Эдвард Бенсон
Up and Down

OCTOBER, 1915

For two days the grand piano remained on its side at the bottom of the stairs, while furniture choked and eddied round it, as when a drain is stopped up and the water cannot flow away. It really seemed that it would stop there for ever, and that the only chance of playing it again involved being strapped into a chair, and laid sideways on the floor. Eventually the foreman of the removal company kindly promised to come back next morning, take out the drawing-room window, and sling the creature in. This would require a regiment of men, and the sort of tackle with which thirteen-inch guns are lifted into a ship. He hoped (he could go no further than that) that the stone window ledge would stand the strain; I hoped so too. My wits, I suppose, were sharpened by this hideous prospect, and I telephoned to the firm who had made the piano to send down three men and see if they concurred in the impossibility of getting the piano upstairs except via the doubtful window-ledge. In half an hour they had taken it up the staircase without touching the banisters or scratching the wall.

Magically, as by the waving of a wand, the constipation on the ground-floor was relieved; it was as if the Fairy Prince (in guise of three sainted piano-movers) had restored life to the house. The tables and chairs danced into their places; bookshelves became peopled with volumes; the china clattered nimbly into cupboards, and carpets unrolled themselves on the stairs. There was dawn on the wreck, and Kino and I set to work on the great scheme of black and white floor decoration which was destined to embellish in a manner unique and surprising the whole of the ground-floor.

Linoleum was the material of it, an apotheosis of linoleum. Round the walls of the passages, the hall, the front room, were to run borders of black and white, with panels in recesses, enclosing a chess-board of black and white squares. Roll after roll of linoleum arrived, and with gravers we cut them up, and tacked down the borders and the panels and the chess-board with that admirable and headless species of nail known as "little brads." The work was not noiseless like the building of the Temple of Solomon, but when it was done, my visitors were indeed Queens of Sheba, for no more spirit was left in them when on their blinded eyes there dawned the glories of the floors that were regular and clean as marble pavements, and kind to the tread. No professional hand was permitted to assist in these orgies of decoration; two inspired amateurs did it all, and one of them did about twenty times as much as the other. (The reader may form his own conclusion as to whether modesty or the low motive of seeking credit where the credit belongs to another prompts my reticence on this point.) Then there were wonderful things to be done with paint (and I really did a good deal of that); ugly tiles were made beautiful with shining black, that most decorative of all hues when properly used, and in one room the splendour given to a door and a chimneypiece put Pompeii in its proper place for ever. And all the time, as we worked, and put something of human personality into the house, the spirit of home was peeping in at windows shyly, tentatively, or hiding behind curtains, or going softly about the pleasant passages, till at last one evening, as we finished some arrangement of books in the front-room, I was conscious that it had come to stay. It did not any longer shrink from observation or withdraw itself when it thought I got a glimpse of it. It stood boldly out, smiling and well pleased, and next day, when I woke for a moment in the hour before dawn, with sparrow-twitters in the trees outside, it was in my room, and I turned over contentedly and went to sleep again. Was it that the disconsolate ghost in Oakley Street had come here, transferring itself from the empty shell? Had it followed, like a deserted cat, the familiar furniture, and the familiar denizens? Or had a new spirit of home been born? Certainly the conviction that the house had found itself, that it had settled down to an incarnate plane again was no drowsy fantasy of the night; for in the morning, when I went downstairs, the whole aspect of things had changed. I knew I was chez moi, instead of just carrying on existence in some borrowed lodging.

That morning an enormous letter, chiefly phonetic, arrived from Seraphina. It was difficult to read, because when Seraphina wished to erase a word, she had evidently smudged her finger over the wet ink, and written something on top of it. At first I felt as bewildered as King Belshazzar, when on the wall there grew the inconjecturable doom; but since I had no Daniel in fee, I managed, by dint of trying again and again, to make out the most of her message. She relapsed sometimes into the dialect of Alatri, but chiefly she stuck to the good old plan, recommended by Mr. Roosevelt, of putting down the letters like which the word, when spoken, would sound. But by dint of saying it aloud, I caught the gist of it all. No word had come from Alatri since Francis's return, and even as I read the glamour of that remote existence grew round me.

She had written before, she said, both to Signorino Francesco and to me, but she supposed that the letters had gone wrong, for they said the Government soaked off the stamps from the envelopes and sold them again. But that was all right; they wanted every penny they could get to spend against the devil-Austrians. Dio! What tremendous battles! How the gallant Italian boys were sweeping them out of the Trentino! And Goriza had fallen twenty times already. Surely it must have fallen by now. And there was the straight road to Trieste…

The flame of war had set Alatri alight; there was scarce a man of military age left on the island, except the soldiers who from time to time were quartered there. The price of provisions was hideous, but thrifty folk had planted vegetables in their gardens, and if God said that only the rich might have meat, why, the poor would get on very well without. She herself had planted nutritious beans in the broad flower-bed, as soon as the flowers were over, as she had said in her previous letter (not received), and already she had made good soup from them, since Signorino Francesco had told her to use garden produce for herself. But Signora Machonochie had come to borrow some beans, and, as the beans belonged to the Signori, Seraphina wished for permission to give her them, since they would otherwise be dried, and make good soup again when the Signori returned. For herself —scusi– she thought the Signora Machonochie was a good soul (though greedy), for she was always making mittens for the troops on the snow of the frontier against the winter-time, and went about the roads perpetually knitting, so that one day she, not looking where she was going, charged into Ludovico's manure cart, and was much soiled. So, if it was our wish that she should have some beans, she should have them, but there would be fewer bottles in the store-room.

Then Seraphina became more of a friend, less of a careful housekeeper. She continued:

"The house expects your excellencies' dear presence whenever you can return. All the rooms are like Sunday brooches: there is no speck of dust. Pasqualino has been gone this long time, for as soon as we went to war with the stinking beasts, up he goes to the military office, and swears on the Holy Book that he is just turned nineteen, and has come to report himself to the authorities. Of course, they looked him out in their register, and he was but eighteen, but he confessed his perjury when it was no longer any use to deny it, and they were not displeased with him, nor did he go to prison, as happened to Luigi. But they wanted young fellows for the Red Cross who look after the wounded, and, after many prayers, Pasqualino was permitted, in spite of his perjury, to go and serve. Gold buttons, no less, on his jacket; so smart he looked; and there was Caterina smiling and crying all in one, and she gulped and kissed him, and kissed him again and gulped, and for all the world she was as proud of him as the priest on Sunday morning, and would not have had him stay. She came up here to help in the house, and it is all for love of Pasqualino, for once I offered her some soldi for the help she had given me in dusting, and she just smacked my hand, and the soldi fell out, and we kissed each other, for then I understood; and she asked to go to Pasqualino's room and sat on the bed, and looked at his washstand, and stroked the coat he had left behind. Oh, I understand young hearts, Signor, for all that I am old, and I left her alone there, and presently she came down again and told me her trouble. It was the night before he went, and your excellency must not think hardly of him or her. Scusi, if I give advice, but they were young, and did not think, for you do not think when you are young, and they are beautiful, both of them, and when they are beautiful, who can wonder? She knows he will marry her, and, indeed, Alatri knows it too, and thus the bambino will not be blackened. Pasqualino is a good boy, and in spite of it, she wanted him to go for the sake of the wounded, thinking nothing of herself and the little one within her. Alatri will be blind to the bambino, and wait for him to make it all right.

"Eh, what a pen I have, for it runs on like a tap! All this last month I have been writing a little every day, and now it is nearly finished. But still I think the Signor would like to hear of Teresa of the Cake-shop. There was never such a wonder; it was like a miracle. Suddenly she would have no more of the cake-shop, but must needs go to Naples, and learn to be a nurse, and look after the wounded, as Pasqualino had done. Never, as the Signor knows, had she gone down to the Marina since fifteen years ago (or is it sixteen?), when she went to meet her promesso, Vincenzo Rhombo, who had come back from Buenos Ayres, and even as he landed on the Marina, was stricken in her very arms with the cholera and died that day. Never since then had Teresa gone to the Marina, whatever was the festa or the fireworks; but now nothing would serve her but that she must go to help in the war. She had money, for the cake-shop had done well all these years, and she must needs go and spend her money in learning nursing in Naples. All of a sudden it was so with her, and one day a month ago she asked me to come down with her to see her forth. And when we came to the Marina, Signor, she shut her eyes, for she could not bear to see it, and asked me to lead her along the quay to where the boats took off the passengers by the steamer. All along the quay I led her, she with eyes closed; but when we came to the steps, where Vincenzo had landed and fell into her arms a stricken man, then at last she opened her eyes, or the tears opened them, and she fell on her knees and kissed the place where Vincenzo had been joined to her. She kissed it, and she kissed it, and then suddenly her tears dried, and she stepped into the boat and waved her hand to her friends and said: 'Vincenzo wishes it; Vincenzo wishes it.' Oh, a brave woman! she had not baked her heart in the cake-shop.

 

"My humble duty to you, excellency, Seraphina has no more to say, but that often the step goes up and down in the studio. I think, as Donna Margherita said, that someone guards the house. It is as a sentry, who makes the house secure. But it will be a good day when I hear there the steps of the Signorino and of you. All humble compliments and the good wishes of a friend who is Seraphina.

"Scusi! Shall I sow the flower seeds in the garden that were saved from last year? If the Signori will not be here in the spring, what need to sow them, for they will keep, will they not? But if there is a chance of your coming, the garden must needs be gay with a welcome."

Right in the middle of the black cloud of war there came a rift, as I read Seraphina's budget of news. Some breeze parted the folds of it, and I saw a peep of blue sky and bluer sea, and the stone-pine and the terraced gardens, with the morning-glory rioting on the wall. But how incredibly remote it seemed, as if it belonged to some previous cycle of existence; as if the closed doors of eternity that swing shut when we are born had opened again, and I looked on some previous incarnation. I thought I remembered (before the war came) experiences like those which Seraphina's letter suggested, but they seemed like the affairs of childhood, when imagination is so mixed up with reality that we scarcely know whether there are robbers in the shrubbery or not. We pretend that there are, and even while we pretend dusk falls and the shrubbery has to be passed, and we are not certain whether there are not robbers there, after all. It was so with the recollection of the things of which Seraphina spoke (and even they were mixed up with war). I felt I might have dreamed them, or have invented them for myself, or have experienced them in some pre-natal existence. Just that one glimpse I had of them, and no more; then the rift in the clouds closed up again, and blacker than ever before, except perhaps during the days of the Retreat from Mons, grew the gigantic bastion of storm through which we had to pass… Even so once, thunderclouds collected before me when I was on the top of an Alpine peak, gathering and growing thicker with extraordinary swiftness. A rent came in them for a moment, and through it we could see the pastures and villages ten thousand feet below. Then it closed up, and we had to pass through the clouds out of which already the lightning was leaping before we could arrive on the safe familiar earth again.

I could scarcely realize, then, what life was like before the war, and now, looking forward, it seemed impossible to imagine that there could be any end to the murderous business. This month a wave of pessimism swept over London; even those who had been most optimistic were submerged in it; and all that was possible was to go on, the more occupied the better, and, anyhow, not to talk about it. A dozen times had our hopes flared high; a dozen times they had been extinguished.

Only a few months ago we had seen the advance of the Russian armies through Galicia, and had told each other that the relentless steam-roller had begun its irresistible progress across the Central Empires, leaving them flattened out and ground to powder in its wake. But now, instead of their being flattened out in its wake, it appeared that they had only been concentrated and piled high in front of it, for now the billow of the enemies' armies, poised and menacing, had broken and swept the steam-roller far back on the beach, where now it remained stuck in the shingle with quenched furnaces and a heavy list. Przemysl had been retaken; the newly-christened Lvoff had become Lemberg again; Warsaw had fallen; Ivangorod had fallen; Grodno and Vilna had fallen. For the time, it is true, that great billow had spent itself, but none knew yet what damage and dislocation had been wrought on the steam-roller. Russia's friends assured us that the invincible resolve of her people had suffered no damage, and expressed their unshaken belief in the triumphant march of her destiny. But even the most eloquent preachers of confidence found it difficult to explain precisely on what their confidence was based.

That was not all, nor nearly all. In the Balkans Bulgaria had joined the enemy; the fat white fox Ferdinand had kissed his hand to his august brothers in Vienna and Berlin, and soon, when Servia had been crushed, they would meet, and in each other's presence confirm the salutation, and be-Kaiser and be-Czar each other. From one side the Austro-German advance had begun, from the other the Bulgarian, and it was certain that in a few weeks we should see Servia extinguished – exterminated even as Belgium had been. It was useless to imagine that all the despairing gallantry of that mountain people could stand against the double invasion, or to speak of the resistance in the impregnable mountain passes, which would take months to overcome. Such talk was optimism gone mad, even as in the Retreat from Mons certain incredible tacticians in the Press assured us that this was all part of a strategic move, whereby the German lines of communication would be lengthened. Certainly their lines of communication were being lengthened, for they were pressing the Allies, who were totally unable to stand against that first rush, across half France. So now only insane interpreters could give encouraging comments on the news from Servia. Servia, who had been but a king's pawn to open the savage game that was being played over the length and breadth of Europe, was taken and swept off the board; in a few weeks at the most we should see the power of Germany extending unbroken from Antwerp on the West to Constantinople on the East. Allied to Bulgaria and Turkey, with Servia crushed, the way to the East, should she choose to go Eastwards, lay open and undefended in front of her. It seemed more than possible, too, that Greece, who had invited the troops of the Allies to Salonika, would join the triumphant advance of the Central Empires. Our diplomacy, as if it had been some card game played by children, had been plucked from our hands and scattered over the nursery table; every chance that had been ours had been thrown on to the rubbish heap, and Germany, going to the rubbish heap, had picked up our lost opportunities and shown us how to use them. It was impossible (it would also have been silly) to be optimistic over these blunders; the Balkan business was going as badly as it possibly could.

There was worse yet. Before the end of the month no one, unless, like the ostrich, he buried his eyes in the sand and considered that because he saw nothing there was nothing to see, had any real hope of a successful issue to the Dardanelles expedition, and it was with an aching sense of regret that one recalled the brave days when the Queen Elizabeth went thundering into the Straits, and we were told that but a mile or two divided us from victory. But what miles! They seemed quite sufficient, to divide us, even as when on board ship you are told that only a plank lies between yourself and a watery grave, the plank will do very well indeed to keep off the watery grave. That mile or two had the same stubborn quality; months of valiant endeavour, endless sacrifice, and sickening mistakes had not brought us any nearer our goal.

It was useless to blink these obvious facts, and I found one morning that it would be wiser to sit down and just stare them in the face, get used to them, as far as might be, rather than shuffle them out of sight, or pretend to see silver linings to clouds which, in spite of the proverb, had not got any. There was a pit of clouds. Somehow that must be explored. It was no use to pretend to put a lid on it, and say there was no such pit. I had to go down into it.

I descended then into this "black tremendous sea of cloud." It was not the invariable daily tale of ill-success in the war that caused it to form in my brain, though I suppose it was that which consolidated it. It came like an obsession. I had gone to bed one night with hope of good news next day; I had taken pleasure in my jolly new house! I had dined with friends and I slept well. But when I woke the Thing was there. There was no bad news in the paper that morning, but in the papers and in my bed, and about my path, and in my breakfast, there was a blackening poison that spread and sprouted like some infernal mushroom of plague. I found that I did not care for anything any more; there was the root of this obsession. I thought of the friends I should presently meet when I went out to my work, and the thought of them roused no feeling of any kind. There was a letter from Francis, saying that in a week's time he would have three days' leave, and proposed that he should spend them with me. There was a letter from Kino, saying that he had found the book which I so much wanted, and would bring it round after breakfast, and should we go out, as we had vaguely planned, that afternoon to Kew, and get the country whiff from the flaming autumn? Certainly if he liked, thought I, for it does not matter. I did not want to go, nor did I want not to go; it was all one, for over all and in all was the blackness of the pit of clouds. We went accordingly, and to me his face and his presence were no more than the face and the presence of any stranger in the street. He had lost his meaning, he was nonsense; it might have been some gesticulating machine that walked by me. We looked at the flaring towers of golden and russet leaf, and I saw them as you see something through the wrong end of a telescope. I saw them through glass, through a diving bell. The sun was warm, the sky was flecked with the loveliest mackerel scales of cloud; I was with a friend stepping along mossy paths below the beech-trees, and within me was a centre-point of consciousness that only wailed and cried out at the horror of existence. The glory of the autumn day was as magnificent as ever; the smell of the earth and the tea-like odour of dry leaves had in itself all the sting and thrill that belonged to it, and by my side was the friend with whom the laying of linoleum had been so wonderful a delight, because we laid it together, and I was cut off from it all. Everything was no more than dried flowers, sapless, brittle and colourless.

Those days were no more than hours of existence, to which somehow my flesh clung, though the fact of existence was just that which was so tragic and so irremediable. By occupying myself, by doing anything definite that required attention, even if it was only acknowledging the receipt of subscriptions, or of writing begging letters on behalf of the fund for which I worked, I could cling to the sheer cliff and still keep below me that sea of cloud. But the moment that the automatism only of life was wanted, the sea rose and engulfed me again. When I walked along a street, when I sat down to eat, when, tired with conscious effort of the mind, I relaxed attention, it drowned me. The effort to keep my head above it was infinitely fatiguing, and when at nights, having been unable to find something more to do, however trivial, or when, unable to hold the dam-gate any longer, I went up to bed, the nightmare of existence yelled out and smothered me. Huge and encompassing, it surged about a pinprick of consciousness which was myself; black wrinkled clouds brooded from zenith to horizon, and I knew that beyond the horizon, and to innumerable horizons beyond that, there reached that interminable blackness in saecula saeculorum. Or, again, as in some feverish dream, behold, it was I, who just before had been a pinprick in everlasting time and space, who now swelled up to infinite dimensions, and was surrounded for ever and ever by gross and infinitesimal nothingness. At one moment I was nothing set in the middle of cosmic darkness; at the next I was cosmic darkness itself, set in a microscopic loneliness, an alpha and omega of the everlasting midnight. No footstep fell there, no face looked out from it, neither of God nor of devil, nor of human kind. I was alone, as I had always been alone; here was the truth of it, for it was but a fancy figment that there was a scheme, a connection, a knitting of the members of the world to each other, and of them to God. I had made that up myself; it was but one of the foolish stories that I had often busied myself with. But I knew better now; I was alone, and all was said.

Now there are many who have been through much darker and deeper waters than these, without approaching real melancholia. To the best of my belief I did no more than paddle at the edge of them. Certainly they seemed to close over me, except for that one fact that even where they were deepest, any manual or mental act that required definite thought was sufficient for the moment to give me a breath of air. All pleasure, and, so it seemed to me, all love had become obscured, but there was still some sense of decency left that prevented me from lying down on the floor, and saying in the Italian phrase, "Non po' combattere." There was a double consciousness still. I said to myself, "I give up!" but I didn't act as if I gave up, nor did I tell another human soul that in myself I had done so. I confessed to depression, but didn't talk about it. I wrote a perfectly normal and cordial letter to Francis, saying how welcome he would be, though I felt that there was no such person. Still, I wrote to him, and did not seriously expect that my note would be returned through the dead-letter office. And this is precisely the reason why I have written these last pages; it is to assure all those who know, from inside, what such void and darkness means, that the one anchor is employment, and the absolute necessity is behaving in a normal manner. It does not seem worth while; it seems, too, all but impossible, but it is not quite impossible, and there is nothing which is so much worth while. Until you actually go over the edge, stick to the edge. Do not look down into the abyss, keep your eyes on such ground as there is, and find something there: a tuft of grass, a fallen feather, the root of a wild plant – and look at it. If you are so fortunate as to discover a little bare root there, something easily helped, cover it up with a handful of kindly soil. (You will not slip while you are doing this.) If a feather, be sure that some bird has flown over, and dropped it from a sunlit wing; if a tuft of grass, think of the seed from which it came. Besides, if God wills that you go down into Hell, He is there also…

Hold on, just hold on. Sometimes you will look back on the edge to which you clung, and will wonder what ailed you.

It was so with me. I merely held on till life, with its joys and its ties, began to steal back into me, even as into a dark room the light begins to filter at dawn. At no one second can you say that it is lighter than it was the second before, but if you take a series of seconds, you can see that light is in the ascendant. A certain Friday, for instance, had been quite intolerable, but, just as you look out of the window, and say "It is lighter," I found on Saturday that, though nothing in the least cheerful had happened in the interval, I didn't so earnestly object to existence, while a couple of days later I could look back on Friday and wonder what it had all been about. What it had been about I do not know now: some minute cell, I suppose, had worked imperfectly, and lo! "the scheme of things entire" not only seemed, but, I was convinced, was all wrong. Subjective though the disturbance was, it could project itself and poison the world.

Two things certainly I learned from it, namely, that manual or mental employment, hateful though it is to the afflicted, is less afflicting than idleness; the second, that the more you keep your depression to yourself the better. I wish that the infernal pessimists whose presence blackens London would learn this. These ravens with their lugubrious faces and their croaking accents, hop obscenely about from house to house, with a wallet full of stories which always begin, "They say that – " and there follows a tissue of mournful prognostications. They project their subjective disturbance, and their tale beginning "They say that – " or "I am told that – " generally means that Mr. A. and Mr. B., having nothing to do, and nothing to think about, have sat by the fire and ignorantly wondered what is going to happen. Having fixed on the worst thing, whatever it is, that their bilious imagination can suggest, they go out to lunch, and in accents of woe proceed to relate that "They say that – " and state all the dismal forebodings which their solitary meditations have hatched. In fact, the chief reason for which I wish that I was a Member of Parliament is that I could then bring in a Bill (or attempt to do so) for the Suppression of Pessimists. I would also gladly vote for a Bill that provided for the Suppression of Extreme Optimists on the same grounds, namely, that to be told that the Kaiser has cancer, and that the burgesses of Berlin are already starving, leads to a reaction such as the pessimists produce by direct means. To be told that the Russians are incapable of further resistance on the authority of "They say that – " depresses everybody at once; and to be told that there isn't a potato to be had in all Germany for love or money (particularly money) gives rise to an alcoholic cheerfulness which dies out and leaves you with a headache of deferred hopes. These grinning optimists were particularly hard to bear when the terrible Retreat from Mons was going on, for they screamed with delight at the notion that we were lengthening out the German lines of communication, which subsequently would be cut, as by a pair of nail-scissors lightly wielded, and the flower of the German army neatly plucked like a defenceless wayside blossom. The same smiling idiots were to the fore again during the great Russian retreat, and told us to wait, finger on lip, with rapturous eyes, till the Germans had reached the central steppes of Russia, when they would all swiftly expire of frosts, Cossacks and inanition. But, after all, these rose-coloured folk do very little harm; they make us go about our work with a heady sense of exhilaration, which, though it soon passes off, is by no means unpleasant. At the worst extreme optimists are only fools on the right side, whereas pessimists are bores and beasts on the wrong one.

Pessimists have had a high old time all this month. They do not exactly rejoice when things go ill for us, but misfortune has a certain sour satisfaction for them, because it fulfils what they thought (and said) in September. Thus now they nod and sigh, and proceed to tell us what they augur for November. If only they would keep their misery to themselves, nobody would care how miserable they are; but the gratuitous diffusion of it is what should be made illegal. For the microbe of pessimism is the most infectious of bacteria; it spreads in such a manner that all decent-minded folk, when they have fallen victims to it, ought surely (on the analogy of what they would do if it was influenza) to shut themselves up and refuse to see anybody. But because the disease is one of the mind, it appears that it is quite proper for the sufferer to go and sneeze in other people's faces. There ought to be a board of moral health, which by its regulations would make it criminal to spread mental disorders, such as pessimism. I had so severe an attack of it myself, when the clouds encompassed me, that I have a certain right to propose legislation on the subject. Those afflicted by the painful disease which, like typhoid, is only conveyed through the mouth, in terms of articulate speech, should be fined some moderate sum for any speech that was likely to propagate pessimism. If the disease is acute, and the sufferer feels himself in serious danger of bursting unless he talks, he would of course be at liberty to shut himself up in any convenient room out of earshot, and talk till he felt better. Only it should be on his responsibility that his conversation should not be overheard by anybody, and, in suspension of the common law of England, a wife should be competent to witness against her husband.