The Upton Letters

by Arthur Christopher Benson

SIBTHORPE VICARAGE, WELLS,
Jan. 7, 1905.

DEAR NELLIE,—I have just opened your letter, and you will know how my whole heart goes out to you. I cannot understand it, I cannot realise it; and I would give anything to be able to say a word that should bring you any comfort or help. God keep and sustain you, as I know He CAN sustain in these dark hours. I cannot write more to-day; but I send you the letter that I was writing, when your own letter came. It helps me even now to think that my dear Herbert told me himself—for that, I see, was the purpose of my dim dream—what was befalling him. And I am as sure as I can be of anything that he is with us, with you, still. Dear friend, if I could only be with you now; but you will know that my thoughts and prayers are with you every moment.—Ever your affectionate,

T. B.

[I add an extract from my Diary.—T. B.]

Diary, Jan. 15.—A week ago, while I was writing the above unfinished lines, I received a letter to say that my friend Herbert was dead—he to whom these letters have been written. It seems that he had been getting, to all appearances, better; that he had had no renewed threatenings of the complaint that had made him an exile. But, rising from his chair in the course of the evening, he had cried out faintly; put his hand to his breast; fallen back in his chair unconscious, and, in a few minutes, had ceased to breathe. They say it was a sudden heart-failure.

It is as though we had been watching by a burrow with all precaution that some little hunted creature should not escape, and that, while we watched and devised, it had slipped off by some other outlet the very existence of which we had not suspected.

Of course, as far as he himself is concerned, such a death is simply a piece of good fortune. If I could know that such would be the manner of my own death, a real weight would be lifted from my mind. To die quickly and suddenly, in all the activity of life, in comparative tranquillity, with none of the hideous apparatus of the sick-room about one, with no dreary waiting for death, that is a great joy. But for his wife and his poor girls! To have had no last word, no conscious look from one whose delicate consideration for others was so marked a part of his nature, this is a terrible and stupefying misery.

I cannot, of course, even dimly realise what has happened; the remoteness of it all, the knowledge that my own outer life is absolutely unchanged, that the days will flow on as usual, makes it trebly difficult to feel what has befallen me. I cannot think of him as dead and silent; yet even before I heard the news, he was buried. I cannot, of course, help feeling that the struggling spirit of my friend tried to fling me, as it were, some last message; or that I suffered with him, and shared his last conscious thought.

Perhaps I shall grow to think of Herbert as dead. But, meanwhile, I am preoccupied with one thought, that such an event ought not to come upon one as such a stunning and trembling shock as it does. It reveals to one the fact of how incomplete one's philosophy of life is. One ought, I feel, deliberately to reckon with death, and to discount it. It is, after all, the only certain future event in our lives.

And yet we struggle with it, put it away from us, live and plan as though it had no existence; or, if it insistently clouds our thoughts, as it does at intervals, we wait resignedly until the darkness lifts, and until we may resume our vivid interests again.