“Don’t be uneasy; we are here.”
I knew very well what death was. The school porter having died, a weird whim of our religious director had constrained us to defile, class by class, before the bier upon which the corpse had been laid, before the cover of the coffin was screwed down. Now this porter was a short stout man, whose mortal remains required a cubic receptacle in which he looked to us so comical and smirking that we burst into a laugh that, though it scandalised us, we found it impossible to repress. The indignant professor who was acting as marshal to this abortive pilgrimage overwhelmed us with the severest reproaches, not hesitating to add thereto in due time a sermon upon our final destiny. With no circumlocution he informed us that we were all to die, and perhaps very soon, that our parents would die, and that we should lose every one we loved. By degrees our laughter died away. A vague fear took possession of us, heightened by the monotonous repetition of the word death, continually thrown at our heads. When I went back to the house that morning, greatly moved in spite of myself by that vehement discourse, I looked at my father and mother as I had never looked at them before. They were coming and going as usual, without dreaming that I was watching them. They even laughed at one of Bernard’s remarks: I heard them laugh—a hearty laugh very like that which the unlucky porter in his box had aroused in us. Ah, that laugh! especially our father’s laugh, strong and sonorous, giving a splendid impression of health—how it comforted me, and how it put to flight the terrified curiosity which had taken possession of me.
“Aha!” I thought in my little brain, “the teacher was lying like a dentist! They will not die—that is certain. They can’t die. To begin with, when people laugh, that means that they don’t die.”
This evident conclusion set my heart at rest. So far as I was concerned there was no longer any question on the subject. They were in front and I behind them. And since there was no risk for them how could death touch me, passing them by?
My question “Am I going to die?” was therefore simply designed to make myself interesting. In their presence I was safe.
Mother and Aunt Deen watched me by turns, that I might see no strange face; mother took two nights out of three, and I liked her best. She glided into the room like a mist over the lake, without the slightest sound. I was never aware of any of her movements. Her cares and her caresses mingled; while Aunt Deen, the dear woman, at the cost of tremendous effort, disturbed and irritated me.
The important part which I myself was playing was by no means irksome to me. I seemed to myself to have become smaller than my brother James and my sister Nicola, and that I might just as well be rocked to sleep with lullabies. I used to ask for Venice and The Pool, because of my own drenching, and they thought I was delirious. I distinctly see in memory those two faces bending over me, and still more clearly that of my father, who was continually coming to see me; the attentive, fixed, almost severe expression with which he noted the effects of my disease upon my body was quite strange to me. It was his professional expression; the examination once over, his features would relax, lightened up by fatherhood.
One day father brought in another doctor, but I clearly saw that the little man stood in awe of him, and invariably repeated what he said to him. With implacable logic I observed to my faithful nurses,
“What’s the use of troubling that gentleman? Father knows much more about it than he. Father doesn’t need any one.”
I probably uttered these words or something like them in a low voice. Aunt Deen promptly approved.