Just at that minute she finally saw him. He had got a little open space of railing all to himself, and was leaning way out, waving his arm. She felt as if her heart was going to break, and threw him three long kisses, and he threw three long kisses back. The steamship whistle began blowing, the tender drew away very fast, but she could still see him waving his arm. Then she couldn’t see any more, because the tears came into her eyes, and she sat down and waited for Katy to come, and turned her head away from the ship and wished she were dead.
YOUR OBITUARY, WELL WRITTEN
I.
A couple of years ago I saw in the “agony column” of The Times a very curious advertisement. There are always curious things in that column—I have always been fascinated by that odd little company of forlorn people who so desperately and publicly wear their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Some of them appear there over and over again—the person who signs himself, or herself, “C.,” for example: who regularly every three months or so inserts the message “Tout passe, l’amitié reste.” What singular and heartbreaking devotion does that brief legend convey? Does it ever reach the adored being for whom it is intended, I wonder? Does he ever see it, does he ever reply? Has he simply abandoned her? Were they sundered by some devastating tragedy which can never be healed? And will she go on till she dies, loosing these lovely flame-colored arrows into an utterly unresponsive void?…
I never tire of reflecting on these things; but the advertisement of which I have just spoken was of a different sort altogether. This was signed “Journalist,” and merely said: “Your obituary? Well written, reviewed by yourself, and satisfaction thus insured.” My first response to this oddity was mere amusement. How extraordinarily ingenious of this journalist! It seemed to me that he had perhaps found a gold-mine—I could well imagine that he would be inundated with orders for glowing eulogies. And what an astonishing method of making a living—by arranging flowers, as it were, for the about-to-be-dead! That again was fascinating—for it made me wonder what sort of bird this journalist might be. Something wrong wih him, no doubt—a kind of sadist, a gloomy creature who perhaps reveled rather unhealthily in the mortuary; even, perhaps, a necrophile. Or was he, on the other hand, perfectly indifferent and detached about it, a mere hack-writer who had, by elimination, arrived at a rather clever idea?… But from these speculations I went on to others, and among them the question—to me a highly interesting one—of what, exactly, one would want put into one’s own obituary. What would this be? Would one want just the usual sort of thing—the “he was born,” “he lived in Rome,” “he was a well-known connoisseur of the arts, and a patron of painting,” “conspicuous in the diplomatic society of three countries,” “a brilliant amateur archaeologist,” “died intestate” sort of thing?… Or would one prefer to have one’s personal qualities touched on—with perhaps a kindly reference to one’s unfailing generosity, one’s warmth of heart, and one’s extraordinary equableness of disposition?…
By neither alternative did it seem to me that my “satisfaction could be insured.” Neither for those who knew me, nor for those who did not, could any such perfunctory eulogium be in the least evocative. In what respect would these be any better than the barest of tombstone engravings, with its “born” and “died” and “he was a devoted father”? Mr. X. or Mr. Z., reading of me that I was an amateur archæologist and a kind old fellow, a retired diplomatic secretary, would form no picture of me, receive from such bare bones of statement not the faintest impression of what I might call the “essence” of my life; not the faintest. But if not these, what then? And it occurred to me suddenly that the best, and perhaps the only, way of leaving behind one a record of one’s life which might be, for a world of strangers, revelatory, was that of relating some single episode of one’s history; some single, and if possible central, episode in whose small prism all the colors and lights of one’s soul might be seen. Seen just for a flash, and then gone. Apprehended, vividly, and then forgotten—if one ever does forget such things. And from this, I proceeded to a speculation as to just which one, of all the innumerable events of a well-filled life, I would choose as revelatory. My meeting with my wife at a ball in Calcutta, for example? Some incident of our unhappy life together—perhaps our quarrel in Venice, at the Lido? The effect of her suicide upon me, her drowning in the Mediterranean—the news of which came to me, while I was dining at the Reform Club, from the P. & O. Company?… I considered all of these, only to reject them. Possibly I rejected them—to some extent, anyway—simply because they were essentially painful. I don’t know. Anyway, whatever the reasons, I did reject them, and at last found myself contemplating my odd little adventure with Reine Wilson, the novelist. Just why I fastened upon this, it would be hard to say. It was not an adventure at all; it was hardly even an episode. It was really nothing but the barest of encounters, as I see it now, or as any third person would see it. If I compare it with my protracted love affair with Mrs. M., for example, or even with my very brief infatuation with Hilda K., it appears to be a mere nothing, a mere fragrance.
A mere fragrance!… Yes, it was that; and it is for that reason, I see now, that it is so precious to me. Volatile and swift as it was, it somehow caught into itself all the scanty poetry of my life. If I may be pardoned for appearing a little bit “romantic” about myself, I might say that it was as if I were a tree, and had, in this one instance, put forth a single blossom, a blossom of unique beauty, perhaps a sort of “sport,” which, unlike my other blossoms, bore no fruit, but excelled all the others in beauty and sweetness. That sounds, in the prosaic statement, rather affected, I am afraid; but it is as nearly a literal statement of the truth as I can find.
It happened when I was a young man, about four years after I had married. I was already unhappy and restless. I wasn’t wholly aware of this—I had, at all events, no conscious desire, as yet, to go in search of adventure. All the same, it is obvious to me now that I was, unconsciously, in search of some sort of escape or excitement. I went about a good deal—and I went about alone. My own tastes being mildly literary, and my wife’s not, I made rather a specialty of literary teas and “squashes,” and had soon made a considerable number of acquaintances among the younger writers who lived in London at that time. Among these was a group of young folk who ran a small monthly magazine called The Banner—a magazine which, like many other such things, ran a brilliant but sporadic course for a year or two and then went bankrupt. My friend Estlin first told me about this, and called my attention to the work of Reine Wilson, whose first novel was coming out serially in The Banner, and whose husband was assistant editor of it. I read the first two chapters of “Scherzo,” and I was simply transported by it. It seemed to me the most exquisite prose I had ever read—extraordinarily alive, extraordinarily poetic, and exquisitely feminine. It was the prose of a woman who was, as it were, all sensibility—of a soul that was all a tremulous awareness. Could one have—I asked Estlin—so ethereally delicate a consciousness, a consciousness so easily wounded, and live? And he horrified me by replying “No,” and by telling me that Reine Wilson was—to all intents—dying. She had a bad heart, and had been definitely “given up.” She might die at any minute. And she ought, by rights, to be dead already.