This Is the End by Stella Benson (best novels of all time .TXT) 📕

"You have a poetic look."

"What look is that?" asked Mr. Russell, much pleased. It was twenty years since he had even remembered that he possessed a look of his own.

"A silly sullen look," said Jay. Presently she added: "But it must have been disappointing to find yourself a poet in Victorian times. I always think of you Olders and Wisers as coming out of your stuffy nineteenth century into our nice new age with a sigh of relief."

"Oh no," said Mr. Russell. "You must remember that when we were born into it, it became our nice new age, and therefore to us there is no age like it."

"It seems incredible," said Jay. "Did Older and Wiser people ever live violently, ever work--work hard--until their brains were blind and they cried because they were so tired? Did they ever get drowned in seas full of foaming ambitions? Did they ever fight without dignity but with joy for a cause? Did they ever shout and jump with joy in their pyjamas in the moonlight? Did they ever feel just drunk with being young, and in at the start? And were Older and Wiser people's jokes ever funny?"

"We were fools often," said Mr. Russell. "Once, when I was fifteen, I bit my hand--and here is the scar--because I thought I had found a new thing in life, and I thought I was the first discoverer. But as to jokes, you are on very dangerous ground there. One's sense of humour is a more tender point than one's heart, especially an Older and Wiser sense of humour. You know, we think the jokes of your nice new age not half so funny as ours. But as neither you nor I make jokes, that obstacle need not come between us."

"Oh, I think difference of date is never in itself an obstacle," said Jay. "Time is not important enough to be an obstacle."

"You and I know that," said Mr. Russell.

A little unnoticed knot of Salvationists surprised Jay at a distance by singing the tune of a sentimental song popular five years ago, and then they surprised her again, as she passed them, and heard the words to which the tune was being sung. Brimstone had usurped the place of the roses in that song, and the love left in it was not apparently the kind of love that Hackney understands.

"Why don't they sing the old hymn tunes?" asked Jay. "Or tunes like 'Abide with Me'--not very old or very good, but worn down with devotion like the steps of an old church? Why do they take the drama out of it all?"

Chloris at that moment introduced drama into the drive by jumping out of the back seat of Christina. I must, I suppose, admit that Chloris was not Really Quite a Lady. On the contrary, motor 'buses were the only motors she knew. She mistook the estimable Christina for a deformed motor 'bus, and when she smelt Victoria Park, she jumped out. Even for Chloris this was an unsuccessful day. A flash of yelping lightning caught the tail of Jay's eye, and she looked round to see her dignified dog, upside down, skid violently down a steep place into the gutter, and there disappear beneath the skirt of a female stranger who was poised upon the kerb. Unhurt, but probably blushing furiously beneath her fur over her own vulgarity, Chloris was retrieved, and spent the rest of the drive in wiping all traces of the accident off her ribs on to the cushions of Christina. I am glad that Mr. Russell's Hound was not there to witness poor Chloris's unsophisticated confession of caste.

"Where are we going?" asked Jay, when she was calm again.

"God knows where ..." said Mr. Russell.

"I'm always coming across districts of that name," said Jay severely. "I often direct my enquiring fares to the region of God Knows Where. It is most unsatisfying. Where are we going?"

"On for ever," said Mr. Russell. "Out of the world. To the House by the Sea."

"Then will you please set me down at Baker's Arms?" said Jay. "Do you know, by the way, that Anonyma always says 'Stay' to a 'bus, if she remembers in time not to say 'Hi, stop,' like a common person."

She was talking desperately against failure, but it seemed a doomed day, and nothing she could think of seemed worth saying.

"I want to talk to you about your House by the Sea," said Mr. Russell. "You know I found it."

"Don't tell me any facts," implored Jay. "Don't tell me you pressed half a crown into the palm of the oldest and wisest inhabitant, and found out facts about some nasty young man who was born in seventeen something, and lived in a place called Atlantic View, and wore curls and a choky stock, and fought at Waterloo, and lies in the village church under a stone monstrosity. Don't tell me facts, because I know they will bar me for ever out of my House by the Sea. Facts are contraband there."

"There is no House by that Sea now," said Mr. Russell. "A slate quarry has devoured the headland on which it used to stand. Where the House used to be there is air now. I daresay the ghosts you knew still trace out the shape of the House in the air."

"The ghosts I know," corrected Jay. "Don't put it in the past."

"It's all in the past," said Mr. Russell. "It's all a dream, and an echo, and the ghost of the day before yesterday."

"How do you know?" asked Jay. "How can you tell it's not 1916 that's the ghost?"

She had been taught by her Friend to take very few things for granted, and time least of all.

"I asked you to tell me no facts," she added.

"I'll only tell you two," persisted Mr. Russell. "One is that they have in the church near the quarry a dark wooden figure of a saint, with the raised arm broken, and straight draperies. I saw it, and they told me what I knew already, that it came out of the hall of a house that was drowned in the sea. The other fact is a story that the tobacconist told me, about a wriggly ladder, and stone balls, and the Law. In the tobacconist's childhood they found the stone balls at the foot of the cliff in the sand. That story, too, I knew already. Quite apart from your letters, you little secret friend, I knew the face of that sea directly I saw it."

"But how did you know? How dared you know?"

"Oh well," said Mr. Russell, "you asked me to tell you no facts."

Mr. Russell was not observant. He was not sufficiently alive to be observant. He was much occupied in remembering phantom yesterdays, and I do not think he listened very much to what the 'bus-conductor said. He only enjoyed the sound of her voice, which he remembered. So he did not know that she was unhappy.

They came presently to a separate part of the forest, which is impaled upon a straight white road. The earth beneath the trees was caught in a mesh of shadows. The trees are high and vaulted there, but the forest is very reticent. The detail of its making is so small that you can only see it if you lie down on your face. Do this and you can see the green threads of the earth's material woven across the skeletons of last year's leaves. You can see the little lawns of moss and weeds, too small to name, that make the way brilliant for the ants. You can watch the heroic armoured beetles defying their world. You can cover with a leaf the great open-air public meeting-places of six-legged things. You can see the spiders at work on their silver cranes, you can watch the bold elevated activities of the caterpillars. You can feel the scattered grasses stroke your eyelids, you can hear the low songs of fairies among the roots of the trees. All these things you may enjoy if you lie down, but the forest does not show them to you. The forest pays you the great compliment of ignoring you, and it does not care whether you see its intimate possessions or not. I think perhaps no day is really unsuccessful that gives you forest earth against your forehead, and forest grass between your fingers, and high forest trees to stand between you and the ultimate confession of failure.

Jay and Mr. Russell boarded out Christina the motor car for the day at an inn, and then they sat and gradually introduced themselves to the forest. Showers fell on their hatless heads, and they did not notice. A mole rose like a submarine from the waves of the forest earth, and they did not notice. The butterflies danced like little tunes in the sunlit clearing, and they did not notice. And from a long way off, near the swings, holiday shrieks trailed along the wind, and they did not notice.

Jay told Mr. Russell, one by one, small unmattering things that she remembered out of her Secret World, and each time when she had told him he wondered with regret why he had not remembered it by himself. He had never thought it worth while to remember before; his imagination was crippled, and needed crutches. He had not thought it worth while to think much about the time when he was young, the time when his past had been as big and shining as his future. The longer we live, it seems, the less we remember, and no men and few women normally possess a secret story after thirty. It would not matter so much if you only lost your story, a worse fate than loss befalls it--you laugh at it. It is curious how the world draws in as one gets older and wiser. The past catches one up, the future burns away like a candle. I used to think that growing up was like walking from one end of a meadow to the other, I thought that the meadow would remain, and one had only to turn one's head to see it all again. But now I know that growing up is like going through a door into a little room, and the door shuts behind one.

I think Mr. Russell's point of difference from most older and wiser people was that he had not forgotten the excitement of writing down snatches of his secret story as it came to him, and the passion of tearing up the thing that he wrote, and the delight of finding that he could not tear it out of his heart. He was a silent person, and a rather neglected person, and unbusinesslike, and unsuccessful, and uncultured, and unsociable, and unbeautiful. So there was nothing worse than emptiness where his secret story used to be. He had not found it worth while to fill the space. He had not found it worth while to shut the door.

"Do you remember that Christmas," said Jay, "when there was a blizzard, and a great sea, and the foam blinded the western windows of the House, and the children went out to sing 'Love and joy come to you'? (Those aren't real words any more now, are they? only pretty caricatures.) And when the children came in with snow and foam plastered up their windward sides, do you remember that one of them said, 'Is this what Lot's wife felt like?'"

"I can just remember Love and Joy mixed up with the wind at the window," said