This Is the End by Stella Benson

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To Mr. Russell it all seemed true, and part of the miracle. He had
nothing to add, and therefore added nothing.

"Obviously you are a poet," said Jay. "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 Mr. Russell. "But always best of all I can remember the way you
looked on ..."

"Me?" said Jay. "I wasn't there."

"Oh yes you were, and that's what you forget. You were there always, and
when I was looking for the House I believe it was always you I was
expecting to find there."

"Me! Me, with this same old face?" gasped Jay. "Oh, excuse me, but you
lie. You never recognised me in my 'bus."

"I knew without knowing I knew. I remembered without remembering that I
remembered. We haven't made a psychical discovery, Jay, we have done
nothing to write a book about. Only you remember so well that you have
reminded me."

"I don't believe that can be true," said Jay. "I know I wasn't there."

"Why can't you see the truth of it?" asked Mr. Russell, sighing for
so many words wasted. "In that House by the Sea, who was your
Secret Friend?"

"My Friend," said Jay, "is young and very full of youth. He is like a
baby who knows life and yet finds it very amusing, and very new. He is
without the gift of rest, but then he does not need it, the world in
which he lives is not so tired and not so muddling as our world. In him
my only belief and my only colour and my last dregs of romance, and
certainly my youth survive. We never bother about reserve, and we never
mind being sentimental in my Secret World. We just live, and we are never
tortured by the futility of knowledge."

"Well," said Mr. Russell, "I had a Secret Friend in my House, and she was
wonderful because she was so young that she knew nothing. She never
asked questions, but she thought questions. She knew nothing, she was
waiting to grow up. She had little colour, only peace and promise. I knew
she would grow up, but I also knew she would never grow old. I knew she
would learn much, but I also knew she would never become complete and ask
no more questions. That voice of hers would always end on a questioning
note. You see, I have found my Secret Friend, grown-up, grown old enough
to enjoy and understand a new and more vital youth."

"Shall I find my Friend?" asked Jay.

"Yes," said Mr. Russell in a very low voice. "You can find him if you
look. You can find him, grown very old and ugly and tired. There are
different ways of growing up, and your Secret Friend was rash in using up
too great a share of his sum of life in the House by the Sea."

Then Jay was suddenly enormously happy, and the veil of failure fell away
from the day and from her life. She held in her hand incredible
coincidences. The angle of the forest, the upright trees upon the sloping
earth, the bend of the sky, the round bubble shapes of the clouds upon
their appointed way, the agreement of the young leaves one with another,
the unfailing pulse of the spring,--all these things seemed to her a
chance, an unlikely and perfect consummation, that had been reached only
by the extraordinary cleverness of God. All love and all success were
pressed into a hair's-breadth, and yet the target was never missed.

"You shall go down to the House by the Sea," said Jay. "You shall go when
the moon is next full over the sea that drowned our house. You shall come
from the east, along the rocky path, as you used to come, between the
foxgloves; you shall play at being a god, coming between the stars and
the sea. And I will play at being a goddess, as I used to play at being a
ghost, and I will run to meet you from the west, and the high grasses and
the ferns shall whip my knees, and the thistles shall bow to me, and the
sea shall be very calm and say no word, and there shall be no ship in
sight. And we will go down the steep path to the shore, and we will stand
where the sand is wet, and look up to where our drowned House used to
be. And there shall be no facts any more, only the ghosts, and the
dreams. Oh, surely it has never happened before--this meeting of Secret
Friends--and surely no friend ever loved her friend as I love you, and
surely there never was so little room for sin and disappointment in any
love as there is in ours. Surely there are no tears in the world any
more, and no Brown Borough, and no War. I don't care if I go hungry every
day till we meet, I don't care if I have nothing but hated clothes to
wear in my Secret World. I don't care if there are six changes on the
journey to the sea, and at every change I miss my connection. I don't
care if the end lasts only a minute, because the minute will last for
ever, there are no facts any more. Because of you the little bothers of
the world are gone, and the big bothers never did exist, because of you.
Oh, I can say what I mean at last, and if it's nonsense--I don't care,
because of you...."

Presently she said, "And now I wonder if I am very proud or very much
ashamed of having spoken."

"You said once," Mr. Russell reminded her, "that life was just a bead
upon a string. Well, does it much matter whether one bead is the colour
of pride or the colour of shame? Does one successful bead more or less
matter, my dear? I think it's all a succession of explanations, more or
less lucid, and all different and all confusing. A string of beads more
or less beautiful, and all unvalued. We don't know that any of the
explanations are true, we don't know that any of the beads have any
worth. We only know that they are ours...."

"I don't care if I trample my beads in the mud," said Jay. "Now let's go
home and think."

When she and Chloris got home that evening to Eighteen Mabel Place,
Chloris barked at a man who was waiting outside the door. He was a young
man in khaki, with one star; he looked very white, and was reading
something from his pocket-book.

"Great Scott, Bill," said Jay. "I thought you were busy sapping in
France. Were you anywhere near Kew?"

I do not know if you will remember the name of young William Morgan. I
think I have only mentioned him once or twice.

"I got back on leave two hours ago," said Mr. Morgan. "I have been
waiting here thirty-two minutes. I saw Kew every day last week, and I was
with him when he died, three hours before I came away yesterday."

Jay was silent. She opened the door, and in the sitting-room she
placed--very carefully--two chairs looking at each other across
the table.

"Jay," said William Morgan, "I am deadly afraid of doing this badly. Kew
and I talked a good deal before it happened, and there was a good deal he
wanted me to tell you. All the way back in the train and on the boat I
have been writing notes to remind me what I had to say to you. I hope you
don't mind. I hope you don't think it callous."

"No," said Jay.

"He was very anxious you should know the truth about it, because he said
he had never lied to you. He was always sure that if he were shot it
would be in the back while he was lacing his boots, or at some other
unromantic moment. And in that case he said he could lie to Anonyma and
your cousin vicariously through the War Office, which would write to
them about Glory, and Duty, and Thanks Due. But he wanted me to write to
you, and tell you how it happened, and tell you that death was just an
ordinary old thing, no more romantic than anything else, without a
capital letter, and that one died as one had lived--in a little ordinary
way--and that there was no such thing as Glory between people who didn't
lie to each other. I am telling you all this from my notes. I should
never have thought of any of it for myself, as you know. I hope you
don't mind."

"No," said Jay. She heard what he said, yet she was not listening. Her
mind was listening to things heard a very long time ago. She heard
herself and Kew in confidential chorus, saying those laboriously simple
prayers that Anonyma used to teach them. She heard again the swishing
that their feet used to make in the leaves of Kensington Gardens. Kew's
was the louder swish by right. She thought of him as an admirable big
brother of eight, with a round face and blunt feet and very hard hands.
She heard the comfortable roar of the nursery fire, and the comfortable
sound of autumn rain baffled by the window; she saw the early winter
breakfast by lamplight, and the red nursery carpet that had an oblong
track worn away round the table by the frequent game of "Little Men
Jumping." She heard the voice of Kew clamouring against the voice of Nana
because he would not eat his bacon-fat. On those days there was a horrid
resurrection at luncheon of the bacon-fat uneaten at breakfast.

"As it happened," continued Mr. Morgan, no longer white, but very red,
"he wasn't killed in an advance, or anything grand. He told me to tell
you, so I am telling you. He was killed by a sniper while he was setting
a trap of his own invention to catch the rats as they came over the
parapet. He was shot in the chest very early yesterday morning, and he
lived about four hours. He was not in much pain, he even laughed a little
once or twice to think he should have lived and died so consistently. He
told me that he had never seen a moment's real romantic fighting; he had
never once felt patriotic or dramatic or dutiful, he said. He wandered a
little, I think, because he seemed worried about the rats that might be
caught in the trap he had set. He seemed to mix up the rats and the
Boches. He said that these creatures didn't know they were vermin, they
just thought they were honest average animals doing their bit, and then
suddenly killed by a malignant chaos. My notes are very hurried. I am
afraid I am repeating myself."

Jay remembered the mouse they once caught, and kept in a bottle for a
day, and the palace they made for it out of stones and mud and moss, and
the sun-bath of patted mud they made by the door of the palace. But the
mouse, when it was installed, flashed straight out of the front door, and
jumped the sun-bath, and knocked down a daisy, and was never seen again.
But Jay and Kew used to believe that on moonlit nights it came back to
the palace, and brought its wife and children, and was grateful to the
palace builders.

"A few days before he was killed," said Mr. Morgan, "he told me that he
had lied so successfully all his life that quite a lot of people thought
him a most admirable young man. He said Anonyma once brought him into a
book, and when he read that book he saw how lying paid, as long as one
didn't lie to absolutely everybody. He said if he died Anonyma would
write something very nice upon his memorial brass about a pure heart or
everlasting life, and he thought you would smile a little at that. He
said that he remembered going home with you in a 'bus and seeing on the
window of the 'bus a text that promised everlasting life on certain
conditions. He said the remembrance of that text tired him still. He said
he had had too much of himself, he had known himself too well, and when
death came, he wanted it to be an honest little death with no frills, and
after that an everlasting sleep with no dreams. I am putting it all in
the wrong order. I shall make you despise me. You talk so well yourself."

Jay was remembering the "Coos" they used to have in the big armchair in
the nursery. When they found that they suddenly loved each other
unbearably, they had a Coo, they tied themselves up in a little tangle
together, and sang Coo in soft voices. And then they felt relieved. Jay
remembered the last Coo. It happened when Kew's voice was breaking ten
years ago, and he found that he could no longer coo except in a funny
falsetto. So, rather than become farcical, the Coos ceased.

"I don't know quite why Kew wanted me to tell you all this," said Mr.
Morgan, "except that he said you knew so much about him that you might as
well get as near as possible to knowing everything. He never thought he
would be killed, in fact I gave him a lot of messages of my own to give
to my mother in case I went. But at the last, when he knew he was dying,
he was desperately anxious you should know that he did not die a
'Stranger's death,' as he said. He thought any hint of drama about his
death would spoil your friendship. He said you knew more than most people
about friends, and he thought that in this way you could find for him a
certain 'secret immortality' which would make the soil of France comfier
for him to sleep in. And then he said, 'If I'm too poetic--like a
swan--don't report me too accurately.' He seemed to go to sleep for some
time after that, and every now and then he laughed very faintly in his
sleep. I had to leave him for a bit, and when I came back he was still
asleep. The only thing he said after that was: 'This is awfully
exciting.' He said that about ten minutes before he died. I hope I'm not
making it too painful for you, dear little Jay.'"

"No," said Jay. Quite irrelevantly, she had found her Secret Friend. She
found a little dark wood, burnt and broken by fire, in a grey light, and
there was a wet ditch that skirted the edge of it. She saw the hopeless
and regretful sky, there was neither night nor morning in it, there was
neither sun nor moon. These things she noticed, but more than all she saw
her Secret Friend, lying crouched upon his side close to the ditch, with
his arms about his face. She saw the slow leaves fall upon him from the
ruined trees, she saw the damp air settle in beads upon his clothes. His
feet were in the undergrowth, and above them the dripping net of the
spider was flung. She had never seen her Friend quite still before. All
her life her Secret Friend and her Secret Sea had kept her soul awake
with movement. But her Friend was dead, and there was no more sea. The
very fine rain blew across her Secret World, and blotted it out. The very
distant sound of guns--which was not so much a sound as an indescribable
vacuum of sound--shattered the walls of her bubble enchantment.

"Oh, darling Jay," said Mr. William Morgan, "I wish I could help you. I
can't go away and leave you like this. I wish I could help you."

She found she had her forehead on the table, and her hands were knotted
in her lap. And where once the Gate to the House had been, there was only
London now. No more would the drum of the sea beat in her heart, there
was nothing left but the throbbing of distant trams.

"So it's all lies ..." she said quietly. "There really is a thing called
death after all. People die...."

"Jay, darling, don't," sobbed Mr. Morgan. "For God's sake marry me, and
I'll comfort you. I won't die--I swear I won't. And after all, it's
Spring. There's no real death in the Spring. Kew can't have died."

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