He climbed the three flights of stone stairs, and put his key into the
lock; but before he turned it, he stopped--to rest, to take breath. On
the door his name was painted in big white letters, Mr. Richard Dane.
It is always silent in the Temple at midnight; to-night the silence
was dense, like a fog. It was Sunday night; and on Sunday night, even
within the hushed precincts of the Temple, one is conscious of a
deeper hush.
When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop
into an armchair before the empty fireplace. He was tired, he was
exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he
always dined on Sundays, with the Rodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had
driven home in a hansom. There was no reason why he should be tired.
But he was tired. A deadly lassitude penetrated his body and his
spirit, like a fluid. He was too tired to go to bed.
'I suppose I am getting old,' he thought.
To a second person the matter would have appeared not one of
supposition but of certainty, not of progression but of
accomplishment. Getting old indeed? But he _was_ old. It was an old
man, grey and wrinkled and wasted, who sat there, limp, sunken upon
himself, in his easy-chair. In years, to be sure, he was under sixty;
but he looked like a man of seventy-five.
'I am getting old, I suppose I am getting old.'
And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him
like a misty landscape, and thought what a failure it had been. What
had it come to? What had it brought him? What had he done or won?
Nothing, nothing. It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude,
disappointment, and, to-night especially, a sense of fatigue and
apathy that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket. On a table, a
yard or two away, stood a decanter of whisky, with some soda-water
bottles and tumblers; he looked at it with heavy eyes, and he knew
that there was what he needed. A little whisky would strengthen him,
revive him, and make it possible for him to bestir himself and undress
and go to bed. But when he thought of rising and moving to pour the
whisky out, he shrank from that effort as from an Herculean labour;
no--he was too tired. Then his mind went back to the friends he had
left in Chelsea half an hour ago; it seemed an indefinably long time
ago, years and years ago; they were like blurred phantoms, dimly
remembered from a remote past.
Yes, his life had been a failure; total, miserable, abject. It had
come to nothing; its harvest was a harvest of ashes. If it had been a
useful life, he could have accepted its unhappiness; if it had been a
happy life, he could have forgiven its uselessness; but it had been
both useless and unhappy. He had done nothing for others, he had won
nothing for himself. Oh, but he had tried, he had tried. When he had
left Oxford people expected great things of him; he had expected great
things of himself. He was admitted to be clever, to be gifted; he was
ambitious, he was in earnest. He wished to make a name, he wished to
justify his existence by fruitful work. And he had worked hard. He had
put all his knowledge, all his talent, all his energy, into his work;
he had not spared himself; he had passed laborious days and studious
nights. And what remained to show for it? Three or four volumes upon
Political Economy, that had been read in their day a little, discussed
a little, and then quite forgotten--superseded by the books of newer
men. 'Pulped, pulped,' he reflected bitterly. Except for a stray dozen
of copies scattered here and there--in the British Museum, in his
College library, on his own bookshelves--his published writings had by
this time (he could not doubt) met with the common fate of
unappreciated literature, and been 'pulped.'
'Pulped--pulped; pulped--pulped.' The hateful word beat rhythmically
again and again in his tired brain; and for a little while that was
all he was conscious of.
So much for the work of his life. And for the rest? The play? The
living? Oh, he had nothing to recall but failure. It had sufficed
that he should desire a thing, for him to miss it; that he should set
his heart upon a thing, for it to be removed beyond the sphere of his
possible acquisition. It had been so from the beginning; it had been
so always. He sat motionless as a stone, and allowed his thoughts to
drift listlessly hither and thither in the current of memory.
Everywhere they encountered wreckage, derelicts; defeated aspirations,
broken hopes. Languidly he envisaged these. He was too tired to
resent, to rebel. He even found a certain sluggish satisfaction in
recognising with what unvarying harshness destiny had treated him, in
resigning himself to the unmerited.
He caught sight of his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown
leather arm of his chair. His eyes rested on it, and for the moment he
forgot everything else in a sort of torpid study of it. How white it
was, how thin, how withered; the nails were parched into minute
corrugations; the veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung
loosely on it, and had a dry lustre: an old man's hand. He gazed at it
fixedly, till his eyes closed and his head fell forward. But he was
not sleepy, he was only tired and weak.
He raised his head with a start and changed his position. He felt
cold; but to endure the cold was easier than to get up, and put
something on, or go to bed.
How silent the world was; how empty his room. An immense feeling of
solitude, of isolation, fell upon him. He was quite cut off from the
rest of humanity here. If anything should happen to him, if he should
need help of any sort, what could he do? Call out? But who would hear?
At nine in the morning the porter's wife would come with his tea. But
if anything should happen to him in the meantime? There would be
nothing for it but to wait till nine o'clock.
Ah, if he had married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his
own, instead of these desolate bachelor chambers!
If he had married, indeed! It was his sorrow's crown of sorrow that he
had not married, that he had not been able to marry, that the girl he
had wished to marry wouldn't have him. Failure? Success? He could have
accounted failure in other things a trifle, he could have laughed at
what the world calls failure, if Elinor Lynd had been his wife. But
that was the heart of his misfortune, she wouldn't have him.
He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she
a girl of eighteen. He could see her palpable before him now: her
slender girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm
brown hair curling round her forehead. Oh, how he had loved her. For
twelve years he had waited upon her, wooed her, hoped to win her. But
she had always said, 'No--I don't love you. I am very fond of you; I
love you as a friend; we all love you that way--my mother, my father,
my sisters. But I can't marry you.' However, she married no one else,
she loved no one else: and for twelve years he was an ever-welcome
guest in her father's house; and she would talk with him, play to him,
pity him; and he could hope. Then she died. He called one day, and
they said she was ill. After that there came a blank in his memory--a
gulf, full of blackness and redness, anguish and confusion; and then a
sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.
He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her
father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He remembered the pale
daylight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all
looked. And there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her
dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her
writing-desk, her book-case. He remembered a row of medicine bottles
on the mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of
them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he
looked at them, because they had failed to do their work.
'You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard,' her mother
said. 'What would you like?'
On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass, in an ivory
frame. He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him.
She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her
hair in it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He
could almost persuade himself that something of her must remain in it.
To own it was like owning something of herself. He carried it home
with him, hugging it to his side with a kind of passion.
He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the
looking-glass in which her face had been reflected a thousand times;
the glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of
herself, he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it,
behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him
an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was
dissolved in joy.
The glass lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in
front of him. That was its place; he always kept it on his
chimney-shelf, so that he could see it whenever he glanced round his
room. He leaned back in his chair, and looked at it; for a long time
his eyes remained fixed upon it. 'If she had married me, she wouldn't
have died. My love, my care, would have healed her. She could not have
died.' Monotonously, automatically, the phrase repeated itself over
and over again in his mind, while his eyes remained fixed on the ivory
case into which her looking-glass was folded. It was an effect of his
fatigue, no doubt, that his eyes, once directed upon an object, were
slow to leave it for another; that a phrase once pronounced in his
thought had this tendency to repeat itself over and over again.
But at last he roused himself a little, and leaning forward, put his
hand out and up, to take the glass from the shelf. He wished to hold
it, to touch it and look into it. As he lifted it towards him, it fell
open, the mirror proper being fastened to a leather back, which was
glued to the ivory, and formed a hinge. It fell open; and his grasp
had been insecure; and the jerk as it opened was enough. It slipped
from his fingers, and dropped with a crash upon the hearthstone.
The sound went through him like a physical pain. He sank back in his
chair, and closed his eyes. His heart was beating as after a mighty
physical exertion. He knew vaguely that a calamity had befallen him;
he could vaguely imagine the splinters of shattered glass at his feet.
But his physical prostration was so great as to obliterate, to
neutralise, emotion. He felt very cold. He felt that he was being
hurried along with terrible speed through darkness and cold air. There
was the continuous roar of rapid motion in his ears, a faint, dizzy
bewilderment in his head. He felt that he was trying to catch hold of
things, to stop his progress, but his hands closed upon emptiness;
that he was trying to call out for help, but he could make no sound.
On--on--on, he was being whirled through some immeasurable abyss of
space.
* * * * *
'Ah, yes, he's dead, quite dead,' the doctor said. 'He has been dead
some hours. He must have passed away peacefully, sitting here in his
chair.'
'Poor gentleman,' said the porter's wife. 'And a broken looking-glass
beside him. Oh, it's a sure sign, a broken looking-glass.'