3
Saunders has an exasperating habit of stopping in the middle of a story, and behaving as though it were finished. He did this now. I reminded him that I was still listening.... No, I haven’t done yet, he admitted. I thought that was the end, but it was only the beginning of poor Bellingham’s troubles. You must imagine me now as popping in and out of his home pretty often. Those two remote rooms, like a fantastic nest built among London chimney-pots, attracted me by the romance they symbolized, by their air of being an idyllic peasant cottage, exquisitely clean, stuck away in the heart of the metropolis. Bellingham sent another urgent summons to me. It was the first of a series of alarms. The haunting began. The dreams that, every few nights, made Bellingham’s sleep a thing of terror began now to invade his waking life. The Watching Eye was upon him, the eye of God, he declared it to be, trying to subdue him to submission. He heard a voice that said to him, ‘Put the woman from you.’ In short, he exhibited all the signs of incipient madness. At the time I thought it was indeed madness which threatened him. With one of his frantic telegrams in my hand—‘I have seen God’ or ‘He is come again in judgment’—what else could I think? Yet I still believed that together he and I, with the courageous co-operation of Joan herself, might fend off the danger. She, poor girl, was tearful but invincibly staunch. She would have sacrificed herself utterly for him, whom she loved with an unshakable devotion; but I persuaded her that her going away, as she suggested, would not ease the situation. You will think me fanciful, no doubt, but sometimes I felt that Bellingham was fighting for his soul against some usurping demon, and that anything—death or damnation—was better than base surrender. And Bellingham, though he took a very different view of the nature of the contest, came to agree with my conclusion. He rejected my proposition but embraced the corollary. He conceived himself fighting against impossible odds, with no less than God, the Might and Majesty of the universe, as his implacable antagonist. ‘I tell you, Saunders,’ he said to me, ‘I saw Him plainly. He stood over there by my desk. He has incarnated Himself once more in order to crush my revolt.’ I passed over the almost maniacal egoism of the conception, and asked for a description of the Divine Visitor. ‘His body was all in strong shadow,’ Bellingham answered, shuddering at the recollection. ‘Only His terrible eyes were visible, and His accusing finger that pointed at me.’
I had respected Bellingham ever since I had come to know him; and now, if I respected his intelligence less, I felt something more than admiration for the indomitable spirit of the man. His unshaken belief that he was defying his Creator made fidelity to Joan a piece of titanic courage. Beset by horrors unspeakable, conscious that the citadel of his very reason was being stormed, he yet held doggedly to his determination. Doggedly at first, and afterwards with a sublime pride that I could not witness without an answering pride, a flaming exultation in the splendour of the human soul. Maniac or not, he extorted willing homage from me. You may say what you like about hallucination and the rest of it, but I tell you that to me, an eye-witness, the battle was lifted into the realm of cosmic drama where everything takes on a significance past mortal understanding but not past mortal apprehension. I thought of Job; I thought of Prometheus; and I thought of Bellingham as no mean third, championing life against death, championing youth, beauty, and all frail humanity, against the cruel bogey of the mind that menaced them. It goes without saying that his terrors derived all their power from his belief in their reality. He was blind to the plain facts of real religion, deaf to my rationalizing explanations of the horror that haunted him, obstinate in his conviction that God, and none other, was the author and agent of his persecution. Equally convinced was he that he had but to cast Joan out and he would save his soul alive. Every week saw a change in his physical condition. That brief period of his second blooming, fostered by the sweet presence and the maternal care of Joan, seemed over for ever; it was as if the seven years of spiritual famine were now to follow. He grew more gaunt, more haggard; vitality shrunk into him like a pent prisoner and peered out through those fiery orbs, his eyes, as through the mean windows of a condemned cell. He was locked fast in an impregnable isolation, from which no one could rescue him, it seemed, certainly not I, either by force or guile. He distrusted his food; he distrusted the men and women who passed him in the street. There were only two human souls he did not distrust: Joan herself was one, and I, by the mercy of heaven, was the other. He began to see a vast and sinister significance in all sorts of trivial events, all sorts of minor disasters that did not in the least concern any one of us, seeing in them the beginning of a cosmic disintegration that should engulf him in perdition. He was afraid yet defiant of these fatalities. He was both egomaniacal and illogical in his conviction that God, his implacable adversary, would behave like the veriest villain of melodrama rather than let him escape: tear the universe to tatters in order to compass the death or the dishonour of this one rebellious spirit, like a man who should pull his own house about his ears in the pursuit of a solitary rat. I myself began to scan the papers anxiously for wars and rumours of wars. Different as were our intellectual convictions, there was the stark comradeship between us of those who face death together. He watched for signs of God; Joan and I, with equal vigilance, watched him. And the stronger grew my affection for Bellingham, the shakier my own nerves became. Finally, with a kind of exultation, I threw up all my work—I was a curate at the time—and flung myself body and soul into this holy war. I found lodgings near Bellingham’s, and visited him every day without fail. I felt that this fretting, this piling of horror upon horror, could not go on much longer. Sooner or later there would be a crisis; the increasing tension would snap. Mingled with my fear for Bellingham’s sanity was a fear for the safety of Joan, caged up with a maniac. For a week or more we worried and waited.