The Flight of the Shadow | Page 9

presence of my eyes on anything he did, and as
a matter of course I sat observing him, partly because I had never seen
any portion of that cabinet open. He turned towards the sky-light near

him, and held up between him and it a small something, of which I
could just see that it was red, and shone in the light. Then he turned
hurriedly, threw it in the drawer, and went straight out, leaving the
drawer open. I knew I had lost his company for the day.
The moment he was gone, the phantasm of the pretty thing he had been
looking at so intently, came back to me. Somehow I seemed to
understand that I had no right to know what it was, seeing my uncle
had not shown it me! At the same time I had no law to guide me. He
had never said I was not to look at this or that in the room. If he had,
even if the cabinet had not been mentioned, I do not think I should have
offended; but that does not make the fault less. For which is the more
guilty--the man who knows there is a law against doing a certain thing
and does it, or the man who feels an authority in the depth of his nature
forbidding the thing, and yet does it? Surely the latter is greatly the
more guilty.
I rose, and went to the cabinet. But when the contents of the drawer
began to show themselves as I drew near, "I closed my lids, and kept
them close," until I had seated myself on the floor, with my back to the
cabinet, and the drawer projecting over my head like the shelf of a
bracket over its supporting figure. I could touch it with the top of my
head by straightening my back. How long I sat there motionless, I
cannot say, but it seems in retrospect at least a week, such a multitude
of thinkings went through my mind. The logical discussion of a thing
that has to be done, a thing awaiting action and not decision--the
experiment, that is, whether the duty or the temptation has the more to
say for itself, is one of the straight roads to the pit. Similarly, there are
multitudes who lose their lives pondering what they ought to believe,
while something lies at their door waiting to be done, and rendering it
impossible for him who makes it wait, ever to know what to believe.
Only a pure heart can understand, and a pure heart is one that sends out
ready hands. I knew perfectly well what I ought to do--namely, to shut
that drawer with the back of my head, then get up and do something,
and forget the shining stone I had seen betwixt my uncle's finger and
thumb; yet there I sat debating whether I was not at liberty to do in my
uncle's room what he had not told me not to do.
I will not weary my reader with any further description of the evil path
by which I arrived at the evil act. To myself it is pain even now to tell

that I got on my feet, saw a blaze of shining things, banged-to the
drawer, and knew that Eve had eaten the apple. The eyes of my
consciousness were opened to the evil in me, through the evil done by
me. Evil seemed now a part of myself, so that nevermore should I get
rid of it. It may be easy for one regarding it from afar, through the
telescope only of a book, to exclaim, "Such a little thing!" but it was I
who did it, and not another! it was I, and only I, who could know what
I had done, and it was not a little thing! That peep into my uncle's
drawer lies in my soul the type of sin. Never have I done anything
wrong with such a clear assurance that I was doing wrong, as when I
did the thing I had taken most pains to reason out as right.
Like one stunned by an electric shock, I had neither feeling nor care left
for anything. I walked to the end of the long room, as far as I could go
from the scene of my crime, and sat down on the great chest, with my
coffin, the cabinet, facing me in the distance. The first thing, I think,
that I grew conscious of, was dreariness. There was nothing interesting
anywhere. What should I do? There was nothing to do, nothing to think
about, not a book worth reading. Story was suddenly dried up at its
fountain. Life was a plain without water-brooks. If the sky was not "a
foul and