Beyond the window there was fairyland. He tried, but he could not dispel the illusion. It brought him back to his youth; beyond youth, to an infancy. He looked and thought, “This will pass quickly, and I will be touched at the quaintness of my thoughts,” but it did not pass.
He stood looking and thought, “And I cannot even call myself ‘fixed,’ or ‘mesmerized,’ but I do not want to move.”
The light was blue grey, and the moonlight shadows were grey brown.
“It is so bright,” he thought, “that, as they say, I could read a newspaper by it.” He tried to think of a print so small as to thwart the moonlight, but he found the thought too mechanical to grace the scene, and left it unfinished in respect.
The view was soft. The shapes were soft.
“There is nothing in the world,” he thought, “equal to this.”
He tried to imagine animals as shapes moving in the blue light, but he could not. “It is empty,” he thought, “of everything but spirit.”
Now, in his cell, he recurred to that night by the lake.
“How perfect it was,” he thought, and, “What were my worries? What sick folly would have caused me a moment’s unrest then? Could I but recapture that time …”
And yet he told himself that could he return, he would, in days, in months, certainly, resume his previous ways—return as he put it, “to myself.”
There was the ripped pain in his throat. He could still feel the knife where the man had cut him. He remembered, with a strange shame, thinking, “Why, it isn’t even sharp.”
He felt the itching which meant that the wound was healing. He remembered the sick, rank sweat in the man’s coveralls when the man straddled him and grabbed his hair back to expose the neck and cut his throat, and the look in his eyes of calm happiness as he cut his throat.
“What is more lovely than belonging?” he thought. “Nothing.”
“Once a month the moon is full and stays full for how many days, and then ebbs to nothing. And at every stage it can be beautiful or stark, or it can fill us with dread—there is no saying what concatenation of circumstances might produce what effect. The man who tried to kill me looked as if he could have been participating at his daughter’s wedding, or at the confirmation of a child. Or the receipt of some reward.
“Does perfect innocence exist? What good is it if these crimes are committed in striving to return to it? Should we not simply repudiate it?
“Should we not simply avow we cannot return?
“For if we are lured to return to innocence through sin, should we not say, ‘I am incapable of distinguishing it, so I will renounce it’?
“Or he could have been a child going to sleep; or on the edge of a perception, when he raised the knife. He held it with the blade extending back, out of the little-finger side of the hand, and back almost parallel to the forearm.
“Who would know to hold a knife like that when you did a murder? Where would one learn that? Who would teach that?”
He smelled the carbolic, and the iodine, soaking the bandages on his neck. He turned his head to the side and saw the white-painted metal of the hospital bed, and, below the paint, the iron.
“White-into-black, and black-to-grey,” he thought.
“The paint, and the chipped margin, are not various. But the iron is. That is because it is not man-made; for, try as we might …”
The moonlight made its usual flat and long shadows on the infirmary wall. “As they are moved to the right, it is turned morning,” he thought. “And today will be hot. All of these people have been told by their God that it is a praiseworthy act to want me dead. Am I in a dream?”
The panic rose in him. It was checked by the thought: “It was the stock quotation—that was the print so small it would have been difficult to read by moonlight,” and then he surrendered into madness for a while.