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Page 1 of 21929 · PDF PAGE 36
…ning of Servetus would have turned pitiful had he heard it, so perfectly did it express quintessence of damnation. Now then my husband's thought seemed to have changed places with the other. It was below, within, withdrawn. said to myself, He is dead! Then came Ar- thur's thought, I had better pretend to be mad. It will save her, perhaps; and it will be a change. I shall pre- tend I have killed her with an axe. Damn it! I hope she is not listening. I was now thoroughly awake, and told the driver to get home quickly. I hope she is killed in…
1929 · PDF PAGE 44
…ion; and it was that which caused suffering so beyond all that poets have ever dreamt of the infernal. I am ashamed to say that my first thought was of the Catholic Church and its masses for the repose of the dead. I went to the Cathedral, revolving as I went all that had ever been saidthe superstitions of a hundred savage tribes. At bottom I could find no difference be- tween their barbarous rites and those of Christianity. However that might be, I was baffled. The priests refused to pray for the soul of a heretic. I hurried back to the house…
1929 · PDF PAGE 51
…s: 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 absolute: no truth, no beauty, no idea, nothing but the whirlwinds of form, unresting, unappeasable. Eternal hunger! Eternal war! Change and pain infi- nite and unceasing. There is no individuality but in illusion…
1929 · PDF PAGE 39
…eadful rose-dawn suddenly greyed and sick- ened with doubt. Hope sank to its nadir; fear rose like a dragon, with leaden wings. Suppose, thought he, that after all death does not end me! I cannot express this conception. It is not that the heart sank, it had nowhither to sink; it knew itself im- mortal, and immortal in a realm of unimagined pain and terror, unlighted by one glimpse of any other light than that pale glare of hate and of pestilence. This thought took shape in these words: I AM THAT I AM. One cannot say that the blasphemy added to…
1929 · PDF PAGE 41
No! thought he, perhaps I lack their faith. Perhaps if I could really persuade myself of God and ChristPerhaps if I could deceive myself, could make believe Such a thought is to surrender one's honesty, to ab- dicate one's reason. It marked the final futile struggle of his will. The demon caught and crunched him, and the noisy delirium began anew. My flesh and blood rebelled. Taken with a deathly vomit, I rushed from the room, and resolutely, for a whole hour, diverted my sensorium from thought. I had always found that the slightest …
1929 · PDF PAGE 31
were a length aheadsuddenly I heard my husbands thought. It was the most hideous and horrible laugh that it is possible to conceive. No devil could laugh so. I screamed, and dropped my paddle. Both the men thought me ill. 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 …
1929 · PDF PAGE 43
… of falling, a dumb ecstasy of changeless fear. There were no waves upon that sea of shame, no troubling of those accursed waters by any thought. There was no hope of any ground to that abyss, no thought that it might stop. So tireless was that fall that even acceleration was absent; it was constant and level as the fall of a star. There was not even a feel- ing of pace; infinitely fast as it must be, judging from the peculiar dread which it inspired, it was yet infinitely slow, having regard to the infinitude of the abyss. I took measures not …
1929 · PDF PAGE 24
…eter. Automatically I became aware that the mercury was close to the limit, and would go over from my other work and adjust it without a thought. More remarkable still, if any object were placed on my bench without my knowledge and then removed, I could, if asked within a few minutes, describe the object roughly, especially distinguishing the shape of its base and the degree of its opacity to heat and light. From these data I could make a pretty good guess at what the object was. This faculty of mine was repeatedly tested, and al- ways with suc…
1929 · 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 46
…ted, deformed, tortured, torn in pieces, abused by every foulness that the imagi- nation of an arch-devil could devise. And so for every thought. I realized that the putre- factive changes in the dead man's brain were setting in motion every memory of his, and smearing them with hell's own paint. I timed one thought: despite its myriad million de- tails, each one clear, vivid and prolonged, it occupied but three seconds of earthly time. I considered the incalculable array of the thoughts in his well-furnished mind; I saw that thousands of years…
1929 · PDF PAGE 47
…an- dle, or else takes monstrous forms. Here was the overwhelming truth; in death man lives again, and lives for ever. Yet we might have thought of it; the phantasmagoria of life which throng the mind of a drowning man might have suggested something of the sort to any man with a sympathetic and active imagination. Worse even than the thoughts themselves was the apprehension of the thoughts ere they arose. Carbun- cles, boils, ulcers, cancers, there is no equivalent for these pustules of the bowels of hell, into whose seething convolutions Arthu…
1929 · PDF PAGE 20
…g on Sunday. But if these expedients salved his conscience, they did nothing to quell Gertrude's incipient tendency to in- dependence of thought and action. There had been a very unpleasant scene when he threw into the fire a book from Mudies (I thought one could have trusted Mudies!) called The Stolen Bacillus, which he under- stood to be of a grossly immoral tendency. (Nasty filth about free love or something, isn't it?) Theodore Bugg was not a sensitive man; excess of intuitive sympathy had not made his life a hell; but he felt that his …
1929 · PDF PAGE 2
…ck eyes, pin-points below shaggy eye-brows, inspired the large man with a certain uneasiness. Not at all a chap to quarrel with, was his thought. However, being himself a widely-travelled manBoulogne, Dieppe, Paris, Switzerland, and even Venicehe had none of that insularity of which foreign- ers accuse some Englishmen, and he had endeavoured to make conversation during the journey. The small man had proved a poor companion, taciturn to a fault, sparing of words where a nod would satisfy the obliga- tions of courtesy, and seemingly fonder of h…
1929 · PDF PAGE 22
…rglars. Yes, he must kill himself. He drew back the hammer. Cold sweat beaded his flabby face. He could not; and anyhow, how did one? He thought of many stories of people who had shot themselves ineffectively. He felt for his heart and failed to find it, wondered if it had stopped and he were dying, had a fit of fear paralysing all his will. He thought of himself lying dead. No, by God! I can't do it! he cried, and flung the pistol back into the drawer. As luck would have it, the weapon exploded. The bullet broke his jaw, tore away four molar…
1929 · PDF PAGE 33
… (temporarily) disap- peared almost entirely under the treatment of a very skilful doctor at that Spa, a Dr. Barbezieux, a most kind and thoughtful man. I am going to try, said Arthur, to penetrate my- self. Am I an animal, and is the world without a pur- pose? 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 a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 11
…and only then dragged out There is a traitor, a spy. Henceforth I must find a new means of communicating the details of my plan. I have thought it all out. I shall speak in a sort of rebus, which not even you will be able to understand unless you have all the piecesand the key. Mind you engrave upon your memory every word I say. The following day: Do you remember the taking of the old mill by the Prussians in 70? My difficulty is that I must give you the skeleton of the puzzle, which I cant do in words. But watch the line of my spade and…
1929 · PDF PAGE 49
…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, ever intensified, by each vial of wrath. Memory increased, and understand- ing grew; the imagination had equally got rid of limit. What this means who can tell? The human mind cannot really appreciate numbers beyond a score or so;
1929 · PDF PAGE 18
…oldly. Furtively and hurriedly, his glance divided between the forbidden book and the shop-door, his only safe- guard from intrusion the thought that nobody who en- tered would be in a position to throw stones at a fellow- culprit, Theodore Bugg turned over the pages. The book began mildly enough with the winged Vic- tory and only entered the rapids with La Gioconda. Thence, Niagra-like, one plunge to the abyssthe Venus de Milo. The blood flame to his face; his breath came hot and quick. With fumbling fingers that trembled with excitement he w…
1929 · PDF PAGE 40
…down, Magdalen!that the demon is made of all those that have died of Bright's disease. There must be different ones for each disease. I thought I once caught sight of a coughing bog of bloody slime. Let me pray. A frenzied appeal to the Creator followed. Sincere as it was, it would read like irreverence in print. And then there came the cold-drawn horror of stark blasphemy against this Godwho would not answer. Followed the bleak black agony of the conviction the absolute certitudeThere is no God! combined with a wave of frenzied wrath a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 48
…with the result that the confusion and exaggeration of madness with all its poignancy was superadded to the simpler hell. One might have thought that any confusion would have been a welcome relief to a lucidity so appalling; but this was not so. The torture was infused with a shat- tering sense of alarm. The images rose up threatening, 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…