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By Root 1332 0

he had none in Hell. Now he saw that Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact which nullified all others. Sufficient health was like thin ice on an infinite sea of pain. Love, work, art, science and law were dangerous games played on the ice; all homes and cities were built on it. The ice was frail. A tiny shrinkage of the bronchial tubes could put him under it and a single split atom could sink a city. All religions existed to justify Hell and all clergymen were ministers of it. How could they walk about with such bland social faces pretending to belong to the surface of life? Their skulls should be furnaces with the fire of Hell burning in them and the skin of their faces dried and thin like scorched leaves. The face of Dr. McPhedron came to him as abruptly as when it was thrust over the edge of the rock. He turned for help to a bookcase beside the bed. It held books got secondhand for sixpence or a shilling, mostly legends and fantasies with some adult fiction and nonfiction. But now the fantasies were imbecile frivolity, and poetry was whistling in the dark, and novels showed life fighting its own agony, and biographies were accounts of struggles toward violent or senile ends, and history was an infinitely diseased worm without head or tail, beginning or end. A shelf held his father’s books, works by Lenin and the Webbs, The History of the Working Classes in Scotland, Humanities Gain from Unbelief The Harmsworth Encyclo¬ paedia and books about mountaineering. Putting out a desperate hand he took from among these a general history of philosophy, opened at random and read:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference between these consists of the degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. These perceptions, which enter with the most force or violence, we may name impressions; and under the name I may comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint image of these in thinking and reasoning….

He read on with increasing relief, brought more and more into a world which, though made of words instead of numbers, was almost mathematical in its cleanness and lack of emotion. Looking up from the book much later he saw between the disordered curtains that the sky was pale and heard a faint distant music, a melodious thrumming which grew louder and louder until it seemed above his head, then faded into the distance. It was too rhythmical for birdsong, too harmonious for aircraft. He was puzzled but oddly comforted and fell into a smooth sleep.

At seven an alarm rang in the living room where his parents slept in the bed settee. Mr. Thaw had breakfast and carried his bicycle downstairs to the street. Mrs. Thaw brought to the bedroom a tray set with porridge, fried egg, sausage, brown bread with marmalade and a cup of tea. She watched as he ate and said, “Is it any better, son?”

“A bit better.”

“Ach, you’ll be all right when ye get to school.”

“Mibby.”

“Take another pill.”

“I have taken another. It’s not doing much good.”

“You’ve made up your mind it’s not doing good! If you wanted it to work it would work!”

“Mibby.”

After a while he said, “Anyway, I don’t want to go to school today.”

“But, Duncan, the exams are two weeks away.”

“I’m tired. I didn’t sleep well.”

Mrs. Thaw said coldly, “Are you trying to tell me you can’t go to school? You weren’t very well yesterday but you were well enough to go to the library. You’ve always enough breath for what you want to do; none for what’s important.”

Thaw laboriously dressed and washed. Mrs. Thaw helped him on with his coat and said, “Now take your time going down the road. It’s church first period so it won’t matter if you’re a bit late. The teachers understand. And straighten your back. Stop walking about like a half-shut penknife. Look the world in the face as if you owned it.”

“I own none of it.”

“You own as much of