“White moths hovered dimly over the garden-beds, and the footsteps of night tip-toed through the bushes.”
This in many ways is the apotheosis of a gushing, insufferable, but paradoxically sufferable, Wordsworth type, with a poetic prose as a glut within Nature’s version of Dorian Gray, the man called Frank who tells a convalescing friend, Darcy, who stays with him, that his null immortality and sense of boredom has been made positive, by dunking himself in the river, exposing himself to the sound of Pan’s Pipes, decrying Christianity and its suffering ethos, scorning “Puritanism, the dismal religion of sour faces,…”, and running away from those in pain, absorbing himself in a hedonism of immortality’s quest. The search for the gestalt of oneness, I might say.
“ ‘…for happiness is more infectious than small-pox. So, as I said, I sat down and waited; I looked at happy things, zealously avoided the sight of anything unhappy, and by degrees a little trickle of the happiness of this blissful world began to filter into me. The trickle grew more abundant, and now, my dear fellow, if I could for a moment divert from me into you one half of the torrent of joy that pours through me day and night,… […] Mad?’ he said. ‘Yes, certainly, if you wish. But I prefer to call it sane. […] There will be a final revelation,’ he said, ‘a complete and blinding stroke which will throw open to me, once and for all, the full knowledge, the full realisation and comprehension that I am one, just as you are, with life. In reality there is no “me,” no “you,” no “it.” Everything is part of the one and only thing which is life. […] Can’t you see?’ he asked. ‘Can’t you understand that that sort of thing, pain, anger, anything unlovely, throws me back, retards the coming of the great hour!’ “
Then there come those ‘elbow’ moments of Pan’s arrival within our own real-time of reading this work…
“Frank, bare-headed as was his wont, with his coat slung over his arm and his shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbow, stood there like some beautiful wild animal with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, drinking in the scented warmth of the air. Then suddenly he flung himself face downwards on the grass at the edge of the stream, burying his face in the daisies and cowslips, and lay stretched there in wide-armed ecstasy, with his long fingers pressing and stroking the dewy herbs of the field. […] ‘The Pan-pipes, the Pan-pipes,’ he whispered. ‘Close, oh, so close.’ Very slowly, as if a sudden movement might interrupt the melody, he raised himself and leaned on the elbow of his bent arm.”
Leading ironically, later, to the climactic elbow moment (“rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to above the elbow”) — containing passages as some of the greatest horror moments in literature, if one can survive the glut of poetic hedonism that precedes them! The shadow that squats upon the hammock where Frank always lolls in idyllic ‘boredom’ and later what is indelibly printed on Frank’s chest! I feel E.F. Benson outdoes himself in horror, during these closing paragraphs and I shall not quote them here, but let you read them for yourself in context.
Ligotti’s hoax?
***
My other reviews of E.F. Benson: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2022/08/15/the-other-bed-by-e-f-benson/
My other unconnected horror story reviews linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
Some may say I am ‘the man who went too far’ when harvesting literary elbows?