Broken A Looking-Glass
He climbed the three flights of stone stairs, and put his key into the lock; but before he turned it, he stopped
to rest, to take breath. On the door his name was painted in big white letters, Mr. Richard Dane. It is always
silent in the Temple at midnight; to-night the silence was dense, like a fog. It was Sunday night; and on
Sunday night, even within the hushed precincts of the Temple one is conscious of a deeper hush.
When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop into an armchair before the empty
fireplace. He was tired, he was exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he always
dined on Sundays, with the Rodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had driven home in a hansom. There was no
reason why he should be tired. But he was tired. A deadly lassitude penetrated his body and his spirit like a
fluid. He was too tired to go to bed.
I suppose I am getting old, he thought.
To a second person the matter would have appeared not one of supposition but of certainly, not of
progression but of accomplishment. Getting old indeed? But he was old. It was an old man, grey and wrinkled
and wasted, who sat there, limp, sunken upon himself, in his easy-chair. In years, to be sure, he was under
sixty; but he looked like a man of seventy-five.
I am getting old, I suppose, I am getting old.
And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him like a misty landscape, and thought what a
failure it had been. What had it come to? What had it brought him? What had he done or won?
Nothing, nothing. It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude, disappointment, and, to-night especially, a
sense of fatigue and apathy that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket. On a table, a yard or two away,
stood a decanter of whisky, with some soda-water bottles and tumblers; he looked at it with heavy eyes, and
he knew that there was what he needed. A little whisky would strengthen him, revive him, and make it possible
for him to bestir himself and undress and go to bed. But when he thought of rising and moving to pour the
whisky out, he shrank from that effort as from an Herculean labour; nohe was too tired. Then his mind went
back to the friends he had left in Chelsea half an hour ago; it seemed an indefinably long time ago, years and
years ago; they were like blurred phantoms, dimly remembered from a remote past.
Yes, his life had been a failure; total, miserable, abject. It had come to nothing; its harvest was a harvest of
ashes. If it had been a useful life, he could have accepted its unhappiness; if it had been a happy life, he could
have forgotten its uselessness; but it had been both useless and unhappy. He had done nothing for others, he
had won nothing for himself. Oh, but he had tried, he had tried. When he had left Oxford people expected
great things of him; he had expected great things of himself. He was admitted to be clever, to be gifted; he
was ambitious, he was in earnest. He wished to make a name, he wished to justify his existence by fruitful
work. And he had worked hard. He had put all his knowledge, all his talent, all his energy, into his work; he
had not spared himself; he had passed laborious days and studious nights. And what remained to show for it?
Three or four volumes upon Political Economy, that had been read in their day a little, discussed a little, and
then quite forgottensuperseded by the books of newer men. Pulped, pulped, he reflected bitterly. Except
for a stray dozen of copies scattered here and therein the British Museum, in his College library, on his own
bookshelveshis published writings had by this time (he could not doubt) met with the common fate of
unappreciated literature, and been pulped.
Pulpedpulped; pulpedpulped. The hateful word beat rhythmically again and again in his tired brain; and
for a little while that was all he was conscious of.
So much for the work of his life. And for the rest? The play? The living? Oh, he had nothing to recall but
failure. It had sufficed that he should desire a thing, for him to miss it; that he should set his heart upon a thing,
for it to be removed beyond the sphere of his possible acquisition. It had been so from the beginning; it had
been so always. He sat motionless as a stone, and allowed his thoughts to drift listlessly hither and thither in
the current of memory. Everywhere they encountered wreckage, derelicts; defeated
aspirations, broken hopes. Languidly he envisaged these. He was too tired to resent, to rebel. He even found
a certain sluggish satisfaction in recognising with what unvarying harshness destiny had treated him, in
resigning himself to the unmerited.
He caught sight of his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown leather arm of his chair. His eyes rested on it,
and for the moment forgot everything else in a sort of torpid study of it. How white was, how thin, how
withered; the nails were parched into minut corrugations; the veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung
loosely on it, and had a dry lustre; an old mans hand. He gazed at it fixedly, till his eyes closed and his head
fell forward. But he was not sleepy, he was only tired and weak.
He raised his head with a start and changed his position. He felt cold; but to endure the cold was easier than
to get up and put something on, or go to bed.
How silent the world was; how empty his room. An immense feeling of solitude, of isolation, fell upon him. He
was quite cut off from the rest of humanity here. If anything should happen to him, if he should need help of
any sort, what could he do? Call out? But who would At hear? nine in the morning the porters wife would
come with his tea. But if anything should happen to him in the meantime? There would be nothing for it but to
wait till nine oclock.
Ah, if he had married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his own, instead of these desolate bachelor
chambers!
If he had married, indeed! It was his sorrows crown of sorrow that he had not married, that he had not been
able to marry, that the girl he had wished to marry wouldnt have him. Failure? Success? He could have
accounted failure in other things a trifle, he could have laughed at what the world calls failure, if Elinor Lynd
had been his wife. But that was the heart of his misfortune, she wouldnt have him.
He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she a girl of eighteen. He could see her
palpable before him now: her slender girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm brown hair
curling round her forehead. Oh, how he had loved her! For twelve years he had waited upon her, wooed her,
hoped to win her. But she had always said, NoI dont love you. I am very fond of you; I love you as a friend;
we all love you that waymy mother, my father, my sisters. But I cant marry you. However, she married no
one else, she loved no one else: and for twelve years he was an ever- welcome guest in her fathers house;
and she would talk with him, play to him, pity him; and he could hope. Then she died. He called one day, and
they said she was ill. After that there came a blank in his memorya gulf, full of blackness and redness,
anguish and confusion; and then a sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.
He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He
remembered the pale playlight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all spoked. And there was
her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her
writing-desk, her book-case. He remembered a row of medicine bottles on the mantelpiece; he remembered
the fierce anger, the hatred of them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he looked at
them, because they had failed to do their work.
You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard, her mother said. What would you like?
On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass, in an ivory frame. He asked if he might have that, and
carried it away with him. She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her hair in it; it had
reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He could almost persuade himself that something of her must
remain in it. To own it was like owning something of herself. He carried it home with him, hugging it to his side
with a kind of passion.
He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the looking-glass in which her face had been
reflected a thousand times; the glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of herself,
he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it, behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it
gave him an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was dissolved in joy.
The glass lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in front of him. That was its place; he always
kept it on his chimney-shelf, so that he could see it whenever he glanced round the room. He leaned back in
his chair and looked at it; for a long time his eyes remained fixed upon it. If she had married me, she wouldnt
have died. My love, my care, would have healed her. She could not have died. Monotonously, automatically,
the phrase repeated itself over and over again in his mind, while his eyes remained fixed on the ivory case into
which her looking-glass was folded. It was an effect of his fatigue, no doubt, that his eyes, once directed upon
an object, were slow to leave it for another; that a phrase once pronounced in his thought had this tendency to
repeat itself over and over again.
But at last he roused himself a little, and leaning forward, put his hand out and up, to take the glass from the
shelf. He wished to hold it, to touch it and look into it. As he lifted it towards him it fell open, the mirror proper
being fastened to a leather back, which was glued to the ivory, and formed a hinge. It fell open; and his grasp
had been insecure; and the jerk as it opened was enough. It slipped from his fingers, and dropped with a
crash upon the hearthstone.
The sound went through him like a physical pain. He sank back in his chair and closed his eyes. His heart was
beating as after a mighty physical exertion. he knew vaguely that a calamity had befallen him; he could
vaguely imagine the splinters of shattered glass at his feet. But his physical prostration was so great as to
obliterate, to neutralise, emotion. He felt very cold. He felt very could. He felt that he was being hurried along
with terrible speed through darkness and cold air. There was the continuous roar of rapid motion in his ears, a
faint, dizzy bewildent in his head. He felt that he was trying to catch hold of thing to stop his progress, but his
hands closed upon emptiness; that has, was trying to call out for help, but he could make no sound. Onon
on, he was being whirled through some immeasurable abyss of space.
Ah, yes, hes dead, quite, the doctor He has been dead some hours. He must have passed away
peacefully, sitting here in his chair.
Poor gentleman, said the porters wife. And a broken looking-glass beside him. Oh, its a sure sing, a broken
looking-glass.