It seemed that my _right to challenge_
was denied. I was not an adversary, with the rights and honours of an
adversary, but a trangressor, whose trangression had already several
times been sharply visited, and would be visited once more the moment it
was repeated. I might, in a sense, please myself whether I brought myself
into Court; but, once there, I was not the arraigner in the box, but the
arraigned in the dock. And I rebelled hotly. Did I sit there, ready for the struggle, only to be
told that there could be no struggle? Did that vengeful Angel of the Arts
ignore my very existence?... By Yea and Nay I swore that he should take
notice of me! Once before, a mortal had wrestled a whole night with an
angel, and though he had been worsted, it had not been before he had
compelled the Angel to reveal himself! And so would I... Challenge, title to challenge, tentatives, preliminaries, I suddenly cast
them all aside. We would have it in deeds, not in further words. I opened
a drawer, took out the whole of the "Life" so far written, and began to
read. I wanted to grasp once more the plan of it in its entirety. Page after page, I read on, with deepening attention. Quickly I ran
through half of it. Then I began to concentrate myself still more
closely. There would come a point at which I should be flush with the
stream of it again, again feel the force of its current; I felt myself
drawing nearer to that point; when I should reach it I would go ahead
without a pause... I read to the end of Chapter Fifteen, the last completed chapter. Then
instantly I took my pen and wrote, "Chapter Sixteen...."

I felt the change at the very first word. *        *        *        *        *

I will not retraverse any ground I have covered before. If I have not
already made clear my former sensations of the petrefaction of hand and
brain, I despair of being able to do so any better now. Suffice it that
once more I felt that inhibition, and that once more I was aware of the
ubiquitous presence of the image of the dead artist. Once more I heard
those voices, near as thunder and yet interstellarly remote, crying that
solemn warning, that though I took the Wings of the Morning, made my bed
in Hell, or cried aloud upon the darkness to cover me, there was one
Spirit from which I could not hope to escape. I felt the slight crawling
of my flesh on my bones as I listened. But there was now a difference. On the former occasion, to hear again
those last horrible words of his, "_You shall very soon know I know who
you are if_..." had been the signal for the total unnerving of me and for
that uncontrollable cry, "_Don't you then want me to write it_?" But now
I intended to write it if I could. In order that I might tell him so I
was now seeking him out, in what heights or depths I knew not, at what
peril to myself I cared not. I cared not, since I now felt that I could
not continue to live unless I pressed to the uttermost attempt. And I
must repeat, and repeat again, and yet repeat, that in that hour
Andriaovsky was immanent about me, in the whole of me, in the last fibre
and cell of me, in all my thoughts, from my consciousness that I was
sitting there at my own writing-table to my conception of God Himself. It may seem strange--whether it does so or not will depend on the kind
 of man you yourself are--that as long as I was content to recognise this
immanence of Andriaovsky's enlarged and liberated spirit, _and not to
dispute with it_, I found nothing but mildness and benignity in my
hazardous experience. More, I felt that, in that clear region to which
in my intensified state of consciousness I was lifted, I was able to move
(I must trust you to understand the word aright) without restraint, nay,
with an amplitude and freedom of movement past setting down, as long as
I was satisfied to possess my soul in quiescence. The state itself was
inimical neither to my safety nor to my sanity. I was conscious of it
as a transposition into another register of the scale of life. And, as
in this life we move in ignorance and safety only by accepting the
hair-balance of stupendous forces, so now I felt that my safety depended
on my observation of the conditions that governed that region of light
and clarity and Law. Of clarity and Law; save in the terms of the great abstractions I may not
speak of it. And that is well-nigh equal to saying that I may not speak
of it at all. The hand that would have written of it lay (I never for one
moment ceased to be conscious) heavy as stone on a writing-table in some
spot quite accidental in my new sense of locality; the tongue that would
have spoken of it seemed to slumber in my mouth. And I knew that both
dumbness and stillness were proper. Their opposites would have convicted
me (the flat and earthly comparison must be allowed) of intrusion into
some Place of beauty and serenity for which the soilure of my birth
disqualified me. For beauty and serenity, austerity and benignity and peace, were the
conditions of that Place. To other Places belonged the wingy and robed
and starry and golden things that made the heavens of other lives than
that which I had shared with Andriaovsky; here, white and shapely Truth
alone reigned. None questioned, for all knew; none sinned, for sin was
already judged and punished in its committal; none demonstrated, for
all things were evident; and those eager to justify themselves were
permitted no farther than the threshold....

And it was to justify, to challenge, to maintain a right, that I was
there. I was there to wrestle, if needs be, with the Angel of that Place,
to vanquish him or to compel him to reveal himself. I had not been
summoned; I had thrust myself there unbidden. There was a moment in which
I noticed that my writing-table was a little more than ordinarily removed
from me, but very little, not more than if I had been looking over the
shoulder of another writer at it; and I saw my chapter heading. At the
sight of it something of the egotism that had prompted me to write it
stirred in me again; everywhere was Andriaovsky's calm face, priest and
Angel himself; and I became conscious that I was trying to write a
phrase. I also became conscious that I was being pitifully warned not to
do so... Suddenly my whole being was flooded with a frightful pang of pain. It was not local. It was no more to be located than the other immanences
of which I have spoken. It was Pain, pure, essential, dissociated; and
with the coming of it that fair Place had grown suddenly horrible and
black. And I knew that the shock came _of my own resistance_, and that it would
cease to afflict me the moment I ceased to resist. I did cease. Instantly the pain passed. But as when a knife is plucked
from a wound, so only with its passing did I shriek aloud....

For I know not how many minutes I sat in stupefaction. Then, as with
earthly pains, that are assuaged with the passing of accidental time, the
memory of it softened a little.