Siegmund lay still, with his eyes closed, enduring the exquisite torture
of the trickling of drops of sweat. First it would be one gathering and
running its irregular, hesitating way into the hollow of his neck. His
every nerve thrilled to it, yet he felt he could not move more than to
stiffen his throat slightly. While yet the nerves in the track of this
drop were quivering, raw with sensitiveness, another drop would start
from off the side of his chest, and trickle downwards among the little
muscles of his side, to drip on to the bed. It was like the running of a
spider over his sensitive, moveless body. Why he did not wipe himself he
did not know. He lay still and endured this horrible tickling, which
seemed to bite deep into him, rather than make the effort to move, which
he loathed to do. The drops ran off his forehead down his temples. Those
he did not mind: he was blunt there. But they started again, in tiny,
vicious spurts, down the sides of his chest, from under his armpits,
down the inner sides of his thighs, till he seemed to have a myriad
quivering tracks of a myriad running insects over his hot, wet,
highly-sensitized body. His nerves were trembling, one and all, with
outrage and vivid suspense. It became unbearable. He felt that, if he
endured it another moment, he would cry out, or suffocate and burst.
He sat up suddenly, threw away the bedclothes, from which came a puff of
hot steam, and began to rub his pyjamas against his sides and his legs.
He rubbed madly for a few moments. Then he sighed with relief. He sat on
the side of the bed, moving from the hot dampness of the place where he
had lain. For a moment he thought he would go to sleep. Then, in an
instant his brain seemed to click awake. He was still as loath as ever
to move, but his brain was no longer clouded in hot vapour: it was
clear. He sat, bowing forward on the side of the bed, his
sleeping-jacket open, the dawn stealing into the room, the morning air
entering fresh through the wide-flung window-door. He felt a peculiar
sense of guilt, of wrongness, in thus having jumped out of bed. It
seemed to him as if he ought to have endured the heat of his body, and
the infernal trickling of the drops of sweat. But at the thought of it
he moved his hands gratefully over his sides, which now were dry, and
soft, and smooth; slightly chilled on the surface perhaps, for he felt a
sudden tremor of shivering from the warm contact of his hands.