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Resurrection - William Gerhardie

With a sickly feeling I let go, and I felt myself a bent and paralysed being standing beside my own body on the bed.

Then it seemed to me as if I were lowered with expert precaution into a vessel which, with a jerk which shook me as if the machinery dropped into my bowels weighed a ton, was now myself. I was lying, stiff, cataleptic, unable to see or move a muscle. I strained every limb, I pushed, and at last opened my eyes.

So Bonzo was dead. I went into the dining-room and sat down to my breakfast. I recalled that Susah had committed a breach yesterday which incurred her self-reproach, for she walked about on tiptoe, stepping softly like a cat - a sign in her of contrition. I looked through the newspapers, as I sometimes do, and saw that the morning Press had reprinted the overnight news of Mr. Lloyd George's message to a distracted wodd :

' Face facts,' he said, ' as in 1917.'

As I was finishirg breakfast my secretary, Patsy, came in, looking more than ever like an English tea-rose. How wonderful work can be with such a lieutenant ! I sat in my study and fingered the pages of my unfinished Resurrection.

I was again the shuttle mechanically weaving what will be the garment of my after-life. I had left Bonzo on the edge of his last day, with all the days before it to wrap around him before the second winter comes and brings the snows of future. I knew he was dead. Nevertheless, after breakfast I rang up Woburn Square.

I could not very well say : ' Is he dead ? ' So I inquired of the butler after the health of the invalid.
It was as I thought. A terrible thing had happened.
The butler's voice broke into a sob. Bonzo had had his wrist smashed to be reset. But he hadn't come round from the anaesthetic. He had collapsed almost as soon as he had gone under. All efforts had failed to bring him round. As a last resort, his chest had been cut open and his heart massaged by the surgeon's hand. To no avail.