“Clark, you jest,” I said: “I know really very little of astronomy, or magnetic phenomena. Besides, I am about to be married. …”
“But what about your botany, my friend? There’s what we should be wanting from you: and as for nautical astronomy, poh, a man with your scientific habit would pick all that up in no time.”
“You discuss the matter as gravely as though it were a possibility, Clark,” I said, smiling. “Such a thought would never enter my head: there is, first of all, my fiancée—”
“Ah, the all-important Countess, eh?—Well, but she, as far as I know the lady, would be the first to force you to go. The chance of stamping one’s foot on the North Pole does not occur to a man every day, my son.”
“Do talk of something else!” I said. “There is Peters. …”
“Well, of course, there is Peters. But believe me, the dream I had was so clear—”
“Let me alone with your dreams, and your Poles!” I laughed.
Yes, I remember: I pretended to laugh loud! But my secret heart knew, even then, that one of those crises was occurring in my life which, from my youth, has made it the most extraordinary which any creature of earth ever lived. And I knew that this was so, firstly, because of the two dreams, and secondly, because, when Clark was gone, and I was drawing on my gloves to go to see my fiancée, I heard distinctly the old two Voices talk within me: and One said: “Go not to see her now!” and the Other: “Yes, go, go!”
The two Voices of my life! An ordinary person reading my words would undoubtedly imagine that I mean only two ordinary contradictory impulses—or else that I rave: for what modern man could comprehend how real-seeming were those voices, how loud, and how, ever and again, I heard them contend within me, with a nearness “nearer than breathing,” as it says in the poem, and “closer than hands and feet.”
About the age of seven it happened first to me. I was playing one summer evening in a pinewood of my father’s; half a mile away was a quarry-cliff; and as I played, it suddenly seemed as if someone said to me, inside of me: “Just take a walk toward the cliff”; and as if someone else said: “Don’t go that way at all”—mere whispers then, which gradually, as I grew up, seemed to swell into cries of wrathful contention! I did go toward the cliff: it was steep, thirty feet high, and I fell. Some weeks later, on recovering speech, I told my astonished mother that “someone had pushed me” over the edge, and that someone else “had caught me” at the bottom!
One night, soon after my eleventh birthday, lying in bed, the thought struck me that my life must be of great importance to some thing or things which I could not see; that two Powers, which hated each other, must be continually after me, one wishing for some reason to kill me, and the other for some reason to keep me alive, one wishing me to do so-and-so, and the other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like other boys, but a creature separate, special, marked for—something. Already I had notions, touches of mood, passing instincts, as occult and primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that stepped; so that such Biblical expressions as “The Lord spake to So-and-so, saying” have hardly ever suggested any question in my mind as to how the Voice was heard: I did not find it so very difficult to comprehend that originally man had more ears than two; nor should have been surprised to know that I, in these latter days, more or less resembled those primeval ones.
But not a creature, except perhaps my mother, has ever dreamed me what I here state that I was. I seemed the ordinary youth of my time, bow in my “Varsity eight,” cramming for exams., dawdling in clubs. When I had to decide as to a profession, who could have suspected the conflict that transacted itself in my soul, while my brain was indifferent to the matter—that agony of strife with which the brawling voices shouted, the one: “Be a scientist—a doctor,” and the other: “Be a lawyer, an engineer, an artist—be anything but a doctor!”
A doctor I became, and went to what had grown into the greatest of medical schools—Cambridge; and there it was that I came across a man, named Scotland, who had a rather odd view of the world. He had rooms, I remember, in the New Court at Trinity, and a set of us were generally there. He was always talking about certain “Black” and “White” Powers, till it became absurd, and the men used to call him “black-and-white-mystery-man,” because, one day, when someone said something about “the black mystery of the universe,” Scotland interrupted him with the words: “the black-and-white mystery.”
Quite well I remember Scotland now—the sweetest, gentle soul he was, with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in stature, with a Roman nose, continually making the effort to keep his neck straight, and draw his paunch in. He used to say that the universe was being frantically contended for by two Powers: a White and a Black; that the White was the stronger, but did not find the conditions on our particular planet very favourable to his success; that he had got the best of it up to the Middle Ages in Europe, but since then had been slowly and stubbornly giving way before the Black; and that finally the Black would win—not everywhere perhaps, but here—and would carry off, if no other earth, at least this one, for his prize.
This was Scotland’s doctrine, which he never tired of repeating; and while others heard him with mere toleration, little could they divine with what agony of inward interest, I, cynically smiling there,
