Before I had sat at the table ten minutes a change burst out with
startling suddenness. At one point in the void the blackness gathered,
concentrated, sprang into an evil flame that gushed aimlessly forth
from nowhere into nowhere.
This was accompanied by the most noxious stench.
It was gone before I could realize it. As lightning precedes thunder,
it was followed by a hideous clamour that I can only describe as the
cry of a machine in pain.
This recurred constantly for an hour and five minutes, 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 awakened it to a new consciousness of things.
This sea, though infinitely cold, was boiling like tubercles. Itself
a more or less homogeneous slime, the stench of which is beyond all
human conception (human language is singularly deficient in words that
describe smell and taste; we always refer our sensations to things
generally known)[2] it constantly budded into greenish boils with
angry red craters, whose jagged edges were of a livid white; and from
these issued pus formed of all things known of man--each one distorted,
degraded, blasphemed.
[2] This is my general complaint, and that of all research students
on the one hand and imaginative writers on the other. We can only
express a new idea by combining two or more old ideas, or by
the use of metaphor; just so any number can be formed from two
others. James Hinton had undoubtedly a perfectly crisp, simple,
and concise idea of the “fourth dimension of space”; he found the
utmost difficulty in conveying it to others, even when they were
advanced mathematicians. It is (I believe) the greatest factor that
militates against human progress that great men assume that they
will be understood by others.
Even such a master of lucid English as the late Professor Huxley
has been so vitally misunderstood that he has been attacked
repeatedly for affirming propositions which he specifically denied
in the clearest language.
Things innocent, things happy, things holy! Every one unspeakably
defiled, loathsome, sickening! During the vigil of the day following
I recognized one group. I saw Italy. First the Italy of the Map, a
booted leg. But this leg changed rapidly through myriad phases. It
was in turn the leg of every beast and bird, and in every case each
leg was suffering with all diseases 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 aborted, deformed, tortured, torn in pieces, abused by every
foulness that the imagination of an arch-devil could devise.
And so for every thought. I realized that the putrefactive 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 details, 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 would not exhaust
them.
But, perhaps, when the brain was destroyed beyond recognition of its
component parts----
We have always casually assumed that consciousness 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. And yet we know how tumour of the brain begets hallucinations.
Consciousness works strangely; the least disturbance of the blood
supply, and it goes out like a candle, 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. Carbuncles, boils, ulcers, cancers, there is
no equivalent for these pustules of the bowels of hell, into whose
seething convulsions Arthur sank, deeper, ever deeper.
The magnitude of this experience is not to be apprehended by the human
mind as we know it. I was convinced that an end must come, for me, with
the cremation of the body. I was infinitely glad that he had directed
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 it is only an accident of me; I stand behind
it all, immune, eternal.”
It must not be supposed that this in any way detracted from the
intensity of the suffering. Rather it added to it. To be loathsome is
less than to be linked to loathsomeness. To plunge into impurity is to
become deadened to disgust. But to do so and yet remain pure--every
vileness adds a pang. Think of Madonna imprisoned in a body of a
prostitute, and compelled to acknowledge “This is I,” while never
losing her abhorrence. Not only immured in hell, but compelled to
partake of its sacraments; not only high priest at its agapae, but
begetter and manifestor of its cult; a Christ nauseated at the kiss of
Judas, and yet aware that the treachery was his own.