ll go round to the
club or not, when suddenly a scene, a death scene, the scene I have
been waiting for, comes rushing through my head. It comes upon me with
tremendous impetus; mechanically, almost unconsciously, I take up a pen
and write. Space opens before me and I see a hospital ward. A blaze of
light floods it. Rows of narrow beds are there, and on one I see
Tomkins--dying. I make my way to him: now I am by his bed. I see him
stretched beneath my eyes. I see the pillow dark with the sweat of his
death agony--the night-shirt torn at his throat to get air. Have I time
to consider then whether the British public like the word night-shirt,
and whether it would not be safer to put Tomkins into a dressing-gown?
The man is there before me, dying, and he is in his night-shirt, and I
must write it. Besides, my pen is tearing on. I cannot stop--he is
dying. Will he speak before he dies? I do not know yet. His eyelids
quiver, the black veins in his throat knot up, he gasps. I bend lower:
'his breath comes hurriedly: his eyes open and fix upon me: they are
red, vitreous but conscious: then I know he will speak, he is going
to--the next moment his half-strangled voice reaches my ear. He is
speaking, and that which I hear him say, I write: no more, no less, no
different. His voice dies away, inarticulate. I see his lips whiten and
draw back upon his teeth. His hands clutch me as a convulsive spasm
wrenches his muscles. There is a tense, rigid silence, and then one
deep-drawn groan. Nerve, limb, muscle, and flesh collapse as the Life
is set loose. The damp body sinks back, leaving its death sweat on my
arms, its gasp in my ears. Tomkins is dead. But the impulse is not done
with me yet. I cannot get out of that hospital ward till I have done
everything, passed through all the circumstances that crop up naturally
from the death of Tomkins. There is no 'making up.' The scene is being
enacted before me. It is. It exists. It is the truth for the time
being, and, as the truth, I write it. There is the miserable girl,
sobbing convulsively, with her arms out-stretched in the bed-clothes.
Can I leave her without some words of consolation? I must write down
that she is there, because I see her there. There are some arrangements
to be made with the nurse, and then, when I am leaving the ward, or at
least intend to, my brain hurries the doctor up the ward to me. I don't
'make him up.' I had not the remotest idea of the head doctor appearing
w