"Well, fuck, fuck, it is in shops, it is in druggists. God knows we have hardly enough money left for living but there must be enough for the other commodity. There is a druggist's shop on the Corso, very near to here. Get it for me, Severn."

"You know I cannot. It would be a kind of murder."

"This is the true murder, Severn. Must I abide this murder by the evil spirits in control? It is a human duty to cheat them."

"You're raving, John. It is the lack of blood. You must rest, you must, truly."

"I desire rest, can you not see that, damned fool? I am not permitted rest. The malignancies are on me."

"You must respect my faith, John. The Lord forbids suicide. He forbids the abetting of suicide. It is the final wickedness, to take one's own life."

"Your damnable Lord did it. He knew he was to die and he did not avoid it. He did not wish to escape. He let himself be crucified. I call that self-slaughter."

"He was killed by the Jews and the Romans. And he rose from the dead. We all rise, remember that. There is life after death for us all. But we forfeit that resurrection through grave sin. There is no sin graver than -"

"You believe this. I do not. My ghost be with the old philosophers." He was better. The blood loss had cleared his brain. He was ready, mad as it all was, for intellectual argument.

"Because you do not believe it does not mean it is not all true. If I do not believe that Florence or Naples exists it does not prevent their existing. Eternal life, eternal damnation – these are real, whether you believe or not." John listened to that. "Now rest," Severn said. John howled out:

"Brainless fool. There are men come back from Florence. We have smelt Naples, stinking hole of sea rats. There is no traveller back from your. After this there is nothing but a great blackness and I wish to engage it today, now. My body to the worms and what is human in me to what of humanity may take it. I am all disease, Severn, and disease is to be burnt out. I am a living tumour, a kind of devil. Fuck and shit to your lying gentle Jesus and your stupid false hopes. If you will not buy me laudanum I will buy it myself." And he got out of bed, despite Severn's pushing of him back into it. He fought hard with Severn, gasping raucously, and even got as far as his stockings, which lay on a chair with his shirt and breeches. Tottering and hopping to get one stocking on, he nearly fell into the fire which, feeble yet, could scarcely harm him. "I cannot," he panted. "I must wait till the blood is back in me. You will not?"

"Buy you laudanum, no. No and always no. Do not expect me to weaken on this. Back into bed with you."

John lay again, sweating coldly, cursing quietly in the monotone of liturgy. Severn tended his fire, which began to chew languidly at green pine. Then he sat on a plain green rickety chair by the fire, his hands loosely joined, praying, fearful eyes on John. John's eyes were on the pale flowers of the wallpaper. "They do not know," he said, "any of them, what mischief they do when they bring a child into the world. They allow themselves to be driven to clasping and colling and kissing and then he is on to her, panting, to pump in a thimbleload of seed. And in the devil's due time, which is three moons by three, a morris of Hecates, comes the child, and he grows and grows to hope from life, and then the smiting. It can be at any time. In my student days I saw children die at three days, and they were lucky, they had not grown to a day of hope. But I saw Tom die too, not twenty. And Chatterton died at seventeen. And here is the little poet Jack Keats dying at twenty-five, one of the luckier, for he has made bad poetry and seen something of the world. But it is the hope that is the curse, to be given hope and then hear the laughter."

"No curse, John. It is the second of the three great things, hope. Charity, which is the greatest, you have shown in abundance. It's only faith you lack. Hope that faith may come, hope for the sight of heaven."

"Severn," John said with calm quiet, "I will, I swear, gain enough strength to kill you if you spurt this sewage out at me. I have faith enough of my own, and it is faith in beauty that is eternal, so long as there are eyes to see it. I do not mean my own eyes, I have neither faith nor hope that these eyes will see a beauty not of the earth nor of the imagination. The earth and the heart and the imagination are all, and I am to have no more part in them. Oh, I may wake tomorrow and have hope that all will be well again, I feel better, I have appetite, the blood courses in its proper channels. But I do not wish more hope so that it may be cruelly quelled. Do you not understand me? There is neither virtue nor use in suffering. If the end is to come, let us have it, and not have the fiends of time at their game. But I will not ask again for a poor blessed twopenny engine of the end. I will lie here and see my body as nothing of mine. This hand I try to lift, see how cunningly fashioned, and it ploughdrove a pen once that scrawled bad hymns to beauty. But it is something now impertinently fastened to me and no longer anything of mine. I am something altogether apart from this machine. Yours, while this machine is to him. Shakespeare knew it all."

"Forgive me, John, do not be angry if I say you speak now more like a Christian. The soul, I mean. It is your soul you are thinking of now. Please, please, no anger, I say no more, but you must admit the truth of it."

"I do not mean that." John rolled his head feebly on the pillow. "Nor anything like that. For what you call my soul is the sparking of this machine. The brain too is the body. It is a fine and cunning trelliswork, but we may eat brain as we eat feet and flanks. But there is one thing that is not to be eaten and that is the little fire saying I am I am I am."

"That is God, that is the name God himself gave to Moses."

"And that little fire you have made there, no burning bush, that says it, and my fountain out there will say it long after this I is no more. So I will consign my own I elsewhere before it is wholly buried in this body that was named John Keats."

"John Keats is more than a body, as you know. Is not the imagination part of the soul? Forgive me again, I try not to speak too much like a Christian."

"It's all in decay, Severn. It was a clever machine, with the tongue and the teeth and the lips clacking and cooing most clever clusters of noises, and the noises long by common acceptance attached to things and thoughts and eager to be juggled in pretty poesy. But at the end there is only this I, shapeless and without memory or intelligence unless I consign it elsewhere. So for the moment I join it to the I of that singing water in the piazza and lose even my name. Or, if you will, write that name on water and hear the water gurgle on uncaring singing I, I, I."

"I wish I could understand you."

"Don't try, Severn. I'm not converting you to Keatsism – God forgive me and you forgive the empty formula, I-ism I would say. All of this machine is tired now, and the I, though never tired, must be courteous and lie quiet with it. I'll sleep back some blood." To Severn's surprise he sank instantly into sleep, and Severn thanked God. Then he tiptoed about the entire apartment, picking up razors, scissors, forks and table knives, and he locked all those death dealers in his trunk. But, he saw sadly, a man intent on his quietus could always find the bodkin: a sliver of windowpane, that firm lamphook there in the ceiling with the noose of his own bedsheet, the bodkin itself long mislaid by a long-dead seamstress. Severn went sadly to the black hole where the jakes was, then came back to John's bedroom to drink milk and gobble a hunk of yesterday's bread. As though he had awaited the return of his audience John started back to waking. He spoke quietly, saying: "Charles Jeremiah Wells is behind it."