How I Died - Page 2

been wont
to jostle me, to help itself before me, to turn its back upon me, to my
importance. "He has a diseased lung--cannot live long"....

I was going into the dark and I was not afraid--with ostentation. I
still regard that, though now with scarcely so much gravity as
heretofore, as a very magnificent period in my life. For nearly four
months I was dying with immense dignity. Plutarch might have recorded
it. I wrote--in touchingly unsteady pencil--to all my intimate friends,
and indeed to many other people. I saw the littleness of hate and
ambition. I forgave my enemies, and they were subdued and owned to it.
How they must regret these admissions! I made many memorable remarks.
This lasted, I say, nearly four months.

The medical profession, which had pronounced my death sentence,
reiterated it steadily--has, indeed, done so now this ten years. Towards
the end of those four months, however, dying lost its freshness for me.
I began to detect a certain habitual quality in my service. I had
exhausted all my memorable remarks upon the subject, and the strain
began to tell upon all of us.

One day in the spring-time I crawled out alone, carefully wrapped, and
with a stick, to look once more--perhaps for the last time--on sky and
earth, and the first scattered skirmishers of the coming army of
flowers. It was a day of soft wind, when the shadows of the clouds go
sweeping over the hills. Quite casually I happened upon a girl
clambering over a hedge, and her dress had caught in a bramble, and the
chat was quite impromptu and most idyllic. I remember she had three or
four wood anemones in her hand--"wind stars" she called them, and I
thought it a pretty name. And we talked of this and that, with a light
in our eyes, as young folks will.

I quite forgot I was a Doomed Man. I surprised myself walking home with
a confident stride that jarred with the sudden recollection of my
funereal circumstances. For a moment I tried in vain to think what it
was had slipped my memory. Then it came, colourless and remote. "Oh!
Death.... He's a Bore," I said; "I've done with him," and laughed to
think of having done with him.

"And why not so?" said I.

THE END