The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

SIXTH

ERIVALE had scooped out a long bathing-pool at the bottom of the garden, and when Evelyn left him, he took his towel and walked down to it. A little higher up was a weir, and from this he plunged into a soda water of vivifying bubble, and floated down as the woven ropes of water willed to take him till he grounded on the beds of yellow, shining gravel at the tail of the pool, laughing with joy at the cool touch of the stream. The day had been very hot, and since breakfast he had been on the move, now under the shadow of the trees, but as often as not grilled by the great blaze of the sun on the open heaths, and it was with an extraordinary sense of renewed life and of kinship with this beautiful creature that was poured from the weir in never-ending volumes that he gave himself up to the clean, sensuous thrill of the moment. It seemed to him that the strong flood that bore him, with waves and eddies just tipped with the gold and crimson of the sun, entirely interpenetrated and possessed him. He was not more himself than was the stream, the stream was not more itself than it was he. The blue vault overhead with its fleeces of cloud beginning to flush rosily was part of the same thing, the beech-trees with leaves a-quiver in the evening breeze were but a hand or an eyebrow of himself.

Then, with the briskness of his renewed vigour, he set himself to swim against this piece of himself, as if right hand should wrestle with left, breasting the river with vigorous strokes, yet scarcely moving against the press of the running stream, while like a frill the water stood up bubbling round his neck. Then again, with limbs deliciously tired with the struggle, he turned on his back and floated down again, with arms widespread, to increase the surface of contact. Though this sense of unity with the life of Nature was never absent from him, so that it was his last waking thought at night and stood by him while he slept, ready to awake him again, water somehow, live, running water with the sun on its surface, or the rain beating on to it, with its lucent depths and waving water-weeds that the current combed, gave it him more than anything else. Nothing else had quite that certainty of everlasting life about it; it was continually outpoured, yet not diminished; it mingled with the sea, and sprang to heaven in all the forms and iridescent colours of mist and cloud, to return again to the earth in the rain that made the grass to grow and fed the springs. And this envelopment of himself in it was a sort of outward symbol of his own absorption in Nature, the outward and visible sign of it. Every day the mystery and the wonder of it all increased; all cleansing, all renewal was contained here, for even as the water cleansed and renewed him, so through the countless ages it cleansed and renewed itself. And here alone the intermediary step, death, out of which came new life, was omitted. To water there was no death; it was eternally young, and the ages brought no abatement of its vigour.

Then in the bright twilight of the sun just set he dressed and walked back to the house to find that he had been nearly an hour gone, and that it was close on dinner-time.

During the earlier part, anyhow, of that meal Evelyn showed no return of his disquietude, but, as was his wont, poured out floods of surprising stuff. He talked shop quite unashamed, and this evening the drawbacks of an artist’s life supplied his text.