I can not be
content with having pressed that spring once. A mania is upon me
which, after thirty years of useless resistance and superhuman
struggle, still draws me from bed and sleep to rehearse in ghastly
fashion that deed of my early manhood. I can not resist it. To
tear out the deadly mechanism, unhinge weight and drum and rid the
house of every evidence of crime would but drive me to shriek my
guilt aloud and act in open pantomime what I now go through in
fearsome silence and secrecy. When the hour comes, as come it
must, that I can not rise and enter that fatal closet, I shall
still enact the deed in dreams, and shriek aloud in my sleep and
wish myself dead and yet fear to die lest my hell be to go through
all eternity, slaying over and over my man, in ever growing horror
and repulsion.
"Do you wish to share my fate? Try to effect through blood a
release from the difficulties menacing you."
XXIII
A THREAD IN HAND
There are moments which stand out with intense force and clearness
in every man's life. Mine was the one which followed the reading
of these lines which were meant for a warning, but which in
more than one case had manifestly served to open the way to a
repetition of the very crime they deplored. I felt myself under
the same fascination.
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