Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery (12 page)

"My dear Darcy," cried Frank, "I am charmed to see you."

But the other stared at him in amazement.

"Frank!" he exclaimed.

"Yes, that is my name," he said laughing, "what is the matter?"

Darcy took his hand.

"What have you done to yourself?" he asked. "You are a boy again."

"Ah, I have a lot to tell you," said Frank. "Lots that you will hardly
believe, but I shall convince you—"

He broke off suddenly, and held up his hand.

"Hush, there is my nightingale," he said.

The smile of recognition and welcome with which he had greeted his
friend faded from his face, and a look of rapt wonder took its place,
as of a lover listening to the voice of his beloved. His mouth parted
slightly, showing the white line of teeth, and his eyes looked out and
out till they seemed to Darcy to be focused on things beyond the vision
of man. Then something perhaps startled the bird, for the song ceased.

"Yes, lots to tell you," he said. "Really I am delighted to see you.
But you look rather white and pulled down; no wonder after that fever.
And there is to be no nonsense about this visit. It is June now, you
stop here till you are fit to begin work again. Two months at least."

"Ah, I can't trespass quite to that extent."

Frank took his arm and walked him down the grass.

"Trespass? Who talks of trespass? I shall tell you quite openly when I
am tired of you, but you know when we had the studio together, we used
not to bore each other. However, it is ill talking of going away on the
moment of your arrival. Just a stroll to the river, and then it will be
dinner-time."

Darcy took out his cigarette case, and offered it to the other.

Frank laughed.

"No, not for me. Dear me, I suppose I used to smoke once. How very
odd!"

"Given it up?"

"I don't know. I suppose I must have. Anyhow I don't do it now. I would
as soon think of eating meat."

"Another victim on the smoking altar of vegetarianism?"

"Victim?" asked Frank. "Do I strike you as such?"

He paused on the margin of the stream and whistled softly. Next moment
a moor-hen made its splashing flight across the river, and ran up the
bank. Frank took it very gently in his hands and stroked its head, as
the creature lay against his shirt.

"And is the house among the reeds still secure?" he half-crooned to it.
"And is the missus quite well, and are the neighbours flourishing?
There, dear, home with you," and he flung it into the air.

"That bird's very tame," said Darcy, slightly bewildered.

"It is rather," said Frank, following its flight.

During dinner Frank chiefly occupied himself in bringing himself
up-to-date in the movements and achievements of this old friend whom he
had not seen for six years. Those six years, it now appeared, had been
full of incident and success for Darcy; he had made a name for himself
as a portrait painter which bade fair to outlast the vogue of a couple
of seasons, and his leisure time had been brief. Then some four months
previously he had been through a severe attack of typhoid, the result
of which as concerns this story was that he had come down to this
sequestrated place to recruit.

"Yes, you've got on," said Frank at the end. "I always knew you would.
A.R.A. with more in prospect. Money? You roll in it, I suppose, and, O
Darcy, how much happiness have you had all these years? That is the
only imperishable possession. And how much have you learned? Oh, I
don't mean in Art. Even I could have done well in that."

Darcy laughed.

"Done well? My dear fellow, all I have learned in these six years you
knew, so to speak, in your cradle. Your old pictures fetch huge prices.
Do you never paint now?"

Frank shook his head.

"No, I'm too busy," he said.

"Doing what? Please tell me. That is what every one is for ever asking
me."

"Doing? I suppose you would say I do nothing."

Darcy glanced up at the brilliant young face opposite him.

"It seems to suit you, that way of being busy," he said. "Now, it's
your turn. Do you read? Do you study? I remember you saying that it
would do us all—all us artists, I mean—a great deal of good if we
would study any one human face carefully for a year, without recording
a line. Have you been doing that?"

Frank shook his head again.

"I mean exactly what I say," he said, "I have been
doing
nothing. And
I have never been so occupied. Look at me, have I not done something to
myself to begin with?"

"You are two years younger than I," said Darcy, "at least you used to
be. You therefore are thirty-five. But had I never seen you before I
should say you were just twenty. But was it worth while to spend six
years of greatly occupied life in order to look twenty? Seems rather
like a woman of fashion."

Frank laughed boisterously.

"First time I've ever been compared to that particular bird of prey,"
he said. "No, that has not been my occupation—in fact I am only very
rarely conscious that one effect of my occupation has been that. Of
course, it must have been if one comes to think of it. It is not very
important. Quite true my body has become young. But that is very
little; I have become young."

Darcy pushed back his chair and sat sideways to the table looking at
the other.

"Has that been your occupation then?" he asked. "Yes, that anyhow is
one aspect of it. Think what youth means! It is the capacity for
growth, mind, body, spirit, all grow, all get stronger, all have a
fuller, firmer life every day. That is something, considering that
every day that passed after the ordinary man reaches the full-blown
flower of his strength, weakens his hold on life. A man reaches his
prime, and remains, we say, in his prime, for ten years, or perhaps
twenty. But after his primest prime is reached, he slowly, insensibly
weakens. These are the signs of age in you, in your body, in your art
probably, in your mind. You are less electric than you were. But I,
when I reach my prime—I am nearing it—ah, you shall see."

The stars had begun to appear in the blue velvet of the sky, and to the
east the horizon seen above the black silhouette of the village was
growing dove-coloured with the approach of moon-rise. White moths
hovered dimly over the garden-beds, and the footsteps of night tip-toed
through the bushes. Suddenly Frank rose.

"Ah, it is the supreme moment," he said softly. "Now more than at any
other time the current of life, the eternal imperishable current runs
so close to me that I am almost enveloped in it. Be silent a minute."

He advanced to the edge of the terrace and looked out standing
stretched with arms outspread. Darcy heard him draw a long breath into
his lungs, and after many seconds expel it again. Six or eight times he
did this, then turned back into the lamplight.

"It will sound to you quite mad, I expect," he said, "but if you want
to hear the soberest truth I have ever spoken and shall ever speak, I
will tell you about myself. But come into the garden if it is not too
damp for you. I have never told anyone yet, but I shall like to tell
you. It is long, in fact, since I have even tried to classify what I
have learned."

They wandered into the fragrant dimness of the pergola, and sat down.
Then Frank began:

"Years ago, do you remember," he said, "we used often to talk about the
decay of joy in the world. Many impulses, we settled, had contributed
to this decay, some of which were good in themselves, others that were
quite completely bad. Among the good things, I put what we may call
certain Christian virtues, renunciation, resignation, sympathy with
suffering, and the desire to relieve sufferers. But out of those things
spring very bad ones, useless renunciations, asceticism for its own
sake, mortification of the flesh with nothing to follow, no
corresponding gain that is, and that awful and terrible disease which
devastated England some centuries ago, and from which by heredity of
spirit we suffer now, Puritanism. That was a dreadful plague, the
brutes held and taught that joy and laughter and merriment were evil:
it was a doctrine the most profane and wicked. Why, what is the
commonest crime one sees? A sullen face. That is the truth of the
matter.

"Now all my life I have believed that we are intended to be happy, that
joy is of all gifts the most divine. And when I left London, abandoned
my career, such as it was, I did so because I intended to devote my
life to the cultivation of joy, and, by continuous and unsparing
effort, to be happy. Among people, and in constant intercourse with
others, I did not find it possible; there were too many distractions in
towns and work-rooms, and also too much suffering. So I took one step
backward or forward, as you may choose to put it, and went straight to
Nature, to trees, birds, animals, to all those things which quite
clearly pursue one aim only, which blindly follow the great native
instinct to be happy without any care at all for morality, or human law
or divine law. I wanted, you understand, to get all joy first-hand and
unadulterated, and I think it scarcely exists among men; it is
obsolete."

Darcy turned in his chair.

"Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?" he asked. "Food, food and
mating."

Frank laughed gently in the stillness.

"Do not think I became a sensualist," he said. "I did not make that
mistake. For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round
his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him. I may be mad,
it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that. No,
what is it that makes puppies play with their own tails, that sends
cats on their prowling ecstatic errands at night?"

He paused a moment.

"So I went to Nature," he said. "I sat down here in this New Forest,
sat down fair and square, and looked. That was my first difficulty, to
sit here quiet without being bored, to wait without being impatient, to
be receptive and very alert, though for a long time nothing particular
happened. The change in fact was slow in those early stages."

"Nothing happened?" asked Darcy rather impatiently, with the sturdy
revolt against any new idea which to the English mind is synonymous
with nonsense. "Why, what in the world
should
happen?"

Now Frank as he had known him was the most generous, most
quick-tempered of mortal men; in other words his anger would flare to a
prodigious beacon, under almost no provocation, only to be quenched
again under a gust of no less impulsive kindliness. Thus the moment
Darcy had spoken, an apology for his hasty question was half-way up his
tongue. But there was no need for it to have travelled even so far, for
Frank laughed again with kindly, genuine mirth.

"Oh, how I should have resented that a few years ago," he said. "Thank
goodness that resentment is one of the things I have got rid of. I
certainly wish that you should believe my story—in fact, you are going
to—but that you at this moment should imply that you do not, does not
concern me."

"Ah, your solitary sojournings have made you inhuman," said Darcy,
still very English.

"No, human," said Frank. "Rather more human, at least rather less of an
ape."

"Well, that was my first quest," he continued, after a moment, "the
deliberate and unswerving pursuit of joy, and my method, the eager
contemplation of Nature. As far as motive went, I dare say it was
purely selfish, but as far as effect goes, it seems to me about the
best thing one can do for one's fellow-creatures, for happiness is more
infectious than small-pox. So, as I said, I sat down and waited; I
looked at happy things, zealously avoided the sight of anything
unhappy, and by degrees a little trickle of the happiness of this
blissful world began to filter into me. The trickle grew more abundant,
and now, my dear fellow, if I could for a moment divert from me into
you one half of the torrent of joy that pours through me day and night,
you would throw the world, art, everything aside, and just live, exist.
When a man's body dies, it passes into trees and flowers. Well, that is
what I have been trying to do with my soul before death."

The servant had brought into the pergola a table with syphons and
spirits, and had set a lamp upon it. As Frank spoke he leaned forward
toward the other, and Darcy for all his matter-of-fact common-sense
could have sworn that his companion's face shone, was luminous in
itself. His dark brown eyes glowed from within, the unconscious smile
of a child irradiated and transformed his face. Darcy felt suddenly
excited, exhilarated.

"Go on," he said. "Go on. I can feel you are somehow telling me sober
truth. I dare say you are mad; but I don't see that matters."

Frank laughed again.

"Mad?" he said. "Yes, certainly, if you wish. But I prefer to call it
sane. However, nothing matters less than what anybody chooses to call
things. God never labels his gifts; He just puts them into our hands;
just as he put animals in the garden of Eden, for Adam to name if he
felt disposed."

"So by the continual observance and study of things that were happy,"
continued he, "I got happiness, I got joy. But seeking it, as I did,
from Nature, I got much more which I did not seek, but stumbled upon
originally by accident. It is difficult to explain, but I will try.

"About three years ago I was sitting one morning in a place I will show
you to-morrow. It is down by the river brink, very green, dappled with
shade and sun, and the river passes there through some little clumps of
reeds. Well, as I sat there, doing nothing, but just looking and
listening, I heard the sound quite distinctly of some flute-like
instrument playing a strange unending melody. I thought at first it was
some musical yokel on the highway and did not pay much attention. But
before long the strangeness and indescribable beauty of the tune struck
me. It never repeated itself, but it never came to an end, phrase after
phrase ran its sweet course, it worked gradually and inevitably up to a
climax, and having attained it, it went on; another climax was reached
and another and another. Then with a sudden gasp of wonder I localized
where it came from. It came from the reeds and from the sky and from
the trees. It was everywhere, it was the sound of life. It was, my dear
Darcy, as the Greeks would have said, it was Pan playing on his pipes,
the voice of Nature. It was the life-melody, the world-melody."