by Bolt, Rodney
FROM MAGGIE BENSON’S 1901 SHORT STORY, ‘THE SOUL OF CAT’,
about Persis, ‘a dainty lady, pure Persian’, who hated her kittens ‘with a hatred founded on jealousy and love’
She was a cat of extreme sensibility, of passionate temper, of a character attractive and lovable from its very intensity. . . should we let her go about with a sullen face to the world, green eyes glooming wretchedly upon it, an intensity of wretchedness, jealousy and hate consuming her little cat’s heart[?]. . . as the kittens grew older maternal tenderness and delights faded, maternal cares ceased, and a dull, jealous misery settled down over Persis. . . she, not responding to my caresses, sat staring out before her with such black, immovable despair on her face that I shall not easily forget it. . . the cat’s life was a series of violent changes of mood. . . she became sullen, suspicious, and filled with jealous gloom. . .
[Persis disappears one day]
So vanished secretly from life that strange little soul of a cat – a troubled soul for it was not the animal loves and hates that were too much for her – these she had ample spirit and courage to endure, but she knew a jealous love for beings beyond her dim power of comprehension, a passionate desire for praise and admiration from creatures whom she did not understand, and these waked a strange conflict and turmoil in the vivid and limited nature, troubling her relations with her kind, filling her now with black despairs, and painful passions, and now with serene, half understood content.
‘A letter from Dr Chambers last night shows to our great comfort that the darling feels among friends,’ Ben wrote to Nettie, a few days after the move. ‘She sent for him several times and begged for him not to ‘send her away’.’ Ben (and sometimes Lucy) wrote regularly to Nettie, keeping her up to date with doctors’ reports on Maggie’s progress. Ben signed her letters ‘Your lovingest Mother’; and when mentioning Ben to Nettie, Lucy often referred to her as ‘Ma’. Nettie had become part of the family. Ben also shared news of Beth (whose health was beginning to fail), life at Tremans, and how Arthur was progressing.
‘She has asked for none of us, so we must just wait,’ Ben wrote to Nettie in mid-November about Maggie. ‘One must just cooperate with all one’s might.’ Ben needed all her might. She was not to see Maggie again for nearly two years. Maggie’s clinician at The Priory, Dr Chambers, considered that the possible emotional disruption might be harmful unless Maggie consented to visits – and Maggie refused. That Christmas, the family were given leave to send cards to Maggie, but not to include any letters. Ben had to content herself with written reports from Dr Chambers or a nurse, charting Maggie’s ‘great confusion’, her restlessness, distress, brooding silences, refusal of food, her at times incoherent ranting and violent delusions – and her continued denunciations of Ben and Lucy, which at times extended to other family members as well, and sometimes were turned in upon herself. When letters were allowed, Ben received pages of poisonous hatred, and accusations that she and Lucy wanted to exclude Maggie from Tremans so that they could be alone together. Arthur thought Maggie’s ingenuity at inflicting pain on Ben was ‘satanical’ – if not consciously malicious, then a result of demonic possession. Ben responded with characteristic self-effacement. ‘I just lie low,’ she wrote. She sought solace in religious meditation, and confided in Hugh, whom she thought understood that side of her life better than the others. ‘She surpassed anything she has ever said before in bitterness and dislike and reproach and fulminations,’ Ben wrote to Hugh after one vitriolic attack, ‘so I have passed into silence again. Oh how I wish one could find the source of this poisonous hatred! Bless her.’ Ben turned the situation over and over in her mind, ‘and in my ears one deep throb is always going on, Maggie, Maggie Maggie – and what it all means’. ‘No storms are more terrible than those that rage at high altitudes,’ wrote Ethyl Smyth, pondering what inner conflicts had brought about ‘the clouding of that wonderful brain’.
A LETTER TO MAGGIE BENSON, FROM HER MOTHER
Dearest Child. Why do you write me such unkind letters? You know they can do nothing but give pain, and all is so untrue. When you feel it would be a pleasure to see me, you must write and say so – I believe you love me deep down, but you have allowed these poisonous thoughts with all their falseness to take possession of you. I love you, as I always have, with my whole heart – and you can imagine therefore what a letter like this is to me. Always your Mother.
Had Dr Chambers been au fait with the thought of Sigmund Freud, whose book Die Traumdeutung had recently been published in Vienna (though not yet in James Strachey’s translation as The Interpretation of Dreams), he may well have seen Maggie’s jealousy of Lucy as one of a sexual rival, as an antagonism to someone who had usurped her father’s male role in a way Maggie herself subconsciously desired to do. As it was, Chambers took the more orthodox view that the causes were gynaecological. ‘An operation’ was considered, and his reports linked Maggie’s loss of control to the ‘special reason’ for which she was confined to bed each month. Ben thought Maggie’s accusations were more than just ‘a cry for help’. To Nettie she wrote: ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is more an utterance of her feeling than an asking. I mean I don’t think answers have any effect. The Cry is always repeated in exactly the same words. . . It seems often like the moaning of a person in delirium. . . God Bless the darling – the one comfort is he loves better than we do.’
As Ben neared her seventieth birthday, her life was once again consumed with the welfare of her children. ‘Arthur is the great problem,’ she wrote to Nettie, soon after Maggie had been removed to The Priory. For the two years following his first spell in the Mayfair nursing home (where he had stayed for three weeks), Arthur never entirely shook off his depression, and was at times gripped by a crippling despair. He tried hypnosis, foreign travel, further cures in nursing homes, was looked after by friends and spent a month in the care of a Hampstead doctor, as well as long periods at Tremans. At times he was suicidal, and he became convinced his condition was hereditary. There had been mad and depressive forebears on both sides of the family, and Arthur thought that he and Maggie both carried their father’s malady. It was a relief, he thought, that none of them had married, and that the Benson line was coming to an end. His illness drew him closer to Fred, whom he had always thought flighty and superficial, but who offered caring and stalwart support. At Tremans Ben gave him what comfort she could, though confided to Nettie a feeling of powerlessness, of not quite understanding the source of Arthur’s wretchedness or really knowing what to do about it.
FROM A. C. BENSON’S NOVEL BESIDE STILL WATERS
One night he went to bed late, and found it difficult to sleep; thoughts raced through his brain, scenes and images forming and reforming with inconceivable rapidity; at last he fell asleep, to awake an hour or two later in an intolerable agony of mind. His heart beat thick and fast, and a shapeless horror seemed to envelop him. He struck a light and tried to read, but a ghastly and poisonous fear of he knew not what seemed to clutch at his mind. At last he fell into a broken sleep; but when he rose in the morning, he knew that some mysterious evil had befallen him. . . For that day and for many days he wrestled with a fierce blackness of depression. . .
Gradually, through the first months of 1909, Maggie began to show some signs of improvement. She was able to dress herself, she stopped refusing food, and for the first time joined other patients in the communal drawing room. The nurse’s notes to Ben, which had once lamented that ‘Miss Benson takes so little interest in anything that it is very difficult to fix on anything that would give her pleasure’, began to report walks in the garden, short carriage drives and even the occasional game of croquet. Ben sent her a canary, as Maggie had always loved animals, and though Maggie at first said ‘nothing thrives here well’, she started taking an interest in it, as well as caring for some plants Nettie had sent. In March, Ben wrote exultantly to Nettie: ‘O NETTIE, YOU are the First Person to whom she has sent a message’ – a verbal one, via
Dr Todd, thanking Nettie for the plants, sending her love and regrets for the harm she had done. A letter to Nettie followed a few weeks later. Maggie requested visits from Hugh and Fred (who went weekly when he was in London), but still not from her mother. In August, Ben was at last permitted to visit. Maggie was polite, gave Ben her own chair because it was higher, picked up Ben’s walking stick when it fell, offered to pour the tea when she saw that Ben’s arm was rheumatic – but she still seemed confused, concentrated on little of what Ben said to her, and at times reverted to her old accusations. There was an unfortunate incident when Ben rose to go, and Maggie wanted to come away too – a scene re-enacted on subsequent visits, on one occasion Maggie wrenching at Ben’s heart as she came right up to the final communication door, crying ‘Mother!’’
MAGGIE BENSON INDICATES WHOM SHE WISHES TO SEE
Once, Maggie had to be assured that Ben was ‘the Real one’; she also (after imagined sightings) asked to see ‘the Real Miss Gourlay’. On 15 January 1910 Maggie wrote Nettie a touching letter beginning, ‘My dearest, I don’t forget that to-morrow was the day on which I first saw you. We had some happy times after that, at least I thought them happy,’ but it was not until March – and then only after many pleas by Ben to Dr Chambers – that Nettie was allowed to visit. Ben might have considered Nettie to be one of the family, but to the doctors she was merely a friend.
In 1911, Beth died, in her ninety-fourth year, after being bedridden for some months following a stroke. Beth had been with the family for seventy-seven years. She had nursed little Minnie, been her girlhood confidante, a comfort to the frightened young Mary Benson in the first years of her marriage, and nurse in turn to each of her six children. In her final months, as Beth lay in her room, Ben would make her own stiff-jointed ascent to the top of the house to comfort her, read to her and reminisce. Beth had given her the unstinting love of a mother. Yet, as ever, Arthur noted, there was ‘neither bitterness nor dumb endurance’ about Ben’s grief. ‘The silence, the gap brought my mother neither horror nor dismay. She did not love anyone less nor think of them as less alive, because they had quitted the earthly scene. Life might be shifted, but love could not be broken.’ Fred cherished Beth’s ‘utterly beautiful life of love and service’; Arthur, who had generally strangled love at birth, said that ‘the love I had and have for her is almost the deepest emotion of my life’. To the end, Beth adored Hugh. When he returned from the disastrous Egyptian trip following his father’s death, Beth (who had been sent to Yorkshire) made the long journey to London to meet him at the railway station. She brought a little gift of a packet of cakes, an orange and a book – as she used to do when he took the train to school. Hugh was with a friend. He laughed gaily, pecked her on the cheek and was gone within minutes, dropping the gift into a rubbish bin.
BETH, AGED SEVENTY-EIGHT
All except Maggie came to Beth’s funeral, at the village church in Horsted Keynes. Maggie was suffering frequent relapses, with recurrences of delusions and bouts of violence. Her treatment of Ben on some visits was so vile that Ben stayed away for long stretches at a time. At one point Maggie thought Fred was dead, that he had been accused of killing her; she told Arthur (who, still concerned for his own health, had stayed away, and was only persuaded to visit her again well into 1910) that she was afraid to use some stationery he had brought as a gift, as doing so courted disaster – a chimney at The Priory might fall down; somehow she was convinced that taking out the envelopes might have the impact of pulling out bricks. Eventually, the family decided that Maggie would benefit more from being in private care, and in October 1913 she was moved as a paying guest to the home of a Dr and Mrs Barton, in Wimbledon. At £800 a year, this arrangement was considerably more expensive than The Priory. Once again, Arthur and Fred contributed sums commensurate with their literary earnings (£225 and £175 respectively), Ben and Lucy said that together they could find £300 (though Arthur suspected they could afford more), and Hugh was unco-operative, saying that Maggie should stay where she was.
Hugh had established a small community at Hare Street House in Buntingford, an odd ménage comprising a dangerous and gossiping Mrs Lindsey, who was clearly in love with him, her little son Ken, with whom Hugh was besotted, a strange Dr Sessions, who had given up his practice to concentrate on an interest in demonic possession, and an old, silent priest who suffered from melancholia. Arthur felt profoundly uncomfortable there, and avoided visiting. The house was filled with cast-off furnishings from Tremans, and together with one Gabriel Pippet and other nimble-fingered brethren, Hugh had snipped and stitched wall-hangings of coloured figures sewn on to brown canvas, including a disquieting Dance of Death (which hung in the room where visiting Anglicans stayed, as a gruesome reminder of their fate). The latest vituperative postcard from Frederick Rolfe might be propped on the chimney-piece. In the midst of all this flitted Hugh, ‘in flannels of inconceivable shabbiness and such shoes as a tramp discards by the wayside’, his only luxury being ‘a prodigious consumption of the cheapest cigarettes he could find’ – infuriating, but insuppressible, with his air of: ‘Oh, isn’t it fun?’
‘Life pumps along,’ Ben wrote to Hugh. She continued to confide her religious meditations to him, but delighted most in Fred’s company – although he was spending long periods in Capri, where he had taken a villa, and in 1913 visited India, to stay with the latest (and most enduring) of his attractive young friends, Francis Yeats-Brown. After months of ill-health there, Fred returned to England, where he consulted a faith healer (with Ben’s approval, though to the horror of the rest of the family), but eventually had to be operated on to have a kidney removed. Fred recovered well. Arthur – after a momentary relapse into depression that lasted the course of Fred’s operation and kept him from visiting – was in good spirits once more, and was standing in for the Master of Magdalene, who was away under doctor’s orders. In Wimbledon, Maggie’s condition had slightly improved – though on one of Arthur’s visits she lay on her back in the grass after a walk, and refused to return to the house, and he feared she might be carrying a knife. She was allowed on short excursions to London with a nurse, and once came to an awkward tea with Ben and Lucy, who were staying at Lambeth Palace. Arthur came down for the day from Cambridge. Maggie spoke bitterly about motherly love, removed a necklace Ben had given her and tried to hand it back, leaving it lying on a table when Ben refused to take it and lapsing into sullen silence. Hoping to avoid an unpleasant scene in front of the Davidsons, Ben asked Arthur to take Maggie away. Passively, Maggie allowed the necklace to be put back on, but as she parted company with Arthur, said: ‘Well, when Mama has manoeuvred us all into our graves, perhaps she will be content.’
One day in the spring of 1914, instead of taking her afternoon rest, Maggie calmly left the Bartons’ house in Wimbledon, boarded a train to Victoria Station and took another to Horsted Keynes. She walked the mile or so to Tremans, greeting a servant she encountered with ‘I have come home, Mary’. The sight of Maggie’s drawn, wizened face suddenly appearing at the drawing-room window shocked a shy young friend of Arthur’s, Geoffrey Madan, who had just arrived on his first visit. Maggie insisted on going around the house. On the old ottoman in Ben’s sitting room she found a whip.
‘What’s this?’ Maggie demanded.
Ben told her it was the whip Joey the parrot liked to bite.
‘It’s the whip I used on myself,’ said Maggie. ‘Did you put it out on purpose?’
She flung accusations at Ben, who tried to talk her down quietly. When Dr Barton arrived with a nurse to take her away, Maggie screamed abuse, flew into a rage, and begged to stay, but was manhandled into a cab, and returned to Wimbledon. Arthur was much shaken by the incident. What made matters worse, it seemed to Arthur, was that Maggie’s intellect was as sharp as ever, ‘but the emotions. . . all atrophied or perverted’.
A few weeks later, Fred left for Capri, for a long stay at the Villa Cercola, the house he had leased jointly with Somerset Maugham (thoug
h the two never stayed there at the same time), and which was occupied year-round by their flamboyant – Arthur thought distasteful – friend, John Ellingham Brooks. One resplendent day at the end of June, after an early breakfast in the shade of the pergola, Fred walked out of the gate, past the garden wall draped with passion-flower and morning glory, and down the stone path to Bagno Timberino, where he spent the morning alternately swimming and basking in the sun. On the way home, he stopped at the post office to pick up mail and the Italian papers, which came over on the noon steamer from Naples. Back at the villa, Brooks skimmed the papers over lunch.
‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘an Archduke was assassinated yesterday. Franz Ferdinand?’
‘What an awful thing,’ responded Fred. ‘Who is he? And where did it happen?’
‘He’s the Emperor of Austria’s heir,’ said Brooks. ‘He was attending manoeuvres at Sarajevo.’
‘Never heard of it. . . I want to go up Monte Solaro after tea. Do come. Those tawny lilies should be in flower.’
‘Too hot,’ said Brooks. ‘Besides, I must water the garden.’
After siesta, Brooks took down The Times Atlas, out of curiosity, to ascertain where Sarajevo was. He told Fred it was the capital of Bosnia, which left Fred little the wiser. The two did not allude to the incident again. Fred travelled back to England, as he had intended, a fortnight later and was mildly surprised by talk of the Serbian Government’s complicity in the Archduke’s assassination, of Austro-Hungarian anger and German aggression, of the tugs of treaties with Britain’s allies. He was at a country-house party on 4 August, when a telegram arrived from a well-connected friend of the host with the news that the Prime Minister was addressing the House of Commons that morning, that an ultimatum sent to Germany had been ignored, and that the country was at war.
