ANGEL PAVEMENT

work of the window-frame, through the cracked mortar
and the foul old stone, its malevolent influences, its
beckoning and gibbering ghosts. The calm, the clarity,
were gone; the dream fumes rose and drifted again; but
when he moved, he still moved slowly, as if led here and
there by uncertain spectral hands. He fastened the
window tight, and stuffed paper in its various crevices,
The door fitted badly, and he had to stuff more paper,
indeed all the paper he had, between the door and the
frame, and then in the keyhole. He turned off the gas
from the tiny mantle, leaving the room uncertainly
illuminated by the gas-fire. For a moment he considered
the dying glow of the mantle. Could he use that gas? If
he had a tube, he could, but he hadn't a tube; and if he
turned it on full, it gave out so little gas that it would
be painfully, horribly slow doing anything to him. No,
the gas-fire was the thing. He had only to turn it out
now, wait a minute or two until the burners had cooled,
then put a hand to that tap again, lie on his bed and hear
the gas hissing out for a minute or two, fall asleep and all
would be over.

He sat on the floor, in front of the fire, leaning his
elbow against the side of his bed. Staring at the three
twisted glowing pillars of the fire, he contemplated with
sombre satisfaction his approaching end. It would be
painless, that he knew, for he had once talked to a man
in the Pavement Dining Rooms, and this man had a
brother who was a policeman, and this policeman had
had a lot of experience with people who had done it with
gas and he gave it as his opinion that they all passed
quietly away in their sleep without a bit of pain and fuss
and worry: it was far easier getting out of the world
altogether than taking a train to the City at Camden