Struggling to bear the fate which I had met, I turned as manfully as I
might, and retraced my steps down the thronging street, within whose
limits I now learned that my freedom was confined. It was a sickening
discovery. I had been a man of will so developed and freedom so
sufficient that helplessness came upon me like a change of temperament;
it took the form of hopelessness almost at once.
What was death? The secret of life. What knew I of the system of
things on which a blow upon the head had ushered me all unready,
reluctant, and uninstructed as I was? No more than the ruddiest live
stockbroker in the street, whose blood went bounding, that fresh
morning, to the antics of the Santa Ma. I was not accustomed to be
uninformed; my ignorance appalled me. Even in the deeps of my misery,
I found space for a sense of humiliation; I felt profoundly mortified.
In that spot, in that way, of all others, why was I withheld? Was it
the custom of the black country called Death, which we mark
"unexplored" upon the map of life,--was it the habit to tie a man to
the place where he had died? But this was not the spot where I had
died. It was the spot where I had learned that I had died. It was the
place where the consciousness of death had wrought itself, not upon the
nerves of the body, but upon the faculties of the mind. I had been
dead twelve hours before I found it out.
I looked up and down the street, where the living men scurried to and
fro upon their little errands. These seemed immeasurably small. I
looked upon them with disgust. Fettered to that pavement, like a
convict to his ball-and-chain, I passed and repassed in wretchedness
whose quality I cannot express, and would not if I could.
"I am punished," I said; "I am punished for that which I have done.
This is my doom. I am imprisoned here."
Sometimes I broke into uncontrollable misery, crying upon my wife's
dear name. Then I would hush the outbreak, lest some one overhear me;
and then I would remember that no one could overhear. I looked into
the faces of the people whom I met and passed, with such longings for
one single sign of recognition as are not to be described. It even
occurred to me that among them all one might be found of whom my love
and grief and will might make a messenger to Helen. But I found none
such, or I gained no such power; and, sick at heart, I turned away.
Suddenly, as I threaded the thick of the press, beating to and fro, and
up and down, as dead leaves move before the wind, some one softly
touched my hand.
It was the St. Bernard, the broker's dog. This time, as before, he
looked into my face with signs of pleasure or of pity, or of both, and
made as if he would caress me.
"Lion!" I cried, "_you_ know me, don't you? Bless you, Lion!"
Now, at the dumb thing's recognition, I could have wept for pleasure.
The dog, when I spoke to him, followed me; and for some time walked up
and down and athwart the street, beside me. This was a comfort to me.
At last his master came out upon the sidewalk and looked for him.
Brake whistled merrily, and the dog, at the first call, went bounding
in.
Ordinary writers upon usual topics, addressing readers of their own
condition, have their share of difficulties; at best one conquers the
art of expression as a General conquers an enemy. But the obstacles
which present themselves to the recorder of this narrative are such as
will be seen at once to have peculiar force. Almost at the outset they
dishearten me. How shall I tell the story unless I be understood? And
how should I be understood if I told the story? Were it for me, a man
miserable and erring, gone to his doom as untrained for its
consequences, or for the use of them, as a drayman for the use of
hypnotism in surgery,--were it for me to play the interpreter between
life and death? Were it for me to expect to be successful in that
solemn effort which is as old as time, and as hopeless as the eyes of
mourners?
What shall I say? It is willed that I shall speak. The angel said
unto me: Write. How shall I obey, who am the most unworthy of any soul
upon whom has been laid the burden of the higher utterance? Sacred be
the task. Would that its sacredness could sanctify the unfitness of
him who here fulfils it.
The experience which I have already narrated was followed by an
indefinite period of great misery. How long I remained a prisoner in
that unwelcome spot I cannot accurately tell.
What are called by dwellers in the body days and nights, and dawns and
darks, succeeded each other, little remarked by my wretchedness, or by
the sense of remoteness from these things which now began to grow upon
me. The life of what we call a spirit had begun for me in the form of
a moral dislocation. The wrench, the agony, the process of setting the
nature under its new conditions, took place in due order, but with
bitter laggardness. The accident of death did not heal in my soul by
what surgeons call "the first intention." I retained for a long time
the consciousness of being an injured creature.
As I paced and repaced the narrow street where the money-makers and
money-lovers of the town jostled and thronged, a great disgust
descended upon me. The place, the springs of conduct, wearied me,
something in the manner that an educated person is wearied by low
conversation. It seemed to be like this:--that the moral motives of
the living created the atmosphere of the dead therein confined. It was
as if I inhaled the coarse friction, the low aspiration, the
feverishness, the selfishness, the dishonour, that the getting of gain,
when it became the purpose of life, involved. I experienced a sense of
being stifled, and breathed with difficulty; much as those live men
would have done, if the gas-pipes had burst in the street.
It did not detract from this feeling of asphyxia that I was aware of
having, to a certain extent, shared the set of moral compounds which I
now found resolved to their elements, by the curious chemistry of death.
I had loved money and the getting of money, as men of the world, and of
success in it, are apt to do. I was neither better nor worse than
others of my sort. I had speculated with the profits of my profession,
idly enough, but hotly, too, at times. I had told myself that I did
this out of anxiety for the future of my family. I had viewed myself
in the light of the model domestic man, who guards his household
against an evil day. It had never occurred to me to classify myself
with the mere money-changers, into whose atmosphere I had elected to
put myself.
Now, as I glided in and out among them, unseen, unheard, unrecognized,
a spirit among their flesh, there came upon me a humiliating sense of
my true relation to them. Was it thus, I said, or so? Did I this or
that? Was the balance of motives so disproportionate after all? Was
there so little love of wife and child? So much of self and gain? Was
the item of the true so small? The sum of the false so large? Had I
been so much less that was noble, so much more that was low?
I mingled with the mass of haggard men at a large stock auction which
half the street attended. The panic had spread. Sleeplessness and
anxiety had carved the crowding faces with hard chisels. The shouts,
the scramble, the oaths, the clinched hands, the pitiful pushing,
affected me like a dismal spectacular play on some barbarian stage.
How shall I express the sickening aspect of the scene to a man but
newly dead?
The excitement waxed with the morning. The old and placid Santa Ma
throbbed like any little road of yesterday. The stock had gained 32
points in ten minutes, and down again, and up again to Heaven knows
what. Men ran from despair to elation, and behaved like maniacs in
both. Men who were gentlemen at home turned savages here. Men who
were honourable in society turned sharpers here. Madness had them, as
I watched them. A kind of pity for them seized me. I glided in among
them, and lifted my whole heart to stay them if I could. I stretched
the hands that no one saw. I raised the voice that none could hear.
"Gentlemen!" I cried, "count me the market value of it--on the margin
of two lives! By the bonds wherewith you bind yourselves you shall be
bound!... What is the sum of wealth represented within these walls
to-day? Name it to me.... The whole of it, for the power to leave
this place! The whole of it, the whole of it, for one half-hour in a
dead man's desolated home! A hundred-fold the whole of it for"--
But here I lost command of myself, and fleeing from the place where my
presence and my misery and my entreaty alike were lost upon the
attention of the living throng as were the elements of the air they
breathed, I rushed into the outer world again; there to wander up and
down the street, and hate the place, and hate myself for being there,
and hate the greed of gain I used to love, and hate myself for having
loved it; and yet to know that I was forced to act as if I loved it
still, and to be the ghost before the ghost of a desire.
"It is my doom," I said. "I am punished. I am fastened to this
worldly spot, and to this awful way of being dead."
Now, while I spoke these words, I came, in the stress of my
wretchedness, fleeing to the head of the street; and there, I cannot
tell you how, I cannot answer why, as the arrow springs from the bow,
or the conduct from the heart, or the spirit from the flesh,--in one
blessed instant I knew that I was free to leave the spot, and crying,
"Helen, Helen!" broke from it.