[BNP/E3, 13A – 77]
The Voice of the Infinite
The Voice of the Infinite.
by Charles Robert Anon
Charles Robert Anon
I.
I am an old man, I know it, a broken down, mad, old man, and yet my madness is not so much the fruit of accumulated years of torture but of a few moments. How can I ever recall them? The very idea, the very thought of them in those coherent light-glimpses in[1] my on the stem and that my madness, when I seem (God help me) to descend from a huge light into a startling tangible darkness — the very idea will many a time suffice to drive me again into gutter world…… And yet if I can but write down, no matter how, the events, or rather the one event, that led to my mental death, I feel that I shall solve a problem of which none have dared to think deeply; I feel that I alone can lift the mist that hangs upon the tragic and inscrutable end of that peaceful town, of those peaceful citizens that died stricken by fear at their impassive thresholds.
None will believe — that I know; none can ever believe me that are sane and are entirely of this world. But let me ask thee, curious thinker, insane blind insect buzzing into the stone face of the world-problem, let me ask thee, poet, man of imagination, making harmony of thy woes, let me ask ye to hear me.
Imagination! I used that word but now; and yet what horror it can recall! That old, rain-swept street with its twinkling lamps, tremulously reflected in the rain-pools, those dark, silent houses, hushed as if in death, the few shivering poor clinging to the inhospitable walls, and the central figure of the master musician now aglow and now dark, as he passed in and out of the town-lights, bareless he stepped, and yet with grim assurance, his clothes making a soaking noise, his face downcast and thoughtful, the eyes of him looking somewhere in a deep, horrible glance, as if he discerned a spirit world in the very midst of our own.
[77v]
It was on that night I first met him.
I was a young, dreamy and unhappy — unhappy merely in thought. Premature in intelligence and in thought, gifted with an enormous imagination[2] and with a large ambition, here was I, cursed for ever by an inconsequent will that let slip my most ardent ideas and by an artistic sense that could not be satisfied with a rapid and mediocre expression. The pains of the heart are great; but those of the mind far greater. I had wept many dead whom I had dearly loved, but at times I could forget them; the painful, horrible world-enjoys never once left me and I went through life, scorned and scorning, in pain, in worry and in fear.
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We have now to consider what are the necessary attributes of a detective story. Nay, first of all we shall proceed to make clear what stories are detective and which are not.
[1] in /(of)\
[2] imagination /(ideality)\
