The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

He was silent again a moment, and then went on.

“It all hangs together,” he said; “the dear Hermit was not as all of us are: he could talk to birds and beasts, and the very peace of God encompassed him. He knew, in a way we don’t, that all-embracing fatherhood. I learned slowly, these weeks I was with him, what the truth of that was to him. And he used often to speak, as you know, of the grim side of Nature, of the cruelty and death, which he had turned his face from, which he called Pan, who, as the myths have it, appeared in form like a goat, to see whom was death. We had been talking of it that night, we both heard curious tramplings in the bushes, and the pungent smell of a goat. Every sensible person, considering, too, that he had seen a big goat that afternoon, would come to the conclusion that, somehow or other the brute had found its way into the garden, and had sprung on him like a wild beast, and trampled him. Then, too, he was thinking about Pan; he might have imagined when the goat appeared, that this was what he in those imaginings, if you like, which were as real to him as the sun and moon, believed to be Pan, and that he died of fright. The jury took the view that some wild goat was the cause of his death: I daresay fifty juries would have done the same. But if you ask me whether I believe that a goat, a flesh and blood goat, killed him, why I laugh at you. For what goat was that? Who saw the goat except the Hermit?”

He paused again, and looked up at his mother with sudden solicitude.

“Ah, dear, you are crying,” he said. “Shall I not go on?”

Again that gentle, loving stroking of his hand began.

“Ah, my son,” she said.

Philip kissed the hand that stroked his. These lines were easy to read between.

But if he had more to tell his mother, she had something also to tell him that he did not know yet.

“You see, I saw such strange and impossible things there,” he went on, “that nothing seems strange nor impossible. It was like an allegory: Tom himself was an allegory. The birds came to his bidding, the shy creatures of the forest were his friends. It was no miracle: it was but what we all could do, if we realised what he realised, and knew as he knew the brotherhood of all that lives. He put into practice the theory of Darwinism that no one in theory denies. The living things were his brothers and his cousins: they knew it, too. But from one huge fact, the fact of sorrow and pain, he turned aside, and, so I believe, it all came to him in a flash, making him perfect. And it came in material form, at least it was so material that it could bruise his flesh. It seems cruel; but—oh, mother, if you had seen his face afterwards, you would have known that the hand that made him suffer comforted him when he had learned what the suffering had to teach him. It could have been done, I must suppose, in no other way.”

Then for a little the strong man was very weak, and he broke down and wept. But one who weeps while eyes so tender watch, weeps tears that are not bitter, or at least are sweetened, each one, as it falls. Then again he went on: much as he had told, there was all to tell yet, yet that all was but short—a few words were sufficient.