The Angel of Pain

It was then to this temple of contradictions that Evelyn returned, three steps to a stride, after seeing Madge off. The figure was right; he felt sure of that, but the tone of the background somehow was not yet quite attuned to it. Above all, the mirror must be bright burnished gold, not dull, for the flame of the cloak, if it was the only note of high colour in the picture, consumed itself, burned away ineffectually, and it was with a heart that beat fast, not only from his gallop upstairs, but from excitement in this creation that was his, that he again stood before the picture. Yes, that was it; another high light was necessary.

For a moment he looked at the laughing face on his canvas, almost laughing himself. Then all on a sudden his laughter died, the need of his picture for another high light died too, for though his eyes were looking on his own presentment of Madge, it was Madge herself that his soul saw. And even as his eyes loved the work of his hands, so he knew in a burning flash of self-revelation that his soul loved her. Up till now, up till this very moment, he had not known that this was so; that it was possible he had long since recognised, that the possibility was reaching its tentacles out into regions of the probable he had recognised, so to speak, out of the corner of his eye, had recognised, but cut it, and now came the knowledge.

Evelyn gave a great sigh, raising his hands, one with the palette on the thumb, the other with the brush it held, to full stretch, and let them fall again, and stood still in front of his own inimitable portrait, drinking in no longer with the artist’s eye only, but with the eye of the lover, the incomparable beauty of his beloved. That rush of sudden knowledge, so impetuous, so overwhelming, for the moment drowned all else; it did not enter his head to consider “What next?” The present moment was so blindingly bright that everything that lay outside it was in impenetrable shadow. The intimate relations into which he was thrown with the girl, by reason of this portrait; the fact that she was engaged, and that to his best friend, did not at first have any existence in his mind; he but looked at this one fact, that he loved her to the exclusion of all else. Then, as must always happen, came reaction from the ecstatic moment, and in the train of reaction, like some grey ghost, thought. But even thought for the time was gilded by the light of that central sun, and it was long before he could frame the situation in the bounding lines of life and conduct. For love is a force which is impatient of opposition, and against opposition it will hurl itself, like a wild bird against the wires of its cage, careless of whether it is dashed to pieces, knowing only the overwhelming instinct and need of liberty, to gain which death is but the snap of a careless finger.

Then, almost with a laugh at himself, came that most important factor that he had overlooked. For a couple of minutes his egoism had run away with him, taking the bit in its teeth, and the thought that he loved her, that he needed her, had not only been uppermost, but alone in his mind. But what of her? She was engaged to Philip, and shortly to be married to him, and he himself was merely to be relegated to that somewhat populous class of “odd man out.” That ebb from the full flood of his passion was swift; it came in a moment, as swiftly as the other had come. So that was all that was left of him, all that was possible; that he should just stand aside while the other two went on their way, not daring even to touch the hem of her garment, for she would most surely draw it away from him. That clearly was the logical outcome, but logical as it was, not a single fibre of his inmost self accepted it. That, the one thing which to the reasonable mind must assuredly happen was to him the one thing which could not possibly happen. The very strength of his newly-awakened love was the insuperable bar to it; it could not be, for what – and the question seemed to himself at that moment perfectly unanswerable – what on earth was to happen to him in that case? Here was the Pagan, the interesting survival, as Tom Merivale had called him, most unmistakably surviving, shouting, as it were, that its own happiness, its own need, was the one thing which the rest of the world must accept and respect. And, since the only way in which due acceptation could be secured for it was conditional on Madge’s loving him, that had to happen also. Yes, nothing else would do; she had to love him.

This reasoning, if one can call by so deliberate a word these leaping conclusions, was not any act of reflecting egoism. His emotions, his whole being, had been suddenly stirred, and there necessarily rose to the surface the sediment, so to speak, of that which dwelt in its depths. The whole course and habit of his past life no doubt was responsible for what was there, but he was no more responsible at this particular moment for the thoughts and conclusions that leaped in fire into his mind than is a man who is suddenly startled responsible for starting; his nerves have acted without the dictation of his brains. But with Evelyn, as the minutes passed, and he still sat there with heightened colour and flashing eyes, looking at his unfinished picture, he ceased to be comparable to a suddenly startled man; the thoughts that had sprung unbidden to his mind were not put away; they remained there, and they grew in brightness. His conscious reflections endorsed the first instinctive impulse.

It so happened that he had arranged to go down that afternoon to spend a couple of nights in the New Forest with the Hermit, but when this engagement was again remembered by him, it seemed to him at first impossible to go. What he had learned in this last hour was a thing so staggering that he felt as if all the affairs of life, social intercourse, the discussion of this subject or of that, as if any subject but one contained even the germ or protoplasm of importance, had become impossible. But go or stay, everything was impossible except to win Madge’s love. Then another impossibility, bigger perhaps than any, made its appearance, for the most impossible thing of all was to be alone, anything was more endurable than that; and side by side with that rose another, namely, the impossibility of keeping his knowledge to himself. He must, he felt, tell somebody, and of all people in the world the Hermit was the person whom it would be most easy to tell.

Then a sort of pale image of Philip came into his mind. He was conscious of no disloyalty to him, because he was incapable of thinking of him at all, except as of somebody, a vague somebody, who dwelt among the shadows outside the light. Mrs. Home was no more, nobody was anything more than a dweller in these shadows. Nor, indeed, had he been able to think of Philip directly, concentratedly, would he have accused himself of disloyalty; either Madge would never love himself, in which case no harm was done to anyone, or she would do so, in which case her marriage with Philip was an impossibility – an impossibility, too, the existence of which had better be found out before it was legally confirmed. Yet all this but quivered through his mind and was gone again, he caught but as passing a glimpse of the world of life and conduct as he caught of the stations that his train thundered through in its westerly course; they but brushed by his inward eye, and had passed before they had ever been focussed or seen with anything like clearness.

The Hermit had once told him, it may be remembered, that he wanted deepening, and Evelyn on that occasion had enunciated the general principle that he had no use for deeps, the surface being sufficient for his needs. And even now, though his egotism was so all-embracing, it was in no sense whatever profound. He did not probe himself, it was of the glittering surface alone on which shone this sun of love that he was conscious. Deeps, perhaps, might lie beneath, but they were unexplored; life like a pleasure boat with shallow-dipping oars went gaily across him. Indeed it was probable that before the depth – if depths were there – could be sounded the sun, so to speak, would have to go in, for with that dazzle on the water it was impossible to see what lay below.

Tom Merivale’s cottage, which had begun life as two cottages, stood very solitary some mile or two outside Brockenhurst, and though the high road passed within a few hundred yards of it, it was impossible to conceive a place that more partook of the essential nature of a hermitage. Between it and the high road lay a field, with only a rough track across it; beyond that, and nearer to the house, an orchard, while a huge box-hedge, compact and homogeneous with the growth and careful clipping of many years, was to any who wished to be shut off from the outer world a bar as impenetrable as a ring of fire. Immediately beyond this stood the cottage itself, looking away from the road; in front a strip of garden led down to the little river Fawn, and across the river lay a great open expanse of heath, through which, like a wedge, came down a big triangular wood of beech-trees. It was this way, over the garden and the open forest, that the cottage looked; not a house of any kind was in sight, and one might watch, like a ship-wrecked mariner for a sail, for any sign of human life, and yet in a long summer day perhaps the watcher would see nothing to tell him that he was not alone as far as humankind went in this woodland world. Tom had built out a long deep verandah that ran the whole length of the cottage on the garden front; brick pillars at the two corners supported a wooden roof, and a couple of steps led down into the garden. Down the centre of that ran a pergola, over which climbed in tangled luxuriance the long-limbed tribes of climbing roses. Ramblers spilt their crimson clusters over it, or lay in streaks and balls of white and yellow foam, while carmine pillar seemed to struggle in their embrace, and honeysuckle cast loving tendrils round them both and kissed them promiscuously. And though a gardener might have deplored this untended riot of vegetation, yet even the most orderly of his fraternity could not have failed to admire. Nature and this fruitful soil and the warm, soft air to which frost was a stranger, had taken matters into their own hands, and the result, though as fortuitous apparently as the splashed glories of a sunset, had yet a sunset’s lavishness and generosity of colour. On each side of this pergola lay a small lawn of well-tended turf, and a shrubbery on one side of lilacs and syringa and on the other a tall brick wall with a deep garden bed below it gave a fragrant frame to the whole. The Hermit’s avowal, indeed, that for the last year he had done nothing except carpentering and gardening implied a good deal of the latter, for the turf, as has been stated, was beautifully rolled and cut, and the beds showed evidence of seed-time and weeding, and had that indefinable but unmistakable air of being zealously cared for. But since such operations were concerned with plants, no principle was broken.

Evelyn arrived here soon after six, and found himself in undisturbed possession. Mr. Merivale, so said his servant, had gone off soon after breakfast that morning and had not yet returned. His guest, however, had been expected, and he himself would be sure to be in before long. Indeed in a few minutes his cry of welcome to Evelyn sounded from the lower end of the garden, and he left his long chair in the verandah and went down through the pergola to meet him.

“Ah, my dear fellow,” said Tom, “it is delightful to see you. You have come from London, have you not, where there are so many people and so few things. I have been thinking about London, and you have no idea how remote it seems. And how is the picture getting on – Miss Ellington’s, I mean?”

Evelyn looked at him with his direct, luminous gaze. Though he had come down here with the object of telling his friend what had happened, he found that at this first moment of meeting him, he was incapable of making his tongue go on its errand.

“Ah, the portrait,” he said; “it really is getting on well. Up to this morning, at any rate, I have put there what I have meant to put there, and, which is rarer with me, I have not put there anything which I did not mean. Do you see how vastly more important that is?”

The Hermit had passed his day in the open merely in shirt and trousers, but his coat was lying in a hammock slung between two pillars of the pergola, and he put it on.

“Why, of course,” he said, “a thing which ought not to be there poisons the rest; anything put in which should be left out sets the whole thing jarring. That’s exactly why I left the world you live in. There was so much that shouldn’t have been there, from my point of view at least.”

Evelyn laughed.

“But if we all left out all that each of us thinks shouldn’t be there, there would be precious little left in the world,” he said. “For instance, I should leave out Lady Ellington without the slightest question.”

He paused a moment.

“And when the portrait is finished she, no doubt, would leave out me,” he added, with charming candour.

“Quite so,” said Merivale; “and since I, not being an uncontrolled despot, could not ‘leave out’ people, which I suppose is a soft way of saying terminate their existence, I went away instead to a place where they were naturally left out, where for me their existence was terminated. It is all part of the simplifying process.”

They had established themselves in the verandah again, where a silent-footed man was laying the table for dinner; and it struck Evelyn for the moment as an inconsistency that the tablecloth should be so fine and the silver so resplendent.

“But in your simplification,” said Evelyn, indicating the table, “you don’t leave out that sort of thing.”

“No, because if I once opened the question of whether I should live on the bare necessities of life, or allow myself, so to speak, a little dripping on my bread, the rest of my life would be spent in settling infinitesimal points which I really don’t think much matter. I could no doubt sell my silver and realize a few hundred pounds, and give that away. But I don’t think it matters much.”

“All the same, it is inconsistent.”

“In details that does not seem to me to matter either,” said Merivale. “For instance, I don’t eat meat partly because I think that it is better not to take life if you can avoid it. But when a midge settles on my hand and bites me, if possible I kill it.”

“Well, anyhow your inconsistencies make up a very charming whole,” said the other, looking round. “It is all charming.”

“I’m glad, and you think you can pass a day or two here without missing the – the complications you live among? I wish Philip could have come down, too; but he is buried in work, it appears, and we know how his leisure is occupied just now.”

Evelyn moved suddenly in his chair.

“Ah, do you know, I am rather glad Philip isn’t here,” he said. “I don’t think – ” and he broke off again. “And as soon as I’ve finished this portrait, I’m going to do his,” he added.

He was silent a moment, feeling somehow that he never would do Philip’s portrait. He would not be able to see him, he would not be able to paint him; something, no shadow, but something so bright would stand between him and the canvas that he would be unable to see beyond or through it.

But Merivale did not seem to notice the check. His eyes were looking out over the glowing garden, where all colours were turned to flame in the almost level rays of the sun as it drew near to its setting. The wall behind the deep garden bed glowed as if the bricks themselves were luminous, light seemed to exude from the grass, the flowers were bells and cups of fire.

“Ah, this is the best moment of all the day,” he said, “when sunset comes like this. The whole of the sunshine of the hours seem distilled into it, it is the very essence of light.”

He rose from his chair, and went to the edge of the verandah, stretching his arms wide and breathing deeply of the warm, fragrant air. Then he turned again to his companion.

“That, too, I hope is what death will be like,” he said. “All the sunlight of life will be concentrated into that moment, until one’s mere body can hold no more of the glow that impregnates it, and is shattered. Look at those clusters of rambler; a little more and they must burst with the colour.”

Evelyn got up too.

“Don’t be so uncomfortable, Tom,” he cried, in a sort of boyish petulance. “I could go mad when I think of death. It is horrible, frightening. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to get old. I want to be young always, to feel as I feel to-day, and never a jot less keenly. That’s what you must tell me while I am here; how am I to remain young? You seem to have solved it; you are much younger than when I knew you first.”

Tom laughed.

“And another proof of my youth is that I feel as I do about death,” he said. “The more you are conscious of your own life, the more absurd the notion that one can die becomes. Why, even one’s body won’t die; it will make life, it will be grass on one’s grave, just as the dead leaves that fall from the tree make the leaf-mould which feeds that tree or another tree or the grass. It doesn’t in the least matter which, it is all one, it is all life.”

Evelyn shivered slightly.

“Yes, quite true, and not the least consoling,” he said; “for what is the use of being alive if one loses one’s individuality? It doesn’t make death the least less terrible to me, even if I know that I am going to become a piece of groundsel and be pecked at by your canary. I don’t want to be groundsel, I don’t want to be pecked at, and I don’t want to become your canary. Great heavens, fancy being a bit of a canary!”

“Ah, but only your body,” said the other.

Evelyn got up.

“Yes, and what happens to the rest? You tell me that a piece of me, for my body is a piece of me, becomes a canary, and you don’t know about the rest. Indeed it is not a cheerful prospect. If some – some bird pecks my eyes out, is it a consolation to me, who becomes blind, to learn that a bird has had dinner?”

Merivale looked at him; even as Gladys had seen that some change had come in Madge, so he saw that something had happened to Evelyn, and he registered that impression in his mind. But the change, whatever it was, was not permanent – it was a phase, a mood only, for next moment Evelyn had broken out into a perfectly natural laugh.

“You shan’t make me think of melancholy subjects any more,” he cried. “Indeed you may try, but you won’t be able to do it. I have never been more full of the joy of life than to-day. That was why I was so glad to come down here, as you are a sort of apostle of joy. But it’s true that I also want to talk to you some time about something quite serious. Not now though, but after dinner. Also you will have to show me all the bag of conjuring tricks, the mechanical nightingale, the disappearing omelette – I could do that, by the way – and the Pan pipes. Now, I’m going upstairs to change; I’ve got London things on, and my artistic eye is offended. Where shall I find you?”

“I shall go down to bathe. Won’t you come?” said Merivale.

Evelyn wrinkled up his nose.

“No, I’ve not been hot enough. Besides, one is inferior to the frog in the water, which is humiliating. Any frog swims so much better!”