During my youth I suffered from a naturally delicate constitution. I was
pale, feeble and sickly, but from no decided disease. A dreamy, quiet
cast of temperament caused me to shrink from the rough sports of my
brothers; the contact of strangers was equally disagreeable, and I
seldom strayed from home. Indeed, I lived almost entirely within myself,
although by no means devoid of natural affection; on the contrary, my
emotions were strong, and my sympathy easily aroused.
How it happened that I acquired a love of learning I do not know, all
the outward circumstances by which I was surrounded tending to foster
any thing rather than intellectual habits, for our family, although each
member possessed a common education, were strictly practical; but this
difference in my disposition cut me off from their pursuits, and I found
my chief enjoyment in the volumes of a library to which I obtained
access.
Perhaps it was the sedentary life I led, the close confinement, and lack
of exercise, that brought on a violent attack of sickness when I was in
my nineteenth year, so that I lay for several weeks completely
prostrated. During two or three days my life hung as in a balance, which
a breath might have turned and launched me beyond the confines of time.
However, the disease succumbed to the persevering attention of
experienced nurses. I arose from my weary bed and found my physical
health slowly improving, but from that period I was subject at irregular
intervals to what the physician pronounced temporary delirium, which I
knew he used as a milder term for insanity.
But it was not insanity. I never lost control of my mind, but I lost
control of my body. It obeyed a will that was not my own. A mighty
antagonistic power seemed to creep over my brain, which impelled my
movements and held my struggling soul in subjection. I presented the
singular phenomenon of one person governed by two separate and distinct
wills, for my mind was not disordered, but only mastered by superior
strength. In this strange condition I would see familiar objects
magnified, exaggerated, and contorted, in an atmosphere varying with all
colors, at the same time being perfectly conscious of their real
appearance. I would hear sounds sweet and musical grow into wails of
heart-rending despair. I could recognize my friends when they were
present, but was forced to regard them with the cold eye of a stranger.
I would commit acts that no human agency could have compelled me to do
when my faculties were untrammelled. I never submitted without a
struggle, and always felt conscious that, if I could but once resist
this seemingly invincible power, if I could but once disregard its
promptings, I should be free.
The attacks were never of long duration. They always left me utterly
exhausted, and it would sometimes require a week to recruit my expended
strength. I could afterward recall every incident with the most distinct
minuteness, for they were branded in characters of fire on my memory.
Vainly I asserted again and again that it was not delirium, that I was
forced into subjection to some mysterious power I could not withstand;
my statements made no impression upon the physician, who evidently
considered mine but a common case of one suffering from attacks of
temporary insanity, and, when I persisted in my statement, he forbade
any further reference to the subject.
However, I could not prevent my mind from continually dwelling upon it
in secret. What was this so foreign, so antagonistic to myself that
mastered my will, that controlled my actions, that made me literally
another being? Why did I not shake off this evil influence and be free?
I felt perfectly conscious of possessing the power, but was not able to
arouse it from a latent condition.
As I have said before, I was naturally of a studious disposition, and I
now turned my attention to metaphysics. I read works, ancient and
modern, on its different branches; I studied medical treatises on
insanity, and, the more I learned, the more thoroughly convinced I
became that I was not suffering from mental aberration. Constant
brooding over my disease greatly wore upon my physical strength;
traveling was recommended, in hopes that change of climate and scene
might benefit my health. My old aversion to strangers clung to me, and,
although possessed by a restlessness to which I was wholly unaccustomed,
I persistently refused to leave home; no arguments could gain my
consent, so that my friends were forced to give up the project in
despair.
One morning, when more than the usual gloom oppressed my spirits, I made
an effort to arouse myself and throw off the melancholy that was
settling upon me, which each day I felt to be growing more confirmed. I
was sitting by a window, which stood wide open, and, just outside, a
caged canary was singing and fluttering its feathers in the warm spring
sunshine. The little bird was my particular property, and I regarded it
with an affection which is rarely bestowed upon pets. With the exception
of my young sister, a child about four years of age, this was the only
living thing that I had taken any interest in since my sickness. I had
trained the canary from the shell, and the little creature seemed to
repay all my care, for from no other member of the family would it
receive caresses. I was so much afraid of its being accidentally injured
that I never allowed it to be freed from the cage, except in my
presence. At my call it would fly about me, resting on my head,
shoulders, or hands, and chirping in a perfect ecstasy of enjoyment.
I arose and opened the door of its prison, then, reseating myself,
softly whistled while it darted into the air, wheeled once or twice, and
descended upon my hand. Stroking its spotless yellow plumage, I regarded
the little thing with a degree of pleasure I had not experienced for
several weeks. But sudden horror almost caused my heart to cease its
beatings, and the perspiration started from my forehead in great drops,
for I felt my fingers slowly closing over the delicate bird. Although I
made an attempt greater than the racking effort we sometimes exert in
the nightmare, I had no power to restrain them. The canary fluttered in
my clasp. I would have dropped it, I would have shrieked for help, but
my muscles, my voice, my _body_, obeyed me not, and my fingers, like the
steady working of machinery, gradually tightened their relentless grasp.
In my agony the veins of my face protruded like lines of cordage. I
heard the frail bones breaking beneath the crushing pressure, then my
involuntary grip suddenly relaxed, and the bird fell upon my knee, dead
and mangled!
At the same moment, I saw, through the open door, my little sister
playing upon the grass-plat; and, almost before I was aware of moving,
or of any volition, I found myself walking rapidly toward her, while my
fingers twitched with a convulsive, clutching movement. Good Heavens! I
already saw her face turn purple, and heard her gasping breath smothered
by gurgling blood. With this terrible picture before my mental vision,
my brain felt as if it would burst its bounds in the desperate, but
unavailing effort I made to turn back, to fly from the spot. But I could
not command myself. In that moment I endured suffering more intense than
language can describe. Perhaps my strange and wild appearance frightened
the child; for, in place of holding out her arms to me, her favorite
brother, she fled crying to the nurse, who did not observe my approach,
and carried her into the house. Saved! unconsciously saved—saved from a
fate too terrible to contemplate.
I sank insensible upon the ground, and, when I recovered, found myself
surrounded by the family, each one applying some restorative, for I had
been in a long and death-like swoon. Slowly, but distinctly, the
recollections of the events which had reduced me to this condition
presented themselves to my memory with all their appalling horror,
nearly depriving me again of consciousness.
I did not refer in any manner to the subject, which was also carefully
avoided by all others in my presence, for fear that it might produce
renewed excitement, and my friends had no suspicion of the circumstances
which brought it about. The bird was found dead upon the floor, and the
family imagined that it had met with some accident. They were evidently
surprised, when the fact was communicated to me, that I made no remarks,
for they had anticipated an outburst of grief.
Grief! I did not suffer from grief; grief was overpowered by the horror
that racked my brain—horror for the act I had committed, and the more
fearful one which had been so mercifully prevented. I had committed? No,
it was not _my_ mind or will which had prompted my hand to do the deed.
I was innocent, even though my fingers had dripped with the blood of a
sister; but the frightful thought filled me with a terror that wrung my
soul. I pondered continually upon it. When might not this mysterious
demon again assert its evil control over me? Strange as it may seem, I
felt certain that it was some foreign agency—I knew not what—that
mastered my will, and not the result of my own intellect, in a
disordered condition.
This overpowering dread of the future, of what might happen, which took
possession of me, drove me to the decision of leaving home, as the best
way of avoiding danger to my friends. Perhaps, too, if my physical
health became better, I might gain strength enough to defy this infernal
power; for, as I have said before, I possessed a singular consciousness
that, if I could once successfully resist its promptings, my soul would
be liberated from thraldom. I announced my determination of making a
journey, without any explanation of my sudden change, and it was greeted
with delight by my friends and relatives, who were anxious to hasten my
departure while the humor was upon me; but they need not have feared any
change of purpose on my part, for I was haunted by this terrible dread
of the future, and I gladly said farewell for a time to my home and
birthplace.
The incidents of travel and of new scenes broke the monotony, and
dispelled to some degree the gloom that had taken fast hold upon me. In
a short period I found myself rapidly improving. Every week brought me
an increase of strength, and I suffered less frequently from these
frightful attacks. Although they occurred at longer intervals than
formerly, they seemed to grow more severe in character; the conflict was
fiercer, and my mind made a more desperate effort to gain the supremacy.
My whole frame would be racked by the intense struggle which I
constantly maintained, though I was constantly vanquished.
The increasing delight I took in the scenery, the continued exercise and
excitement, almost drove despair from me, and hope once more brightened
my countenance. I began to look forward to the time when my health would
be entirely restored, and my body and mind be in unison. I did not hope
vainly, for the final conflict came, and with it a strange termination
of my long sufferings.
I stood upon the side of an Eastern mountain. Above my head vast rocks
arose in solemn grandeur, their summits lost in canopied mists which,
gray and clinging, wrapped them in obscurity. Below, a great chasm rent
the mountain; a yawning, bottomless gulf. While I gazed, awed by the
thought of its mysterious depths, where no human eye had seen, where no
human foot had trod, a ray of light struggled in and rested on gaunt
trees, on snake-like ferns, damp and cold, that clung to its slimy
sides, and on one pale flower which nodded in the chill draught that
came up, a palpable horror, from the blackness of darkness. I turned
away. Near the western horizon dead clouds were piled one above another,
and their heavy shadow lay brown and dark upon the sullen earth. No wind
stirred the forests, or rustled their motionless leaves, and the awe of
the unbroken silence fell, with a dread oppression, upon my heart.
Suddenly I was seized by an ungovernable desire to possess the
flower—the colorless flower that hung far down in the death-damp of the
chasm. A freezing terror crept through my blood as I recognized this
decree of a will I had never been able to disobey. I felt myself
crawling closer to the verge of the precipice; nearer, yet nearer, until
I sat within the very jaw of the savage gulf. The dead clouds heaved
their shroud-like forms and wavered overhead. I heard the rush of
subterranean waters sounding a muffled requiem. The sickly flower with
its long stem writhed and twisted, as a serpent stretches his folds into
the air. Slowly back and forth it swayed, glaring at me like a
lustreless eye.
My brain reeled, and all the forces of my nature gathered up their
increased strength for one fierce and final conflict. I felt the blood
rage through my veins with the headlong fury of cataracts. The very
spring of life within me was stirred and troubled, when, with one mighty
strain, I drew myself up and fell backward on the grass.
The whole world went out in utter darkness. Before my eyes stretched a
vast, illimitable gloom, when suddenly out of its impenetrable depths
above my head there grew and glimmered faintly a thin and wavering mist.
Folding upon itself, it hung down, white and luminous, a cloud of
palpitating nebulæ. Pricked with a thousand points of fire it gathered
slowly to a nucleus in the center—a flickering speck, a disc, it flamed,
blazed into a star, and lo! poised midway in the air, an aureole of
light, it rested upon the brow of a female figure.
Her scornful eyes looked down upon me with a lurid gleam that seemed to
burn my soul. A smile of derision sat upon her lips that were more vivid
in hue than the vermilion dye. Her locks were yellow as the sun at
noontide; her skin was white as the leper’s; her breath hot as the
desert air, and the light of the star upon her forehead burned red with
the frightful redness of fresh blood. Suddenly I saw that the murky
clouds on either side her form swarmed with a thousand dwarfed and
warted shapes. Black and hideous, they knotted, flitted to and fro, in
and out, with their formless claws and tumultuous motion. She spread her
wings. Immediately there gathered all the dusky shapes—the legion demons
of delirium with their needle eyes—and settled down upon her sable
plumes. A shrill phantom laugh rang out, mocked itself by echoes that
ran up in thin shafts of sound to the skies, and the SPIRIT OF FEVER had
fled from me forever!
The rays of the sun as it sank to rest, slanting through rose-colored
avenues, fell upon the gray mists, and crowned the mountain’s summit in
a rainbow of glory. The rising breeze swept through the forests with a
soothing sound, and, eastward, the eye was lost in mellow lines of
golden haze, which to my soul freed from captivity, seemed cathedral
aisles of peace.
[Illustration]