Captures - Free Audiobook

3 §

Late—299 sat in the firelight, a glass beside him, a cigarette between his smiling lips. The cinders clicked, a clock struck. Eleven! He pitched the stump of his cigarette into the ashes, stretched himself, and rose. He went upstairs and opened the first door. The room was dark. A faint voice said:

“Philip?”

“Yes.”

The light sprang out under his thumb. His wife was sitting up in bed, her face pale, her lips moving:

“To-night—must you?”

Late—299 moved to the foot of the bed; his lips still smiled, his eyes gazed hungrily.

“Not at all. We learn to contain ourselves in prison. No vile contacts? Quite so. Good-night!”

The voice from the bed said faintly:

“Philip, I’m so sorry; it’s the suddenness—I’m——”

“Don’t mention it.” The light failed under his thumb. The door fell to....

Three people lay awake, one sleeping. The three who lay awake were thinking: ‘If only he made one feel sorry for him! If only one could love him! His self-control is forbidding—it’s not human! He ought to want our sympathy. He ought to sympathise with us. He doesn’t seem to feel—for himself, for us, for anything. And to-morrow—what will happen? Is life possible here, now? Can we stand him in the house, about the place? He’s frightening!’

The sleeper, in his first bed of one thousand and one nights, lay, his eyes pinched up between brows and bony cheeks of a face as if carved from ivory, and his lips still smiling at the softness under him.

Past dawn the wakeful slept, the sleeper awoke. His eyes sought the familiar little pyramid of gear on the shelf in the corner, the bright tins below, the round porthole, the line of distemper running along the walls, the closed and solid smallness of a cell. And the blood left his heart. They weren’t there! His whole being struggled with such unreality. He was in a room staring at light coming through chintz curtains. His arms were not naked. This was a sheet! For a moment he shivered, uncertain of everything; then lay back, smiling at a papered ceiling.