“I’ve no strength,” I said to Bohun.
“Pull for God’s sake!” he answered. We dragged the body a little way; my hand clutched the thigh, which was hard and cold under the stuff of his clothing. His head rolled round, and his eyes now were covered with snow. We dragged him, and he bumped grotesquely. We had him under the wall, near the two women, and the blood welled out and dripped in a spreading pool at the women’s feet.
“Now,” said Bohun, “we’ve got to run for it.”
“Do you know,” said I, as though I were making a sudden discovery, “I don’t think I can.” I leaned back against the wall and looked at the pool of blood near the kiosk where the man had been.
“Oh, but you’ve got to,” said Bohun, who seemed to feel no fear. “We can’t stay here all night.”
“No, I know,” I answered. “But the trouble is—I’m not myself.” And I was not. That was the trouble. I was not John Durward at all. Some stranger was here with a new heart, poor shrivelled limbs, an enormous nose, a hot mouth with no eyes at all. This stranger had usurped my clothes and he refused to move. He was tied to the wall and he would not obey me.
Bohun looked at me. “I say, Durward, come on, it’s only a step. We must get to the Astoria.”
But the picture of the Astoria did not stir me. I should have seen Nina and Vera waiting there, and that should have at once determined me. So it would have been had I been myself. This other man was there.... Nina and Vera meant nothing to him at all. But I could not explain that to Bohun. “I can’t go...” I saw Bohun’s eyes—I was dreadfully ashamed. “You go on...” I muttered. I wanted to tell him that I did not think that I could endure to feel again that awful expansion of my back and the turning my feet into toads.
“Of course I can’t leave you,” he said.
And suddenly I sprang back into my own clothes again. I flung the charlatan out and he flumped off into air.