"

"I couldn't say. I've never seen anything like it. I've seen a lot of
dead faces, but they are usually quiet enough, as if they were asleep.
But I'll tell you one thing, sir, that I have noticed, and that is that
money--which includes diamonds and such like, makes a man die worse and
more bitter than anything else."

He turned his lantern down the street. A sound of wheels reached us.

"That's the ambulance."

"Will you really require me at the police station?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Will it be necessary to prove who I am?"

He smiled.

"You won't need to prove that you're a doctor, sir," he said genially.
"We have a lot to do with doctors. I could tell you were a doctor after
talking a minute with you. You are all the same."

"What do you mean?"

"Well--it's the things you say. Now only a doctor could have said what
you did--about life being a cell. Do you know, sir, I sometimes believe
that doctors is more innocent than parsons. It's the things they
say...."

The low rumbling began again in his interior. I waited silently until
the ambulance came up. I felt a slight shade of annoyance. But how could
I expect the enormous uneducated bulk beside me to take a really
intelligent and scientific view of life? Of course life was a cell.
Every educated person knew that--and now that cell was, for the first
time in history, about to become immortal--but what did the policeman
care? How stupid people were, I reflected. We moved off in a small
procession towards the police station. Half an hour later I was on my
way west, deeply pondering on the causes of that extraordinary
expression of fear in the dead sailor's face. Never in my life before
had I seen so agonized a countenance, but I was destined to see others
as terrible. As I walked, the strangeness of the dead man's tragedy
grew in my mind and filled me with a tremendous wonder, for who had ever
seen a dead Immortal?

On reaching home I roused Sarakoff and related to him what I had seen.

CHAPTER XIV

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF IMMORTALITY

After two hours of sleep I awoke. My brief rest had been haunted by
unpleasant dreams, vague and indefinite, but seeming to centre about the
idea of an impending catastrophe. I lay in bed staring at the dimly
outlined window. I felt quite rested and very wide awake. For some time
I remained motionless, reflecting on my night adventures and idly
thinking whether it was worth while getting up and attending to some
cor