Part 12

There is nothing in the world more certain than this, and one may as well face it. Helen will die, and I shall die, and one of us will die first. And the other will sometimes see a grave with the grass green over it, and roses triumphant thereon. For we have settled most things at one time or another, she and I, and the manner of our funerals and what happens after has passed under discussion. We have decided definitely against cremation, because it seems such a waste of tissue, and we are both of us going to be properly buried, the one close to the other so that the same rose may bloom from us both. But she _will_ have roses and strawberries on her grave, so that the Sunday-school children may pluck and eat them, while I, on the other hand, am going to be a spring-man, and have daffodils, for I feel no leaning, as I have said, towards Sunday-schools. Here lies the difficulty: she wants a rich clayey soil for her roses and strawberries, and my daffodils will demand not clay but sand. Also she is going to plant purple clematis by my head, and clematis likes sand too. We have not yet perfectly decided where we are going to die, but it seems probable that the survivor will stay in the same place as the survived. But I want purple clematis, since it was when I saw that that I knew somebody whom I had thought to be a friend was false. Indeed, I have done all I could to forgive, but I think a clematis that feeds on me may make it surer.

Our funerals will shock the neighbourhood, I am afraid. I am going to have the A flat Fugue and Prelude blared on the organ (it is time somebody began to learn to play) at that distressing moment when my coffin is wheeled out of the church, simply to show that I have enjoyed myself enormously. Great Heaven! I should as soon think of having a dead march of whatever kind played over me as I should let them play the works of Mr. Mendelssohn. I shall have had (whatever happens) an immensely good time. It seems to me much fitter to return thanks for that than to remind people that my poor body is dead, which they knew already, or why did they come to my funeral service? As for requiems, I will have none of them. Whatever happens, _I_, my body at least, cannot possibly lie quiet in my grave. The dear flowers planted there will see to that.

Oh, my God, my God, what unanswerable riddles you set us! Even this body, and what happens to it, is so occupying a subject. I don’t really care what happens to mine: it may be set up in an anatomical museum if it will teach anybody anything; but Helen’s.... Somehow, when I come out of the valley of the shadow, something of that must wait for her; or, if she has gone through that passage first, I shall not know myself unless at the end of it, when the darkness lifts a little, I shall see grey eyes looking at the procession of those passing over, and meeting mine, and saying somehow, ‘I am here.’ She must be there (is it not so?) waiting on the eternal shore for me.

There she must be. I can’t help what I believe; that is the one thing in oneself which one can never change. And Dick will be there, and Margery ... what a splendid day!

* * * * *

Then the one horrible certainty descended on me again. In so few years we shall all--our bodies, I mean, the appearance by which we recognize each other--not be our bodies at all, but part of the fibre of other living things which are having their day, even as we have had ours. It is so now with Dick and Margery, so how shall I _know_ them? Are they to be just voices in the air, presences that are felt? Is that all? Shall I never see again that quiver on Margery’s mouth, which means that a smile is ready to break from it? I don’t want incorporeal presences. I want Dick and his crooked nose, and Margery’s smile....

Then, on this warm February morning I must suppose that I went down into Hell. Dead leaves and flowers, it was certain, were transformed into fresh living forms, the bones, too, and flesh of dead animals, and of men and women, passed again into the great machine of life, and were served up in new transformations, so that of the individual body nothing at all was left. That is bad enough; I shall never see Margery and Dick again as I used to see them. Helen will pass, too, into other forms ... that is bad enough. But this is infinitely worse. What of the individual soul, the spirit that we love? Will that, too, as analogy grimly insists, be put back again into the principle of eternal life from which it came, so that its identity, too, is lost, and lives but only as the autumn leaves of last year live in the verdure of the next spring? With everything else that happens; the bodies of those we love even, a cruel thing surely, but certainly true, are used up again to make fresh forms of life. Why should we suppose that God makes any exception in dealing with the souls of men, the individuals? Every other form of life He uses and re-uses ... the world is but a lump of modelling clay, with which He beguiles the leisure of eternity, making now one shape, then crushing it all up and making another.

So this is all that the promise of Eternal Life amounts to, that we shall pass back into the crucible, and issue forth again as bits of somebody else! It seems to me a very mean affair; frankly, it seems a swindle. It is a poor trick to make us puny little creatures love one another, and try to be kind, and console ourselves for the evil days and the sorrows of the world with thoughts of the everlasting day that shall dawn for us all, if that everlasting day is nothing more than the day that is here already; if the souls whom we have believed are at rest in some ineffable peace and content, or, on the other hand, through further suffering are getting nearer, ever nearer, to the perfection and flower of their being, have already passed into other forms of life, so that Dante and Beatrice are themselves no longer (as we should call ‘themselves’), but have been infinitely divided into soldiers, sailors, tinkers, and tailors. In that sense they may be said to be alive still, but it is a very paltry sense. _They_ (what we mistakenly call ‘they’) are as dead as if they had never been.

It is all very well to say that Dante is immortal by reason of his deathless verse; that is all very well for us, but how is it for that fiery soul which is split up into a thousand other bodies? When he thought to open his eyes on the Mystical Rose as the dark waves of death slowly drew back from his emancipated spirit, it was all a dismal mistake. No Beatrice awaited him; she, too, is split into a million other forms of life. They were absorbed back into the central fire, and a spark of Dante’s soul went into this man, and another into that, so that in this sense there is eternal life for him. But in no other; the Dante which we mean was formed out of other lives, and into other lives he went. The man is there no more, and there is no Beatrice. There will be nothing of us either, unless you mean that at some future time I am alive because part of me has become perhaps a murderer, and another part a politician, and another a housemaid, for all I know.

The February sun was warm; you might almost call it hot. A little wind pregnant with spring moved through the bushes; the snowdrops, those pale heralds of the triumphant march of the new year, were thick in the grass where we had planted them, Helen and I, last autumn, so that they should give us the earliest news of the returning tide of life. And to me this morning they brought but bitter news, for they spoke not of the returning of life, but of the thousand deaths which made them alive. They pointed not forwards towards the glory of the many-coloured summer, but back to the innumerable decay of the autumn. And the quiet garden which I loved, the tiled mossy roof which I had called home, became the place of death, even as last autumn death had called to me from it, and had been seen by Legs, and had made the dog howl. Was it this that was hinted at by those dim forebodings which for months had never been absent from me? Was the fear that crouched in the shadow ready to spring taking form now? It seemed to me that the logic which had turned the world to hell was irrefutable; I expected some shattering stroke that should blot out sunshine and sensation from me for ever, proving that I and my logic were right. I had guessed the horrid secret of the world; I was like a spy found with the plans of the enemy’s fortress on me, and must die, lest I should communicate them. I said that to myself; I said ‘Enemy’s fortress,’ meaning the world where I had loved and been loved. ‘Enemy,’ mark you; I knew what I meant. The world was the enemy’s fortress.

And then, thank God--oh! thank God!--before that which was impending happened, I said to myself that I was wrong. I did not at the moment see where I was wrong, but I knew that I must have made some gross and awful mistake. Things could not be as I had imagined them. And the moment I said that to myself the darkness lifted a little. It was all dark still, but the quality of the darkness changed. And then, unbidden as a tune that suddenly rings in one’s head, a few words made themselves recollected. And they were, ‘If I go down into hell, Thou art there also.’

At that I caught a glimpse again of this dear garden and house, as I had seen and known them. I do not suppose that this blackness and loneliness of spirit which I have tried to indicate could have lasted more than a few minutes, as measured in the world of time, but time has nothing to do with the spirit. In a second, as computed by the unmeaning scale of hours and days, the soul may live a thousand lifetimes or die a thousand deaths. Redemption may be wrought there in an infinitesimal fraction of a moment, or in that same fraction a soul may damn itself. For it is not the moment which is anything: it is the instantaneous choice which therein sums up the infinite series of deeds which one has already done, and thoughts which one has harboured. And the message that leaps round the world on electric wires is a sluggard to choice. My choice at this moment was between the truth of what I had been elaborately thinking out and the truth of the words that rang in my head. There was reason on one side; there was just It on the other. And what was ‘It’? Just that which, very faintly, but quite audibly, said that I had come near to blasphemy. There are many names for it: we all know its visitation, though it is obscured sometimes because we encourage the Devil, who comes to us all in many forms, and can take the most respectable disguises, like those of intellect and mind. But perhaps the simplest name and the truest for It is the Grace of God.

Then, in the same moment (I am lumbering in words, and trying to express what I know cannot be said), I saw that Helen was already half-way across the grass, coming towards me. She held a telegraphic sheet in her hand, and there was in her face a gravity infinitely tender, and quite quiet, and quite normal. I had seen it there once before, when the news came of her father’s death, which was sudden.

‘Legs won’t come down this afternoon,’ she said gently. ‘We have got to go up to him.’

And then she showed me the telegram.

* * * * *

It was not many hours before we knew all there was to be known. Legs had started to ride down from town, and turning into the King’s Road from Sloane Square his motor bicycle had skidded, and he had fallen under an omnibus. A wheel had passed over him.

He had a letter or two, which identified him, in his pockets, and he had been taken, since it was so near, back to the house in Sloane Street. When we got there he was still alive.

His room was at the back of the house, and we were allowed to go in at once. He lay there, quite unconscious, and in no pain, for the only thing that could be done for him was to keep him like that. The bedclothes were not allowed to touch him, and a round wooden frame was under them. There was no hope at all.

His bed ran out into the middle of the room, and Helen and I sat one on each side of it, while a little distance off was the doctor, who just watched him. Sometimes he got up and looked at him, sometimes he softly left the room, returning as quietly. And in those hours of waiting, for a long time I was conscious of nothing except the trivial details of the room itself. I suppose I had been there before--ah! yes, of course, I had, when Legs had the influenza in the winter--but it was not familiar. Yet it was just like what I should have expected Leg’s room to be, and in a moment I found I knew it as well as I knew him. There was a pile of letters on the writing-table, a bag of golf-clubs in the corner, an enormous sponge on the washing-stand, and on the dressing-table a most elaborate shaving apparatus--a metal bowl, a little Etna for hot water, a half-dozen razor blades in a neat case, with a sort of mowing-machine handle. He had not packed them, since he was only going to be with us for a couple of days, and he could never have used all those blades once each on that smooth chin....

He had been, as I remembered now, to a fancy-dress ball the night before, and his wardrobe, gaping open, showed the hose and ruffles of the Elizabethan period, while hanging up by them was a small pointed beard and a high head-top, with long and rather scanty brown hair. ‘For the point is,’ Legs had said rather shrilly, ‘everyone will say, “Shakespeare, I presume?” and I shall say, “How dare you! I am Hall Caine!” And if some people are a little cleverer and say, “‘The Bondman,’ I suppose?” I shall say, “You seem to have forgotten William Shakespeare.” Perhaps you don’t think it funny. But then, you see, you are not going to the ball.’

* * * * *

No; we had not thought it very funny, and Legs had been rather ruffled. He told us we had spoiled his pleasure, but if so, it must have very quickly become unspoiled again, for--it was only a week ago that he had conceived that idea--he spent a boisterously hilarious evening afterwards. But, how I wish we had not spoiled his pleasure even for that moment! As if it mattered whether it was funny or not, so long as it amused him. Helen had said it was rather a cheap sort of joke.... And just then her eyes, too, saw the fancy dress hanging up in the wardrobe, and the moment afterwards she looked across to me. And then she left the room for a little while. She, too, I am sure, had thought of that.

* * * * *

I had a friend once who was killed in a railway accident. A year afterwards I was staying with his mother, and one evening, when we were alone, she began crying gently. ‘Jim took his lunch with him to eat in the train that day,’ she said to me soon, and he had asked me to put him up an orange. But I forgot.’

That is the pathos of little things. Yes, you dear soul, weep a little over the forgotten orange, and let Helen weep a little because she said Leg’s joke was cheap. And then let us think of the bigger things--the love and the loving-kindness that have been ours, that bright, boyish spirit that made mirth in the home. Even now let us try to thank God for what has been. You know what Legs was to us--a sort of son, a sort of brother.

All that afternoon we sat there, hearing London rumble distantly around us, and little stirrings and creakings came from different parts of the room. Now the blind flapped, now a curtain sighed, or, as often happens in spring-time, a board of the flooring gave a little sharp rap, some infinitesimal particle of sap still lingering in it, perhaps, and hearing the heralds of spring blowing their horns outside. Only from the bed there came no sound at all: he was still sunk deep in that sleep which the doctor hoped would join and be one with death. If he woke at all, there was a chance that he would suffer blinding, excruciating pain. On the other hand, he might come to himself, just at the last moment of all, when pain would be already passed.

The doctor was saying this in the hushed whisper with which we speak in the chamber of death, though there may be no real reason why we should not speak openly, when I heard a little stir from the bed, and, looking round, I saw that Leg’s eyes were open, and that he was moving them this way and that, as if in search of something. Helen had seen, too, and next moment she was by him. He recognized her, for there was welcome in his eyes, and then, turning his head a little, he saw me. The doctor meantime had moved to the head of the bed and looked at Leg’s face very intently. Then he made a little sign to me that I should come up to the bed, and he himself went and stood by the window, looking out.

And I understood.

Then Legs spoke in his ordinary voice.

‘Wasn’t it bad luck?’ he said. My bicycle skidded, and the omnibus----

‘What is happening to me?’ he asked quickly. ‘Is it----’

Helen laid her hand on his head.

‘Yes, my darling,’ she said. ‘But you are not afraid, are you?’

For a moment the pupils of his eyes contracted; then they grew quite normal again.

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ve had an awfully good time. Oh, and it was a great success--Shakespeare, you know.’

Then a shadow seemed to pass over his face and his eyelids fluttered.

‘Now? Is it coming now?’ he said.

‘Yes, my darling,’ said she again, and kissed him.

Legs lay quite still for a moment with closed eyes. Then he quickly opened them again, and made as if he would raise his head.

‘Buck up, you two, won’t you?’ he said.

From outside there came the dim roar of London, and little noises crept about the room. But from the bed came no sound at all.

* * * * *

Two days afterwards we went down home again, arriving in the evening, and the body rested that night in his own room down here, to be taken next day to the churchyard, which the sun blesses more than any other place I have ever seen, and over which the grey Norman tower keeps watch. His last charge to us had been to ‘buck up,’ and I do not know how it was, but it seemed to us both as if he was still liking us to ‘buck up.’ So, in so far as we found it possible, we did what Legs wished us to do.

But to-night he would have been here, making the third of a merry table, and when the servants had come in for the last time, bringing us coffee, it was not possible not to remember that, and Helen rose. And when she spoke, her voice trembled.

‘Is it very foolish of me?’ she asked. ‘And do you think Legs will mind? But I feel as if I can’t face to-morrow, unless I go and look at the place where we shall put him. It is quite warm outside, Jack. Oh, let us go out and look at it. It will seem more natural then. I think I shall “buck up” better if I see it first.’

So we went across the garden, and through the place of roses, and through the gate on the far side, and through the field which bounded the churchyard. There was a great yellow moon just risen, and shadows were sharp-cut, so that there was no doubt when we came to the place that had been so newly dug. His uncle, Helen’s father, lay there; the two graves were side by side.

So we sat there in silence for some time, very still, for a rat ran on to the mound of earth by the graveside, and sat there, smartening itself up, brushing its face and whiskers with nimble paws. The shadow of the tower swung just clear of the place, and sharp-cut in the light was that oblong hole in the ground. There was nothing as yet to be said, for Helen was crying quietly to herself, and I could not stay those loving tears. Once she said to me: ‘Oh, let us buck up!’ But then she silently wept again.

You see, I know Helen. I knew that there was nothing of bitterness in her crying. Tears of that sort were not opposed to the bucking up. Legs did not mean that he wanted us not to miss his dear companionship. He only wanted us to stand up and be cheery, not be bitter or broken. But since Helen felt she could face to-morrow better if she faced the scene of it, why, that was all right; it was bucking up.

Then in a few little sentences we talked of the next day. There should be the A flat Fugue--no funeral march--and we would have no funeral hymns, but just one Psalm, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd,’ and one hymn after all that had to be done was over; so then we would sing ‘Adeste Fideles,’ Helen thought, for it is always Christmas since the first Christmas Day.

Helen just moved as she sat there on the edge of his grave when we had settled this as if to go home again, but----

And then I told her all that I had thought three mornings ago--all the doubts that merged into certainty, all the logical conclusions. Whether I then at that moment inclined more to the side of the Devil or of God I do not know, but in any case I told her all; and then she put her arms round me.

‘Yes, dear,’ she said, ‘but in hell He is there also. And we are all there sometimes, and it is but the lowest step of the beautiful stair to heaven.’

The moon had swung behind the tower, and we sat in the darkness of its shadow.

‘It is all so simple,’ she said. ‘It all depends upon what you believe, not what you think or what you reason about. Do you believe that we bury Legs to-morrow? Do you believe that he is dead, or that he has ceased to be an individual? You may reason about it, and ask me, as you asked yourself, how you will recognize him if his body has become grass and flowers? I am quite content to say that I have no idea. You see, one doesn’t know all God’s plans quite completely, and sometimes we are apt to think that if one doesn’t know plans about a certain thing He hasn’t got one. We put our intelligence above His. That is a mistake.’

And we sat in silence again; then Helen spoke asking me an extremely simple question.

‘What does faith mean if you are right about it?’ she said.

‘It means nothing. It is without meaning.’

‘And are you prepared to abide by that?’

Again there was silence. She sat a little apart from me, so that her questions came from the darkness; they were put impersonally, so to speak, not by Helen, but just by a voice.

‘Do you believe that Margery and Dick are nothing now except grass and flowers, and perhaps a little bit of the lives of other people? Do you really believe it? And is Legs nothing now?’

It was quite still. We had come to a very sequestered corner of the great house of life to talk about these things. In front was the shadow of the grave, and over it now lay the shadow of the tower. Once from the grave’s side a few pebbles detached themselves and fell rattling to the bottom, and I had no answer to this. Three days ago I had asked myself the same questions, and what I call my brain answered them; but now it gave no answer. Something, I suppose, had made it uncertain.

‘How can the wheel of an omnibus hurt Legs?’ she asked. ‘It can do no more than hurt his body.’

Then she came closer to me again.

‘And what does love mean?’ she said.

* * * * *