His spittoon is always full.  It is obvious that his heart, where his wasted sulphurate hand is placed, beats too hard and presses his spongy lungs and the tumor of water which distends him.  He lives in the settled notion of emptying his inexhaustible body.  He is constantly examining his bed-bottle, and I see his face in that yellow reflection.  All day I watched the torture and punishment of that body.  His cap and tunic, no longer in the least like him, hang from a nail.

Once, when he lay engulfed and choking, he pointed to the negro, perpetually oscillating, and said: 

“He wanted to kill himself because he was homesick.”

The doctor has said to me—­to me:  “You’re going on nicely.”  I wanted to ask him to talk to me about myself, but there was no time to ask him!

Towards evening my yellow-vested neighbor, emerging from his meditations and continuing to shake his head, answers my questions of the morning: 

“They can’t wash his hands—­it’s embedded.”

A little later that day I became restless.  I lifted my arm—­it was clothed in white linen.  I hardly knew my emaciated hand—­that shadow stranger!  But I recognized the identity disk on my wrist.  Ah, then! that went with me into the depths of hell!

For hours on end my head remains empty and sleepless, and there are hosts of things that I perceive badly, which are, and then are not.  I have answered some questions.  When I say, Yes, it is a sigh that I utter, and only that.  At other times, I seem again to be half-swept away into pictures of tumored plains and mountains crowned.  Echoes of these things vibrate in my ears, and I wish that some one would come who could explain the dreams.

* * * * * *

Strange footsteps are making the floor creak, and stopping there.  I open my eyes.  A woman is before me.  Ah! the sight of her throws me into infinite confusion!  She is the woman of my vision.  Was it true, then?  I look at her with wide-open eyes.  She says to me: 

“It’s me.”

Then she bends low and adds softly: 

“I’m Marie; you’re Simon.”

“Ah!” I say.  “I remember.”

I repeat the profound words she has just uttered.  She speaks to me again with the voice which comes back from far away.  I half rise.  I look again.  I learn myself again, word by word.

It is she, naturally, who tells me I was wounded in the chest and hip, and that I lay three days forsaken—­ragged wounds, much blood lost, a lot of fever, and enormous fatigue.

“You’ll get up soon,” she says.

I get up?—­I, the prostrate being?  I am astonished and afraid.

Marie goes away.  She increases my solitude, step by step, and for a long time my eyes follow her going and her absence.

In the evening I hear a secret and whispered conference near the bed of the sick man in the brown vest.  He is curled up, and breathes humbly.  They say, very low: