The original of Laura

DN: CHAPTER SEVEN

I was enjoying a petit-beurre with my noon time tea when the droll configuration of that particular biscuit's margins set into motion a train of thought that may have occurred to the reader even before it occurred to me. He knows already how much T disliked my toes. An ingrown nail on one foot and a corn on the other were now pestering me. Would it not be a brilliant move, thought I, to get rid of my toes by sacrificing them to an experiment that only cowardliness kept postponing? I had always restored, on my mental blackboard, the symbols of deleted organs before backing out of my trance. Scientific curiosity and plain logic demanded I prove to myself that if I left the flawed line alone, its flaw would be reflected in the condition of this or that part of my body. I dipped a last petit-beurre in my tea, swallowed the sweet mush and resolutely started to work on my wretched flesh.

Testing a discovery and finding it correct can be a great satisfaction but it can be also a great shock mixed with all the torments of rivalry and ignoble envy. I know at least two such rivals of mine — you, Curson, and you, Croydon — who will clap their claws like crabs in boiling water. Now when it is the discoverer himself who tests his discovery and finds that it works he will feel a torrent of pride and purity that will cause him actually to pity Prof. Curson and pet Dr. Croydon (whom I see Mr. West has demolished in a recent paper). We arc above petty revenge. On a hot Sunday afternoon, in my empty house — Flora and Cora being somewhere in bed with their boyfriends — I started the crucial test. The fine base of my chalk white "I" was erased and left erased when I decided to break my hypnotrance. The extermination of my ten toes had been accompanied with the usual volupty. I was lying on a mattress in my bath, with the strong beam of my shaving lamp trained on my feet. When I opened my eyes, I saw at once that my toes were intact. After swallowing my disappointment I scrambled out of the tub, landed on the tiled floor and fell on my face. To my intense joy I could not stand properly because my ten toes were in a stale of indescribable numbness. They looked all right, though perhaps a little paler than usual, but all sensation had been slashed away by a razor of ice. I palpated warily the hallux and the four other digits of my right foot, then of my left one and all was rubber and rot. The immediate setting-in of decay was especially-sensational. I crept on all fours into the adjacent bedroom and with infinite effort into my bed. The rest was mere cleaning-up. In the course of the night I teased off the shriveled white flesh and contemplated with utmost delight

I know my feet smelled despite daily baths, but this reek was something special.

That test — though admittedly a trivial affair — confirmed me in the belief that I was working in the right direction and that (unless some hideous wound or excruciating sickness joined the merry pallbearers) the process of dying by auto-dissolution afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man.

I expected to see at best the length of each foot greatly reduced with its distal edge neatly transformed into the semblance of the end of a bread loaf without any trace of toes. At worst I was ready to face an anatomical preparation often bare phalanges sticking out of my feet like a skeleton's claws. Actually all I saw was the familiar rows of digits.