was this very sunlight and freshness of air which penetrated to those
other depths which were the springs of life and death. From the bitter
depth of his own hell Philip had swum up into life, and yet as he went
up he was getting down, by the same movement, into other depths; but
these were cool, and no blackness mingled with their veiled obscurities.
Early September this year in the New Forest had harked back to June.
After that day or two of storm and hot rain, the weather had cleared
again, and a week of golden hours, golden with the sun by day and with
the myriad shining of the stars by night, made one almost believe that
time had stopped, or that its incessant wheel had begun to run back to
the clean and early days of the world. That moment which had come to
Philip, when the outpouring of his bitterness and resentment were
stayed, was an epoch to him, which ranked by itself. It drew away from
his other days and deeds, it was a leaven that worked incessantly,
clouds cleared, Marah itself began to grow sweet, and splash by splash
pieces of his bitterness dropped like stones into that sea of
forgetfulness and forgiveness which, before any soul is complete and
ready to stand before God, must spread from pole to pole. The
determination to forget in most cases, as here, sets the tides on the
flow; forgiveness, the higher quality, is often the natural sequel. Yet
to forget a grudge is to have forgiven it, while forgiveness may be a
hard, metallic thing--the best perhaps of which we are capable--but it
will not grow soft until forgetfulness has come as well. The cause for
the grudge must cease to exist in the mind before the grudge can be
wholly forgiven. Poor Philip was not near that yet, but still bits of
the grudge kept falling into the sea of forgetfulness as from the
stalactitic roof of a cavern. Some dropped on the beach merely, and were
still hard and unabsorbed, but others fell fair, and a dead splash was
the end of them.
* * * * *
These tranquil golden days helped it all; while the huge beeches grew
slim and straight against the sky, while the warm, wholesome air was an
anæsthetic to his pain, and while above all this serene, joyous youth, a
patent, undeniable proof of the practical power of inward happiness, was
with him, it became daily more impossible to nurse and cherish any
bitterness, however well nourished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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