I
My Dear Violet,--So you "gather from the tone of two or three recent
letters that my spirit is creeping back to light and warmth again"?
Well, after a fashion you are right. I shall never laugh again as I
used to laugh before Harry's death. The taste has gone out of that
carelessness, and I turn even from the remembrance of it. But I can be
cheerful, with a cheerfulness which has found the centre of gravity.
I am myself again, as people say. After months of agitation in what
seemed to be chaos the lost atom has dropped back to its place in the
scheme of things, and even aspires (poor mite!) to do its infinitesimal
business intelligently. So might a mote in a sunbeam feel itself at one
with God!
But when you assume that my recovery has been a gradual process, you are
wrong. You will think me more than ever deranged; but I assure you that
it has been brought about, not by long strivings, but suddenly--without
preparation of mine--_and by the immediate hand of our dead brother_.
Yes; you shall have the whole tale. The first effect of the news of
Harry's death in October last was simply to stun me. You may remember
how once, years ago when we were children, we rode home together across
the old Racecourse after a long day's skating, our skates swinging at
our saddle-bows; how Harry challenged us to a gallop; and how, midway,
the roan mare slipped down neck over crop on the frozen turf and hurled
me clean against the face of a stone dyke. I had been thrown from
horseback more than once before, but somehow had always found the earth
fairly elastic. So I had griefs before Harry died and took some rebound
of hope from each: but that cast repeated in a worse degree the old
shock--the springless brutal jar--of the stone dyke. With him the sun
went out of my sky.
I understand that this torpor is quite common with men and women
suddenly bereaved. I believe that a whole week passed before my brain
recovered any really vital motion; and then such feeble thought as I
could exert was wholly occupied with the desperate stupidity of the
whole affair. If God were indeed shaping the world to any end, if any
design of His underlay the activities of men, what insensate waste to
quench such a heart and brain as Harry's!--to nip, as it seemed out of
mere blundering wantonness, a bud which had begun to open so generously:
to sacrifice that youth and strength, that comeliness, that enthusiasm,
and all for nothing! Had some campaign claimed him, had he been spent
to gain a citadel or defend a flag, I had understood. But that he
should be killed on a friendly mission; attacked in ignorance by those
East Coast savages while bearing gifts to their king; deserted by the
porters whose comfort (on their own confession) he had studied
throughout the march; left to die, to be tortured, mutilated--and all
for no possible good: these things I could not understand. At the end
he might have escaped; but as he caught hold of his saddle by the band
between the holsters, it parted: it was not leather, but faced paper,
the job of some cheating contractor. I thought of this, too. And Harry
had been through Chitral!
But though a man may hate, he cannot easily despise God for long.
"He is great--but wasteful," said the American. We are the dust on His
great hands, and fly as He claps them carelessly in the pauses of His
work. Yet this theory would not do at all: for the unlucky particles
are not dust, not refuse, but exquisite and exquisitely fashioned,
designed to _live_, and to every small function of life adapted with the
minutest care. There were nights indeed when, walking along the shore
where we had walked together on the night before Harry left England and
looking from the dark waters which divided me from his grave up to the
nightly moon and to the stars around her, I could well believe God
wasteful of little things. Sirius flashing low, Orion's belt with the
great nebula swinging like a pendant of diamonds; the ruby stars,
Betelgueux and Aldebaran--my eyes went up beyond these to Perseus
shepherding the Kids westward along the Milky way. From the right
Andromeda flashed signals to him: and above sat Cassiopeia, her mother,
resting her jewelled wrists on the arms of her throne. Low in the east
Jupiter trailed his satellites in the old moon's path. As they all
moved, silent, looking down on me out of the hollow spaces of the night,
I could believe no splendid waste too costly for their perfection: and
the Artificer who hung them there after millions of years of patient
effort, if more intelligible than a God who produced them suddenly at
will, certainly not less divine. But walking the same shore by daylight
I recognised that the shells, the mosses, the flowers I trampled on,
were, each in its way, as perfect as those great stars: that on these--
and on Harry--as surely as on the stars--God had spent, if not infinite
pains, then at least so superlative a wisdom that to conceive of them as
wastage was to deny the mind which called them forth.
There they were: and that He who had skill to create them could blunder
in using them was simply incredible.
But this led to worse: for having to admit the infallible design, I now
began to admire it as an exquisite scheme of evil, and to accuse God of
employing supreme knowledge and skill to gratify a royal lust of
cruelty. For a month and more this horrible theory justified itself in
all innocent daily sights. Throughout my country walks I "saw blood."
I heard the rabbit run squeaking before the weasel; I watched the
butcher crow working steadily down the hedge. If I turned seaward I
looked beneath the blue and saw the dog-fish gnawing on the whiting.
If I walked in the garden I surprised the thrush dragging worms from the
turf, the cat slinking on the nest, the spider squatting in ambush.
Behind the rosy face of every well-nourished child I saw a lamb gazing
up at the butcher's knife. My dear Violet, that was a hideous time!
And just then by chance a book fell into my hands--Lamartine's _Chute
d'un Ange_. Do you know the Seventh and Tenth Visions of that poem,
which describe the favourite amusements of the Men-gods? Before the
Deluge, beyond the rude tents of the nomad shepherds, there rose city
upon city of palaces built of jasper and porphyry, splendid and utterly
corrupt; inhabited by men who called themselves gods and explored the
subtleties of all sciences to minister to their vicious pleasures.
At ease on soft couches, in hanging gardens set with fountains, these
beings feasted with every refinement of cruelty. Kneeling slaves were
their living tables; while for their food--
Tous les oiseaux de l'air, tous les poissons de l'onde,
Tout ce qui vole ou nage ou rampe dans le monde,
Mourant pour leur plaisir des plus cruels trepas
De sanglantes savours composent leurs repas. . . .
In these lines I believed that I discerned the very God of the universe,
the God whom men worship--
Dans les infames jeux de leur divin loisir
Le supplice de l'homme est leur premier plaisir.
Pour que leur oeil feroce a l'envi s'en repaisse
Des bourreaux devant eux en immolent sans cesse.
Tantot ils font lutter, dans des combats affreux,
L'homme contre la brute et les hommes entre eux,
Aux longs ruisseaux de sang qui coulent de la veine,
Aux palpitations des membres sur l'arene,
Se levant a demi de leurs lits de repos
Des frissons de plaisir fremissent sur leurs peaux.
Le cri de la torture est leur douce harmonie,
Et leur oeil dans son oeil boit sa lente agonie.
I charged the Supreme Power with a cruelty deliberate, ruthless, serene.
Nero the tyrant once commanded a representation in grim earnest of the
Flight of Icarus; and the unhappy boy who took the part, at his first
attempt to fly, fell headlong beside the Emperor's couch and spattered
him with blood and brains. For the Emperor, says Suetonius, _perraro
praesidere, ceterum accubans, parvis primum foraminibus, deinde toto
podio adaperto, spectare consuerat_. So I believed that on the stage of
this world men agonised for the delight of one cruel intelligence which
watched from behind the curtain of a private box.