"stoker-dracula-168" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stoker Bram)

the sugar of his tea spread out on the window-sill, and is reaping
quite a harvest of flies. He is not now eating them, but putting
them into a box, as of old, and is already examining the corners of
his room to find a spider. I tried to get him to talk about the past
few days, for any clue to his thoughts would be of immense help to me;
but he would not rise. For a moment or two he looked very sad, and
said in a sort of far-away voice, as though saying it rather to
himself than to me:-

"All over! all over! He has deserted me. No hope for me now unless I
do it for myself!" Then suddenly turning to me in a resolute way, he
said: "Doctor, won't you be very good to me and let me have a little
more sugar? I think it would be good for me."

"And the flies?" I said.

"Yes! The flies like it, too, and I like the flies; therefore I like
it." And there are people who know so little as to think that madmen
do not argue. I procured him a double supply, and left him as happy
a man as, I suppose, any in the world. I wish I could fathom his mind.

Midnight.- Another change in him. I had been to see Miss Westenra,
whom I found much better, and had just returned, and was standing at
our own gate looking at the sunset, when once more I heard him
yelling. As his room is on this side of the house, I could hear it
better than in the morning. It was a shock to me to turn from the
wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid
lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul
clouds even as on foul water, and to realise all the grim sternness of
my own cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and
my own desolate heart to endure it all. I reached him just as the
sun was going down, and from his window saw the red disc sink. As it
sank he became less and less frenzied; and just as it dipped he slid
from the hands that held him, an inert mass, on the floor. It is
wonderful, however, what intellectual recuperative power lunatics
have, for within a few minutes he stood up quite calmly and looked
around him. I signalled to the attendants not to hold him, for I was
anxious to see what he would do. He went straight over to the window
and brushed out the crumbs of sugar; then he took his fly-box and
emptied it outside, and threw away the box: then he shut the window
and crossing over, sat down on his bed. All this surprised me, so I
asked him: "Are you not going to keep flies any more?"

"No," said he; "I am sick of all that rubbish!" He certainly is a
wonderfully interesting study. I wish I could get some glimpse of
his mind or of the cause of his sudden passion. Stop; there may be a
clue after all, if we can find why to-day his paroxysms came on at
high noon and at sunset. Can it be that there is a malign influence of
the sun at periods which affects certain natures- as at times the moon
does others? We shall see.