His mind, confronted by a painful complexity of
unanswerable problems, failed utterly. He was conscious of his impotence
chilling his blood, deadening his nerves. Thin tears fell over his
hollow cheeks; and he rose shakily, fiercely dragging at his bandanna.
But he discovered that his hand was numb with cold. The fire lay black
and dead. The shrilling wind, ladened with snow, wrenched at the
shutters. The room was bitter. He must get up to bed ... warm blankets.
A chill touched him with an icy breath. It overtook him midway on the
stair, and he clung to the railing, appalled at its violence in his
fragile being. He got, finally, to his room, to the edge of his bed,
where he sat waiting for the assault to subside. He wanted Rudolph, but
the effort to move to the door, call, appeared insuperable. The chill
left him; and blundering, hideously delayed, he wrapped himself in the
bed covering.
Not all the wool in the world, he thought, would be sufficient to drive
the cold from his body. He fell into a temporary exhaustion of sleep;
but was waked later by sharp and oppressive pains in his chest,
deepening when he breathed. The suffering must be mastered, and he lay
with gripping hands, striving by force of will to overcome what he
thought of as the brutal play of small, sharp knives.
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