I HAD two hideous familiars, two fiendish jailers, who with the sudden onrush of darkness and solitude leapt on me every night and seized me one on each side and would not let me go. These two were two Awful Thoughts which my mind had hit upon in its childish explorings and had been poisoned by and made sick and swollen by, as if one of them had been a snake that had bitten me and the other an evil plant that had stung me. One of the two Awful Thoughts was the endlessness of Space, and the other was the endlessness of Time. Every night, held in the grip of these two horrors, my little brain rolled over backward in humble, piteous convulsions of fear, and my body trembled and shook with the hideous disaster of having been born into this awful universe, of being forced to exist in the very arms of these two unthinkable things.
Yet, on the other hand, not to have been born, never to have been me at all, to have remained forever nonexistent somewhere in outer Space was even more lonely and terrible to think of. There was no escape from thinking, in life or in death, since I believed in the immortality of my own consciousness—that it was doomed to continue forever either in heaven or in hell. Each night the whole terrible realization would spread slowly and surely to the very edges of my body and mind, soaking me, cooking me, in the pure poison of horror. Like a terrified mouse, my mind would scurry this way and that for a hole to hide in, for some little nest that I could curl up in. But there was no such little hole. All the daytime life and its thoughts which I loved so much became at night suddenly unreliable and false. My cousins, our jokes, Christmas presents, my dolls, the Woodsey Path in Stowe, my birthday and what I wanted, the St. Nicholas—I ran appealing and stricken among them all—my nicest, dearest, daytime thoughts—and they availed nothing against the feeling of cosmic loneliness and doom. My awful thoughts breathed an icy breath on all the charm and fun and adorableness of the life of day and made it crumple into nothing, and prove itself to have been no more than a pitiful deception. Every night I looked backward upon my darling little cheerful loves and occupations of the day just passed, like a mother torn from her children.
Every night, as if I were compelled as a sort of punishment, I went over and over the same hopeless path, climbing up to the brink of unthinkableness and then tumbling back again, up and back, up and back—until I could actually feel the aching groove the repetition made inside my head. Every night I would endure and endure and endure, knowing I must not call or cry out until I simply could not bear it any longer. When the unbearable limit suddenly came, I screamed, I called, Papa! Then I listened, boiling with fear. It was worse to have screamed if nobody came—more horrible, more lonely. Sometimes nobody heard me the first time, and I called again. Papa! … Then, oh, merciful! I heard footsteps—slow, calm, cozy footsteps. Into the back hall, up the stairs, across the threshold of my room, the footsteps brought my tall, narrow-shouldered, frail Papa.
He sat down close beside me, and put his healing and comforting hand upon me. Wonderful hand! … Wonderful calm quietness! … Then he began to recite Wordsworth’s poem about the daffodils. After that, Lochinvar. Always the same two poems. Then perhaps he would sit without speaking, and in the calm loving stillness that he created between us I was supposed to lose my childish nervous fears and begin to grow sleepy. But even while he sat so close to me in the darkness we were separated. For I was sure that he had never thought about endlessness. Otherwise he could not have been so calm. He, like all the other strangely casual grownups, had apparently never come across these Awful Thoughts. His innocent mind had never explored as far as mine had done. He, like the rest, could be so preoccupied with the cozy life of our earth, of our sitting room downstairs, of his books, of the new Atlantic Monthly, that he was unbelievably forgetful of the awful abyss in which our earth was hanging.
Like someone trying again and again to fling himself over a wall that is just too high, I kept trying in spite of my failure every night to bring myself to the fearful point of speaking of it to him. I would work myself up by a terrific force of will to a decision to ease my mind come what would; I got my first sentence up to the threshold of possible plausible utterance and at last a few parched dreadful words would cross my lips. Then my heart thundered as I paused to see what the effect would be. My father, to my amazement, remained perfectly unperturbed. “Let’s think about Stowe,” he would say. “See if you can see the Woodsey Path in your mind’s eye. Tell me, can you see how it looks when the raspberries are ripe on the wild raspberry bushes?” Tears of disappointment rushed to my eyes in the darkness. He didn’t know! He couldn’t understand! To please him, I would try to force myself to think about the raspberry bushes or whatever else he suggested to soothe me, while I gave up once more the hope of ever sharing my suffering. The contrast between my horrors and his simple unquestioning innocence and tranquillity was too much for me. I felt as if I were the mature person and he the happy unconscious child. And so I felt a yearning tenderness and pity for him, and an even more lonely despair for myself.
I realized again and again that grownups were too cheerful, even the sensitive ones like my father, to understand really terrible things. Even if the horror is unescapably true, as it seemed to me to be, the grownups cannot see its truth, cannot grasp it, because it is too foreign to their easy comfortable way of thinking. The very calmness that grownups seem to bring with them into the fear-crowded darkness of a child’s bedroom too often consists only in a hopeless insulation and imperviousness on their part, making them seem so superior and panic-proof that the child is driven to conceal from them all the really queer and terrible things he thinks or feels. I myself often wondered, even then, if many of these imperturbable grownups would have been able to stand the continuous relentless mental suffering that I was having every night.
In my mental loneliness I thought that I had been initiated by chance into a knowledge that no human being was supposed to have or endure, and certainly no child. Because of it, I felt myself secretly an exile from the happy unconscious level of existence that my father and everyone else that I knew inhabited. I was banished and damned forever. It was as if they breathed a different air from me. I contemplated my situation with a fearful wistfulness, because I could see so well how blissfully happy I would have been, with my talents, and all my treasures, St. Nicholas, our summers in beloved Stowe, the grape arbor, the playhouse, if only I could wipe out forever that unlucky day when my mind had roamed too far. Such was the underlying sense of cosmic woe and cosmic disaster that curdled the joy of my childhood. And all the while some docile unconscious sweetness kept me from ever questioning the disaster that had befallen my body.
It is a very long time now since I lay quaking on my bed and my father sat beside me night after night, so tenderly aware of me, and never knew that I was in hell. Now that I am grown up myself I have become strangely casual and calm about the universe and I can tell it at last. But it is many years too late, he is gone, long, long ago—and it doesn’t matter any more. And too late I know that his tranquillity those evenings concealed from me agonies of his own that were almost as bad as mine. Why couldn’t we both have cried out and told each other all about our horrors and clung together and really known each other, father and child?