Actually the demons were—Welkin knew—still there, but they had become less compelling, or attractive; he began to feel their attention slip away from him, and it seemed to him that they turned instead toward the things he studied, the things that he placed beneath his lenses, copied in colored inks: as though they hungered painfully for what they couldn't have, the sealed and well-made solidity that any leaf, any quartz crystal or hair root possesses. So he ceased to fear them, or hate them, and when we cease to fear them, or to love or hate them in fear, they lose their interest in us, and go away.

"Whether it were the attentions of that good man,” he wrote of Osterwald, “who was for so long my only friend, that effected my release from the self-cast spells I labored under, or merely that (as has been often noted in cases of dementia praecox) the mania passed away by a natural physiological reduction, I do not know. But even now, in my old age, when I take up our albums of pressed specimens or the curious stones he liked to bring me, I can feel a sort of thrill through me that is the old madness, still lying like a long-healed lesion in my being. One of those stones was taken from the stomach of a deer, and Horace Osterwald called it a mad-stone, and said that it had the natural power to keep melancholy at bay. I no longer believe, if I was ever tempted to do, that it keeps me safe, but I still have it, in my pocket, for Horace was very clear that it would help me whether I believed in it or not."

From stones and plants Welkin at Horace's urgings moved on to more fearsome things, to the weather and the animal world, with their apparent free will and their malevolence or benevolence. With them it wasn't enough merely to classify and sort, because thunder clearly spoke in words to him and foxes really looked out from their eyes into his, and this conviction took time and care to overcome: not to you, son, Horace would say to him, taking his hand; not at you. Last of all he faced those wise apes or primates his fellow townspeople, whose hostile or needful souls, clothed in the figments of their flesh and their dress, he had always shrunk from.

Then when he could do that he was empty, or the world was: still, and possessed only by itself. He could ever after name the summer day on which, at dinner, he had looked up from his soup and realized that not for one moment in this day, from dawn to blue-green evening, had he feared, or sought to see, or growled at, a demon in hiding, and what was more wonderful, hadn't even noticed he had not. He put down his spoon, and with Horace he knelt on the floor and prayed. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of Hell gat hold upon me, he said. Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.

He was asked later by one who knew of his experiences if he didn't regret so much of his youth spent in unrealities, and he said he felt no regret, only gratitude that he had left them behind. Maybe there's always a regret, though, that the once-possessed know, along with their thanksgiving: to feel the wild beings they have shared themselves with, the vivid powers making free within them, depart, and leave them nothing but themselves.

And his poor parents: whom no one could reassure him had not died from fear of his ungodly intractability, and grief at their own impotence to help him. He never altered the bedroom they had shared on the second floor of the West Plain Road house, and he never after entered it either.

When he was thirty years old he read Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which Horace Osterwald had long steered him away from, fearing it would threaten his religious certainties, and thus his mental health: the terror of blind, meaningless, mechanical evolution. And for a long time after he read it, Welkin watched and waited, like a man who has taken something he thinks might be poison, for the dire effects to appear. There were effects, but he couldn't at first determine what precisely they were; anyway they weren't fearful. Darwin's arguments themselves were to his mind entirely and utterly convincing; it was as though he'd known them all along, as though so far from exciting his madness they described with great beauty and hopeful clarity the world he had recently awakened into.

On a certain spring day he was botanizing on Mount Randa, the very day he discovered a theretofore unknown subspecies of Silene virginica, and—though he had not been pondering Darwin or his scheme for days—he understood, suddenly and yet without surprise, that what Darwin had done was to relieve God of the awful burden of making the world: of shaping every leaf and snail shell, squeezing out every litter of kittens and every pupating butterfly, building every snowstorm; relieved him both of the labor and the guilt. He had chosen an assistant to do that work, and the assistant was Chance. Indeed he probably had no choice; nothing else would do.

Chance.

Welkin wrote that at that moment there came over the world around him—he could see all the Faraways from where he stood—"a loud yet still gentle noise,” and a darkening, then a brightening, as comes when we stand up too fast. But light and sound were not what they were; he could not say after what they were, except to call them, together, Love, though he said he knew that made no sense, and his soul entered a new land. He saw that he had formerly, and without knowing it, thought of God as simply the greatest of the demons: a powerful perhaps good being, but working just as demons did, working in the world, working working his designs upon us, which it was our duty to discover, if only we could; his meanings, laid deep with every fashioned thing.

But it wasn't so. There were no meanings, no workman, no designs. The world had no designs upon us. God's Love walked in Eden in the cool of the evening, our Friend, his infinite heart empty and cool, even as Hurd Hope Welkin's was just then. Together they walked down the mountain.

It was after that that Welkin began talking and writing to others; he taught natural history in his books, and God's love in Sunday school, which he was allowed to do after years had passed and he had done no one harm and seemed as sane as the next man. Hurd Hope Welkin had climbed out of the demon world and into uncreated creation, a world whose only reason for being was being—that is, no reason, no blessed reason—and found, at the end of his journey, that he was returned into the human community. For him there had been no other way but this long way around to reach it, just as Dante could not climb the holy mountain he at first set out upon without going the long way around, right through the universe. “I saw my fellows in the town hall and in the markets and I saw them in the Church at Divine Service,” Welkin wrote. “They said to me, Come sit, and I did sit. I joined with them in praise and thanksgiving, not soul to soul, but now only face to face: which was to me, after all my wanderings, a great Relief."

12

And that's the last chapter of the history of the world: in which we create, through the workings of the imagination, a world that is uncreated: that is the work of no author. A world that imagination cannot thereafter alter, not in its deepest workings and its laws, but only envision in new ways; where our elder brothers and sisters, the things, suffer our childish logomantic games with them and wait for us to grow up, and know better; where we do grow up, and do know better.