Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

by Richard Le Gallienne

“You must see no one else to-day,” said his physician, presently, “if you wish to make those other farewells.”

“I have still to-morrow and most of Friday. I shall go out, like Falstaff, ‘even at the turning of the tide,’” he said, laughing softly at himself, as he had done all his life, and repeating to himself the phrase that had romantically touched his fancy—“even at the turning of the tide!... even at the turning of the tide!”

“What am I dying of, doctor?” he said, presently.

“I can see no reason why you should be dying at all,” answered the physician, “unless it is pure whim.”

“Perhaps it is partly that,” said the poet, “but I think it is chiefly because—I have lived. To live longer would be mere repetition. I have just enjoyed the last new experience life had to give me—and I almost think it was the most wonderful of all. It was the last touch of romance needed to complete a romantic life—to have paid my debts! You are right. That was indeed enough excitement for one day. I will sleep now—the happiest man in the world.”

He had hardly finished speaking before he had fallen into one of those sudden deep sleeps that come and go fitfully with the dying. He lay on his back, his hands crossed, and a smile of infinite serenity and thankfulness on his face. Over his head hung the great laurel wreath, still in flower....

Still in flower!

“It is strange that he should choose so deliberately to die—for he has still a great future in store for him,” said the physician to himself as he went out, giving on his way certain instructions to the nurse-in-waiting.

The physician, like the majority of human beings, confounded the length of a man’s life with the success of it—as was, perhaps, peculiarly natural in a man whose business was the lengthening of human existence. To die before sixty was to him a form of failure, and he himself, already sixty-three, was still, with childish eagerness, pursuing certain prizes, professional and social, at which Wasteneys would indeed have smiled. He dreamed, for instance, of a knighthood. Now one of Wasteneys’s great fears had been that he should not be in a position to die before he was knighted. That had in some degree accounted for the fury of his production during the last two years. He would not indeed have disdained to have been made a lord, but that necessitated living so much longer, and writing so many more words—and really it was not worth it. He regarded his life as completed—at least to his own satisfaction. To take it up again would be to begin an entirely new career. Already, as rich men are said to go through two or three fortunes, Wasteneys had run through three careers. Three seemed enough. He had won all the prizes he cared for. The rest could only be humorous. So, “Good-bye, proud world; I’m going home!”

Next morning, when his toilet had been made for him by the beautiful nurse-in-waiting and his faithful man servant, Wasteneys received his physician and his lawyer; and then, as the little clock chimed the hour of noon, he said: