The Stratagem and Other Stories

“No!” thought he, “perhaps I lack their ‘faith.’ “Perhaps if I could really persuade myself of God and Christ——Perhaps if I could deceive myself, could make believe——” Such a thought is to surrender one's honesty, to ab- dicate one's reason. It marked the final futile struggle of his will. The demon caught and crunched him, and the noisy delirium began anew. My flesh and blood rebelled. Taken with a deathly vomit, I rushed from the room, and resolutely, for a whole hour, diverted my sensorium from thought. I had always found that the slightest trace of tobacco smoke in a room greatly disturbed my power. On this occasion I puffed cigarette after cigarette with excellent effect. I knew nothing of what had been going on. IV Arthur, stung by the venomous chyle, was tossing in that vast arched belly, which resembled the dome of hell, churned in its bubbling slime. I felt that he was not only disintegrated mechanically, but chemically, that his being was loosened more and more into its parts, that these were being absorbed into new and hateful things, but that (worst of all) Arthur stood immune from all, behind it, unimpaired, memory and reason ever more acute as ever new and ghastlier experience informed them. It seemed to me as if some mystic state were su- per-added to the torment; for while he was not, em- phatically not, this tortured mass of consciousness, yet that was he. There are always at least two of us! The one who feels and the one who knows are not radically one person. This double personality is enormously ac- centuated at death. Another point was that the time-sense, which with men is usually so reliable—especially in my own case— was decidedly deranged, if not abrogated altogether.