CHAPTER XXXIII

About this time, influenced by Amiel, whom I had come across in Mrs. Humphry Ward’s translation, I had begun to keep a diary, or journal, of my “sensations and ideas.” I unearthed it the other day, with the paper time-staled as the sensations, and the ink faded as the ideas. On reading it over I found it so unbalanced, so one-sided, that I can scarce quote a passage as really expressive of what I actually was. It expresses only what I was when I sat down to write my journal, and I never appear to have done this except when I was in a particularly unhealthy mood. Some of this journal is descriptive, some of it merely notes certain thoughts that came to me and that I evidently, the Lord knows why, imagined worthy of preservation. A single entry, the description of a dream, will, I fancy, give an idea of the whole.

“Last night I went out and wandered about the streets for a while, and when I came home I went straight to bed. I did not go to sleep for a long time. I remember hearing the clock strike two, and when I awoke it was just four, but of course I cannot really tell how long my dream lasted.

“I was in a room with some people I knew very well. My father was there, and Aunt Margaret and Uncle George. I was laughing at something, I cannot remember what, only that it had to do with a question of religion, when suddenly the figure of Christ appeared, in a long, purple, velvet robe――a slight figure, with narrow effeminate face, pointed beard, and a soft treacherous expression in the slanting eyes. Everybody in the room except myself fell on their knees in fear, but I stood still. He watched me and then came closer, holding out his pierced hands and making the sign of the cross. He did not speak, but I knew what he meant, and I detested him. He drew still nearer and still I would not kneel. My defiance filled me with a mingled fear and exultation, and, as he was about to touch me, I cried out, invoking Satan, offering myself to him. A horrible look of baffled rage and malice distorted the face of the Christ. Outside a storm was raging and the wide window was a black square. With a shrill scream the Christ vanished, and a man, naked, superb, the colour of dark, greenish bronze, shot through the window as though propelled by some invisible force. (From this on, an undertone of strange music floated through my dream, rising and falling with the rise and fall of my emotions.)

“The face of this dark angel was beautiful and proud. His forehead was broad and low and slightly overhanging, giving him a stern and brooding expression, but although I was afraid of him I loved him, and felt an irresistible longing to put myself in his power. We were now alone together in the room, which had suddenly grown dark, and he seized me. I struggled, but in his grasp I was helpless as a young bird in the clutches of a boy. He stripped me naked and rubbed my body over with some kind of ointment that left no mark. And somehow I knew he was going to send me down into hell, and that after a while I should return again to earth, but that I should be his for ever.

“‘I shall not be tortured?’ I asked him, and he answered in a deep voice, ‘There are no tortures such as you are thinking of.’

“‘When I come back,’ I said, ‘I shall have forgotten all I saw there; I shall think I have been only dreaming. Can you not mark me in some way?’

“He placed me in front of the mirror that was at one end of the room, and which seemed to shine in the dark as with fire. And in the glass I saw over my right breast a red flush, and upon this a white streak, broad and long as his fore-finger. He took my hand, and suddenly the room I was in seemed to be dropping. Down and down it rushed, so rapidly that the walls glowed red hot, but because of the ointment with which I had been covered I felt nothing. And we seemed to be sinking down through a bottomless sea that hissed in steam against the walls. Then the speed increased a thousandfold and I lost consciousness.

“I do not know what interval had elapsed, but it was evening and I was back again in the room, our parlour at home. My father was kneeling down and calling upon me in desperation to pray to God before it was too late――to pray――to pray. But I would not pray. Mrs. Carroll was there and she was crying. Then a voice said aloud above our heads, ‘It was all only a dream,’ and for a little we believed this; and then all at once I knew the voice was lying. My father read in my face what was passing in my mind, and his own face grew white as paper. But I knew; and I exulted and wept at the same moment. I tore away my shirt from my breast. ‘Look――look! It is his mark!’

“A loud cry rang through the room, and I awoke, bathed in perspiration, to the silence and darkness of night. I could hear George breathing quietly in his sleep. Then I got up and lit the gas and looked to see if the mark were indeed there upon my breast, but there was nothing.”

* * * * *

Could I have been mentally, morally, even physically, well when I had this dream? Childish and foolish, perhaps, it had at the time an intensity the effect of which lingered on long after I had awakened. There is something disquieting in the thought that so slender a veil should separate the world of order and sanity from a world of disorder and delirium such as my eyes were opened to then. Yet that other world is always there, waiting, and the veil may be torn at any moment, letting tongues of the dreadful, flaming light shoot through. The Christ of my dream was not a blasphemous creation of my own mind, but a sort of distorted memory of one or two pictures in a book about Byzantine wall-paintings I had looked at years before. The main fact, however, psychologically, is, I suppose, the fact that I kept a journal at all. Probably what was at the bottom of it was an idea of confession which now haunted me. It came to me in several relations. I thought of Owen, thought it was my duty to tell him everything about myself, and that in this way we might make our friendship perfect. At other times I feared that instead of doing this it might do just the opposite. I was not sure, either, what my motive really was――whether it really proceeded from a sense of duty, or only from a desire of personal relief. It was strange that while in many respects I continued to have an exaggerated opinion of myself, I should yet have been so frequently visited just now by hours of despondency, when I imagined my life as already irretrievably doomed to failure. I did not look upon myself as an ordinary person, or the crisis through which I was passing as an ordinary crisis. I began to ponder over the meaning of sin and damnation, and I figured this latter quality as a condition of mind which attracts evil, and from which no evil can be hidden. When I was with Owen my troubles grew fainter, and even disappeared. Mentally, morally, he had upon me much the same effect as, physically, a draught of fresh air would have had, after long confinement in a stifling atmosphere. I admired him; I envied him his freedom from all that made my own life just now so difficult. I discussed the question of free will with him, but I no more believed in it than did my Arabian Nights heroes. I was as closely imprisoned in my own physical temperament as a rat in a trap. And if I were to die? For the first time it dawned upon me that one might pass into a spiritual world as dark and dreadful as any I had ever seen in a dream. With this appalling thought it occurred to me that a priest might be the best person to confess to, and I began to consider to whom I could go.