The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Good Place/Chapter 2
II
He might have been a week in the place—the scene of his new consciousness—before he spoke at all. The occasion of it then was that one of the quiet figures he had been idly watching drew at last nearer, and showed him a face that was the highest expression—to his pleased but as yet slightly confused perception—of the general charm. What was the general charm? He couldn't, for that matter, easily have phrased it; it was such an abyss of negatives, such an absence of everything. The oddity was that, after a minute, he was struck as by the reflection of his own very image in this first interlocutor seated with him, on the easy bench, under the high, clear portico and above the wide, far-reaching garden, where the things that most showed in the greenness were the surface of still water and the white note of old statues. The absence of everything was, in the aspect of the Brother who had thus informally joined him—a man of his own age, tired, distinguished, modest, kind—really, as he could soon see, but the absence of what he didn't want. He didn't want, for the time, anything but just to be there, to stay in the bath. He was in the bath yet, the broad, deep bath of stillness. They sat in it together now, with the water up to their chins. He had not had to talk, he had not had to think, he had scarce even had to feel. He had been sunk that way before, sunk—when and where?—in another flood; only a flood of rushing waters, in which bumping and gasping were all. This was a current so slow and so tepid that one floated practically without motion and without chill. The break of silence was not immediate, though Dane seemed indeed to feel it begin before a sound passed. It could pass quite sufficiently without words that he and his mate were Brothers, and what that meant.
Dane wondered, but with no want of ease—for want of ease was impossible—if his friend found in him the same likeness, the proof of peace, the gage of what the place could do. The long afternoon crept to its end; the shadows fell further and the sky glowed deeper; but nothing changed—nothing could change—in the element itself. It was a conscious security. It was wonderful! Dane had lived into it, but he was still immensely aware. He would have been sorry to lose that, for just this fact, as yet, the blessed fact of consciousness, seemed the greatest thing of all. Its only fault was that, being in itself such an occupation, so fine an unrest in the heart of gratitude, the life of the day all went to it. But what even then was the harm? He had come only to come, to take what he found. This was the part where the great cloister, inclosed externally on three sides and probably the largest, lightest, fairest effect, to his charmed sense, that human hands could ever have expressed in dimensions of length and breadth, opened to the south its splendid fourth quarter, turned to the great view an outer gallery that combined with the rest of the portico to form a high, dry loggia, such as he a little pretended to himself he had, in Italy, in old days, seen in old cities, old convents, old villas. This recall of the disposition of some great abode of an Order, some mild Monte Cassino, some Grande Chartreuse more accessible, was his main term of comparison; but he knew he had really never anywhere beheld anything at once so calculated and so generous.
Three impressions in particular had been with him all the week, and he could only recognise in silence their happy effect on his nerves. How it was all managed he couldn't have told—he had been content moreover till now with his ignorance of cause and pretext; but whenever he chose to listen with a certain intentness he made out, as from a distance, the sound of slow, sweet bells. How could they be so far and yet so audible? How could they be so near and yet so faint? How, above all, could they, in such an arrest of life, be, to time things, so frequent? The very essence of the bliss of Dane's whole change had been precisely that there was nothing now to time. It was the same with the slow footsteps that always, within earshot, to the vague attention, marked the space and the leisure, seemed, in long, cool arcades, lightly to fall and perpetually to recede. This was the second impression, and it melted into the third, as, for that matter, every form of softness, in the great good place, was but a further turn, without jerk or gap, of the endless roll of serenity. The quiet footsteps were quiet figures; the quiet figures that, to the eye, kept the picture human and brought its perfection within reach. This perfection, he felt on the bench by his friend, was now more in reach than ever. His friend at last turned to him a look different from the looks of friends in London clubs.
'The thing was to find it out!'
It was extraordinary how this remark fitted into his thought. 'Ah, wasn't it? And when I think,' said Dane, 'of all the people who haven't and who never will!' He sighed over these unfortunates with a tenderness that, in its degree, was practically new to him, feeling, too, how well his companion would know the people he meant. He only meant some, but they were all who would want it; though of these, no doubt—well, for reasons, for things that, in the world, he had observed—there would never be too many. Not all perhaps who wanted would really find; but none at least would find who didn't really want. And then what the need would have to have been first! What it at first had to be for himself! He felt afresh, in the light of his companion's face, what it might still be even when deeply satisfied, as well as what communication was established by the mere mutual knowledge of it.
'Every man must arrive by himself and on his own feet—isn't that so? We're brothers here for the time, as in a great monastery, and we immediately think of each other and recognise each other as such; but we must have first got here as we can, and we meet after long journeys by complicated ways. Moreover we meet—don't we?—with closed eyes.'
'Ah, don't speak as if we were dead!' Dane laughed.
'I shan't mind death if it's like this,' his friend replied.
It was too obvious, as Dane gazed before him, that one wouldn't; but after a moment he asked, with the first articulation, as yet, of his most elementary wonder: 'Where is it?'
'I shouldn't be surprised if it were much nearer than one ever suspected.'
'Nearer town, do you mean?'
'Nearer everything—nearer every one.'
George Dane thought. 'Somewhere, for instance, down in Surrey?'
His Brother met him on this with a shade of reluctance. 'Why should we call it names? It must have a climate, you see.'
'Yes,' Dane happily mused; 'without that———!' All it so securely did have overwhelmed him again, and he couldn't help breaking out: What is it?'
'Oh, it's positively a part of our ease and our rest and our change, I think, that we don't at all know and that we may really call it, for that matter, anything in the world we like—the thing, for instance, we love it most for being.'
'I know what I call it,' said Dane after a moment. Then as his friend listened with interest: 'Just simply "The Great Good Place."'
'I see—what can you say more? I've put it to myself perhaps a little differently.' They sat there as innocently as small boys confiding to each other the names of toy animals. 'The Great Want Met.'
'Ah, yes, that's it!'
'Isn't it enough for us that it's a place carried on, for our benefit, so admirably that we strain our ears in vain for a creak of the machinery? Isn't it enough for us that it's simply a thorough hit?'
'Ah, a hit!' Dane benignantly murmured.
'It does for us what it pretends to do,' his companion went on; 'the mystery isn't deeper than that. The thing is probably simple enough in fact, and on a thoroughly practical basis; only it has had its origin in a splendid thought, in a real stroke of genius.'
'Yes,' Dane exclaimed, 'in a sense—on somebody or other's part—so exquisitely personal!'
'Precisely—it rests, like all good things, on experience. The "great want" comes home—that's the great thing it does! On the day it came home to the right mind this dear place was constituted. It always, moreover, in the long run, has been met—it always must be. How can it not require to be, more and more, as pressure of every sort grows?'
Dane, with his hands folded in his lap, took in these words of wisdom. 'Pressure of every sort is growing!' he placidly observed.
'I see well enough what that fact has done to you,' his Brother returned.
Dane smiled. 'I couldn't have borne it longer. I don't know what would have become of me.'
'I know what would have become of me.'
'Well, it's the same thing.'
'Yes,' said Dane's companion, 'it's doubtless the same thing.' On which they sat in silence a little, seeming pleasantly to follow, in the view of the green garden, the vague movements of the monster—madness, surrender, collapse—they had escaped. Their bench was like a box at the opera. 'And I may perfectly, you know,' the Brother pursued, 'have seen you before. I may even have known you well. We don't know.'
They looked at each other again serenely enough, and at last Dane said: 'No, we don't know.'
'That's what I meant by our coming with our eyes closed. Yes—there's something out. There's a gap—a link missing, the great hiatus!' the Brother laughed. 'It's as simple a story as the old, old rupture—the break that lucky Catholics have always been able to make, that they are still, with their innumerable religious houses, able to make, by going into "retreat." I don't speak of the pious exercises; I speak only of the material simplification. I don't speak of the putting off of one's self; I speak only—if one has a self worth sixpence—of the getting it back. The place, the time, the way, were for those of the old persuasion, always there—are indeed practically there for them as much as ever. They can always get off—the blessed houses receive. So it was high time that we—we of the great Protestant peoples, still more, if possible, in the sensitive individual case, overscored and overwhelmed, still more congested with mere quantity and prostituted, through our "enterprise," to mere profanity—should learn how to get off, should find somewhere our retreat and remedy. There was such a huge chance for it!'
Dane laid his hand on his companion's arm. 'It's charming, how, when we speak for ourselves, we speak for each other. That was exactly what I said!' He had fallen to recalling from over the gulf the last occasion.
The Brother, as if it would do them both good, only desired to draw him out. 'What you said———?'
'To him—that morning.' Dane caught a far bell again and heard a slow footstep. A quiet figure passed somewhere—neither of them turned to look. What was, little by little, more present to him was the perfect taste. It was supreme—it was everywhere. 'I just dropped my burden—and he received it.'
'And was it very great?'
'Oh, such a load!' Dane laughed.
'Trouble, sorrow, doubt?'
'Oh, no; worse than that!'
'Worse?'
'"Success"—the vulgarest kind!' And Dane laughed again.
'Ah, I know that, too! No one in future, as things are going, will be able to face success.'
'Without something of this sort—never. The better it is the worse—the greater the deadlier. But my one pain here,' Dane continued, 'is in thinking of my poor friend.'
'The person to whom you've already alluded?'
'My substitute in the world. Such an unutterable benefactor. He turned up that morning when everything had somehow got on my nerves, when the whole great globe indeed, nerves, or no nerves, seemed to have squeezed itself into my study. It wasn't a question of nerves, it was a mere question of the displacement of everything—of submersion by our eternal too much. I didn't know où donner de la tête—I couldn't have gone a step further.'
The intelligence with which the Brother listened kept them as children feeding from the same bowl. 'And then you got the tip?'
'I got the tip!' Dane happily sighed.
'Well, we all get it. But I dare say differently.'
'Then how did you———?'
The Brother hesitated, smiling. 'You tell me first.'