Through the door, half open, I caught a glimpse of a hollow, wax-white face ... he looked as if all the blood had been let out of his body, little by little.  The little, pretty, dark woman looked like a crafty animal ... there was a beady shine of triumph, which she could not conceal, in her eyes, as she opposed my entering.  I smelt the pungent smell of her physical womanhood.  There was a plumpness about her body, a ruddiness to her lips, that gave me the phantasy that, perhaps, the moment before, she had drunk of my father’s blood, and that she was preventing me from going in to where he lay till a certain tiny, red puncture over his jugular vein had closed.

“You forget, Mrs. Jenkins, that he is my father.”

“You shan’t go in ... please, Johnnie ... let him sleep just a little longer ... as soon as he wakes he asks for another drink!”

“And who put him in this state?” I charged directly, vividly remembering what Hartman had said....

“What, you don’t mean to insinuate?”—­she gasped.

“I mean nothing, only that I have come home to take care of my father, till his lodge takes charge of him, and that, for the present, I want you to please leave me alone with him.”

Her small, black pupils dilated angrily.  But she did not press the point of her staying.  She had put her hand on my arm cajolingly, but I had shook it off with such evident disgust—­founded partly and secretly on a horror of physical attraction for her—­that drew my morbid, starved nature—­

“Very well!... but I’ll be back this afternoon, early.  When he wakes up and asks for a drink of whiskey ... starts out to get one ... draw him a glass of water from the faucet, and take your oath that it’s whiskey ... he’ll believe you and drink it!”

And she departed, an odor of strong perfume in her wake.

* * * * *

Had this planet of earth been populated from without?... there were evidently two races on it—­the race of men—­the race of women—­men had voyaged in from some other world in space women had done the like from their world ... to this world, alien to both of them.  And here a monstrous thing had brought them together like an interlocking fungus—­their sex-union ... a function that monstrously held together two different species of animals that should not even be on meeting terms.

Thus my morbid fancy ran, as I entered slowly my father’s room.

He slept.

On a chair by his bed lay a copy of Hamlet, his favourite Shakespearean play.  I picked it up, read in it, waiting for him to wake, while he breathed laboriously.

I became absorbed in the play ...  I must write a poem, some time, called “Hamlet’s Last Soliliquy.”

* * * * *

My father was awake.

I did not know how long he had been so, for his breathing had not changed and the only difference from his sleeping state was that his eyes stared, wide and glassy, at the ceiling, as if they comprehended nothing.