The Red Pill — A Story

A Story

As though unseen fingertips had touched her eyes, they opened upon a pitch darkness into which she stared a long while until she regained her senses; and with a mechanical movement her hand reached out to the button hanging from the bed and pressed it, and her eyelids narrowed in a strained glance at the clock... She knew beforehand that it was two!... Strange, this tyrannical insomnia — with what precision it keeps its appointments... This is the tenth day she has waked fully at just this hour, and nothing brings sleep back to her but a red pill she has grown used to... And yesterday her doctor warned her of the consequences of what she was doing... addressing her in the tone of a counseling father:

'Listen, Lamia. This drug numbs the ailment; it does not remove it. The cause of the insomnia must be sought out and treated. I am certain you know it better than anyone. Here is your own self — take counsel with it in the matter. You are intelligent, you have reached the university stage, and I have no need to remind you that a ship adrift without a captain never finds its way to the safe shore.'

The doctor was right! Right in every word. She knows the cause of her sleeplessness better than any human being. For two weeks she has been prey to obsessions from which she can find no way out, and she knows that in her nightly resort to the red pill she is only fleeing her own reality out of weakness and cowardice... And she knows too that her drifting ship, alone and without a captain, will never one day bring her to the shore. The night, no doubt, is suited to the study of her crisis, to facing the matter squarely.

Helping her to collect her mind and analyze the situation is this mute, deaf silence, which is not to be had by day. Ah, if only she could put out this glaring light that defies her delicate mood at this very moment, and replace it with a soft candle to keep her company — discreetly, so that her mother would not leap up in alarm to ask the secret of her wakefulness. The idea pleased her, and she lit a slender white candle and pressed once more the button hanging from the bed.

From the nearby casement a moist spring breeze drifted in, brushing her face and her loosened hair, and she felt refreshed; she settled back languidly, drawing the cover over a body gleaming through the sheerness of silk, and sinking her exhausted head into a pillow of downy feathers. And facing her on the wall she was met by a picture of herself laughing madly. Who would believe that only weeks ago she was like that — carefree, frolicsome, with nothing to trouble her mind? How often her companions, boys and girls alike, envied her the freedom she enjoyed! For she never knew her father — he went abroad before she was weaned. And her mother? — Poor mother: at first she tried to restrain her and call her to account, but the girl was too stubborn to bend to her mother's will; and how quickly the halter slipped from the mother's hand, and the young girl found herself loosed from every bond; and how easily freedom tempted her, and she answered its call and lived as she pleased.

The way was smoothed for this course by a set of comrades she was accustomed to accompany to the cinema and to dancing parties, joining them in discussing the books they read and the theories they came to know — most of them tending toward a modern philosophical bent which her nature was strongly curious to explore and whose hidden depths she longed to fathom... And she wonders now how it came about that she succeeded in her studies for three whole years while living in this fashion!

It is an experience... and perhaps a necessary one for every young man and woman — so Lamia would persuade herself, defending her conduct, clinging to those extreme theories with which the books of philosophy teem: man is a slave to his desires, and no blame attaches to him if they seduce and beguile him and he yields to them obediently, not by choice.

She knows that she never once tried to resist a desire that surged in her breast. How she used to chase madly after her end, giving no thought to consequences, heedless of malicious criticism or of disinterested, sensible advice..

A light, dissolute life she had lived ever since she came to the verge of youth with an abundance of fresh beauty and intelligence.. And despite all the means of comfort and happiness at her disposal, one thing was still missing: 'peace of soul.'

How the doctor's simile for her life pleased her — the tale of the drifting ship. Could he have understood everything from her appearance? From her bewilderment? From her shortness of temper?.. Or had he heard reports of her from here and there?

She can affirm, with the help of her sharp memory, that her disquiet began to reveal itself to her some weeks after she joined the philosophy class. How much she had heard of that professor's personality and his idealism — yet it had never occurred to her that it lay within any man's power to hold sway over her and impose his authority like this, while he remained utterly unaware of her very existence. And at once the professor rose up in her imagination, with his towering figure, his broad chest, his high forehead, and his warm, ringing voice. What a fool she had been when the company of that 'set' beguiled her, even for a while. How could she stop comparing that breed of insipid dwarfs with this noble, superior man who had worked upon her soul like magic... No doubt the influence was for the better... toward 'the loftier.'

Her pride forbids her to put a name to her 'feeling' toward her professor. Could it possibly be 'love'?! No, no! She wants to convince herself that this passion of hers — this obsession, rather — was not for the person of the professor, but, through him, for the great philosopher — the axis of their studies and their discussions. And what does it matter to her whether she loved the one or the other? The important thing is that her heart has looked out upon a new world, and opened upon a bliss; she is now a second person — a person who loves — and for the sake of this love she denied her own self, and for the first time her mind stirred and woke as from a slumber, and rose to call her to account. And her own truth was laid bare to her. God! In what illusion — in what error she had been living! Her mind in fetters, held back from its work!!

And all her attention poured itself upon that philosopher: she studied him with a zeal and an appetite she had never known, trying to imitate him and to follow his austere, ascetic ways of living.

Then she began to neglect the company of her comrades — to recoil from it, rather — inventing excuses for staying behind at home, absorbed in meditation and thought, without daring to speak aloud the sorrows contending within her!

And the more devoted she grew to that philosopher, and the more his principles and teachings moved her, the more ashamed she grew of the depths to which she had sunk — and her struggle began...

A fierce struggle, revealed in this anxiety of soul... and the sleeplessness.

Strange, this philosopher — looking out at her from his remote, remote age, with his piercing eyes and his mighty, boundless understanding, to rebuke her and shake her violently, soaring into the depths of her conscience and standing her on her feet for the first time, to see her own self naked, small, trifling.

Lamia had put her finger on the source of the ailment! How much she had needed to come to know that Greek teacher before those philosophers, the moderns; then she would have gained years lost in wantonness and folly... She had been living in a state of bohemianism and unconsciousness, without will and without a guiding mind, on the word of those who say: 'Man is at the mercy of his passions'... Woe to her! Into what a torrent she had flung herself, and against what emptiness she had collided... In vain she squandered a precious handful of the flower of her life, only to come back tonight humbled and surrendering, and open her eyes dazzled, like one waking from a troubling dream.

She understands now that man has a mind to master his passions, to bridle them and direct them, so that they do not bolt with him and drag him to perdition and the fire. She understands that once her mind, with conscious will, is master of the situation, her ship will have a captain to steer it to the safe shore.

She flung out her arms and stretched, the thrill of victory sweeping over her. She had won the battle! Her crisis now lay clear, its knots undone. Here she is, little by little, recovering her serenity and her calm of nerves. She breathed from the depths, as though a mountain had rolled from her back... and yawned!

And the first violet heralds of the dawn had begun to line the horizon with kohl when Lamia blew out her candle with the breath of a conquering soldier and hurried to pull her quilt up to her ears.. She no longer needed the red pill!