There the narrative found upon Mr. Elvesham’s desk ends.  His dead body lay between the desk and the chair.  The latter had been pushed back, probably by his last convulsions.  The story was written in pencil and in a crazy hand, quite unlike his usual minute characters.  There remain only two curious facts to record.  Indisputably there was some connection between Eden and Elvesham, since the whole of Elvesham’s property was bequeathed to the young man.  But he never inherited.  When Elvesham committed suicide, Eden was, strangely enough, already dead.  Twenty-four hours before, he had been knocked down by a cab and killed instantly, at the crowded crossing at the intersection of Gower Street and Euston Road.  So that the only human being who could have thrown light upon this fantastic narrative is beyond the reach of questions.  Without further comment I leave this extraordinary matter to the reader’s individual judgment.

  XII.

  UNDER THE KNIFE.

“What if I die under it?” The thought recurred again and again, as I walked home from Haddon’s.  It was a purely personal question.  I was spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on account of their duty of regret.  I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few could possibly exceed the conventional requirement.  Things came before me stripped of glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk from Haddon’s house over Primrose Hill.  There were the friends of my youth:  I perceived now that our affection was a tradition, which we foregathered rather laboriously to maintain.  There were the rivals and helpers of my later career:  I suppose I had been cold-blooded or undemonstrative—­one perhaps implies the other.  It may be that even the capacity for friendship is a question of physique.  There had been a time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at the loss of a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional side of my imagination was dormant.  I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry for my friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.

I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature—­no doubt a concomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered off along the line it suggested.  Once before, in my hot youth, I had suffered a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of death.  I remembered now that my affections as well as my passions had drained out of me, leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation, a dreg of self-pity.  It had been weeks before the old ambitions and tendernesses and all the complex moral interplay of a man had reasserted themselves.  It occurred to me that the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual slipping away from the pleasure-pain guidance of the animal man.  It has been proven, I take it, as thoroughly as anything can be proven