Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/247

 use saying another word. You met your soul’s mate and parted with her again. I have mine within me. We could not part. We were warned, but we resolved to take our chances. If we could only manage to walk it wouldn't be so bad.”

“Let me try and understand you,” I said, earnestly. “Do you actually feel her bodily weight? It cannot be, even allowing”

“Even allowing I’m sane! Out with it. No, it is not exactly that! It is a sort of brain pressure. I feel like a man whose hat is too tight for him; as though a lump of iron  was on my head. When I try to move I cannot control my limbs. With my poor girl it is even worse, for when she takes control, the very air seems to stifle her and your voices  sound hideous. She is furiously jealous about Walla too. Oh dear, I’m sure I don’t see what we are going to do.”

I stared at him helplessly. In spite of my own confession any one might have seen that I was not fully converted even yet.

Just then I thought I heard a groan again, but as before Maurice paid no heed.

“You see we can’t both make my physical brain act at once George,” he continued. “When I take control my individuality is in the ascendant and that gives me my natural expression and lets me talk to you as I am talking now, but  when she takes hold I am obliterated, pushed out of existence for the time being, as it were. Then my face becomes transfigured until it looks almost like hers, she tells me, and  she can only talk to you in her own language; but we  neither of us seem able to fully control the body; perhaps  we may learn in time.”

“It is a desperate situation, Maurice. I am trying to comprehend it, but it comes very hard.”

“And if you find it hard what on earth will others do? Mirrikh told me that it was madness, but I listened to the advice of another, an over-enthusiastic fellow who claimed  to have lived double on Jupiter. You see it’s very common for man and wife to occupy one body on Jupiter, and”

“Stop!” I interrupted. “I beg you will stop! Whatever you may know about these matters you will do well to keep to yourself. Later, perhaps, you and I may talk them over, but what we want now is to devise some plan to get you out  of your desperate fix?”