sep. 21, 1900.
i am climbing, climbing, hour by hour, slowly and cautiously, out of the darkness, as a man climbs up some dizzy crag, never turning his head—yet not back to life! i shall not achieve that.
how strange it would seem to others that i can care to write thus—it seems strange even to myself. if ever, in life, i looked on to these twilight hours, with the end coming slowly nearer, i thought i should lie in a kind of stupor of mind and body, indifferent to everything. i am indifferent, with the indifference of one in whom desire seems to be dead; but my mind is, or seems, almost preternaturally clear; and the old habit, of trying to analyse, to describe, anything that i see or realise distinctly is too strong for me. i have asked for pencil and paper; they demur, but yield; and so i write a little, which relieves the occasional physical restlessness i feel; it induces a power of tranquil reverie, and the hours pass, i hardly[246] know how. the light changes; the morning freshness becomes the grave and solid afternoon, and so dies into twilight; till out of the dark alleys steals the gentle evening, dark-eyed and with the evening star tangled in her hair, full of shy sweet virginal thoughts and mysteries ... and then the night, and the day again.
do i grieve, do i repine, do i fear? no, i can truthfully say, i do not. i hardly seem to feel. almost the only feeling left me is the old childlike trustfulness in mother and nurse. i do not seem to need to tell them anything. one or other sits near me. i feel my mother’s eyes dwell upon me, till i look up and smile; but between our very minds there runs, as it were, an airy bridge, on which the swift thoughts, the messengers of love, speed to and fro. i seem, in the loss of all the superstructure and fabric of life, to have nothing left to tie me to the world, but this sense of unity with my mother—that inseparable, elemental tie that nothing can break. and she, i know, feels this too; and it gives her, though she could not describe it, a strange elation in the midst of her sorrow, the joy that a man is born into the world, and that i am hers.
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a mother’s heart
with the beloved nurse it is the same in a sense; but here it is not the deep inextricable bond of blood, but the bond of perfect love. i lose myself in wonder in thinking of it; that one who is hired—that is the strange basis of the relationship—for a simple task, should become absolutely identified with love, with those whom she serves. i do not believe that susan has a single thought or desire in the world that is not centred on my mother or myself. the tie between us is simply indissoluble. and i feel that if we wandered, we three spirits, disconsolate and separate, through the trackless solitudes of heaven, she would somehow find her way to my side.
i have noticed that since my illness began she has slipped into the use of little nursery phrases which i have not heard for years; i have become “master henry” again, and am told to “look slippy” about taking my medicine. this would have moved me in other days with a sense of pathos; it is not so now, though the knowledge that these two beloved, sweet-minded, loving women suffer, is the one shadow over my tranquillity. if i could only explain to them that my sadness for their sorrow[248] is drowned in my wonder at the strangeness that any one should ever sorrow at all for anything!
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