Produced by Polyvios J. Simopoulos
[Transcriber's note:
In Memoriam
Michael S. Hart (1947-2011),
Inventor of the e-Book
and
Founder of Project Gutenberg
]
=================
Across the Stream
by E. F. Benson
=================
ACROSS THE STREAM
BY E. F. BENSON
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1919
INTRODUCTION
There is a very large class of persons alive to-day who believe that not
only is communication with the dead possible, but that they themselves
have had actual experience of it. Many of these are eminent in
scientific research, and on any other subject the world in general would
accept their evidence.
There is possibly a larger class of persons who hold that all such
communications, if genuine, come not from the dead but from the devil.
This is the taught opinion of the Roman Catholic Church.
A third class, far more numerous than both of these, is sure that any
one who holds either of these beliefs is a dupe of conjurers, or the
victim of his own disordered brain. This type of robust intellect has,
during the last ten decades, affirmed that hypnotism, aviation in
machines heavier than air, telepathy, wireless telegraphy, and other
non-proved phenomena, are superstitious and unscientific balderdash. In
an earlier century it was equally certain that the earth did not go
round the sun. It is, happily, never disconcerted by the frequency with
which the superstitions and impossibilities of one generation become the
science of the next.
The first part of this book may be accepted by the first of these three
classes, the second by the second, and none of it by the third. Its aim
is to state rather than solve the subject with which it deals, and to
suggest that the dead and the devil alike may be able to communicate
with the living.
E. F. BENSON.
_BOOK I_
CHAPTER I
Certain scenes, certain pictures of his very early years of childhood,
stood out for Archie like clear sunlit peaks above the dim clouds that
shrouded the time when the power of memory was only beginning to
germinate. He had no doubt (and was probably right about it) as to which
the earliest of those was: it was the face of his nurse Blessington,
leaning over his crib. She held a candle in her hand which a little
dazzled him, but the sight of her face, tender and anxious, and divinely
reassuring, was the point of that memory. He had been asleep, and had
awoke with a start, and, finding himself alone in the midst of the
immense desolation of the dark that pressed on him like an invader from
all sides, he had lifted up his voice and yelled. Then, as by a
conjuring-trick, Blessington had appeared with her comforting presence
that quite robbed the dark of its terrors. It must still have been early
in the night, for she had not yet gone to bed, and had on above her
smooth grey hair her cap with its adorable blue ribands in it. At her
throat was the brooch made of the same stuff as the shining shillings
with which a year or two later she bought the buns and sponge-cakes for
tea. He remembered no more than that; he knew nothing of what she had
said: the whole of that memory consisted in the fact of the secure
comfort and relief which her face brought. It was just a vignette of
memory, the earliest of all; there was nothing whatever before it, and
nothing for some time after.
Gradually the horizon widened; scenes and situations in which Archie was
still a detached observer, as if looking through a telescope, made
themselves visible. He remembered gazing through the bars of the high
nursery fire-guard at the joyful glow of the fuel. At the corner of the
grate (he remembered this with extreme distinctness), there was a black
coal, the edge of which was soft and bubbly. A thin streamer of smoke
blew out of it, and from time to time this smoke caught light and flared
very satisfactorily. But all that, the joyfulness and the satisfaction,
was external to him; it was the coals and the streams of burning gas
that were in themselves joyful and satisfactory. That must have been in
the winter, and it was in the same winter perhaps that he came home with
Blessington and two other children--girls, and larger than himself--whom
he grew to believe were his sisters, through a wood of fir-trees between
the trunks of which shone a round red ball that resembled the coals in
the nursery-grate. He knew--perhaps Blessington, perhaps a sister,
perhaps his mother had told him--that it was Christmas Eve, and he saw
that when Blessington spoke to him she steamed delightfully at the
mouth, as if there had been a hot bath just inside her lips. At her
suggestion he found he could do it, too, and his sisters also;
whereafter they played hot-baths all the way home. But of the Christmas
Day that followed he had no recollection whatever.
His observation became a little less detached; he began to form in his
mind an explorer's map of the places where these phenomena occurred, to
be dimly aware that he was taking some sort of part in them, and was not
a mere spectator, and one summer evening he definitely knew that the
day-nursery and the night-nursery and the room beyond where his sisters
slept were all part of the red-brick house which he and others
inhabited, just as, according to Blessington, the rabbit which he had
seen pop into its hole in the wood beyond the lawn, had a home within
it. He had already had his bath, on a patch of sunlight that lay across
the nursery-floor, and escaping, slippery as a trout, from Blessington's
towelling hands, had run with a squeal of delight across to the window.
Outside was the lawn, which hitherto he had thought of as a thing apart,
a picture by itself, and beyond was the wood where the rabbit had a
house. On the lawn was his mother, playing croquet with his two sisters,
and of a sudden it flashed upon him that the wood and the rabbit, the
lawn and the croquet-players, the night-nursery, Blessington, the shine
of the sun low in the west, and his own wet self were all in some queer
manner part of the same thing, and made up that to which he and
Blessington went back when, at the limit of their walk, she said it was
time to go home.
"Oh, there's mummy," he cried. "Mummy!" And he danced naked at the
window.
Blessington caught him in the towel again.
"Well, I never!" she said. "That's not the way for a young gentleman to
behave. There, let me dry you, dear, and put your night-shirt on, and
you shall say good-night to your mamma out of the window."
This was duly done, and it struck Archie as a very novel and delightful
discovery that he could say good-night to his mother when she was on the
croquet-lawn and he up in the night-nursery. It shed a new light on
existence generally, and coloured with a new interest the few drowsy
moments which intervened between his being put into bed and falling
asleep. Blessington still moved quietly about the room, emptying his
bath, and putting his clothes tidy, and he just remembered her kissing
him when she had finished. He was already too suffused with drowsiness
to make any response, and he slid softly out over the tides of sleep.
That night he became acquainted with a new sort of experience, something
hitherto quite foreign to him. Once again he woke in the night and found
himself surrounded by the vast dark, save where, in a corner of the
nursery, there burned the shaded night-light. But now there was no sense
of terror; he did not want to call for Blessington, but lay open-eyed
and absorbed in the amazing thing that was happening. The night-nursery
(where he knew he was), and he with it, were expanding and extending,
till they comprised the lawn and the wood beyond the lawn, and all else
that he had ever known. His sisters and his mother and father were all
there, though he could not see them; Blessington was there, and Graves
the butler, and Walter and William, the two footmen. He could not see
them, any more than he could see the moon and the sun, which were there
also, but they were there as part of an unusual presence that filled the
place. He could not see that unusual presence either, but it was
tremendously real and filled him not in the least with awe, but with the
feeling with which Blessington's face and his mother's face inspired
him... And the next thing that he was aware of was the rattle of the
blind, and Blessington's voice saying, "Eh, what a time of morning to
have slept to. I know a sleepy-head!"
He recounted this remarkable experience to Blessington at breakfast, who
was quite sure that it was all a dream; a nice dream, but a dream.
"Wasn't a dream," said Archie firmly.
"And where did Mr. Contradiction go?" asked Blessington.
Archie knew where Mr. Contradiction went, for Mr. Contradiction lived in
a very dull corner of the nursery with his face to the wall for five
minutes.
"Well, it didn't seem like a dream," he said. "May I get down?"
"Yes, and say your grace."
"Thank God for my good dinner," said Archie, who was not attending.
"Say it again, dear," said Blessington; "and think."
"I meant breakfast," said Archie. "Amen."
The discovery of the connection, made last night, between himself in the
night-nursery and his mother on the lawn, which proved that the lawn and
the house were part of the same thing, produced further results that
day. Instead of memory consisting of different and severed pictures, it
began to flow into one coherent whole. He knew, of course, already that
at the end of the nursery passage was a wooden wicket-gate, and that
outside that was the long gallery that skirted round three sides of the
hall, while on the fourth ran a broad staircase each step of which had
to be surmounted and descended either by a series of jumps, or, if the
feet were tired, by the extension of one foot on to the next stair where
it was joined by the other; but he began now to put these isolated facts
together, and form them into the conception of a house. When the
staircase was negotiated you found yourself in a large oak-floored hall,
where you were not allowed to slide on purpose, though both Blessington
and his mother had the sense to distinguish between deliberate and
unintentional slidings. There were bright rugs spread here and there
over the hall, forming islands in a glassy sea. Archie knew it was not
made of glass really, but he chose to think that it was, for it had the
qualities of a looking-glass in that it reflected his own bare-legged
form above it, and the slipperiness of glass as exhibited in the
window-panes of the nursery, and he chose also to think that it was to
the hall-floor that the hymn alluded which was sung last Sunday morning
in a dazzling and populous place to which his mother had taken him. The
people who sang loudest were two rows of boys dressed in crinkly white
night-shirts, in company with some grown-up men who were attired in the
same curious manner. But none of them went to bed, and at a pause in the
proceedings Archie had suddenly asked his mother, in a piercing voice,
why they didn't go to bed. Evidently that had puzzled her too, for she
had no reply to give him except "Hush, darling!" which wasn't an answer
at all. Then another man had begun talking all by himself. He had a
quantity of hair on his chin which wagged in so delightful a manner when
he spoke that Archie watched him entranced for a little, and then,
afraid that his mother was missing this lovely sight, said:
"O mummy, _isn't_ that a funny man?"
Upon which Blessington, magically communicated with, appeared by his
side and whispered that they were going for a walk, and towed him down
the aisle, still rapturously looking back at the funny man. Archie had
thought it all very entertaining, but he was told afterwards by his
father that he had disgraced himself and should not go to church again
for many Sundays to come.
Archie was frightened of his father, and always went warily by the door
of the room at the dark corner of the hall where this tremendous person
lived. There were other dangers about that corner, for on the floor were
two tiger-skins which looked as if the animal in question had, with the
exception of its head, been squashed out flat, like as when he and
Blessington sometimes put a flower they had gathered on their walks
between two sheets of blotting-paper, and piled books on the top, so
that it ceased to be a flower, and became the map of a flower. Archie
wished the tigers' heads had been pressed in the same way; as it was,
they were disconcertingly solid and life-like, with long teeth and
snarling mouths and glaring eyes. He had always made Blessington come
right up to his father's door with him when he went in to say
good-night, so that she should pilot him safely past the tigers on his
entry and escort him by them again on his return. But one night his
father had come out with him, and, finding Blessington waiting there,
had divined, as by some awful black magic, why the nurse was waiting,
and had decreed that Archie should in future make his way across the
danger zone unattended. But, next evening, the trembling Archie,
hurrying away in the dusk, had fallen down on the glassy sea between the
awful Scylla and Charybdis, and, convinced that his last hour had come,
when these two cruel heads beheld him prostrate on the floor, had cried
himself to sleep from terror of that awful ending. But next day his
mother, who understood about things in general better than anybody, had
caused the tigers to make friends with him, and in token of their amity
they had each of them presented him with a whisker-hair. That assured
their friendship, and they wished it to be understood that their
snarlings and glarings were directed, not at Archie, but at Archie's
enemies. This naturally changed their whole aspect, and Archie, after he
had wished his father good-night, kissed the hairy heads that had once
been so terrifying, and thanked them for successfully keeping his
enemies from molesting him.
But though now the presence of the tigers, ceasing to be a terror by
night, had become a protection to Archie, their corner of the hall still
constituted a danger zone to be gone by swiftly and silently, lest a
raised voice or an incautious noise should cause him to be called from
within the closed door of his father's room. There were risks in that
room; you never quite knew whether you were not going to be blamed for
doing something which you had no idea was blame-worthy. One day Archie
had found a lovely wax match with a blue head to it on the floor, and
had put it in his pocket, where he fingered it delightedly, for he knew
it to be the sort which flamed when you rubbed it against your boot or
the bricks of the house, as he had seen his father do. But then, when a
little later he had come to sit on his father's knee and be shown
pictures in a book of natural history, it was detected that his small
fingers smelled of phosphorus, and when the reason was discovered, he
was told by his father that he had stolen that match. To Archie's mind
there was something inexplicably unfair and unjust about this; he knew
quite well that the match was not his, but he had no idea that it was
stealing if you appropriated something that was dropped on the floor. A
thing dropped on the floor was nobody's, and anybody, so he supposed,
might take it. It had been quite another affair when he had taken eight
lumps of sugar out of the basin on the tea-table in the drawing-room and
hidden them in his domino-box. He had been perfectly well aware that he
was stealing them, and had no sense of injustice when his mother had
promptly and soundly smacked him for it. But he intensely resented being
told by his father that he had stolen (even though he was not smacked)
when he had not the least idea that a match dropped on the floor was a
stealable article at all, and he felt it far more bitter to be unjustly
blamed than justly punished.
"But I didn't know it was stealing, daddy," said he.
"But didn't you know it wasn't yours?"
"Yes."
"And didn't you know that to take what isn't yours is stealing?"
Archie couldn't explain, but he was still quite sure he had not been
stealing...
His father's room then, at least when that potentate was in it, was a
place where extreme caution was necessary, and, however cautious you
were (he had not felt guilty of the smallest temerity in picking up that
match), you could never be quite sure that Fate, like some great
concealed cat, would not pounce upon you from the most unexpected
quarter. But, considered in itself, the room had a tremendous attraction
for him. There was a delicious smell about it, subtly compounded of the
leather backs of books and the aroma of tobacco, which to Archie's
dawning perception had something virile and masculine about it. He could
understand the manliness of the place, it answered to something that was
shared by him, and not shared by his mother or Blessington or his
sisters, and belonged to a man. The furniture and the appurtenances of
the room conveyed the same message; they were strong and solid, without
frillings or frippery, and had a decisive air and a purpose about them
which somehow concerned that mysterious difference between boys and
girls and between men and women. His mother's sitting-room, it is true,
seemed to Archie a fairy-palace of loveliness, with its spindle-legged
tables, its lace-edged curtains, its soft, silky cushions, its china,
its glittering silver toys on a particular black lacquer table, its
nameless feminine fragrance. But this room, with its solid leather
chairs, which held small limbs as in a tender male embrace, its gun-case
in the corner, its whip-rack, its few solid, sober pictures which hung
above the book-shelves, struck a different and more intimate and more
intelligible note. Archie felt that he knew what it was all about... it
was about a man, to which _genus_ he himself belonged. This particular
specimen, his father, might be unjust to him, and severe to him, but in
some secret inexplicable manner Archie understood him, though fearing
him, better than he understood either his mother or Blessington, both of
whom he loved. His two sisters, in the same way, had a quality of enigma
about them.
These floating impressions, the untranslatable instincts of early
childhood, began to thicken, when Archie was getting on for six years
old, into thoughts capable of being solidified into language. He could
not have solidified them himself, but if any one capable of presenting
them to him in actual words had asked him, "Is it this you mean?" he
would have assented. And his solidified thoughts would have taken the
following mould:
There was something odd about females, and it was a mystery into which
he did not at all want to enquire. They wore skirts, which perhaps
concealed some abnormality, which would be fearful to contemplate. They
had soft faces and soft bodies; when his mother took him on her
knee--she already said that he was getting too big a boy to sit on her
knee, which to Archie sounded very grand and delightful--she was soft to
his shoulder, and her cheek was soft to his. But when he sat on his
father's knee he felt a hard, firm substance behind him, and the
contrast was similar to the contrast between his mother's soft cushions
and his father's leather-clad chairs. And his father had a hard, bristly
cheek on which to receive Archie's good-night kiss. Judged by the
standards of pleasure and luxury, it was not nearly as nice as his
mother's, but it gave him, however great need there was for caution, a
sense of identity with himself. He was of that species... And this
conception of abnormality in women was strongly confirmed when, one
morning, he went as usual to his mother's bedroom to see her before she
went down to breakfast. She had been late in getting up that day, and,
not finding her in her bedroom, Archie's attention had been arrested by
hearing sounds from her bathroom next door, and very naturally had
turned the handle in order to enter. But a voice from inside had said:
"Is that you, darling? Wait just a minute."
"But I want to come in now," said Archie. "I'm coming in."
"Archie, I shall be very angry if you come in before I give you leave,"
said the voice. Then there were rustlings. "Come in now."
And there was his mother standing by her bath, which smelt deliciously
fragrant, in a lovely blue bath-towel dressing-gown.
"Good-morning, darling," said she. "But you must never come into a
lady's bathroom unless she gives you leave."
"Why not?" said Archie. "You come to see me in my bath without my saying
'Yes.'"
She gave that delicious bubble of laughter that reminded Archie of the
sound of cool lemonade being poured out of the bottle.
"I shan't when you're as old as me," she said. "I shall always ask your
leave. And probably you won't give it me."
"Why not? It's only me," said Archie.
"You'll know when you're older," said she.
Archie rather despised that argument: it seemed to apply to so many
situations in life. But he had already formed the very excellent habit
of crediting his mother with the gift of common sense, for was it not
she who had discovered that the snarl of the tiger-heads was a snarl not
at Archie, but at his enemies? But on this occasion it merely confirmed
his conviction that women were somehow deformed. They wore skirts
instead of breeches, and though, judging by his younger sister, they
were normal up to about the level of the knee, it seemed likely that
their legs extended no farther, but that they became like peg-tops,
swelling out in one round piece till their bodies were reached. What
confirmed this impression was that they seemed to run from their knees
instead of striding with a swung leg. Blessington always ran like that:
her feet twinkled in ridiculously short steps, and after a moment or two
she said:
"Eh, I can't run any more. I've got a bone in my leg."
"And haven't I?" asked Archie.
"No, dear: you're just made of gristle and quicksilver," said
Blessington, with a sudden lyrical spasm as she looked at the shining
face of her most beloved.
"What's quicksilver?" asked Archie. "And why haven't I got a bone in my
leg? O-o-oh!" and a sudden thought struck him. "Have women got bones in
their legs and not boys? Is that why they can't run properly? Mummy
can't run, nor can you; but William can, damn him."
"Master Archie!" said Blessington in her most severe voice.
"What for?" asked Archie.
"You must never say that, Master Archie," said Blessington, who only
called him Master Archie on impressive occasions. "You must never say
what you said after 'William can.'"
"But daddy said it to William this morning," said Archie.
Blessington still wore the iron mask on her face. It was lucky for her
that Archie did not know how puzzled she was as to the correct answer.
"Your papa says what he thinks fit," she said, "and that is right for
him. But young gentlemen never say it."
"How old shall I have to be--" began Archie.
"And look at your shoe-lace all untied," said Blessington with extreme
promptitude. "Do it up at once, or you'll be treading on it. And then it
will be time for you to go in, and you can write your letter to Miss
Marjorie before your dinner."
Miss Marjorie was the elder of Archie's two sisters. She was ten years
older than he, and at the present time was staying with her grandmother,
whom Archie strongly suspected of being either a witch or a man. She was
large and rustling, and had a bass voice and a small moustache and a
small husband, who was an earl, to whom, when he came to stay with
Archie's father, who appeared to be his son, every one paid a great deal
of unnecessary attention. Both of them, Archie's father, and Archie's
father's father, were lords, and Archie distinctly thought he ought to
be a lord too, considering that both his father and his grandfather
were. Blessington had hinted that he would be a lord too, some day, if
he were good, but when pressed she couldn't say when. In fact, there was
a ridiculous reticence about the whole matter, for when he had asked his
mother, in the presence of his grandfather, when he was going to be a
lord, his grandfather, quite inexplicably, had giggled with laughter,
and said:
"I've got one foot in the grave already, Archie, and you want me to have
both."
That was a very cryptic remark, and when Archie asked William the
footman what grandpapa Tintagel had meant, William had said that he
couldn't say, sir. On which Archie, looking hastily round, and feeling
sure that Blessington was not present, had repeated "Damn you, William,"
as daddy said.
Then William, after endeavouring not to show two rows of jolly white
teeth, had said:
"You must never say that to me, Master Archie."
In fact, there was clearly a league. Blessington and William, who didn't
love each other, as Archie had ascertained by direct questions to each,
were at one over the question of him not saying that. Under the stress
of independent evidence, Archie decided not to say it any more, without
further experiments as to the effect "it" would have on his mother. If
William and Blessington were both agreed about it, it had clearly better
not be done, any more than it was wise to walk about among the flowers
of the big, herbaceous border. The gardener and the gardener's boy and
his mother were all of one mind about that, and the gardener's boy had
threatened to turn the hose on to him if he caught him at it. The
gardener's boy was quite grown up, and so for Archie he had a weight of
authority that befitted his years.
It was a lovely, disconnected life. There were all sorts of delightful
and highly coloured strands that contributed to it, and others of a more
sombre hue, and others again quite secret, which concerned Archie alone,
and of which he never spoke to anybody. Of the delightful and highly
coloured strands there were many. Waking in the morning, and knowing
that there was going to be another day was one of them, and perhaps that
was the most delightful of all except when, rarely, it was clouded with
some trouble of the evening before, as when Archie had broken a window
in his father's study in the laudable attempt to kill a wasp with a
fire-shovel, and had been told by Blessington that his father wished to
see him the moment he was dressed in the morning. But usually the
wakings were ecstatic; and often he used to return to consciousness in
those summer months long before Blessington came in to call him. The
window was always open--all the windows in the night-nursery were opened
as soon as he got into bed--and the blinds were up, and on the ceiling
was the most delicious green light, for the early sun shone through the
branches of the beeches outside, and painted Archie's ceiling with a
pale, milky green which was adorable to contemplate. He would pull up
his night-shirt, and with his bare arms clasp his bare knees, and, lying
on his back, rather unsteadily anchored, would roll backwards and
forwards looking at the green light, and rehearsing all the delightful
probabilities of the day. Sometimes his mother had promised him that he
should go out fishing on the lake when his lessons were done, and this
implied the wonderful experience of seeing Walter or William come out on
to the lawn, and pour out of a tin gardening can a mixture of mustard
and water. When the footman did that it was certain that in a short time
the grass would be covered with worms, which William put in a tin box
lined with moss. Then Archie and William, sometimes with a sister, whose
presence, Archie thought, was not wholly desirable, since she impeded
the free flow of talk between him and William, would go down to the
lake, and William, who could do everything, put worms on hooks (they did
not seem to mind, for they said no word of protest), and sculled across
to the sluice above which was deep water, where the fish fed, and away
from the reeds, where the line got entangled, so that it was impossible
to know whether you were engaged with a fish or a vegetable. The
fishing-rod came out of his father's study--that was another delightful
male attribute about the room--and when Archie went in to ask for it,
William came too, not in his livery, but in ordinary clothes, and his
father said, "Take good care of Master Archie, William. Good sport,
Archie." Sometimes again, if he was not busy, Lord Davidstow came out
with Archie instead of William. That was somehow an honour, but Archie
did not like it so much.
Once there was a great happening. William produced a curious object that
looked like the bowl of a spoon with hooks set all round it. He said
there were going to be no worms this time, and, instead of drifting
about, he rowed up and down, while Archie, with his rod over the stern,
saw the spoon flashing through the water. Then a great shadow came over
it, and Archie felt the rod bend in his hands. He was so excited that he
stepped on to the seat of the boat, in order to see better, and promptly
fell overboard.
He was not the least frightened, and rather enjoyed the splash and the
sense of soda-water round him. With both hands he held on to the
fishing-rod, which seemed an absolutely essential thing to do, and sank
down, down in the deep water, seeing it green and yellow above his head.
And then instantly he knew he was going to be drowned, and a feeling
precisely identical to that which he had experienced one night when he
woke, of a universal presence round about him, took complete possession
of him. Then, even before he was conscious of the least sense of choking
or discomfort, but was still only aware of coolness and depth and
greenness, a great dark splaying object came right down upon him from
above, and he found himself tucked underneath a human arm, coatless and
in shirt-sleeves which he took to be William's. But still Archie did not
let go of the fishing-rod, and mistakenly trying to speak, bidding
William take care of it, his mouth and apparently his whole interior
filled with water, and drowning suddenly seemed to be a disagreeable
process. Next moment, however, his head emerged from the water again,
and William caught hold of the boat.
"Let go the rod, Master Archie," said he, "and catch hold of the boat."
"But there's a fish on it," spluttered Archie.
"Do as I tell you, sir," said William quite crossly.
Archie had been told that, when he went out in the boat with William, he
had to do precisely as William told him. He was not, it is true, in the
boat at the moment, but the injunction probably applied. So he let go of
the rod, and the moment afterwards found himself violently propelled
over the side of the boat, and tumbled all abroad on the floor of it.
They were but a dozen yards from land, and William having once got
Archie into the boat, grabbed hold of the rod with his spare hand, and
swam, shoving the boat in front of him.
"Oh, well done, William. Oh, William, I love you," screamed Archie when,
having righted himself, he observed this brilliant manoeuvre. "Is the
fish there still?"
William scrambled up the bank, still holding the rod.
"Run indoors at once, Master Archie," he said. "Don't wait a moment."
"But William, is the fish--" began Archie.
"Do as I tell you, sir," said William again. "I'll bring the fish for
you, if I get him."
Archie ran with backward glances across the lawn, where he was met by
Blessington who had observed the accident out of the window, and, before
he could explain half the thrilling things that had happened, was
undressed and rubbed down and put between blankets. And then, after a
few minutes, in came William, having also changed his clothes, with a
great pike, and his father followed and shook hands with William, and
his mother did the same, saying things that made William blush and stand
first on one foot and then on the other, murmuring: "It was nothing at
all, my lady," and Archie asked if he and William might go out again
that afternoon, and catch another pike. Then in came his younger sister,
Jeannie, who was only two years his senior. She appeared to be on the
point of crying, and she flung her arms round Archie's neck in an
uncomfortable sort of way, and Archie told her she was messing him.
After that, in reaction from those thrilling affairs, he felt suddenly
tired, and, being encouraged to go to sleep, nestled down in the
blankets and woke up to find that there was his fish stuffed for dinner,
and for himself and William an era of unexampled popularity.
Archie did not understand at the time why he had suddenly blossomed into
such favouritism, unless it was for having clung tight to his father's
fishing-rod but he enjoyed it immensely. It was pleasant, too, not long
afterwards, to be given a gold watch by his father, to present to
William, with a gold chain provided by his mother. And William permitted
him to put the gold watch into one waistcoat pocket, and the end of the
gold chain into the other, and his father and mother and Jeannie all
shook hands with William again (every one seemed to be spending their
time in shaking hands with William). So Archie, since William was his
friend more than anybody else's, kissed him, in order to mark the
difference between himself and other people with regard to him. He was
surprised to find that William had got a soft cheek like his mother's,
and supposed that men's faces grew hard as they grew older. He instantly
mentioned this surprising fact, and William appeared rather glad to
leave the room. But in all Archie's life no event ever occurred which
approached the splendour and public magnificence of this whole
experience.
Every day the world widened, and, lying looking at the green light on
the ceiling in the cool still mornings of that summer which seemed to
last for years and years, Archie found himself not only speculating on
what fresh joys the day would bring, but joining together in his mind
the happenings that at the time seemed disconnected, but which proved to
be part of a continuous thread of existence. Just as the nursery
passage, and the steep stairs, and his father's room, and the lawn, and
the lake passed from being isolated phenomena into pieces of a whole, so
things that happened proved to be the experiences of the person who was
known to others as Archie Morris, and to Archie as himself. Sometimes he
so tingled with vigour when he woke that, contrary to orders, he stepped
out of bed and leaned out of the window, to look at the bright dewy
world, with one ear alert to hear Blessington's foot along the passage,
in order to leap back into bed again, for now he had the night-nursery
to himself, and Blessington slept next door. At that hour the lawn would
be covered with a shimmering grey mantle, pearl-coloured, and here and
there a few diamonds had got in by mistake which shone with just the
brilliance of his mother's necklace. Perhaps these were the bed-clothes
of the lawn, and when day came, they were covered over by the green
bed-spread like that which lay on his own bed. The lake away to the
right had different bed-clothes, thicker ones, but of the same colour.
No doubt they were thicker because the lake was colder, for on some
mornings he could not see through them at all. To the left, out of the
window, rose the wood where the rabbits lived; sometimes one of them, an
early riser like Archie, would have found a gap in the netting and was
out on the lawn nibbling the grass. The gardener did not approve of
that, for the lawn, it appeared, belonged to the people who lived in
Archie's house, and not to the folk in the wood, and this was a trespass
on the part of the rabbits, for which the punishment, rather a severe
one, was death by shooting. This had added a new terror to the notice in
another wood where he and Blessington sometimes walked, which announced
that trespassers would be prosecuted. Blessington was foolhardy enough
to disregard that notice altogether, saying that it was his daddy's
notice, and didn't apply to them; but for some time Archie never chose
that walk for fear that Blessington might be wrong about it, and that
they would meet somebody in the wood who would instantly shoot them both
for trespassing. But in childish fashion he kept those terrors to
himself, sooner than enquire about them, till one day they actually did
meet in that wood a man with a gun. Then in a sudden wild terror Archie
clung to Blessington, crying out, "Oh, ask him not to shoot us this
time!"
"Eh, darling," said Blessington. "Who's going to shoot us? It's only one
of your daddy's keepers."
"No, but he will shoot us," screamed Archie. "We're trespassers, and
he'll shoot us like the rabbits."
Matters being thereupon explained, and Archie convinced that he and
Blessington were not going to be shot for trespassing, he found that he
could make up for himself an entrancing story of how Master Rabbit and
his nurse (who were good) never trespassed on the lawn, and that the
rabbits he saw there corresponded to Grandmamma Tintagel, and so he did
not care whether they were shot or not.
These stories which he told himself in the early morning, looking out on
to the lawn, or lying curled up on his back in bed, looking at the green
ceiling, were not vague, dream-like imaginings, but were endowed with a
vividness that made Blessington's entry with his bath and his clothes
seem less real than they. It became impossible indeed for him to
disentangle reality (as judged by people like his father and the
gardener) from imagination. He told himself so strongly that there was
Grandmamma Tintagel sitting on the lawn, trespassing and nibbling grass
for her breakfast, that her presence there, or her absence when there
was no trespassing rabbit, became things as vivid as his subsequent
dressing and breakfast. Had he been definitely asked if he believed it
was Grandmamma Tintagel, he would have said "No"; but in his imaginative
life, so hard for a child to dissociate from his real life, there was no
question as to her identity. It happened also that at this time his
mother was reading to him the realest of all books, namely, _Alice in
Wonderland_. No imaginative boy of five could possibly doubt the actual
existence of the White Rabbit in that convincing history, and Archie
would not have been surprised if, one morning, there had proved to be a
white rabbit sitting by the fence, who looked at his watch and put on
his gloves. Yet he never spoke of this possibility even to Blessington
or William; it did not belong to the sphere of things about which it was
reasonable to converse to grown-up people, simply because they were
stupid about certain matters and would not understand him. The fact that
Grandmamma Tintagel sometimes sat on the lawn in the early morning was
among the topics which he kept quite completely to himself.
There were other such topics. Sometimes, when he lay in bed, waiting for
Blessington to call him, and did not choose to get up and look out of
the window, it was because these other secret affairs engaged him. If he
lay still, and stared at the green-hued ceiling, curious waves of shadow
appeared to pass over it, and it seemed like that sunny floor of water
that had closed above his head on the morning when he fell out of the
boat. There was he lying in bed deep below some surface of liquid light
that cut him off from the outer world, and he wondered if in a moment a
splayed starfish of arms and legs which turned out to be William would
dive down for him, and bring him up among the common things again. But
William never made this impressive entry through the ceiling, and if he
stared long enough, Archie only seemed to himself to slip down and down,
gently and rapturously, through deep water, and another world, the world
of hidden things that dwelt below the surface, came slowly into
existence, like as when, on mounting a slope, fresh valleys and
hillsides arise and unfurl themselves. Only, in this case, you had to go
down somewhere inside yourself to become aware of them. And something,
some inner consciousness, recognized and hailed them. It was not that he
was getting sleepy, and sinking into the waters of dreams; rather the
experience was the result of a more vivid life and awakened perceptions.
But he never got further than that, and during the day he was far too
busy with the affairs of normal life to trouble about those perceptions
that dawned on him on still quiet mornings when he lay a-bed and stared
at the ceiling with its flickering green lights and moving shadows.