Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  It was in this last year at Lincoln that I had a fit of demoniacal possession, for I committed three heinous crimes one after the other. On a shelf in the drawingroom with Dresden figures and vases there was an Easter egg which had been sent to my father. It was decorated with a cross and a crown and a halo and some flowers, and was without doubt a goose’s egg. This trophy was singularly sacred, and my father had told us that we were never to touch it. Because of that prohibition I wetted my ringer and rubbed oil a piece of the crown and the halo. I followed this up by stealing a quantity of sugar from the tea-table in a yellow box which I think had contained sweetmeats, and kept it on my knees under the table-cloth. I suppose I then forgot about it and getting up, I caused it to fall to the ground, and spill its contents all over the floor.

  The third piece of devil work was far more daring and inexplicable. I had a cold one day and was not allowed to go out, but was left instead by the fire in the sitting-room belonging to my two elder brothers. There was a white sheepskin rug in front of it, and as soon as my father with the four eldest children had left the house, I ladled the whole of the burning coals out of the grate and put them on the hearthrug. An appalling stench arose as the wool caught fire; the place was filled with smoke, and I left the room, quite impenitent and merely interested to know what on earth would happen next. The smoke must by now have penetrated to the rest of the house, for I met my mother running downstairs, and she asked me if I knew what that smell was. I told her that I didn’t, and went up to the nursery. Presently, having extinguished the fire, she followed me, and again asked me if I was sure I didn’t know anything about it. Upon which I told her that it was I who had emptied the fire on to the rug. A fine spanking followed, which I did not in the least resent, and I was told to go to bed till I was sorry. I never was sorry — for it was demoniacal possession — but I suppose that some time I must have got up again.

  Friendships had sprung up between us and other children at Mrs. Giles’s day-school, and among these was May Copeland, who was Nellie’s particular friend, and told us that she was descended from Oliver Cromwell. This was very distinguished, and I fully meant to marry her. There was also a girl whose name I forget, and she was responsible for one of the greatest surprises of my young life, for one day while she and I were looking for a tennis ball in the bushes, she took my hands and drew them upwards against her bosom. I found to my astonishment that instead of being flat, she had two swellings there, and I asked her if they were bruises. She seemed rather offended and said that they certainly were not. Then there was Willie Burton to whom I told, in the spirit of bravado, what I had done to the sheepskin hearthrug, and he thought it very magnificent. He used to get phosphorus matches from his father’s table, which was grand, for we only used Bryant and May’s safety matches, and our great game was to retire into the blackness of the tool-house, wet the palms of our hands, and rub on the phosphorus which glowed with a mysterious light. He had an awful story which I entirely believed of an aunt of his on whom a practical joker played a dreadful trick, for he wrote up in phosphorus above his aunt’s bed the text, “This night shall thy soul be required of thee.” On which his poor aunt went raving mad, and I got a general distrust of phosphorus.... Willie Burton was dressed in sailor clothes, and I in a short jacket and knickerbockers, and one day with a sense of almost excessive adventure, we undressed in the tool-house and each put on the other’s clothes. We then opened the door in order to let daylight behold this transformation, and swiftly changed back again. That was a wonderful thing to have done, and when we met next day at the gymnasium we looked at each other’s clothes with glances of secret knowledge.

  My final remembrance at Lincoln is perhaps the most vivid of all, for the sense of it was not that of a momentary impression, but of a growing reality. Every evening now we came down to my mother’s room and for half an hour before bedtime she read Dickens aloud to us, sitting in front of the fire. She liked to have her hair stroked, so I used to stand behind her chair, passing my fingers over the smooth brown hair above her forehead, and listening to the story of the Kenwigses. Her voice and the contact of my fingers on her hair wakened in me the knowledge of how I loved her.

  CHAPTER IV. THE NEW HOME AT TRURO

  ONE morning a most exciting bomb-shell exploded in the Chancery and blew Lincoln into fragments. It came in the shape of two letters, one from the Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield, offering my father the Bishopric of the newly created see of Truro in Cornwall, the other from Queen Victoria, saying that she personally hoped that he would accept it. These letters must have arrived a few days before we knew of them, for that day my father told us that he had thought it over and had settled to go. I felt nothing whatever except wild delight and excitement, unmingled as far as I am aware, with any regret for leaving Lincoln, and all the time that we were out for our walk that morning Maggie and I, instead of telling each other stories, whispered with secret smiles, “The Lord Bishop of Truro! The Lord Bishop of Truro!” We were vastly proud of my father, and thought it most sensible of Lord Beaconsfield and the Queen to have selected him. (Lord Beaconsfield seems to have been as pleased as we were at my father’s accepting the bishopric, for he wrote exultantly to a friend, saying, “Well, we have got a Bishop.”)

  The fresh move came in the spring of 1877, and in that loveliest of all seasons the train slid one evening across the tall wooden viaducts with the lights of Truro pricking the dusk, where the town lay below, and the enchantment of Cornwall instantly began to weave its spell. The new home was the Vicarage of Kenwyn, a small village high on the western hills and perhaps a mile from the centre of the town. As a house it was not comparable for amenities and mysteries with the Chancery of Lincoln, but what was the garden at Lincoln, for all its towers and rolling banks, in comparison to the garden here and the fields and water-haunted valleys which encompassed it? The garden at Lincoln, confined within its brick walls and planted down in the middle of a town, was like some caged animal that here roamed wild and untamed.

  Oh, unforgettable morning when for the first time I awoke in the new house, and saw on the ceiling the light of the early sun that shone in through the copse outside, making a green and yellow dapple on the whitewash! The house was still silent; opposite me was Hugh’s bed with his head half-hidden in the sheet, and I dressed stealthily and went downstairs and out. From the lawn I could see the viaduct over which we had come, and below it the misty roofs of the town, with one steeple piercing the vapour into sunlight. Then the mist faded like a frosty breath and beyond the town there stretched broad and shining the estuary of the Fal. Instead of the sorry serge of ivy, the house was clad with tree-fuchsias, and magnolia, and climbing roses and japonica: never was there such a bower of a habitation. On that April morning no doubt the fuchsia and the roses were not in flower, but looking back now, that moment seems to have sucked into itself the decorations of all the months, making in my mind a composite picture, from which I cannot now disentangle the true component parts. But surely there was a gorse bush at the corner of the house, on the edge of the copse through which the sun had shone, and surely it was on that morning that I found a mossy feathery little football of a tit’s nest, woven inextricably among the spines of the gorse, and a virago of an infinitesimal bird peeped out of the circular door, when I drew too near, and scolded me well for my intrusion. I passed up the winding path that led through the shrubbery, and found a circular pleasance with a summer-house. I went cautiously past a row of beehives; I came through a door into a lane below the churchyard, where ferns (the sort of things not known before to exist in other localities than greenhouses and tables laid for dinner-parties) grew quite carelessly in the crevices, and so back, now breathlessly scampering and surfeited with impressions past woodshed and haystack and stable, and upstairs again with heart and shoes alike drenched with the spring-dew.

  All that ensuing summer, lessons I fancy were considerably relaxed, and the lovely months passed like some fugue built on the subjects of
that early walk, coloured, amplified and decorated. My father gave us a prize for botany (all specimens to be personally gathered, personally pressed, and mounted on sheets of cartridge paper with the English, and, if possible, the Latin name written below), and we scoured the hedges and liquid water-sides and the edges of the growing hay meadows, with a definite object in view. Study was necessitated by the addition of those names (Latin if possible), but this, like some homoeopathic dose conveyed in honey, was drowned in the delight of rambling explorations. The appetite of the collector was whetted; there was a certain craving created for exact knowledge, but far above that was the interest in the loveliness that we should not otherwise have noticed, and the admiration which the interest engendered. Definitely also I think I trace a love of words in themselves which this studied collecting gave us, for what child could write “centaury” or “meadow-sweet,” “bee-orchis,” “comfrey,” “loosestrife,” or in more exalted spheres, “Osmunda regalis” on the virgin sheet of cartridge paper without tasting something of the flavour of these blossom-like syllables? Or what child could fail to whoop with gladness when one of us brought an unknown bloom to a certain botanist friend of my father’s, and was apologetically told that its name was “Stinking Archangel”? For in the lives of all of us, words and due discrimination in their use came to play a considerable part, and somewhere we hoarded these rich additions to our vocabulary. My sister Nellie won the prize, and I remember that she afterwards confessed to me that she had stolen some of my pressed specimens and added them to her own. I never was more astonished, and class this lapse of hers with instances already given of my own demoniacal possession in the matter of the Easter egg and the sheepskin hearthrug. We both agreed that she could not possibly resign the prize, for that would lead to investigation, and she gave me a shilling by way of compensation.

  Birds’ eggs as a collection had hitherto been represented in the Museum by one addled swan’s egg, but now they took rank among the objects of existence. Here my father dictated the conditions under which they might be acquired, namely, that no egg was to be taken from any nest unless that nest contained four, and under no circumstances was more than one to be taken. There was of course no questioning his decision, but it seemed a pity to leave the great tit in the gorse bush to bring up a family of fifteen after our levy had been made, and never to be able to get a wood-pigeon’s egg at all, since those prudent birds refused to lay more than two. But here Charles the groom shone forth gilded with the glory of celestial charity, for he came to me one morning with his entire collection of eggs and “would I accept of them?” Was there ever such a groom? And among these was a pair of wood-pigeon’s eggs, so those parsimonious parents were thwarted.

  For a while games were quite in abeyance, romantic natural history held the field. For consider: my sister Maggie and I had heard that otters were found in Cornwall, and on that simple fact we built up the following fairy-like adventure. There was a round copse, rather lonely, on the edge of our fields; from it the ground declined in a steep down to the bottom of a valley, through which ran a stream so small that by wetting only one foot you could get across it at its widest part. But it ran below bushes and under steep banks, and it seemed highly probable that some of these Cornish otters lived there. Well, otters went about on land as well as in the water, and the lure of imagination pictured them taking a nice walk up this down and coming to the lonely copse. This grew very thick in brushwood, through which the otters (now indigenous in the copse) would certainly walk. So we hung nooses of string here and there a foot or so from the ground so that the otter might, in his walks, insert his head in the noose which would then be pulled tight, and we should come and capture him. This gave rise to further considerations; he might struggle, and get hurt if not strangled in the noose, so we must clearly be on the spot to loosen the noose, and substitute for it a chain and collar of one of the dogs. But if the otter saw us, he would probably gallop back over the down to his stream, so we built a hut woven of withies between two trees in which we could lie perdus, and watch for the otter. Then we should lead him chained to the stables, and gradually tame him till he could come out walking with us in company with Watch and the nanny-goat which already formed part of the family procession. (A second goat, called Capricorn, was presently added, but he had an odious habit of standing upright on his hind legs and hurling himself like a battering-ram against the hinder-parts of the unobservant, and when harnessed to a small truck which was used for gardening purposes, galloped with it at such speed that sparks flew from its wheels as they spurned the gravel.)

  A much larger bowl was now granted us for the aquarium, and the spa and madrepores carefully brought from Lincoln (though the preserved hornet seemed to have been forgotten) did not more than cover the bottom of the new and sumptuous receptacle. Caddis-worms were culled from the streams that flowed Fal-wards, and whelk-like water-snails were comforted for their expatriation by having the chance of eating bread crumbs if so they wished. But the aquarium was still but a crawling democracy, and needed some denizen of livelier locomotive power to fill the post of king in this water-world. And then one day, as I have told before, in a book now mercifully forgotten, we caught the unique and famous stickleback, by accident you may say (if you believe in accidents), for certainly at the moment of his capture we had not even seen him, though it is true that we were dredging in the stream in which the otter still failed to make his appearance.

  My sister Maggie and I then were just emptying out the dredging (butterfly) net thinking we had found no great treasure on that cast, when something stirred in the residuary mud, after we had extracted no more than a caddis worm or two, and it was he. With tremulous rapture we popped him in a jar for transport to the aquarium, and overcome with the greatness of the moment (like Paolo and Francesco) we fished no more that day. For perhaps a week he swam gorgeously about this new kingdom, never getting over his delusion that if he swam swiftly enough against the side of it, he would find himself at liberty again, and then the tragedy happened.

  It was our custom every morning to empty out the contents of the aquarium, down the drain in the stable yard, and replace them with fresh water. During this operation one of us held a piece of gauze over the lip of the aquarium so that none of its inhabitants should be poured away. And on one of these occasions, when the water was nearly drained out, and the stickleback swimming in short indignant circles in the residue, Maggie’s hand which was holding the gauze slipped suddenly and in a flood the remaining pint or two rushed out, the stickleback in the midst of it. With one flick of his tail, he disappeared down the drain in the stable yard, leaving us looking at each other in incredulous dismay....

  It was certainly during this summer that another idol came to fill that shrine of worship in my heart once occupied by the chorister, and once again music was the hot coal that fired my incense, and the music in question was the mellow thunder of the organ in Kenwyn Church. I still believe that it was very skilfully and sympathetically played by the unconscious object of my adoration.

  Elizabeth Cooper; “BETH.” ÆT. 78

  I I must have fallen in love not really with what she was, but with what she did, for my passion was all ablaze before ever I had seen her face, or had the slightest idea what she was like. All I knew of her was that she produced these enchanting noises, since from our pew I could see nothing of her except her back, and a hand which reached out to shut a stop or open another bleatling fount of melody. She played the pedals, those great wooden keys, and swayed slightly from side to side as her feet reached out for them. Once or twice, entering or leaving the church I had a glimpse of her in less than profile, and that served my adoration well enough. Her name was Mrs. Carter, and I daresay she was thirty years old or thereabouts, for she had a son of about my own age who used sometimes to turn over leaves for her, sitting by her on the organ bench, and though I don’t think would quite have exchanged mothers with him, I would have given most other things to take his place there.
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  This seemed likely to be a barren affair, for Sunday after Sunday passed and I never saw more than the swaying back of Mrs. Carter. But by way of killing one bird and possibly two with one stone, I got leave somehow (with the gardener’s boy to blow the bellows for an occasional quarter of an hour) to find my way about the organ. That exploration was a good bird in itself, but a better lurked in my mind, for I thought that Mrs. Carter might so easily come up to Kenwyn Church during the week to arrange her music or what not, and she would find Me sitting in her place and making tentative experiments with the stops, and straining after the nearer pedals with my short legs. Surely some day I should look up and see her standing by, and she would say, “Who taught you to play so nicely?” (I perceive that vanity was mingled with passion) and I, in a happy tumult of emotion, would reply, “Oh, Mrs. Carter!”