The Court of the King, and Other Studies

by Margaret Benson

Inside life had dwindled to a thin thread of consciousness, or rather it seemed like two strands worn nearly to breaking lying side by side. The one, the actual physical consciousness of a corporal life ebbing, of breath drawn with difficulty; of physical sensation not perhaps actually painful, but almost altogether wearying—a consciousness close to that mysterious land of delusions, where the physical symptoms are set apart from the personal consciousness and become external antagonistic forces. It was not intolerable because it was becoming a thing more and more external, more separate from that other spiritual consciousness with which it was still lightly entwined.

And that other thread of being, how shall one describe it? It was not quite continuous, for now and again the physical sensation numbed it; now and then, when times of refreshment came, the other like a stream rose and engulfed it.

Compare that old image of the Rhone and the Saone. The one flows on, blue, clear, transparent; the other side by side, turbulent, muddy and swift. The man lying here seemed to himself to be both, but most of all the clearer thinner stream. The turbulence, the force of the other is daily less and less himself, more and more an alien power to which he yet jealously clings in the body of this death, and will not, cannot part from it.

And from time to time comes a new impulse of the stronger torrent—its yellowing waters tinge the blue—it is fuller, and there is a sense of well-being; and yet that transparent river of spiritual being, clear as crystal, has been sullied, it has disappeared.

Such little trivial things too will give him back the life which is his power and his bondage;—the cup of iced coffee, that he looks for and can drink when other food nauseates, this makes him feel that he lives again and yet kills that clearer, sweeter, finer, life;—as much, in a sense, as overpowering bodily discomfort kills it—more, perhaps, for the more it overpowers the more external it is, the less it is himself.

If only he can keep from fear, for that kills all. And yet this thread of consciousness, which I have called spiritual, is not thinking any thought, it is seeing visions, and these visions are not of another world but of the sweeter, purer things of this world, transfigured and serene. He is a child again in a Cornish lane, and the grass is deep and dewy, the banks are high, crowned with little bushes nearly bare of leaf, for it is spring; deep in the grass are primroses, long stalked and growing by the handful, you can thrust your hand into the damp grass, rich in little ferns and unnamed leaves, and pluck them so; between the primroses there are violets—are they purple or grey or blue?—and here and there a celandine, golden yellow. Or he is a boy sitting on a rock; his feet are bare, the sea is shallow round him, the ripples run out, and the sun shining through them laces the fine sand below with gold. He tells the nurses that as soon as he is well he will go to the sea and dip his feet in it.

Then he thinks of music that he knows, and it comes with unutterable sweetness of cadence like music heard in dreams.

And this radiance lies not only on things imagined but on things seen. The roses brought into the room are the roses of Dorothea; the scent of the palm, in blossom outside, fills the room with an ethereal fragrance; and oh, those clusters of waxen palm flowers that his friends bring in and place in the green jug, surely it must come from that tree whose very leaves are for the healing of the nations!

It is only at night that the horror comes—no nameless horror, but the horror of fighting with the darkness; it is hot, and it stifles. The doctors have been, and he knows their report is not good though no one has told him so. The medicine bottles begin to change; there is one like a knight’s head near the candle, he knows it is only a cork in it, but it is very like the armoured head of a knight; and the darkness comes near, it oppresses all, laying a heavy hand on the world: it is too near, too heavy, all round us and weighing on us above.

He sleeps, to shout at the people in the room—he asks the nurse to expel the Arab who is beside the bed. He knows they are not there at all, but he does not want to sleep, for he will wake in that horrible strangle of breath. It is so long, if only there were any light at all! Weary, interminable length, and some lines of a poem run in his mind: