time, which is to the mind a function of the mind, stretches and contracts, as all men know, when the mind impelled by forces not its own demands the expansion or the lessening of time. thus in a moment, as the foolish physicists can prove, long experiences of dreams are held; and thus hours upon hours of other men’s lives are lost to us for ever when we lie in profound sleep; and i knew a man who, sleeping through a morning upon the grassy side of a hill many years ago, slept through news that seemed to have ruined him and his, and slept on to a later moment when the news proved false and the threat of disaster was lifted; during those hours of agony there had been for him no time.
they say that with men approaching dissolution some trick of time is played, or at least that when death is very near indeed the whole scale and structure of thought changes, just as some have imagined (and it is a reasonable suspicion) that the common laws governing matter do not apply to it in some last stage of tenuity, so the ordered sequence of the mind takes on something fantastic and moves during such moments in a void.
[284]so must it have been with that which i will now describe.
a man lay upon a bed of a common sort in a room which was bare of ornament. but he had forgotten the room. he was a man of middle age, corpulent, and one whose flesh and the skin of whose flesh had sagged under disease. his eyes were closed, his mouth, which was very fine, delicate, and firm, alone of his features preserved its rigour. those features had been square and massive, their squareness and their strength the more emphasised by the high forehead with its one wisp of hair. but though the strength of character remained behind the face, the muscular strength had left it, for that body had suffered agony.
the man so lying was conscious of little; the external world was already beyond his reach. he knew that somehow he was not suffering pain, and the mortal fatigue that oppressed him had, in that unexpected absence of pain, some opportunity for repose. neither his room nor what was left of companionship round him, nor the voices that he knew and loved, nor those others that he knew too well and despised, reached his senses. for many years the air in which he had lived and in which he was now perishing had been to him in his captivity a mournful delight. it was a tropical air, but enlivened by the freshness of the sea and continually impelled in great sea winds above him. now he felt that air no longer, and might have[285] been so many thousand miles away in the place where he had been born, or many thousand miles more, in the snows of a great campaign, or under the violent desert sun of certain remembered battles; it was all one to him, for he only held to life by one thread within, and outer things had already left him.
within, however, his mind in that last weakness still busily turned; no longer considering as it had considered during the activity of a marvellous life what answers the great questions propounded to the soul of man should receive, still less noting practical and immediate needs or considering set problems. his mind for once, almost for the first time, was this last time seeing things go by.
first he saw dull pageantries which had been the common stuff of his life, and he was confused by half-remembered, half-restored, faint cheers of distant crowds, colours, and gold, and the twin flashes of gems and of steel. and through it now and then strains of solemn music, and now and then the tearing cry of bronze: the bugles. all these sensations, confused and blurred, re-arose, and as they re-arose, welling up into him like a mist, there re-arose those permanent concomitants of such things. he felt again the nervous dread of folly and mishap, wondered upon the correctness of his conduct, whether he had not given offence somewhere to someone ... whether he had not been the subject of criticism by some tongue he feared. and as all that part of his great life returned to him, his face even in that[286] extremity showed some faint traces of concern such as it had borne when in truth and in the body he had moved in the midst of a court.
next, like shadows disappearing, all that ghostly hubbub passed, but before he could be alone another picture succeeded, and he thought to feel beneath him the rolling of the sea. he was a young man looking for land, with others standing behind upon the deck, watching him in envy because of the miracles he was to do with armed men when he should touch the shore. and yet he was not a young man. he was a man already weighted with disappointment and with loss of love, and with some confused conception of breaking under an immense strain; and those who were on the deck behind him watching him, watched him with awe and with pity, and with a sort of dread that did not relieve his spirit. so young and old in the same moment, he felt in the brain the swinging of a ship’s deck. so he strained for land, a land where he should conquer, and at the same time it was a land where he should be utterly alone, and utterly forget, and be filled with nothing but defeat. the contradiction held him altogether.
then this movement also steadied and changed, and he had the sensation of a man walking up some steep hill, some hill too steep. he was leading a horse and the horse stumbled. it was bitterly cold, but he did not feel the cold: the roaring and the driving round him in the snow. next he was in the[287] saddle; there was a little eminence from which he saw a plain. slight as the beast was his seat galled him. he sat his mount badly, and he dreaded lest it should start with him as it had started the day before. but even as he so worried himself on his bad horsemanship, all his mind changed at quite another sight.
for in the plain below that little height the great battalions went forward, rank upon rank upon rank; it was a review and it was a battle and it was a campaign. mad imagery! the uniforms were the uniforms of gala, the drum-majors went before the companies of the guard, gigantic, twirling their gigantic staves; the lifted trumpets of the cuirassiers sounded as though upon some great stage, for the mere glory of the sound. and mass upon mass, regular, instinct with purpose, innumerable, the army passed below. there was no end to it. he knew, he was certain, as he strained his eyes, that it would never end. it was afoot, and it would march for ever. far off, beyond the line, upon the flank of it, distant and terrible went the packed mass of the guns, and you could hear faintly amid the other noises of the advance the clatter-clank-clank of the limber. and from so far off he saw the leading sabres of commanders saluting him from his old arm. here again was a mixture for him of things that do not mix in the true world: glory and despair. this endless army was his, and yet would go on beyond him. it was his and not his. there[288] was room upon the colours for a million names of victories, but every victory in some way carried the stamp of defeat. and yet seeing all that pageant as the precursor of failure, he saw it also as something constructive. he thought of wood that burns and is consumed, but is the fuel of a flame of fire and all that fire can do.
as he so thought, like a wind and a spirit blowing through the whole came some vast conception of a god. and once again the mixed, the dual feeling seized him, more greatly than before. it was a god that drove them all, and him. and that god was in his childhood, and he remembered his childhood very clearly. it was something of which he had been convinced in childhood, a security of good.... look how the army moved!...
and now it had halted.
here his mind failed, and he had died. it was napoleon.
