Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Nellie had a maxim (which Maggie acknowledged held for all of them) of ‘Contradict while you are thinking what to say’. The resultant wrangles made Ethel long for a pocket gramophone recorder. She had never known a family in whose existence humour played so great a part, and her prevailing concern when with the Bensons was: ‘What made you so awfully clever?’ They enthralled her (except Hugh, for whom she had an ‘instinctive un-liking’). Yet Maggie, especially, could infuriate her with religious pomposity and a supreme conviction of her own rightness. Arguments at Addington and Lambeth raged late into the night. Mary once wryly sent Ethel a ‘Thanksgiving to be used irregularly’ that read: ‘I thank thee, O Art, that I am not as other women are – strait-laced, narrow-minded, dogmatic – or even as those Bensons.’ With Arthur and Fred, Ethel made friends for life.

  FRED BENSON DEPICTS MISS ETHEL SMYTH AS EDITH STAINES, IN HIS NOVEL DODO

  The door was half open, and there came from within the sounds of vigorous piano-playing, and now and then a bar of music sung in a rich, alto voice. These tokens seemed to indicate that Miss Edith Staines was taking her breakfast at the piano. . . Edith Staines talked in a loud, determined voice, and emphasised her points with little dashes and flourishes of the dish of poached eggs. . . Edith went back to the drawing-room, whistling in a particularly shrill manner.

  ‘Oh, did you ever!’ said Dodo, who was laughing feebly in her chair. ‘Edith is really splendid. She is so dreadfully sure of herself. And she does talk so loud – it goes right through your head like a chirping canary. . . ’ [. . .]

  ‘The worst of it is,’ said Edith, ‘I care for such a lot of things. There’s my music, and then there’s any sort of game – have you ever seen me play tennis? – and then there isn’t time for everything. I am a musician, and a good shot, and an excellent rider, and a woman, and heaps of other things. It isn’t a conceit to say so – I simply know it.’

  Dodo laughed.

  ‘Well, you know, Edith, you’re not modest. Your worst enemies don’t accuse you of that. . . ’

  Inasmuch as the Primate of All England may be permitted such feelings, Edward loathed Ethel Smyth. So deep was his antipathy that it was soon considered expedient to smuggle her into Lambeth by back entrances and usher her into side rooms. The mere sight of Ethel from his study window, strolling with Mary in the garden (beside the long, dreary border of spiky flowers Mary had nicknamed ‘the Apostolic Succession’), would ‘infallibly wreck whatever work the Archbishop might happen to be engaged on at the moment’. Some of the boys’ young male friends had the same effect. When Edward overheard Ethel playing parts of her Mass on the piano at Addington, he remarked that it appeared the Lord was being commanded rather than implored to have mercy, that the music sounded ‘like orders issued in an extremely peremptory manner’. (In this instance, the Archbishop might have found an ally in George Bernard Shaw, who thought the Mass belonged to ‘the light literature of Church music’, and when reviewing it wrote: ‘It repeatedly spurts ahead in the briskest fashion, so that one or two of the drum flourishes reminded me, not of anything so vulgar as the Salvation Army, but of a crack cavalry band.’)

  Ethel, for her part, ‘stood in deadlier awe [of the Archbishop] than of anyone I ever met in the whole course of my life’. His disconcerting physical beauty, the weight of his office, his own prickly social unease, crippled her with nervousness. ‘The sight of his majestic form approaching the tea-table scattered my wits as an advancing elephant might scatter a flock of sheep,’ she confessed. With no one else did she say quite such stupid things, ‘raking up scraps of schoolboy slang’ in her disorder. On one occasion, when Ethel had blurted out that Handel’s music reminded her of a Mothers’ Meeting, the Archbishop (in whose opinion this great ‘English’ composer’s work was the only music worth listening to, other than church psalms) demanded with some hauteur that she justify her statement. He listened in silence, until her halting explanation spluttered to an end, then retorted: ‘Are you aware that you have used the words “that sort of thing” seven times running?’

  Mary, in her devilish way, rather enjoyed the progress of these run-ins, and would afterwards declare that ‘the mouse-like voice which replied to the Archbishop’s remarks was a very beautiful thing to listen to’. After one particularly acid encounter, she told Ethel cheerily: ‘We all realise that you and the Head of the Church are not two dewdrops destined to roll into one.’ The rare instances on which Ethel encountered any archiepiscopalian goodwill somehow made matters worse. After a memorable cricket match at Lambeth Palace, with a team made up entirely of the cricket-mad Talbot family playing against another raised by Nellie, the home team (in which Ethel took a leading part) quite unexpectedly won. The Archbishop’s delight in the victory was almost boyish, and enveloped Ethel, too. And yet, she pointed out, ‘it was just these human rays, shooting out unexpectedly from behind clouds of awfulness, that made him such a nerve-shaking acquaintance.’

  Despite her rumbustiousness, and her gaucheness with the Archbishop, as a musician Ethel was sensitive and talented. The writer Maurice Baring, an acquaintance of Arthur’s, heard her singing Brahms and Schubert for a group of friends, and ‘knew at once that I had opened a window on a new and marvellous province’. Ethel’s interpretation was so intimate, so penetrating and revealing, that it seemed as if the composers themselves were singing their own work. Baring was moved by ‘the rare and exquisite quality and delicacy of her voice, the strange thrill and wail, the distinction and distinct clear utterance, where every word and every note told without effort, and the whirlwind of passion and feeling she evoked.’

  Music was all to Ethel, and formed the one serious sticking point in her friendship not only with Mary, but with the family as a whole. The Bensons were indeed an ‘unpermissibly gifted family’, she wrote, but ‘the women of that family had not an ounce of artistic blood between them’. Maggie had gone so far as to give her reasons for not going to hear a Passion one day as ‘I don’t like Bach because he is so very ugly’. Ethel saw this as a ‘difference of breed’ between them, and it was the source of many of those late-night discussions. ‘People who only admit one view of moral law – that of the Church,’ observed Ethel, ‘can hardly mix at bottom with those who see life through an artist’s eyes; not at least unless artistic kinship is there to bridge the gulf between them.’

  When Ethel first met Mary, in the tumult of the collapse of her relations with Lisl von Herzogenberg, ‘the artist was in abeyance’. Although Ethel was not a committed Christian – at least, apart from a short ‘phase of intense belief’, not with Mary’s fervour – she had a High Church upbringing, and their outlook was ‘more or less the same; but even then the dissimilarity of grain made itself felt’. Ultimately Ethel needed someone who could understand what was most important to her, her art, and Mary was not ‘musician enough’ for that. Apart from the occasional gathering round a piano after dinner, music played little part in Mary’s life. Without it, there was a gulf between her and Ethel which meant that on Ethel’s part at least, the intensity of their initial feelings could not be sustained. She and Mary, Ethel later recalled, were ‘like two trees whose upper branches occasionally mingling gave the illusion of one tree, whereas their roots were far, far apart’.

  Something else intervened between Ethel and Mary – someone else. Ethel and Nellie fell in love. They were closer in age – Nellie was five years younger than Ethel – and although Nellie, like her mother and sister, had not ‘an ounce of artistic blood in her’, she shared with Ethel a devotion to games and adventure, unmatched (Ethel wrote) by anyone she had ever met. The two could also make each other erupt with laughter. The spirit that had impelled Nellie to found a Slang Society, in opposition to the more severe Maggie’s Anti-Slang Society at school in Truro, appealed to Ethel. She was also secretly impressed by the fact that, of all the Benson siblings, Nellie was the only one at ease with their father. As she grew older, Nellie had no awe of Edward. Not only could she hold her
own in conversation with him, but she could allow him the affection he craved from his other children, and which they were unable or unwilling to give.

  Nellie had been recalled from Oxford when Maggie went up in 1883, as it was felt that at least one daughter was needed at home, to help with hospitalities at Lambeth and Addington. Short and rather dumpy, like her mother, Nellie also shared Mary’s sunniness and self-deleting interest in others. She was always delighted to fall in with other people’s plans, skilled at reflecting their moods, and ever willing to give people their own head – a characteristic that endeared her both to Edward and to Ethel. ‘What shall we do?’ was Nellie’s favourite question. She was outgoing, caring, and often ‘uncommonly jolly’. ‘No one could be morbid or haunted or unduly fanciful in Nelly’s company,’ wrote Arthur (who persistently spelled his sister’s name thus), ‘her humour and common-sense and a power of almost complimentary ridicule, swept cobwebs away very quickly’. Back from Oxford, she had flung herself into life at Lambeth and Addington, her sincere caring overflowing the palace boundaries into engaged and effective work among London’s poor.

  Like Mary, Nellie formed her most intense friendships with women. Both at school and at Oxford she was an object of adoration, a recipient of impassioned billets-doux (as their friendship deepened, Ethel wrote her over 150 letters in a single year). As Ethel drew closer to Nellie, she began to push Mary away, causing anguish on Mary’s part. ‘I am just yearning over you,’ Mary wrote to Ethel. ‘The past is and will always be, for me as well as for you. . . you say I “must be a factor or nothing”. I can never be “nothing” now. The past makes that impossible – why reject a factor even if small. You see 8 × 2 = 16 – why can’t you give me the place of 2?’ Ethel was also on the verge of an affair with Henry Brewster, Lisl’s brother-in-law. That was easier for Mary to deal with, as it could be condemned as adultery.

  The triangle of tension between her, Ethel and Nellie presented far more difficulty. It meant Mary had to confront the conflict between her Christianity and her physical desires that had so troubled her in the past, and to accept the blowing away of the mist that comfortably clouded the borders between sympathetic counselling and erotic desire. She exercised her old arguments with Ethel – that she had come to God through understanding human love, but that impulses of desire needed to be controlled. But Ethel was of a new generation, one for whom such reasoning lacked the power it held for Mary – and, as her behaviour over Henry Brewster, Lisl and Lisl’s sister had shown, she was uncomprehending, if not uncaring, of any heartache the pursuit of her own passions caused others. Mary had to cope not only with being an older woman rejected by a younger; not only with being in a position which seemed to require she give her blessing to the new friendship that excluded her; not only with being a mother whose daughter was embarking on a journey she feared for; but with the tortured, tangled knot in which these strands came together.

  At first, Mary seemed willing to stand aside. She wrote to Ethel from Switzerland, where the family was on holiday in September 1889, admitting that the situation was one that would cause ‘any amount of wear and tear and confusion on all sides’, but:

  As far as I can help it there shant be. I have always claimed both for myself and others, that when a new friendship began to blossom there should be freedom given to form it. . . I know personally I cant form two relations worth having at once. Therefore I wanted and want you to know how free I leave you about Nellie.

  But later in the long letter Mary’s hurt, and a little of her confusion, emerges:

  Now as to the ‘position you assign me’. Heaven forbid that I should deprive you of the old joke of General Physician, or any other joke. . . Only, let it be a joke. Don’t you see, when you speak of my ‘function’ towards you and my possible feeling that it could be discharged equally well by my daughter, there you go awfully wrong. The bond that knots you and me is no function.

  A month later, Mary was less assured about giving any blessing to Ethel and Nellie, and seemed compelled by circumstance, rather than magnanimity. ‘I feel now that I must stand aside in the matter and leave you two alone,’ she wrote. ‘Ethel, I do wish you knew human nature a little more! you would then understand my inarticulateness – I am here yet must be quiet. The relation between you and me is a very tender plant, and of slow and delicate growth. . . It is superfluous to say that I accuse you of nothing. But I must keep these delicate tendrils free from tangles – and you will admit that in this case tangles are very difficult to avoid.’

  Tangles were indeed unavoidable, as Mary tried to align her role as a mother, her concern for Nellie’s happiness, and fears that she may be hurt by Ethel, with her own role in the affair, her sense of loss and her awareness of age. Nellie appeared infatuated. She had refused to show Mary a letter Ethel had written her, and when Mary asked if there was anything private in it had said ‘yes’; asked if she had ‘any feeling of indecency’ in showing it to her mother, she had said ‘yes’ again – though admitting that Ethel might not see it thus. ‘I have been pained to think that Nellie was desiring something fuller than you spoke of in your first [letter],’ Mary wrote to Ethel in October. ‘But I realise now that more is developping [sic] in you, and feel more satisfied. . . I think Nellie is very happy now. You must have foreseen that from the first. Your nearness in ages, and her possibilities etc. made it so certain – and you did it with your eyes open. I feel that this time is emphatically hers, and I do long for her to have it good.’ Having lost none of her deft touch with metaphor, Mary added a note of caution: ‘She is a bivalve you see, and you do want both her shells. . . ’

  At times Mary’s resolve crumpled, and her heartache and anger exploded: ‘Quiet!! and you really think I can get a “letter” like that from you, and be quiet – Ethel!’ Mary began a letter in November, without any salutation. ‘I call it a “letter”, because I scarcely ever saw so short a thing contain so much pain. . . Ethel, I mustn’t get too tragic – it is always my tendency – but answer you I will.’ Then she went on, slightly calmed by her outburst, to summarize the situation:

  Think over the past – we meet first, you and I – we sound depths together – and out of that there grows of itself a relation – a deep relation. . . Then there comes this new drawing of you and Nellie – I don’t understand it at first. . . all this means on either side. But soon it dawns on me. You speak of ‘confusion and wear and tear on all sides’ – and by Allah, it comes. But – and here we come to our present crux, your way out of it I cannot make mine. The play of nature between Nellie and me – The awful inner tie of mother and daughter – and if you will, my own limitations speak all together in clear tones, and a most deep inner instinct bids me be still – bids me, so to speak ‘get out of the way’ while this relation, which is evidently increasing more than either of you knew it would, developes [sic] itself. . . You say we speak too different languages ever to understand each other. Are there no dictionaries? No grammars? Must we give up the moment we make a poor translation, or a false construction? I cannot give it up. I will bungle on. I will know you.

  Ethel Smyth may well in time have discovered that the gulf that separated her from Mary, also, in the end, lay between her and the unartistic, similarly devout Nellie; or tensions between all three may eventually have torn through the fabric of the Benson family – but neither scenario was given the chance to play itself out. Within a year of Mary’s writing that letter, Nellie was dead.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In October of 1890, just over a fortnight after her twenty-seventh birthday, Nellie developed a sore throat while at Addington. The doctor diagnosed diphtheria, which Nellie had probably caught through contact with children in the village schoolroom, on her usual round of good works. Within days she could not speak at all, and was communicating only through shakily written notes, which were dowsed in disinfectant before being delivered. Nellie deteriorated rapidly. Her final note was to Mary, who was by her bed, and read: ‘I wonder what it will be
like. Give them all my love.’ Mary began to say the words of ‘Jesu, Lover of my soul’, and as she was doing so, Nellie died.

  A HYMN BY CHARLES WESLEY

  Jesu, Lover of my soul,

  let me to Thy bosom fly,

  While the nearer waters roll,

  while the tempest still is high.

  Hide me, O my Saviour, hide,

  till the storm of life is past;

  Safe into the haven guide;

  O receive my soul at last.

  Other refuge have I none,

  hangs my helpless soul on Thee;

  Leave, ah! leave me not alone,

  still support and comfort me.

  All my trust on Thee is stayed,

  all my help from Thee I bring;

  Cover my defenceless head

  with the shadow of Thy wing.

  Wilt Thou not regard my call?

  Wilt Thou not accept my prayer?

  Lo! I sink, I faint, I fall

  – Lo! on Thee I cast my care;

  Reach me out Thy gracious hand!

  While I of Thy strength receive,

  Hoping against hope I stand,

  dying, and behold, I live. . .