I am perfectly happy. It is sublime not to be dependent any more on earthly things. Keletiel came and told me to go and prophesy to Peter, so I will hide away the diary. I must think of a new place every time, else Peter will find out where I keep it, or the old man may be hunting around in his astral body and take it away. I have been very careful what I wrote; but he might discover some of the secrets and ruin everything.
There’s another trouble. I can only remember spiritual things clearly. The material world is fading out. It would be disaster if I forgot where I hid it.
Basil would never forgive me.
I will hide it in the chimney, then I can always look up where I put it. . . .
What is dreadful is the length of time. With H. or C. or both, there is never a dull moment; without them the hours, the very minutes, drag. It’s difficult to read or write. My eyes won’t focus properly. They have been open to the spiritual world, they can’t see anything else. It’s hard, too, to control the hands. I can’t form the letters properly.
This waiting is hellish. Waiting for something to happen! I can think of nothing but H. Everything in the body is wrong. It aches intolerably. Even a single dose would put everything right.
It makes me forget who I am, and the wonderful work to be done. I have become quite blind to the spiritual world. Keletiel never comes. I must wait, wait, wait for the Holy Spirit; but that’s a memory so far, far off!
There are times when I almost doubt it, yet my faith is the only thing that prevents my going insane. I can’t endure without H.
The sympathy of suffering has brought Peter closer. We lie about and look at each other; but we can’t touch, the skin is too painful. We are both restless as it is impossible to describe. It irritates us to see each other like this, and we can’t do anything; we constantly get up with the idea of doing something, but we sit down again immediately. Then we can’t sit, we have to lie down. But lying down doesn’t rest us; it irritates us more, so we get up again, and so on for ever. One can’t smoke a cigarette; after two or three puffs it drops from one’s fingers. The only respite I have is this diary. It relieves me to write of my sufferings; and besides, it is important for the spiritual life. Basil must have the record to read.
I can’t remember dates, though. I don’t even know what year it is. The leaves in the park tell me it is autumn, and the nights are getting longer. The night is better than the day; there is less to irritate. We don’t sleep, of course, we fall into a torpor. Basil told me about it once. He called it the dark night of the soul. One has to go through it on the way to the Great Light.
The light of day is torture. Every sense is an instrument of the most devilish pain. There is no flesh on our bones.
This perpetual craving for H! Our minds are utterly empty of everything else. Rushing into the void come tumbling the words of that abominable poem:
“A bitten and burning snake
Striking its venom within it,
As if it might serve to slake
The pain for the tithe of a minute.”
It is like vitriol being thrown in one’s face. We have no expression of our own. We cannot think. The need is filled by these words. . . .
The impact of light itself is a bodily pain.
“When the sun is a living devil
Vomiting vats of evil,
And the moon and the night but mock
The wretch on his barren rock,
And the dome of heaven high-arched
Like his mouth is and parched,
And the caves of his heart high-spanned
Are choked with alkali sand!”
We are living on water. It seems for the moment to quench the thirst, at least part of it. Peter’s nervous state is very alarming. I feel sure he has delusions.
He got up and staggered to the mantelpiece and leant against it with his arms stretched out. He cried in a hoarse, dry voice:
“Thirst
Not the thirst of the throat,
Though that be the wildest and worst
Of physical pangs that smote
Alone to the heart of Christ,
Wringing the one wild cry
‘I thirst’ from His agony,
While the soldiers drank and diced.”
He thought he was Jesus on the Cross instead of the Dragon, as he really is. It makes me very nervous about him.
When he had finished reciting, his strength suddenly failed him, and he collapsed. The clatter of the fire-irons was the most hideous noise that I had ever heard. . . .
When I can summon up enough strength to write in my diary, the pain leaves me. I see that there are two people here. I, myself, am the Woman clothed with the Sun, writing down my experiences. The other is Lou Pendragon, an animal dying in agony from thirst.
I said the last word aloud, and Peter caught it up.
He crawled away from the grate towards me croaking out,
“Not the thirst benign
That calls the worker to wine;
Not the bodily thirst
(Though that be frenzy accurst)
When the mouth is full of sand,
And the eyes are gummed up, and the ears
Trick the soul till it hears
Water, water at hand,
When a man will dig his nails
In his breast, and drink the blood
Already that clots and stales
Ere his tongue can tip its flood.”
His mind had gone back to infancy. He thought that I was his mother, and came to me to be nursed.
But when he came near, he recognised me and crawled away again, hurriedly, like a wounded animal trying to escape from the hunter. . . .
Most of the time, when we have energy to talk at all, we discuss how to get more H. and C. The C. has been finished long ago. It’s no good without the H. We could go to Germany and get it; or even to London, but something keeps us from decision.
I, of course, know what it is. It is necessary for me to undergo these torments that I may be purified completely from the flesh.
But Peter doesn’t understand at all. He blames me bitterly. We go over the whole thing again and again. Every incident since we met is taken in turn as the cause of our misery.
Sometimes his brutal lust revives in his mind. He thinks I am a vampire sent from Hell to destroy him; and he gloats over the idea. I cannot make him understand that I am the woman clothed with the sun. When he gets those ideas, they arouse similar thoughts in me. But they are only thoughts.
I am afraid of him. He might shoot me in a mad fit. He has got a target pistol, a very old one with long, thin bullets, and carries it about all the time. He never mentions the Germans now. He talks about a gang of hypnotists that have got hold of him, and put evil thoughts in his mind. He says that if he could shoot one of them it would break the spell. He tells me not to look at him as I do; but I have to be on the watch lest he should attack me.
Then he mixes up my hypnotic gaze with ideas of passion. He keeps on repeating:
“Steadily stares and squarely,
Nor needs to fondle and wheedle
Her slave agasp for a kiss,
Hers whose horror is his
That knows that viper womb,
Speckled and barred with black
On its rusty amber scales,
Is his tomb –
The straining, groaning rack
On which he wails – he wails!”
He takes an acute delight in the intensity of his suffering. He is wildly proud to think that he has been singled out to undergo more atrocious torments than had ever been conceived of before.
He sees me as the principal instrument of the torture, and loves me with perverse diabolical lust for that reason, yet the whole thing is a delusion on his part, or else it is a necessary
consequence of his changing into the Dragon.
It is only natural that there should be strange incidents in a case of that sort, especially as it never happened before. It is wonderful and terrible to be unique. But, of course, he is not really unique in the way that I am. . . .
We have lighted a huge fire in the billiard-room. We sleep there so far as we sleep at all. We got the waiter to bring down blankets and quilts from the bedroom, and he leaves the food on the table.
But fires are no good. The cold comes from inside us. We sit in front of the blaze, roasting our hands and faces; but it makes no difference. We shiver.
We try to sing like soldiers round a camp fire, but the only words that come are the appropriate ones. That poem has obsessed us. It fills our souls to the exclusion of everything else except the thirst.
“Every separate bone
Cold, an incarnate groan
Distilled from the icy sperm
Of Hell’s implacable worm.”
We repeated them over and over. . . .
I don’t know how one thing ever turns into another. We are living in an eternity of damnation. It is a mystery how we ever get from the fire to the table or the two big Chesterfields. Every action is a separate agony rising to a climax which never comes. There is no possibility of accomplishment or of peace.
“Every separate nerve
Awake and alert, on a curve
Whose asymptote’s name is ‘never’
In a hyperbolic ‘for ever!’”
I don’t know what some of the words mean. But there is a fascination about them. They give the idea of something without limit. Death has become impossible, because death is definite. Nothing can really ever happen. I am in a perpetual state of pain. Everything is equally anguish. I suppose one state changes into another to prevent the edge being taken off the suffering. It would be incredibly blissful if one could experience something new, however abominable. The man that wrote that poem has left out nothing. Everything that comes into my mind is no more than an echo of his groans.
“Body and soul alike
Traitors turned black-hearted,
Seeking a place to strike
In a victim already attuned
To one vast chord of wound.”
The rhythm of the poem, apart from the words, suggests this moto perpetuo vibration. Yet the nervous irritability tends to exhaust itself as such. It is so unendurable; the only escape seems to be if one could transform it into action. The poison filters through into the blood. I am itching to do something horrible and insane.
“Every drop of the river
Of blood aflame and a-quiver
With poison secret and sour –
With a sudden twitch at the last
Like certain jagged daggers.”
When Peter crosses the room, I see him
“With blood-shot eyes dull-glassed
The screaming Malay staggers
Through his village aghast.”
It is natural and inevitable that he should murder me. I wish he were not so weak. Anything to end it all.
The medical books said that if one didn’t die outright from abstention, the craving would slowly wear off. I think Peter is already a little stronger. But I am so young to die! He complains constantly of vermin under his skin. He says he could bear that; but the idea of being driven mad by the hypnotists is more than any man can be expected to stand. . . .
I felt I should scream if I went on a moment longer; and by scream I don’t mean just an ordinary scream, I mean that I should scream and scream and scream and never stop.
The wind is howling like that. The summer has died suddenly – without a warning, and the world is screaming in agony. It is only the echo of the wailing for my own lost soul. The angels never come to me now. Have I forfeited my position? I am conscious of nothing but this tearing, stabbing, gnawing pain, this restless raging trembling of the body, this malignant groping of a mad surgeon in the open wound of my Soul.
I am so bitter, bitter cold. Yet I can’t stand the room. Peter is lying helplessly on the couch. He follows me about with his eyes. He seems to be afraid that he will be caught out in something. It’s like it was when we had dope. Though we knew we were taking it, offering it to each other openly, yet whenever we took it ourselves, we were afraid lest the other should know.
I think he has something that he wants to hide away, and is trying to get me out of the room so that I shan’t know where he has put it.
Well, I don’t care, I’m not interested in his private affairs. I’ll go out and give him a chance. I’ll hide this book in the magic room, if I have strength to get there. The old man might be able to give me some elixir. I wouldn’t mind if it killed my body; if my spirit were free I could fulfil my destiny. . . .
Just as I closed the book I heard an answering shot. It must have been the door, for the old man has come in. He has a marvellous light in his eyes, and he radiates rainbow colours throughout the world. I understand that my ordeal is over. He stands smiling and points downwards. I think he wants me to go back to the billiard-room. Perhaps there is some one waiting for me; some one to take me away to fulfil my destiny.
I know now what it was that I thought was a shot, or a door closing. It was really both of these things in a mystical sense; for I know now who the old man is, and that he is the father of the Messiah. . . .
Chapter VII
THE FINAL PLUNGE
Sunday
The church bells tell me the day. I have been through another terrible ordeal. I don’t know how long ago since I came down from the north tower. The noise was really a shot. I found Peter on the floor with the pistol by his side, and blood pouring from a wound in his breast.
I understood immediately what I had to do. It was impossible to send for a doctor. The scandal of the suicide would make life impossible ever after, and he would immediately discover that it was due to dope. The burden must be on my own shoulders. I must nurse my boy back to life.
I remember that I had been too weak to walk down from the north tower. I climbed to the balustrades and gasped, and slid myself, sitting, from step to step. I was almost blind, too. My eyes seemed unable to focus on anything.
But the moment I saw what had happened, my strength came back to me, at least, not my strength but the strength of nature. It flowed through me like the wind blowing through a flimsy ragged curtain.
The cartridges were very old, and the powder must have lost its strength; for the bullet turned on his breast bone and ran round the ribs. It was really a trifling wound; but he was so weak that he might have died from loss of blood. I got some water, and washed the wounds, and bound them up as best I could. When the waiter came, I sent him for proper things from the chemist, and some invalid food. For the first time I was glad of the war. My Red-Cross training made all the difference.
There was a little fever, due to his intense weakness, and occasionally he had delirium. The obsession of the poem still enthralled him. While I was dressing the wounds he said feebly and dreamily:
“She it is, she, that found me
In the morphia honeymoon;
With silk and steel she bound me
In her poisonous milk she drowned me,
Even now her arms surround me.”
“Yes,” I said, “but it’s your wife who loves you and is going to nurse you through this trouble, and we’re going to live happy ever afterwards.”
He smiled very faintly and sweetly and dozed off. . . .
Wednesday
I count the days now. We are having an Indian summer. Nature is lovely. I go out for little walks when Peter is asleep.
Friday
There have been no complications, or I should have had to get a doctor in at whatever risk. What troubles me is that as he gets stronger, the delusions of persecution have begun to re
turn. I know now how deeply I was myself obsessed by ideas of grandeur, and how my need to be a mother determined their form.
But is it a delusion that I should be thinking constantly of Basil? I seem to hear him saying that I was cured from the moment that I forgot myself altogether in the absorption of my love for Peter; the work of bringing him back to life.
And now that I have ceased to look at myself and feel for myself, I have become able to see him and feel for him with absolute clearness. There is not the slightest possibility of error.
All the time he has been able to realise dimly that he was slipping down the dark slope to insanity. He has mixed it all up with the idea of me. He had begun to identify me with the phantom of murderous madness which he recognised as destroying him. A look of trouble comes into his face every now and then; and he begins to repeat plaintively in a puzzled voice with his eyes fixed on mine:
“Know you now why her eyes
So fearfully glaze, beholding
Terrors and infamies
Like filthy flowers unfolding?
Laughter widowed of ease,
Agony barred from sadness,
Death defeated of peace,
Is she not madness?”
Over and over again he said it, and over and over again I told him the answer. I had indeed been a personification of the seductress, of the destroying angel. But it had been a nightmare. I had awakened, and he must awake.
But he saw not me any more, but his ideal enveloping me congealed into my form. No matter what I said, his fixed idea became constantly stronger as his physical strength came back.
“She waits for me, lazily leering,
As moon goes murdering moon;
The moon of her triumph is nearing;
She will have me wholly soon.”
The rhythm of the poem was still in my own blood; but it seemed to have worked itself out into another channel. I had forgotten the acute personal anguish of the earlier part of the poem. I could not even remember the lines any more. I was wholly occupied by the last two paragraphs where the subject changes so suddenly.
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