The Death Warrant

Fiction ~ short story/thing
Published in Six Common Things, November 1893
Approx. 1,300 words
(First read 26/10/2014)

In the final doodah of Six Common Things our Unnamed Narrator tells us he's been diagnosed with cancer and has six months to live.  He addresses the reader directly:

May I treat you all quite intimately?  May I say things to you that I would say only to those that I trusted and loved?

"Yeah, why not, whatever, knock yourself out," was my reply; "you don't mind if I carry on worming the cat while you're doing it, do you?"  Luckily the up-and-coming 26-year old wunderkind E. F. Benson is on hand to drive away any clouds of gloom that might consider showing themselves to attend on our moribund middle-aged friend:

[...] I do not fear, but I look forward to this change that will soon happen to me, with the intensest longing and wonder.  What will it be?  I wish I could come back and tell you.  [...] it is worth while, I think, to be brave.

Appalling.  For my final verdict on this irritating little book, go to Six Common Things.
It's available online here. 


THE CRITICS

The final story [of Six Common Things], The Death Warrant, is an extraordinary little account of how the narrator, discovering that he is going to die of cancer, faces death and the thought of what might come after, with resignation and courage. It might have been written by a very old man [rather than] a young one on the threshold of life.

~Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd in E. F. Benson As He Was, 1988

Machaon

Swallowtail butterfly ~ Papilio machaon

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, January 1923
Collected in Visible and Invisible (October 1923)
6,055 words
(First read 15/06/2012)

Another ~ frankly ~ idiotic story about a medium and a random message from beyond the grave.  In this one the visitor turns out to be none other than some Very Ancient Greek named Machaon, son of Aesculapius (y'know, the one who invented medicine), who struggles through the ether or ectoplasm or whatever to deliver to our Unnamed Narrator, who just happens to live in a little town named Tilling, in a house with a garden room, the verdict that U.N.'s faithful manservant, currently lying in hospital stricken with cancer, should be treated with X-rays.  [No, I'm not making this up: EFB is.]  The whole thing is so preposterous that I'm not prepared to spend any more time on it.
But maybe you'll have better luck with it: it's available online here. 

Caterpillars

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
3,510 words
(First read 09/12/2011) 

At about half the length of one of EFB's regular spook stories, this is really more of a horror story or a ... erm ... psychomedical melodrama ...  Not sure what to call it.  Unnamed Narrator (let's call him Freddie) goes to stay with friends at their villa on the Italian Riviera.  Also living with them is a painter by the name of Arthur Inglis.  On his first night there, Freddie dreams ... is it a dream, though? ... of an infestation of hideous giant caterpillars in a particular unused bedroom.  The next day Inglis finds one of said bugs; he plans to keep it but Freddie is so horrified that he throws it into a fountain; the caterpillar survives its dunking but is eventually squished by Inglis.  Again that night Freddie dreams (¿?) of the infestation, but now it's on the move.  Well, the long and short of it is that the creepie-crawlies (if they exist) are harbingers of Inglis' death from cancer.  The story ends with the villa-owner ~ or the author ~ expressing the extraordinary belief that cancer is in some way infectious.
I'm fairly sure EFB uses the insects-as-cancer motif in something else I've read; he certainly uses the insects-as-consumption motif in Sheaves (1907).  The man himself died of throat cancer in 1940.  I'm not saying a single word about EFB having presaged his own death here.  That would be almost as daft as the story itself, whose main virtue is that it's short.  Available online here




THE CRITICS

Caterpillars […] tells of a vile dream in which millions of the insects are crawling in through keyholes and covering the floor with their writhing mess, which on waking turns out to be a presentiment of cancer. [It] is such a long way from the arch humour of Benson's English village novels that it scarcely seems credible they were written by the same man …

~ Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991

Other memorable stories [from The Room in the Tower and Other Stories] include Caterpillars, with its zodiacal pun (a relentless tide of huge, writhing caterpillars with crablike pincers instead of suckers, force their way into a painter's bedroom, after which the painter contracts cancer) …

~Richard Dalby in introduction to The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson, 1992