I told him to print it anyway, or not print it at all, and that either way I would not be reading the letters column afterward to find out which choice he made.
He asked me, just now, setting down his pencil for a moment to rest his hand, whether I was afraid. I found I did not mind the question the way I would once have minded it from anyone else, since dying men are permitted certain liberties in conversation that healthy ones are not, and being asked a plain question plainly is one of the better ones. I told him I was not afraid exactly, only curious, which he seemed to find an odd answer and wrote down anyway. I stand by it now as much as I did when I said it. Thirty years of knowing things before anyone else in London leaves a man with a certain appetite for finding out what comes next, even when what comes next is the one piece of information no source I ever cultivated could have sold me in advance.
I have spent thirty years selling other people's secrets for a living, and I find, now that the account is nearly finished, that the only secret I ever really kept, properly and completely, was my own: that a difficult, exacting, occasionally quite cold man once trusted a professional gossip with the private business of the people he was trying to protect, again and again, for three decades, because he had decided, correctly as it turned out, that I could be relied upon to want the truth for its own sake at least as often as I wanted it for money.
I do not know what more a man in my trade could reasonably ask to have said of him when he is gone. I have asked young Anstey to see that these words reach Dr. Watson, wherever he is keeping himself these days, since I suspect he is the one man left in London who will read them and understand precisely what they cost me to say, and precisely why I waited until now, with nothing left to lose by the saying, to finally say them.
I see the young man is still writing. I hope he gets the punctuation right. I never could abide a badly punctuated confession.
The nurse has just come in to say I ought to rest now, and I have told her, as I told Anstey a moment ago, that I have had thirty years of rest ahead of every deadline I ever met and see no reason to start resting behind one now, on my last. She did not find this as amusing as I intended it, which is, I suppose, a fitting enough note to end a life spent making a living from other people's reactions to things I said. I have asked Anstey to leave the window curtain open when he goes, so that I can see St. James's Street a little longer, or what I can still make out of it from this chair. It is not a great deal. It is, all the same, exactly the view I would have chosen, had anyone troubled to ask me.