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his fatigue and his horror for his whole situation. He got up, washed his face, and paced barefoot back and forth until he was shivering with cold and thought that now he would sleep.
    But no sleep came. He lay in bed, inescapably the victim of his memories, of ugly, painful, and humiliating feelings: hatred for his wife, pity for himself, perplexity, a craving for explanations, excuses, consolations. And since no consolations occurred to him and the way to understanding was so deeply and mercilessly hidden in the secret, dangerous thickets of his memories, and sleep still would not come, he lay for the rest of the night in a state of agony worse than anything he had hitherto known. All the horrible feelings that contended within him combined into a dreadful, suffocating, deadly anxiety, a nightmarish pressure upon his heart and lungs. It increased again and again to the very edge of his endurance. He had long known what anxiety was, had known it for years, and more than ever in the past few weeks and days. But never before had he felt it gripping his throat so fiercely. Compulsively, he was forced to think of the most trivial things, a forgotten key, the hotel bill, and to build mountains of cares and painful problems out of them. The question of whether this shabby little room for the night was likely to cost more than three and a half francs, and whether in that case he ought to stay on in the hotel, kept him breathless, sweating, and with pounding heart for about an hour. Yet he knew all the while how stupid these thoughts were and repeatedly talked to himself reasonably and reassuringly as to a defiant child, reckoning out on his fingers the utter insubstantiality of his worries—in vain, totally in vain. Rather, something like cruel mockery gleamed even behind these cajoleries and attempts at self-comfort, as though the whole thing were mere make-believe, just like his make-believe over the murderer W. It was quite clear to him that his deathly fear, his ghastly sense of strangulation and condemnation, could not come from his worry over a few francs or any similar causes. Worse, more serious matters lurked behind this—but what? They must be things connected with the murderous schoolteacher, with his own cravings to kill, and with all the sickness and disorder within him. But how could he get at it? How find the bottom? There was not a spot inside him that was not bleeding, nothing that was not sick and rotten and insanely sensitive to pain. He felt that he could not bear this much longer. If it went on, and if many other nights like this followed, he would go mad or take his life.
    Tensely, he sat up in bed and tried to drain utterly his sense of his predicament, in order to be done with it once and for all. But it was always the same. Alone and helpless, he sat with fevered brow and painful pressure around his head, gripped by a fear of fate which held him spellbound like a bird watching a snake. Fate, he now knew, did not come from just anywhere; it grew within himself. If he found no remedy for it, it would consume him. Anxiety, this horrible anxiety, would pursue him, would dog his every step, would drive him farther and farther from rationality, until he reached the brink. Already he could feel how close that brink was.
    If only he could understand—that might mean salvation. He was still far from grasping his predicament and what had led up to it. So far he had made no more than a beginning; his feelings told him that clearly. If he could pull himself together and sum up everything precisely, arrange and consider all that had taken place, perhaps he would find the thread. The whole would acquire meaning and outline and might then be endurable. But this effort, this last struggle to pull himself together, was too much for him. It exceeded his strength. He simply was not up to it. The more strenuously he tried to think, the more he bungled it. Instead of memories and explanations he found only empty