For a long time Ralph sat and stared at this document;
then he began to laugh and tossed it into the scrap-basket.
After that, with a groan, he dropped his head against
the edge of his writing table.
When he woke, the first thing he remembered was the
fact of having cried.
He could not think how he had come to be such a fool.
He hoped to heaven no one had seen him. He supposed
he must have been worrying about the unfinished piece
of work at the office: where was it, by the way,
he wondered? Why—where he had left
it the day before, of course! What a ridiculous
thing to worry about—but it seemed to follow
him about like a dog...
He said to himself that he must get up presently and
go down to the office. Presently—when
he could open his eyes. Just now there was a
dead weight on them; he tried one after another in
vain. The effort set him weakly trembling, and
he wanted to cry again. Nonsense! He must
get out of bed.
He stretched his arms out, trying to reach something
to pull himself up by; but everything slipped away
and evaded him. It was like trying to catch at
bright short waves. Then suddenly his fingers
clasped themselves about something firm and warm.
A hand: a hand that gave back his pressure!
The relief was inexpressible. He lay still and
let the hand hold him, while mentally he went through
the motions of getting up and beginning to dress.
So indistinct were the boundaries between thought
and action that he really felt himself moving about
the room, in a queer disembodied way, as one treads
the air in sleep. Then he felt the bedclothes
over him and the pillows under his head.
“I must get up,” he said, and pulled
at the hand.
It pressed him down again: down into a dim deep
pool of sleep. He lay there for a long time,
in a silent blackness far below light and sound; then
he gradually floated to the surface with the buoyancy
of a dead body. But his body had never been more
alive. Jagged strokes of pain tore through it,
hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth.
They wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights
to him, tried to pull him down with them; but still
he floated, floated, danced on the fiery waves of
pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an
arrowy sky.
Charmed intervals of rest, blue sailings on melodious
seas, alternated with the anguish. He became
a leaf on the air, a feather on a current, a straw
on the tide, the spray of the wave spinning itself
to sunshine as the wave toppled over into gulfs of
blue...
He woke on a stony beach, his legs and arms still
lashed to his sides and the thongs cutting into him;
but the fierce sky was hidden, and hidden by his own
languid lids. He felt the ecstasy of decreasing
pain, and courage came to him to open his eyes and
look about him...
The beach was his own bed; the tempered light lay
on familiar things, and some one was moving about
in a shadowy way between bed and window. He was
thirsty and some one gave him a drink. His pillow
burned, and some one turned the cool side out.
His brain was clear enough now for him to understand
that he was ill, and to want to talk about it; but
his tongue hung in his throat like a clapper in a
bell. He must wait till the rope was pulled...
