Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  My father was sitting in his study with an open letter in his hand. I think he gave it me to read; in any case, Mr. Edgar had been sufficiently explicit, and in all my life I have never been so benumbed with fear.... Had I committed the most heinous of moral crimes my father could not have made a blacker summing-up. He said that he would not see me among the rest of his children. I was to have my meals alone and disgraced upstairs, and to take no part in their games or in their society, and away I went battered and yet inwardly rebelling against this appalling sentence. Then I think my mother or Nellie must have pleaded, for I was allowed to go out for a walk with Nellie alone that afternoon, but was segregated from the others. I was still bewildered with the fierceness of my father’s displeasure, and took it for granted that I must have done something unintelligibly wicked, for I asked Nellie if she had ever done anything so dreadful as the crime of which I had been guilty. She said she had not, so I drew the inference that her theft of dried plants from my collection (which, after all, was a violation of one of the commandments) was venial. But it was precious on that black afternoon to receive sympathy at all, which certainly she gave me, and I did not risk the loss of it by enquiring about the comparative wickedness of the “Affair Turkish delight” and theft.

  Then on Christmas Eve, which I think must have been next day, came one of those unutterable brightnesses which my father always had in store. Again he sent for me, and I went stiff and resigned, not knowing whether there was not to be some renewal of his anger.... Instead, he put me in an armchair close by the fire and wrapped a rug round my knees, and asked if I was quite comfortable, and shared with me the tea that had been brought in for him, since he was too busy to come into the nursery as usual and have it with the rest of us. And then he somehow gave me a glimpse, sitting tucked up by the fire, of the love that was at the base of his severity. How, precisely, he conveyed that I cannot tell, but there was no more doubt about it than there was about the heaviness of his displeasure.

  The remaining two terms at Temple Grove passed along pleasantly. In school work I continued my slow placid gravitation to the bottom of my form, as other boys were promoted into it and took their places below me. I sank gently through them and came calmly to rest at a position where no fresh sinking was possible. There I went in for a little more sleep, “a little slumber, a little folding of the hands in sleep,” and resisted with the passive force of mere inertia any attempt to raise me.

  E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 19

  But probably vital forces were beginning to stir again, for I got free of the successive childish ailments which had been afflicting me — colds, sore throats, earaches and toothaches — all of which no doubt added their contribution to my general apathy, and also I woke to a violent interest in friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. The last of these I take to have been due to the fructification of the seed sown by Waterfield’s readings, and, with Carrington’s translation of the “Æneid” to help, it is a fact that I produced in an American cloth-covered notebook a complete and rhymed and rhythmical rendering of the third “Æneid” which we were working at in school, without caring one jot for the merits of the original Latin. What I wanted to do was to compose a quantity of English myself, and compose it I did, glorying in the speed of its production, quite careless about the faithfulness of the rendering or the accuracy of the grammar, and the only merit it can possibly have had was that it was a labour of love. Other poems dashed off in the intervals of this epic were connected with friendship, for I conceived a violent adoration for a boy of the same standing as myself, romantic to the highest degree in that I gave him a whole-hearted devotion, but quite devoid of mawkishness or sentimentality. To him I addressed rhymed odes, and then we quarrelled and made it up again, with more odes, for he addressed me also in flowing stanzas. Then there was a parody of Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” held to be a devastatingly comic piece; and not less comic I suspect was a blank verse lament by a mother over the death of her only son.

  Not very far behind poetry and friendship as objects of existence came steam-engines, my fellow-engineer sitting next me, bottom but one of the form. We got illustrated catalogues from the makers of models, and copied and recopied diagrams of slide-valves, waste pipes, and eccentrics with a zeal and accuracy which, if devoted to lessons, must speedily have pulled us out of the humble positions we so contentedly occupied. A certain geographical jealousy was mixed up in this, since, though we both condemned the engines on the South-Western, on which line was Mortlake, as very poor and flimsy mechanisms, he, whose home was reached by the Great Northern, considered the engines on that line far superior to anything that the Great Western, which took me to and from Truro, had to show. He drew pictures of the Great Northern express engines, and I retorted with sketches of the “Flying Dutchman” (11.45 a in from Paddington), which went to Swindon without a stop and ran on a broad gauge, while the Great Northern was only a narrow gauge. Against that he set the fact that Peterborough was a mile further from London than was Swindon.... He was the happy possessor of a model locomotive with slide-valve cylinders and a waste-pipe going up the chimney, and though I could not run to that, by dint of saving up and of my mother’s anticipation of my birthday, I became possessor of another model with a copper boiler and a brass chassis called the “Dart.” The “Dart” had only oscillating cylinders, which, as all the world knows, do not discharge their waste steam up the funnel, but from small holes at their base, and have this further infirmity, that they only have one steam-driven stroke in each revolution of their fly-wheel, whereas a slide-valve cylinder has two. The slide-valve engine, therefore, was of a different class altogether from the “Dart,” but I found that I could get up a very powerful head of steam in the “Dart” by stuffing small pellets of blotting-paper up the safety-valve, so that she held her breath while her rival was letting off steam. Then, when for fear of a burst boiler I said the “Dart” was ready, and turned on the tap that conveyed the steam to the cylinder, she would start off like mad, and for a few yards easily outrun her more powerful rival. But long before she got to the end of the open-air cloisters where these races took place she would be overhauled; and, indeed, the “Dart” usually failed to run a complete course, and had to be bottled up again to develop fresh energy. But inferior as the “Dart” was in staying power, it must be accounted unto her for righteousness that she never burst when her safety-valve was stopped up. There was also a stationary engine (oscillating cylinder) belonging to one of us, but we unfortunately burned its bottom out by neglecting to put any water in the boiler.

  Friendship, engines, and poetry, then, were the safety-valves — not choked with blotting-paper like that of the much-enduring “Dart” — through which my growing vitality discharged itself, and I used to lie awake at night, making rhymes and phrases and thinking of the friend of my heart, and trying to devise some plan by which the “Dart” should generate a more abundant supply of steam. To these objects of existence, when the summer term began, was added cricket, but never did my school work arouse one ounce of latent energy, even though scholarship time was coming near again. If I can recollect my attitude rightly, I was entirely without ambition as regards winning a scholarship, in the sense that I chose to devote myself to Latin and Greek with a view to subsequently obtaining one. It is true that I wanted, rather, to go to Eton, and knew that I should not be sent there unless I got a scholarship, but for that end I did not divert my energies from friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. I think I am correct in this recollection, for in all the years that have passed since then I cannot remember ever being nearly so much interested in the future as in the present.

  The actual interest blazing within me (and there were often several respectable conflagrations going on) has always seemed to me of far vaster importance than a remoter goal. I do not mean that I was fitful in my intentions, because I certainly pursued the same object for years together; only it was not for the ultimate achievement that I pursued it, but because I was continuously inter
ested in the same thing. That the opposite line of action is the most effective and brings the biggest results I do not deny, but, on the other hand, think of the wild and fugitive acquisitions that fall to the lot of the short-range strategist.... But I am not defending my conduct, in any case, but merely describing it.

  My own lack of effective ambition must have been terribly disappointing to the elders who had formed and, in a material sense, directed this scholarship campaign. Mr. Edgar and my father agreed on a tremendous programme, which I was to carry out, and the “general idea” was this. There was a scholarship examination at Marlborough in June or perhaps early in July, in which there were offered for competition some half-dozen scholarships, with a great plum at the top called the “House Scholarship.” The House Scholarship was worth, I think, £80 a year, the next six £50, and my father in a letter he wrote me shortly before the event said that he did not think the great plum was out of my reach. His main desire, I know, was that I should achieve a distinction, but I am also sure that he felt I ought to do something to help towards the expenses of my education, since he believed that I was capable of so doing. He was not a rich man; hitherto his sons Martin and Arthur had won scholarships which made their education at Winchester and Eton a matter of small expense, and he did not mean to send me to Eton, as the event proved, unless I got a scholarship, but to a much cheaper but in no way less excellent school. I was, therefore, in the examination at Marlborough to get a scholarship of some sort — the House Scholarship for choice — and then, a few weeks later, to go up for Eton. If I got a scholarship there, I was to be sent there instead of Marlborough, but, failing that, to accept the laurels which Marlborough would no doubt have offered me.

  So first I went off to Marlborough and competed there. I didn’t carry off the House Scholarship, nor did I carry off any other scholarship, nor was my name mentioned as having approached to distinction, and so Eton was given its chance without any back-thought at having wiped Marlborough’s eye. Once again, therefore, I competed sadly at Eton, and Eton had precisely the same opinion of me as it had had a year before. The plan of campaign had completely failed, and it was settled that I should unconditionally surrender to Marlborough. I did not in the least want to go there, because I wanted to go to Eton, as far as I wanted anything at all apart from friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. Certainly I did not want to remain at Temple Grove any longer, for my greatest friend had won a scholarship at Winchester, and the steam-engine friend was off to Harrow, and another person who mattered had been successful at Eton. But the idea of Marlborough was not without charm, for a year before another friend had gone there, and I looked forward with a certain excitement to seeing him again. We had met during the days of the scholarship examination, and he had aroused in me some shy sort of adoration. He had grown tall and handsome, and asked condescendingly about Temple Grove and the odious habit of keeping stag-beetles, yet with a certain personal interest that he veiled behind a splendid manly brusqueness. I wondered whether he would appreciate a short ode, but decided that he would not. But he called me a “decent little kid,” which I liked as coming from so magnificent a being.

  Temple Grove ended very soon after that in a general dammerung of failure. Faute de mieux I was to be sent to Marlborough, and throwing a Latin dictionary carelessly into my locker, I squashed my gigantic stag-beetle quite flat, and he was as Og the King of Bashan. On the last day of the term I played cricket against a team of Old Templegrovians and lost the match by failing to hold the easiest catch ever spooned up amid a wildly excited circle of contemporaries, having previously got out first ball (or second). But Mr. Edgar was kind, and said that it didn’t matter, though his frenzied sucking of his eyeglass and his dropping it into my lemonade indicated tact rather than sincerity.

  So the poor ugly duckling who had failed to accomplish anything went home to its family of swans, who, dazzlingly white, cut circles in the air above it on the pinions of their various accomplishments. There was Arthur, now nineteen, who had got an Eton scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, and was going there in October, whose scholastic success was only equalled by his volleys with an Eton football and his wholly untakeable service at lawn-tennis. He could do everything with ease, was listened to by my father with attention when he talked, and yet remained unconscious of his sovereignty, and was altogether kind and faintly pitiful to my all-round shortcomings. There was Nellie, who annexed every distinction that could be annexed at the Truro High School, except when Maggie butted up against her, who could play Schumann’s first novelette and had been pronounced to have a “veiled” contralto voice in which she sang melodies by Marzials and Molloy, and who, on the occasion of Redruth High School or some inferior congregation of females challenging Truro High School for a match at cricket, bowled out the entire side of those misguided young ladies with lobs that cut the daisies from their stalks and were admired even by the vanquished for their paralyzing swiftness. Then there was Maggie, who took the rest of the prizes at the High School and painted ravishly not only in water-colours, but in oils, with McGuilp (was it?) as a medium, and tubes that squirted rainbows on to her palette. She was not athletic, but she had the great physical distinction of having been knocked down by a cow whose calf had been taken from her, and lying prone on the ground held on to the animal’s horns and with perfect calmness continued to scream loudly and serenely until rescued by Parker the butler. After these dazzling swans there came the ugly duckling, who had failed in games and in scholarship, who had not achieved the smallest intellectual distinction, but who in some queer manner of his own was quite as independent as any of the swans.

  And, finally, there was Hugh, on whom at this time my father’s hopes were centred, for I think he regarded him as the one who was going to take Martin’s place. If he listened with respect to Arthur, he hung on Hugh, who, for independence, for knowing what he wanted, and for a perfectly fearless disregard of other people’s opinions, was, for a boy of nine, wholly unique. If his reason was convinced, he would adopt a plan different from the one he had chosen, but it was necessary to convince him first, and no amount of bawling or insistence would make him alter his mind if he did not agree. He adored Beth, but if he chose to walk through puddles, neither affection for her, nor respect for her authority, would make him cease to do so, unless she convinced him of the greater suitability of the dry places. He was so dreadfully funny that nobody could possibly be angry with him for long, and when he had reduced a sister, who was teaching him his lessons, to distraction by his disobediences and inattention, he would anticipate the final threat the moment before it came, and, with shut eyes and a face inexpressibly solemn, would chant, “Mamma shall be told!” Arthur alone out of us all could deal with him. Once, when in some theatrical rehearsal, Hugh, with soft paper round a comb, had to supply orchestral accompaniment to the piano, and wouldn’t stop, Arthur observed in an awful voice, “If the orchestra isn’t quiet, it shall be sent out of the room with several hard slaps.”... Hugh had a habit, when things were breezy, of writing insulting remarks in round hand on a piece of paper, and then doubling it up and throwing it at the object of his scorn, and while you were reading it he ran away. A further development of this was that, when pursuit was hot behind him, he would pull a small ball of paper out of his pocket and surreptitiously drop it, as if fearing to be caught with it. Naturally, the pursuer stopped to smooth out the paper and see what fresh insult was recorded there, and would find a perfectly blank half-sheet. But by that time Hugh would be at the top end of the garden path and have had time to conceal himself anywhere. Clad in pasteboard armour, covered with silver paper, with a shield and a helmet and greaves, he would hide in the shrubbery and hurl paper lances at you. Then a hot pursuit followed, until one of the greaves dropped off, and, still flying, he would pant out “Pax, until I’ve put on my greave again!” He and I lived in a perpetual high-tension atmosphere of violent quarrels, swift reconciliations, and indissoluble alliances with secret signs and mysteri
es to which even Maggie was not admitted. We had a cypher language of our own which consisted in substituting for each vowel the one that came next in the alphabet; it was easy to write, but difficult to speak and even more difficult to understand when spoken. What we communicated to each other in it I have no conception, nor can I now remember the aims and objects of the mystic club called “Mr. Paido.” One of the rites consisted in walking in the garden with bare feet, which, after all, was an adventure in itself.

  The great excitement of this summer holiday, after which I was to go to Marlborough, was an expedition to Switzerland. All that any of us knew about Switzerland was a remarkable picture that hung in the nursery in which rows of dazzling summits crowned cerulean lakes. Above that panoramic view, in which the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc somehow appeared together, were little vignettes, one of a Swiss chalet, one of the Staubbach, one of the castle at Chillon. We journeyed via Southampton and Havre, five children, Beth, my father and mother, and sat upright in a second-class carriage all the way from Paris to Berne, by what route I have no idea. Our objective was a village called Gimmelwald, a few miles from Murren, and we spent a day and a night at Berne, and from Berne, on the terrace in front of the church, I had my first glimpse of snow mountains. Perhaps because I had been sitting bolt upright all night, perhaps because I had thought that the brilliant blues and dazzling whites of the pictures in the nursery would be collectively unveiled on an enormous scale, I was more disappointed than words can fairly convey. Low on the horizon were a few greyish jagged hills beset with streamers of mist, and that was all. Nellie drew a long breath and said, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful!” and I labelled her the most consummate hypocrite.