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From Savoy, (1896-aug) pp. 66-74
"Memento homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris"
HE had lived so long in the meditation of death, visited it so often in others, studied it with such persistency, with a sentiment in which horror and fascination mingled; but it had always been, as it were, an objective, alien fact, remote from himself and his own life. So that it was in a sudden flash, quite too stupefying to admit in the first instance of terror, that knowledge of his mortality dawned on him. There was absurdity in the idea too.
"I, Francis Donne, thirty-five and some months old, am going to die," he said to himself; and fantastically he looked at his image in the glass, and sought, but quite vainly, to find some change in it which should account for this incongruity, just as, searching in his analytical habit into the recesses of his own mind, he could find no such alteration of his inner consciousness as would explain or justify his plain conviction. And quickly, with reason and casuistry, he sought to rebut that conviction.
The quickness of his mind--it had never seemed to him so nimble, so exquisite a mechanism of syllogism and deduction--was contraposed against his blind instinct of the would-be self-deceiver, in a conflict to which the latter brought something of desperation, the fierce, agonized desperation of a hunted animal at bay. But piece by piece the chain of evidence was strengthened. That subtile and agile mind of his, with its special knowledge, cut clean through the shrinking protests of instinct, removing them as surely and as remorselessly? he reflected in the image most natural to him, as the keen blades of his surgical knives had removed malignant ulcers.
"I, Francis Donne, am going to die," he repeated, and, presently, "I am going to die soon; in a few months, in six perhaps, certainly in a year."
Once more, curiously, but this time with a sense of neutrality, as he had often diagnosed a patient, he turned to the mirror. Was it his fancy, or, perhaps, only for the vague light that he seemed to discover a strange grey tone about his face?
But he had always been a man of a very sallow complexion.
There were a great many little lines, like pen-scratches, scarring the parchment-like skin beneath the keen eyes: doubtless, of late, these had multiplied, become more noticeable, even when his face was in repose.
But, of late, what with his growing practice,
his lectures, his writing; all the unceasing labour, which
his ambitions entailed, might well have aged him somewhat.
That dull, immutable pain, which had first directed his
attention from his studies, his investigations, his
profession, to his corporal self, the actual Francis Donne,
that pain which he would so gladly have called inexplicable,
but could explain so precisely, had ceased for the moment.
Nerves, fancies! How long it was since he had taken any
rest! He had often intended to give himself a holiday, but
something had always intervened. But he would do so now,
yes, almost immediately; a long, long holiday--he would
grudge nothing-- And even while he promised himself this
necessary relaxation in the immediate future, as he started
on his afternoon round, in the background of his mind there
lurked the date, was, as it were, some tardy sacrifice,
almost hypocritical, which he offered to powers who might
not be propitiated.
Once in his neat brougham, the dull pain
began again; but by an effort of will he put it away from
him. In the brief interval from house to house--he had some
dozen visits to make--he occupied himself with a medical
paper, glanced at the notes of a lecture he was giving that
evening at a certain Institute on the "Limitations of
Medicine."
He was late, very late for dinner, and his
man, Bromgrove, greeted him with a certain reproachfulness,
in which he traced, or seemed to trace, a half-patronieing
sense of pity. He reminded himself that on more than one
occasion, of late, Bromgrove's manner had perplexed him. He
was glad to rebuke the man irritably on some pretext, to
dismiss him from the room, and he hurried, without appetite,
through the cold or overdone food which was the reward of
his tardiness.
His lecture over, he drove out-to South
Kensington, to attend a reception at the house of a great
man--great not only in the scientific world, but also in the
world of letters. There was some of the excitement of
success in his eyes as he made his way, with smiles and
bows, in acknowledgment of many compliments, through the
crowded rooms. For Francis Donne's lectures--those of them
which were not entirely for the initiated--had grown into
the importance of a social function. They had almost
succeeded in making science fashionable, clothing its dry
bones in a garment of so elegantly literary a pattern. But
even in the ranks of the profession it was only the envious,
the unsuccessful, who ventured to say that Donne had
sacrificed doctrine to popularity, that his science was, in
their contemptuous parlance, "mere literature."
Yes, he had been very successful, as the
world counts success, and his consciousness of this fact,
and the influence of the lights, the crowd, the voices, was
like absinthe on his tired spirit. He had forgotten, or
thought he had forgotten, the phantom of the last few days,
the phantom which was surely waiting for him at home.
But he was reminded by a certain piece of
news which late in the evening fluttered the now diminished
assembly: the quite sudden death of an eminent surgeon,
expected there that night, an acquaintance of his own, and
more or less of each one of the little, intimate group which
tarried to discuss it. With sympathy, with a certain awe,
they spoke of him, Donne and others; and both the awe and
the sympathy were genuine.
But as he drove home, leaning back in his
carriage, in a discouragement, in a lethargy, which was only
partly due to physical reaction, he saw visibly underneath
their regret--theirs and his own--the triumphant assertion
of life, the egoism of instinct. They were sorry, but oh,
they were glad! royally glad, that it was another, and not
they themselves whom something mysterious had of a sudden
snatched away from his busy career, his interests, perhaps
from all intelligence; at least, from all the pleasant
sensuousness of life, the joy of the visible world, into
darkness. And honestly dared not to blame it. How many times
had not he, Francis Donne himself experienced it, that
egoistic assertion of life in the presence of the dead--the
poor, irremediable dead? . . . And now, he was only good to
give it to others.
Latterly, he had been in the habit of
subduing sleeplessness with injections of morphia, indeed in
infinitesimal quantities. But to-night, although he was more
than usually restless and awake, by a strong effort of
reasonableness he resisted his impulse to take out the
little syringe. The pain was at him again with the same dull
and stupid insistence; in its monotony, losing some of the
nature of pain and becoming a mere nervous irritation. But
he was aware that it would not continue like that. Daily,
almost hourly, it would gather strength and cruelty; the
moments of respite from it would become rarer, would cease.
From a dull pain it would become an acute pain, and then a
torture, and then an agony, and then a madness. And in those
last days, what peace might be his would be the peace of
morphia, so that it was essential that, for the moment, he
should not abuse the drug.
And as he knew that sleep was far away from
him, he propped himself up with two pillows, and by the
light of a strong reading lamp settled himself to read. He
had selected the work of a distinguished German
savant upon the cardiac functions, and a short
treatise of his own, which was covered with recent
annotations, in his crabbed handwriting, upon "Aneurism
of the Heart." He read avidly, and against his own
deductions, once more his instinct raised a vain protest. At
last he threw the volumes aside, and lay with his eyes shut,
without, however, extinguishing the light. A terrible sense
of helplessness overwhelmed him; he was seized with an
immense and heartbreaking pity for poor humanity as
personified in himself; and, for the first time since he had
ceased to be a child, he shed puerile tears.
The faces of his acquaintance, the faces of
the students at his lectures, the faces of Francis Donne's
colleagues at the hospital, were altered; were, at least,
sensibly altered to his morbid self-consciousness. In every
one whom he encountered, he detected, or fancied that he
detected, an attitude of evasion, a hypocritical air of
ignoring a fact that was obvious and unpleasant. Was it so
obvious, then, the hidden horror which he carried
incessantly about him? Was his secret, which he would still
guard so jealously, become a by-word and an anecdote in his
little world? And a great rage consumed him against the
inexorable and inscrutable forces which had made him to
destroy him; against himself, because of his proper
impotence; and, above all, against the living, the millions
who would remain when he was no longer, the living, of whom
many would regret him (some of them his personality, and
morc, his skill), because he could see under all the
unconscious hypocrisy of their sorrow, the exultant
self-satisfaction of their survival.
And with his burning sense of helplessness,
of a certain bitter injustice in things, a sense of sharne
mingled; all the merely physical dishonour of death shaping
itself to his sick and morbid fancy into a violent symbol of
whlt was, as it were, an actual moral or
intellectual dishonour. Was not death, too, inevitable and
natural an operation as it was, essentially a process to
undergo apart and hide jealously, as much as other natural
and ignoble processes of the body?
And the animal, who steals away to an
uttermost place in the forest, who gives up his breath in a
solitude and hides his dying like a shameful thing,---might
he not offer an example that it would be well for the
dignity of poor humanity to follow?
Since Death is coming to ;ne, said Francis
Donne to himself, let me meet it, a stranger in a strange
land, with only strange faces round me and the kind
indifference of strangers, instead of the intolerable pity
of friends.
On the bleak and wave-tormented coast of
Finistère, somewhere between Quiberon and Fouesnant,
he reminded himself of a little fishing-village: a few
scattered houses (one of them being an auberge at
which ten years ago he had spent a night), collected round a
poor little grey church. Thither Francis Donne went, without
leave-takings or explanation, almost secretly, giving but
the vaguest indications of the length or direction of his
absence. And there for many days he dwelt, in the cottage
which he had hired, with one old Breton woman for his sole
attendant, in a state of mind which, after all the years of
energy, of ambitious labour, was almost peace.
Bleak and grey it had been, when he had
visited it of old, in the late autumn; but now the
character, the whole colour of the country was changed. It
was brilliant with the promise of summer, and the blue
Atlantic, which in winter churned with its long crested
waves so boisterously below the little white lighthouse,
which warned mariners (alas! so vainly), against the
shark-like cruelty of the rocks, now danced and glittered in
the sunshine, rippled with feline caresses round the hulls
of the fishing-boats whose brown sails floated so idly in
the faint air.
Above the village, on a grassy slope, whose
green was almost lurid, Francis Donne lay, for many silent
hours, looking out at the placid sea, which could yet be so
ferocious, at the low violet line of the Island of Groix,
which alone interrupted the monotony of sky and ocean.
He had brought many books with him but he
read in them rarely; and when physical pain gave him a
respite for thought, he thought almost of nothing. His
thought was for a long time a lethargy and a blank.
Now and again he spoke with some of the
inhabitants. They were a poor and hardy, but a kindly race:
fishers and the wives of fishers, whose children would grow
up and become fishermen and the wives of fishermen in their
turn. Most of them had wrestled with death; it was always so
near to them that hardly one of them feared it; they were
fatalists, with the grim and resigned fatalism of the poor,
of the poor who live with the treachery of the sea.
Francis Donne visited the little cemetery,
and counted the innumerable crosses which testified to the
havoc which the sea had wrought. Some of the graves were
nameless; holding the bodies of strange seamen which the
waves had tossed ashore.
"And in a little time I shall lie
here," he said to himself; "and here as well as
elsewhere," he added with a shrug, assuming, and, for
once, almost sincerely, the stoicism of his surroundings,
"and as lief to-day as to-morrow."
On the whole, the days were placid; there
were even moments when, as though he had actually drunk in
renewed vigour from that salt sea air, the creative force of
the sun, he was tempted to doubt his grievous knowledge, to
make fresh plans for life. But these were fleeting moments,
and the reaction from them was terrible. Each day his hold
on life was visibly more slender, and the people of the
village saw, and with a rough sympathy, which did not offend
him, allowed him to perceive that they saw, the rapid growth
and the inevitableness of his end.
But if the days were not without their
pleasantness, the nights were always horrible--a torture of
the body and an agony of the spirit. Sleep was far away, and
the brain, which had been lulled till the evening, would
awake, would grow electric with life and take strange and
abominable flights into the darkness of the pit, into the
black night of the unknowable and the unknown.
And interminably, during those nights which
seemed eternity, Francis Donne questioned and examined into
the nature of that Thing, which stood, a hooded figure
beside his bed, with a menacing hand raised to beckon him so
peremptorily from all that lay within his consciousness.
He had been all his life absorbed in science;
he had dissected, how many bodies? and in what anatomy had
he ever found a soul? Yet if his avocations, his absorbing
interest in physical phenomena had made him somewhat a
materialist, it had been almost without his consciousness.
The sensible, visible world of matter had loomed so large to
him, that merely to know that had seemed to him sufficient.
All that might conceivably lie outside it, he had, without
negation, been content to regard as outside his province.
And now, in his weakness, in the imminence of
approaching dissolution, his purely physical knowledge
seemed but a vain possession, and he turned with a
passionate interest to what had been said and believed from
time immemorial by those who had concentrated their
intelligence on that strange essence, which might after all
be the essence of one's personality, which might be that
sublimated consciousness--the Soul--actually surviving the
infamy of the grave?
Ah, the question! It was a harmony, perhaps
(as, who had maintained? whom the Platonic Socrates in the
"Phaedo" had not too successfully refuted), a
harmony of life, which was dissolved when life was over? Or,
perhaps, as how many metaphysicians had held both before and
after a sudden great hope, perhaps too generous to be true,
had changed and illuminated, to countless millions, the
inexorable figure of Death a principle, indeed, immortal,
which came and went, passing through many corporal
conditions until it was ultimately resolved into the great
mind, pervading all things? Perhaps? . . . But what scanty
consolation, in all such theories, to the poor body, racked
with pain and craving peace, to the tortured spirit of
self-consciousness so achingly anxious not to be lost.
And he turned from these speculations to what
was, after all, a possibility like the others; the faith of
the simple, of these fishers with whom he lived, which was
also the faith of his own childhood, which, indeed, he had
never repudiated, whose practices he had simply discarded,
as one discards puerile garments when one comes to man's
estate. And he remembered, with the vividness with which, in
moments of great anguish, one remembers things long ago
familiar, forgotten though they may have been for years, the
triumphant declarations of the Church:
"Omnes quidem resurgemus, sed non
omnes immutabimur. In momento, in ictu oculi, in novissima
tuba: canet enim tuba: et mortui resurgent incorrupti, et
nos immutabimur. Oportet enim corruptibile hoc induere
immortalitatem. Cum autem mortale hoc induerit
immortalitatem tunc fiet sermo qui scriptus est: Absorpta
est mors in victoria. Ubi est, mors, victoria tua? Ubi est,
mors, stimulus tuus?"
Ah, for the certitude of that! of that
victorious confutation of the apparent destruction of sense
and spirit in a common ruin . . . But it was a possibility
like the rest; and had it not more need than the rest to be
more than a possibility, if it would be a consolation, in
that it promised more? And he gave it up, turning his face
to the wall, lay very still, imagining himself already stark
and cold, his eyes closed, his jaw closely tied (lest the
ignoble changes which had come to him should be too
ignoble), while he waited until the narrow boards, within
which he should lie, had been nailed together, and the
bearers were ready to convey him into the corruption which
was to be his part.
And as the window-pane grew light with
morning, he sank into a drugged, unrestful sleep, from which
he would awake some hours later with eyes more sunken and
more haggard cheeks. And that was the pattern of many
nights.
One day he seemed to wake from a night longer
and more troubled than usual, a night which had, perhaps,
been many nights and days, perhaps even weeks; a night of an
ever-increasing agony, in which he was only dimly conscious
at rare intervals of what was happening, or of the figures
coming and going around his bed: the doctor from a
neighbouring town, who had stayed by him unceasingly, easing
his paroxysms with the little merciful syringe; the soft,
practised hands of a sister of charity about his pillow;
even the face of Bromgrove, for whom doubtless he had sent,
when he had foreseen the utter helplessness which was at
hand.
He opened his eyes, and seemed to discern a
few blurred figures against the darkness of the closed
shutters through which one broad ray filtered in; but he
could not distinguish their faces, and he closed his eyes
once more. An immense and ineffable tiredness had come over
him that this--this was Death; this was the thing
against which he had cried and revolted; the horror from
which he would have escaped; this utter luxury of physical
exhaustion, this calm, this release.
The corporal capacity of smiling had passed
from him, but he would fain have smiled.
And for a few minutes of singular mental
lucidity, all his life flashed before him in a new relief;
his childhccd, his adolescence, the people whom he had
known; his mother, who had died when he was a boy, of a
malady from which, perhaps, a few years later, his skill had
saved her; the friend of his youth who had shot himself for
so little reason; the girl whom he had loved, but who had
not loved him . . . All that was distorted in life was
adjusted and justified in the light of his sudden knowledge.
Beati mortui . . . and then the great tiredness swept
over him once more, and a fainter consciousness, in which he
could yet just dimly hear, as in a dream, the sound of Latin
prayers, and feel the application of the oils upon all the
issues and approaches of his wearied sense; then utter
unccnsciousness, while pulse and heart gradually grew
fainter until both ceased. And that was all.
ERNEST
DOWSON
(End.)
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Animula, vagula, blandula!
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca?
Pallidula, rigida, nudula.
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