DEAD WEIGHT
chamber. The dying saint, his head safe in the arms of
Crowley, safe on his gentle breast, whose tears mingled with
his own, strove hard against the approach of the Grim Reaper.
Dr. Wynn Westcott was in a corner sharpening (in the worst
of taste) his knives for the inevitable post-mortem on the
dying saint.
Mr. Wilmshurst was reading through the will in which
the dying saint had left everything to Lady S——, and could
find no flaw, though he had drawn it up himself. Mr.
Battiscombe Gunn was rapidly revising the funeral arrange-
ments of the dying saint, which he proposed to found on some
unedited documents of the Second Dynasty, which showed
conclusively that the sacred lotus was in reality a corset, and
the Weapon of Men Thu a button-hook.
Neuburg was improvising (for soothing of the last moments
of the dying saint) a crooning lay to the tune (and the words,
mutato mutando) of
“Jesus, lover of my soul,
Let me to thy bosom fly,”
the bass accompaniment being an obbligato by Wilfred
Merton. Mr. E. S. P. Haynes (to the horror of Ada Lake-
man and Col. Gormley) was reading Morrison’s Red Triangle
to conceal his emotion. Mr. Austin Harrison, Veli Bey,
Madame Strindberg, the Editor of the Zyuinox, and some
others, were avoidably absent from the death-bed of the
dying saint.
Transfusion of blood having been suggested, Crowley
readily lent himself to the operation, Neuburg thoughtfully
changing to “There is a fountain.”
But the physicians had made a fatal error. Blood was
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