The Stratagem and Other Stories

it can deal with numbers by ratiocination, it cannot ap- prehend them by direct impression. It requires a highly trained intelligence to distinguish between fifteen and sixteen matches on a plate without counting them. In death this limitation is entirely removed. Of the infinite content of the Universe every item was separately real- ized. The brain of Arthur had become equal in power to that attributed by theologians to the Creator; yet of ex- ecutive power there was no seed. The impotence of man before circumstance was in him magnified indefinitely, yet without loss of detail or of mass. He understood that The Many was The One without losing or fusing the con- ception of either. He was God, but a God irretrievably damned: a being infinite, yet limited by the nature of things, and that nature solely compact of loathliness. IX I have little doubt that the cremation of my hus- band's body cut short a process which in the normally buried man continues until no trace of organic substance remains. The first kiss of the furnace awoke an activity so vio- lent and so vivid that all the past paled in its lurid light. The quenchless agony of the pang is not to be de- scribed; if alleviation there were, it was but the exulta- tion of feeling that this was final. Not only time, but all expansions of time, all mon- sters of time's womb were to be annihilated; even the ego might hope some end. The ego is the “worm that dieth not,” and existence the “fire that is not quenched.” Yet in this universal pyre, in this barathrum of liquid lava, jetted from the volca- noes of the infinite, this “lake of fire that is reserved for the devil and his angels,” might not one at last touch bottom? Ah! but time was no more, neither any eidolon thereof!