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....