The Child of the Dawn by Arthur Christopher Benson


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Page 2

This particular tale rose unbidden in my mind. I was never conscious
of creating any of its incidents. It seemed to be all there from the
beginning; and I felt throughout like a man making his way along a road,
and describing what he sees as he goes. The road stretched ahead of me;
I could not see beyond the next turn at any moment; it just unrolled
itself inevitably and, I will add, very swiftly to my view, and was thus
a strange and momentous experience.

I will only add that the book is all based upon an intense belief in
God, and a no less intense conviction of personal immortality and
personal responsibility. It aims at bringing out the fact that our life
is a very real pilgrimage to high and far-off things from mean and
sordid beginnings, and that the key of the mystery lies in the frank
facing of experience, as a blessed process by which the secret purpose
of God is made known to us; and, even more, in a passionate belief in
Love, the love of friend and neighbour, and the love of God; and in the
absolute faith that we are all of us, from the lowest and most degraded
human soul to the loftiest and wisest, knit together with chains of
infinite nearness and dearness, under God, and in Him, and through Him,
now and hereafter and for evermore.

A.C.B.

THE OLD LODGE, MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, _January_, 1912.




The Child of the Dawn




I


Certainly the last few moments of my former material, worn-out life, as
I must still call it, were made horrible enough for me. I came to, after
the operation, in a deadly sickness and ghastly confusion of thought. I
was just dimly conscious of the trim, bare room, the white bed, a figure
or two, but everything else was swallowed up in the pain, which filled
all my senses at once. Yet surely, I thought, it is all something
outside me? ... my brain began to wander, and the pain became a thing.
It was a tower of stone, high and blank, with a little sinister window
high up, from which something was every now and then waved above the
house-roofs.... The tower was gone in a moment, and there was a heap
piled up on the floor of a great room with open beams--a granary,
perhaps. The heap was of curved sharp steel things like sickles:
something moved and muttered underneath it, and blood ran out on the
floor. Then I was instantly myself, and the pain was with me again; and
then there fell on me a sense of faintness, so that the cold sweat-drops
ran suddenly out on my brow. There came a smell of drugs, sharp and
pungent, on the air. I heard a door open softly, and a voice said, "He
is sinking fast--they must be sent for at once." Then there were more
people in the room, people whom I thought I had known once, long ago;
but I was buried and crushed under the pain, like the thing beneath the
heap of sickles. There swept over me a dreadful fear; and I could see
that the fear was reflected in the faces above me; but now they were
strangely distorted and elongated, so that I could have laughed, if only
I had had the time; but I had to move the weight off me, which was
crushing me. Then a roaring sound began to come and go upon the air,
louder and louder, faster and faster; the strange pungent scent came
again; and then I was thrust down under the weight, monstrous,
insupportable; further and further down; and there came a sharp bright
streak, like a blade severing the strands of a rope drawn taut and
tense; another and another; one was left, and the blade drew near....

I fell suddenly out of the sound and scent and pain into the most
incredible and blessed peace and silence. It would have been like a
sleep, but I was still perfectly conscious, with a sense of unutterable
and blissful fatigue; a picture passed before me, of a calm sea, of vast
depth and clearness. There were cliffs at a little distance, great
headlands and rocky spires. I seemed to myself to have left them, to
have come down through them, to have embarked. There was a pale light
everywhere, flushed with rose-colour, like the light of a summer dawn;
and I felt as I had once felt as a child, awakened early in the little
old house among the orchards, on a spring morning; I had risen from my
bed, and leaning out of my window, filled with a delightful wonder,
I had seen the cool morning quicken into light among the dewy
apple-blossoms. That was what I felt like, as I lay upon the moving
tide, glad to rest, not wondering or hoping, not fearing or expecting
anything--just there, and at peace.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Fri 29th Mar 2024, 10:18