How I Died

It is now ten years ago since I received my death warrant. All these ten
years I have been, and I am, and shall be, I hope, for years yet, a
Doomed Man. It only occurred to me yesterday that I had been
dodging--missing rather than dodging--the common enemy for such a space
of time. _Then_, I know, I respected him. It seemed he marched upon me,
inexorable, irresistible; even at last I felt his grip upon me. I bowed
in the shadow. And he passed. Ten years ago, and once since, he and I
have been very near. But now he seems to me but a blind man, and we,
with all our solemn folly of medicine and hygiene, but players in a game
of Blind Man's Buff. The gaunt, familiar hand comes out suddenly,
swiftly, this time surely? And it passes close to my shoulder; I hear
someone near me cry, and it is over.... Another ream of paper; there is
time at least for the Great Book still.

Very close to the tragedy of life is the comedy, brightest upon the very
edge of the dark, and I remember now with a queer touch of sympathetic
amusement my dear departed self of the middle eighties. How the thing
staggered me! I was full of the vast ambition of youth; I was still at
the age when death is quite out of sight, when life is still an
interminable vista of years; and then suddenly, with a gout of blood
upon my knuckle, with a queer familiar taste in my mouth, that cough
which had been a bother became a tragedy, and this world that had been
so solid grew faint and thin. I saw through it; saw his face near to my
own; suddenly found him beside me, when I had been dreaming he was far
beyond there, far away over the hills.

My first phase was an immense sorrow for myself. It was a purely selfish
emotion. You see I had been saving myself up, denying myself half the
pride of life and most of its indulgence, drilling myself like a
drill-sergeant, with my eyes on those now unattainable hills. Had I
known it was to end so soon, I should have planned everything so
differently. I lay in bed mourning my truncated existence. Then
presently the sorrow broadened. They were so sorry, so genuinely sorry
for me. And they considered me so much now. I had this and that they
would never have given me before--the stateliest bedding, the costliest
food. I could feel from my bed the suddenly disorganised house, the
distressed friends, the new-born solicitude. Insensibly a realisation of
enhanced importance came to temper my regrets for my neglected sins. The
lost world, that had seemed so brilliant and attractive, dwindled
steadily as the days of my illness wore on. I thought more of the
world's loss, and less of my own.

Then came the long journey; the princely style of it! the sudden
awakening on the part of external humanity, which had hitherto