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?
IX
Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle's deathbed is my aunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live I threw aside whatever concealment remained to us and telegraphed directly to her. But she came too late to see him living. She saw him calm and still, strangely unlike his habitual garrulous animation, an unfamiliar inflexibility.
"It isn't like him," she whispered, awed by this alien dignity.
I remember her chiefly as she talked and wept upon the bridge below the old castle. We had got rid of some amateurish reporters from Biarritz, and had walked together in the hot morning sunshine down through Port Luzon. There, for a time, we stood leaning on the parapet of the bridge and surveying the distant peeks, the rich blue masses of the Pyrenees. For a long time we said nothing, and then she began talking.
"Life's a rum Go, George!" she began. "Who would have thought, when I used to darn your stockings at old Wimblehurst, that this would be the end of the story? It seems far away now--that little shop, his and my first home. The glow of the bottles, the big coloured bottles! Do you remember how the light shone on the mahogany drawers? The little gilt letters! Ol Amjig, and Snap! I can remember it all--bright and shining--like a Dutch picture. Real! And yesterday. And here we are in a dream. You a man--and me an old woman, George. And poor little Teddy, who used to rush about and talk--making that noise he did--Oh!"
She choked, and the tears flowed unrestrained. She wept, and I was glad to see her weeping.
She stood leaning over the bridge; her tear-wet handkerchief gripped in her clenched hand.
"Just an hour in the old shop again--and him talking. Before things got done. Before they got hold of him. And fooled him.
"Men oughtn't to be so tempted with business and things....
"They didn't hurt him, George?" she asked suddenly.
For a moment I was puzzled.
"Here, I mean," she said.
"No," I lied stoutly, suppressing the memory of that foolish injection needle I had caught the young doctor using.
"I wonder, George, if they'll let him talk in Heaven...."
She faced me. "Oh! George, dear, my heart aches, and I don't know what I say and do. Give me your arm to lean on--it's good to have you, dear, and lean upon you.... Yes, I know you care for me. That's why I'm talking. We've always loved one another, and never said anything about it, and you understand, and I understand. But my heart's torn to pieces by this, torn to rags, and things drop out I've kept in it. It's true he wasn't a husband much for me at the last. But he was my child, George, he was my child and all my children, my silly child, and life has knocked him about for me, and I've never had a say in the matter; never a say; it's puffed him up and smashed him--like an old bag--under my eyes. I was clever enough to see it, and not clever enough to prevent it, and all I could do was to jeer.
I've had to make what I could of it. Like most people. Like most of us.... But it wasn't fair, George. It wasn't fair. Life and Death--great serious things--why couldn't they leave him alone, and his lies and ways? If WE could see the lightness of it--"Why couldn't they leave him alone?" she repeated in a whisper as we went towards the inn.
