The Angel of Pain. Benson Edward Frederic

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СКАЧАТЬ answers. Now you’ve been here how long? More than a year, isn’t it? What can you show for it? Number two: What’s it all about? Number three: How can you call yourself a student of Nature when you deliberately shut your eyes to all the suffering, all the death, all the sacrifice that goes on eternally in Nature? I might as well call myself an artist and refuse to use blue and red in my pictures. I remember asking you something of this sort before, and your answer was eminently unsatisfactory. Besides, I have forgotten it.”

      Merivale moved sideways to the table, and crossed one leg over the other.

      “Does it really at all interest you?” he said.

      “It does, or I should not ask. Another thing, too: I have been looking at you all dinner, and I could swear you look much younger than you did five years ago. Indeed, if I saw you now for the first time I should say you were not much more than twenty. Also you used to be a touchy, irritable sort of devil, and you look now as if nothing in the world had the power to make you cease smiling. Did you know, by the way, that you are always smiling a little?”

      Tom laughed.

      “No, not consciously,” he said; “but now you mention it, it seems impossible that I should not.”

      “Well, begin,” said Evelyn, with his usual impatience. “Tell me all about it, and attempt to answer all those very pertinent questions. Smoke, too; I listen better to a person who is smoking, because I feel that he is more comfortable.”

      A sudden wind stirred in the garden, blowing towards them in the verandah the sleeping fragrance of the beds and the wandering noises of the night, which, all together make up what we call the silence of the night, even as the mixture of primary colours makes white.

      “Smoke? No, I don’t smoke now,” said Merivale; “but if you really want to know, I will tell you all I can tell you. The conjuring tricks, as you call them, I suppose you will take for granted?”

      Evelyn, comfortable with his coffee and liqueur, assented.

      “Yes, leave them out,” he said. “Here beginneth the gospel.”

      He tried in these words to be slightly offensive; the offensiveness, however, went wide of the mark, and he was sorry. For the Hermit, as he had known him in the world, was singularly liable to take offence, to be irritable, impatient, to be stamping and speechifying on an extremely human platform. But no vibration of any such impatience was in Merivale’s voice, and in his words there was no backhander to answer it. So the gospel began.

      “It is all so simple,” he said, “yet I suppose that to complicated people simplicity is as difficult to understand as is complexity to simple people. But here it is, anyhow, and make the best or the worst of it; that is entirely your concern.”

      “There is God,” he said, “there is also Nature, which I take to be the visible, tangible, audible expression of Him. There is also man – of which you and I are specimens, and whether we are above or below the average doesn’t matter in the least – and man by a dreadful process called civilisation has worked himself back into a correspondingly dreadful condition. If he were either fish, flesh, or fowl one would know where to put him, but he is none of those. He seems, at any rate to me, to be a peculiar product of his own making, and instead of being a creature compounded of life and joy, which should be his ingredients and also his study, he has become a creature who is mated with sorrow and at the end with death. He has become rotten without ever being ripe, the flower to which he should have attained has been cankered in the bud. Now, all this it has been my deliberate aim to leave behind me and to forget, and to go straight back to that huge expression of the joy of God, which man has been unable to spoil or render sorrowful, to the great hymn of Nature. Listen to that for a moment – and for the more moments you listen to it the more unmistakable will its tenour be – and you will hear that the whole impression is one of life and of joy. There is, it is true, throughout Nature the sound of death, of cruelty, and of one creature preying on another; but the net result is not death, it is ever-increasing life. And so when I went to Nature I shut my ears and eyes to that minor undercurrent of sound. Of the result I was sure; day after day there is more life in the world, in spite of the death that day after day goes on. All the death goes to form fresh life. In the same way with the joy and sorrow of Nature; for every animal that suffers there are two that are glad, for every tree that dies there are two in the full vigour of the joy of life. And that joy and that life is my constant study. I soak myself in it, and shall so do until I am utterly impregnated with it. And when that day comes, when there is no tiny or obscure fibre in my being that does not completely realise it, then, with a flash of revelation, so I take it, I shall ‘grasp the scheme of things entire.’ Whether by life or by death, I shall truly realise that I and that moth flitting by, and the odours of the garden and the river are indivisibly one, just an expression of the spirit of life, which is God.”

      He paused a moment.

      “There were two other questions you asked me,” he said. “What have I got to show for the years I have spent here? I shrug my shoulders at that; it is I who am being shown. The second concerns my personal appearance, for you say I look younger. That is probably quite true and quite inevitable, for the contemplation of the eternal youth of the world I suppose must make one younger, body and soul alike. And that is all, I think.”

      Evelyn was listening with extreme attention; he did not look in the least uninterested.

      “My word, you’ve got a perfectly sober plan at the bottom of it all,” he said, “and I thought half of it was moonshine and the other half imagination. There is one more question – two more. What if the whole of the suffering and the cruelty and the death in Nature is made clear to you in a flash, if it is that which will come to make you grasp the scheme of things entire?”

      Merivale smiled still, rocking forward in his chair with his hands clasped round his knee.

      “That is possible,” he said, “and I recognise that. But I don’t think I am frightened at it If it is to be so, it is to be so. Though I suppose one won’t live after it. Well?”

      “And the second question. You think, then, it is our duty to seek happiness and joy and forget the sorrow of the world?”

      “I think it is so for me,” said he, “though I do think that there are many people, most, I suppose, that realise themselves through sorrow and suffering. I can only say that I believe I am not one of those. The way does not lie for me there.”

      Evelyn got up, and stood leaning on the balustrade of the verandah. This was beginning to touch him more closely now; his own threads were beginning to interweave in the scheme Merivale drew.

      “And for me,” he said. “What is your diagnosis of me? Am I one of those who will find themselves through sorrow or through joy?”

      Merivale turned to him with almost the same eagerness in his face as Evelyn himself showed.

      “Ah, how can I tell you that?” he said, “beyond telling you at least that in my opinion, which after all is only my opinion, it is in joy that you, almost above everyone I know, will ripen and bear fruit. Sorrow, asceticism is the road by which some approach happiness, but I do not see you on that road. Renunciation for you – ”

      Evelyn got up and came a step closer.

      “Yes? Yes?” he cried.

      Merivale answered him by another question.

      “Something has happened to you,” he said. “What is it?”

      “I have fallen in love,” said the other. “I only knew it to-day. Yes, her, Madge Ellington. СКАЧАТЬ