SINCE the moment when the ice had been broken between Philip and Tom Merivale, and, what was perhaps more vital, since that terrible ice round Philip’s heart had begun to thaw, talk between them, till then so scanty and superficial, had taken a plunge into the depths of things, into those cool, wavering obscurities that lie round the springs of life and death. And the import of this was perhaps no less weighty to the Hermit than it was to Philip; never before had he unveiled, not his mystery, but his exceeding simplicity, to another, except in so far as half-laughing paradox and the apparent marvel of the nightingale that sat on his hand and sang could be considered as unveiling. But he was very conscious in himself, with that premonition that birds and beasts, and all the living things, that have not had their natural instincts blunted for generations by indoor and artificial life, possess, that something critical was at hand. What that was he could not guess, and, indeed, refrained from trying to do so. But for months now he had waited for some revelation, as a neophyte waits for a further initiation. As far as he could tell he knew all the secrets of that antechamber in which he waited. Up to a certain point his knowledge was complete and consolidated; the joy of animate nature was utterly his, no thrush or scudding blackbird knew better than he the joy that comes from the mere fact of life and air and food and sleep and drink, of which every moment brings its own reward. To none, too, could he have stated this so easily as to his old friend, and the very fact that Philip was but now just beginning to emerge from black and bitter waters, made his understanding of it more piercing. It was the fresh, vital air to a man who has sunk and nearly been drowned in a pool, from the depths of which he has but just had strength to struggle, and lie with eyes but half open and mouth that could only just drink in the freshness of the day God made. And it was this very sunlight and freshness of air which penetrated to those other depths which were the springs of life and death. From the bitter depth of his own hell Philip had swum up into life, and yet as he went up he was getting down, by the same movement, into other depths; but these were cool, and no blackness mingled with their veiled obscurities.

Early September this year in the New Forest had harked back to June. After that day or two of storm and hot rain, the weather had cleared again, and a week of golden hours, golden with the sun by day and with the myriad shining of the stars by night, made one almost believe that time had stopped, or that its incessant wheel had begun to run back to the clean and early days of the world. That moment which had come to Philip, when the outpouring of his bitterness and resentment were stayed, was an epoch to him, which ranked by itself. It drew away from his other days and deeds, it was a leaven that worked incessantly, clouds cleared, Marah itself began to grow sweet, and splash by splash pieces of his bitterness dropped like stones into that sea of forgetfulness and forgiveness which, before any soul is complete and ready to stand before God, must spread from pole to pole. The determination to forget in most cases, as here, sets the tides on the flow; forgiveness, the higher quality, is often the natural sequel. Yet to forget a grudge is to have forgiven it, while forgiveness may be a hard, metallic thing—the best perhaps of which we are capable—but it will not grow soft until forgetfulness has come as well. The cause for the grudge must cease to exist in the mind before the grudge can be wholly forgiven. Poor Philip was not near that yet, but still bits of the grudge kept falling into the sea of forgetfulness as from the stalactitic roof of a cavern. Some dropped on the beach merely, and were still hard and unabsorbed, but others fell fair, and a dead splash was the end of them.

These tranquil golden days helped it all; while the huge beeches grew slim and straight against the sky, while the warm, wholesome air was an anÆsthetic to his pain, and while above all this serene, joyous youth, a patent, undeniable proof of the practical power of inward happiness, was with him, it became daily more impossible to nurse and cherish any bitterness, however well nourished.

Philip had been here now nearly three weeks, and for the last ten days he had lived completely cut off from any world but this. Telegrams and communications at first had followed him from the City, but times were quiet, and he had entrusted his junior partner with all power to act in his absence, saying also that he felt sure that no business need be referred to him. He wanted a month’s complete rest, and if any news or call for a decision came to him he would disregard it. He was to be considered as at sea; nothing must reach him. Also he had begged Tom Merivale not to take in any daily paper on his account; he was at sea—that was exactly it—without the disadvantage of having to sleep in a berth and use a quarter-deck for exercise. But on this transitory planet an end to all things comes sooner or later, even when those things are as imperishable as golden days. And, physically and spiritually, the end was very near.

They had dined one night as usual on the verandah, but for the first time for ten days the wonderful twilight of stars was quenched, and a thick blanket of cloud again overset the sky, and the heat of the evening portended thunder. A week before this Merivale had told his friend of that thunderstorm when Madge had been here with Evelyn, and had confessed to passive complicity in their love. Philip had not resented this either openly or secretly; Merivale had not encouraged it; he had, so he thought to himself, but seen that it was inevitable. And to-night the thunderous air brought up the previous storm to the Hermit’s mind.

“The traces of that are cleared away,” he said. “The tree that was struck is firewood in the wood-shed now. But there is a wound; the senseless fire came down from Heaven; it killed a beautiful living thing, that tree.”

They had finished dinner, and Philip turned his chair sideways to the table.

“Yes, and where is the compensation?” he said. “Surely that is needless suffering and needless death.”

“Ah, I don’t believe that. You and I say it is needless, because we cannot see what life is born from it. Your suffering, my dear fellow, you thought that gratuitous, like a lightning flash, but it isn’t; you know that now.”

This had so often been mentioned between them that Philip did not wince at it.

“I take it on trust only,” he said, “but the proof will come when, because of what has happened to me, I am kinder, more indulgent to others. If it has taught me that it is all good, but at present no test has come. I have but lived here with you.”

He paused a moment.

“And I must soon get back,” he said. “Your mÉtier is here, but mine isn’t. This is your life, it has been my rest and my healing and my hospital. But when one is well, one has to go back again. Oh, I know that, I feel it in my bones. This has been given me in order that I may make my life again. With it behind me I have to go—I should be a coward if I did not; I should tacitly imply that I ‘gave up’ if I did not face things again.”

He drew his chair a little closer to his friend.

“Tom, you have saved me,” he said, “but my salvation has to be proved. It is all right for you to stop here, that I utterly believe, but I believe as utterly that it is not for me. I must go back, and be decent, and not be bitter. I must continue my normal life, I must play Halma with my mother, and slang the gardeners if they are lazy. Now, dear old chap, since my time here will be short, I want to talk to you about your affairs. Or rather I want you to talk about them. I want to grasp as clearly as I can any point of view which is not my own. That will help me to understand the—the damnable muddle the world generally has got into. It’s all wrong; I can see that. Nobody goes straight for his aim. We all—you don’t—we all compromise, because other people compromise. Now I don’t want to do that any more. I want to see my aim, and go straight for it. So tell me yours, and let me criticise. Any point of view that is quite clear helps one to believe that there are other points of view as clear, if one could but see them.”

A tired light came over the sky, as if drowsy eyelids had winked. Through the clouds the reflection of distant lightning illuminated the garden for a moment. There was a gap in the trees by the stream, where the stricken tree had stood, but of its corpse nothing remained; it had all been cut up and taken to make firewood for the winter. But a hot air blew, and in the bushes those strange, unaccountable noises of creaking twigs sounded insistently loud.

“Ah, you know my gospel well enough,” said Merivale. “The joy of life; the joy inherent in the fact of life. I have really nothing more to tell you of it—from living here with me you know it all. And you have to peel life like an orange, to simplify it, to take the rind of unnecessary things off, before you can really taste it.”

“Well, speak to me of your fear then.”

“I have no fear.”

He smiled with the convincing, boyish smile, that is pure happiness.

“Oh, lots of things may happen,” he said, “but I assure you that I don’t fear them. At least, I don’t fear them with my reason. I feel convinced—and that is a lot to say—that my general scheme of life was right for me. Was? And will be. The future holds no more terrors than the past. Indeed the two terms, which sound so opposite to most people, are really one. Past or future, it is I. I have pursued the joys of life, not beastly, sensual joys, for never have I had part in them, but the clean, vital joy of living. And you tell me, as Evelyn has told me, that there are vital pains of living, as clean and as essential as those joys. Well, let them come. I am ready. They can come to-night if they choose. Ah, the huge Bogey of pain and sorrow may come and lie on my chest, like a nightmare. But my point is this——”

He paused a moment.

“If that is to be, if that is essential,” he said, “I give it the same welcome as I have ever given to joy. It may frighten me out of existence, because the body is a poor sort of thing, and an ounce of lead or less will kill it, or, what is worse, deprive it of sight or hearing. But whatever can happen cannot hurt me, this me. Do you tell me that a rifle bullet, or a hangman’s noose can kill me? And can a frightful revelation of all the sorrow of the world, and its pain, and its terror, and its preying, the one creature on another, touch my belief that life is triumphant, and that joy is triumphant over pain? Oh, I can believe most things, but not that. Should that come, I daresay my stupid flesh would shrink, shrink till it died if you like. But me? How does it touch me?”

He looked round with a sudden startled air, even as the words were on his lips.

“Tramp, tramp,” he said, “there is a skipping and jumping in the bushes. I saw a frightful big goat on the ridge to-day, and it followed me, butting and sparring. I could almost think it had got into the garden. There is a sort of goaty smell, too. Well, it can’t reach me in the hammock. Ah, there is lightning again: there is going to be a storm to-night.”

“Sleep indoors,” said Philip quietly. He was quiet, for fear of his nerves. But Tom laughed.

“I should rather say to you ‘Sleep outside,’” he said. “If the lightning makes another shot here, it will certainly shoot at the highest thing, and the house is much higher than my hammock.”

He looked at him a moment in silence, with the pity that is akin not to contempt, but to love.

“Ah, you are afraid of fear,” he said. “That is one degree worse than anything we need be afraid of. It is of our own making, too. We dress up Fear like a turnip-ghost and then scream with terror at it. Or, don’t you remember as a child making faces at yourself in a looking-glass till you were so frightened you could scarcely move? That is what most of us do all our lives.”

Again, and rather more vividly, a blink of lightning was reflected in the clouds, and from far off the thunder muttered sleepily.

“So when I go,” asked Philip, “I can think of you as being as happy and fearless—as certain of yourself and the scheme of the world as ever?”

Merivale smiled.

“Yes, assuredly you can do that,” he said, “and though I do not like to hear you talk of going, of course I know you must. If you stopped here you would get bored and fidgetty. You have not at present because you have been getting well, and in convalescence all conditions, so long as one is allowed to stop still, are delightful. But your place, your work is not here. I feel that as strongly as you. You have the harder part; you have to go back and sort the grains of gold from the great lumps of worthless alloy, and distinguish many things that glitter from the royal metal. However, you know all that as well as I do.”

He leaned forward over the table, and looked very earnestly at Philip.

“Think of me always as happy,” he said, “and think of me as of a man who is waiting in an antechamber, waiting to be summoned to a great Presence. At least that is how I feel myself, how strongly and certainly I cannot explain to you. Here am I in this beautiful and wonderful antechamber, the world which I love so, in which I have passed days and months of such extraordinary happiness. But at one end of the antechamber there is a curtain drawn, and behind that is the Presence. Soon I think it will be drawn back and I shall see what is behind it. I think it will be drawn soon, for—all this imagery is so clumsy for what is so simple—for lately the curtain has been stirred, so it seems to me, from the other side: it has been jerked so that often I have thought that each moment it was to be drawn away, whereas till lately it has always hung in heavy, motionless folds. And I am waiting in front of it, conscious still—oh, so fully conscious—of all the beautiful things I have loved, but looking at them no longer, for I can look nowhere but at the curtain which stirs and is twitched as if someone is on the point of drawing it back.”

He paused a moment, but did not take his eyes off Philip, but continued looking at him very gravely, very affectionately.

“Of course I cannot help guessing what lies behind,” he said, “and conjecturing and reasoning. It may be several things; at least it may appear under several forms, but of this I am certain, that it is God. And will there be a blinding flash of joy, which shows me that even the sorrow and the death which is everywhere is no less part of perfection than the joy and the life? Even now, as you know, in my puny little attempts to be happy in the way that Nature is happy, youth has come back to me in some extraordinary manner, and when I see what I shall see, will immortal life, lived here and now, be my portion? I don’t know; I think it quite possible. And if that is so, if that is the initiation—ah, my God! that impulse of joy which I shall receive will spread from me like the circles in a pool when a stone is thrown into it.”

He paused again, his smooth brown hands trembling a little.

“The Pan-pipes, too,” he said—“they are never silent now: I hear them all the time, and I take that to mean that I am at last never unconscious of the hymn of life. I heard them at first, you know, just in snatches and broken stanzas, when I could screw myself up to the realisation of the song without end and without words that goes up from the earth day and night. Where does it come from? As I told Evelyn, I neither know nor care. Perhaps my brain conceives it, and sends the message to my ears, but it is really simpler to suppose that I hear it, just as you hear my voice talking to you now. For there is no question as to the fact of its existence; the hymn of praise does go on forever. So, perhaps, in my small way, I am complete, so to speak, with regard to that. Then—then there is another thing that may be behind the curtain. It may be that I shall be shown, and if I am shown this, it must be right and necessary—all the sorrow and pain and death that is in the world. I have turned my back on it; I have said it was not for me. But perhaps it will have to be for me. And that—to use a convenient phrase—will be to see Pan.”

He paused on the word, then shook his hair back from his forehead, and got up.

“And now I have told you all,” he said.

Philip got up, too, feeling somehow as if he had been mesmerised. He could remember all that Merivale had said; it was strangely vivid, but it had a dreamlike vividness about it; the fabric, the texture, the colour of it, for all its vividness, was unreal somehow, unearthly. But as to the reality of it and the truth of it, no question entered his head. He had never heard anything, no commonplace story or chronicle of indubitable events which was less fantastic. He looked out in silence a moment over the garden, and though half an hour ago he had been vaguely frightened at the thought of the mysterious and occult powers that keep watch over the world, yet now when they had been spoken of with such frankness, so that they seemed doubly as real as they had before, he was frightened no longer. It was, indeed, as Merivale had said; he had been afraid of fear.

It was already very late, and after a few trivial words he went indoors to go up to bed. As he got to the bottom of the stairs he looked back once, and saw his friend standing still on the verandah, with his face towards him. And as Philip turned, Merivale, standing under the lamp in his white shirt and flannels, with collar unfastened at the neck and sleeves rolled up to the elbow, smiled and nodded to him.

“Good night!” he said; “sleep well. I think you are learning how to do that again.”

Philip began undressing as soon as he got to his room, feeling unaccountably tired and weary. His servant slept in a room just opposite him, and he hesitated for a moment as to whether he should tell him not to call him in the morning till he rang, for he had that heaviness of head which only satiety of sleep entirely removes. But it was already late, and the man had probably been in bed and asleep for some time. So he closed his door, drew the blind down over his window, and put out his light. His brain, for all the vividness of that evening’s talk, seemed absolutely numb and empty, as if all memory were dead, and he fell asleep instantly.

He slept heavily for several hours, and then external sounds began to mingle themselves with his dreams, and he thought he was in a large, empty, brown-coloured hall lit by dim windows very high up, through which a faint, tired light was peering. But now and again the squares of these windows would be lit up for a moment vividly from outside, and as often as this happened some low, heavy, tremulous sound echoed in the vault above him like a bass bourdon note. He was conscious, too, that many unseen presences surrounded him; the hall was thick with them, and they were all saying: “Hush-sh-sh!” A sense of deadly oppression and coming calamity filled him, he was waiting for something, not knowing what it was. Then the coils of sleep began to be more loosened, and before long he awoke. His room looked out over the garden, and the “Hush-sh-sh” was but the rain that fell heavily on to the shrubs below his window. Then the light and the tremulous note were explained too, for suddenly the window started into brightness, and a couple of seconds after a sonorous roll of thunder followed. But the uneasiness of the dream had not passed: he still felt frightfully apprehensive. All desire for sleep, however, had left him, and for some half hour, perhaps, he lay still, listening to the windless rain, for the night was so still that his blind hung over the open window without tapping or stirring. Then with curious abruptness the rain ceased altogether and there was dead silence.

Then suddenly a frightful cry rent and shattered the stillness, and from outside a screaming, strangled voice called:

“Oh, my God!” it yelled. “Oh, Christ!”

For one moment Philip lay in the grip and paralysis of mortal fear, but the next he broke through it, and sprang out of bed, and, not pausing to light a candle, stumbled to the door. At the same moment his servant’s door flew open, and he came out with a white, scared face. He carried a lighted candle.

“It was from the garden, sir,” he said. “It was Mr. Merivale’s voice.”

Philip did not answer, but went quickly downstairs, followed by the man. The door into the verandah stood open, as usual, and he hurried out. There on the table were the cloth and the remains of dessert; his chair stood where he had sat all evening; Merivale’s was pushed sideways. The moon was somewhere risen behind the clouds, for thick as they were, the darkness was not near pitch, and followed by the servant, the light of whose candle tossed weird, misshapen shadows about, Philip set his teeth and went down towards where the hammock was slung in which Merivale usually slept.

That strange, pungent smell, which he had noticed more than once before, was heavy in the air, and infinitely stronger and more biting than it had been. And for one moment his flesh crept so that he stopped, waiting for the man to come up with the light. He could not face what might be there alone.

A few yards further on they came in sight of the hammock. Something white, a flannelled figure, glimmered there, but, like some strange, irregular blot, something black concealed most of the occupant. Then that black thing, whatever it was, suddenly skipped into the air and ran with dreadful frolicsome leaps and bounds and tappings on the brick path of the pergola, down to the far end of the garden, where they lost sight of it. Then they came to the hammock.

Merivale was sitting up in it, bunched up together with his head drawn back, as if avoiding some deadly contact. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, so that the gums showed, his eyes were wide-open, and terror incarnate sat there, and the pupils were contracted to a pin-point as if focussed on something but an inch or two from him. He was not dead, for his chest heaved with dreadful spasms of breathing, and Philip took him up and carried him away from that haunted place into the house, laying him on a rug in the passage.

But before they had got him there the breathing had ceased, the mouth and the eyes had closed, and what they looked on was just the figure of a boy whose mouth smiled, and who was sunk in happy, dreamless sleep.

There was nothing to be done. Philip knew that, but he sent his servant off at once to fetch a doctor from Brockenhurst, while he waited and watched by Merivale or what had been he. All terror and shrinking had utterly passed from that face, and Philip himself, in spite of the frightful, inexplicable thing that had happened, was not frightened either, but sat by him, feeling curiously calm and serene, hardly conscious even of sorrow or regret. Nor did he fear any incomer from the garden. For the curtain had been drawn, and the dead man had felt so sure that whatever form the revelation was to take, it would be God, that the assurance of his belief filled and quieted the man who watched by him.

His shirt was open at the neck, as Philip had seen him last, standing below the lamp on the verandah, and his sleeves were rolled back to above the elbow. And as Philip looked, he saw slowly appearing on the skin of his chest and the sunburnt arms curious marks, which became gradually clearer and more defined, marks pointed at one end, the print of some animal’s hoofs, as if a monstrous goat had leaped and danced on him.

It was a week later, and Philip was seated alone with his mother in the small drawing-room of his house at Pangbourne which they generally used if there was no one with them. He had arrived home only just before dinner that night, and when it was over he had talked long to her, describing all that had happened during his stay with Merivale, all that had culminated in that night of terror about which even now he could hardly speak. The story had been a long one, sometimes he spoke freely, at other points there were silences, for the words would not come, and his choking throat and trembling lips had to be controlled before he could find utterance. For it concerned not Merivale only; and, indeed, friend of his heart as he had been, one who could never be replaced, Philip could scarcely think of his death as sad.

“For though,” he said, “just for that moment when he cried on God’s name and on the name of Christ, when that terror, whatever it was, came close to him, the flesh was weak, yet I know he was not afraid. He had told me so: his spirit was not afraid. And he so longed to see the curtain drawn.”

The joy of getting Philip back again, the joy, too, of knowing that that black crust of hate and despair no longer shut him off from her, was so great, that Mrs. Home hardly regarded the anxiety she would otherwise have felt. For she had never seen Philip like this; what had happened had stirred him to the depths of his soul. Even the sudden and dreadful death of so old a friend she could not have imagined would have affected him so.

“Philip, dear,” she said, “you are terribly excited and overwrought. Get yourself more in control, my darling.”

He was quiet for a moment, and even lit a cigarette, but he threw it away again immediately.

“Ah, mother, when I have finished you will see,” he said. “Let me go on.”

He paused a moment, and the soft stroking of her hand on his calmed him.

“It was just dawn when Flynn came back with the doctor,” he said; “a clear, dewy dawn, the sort of dawn Tom loved. The doctor needed but one glance, one touch. Then he said: ‘Yes, he has been dead for more than an hour.’ So I suppose I had sat there as long as that; I did not think it had been more than a minute or two. Then his eye fell on those marks and bruises I told you of, and he looked at them. He undressed him a little further: there were more of them. I needn’t go into that, but you know what the surface of a lane looks like when a flock of sheep has passed?—it was like that.

“All this, of course, came out at the inquest, where I told all I knew, and Flynn corroborated it. I saw also what Tom had told me that afternoon, how a huge goat had sparred and gambolled round him as he came home across the forest. And the verdict, as you say, perhaps, was brought in, in accordance with that. The world will be quite satisfied. I am satisfied, too, but not in that way.”

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.

“And so my lesson came home to me,” he said. “A month ago I said, as you know, ‘I will hate, I will injure.’ A fortnight ago I said, ‘What good is that?’ But now, when poor Tom, who was all kind and all gentle, had to be taught like that, with those battering hoofs, that pain must be and that one must accept it and sorrow, and not leave them out of life, now I say, ‘Can I help? May not I bear a little of it?’”

He got up.

“You don’t know me,” he said. “I don’t know myself. But I suppose this is how such a thing comes to one. I have been in an outer darkness: I have been black and bitter and all my life before that I was hard. That, I suppose, was needful for me. I don’t think I am going to be a prig, but if that is so, perhaps it doesn’t much matter. But I do know this, that I am sorry for poor things.”

Mrs. Home said nothing for the moment; then she turned her eyes away as she spoke.

“You have not heard then, dear?” she said.

“I have heard nothing.”

“It was in the paper this evening,” she said. “I know no more than that. Evelyn was shot in the face yesterday.”

Then her voice quivered.

“They think he will live,” she said. “But they know he will be blind. Oh, Philip, think of Evelyn blind!”

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