sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater loser.
Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly
to church, and he groaned out: “Oh yes,
I go. It ’most kills me, but I go,”
and I did not need his telling me to understand that
he went because his wife wished it. He did tell
me, after they both ceased to go, that it had finally
come to her saying, “Well, if you are to be lost,
I want to be lost with you.” He could accept
that willingness for supreme sacrifice and exult in
it because of the supreme truth as he saw it.
After they had both ceased to be formal Christians,
she was still grieved by his denial of immortality,
so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic
lies, which for love’s sake he held above even
the truth, and he went to her, saying that he had
been thinking the whole matter over, and now he was
convinced that the soul did live after death.
It was too late. Her keen vision pierced through
his ruse, as it did when he brought the doctor who
had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the
heart, and, after making him go over the facts of
it again with her, made him declare it merely functional.
To make an end of these records as to Clemens’s
beliefs, so far as I knew them, I should say that
he never went back to anything like faith in the Christian
theology, or in the notion of life after death, or
in a conscious divinity. It is best to be honest
in this matter; he would have hated anything else,
and I do not believe that the truth in it can hurt
any one. At one period he argued that there must
have been a cause, a conscious source of things; that
the universe could not have come by chance. I
have heard also that in his last hours or moments he
said, or his dearest ones hoped he had said, something
about meeting again. But the expression, of which
they could not be certain, was of the vaguest, and
it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of
his tenderness. All his expressions to me were
of a courageous, renunciation of any hope of living
again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost.
He suffered terribly in their loss, and he was not
fool enough to try ignoring his grief. He knew
that for this there were but two medicines; that it
would wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile
there was nothing for it but those respites in which
the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I remember
that in a black hour of my own when I was called down
to see him, as he thought from sleep, he said with
an infinite, an exquisite compassion, “Oh, did
I wake you, did I wake, you?” Nothing more, but
the look, the voice, were everything; and while I
live they cannot pass from my sense.
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