THE DEATH OF MY FATHER

My doctor has gone away on a holiday and I never asked him whether he meant me to give the story of my father’s life as well as my own. If I were to describe my father too minutely, it might appear an essential condition of my cure that he should have been analysed first, in which case all my trouble will have been in vain. However, I go boldly on, because I am convinced that even if my father did need the same treatment as me it would have been for quite a different complaint. So, to save time, I will only go into my father’s story in so far as it helps me to recollect my own.

15.iv.1890—4.30 a.m. My father died. L.C.

For whoever it may interest let me explain that the last two letters stand for “last cigarette.” I find this note on the flyleaf of a volume of Positive Philosophy by Ostwald, over which I pored optimistically, hour after hour, but never succeeded in understanding. Probably no one will believe me, but this brief note records the most important event in my life.

My mother died before I was fifteen. I wrote some poems to her memory—not a very good substitute for tears; and in the midst of my grief I could not get rid of the feeling that the serious business of life must begin for me from that moment. My grief seemed to be the token of a new and intenser life. I was at that time genuinely religious, and this also helped somewhat to lighten the blow. I felt my mother was still alive, though very far away, and that she would rejoice in any success I might achieve. This was a very comforting conclusion. I remember my state of mind perfectly at that moment. My mother’s death and the healthy emotion it caused made me feel that everything was going to get better.

My father’s death, on the contrary, was an unmitigated catastrophe. Paradise had ceased to exist for me, and at thirty I was played out. Yes, it was all up with me. I realised for the first time that the most important, the really decisive part of my life lay behind me and would never return. But my grief was not so purely selfish as this would seem to suggest. No! I mourned for him and for myself, but for myself only because he was dead. Up to that moment I had passed from cigarette to cigarette, and from subject to subject at the University, with an indestructible faith in my possibilities. And I cannot help believing I should not have lost that happy and inspiring faith if my father had not died. His death destroyed the future which alone gave point to my resolutions.

How often when I look back on it, have I wondered at the curious fact that this despair about my future overwhelmed me only when my father died, and not before! All this happened fairly recently and I don’t need to dream, as our psycho-analytic friends prescribe, in order to remember every detail of the tragedy and my tremendous grief. I remember everything, but I understand nothing. Up to the time of my father’s death I had never devoted myself to him. I made no effort to get into touch with him; I even avoided him so far as I could without giving offence. At college they all knew him by my nickname for him: Old Silva free-fist. It needed his illness to draw me to him, and he was hardly ill before he was dead; the doctor at once gave him up.

When I was at Trieste we saw each other at most for about an hour a day. We had never been so much together, nor for so long, as when I was mourning for his death. If only I had been nicer to him and mourned for him less, I should not have been so ill. It was difficult for us to be together, because intellectually we had so little in common. We both looked at each other with a rather pitying smile, which in him had a certain bitterness because of his anxiety about my future. Mine, on the contrary, was all indulgence; I regarded his little weaknesses as of no importance because I attributed them chiefly to age. It was he who first expressed doubts about my strength of will—too soon, I think. I cannot help suspecting, though I have no scientific proof of it, that he lacked confidence in me just because I was his child; which, in itself, was quite enough—and here science supports me—to diminish my confidence in him.

He had however the reputation of being an able man of business; but I knew that for many years past it was Olivi who had managed his affairs. In his incapacity for business he resembled me, but it was the only thing we had in common; if it comes to comparing us, I am bound to say that of the two I was the stronger character. Everything I have put down in my notebooks proves quite clearly that I have, and have always had, a strong impulse to become better; this is perhaps my greatest misfortune. My many dreams of strength and balance can only be interpreted in this sense. All this was quite outside my father’s ken. He was perfectly satisfied with himself as he was, and I doubt if he ever made any effort to improve himself. He smoked all day long and, after my mother’s death, all night too when he could not sleep. He drank in moderation, as a gentleman should; just enough at dinner to be sure of falling asleep directly he put his head on the pillow. But he regarded tobacco and alcohol as wholesome drugs.

As regards women, I was told by relations that my mother had had some cause for jealousy. It seems that the quiet little woman had to interfere sometimes to keep her husband within bounds. He let himself be guided by her whom he loved and respected, but apparently she never succeeded in making him confess he had been unfaithful, so that she died in the belief that she had been mistaken. However my kind relations say that she once almost caught her husband en flagrant délit with her dressmaker. He pleaded a fit of distraction, and with such persistence that she at last believed him. The only consequence was that my mother never went to that dressmaker again, nor did my father. In his place I think I should have ended by confessing, but probably without giving up the dressmaker; for where I halt, there I take root.

My father, like so many family men, was an adept in the art of least resistance. He was at peace with his family and with himself. He only read safe and moral books, not out of hypocrisy but from genuine conviction. I think he really believed in those sermons, and that it quieted his conscience to feel himself sincerely on the side of virtue. Now that I am getting old and begin to approach the patriarchal state, I too feel that it is worse to preach immorality than to practise it. One may be driven to commit murder by love or hatred, but one can only advocate murder out of sheer wickedness.

We had so little in common that he confessed to me that I was one of the human beings who gave him most cause for anxiety. My pursuit of health had led me to study the human body. He, on the other hand, had succeeded in banishing from his memory all thoughts of that terrible machine. As far as he was concerned the heart did not beat, and he had no need to remind himself of valves and veins and metabolism to explain why he was alive. Only no movement! for experience taught one that whatever moved must in the end wear out. For him the earth was motionless and solid, poised between its poles. Of course he never said so, but it pained him if something was said which did not conform to this conception. He interrupted me one day in sheer disgust when I said something about the antipodes. The thought of all those people standing upside down made him feel quite sick and giddy.

He reproached me for two other things—my absent-mindedness, and my tendency to laugh about serious things. As regards absent-mindedness, the only difference between us was that he kept a notebook in which he put down everything which he wanted to remember, and looked at it several times during the day. This made him feel that he had conquered his weakness and he was no longer worried by it. He insisted on my keeping a notebook too, but I only used it for putting down a few last cigarettes.

As for my supposed contempt for serious things, I think his fault was to take too many things in this world seriously. For example: when, after leaving the Law for Chemistry, I obtained his permission to go back again to Law, he said good-naturedly: “It is quite clear to me that you are mad.”

I was not the least offended, and was so grateful to him for giving his consent that I thought I would reward him by telling him something to make him laugh. I went to Dr. Canestrini to be medically examined and get a certificate of sanity. It was no easy matter, for I had to submit to a long and minute examination. When I had got my certificate I carried it off in triumph to my father; but I could not even win a smile. In an agonised voice and actually with tears in his eyes, he exclaimed: “Ah, then you really are mad!”

This was all the thanks I got for my exhausting but innocent little comedy. He never forgave me for it, and therefore he would never laugh at it. Go to a doctor as a joke? Have a certificate stamped on purpose, just as a joke? Sheer madness!

Compared with him I felt myself strong, and I sometimes think that the loss of this weaker person with whom I could compare myself to my own advantage made me feel that my value had definitely diminished.

I had a clear proof of his weakness when that scoundrel Olivi insisted on his making his will. Olivi was in a great hurry to get a will made which appointed him guardian of my affairs, and he spent much time and energy in persuading the old man to go through all the formalities of drawing it up. At last my father gave in, but his great beaming face became quite overcast. He was always thinking about death, as if the act of making his will had brought him nearer to it.

One evening he said to me: “Do you think that death is the end of everything?”

Not a day passes but I meditate on the mystery of death, but I had not yet reached the point of being able to give him the information he wanted. I invented, to please him, a very cheerful view of our life beyond the grave.

“I think that pleasure will survive, but that there will be no more need for pain. Perhaps death will remind us of the pleasures of love. It must surely be accompanied by a feeling of happiness and repose, after the continuous work of building up the body. Death must surely be the crown of life!”

It was a complete fiasco. We had just had dinner and were still at table. My father got up without a word, emptied his glass and then said:

“This is not the moment to philosophise, especially with you!” And out he went.

I followed him sadly. I should have liked to have stayed with him and tried to distract him from his gloomy thoughts. But he sent me away, saying that I reminded him of death and the pleasures he used to enjoy.

He could not get his will out of his mind till he had spoken to me about it. Whenever he saw me he thought about it. One evening he burst out with:

“I must tell you I have made my will.”

Hoping to rid him of his obsession, I at once overcame the surprise this news caused me and said:

“I shall never have to bother about one, for I hope to outlive all my heirs!”

My laughing at such a serious matter upset him at once, and restored to him all his old desire to punish me so that he found it easy enough to tell me the fine trick he had played me in making Olivi my guardian.

I must confess that I behaved very dutifully. I refrained from making the smallest objection, so anxious was I that he should not again fall a prey to such melancholy thoughts. I said that whatever he might appoint I should submit to.

“Perhaps,” I added, “my conduct will be such that you will feel called upon in time to make a new will.”

This pleased him because he saw that I anticipated a long life for him—a very long one indeed. But he exacted from me an oath that, supposing he did not alter his will, I would not try to interfere with the powers he had given Olivi. I took an oath, since my word of honour did not satisfy him. I was so docile and accommodating that when I am tortured by the thoughts that I did not love him enough before he died, I always try to call up that scene. To be frank I must say that it was fairly easy for me to resign myself to his will because at that time I positively welcomed the idea of being obliged not to work.

About a year before he died I was able to interfere efficaciously in the interest of his health. He confided to me that he did not feel well, and I persuaded him to go and see a doctor and to let me go with him. The doctor wrote a prescription and told us to come back in a few weeks’ time. My father refused to, saying that doctors and grave-diggers were both equally odious, and he would not take his medicine because that also reminded him of doctors and grave-diggers. He stopped smoking for a few hours, and for one whole meal drank no wine. When he decided to give up this treatment he felt much better, and seeing him so cheerful I thought no more about it.

After that he sometimes seemed to be depressed; but I should have been more surprised if he had been cheerful considering how old and lonely he was.

One evening towards the end of March I came home a little later than usual, for the rather trivial reason that I had run into a learned friend who had insisted on treating me to his ideas on the origins of Christianity. It was the first time that I had ever been asked to give a thought to the subject, and I only submitted to the long lecture to please my friend. It was raining a little and very cold. Everything seemed dreary and dismal, including the Greeks and Hebrews my friend was discussing, but I put up with his tiresome lecture for a good two hours. My usual weakness! I am so bad at refusing anyone anything that I don’t mind betting I might at any moment be persuaded, if you tried hard enough, to take up astronomy—for a short time at least.

I came in at the garden gate from which a short carriage drive leads up to the house. Our servant Maria was at the window looking out for me, and when she heard me coming she called out in the dark:

“Is that you, Mr. Zeno?”

Maria was one of those servants who are a thing of the past. She had been with us for fifteen years. She put aside part of her wages monthly into the savings bank, to provide for her old age; but she never profited by her economy, for soon after my marriage she died, still in our service.

She told me that my father had come in several hours before, but that he had insisted on waiting dinner for me. When she had urged him to begin without me, he had spoken rather sharply to her and sent her away. Then he had inquired for me several times, and seemed to be worried because I did not come in. Maria hinted that my father probably was not feeling very well. She said he had difficulty in speaking and seemed short of breath. The fact is she was alone with him so much that she often got it into her head that he was ill. The poor woman had not much to think about, alone in that house, and she assumed that we should all die before her, as my mother had done.

I hurried to the dining-room, curious to see what was the matter, but without feeling any particular cause for alarm. My father rose hastily from the sofa on which he was lying and welcomed me joyfully; but his greeting left me rather cold for I thought it was meant as a reproach. It was however quite sufficient to reassure me, because joy always seems to be a token of health. I could not discover any trace of the difficulty in speaking or breathing which Maria had mentioned. Instead of scolding me he only apologised for being so obstinate.

“You must forgive me,” he said gaily. “You and I are alone in the world, and I wanted to see you before going to bed.”

If only I had behaved simply and embraced him—my dear father who, because he was ill, had become so tender and affectionate. But instead I began coldly to diagnose the situation: Why has old Silva suddenly grown so lamb-like? Can it be that he is ill? I looked at him suspiciously and all I could find to say, in a tone of reproach, was:

“But why did you keep dinner back all this time? You could have had yours and then waited for me.”

He laughed gaily and said: “It is more fun to eat when there are two of us.”

I thought his cheerfulness was a sign that he was hungry; my mind was quite at rest, and I sat down to dinner. My father shuffled to the table in his slippers, rather insecurely, and sat down in his usual place. He sat and watched me eating, only taking a few mouthfuls himself, and then pushing his plate away as if he could not bear the sight of it. But there was still the same smile on his old face. Only I remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, that several times when I looked straight at him, he turned his face away. That is supposed to be a sign of insincerity, but I now know that it is a sign of illness. A sick creature will not let one look it straight in the eye, lest one should detect its weakness there. He was still waiting for me to tell him how I had spent all those hours he had been expecting me. And seeing how much he wanted to hear, I stopped eating a moment and said coldly that I had been busy discussing the origins of Christianity.

He looked puzzled, and said rather doubtfully:

“Are you occupied with religion too, then?”

I saw that it would have been a great consolation to him if I would have consented to talk to him about it. But so long as my father was alive (no longer) I always felt contrary, and I replied in one of those well-worn phrases, which you may hear any day in the cafés near the university:

“I look upon religion simply as a phenomenon to be studied like any other.”

“Phenomenon?” he repeated in bewilderment. He searched for a reply and opened his mouth in readiness to make it. Then he hesitated and looked at the second course which Maria was just handing to him; but he would not touch it. So the better to gag himself he stuck a cigar-end between his teeth, lit it, and at once let it go out. He had thus gained time to reflect quietly. He looked at me fixedly for a moment and then said:

“You don’t mean to laugh at religion?”

And I, who have always been the perfect type of Bohemian student, answered with my mouth full:

“I don’t laugh at it, I study it!”

He said nothing, but went on staring at the cigar-end, which he had put down on a plate. I understand now why he said that to me. I understand now everything that passed through his already clouded mind, and I only wonder why I understood so little at the time. I think it was because I lacked the sympathy which makes one understand so many things. Later on it was easy enough. My father avoided saying anything which might shock my scepticism, for he could not face a direct conflict at that moment; but he thought he might venture cautiously on a flank attack, as more suited to the resources of an invalid. I remember how he caught his breath, and what difficulty he had in getting his words out. Preparing for a battle is very exhausting. But I felt that he would not be content to go to bed until he had put me in my place, and I resigned myself to the discussion which after all never came. Still staring at his now extinguished cigar-end, he said:

“I feel that I have much experience and a great knowledge of life. One cannot have lived all these years in vain. I know a great many things but, alas, I don’t know how to make you understand them. How I wish I could! I feel that I can see the meaning of things to a certain extent and can also distinguish between what is true and what is false.”

It was no good arguing about it. I went on eating and muttered, without much conviction: “Yes, father.”

I didn’t want to offend him.

“It is a pity you came in so late. Earlier in the evening I was less tired and could have explained it to you much better.”

I thought he wanted to begin worrying me again about coming in late, and I suggested we might put off discussing things till next day.

“It is not a matter of discussing things,” he said in a dreamy voice. “It is about something quite different—something which it is impossible to discuss, but which you will understand directly I have told you. But it is so difficult to talk about.”

My suspicions were aroused. “Don’t you feel well?” I said.

“I can’t really say I feel ill, but I am very tired and shall go to bed at once.”

He rang the bell and called for Maria at the same time. When she came he asked if his room was quite ready. He got up at once and went towards the door, dragging one foot after the other. As he passed me he bent down and offered me his cheek to kiss, as he did every evening.

When I saw how insecurely he walked my old doubts returned and I asked him again if he felt unwell. We both repeated the same question and answer several times, he assuring me that he was not ill, but tired. Then he added:

“Now I shall think over what I want to say to you to-morrow. I know I shall be able to convince you.”

I felt quite moved. “Father,” I said, “I shall be delighted to listen to you.”

When he saw how ready I was to profit by his experience he seemed to hesitate about leaving me; surely he ought to take advantage of such a favourable moment. He passed his hand over his forehead several times and sat down on the chair he had leaned on when he offered me his cheek to kiss. He sighed.

“It is curious,” he said, “I can’t find anything to say, absolutely nothing.”

He looked round as if he was hoping to get from outside what he could not find within himself.

“Yet there are so many things I know. I feel as if I knew almost everything. It must be the result of my great experience.”

He already felt less acutely his inability to express himself. He smiled as if he rejoiced in the sense of his own greatness.

I don’t know why I did not send for the doctor at once. I must confess with shame and remorse that I thought my father’s words were inspired by a conceit which I had often noticed in him. But I could not help seeing that he was very feeble, and that alone prevented me from arguing with him. I was glad to see him so happy in the illusion that he was strong just when he was at his weakest. Besides I felt flattered by his affection and by his wanting to hand on his knowledge to me, however convinced I may have been that I had nothing to learn from him. To flatter him and set his mind at rest, I told him that he mustn’t overstrain himself in trying to find the exact words he wanted on the spot, because the wisest men often store up in the corner of their brain things which they find too complicated to express, and trust to time for them to become simpler.

He replied:

“What I am after is not at all complicated. It is only a matter of finding a single word, and I know I shall find it. But not to-night, for I shall sleep right through now and not be troubled by the least little thought.”

But he still did not rise from his chair. He kept gazing at me and said at last, hesitatingly:

“I am afraid I shall not be able to tell you what I really think because you always make game of everything.”

He smiled at me as if he wanted to beg me not to take offence at his words, got up from his chair and held out his cheek to me a second time. I made no attempt to convince him by argument that there are many things in this world which one can and ought to laugh at; instead I tried to reassure him by kissing him warmly on both cheeks. Perhaps my gesture was too emphatic, for he at once escaped from my embrace, looking more troubled than ever; but he certainly understood that I wanted to show him sympathy, for he waved his hand to me affectionately.

“And now to bed!” he cried merrily, and went out of the room, followed by Maria.

When I was left alone (how strange it seems) I did not give my father’s health a thought, but found myself respectfully regretting that an intelligent man like my father, with such high ideals, should not have had the opportunity of a better education. As I write now, having very nearly reached my father’s age, I know for a fact that it is perfectly possible for someone to be conscious of possessing a very lofty intellect even though that consciousness is the only proof he has of it. It is rather like this: you take a deep breath and are filled with a sense of the wonder and greatness of Nature as she is revealed to us, whole and immutable; and in doing that you participate in the mind which planned the whole of creation. I thought that last lucid moment in which my father became conscious of intellectual power, originated in a sudden religious awakening, and that it was my telling him about my study of the origins of Christianity which induced him to speak to me about it. But I know now that this feeling was a symptom of hæmorrhage of the brain.

Maria came in to clear away and told me that she thought my father had gone to sleep at once. So I went to bed too, quite reassured. Outside the wind howled and moaned. From my bed it sounded like a lullaby, which grew farther and farther away as I sank deeper into sleep.

I don’t know how long I had been asleep when I was wakened by Maria. It appears that she had been to my room to call me several times before and then had run away again. I was conscious of a certain disturbance in the depths of my sleep; then through my half-open eyes I recognised the old woman dancing about the room; and finally I realised what was happening. She was trying to wake me, but by the time I was really wide awake she had left the room. The wind was still trying to sing me to sleep, and to tell the truth I felt profoundly annoyed at being snatched from my dreams so brutally, as I went along to my father’s room. I reflected that Maria was always thinking my father was in danger. I determined to remonstrate with her if this was another false alarm.

My father’s bedroom was not very big, and it was over-furnished. When my mother died he tried to help himself to forget by moving into another room, but he took with him all the old furniture from the bigger room. The room was all in shadow, only dimly lighted by a small gas-jet above the low table by his bed. Maria was supporting my father, who was lying on his back with the upper part of his body projecting from the bed. His face, which was covered with perspiration, glowed red in the gaslight. His head was leaning against Maria’s faithful breast. He was groaning with pain and his mouth hung open helplessly, while the saliva trickled from his chin. He was gazing motionless at the opposite wall, and took no notice when I came in.

Maria said she had heard him groaning and had arrived just in time to prevent him from falling out of bed. At first, she said, he had been rather restless, but now he seemed to have quieted down; only she did not dare to leave him alone. I think she wanted to apologise for having waked me, but I at once realised that she had acted rightly. She went on crying all the time she was talking to me. I did not cry; on the contrary I told her to control herself and not add to the horror of that hour by weeping. I had not really grasped yet what had happened. The poor creature did her best to calm her sobs.

I put my face close to my father’s ear and said in a loud voice:

“Why are you groaning, father? Do you feel ill?”

I think he heard me, for his groans became fainter, and he turned his eyes from the wall facing him as if he were trying to look at me; but he could not quite turn them so far. I shouted the same question in his ear three times, and always with the same result. My courage soon broke down. My father was already closer to death than he was to me; my cries could no longer reach him. Terror seized me, and immediately the words we had exchanged only the evening before came back to me. So few hours had passed, yet he was already on his way to discover which of us was right. How strange! My sorrow was accompanied by remorse. I hid my face in my father’s pillow and burst into the same hopeless sobs for which I had chidden Maria.

It was now her turn to calm me, but she went a strange way about it, talking of my father as if he were already dead, though he lay groaning with his eyes wide open.

“Poor dear,” she said. “To think of his dying like that, with all his fine thick hair too.” She stroked it as she spoke. It was true; my father’s head was covered by a great mane of curly white hair, whereas mine, at thirty, was already very thin.

I had quite forgotten that there were such things as doctors in the world, and that sometimes they were supposed to be able to save one. I had already seen death on that face contorted with pain, and I had given up hope. It was Maria who first thought of the doctor, and she went to wake the gardener to send him to the town.

I stayed alone for about ten minutes, which seemed an eternity, supporting my father. I remember I tried to put into my hands all the tenderness with which my heart was suddenly filled. He could no longer hear my words. What could I do to make him feel how much I loved him?

When the gardener came I went to my room to write a note, and had great difficulty in framing the few words necessary to give the doctor an idea of the case so that he might know what medicines to bring with him. I kept seeing before me the imminent and certain death of my father, and asking myself: “What is there for me to do in the world now?”

Then followed several long hours of waiting. I have a fairly clear remembrance of those hours. It soon became unnecessary to support my father, for he lay back quite unconscious on the bed. His groaning had ceased; he seemed to have lost all sense of everything. His breathing was hurried; half unconsciously mine became so too. It was impossible for me to go on breathing long at that pace, so I allowed myself short intervals of rest, hoping thereby that I might induce a quieter heart-beat in my patient. But it hurried on and never tired. We tried in vain to make him take a spoonful of tea. His torpor became less profound when it was a question of defending himself against our interference. He kept his teeth resolutely shut. His obstinacy did not leave him even in a state of unconsciousness. Long before dawn the rhythm of his breathing changed. It fell into periods alternating between what seemed almost like the breathing of a healthy man and bursts of hurried respiration, with sometimes a long terrible interval when it seemed to stop altogether, which made Maria and me feel that death must be close at hand. But then the sequence of periods would begin again, a colourless music, infinitely sad. That noisy, uneven breathing seemed to become part of the room. From that time and for long, long afterwards it was always there.

I flung myself on a sofa, while Maria sat up on a chair near the bed. My bitterest tears were shed on that sofa. Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse Fate without fear of contradiction. I wept because I was losing my father for whom I had always lived. It did not matter that I had been so little with him. Had not all my efforts to become better been made in order to give satisfaction to him? It is true that the success I strove for would have been a personal triumph for me as against him who had always doubted me, but it would have been a consolation to him as well. And now he could wait no longer and was going away convinced of my incurable incapacity. The tears I shed were indeed bitter.

While I sit writing, or rather engraving these tragic memories on my paper, I realise that the image that obsessed me at the first attempt to look into my past—the image of an engine drawing a string of coaches up a hill—came to me for the first time while I lay on the sofa listening to my father’s breathing. That is just what engines do when drawing an enormous weight: they emit regular puffs, which then become faster and finally stop altogether; and that pause seems dangerous too, because as you listen you cannot help fearing that the engine and the train must go tumbling head over heels down into the valley. How curious that is! My first real effort to remember had carried me back to the night which was the most important in my life.

Dr. Coprosich arrived at the house before it grew light, accompanied by a male nurse, who was carrying a box of drugs. He was obliged to come on foot because he had been unable to find a carriage, on account of the violent storm.

I received him in tears, and he was very kind to me, and urged me not to give up hope. But I may as well say at once that from the moment of our first meeting there are few men who have aroused in me such violent antipathy as Dr. Coprosich. He is still alive, though very decrepit; and he is greatly esteemed by everybody in the town. When I see him tottering along through the streets to get a little air and exercise, all my former dislike revives.

At that time the doctor cannot have been more than forty. He had devoted himself to the study of legal medicine, and though he was notorious as being a very patriotic Italian the Imperial Courts of Justice entrusted him with the most important missions. He was a thin, nervous type. The real insignificance of his face was disguised by his baldness, which made him appear to have a very lofty brow. Another defect also added to his importance; when he took off his spectacles (as he constantly did when meditating on anything), his myopic eyes looked round or above his interlocutor, and were strangely like the colourless eyeballs of a statue, threatening or perhaps ironical. His eyes became very disagreeable then. But directly he put on his eyeglasses (as he always did for the least word) they became at once the eyes of any honest bourgeois, submitting whatever he says to a careful examination.

He sat down to rest for a few minutes in the hall. He asked me to describe exactly what had happened from the moment of the first alarm till his arrival. He removed his eyeglasses and fixed his uncanny eyes on the wall behind my back. I tried to give an exact account, which was not very easy considering the state I was in. I remembered that Dr. Coprosich could not bear people who knew nothing about medicine to use medical terms, as if they were pretending to some knowledge of the subject. And when I happened to mention “stertorous breathing” he put on his spectacles in order to say: “Go slow with your definitions. We shall soon see what the trouble is.” I told him of my father’s strange demeanour, of his anxiety to see me and of his anxiety to get to bed. I did not repeat to him my father’s strange speeches; perhaps I was afraid I should have to repeat my answers too. But I told him what difficulty my father had had in expressing himself; and how he seemed to be revolving something in his mind which he could not succeed in formulating. The doctor, putting on his great spectacles again, exclaimed triumphantly:

“I know what was going on in his head.” I knew too, but I didn’t say so for fear of making him angry: it was the cerebral hæmorrhage.

We went in to the sick man’s room. The male nurse helped him to turn over in all directions that poor lifeless body, for what seemed to me a century. He examined him thoroughly, and tried in vain to make the patient help himself a little.

“That will do,” he said after a time. He came up to me with his spectacles in his hand, and his eyes on the floor, and said:

“You must be brave. It is a very serious case.”

We went to my room, and he washed his face and hands. He was without his spectacles of course, and when he raised his head to dry it, it looked like the strange little head of an amulet, carved by an unskilful hand. He said he remembered that we had been to see him several months ago, and he expressed surprise that we had not been again. He imagined that we had left him for another doctor; he had stated very clearly then that my father ought to have treatment. He was terrifying, scolding me there without his glasses. He raised his voice and demanded an explanation. His eyes roved everywhere in search of it.

Of course he was quite right and I deserved his scolding. Also I don’t think it was that which made me hate Dr. Coprosich. I tried to excuse myself by telling him how my father hated doctors and drugs; I wept as I spoke and the doctor generously tried to calm me by saying that even if we had called him in earlier his knowledge would only have availed to delay the catastrophe, not to avert it.

But as he proceeded to inquire into the causes leading up to my father’s illness, he found occasion to reproach me. He wanted to know if my father had complained of his health during the last months, whether he had eaten and slept well. I was not able to tell him anything definite; I had not even noticed whether my father’s appetite was good or bad, though we had had our meals together day after day. I was overwhelmed by a sense of guilt, but the doctor did not press his questions. I told him that Maria always thought my father was dying, and that I had laughed at her for it.

He stood drying his ears and gazing up at the ceiling.

“He will probably recover consciousness, in part at least, in the course of the next few hours,” he said.

“Is there any hope then?” I exclaimed.

“None whatever!” he answered dryly. “But leeches have never been known to fail in a case like this. He will certainly become partly conscious, but will probably lose his reason.”

He shrugged his shoulders and put the towel back in its place. That shrugging of his shoulders seemed to suggest that he had not much opinion of his own work, and I felt encouraged to speak. I was terrified at the thought that my father might become conscious only to realise that he was dying, but if I had not seen the doctor shrug his shoulders I should not have dared to express my fears.

“Doctor!” I implored. “Doesn’t it seem to you wicked to let him recover consciousness?”

I burst into tears. My nerves were so shaken that I felt a perpetual desire to cry, and I gave way to it now unrestrainedly; I wanted him to see me crying, thinking he would the more readily forgive me for desiring to criticise him.

He said to me very kindly:

“There, there, you must try to control yourself. Your father will never be sufficiently conscious to realise his condition. He is not a doctor. One has only not to tell him that he is dying, and he will never find out. But something worse may happen to him; he may go mad. I brought a strait-jacket with me in case that should happen, and the nurse will stay here.”

More terrified than ever I begged him not to apply the leeches. Whereupon he calmly told me that the nurse had already applied them, because he had told him to before leaving my father’s room. Then I flew into a rage. Could anything be more wicked than to force a desperately ill person to come to, when there was not the smallest chance of saving his life and only misery lay before him; perhaps too the unspeakable torture of a strait-jacket? In an absolute fury, but still crying piteously all the time, as if imploring for mercy, I declared that it seemed an unheard-of cruelty not to let a condemned man die in peace.

I hate that man because he then got angry with me too. And for one thing I can never forgive him. He got so excited that he forgot to put on his spectacles, and yet succeeded in discovering exactly where my head was, and fixing it with his terrible eyes. He said it looked as if I wanted to cut the slender thread of hope which still existed. He said it crudely, just like that. Here I joined battle with him. Weeping and shouting with rage I protested that only a few seconds before he had said himself that there was absolutely no hope of saving my father. I refused to let my house and its inmates be made use of for such an experiment. There were plenty of places in the world where they specialised in it!

He replied very severely, and with an almost menacing calm:

“I was explaining to you the scientific standpoint in such a case, but who knows what may happen in half an hour’s time or, let us say, by to-morrow? If I have succeeded in keeping your father alive I have left a loophole for any contingency.”

Then he put on his glasses, and with the manners of a pedantic official went on to make countless other demonstrations of the important rôle a doctor might sometimes play in the economic fortunes of a family. One half-hour of life, more or less, might alter the whole character of a patrimony.

If I went on crying now it was because I pitied myself for having to listen to such stuff at a moment like that. I was exhausted and in no mood to argue. So it was too late to stop them applying the leeches!

The doctor has a great deal of power beside a sick bed, and I treated Dr. Coprosich with all respect. Perhaps that was why I did not dare to propose a consultation, a thing for which I reproached myself for many a long year. My remorse is dead now, together with all the other matters I have to relate; so I can speak of them as coldly as if they had happened to a stranger. All that remains to me of those days is my hatred of the doctor, and that will never die.

After a little while we went into my father’s bedroom again. We found him lying on his left side. They had put a bandage on his forehead to cover the wound which the leeches had made. The doctor wanted to try at once whether he had recovered consciousness, and shouted in his ear. My father made not the faintest movement.

“So much the better!” I said courageously, but still in tears.

“They cannot fail to take effect,” remarked the doctor. “Can’t you see that his breathing has become different?”

It was quite true that his breathing, which was now uniformly quick and laboured, no longer had that periodic character which had frightened me so much, earlier.

The nurse said something to the doctor to which he assented. It was about trying on the strait-jacket. They took the horrible thing out of the bag, and between them raised my father, forcing him to sit upright on the bed. Then suddenly he opened his eyes. They were dim, and still unaccustomed to the light. I was in an agony of fear lest he should wake up and see everything. But instead of that when his head fell back on the pillow his eyes closed too, like those of certain dolls.

The doctor was triumphant:

“There, that is quite different,” he said in a low voice.

Yes, it was quite different, and for me it meant something horribly threatening. I kissed my father warmly on the forehead, and said to him in my secret heart:

“Oh, may you sleep till eternal sleep overtakes you!” And so I prayed that my father might die. The doctor however guessed nothing, for he said cheerfully:

“You must admit that you are glad to see him come to.”

Dawn had come by the time the doctor went away—an overcast, hesitating dawn. The wind seemed to me less violent though it still blew in gusts, and blew the frozen snow about.

I went with the doctor as far as the garden. I behaved to him with exaggerated politeness so that he should not guess what I really felt towards him. My face expressed only consideration and respect. It was not till I saw him going down the garden path to the gate that I allowed myself a grimace of disgust. He looked such an insignificant black little thing in the snow, staggering down the path, and occasionally stopping, as each fresh gust smote him, in order to withstand it better. But the grimace was not enough; I felt the need of violent movement after my long effort at self-control. I walked up and down the path for several minutes in the cold, with nothing on my head, stamping my feet furiously in the deep snow. But I don’t really know whether my childish fury was directed against the doctor or against myself. Myself perhaps first, because I had desired my father’s death, but had not dared to say so. It was true that I had desired it solely out of filial affection, but the fact that I had remained silent about it made it a crime which weighed heavily on my mind.

The sick man was still asleep. He said only a few words which I could not hear, but he said them in a calm, confidential tone, contrasting strangely with his hurried breathing which gave such an impression of unrest. Would he soon be conscious again and realise the worst?

Maria and the male nurse were both sitting by his bed. I felt confidence in the latter, and was only irritated by a certain air of exaggerated conscientiousness. He rejected Maria’s proposal to give the invalid a spoonful of broth, a remedy in which she had great faith. The doctor had not said anything about giving him broth, and the nurse wanted to wait for his next visit before venturing on anything so important. I thought him much more overbearing than was necessary. Poor Maria did not press the matter, nor did I. But I made another grimace of disgust.

They persuaded me to lie down now, so that I could sit up with the hired nurse during the night. Two were enough at a time if the invalid needed anything, and we could take it in turns to rest on the sofa. I lay down and fell asleep at once, losing consciousness completely without the faintest flicker of a dream.

Last night however, after I had spent the whole of yesterday in trying to recall what I have here set down, I had an exceedingly vivid dream which with one enormous bound carried me back over the years to the very time I have been speaking of. I saw myself and the doctor standing in the room where we had been discussing the leeches and the strait-jacket. The room looks quite different now because it is my wife’s and my bedroom. I was instructing the doctor in the various steps he should take to cure my father, while he, spectacles in hand, and with a distracted look, was shouting that it was not worth while doing all these things. I did not see him as he is now, old and decrepit, but keen and vigorous as he was then. This is what he was saying: “We must not apply leeches; they will only recall him to life and suffering.” I meanwhile was banging a book of prescriptions with my fist and shouting: “Bring leeches! I will have those leeches! And the strait-jacket too!”

Apparently I made a noise in my dream, for my wife woke me up in the middle of it. Distant shades! It seems one can only recapture you by an optical illusion which turns you upside down.

My sleeping so peacefully is the last thing I can remember about that day. Then followed several weary days which seem to me now to have been all exactly alike. As the weather improved they said that my father’s condition improved too. He could walk across the room now by himself, and began his daily progress from bed to sofa, in search of air. Sometimes he would watch for a few minutes through the closed windows the sunlit, dazzling snow which still covered the garden. I would go in from time to time expecting to find that return of consciousness prophesied by Coprosich, and resolved to overcloud it again by discussion. But though my father’s eyesight and hearing seemed to improve daily there was no real return of consciousness.

All the time my father was ill my heart was filled with a strange mixture of grief and resentment. The principal element in this resentment was my rage against Coprosich, which only grew greater the longer I tried to conceal it. But I also felt furious with myself for not daring to renew my discussion with the doctor, and tell him that I did not care a fig for all his science, and that I hoped my father would die and be saved all that suffering.

And finally I began to feel resentment against my father. Anyone will understand who has tried watching day after day, for weeks on end, by the bed of somebody who is ill, when one knows nothing about nursing and is therefore obliged to be a passive spectator. I felt the need of a real rest in order to clear up my mind and take some of the sting out of the grief I felt on my father’s account and on my own. Instead of which I was obliged to be constantly fighting with him, now forcing him to take his medicine and now preventing him leaving the room. And conflict always produces anger.

One evening Carlo, the nurse, called me in to see a further improvement in my father. Greatly excited I rushed in, fearing that the old man had become conscious of his condition and would upbraid me for it.

My father was standing in the middle of the room in his underclothes, with his red silk night-cap on his head. He still had great difficulty in breathing, but from time to time said a few words quite intelligibly. Just as I went in he said to Carlo:

“Open!”

He wanted him to open the window. Carlo replied that he could not because it was too cold. For a little while my father forgot what it was he had asked. He sat down in an arm-chair by the window and stretched out his legs so as to be more comfortable. When he saw me he said:

“Have you been asleep?” I don’t think he heard my reply. This was not the kind of recovery I had feared. When you are actually dying you have other things to do than to think about death. His whole being was concentrated on the effort to get his breath. Instead of listening to my answer he shouted to Carlo again:

“Open!”

He could not rest. He got up from the chair and tried standing. Then with a great effort, and with the help of the nurse, he lay down on the bed, lying first for an instant on his left side, and then changing almost immediately to his right, for he knew that he could hold out in this position for several minutes on end. Then he called the nurse again to help him to his feet, and went back to the arm-chair, where he remained sitting much longer than before.

The same day, on one of his frequent journeys from the bed to the arm-chair, he stopped in front of the glass and looked at himself in it for quite a long time. Then he murmured:

“I look like a Mexican!”

It must have been to break the awful monotony of his journey to and from the arm-chair that he started trying to smoke that day. But he got no further than filling his mouth once with smoke and puffing it out again, exhausted.

Once Carlo called me in during a moment of complete consciousness:

“Am I seriously ill then?” he had asked in a terrified voice; but it was only one brief flash followed by a moment’s delirium. He sat up in bed and thought he had just woke up, and that he was spending the night in an hotel in Vienna. It was probably the longing to cool his burning mouth which made him dream of Vienna where there is such lovely water and so cold. He went on to speak of the delicious water which awaited him at the nearest fountain.

He was a restless patient, but otherwise very good. I was continually afraid of his becoming irritable when he discovered how ill he really was, so that his gentleness did nothing to diminish my fatigue; but he always patiently accepted any new suggestion that was made to him, because he was always hoping to get relief from one of them. When the nurse offered to go and get him a glass of milk he accepted with genuine delight. But he was soon as eager to get rid of the milk as he was to have it, and because it was not taken from him after he had had one small sip, he threw it on the ground.

The doctor never showed any sign of being disappointed by the invalid’s condition. Every day he noticed a slight improvement, but he regarded the catastrophe as inevitable. One day he arrived in his carriage and was in a great hurry to be off again. He told me to persuade my father to lie down as much as possible, because a horizontal position was better for the circulation. He spoke to my father about it too, who heard what he said and promised to do so with an air of complete understanding, but nevertheless remained standing in the middle of the room and seemed to fall back at once into a state of absent-mindedness, or rather into that preoccupation with his lack of breath which I described above.

The following night I experienced for the last time the fear of that much-dreaded return of consciousness. He was sitting by the window in an arm-chair, and gazing through the panes out on to the clear starlit sky. His breathing was still laboured, but he was so absorbed in watching the sky that it did not seem to trouble him. Perhaps it was his efforts to get his breath which made him seem to nod his head as if in sign of assent.

I thought with horror: Now at last he is considering the problem he has always avoided. I tried to discover which exact point of the sky it was that he was gazing at. There he sat, upright, with the intense and concentrated effort of someone who is trying to peer through a window too high up. I thought he was looking at the Pleiades. During his whole life he had probably never gazed into the distance for so long on end. Suddenly he turned his whole body towards me, still sitting upright in his chair.

“Look! Look!” he said, with a stern, commanding air. He returned once more to his study of the sky, and then said to me again:

“Did you see? Did you see?”

He tried to go back again to the stars, but he could not: he sank exhausted into the arm-chair, and when I asked him what it was he had wanted to show me, he did not seem to remember that he had wanted to show me anything—he probably did not even hear me. The word he had been searching for, which he so much wanted to confide to me had escaped him for ever.

The night was long, but not particularly fatiguing either for me or for the nurse. We let the sick man do as he liked, and he went on walking about the room in his queer costume, quite unconscious that he was waiting for death. Once he tried to go out in the passage where it was very cold. I would not let him and he obeyed at once. Another time when his nurse, who had heard the doctor’s orders, tried to prevent him getting up, my father rebelled. He shook off his stupor and wept and swore as he struggled to raise himself. I insisted on his being allowed to move about exactly as he pleased. He quieted down at once, and returned to his life of silence and his vain pilgrimage in search of relief.

When the doctor came he allowed himself to be examined, and even tried to do as he was told and to take a deep breath. Then, turning to me, he said:

“What is he saying?”

He forgot me for a moment, but soon came back again:

“When can I go out?”

The doctor, encouraged by his docility, urged me to tell him that he ought to lie down more. My father only listened to voices he knew, like mine and Maria’s and the nurse’s. I had no faith in the value of that prescription, but I repeated it to him and put a touch of severity into my tone.

“Yes, yes,” my father agreed, and at once got up and went to the arm-chair.

The doctor watched him and murmured with resignation:

“It is clear that it relieves him a little to change his position.”

I went to bed soon afterwards, but I could not close my eyes; I was probing the future, and trying to discover in it some motive for continuing my efforts at self-improvement. I cried a great deal, more on my own account than for my poor father who roamed his room perpetually in a vain effort to find peace.

When I got up Maria went to lie down, and I joined the nurse at my father’s bedside. I was very tired and depressed, and my father was more restless than ever.

Then came that terrible, unforgettable scene which threw its shadow far into the future, and deprived me of all my courage and of all joy in life. The intensity of my grief was only mitigated when time had blunted all my feelings.

The nurse said:

“What a good thing it would be if we could persuade him to stay in bed. The doctor attaches so much importance to it.”

I had been lying down on the sofa. I got up at once and went over to the bed where my father was lying at the moment, struggling more than ever to get his breath. I was resolved to insist on his remaining on the bed for at least half an hour, as the doctor had ordered. Surely it was my duty to do so.

Suddenly my father started struggling to escape the pressure of my hands which were holding him down, and began edging himself towards the other side of the bed. I kept my hand firmly on his shoulder and forced him down, while at the same time I ordered him in a loud voice not to move about. He obeyed for a few seconds, startled by the sternness of my voice. Then he exclaimed:

“I am dying!”

And he sat straight up. I in my turn was startled by his cry and relaxed the pressure of my hand, so that he succeeded in sitting on the edge of the bed, exactly facing me. I think he was furious at finding himself held down by force, even for a moment, and that he had the impression that it was I who was depriving him of the air he needed so much, just as I was shutting out the light by standing, while he was sitting down. With a supreme effort he struggled to his feet, raised his arm high above his head, and brought it down with the whole weight of his falling body on my cheek. Then he slipped from the bed on to the floor and lay there—dead!

I did not realise he was dead, but my heart contracted with grief at the thought of the punishment which the dying man had tried to administer to me. I raised him with Carlo’s help and got him back on to the bed. Then, crying like a child who has been punished, I shouted in his ear:

“It was not my fault! It was that cursed doctor who wanted to make you lie down!”

It was a lie. Then I promised, like a child, never to do it again:

“I will let you do exactly what you like.”

The nurse said:

“He is dead.”

They had to use force to get me to leave the room. He was dead and it was impossible for me to prove my innocence.

When I was alone I tried to recover myself. I began reasoning: it was out of the question that my father, who was not in his right mind, could have taken such perfect aim at my cheek with the direct intention of punishing me.

But how could I ever know for certain that my reasoning was just? I even thought of consulting Coprosich about it. He, as a doctor, might be able to throw some light on a dying man’s ability to plan and execute a design like that. Perhaps I had only been the victim of a supreme effort on my father’s part to recover his breath. But I never spoke to Coprosich about it. I could not bear to go and tell him what sort of a parting I had had from my father, especially as it was he who had actually accused me of not showing him enough kindness.

It was another terrible blow to me when, later in the evening, I heard Carlo say to Maria in the kitchen:

“You should have seen how the old man raised his arm and gave his son a great blow in the face. It was the last thing he did.” Carlo had seen it then, so of course Coprosich would hear all about it.

When at last I went back to the death chamber I found they had already dressed the corpse. His beautiful white hair had been brushed, no doubt by the nurse. Death had already stiffened the body, which lay there proud and menacing. His large, shapely, powerful hands were livid, but were disposed so naturally that they seemed ready to grasp and punish. After that I felt that I could not bear to see him again.

At the funeral I tried to recall my father as I had always known him since childhood, indulgent and weak; and I persuaded myself that the blow he had given me when he was dying could not have been intentional. I became gentle and kind, and the memory of my father was always with me and grew ever dearer to me. It was like a delightful dream; now that we were in perfect agreement, I was the weak one and he the strong.

I returned to the religion of my childhood and held to it for a long time. I imagined that my father could hear what I said, and I was able to tell him that it had not been my fault, but the doctor’s. The lie was no longer of any importance because now he understood everything and so did I. For some time I continued these conversations with my father, which were as sweet and secret as an illicit love; to everyone else I went on laughing at religious practices, though in reality—I will confess it here—I daily with my whole heart commended my father’s soul to the care of some unknown being. It is the essence of true religion that one does not need to make a loud profession of it in order to get the consolation which at certain moments one cannot do without.