[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

between two mountain chains. It is
necessary, in this world, to be made of
harder stuff than one's environment. But
Iliel had no ambition to any action; she was
reflex; simple reaction to impression was
what she thought her will. And so she
inflicted phantasies upon the patient fold
about her; one day she was all for dressing
herself strangely; another day she would
insist upon a masque or a charade; but she
took no true pleasure in any of these
things. Cyril Grey was assiduous in meeting
her desires; [253] there were but two
prohibitions left of all the elaborate
restrictions of the second stage of the
experiment; she might not be unduly
intimate with him, and she might not in any
way communicate with the outside world.
In other words, the citadel and the
ramparts must be kept intact; between
these was a wide range for whim. Yet she
was not content; it was just those two
forbidden things that haunted her. (The
serpent is a later invention in the story of
the Fall!) Her unconscious wish to violate
these rules led to a dislike for those who
personified their rigidity; namely Cyril Grey
and Brother Onofrio. And her febrile mind
began to join these separate objects in a
common detestation.
This shewed itself in a quite insane
jealousy of their perfectly natural and
necessary intimacy. Sometimes, as they sat
sunning themselves upon the wall of one of
the terraces she would come flaming down
the garden with some foolish tale, and
Brother Onofrio at least could not wholly
hide his annoyance. He was naturally
anxious to make all he could out of the
presence of the more advanced adept; and
his inborn ecclesiastical contempt for
women showed through the tissue of his
good manners. Cyril's most admirable
patience tried her even more sorely. "Are
you my lover or my grandfather?" she
screamed at him one night, when he had
been more than usually tactful.
Had the matter rested there, it had
been ill enough with her. But the mind of
man is a strange instrument. "Satan finds
some mischief still for idle hands to do" is a
rattling good piece of psychology. Iliel had
nothing to occupy her mind, because she
had never trained herself to concentrate
the current of her thoughts on one thing,
and off all others. A passion for crochet-
work has saved many a woman from the
streets or the river. And as on marshes
[254] methane forms, and Will o' th' Wisp
lures peasants to their oozy doom, so in the
idle mind monsters are bred. She began to
suffer from a real insanity of the type of
persecution-mania. She began to imagine
that Cyril and Brother Onofrio were
engaged in some mysterious plot against
her. It was lucky that every one in the
house possessed medical knowledge and
training, with specialization in psychology,
so that they knew precisely how to treat
her.
Yet in the long run that very knowledge
became a danger. The extraordinary powers
of mind -- in certain limited directions --
which insanity often temporarily confers,
enabled her to see that she was regarded as
in a critical mental state. She accepted the
situation as a battle, instead of co-
operating in frank friendship, and began to
manoeuvre to outwit her guardians. Those
who have any experience of madness, or its
congeners, drug-neuroses, know how
infernally easy was her task. Many's the
woman who, with her pocket handkerchief
to her face, and the tears pouring from her
eyes, has confessed all to the specialist,
and begged him to break her of the whisky
habit, the while she absorbed a pint or so of
the said whisky under cover of the said
pocket handkerchief.
Iliel simply noted the states of mind
which they thought favourable, and
simulated them. Peaceful absorption in
nature, particularly in the moon when she
was shining, pleased them; and she
cultivated these states, knowing that the
others never disturbed her at such times;
and, thus secured, she gave herself over to
the most hideous thoughts.
They were in fact the thoughts of
madness. It is a strange fact that the most
harmless states of mind, the most correct
trains of idea, may accompany a dangerous
lunacy. The difference is that the madman
makes a secret of his fancies. Lord
Dunsany's [255] stories are the perfect
prose jewels of a master cutter and
polisher, lit by the rays of an imagination
that is the godlike son of the Father of All
Truth and Light; but if he kept them to
himself, they would be the symptoms of an
incurable lesion of the brain. A madman
will conceal the Terrible Secret that "today
is Wednesday," perhaps "because the devil
told him to do so." "I am He who is Truth"
was the boast of a great mystic, Mansur,
and they stoned him for it, as they stone all
men who speak truth; but had he said
"Hush! I am God!" he would have been
merely a maniac.
So Iliel acquired the habit of spending a
great part of the day in her cradle, and
there indulging her mind in every possible
morbidity. The very fact that she could not
go on to action served to make the matter
worse. It is a terrible error to let any
natural impulse, physical or mental,
stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be
done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of
the system; but do not allow it to remain
there and putrefy. The suppression of the
normal sex instinct, for example, is
responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan
countries one inevitably finds a morbid
preoccupation with sex coupled with every
form of perversion and degeneracy.
Addiction to excess of drink, and to the
drug habits, which are practically unknown
in Latin countries, increase one's admiration
at the Anglo-Saxon temperament.
Thus also Iliel's stagnant mind bred
fearsome things. Hour after hour, the
pageant of diseased thoughts passed
through the shadowy gulfs of her chaotic
spirit. Actual phantoms took shape for her,
some seductive, some menacing; but even
the most hideous and cruel symbols had a
fierce fascination for her. There was a stag-
beetle, with flaming eyes, a creature as big
as an elephant, with claws in constant
motion, that threatened her continually.
[256] Horribly as this frightened her, she
gloated on it, pictured its sudden plunge
with those ghastly mandibles upon her
flanks. Her own fatness was a source of
curious perverse pleasure to her; one of her
favourite reveries was to imagine herself
the centre of a group of cannibals, watch
them chop off great lumps from her body,
and seethe them in the pot, or roast them
on a spear, hissing and dripping blood and
grease, upon the fire. In some insane or
atavistic confusion of mind this dream was
always recognized as being a dream of love.
And she understood, in some sub-current of
thought, why Suffragettes forced men to
use violence upon them; it is but a
repressed sexual instinct breaking out in
race-remembrance of marriage by capture.
But more dangerous even than such
ideas were many which she learned to
group under a name which one of them
gave her. It was not a name that one can
transcribe in any alphabet, but it was
exactly like a very short slight cough, hardly
more than a clearing of the throat, a quite [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]