The Stratagem and Other Stories

their bowels dragging behind them; creatures half ele- phant, half beetle; things that were but a ghastly blood- shot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother; these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. The most were things impossible to name or to describe. I was brought back from the vision by the stertorous and strangling breath of Arthur, who had been seized with a convulsion. From this he never really rallied. The dim sight grew dimmer, the speech slower and thicker, the headaches more persistent and acute. Torpor succeeded to his old splendid energy and ac- tivity; his days became continual lethargy ever deepen- ing towards coma. Convulsions now and then alarmed me for his immediate danger. Sometimes his breath came hard and hissing like a snake in anger; towards the end it assumed the Cheyne- Stokes type in bursts of ever-increasing duration and severity. In all this, however, he was still himself; the horror that was and yet was not himself did not peer from be- hind the veil “So long as I am consciously myself,” he said in one of his rare fits of brightness, “I can communicate to you what I am consciously thinking; as soon as this con- scious ego is absorbed, you get the subconscious thought which I fear—oh how I fear!—is the greater and truer part of me. You have brought unguessed explana- tions from the world of sleep; you are the one woman in the world—perhaps there may never be another—who has such an opportunity to study the phenomena of death.” He charged me earnestly to suppress my grief, to concentrate wholly on the thoughts that passed through his mind when he could no longer express them, and