(_Being a rather hysterical contribution from our Analytical Novelist._)
_Friday._--I suppose one never realises till one is actually dead how
nearly dead one can be without actually being it. You see what I mean? No.
Well, how blithely, how recklessly one rollicks through life, fondly
believing that one is in the best of health, in the prime of condition, and
all the time one is the unconscious victim of some fatal infirmity or
disease. I mean, take my own case. I went to see my doctor in order to be
cured of hay fever. He examined my heart. He made me take off my shirt. He
hammered my chest; he rapped my ribs with his knuckles to see if they
sounded hollow. I don't know why he did this, but I think he was at one
time attached to a detective and has got into the habit of looking for
secret passages and false panels and so on.
Anyhow, he suspected my chest, and he listened at it for so long that any
miscreant who had been concealed in it would have had to give himself away
by coughing or blowing his nose.
After a long time he said, "Your heart's dilated. You want a complete rest.
Don't work. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Don't eat. Don't do anything. Take
plenty of exercise. Sit perfectly still. Don't mope. Don't rush about. Take
this before and after every meal. Only don't have any meals." I laughed at
him. I knew my heart was perfectly sound, much sounder than most men's. I
went home. I didn't even have the prescription made up.
_Saturday._--Now comes the tragic thing. _That very night I realised that
he was right._ There _is_ something wrong with my heart. It is too long. It
is too wide. It is too thick. It is out of place. It would be difficult to
say _exactly_ where the measurements are wrong, but one has a sort of
_sense_ ... you know?... One can feel that it is too large.... A swollen
feeling.... Somehow I never felt this before; I never even felt that it was
there ... but now I always know that it is there--trying to get out.... I
put my hand on it and can feel it definitely expanding--like a football
bladder. Sometimes I think it wants to get out at my collar-bone; sometimes
I think it will blow out under my bottom rib; sometimes some other way. It
is terrible....