The whisky-jug blinked with his little eyes and added, “He meant well, but——”
I knew what he was going to say, and this made me very angry. I therefore jumped at him and gave him a box on the ear; but my fist went quite through his head, and it had no other effect upon him than stopping his sentence. He did not seem to notice it; but I now knew that I had died and become a spirit. I also saw that I could take possession of people and use their organs of speech, and as the nut-cracker was nearest to me, I went inside of him and caused him to exclaim:—
“I will show you whether or not I am a well-meaning fool! Confound you and your science! I have been among the gnomes and know that they exist! but you are the blind fools who cannot see anything because you are too stupid to open your eyes.”
“Brother Stiffbone has become insane,” said the baboon; “let us tie him before he does us any injury.”
Thereupon the baboon and the whisky-jug went for me while I was in the nut-cracker’s body, and I went in that shape for them. I snapped at the baboon’s ear and gave him a black eye, and I tore out a handful of hair from the head of the whisky-jug, who in his turn broke my—that is to say, the nut-cracker’s nose. At last they got the best of me; because the wooden limbs of the nut-cracker were so stiff and I could not move them quickly enough. We fell down, and the baboon was kneeling upon my breast when I awoke.
Once more I was Mr Mulligan. I opened my eyes and found myself in inky darkness. The first thing I did was to feel my nose to see whether it was broken. The nose was all right, and its solidity convinced me that I was no ghost, and my adventure with the nut-cracker’s body, however real it seemed, had been only a dream. I groped about for the purpose of finding the jumping-jack, but it was gone; neither did I regret its absence, for with the sight of it all my affection for it had departed, and I could not understand how I could have been so foolish as to permit myself to be attracted by it. My desire for the purple monkey had left me; but my love for the princess returned. I yearned for her presence and called her name; but no answer came; there was nothing around me but darkness and solitude.
Ever since that event I have often asked myself, Why do we hate to be for a long time alone? The only answer I could find is, that when we are alone with ourselves, the company of our self is not sufficiently satisfactory and agreeable to us. Perhaps we do not sufficiently know that self to fully enjoy its presence. Perhaps we do not know that self at all, and then of course we are in company with something we do not know, which means in company with nothing, and to enjoy the presence of nothing is to have no enjoyment at all.
I confess that I never realised my own nothingness so much as on that occasion. The old doubts returned again. I did not know whether I was living or whether something which imagined itself to be “I” seemed to live, and if that which only seemed to be myself was to be vivisected, why should I trouble myself about it, as the vivisection of something unknown to me did not concern me at all, unless I voluntarily chose to take any interest in it? But how could I think of making any choice at all if that “I” was something unknown? I instinctively refused to recognise as myself that personality which was governed by the spell of a jumping-jack, and I spoke to myself as if I were another person.
“Well, Mulligan!” I said, “how could you be such an idiot as to submit yourself to the power of a baboon! Really, I doubt whether you are a man. Pshaw! the gnomes are right. You are a monkey yourself, and even inferior to a monkey, because the baboon was your master. A nice lord of creation you are, being controlled by the creation of your own foolish fancy. A lord of creation, indeed! One who cannot even resist the attraction of a jumping-jack!”
Thus I went on moralising, and wondered what my real Ego was, and whether it had anything at all to do with what seemed to be myself. I wished to know whether I—that is to say, my real self—was; for what purpose I was in the world, and where I had been before I entered the world, and what that was which caused me to be born, and whether I would be born again after I—that is to say, my body—had been dissected. Alas, for all these questions Cracker’s science had no answer to give, and I envied the gnomes who had the ability to dissolve and condense into bodies at will.