A Mere Accident | Page 6

of laxity of principle. Mrs
Norton was a woman with an intelligence, who had inherited in all its
primary force a code of morals that had grown up in the narrower
minds of less gifted generations. In talking to her you were conscious
of two active and opposing principles: reason and hereditary morality. I
use "opposing" as being descriptive of the state of soul that would
generally follow from such mental contradiction, but in Mrs Norton no
shocking conflict of thought was possible, her mind being always
strictly subservient to her instinctive standard of right and wrong.
And John had inherited the moral temperament of his mother's family,
and with it his mother's intelligence, nor had the equipoise been
disturbed in the transmitting; his father's delicate constitution in
inflicting germs of disease had merely determined the variation
represented by the marked artistic impulses which John presented to the
normal type of either his father's or his mother's family. It would
therefore seem that any too sudden corrective of defect will result in
anomaly, and, in the case under notice, direct mingling of perfect health
with spinal weakness had germinated into a marked yearning for the
heroic ages, for the supernatural as contrasted with the meanness of the
routine of existence. And now before closing this psychical
investigation, and picking up the thread of the story, which will of
course be no more than an experimental demonstration of the working
of the brain into which we are looking, we must take note of two
curious mental traits both living side by side, and both apparently
negative of the other's existence: an intense and ever pulsatory horror
of death, a sullen contempt and often a ferocious hatred of life. The
stress of mind engendered by the alternating of these themes of
suffering would have rendered life an unbearable burden to John, had
he not found anchorage in an invincible belief in God, a belief which
set in stormily for the pomp and opulence of Catholic ceremonial, for
the solemn Gothic arch and the jewelled joy of painted panes, for the
grace and the elegance and the order of hieratic life.

In a being whose soul is but the shadow of yours, a second soul looking
towards the same end as your soul, or in a being whose soul differs
radically, and is concerned with other satisfactions and other ideals,
you will most probably find some part of the happiness of your dreams,
but in intercourse with one who is grossly like you, but who is
absolutely different when the upper ways of character are taken into
account, there will be--no matter how inexorable are the ties that
bind--much fret and irritation and noisy clashing. It was so with John
Norton and his mother; even in the exercise of faculties that had been
directly transmitted from one to the other there had been angry
collision. For example:--their talents for business were identical; but
while she thought the admirable conduct of her affairs was a thing to be
proud of, he would affect an air of negligence, and would willingly
have it believed that he lived independent of such gross necessities.
Then his malady--for intense depression of the spirits was a malady
with him--offered an ever-recurring cause of misunderstanding. How
irritating it was when he lay shut up in his room, his soul looking down
with murderous eyes on the poor worm that writhed out its life in view
of the pitiless stars, and longing with a fierce wild longing to shake off
the burning garment of consciousness, and plunge into the black
happiness of the grave, to hear Mrs Norton on the threshold uttering
from time to time admonitory remarks.
"You should not give way to such feelings, sir; you should not allow
yourself to be unhappy. Look at me, am I unhappy? and I have more to
bear with than you, but I am not always thinking of myself.... I am in
fairly good health, and I am always cheerful! Why are you not the same?
You bring it all upon yourself; I have no pity for you.... You should
cease to think of yourself, and try to do your duty."
John groaned when he heard this last word. He knew very well what his
mother meant. He should buy three hunters, he should marry. These
were the anodynes that were offered to him in and out of season. "Bad
enough that I should exist! Why precipitate another into the gulf of
being?" "Consort with men whose ideal hovers between a stable boy
and a veterinary surgeon;" and then, amused by the paradox, John, to
whom the chase was evocative of forests, pageantry, spears, would

quote some stirring verses of an old ballad, and allude to certain
pictures by Rubens, Wouvermans, and Snyders. "Why