Page:The elephant man and other reminiscences.djvu/84

72 never gone to the extreme of wishing to die for the mere sake of convincing my husband of obstinate stupidity. I should like to go into a death-like trance and frighten him, for then I should be able to hear what he said when he thought I was gone and remind him of it afterwards whenever he became cynical.

It is in the morning that I feel so bad. I am really ghastly then. I wake up with the awful presentiment that something dreadful is going to happen. I don't know what it is, yet I feel I could sink through the bed. I imagine the waking moments of the poor wretch who has been condemned to death and who is said to have "slept well" on the night before his execution. He will probably awake slowly and will feel at first hazily happy and content, will yawn and smile, until there creeps up the horrible recollection of the judge and the sentence, of the gallows and the hanging by the neck. I know the cold sweat that breaks over the whole body and the sickly clutching about the heart that attend such an awakening, but doubt if any emerging from sleep can be really worse than many I have experienced.

I can do so little in the day-time. I soon get exhausted and so utterly done up that I can only lie still in a dark room. When I am like that the