Part 34 (2/2)
Thousands have grieved as I am grieving in this self-same place, have asked the same sad questions. Sitting under these ancient walls young men have dreamed as I am dreaming--no new thoughts are mine. For five thousand years man has asked himself why he lives. Five thousand years have changed the face of the world and the mind of man; no thought has resisted the universal transformation of thought, save that one thought--why live? Men change their G.o.ds, but one thought floats immortal, unchastened by the teaching of any mortal G.o.ds. Why see another day? why drink again the bitter cup of life when we may drink the waters of oblivion?”
He walked through Pump Court slowly, like a prisoner impeded by the heavy chain, and at every step the death idea clanked in his brain.
All the windows were full of light, and he could hear women's voices.
In imagination he saw the young men sitting round the sparely furnished rooms, law-books and broken chairs--smoking and drinking, playing the piano, singing, thinking they were enjoying themselves. A few years and all would be over for them as all was over now for him.
But never would they drink of life as he had drunk, he was the type of that of which they were but imperfect and inconclusive figments.
Was he not the Don Juan and the poet--a sort of Byron doubled with Byron's hero? But he was without genius; had he genius, genius would force him to live.
He considered how far in his pessimism he was a representative of the century. He thought how much better he would have done in another age, and how out of sympathy he was with the utilitarian dullness of the present time; how much more brilliant he would have been had he lived at any other period of the Temple's history. Then he stopped to study the style of the old staircase, the rough woodwork twisting up the wall so narrowly, the great banisters full of shadow lighted by the flickering lanterns. The yellowing colonnade--its beams and overhanging fronts were also full of suggestion, and the suggestion of old time was enforced by the sign-board of a wig-maker.
”The last of an ancient industry,” thought Mike. ”The wig is representative of the seventeenth as the silk hat is of the nineteenth century. I wonder why I am so strongly fascinated with the seventeenth century?--I, a peasant; atavism, I suppose; my family were not always peasants.”
Turning from the old Latin inscription he viewed the church, so evocative in its fortress form of an earlier and more romantic century. The clocks were striking one, two hours would bring the dawn close again upon the verge of the world. Mike trembled and thought how he might escape. The beauty of the cone of the church was outlined upon the sky, and he dreamed, as he walked round the shadow-filled porch, full of figures in prayer and figures holding scrolls, of the white-robed knights, their red crosses, their long swords, and their banner called Beauseant. He dreamed himself Grand Master of the Order; saw himself in chain armour charging the Saracen. The story of the terrible idol with the golden eyes, the secret rites, the knight led from the penitential cell and buried at daybreak, the execution of the Grand Master at the stake, turned in his head fitfully; cloud-shapes that pa.s.sed, floating, changing incessantly, suddenly disappearing, leaving him again Mike Fletcher, a strained, agonized soul of our time, haunted and hunted by an idea, overpowered by an idea as a wolf by a hound.
His life had been from the first a series of attempts to escape from the idea. His loves, his poetry, his restlessness were all derivative from this one idea. Among those whose brain plays a part in their existence there is a life idea, and this idea governs them and leads them to a certain and predestined end; and all struggles with it are delusions. A life idea in the higher cla.s.ses of mind, a life instinct in the lower. It were almost idle to differentiate between them, both may be included under the generic t.i.tle of the soul, and the drama involved in such conflict is always of the highest interest, for if we do not read the story of our own soul, we read in each the story of a soul that might have been ours, and that pa.s.sed very near to us; and who reading of Mike's torment is fortunate enough to say, ”I know nothing of what is written there.”
His steps echoed hollow on the old pavement. Full of shadow the roofs of the square church swept across the sky; the triple lancet windows caught a little light from the gaslight on the buildings; and he wondered what was the meaning of the little gold lamb standing over one doorway, and then remembered that in various forms the same symbolic lamb is repeated through the Temple. He pa.s.sed under the dining-hall by the tunnel, and roamed through the s.p.a.ces beneath the plane-trees of King's Bench Walk. ”My friends think my life was a perfect gift, but a burning cinder was placed in my breast, and time has blown it into flame.”
In the soporific scent of the lilies and the stocks, the night drowsed in the darkness of the garden; Mike unlocked the gate and pa.s.sed into the shadows, and hypnotized by the heavenly s.p.a.ces, in which there were a few stars; by the earth and the many emanations of the earth; by the darkness which covered all things, hiding the little miseries of human existence, he threw himself upon the sward crying, ”Oh, take me, mother, hide me in thy infinite bosom, give me forgetfulness of the day. Take and hide me away. We leave behind a corpse that men will touch. Sooner would I give myself to the filthy beaks of vultures, than to their more defiling sympathies. Why were we born? Why are we taught to love our parents? It is they whom we should hate, for it was they who, careless of our sufferings, inflicted upon us the evil of life. We are taught to love them because the world is mad; there is nothing but madness in the world.
Night, do not leave me; I cannot bear with the day. Ah, the day will come; nothing can r.e.t.a.r.d the coming of the day, and I can bear no longer with the day.”
Hearing footsteps, he sprang to his feet, and walking in the direction whence the sound came, he found himself face to face with the policeman.
”Not able to get to sleep sir?”
”No, I couldn't sleep, the night is so hot; I shall sleep presently though.”
They had not walked far before the officer, pointing to one of the gables of the Temple gardens, said--
”That's where Mr. Williamson threw himself over, sir; he got out on the roof, on to the highest point he could reach.”
”He wanted,” said Mike, ”to do the job effectually.”
”He did so; he made a hole two feet deep.”
”They put him into a deeper one.”
The officer laughed; and they walked round the gardens, pa.s.sing by the Embankment to King's Bench Walk. Opening the gate there, the policeman asked Mike if he were coming out, but he said he would return across the gardens, and let himself out by the opposite gate.
He walked, thinking of what he and the policeman had been saying--the proposed reduction in the rents of the chambers, the late innovation of throwing open the gardens to the poor children of the neighbourhood, and it was not until he stooped to unlock the gate that he remembered that he was alive.
Then the voice that had been counselling him so long, drew strangely near, and said ”Die.” The voice sounded strangely clear in the void of a great brain silence. Earth ties seemed severed, and then quite naturally, without any effort of mind, he went up-stairs to shoot himself. No effort of mind was needed, it seemed the natural and inevitable course for him to take, and he was only conscious of a certain faint surprise that he had so long delayed. There was no trace of fear or doubt in him; he walked up the long staircase without embarra.s.sment, and in a heavenly calm of mind hastened to put his project into execution, dreading the pa.s.sing of the happiness of his present mood, and the return of the fever of living. He stopped for a moment to see himself in the gla.s.s, and looking into the depths of his eyes, he strove to read there the story of his triumph over life. Then seeing the disorder of his dress, and the untidy appearance of his unshaven chin, he smiled, conceiving in that moment that it would be consistent to make as careful a toilette to meet death, as he had often done to meet a love.
He was anxious for the world to know that it was not after a drunken bout he had shot himself, but after philosophic deliberation and judicious reflection. And he could far better affirm his state of mind by his dress, than by any written words. Lying on the bed, cleanly shaved, wearing evening clothes, silk socks, patent leather shoes and white gloves? No, that would be vulgar, and all taint of vulgarity must be avoided. He must represent, even in a state of symbol, the young man, who having drunk of life to repletion, and finding that he can but repeat the same love draughts, says: ”It is far too great a bore, I will go,” and he goes out of life just as if he were leaving a fas.h.i.+onable _soiree_ in Piccadilly. That was exactly the impression he wished to convey. Yes, he would have out his opera hat and light overcoat. He was a little uncertain whether he should die in the night, or wait for the day, and considering the question, he lathered his face. ”Curious it is,” he thought, ”I never was so happy, so joyous in life before.... These walls, all that I see, will in a few minutes disappear; it is this I, this Ego, which creates them; in destroying myself I destroy the world.... How hard this beard is! I never can shave properly without hot water!”
As he pulled on a pair of silk socks and tied his white necktie he thought of Lady Helen. Going to bed was not a bad notion--particularly for a woman, and a woman in love, but it would be ridiculous for a man. He looked at himself again in the long gla.s.s in the door of his carved mahogany wardrobe, and was pleased to see that, although a little jaded and worn, he was still handsome. Having brushed his hair carefully, he looked out the revolver; he did not remember exactly where he had put it, and in turning out his drawers he came upon a bundle of old letters. They were mostly from Frank and Lizzie, and in recalling old times they reminded him that if he died without making a will, his property would go to the Crown. It displeased him to think that his property should pa.s.s away in so impersonal a manner.
But his mind was now full of death; like a gourmet he longed to taste of the dark fruit of oblivion; and the delay involved in making out a will exasperated him, and it was with difficulty that he conquered his selfishness and sat down to write. Fretful he threw aside the pen; this little delay had destroyed all his happiness. To dispose of his property in money and land would take some time; the day would surprise him still in the world. After a few moments' reflection he decided that he would leave Belthorpe Park to Frank Escott.
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