The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

How mysterious and how profoundly true this transference of emotion was, or, in terms of the present analogy, these invasions of spiritual microbes! For what caused panic to spread through a crowd? Not danger itself, but fear, fear which ran like an electric current through the ranks of its quivering victims. Serenity, therefore, must be equally contagious, and if one could isolate one of those fear-ridden folk for a moment in a ring of men who were not afraid, it could not be doubted that their fearlessness would triumph. No reassuring word or gesture need be spoken or made, the very fact of the atmosphere of calm must inevitably quiet the panic-stricken. Worry, too, would stifle if isolated in serenity, just as serenity would vanish if the hosts of its enemy hemmed it in. And here, to take the case in point, was Philip, possessed and infected by the poisonous microbes of unhappiness, which blackened his soul and darkened the sun for him. What was the remedy? Not, as he had been trying to do, to drug himself into unconsciousness over work, while they continued their ravages unchecked and unchallenged, but to steep himself as in some antiseptic bath in an atmosphere that was charged with their bitterest foes. It was happiness, the atmosphere of happiness, that alone could combat his disease. And of the eventual result of that treatment Merivale did not entertain the slightest doubt; there would, of course, be war between happiness and the misery of his friend, but he felt within himself that it was impossible that Philip’s misery could be so strong as the armies on his own side. Think of the allies, too, that surrounded him: his light-armed skirmishers, the birds and bees, with their staccato artillery of joy forever playing on the object of their detestation; the huge guns of the great beech forest forever pouring their sonorous discharge on to the enemy; the flying cavalry of the river, the heather-fragrant wind which encompassed and outflanked him in each direction.

Thus though, as has been said, his first impulse was one of shrinking from this proximity to what was unhappy and suffering, how splendid a demonstration of all that on which he so largely based his theory of life was here offered him. He did not seek after a sign, no demonstration could deepen his belief, yet he rejoiced that a sign was offered him, even as one who utterly believes in the omnipotence of God may yet look on the shining of the starry-kirtled night, and glow at the reminder he is given of what he believes. Well he knows the glory of God, but it does his heart good to behold it.

The work of the house took him, as a rule, but an hour or so to get through every morning; but to-day there were further preparations to be made for his friend’s arrival; linen had to be brought out for his bed, water to be fetched for his jug, and his room to be dusted and made ready. But these menial occupations seemed to Merivale to be in no way mean; nothing that was necessary for the ordinary simple needs of life could possibly be derogatory for the wisest or busiest or wealthiest of mankind to perform for himself, though to pass a lifetime in performing them for others was a mean matter both for employer and employed. But such things were not to him even tedious, any more than breathing or washing were tedious, and to find them tedious but meant that one was out of tune with the great symphony of life. Everyone, so ran his theory, ought ideally to be so simple in his needs that he could minister to his own necessities, without any sense that his time was wasted; one washed one’s hands, and brushed the hair. For this was part of the true simplification of life—to need but little, and provide that little oneself. Yet inasmuch as most of the world did not yet take his view (and Philip was one of them), he was accustomed to hire help, and intended to do so now, for a friend’s visit.

He moved quickly and deftly enough about his work; pausing to think for a moment as to the making of the bed, for all this summer he had scarcely once slept in one, while in winter a mattress and a rug comprised his own needs. Then the work of dusting brought him to the dressing-table, and for a moment he looked at himself in the glass with a sort of pang of delight, though in his delight there was neither self-consciousness nor vanity that this was he. For he was now several years past thirty, a time of life when on every face there begin to appear the marks of years; but from the glass there looked back into his eyes the face of a youth just standing on the threshold of manhood. The strength of manhood was there, but it was a strength in which the electric vigour of boyhood still quivered like a steel spring; not a sign of slack or wrinkled skin appeared there, and his hair, with its close-cropped curls, was thick and shining with health. But looking at this image of perfect and vigorous youth, he thought, after the first inevitable delight in the knowledge that this was he, not at all of himself, only of the fact that to any who lived his life this must be the certain and logical consequence. For the body was but the visible sign of the spirit: it was the soul of man that made his body, as a snail its shell; it was worry and discontent assuredly that drew lines and wrinkles on the face and brought fatigue and sloth to the muscles, not the passage of the years; it was just as surely serenity and the passionate acceptation and absorption of the joy of life that made a man young, and would keep him so body and soul alike.

But never before had he so fully realised this change that had come to him, and when, after his work in the house was over, he walked into Brockenhurst to engage a servant for the cooking which Philip’s visit would involve, he found himself wondering with a more than usually vivid curiosity to what further knowledge and illumination his undeviating quest should lead him. For he felt he was getting nearer every day, and very quickly nearer to the full realisation of his creed, namely, that all life was indivisibly one, and that the purport of all life was joy. And when his knowledge of this was made perfect, how would the revelation come, and what would be the effect? Would life eternal lived here and now be his, or would that light be too great for him to bear, so that this tabernacle of flesh and blood, hereditarily weakened by centuries of sin and shame, could not stand it? Was it life or seeming death that awaited him? He scarcely cared.

The tree that had been struck by lightning at the end of the garden he had felled soon after, and part of his daily work now was to cut up the branches into faggots and sticks of firewood for the winter. That dreadful stroke from the skies which had dealt death to this beautiful tree in the prime of its strength and luxuriance of its summer had often seemed to Merivale to involve a difficult question, for it was intimately bound up with all those things on which he had deliberately turned his back. Death did exist in the world, and though, as he had once said to Evelyn, out of death invariably came life, yet the fact of death was there, just as beyond all possibility of denial, pain and disease and sorrow were in the world also. These, however, were largely of man’s making, yet here, in the case of this poor stricken tree, it was Nature herself who deliberately attacked and slew part of herself. One animal, it is true, preyed on another, and by its death sustained its own life: that was far easier to understand. But there was something senseless and brutal in the fact of this weapon of the storm, a thing as inanimate as a rifle-bullet, striking at life. It was wanton destruction. Nothing came of it (and here he smiled, though not believing he had guessed the riddle), except firewood for him.

The morning was intensely hot, and as he worked hatless under the blaze of the sun, the wholesome sweat of toil poured from him. How good that was; how good, too, to feel the strong resistance of the wood against the blade of his axe, to feel the sinews of his arms alternately tighten and slacken themselves in the swiping strokes, to stand straight up a moment to rest his back, and wipe the moisture from his face and draw in two or three long, satisfying breaths of summer air. It was as if the song of the birds, too, entered into his very lungs, and the hum of the bees, and the murmur of the forest, which was beginning to be hushed a little at the hour when even the cicala sleeps. One thing alone would not be hushed, and that the liquid voice of the river, in which he would soon be plunged. No length of drought in this wonderful year seemed to diminish the wealth of its outpouring; it was as high between its fern-fringed banks now as it had been in April. But first there was the carrying of the aromatic, fresh-cut logs to the house to be done, and he almost regretted how near completion was the stack that filled the wood-shed, for there was something about the hardness of this particular toil that was intimately delightful. It required the exercise of strength and vigour, the full use of supple and well-hardened muscles; it was very typical of the splendid struggle for life in which the struggle itself, the fact of work, was a thing ecstatic. He had cut more than usual this morning, and it was with a boyish sense of playing some game against a rigid and inflexible opponent that he determined not to make two journeys of it, but carry all he had cut in one. And underneath this staggering burden which he loved he toiled to the wood-shed.

Merivale had just come up from his bathe in the evening when Philip arrived, and he met him halfway up the garden. That extraordinary change which he had himself seen in the glass that morning struck his friend, too.

“It was awfully good of you to let me come, Tom,” he said. “And what has been happening to you? If I had not known you ten years ago, I should scarcely have recognised you now.”

Tom laughed.