lightness, no ordinary, quite usual competence of bodily power. And this
was bitter, yet as nothing to the Marah that lay beyond. For my body was
in a way complete. It was a wretch. But when you came to the mind you
had the real tragedy. In many decrepit flesh temples there dwells a
commanding spirit, as a great God might dwell--of mysterious choice--in
a ruinous and decaying lodge in a wilderness. And such a spirit rules,
disposes, presides, develops, has its own full and superb existence,
triumphing not merely over, but actually through the contemptible body
in which it resides, so that men even are led to worship the very
ugliness and poverty of this body, to adore it for its power to retain
such a mighty spirit within it. Such a spirit was not mine. Had it been,
I might have been happy by the burn that Autumn day. Had it been, I
might never--But I am anticipating, and I must not anticipate. I must
sit with the brown water rushing beneath the arch of my limbs, and
recall the horror of my musing.

In a manner, then, my soul matched my body. It was feeble and
incompetent too. My brain was dull and clouded. My intellect was
sluggish and inert. But--and this was the terror for me!--within the
rank nest of my soul--my spirit--lay coiled two vipers that never ceased
from biting me with their poisoned fangs--Self-consciousness and
Ambition. I knew myself, and I longed to be other than I was. I watched
my own incompetence as one who watches from a tower. I divined how
others regarded me--precisely. The blatant and comfortable egoism of a
dwarf mind in a dwarf body was never for one moment mine. I was that
terrible anomaly, an utterly incomplete and incompetent thing that
adored, with a curious wildness of passion, completeness, competence.
Nor had I a soul that could ever be satisfied with a one-sided
perfection. My desires were Gargantuan. When I was with my cousin Gavin,
a fine all-round sportsman, I longed with fury to be a good shot, to
throw a fly as he did, to have a perfect seat on a horse. I felt that I
would give up years of life to beat him once in any of his pursuits.
When I was with Dr Wedderburn, my desires, equally intense, were utterly
different. He represented in my neighbourhood Intellect--with a capital
I. A man of about fifty, minister of the parish of Carlounie, he was
astonishingly adroit as a controversialist, astonishingly eloquent as a
divine. His voice was full of music. His eyes were full of light