Whatever rules the world, it is not we.
An hour later, Cosmo brought Mr Barnett home to lunch, as had been his custom during all these days. The meal was short: they feared to speak at the dining-table lest they should wake Mr Burden, whose bedroom was immediately above. To avoid disturbing him, they went into the drawing-room together, to talk at ease upon the subject which most absorbed them; and Mr Barnett, in whom something of the artist lingered, watched with pleasure the contrast of strong light striking the darkened room like a shaft from the greenhouse beyond.
They spoke frankly one to the other, as is the fashion of honest men, when they believe themselves alone, and near them, in his chair beyond the archway, Mr Burden lay steeped in an unnatural slumber. Of what they said to each other I know nothing; but I have heard minutely the description of the phantasmagoria which passed through the brain of Mr Burden as the physic took effect.
He seemed to be now here, now there, but always in a place of very bright colours and strong scents under a hot sun; and, though the scene continued to change, it had always one thing in common, an expanse of marsh and reeds and stagnant, slimy, steaming water: tropical, and deadly to mankind. And up and down this horror there passed, with movements that corresponded to clouds in his own brain, great animals, now fantastic, as Wyverns, now of nature as hippopotami and sloths, but always having in their expression, when they turned towards him, something of the terrible.
Gradually in this place there were voices; one voice he recognised for that of his son, the other he could not fix; he knew it and then he did not know it; it pulsated between extremes of recognition almost absolute, and again of a complete bewilderment. At last he thought that he could attach a name to this second voice, a name that began, he thought, with an N; but the mere attempt at thinking so pressed upon and tortured him, that his poor soul abandoned itself again to the mere watching of the confused and painful delirium. And one voice, which was that of his son, was speaking perpetually of fools, and of old fashions, and saying that he knew them, as though he were proud of knowing them; and the other voice kept on insisting that something or other must be done, and boasting of strength and of power. Then the first voice, Cosmo’s again, passed into another phase, and entreated and cajoled; and the second voice seemed only to sneer, and, in some astonishing incongruous way, the name of his friend, the name of the friend he had lost, the name of Mr Abbott, came once and again upon the sufferings of this poor old man, and mixed grotesquely with those other vague and awful things. And he heard a repeated reference to an approaching death, and, on the other side, a repeated sneer that death kept no certain hour.
Through all this tortured hour of vision the body and the soul of him were not only in an agony, but in an anarchy as well; for the intellect was broken and did not reign. He was entranced, and could not judge, but only hear and see things quite inconsequent.
Then came the twilight whereby the soul of a man escapes from darkness. It came rapidly. First he could smell distinctly, it was the smell of an excellent cigar; then, with his eyes half closed, he saw a daylight which he knew was not the cheating glare of his unnatural sleep, and, with every moment, he caught the outer senses more and more.
Mr Burden’s head was fuddled: he might have been asleep and dreaming painfully, or he might have heard spoken words: false or true, he could not comprehend them thoroughly. Even in health he would not have followed all their meaning. Now they left upon him but a confused impression of inward desolation and misery, which interwove with his physical exhaustion and with the dull ache and ill-ease of his body.
He opened his eyes and saw the realities of our world. He recognised in a row of pots before him the Primula Robinsoniensis, and the Ranuncula Japonica, his gardener’s pride. Still motionless, but more and more alive, he noted the long lines of soot and grime upon the glass, the bubbles of dried paint upon the woodwork, and, on a corner of the iron frame of the conservatory, the stamp of the makers, “Aurora Works,” and the situation of their industry, the Isle of Dogs. He stared at the empty stove, and knew himself and his name.