Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “All is beauty,

  And knowing this is love, and love is duty,

  What further can be sought for or declared?”

  That glittered from the fading shores of Attica, and then after a few miles of sea, there arose the low and sinister coast, and as you began to guess at the mystery of the desert-bounded land you quaked at the conclusion. There was something old and evil there and as tired as Ecclesiastes: it preached Vanitas Vanitatum instead of singing the sunny love-spell of Greece, and while its mouth mumbled the syllables, its relentless hands reared the pyramids which must stand for ever to the astonishment of the world as a monument of unimaginative construction and lost labour. There too it set the Sphinx whose totally blank and meaningless face, innocent of any riddle except that of its own soullessness, defies the rising glory of the sun and the moon of lovers to instil any spark of animation into its stony countenance. What monsters to an Attic pilgrim were these gods conceived not in the kindly image of humanity but as out of some incestuous menagerie! Here was no deep-bosomed Hera, queen of gods and men, for the royalty of motherhood; no helmeted Athene for the royalty of wisdom; no Aphrodite for the excellence of love sent her herald Eros to announce her epiphany from the wine-dark sea. The Egyptian artificers hewed no images of joy and mirth, they set no Faun nor Satyr dancing in the twilight, no Hermes held the winds in the flower-like pinions of his heels, or nursed the god after whom the Bacchantes revelled, with the smile that so quivered on his mouth that next moment surely the vitality with which he tingled, would break through that momentary marble arrest. Far other were these incongruous composite divinities, all as dead as a hangman’s noose, all incapable of summoning up one quiver of a kindly mirth. As by some disordered dream of a religious maniac the hawkfaced god had a cobra for symbol of his divinity; a cow or a cat or a lion had mated with a man and the offspring sat there, bleak and appalling, to be worshipped. And in matter of material, for the glow of the white Pentelic that holds the sunshine in solution within, even as a noble vintage is redolent of Provençal summers, these monstrous forms were presented in dead black basalt, a frozen opacity of ink.

  Into these tight-fisted inexorable hands were given the jail-keys of death. Egypt was ever the land of graves, Memento Mori, the sad gospel of its religion. A little honey, a little pulse, blue-glazed images of slaves who might still toil for their master in that dim underworld, images of food in the chambers of the dead, were all that the pious could provide for the desolate whimpering soul, feeble as a moth, that went forth on its lonely journey through dubious twilight. The crowns and the sceptres, the gold and precious stones that were buried with the kings were but a mockery to them of all that they had quitted; the mightiest monument that Pharaoh had raised was no more than a flickering beacon behind him as he trod the dark passage, which cast in front the shadow of the man that he had been. The gigantic and hopeless art, bound hand and foot by the fetters of hieratic tradition could do no more than multiply monoliths, incredulous of its own greatness and untinged with the living colour of humanity. Yet out of this mere piling up of dead on dead there arose a musty necromantic magic, awful and old and corrupt, that sat like a vulture on the sandbanks and was wafted, eternally fecund, down the waters of the Nile. All the way up to Luxor, where we settled down for a time, through the splendour of noon and the last ray of sunset that turns the stream into a sheet of patinated bronze, there was present that underlying sense of woe; and to this day my nightmares are set on the Nile in the sweet scent of bean fields beneath the waving of mimosa and of palms, where, by the terrible river there crouches some abominable granite god.

  I have given a wrong notion of this curious psychic horror if I have represented it as interfering with enjoyment and interest. It lay couched and in concealment, seldom stirring, and belonged I suppose to that subconscious world which, somewhere within us, is absorbed in its own constructive energies, and only rarely lets news of itself rise, like a bubble through dark water, into our controlled and effective consciousness. But cell by cell was stored with its bitter honey, and my bees must have been busy, for when a few years later I began to write a book called The Image in the Sand I found the combs full and ready for my despoiling. How such invention as is implied in writing a book, exercises itself in others, I do not know, but I have a very clear idea of my own case. The material, the stuff out of which the threads are woven, or, if you will, the stock-pot out of which the pottage comes, has long been simmering and stewing before the planning, the conscious invention begins. These two stages, so I take it, are widely severed from each other; the storing and the stewing have long preceded this rummage and inspection of what the author wants for his purpose. But there is, practically always, a second pot on the fire, subconsciously stewing, the contents of which concern him not at all, while he is exercising such culinary art as may be his over the contents of the first. Thus, while subconsciously I was gathering and shredding into this second pot, some of these secret and bitter herbs of Egypt to be used years afterwards, my conscious cooking powers were altogether absorbed with the stuff I had long before collected in Greece. In other words, I was busy with writing The Vintage while my subconscious mind was just as busy on its own office of making ready for The Image in the Sand. Every morning, and all morning, as we went up the Nile in the post-boat, I used to carry book and pen and ink to some sequestered corner where the sun beat full on me, and, while the sandbanks and the vultures and the wicked old spell of Egypt were working on my subconscious mind, I exuded on to paper what I had captured of the sunnier spell of Greece. I fancy that this must be a mental process common to most people, and that nobody writes of the interests and experiences which at the moment absorb him. They have to be kept and stored and stewed before they are fit for use; the harvest in fact has long been completed before the grain is ground, or before the baker, later still, is at his oven.

  Every winter then, for those three years, and indeed for one year more, tragic and final — I went across to Egypt from Greece, firm in the protection of the sunny gods when I started, and hastening to swing the incense again when I returned. And I must surely have been inoculated with the poison of the darker deities, so that for two years I was immune from their attacks, or perhaps Maggie’s excavations in the temple of Mut in Karnak were so thrilling and surprising that “the plague was stayed,” or perhaps I made some truce and reconciliation with the hawk-faced gods and the cats and the baboons, or perhaps (as seemed most probable of all) I had imagined a vain thing when for the first time I thought that the iron of these malignant conceptions had entered into my soul, for the early months of the new year in 1895 and 1896 were weeks of incessant exhilaration, the glory of which was this concession, given to Maggie by the Ministry of Antiquities, that she might conduct the excavation of a temple.

  Did ever an invalid plan and carry out so sumptuous an activity? She was wintering in Egypt for her health, being threatened with a crippling form of rheumatism; she was suffering also from an internal malady, depressing and deadly: a chill was a serious thing for her, fatigue must be avoided, and yet with the most glorious contempt of bodily ailments which I have ever seen, she continued to employ some amazing mental vitality that brushed disabilities aside, and, while it conformed to medical orders, crammed the minutes with such sowings and reapings as the most robust might envy. When I got to Egypt in the first of these three years she had already obtained permission to excavate the temple of Mut in the horseshoe lake at Karnak, with the proviso that the museum at Gizeh was to claim anything it desired out of the finds; she had got together sufficient funds to conduct a six weeks’ exploration with a moderate staff of workers, and there she was with her fly-whisk and her white donkey, using a dozen words of Arabic to the workers with astonishing effect. She had begun by trenching the site diagonally in order to cut across any walls that were covered by the soil, and another diagonal soon gave the general plan of the unknown temple. All the local English archaeologists were, so to speak, at her feet, part
ly from the entire novelty of an English girl conducting an excavation of her own, but more because of her grateful and enthusiastic personality, and M. Naville, who was engaged at Deir-el-Bahari across the river, came and sat like a benignant eagle on a corner stone, while Mr. Newberry deciphered some freshly exposed inscription. I was given a general supervision, with the object of discovering the most economical method of clearing, of arranging the “throws” of earth (so that those going to the chucking heap should not use the same path as those returning with empty baskets, a plan which entailed collisions and much pleasant conversation between the workmen who were going to and fro) and with making a plan to scale of the temple. A friend of Maggie’s kept an eye wide open for possible thefts of small objects, but the genius, the organizer, the chairman of it all was Maggie. After a morning there, she had to get back to Pagnon’s Hotel, lunch quietly and rest afterwards, but presently she would be out again, cantering on her white donkey without fatigue owing to her admirable seat, with a tea-basket on the crupper, and Mohammed the devoted donkey-boy trotting behind with encouraging cries so that the donkey should not lapse into that jog-trot which was so bad for tea-things. At sunset, the work was over, and we made our leisurely way back to the hotel. Maggie rested a tired body before dinner, but exercised an indefatigible mind, working at what was familiarly known as “her philosophy,” which eventually took shape in her book, The Venture of Rational Faith, or scribbling at one of the charming animal stories, which she published later under the title of Subject to Vanity. Then after dinner, the old habits reasserted themselves and we played games with pencil and paper, producing poetical answers to preposterous questions or rooking each other at picquet. Each Saturday, she jingled out with money-bags to the temple of Mut, and paid her workmen, while her native overseer checked the tale of piastres, and waved the whisk to keep the flies off his mistress.

  Sometimes there were days off, when one of the three was left in charge, and the two others went far through the fertile land, or ferrying across the Nile, spent the day with M. Naville at Deir-el-Bahari to see what fresh sculptured wall had been reclaimed from the blown sand of the desert, showing the pictured ivory and gold which the expedition of Queen Hatasoo had brought back from the mysterious land of Punt; or we crawled dustily into some newly discovered malodorous tomb in the valley where the kings of Egypt were buried, or visited Professor Petrie at the Ramesseum and exchanged the news of fresh finds. Sometimes I took a holiday from the remote and swarming past, and with a horse in place of the demurer donkey, went far out into the desert on the other side of the Nile. Pebbles and soft sand, hard sand and rocks succeeded each other in slope and level, and the horse whinnied as he sniffed the utter emptiness of the unbreathed air. One kite hung, a remote speck in the brazen sky, and the silence and the solitude wove the unutterable spell of the desert. There, out of sight of all that makes the planet habitable, your horse alone made the link with the ephemeral living world; all else was as it had been through uncounted centuries, and as it would remain for centuries to come, until the spinning earth grew still. In the desert the past and the future are one, and the present, dwindled to a microscopical point, is but a shadow of time in the timeless circle of eternity. Old wicked Egypt was no more than that; the dynasties were whisked away like an unquiet fly, that persists for a little, but not for long.

  Luxor would be full of southerly-going dahabeahs and English tourists during this month of January, and I can see Maggie waving her long fine-fingered hands in impotent despair, as I brought her an invitation from some friend that she and I would dine on one of these dahabeahs to-night or next night or the night after. “How am I to get on with my work,” exclaimed this outraged invalid, “with all these interruptions? Won’t it do, if we ask them to tea at the temple?” That certainly usually “did” quite well, for while Maggie was making tea, the cry of “Antica!” would arise from the diggers, and she popped the lid on the teapot, and we turned to see what had been unearthed. Once it was the statue of the Rameses of the Exodus, which would tremendously excite the visitor, but left us cold, for he was already plentifully represented. Or it might be a scribe of the eighteenth dynasty whom to-day you may see in the museum at Gizeh, and better even than that was a superb Saite head, such as I may behold at this moment if I raise my eyes from the page, or best of all it was the image of Sen-mut himself, to see which, again, you must go to Gizeh. That was the crown and culmination of the digging and worthy of an archaeological digression.

  Sen-mut, we knew, was the architect of our temple, and of the temple of Deir-el-Bahari across the river, and the mysterious thing in connection with him was that wherever his name and his deeds appeared in hieroglyphic inscriptions they had always been defaced, and an inscription about King Thothmes III, nephew and successor of Queen Hatasoo, to whose reign the activities of Sen-mut belonged had been superimposed. Sometimes the deletion was not quite thorough and you could read Sen-mut’s name below some dull chronicle of King Thothmes. What the reason for these erasures had been was hitherto only conjecture: now, on the close of this bright January afternoon the riddle was solved, and we found ourselves the accidental recoverers of a scandal nearly four thousand years old. For Sen-mut was but a common man, “not mentioned in writing” (i.e. with no ancestral records), and he speaking from the inscription on the back of this statue of himself which he had dedicated told us that, “I filled the heart of the Queen (Hatasoo) in very truth gaining the heart of my mistress daily... and the mistress of the two lands (Upper and Lower Egypt) was pleased with that which came forth from my mouth, the Priest of Truth, Sen-mut. I knew her comings in the Royal house, and was beloved of the ruler.”

  Here then was the reason for all these erasures: there had been a scandal about the intimacy between this “common man” and the Queen; so, when she died, and her nephew succeeded, he caused all mention of Sen-mut to be erased, and covered up the blank spaces with majestic records of his own achievements. It was his design to destroy all evidence of this disreputable or at least undignified affair, and hammer and chisel, at his order, were busy to delete all hint of Aunt Hatasoo’s indiscrétions. Pious King Thothmes was all but successful in this piece of family pride: only just one record escaped his erasing hand. But now, four thousand years later, Maggie dug up that solitary omission.

  I know that there must have been clouds on these halcyon days of winter, but they passed and prevailing sunlight was dominant again. Once Maggie got a chill as she lingered by the horse-shoe lake, and developed a congestion of the lungs, but when she was allowed to leave her bed again and go out, she was carried in a sort of litter, by her own express decree, to the beloved excavation again, and made a delighted progress round the fresh clearing, ordering that some mason must be at once employed in piecing together the huge lion-headed statues which had been discovered in the fore-court of the temple, and in setting them in place again. She was more dubious about certain abominable baboons that crouched in a small chamber within the temple, whose awful ugliness seemed better left alone.... Then over us both passed the cloud of slightly disquieting letters from my mother. My father was overtired, and Would go on working: he had attacks of breathlessness if he rode, a sense of oppression on his chest that was not mitigated by his remedy of thumping it. But no one, least of all the sufferer, took these things at all seriously, Maggie got better, my father received no alarming report from his doctor, and my mother, as these clouds seemed to melt, added them to her general list of the workings of “unreasonable fear,” that ghostly enemy of hers, whom she was for ever combating and holding at arm’s length, but never quite slaying.

  Arthur, during these Græco-Egyptian years, had slid into the groove of a career; he was a house-master at Eton, prosperous and popular, though from time to time his own cloud beset him, and out of it he would announce that the burden of his work was quite intolerable, and that he could not possibly stand it for another term. But this was a fruitful Jeremiad, for it relieved his mind, and he buckled to with r
enewed energy and that amazing gift of getting through a task more quickly than anybody else could have done it, without the slightest loss of thoroughness, and he added to the work that was incident to his profession an immense literary activity of his own, producing several volumes of verse, and experimentalizing in those meditative essays in which before long he found his own particular métier. Hugh, in the same way, after studying at Llandaff under Dean Vaughan, had taken orders in the English Church and was attached to the Eton Mission at Hackney Wick, so that of the three sons I was the only one who had not settled down to any career. By this time archæology, as a scholastic profession, was already closed to me, for Cambridge could not go on giving me grants indefinitely, and in order to crown my days of classical learning with a final failure, King’s had not decorated with a fellowship either the work I sent in on the Roman occupation of Chester, or on certain aspects of the cult of Asclepios. So, in deference to my father’s wishes, I took the first step towards getting a post in the Education Office, collected and sent in testimonials, and craved employment there as an inspector or examiner, I forget which. This regularized matters: that was a respectable employment, and by sending in those testimonials I was doing my best to be respectably employed, and pending appointment I could go on writing, thus treading the path that by now I fully meant to pursue. At no time was it definitely agreed that I should become anything so irregular as a writer of novels, and I suppose that if I had been appointed to a post in the Education Office, I should have taken it up. But those in whose hands the appointment rested thought that the author of Dodo would be a very indifferent educator, in spite of these brilliant panegyrics from his tutors, and for aught I know those testimonials are dustily filed there still.

  But neither Arthur nor Hugh thought of their present vocations in their present form as their lives’ work; Arthur, at any rate, had not the slightest intention, as events proved, of plucking the rewards which his profession as schoolmaster was soon to offer him, and when headmasterships came within his reach he did not put his hand out to them. Hugh’s case was only a little different; the direct service of God was now his choice and his passion, but as evolution of that progressed in him, it took him out of the English Church altogether. No one ever questioned that his joining the Roman communion and taking orders there was anything but a matter of irresistible conviction with him, but what would have happened had that conviction taken hold on him before my father’s death it is impossible to say. I cannot imagine any human relation, any pietas restraining Hugh when he had the firm belief that it was by divine guidance that he so acted: on the other hand I cannot imagine what the effect on my father would have been; whether he could have beaten down his own will in the matter, as my mother did, and have accepted this without reserve at all, or whether it would have been to him, as the death of Martin had been, an event unadjustable, unbridgable, unintelligible, a blow without reason, to be submitted to in a silence which, had it been broken, must have been resolved into bewildered protest.