White moths
hovered dimly over the garden-beds, and the footsteps of night tip-toed
through the bushes. Suddenly Frank rose. “Ah, it is the supreme moment,” he said softly. “Now more than at any
other time the current of life, the eternal imperishable current runs so
close to me that I am almost enveloped in it. Be silent a minute.”

He advanced to the edge of the terrace and looked out standing stretched
with arms outspread. Darcy heard him draw a long breath into his lungs,
and after many seconds expel it again. Six or eight times he did this,
then turned back into the lamplight. “It will sound to you quite mad, I expect,” he said, “but if you want to
hear the soberest truth I have ever spoken and shall ever speak, I will
tell you about myself. But come into the garden if it is not too damp
for you. I have never told anyone yet, but I shall like to tell you. It
is long, in fact, since I have even tried to classify what I have
learned.”

They wandered into the fragrant dimness of the pergola, and sat down. Then Frank began:

“Years ago, do you remember,” he said, “we used often to talk about the
decay of joy in the world. Many impulses, we settled, had contributed
to this decay, some of which were good in themselves, others that were
quite completely bad. Among the good things, I put what we may call
certain Christian virtues, renunciation, resignation, sympathy with
suffering, and the desire to relieve sufferers. But out of those things
spring very bad ones, useless renunciations, asceticism for its own
sake, mortification of the flesh with nothing to follow, no
corresponding gain that is, and that awful and terrible disease which
devastated England some centuries ago, and from which by heredity of
spirit we suffer now, Puritanism. That was a dreadful plague, the brutes
held and taught that joy and laughter and merriment were evil: it was a
doctrine the most profane and wicked. Why, what is the commonest crime
one sees? A sullen face. That is the truth of the matter. “Now all my life I have believed that we are intended to be happy, that
joy is of all gifts the most divine. And when I left London, abandoned
my career, such as it was, I did so because I intended to devote my life
to the cultivation of joy, and, by continuous and unsparing effort, to
be happy. Among people, and in constant intercourse with others, I did
not find it possible; there were too many distractions in towns and
work-rooms, and also too much suffering. So I took one step backwards or
forwards, as you may choose to put it, and went straight to Nature, to
trees, birds, animals, to all those things which quite clearly pursue
one aim only, which blindly follow the great native instinct to be happy
without any care at all for morality, or human law or divine law. I
wanted, you understand, to get all joy first-hand and unadulterated, and
I think it scarcely exists among men; it is obsolete.”

Darcy turned in his chair. “Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?” he asked. “Food, food and
mating.”

Frank laughed gently in the stillness. “Do not think I became a sensualist,” he said. “I did not make that
mistake. For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round
his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him. I may be mad,
it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that. No,
what is it that makes puppies play with their own tails, that sends cats
on their prowling ecstatic errands at night?”

He paused a moment. “So I went to Nature,” he said. “I sat down here in this New Forest, sat
down fair and square, and looked. That was my first difficulty, to sit
here quiet without being bored, to wait without being impatient, to be
receptive and very alert, though for a long time nothing particular
happened. The change in fact was slow in those early stages.”

“Nothing happened?” asked Darcy rather impatiently, with the sturdy
revolt against any new idea which to the English mind is synonymous
with nonsense. “Why, what in the world _should_ happen?”

Now Frank as he had known him was the most generous but most
quick-tempered of mortal men; in other words his anger would flare to a
prodigious beacon, under almost no provocation, only to be quenched
again under a gust of no less impulsive kindliness. Thus the moment
Darcy had spoken, an apology for his hasty question was half-way up his
tongue. But there was no need for it to have travelled even so far, for
Frank laughed again with kindly, genuine mirth. “Oh, how I should have resented that a few years ago,” he said. “Thank
goodness that resentment is one of the things I have got rid of. I
certainly wish that you should believe my story--in fact, you are going
to--but that you at this moment should imply that you do not, does not
concern me.”

“Ah, your solitary sojournings have made you inhuman,” said Darcy, still
very English. “No, human,” said Frank. “Rather more human, at least rather less of an
ape.”

“Well, that was my first quest,” he continued, after a moment, “the
deliberate and unswerving pursuit of joy, and my method, the eager
contemplation of Nature. As far as motive went, I daresay it was purely
selfish, but as far as effect goes, it seems to me about the best thing
one can do for one’s fellow-creatures, for happiness is more infectious
than small-pox. So, as I said, I sat down and waited; I looked at happy
things, zealously avoided the sight of anything unhappy, and by degrees
a little trickle of the happiness of this blissful world began to filter
into me. The trickle grew more abundant, and now, my dear fellow, if I
could for a moment divert from me into you one half of the torrent of
joy that pours through me day and night, you would throw the world, art,
everything aside, and just live, exist. When a man’s body dies, it
passes into trees and flowers. Well, that is what I have been trying to
do with my soul before death.”

The servant had brought into the pergola a table with syphons and
spirits, and had set a lamp upon it. As Frank spoke he leaned forward
towards the other, and Darcy for all his matter-of-fact common-sense
could have sworn that his companion’s face shone, was luminous in
itself. His dark brown eyes glowed from within, the unconscious smile of
a child irradiated and transformed his face. Darcy felt suddenly
excited, exhilarated. “Go on,” he said. “Go on. I can feel you are somehow telling me sober
truth. I daresay you are mad; but I don’t see that matters.”

Frank laughed again. “Mad?” he said. “Yes, certainly, if you wish. But I prefer to call it
sane. However, nothing matters less than what anybody chooses to call
things. God never labels his gifts; He just puts them into our hands;
just as he put animals in the garden of Eden, for Adam to name if he
felt disposed.”

“So by the continual observance and study of things that were happy,”
continued he, “I got happiness, I got joy.