Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (81 page)

My
shudder
was
noticeable
evidently.
He
eyed
me
keenly,
alive to
my
exhaustion.
"You—you
will
stick
it,
won't
you?"
he
asked, almost
piteously.

I
looked
into
those
beseeching
eyes.
The
pallid
face,
wasted
with intense
desire,
distraught,
scarred
by
experiments
of
nameless
kind, the
face
of
a
man
who
had
not
spared
himself
in
the
search
for
what he
deemed
knowledge,
made
an
almost
violent
appeal.
The
pain, too,
was
there,
the
sense
of
loss,
the
anguish
due
to
being
robbed of
refreshment
poignantly
expected,
earned—robbed
by
another whom,
moreover,
he
considered,
at
the
least,
unworthy.

I
asked
a
few
questions.
He
answered
them.
It
all
still
seemed to
me
a
dream
of
marvellous,
even
supernatural,
sort,
a
dream
I could
only
partially
recover.
It
seems
so
to-day,
indeed,
more
than ever.

"I'm
scared,"
I
whispered.

"You
well
may
be,"
he
whispered
back.

I
gave
my
promise,
if
fearfully,
yet
at
the
same
time
eagerly
as well.

"Scared,"
that
little
trivial
word,
was
the
one
that
hung
echoing in
the
air
during
the
hours
of
my
long
vigil.
I
dreaded
the
awakening, yet
longed
for
it.
My
mind
was
a
turmoil.
Contradictions
raged
in
me. Mantravers,
they
said,
had
of
course
been
in
hiding
all
these
years —yet
his
very
clothes,
hanging
over
the
chair,
denied
it.
It
was
all a
tricky
hallucination
of
my
own
mind—my
recent
war
experiences denied
that
still
more
decisively.
The
alternative
was
staggering, more
than
my
faculties
could
hold
or
deal
with—that
my
cousin, sleeping
calmly
in
that
bed,
had
left
our
space
and
time
for
a
period of
four
years,
and
that
before
this
complete
disappearance,
as'
a preliminary
to
it,
by
way
of
training
possibly,
he
had
escaped
our time,
while
still
occupying
our
space,
for
a
far
longer
period,
for some
twenty-five
years,
an
entire
generation.
When
he
woke
up
in that
bed
across
the
floor,
woke
out
of
this
interval
of
readjustment which
was
an
earthly
sleep,
he
might
tell
me
something,
things
of unexampled,
fearful
interest—me,
because
though
ignorant
I
was
open-minded,
not
knowing
enough
even
to
have
prejudices.
.
.
.

With
books
I
could
not
read,
with
pencil
and
writing-pad
in
hand, I
sat
peering
through
the
half-open
door.
I
could
easily
see
the emaciated,
shining
face,
the
collar
of
blue
pyjamas
round
the
neck,
the nose
buried
in
the
pillow,
the
counterpane
rising
and
falling
with
the steady
breathing.
No
other
movement
came,
no
sound,
no
gentle snoring
even;
he
might
pass
his
life
away,
it
seemed
to
me,
dying
in his
sleep.
He
looked
as
if
he
could
never
wake,
as
if
he
did
not mean
to,
certainly
did
not
want
to,
wake.
What
dying
might
mean to
him,
I
dared
not
think.
Once
I
crept
in
on
tiptoe,
and
looked closer,
standing
within
two
feet
of
the
bed.
God—that
strange
radiance!
Even
the
transparent
eyelids
glowed,
as
though
the
eyeballs underneath
looked
through
at
me.
I
felt
"seen
through,"
my
very soul
examined.
I
returned
again
and
again,
stealthily,
as
though irresistibly
attracted,
fascinated.
I
hoped
he
would
never
wake,
I hoped
he
would.
I
sat
with
nerves
on
edge,
with
senses
painfully alert,
too
frightened
to
feel
fear.