Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “You know I want to be cured,” he said.

  Cochrane made a little sign to Maud, who left the room, leaving the two men alone.

  “Yes, I know you do,” he said gently, “and you’re going to be cured. But you can help or hinder. All breakfast, you know, you’ve been hindering. ’Tis such a pity. You’ve been asking questions, which I love to be asked, and love answering too, when I can answer them, not because you wanted to know, but because you wanted to catch me out. Why, of course, you can catch me out, because often and often I am bound by error and claims of mortal mind. Also, I don’t know absolutely everything — I don’t indeed. But when you want to catch me out like that, it means you are adopting a hostile attitude to me and to that which I hope to bring you. That hinders me. It isn’t fair.”

  Cochrane shook his head at him, like some nice boy remonstrating kindly with a friend whom he likes for not “playing the game.” Then he went on more seriously.

  “Now, what’s the trouble?” he said. “Why are you hostile? Is it just because Infinite Love came to your help last night, and sent you to sleep, instead of letting you drink that poisonous stuff? I guess it’s that. But to think or suggest that I hypnotised you or drugged you is childish. To doubt that it all happened in any other way than the way it did is error on your part. Why not accept a perfectly simple explanation. Can you seriously offer any other? How often before, when you’ve been wanting the stuff badly, and have known you would get it in an hour, have you dropped off to sleep instead? Why, never. And what is the first occasion of it happening? When I was treating you, bringing you into the presence of Divine Love — not suggesting things either to Him or you, but just leaving you together. I treated you for some four hours last night, beginning soon after dinner.”

  “But it’s all impos — —” began Thurso. “I don’t understand it, anyhow.”

  “That’s a different matter,” said Cochrane.

  “But explain. If you’ve brought me there, is it all over? Am I cured?”

  “No; because you have made a habit of error, and that habit has to be broken. You’ve got to form a new habit of non-error. You will have to put yourself in the hands of Love often and often before you get rid of this. At least, I expect that, though we can’t tell in what manner He will choose to heal you. But I expect that: from what we know a habit takes longer to cure than an occasional lapse. It is hard to forget a thing we have got by heart. And we’ve got to ask, to keep on asking.”

  Again the hostile attitude was smothered, and interest took its place.

  “But why?” asked Thurso. “Why, if error is all a mistake, without real existence, does it bind us? How can it?”

  “Gracious! I can’t tell you,” said Cochrane. “But there’s no doubt it is so.”

  “And you can heal people who don’t believe?” he asked.

  “Why not? But a man who didn’t believe couldn’t heal. And by the time the cure is complete, as far as I know, the patient nearly always believes.”

  Thurso was asking questions now in a different spirit to that which had prompted them before. He knew the difference himself.

  “You spoke of laudanum as poisonous stuff just now,” he said. “But if God made everything, including poppies, how can it be poisonous?”

  Cochrane laughed.

  “Well, we had better ask Lady Maud to come back,” he said. “It was about that very point that I was going to talk to her to-day. Now, if you care to listen to that, since you have asked the question, pray do. But if it bores you, why, if you’ll read the paper or occupy yourself for half an hour, we can then all start out skating, or what you please.”

  “But aren’t you going to treat me?” asked Thurso.

  “Oh, I was at it this morning for some time,” he said. “I’ve paid you the morning visit, so to speak.”

  Then again some spirit of antagonism entered into Thurso, and when Maud came back he crossed over to the fire with the paper. But the news was of no importance or interest, since it chiefly concerned American affairs, which meant nothing to him, and by degrees he found himself attending less to the printed page and more to the voice that sounded so cheerful and serene. Sometimes he found himself mentally ridiculing what was said, but yet he listened. It was arresting, somehow, and whether it was only the personality of the speaker that arrested him, or what he said, he found himself, whether approving or disapproving, more and more absorbed in it.

  Cochrane spoke first, as he said he was going to do, about the apparently poisonous or sanative effects of drugs. These effects, he maintained, were not inherent in the drugs themselves, but in the belief of those who used them. It was quite certain, for instance, from the purely medical point of view, that an injection of plain water could be made, and that the patient, believing it to be morphia, would sleep under the influence of what had no influence at all. He slept because he believed he had been given something which would make him sleep. But, from the Christian Science point of view, to use drugs for curative purposes was merely to encourage the false belief that they could in themselves cure, while, on the other hand, anyone who knew and fully believed that they could neither be health-giving nor destructive of health might, if he chose, eat deadly poison, and be none the worse for it. But no one who held this belief would do so merely as a demonstration to satisfy the idle curiosity of those who did not believe.

  Up till now he had been speaking quietly, as if all that was mere commonplace and superficial. But now intenser conviction vibrated in his voice.

  “All this,” he said, “though, of course, it is perfectly true, is only a detail, a little inference that follows from the real and vital proposition. How error originally came in I don’t pretend to say. What we have got to deal with to-day is that error is here in embarrassing quantities, and that one of the commonest forms of it is to attribute real existence — real, that is to say, in comparison with the reality of Love — to material things. What is truly worth our concern is not to know what does not exist, but to know what does. And one thing only exists, and that is God, in all His manifestations. Originally, as we all know, He made the world, and pronounced what He made to be good; but that seems to have been before error entered. But the Infinite Mind, which is Divine Love, is all that has any real being. And as light, pure white light, can be split up, so that different beams of it appear as of all the colours of the rainbow, so that when you say, “This is blue, this is red,” you are only speaking of aspects of light, so when you say, “This is unselfish, this is courageous, this is pure,” you are only speaking of one of the colours of God. It is good that we should contemplate any one of these, for each of them is lovely; but we must continually be fusing them all together in our thought, so that they are mingled and made one again. And when that is done, when by the power of the little we know of the Infinite Mind we bring together all we can conceive of love and purity and unselfishness, then it is God we are contemplating. And whenever we contemplate Him like that, there is no existence possible for sin or error or imperfection. They pass into nothingness, not because we will them to do so, or make any longer an assertion of their nothingness, but because their existence is inconceivable.”

  Thurso had dropped his paper, and was listening, still with occasional antagonism and mental ridicule, but with interest; it was not so dull as the paper. Besides, what if it was true? Then, indeed, his antagonism would be that of some feeble soft-bodied moth fluttering against an express train, and thinking to stop it. And there was something serenely authoritative about these words. It was not as when scribes and Pharisees spoke.

  Somehow, also — it was impossible not to feel this — there was the same authority not only in Cochrane’s words, but in his life. The things which he said were borne out by what he did, and it seemed as if it was not his temperament that inspired his words, but the belief on which his words were based that produced a completely happy temperament. Big troubles, big anxieties, he had said, never came near him, but, what to Maud was as remark
able, it appeared that the little frets and inconveniences which she would have said were inseparable from the ordinary life of every day were unable to touch or settle on him. Round him there seemed to be some atmosphere, as of high mountain places, in which the bacilli of worry and anxiety could not live; nothing could fleck or dim the happiness of those childlike eyes. A child’s faith, as she had recognised last summer, shone there, and it was supported and proved by the knowledge and experience of a man. Like all faith, it was instinctive, but every hour of his life endorsed the truth of his instinct.

  And if either Thurso or Maud could have guessed how passionate and furious was the struggle going on within him, during this first day or two, between the desire of his human love and the absolutely convinced knowledge that he had no right to use this intimacy into which he was thrown with Maud by the call to cure her brother for his own ends, they would have said that a miracle was going on before their eyes. The tempest of desire, the storm of his longing for her, and, more potent than either, the knowledge that he loved her with all the best that was in him, continually beat upon him; but the abiding-place of his soul was absolutely unmoved by the surrounding tumult, and not for a moment was his essential serenity troubled.

  It was the third day after his arrival at the house in Long Island, and he and Maud were sitting together by the fire before evening closed in. The weather this morning had suddenly broken, and instead of the windless, sunny frost a south-easterly gale from the sea had set chimneys smoking and ice melting, and drove torrents of volleying rain against the windows of the shuddering house. Maud at this moment was wiping her eyes, which the pungency of the wood-smoke had caused to overflow.

  “You were quite right,” she said, “when you warned me not to have the fire lit in this easterly room. And what makes it more annoying is that you don’t weep also. Is that Christian Science or strong eyes? Perhaps they are the same thing. But I think we had better move into the other room. I can’t stand it.”

  The other room was the billiard-room, in which they did not often sit. It was free from smoke, however, and the fire prospered. Thurso had gone upstairs half an hour ago to write letters, and had not yet come back.

  “He is so much better,” she said, as she settled herself into a comfortable chair. “His recovery has been quite steady, too. Do you any longer fear a relapse?”

  “Oh, I never feared it,” he said, “in the sense that I ever imagined it would baffle me. How could it? Nothing can possibly interfere with truth. But sometimes — sometimes when error has gone very deep, and has been allowed to rest there, you tap a sort of fresh reservoir of it just when you think you are getting to the end of it. In one sense, I suppose, I have feared that. It may not happen, I have no reason to believe that it will, but I have seen very sudden attacks and onslaughts of the most violent kind, even when one thought the cure was practically complete.”

  “But surely he has made marvellous progress,” said Maud. “Think; it is only four days since you began to treat him.”

  “Yes; no one progress is more marvellous than any other, since all progress is right, but it has been very smooth sailing so far. And — I don’t care whether I am being heretical or not, but I think I am — conditions have been very favourable. Weather, climate, all external influences, have a great effect. They have no real power to help or hinder, but when a soul is bound by a material habit material conditions do come in. It is no use to say otherwise. The depression caused by a wet, windy day, such as to-day, is certainly a false claim, but it goes and hobnobs with other false claims, and they sit round the fire and talk.... But, take it as a whole, those who believe are less affected by such things than those who do not. Mental worry is less felt by the Scientist, because he knows it does not really exist. So he will discount the depressing influences of weather; he won’t so much mind a windy or an oppressive day.”

  “And doesn’t weather ever upset you?” asked Maud.

  He laughed.

  “Oh dear, yes,” he said. “I’ve been having false claims all over me all day, like — like a shower-bath, and all day I’ve been reversing them till I’m dizzy.”

  “You have looked serene enough,” she said. “I shouldn’t have guessed it.”

  “Well, I hope not, since it is by the serenity that comes from complete conviction of the one Omnipotence that you fight them. If you abandon that, what are you to fight them with?”

  He looked at her, smiling; but then his smile faded, for he felt for a moment that, in spite of himself, his love must betray itself by word or gesture. And surely there was some answering struggle going on in her, or was it only sympathy, only gratitude for what he had done, that made that beacon in her eyes? Whatever it was she had it in control also.

  “Won’t you tell me of them?” she asked. “Sometimes telling a thing, the very putting of it into definite words, shows us how shadowy and indefinite it really is. I — I don’t ask from inquisitiveness.”

  “I am sure of that,” he said, “but the thing that has been worrying me most to-day is — at present — absolutely a private affair. Then there is another — I have been letting myself be anxious about your brother, and that is very bad for him as well as me. When I was treating him this morning all sorts of doubts kept coming into my mind. Half the time I was fighting them, instead of giving myself entirely to him.”

  “Ah, but you never really doubted,” she said. “I am sure that you denied them.”

  “Yes, but I was feeble. I was a muddy, choked channel for the flowing of Divine Love. And I am now. I have to be continually dusting and cleansing myself. I have been having fears.”

  “Specific ones? Fear of some definite event?”

  “Yes; I’m afraid I have gone as far as that. I have had fears of some violent access of error coming upon him, and I have no reason for fearing. Because if it did occur I should know quite well what to do. There couldn’t be anything to fear really. I guess he’s been getting well so quickly and smoothly that I have allowed myself to wonder whether it could be true, though, of course, I knew it was. But that’s so like feeble mortal mind! The very fact that our needs are answered so abundantly and immediately makes us wonder if it is real!”

  Maud got up.

  “What would you do if he had a relapse?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t say now, and I certainly mustn’t allow myself to contemplate it. But if it came, it would surely be made quite clear to me how to demonstrate over it. We are never left in the lurch like that; it’s only the devil who plays his disciples false, and lets them have fits of remorse just when they want to amuse themselves.”

  The flames on the hearth leaped up or died down in response to the great blasts outside which squalled and trumpeted over the house, or paused as if to listen in glee to the riot that they caused. The wind was like a wild creature that, with frightened hands, rattled at the fastenings of the windows as if seeking admittance, till a tattoo of sleet silenced it or drove it away. Then a low, long-drawn whistle of alto note would sound in the chimney, and suddenly rise siren-like to a screech of demoniacal fury, or, like a passage for drums, the rattle of the leafless branches of the tortured trees mixed with the sound of the surf a mile away seemed to portend some deadly disaster. All hell seemed loose in this infernal din of the elements.

  Bertie Cochrane drew his chair close to the fire with a little shudder of goose-flesh.

  “I was awfully frightened by a storm once when I was a little chap,” he said, “and it has left a sort of scar on my mind which is still tender. I always have to demonstrate to myself when there’s a gale like this; I don’t seem to be able to get used to them. My father died in the middle of that awful storm ten years ago, too. What a confession of feebleness, isn’t it? But I don’t think you would have guessed how I hated storms if I hadn’t told you.”

  “No, I don’t think I should,” she said. “But I am so sorry. I am just the opposite. There is nothing I love so much as a gale like this — a maniac. There, listen to
that!”

  An appalling blast swept by the house, full of shrieks and cries, as if the souls of the lost were being driven along in the pitiless storm, and it seemed as if some window must have burst open, or some door communicating with the night and the tempest have come unlatched, for the thick double curtain which served instead of door between the billiard-room where they sat and the hall outside was lifted a clear foot from the ground, and a flood of cold air, strong as a wind, poured in, making the candles flicker and stream, and stirring the carpet as if a ground swell had passed beneath it. Cochrane jumped up.

  “Something must be open,” he said. “The wind has come right into the house.”

  Maud got up with him, but before he had pulled the curtain aside for her to pass, the strange wind ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the heavy folds fell to the ground again. But by the front-door, with the latch still in his hand, stood Thurso. The rain dripped from his coat; he was deluged, a waterspout. And Maud’s heart sank when she saw him.

  “Why, Thurso,” she said, “what have you been doing? Have you been out in this gale? I thought you were upstairs writing letters.”

  He looked from one to the other as he took off his dripping overcoat, and spoke in a voice that both knew, a stammering, stuttering voice.

  “I — I finished my letters,” he said, “and then I went out to — to post them — yes, post them. You couldn’t expect a servant to go out in this. Not — not reasonable. And besides, I — I had not been out all day. I — I wanted a breath of fresh air. Sir James told me to be out as much as I could. How did you hear me come in? I thought you were in the drawing-room.”

  Maud’s heart sank — sank.

  “We were in the billiard-room,” she said.

  She looked at Cochrane. All thought of the gale, all trouble of nerves, and whatever else it was that had been obsessing him all day, had passed from him. His eyes were vivid and alight; his face alert again, and full of that huge vitality that was so characteristic of it.