Oh, goat-hoofed devil in man, and buffeted aspirant soul! Oh, divine God-man, who art myself, and whom I with my own hands do hourly crucify, whom I do scourge and crown with thorns and spit upon!
Shall a man think thus but once only—shall he feed this burning iron in his breast but one sole time, and then go gaily afield in search of fresh agonies? Even so, and not once again only, but his lifetime through. This is why it is written that though you bray a fool in a mortar among bruised wheat with a pestle, yet will not his folly depart from him.
Bowed earthward, with garments that stink of rain-soaked dye drying in the sunshine, with swollen features and boots that suck at the flagstones, bristled and bloated and bleared, I go by you. Had I never a concupiscence for honour? Is there no Christ-half that walks within me towards the place of rottenness and dead men’s bones?
Back to the vision again, not merely remembering, but living it all.
Sick nausea, rising faintly yet heavily on the senses, swimming upward, as it were, along with a half-drowned rebeginning of life and the cognizance of things; deep loathing, and eyes like new-cast musket-balls for heat and weight; a frowsy air; a mouth like burned leather lined with vile odours. Forget it all in a mere instinct of distaste. Sink down with the sick wave. Swim down the sick wave in floating circles. Sway here and swing there at the bottom of the whirlpool, and up again towards the light which heaves slowly on the eye as it used to do at the upward turn after a dive, when the sunlight shone through the yellow water of the lock. Then on a sudden—daylight; and then, like a bursting shell on the brain, the truth.
No use for the incredulous oath that the truth is false.
‘My God! it isn’t—it can’t be!’
It can be—and it is. It has been, and no mere episode of an eternity will wipe it out or can undo it There is the dirty blind torn away from one corner of the roller; there is the peeling paper on the wall, and the wall leprous where the paper has fallen away from it. Here, under his cheek, is the yellow malodorous pillow.
The sick brain cannot think; the foul mouth seems to taste of his own soiled soul.
And the woman, when he turns his leaden head, lying there, flushed—a girl of the bestial-handsome sort, with a smear of wet black hair on her brow, and a sensuous mouth, spurting breath like the lips of a swimmer half under water.