George Eliot

The Lifted Veil George Eliot

The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; andin the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life willnot be protracted many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physicalconstitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longergroan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. If it were to be otherwise-ifI were to live on to the age most men desire and provide for-I should for once have knownwhether the miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of trueprovision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my lastmoments. Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in thisstudy, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising inthe fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I shallonly have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation willcome. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will havequarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, andis gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers thebell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with ahorrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and thereis no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with theknown, and be weary of it: I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation-and all the whilethe earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after therain, the light of the morning through my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth afterthe frosty air-will darkness close over them for ever?Darkness-darkness-no pain-nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on throughthe darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward. . . Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling thestrange story of my experienc