So imagine the difficulties of separating the toxins into one component ascribable to the known streptococci and another component ascribable to the unknown scarlet-fever pathogen. A project like this requires superhuman diligence, great sacrifices of time and money. I lacked time, especially. I wanted to live at the workbench, but my wife wanted something else. She would hear no talk of my money worries. She herself had more than enough money, after all. The marriage, as fragile as it was, ate up a lot of time. The less I loved my wife, the more she craved my attention. And pinched pennies drastically. Who does not understand that? She loved me and feared me. A state of affairs intolerable in the long run.

VIII

I have never in my life been entirely free of stirrings of compassion. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Hamlet, archetype of recent Europeans. True, I never had so much of a conscience that it exerted a compelling effect on my life. I always felt compassion in the wrong places, all the more when I resisted it. In my youth my father had wanted to tear this evil (and it is never anything but an evil) out by the roots. But who can get hold of the roots of a personal trait? I knew what I was doing when I put an animal, a living creature that feels pain and has a certain degree of consciousness, on the torture rack. Other people did not know. Other people did not require intoxication, mental anesthesia, forcible calming after their horrific bloody experiments, other people did not suffer from a constant craving for excitement. But why speak of animals when we are talking about a person so close to me that . . .

Just the facts. As the intolerability of the overall circumstances of my life emerged, becoming clearer every day (if it would not have taken us too far afield, I would have liked to give a full account of a day during this period, in all the hellish endlessness of its twenty-four hours)–when I had recognized the intolerability of my circumstances clearly enough, I made a final attempt to free myself from my spouse in an amicable manner. We had been married in church like everyone we knew. But the bond generally expected to hold a marriage together, conjugal love, existed on her side only. I did not love her. To this day I really do not know whether I was still capable of this much-discussed feeling at all, indeed, whether I was ever capable of love. Who does know?

The cornerstone of marriage is supposed to be the partnership of the sexes, a partnership craved for the purpose of satisfying natural urges and entered into in the hope of mutual succor. So says the Church, citing the procreation of offspring as the primary purpose of marriage. I wanted a child very much. But at the same time I was afraid to have one.