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Updated: June 23, 2025
I closed the door in the hoarding behind her. Then I walked straight across the yard to Benlian's. He was lying on a couch, not doing anything. "I know I ought to have come sooner, Benlian," I said, "but I had somebody with me." "Yes," he said, looking hard at me; and I got a bit red. "She's awfully nice," I stammered; "but you never bother with girls, and you don't drink or smoke "
His chair had overturned, and he lay in a heap beside it. I called "Benlian!" but he didn't answer.... He'd passed beautifully; quite dead. I looked up at the statue. It was just as Benlian had said it didn't open its eyes, nor speak, nor anything like that. Don't you believe chaps who tell you that statues that have been passed into do that; they don't.
It fooled them all the clever X-ray men, the artists of the academies, everybody! Written on the fly-leaf was "To My Pudgie." I shall publish it when I get it back again. Benlian had now got frightfully weak; it's awfully hard work, passing yourself. And he had to take a little milk now and then or he'd have died before he had quite finished.
I developed the plate. The obliteration now seemed complete. But Benlian seemed dissatisfied. "There's something wrong somewhere," he said. "It isn't so perfect as that yet I can feel within me it isn't. It's merely that your camera isn't strong enough to find me, Pudgie." "I'll get another in the morning," I cried. "No," he answered. "I know something better than that.
He was sunk in a big chair, gaunt as a mummy now, and all the life in him seemed to burn in the bottom of his deep eye-sockets. At the sight of him I fiddled with my knuckles and giggled. "You are going it, Benlian!" I said. "Am I not?" he replied, in a voice that was scarcely a breath. "You meant me to bring the camera and magnesium, didn't you?" "Yes. Go ahead."
I really don't know why we both whispered. "Really that, Benlian?" I whispered again. "Shall I show you?... I tried my hardest not to, you know,..." he still whispered. "Yes, show me!" I replied in a suppressed voice. "Don't breathe a sound then! I keep them up there...."
Now a chap doesn't like to be changed about like that; so, without looking at Benlian, I muttered a bit testily, "Don't, Benlian!" Then I heard him get up and knock his chair away. He was standing behind me. "Pudgie," he said, in a moved sort of voice, "I'm no good to you. Get out of this. Get out " "No, no, Benlian!" I pleaded. "Get out, do you hear, and don't come again!
But it is a bit rotten hanging on here, especially when the doctors themselves admit how reasonable it all is.... Still, if Benlian says it's "All right ..." As the young man put his hand to the uppermost of the four brass bell-knobs to the right of the fanlighted door he paused, withdrew the hand again, and then pulled at the lowest knob.
It was like coming out of fog and darkness into a split in the open heavens, my statue was so transfigured; and I'll bet if you'd been there you'd have clapped your hands, as I did, and chucked the tablecloth over the Benlian on the floor till they should come to cart that empty shell away, and patted the statue's foot and cried: "Is it all right, Benlian?"
He advanced to the couch, and put his hand under one of the frames of ground glass. One of the doctors did something in a corner. A harsh crackling filled the room, and an unearthly, fluorescent light shot and flooded across the frame where Benlian's hand was. The two doctors looked, and then started back. One of them gave a cry. He was sickly white. "Put me on the couch," said Benlian.
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