This Is the End by Stella Benson

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"I also persuaded a woman to give up drink," continued Mrs. Gustus. "I
put it to her on the ground of simplicity. She was in bed, having been
drunk the night before, and I sat on her bed with my hand on hers. I
said, 'Dear fellow-woman, there are no essentials in life but bread and
water and love. Everything else is a sort of skin-disease which has
appeared on the surface of Nature, a disease which we call civilization.'
She cried bitterly, and I gathered that she was lacking in all three
essentials. I went and bought her four loaves of bread, on condition she
would promise never to touch intoxicants again. I said I would not go
away until she promised. She promised. I left her still crying."

Cousin Gustus sighed. He never went about himself, and only saw the world
through his wife's eyes. This did not tend to cure his pessimism.

"It is wonderful how one can reach the bed-rock of life in two hours
among the poor and simple," said Mrs. Gustus. "By the way, I only put in
two hours to-day, because I think I can do better work in two hours
twice a week than in four hours once. So I shall come up for the
afternoon one day this week from wherever we are by then, and leave you
three men prostrate on some shore, with your ears to Nature, like a
child's ear to a shell."

She groped for her notebook.

"I must come up now and then too," said Mr. Russell, and poked his Hound
secretly in the ribs.

* * * * *

I can't tell you what countless miles away his 'bus-conductor was by now.
A certain fraction of her, to be sure, was sitting in the dark room at
Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown Borough, with fierce hands pinching
the table-cloth, and a hot forehead on the table. All day long the thirst
for a secret journey had been in her throat. All day long the elaborate
tangle of London had made difficult her way, but she had kicked aside the
snare now, and her free feet were on the step of the House by the Sea.

No voices met her at the door, the hall was empty. The firelight
pencilled in gold the edges of the wooden figure that presided over the
stairs. I think I told you about that figure. I never knew whose it
was--a saint's I think, but her virtuous expression was marred by her
broken nose, and the finger with which she had once pointed to Heaven was
also broken. Her figure was rather stiff, and so were her draperies,
which fell in straight folds to her blocklike feet. Her right hand was
raised high, and her left was held alertly away from her side and had
unseparated fingers. She had seen a great procession of generations pass
her pedestal, but she never saw Jay. Of course not, for Jay was not
there. Only a column of thin watching air haunted the House.

There are many ghosts that haunt the House by the Sea. Jay is, of
course, one of them, and for this reason she knows more about ghosts than
any one I know. Fragments of untold stories are familiar to her. She
knows how you may hear in the dark a movement by your bed, and fling out
your hand and feel it grasped, and then feel the grasp slide up from your
hand to your shoulder, from your shoulder to your throat, from your
throat to your heart. She knows how you may go between trees in the
moonlight to meet your friend, and find suddenly that some one is keeping
pace with you, and how you, mistaking this companion for your friend, may
say some silly greeting that only your friend understands. And how your
heart drops as you hear the first breath of the reply. She knows how,
walking in the mid-day streets of London, you may cross the path of some
Great One who had a prior right by many thousand years to walk beside the
Thames. These are the ghost stories that never get told. Few people can
read them between the lines of press accounts of inquests, or in the
dignified announcements of the failure of hearts, on the front page of
the _Morning Post_. But Jay knows, because of her intimacy with the House
by the Sea. There she meets her fellow-ghosts.

The House, as I told you, has hardly any garden; having the sea, it
doesn't need one. But there is a little formal place about twenty paces
across, set, as it were, in the heart of the House. A small prim square,
bounded on the north, south and east by the House itself, and on the west
by the cliff and the sea. There is a stone balustrade to divide the
garden from space. In the middle of the square is a stone basin with
becalmed water-lilies and of course goldfish. Round the basin the orderly
ranks of little clipped box hedges manoeuvre. The untamed elements in the
garden are the climbing things, they sing in gold and yellow and orange
and red from the walls. The only official way into the garden is a door
from the House, a bald door without eyebrows, so to speak, like all the
doors and windows in the House. But there is an unofficial way into the
garden, and Jay found her Secret Friend there. This is the short cut to
the sea. In other words, it is a wriggly ladder, one end of which you
attach to a hook in the wall, and the other you throw over the balustrade
down the cliff to the sea. It is a long way to walk round the House and
along the cliff and down to the sea by the path. And just as the
house-agents always want to be one minute and a half from the church and
the post-office, so we in the Secret House cannot afford to be more than
a minute and a half from the sea.

The Secret Friend was there, and he was gazing so earnestly down the
cliff that his hair was hanging forward most unbeautifully, and he was
rather red in the face. He was looking at a little boat which was on its
way towards the foot of the wriggly ladder. A schooner with the low sun
climbing down her rigging breathed on the breathing sea not far away. The
tide was high.

The oars of the little boat suddenly wavered and were paralysed. One of
the rowers made a quick movement with his hand.

"It's the Law," said the Secret Friend, and he tried spasmodically to
extinguish the sun with his hand. "It's the Law. The man with the tall
and dewy brow."

The Law, in a fat officious-looking boat, came sneaking round the near
point of the cliff. The air was so still, and the sea so calm, that you
could hear the sides of the boat grate against the cliff. And the air was
so clear that you could see the tall and dewy brow of the Law, as he
stood up and discovered the wriggly ladder.

"To have a face like that," said the Secret Friend, "is to challenge
fate. It makes me sick."

"What is this?" asked the Law, although there seemed little doubt that
the thing was a wriggly ladder. No one answered; so the Law rowed to the
foot of the thing in question. The Secret Friend jerked it up about six
feet, and secured it so.

The Law cleared its throat, and looked nervously at the schooner, and at
the sun, and at the other boat, and at the Secret Friend. The Law likes
to be argued with. Take away words and where is the Law? Silence always
annoys it.

Yet there was no silence in the Secret World. I remember how the roses
sang, and how the sea mourned over the confusion of its gentle dreams.
The knocking of the slow sea upon the cliff seemed like the ticking of
the great clock that is our world. It was a night when every horizon had
heaven calling from the other side.

The Story went on....

* * * * *

It was Chloris who brought Jay back to Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown
Borough. Chloris gave an unromantic snort and sat with unnecessary
clumsiness upon Jay's toe. So Jay returned, falling suddenly out of the
music of the sea into the band-of-hopeful music of distant Boy Scouts on
the march.

Number Eighteen Mabel Place is not, as a rule, a hopeful place to return
to. Jay and I know quite well what Satan felt like when he was expelled
from Heaven.

So Jay, whose refuge from most ills was talk, went to see a friend. She
had many friends in the Brown Borough, and most of them were what Mrs.
Gustus would call "undeserving." Mrs. Gustus has a very high mind; she
and the C.O.S. are dreadfully grown-up institutions, I think; they forget
what it feels like to have a good rampageous kick against the pricks.
Nearly everybody in the Brown Borough enjoys a kick once a week (on
pay-day)--and some of us go on kicking all our lives. At any rate, the
Brown Borough is peopled with babies young and old, and high minds and
grown-up institutions are apt to look over heads. Jay had a low mind and
walked about on the Brown Borough level.

"I have got neuralgia," said Jay to Chloris, "my hat feels too tight.
My head feels like _tete de veau farcie_. I shall go and talk to Mrs.
'Ero Edwards."

And so she did, and found that Mrs. 'Ero Edwards had been wanting to
see her to tell her that the war would be over in June, and that the
Edwards's nephew knew on the best authority that the Kaser couldn't get
no kipper to his breakfast any more because Preserdink Wilson was
a-holding of them up upon the high seas, and that Jimmy Wragge was
"wanted" for "helping himself," and that young Dusty Morgan, the
lodger, had gone for a soldier, and his wife had taken his job as
driver of a van.

"There's only two jobs now," said Mrs. 'Ero Edwards, "wot you never see
a woman doin', and one's a burglar, an' the other's a scarecrow."

Jay said, "The lady burglars would be so clever they'd never get into the
papers, and the lady scarecrows would be so attractive that they'd
fascinate the birds."

And then Mrs. 'Ero Edwards considered what she would say to an 'Un if she
had him here, and Jay was called upon to provide 'Unnish replies in the
'Unnish lingo. Her German was so patriotically rusty that she could think
of no better retorts than "Nicht hinauslehnen," or "Bitte nicht zu
rauchen," or "Heisses Wasser, bitte," or "Wacht am Rhein," or "Streng
verboten." Yet the dramatic effect of the interview was very good indeed,
and Mrs. 'Ero Edwards's arguments were unanswerable in any tongue.

And then they thought they would make a surprise for young Mrs. Dusty
Morgan, the lodger, against she come back from work, because she was that
down'earted. So they went and bought some ribbon to tie up the curtains,
and some flowers for the table, and put the chairs in happy and new
attitudes of expectancy, and cleaned the windows, putting a piece of
white paper on the broken pane instead of the rag, which was rather weary
of its job. And then Mrs. 'Ero Edwards confided to Jay that young Mrs.
Dusty wanted very much to find the picture of a real tip-top soldier, so
that she might look at it and remember how this business was going to
make a man of young Dusty. And Jay went all the way to the City and could
find no picture of a tip-top soldier, and then she came back to the Brown
Borough, and because of the intervention of Providence, found Albrecht
Duerer's "St. George" second-hand in a Jew-shop. And they hung it up over
the mantelpiece, and decided that it was rather like Dusty, if it wasn't
for the uniform. And the general effect was so superb that Jay nearly
spoilt it all by jumping a hole in the floor, so as to jog Time's elbow
and bring Mrs. Dusty home quickly to see it all. It was a very delicate
floor. Jay always jumped when she was impatient. She did everything with
double fervour, and where you or I would have stamped one foot, she
stamped two at once.

Mrs. Dusty Morgan came back a little bit drunk. When she saw the Saint
over the mantelpiece she cried, and blasted the war that made it
necessary to wear them ... respirators all over (the Saint is in
armour),--and when she saw the flowers, she laughed, and said it seemed
like Nothing-on-Earth to have Dusty away.

Oh, bend your eyes, nor send your glance about.
Oh, watch your feet, nor stray beyond the kerb.
Oh, bind your heart lest it find secrets out.
For thus no punishment
Of magic shall disturb
Your very great content.

Oh, shut your lips to words that are forbidden.
Oh, throw away your sword, nor think to fight.
Seek not the best, the best is better hidden.
Thus need you have no fear,
No terrible delight
Shall cross your path, my dear.

Call no man foe, but never love a stranger.
Build up no plan, nor any star pursue.
Go forth with crowds; in loneliness is danger.
Thus nothing Fate can send,
And nothing Fate can do
Shall pierce your peace, my friend.

Christina the motor car started next morning. She set her tyres on the
road to the Secret World. For all the clues that Jay provided pointed to
that region.

"Here is another letter from Jay," said Mrs. Gustus as they started,
bristling with clues. Odd, under the circumstances, that she writes to
me so often and so freely. I will read you some of it, but not all, until
I have thought my suspicions over. She writes:

"... A collision with the Law to-night, under a great sunset. It would
have been rather silly by common daylight, but under a yellow sky with
stars in it, I think nothing can live but romance. The tide was coming
up, and the Law--a man with a tall and dewy brow--rowed up to the foot of
our little ladder that leads to the sea.... You know those round stone
balls that sit on the balustrades of formal gardens such as this ... we
only meant to frighten the Law, a splash was all that we intended, but
the sun was in my Friend's eyes as he dropped the ball. It struck the bow
of the boat, which went under like a frightened porpoise. There were two
men in it, besides the Law itself, and they all came up spitting and
spouting, and stood up to their necks in water. Oaths bubbled up to us.
The boat came up badly perforated, and I expect we shall get into
trouble. It was funny, but the War has rather pacified us peace-time
belligerents, and made people like me unused to collisions with
authority. I felt very nervous, but it was all right because ..."

"I will read you no more, but in that much there should be several clues.
We must keep the western sun in our eyes to begin with."

"We must look out for a householder of irregular--not to say
murderous--habits," said Cousin Gustus. "Juggling with stone balls is a
trick that is frequently fatal. Nobody but Jay would encourage it."

"We must comb out all western seaside resorts for local police with tall
and dewy brows," said Kew.

But Mr. Russell, who preferred not to speak and drive Christina at the
same time, drew up to the kerb, and removed his gloves, preparatory to
saying something of importance.

Mr. Russell was at his best in a car, or, to put it another way, he
was at his worst everywhere else. When he and Christina went out
together they were only one entity. They were a centaur on wheels; Mr.
Russell could feel the rushing of the road beneath his tyres, and I
think if you had stuck a pin into the back seat, Mr. Russell would have
known it. You could feel now the puzzled growl of Christina's engines
as Mr. Russell pondered.

"But I remember ..." said Mr. Russell. "Now, did I see it in the
paper...? I remember.... Half a minute, it is coming back."

"Here's to-day's paper," said Kew, who was getting a little confused. You
will feel the same when you set out to follow the western sun in search
of something you know you have left behind you.

Mr. Russell and Christina lingered beside the kerb for quite a minute,
and then shrugged their shoulders and started again.

So the Family set their faces towards the Secret World, with Mr. Russell
as their guide, and the morning sun behind them.

London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will
be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and
that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my
happy lot in future generations. Always, whether sleeping or waking, I
shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of
Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green
pasture. Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel
of London; always as you go up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look
back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of
Whitehall. That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white
cliffs of St. Paul's will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance.
There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always
London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we
come back we have our romance again.

Mr. Russell was a lover of London, and that is why he liked his new-found
'bus-conductor. He was an uncalculating sort of man, and he only thought
that he had found a flower in London, a very London flower, and he hoped
that London would show it to him again. He had no instinct either for the
past or the future. He never looked back over the road he had trod,
unless he was obliged to, and he never tried to look forward to the end
of the road he was treading.

Mrs. Gustus, with an iron expression about her chin, kept time to the
beat of Christina's engine with the throbbing of disagreeable thoughts.
There was one thing very plain to her in the matter of Jay--that Jay was
living a life that in a novel is called free, but in a Family--well--you
know what ... Mrs. Gustus knew all about these Friends with capital F's,
Friends with hair flopping over their foreheads, Friends who might drop
stone balls on the Law and still retain their capital F's. She had, in
fact, written about them with much daring and freedom. But one's young
relations may never share the privileges of one's heroines. Sympathy with
such goings on must be confined to the printed page.

"I will keep these things from the others," thought Mrs. Gustus. "They
have no suspicions, and if we can find Jay I may be able to save her
reputation yet."

Really she was thinking as much of her own good name as of Jay's. For
there was a most irritating similarity between Jay's present apparent
practices and Mrs. Gustus's own much-expressed theories. The beauty of a
free life of simplicity had filled pages of Anonyma's notebooks, and
also, to the annoyance of Cousin Gustus, had overflowed into her
conversation. Cousin Gustus's memory had been constantly busy extracting
from the past moral tales concerning the disasters attendant on excessive
simplicity in human relationships. For a time it had seemed as if Cousin
Gustus's lot had been cast entirely with the matrimonially unorthodox.
And now Mrs. Gustus, for one impatient minute, wished that the children
would pay more attention to their elderly and experienced guardian. It
was too much to ask her--a professional theory-maker--to adapt her
theories to the young and literal. That was the worst of Jay, she was so
literal, so unimaginative, so lacking in the simple unpractical quality
of poetry. However, not a word to the others. Jay's reputation and
Anonyma's dignity might yet be saved.

"I don't know where we are going," said Anonyma presently. "I have no
bump of locality."

She always spoke proudly of her failings, as though there were a
rapt press interviewer at her elbow, anxious to make a word-vignette
about her.

Mr. Russell was thinking, and Kew was singing, so between them they
forgot to shape the course of Christina due west. When they got outside
London, they found themselves going south.

To go out of London was like going out of doors. The beauty of London is
a dim beauty, and while you are in the middle of it you forget what it is
like to see things clearly. In London every hour is a hill of adventure,
and in the country every hour is a dimple in a quiet expanse of time.

The Family went out over the hills of Surrey, and between roadside
trees they saw the crowned heads of the seaward downs. The horizon
sank lower around them, the fields and woods circled and squared the
ribs of the land.

Before sunset they had reached the little town that guards the gate
in the wall of the Sussex downs. They were welcomed by a thunderstorm,
and by passionate rain that drove them to the inn. Christina, torn
between her pride of soul and her pride of paint, was obliged to edge
herself into a shed which was already occupied by two cows and a red
and blue waggon.

When the pursuers of Jay set their feet on the uneven floor of the inn,
they recognised the place immediately as ideal. Its windows squinted, its
floor made you feel as though you were drunk, its banisters reeled, its
flights of stairs looked frequently round in an angular way at their own
beginnings.

"How Arcadian!" said Mrs. Gustus, as she splashed her signature into the
visitor's book. "One could be content to vegetate for ever here. Isn't it
pathetic how one spends one's life collecting heart's desires, until one
suddenly discovers that in having nothing and in desiring nothing lies
happiness."

But when they had been shown their sitting-room, and had ordered their
supper--lamb and early peas and gooseberry tart with _tons_ of
cream--Mrs. Gustus saw the Ring, that great green breast of the country,
against the broken evening sky, and said, "Now I see heights, and I
shall never be happy or hungry till I have climbed them. The Lord made
me so that I am never content until I am as near the sky as possible.
Silly, no doubt. But what a sky! Blood-red and pale pink, what a unique
chord of colour."

"Same chord as the livery of the Bank or England," said Kew, who was
hungry, and had an aching shoulder. He hated beauty talked, just as he
hated poetry forced into print apropos of nothing. Even to hear the
Psalms read aloud used to make him blush, before his honest orthodoxy
hardened him.

Mrs. Gustus asked the lamb and gooseberry tart to delay their coming; she
placed Cousin Gustus in an arm-chair, first wrapping him up because he
felt cold, and then unwrapping him again because he felt hot; she kissed
him good-bye.

"We shan't be more than an hour," she said. When Mrs. Gustus said an
hour, she meant two. If she had meant an hour, she would have said
twenty minutes. "You must watch for us to appear on the highest point
of the Ring."

"Don't watch, but pray," murmured Kew. "There's that thunderstorm just
working up to another display."

And so it was, but when they reached the ridge of down that led to the
Ring, they were glad they had come. They were half-drowned, and
half-blinded, and half-deafened, but there is a reward to every effort.
There was an enormous sky, and the sunlight spilled between the clouds to
fall in pools upon the world. There was a chord made by many larks in the
sky; the valleys held joy as a cup holds water. From the down the
chalk-pits took great bites; the crinolined trees curtseyed down the
slopes. The happy-coloured sea cut the world in half; the sight of a
distant town at the corner of the river and the coast made one laugh for
pleasure. There was a boat with sunlit sails creeping across the sea. I
never see a boat on an utterly lonely sea without thinking of the secret
stories that it carries, of the sun moving round that private world, of
the shadows upon the deck that I cannot see, of the song of passing seas
that I cannot hear, of the night coming across a great horizon to devour
it when I shall have forgotten it. Further off and more suggestive than a
star, it seems to me.

A gust of sunlight struck the watchers, and passed: they each ran a few
steps towards the sight that pleased them most. And then they stood so
long that Mr. Russell's Hound had time to make himself acquainted with
every smell within twenty yards. He turned over a snail that sat--round
and striped like a peppermint bull's-eye--on the short grass, he patted a
little beetle that pushed its way across a world of disproportionate
size, and then, by peevishly pulling the end of his whip which hung from
Mr. Russell's pensive hand, he suggested that the pursuit should
continue. So they walked to the crest of wood that stands at the top of
the Ring, a compressed tabloid forest, fifty yards from side to side, as
round as a florin piece.

The slopes rushed away from every side of it. There was a dark secret
beneath those trees, there was a hint of very ancient love and still more
ancient hatred. You could feel things beyond understanding, you left
fact outside under the sky, and went in with a naked soul.

They walked across it in silence, well apart from each other. When they
came out the other side, Mrs. Gustus said, "We must stay for a little
while within reach of this. It has something ..."

Mr. Russell swallowed something that he had thought of saying, and
instead drew his Hound's attention to a yellow square of mustard-field
which made brilliant the distance.

Kew said nothing, but he felt choked with a lost remembrance of a very
old childhood. He seemed to taste the quiet taste of youth here, there
was even a feeling of going home through a damp evening to a nursery tea.
It was the nursery of all Secret Worlds. Gods had been born there. No
surprise could live there now, no wonder, no protest. The years like
minutes fled between those trees, dynasties might fall during the singing
of a bird. I think the thing that haunted the wood was a thing exactly as
old and as romantic as the first child that tracked its Secret Friend
across the floor of a forest.

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