Then he took a little bottle out of his pocket marked "Chloroform." Over the head of the bed he fixed up a sort of rack with two hatpins and some string, so that the bottle could swing exactly over his pillow. Then he pricked a hole in the cork in such a manner that if the phial was turned upside-down, every few minutes a drop of liquid would ooze through.
He lit a cigarette and sat down to think. He was not quite sober, but he felt a dull conviction that things were never more unsatisfactory. He felt no sadness, no pathos, stealing over him.
With a great effort he struggled to realize things, getting up and walking round the room, talking thickly to himself. "Here I am, young, clever, of a good family, a man who might have been good or even great; am I going to die like a rat in a hole? Oh, God!" He said it with all the force and yearning he could put into his voice, trying to force a note of pain, but the result was most ordinary. He looked at his face in a little strip of looking-glass above the fireplace. He saw nothing but the imprint of impurity and sin.
Then he lay back on the bed, and thought that he roared with laughter. The situation seemed irresistibly comic. He only chuckled feebly, but to him it seemed as if he were shrieking in an ecstasy of mirth.
Suddenly he got up and fell on his knees, praying aloud, "Oh, God, help me! God forgive me!" All the time that he knelt and tried to pour out an impassioned prayer for forgiveness he knew that it was only an attempt to bring some poetry, some pathos, into his last moments. Again he got up and laughed wildly. His face grew ashen grey and horribly drawn in his attempts to deceive himself, to pose once more.
"Is there nothing, NOTHING? Good God!... why can't I feel? Why? why? Ah! ahh!" He tore at the bed-quilt wildly, snarling like a beast.
In the middle of his paroxysm he stopped suddenly and stiffened. Once more the weird horror of another presence in the room came over him. He whimpered like a dog, shrinking into a corner, with staring eyes, not knowing what he did, muttering "Mother—mother!" Then with a complete change of tone and manner, he said, "A nonentity with most seductive hair."
He took the little bottle from the table, and hung it mouth downwards in the sling.