Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

by E. F. Benson

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 archæological 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 indiscretions. 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 renewed 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.

Apart from their present professions both Arthur and Hugh were moving towards the pursuit, that of authorship, which was soon to take at least equal rank with their other work. Within ten years it was as an essayist, a writer of delicate meditative prose that Arthur was most widely known, and to this he devoted the flower of his energy, while Hugh served his Church not as a parish priest, but as preacher and as writer of propagandist novels, novels with the purpose of showing the dealings of God through His Church. As works of art his sermons far transcended his books, an opinion which no one I think who ever listened to that tumultuous eloquence could doubt. They carried his untrammelled message; while he preached, he could say with supreme instinctive art all that in novel-writing he had more indirectly to convey: his sermons had an overwhelming sincerity which made the delivery of them flawless and flame-like. When he wrote he was never quite so inspired: the message was the same, but it had to be wrapt about with the allegory of ordinary life, he had to convey it in terms of country houses or historical episode, and the sermon which was the underlying intention was often a handicap to the art of story-telling. But it was towards his books that his inclination tended; his joy of achievement lay in the written, not in the spoken word.

Then came the closing summer of this period, after which the whole stage and manner of life was altered altogether. That year I had stayed late in the south, going on from Athens to Capri, and laying the foundation then of that Italian castle of dreams, which was afterwards to take a more solid form. Maggie had supplemented Egypt with a cure at Aix-les-Bains, but in August we were all together again at Addington, and once more, as before Nellie’s death, and never since then, there were hundreds of small cones on the cedar that scattered the sulphur-like powder. Arthur came there before he went to Scotland, Hugh had a holiday release from the Eton mission, Maggie was established there deep in the collation of the results from the digging at Luxor. Soon my father and mother were to start on a tour through Ireland, and when September saw their departure, Maggie and I stayed on for a little and then drifted off on different visits. We were all free to stop at home if we liked, and ask friends there; Addington was just an ark for any wandering family doves, picnicky as my mother said, but there it was.... Maggie and I saw my father and mother off, and as from my first remembered days and ever afterwards when he wished “good night” or “good bye,” he kissed me, and said, “God bless you, and make you a good boy always.” Then, after he got into the carriage, he waved his hands with some affectionate and despairing gesture, saying, “I can’t bear leaving you nice people here,” and the carriage turned, and went up the slope in front of the house. A very few days afterwards, Maggie and I went off on our ways, leaving Beth at the front door, saying, “Eh, pray-a-do come back soon.”

I had trysted with a friend to spend a few days at Addington early in October, and arrived there to find a letter from him that he was prevented, and I was in two minds as to whether to stop here alone, or go off on some other visit for the Sunday. That scarcely seemed worth while, for I had learned that my father and mother were leaving Ireland that day, and would spend the Sunday with Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden. The Irish tour therefore was over, and they would be back on Monday. Beth and I talked about it, and she said, “Nay, don’t you go away to-day, you be here for when your Papa and Mamma get back. Have a quiet Sunday, you and me.”

It was arranged so: and after lunch on Sunday I went out for a long walk through the myriad paths of the Park, where the beeches were russeting and the squirrels gathering the nuts, and came home in time to have tea with Beth. There was a telegram for me on the hall-table, and glancing at the sender’s name first I saw it was from Mrs. Gladstone.