The Stratagem and Other Stories

We all judge of the lapse of time in relation to our daily habits or some similar standard. The conviction of immortality must naturally destroy all values for this sense. If I am immortal, what is the difference between a long time and a short time? A thousand years and a day are obviously the same thing from the point of view of “for ever.” There is a subconscious clock in us, a clock wound up by the experience of the race to go for seventy years or so. Five minutes is a very long time to us if we are waiting for an omnibus, an age if we are waiting for a lover, nothing at all if we are pleasantly engaged or sleeping.1 We think of seven years as a long time in connection with penal servitude; as a negligibly small period in deal- ing with geology. But, given immortality, the age of the stellar system itself is nothing. This conviction had not fully impregnated the con- sciousness of Arthur; it hung over him like a threat, while the intensification of that consciousness, its libera- tion from the sense of time natural to life, caused each act of the demon to appear of vast duration, although the intervals between the howls of the body on the bed were very short. Each pang of torture or suspense was born, rose to its crest, and died to be reborn again through what seemed countless aeons. Still more was this the case in the process of his as- similation by the “demon.” The coma of the dying man was a phenomenon altogether out of Time. The condi- tions of “digestion” were new to Arthur, he had no rea- son to suppose, no data from which to calculate the dis- tance of, an end. It is impossible to do more than sketch this process; as he was absorbed, so did his consciousness expand into that of the “demon”; he became one with all its hunger and corruption. Yet always did he suffer as him- self in his own person the tearing asunder of his finest