MY PASSING
It was on a Saturday, at six in the
morning, that I died after a three days’ illness.
My wife was searching a trunk for some linen, and when
she rose and turned she saw me rigid, with open eyes
and silent pulses. She ran to me, fancying that
I had fainted, touched my hands and bent over me.
Then she suddenly grew alarmed, burst into tears and
stammered:
“My God, my God! He is dead!”
I heard everything, but the sounds
seemed to come from a great distance. My left
eye still detected a faint glimmer, a whitish light
in which all objects melted, but my right eye was
quite bereft of sight. It was the coma of my
whole being, as if a thunderbolt had struck me.
My will was annihilated; not a fiber of flesh obeyed
my bidding. And yet amid the impotency of my
inert limbs my thoughts subsisted, sluggish and lazy,
still perfectly clear.
My poor Marguerite was crying; she
had dropped on her knees beside the bed, repeating
in heart-rending tones:
“He is dead! My God, he is dead!”
Was this strange state of torpor,
this immobility of the flesh, really death, although
the functions of the intellect were not arrested?
Was my soul only lingering for a brief space before
it soared away forever? From my childhood upward
I had been subject to hysterical attacks, and twice
in early youth I had nearly succumbed to nervous fevers.
By degrees all those who surrounded me had got accustomed
to consider me an invalid and to see me sickly.
So much so that I myself had forbidden my wife to
call in a doctor when I had taken to my bed on the
day of our arrival at the cheap lodginghouse of the
Rue Dauphine in Paris. A little rest would soon
set me right again; it was only the fatigue of the
journey which had caused my intolerable weariness.
And yet I was conscious of having felt singularly
uneasy. We had left our province somewhat abruptly;
we were very poor and had barely enough money to support
ourselves till I drew my first month’s salary
in the office where I had obtained a situation.
And now a sudden seizure was carrying me off!
Was it really death? I had pictured
to myself a darker night, a deeper silence. As
a little child I had already felt afraid to die.
Being weak and compassionately petted by everyone,
I had concluded that I had not long to live, that
I should soon be buried, and the thought of the cold
earth filled me with a dread I could not master a
dread which haunted me day and night. As I grew
older the same terror pursued me. Sometimes,
after long hours spent in reasoning with myself, I
thought that I had conquered my fear. I reflected,
“After all, what does it matter? One dies
and all is over. It is the common fate; nothing
could be better or easier.”
I then prided myself on being able
to look death boldly in the face, but suddenly a shiver
froze my blood, and my dizzy anguish returned, as if
a giant hand had swung me over a dark abyss. It
was some vision of the earth returning and setting
reason at naught. How often at night did I start
up in bed, not knowing what cold breath had swept over
my slumbers but clasping my despairing hands and moaning,
“Must I die?” In those moments an icy
horror would stop my pulses while an appalling vision
of dissolution rose before me. It was with difficulty
that I could get to sleep again. Indeed, sleep
alarmed me; it so closely resembled death. If
I closed my eyes they might never open again I
might slumber on forever.
I cannot tell if others have endured
the same torture; I only know that my own life was
made a torment by it. Death ever rose between
me and all I loved; I can remember how the thought
of it poisoned the happiest moments I spent with Marguerite.
During the first months of our married life, when
she lay sleeping by my side and I dreamed of a fair
future for her and with her, the foreboding of some
fatal separation dashed my hopes aside and embittered
my delights. Perhaps we should be parted on the
morrow nay, perhaps in an hour’s time.
Then utter discouragement assailed me; I wondered
what the bliss of being united availed me if it were
to end in so cruel a disruption.
My morbid imagination reveled in scenes
of mourning. I speculated as to who would be
the first to depart, Marguerite or I. Either alternative
caused me harrowing grief, and tears rose to my eyes
at the thought of our shattered lives. At the
happiest periods of my existence I often became a
prey to grim dejection such as nobody could understand
but which was caused by the thought of impending nihility.
When I was most successful I was to general wonder
most depressed. The fatal question, “What
avails it?” rang like a knell in my ears.
But the sharpest sting of this torment was that it
came with a secret sense of shame, which rendered
me unable to confide my thoughts to another. Husband
and wife lying side by side in the darkened room may
quiver with the same shudder and yet remain mute,
for people do not mention death any more than they
pronounce certain obscene words. Fear makes it
nameless.
I was musing thus while my dear Marguerite
knelt sobbing at my feet. It grieved me sorely
to be unable to comfort her by telling her that I
suffered no pain. If death were merely the annihilation
of the flesh it had been foolish of me to harbor so
much dread. I experienced a selfish kind of restfulness
in which all my cares were forgotten. My memory
had become extraordinarily vivid. My whole life
passed before me rapidly like a play in which I no
longer acted a part; it was a curious and enjoyable
sensation I seemed to hear a far-off voice
relating my own history.
I saw in particular a certain spot
in the country near Guerande, on the way to Piriac.
The road turns sharply, and some scattered pine trees
carelessly dot a rocky slope. When I was seven
years old I used to pass through those pines with
my father as far as a crumbling old house, where Marguerite’s
parents gave me pancakes. They were salt gatherers
and earned a scanty livelihood by working the adjacent
salt marshes. Then I remembered the school at
Nantes, where I had grown up, leading a monotonous
life within its ancient walls and yearning for the
broad horizon of Guerande and the salt marshes stretching
to the limitless sea widening under the sky.
Next came a blank my father
was dead. I entered the hospital as clerk to
the managing board and led a dreary life with one solitary
diversion: my Sunday visits to the old house
on Piriac road. The saltworks were doing badly;
poverty reigned in the land, and Marguerite’s
parents were nearly penniless. Marguerite, when
merely a child, had been fond of me because I trundled
her about in a wheelbarrow, but on the morning when
I asked her in marriage she shrank from me with a
frightened gesture, and I realized that she thought
me hideous. Her parents, however, consented at
once; they looked upon my offer as a godsend, and the
daughter submissively acquiesced. When she became
accustomed to the idea of marrying me she did not
seem to dislike it so much. On our wedding day
at Guerande the rain fell in torrents, and when we
got home my bride had to take off her dress, which
was soaked through, and sit in her petticoats.
That was all the youth I ever had.
We did not remain long in our province. One day
I found my wife in tears. She was miserable; life
was so dull; she wanted to get away. Six months
later I had saved a little money by taking in extra
work after office hours, and through the influence
of a friend of my father’s I obtained a petty
appointment in Paris. I started off to settle
there with the dear little woman so that she might
cry no more. During the night, which we spent
in the third-class railway carriage, the seats being
very hard, I took her in my arms in order that she
might sleep.
That was the past, and now I had just
died on the narrow couch of a Paris lodginghouse,
and my wife was crouching on the floor, crying bitterly.
The white light before my left eye was growing dim,
but I remembered the room perfectly. On the left
there was a chest of drawers, on the right a mantelpiece
surmounted by a damaged clock without a pendulum,
the hands of which marked ten minutes past ten.
The window overlooked the Rue Dauphine, a long, dark
street. All Paris seemed to pass below, and the
noise was so great that the window shook.
We knew nobody in the city; we had
hurried our departure, but I was not expected at the
office till the following Monday. Since I had
taken to my bed I had wondered at my imprisonment
in this narrow room into which we had tumbled after
a railway journey of fifteen hours, followed by a
hurried, confusing transit through the noisy streets.
My wife had nursed me with smiling tenderness, but
I knew that she was anxious. She would walk to
the window, glance out and return to the bedside, looking
very pale and startled by the sight of the busy thoroughfare,
the aspect of the vast city of which she did not know
a single stone and which deafened her with its continuous
roar. What would happen to her if I never woke
up again alone, friendless and unknowing
as she was?
Marguerite had caught hold of one
of my hands which lay passive on the coverlet, and,
covering it with kisses, she repeated wildly:
“Olivier, answer me. Oh, my God, he is
dead, dead!”
So death was not complete annihilation.
I could hear and think. I had been uselessly
alarmed all those years. I had not dropped into
utter vacancy as I had anticipated. I could not
picture the disappearance of my being, the suppression
of all that I had been, without the possibility of
renewed existence. I had been wont to shudder
whenever in any book or newspaper I came across a
date of a hundred years hence. A date at which
I should no longer be alive, a future which I should
never see, filled me with unspeakable uneasiness.
Was I not the whole world, and would not the universe
crumble away when I was no more?
To dream of life had been a cherished
vision, but this could not possibly be death.
I should assuredly awake presently. Yes, in a
few moments I would lean over, take Marguerite in
my arms and dry her tears. I would rest a little
while longer before going to my office, and then a
new life would begin, brighter than the last.
However, I did not feel impatient; the commotion had
been too strong. It was wrong of Marguerite to
give way like that when I had not even the strength
to turn my head on the pillow and smile at her.
The next time that she moaned out, “He is dead!
Dead!” I would embrace her and murmur softly
so as not to startle her: “No, my darling,
I was only asleep. You see, I am alive, and I
love you.”