The Return of the Soul

The Return Of The Soul, by
Robert S. Hichens

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Title: The Return Of The Soul 1896
Author: Robert S. Hichens
Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23419]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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RETURN OF THE SOUL ***

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THE RETURN OF THE SOUL
By Robert S. Hichens
1896

"I have been here before, But when, or how, I cannot tell!"
Rossetti.

I.
Tuesday Night, November 3rd.
Theories! What is the good of theories? They are the scourges that lash
our minds in modern days, lash them into confusion, perplexity, despair.
I have never been troubled by them before. Why should I be troubled
by them now? And the absurdity of Professor Black's is surely obvious.
A child would laugh at it. Yes, a child! I have never been a diary writer.
I have never been able to understand the amusement of sitting down
late at night and scrawling minutely in some hidden book every paltry
incident of one's paltry days. People say it is so interesting to read the
entries years afterwards. To read, as a man, the menu that I ate through
as a boy, the love-story that I was actor in, the tragedy that I brought
about, the debt that I have never paid--how could it profit me? To keep
a diary has always seemed to me merely an addition to the ills of life.
Yet now I have a hidden book, like the rest of the world, and I am
scrawling in it to-day. Yes, but for a reason.
I want to make things clear to myself, and I find, as others, that my
mind works more easily with the assistance of the pen. The actual
tracing of words on paper dispels the clouds that cluster round my
thoughts. I shall recall events to set my mind at ease, to prove to myself
how absurd a man who could believe in Professor Black would be.
"Little Dry-as-dust" I used to call him 'Dry'? He is full of wild romance,
rubbish that a school-girl would be ashamed to believe in. Yet he is
abnormally clever; his record proves that. Still, clever men are the first
to be led astray, they say. It is the searcher who follows the wandering
light. What he says can't be true. When I have filled these pages, and
read what I have written dispassionately, as one of the outside public
might read, I shall have done, once for all, with the ridiculous fancies
that are beginning to make my life a burden. To put my thoughts in

order will make a music. The evil spirit within me will sleep, will die. I
shall be cured. It must be so--it shall be so.
To go back to the beginning. Ah! what a long time ago that seems! As a
child I was cruel. Most boys are cruel, I think. My school companions
were a merciless set--merciless to one another, to their masters when
they had a chance, to animals, to birds. The desire to torture was in
nearly all of them. They loved to bully, and if they bullied only mildly,
it was from fear, not from love. They did not wish their boomerang to
return and slay them. If a boy were deformed, they twitted him. If a
master were kind, or gentle, or shy, they made his life as intolerable as
they could. If an animal or a bird came into their power, they had no
pity. I was like the rest; indeed, I think that I was worse. Cruelty is
horrible. I have enough imagination to do more than know that--to feel
it.
Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women
brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is
lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the
torturer.
As a child I was cruel by nature, by instinct. I was a handsome,
well-bred, gentlemanlike, gentle-looking little brute. My parents adored
me, and I was good to them. They were so kind to me that I was almost
fond of them. Why not? It seemed to me as politic to be fond of them
as of anyone else. I did what I pleased, but I did not always let them
know it; so I pleased them. The wise child will take care to