Like Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, the sun seemed to blaze with sevenfold
heat; the sky glowed like steel in the process of blistering; a haze
yellow as the radiance above a crucible gilded the streets; the great
plants swooned in the garden--fainting flowers laid their heads on the
dry clay; the winds were dead; the Yellow Plague filled the city with
invisible exhalations of death. A silence as of cemeteries weighed down
upon the place; commerce slept a wasting slumber; the iron muscles and
brazen bones of wealth machinery relaxed, and lungs of steel ceased
their panting; the ships had spread their white wings and flown;
the wharves were desolate; the cotton-presses ceased their mighty
mastication, and no longer uttered their titanic sighs.
The English mill-master had remained at his post, with the obstinate
courage of his race, until stricken down. There was a sound in his
ears as of rushing waters; darkness before his eyes: the whispering of
the nurses, the orders of the physicians, the tinkling of glasses and
spoons, the bubbling of medicine poured out, the sound of doors softly
opened and closed, and of visits made on tiptoe, he no longer heard
or remembered. The last object his eyes had rested upon was a tiny
white-and-red pill-box, lying on the little table beside the bed.
The past came to him in shadowy pictures between dark intervals of
half-conscious suffering--of such violent pain in thighs and loins
as he remembered to have felt long years before after some frightful
fall from a broken scaffolding. The sound in his ears of rushing water
gradually sharpened into a keener sound--like the hum of machinery,
like the purring of revolving saws, gnawing their meal of odorous wood
with invisibly rapid teeth. Odors of cypress and pine, walnut and oak,
seemed to float to his nostrils--with sounds of planing and beveling,
hammering and polishing, subdued laughter of workmen, loud orders,
hurrying feet, and above all the sharp, trilling purr of the hungry
saws, and the shaking rumble of the hundred-handed engines.
He was again in the little office, fresh with odors of resinous
woods--seated at the tall desk whose thin legs trembled with the
palpitation of the engine's heart. It seemed to him there was a vast
press of work to be done--enormous efforts to be made--intricate
contracts to be unknotted--huge estimates to be made out--agonizing
errors to be remedied--frightful miscalculations to be corrected--a
world of anxious faces impatiently watching him. Figures and diagrams
swam before his eyes--plans of façades--mathematical calculations
for stairways--difficult angles of roofs--puzzling arrangements of
corridors. The drawings seemed to vary their shape with fantastic
spitefulness; squares lengthened into parallelograms and distorted
themselves into rhomboids--circles mockingly formed themselves
into ciphers--triangles became superimposed, like the necromantic
six-pointed star. Then numerals mingled with the drawings--columns
of magical figures which could never be added up, because they
seemed to lengthen themselves at will with serpent elasticity--a mad
procession of confused notes in addition and subtraction, in division
and multiplication, danced before him. And the world of anxious faces
watched yet more impatiently.
All was dark again; the merciless pain in loins and thighs had
returned with sharp consciousness of the fever, and the insufferable
heat and skull-splitting headache--heavy blankets and miserable
helplessness--and the recollection of the very, very small pill-box on
the table. Then it seemed to him there were other pill-boxes--three!
nine! twenty-seven! eight-one! one hundred and sixty-two! one hundred
and sixty-two very small pill-boxes.
He seemed to be wandering in a cemetery, under blazing sunlight and
in a blinding glare of white-washed washed tombs, whose skeletons of
brick were left bare in leprous patches by the falling away of the
plastering. And, wandering, he came to a deep wall, catacombed from
base to summit with the resting-places of ten thousand dead; and there
was one empty place--one black void--inscribed with a name strangely
like his own. And a great weariness and faintness came upon him; and
the pains, returning, carried back his thoughts to the warmth and
dimness of the sick-room.
It seemed to him that this could not be death--he was too weary even
to die! But they would put him into the hollow void in the wall!--they
might: he would not resist, he felt no fear. He could rest there very
well even for a hundred years. He had a gimlet somewhere!--they would
let him take it with him;--he could bore a tiny little hole in the wall
so that a thread of sunlight would creep into his resting-place every
day, and he could hear the voices of the world about him. Yet perhaps
he should never be able to leave that dark damp place again!--It was
very possible; seeing that he was so tired. And there was so much to
be arranged first: there were estimates and plans and contracts; and
nobody else could make them out; and everything would be left in such
confusion! And perhaps he might not even be able to think in a little
while; all the knowledge he had stored up would be lost; nobody could
think much or say much after having been buried. And he thought again
of the pill-boxes--one hundred and sixty-two very small pill-boxes.
No; there were exactly three hundred and sixty-six! Perhaps that was
because it was leap year.
Everything must be arranged at once!--at once! The pill-boxes
would do; he could breathe his thoughts into them and close them
tightly--recollections of estimates, corrections of plans, directions
to the stair-builders, understanding with contractors, orders to the
lumber dealers, instructions to Texan and Mississippi agents, answers
to anxious architects, messages to the senior partner, explanations
to the firm of X and W. Then it seemed to him that each little box
received its deposit of memories, and became light as flame, buoyant
as a bubble;--rising in the air to float halfway between floor and
ceiling. A great anxiety suddenly came upon him;--the windows were all
open, and the opening of the door might cause a current. All these
little thoughts would float away!--yet he could not rise to lock the
door! The boxes were all there, floating above him light as motes in a
sunbeam:--there were so many now that he could not count them! If the
nurse would only stay away!... Then all became dark again--a darkness
as of solid ebony, heavy, crushing, black, blank, universal...
All lost! Brutally the door opened and closed again with a cruel clap
of thunder.... Yellow lightnings played circling before his eyes....
The pill-boxes were gone! But was not that the face of the doctor,
anxious and kindly? The burning day was dead; the sick man turned his
eyes to the open windows, and beheld the fathomless purple of the
night, and the milky blossoms of the stars. And he strove to speak,
but could not! The light of a shaded lamp falling upon the table
illuminated a tiny object, blood-scarlet by day, carmine under the
saffron artificial light. _There was only one pill-box._