his arms. 'Don't look at me,' he begged her, 'only remember,
dearest, I would rather have died down there and been never seen
again than have given you pain. Run--run, your mother's calling.
Write to me, think of me; good-bye!'

He threw himself on the bed and lay there till evening--till the
door had shut gently behind the last rat to leave the sinking
ship. All the clearness, the calmness were gone again. Round and
round in dizzy sickening flare and clatter his thoughts whirled.
Contempt, fear, loathing, blasphemy, laughter, longing: there was
no end. Death was no end. There was no meaning, no refuge, no
hope, no possible peace. To give up was to go to perdition: to go
forward was to go mad. And even madness--he sat up with trembling
lips in the twilight--madness itself was only a state, only a
state. You might be bereaved, and the pain and hopelessness of
that would pass. You might be cast out, betrayed, deserted, and
still be you, still find solitude lovely and in a brave face a
friend. But madness!--it surged in on him with all the clearness
and emptiness of a dream. And he sat quite still, his hand
clutching the bedclothes, his head askew, waiting for the sound
of footsteps, for the presences and the voices that have their
thin-walled dwelling beneath the shallow crust of consciousness.

Inky blackness drifted up in wisps, in smoke before his eyes; he
was powerless to move, to cry out. There was no room to turn; no
air to breathe. And yet there was a low, continuous,
never-varying stir as of an enormous wheel whirling in the gloom.
Countless infinitesimal faces arched like glimmering pebbles the
huge dim-coloured vault above his head. He heard a voice above
the monstrous rustling of the wheel, clamouring, calling him