It was irresistible.
Then there would be an inquiry, the sacking of my room.
"At the thought of the possibility of my work being exposed or interrupted at its very climax, I became very angry and active.
I hurried out with my three books of notes, my cheque-book—the tramp has them now—and directed them from the nearest Post Office to a house of call for letters and parcels in Great Portland Street.
I tried to go out noiselessly.
Coming in, I found my landlord going quietly upstairs; he had heard the door close, I suppose.
You would have laughed to see him jump aside on the landing as came tearing after him.
He glared at me as I went by him, and I made the house quiver with the slamming of my door.
I heard him come shuffling up to my floor, hesitate, and go down.
I set to work upon my preparations forthwith.
"It was all done that evening and night.
While I was still sitting under the sickly, drowsy influence of the drugs that decolourise blood, there came a repeated knocking at the door.
It ceased, footsteps went away and returned, and the knocking was resumed.
There was an attempt to push something under the door—a blue paper.
Then in a fit of irritation I rose and went and flung the door wide open.
'Now then?' said I.
"It was my landlord, with a notice of ejectment or something.
He held it out to me, saw something odd about my hands, I expect, and lifted his eyes to my face.
"For a moment he gaped. Then he gave a sort of inarticulate cry, dropped candle and writ together, and went blundering down the dark passage to the stairs.
I shut the door, locked it, and went to the looking-glass.
Then I understood his terror… .
My face was white—like white stone.
"But it was all horrible. I had not expected the suffering.
A night of racking anguish, sickness and fainting.
I set my teeth, though my skin was presently afire, all my body afire; but I lay there like grim death.
I understood now how it was the cat had howled until I chloroformed it.
Lucky it was I lived alone and untended in my room.
There were times when I sobbed and groaned and talked.
But I stuck to it… . I became insensible and woke languid in the darkness.
"The pain had passed.
I thought I was killing myself and I did not care.
I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids.
My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last.
I gritted my teeth and stayed there to the end. At last only the dead tips of the fingernails remained, pallid and white, and the brown stain of some acid upon my fingers.
"I struggled up.
At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see.
I was weak and very hungry.
I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist.
I had to hang on to the table and press my forehead against the glass.
"It was only by a frantic effort of will that I dragged myself back to the apparatus and completed the process.
"I slept during the forenoon, pulling the sheet over my eyes to shut out the light, and about midday I was awakened again by a knocking.
My strength had returned.
I sat up and listened and heard a whispering.
I sprang to my feet and as noiselessly as possible began to detach the connections of my apparatus, and to distribute it about the room, so as to destroy the suggestions of its arrangement.
Presently the knocking was renewed and voices called, first my landlord's, and then two others.
To gain time I answered them.
The invisible rag and pillow came to hand and I opened the window and pitched them out on to the cistern cover.
As the window opened, a heavy crash came at the door.
Someone had charged it with the idea of smashing the lock.
But the stout bolts I had screwed up some days before stopped him.