Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/139

127 seeing me, put out her brown-gloved hand to me; and then, when I would have caught and pressed it into my bosom, touched my chest with her finger-tips: the carriage moved onwards: the child wailed: I fell backwards and down, and awoke trembling and wet with trickling sweat.

It was the next morning that, when we came together to the hospital, they told us that Mr. Brooke had died during the night delirious.

In a long moment Starkie turned away. I followed him.

We went in silence along the pavement with the on-moving people, till I said to myself half-aloud:

'I cannot realise that it is so.'

'Nor I,' he said in the same way, 'nor I scarcely. … He was a good man.'

Then I said:

'It is a deep thought to think that his soul has gone out like a candle, and that that is the end of him.'

Starkie answered nothing.

'I wish,' I said, 'you would tell me truly and from the bottom of your soul: do you believe that that is the end of him?'

In a little:

'I believe it,' he said, 'the energy that was in him has undergone some change. We call that change death. It is, I believe, the end of us.'

'Do you think that, when that change comes to you, you will end, that there will be no more of you?'

'I do. Death looses that which grips the gathered threads of our individualities: the threads fall away, going to other invisible work, just as the threads of the body which is left slowly fade into the earth and air, going for other visible work. What death or, to use what seems to me its proper name, solution may be, I cannot of course pretend to guess: but our grandchildren may be able to, and their grandchildren, perhaps, to know. You asked me to tell you my belief: what I truly and from the bottom of my heart believe. That is my belief.'

'I thank you for it,' I said, 'for from to-day I purpose beginning my soul's life anew, and I might go far