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Watersprings

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> Watersprings




"That's all very wonderful," said Howard, musing, "wonderful and
beautiful. . . . I wish I had seen that!"

"Yes, but you didn't need it," said Maud; "one sees what one needs,
I think. And I want to add something, dearest, which you must
believe. I don't want to revert to this, or to speak of it again--I
don't mean to dwell upon it; it is just enough for me. One mustn't
press these things too closely, nor want other people to share them
or believe them. That is the mistake one makes, that one thinks
that other people ought to find one's own feelings and fancies and
experiences as real as one finds them oneself. I don't even want to
know what you think about it--I don't want you to say you believe
in it, or to think about it at all. I couldn't help telling you
about it, because it seems as real to me as anything that ever
happened in my life; but I don't want you to have to pretend, or to
accept it in order to please me. It is just my own experience; I
was ill, unconscious, delirious, anything you please; but it is
just a blessed fact for me, for all that, a gift from God. Do you
really trust me when I say this, dearest? I don't claim a word from
you about it, but it will make all the difference to me. I can go
on now. I don't want to die, I don't want to follow--I only want
you to feel, or to learn to feel, that the child is a real child,
our very own, as much a part of our family as Jack or Cousin Anne;
and I don't even want you to SAY that. I want all to be as before;
the only difference is that I now don't feel as if I was CHOOSING.
It isn't a case of leaving him or leaving you. I have you both--and
I think you wanted me most; and I haven't a wish or a desire in my
heart but to be with you."

"Yes, dearest," said Howard, "I understand. It is perfect to be
trusted so. I won't say anything now about it. I could not say
anything. But you have put something into my heart which will
spring up and blossom. Just now there isn't room for anything in my
mind but the fact that you are given back to me; that's all I can
hold; but it won't be all. I am glad you told me this, and utterly
thankful that it is so. That you should be here, given back to me,
that must be enough now. I can't count up my gains; but if you had
come back, leaving your heart elsewhere, how could I have borne
that?"






XXXV

THE POWER OF LOVE





It was a few days later that Howard found himself sitting alone one
evening after dinner, with his aunt.

"There is something that I want to talk to you about," he said. "No
doubt Maud has told you all about her strange experience? She has
described it to me, and I don't know what to say or think. She was
wonderfully fine about it. She said she would not mention it again,
and she did not desire me to talk about it--or even believe it! And
I don't know what to do. It isn't the sort of thing that I believe
in, though I think it beautiful, just because it was Maud who felt
it. But I can't say what I really believe about it, without seeming
unsympathetic and even rough; and yet I don't like there being
anything which means so much to her, which doesn't mean much to
me."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "I foresaw that difficulty, but I think
Maud did right to tell you."

"Of course, of course," said Howard, "but I mean much more than
that. Is there something really THERE, open to all, possible to
all, from which I am shut out by what the Bible calls my hardness
of heart? Do you really think yourself that a living spirit drew
near and made itself known to Maud thus? or is it a beautiful
dream, a sort of subjective attempt at finding comfort, an
instinctive effort of the mind towards saving itself from sorrow?"

"Ah," said Mrs. Graves, "who shall say? Of course I do not see any
real objection to the former, when I think of all the love and the
emotion that went to the calling of the little spirit from the
deeps of life; but then I am a woman, and an old woman. If I were a
man of your age who had lived an intellectual life, I should feel
very much as you do."

"But if you believe it," said Howard, "can you give me reasons why
you believe it? I am not unreasonable at all. I hate the attitude
of mind of denying the truth of the experience of others, just
because one has not felt it oneself. Here, it seems to me, there
are two explanations, and my scepticism inclines to what is, I
suppose, the materialistic one. I am very suspicious of experiences
which one is told to take on trust, and which can't be
intellectually expressed. It's the sort of theory that the clergy
fall back upon, what they call spiritual truth, which seems to me
merely unchecked, unverifiable experience. I don't, to take a crude
instance, believe in statues that wink; and yet the tendency of the
priest is to say that it is a matter of childlike faith; yet to me
credulity appears to be one of the worst of sins. It is incredulity
which has disposed of superstition."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves. "I fully agree with you about that; and
there is a great deal of very objectionable nonsense which goes by
the name of mysticism, which is merely emotion divorced from
commonsense."

"Yes," said Howard, "and if I may speak quite frankly, I do very
much respect your own judgment and your convictions. It seems to me
that you have a very sceptical turn of mind, which has acted as a
solvent upon a whole host of stupid and conventional beliefs. I
don't think you take things for granted, and it always seems to me
that you have got rid of a great many foolish traditions which
ordinary people accept--and it's a fine attitude."

"I'm not too old to be insensible to a compliment," said Mrs.
Graves, smiling. "What you are surprised at is to find that I have
any beliefs left, I suppose? And I expect you are inclined to think
that I have done the feminine thing ultimately, and compromised, so
as to retain just the comfortable part of the affair."

"No," said Howard, "I don't. I am much more inclined to think that
there is something which is hidden from me; and I want you to
explain it, if you can and will."

"Well, I will try," said Mrs. Graves. "Let me think." She sate
silent for a little, and then she said: "I think that as I get
older, I recognise more and more the division between the rational
part of the mind and the instinctive part of the mind. I find more
and more that my deepest convictions are not rational--at least not
arrived at by reason--only formulated by it. I think that reason
ought to be able to formulate convictions; but they are there,
whether expressed or not. Most women don't bring the reason to bear
at all, and the result is that they hold a mass of beliefs, some
simply inherited, some mere phrases which they don't understand,
and some real convictions. A great deal of the muddle comes from
the feminine weariness of logic, and a great deal, too, from the
fact that they never learn how to use words--words are the things
that divide people! But I believe more and more, by experience, in
the SOUL. I do not believe that the soul begins with birth or ends
with death. Now I have no sort of doubt in my own mind that the
soul of your child was a living thing, a spirit which has lived
before, and will live again. Souls, I believe, come to the brink of
life, out of some unknown place, and by choice or impelled by some
need for experience, take shape. I don't know how or why this is--I
only believe that it is so. If your child had lived, you would have
become aware of its soul; you would have found it to have perfectly
distinct qualities and desires and views of its own, not learnt
from you, and which you could not affect or change. All those
qualities are in it from the time of birth--but it takes a soul
some time to learn the use of the body. But the connection between
the soul and the father and mother who give it a body is a real
one; I don't profess to know what it is, or why it is that some
parents have congenial children and some quite uncongenial ones--
that is only one of the many mysteries which beset us. Holding all
this, it does not seem to me on the face of it impossible that the
soul of the child should have been brought into contact with Maud's
soul; though of course the whole affair is quite capable of a
scientific and material explanation. But I have seen too many
strange things in my life to make me accept the scientific
explanation as conclusive. I have known men and women who, after a
bereavement, have had an intense consciousness of the presence of
the beloved spirit with them and near them. I have experienced it
myself; and it seems to me as impossible to explain as a sense of
beauty. If one feels a particular thing to be beautiful, one can't
give good reasons for one's emotion to a person who does not think
the same thing beautiful; but it appears to me that the duty of
explaining it away lies on the one who does NOT feel it. One can't
say that beauty is a purely subjective thing, because when two
people think a thing beautiful, they understand each other
perfectly. Do I make myself clear at all, or is that merely a bit
of feminine logic?"

"No, indeed," said Howard slowly, "I think it is a good case. The
very last thing I would do is to claim to be fully equipped for the
understanding of all mysteries. My difficulty is that while there
are two explanations of a thing--a transcendental one and a
material one--I hanker after the material one. But it isn't because
I want to disbelieve the transcendental one. It is because I want
to believe it so much, that I feel that I must exclude all
possibility of its being anything else."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "and I think you are perfectly right; one
must follow one's conscience in this. I don't want you to swallow
it whole at all. I want you, and I am sure that Maud wants you,
just to wait and see. Don't begin by denying the possibility of its
being a transcendental thing. Just hold the facts in your mind, and
as life goes on, see if your experience confirms it, and until it
does, do not pretend that it does. I don't claim to be omniscient.
Something quite definite, of course, lies behind the mystery of
life, and whatever it is, is not affected by what you or I believe
about it. I may be wholly and entirely mistaken, and it may be that
life is only a chemical phenomenon; but I have kept my eyes open,
and my heart open; and I am as sure as I can be that there is
something very much bigger behind it than that. I myself believe
that each being is an immortal spirit, hampered by contact with
mortal laws, and I believe that consciousness and emotion are
something superior even to chemistry. But to use emotion to silence
people would be entirely repugnant to me, and equally to Maud. She
isn't the sort of woman who would be content if you only just said
you believed her. She would hate that!"

"Well," said Howard, smiling, "you are two very wonderful women,
and that's the truth. I am not surprised at YOUR wisdom--it IS
wisdom--because you have lived very bravely and loved many people;
but it's amazing to me to find such courage and understanding in a
girl. Of course you have helped her--but I don't think you could
have produced such thoughts in her unless they had been there to
start with."

"That's exactly what I have tried to say," said Mrs. Graves. "Where
did Maud's fine mixture of feeling and commonsense come from? Her
mother was a woman of some perception, but after all she married
Frank, and Frank with all his virtue isn't a very mature spirit!"

"Ah," said Howard, "my marriage has done everything for me! What a
blind, complacent, petty ass I was--and am too, though I at least
perceive it! I see myself as an elderly donkey, braying and
capering about in a paddock--and someone leans over the fence, and
all is changed. I ought not to think lightly of mysteries, when all
this astonishing conspiracy has taken place round me, to give me a
home and a wife and a whole range of new emotions--how Maud came to
care for me is still the deepest wonder of all--a loveless prig
like me!"

"I won't be understood to subscribe to all that," said Mrs. Graves,
laughing, "though I see your point of view; but there's something
deeper even than that, dear Howard. You care for me, you care for
Maud; but it's the power of caring that matters more than the power
of caring for particular people. Does that seem a very hard saying?
You see I do not believe--what do you say to this--in memory
lasting. You and I love each other here and now; when I die, I do
not feel sure that I shall have any recollection of you or Maud or
my own dear husband--how horrible that would sound to many men and
nearly all women--but I have learned how to love, and you have
learned how to love, and we shall find other souls to draw near to
as the ages go on; and so I look forward to death calmly enough,
because whatever I am I shall have souls to love, and I shall find
souls to love me."

"No," said Howard, "I can't believe that! I can't believe in any
life here or hereafter apart from Maud. It is strange that I should
be the sentimentalist now, and you the stern sceptic. The thought
to me is infinitely dreary--even atrocious."

"I am not surprised," said Mrs. Graves, "but that's the last
sacrifice. That is what losing oneself means; to believe in love
itself, and not in the particular souls we love; to believe in
beauty, not in beautiful things. I have learned that! I do not say
it in any complacency or superiority--you must believe me; but it
is the last and hardest thing that I have learned. I do not say
that it does not hurt--one suffers terribly in losing one's dear
self, in parting from other selves that are even more dear. But
would one send away the souls one loves best into a loveless
paradise? Can one bear to think of them as hankering for oneself,
and lost in regret? No, not for a moment! They pass on to new life
and love; we cannot ourselves always do it in this life--the flesh
is weak and dear; and age passes over us, and takes away the close
embrace and the sweet desire. But it is the awakening of the soul
to love that matters; and it has been to me one of the sweetest
experiences of my life to see you and Maud awaken to love. But you
will not stay there--nothing is ultimate, not the dearest and
largest relations of life. One climbs from selfishness to liking,
and from liking to passion, and from passion to love itself."

"No," said Howard, "I cannot rise to that yet; I see, I dimly feel,
that you are far above me in this; but I cannot let Maud go. She is
mine, and I am hers."

Mrs. Graves smiled and said, "Well, we will leave it at that. Kiss
me, dearest boy; I don't love you less because I feel as I do--
perhaps even more, indeed."






XXXVI

THE TRUTH





It was a sunny day of winter with a sharp breeze blowing, just
after the birth of the New Year, that Howard and Maud left Windlow
for Cambridge. The weeks previous had been much clouded for Howard
by doubts and anxieties and a multiplicity of small business.
Furnishing even an official house for a life of graceful simplicity
involved intolerable lists, bills, letters, catalogues of things
which it seemed inconceivable that anyone should need. The very
number and variety of brushes required seemed to Howard an outrage
on the love of cheap beauty, so epigrammatically praised by
Thucydides; he said with a groan to Maud that it was indeed true
that the Nineteenth Century would stand out to all time as the
period of the world's history in which more useless things had been
made than at any epoch before!

But this morning, for some blessed reason, all his vexations seemed
to slip off from him. They were to start in the afternoon; but at
about eleven Maud in cloak and furred stole stepped into the
library and demanded a little walk. Howard looked approvingly,
admiringly, adoringly at his wife. She had regained a look of
health and lightness more marked than he had ever before seen in
her. Her illness had proved a rest, in spite of all the trouble she
had passed through. Some new beauty, the beauty of experience, had
passed into her face without making havoc of the youthful contours
and the girlish freshness, and the beautiful line of her cheek
outlined upon the dark fur, with the wide-open eye above it, came
upon Howard with an almost tormenting sense of loveliness, like a
chord of far-off music. He flung down his pen, and took his wife in
his arms for an instant. "Yes," he said in answer to her look,
"it's all right, darling--I can manage anything with you near me,
looking like that--that's all I want!"

They went out into the garden with its frost-crisped grass and
leafless shrubberies, with the high-standing down behind. "How it
blows!" said Howard:


"''Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind, in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood!'


How beautiful that is--'the old wind, in the old anger!'--but it
isn't true, for all that. If one thing changes, everything changes;
and the wind has got to march on, like you and me: there's nothing
pathetic about it. The weak thing is to want to stay as we are!"

"Oh yes," said Maud; "one wastes pity. I was inclined myself to be
pathetic about it all yesterday, when I went up home and looked
into my little old room. The furniture and books and pictures
seemed to me to reproach me with having deserted them; but, oh
dear, what a fantastic, foolish, anxious little wretch I was, with
all my plans for uplifting everyone! You don't know, dearest, you
can't know, out of what a stagnant little pool you fished me up!"

"And yet _I_ feel," said Howard, "as if it was you who had saved me
from a sort of death--what a charming picture! two people who can't
swim saving each other from drowning."

"Well, that's the way that things are done!" said Maud decisively.

They left the garden, and betook themselves to the pool; the waters
welled up, green and cold, from the depth, and hurried away down
their bare channel.

"This is the scene of my life," said Howard; "I WILL be sentimental
about this! This is where my ghost will walk, if anywhere; good
heavens, to think that it was not three years ago that I came here
first, and thought in a solemn way that it was going to have a
strange significance for me. 'Significance,' that is the mischief!
But it is all very well, now that every minute is full of
happiness, to laugh at the old fears--they were very real at the
time,--'the old wind, in the old anger'--one can't sit and dream,
though it's pleasant, it's pleasant."

"It was the only time in my life," said Maud, "when I was ever
brave! Why isn't one braver? It is agreeable at the time, and it is
almost overpaid!"

"It is like what a doctor told me once," said Howard, "that he had
never in his life seen a patient go to the operating table other
than calm and brave. Face to face with things one is all right; and
yet one never learns not to waste time in dreading them."

They went on in silence up the valley, Maud walking beside him with
all her old lightness. Howard thought he had never seen anything
more beautiful. They were out of the wind now, but could hear it
hiss in the grasses above them.

"What about Cambridge?" said Maud. "I think it will be rather fun.
I haven't wanted to go; but do you know, if someone came to me and
said I might just unpack everything, I should be dreadfully
disappointed!"

"I believe I should be too," said Howard. "My only fear is that I
shall not be interested--I shall be always wanting to get back to
you--and yet how inexplicable that used to seem to me, that Dons
who married should really prefer to steal back home, instead of
living the free and joyous life of the sympathetic and bachelor;
and even now it seems difficult to suppose that other men can feel
as I do about THEIR wives."

"Like the boy in Punch," said Maud, "who couldn't believe that the
two earwigs could care about each other."

A faint music of bells came to them on the wind. "Hark!" said
Howard; "the Sherborne chime! Do you remember when we first heard
that? It gave me a delightful sense of other people being busy when
I was unoccupied. To-day it seems as if it was warning me that I
have got to be busy."

They turned at last and retraced their steps. Presently Howard
said, "There's just one more thing, child, I want to say. I haven't
ever spoken to you since about the vision--whatever it was--which
you described to me--the child and you. But I took you at your
word!"

"Yes," said Maud, "I have always been glad that you did that!"

"But I have wanted to speak," said Howard, "simply because I did
not want you to think that it wasn't in my mind--that I had cast it
all lightly away. I haven't tried to force myself into any belief
about it--it's a mystery--but it has grown into my mind somehow,
and become real; and I do feel more and more that there is
something very true and great about it, linking us with a life
beyond. It does seem to me life, and not silence; love, and not
emptiness. It has not come in between us, as I feared it might--or
rather it HAS come in between us, and seems to be holding both our
hands. I don't say that my reason tells me this--but something has
outrun my reason, and something stronger and better than reason. It
is near and dear: and, dearest, you will believe me when I say that
this isn't said to please you or to woo you--I wouldn't do that! I
am not in sight of the reality yet, as you have been; but it IS a
reality, and not a sweet dream."

Maud looked at him, her eyes brimming with sudden tears. "Ah, my
beloved," she said, "that is all and more than I had hoped. Let it
just stay there! I am not foolish about it, and indeed the further
away that it gets, the less I am sure what happened. I shall not
want you to speak of it: it isn't that it is too sacred--nothing is
too sacred--but it is just a fact I can't reckon with, like the
fact of one's own birth and death. All I just hoped was that you
might not think it only a girl's fancy; but indeed I should not
have cared if you HAD thought that. The TRUTH--that is what
matters; and nothing that you or I or anyone, in any passion of
love or sorrow, can believe about the truth, can alter it; the only
thing is to try to see it all clearly, not to give false reasons,
not to let one's imagination go."

"Yes, yes," said Howard, "that's the secret of love and life and
everything; and yet it seems a hard thing to believe; because if it
were not for your illusions about me, for instance--if you could
really see me as I am--you couldn't feel as you do; one comes back
to trusting one's heart after all--that is the only power we have
of reading the writing on the wall. And yet that is not all; it IS
possible to read it, to spell it out; but it is the interpretation
that one needs, and for that one must trust love, and love only."

They went back to the house in a happy silence; but Maud slipped
out again, and went to the little churchyard. There behind the
chancel, in a corner of the buttress, was a little mound. Maud laid
a single white flower upon it. "No," she said softly, as if
speaking in the ear of a child, "no, my darling, I am not making
any mistake. I don't think of you as sleeping here, though I love
the place where the little limbs are laid. You are awake, alive,
about your business, I don't doubt. I'd have loved you, guarded
you, helped you along; but you have made love live for me, and
that, and hope, are enough now for us both! I don't claim you,
sweet; I don't even ask you to remember and understand."


THE END

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