Again his stern mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:
“Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest bit of the ferment to the end, to eat you. But to die this way.”
He shrugged his shoulders, or attempted to shrug them, rather, for the left shoulder alone moved. Like the smile, the shrug was twisted.
“But how can you account for it?” I asked. “Where is the seat of your trouble?”
“The brain,” he said at once. “It was those cursed headaches brought it on.”
“Symptoms,” I said.
He nodded his head. “There is no accounting for it. I was never sick in my life. Something’s gone wrong with my brain. A cancer, a tumour, or something of that nature,—a thing that devours and destroys. It’s attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by cell—from the pain.”
“The motor-centres, too,” I suggested.
“So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here, conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going down, breaking bit by bit communication with the world. I cannot see, hearing and feeling are leaving me, at this rate I shall soon cease to speak; yet all the time I shall be here, alive, active, and powerless.”
“When you say you are here, I’d suggest the likelihood of the soul,” I said.