"What do you want?" I asked, starting; "I don't know you."
"Well, sir," returned one of them, bending down and touching me on
the shoulder, "this is a matter that you'll soon arrange, I dare
say, but you're arrested."
"What is the debt?"
"Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller's account,
I think."
"What is to be done?"
"You had better come to my house," said the man. "I keep a very
nice house."
I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next
attended to them, they were standing a little off from the bed,
looking at me. I still lay there.
"You see my state," said I. "I would come with you if I could; but
indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall
die by the way."
Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me
to believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang
in my memory by only this one slender thread, I don't know what
they did, except that they forbore to remove me.
That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I
often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I
confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a
brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the
giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam
of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I
implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part
in it hammered off; that I passed through these phases of disease,
I know of my own remembrance, and did in some sort know at the
time.
Pages:
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713