What he loves is not at all frightening, and what should be frightening seems to bore him.

Cover by Douglas Walters, for the Ash-Tree Press edition, 2012.

"Negotium Perambulans..." features some of E. F. Benson's best writing, a well-described locale, and a slavering monster, yet the story has never worked for me. Why not?

1) SETTING SHOULD BE ATMOSPHERE.

Whether an actual place or a creation of Benson's idle moments, the fishing village of Polearn inspires him to write with his full attention. He describes it so thoroughly that "Negotium Perambulans..." could almost be a passage from a traveller's diary:

"The casual tourist in West Cornwall may just possibly have noticed, as he bowled along over the bare high plateau between Penzance and the Land’s End, a dilapidated signpost pointing down a steep lane and bearing on its battered finger the faded inscription 'Polearn 2 miles', but probably very few have had the curiosity to traverse those two miles in order to see a place to which their guide-books award so cursory a notice."

Benson clearly loves the place as if he had lived there, as if he wanted to return there for the rest of his life, to spend his days in peace. The trouble, here, is that his love makes the setting desirable and soothing, but not at all eerie. Any mood of dread that he would like to build up in the story is undermined by the calm and sunlit beauty of sea cliffs and shore.

2) REPETITION BREEDS TEDIUM.

A terrible supernatural event has left its mark on the past. Then it happens again. When it happens for a third time, the reader has every right to wonder if such repetition might not make this event more common than unusual.

Another day, another brutal death. Ho hum. At least the weather is fine and the fishing is good.

3) DRINKING BY YOURSELF IS WICKED, AND SO IS PAINTING.

"A church far more ancient than that in which my uncle terrified us every Sunday had once stood not three hundred yards away, on the shelf of level ground below the quarry from which its stones were hewn. The owner of the land had pulled this down, and erected for himself a house on the same site out of these materials, keeping, in a very ecstasy of wickedness, the altar, and on this he dined and played dice afterwards."

A non-religious reader might feel compelled to ask if the supernatural punishment meted out in the story (three times!) was actually deserved. By the date the story was published, in 1922, the world had already seen several thousand years of wickedness more terrible than the crime on display, here. That one "sinner" also drinks alone, and the other paints eerie pictures, hardly seems to merit an earthly retribution, let alone a supernatural fate.

4) THIS HAPPENED TO SOMEONE ELSE, BUT I'M JUST FINE, THANKS.

In my favourite Benson stories ("The Face," "Caterpillars," "The Room in the Tower," "The Horror Horn"), the narrator, or the third-person viewpoint character, is confronted by horror directly, is personally involved; this allows the reader to feel the same dreads and uncertainties. Even in a story like "The Sanctuary," in which the narrator pops up unexpectedly halfway through -- Hi, I'm the narrator! I'll bet you didn't know that I existed, huh? -- this character still takes part in the story and witnesses events on his own.

In contrast, "Negotium Perambulans..." takes a distant view. Terrible things happen to other people, but not to the narrator. He tells us that other people are consumed by fear, but he is not; these events have little to do with him. As a result, there is no build-up of tension, and for that reason, when the narrator does encounter a monster on the final page, this encounter comes and quickly goes without effect.

All of these points undermine a story that could have been one of his better ones. I rarely find, in his work, writing that can match the quiet assurance of this prose:

"Before getting into bed I drew my curtains wide and opened all the windows to the warm tide of the sea air that flowed softly in. Looking out into the garden I could see in the moonlight the roof of the shelter, in which for three years I had lived, gleaming with dew. That, as much as anything, brought back the old days to which I had now returned, and they seemed of one piece with the present, as if no gap of more than twenty years sundered them. The two flowed into one like globules of mercury uniting into a softly shining globe, of mysterious lights and reflections."

This combination of specific, physical detail and abstract implication represents, for me, Benson at his best.

I find a later passage less effective:

"He was justified in his own estimate of his skill: he could paint (and apparently he could paint anything), but never have I seen pictures so inexplicably hellish. There were exquisite studies of trees, and you knew that something lurked in the flickering shadows. There was a drawing of his cat sunning itself in the window, even as I had just now seen it, and yet it was no cat but some beast of awful malignity. There was a boy stretched naked on the sands, not human, but some evil thing which had come out of the sea. Above all there were pictures of his garden overgrown and jungle-like, and you knew that in the bushes were presences ready to spring out on you...."

Here, the adjectives are banal, and do not convey, but assert. With a better choice of words, with more justification by physical detail, the passage could have been interesting, but Benson seems not to have given it much concern.

This is the trouble with "Negotium Perambulans...": in the story, Benson focuses best on what he loves, but what he loves is not at all frightening, and what should be frightening seems to bore him.