Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “I suppose I’m pretty bad,” he observed.

  “I should just think you were. Why, you are all wrapped up in error! Have you ever unwound a rubber-covered golf ball? There are yards and yards of india-rubber string, and you think it’s going on for ever. But at the centre there is a core. And there is a core in you too. But we’ve got to unwind the error in order to get at it.”

  Thurso got up; he was feeling every moment more fidgety and impatient. He was beginning to want the drug most terribly; his craving was growing with mushroom-like rapidity. Yet while Cochrane was there he felt that his will to get well, his desire to be free, was keen also. And that gave him an impulse of honesty.

  “I tell you this, too,” he said: “I’m longing for the drug most frightfully now. Ah, help me!” he cried in a sudden wail of appeal, “for I know what I shall do when you are gone.”

  “Yes, tell me that,” said Cochrane; and the wail of the voice told him that true impulse still existed, whatever Thurso’s own forecast was.

  “Well, I shall go and see where Maud is,” he said, “and if she is downstairs I shall tell her that I am going to my room to sleep till it is time to dress, so that I can get away by myself. She trusts me, I think, even after all that has happened. Good heavens! why am I telling you this?” he said suddenly. “You will tell her now, damn you! and spoil it all.”

  Cochrane interrupted quietly.

  “Your damning me doesn’t hurt,” he said, “and I solemnly promise you not to give your plan away. There’s no chemist very near, I’m afraid, but there’s one in Port Washington; we passed the place this afternoon.”

  “Ah, you’ve warned him,” said Thurso.

  “I have done nothing of the kind, nor shall I. Pray get on.”

  The pleasure that the diseased imagination took in the projection of its plans was suggestive of the joy of their realisation. Thurso gulped as he spoke.

  “I take it, then, that you won’t interfere,” he said. “Well, I shall go to my room and forge — yes, forge a prescription. I’m getting a rare hand at that.”

  He gave a little cackle of delight; the impulse that a couple of minutes ago had prompted the cry for help was half smothered, and he was conscious of one need only. He pointed a warning finger at Cochrane.

  “It’s understood that you do nothing to hinder me,” he said, “nothing tangible, practical, though you can treat me — don’t you call it? — till all’s blue. Then I shall send to the stable, and tell a man and horse to go down to the chemist’s, wait for the prescription to be made up, and bring it back. Lord Thurso, you know! Republicans think a lot of a lord, and they’ll hurry, because they’ve got a fine specimen of one now. And I shall sit gnawing my nails till that bottle comes back. Then — two hours’ Paradise before dinner. God! I wonder the whole world doesn’t take to laudanum. Paradise made up while you wait. Cheap, too.”

  “Remarkably cheap,” said Cochrane.

  “Ah, you are laughing at me. But you don’t know, you can’t guess — —”

  Thurso came close up to him and pressed his arm. The latent hostility was all gone; here was a friend who should be told what he was missing. So easy was it to get out of hell into purgatory, and through purgatory past the unbarred gates of a Paradise of rose and gold. No flaming-sworded angel was there; a glass and a bottle were the pass-word for admittance. You had but to draw a stopper, chink a glass, and drink, and the whole world was changed. The thought invaded and encompassed him. He could think of nothing but that.

  “Suppose you try it one night,” he said to Cochrane, “when you are staying down here, as you will be to-morrow? You just see; there’s no need for any healing any more — the thing is health and life. I say, wouldn’t it be funny if, after I had come over here to be cured by you, I succeeded in pulling you after me. Just try some night.”

  Bertie Cochrane nodded at him.

  “Well, it may come to that,” he said; “there’s nothing which you can say is impossible.”

  Thurso laughed again.

  “Maud too, perhaps,” he said. “What a good time we might have: ‘up to heaven all three,’ as it says in that poem by — by — I never can remember names now!”

  Cochrane could barely restrain a little shudder of disgust at this, but he checked it.

  “Well, you’re making an excellent start,” he said, “because you’re telling me all your plans for the future, just as you have told me all the history of the past. And as for the present, I can figure that up pretty correctly now. Now, do you know what you’ve been doing for this last ten minutes? You’ve been almost forcing yourself to do what you say you are going to do by imagining it. Every action begins in the brain. But just before that another action began. You said, ‘Ah, help me!’ Do you remember that?”

  “Yes, but it’s useless,” said Thurso. “You see for yourself.”

  “It isn’t useless. I never spend my time over useless things. When you said that your will was on the right side. And even now when you are half-crazy for that drink, aren’t you ashamed to think of what you have just suggested — that Lady Maud, your sister, should be dragged down with you? Aren’t you ashamed? You have been very candid; I want your candid opinion on that.”

  Thurso frowned.

  “I didn’t say that; I’m sure I didn’t say that.”

  “But indeed you did. Now come back on the right side again. You’ve been suggesting things to yourself, and imagining them with remarkable vividness. So now, to make it fair, plan another evening for yourself. Come, what would be pleasant? Don’t make a long evening of it; I want you to go to bed before eleven.”

  “Why?” asked Thurso.

  “Just because it’s a sensible hour. I shall be treating you by then.”

  “But Maud tried to treat me once on the steamer,” said he, “and the effect was that I couldn’t get to sleep at all. I thought she was in the room.”

  For the moment, anyhow, the edge of his desire was dulled. There was something that compelled attention in this big, strong young man, who was so cheerful and quiet, who looked so superlatively well, and seemed to diffuse sanity and health.

  “Why, that was real good of Lady Maud, wasn’t it?” he said, “and that feeling of yours that she was in the room was very likely to happen. I’ll tell you why: like everything else in science, it is so simple. The healer ought quite to sink himself; he shouldn’t be conscious of himself at all. He mustn’t think that he is controlling the working of the power of Divine Love. But that unconsciousness of self only comes with practice. At first the healer finds that his personality obtrudes itself.”

  Quite unconsciously Thurso began to be more interested; consciously he knew that he did not want the drug just this moment as devouringly as he had thought. The simplicity of what Cochrane was saying struck him also; it was so exceedingly unlike the torrential inconsequence of Alice Yardly.

  “Then why can’t you heal me instantly?” he said. “If error cannot exist in the presence of Divine Love, how is it that time is required for its destruction?”

  Cochrane laughed.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said; “but, then, I do not profess to be able to explain everything. Sometimes healing is really instantaneous, sometimes it takes time. But if you ask me why, I confess I can’t tell you. It is so, though.”

  He got up.

  “Now I must go,” he said, “for though there’s no such thing as time really, it is still possible to miss a train. Now keep on making other pictures of this evening to yourself, and say you will go to bed at eleven.”

  Thurso lay back in his big chair after Cochrane had gone, conscious that something else besides laudanum had begun to interest him a little. He felt no leaning or tendency whatever towards Christian Science, and he wanted to find some weak spot in the central theory, some fatal inconsistency, which must invalidate it altogether. There must be one even in the little he had heard about it. At this moment Maud came in.

  “I’ve had a long
talk to Cochrane,” he said, “and he left only ten minutes ago. Maud, give me a Christian Science book; I’m going to prove that it’s all wrong.”

  She laughed.

  “Do, dear; it is the business of everybody to expose error. Shall I read it to you?”

  “Yes, if you will.”

  Then suddenly his craving began to return, sharpening itself instantaneously to hideous acuteness. His mind was like some light vehicle, from which the driver had been spilled, being galloped away with by the bolting, furious horses of habit. Never before had the stroke fallen upon him with such suddenness. “A fine first-fruit of the value of Christian Science,” he said to himself. Yet though its onslaught made him almost dizzy, he retained his presence of mind and the cunning which seemed to have been developed in him since he took to the drug. He mastered his voice completely; he mastered also that watering of the mouth and the automatic swallowing movement of his throat.

  “Or shall we read after dinner?” he said. “That sleigh-drive made me so sleepy. I think I should drop asleep at once if you began to read.”

  Maud looked at him for a moment with a pity that was instinctive; she could not help it. Then she laughed again.

  “Oh, Thurso, how transparent!” she said. “You want to go to your bedroom and forge — yes, forge the prescription which you forged with such brilliant success on the steamer, and send it down to the village to get your horrid bottle. It’s all very well to forge once or twice, but you really mustn’t get in the habit of it; it grows on one dreadfully, I am told.”

  He came towards her white and shaking.

  “That quack Cochrane has been talking to you, has he,” he said. “He promised not to interfere.”

  “He hasn’t interfered. You are perfectly free to do what you like. And he is not proved to be a quack yet.”

  He laid his hand on her arm.

  “Maud, just this once,” he said— “do let me have it this once. It shall be the last time. You see, the treatment will soon put me right now.”

  “Why do you want my leave?” said she.

  “I don’t know. It would make me more comfortable; I should enjoy it more.”

  “Well, I propose a slightly different plan,” she said. “I promise you that I will go and get it for you myself at twelve o’clock to-night if you still really want it. Hold on for six hours — five hours — and then, if you ask me, I will take down the forged prescription myself. Only in the interval you must do your best — your best, mind, not to think about it. And you must go to bed at eleven. That’s not much to ask, is it?”

  He weighed this in his mind, and soon decided, for there was something rapturous in the waiting, provided he knew he would soon get it.

  “Yes, of course I’ll wait,” he said, “though I can’t guess what your point is. You really promise it me at twelve? And you won’t tell Cochrane?” he added, with a little spurt of glee, thinking that for some inexplicable reason Maud was going to help him.

  “Oh no, I won’t tell him; you probably will. Now, if the sleepiness of the sleigh-drive has gone off, I will read to you. It will help to pass the hours till twelve.”

  It had required all Maud’s faith to get through with this, but she had understood and agreed with what Mr. Cochrane had said before he left. He wanted, above all things, that Thurso should make an effort of abstention, though it was only for a few hours, of his own accord, and believed that at present he could hardly do so unless he was bribed, so to speak. He had, in fact, suggested this plan.

  “And if he wants it at twelve?” she asked.

  “Keep your promise. But he won’t. He can’t.”

  All this Thurso thought over as he lay in bed next morning watching his valet put out his clothes. He had gone to bed, as he had promised, before eleven, hugging to himself the thought that midnight was coming closer every minute. And then he had simply fallen asleep, and when he woke the pale winter sunlight was flooding the room.

  Yet, mixed with the exhilaration of this cold, bracing air, the memory of the pleasant day before, the sense of recuperation after his excellent night, there came the feeling as he got up and dressed, turning over these events in his head, that he had been tricked. He had no idea how the trick was done, or how it was that he could have gone to sleep when, if he had but kept awake so short a time, he would have enjoyed, and that with no sense of concealment or surreptitious dealing, the one sensation that turned life into paradise. Certainly it had been extremely neatly done. As a conjurer, Cochrane’s sleight of mind, so to speak, was of the most finished sort, for, as has been said, Thurso had had no sense of his presence or intimation of his influence. Cochrane, however, would be here to-day, and perhaps he would explain. But the feeling of having been tricked somehow piqued him, and the pique was not lessened by the fact that he could not guess how the trick was done. Of course, it must have been suggestion or hypnotism in some form; but the odd thing was that neither Maud nor Cochrane had suggested to him at all that he should go to sleep. He had gone to sleep by accident without intending to do anything of the sort, and without any feeling that others were intending it for him.

  While he was dressing he heard the sound of sleigh-bells, which probably betokened Cochrane’s arrival, and when he got downstairs he found him and Maud already breakfasting.

  Cochrane nodded to him.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Now Lady Maud will tell you that neither she nor I have spoken a word about you this morning. I know nothing of what has happened here since I left last night. I told her, by the way, just before I left, to promise to get your drink for you, if you wanted it, at twelve o’clock midnight. Now let’s hear what happened.”

  “I went to Thurso’s room at twelve and knocked,” said Maud. “There was no answer, so I went in. I called him several times, I even touched him, but he didn’t wake.”

  Cochrane laughed.

  “I call that pretty good,” he said.

  “Oh, this is childish!” broke in Thurso. “Maud, do you swear that that is true?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, you or Mr. Cochrane must have hypnotised me or drugged me,” he said.

  “I know less about hypnotism than I know of the inhabitants of Mars,” said Cochrane. “Or what do you think we drugged you with?”

  “Well, how did you do it, then?” he asked. “I congratulate you, anyhow. It was very neat.”

  “I didn’t do it. I had no idea, at least, whether you were asleep or awake at midnight. I only knew that Divine Love was looking after you.”

  Something rather like a sneer came into Thurso’s voice.

  “Did — ah! did Divine Love tell you so?” he asked.

  “Yes, most emphatically. He has promised to look after us all, you know, and do everything that is good for us. My word! you’ve never seen such a beauty of a morning outside. Cold, though.”

  Thurso was undeniably in a very bad humour by this time. He felt convinced in his own mind that there had been some hypnotic force or suggestive influence used on him last night; but when a man denies it, and simply attributes all that has happened to the working of Divine Love, you cannot contradict him. Maud, however, had read to him last night out of some Christian Science book, and he had found, he thought, a hundred inconsistencies in it. Cochrane’s last words, too, were utterly inconsistent, simple as they sounded.

  “How can you say it is cold,” he asked, “when your whole Gospel is rooted, so I understand, in the unreality of all such things — cold, heat, pain, and so on? Or did I misunderstand, do you think, what Maud read to me last night? I certainly gathered that neither cold nor heat had any real existence.”

  “No; but we think it has,” said Cochrane, with his mouth full.

  “Then, is it not what the Reverend Mrs. Eddy calls ‘voicing error’ to allude to the temperature of the morning?”

  Cochrane laughed, a great big genial laugh.

  “Oh, we don’t — at least, I don’t — make any claim to be beyond feeling cold o
r heat when there is no reason for not feeling it.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  Cochrane still looked amused and quite patient.

  “Well, if for any cause it was necessary that I, in healing you, should have to stand in a tub of ice-cold water, I don’t imagine it would affect me much. There would be a reason for my doing it. But in the ordinary way we say, ‘This is cold, this is hot.’ They don’t hurt. My time is taken up in denying things that do hurt.”

  “Though nothing hurts.”

  “False belief hurts, and its consequences.”

  Maud joined in. Thurso was being tiresome and irritable.

  “Dear Thurso, pass the marmalade, please. I have a false claim of wanting some, so don’t tell me there isn’t any. I propose to indulge my false claim. Oh, don’t be severe with us; it is such a pity, and spoils my pleasure.”

  “I was merely inquiring into these matters,” said Thurso rather acidly, for his mind still chafed at the trick, or so he called it, that had made him go to sleep last night.

  Maud’s false claim of wanting marmalade was soon satisfied, and she got up.

  “Now, Mr. Cochrane has promised to give me instruction for half an hour, Thurso,” she said, “and after that I vote we go out. There’s a lake, he says, not far off. We might skate.”

  “And what is to happen to me?” he asked. “Am I to have treatment or laudanum, or to be put to sleep again?”

  Bertie Cochrane looked up at him suddenly. For half a second he allowed himself to be stung, affronted, by Thurso’s tone. But he recovered immediately.

  “Now, honestly, which would you like best?” he asked.

  Then, though the moment was, as measured by time, an infinitesimal one, in eternity his soul had thrown itself at the foot of Infinite Love, reminding Him of His promise, like a child, calling Him to help.

  The acidity and sneering criticism suddenly died out of Thurso’s mind. His moods altered quickly enough and violently; it may have been that only.