For any sake don't say a word or give a look of pity or sympathy. I
shall bring a servant--may I?--who will look after me. I don't want
to give you trouble, and I intend to take none myself. Mind, I
trust you to telegraph "No" quite simply if you don't want me.
There was only one reply possible to this, and, indeed, Merivale had no
inclination to give any other. Of course Philip was welcome; he would
very likely have proposed this himself had not this letter come so
opportunely, and the telegram in reply was genuinely cordial. Poor old
Philip, who used to be so happy in the way in which probably a
locomotive engine is happy, groomed and cared for, and only required to
do exactly that which it loves doing, namely, being strong and
efficient, and exercising its strength and speed. Yet though Tom's
welcome of him was so genuine, he shrank inwardly, though he did not
confess this even to himself, from what lay before him, for he hated
misery and unhappiness--hated the sight or proximity of it, he even
thought that it was bad for anybody to see it, but if on this point his
attitude was inconsistent with the warmth of his telegram, the
inconsistency was wholly human and amiable.
On the other hand, though he was by no means of a proselytising nature,
there was here, almost forced upon him, a fine test case. He believed
himself very strongly in the infectious character of human emotions;
fear seemed to him more catching than the smallpox, and worry ran
through a household even as does an epidemic of influenza. And if this
which he so profoundly believed was true, that truth must hold also
about the opposite of all these bad things; they, too, must be
infectious also, unless one chose to draw the unthinkable conclusion
that evil was contagious, whereas good was not communicable by the same
processes. That could not be, the spiritual microbes must, as far as
theory or deduction could be trusted to supply an almost certain
analogy, correspond to the microbes of the material world; there must in
fact be in the spiritual world, if these microbes of suffering and
misery were there, much vaster armies of microbes that produced in man
all the things that made life worth living; battalions of
happiness-germs must be there, of germs that were forever spreading and
swarming in their ceaseless activity of building-up and regenerating
man, of battling with the other legions whose work was to destroy and
depress and kill. And if there was anything in his belief--a belief on
which he would gladly have staked his life--that joy, health, life were
ever gaining ground and triumphing over their lethal foes, then it
followed that the germs of all things that were good were more potent
than those that were evil if their armies were mobilised.
How mysterious and how profoundly true this transference of emotion was,
or, in terms of the present analogy, these invasions of spiritual
microbes! For what caused panic to spread through a crowd? Not danger
itself, but fear, fear which ran like an electric current through the
ranks of its quivering victims. Serenity, therefore, must be equally
contagious, and if one could isolate one of those fear-ridden folk for a
moment in a ring of men who were not afraid, it could not be doubted
that their fearlessness would triumph. No reassuring word or gesture
need be spoken or made, the very fact of the atmosphere of calm must
inevitably quiet the panic-stricken. Worry, too, would stifle if
isolated in serenity, just as serenity would vanish if the hosts of its
enemy hemmed it in. And here, to take the case in point, was Philip,
possessed and infected by the poisonous microbes of unhappiness, which
blackened his soul and darkened the sun for him. What was the remedy?
Not, as he had been trying to do, to drug himself into unconsciousness
over work, while they continued their ravages unchecked and
unchallenged, but to steep himself as in some antiseptic bath in an
atmosphere that was charged with their bitterest foes. It was happiness,
the atmosphere of happiness, that alone could combat his disease. And of
the eventual result of that treatment Merivale did not entertain the
slightest doubt; there would, of course, be war between happiness and
the misery of his friend, but he felt within himself that it was
impossible that Philip's misery could be so strong as the armies on his
own side. Think of the allies, too, that surrounded him: his light-armed
skirmishers, the birds and bees, with their staccato artillery of joy
forever playing on the object of their detestation; the huge guns of the
great beech forest forever pouring their sonorous discharge on to the
enemy; the flying cavalry of the river, the heather-fragrant wind which
encompassed and outflanked him in each direction.
Thus though, as has been said, his first impulse was one of shrinking
from this proximity to what was unhappy and suffering, how splendid a
demonstration of all that on which he so largely based his theory of
life was here offered him. He did not seek after a sign, no
demonstration could deepen his belief, yet he rejoiced that a sign was
offered him, even as one who utterly believes in the omnipotence of God
may yet look on the shining of the starry-kirtled night, and glow at the
reminder he is given of what he believes. Well he knows the glory of
God, but it does his heart good to behold it.
The work of the house took him, as a rule, but an hour or so to get
through every morning; but to-day there were further preparations to be
made for his friend's arrival; linen had to be brought out for his bed,
water to be fetched for his jug, and his room to be dusted and made
ready. But these menial occupations seemed to Merivale to be in no way
mean; nothing that was necessary for the ordinary simple needs of life
could possibly be derogatory for the wisest or busiest or wealthiest of
mankind to perform for himself, though to pass a lifetime in performing
them for others was a mean matter both for employer and employed. But
such things were not to him even tedious, any more than breathing or
washing were tedious, and to find them tedious but meant that one was
out of tune with the great symphony of life. Everyone, so ran his
theory, ought ideally to be so simple in his needs that he could
minister to his own necessities, without any sense that his time was
wasted; one washed one's hands, and brushed the hair. For this was part
of the true simplification of life--to need but little, and provide that
little oneself. Yet inasmuch as most of the world did not yet take his
view (and Philip was one of them), he was accustomed to hire help, and
intended to do so now, for a friend's visit.
He moved quickly and deftly enough about his work; pausing to think for
a moment as to the making of the bed, for all this summer he had
scarcely once slept in one, while in winter a mattress and a rug
comprised his own needs. Then the work of dusting brought him to the
dressing-table, and for a moment he looked at himself in the glass with
a sort of pang of delight, though in his delight there was neither
self-consciousness nor vanity that this was he. For he was now several
years past thirty, a time of life when on every face there begin to
appear the marks of years; but from the glass there looked back into his
eyes the face of a youth just standing on the threshold of manhood. The
strength of manhood was there, but it was a strength in which the
electric vigour of boyhood still quivered like a steel spring; not a
sign of slack or wrinkled skin appeared there, and his hair, with its
close-cropped curls, was thick and shining with health. But looking at
this image of perfect and vigorous youth, he thought, after the first
inevitable delight in the knowledge that this was he, not at all of
himself, only of the fact that to any who lived his life this must be
the certain and logical consequence. For the body was but the visible
sign of the spirit: it was the soul of man that made his body, as a
snail its shell; it was worry and discontent assuredly that drew lines
and wrinkles on the face and brought fatigue and sloth to the muscles,
not the passage of the years; it was just as surely serenity and the
passionate acceptation and absorption of the joy of life that made a man
young, and would keep him so body and soul alike.
But never before had he so fully realised this change that had come to
him, and when, after his work in the house was over, he walked into
Brockenhurst to engage a servant for the cooking which Philip's visit
would involve, he found himself wondering with a more than usually vivid
curiosity to what further knowledge and illumination his undeviating
quest should lead him. For he felt he was getting nearer every day, and
very quickly nearer to the full realisation of his creed, namely, that
all life was indivisibly one, and that the purport of all life was joy.
And when his knowledge of this was made perfect, how would the
revelation come, and what would be the effect? Would life eternal lived
here and now be his, or would that light be too great for him to bear,
so that this tabernacle of flesh and blood, hereditarily weakened by
centuries of sin and shame, could not stand it? Was it life or seeming
death that awaited him? He scarcely cared.
* * * * *
The tree that had been struck by lightning at the end of the garden he
had felled soon after, and part of his daily work now was to cut up the
branches into faggots and sticks of firewood for the winter. That
dreadful stroke from the skies which had dealt death to this beautiful
tree in the prime of its strength and luxuriance of its summer had often
seemed to Merivale to involve a difficult question, for it was
intimately bound up with all those things on which he had deliberately
turned his back. Death did exist in the world, and though, as he had
once said to Evelyn, out of death invariably came life, yet the fact of
death was there, just as beyond all possibility of denial, pain and
disease and sorrow were in the world also. These, however, were largely
of man's making, yet here, in the case of this poor stricken tree, it
was Nature herself who deliberately attacked and slew part of herself.
One animal, it is true, preyed on another, and by its death sustained
its own life: that was far easier to understand. But there was something
senseless and brutal in the fact of this weapon of the storm, a thing as
inanimate as a rifle-bullet, striking at life. It was wanton
destruction. Nothing came of it (and here he smiled, though not
believing he had guessed the riddle), except firewood for him.
The morning was intensely hot, and as he worked hatless under the blaze
of the sun, the wholesome sweat of toil poured from him. How good that
was; how good, too, to feel the strong resistance of the wood against
the blade of his axe, to feel the sinews of his arms alternately tighten
and slacken themselves in the swiping strokes, to stand straight up a
moment to rest his back, and wipe the moisture from his face and draw
in two or three long, satisfying breaths of summer air. It was as if the
song of the birds, too, entered into his very lungs, and the hum of the
bees, and the murmur of the forest, which was beginning to be hushed a
little at the hour when even the cicala sleeps. One thing alone would
not be hushed, and that the liquid voice of the river, in which he would
soon be plunged. No length of drought in this wonderful year seemed to
diminish the wealth of its outpouring; it was as high between its
fern-fringed banks now as it had been in April. But first there was the
carrying of the aromatic, fresh-cut logs to the house to be done, and he
almost regretted how near completion was the stack that filled the
wood-shed, for there was something about the hardness of this particular
toil that was intimately delightful. It required the exercise of
strength and vigour, the full use of supple and well-hardened muscles;
it was very typical of the splendid struggle for life in which the
struggle itself, the fact of work, was a thing ecstatic. He had cut more
than usual this morning, and it was with a boyish sense of playing some
game against a rigid and inflexible opponent that he determined not to
make two journeys of it, but carry all he had cut in one. And underneath
this staggering burden which he loved he toiled to the wood-shed.
* * * * *
Merivale had just come up from his bathe in the evening when Philip
arrived, and he met him halfway up the garden. That extraordinary change
which he had himself seen in the glass that morning struck his friend,
too.
"It was awfully good of you to let me come, Tom," he said. "And what has
been happening to you? If I had not known you ten years ago, I should
scarcely have recognised you now."
Tom laughed.
"And in ten days you won't recognise yourself," he said. "You look
pulled down, and no wonder, if you've been working in London all August.
Anyhow, this isn't the least like London, and you are going to do no
work. You are going to sit in the garden, and go for immense slow walks,
and listen to my practically incessant and wholly fatuous
conversation."
But it was difficult for him to conceal the shock that Philip's
appearance gave him. He looked so horribly tired and so old. The
suffering of this last month had made him haggard and heavy-eyed, and
what was worse, the hatred that had been his soul's guest had made his
face hard and bitter, and yet for all the hardness it was strangely
enfeebled: it had lost the look of strength and life that had always
been so characteristic of it. The vital principle had been withdrawn
from it; all that it expressed was lethal, negative.
Philip's weary eyes looked round on the garden and the low, thatched
house where dinner was already being laid in the verandah.
"So this is the Hermitage," he said. "Dear God, you have found peace."
Then he broke off suddenly, and began again in a different voice, a
voice that was like his face, bitter and hard and old.
"Yes, I've been overworking," he said, "and as I told you, yesterday I
suddenly collapsed. I think my work has got on my brain too much; I
didn't sleep well. London was dreadfully hot and stuffy, too. But I've
made a pot of money this month. Those fools on the Stock Exchange say
that August is a slack month. Of course it is if you are slack. But
certainly from a business point of view I've had an all-round time. I
brought some of them back, too, from their deer-forests and fishings in
double-quick time. And they were mostly too late even then. Good joke,
too, my going off suddenly like this, and leaving them grilling in
London."
Merivale could not quite let this pass; besides, he must answer somehow.
He laughed.
"I don't altogether agree with your idea of humour," he said. "Was it
really--from a humorous point of view--worth while?"
Philip's face did not relax.
"It was from a business point of view," he said.
Then his gardener's eye was suddenly arrested by a _perle des jardins_
that was ramping beyond all bounds.
"I used to know about roses," he said, "and I'll cut that back for you
to-morrow. You are not getting half the roses out of it."
"I know, but it's enjoying itself so enormously," said Merivale.
Philip considered this as an abstract question on to which he had not
previously turned his mind.
"And you think that ought to be taken into consideration when one deals
with the destinies even of rose-trees?" he asked with a terrible air of
being in earnest.
Merivale smiled.
"Decidedly London has not been good for you," he said. "I think your
words were 'the destinies even of rose-trees.' Now what destiny matters
more than that? Not mine, I am sure, and I doubt if yours. Besides, the
destinies of your rose-trees used to be of extraordinary importance, not
only to them, but to you."
Philip was silent a moment. Then for the first time, at the sense of
peace that was here so predominant a note, or at the sight of Tom
himself, in all the vigour and freshness of a youth that measured by
years was already past, some faint gleam, or if not a gleam, the sense
that light was possible to him, broke through the dismal darkness of his
soul. For one short moment he laid his hand on his friend's arm.
"Make allowance for me, Tom," he said.
In spite of his long aloofness from the fretful race of men and the ways
of them, Merivale had not forgotten--indeed it is as impossible for one
who has ever known it to forget it as it is to forget how to swim--that
divine gift of tact. Indeed, it is probable that his long sojournings
alone had, if anything, made more sensitive those surfaces which come
into contact with others and which others insensibly feel (for this is
tact) to be smooth and warm and wise. And it was a fine touch that he
did not respond, however remotely, to Philip's appeal, for Philip had
told him that pity and sympathy were exactly what he could not stand.
Consequently he let this cry be the voice of one in the desert; it
wanted silence, not audible answer. He, like the trees in the garden and
the stream, must be dumb to it.
This silence was the key to several days that followed: there was, in
fact, no intimate conversation of any sort between the two friends.
Philip would sit for hours in the garden, stung sometimes into spasmodic
activity, during which he would send off a dozen telegrams to his office
on monetary affairs, but for the most part with an unread paper on his
knees, or a book that tumbled unheeded on to the grass. But soon during
this frosty and strictured time, Merivale thought he saw, as birds know
the hour of sunrise before the faintest dawn illuminates the sky, that
there were signs that this frost was less binding than it had been.
Philip would take a pruning-knife sometimes, and with his deft and
practised hand reduce a rose to reasonable dimensions. Sometimes
half-way through the operation he would let the knife fall from his
fingers, as if his labours, like everything else, were not worth while;
but often afterwards he would resume his labours, and enable the tree to
do justice to itself. By degrees, too, these outbursts of City activity
grew rarer and more spasmodic, becoming, as it were, but the echoes of a
habit rather than demonstrations of the habit itself. He did not join
Merivale in his long tramps over the forest, but he began to wait for
his return, and if he knew from what point of the compass he was likely
to return, he sometimes set out to meet him. Once Merivale was very
late: his tramp had taken him further than usual, and night, falling
cloudy and moonless, had surprised him in a wood where even one who knew
the forest as well as he might miss his way. On this occasion he found
Philip pacing up and down the garden in some agitation.
"Ah, there you are," he cried in a tone of obvious relief when his
white-flannelled figure appeared against the deep dusk of the bushes
that lined the stream. "I was getting anxious, and I did not know what
to do. I should have come out to look for you, but I did not know where
you might be coming from."
And that little touch of anxiety was perhaps the first sign that he had
shown since he had abandoned himself to bitterness that his heart was
not dead: never before had the faintest spark of the sense of human
comradeship or its solicitudes appeared.
Then Merivale knew that the fortnight that Philip had already spent here
had not been utterly wasted, and before going to bed that night he wrote
one line of hope to Mrs. Home.
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