at his long stiff stride around the corner that led to the lifts in the main building. When Eugene got there Robert was pressing buttons feverishly, but unfortunately, because the hour was so late and the lift-man was asleep below, his call had not yet been answered. Eugene seized him by the arm and began to pull him along back towards his room.
“Let go of me!” he said.
“You damned fool!… Do you want to ruin us all?”
He seemed to sober up and grew calmer after a moment or two of excited prayer and protest. They went back to the room quietly enough. When they got there Martha was supporting Upshaw’s body against the basin of the washstand. The man, by this time, was either unconscious or semi-conscious: all the savage and unholy energy which had burned for a space so incredibly that it had the power to hurl this diseased and near-dead mite across a continent had now flared utterly out and the creature which the girl supported in her arms, with a kind of dark and sullen tenderness, seemed to have died and dwindled with it; the body was no longer discernible, it seemed to have faded, a fabric of rotten sticks, into a shapeless heap of clothing; it dangled shapelessly and grotesquely like some deflated figure, and yet from the head, from that death’s-head of skull and tooth and blazing eyes, there were spurting unbelievable, incredible fountains of blood: it burst simultaneously from the mouth and nostrils in a steady torrent until his skin was laced with it; it filled the basin, it was incredible that such fountains of bright blood should pour out of this withered squirrel of a man.
Robert sat down sullenly in a chair by the table after saying, “Now, this is your last chance…. I’ve had as much as I can stand. You’ve got to decide between us here and now!” She did not answer him, and he said no more, relapsing into a sullen and half-drunken stupor.
The girl washed the blood away from Upshaw’s face with a towel: in a moment more she asked Eugene if he would help her carry him to the bed. Eugene picked him up and put him on the bed; his body felt like a handful of light dry sticks, he weighed no more than a child of ten; already his figure seemed, under the strange and terrible chemistry of death, to shrink and wither visibly from one moment to another, but his head rested above that shapeless and grotesque bundle of clothing as if it had been severed from the body—with an immense austerity of line and light, a cold, stiffening, and upthrust calm.
Eugene went down to the office and told them what had happened. The night
