The House of Defence v. 1

by E. F. Benson

Maud shook her head. She knew quite well it would be perfectly idle to suggest such a thing to Thurso, and, indeed, to her sense, too, there was something unthinkable about calling into play the power that rules the world in order to cure neuralgia. Besides, the poppy-juice, though she did not wholly like his taking it, would do that. The other was like cracking your egg for breakfast with a steam-hammer.

“Oh, thank you very much,” she said, “but his medicine always puts him right.”

And she instantly turned the conversation to the subject he had suggested, and spoke of certain pools in the river which he had found difficulty in fishing satisfactorily.

Thurso, meantime, half blind with pain, had almost run to his room, for he longed for the relief which awaited him there as the desert-parched traveller longs for water. And keenly as he desired the cessation of pain, much more keenly did he thirst for the ecstatic sense of well-being that the drug produced. All day, even before this racking neuralgia came on, he had been almost unable to think of anything but that. He had thirsted all day for that stimulated consciousness, that huge, vivid sense of happiness, which already seemed to him the proper, normal level of life. Already, too, he was beginning to be dishonest with himself, just as yesterday he had been dishonest with Maud; and even as he poured it out he told himself, knowing it was untrue, that he would not be taking it if Mr. Cochrane had not been dining with them. It was inhospitable and impossible to send him away five minutes after dinner; it was equally impossible that he should spend the evening alone with Maud. And though that, so far as it went, was true, it was not the essential truth.

He took the glass in his hand, torturing himself, now that relief was near and assured, with voluntary delay, even as the caged beast which has been roaring for its meat sits fierce and snarling when it has been given it before it begins to assuage the hunger-pangs which it now knows it can satisfy, and deliberately prolonged for a moment more this stabbing pain. He sat down in an easy-chair, and put his feet up on another, in order to make himself quite comfortable before he drank it. His room looked north-west, and they had dined early, so that the sun still shone in at his window, flooding the room in cool crystal light. Then he drank.

Inside his head during this last hour he felt as if a sort of piston-rod from a cylinder had been making firm strokes onto some bleeding, mangled nerve. The end of the piston-rod was fitted sometimes with a blunt hammer, so that it crushed the nerve, sometimes with a sharp needle-point which went deeper, and seemed to penetrate the very home and heart of pain. Then perhaps the piston-rod would cease for a few seconds, while an iron-toothed, rusty rake collected the smashed fragments of nerve together again, so that the hammer should not fail to hit them squarely, and made a neat little pyramid of the pieces on the place where it would descend. This raking together (the image was so vivid to him that he almost believed that it actually took place) was about the worst part. He knew that in a minute the hammer would begin again. But now, a few moments only after he had taken his dose, the change began. Though the hammer did not cease to fall, its blows no longer produced pain. They produced instead a warm, tingling sensation, like that which the hand feels when it spreads out icy fingers to a friendly blaze. And that tingling warmth felt its way gradually through his head, passed down his neck, and slowly flooded body and limbs to toe and finger tip. He forgot what pain meant; he was unable to realise even before the piston-rod ceased to beat what it connoted, knowing only what the oncoming of this tide of physical bliss was like.

Every sense, too, was quickened and stimulated. The sun that still shone in at his windows burned with a ruddier and more mellow light. The glory of it was soft but incredibly brilliant, and to his quickened sense of smell the air that came in through the open sash was redolent with the honey-scent of warm heather. The blind had been a little drawn down over the top of the window, but whereas, when he was dressing for dinner an hour ago, the sound of it flapping against the frame was a fretting and irritating thing, it now seemed to him to give out flute-like and vibrating notes, while the taste of the cigarette which he had lit five minutes ago, and brought up with him, had a flavour new and exquisite. The present moment, and the sensations of it, were all quickened into the vividness of dream-life, while it was but vaguely that he remembered that downstairs Maud was sitting with a very pleasant American fellow who had come to dinner. At dinner he remembered, but again vaguely, that he was not sure if he liked him; now he appeared to be the most charming of companions. But with the gates of Paradise here upstairs flung wide for his reception, he could not fix his mind very clearly on him. No doubt, if he made an effort, he could recall more about him, and remember his name, which just now eluded him; but an effort was the one thing he certainly would not make, since it might disturb or destroy this perfect equilibrium on which he was balanced. And there was really no reason, so it now appeared, why he should go downstairs again. Maud and her poaching friend would talk about fishing for awhile, and then he—ah, yes! Bertie Cochrane—would go away. They would both easily understand his own non-appearance. He had suffered tortures; no inquisitor or master of the rack would refuse to grant him this little rest and compensation.

Then for a moment his breeding and the habit of his whole life jerked him to his feet, with the intention of rejoining them, as courtesy and decorum demanded. But the drug he had taken was already more powerful than they. It told him with authority that this ecstasy of consciousness would be trespassed on and interfered with by the presence of others. It would, if he went downstairs, be necessary for him to some extent to give attention to them instead of letting himself be absorbed in the exquisiteness of his own sensations. And those sensations had nothing in common with the dulled perceptions of sleep or intoxication. He was lifted onto a plane more vivified than the normal; he basked in super-solar sunlight.

Then, still without any suggestion of sleepiness or intoxicated consciousness, the most wonderful visions, or, rather, the intentional visualisation of scenes and moods magic in their beauty, passed in front of him. He, turned into Keats himself, was listening to the nightingale, and losing himself in “embalmed darkness” to the charmed music of the immortal song. “The weariness, the fever and the fret,” were remembered only as the traveller arrived at his long-desired home remembers the weariness of the way. His spirit seemed to draw away from life, though still intensely living, and he was in love with death, that but loosed it from the impediment of the body. Then a curve was suddenly turned, and next moment he was mounting higher than the blithe spirit of the lark could carry it, and hung in some clear interstellar ether so remote that the sun above him and the earth below seemed about equal in size, and the shape of England and the coasts of Europe were visible as in a map, set in dim blue sea. Then, still mounting, he turned his eye upward, and looked undazzled into the high noon of the heavens, and yet, though it was noon, the infinite velvet vault was sown with the sparkle of stars. Sun and stars shone there together, and a slip of crescent moon made the company of heaven complete.

Again, still vividly awake, and without the least hint of drowsiness, the aspect of the firmament was changed, and the stars became globules of sparkling dew, and the empty spaces of ether took shape, until above him that which had been the heavens was transformed into a huge bed of blue acanthus-leaves, on which the dew of the stars lay sparkling. The sun was still there in the centre of all, and round it the sky took the shape of the petals of a flower. It was the “centre spike of gold” in an immense blue blossom, which was thick with petals as a rose, and pure of shape as a daffodil. All this, too—this vision to which the hosts of heaven contributed—was his own, born of his own brain, which so short a time ago was bound on the rack of torture and sordid suffering. But now that was nothing. He remembered he had been in pain, but no more, and how cheaply had he purchased, at the price of but copper coin, these jewels of consciousness. That little draught which relieved him of physical pain had brought him these astounding joys; it had made the whole machinery of the universe to serve his vision. The stars were drops of dew on the acanthus-leaves of infinite space, and the sun burned in the centre of this unique flower. A few minutes ago he had half started to go downstairs; now the ravings of any lunatic in Bedlam were not more distant from his mind than such a thought. He was absorbed in that contemplation of things which the brain, with the aid he had given it, can re-create out of the objects it is used to see without wonder. But this was the real world, easy of entry to those who had the sense to turn the key; while the material world was a dream, vague and pale, compared to this reality.