THE DARKEST HOUR.
Suffering is perhaps the only preparation for suffering: still I was
but poorly prepared for what followed.
Having gathered strength, and a certain quietness which I could not
mistake for peace, I returned to London towards the close of the
Spring. I had in the interval heard nothing of Mary. The few letters
Marston had sent on had been almost exclusively from my publishers. But
the very hour I reached my lodging, came a note, which I opened
trembling, for it was in the handwriting of Miss Pease.
DEAR SIR,--I cannot, I think, be wrong in giving you a piece of
information which will be in the newspapers to-morrow morning. Your old
acquaintance, and my young relative, Mr Brotherton, was married this
morning, at St George’s, Hanover Square, to your late friend’s sister,
Miss Mary Osborne. They have just left for Dover on their way to
Switzerland. Your sincere well-wisher,
‘JANE PEASE.’
Even at this distance of time, I should have to exhort myself to write
with calmness, were it not that the utter despair of conveying my
feelings, if indeed my soul had not for the time passed beyond feeling
into some abyss unknown to human consciousness, renders it unnecessary.
This despair of communication has two sources--the one simply the
conviction of the impossibility of expressing _any_ feeling, much more
such feeling as mine then was--and is; the other the conviction that
only to the heart of love can the sufferings of love speak. The attempt
of a lover to move, by the presentation of his own suffering, the heart
of her who loves him not, is as unavailing as it is unmanly. The poet
who sings most wailfully of the torments of the lover’s hell, is but a
sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal in the ears of her who has at best
only a general compassion to meet the song withal--possibly only an
individual vanity which crowns her with his woes as with the trophies
of a conquest. True, he is understood and worshipped by all the other
wailful souls in the first infernal circle, as one of the great men of
their order--able to put into words full of sweet torment the dire
hopelessness of their misery; but for such the singer, singing only for
ears eternally deaf to his song, cares nothing; or if for a moment he
receives consolation from their sympathy, it is but a passing weakness
which the breath of an indignant self-condemnation--even contempt, the
next moment sweeps away. In God alone there must be sympathy and cure;
but I had not then--have I indeed yet found what that cure is? I am at
all events now able to write with calmness. If suffering destroyed
itself, as some say, mine ought to have disappeared long ago; but to
that I can neither pretend nor confess.
For the first time, after all I had encountered, I knew what suffering
could be. It is still at moments an agony as of hell to recall this and
the other thought that then stung me like a white-hot arrow: the shafts
have long been drawn out, but the barbed heads are still there. I
neither stormed nor maddened. I only felt a freezing hand lay hold of
my heart, and gripe it closer and closer till I should have sickened,
but that the pain ever stung me into fresh life; and ever since I have
gone about the world with that hard lump somewhere in my bosom into
which the griping hand and the griped heart have grown and stiffened.
I fled at once back to my solitary house, looking for no relief in its
solitude, only the negative comfort of escaping the eyes of men. I
could not bear the sight of my fellow-creatures. To say that the world
had grown black to me, is as nothing: I ceased---I will not say _to
believe_ in God, for I never dared say that mighty thing--but I ceased
to hope in God. The universe had grown a negation which yet forced its
presence upon me--death that bred worms. If there were a God anywhere,
this universe could be nothing more than his forsaken moth-eaten
garment. He was a God who did not care. Order was all an invention of
phosphorescent human brains; light itself the mocking smile of a
Jupiter over his writhing sacrifices. At times I laughed at the
tortures of my own heart, saying to it, ‘Writhe on, worm; thou
deservest thy writhing in that thou writhest. Godless creature, why
dost thou not laugh with me? Am I not merry over thee and the world--in
that ye are both rottenness to the core?’ The next moment my heart and
I would come together with a shock, and I knew it was myself that
scorned myself.
Such being my mood, it will cause no surprise if I say that I too was
tempted to suicide; the wonder would have been if it had been
otherwise. The soft keen curves of that fatal dagger, which had not
only slain Charley but all my hopes--for had he lived this horror could
not have been--grew almost lovely in my eyes. Until now it had looked
cruel, fiendish, hateful; but now I would lay it before me and
contemplate it. In some griefs there is a wonderful power of
self-contemplation, which indeed forms their only solace; the moment it
can set the sorrow away from itself sufficiently to regard it, the
tortured heart begins to repose; but suddenly, like a waking tiger, the
sorrow leaps again into its lair, and the agony commences anew. The
dagger was the type of my grief and its torture: might it not, like the
brazen serpent, be the cure for the sting of its living counterpart?
But alas! where was the certainty? Could I slay _myself?_ This outer
breathing form I could dismiss--but the pain was not _there_. I was not
mad, and I knew that a deeper death than that could give, at least.
than I had any assurance that could give, alone could bring repose.
For, impossible as I had always found it actually to believe in
immortality, I now found it equally impossible to believe in
annihilation. And even if annihilation should be the final result, who
could tell but it might require ages of a horrible slow-decaying
dream-consciousness to kill the living thing which felt itself other
than its body?
Until now, I had always accepted what seemed the natural and universal
repugnance to absolute dissolution as the strongest argument on the
side of immortality;--for why should a man shrink from that which
belonged to his nature? But now annihilation seemed the one lovely
thing, the one sole only lonely thought in which lay no blackness of
burning darkness. Oh, for one eternal unconscious sleep!--the nearest
likeness we can cherish of that inconceivable nothingness--ever denied
by the very thinking of it--by the vain attempt to realize that whose
very existence is the knowing nothing of itself! Could that dagger have
insured me such repose, or had there been any draught of Lethe, utter
Lethe, whose blessed poison would have assuredly dissipated like a fume
this conscious self-tormenting _me_, I should not now be writhing anew,
as in the clutches of an old grief, clasping me like a corpse, stung to
simulated life by the galvanic battery of recollection. Vivid as it
seems--all I suffer as I write is but a faint phantasm of what I then
endured.
I learned, therefore, that to some minds the argument for immortality
drawn from the apparently universal shrinking from annihilation must be
ineffectual, seeing they themselves do not shrink from it. Convince a
man that there is no God--or, for I doubt if that be altogether
possible--make it, I will say, impossible for him to hope in God--and
it cannot be that annihilation should seem an evil. If there is no God,
annihilation is the one thing to be longed for, with all that might of
longing which is the mainspring of human action. In a word, it is not
immortality the human heart cries out after, but that immortal eternal
thought whose life is its life, whose wisdom is its wisdom, whose ways
and whose thoughts shall--must one day--become its ways and its
thoughts. Dissociate immortality from the living Immortality, and it is
not a thing to be desired--not a thing that can on those terms, or even
on the fancy of those terms, be desired.
But such thoughts as these were far from me then. I lived because I
despaired of death. I ate by a sort of blind animal instinct, and so
lived. The time had been when I would despise myself for being able to
eat in the midst of emotion; but now I cared so little for the emotion
even, that eating or not eating had nothing to do with the matter. I
ate because meat was set before me; I slept because sleep came upon me.
It was a horrible time. My life seemed only a vermiculate one, a
crawling about of half-thoughts-half-feelings through the corpse of a
decaying existence. The heart of being was withdrawn from me, and my
life was but the vacant pericardium in which it had once throbbed out
and sucked in the red fountains of life and gladness.
I would not be thought to have fallen to this all but bottomless depth
only because I had lost Mary. Still less was it because of the fact
that in her, around whom had gathered all the devotion with which the
man in me could regard woman, I had lost all womankind. It was _the
loss_ of Mary, as I then judged it, not, I repeat, the fact that _I_
had lost her. It was that she had lost herself. Thence it was, I say,
that I lost my hope in God. For, if there were a God, how could he let
purity be clasped in the arms of defilement? how could he marry my
Athanasia--not to a corpse, but to a Plague? Here was the man who had
done more to ruin her brother than any but her father, and God had
given her to _him!_ I had had--with the commonest of men--some notion
of womanly purity--how was it that hers had not instinctively shuddered
and shrunk? how was it that the life of it had not taken refuge with
death to shun bare contact with the coarse impurity of such a nature as
that of Geoffrey Brotherton? My dreams had been dreams indeed! Was my
Athanasia dead, or had she never been? In my thought, she had ‘said to
Corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my
sister.’ Who should henceforth say of any woman that she was impure?
She _might_ love him--true; but what was she then who was able to love
such a man? It was this that stormed the citadel of my hope, and drove
me from even thinking of a God.
Gladly would I now have welcomed any bodily suffering that could hide
me from myself; but no illness came. I was a living pain, a conscious
ill-being. In a thousand forms those questions would ever recur, but
without hope of answer. When I fell asleep from exhaustion, hideous
visions of her with Geoffrey would start me up with a great cry,
sometimes with a curse on my lips. Nor were they the most horrible of
those dreams in which she would help him to mock me. Once, and only
once, I found myself dreaming the dream of _that_ night, and I knew
that I had dreamed it before. Through palace and chapel and
charnel-house, I followed her, ever with a dim sense of awful result;
and when at the last she lifted the shining veil, instead of the face
of Athanasia, the bare teeth of a skull grinned at me from under a
spotted shroud, through which the sunlight shone from behind, revealing
all its horrors. I was not mad--my reason had not given way: _how_
remains a marvel.