Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

by E. F. Benson

This bleating piece of Platonism came to an end somehow, and I grew to be able to contemplate Mrs. Carter’s back swaying to her pedal-playing without emotion. But I think that this warm soft Cornish climate must have brought out a sort of measles of sentimentality in me, for without pause I transferred my sloppy heart to the curate at Kenwyn, the Rev. J. A. Reeve, who subsequently was appointed Rector of Lambeth by my father, and was an intimate friend of all of us. He was a man who was habitually surrounded by an atmosphere of ecstasy, an adorer of children, and next door to a fanatic in matters of religion, beloved and blissful, living in a light that never was on sea or land. To the outward view he presented a long lean figure, walking at a tremendous pace, and perspiring profusely, with his umbrella tucked under his arm, and his hands clasped in perpetual admiration of this inimitable world, and the saints that he constantly discovered in it under the most deceptive of disguises. There were no “miserable sinners” in his sight; the most impenitent were but rather wilful children of the Father. He had a mane of yellow hair which he tossed back as he laughed peals of uproarious appreciation of any joke at all. But whereas with the chorister and Mrs. Carter there certainly was some personal, physical attraction (though no doubt the main source of the inspiration was music), with Mr. Reeve there was no personal attraction of any kind, and the experience was of the stained-glass window order, in which I was cast for the stained-glass window, and Mr. Reeve for the worshipper. At the bottom of it all perhaps there was some grain of genuine religious sentiment, but this was so largely diluted by mawkishness and vanity, that examination fails to find more than that minute presence described in the analysis of medicinal waters as “some traces.” He used to breakfast with us after a short service in Kenwyn Church at a quarter to eight every morning, to which we children were encouraged though not obliged to go, and he was a kind of unofficial chaplain to my father, writing his letters for him half the morning with a puckered brow, but ready to burst into peals of laughter on the smallest opportunity for mirth. Every Sunday also, he came to tea before service, and afterwards to supper, and every Sunday evening after tea I went with him into a spare bedroom where, with his arm round my neck, he read me the sermon he was about to preach. I suppose my comments were very edifying and satisfactory, for he certainly told my mother that “that boy was not far from the kingdom of God.” She must very wisely have begged him not to tell me that, for I had no idea of it at the time. Once, indeed, he sadly failed me, for meeting me as I was being taken to the dentist by Beth, there to have two teeth out under gas, he said that to have gas was the same as getting drunk, and I went on my weary way feeling not only terrified but wicked as well. It is true, though scarcely credible, that the gas was administered by Mrs. Tuck the dentist’s wife, and that there was no anæsthetist or doctor present. But I daresay Mrs. Tuck performed her office very well, for I had a delightful dream about being in a balloon in the middle of a rainbow.

That autumn lessons began again, and until I went to a private school next Easter I suffered under the awful rule of a German governess, not our kind Miss Braun of Lincoln, but a dark-eyed and formidable woman who, I was firmly convinced, must truly have been the terrible Madame de la Rougierre in the tale of Uncle Silas which I was reading then in small instalments, being too frightened to read much at a time. She cannot have been with us long, for before I went to school the beloved Miss Bramston came back, not originally as governess but for another and a tragic reason.

The Christmas holidays of 1877 were the last when the whole of the family of six, with my father and mother and Beth, who was absolutely of the family also, were together. My eldest brother Martin was then seventeen, and so great a gulf is fixed between that age and ten, that never, till the day I saw him last, did I form any clear idea of him. Here, then, I must abandon the standpoint I have hitherto maintained, namely, that of speaking of the events of these early years through my own personal recollection of what impression they made on me as the jolly days slipped by, and mingle recollection with subsequent knowledge.

At the age of fourteen Martin had won the first open scholarship at Winchester, and had now mentally developed into an extraordinary maturity and wisdom. He took an amazing interest in the political affairs of the day, in classics he was considered to be perhaps the most remarkable scholar that Winchester ever had, and as witness to his innate love of learning there was a library which he had himself acquired, and which must have been unique for a boy of his age. Already at Lincoln he had “spotted” an Albert Dürer woodcut pasted on to the fly-leaf of some trumpery book at a penny bookstall, and had breathlessly conveyed the treasure home, and he and my father used to exchange original Latin versions of hymns. But this precocity of scholarship did not in the least check his boyishness, which verged on the fantastic, for once he appeared in school with four little Japanese dolls attached to the four strings of his shoelaces, and gravely proceeded with his construing. There are notebooks full of his exquisite ridiculous drawings with appropriate text in his minute handwriting: there are poems as ridiculous, and behind it all was this serious limpid spirit....

He went back that January to Winchester, and Arthur to Eton, and one day, early in February he had a sudden attack of giddiness, and then followed an attack of meningitis. My father and mother were sent for; he was then unconscious. Arthur went there from Eton, but my mother decided that we younger children should not go and instead Miss Bramston came down to us in Cornwall. The rest I will tell by means of two letters which my mother wrote to Beth. I found them, after my mother’s death, forty years after, in a little packet of papers which had belonged to Beth, and consisted of letters from all of us which she had always kept.

“Winchester,
Friday (Feb. 8, 1878).

Dearest Beth,

I must write you a few lines to-day. Our dear one is no better at all. Nothing can be done for him but to watch him and to give nourishment and to pray and trust in God. Everything possible is done for him; he has two nurses, day and night. We go in and out of his room from time to time. He lies quite peacefully, mostly sleeping, and evidently quite unconscious of any pain. There is no sign of pain about his face. He knows us now and then, we think, but he does not speak. He takes a little nourishment from time to time, but with difficulty. Sir William Jenner has been sent for, though there does not seem anything he can do.

Dearest Beth, it is such a comfort to think that you are with those dear ones at home. I don’t know what they would do without you, or how we could bear to think of leaving them unless they had you. We are both quite sure that it is better they should not come. They could not be with him, and it is no use their hearing details. We ought to and must keep before their young minds just the Love of God, whether He shews it in giving our darling back to our prayers, or in taking to Himself so beautiful and holy a life.

But we must not, and do not give up hope. Though as far as man knows or sees there is nothing to be done, and the doctors dare not give us hope of recovery, yet just where man is most powerless, God does work, often, and we continue to pray to Him in hope for our darling’s restoration. While there is life, we will not despair.