loucester infirmary, I chanced to
see an astonishing thing: five bodies of poor old women in shawls, come
to have their ailments seen-to on the day of doom; and these, I
concluded, had been unable to realise that anything would really happen
to the daily old earth which they knew, and had walked with assurance
on: for if everybody was to die, they must have thought, who would
preach in the Cathedral on Sunday evenings?--so they could not have
believed. In an adjoining room sat an old doctor at a table, the
stethoscope-tips still clinging in his ears: a woman with bared chest
before him; and I thought to myself: 'Well, this old man, too, died
doing his work....'

In this same infirmary there was one surgical ward--for in a listless
mood I went over it--where the patients had died, not of the poison, nor
of suffocation, but of hunger: for the doctors, or someone, had made the
long room air-tight, double-boarding the windows, felting the doors, and
then locking them outside; they themselves may have perished before
their precautions for the imprisoned patients were complete: for I found
a heap of maimed shapes, mere skeletons, crowded round the door within.
I knew very well that they had not died of the cloud-poison, for the
pestilence of the ward was unmixed with that odour of peach which did
not fail to have more or less embalming effects upon the bodies which it
saturated. I rushed stifling from that place; and thinking it a pity,
and a danger, that such a horror should be, I at once set to work to
gather combustibles to burn the building to the ground.

It was while I sat in an arm-chair in the street the next afternoon,
smoking, and watching the flames of this structure, that something was
suddenly born in me, something from the lowest Hell: and I smiled a
smile that never yet man smiled. And I said: 'I will burn, I will burn:
I will return to London....'

* * * * *

While I was on this Eastward journey, stopping for the night at the
town of Swindon, I had a dream: for I dreamed that a little brown bald
old man, with a bent back, whose beard ran in one thin streamlet of
silver from his chin to trail along the ground, said to me: 'You think
that you are alone on the earth, its sole Despot: well, have your fling:
but as sure as God lives, as God lives, as God lives'--he repeated it
six times--'sooner or later, later or sooner, you will meet another....'

And I started from that fright