The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

“Take care of the habit of beautiful language, dear,” she said. “It grows on you without your knowing it. And surely it’s dinner time.”

Evelyn cast a tragic glance round.

“Ah, there it is,” he cried. “I really had completely forgotten—you needn’t believe it unless you like—about the dividend we are going to drink. I suppose a little ice now wouldn’t be possible? I would go and get it.”

“Yes, but I don’t officially know about it,” said she.

Storms in the physical and material sense are variously supposed to have two diametrically opposite effects; they may be regarded as likely to clear the air, or, on the other hand, to cause a general unsettlement in the weather. And mental or spiritual storms can in the same way either be the precursors and causes of serene blue weather, or they can produce a disturbance of equilibria which is not easily or immediately adjusted again; the violent agitation sets everything shaking and jarring. And the worst of it is that there is no barometer known which will reliably predict which of these effects is likely to be produced. To speak of a thing, “to have it out” as the phrase goes, may get rid of it altogether; it may be pricked like a puff-ball and vanish in a little dust and smoke, leaving an empty bladder, and again “to have it out” may but emphasise and make its existence more real. The “having it out,” in fact, is but a sort of preliminary examination, which proves whether there is something there or whether there is nothing.

This talk between Evelyn and his wife had its distinct analogy to a storm. Things had been gathering up—indeed they were clouds—in Madge’s mind ever since Le Touquet, and though their bursting had been unaccompanied by rain or explosions, yet to-night they had been undeniably discharged, and it remained only to see whether the air should prove to have been cleared, or whether the disturbance had upset the moral atmosphere. Again, they had “had it out,” she had indicated where her trouble lay, or rather he had laid an unerring finger on it, and as physician had said “Leave it alone; that is my suggestion. Don’t let us hear any more about it.” She fully intended to follow his advice, but half-consciously she made a reservation, for she knew that some time—next week, next month, next year—she must know that either he had been right, and that the trouble had vanished, or that he had been wrong and the trouble had grown worse. And so some secret sense of uncertainty and unsatisfiedness sat somewhere deep in the shadows of her heart. It did not often obtrude its presence, but she knew it was there.

On Evelyn, however, this same scene appeared to leave no trace of any kind—and, indeed, there was no reason why it should, because it had contained nothing that was new to him, and also because it had ended so thoroughly satisfactorily. Madge had agreed with him about the advisability of letting analysis alone for the future. He had, indeed, this evening indulged in a little, and he found that there was nothing in their mutual relations which he wanted altering, nothing which alteration would not have spoiled. Not for a moment did he say that there were not things in himself which he should have preferred vastly different, but with a certain good sense he considered that in shaping one’s course in life one had to accept certain tendencies and limitations in oneself, and, having granted them, to do one’s best. And he did not see that any perseverance or thought or pains on his part could create in him what Merivale had called a conscience. His life was honest, sober, and clean, not, it must be confessed, because morality indicated that it should be, but because his artistic sense would be hurt by its being other than that. It was sheer waste of time for him to sit down and think about duty, because it really meant nothing to him; he might as well have sat down and thought about Hebrew. But from the kindliness and warmth of his nature his conclusions as regards conduct were extraordinarily like those which the very finest sense of duty would have dictated. Yet now and then, as when he had said that he was sorry for Philip, but that nothing could have happened differently, though Madge in word agreed with him, yet she, with her fine feminine sense, knew that she agreed with him, but agreed somehow on a plane quite different from his. That nothing could have happened differently she knew in another way than his: deeply, fiercely, and whole-heartedly as he loved her. For all her life up till now, her whole nature had lain dormant; it had awoke all at once, and awoke to find that one person only was there, even as Brunnhilde woke on the mountain top and saw Siegfried. That awakening had been long delayed, but when it came it was complete, like that thunder-clap when he had declared his love for her, it deafened and paralysed all other senses; there was only one thing in the world for her, and that was her love.

But to him—she could not help knowing this—his love for her had not been the blinding flash that awoke all his nature. He had loved before that, keen sensibilities had been his, the sensibilities that inspired his art and made it so extraordinarily vital. All his life a huge joy of life had inspired him; he had waved in the winds of human emotions, he brought to her a love which was new indeed, but one which was driven by an engine that drove other machines as well, his art, his joy of life, for instance. But all that she was, was this one thing; she had lain like a chrysalis hitherto, and the moth beautiful that came out with wings at first crumpled and quivering, but momentarily expanding in the sun, had till then lived in darkness, and the light it saw when it emerged from its cracked husk was the only light it had ever known. She did not compare the respective dimensions, so to speak, of the love of each of them for a moment—she believed that Evelyn loved her as completely as she loved him. But he loved other things as well; his art was a vital part of his life, while she had nothing but him. This was why, though he was so much more developed than she, she had spoken a sort of truth when she said he was undeveloped, for he did not love her to the exclusion of all else. She was not, and could not be, the only thing the world held for him.

In the same way also his sorrow for Philip’s suffering was different from hers, for he, so it seemed to her, was sorry for Philip, as his nature would make it necessary for him to be sorry for anyone who had suffered great loss, for an artist who went blind, for a musician who went deaf, but had yet the other joys of life, with, in course of time, an increase in his other sensibilities as compensation to make his loss good. But she who had emerged from nothingness into the full blaze of this unconjectured noonday rated Philip’s loss at what her own would have been. All had been taken from him, he was left in the original outer darkness which can only be estimated by those who have seen light, and not by the purblind creatures that have never left it. Philip, what must Philip’s sufferings have been! Poor Philip, who was so kind, so likeable, so everything but loved by her. And it was she who had done this; she had brought a misery on him which she honestly gauged by the knowledge of what her misery would be if something happened which made Evelyn no longer love her.

She had carried the skeleton of these thoughts with her to bed that night, and she woke early to find that, as in the dry bones of Ezekiel’s vision, they were beginning to knit themselves together, bone coming to his bone, and the flesh covering them. The pale dawn was beginning to peer into the windows, and the birds to tune up in broken chirrupings for the songs of the day. Had Philip woke like this, she wondered, during this hot August month that he, too, had spent in London? If so, what mitigation of his misery had he found? Not in his business, she could not believe that; surely he must have taken to work as another man, unhappy but less manly, takes to a drug that deadens the power of sense. Surely that must be the explanation of his tireless industry in the city all this month, when others now went for holiday to moor and mountain. Oh, poor Philip! She had brought all this on him, too; she could have made him happy, she felt sure of that, had not soft, irresistible love made that gracious task impossible for her.