Chapter XIX: To Hugh Pontrex, Hotel Montana, Biarritz

91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_July_ 16, 1910.

MY DEAR HUGH,

So the pendulum of our frailty swings. The warm airs of July have surrounded you with well-being in your Atlantic quarters, and a confounded carbuncle under my left shoulder has been painting my world quite black for at least four days, and grey for the inside of a week. It's the penalty, I suppose, of being rarely laid aside by sickness, that when some trivial misfortune does make its appearance, one exaggerates its proportion in the general scheme of things to a quite unmerited degree--and especially, I think, if one happens to be a doctor. "Physician, heal thyself," the mockers say. But he should never attempt to. He knows too much about the various possibilities, the remoter significances of each one of his little troubles, to be a sufficiently clear-minded judge. And he is far better advised when he resigns his body _in toto_ to the care of some outside mind, and confines his own mental powers to the fortification of his private philosophy.

Pain, sleeplessness, and that peculiar sense of being disowned by one's own body that a high temperature always seems to induce--I suppose if all the comfortable words that have been uttered in their explanation were to be gathered up into a book the whole world would not be great enough to contain it. We were told not so desperately long ago that they represented the direct tenancy of the evil one or some of his dependents. Then a more enlightened but still stern theology informed us that they represented the well-deserved judgments of God; until a later and more generous interpretation has inclined rather to believe in them as evidences, a little puzzlingly disguised, of a chastening yet still indubitable Love.

But, alas, it is so easy, even in the full comfort of bodily health, to perceive the bottomless gaps in these and all other arguments about the great problem of pain, that in the actual enduring of it there seems, after all, very little to be done but to lie low, and bear it humbly--as many a better fellow and weaker woman have borne worse things before us since the foreconsciousness of death became the price of the first man's soul. And yet I believe quite orthodoxly that these unattractive episodes in one's life--even carbuncles--do really contain some sort of a message to one's intelligence, apart from the patent one that somewhere or other one has blundered against a natural law, and paid the necessary penalty.

For there comes a period in most illnesses, I think, sometimes during a temporary respite, more often perhaps at the first dawn of convalescence, when one becomes extraordinarily conscious, yet without discomfort, of the almost trivial delicacy of one's surrounding tissue. It is generally, I suppose, a moment of exhaustion, both mental and physical, either upon the bugle of a victory or a truce. But it is a moment when one's spiritual aesthesis, as it were, is peculiarly at liberty. Very soon, in a minute or two even, Nature will begin her work of restoration--none more willing than she, given a very little patience and half a straw to make her bricks with. But now she is standing by for a moment, trowel in hand, and the outer wind is breathing through the gap. And it's then, I think, if you'll only listen carefully enough, that you can sometimes hear it whispering.

"Presently," you can hear it say, "this little house of yours will be mended, and the more easily maybe, because its walls are so thin. But don't--don't forget too quickly that it is but a house after all."

Yet I suppose we do forget it, most of us, and probably quite healthily, when once the dwelling-place is bricked up again, and the new paint is on, and it stands foursquare to the winds that may not enter now. And yet again, if the message has once been heard, or twice, or thrice, as circumstances have it, I don't believe that it is ever entirely lost. And there, perhaps, may even lie the key to all the mystery; so that when the last storm blows, and Nature must shake her head, and let the frail house fall, its tenant may not go out altogether unprepared.

I felt all this very strongly some ten days ago, having made or reviewed my will about twenty-seven times, resigned myself to the administration of gas and the skilful weapons of old Sir Jeremy across the way, and awakened next morning to a normal temperature and a comparatively comfortable back. But a week's high feeding, and three days with Esther at Eastbourne, in the occasional brisk and simple company of Claire and her pals, have been steadily blunting my higher susceptibilities. So that's why I've been setting them on record with so much circumstantial detail--a great deal less for your satisfaction than my own.

We had resolved to take Miss Claire by surprise, and, calling at the school, found, as a consequence, that she was out. She had probably gone Pevensey way, thought the maid, with some of the older young ladies and one of the governesses. And it was out Pevensey way that we presently recognised upon the beach, among a heterogeneous collection of empty shoes and stockings, some big-brimmed straw hats with the school ribbon upon them. Their owners were for the most part thigh-deep in the English Channel with their skirts tucked conveniently round their plump waists. And they were being watched from the shore by a very pleasant young lady, who looked rather wistfully as if she would like to be out there too. Yes, she told us, Claire was in the water with the others, probably among the deeper ones who were getting their knickers wet. Surveying the melee with an expression of polite concern, she was rather afraid that it would be a little difficult to make Claire understand who we were. But if we wouldn't mind waiting for a minute or two they would all be coming in to dry their legs before going back to prep.

Presently some floating atom of wreckage took them unanimously eastward, splashing through the shallows, until the governess, waving a white handkerchief, brought them gingerly ashore across a little bank of rather slippery-looking rock. There was a general shaking out and rearranging of tousled manes, yellow and chestnut and black, and a modest dropping of skirts to the demurer level of shining wet knees.

The little party drifted slowly towards us, their brown feet lingering wholesomely across the sands.

"You'll know Claire," said the governess, "by the bandage round her instep. I oughtn't really to have let her paddle."

Esther's eyes became a little anxious.

"But what has been the matter?" she asked.

The governess smiled.

"Oh, nothing very serious," she said. "And I think you must ask Claire herself. Tales out of school, you know."

And then the least tidy, perhaps, of the damsels detached herself suddenly from her comrades, and came down upon us at top speed, regardless of pebbles.

"Have you got me off prep?" she asked earnestly, after she had kissed us and found her shoes and stockings. And having explained to her that we were going to take her out to tea for a pre-birthday treat--she was going to be sixteen next week--we inquired about the bandage. It was the result, we discovered, of an illegal (and unconfirmed) raid upon a neighbouring dormitory, during which, by a kind of Homeric retribution, a stray tin-tack had wounded her unprotected foot.

"But it's about well now, I should think," she said, undoing the bandage, and turning up a salmon-pink sole for our inspection. And we were obliged to confess that it was.

She rolled up the bandage into a little ball, and threw it down the beach.

"I wish we could _always_ go barefoot," she sighed. And for the moment I felt inclined to agree with her. For the happy foot, as T. E. Brown has said, swings rather from the heart than from the hip. And there are few prettier things in nature than the restless, romping legs of the average healthy little maiden. They are her life's joy made visible; so that it really seems a shame, if a necessary one, to imprison them in even the airiest of stockings and the most hygienic of leather shoes.

Blue gingham petticoats,
White blown aprons,
Five pairs of plump legs
Twinkling down the hill,
Black imprisoned plump legs,
Fretful for the stream bed,
Tired of shoes and stockings,
Dancing like a rill,
Dancing down the hillside,
So come the children,
Like a rill in sunshine,
So dance they,
Seek the solemn waters,
Marching to the ocean,
Set the solemn waters
Laughing at their play.
So into my heart come,
Silver it with laughter,
Lest among the shadows
Lost should be its way,
So into my heart come
Rosamund and Daphne,
Marian and Rosemary,
And little baby May.

Claire and her companions had been paddling in the big ocean itself; and being comparatively dignified did not of course wear aprons. Moreover, as I had the strongest reasons for believing, they were at this moment quite innocent of petticoats. But the little poem comes back to me as I write.

"And next week," she proceeded ruefully, "I shall have to go into blobs and half-masters."

We stared at her rather blankly.

"All the girls do, you know," she added, "when they turn sixteen."

"But blobs----" I began.

"And half-masters?" puzzled Esther.

"When your hair's neither up nor down," Claire explained, "with a big fat bow on it. And when you have to wear skirts a foot below your knees."

She rolled over, and struck her toes into the sand.

"It's to show," she finished pathetically, "that you're too grown up to be spanked and not old enough to have visiting cards."

Which seems to suggest that even sixteen may have its tragedies, though its capacity for ices remains happily unimpaired. Or would you call them growing pains? And are all pains growing pains?

Ever yrs.,
P. H.