The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Good Place/Chapter 5
V
'Why, it's raining!' And he stood and looked at the splash of the shower and the shine of the wet leaves. It was one of the summer sprinkles that bring out sweet smells.
'Yes—but why not?' his mate demanded.
'Well—because it's so charming. It's so exactly right.'
'But everything is. Isn't that just why we're here?'
'Just exactly,' Dane said; 'only I've been living in the beguiled supposition that we've somehow or other a climate.'
'So have I; so, I dare say, has every one. Isn't that the blessed moral?—that we live in beguiled suppositions. They come so easily here, and nothing contradicts them.' The good Brother looked placidly forth—Dane could identify his phase. 'A climate doesn't consist in its never raining, does it?'
'No, I dare say not. But somehow the good I've got has been half the great, easy absence of all that friction of which the question of weather mostly forms a part—has been indeed largely the great, easy, perpetual air-bath.'
'Ah, yes—that's not a delusion; but perhaps the sense comes a little from our breathing an emptier medium. There are fewer things in it! Leave people alone, at all events, and the air is what they take to. Into the closed and the stuffy they have to be driven. I've had, too,—I think we must all have,—a fond sense of the south.'
'But imagine it,' said Dane, laughing, 'in the beloved British islands and so near as we are to Bradford!'
His friend was ready enough to imagine. 'To Bradford?' he asked, quite unperturbed. 'How near?'
Dane's gaiety grew. 'Oh, it doesn't matter!'
His friend, quite unmystified, accepted it. 'There are things to puzzle out—otherwise it would be dull. It seems to me one can puzzle them.'
'It's because we're so well disposed,' Dane said.
'Precisely—we find good in everything.'
'In everything,' Dane went on. 'The conditions settle that—they determine us.'
They resumed their stroll, which evidently represented on the good Brother's part infinite agreement. 'Aren't they probably in fact very simple?' he presently inquired. 'Isn't simplification the secret?'
'Yes, but applied with a tact!'
'There it is. The thing's so perfect that it's open to as many interpretations as any other great work—a poem of Goethe, a dialogue of Plato, a symphony of Beethoven.'
'It simply stands quiet, you mean,' said Dane, 'and lets us call it names?'
'Yes, but all such loving ones. We're "staying" with some one—some delicious host or hostess who never shows,'
'It's liberty-hall—absolutely,' Dane assented.
'Yes—or a convalescent home.'
To this, however, Dane demurred. 'Ah, that, it seems to me, scarcely puts it. You weren't ill—were you? I'm very sure I really wasn't. I was only, as the world goes, too "beastly well"!'
The good Brother wondered. 'But if we couldn't keep it up———?'
'We couldn't keep it down—that was all the matter!'
'I see—I see.' The good Brother sighed contentedly; after which he brought out again with kindly humour: 'It's a sort of kindergarten!'
'The next thing you'll be saying that we're babes at the breast!'
'Of some great mild, invisible mother who stretches away into space and whose lap is the whole valley———?'
'And her bosom'—Dane completed the figure—'the noble eminence of our hill? That will do; anything will do that covers the essential fact.'
'And what do you call the essential fact?'
'Why, that—as in old days on Swiss lake-sides'—we're en pension.'
The good Brother took this gently up. 'I remember—I remember: seven francs a day without wine! But, alas, it's more than seven francs here.'
'Yes, it's considerably more,' Dane had to confess. 'Perhaps it isn't particularly cheap.'
'Yet should you call it particularly dear?' his friend after a moment inquired.
George Dane had to think. 'How do I know, after all? What practice has one ever had in estimating the inestimable? Particular cheapness certainly isn't the note that we feel struck all round; but don't we fall naturally into the view that there must be a price to anything so awfully sane?'
The good Brother in his turn reflected. 'We fall into the view that it must pay—that it does pay.'
'Oh, yes; it does pay!' Dane eagerly echoed. 'If it didn't it wouldn't last. It has got to last, of course!' he declared.
'So that we can come back?'
'Yes—think of knowing that we shall be able to!'
They pulled up again at this and, facing each other, thought of it, or at any rate pretended to; for what was really in their eyes was the dread of a loss of the clue. 'Oh, when we want it again we shall find it,' said the good Brother. 'If the place really pays, it will keep on.'
'Yes, that's the beauty; that it isn't, thank heaven, carried on only for love.'
'No doubt, no doubt; and yet, thank heaven, there's love in it too. They had lingered as if, in the mild, moist air, they were charmed with the patter of the rain and the way the garden drank it. After a little, however, it did look rather as if they were trying to talk each other out of a faint, small fear. They saw the increasing rage of life and the recurrent need, and they wondered proportionately whether to return to the front when their hour should sharply strike would be the end of the dream. Was this a threshold perhaps, after all, that could only be crossed one way? They must return to the front sooner or later—that was certain: for each his hour would strike. The flower would have been gathered and the trick played—the sands, in short, would have run.
There, in its place, was life—with all its rage; the vague unrest of the need for action knew it again, the stir of the faculty that had been refreshed and reconsecrated. They seemed each, thus confronted, to close their eyes a moment for dizziness; then they were again at peace, and the Brother's confidence rang out. 'Oh, we shall meet!'
'Here, do you mean?'
'Yes—and I dare say in the world too.'
'But we shan't recognise or know,' said Dane.
'In the world, do you mean?'
'Neither in the world nor here,'
'Not a bit—not the least little bit, you think?'
Dane turned it over. 'Well, so it is that it seems to me all best to hang together. But we shall see.'
His friend happily concurred. 'We shall see.' And at this, for farewell, the Brother held out his hand.
'You're going?' Dane asked.
'No, but I thought you were.'
It was odd, but at this Dane's hour seemed to strike—his consciousness to crystallise. 'Well, I am. I've got it. You stay?' he went on.
'A little longer.'
Dane hesitated. 'You haven't yet got it?'
'Not altogether—but I think it's coming.'
'Good!' Dane kept his hand, giving it a final shake, and at that moment the sun glimmered again through the shower, but with the rain still falling on the hither side of it and seeming to patter even more in the brightness. 'Hallo—how charming!'
The Brother looked a moment from under the high arch—then again turned his face to our friend. He gave this time his longest, happiest sigh. 'Oh, it's all right!'
But why was it, Dane after a moment found himself wondering, that in the act of separation his own hand was so long retained? Why but through a queer phenomenon of change, on the spot, in his companion's face—change that gave it another, but an increasing and above all a much more familiar identity, an identity not beautiful, but more and more distinct, an identity with that of his servant, with the most conspicuous, the physiognomic seat of the public propriety of Brown? To this anomaly his eyes slowly opened; it was not his good Brother, it was verily Brown who possessed his hand. If his eyes had to open, it was because they had been closed and because Brown appeared to think he had better wake up. So much as this Dane took in, but the effect of his taking it was a relapse into darkness, a recontraction of the lids just prolonged enough to give Brown time, on a second thought, to withdraw his touch and move softly away. Dane's next consciousness was that of the desire to make sure he was away, and this desire had somehow the result of dissipating the obscurity. The obscurity was completely gone by the time he had made out that the back of a person writing at his study-table was presented to him. He recognised a portion of a figure that he had somewhere described to somebody—the intent shoulders of the unsuccessful young man who had come that bad morning to breakfast. It was strange, he at last reflected, but the young man was still there. How long had he stayed—days, weeks, months? He was exactly in the position in which Dane had last seen him. Everything—stranger still—was exactly in that position; everything, at least, but the light of the window, which came in from another quarter and showed a different hour. It wasn't after breakfast now: it was after—well, what? He suppressed a gasp—it was after everything. And yet—quite literally—there were but two other differences. One of these was that if he was still on the sofa he was now lying down; the other was the patter on the glass that showed him how the rain—the great rain of the night—had come back. It was the rain of the night, yet when had he last heard it? But two minutes before? Then how many were there before the young man at the table, who seemed intensely occupied, found a moment to look round at him and, on meeting his open eyes, get up and draw near?
'You've slept all day,' said the young man.
'All day?'
The young man looked at his watch. 'From ten to six. You were extraordinarily tired. I just, after a bit, let you alone, and you were soon off.' Yes, that was it; he had been 'off'—off, off, off. He began to fit it together; while he had been off the young man had been on. But there were still some few confusions; Dane lay looking up. 'Everything's done,' the young man continued.
'Everything?'
'Everything.'
Dane tried to take it all in, but was embarrassed and could only say weakly and quite apart from the matter: 'I've been so happy!'
'So have I,' said the young man. He positively looked so; seeing which George Dane wondered afresh, and then, in his wonder, read it indeed quite as another face, quite, in a puzzling way, as another person's. Every one was a little some one else. While he asked himself who else then the young man was, this benefactor, struck by his appealing stare, broke again into perfect cheer. 'It's all right!' That answered Dane's question; the face was the face turned to him by the good Brother there in the portico while they listened together to the rustle of the shower. It was all queer, but all pleasant and all distinct, so distinct that the last words in his ear—the same from both quarters—appeared the effect of a single voice. Dane rose and looked about his room, which seemed disincumbered, different, twice as large. It was all right.