The Angel of Pain

“Phil, I swear I saw a bird, and heard it sing,” he said excitedly. “It was sitting there, there on his finger. What has happened? Go on, Tom – tell us what it means.”

“It means you are the son of a monkey, as Darwin proved,” said he, “and the grandson, so to speak, of a potato. That is all. It was a cousin of a kind that sat on my finger. Philip, with his gold and his Stock Exchange and his business generally, does much more curious things than that. But, personally, I do not find them so interesting.”

Philip, silent as was his wont when puzzled, instead of rushing into speech, had said nothing. But now he asked a question.

“Of course, it was not a conjuring trick,” he said. “That would be futility itself. But you used to have extraordinary hypnotic power, Tom. I only ask – Was that a real nightingale?”

“Quite real.”

Evelyn put down his glass untasted.

“I am frightened,” he said. “I shall go to bed.”

And without more words he bolted into the house.

Philip called good night after him, but there was no response, and he was left alone with the Hermit.

“I am not frightened,” he said. “But what on earth does it all mean? Have a drink?”

Tom Merivale laughed quietly.

“It means exactly what I have said,” he answered. “Come down to my home sometime, and you shall see. It is all quite simple and quite true. It is all as old as love and as new as love. It is also perfectly commonplace. It must be so. I have only taken the trouble to verify it.”

Philip’s cool business qualities came to his aid, or his undoing.

“You mean you can convey a message to a bird or a beast?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Why not? The idea is somehow upsetting to you. Pray don’t let it upset you. Nothing that happens can ever be upsetting. It is only the things that don’t happen that are such anxieties, for fear they may. But when they have happened they are never alarming.”

He pushed his chair back and got up.

“Ah, I have learned one thing in this last year,” he said, “and that is to be frightened at nothing. Fear is the one indefensible emotion. You can do nothing at all if you are afraid. You know that yourself in business. But whether you embark on business or on – what shall I call it? – nature-lore, the one thing indispensable is to go ahead. To take your stand firmly on what you know, and deduce from that. Then to test your deduction, and as soon as one will bear your weight to stand on that and deduce again, being quite sure all the time that whatever is true is right. Perhaps sometime the world in general may see, not degradation in the origin of man from animals, but the extraordinary nobility of it. And then perhaps they will go further back – back to Pagan things, to Pan, the God of nature.”

“To see whom meant death,” remarked Philip.

“Yes, or life. Death is merely an incident in life. And it seems to me now to be rather an unimportant one. One can’t help it. Whereas the important events are those which are within one’s control; one’s powers of thought, for instance.”

Philip rose also.

“And love,” he said. “Is that in one’s control?”

Tom took a long breath.

“Love?” he said. “It is not exactly in one’s control, because it is oneself. There, the dear bird has got home.”

And again from the trees below the bubble of liquid melody sounded.

THIRD

EVELYN DUNDAS was sitting next morning after breakfast on the terrace, where what he alluded to as “the nightingale trick” had been performed the evening before, in company with the conjurer who had performed it. Philip and Madge Ellington had just gone down to the river, Lady Ellington who was to have accompanied them having excused herself at the last moment. But since a mother was in closer and more intimate connection with a girl than a mere chaperone, she had seen not the smallest objection to the two going alone. Indeed she had firmly detained Evelyn by a series of questions which required answers, from joining them, and, though deep in a discussion about art, she had dropped it in its most critical state when she judged that the other two had been given time to get under way. It had required, indeed, all her maternal solicitude to continue it so long, for she cared less for art or Evelyn’s theories about it than for a week-old paper.

Like most artists, Evelyn had a somewhat egoistic nature, and since his personality was so graceful and interesting, it followed that many people found his talk equally so, especially when he talked about himself. For his egoism he had an admirably probable explanation, and he was at this moment explaining it to Tom Merivale, who had made the soft impeachment with regard to its undoubted existence.

“Ah, yes,” he was saying, “an artist’s business is not to put things down as they are, but to put them down as they strike him. Actual truth has nothing to do with the value of a landscape. The point is that the picture should be beautiful. And the same with portraits, only beauty there is unnecessary. You have to put down what you think you see, or what you choose to see.”

“That shouldn’t lead to egoism,” remarked Tom. “It should lead you to the study of other people.”

Evelyn shook his head.

“No, no,” he said, “it leads you to devote yourself entirely almost to the cultivation of your own faculty of seeing. All fine portraits show a great deal of the artist, and perhaps comparatively little of the sitter. Why are Rembrandts so unmistakable? Not because the type of his sitters themselves was almost identical, but because there is lots of Rembrandt in each. You can’t have style unless you are egoistic. In fact, for an artist style means egoism. I have heaps. I don’t say or pretend it’s good, but there it is. Take it or leave it.”

Tom Merivale laughed.

“You are perfectly inimitable,” he said. “I love your serious, vivid nonsense. That you are an egoist is quite, quite true. But how much better an artist you would be if you weren’t. What you want is deepening. You don’t like the deeps, you know. You haven’t got any. You don’t like what you don’t understand; that very simple little affair last night, for instance, frightened you.”

Egoists are invariably truthful – according to their lights – about themselves. Evelyn was truthful now.

“Yes, that is so,” he said. “I don’t pretend to wish to seek out the secrets of the stars. But I know what I like. And I don’t like anything that leads into the heart of things. I don’t like interiors and symbolism. There is quite enough symbol for me on the surface. What I mean is that the eyebrow itself, the curve of the mouth, will tell you quite as much as one has any use for about the brain that makes the eyebrow frown or the mouth smile. Beauty may be skin deep only, but it is quite deep enough. Skin deep! Why, it is as deep as the sea!”

Tom Merivale was silent a little.

“Do you know, you are an interesting survival of the Pagan spirit?” he said at length.

Evelyn laughed.

“Erect me an altar then at once, and crown me with roses,” he remarked. “But what have I said just now that makes you think that?”

“Nothing particular this moment,” he answered, “though your remarking that beauty was enough for you is thoroughly Greek in its way. No; what struck me was that never have I seen in you the smallest rudiment or embryo of a conscience or of any moral sense.”

Evelyn looked up with real interest at this criticism.

“Oh, that is perfectly true,” he said. “Certainly I never have remorse; it must be awful, a sort of moral toothache. All the same, I don’t steal or lie, you know.”

“Merely because lying and stealing are very inartistic performances,” said Tom. “But no idea of morality stands in your way.”

Evelyn got up, looking out over the heat-hazed green of the woods below them with his brilliant glance.

“Is that very shocking?” he asked, with perfectly unassumed naïvetê.

“I suppose it is. Personally, I am never shocked at anything. But it seems to me very dangerous. You ought to wear a semaphore with a red lamp burning at the end of it.”

Evelyn half shut his eyes and put his head on one side.

“I don’t think that would compose well,” he said.

“That is most consistently spoken,” said Tom. “But really, if you are ever in earnest about anything beside your art, you would be a public danger.”

Evelyn turned round on this.