'Father!' she cried at last.
He started up, gripping the arms of his chair, trembling.
'Yes, I'm going,' he said.
He rose, and went unevenly upstairs. Vera followed him close behind.
'If he reels and falls backwards he will kill me,' she thought, but he
did not fall. From habit he went into the bathroom. While trying to
brush his teeth he dropped the tooth-brush on to the floor.
'I'll pick it up in the morning,' he said, continuing deliriously: 'I
must go to bed--I must go to bed--I am very tired.' He stumbled over the
door mat into his own room.
Vera was standing behind the unclosed door of her room. She heard the
sneck of his lock. She heard the water still running in the bathroom,
trickling with the mysterious sound of water at dead of night. Screwing
up her courage, she went and turned off the tap. Then she stood again in
her own room, to be near the companionable breathing of her sleeping
sister, listening. Siegmund undressed quickly. His one thought was to
get into bed.
'One must sleep,' he said as he dropped his clothes on the floor. He
could not find the way to put on his sleeping-jacket, and that made him
pant. Any little thing that roused or thwarted his mechanical action
aggravated his sickness till his brain seemed to be bursting. He got
things right at last, and was in bed.
Immediately he lapsed into a kind of unconsciousness. He would have
called it sleep, but such it was not. All the time he could feel his
brain working ceaselessly, like a machine running with unslackening
rapidity. This went on, interrupted by little flickerings of
consciousness, for three or four hours. Each time he had a glimmer of
consciousness he wondered if he made any noise.
'What am I doing? What is the matter? Am I unconscious? Do I make any
noise? Do I disturb them?' he wondered, and he tried to cast back to
find the record of mechanical sense impression. He believed he could
remember the sound of inarticulate murmuring in his throat. Immediately
he remembered, he could feel his throat producing the sounds. This
frightened him. Above all things, he was afraid of disturbing the
family. He roused himself to listen. Everything was breathing in
silence. As he listened to this silence he relapsed into his sort
of sleep.
He was awakened finally by his own perspiration. He was terribly hot.
The pillow, the bedclothes, his hair, all seemed to be steaming with hot
vapour, whilst his body was bathed in sweat. It was coming light.
Immediately he shut his eyes again and lay still. He was now conscious,
and his brain was irritably active, but his body was a separate thing, a
terrible, heavy, hot thing over which he had slight control.