The Research Magnificent | Page 8

leading clear to escape I should have awaited him paralyzed.
At last I gripped my nurse's hand. ‘Take me away,' I whispered.
"In my dreams that night he stalked me. I made my frozen flight from him, I slammed a
door on him, and he thrust his paw through a panel as though it had been paper and
clawed for me. The paw got longer and longer. . . .
"I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.

"I remember that he took me in his arms.
"‘It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said. FELIS TIGRIS. FELIS, you know, means
cat.'
"But I knew better. I was in no mood then for my father's insatiable pedagoguery.
"‘And my little son mustn't be a coward.' . . .
"After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers alone.
"For years the thought of that tiger's immensity haunted my mind. In my dreams I
cowered before it a thousand times; in the dusk it rarely failed me. On the landing on my
way to bed there was a patch of darkness beyond a chest that became a lurking horror for
me, and sometimes the door of my father's bedroom would stand open and there was a
long buff and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed an ottoman, but by night--. Could an
ottoman crouch and stir in the flicker of a passing candle? Could an ottoman come after
you noiselessly, and so close that you could not even turn round upon it? No!"

5
When Benham was already seventeen and, as he supposed, hardened against his fear of
beasts, his friend Prothero gave him an account of the killing of an old labouring man by
a stallion which had escaped out of its stable. The beast had careered across a field, leapt
a hedge and come upon its victim suddenly. He had run a few paces and stopped, trying
to defend his head with the horse rearing over him. It beat him down with two swift
blows of its fore hoofs, one, two, lifted him up in its long yellow teeth and worried him as
a terrier does a rat--the poor old wretch was still able to make a bleating sound at
that--dropped him, trampled and kicked him as he tried to crawl away, and went on
trampling and battering him until he was no more than a bloody inhuman bundle of
clothes and mire. For more than half an hour this continued, and then its animal rage was
exhausted and it desisted, and went and grazed at a little distance from this misshapen,
hoof-marked, torn, and muddy remnant of a man. No one it seems but a horror-stricken
child knew what was happening. . . .
This picture of human indignity tortured Benham's imagination much more than it
tortured the teller of the tale. It filled him with shame and horror. For three or four years
every detail of that circumstantial narrative seemed unforgettable. A little lapse from
perfect health and the obsession returned. He could not endure the neighing of horses:
when he saw horses galloping in a field with him his heart stood still. And all his life
thereafter he hated horses.

6
A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due to a certain clumsiness
and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable places. There he was more definitely
balanced between the hopelessly rash and the pitifully discreet.
He had written an account of a private struggle between himself and a certain path of
planks and rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin. This happened in his adolescence. He
had had a bad attack of influenza and his doctor had sent him to a little hotel--the only
hotel it was in those days--at Montana in Valais. There, later, when he had picked up his
strength, his father was to join him and take him mountaineering, that second-rate
mountaineering which is so dear to dons and schoolmasters. When the time came he was
ready for that, but he had had his experiences. He had gone through a phase of real

cowardice. He was afraid, he confessed, before even he reached Montana; he was afraid
of the steepness of the mountains. He had to drive ten or twelve miles up and up the
mountain-side, a road of innumerable hairpin bends and precipitous banks, the horse was
gaunt and ugly with a disposition to shy, and he confesses he clutched the side of the
vehicle and speculated how he should jump if presently the whole turnout went tumbling
over. . . .
"And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices. I made strides over precipices, I fell and
fell with a floating swiftness towards remote valleys, I was assailed by