4.4. LOVE AND DEATH.
For he who has faith, death, so far as it is his own death, ceases to
possess any quality of terror. The experiment will be over, the rinsed
beaker returned to its shelf, the crystals gone dissolving down the
waste-pipe; the duster sweeps the bench. But the deaths of those we love
are harder to understand or bear.
It happens that of those very intimate with me I have lost only one, and
that came slowly and elaborately, a long gradual separation wrought by
the accumulation of years and mental decay, but many close friends and
many whom I have counted upon for sympathy and fellowship have passed
out of my world. I miss such a one as Bob Stevenson, that luminous,
extravagant talker, that eager fantastic mind. I miss him whenever I
write. It is less pleasure now to write a story since he will never read
it, much less give me a word of praise for it. And I miss York Powell's
friendly laughter and Henley's exuberant welcome. They made a warmth
that has gone, those men. I can understand why I, with my fumbling
lucidities and explanations, have to finish up presently and go,
expressing as I do the mood of a type and of a time; but not those
radiant presences.
And the gap these men have left, these men with whom after all I only
sat now and again, or wrote to in a cheerful mood or got a letter from
at odd times, gives me some measure of the thing that happens, that may
happen, when the mind that is always near one's thoughts, the person who
moves to one's movement and lights nearly all the common flow of events
about one with the reminder of fellowship and meaning--ceases.
Faith which feeds on personal love must at last prevail over it. If
Faith has any virtue it must have it here when we find ourselves bereft
and isolated, facing a world from which the light has fled leaving it
bleak and strange. We live for experience and the race; these individual
interludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in which we lovers met
and refreshed was but a halt on a journey. When we have loved to the
intensest point we have done our best with each other. To keep to that
image of the inn, we must not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire.
We must go on to new experiences and new adventures. Death comes to part
us and turn us out and set us on the road again.
But the dead stay where we leave them.
I suppose that is the real good in death, that they do stay; that it
makes them immortal for us. Living they were mortal. But now they can
never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change again. They have
finished--for us indeed just as much as themselves. There they sit for
ever, rounded off and bright and done. Beside these clear and certain
memories I have of my dead, my impressions of the living are vague
provisional things.
And since they are gone out of the world and become immortal memories in
me, I feel no need to think of them as in some disembodied and
incomprehensible elsewhere, changed and yet not done. I want actual
immortality for those I love as little as I desire it for myself.
Indeed I dislike the idea that those I have loved are immortal in any
real sense; it conjures up dim uncomfortable drifting phantoms, that
have no kindred with the flesh and blood I knew. I would as soon think
of them trailing after the tides up and down the Channel outside my
window. Bob Stevenson for me is a presence utterly concrete, slouching,
eager, quick-eyed, intimate and profound, carelessly dressed (at
Sandgate he commonly wore a little felt hat that belonged to his son)
and himself, himself, indissoluble matter and spirit, down to the heels
of his boots. I cannot conceive of his as any but a concrete
immortality. If he lives, he lives as I knew him and clothed as I knew
him and with his unalterable voice, in a heaven of daedal flowers or a
hell of ineffectual flame; he lives, dreaming and talking and
explaining, explaining it all very earnestly and preposterously, so I
picture him, into the ear of the amused, incredulous, principal person
in the place.
I have a real hatred for those dreary fools and knaves who would have me
suppose that Henley, that crippled Titan, may conceivably be tapping at
the underside of a mahogany table or scratching stifled incoherence into
a locked slate! Henley tapping!--for the professional purposes of
Sludge! If he found himself among the circumstances of a spiritualist
seance he would, I know, instantly smash the table with that big fist of
his. And as the splinters flew, surely York Powell, out of the dead past
from which he shines on me, would laugh that hearty laugh of his back
into the world again.
Henley is nowhere now except that, red-faced and jolly like an October
sunset, he leans over a gate at Worthing after a long day of picnicking
at Chanctonbury Ring, or sits at his Woking table praising and quoting
"The Admiral Bashville," or blue-shirted and wearing that hat that
Nicholson has painted, is thrust and lugged, laughing and talking aside
in his bath-chair, along the Worthing esplanade...
And Bob Stevenson walks for ever about a garden in Chiswick, talking in
the dusk.
