Escape, and Other Essays - Arthur Christopher Benson (free novel reading sites .txt) 📗

said. "I am weak and faint; but you can help me; be as brave as you can. Try not to think or grieve. I shall be able to help you again soon, but not now. . . . Ah, leave me to myself," it added. "I must sleep, a long sleep; it is your turn to help!"

And then I heard no more; till a day long after, when the voice came to me on a bright morning by the sea, with the clear waves breaking and hissing on the shingle; the voice came blithe and strong, "I am well again; you have done your part, dear one! Give me your burden, and I will carry it; it is your time of joy!"

And then for a long time after that I did not hear the voice, and I was full of delight, hour by hour, grudging even the time I must spend in sleep, because it kept me from the life I loved.

These then are some of the talks we have held together, that Other One and I. But I must say this, that he will not always come for being called. I sometimes call to him and get no answer; sometimes he cries out beside me suddenly in the air. He seems to have a life of his own, quite distinct from mine. Sometimes when I am fretted and vexed, he is quietly joyful and elate, and then my troubles die away, like the footsteps of the wind upon water; and sometimes when I would be happy and contented, he is heavy and displeased, and takes no heed of me; and then I too fall into sorrow and gloom. He is much the stronger, and it matters far more to me what he feels than what I feel. I do not know how he is occupied--very little, I think, and what is strangest of all, he changes somewhat; very slowly and imperceptibly; but he has changed more than I have in the course of my life. I do not change at all, I think. I can say better what I think, I am more accomplished and skilful; but the thought and motive is unaltered from what it was when I was a child. But he is different in some ways. I have only gone on perceiving and remembering, and sometimes forgetting. But he does not forget; and here I feel that I have helped him a little, as a servant can help his master to remember the little things he has to do.

I think that many people must have similar experiences to this. Tennyson had, when he wrote "The Two Voices," and I have seen hints of the same thing in a dozen books. The strange thing is that it does not help one more to be strong and brave, because I know this, if I know anything, that when the anxious and careful part of me lies down at last to rest, I shall slip past the wall which now divides us, and be clasped close in the arms of that Other One; nay, it will be more than that! I shall be merged with him, as the quivering water-drop is merged with the fountain; that will be a blessed peace; and I shall know, I think, without any questioning or wondering, many things that are obscure to me now, under these low-hung skies, which after all I love so well. . . .


XII


SCHOOLDAYS

1


It certainly seems, looking back to the early years, that I have altered very little--hardly at all, in fact! The little thing, whatever it is, that sits at the heart of the machine, the speck of soul-stuff that is really ME, is very much the same creature, neither old nor young; confident, imperturbable, with a strange insouciance of its own, knowing what it has to do. I have done many things, gathered many impressions, ransacked experience, enjoyed, suffered; but whatever I have argued, expressed, tried to believe, aimed at, hoped, feared, has hardly affected that central core of life at all. And I feel as though that strange, dumb, cheerful self--it is always cheerful, I think--had played the part all along of a silent and not very critical spectator of all I have tried to be. The mind, the reason, the emotion, have each of them expanded, acquired knowledge, learned skill, but that innermost cell has lain there, sleepless, perceptive, dreaming head on hand, watching, seldom making a sign of either approval or disapproval.

In childhood it was more dominant than it is now, perhaps. It went its way more securely, because, in my case at least, the mind was, in those far-off days, strangely inactive. The whole nature was bent upon observation. Ruskin is the only writer who has described what was precisely my own experience, when he says that as a child he lived almost entirely in the region of SIGHT. It was the only part of me, the eye, that was then furiously and untiringly awake. Taste, smell, touch, had each of them at moments a sharp consciousness; but it was the shape, the form, the appearance of things, that interested me, took up most of my time and energy, occupied me unceasingly. Even now my memory ranges, with lively precision, over the home, the garden, the heathery moorland, the firwoods, the neighbouring houses of the scene where I lived. I can see the winding walks, the larch shrubberies, the flower-borders, the very grain of the brickwork; while in the house itself, the wall papers, the furniture, the patterns of carpets and chintzes, are all absolutely clear to the memory.

Thus I lived, from day to day and from year to year, in the moment as it passed; but I remember no touch of speculation or curiosity as to how or why things existed as they did. The house, the arrangements, the servants, the meal-times, the occupations were all simply accepted as they were, just the will of my parents taking shape. I never thought of interrogating or altering anything. Life came to me just so. I remember no sharp emotions, no dominant affections. My parents seemed to me kind and powerful; but it did not occur to me that, if I had died, they would feel any particular grief. I was just a part of their arrangements; and my idea of life was simply to manage so that I should be as little interfered with as possible, and go my way, annexing such little property as I could, and learning the appearance of the things that were too large to be annexed.

Then my elder brother went off to school. I do not remember being sorry, or missing his company; in fact, I rather welcomed the additional independence it gave me. I was glad in a mild way when he came back for the holidays; but I do not recollect the faintest curiosity about what he did at school, or what it was all like. He told us some stories about boys and masters; but it was all quite remote, like a fairy-tale; and then the time gradually drew near when I too was to go to school; but I remember neither interest or curiosity or excitement or anxiety. I think I rather enjoyed a few extra presents, and the packing of my school-box with a consciousness of proprietorship. And then the day came, and I drifted off like thistledown into the big world.


2


My father and mother took us down to school. It was a fine place at Mortlake, called Temple Grove, near Richmond Park. Mortlake was hardly more than an old-fashioned village then, in the country, not joined to London as it is now by streets and rows of villas. It was a place of big suburban mansions, with high walls everywhere, cedars looking over, towering chestnuts, big classical gate-posts. Temple Grove, so called from the statesman, the patron of Swift, was a large, solid, handsome house with fine rooms, and large grounds well timbered. Schoolrooms and dormitories had been tacked on to the house, but all built in a solid, spacious way. It was dignified, but bare and austere. We arrived, and went in to see the headmaster, Mr. Waterfield, a tall, handsome, extremely alarming man, with curled hair and beard and flashing eyes. He was a fine gentleman, a brilliant talker, and an excellent teacher, though unnecessarily severe. I had been used to see my father, who was then himself headmaster of Wellington College, treated with obvious deference; but Waterfield, who was an old family friend, met him with a dignified sort of equality. My parents went in to luncheon with the family. My brother and I crawled off to the school dinner; he of course had many friends, and I was plunged, shy and bewildered, into the middle of them. There were over a hundred boys there. Some of them seemed to me alarmingly old and strong; but my brother's friends were kind to me, and I remember thinking at first that it was going to be a very pleasant sort of place. Then in the early afternoon my parents went off; we went to the station with them, and I said good-bye without any particular emotion. It seemed to me a nice easy kind of life. But as my brother and I walked away, between the high-walled gardens, back to the school, the first shadow fell. He was strangely silent and dull, I thought; and then he turned to me, and in an accent of tragedy which I had never heard him use before, he said, "Thirteen weeks at this beastly place!"

I took a high place for my age, and after due examination in the big schoolroom, where four masters were teaching at estrades, with little rows of lockered desks much hacked and carved, arranged symmetrically round each, the big fireplace guarded with high iron bars, I was led across the room, and committed to the care of a little, pompous, stout man, with big side-whiskers, a reddish nose, and an air half irritable, half good-natured, in a short gown, who was holding forth to a class. It was all complete: I had my place and my duty before me; and then gradually day by day the life shaped itself. I had a little cubicle in a high dormitory. There was the big, rather frowsy dining-room, where we took our meals; a large comfortable library where we could sit and read; outside there were two or three cricket fields, a gravelled yard for drill, a gymnasium; and beyond that stretched what were called "the grounds," which seemed to me then and still seem a really beautiful place. It had all been elaborately laid out; there was a big lawn, low-lying, where there had once been a lake, shrubberies and winding walks, a ruinous building, with a classical portico, on the top of a wooded mound, a kitchen garden and paddocks for cows beyond; and on each side the walls and palings of other big mansions, all rather grand and mysterious. And there within that little space my life was to be spent.

The only sight we ever had of the outer world was that we went on Sundays to an extraordinarily ugly and tasteless modern church, where the services were hideously performed; and occasionally we were allowed to go over to Richmond with a shilling or two of pocket-money to shop; and sometimes there were walks, a dozen boys with a good-natured master rambling about Richmond Park, with its forest clumps and its wandering herds of deer, all very dim and beautiful to me.

Very soon I settled in my own mind that it was a detestable place. Yet I was never bullied or molested in any way. The tone of the place