Henry Wimbush brought down with him to dinner a budget of printed sheets
loosely bound together in a cardboard portfolio.
“To-day,” he said, exhibiting it with a certain solemnity, “to-day I
have finished the printing of my ‘History of Crome’. I helped to set up
the type of the last page this evening.”
“The famous History?” cried Anne. The writing and the printing of this
Magnum Opus had been going on as long as she could remember. All her
childhood long Uncle Henry’s History had been a vague and fabulous
thing, often heard of and never seen.
“It has taken me nearly thirty years,” said Mr. Wimbush. “Twenty-five
years of writing and nearly four of printing. And now it’s finished--the
whole chronicle, from Sir Ferdinando Lapith’s birth to the death of my
father William Wimbush--more than three centuries and a half: a history
of Crome, written at Crome, and printed at Crome by my own press.”
“Shall we be allowed to read it now it’s finished?” asked Denis.
Mr. Wimbush nodded. “Certainly,” he said. “And I hope you will not find
it uninteresting,” he added modestly. “Our muniment room is particularly
rich in ancient records, and I have some genuinely new light to throw on
the introduction of the three-pronged fork.”
“And the people?” asked Gombauld. “Sir Ferdinando and the rest of
them--were they amusing? Were there any crimes or tragedies in the
family?”
“Let me see,” Henry Wimbush rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I can only
think of two suicides, one violent death, four or perhaps five broken
hearts, and half a dozen little blots on the scutcheon in the way of
misalliances, seductions, natural children, and the like. No, on the
whole, it’s a placid and uneventful record.”
“The Wimbushes and the Lapiths were always an unadventurous, respectable
crew,” said Priscilla, with a note of scorn in her voice. “If I were to
write my family history now! Why, it would be one long continuous blot
from beginning to end.” She laughed jovially, and helped herself to
another glass of wine.
“If I were to write mine,” Mr. Scogan remarked, “it wouldn’t exist.
After the second generation we Scogans are lost in the mists of
antiquity.”
“After dinner,” said Henry Wimbush, a little piqued by his wife’s
disparaging comment on the masters of Crome, “I’ll read you an episode
from my History that will make you admit that even the Lapiths, in their
own respectable way, had their tragedies and strange adventures.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Priscilla.
“Glad to hear what?” asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private
interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation,
smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last “I see,” and popped back, clapping shut
the door behind her.
Dinner was eaten; the party had adjourned to the drawing-room.
“Now,” said Henry Wimbush, pulling up a chair to the lamp. He put on
his round pince-nez, rimmed with tortoise-shell, and began cautiously
to turn over the pages of his loose and still fragmentary book. He found
his place at last. “Shall I begin?” he asked, looking up.
“Do,” said Priscilla, yawning.
In the midst of an attentive silence Mr. Wimbush gave a little
preliminary cough and started to read.
“The infant who was destined to become the fourth baronet of the name of
Lapith was born in the year 1740. He was a very small baby, weighing not
more than three pounds at birth, but from the first he was sturdy and
healthy. In honour of his maternal grandfather, Sir Hercules Occam of
Bishop’s Occam, he was christened Hercules. His mother, like many other
mothers, kept a notebook, in which his progress from month to month was
recorded. He walked at ten months, and before his second year was out
he had learnt to speak a number of words. At three years he weighed but
twenty-four pounds, and at six, though he could read and write perfectly
and showed a remarkable aptitude for music, he was no larger and heavier
than a well-grown child of two. Meanwhile, his mother had borne two
other children, a boy and a girl, one of whom died of croup during
infancy, while the other was carried off by smallpox before it reached
the age of five. Hercules remained the only surviving child.
“On his twelfth birthday Hercules was still only three feet and two
inches in height. His head, which was very handsome and nobly shaped,
was too big for his body, but otherwise he was exquisitely proportioned,
and, for his size, of great strength and agility. His parents, in the
hope of making him grow, consulted all the most eminent physicians of
the time. Their various prescriptions were followed to the letter, but
in vain. One ordered a very plentiful meat diet; another exercise; a
third constructed a little rack, modelled on those employed by the Holy
Inquisition, on which young Hercules was stretched, with excruciating
torments, for half an hour every morning and evening. In the course of
the next three years Hercules gained perhaps two inches. After that his
growth stopped completely, and he remained for the rest of his life a
pigmy of three feet and four inches. His father, who had built the most
extravagant hopes upon his son, planning for him in his imagination
a military career equal to that of Marlborough, found himself a
disappointed man. ‘I have brought an abortion into the world,’ he would
say, and he took so violent a dislike to his son that the boy dared
scarcely come into his presence. His temper, which had been serene,
was turned by disappointment to moroseness and savagery. He avoided all
company (being, as he said, ashamed to show himself, the father of a
lusus naturae, among normal, healthy human beings), and took to solitary
drinking, which carried him very rapidly to his grave; for the year
before Hercules came of age his father was taken off by an apoplexy. His
mother, whose love for him had increased with the growth of his father’s
unkindness, did not long survive, but little more than a year after
her husband’s death succumbed, after eating two dozen of oysters, to an
attack of typhoid fever.
“Hercules thus found himself at the age of twenty-one alone in the
world, and master of a considerable fortune, including the estate and
mansion of Crome. The beauty and intelligence of his childhood had
survived into his manly age, and, but for his dwarfish stature, he would
have taken his place among the handsomest and most accomplished young
men of his time. He was well read in the Greek and Latin authors, as
well as in all the moderns of any merit who had written in English,
French, or Italian. He had a good ear for music, and was no indifferent
performer on the violin, which he used to play like a bass viol, seated
on a chair with the instrument between his legs. To the music of the
harpsichord and clavichord he was extremely partial, but the smallness
of his hands made it impossible for him ever to perform upon these
instruments. He had a small ivory flute made for him, on which,
whenever he was melancholy, he used to play a simple country air or jig,
affirming that this rustic music had more power to clear and raise the
spirits than the most artificial productions of the masters. From an
early age he practised the composition of poetry, but, though conscious
of his great powers in this art, he would never publish any specimen of
his writing. ‘My stature,’ he would say, ‘is reflected in my verses; if
the public were to read them it would not be because I am a poet,
but because I am a dwarf.’ Several MS. books of Sir Hercules’s poems
survive. A single specimen will suffice to illustrate his qualities as a
poet.”
“‘In ancient days, while yet the world was young,
Ere Abram fed his flocks or Homer sung;
When blacksmith Tubal tamed creative fire,
And Jabal dwelt in tents and Jubal struck the lyre;
Flesh grown corrupt brought forth a monstrous birth
And obscene giants trod the shrinking earth,
Till God, impatient of their sinful brood,
Gave rein to wrath and drown’d them in the Flood.
Teeming again, repeopled Tellus bore
The lubber Hero and the Man of War;
Huge towers of Brawn, topp’d with an empty Skull,
Witlessly bold, heroically dull.
Long ages pass’d and Man grown more refin’d,
Slighter in muscle but of vaster Mind,
Smiled at his grandsire’s broadsword, bow and bill,
And learn’d to wield the Pencil and the Quill.
The glowing canvas and the written page
Immortaliz’d his name from age to age,
His name emblazon’d on Fame’s temple wall;
For Art grew great as Humankind grew small.
Thus man’s long progress step by step we trace;
The Giant dies, the hero takes his place;
The Giant vile, the dull heroic Block:
At one we shudder and at one we mock.
Man last appears. In him the Soul’s pure flame
Burns brightlier in a not inord’nate frame.
Of old when Heroes fought and Giants swarmed,
Men were huge mounds of matter scarce inform’d;
Wearied by leavening so vast a mass,
The spirit slept and all the mind was crass.
The smaller carcase of these later days
Is soon inform’d; the Soul unwearied plays
And like a Pharos darts abroad her mental rays.
But can we think that Providence will stay
Man’s footsteps here upon the upward way?
Mankind in understanding and in grace
Advanc’d so far beyond the Giants’ race?
Hence impious thought! Still led by GOD’S own Hand,
Mankind proceeds towards the Promised Land.
A time will come (prophetic, I descry
Remoter dawns along the gloomy sky),
When happy mortals of a Golden Age
Will backward turn the dark historic page,
And in our vaunted race of Men behold
A form as gross, a Mind as dead and cold,
As we in Giants see, in warriors of old.
A time will come, wherein the soul shall be
From all superfluous matter wholly free;
When the light body, agile as a fawn’s,
Shall sport with grace along the velvet lawns.
Nature’s most delicate and final birth,
Mankind perfected shall possess the earth.
But ah, not yet! For still the Giants’ race,
Huge, though diminish’d, tramps the Earth’s fair face;
Gross and repulsive, yet perversely proud,
Men of their imperfections boast aloud.
Vain of their bulk, of all they still retain
Of giant ugliness absurdly vain;
At all that’s small they point their stupid scorn
And, monsters, think themselves divinely born.
Sad is the Fate of those, ah, sad indeed,
The rare precursors of the nobler breed!
Who come man’s golden glory to foretell,
But pointing Heav’nwards live themselves in Hell.’
“As soon as he came into the estate, Sir Hercules set about remodelling
his household. For though by no means ashamed of his deformity--indeed,
if we may judge from the poem quoted above, he regarded himself as being
in many ways superior to the ordinary race of man--he found the presence
of full-grown men and women embarrassing. Realising, too, that he
must abandon all ambitions in the great world, he determined to retire
absolutely from it and to create, as it were, at Crome a private
world of his own, in which all should be proportionable to himself.
Accordingly, he discharged all the old servants of the house and
replaced them gradually, as he was able to find suitable successors,
by others of dwarfish stature. In the course of a few years he had
assembled about himself a numerous household, no member of which was
above four feet high and the smallest among them scarcely two feet and
six inches. His father’s dogs, such as setters, mastiffs, greyhounds,
and a pack of beagles, he sold or gave away as too large and too
boisterous for his house, replacing them by pugs and King Charles
spaniels and whatever other breeds of dog were the smallest. His
father’s stable was also sold. For his own use, whether riding or
driving, he had six black Shetland ponies, with four very choice piebald
animals of New Forest breed.
“Having thus settled his household entirely to his own satisfaction, it
only remained for him to find some suitable companion with whom to share
his paradise. Sir Hercules had a susceptible heart, and had more than
once, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, felt what it was to love.
But here his deformity had been a source of the most bitter humiliation,
for, having once dared to declare himself to a young lady of his choice,
he had been received with laughter. On his persisting, she had picked
him up and shaken him like an importunate child, telling him to run away
and plague her no more. The story soon got about--indeed, the young lady
herself used to tell it as a particularly pleasant anecdote--and
the taunts and mockery it occasioned were a source of the most acute
distress to Hercules. From the poems written at this period we gather
that he meditated taking his own life. In course of time, however, he
lived down this humiliation; but never again, though he often fell in
love, and that very passionately, did he dare to make any advances to
those in whom he was interested. After coming to the estate and finding
that he was in a position to create his own world as he desired it, he
saw that, if he was to have a wife--which he very much desired, being
of an affectionate and, indeed, amorous temper--he must choose her as
he had chosen his servants--from among the race of dwarfs. But to find
a suitable wife was, he found, a matter of some difficulty; for he would
marry none who was not distinguished by beauty and gentle birth. The
dwarfish daughter of Lord Bemboro he refused on the ground that besides
being a pigmy she was hunchbacked; while another young lady, an orphan
belonging to a very good family in Hampshire, was rejected by him
because her face, like that of so many dwarfs, was wizened and
repulsive. Finally, when he was almost despairing of success, he
heard from a reliable source that Count Titimalo, a Venetian nobleman,
possessed a daughter of exquisite beauty and great accomplishments, who
was by three feet in height. Setting out at once for Venice, he went
immediately on his arrival to pay his respects to the count, whom he
found living with his wife and five children in a very mean apartment
in one of the poorer quarters of the town. Indeed, the count was so far
reduced in his circumstances that he was even then negotiating (so it
was rumoured) with a travelling company of clowns and acrobats, who had
had the misfortune to lose their performing dwarf, for the sale of his
diminutive daughter Filomena. Sir Hercules arrived in time to save her
from this untoward fate, for he was so much charmed by Filomena’s grace
and beauty, that at the end of three days’ courtship he made her a
formal offer of marriage, which was accepted by her no less joyfully
than by her father, who perceived in an English son-in-law a rich and
unfailing source of revenue. After an unostentatious marriage, at which
the English ambassador acted as one of the witnesses, Sir Hercules and
his bride returned by sea to England, where they settled down, as it
proved, to a life of uneventful happiness.
“Crome and its household of dwarfs delighted Filomena, who felt herself
now for the first time to be a free woman living among her equals in
a friendly world. She had many tastes in common with her husband,
especially that of music. She had a beautiful voice, of a power
surprising in one so small, and could touch A in alt without effort.
Accompanied by her husband on his fine Cremona fiddle, which he played,
as we have noted before, as one plays a bass viol, she would sing all
the liveliest and tenderest airs from the operas and cantatas of her
native country. Seated together at the harpsichord, they found that they
could with their four hands play all the music written for two hands
of ordinary size, a circumstance which gave Sir Hercules unfailing
pleasure.
“When they were not making music or reading together, which they often
did, both in English and Italian, they spent their time in healthful
outdoor exercises, sometimes rowing in a little boat on the lake, but
more often riding or driving, occupations in which, because they were
entirely new to her, Filomena especially delighted. When she had become
a perfectly proficient rider, Filomena and her husband used often to go
hunting in the park, at that time very much more extensive than it is
now. They hunted not foxes nor hares, but rabbits, using a pack of
about thirty black and fawn-coloured pugs, a kind of dog which, when not
overfed, can course a rabbit as well as any of the smaller breeds. Four
dwarf grooms, dressed in scarlet liveries and mounted on white Exmoor
ponies, hunted the pack, while their master and mistress, in green
habits, followed either on the black Shetlands or on the piebald New
Forest ponies. A picture of the whole hunt--dogs, horses, grooms, and
masters--was painted by William Stubbs, whose work Sir Hercules admired
so much that he invited him, though a man of ordinary stature, to come
and stay at the mansion for the purpose of executing this picture.
Stubbs likewise painted a portrait of Sir Hercules and his lady driving
in their green enamelled calash drawn by four black Shetlands. Sir
Hercules wears a plum-coloured velvet coat and white breeches; Filomena
is dressed in flowered muslin and a very large hat with pink feathers.
The two figures in their gay carriage stand out sharply against a dark
background of trees; but to the left of the picture the trees fall away
and disappear, so that the four black ponies are seen against a pale and
strangely lurid sky that has the golden-brown colour of thunder-clouds
lighted up by the sun.
“In this way four years passed happily by. At the end of that time
Filomena found herself great with child. Sir Hercules was overjoyed.
‘If God is good,’ he wrote in his day-book, ‘the name of Lapith will be
preserved and our rarer and more delicate race transmitted through the
generations until in the fullness of time the world shall recognise the
superiority of those beings whom now it uses to make mock of.’ On his
wife’s being brought to bed of a son he wrote a poem to the same effect.
The child was christened Ferdinando in memory of the builder of the
house.
“With the passage of the months a certain sense of disquiet began to
invade the minds of Sir Hercules and his lady. For the child was growing
with an extraordinary rapidity. At a year he weighed as much as Hercules
had weighed when he was three. ‘Ferdinando goes crescendo,’ wrote
Filomena in her diary. ‘It seems not natural.’ At eighteen months the
baby was almost as tall as their smallest jockey, who was a man of
thirty-six. Could it be that Ferdinando was destined to become a man of
the normal, gigantic dimensions? It was a thought to which neither of
his parents dared yet give open utterance, but in the secrecy of their
respective diaries they brooded over it in terror and dismay.
“On his third birthday Ferdinando was taller than his mother and not
more than a couple of inches short of his father’s height. ‘To-day for
the first time’ wrote Sir Hercules, ‘we discussed the situation. The
hideous truth can be concealed no longer: Ferdinando is not one of us.
On this, his third birthday, a day when we should have been rejoicing at
the health, the strength, and beauty of our child, we wept together over
the ruin of our happiness. God give us strength to bear this cross.’
“At the age of eight Ferdinando was so large and so exuberantly healthy
that his parents decided, though reluctantly, to send him to school.
He was packed off to Eton at the beginning of the next half. A profound
peace settled upon the house. Ferdinando returned for the summer
holidays larger and stronger than ever. One day he knocked down the
butler and broke his arm. ‘He is rough, inconsiderate, unamenable to
persuasion,’ wrote his father. ‘The only thing that will teach him
manners is corporal chastisement.’ Ferdinando, who at this age was
already seventeen inches taller than his father, received no corporal
chastisement.
“One summer holidays about three years later Ferdinando returned to
Crome accompanied by a very large mastiff dog. He had bought it from an
old man at Windsor who had found the beast too expensive to feed. It
was a savage, unreliable animal; hardly had it entered the house when it
attacked one of Sir Hercules’s favourite pugs, seizing the creature in
its jaws and shaking it till it was nearly dead. Extremely put out by
this occurrence, Sir Hercules ordered that the beast should be chained
up in the stable-yard. Ferdinando sullenly answered that the dog was
his, and he would keep it where he pleased. His father, growing angry,
bade him take the animal out of the house at once, on pain of his utmost
displeasure. Ferdinando refused to move. His mother at this moment
coming into the room, the dog flew at her, knocked her down, and in
a twinkling had very severely mauled her arm and shoulder; in another
instant it must infallibly have had her by the throat, had not Sir
Hercules drawn his sword and stabbed the animal to the heart. Turning on
his son, he ordered him to leave the room immediately, as being unfit to
remain in the same place with the mother whom he had nearly murdered. So
awe-inspiring was the spectacle of Sir Hercules standing with one foot
on the carcase of the gigantic dog, his sword drawn and still bloody, so
commanding were his voice, his gestures, and the expression of his face
that Ferdinando slunk out of the room in terror and behaved himself
for all the rest of the vacation in an entirely exemplary fashion. His
mother soon recovered from the bites of the mastiff, but the effect on
her mind of this adventure was ineradicable; from that time forth she
lived always among imaginary terrors.
“The two years which Ferdinando spent on the Continent, making the Grand
Tour, were a period of happy repose for his parents. But even now
the thought of the future haunted them; nor were they able to solace
themselves with all the diversions of their younger days. The Lady
Filomena had lost her voice and Sir Hercules was grown too rheumatical
to play the violin. He, it is true, still rode after his pugs, but his
wife felt herself too old and, since the episode of the mastiff, too
nervous for such sports. At most, to please her husband, she would
follow the hunt at a distance in a little gig drawn by the safest and
oldest of the Shetlands.
“The day fixed for Ferdinando’s return came round. Filomena, sick with
vague dreads and presentiments, retired to her chamber and her bed.
Sir Hercules received his son alone. A giant in a brown travelling-suit
entered the room. ‘Welcome home, my son,’ said Sir Hercules in a voice
that trembled a little.
“‘I hope I see you well, sir.’ Ferdinando bent down to shake hands, then
straightened himself up again. The top of his father’s head reached to
the level of his hip.
“Ferdinando had not come alone. Two friends of his own age accompanied
him, and each of the young men had brought a servant. Not for thirty
years had Crome been desecrated by the presence of so many members of
the common race of men. Sir Hercules was appalled and indignant, but the
laws of hospitality had to be obeyed. He received the young gentlemen
with grave politeness and sent the servants to the kitchen, with orders
that they should be well cared for.
“The old family dining-table was dragged out into the light and dusted
(Sir Hercules and his lady were accustomed to dine at a small table
twenty inches high). Simon, the aged butler, who could only just look
over the edge of the big table, was helped at supper by the three
servants brought by Ferdinando and his guests.
“Sir Hercules presided, and with his usual grace supported a
conversation on the pleasures of foreign travel, the beauties of art and
nature to be met with abroad, the opera at Venice, the singing of the
orphans in the churches of the same city, and on other topics of a
similar nature. The young men were not particularly attentive to his
discourses; they were occupied in watching the efforts of the butler to
change the plates and replenish the glasses. They covered their laughter
by violent and repeated fits of coughing or choking. Sir Hercules
affected not to notice, but changed the subject of the conversation to
sport. Upon this one of the young men asked whether it was true, as he
had heard, that he used to hunt the rabbit with a pack of pug dogs. Sir
Hercules replied that it was, and proceeded to describe the chase in
some detail. The young men roared with laughter.
“When supper was over, Sir Hercules climbed down from his chair and,
giving as his excuse that he must see how his lady did, bade them
good-night. The sound of laughter followed him up the stairs. Filomena
was not asleep; she had been lying on her bed listening to the sound of
enormous laughter and the tread of strangely heavy feet on the stairs
and along the corridors. Sir Hercules drew a chair to her bedside
and sat there for a long time in silence, holding his wife’s hand and
sometimes gently squeezing it. At about ten o’clock they were startled
by a violent noise. There was a breaking of glass, a stamping of feet,
with an outburst of shouts and laughter. The uproar continuing for
several minutes, Sir Hercules rose to his feet and, in spite of his
wife’s entreaties, prepared to go and see what was happening. There
was no light on the staircase, and Sir Hercules groped his way down
cautiously, lowering himself from stair to stair and standing for a
moment on each tread before adventuring on a new step. The noise was
louder here; the shouting articulated itself into recognisable words
and phrases. A line of light was visible under the dining-room door. Sir
Hercules tiptoed across the hall towards it. Just as he approached the
door there was another terrific crash of breaking glass and jangled
metal. What could they be doing? Standing on tiptoe he managed to look
through the keyhole. In the middle of the ravaged table old Simon, the
butler, so primed with drink that he could scarcely keep his balance,
was dancing a jig. His feet crunched and tinkled among the broken glass,
and his shoes were wet with spilt wine. The three young men sat round,
thumping the table with their hands or with the empty wine bottles,
shouting and laughing encouragement. The three servants leaning against
the wall laughed too. Ferdinando suddenly threw a handful of walnuts at
the dancer’s head, which so dazed and surprised the little man that he
staggered and fell down on his back, upsetting a decanter and several
glasses. They raised him up, gave him some brandy to drink, thumped
him on the back. The old man smiled and hiccoughed. ‘To-morrow,’ said
Ferdinando, ‘we’ll have a concerted ballet of the whole household.’
‘With father Hercules wearing his club and lion-skin,’ added one of his
companions, and all three roared with laughter.
“Sir Hercules would look and listen no further. He crossed the hall once
more and began to climb the stairs, lifting his knees painfully high
at each degree. This was the end; there was no place for him now in the
world, no place for him and Ferdinando together.
“His wife was still awake; to her questioning glance he answered, ‘They
are making mock of old Simon. To-morrow it will be our turn.’ They were
silent for a time.
“At last Filomena said, ‘I do not want to see to-morrow.’
“‘It is better not,’ said Sir Hercules. Going into his closet he wrote
in his day-book a full and particular account of all the events of the
evening. While he was still engaged in this task he rang for a servant
and ordered hot water and a bath to be made ready for him at eleven
o’clock. When he had finished writing he went into his wife’s room, and
preparing a dose of opium twenty times as strong as that which she
was accustomed to take when she could not sleep, he brought it to her,
saying, ‘Here is your sleeping-draught.’
“Filomena took the glass and lay for a little time, but did not drink
immediately. The tears came into her eyes. ‘Do you remember the songs we
used to sing, sitting out there sulla terrazza in the summer-time?’ She
began singing softly in her ghost of a cracked voice a few bars from
Stradella’s ‘Amor amor, non dormir piu.’ ‘And you playing on the violin,
it seems such a short time ago, and yet so long, long, long. Addio,
amore, a rivederti.’ She drank off the draught and, lying back on the
pillow, closed her eyes. Sir Hercules kissed her hand and tiptoed away,
as though he were afraid of waking her. He returned to his closet, and
having recorded his wife’s last words to him, he poured into his bath
the water that had been brought up in accordance with his orders. The
water being too hot for him to get into the bath at once, he took down
from the shelf his copy of Suetonius. He wished to read how Seneca had
died. He opened the book at random. ‘But dwarfs,’ he read, ‘he held in
abhorrence as being lusus naturae and of evil omen.’ He winced as though
he had been struck. This same Augustus, he remembered, had exhibited in
the amphitheatre a young man called Lucius, of good family, who was
not quite two feet in height and weighed seventeen pounds, but had
a stentorian voice. He turned over the pages. Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius, Nero: it was a tale of growing horror. ‘Seneca his preceptor,
he forced to kill himself.’ And there was Petronius, who had called
his friends about him at the last, bidding them talk to him, not of the
consolations of philosophy, but of love and gallantry, while the life
was ebbing away through his opened veins. Dipping his pen once more in
the ink he wrote on the last page of his diary: ‘He died a Roman death.’
Then, putting the toes of one foot into the water and finding that it
was not too hot, he threw off his dressing-gown and, taking a razor in
his hand, sat down in the bath. With one deep cut he severed the artery
in his left wrist, then lay back and composed his mind to meditation.
The blood oozed out, floating through the water in dissolving wreaths
and spirals. In a little while the whole bath was tinged with pink. The
colour deepened; Sir Hercules felt himself mastered by an invincible
drowsiness; he was sinking from vague dream to dream. Soon he was sound
asleep. There was not much blood in his small body.”