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Page 1 of 11929 · PDF PAGE 29
…as we worked, day by day, I found my grasp of detail ever fuller. It is not only that I could read emotions; I could tell whether he was thinking 3465822 or 3456822. In the year following my illness we made 436 experiments of this kind, each extending over sev- eral hours; in all 9363, with only 122 failures, and these all, without exception, partial. The year following, our experiments were extended to a reading of his dreams. In this I proved equally suc- cessful. My practice was to leave the room before he woke, write down the dream that he …
1929 · PDF PAGE 38
…sly, but began to count. My calculation was correct. He turned to me, Are you a woman? No, said I, I am my husband's colleague. I think it is suggestion. You have hypnotized him? Never: but I can read his thoughts. Yes, I remember now; I read a very remarkable paper in Mind two years ago. 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 b…
1929 · PDF PAGE 46
…e always casually assumed that conscious- ness depends upon a proper flow of blood in the vessels of the brain; we have never stopped to think whether the records might not be excited in some other manner.
1929 · PDF PAGE 27
…executors. III In the middle of the day, in my third year, my father was dangerously ill. I bicycled over to Peterborough at once, never thinking of my work. (My father is a canon of Peterborough Cathedral.) On the third day I received a telegram from Professor Blair, Will you be my wife? I had never realized myself as a woman, or him as a man, till that moment, and in that moment I knew that I loved him and had always loved him. It was a case of what one might call Love at first absence. My father recov- ered rapidly; I returned to Cambrid…
1929 · PDF PAGE 52
…osion of a dyna- mite cartridge in the mouth is the most practicable method of effecting this. There is just the possibility that if all thinking minds, all spiritual beings, were thus de- stroyed, and especially if all organic life could be annihi- lated, that the Universe might cease to be, since (as Bishop Berkeley has shown) it can only exist in some thinking mind. And there is really no evidence (in spite of Berkeley) for the existence of any extra-human con- sciousness. Matter in itself may think, in a sense, but its monotony of woe is …
1929 · PDF PAGE 37
…tely un- conscious and suffers nothing. A pause. My God! why do you look at me like that? he exclaimed, frightened out of his wits. I think my face had caught something of that devil's, something of that sneer, that loathing, that mire of contempt and stark despair. I sank back into myself, ashamed already that mere knowledgeand such mean vile knowledgeshould so puff one up with hideous pride. No wonder Satan fell! I began to understand all the old legends, and far more I told Doctor Kershaw that I was carrying out Ar- thur's last wishes.…
1929 · PDF PAGE 35
…nd of suicide. I beg my readers most earnestly not to doubt my statements: the notes of our experiments, left in my will to the greatest thinker now living, Professor von Buhle, will make clear the truth of my relation, and the great and terrible necessity of immediate, drastic, action. PART II I THE stunning physical fact of my husband's illness was the immense prostration. So strong a body, as too often the convulsions gave proof; such inertia with it! He would lie all day like a log; then without warning or ap- parent cause the convulsions w…
1929 · PDF PAGE 31
…ant and increasing. I was at this time twenty-three years old. You wonder that I write with such serious atti- tude of mind. I sometimes think that I have never had any thoughts of my own; that I have always been read- ing the thoughts of another, or perhaps of Nature. I seem only to have been a woman in those first few months of marriage. VII The six months following held for me nothing out of the ordinary, save that six or seven times I had dreams, vivid and terrible. Arthur had no share in these; yet I knew, I cannot say how, that they were …
1929 · PDF PAGE 4
…gossa. Bevan was startled, and showed it. After the siege, sir, she was honourably married to a nobleman, snapped Duguesclin. Do you think a man of my ancestry will permit a stranger to lift the shadow of an eyebrow against the memory of my great- grandmother? The Englishman protested that nothing had been further from his thoughts. I suppose so, proceeded the other more qui- etly. And the more, perhaps, that I am a convicted murderer. Bevan was now fairly alarmed. I am proud of it, continued Duguesclin. At the age of twenty-five my…
1929 · PDF PAGE 47
…loathsomeness. To plunge into impurity is to become deadened to disgust. But to do so and yet to remain pureevery vileness adds a pang. Think of Madonna imprisoned in the body of a prostitute, and compelled to acknowledge This is I, while never losing her abhor- rence. Not only immured in hell, but compelled to par- take of its sacraments; not only high priest at its aga- pae, but begetter and manifestor of its cult; a Christ nauseated at the kiss of Judas, and yet aware that the treachery was his own.
1929 · PDF PAGE 20
…ces, though. Let me show you, father, dear. She opened the portfolio and turned over the leaves. I'm getting on splendidly. Mr., Davis thinks I ought to go to Paris and study properly. Do let me. How can you think of such a thing, Gertrude? A daughter of mine! Study properly!!! No indeed! A little
1929 · PDF PAGE 42
… us if we are waiting for an omnibus, an age if we are waiting for a lover, nothing at all if we are pleasantly engaged or sleeping.1 We think of seven years as a long time in connection with penal servitude; as a negligibly small period in deal- ing with geology. But, 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, c…
1929 · PDF PAGE 21
…me, father, said the girl at last, but I've just had a glimpse of you for the first time in my life, and it's a bit of a shock. I must think. And she stood motionless until her hapless father at- tracted her attention by backing into his wicker chair. Don't touch holy things, she snapped suddenly, taking the sketch from his nerveless hand, and replacing it rev- erently in the portfolio. The action seemed to decide her.
1929 · PDF PAGE 36
…r of this thought was my convictionthen and nowthat it represented perfect sanity and coher- ence of thought. For I dreaded utterly to think what such words might imply. 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,…
1929 · PDF PAGE 6
…in the glint of the sun on the steel, and he forbade that man to clean his spade. A trifle, indeed. What do you know of what pris- oners think of trifles? The man went raving mad, and for no other reason. It seemed to him that such de- tailed refinement of cruelty was a final proof of the in- nate and inherent devilishness of the universe. Insanity is the logical consequence of such a faith. No, sir, I will spare you the description. Bevan thought that there had already been too much description, and in his complacent English way surmised that…
1929 · PDF PAGE 33
…? Or am I a soul in a body? Or am I, one and indi- visible in some incredible sense, a spark of the infinite light of God? I am going to think inwards: I shall possi- bly go into some form of trance, unintelligible to myself. You may be able to interpret it. The experiment had lasted about half an hour when he sat up gasping with effort. I have seen nothing, heard nothing, I said. Not one thought has passed from you to me. But at that very moment what had been in his mind flashed into mine. It is a blind abyss, I told him, and there han…
1929 · PDF PAGE 12
… have him; he doesnt know Paris. Now thendraw a line from the Gare de lEst to the Etoile; erect an equilateral triangle on that line. Think of the name of the world-famous man who lives at the apex. (This was a touch of super- genius, as it forced me to use the English alphabet for the basis of the cipher, and the spy spoke no language but his own, except a little Swiss.) From this time I shall communicate in a cipher of the direct additive nu- merical order, and the key shall be his name. It was only my incomparably strong constitution …
1929 · PDF PAGE 10
son to think highly of my intelligence. By a stratagem, he repeated with emphasis. I have a plan, he continued. It will take twenty- three days to communicate, if we are not interrupted; between three and four months to prepare; two hours and eight minutes to execute. It is theoretically possible to escape by air, by water, or by earth. But as we are watched day and night, it would be useless to try to drive a tunnel to the mainland; we have no aeroplanes or balloons, or means of making them. But if we could once reach the waters edge, …