by E. F. Benson
Thus though, as has been said, his first impulse was one of shrinking from this proximity to what was unhappy and suffering, how splendid a demonstration of all that on which he so largely based his theory of life was here offered him. He did not seek after a sign, no demonstration could deepen his belief, yet he rejoiced that a sign was offered him, even as one who utterly believes in the omnipotence of God may yet look on the shining of the starry-kirtled night, and glow at the reminder he is given of what he believes. Well he knows the glory of God, but it does his heart good to behold it.
The work of the house took him, as a rule, but an hour or so to get through every morning; but to-day there were further preparations to be made for his friend’s arrival; linen had to be brought out for his bed, water to be fetched for his jug, and his room to be dusted and made ready. But these menial occupations seemed to Merivale to be in no way mean; nothing that was necessary for the ordinary simple needs of life could possibly be derogatory for the wisest or busiest or wealthiest of mankind to perform for himself, though to pass a lifetime in performing them for others was a mean matter both for employer and employed. But such things were not to him even tedious, any more than breathing or washing were tedious, and to find them tedious but meant that one was out of tune with the great symphony of life. Everyone, so ran his theory, ought ideally to be so simple in his needs that he could minister to his own necessities, without any sense that his time was wasted; one washed one’s hands, and brushed the hair. For this was part of the true simplification of life — to need but little, and provide that little oneself. Yet inasmuch as most of the world did not yet take his view (and Philip was one of them), he was accustomed to hire help, and intended to do so now, for a friend’s visit.
He moved quickly and deftly enough about his work; pausing to think for a moment as to the making of the bed, for all this summer he had scarcely once slept in one, while in winter a mattress and a rug comprised his own needs. Then the work of dusting brought him to the dressing-table, and for a moment he looked at himself in the glass with a sort of pang of delight, though in his delight there was neither self-consciousness nor vanity that this was he. For he was now several years past thirty, a time of life when on every face there begin to appear the marks of years; but from the glass there looked back into his eyes the face of a youth just standing on the threshold of manhood. The strength of manhood was there, but it was a strength in which the electric vigour of boyhood still quivered like a steel spring; not a sign of slack or wrinkled skin appeared there, and his hair, with its close-cropped curls, was thick and shining with health. But looking at this image of perfect and vigorous youth, he thought, after the first inevitable delight in the knowledge that this was he, not at all of himself, only of the fact that to any who lived his life this must be the certain and logical consequence. For the body was but the visible sign of the spirit: it was the soul of man that made his body, as a snail its shell; it was worry and discontent assuredly that drew lines and wrinkles on the face and brought fatigue and sloth to the muscles, not the passage of the years; it was just as surely serenity and the passionate acceptation and absorption of the joy of life that made a man young, and would keep him so body and soul alike.
But never before had he so fully realised this change that had come to him, and when, after his work in the house was over, he walked into Brockenhurst to engage a servant for the cooking which Philip’s visit would involve, he found himself wondering with a more than usually vivid curiosity to what further knowledge and illumination his undeviating quest should lead him. For he felt he was getting nearer every day, and very quickly nearer to the full realisation of his creed, namely, that all life was indivisibly one, and that the purport of all life was joy. And when his knowledge of this was made perfect, how would the revelation come, and what would be the effect? Would life eternal lived here and now be his, or would that light be too great for him to bear, so that this tabernacle of flesh and blood, hereditarily weakened by centuries of sin and shame, could not stand it? Was it life or seeming death that awaited him? He scarcely cared.
The tree that had been struck by lightning at the end of the garden he had felled soon after, and part of his daily work now was to cut up the branches into faggots and sticks of firewood for the winter. That dreadful stroke from the skies which had dealt death to this beautiful tree in the prime of its strength and luxuriance of its summer had often seemed to Merivale to involve a difficult question, for it was intimately bound up with all those things on which he had deliberately turned his back. Death did exist in the world, and though, as he had once said to Evelyn, out of death invariably came life, yet the fact of death was there, just as beyond all possibility of denial, pain and disease and sorrow were in the world also. These, however, were largely of man’s making, yet here, in the case of this poor stricken tree, it was Nature herself who deliberately attacked and slew part of herself. One animal, it is true, preyed on another, and by its death sustained its own life: that was far easier to understand. But there was something senseless and brutal in the fact of this weapon of the storm, a thing as inanimate as a rifle-bullet, striking at life. It was wanton destruction. Nothing came of it (and here he smiled, though not believing he had guessed the riddle), except firewood for him.
The morning was intensely hot, and as he worked hatless under the blaze of the sun, the wholesome sweat of toil poured from him. How good that was; how good, too, to feel the strong resistance of the wood against the blade of his axe, to feel the sinews of his arms alternately tighten and slacken themselves in the swiping strokes, to stand straight up a moment to rest his back, and wipe the moisture from his face and draw in two or three long, satisfying breaths of summer air. It was as if the song of the birds, too, entered into his very lungs, and the hum of the bees, and the murmur of the forest, which was beginning to be hushed a little at the hour when even the cicala sleeps. One thing alone would not be hushed, and that the liquid voice of the river, in which he would soon be plunged. No length of drought in this wonderful year seemed to diminish the wealth of its outpouring; it was as high between its fern-fringed banks now as it had been in April. But first there was the carrying of the aromatic, fresh-cut logs to the house to be done, and he almost regretted how near completion was the stack that filled the wood-shed, for there was something about the hardness of this particular toil that was intimately delightful. It required the exercise of strength and vigour, the full use of supple and well-hardened muscles; it was very typical of the splendid struggle for life in which the struggle itself, the fact of work, was a thing ecstatic. He had cut more than usual this morning, and it was with a boyish sense of playing some game against a rigid and inflexible opponent that he determined not to make two journeys of it, but carry all he had cut in one. And underneath this staggering burden which he loved he toiled to the wood-shed.
Merivale had just come up from his bathe in the evening when Philip arrived, and he met him halfway up the garden. That extraordinary change which he had himself seen in the glass that morning struck his friend, too.
“It was awfully good of you to let me come, Tom,” he said. “And what has been happening to you? If I had not known you ten years ago, I should scarcely have recognised you now.”
Tom laughed.
“And in ten days you won’t recognise yourself,” he said. “You look pulled down, and no wonder, if you’ve been working in London all August. Anyhow, this isn’t the least like London, and you are going to do no work. You are going to sit in the garden, and go for immense slow walks, and listen to my practically incessant and wholly fatuous conversation.”
But it was difficult for him to conceal the shock that Philip’s appearance gave him. He looked so horribly tired and so old. The suffering of this last month had made him haggard and heavy-eyed, and what was worse, the hatred that had been his soul’s guest had made his face hard and bitter, and yet for all the hardness it was strangely enfeebled: it had lost the look of strength and life that ha
d always been so characteristic of it. The vital principle had been withdrawn from it; all that it expressed was lethal, negative.
Philip’s weary eyes looked round on the garden and the low, thatched house where dinner was already being laid in the verandah.
“So this is the Hermitage,” he said. “Dear God, you have found peace.”
Then he broke off suddenly, and began again in a different voice, a voice that was like his face, bitter and hard and old.
“Yes, I’ve been overworking,” he said, “and as I told you, yesterday I suddenly collapsed. I think my work has got on my brain too much; I didn’t sleep well. London was dreadfully hot and stuffy, too. But I’ve made a pot of money this month. Those fools on the Stock Exchange say that August is a slack month. Of course it is if you are slack. But certainly from a business point of view I’ve had an all-round time. I brought some of them back, too, from their deer-forests and fishings in double-quick time. And they were mostly too late even then. Good joke, too, my going off suddenly like this, and leaving them grilling in London.”
Merivale could not quite let this pass; besides, he must answer somehow. He laughed.
“I don’t altogether agree with your idea of humour,” he said. “Was it really — from a humorous point of view — worth while?”
Philip’s face did not relax.
“It was from a business point of view,” he said.
Then his gardener’s eye was suddenly arrested by a perle des jardins that was ramping beyond all bounds.
“I used to know about roses,” he said, “and I’ll cut that back for you to-morrow. You are not getting half the roses out of it.”
“I know, but it’s enjoying itself so enormously,” said Merivale.
Philip considered this as an abstract question on to which he had not previously turned his mind.
“And you think that ought to be taken into consideration when one deals with the destinies even of rose-trees?” he asked with a terrible air of being in earnest.
Merivale smiled.
“Decidedly London has not been good for you,” he said. “I think your words were ‘the destinies even of rose-trees.’ Now what destiny matters more than that? Not mine, I am sure, and I doubt if yours. Besides, the destinies of your rose-trees used to be of extraordinary importance, not only to them, but to you.”
Philip was silent a moment. Then for the first time, at the sense of peace that was here so predominant a note, or at the sight of Tom himself, in all the vigour and freshness of a youth that measured by years was already past, some faint gleam, or if not a gleam, the sense that light was possible to him, broke through the dismal darkness of his soul. For one short moment he laid his hand on his friend’s arm.
“Make allowance for me, Tom,” he said.
In spite of his long aloofness from the fretful race of men and the ways of them, Merivale had not forgotten — indeed it is as impossible for one who has ever known it to forget it as it is to forget how to swim — that divine gift of tact. Indeed, it is probable that his long sojournings alone had, if anything, made more sensitive those surfaces which come into contact with others and which others insensibly feel (for this is tact) to be smooth and warm and wise. And it was a fine touch that he did not respond, however remotely, to Philip’s appeal, for Philip had told him that pity and sympathy were exactly what he could not stand. Consequently he let this cry be the voice of one in the desert; it wanted silence, not audible answer. He, like the trees in the garden and the stream, must be dumb to it.
This silence was the key to several days that followed: there was, in fact, no intimate conversation of any sort between the two friends. Philip would sit for hours in the garden, stung sometimes into spasmodic activity, during which he would send off a dozen telegrams to his office on monetary affairs, but for the most part with an unread paper on his knees, or a book that tumbled unheeded on to the grass. But soon during this frosty and strictured time, Merivale thought he saw, as birds know the hour of sunrise before the faintest dawn illuminates the sky, that there were signs that this frost was less binding than it had been. Philip would take a pruning-knife sometimes, and with his deft and practised hand reduce a rose to reasonable dimensions. Sometimes half-way through the operation he would let the knife fall from his fingers, as if his labours, like everything else, were not worth while; but often afterwards he would resume his labours, and enable the tree to do justice to itself. By degrees, too, these outbursts of City activity grew rarer and more spasmodic, becoming, as it were, but the echoes of a habit rather than demonstrations of the habit itself. He did not join Merivale in his long tramps over the forest, but he began to wait for his return, and if he knew from what point of the compass he was likely to return, he sometimes set out to meet him. Once Merivale was very late: his tramp had taken him further than usual, and night, falling cloudy and moonless, had surprised him in a wood where even one who knew the forest as well as he might miss his way. On this occasion he found Philip pacing up and down the garden in some agitation.
“Ah, there you are,” he cried in a tone of obvious relief when his white-flannelled figure appeared against the deep dusk of the bushes that lined the stream. “I was getting anxious, and I did not know what to do. I should have come out to look for you, but I did not know where you might be coming from.”
And that little touch of anxiety was perhaps the first sign that he had shown since he had abandoned himself to bitterness that his heart was not dead: never before had the faintest spark of the sense of human comradeship or its solicitudes appeared.
Then Merivale knew that the fortnight that Philip had already spent here had not been utterly wasted, and before going to bed that night he wrote one line of hope to Mrs. Home.
FIFTEENTH
A COUPLE of days after this the weather suddenly broke, and for the unclouded and azure skies they had a day of low, weeping heavens, with an air of dead and stifling dampness. Never for a moment through the hours of daylight did the sullen downpour relax; the trees stood with listless, drooping branches, from which under the drenching rain a few early autumn leaves kept falling, though the time of the fall of the leaf was not yet. In the garden beds the plants had given up all attempts to look gay or to stand up, and bent drearily enough beneath the rain that scattered their petals and dragged their foliage in the muddy earth. The birds, too, were silent; only the hiss of the rain was heard, and towards afternoon the voice of the river grew a little louder. Merivale, however, was undeterred and quite undepressed by these almost amphibious conditions, and, as usual, went off after breakfast for one of those long rambles of his in the forest, leaving Philip alone. There was no hint of unfriendliness taken in this; indeed, Philip had exacted a promise from his host on the evening of arrival that his normal course of life should be undisturbed.
That first little token that he had given two days before that his heart was not dead had more than once repeated itself since then, and he was perhaps faintly conscious of some change in himself. He was not, so far as he knew, less unhappy, but that frightful hardness was beginning to break down, the surface of its ice was damped with thawed water, his hatred of all the world, his deep resentment at the scheme of things — if any scheme underlay the wantonness of what had happened — was less pronounced. It might, indeed, be only that he was utterly broken, that his spirit of rebellion could no longer raise its banner of revolt, yet he did not feel as if he had surrendered, he did not in the least fold his hands and wait mutely for whatever the Powers that be might choose to do with him. He was conscious, indeed, of the opposite, of a certain sense of dawning willpower; and though his life, so to speak, lay shattered round him, he knew that subconsciously somehow he was beginning to regard the pieces with some slight curiosity that was new to him, wondering if this bit would fit on to that. In a way he had plunged into business again with that feverish rush which had taken him through August with some such idea; his immediate salvation, at any rate, he had believed to lie in concentrated o
ccupation; yet there had been nothing constructive about that; it was a palliative measure, to relieve pain, rather than a course that would go to the root of the disease. Also, such as it was, it had failed, his health had given way: he could for the present take no more of that opiate.
In another respect also it had failed, for to-day by the mid-day post there had come for him communications of the greatest importance from the City, information which was valuable, provided only he acted on it without delay. There was no difficulty about it, the question had no complications; he himself had only to send off instructions which ten minutes’ thought could easily frame. Yet he sat with paper and pens in front of him, doing nothing, for he had asked himself a very simple question instead. “Is it all worth while?” was what he said to himself. And apparently it was not.
Now, if this had happened a month ago, it would have been equivalent to a surrender; it would have been a confession that he was beaten. But now the whole nature of his doubt was changed. Work, it is true, had done something for him; it had got him through a month in which he was incapable of anything else, it had got him, in fact, to the point which was indicated two days ago by his little anxiety about Merivale. And had he known it, that was much the most important things that had happened to him for weeks. Something within him had instinctively claimed kinship again with mankind.
