The Dawn of a To-morrow | Page 4

the morbidness of a fagged brain
blotted out the memory of more normal days and told him fantastic lies
which were but a hundredth part truth. He could see only the hundredth
part truth, and it assumed proportions so huge that he could see nothing
else. In such a state the human brain is an infernal machine and its
workings can only be conquered if the mortal thing which lives with
it--day and night, night and day--has learned to separate its controllable
from its seemingly uncontrollable atoms, and can silence its clamor on
its way to madness.
Antony Dart had not learned this thing and the clamor had had its
hideous way with him. Physicians would have given a name to his
mental and physical condition. He had heard these names
often--applied to men the strain of whose lives had been like the strain
of his own, and had left them as it had left him-- jaded, joyless,
breaking things. Some of them had been broken and had died or were
dragging out bruised and tormented days in their own homes or in
mad-houses. He always shuddered when he heard their names, and
rebelled with sick fear against the mere mention of them. They had
worked as he had worked, they had been stricken with the delirium of
accumulation--accumulation-- as he had been. They had been caught in
the rush and swirl of the great maelstrom, and had been borne round
and round in it, until having grasped every coveted thing tossing upon
its circling waters, they themselves had been flung upon the shore with
both hands full, the rocks about them strewn with rich possessions,
while they lay prostrate and gazed at all life had brought with dull,
hopeless, anguished eyes. He knew --if the worst came to the worst--
what would be said of him, because he had heard it said of others. "He
worked too hard--he worked too hard." He was sick of hearing it. What
was wrong with the world-- what was wrong with man, as Man --if
work could break him like this? If one believed in Deity, the living
creature It breathed into being must be a perfect thing--not one to be
wearied, sickened, tortured by the life Its breathing had created. A mere
man would disdain to build a thing so poor and incomplete. A mere
human engineer who constructed an engine whose workings were
perpetually at fault--which went wrong when called upon to do the
labor it was made for--who would not scoff at it and cast it aside as a
piece of worthless bungling?

"Something is wrong," he mut- tered, lying flat upon his cross and
staring at the yellow haze which had crept through crannies in window-
sashes into the room. "Someone is wrong. Is it I--or You?"
His thin lips drew themselves back against his teeth in a mirthless smile
which was like a grin.
"Yes," he said. "I am pretty far gone. I am beginning to talk to myself
about God. Bryan did it just before he was taken to Dr. Hewletts' place
and cut his throat."
He had not led a specially evil life; he had not broken laws, but the
subject of Deity was not one which his scheme of existence had
included. When it had haunted him of late he had felt it an untoward
and morbid sign. The thing had drawn him--drawn him; he had
complained against it, he had argued, sometimes he
knew--shuddering-- that he had raved. Something had seemed to stand
aside and watch his being and his thinking. Something which filled the
universe had seemed to wait, and to have waited through all the eternal
ages, to see what he--one man--would do. At times a great appalled
wonder had swept over him at his realization that he had never known
or thought of it before. It had been there always--through all the ages
that had passed. And sometimes-- once or twice--the thought had in
some unspeakable, untranslatable way brought him a moment's calm.
But at other times he had said to himself--with a shivering soul
cowering within him--that this was only part of it all and was a
beginning, perhaps, of religious monomania.
During the last week he had known what he was going to do-- he had
made up his mind. This abject horror through which others had let
themselves be dragged to madness or death he would not endure. The
end should come quickly, and no one should be smitten aghast by
seeing or knowing how it came. In the crowded shabbier streets of
London there were lodging-houses where one, by taking precautions,
could end his life in such a manner as would blot him out of any world
where such a man as himself had been known. A pistol,