SIXTH

Merivale had scooped out a long bathing-pool at the bottom of the

garden, and when Evelyn left him, he took his towel and walked down to

it. A little higher up was a weir, and from this he plunged into a soda

water of vivifying bubble, and floated down as the woven ropes of water

willed to take him till he grounded on the beds of yellow, shining

gravel at the tail of the pool, laughing with joy at the cool touch of

the stream. The day had been very hot, and since breakfast he had been

on the move, now under the shadow of the trees, but as often as not

grilled by the great blaze of the sun on the open heaths, and it was

with an extraordinary sense of renewed life and of kinship with this

beautiful creature that was poured from the weir in never-ending volumes

that he gave himself up to the clean, sensuous thrill of the moment. It

seemed to him that the strong flood that bore him, with waves and eddies

just tipped with the gold and crimson of the sun, entirely

interpenetrated and possessed him. He was not more himself than was the

stream, the stream was not more itself than it was he. The blue vault

overhead with its fleeces of cloud beginning to flush rosily was part of

the same thing, the beech-trees with leaves a-quiver in the evening

breeze were but a hand or an eyebrow of himself.

Then, with the briskness of his renewed vigour, he set himself to swim

against this piece of himself, as if right hand should wrestle with

left, breasting the river with vigorous strokes, yet scarcely moving

against the press of the running stream, while like a frill the water

stood up bubbling round his neck. Then again, with limbs deliciously

tired with the struggle, he turned on his back and floated down again,

with arms widespread, to increase the surface of contact. Though this

sense of unity with the life of Nature was never absent from him, so

that it was his last waking thought at night and stood by him while he

slept, ready to awake him again, water somehow, live, running water

with the sun on its surface, or the rain beating on to it, with its

lucent depths and waving water-weeds that the current combed, gave it

him more than anything else. Nothing else had quite that certainty of

everlasting life about it; it was continually outpoured, yet not

diminished; it mingled with the sea, and sprang to heaven in all the

forms and iridescent colours of mist and cloud, to return again to the

earth in the rain that made the grass to grow and fed the springs. And

this envelopment of himself in it was a sort of outward symbol of his

own absorption in Nature, the outward and visible sign of it. Every day

the mystery and the wonder of it all increased; all cleansing, all

renewal was contained here, for even as the water cleansed and renewed

him, so through the countless ages it cleansed and renewed itself. And

here alone the intermediary step, death, out of which came new life, was

omitted. To water there was no death; it was eternally young, and the

ages brought no abatement of its vigour.

Then in the bright twilight of the sun just set he dressed and walked

back to the house to find that he had been nearly an hour gone, and that

it was close on dinner-time.

During the earlier part, anyhow, of that meal Evelyn showed no return of

his disquietude, but, as was his wont, poured out floods of surprising

stuff. He talked shop quite unashamed, and this evening the drawbacks of

an artist's life supplied his text.

"Yes, everyone is for ever insisting," he said, "that the artist's life

is its own reward, because his work is creative; but there are times

when I would sooner be the man who puts bristles in toothbrushes. Those

folk don't allow for the days when you sit in front of a blank canvas,

or a canvas half-finished, and look at it in an absolute stupor of

helplessness. I suppose they would say 'Go on, put down what you see,'

and they are so wooden-headed as not to realise that on such occasions,

unfortunately numerous, one doesn't see anything, and one couldn't put

it down if one did. There is a blank wall in front of one. And it is

then I say with Mr. Micawber, 'No one is without a friend who is

possessed of shaving materials'--yet I don't kill myself. Oh, hang it,

here we are talking about death again! Give me some more fish."

Merivale performed this hospitable duty.

"Ah, but what do you expect?" he asked. "Surely you can't think it's

possible that a man can live all the time in the full blaze of

imaginative vision? You might as well expect him to run at full speed

from the day he was born to the day of his--well, all the time, as you

dislike the word."

Evelyn drummed the table with his fingers.

"But it's just that I want," he cried. "Whose fault is it that I can't

do what I feel is inside me all the time? If I have what you call the

imaginative vision at all, who has got any business to put a cap like

the cap of a camera lens over it, so that I can see nothing whatever?

Oh, the pity of it! Sitters, too! Sitters can be so antipathetic that I

feel when I look at them that the imaginative vision is oozing out of

me, like sawdust when you clip a doll's leg, and that in another moment

I shall be just a heap of collapsed rags on the floor, with a silly

waxen head and shoulders on the top. If only people would come to me to

paint their caricatures I could do some rippers. The next woman I've got

to paint when these two are finished is a pink young thing of sixty,

with a face that has exactly the expression of a pansy. Lord! Lord!"

This was so completely the normal Evelyn Dundas that Merivale, if not

reassured, for there was no need for that, at any rate thought that he

had been mistaken in his idea that some change had come to him. He was

just the same vivid, eager boy that he had always been, blessed with one

supreme talent, which, vampire-like, seemed to suck the blood out of all

the other possibilities and dormant energies of his nature, and suck,

too, all sense of responsibility from him.

"Refuse them then," he said; "say 'I won't paint you; you sap my

faculties.'"

Evelyn burst out into a great shout of laughter.

"'Mr. Dundas presents his compliments to Lady What's-hername,'" he said,

"'and regrets, on inspection, that he is unable to paint her portrait,

owing to the fact that a prolonged contemplation of her charms would sap

his artistic powers, which he feels himself unwilling to part with.'

What would be this rising young painter's position in a year's time, eh?

His studio would be as empty as the New Forest. You might then come and

live there, Tom."

Evelyn finished his wine and lit a cigarette all in one breath.

"Now, strange though it may seem to you," he said, "I feel that I've

talked enough about myself for the moment, though I propose to go on

afterwards. So, by way of transition, we will talk about you. As I

dressed a number of frightful posers came into my head about you, and I

want categorical answers. Now you've been here how long? More than a

year, isn't it? What can you show for it? Number two: What's it all

about? Number three: How can you call yourself a student of Nature when

you deliberately shut your eyes to all the suffering, all the death, all

the sacrifice that goes on eternally in Nature? I might as well call

myself an artist and refuse to use blue and red in my pictures. I

remember asking you something of this sort before, and your answer was

eminently unsatisfactory. Besides, I have forgotten it."

Merivale moved sideways to the table, and crossed one leg over the

other.

"Does it really at all interest you?" he said.

"It does, or I should not ask. Another thing, too: I have been looking

at you all dinner, and I could swear you look much younger than you did

five years ago. Indeed, if I saw you now for the first time I should say

you were not much more than twenty. Also you used to be a touchy,

irritable sort of devil, and you look now as if nothing in the world had

the power to make you cease smiling. Did you know, by the way, that you

are always smiling a little?"

Tom laughed.

"No, not consciously," he said; "but now you mention it, it seems

impossible that I should not."

"Well, begin," said Evelyn, with his usual impatience. "Tell me all

about it, and attempt to answer all those very pertinent questions.

Smoke, too; I listen better to a person who is smoking, because I feel

that he is more comfortable."

A sudden wind stirred in the garden, blowing towards them in the

verandah the sleeping fragrance of the beds and the wandering noises of

the night, which, all together make up what we call the silence of the

night, even as the mixture of primary colours makes white.

"Smoke? No, I don't smoke now," said Merivale; "but if you really want

to know, I will tell you all I can tell you. The conjuring tricks, as

you call them, I suppose you will take for granted?"

Evelyn, comfortable with his coffee and liqueur, assented.

"Yes, leave them out," he said. "Here beginneth the gospel."

He tried in these words to be slightly offensive; the offensiveness,

however, went wide of the mark, and he was sorry. For the Hermit, as he

had known him in the world, was singularly liable to take offence, to be

irritable, impatient, to be stamping and speechifying on an extremely

human platform. But no vibration of any such impatience was in

Merivale's voice, and in his words there was no backhander to answer it.

So the gospel began.

"It is all so simple," he said, "yet I suppose that to complicated

people simplicity is as difficult to understand as is complexity to

simple people. But here it is, anyhow, and make the best or the worst of

it; that is entirely your concern."

"There is God," he said, "there is also Nature, which I take to be the

visible, tangible, audible expression of Him. There is also man--of

which you and I are specimens, and whether we are above or below the

average doesn't matter in the least--and man by a dreadful process

called civilisation has worked himself back into a correspondingly

dreadful condition. If he were either fish, flesh, or fowl one would

know where to put him, but he is none of those. He seems, at any rate to

me, to be a peculiar product of his own making, and instead of being a

creature compounded of life and joy, which should be his ingredients and

also his study, he has become a creature who is mated with sorrow and at

the end with death. He has become rotten without ever being ripe, the

flower to which he should have attained has been cankered in the bud.

Now, all this it has been my deliberate aim to leave behind me and to

forget, and to go straight back to that huge expression of the joy of

God, which man has been unable to spoil or render sorrowful, to the

great hymn of Nature. Listen to that for a moment--and for the more

moments you listen to it the more unmistakable will its tenour be--and

you will hear that the whole impression is one of life and of joy. There

is, it is true, throughout Nature the sound of death, of cruelty, and of

one creature preying on another; but the net result is not death, it is

ever-increasing life. And so when I went to Nature I shut my ears and

eyes to that minor undercurrent of sound. Of the result I was sure; day

after day there is more life in the world, in spite of the death that

day after day goes on. All the death goes to form fresh life. In the

same way with the joy and sorrow of Nature; for every animal that

suffers there are two that are glad, for every tree that dies there are

two in the full vigour of the joy of life. And that joy and that life is

my constant study. I soak myself in it, and shall so do until I am

utterly impregnated with it. And when that day comes, when there is no

tiny or obscure fibre in my being that does not completely realise it,

then, with a flash of revelation, so I take it, I shall 'grasp the

scheme of things entire.' Whether by life or by death, I shall truly

realise that I and that moth flitting by, and the odours of the garden

and the river are indivisibly one, just an expression of the spirit of

life, which is God."

He paused a moment.

"There were two other questions you asked me," he said. "What have I got

to show for the years I have spent here? I shrug my shoulders at that;

it is I who am being shown. The second concerns my personal appearance,

for you say I look younger. That is probably quite true and quite

inevitable, for the contemplation of the eternal youth of the world I

suppose must make one younger, body and soul alike. And that is all, I

think."

Evelyn was listening with extreme attention; he did not look in the

least uninterested.

"My word, you've got a perfectly sober plan at the bottom of it all," he

said, "and I thought half of it was moonshine and the other half

imagination. There is one more question--two more. What if the whole of

the suffering and the cruelty and the death in Nature is made clear to

you in a flash, if it is that which will come to make you grasp the

scheme of things entire?"

Merivale smiled still, rocking forward in his chair with his hands

clasped round his knee.

"That is possible," he said, "and I recognise that. But I don't think I

am frightened at it If it is to be so, it is to be so. Though I suppose

one won't live after it. Well?"

"And the second question. You think, then, it is our duty to seek

happiness and joy and forget the sorrow of the world?"

"I think it is so for me," said he, "though I do think that there are

many people, most, I suppose, that realise themselves through sorrow and

suffering. I can only say that I believe I am not one of those. The way

does not lie for me there."

Evelyn got up, and stood leaning on the balustrade of the verandah. This

was beginning to touch him more closely now; his own threads were

beginning to interweave in the scheme Merivale drew.

"And for me," he said. "What is your diagnosis of me? Am I one of those

who will find themselves through sorrow or through joy?"

Merivale turned to him with almost the same eagerness in his face as

Evelyn himself showed.

"Ah, how can I tell you that?" he said, "beyond telling you at least

that in my opinion, which after all is only my opinion, it is in joy

that you, almost above everyone I know, will ripen and bear fruit.

Sorrow, asceticism is the road by which some approach happiness, but I

do not see you on that road. Renunciation for you----"

Evelyn got up and came a step closer.

"Yes? Yes?" he cried.

Merivale answered him by another question.

"Something has happened to you," he said. "What is it?"

"I have fallen in love," said the other. "I only knew it to-day. Yes,

her, Madge Ellington. Good God, man, I love her! And I am painting

her--I see her nearly daily alone; it is my business to study her face

and get to know her----"

His voice dropped suddenly.

"What am I to do?" he said after a moment. "Philip, the whole thing----"

"Ah, you can't go on," said Merivale quickly. "You must see that.

Wherever our paths lie, there is honour----"

"Honour?" cried Evelyn almost savagely. "Have I not as good a right to

love her as Philip has? You can't tie one down like that! Besides, how

can I help loving her? Night and day are not less in my control.

Besides, I have no reason to suppose that she loves me, so what harm is

done? But if she does or should----"

Again he stopped, for there was no need to go on; the conclusion of the

sentence was not less clear because it was unspoken. After a moment he

continued.

"And what was your view just now about renunciation for me?" he asked.

Merivale got up.

"I don't know what to say to you," he said. "What do you propose, you

yourself?"

"I propose to tell her what I know--that I love her," said he.

There was a long pause; Merivale was looking out over the dusky garden,

and his lips moved as if he was trying to frame some sentence, yet no

words came. In the East the moon was soon to rise behind the wedge of

beech-wood which came diagonally across the heath, and though it was not

yet visible, the sky was changing from the dark velvet blue which had

succeeded sunset to the mysterious dove colour which heralds the moon. A

night breeze stirred among the shrubs, and the scent of the stocks was

wafted into the verandah, twined, as it were, with the swooning

fragrance of the syringa. But for once Merivale was unconscious of the

witchery of the hour; in spite of himself, the interests, the problems,

the suffering and renunciation of human life, from which he had thought

he had weaned himself, claimed him again. He had tried, and in great

measure succeeded, in detaching himself from them, but he had not

completely broken away from them yet. He had enlisted under the banner

of joy, but now from the opposing hosts there came a cry to him, and he

could not shut his ears to it. Here was the necessity for suffering, it

could not but be that of these two friends of his, suffering poignant

and cruel lay before one of them, though which that one should be he did

not know. But the necessity was dragged before his notice.

Then from the garden his eyes rested on Evelyn again, as he stood close

to him with his keen, beautiful face, his eyes in which burned the

wonder of his love, his long, slim limbs and hands that trembled, all so

astonishingly alive, and all so instinct with the raptures and the

rewards of living, and he could not say "Your duty lies here," even had

he been certain that it was so, so grey and toneless, so utterly at

variance with the whole gospel of his own life would the advice have

been. Yet neither, for his detachment from human affairs was not, nor

could it be, complete, could he say to him "Yes, all the joy you can lay

hands on is yours," for on the other side stood Philip. But his

sympathies were not there.

He spread out his hands with a sort of hopeless gesture.

"I don't know what to say: I don't even know what I think," he said. "It

is one of those things that is without solution, or rather there are two

solutions, both of which are inevitably right, and utterly opposed. But

you have as yet no reason to think that she loves you; all goes to show

otherwise."

"Yes, all," said Evelyn softly, "but somehow I don't believe it. I can't

help that either."

Then suddenly he took hold of Merivale's shoulders with both hands.

"Ah, you don't understand," he said. "You were saying just now that you

and the river were indivisibly one. That is a mere figure of speech,

though I understand what you mean by it. But with me it is sober truth;

I am Madge. I have no existence apart from her. Some door has been

opened, I have passed through it into her. Half oneself! Someone says

man alone is only half himself. What nonsense! Till he loves he is

complete in himself, but then he ceases to be himself at all."

Wild as were his words, so utterly was he in the grip of his

newly-awakened passion that possessed him, there was something

convincing to Merivale about it. He might as well have tied a piece of

string across a line to stop a runaway locomotive as hope to influence

Evelyn by words or advice, especially since he at heart pulled in the

opposite way to the advice he might thus give. The matter was beyond

control; it must work itself out to its inevitable end.

"And when will you tell her?" he asked.

"I don't know. The moment I see she loves me, if that moment comes."

"And if it does not?"

Again his passion shook him like some great wave combing the weeds of

the sea.

"It must," he said.

That clearly was the last word on the subject, and even as he spoke the

rim of the moon a week from full topped the beech-wood, and flooded the

garden with silver, and both watched in silence till the three-quarter

circle swung clear of the trees. Just a month ago Evelyn had watched it

rising with Madge on the terrace of Philip's house, and the sight of it

now made the last month pass in review before him like some scene that

moved behind the actors, as in the first act in _Parsifal_. The light it

shed to-day seemed to flash back and illumine the whole of those weeks,

and showed him how in darkness that plant had grown which to-day had

flowered rose-coloured and perfect. Every day since then, when the seed

had first been planted in his soul, had it shot up towards the light;

there had been no day, so he felt now, on which the growth had stood

still; it had been uninterrupted from the first germination to this its

full flower. But the last word had been spoken, and when the moon had

cleared the tree-tops, Merivale turned to him.

"I seldom sleep in the house," he said, "and I certainly shall not

to-night."

"Where then?" asked the other.

"Oh, anywhere, often in several places. In fact, I seldom wake in the

morning where I go to bed in the evening."

"Sleep-walking?" suggested Evelyn.

"Oh, dear no! But you know all animals wake in the night and turn over,

or get up for a few moments and take a mouthful of grass. Well, the same

thing happens to me. I always wake about three in the morning, and walk

about a little, and, as I say, usually go to sleep again somewhere else.

But I suppose the dignity of man asserts itself, and I often go further

than animals. For instance, I shall probably go to sleep in the hammock

in the garden, and walk up into the beech-wood when I wake for the first

time."

"Ah, that does sound rather nice," said Evelyn appreciatively.

"Well, come and sleep out too. It will do you all the good in the world.

You can have the hammock; I'll lie on the grass. I always have a rug."

But Evelyn's appreciation was not of the practical sort.

"Heaven forbid!" he said. "My bedroom is good enough for me."

It was already late, and he took a candle and went upstairs, Merivale

following him to see he had all he wanted. His servant, however, had

arranged the utmost requirements in the most convenient way, and the

sight suddenly suggested a new criticism to Evelyn.

"Keeping a servant, too," he said. "Is not that frightfully

inconsistent?"

Merivale laughed.

"You don't suppose I keep a servant when I am alone?" he asked. "But I

find I am so bad at looking after the requirements of my guests that I

hire one if anyone happens to be here. He is a man from the hotel at

Brockenhurst."

"I apologise," said the other. "But do dismiss him to-morrow. For I

didn't want to come to an hotel; I wanted to see how the Hermit really

lived."

"Stop over to-morrow then, and you will see," said Merivale. "But I keep

a woman in the house, who cooks."

"That also is inconsistent."

"No, I don't think so. It takes longer than you would imagine to do all

the housework yourself. I tried it last winter and found it not worth

while. Besides, dusting and cleaning are so absorbing. I could think of

nothing else."

"But doesn't she find it absorbing?"

Merivale laughed.

"I feel sure she doesn't," he said, "or she would do it better. But when

I dusted for myself, nothing short of perfection would content me. I was

dusting all day long."

Evelyn looked doubtfully at his bed.

"Shall I have to make it--whatever 'making' means?" he asked, "if I

sleep in it? If so, I really don't think it would be worth while.

Besides, I know I shan't sleep, and if I don't sleep I am a wreck."

Merivale raised his eyebrows.

"Surely you sleep when you want sleep just as you eat when you are

hungry," he said, "or is that an exploded superstition?"

"Quite exploded. I shan't sleep a wink," said Evelyn, beginning to

undress. "Oh, how can I?" he cried.

"And you really want to?"

"Why, of course. I'm as cross as two sticks if I don't."

Merivale shook his head.

"I'll make you sleep if you wish," he said. "Get into bed. I must go and

turn out the lights. I'll be back in two minutes."

He left the room, and Evelyn undressed quickly.

All that had happened to-day ran like a mill-race in his head, and,

arguing from previous experience, he knew perhaps the tithe of what

awaited him when the light was out. For often before, when a picture,

not as now the original of it, occupied him, misshapen parodies of rest

had been his till cock-crow. First of all would come a sense of

satisfaction at being alone, at being able to let his thoughts take

their natural course uninterrupted; he would feast his eyes on the

untenanted blackness, letting his imagination paint there all that it

had been so intensely occupied with during the day. But then as the

brain wearied, in place of the ideal he had been striving for would come

distorted reflections of it, seen as if in some bloated mirror, and

still awake he would see his thoughts translated into some horrible

grotesque that would startle him into sitting-up in bed, just for the

grasping of the bed-post, or the feeling of the wall, to bring himself

back into the realm of concrete things. Otherwise the grotesques would

grow into dancing, shapeless horrors, and in a moment he would have to

wrench himself free from the clutches of nightmare and start up, with

dripping brow and quivering throat that could not scream, into reality

again. But to-night he feared no nightmare; he knew simply that sleep

could not come to him, his excitement had invaded and conquered the

drowsy lands, and though he felt now that he would be content to think

and think and love till morning, morning, he knew, would, like an

obsequious waiter, present the bill for the sleepless night.

Consequently, when Merivale again entered, he welcomed him.

"I demand a conjuring-trick," he said, "I know I shan't sleep at all,

unless you have some charm for me. Good God, how can I sleep? And, after

all, why should I want to? Isn't waking good enough?"

Merivale paused; waking and sleeping seemed to him no more matters for

concern than they seem to an animal which sleeps when it is sleepy, and

wakes when its sleepiness has gone.

"That is entirely for you to settle," he said. "If you want to sleep I

can make you; if you don't, I shall go to sleep myself. I shall do that

in any case," he added.

Evelyn was already overwrought with the events of the day, and he spoke

petulantly.

"Oh, make me sleep, then!" he said. "There is to-morrow coming. I can

do nothing to-night, so let's get it over."

"Lie down, then," said the Hermit, "and look at me, look at my eyes, I

mean."

He sat down on the edge of Evelyn's bed, and spoke low and slow.

"The wind is asleep," he said, "it sleeps among the trees of the forest,

for the time of sleep has come, and everything sleeps, your love sleeps

too. Lie still;" he said, as Evelyn moved, "the trees of the forest

sleep; and their leaves sleep, and high in the branches the birds sleep.

Everything sleeps, the tired even and the weary sleep, and those who are

strong sleep, and those who are weak."

Evelyn's eyelids quivered, shut a moment, then half-opened again.

"The flowers sleep," said Merivale, "and the eyelids of their petals are

closed, as your eyelids are closing. Sleep, the black soft wing, has

shut over them, as the wings of birds shut over their heads. The earth

sleeps, the very stones of her sleep; she will not stir till morning, or

if she stirs it will be but to sleep again. The sad and the happy sleep,

the very sea sleeps and is hushed, and the tides of the sea are asleep.

Sleep, too," he said, slightly raising his voice, "sleep till they

wake--sleep till I wake you."

He waited a moment, but Evelyn's eyelids did not even quiver again. Then

he blew out the light and left the room.

Merivale stepped softly down the stairs, and went out on to the

verandah, where they had dined a few hours before. At the touch of the

soft night-air all the trouble that during this evening had been his was

evaporated and vanished. The sum of his consciousness was contained in

the bracket, that he was alive, and that he was part of life. It was

like stepping into an ocean that received him and bore him on its

surface, or took him to its depths; which mattered not at all--the thing

embraced and encompassed him. He went back again to it from the fretful

trivialities that had arrested him as the midge on his wrist could for

the moment arrest him, trivially and momentarily causing him some

infinitesimal annoyance. But that was over; the huge sky was above him,

the world was asleep, and was his possession. It--the material part of

it--was but a dream, the spirit of it all suffused him. There was life

everywhere, life in its myriad forms, its myriad beauties. The sleepy

voice of the river was part of him, the moon was he, the utmost twinkle

of a star was he also. Yet no less the smallest blade of grass was he;

there was no atom of the universe with which he did not claim identity.

Yes, there was one, the fretting of the human spirit, whereas his own

did not fret. What he could interpret existence into was to him

satisfying. For himself he longed and wished for nothing, except to hold

himself open, as he indeed held himself, for the moods of Nature to play

upon. Yet in that bedroom upstairs he had left one, asleep indeed by the

mere exercise of a stronger will on his, who would to-morrow awake and

combat and perhaps succumb to forces that were stronger than he. For

himself, he combatted with no force; he but yielded in welcome to what

to him was irresistible. But Evelyn, who slept now, would awake to try

his strength against another. Which was right?

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