Harold said quite calmly, “This is the end.”
“Yes,” said Sir Edwin, nervously taking the lamp, “now it’s bedtime.”
“If you think I’m mad,” said Harold, “I am mad. That’s all it means.”
“Go to bed, Harold, to please me.”
“Six people say I’m mad. Is there no one, no one, no one who understands?” He stumbled up the passage as if he were blind, and they heard him calling “Tommy.”
In the sitting-room he caught his foot in the carpet and fell. When they picked him up, he was murmuring—“Harold can’t stand up against six. What is Harold? Harold. Harold. Harold. Who is Harold?”
“Stop him!” cried the little man. “That’s bad! He mustn’t do that.”
They shook him and tried to overtalk him, but he still went on. “What is Harold? Six letters. H. A. R. O. L. D. Harold. Harold. Harold.”
“He’s fainted again!” cried Lady Peaslake. “Oh, what has happened?”
“It’s a sunstroke,” said Sir Edwin. “He caught it through sleeping in the sun this afternoon. Mildred has told me all about it.”
They took him up and carried him to his room.
As they were undressing him, he revived, and began to talk in a curious, thick voice.
“I was the last to go off the sofa, wasn’t I? I counted five go—the wisest first—and I counted ten kinds of wine for certain before I slipped. Your conjurers are poor—but I liked the looks of the flute-girl.”
“Go away, dears,” said Lady Peaslake. “It’s no good our stopping.”
“Yes, I liked the flute-girl; is the porter I gave you last week a success?”
“Yes,” said the little man, whose cue it was always to agree.
“Well, he’d better help carry me home, I don’t want to walk. Nothing elaborate, you know. Just four porters for the litter, and half a dozen to carry the lights. That won’t put you out.”
“I’m afraid you must stop here for the night.”
“Very well, if you can’t send me back. Oh, the wine! the wine! I have got a head.”
“What is he saying?” asked Mildred through the door.
“Is that the flute-girl?” said Harold raising an interested eye.
Sir Edwin laid hold of him, but he was quite passive, and did not attempt to move. He allowed himself to be undressed, but did not assist them, and when his pyjamas were handed to him, he laughed feebly and asked what they were for.
“I want to look out of the window.” They took him to it, hoping that the fresh air would recall his wits, and held him tight in case he tried to leap out. There was no moon, and the expanse of trees and fields was dark and indistinguishable.
“There are no lights moving in the streets,” said Harold. “It must be very late. I forgot the windows were so high. How odd that there are no lights in the streets!”
“Yes, you’re too late,” said the little man. “You won’t mind sleeping here. It’s too far to go back.”
“Too far—too far to go back,” he murmured. “I am so sleepy, in this room I could sleep forever. Too far—too far—oh, the wine!”
They put him into the bed, and he went off at once, and his breathing was calm and very regular.
“A sunstroke,” whispered Sir Edwin. “Perhaps a good night’s rest—I shall sit up.”
But next morning Harold had forgotten how to put on his clothes, and when he tried to speak he could not pronounce his words.
IV
They had a terrible scene with him at the Girgenti railway station next morning when the train came in. However they got him on to it at last, and by the evening he was back at Palermo and had seen the English doctor. He was sent back to England with a keeper, by sea, while the Peaslakes returned by Naples, as soon as Mildred’s health permitted.
Long before Harold reached the asylum his speech had become absolutely unintelligible: indeed by the time he arrived at it, he hardly ever uttered a sound of any kind. His case attracted some attention, and some experiments were made, which proved that he was not unfamiliar with Greek dress, and had some knowledge of the alphabet.
But he was quite blank when spoken to, either in ancient or modern Greek, and when he was given a Greek book, he did not know what to do with it, and began tearing out the pages.
On these grounds the doctors have concluded that Harold merely thinks he is a Greek, and that it is his mania to behave as he supposes that a Greek behaved, relying on such elementary knowledge as he acquired at school.
But I firmly believe that he has been a Greek—nay, that he is a Greek, drawn by recollection back into his previous life. He cannot understand our speech because we have lost his pronunciation. And if I could look at the matter dispassionately—which I cannot—I should only rejoice at what has happened. For the greater has replaced the less, and he is living the life he knew to be greater than the life he lived with us. And I also believe, that if things had happened otherwise, he might be living that greater life among us, instead of among friends of two thousand years ago, whose names we have never heard. That is why I shall never forgive Mildred Peaslake as long as I live.
Most certainly he is not unhappy. His own thoughts are sweet to him, and he looks out of the window hour after hour and sees things in the sky and sea that we have forgotten. But of his fellow-men he seems utterly unconscious. He never speaks to us, nor hears us when we speak. He does not know that we exist.
So at least I thought till my last visit. I am the only one who still goes to see him: the others have given it up. Last time, when I entered the room, he got up and kissed me on the cheek. I think he knows that I understand him and love him:
