detail what followed; outwardly I went
about the day's labour as before, saying nothing to my wife. But she
soon saw that I had changed; I spent my spare time in a room which I had
fitted up as a laboratory, and often I crept upstairs in the grey dawn
of the morning, when the light of many lamps still glowed over London;
and each night I had stolen a step nearer to that great abyss which I
was to bridge over, the gulf between the world of consciousness and the
world of matter. My experiments were many and complicated in their
nature, and it was some months before I realized whither they all
pointed, and when this was borne in upon me in a moment's time, I felt
my face whiten and my heart still within me. But the power to draw back,
the power to stand before the doors that now opened wide before me and
not to enter in, had long ago been absent; the way was closed, and I
could only pass onward. My position was as utterly hopeless as that of
the prisoner in an utter dungeon, whose only light is that of the
dungeon above him; the doors were shut and escape was impossible.
Experiment after experiment gave the same result, and I knew, and shrank
even as the thought passed through my mind, that in the work I had to do
there must be elements which no laboratory could furnish, which no
scales could ever measure. In that work, from which even I doubted to
escape with life, life itself must enter; from some human being there
must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place
(for in the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber)--in its
place would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind
cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death
itself. And when I knew this, I knew also on whom this fate would fall;
I looked into my wife's eyes. Even at that hour, if I had gone out and
taken a rope and hanged myself, I might have escaped, and she also, but
in no other way. At last I told her all. She shuddered, and wept, and
called on her dead mother for help, and asked me if I had no mercy, and
I could only sigh. I concealed nothing from her; I told her what she
would become, and what would enter in where her life had been; I told
her of all the shame and of all the horror. You who will read this when
I am dead--if indeed I allow this record to survive,--you who have
opened the box and have seen what lies there, if you could understand
what lies hidden in that opal! For one night my w