She had been his pupil, he her master. At every step he had instructed her, not tritely as a Mr. Barlow, but he had been Barlowish, and that was bad. He had never admitted her to equality. How could he? He had never admitted himself to equality with his inmost self. He had always, as it were, instructed himself, set out upon the crowded way of life with mnemonic precepts, and gathered more and more of them, so that he had never, after childhood, drawn upon his innate knowledge, that was more than knowledge. Without its use his life had, for convenience, been split up into parts more and more, with passing years, at variance with each other. And when the time came to give his life he was no longer master of it. He could lend this and that and the other part; lend, in usury, for only a life can be given. . . . He had brought her to suffering: the much he had given her, the pleasantness and ease, making her only the more intimately feel her need of the more he might have given. He had brought her to suffering and through her suffering he was beginning to learn.
When he thought of her suffering he was tempted to say to her—perhaps not in words—“You will not go. I will. I will leave you free.” But that would be to lay her under another obligation, and once more to instruct. The thing was beyond good and evil now: they three were passing through the inmost fire of life. Absurdly he thought of the three Hebrews of the Bible and of an old rhyme his nurse had been used to gabble at him and Robert when they were little boys:
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,
Shake the bed,
Make the bed,
And into bed you go.
For a moment or two, like a proper Englishman, he sighed for the happy state of childhood. Then he shook that off.
“Bah!” he said. “We sacrifice the whole of our lives to the ideas implanted in us during the first foolish years of them.”
Sir Robert Wherry lay adying. He had never been able to resist an obituary. Never an illustrious man died but Wherry rushed into print, preferably in the Times newspaper, with reminiscence and lamentation. So, as he lay adying, he composed many obituaries of himself. There were reporters at his door waiting upon his utterances. They came as regularly as the bulletins. As each might be his last, it was carefully framed to rival Goethe’s or Nelson’s or the Earl of Chatham’s final words. Three of them began: “We men of England . . .” one “My mother said . . .” two with the word “Love . . .” and once, remembering William Blake, he raised his head and prated of angels. Last, with the true inspiration of death, faithful to himself and the work of his life, he turned and smiled at his nurse and his wife and daughter and said: “Give my love to my public.” So he died, and there were tears in thousands of British homes that night.
His death crowded every other topic to the back pages of the newspapers. There were columns of anecdotes and every day brought a fresh flood of tributes from divines, lecturers, novelists, dramatists, publicists of all kinds. One newspaper sent this reply-paid telegram to Old Mole: