For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in
helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason
that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was
some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I
never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.
There was something in the event which discharged him of all
obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must
have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the
question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several
of those relations--father, son, brother, husband--without identifying
him very satisfyingly in either.
As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we
owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I
cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a
strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat
occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now,
by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner
allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; I
was there until we could find a more permanent office. The man had
nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he had no manuscript, or
plan for an article which he wished to propose and to talk himself
into writing, so that he might bring it with a claim to acceptance, as
though he had been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even look of
the writing sort; and his affair with some other occupant of that
anomalous place could have been in no wise literary. Probably it was
some kind of insurance business, and I have been left with the
impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he had to my involuntary
attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.
After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to notice
him, without being able to give myself to my own work. The day was
choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade one so much
effort as was needed to relieve one of one's discomfort; to pull at
one's wilted collar and loosen the linen about one's reeking neck
meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it was less suffering to
suffer passively than to suffer actively. The day was of the sort
which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling breeze,
decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the sun was no escape
from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley where the air was
damper without being cooler than the air within.
At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the
psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter
rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in
having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that
his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a
subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation
gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of
his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for
his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe,
the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he
could not.
My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly to
employ itself with the question of how far our experiences really
affect our characters. I remembered having once classed certain
temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and others as the stuff of
comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which
light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them.
Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when
it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made
to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging
which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this
make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than
frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I asked myself how I
should be affected by the sight of certain things, like the common
calamities reported every day in the papers which I had hitherto
escaped seeing. By another zigzag I thought that I had never known a
day so close and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the
comparative poverty of the French language, which I was told had only
that one word for the condition we could call by half a dozen
different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking, sweltering,
and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms would give even more
English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my book of synonyms was
at the back of my table, and I would have to rise for it. Then I
questioned whether the French language was so destitute of adjectives,
after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.
With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the
person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must
have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about,
crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he
went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should
have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New
York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of
sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people
pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those
whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting
him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted
as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be
sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and
from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one's peace
with God, as it used to be said, and after all there might be
something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no
longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared for
the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I struggled to
get away from the question, but the vagaries which had lightly
dispersed themselves before clung persistently to the theme now. I
felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a promising diversion. Had
one any sort of volition in the quick changes of dreams? One was aware
of finding a certain nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from it
as by main force, and then falling into a deep, sweet sleep. Was death
something like waking from a dream such as that, which this life
largely was, and then sinking into a long, restful slumber, and
possibly never waking again?
Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been
there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of
unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the
half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking into the room
blankly.
As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead
as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one
very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my
forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished
as if he had sunk through the floor.
People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was
not there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had
been, and one of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs
lifted his head and mainly carried him into the wide space which the
street stairs mounted to, and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if
not cooler there, and we stood back to give him the air which he drew
in with long, deep sighs. One of us ran down the stairs to the street
for a doctor, wherever he might be found, and ran against a doctor at
the last step.
The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its
pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my
telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations
which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking
life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those
vast sighs.
They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the
expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there
was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so
remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to
our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a
surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to
the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret,
speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from
which there is no returning.
There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened with the slower and
slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and
expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for the breathing to
begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling over
the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a kind of
soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers with the
thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now become all
dust forever.
That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest
of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow
which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and
who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having
been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident
remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than
seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another's. They
whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the
fact.