Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/58

Rh felt its equal in life. It was not physical discomfort, nor was it quite mental agony. It was worse than either of them, but not so tangible. Comparing the feeling to life, it was, he thought, as if he had murdered everyone in the world and was consequently forced to live alone. Alone, he thought, with a strict, puritan conscience for company. He felt utterly abandoned, and he was all misery. In life he might have thrown off even so intense a suffering by drink or by any form of material pleasure. But in his present state he was helpless.

This persistent spiritual aching soon drove him into panic. He felt he must go somewhere, talk to someone, anyone. He wondered if he must remain in the bedroom with his useless body, and soon found that he could move through solid objects, but that he could not leave the floor. He realized that he was invisible because no part of his being was visible to himself. He thought it strange that he could walk, although he seemed to drift along rather than take actual steps.

But such misery! And every pang said, "Anne, Anne." It was as if Anne herself were prodding his wounded soul, persecuting him with pain. He tried to think of other things, of pleasant things, but the voice said, "Anne," with added distress, with unbearable wretchedness.

Deciding that he could bear it no longer, Hargrove left the bedroom and went downstairs. The servants were in the kitchen eating breakfast. Undoubtedly they had not yet discovered his body, and they knew better than to disturb him before noon. He decided not to bother them. He would walk out and try to find relief from this insufferable agony.

He left the house and drifted aimlessly along familiar streets. He encountered several acquaintances, stopped and bade them good morning, but they passed through him, unperturbed. He shouted after them, but they paid him no heed. His misery increased. He could not understand, if his present state were death, why life was so near at hand. And since life was so close why could he not reach out and grasp it? He wondered if he must go on thus eternally. Where was the promise death had pledged him?

Drifting—drifting. He who had been so completely material now so entirely spiritual. Thoughts. He could do nothing but think. Think back on Anne. Think back with a pang of remorse over each sordid detail of his life with her. He who had been so unutterably unfeeling, so thoroughly selfish. Think back, always back. No future, no ray of hope, no merciful rest. He must continue drifting, always drifting—drifting.

He lived again his lurid years with his wife. He saw her, young, attractive, an orphan depending on the world of men for her livelihood. She had been his secretary, and he had wanted her. And because she was honest he had married her. But although she did become his wife she was simply another woman in his life. That she had loved him mattered not. It was the same old hackneyed story of the man grown tired of the woman and the woman dying a little from each rebuke—dying that slow, creeping death which only a woman who loves knows.

And when finally she left him he had thought it a great joke. He had hastened to his lawyer’s so that he might exclude her from any share of his worldly goods in case he died first. She had worked before; she could work now, and continue to work until she cursed the day she left him. Just the same old trite story. Beauty and the Beast. That same old bromide, worked to death,