I am constantly aware of the heart beating inside my breast, strongly and resolutely pumping the blood through my veins. Once I read somewhere that when the blood is thin it wants to return whence it came. But my blood is not thin, my blood does not want to fall back. Unbearable reluctance of the blood that will not fall! How many, dying on the scaffold, must have suffered this unspeakable punishment, not to be justified by any penal code.
Yesterday afternoon I lay down on the couch in my living-room. I had scarcely slept at all the previous night and I felt I must rest a little. But I had hardly put my head on the cushions when a voice seemed to shout in my ear: ‘What, are you going to waste an hour with your eyes closed when perhaps this is their last hour for seeing anything?’
I jumped up, and like a demented person, like someone driven by furies, I hurried through the rooms of the house, hurried into the garden and into the fields, straining my eyes to appreciate every detail, straining to store up within my brain the images of all these things which are so soon to be hidden from me for ever. Later on, quite exhausted, I went into the inn for a drink; but no sooner was the glass in my hand than I felt an impulse to throw it away, unwilling to dim even with a single drop of alcohol the sharp vision of what might be the last scene upon which I should ever look.
People were there whom I knew. They laughed and spoke together about the coming summer and what they would do in the long summer days. How could I stay and listen to their talk, knowing that while they are carrying out the plans made so carelessly I shall be far from every activity? And how can I stay at home, either, answering the questions of the gardener about seeds for the summer, and hearing the chatter of my little girl who knows nothing of what is happening to me, and who also talks of the future, of the summer, and of what we will do together?
The hours pass, some slowly, some like flashes of light, but each one leading me inexorably nearer to the end. Incredulous, I watch the hours pass without bringing any reprieve. ‘Isn’t anyone going to do anything, then?’ I want to cry out. ‘Isn’t anything going to happen to save me? They can’t let me be destroyed like this. A message must come to say it was all a mistake. Somebody must do something.’
But no one around me even knows what is going on. Only the dog seems to sense that all is not well with me. And when, just now, unable to bear my sufferings any longer in silence, I whispered to him, ‘Oh, Tige, I’ll soon have to leave you — this dreadful thing is really going to happen to me — nothing will save me now,’ I saw a dimness like tears in his lustrous brown eyes.
THERE IS NO END
‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
Whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend into heaven thou art there.
If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, even there thy hand shall lead me.’
I can’t think properly these days, I find it difficult to remember, but I suppose those words were written about Jehovah, though they apply just as well to my enemy — if that is what I should call him.
‘If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.’ That particular phrase rings in my brain with a horrid aptness: for certainly I have made my bed in hell and certainly he is here with me. He is near all the time although I do not see him. Only sometimes, very early in the morning before it has got light, I seem to catch a glimpse of a half familiar face peering in at the window; but it is always snatched away so quickly that I have no time to recognize it. And just once, one evening, the door of my room was suddenly opened a little way and somebody glanced in through the crack, glanced in, and then passed hurriedly out of sight down the corridor. Perhaps that was he.
Why does he keep his eye on me like this now that he has accomplished his purpose and brought about my destruction? It can’t be to make sure that I don’t escape; oh, no, there’s no possibility of that, he need not have the slightest fear. Is it just to gloat over my ruin? But no, I don’t think that’s the reason, either, for if that were so he would come more often and at times more humiliating to me when I am in the deepest despair.
Somehow I have the impression from those vague glimpses I have caught of his face that it wears a look that is not vindictive, but kindred, almost as though he were related closely to me by some similarity of brain or blood. And of late the idea has come to me — fantastic enough, I admit — that possibly after all he is not my personal enemy, but a sort of projection of myself, an identification of myself with the cruelty and destructiveness of the world. On a planet where there is so much natural conflict may there not very well exist in certain individuals an overwhelming affinity with frustration and death? And may this not result in an actual materialization, a sort of eidolon moving about the world?
I have thought a lot about such matters of late, sitting here and looking out of the window. For, strangely enough, there are windows without bars in this place and doors which are not even locked. Apparently there is nothing to prevent me from walking out whenever I feel inclined. Yet though there is no visible barrier I know only too well that I am surrounded by unseen and impassable walls which tower into the highest domes of the zenith and sink many miles below the surface of the earth.
So it has come upon me, the doom too long awaited, the end without end, the bannerless triumph of the enemy who, after all, appears to be close as a brother. Already it seems to me that I have spent a lifetime in this narrow room whose walls will continue to regard me with secrecy through innumerable lifetimes to come. Is it life, then, or death, stretching like an uncoloured stream behind and in front of me? There is no love here, nor hate, nor any point where feeling accumulates. In this nameless place nothing appears animate, nothing is close, nothing is real; I am pursued by the remembered scent of dust sprinkled with summer rain.
Outside my window there is a garden where nobody ever walks: a garden without seasons, for the trees are all evergreens. At certain times of the day I can hear the clatter of footsteps on the concrete covered ways which intersect the lawns, but the garden is always deserted, set for the casual appreciation of strangers, or else for the remote and solitary contemplation of eyes defeated like mine. In this impersonal garden, all neatness and vacancy, there is no arbour where friends could linger, but only concrete paths along which people walk hurriedly, inattentive to the singing of birds.