The Altar Fire - Arthur Christopher Benson (the chimp paradox txt) 📗

do not pretend to dislike it. The sight of unknown houses, high garden walls, windows looking into blind courts, staircases leading to lofts, dark cupboards, old lumber, has a very stimulating effect on my imagination. Perhaps, too, I sometimes think, these old places are full of haunting spiritual presences, clinging, half tearfully, half joyfully to the familiar scenes, half sad, perhaps, that they did not make a finer thing of the little confined life; half glad to be free--as a man, strong and well, might look with a sense of security into a room where he had borne an operation. But I have never believed much in haunted rooms. The Father's many mansions can be hardly worth deserting for the little, dark houses of our tiny life.

I disliked some of the houses intensely--so ugly and pretentious, so inconvenient and dull; but even so it is pleasant in fancy to plan the life one would live there, the rooms one would use. One house touched me inexpressibly. It was a house I knew from the outside in a little town where I used to go and spend a few weeks every year with an old aunt of mine. The name of the little town--I saw it in an agent's list--had a sort of enchantment for me, a golden haze of memory. I was allowed a freedom there I was allowed nowhere else, I was petted and made much of, and I used to spend most of my time in sauntering about, just looking, watching, scrutinising things, with the hard and uncritical observation of childhood. When I got to the place, I was surprised to find that I knew well the look of the house I went to see, though I had not ever entered it. Two neat, contented, slightly absurd old maiden ladies had lived there, who used to walk out together, dressed exactly alike in some faded fashion. The laurels and yews still grew thickly in the shrubbery, and shaded the windows of the ugly little parlours. An old, quiet, respectable maid showed me round; she had been in service there for twenty years, and she was tearfully lamenting over the break-up of the home. The old ladies had lived there for sixty years. One of them had died ten years before, the other had lingered on to extreme old age. The house was like a museum, a specimen of a house of the thirties, in which nothing had ever been touched or changed. The strange wall-papers and chintzes, the crewel-work chairs, the mirrors, the light maple furniture, the case of moth-eaten humming-birds, the dull engravings of historical pictures, the old books--the drawing-room table was covered with annuals and keepsakes, Moore's poems, Mrs. Barbauld's works--all had a pathetic ugliness, redeemed by a certain consistency of quality. And then the poky, comfortable arrangements, the bath-chair in the coach-house, the four-post bedsteads, the hand-rail on the stairs, the sandbags for the doors, all spoke of a timid, invalid life, a dim backwater in the tide of things. There had been children there at some time, for there were broken toys, collections of dried plants, curious stones, in an attic. The little drama of the house shaped itself for me, as I walked through the frowsy, faded rooms, with a touching insistence. This bedroom had never been used since Miss Eleanor died--and I could fancy the poor, little, timid, precise life flitting away among the well-known surroundings. This had been Miss Jackson's favourite room--it was so quiet--she had died there, sitting in her chair, a few weeks before. The leisurely, harmless routine of the quiet household rose before me. I could imagine Miss Jackson writing her letters, reading her book, eating her small meals, making the same humble and grateful remarks, entertaining her old friends. Year after year it had gone on, just the same, the clock ticking loud in the hall, the sun creeping round the old rooms, the birds singing in the garden, the faint footsteps in the road. It had begun, that gentle routine, long before I had been born into the world; and it was strange to me to think that, as I passed through the most stirring experiences of my life, nothing ever stirred or moved or altered here. Miss Jackson had felt Miss Eleanor's death very much; she had hardly ever left the house since, and they had had no company. Yes, what a woefully bewildering thing death swooping down into that quiet household, with all its tranquil security, must have been! One wondered what Miss Eleanor had felt, when she knew she had to die, to pass out into the unknown dark out of a world so tender, so familiar, so peaceful; and what had poor Miss Jackson made of it, when she was left alone? She must have found it all very puzzling, very dreary. And yet, in the dim past, perhaps one or both of them, had had dreams of a fuller life, had fancied that something more than tenderness had looked out of the eyes of a man; well, it had come to nothing, whatever it might have been; and the two old ladies had settled down, perhaps with some natural repining, to their unexciting, contented life, the day filled with little duties and pleasures, the nights with innocent sleep. It had not been a selfish life--they had been good to the poor, the maid told me; and in old days they had often had their nephews and nieces to stay with them. But those children had grown up and gone out into the world, and no longer cared to return to the dull little house with its precise ways, and the fidgety love that had once embraced them.

The whole thing seemed a mysterious mixture of purposelessness and contentment. Rumours of wars, social convulsions, patriotic hopes, great ideas, had swept on their course outside, and had never stirred the drowsy current of life behind the garden walls. The sisters had lived, sweetly, perhaps, and softly, like trees in some sequestered woodland, hardly recognising their own gentle lapse of strength and activity.

And now the whole thing was over for good. Curious and indifferent people came, tramped about the house, pronounced it old-fashioned and inconvenient. I could not do that myself; the place was brimful of the pathetic evidences of what had been. Soon, no doubt, the old house would wear a different guise--it would be renovated and restored, the furniture would drift away to second-hand shops, the litter would be thrown out upon the rubbish-heap. New lives, new relationships would spring up; children would be born, boys would play, lovers would embrace, sufferers would lie musing, men and women would die in those refurbished rooms. Everything would drift onwards, and the lives to whom each corner, each stair, each piece of furniture had meant so much, would become a memory first, and then fade into nothingness. Where and what were the two old ladies now? Were they gone out utterly, like an extinguished flame? were they in some new home of tranquil peace? Were they adjusting themselves with a sense of timid impotence--those slender, tired spirits--to new and bewildering conditions?

The old, dull house called to me that day with a hundred faint voices and tremulous echoes. I could make nothing of it; for though it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to have no certain message for me, but the message of oblivion and silence.

I was sorry, as I went away, to leave the poor maidservant to her lonely and desolate memories. She had to leave her comfortable kitchen and her easy routine, for new duties and new faces, and I could see that she anticipated the change with sad dismay.

It seemed to me in that hour as though the cruelty and the tenderness of the world were very mysteriously blended--there was no lack of tenderness in the old house with its innumerable small associations, its sheltered calm. And then suddenly the stroke must fall, and fall upon lives whose very security and gentleness seemed to have been so ill a preparation for sterner and darker things. It would have been more loving, one thought, either to have made the whole fabric more austere, more precarious from the first; or else to have bestowed a deep courage and a fertile hope, a firmer endurance, rather than to have confronted lives so frail and delicate with the terrors of the vast unknown.


April 8, 1890.


Our new house is charming, beautiful, homelike. It is an old stone building, formerly a farm; it has a quaint garden and orchard, and the wooded hill runs up steeply behind, with a stream in front. It is on the outskirts of a village, and we are within three miles of Maud's old home, so that she knows all the country round. We have got two of our old servants, and a solid comfortable gardener, a native of the place. The house within is quaint and comfortable. We have a spare bedroom; I have no study, but shall use the little panelled dining-room. We have had much to do in settling in, and I have done a great deal of hard physical work myself, in the way of moving furniture and hanging pictures, inducing much wholesome fatigue. Maggie, who broke down dreadfully on leaving the old home, with the wonderful spring that children have, is full of excitement and even delight in the new house. I rather dread the time when all our occupations shall be over, and when we shall settle down to the routine of life. I begin to wonder how I shall occupy myself. I mean to do a good many odd jobs--we have no trap, and there will be a good deal of fetching and carrying to be done. We shall resume our lessons, Maggie and I; there will be reading, gardening, walking. One ought to be able to live philosophically enough. What would I not give to be able to write now! but the instinct seems wholly and utterly dead and gone. I cannot even conceive that I ever used, solemnly and gravely, to write about imaginary people, their jests and epigrams, their sorrows and cares. Life and Art! I used to suppose that it was all a softly moulded, rhythmic, sonorous affair, strophe and antistrophe; but the griefs and sorrows of art are so much nearer each other, like major and minor keys, than the griefs and sorrows of life. In art, the musician smiles and sighs alternately, but his sighing is a balanced, an ordered mood; the inner heart is content, as the pool is content, whether it mirrors the sunlight or the lonely star; but in life, joy is to grief what music is to aching silence, dumbness, inarticulate pain--though perhaps in that silence one hears a deeper, stranger sound, the buzz of the whirring atom, the soft thunder of worlds plunging through the void, joyless, gigantic, oblivious forces.

Is it good thus to have the veils of life rent asunder? If life, the world's life, activity, work, be the end of existence, then it is not good. It breaks the spring of energy, so that one goes heavily and sorely. But what if that be not the end? What then?


May 16, 1890.


At present the new countryside is a great resource. I walk far among the wolds; I find exquisite villages, where every stone-built house seems to have style and quality; I come down upon green water-meadows, with clear streams flowing by banks set with thorn-bushes and alders. The churches, the manor-houses, of grey rubble smeared with plaster, with stone roof-tiles, are a feast for eye and heart. Long days in the open air bring me a dull equable health of body, a pleasant weariness, a good-humoured indifference. My mind becomes grass-grown, full