Next week there may be something really funny.

Larry Semon or Buster Keaton—who knows?

Conclusion

I

The tea grew cold upon the chamber cupboard and Adam Doure stared out into the void.

The rain of yesterday had cleared away and the sun streamed into the small bedroom, lighting it up with amiable and unwelcome radiance. The distressing sound of a self-starter grappling in vain with a cold engine rang up from the yard below the window. Otherwise everything was quiet.

He cogitated: therefore he was.

From the dismal array of ills that confronted him and the confused memories that lay behind, this one proposition obtruded itself with devastating insistence. Each of his clearing perceptions advanced fresh evidence of his existence; he stretched out his limbs fully clothed under the counterpane and gazed at the ceiling with uncomprehending despair, while memories of the preceding evening, of Ernest Vaughan with swollen neck and staring eye, of the slum bar and the eager faces of the two pimps, of Henry, crimson and self-righteous, of shop girls in silk blouses eating plum cake, of the Ford wrecked in the broken window, fought for precedence in his awakening consciousness until they were established in some fairly coherent chronological order; but always at the end there remained the blue bottle and the sense of finality rudely frustrated. It stood upon the dressing table now, emptied of all its power of reprieve, while the tea grew cold upon the chamber cupboard.

After all the chaotic impressions which he had thus painfully and imperfectly set in order, the last minutes before he had turned out the light stood out perfectly clearly. He could see the white, inconsolable face that had stared out at him from the looking glass; he could feel at the back of his tongue the salt and bitter taste of the poison. And then as the image of the taste began to bulk larger in his field of consciousness, as though with the sudden breaking down of some intervening barrier another memory swept in on him blotting out all else with its intensity. He remembered as in a nightmare, remote, yet infinitely clear, his awakening in the darkness with the coldness of death about his heart; he had raised himself from the bed and stumbled to the window and leant there, he did not know how long, with the cold air in his face and the steady monotone of the rain fighting with the drumming of blood in his head. Gradually, as he stood there motionless, nausea had come upon him; he had fought it back, his whole will struggling in the effort; it had come again; his drunken senses relaxed their resistance, and with complete abandonment of purpose and restraint, he vomited into the yard below.

Slowly and imperceptibly the tea grew cold on the chamber cupboard.

II

Centuries ago, in his dateless childhood, Ozymandias had sprung to the top of the toy cupboard tired of Adam’s game. It was a game peculiar to himself and Ozymandias which Adam had evolved, and which was only played on the rare occasions of his being left alone. First, Ozymandias had to be sought from room to room, and when at last he was found, borne up to the nursery and shut in. He would watch him for some minutes as he paced the floor and surveyed the room with just the extreme tip of his tail expressing his unfathomable contempt for European civilization. Then armed with a sword, gun, battledore, or an armful of bricks to throw, and uttering sadistic cries, Adam would pursue him round and round the room, driving him from refuge to refuge, until almost beside himself with rage and terror, he crouched junglelike with ears flattened back and porpentine hair. Here Adam would rest, and after some slight pause the real business of the game began. Ozymandias had to be won back to complacency and affection. Adam would sit down on the floor some little way from him and begin calling to him softly and endearingly. He would lie on his stomach with his face as near Ozymandias as he would allow and whisper extravagant eulogies of his beauty and grace; mother-like he would comfort him, evoking some fictitious tormentor to be reproached, assuring him that he was powerless to hurt him any more; Adam would protect him; Adam would see that the horrible little boy did not come near him again. Slowly Ozymandias’ ears would begin to come forward and his eyes begin to close, and the delectable exercise invariably ended with caresses of passionate reconciliation.

On this particular afternoon, however, Ozymandias had refused to play, and the moment Adam brought him into the nursery, had established himself in unassailable sanctuary at the top of the toy cupboard. He sat there among the dust and broken toys, and Adam, foiled in his purpose, sat gloomily beneath calling to him. But Adam—at the age of seven—was not easily discouraged, and soon he began pushing up the nursery table towards the cupboard. This done he lifted the soldier box into it, and above this planted a chair. There was not room, turn it how he might, for all four legs to rest on the box, but content with an unstable equilibrium, Adam poised it upon three and mounted. When his hands were within a few inches of Ozymandias’ soft fur an unwary step on to the unsupported part of the chair precipitated him and it, first on to the table and then with a clatter and cry on to the floor.

Adam had been too well brought up to remember very much of his life in the days before he went to his private school, but this incident survived in his memory with a clearness, which increased as he became farther removed from it, as the first occasion on which he became conscious of ill as a subjective entity. His life up till this time had been so much bounded with warnings of danger that it seemed for a moment inconceivable that he could so easily have broken through into the realm of positive bodily harm. Indeed, so incompatible did it seem with all previous experience that it was some appreciable time before he could convince himself of the continuity of his existence; but for the wealth of Hebraic and mediaeval imagery with which the idea of life outside the body had become symbolized, he could in that moment easily have believed in his own bodily extinction and the unreality of all the sensible objects about him. Later he learned to regard these periods between his fall and the dismayed advent of help from below, as the first promptings towards that struggle for detachment in which he had, not without almost frantic endeavour, finally acknowledged defeat in the bedroom of the Oxford hotel.

The first phase of detachment had passed and had been succeeded by one of methodical investigation. Almost simultaneously with his acceptance of his continued existence had come the conception of pain—vaguely at first as of a melody played by another to which his senses were only fitfully attentive, but gradually taking shape as the tangible objects about him gained in reality, until at length it appeared as a concrete thing, external but intimately attached to himself. Like the pursuit of quicksilver with a spoon, Adam was able to chase it about the walls of his consciousness until at length he drove it into a corner in which he could examine it at his leisure. Still lying perfectly still, just as he had fallen, with his limbs half embracing the wooden legs of the chair, Adam was able, by conscentrating his attention upon each part of his body in turn, to exclude the disordered sensations to which his fall had given rise and trace the several constituents of the bulk of pain down their vibrating channels to their sources in his various physical injuries. The process was nearly complete when the arrival of his nurse dissolved him into tears and scattered his bewildered ratiocinations.

It was in some such mood as this that, an hour or so after his awakening, Adam strode along the towing path away from Oxford. He still wore the clothes in which he had slept, but in his intellectual dishevelment he had little concern for his appearance. All about him the shadows were beginning to dissipate and give place to clearer images. He had breakfasted in a world of phantoms, in a great room full of uncomprehending eyes, protruding grotesquely from monstrous heads that lolled over steaming porridge; marionette waiters had pirouetted about him with uncouth gestures. All round him a macabre dance of shadows had reeled and flickered, and in and out of it Adam had picked his way, conscious only of one insistent need, percolating through to him from the world outside, of immediate escape from the scene upon which the bodiless harlequinade was played, into a third dimension beyond it.