With his numbed hands Mr. Pennycomequick unloosed his white neckcloth, and with it bound his arm to a branch of the poplar, tying the knot with one hand and his teeth, whilst the water ran through his mouth over his tongue, and washed away from it the smack of anchovy that fancy had conjured to it.
Then he resigned himself to his lot. A dull sense of being in the power of an inexorable fate came over him, the eagerness for life had faded away, and was succeeded by indifference as to what befel him, this to make way, as the cold and misery intensified, for impatience that all might be over speedily. He still looked up at the moon, but no longer cared what the life of the Selenites was like, it was their concern, not his. The thought of anchovy toast no longer had power to bring its flavour to his tongue. Then the moon passed behind a drift of vapour that obscured but did not extinguish it, and Jeremiah, half-unconsciously with his stiffening lips, found himself murmuring the words of Milton which he had learned at school, and had not repeated since:
’The wandering moon Riding near her highest noon, Like one that hath been led astray Through the heav’ns wide pathless way, And oft, as if her head she bow’d, Stooping through a fleecy cloud.’
And so murmuring again, and more brokenly, at last fell into complete unconsciousness.
The critic who generally hits on those particulars in a story which are facts, to declare them to be impossibilities, and those characters to be unnatural, which are transcripts from nature, is certain to attack the author for making a man who trembles on the confines of death think of anchovy toast and quote ’Il Penseroso;’ to which criticism we answer that he has had no experience such as that described, or he would know that what has been described above is in accordance with nature.
For how long Mr. Pennycomequick was unconscious he never knew, and no one, of course, was able to inform him. When he returned to himself, he found that he was lying in a contracted and queer bed, in the side of a chamber equally contracted and queer, tenanted, as far as he could make out, only by a contracted and queer human being, whose sex was not to be determined at first glance. If Mr. Pennycomequick had recovered his sense of smell at the same time that he recovered his other senses, he would have supposed that during the period of unconsciousness he had been steeped in creosote, for the atmosphere about him was charged with the odour of tar.