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Page 1 of 21929 · PDF PAGE 30
V That my only means of discovering Arthur's thought was by muscle-reading became more than doubtful dur- ing the third year of our marriage. We practised telepa- thy unashamed. We excluded the muscle-reader and the superauditor and the human thermopile by elaborate precautions; yet still I was able to read every thought of his mind. On our holiday in North Wales at Easter one year we separated for a week, at the end of that week he to be on the leeward, I on the windward side of Tryfan, at an appointed hour, he there to open and read t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 32
tions, was a vast, deadly pale devil with a face which was a blasphemy on Arthurs. The evil joy of it was inde- scribable. So wan and bloated, its lips so loose and bloodless; fold after fold of its belly flopping over the rostrum and pushing the students out of the hall, it leered unspeakably. Then dribbled from its mouth these words: Ladies and gentlemen, the course is finished. You may go home. I cannot hope even to suggest the wickedness and filth of these simple expressions. Then, raising its voice to a grating scream, it yelled: White…
1929 · PDF PAGE 27
…ore after a delightful tramp from Chamounix over the Col du Ge- ant to Courmayeur, and thence to Aosta, and so by de- grees to Pallanza. Arthur rose, apparently struck by some idea, and began to walk up and down the terrace. I was quite suddenly impelled to turn my head to assure myself of his presence. This may seem nothing to you who read, unless you have true imagination. But think of yourself talking to a friend in full light, and suddenly leaning forward to touch him. Arthur! I cried, Arthur! The distress in my tone brought him running…
1929 · PDF PAGE 36
…. At the door of the sick-room I was met by the male nurse, who asked me not to enter. Uncontrollably, I asked, Is he dead? and though Arthur lay absolutely senseless on the bed I read the answering thought Dead! silently pronounced in such tones of mockery, horror, cynicism and despair as I never thought to hear. There was a something or somebody who suffered infi- nitely, and yet who gloated infinitely upon that very suf- fering. And that something was a veil between me and Arthur. The hissing breath recommenced; Arthur seem to be trying …
1929 · PDF PAGE 51
The shell was consumed; the gases of the body, combined and recombined, flamed off, free from organic form. Where was Arthur? His brain, his individuality, his life, were utterly de- stroyed. As separate things, yes: Arthur had entered the universal consciousness. And I heard this utterance: or rather this is my translation into English of a single thought whose syn- thesis is Woe. Substance is called spirit or matter. Spirit and matter are one, indivisible, eternal, inde- structible. Infinite and eternal change! Infinite and eternal pain! No…
1929 · PDF PAGE 39
…he moderns, without a flaw. But was it imaginary or was it real? Real enough to swal- low up the sane thought! At that instant the old Arthur reappeared. I am not the monster! I am Arthur Blair, of Fettes and Trinity. I have passed through a paroxysm.
1929 · PDF PAGE 38
…o. That was child's play. But let me go on with my work. He gave some final instructions to the nurse, and went out. The suffering of Arthur was at this time unspeak- able. Chewed as he was into mere pulp that passed over the tongue of Dis, each bleeding fragment kept its own identity and his. The papillae of the tongue were ser- pents, and each one gnashed its poisoned teeth upon that fodder. And yet, though the sensorium of Arthur was abso- lutely unimpaired, indeed hyperaesthetic, his conscious- ness of pain seemed to depend upon the op…
1929 · PDF PAGE 41
…turbed my power. On this occasion I puffed cigarette after cigarette with excellent effect. I knew nothing of what had been going on. IV Arthur, stung by the venomous chyle, was tossing in that vast arched belly, which resembled the dome of hell, churned in its bubbling slime. I felt that he was not only disintegrated mechanically, but chemically, that his being was loosened more and more into its parts, that these were being absorbed into new and hateful things, but that (worst of all) Arthur stood immune from all, behind it, unimpaired, memor…
1929 · PDF PAGE 46
…from leprosy and elephantiasis to scrofula and syphilis. There was also the consciousness that this was inalienably and for ever part of Arthur. Then Italy itself, in every detail foul. Then I myself, seen as every woman that has ever been, each one with every disease and torture that Nature and man have plotted in their hellish brains, each ended with a death, a death like Arthur's, whose infinite pangs were added to his own, recognized and accepted as his own. The same with our child that never was. All children of all nations, incredibly abo…
1929 · PDF PAGE 37
…th an axe. After a moment's pause: a million is not very many now-a-days." From thiswhich I now see to have been the speech of a sane Arthurhe dropped again into de- lirium. A million pieces, a cool million, a million mil- lion million million million million and so on: then abruptly: Fannys dogs dead. I cannot explain the last sentence to my readers; I may, however, remark that it meant everything to me. I burst into tears. At that moment I caught Arthur's thought, You ought to be busy with the note-book, not crying. I resolute…
1929 · PDF PAGE 31
…. I assured myself that it was not the laugh of some townee on the bridge, distorted by my over- sensitive organization. I said no more; Arthur looked grave. At night he asked abruptly after a long period of brooding, Was that my thought? I could only stammer that I did not know. Incidentally he complained of fa- tigue, and the listlessness, which before had seemed nothing to me, assumed a ghastly shape. There was something in him that was not he! The indifference had appeared transitory; I now became aware of it as con- stant and increasing.…
1929 · PDF PAGE 47
… Carbun- cles, boils, ulcers, cancers, there is no equivalent for these pustules of the bowels of hell, into whose seething convolutions Arthur sank deeper, ever deeper. The magnitude of this experience is not to be ap- prehended by the human mind as we know it. I was convinced that an end must come, for me, with the cre- mation of the body. I was infinitely glad that he had di- rected this to be done. But for him, end and beginning seemed to have no meaning. Through it all I seemed to hear the real Arthur's thought. Though all this is I, yet …
1929 · PDF PAGE 42
…ut, given immortality, the age of the stellar system itself is nothing. This conviction had not fully impregnated the con- sciousness of Arthur; it hung over him like a threat, while the intensification of that consciousness, its libera- tion from the sense of time natural to life, caused each act of the demon to appear of vast duration, although the intervals between the howls of the body on the bed were very short. Each pang of torture or suspense was born, rose to its crest, and died to be reborn again through what seemed countless aeons. St…
1929 · PDF PAGE 49
…the brain and interpenetrating it were represented in his consciousness by the denizens of the pustules becoming formless and impersonalArthur had not yet fathomed the abyss. Creeping, winding, embracing, the Universe en- folded him, violated him with a nameless and intimate contamination, involved his being in a more suffocating terror. Now and again it drowned that consciousness in a gulf which his thought could not express to me; and in- deed the first and least of his torments is utterly beyond human expression. It was a woe ever expanded,…
1929 · PDF PAGE 28
…s it grows between all men and women who love with their whole hearts, and love unselfishly. IV We returned to Cambridge in October, and Arthur threw himself vigorously into the new year's work. Then I fell ill, and the hope we had indulged was disap- pointed. Worse, the course of the illness revealed a con- dition which demanded the most complete series of op- erations which a woman can endure. Not only the past hope, but all future hope, was annihilated. It was during my convalescence that the most re- markable incident of my life took place.…
1929 · PDF PAGE 45
… describe as the cry of a machine in pain. This recurred constantly for an hour and five min- utes, then ceased as suddenly as it began. Arthur still fell. It was succeeded after the lapse of five hours by another paroxysm of the same kind, but fiercer and more continuous. Another silence followed, age upon age of fear and loneliness and shame. About midnight there appeared a grey ocean of bowels below the falling soul. This ocean seemed to be limitless. It fell headlong into it, and the splash awak- ened it to a new consciousness of things. Th…
1929 · PDF PAGE 40
…le who had so glibly assured him that there was, an almost ma- niac hope that they would suffer more than he, if it were possible. (Poor Arthur! He had not yet brushed the bloom off Suffering's grape; he was to drink its fiercest distillation to the dregs.)
1929 · PDF PAGE 48
…g, disappeared only by blasting themselves into the pultaceous coprolite which was, as it were, the main body of the army which composed Arthur. Deeper and deeper as he dropped the phenomena grew constantly in every sense. Now they were a jungle in which the obscurity and terror of the whole gradually overshadowed even the abhorrence due to every part. The madness of the living is a thing so abominable and fearful as to chill every human heart with horror; it is less than nothing in comparison with the madness of the dead! A further complicatio…
1929 · PDF PAGE 50
…In death this limitation is entirely removed. Of the infinite content of the Universe every item was separately real- ized. The brain of Arthur had become equal in power to that attributed by theologians to the Creator; yet of ex- ecutive power there was no seed. The impotence of man before circumstance was in him magnified indefinitely, yet without loss of detail or of mass. He understood that The Many was The One without losing or fusing the con- ception of either. He was God, but a God irretrievably damned: a being infinite, yet limited by t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 34
…s. The most were things impossible to name or to describe. I was brought back from the vision by the stertorous and strangling breath of Arthur, who had been seized with a convulsion. From this he never really rallied. The dim sight grew dimmer, the speech slower and thicker, the headaches more persistent and acute. Torpor succeeded to his old splendid energy and ac- tivity; his days became continual lethargy ever deepen- ing towards coma. Convulsions now and then alarmed me for his immediate danger. Sometimes his breath came hard and hissing l…