‘Thank you,’ she said—‘thank you for being here, Jack. Dick is waiting for me. Yes, Dick!’
She raised herself a little more, and seemed to struggle for breath.
‘Is it morning?’ she said. ‘Let in the morning.’
And even as I pulled the curtains aside and raised the blinds there dawned on her the Everlasting Day.
JULY
I have told you about the May of three years ago, and the June of two years ago, because those two months are so dedicated in my mind to what happened then, that, while the months are running, I cannot free myself from them and live in the present year. Have you not certain such dates in your year—days on which you live, not on the day that is now passing, but on a certain day in some year long past? There is a foolish proverb that says that those people are happy who have no history. In other words, it is better to be a cow than a man. I cannot see it. But if it will not bore you, and if, in fact, my May and June are ever so little human to you, I will tell you quite shortly a little more of them. If, on the other hand, this does bore you, leave out the next four pages.
Believe me, death is not so terrible; what is terrible is the thought that it is so. But learn how false that thought is, and death will not terrify you. For what lies behind? God and He who died for us. And if I am wrong, if it is not so, nothing whatever seems to me to matter, and we can look on death as on a flea-bite. But believing, as I do, that beyond death—even as on this side of it—is God, when lives have ended, as those of Margery and Dick, so utterly without reproach, when two souls have been so splendidly human as they were, it seems that God must have been knowing what He was about when He allowed that bullet—blindly illogical as it may seem to us—to end her life as surely as it ended his. I can understand the existence of a lifelong regret and bitterness if a thing had not been well done, if a man died from obvious carelessness of any kind, or from weak persistence in a bad habit. Then one might say, ‘If it had been otherwise!’ But he had done his duty, and his duty implied death. And his death—I only grope dimly after what I believe to be true—implied hers. Does this seem to you a stoical, unhuman view? Ah! believe me, it is not so. It would have been very easy for one who loved them both to take another point of view, and find life dull, objectless, without interest or merriment. But—but would that have been better? Would it have been better to have turned aside from all other things, saying ‘I cannot,’ rather than to have steadfastly said ‘I can,’ until—well, until one could? Some day I know, on that day when Slam’s kitten stands between earth and heaven in the midst of the four pines, and Slam says, ‘Oh, it is nice!’ there will meet me one who died on the African uplands, and one on whose grave the sweet-peas are yearly odorous; and we shall know each other, and God will look on the greeting we give each other, well pleased. How that will be I cannot guess; I am only sure that it will be so. Atheists and dyspeptics (the two are much the same) may laugh, and if they enjoy their laugh so much the better for them.
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