It was dark night when I left his deathbed and went back to my own inn
down the straggling street of Luzon.
That return to my inn sticks in my memory also as a thing apart, as an
experience apart. Within was a subdued bustle of women, a flitting of
lights, and the doing of petty offices to that queer, exhausted thing
that had once been my active and urgent little uncle. For me those
offices were irksome and impertinent. I slammed the door, and went out
into the warm, foggy drizzle of the village street lit by blurred
specks of light in great voids of darkness, and never a soul abroad.
That warm veil of fog produced an effect of vast seclusion. The very
houses by the roadside peered through it as if from another world. The
stillness of the night was marked by an occasional remote baying of
dogs; all these people kept dogs because of the near neighbourhood of
the frontier.
Death!
It was one of those rare seasons of relief, when for a little time one
walks a little outside of and beside life. I felt as I sometimes feel
after the end of a play. I saw the whole business of my uncle’s life as
something familiar and completed. It was done, like a play one leaves,
like a book one closes. I thought of the push and the promotions, the
noise of London, the crowded, various company of people through which
our lives had gone, the public meetings, the excitements, the dinners
and disputations, and suddenly it appeared to me that none of these
things existed.
It came to me like a discovery that none of these things existed.
Before and after I have thought and called life a phantasmagoria, but
never have I felt its truth as I did that night.... We had parted; we
two who had kept company so long had parted. But there was, I knew, no
end to him or me. He had died a dream death, and ended a dream; his
pain dream was over. It seemed to me almost as though I had died, too.
What did it matter, since it was unreality, all of it, the pain and
desire, the beginning and the end? There was no reality except this
solitary road, this quite solitary road, along which one went rather
puzzled, rather tired....
Part of the fog became a big mastiff that came towards me and stopped
and slunk round me, growling, barked gruffly, and shortly and presently
became fog again.
My mind swayed back to the ancient beliefs and fears of our race. My
doubts and disbeliefs slipped from me like a loosely fitting garment. I
wondered quite simply what dogs bayed about the path of that other
walker in the darkness, what shapes, what lights, it might be, loomed
about him as he went his way from our last encounter on earth—along the
paths that are real, and the way that endures for ever?