Tom Merivale did not, as Mrs. Home had feared he might, appear without
clothes at dinner, nor did he make clamorous demands for cabbage. It is
true that he ate no meat of any kind, but he was not of the preaching
sort of vegetarians, and did not call attention to his abstinence.
Instead, he and Evelyn Dundas between them managed to turn the meal into
a ridiculous piece of gaiety by sheer exuberance of animal spirits, and
even Lady Ellington forgot to examine the dishes with her usual
magisterial air, and really ate and drank without criticising.
There was an extraordinary superficial resemblance in certain ways
between the two men. Both, at any rate, were glorious examples of the
happiness that springs from health, a happiness which is as inimitable
as it is contagious. By health, it must be premised, is not meant the
mere absence of definite ailments, but that perfect poise between an
active mind and an exuberant body which is so rare.
It was on this very subject that Merivale was speaking now.
"Ah, no, Lady Ellington," he was saying, "to be able to get through the
day's work, day after day and year after year, is not health. Perfect
health implies practically perfect happiness."
"But how if you have a definite cause of worry?" she said.
"You can't worry when you are well. One knows, for example, that if one
is definitely unwell, the same cause produces greater worry and
discomfort than if one is not. And my theory is, that if one is
absolutely well, if your mind and soul, that is to say, as well as your
body, are all in accord with each other and with their environment,
worry is impossible."
Lady Ellington, to do her justice, always listened to that were really
new to her. She always assumed, by the way, that they were not.
"My theory exactly," she said. "I could scarcely have lived through
these last years unless I had made up my mind never to let any anxiety
take hold of me."
Evelyn Dundas laughed. Dinner was nearing its end and conversation was
general.
"My mind and my body are not in absolute accord this moment," he said,
"and I am rather anxious. My body demands some more ice-pudding; my mind
tells me it would be extremely unwise. Which am I to listen to, Tom?"
"Give Mr. Dundas some more ice-pudding," remarked Philip to a footman.
"The laws of hospitality compel me to fall in with my host's
suggestions," said Evelyn. "Tom, where you are wrong lies in thinking
that it is worth while spending all your time in keeping well. He lives
in the New Forest, Lady Ellington, and if when you are passing you hear
the puffs of a loud steam-engine somewhere near Brockenhurst you will
know it is Tom doing deep breathing. He expects in time to become a
Ram-jam or something, by breathing himself into Raj-pan-puta."
Tom Merivale laughed.
"No, I don't want to become a Ram-jam," he said, "whatever that may be.
I want to become myself."
"No clothes," murmured Mrs. Home.
"Become yourself?" asked Lady Ellington.
"Yes, most of us are stunted copies of our real selves," he said.
"Imitations of what we might be. And what might one not be?"
The talk had got for him, at any rate, suddenly serious, and he looked
up at Lady Ellington with a sparkling eye.
"Explain," she said.
"Well, it seems to me one cripples oneself in so many ways. One allows
oneself to be nervous, and to be angry, and to be bound by conventions
that are useless and cramping."
"Tall hats, frock-coats?" asked she.
"No, certainly not, because they, at any rate, are perfectly harmless.
But, to take an example of what I mean, it seems to me a ridiculous
convention that we should all consider ourselves obliged to know what is
going on in the world. It does not really do one any good to know that
there is war between China and Japan. What does do us good is not to be
ill-tempered, and never to be sad. Sadness and pessimism are the worst
forms of mental disease I know. And the state will not put sad and
pessimistic people in asylums, or isolate them at any rate so that their
disease should not spread. Such diseases are so frightfully catching,
and they are more fatal than fevers. People die of them, soul and body!"
Lady Ellington felt that Mrs. Home was collecting her eye, and rose.
"What a fascinating theory," she said. "Just what I have always thought.
Ah, I have caught my dress under my chair. You should have castors, Mr.
Home, on your dining-room chairs."
* * * * *
Evelyn moved up next to Tom Merivale after the others had left them.
"Dear old Hermit!" he said. "Now, you've got to give an account of
yourself. Neither Phil nor I have seen you for a year. What have you
been doing?"
Tom let the port pass him.
"I suppose you would call it nothing," said he.
"Ah, but in real life people don't go and live in the New Forest and do
nothing. What have you written in the last year?"
"Not one line. Seriously, I have been doing nothing except a little
gardening and carpentering; just manual labour to keep one sane."'
"Well, it looks as if it suited you. You look well enough, and what is
so odd, you look so much younger."
Tom laughed again.
"Ah, that strikes you, does it?" he said. "I suppose it could not have
been otherwise, though that wasn't my object in going to live there."
"Well, tell us, then!" said Evelyn, rather impatiently. He had begun to
smoke, and smoked in a most characteristic manner; that is to say, that
in little more than a minute his cigarette was consumed down one side,
and was a peninsula of charred paper down the other, while clouds of
smoke ascended from it. Perceiving this, he instantly lit another one.
But Philip rose.
"Tell us afterwards, Tom," he said. "Lady Ellington likes to play
bridge, I know, as soon as dinner is over."
Evelyn rose also.
"Ah, she is like me," he said. "She wants to do things not soon, but
immediately, Philip, how awfully pretty Miss Ellington is. Why wasn't I
told? I should like to paint her."
Philip paused by the door.
"Really, do you mean that?" he said. "And have you got time? I hear you
always have more orders than you can ever get through."
Evelyn tossed his head with a quick, petulant gesture.
"You talk as if I was a tailor," he said. "But you suggest to me the
advisability of my getting apprentices to paint the uninteresting people
for me, and I will sign them. That would satisfy a lot of them. Yes, I
have more than I can do. But I could do Miss Ellington remarkably well.
Shall I ask her to sit for me?"
"That would be rather original, the first time you saw her."
"A good reason for doing it," said Evelyn, hastily drinking another
glass of port.
"But it would certainly give her a good reason for saying 'No,'"
remarked Philip.
Madge, it appeared, did not play bridge; her mother, at any rate, said
she did not, and Evelyn Dundas, rather to his satisfaction, cut out.
That feat happily accomplished, he addressed himself to Madge.
"Fancy a hermit playing bridge!" he said. "Does it not seem to you very
inconsistent? Patience is the furthest he has any right to go."
Madge got up.
"Patience, both in cards and in real life, seems to me a very poor
affair," she said. "How are we going to amuse ourselves while they play?
Will you go out of the room while I think of something, and then you can
come in and guess it?"
An amendment occurred to Evelyn.
"We might both go out," he said. "It is deliciously warm; just out on to
the terrace."
"And when we come in they can guess where we have been," said Madge.
The night, as he had said, was deliciously warm, and the moon, a day or
two only from full, shone with a very clear light. Below them lay the
dim, huddled woods, and beyond, shining like a streak of silver, slept
the Thames. Somewhere far away a train was panting along its iron road,
and to the left scattered lights showed where Pangbourne stood. Odours
of flowers were wafted from the beds, and pale-winged moths now and then
crossed the illuminated spaces of light thrown by the drawing-room
window on to the gravel.
"Ah, what a pity to be indoors!" said the girl as they stepped out. "I
suppose I must be of Gipsy blood; I always want to go somewhere."
"Where particularly?" asked he.
"That doesn't matter; the going is the point. If you asked me to go to
the Black Hole of Calcutta I should probably say 'Yes.' What a pity we
can't go on the river!"
"Ah, let us do that!" said he.
Madge laughed.
"It would be quite unheard-of," she said. "I don't live in the New
Forest like Mr. Merivale, and cast conventions aside. No, we will walk
up and down a little, and then you shall go and play. Do you know, I am
really so pleased to have met you I have admired your pictures so. Do
you find it a bore having that sort of thing said to you?"
Evelyn thought over this for a moment.
"Well, I think my pictures bore me when they are done," he said, "though
the opinion of other people never does. A picture is--is like a cold in
the head. It possesses you while it is there, and you have to throw it
off. And when it is thrown off, one never thinks of it again. At least,
I don't."
They had come to the end of the terrace, and the girl stopped as they
turned.
"And then you do another. Ah, how delightful to know that probably to
the end of your life you will have things to do!"
"I don't think you would say that if you had to do them," said he. "Yet,
I don't know. Of course creating a thing is the biggest fun in the
world. But how one tears one's hair over it!"
Madge looked at his thick black thatch.
"You seem to have got some left," she remarked.
"Yes, but I'm looking thinner. Mrs. Home told me so. Oh, look at the
moon! What a dreadful thing to say, too! But it really is out of
drawing--it is far too big!"
"Perhaps we are far too small," said she.
Evelyn shook his head.
"It is impossible to be small if that occurs to you," he said.
They walked in silence after this for a dozen yards or so, Madge
feeling, somehow, strangely attracted by her companion. There was
nothing, it is true, particularly brilliant about his conversation; it
was boyish rather than brilliant; but she felt, as most people did, that
she was in the presence of a personality that was rather unusual. And
this personality seemed to her to be very faithfully expressed in his
pictures; there was something daringly simple about both him and them.
He evidently said whatever came into his head, and her experience was
that so many people only talked about such things as were supposed to be
of interest. Also, in spite of this moonlight solitude, he evinced not
the smallest tendency to notice the fact that she was a very
good-looking girl; no hint of it appeared in his talk or his attitude to
her. There was not the very slightest suspicion of that even in his
desire to go on the river with her. That ridiculous suggestion she felt,
with unerring instinct, had been made simply from comrade to comrade;
there were two of them together, cut out from a table of bridge, and he
had proposed it just as he might have proposed it to a man, instead of a
girl, of his own age. And to Madge this was something of an exception in
her experience of the other sex, for most unmarried men of her
acquaintance had shown a tendency towards tenderness. Her beauty made it
perhaps excusable in them, but she found it rather trying. It was a
relief, at any rate, to find a young man who took her frankly, who could
say "Look at the moon," only to point out that it was out of drawing.
For in the matter of emotion Madge was strangely unfeeling, or, at any
rate, strangely undeveloped; and if her mother had let any anxiety dwell
upon her hard and polished mind, the doubts about Madge's future would,
perhaps, have pressed as heavily there as any. As a good mother should,
she had brought to her daughter's notice, not to say thrown at her
head, a large variety of young men, to none of whom had Madge responded
at all satisfactorily. And it was almost intensely pleasing to her at
this moment to find someone matrimonially quite impossible to her
mother's mind, who was both so attractive to her personally, and who did
not show the smallest desire to treat her otherwise than a man should
treat a man. He was perfectly natural, in fact, perfectly simple, and
quite an exception to her experience of moonlight walkers. And this
paragon continued his peerless way.
"Have you met Tom Merivale before?" he asked. "No? Of course he would
think it almost profane to say the moon was too large. He takes any fact
in nature and then proceeds to fit himself to it. Whatever untutored
nature does is right, in his view. I wonder what he would make of slugs
eating the faces of pansies slowly away. I shall ask him."
Madge gave a little shriek of horror.
"That is one of the facts of life which I can't get over," she said. "I
can't reconcile myself to wanton destruction of beauty. Oh, there is so
little in the world."
Now, there is a particular mental sensation which corresponds to the
physical sensation of stepping up a step when there is no step there.
Evelyn felt this now.
She had gone suddenly into vacancy, with a thump.
"What do you mean?" he said. "I should have thought there was so much
there that one was bewildered. Surely almost everything is beautiful."
"Do you really think that?" she asked.
"Why, of course. But the trouble is that one has not wits enough to see
it. And all beauty is equal--woman, man, mountain-side, pansy. And
probably slug," he added. "But to appreciate that would require a great
deal of insight. But Sir John Lubbock says that earwigs are excellent
mothers. That opened my eyes to earwigs."
Again Madge walked on in silence for a space.
"Are you ever bored?" she asked at length.
"Bored? No. All that anyone has ever made is at one's disposal to wonder
at. And if one can't do that, one can go and make something oneself. No,
I hope I shall have the grace to commit suicide before I am bored."
Madge stopped and turned to him. That she was being unwise she knew,
but something intimate and indwelling dictated to her.
"I am bored every day of my life!" she said. "And how can I avoid it? Is
it very stupid of me?"
Evelyn did not hesitate in his reply.
"Yes, very!" he said. "Because it is such a waste of time to be bored.
People don't recollect that."
They had come opposite the drawing-room window, and as they passed Lady
Ellington stepped out on to the terrace.
"Is that you, Madge?" she asked.
Even in the darkness Evelyn knew what had happened to Madge's face. The
fall of it was reflected in her voice.
"Yes; have you finished your bridge?" she asked.
"We are waiting for Mr.--Mr. Dundas to cut in," she said. "Mr. Home
thought he was in the smoking-room, and has gone there."
"Oh, I am not in the smoking-room," said Evelyn.
If one judged by definitions given in dictionaries it would probably be
a misuse of language to say that Lady Ellington "played" bridge. Cards
were dealt her, and she dealt with them, embarking on commercial
transactions. She assessed the value of her hand with far more accuracy
than she had ever brought to play on the assessment of her income-tax,
and proceeded to deal with her assets with even more acuteness than she
was accustomed to dispose on the expenditure of her income. Mrs. Home
had silently entreated Philip to allow her to cut out, and Lady
Ellington was left to play with three men. This she always enjoyed,
because she took full advantage of the slight concessions which were
allowed to her sex if no other woman was of the table. But before
embarking on the second rubber she turned to Madge.
"I want to speak to you, dearest," she said, "before you go to bed. We
shall only play a couple more rubbers. Mr. Home, you really ought to
have pneumatic cards; they are a little more expensive, but last so much
longer--yes, two more rubbers--I go no trumps--and I will come to your
room on my way up. No doubling? Thank you, partner; that is the suit I
wanted."
Philip, who was her partner, had exposed two excellent suits, so the
imagination of the others might run riot over which particular suit was
the desire of Lady Ellington. At any rate she scored a little slam, but
was not satisfied, and turned on Evelyn, who, it is idle to remark, had
talked during the play.
"I missed a nine," she said. "Mr. Dundas was saying something very
amusing."
But as her face had been like flint, Mr. Dundas had to draw the
inference that, however amusing, she had not been amused.
Lady Ellington always kept the score herself, and never showed any signs
of moving, if she had won, until accounts had been adjusted and paid.
To-night affairs had gone prosperously for her; she was gracious in her
"good-nights," and even commended the admirable temperature of the hot
water, a glass of which she always sipped before going to bed. Madge had
gone upstairs, but not long before; and her mother, having locked her
winnings into her dressing-case, came to her room and found her sitting
by the open window, still not yet preparing to go to bed.
"Do I understand that you walked on the terrace alone with Mr. Dundas?"
she asked in a peculiarly chilly voice.
Madge showed no surprise; she had known what was coming.
"Yes, we took a turn or two," she said.
Her mother sat down; Madge had not turned from the window and was still
looking out.
"Kindly attend, Madge," she said. "It was very indiscreet, and you know
it. I don't think Mr. Home liked it."
Of the girl who had talked so eagerly and naturally to Evelyn on the
terrace there was hardly a trace; Madge's face had grown nearly as hard
as her mother's.
"I am not bound just yet to do all Mr. Home likes," she said.
"You are bound, if you are a sensible creature, at all events not to run
any risks, especially now."
Madge turned away from the window.
"You mean until the bargain is completed. Supposing I refuse?" she said,
and there was a little tremor in her voice, partly of contempt, partly
of fear.
Lady Ellington, as has been remarked, never let her emotions, however
justifiable, run away with her; she never, above all, got hot or angry.
Causes which in others would produce anger, produced in her only an
additional coldness and dryness, which Madge was, somehow, afraid of
with unreasoning nightmare kind of fear.
"I will not suppose anything so absurd!" said her mother. "You are
twenty-five years old, and you have never yet fallen in love at all. But
as I have pointed out to you before, you will be far happier married
than living on into the loneliness and insignificance of being an old
maid. Lots of girls never fall in love in the silly, sentimental manner
which produces lyrics. You are quite certainly one of them. And as
certainly Mr. Home is in love with you."
"We have been into this before," said the girl.
"It is necessary, apparently, to go into it again. Mr. Home, I feel
certain, is going to propose to you, and you should not do indiscreet
things. With regard to your refusing him, it is out of the question. He
is extremely suitable in every way. And you told me yourself you had
made up your mind to accept him."
"You made up my mind," said Madge; "but it comes to the same thing."
"Precisely. So please promise me not to do anything which a girl in your
position should not do. There is no earthly harm in your walking with
any penniless artist in the moonlight, if you were not situated as you
are. But at the moment it is indiscreet."
"You are wrong if you suppose that Mr. Dundas said anything to me which
could possibly be interpreted into a tender interest," said Madge. "He
called attention to the moon merely in order to remark that it was out
of drawing."
"That never occurred to me," said her mother, "though it would be a
matter of total indifference whether he took a tender interest in you or
not. I merely want your promise that you will not repeat the
indiscretion."
"Oh, certainly," said Madge.
Lady Ellington had put her bedroom candle on Madge's dressing-table. As
soon as she had received the assurance she required, she at once rose
from her chair and took it up. But with it in her hand she stood silent
a moment, then she put it down again.
"You have spoken again of things I thought were settled, Madge," she
said, "and I should like your assurance on one point further. We agreed,
did we not, that it would be far better for you to marry than remain
single. We agreed also that you were not of the sort of nature that
falls passionately in love, and we agreed that you had better marry a
man whom you thoroughly like and esteem. Mr. Home is such a man. Is that
correctly stated?"
"Quite," said Madge. "In fact, I don't know why I suggested that I
should refuse him."
"You agree to it all still?"
Madge considered a moment.
"Yes; things being as they are, I agree."
"What do you mean by that exactly?"
Madge got up, and swept across the room to where her mother stood.
"I have long meant to say this to you, mother," she said, "but I never
have yet. I mean that at my age one's character to some extent certainly
is formed. One has to deal with oneself as that self exists. But my
character was formed by education partly and by my upbringing, for which
you are responsible. I think you have taught me not to feel--to be
hard."
Lady Ellington did not resent this in the slightest; indeed, it was part
of her plan of life never to resent what anybody did or said; for going
back to first principles, resentment was generally so useless.
"I hope I have taught you to be sensible," she remarked.
"It seems to me I am being very sensible now," said Madge, "and you may
certainly take all the credit of that, if you wish. I fully intend to
do, at any rate, exactly what you suggest--to accept, that is to say, a
man whom I both esteem and respect, and who is thoroughly suitable. For
suitable let us say wealthy--because that is what we mean."
Lady Ellington qualified this.
"I should not wish you to marry a cad, however wealthy," she said.
Madge moved softly up and down the room, her dress whispering on the
carpet before she replied.
"And it does not strike you that this is rather a cold-blooded
proceeding?" she asked.
"It would if you were in love with somebody else. In which case I should
not recommend you to marry Mr. Home. But as it is, it is the most
sensible thing you can do. I would go further than that; I should say it
was your duty."
Again Madge walked up and down without replying at once.
"Ah, it is cold-blooded," she said, "and I am doing it because I am
cold-blooded."
Then she stopped opposite her mother.
"Mother, when other girls fall in love, do they only feel like this?"
she asked. "Is this all? Just to feel that for the rest of one's life
one will always have a very pleasant companion in the house, who, I am
sure, will always deserve one's liking and esteem?"
Lady Ellington laughed.
"My dear, I can't say what other girls feel. But, as you remark, it is
all you feel. You are twenty-five years old, and you have never fallen
in love. As you say, you have to take yourself as you are. Good night,
dear. It is very late."
She kissed her, left her, and went down the passage to her own room. She
was a very consistent woman, and it was not in the slightest degree
likely that she should distrust the very sensible train of reasoning
which she had indicated to her daughter, which also she had held for
years, that a sensible marriage is the best policy in which to invest a
daughter's happiness. Lady Ellington's own experience, indeed, supplied
her with evidence to support her view, for she herself was an excellent
case in point, for her husband had been a man with whom she had never
been the least in love, but with whom, on the other hand, she had
managed to be very happy in a cast-iron sort of way. She felt, indeed,
quite sure, in her reasonable mind, that she was acting wisely for
Madge, and it was not in her nature to let an unreasonable doubt trouble
her peace. But an unreasonable doubt was there, and it was this, that
Madge for the first time, as far as she knew, seemed to have
contemplated the possibility of passion coming into her life. There had
been in her mind, so her mother felt sure, an unasked question--"What if
I do fall in love?"
Lady Ellington turned this over in the well-lit chamber of her brain as
she went to bed. But her common-sense came to her aid, and she did not
lie awake thinking of it. She had made up her mind that such a thing was
unlikely to the verge of impossibility, and she never wasted time or
thought over what was impossible. Her imagination, it is true, was
continually busy over likely combinations; there were, however, so many
of these that things unlikely did not concern her.
The men meantime had gone to the smoking-room, and from there had moved
out in general quest of coolness on to the terrace. The moon had risen
nearly to the zenith, and no longer offended Evelyn's sense of
proportion, and the night, dusky and warm, disposed to personal talk.
And since neither Evelyn nor Philip had seen Tom Merivale for a year, it
was he who had first to be brought up to date.
"So go on with what you were saying at dinner, Tom," said Evelyn.
"Really, people who are friends ought to keep a sort of circulating
magazine, in which they write themselves up and send it round to the
circle. In any case, you of the three of us are most in arrears. What
have you done besides growing so much younger?"
"Do you really want to know?" asked he.
"Yes."
Evelyn rose as he spoke and squirted some soda-water into his glass.
They were sitting in the square of light illuminated by the lamps of the
room inside, and what passed was clearly visible to all of them.
"You must sit quiet then," said Tom, in his low, even-toned voice, "or
you will frighten them."
"Them? Whom? Are you going to raise spirits from the vasty deep?" asked
Philip.
"Oh, no; though I fancy it would not be so difficult. No, what I am
going to show you, if you care to see it--it may take ten minutes--is a
thing that requires no confederates. It is not the least exciting
either. Only if you wish to see what I have done, as you call it, though
personally I should say what I have become, I can give you an example
probably. Oh, yes, more than probably, I am sure I can. But please sit
still."
The night was very windless and silent. In the woods below a nightingale
was singing, but the little wind which had stirred before among the
garden beds had completely dropped.
"Have you begun?" asked Evelyn. "Or is that all? Is it that you have
been silent for a year?"
"Ah, don't interrupt," said the other.
Again there was silence, except for the bubbling of the nightingale.
Four notes it sang, four notes of white sound as pure as flame; then it
broke into a liquid bubble of melodious water, all transparent,
translucent, the apotheosis of song. Then a thrill of ecstasy possessed
it, and cadence followed indescribable cadence, as if the unheard voice
of all nature was incarnated. Then quite suddenly the song ceased
altogether.
There was a long pause; both Evelyn and Philip sat in absolute silence,
waiting. Tom Merivale had always been so sober and literal a fellow that
they took his suggestion with the same faith that they took the
statements of an almanack--it was sure to be the day that the almanack
said it was. But for what they waited--what day it was--neither knew nor
guessed.
Then the air was divided by fluttering wings; Tom held his hand out, and
on the forefinger there perched a little brown bird.
"Sing, dear," said he.
The bird threw its head back, for nightingales sing with the open
throat. And from close at hand they all three heard the authentic love
song of the nightingale. The unpremeditated rapture poured from it,
wings quivering, throat throbbing, the whole little brown body was alert
with melody, instinctive, untaught, the melody of happiness, of love
made audible. Then, tired, it stopped.
"Thank you, dear brother," said Tom. "Go home."
Again a flutter of wings whispered in the air, and his forefinger was
untenanted.
"That is what I have done," he said. "But that is only the beginning."
Evelyn gave a long sigh.
"Are you mad, or are we?" he asked. "Or was there a bird there? Or are
you a hypnotist?"
He got up quickly.
"Phil, I swear I saw a bird, and heard it sing," he said excitedly. "It
was sitting there, there on his finger. What has happened? Go on,
Tom--tell us what it means."
"It means you are the son of a monkey, as Darwin proved," said he, "and
the grandson, so to speak, of a potato. That is all. It was a cousin of
a kind that sat on my finger. Philip, with his gold and his Stock
Exchange and his business generally, does much more curious things than
that. But, personally, I do not find them so interesting."
Philip, silent as was his wont when puzzled, instead of rushing into
speech, had said nothing. But now he asked a question.
"Of course, it was not a conjuring trick," he said. "That would be
futility itself. But you used to have extraordinary hypnotic power, Tom.
I only ask--Was that a real nightingale?"
"Quite real."
Evelyn put down his glass untasted.
"I am frightened," he said. "I shall go to bed."
And without more words he bolted into the house.
Philip called good night after him, but there was no response, and he
was left alone with the Hermit.
"I am not frightened," he said. "But what on earth does it all mean?
Have a drink?"
Tom Merivale laughed quietly.
"It means exactly what I have said," he answered. "Come down to my home
sometime, and you shall see. It is all quite simple and quite true. It
is all as old as love and as new as love. It is also perfectly
commonplace. It must be so. I have only taken the trouble to verify it."
Philip's cool business qualities came to his aid, or his undoing.
"You mean you can convey a message to a bird or a beast?" he asked.
"Oh, yes. Why not? The idea is somehow upsetting to you. Pray don't let
it upset you. Nothing that happens can ever be upsetting. It is only the
things that don't happen that are such anxieties, for fear they may. But
when they have happened they are never alarming."
He pushed his chair back and got up.
"Ah, I have learned one thing in this last year," he said, "and that is
to be frightened at nothing. Fear is the one indefensible emotion. You
can do nothing at all if you are afraid. You know that yourself in
business. But whether you embark on business or on--what shall I call
it?--nature-lore, the one thing indispensable is to go ahead. To take
your stand firmly on what you know, and deduce from that. Then to test
your deduction, and as soon as one will bear your weight to stand on
that and deduce again, being quite sure all the time that whatever is
true is right. Perhaps sometime the world in general may see, not
degradation in the origin of man from animals, but the extraordinary
nobility of it. And then perhaps they will go further back--back to
Pagan things, to Pan, the God of nature."
"To see whom meant death," remarked Philip.
"Yes, or life. Death is merely an incident in life. And it seems to me
now to be rather an unimportant one. One can't help it. Whereas the
important events are those which are within one's control; one's powers
of thought, for instance."
Philip rose also.
"And love," he said. "Is that in one's control?"
Tom took a long breath.
"Love?" he said. "It is not exactly in one's control, because it is
oneself. There, the dear bird has got home."
And again from the trees below the bubble of liquid melody sounded.