Distrain

“ And now one—as slowly, truly, but with the startling brevity that prevents one's dwelling on its drowsy note. Dysart, with a tired groan, flings down his book, and, rising to his feet, stretches his arms above his head in an utter abandonment to sleepless fatigue that is even more mental than bodily. Once the subject of that book had been of an enthralling interest to him. To-night it bores him. He has found himself unequal to the solving of the abstruse arguments it contains. One thought seems to have dulled all others. ”

“ Any passion so neutral and negative as jealousy soon burned itself out in an actively positive brain like Durkin's. And it left, as so often had happened with him, manifold gray ash-heaps of regret for past misdeeds. It also brought with it the customary revulsion of feeling, and a prowling hunger for some amendatory activity. Yet with that hunger came a new and disturbing sense of fear. He was realizing, almost too late, the predicament into which he and Frank had stumbled, the danger into which he had passively permitted his wife to drift. ”

“ And Miss Strange, brooding over these instances, would have said the same, but for Miss Driscoll's absolute serenity of demeanour and complete abandonment to love. These seemed incompatible with guilt; these, whatever the appearances, proclaimed innocence—an innocence she was here to prove if fortune favoured and the really guilty person's madness should again break forth.
For madness it would be and nothing less, for any hand, even the most experienced, to draw attention to itself by a repetition of old tricks on an occasion so marked. ”

“ It carried a woebegone impassivity, the impassivity which implied he was so submerged in misery that no further blow could be of consequence to him. And yet, beyond the fixed pallor of that face there was something appealing, some trace of finer things, some touch which told me that he and the nocturnal underworld had nothing in common.
"But are you getting used to the other thing?" I asked. ”

“ I hopelessly envy men who can think consecutively under conditions distracting to others—in a crowded meeting or in the midst of their children—for I am as sensitive as most people to distraction; but if I can think at all, I am not sure that the roar of the Strand is not a more favourable environment than the quiet of my own study. ”

“ His brain twenty-five years ago had thrown out what was to him a meaningless word, that word had penetrated an ear and put a brain into such a strong agitation that it still vibrated after having given direction to the whole life of a human being. ”

“ She marveled at the intensity of his misery.
“Can't you see,” she said at last, “it had to come of itself? It would have been worse than useless if it had come to you except by way of your own heart.”
“And all the while,” he continued, more quietly, “all the while you were living for others. ”

“ And all infectious distempers must be communicated by those passages.
Some distempers or dispositions of body, make men rave; others make them melancholy: Some give them courage, impetuosity, prodigious energy of mind, and rapturous thoughts and expressions; others sink and depress their spirits, give them panick fears, dismal apprehensions, melancholy images, and secret frights; and they will all account for such sensations from their former imbibed prejudices by early education, and by long use become familiar to them. ”

“ Haven’t I walked the floor night after night! when you haven’t been here? Bear with you—yes, yes! Who’s to bear with me when my heart is breaking? Oh, God!” she suddenly added, with passionate vigor, “I’m miserable! I’m miserable! My heart aches! It aches!” ”

“ But Dysart could no more avoid making eyes at anything in petticoats than he could help the tenderness of his own smile or the caressing cadence of his voice, or the subtle, indefinite something in him which irritated men but left few women indifferent and some greatly perturbed as he strolled along on his amusing journey through the world. ”

“ He no longer studied the garden, with its sundial slightly awry and its unused fountain and its shadowed turf-slope and ragged paths edged with perennials. It was the girl that held his attention, and oddly enough, his first vague feeling of depression slipped away from him. ”

“ Let them remember that a time of distress is a time of dreadful temptation, and all the strength to resist is taken away; poverty presses, the soul is made desperate by distress, and what can be done? It was one evening, when being brought, as I may say, to the last gasp, I think I may truly say I was distracted and raving, when prompted by I know not what spirit, and, as it were, doing I did not know what or why, I dressed me (for I had still pretty good clothes) and went out. I am very sure I had no manner of design in my head when I went out ”

“ We speak of distracting a man’s attention, when we call him off from looking at one thing to make him look at something else, and we call anything which interrupts us in our business, or puts a thought suddenly out of our heads, a distraction. ”

“ What followed then was what invariably follows in the wake of every tortured consciousness. From what it dreads or hates, yet knows or feels to be unescapable, it takes refuge in that which may be hoped for—or at least imagined. ”

“ She in turn studied him for a moment or two with her intent eyes. Then she slowly changed color.
"I'm sorry," she finally said.
"About what?"
Her slow look back over her shoulder had not escaped him. But he was quite satisfied to stand and stare at her. She seemed the only point of life in that house of dead and silent mustiness. ”

“ You know that I can hear nothing.’
‘You can hear, my dear, what Mr. Crisparkle has heard, and heard with approval.’
‘Yes; I can hear so much.’
‘Well, it is this. I am not only unsettled and unhappy myself, but I am conscious of unsettling and interfering with other people. How do I know that, but for my unfortunate presence, you, and—and—the rest of that former party, our engaging guardian excepted, might be dining cheerfully in Minor Canon Corner to-morrow? Indeed it probably would be so. ”

“ The histories of the two psychoses differentiate the two reactions which may be indistinguishable at one interview. The keynote of one reaction is indifference, while that of absorption is distraction, a perversion of attention to an inner, unreal world. ”

“ We can talk there without having a driver lifting a lid over our heads every two minutes.
“Do you know,” she went on, dreamily, as she watched the waiter push out through the crowded, many-odored room, “I often think I must have lived through all the ordinary feelings of life. I mean that we have taken such chances together, you and I, that now only a big thing can stir me into interest. I suppose we have exhausted all the everyday sensations of life!”
“Yes, I know the feeling,” said Durkin, through his cigar-smoke. ”

“ Some time she spent in wandering up and down, thinking to encounter the buildings by chance, so readily is the mind, bent upon prosecuting a hard but needful errand, eased by that self-deception which the semblance of search, without the reality, gives. ”

“ This," with a hand-sweep about the cluster of dishes, "is some music I'll have to face alone. But what's that, when you're on the last inch of the last rope-end?"
"Your position," I ventured, "sounds almost like a desperate one."
"Desperate!" he echoed. "It's more than that. It's hopeless!" ”

“ That cell of his brain was closed and lost; that picture in his mind was faded and vanished. He tramped on still struggling. There was something sinister, almost tragic in this near-illumination, in this warning he had almost heard, and which had died in silence. ”

“ The marginal distractions in such a case would consist, first, in external sensations, such as the glare from your study-lamp, the hissing of the radiator, the practising of a neighboring vocalist, the rattle of passing street-cars. The bodily distractions might consist of sensations of weariness referred to the back, the arms and the eyes, and fainter sensations from the digestive organs, heart and lungs. The irrelevant ideas might consist of thoughts about a German lesson which you are going to study, visions of a face, or thoughts about some social engagement. ”

“ All that is most precious is most precarious. Vainly do we cry to the moment: 'Verweile doch, du bist so schön!' Only the heavy hours are heavy-footed. The winged Psyche, even at the moment of birth, is sick with the pangs of dissolution. ”

“ Then the cunning will be over and gone with which his distracted mind has tried, as if in delirium, to snatch at all manner of trivial things and thoughts in order to avoid the one feeling which ever weighs him down. ”

“ Storms of hisses or bursts of ironical applause greet every sentence that he utters, and the curtain finally falls on his disgrace. This generally cures the disease of which we have been speaking. A night of agony, a week of pain, and the young gentleman, disenchanted and disenthralled, looks back upon his temporary mania with feelings of humiliation and surprise, cuts his aiders and abettors, and betakes himself seriously to the rational business of life.
But there are some stage-struck gentlemen whom nothing can convince of their total unfitness for the stage. ”

“ I never saw such sickly, shabby, run-down-at-the-heels, decayed figures in all my life—figures from which all sap and juice and the freshness of youth and even manhood had long since departed. Men and women they were who seemed to emerge out of gutters and cellars where could be neither light nor freshness nor any sense of hope or care, but only eloquent misery. ”

“ His actions are distractions, But then his distractions can be traced back to a definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of absence of mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the presence of the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings. ”

“ These persons [Pg 218] enumerate, among the exciting causes of delirium, “Too great, or too long continued exertion of the mental faculties, as in the delirium which often succeeds long continued and abstract calculation; and the deliria to which men of genius are peculiarly subject.”
The mind of every man is capable of a definite quantity of exertion to good effect; all endeavours, beyond that point, are impotent and perplexing. The attention is capable of being fixed to a certain extent, and, when that begins to deviate, all continuance is time lost. ”

“ This likewise struck me as peculiar, for the deference he displayed was more marked than that usually bestowed on strangers, while his lack of surprise at an encounter more or less startling in such a mist, was calculated to puzzle an ordinary man like myself. Indeed, he was so little impressed by my presence there that he was for passing me without a word or any other hint of good-fellowship save the bow of which I have spoken. ”

“ Dear me, Thyrsis, I hope I will not always have to yell to you over a foggy ocean!
XX. DEAR THYRSIS:
Can you imagine what it must be to be shut up in a little room on a rainy night, with the children and people screaming under your window? That is my position now.
I find myself hard to manage at times. I want to become discouraged or melancholy or disgusted, but I drive myself better than I used to. I even was happy a little for a few moments to-night. I was playing one of my piano-pieces, and I found myself imagining all sorts of things. ”

“ As usual, once the dissociation is established, there is [Pg 97] no limit to its manifestations. Picture three or four Dissociates at work at a table, all bent upon producing signs of the marvellous, all blind to the mechanism at work, and with the hypersensitiveness of the dissociated stream ready to draw on the memories of the unconscious.
Mixed with this is the possibility of more elaborate deceit: when the hands of all are raised from the table their knees may still be under it; and if the knees are clear of it a blackened lath concealed up a sleeve can still work miracles. ”

“ Distraction and Inattention.—I know no one thing more offensive to a company than that inattention and distraction. It is showing them the utmost contempt; and people never forgive contempt. No man is distrait with the man he fears or the woman he loves; which is a proof that every man can get the better of that distraction, when he thinks it worth his while to do so ”

“ But even that open acknowledgment of his evil ways didn't disturb me. If your thirteenth bluepoint never tastes good, as some wise cynic has observed, it's equally true that your thirteenth nervous shock in one night isn't going to come like a thunder-clap. ”

“ In other words, that he was, like other historic [Pg 170] personages whom we have already encountered, a victim of dissociation. There is no gainsaying the fact that he was of a distinctly nervous temperament; and it is equally certain that he chose a vocation, and placed himself in an environment, which would tend to make a dissociated state habitual with him. But this is bringing us to the consideration of a psychological problem which would itself require a volume for adequate discussion. ”

“ Delirium is often a sort of cloud-castle, a sort of magnified and distorted shadow of actualities, but it is a very difficult thing, almost an impossible thing, to reconstruct the real house from the distortion of it, thrown on the clouds of the patient’s brain. ”