When I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so far as
possible to dissociate the statement from any conventional, and
certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which you may have
acquired. Death sometimes shows himself one of those impersonal artists
who conceal their art, and, unless you had been told, you could hardly
have guessed that Matthew was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an hour,
dying of consumption, dying because some one else had died four years
before, dying too of debt.
Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood; at a glance would have
named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those noble hollows in
the finely modelled face,--that Pygmalion who turns all flesh to
stone,--at a glance would have named the painter who was cunningly
weighting the brows with darkness that the eyes might shine the more
with an unaccustomed light. Matthew and I had long been students of the
strange wandering artist, had begun by hating his art (it is ever so
with an art unfamiliar to us), and had ended by loving it.
'Let us see what the artist has added to the picture since yesterday,'
said Matthew, signing to me to hand him the mirror.
'H'm,' he murmured, 'he's had one of his lazy days, I'm afraid. He's
hardly added a touch--just a little heightened the chiaroscuro,
sharpened the nose a trifle, deepened some little the shadows round the
eyes....
'O why,' he presently sighed, 'does he not work a little overtime and
get it done? He's been paid handsomely enough....
'Paid,' he continued, 'by a life that is so much undeveloped gold-mine,
paid by all my uncashed hopes and dreams....'
'He works fast enough for me, old fellow,' I interrupted; 'there was a
time, was there not, when he worked too fast for you and me?'
There are moments, for certain people, when such fantastic unreality as
this is the truest realism. Matthew and I talked like this with our
brains, because we hadn't the courage to allow our hearts to break in
upon the conversation. Had I dared to say some real emotional thing,
what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing?
and it was our aim that he should die with as little to-do as
practicable. The emotional in such situations is merely the obvious.
There was no need for either of us to state the elementary feelings of
our love. I knew that Matthew was going to die, and he knew that--I was
going to live, and we pitied each other accordingly; though I confess my
feeling for him was rather one of envy,--when it was not congratulation.
Thus, to tell the truth, we never mentioned 'the hereafter.' I don't
believe it even occurred to us. Indeed, we spent the few hours that
remained of our friendship in retailing the latest gathered of those
good stories with which we had been accustomed to salt our intercourse.
One of Matthew's anecdotes was, no doubt, somewhat suggested by the
occasion, and I should add that he had always somewhat of an
ecclesiastical bias--would, I believe, have ended some day as a
Monsignor, a notable 'Bishop Blougram.'
His story was of an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his
congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire. 'You know the
Black Country, my friends,' he had declaimed,' you have seen it, at
night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of
which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!),
snatch a precarious existence--you have seen them silhouetted against
the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in
the very jaws of the awful fire. Have you realised that the burdens with
which they thus run hither and thither are molten iron, iron to which
such a stupendous heat has been applied that it has melted, melted as
though it had been sugar in the sun?--well! returning to hell-fire, let
me tell you this, that in hell they eat this fiery molten metal for
ice-cream!--yes! and are glad to get anything so cool.'
It was thus we talked while Matthew lay dying, for why should we not
talk as we had lived? We both laughed long and heartily over this story;
perhaps it would have amused us less had Matthew not been dying; and
then his kind old nurse brought in our lunch. We had both excellent
appetites, and were far from indifferent to the dainty little meal which
was to be our last but one together. I brought my table as close to
Matthew's pillow as was possible, and he stroked my hand with tenderness
in which there was a touch of gratitude.
'You are not frightened of the bacteria!' he laughed sadly; and then he
told me, with huge amusement, how a friend (and a true, dear friend for
all that) had come to see him a day or two before, and had hung over the
end of the bed to say farewell, daring to approach no nearer, mopping
his fear-perspiring brows with a handkerchief soaked in 'Eucalyptus'!
'He had brought an anticipatory elegy too,' said my friend, 'written
against my burial. I wish you'd read it for me,' and he fidgeted for it
in the nervous manner of the dying. Finding it among his pillows, he
handed it to me saying, 'You needn't be frightened of it. It is well
dosed with Eucalyptus.'
We laughed even more over this poem than over our stories, and then we
discussed the terms of three cremation societies to which, at the
express request of my friend, I had written a day or two before.
Then having smoked a cigar and drunk a glass of port together (for the
assured dying are allowed to 'live well'), Matthew grew sleepy, and,
tucking him beneath the counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he was
not to die that day.
Circumstances prevented my seeing him again for a week. When I did so,
entering the room poignantly redolent of the strange sweet odour of
antiseptics, I saw that the great artist had been busy in my absence.
Indeed, his work was nearly at an end. Yet to one unfamiliar with his
methods there was still little to alarm in Matthew's face. In fact, with
the exception of his brain, and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever.
And even to his brain had come a certain unnatural activity, a life as
of the grave, a sort of vampire vitality, which would assuredly have
deceived any who had not known him. He still told his stories, laughed
and talked with the same unconquerable humour, was in every way alert
and practical, with this difference, that he had forgotten he was going
to die, that the world in which he exercised his various faculties was
another world to that in which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our
last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, smoked our last cigar together.
His talk was so convincingly rational, dealt with such unreal matters in
so every-day a fashion, that you were ready to think that surely it was
you and not he whose mind was wandering.
'You might reach that pocket-book, and ring for Mrs. Davies,' he would
say in so casual a way that of course you would ring. On Mrs. Davies's
appearance he would be fumbling about among the papers in his
pocket-book, and presently he would say, with a look of frustration that
went to one's heart--'I've got a ten-pound note somewhere here for you,
Mrs. Davies, to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow I seem to have
lost it. Yet it must be somewhere about. Perhaps you'll find it as you
make the bed in the morning. I'm so sorry to have troubled you....'
And then he would grow tired and doze a little on his pillow.
Suddenly he would be alert again, and with a startling vividness tell me
strange stories from the dreamland into which he was now passing.
I had promised to see him on Monday, but had been prevented, and had
wired to him accordingly. This was Tuesday.
'You needn't have troubled to wire,' he said. 'Didn't you know I was in
London from Saturday to Monday?'
'The doctor and Mrs. Davies didn't know,' he continued with the creepy
cunning of the dying: 'I managed to slip away to look at a house I think
of taking--in fact I've taken it. It's in--in--now, where is it? Now
isn't that silly? I can see it as plain as anything--yet I cannot, for
the life of me, remember where it is, or the number.... It was somewhere
St. John's Wood way ... never mind, you must come and see me there, when
we get in....'
I said he was dying in debt, and thus the heaven that lay about his
deathbed was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden colossal legacies, and
miraculous windfalls.
'I haven't told you,' he said presently, 'of the piece of good luck that
has befallen me. You are not the only person in luck. I can hardly
expect you to believe me, it sounds so like the Arabian Nights. However,
it's true for all that. Well, one of the little sisters was playing in
the garden a few afternoons ago, making mud-pies or something of that
sort, and she suddenly scraped up a sovereign. Presently she found two
or three more, and our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or two with
the spade revealed quite a bed of gold; and the end of it was, that on
further excavating, the whole garden proved to be one mass of
sovereigns. Sixty thousand pounds we counted ... and then, what do you
think?--it suddenly melted away....'