The Angel of Pain. Benson Edward Frederic

from his home now for the past year, and delighted though he was to see these two old friends of his again, he confessed to himself that he found the call on sociability which a visit tacitly implied rather trying. More than that, he found even the presence of other people in the house with whom he was not on terms of intimacy a thing a little upsetting, for his year of solitude had given some justification to his nickname. For solitude is a habit of extraordinary fascination, and very quick to grow on anyone who has sufficient interest in things not to be bored by the absence of people. And with Tom Merivale, Nature, the unfolding of flowers, the lighting of the stars in the sky, the white splendour of the moon, the hiss of the rain on to cowering shrubs and thirsty grass was much more than an interest; it was a passion which absorbed and devoured him. For Nature, to the true devotee, is a mistress far more exacting and far more infinite in her variety and rewards than was ever human mistress to her adorer. Tom Merivale, at any rate, was faithful and wholly constant, and to him now, after a year spent in solitude in which no man had ever felt less alone, no human tie or affection weighed at all compared to the patient devotion with which he worshipped this ever young mistress of his. To some, indeed, as to Mrs. Home, this cutting of himself off from all other human ties might seem to verge on insanity; to others, as to Philip, it might equally well be construed into an example of perfect sanity. For he had left the world, and cast his moorings loose from society in no embittered or disappointed mood; the severance of his connection with things of human interest had been deliberate and sanely made. He believed, in fact, that what his inner essential self demanded was not to be found among men, or, as he had put it once to Philip, it was to be found there in such small quantities compared to the mass of alloy and undesirable material from which it had to be extracted, that it was false economy to quarry in the world of cities. More than this, too, he had renounced, though this second renunciation had not been deliberate, but had followed, so he found, as a sequel to the other; for he had been a writer of fiction who, though never widely read, had been prized and pored over by a circle of readers whose appreciation was probably far more worth having than that of a wider circle could have been. Then, suddenly, as far as even his most intimate friends knew, he had left London, establishing himself instead in a cottage, of the more comfortable sort of cottages, some mile outside Brockenhurst. In the tea-cup way this had made quite a storm in the set that knew him well, those, in fact, by whom he was valued as an interpreter and a living example of the things of which he wrote. These writings had always been impersonal in note, slightly mystical, and always with the refrain of Nature running through them. But none, when he disappeared as completely as Waring, suspected how vital to himself his disappearance had been. Anything out of the way is labelled, and rightly by the majority, to be insane. By such a verdict Tom Merivale certainly merited Bedlam. He had gone away, in fact, to think, while the majority of those who crowd into the cities do so, not to think, but to be within reach of the distractions that leave no time for thought. For action is always less difficult than thought; a man can act for more hours a day than he can think in a week, and action, being a productive function of the brain, is thus (rightly, also, from the social point of view) considered the more respectable employment.

      The subject of this difficult doctrine, however, was more than content; as he had said, he was happy, a state far on the sunward side of the other. He seemed to himself, indeed, to be sitting very much awake and alert on some great sunlit slope of the world, untenanted by man, but peopled with a million natural marvels unconjectured as yet by the world, but which slowly coming into the ken of his wondering and patient eyes. For a year now he had consciously and solely devoted himself to the study and contemplation of life, that eternal and ever-renewed life of Nature, and the joy manifested therein. He had turned his back with the same careful deliberation on all that is painful in Nature, all suffering, all that hinders and mars the fulness of life, on everything, in fact, which is an evidence of imperfection. In this to a large extent he was identically minded with Christian Scientists, but having faced the central idea of Christianity, namely, the suffering which was necessary as atonement for sin, he had confessed himself unable to accept, at present at any rate, the possibility of suffering being ever necessary, and could no longer call himself a Christian. Happiness was his gospel, and the book in which he studied it was Nature, omitting always such chapters as dealt with man. For man, so it seemed to him, had by centuries of evolution built himself into something so widely different from Nature’s original design, that the very contemplation of and association with man was a thing to be avoided. Absence of serenity, absence of happiness, seemed the two leading characteristics of the human race, whereas happiness and serenity were the chief of those things for which he sought and for which he lived.

      This year’s solitude and quest for joy had already produced in him remarkable results. He had been originally himself of a very high-strung, nervous, and irritable temperament; now, however, he could not imagine the event which should disturb his equanimity. For this, as far as it went alone, he was perfectly willing to accept the possible explanation that a year’s life in the open air had wrought its simple miracle of healing on his nerves, and, as he had said to Lady Ellington, the perfection of health had eliminated the possibility of discontent.

      But other phenomena did not admit of quite so obvious an interpretation; and it was on these that he based his belief that, though all that occurred must necessarily be natural, following, that is to say, laws of nature, he was experiencing the effects of laws which were to the rest of the world occult or unknown. For in a word, youth, with all its vivid vigour, its capacity for growth and expansion, had returned to him in a way unprecedented; his face, as Evelyn had noticed, had grown younger, and in a hundred merely corporeal ways he had stepped back into early manhood. Again, and this was more inexplicable, he had somehow established, without meaning to, a certain communion with birds and beasts, of which the “nightingale trick” had been a small instance, which seemed to him must be a direct and hitherto unknown effect of his conscious absorption of himself in Nature. How far along this unexplored path he would be able to go he had no idea; he guessed, however, that he had at present taken only a few halting steps along a road that was lost in a golden haze of wonder.

      He strolled along out through the garden into a solitary upland of bush-besprinkled turf. Wild flowers of downland, the rock-rose, the harebell, orchids, and meadow-sweet carpeted the short grass, and midsummer held festival. But this morning his thoughts were distracted from the Nature-world in which he lived, and he found himself dwelling on the human beings among whom for a few days he would pass his time. It was natural from the attitude of this last year that Evelyn Dundas and Mrs. Home should be of the party in the house the most congenial to him, and the simplicity of them both seemed to him far more interesting than the greater complexity of the others. It would, it is true, be hard to find two examples of simplicity so utterly unlike each other, but serene absence of calculation or scheming brought both under one head. They were both, in a way, children of Nature; Mrs. Home on the one hand having arrived at her inheritance by cheerful, unswerving patience and serenity with events external to herself; while in the case of the other, his huge vitality, coupled with his extreme impressionableness to beauty, brought him, so it seemed to Tom Merivale, into very close connection with the essentials of life. But, as he had told his friend, Evelyn’s attitude to life was instinctively Pagan; immoral he was not, for his fastidiousness labelled such a thing ugly, but he had apparently no rudiments even of conscience or sense of moral obligation. And somehow, with that curious sixth sense of prescience, so common in animals, so rare among civilized human beings who, by means of continued calculation and reasoned surmise of the future, which has caused it to wither and atrophize, Tom felt, just as he could feel approaching storms, a vague sense of coming disaster.

      The sensation was very undefined, but distinctly unpleasant, and, following his invariable rule to divert his mind from all unpleasantness, he lay down on the short turf and buried his face in a great bed of thyme which grew there. All summer was in that smell, hot, redolent, the very breath of life, and with eyes half-closed and nostrils expanded he breathed it deeply in.

      The place he had come to was very remote and solitary, a big clearing in the middle of trees, well known to him in earlier years. No road crossed it, no house lay near it, but the air was resonant with the labouring bees, and the birds called and fluted to each other in the trees. But suddenly, as he lay there, half lost in a stupor of happiness, he heard very faintly another noise, to which at first he paid but little attention. It was the sound apparently of a flute being played at some great distance off,