be rolled on the hard glazed snow, and hear the plunge of the toboggan in the bramble-bush, or its crash against the Scotch fir. If you got through safely, a second and more open slope succeeded and you pursued your way across the path between the church and the house, and bumped into the kitchen-garden fence. Bruised and unwearied we took the injured toboggans to the estate carpenter, whose time at Christmas must have been chiefly occupied with repairing these fractures, and played golf over the nine holes which we had made along the slope in front of the house, on the snow and in a fog. The greens, which were about as large as tablecloths, had been swept, and the boy who had the honour whacked his ball in the conjectured direction, and ran like mad after it. When he had found it, he shouted and his opponent drove in the direction of his voice. If he sliced or pulled, he too ran like mad in the conjectured direction; if he drove straight his ball was probably marked by the first driver. The thrillingest excitement was when, driving first, you topped your ball or spouted it in the air, for then you crouched as you heard the crack of the second ball, which whizzed by you unseen. Football in the top passage with bedroom doors for goals ushered in lunch and after lunch we skated on dreadful skates called “Acmes” or “Caledonians,” which clipped themselves on to the heels and soles of the boot, and came off and slithered across the ice at the moment when you proposed to execute a turn. Hugh despised my figure-skating (and I’m sure I don’t wonder) and christened himself a speed skater. The pond was of no great extent and fringed on one side by tall rhododendron thickets, into which he crashed when unable to negotiate a corner.

  The evening closing in early was the dawn of the intellectual labours of the day. The Saturday Magazine made frequent appearances, burgeoning like Aaron’s rod into miraculous blossom of prose and poetry: between-whiles Arthur composed voluntaries to be played on the organ in the chapel at prayers, Nellie studied the violin, Hugh produced a marionette theatre, and wrote a highly original play for it, called The Sandy Desert; or, Where is the Archbishop? and Maggie made oil pictures of her family of Persian cats. Once at least during Christmas holidays we all jointly wrote a play: it was The Spiritualist one year, in which there was a slashing exposure of mediums; another year we dramatized The Rose and the Ring in operatic form with original lyrics set to popular tunes. With the exception of Nellie, our voices were singularly inefficient and completely untrained, which was part of the fun of it. To these plays the neighbourhood was invited, and all the servants and lodge-keepers formed a solid mass at the back. At one of them, Arthur for some reason, must be disguised as a young woman, six feet two high, with a yard or so of trousers showing below the skirt. This impersonation made a kitchen-maid laugh so hysterically, that the play had to pause while she was taken out by two housemaids, and her yells died away as she ret
reated down the back-stairs.

  Life in those holidays was an orgy, celebrated in an atmosphere of absolutely ceaseless argument and discussion. Every question rose to boiling-point: for while we regarded each other with strong and quite unsentimental affection we were violently critical of each other. We drew biting caricatures of my father going to sleep after tea, of my mother keenly observant above and not through her spectacles, of Hugh falling off Ajax, of any ludicrous and humorous posture. But above all it was writing that most enthralled us, and innumerable were the quires of sermon-paper that, yielded up their fair white lives to our scribblings. These were now beginning to enter a more professional arena than the Saturday Magazine; Nellie, then at Lady Margaret’s Hall in Oxford, had, before she was twenty, published an article on Crabbe in Temple Bar; Arthur, a year or two older, had written his first book, Arthur Hamilton, in the form of an imaginary memoir, and Maggie and I were in the throes of a joint story, in which I can perceive the infancy of a novel called Dodo. This was abandoned before completion, but in a moraine of forgotten dustinesses, I came across some few pages of it the other day and really felt that there was some notion in it, some conscious attempt anyhow, to convey character by means of conversation rather than by analysis, an achievement in the, direction of which, in spite of dispiriting results, I am still grubbing away. There certainly, in that heap of ancient manuscript fortuitously preserved, was the conscious striving after psychical dialogue, in which the interlocutors revealed themselves. Trivial as might be the personalities revealed, the idea of the excited authors was to avoid narrated analysis, and to convict and justify their characters out of their own mouths. There was a crisis of creativeness in the writing of it, for we firmly and designedly intended that a certain middle-aged lady, at whose feet everybody else fell flat in adoration of her tact and her sympathy and her comprehension, should “be” my mother. But, such is the waywardness of idealistic portraiture, we found, about Chapter VI, that though she was already supposedly installed on the throne of tact and comprehension, before which everybody else bowed the knee, she had not justified the part which we had cast for her, for she really had said little more than “I feel so deeply for you,” or “Pass the mustard.” We were determined that she should reveal her incomparable humanity by the sympathetic dialogues in which we engaged her, but she was so tactful that she never said anything at all that bore on the problems which were submitted to her. In the book to which I have alluded, she certainly appears as “Mrs. Vivian,” who, as may faintly be remembered, is supposed to be possessed of superhuman tact and insight, taking painful situations with calming and yet exhilarating effect. For the satisfaction of the curious, it may be stated that Mrs. Vivian was the one live model in the book and was completely unrecognisable. When first we enthusiastically scribbled at its earlier incarnation, my sister and I were at the ages of nineteen and seventeen, and for the very reason, namely, that we thought of my mother in our adoring limning of her, the presentment is not only unlike her, but unlike anybody at all.