The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

He watched consciousness fade from his father’s body and found strange, sly analogies (they were like horrid nudges in the dark)—with his mother’s death, the worthless man, the saintly woman, mingling in the sameness of their ending, the pitifulness, after all, of the final insignificance that overtook them both. And so glassy was the current, so sleepy the wind, that the analogy shook hardly a tremor of pain through him.

In the hour of his father’s death, a more trivial memory came—trivial, yet it lent a pathos, even a dignity, to the dying man. In the captain’s eyes, turned wonderingly on him, in the automatic stretching out of his wasted hand for his,—Gavan held it to the end—was the reminiscence of the poor monkey’s far-away death, the little tropical creature that had drooped and died at Kirklands.

On the day of the funeral, Gavan sat in the library at dusk, and the lassitude had become so deep, partly through the breakdown of sheer exhaustion, that the thought of going on watching his own machinery work—toward that same end,—the end of the monkey, of his father, his mother,—was profoundly disgusting.

It was a positively physical disgust, a nausea of fatigue, that had overtaken him as he watched the rooks, above the dark yet gilded woods, wheel against a sunset sky.

Almost automatically, with no sense of choice or effort, he had unlocked a drawer of the writing-table beside him and taken out a case of pistols, merely wondering if the machine were going to take the final and only logical move of stopping itself.

He was a little interested to observe, as he opened the case, that he felt no emotion at all. He had quite expected that at such a last moment life would concentrate, gather itself for a final leap on him, a final clinging. He had expected to have a bout with the elemental, the thing that some men called faith in life and some only desire of life, and, indeed, for a moment, his mind wandered in vague, Buddhistic fancies about the wheel of life to which all desire bound one, desire, the creator of life, so that as long as the individual felt any pulse of it life might always suck him back into the vortex. The fancy gave him his one stir of uneasiness. Suppose that the act of departure were but the final act of will. Could it be that such self-affirmation might tie him still to the wheel he strove to escape, and might the drama still go on for his unwilling spirit in some other dress of flesh? To see the fear as the final bout was to quiet it; it was a fear symptomatic of life, a lure to keep him going; and, besides, how meaningless such surmises, on their ethical basis of voluntary choice, as if in the final decision one would not be, as always, the puppet of the underlying will. His mind dropped from the thread-like interlacing of teasing metaphysical conjecture to a calm as quiet and deep as though he were about to turn on his pillow and fall asleep.

Now, like the visions in a dreamy brain, the memories of the day trooped through the emptiness of thought. He was aware, while he watched the visions, of himself sitting there, to a spectator a tragic or a morbid figure. Morbid was of course the word that a frightened or merely stupid humanity would cast at him. And very morbid he was, to be sure, if life were desirable and to cease to desire it abnormal.

He saw himself no longer in either guise. He was looking now at his father’s coffin lowered into the earth of the little churchyard beside his mother’s grave; the fat, genial face of the sexton, the decorous sadness on the little rector’s features. Overhead had been the quietly stirring elms; sheep grazed beyond the churchyard wall and on the horizon was the pastoral blue of distant hills. He saw the raw, new grave and the heave of the older grave’s green sod, the old stone, with its embroidery of yellow lichen and its text of eternal faith.

And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,—all sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had hated,—struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,—this dream where such resurrections were possible.

He had lifted the pistol, pausing for a moment in an uncertainty as to whether head or heart were the surer exit, when a quiet step at the door arrested him.