It was perhaps lucky as regards the future of Madge and her husband that
this _debacle_ had taken place so near to the end of the season. Many
people, indeed, had waited in London only for the marriage, for the
season was already over, and for the last three days there had been
nothing but this to detain them. Genuine sympathy was at first felt for
Philip, but it very soon was known that he was at his office again every
day and all day, worked just as hard if not harder than usual, and was
supposed, by way of signalising his own disappointment, to have made
some great _coup_ over a South African company, thereby inflicting a
quantity of very smart disappointments on the gentlemen of the Stock
Exchange. He had dealt these blows out with an impartial hand; first
there had been some staggering smacks which had sent the bulls flying
like ninepins, while the bears stood round and grinned, and profited by
the experience of their fraternal enemies. Then Philip, it seemed, had
seen them grinning, and had done the same for them.
In other words, things had come off in exactly the way he had
anticipated. The knowledge that he had bought a very large option had
induced many operators less substantial than he to buy also, and the
sudden news that he had received a detailed report from the spot, and
had subsequently not exercised his option, landed many of these buyers
in awkward places. Then, as was natural, the bears saw their
opportunity, sold largely, on the strength of the inference that
Philip's report was highly unfavourable, bringing prices down with a
run. Then, with the same suddenness with which he had decided not to
take up his option, he bought at this very much lower price a vastly
increased number of shares, and within a week of the original slump
Metiekull was considerably higher than it had ever been. The £7,000 he
had forfeited over not taking up his option was but a bagatelle to his
subsequent gains, and the market generally at this conclusion remarked,
among other things not worth repeating, that there was a good deal to be
said in favour of long spoons; while that not inconsiderable part of
more westerly London which is always burning its fingers in this City
fire of the Stock Exchange, said with a somewhat cynical smile that
since Philip could still hit so hard, he had not, perhaps, been so hard
hit himself. Perhaps, in fact, Madge had not made such a very terrible
mistake, after all, for Mr. Dundas was undeniably _the_ most fascinating
person, whereas Philip, so it appeared, did not let the most dreadful
affair of the heart interfere in the slightest with the stuffing of the
money-box.
But in this they utterly mistook him, for this steady, concentrated
application to work was, perhaps, the only thing in the world which
could have prevented him breaking down or losing his mental balance
altogether. Even as it was, it partook only, as far as he could see, of
the nature of a temporary alleviation, for in the very nature of things
he could not go on working like this indefinitely. And what would happen
to him when he relaxed he could not imagine, he only knew that the hours
when he was not at the office were like some nightmare repeated and
again repeated. Nor did they lose, at present, the slightest edge of the
intensity of their horror. This week was as bad as last week; last week
was no better than the week before, all through this hot August when he
remained in town, not leaving it even for his usual week end on the
river, but seeing its pavements grow hotter and dustier and emptier as
more and more of its toiling crowds escaped for a week or two to the
sands or the moors.
The worst time of all was the early morning, for though he usually went
to sleep from sheer weariness when he went to bed, he began to wake
early, while still Jermyn Street was dusky and dewy, and as yet the
sparrows in the plane trees opposite his window had not begun to tune up
for the day. Morning by morning he would watch "the casement slowly grow
a glimmering square," or if it was, as often, absolutely unbearable to
lie in bed, he would get up and go into his sitting-room, where the wan
light but brought back to him the dreadful hours he had passed there the
evening before. The glass from which he had drunk stood on the little
table by the sofa, and by it lay the unread evening paper. The beloved
Reynolds prints, Mrs. Carnac, Lady Halliday, Lady Stanhope, Lady
Crosbie, all first impressions, smiled meaninglessly on the wall, for
all the things he had loved and studied had lost their beauty, and were
blackened like dahlias in the first autumn frosts. Sometimes a piece of
music stood on the piano, from which he had played a bar or two the
night before, but had then stopped, for it, too, conveyed nothing to
him; it was but a jangle of senseless chords. Sometimes in these
dreadful morning hours he would doze a little on the sofa, but not
often; and once he had poured out into the glass a stiff dose of whisky,
feeling that even an alcohol-purchased oblivion would be better than
more of this wakefulness. But he had the sense left not to take to that;
if he did that to-day he would do it to-morrow, and if he admitted the
legitimacy of such relief, he knew he would find less and less reason
every day for not letting himself sink in that slough. Besides, he had
to keep himself clear-headed and alert for the work of the day.
Two passions, to analyse a little further, except when he was at work,
entirely possessed him, one his passion for Madge, of which not one jot,
in spite of what had happened, was abated. It was not, nor ever had
been, of the feverish or demonstrative sort, it did not flicker or
flare, it burned steadily with a flame that was as essential a part of
his life as breathing or the heart-beat. And the other, existing
strangely and coincidently with it, was the passion of hate--hatred for
her, hatred for Evelyn, a red flame which shed its light on all else, so
that in the glare of it he hated the whole world. Two people only stood
outside of it--his mother and Tom Merivale; for these he did not feel
hate, but he no longer felt love; he was incapable of feeling that any
longer except for Madge. But he did not object to them, he thought of
them without resentment, but that was all.
Then, as his nerves began to suffer under this daily torture, the hours
of enforced idleness became full of alarm. What he feared he did not
know, he only knew that he was apprehensive of some further blow that
might be dealt him from a quarter as unexpected as that from which this
had come. Everything had been so utterly serene when this bolt from the
blue struck him, he could not have conjectured it; and now he could not
conjecture what he expected next.
But all this London did not know: it only knew that this very keen man
of business was as acute as ever, to judge by the Metiekull episode, and
began to reason that since he was so callous to what had happened, Madge
had really not behaved so outrageously as had been supposed. She had
found--this was the more human and kindly view induced by the cessation
of the late London hours, and the substitution of a great deal of open
air for the stifling ballroom of town--she had found that she really was
in love with Mr. Dundas, and that Philip on closer acquaintance was what
he had proved himself to be, business man first, lover afterwards. And
really Mr. Dundas's pictures this year had been stupefyingly clever.
They made one just gasp. Surely it would be silly to get somebody else
to "do" one instead of him, just because Madge had found out her mistake
in time, and he had assisted at the correction of it. He was certain to
have heaps of orders in any case, so it would be just as well to be
painted by him as soon as possible. Of course that implied that one
accepted his marriage in a sort of way, but, after all, why not?
Besides--here the world's tongue just tended to approach the cheek--it
would be a kindness to old Lady Ellington to smooth things over as much
as possible, and that dear little thing, Gladys, whom everybody liked so
much, would be so pleased to find that Madge was not hardly thought of.
Yes, quite so, and has the dressing-gong sounded already? And Tom killed
a stag, and they had a good day among the grouse, and Jack killed a
salmon, so there will be fish for dinner. What a blessing!
* * * * *
One of these mornings which saw Philip in the gloaming of dawn hearing
the sparrows beginning their chirruping in the plane-trees, saw Tom
Merivale also, not only hearing but listening to the twitter of
half-awakened birds in his garden. He had slept in the hammock slung in
the pergola, and after the coolness of the clear night following on the
intense heat of the day before, the dew had been heavy. His blanket was
shimmering with the seed-pearls of the moisture, his hair also was wet
with it, and on the brick of the pergola path it lay like the
condensation of the breath of the spirit of woodland itself. The
cleanness and purity of this hour of dawn was a thing that every morning
more astounded him. Whether a clear and dove-coloured sky brooded as
now overhead, or whether morning came wrapped in rain-clouds, it always
brought to one who slept with the sky for a roof a sense of renewal and
freshness which it was impossible to get used to. Everything was rested
and cleaned, ready to begin again on the hundred joyful businesses of
day.
Just as a stone falling through the air moves with a speed that is
accelerated each moment by double the acceleration of the last, so
Merivale felt that every day his communion with and absorption in Nature
made progress out of all proportion to what he had achieved before. It
was so few months ago that he had himself wondered at the mysterious and
silent telepathy that ran through all Nature, the telepathy that warns
birds and beasts of coming storm, that makes the bats wake and begin
their eerie flittings even at the hour when sunset is brightest, knowing
that the darkness is imminent, that connects man, too, as he had proved,
if man only will be quiet and simple instead of fretful and complicated,
with birds and beasts, so that they know he is their brother and will
come to his silent call to them. But of late that had become such a
commonplace to him that he only wondered how it could ever have been
otherwise than obvious. He remembered, too, how so few weeks ago he had
for the first time heard the sound of the glass flute in the woods above
Philip's house at Pangbourne, but now not a day passed, often not an
hour, in which that unending melody, the eternal and joyful hymn of
Nature and of life, was not audible to him. Whether what he heard was
really a phenomenon external to himself or only the internal expression,
so to speak, of those thoughts which filled his entire consciousness,
both waking and sleeping, he did not care to ask himself, for it did not
in the least seem to him to matter. Wherever that melody came from,
whether it was born in his own brain and telegraphed from there to his
ears, or whether it was really some actual setting of the joy of life to
song, external to him, and heard just as a railway whistle or the bleat
of a sheep is heard and conveyed from his ears to his brain, he did not
even wish to know, for wherever coined, it was of royal minting, the
secret and the voice of Life itself was there.
The woods of Pangbourne--Philip. He had heard from Mrs. Home of the
catastrophe, and in answer to a further letter of his he had learned
that Philip remained in London slaving all day at the office, seeing no
one but his clerks, silent, alone, giving no sign even to her. This
letter had come only last night, and ended with an imploring cry that if
Tom thought he could help him in any way, his mother besought him to do
what he could. Philip had been down to see her once only, immediately
after his engagement was broken off, and he had been utterly unlike
himself--hard, terrible, unforgiving. Could Merivale not do something?
Philip had never had but four friends in the world, two of these had
turned enemies (Mrs. Home had crossed out in a thin, neat line the last
two words and substituted "ceased to be friends"), and there were left
only himself and she. And she had tried, and could do nothing.
Tom Merivale thought over all this as the twitter of birds grew more
coherent in the bushes, passing from the sound like the tuning-up of an
orchestra into actual song. The resemblance, indeed, was curiously
complete, for after the tuning-up had ceased, while it was still very
faintly light, there was a period of silence before song began, just
such a silence as ensued when the strings of a band had found the four
perfect fifths, and there was the hush and pause over singers and
audience alike until the conductor took his place. Day was the conductor
here, and to-day it would be the sun who would conduct his great
symphony in person at dawn, the approach of which to Philip but meant
the hard outlining of the square of window, but to Tom all the joy of
another day, a string of round and perfect pearls of hours. The East was
already in the secret, for high above the spot where dawn would break
rosy fleeces of clouds had caught the light, while nearer to the horizon
the nameless green of dawn, that lies between the yellow of the
immediate horizon itself and the blue of the zenith, was beginning to
melt into blue. Then, how well he knew it, the skeins of mist along the
stream below would dissolve, the tintless, hueless, darknesses of clear
shadow that lay beneath the trees would grow green from the sun striking
through the leaves. These things were enough to fill this hour with
ecstasy, and every hour to him brought its own. There would be the meal
prepared by himself, the work in the garden, claiming fellowship and
friendship every moment with the green things of the earth, the mid-day
bathe, when he was one with the imperishable water, the long communing
with eyes half-shut on the sunny heather, where even the stealthy adder
was no longer a thing of aversion, and then for the sake "of his sister,
the body," as the old Saint said, a walk that might cover twenty miles
before he returned at dusk. Oh, how unutterably good, and how
unutterably better each day!
A wind came with the dawn itself, that scattered more dew on to him from
the rose-sprays overhead, and he slid out of the hammock to go into the
house to make his breakfast, stretching himself once or twice before he
went in to feel his muscles, the rigging of the ship of the body, all
twang sound and taut. Nor did it seem to him in any way unworthy that
even this physical fitness of his should give him such joy: it would,
indeed, have been a disgrace if it had been otherwise. For all the
sensations and functions of life were on one plane, and whether the
sweat poured from him as he dug the garden, or his teeth crushed a
nuthusk, or the great thigh-muscles strained as he mounted a hill, or
his ear was ravished with the fluting of a bush-bowered thrush, it was
all one; each was a function of life, and the sum of them was just joy.
But Philip; this morning he could not get Philip out of his head, for
detached from the world of men and women as he was, he could not help
pitying the blind, meaningless suffering of his old friend. For all
suffering to him was meaningless, he did not in himself believe that any
good could come out of it considered merely as suffering: much more
good, that is to say, would have come out of joy; this was withheld by
suffering, a thing almost criminal to his view. But he could realise,
and did, that all that Philip loved best had gone from him; it was as if
in his own case the sun and the moon had been plucked from the sky, or
water had ceased to flow, as if something vital in the scheme of things
was dead.
It seemed to him, then, with his mind full of Philip, very natural that
there should be a letter from him when the post came in that morning. It
ran thus:
DEAR TOM,--I had rather an unpleasant experience yesterday, for
suddenly in the middle of the morning I fainted dead off. It seemed
sensible to see a doctor, who of course said the usual
thing--overwork, overworry, go and rest completely for a time. He
was a sensible man, I've known him for years, and so I have decided
to do as he tells me.
Now you are such an old friend that I trust you to say "No" quite
frankly if you don't want me. I therefore ask you if I may come
down and stay with you a bit. I thought of going home, but I should
be alone there, as my mother is away just now, or on the point of
going, and I don't want to bring her back, and I really think I
should go crazy if I was alone. You seem to have found the secret
of happiness, and perhaps it might do me good to watch you. All
this is absolutely subject to your saying "No" quite frankly. Just
send it or the affirmative by telegram, will you, and I will arrive
or not arrive this evening. But I warn you I am not a cheerful
companion.--Yours,