The Angel of Pain

“I’m sure I don’t wonder,” he said to himself.

The door opened once as he lay in this window-seat, and correctly and mechanically he pictured what was going on. Only one person entered; that he could tell by the footfalls, and that one person whistled gently to himself. He paused by the table, then went to the door again, and again re-entered and paused by another. Then he poked the fire and swept up the grate. Clearly the footman making the room ready, and he banged the door as he went out.

Now if that child had cried at the sight of his face, what must it be to others? Surely they would cry too if they obeyed their natural impulse, either cry or turn away, in pity, no doubt, but also in repulsion. It must be an effort to everybody to look at him, to be with him. And Madge was with him so much; she kissed him, she let him kiss her; she was his wife, the wife of this man with the nightmare face at which a child cried out as if it saw bogey. Philip had been quick and ready on that occasion, had said the child was teething, and wrung corroboration from the father. But he had answered, “Yes, it teethes when it sees me,” and Philip was not ready enough for that.

The crying child explained other things too; for Mrs. Home had cried when she saw him; he could hear from her voice that she was crying, there were sobs in it. He had thought then that it was from pity merely and sympathy, but he told himself now that it was not so; she cried from horror at him. All his life he had hated ugly things, and now it would be hard to match himself in that abhorred category.

The very kindness, too, and pity which he knew surrounded him were scarcely more bearable. He did not want to be pitied, he would sooner be left to drag out a lonely, shunned life than to be surrounded with pity; while with regard to kindness, the knowledge that he and Madge were frankly living on Philip became harder every day to swallow. Philip certainly had done all he could to minimise the burden of that; he had, soi-disant, bought the unfinished picture of himself, declaring that no finished picture could possibly be so like him; he had bought, too, after argument, the picture of Madge. The proceeds he had invested for Evelyn, promising since he had advised him so ill before to take greater care this time, and twice during this last month he had reported substantial profits from the investments he had made for him, so that if he insisted, as he did insist, on paying the bills for his nurse and doctor, he still could run up to London whenever he pleased if Pangbourne bored him. With luck, too, and care his investments would grow fatter yet.

On this occasion Evelyn had broken out.

“Ah, I can’t stand it,” he cried. “I can’t go on living here, Madge and I, indefinitely. Yes, I know how kind you are, both you and your mother, and how you would be pleased – really pleased – for us to stop forever, but can’t you see how impossible it is for me to accept your hospitality like that? I must, I simply must, pay my way, earn something, work and get tired, if only for the distraction of it. A barrel-organ, now. ‘Totally blind. Ky-ind Gentleman!’ That would be more self-respecting than to sit here and do nothing. It’s better to beg in the streets than to accept alms without begging for them. That’s why the poor have such a horror of the workhouse. They would sooner be cold and hungry, and so would I.”

He was silent a moment after this.

“I suppose I needn’t have said all that,” he observed drearily. “However, it doesn’t much matter what I say.”

Philip had a horror of improving the occasion, but he could hardly let such a chance of a word in season slip. He was, too, keenly wounded by this.

“You don’t recollect, my dear fellow,” he said, “that we are all doing our best, and that it is hard not to be hurt by words like those.”

“Oh, for God’s sake don’t preach,” cried Evelyn.

Philip flushed for a moment rather angrily, but re-collected himself.

“Indeed, I hope not,” he said with a laugh. “Now are you ready to give me my revenge at picquet?”

It was quite dark behind the curtains, though to Evelyn, who lay there, whatever the light was, it would have been dark in any case, and in a grosser darkness than that, a darkness of despair unilluminable by any sun, he pondered these things, his own helplessness, his blindness, the horror of his own face, and the dead weight of his indebtedness to Philip, the one man in all the world whose charity, from the very nature of things, was most unbearable. Together, poor fellow they formed a blank wall which it seemed hopeless to try to scale; indeed, he no longer really wanted to scale it, he only wanted to be allowed to sit down and have not only sight, but hearing and feeling and taste and smell closed forever, for death was surely a thing far less bitter than this living death in life. He could no longer now look forward to the future at all; it required all his energies to get through the hour that was present, without some breakdown; decent behaviour for the moment, when he was with any of the others, was the utmost he was capable of, and even of that he often felt incapable. And his energies, such as they were, were gradually failing before the hourly task. He was in no sense beginning ever so slightly to get used to it all, and the trials of each day, so far from making the trials of the next more easy to contemplate or to bear, only weakened his powers of bearing them. It was all so hopeless; for him hope was dead, and the last chord of her lyre had snapped.

But he did not feel this dully and vaguely; the very vividness and alertness of his nature which had made life so passionately sweet to him before made his hopelessness just as passionately felt now. He, too, like Tom Merivale, but with less of set purpose and more of instinct in his choice, had been in love with life, and that fire which had gone out had left not mere grey ash, but something burningly cold, and life was now as actively terrible to him as it had once been lovely.

There was the muffled sound of talking in the hall, and next moment the steps of two people entered, and Madge spoke. The other step went on towards the fireplace.

“Evelyn not here?” she said. “I suppose he’s gone to the library for tea.”

Then Philip’s voice spoke.

“How has he been to-day?”

“Ah, so bad, poor darling!” she said. “Sometimes I almost despair, Philip; if it wasn’t for you I know I should. Of course he tries all he can, but it seems almost as if his powers of trying were failing. It makes me utterly miserable to think of him.”

Evelyn did not move nor reveal his presence in any way. He felt as if the speaker was but being the echo of his own thoughts. Philip said something sympathetic in tone, but he did not catch that; he wanted only to hear how far Madge agreed with himself.

“And I dread his suspecting more,” she went on. “I so often see him feeling his face, as if trying to picture it to himself more clearly. And if for a moment I should break down and let him know – ah, I can’t talk of it. Let us go to the library and see if he is there.”

Her voice choked a little over this; then without more words they passed out of the drawing-room again, and Evelyn felt as if something had snapped in his brain. He almost wondered that they had not heard it.

As soon as the door had closed behind them he got swiftly and quietly up from his seat and felt his way to the centre window, which opened on to the terrace. He undid the shutters of it, stepped out, and closed it behind him. He was hardly conscious of any motive in his action – he certainly had no plan as to what he should do next. One overwhelming fact had become a certainty to him, the fact contained in Madge’s last sentence, and he knew nothing more than that he must go away somewhere, lose himself somehow, do anything rather than go back to her, to be pitied, to be secretly shuddered at, to be a daily, hourly fear to her. Indeed, he would never look upon their child.

It was a cold, windless evening, and the rain descended in a steady downpour, hissing on to the shrubs, while the gutters of the house gurgled and chuckled. But louder than the rain and more sonorous was the great rush and roar of the river below, as it poured seawards, swollen to a torrent of flood from these persistent rains. And something in the strength and glory of that deep voice called to him; he must go down to the river, for it had something to say to him. Yet it was not the river that called to him, but in some mysterious way Tom Merivale, whose jovial, deep voice was shouting to him to come with the authenticity of actual hallucination. He hardly knew which it was; he knew only that he could never go back to the house he had just left, and that something called, with promise in its voice of life, real life, or of death and deliverance, he knew not which.

He had no stick to guide him, but without hesitation he crossed the gravel of the terrace, and felt his way along the wall of it to where a stone vase stood at the top of the steps leading to the lawn below. A purple clematis twined round it; he had made a study of it for a picture last summer. Then came the twelve steps, the shuffling across the soaked grass of the lawn, and a further flight of twelve steps into the rose garden.

But at the thought of deliverance of some kind so close to him, so that he need no more now think of “to-morrow and to-morrow,” and all the impossible to-morrows, his poor tired brain cleared, his myriad troubles and sorrows seemed to roll away from him, for though the bitterness of death was not past, the bitterness of life, in comparison to which the other was sweet, was over. So with unclouded mind and soul, which no longer rebelled and resented, he thought quietly, as he felt his way across the rose garden, and struck the steep path leading to the river, of all the past.

How wonderful and beautiful life had been; since his earliest boyish recollections, how full of surprising joys! Health and vigour had been his, a clean, wholesome life, the power of loving this exquisite world, an artistic gift that had made a daily Paradise, and, above all, love itself, and the fulfilment of love. Then had come a crash, a break, but how short had been these weeks in comparison of the rest. If this was the pain with which he had to make payment for all his joy, how cheap, to look at it fairly, had joy been. Now that he knew that was the full payment that would be demanded for the joy he had received in such unstinted abundance, he no longer complained, it was only while the payment seemed to be going to be charged him indefinitely, every day for years to come, that he had rebelled and owned himself bankrupt. The one eternal necessity of life, which, the moment it ceases to brace begins to paralyse, had passed from him, the necessity of going on always, every day and hour, having to meet one difficulty after another, and without hope of getting any respite, so long as life lasts. For now he knew that some end was very near.

He paused a moment to brush his dripping hair back from his face, wondering in a sort of vague, uninterested manner whether something had actually cracked in his brain, whether he had gone mad, or so the world could call it. But whatever had cracked, it had been the tension of it which all these weeks had caused his misery, and in this exquisite moment of peace that had suddenly come to him he almost laughed aloud for the unspeakable relief which the cessation of pain had brought. He felt that up till now his mental eyes had been as blind as his physical ones, that the blows that had been dealt him had been dealt from the dark, so that he could not guess who wielded the whip. But now they had ceased, and the clouds of darkness were rolled away, and there sat there One with a face full of infinite compassion, and since none but He was there, it must have been He, or some ministering angel of pain, who at his bidding had chastised him thus. Then Evelyn felt as if he had asked permission of Him to go on, for the river – or Tom’s voice – still hailed him joyously; and since it was allowed, still without intention, without definite thought of any kind, he went on his way, with shuffling steps indeed that stumbled over the gravel of the path, but with a great, serene light shining on him.

He had by now come close to the edge of the river, and the rain for the moment had ceased, so that he could hear the suck and gurgle of the hurrying flood-water, which whispered and chuckled to itself. But this rapturous noise of swift-flowing water sounded but faintly, for a hundred yards below was the weir. All the sluices were raised, and tons of water momently plunged through the openings, bellowing with a great hoarse laugh of ecstasy as they fell into the pool below. It was to that place, somewhere in the middle of the narrow pathway of planks that he was called; it was from there, where he would be surrounded on all sides with the noise of waters, that the voice of Tom, that faithful lover of water, called him. That somehow, and he did not question how or why, was his goal, nor did he know whether life or death awaited him there; only there was going to be reconcilement in some manner.

He had been there many times before; he had been there, indeed, only yesterday to listen to the splendid tumult of water. But to-day its voice was redoubled, and he could feel the mist from the plunging stream wet on his face as he went slowly and cautiously out over the wet planks. Louder and more triumphantly every moment the voice of the river – or was it Tom laughing with open mouth, as he used to laugh when he swam in the garden pool below his cottage? – called to him. On both sides, before and behind, he was surrounded by the joyous riot of waters, that filled and possessed his brain till his whole consciousness was flooded with it till his voice too had to join in it. So he raised his arms, spreading them out to the night, and threw back his head with a great shout of ecstatic rapture. And as he did this his foot slipped on the wet planks, and he fell into the roaring, rushing pool below. So the great Mother took him back to herself.