Maud wondered ifWillie’s anger at her departure from the Order was not intensified in that what he really felt was relief. The Lady in Grey seemed to have her own bond with the poet, and though Maud could sense nothing of their interaction, she knew well by now the Lady’s cruel streak and knew that Willie would be offered no kindness from that quarter.
One night, years after the birth of Iseult,Maud dreamed. A powerful spirit, represented as a towering figure of light, stood beside her bed, beckoning her to follow.Maud rose obediently, and was led into a great throng of spirits, each a living flame possessed of a human shape. Her guide stopped and placed her hand into that of another spirit. When their hands met, Maud saw that the spirit was Willie Yeats.
“You are married now,”th e great spirit said, and Maud knew it was true.
Then the Lady in Grey, her voice filled with mocking laughter, her flame cold and blue, spoke from among the gathered spirits, “And a great lot of good it will do you.”
Maud looked where the Lady pointed and saw that though elsewhere Willie glowed with a pure clear light, the area about his groin was dark and cold.
“You have castrated him,”said the Lady in Grey, “for he loves only you, and though he tries to take other lovers, his virility fails him. Now he convinces himself he lives celibate because his love is the pure love of old, but his heart knows the bitter truth.”
WILLIE
Willie awoke with a vision of Maud kissing him, her form fading from his sight as if the real woman was slowly stepping back. Unlike those erotic dreams he had had of her—and they were legion—this simple kiss left him with no sense of guilt or defilement.
He whistled as he went about his shaving, and went to meet Maud with a light heart. They had plans to spend the day together, visiting old Fenian leaders and learning what they might for the cause.
Maud greeted him with an odd question.
“Had you a strange dream last night?”
Emboldened by his curious contentment, Willie replied, “I dreamed this morning for the first time in my life that you kissed me.”
Maud said nothing to this, but turned the conversation to some mundane matter, but all the day her mood was strange. They dined together that evening and, as Willie was about to take his leave, Maud said suddenly, “Let me tell you what happened. Last night I dreamed a great spirit brought me to you and told me we were married.”
Willie hardly knew what to say, and while he was struggling for words,Maud leaned forward and for the first time in their long association kissed him on the mouth. She left him then, and as he walked back to his hotel he imagined that finally she would be his.
And then we will win over you at last, he said in thought to the Lady in Grey.
But when morning came, and Willie went to Maud, he found her cast in as deep a gloom as he had ever seen.
“I should not have spoken to you that way last night,”Maud said, not looking away from the leaping flames of the fire, “for I can never be your wife.”
“Is there someone else?”h e asked, thinking of rumors he had heard.
“There was,”sh e replied, “and there is still, in a way. Sit with me.
There is much I should have told you long ago.”
Willie took the chair she indicated, and found himself unable to look at her. Instead, he gazed into the flames as Maud told him the truth behind things he had heard rumored and refused to believe. She told him of her French lover, of the son who had died, of the daughter who still lived.
As he listened, his heart twisted in him, and his world shifted around him, for her tone left no doubt that she spoke the truth.Willie had always accepted that others would love his Maud. How could they not? It was harder to accept that she had loved another, and how badly that other had used her.
Without a pause, Maud went from these recent sins to tell him about her belief that she had been responsible for her father’s death. At last she ended, facing him for the first time in all that long narration.
“Having done what I have done, having been what I have been, how could you marry me? You would never forget. Better, perhaps, that I should have left you to your grand romance and the poetry you make of it, but I thought I owed you truth instead.”
Her gaze dropped, and Willie realized that somehow she knew of the curse put on him by the Lady in Grey, and that she hoped that her honesty would free him—as he realized that her dishonesty had bound him, for the idealized image of herself was what linked them both to the Lady in Grey.
Yet Willie felt no stirring in his loins, though Maud’s lovely eyes were upon him. He knew that at this moment Maud would lie with him, even though she would not marry him. He felt no desire, only wrung out and weary—not from the truth Maud had offered him, but because he finally realized that though he might ask a hundred times more,Maud would never accept him.
She fears you, came the voice of the Lady in Grey, for you offer her a contentment that would rob her of her desire to act—and without action how can she redeem herself?
“I leave her then,”W illie said, and he hardly knew whether he spoke aloud or not, “to you and redemption.”
And without another word, he rose and walked out the door.
He knew, however, that Maud had only to speak and he would return, over and over again, until at last death did them part.
A Drop of
Something Special
in the Blood
BY FRED SABERHAGEN
M onday, 16 J uly, 1888—
The dream again, last night. I shall continue to call these visitations dreams, as the London specialist very firmly insisted upon doing, and it is at his urging that I begin this private record of events. As to the “dream”itself, I can only hope and pray that in setting it down on paper I may be able to exorcise at least a portion of the horror.
I awoke—or so I thought—in an unmanly state of fear, at the darkest hour of the night.
As before, the impression (whether true or not) that I had come wide-awake, was very firm. There was no confusion as to where I was; I immediately recognized, by the faint glow of streetlights coming in round the edges of the window curtain, the room in which I had lain down to sleep, in this case a somewhat overdecorated bedchamber in an overpriced Parisian hotel.
For a moment I lay listening, in a strange state of innocent anticipation. It was as if my certain memory of what must inexorably follow was for the moment held in abeyance. But that state lasted for a few breaths only. In the next instant, memory returned with a rush. There was a faint sound at the window; and I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt what I must see when I turned my gaze in that direction. She was standing there, of course, just inside the window. In my last coherent thoughts before falling asleep, I had begun to hope (absurdly, I suppose, whatever the true cause may be) that the visitations could not have followed me from London.
In the poor light it was as difficult as on the previous occasions to be sure of the color of her long curls of hair, but I thought they might be as red as my own were in my youth. The long tresses fell to her waist round her voluptuous body, that was otherwise only partially concealed by a simple shift or gown.
Though the moonlight was behind her, I thought that her slight figure threw no shadow on the floor. In spite of that, hers was a most carnal and unspiritual appearance. Plainly I could see her brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of her full lips.
A tremendous longing strove against a great fear in my heart . . . I knew, as had happened on every previous occasion, a burning desire that she would kiss me with those red lips . . .
It is difficult for me to note these things down, lest someday this page should fall under the gaze of one I love, and cause great pain. (Florence, forgive me, if you can! Will I ever embrace you again?) But it is the truth, even if only a true account of a strange dream, and I must hope that the truth will set me free.
I have not yet learned my nocturnal visitor’s name—assuming that the woman i
s real enough to have one. Perhaps I should call her “the girl,”for she seems very young. As she approached my bed last night she laughed . . . such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound could never have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water glasses when played on by a cunning hand . . .
Overcome by a strange helplessness, I had closed my eyes. The girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but could see out perfectly under the lashes. The girl bent over me, and I had the sense that she was fairly gloating. She actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and bearded chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat . . . I could feel the hot breath on my neck, and the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer—nearer . . . the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.
Suddenly she straightened, and her head turned as if listening for some distant but all-important sound. As if released from a spell, I moved as if to spring out of the bed, but in the instant before the motion could be completed, she bent over me again. The touch of her fingers on my arm seemed to drain the strength from all my limbs, and I sank back helplessly.
“So sweet is your blood,my little Irishman. I think there is a drop of something special in it,”the apparition murmured. In my confused state, the idea that this diminutive visitor might call my large frame “little”dr ew from my lips a burst of foolish laughter.
In response, the girl laughed again, a sound of ribald coquetry, and bent over me to accomplish her purpose.
Then the truth, or what seemed the truth, of what was happening overcame me, and I sank down in a delirium of unbearable horror and indescribable delight commingled, until my senses failed me.
ODDLY ENOUGH, my faint, if such it was, passed seamlessly into a deep and restful sleep, and I slept well until the street sounds of Paris, some cheerful and some angry, below my window, brought me round at almost ten o’clock.
My awakening this morning was slow and almost painful, and it was difficult to fight free of a persistent heaviness clinging to all my limbs. A single spot of dried blood, half the size of my little finger’s nail, stained the pillow, not three as on certain unhappy mornings in the recent past. In London I had independent confirmation (from a hotel maid) that the stains themselves are real, which at the time afforded me inordinate relief.
This morning, as before, an anxious examination in a mirror disclosed on my throat, just where I felt the pressure of lips and teeth, near the lower border of my full beard, the same ambiguous evidence—two almost imperceptible red spots, so trivial that in ordinary circumstances no one would give them a moment’s thought. I cannot say it is impossible that the small hemorrhage had issued from them, but it might as easily have come from nostril, mouth, or ear.
I take some comfort in the fact that if anyone in the world can help me, it is the physician I have come to Paris to see—Jean-Martin Charcot, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on locomotor ataxia, as well as hypnotism.Whether he can possibly help me, either in his character as mesmerist, or as expert in neuropathy, is yet to be discovered. If Charcot can help, in one capacity or the other, he must. If he cannot, I tremble for my very life. I have already gone past the point of fearing for my sanity.
I must force myself to write down what I have been avoiding until now, the evil I fear the most. If the girl has no objective reality, then mental horrors that I endure are sheer delusion, and the precursor of much worse to come, of an absolute mental and physical ruin. I am in the grip of a loathsome and shameful disease, contracted years ago—if that is so, then what is left of my life will not be worth the living. I only pray God that the source of my agony may not be syphilis. It is only with difficulty that I can force myself to pen the word on this white page—but there, it is done.
As far as I know, or the world knows, there is no cure. The more advanced physicians admit that the current standard of treatment, with potassium iodide, has been shown to be practically worthless. I know the early symptoms (alas, from my own case) and have seen the full horror of the tertiary stage expressed in the bodies of other men. Delusions are frequently a part of that catastrophe.
But the beast takes many forms. The first symptom of the last stage, sometimes appearing decades after the first, local signs of infection have passed away, tends to be a weakening or total loss of the ankle and knee reflex. In succeeding months and years the patient’s ability to walk, and even to stand normally, slowly declines. Sometimes in medical description the initials GPI are used, standing for general paralysis of the insane, the most dreaded late manifestation. The effects on the brain are varied, but include delusions, loss of memory, sometimes violent anger. Disorientation, incontinence, and convulsions occur often. Tabes dorsalis (also known as locomotor ataxia) is the commonest symptom of infection in the spinal cord.Others include darting attacks of intense pain in the legs and hips, difficult urination, numbness in hands or feet, a sense of constriction about the waist, an unsteadiness in walking—all capped by a loss of sexual function.
So far I have experienced only the delusions—if such they are. Horrible as that fate would be, I believe this current torture of uncertainty is even worse. I will go mad if Heaven does not grant me an answer soon.
(LATER)—I find it a source of irritation that I will not be presenting myself, openly and honestly from the beginning, to Charcot as a sufferer in need of help, but only as a visiting “celebrity.”I n the latter category I of course shine solely by the reflected light of my employer. No one here has shown the least awareness of my own small literary efforts; and I would not be surprised to learn that no Parisian has ever read Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland.
This concealment of my true purpose is, to a certain extent, dishonesty on my part. But when I consider the unfortunate publicity that might otherwise result, and the risk of harm to others if my condition were widely known, it seems to me the role of honor must include a measure of dishonesty. Desperate though my situation is, I wish to meet Charcot and form my own estimate of the man and his methods (which some denounce, perhaps out of jealousy), before committing myself completely into his hands.
EVENING: TODAY I HAVE seen and heard that which frightened me anew, but also that which gives me hope. Let me set down the events of the afternoon as quickly and calmly as I can, before the memory of even the smallest detail has begun to fade.
First, let me state my key discovery: The girl is real! Real, and, to my utter astonishment, a patient of Charcot’s!
I was certain, from the moment today when our eyes met in the hospital, that she knew me as instantly and surely as I knew her. I suppose I need not try to describe the hideous shock I suffered upon rec- ognizing her among the inmates. There can be no possibility of a mistake, though in the filtered daylight her teeth appeared quite small and ordinary.
I was certain that she knew me from the moment when our eyes met, and I had the odd impression that she might even have been expecting me.
We were standing close together in the treatment room, one of the stops on what I suppose must be the regular tour afforded distinguished visitors.Her whisper was so soft that I am certain no one but I could hear it. But I could read her lips with perfect ease. “It is my little Irishman!”A nd then she licked them with her soft, pink tongue
BUT I SHOULD set down the afternoon’s ev
ents in their proper order. The hospital, La Salpêtriére, sprawls over several acres of land not far from the botanic gardens, and houses several thousand patients, nearly all women. (The Bicêtre, nearby, is reserved for men.)
The famous doctor is now about sixty years of age, of small stature but imposing appearance. I have heard it said that he is pleased to exaggerate his natural resemblance to Napoléon . . . he is pale, clean-shaven with straight black hair only lightly tinged with grey, a firm mouth, and dark melancholy eyes that seem to remember some ancient loss.
Our tour began in what seemed routine fashion. Charcot called several patients (by their given names only), and brought them forward one at a time to demonstrate the symptoms of their illness and the means he used to treat it. His comments were terse and to the point.Whatever could not be helped by the power of suggestion must be the result of heredity, and nothing could be done about it.
I paid little attention to the mysterious girl when she first appeared, as routinely as any of the others, called out of her private room, or perhaps I should say cell. Her long, red hair, which first caught my eye, was bound up in a cap, from which a few strands of bright coppery red escaped, and she was decently clad, like the other patients, in a plain hospital robe. I did not even look closely at her until I heard her voice.
Charcot was pronouncing his accented English in forceful tones. “Lucy, this gentleman has come from England to visit us today. He is a famous man in London, business manager of the Lyceum Theater.”
Lucy—that is the only name by which I have heard her called—responded to the doctor’s questions in English bearing almost the same flavor of Ireland as does my own. From Charcot’s first remarks regarding her, it was clear that she has been his patient for only a few days.With a casual question I confirmed that she had been admitted on the very day of my own arrival in Paris.
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