sane. However, nothing matters less than what anybody chooses to call
things. God never labels his gifts; He just puts them into our hands;
just as he put animals in the garden of Eden, for Adam to name if he
felt disposed.”
“So by the continual observance and study of things that were happy,”
continued he, “I got happiness, I got joy. But seeking it, as I did,
from Nature, I got much more which I did not seek, but stumbled upon
originally by accident. It is difficult to explain, but I will try.
“About three years ago I was sitting one morning in a place I will show
you to-morrow. It is down by the river brink, very green, dappled with
shade and sun, and the river passes there through some little clumps of
reeds. Well, as I sat there, doing nothing, but just looking and
listening, I heard the sound quite distinctly of some flute-like
instrument playing a strange unending melody. I thought at first it was
some musical yokel on the highway and did not pay much attention. But
before long the strangeness and indescribable beauty of the tune struck
me. It never repeated itself, but it never came to an end, phrase after
phrase ran its sweet course, it worked gradually and inevitably up to a
climax, and having attained it, it went on; another climax was reached
and another and another. Then with a sudden gasp of wonder I localised
where it came from. It came from the reeds and from the sky and from the
trees. It was everywhere, it was the sound of life. It was, my dear
Darcy, as the Greeks would have said, it was Pan playing on his pipes,
the voice of Nature. It was the life-melody, the world-melody.”
Darcy was far too interested to interrupt, though there was a question
he would have liked to ask, and Frank went on:
“Well, for the moment I was terrified, terrified with the impotent
horror of nightmare, and I stopped my ears and just ran from the place
and got back to the house panting, trembling, literally in a panic.
Unknowingly, for at that time I only pursued joy, I had begun, since I
drew my joy from Nature, to get in touch with Nature. Nature, force,
God, call it what you will, had drawn across my face a little gossamer
web of essential life. I saw that when I emerged from my terror, and I
went very humbly back to where I had heard the Pan-pipes. But it was
nearly six months before I heard them again.”
“Why was that?” asked Darcy.
“Surely because I had revolted, rebelled, and worst of all been
frightened. For I believe that just as there is nothing in the world
which so injures one’s body as fear, so there is nothing that so much
shuts up the soul. I was afraid, you see, of the one thing in the world
which has real existence. No wonder its manifestation was withdrawn.”
“And after six months?”
“After six months one blessed morning I heard the piping again. I wasn’t
afraid that time. And since then it has grown louder, it has become more
constant. I now hear it often, and I can put myself into such an
attitude towards Nature that the pipes will almost certainly sound. And
never yet have they played the same tune, it is always something new,
something fuller, richer, more complete than before.”
“What do you mean by ‘such an attitude towards Nature’?” asked Darcy.
“I can’t explain that; but by translating it into a bodily attitude it
is this.”
Frank sat up for a moment quite straight in his chair, then slowly sunk
back with arms outspread and head drooped.
“That;” he said, “an effortless attitude, but open, resting, receptive.
It is just that which you must do with your soul.”
Then he sat up again.
“One word more,” he said, “and I will bore you no further. Nor unless
you ask me questions shall I talk about it again. You will find me, in
fact, quite sane in my mode of life. Birds and beasts, you will see
behaving somewhat intimately to me, like that moor-hen, but that is all.
I will walk with you, ride with you, play golf with you, and talk with
you on any subject you like. But I wanted you on the threshold to know
what has happened to me. And one thing more will happen.”
He paused again, and a slight look of fear crossed his eyes.
“There will be a final revelation,” he said, “a complete and blinding
stroke which will throw open to me, once and for all, the full
knowledge, the full realisation and comprehension that I am one, just as
you are, with life. In reality there is no ‘me,’ no ‘you,’ no ‘it.’
Everything is part of the one and only thing which is life. I know that
that is so, but the realisation of it is not yet mine. But it will be,
and on that day, so I take it, I shall see Pan. It may mean death, the
death of my body, that is, but I don’t care. It may mean immortal,
eternal life lived here and now and for ever. Then having gained that,
ah, my dear Darcy, I shall preach such a gospel of joy, showing myself
as the living proof of the truth, that Puritanism, the dismal religion
of sour faces, shall vanish like a breath of smoke, and be dispersed and
disappear in the sunlit air. But first the full knowledge must be mine.”
Darcy watched his face narrowly.
“You are afraid of that moment,” he said.
Frank smiled at him.
“Quite true; you are quick to have seen that. But when it comes I hope I
shall not be afraid.”
For some little time there was silence; then Darcy rose.
“You have bewitched me, you extraordinary boy,” he said. “You have been
telling me a fairy-story, and I find myself saying, ‘Promise me it is
true.’”
“I promise you that,” said the other.
“And I know I shan’t sleep,” added Darcy.
Frank looked at him with a sort of mild wonder as if he scarcely
understood.
“Well, what does that matter?” he said.
“I assure you it does. I am wretched unless I sleep.”
“Of course I can make you sleep if I want,” said Frank in a rather bored
voice.
“Well do.”
“Very good: go to bed. I’ll come upstairs in ten minutes.”
Frank busied himself for a little after the other had gone, moving the
table back under the awning of the verandah and quenching the lamp. Then
he went with his quick silent tread upstairs and into Darcy’s room. The
latter was already in bed, but very wide-eyed and wakeful, and Frank
with an amused smile of indulgence, as for a fretful child, sat down on
the edge of the bed.
“Look at me,” he said, and Darcy looked.
“The birds are sleeping in the brake,” said Frank softly, “and the winds
are asleep. The sea sleeps, and the tides are but the heaving of its
breast. The stars swing slow, rocked in the great cradle of the Heavens,
and----”
He stopped suddenly, gently blew out Darcy’s candle, and left him
sleeping.
Morning brought to Darcy a flood of hard common-sense, as clear and
crisp as the sunshine that filled his room. Slowly as he woke he
gathered together the broken threads of the memories of the evening
which had ended, so he told himself, in a trick of common hypnotism.
That accounted for it all; the whole strange talk he had had was under a
spell of suggestion from the extraordinary vivid boy who had once been a
man; all his own excitement, his acceptance of the incredible had been
merely the effect of a stronger, more potent will imposed on his own.
How strong that will was, he guessed from his own instantaneous
obedience to Frank’s suggestion of sleep. And armed with impenetrable
common-sense he came down to breakfast. Frank had already begun, and was
consuming a large plateful of porridge and milk with the most prosaic
and healthy appetite.
“Slept well?” he asked.
“Yes, of course. Where did you learn hypnotism?”
“By the side of the river.”
“You talked an amazing quantity of nonsense last night,” remarked Darcy,
in a voice prickly with reason.
“Rather. I felt quite giddy. Look, I remembered to order a dreadful
daily paper for you. You can read about money markets or politics or
cricket matches.”
Darcy looked at him closely. In the morning light Frank looked even
fresher, younger, more vital than he had done the night before, and the
sight of him somehow dinted Darcy’s armour of common-sense.
“You are the most extraordinary fellow I ever saw,” he said. “I want to
ask you some more questions.”
“Ask away,” said Frank.
* * * * *
For the next day or two Darcy plied his friend with many questions,
objections and criticisms on the theory of life and gradually got out of
him a coherent and complete account of his experience. In brief then,
Frank believed that “by lying naked,” as he put it, to the force which
controls the passage of the stars, the breaking of a wave, the budding
of a tree, the love of a youth and maiden, he had succeeded in a way
hitherto undreamed of in possessing himself of the essential principle
of life. Day by day, so he thought, he was getting nearer to, and in
closer union with the great power itself which caused all life to be,
the spirit of nature, of force, or the spirit of God. For himself, he
confessed to what others would call paganism; it was sufficient for him
that there existed a principle of life. He did not worship it, he did
not pray to it, he did not praise it. Some of it existed in all human
beings, just as it existed in trees and animals, to realise and make
living to himself the fact that it was all one, was his sole aim and
object.
Here perhaps Darcy would put in a word of warning.
“Take care,” he said. “To see Pan meant death, did it not.”
Frank’s eyebrows would rise at this.
“What does that matter?” he said. “True, the Greeks were always right,
and they said so, but there is another possibility. For the nearer I get
to it, the more living, the more vital and young I become.”
“What then do you expect the final revelation will do for you?”
“I have told you,” said he. “It will make me immortal.”
But it was not so much from speech and argument that Darcy grew to grasp
his friend’s conception, as from the ordinary conduct of his life. They
were passing, for instance, one morning down the village street, when an
old woman, very bent and decrepit, but with an extraordinary
cheerfulness of face, hobbled out from her cottage. Frank instantly
stopped when he saw her.
“You old darling! How goes it all?” he said.
But she did not answer, her dim old eyes were rivetted on his face; she
seemed to drink in like a thirsty creature the beautiful radiance which
shone there. Suddenly she put her two withered old hands on his
shoulders.
“You’re just the sunshine itself,” she said, and he kissed her and
passed on.
But scarcely a hundred yards further a strange contradiction of such
tenderness occurred. A child running along the path towards them fell on
its face, and set up a dismal cry of fright and pain. A look of horror
came into Frank’s eyes, and, putting his fingers in his ears, he fled at
full speed down the street, and did not pause till he was out of
hearing. Darcy, having ascertained that the child was not really hurt,
followed him in bewilderment.
“Are you without pity then?” he asked.
Frank shook his head impatiently.
“Can’t you see?” he asked. “Can’t you understand that that sort of
thing, pain, anger, anything unlovely throws me back, retards the coming
of the great hour! Perhaps when it comes I shall be able to piece that
side of life on to the other, on to the true religion of joy. At present
I can’t.”
“But the old woman. Was she not ugly?”
Frank’s radiance gradually returned.
“Ah, no. She was like me. She longed for joy, and knew it when she saw
it, the old darling.”
Another question suggested itself.
“Then what about Christianity?” asked Darcy.
“I can’t accept it. I can’t believe in any creed of which the central
doctrine is that God who is Joy should have had to suffer. Perhaps it
was so; in some inscrutable way I believe it may have been so, but I
don’t understand how it was possible. So I leave it alone; my affair is
joy.”
They had come to the weir above the village, and the thunder of riotous
cool water was heavy in the air. Trees dipped into the translucent
stream with slender trailing branches, and the meadow where they stood
was starred with midsummer blossomings. Larks shot up carolling into the
crystal dome of blue, and a thousand voices of June sang round them.
Frank, bare-headed as was his wont, with his coat slung over his arm and
his shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbow, stood there like some
beautiful wild animal with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, drinking
in the scented warmth of the air. Then suddenly he flung himself face
downwards on the grass at the edge of the stream, burying his face in
the daisies and cowslips, and lay stretched there in wide-armed ecstasy,
with his long fingers pressing and stroking the dewy herbs of the field.
Never before had Darcy seen him thus fully possessed by his idea; his
caressing fingers, his half-buried face pressed close to the grass, even
the clothed lines of his figure were instinct with a vitality that
somehow was different from that of other men. And some faint glow from
it reached Darcy, some thrill, some vibration from that charged
recumbent body passed to him, and for a moment he understood as he had
not understood before, despite his persistent questions and the candid
answers they received, how real, and how realised by Frank, his idea
was.
Then suddenly the muscles in Frank’s neck became stiff and alert, and he
half-raised his head.
“The Pan-pipes, the Pan-pipes,” he whispered. “Close, oh, so close.”
Very slowly, as if a sudden movement might interrupt the melody, he
raised himself and leaned on the elbow of his bent arm. His eyes opened
wider, the lower lids drooped as if he focussed his eyes on something
very far away, and the smile on his face broadened and quivered like
sunlight on still water, till the exultance of its happiness was
scarcely human. So he remained motionless and rapt for some minutes,
then the look of listening died from his face, and he bowed his head
satisfied.
“Ah, that was good,” he said. “How is it possible you did not hear? Oh,
you poor fellow! Did you really hear nothing?”
A week of this outdoor and stimulating life did wonders in restoring to
Darcy the vigour and health which his weeks of fever had filched from
him, and as his normal activity and higher pressure of vitality
returned, he seemed to himself to fall even more under the spell which
the miracle of Frank’s youth cast over him. Twenty times a day he found
himself saying to himself suddenly at the end of some ten minutes’
silent resistance to the absurdity of Frank’s idea: “But it isn’t
possible; it can’t be possible,” and from the fact of his having to
assure himself so frequently of this, he knew that he was struggling and
arguing with a conclusion which already had taken root in his mind. For
in any case a visible living miracle confronted him, since it was
equally impossible that this youth, this boy, trembling on the verge of
manhood, was thirty-five. Yet such was the fact.
July was ushered in by a couple of days of blustering and fretful rain,
and Darcy, unwilling to risk a chill, kept to the house. But to Frank
this weeping change of weather seemed to have no bearing on the
behaviour of man, and he spent his days exactly as he did under the suns
of June, lying in his hammock, stretched on the dripping grass, or
making huge rambling excursions into the forest, the birds hopping from
tree to tree after him, to return in the evening, drenched and soaked,
but with the same unquenchable flame of joy burning within him.
“Catch cold?” he would ask, “I’ve forgotten how to do it, I think. I
suppose it makes one’s body more sensible always to sleep out-of-doors.
People who live indoors always remind me of something peeled and
skinless.”
“Do you mean to say you slept out-of-doors last night in that deluge?”
asked Darcy. “And where, may I ask?”
Frank thought a moment.
“I slept in the hammock till nearly dawn,” he said. “For I remember the
light blinked in the east when I awoke. Then I went--where did I go--oh,
yes, to the meadow where the Pan-pipes sounded so close a week ago. You
were with me, do you remember? But I always have a rug if it is wet.”
And he went whistling upstairs.
Somehow that little touch, his obvious effort to recall where he had
slept, brought strangely home to Darcy the wonderful romance of which he
was the still half-incredulous beholder. Sleep till close on dawn in a
hammock, then the tramp--or probably scamper--underneath the windy and
weeping heavens to the remote and lonely meadow by the weir! The picture
of other such nights rose before him; Frank sleeping perhaps by the
bathing-place under the filtered twilight of the stars, or the white
blaze of moon-shine, a stir and awakening at some dead hour, perhaps a
space of silent wide-eyed thought, and then awandering through the
hushed woods to some other dormitory, alone with his happiness, alone
with the joy and the life that suffused and enveloped him, without other
thought or desire or aim except the hourly and never-ceasing communion
with the joy of nature.
They were in the middle of dinner that night, talking on indifferent
subjects, when Darcy suddenly broke off in the middle of a sentence.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “At last I’ve got it.”
“Congratulate you,” said Frank. “But what?”
“The radical unsoundness of your idea. It is this: ‘All Nature from
highest to lowest is full, crammed full of suffering; every living
organism in nature preys on another, yet in your aim to get close to,
to be one with nature, you leave suffering altogether out; you run away
from it, you refuse to recognise it. And you are waiting, you say, for
the final revelation.”
Frank’s brow clouded slightly.
“Well,” he asked, rather wearily.
“Cannot you guess then when the final revelation will be? In joy you are
supreme, I grant you that; I did not know a man could be so master of
it. You have learned perhaps practically all that nature can teach. And
if, as you think, the final revelation is coming to you, it will be the
revelation of horror, suffering, death, pain in all its hideous forms.
Suffering does exist: you hate it and fear it.”
Frank held up his hand.
“Stop; let me think,” he said.
There was silence for a long minute.
“That never struck me,” he said at length. “It is possible that what you
suggest is true. Does the sight of Pan mean that, do you think? Is it
that nature, take it altogether, suffers horribly, suffers to a hideous
inconceivable extent? Shall I be shown all the suffering?”
He got up and came round to where Darcy sat.
“If it is so, so be it,” he said. “Because, my dear fellow, I am near,
so splendidly near to the final revelation. To-day the pipes have
sounded almost without pause. I have even heard the rustle in the
bushes, I believe, of Pan’s coming. I have seen, yes, I saw to-day, the
bushes pushed aside as if by a hand, and piece of a face, not human,
peered through. But I was not frightened, at least I did not run away
this time.”
He took a turn up to the window and back again.
“Yes, there is suffering all through,” he said, “and I have left it all
out of my search. Perhaps, as you say, the revelation will be that. And
in that case, it will be good-bye. I have gone on one line. I shall have
gone too far along one road, without having explored the other. But I
can’t go back now. I wouldn’t if I could; not a step would I retrace! In
any case, whatever the revelation is, it will be God. I’m sure of that.”
* * * * *
The rainy weather soon passed, and with the return of the sun Darcy
again joined Frank in long rambling days. It grew extraordinarily
hotter, and with the fresh bursting of life, after the rain, Frank’s
vitality seemed to blaze higher and higher. Then, as is the habit of the
English weather, one evening clouds began to bank themselves up in the
west, the sun went down in a glare of coppery thunder-rack, and the
whole earth broiling under an unspeakable oppression and sultriness
paused and panted for the storm. After sunset the remote fires of
lightning began to wink and flicker on the horizon, but when bed-time
came the storm seemed to have moved no nearer, though a very low
unceasing noise of thunder was audible. Weary and oppressed by the
stress of the day, Darcy fell at once into a heavy uncomforting sleep.
He woke suddenly into full consciousness, with the din of some appalling
explosion of thunder in his ears, and sat up in bed with racing heart.
Then for a moment, as he recovered himself from the panic-land which
lies between sleeping and waking, there was silence, except for the
steady hissing of rain on the shrubs outside his window. But suddenly
that silence was shattered and shredded into fragments by a scream from
somewhere close at hand outside in the black garden, a scream of supreme
and despairing terror. Again and once again it shrilled up, and then a
babble of awful words was interjected. A quivering sobbing voice that he
knew, said:
“My God, oh, my God; oh, Christ!”
And then followed a little mocking, bleating laugh. Then was silence
again; only the rain hissed on the shrubs.
All this was but the affair of a moment, and without pause either to put
on clothes or light a candle, Darcy was already fumbling at his
door-handle. Even as he opened it he met a terror-stricken face outside,
that of the man-servant who carried a light.
“Did you hear?” he asked.
The man’s face was bleached to a dull shining whiteness.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “It was the master’s voice.”
* * * * *
Together they hurried down the stairs, and through the dining-room where
an orderly table for breakfast had already been laid, and out on to the
terrace. The rain for the moment had been utterly stayed, as if the tap
of the heavens had been turned off, and under the lowering black sky,
not quite dark, since the moon rode somewhere serene behind the
conglomerated thunder-clouds, Darcy stumbled into the garden, followed
by the servant with the candle. The monstrous leaping shadow of himself
was cast before him on the lawn; lost and wandering odours of rose and
lily and damp earth were thick about him, but more pungent was some
sharp and acrid smell that suddenly reminded him of a certain chalet in
which he had once taken refuge in the Alps. In the blackness of the hazy
light from the sky, and the vague tossing of the candle behind him, he
saw that the hammock in which Frank so often lay was tenanted. A gleam
of white shirt was there, as if a man sitting up in it, but across that
there was an obscure dark shadow, and as he approached the acrid odour
grew more intense.
He was now only some few yards away, when suddenly the black shadow
seemed to jump into the air, then came down with tappings of hard hoofs
on the brick path that ran down the pergola, and with frolicsome
skippings galloped off into the bushes. When that was gone Darcy could
see quite clearly that a shirted figure sat up in the hammock. For one
moment, from sheer terror of the unseen, he hung on his step, and the
servant joining him they walked together to the hammock.
It was Frank. He was in shirt and trousers only, and he sat up with
braced arms. For one half-second he stared at them, his face a mask of
horrible contorted terror. His upper lip was drawn back so that the gums
of the teeth appeared, and his eyes were focussed not on the two who
approached him but on something quite close to him; his nostrils were
widely expanded, as if he panted for breath, and terror incarnate and
repulsion and deathly anguish ruled dreadful lines on his smooth cheeks
and forehead. Then even as they looked the body sank backwards, and the
ropes of the hammock wheezed and strained.
Darcy lifted him out and carried him indoors. Once he thought there was
a faint convulsive stir of the limbs that lay with so dead a weight in
his arms, but when they got inside, there was no trace of life. But the
look of supreme terror and agony of fear had gone from his face, a boy
tired with play but still smiling in his sleep was the burden he laid on
the floor. His eyes had closed, and the beautiful mouth lay in smiling
curves, even as when a few mornings ago, in the meadow by the weir, it
had quivered to the music of the unheard melody of Pan’s pipes. Then
they looked further.