Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  In the afternoon there was a family walk, and then Cathedral service again. Then came a reading of Sunday books, or a reading of the Bible with my father, and we went utterly fatigued to bed. It was not so much the plethora of religious exercises that caused this lassitude, but the entire absence of any recreation. Spare time (and there was not much of it) was supposed to be taken up with Bishop Heber’s Journal, Agathos and The Rocky Island. Once a certain brightness came into these Sunday readings, because we were allowed a book called Sunday Echoes in Week-day Hours. There was a widowed mother in it, and her boy called Cecil, and their conversation about collects was so excruciatingly pious that it became merely humorous, and we invented fresh Cecil-talk among ourselves. We once indulged in this before my mother, who with a controlled countenance withdrew the delightful volume. I remember waking up after falling asleep one Sunday night, and hearing Compline going on in the chapel with another hymn, and thinking with amazement that they were still at it. In the way of a child, I think I was, from certain evidence that will appear, religious, but to put it quite frankly, I was sick of the whole affair by Sunday evening.

  I cannot chronologize the events in our life at Lincoln, which only lasted for three and a half years, and I do not quite know when the Cathedral services began to wear a perfectly new complexion for me. The reason of this was that I was violently attracted by a choir-boy, or rather a chorister, one of four, who instead of wearing a surplice like the common choir-boy, wore a long dark blue coat down to the knees faced with white. A similar experience, I fancy, is almost universal: the first romantic affection a girl is conscious of is nearly always towards a girl, and in the same way, a small boy, when first his physical nature begins to grope, still quite blindly and innocently, in the misty country of emotion, is pretty certain to take as his idol for secret romantic worship, one of his own sex. It was so at any rate with me, and instead of the Cathedral services being of incomparable tedium, they became exciting and exalting. He, the nameless he, came in procession at the end of the choirboys just before the lay-clerks, and besides having this soul-stirring effect on me, he woke in me, by means of his singing, my first love of music. He sat at the end of the choir nearest our seat, and luckily on the other side, so that I could see him without the intervention of dull people’s heads. I could hear his voice, sexless and unemotional, above the rest of the trebles, but with what emotion did that voice inspire me! He used to sing solos as well, and I am sure that the sneaking love that I have still for Mendelssohn, was due to the fact that (unaccompanied) he sang “The night is departing, de-pa-a-art (A in alt) ing.” I would have welcomed the interminable Litany becoming literally interminable, so long as he continued singing, “We beseech thee to hear us, Good Lord,” with his chin a little stuck out, and his eyes roving about the pews. Sometimes I thought he saw me and noticed me, and then my imagination took wings to itself, and I saw myself meeting him somewhere alone, him in his chorister’s cope. What we should have to say to each other, I had not the smallest idea, but we should be together, and there lay completion. It was due to his unconscious influence that I began to sing loudly in the chapel at the Chancery, and never shall I forget my father once saying to me, “Perhaps some day you will sing an anthem in the Cathedral.” That supplied a fresh imaginative chapter to my secret book; I should be a chorister too, and sit next the idol, and we would sing together. I was not egoistic in this vision: I had no thought of ravishing the world by the beauty of my voice: it merely became a sunlit possibility (after all my father had said as much) that I should sing in the Cathedral. But I knew, though he did not, that I should be singing with the chorister. Thanks to my idol, Sunday became, as long as this passion lasted, a day in which joy watered the arid sands of Bishop Heber’s Journal, and made it, literally, “break forth into singing.” That emotion, the fulfilment of which was brought into the realms of possibility by my father’s remark, touched such religion as I had with ecstasy, and I added to my prayers the following petition, which I said night and morning.

  “O God, let me enter into Lincoln Cathedral choir, and abide there in happiness evermore with Thee!”

  Who “Thee” was I cannot determine: I believe it to have been a mixture of God and the chorister, and, I think, chiefly the chorister.

  This quickening of emotion gave rise to a sort of waking vision in which I used then consciously to indulge, promising myself as I undressed for bed a night of Holy Convocation. Two minutes of Holy Convocation were about the duration of it, and then I went to sleep. There was a hymn in the “Holy Year” in which there were lines

  To Holy Convocations

  The silver trumpets call, and with that and the chorister as yeast, there used to bubble out, when I had gone to bed, this curious waking vision. I would not be asleep at all, but with open eyes I distinctly saw against the blackness of the night nursery a line of golden rails, very ornamental, before which I knelt. There was the sound of silver trumpets in my ears, there was the sound of the chorister, anthems in the Cathedral, and the presence of God. But all these things were secret and apart, never told of to this day, and they did not in the least interfere with wrestlings in the tower, and violent games of rounders and the pleasing terrors of hide-and-seek. The shrine usually stood shut, but when it opened it disclosed blinding splendours.

  The Cathedral had, apart from the chorister and the services, certain pains and pleasures of its own. Occasionally assizes were held in Lincoln, and then on Sunday the judges would attend in robes of majesty with full wigs falling on to their shoulders. They walked in procession up the choir, and, reaching their seats, turned round awful pink clean-shaven faces of eternal calm, awful mouths that pronounced death-sentences. Once to my knowledge there was a murder-trial at Lincoln and a man condemned to death and the judge on that occasion became more terrible than death itself, and I slunk out after the Litany with apprehension that I should be called back, and hear some appalling sentence pronounced on me. Again, one day, a canon of the Cathedral stepped backwards through a skylight and was killed and Great Tom, the big bell in the central tower, tolled for the funeral. But the whole circumstances of that were so interesting that, though terror was mingled with them, they were more exciting than terrible. Wholly delightful on the other hand was a scientific demonstration that took place in the nave. A long cord was hung from one of the arches, to the end of which depended a heavy lead weight. On the pavement beneath it there was marked out a circle in white chalk,’ and this pendulum was then set swinging. As the hours passed, it swung in a different direction from that in which it was started, and instead of oscillating up and down the nave it moved along the transepts, thus demonstrating the motion of the earth. Why that delightful piece of science was shown in the Cathedral I have no idea; certain it is, however, that my mother took me to see the pendulum after breakfast one morning and again before tea when it was swinging in quite another direction. I never had any doubts about the rotary movement of the earth after that, nor, as far as I can remember, before.

  CHAPTER III. LINCOLN AND DEMONIACAL POSSESSION

  THOSE three and a half years at Lincoln appear to have lasted for decades, so eventful was the unfolding of the world, and all the years which have passed since then, with their travels to many foreign lands, and climbings of perilous peaks, seem to have contained no exploration so thrilling as the revelation of Riseholme, where lived Bishop Wordsworth of Lincoln, who wrote the “Holy Year,” and his wife, and his family and Janet the housekeeper. (The latter, like Mrs. Wordsworth, had ringlets down the sides of her face, and dispensed Marie biscuits and cowslip wine in unstinted profusion.) The family, too, were interesting, for one daughter when she laughed said, “Sss-sss,” and another, “Kick-kick-kick,” and the Bishop himself had a face like a lion, and a hollow ecclesiastical voice. My sisters considered him very formidable, but I was not afraid of him, chiefly because at an early stage of our acquaintance he gave me an ink-bottle of pottery, with a gilded lion (like himself) on top of it, and
a receptacle to hold sand for the blotting of your letter, if you had managed to write it. This argued an amiable disposition, and when I came in contact with him, I was conscious of no embarrassment.

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree, but Xanadu was nothing to Riseholme for domes and stateliness. There were two lakes peopled with dace and water-lilies and pike and swans, and an island where the swans nested, and a sluice, around which the water was of fabulous depth, where we fished for dace. There was a boat-house, on the roof of which in the autumn a great chestnut tree used to shed its fruit, bursting the husks, and disclosing the shiny brown kernels; and at Riseholme, as far as I remember, we were allowed to do precisely as we pleased. We used to go out alone in the boat, with paste for bait, and splash the water at each other, and come home with a couple of dace, dirty and wet and hopelessly happy. Swans used to scold and hiss at us, the boat did everything but capsize, and æons of bliss were our portion. There were water-snails to be collected, if the fish would not bite (they seldom did), and wreaths of stinking water-weed, and broken fragments of swan eggs lined inside with a tough kind of parchment, which we called “swan-paper.” Then dace (when there were any) were cooked for tea, and provided a bony mouthful for one; the swan-paper was taken home for the Museum, together, on one glorious occasion, with the addled swan’s egg; and the wreaths of stinking water-weed were laid out on sheets of cartridge-paper and pressed. This pressing resulted in an awful fricassee of weed and paper, and then something else occupied us. On the banks of the lake, at intervals, appeared a sympathetic Bishop with daughters, to whom we shouted the results of our explorations, and one of the daughters said, “Kick-kick-kick,” and another, “Sss-sss-sss.” For larger people, such as Arthur, there was more grown-up fishing, and once with a spoon-bait he caught a pike that weighed three pounds. But not even the sympathetic and combined appetites of the juniors could finish that toothsome dish.

  Then there were expeditions into the vast forest that lay below the sluice, where marsh-marigolds grew, and the willow shoots flew back and slapped the faces of those who followed the leader in these excursions. Maggie and I formed a small club or society (I suppose Nellie was too old then, being about eleven) to get lost in this pathless place, but we never quite succeeded in doing so. Just as we thought there was no hope of our ever being discovered, in which case we proposed to live on leaves and drink the water that came from the sluice in a small stream, Beth’s voice would sound quite near at hand, or, by mistake, we came back into the meadow beyond the lake, or into the path that bordered it. So instead, we collected chestnuts, if there was not a marine or lacustrine expedition, and ground up the kernels into a nutritive powder, or mixed it with lake-water to form a paste. About this time Maggie and I formed a special alliance, which continued till the end of her life, and the light of it was never quite obscured by those dusky years of darkened mind through which her way led, for she was always willing to talk of the days at Lincoln, and the collections and the amazing stories which we invented to beguile our walks. They were compounded of strange adventures, with the finding of gold and immense diamonds, of desert islands and bandits, and the central figures were she and I and the collie, Watch. All was coloured with the vividness of dreams, and the seriousness of childhood.

  Riseholme was about two and a half miles from Lincoln, and the most exciting experience I ever had in its connection was that of being sent over there by my father with a note for the Bishop. I took Watch with me, and “Kick-kick-kick” and “Sss-sss-sss” were so entertaining and the Bishop so long in writing his answer that it was nearly dark before, with sinkings of the heart, I started on my return. “Sss-sss-sss” I think offered to accompany me till I got out of the loneliness of the road and in touch with the lights of Lincoln, but I was too cowardly to say I was afraid of the darkness and the emptiness, and started off alone. Wanting to get it over as quickly as possible, I ran, and was frightened at the noise of my running. Then, one after the other, my stockings came down, and I thought that the strip of whiteness would encourage highwaymen to attack me, and so had to stop every third step to pull them up. Then I talked to Watch in order to hearten myself, saying, in so many words, “Watch, aren’t we benighted?” (new word) and then was frightened at the sound of my voice in the frosty stillness. But there was pleasure in this sense of adventure, and I was given an egg for tea.

  There were expeditions to Nocton, where in a wood of vast extent the whole ground was white with lilies of the valley growing wild, and the still languid air beneath the trees swooned with the scent of them, which, I am told (though never since that day have I been able to believe it), is extremely pleasant. For the last of these expeditions to Nocton had a tragic sequel so far as I was concerned. We had lunch there after picking lilies all the morning, and I suppose I ate too much, and it began to rain as we drove homewards so that the carriage, full of hot children and lilies of the valley, had to be closed. The effect was that I was exceedingly unwell and never since that day have been able to dissociate the smell of lilies of the valley from being sick. To balance that bilious day was a glorious expedition to Skegness, where I saw the sea for the first time, and fell in love with it with a devotion that has never wavered. I took with me a small black handbag in which to stow the treasures of the shore, among which I rather mistakenly selected a dead decaying skate. An odour as unpleasant to others as was that of lilies of the valley to me filled the railway carriage on the return, which was eventually traced to my bag, and the dead skate which would have looked, anyhow, interesting in the Museum, was thrown out of the window. That first impression of the sea was confirmed by summer holidays spent at Torquay, and it was there, I think, that I must have learned to swim, and then have forgotten that I knew how. For when some years later I went to Marlborough and began to learn in the school bathing-place, I instantly did swim, and the old instructor who sat with small boys in a strap at the end of a fishing-rod, said with disgust, “Why you swims already!” Torquay was responsible for a whole host of further activities, for it was there, I believe, that we began those scribblings which subsequently developed into the Saturday Magazine (an industry so important that it must presently have a paragraph to itself) and it was certainly there that there were hot twisty rolls for breakfast which were only to be obtained by reciting some sort of rhyme, of which one of my mother’s seemed to me to touch the high-water mark of inspired wit and poetry. This ran:

  Bread is the staff of life, the proverbs say, So give me of its twisted staff to-day.

  Surely that was far better than a miserable effusion by Bishop Temple, of Exeter, who merely said:

  An egg,

  I beg, and was sycophantically applauded by the grown-up people present. You could have eggs without making rhymes... but perhaps he didn’t understand, and anyhow it was no use wasting time over him. There, among the diversions of Torquay we all violently embraced the career of artists, and drew miles of cottages and churches and painted leagues of the English Channel. The shell collection was started then, so also collections of wild flowers, and there was bathing and Devonshire cream, and a steep garden with gladioli and aloes in its beds. I think my birthday must have been celebrated there, for certainly I received a present of a terra-cotta teapot with lines of blue enamel on it, after receiving which it was difficult to imagine circumstances that could have the power to hurt one ever again.

  Never can I sufficiently admire or be sufficiently thankful for the encouragement my father and mother both gave to these multitudinous hobbies, for hobbies, as they well knew, whether literary, artistic, or scientific, are a priceless panacea for the preservation of youth, and the stimulation of the world-wonder of beauty. At this time we were all of us draughtsmen, ornithologists, conchologists, geologists, poets, and literary folk: we all drew and wrote and collected shells and birds’ eggs, and smashed stones in order to discover fossils. I claim no measure of eminence or even promise in any of us, but that is not the point. The point is that
under parental encouragement we did all these things with extreme zest and interest. In sports and games my father gave us less support, for he looked on them only as a recreation which would enable the mind to get to work again, and as having no intrinsic value beyond what a brisk walk could have brought. But we had enough keenness among ourselves for these, and a ball and something to hit it with filled the rest of the vacant hours with ardour. For music, among the arts, he had likewise no sympathy at all: he liked the singing of Psalms and Handel and hymns entirely because of the words, and when he joined in the hymns in chapel, he produced a buzzing noise that bore no relation to any known melody. By this time my own love of music, sown in me by the adored chorister, had taken firm hold, and with help from my mother to start me, and an elementary book of instruction, music became to me a thing apart. I wanted no companionship or sympathizer in it, and though as far as execution on the piano went I was leagues behind my sisters, I felt certain in my own mind that I had opened a door for myself into a kingdom to which they did not really penetrate though they could execute (both counting very loud) Diabelli’s Celebrated Duet in D which I considered below contempt, though it was very’ clever of them to move their fingers so fast. At that time my mother, who had always an Athenian disposition with regard to the joy of a new thing, went in for a course of instruction somehow connected with Dr. Farmer of Harrow. There was founded at Lincoln a Farmer Society of some kind, and the ladies met once a week or thereabouts and played easy Bach to each other, and one of the most rapturous Lincoln days was a certain wet afternoon, when the Society met at the Chancery’. My sisters and I were allowed to sit in the window-seat, provided we remained quiet, and we all had acid drops to suck, and books to read when we got tired of listening. They were soon deep in Little Women and Good Wives, but for me, in spite of a toothache, I listened in an entranced bliss to a series of Gavottes and Sarabands and Allemandes, while the rain beat on the windows, and the melodious dusk gathered. The time of the year must have been near Christmas, for I feel as if I went straight from there to the nursery, on the floor of which was laid out a large sheet piled with holly and laurel and ivy, out of which we made wreaths for the doors. The remaining leaves, when all was done, were put in the fire and roared and crackled up the chimney, filling the room with an aromatic smell of burning, that ranks next in preciousness of recollection to the smell of lilac.