The Long Reckoning

There is a calculation I have refused, these many months, to set down on paper — though it has run itself in the dark behind my eyes as faithfully as any sequence I ever ordered the cards to perform; and it is the simplest arithmetic in all the world. My father died at thirty-six. I am thirty-six. The distance between us, which once seemed an infinity, has been reduced by the slow operations of this disease to nothing whatever — the two terms made equal, and the equation, at last, closed. I had imagined, in my arrogance, that I should slip the symmetry. I see now that I was always to stand as its proof.

The illness did not announce itself as a great enemy — not at all; it came as the small things come. A weariness I could not reason away; a pain low in the body, which I named, for a season, by gentler names. I have been ill my whole life, after all. I learned at thirteen, lying paralysed and half-blind, that the body is a treacherous Store — holding what it likes, surrendering what it pleases, and never once consulting the Mill of the mind that hangs upon it. So I struck my old bargain over again: I would not attend to it. I had Numbers to think of, and a system, and debts I dared not name to William. The body, I told myself, was merely a servant grown insolent. But the servant had become the master, and was drawing up, in red ink, a debt I could not dispute.

The physicians came, and conferred, and grew grave in that manner physicians have — which is the manner of men reading off a verdict they have resolved not to pronounce. There was bleeding — a great deal of it, my own and theirs — and there were the opiates, which are a country unto themselves. I had thought I knew the laudanum. I did not. In the worst of the pain it is no mercy but a bargain: it takes the agony, and leaves in its place a soft dissolution of the very faculty I prized above my life — so that I lie here and feel my reason slip its moorings and drift; and the ceiling breathes; and figures I once commanded swim past me unsummoned, and will not hold still to be examined. That is the cruelty of which no one warned me — not that the body fails, but that it drags the mind down after it, hand over hand, into the one grave. I, who wrote that my brain was something more than merely mortal — I have watched it grow mortal by degrees; and I have wept, not for the pain, but for the fog.

And into that room, when I was at my lowest, my mother returned.

I must be exact, for exactness is very nearly all I have left to offer. There was a season of my life — the whole of my girlhood — when I lived under her vigilance as under a glass: watched by her appointed women, my every wildness logged against the dreaded inheritance she feared in me, the Byronic taint she had set herself, with parallelograms and propositions, to school away. I resented her with a heat I am not proud of. And now, at the last, she is come to govern my sickroom as once she governed my schooling — and I find, to my own astonishment, that I have not the strength to resist her; and that some part of me, the eight-year-old part that never had a father and could not keep a mother, does not wish to.

She has taken the management of everything. The visitors are admitted or turned away by her judgement; the hours are ordered by her; the very furniture of my soul she would rearrange, could she, and she is trying. For there has been, in these months, a great pressing upon me in the matter of religion — confessions sought, a searching of conscience conducted as rigorously as any examination I was ever put to as a child. I have made confessions. I will not write here what they were; there are things a woman may say once, in extremity, to those who must hear them, that she need not say twice to the air. Let it be enough that I have tried to set my soul in order — and that the ordering has cost me more terror than I knew was in me to feel.

For I am afraid. I will not pretend otherwise; I have pretended too much in my life, and have no use now for the false serenity that is laid, like a clean sheet, over the dying. There are nights when faith comes to me like a wide and certain light, and I believe — truly believe — that the intelligence which can conceive the unbounded analytical world, which can follow a law of Numbers out past the last thing the eye has ever seen, was not fashioned merely to be snuffed like a taper and swept up with the ash. A faculty that reaches toward the infinite must, I reason, have some commerce with the infinite — it cannot be that we are given the appetite for eternity, and nothing whatever to feed it. On such nights I am not afraid at all.

And then the light withdraws, and the laudanum thickens the dark, and I am a frightened creature in a body consuming itself, and all the architecture of my reasoning shows like a child's house of cards that the first real wind will scatter. I hold both of these in the one hand. I have always held opposites in the one hand — the poet and the analyst, the imagination and the calculus, my father's fire and my mother's straight line; and it would be a strange dishonesty to let go the habit now, at the very end, and counterfeit a peace I have not earned. I am not at peace. I am at work — the last and hardest work there is, which is to die without lying about it.

My mother and I have made our reconciliations. I will not call them complete; we are neither of us women who deal in the complete. But there has been tenderness — real tenderness, wrung out of us both by the simple, unbearable fact that one of us is going and the other must stay, and that there will be no more time left in which to be proud. She holds my hand, and I let her; and the long war between us, which began before I could speak and has run the whole length of my days, comes quietly to its armistice in this dim Marylebone room, with the December of the year coming on. I had imagined our peace, should it ever come, would feel like a victory. It feels like nothing of the kind. It feels like two travellers, who have quarrelled the whole road, sitting down together at the last — because the road has ended.

There is the matter of where I am to be laid; and here, at least, I have been suffered to command. I have asked — I have insisted, with the last of the imperiousness that was always mine — that I be carried north, to Hucknall, in Nottinghamshire, and set down in the Byron vault, beside my father.

It is a strange wish; and I have turned it over often enough to know how strange. I never saw him. He left England before I had memory; he died at Missolonghi when I was eight — a name in the newspapers, a portrait kept veiled at my mother's order, a legend I was raised expressly to be unlike. The whole of my education was one long argument against him. And yet I find the equation will not balance any other way. He wrote of me, before he went, that I was the sole daughter of his house and heart — and then he shut the door of that house, and never opened it again, and I have stood outside it the whole of my life. To go in now — to lie down at last beside the one parent who never had the chance to disappoint me, nor I him — is the only homecoming left me to choose. We meet, he and I, at thirty-six. We meet in the one ground. The discipline my mother built in me, and the fire he bequeathed me, shall keep, at the very last, the same address.

I think sometimes of the engine in these hours, when the medicine permits me thought at all — of the cards, and the Store, and the patient Mill that would weave its algebraical patterns long after the hand that ordered them was still. It will not be built in my time; I have known that these many years. But I set down what it might do, as truly as I could see it — and what it could not do, which I think I saw more truly than any: that it has no pretensions whatever to originate, that it can do only what we know how to order it to perform. I ordered what I could. The rest I must leave to a future I shall not enter, and trust — as one trusts a sum one has checked and cannot stay to see proved — that the answer was right.

The reckoning is nearly closed. The pain will have its way with the body, and the laudanum its way with the mind; and presently the two columns will be drawn together and ruled off, and the account rendered up to whatever Intelligence keeps the great ledger. I do not know what I shall find written there. I know only that I have not falsified the entries — and that I am going north, to my father, with my mother's hand in mine; both inheritances at last in the one grave, and the long division of my life resolved into a single whole.