E. F. Benson

“ There were other distractions as well, for owing to the spring cleaning in progress in the dining-room, he sat with Phœbe in the drawing-room, and she, quite recovered from her headache, and quite undisturbed by his presence, was reeling off sheet after sheet in her big, firm handwriting of the further trials that awaited Algernon. Sometimes she looked up at him with a bright, glad smile, born of the joy of creation; but for the most part her head was bent over her work, and but a short peal of silver-bell laughter from time to time denoted the ecstasy of invention. ”

“ Waghorn suddenly got up.
“‘You meant,’ ‘you said,’ ‘you did,’” he cried. “What if it’s ‘he meant,’ ‘he said,’ ‘he did’?”
“It’s impossible,” she said.
“Good Lord! What’s impossible?” he asked. “What if I really am that which I have so long pretended to be? What if I am a medium, one who is the mysterious bridge between the quick and the dead? I’m frightened, but I’m bound to say I’m horribly interested. All that you tell me I said when I was in trance never came out of Mrs. Forsyth’s mind. ”

“ Oliver felt a curious diplomatic pleasure in giving true information which he knew would deceive.
“Yes; I feel sure you have seen her,” he said, remembering that Alice had her dresses made at the shop where his divinity deified the window. “I can’t say that you know her.”
“Oh, who is she?” cried Alice. “Is she a girl? Is she a woman? Will she marry you?”
“No; I don’t suppose so,” said he.
Alice’s face fell.
“Is she somebody else’s wife, then?” she asked. “I hope not. But I don’t know that it matters. It is the fact of your having fallen in love which has improved you so immensely. ”

“ THE BLACKMAILER OF PARK LANE Arthur Whately had known very well what it was like to be desperately poor, and in consequence, when he became so desperately rich that money ceased to mean anything to him, his pity for the penurious was not hysterical or exaggerated. He could recall very vividly what it felt like to have neither tea, dinner nor supper, and to wake in the morning, stiff and cold as armour, on a bench on the Embankment and see the ridiculous needle of Cleopatra stonily pointing heavenwards against the sky, in which the stars were beginning to burn dim at the chilly approach of day. ”

“ All the extraordinary fantastic things that Rankin had said to him became sober and real. And simultaneously the girl’s clinging fingers on his arm became like the touch of some poisonous, preying thing, snake-coil, or suckers of an octopus, or hooked wings of a vampire bat. Something within him still shook and trembled like a quicksand, but his conscious mind was quite clear and collected.
“Go away,” he said to the ape, and pointed into the garden, and it scampered off, still gleefully spurning and kicking the soft sandy path. Then he quietly turned to the girl. ”

“ The housemaid would clear up the fireplace in the drawing-room, and there among the ashes, like a snake in the grass, would be the keen tooth of the razor-blade. Perhaps already Philip was too late, and before he could get down a cry of pain would ring through the silent house, betokening that Jane’s life-blood was already spreading over the new Kidderminster carpet, and he sprang from his bed and with bare feet went hurriedly down to the drawing-room. ”

“ Suddenly Hampden began to groan. His mouth worked, and he ground his teeth together. A horrible convulsion seized his face, a distortion of rending agony, like that which sometimes seizes on a dying man whose body clings desperately to the spirit that is emerging from it. A rattle and a strangled gulping came from his throat, and the foam gathered on his lips.
“It is there that you are, James Rolls,” said Roupert in a loud voice of exultation. “In the name of God, come out!” ”

“ There they sat while Richard, breathing deeply and moaning in his simulated trance, was the mouthpiece of Mentu and told them things which, but for his indubitable gift of thought-reading, it was impossible for him to know; or, if the power was not coming through properly, they listened, hardly less thrilled, to spirit-rappings and musical boxes and unverifiable information about the conditions of life where the mortal coil hampers no longer. ”

“ Every morning, directly after breakfast, Philip sat in the dining-room, and until one o’clock proceeded to turn into narrative the very complete and articulated skeleton of the tale which Phœbe manufactured in the drawing-room. The imaginative gift was hers; there was not a situation in the world which she could not contemplate unwinking, like an eagle staring into the sun, and these she passed on to her husband, whose power of putting them into narrative was as unrivalled as his wife’s in conceiving them. ”

“ Hugh got up. He had been out in the sun all day, and felt at this moment a little intimate shiver, which warned him that it was wiser to go indoors till the chill of sunset had passed.
“I expect you’ve tried it on with the half-monkey, haven’t you?” he said.
Abdul burst out into a toothless cackle of laughter.
“Yes, effendi,” he said. “I have tried it a hundred times, and nothing happens. Else I would not have sold it you. Half-monkey is no monkey at all. I have tried to make boy with the ink-mirror see something about monkeys, but nothing comes, except the clouds and the man who sweeps. ”

“ The sunset faded into the dusk of the clear May evening, and the two still sat there waiting for the telephone to inform them whether the door which, as Waghorn had said, had seemed so often ajar, and never quite closed, was now thrown open, and light and intelligence from another world had shone on his unconscious mind. Presently the tinkling summons came, and with an eager curiosity, below which lurked that fear of the unknown, the dim, mysterious land into which all human creatures pass across the closed frontier, he went to hear what news awaited him. ”

“ Ten minutes ago the rain had ceased as suddenly as if a tap had been turned off, and, except for the tom-tom that still beat monotonously in the town, a silence of death prevailed. The steam rose thick as sea-mist from the ground; above it a blurred etching of trees appeared and the roof of the mess-room. The grey unreal light shone full into the veranda, and he could see that Boxer was sitting bolt upright on his blanket-bed, looking at Oldham’s retreating figure. ”

“ But though Puss-cat resembled her mother in the matter of the high sense of duty and moral qualities, she had what Martha lacked: that indefinable attraction which we call charm, and a great heart. She was always pleased and affectionate, and went about her duties with as near an approach to a smile as is possible for the gravest species of animal. Martha, for instance, played with Jill as a part of her duty, Puss-cat made a pleasure out of it and played with the ecstatic abandon of a child. ”

“ He was not conscious of thought; it seemed only that a vivid picture was spread before his mind—the picture of a dark-blanketed bed on which, like a round black pool, there lay the coiled and sleeping cobra. The door of that room was shut, and a man entering it would no longer find, as he had done, a match-box ready to his hand, close beside the door.
For another hour he sat there, this mental picture starting from time to time into brilliant illumination, even as at the lightning flashes the landscape in front of him leaped into intolerable light and colour. ”

“ But after all I had a perfectly amazing week when I waited for your answer. I don’t deny that you have given me an awful week, too, or that there are many rather cheerless weeks in front of me. It’s no use my attempting to explain; you would never understand. Your soul doesn’t rise above sovereigns.”
Lord Peebles came a step nearer him, looking vexed.
“For those remarks,” he said, “you deserve to be treated as—as you deserve. You don’t seem to realize that I have had a week of the most thrilling enjoyment. You think that nobody has a sense of humour except yourself. ”

“ He began not to dislike the crowded pavements, for he no longer took any notice of the real people who were there, so absorbing had become the shop windows which gave him the material which he translated into dreams. Hitherto, when he had passed a fish shop he had held his breath, so that the objectionable smell of it might not vex him; now, he inhaled it with a gusto as adding to the vividness of M. Pierre Loti’s “Pêcheur d’Islande,” He would stand before a fish shop for five minutes at a time, and be no longer in Bond Street, but in the hold of his boat or on the quay at Paimpol. ”

“ Outside, another change had come over the hot, tumultuous night, and, as if the very moon and stars were concerned in this pigmy drama, where but a single life out of the innumerable and infinitesimal little denizens of the world was involved, a queer triangular rent had opened in the rain-swollen sky, and a dim moon and a company of watery stars stared silently down, and to Case’s excited senses they appeared hostilely witnessing. ”

“ He had always hated real people, real experiences, the sun, the wind, the rain, but equally had he loved the counterfeits of them as presented by Art in its various forms, and by the suggestions that a lemon or a continental Bradshaw or a piece of wool-work could give him. The theory that held all these things together was that life for him consisted of imagination, not of experience, and the practical application of that was to study and soak himself in the suggestions that gave him the sting of experience, without any sordid contact with life. ”

“ Hugh said. “You told your story with extraordinary gravity. And what you mean is that those two blue bits I hold in my hand control the whole ape-nature of the world? Bravo, Rankin! For a moment, you and your impressiveness almost made me take it all seriously. Lord! You do tell a story well! And what’s the secret name of the ape?”
Rankin turned to him with the shake of an impressive forefinger.
“My dear boy,” he said, “you should never be disrespectful towards the things you know nothing of. Never say a thing is moonshine till you know what you are talking about. ”

“ Alice could not resist another walnut or two, and the crashings began again.
“That may be true,” she said; “but that’s not really the point. A woman may be a real woman and yet want to do things herself. The real mistake that Nature makes is to give people arms and legs and a quantity of good red blood, and not give them the desire of using them.”
“Or to give them an imagination without the desire of using it,” remarked Oliver.
“I’m glad I have none,” said Alice firmly. “I never imagine what a thing is going to be like. ”

“ She had settled that there was but one cat, which was, of course, herself. Occasionally alien heads looked over the wall, and the cries of strangers sounded. Whenever that happened, whatever the stress of housework might be, Martha bounded from house into garden to expel and, if possible, kill the intruder. Once from my bedroom window I saw a terrific affair. Martha had been sitting as good as gold among hair-brushes and nail-scissors, showing me how to shave, when something feline moving in the garden caught her eye. ”

“ As it was, she felt wholly at ease, and inclined to congratulate herself on the unique and signal character of Amelie’s success. Never before, so she thought, had a woman so dominated the season; never, certainly, had one of her countrywomen so “mattered.” And all this, with the exception, perhaps, of the haymaking party and the incident of the pearls at Christie’s, had been gained in quiet, unsensational ways; and, lulled to content, she did not realize that the spirit that inspired the queen of hostesses was ready to flare up like an access of malarial fever. ”

“ Puss-cat, like the ancient Greeks, was never sick or sorry; never sick, because of her robust and stalwart health; never sorry, because she never did anything to be sorry for. From living with Jill, and never seeing a cat, except for those short and painful interviews which preceded expulsion from the garden, she grew to have something of the selfless affection of a dog, and when I came home after an absence she would run out into the street to meet me, stiff-tailed, and really not attending to the debarkation of luggage, but intent only on welcoming me home. ”

“ But, quite apart from his pedigree, there was never any question at all about Cyrus. There was no single hair on his lean little body that was not of the true and royal blue, and his ears already were tufted inside with downy growth, and his poor little eyes, sadly screened by the moisture of his catarrh, showed their yellow topaz irises, that were never seen on Master Jones. ”

“ Mind is no more than the servant who comes to the door, and takes your hat and coat, and tells you in a word or two how the patient has been. Mind is not the master of the house, whom you have really come to see, and who sits there alone, mortally sick, perhaps, and in terror and darkness for the master of the house is the spirit. We have got to examine him before we can touch the source of these diseases. For the farther that science advances, the more certain it is that there is a master sitting within to whom the mind is only the servant. ”