“I am afraid I am at a loss to understand,” I replied, “perhaps you can explain.”
“Existence became utterly unendurable,” he continued, “worries heaped upon one another until the strain was unbearable, and then, to crown all, a terrible disease took possession of me. I knew I could not live. It might be a matter drawn out in all its hideousness for two or three years, but—the germ was there.”
“We shall none of us live for ever,” I replied cheerily. “Death is inevitable.”
“Oh yes,” he nodded, “death is inevitable; but we do not all have to face it in this way. So unendurable was the strain that I determined to end the matter in my own fashion, and a day or two ago I finally decided to take my life.”
The man talked in a perfectly rational manner, though at the same time in an extremely impressive tone.
“I did not come to the conclusion lightly,” he continued. “I weighed all the pros and cons; faced all the circumstances of the case, and I could not see that my life was of any value; in fact, in many ways my family would be better off without me. I had not much pluck left to face the inevitable racks of pain and disease, so after hours and days of mental torment I decided to end it all.
“Night came.
“Having determined to wait quietly until all the family were in bed, I sat in my study and read. I read and thought, and planned and argued, and the hours appeared to drag interminably. For some reason the servants seemed later than usual in retiring, and I watched the hands of the clock slowly move along. It was almost midnight. The lights had been put out in the passages. I could no longer hear the tread of people overhead; but for fear that it was still too early I returned to the book I was reading. Strangely enough, my eye fell on the word suicide. It seemed to rivet me with a weird and terrible fascination. I looked again, and that word appeared to be written in letters of blood. Was it a message, I wondered, to a man standing on the brink of the grave, on the verge of cutting the knot of life? What did that word suicide portend? I read on....
“Gradually I became interested. Here was a strange case. A man battling with blindness, a man whose circumstances seemed somewhat similar to my own; and as I read, I discovered that he had thought deeply on the same subject, he had disentangled the same problem. Yes, as I read and re-read the words they seemed to burn into my brain. I realised that this man decided that he was not justified in taking his own life, that even though blindness threatened he still had a mission to fulfil; and when I had learnt those words by heart, I banged down the book, rose from the table, clenched my fist, and determined to go on quietly and live my life to the bitter end. That page which altered the course of events was in the ‘Life’ you wrote of your father.[1] Since that evening I have read the book from end to end. Clearly he was right. He had a mission to fulfil and fulfilled it. I have, I hope, now passed through the darkest hour of my life, but I could not rest until I came to tell you personally that if you had not written the book, which chance put into my hand that night, I should have been a dead man to-day.”