第70章 MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE(6)

After all,what had I to live for if the great primal instinct which strives to make whole the half life of lonely manhood is defeated,suppressed,crushed out of existence?Why not as well die in the attempt to break up a wretched servitude to a perverted nervous movement as in any other way?I am alone in the world,--alone save for my faithful servant,through whom I seem to hold to the human race as it were by a single filament.My father,who was my instructor,my companion,my dearest and best friend through all my later youth and my earlier manhood,died three years ago and left me my own master,with the means of living as might best please my fancy.This season shall decide my fate.One more experiment,and Ishall find myself restored to my place among my fellow-beings,or,as I devoutly hope,in a sphere where all our mortal infirmities are past and forgotten.

I have told the story of a blighted life without reserve,so that there shall not remain any mystery or any dark suspicion connected with my memory if I should be taken away unexpectedly.It has cost me an effort to do it,but now that my life is on record I feel more reconciled to my lot,with all its possibilities,and among these possibilities is a gleam of a better future.I have been told by my advisers,some of them wise,deeply instructed,and kind-hearted men,that such a life-destiny should be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others,and especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion,when they are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of the closely connected nervous centres.

For myself I can truly say that I have very little morbid sensibility left with reference to the destiny which has been allotted to me.Ihave passed through different stages of feeling with reference to it,as I have developed from infancy to manhood.At first it was mere blind instinct about which I had no thought,living like other infants the life of impressions without language to connect them in series.In my boyhood I began to be deeply conscious of the infirmity which separated me from those around me.In youth began that conflict of emotions and impulses with the antagonistic influence of which I have already spoken,a conflict which has never ceased,but to which I have necessarily become to a certain degree accustomed;and against the dangers of which I have learned to guard myself habitually.That is the meaning of my isolation.You,young man,--if at any time your eyes shall look upon my melancholy record,--you at least will understand me.Does not your heart throb,in the presence of budding or blooming womanhood,sometimes as if it "were ready to crack"with its own excess of strain?What if instead of throbbing it should falter,flutter,and stop as if never to beat again?You,young woman,who with ready belief and tender sympathy will look upon these pages,if they are ever spread before you,know what it is when your breast heaves with uncontrollable emotion and the grip of the bodice seems unendurable as the embrace of the iron virgin of the Inquisition.Think what it would be if the grasp were tightened so that no breath of air could enter your panting chest!

Does your heart beat in the same way,young man,when your honored friend,a venerable matron of seventy years,greets you with her kindly smile as it does in the presence of youthful loveliness?When a pretty child brings you her doll and looks into your eyes with artless grace and trustful simplicity,does your pulse quicken,do you tremble,does life palpitate through your whole being,as when the maiden of seventeen meets your enamored sight in the glow of her rosebud beauty?Wonder not,then,if the period of mystic attraction for you should be that of agitation,terror,danger,to one in whom the natural current of the instincts has had its course changed as that of a stream is changed by a convulsion of nature,so that the impression which is new life to you is death to him.

I am now twenty-five years old.I have reached the time of life which I have dreamed,nay even ventured to hope,might be the limit of the sentence which was pronounced upon me in my infancy.I can assign no good reason for this anticipation.But in writing this paper I feel as if I were preparing to begin a renewed existence.

There is nothing for me to be ashamed of in the story I have told.

There is no man living who would not have yielded to the sense of instantly impending death which seized upon me under the conditions Ihave mentioned.Martyrs have gone singing to their flaming shrouds,but never a man could hold his breath long enough to kill himself;he must have rope or water,or some mechanical help,or nature will make him draw in a breath of air,and would make him do so though he knew the salvation of the human race would be forfeited by that one gasp.

This paper may never reach the eye of any one afflicted in the same way that I have been.It probably never will;but for all that,there are many shy natures which will recognize tendencies in themselves in the direction of my unhappy susceptibility.Others,to whom such weakness seems inconceivable,will find their scepticism shaken,if not removed,by the calm,judicial statement of the Report drawn up for the Royal Academy.It will make little difference to me whether my story is accepted unhesitatingly or looked upon as largely a product of the imagination.I am but a bird of passage that lights on the boughs of different nationalities.I belong to no flock;my home may be among the palms of Syria,the olives of Italy,the oaks of England,the elms that shadow the Hudson or the Connecticut;Ibuild no nest;to-day I am here,to-morrow on the wing.