by E. F. Benson
‘Physically there’s nothing much wrong with him, Miss Faraday,’ he said, ‘but I want to consult you. I found him very nervous and I am sure he was wanting to tell me something, but couldn’t manage it. He ought to have thrown off his rheumatism days ago, but there’s something on his mind, sapping his vitality. Have you any idea – strict confidence, of course – what it is?’
She gave her little bleat of laughter.
‘Wrong of me to laugh, I know, Dr Inglis,’ she said, ‘but it’s such a relief to be told there’s nothing really amiss with dear Edmund. Yes: he has something on his mind – dear me, it’s so ridiculous that I can hardly speak of it.’
‘But I want to know.’
‘Well, it’s a lame man, whom he has seen several times. I’ve seen him, too, and the odd thing is he is exactly like Edmund. Last night he met him just outside the house, and he came in, well, really looking like death.’
‘And when did he see him first? After this lameness came upon him, I’ll be bound.’
‘No: before. We both saw him before. It was as if – such nonsense it sounds! – it was as if this sort of double of himself showed what was going to happen to him.’
There was glee and gusto in her voice. And how slovenly and uncouth she was with that lock of grey hair loose across her forehead, and her uncared-for hands. Dr Inglis felt a distaste for her: he wondered if she was quite right in the head.
She clasped one knee in her long bony fingers.
‘That’s what troubles him – oh, I understand him so well,’ she said. ‘Edmund’s terrified of this man. He doesn’t know what he is. Not who he is, but what he is.’
‘But what is there to be afraid about?’ asked the doctor. ‘This lame fellow, so like him, is no disordered fancy of his own brain, since you’ve seen him too. He’s an ordinary living human being.’
She laughed again, she clapped her hands like a pleased child. ‘Why, of course, that must be so!’ she said. ‘So there’s nothing for him to be afraid of. That’s splendid! I must tell Edmund that. What a relief! Now about the rules you’ve laid down for him, his food and all that. I will be very strict with him. I will see that he does what you tell him. I will be quite relentless.’
For a week or two Faraday saw no more of this unwelcome visitor, but he did not forget him, and somewhere deep down in his brain there remained that little cold focus of fear. Then came an evening when he had been dining out with friends: the food and the wine were excellent, they chaffed him about his abstemiousness, and loosening his restrictions he made a jolly evening of it, like one of the old days. He seemed to himself to have escaped out of the shadow that had lain on him, and he walked home in high good humour, limping and leaning on his stick, but far more brisk than was his wont. He must be up betimes in the morning, for the annual general meeting of his company was soon coming on, and tomorrow he must finish writing his speech to the shareholders. He would be giving them a pleasant half-hour; twelve per cent free of tax and a five per cent bonus was what he had to tell them about Faraday’s Stores.
He had taken a short cut through the dingy little thoroughfare where his father had lived during his last stricken years, and his thoughts flitted back, with the sense of a burden gone, to the last time he had seen him alive, sitting in his bathchair in the garden of the Square, with Alice reading to him. Edmund had stepped into the garden to have a word with him, but his father only looked at him malevolently from his sunken eyes, mumbling and muttering in his beard. He was like an old monkey, Edmund thought, toothless and angry and feeble, and then suddenly he had struck out at him with the hand that still had free movement. Edmund had given him the rough side of his tongue for that; told him he must behave more prettily unless he wanted his allowance cut down. A nice way to behave to a son who gave him every penny he had!
Thus pleasantly musing he came out of this mean alley, and crossed into the Square. There were people about tonight, motors were moving this way and that, and a taxi was standing at the house next to his, obstructing any further view of the road. Passing it, he saw that directly under the lamp-post opposite his own door there was drawn up an empty bathchair. Just behind it, as if waiting to push it, when its occupant was ready, there was standing an old man with a straggling white beard. Peering at him Edmund saw his sunken eyes and his mumbling mouth, and instantly came recognition. His latchkey slipped from his hand, and without waiting to pick it up, he stumbled up the steps, and, in an access of uncontrollable panic, was plying bell and knocker and beating with his hands on the panel of his door. He heard a step within, and there was Alice, and he pushed by her, collapsing on to a chair in the hall. Before she closed the door and came to him, she smiled and kissed her hand to someone outside.
It was with difficulty that they got him up to his bedroom, for though just now he had been so brisk, all power seemed to have left him, his thigh-bones would scarce stir in their sockets, and he went up the stairs crab-wise or corkscrew-wise, sidling and twisting as he mounted each step. At his direction, Alice closed and bolted his windows and drew the curtains across them; not a word did he say about what he had seen, but indeed there was no need for that.
Then leaving him she went to her own room, alert and eager, for who knew what might happen before day? How wise she had been to leave the working out of this in other hands: she had but concentrated and thought, and, behold, her thoughts and the force that lay behind them were taking shape of their own in the material world. Fear, too, that great engine of destruction, had Edmund in its grip, he was caught in its invisible machinery, and was being drawn in among the relentless wheels. And still she must not interfere: she must go on hating him and wishing him ill. That had been a wonderful moment when he battered at the door in a frenzy of terror, and when, opening it, she saw outside the shabby old bath-chair and her father standing behind it. She scarcely slept that night, but lay happy and nourished and tense, wondering if at any moment now the force might gather itself up for some stroke that would end all. But the short summer night brightened into day, and she went about her domestic duties again, so that everything should be comfortable for Edmund.
Presently his servant came down with his master’s orders to ring up Dr Inglis. After the doctor had seen him, he again asked to speak to Alice. This repetition of his interview was lovely to her mind: it was like the re-entry of some musical motif in a symphony, and now it was decorated and amplified, for he took a much graver view of his patient. This sudden stiffening of his joints could not be accounted for by any physical cause, and there accompanied it a marked loss of power, which no bodily lesion explained. Certainly he had had some great shock, but of that he would not speak. Again the doctor asked her whether she knew anything of it, but all she could tell him was that he came in last night in a frightful state of terror and collapse. Then there was another thing. He was worrying himself over the speech he had to make at this general meeting. It was highly important that he should get some rest and sleep, and while that speech was on his mind, he evidently could not. He was therefore getting up, and would come down to his sitting-room where he had the necessary papers. With the help of his servant he could manage to get there, and when his job was done, he could rest quietly there, and Dr Inglis would come back during the afternoon to see him again: probably a week or two in a nursing home would be advisable. He told Alice to look in on him occasionally, and if anything alarmed her she must send for him. Soon he went upstairs again to help Edmund to come down, and there were the sounds of heavy treads, and the creaking of banisters, as if some dead weight was being moved. That brought back to Alice the memory of her father’s funeral and the carrying of the coffin down the narrow stairs of the little house which his son’s bounty had provided for him.
She went with her brother and the doctor into his sitting-room and established him at the table. The room looked out on to the high-walled garden at the back of the house, and a long French win
dow, opening to the ground, communicated with it. A plane-tree in full summer foliage stood just outside, and on this sultry overcast morning the room was dim with the dusky green light that filters through a screen of leaves. His table was strewn with his papers, and he sat in a chair with its back to the window. In that curious and sombre light his face looked strangely colourless, and the movements of his hands among his papers seemed to falter and stumble.
Alice came back an hour later and there he sat still busy and without a word for her, and she turned on the electric light, for it had grown darker, and she closed the open window, for now rain fell heavily. As she fastened the bolts, she saw that the figure of her father was standing just outside, not a yard away. He smiled and nodded to her, he put his finger to his lips, as if enjoining silence; then he made a little gesture of dismissal to her, and she left the room, just looking back as she shut the door. Her brother was still busy with his work, and the figure outside had come close up to the window. She longed to stop, she longed to see with her own eyes what was coming, but it was best to obey that gesture and go. The hall outside was very dark, and she stood there a moment, listening intently. Then from the door which she had just shut there came, unmistakably, the click of a turned key, and again there was silence but for the drumming of the rain, and the splash of overflowing gutters. Something was imminent: would the silence be broken by some protest of mortal agony, or would the gutters continue to gurgle till all was over?
And then the silence within was shattered. There came the sound of Edmund’s voice rising higher and more hoarse in some incoherent babble of entreaty, and suddenly, as it rose to a scream, it ceased as if a tap had been turned off. Inside there, something fell with a thump that shook the solid floor, and up the stairs from below came Edmund’s servant.
‘What was that, miss?’ he said in a scared whisper, and he turned the handle of the door. ‘Why, the master’s locked himself in.’
‘Yes, he’s busy,’ said Alice, ‘perhaps he doesn’t want to be disturbed. But I heard his voice, too, and then the sound of something falling. Tap at the door and see if he answers.’
The man tapped and paused, and tapped again. Then from inside came the click of a turned key, and they entered.
The room was empty. The light still burned on his table but the chair where she had left him five minutes before was pushed back, and the window she had bolted was wide. Alice looked out into the garden, and that was as empty as the room. But the door of the shed where her father’s bath-chair was kept stood open, and she ran out into the rain and looked in. Edmund was lying in it with head lolling over the side.
Monkeys
R. Hugh Morris, while still in the early thirties of his age, had justly earned for himself the reputation of being one of the most dexterous and daring surgeons in his profession, and both in his private practice and in his voluntary work at one of the great London hospitals his record of success as an operator was unparalleled among his colleagues. He believed that vivisection was the most fruitful means of progress in the science of surgery, holding, rightly or wrongly, that he was justified in causing suffering to animals, though sparing them all possible pain, if thereby he could reasonably hope to gain fresh knowledge about similar operations on human beings which would save life or mitigate suffering; the motive was good, and the gain already immense. But he had nothing but scorn for those who, for their own amusement, took out packs of hounds to run foxes to death, or matched two greyhounds to see which would give the death-grip to a single terrified hare: that, to him, was wanton torture, utterly unjustifiable. Year in and year out, he took no holiday at all, and for the most part he occupied his leisure, when the day’s work was over, in study.
He and his friend Jack Madden were dining together one warm October night at his house looking on to Regent’s Park. The windows of his drawing-room on the ground-floor were open, and they sat smoking, when dinner was done, on the broad window-seat. Madden was starting next day for Egypt, where he was engaged in archaeological work, and he had been vainly trying to persuade Morris to join him for a month up the Nile, where he would be engaged throughout the winter in the excavation of a newly-discovered cemetery across the river from Luxor, near Medinet Habu. But it was no good.
‘When my eye begins to fail and my fingers to falter,’ said Morris, ‘it will be time for me to think of taking my ease. What do I want with a holiday? I should be pining to get back to my work all the time. I like work better than loafing. Purely selfish.’
‘Well, be unselfish for once,’ said Madden. ‘Besides, your work would benefit. It can’t be good for a man never to relax. Surely freshness is worth something.’
‘Precious little if you’re as strong as I am. I believe in continual concentration if one wants to make progress. One may be tired, but why not? I’m not tired when I’m actually engaged on a dangerous operation, which is what matters. And time’s so short. Twenty years from now I shall be past my best, and I’ll have my holiday then, and when my holiday is over, I shall fold my hands and go to sleep for ever and ever. Thank God, I’ve got no fear that there’s an after-life. The spark of vitality that has animated us burns low and then goes out like a wind-blown candle, and as for my body, what do I care what happens to that when I have done with it? Nothing will survive of me except some small contribution I may have made to surgery, and in a few years’ time that will be superseded. But for that I perish utterly.’
Madden squirted some soda into his glass.
‘Well, if you’ve quite settled that – ’ he began.
‘I haven’t settled it, science has,’ said Morris. ‘The body is transmuted into other forms, worms batten on it, it helps to feed the grass, and some animal consumes the grass. But as for the survival of the individual spirit of a man, show me one tittle of scientific evidence to support it. Besides, if it did survive, all the evil and malice in it must surely survive too. Why should the death of the body purge that away? It’s a nightmare to contemplate such a thing, and oddly enough, un-hinged people like spiritualists want to persuade us for our consolation that the nightmare is true. But odder still are those old Egyptians of yours, who thought that there was something sacred about their bodies, after they were quit of them. And didn’t you tell me that they covered their coffins with curses on anyone who disturbed their bones?’
‘Constantly,’ said Madden. ‘It’s the general rule in fact. Marrowy curses written in hieroglyphics on the mummy-case or carved on the sarcophagus.’
‘But that’s not going to deter you this winter from opening as many tombs as you can find, and rifling from them any objects of interest or value.’
Madden laughed.
‘Certainly it isn’t,’ he said. ‘I take out of the tombs all objects of art, and I unwind the mummies to find and annex their scarabs and jewellery. But I make an absolute rule always to bury the bodies again. I don’t say that I believe in the power of those curses, but anyhow a mummy in a museum is an indecent object.’
‘But if you found some mummied body with an interesting malformation, wouldn’t you send it to some anatomical institute?’ asked Morris.
‘It has never happened to me yet,’ said Madden, ‘but I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t.’
‘Then you’re a superstitious Goth and an anti-educational Vandal,’ remarked Morris . . . ‘Hullo, what’s that?’ He leant out of the window as he spoke. The light from the room vividly illuminated the square of lawn outside, and across it was crawling the small twitching shape of some animal. Hugh Morris vaulted out of the window, and presently returned, carrying carefully in his spread hands a little grey monkey, evidently desperately injured. Its hind legs were stiff and outstretched as if it was partially paralysed.
Morris ran his soft deft fingers over it.
‘What’s the matter with the little beggar, I wonder,’ he said. ‘Paralysis of the lower limbs: it looks like some lesion of the
spine.’
The monkey lay quite still, looking at him with anguished appealing eyes as he continued his manipulation.
‘Yes, I thought so,’ he said. ‘Fracture of one of the lumbar vertebrae. What luck for me! It’s a rare injury, but I’ve often wondered . . . And perhaps luck for the monkey too, though that’s not very probable. If he was a man and a patient of mine, I shouldn’t dare to take the risk. But, as it is . . . ’
Jack Madden started on his southward journey next day, and by the middle of November was at work on this newly-discovered cemetery. He and another Englishman were in charge of the excavation, under the control of the Antiquity Department of the Egyptian Government. In order to be close to their work and to avoid the daily ferrying across the Nile from Luxor, they hired a bare roomy native house in the adjoining village of Gurnah. A reef of low sandstone cliff ran northwards from here towards the temple and terraces of Deir-el-Bahari, and it was in the face of this and on the level below it that the ancient graveyard lay. There was much accumulation of sand to be cleared away before the actual exploration of the tombs could begin, but trenches cut below the foot of the sandstone ridge showed that there was an extensive area to investigate.
The more important sepulchres, they found, were hewn in the face of this small cliff: many of these had been rifled in ancient days, for the slabs forming the entrances into them had been split, and the mummies unwound, but now and then Madden unearthed some tomb that had escaped these marauders, and in one he found the sarcophagus of a priest of the nineteenth dynasty, and that alone repaid weeks of fruitless work. There were nearly a hundred ushaptiu figures of the finest blue glaze; there were four alabaster vessels in which had been placed the viscera of the dead man removed before embalming: there was a table of which the top was inlaid with squares of variously coloured glass, and the legs were of carved ivory and ebony: there were the priest’s sandals adorned with exquisite silver filigree: there was his staff of office inlaid with a diaper-pattern of cornelian and gold, and on the head of it, forming the handle, was the figure of a squatting cat, carved in amethyst, and the mummy, when unwound, was found to be decked with a necklace of gold plaques and onyx beads. All these were sent down to the Gizeh Museum at Cairo, and Madden reinterred the mummy at the foot of the cliff below the tomb. He wrote to Hugh Morris describing this find, and laying stress on the unbroken splendour of these crystalline winter days, when from morning to night the sun cruised across the blue, and on the cool nights when the stars rose and set on the vapourless rim of the desert. If by chance Hugh should change his mind, there was ample room for him in this house at Gurnah, and he would be very welcome.
