Miss Medley, the nurse, was sitting beside the wounded youth's bunk,
endeavoring to soothe and restrain him. The young anarchist, whose
eyes were bright with fever, was talking rapidly in a weak but
high-pitched singsong voice.
"He's off on the poems again," said the Doctor, after listening a
moment. "But wait, he'll get back to Loge. It's been one or the other
for an hour now."
"I spit upon your flag," shrilled Giuseppe Jones, feebly declamatory.
"'I spit--I spit--but, as I spit, I weep.'" He paused for a moment,
and then began at the beginning and repeated all of the lines which
Cleggett had read from the little book. One gathered that it was
Giuseppe's favorite poem.
"'I spit upon the whole damned thing!'" he shrilled, and then with a
sad shake of his head: "But, as I spit, I weep!"
If the poem was Giuseppe's favorite poem, this was evidently his
favorite line, for he said it over and over again--"'But, as I spit, I
weep'"--in a breathless babble that was very wearing on the nerves.
But suddenly he interrupted himself; the poems seemed to pass from his
mind. "Loge!" he said, raising himself on his elbow and staring, with
a frown not at, but through, Cleggett: "Logan--it isn't square!"
There was suffering and perplexity in his gaze; he was evidently living
over again some painful scene.
"I'm a revolutionist, Loge, not a crook! I won't do it, Loge!"
Watching him, it was impossible not to understand that the struggle,
which his delirium made real and present again, had stamped itself into
the texture of his spirit. "You shouldn't ask it, Loge," he said. The
crisis of the conflict which he was living over passed presently, and
he murmured, with contracted brows, and as if talking to himself: "Is
Loge a crook? A crook?"
But after a moment of this he returned again to a rapid repetition of
the phrase: "I'm a revolutionist, not a crook-not a crook--not a
crook--a revolutionist, not a crook, Loge, not a crook----" Once he
varied it, crying with a quick, hot scorn: "I'll cut their throats and
be damned to them, but don't ask me to steal." And then he was off
again to declaiming his poetry: "I spit, but, as I spit, I weep!"
But as Cleggett and the Doctor listened to him the youth's ravings
suddenly took a new form. He ceased to babble; terror expanded the
pupils of his eyes and he pointed at vacancy with a shaking finger.
"Stop it!" he cried in a croaking whisper. "Stop it! It's his
skull--it's Loge's skull come alive. Stop it, I say, it's come alive
and getting bigger." With a violent effort he raised himself before
the nurse could prevent him, shrinking back from the horrid
hallucination which pressed towards him, and then fell prone and
senseless on the bunk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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