Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (87 page)

The
whisper
died
out
because
the
lips
through
which
it
came were
gone
already.
I
remember
an
odd
sound
behind
me,
an
increase of
light
as
well,
but
it
was
impossible
to
turn
my
head.
The
horror of
what
Vronski's
cryptic
words
had
suggested
was
nothing
to
the horror
of
what
I
saw.
I
stared.
The
whole
dreadful
sight
came,
it seemed,
in
a
single
second.
Twenty-five
years
rushed
on
him
in
a single
moment.
He
did
not
stare
back
because
the
eyes,
following the
lips,
were
no
longer
there
to
stare
with.
The
features
all
ran away
together.
In
the
space
of
a
few
seconds,
fifteen
perhaps
at most,
Sydney
Mantravers
aged
twenty-five
years,
became
a
quarter of
a
century
older.
The
accumulation
of
this
period's
decay
was upon
him,
all
over
him,
with
an
abrupt,
appalling
rush.
The
skin grew
loose
and
wrinkled,
changing,
even
hiding
the
eyes
so
that
it seemed
they
disappeared;
the
muscles
slackened,
sprayed,
sagged away,
chin
and
neck
showing
it
most
clearly.
There
was
a
ghastly crumpling
together
of
the
entire
physical
frame.
The
shrivelling seemed
intensified
by
its
swiftness.
I
remember
that
no
comprehensible
feeling
was
in
me,
horror
having
passed
into
something
else, and
similarly,
no
thought
took
the
brain.
Tire
"bends"
rose
as
a picture,
because
probably
my
mind
contained
it
as
the
only
comparable
human
experience,
the
hideous
"bends"
that
divers
know on
rising
too
rapidly
from
deep
waters
before
the
decompression can
be
applied,
or,
when
caught
unawares
in
too
great
depths,
the frame
is
jellied,
the
entire
body
crammed
up
into
the
helmet.
There rose
another
picture
too—of
a
mummy
exposed
suddenly
to
air and
damp
becoming
a
little
heap
of
dust
soon
after.
These
awful pictures
rose,
then
vanished,
as
though
the
mind
automatically searched
for
a
parallel.

Though
it
was
not
quite
so,
the
body
none
the
less
collapsed
in a
dreadful,
stupid
heap
before
my
eyes,
the
last
detail
to
suffer
change being
the
small
red
bruise
that
glowed
in
the
right
temple
before
it too
was
gone.
One
feeble
breath
rose
from
the
huddled
shape
upon the
sheets,
one
last
fluttering
breath
escaped
the
dried
and
shrunken flesh
that
had
been
lips,
bearing
with
extreme
faintness
a
ghost
of happy
laughter,
and
just
reaching
my
ears
as
I
bent
closer
above
the dissolving
face:
"a
moment
.
.
.
only
a
moment
.
.
.
and
I
will
tell you
.
.
.
escaping
way
.
.
.
elsewhere
and
otherwise
.
.
."

Loud
and
quite
clear
behind
my
back,
as
the
light
came
closer suddenly,
was
the
piteous,
convulsive
sound
of
Vronski's
sobbing, beyond
which
again,
the
faint
clear
note
as
of
a
ringing
bell
that died
away
into
the
silence.