Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  There was a great change in Francis since ten days ago; he had drifted far on the tide that was carrying him so peacefully away. He just recognized me, said a few words, and then dozed off again into the stupor in which he had lain all day. Through the morning of Good Friday also, and into the afternoon he lay unconscious. But now for the first time his sleep was troubled, and he kept stirring and muttering to himself, unintelligibly for the most part, though now and then there came a coherent sentence. Some inner consciousness, I think, was aware of what day this was, for once he said, “It was I, my Lord, who scourged Thee, and crowned Thee with the thorns of many sorrows.” During these hours the nurse and I remained at his bedside, for his breathing was difficult, and his pulse very feeble, and it was possible that at any moment the end might come. Pasqualino went softly about the garden barefooted, doing his weeding, and once or twice came to look at his Signorino. A cat dozed in the hot sunshine, the lizards scuttled about the pillars of the pergola, and in the stone-pine a linnet sang.

  But about three o’clock in the afternoon his breathing grew more quiet, his pulse grew stronger, and he slept an untroubled sleep for another hour. After that he awoke, and that evening and all Saturday morning he was completely conscious and brimming over with a serene happiness. Sometimes we talked, sometimes I read to him out of “Emma,” or “Alice in Wonderland,” and during the afternoon he asked me to read him the few verses in St John about Easter Eve.

  “Do come very early to-morrow morning,” he said, when this was done, “and read the next chapter, the Easter morning chapter.”

  I put down the Bible, still open, on his table.

  “Very well,” I said, “I’ll come at sunrise. But aren’t you tired now? You’ve been talking and listening all day.”

  “Yes; I’ll go to sleep for a bit. And won’t you go for a walk? You always get disagreeable towards evening if you’ve had no exercise.”

  “Where shall I go?” I asked.

  He thought a moment, smiling,

  “Go to the very top of Monte Gennaro,” he said, “to get the biggest view possible, and stand there and in a loud voice thank God for everything that there is. Say it for yourself and for me. Say ‘Francis and I give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory.’ That’s about all that there is to say, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t think of anything else.”

  “Off you go, then,” he said. “Oh, Lor’! I wish I was coming too. But I’ll go to sleep instead. Good-bye.”

  I woke very early next morning, before sunrise, with the impression that somebody had called to me from outside, and putting on a coat, I went out into the garden to see whether it was Francis’s voice that I heard. But he lay there fast asleep, and I supposed that the impression that I had been called was but part of a dream. Overhead the stars were beginning to burn dim in a luminous sky, and in the East the sober dove-colour of dawn was spreading upwards from the horizon, growing brighter every moment. Very soon now the sun would rise, and as I had promised to come out then and read Francis the chapter in St John about the Resurrection morning, it was not worth while going back to bed again.

  So waiting for him to awake, I took up the Bible, which still lay open on his table where I had laid it yesterday, with “Emma” and “Alice in Wonderland,” and as I waited I read to myself the verses that I should presently read aloud to him. Just as I began the first ray of the sun overtopped the steep hill-side to the East, and shone full on the page. It did not yet reach the bed where Francis lay asleep.

  “And when she had thus said, she turned herself and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.

  “Jesus saith unto her, ‘Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?’ She, supposing him to be the gardener....”

  At that moment I looked up, for I thought I heard footsteps coming towards me along the terrace, and it crossed my mind that this was Pasqualino arriving very early to help in the house and garden, though, as it was Sunday, I had not expected him. But there was no one visible; only at the entrance to the pergola, which was still in shadow, there seemed to be a faint column of light. I saw no more than that, and the impression was only vague and instantaneous, and perhaps the first sunray on the book had dazzled me....

  And then I looked there no more, for a stir of movement from the bed made me turn, and I saw Francis sitting up with his hands clasped together in front of him. And whether it was but the glory of the terrestrial dawn that now shone on his face or the day-spring of the light invisible, so holy a splendour illuminated it that I could but look in amazement on him. He was gazing with bright and eager eyes to the entrance of the pergola, and in that moment I knew that he saw there Him whom Mary supposed to be the gardener.

  Then his clasped hands quivered, and in a voice tremulous with love and with exultation:

  “Rabboni!” he said, and his joyful soul went forth to meet his Lord.

  Never have I felt the place so full of his dear and living presence as in the days that followed. It was so little of him that we laid in the English cemetery here, no more than the discarded envelope which he had done with, and the love of our comradeship seemed but to have been more closely knit. Day after day, and all day long, Francis was with me in an intensity of actual presence that never lost its security or its serenity. For a week I remained there, and hourly throughout it I expected to see him in bodily form or to hear the actual sound of his voice. But I am sure that no appearance of him, such as we call a ghost, or any hearing of his voice, could possibly have added to the reality of his companionship. What those laws are which sometimes permit us to be conscious with physical eye or ear of someone who has passed over that stream which daily seems to me more narrow, we do not certainly know; but never before did I realize how little the mere satisfaction of vision or audition matters, when the inward sense of the presence of the dead is so vivid. Nor was it I alone who felt this, for Seraphina has told me how often in those days she would hear the stir of a rattled door-handle or steps along the kitchen passage when she was at her cooking, and look round, expecting to see “her Signorino,” before she recollected that she would see him no more. It was the same with Pasqualino, and, oddly enough, though the islanders are full of superstitious terror of the dead, and avoid certain places as haunted and uncanny, neither she nor he felt the slightest fear at the thought of seeing Francis, but looked round for him with bright eager faces which disappointment clouded again.

  And for me he was always there: in that hot blink of premature summer he came down to bathe, and lay beside me on the beach; he swam with me to the rock of the cache; he sat with me at meals; one afternoon he came up to the top of Monte Gennaro, to pick the orchises of the spring and to say his Gloria for himself. There was no break at all in our companionship; indeed, it but seemed, as I have said, to have grown intenser and more vivid. And that which, when he lay dying, seemed quite impossible, namely, that I should come back to the island and the villa again now that I should not find him here, has become perfectly natural, since I shall most assuredly find him here. He will be with me in England, too, and wherever I may go during the period of my mortal days, I shall find him, not by any act of faith that the dead die not, nor by any theoretical conviction that his individuality survives, but from the plain experience that it is so.... And when the dimness and the dream of life vanish from my awakening vision, I know also that among the first who will give me welcome will be Francis, and his grey merry eyes will greet me....

  I arrived back to a cold and snowy England towards the end of the month, and as soon as I got home unlocked the drawer in which I had placed on a certain day last January the two “posthumous packets,” as Francis called them, which we had severally prepared. As the reader may remember, we had packed them to serve as a test concerning the possibility of spirit-communication, and in mine I had placed a “J” nib, a five-franc piece and some carbolic tooth-powder, and had written directions on it that it was to be sent to him to deal with in the event of my dying first. While I
was doing this upstairs, he was making ready his packet in the sitting-room, and on my return gave it me wrapped up and bound with string and sealed. There in its drawer it had lain till to-day, and the time was now come when the test could be put. The box in which he had disposed a certain object or objects unknown to me was some six inches long, and about the same across.

  I at once went to a friend who is much immersed in spiritualistic affairs, and asked him to arrange a sitting for me with some medium whom he believed to have power, and believed not to be fraudulent. (It did not really matter whether the medium was fraudulent or not, since no amount of trickery could discover the contents of that package.) I asked that my name should not be given, but that a sitting should be arranged on some appointed day. I begged him, finally, to come with me, so that between us we might get a fairly complete account of what occurred, and to be a witness. I may add that I was not at all sanguine as to anything occurring.

  Accordingly a few days afterwards Jack Barrett arrived, and together we drove off to the medium’s house. The packet that Francis had made still lay in the locked drawer of a black oak table, and I said no word to my friend either about Francis, whom he had known slightly, or about the packet.

  The procedure was of the kind common to trance-mediums. We sat in a small front-room of a rather dingy house in a dull respectable street. The room was partially darkened by the drawing of curtains over the window, but there was a bright fire burning on the hearth, and a lamp turned low was placed for my friend and me on a small round table, so that we could see sufficiently to write without difficulty. The medium herself was a pleasant-looking woman, about thirty years of age, with a slight cockney accent and a quiet level voice. Before the sitting began she made us an explanation of her powers, which I will give for what it is worth. Since she was a child she had often gone off into queer trances, which she could induce at will. When she awoke from them, she never knew more than that she had been having very vivid dreams, and talking to unknown people, but all recollection of what had passed instantly faded from her memory. Subsequently she married and had one child, a girl, who died at the age of ten. But, going into a trance a day or so after her death, the mother was aware when she awoke that she had been talking to her child. Thereafter she cultivated her gift, getting her husband or a friend to sit with her when she was in trance, and listen to and take down what she said. When in trance she spoke in Daisy’s voice, not in her own, and the dead child told her about its present state of existence. Daisy described other dead people whom she came across, and could transmit messages from them. Such was Mrs. Masters’s account of her gift.

  She asked me only one question, and that was whether I wanted to get into communication with a dead friend. I told her that this was so, and then quite suddenly found myself harbouring a strong distaste for all these proceedings. I should certainly have gone away and had no sitting at all, if I had not recollected my promise to Francis to go through with it. It seemed to me like taking some sacred thing into a place of ill-fame....

  All that follows is a compilation from our joint notes, and I have inserted nothing which did not appear in the notes or in the recollection of both of us.

  The medium sat close to me in a high chair opposite the fire, so that her face was clearly visible. Her eyes were closed and she had her hands on her lap. For about five minutes she remained thus, and then her breathing began sensibly to quicken; she gasped and panted, and her hands writhed and wrestled with each other. That passed, and she sat quite quiet again.

  Presently she began to whisper to herself, and though I strained my ears to listen, I could catch no words. Very soon her voice grew louder, but it was a perfectly different voice from that in which she had spoken to us before.... It was a high childish treble, with a little lisp in it. The first coherent words were these:

  “Yes, I’m here. Daisy’s here. What shall I tell you about?”

  “Ask her,” said Barrett to me.

  “I want to know if you can tell me anything about a friend of mine,” I said.

  “Yes, here he comes,” she said.

  She then told us that he — whoever it was — was in the room, and was looking into my face, and was rather puzzled because I did not appear to see him. He put his hand on my shoulder and was talking to me and smiling, and again seemed puzzled that I could not hear him. She proceeded to describe him at length with very great accuracy, and presently, in answer to a question, spelled out the whole of his name quite correctly. She told us that he had not long passed over; he had been on this side but a few weeks before, that he had died not in England, and not fighting, but he was connected with fighting. She said he was talking about an island in the sea, and about bathing, and about a garden where he had died; did I not recollect all those things?

  Now so far all that had been told us could easily be arrived at and accounted for by mind-reading. All those things were perfectly well known to me, and contributed no shred of proof with regard to spirit-communication. For nearly an hour the medium went on in this manner, telling me nothing that I did not know already, and before the hour was up I had begun to weary of the performance. As a whole it was an extraordinary good demonstration of thought-reading, but nothing more at all. Indeed, I had ceased to take notes altogether, though Barrett’s busy pencil went writing on, when quite suddenly I took my own up again, and attended as intently as I possibly could.

  Francis told her, she said, that there was a test, and the test was in a box, and the box was in a big black drawer. “It’s a test, he says it’s a test,” she repeated several times.

  Then she stopped, and I could hear her whispering again.

  “But it’s silly, it’s nonsense,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She laughed, and spoke again out loud.

  “He says, ‘Bow, wow, wow! Puss,’” she said. “He says, ‘Gott strafe the V.C.’ He says it’s a parrot. He says it’s a grey feather of a parrot and something else besides. Something about burning, he says. He says it’s a cinder. It’s a cinder and a parrot’s feather. That’s what he says is the test.”

  It was not long after this that the coherent speaking ceased and whisperings began again. Presently the medium said, still in the child’s voice, that the power was getting less. Then the voice stopped altogether, and soon afterwards I saw her hands twisting and wrestling together. She stretched out her arms with the air of a tired woman, and rubbed her eyes, and came out of trance.

  My friend and I went home, and before we opened the box we compared and collated our notes. Then I unlocked the drawer, took out Francis’s packet and broke the seals and cut the string. The cardboard box contained a piece of paper folded round one of Matilda’s grey feathers and a fragment of burned coal.

  Now I see no possible way of accounting for this unless we accept Mrs. Masters’s explanation, and believe that in some mysterious manner Francis, his living self, was able to tell her while in this trance what were the contents of the packet he had sealed up. No possible theory of thought-transference between her and anyone living in the conditions of this earthly plane will fit the case, for the simple reason that no one living here and now has ever had the smallest knowledge of what the packet contained. That information had never, until the moment that Mrs. Masters communicated it to me and my friend, been known to more than one person. Francis had made the packet, had sealed it up, and in that locked drawer it had remained till we opened it after this sitting. I can conceive of no possible channel of communication except one, namely, that Francis himself spoke in some mysterious way to the medium’s mind. My reason and my power of conjecture are utterly unable to think of any other explanation.

  So accepting that (for a certain reason to be touched on later, I rather shrink from accepting it), it follows as possible that all the earlier part of the sitting, which can certainly be accounted for by the established phenomenon of thought-transference, may not have been due to thought-transference at all, but to direct communication also
with Francis. And yet while the medium was speaking, telling me that he was looking into my face, and wondering that I could not see him, I, who have so continually with me the sense of his personal presence, had no such feeling. That Francis whom I knew, the same one who is now so constantly with me, did not seem to be there at all ...

  Now I reject altogether the theory of the Roman Catholic Church, namely, that when we try to communicate with the dead and apparently succeed in so doing, we are not really brought into connection with them, but into connection with some evil spirit who impersonates them. I cannot discover or invent the smallest grounds for believing that; it seems to me more a subject for some gruesome magazine tale than a spiritual truth. But what does seem possible is this, that we are brought into connection not with the soul of the departed, his real essential personality, the thing we loved, but with a piece of his mere mechanical intelligence. Otherwise it is hard to see why those who have passed over rarely, if ever, tell us, except in the vaguest and most unconvincing manner, about the conditions under which they now exist. They speak of being happy, of being busy, of waiting for us, but they tell us nothing that the medium could not easily have invented herself. No real news comes, nothing that can enable us to picture in the faintest degree what their life over there is like. Possibly the conditions are incommunicable; they may find it as hard to convey them as it would be to convey the sense and the effect of colour to a blind man. Material and temporal terms must naturally have ceased to bear any meaning to them, since they have passed out of this infinitesimal sphere of space and time into the timeless and immeasurable day, the sun of which for ever stands at the height of an imperishable noon. If they could tell us of that, perhaps we should not understand.