Diogenes of London (collection)/Dick a-Dying

E lay upon his rough bed, confined within meagre wrappings, and contemplated the mangy ceiling. In one comer a spider wandered about its dusty web; the plaster, distempered with the grime of smoke, was streaked and patched with blots of darkness; it gaped with swelling fissures, from which thin filaments hung, and shook at the rumble of passing vehicles. The low roof stretched overhead as a particoloured map, in which his eye travelled listlessly over seas and continents. He had the distribution of the elements by heart, and could have redrawn them in their proper proportions. The squalid ceiling held no more for him now than the space within the four walls, than the dingy street at which his attic window blinked. The phenomena of that room were worn smooth by long use; yet the day had its own slow history. In fine weather the autumnal sun struck through the panes at high noon, and fell on the ragged carpet. There the thread of light lay inert and dead for some time, then stirred sluggishly and crept towards the doorway. His eyes were wont to watch it till it vanished somewhere through the chinks, along the wall and into the street again. Towards evening it flashed on the windows across the way, and was then gone from his cramped world altogether. The fall of night on these occasions was an agreeable event, for it was as though more incidents attended the close of day. There was constantly some change in his purview. The air turned chilly; the sky showed some faint reflections from the west; the mists rolled out of the river; and lights sprang up in the houses opposite. At that time, too, the streets emptied of its yelling children; doors clapped-to behind home-comers: a piano tinkled in the distance; an early tippler beguiled the way with song; and as the candle spluttered out by his bedside, Dick drew nearer to sleep.

The day broke bleakly, and for the more part in fog or rain. Perched in his high seclusion, he could despatch his gaze across a wide stretch of housetops, broken by peaks and chimneys. Narrow rims and gutters in the prospect marked the deep streets and lanes that cut this monstrous plateau into islands. It seemed to him as though he on his heights were the single tenant of a silent and desert world, reaching indeterminately away, with stack on stack of smoking chimneys, and wave on wave of rolling gables. Below ran an invisible life in which he might take no part; monotonous, it would appear from the unchanging sounds of traffic and communion, but still a world too familiar to be forsaken for this motionless and quiet sphere above. This thought had grown clearer in him, had mounted into a constant pain. He supposed he should be gone from this outer life in a little without the liberty of farewell; and he was kept still within hearing of it, a parcel of the next, to which he had not yet resigned himself. By this he had grown too weak for movement, though the throes of his malady had left him; and his mind, revolving in itself, was free to regard the prospect with its best fortitude. As he approached death he must fit his spirit for the dissolution: must, at least, withdraw it from the interests of the street, lest it should take its separation too desperately at the moment of departure. To think upon that packed life, its marvellous passions, its snug corners, its spacious breadth and singular continuity, the very chequers in its ample warmth and brightness—to take all this info his thoughts in a flash, and to forecast his good-byes, chilled his heart to an extremity of cold. He was upon the precipice, with his eyes full-opened on the fall; and the agony of that anticipated descent appalled him. It were better, he concluded, to watch the yellow sunlight, to travel with the the spider to and from his shiny web, to count the stacks upon the houses in his superior world, rather than to suffer his soul to dwell in this torment. When these distractions failed he would have the refuge of sleep, upon which his worn body declined now with increasing readiness.

As he lay upon his pallet the door opened noiselessly, and a man stood within the precincts of the room and regarded him. Dick turned his head and smiled as at a familiar face.

'A little weaker,' said the doctor, taking hold upon the thin wrist. 'You have had a constitution of steel.'

Dick looked at him. He was a man of some sixty years, meanly dressed; his moustache powdered yellow with the use of snuff, his eyes hard and weary, his shoulders stooped, his skin fitted tightly over a bony skull. He met his patient's eyes, and passed them without recognition; he had, no doubt, some grave point of treatment to discuss with himself, and could not be at the bother of ceremony. This man had looked into the eyes of death for forty years; and yet (Dick wondered) did he spare a little pity for this one of many thousands? The doctor hummed a gentle air; he sat upon the mattress, scanning the sick man.

'It is a spurious kindness to keep the truth from you,' said he.

Dick nodded; his eyes were fastened on the other's features. He hardly heard. His career had been brief, as careers go; he had made and lost it for himself; for fifteen years he had been in the enjoyment of vain pleasures. He had been at pains to constitute a scheme after his own taste; he had taken the trouble to step out of his native circle into another he conceived of greater opportunity and promise. He had given no thought to enduring friendships; he had married no wife; he had spent upon himself the years of his manhood. This doctor alone of all men that had fallen within the compass of his acquaintance was to compassionate him on his end.

The doctor took some snuff.

'Have you no friends?' he asked.

'I have a brother,' said Dick.

'Send for him,' replied his visitor.

Dick's glance drifted to the window. The street was roaring with the midday voices; the air hung heavy with smoke and mist. At a motion the dirty attic and its contiguous squalor had lost their proximity, and he was regarding himself with the eyes of childhood. The vices and pleasures of his adult life invited him vainly from their cold distance. In the full costume of manhood, though the frame of it was shrunken, with the complete experiences of his five-and-thirty years, he had now the vision and emotions of a boy. The habit of manliness, like the pleasant vices, had faded inconceivably; the ghost of a strong will, bloodless and frail, stared wofully through its prison-bars. The spirit lay a-dying with the flesh, leaving vivid only the sense of horror and the faculty of tears. Thrills of a soft affection stirred along his nerves, and gentle voices were calling in his ears. It was strange how he could resume those preterite feelings, upon which his memory had made no call for years which he had long since flung off as attachments unworthy of the larger mind. He could not, indeed, perfectly reconstruct the ancient company of his childhood: for of the faces many came as shadows, some from the grave, some from oversea; with variable traits and uncertain features. But their memories crept very near him, enclosing him in a warm gush of affection; and closest and warmest of all was that figure of his brother, now the sole relic from his school-days, wearing the gracious air of common associations and claiming the tie of blood. If his eyes must shut upon the world, let it be with something familiar in that final gaze.

'I should like him to be here,' said he in his thin voice.

'I will telegraph,' said the doctor.

There seemed that afternoon a pause in the course of the sun. It was but a trickle of light that dribbled through the shallow mist, but it was long in passing. As the hours wore on, Dick could hear mounting from below snatches of sound in the house: as each rose he stiffened in his bed with an anxious expectancy, his mouth ready seamed for a smile. Betweenwhiles his thoughts flowed in a sluggish dream, wherein the past was very clear and present. But at the fall of night the doctor returned, a brown envelope between his fingers. Dick rose upon an elbow painfully and searched the passive face. Some change there in the narrow eyes answered his silent question; he sank again.

'He is sorry; he has a great press of business,' quoth the doctor.

At the words those amiable phantoms of boyhood departed from their neighbourhood, and resumed their proper distance. The past fell clean out of sight, and but the present filled the room. Yet the yearning for this familiar object wherefrom to close the eyes survived from the barren experiment. His associates were gone out of his life; he had quarrelled upon a woman with one, had betrayed the honour of another, was forgotten of a third. In this way and in that he had destroyed an environment of no particular consistency. There seemed to him left now only the bare walls of his material enclosure. There was a girl to whom he had professed more than the current affection; and perhaps she, too, had taken him at a superior value. But these attachments were of the whim, too casual, too ordinary, too multitudinous for grave issues. His fancy lingered for one instant on this careless creature of black eyes, but the next perceived her wincing through her paint, and withdrawing her dainty skirts from the contact of his tawdry bed. The incongruous apparition fled at the glimpse, and he beheld the doctor regarding him with lowered eyes.

'There is no one else?' he asked.

Dick saw his spider nesting for the night; in the candle-light black shadows dodged and flickered over the ceiling; the smoke floated up as incense; and little draughts whistled in the cracks of the floor. The doctor rose, and pulled the blind across the window. The action had a touch of homeliness, and carried with it suggestions of a fireside. He was shutting out the dark from this poor candle, and would turn to talk with him. Dick would fetch topics even now out of his manifold experiences, with which they might beguile the remaining hours. He would discuss with abating breath stray ideas from his rich memories, and make, as it were, a final stand in life. Death should approach unheard in this last exchange of sympathies. Or at least he should sink quietly into oblivion, with some one watching who had done him kindly offices, and had some sense of those agonies which he was to endure.

'Doctor,' said he; 'have you seen many die?' His gaze moved wistfully over the parched face. The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

'I have lived some sixty years,' said he; 'and my own death will be at the tail of very many.'

Dick's eyelids drooped. Life, then, was so mortal to this man that its termination must be but an unessential incident, so slight and common as to pass without record in the memory. To die with those sharp, expert eyes upon him were to add to the terrors of dissolution; far less disquieting were the cold and pallid walls, the vacant air, the droning silence.

'Let me be,' he whispered; 'I shall die gently.'

Some one late that night, stumbling to a neighbouring garret by the gusty flare of a candle, paused outside the sick-room. The door crept open in a gap, and Dick saw the face of the little serving maid, unkempt and flurried, framed distressfully in the long aperture. His eyes and his lean finger invited her towards the chair. Staring with inflated eyes, she obeyed the gesture, and sat, her candle on her knee, her mouth agape in a pant of wondering fear. Dick dumbly watched the ill-shapen features. This then was the last human figure of which he might have sense. Other phantoms might rise in his mind and mingle there in a shadowy morrice, but this alone would move and feel and speak with continuity and independence. Them he could exclude from his weary brain in a twinkling, at the call of a fly buzzing on the pane; while this alone should stay there persistent, should dance to no invisible strings, should stir with young vigour, should be fulfilled of lively motions. He could not predict her actions; she would be gay with surprises. She would answer his mute eyes by some correspondent expression of her features, would interpret his impalpable thoughts into the flesh of performance, would watch him with some sorrow, would, perchance, tend him with some pity and lament him with some sincerity. She was too young to have this doctor's neglect of death; and with this poor creature's solemn awe and childish sympathy he might pass from the presence of a warm and living soul, not wholly discarded of a world of which he still was part.

She had recovered from her emotions, and sat staring about the room with a chastened wonder. It was all too familiar to her; and yet, it seemed, the discoloured walls, the sooty roof, the cracked chair, were all invested with new aspects. Her gaze returned to him. Her face was small and pitiful; her years were few weighed against her labours. Dick strove at a smile; he fixed his spectral eyes upon her. His wits were shining clear and luminous, but he was past speech or action. In his mouth the thought he would have put into words rattled at its prison-bars. At the sound the girl started. It was as if the sudden irruption upon the quiet had frightened her. She gave a tiny cry, which was suddenly hushed in her throat as though she had remembered the sick-chamber. A panic sprang out in her face. She rose, and, watching him fearfully, backed quickly and noiselessly from the room, leaving the still figure with its eyes riveted upon the door.