The Angel of Pain

Not all day nor when night fell did the rain cease, but the air was very warm, and the two dined out as usual in the verandah. The candles burned steadily in the windless air, casting squares of uncertain light on to the thick curtain of the night which was hung round them. Merivale, it appeared, had passed a day of high festival even for him; the rain of which the thirsty earth was drinking so deeply suited him no less.

“Ah, there is no mood of Nature,” he cried, “which I do not love. This hot, soaking rain falling windlessly, which other people find so depressing, is so wonderful. The earth lies beneath it, drinking like a child at its mother’s breast. The trees stand with drooping leaves, relaxing themselves, making no effort, just drinking, recuperating. The moths and winged things creep close into crevices in their bark – I saw a dozen such to-day – or cling to the underside of the leaves, where they are dry and cool. Everything is sleeping to-day, and to watch the earth sleep is like watching a child sleep: however lovely and winsome it is when it is awake, yet its sleep is even more beautiful. There is not a wrinkle on its face: it is as young as love, and with closed eyes and mouth half-open it rests.”

Philip was looking at him with a sort of dumb envy, which at length found voice.

“I would give all I have for just one day of your life,” he said, pushing back his plate and putting his elbows on the table, a characteristic movement when he wanted to talk, as Merivale knew.

“Ah, my dear fellow,” he cried, “it is something very substantial gained already, if you wish that. To want to be happy is a very sensible step towards it.”

“It is true that a fortnight ago I don’t think I even wanted to be happy,” said Philip.

“I know. But you have made the first step. Also, I can say it now, you look very much better than when you came.”

“I am not more happy,” said Philip.

“No, but you conceive it distantly possible that one day you may be. That has only just begun to occur to you.”

Philip established his elbows more firmly yet.

“You are a living miracle, Tom!” he said. “I believe you are happier than any man on this earth has ever been, since, at any rate, man began to grow complicated and want things. You want nothing, I suppose, do you? And is it that which has made you a boy again, while wanting and not getting, and being robbed of what was mine, has made an old man of me?”

Tom smiled, showing his white even teeth.

“Ah, I want,” he said, “I want passionately, but I feel sure I shall get what I want. It is the old story, I have told it you before: what I want is the full realisation of the oneness of all life, and of the joy that pervades everything.”

“What would I not give to realise one millionth-part of that?” said Philip.

He paused a moment and then broke out suddenly.

“Ah, it is the very intensity and completeness with which I loved her that makes it all so bitter,” he said. “A little love would only have meant a little bitterness. But my love was not little, and so also is not my bitterness. And afterwards, I did the best thing I could think of. I worked, using work as a drug. As you know, I took too much of that drug, and nearly broke down in consequence. And, oddly enough, now, so far from finding myself a slave to it, the thought of it is rather distasteful than otherwise. I might have made quite a lot of money to-day, if I had only taken the trouble to write a telegram, which would have been done in ten minutes and have cost me ten shillings. But I thought: ‘Is it worth while?’ And when one thinks that, it is certainly not worth while: only things that are quite indubitably worth while are worth while at all. And then I thought over what I had done to Evelyn, and that seemed not worth while either. I should not do it again if I had the chance.”

“What was that?” asked Merivale.

Philip told him in a few words the history of Metiekull.

“It was designed to hurt Madge, too,” he said, “which again doesn’t seem worth while. I don’t care whether she is hurt or not. And I thought I was so strong, so unbending.”

He paused a moment, but the need of confiding, of laying his heart open, was strong upon him. It had long been dammed up, now the flood-water had at last begun to make a breach in the banks.

“I love her still,” he said, “and I loved her all the time when I would have done anything to hurt her. I wonder if you understand that. It is true at all events. I would like, or rather I would have liked, to hurt her and go on hurting till she writhed with pain, and all the time I should have been longing to kiss her tears away. But now I don’t want to hurt her any more. It does not seem worth while. And besides, I can’t hurt her; only one person in the world can really hurt her, because she loves him. I am an object of indifference to her, and therefore I have no power to hurt her. My God, by what diabolical trick is it that only those we love have the power to hurt us? That was a cruel trick God played on us when he made us so. It is infamous!”

His hands, which were supporting his head, trembled, and for the first time his eyes grew soft with unshed tears. Never until this moment had he felt the slightest desire to weep; now the tears were ready to come. But he repressed them and went on.

“My house is in ruins,” he said, “and perhaps I have been looking at the ruins too long. It has done no good in any case: looking at them has brought me no nearer to laying the first stone again. I have just the sense left to see that. One has to build, to begin again, not count over the destruction that has been wrought. Yet my house was so beautiful, the house that was already built, and waited only for one to enter.”

Again he paused, for his voice trembled, too.

“But as there is no such futile fool as the pathetic fool,” said he, “I will not go on about that. I want, and I want you to help me in this, to look the other way, forward. I think you have vitality enough, or call it what you will, to resuscitate a man who is all but drowned, over whose head the billows have gone. There is something infectious about you, I think; you somehow shine on one, and I feel as if I was sickening, so to speak, by being with you, for the disease of life. Work, anyhow, did me no good; it only ended in my breaking down. But mere idling here has done something for me. I feel as if I could acquiesce in continuing idle here, whereas before the thought of continuing to do either anything or nothing was intolerable. I could but just get through the present dreadful moment. Through all these weeks the next moment, the next hour, the next day, might easily have proved to be impossible. For, look here – you know I am not melodramatic!”

He took from his pocket a little surgical lancet, and stroked the side of his throat with his thumb.

“I tried to get prussic acid,” he said, “but I suppose I asked for it badly, and they did not believe some foolish tale about a dog which I wanted to put out of the way. So I bought this. One little incision – I took the trouble to learn the right place, for it is dreadfully foolish to make a mess, over and above the mess that must be made, about such simple things. I don’t really know why I have not used it before; I can only say it was not from cowardice. But now I want it no longer; I am beginning to be able to look forward. So it goes.”

With a jerk of his wrist he flung it among the shrubs to the right of the lawn, where it fell with a little splutter of applause, as it were, from the leaves, as if they, too, were glad to assist in the disposal and forgetting of it.

But Merivale looked neither shocked nor surprised; it was as if but a very commonplace thing had been told him.

“Yes, my dear chap,” he said, “of course I don’t put it down to cowardice, the fact, I mean, that you did not use that abominable little knife. Why, if you were a coward, you would have done so. Of course it must have been much easier for you to die than to live all this time. But I’m glad you weren’t a coward, Philip. I don’t think a coward can be much good for anything. A man who won’t meet what is in front of him, and prefers to run away somewhere, he doesn’t know where, is a poor sort of being. Of course, we all have our fears; life is full of terror. All we can do is to say we are not afraid, and to behave as if we were not. And since you have thrown that knife away, I may say that I think suicide is one of the most abject species of cowardice. Of course you were not yourself when you contemplated it, however vaguely. Now that you are a little better, you throw the thing away.”

His tone was so extremely matter-of-fact that its very normalness arrested Philip. As he had said, it was perfectly true that nothing was further from his thoughts than melodrama, and the interest he felt in Tom’s attitude, as thus revealed, towards life and death and fear was a fresh sign, and he himself felt it to be such, of his reawakening interests. Hitherto it had not, however remotely, concerned him as to what anyone else might think of it all.

“You talk of fears,” he said; “what do you know of them? Surely you, at any rate, are free from fear. Oh, talk, Tom, interest me in anything; talk about yourself, or birds, or beasts. You have given me so much: give me more. Give me the foundation of my new house, since it is you – yes, you, you dear fellow – who have made me turn my back upon the ruins. I have got to begin again; I have nothing to begin with. I am bankrupt. I beg you to give me a bit of that which you have so abundantly.”

His voice again half-failed him, but he recovered it in a moment.

“We were talking about fear,” he said; “what have you got to fear? You don’t depend on men and women; you don’t love. There is nothing in the world to be afraid of except love. I have found that out. Yet people seek it, the fools. They call it by sweet names: they say it is love that makes life worth living. My God, I should be so content if I had never known what it was. Damn her! I could have lived exactly like you – no, that is not true; I could never have been even remotely happy without loving her, just as, if I had never loved her, I should never have known what misery was. But you among your birds and beasts and trees, what on earth have you to fear? You won’t fall in love with a beach-tree and find that it elopes with an elm. Tell me about your bloodless Paradise, and how the serpent, which is fear, can enter into it.”

Tom Merivale had grown rather grave during this sudden outburst. Nothing in the world, so he believed, had power to ruffle his temper: only it was difficult to explain to such a child as Philip had shown himself to be. But before the pause was on his side the other spoke again.

“I am sorry,” he said, “but it was a sort of baffled ignorance that spoke. I don’t understand you; and for that reason I had no business to call your happiness, which is maddeningly real to me, a bloodless Paradise. But, for God’s sake, show me anything approaching Paradise, at the door of which there is not an angel with a sword, not flaming, but cold and convincing. And where, above all, is your fear? How can fear exist for you? What is there to be afraid of unless you love and can be betrayed?”

Philip’s servant came out from the house, bringing a tray with glasses and bottles. He paused by his master a moment.

“What time will you be called, sir?” he asked.

“Usual time; you can go to bed.”

The pause lasted till the man had entered the house again. Then Merivale spoke.

“I fear all I have not learned,” he said. “I fear the revelation of what people suffer, of what you have suffered, of what Christ suffered. I fear that all suffering, in its degree, is atonement. I don’t believe it, mind you, but I am afraid it may be true, and that somehow I shall have to believe it. I am not a Christian, and so I put it that a man who was as infinitely above the rest of mankind as Shakespeare is above the child which is idiotic from its birth and has never felt the warmth of the slightest spark of reason, found it necessary to die, and believed that his death atoned for the sins of the whole world. Ah, if I only believed that he was right, how instinctively I should believe that he was God. No one but God could have thought of that.”

He paused a moment.

“But I am beginning to think that I shall not die without believing it,” he said. “I don’t think that even the death of the body could come to this body of mine unless I became convinced of the necessity for suffering and for death. Why am I beginning to think that? I can’t possibly say; there is never any reason for one’s believing anything, except the conviction that it must be so. Evelyn, I remember, once talked to me about it. At that time I was satisfied with my own reasoning; now I am not. I said to him then that my métier was the realisation of joy. Well, at present I know nothing that invalidates that belief. But I see clearly now the possibility that he was right, in which case it is possible that my fears, about which you asked, are right also. Mind, I am not afraid in any case. I would sooner see all the sorrows of the world, and realise them, as far as I am able, than turn aside. But my fear is that I may be called upon to realise them. I shall not like it, but if that is to be, I can assure you that I shall not attempt to turn back. Not one step of the way which I have gone along would I retrace. I will meet them all, I will realise them all. And, in my own language, that means that I shall see Pan, the god of all Nature, of the suffering and sorrow of Nature as well as the illimitable life and joy of her. And to tell you the truth, I think it quite probable that I may have to do so.”

The rain had stopped, and a sudden sough of the wind in the bushes sounded as if some animal had strayed there. Twigs creaked as if broken; small branches swayed. Also, so it seemed to Philip, the wind brought with it some faint, indefinable aroma, evoked no doubt by this rain from some shrub in the garden. But for all his horticultural knowledge, he could not give a name to it; it was pungent, of an animal flavour to the nostrils, and reminded him, with the instantaneous evoking of memory which scent possesses above all the other senses, of a châlet in which he had once taken refuge from a sudden mountain storm in some Alp above Zermatt. Tom, too, just then threw back his head, and seemed to sniff for a moment in the air. But he made no comment, and continued —

“Yes, it was Evelyn who suggested that to me,” he said. “His idea, I think, was that somehow and somewhere the balance is struck, that if one is overloaded with joy, some compensating pain has got to be put in before one is complete. It may come in a moment, so I conjecture, or one may have to suffer the agony of months and years, but of this I am sure, that the balance is in favour of joy. If I have to suffer, my suffering will be quite certainly less than the joy I have had. If the sorrows of death come upon me, they will weigh – I am certain of this – less than the ecstasies of life that have been mine. But, dear God, I have a long bill to settle.”

The mention of Evelyn had roused black blood again.

“He too will have a bill to pay,” said Philip.

Merivale took this quite impersonally.

“Yes, Evelyn is extraordinarily happy,” he said. “I have scarcely ever known him otherwise. If he is right about me, he will have to be right about himself. Poor chap! What a good thing it is that neither you nor I have to be his judges, or have to apportion to him the dose of misery which will suit him. How could one tell when a man has had enough to make him whole, complete?”

He got up quickly and looked out into the night.

“Ah, we have all got to be made perfect,” he cried. “I take it that no man in his senses can have any doubt of that. The thing which is you, that essential, vital flame, has got now or at some future time to burn its best. I have to do the same; we shall all be strung up to perfection either through joy, or, perhaps, if we are approaching it from the other side, through some blinding pain. We all have to attempt to approach perfection to the best of our abilities. Our abilities may make a mistake; very likely they do. But I, when I attempt to approach the best of me through the pleasant ways of joy and simplicity, I would not go back one step to save myself from the pangs that may follow. I am very likely blind, but, as far as I know, I do my best. Perhaps – who knows, since my life has been an extraordinarily useless one, as the world counts ‘use,’ the world may be right, and I shall have to embark on a career of work in an office. But I don’t think that is likely.”

Again he paused a moment, taking a deep breath of the night air into his lungs. Then he turned round.

“You told me not to pity you,” he said, “and I tacitly agreed not to, and fully intended not to. But the time has come when my pity cannot hurt you. For I pity you from the same plane as that on which I perhaps some day may be glad of your pity. You have suffered, and you are suffering. Well, I pity you, as God pities you, supposing that suffering does happen to be necessary. I would not spare you one pang of it, if this is so, but I just put out my hand to you, saying that I am there, and watching and worshipping, I may say, for if suffering is necessary it is certainly sacred. I don’t know that it is necessary; but if it is, there am I, if that will do you any good, and there also are all those who have suffered, watching you with the pity that cannot help healing a little, and the sympathy that lightens. But if I were convinced, even for the winking of an eye, and to save a woodlouse from the absence of its dinner, that suffering must be, I should accept it all, and take not only my share of it, but the share of anybody else who would be so good as to shoulder me with it, for it is impossible to have enough or too much of anything that is right. At present I have not seen – so as to know – the necessity of it, though I have long known that all Nature groans under it. Everything preys on something else – you prey on the animals you eat, and the folk you make fools of on the Stock Exchange. And Evelyn preys on you. Yes, yes. And I – I try to prey on nobody, but perhaps this law of preying will some day be brought home to me. My joy, which so weighs down the scale, may have its compensating burden of suffering given to it. And whatever blackness of horror awaits me, I won’t turn back. My way of approach is this: to others there is the rough-and-tumble of the world, to others the ascetic life. But I believe that joy and life are the predominant factors; that is why I have chosen them, it has been my business to get acquainted anyhow with them. But what I absolutely refuse is the horrible mean, where one makes no ventures, and but paddles on the shore of the eternal sea. Let the breakers leave me high and dry and smashed on the shingle, or let me steer through them and see the unimagined islands of myth and fable. But I will not just pull my shoes and stockings off, and shriek when the water comes up to my knee. Something, whatever it is, must infallibly be so much better than nothing.”

He walked up and down the verandah once or twice with his long, smooth step, moving with that peculiar grace and ease which denotes great physical strength. He had forgotten about Philip, and Philip for the first time had forgotten about Philip too.

“But during these last years,” he went on, “I have consciously and deliberately turned my back on pain, because it is hideous, because it is a foe to joy, and because I have not and do not now realise its necessity. All I can say is, with Oliver Cromwell, it is just possible I may be mistaken, and in that case I am sure I shall have to – ah, no, be allowed to – learn my mistake. A child crying seems to me a dreadful thing, a beggar by the wayside with a broken tobacco-pipe, and not a penny to get another, the shriek of the rabbit when the stoat’s teeth fasten in its throat; they are all dreadful, and enemies to joy. But I am no longer convinced, as I used to be, that pain is unnecessary; I am beginning, as I said, to hold an open mind on the subject, and only say that I believe I can realise myself best and bring myself best into harmony with Nature, with the whole design, by avoiding it. Yet for me also pain and suffering may be necessary. If so, let them come; I am quite ready. I only hope that it will be soon over, that it will be so frightful that I can’t stand it. I should prefer that, some blinding, dreadful flash of revelation, to any slow, remorseless grinding of the truth into me. That, however, is not in my hands.”

Philip’s mind had gone back again on to himself.

“But how can it possibly be any good that those two should have behaved like this to me?” he cried, speaking directly for the first time. “What monstrous image do you make of the controller of the world and all our destinies, if it is by his will that this is done to me which turns all that may have been good in me into hatred and bitterness? Is that the lesson that I am meant to learn – that those whom one loves best are one’s bitterest foes, and will hurt one most?”

Tom stopped in his walk and sat down on the edge of the table by Philip.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “Oliver Cromwell will help us again. Is it not just possible that you too are mistaken when you assume that your trouble was sent you in order that your love might be turned into hate? That it should have happened so may (just possibly again) be in some measure your fault. Could you not have done otherwise, and done better? I don’t want to preach, you know.”

Philip sat silent, but his face hardened again.

“If I could have done better, it would not have been I,” he said. “It would have been altogether another man.”

Tom got down off the table.

“Ah, you repudiate moral responsibility for your own acts,” he said.

“Not exactly that. I say that there may be circumstances under which one’s will is crumpled up like a piece of waste paper, and one’s powers of resistance are paralysed. Don’t you believe that?”

Merivale shook his head.

“No, I don’t believe that the power of choice is ever taken away from one while one remains sane,” he said. “The moment one cannot choose, the doors of Bedlam are opened.”

Philip got up.

“They are still ajar for me,” he said. “But they were more widely open when I came here. For pity’s sake, Tom, go on helping me. It is only you, I think, who can get them closed for me.”

He paused a moment, looking out into the still blackness of the garden, and again something stirred and creaked in the bushes, and the drowsy wind was tainted with some sharp smell. He turned to Tom —

“I wonder if all that you have been saying is a fairy tale,” he said, “and whether I have been taking it literally, so that I imagine that things which are only, and can only be, allegorical and mythical are true.”

“You mean the Pan-pipes, for instance, which I heard for the first time at Pangbourne, and which I hear so often now?” asked Merivale.

“Yes, that among other things. Pan himself, too. I begin to think of Pan as a real being, the incarnation of all the terror and fear and sorrow of the world. The crying child you spoke of is part of Pan, the shriek of the rabbit is part of him. All these things, as you say, you have turned your back on. What if they should all be shown you suddenly, they and the huge significance and universality of them?”

Merivale looked quite grave; anyhow it was no fairy story to him, whatever it might be to others.

“Yes, that is all possible,” he said, “and that will mean that I shall see Pan. What a wonderful mode of expression that is of the Greeks. For Pan means ‘everything,’ and to see everything would be clearly more than one could stand. And so to see Pan means death.”

Once again the strange, pungent odour was noticeable.

“Where are you going to sleep to-night?” asked Philip suddenly.

“Oh, in the hammock,” said Tom. “I hardly ever sleep in the house.”

Then a more definite, though utterly fantastic, fear seized Philip.

“No, sleep in the house to-night,” he said, feeling that his fear was too childish to be allowed utterance.

At that Merivale laughed; there was no need for Philip to utter his thought, for he knew perfectly well what it was.

“I know what you mean,” he said, “but do you think that if Pan is going to visit me he will only come into the garden, and not into the house? You are mixing up the fear of Pan with the general sense of insecurity about sleeping out of doors, which comes from unfamiliarity with that delightful way of spending the night. And I know another thing you felt; you heard an odd rustling in the bushes, as I often hear it, and you smelt a rather queer smell, something rather pungent, and it reminded you of a goat. Of course Pan used to appear, so the Greek myth said, in goat form, and your inference was that Pan was in those bushes. But he is just as much in this verandah, and, for that matter, in Piccadilly, poor thing! There is quite certainly no getting away from him; I am as safe here as I should be if I was locked into the strong-room in the Bank of England. For it is not just to this place or that that he comes, but to this person or that.”